By the time we crossed the Anacostia bridge and took Maine Avenue to the Tidal Basin, Varley became lively enough to ask for a cigarette. I was to get to know that liveliness of his. He was a gaunt and grave-looking man but had an irrepressible buoyancy which wore a little thin after you got to know him, like a whore’s professional smile.
“I don’t know what my wife told you, Drum,” he said. “I don’t make a habit of getting picked up by private dicks in the middle of the night.” He laughed. “I can usually take pretty good care of myself.”
“Do you usually have to?”
Again he laughed and said, “Well, it makes life interesting.”
“Then that’s why you stood out there in front of my headlights so they could see you? To make life interesting?”
“What’s the matter?” he said. “Don’t you like me?”
“Nobody’s paying me to like you, Mr. Varley. I’ll take a reasonable risk for a client, sure. That’s my line of work. But I won’t jump into something like this again for someone who wants to get his head kicked in.”
The brown-skinned boy handcuffed to the wheel surprised me by saying, “Mr. Varley’s no masochist, if that’s what you mean.” It was the first time he had spoken. He had a tenor voice and an Oxford accent and an obvious, arrogant contempt for lowbrows—present company not excepted.
“It’s the old Varley curiosity,” Varley said. “I had to find out if Ambedkar was just bluffing.”
I told him what to do with the old Varley curiosity. Ambedkar laughed. He drove very well. He didn’t seem worried about anything. We went up along the black water of the Potomac and past Francis Scott Key Bridge to Canal Road. I didn’t have to tell Ambedkar where to turn.
He pulled up in front of a brick Colonial house with one of the few really big lawns in Georgetown. I put the ignition key into my pocket and led Varley from the car. We took only a couple of steps on the red brick sidewalk when the front door of the Colonial house opened and a woman came hurrying down the walk toward us.
“Stewart!” she said. “You gave us a scare.”
She floated into the glow of the street lights like a dream. She wore a metallic silver dressing gown and had a halo of silver-blonde hair and the kind of tall, long-legged figure that belongs in every man’s secret dreams. Her face was dream stuff too. Even under the street lights you could tell her eyes were deep blue. But somehow, despite all her obvious assets, she managed to look as cold as the far side of the Greenland icecap.
She studied Varley’s face and touched the bruises with her long fingers. “You picked yourself a good detective,” Varley said cheerfully, effusively. “You should have seen him out there, Priscilla.”
Priscilla Varley nodded her lovely head in the direction of the house. “I’ll be along in a minute, dear,” she said as Varley made his way obediently across the red bricks. Then she told me: “I’d like to thank you, Mr. Drum. If I mail a check for a hundred dollars to your office, will that be satisfactory?”
“More than.”
“Well then. I guess I’ll say good night.” She extended her hand. “And thank you again.”
“Hold on,” I said, and jerked a thumb toward the car. “There’s your hoodlum, Mrs. Varley. Some hoodlum. What do I do, put a stamp on him and mail him back to the Eton rowing crew?”
Priscilla Varley’s penciled black eyebrows climbed toward her silver-blonde hair. “You mean you brought them with you?”
“One of them. The other one got away. I can turn him loose or put a scare into him or hand him over to the buttons. What’s it going to be?”
“We couldn’t possibly press charges if you handed him over to the police.”
“You’re the client.”
Priscilla Varley smiled. “How would you go about putting a scare into him? I wouldn’t want you to hurt—”
“Hell, maybe you’d like me to drive him home, wherever home is, and tuck him into bed.”
“You needn’t be sarcastic.”
“No? The way things are going, the next thing you’re liable to tell me is the guy’s the houseboy around here.”
Priscilla Varley shook her head. “Not around here. If the man in your car is a handsome little fellow with an arrogant smirk on his face, he’s the houseboy over at the Indian Embassy, his name is Ranjit Ambedkar, you can do whatever you bloody well please with him, and I’m going to bed.” She was mad suddenly. Not at me and not at Ranjit Ambedkar. At her husband, I figured. She turned around and stalked quickly across the red bricks and up the path and into the house. The door slammed.
I went back to the car. “Far as I’m concerned, buddy,” I said, “you’re out of the dog house—if you agree to get out of the neighborhood.”
Ambedkar nodded without speaking. I unlocked the nippers for him and he came lithely from the car smirking at me. He was barely more than five feet tall. “What I can’t fathom,” he said in his Oxford accent, “is why, with something like that walking around his own house, he insists on looking for trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“The kind of trouble he is looking for. You’d better warn him, mister.”
I snorted and began to think that none of this had happened, that it was the kind of dream a private dick will have, and that I would wake up any minute. I got into the car and drove around the block a couple of times until I saw Ambedkar waiting for a streetcar on Canal Road.
He saw me driving by and waved.
4.
I TOOK the elevator up to Gil Sprayregan’s floor of the rundown office building on E Street shortly after noon the next day. As I neared the door to his office it opened and a short, middle-aged woman came out, her face livid and her lips trembling. “I ought to report him,” she said. “I ought to report him to the police.”
She went on down the hall and I went in. Sprayregan paid his hundred bucks a month for a waiting room about the size of a water closet in a cold-water flat and an inner office which barely had room for a small filing cabinet, two chairs, a hatrack and a beat-up roll-top desk which had been new when the Pinkerton guards rode stagecoaches.
Sprayregan was drunk. He had forgotten to shave this morning. The tic danced under his left eye. “Screw you, bud,” he said. “If you think you’re gonna climb on the li’l old gravy train after old Gil already went’n got the ball rolling, you can just screw you, what I mean, screw you.”
He reached for the bottle on the desk and knocked it over. It was empty anyway.
“Is that what you told her?” I asked, nodding my head toward the door.
“’Smatter, can’t I pick my clients? Friends too. I can pick my friends. Scram outa here, buddy. Get lost. Dusht, buddy. Dust.”
“Better tell me about it, Mr. Sprayregan. What happened?”
“We don’t want you here,” he said, lurching to his feet heavily and lunging in my direction.
“Didn’t you get a message to call me?”
“I called, aw right. No answer. Afraid to pick up a phone? You’re yellow, Drum. Yellow.”
“What happened?”
“If you must know, I got in touch with the mark. Appointment li’l while.”
“Where?”
His big red face twisted into a crafty smile. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“You told the mark’ what?”
“Nothing. Nothing yet. Worth his while is all.”
He waved a big hand toward the door. I got out of there and took the elevator down to the lobby and went outside. It was an overcast day, much colder than yesterday, with a light rain falling from a bleak gray sky.
I found a hack stand down the block and opened the door of the first cab in line. A young guy with a visored cap and a long nose and a long neck sat behind the wheel eating a sandwich.
“You interested in a tail job?” I said.
He looked up and grinned cockily. “I’m your Indian, chief.”
“Trouble is, I don’t know when it’s going to start.”
“Sh
oot; that’s okay. I’m on my lunch hour. Come in out of the rain. You a flatfoot?”
“Private dick,” I said.
“Well, well, well.” He went on eating his sandwich. I sat down in the back of the cab to wait.
Forty-five minutes later Sprayregan came out, his big frame leaning forward as he walked, like a man fighting a stiff wind. The only indication of the alcohol in his blood was a slight roll in his stride. I pointed and the long-nosed boy started the cab. We slipped out into traffic as Sprayregan went around the corner.
“You’da done better on shanks mare,” the boy said, but then quickly pulled into a parking space when Sprayregan crossed the street to a Texaco service station. He talked to a grease monkey, then waited while a gray Packard three or four years old came down off the grease rack, paid the grease monkey, got behind the wheel, and started up North Capitol toward the rail yards.
“Better get closer,” I told the boy.
“Chief,” he grunted, “I do this just as natural as you breathe. Watch me.”
I sat back and watched him. The gray Packard made a left on M Street when we were still a block away. The boy gunned it, then slammed on the brakes when the traffic light turned yellow and a stout traffic cop waved his white glove at us and yelled something I couldn’t hear.
I began to curse but didn’t get past the first four-letter word. Half a block down M, the Packard pulled into a slot near the curb. In about ten seconds a figure moved across the sidewalk quickly. He was a small man and at this distance I couldn’t make out his face through the rain. He wore a white tennis sweater, though, with a vivid red and blue V gashing the neck line. He got into the Packard and slammed the door.
“What’s the matter,” the boy at the wheel demanded, “you seen a ghost?”
Coincidence, I thought. All of a sudden Washington was crowded with little brown-skinned men in red, white and blue tennis sweaters. Coincidence, sure.
It was Ambedkar.
When the light changed we went tires squealing around the corner on M street. The boy stepped on the gas and began weaving in and out. I spotted the Packard again, then lost it in front of a moving van. I sat forward gripping the leather upholstery of the front seat. The boy whistled and we passed the van doing forty. The Packard still had a block on us. Then at the intersection of Sixth Street Sprayregan ran a yellow light. We hit it on red, cross traffic surged forward from both directions, and the boy mumbled and brought his cab to a screeching halt. The back of his neck almost matched the color of the light.
In about a minute the light turned yellow for the Sixth Street traffic. The boy leaned on his horn, gunned his motor, and took off. Crossing Ninth I thought I saw the Packard. We hit Thomas Circle doing thirty and the boy slowed down. We took the circle around past Vermont Avenue and Fourteenth Streeth and Massachusetts Avenue, then M Street, Vermont, Fourteenth, Massachusetts and M again.
“See him?” the boy asked in a subdued voice.
I shook my head.
“Want I should try M straight through?”
“No. What for?”
“Yeah,” he said, “what for?” He pulled over to the curb. “You wouldn’t believe it, chief, but this never happened to me before. Where to now?”
I gave him my office address.
“You ain’t mad?”
“Forget it.”
“Well, this one’s on the house.”
It was, too. But that didn’t help me any. And it certainly didn’t help Sprayregan.
I looked up Sprayregan’s home address in the phone book, hoping I’d find his wife in. But there was no answer. I prowled around the office for a while, looking out of the window at the view of the Treasury Building across the street. The rain fell steadily and the hiss of the traffic came through the window on a wet cold breeze. I picked up the phone and dialed Sprayregan’s home number again. Still no answer. I lit a cigarette and poured Jack Daniels into a paper cup and left him standing there on the desk top so he’d be frustrated too. Then I dialed the State Department’s number and asked for Jack Morley in the Protocol Section.
Jack’s Assistant Chief of Protocol over at the department. We’d gone through F.B.I. school together and stuck out our first hitch together. Then Jack decided on a State Department career and I got tired of taking orders, nailed up my shingle, and went to work for myself.
“Well, if it isn’t the best third of the Spirit of Seventy-six,” Jack said. I swung the swivel chair around and stared out at the rain and cracked back at him, but thought of Sprayregan out there driving through the rain somewhere, busily and nervously talking himself into an early grave if his wife knew what she was talking about.
“What’s the matter?” Jack said. “Why the long voice?”
“Jack, you know of any skeletons in the Indian Embassy closet?”
“What? What did you say?”
“Well, let’s say a party over there can be blackmailed. Someone pretty big. Any idea what it might be?”
“N-no. I don’t know.”
“Maybe this will help. A gal, wife of a big-shot diplomat, maybe, with an inclination to go visiting all the bedrooms she can squeeze into her itinerary?”
Jack laughed. “My God, Chet. Don’t tell me you only just now tumbled to that?”
“I didn’t tumble to anything.”
“The lady’s name is Sumitra Mojindar. Wife of the First Secretary of the Indian Embassy, the same Mojindar who’s been Krishna Menon’s front man in organizing the Benares Conference. Everybody in Washington knows Lady Mojindar as an Anglo-Indian beauty with overactive glands and a dedicated public servant of a husband more than twice her age—everybody but Mojindar himself, from what I’ve heard. That what you’re after?”
“Maybe. But if everyone knows it, just who the hell would my extortionist blackmail?”
“I’ve seen them at the usual parties. Mojindar doesn’t know, Chet. He dotes on his wife—when he isn’t doting on the latest two-steps-forward-and-one-step-back of India’s neutralist policy. Like the typical husband wearing horns, I guess he’s the last one to know.”
“So conceivably he could put the bite on Mojindar?”
“Sure, unless he got short-stopped by someone in the know over there. Then he’d get a swift boot in the rear end for his troubles, they’d tell Mojindar the sad truth, and that would be that.”
“Would a guy named Ambedkar be someone in the know?”
“Ambedkar? Name doesn’t ring a bell, Chet.”
“What if the fellow in the know, whoever he is, didn’t want Mojindar to tumble?”
“Then I would say this blackmailer of yours had better watch his ass. But why shouldn’t they want Mojindar to find out?”
“Search me. What about Stewart Varley, Jr.?”
“What what about him?”
“He know the Mojindar woman?”
“I guess so.” Jack chuckled. “If you mean is he sleeping with her, unfortunately Mr. Varley doesn’t talk about his conquests. But he sure as heck knows her. He’s quite a guy, Chet. He’s as unpredictable as the Brooklyn Dodgers but has enough charm to have pulled some strings and wrapped up the first big assignment of his career, United States observer at the coming Asian-African Benares Conference. So he’s more than likely spent plenty of time with the Mojindars lately. Listen, Chet. You wouldn’t be this hypothetical extortionist?”
“What do you think?”
“All right, I apologize. But whatever else you are, Drummer-boy, you, Varley and the Dodgers all have something in common.”
“You a Dodger fan?”
“I’m a Drum fan.”
I thanked Jack for his information, wondered if he’d really given me any information, dialed the Sprayregan home again and hung up after the eighth ring.
About twenty minutes later a messenger boy wearing the full-dress livery of the Mercury Courier Service came in with an envelope. I signed for it, gave the boy a quarter which he did not thank me for, and opened my envelope.
It c
ontained a check for one hundred dollars made out in my favor and signed Priscilla Varley, and a note:
Thank you so much again, Mr. Drum. Something has come up that is terribly important to me and could mean considerable money to you. Will you meet me for cocktails at the Sheraton Park lounge at five this afternoon? P.V.
I put the hundred-dollar check into my wallet and read the note again and wondered what roadhouse Stewart Hoffman Varley, Jr., was going to get himself kicked in the head outside of this time. Or maybe someone had chalked Stewie loves Lady Mojindar on the brick wall of the Varley home in Georgetown. Or maybe Priscilla Varley would show me what seemed a coincidence in a business where coincidences are the exception and not the rule was not a coincidence at all.
I called Sprayregan’s home three more times without success. I called his office, but the phone service girl couldn’t help me. At twenty to five I locked up for the day.
5.
WHAT kind of cocktail can I bring you today, Mr. Drum?”
“A Martini will be fine.”
The waiter came and fawned over Mrs. Varley. He was an old man who probably hadn’t smiled that way in thirty years, unless he did it each time he saw Mrs. Varley. She was a girl to fawn over, all right. She wore a mauve suit and a jaunty little mauve hat on her silver-blonde hair and some silky fluff at the open throat of her jacket to match her hair. She was as lovely as a girl could be without bludgeoning your endocrines. If anything, she was subdued, very tailor-made, very sure of herself. She was a dream sculptured from ice—the kind of ice that burns when you touch it. She wore gloves that matched the silver scarf. There wasn’t a speck of lint on the mauve suit. I got the feeling you wouldn’t burn your hand after all: you could put your hand right through her. She was too perfect for anything but a dream.
We saluted each other with our Martinis and sipped them. If there was a male in the Sheraton Park who didn’t stop whatever he was doing to give her a long and longing stare he was a male in name only.
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