by Ed Gorman
"Oh.
"He had his sorrow."
"I see."
"And so I couldn't hate him. It's pretty hard to hate anybody, when you really think about it."
Abruptly, she handed me the boot. It was Texas-style and alligator and expensive. She pushed forth her leg at the end of which was a wiggly little size-six foot covered in a clean white sweat sock with a bright red circle at the top.
"You think you can do it?"
"I'll try."
She giggled. "Cinderella."
I started to ease the boot on. She had the ankle of a colt, so slender. I had the sense I could snap it. I was careful, so careful.
"Your face is getting red," she said.
"Thanks for pointing that out."
"I wonder if the prince's face got red."
"The prince?"
"In Cinderella. When he was sliding the glass slipper on."
"Ah."
So I pushed some more, and tugged, and I thought of my shoe-selling job. Holding the sweaty feet of others is not my idea of a fun profession. (No, ma’am, I don't have a shoe in boxes here.)
I said, "Did your father and Richard ever have arguments?"
"Oh, sure. Richard had arguments with everyone."
"How about recently?"
"Did they have an argument recently, you mean?"
"Yes."
Hesitation. "I thought you and I were going to be friends."
I looked up from where I was just about finished turning and twisting the boot into place. "Gee, I hope we still are."
"Then please don't try to make me incriminate Tom." She was older again; and angry. "Tom didn't kill Richard, if that's what you're getting at."
I stood up. The exertion had put a light sheen of sweat on my face. "I'm sorry if I hurt your feelings, Mignon."
"Tom may not be perfect but he's my father and I love him very much. My mother died of cancer when I was seven years old and I think, all things considered, that Tom has done a very good job raising me." She had fixed me with her lovely dark gaze. "I want you to believe me."
"About Tom?"
"Yes."
"That he didn't kill Richard?"
"Yes."
"All right."
She shook her head. "I only wish you meant that."
"I don't think Earle Tomkins killed him."
"Perhaps not."
"That would most likely leave the people closest to him."
"It could have been a stranger. A robbery."
"The police report says that more than two thousand dollars in bills was found in his wallet and that he was wearing a wristwatch valued at three thousand dollars. I'm afraid that doesn't support a robbery theory, Mignon."
"Well, it wasn't Tom."
"All right."
The door in the side of the building banged shut. Tom Anton walked toward us. For a few feet, before he saw me, he slid on the ice like a kid. The resemblance between father and daughter was strong—the almost glossy good looks, the Aspen ski tan, the sense of sorrow Mignon spoke of so freely, almost romantically.
When he looked up and saw me, he stopped as if he'd just realized he was walking into a trap of some sort. He even looked around, as if for places to run and hide.
Then he composed himself, put on his arrogant smile, gave his step a jauntiness, nudged up the collar of the ski jacket that matched Mignon's, and then came up the shining rut of ice toward us.
"I'd prefer you not talk to my daughter, Dwyer," he said. "I'd just as soon she not know people like you exist."
"Please, Tom," she said.
He stood in the sunlight glaring at me.
Mignon said, "He helped me get my boot on, Tom."
Anton did not look pleased that my infidel's hand had been laid anywhere on his daughter's body. He said, "I hope Deirdre is happy. It's not bad enough that poor Richard is murdered and that the restaurant suffers all the bad publicity—now she wants to keep everything going by having you pester all of us."
"She doesn't think Earle Tomkins killed him."
He laughed. "My God, Dwyer, are you that naive? Can't you see that you were hired just to bother us? She doesn't give a damn about Tomkins. Deirdre is a very spoiled woman who never got over the fact that she drove her husband into the arms of another woman. Deirdre wants anything she can't have."
"She seems to think Jackie killed Richard."
"That isn't why she hired you, Dwyer."
"No?"
"No. As I said, she hired you to bother all of us but we shut her out long ago. She's a very destructive woman." He looked around again; and once more I had the impression that he wanted to run and hide somewhere. "And she hired you to find out what Richard was so afraid of."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Neither do I, exactly. But she seems to think that something was going on here at the restaurant—something worth discovering. Something only Richard knew about. That's why she really hired you. To find out what Richard was hiding—and to have the pleasure of seeing you keep Jackie and me unhappy."
He had started, by the end, to speak to me in something like a civil tone. I returned the favor. "You really don't know what Richard was hiding?"
"No."
"How do you know he was hiding anything at all?"
"Because he took to locking his office. And questioning our chef mercilessly to the point where the man quit. In case you don't know anything about chefs—or the best ones anyway—there're not easy to come by."
"What was this chef's name?"
"Sal Umbretti."
"He's still in the city?"
He frowned. "Yes, he's now working for our chief competitor. Their business is up, I'm told, about twenty percent."
"What made him quit?"
"I'm not sure except that one night a customer found something in his food and made a big stink about it. That's all I know. Umbretti was very upset." He shot his sleeve and consulted his wristwatch. "I have to go." Then he took out a pair of mirror sunglasses and slipped them on.
Through the windshield, Mignon stared at me. She looked lost.
Anton got in the car, slid behind the wheel. With his hundred-dollar haircut and his mirror sunglasses and his black leather driving gloves, he looked as if God had put him on this planet for no other reason than to sit behind the wheel of an XKE.
He slammed the door and put the car in gear. Mignon continued to stare at me.
Anton didn't say goodbye or even look in my direction. Somehow that didn't surprise me.
But as they pulled from the lot, Mignon glanced back once, just once. I thought of the way she called her father Tom. I didn't know why but that made me feel badly for both of them.
Chapter 10
A man was on his hands and knees crawling around in the filthy sidewalk snow. He looked a week past shaving and smelled even longer past a bath. He wore a threadbare long Army coat and a Navy stocking cap. He made a vague grab at me as I approached the entrance to St. Mark's. I started to walk wide when another man appeared in the double doors, glanced nervously around, and then found the man he'd apparently been looking for right beneath his eyes. "Donald! Donald, now you stand up and get in here. Gwen's been looking for you for the past fifteen minutes. She was about ready to call the cops."
The man in the doorway wore the sort of faded good clothes you find in Goodwill—once expensive but now given dignity by their cleanliness and the fact that they clothed a poor man. The man had the sharp quick eye of a zealot. He was sober, clean-shaven, clear-eyed. He'd probably become an assistant to the woman who ran the shelter and he took his job with TV-minister seriousness.
"Now you get up here," he said again, sounding almost motherly as he bent over to help the drunkard to his feet. He was tall and angular and sour and in his next incarnation would probably be a Presbyterian minister.
He had no luck with the drunkard. Oh, he got him to his feet all right but then they started doing Laurel and Hardy, sliding around on the ice, a
slippery ballet.
"Would you be so kind, sir, as to give me a hand here?" He was obviously restraining himself, wanting to call me a worthless sonofabitch for just standing there, but the responsibility of his job forbade such indulgence. "Please?" he said then, remembering the old please-and-thank-you of our youth.
I went over and got the drunk man under the arms. This close, he really smelled rancid. Sometime not too long ago he'd filled his pants. I held him tight and started pushing him, like this big sled, toward the entrance doors.
The drunkard had no qualms about calling me names. "Fuckin' bas'ard, lemme go!" And then tried to shrug me off. He had wild pitiful brown eyes covered now by a gauzy membrane that resembled cataracts. I walked him in lock step up to the doors, pushed him flailing up the three steps, and then shoved him inside the vast stone building that had once been a Catholic church. He was bringing back a lot of unpleasant memories of when I'd been a beat cop trying to push violent drunks into the backseats of patrol cars.
Inside what had once been the vestibule, the drunkard started back for the door. The other man slammed into him with a body block that would have done a pro football player proud. "Now, Donald, you just calm down. We're going to clean you up and get you sober." He looked at me and shook his head. He looked back at the drunkard. "My name is Ron as I already told you, but you probably don't remember that." He stared straight into the man's face. Given the man's bodily odors, Ron was a hell of a lot braver man than I would have been. "Now we're going down the corridor here to the showers and I don't want any trouble, all right?"
Even now, probably not too far from death from alcohol poisoning, the drunkard had some resources. He started pushing something that vaguely resembled a punch in Ron's direction and said, "Fuckin' bas'ard."
Ron looked at me and shook his head again. "Could I help you, sir?"
"I'd like to see the woman who runs the shelter."
"Gwen Daily?"
"If she's in charge."
"Could I tell her who's asking for her?" He sounded distrustful. Maybe they got assassins coming here a lot.
I started to give him my name but the drunkard took another swing. This time he ended up on the floor. Ron put his hands on his hips. The motherly tone was back. "I hope you're proud of yourself, Donald. I hope you're proud of yourself."
"Jack Dwyer's my name."
He raised his head from Donald and said, "And you're with?"
"American Security."
He seemed to chew on that awhile, apparently trying to figure out exactly what American Security might be.
"If you'll keep an eye on him, I'll go tell Gwen you're here."
I nodded and he left. He went through two very wide doors that had once led to the church interior but that now led to a short row of office doors on either side of a whitewashed narrow corridor. At the end of the corridor was another door and from beyond that you could hear the talk and the laughter and the coughing of men in the morning, men who'd drunk too long and smoked too much. It sounded like a ward in a veterans' hospital.
"Fuckin' bas'ard," Donald said again from his position in the center of the floor.
"You'll be all right. Just calm down."
"Sonofabitch," he said.
I was tired of him already.
Ron came back. "How's he doing?"
"Just great."
"No trouble?"
"We're the best of friends, Donald and I."
He frowned at my sarcasm. "He just kind of gets me down is all," I said.
He got wound tight again. "If we all thought like that, then nobody would take care of the poor and homeless now, would they?"
He had a point. "I shouldn't have said that. I'm sorry."
Ron sighed. "You're not any worse than others, I suppose. You see somebody like Donald here and you can't quite convince yourself that he's a human being just like you. It's the only way you can deal with him—otherwise you'd have to face some very ugly facts about our society."
I didn't want to hear any more socialist messages this morning so I went over and bent down and got Donald to his feet. "Where do you want him?" I asked.
"I can do this. You don't have to."
"Catholic guilt."
"What?"
"Nothing."
I helped bring Donald down to the end of the corridor. Ron opened the door. Inside was the cavernous remains of the church. The gothic architecture of the exterior—with its huge spire soaring right up from the roof of the church—was continued in here. High ribbed vaulting and fine window tracery enveloping beautiful stained glass paintings of a solemn Jesus and a radiant Mary glowed in the sunlight. Everything that had once been on the floor—altar, pews, baptismal station—had been torn out and replaced by a gymnasium-like arrangement that resembled one of those shelters run by the Red Cross following a natural disaster—a flood or tornado. Cots and single beds lined the walls. Strung down the middle was an endless clothesline on which hung drying T-shirts and underwear and shirts and work pants. Maybe a hundred men milled around, some fully dressed, some just in long johns. I thought of Depression Oakies in the Dust Bowl. Radios battled—country-western, rock, even, unlikely as it seemed, FM playing Brahms. The air smelled of sweat, sleep, cigarette smoke, and gallons of Aqua Velva blue.
"Just leave him here," Ron said. He nodded back to the corridor. "Gwen's office is the middle one." He smiled. Now I saw why he didn't smile more often. The few teeth he had were black. "And thanks, Dwyer. God will bless you for your kindness."
His formality embarrassed me. He could have just left it at thanks. I nodded and left, taking a last look as I did. This was the final stop just before you pushed off to the final darkness. So many failed lives here. So little you could do for them really, just let them pace around in the cages of their sorrow.
Gwen Daily's office was painted yellow with orange flowers on it. The sort of hand-done stuff that smacked of giving a resident a paintbrush and saying, Be creative. I'm sure the guy had a great time doing it all.
The office furnishings weren't much better, the sort of chipped, smashed, and battered stuff you get at bankruptcy sales. Gwen Daily appeared to be about thirty. She had soft brown hair cut stylishly short and soft brown hazel eyes busy with some accountancy sheets on her desk. In her right hand, arched in the mannered but attractive way of a model, burned a filter-tip cigarette in direct violation of the NO SMOKING PLEASE sign on the wall. She had a cute little wrist and fingernails so badly bitten that you could see where they bled through the skin sometimes. She wore a plain white blouse with a necklace of outsize brown beads. If I hadn't already glimpsed her eyes, I probably would have mistaken her for a working single mother who didn't get enough sleep and probably hadn't shared a bed with a fellow in several long lonely months. But I had seen the eyes and they were the same sort of eyes prim Ron had shown me, a zealot's eyes, part grief, part rage. She looked up and said, "Yes?"
"Gwen?"
"Yes."
"I'm Dwyer."
"Dwyer?"
"Didn't Ron mention me?"
"Oh. Right. Dwyer. Sorry. I just got lost in some figures. Sit down if you'd like."
"Thanks."
"Like some coffee?"
"Please."
"I make it pretty strong."
"I like it pretty strong."
She got up and walked over to a metal bookcase packed with what appeared to be bound government reports and textbooks on, God forbid, sociology. Cops always figure sociologists should have bounties on their heads.
The seat I took was a green leatherette-covered armchair that made an embarrassing whooshing sound when I sat down. The whooshing made me want to apologize—one of those idiot social moments—but I figured that by now she was probably used to the sound the chair made. The right arm was taped with dirty-gray electrician's tape and the left one was covered with cigarette burns.
She poured two cups of coffee and brought them over. She wore a brown tweed skirt that touched just below her knees.
She had very nice legs. The brown pumps surprised me a bit. They not only emphasized the clean lines of her calves but seemed a little dashing all on their own. Somehow she didn't seem the sort.
She served me coffee in a white ceramic mug with the name JIM painted on the side of it. The mug had two flowers more or less identical to the ones on the wall. Somebody had to stop this guy and soon.
She went back around behind her desk and sat down and said, "So exactly what is American Security, Mr. Dwyer?"
"It's a security agency that also does private investigative work and I'll pay you a dollar if you'll just call me Jack."
She had a quick warm girlish laugh. I liked her on the spot for it. "I wish all our dollars were that easy to raise here at St. Mark's."
"Tough, huh?"
"People hate poor people. They did in Christ's time and they're no different now."
"Why don't you hate poor people?"
"Because I am now and always have been a 'poor people' myself." She made cute little invisible quotation marks with her cute little bitten-up fingers. "My father was an alcoholic carpenter and my mother suffered all her short and painful life from rheumatoid arthritis." She stubbed her cigarette out in an otherwise clean ashtray. "I'm waiting for you to make some sarcastic remark about the no-smoking sign."
"Far be it from me."
"Everybody else comes in here and smokes. I figure I should get to, too. Though I'm trying to quit."
"Me too," I said.
"You've tried?"
"Several times. Haven't smoked for nearly two years now."
"Do you miss it?"
"Not more than thirty or forty times a day."
She laughed her quick warm laugh again. "Gosh, thanks for the encouragement."
"You don't get sick of them?"
"Of who?"
"Of poor people."
"Oh, sure. Half the time I hate them. I look at them and say, You lazy, shiftless bums, why don't you get your act together and clean yourself up and go out and get a job?"
"You say it to them?"
"Of course not. They hate themselves enough already. I say it to myself. Then I pray and ask for patience and wisdom."
"Do you ever get them?"
"Patience, maybe. Wisdom, not so far as I can tell."