I said, “What about this apartment, where she lived? Can that be traced back to you?”
Rembek looked worriedly at Canfield, who said, “We aren’t certain. We think it unlikely, but we aren’t entirely sure. At the worst, Mister Rembek may be questioned, but he intends to state that he was maintaining the apartment for a friend, a man on the West Coast who does occasionally make trips East. The man in question is already prepared to support Mister Rembek’s statement and claim he was loaning the apartment to Miss Castle while he was on the Coast. There is a legitimate connection between this man and Miss Castle.”
Rembek said, “We hope it doesn’t come up at all. If it does, we’ll do our best to cover.”
I said, “Finding the man may be just as difficult even with the background. Who knows how many men this girl knew? You say she was a television actress; there’s all the people she might have met there, maybe other people in other ways.”
Canfield said, “We think not. Take a look at that note again, Mister Tobin. You notice she says there, ‘You’ll never see either of us again.’ Us again.”
I saw it. I nodded and said, “You think that means the man is somebody Rembek knows.”
Rembek said, “It has to be. Somebody she met through me, who got to her when my back was turned.”
Kerrigan, the observer, said, “More than that. It’s almost bound to be somebody inside the corporation. That’s our main reason for wanting him found, we consider him dangerous to have around. We want him out.”
Rembek explained, “The people she met through me were all people on the inside. I don’t know many square Johns, and the few I do know I wouldn’t be bringing around that place.”
I said, “Have you looked to see who’s missing?”
Rembek nodded impatiently. “That’s the first thing I thought of. We got the word here at twenty after seven this morning. By twelve o’clock I’d made a list of everybody Rita knew that I knew, and by one-thirty they’d all been checked out and every one of them is where he’s supposed to be.”
Kerrigan said, “This guy is playing it cool. He doesn’t want the corporation looking for him, so he plans to stick around for maybe a year or two, sit on the cash, and then find some nice sensible reason for retiring.”
I said, “That would mean he’d planned to kill her all along. He didn’t plan to run away and hide with her at all.”
Rembek said, “He set us both up.”
Canfield, smiling faintly, said, “Do you see the multiplicity of reasons why we want him found, Mister Tobin?”
I nodded. “I see them.”
“Will you take the job?”
“I don’t know. What do you want me to do exactly?”
He seemed surprised. “Find him,” he said.
“I mean, in detail,” I said. “Do you have the idea if you hire a cop—an ex-cop—all he has to do is sit in a corner and think awhile and out comes the name?”
Canfield smiled again, saying, “Hardly, Mister Tobin. We have had some extensive dealings with the police, we do know them fairly well.”
I said, “The man you want found is somewhere inside your organization. In order to find him, I’ll have to get inside the organization myself. You’ll have to be ready to show me anything, answer me any question.”
Rembek said, “We know that. We’re ready.”
“I still think like a cop,” I said. “I still consider myself an honest man and a responsible citizen.”
Rembek said, “We brought you here because you’re still a cop, on the inside. For every job there’s a specialist, and for this job we have to go outside the company to find the specialist, and the specialist is you.”
“If,” Canfield said, “you’ll agree to take the job.”
I said, “But what I see I’ll have to report. To the authorities.”
Kerrigan said, “No. That isn’t part of the deal. We’re not here to cut our throat.”
Canfield said, “Be sensible, Mister Tobin. We need a private man because we can’t afford the scrutiny of the authorities. If you took on this job, you would have to agree that anything you might learn of the corporation’s activities as a result of this employment would be treated by you in a strictly confidential and privileged manner.”
“I’m not sure I can make that promise,” I said.
“We cannot afford to hire you without it,” he said. He leaned forward and said, “Mister Tobin, please do not let your recent unfortunate experiences make you inflexible. As an active officer on the force you found it possible to deal with informers, to make arrangements for the sake of learning the facts. This is merely the same thing. In order to do this job properly, you must be made privy to facts you would surely never learn otherwise. It would hardly be fair to take advantage of the situation by giving these facts to the authorities, now would it?”
He was right. Rigidity of mind is useless to a functioning cop. I said, “All right. If I take the job on, I’ll give you the promise. If I take it on.”
Canfield said, “For obvious reasons, time is a factor here. How much of it will you need before you make your decision?”
“I’ll have to talk to my wife,” I said. “Naturally, whatever promise of silence I make goes for my wife, too. She’ll have to know what I’m doing, so I’ll vouch for her now.”
Canfield nodded. “That is satisfactory.”
Rembek said, “Let’s try to cut this as short as possible. To save you an extra trip, let’s talk about the finances now, in case you decide to say yes.”
“All right.”
Rembek nodded to William Pietrojetti, the accountant, who until now had been so silent as to be effectively invisible. Now, in a dry and bloodless voice, Pietrojetti said to me, “The offer is five thousand dollars in advance, fifty dollars a day, reimbursement for all expenses, a maximum total of ten days on the case, and a bonus of five thousand dollars if the case is brought to a satisfactory conclusion.”
Canfield said, “Of course, we’ll get this all down properly on paper.”
Rembek said, “Are the terms okay?”
“They’re fine,” I said. With five thousand dollars I could stop worrying about money for a while. Kate could quit work. And if I found the man for them it would be twice as much. Yes, the terms were okay.
Pietrojetti said, “The next question is method of payment. Do you have any preference?”
I didn’t know what he meant, and told him so. He spread his hands and said, “Partly, of course, it depends on your tax structure. You should definitely report this income as income, but the project should also result in a satisfactory amount of offsetting deductions. Now, you can take the first figure as a lump-sum payment now, or we could adjust it over a two-year period if that would be better for you, or if you need the cash now but would prefer a two-year spread, we could give you the lump sum in cash and arrange paper payments to extend into January.”
“I don’t have that kind of tax problem,” I said. “I’ll take a lump sum.”
He nodded, though I’m sure the answer was too simple for him. He would have preferred to do acrobatics with the five thousand dollars for a while. Still in his dry expressionless voice, he said, “The other matter is apparent source. It is possible you would be faced with embarrassing questions if the money came overtly from us. If you’d care to, I’d be happy to go over your income potential with you in order to find the best way to insert this amount into the normal pattern.”
I shook my head. “That won’t be necessary. If I take this job, I won’t hide it. If I’m asked, I’ll tell where the money came from and what I did for it.” I looked at Rembek and added, “Without giving the details.”
Rembek said, “Fair enough. Is there anything else you need to know before you can make up your mind?”
“Not that I can think of.”
“Fine.” Rembek got to his feet, saying, “I’ll have my car drive you home.”
“That’s all right,” I said, rising, “I’ll take the subwa
y.”
Rembek looked impatient. He said, “It wasn’t a polite offer, Mister Tobin. If you take the job, we’ll all be in a hurry. You’ll want to go to Allentown, and the fastest way is in my car. The fastest way to get you home to talk to your wife is the same way.”
“Oh,” I said. “In that case, all right.”
Rembek came around the desk, smiling slightly with one side of his mouth. “Try to relax, Mister Tobin,” he said. “Nobody wants your cherry.”
five
REMBEK’S CAR WAS A black chauffeur-driven Lincoln Continental. Sitting all alone in the back, I studied my reactions to the job I’d been offered. The job itself required no study; if it contained no elements other than those already described to me, it was a plain and honest piece of work. I might or might not be capable of handling it, but legally and morally I could have no qualms about it.
No, it wasn’t the job that was complicated, it was my reaction to it. To a large extent I wanted to make believe the offer had never come along, I wanted to go back to work on my wall and think of nothing but dirt and bricks and concrete block. But in a small corner of my mind I felt a certain excitement, almost eagerness about the job; it would be a kind of return to the life I’d lost, a task within my competence, and I couldn’t help feeling a degree of hunger for it.
But there was another reaction as well, a feeling of wariness and mistrust. Rembek had referred to it, crudely, at the end there, and logically I understood that he had been telling the truth, that these were businessmen and not hirelings of Satan, that they had not the slightest interest in whether or not I was in the state of grace. And yet, and yet…I felt very much like a yokel surrounded by slyly smiling sharpies, and I found myself time and again thinking, What do they want from me?
This was my first trip in a limousine, and one of the few times I’d traveled from Manhattan home to Queens by auto, and the double novelty of this experience kept distracting me from the spiral of my thoughts. Still, by the time we’d made the turn off Woodhaven Boulevard and were sliding silently down the last four blocks to my home, I’d managed to isolate the irrational mistrust and put it away in a box where it wouldn’t confuse my mind. I would make my decision without that.
I pointed out the house, and the chauffeur pulled to a stop directly behind my Chevrolet. I felt awkward climbing out of such a car in front of my own house; the car couldn’t have looked more out of place parked in front of an igloo. I went on up the walk to the house.
I’d called Kate at the store before leaving Rembek’s apartment, telling her only that I had something to discuss with her and wanted her to come home right away, and she met me now at the front door, looking past me and saying, “Did you come here in that?”
“It’s part of the story,” I said.
“Come to the kitchen,” she said. “I put coffee on.”
We walked along the hall past the stairs. I said, “Where’s Bill?”
“I don’t know, out somewhere. Will you be having dinner?”
“I don’t know yet. It depends.”
I sat at the kitchen table and told her the story while she made me coffee and got out a plate of chocolate chip cookies. She sat opposite me as I finished the story, and then said, “Do you want to do it, Mitch?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been thinking I have to get work, sooner or later I need a job of some kind. This could tide us over for a while. And it’s one employer who won’t ask a lot of questions.”
“Mitch, please. Don’t make money decide for you. I’ve told you I don’t mind doing my share, and I mean it.”
“This isn’t your share.”
“Don’t decide because of money,” she said. “Please, Mitch, promise me you won’t.”
“In other words, you don’t want me to do it.”
She shook her head. “No. As a matter of fact, I do want you to do it. But not for the money, that would be the wrong reason.”
“What’s the right reason?”
“You were stopped,” she said. “Six months ago you just came to a stop, as though somebody turned a switch. Maybe this will get you started again.”
I got up from the table and went over to the back door and out onto the porch. Under the long shadows of late afternoon, the hole looked like a grave again. I had the piles of brick covered with canvas tarps, gray anonymous mounds out there like cancerous mushrooms. But that was where I wanted to be, bending my back, working my arms and my shoulders, thinking about shovelfuls of dirt, thinking about the arc of the pick, checking the depth of the hole, watching the level, filling my mind with the details of the wall, filling it so full with the facts of the wall that no space could be left over for anything else.
For the money, then. And because it would make Kate hopeful.
I went back into the kitchen. “I’ll have to pack some clothes,” I said. “I don’t know how long I’ll have to stay in Allentown.”
six
ALLENTOWN IS ABOUT NINETY miles due west of New York. We drove back into Manhattan, picked up Roger Kerrigan, the observer, at Third Avenue and 34th Street, and an hour and twenty minutes later we swung off Route 22 outside Allentown and came to a stop on the gravel in front of the Mid-Road Motel.
Kerrigan, at first, had tried to make Smalltalk, mentioning baseball and movies and so on, trying to find some subject in which I would be interested, but I had no desire to talk with him and couldn’t make the effort to be polite, so after a while he’d grown silent and we hurtled westward in our separate rear corners of the limousine.
The Mid-Road Motel was cheap but new, its tinsel still bright and seeming nearly to be a sufficient substitute for quality. We had passed similar places, a bit older, which had made it clear how badly this structure would age, but for the moment it was sparkling and cheerful and the limousine did not look entirely incongruous in front of it.
The owner, whom we found in his office, was a short round nervous man with a bushy mustache and a receding hairline, a man of about forty, who, I would judge, had failed in small business enterprises in the past and would do so again in the future. His name was William MacNeill, and he was expecting us. When Kerrigan introduced himself, MacNeill bustled right into action, grabbing a key from the board and coming around the end of the desk, saying, “I’ll show you where she is.” We followed him back outside.
It was just six o’clock. To the left an access road led up to Route 22, which ran, four lanes wide, straight as a ruler into the sun sitting on the horizon out at about Harrisburg. The big trucks rolled by up there at sixty miles an hour, their aluminum sides casting sheets of orange sun reflection. All shadows were very long and very thin and very pale.
We walked along the stucco front of the motel, past the pastel doors, each with its silver number. The sun was in our eyes, making us lower our heads like a trio of penitents. Venetian blinds were drawn in the window beside each door.
“I haven’t touched her,” MacNeill told us over his shoulder. “Haven’t moved her. Haven’t touched a thing.”
The door he unlocked was numbered 9 and had a Do Not Disturb sign hanging on the knob. MacNeill took the sign off, saying, “I put that there myself. Make sure nobody else went in.”
He hit a light switch as he went in, then stepped to one side for Kerrigan and me, shutting the door behind us.
It was a long narrow room with plain beige walls, no molding, rust carpet on the floor. At this end there were the door and window, and a radiator enclosure under the window. At the far end, a closet on the left, bathroom on the right. In between were two beds, their heads against the right-hand wall, separated by a simulated wood night table with a modernistic lamp on it. There was little space to get by between the foot of each bed and the left wall. Nearer us, also on the right wall, was a long low dresser, also of simulated wood, with a large wall mirror above it, and a small upholstered chair with flat wooden arms. Beyond the beds, toward the bathroom, were a small dark writing table and wooden chair. The left wall was bare, except for
a long painting of woods in autumn placed at about the midpoint. The painting looked like jigsaw puzzles I’d done as a boy.
At first the room gave an appearance of complete normality. A small white suitcase lay open on the dresser, showing an interior filled with female garments. A pair of black high heels stood neatly beside the near bed. A white bath towel was flung across the far bed. Only one bed had been slept in and it was still rumpled.
But there was blood on the towel, just a little, just barely noticeable, a streak of stain across it like rust. And the drawer was missing from the night table between the beds.
MacNeill walked down the room and stopped, looking in at the floor between the beds. “Here she is here,” he said.
Kerrigan apparently had no desire to observe this part. He stood to one side, and I went forward and stood beside MacNeill and gazed down at her.
They always look dead. That may be a stupid thing to say, but it’s true. I’ve seen the imitations, in the movies and on television, and I’ve seen the real thing in the course of my former job, and there’s never any question about it. The real corpse looks like something that never was alive.
It lay face down, naked, its arms stretched out ahead of it like an acrobat still reaching for the trapeze. The back of its head was punched in, the blond hair now matted with rust. The rest of the body, as much of it as I could see, was untouched. It looked as though she had come out fresh from the shower, had started to go around between the beds, and had been struck down by one hard vicious blow from behind.
In falling, her flailing hand had hooked in the handle of the night-table drawer, yanking it out and onto the floor, where it lay beside the body like a box for offerings. It had contained stationery and a Gideon Bible; the stationery was now scattered around the body, and the Bible was tilted face down against the corpse’s left elbow.
Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death Page 3