Cynthia

by Howard Fast

  “What is disrespectful about a hundred grand?”

  “Perhaps a better word is preposterous.”

  “Then why bring it up at all?” I demanded, unable to conceal my irritation. “You know what you want me to do. How do I do it? Why don’t you be realistic? Suppose the girl was grabbed? Who does a job like that? Crumbs, psychopaths, hopheads—the organized people don’t go in for that kind of thing. The only way I know is to buy and pay, and not to have to account for the money. That’s why I specify that I want my fee out of that money. I don’t want any accusations of bilking the company.”

  “Ridiculous!” The fatherly tone was gone now.

  “It’s a lousy three percent.”

  “There is a limit to our patience, Krim.”

  “Why?” I asked him. “We could go back to that virtue you reminded me about before. Independence. I am independent as hell. I have an offer to teach Criminology at the University of North Carolina. So fire me.”

  “Why don’t you cool down,” Smedly said. “What the devil do you know about criminology?”

  Then we both grinned. I never knew that Smedly had it in him, but there it was—an honest, open, comprehending grin.

  “Suppose the girl turns up tomorrow?” he asked me.

  I shrugged.

  “All right, Harvey,” he said, calling me by my first name—as good a way as any of stating that we were down to realities. “You will not undertake this without a fat fee. You work for us, but you invite me to fire you. The alternative is to buy you. Do I state the case properly?”

  “Just about.”

  “How would you describe your services?”

  “As far as I know, I am the best insurance investigator around. Maybe in the country. If there’s anyone better, I haven’t met him.”

  “Also the most unscrupulous.”

  “I still hold a license.”

  “Ten thousand dollars fee. The rest is returnable—ninety thousand dollars of working capital.”

  “Twenty.”

  “Fifteen, Harvey. Not a nickel more. Eighty-five thousand dollars returnable.”

  “Without papers. On my word.”

  “All right. You are one of the most unscrupulous bastards I have ever known, Mr. Krim, but I believe you are honest.”

  “Thank you.”

  “How do you want it?”

  “Two certified checks. The fifteen is income. The eighty-five remains company money in work.”

  “All right.” He flicked on the intercom over his highly polished, old-fashioned desk, and ordered the checks drawn. Then he leaned back, put the tips of his fingers together, observed me over his glasses, and finally asked me.

  “Just how much has Alex Hunter told you about this, Harvey? By the way, I shall call you Harvey from here on. I think the situation demands it, don’t you?”

  “By all means. Hunter sort of filled me in on Brandon and his daughter.”

  “Did he tell you what his yearly premiums amount to?”

  “A couple of hundred thousand?”

  “Nonsense!” he snorted. “A damn sight more. Never mind how much—but enough to force us to double the coverage on the girl. I don’t want to give you a lecture on money, Harvey, and anyway I suspect that you know as much about its symbolic side as I do. Brandon is a money man. All other gods are gone. Only money.”

  “What is he worth—Brandon?”

  “Who the devil knows, Harvey?—well, maybe the devil does. At his level, it is not what a man is worth in the old-fashioned sense, no dollar count. What are his resources? What can he command if the need arises? Who knows—maybe a billion, maybe half of that—but very big, Harvey.”

  “I am impressed.”

  “You damn well are. Now, Harvey, listen to me.” He leaned toward me over the shiny mahogany desk and tapped upon it with a well-manicured forefinger. “I am no Alex Hunter. You are not dealing with boobs or cops. You are dealing with Homer Smedly, born fifty-five years ago in Akron, Ohio, and today the vice-president of the third largest insurance company in the world. I know something about you, so it is only fitting that you know something about me. You pulled off a brilliant coup in the Sabin Case, and I believe you have intelligence It is not the kind of intelligence I would ever hire for anything except your line of work, but I respect it because any kind of intelligence is in extremely short supply. I am going to hand you two checks in a few minutes—checks so preposterous in kind and cause that they will constitute a major headache for my comptroller. I hand them over to you without complaint. In return, Harvey, I want Cynthia Brandon. I want her alive—and God help you if you don’t deliver.”

  “Suppose she’s dead already?”

  “You should have thought of that before, Harvey.”

  “God help me? What does that mean?”

  “I leave it up to your imagination, saying only that you will wish you had never been born. I am a very powerful man, Harvey, and far more dangerous than someone like Alex Hunter.”

  “I realize that,” I said cheerfully. But I was not feeling cheerful—not by any means.

  “You can throw in your cards, Harvey. Drop the job. Then you’re fired, which is a comparatively painless process. Walk through that door and that’s the end of it.”

  “No, sir, Mr. Homer Smedly,” I said. “Fifteen thousand dollars is a lot of money, and I will do a lot of things for it—even incur your wrath. So I am on the Brandon case.”

  “Good. Then sit down over there and wait for the checks. I am a busy man, Harvey, and I have work to do.”

  Chapter 2

  I remember taking an intelligence test when I was pretty much of a kid, and one of the questions showed a diagram of a fenced field. The proposition was that this field was covered with high grass and that a ball had been thrown into it and currently was lying hidden in the grass. Problem: using a pencil line to describe your movements, show how you would go about finding the ball.

  I could not have more than twelve or thirteen at the time, but I knew what they wanted. They wanted a geometric Crosshatch that would cover every inch of the field; but I also knew that human beings do not function that way. If a machine had lost the ball and another machine had set about to find it, the Crosshatch gridiron would have been perfectly proper. A man—even a sensible man—would wander around, kicking at the grass, thinking, trying to remember the direction of the ball when it crossed the fence, trying to gauge whether it had bounced or not. The pencil line of his movements would have amounted to a meaningless, sort of idiotic scrawl.

  It’s a good description of how I work—in a sort of senseless scrawl that makes sense to me and not to anyone else; and thereby they have me on the books as a smart investigator. But all I do is kick at the grass until something turns up.

  Along with that, sometimes, I have a gleam of a notion; but nothing to boast about; and if I do have even a flicker of a dream, I call Lucille Dempsey, who is assistant to the chief librarian in the Donnell Branch of the New York Public Library. The said branch is located on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenue, directly facing the Museum of Modern Art, which up until recently served the best cheap lunch in New York for one dollar. Even when their lunch took a large jump in price, it remained the best for the money in that part of town.

  Today, however, when I telephoned Lucille, she asked acidly whether I proposed to meet the raised museum prices once again. I told her no, rather severely, and proposed that she lunch with me at the Woman’s Exchange on Madison Avenue and 54th.

  “Harvey—you are not for real. Never.”

  “So I have some neurotic problems.”

  “Harvey, you’re simply chintzy. You’re the very last of the big spenders and it’s an illness with you.”

  “What is wrong with the Woman’s Exchange?”

  “Nothing, Harvey. It’s a delightful place and it has the best food in town and it’s marvelously inexpensive. Just once, please, take me to a bad restaurant that costs more than a dollar-eighty for a lunch. I�
��ll take the check myself. Of course I am not angry with you, Harvey.”

  I went to the bank first, and walking there, I thought about Lucille. Being as nervous as the next man in New York, I once decided that what I needed more than anything else in the world was psychoanalysis, and I put in eleven months with Dr. Fred Bronstein on East 75th Street. In the course of this, I talked about Lucille Dempsey—a thing I remember very well, since it came after eleven months of futility.

  “Doc,” I said to him on that particular morning, “there is this girl called Lucille Dempsey.”

  “Go on,” he said in that quiet, offhand way of his—the tone he always used when he had a hand around his sharpest knife, ready to draw it and plunge it into your mental guts.

  “She is twenty-nine years old and five feet-seven inches tall, honey-colored hair, brown eyes and just quietly intelligent. She comes from Western Massachusetts and she works in the Donnel Branch of the New York Public Library and she is a Radcliffe graduate. She’s a Presbyterian but hardly works at it, and she has been fond of me for a long time for reasons I don’t understand, and she wants me to marry her.”

  There was silence after that, and I waited out a decent period of time and then asked him, “Well?”

  “Well?”

  “Well, Goddamnit, aren’t you going to say something?”

  “What should I say, Harvey? You’re a nut. My role here is to listen, not to comment.”

  “That’s a hell of a thing for a responsible doctor to say!”

  “It sure is, Harvey.”

  I paid him cash. He wanted to send me a bill, but I paid him cash right there and never went back. I thought about it now, walking to the bank. Now and then I missed Dr. Bronstein.

  When I have dealings at the bank more important than depositing my paycheck in time to cover my alimony, I deal with one of the younger officers, whose name is Frank Vancleffin. He is at least two years younger than I am and he looks up to me. He sits at the other side of half an acre of terrazzo floors and marble counters, and he always watches my approach with pleasure. This time, when I laid down the two checks, he was duly impressed.

  “That’s a lot of money, Mr. Krim,” he said approvingly.

  “Only the small one’s for deposit.”

  “You know, Mr. Krim,” he said, “it’s very interesting to deal with people who call a check for fifteen thousand dollars small. But I guess as a private eye, lots of these things—I mean these kind of situations—come your way.”

  “I am not a private eye. I’m only an insurance investigator, Mr. Vancleffin.”

  “I tell my kids you’re a private eye. You don’t mind that, do you?”

  “Oh, no. No. Not at all.”

  “I also tell them you carry a gun.”

  “I don’t.”

  “No?”

  “No,” I said apologetically. “You see, I know a lot of cops, and they would feel very uneasy if I had a gun, and even if I had a permit, they would probably try to get it away from me.”

  “Because you might shoot some innocent person?”

  “Myself.”

  “You?”

  “Right.”

  “How would I tell that to the kids? You’re putting me on.”

  “Maybe a little.”

  “It’s all right if I tell the kids about the big one—the eighty-five thousand?”

  “No reason why not.”

  “And you’re sure you want it all in traveler’s checks?”

  “Five ten thousand dollar checks, five five thousand, and ten of one thousand each.”

  “It makes a tidy little package, Mr. Krim.”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “Well, I’m just the banker.”

  But I was a few minutes late for my lunch date with Lucille Dempsey, because I had to wait until they had called the company and made certain that my honest face had an honest pair of hands to tag along with it. She had snagged the last remaining table at the Woman’s Exchange, and when I sat down opposite her, she said, “For heaven’s sake, Harvey, you look as smug and foolish as a Cheshire cat. Is it your birthday?”

  “No, but I just deposited fifteen thousand dollars to the account of Harvey L. Krim.”

  “And it’s yours, Harvey?”

  “Absolutely—after I put five away for the tax and then try to make a deal with the woman I was once married to. I figure to offer her eight thousand dollars cash to let me off the hook. I hear she’s in love with some feller, so she may just take it. That leaves us two thousand to get married on and have a honeymoon in the Canary Islands and to get one of those see-through apartments on Third Avenue.”

  “You’re out of your mind, Harvey. Let’s order some food.”

  While we waited for the food and while we ate, I told her the story of Cynthia Brandon and the hundred thousand dollars.

  “I don’t believe it,” she said constructively, when I had finished. “I just don’t believe it, Harvey.”

  I showed her the traveler’s checks, eighty-five thousand in one tight little black folder.

  “Well, I still don’t believe it, but why on earth do you want it in traveler’s checks?”

  “So I can carry it around with me. How else could you keep eighty-five thousand dollars of real money in your pocket?”

  “But why?”

  We were at the dessert, which is the best dessert in New York, and mine was ice cream. I ate it carefully and gratefully, while she watched me with despair.

  “You know, I often think the world is crumbling,” she said, “I mean compared to the way it was when I was a kid, Harvey, but it can’t get so crumbly that the third largest insurance company in the country gives you eighty-five thousand dollars, but you don’t know why or what you are going to do with it? Or do you?”

  “No.”

  “Then it doesn’t make sense.”

  “No. I asked you to marry me—or don’t you remember?”

  “I remember, Harvey. I remember that you asked the Cotter girl to marry you, and don’t you think I have as much sense as she had?”

  “I think you have more sense than any girl I ever knew. I think that’s what’s the trouble with you. And it’s only because you have so much sense that I expect you to come up with an answer.”

  “Harvey, what on earth are you talking about? What answer?”

  “Cynthia.”

  I paid the check and we went outside and I walked her back to the library, and in the course of it she mentioned my qualities. Lucille doesn’t praise me, although she thinks she does, and she referred to the fact that instead of doing anything creative or admirable, I was a shamus for an oversize legal bookie; although she doesn’t use words like shamus, and I often think myself that such words are more gauche than definitive, she has no great admiration for the insurance business, particularly because she blames them for my own deterioration.

  “Is that really how you go about solving a case, Harvey?” she asked me.

  “Sort of.”

  “And you expect me to come up with Cynthia?”

  “Oh, no—just some notion about her.”

  “And you’re serious?”

  “You’re damn right.”

  “Well, then you’re crazy,” she said.

  “No. You’ll see.”

  “You mean just out of the clear sky I will call you up and say, ‘Harvey, I know where you can find Cynthia?’”

  “Maybe not just that way. But almost.”

  “Hah!” she said.

  Chapter 3

  The building at 626 Park Avenue, which spreads itself over half a city block, rises up twenty-nine stories and contains forty-three apartments. According to one of those statistical studies which our company adores—believing along with Mark Twain that there are lies, damn lies and statistics—the combined wealth of the inmates of 626 Park Avenue is slightly under a billion dollars; which explains why it is only Fort Knox that is harder to bust into. However, since we write something like five or six million dollars wo
rth of personal property insurance in the building, the doorman is no stranger to me. He is a large, fleshy, crafty product of Flat-bush, who goes by the name of Homer Clapp, and his mental equipment for the job is a sort of animal-like suspicion of anything under a million dollars.

  He held out a hand automatically, and I put fifty cents in it and told him that I was on my way up to interview E.C. Brandon.

  “You’re breaking your heart, Harvey,” he nodded, regarding the money in his palm. “You know, I can return this to you on a loan basis. I don’t even charge no interest, and you can buy subway tokens.”

  “Drop dead.”

  “Anyway, Brandon is not home. His wife is there.”

  I put a whole dollar in his hand. “Have you seen the daughter lately?”

  “Nope.”

  “Since when?”

  “Maybe last week. You sure you’re all right?” folding the dollar carefully into his pocket.

  “Can you remember anything about when you last saw her?”

  “I seen her—period. What’s special?”

  “That’s what I would like to know. What was she wearing?”

  “Clothes,” he explained, and then I persuaded him to call Mrs. Brandon and ask her, please would she be so kind as to see Mr. Krim from the insurance company. Mrs. Brandon must have been bored, because she said that she would be delighted.

  I have been in posh apartments here and there on New York’s East Side, so I am not easily impressed. The Brandon place impressed me. A butler opened the door for me, and I looked out across half an acre of marble foyer, not big enough for tennis but perfectly all right for badminton. The badminton effect was heightened by a pair of curved staircases which swept up to the balcony of the duplex, leaving the ceiling of the entranceway some twenty-two feet high, like a set from Gone With the Wind transported to Park Avenue and Sixty-fifth Street. As the butler took my topcoat, what was evidently Mrs. Brandon appeared at the top of the lefthand staircase, posed a moment, and then descended. She was dressed in lavender, the color of the wallpaper. The side-chairs in the entranceway were upholstered in a sort of magenta, and the butler wore a mauve cummerbund.