The Knowland Retribution

by Richard Greener

  The talking heads asked each other when would they learn? They berated themselves as too damned trusting. They wondered what would become of us all if things like this continued to sap America’s faith in its media. And who, after all, was this Isobel Gitlin? No friend of theirs, to be sure. None of them knew her.

  Isobel still had her salary and her office, and Mel Gold was there to do what he could. Nevertheless, she saw herself near the end of a very short branch. That was when Walter Sherman called.

  “Miss Gitlin,” he said. “We have not met, but I know that you’re right. I’d like to talk it over.”

  “What do you mean you know I’m right? Right about what?”

  “Hopman, MacNeal, and Ochs. I know things that you don’t. I know things that you should know. Where would you like to meet?”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Walter Sherman. Meet me in the restaurant of the Mayflower Hotel. Six o’clock. I’ll be sitting at a table next to the window facing Central Park West. I’ll be wearing a camel-hair blazer. You’ll be relieved when you see me. I’m old enough to be your father, and harmless as a pup. I know what you look like. I’ll see you come in. I’ll be dining and I hope you’ll join me . . . if you have any appetite nowadays.”

  “Mr. Sherman,” she said. “I will have a gun in my purse. If you are f-fucking around I will shoot off your b-b-balls.”

  The tables by the window are actually in the bar. The first entrance from the lobby brings you there. A single line of tables sits against the plate glass, inches from the street. The bar’s a step up. In between the tables and stools, a row of planters is filled with large, leafy triffids that keep the rooms apart. Walter watched Isobel walk past him outside, wearing a green summer dress and yellow sweater, chin on her chest, stepping quickly, hands clutching a green, beaded purse. He stood up, smiled, and waved as she moved inside.

  “It’s a pleasure. I’m Walter. May I call you Isobel? Please have a seat. And please leave the gun in your purse.”

  She shook his outstretched hand, sat, and felt an awkward silence roll in. He liked awkward silences. They sometimes offered a window into the subject’s state of mind. The quality of the smile, or frown, the posture, the steadiness of the gaze—there were things you could often tell from signs like that.

  Walter Sherman’s own manner had nothing much to offer. He seemed relaxed but purposeful, self-assured but diffident. What he said next suggested telepathy:

  “See? Old enough to be your dad.”

  “I’m older than I look,” she said. “You could be younger.”

  Now his pale-blue eyes showed her something nice: he was at least a little impressed. “Drink?” he said, flicking a finger. A smiling waiter leapt forward. She ordered a vodka martini. He asked for a Diet Coke.

  “Is that quite fair?” she asked him.

  Walter said, “I’ll have wine with dinner. We can talk about sports until then.”

  Isobel could hold five martinis long before she left London.

  “You know about me. Everyone does. It’s ugly.” She was stammering only moderately, and felt unexpectedly at ease. Now she saw a curious light in Walter’s bright blue eyes. She tried a telepathic turn of her own:

  “I spoke English and very good French at home. As a child I spoke Hindustani every day, and Bauan as well. I still can. My parents tried to keep my speech white, European. I rebelled against that, which could have produced my stammer. They say I pronounce my English like a little black village girl. That may help to explain the inflection you hear. I cultivate it because I like it. Do you?”

  The surprise in his smile seemed to confirm that she had, in fact, read his mind. Then came the martini. She felt its first effect before the alcohol hit her blood. Coffee worked the same way. She got her first rush from the smell. She became aware that this was becoming a “jolly bash,” as her suave, determined father might have said. And a jolly bash was not what she had in mind.

  “Now let’s hear about you,” she said matter-of-factly. “What do you do besides advertise your antiquity?”

  “I find missing people,” he said.

  No question: he’d said the same thing hundreds of times before. He could certainly have lied; anything else would have sounded more likely. She got the sense that he liked going straight to the point. Did he really find that practical? When did circumstances permit that kind of candor? How would it work for a catcher of people? Or was it a nifty affectation?

  “Why do you do it?” Isobel asked, all pretty eyes and ears.

  “People pay me to do it.”

  “Why don’t they call the police?”

  “Most do, but some are embarrassed, and some are afraid of ridicule, the risk of humiliation. Sometimes they need a private way to find whoever’s lost.”

  “First you said ‘missing.’ Then you said ‘lost.’ Which is it?”

  “Sometimes there’s no difference. Some people want to be missing. They are not lost. Once in a while they don’t know where they are. Then they are lost.”

  “What do you call yourself, professionally? What’s the name for it?”

  “I usually don’t, and I don’t know,” Walter smiled again. She noticed the skin crinkling around his eyes and mouth. She thought him mid- to late-forties, but she thought he looked sixty because of the tan—what it had done to his face. Her father and mother avoided the sun, out of European vanity. She was afraid of sunburn. This one, like many Americans, seemed to pursue melanoma.

  She said, “I never imagined anyone actually did what you say you do. I imagined it was all in the movies.”

  “Well,” said Walter, “just goes to show.”

  “Your . . . what do you call them, clients? I assume they’re celebrities, public figures? People who don’t want the world to know that their daughter—I’ll bet it’s always the daughter—ran away with a Hell’s Angel gang, or a circus, or wherever they go. And, that’s where you come in.”

  He seemed a little less charmed. Her flippancy was doing its job. She expected to get a look at him now. “That’s where I come in,” he said, just a little shortly.

  “I feel like calling you Robert Mitchum. Except he’d be somewhat older, if he were alive.”

  He didn’t like impertinence. Probably took it for disrespect. He was sipping his Diet Coke silently. Sullenly? No. Not quite that.

  “What makes you good at doing it?”

  He said, “I really don’t know. I just am. I know where to look. I know what to ask. The right things come to mind. Experience helps. I know when a hunch is worth chasing. What makes you good at what you do? What makes anyone good?”

  Isobel sipped the last of her drink. She put down the glass with emphasis.

  “What do you have to do with Hopman, MacNeal, and Ochs?”

  “There are other people on the list.” Walter was looking into her pupils, expecting a reaction. She gave him none. He went on. “Some of the ones who are probably on the list hired me to find the killer.”

  “Who are the others?” Stupid, stupid, stupid. It was a stupid thing to say and she knew it, but too late.

  “First I have to identify the guy, assuming it’s a him.”

  “What will you do after you know who it is?”

  “I will find him.”

  “After you find him, what will you do?”

  “I won’t ‘do’ anything.” The tone of his answer rejected her plain implication—that he intended to rub someone out. He was past his impatience now. He seemed pleased to be talking simple business. “Most of the time I’m bringing somebody home. All I’m doing now is finding a guy.”

  “And what do you think your friends will do when you find him?”

  “They’re not my friends. Just my clients. And what they do is their business. They’re not killers themselves
. From what I’ve seen they will buy him off.”

  “So you think he survived the E. coli disaster and lost someone he loved? Wife, child? Something like that?” She paused long enough for him to let her go on. “Then how do you buy off a person like that?”

  Walter stopped, took in a long, deep breath through his nose, then turned his gaze to the park across the street for only a moment. “What’s the largest amount of money you’ve ever thought of having?” he asked, turning to look at her.

  “I already have it. My people are not poor. I struggle only because I prefer it. Actually, I don’t struggle.”

  “How much? Give me a figure.”

  “I am not a materialist. I think in modest terms.”

  “How much?”

  Isobel took a moment to ponder. Before she could speak he reached out and touched her hand, his fingers surprisingly warm.

  “In dollars. Do you have a figure in mind?”

  She did, and she nodded.

  Walter sat back. “Now double it, triple it, quadruple it.”

  “Oh, m-m-my,” said Isobel.

  “Think about Hopman and MacNeal. Think about their money. How much was their life worth? Think of the people we’re talking about.”

  Another flick of the finger, another waiter. They ordered, and Walter went on without losing a beat. She had the somewhat creepy feeling that Walter believed he knew all about her. In retrospect now, his impatience seemed measured, as though he were tolerating expected girlish antics. She suddenly felt—absurdly, really—taken for granted. She also felt a little like being understood. His apparently genuine inclination to talk straight had an effect. She found herself tending to accept his words at face value.

  He said he wanted Isobel’s help in identifying his man; he was sure that she’d done more research on it, and gathered more good information, than anyone else in the wide, wide world. He also said, quite matter-of-factly, that while Isobel’s research would speed his work, she could not realistically expect to identify this guy without him.

  And he left it precisely there.

  She thought long and hard, and he did not attempt to hurry her.

  They ate in silence for what must have been quite a while, as New York passed on the street outside, and waiters danced through the room, and diners, all nicely dressed, a surprising number of them older, hummed at each other over their food.

  She suddenly saw that he’d ordered a bottle of white wine. As the waiter poured, Isobel understood that her mind was made up. She explained that she’d turned her West Side apartment into a photo gallery. She said she had pictures of hundreds of adult survivors—parents and spouses and brothers and sisters and grown-up children of those killed by Knowland meat. She also had spreadsheets designed to connect the dots, to correlate factors likely to narrow the field, to grind the data down to a workable list.

  She had a rough timeline tracking who died when. She knew who lost a child, a wife, a husband, a brother, a sister. She included cousins when evidence showed they were close. Many of their pictures were taped on her walls. On her kitchen wall, her “wall of fame,” hung photographs of all who had lost two or more close relatives. She and her assistant spent days on the net assembling facts and likenesses, then dumping them into a system of folders she had designed for that purpose.

  Walter expressed neither admiration nor surprise, which disappointed Isobel and left her somewhat irritated, which irritated her all the more.

  “You have the data,” Walter said. “I have the skill and experience. We need to help each other.”

  “I am not without skill and experience.” Now this old man was getting on her nerves. “Besides, I have the New York Times behind me.” She wished she hadn’t said it the moment she did. Behind her with a pitchfork, maybe. Walter certainly knew that.

  But he played it like a gentleman, just as her father would. “My guess is that that anyone who knows you finds it impossible to believe that you were dishonest or sloppy. I’m sure that many colleagues believe you, but I do not believe you. I know for a fact that you are right. And you know that I’m the only one who does.”

  They both knew the deal was done.

  And so was dinner. He suggested dessert and coffee and cognac. She signaled that she needed a rest by saying she’d never been inside the Mayflower before. He said that he based himself here when he stayed in New York. She thought to say that the senior contingent probably made him feel very young indeed, but she sipped her coffee instead.

  Walter said, “When I was a kid in Rhinebeck, it took a couple of hours to drive down here. In high school we’d do it sometimes, get drunk, and drive home. It was a change of pace. At the time there was a notorious call girl ring in this building. It was all very high class and got some play in the papers when they busted the ring. I told my friends to drive by. We went around the block half a dozen times. After that I used to imagine walking down the street right out there, and one of these girls comes out looking like a movie star, and she wiggles her finger and there I go. And I’m sitting around in this penthouse with dozens of girls, drinking scotch and all the rest of it. The thing was, I’d seen an actual place that was in the news. I felt a connection. The first time I had to stay in the city for business, I came right here. I’ve done it ever since. I’ve sat at this table more times than I can count. As you can see, I’m a very popular figure here.”

  “And the girls . . . ?”

  “Long gone by the time I landed.”

  She was greatly encouraged by her meeting and ongoing work with Walter. It helped her keep her chin up during the next couple of days, as the criticism continued. She spent the next day at home, working with him. She went to the office the following morning, more than a little bucked up. On top of the pile of her morning mail was an envelope bearing no postmark, no stamp, and no return address. The computer-generated label showed only her name. Whoever sent it had gotten it into the Times’ internal system. It contained a single sheet, unsigned. The following words in 16 pt. bold were printed across the center:

  I killed Floyd Ochs.

  It was not Harlan Jennings.

  Details to follow.

  Very carefully, holding it by a single edge, she placed the envelope between two sheets of paper and stapled them top and bottom. Later, she learned there were no fingerprints on either the envelope or the note. Then she placed the evidence in her top drawer and sat back to focus on her breathing, trying to get her heart under control.

  St. John

  “Best towel I ever used was in Aruba,” said Walter, wiping his face with the relatively clean specimen Billy had produced from behind the bar. “Big orange ones. They handed them out when you got to the beach. Real thick, but not too heavy. They smelled good too. You’d come out of the water and wrap one around you. It was just about perfect.”

  “When was that?” Billy said.

  Walter shrugged. “A while ago.”

  “You wasn’t alone. I can sure see that.” Ike tilted his head sympathetically. Respect for Walter’s privacy forbade him from speaking his thoughts: “Everything comes back when you see that orange towel. The good and the bad. It all comes back. I can see it in your face right now.”

  Instead, he looked at the ceiling and said, “Best one I can remember was New Orleans, summer of ’49. She was a whore, you know, but she was a high-class woman. Told me she was twenty-four. Come to find out she wasn’t but seventeen. No matter. Woman like that make an old man young and a young man feel a lot older.”

  “Lucky she didn’t kill you,” Billy said, heavy lids showing more of his sad brown eyes than usual.

  “Man, she made me feel like I never did before and have not since,” said Ike.

  “I thought this was about towels,” Billy said.

  “I’m getting to the towels. When I was done, which was none too quick
, I was soaking wet. I was covered with my sweat and hers. And we’re in this hotel room with a big open window and doors leading out to a little terrace. Had a fan, but damn sure no air conditioning. It was hot and sticky too. She stood there by that open window and the moonlight shined off her in a way that made her look like, I don’t know what—an angel, a statue like you see in a museum—except I knew she was never no statue. Never seen a woman beautiful as that. Next thing I know, she had a towel and sat down beside me on the bed and went to wiping me off. That’s the best towel I ever had.”

  Walter said, “Hell of a way to get old.”

  Ike nodded. “I was half your age at the time, but I growed up a lot that night.”

  Billy suddenly stood up straight behind the bar, surprising Walter and Ike with his height. Unslouched, he was a different man. “My mother used to put a clean towel on the bathroom door every time I took a bath.”

  “Your mother?” said Walter.

  “What’s wrong with that? She took a towel out of the closet and hung it up on the bathroom door. It was clean and it smelled good. Every time I took a bath. Anything wrong with that?”

  Walter’s eyebrows jumped.

  Billy bent toward him: “You want to hear about towels? Wrapped around people’s heads after they got their brains beat out behind some warehouse? Towels all covered with blood so you didn’t know what color they were? Believe me, Walter, I seen plenty of towels.”

  “I like your momma’s towel fine,” said Ike.

  “Write it up, Billy,” said Walter.

  “What?”

  “New Orleans, Aruba, mom.” And to the general satisfaction, that’s what he wrote on the rimless blackboard leaning against the mirror.