“Cyanide.” He was still looking at the carrier. “You’d think they’d have developed something better by now. I took cyanide in Vienna. I was in with this bunch of retired storm troopers and somebody in my own office tipped them. They had me cold in this basement room with no windows. My instructions in a case like that were pretty specific, so I bit down on this capsule I’d been carrying around for six months. The glass cut my lip and I winced and most of it went down my chin. When I went into convulsions a young fellow named Strendle gave me mouth-to-mouth until I started breathing again on my own. I wasn’t in no condition to talk after that, so the others left me alone with Strendle. By then I guess he figured he’d bought some stake in my continued well-being, because he helped me escape that night. Sicker than a dog I was, but I kept on walking till the MPs found me. That boy saved my life twice that night. They killed him later.”
“The Nazis?”
“No, the Allies. Seems Strendle was personally responsible for the massacre of sixty-seven Jews at Birkenau. They found him guilty at Nuremberg and hanged him.” He turned my way. “No, son, I wouldn’t feed nobody cyanide. Next time someone tells you it’s a humane way to die, you tell him to go ahead and hold his breath until he faints. That’ll give him some idea of what it’s like. I’m a killer, not a sadist.”
“I didn’t think you killed him personally. I was just asking for a professional opinion. I think you followed Sahara long enough to put together this itinerary, then switched your attention to Catherine so she’d feel guilty when she found out she was being shadowed by a private detective. You hired Pingree for that, knowing he’d blow it and call attention to himself and cause a confrontation between her and Sahara. She’d be that kind. Only she came to me instead.
“You weren’t finished, though. You fed the itinerary to Pingree and turned him loose on Sahara. I don’t know what you told him, but I’ll bet you flashed your credentials and read him the national security speech. He ate it up, along with a nice retainer, and agreed to keep his mouth shut, even in his business records. Sahara would tumble to him quicker than Catherine. Maybe he’d panic and take off with the list and you’d nail him with it on his person. First, though, he’d flick Pingree away like a mosquito. It was the same as if you’d killed him yourself, Usher. He wasn’t much, just a little guy in the wrong racket. I don’t know the rules of your game, but it seems to me these little pieces you blow down when you twirl the spinner are supposed to be the object.”
He raised his stick and studied the ferrule. I stepped back a pace, but he just flicked at it with his thumb and returned it to the ground. “If someone was to do that, it’d be a bad thing,” he said finally. “But if the names on that list got into the wrong hands, there’d be funerals clear across the country.”
“That song never plays. Not unless you sang it for Pingree first.”
“We do what we do, son. Why we do it ain’t always so clear. Nothing is, without uniforms. Maybe nothing ever was.”
“Is that a confession?”
He turned away from the carrier and started back along the river the way we’d come. I fell in beside him. A bank of soiled clouds had moved in front of the sun and the air coming off the water was dank, like a gust off an old barrel. He said, “If I wanted to flush Sahara out, why didn’t I just make an anonymous call, tell him somebody was on to him?”
“He wouldn’t have fallen for it. He and you have been playing the double-reverse so long you wouldn’t know a direct approach if it rolled over you. Maybe Pingree’s partly responsible. Maybe he tried to sell Sahara that itinerary the way Sahara was peddling the list of agents. I doubt it, though, or the last thing he’d have wanted was a partner to split the take. The only time we met he offered to kick half the job over to me, a complete stranger. Maybe you told him to pose as a blackmailer. Maybe he had just enough smarts to suspect something was wrong with the whole business, and that’s why he made me that offer, to get my opinion. Either way you killed him. You might as well have gone up there and handed him that glass of water yourself.”
“It won’t stick, son, even without the maybes. You need chain of evidence.”
“Lawyers need evidence. I fly by my gut. Anyway, you’ve got some kind of license to kill, so why not humor me and confess?”
“If I did have one, it would only be valid as long as I kept my own mouth shut.”
“You haven’t denied it.”
“All right, it didn’t happen.”
“Killers lie just like everyone else.”
“Not this one,” he said. “Not unless he has to. I’m probably the only good ol’ boy from my home county that don’t get a boot out of it.”
I blew some air. “I didn’t care for the story much myself. It took too many left turns for my taste. That’s why I thought the government had to be involved.”
“Well, I wish you luck with it, son. Just don’t get between me and Sahara. There’s no percentage in it for a citizen.”
“I wish to hell you civilized sons of bitches would make a threat when you make a threat. Every one of you borrows his dialogue from Graham Greene.”
“I wouldn’t know how to begin to make one. You got any rattlers up here?”
The change of subjects threw me for a second.
“Rattlesnakes? Some massasauga. They might bite you if you step on them hard enough.”
“I was thinking of the western diamondback. Pound for pound they’re the deadliest thing on this continent, but not one of them’s a match for your common barnyard hog. You want to know why?”
“Does it matter?”
“They rattle before they strike. Can’t help it, it’s in their nature. That hog, as soon as he hears that sound he goes after it with his hooves and teeth. Don’t take but a few seconds. I ain’t heard tell yet of a hog ever losing that fight.”
“So the moral is, strike before you rattle.”
“That ain’t it.”
“What is?”
“Stay away from hogs.”
We parted where we’d met, in front of Ford Auditorium. He changed hands on the stick and held out his right. “It’s been a pleasure, son. I been in the woods so long I forgot what a man looks like.”
“Leave Catherine alone.”
He shrugged and returned his hand unshaken to the stick. “I was going to tell her good-bye tonight anyway. Maybe you’ll say it for me. Tell her I died or I went back home or I got arrested for messing around with eleven-year-old girls. You can make up a lie just as good as I can. That’s a compliment. I made up some of the best.”
“You are a lie. You and your whole tribe.”
“That’s a fact. But like all lies we got to play out our string. Good luck again, son. Mind what I said about the hogs.”
I said nothing. He stepped onto the porch and went around the curve of the mica wall. I heard his stick tapping for a while.
The cold was thickening and there was a brassy smell of snow in the air. I took my coat and hat off the back seat and put them on before driving back to the office. There I shut myself in; a redundancy in that building, empty of a Saturday. As empty as my head. I sat behind the desk and swiveled my chair toward the window and looked at the roof of the building next door and listened to the foundation crumble under me. I thought about pouring myself a drink. I thought about it some more. Thinking about it was almost as good as drinking it, and a lot easier on the liver. I wondered if I was on to something. I could write a book: The Cosmic Cockeye. I might sell a million before the government figured out a way to tax metaphysical boozing.
“I guess if you have to work weekends that’s the way to do it.”
I swiveled to face Sergeant Trilby. I hadn’t switched on the buzzer that tells me someone has entered the outer office and he’d let himself through two doors with none of the club-footed telegraphy of the previous generation of peace officers. He had on a tan corduroy sport coat with chamois patches on the elbows over a V-neck sweater and a pink shirt with a maroon tie. Blue jean
s and topsiders. All showing rough use, the uniform of the perennial undergrad, if the college had more green growing up its walls than on its grounds. He was carrying a briefcase under one arm, the soft vinyl kind without a handle.
“I thought the brass was favoring vests this year,” I said.
“In East Detroit we’re a little more casual. Especially on Saturday. When no one answered the phone at your house I thought I’d see if I could find you here. I’m on my way to Detroit Police Headquarters with some evidence for their lab and it wasn’t that much of a detour.”
“Nice of you to think of me. I’d offer you a drink, but I have to see your driver’s license first.”
“Never touch it. So this is where you get to work when you went to detective class.”
“I apologized for that crack.” I pointed my chin at the briefcase. “That the evidence? Nice case. Goes with your outfit.”
He laid it on his side of the desk without answering and sat down in the customer’s chair. He propped his right ankle on his left knee and grasped the ankle with both hands. “We got the cutter’s report on Pingree. Came in two hours ago.”
I lifted my brows politely.
“Hydrocyanic acid,” he said. “Thirty grains, give or take. Enough to kill a basketball team full of Pingrees and the mascot. You’d be surprised how easy cyanide is to lay hands on; I was, when I asked the toxicologist. Peach leaves, peach pits, apple seeds — cripes, it’s the poison in mercury poisoning, and you can get that from fish. So much for canvassing all the local pharmacists, although we’re doing that anyway. Any ninth-grade chemistry student can distill himself a batch in his basement with enough kick to wipe out the faculty. And we were worried about crack.”
“It’s a dangerous old world, Sergeant. But you knew that.” I wondered where this was going.
“You frisked Pingree’s office, didn’t you?”
I scratched my ear. I wanted a smoke, but I didn’t want him to think I was stalling. Finally I figured the hell with it and broke one out and got it burning. “I frisked it. It seemed like the thing to do. I thought I was more careful than that. Or are you just fishing?”
“We lifted a partial thumb from his appointment book. Prints don’t wipe so well off paper. When it didn’t match Pingree’s I played a hunch and Faxed it to Lansing. The state police have a full set of yours on file, as they do all private investigators they license in the State of Michigan. What’d you find?”
“Just a lunch date he’d made with Edith Hibbard, his roommate. She told you I kept it for him.”
“Did she?”
“Come on, Sergeant. I know the order of the universe. If she didn’t tell you, you got it from the staff at the Black Bull. I hope they were kind to me in their descriptions.”
“She told us. And we got the lunch date off the next sheet on the pad, the old edge-of-the-pencil trick like you read in Agatha Christie. It works about as often as that line about not leaving town. You didn’t find anything else?”
I used the ashtray. “If I did, I’d be pretty stupid to admit it now, having withheld evidence in a murder for more than twenty-four hours. By now you’ve checked me out with Thirteen Hundred downtown. Some of them have told you I’m square as the Old North Church and some of them have told you I’d lie about the time of day in a clock shop. All of them are right, so far as they go.”
“I want to hear it anyway.”
“I didn’t find anything but a little dust, and not much of that. The amount of business Pingree did in that office wouldn’t have distracted him from his housekeeping.”
He took a hand off his ankle and held his thumb and forefinger an eighth of an inch apart. “I came that close to sending a unit for you when the word came back from Lansing on that partial. Warrant, handcuffs, the works. Then I reminded myself I’m one of the New Breed. You know, Freud in one pocket, Blackstone in the other. We don’t clip our toenails in public or beat suspects to death in the squad room. Not on Saturdays. The part of me that was trained by the sort of cop who practices twirling his nightstick in front of a mirror wanted to get you into interrogation without your belt and shoelaces. The part of me that signed up for a night course in Abnormal Psychology wanted even more to come down here and ask you why you’re so interested in the murder of someone you say you only knew for fifteen minutes.”
I said, “I’m a curious man, Sergeant. It’s one of the reasons I sit here day after day on my college degree and take jobs a cat wouldn’t bury for no money to speak of. I get to study the human condition, and I don’t even have to sign up for a night course. The number of clients you didn’t trip over on your way in here tells you I’ve got some time on my hands just now. When a harmless little guy like Pingree gets himself killed in a flashy way, I don’t want to wait to read about it in the papers.” I looked at my watch. “If you’re going to feed me the lay-off-or-else speech I wish you’d get to it and go. Nine hours is as long as I’m willing to work on weekends.”
“You’re a liar.”
“That’s the Old Breed talking.”
“I think you two were working something,” he said. “It wouldn’t be the first time we caught a bereaved partner rifling the office for cash or dope or whatever. I think you know who killed him and why, and if you don’t know you’ve got a good idea. As long as we’re checking watches, you have forty-one hours left to come to us with the package. After that it won’t matter which breed I belong to, I’ll send the wagon and you can cool your curiosity at County until I’m good and ready to hear what you have to say.”
“You’ll need a charge.”
“We talked to the neighbors. The cleaning crew was in early yesterday, there was an old lady sweeping up and a window washer on the fifth floor. The executive in charge of real property for the corporation that owns the building is in the Cayman Islands with his secretary, probably surfing on his bank account, so we don’t know yet what company the crew works for. The only other visitor to Pingree’s floor seems to have been the owner of a man’s voice his closest neighbor heard through the wall. It could have been your voice. I don’t know how they do things down here, but in East Detroit, suspicion of murder sticks long enough to sort some things out.”
I leaked smoke. “Oh, that. I’ve been in County a couple of times. It’s my Cayman Islands. It wouldn’t change the fact that I don’t know who killed Pingree. You don’t think I did it or you’d have come in here with help and called the newspapers later.”
He put his foot on the floor, leaned forward, and unzipped the briefcase. “Pingree shared a toilet down the hall with the other offices on the floor. There’s a crawl space behind the radiator with a panel that comes off so the plumber doesn’t have to punch holes in the wall to get to the pipes. The screws were rusty, but there was fresh steel showing in the slots where someone had been at work recently with a screwdriver. Otherwise we never would have thought to look behind the panel.”
I watched him remove a thick manila envelope and put it on the desk in front of me. It was stuffed full, splitting at the seams. The pre-printed address label, from the Professional Investigators Book Service of Denver, Colorado, was made out to Herbert S. Pingree. I thought I knew what was inside, and it threw every theory I had straight into the dumper.
24
THE THICK SHEAF of papers was sticking out through the wrinkled flap. I put out my cigarette, pinched the bottom of the envelope, and pulled it free of its contents. I went through the stuff slowly, as if I were reading it for the first time. The composition books made me think of school. How I Spent My Summer Vacation, by Herbert Selwyn Pingree. Camping, swimming, drinking hydrocyanic acid. Lost something? Only my best lead. In trouble? Just with the law. Call A. WALKER INVESTIGATIONS today for a free consultation. A kick in the head is our stock-in-trade. I felt Trilby’s eyes on me like twin augers. And I had thought they weren’t cop’s eyes.
I was looking for something, but when I found it I didn’t spend any more time with it than I had with the other stuff.
The page had been typed on heavy stock with a ribbon that needed replacing, hence the fuzzy copy I had been rapping my head against since yesterday. I went on through the bills and other miscellany to the end. It didn’t take me as long as it had the first time, but I didn’t just thumb through it either. Trilby watched me the whole time. When I was done I put everything back in order, straightened the edges, poked it back into the envelope, and sat back.
“Any of it spell anything?” asked the sergeant.
“I wish I had his hand. I have to type up all my notes or I can’t read them the next day.”
“The penmanship is satisfactory and the grammar is well above average, not a dangling participle or a misplaced first predicate in a carload. His arithmetic is okay too. I don’t know where he stood in geography, because I never got the chance to ask him the state capitals. When I want a handwriting analysis I’ll ask my sister. She does horoscopes too. She told me to avoid the company of jackass private eyes today, but I didn’t listen. You know what I want.”
“Just an observation. He might as well have used Sanskrit for what I got out of it. He kept an adequate record of a crummy practice, that’s it.”
“What about that typewritten piece? Everything else is in longhand.”
“A list of things to do, maybe, places to go. Maybe he bought a machine, didn’t like it, and took it back. I know a P.I. who used a shotgun on a brand-new word processor the first time it stuttered and lost an entire surveillance report.”
“Funny you should mention a surveillance report,” he said.
I cocked a hand. “It could be that. A damn sketchy one. Standard procedure is to record the subject’s actions at the places he visits and who he meets. Take pictures if possible. I didn’t see a camera in Pingree’s office.”
“His girlfriend said he talked about buying one and kept putting it off because he didn’t know an F-stop from the FAA. Notice anything else about this stuff?”
“Only that he was flush toward the end, settling bills and things. Maybe he hit the daily double at Hazel Park.”
Sweet Women Lie Page 14