Ask the Right Question

by Michael Z. Lewin

  “The Swiss thing?”

  “Yes. Now I can’t guarantee it, but this page and this page”—he waved, economically, two pages—“have the distinct smell of a Swiss bank account.”

  “How distinct?”

  “Oh, pretty distinct. It seems to have about a million and a quarter in it, and it is identified only by a number.” It was the straightest sentence I had gotten out of him. I wondered if he was tiring.

  “I can’t be certain, of course, but they usually imply a certain amount of tax fraud. Would that be of any use to you?”

  “I think it would,” I said.

  “Oh, good,” he said, and started gathering papers. I stopped him.

  “There are a couple of things we have yet to settle, Mr. Elmitt. The other material. And I’m not sure that I can afford your going on with these.”

  “Well, what are we set at so far?”

  “A hundred,” I said. As if it were thousands.

  “Up to a hundred and a half and I’ll give you the works on this stuff.”

  “OK.” I said. “Consider it upped.”

  “Good. I said you wouldn’t have to pay to support this place. But you can help my daughter to get a new dress. I would have hated to be teased and then not be given the chance to run through all the calculations.” There was a large adding machine on a desk in the corner of the room. I mean, what was a sun-room supposed to be for? Why not add in the sun?

  “About the years before 1956?”

  He sighed, and waved at two small piles. “Outcome,” he said as he patted the first pile. “Income,” and he patted the next, a couple of sheets. “It doesn’t take a genius to figure them out.”

  I let it go at that. I wasn’t a genius. I put one pile in each of my jacket pockets, and let him show me his toys on the way out. He even had a little computer in the basement. But I didn’t rue my investment, or incipient investment, because he also had a pinball machine sitting right next to the computer. “For my son,” he said when he saw me looking at it, and smiling.

  I bet. I would almost have bet that he didn’t even have a son. But after his hundred and fifty, I didn’t have much betting money left.

  I shoved off and agreed to wait for his call.

  35

  As I walked down the hall toward my office I realized that my door was open. Wide open, not just ajar.

  My heart started to pound. I hate surprises, especially when I know one is coming but don’t know what, or in this case, who it is. Whether to man my defenses, or trot out my sweets.

  I considered just heading back out, going over to cop center and talking to Miller there. Reluctantly I decided not to. I didn’t want to put the extra pressure of a personal appearance on Miller after the night’s foolish call.

  But I couldn’t go straight into the office.

  So I paid a call to my neighborly vacancy next door. I tripped the lock, and skipped in. It is a pair of dirty empty rooms, except for the improvements I have made in the neighborhood of the bathtub. I picked the least growth-ridden corner and put my notebook down in it. Then the set of Crystal photos I’d been carrying around in a manila envelope. Then my jacket with its pockets of in and outcomes.

  I wondered, for the several steps back to the firetrap I call home, just who or what was waiting for me.

  When I peeked around the edge of the open doorway, I began to suspect a what. My office was empty.

  After making one quick move to see if anyone was behind the door, I went in as quietly as I could. I tiptoed to my living-room door. It too was open. Before looking in I stopped to listen. I heard nothing. Maybe I had just left it all open as I went out in the morning. Though I try to be careful about such things, it could happen. I framed a mental picture of myself tippy-toeing around my own empty living quarters. A shadower afraid of his own shadow.

  But how does a man live if he doesn’t take himself seriously?

  I tiptoed to my back room.

  My dining-room chair was turned around, facing my window. On one of its broad elm arms I saw a slouched walnut-colored head.

  It didn’t move. I stood there for what seemed like an eternity, and it didn’t move.

  I glanced around the room. No other people, otherwise apparently unchanged. I looked back at the back of my former client’s head.

  I didn’t have the faintest idea of what to do.

  I went to her, still tiptoeing. I looked at her face. Eyes closed, pale. Unmoving.

  I took her hand. It was warm.

  She opened her eyes and looked into mine. Leaving her hand in mine she stretched slowly. And slowly woke up.

  “I’ve been waiting quite awhile,” she said. The sleep left a fuzz on her ordinarily sleek speech. I let go her hand and rocked back gently and sat on the floor in front of her. Inadvertently it left me looking up her skirt. That made me uncomfortable, so I got up and sat on the windowsill instead. From there I got preoccupied with the low cut of her dress. She was sporting a fair share of teen-age cleavage.

  That made me uncomfortable too. I went and got my telephone chair and pulled it up in front of her. Neither above nor below. The third time was a charm. My attention fixed on her baggy eyes and her pallidness.

  She sat up. “I wanted to know what you are doing. And why,” she said.

  “I can see you’ve been going through a hard time. Problems at home?”

  “Yes,” she said, “Ever since you started messing around.” She fell silent, as we both pondered the fact that it had been she who originally started my messing around.

  “I want you to stop,” she said with an air of finality.

  “Stop what?” I said. And she started to cry. She continued to cry.

  I’m sure it was sincere and all that. But I am not one of those whose hearts of stone are cracked by tears. If she had been in my family I would have told her to shut up or go cry in the hall. Being as she was a guest of sorts, I just let her go on, since it wasn’t loud enough to disturb the neighbors. Not that they disturb in this cruddy building. Not that I have any neighbors. One of the things I might have done with that fifty thou would have been to lease myself a foothold in a “nicer” joint.

  While she cried it out I made us a pot of tea.

  The making lasted just long enough. I poured a mug of tea for myself and a cup for her. I put her cup on a little tray, put a little glass of milk, a box of sugar, and a spoon alongside it on the tray, and put it on the arm of the chair. It was just the right amount of time. I know, because she snuffled a “Thank you.” If I’d got it to her much earlier she wouldn’t have said anything and might have knocked the tray off with her twistings and agonies.

  Maybe not though. It’s a pretty big arm on the chair and trays sit firmly.

  I sat down again on my telephone chair.

  She studied the tea, and then with a little sigh she poured some sugar from the box into the spoon. Two spoonfuls, then milk. I take milk; I can’t stand sugar in hot tea. But each to his own. She also spilled some sugar on the tray which she would have avoided if she had poured the sugar into the spoon over the cup. Not a child of tidy habits. Men who live alone get picky that way. I can’t go on much longer living alone. It’s eroding what is left of my charming and delicate personality.

  She stirred her tea and the social action made her into a woman/girl again. As such she tried a gambit. “I thought that once you liked me.” She looked up at me with big wet brown eyes. The crying had brought color to her face. She didn’t look half bad, but I could hardly keep from laughing. When I am really in the middle of some business, and excited about it. I am one coldhearted bastard.

  “I did. I do. You were a good boss.”

  She played it to the hilt, turned away, snuffled, the works. “I didn’t mean like that.”

  “I know,” I said. But though I never kick animals, I am not always nice to children. “You want me to stop. What do you want me to stop?”

  “Whatever you’re doing.”

  “Are you having a har
d time at home?”

  “I don’t know what is going on, but everybody is just horrible. Mummy has had all kinds of fits and her doctor says she has to stay in and that he will be coming down from Lafayette to see her every couple of days. And Daddy just doesn’t know what to do.”

  “And you think that it is all your fault because you put me on this thing.”

  “That day that you came over and talked to him I thought it was all over. And all better. I mean Daddy talked to me that day, for the first time like I wasn’t a little girl. And he said it was going to be all better, and that he was really going to look after Mummy, and everything. And after all, you did find out what I wanted you to find. I just don’t understand why you keep on messing around.”

  And I would have been hard put to tell her. I didn’t want to monkey prematurely with the story she had been told. Before I had a complete story to replace it with. But she pressed me.

  “Why are you doing it?” she asked.

  “I don’t like being lied to.” I said.

  “Who lied to you?” she said sharply.

  “I didn’t say someone did.”

  “Who lied to you?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Not my father! He didn’t lie to you.” I noted that she had gotten her problems of terminology straightened out with respect to Leander Crystal.

  She was getting on my nerves. “I didn’t say anybody had lied to me, I said I don’t like being lied to, and that means that when I am told a story I will check it out to make sure that I am not being lied to, and that’s what I am doing, and that’s what I shall continue to do. And besides,” I added, because I felt bloody self-priggy-righteous, “I don’t like my office being broken into.”

  “Who broke into your office?”

  I sighed, but spoke carefully. “Somebody interested only in a file marked ‘Crystal.’ Who do you think it was?”

  She was clearly startled. “And that’s when you sent the check back?”

  Why complicate matters; it was technically the truth even though I had made the resolution beforehand. “That’s when I sent the check back.” I said.

  “And you think he did it?”

  I felt out of place as a teacher in elementary detectiveness. “I figured that it was Santa Claus because he forgot the address of your chimney.”

  “You don’t have to be snotty about it.”

  “I know. I’m just tired.”

  “I must bore you,” she said with a burst of feeling, “something awful.”

  I just can’t understand how it is that older men get mixed up with teen-age girls. They’re so damn unreliable. Unless maybe it’s because they are changeable, and not the same, day after day, minute after minute. But she was wearing me out.

  “Don’t worry about it, little lady,” I said with as much kindness as I could muster. “I am sorry if I am making waves in the Crystal home, but at this point it is certainly not your fault. Blame it on me. I am certainly perverse about such matters, if you know the word. It’s why I’m not rich.” How true! “I will try to make it as painless as I can. Try to trust me if you can. And if you can’t, then I just hope you realize that there is nothing you can do about it.”

  “Nothing?” she said. I knew what she was thinking. I thought I knew what she was thinking.

  “Absolutely nothing.”

  “OK,” she said. She got up and turned for the door and then turned back. “I feel better. I don’t know why, but I feel a lot better.” I nodded beneficently. At the door she turned again and said, “Thanks for the tea. It was good.” She left.

  I felt better too. I knew why. Not virtue rewarded, but the fact that no matter how it was settled, I liked this as a last meeting much better than the tense bitter little girl I had talked to at the Crystal house. I had disliked her enough then that I had virtually forgotten about her altogether. Though I wished I had told her to keep her trap shut when she got home, I had a more sympathetic taste in my mouth for my little lady client. Former client.

  36

  I waited awhile before I called Miller. To segment the parts of my life. Break it all down into more handleable pieces. I had another mug of tea.

  I called Miller. That is, I called Police HQ and asked for Miller. Not there, but he had left the stuff for me. “Are you Mr. Samson? Sergeant Miller left an envelope for you. When would you care to pick it up?” I cared to pick it up immediately. I knew the desk man wasn’t Numbie. I could tell by the grammar. I was beginning to wonder what had happened to poor old Numb Nuts. I still don’t know. I guess I’ll have to remember to ask Miller sometime.

  I picked up the folder from a clean-cut young cop who was filling in on the desk. I walked home, and on the way in I picked up the items I’d stashed next door.

  I had a choice. Leander’s tiddly bills or the Immigration file.

  I went for the Immigration file.

  Annie Lombard; French, unmarried, aged nineteen at time of entry into the United States on April 17, 1954. Admitted as resident alien. Fingerprints enclosed. Address in United States.: 413 East Fiftieth Street, Indianapolis, Indiana. American Consulate in Marseilles stated she had proof of assets of over nine thousand dollars and that her fiancé, an American, had written a letter “guaranteeing” that she would not become a “ward of the state.”

  In April, 1955, was the first notation that there was no record of an Annie Lombard having registered at a post office, or having left the country.

  At that point Immigration had turned the case over to the Justice Department. They had found that she no longer resided at the address given and that persons currently residing at that address knew nothing about her.

  There was a covering note stating the presumption that either she had left the country and her leaving had been missed clerically, or that she remained illegally. It also asked for any further information on this “missing alien” which the Indianapolis Police might have.

  Altogether a fascinating document. Quite, quite fascinating, considering the information it gave as stacked up against the information I had.

  There had never been “friends” at the address given. Only a bald man with curious neighbors. She had left the address in September, 1954, not later. And she had been pregnant.

  But what happened to the lady? Left to go back to France? Or, sensing the Indiana winters, did she go to Mexico and then go wherever she was going from there?

  And the baby? She was single, nineteen, monied and pregnant. Not usually a situation that lasts, intact, for the full nine months. Usually something gives, like getting married, or committing suicide, or blowing some bread to get rid of the bun in the oven.

  I wondered just how pregnant she had been when she hung out the wash on Fiftieth Street.

  Altogether quite fascinating.

  I went to the jacket pocket that contained Leander Crystal’s income records. I went through each sheet quite carefully. There weren’t all that many, and while I can’t claim to know what each item was, I was more adept at picking out what it wasn’t. What each one wasn’t was rent from the Fiftieth Street property.

  Which wasn’t conclusive of anything. I had no way of being certain that the records were complete or that I necessarily would have spotted rent income.

  But after I went through them I was pretty sure. Sure enough to do some speculating.

  Like, maybe Annie Lombard had a friend in Indianapolis after all.

  But why? how? and miscellaneous other questions pertaining to the establishment of the establishment. The best question of which was the pregnancy. I knew one landlord who had not caused it.

  I let it go for the moment.

  I started instead on Leander Crystal’s debits from before 1956.

  I’m better on debits than credits. I was able to do quite a bit of positive classification. A pile of household bills, and department store bills, and tax bills. I was surprised just how unusual and outstanding the checks to Jacques Chaulet had been. They had seemed much more ordinary to
me the last time I had gone through the canceled checks. I had to conclude that I was developing more skill with practice, more ability to sort out the usual from the unusual in canceled-check line. I realized how dumb I must have been not to pick out twenty thousand dollars’ worth of checks to one man at the beginning.

  Even so, now I could class by date and by payee just what each thing went for. Like a puzzle. The things that were not blatantly ordinary centered on the house on Fiftieth Street, the trip to Europe, and the trip to New York during which Eloise was born. The house economics I had been through before: the purchase, the remodelings and the apparently rent-free status for all occupants since Crystal’s purchase.

  The European trip gave me a little more. They had blasted nearly nineteen thousand dollars in six and a half months. That seemed a trifle high to me for 1953–54. I wondered how easy it was to drop that kind of pocket change. I wondered if they had made any fantastic purchases. I wished I still had the letters Eloise had so graciously brought once upon a time; I wanted to go over Fleur’s letters to her father. I didn’t remember any suggestion of beautiful things but maybe I hadn’t been looking for that sort of reference. What you notice depends so much on what you want to see.

  I would have been glad to take a look at the item-by-item breakdown of that expenditure, but there wasn’t any. All that was separate was a check for traveler’s checks for $17,000 and a check to Matador Travel Agency for $2,941.91. That one had me too. Bit steep for plane tickets, yet not a lot for extended hotel bookings for six-plus months. Maybe tickets plus some hotels. Fair enough.

  Matador had done some good business with Leander. The New York trip came through them too. September, ’54. The check was dated the fifth, and paid out $307.52. That seemed high too, tacked onto a check to the Essex House Hotel for $4,102. But some folks live in style. And at the Essex House you can do just that. I figured from September 6 to November 15 made about seventy days. OK, nearly $60 a day, not bad. But a fellow begins to wonder.

  In the process of wondering it occurred to me that Chivian had probably come along for the trip and I felt a little better. Three people can eat a lot more than two.