Ice Blues ds-3

by Richard Stevenson

  Gail Tesney saw me catch sight of the suitcases as she turned toward a doorway leading to the other end of the apartment. She did a quick double take but said nothing and passed out of sight as I seated myself on the couch. The American Journal of Nursing on the end table was addressed to Ms. Gail Tesney, Apartment 5-H, 714 North Scotsmont, which was the apartment I was in.

  Muffled voices came from behind a closed door. After several minutes of this I heard a door open-but not close-and Gail Tesney returned. She sat looking tense on a chair facing me and said, “Joan is lying down. She’s really not feeling up to talking to anyone about Jack. I’m sorry. I really am. I appreciate that you’ve come all the way from Albany, and you’re disappointed. But-what can I say? I hope you’ll understand. Is there some message I can give Joan?”

  I said, “Where’s the money?”

  Her mouth snapped shut and her black eyes flashed, but it wasn’t all anger.

  She seemed frustrated and unable to make up her mind about something. It was also evident that

  I was not the sole cause of Gail Tesney’s unsettled conflicting emotions.

  Working hard not to glance in the direction of the dining room, she said,

  “What money are you referring to, Mr. Strachey?”

  I laid it all out for her-them. How Jack’s body had been left in my car; the menacing calls from Hankie-mouth and his assumption that I had the money; my tracing Jack’s visits to Joan Lenihan in October and again the weekend before he died; Jack’s negotiations with the Albany pols; the letter from Jack asking my help and the arrival of five suitcases full of newspapers with Joan Lenihan’s return address on them.

  I said, “My aim is to recover the two and a half million, deduct a relatively modest sum to cover my fee and expenses as per Jack’s instructions, and then carry out his project-provided, of course, that I can verify to my satisfaction that the money was legitimately obtained in the first place.

  Who is this Al Piatek anyway?”

  Tesney sat poised on the edge of her chair looking stricken throughout my monologue. When I’d finished, she just stared at me. Finally, she said, “I am going to tell you something in confidence.”

  “All right.”

  “This is not to be repeated in Albany.”

  “Is it illegal?”

  “Not in California anymore. Texas, I think.”

  “Then as far as I’m concerned, mum’s the word.”

  “You’re gay, aren’t you? Jack mentioned that.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’ll understand. Joan and I are lovers.”

  “I thought you might be. But why the secrecy? This is West Hollywood, where the city hall probably has a statue of Sappho on the roof. Sappho and Montgomery Clift with raised fists.”

  She wanted to smile but couldn’t quite. “Joan and I are in the medical profession, which is not as consistently enlightened as you might think it is, even in California. There are certain administrators closeted dykes themselves in two cases-who would make our lives a lot more difficult if we were as open as we’d like to be. Nothing we could sue over, but a lot of petty meannesses we would prefer to avoid. We saw it happen to another couple once who were so brazen as to kiss each other good-bye one morning in the hospital parking lot.”

  “I understand that.”

  “But I am mainly talking about Albany. Joan has her own reasons for not wanting it known that she’s a lesbian, and although I don’t agree with her that it should matter anymore, I do respect her wishes absolutely. I am asking-insisting-that you do the same.”

  “I will. But what has that got to do with the problem we’re all facing here?”

  “You just said it, Mr. Strachey. The problem we’re all dealing with here. I want you to understand that any problem of Joan’s is my problem too. In fact, Joan wanted to keep me out of this. And I agree that there are some things that each of us has to handle on our own. But this is not one of them. It’s too big.”

  “I agree. Murder is an event that has to command everybody’s full attention.”

  She blanched, then opened her mouth to speak. No words came out and her chin trembled.

  I said, “Who do you and Joan think killed Jack?”

  “Why-why, one of those politicians. Isn’t that obvious? Joan has told me all about what Albany politicians are like. And the horror of it is, they’ll probably get away with it. The police will cover it up. It’s sickening.”

  “And Joan is prepared to let that happen by not telling them what she knows?”

  With a puzzled shake of the head, she said, “I really don’t understand her thinking about that. I just can’t get it into my head.

  She says she simply doesn’t want to have anything to do with Albany-that nothing but disaster could ever come of it. Yet-oh, I don’t know. I wish I could understand. I’m trying to understand.”

  Here was some serious strain on a relationship that I guessed was unaccustomed to it. I said, “Please tell me about Al Piatek.”

  A sound came from the hallway and we both looked up as Joan Lenihan entered the room. She calmly leaned down and kissed Gail on the cheek, squeezed her hand, then sat on the other end of the couch and gazed at me with pained, resentful eyes.

  “You did not have to do this,” she said. “None of it. I read the letter Jack wrote to you. You could have turned it over to the police and left Albany until the whole thing blew over. But here you are, aren’t you? Big as life and twice as persistent.” She slipped a cigarette from the pack on the end table and lit it. “Jack was a true Lenihan in some ways-a brooder, sometimes vindictive, often a little too footloose and fancy-free for his own good. But he was always a superb judge of character.”

  “Not always,” I said. “Someone he trusted killed him.”

  She didn’t flinch, just stared at me with eyes full of suppressed rage, the cigarette poised in the air, smoke curling around the feathery close-cropped hair, which was the color of the smoke. She was sixtyish, small-boned but full-breasted, with a long worn face and a slight overbite. She wore jeans and a brown UCLA sweatshirt and was not so tanned as Gail Tesney, though her slight body gave off an aura of tensile strength. She came across as a woman capable of remarkable feats of work or pleasure, and a woman not to be messed with.

  She said, “I’ll pay your expenses. But there is no fee, Mr. Strachey. I’m sorry, but your client is dead.”

  “Who killed him?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing anyone in Albany does surprises me.

  “You think it was one of the politicians he was bargaining with?”

  “I suppose.”

  “But not dope dealers?”

  “Jack wasn’t doing that anymore. He told me. And he never lied to me. He didn’t have to. We were like that.”

  “His death must be very hard for you to accept.”

  She blew smoke out the side of her mouth, turned to watch it trail away, and said, “Yes. It is.”

  “Did Jack know he was in danger? Did you?”

  A faint shiver passed through her. “No. No, not that kind of danger.”

  “In his letter to me, Jack said someone was very angry with him. You said you read the letter before he mailed it. Who was he referring to?”

  She sat there seeming to work at manufacturing a careful response in her mind. “Perhaps he meant me,” she said.

  “Why you?”

  “Because I was against this whole business from the very beginning. Jack was like a giddy child with it, and I was the mother telling him it was foolish and irresponsible. There is no way to save Albany. I told him that. The place is rotten to the core, and Jack was wasting his time. There are people in Albany who can kill you just by touching you. The only thing you can do is stay away from them. I know this.”

  “I take it your own experience there was not a happy one.”

  A hard look. “Not happy? Don’t trivialize what I am telling you, Mr.

  Strachey. Yes, I was a young Catholic lesbian on Walter Str
eet married to a drunk, and there was not a day that passed from my twenty-third year to my forty-first year when I did not consider sticking my head in the oven and letting the Lenihans try to explain it to the neighborhood. If it hadn’t been for Jack and Corrine-for their needing me, and for the love they gave to me-I would have done it. Except for my children, I detested my life in Albany, and until my husband died I was too weak a person to change it.

  But my own experience was my own doing. It was all I knew at the time, and I would have done the same thing in any town. Albany’s rottenness is bigger than that.”

  Tesney was sitting with her chin in hands, listening hard, trying to make sense of what we were hearing, as was I.

  I said, “I think I get the drift of what you’re saying, but I’m not sure. Can you elaborate?”

  She said, “No. I can’t. It’s not worth it.”

  “All right. For now, then, who is Al Piatek?”

  She blew smoke toward a half-open window where the breeze made the smoke shudder suddenly and vanish. “Albert Piatek was a very sad young man. He should not have died. But he’s gone now, and it’s better that you let him rest. Can you understand that?”

  “That can’t be. You know it.”

  Her look was bitter. “Do I know that? I didn’t know I knew that.”

  “An Albany police detective by the name of Bowman is on his way out here.

  He’ll want to question you, and he’ll be checking on Piatek. It’s better that I discover first whatever there is to know. I think you understand that.”

  Her face reddened and she abruptly stubbed out the cigarette. She stood, her whole body working, uncertain about whether to leave the room or smash a lamp over my head. She left the room suddenly and a door slammed down the hallway.

  Gail Tesney sat gazing fiercely at the ceiling, tears streaming down her face. She looked over at me after a moment and said, “Please leave now.

  Would you mind?”

  “I’ll have to come back. I’m sorry you’re caught in the middle of this.”

  “It’s all right. I choose to be where I am. I’m sick of it, but it’s all right.”

  “The money is in those bags in the dining room, isn’t it?”

  She quickly shook her head. “No. No, those bags are empty.”

  “Joan said Jack showed her his letter to me. Five keys were taped to the bottom of it. It is my belief that just before Jack shipped the bags, his mother removed the keys from the letter, opened the bags, took the money, filled the bags with newspapers, locked them, and replaced the keys in the letter. Why?”

  “I don’t know! I don’t know! I don’t know! Please-” She snatched a Kleenex out of a box with one hand and gestured toward the door with the other. As I moved toward it, Tesney turned toward me and blurted, “I can only take so much of this. Wait.” She went to the bookshelf, pulled down a copy of Michener’s Space, and removed a newspaper clipping that had been stuck inside the jacket. This she handed to me and said, “If you can put an end to this damned confusion, please do it. I know I can’t. I’ve tried and I just can’t get through to her. You try. I’ve had just about as much of this insanity as I can take. “

  I said, “I guess you know that you might have to take some more,” and her look said she knew it.

  Outside, I studied the newsclip, an obituary for Albert R. Piatek, Funston Lane, West Hollywood, who had died the previous October 28 “after a long illness.”

  ELEVEN

  Back at the motel I phoned an LA investigator who’d done some work for me, as I had for him, in times gone by. I asked him to use his phone-company contacts to get a list of calls made from Joan Lenihan’s number to Albany, New York, over the previous weekend when Jack had been there. It was 2:25 when I called and he said he’d have the list by five o’clock.

  I phoned my service in Albany, which had two messages. One was from an unnamed caller with a muffled voice who asked the operator to inform Mr.

  Strachey that “you are dead.” The other was from my contact at the Department of Motor Vehicles notifying me that the license plate number I’d asked him to track down belonged to a Mrs. Bella Kunkle of North Greenbush, New York, and that she had reported her station wagon stolen from a supermarket parking lot Thursday evening. The theft appeared to have been professionally done.

  I consulted a West Hollywood street map in the motel office, then trekked the eight blocks down Sunset to Funston Lane, where I turned right along a narrow residential street lined with small wooden beige bungalows set close together. The tiny houses looked as if they should have had a Lionel train whooshing this way and that way among them. Here and there a lawn sprinkler exhaled a misty spray over a six-foot square of green-bearded earth, though most of the water, having nearly completed its circuitous journey from the Rockies to the Pacific, ran into the gutter and down a grate.

  Number 937 Funston Lane had a walkway leading up to a three-by-four-foot side porch with some bougainvillea clinging to a sagging trellis. I rapped on the door, which had a square of window in it with the view inward blocked by a curtain the color of the house. The curtain was shoved aside and a male face peered out at me. The door opened.

  “Hi. I already have a set of encyclopedias, you’d have to talk to the owner about aluminum siding, and I already have Jesus in my heart. But thanks anyway.”

  I said, “How much are you paying for your long-distance calls?”

  “I don’t make any. Everybody I know lives in West Hollywood. “

  “But perhaps one of them will move to Fresno and you’ll want to stay in touch. Micky’s Phone Company will enable you to do that for just pennies a day.”

  “Anybody who moved to Fresno voluntarily would not be a person who’d want to hear from me. I wish you all the luck in the world with your phone company, Micky, but right now I’m kind of busy.”

  He tried to shut the door, but I stuck my foot in it. “I’m Don Strachey, a private investigator from Albany, New York, and I’d like to talk with you about Al Piatek.”

  Slightly built and a little stoop-shouldered, he wore jeans and a lavender Tshirt with printing across the front that said BORN TO RAISE ORCHIDS. He had a sweetly comic oblong face and droll blue eyes that were just right for the sly chirpiness of his manner, but now his face fell. He blinked a couple of times and recited, “The sky was black with chickens coming home to roost.”

  “What’s that from, Macbeth?”

  “Camille, I think. I guess you’d better come in. I’m Kyle Toot.”

  I entered the miniature house, or houselet.

  “Sit wherever you can find a place. No, let’s go out to the kitchen.”

  “Is it nearby?”

  We passed through the living roomette, where stacks of paper with printing on them were arranged on the floor, coffee table, couch seat and arms.

  “Did Jack Lenihan send you out here, or is he in trouble himself?”

  “Both.”

  “Could I get you anything?”

  “Information.”

  “I’d better have a drink.”

  I wedged myself into a seat between the Formica table and the south and east walls. Toot: brought out a jug labeled “Grackle Valley Pure Spring Water-no additives, no fad-datives.” He poured from the cAntainer into a glass, then replaced the jug in the refrigerator, which had a canister motor atop it, circa 1934. Los AfigeleS, land of antiquities.

  “Do you keep gin in there?”

  “No, I keep water in there. It’s obvious you’re from Albany” He squeezed into the seat across from me.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “It’s a town where the consumption of gin from a jug in midafternoon is probably a commonplace.”

  “It’s endemic but not epidemic. And now you’re going to tell me that in Los Angeles the ingestion of mind-altering substances is practically unknown,”

  “It’s known, but not by me. People who want to work can’t stay stoned all the time. Unless they’re already under contract.
I’m not.”

  “You’re an actor?”

  “Sometimes. I also cut and staple raffle tickets for a printer. That’s the mess in the living room. I get a penny a book, and it’s a rich and rewarding life.”

  “I’ve heard that acting is chancy.”

  “Last month it was Uncle Vaniaa at the Harriet and Raymond P. Rathgeber Pavilion, and this month it’s raffle tickets, I auditioned for the fool to Charlton Heston’s Lear, which is opening in May, but Chuck thought I was too tall. Fools in Elizabethan times were iiever more than four feet tall, he told me, and he wants to keep it authentic. I’m up for the part of Ticky, a new character they’re introducing on Love Boat next season, but it’ll all depend on how my eye-rolling test came out. You have to be able to roll your eyes up into your skull, down the inside of the back of your head, up your jawbone, and into the sockets again. That’s how the writers wrote the character, and the producers have too much integrity to alter the conception. I had sinus problems the day I auditioned, so I don’t know how well I did.”

  “Well, I’ll watch for you in case you make it. It’s my favorite show except for reruns of Love That Bob.”

  He laughed and said, “How’s crazy Jack Lenihan doing? Has the law caught up with him yet? Now there’s an actor.”

  “He’s dead.”

  Toot went white. “No.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What happened to him? Jack was fine in October. He’s dead?”

  “Jack died on Tuesday. He was murdered.” Toot had been nursing his glass of spring water, but now he set it down and stared at me. I said, “How did you know Jack? Are you from Albany?”

  “No, I’m from Encino. Who killed him? Why?”

  “Those are two things I’m trying to find out. So are the police. An Albany cop by the name of Bowman will probably come by here. It’s known that Jack had a connection of some kind with Al Piatek. Everybody wants to know what it was. Did you live with Al here?”