by Ed McBain
“Then what’s your first name?”
“Matthew.”
“Do you have an appointment, Mr. Matthews?”
“No, I’m waiting for—”
“Did you want to see the doctor?”
“No,” I said.
“Then why are you here?”
“I’m with Mrs. McKinney,” I said.
“Oh, right,” she said. “Well, have a seat, okay?” She looked at the typewriter. She looked up at me again, bewildered. “Where’d that switch go?” she said, and began searching for it all over again.
The door to the inner office opened not ten minutes later. Veronica, in white and in mid-conversation, came through into the white reception area, followed by a man who was also dressed in white. For a moment it looked like a sudden snowstorm.
“—ever you did, it feels much better already,” Veronica said.
The man nodded, pleased. He was tall and burly, with an olive complexion that seemed deeper against the white of his tunic. His eyes were brown. There was a shaggy black mustache under his nose.
“Matthew,” she said, “I’d like you to meet Calusa’s miracle worker. If ever you’ve got a muscle that refuses to behave, you just call him. Dr. Alvarez—Matthew Hope.”
“Nice to mee’ you,” Alvarez said, with an accent I could have spread on a tostada.
I called Bloom the moment I was in my office.
I told him that Veronica McKinney’s chiropractor had a Spanish accent.
He said, “Yeah?”
I reminded him that Sunny McKinney had overheard her brother in conversation with a man who had a Spanish accent and that—
“Yes, I know,” he said.
—according to her they’d been discussing the theft of cows.
“I’ve been giving a lot of thought to that telephone conversation,” Bloom said. “I’m not so sure they were talking about cows. Remember my first impression when I heard this kid had forty thousand in cash? I thought dope is what I thought, the kid was involved some way with dope. Okay, last October he gets a call from a guy with a Spanish accent—all your cocaine comes up from Colombia, Matthew, the dope heavies in Florida are mostly all Spanish. And the guy says how many and the kid says fifteen at thirty. Okay, Matthew, I know this is far out, I know it’s pretty much off the wall. But the going rate for good cocaine in Miami is fifty grand a kilo. Okay. Suppose you could get shitty cocaine for thirty grand a kilo?”
“You think Jack McKinney was selling cocaine to this man? Instead of cows?”
“No, sir.”
“You just said...”
“I think it could’ve been the other way around, Matthew. The guy with the Spanish accent was selling the girl—”
“What girl?”
“The dope. Girl, coke, snow, nose candy, they’re all names for cocaine. ‘The brighter the blue, the better the girl’—you never heard that expression?”
“Never.”
“Your hotshot dope dealers’ll test the coke with cobalt thiocyanate to make sure it isn’t Johnson’s Baby Powder or something. If it turns blue, it’s the McCoy. The really pure stuff turns a bright blue. Live and learn,” he said.
“And that’s what you honestly think? That McKinney was buying cocaine from this guy with the Spanish accent?”
“It’s possible. Fifteen kilos of not very good dope. At thirty thousand bucks a throw.”
“That comes to four hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
“It does.”
“You think McKinney had that kind of money, huh?”
“If he was trafficking in dope, that’s peanuts.”
“Well,” I said.
“What does ‘well’ mean?”
“It means this all sounds like sheer speculation.”
“It is. That’s the business I’m in, Matthew. Speculation. Until all the pieces fall together, that’s all it is—speculation. What’d Mrs. McKinney have to say about her Spanish chiropractor?”
“She told me he’s Cuban.”
“You asked her?”
“Right after I met him. She was driving me over to my...”
“Oh,” Bloom said, “you met him?”
“Yes. His name is Ramon Alvarez.”
“How’d you happen to meet him?”
“I went to his office with her.”
“This morning?”
“Yes.”
“And in the car afterwards, you happened to ask her whether he was Cuban, is that right?”
“Well, I’d asked her last night if she knew—”
“Oh, you were with her last night, too?”
“Yes.”
There was a silence on the phone. I knew just what Bloom was thinking. Veronica had been with me last night, and she’d been with me again early this morning. Bloom was thinking just what Mrs. Martindale had thought.
“Did she come over for a swim, too?” he asked.
“She came over to talk.”
“About her chiropractor?”
“No. But during the course of the conversation, I asked if she knew anyone with a Spanish accent—”
“And she told you her chiropractor was Spanish.”
“No, she could only remember a Mexican cook who used to work for them.”
“She couldn’t remember her chiropractor?”
“Well, what she said, actually—”
“When was this? Last night, or in the car today?”
“In the car. She said she thought I’d meant anyone connected with the ranch. The chiropractor never occurred to her.”
“I don’t believe in chiropractors, do you?” Bloom said.
“Well, they seem to help people.”
“So let me get this straight. Last night, out of the blue, you happened to ask Mrs. McKinney if she knew anyone with a Spanish accent. And she told you—”
“Not out of the blue,” I said. “We were talking about her son’s murder, and I remembered Sunny telling me—”
“Is that what she came there to talk about? Her son’s murder?”
“Yes.”
“What’d she have to say about that?”
“She thought Jack knew the person he let into his apartment. Because there’s a peephole on the door. He would have seen who was outside. He wouldn’t have opened the door for a stranger.”
“That’s occurred to us,” Bloom said dryly. “Did it occur to Mrs. McKinney that the killer may have had a key?”
“Well...no. She didn’t say anything about a key.”
“The resident manager’s office has passkeys to every apartment in that condo,” Bloom said.
“Oh.”
“So it didn’t have to be a pal the kid let in. He didn’t have to let anyone in at all, in fact. The killer could have used a key.”
“She also mentioned a gun. Did you find a gun in that apartment, Morrie?”
“No. A gun? No.”
“Veronica says her son kept a gun.”
“Oh, it’s ‘Veronica’ now, is it?”
“Well...yes.”
“You’ve been busy, Matthew.”
I suddenly remembered something Bloom had said to me a long time ago. “Counselor,” he’d said, “it would be nice to have your word from this minute on that you won’t be running all over the city of Calusa questioning anybody you think might have some connection with this case.” He still referred to that case as “the German dwarf mess.” I referred to it as “the Vicky Miller tragedy.” His warning back then had been prefaced by the word counselor, which in my profession was often used sarcastically by opposing courthouse attorneys. Cops used it the same way in their profession, I discovered that day, inflecting the word so that it seemed synonymous with shyster. I didn’t know now whether his comment about my having been busy referred to Veronica or simply to the fact that I’d been asking questions he felt I had no right to ask. Either way, it sounded like a reprimand. I said nothing. The silence on the line lengthened. I didn’t know now whether Bloom was thinking or sulking.
“Where’d he get this gun?” Bloom asked at last.
“A birthday present from his father.”
“His father’s been dead for two years now.”
“He gave it to him just before he died.”
“Veronica told you this?”
It seemed to me he put the same inflection on her name that he’d put on the word counselor all those years ago. I decided he was sulking, after all.
“Yes,” I said. “Veronica.”
“Where was this gun supposed to be?” Bloom asked.
“In his apartment. He took it with him when he moved off the ranch in June.”
“What kind of a gun, did she say?”
“A .38 Smith & Wesson.”
Bloom was silent for what seemed like a very long time.
“That’s very interesting,” he said at last.
“How so?”
“Because I’ve got here on my desk in front of me a report from Ballistics saying the gun that killed Burrill was a .38 Smith & Wesson. Now that is what I call an even bigger coincidence than the going rate for a kilo of coke. I think I better have another talk with Mrs. Veronica McKinney, find out a little more about this gun her son owned. A birthday present, huh? They give nice birthday presents down here in sunny Florida. You don’t even have to register them, you can pick a gun off the shelf like it was a ripe banana.” He paused. “What else did she have to say?”
I debated telling him about her long-ago affair with Hamilton Jeffries, the veterinarian. I decided, perhaps wrongly, that revealing this would be unfair to her. Even though she’d told me about it before we’d gone to bed together, I nonetheless considered it pillow talk. And pillow talk, on my scale of values, rates almost as high as the privileged communication between an attorney and his client—which, in fact, we also were.
“Matthew? Did she say anything else?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Did she know about Burrill? His getting killed?”
“She didn’t seem to.”
“What do you suppose he was looking for?”
“Who?”
“Whoever shot Burrill.”
“Was he looking for something?”
“Well, you saw the place, didn’t you? Looked like a tornado went through there. Same as McKinney’s apartment, everything thrown upside down, mattresses tossed and slashed, drawers spilled all over the floor. Guy living like a Bowery bum, what the hell could he have been hiding in that pigsty? She said he couldn’t have been involved in dope, huh?”
It was sometimes difficult to follow Morris Bloom’s stream-of-consciousness meanderings. I gathered he was referring to Sunny McKinney and her brother, Jack.
“She didn’t think so,” I said.
“Because doesn’t it sound to you like dope?” Bloom said. “I mean, what was all that shit about ‘fifteen at thirty’? It sure sounds like the going price for a kilo of beat snow, doesn’t it? Thirty grand, something like that? Your really good stuff goes for fifty. You think Burrill and McKinney were running dope together? You think maybe that’s what the killer was looking for? Dope?”
“I don’t know.”
“Assuming it was the same guy who killed them both,” Bloom said. “The gun makes it look like there’s a real connection, doesn’t it?”
I realized that Bloom was thinking out loud. He no more needed me on the other end of the line than he needed a mirror. I suddenly knew what he and his wife talked about when they were alone together.
“Well, I’ll give her a ring,” he said, “the cow lady. Meanwhile, don’t forget we’re going to the gym today.”
“I have it on my calendar,” I said.
“See you at five,” Bloom said, and hung up.
I did not get back from the eleven o’clock closing at Calusa First until almost one o’clock. I asked Cynthia to phone out for a hot pastrami on rye and a bottle of Heineken beer, and I was just unwrapping the sandwich when Frank came into my office.
“Howdy, Tex,” he said.
I uncapped the beer.
“How are the deer and the antelope playing these days?” he asked.
I bit into the sandwich.
“I’m sure the enormous fee we’ll be earning on this McKinney shit will justify all the time you’re putting in on it,” he said. “Loomis called while you were out, wants you to get back to him.”
I nodded.
“Have you been stricken mute?” Frank said. “How’d the closing go?”
“Fine.”
“How’d you like my ten rules?”
“Fine.”
“They’re not supposed to be trick rules, you know.”
“Oh, I thought they were trick rules.”
“Lots of people think so.”
“Do you hand them out to lots of people?”
“Only those who need help desperately. The reason lots of people think they’re trick rules is because of the first two.”
“Which ones are those?”
“Always treat a lady like a hooker. Always treat a hooker like a lady.”
“Ah, yes,” I said.
“People automatically assume,” Frank said, “that in all the rules following those two, you’re supposed to substitute lady for hooker and hooker for lady. But that isn’t the case. In other words, where rule number five says, ‘Never try to buy a lady into bed,’ it doesn’t mean ‘Never try to buy a hooker into bed.’ It means just what it says. Lady.”
I looked at him.
“You’re not supposed to think that because you’re supposed to treat a hooker like a lady that where it says, ‘Never try to buy a lady into bed,’ it really means ‘Never try to buy a hooker into bed,’ which is how you’re supposed to treat a lady if you’re observing the first rule. Like a hooker. In which case, if you’re treating her like a hooker, you should never try to talk her into bed, the lady, and that’s wrong.”
“I see.”
“It can get complicated,” Frank said, “but it’s not meant to be tricky.”
“I’m glad you told me that.”
“Have you tried any of them yet?”
“I don’t know any hookers.”
“I don’t know any hookers, either,” he said, looking offended.
The buzzer on my desk sounded. It was Cynthia, telling me that Attorney Loomis was on five.
“Loomis,” I said to Frank, and took a swallow of beer.
“You really think I know hookers, don’t you?” he said, and shook his head and walked out of the office. I pressed the five button in the base of the phone.
“Hello, Mr. Loomis,” I said.
“Mr. Hope?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Looks like we’ve got ourselves a pair of dead clients, don’t it?”
“Looks that way.”
“Which don’t change the situation none, the way I look at it.”
“I didn’t think it would.”
“Burrill wrote a will leaving everything he had to his only daughter, woman named Hester Burrill in New Orleans, named her personal representative too. I’ve been trying to reach her all day. She’s either busy talkin’ on the phone, or else it’s off the hook or out of order. Anyway, I wanted you to know I’m going to recommend the same thing to her I recommended to Burrill. She keeps the property, a’course, and you forfeit the four thousand, plus you fork over the Mustang and five thousand in damages. You had a chance to talk this over with Mrs. McKinney yet?”
“I mentioned it to her.”
“What’d she say?”
“She said I should tell you to go to hell.”
“Sounds like a right nice lady,” Loomis said.
“She is,” I said.
“Well, you know our position, and we ain’t budgin’ an inch from it. Save us all a lot of trouble if your client agreed to it now. ’Cause otherwise, what I’ll recommend to Burrill’s daughter is to file an action against the estate, see if we can’t turn up that cash.”
“I’m not going back to Mrs. McKinney o
n this,” I said. “She’s already refused your offer.”
“Suit yourself,” Loomis said. “You’ll be hearin’ from me soon’s I talk to the daughter.”
The buzzer sounded again almost the moment he’d hung up.
“Your wife,” Cynthia said. “On six.”
“I don’t have a wife,” I said.
“Shall I tell her you’re out?”
“I’ll take it,” I said, and sighed, and pressed the button. “Hello?” I said.
“Matthew?” she said. “How are you?”
The Waif.
“Fine,” I said.
“And you?”
“My eyes are watering a lot,” she said. “My allergies.”
The Waif, for sure.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.
“One of these days I may just leave Florida,” she said.
She knew she couldn’t take up residence outside the state until Joanna reached the age of twenty-one. I’d made damn certain of that in the settlement agreement. I refused to rise to the bait.
“So what’s on your mind?” I asked.
“Matthew, I feel embarrassed asking you this, you’ll think I’m taking advantage of you.”
I thought, perhaps unkindly, that she had taken everything else in the divorce settlement, so what would it matter if she took mere advantage now? And then I wondered what catastrophe Susan the Witch had conjured for Susan the Waif to lay on me in order to spoil whatever little time I’d be spending with our daughter this weekend. In the next three seconds, I felt I was getting omniscient when it came to Susan.
“Matthew,” she said, “I don’t want Joanna to be sulking around your house all weekend. You know how she can get when she’s been deprived.”
I did not know how she could get when she’d been deprived. To my knowledge, I had never deprived her of anything but my presence in her mother’s house.
“Matthew,” she said, “do you remember Rhett Robinson?”
“I remember her,” I said.
“She got divorced just about the time we did, do you remember?”
“I remember.”
“She’s getting married again this weekend. To a lovely man from Bradenton.”
“That’s nice,” I said.
“Do you remember her daughter? Daisy?”
“I remember her.”
The Robinsons all had rather fanciful names. Rhett had been named after Mr. Butler in Gone with the Wind; I assumed her mother had been hoping for a boy. Her former husband, Bruce, had been named after Bruce Cabot, the actor who’d played Magua in the film based on The Last of the Mohicans. Their daughter, Daisy, had been named after Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. An entirely literary family, the Robinsons. I seemed to recall, however, that Bruce had remarried just before Christmas, and his new wife’s name was Mary—plain as any name can be. The last time I’d seen Daisy Robinson was when she was ten years old and sleeping over at the house Susan and I then shared. I remembered her as a runny-nosed little girl who kept calling Joanna a cheat, because Joanna consistently beat her at the game of jacks.