How he envied them, the man in the street, the pockmarked dropout of some future millennium, how he was sickened at the thought of the punch lines of jokes he could not understand even if they were patiently explained to him. What answers they would so casually have! Their 90 IQ’s would encompass wisdoms that the greatest minds of today could not even begin to comprehend. The more things changed, it was said, the more they remained the same. That was bullshit, just one more justification and excuse, another good word put in for death.
It was a terrible thing Oyp and Glyp had done. How I envy them! How glad I am I was there to see it!
It was his stop. He got off and walked the half-block to the Vernon Manor Hotel.
Although it was a residential hotel, with its wide horseshoe drive and massive quarter moons of carefully tended lawn, its groundfloor ballroom with its sequence of tall leaded windows like five big fingertips, the Vernon Manor had the look of a resort hotel of the Twenties. It might have looked more in place along the shore. Far from downtown, it seemed an awry speculation to the Phoenician whenever he came upon it. He rather liked the hotel, enjoyed the old ladies in their seventies with their clean thin hair that always reminded him of the fish-scale blue one sees in chemical toilets on airplanes. He enjoyed the big white uniformed colored women who pushed their wheelchairs or steadied them on their sticks as they bobbed along, or helped them into their cars and took the wheel to drive them to their doctor appointments. Not all the residents were cripples, but all seemed frail, their survivorship underscoring their frailty, their neatness and grooming a testament to the care they had to take of themselves. They seemed vaguely but limitedly moneyed, on budgets, their strict accountancy signaling necessity rather than a careful husbandry for the benefit of sons and daughters and grandchildren (they seemed as bereft of these as of husbands). It cheered the Phoenician to think of their clever economies, shrewdened them in his eyes. They were like hunters who killed to eat. He pictured them still awake, in front of their television sets or entering figures in ledgers from the financial pages, sipping hot water and lemon to outwit their bowels, warm milk their insomnia. What did they make of the world? (Mystery, mystery. He did not know them. Old ladies did not come to him for bail.)
In the lobby he moves toward the small bank of elevators where the night porter snoozes in a chair.
“Sir?” the night clerk says.
Main goes up to him, stands by the darkened candy cases, the low revolving tree of post card, the wide magazine rack, tomorrow’s Enquirer, the headline showing through a window in the yellow vending machine. He looks around at the glass signatures of the signs above the beauty parlor and dress shop, drained of neon and dusty as empty alembic. He glances past the night clerk into the message boxes, the few keys that spill out of their mouths like tongues.
“May I help you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re not a guest?”
“No.”
“I’m afraid the dining room is closed. We serve our last meal at ten.”
“That’s all right, I’ve eaten.”
“Are you visiting someone in the hotel?”
“Yes.”
“May I ask if you’re expected?”
“I’m not expected.”
“It’s almost one. I’ll have to ring up and announce you.”
“Tell Crainpool Mr. Main is downstairs.”
The clerk shrugs, goes to the switchboard, plugs into Crainpool’s room and speaks softly into the thin prosthetic gear that runs from his ear to his chin. He looks up at Main and frowns. “I’m afraid I woke him. He says he’ll be down as soon as he can get dressed.”
“I’ll go up.” The clerk is about to protest, but Alexander has already turned and shaken the porter awake. “Five,” he says. He has to repeat himself to the groggy man. In the elevator he glances at the framed menus high on the wall, reads the cheerful Good Morning! from the closed coffee shop. It is old news.
The elevator door opens in a cul-de-sac. There is gray and faded floral carpeting, hard upholstered benches where the old people sit while waiting for the elevator. He turns left and left again and goes down the long corridor past the housekeeper’s closets and old-fashioned hollow metal doors that belly the hall. Crainpool’s room is at the far end of the corridor. There are hotel offices across from him and a housekeeping closet next door. He turns the knob on Crainpool’s door, but it is locked. He bangs on it with his fist.
Crainpool, already in his trousers but still in his pajama tops and an old blue bathrobe, opens it. “Mr. Main.”
“It’s after hours, Crainpool. We don’t have to be so formal after hours.”
“Has something happened? Have there been mass arrests on the campus? I was sleeping; I didn’t see the eleven o’clock news. Do we have to go downtown? Just give me a minute to put on my clothes.”
“Nice place you got here.”
“It’s comfortable.”
“Small, compact, but I expect it meets your requirements. Just get lost in someplace larger.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Rattle around.”
“I guess I would.”
“Yet your needs are taken care of.” He pounds the swollen metal door. “Hotel has a laundry and dry-cleaning service, I suppose.”
“It does, yes, sir, but it’s pretty expensive. I don’t often use it.”
“Wash out a few things in the sink each night, do you? Hang ’em to dry on the rod in the bath?”
“Well, yes, sir, I do.”
“Yes. I see. I see you do.” He has strolled into the small bathroom. Underwear swims in the sink; two shirts hang on hangers above the tub, dripping water half on the tile and half in the bath; handkerchiefs stretch over the radiators like canvas on Conestoga wagons; a pair of pajamas dry on a wooden rack in the corner.
Main unzips his fly and pees into his employee’s toilet. He does not close the door or raise the seat. “These pajamas,” he says.
“Sir?”
“I was saying these pajamas,” he calls over the splash of his pee, “what happened to the nightshirt I gave you for Christmas? Don’t you use it?”
“Well, I thought that was meant as a joke, sir.”
He walks back into the room. “A joke? Why would you think it was a joke? And the nightcap, did you think the nightcap was a joke, too?”
“Well, sir—”
“The trouble with you, Crainpool, is that you don’t take things seriously. Playful yourself, you assume that everyone else has your sense of humor. A joke! That was a business investment, Mr. Crainpool, a business investment. I took it off my taxes. I thought that nightshirt and cap would solidify your image, help put you in the proper frame of mind for what’s wanted. A joke indeed! Like the garters, I suppose. Like the quill pens and the high stool. I’ve taken a great many pains, Mr. Crainpool—and gone to considerable expense, too, I might add—to reinforce your clerk’s ambience, to clericalize you. Yet you persist in your taste for the newfangled. I suppose you’ve been thinking in terms of electric typewriters and Xerox machines. What’s next, sir, conference telephones, gadgets that take your calls? ‘Mr. Crainpool is unavailable right now. Your message will be recorded and played back for him when he returns. Please begin speaking when you hear the electronic bleep…Bleep.’ ”
“No, sir.”
“ ‘No, sir.’ You’re damned right, sir, no sir. And what happens to the thick ledgers with the careful rulings inked down the center of the page? The big gray and black cardboard boxes with their snaps and clasps and their colors running like a melted zebra? To the huge checkbooks like a family album? What do we do, throw them all out, I suppose?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Crainpool says, trying not to giggle.
“Yes, sir. I should think you would be. It isn’t as if I’ve tried to trespass in your private life…Well, have I?”
“No, sir.”
“No. You didn’t see the eleven o’clock news, you said. That implies that y
ou have a television. Television is provided, is it not? You needn’t answer; I see it. Television is provided. Three networks and an educational channel at your disposal. There is the telephone. I see an air-conditioning unit. I rode up here in an elevator.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I was under no obligation to provide you with such lavish mod cons. None of the advantages you enjoy—there’s the electric light, there’s the flush toilet—were actually coming to you.”
“No, sir.”
“My first thought was to set you up in a boardinghouse. Such places still exist, you know, though admittedly they are scarcer now than when you first came into service.”
“Yes, sir.” Crainpool is trying very hard to keep a straight face.
“Go on, go on, continue dressing.”
“Then we’re going downtown?”
“Then I thought, no, though a boardinghouse would be the proper place for you and would go a long way towards bringing out those qualities in you which I was looking for, it might have certain drawbacks. You might not have liked your neighbors—or you might have liked some of them too much, fallen in with the wrong sort, made yourself vulnerable at the dinner hour or in the lounge on Sunday. You’d have had to share a bath, don’t forget.”
“Yes, sir.” Crainpool is buttoning his shirt.
“You wouldn’t have had your own phone. You’d have been roused at all hours to take other people’s messages. The walls in such places are paper thin. A fellow roomer’s radio could have kept you up half the night.”
“Yes, sir, I suppose that’s true, sir.”
“Then I found this place for you, didn’t I?”
“You did.”
“Yes. Then I found this place for you. A quiet residential hotel. Genteel. Yet with all the latest up-to-the-minute features you could possibly wish. Say, I like that carpet in the hall. Do all the floors have it?”
“Some do, but the patterns vary, I think.”
“You think. Only what you see when the elevator opens to take on a passenger. I take it, then, that you have no close friends in the hotel. Only the odd nodding acquaintance in the lobby and coffee shop.”
“That’s about it, sir.” He has begun to put on his tie.
“So I thought. No, don’t bother about the tie.”
“I’ll just get my jacket, sir.” He puts on his jacket and looks at the Phoenician. “I’m ready.”
“Ready?”
“To go downtown with you.”
“No, no, it’s after business hours; I already told you that. Shop’s closed. You’ll have to remember these things, Mr. Crainpool.”
“We’re not going downtown?”
“We’re not.”
“I see.” Crainpool leaves the hall where he has been waiting for the Phoenician and returns to the center of the room. “Would you like to sit down, sir?”
“Thank you, Crainpool. Too bad there’s only the one chair.”
Crainpool sits primly on his bed. “To what do I owe this honor?” he says at last.
“To bad dreams. To my poor scores in the hard subjects. To your vulnerable history.”
Crainpool blushes and it is the first time in years. Their cat-and-mouse had settled years before into a rhetoric, glancing off Crainpool like punch lines rained down on fools in comedy turns, touching him as little. Over the years he has become a stunt man, his bruises routinized, his flexible rubber bones deepsea’d fathoms beneath his skin and his nerves and pride Atlantisized, lost continented. The blush is not embarrassment but fear, and Main recognizes it because he has seen it once before.
“Aren’t you satisfied with my work, Mr. Main?”
“Perfectly.”
Now his face goes redder still, and Main sees ideas squeezing in his brain like turds. “Oyp and Glyp,” he says breathlessly, “you found Oyp and Glyp.”
“Oyp and Glyp are dead.”
“Dead?”
“Or captured. Split up, perhaps. Gone straight, could be. Married with kids. Working in factories or fueling jets on the runway. With the Highway Department, waving red flags to stop the traffic while the road’s being fixed. Or selling door-to-door, or moving The Watchtower. Hired hands, maybe, or taken up cooking. In Dobb’s House management, Dairy Queen. Studying the motel trade.”
“You have information?”
“Who has information? Nah, they’re dead.”
“Have you given up on them, sir?”
“The bailbondsman’s statute of limitations, Mr. Crainpool, the Phoenician’s sanctuary, Main’s pardon—they have it all.”
“Gee.”
“That surprise you?”
“I thought you’d found them, or even just one of them.”
“Never find ’em. They’re vanished. Cut my losses like a tailor. God told me that in a vision.”
“Yes, sir. Good advice.”
“What, that? That’s how He answers all prayer.”
“Oh,” Crainpool says. “That lawyer called, Avila. He told me to tell you that Mr. Withers is back and that he’ll appear as scheduled.”
“Anything else?”
“Just before I closed up, the desk sergeant from the Fourth District called in with some leads about the arraignments. I tried to reach you at home.”
“Something interesting?”
“Well, they’ve picked up a suspect for that bank robbery. They think they have enough evidence to hold him. I left a message with your answering service and asked the girl to call before you left in the morning.”
“All right.”
“Would you like some coffee, sir? There’s only the hot plate, and it’s just instant, but I could make some if you’d like.”
“You’re losing the thread.”
“Sir?”
“You’re losing the thread. Of the conversation. I make this extraordinary late-night visit and an absolutely unique allusion to your past to which you duly react, and now you’re losing the thread of the conversation. You’re not out of the woods yet, you know, Mr. Crainpool.”
“I know that, sir,” he says shyly.
“That’s better. Tell me, Crainpool, did you blush like that when you beat up your wife and put her in hospital?”
“I didn’t have the opportunity to study myself, sir.”
“No, of course you didn’t. Did you have the opportunity when you heard three weeks later, and you were already out on my bond, that there was a fire in her ward and that she’d burned to death?”
“Mr. Main,” Crainpool says, “that was sixteen years ago. You spoke of the statute of limitations.”
“Certainly. And you’ll be able to take whatever advantage of it you can once I turn you over to the police. Be sure to mention it to them. Tell your lawyer.”
“You’re turning me in? Jesus, Phoenician, that was sixteen years ago that happened. I’ve been your goddamn slave eleven years. You’re turning me in?”
“Which among us craps jellybeans, Mr. Crainpool?”
“Sixteen years and you’re turning me in?”
“No, lad, I’m killing you. I’m going to kill you.”
“The statute of—”
“That’s between you and the State of Ohio. We have a contract.” He pats his breast pocket. “Nothing about any old statute of limitations in this. You jumped my bail. Do I have to read it to you? Good God, man, you’ve worked for me eleven years. You’ve seen thousands of these contracts, you have the relevant clauses by heart, all that stuff about consenting to the application of such force as may be necessary to effect your return.”
Crainpool jumps up from the bed. “Let’s go,” he says crisply and smiles. “I consent!” He begins to laugh. “I consent, I consent. Draw your gun and stick it in my ear, I consent!”
The Phoenician studies him. “You’re putting up an even bigger struggle than I anticipated. Best sit back down, son. Sit down, honey.”
“But I consent,” Crainpool whines.
“My life should retain credibility,” the Phoenician says.
“Listen, Mr. Main,” the man pleads, “let me off.”
“Hush, Crainpool.” He looks at his man. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“What I’m thinking? I’m scared stiff.”
“Please,” Main says reassuringly, “be calm, take time. Nothing will happen yet. What are you thinking?”
The frightened man begins to speak, but hesitates. “Yes?” Main coaches.
“That our arrangement wasn’t such a bad one,” Crainpool says finally.
The Phoenician sighs, disappointed. “You’re trivial, you’re a trivial man,” he says. “Me too. Well-a-day, Crainpool, me too. All I can think to do right now is satisfy you. I put myself in your shoes and I think, ‘He’s mad, he won’t do it, he’ll never get away with it.’ I’d want scenario, demand explanation like a last cigarette, civilized denouement like a detective’s professional courtesy in the drawing room and even the murderer’s glass filled. Do you feel any of that?”
“I do. Yes. A little. I do.”
Main looks at Crainpool suspiciously. “I hope you do. There are conventions, ceremonies. The mechanics are explained but never the mysteries. Foh. Look at me. I’m a parade. At bottom I’ve a flatfoot’s heart: This is how I broke the case. You need to know anything like that?”
“Sure,” Crainpool says.
“You’re not just stalling for time, are you?”
“Not entirely.”
“Because to tell the truth I haven’t made my mind up yet. Not absolutely. I’m more likely to kill you than not, but nothing’s been finalized.”
“How’d you break the case, sir?”
“Don’t patronize me, you son of a bitch!”
Searches & Seizures Page 13