by Parnell Hall
“There’s a leak.”
“A leak?”
“Yeah. A leak. Here. At Rosenberg and Stone.”
I stared at him. “You suspect one of your staff?”
“No, no, no,” Richard said, shaking his head. “At least, not necessarily. The person who’s doing it probably doesn’t even know he’s doing it. But here’s the thing. The calls come in here. All the information is right here. About the clients, I mean. And someone is leaking it out.”
“Who?”
“Well,” Richard said. “The most likely person would be you.”
“What?!”
“I’m not saying you did, I’m just saying you’re the most likely. After all, you get beeped and told the whole story. That gives you the information to use.
“The second would be Sam. As I understand it, he was offered some of those jobs before you were.
“Then there’s Wendy and Janet. They took down the information to begin with. They could easily have passed it on to somebody else.”
“Yes. But why would they do that?”
“I don’t know,” Richard said. “But look at it this way. Suppose either Wendy or Janet had a boyfriend. A boyfriend who didn’t like her working here. Who thought it was a waste of time. Who thought I wasn’t paying her enough.”
I saw Richard’s eyes blink as he recognized a touchy subject. He hurried over it.
“Who wanted her home so he could put the old pork to her instead of her coming to work every day. Suppose this guy was a psychopath who took a notion about closing down Rosenberg and Stone.”
I wrinkled up my face. “I’m afraid that doesn’t sound too logical to me.”
Richard’s eyes narrowed. “I suppose it sounds more logical to you that I would have fucked over some client.”
“No, no, of course not,” I said. “The thing I have to keep remembering is the whole thing is absurd.”
“You do that,” Richard said. “And then there’s those two file clerks, whatever the hell their names are. Wendy and Janet can’t leave here. They’re on the phones all day long. But those two guys. They do so little work here. They could have heard the call come in, rushed out, killed the guy and got back here, and nobody would have known the difference.”
I frowned. “Well, maybe.”
“Maybe is right,” Richard said. “But maybe is all we got to go on here. So that’s it. I want you to check this out.”
“What?״
“Yeah, you heard me. I want you to check this out. I’m not happy with what Sergeant Clark is doing. I want something else done. You’ve had some experience in these matters, so you’re the man to do it.”
“You’re kidding?”
“No, I’m not. Look, I want you to go out, go on your rounds as normal today. You’ve got to anyway. Sergeant Clark will be expecting it, and you can’t do anything different. Besides, everyone else will be here. Then tonight, after you get off, I want you to poke around.”
“Poke around?”
“Yeah. I want you to call on those people. Wendy, Janet, Sam. Those two guys.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Not at all.”
“What’ll I tell ’em?”
“I don’t know. Make something up. Tell ’em as much of the truth as possible. That’s always easiest. Tell ’em I’m not happy with how things are going, I think the cops are messing everything up and I’ve asked you to ask some questions to try to straighten things out. Yeah, that’s it,” Richard said brightly. “It’s not a question of my suspecting them. It’s a question of feeling the cops have got their information wrong.”
“I see,” I said.
Already in my mind I had agreed to the project. Actually, it was what I felt like doing all along. I agreed one hundred percent that the cops were off on the wrong scent. I wasn’t sure this was the right one, but whatever I was going to do couldn’t hurt. And Richard did have a point. The motive of this thing could well be internal. So it was something that should be done.
Also, Richard had never asked me to do anything like this before. And this was not your ten-buck-an-hour, thirty-cents-a-mile job. This was serious stuff.
I wondered what it was worth. I was tempted to say, “All right, Richard. Two hundred bucks a day plus expenses.” But I couldn’t quite see doing that. Not seeing as how I was spending most of the day working for him in the regular job. It would be like getting paid twice. I decided I’d have to wait and see what he’d offer.
“All right,” I said. “I guess I could see what I could do.”
Richard smiled. He walked over, shook my hand, clapped me on the shoulder.
“Good man,” he said. “I knew I could count on you. I appreciate it.”
Then, before I even realized what had just happened, he turned and walked out the door to see what the cops going over his files were doing.
26.
I THOUGHT ABOUT it all day as I drove around and signed up my three cases. There were only three because Sam was working today. Somehow or other, his agent had not managed to get him another audition, so I had it relatively easy. Three signups, two in Queens and one in Brooklyn.
It was kind of weird going out on them. It was weird because I knew the cops were there. I’d get beeped, call in, get the address and know before I even got started that the cops would be there before me.
I’m only human. I looked for them. I looked for them at every address I went. And I never spotted one. But I knew they were there. And I knew that if the person I was calling on happened to be dead, all I had to do was walk out the front door and wave my arms and cops would suddenly materialize from everywhere. It was kind of freaky.
But none of my clients were dead. It was a perfectly routine day, and I had nothing to do but drive around leisurely and think about the case.
And the job I was going to do for Richard. That was kind of exciting somehow. Even if Richard didn’t pay me for it, it was kind of nice. The secret agent. The man on the inside.
It was nice that Richard shared my lack of faith in Sergeant Clark. It was nice, too, that he shared my fantasy of beating Clark to the punch, of cracking this stupid case.
Although, on reflection, I had to admit that Richard’s ideas were even more stupid than Sergeant Clark’s. I mean, come on. A leak at Rosenberg and Stone? Wendy/Janet, the spy within our ranks? Give me a break. The paralegals, Frick and Frack, who probably didn’t have an I.Q. of a hundred between them. Frank Burke, the frustrated investigator, seething because he can’t cut the job, sets out to destroy Rosenberg and Stone from within. Hey, there’s a great theory. The guy doesn’t have the guts to go into bad neighborhoods to do signups, but he’s got the nerve to strangle people. Sam Gravston. Well ...
Sam Gravston.
I started thinking about Sam. Sam was working Manhattan and the Bronx today. I wondered if he’d get any assignments. I wondered if he’d get one in Harlem. I wondered if he did, if he’d walk in and find the client dead. So far, I’d been the only one to do that. But what if Sam did?
I thought about that. I thought about that a lot. And once again, words began to haunt me. This time it was Richard’s words, Richard saying, “He was offered some of those jobs before you were.”
Jesus. He certainly was. In every single case. No, that wasn’t right. But in the Winston Bishop case and in the Gerald Finklestein case, they’d been offered to Sam before they’d been offered to me. So he had the names and addresses. They hadn’t offered him the Clarence White case, but that didn’t matter. Because that wasn’t an actual call-in. Clarence White had been killed the night before. And then the murderer had called in the next day to make the appointment. Sam could have done it. But the call had been from Broadway and 125th Street. And Sam was downtown at an audition. But wait. The call had been late in the day. Four-fifteen. Presumably the audition would have been over. Sam could have rushed uptown to make the call. He’d have gone uptown because he was smart enough to have figured out the police might start tracing the
calls, and if so, he’d want them to trace the call to Harlem.
But wait. I was being stupid. I’d heard that phone call. That call had been made by an uneducated black man, and—
A chill ran down my spine. I remembered what I’d thought at the time. A voice so typically black as to be almost a caricature of itself, as if a stage comedian were doing a jive black man.
Jesus.
Sam Gravston was an actor. And presumably a good one. And he did dialects. And did them with ease. I remember when I was an actor and had to do an accent, I would take two or three weeks to work into the voice. But not Sam. He could slip in and out of voices at will. I’d heard his French, his Spanish, his German. And what could be easier for him than jive black? And high-pitched to boot, to further disguise his voice.
I realized I was being ridiculous. Good god, I didn’t have a motive. I mean, why the hell would a young, eager, aspiring actor with an agent and everything, and presumably on the eve of a sort of breakthrough, decide to indiscriminately start killing people? It made absolutely no sense. No, there was absolutely no motive.
The more I analyzed it, the only motive I could come up with was my own. Much as I hated to admit it, the only reason I could think of for maintaining a case against Sam Gravston in this matter was because he was a young actor who had succeeded in getting an agent and succeeded in getting himself auditions, and I couldn’t bear his success and wanted to be able to think something must be wrong.
I thought about that for a while, and I laughed about it, and I laughed at myself, and I laughed at Sam and I laughed at the whole situation. If that seems heartless, it’s just that, when a situation gets too grim and your senses just can’t take it anymore, the defense mechanism is to laugh. “All right, gang, I’m sorry, so people are getting killed. Sorry about it, but I just can’t see the horror in it anymore. I’m just wonderin’ who’s gonna bite the big one next.”
I actually started giggling as I was driving along in my car. I do that every now and then, particularly in tense situations. I just hold myself together as long as I can, and then I sort of lose it.
In this case I really lost it. I got the giggles pretty good. By the time I got to my last assignment, it struck me so funny that the person I was calling on was actually alive that it was all I could do to keep a straight face through the signup. The line I thought about, but did not actually say when the client opened the door, “Oh, you’re alive,” kept running through my head, and every time it did I had to bite my lip to keep from going to pieces. It was a huge relief when I finally shot the client’s picture and got the hell out of there.
When I did it was after five o’clock, and seeing as how I hadn’t been beeped, by then it was time to head back to the city.
Ordinarily, I’d have headed home, but tonight I was on special assignment for Richard. Richard’s switchboard shuts down at six, which meant by the time I hit Manhattan the office would be closed and the staff would be heading home. Time for supersleuth to swing into action.
But first, supersleuth had to clear it with the powers that be.
I hunted up a pay phone and called Alice. It was Friday night, and had Alice managed to line up a baby-sitter for us, I might have been in deep shit, but as it happened, she hadn’t. She wasn’t at all pissed at my not coming home. In fact, when she heard what Richard had in mind, she thought it was rather neat.
“And you’re just the person to do it, too,” she said. “It’s right up your alley. You’re good with people. They like you. They’ll tell you things. You’ll see.”
I was glad for her support, but I wished I shared her optimism. As far as I was concerned, I was a fool on a fool’s errand, with little or no expectations of success.
But a job’s a job, whether for pay or not, and I had undertaken it, and it was up to me to carry it out.
So I girded my loins, fired up the ancient Toyota and headed into Manhattan. Mr. Secret Agent. The man behind the scenes. The man under cover.
Come to save the day.
27.
EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS wanted to know about Wendy/Janet but were afraid to ask.
Correction. More than you wanted to know about Wendy/Janet. More than anyone could ever want to know about Wendy/Janet.
Jesus.
I tried Janet first. She was the lesser of two evils. After all, she’d been at Rosenberg and Stone a shorter amount of time, so I had less to resent her for. Plus, the fact that she was newer made her more of a suspect, if such a ridiculous concept could really apply.
Janet had a one-bedroom apartment in a brownstone on Bleeker Street in the Village. It was a fairly nice building. Janet was too young to have lived there long enough to be paying very low rent, and with what Richard Rosenberg was paying her, there was no way she could afford it. I figured she must have some outside source of income, probably rich and indulgent parents.
It was around seven o’clock when I got to Janet’s. She’d been home long enough to have got undressed, ’cause she came to the door in a robe and slippers.
“Stanley,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“Sorry to bother you,” I said. “But I need to talk to you. It’s about the murders.”
“The murders?” she said. She seemed hesitant to let me in the door.
“It will only take a few minutes,” I told her.
She opened the door then.
“Well, it better,” she said. “I have a date.”
That figured. I followed her into the living room, wondering why it was when women went out on a date, they always got ready for it by taking their clothes off.
“What’s this all about?” Janet said.
Janet was clearly ill at ease and unhappy to have me there, and it couldn’t be just that I was a pain-in-the-ass investigator that she had to deal with. I figured her date was with someone special.
“As I said, it’s about the murders. Or rather, about the murder investigation. Richard is not happy with what the police are doing.”
“I should think not,” Janet said. “You think it’s easy working in that office with the police crawling around all over the place? They make me so nervous I can’t think straight.”
It occurred to me that the presence of two policeman was not a necessary prerequisite for that occurrence.
I didn’t point that out. I merely said, “That must be annoying.”
“Annoying,” she said. “It’s insufferable. How’d you like a police officer looking over your shoulder all day?”
“I’ve had one,” I told her.
“Oh, that’s right,” she said. “So you see what I mean.”
“Yes, I do. You don’t like it. And Richard doesn’t like it. In fact, he’s so dissatisfied that he’s asked me to do something about it.”
“Oh really?” she said.
“Yes. He thinks the police are botching up the case and not getting anywhere. He thinks their theories are stupid. He thinks they’re off on the wrong track. He’s asked me to try to straighten things out.”
She looked at me. “You?”
“Yes.”
Her face showed utter puzzlement. “Why you?” she said.
Clearly, she hadn’t the faintest notion the remark could be the least bit rude.
“I’m a private detective,” I told her. “I’ve had some experience in these matters.”
Usually, I blush to tell people I’m a private detective, but in Janet’s case I didn’t mind. The result was astonishing. Her eyes widened.
“You’re a private detective?” she said.
My first thought was, Jesus Christ, what did she think I was, a dishwasher? Then I realized she wasn’t really being stupid. She was just another person brainwashed by television. To her a private detective meant “Spenser For Hire.” She kept staring at me, as if wondering how she’d missed seeing my muscles and my gun.
“That’s right,” I said. “And I’ve helped the police on other murder investigations. For instance, the Darryl Jackson ca
se that they were talking about the other day. So Richard has asked me to look into this. And that’s why I’ve come to you.”
Her eyes got even wider. “Me? Why me?”
“Don’t be alarmed,” I told her. “No one suspects you of anything. But Richard feels the police have the facts all mixed up, and he wants them straightened out. You know that Sergeant Clark, the guy who questioned you?”
Wendy drew herself up. “I certainly do.”
Her antagonism was so blatant I decided to play off it. “Well, Richard feels the way he questioned you was a disgrace.”
“Oh?” she said, brightening.
“Yes. Richard feels the way he questioned you was totally unfair, and as a result, Clark got his facts all balled up. So he wanted me to chat with you and straighten things out.”
A frown creased Janet’s brow as she realized she was going to have to remember again. “About the phone calls, you mean?” she said.
I decided to win her heart. “No,” I said.
You’d have thought I just crowned her Miss America.
“Well,” she said, practically giggling in relief. “What, then?”
“Well, let’s go back to the day of the first phone call.”
Storm clouds appeared.
“Never mind the phone call itself. Just that day.”
“All right,” she said.
She sat there expectantly.
This is the point at which I wanted to be brilliant. I wanted to say something seemingly irrelevant, like, “What color dress were you wearing?” And then her eyes would widen, and she would say, “That’s it! That’s it! I remember!” And then she’d blurt out the one crucial fact I needed to crack the case.
The thing was, I couldn’t think of one fucking thing to ask her. I felt like a total moron. There I was with the girl all softened up, all primed, all ready to tell me anything I wanted, and I was bone dry. The actor’d gone up on his lines.
Some detective.
I was saved by the front doorbell.
“Oh, my god,” Janet said, jumping up. “That’s Barry. He hates it when I’m late.” She ran for the bedroom. “Let him in, tell him I’m sorry, I’ll be right there.” She slipped inside and slammed the bedroom door. I went to the door and opened it. There was no one there. Of course. He’d rung the downstairs bell. Janet hadn’t told me how to deal with that, but the button on the wall looked promising. I pushed it, and I heard a faint buzz below.