Bitter Truth

by William Lashner

  Rittenhouse Square is a swell place to live, which is why so many swells live there. It is the elegant city park. There are trees and wide walkways and a sculpture fountain in the middle. Society ladies, plastic poop bags in hand, walk their poodles there; art students, clad all in black to declare their individuality, huddle; college dropouts looking like Maynard G. Krebs walk by spouting Kierkegaard and Mr. Ed in the same breath; hungry homeless men sit on benches with handfuls of crumbs, luring pigeons closer, ever closer. It is a small urban pasture, designed by William Penn himself, now imprisoned by a wall of stately high-rises jammed with high-priced condominiums: The Rittenhouse, the Dorchester, the Barclay. It was the Cambium I was headed for now, a less imposing building on the south side of the park, hand-wrought iron gates, carved granite facings, million-dollar duplexes two to a floor. A very fashionable place to die, as Jacqueline Shaw had discovered.

  “Mr. Peckworth, please,” I said to the doorman, who gave me a not so subtle look that I didn’t like. I was dressed in a suit, reasonably well groomed, my shoes may have been scuffed, sure, but not enough to earn a look like that.

  “Who then can I say is visiting this time?” he asked me.

  “Victor Carl,” I said. “I don’t have an appointment but I expect he’ll see me.”

  “Oh yes, I’m sure he will,” said the doorman.

  “Do we have a problem here?”

  “No problem at all.”

  “I don’t think I said anything funny. Do you think what I said was funny or is it just the way I said it?”

  “I did not mean in any way to…”

  “Then maybe you should stop smirking and get on the phone and let Mr. Peckworth know I’m here.”

  “Yes sir,” he said without a smile and without a look.

  He called up and made sure the visit was all right. While he called I looked over the top of his desk. The stub of a cigar smoldered in an ashtray, a cloth-bound ledger lay open, the page half filled with signatures. When the doorman received approval for my visit over the phone he made me sign the ledger. A few signatures above mine was a man from UPS. “All UPS guys sign in?”

  “All guests and visitors must sign in,” he said.

  “I would have thought they’d just leave their packages here.”

  “Not if the tenant is at home. If the tenant is at home we have them sign in and deliver it themselves.”

  “That way stuff doesn’t get lost at the front desk, I suppose.”

  The doorman’s face tightened but he didn’t respond.

  While I waited beside the elevator, I noticed the door to the stairs, just to the left of the elevator doors. I turned back to the doorman. “Can you go floor to floor by these stairs?”

  “No sir,” he said, eyeing me with a deep suspicion. “Once inside the stairwell you can only get out down here or on the roof.”

  I nodded and thanked him and then waited at the elevator.

  Peckworth was the fellow who had seen a UPS guy outside Jacqueline Shaw’s apartment when no UPS guy should have been there. He had later recanted, saying he had confused the dates, but it seemed strange to me that anyone would not remember the day his neighbor hanged herself. That day, I figured, should stick in the mind. On the elevator I told the operator I was headed for the eighth floor. It was an elegant, wooden elevator with a push-button panel that any idiot could work, but still the operator sat on his stool and pushed the buttons for me. That’s one of the advantages of being rich, I guess, having someone to push the buttons.

  “Going up to visit them Hirsches, I suppose,” said the operator.

  “Are the Hirsches new here?”

  “Yes sir. Moved in but just a few months ago. Nicest folk you’d want to meet.”

  “I thought there was a young woman living in that apartment.”

  “Not no more, sir,” said the operator, and then he looked up at the ceiling. “She done moved out.”

  “Where to, do you know?”

  “Just out,” he said. “So you going up to visit them Hirsches?”

  “No, actually.”

  “Aaah,” he said, as if by not going to visit the Hirsches I had defined myself completely.

  “Is there something happening here that I’m not aware of? Both you and the doorman are acting mightily peculiar.”

  “Have you ever met Mr. Peckworth before, sir?” asked the operator.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well then that there explains it,” said the operator.

  “I guess I’m in for a treat.”

  “Depends on your tastes is all,” said the operator as the elevator door slid open onto a short hallway. “Step to your right.”

  I nodded, heading out and to the right, past the emergency exit, to where there was one door, mahogany, with a gargoyle knocker. A round buzzer button, framed with ornate brass, glowed, but I liked the looks of that knocker, smiling grotesquely at me, and so I let it drop loudly. After a short wait the door opened a crack, revealing a thin stooped man, his face shiny and smooth but his orange shirt opened at the collar, showing off an absurdly wrinkled throat. “Yes?” said the man in a high scratchy voice.

  “Mr. Peckworth?”

  “No, no, no, my goodness, no,” said the man, eyeing me up and down. “Not in the least. You’re a surprise, I must say. We don’t get many suits up here. But that’s fine, there’s a look of desperation about you I like. My name is Burford and I will be handling today’s transaction. In these situations I often act as Mr. Peckworth’s banker.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Well come in, please,” said the man as he swung the door open and stepped aside, “and we’ll begin the bargaining process. I do so enjoy the bargaining process.”

  I entered a center hallway lined with gold-flocked paper and then followed Burford into another, larger room that had traveled intact from the nineteenth century. The room was papered in a dark maroon covered with large green flowers, ferocious blooms snaking their way across the walls. There was a dark old grandfather clock and a desk with spindly animal legs and an overstuffed couch and thick carpets and dark Gothic paintings of judges in wigs with a lust for the hangman in their eyes. Thick velvet drapes framed two closed windows, the drapes held to the wall with iron arrows painted gold. The place smelled of not enough ventilation and too much expensive perfume. On one wall was a huge mirror, oval, sitting like a giant cat’s eye in a magnificent gold-leaf frame.

  Burford led me to the center of the room and then, as I stood there, he circled me, like a gallery patron inspecting a sculpture he was interested in purchasing.

  “My name is Victor Carl,” I said as Burford continued his inspection. “I’m here to see Mr. Peckworth.”

  “Let’s start with the tie,” said Burford. “How much for the tie? Is it silk, Mr. Carl?”

  “Polyester, one hundred percent,” I said. It was a stiff black-and-red-striped number, from which stains seemed to slide right off, which is why I liked it. Wipe and wear. “But it’s not for sale.”

  “Come now, Mr. Carl,” said Burford. “We are both men of the world. Everything is for sale, is it not?”

  “Yes, actually, that’s been my experience.”

  “Well then, fine, we are speaking the same language. Give me a price for your one hundred percent polyester tie, such a rarity in a world lousy with silk.”

  “You want to buy this tie?”

  “Isn’t that why we’re here?”

  “One hundred dollars,” I said.

  “A tie like that? You can buy it in Woolworth’s for seven dollars, new. I’ll give you a profit on it, though, seeing that you’ve aged it for us. Let’s say fifteen dollars? Who could refuse that?”

  “Is Mr. Peckworth in?”

  “Twenty dollars then.”

  “I didn’t come here to haggle.”

  “Thirty dollars,” said Burford.

  “Let me just talk to Mr. Peckworth.”

  “Well, forget the tie for the moment. Le
t’s discuss your socks. Tasty little things, socks, don’t you think? So sheer, so aromatic.”

  “One hundred dollars,” I said.

  “The thing about socks,” said Burford, “is you take them off, sell them, and all of a sudden you look more stylish than you did before. See?” He hitched up one of his pants legs. A bare foot was stuffed into a tan loafer. “Stylishness at a profit.”

  “One hundred dollars.”

  “That’s quite high.”

  “Each.”

  “Did you shower today, Mr. Carl?”

  “Every day.”

  “Then they wouldn’t quite be ripe enough for the price you are asking. But that tie, that is special. We don’t see enough man-made fibers these days. You don’t happen to have a leisure suit somewhere in the recesses of your closet, do you?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Fifty dollars for the tie, but no more. That is the absolute limit.”

  “Seventy-five dollars.”

  Burford turned his face slightly and stared at me sideways. Then he took a thick roll of bills out of his pants pocket, licked his thumb with pleasure, and flicked out three twenties. He fanned the bills in his hand. “Sixty dollars. Take it or leave it,” he said, smiling smartly.

  I took the bills and stuffed them in my pocket.

  “Come now, come now,” said Burford. “Let’s have it. Don’t balk now, the deal’s been done, money’s been passed. Time to pay the piper, Mr. Carl.”

  At the same time he was demanding my tie he stepped aside, a smooth glide slide to the left which I found peculiar. What that smooth step did, I realized, was clear my view of the large oval mirror so that I would be able to watch myself take off my tie. There was something so neat about that glide slide, something so practiced.

  I turned toward the mirror and gripped the knot of my tie with my forefinger and started slipping it down, slowly, inch by inch. “Now that you’ve bought my tie, Mr. Peckworth,” I said to the mirror, “I have a few questions I’d like to ask.”

  For a moment I felt like an idiot for having spoken to a mirror but then, over an intercom, I heard a sharp voice say, “Take the tie and bring him here, Burford,” and I knew I had been right.

  Burford stepped up to me and held open a clear plastic bag. “You’re such a clever young boy, aren’t you,” he said with a sneer.

  I dropped the tie in the bag. “I try.”

  Burford moved to the desk, where a little black machine was sitting. I heard a slight slishing sound and a thin waft of melting plastic reached me. “Yes, well, I would have paid you the seventy-five. I’ll take you to Mr. Peckworth.”

  Peckworth was in a large garish room, red wallpaper, gold trimmings, the ceiling made of mirrored blocks. He was ensconced on a pile of pillows, leaning against steps that ringed the floor of what we would have called a passion pit twenty years ago. There were mounds of pillows and a huge television and a stereo and the scent of perfume and the faint scent of something beneath the perfume that I didn’t want to identify. On one wall was a giant oval window looking into the room in which I had taken off my tie, a two-way mirror.

  “Sit down, Mr. Carl. Make yourself comfortable.” Peckworth was a slack-jawed bald man with the unsmiling face of a tax auditor, looking incongruous as hell in his pink metallic warmup suit.

  I looked around for a chair, but this was a passion pit, no chairs, no tables, just pillows. I sat stiffly on one of the steps and leaned back, pretending to be at ease.

  “I hope you’ll excuse the entertainment with the tie,” said Peckworth in a sharp, efficient voice. “Burford sometimes can’t help himself.”

  “I hated to part with it for sentimental reasons,” I said, “but he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

  Peckworth didn’t so much as fake a smile. “It is nice to be able to mix business and pleasure. Unfortunately, we’ll lose money on the tie, but you’d be surprised how much profit we can earn from our little auctions. The market is underground but shockingly large.”

  “Socks and things, is that it?”

  “And things, yes.”

  I imagined some room in that spacious luxury duplex dedicated to the storage of varied pieces of clothing in their plastic bags, organized impeccably by the ever-vigilant Burford, their scent and soil preserved by the heat-sealed plastic. The reheating directions would be ever so simple: (1) place bag in microwave; (2) heat on medium setting for one minute; (3) remove bag from microwave with care; (4) slit open bag with long knife; (5) place garment over head; (6) breathe deep. Follow the directions precisely and the treasured artifact would be as fresh and as fragrant as the day it was purchased. That’s one of the things I loved about Philadelphia, you could learn about some foul new pleasure every day of the week.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Carl?”

  “I’m a lawyer,” I said.

  “Oh, a lawyer. Had Burford only known he would have negotiated a better deal. I think he mistook you for a man of principle.”

  “I’m representing the sister of your former neighbor, Jacqueline Shaw.” That was technically a lie, but it wouldn’t matter to Peckworth. “I wanted to ask you some questions about what you saw the day of her death.”

  “Nothing,” he said, turning his slack face away from me. “I already told the police that.”

  “What you originally told the police was that you saw a UPS man in the hallway the day of her death. Which was interesting since no UPS guy had signed in that day. But later you changed your story and said you saw the guy two or three days before. The change conveniently matched the guest register at the front desk, so the police bought it. But the change of memory sounded peculiar to me and I wanted to ask you about it.”

  “It happens,” he said. “I’m older than I was, my memory has slipped.”

  “This man you saw, can you describe him?”

  “I already told that to the police.”

  “So you shouldn’t mind telling it to me.”

  “Tall and handsome, broad shoulders, dark curly hair. His brown shirt and slacks, I remember, were impeccably pressed.”

  “As if they had just come out of the box.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  I opened my briefcase and took out a file. Inside was a folder with eight small black-and-white photos arranged in two rows and glued to the cardboard. The photos were head shots, all of men between twenty-five and thirty-five, all with dark hair, all facing forward, all aiming blank stares at the camera. It was a photo spread, often used in lieu of a lineup in police investigations. I stepped down onto the base of the passion pit with the photo spread. The ground tumbled when I stepped on it and then pushed back. It was a giant water mattress. I fought to remain upright while I stumbled over to where Peckworth reclined. Standing before him, maintaining my balance steady as she goes, I handed the spread to him.

  “Do you recognize the UPS man you saw in these photos?”

  While he examined the photos I examined his eyes. I could see their gaze pass over the photos one after another and then stop at the picture in the bottom left-hand corner. He stared at it for a while and then moved his eyes around, as if to cover the tracks of his stare, but he had recognized the face in the bottom left-hand corner, just as I suspected he would. I had received the spread in discovery in one of my prior cases and that figure on the bottom left had a face you wouldn’t forget, dark, sculpted, Elvesine. A guy like Peckworth would never forget the likes of Peter Cressi or his freshly pressed brown uniform. I wondered if he had made him an offer for the uniform instantly upon seeing it on him.

  Peckworth handed me back the spread. “I don’t recognize anyone.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Perfectly. I’m sorry that you wasted so much of your time.” He reached for the phone console beside him and pressed a button. “Burford, Mr. Carl is ready to leave.”

  “Who told you to change your story, Mr. Peckworth? That’s what I’m really interested in.”

  “Burf
ord will show you out.”

  “Someone with power, I bet. You don’t seem the type to scare easy.”

  “Have a good day, Mr. Carl.”

  Just then the door behind me opened and Burford came in, smiling his smile, and behind Burford was some gnomelike creature in a blue, double-breasted suit. He was short and flat-faced and impossibly young, but with the shoulders of a bull. I must have been a foot and a half taller than he but he outweighed me by fifty pounds. Look in the dictionary under gunsel.

  “Come, come, Mr. Carl,” said Burford. “It’s time to leave. I’m sure you have such important things to do today.”

  I nodded and turned and made my careful unbalanced way across the great water mattress. When I reached the wraparound steps leading to the door I turned around again. “An operation like this, as strange as it would appear to authorities, must pay a hefty street tax. Probably cuts deeply into your profits.”

  “Let’s go, Mr. Carl,” said Burford. “No time for nonsense. Time to leave. Everett, give Mr. Carl a hand.”

  The gunsel skipped by Burford with an amazing grace and grabbed hold of my arm before I could grab it away. His grip was crushing.

  “I might be able to do something about the tax,” I said. “I have certain contacts in the taxing authority that might be very grateful for your information.”

  Everett gave a tug that nearly separated my arm from its socket and I was letting him pull me up and out of that room when Peckworth said, “Give us a minute.”

  After Burford and Everett closed the door behind them, Peckworth asked me, “What could you do about it?”

  “How much are you paying?”

  “Too much.”

  “If the information proves as valuable as I expect, I might be able to convince my contacts to reduce your tax substantially.”

  “Is that so? And do we even know who is in charge after yesterday’s dance macabre on the expressway?”

  “I’m betting the old bull holds his ground.”

  “And if he does, and you get me the break you say you can get me, what do you get out of it?”

  I was about to say nothing, but then realized that nothing wouldn’t satisfy the suspicions of a man like Peckworth. There had to be an angle to it for him to buy in. “I get twenty percent of the reduction.”