Abel Baker Charley

by John R. Maxim

  “Any chance he's on loan from the Sixth?”

  “Not unless you have a parade or a rock concert going on up there, Mr. Harrigan. He shouldn't be there—Can you hold, Mr. Harrigan? There's another call.”

  Harrigan sighed and eased his seat into a reclining position.

  “Ah, Baker,” he said aloud, “it gets curiouser and curiouser, doesn't it? We now have a cop who's not a cop. That's on top of a Baker who is not a Baker, two muggers who are not muggers, and an oddly nervous Michael Biaggi who is...I don't know what Michael is. That Michael serves two masters has never been in serious doubt. Not if I know tidy old Duncan Peck. But could there possibly be more than two? And how many phone calls could the lad be making right this minute?”

  “Mr. Harrigan?”

  “I'm alone, by the way, Katy darlin' .”

  “Hi, Connor.” Her voice smiled. “That was your man Dugan over at the Warwick. There's no sign of Baker, but he says the two hoods who were prowling around the place have been joined by a third. They seem to be holding a strategy meeting. Dugan says the new shooter is Stanley Levy.”

  “Stanley's not a shooter. He's an ice pick, Katy.”

  “Whatever. Do we assume he's after Mr. Baker?”

  “Yes, Katy. I'm afraid we must. Let me have just a moment, darlin'.”

  Connor Harrigan laid the telephone mike across his leg and squinted through the film of moisture on his window. “Mr. Baker,” he said softly to the night, “did I mention that it was getting curiouser? Yes, of course I did. The field keeps getting bigger. We now have Mr. Stanley Levy, who is smaller, older, and balder than yours truly and who commands a handsome retainer for the employment of his ice pick and his tenaciousness. Likes to leave calling cards. Such as the one that pinned the hands of old Rent-a-judge Bellafonte. Mr. Levy's presence at this particular starting gate has at least two meanings. First, he knows you're here, which raises other obvious and vexing questions such as how he knows. Second, we must assume that Mr. Tortora's interest in you has definitely been enkindled anew. It should positively blossom when he discovers how disagreeable you were toward his little boy.”

  Harrigan brought the phone back to his ear. “Katy, is there anyone there who can relieve you?”

  “Janet's here. She's working the darkroom.”

  “How would you like to be a Sixth Avenue hooker for a few hours?”

  I’m getting just a bit long in the tooth for that sort of thing, Connor. But if it's dark enough, a dollar is a dollar.”

  “Sorry, Katy. No actual partying, unless of course you should come upon a fine-looking Irishman sitting in an Oldsmobile.” He smiled. “Otherwise, what I want you to do is patrol Sixth Avenue from the Warwick to the park. If Levy moves in this direction, I want to know that. Bring a transceiver.”

  “Sure, Connor. Anything else?”

  “Now that you ask . . .” Harrigan pulled a Kleenex from the visor and wiped the brown dampness from the inside of the windshield. “If you see an opportunity, Katy, and you can do it neatly, I'd like you to kill Mr. Levy and leave him in a doorway.”

  “I'll bring something quiet.”

  “Be well, Katy love.”

  Harrigan put the phone on its hook. “Remember what Thoreau said, Mr. Baker? He said, * Simplify. Always simplify.’ ”

  She lay pressed against him. Her head and one arm upon his chest. Neither had moved since the light switched off. Neither slept. She was not afraid while they were touching. She felt warm and safe and cared about, and the night stayed far away. Now and then she felt him shudder and each time sink more deeply into the quilted bed. It was as if a hurt was being slowly drained away. She was glad. Someday, she thought, they'd make love. They would. Away from here and on a different night. And they'd be able to see tomorrow. And next week.

  “Peter?”

  “Yes, lovely lady.”

  “Do you ski?”

  “Not in your league, but yes.”

  “Suppose everything else were to work out. Would you go skiing with me someday?”

  “How does Sun Valley sound?” he asked dreamily. “Or maybe Klosters. I hear there are parts of the Swiss Alps where you can ski for twenty miles.” She answered with a purring sound. “But how about you, Peter? What are your special things?”

  “Oh, I like to sail,” he said. “Especially racing one designs, but I haven't in a while. I play some racquetball to stay in shape, and otherwise the things I like are pretty simple. Walking in the snow, tailgating at football games, and I . . .” He almost said “paint.” That would have been too close. He knew that he shouldn't have mentioned sailing either. “How about yourself?”

  ”I have a boat,” she answered brightly. “It's a little J-24 that I bought from an actor who moved East. He taught me to sail, kind of. Not enough to race. She's my get-away-and-be-quiet machine, even if all I do is sleep on her and listen to the wind. Her name is Lady Liz.99

  “Liz?”

  “It's my first name. Elizabeth Tanner Burke. My parents call me that. And most of the kids I grew up with in Boulder.”

  “Liz,” he repeated, nodding. “It suits you. Tanner isn't quite as soft. But I guess Tanner is a better name for an actress.”

  “There's that, I guess.” She yawned. “But I used Tanner on ski race rosters since I was five. Tanner's my mother's maiden name. Beth Tanner. She was a pretty hot downhiller and I wanted to keep up a tradition.” She squeezed him. “Say 'Liz' again.”

  “Liz. Liz Burke.” Baker, too, listened to the sound.

  ”I like the way you say it.” She lifted her head to see the blur of his face. “What about yours?” she asked. “Can you tell me at least your real first name? Just the name other people call you?”

  She tried not to let it hurt her that he hesitated. “Can that really worry you? I mean, if I knew your name was Jack or Tom, I'd have at least that much of a real person to remember when I think about you. How could telling me your first name hurt you?”

  “It's just that it's an unusual name.”

  “Throckmorton? Abercrombie? Margaret?”

  The name formed on his lips and the warning came. Just a tiny spark of pain behind his eye. But the anger was his own when he realized that Abel had been there all this time. What if he had made love to her? Damn it. Would Abel have shared in that? Abel kicked again.

  No, he thought. Abel wouldn't care. All he'd think about is me not getting too close. You can go to hell, Abel.

  “Did you say something?”

  “Jared,” he answered. “Liz, my name is Jared.”

  “Jared,” she repeated. “It's a good name for you, Jared,” she said again. And soon she was asleep.

  But not Baker. There were too many new and happy thoughts. Awake, he could choose his dreams. He could play a long ski run on the ceiling and he could see Liz Burke ahead, waiting for him to catch up, and she had Tina with her. My God, they look like sisters. Liz must have been teaching Tina. Teaching the leg to work again better than ever.

  And now he saw a beach. He felt Liz Baker's . . . Liz Burke's hand in his and a warm August surf brushing over bare feet. And then a boat. He was at the helm, and he saw Liz on the foredeck dropping the genoa as the boat coasted to an anchorage. It was a cove. A place to take a swim and then pour wine and grill steaks over the stern. They'd watch the sun go down. Baker's eyes grew heavy. In no more than a blink, the boat was different. Bigger. Oh, damn, he thought. Now he was on Sonnenberg's boat and Liz was gone and where was Sonnenberg? He's here somewhere. Sonnenberg's always here. Listening. Watching. Recording. For a week and then another week. Every day. That's enough, Doctor. I want to get off this boat.

  “They'll kill you or imprison you, Jared. Be patient, I hope to have news for you soon. Glorious news.”

  ”I want to see Tina. I'm going to find a way to see Tina.”

  “Come to my home, Jared. We'll leave the boat and you'll stay at home. It's not far. I have a surprise for you there, Jared. And you can call Tina. There's a way th
at you can talk to her from my home.”

  Baker rubbed his eyes and opened them. Liz? Where was Liz? He tried to sit up so he could turn on the light and look for her, but a weight pressed him back. She was still there. She'd been so close against him that it was hard to tell where her body ended and his began. She was there. For now. But so, in his way, was Sonnenberg. For now.

  6

  It was only a month since he'd found Baker. But such a month. What was Ben Meister's expression? The mother lode. Yes. Well, we'll know in the morning, won't we. In the morning, Mr. Baker, you may take one giant step. May I, Doctor? Yes, you may, Baker. And once we both find out what you're made of, we'll try one giant leap.

  Sonnenberg grinned and shivered. The very prospect was making him giddy. Composure, Marcus, he chided himself. Calm yourself. If Mrs. Kreskie sees you excited, she'll be at your door with a bowl of chicken soup, folding down your bed.

  Marcus Sonnenberg listened at the door of his bedroom on the second floor. He heard the sound of a television program coming from Baker's room. There were no other noises. Then, satisfied that Mrs. Kreskie had stopped dawdling over the silver service and had either taken herself to bed or gone prowling in the night, he bolted his door from the inside and limped to the larger of two bookcases. There, from a hollowed volume of The Oxford Book of English Verse, he chose one of the four entubed Monte Cristo cigars he kept hidden there. He had long since come to terms with the destruction of the book for such a purpose. Shelley, Oscar Wilde, and certainly Kipling would understand completely. John Milton and Alexander Pope, however, and Mrs. Kreskie, who was easily their peer at fussbudgetry, would doubtless visit great scorn upon him for pursuing this secret vice at all, let alone compounding the act with literary vandalism. Odors in the odes, so to speak.

  Sonnenberg dragged his stiffened leg to a window that overlooked the darkened twelfth fairway of the Westchester Country Club. Sniffing the cigar at its length and testing its moisture content with gentle pressure from his fingertips, the bearded man eased himself into a bentwood rocker positioned there. He lit his prize slowly with a wooden match and readied himself for an hour of peaceful contemplation.

  As the smoke drifted through the open window, his eyes fell upon the small parabolic microphone that sat on a collapsed tripod near the sill. Sonnenberg enjoyed, during idle moments, listening to the chitchat of passing golfers. It was often amusing and sometimes instructive. Sonnenberg liked to know his neighbors.

  All asleep now, though, he thought. And no one on the golf course except land turtles laying eggs and raccoons eating them. His random thoughts began to focus, for no reason that he knew, on a small but odd event of a fortnight earlier. He'd been listening at his window, headphones over his ears, and peering through a cloud of good Havana toward the twosome on the twelfth tee. A loud thunk caused him to blink. The sound came through his feet. A simultaneous “Oh, shit!” came through the headphone from a hundred and seventy yards away and another voice said, “The hell with it, Dunny. Take another one.”

  Dunny's tee shot, probably attempted with an ill-advised driver, had cleared Sonnenberg's high stockade fence and caromed off the house itself. The doctor silently congratulated himself for opting against aluminum siding, even though the economics were sound enough when compared to the triennial five thousand dollars he paid to Puzo and his two Sicilians. But there were other considerations. One could literally envelop an aluminum-clad home with unseen listening devices. And, as Dunny's errant shot had demonstrated, to protect any investment in siding would have required the education of the entire membership of that silly club as to the physical laws that apply to successfully negotiating a short par four with a dogleg to the right. A three iron at most would likely have stayed in bounds. It would have left the ball in position for a reasonable second shot. And a law requiring the use of a three iron would spare him these seasonal mortar attacks on the roof and walls of his house.

  A golf cart purred to a stop outside the stockade fence. Only its surrey top was visible to Sonnenberg. He depressed the platter-shaped microphone and sat back to listen.

  The erring golfer had just read aloud a sign on Sonnenberg's fence that said, BEWARE, ATTACK CAT ON PREMISES, and had discovered a small pail of balls that hung from a peg beneath it.

  “The sign's just a nice way of saying keep out,” said the other man. “If you come through here tomorrow, your ball will be in the bucket.”

  ”I suppose he's had trouble with people climbing the fence,” the one called Dunny wondered. Sonnenberg recalled that he was a tall man, over sixty, with a boardroom look about him even dressed in Izods.

  “Nope,” his partner told him. “No one ever does. Even if you got to the top without breaking your neck, there's a jungle of high rhododendrons on the other side. On top of that, the whole house is electronically rigged like nothing you ever saw. It has electric eyes, pressure plates, silent alarms, klaxons, and hidden cameras. He's even got recorded screams and gunshots that'll scare the hell out of you if you happen to break the wrong beam.”

  “What is he, a nut?”

  “If he is, he's a pleasant enough nut,” Dunny's partner answered. Sonnenberg knew this one now. Blair Palmer. Across the street and two houses up. A broker specializing in arbitrage. Two daughters and one son. The son had had a minor homosexual encounter in New York the year before and almost went insane when his erstwhile companion learned his address and began calling him at home demanding “loans.” Sonnenberg had played the tapes for Mrs. Kreskie, who quietly put a lasting stop to that.

  “That's old Doc Sonnenberg,” Blair Palmer continued. “He invents all that stuff. Lives there alone except for a mute housekeeper and some technicians that come and go.”

  “How well do you know him?” Dunny asked.

  Sonnenberg arched one eyebrow. An odd question for a golfer newly burdened with a two-stroke penalty and facing an even more vexing shot to the green.

  “Not that well. He throws a party for the neighbors once a year and that's about it.” Palmer glanced back toward the tee and the waiting golfers, who were becoming restive. “Listen,” he urged Dunny, “you better take a drop right here and then try to lay up short with a seven iron.”

  Sonnenberg listened to the soft wock of the shot being made and watched the ball soar to Blair Palmer's applause. It faded past a tall elm and bounded confidently toward the twelfth green. Sonnenberg's other eyebrow went up. Very deftly done for a man whose previous shot was mishit so heroically. He listened to the fading voices of the two men as the cart pressed a path into the Karastan fairway and wished he'd had a better look at the one called Dunny. The thought nipped at Sonnenberg for the next two weeks.

  Probably nothing to it, Sonnenberg decided now. He reached absently toward the dials of a small black console that sat on a Parsons table to his left. Still, Sonnenberg wished that he'd thought to tune in to the Palmer house that same evening to see what might be said about Blair Palmer's golf partner. Probably nothing, though. For the second time in as many weeks, Sonnenberg dismissed the man called Dunny from his conscious thought.

  He rested one finger on the console's power switch. What to do? Do I spend another evening listening to Baker's tapes or do I visit the neighbors for a change. There's not much more to be learned about Baker. Not without stirring the soup, and we'll try that tomorrow. For now, how about listening in to the Dickersons first. They're entertaining, I understand, if the word applies in their case. Allison Dickerson could discourse with equal ignorance on the subjects of Szechuan cookery, post-impressionist art, the care of African violets, and the devotion of her husband, of which he had not a whit. Allison Dickerson. Sounds like Higgledy-Piggledy. I must write a piece of doggerel someday about Allison Dickerson. Perhaps I just did. függiedy-Piggledy Allison Dickerson, egregiously boring and tiresome twit. Higgledy-Piggledy, Allison Dickerson, who reads Reader's Digest for wisdom and wit. What else rhymes? Grit?. Warm spit?. Split? Now there's a notion. What if I could draw from Allison Dic
kerson what there is in Baker? What is the counterpoint to a boring woman? An aggressively boring woman? A violently boring woman? A woman who'll tear your head off if you wince at the taste of her Peking duck? Steady, Marcus. And sorry, Jared Baker. I'm just a bit flighty this evening. I hoped you'd understand this electronic eavesdropping. A harmless entertainment. One that sometimes has a salutary effect, however, as in the case of young David Palmer. Above all, I simply like to know what's being said of me from house to house. I like to know that I've succeeded in being reclusive without seeming more than a touch eccentric or unduly mysterious. An inventor of electronic exotica is expected to follow a different buzzer, as it were.

  Sonnenberg flipped on the switch.

  Even if rarely seen, Sonnenberg was a popular neighbor. Somehow, he always managed to know of anniversaries and graduations and other happy events in the lives of the people nearby. A bottle of Mouton Rothschild, for which he was known to have a passion, would appear at their doorsteps with a gracious note that began: ”I seem to recall . . .” At Christmastime, each of the local policemen had come to expect a boxed gallon of Chivas Regal and their superiors received some portion of a case of wine. Sonnenberg hoped sincerely that this division did not smack of condescension. There was only so much of the better vintages to be found, and experience, in any case, had shown him that the Scotch would be perceived as the greater gift by the men in uniform. This he accepted reluctantly, convinced that this particular blend of Scotch was genetically undistinguished, pretentious to the point of fraud, and dreadfully overpriced. One neighbor, who was in advertising, had once remarked that if there were neither a Christmas nor a Harlem, there would be no Chivas Regal. The insight delighted Sonnenberg and impressed him with his neighbor's wit. He made a mental note to listen in on more of that man's conversations. But be that as it may, the effect of his holiday remembrances was that his house was regularly patrolled and checked, particularly during his frequent absences.