Early the next morning, I called Mellisa’s roommate, Sweetheart, from a phone booth in a subway station. “You don’t have to believe this,” I said, “but I’d like you to. I’m innocent.”
“You must have the wrong number,” she said, her voice so weak I couldn’t be sure I wasn’t inventing her conversation.
I called again an hour later. “Where are you, Sam?” she asked.
“Place is unimportant,” I said. “It’s time that matters. Mellisa’s boss was the last one to see her alive. I heard them before they went into her room.”
“That’s eavesdropping,” she said.
Sweetheart had a fine idea of the world and when reality didn’t correspond to that idea she tended to shut it out of mind. I put things in perspective for her. “A beautiful woman’s dead and an innocent man’s being sought for the murder. If you want to help solve this thing, you’ll give me the name of Mellisa’s boss.”
She said she would on the condition that I let her tag along, and wouldn’t if I didn’t. I agreed to her terms, but warned her that she might be sorry afterward.
“I’m always sorry afterward,” she said. “His name is Harvard Sollness. And don’t break your promise or you’ll burn in hell.”
Hell, I can tell you, was the least of my worries. There was no Harvard Sollness of any spelling in’ the Manhattan phone book. There was a Harris H. Solness on East 67th Street, and H. L. Solness on West 72nd, a Dr. Harwood Sollness (two l’s) in the Squibb Building and that was it. I would have to wait for Sweetheart to find out which of these Sol(l)nesses was the right Sol(l)ness. I was in a bad mood. There was nothing in the morning papers on the murder, which I can tell you made me suspicious. “Never trust a woman that wasn’t standing where you could see her.” my father used to say. “And you’re a damn fool if you have nothing better to do than gawk at a woman all day.” He was a smart old bird but they got him when he turned his head.
I was thinking murderous thoughts when I saw Sweetheart coming toward me at the corner of l20th and Amsterdam wearing a large floppy pink hat, a yellow summer frock, and dark glasses, looking worried and swell.
The man I was looking for, she told me (her milky tongue circling the globe of an ice cream cone), was director of a non-profit government organization called the Trade Winds Foundation which had something hush-hush to do with Latin America. Mellisa hadn’t told her much, she said had acted as if there was some mystery involved, something not quite right.
I glanced at my watch while Sweetheart nibbled at the edges of her cone. It was late and getting later. I had to get to Sol(l)ness before the heat got to me, which meant get to him fast. Though new to the detective business then, I had an instinct for it. It was in the blood, I guess. My old man had been a private eye, one of the best, before women and booze and an excess of integrity did him in. I improvised a plan which was something, if I do say so myself, to catch the conscience of a king. “Do you know what you’re supposed to do?” I asked when I had finished.
She nodded, licked her lips. “Why don’t we go back to my place and make whoopee. Sam?”
I could live to be thirty-three and never understand the way a woman’s mind worked. “Mellisa is dead.” I reminded her.
The news seemed to surprise her. “I forgot,” she said. “I’ve always had a short memory, Sam. You want me to phone Sol(l)ness and say I’m Mellisa. That’s it, isn’t it? What if he doesn’t believe I’m Mellisa?”
“He’ll know that you’re not Mellisa, Sweetheart, but he’ll be too clever to let you know that he knows.”
“Then I’m to tell him that I want to see him, that it’s a matter of life and death. Then…don’t tell me…just give me the first word.”
“You make an appointment to see him. You write the time and place on a scrap of paper and leave it for me in a phone booth on the northeast corner of Broadway and 121st.”
I went over the plan with her again. “You tell him, see, you know everything.”
“I know everything,” she said as if a transforming self-discovery. “You know, for example, he took her out to dinner and brought her home shortly after midnight. Playing on her weakness, he insinuated himself into her room.”
“Of course. Insinuated himself.”
“You overheard them from your room. At about 1:30, they had an argument—perhaps about his wife, perhaps about the Trade Winds Foundation and she said something that made him murderously angry, something unforgivable.”
“It was unforgivable.”
“And then…” I hesitated for effect…”pretending that you wanted to make up, you put your arm around her neck, and gradually increasing the pressure, very gradually—she might have thought she was being hugged—you strangled her to death.”
Sweetheart choked on the last remnant of her cone. “It wasn’t me,” she said. “I was in my room at the time. You said so yourself.” Her thumb wormed its way into her mouth.
I punched her affectionately on the chin. “You’re good, Sweetheart,” I said. “You’re very good.”
“I wish we could be together under other circumstances,” she said, smiling through her tears.
“Someday we will.” I kissed her goodbye, warned her to be careful, lit a cigarette to steady my nerves and looked out at the river. What a screwed up piece of business life is, I thought.
2
I lost another ten minutes in the race against time, riffling the phone booth, before I found Sweetheart’s note ingeniously concealed in the coin return.
SCANDINAVIAN PAVILION
2:15
come as you are.
S.
I looked at my watch. Then I noticed a big beefy man in a dark blue suit waiting outside the phone booth, his back to me. If you didn’t follow your hunches, right or wrong, the old man used to say, you were halfway to being a machine and therefore no match for them because they had better machines than you could ever hope to be. I called the weather.
The temperature at 1 pm in Central Park is 84 degrees relative humidity 82 percent. Variable winds at ten to fifteen miles an hour. The forecast for today
The forecast for today
The booth opened and something hard came down on the back of my head. Something quite hard. I remembered thinking: what the. I never saw it coming, saw only the shadow of the blow, an intuition of its reality reconstructed after the fact like an imagined or remembered dream.
I woke as if from the dead. My head hurt like hell. “He’s moving,” a voice said, which was certainly true. “Hold him,” a woman said, a matronly broad in a flowerprint dress. “He has no business going anywhere in that condition.” She took a whistle from her purse and blew a lightning bolt against my eardrum. No doubt she meant well. I went into the nearest building, which was Teachers College, and into a Men’s Room which smelled of structured curriculum and lonely afternoons. There was somewhere I had to be, dim urgency prodding the surface of memory. Water was supposed to revive you so I turned on the cold and put my head under the faucet.
The bathroom door opened. Once slugged, twice shy. If I was going to be hit, it would not be from behind. My visitor was about my own age and height, though sporting muttonchops and Fu Manchu mustache; said his name was Marlowe. He had found me unconscious in a phone booth, he said, and had carried me to the sidewalk. I thanked him for his trouble.
“Get separated from anything?” he asked.
Nothing, it turned out, but the note. I looked at my watch. It was twenty after two. In this business, five minutes could seem like an hour.
“If you’re in a hurry,” Marlowe said, “I have an Alfa parked outside.”
As we drove downtown in Marlowe’s Alfa Romeo, I told him as much of the present business as a graduate Sociology student could be expected to assimilate.
“Why should Sol(l)ness steal a note containing information of a meeting he himself had arranged?” I asked, wanting to see what he would say.
“He didn’t want it around to be used as evidence against him
.
Or—there’s another contingency we shouldn’t overlook—maybe it wasn’t Sol(l)ness. Maybe it was someone of whose existence neither of us is yet aware.”
Everything is a paradox they teach you in college, and after awhile you can’t see your own reflection in the mirror without thinking it’s someone else.
Marlowe gave the illusion of driving fast, but didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. “Look at the facts,” he said. “There was about two hours between the time the man you assumed was Sol(l)ness left Markey’s room and the time you happened to make your visit.”
“Probably no more than an hour.”
“In which you slept.”
“Sleep and I are strangers. Can’t you go any faster?”
“I’m going as fast as the traffic will bear. It’s a common phenomenon not being aware of having slept. Let’s say you dozed off. From your own account there’s someone else it could have been. Someone who had as much opportunity and motive as Sol(l)ness. “
“You don’t think it’s—?” I said, though the more I thought of it the more likely it seemed. “Even if you’re right, you’re wrong,” I said, throwing him a little paradox of my own.
It was two minutes past three o’clock when we pulled up to the Scandinavian Pavilion. I was getting out of the car when I noticed the mug who had slugged me (a mug who looked like the mug—he had changed the cut and color of his suit) coming out of the restaurant. “It’s him,” I said. “Sol(l)ness?” “Slugger,” I said. We watched him get into a cab. “It would be nice to know where he’s going,” I said. “I’ll follow him for you,” Marlowe said. We arranged to meet at Teachers College at six and Marlowe took off, leaving me to my business at the Pavilion.
The restaurant was dark as sin—candlelight gave the illusion of elegance—and three-quarters empty. I found Sweetheart sitting alone at a table in the back, drinking something green. There was another setting. “Where’s Sol(l)ness?” I asked her.
“Said he was going to the Men’s Room.” Her voice was thick.
“Such a nice man. He offered me the price of hope.”
“Did you get a confession?”
She nodded, then shook her head. “If he sees us together, don’t know what he’ll do.” She looked around nervously.
I found a place at the bar where I could keep tabs on them without being conspicuous. Five minutes went by and Sol(l)ness hadn’t returned. The bartender was staring so I ordered a shot of red-eye, which they didn’t have. In my old man’s day, they used to carry a special bottle of the poison for his private use. Just then a man who wasn’t Sol(l)ness, not the Sol(l)ness I knew, sat down at the table opposite Sweetheart. Whoever he was, I could see he was no stranger to her. I worried about the message I was getting. Nothing apparent to the eye. A scent as subtle as the memory of a breeze in a pall. The seismograph in me registered the first subterranean tremors of some evil working its way through the psychic underground of the room.
Sweetheart got up, holding her purse against her belly as if concealing something in one or the other, not too steady on her pins. I figured she’d be going to the Powder Room and I thought to head her off, took two steps and felt something hard against my ribs. “Act natural,” a voice with a slight accent instructed.
“Nature isn’t always right,” I said and sent him a special delivery message with my elbow. It hit neck and he folded. The next thing I knew there were waiters coming at me from all sides. An excessively polite fat man, chewing on a cigar, popped up and offered me his chair. I took the chair and held it out in front of me like a lion tamer while backing toward the door.
“If you put any value on your life, sir, you’ll put down that chair without a fuss.” The fat man had a small gun and was pointing it at me. I let go of the chair. The ox, tugging at the other end, sailed backwards across the room until a wall interrupted him.
“I never wanted the chair,” I said. “Your friend can have it if it means so much to him.”
“Sir, we have matters of mutual interest, I’m bound to say, that would be best discussed in the privacy of my office. Be so kind as to walk ahead, keeping your hands where I can see them. I am an excellent shot at close range.”
I thought I’d play along until I found out what his game was. His office looked more like a museum than an office, more like an antique shop than a museum. I don’t think there was an object in it, including the waste basket, that was less than a hundred years old. The fat man sat down behind an ornate desk that might have been used by one of the Borgias to write poison pen letters.
“Let me say, sir,” he said in an asthmatic voice, “you are a young man of exceptionally nice wit.” He laughed, folding his hands over his expansive stomach. “You are a man of action, which is the kind of man I admire. I hope you won’t take offense at my speaking so directly.”
“You didn’t bring me here to swell my head with compliments, I hope.”
“I did not, sir. I most certainly did not. I have a business proposition to make to you. Let me introduce myself. Heinrich Stockholm, Exporter-Importer, man of rare taste and discernment. And you, sir?”
“Charles Chan.”
“You are a character, sir. Indubitably, you are. The Chan, to whom you refer, is, if I’m not mistaken, an Oriental gentleman.”
“What are you, Stockholm, some kind of racist?”
The fat man nodded his head and one of his mugs jabbed the butt of a gun in my back. “I’m Charles X. Chan,” I said. “Illegitimate Occidental son of…” Anticipating another blow, I brought the side of my hand down sharply against the wrist of the mug who had been working me over, knocking the gun to the floor. I fell on the gun (a little trick I had learned from the old man), before Stockholm, fumbling with the drawer of his desk, could get to his weapon.
“All right,” I said, collecting guns. “Let’s everyone keep his hands in front of him. Stockholm, what do you know about Sol(l)ness?”
The fat man laughed his asthmatic laugh. “Egad, sir, it never fails to amaze me how the most intelligent and perspicacious of men confuse appearance and reality like schoolboys. It had been my impression, sir, that you were working for Sol(l)ness. And it had been your impression, correct me if I’m wrong, that Mr. Sol(l)ness and I were, so to speak, partners in crime. In point of fact, Sol(l)ness and I are working to somewhat different purpose. An amusing contretemps. You see we do have interests in common, sir, you and I.”
“Do we?”
“We do indeed, sir. There is the matter of the black bird.”
I had heard stories about the black bird since I was a kid.
Rumor was the original was worth anywhere from five hundred to five million dollars depending on condition and how badly you wanted it. “Where does the Trade Winds Foundation fit in?” I asked.
“The Trade Winds Foundation, and I dare say I’m not telling you any more than you know, is a front for…”
He never finished the sentence. The phone rang and we were informed by an anonymous tipster that police had entered the restaurant and were looking for a suspicious person.
“This is the work of our friend Sol(l)ness,” he said. “I suggest, sir, that we, in the parlance of our profession, take a powder. Unless of course you welcome an interview with the law.”
Perhaps the police weren’t there but couldn’t take the chance of finding out, followed Stockholm and his two henchmen through an opening in the teak-paneled wall and down a winding stairway into an underground passageway. We went in single file, the bodyguards, Wilmer and Fritz (or Fritz and Wilmer), followed by the fat man wobbling delicately on his toes like a ballerina, pulled up the rear, rod in hand, directing traffic. “How far is it?” I asked him.
“If your gun is too heavy, sir, give it here,” he wheezed. “Fritz or Wilmer will be glad to carry it for you.” The fat man laughed, the sound reverberating.
“Just keep walking, fat man. If I want any advice, I’ll write to Miss Lonelyhearts.”
I heard footsteps coming fr
om behind and turned, gun cocked, though saw nothing. The tunnel had crazy acoustics. Sounds in front, I realized, echoed as if coming from in back. But then what did it mean if you heard footsteps in front of you? The fat man’s laugh was getting on my nerves. I stumbled but recovered without falling.
There was a steel door at the end of the passageway and Wilmer or Fritz opened it with a tiny steel key. On the other side of the door was a room almost identical to the one we had just left. Fritz (unless it was Wilmer) went in first, followed by the other, followed by the fat man. My turn never came. “You have had weapon long enough,” a woman’s Oriental voice purred into my ear. “Please throw rod into room.” I hesitated. “I am perfectly willing to shoot you down like dog,” she hissed, “if you leave this foolish woman no other choice.”
“What guarantee do I have if I throw the gun away, you won’t kill me anyway?”
“You have word of Dragon Lady,” she said. I gave up the ghost of my gun.
“I’ll ask only once,” Stockholm said, pointing the gun while the Dragon Lady tied my hands behind me; “where, sir, is the black bird?”
“It’s just a story,” I said. “There is no black bird.”
The fat man laughed. “You are a character, sir, or my name isn’t Heinrich Stockholm.”
“Trust me,” the Dragon Lady whispered. And then she was gone, the steel door slamming shut, the echo reverberating through the long hollow chamber. Stock-holm Stock-holm holm holm holm holm holmmmmmmmmmm. I felt as if the lid of my head had been flapped shut.
It looked bad for a few minutes, and I regretted a lot of things I had done in my time and a lot of things I hadn’t done, and I regretted regretting them, when I heard footsteps front and back and Marlowe appeared on the dead run and untied me. We went back through the passageway to Stockholm’s office in the Scandinavian Pavilion.
“How did you find me?” I asked when it was clear that we were out of danger.
“It’s a long story,” he said and proceeded to tell it.
The Return of Service Page 2