by Parnell Hall
“That’s right. In fact, I opened it in the foyer. I picked up the mail on my way in.”
“Okay. And then you went right into your apartment?”
“That’s right.”
“And how soon after that was the phone call?”
“Not long.”
“How not long?”
“Right away. Maybe five minutes.”
Farron stole another glance at Stams, as if to say, “Is that what you think is significant?” Of course, he got no response.
“You have any enemies?” he asked the girl.
She shook her head. “No. And I don’t know anyone who’d want to blackmail me, either.”
Farron looked at her. “You think this is a blackmail note?”
She smiled. “Well, what do you think it is? An invitation to dinner?”
Farron frowned. The girl was cute and spunky. Farron was beyond appreciating cute and spunky. He found girls like her a pain in the ass.
“Are you a likely candidate for blackmail?” he asked.
“Do you mean do I have any money, or do you mean do I have anything to hide?”
“Either.”
“As to money, I have none. I’m an actress. All I’ve been able to get lately is some extra work. I have a trust fund that doles me out just enough money to get by.”
A light went on. “A trust fund?”
“Yes. And you can stop thinking what you’re thinking, because my dear departed grandfather fixed it so that I can’t touch the money until I’m thirty-five. I’m twenty-four now.”
“That’s very interesting. Tell me about the trust fund.”
“Why? I told you, I can’t touch the money—”
“Nonetheless, tell me about it.”
“I don’t see what difference it makes.”
“You also don’t see why anyone would want to send you that letter.”
“Oh ...”
Lieutenant Farron smiled, which didn’t come easy for him. “Humor me.”
Sheila brushed the hair out of her eyes and frowned. She was no more used to men like Lieutenant Farron than he was to her. Like many pretty girls her age, she wasn’t used to doing what men wanted. She was used to smiling sweetly, and having men do what she wanted. Still, she was scared, and she wanted help.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m an orphan. My father died before I was born. My mother was killed in a car accident when I was four. My Uncle Max brought me up. My grandfather, that’s my mother’s and Uncle Max’s father, died shortly after my mother was killed. In his will, he set up a trust fund for me. But I tell you, there’s no way I can touch it until I’m thirty-five.”
Farron pursed his lips. “Is it a large trust?”
“Yes.”
“Could you be more explicit?”
“What?”
“How large?”
“What does it matter? I tell you—”
“Miss ...” Farron had a moment of panic, as he realized he had no idea who he was talking to, not the best of procedures for a veteran police officer. He glanced at the address on the envelope the letter had come in. “Miss Benton. I’m a police officer. It’s my job to determine what is and what isn’t important. I take all the facts and sift through them. If I let someone else decide for me what’s important and what’s not, then I’m a lousy police officer and I’m not doing my job. Now, I just want to know the relative size of your trust fund. In my mind it’s important. So tell me. Is it bigger than a breadbox?”
Sheila smiled. “All right. My grandfather was very wealthy. The trust is quite large. I have no idea how much is actually in it. The only one who would know is Uncle Max. But I know it’s several millions.”
Lieutenant Farron raised his eyebrows. “Several millions?”
“Yes,” Sheila said, somewhat impatiently. “But I can’t touch it. You know what I get? Two hundred a week. That’s eight hundred a month, ten thousand, four hundred a year. Try and live on that in New York. The only reason I get by is I have a dingy, one-room apartment on the Upper West Side that’s rent-controlled and costs me three hundred a month. Which I know I shouldn’t complain about, because there are people who would kill for it. But that’s it. I have nothing. I own nothing. I have no money.”
“Except for the trust.”
“Which I can’t touch.”
“Who is your trustee?”
“Uncle Max.”
“And who is Uncle Max?”
“Uncle Max. Maxwell Baxter.”
And suddenly Lieutenant Farron understood. Maxwell Baxter. One of the richest men in New York, in the United States for that matter. A wealthy man. A powerful man. A man with political connections. A man, perhaps, with connections to the commissioner.
Farron looked at Stams. Without changing expression, Stams seemed to be saying, “I told you so.”
So he had. Stams’ judgment was vindicated. This was why he’d brought him the girl. This was why he’d brought him this unlikely and unimportant case. The girl was Maxwell Baxter’s niece, and therefore merited attention. There was no way to fault Stams on it. He’d done right.
But he’d done more than that. And both he and Farron knew it. Yes, he’d informed Farron, so Farron wouldn’t be caught flat-footed if this developed into something. But more important, he’d covered his ass. He protected himself, by not turning the girl down. By not taking the responsibility. By leaving it up to Lieutenant Farron to turn the girl down.
He’d passed the buck.
“So,” Farron said. “Maxwell Baxter is your trustee?”
“Yes.”
“Is he your sole trustee?”
“That’s right.”
“And he gives you two hundred dollars a week?”
“Actually I get a check once a month. Sometimes it’s eight hundred, sometimes it’s a thousand, depending on how the weeks fall. It all adds up to ten thousand, four hundred a year.”
“What about inflation?”
Sheila made a face. “What about it? That’s with inflation. I started at fifty a week. It’s up to two hundred.”
“Is the amount a provision of the trust?”
“Yes. Carefully worked out by Grandpa to keep me poor for as long as possible.”
“And your uncle can’t increase that amount.”
She hesitated. “No.”
“You hesitated.”
“Did I? The answer is no, he can’t.”
“But he can give you money at his discretion?”
“In an emergency, yes.”
“And blackmail would be considered an emergency.”
Sheila was getting annoyed. This was not going the way she had hoped. “Look, let’s get something straight. If someone were blackmailing me, the threat would be that if I didn’t pay them, they would tell my uncle. Can you really see me going to my uncle to get money to pay to a blackmailer to keep him from telling my uncle something?”
Farron smiled. “No. Which brings me to the second part of my question. What would this man tell your uncle? What is it you have to hide?”
Sheila looked at him with wide-eyed innocence. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing that I’d pay a dime for, even if I had it.”
“Publish and be damned, eh?” Farron nodded. “Quite proper attitude.”
Farron had had enough. He got up to indicate the interview was over.
“Well, Miss Benton, we’ll do what we can.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“If you get any more calls or letters, get in touch with us immediately.”
Sheila stood up. “You sound as if you’re washing your hands of the whole thing.”
Lieutenant Farron came around the desk. He smiled at her, but he also took her arm and guided her to the door.
“Well, Miss Benton,” he said. “You must admit it sounds rather unpromising. You have no money to pay blackmail. You’ve done nothing to be blackmailed about. And so far, no one’s made any demands on you.”
“So
me people want other things besides money,” Sheila protested.
“That they do, Miss Benton. That they do.”
Farron opened the door. She gave him a look, then stalked out of the office.
Farron closed the door, went back, and sat at his desk.
“Well,” Stams said. “What do you think?”
Lieutenant Farron thought Sergeant Stams had successfully passed the buck. But he wasn’t going to acknowledge that to him.
Farron shrugged. “Could be nothing. Practical joke. Could be something else. What I don’t like is the fact the phone call came as soon as she got home. It could mean our man’s watching the house.”
Stams nodded. “So what do we do?”
Lieutenant Farron knew that sarcasm would be lost on Sergeant Stams, but he couldn’t help himself.
“What do we do?” he said. “We put three bodyguards on her at all times, assign five squad cars to the area, and tap her phone.”
He looked up to see Sergeant Stams looking at him, impassive as always.
“What do you think we do?” Farron said. He snorted and handed him the letter. “File it.”
3.
SHEILA BENTON SPENT A RESTLESS night.
Johnny called around seven o’clock to tell her he’d arrived safely and everything was going fine. Sheila would have loved to have told him all about what was happening, but she didn’t have the heart. He had his wife’s attorneys to deal with, and he didn’t need the added distraction. Besides, he’d kidded her on the way to the airport that she wouldn’t be able to get along for two days without him, that she’d be calling him up for advice. Well, she’d handled this herself, hadn’t she? She’d reported it to the police. She’d done everything she could do. And what the hell could he do, a million miles away?
And the other thing was, Johnny was never serious. He treated everything as a joke. He wouldn’t take this seriously. He’d just kid her about it
That started Sheila off on a bad train of thought. Johnny was never serious. How could she be sure he was serious about her? Nonsense. She knew he loved her. Didn’t he? Wasn’t he in Reno divorcing his wife so he’d be free to be with her? So what if he was never serious. She liked the way he kidded around. That was part of what had attracted her to him in the first place. So what was she worrying about?
It was a bad night. A night without Johnny. A night without coke. Jesus, she hadn’t thought it was going to be this hard. By eleven o’clock she was climbing the walls. She had ransacked the refrigerator and the kitchen shelves, and found damn little. Some orange juice. Some Wheaties. Some stale crackers. What she found, she ate, but it wasn’t nearly enough. She wanted something exciting, like pizza. But she couldn’t eat a whole pizza, and no one would deliver a slice. And she wasn’t that keen about walking out to Broadway, not alone, not at night, and not now. But she really wanted something.
What she wanted, of course, was coke. She didn’t really want to admit that, but it was true. And when she finally did admit it, when she finally said to herself, “Jesus, I need a hit of coke,” she rationalized. It would have been all right, she told herself, if it hadn’t been for the letter. That was what was throwing her. If it hadn’t been for that, she wouldn’t have needed the coke. She wouldn’t have felt this anxious and desperate. She could give up the coke easy enough, that wasn’t the problem. But not now. Not with Johnny gone and this thing happening to her. This scary thing that she didn’t understand. There was plenty of time to stop taking coke when everything was all right. That was the time to do it. Not in the middle of a crisis. Not with so much else on her mind.
By one in the morning she had convinced herself that there was nothing wrong with buying coke at this particular juncture in her life, and, considering how things stood, she should simply go ahead and do so.
With this conviction, she was finally able to fall asleep.
She awoke the next morning at nine o’clock. She got up, showered and dressed, folded up the bed and set out to accomplish her purpose.
On her way out, she checked the mailbox. The mail hadn’t come yet, and she was glad. She wasn’t up to another letter, if one happened to be in it.
Sheila walked out to Broadway and hailed a cab. Aside from cocaine, taxis were her one extravagance. Sheila couldn’t stand public transportation. It was so filthy in the subway. And so inconvenient, particularly getting from one side of town to the other. You had to take the subway to Times Square, shuttle, and then take a third train where you wanted to go, which was usually blocks from a subway stop anyway. So Sheila splurged a lot on cabs.
The cab took her through Central Park at Eighty-sixth Street, down Fifth Avenue and across to the address she had given on Park Avenue.
Sheila dug in her purse and discovered she had twenty-one dollars. She gave the driver a twenty and a smile. He grumbled over the twenty, which Sheila felt was uncalled for. After all, the meter had been five-seventy. She’d been about to tell him to keep seven bucks, but when he bitched, she made it six-fifty.
A doorman opened the door of the cab and said, “Good morning, Miss Benton,” as Sheila got out. Sheila favored him with a smile. It was nice to be greeted by name in such a posh setting.
Sheila went into the lobby and waited for the elevator. When it arrived, the elevator man also greeted her by name. She smiled at him also. The fact that she knew neither his name nor that of the doorman bothered her not at all, nor did it seem to bother them.
The elevator stopped at the eighth floor and let her off, not in a hallway, but in the spacious foyer of the floor-through apartment.
The double doors to the living room were open, and Sheila could see someone sitting on the couch. She frowned and had an uncharitable thought for the doorman and the elevator man. They should have told her Uncle Max had company. That didn’t suit her purpose at all.
Sheila walked in and the person on the couch heard her and turned. He was a young man, about twenty-five, dressed in a tweed jacket and slacks, which coupled with his glasses immediately identified him as a student.
Sheila, who had been prepared to dislike the intruder, whoever he might be, nonetheless, broke into a smile. “Phillip!”
“Hi, Sheila.”
“What are you doing here?”
He smiled. “What do you think? I want to go to summer school.” He jerked his thumb toward the door to the study. “Dad’s in there making the touch now.”
“You study too much.”
“I don’t study enough. You know how long it takes to get through law school?”
Sheila looked at him. “You really want to be a lawyer, Phillip?”
Phillip shrugged. “Uncle Max will support me through school. He wouldn’t give me a dime if I quit.”
“You have your trust fund.”
Phillip grinned. “Yeah. Just like yours. And what brings you here, cousin?”
Sheila grinned back. “What do you think?”
They both laughed, as they shared their own, special in-joke.
“Can’t wait to be thirty-five, can you?” Phillip said. “Well, I’ve got it all figured out. By the time I’m thirty-five, I’ll either be a wealthy lawyer or I’ll still be in school.”
The door to the study opened and Max and Teddy Baxter came out.
Sheila looked up at them, and thought the same thing she always thought when she saw them together. It was hard to believe that they were brothers, and only a year apart, too. Moreover, it was hard to believe that Teddy was the eldest. Maxwell Baxter, hearty, robust, assured and confident, looked like what he was—a wealthy powerlord. Teddy Baxter, slim, emaciated, tentative, and apologetic, looked like what he was—a poor relation.
Secretly, Sheila liked Teddy, Phillip’s father, better. Uncle Max was a cold, cultured, condescending, affluent snob. Uncle Teddy was a real person. But Sheila, who like Teddy and Phillip depended on Maxwell Baxter for everything, was careful never to let this show.
Uncle Teddy spotted Sheila first.
“Sh
eila!” he said. “What a pleasant surprise.”
“Hello, Uncle Teddy. How are you?”
“Fifteen hundred dollars richer, that’s how he is,” Max said dryly.
Sheila gave him a playful scolding. “Uncle Max, that’s not nice.”
“It’s a crime, but there you are,” Max said.
Teddy, feeling called upon to justify himself said somewhat stiffly, “Education is very important—”
“Yes it is,” Max cut him off brusquely, without taking his eyes off Sheila. “You know, Sheila, if you’d just go back to school, I’d be happy to pay your way.”
Sheila smiled. “Somehow I remember. You tell me every time I see you.”
“How’s the acting world?” Teddy asked.
“Great,” Sheila said. “I’m going to be on TV next Thursday. An ABC Movie of the Week.”
“No kidding.”
Sheila smiled. “Yeah. In the banquet scene, I’m the girl with her back to the camera at the third table from the left.”
Teddy and Phillip laughed.
“We’ll watch for you,” Teddy said.
Phillip looked at his watch. “Come on, Dad. We’ll miss my bus.”
“Right,” Teddy said. “We’ve got to get going.”
They walked out into the foyer and rang for the elevator, which arrived promptly.
“Well, so long,” Teddy said. “And thanks again.”
“Don’t mention it,” Max said dryly.
As the elevator doors closed, Maxwell Baxter wheeled around to regard Sheila. There was accusation in his eyes.
Sheila didn’t like dealing with Uncle Max, but she could do it. She handled him the way she handled all men, by being cute and witty and adorable, by kidding him along with light irony and gentle sarcasm.
Still, she always hated to take the initiative, especially under that steely gaze.
But she had to, so she did.
“Uncle Max—” she began.
He cut her off with a voice as cold as ice. “How much?”
Sheila smiled, one of her most adorable smiles. “Uncle Max, don’t be like that.”
“How much?”
“A hundred.”
“For what?”
“Rent.”
“It’s the middle of the month.”