Caper

by Parnell Hall

  I opened my mouth.

  She continued, “Or two shy innocent bystanders. No, it would have to be someone with a vested interest in the case. Someone with the motivation to go poking around where they shouldn’t. Can you think of who that might be?”

  “Have you tried the widow’s lover?”

  She shook her head. “No, no, no. That would be a choice for the killer.”

  “Then I have no idea.”

  “That’s strange. You seem to have ideas about everything else.” She cocked her head. “So, you still think Hanson is innocent?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “How can that be? According to the doorman, he’s the only one who was there.”

  “Aside from the obvious answer that the doorman is lying, let’s assume he’s telling the truth. Let’s assume the congressman had a visitor who managed to get into the building despite the ironclad security of the world’s best doorman. Let’s assume that visitor killed the congressman. The objection is the phone call upstairs. If you reject the obvious answer that the doorman is lying, let’s assume he called upstairs, the congressman answered the phone and said send him up. The congressman’s visitor, whoever that is, decides what a dandy time this would be to kill the son of a bitch. He does the deed, goes out, hides in the hallway, and waits for the contractor to walk into the trap. He might even exit the building and make the anonymous phone call to make damn sure the contractor gets caught in the trap. How does he get out? Same way he got in. I don’t know specifically, but that’s not my job. I can give you a theory or two. For one thing, maybe he lives in the building, which would account for no one seeing him go in. As for making the phone call, he could just go out and make it, because a tenant leaving his own building is not something anyone is going to notice or mention.”

  “That scenario has the killer making the phone call.”

  “Yes. For a specific reason. To trap the contractor.”

  “And why would the killer make the second phone call?”

  “Same reason. To implicate the contractor. To complete the frame. So the cops will show up, find him hanging, think it was a murder-suicide.”

  She shook her head. “You’re going around in circles. We already rejected the murder-suicide theory as making no sense.”

  “It makes no sense the way you tell it. But you may not have all the facts.”

  “Stop. Let’s not go off on a tangent. Let’s assume those phone calls weren’t made by the killer or an innocent bystander. Let’s assume those phone calls were made by a pain-in-the-ass, meddling PI who doesn’t know any better than to leave well enough alone.”

  “What the hell would a PI be doing messing around is this case?”

  “You tell me.”

  “I can’t think of a reason.”

  “Neither can I. That’s the big stumbling block here. If there were such a person, he would have to be a complete moron to get involved.”

  ADA Reynolds opened his mouth to say something.

  She silenced him with a look. “Care to venture a guess how a PI might have gotten into the congressman’s apartment?”

  “Can’t think of a thing. I can imagine a PI tailing the guy to his apartment, being unable to go in, and calling 911 in frustration to try to drive the guy out.”

  “You see that as a possible scenario?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Are you saying you did that?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Why not?”

  “It would be stupid as hell.”

  “I agree. Would you be willing to talk to the doorman of the building, see if you can work this out?”

  “I asked to talk to the doorman. He said no.”

  “Things have changed. I think we can accommodate you.” She pushed a button on the intercom. “Harold? See if you can get the doorman back in, will you?” she said and hung up.

  “What’s the point?” I asked.

  She smiled. “You wanted to see the doorman. In the spirit of cooperation, I’m going to set it up. Put you two guys together and see what happens. You claim someone else could have gotten in. The doorman claims he couldn’t. No reason not to let you guys duke it out.”

  “You expect me to get him to admit he’s wrong?”

  “I think you might trip him up. It will be fun to see you try.”

  The phone rang. She scooped it up, said, “Yes?” Listened, said thanks, and hung up. “Ten o’clock tomorrow morning. How’s that sound.”

  “Great,” I told her.

  48

  I WAS TOTALLY SCREWED. NEXT MORNING AT TEN O’CLOCK the doorman would come walking into ADA Reynolds’s office and identify me as the flower delivery man, and I could kiss my private eye license goodbye. And that was the best-case scenario. That was assuming I wasn’t charged with murder and prosecuted for one homicide, if not two. At least then Richard would have to take an interest in the case. Still, it seemed a long way to go to attract his attention.

  My only hope was to solve the case before then. The likelihood of which was approximately zero. It would be easier to kill the doorman. Now there was an idea. In this instance, it would probably be easier to get away with a crime I did commit than not commit it, and try to get away with the crimes I didn’t. Unfortunately, I wasn’t a killer. Which ruined my perfect scheme. My non-nefarious nature made it impossible for me to kill the doorman. Well, could I get someone else to kill the doorman? In all likelihood, it was possible. Not that I’d ever try such a thing. But if I bumbled around in my usual manner, given my track record there was a damn good chance it would actually happen.

  I shook my head to clear it. Damn, I was getting punchy. Of course, standing on a precipice will do that. How the hell did I get out of it?

  Okay.

  It occurred to me that if the doorman wasn’t available now, he was probably on duty. I could go over and see him. Talk to him prior to the meeting so the confrontation in front of the ADA wouldn’t be such a shock. But what could I tell him? Come clean? That hardly seemed like a good idea. Invent some enormously complicated lie? That sounded better. Such as what? All right. How about some immensely complicated half truth? Now that seemed more likely. Admit to being a private eye, but deny everything else. Enlist his aid in fooling the ADA. Right. He’d be sure to go for that.

  Except.

  I knew he was lying about the phone call. If he blew the whistle on me, he’d be in the soup. I could point that out to him, suggest that he’d better play ball.

  Good Lord. It occurred to me things had come to a pretty pass when blackmailing a material witness in a homicide case into giving perjured testimony looked like my best option.

  My car, as if by its own accord, was wending its way through the 96th Street transverse to the East Side. That couldn’t be good. The gods and the mechanical devices of the world were conspiring to push me into an ill-advised encounter. Should I talk to the doorman? Should I stop at the nearest newsstand and buy a lottery ticket? That probably had an equal chance of paying off.

  Nonetheless, there I was, pulling up at a meter, and strolling around the block from Madison Avenue to survey the congressman’s building from down the street.

  I whipped my cell phone out of my pocket and called Alice. “Talk me out of it.”

  “What?”

  “I’m thinking of having a heart-to-heart with the doorman.”

  “Don’t do it.”

  “In an attempt to stave off a meeting tomorrow morning in front of the ADA.”

  “With the doorman?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t do that either.”

  “How would you propose I avoid it?”

  “Call Richard.”

  “Richard won’t help me. Not for anything short of a murder.”

  “This is murder.”

  “I’m not charged with it.”

  “You will be if you meet the doorman.”

  I hung up and called Richard.

  He wasn’t pleased to hear f
rom me.

  I told him my predicament.

  He was even less pleased. “You called up to have me talk you out of a suicidal line of action?”

  “Didn’t you hear what I said, Richard? Tomorrow morning it all blows up in my face.”

  “Call me when it does,” Richard said, and hung up the phone.

  I stood on the sidewalk, cursing Richard, cursing the doorman, cursing my fate.

  The congressman’s widow came out of the building. She was pushing a laundry cart. Filled with Gristedes bags. Full Gristedes bags. That didn’t compute. People take laundry carts to the grocery store to bring bags of groceries home. No one takes bags of groceries back.

  But that’s what the widow was doing. And she was coming right at me. I ducked behind a parked car to let her go by.

  I followed her three blocks up Fifth Avenue and into Central Park. It was a gorgeous afternoon, sunny and bright. It had probably been gorgeous all day, but I hadn’t noticed. Easier to notice in the park. When you’re not contemplating jail.

  I followed at a discreet distance while the congressman’s widow pushed the laundry cart along one of the paved walks to an athletic field where two soccer teams in uniform were practicing shots on their respective goals.

  Which explained the laundry cart. The widow was a soccer mom and it was her turn to bring the snack. The bags would be full of cookies, oranges, and Gatorade.

  Other parents had already gathered on the sidelines. As the widow bumped the cart along, the jock suddenly appeared out of the crowd to help her. She tried to wave him off, but he insisted. As he did, I had a revelation. Why was he there? He didn’t have a son on the soccer team. So what was he doing there? Had he come just to meet the widow? That would seem horribly indiscreet, even for the most ardent of lovers. But that must be the case. Unless his wife was there. But why would she be?

  I scoured the crowd for Mrs. Jock, and saw instead …

  Sharon’s mom!

  I instinctively ducked out of sight. Had she seen me? Surely not, or she would have torn my head off. So, there she was, yet another grenade on life’s grand grid of MineSweeper on which my territory was rapidly shrinking, where even a high school soccer game wasn’t a safe place to be.

  Then it occurred to me, what was she doing there? She didn’t have a son on the team either.

  The question immediately answered itself as the cheerleading squad, twelve boys and girls in purple in gold, ran onto the field, formed a circle, and broke apart into a choreographed little number. The girls looked happy to be there. The boys didn’t. Or perhaps that’s just my personal prejudice. I wouldn’t have been happy to be there. I’d have wanted to be out on the field, kicking the ball. Even though I couldn’t kick a soccer ball to save my life and wound up playing goalie, at least I played. Anyway, I shouldn’t be an intolerant elitist jock snob. They also serve who only stand and cheer.

  It was not until the end of the routine that I noticed one cheerleader stood out, though I couldn’t be sure if that was true, or if I was merely prejudiced, since I knew her. But Sharon, the congressman’s son’s girlfriend, the falsely alleged teenage hooker and the source of all my troubles ever since the dawn of time, the star player, the featured cheerleader, the youngest, brightest, button-nosest, chirpiest cheerleader of them all, with lithe and limber moves, and a smile you could die for, was, at least for me, stealing the show.

  It suddenly occurred to me that she was the key, she was the be-all and the end-all, that if only I could make it up with her, I could solve the whole thing, and it would all fall into place. I realized I was being duped by a TV catch phrase, from the first year of Heroes, “Save the cheerleader, save the world!” Which was my original premise, way back when. To save Sharon from a fate worse than death.

  As if to punctuate my thoughts, the cheerleaders segued into an acrobatic sequence, with boys flipping girls, girls sliding though boys, legs in a cross-handed pull that must have been easy or the boys couldn’t have handled it, but which looked amazingly hard, and wound up in a human pyramid. It was not that high, just six people, three, two, one, flanked and braced by the other six, but it was still impressive. At the pinnacle of the pyramid, smiling brightly from her perilous perch without the slightest trace of fear, was my nemesis, my undoing, my Achilles heel, the fair maiden I had mistakenly and ignominiously rescued.

  At the base of the pyramid, peeking around one of the cornerstones, all but giggling in giddy fun, was Sharon’s friend, who I’d seen practicing with her on the sidewalk, before my ill-fated Philadelphia trip.

  Immediately my smile turned upside down, turned to a frown.

  Shit.

  She accounted for the jock. He was here to see his daughter. Not for a clandestine rendezvous with a congressional widow. What I was witnessing was a high school soccer game and nothing more. It did not help me in any way except to pass the time. Which I did not want passed, as it continued to tick ever closer to my morning meeting with the doorman. And nothing could save me, because the jock wasn’t hitting on the congressman’s widow at all.

  As if to punctuate the thought, Macho Man walked down the sideline and draped a large, muscular arm around the shoulders of his diminutive wife.

  The congressman’s widow was not glaring daggers at her. The congressman’s widow was not paying the least bit of attention to either of them. The congressman’s widow was gazing at the young man on the field who had stopped to watch the cheerleaders, the boy-band member staring with teenage ardor, smitten by the girl at the top of the pyramid.

  49

  “SUPPOSE YOU WERE A COMPETENT DETECTIVE.”

  “Alice.”

  Alice was looking good, in a simple cotton T-shirt and panties, standard nighttime gear. Alice seldom wore pajamas, unless it was really cold.

  “I’m not trying to put you down. You are who you are. You’re not your normal, everyday detective. But suppose you weren’t Stanley Hastings, actor/writer, who fell into the PI shit as a job between gigs. Say you were just your average, regular detective. What could I expect?”

  I looked at her, baffled. “Alice?”

  “I come into your office, and you’re a common, ordinary PI. Not some romantic fool influenced by movies, books, and TV.”

  “Is there a point to all this?”

  “Absolutely. I come into your office and spin you a story that makes you feel sympathetic, and ask you to rescue my daughter from a life of sin. Now, what do I expect you to do?”

  “Go out and rescue your daughter.”

  Alice made a face. “No. I expect you to fuck up. I’ve given you a load of information, a lot of it’s bullshit, you’re bound to fuck up and blow the whole thing sky-high. Do I ask you to dope her with chloral hydrate and bring her home? No. It never occurs to me that you might. My expectation of your being able to get her out of the nightclub and bring her home to New York is zero. I don’t even expect you to try. I expect you to make a total hash of the situation that will result in someone calling the cops. That happened, but not until you managed to successfully abduct the girl. Which is something I hadn’t foreseen. You weren’t supposed to get arrested in New York. You were supposed to get arrested in the nightclub in Philadelphia. When you tried to get the girl away from the congressman, and she wouldn’t go. Which would have happened if you were a competent detective, a normal detective, the type of detective the woman was trying to hire. Only I hired Stanley Hastings, white knight, who, against his own best interests, and at great personal risk, drugs the girl and drags her home. Wasn’t supposed to happen. There was supposed to be a huge scene in the nightclub, resulting in cops, arrests, and the media gleefully reporting on the congressman being tailed by a New York private eye for sexual high jinks with the teenage girlfriend of his teenage son who was performing in a boy band. The press would have a field day. And all it took was your being a competent detective. No more, no less. See what I’m getting at?”

  “You know you look lovely when you lecture?”

>   “So, you have to ask yourself. What if you were a competent detective? What if you were responsible for an ugly scene?”

  “What if I were?”

  “What would have happened then?”

  “What are you getting at, Alice?”

  “I was just thinking maybe you’re going about this all wrong.” She put up her hand. “I know, what a bizarre concept.”

  “Anytime you’re through having fun.”

  “You assume someone was trying to embarrass the congressman. What if they weren’t? What if the idea wasn’t to embarrass the congressman? What if the idea was to embarrass the girl?”

  “What?”

  “Popular kid. Dating a singer in a boy band. Wouldn’t you like to take her down a peg?”

  “Sure, if I was one of her classmates. Then I wouldn’t have the resources to do it. I mean, give me a break.” I weighed them in my hands. “Teenage girl. Congressional figure. Who you gonna set up?”

  “True. But who set them up?”

  “What?”

  “You never found your bogus mother.”

  “So?”

  “How do you know she wasn’t a teenage girl?”

  “Oh, come on. You think I can’t tell a girl from a woman?”

  “What’s the dividing line? Sixteen? Eighteen? Twenty-one? Thirty? How old was the phoney mother?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t remember anything about her except she had a pair of tits. So she probably wasn’t eight.”

  “That’s unfair.”

  “Well, narrow it down for me. What are we talking here? Fifteen to forty-five?”

  “That’s in the ballpark.”

  “You’re hopeless. So if the girl had bitchy classmates, jealous of her popularity …”

  “She did.”

  “Oh?”

  “Her best friend fits the profile. A lesser light, definitely second-string.”

  “So?”

  “Scrawny little thing, gawky, undeveloped, probably hasn’t gone through puberty.”

  “You think she’s jealous?”

  “I would be. She’s just another cheerleader and her friend’s the star.”