05-Client

by Parnell Hall

  I thought that over. It wasn’t my idea of a good time, but it was something I could do.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “Fine. So go do it. Get out of here. I got work to do.”

  “There’s one more thing,” I said.

  “Shit. There’s always one more thing. What is it?”

  I told him about the license plate named POP.

  MacAullif wasn’t pleased. “You held this out on the cops?”

  “Well, I wasn’t sure it meant anything, and—”

  “Save it for the judge. Jesus Christ. Yet another obstruction of justice.”

  “All right. I’m a bad boy. The point is, can you trace it?”

  “Trace what? You got three letters there. You got any numbers?”

  “No.”

  MacAullif stared at me. “You want me to trace every license plate number starting with POP?”

  “How many of them can there be?”

  “A thousand, you moron. Three digits is nine hundred and ninety-nine, triple zero makes a thousand.”

  “They don’t issue ’em all, do they?”

  “They issue enough. Say it’s only five hundred—what the hell good’s it gonna do you? You’ll have names and addresses of people spread out all over the state, and what’s the point? How are you gonna pin ’em down?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, let me help you. What make of car was it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?“

  “I was being arrested. I was a little distracted at the time.”

  “You saw the car. You saw the plate.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what kind of car was it? Big? Small? A foreign job?”

  “I’m not sure. Medium size. I think it was American.”

  “That’s a big help. What color?”

  “A light color. Gray or tan.”

  “Gray or tan?”

  “Or light blue or green.”

  “Shit.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It ever occur to you you’re in the wrong line of work?”

  “Constantly.”

  MacAullif rubbed his head. “Great. You got no way to pin it down. So what’s the point?”

  “I don’t know the point. I’m desperate. It’s my only lead. If you don’t wanna do it, you don’t have to do it.”

  I got up to go.

  “Wait a minute,” MacAullif said. “Don’t get so huffy. Did I say I wouldn’t do it? I just asked you what’s the point.”

  “I tell you, I don’t know.”

  “Fine. That’s good enough for me. Call back this afternoon. I’ll get you your damn numbers. Now, was there anything else?”

  “No, that will do.”

  “Jesus Christ, I should hope so. Now get the hell out of here, will you? I wasted enough damn time already. Now I gotta run a thousand license plates.”

  MacAullif picked up the cigar again and leveled it at me as if it were a gun. “Let me tell you something. If there’s another ax murder, it’ll be your damn fault.”

  24.

  IT WASN’T THAT BAD. Actually, it was kind of fun. Going into the office building and asking people if they’d seen the woman in the picture. It was almost like real detective work somehow. After my usual initial nervousness, I kind of got into it. By the fourth or fifth office I was even asking the receptionist relevant questions, like, “Were you working here last Tuesday?” No one was remembering the woman in the picture, but no one was throwing me out on my ear either. So it was almost fun.

  I had a feeling most of the receptionists thought I was a cop. Of course, I was doing my best to promote that image. I wasn’t saying I was a cop, but I wasn’t saying I wasn’t, either. In a crunch, no one could accuse me of impersonating a cop. In point of fact, the only misleading word I was using at all was the pronoun ‘we.’ As in, “Excuse me, but we’re trying to trace the movements of this woman. Have you seen her?” Somehow that one small word made me sound like the whole damn police force. But I could justify it—I knew a private detective in Atlantic City who used the word ‘our’ to refer to his one-man operation, so I guess I could use the word ’we’ to refer to mine. At any rate, it sure worked. No one asked to see my I.D., and receptionist after receptionist was damn cordial.

  Of course, some of them recognized the picture as that of the woman they’d seen on the news or in the morning paper, but that didn’t hurt me any. If anything, it helped. But not many made the connection. I guess a lot of people just don’t equate what they see in the media with real life.

  I struck pay dirt on the sixteenth floor. I’d started at the bottom and worked my way up, and by that time the thrill had worn off and I was damn glad to get a nibble.

  It was an ad agency, and if I were smart, that was where I would have started, looking for a place a high-priced fashion model might be expected to go, rather than checking all the offices in turn. But then again, if I were smart, I wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with.

  The receptionist was a genial young woman who probably could have been a fashion model herself if she’d lost a hundred pounds, bought a new wardrobe, and cut her hair. She took one look at the picture and said, “Yeah. I know her. She was in here last week.”

  “Tuesday?”

  “Could have been Tuesday. I don’t recall.”

  “Can you recall where she went?”

  “She had an appointment with someone. Either Mr. Metzer or Mr. Saltzman.”

  “Are they in today?”

  “Yes they are.”

  “Then I’ll need to see them.”

  She frowned. “What’s this all about?”

  I gave her what I hoped was an enigmatic smile. “I’m sorry, but I need to be the one to tell them. Could you ring them one at a time and send me in please?”

  She gave me a look, but picked up the phone.

  Mr. Metzer turned out to be an overweight middle-aged man with horn-rimmed glasses and a paranoid fear that I was a private detective employed by his wife. He barely glanced at the picture before denying he knew the woman in question. In fact, he began his stream of denials before I even handed him the picture. It was only after I got him to take a good look at it and he suddenly came to the happy realization that he really didn’t know the woman, that I was able to calm him down.

  Of course, that’s just my analysis of the situation, and I’m not that good a judge of character, so I couldn’t really be sure if that were true or if he actually did know her and everything else was just an act.

  Until I met Saltzman.

  Mr. Saltzman was a tall, thin young man, with the calm assurance of someone with executive ability. He took one look at the picture and said, “Yes. I know her. She was in last week.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. Tuesday, I believe. Tuesday afternoon.”

  “She had an appointment with you?”

  He smiled. “Well, now, that’s the thing. She thought she did.”

  “Oh?”

  “But she didn’t. I’d never heard of her, and I’d never made any appointment.”

  “But she claimed you had?”

  “Exactly. She said I’d called her and made the appointment.”

  “You or your secretary?”

  “Me. She said she’d talked to me personally.”

  “And you hadn’t?”

  “No, of course not. Well, I shouldn’t say of course not. She’s a model, and we employ models. In fact, we may have even used her agency.”

  “But not this time?”

  “No. It hadn’t happened. It was a mistake.”

  “How’d she take it when you said you hadn’t called her?”

  “Not well. She was put out. She tried to argue with me. I understood her feelings, but she should have understood mine. Someone played a joke on her, a nasty kind of joke, but it wasn’t my fault.”

  “I understand. Did she say anything else?”

  He frowned. “Why is it importa
nt?”

  So far he had all the right answers. I decided to give him a jolt. “Because she wound up dead.”

  His eyes widened. “What?”

  I nodded. “That’s right.”

  “Dead? That woman? Dead?”

  “That’s right,” I said. I added, “Murdered.”

  “Murdered!” He frowned thoughtfully. “I see.”

  “So you see why it’s important. We need to know the events leading up to her death. Particularly anything out of the ordinary. If she thought she had an appointment that she actually didn’t have, that’s interesting. It means someone tricked her. And someone also murdered her. It doesn’t mean they’re necessarily one and the same person, but you can see why it would be important.”

  Saltzman frowned and shook his head. “Yes. I see.”

  “So if you can recall anything about the incident. Anything that she said.”

  He thought a moment. “Well, one thing. When she was arguing with me—when she was still insisting that I had made the appointment, that I’d called her myself—she said I’d actually called her twice. She said I’d called her first Monday morning to make the appointment for Monday afternoon. Then I’d called her back later in the day, told her I had a conflict, and changed it to Tuesday.”

  “I see,” I said.

  And I did. That fit in with everything as I knew it. The bogus Marvin Nickleson would have called her Monday morning to make the Monday afternoon appointment. When I refused to work on Monday, he’d have had to call her back and change it to Tuesday.

  Which was too bad. Because if that were true, it meant the bogus Marvin Nickleson had arranged the whole thing, and Saltzman wasn’t an accomplice after all, just another dead end.

  I asked a few more questions which accomplished nothing, and got the hell out of there.

  By then it was afternoon, so I headed downtown to check in on MacAullif.

  MacAullif had been busy. He hadn’t solved his ax murder, but he had managed to trace my license plates for me.

  “You traced them all?” I said.

  MacAullif snorted. “Yeah, well I caught a break. There weren’t a thousand, just five hundred and seventy-six.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. Some days you get lucky.”

  “You traced five hundred and seventy-six license plates.”

  “Uh-huh. Don’t say I never did you any favors. I got you names, addresses, the whole schmear.”

  “How the hell’d you do that?”

  MacAullif shrugged. “Piece of cake, really. It’s all computerized. The guy typed in “POP asterisk, asterisk, asterisk,” and asked the machine to do a search and print out.” MacAullif jerked open a desk drawer. “Here you go.”

  MacAullif pulled out a sheaf of papers. I recognized it instantly, being in a computer family now. The pages were joined together and had perforated strips with holes in them on the sides.

  I picked it up. “Thanks a lot.”

  “Yeah,” MacAullif said. “I don’t know what you’re going to do with it, but for what it’s worth, it’s yours. O.K., you’ve worn out your welcome today. I traced five hundred and seventy-six cars for you. Now let me get back to work.”

  I thanked MacAullif again, took the computer printout and went home.

  Where Alice pounced on it the minute I got in the door. Perforated paper is like catnip to a computer junkie. Before I even had my coat off Alice had it out of my hands and was demanding to know what it was. When I told her, she was quick to offer an expert opinion.

  “Ha,” she snorted. “Cheap dot-matrix printer. Terrible font.”

  “It’s not supposed to be artistic. Just functional.”

  “It’s not even that. It’s just a list of the plates in numerical order.”

  “Sure,” I said, parroting back what MacAullif had told me. “The machine searched for POP blank, blank, blank, and it printed out the numbers in order. That’s the beauty of doing a search, right?”

  Alice shook her head. “That’s the first step. You can do so much more than that. What do you want the numbers in order for? That doesn’t help you at all. Wouldn’t you rather have them grouped by geographical location?”

  “Sure, but they can’t do that.”

  Alice gave me one of her withering looks. “Of course they can. It’s easy.”

  “How?”

  “Any way you want. Just tell the computer to do it.”

  Another thing about computer junkies is they always talk as if everyone knows what they’re talking about, and tend to get angry when it turns out they don’t.

  I didn’t want Alice to get angry. “O.K.,” I said. “What could I tell the computer to do?”

  Alice got angry. “Oh, come on. For an intelligent man, sometimes you’re a moron. Think.”

  “I don’t know anything about computers.”

  “You don’t have to know anything about computers. You just have to know what you want. What do you want?”

  I wanted Alice to leave me alone and let me look at my list, but I didn’t think that was the answer she was looking for. “What you said. To group them geographically.”

  “Fine. So that’s what you tell the computer to do.”

  “How? What do I do, type in ‘group them geographically?’”

  “No, of course not. You have to give the computer a command that it can understand.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, it can alphabetize. You could order it to list them alphabetically by town. What about that?”

  “Yeah. That would do it.”

  “Or numerically by zip code.”

  “Yeah. That would do it too. So, can you do it?”

  “What?”

  “Can you do that for me? On the machine?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the data isn’t in the computer.”

  “You mean you’d have to type it in?”

  Alice nodded. “Unless we had a floppy disk with the data on it.”

  “Which we don’t.”

  “Right. Or unless we had a scanner.”

  “A what?”

  “A scanner. You run it over the printed page and it reads the information into the computer.”

  A warning light had gone on. I could see Alice leading up to making a pitch for the purchase of an expensive piece of sophisticated machinery.

  “Too bad,” I said. I picked up a pen from the desk. “I’ll just have to make do with this.” I smiled at Alice and fled for the living room to tally up the names on my list.

  Some fun. To the best that I could determine, in the New York City area there were two hundred and twenty seven POPs. That was including all five boroughs, Long Island, and Westchester County. Of course, there was no reason to assume POP came from the New York City area just because Julie Steinmetz did. After all, she’d been killed in Poughkeepsie.

  There were three POPs in Poughkeepsie, and several more in the immediate vicinity. It was hard pinpointing those, ’cause I wasn’t familiar with the towns, and I had to keep looking at the map.

  Going over the list was beginning to give me a headache. And I rarely get headaches. So this alone was enough to point up the tedium and futility of the task.

  I was getting nowhere, so it was actually a relief when Tommie got home and wanted to play with me.

  I heard the door open and close when he came in, and then I heard Alice intercepting him in the foyer and trying to protect me, saying, “Don’t disturb Daddy, he’s very busy now.” I sprang up, opened the living room door and magnanimously offered to take time off from my work to play with him.

  Tommie wanted to play “Zelda,” one of the adventure games in his Nintendo Entertainment System. I’d figured he would. We’d been playing it off and on all weekend. And it’s a very addictive game. That’s because you don’t start over at the beginning each time, as you do with most video games. Everything you’ve earned, hours and hours of playing time, is stored in the memory o
f the gamepack. So you can pick up where you left off. And it’s not just fighting—it’s finding things and figuring things out. It’s really challenging, and when you get stuck and can’t do it, it drives you crazy.

  At the moment, Tommie and I were going crazy. We were in the fourth level of the second quest, and we couldn’t find the raft. We’d already been through the whole labyrinth, and we’d killed Digdogger and gotten our extra heart container and our piece of the Triforce, which raised our energy level and transported us outside the labyrinth again, since once you’ve gotten the Triforce you’ve supposedly completed the level.

  Only we hadn’t gotten the raft. And without the raft, you can’t get to level five, because level five is on an island.

  So we were going nuts. The treasures in the labyrinths are always in underground chambers that you reach by killing all the enemies in the room above, and then moving a stone to open a secret passage in the floor. Well, we’d been in every room in the labyrinth, and killed everybody in every room with a stone in it, and tried to move every one of those stones, and still nothing. Zip. Zero. So now we were running around killing everybody in the rooms that didn’t have stones, even though that had to be a futile exercise, since without a stone to move, there could be no secret passage. But we were desperate, and we were trying everything.

  In one room, in a far-off corner of the labyrinth, were six blue Darknuts, which look like little cats with shields. We’d never killed them before, first of all because there was no stone in the room, and second of all, because they’re so damn hard to kill. You can’t hit ’em from the front because of their shields, and the moment you make a move on them, they turn toward you. And the blue ones are twice as tough as the red ones, and take twice as many hits to kill. So out of the kindness of our hearts, we had previously left them alone.

  Now it was death to the Darknuts. Armed with the white sword, twelve bombs, and the water of life, the red potion that costs sixty-eight rubies and allows you to fill up your life-hearts twice during the course of a battle, we waded in and took them on.

  It was close. We’d used up all our bombs, both bottles of potion, and were down to two and a half life-hearts when the final Darknut breathed his last. As expected, no secret passage opened in the floor.

  But the map appeared. The map of the labyrinth. It was lying there on the floor.