I rang the bell twice. I didn’t hear anything. I rang again and was about to leave when a woman inside said, “Is somebody there?”
“Yes,” I called.
“I’m not expecting anybody,” she said. But began to unlock the door.
Linn Pighee was a woman in her late twenties who balanced a glass with practiced ease. She had long black hair and glassy brown eyes, and she admitted strangers to her house.
“You don’t mind if we don’t find out what you want in the living room, do you?” she asked. “It’s cooler on the screened porch.”
I followed her to the porch, where she filled the hollow in the upholstery of a chaise next to a portable bar. “Make yourself comfortable,” she said, but she didn’t offer any means beyond a chair.
“I’ve had a terrible day,” she said. “I’ve felt just so weak! I can’t seem to do anything.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She laughed. She sipped from her glass but contorted her face as if what she drank didn’t taste very good. “What’s your day been like?”
“Like trying to pry the lid off a can of worms with my fingers,” I said. “I can get it up high enough to see the worms are in there. But I don’t have a hope without an opener.”
“Gee, that’s too bad.” She projected surprisingly genuine concern.
“Can I do anything for you?”
“You can,” I said, “but probably you won’t.”
She laughed again, began to drink, but took an ice cube instead and chewed it up. “The ambitious, positive, confident type,” she said.
“I’m rarely accused of an overweening ambition,” I said.
“That’s something in your favor,” she said. “I don’t like ambitious people.” She exhaled sharply. “Well, what do you want?”
“That you could see your way clear to telling me about the arrangements you have with Loftus Pharmaceuticals concerning your husband.”
She did a double take. “Interested in John, are you?” she said, and drank an inch. “I suppose I should ask what business John is of yours.”
“I would, in your place.”
“There’s hardly room for two in my place.” She twisted on the chaise to get a pack of cigarettes from behind the bottles on the bar. She took one, lit it, sucked deeply and contentedly, then stubbed it out. She got comfortable in the chaise again. “John had an accident, I suppose you know.”
I nodded.
“Something serious. What happened, there was some kind of explosion or . . . something. Anyway, he probably would have died right then, but it happened on company premises and they rushed him to their fancy place at the hospital. Anyway, John is still alive and because he fits into their research or something, they foot all the medical bills, they pay me his salary, and if he dies because of the accident they give me some kind of compensation. It’s all gone through the lawyer and he says it’s the way John wants it and it’s O.K. Nobody trying to screw me financially. So no complaint about the company, if that’s what you’re interested in.”
“How often do you visit him?” I asked, trying to look dull.
“Oh, I don’t bother. I haven’t been feeling very well, and he’s out cold, so what’s the point?”
“It must have been a very disturbing experience for you,” I said.
“I’d have thought I’d get over it by now. Got used to it. But I feel so lousy and weak. I feel I’m missing being alive. I wouldn’t have thought I’d have cared that much. But I suppose I won’t feel right again until John has either died or got better.”
“May I ask how long you’ve been married?”
“Since I was seventeen. I was twenty-eight last week.” “Congratulations.”
“Thanks,” she said, and drank.
“I’ve got a birthday coming up myself,” I said.
“How old? Fifty?”
“Forty-one.”
“You must work too hard.”
I smiled. We shared the pause. It was time for me to take what I had learned and leave or to volunteer a little something. I liked her. I volunteered.
“I’m a private detective,” I said.
“Pull the other one.”
“Your sister-in-law, Mrs. Thomas, hired me to find out why she’s not allowed to visit her brother. Is there any reason that you know of?”
“Nope,” she said. “Hired a detective, did she? Trust her.”
“You’re going to hurt my feelings in a minute.”
“I wouldn’t have said your feelings could feel pain.”
“You really have hurt my feelings now,” I said.
“Sorry,” she said without sorrow. “And how do you like my sister-in-law?”
“I hardly know her. She seems to have a reasonable question about this visiting thing. But in her place I think I might have tried more direct methods than hiring me.”
“You’re going to hurt your own feelings next.”
I nodded.
“She’s not a very direct person, Dorothea Thomas. Not like me.”
I waited.
“And she adores that damn brother of hers. Also not like me.”
“And she thinks you should?”
“She thinks that because John got himself hurt I should get myself a black veil and camp in the hospital corridor outside his door. Not my style.”
“On the other hand, if you did fawn over him she’d think you were competing with her, trying to out-adore her?”
“My detective friend, you’ve put yourself exactly on the right wavelength. I think I’d better know your name.”
“Albert Samson.”
“And do you make a girl tingle when you kiss her, Albert?”
“Only one girl in ten.”
“Lucky girl,” she said, and mused. I mused, too. “I’m not always like this,” she said. “At least I wasn’t.”
“And what kind of person is John Austin Pighee? Seventeen is pretty young for a girl to get swept off her feet and still be around eleven years later.”
“He’s the kind of man who’s about to go to college and knocks up a girl with one more year of high school. He marries her and then he goes to college anyway, because he’s talked his sister into helping with money and she comes to live with them.”
“I didn’t realize you had children,” I said.
“Not the type, huh?”
“That’s not what I meant. I hadn’t heard about any children.”
“Well, I don’t have any children now, so it doesn’t matter.”
“Don’t say it doesn’t matter,” I said. Trying to offer something for having turned the conversation to the subject.
“Why not?”
“Because next week I’m going to be seeing my only kid for the first time in twelve years. You don’t want to put me off and make me write to tell her not to come, do you?”
“Daughter?”
“Yeah.”
“How old?”
“You know,” I said, “I don’t know exactly without working it out. Late teens.”
But she wasn’t quite listening to my confessions. She said, “That’s nice. Twelve years is a long time.”
“I know.”
“I had twin girls.”
I nodded to encourage her, but didn’t speak.
“Hell,” she said, finishing her drink. “They were killed in a car crash five years ago.”
“Both of them?”
“Yeah. Dinny outright. Simmy hung on for about two weeks before she went. She”—pointedly—“didn’t regain consciousness. Just as well, I suppose. If they had to go, they went together. Exit the old life, enter the new.”
“You seem to have had much more than your share of bad luck, Mrs. Pighee.”
“Call me Linn,” she said. “Please.” Urgently.
“Linn,” I said.
“Luck? What’s luck? You make your own luck, John says. Said. I just wish I felt better.”
A bell rang in the distance.
“I thought it was
about time,” she said, and rose. I followed her to the front door, stood behind her as she opened it.
Outside, holding a brown paper bag, was a tall thin teenager.
“Hi, Linn,” he said. And saw me. “Hi, you, too.”
“Hi,” I said.
“I brought your prescription. Linn,” he said, and pushed the bag forward.
She took it. “Dougie, this is Mr. Albert. He’s a private detective. Mr. Albert, this here is Dougie and he is one of Beech Grove’s very best basketball players. He works at a liquor store in the summer and we have a little joke about”—she rattled the bag—“my medicine.” She stepped to one side, leaning against the open door, and pushed me with her free hand. “Do come back again to talk some more. Please. Sometime soon.”
I yielded to the pressure and walked out the door. It closed behind me. Dougie and I stood looking at each other.
“Gee, Mr. Albert,” Dougie said, “are you really a private detective?”
I turned to the porch steps. “Are you really a basketball player?”
He caught up with me. “Don’t I look like one?”
I didn’t answer. He walked out to the road, then looked around as if he’d misplaced me.
But I didn’t go to the road. I walked around the side of the house to call on my client.
Chapter Seven
Mrs. Thomas met me at the corner of the garage. “You’ve been to see her, haven’t you?”
“Mrs. Pighee? Yes.”
“Why?”
“I thought she might be able to help—”
“She wouldn’t help me if—if—” Apparently there were no circumstances fantastic enough to contemplate Linn Pighee helping her sister-in-law.
“I don’t know about that,” I said. “But she signed an agreement giving the doctors control over decisions like visiting. I hoped she’d let me see it or at least tell me about it.”
“And did she?”
“No.”
“She doesn’t care whether John lives or dies.”
“That wasn’t the impression she gave me,” I said. Though I wasn’t sure whether I was lying.
“Impressions! Impressions!” said Mrs. Thomas. “I know her.” “Much better than I do,” I said. “I want to give you a rundown on what I’ve done today, so you can decide whether you want me to go on.”
She frowned. “You’re planning to stop?”
“That’s up to you.”
She led me into her home and we sat where we had before.
“I’ve asked a number of people questions, but I haven’t gotten very far toward getting you in to see your brother.”
“I don’t expect things to happen fast,” she said. “Nothing ever does.”
“Most people expect results yesterday. I appreciate your attitude.” She didn’t reply.
“Access to your brother’s bedside is governed by the company’s doctors because he’s in the company’s experimental section of the hospital.”
“I told you that,” she said sharply.
“You told me where he was. You didn’t tell me that legal control rests with the company rather than the hospital administration.”
She didn’t respond.
“Nor did you tell me he’d been in a coma for seven months.”
“That doesn’t matter to me.”
“But it means I can’t go to his doctors and say he needs his morale kept up.”
“But he might wake up. I can’t bear to think of him waking up with nobody there. And you can be sure she isn’t going to be.”
“There is a substantial chance that he won’t wake up, Mrs. Thomas.”
“Yes, he will,” she said simply.
“But his doctor’sjudgment is the one that seems to matter,and at the moment she is very negative about visitors.”
“You mean . . . there’s nothing you can do?”
“That’s not what I mean,” I said in measured tones.
“Well?” A leathery frown.
“I think there are two ways to go. If your sister-in-law would cooperate, we may be able to bring pressure through her and the legal arrangement she’s made with the company. . . .”
Frown still there.
“Or we may be able to cause enough trouble for them that it would be easier to let you visit than to keep refusing.’
“Trouble?” she asked. It interested her.
“Why shouldn’t your brother have visitors?” I asked her rhetorically. “Either he picked up some contagious disease in the explosion or they’re treating him with experimental drugs which lower his resistance to infection brought in from outside.”
She looked slow but attentive.
“Either way, they haven’t told you the real reason you’re being kept from him. We could threaten to go to the press.”
“The press? You mean call in reporters and all that?”
“I don’t think we’d actually have to do it,” I said. “But if we threatened to, the least it would do would be to get better reasons from them why John isn’t allowed visitors.”
She considered it. She liked it.
“That’s the point about this whole business, isn’t it, Mrs. Thomas? It seems funny that they should care whether you sat by his bedside or not. I asked a couple of doctors today, and they say it’s not standard practice.”
“Well,” she said, “do it.”
“It will stir them up. And I don’t think they’d pay much attention to you without some incentive.”
“You do what you think is best,” she said.
“Do you mind answering some other questions for me?” “What questions?”
“I must say, I don’t understand what your brother was doing in a research laboratory.”
“Oh, he worked there.”
“He worked there? I thought you told me he was a salesman.”
“He is. Primarily a salesman. I mean that’s what he was hired to do. But a couple of years ago he started doing some extra work in the labs. That was his subject in college, chemistry. And when the chance to do some chemistry work came along he jumped at it. Even though it did mean working more hours, and a lot of nights. I know because he used to stop in and see me after he got back from work, or if he had to go in at night, before he went. He was very regular.”
“I didn’t know anything about this, Mrs. Thomas.”
“He is a salesman. That’s the department he works for and he does selling work, too. Very successfully. He is a very talented boy, my brother. He can do just about anything he has a mind to do.”
“It sounds as if he can,” I said. “So your brother did some kind of work in a lab. Do you know what kind?”
“Not exactly. Not really at all. No,” she said, looking worried.
“Well,” I said, and sat back. As far as the compact seating would allow.
“He’s a wonderful boy,” she said. “He would want me there if I could be.”
I nodded.
Then she said, “I don’t see any reason why I shouldn’t sit by John’s bedside if I want to. Do you?” And she managed a few tears.
I waited till she dried up before I left.
Chapter Eight
It was a few minutes short of seven when I rolled into my parking space in the lot around the corner from my office. My office of the moment. My parking place of the moment. The lot was in the same area as my building, so it was due to be built on, too.
As I climbed my stairs, I noticed my door wasn’t quite closed. It’s a tricky fit because it came from the last office I had that got torn down. I kept it for sentimental reasons. The writing on the glass reads “Albert Samson, Private Investigator. Walk Right In.”
Someone apparently had.
Advertising pulls them in.
As I opened the door, I saw a girl sitting behind my desk. Late teens, with slightly reddish-brown hair, dark brown eyes, and freckles. She looked vaguely familiar. I took two steps inside and stumbled over a knapsack that I hadn’t left in the middle of the floor.
>
I hadn’t left it anywhere; it wasn’t mine.
“This yours, Miss?”
She nodded. Then she opened the middle drawer of my desk.
“Hey, there’s nothing in here,” she said. “Why don’t you keep anything in it?”
“Because when I’m out working I leave the office open. To offer a moment’s rest for strays and waifs and the occasional client. Which might you be?”
She smiled at me until she saw that I wasn’t smiling. “I don’t think I’m any of those categories. Do you?”
“Look here, young lady, it’s hot. I’ve had a hard day—”
She stood up with a sense of urgency. “Don’t you really recognize me?”
I frowned. She did look . . .
“Daddy!” she said.
“Oh, my God,” I said. It takes a wise father to know his own child.
“I recognized you! And all I’ve had is a picture from more than twelve years ago.”
“My God,” I said. “My God.”
After a little hugging I took her from the austerity of my office to the austerity of my living quarters. “I just got a letter today,” I said. “It said—”
“I was coming in a week. But I only know you from letters and what Mummy’s said about you. And I was worried that you might get all nervous about me coming. So I decided to come early because I wanted you to be relaxed about me and not worry.”
“Relaxed is not quite how I’d describe myself.”
“Well, sit down. You must have had a hard day to have been working until seven. Let me get you a beer. I’ll have one, too.”
“You’re bigger than the last time I saw you,” I said. Then I sat down.
She went to the refrigerator; we split the can of beer she found there.
“How—?” I began.
“Since four-forty-five. I’ve been waiting here for you since five- thirty. I stopped and had a hamburger in case you didn’t have enough food for me.”
“You’re very organized,” I said.
“Just like Mummy, everybody says,” she said. “But I don’t think that’s all bad, do you?”
“No, my dear Marianne, I don’t.”
“And nobody calls me Marianne any more.”
The Silent Salesman Page 4