“Is he?”
“Well, I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe he had it better than I do.”
“I’m not clear how much work he did there,” I said. “Was he part-time or full-time?”
“I don’t really know, because he tended to work different hours from me—afternoons and nights—but he was there a lot for part¬time. I still don’t know what he was doing. I asked a couple of the technicians today, and they don’t know either. I don’t think I’m going to be able to stick it. My only chance is to get assigned to one of the field trials somewhere. It’s my only way of lasting it.”
“Field trials?”
“They try out new drugs on people, like in Africa and places. When they’re not suitable for trying in hospitals in this country.”
“Like at their clinic at Entropist Hospital.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“What do they do there?”
“That I don’t know, either. Some kind of accident research, I guess.”
“But do you work with Dr. Merom?”
“Yeah, sometimes. What about it?”
“Isn’t she in charge of the work at the Entropist Clinic?”
“Is she? If she is, she sure doesn’t spend much time there, ‘cause she’s running a couple of projects in Research Three.”
There was a knock at the door.
I got up to answer it. Sam got Ray another beer. It was my woman and her daughter Lucy. I introduced them. Sam introduced herself and Ray, who said, “Who is this, then?”
“This is Daddy’s lady friend.”
“Is it?” he said, and shot a look toward the bedroom door. “Wow. This is a groovy pad. You are a funny man, man.”
“Who’s got the new bed in the office, Albert?” my woman asked.
“I do,” I said. “It’s a long story.”
I told it. Including how there happened to be a strange woman asleep in my other bed. I’d been out for a walk in the woods, see. And when I came back not only had somebody eaten all my porridge, but . . .
My woman believed me, even if Raymond McGonigle didn’t.
I was up before nine. Early for a Sunday. Early for any day.
And instead of having a group breakfast, I took Linn Pighee’s keys and headed for Beech Grove.
When I got out of my truck, I was surprised to see movement on the front porch of the Pighees’ house. I walked toward it and saw Mrs. Thomas closing the door. Then she turned and saw me.
“Hello, Mrs. Thomas,” I said, to show there were no hard feelings.
“If you’ve come to see my sister-in-law, she’s still asleep,” Mrs. Thomas said.
“Not at church?”
“She always sleeps late,” Mrs. Thomas said, in a voice half hushed and half shrill.
“Left an early call, did she?” I asked. Considering the lack of familial feeling expressed to me by both of these legal sisters, I was interested in what she was doing in the house.
“I’ve got to protect John’s interests,” Mrs. Thomas said. But she, in her turn, was surprised to see me. “What are you doing here?” she asked, not to put too fine a point on it.
I didn’t really feel like telling her I’d come to look through her brother’s financial records. “I’ve finished my work for you, that’s understood,” I said. “I put the bill in the mail yesterday.”
“Better not be for much,” she said. “You didn’t do much.”
“I got you permission to visit your brother, which is what you wanted. Until you decided you weren’t so bothered, after all.”
“It was the principle of the thing,” she said.
We stood on the porch, each waiting for the other to leave.
Then she said, “You can ring the bell all you like. It’s nothing to do with me.”
I watched her walk around the house. She looked back only as she turned the corner.
Inside, things were neat and organized. Far more so than when I’d visited before. I’d expected disarray. Preconceptions about disturbed people predispose expectations of abnormal chaos. If anything was abnormal, it was the order.
Then I remembered Mrs. Thomas. Who used to keep house for her brother. Maybe her habits broke hard.
I found John Pighee’s financial records easily, once I realized that he had had a bedroom of his own. A highly organized couple.
I went through his bank statements, but found the mass of numbers, year after year, anything but illuminating. Then I went back through them more slowly, making a list of deposits, each year, in his checking and savings accounts.
He had an electronic calculator, which I used to total the figures on the spot. Knowing that without it I would have run out of fingers.
But apart from the fact that he started life with Sir Jeff taking home about $7,500 a year and had upped it, over their five-year association, to a little under $12,000, there didn’t seem to be anything dramatic. No sudden leaps up; no sudden leaps down. The surface of things proved what I already knew: everybody earns more money than I do.
I worked backward through the canceled checks but got fed up after two years. There was nothing unusual, apart from regular maintenance to Mrs. Thomas. The whole thing irritated me. There was a kind of control over the visible aspects of John Pighee’s life. Many aspire to that kind of containment of life’s parameters, but few are chosen. And if he was one of the few, it didn’t square with the kind of activity that would lead him into a mysterious explosion. Pighee wasn’t in debt, he paid his bills on time, and he had more than $3,000 in his savings account. A Never-Touch Fund, which he’d never touched.
I left Pighee’s papers. I walked around the house room by room. Upstairs, apart from the two main bedrooms, there was a sparsely furnished guest room and a room with bunk beds. Neither showed conspicuous signs of use. Downstairs there were several rooms, more than minimally furnished. But it was clear where Linn Pighee’s main haunts were, because only there were there the little scraps that fall from regular human usage. She used the porch where she interviewed me, she used the kitchen, and she used her bedroom. Nothing else looked lived in. Nothing else looked as if it had ever been lived in. Even John Pighee’s bedroom itself. If he was an ambitious man—and everybody said he was—then he didn’t surround himself with the traditional self-confidencers that most such men use to celebrate each step up the ladder. There were no fancy stereos, no expensive hobby gadgets or house improvements.
I went out to the double garage and found one car. A small ’74 Ford; nothing fancy. Probably Linn’s car. The hinges on the door on the empty side of the garage looked functional. But I don’t know how to tell by looking whether something unused for seven months had been used regularly before then.
I got in the car that was there, tried the key on Linn’s key ring. The car started immediately. It was half full of gas, showed nearly eleven thousand miles. I found some service records and insurance documents in the glove compartment. Everything up to date. I put them back and returned to the house.
Instead of going immediately to John Pighee’s room, I went to Linn’s bedroom, and to the desk she had there. I packed up her checkbook and some envelopes that seemed to hold receipts and bank statements and carried them next door.
In John Pighee’s bedroom doorway I paused, struck by a powerful sense of foreboding familiarity. It stopped me cold; struck me cold. The situation reminded me of two different problems I’d worked on in past days. One where I’d spent wretched, boring hours going through photographs of the financial and other records of a man who’d led a double life of sorts. A man now in jail. The other problem had been one that had led me to hunt through a house looking for a box of filing cards. I’d got tired and slept for a few hours. The house—the bed on which I’d slept—belonged to a dead man, a man killed, a man who’d been a private detective in his lifetime.
Neither memory was pleasant.
But I went in and sat at Pighee’s desk. I doodled for a while. Then, one by one, I went through his drawers. I made a
pile of everything financial, which was in fact almost everything. I found a gun, too. That brought back memories of years before, when I’d shot a man because he was stealing something I was supposed to guard. Another scar. I packed up all the records and left. Leaving the gun where I’d found it.
Chapter Seventeen
“We thought you’d deserted us,” Sam said cheerily when I came upon them in my living room.
“No such luck.” I addressed Linn. “How’s the patient?” “Better,” she said, without being particularly convincing.
“I was just about to go out,” Sam said. “I’m glad you came back, though. Do you have the Sunday paper delivered or do you go out and get it?”
“You’re not going to have time to read any Sunday paper,” I said.
“I’m not?”
“You’re on a case.”
“I know, but . . .”
“So you’ve got work to do. Come on.”
I took her to the office and set her to compiling detailed statistics from the pile of papers I’d taken from the Pighee house.
“Oh, Daddy!”
“Make me charts. I want charts,” I said. “Income charts. Totals year by year, and individual source totals. Classify any records you can find. Then expenditure charts. Go through all the canceled checks and group them. Then through loose bills, see if they correspond to the checks. We’re looking for unusual things, but we’ve got to know first what’s usual. Complete analysis.”
“Complete?” she asked, not knowing quite what was wanted. “Yup. I’ll push your meals under the door, and if you’re not finished by the end of the week, you’re fired.”
“Oh, Daddy!”
Linn was leaning back in my dining-room chair with her eyes closed.
“Has she fed you?” I asked.
“I’m not very hungry. I don’t much like eating in the mornings.” “Pregnant?”
She looked at me, but didn’t say anything. Then tilted her head back again and said, “I should be so lucky.”
I busied myself with toast and reheating Sam’s coffee. I fought through the beer surplus and got myself some orange juice. Thus fortified, I sat down at my living-room desk. “Are you up to answering a few questions for me?”
Without opening her eyes she said, “I suppose so.”
“Since he started working in the research labs, John was only on the sales staff part-time. That was—what, nearly two years ago. Why didn’t his income drop? I’ve gone through his deposits and they rise neatly and regularly without the smallest kink to show when he changed his work pattern.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know about his money.”
“Do you know how much he was earning?”
She shook her head.
“All right,” I said, “something else. Did he have a car?”
“Sure.”
“Where is it?”
“Christ!” she said. Then hesitated. “Isn’t it in the garage?” “No. Only yours. The Ford is yours, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. It’s not in the garage? Oh, hang on. It was a company car—would that have anything to do with it? I just never thought about it. I didn’t look.”
“You haven’t even been to the garage since it happened?”
“No,” she said. “I guess they must have found the car at the company. And taken it back. Or something. Walter might know.”
“The lawyer?”
“Yes. Everything addressed to John goes there now.”
I nodded. “When I got to the house,” I said, “your sister-in-law was just coming out of the front door.”
“The bitch. She has a key. I locked it before I left, but she has a key to the front.”
“Why would she have been in the house?”
“Nosing around. She wants the house. I’m sure that’s what it is. She used to keep house for us. For John, anyway. Everything absolutely in place. Screwed to the shelves. The way John liked things. Since the accident, she only sneaks in in the mornings sometimes, when she thinks I’m asleep. It’s not as if I can’t run a house, but she thinks John is God’s chosen and she’s all thirteen apostles. I set a mousetrap in April. If I’d caught a mouse, I’d have left it in the front hall for her. She’d have cleared it away without a murmur.”
It was the longest speech I’d ever heard her make. And hardly ambiguous. While she was being direct, I asked, “Linn, are you sure you haven’t been out of the house since the accident?”
This brought her head up, and she looked at me. “You mean before yesterday?”
I nodded.
“Of course I’m sure.”
“Not to buy food, or anything?”
“I phone for everything to be sent in. What are you asking, Mr. Albert? I ought to know whether I’ve been out or not.”
“Not even as far as the garage?”
She just stared at me.
“I tried the car in the garage. Your car.”
“What of it?”
“It started. Right away. If it hadn’t been used in the last seven months, it wouldn’t have. Who uses it? Surely not Mrs. Thomas.” “She’d run it into a phone pole just because it was mine,” Linn said. Then she put her head back and closed her eyes and didn’t say anything.
I waited. Then I said, “Well?”
“The car gets used sometimes.”
“Who by?”
“There’s a boy who brings me medicine. . . .”
“Dougie? The basketball player?”
“You know him?”
“I met him the first time I came to see you.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said without remembering clearly.
“And the medicine is booze and it’s a regular delivery. I don’t see how that ties into use of the car.”
“Well, Dougie doesn’t have a car, and the liquor store he works for keeps strict tabs on the mileage in the delivery truck. So I lend him my car sometimes. And he runs special errands for me. There are some things it’s hard to have delivered. He does some of my special shopping. Books and stuff from the drugstore. He helps me quite a lot.”
“And you lend him your car?”
“Yes,” she said. “He has a girl friend and it’s hard to have a girl friend around here without a car. I wish he’d use it more, really. He’s a very careful type of kid. Not at all like most of them. And each time, Mrs. Nosy Thomas must think it’s me going out and I really like that.”
“Is lending him your car all you do for Dougie?”
“You mean money?”
“No.”
She hesitated before saying, “I get very lonely. Very lonely. I’m not the type of person to live on my own. It really gets to me.” She paused. “Don’t think badly of me.”
“I don’t,” I said.
She didn’t say anything.
“Are you up to making a phone call for me?”
“A phone call?”
“To Walter Weston. Because of . . . your being a bit off-color yesterday, I didn’t get to see him. I wondered if you, might request that he drop into his office this afternoon to give me a chance to read through those papers of John’s.”
“He won’t like that,” she said. And sat up. “Where’s the phone?”
She was very tough with him. Threatened to take her business elsewhere, and that was evidently enough to rouse him from the trivia of a day at home with his family. She fixed three in the afternoon as a convenient time. I gave her a round of applause after she hung up.
But she said quietly, “I don’t like him much. I don’t like many people. Can I go to bed now?”
“Sure.”
About twelve I took Sam a cup of coffee and a set of colored pencils. She was working hard and didn’t stop for my interruption. One day she would make someone a good private detective.
At 2:30 I left, but on the stairs I found a visitor on his way up. The increasingly familiar form of Raymond McGonigle.
“My ma was a little late with dinner,” he said. “Otherwise I’d have
been over earlier.”
I presume he stood there watching me as I went out.
Weston watched me as I came in. He left me in no doubt about what he thought of the situation.
“I don’t like this,” he said. “You seem to have some kind of influence over Linn Pighee.”
“Just because she’s asking questions?”
“I thought you worked for John’s sister.”
“I did. I work for Mrs. Pighee now.”
“I’ve seen some low sharpsters in my time,” he said, “but you seem to work on a level new to me.”
I faced him squarely. “The situation surrounding John Pighee’s accident stinks,” I told him. “And I don’t know whether you’re a source of stink or whether some of it’s just rubbed off. I don’t need to prove my integrity to myself. But don’t be surprised if I’m not particularly tactful with you.” I pulled Linn’s letter of instruction out and gave it to him. “I’ve got the right now to look at the documents relating to your clients John and Linn Pighee. Would you produce them, please?”
He studied the paper. Then he gave in and got me a large tie-closed folder. He sat down while I opened it. “These are the basic records of my six years representing the Pighees. Tell me what you want to see, and I’ll tell you whether I can show it to you.”
“I’ll just take the file home with me, shall I, and sort through it all without making you wait and watch.”
“Like hell,” he said.
I smiled. Then I asked for the compensation papers. He sorted out a five-page document. I glanced at it. A private contract. Binding neither Loftus Pharmaceuticals nor any named insurance company.
“This is in addition to some basic cover from the company, is it?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about Pighee’s money. Is it paid directly to you now?”
“Copies of all documents go to Linn,” he said defensively, “but I handle the accounts. She writes checks on them.”
“How much money is coming in?”
“John gets his full salary.”
“Which is?”
“Gross about twelve hundred dollars a month,” he said grudgingly.
“Hmm,” I said. “And where does it come from?”
“Why, the company, of course,” Weston said.
The Silent Salesman Page 10