The Silent Salesman

by Michael Z. Lewin

  I called Fincastle’s attention to the entry. “What do you do when somebody signs in but doesn’t sign out?”

  He squinted over it. “Let’s see. That one’s been checked out and approved. That’s what that check is about.” He pointed to a red tick.

  “But what happens?”

  “Well, about eleven-thirty we go through the book and make a call from here to everybody who’s still in, reminding them they’re supposed to be out by twelve.”

  “They’re supposed to be out by twelve?”

  “Mostly, yes. But it wouldn’t apply to your fella there. He was in a research building and they work some weird hours.”

  “So you’d just let him stay.”

  “We’d let our patrol people know which building he was in. They’d usually have a look before 1 a.m. And even the scientists don’t stay much after that, usually. But we keep tabs on them.”

  I went back to the books. Confirmed that John Pighee’s name didn’t appear after the twenty-seventh of January, then went back to the accident night, to see who else was in Research Three.

  I found Ray McGonigle’s name, signed out at 10:15. And Dr. Marcia Merom’s for 7:39, which was before the accident. Ray had timed it about eight. But those were the only signatories for Research Three.

  “This is funny,” I said.

  “What is?”

  “I know of at least one person who was in Research Three on the twenty-seventh who isn’t signed in or out.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “The guy I’m tracing had an accident. People have told me he was there.” Ray had said Dundree was quickly on the scene.

  “Accident?”

  “A guy blew himself up in Research Three. January 27th.”

  “I remember something about it, vaguely,” he said vaguely. “I suppose sometimes people get in or out without signing. And if they stay there all night, they wouldn’t sign out.”

  “You don’t seem all that worried.”

  “I wasn’t on that night,” he said.

  I thought for a minute.

  “You wouldn’t want to do me a favor, would you?” I asked.

  “Shouldn’t think so,” he said, with a smile.

  “For maybe ten bucks?”

  “What kind of favor?”

  “I’d like a list of all the people who signed out or in and out of Research Three over the year or so before this guy’s accident.”

  “You’re talking about a long list,” he said.

  “I thought maybe something you could do easily enough in your slow times tonight.”

  “You gave me four dollars and ninety-eight cents just to look in the books yourself. At that rate, what you’re asking me to do would be worth forty-nine ninety-five.”

  “Twenty’s the limit.”

  “Done,” he said without hesitating.

  Chapter Nineteen

  When I got back to the office, Ray McGonigle, finished with my door, was working on my doorframe. I just walked through to my living room. It was a quarter to eight and Linn Pighee was awake, talking with Sam.

  “Hello,” I said. “Sam, I think your friend wants some help on his carpentry lesson.”

  “What?”

  “Go help your friend.”

  “But—”

  “This is your employer speaking.”

  “Oh. I . . .” She went.

  “How do you feel?” I asked Linn.

  “Better, for the moment,” she said. “Sam said you’ve been out working. Do you work seven days a week?”

  “Only when I’m employed,” I said. “Linn, we’ve come to the time to try to find some things out. All I’ve got for my efforts, so far, is more questions and none of the answers.”

  “What do you want to do?” she asked uncertainly.

  “I want to go to the hospital tomorrow,” I said. “And I want you to come, too.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But why?”

  “Because I need someone who can identify your husband.”

  “Identify him? What do you mean?”

  “The Loftus people—or the Rush people, at least—have gone to a lot of trouble to keep John’s family from seeing him. Just seeing him. That’s suspicious behavior in my book. But it’s more suspect because John was involved in a setup which not only took a lot of shortcuts about his salary and getting him into the labs despite a shortage of lab space for more qualified people, but provided him with a lot of cash.”

  “Cash?”

  “He left an envelope with twenty-two thousand dollars in used hundred-dollar bills with Walter Weston. So far, I don’t have any idea where he’d have come across money like that. Have you?” She shook her head.

  “Linn,” I said quietly, “he left it in an envelope saying it should go to someone named Marcia Merom.”

  “It’s his money.”

  “Do you know Marcia Merom?”

  “No.”

  “Have you heard the name? Do you know who she is?”

  “No.”

  “She works at Loftus. In the lab he worked in, and she’s his doctor at the Loftus Clinic.”

  “Cozy,” she said.

  “It doesn’t bother you?”

  “You obviously think it should.”

  “It seems to imply the sort of thing that does bother a lot of people.”

  “Albert,” she said warmly, “I was missing my huggings a lot longer ago than seven months.” Then she said, “Walter never mentioned an envelope of money.”

  “He didn’t know until today. The point is there’s nothing on paper in your husband’s records to show where that kind of money came from. It opens a whole group of questions, which tend to imply some criminal activities.”

  “Criminal? Oh, no,” she said. “John wouldn’t be involved in anything criminal.”

  “That is something we’ll have to confirm,” I said.

  “Oh, dear.”

  “But I have to ask questions about why they don’t want people seeing him in the hospital. Hard questions.”

  “Like?”

  “Like, is it John Pighee who is in the hospital?”

  She sat quiet for a moment. Then said, “My God.”

  “Has anyone seen him there that you know of? Has anyone seen anybody?”

  She sat silently. She hadn’t. She didn’t know.

  “I need someone who knows him. Someone I can trust.”

  “But . . .” she began. “But . . .”

  “He might be alive somewhere. He might have cooperated in this whole business to leave and start a new life.”

  She shivered. Whether because she thought that impossible or just because she didn’t like the idea, I didn’t know.

  “Or they might have someone else in there for some other reason.”

  “What?”

  ‘The range of possibilities could be very wide. He might be off doing something for somebody . . . and not want to answer questions.”

  She shook again.

  “It’s also perfectly possible that something about the work he was doing needs covering up.”

  “But which . . .?” she asked, a little frantically.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s time, tomorrow, that we stopped asking people to tell us. And started making them.”

  Chapter Twenty

  At 9 a.m. I called Loftus Pharmaceuticals and asked for P. Henry Rush’s office.

  His secretary told me that he wasn’t in and might not be coming in today; who was calling?

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “He might be going out of the state today.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “My name is Albert Samson,” I said. “I’m calling about John Austin Pighee. I want him to call me back before ten, because that’s when I’m going to the police.”

  With no apparent emotion she read the message back to me, and we severed our connections.

  “That sounded pretty tough, Daddy,” Sam said with her eyes wid
e. “Are you really going to the police? If he doesn’t call back, I mean?”

  “I don’t expect to have that condition met,” I said.

  And I didn’t. At 9:50 the phone rang. P. Henry Rush.

  “I just came in and my secretary gave me your strange message, Samson. I don’t know what it’s about but it sounds a rather thinly veiled threat to me. Perhaps I should be the one talking about going to the police.”

  “We’ll go together, shall we?”

  “What’s all this about?” he said, firming up.

  “It’s about access to John Pighee,” I said.

  “I thought we’d been through all that. Last . . . Friday. Lunchtime, wasn’t it? I contacted the Clinic and left them instructions to allow family visitors. Has your client been turned away again?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well?”

  “My client as of Friday was Pighee’s sister. An hour after I talked to you, Dr. Jay Dundree called on the lady and bought her off.”

  “Bought her off?” Said as if such a phrase tasted bad on his lips.

  “Talked her out of her expressed and strong wish to visit her brother and gave her money.”

  “So you’re without a client,” he said. “I see.”

  “I have a new client,” I said. “Mrs. Pighee. And she wants to see her husband.”

  “Do you?” he said. “Does she?”

  “That’s right. Today.”

  “I can see that you might well feel disgruntled if Dr. Dundree convinced your client that she didn’t need your services. But you sound as if you’ve taken it all personally. Are you implying that I had some hand in Dr. Dundree’s action?”

  “Tinker to Evers to Chance,” I said. “Yes, it crossed my mind.” “Well, I didn’t. While Dr. Dundree was taking time out from his duties to visit an injured colleague’s sister, I was arranging that she be allowed to visit if she wanted. I only found out afterwards that he had obviated the need. But we certainly acted separately. I believe you saw him Friday morning and told him of the sister’s worries. He acted in response to that visit. He didn’t know that you had seen me in connection with the same matter.”

  He sounded convincing. “You won’t be offended,” I said, “if I don’t necessarily believe you.”

  “What I say is true, Samson. But it’s also past. You say you have a new client who wants to see John Pighee?”

  “His wife, yes. She wants to see him today.”

  “Out of the blue? After seven months.”

  “Today,” I said.

  “I don’t know what satisfaction she hopes to get from visiting a man in a coma.”

  “I’m sure you don’t,” I said.

  “Does she know the medical risks she may be putting her husband to?”

  “Here we go again,” I said. “We’ll be at the hospital at four o’clock and we’ll expect to see John Pighee. If we’re prevented, you can expect, at the least, legal action and newspaper reports. And in all likelihood criminal investigation.”

  “You said something about the police in your message,” Rush said. “I thought it was just a cheap device to impose on my attention.”

  “I’m not expensive,” I said, “but I’m not cheap.”

  “Are you seriously suggesting some police involvement in this business? Because wasting police time and money is not something to be done lightly.”

  “Thanks for your concern,” I said. “See you at four.”

  “You’re requiring my presence now, are you?” he said with growing exasperation. He was giving a good performance of someone dealing with a madman of ever-increasing dementia.

  “No,” I said. “All we want is to see John Pighee.”

  Well, nearly all.

  Sam sat in silence while I made notes of this conversation in my notebook.

  “I don’t know whether Linn’s up to seeing her husband,” she said as I poured myself a cup of coffee.

  “I asked her last night,” I said.

  Sam shrugged. “Is there anything for me to do?” she asked. “I’m going out now,” I said. “Mind the shop and take care of the customers, will you?”

  “I guess so,” she said. Without enthusiasm.

  “Look, I’m going to see my friend at the police department. I don’t think you’d much like that.”

  “No,” she said, and wrinkled her nose.

  I realized she hadn’t smiled at me all morning. “Is something wrong?”

  “I just wondered if you were sure you are doing the right thing.” “Going to the police?”

  “Pushing things.”

  “I’m stirring the pot, at least,” I said.

  “Linn seemed so sad last night.”

  “Did she?”

  “Didn’t you notice?”

  “She was tired. But she’s always tired. I thought she was getting a little better, though.”

  “She doesn’t eat anything,” Sam said.

  “She doesn’t?”

  “Almost nothing.”

  “Well,” I said, picking up my notebook, “feed her.” I left.

  I caught up with Miller at about twenty past ten. He looked surprised to see me.

  “I said I’d be in today,” I said.

  “You must want something. I thought I was going to have to put out a pickup on you to get you in.”

  “But I said . . .”

  “So what is this business about John Pighee?” he asked.

  I showed my surprise. I hadn’t given him the name.

  “I had a little talk with Russ Fincastle, yeah. I put you on to him. I thought I was entitled. So you’re working on a guy who had an accident in January. So a guy got himself seriously injured. Big deal. It happens in the best of companies.”

  “They don’t usually know it’s going to happen before it does,” I said.

  “He knew it was going to happen?”

  “He made some unusual contingency plans,” I said, and told him about the agreement and the envelope marked “Not to be opened before I am dead.” “The used hundreds were in the envelope.”

  “Has he been declared dead?” Miller asked solemnly.

  “No.”

  He rubbed his face as if that was the answer he’d expected. “How is the guy?”

  I told him.

  He said, “I was thinking about those used hundreds. They don’t have to have been obtained illegally. They might just be a crude way of getting around inheritance taxes.”

  “The guy wasn’t blatantly crude,” I said, “and his financial records give no indication where he’d come across a lump sum like that. I’ve been through them. He’s got three thousand or so in savings, which came from his earnings over the last five years. He couldn’t really have saved a lot more than that from the incomes he declared on his tax returns without living a lot more austerely than he did. So he had some other income, and it came in cash and without records. You’ve got superficial tax evasion if nothing else.”

  “But you think it’s something else?” Miller asked.

  I went through the history of the exclusion of family from Pighee’s bedside and why it seemed suspicious to me.

  “I don’t know,” Miller said.

  “I’m taking Linn Pighee over there this afternoon at four. I want you to come.”

  “Me?”

  “As a sort of unofficial official witness.”

  “It’s not a police matter, Al,” he said.

  “I didn’t say it was, but we’re less likely to get fobbed off if you’re there sort of on your own time.”

  “You want me to come on my own time, on police time, to be an unofficial official witness?”

  “I couldn’t have put it better myself.”

  I left without his promise, but I knew the situation interested him. That was almost as good as a promise.

  I enjoyed the idea of pulling a string and having people jump a little. Having jumped to many a string myself. So after I left Miller I phoned Walter Weston. He was one of the world’s u
nlucky people. Whenever I called him he was in.

  I said, “Linn Pighee is going to Loftus Clinic this afternoon, to visit her husband. At four o’clock. She would like you to be present.”

  “Me?” he said. “Why?”

  “There may be legal complications, and she’d like her own and her husband’s interests protected.”

  “What kind of complications?”

  “Identification, for one.”

  “Identification? Of what?”

  “Of John Pighee. It’s not entirely certain that the man in Loftus Clinic is John Pighee.”

  “You’re kidding!” he said.

  I wasn’t. “Can you be there?”

  “What reason do you—”

  “Can you be there?” I repeated.

  “I guess so,” he said.

  I was having a party and the guest list was complete.

  Chapter Twenty One

  I went back to the office, where I found Sam looking sternly at Linn Pighee.

  “What’s up?” I asked them.

  “She won’t eat breakfast,” Sam said.

  “I’m not hungry.” Linn’s voice was very weak.

  “You’ve got to keep your strength up,” I said. “And we’ve got a big afternoon today.”

  “I don’t really feel very well,” Linn said.

  “She doesn’t want to go, Daddy,” Sam said.

  “She doesn’t?” I asked sharply. “You don’t?”

  “I never said that,” Linn said.

  “But you don’t want to, do you?” Sam asked.

  “None of us want to,” I said.

  “I’ll go,” Linn said, “if you think it’s best.”

  “If we want to find out what’s happening about your husband, I think we have to.”

  “Do you really think John is somewhere else?” Linn asked.

  “I don’t know what to think. But after today we’ll know a lot better.”

  “You shouldn’t get her hopes up, Daddy,” Sam said.

  “And you shouldn’t go around telling everybody what they want and what they think,” I snapped.

  “Well, she’s not well! She shouldn’t go out. And you complained when I tried to push her around.”

  “Don’t argue,” Linn said plaintively. “I’ll be all right. I just didn’t sleep so well last night. I’ll take a nap now so I’ll be ready this afternoon.”