“It looks like a bill,” I said. “From me.”
“That’s right. For eighty-two dollars! That’s ridiculous.”
I skimmed through the accounting of time and expenses. “No, it’s not. It’s very reasonable.”
“Reasonable? Who do you think you are—Sherlock Holmes?”
“We agreed on the rate before I started the job,” I said. “And if anything, it’s an underestimate.”
“Well,” she said stiffly, “I didn’t expect that attitude.”
“What attitude did you expect?”
“I expected you to be more apologetic.”
“If you feel dissatisfied, I suggest you go to another agency or the Better Business people and ask whether they feel the rate is unreasonable for the job.”
“You seem to be willing to make pretty free with my time,” she said. “No doubt as free as you made with the time total on this bill.”
“A lot of people would bill you for 20 percent of what Jay Dundree gave you. A kind of finder’s fee, as a direct result of their work.”
“It’s a good thing you didn’t try,” she said. But she didn’t deny the implication that the 20 percent would have come to more than the eighty-two dollars I’d billed her for.
“I am untypically scrupulous about my accounting of clients’ time,” I said. “I’m sorry if you were surprised at the size of the bill, but the only way you would have had it done for less is by realizing before you started you weren’t as eager as you thought to visit your brother.”
“Don’t think I’m going to let this pass,” Mrs. Thomas said. But at least she passed from my office.
How long did she think eighty-two dollars kept a private detective going? With an office to hire. With a daughter to feed.
After feeding my daughter I got dressed.
“Where are you going, Daddy?”
“Out.”
“Hey, don’t I get to come with you?”
“You’ve got another job.”
“I do?”
“You’re to go visit our client in the hospital.”
“Gosh,” she said. “I sort of forgot.”
“A private detective,” I told her, “never forgets. Because he writes everything down in his notebook.”
“You said you’d give me one,” she said, “but you forgot. I didn’t want to ask.”
“A private detective always asks, whether he wants to or not,” I said stuffily. I gave her a notebook, and left.
I went to the police station.
After waiting forty-five minutes, I got in to talk to Miller.
“The bad penny,” he said. Then frowned. “Sorry I couldn’t make it yesterday. But I couldn’t.”
I put the glass with its fingerprints on his desk. “I wouldn’t lie to you,” I said. “You didn’t miss much.”
“It didn’t go well?”
“I think the fingerprints on this glass will prove that the guy in the hospital is John Pighee.”
“Isn’t he supposed to be?”
“Yeah.”
He shook his head. “You’re a mess, Albert. You even look a mess.”
“Something’s wrong about this, Jerry,” I said with surprising passion. “But I don’t know what to do, where to look.”
“Is it just that money?”
“No,” I said. “Why did he seem to know that something was going to happen to him? Why doesn’t anybody know what he was working on? Why has there been such a big deal about no visitors?”
“It could be O.K.,” he said.
I just shook my head. “And now my client’s sick and in the hospital. My last client is bitching about her bill. And they’re going to pull my building down.”
“I think you’re just in a bad patch,” Miller said. “If the rest of your life was going better, this Pighee business wouldn’t bother you so much. Is your lady friend around?”
“She left on vacation a couple of days ago.”
“See, nothing’s right in the world.”
I shrugged. I pushed the glass toward him.
“What am I supposed to do with it?”
“Take the prints.”
“Where am I supposed to get a set of Pighee’s for comparison?”
I pursed my lips. “Hadn’t thought of that,” I said.
“Take a vacation, Albert.”
“No,” I said forcefully. “Run them through, Jerry. You may have Pighee’s prints. Or if they’re someone else’s maybe you have his. It’s a small enough thing to do.”
He sighed.
“The situation just doesn’t make sense to me,” I said.
“Does the whole world have to make sense to you?” he asked sharply.
I thought about that question for quite a while. Then I answered him truly. “Yes,” I said. “It does. It’s what keeps me going,”
“It’s why you’re a failure,”
“I don’t think I’m a failure,” I said, “I’m just broke, stupid, and on a bad streak of luck.”
Miller shrugged.
I thought about things as I was waiting for the elevator. Realized that rationalizing the strange facts I had about John Pighee was important to me, that I couldn’t worry about other things until I’d eased my mind about it. So I was being evicted; I’ve been evicted before. So I was broke; there are worse things in life than having to stop being a private detective. I was lucky to have the luxury of having only myself to worry about. Decisions affected me alone. I had no money, but I had the greatest luxury of all: the freedom to decide how I wanted to go to hell and when.
I went to the Loftus Pharmaceuticals Security Building. It wasn’t until I saw Russell Fincastle there that it occurred to me that he might have been on a different shift. Maybe it was my lucky day, after all.
“Mr. Samson,” he said cheerfully as he let me in. “Come for your list.”
“Yes.”
“I worked for my money, I’ll tell you that. There’s a lot of people work late in Research Three.” He pulled out several sheets of paper covered with large loose handwriting.
I smiled and nodded and pulled out my wallet. And remembered an awful truth. The last money I’d spent had been $4.98. “Oh, Christ,” I said. “It’s not my day.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I didn’t bring any money. I’m trying to figure out how I could be that stupid.”
“I don’t like being messed around,” Fincastle said, making it clear he’d already spent the twenty.
“I’ll go home and get it,” I said.
Fincastle folded the list ostentatiously and put it in his pocket.
I walked back to my van shaking my head. I drove home.
The office was in chaos.
I couldn’t believe it. Paper scattered everywhere; drawers out. I hadn’t realized I’d had that much paper in the office in the first place. I don’t keep much of value there. Because it’s open to the public.
I sat for a few minutes in my swivel chair. It was a shock. Though any thief who robbed me must be pretty hard up.
Hard up reminded me of what I’d come home to do.
I went into the living room. It was strewn with everything I owned.
I didn’t run, only walked, to the box my Never-Touch money was in. It had been touched.
I sat in my dining-room chair, and rested. They even took my woman’s picture.
“Daddy!” Twenty minutes later Sam burst in, followed closely by Ray McGonigle. “Daddy, what happened!”
I was about to tell her I’d decided on some spring cleaning, but the words were hardly in my mouth when I sighed instead. “We’ve been robbed,” I said.
“Wow,” McGonigle said.
Chapter Twenty Four
I borrowed fifteen dollars from Sam and five dollars from McGonigle and a couple of dimes from the pocket of my other pants. I drove back to Russell Fincastle.
His list covered six sheets of paper. After I bought it, I went straight back home, where I dropped into my chair, a cl
apped-out yo-yo.
Sam and Ray had piled my disturbed belongings against spare walls without attempting to sort them out or put them back where they had come from. Sam was making us lunch. I surveyed my kingdom. Decided to leave it in untidy piles. I was moving soon anyway.
Lunch was goose pate on hot crumpet.
Ray asked, “You always eat this kind of funny food here, man?”
“I only buy the kinds with a joke on the wrapper,” I said. “Hey, why aren’t you at work?”
“I got a call this morning from the boss. He said he found some mistakes in my time records and that they owed me some vacation time and could I take it this week.”
“Isn’t that lucky, Daddy?”
“So I called up your lady daughter and she said she needed some wheels so I came over.”
“Wheels?”
“I needed some way to get to the hospital. Daddy.”
“Did you get in to see her?”
Sam’s face saddened. “No. She was asleep. We waited nearly an hour, but she was still asleep.”
“Did you find out what’s wrong with her?”
“They’re still doing tests. But they said she’s got malnutrition. She hardly ate anything while she was here. I really feel bad about it.”
“It takes longer than a couple of days to get into that kind of condition,” I said. “No one’s been looking after her for a long time and she hasn’t had much of an urge to look after herself.”
“But we’re looking after her now, aren’t we, Daddy?”
“Yes, love,” I said. “We’re looking after her now. If we get half a chance.”
I put Sam to work on the list from Fincastle. Making a tally of each of the people who signed out of Research Three in the calendar year before Pighee’s accident. I wanted patterns.
Myself, I went to find Lieutenant Miller again.
“But they robbed me!”
“Somebody robbed you,” he said. “You don’t know who.”
“I don’t believe in coincidences,” I said.
“What coincidences?”
“Yesterday at the Loftus Clinic I mentioned that Pighee left an envelope to be opened after he died. They reacted surprised, or worried, or something. I said that I had it in my office.”
“Was it in your office?”
“Of course not. The Pighees’ lawyer has it. But the next day my office is turned over, and out of frustration they rob me of nine hundred and thirty-eight dollars.”
“That’s a lot of bread to have lying around.”
“I like to keep a little change on hand. In case I don’tfeel up to going to the bank.”
“But whoever it was took the money. So you don’t know they were after anything else.”
“Except that all my files were turfed out. The whole place was turned over. I don’t believe in coincidences. The simplest explanation is that the Loftus people had a guy break in to look for the envelope that wasn’t there. Other things are possible, but that’s the simplest, so I accept it as a working hypothesis. Occam’s razor.”
He thought about it and said, “It doesn’t sound so simple to me.”
“The implications are complicated.”
“Even so,” Miller said. “What I don’t see is what you want me to do about it all.”
“You agree the situation stinks?”
Not the technical description for the condition, but he nodded.
“Well, what do you suggest we do next?”
“I’m not opening it as a case, Albert. What’s the crime I’d be supposed to be solving? There is some unexplained money. There’s a break-in at your office that you leave open to the public. There’s been reluctance by medical people to let relatives visit a man who would be dead if they hadn’t been taking such good care of him. There’s a bit of mystery about what he was working on that was so dangerous.” He spread his hands in a large shrug. “But where’s the handle that I’m supposed to grab on to? I’m here in Homicide and Robbery with Violence. It’s hard to see where I can fit in.”
“Even unofficially?”
“But what? What am I supposed to do? As it stands, I can pass the money question to the tax people, who will say he must have had some source of income unknown to them. They’ll take the cash and wait for an explanation till he wakes up.”
“Except he’s unlikely to wake up.”
“I can ask the safety people to check out the record of accidents in the Loftus labs. I mean, hell’s bells, Albert. What do you want me to do? You haven’t got anything I can work from.”
So I resolved to try to get him something.
As I rode down in the elevator, I started drawing simple conclusions from what facts I had. Like the money in the envelope. Suppose it came from the unknown but dangerous work Pighee was doing in Research Three. Work that had exploded? What sort of things explode?
And leaving money for Marcia Merom. Conclusion: he liked her. . . .
And Merom, Dundree, and Rush’s reluctance to let people see Pighee? People might ask questions, which might lead to unsecreting their secret work.
Which was . . .
Which was exactly what I determined to find out.
Even if it meant taking chances that were bigger than I usually allowed myself. Chances that might cost me my license. I laughed to myself. The way things had been going my license wasn’t worth much anyway.
Dr. Marcia Merom was listed only as “Merom, M.” in the phone book. Modesty, no doubt. I dialed her number. While it rang, I worked over how I was going to get her to invite me over for a cup of tea.
But after twenty-five rings I hung up. That was all right, too: I wasn’t that thirsty.
Plan B. I went to the address on North Washington Boulevard and, as I expected, found it was a block of apartments. But not a shiny new building. It was a forties brick collection, three floors high. Well taken care of, with air conditioners sticking out of windows like infections of a rectangular type of parasite. More windows were affected than were unaffected.
I parked across the street and watched for a while. I was gratified by the lack of conspicuous activity, the implication that it was a largely empty building during the working day. Then I walked into the lobby, found Merom’s apartment number and bell, and rang it.
Four times, with feeling.
After no response in either the intercom or the door buzzer, I settled to the problem of getting in. I rang all the first- and second- floor apartments, then waited. I rang them again. Finally the intercom crackled. A male voice came through: “Who’s there, for Chrissake?”
In my own crackly falsetto I said, “I arr oiga electric rhumn squargiarra urgent singalyally farumshia fleemickality official.”
The intercom said, “Shit.” The door buzzer went. I was in.
I sprinted up the stairs to the third floor, in case my intercom converser opened his door to see what he’d let in.
I caught my breath. Then rang 3C’s doorbell. I didn’t expect an answer. I only tried twice.
I got to work with a couple of picks and a plastic ruler.
It took me seven minutes to convince myself that Marcia Merom had a better than average lock on her door. Most people secure their doors with locks that look good but lock bad. I can get past those.
But I was left with Plan C.
I went outside again, got in the van, and went round the block to the alley behind the building. I pulled in at the base of the building and worked out which of the sets of stairs led up to Marcia Merom’s back door. Having a panel truck is an advantage when you’re trying to break into an apartment in the middle of the afternoon. You look more like a repairman.
I got out a few tools and walked slowly up the stairs. At the door, I decided to forget the lock and go to Plan C sub-plan b immediately. I chipped all the putty away from a pane of glass in the door, pulled the glazing pins with a pair of pliers, and eased the glass out.
I felt something on the back of my leg. It startled me. I nearly dropped the g
lass.
It was a gray-and-white cat, giving my leg a desultory rub in hopes of a presentation mouse. It rubbed my other leg, but without conviction.
“Go away. Shoo,” I whispered.
It looked at me and made up its own mind. It walked half a dozen steps and sat down next to the porch railings. It watched me. Made me nervous. When I’m being naughty, I don’t like witnesses.
“Shoo,” I repeated. “Go on.”
It ignored me. Didn’t even yawn and lie down. It watched the variegated spectacle of life passing before its tiger-tawny eyes.
I’ve been some pretty demeaning things in my life, but between meals entertainment for a cat was a new low. “Shoo,” I said again, but no longer hopeful.
I put the glass down on the porch next to the doorway and reached inside the window to open the door.
I got hold of the lock latch.
At the same moment a hand took a powerful grip on my wrist and pulled. My arm had little option but to follow inside. Where a body pressed it against the inside of the door.
An angry voice said, “Don’t struggle, Lee. I’ve got a gun pointed at your stomach and I know how to use it.”
“Use what?” I asked instinctively. “My stomach?”
Chapter Twenty Five
I’m just not the adventurous lucky-type detective. I get caught when I try to do things. It’s not fair.
I heard a click from inside the door. I don’t know much about guns but I know when a revolver hammer is being cocked.
“Don’t do anything I might regret!” I shouted. “I’ll do anything you say!” Hearing my squeaks, the cat cocked its ears.
The pressure eased from my arm, though the grip remained on the wrist. I didn’t struggle. I’ve never liked the idea of running for it in a situation like this: with bullets coming from behind, you can’t see to dodge them.
Besides, I was curious. The voice the other side of the door was a woman’s, and I had a question or two to ask her.
“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” I said as I entered Marcia Merom’s kitchen through the back door. She stood well away from me and with two hands held a long-barreled revolver pointed at my chest. Without a wobble. “It would help if you would answer your phone or your doorbell.”
The Silent Salesman Page 14