She was intensely serious but without any fear, because she hadn’t expected me to be me. It was Lee that she really hadn’t been expecting. “Don’t make any fast moves,” she said.
“Why should I? Oh, I see. You think I’ve got a gun, too. But I don’t.”
“Go into the living room,” she said.
“Your wish,” I said.
I preceded her into a pale blue room filled with tables, chairs, bookshelves, and ornaments. Also a desk, which would have been a prime candidate for my interest if I had entered the room unescorted. There were pictures on the walls of horses and mournful dogs. They weren’t prints, but genuine pictures, like with paint on them. There were many signs of significant means and a certain, if not congenial taste. Over the desk there was a certificate from the University of Minnesota, awarding a Ph.D. in biochemistry to Marcia Janet Merom. The date was 1972.
Merom directed me to the front door. I started to complain that we’d hardly got acquainted. But she said, “Shut up!”
“You’re the one with the gun,” I said.
“Don’t forget it,” she said.
I reached the door.
“Now take the position,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“Against the door. You must know how to do it.”
“You mean lean against it? Like they do on television?”
“Stop stalling.”
I took the position. Gingerly but thoroughly, she assured herself that there were no lumpy objects of metal concealed beneath my clothing. She didn’t seem embarrassed. I was.
“Any happier?” I asked.
“All right, get up,” she said. “Turn around. Now sit down.”
I moved toward a chair.
“No! At the foot of the door!”
I didn’t understand, but sat on the floor with my back against her front door. I began to think about my story. But she began to smile. “You know I could kill you right now if I wanted to?”
I was surprised, shocked. It wasn’t the story I’d been thinking of.
“Breaking into my apartment,” she said. “A big strong man against a poor defenseless woman.”
“Why ever should you want to shoot me?” I said.
“I didn’t say I wanted to,” Marcia Merom said pedantically. “I said I could if I wanted to. You’re at my mercy.” A certain intense pleasure passed through her eyes, and then seemed to fade.
I followed the impulse to counterattack, “Is this what you had in mind for Lee if it had been him instead of me?”
But she seemed not to hear. “Is there any reason why I shouldn’t call the police and have you arrested?”
“Yes,” I said.
“What is it?” She seemed curious to know. She lowered her gun.
“Do you want to pretend that you don’t know as well as I do?”
A counter-counterattack counterattack.
She was remembering me. The episode we’d gone through at the Loftus Clinic. With and around John Pighee. She didn’t move toward the phone.
I feigned unconcern. “You heard the phone ring twenty-five times. You heard the buzzer downstairs, the doorbell here. Why didn’t you answer them?”
“Why should I?”
“I only came here wanting to talk to you. They show that I wanted to talk to you.”
“And,” she said positively, “what I did shows that I didn’t want to talk to you. Or anyone. Why didn’t you just go away and try again another time?”
“Well, I live on the other side of town. While I was in the neighborhood, I thought I’d leave you a note.”
“A note?” She didn’t seem particularly quick.
“Yeah,” I said. “So I said to myself, a busy scientist like Dr. Merom, she might not have time to look in her mailbox. So it would be better to put it where she won’t miss it. So I was going to leave the note on your kitchen table, so when you ate your Soggy Pops you’d be sure to see it.”
She paused to think. Then said, “I am not amused by facetiae.”
At least now she was reacting to what I was saying. Instead of the other way around. “You had the gun out because you thought I was Lee. What’s the matter, aren’t you getting along with him?”
“You might say that.”
“You expected him to force his way in here?”
“When he gets an idea—about anything—it’s very hard to get him to . . .” She tailed away. Then: “I don’t want to talk about Lee.”
“Must be a strain on your business relationship if there’s problems like these,” I said. “Members of a gang should get along. They should work like a well-oiled machine.”
“What do you know about business?” she asked.
I tried to look inscrutable. “Isn’t it enough for me to know that there is a business? And a gang.”
“Gang?” she said. As if it was a strange word to use for whatever was going on.
“The strain of the Pighee situation beginning to catch up with people? Must be hardest on you.” I paused, but she didn’t say anything. “Considering your intimate relationship with Pighee.” No reaction. “Did you know he’d left you quite a lot of money? If he dies, I mean. Maybe I shouldn’t have told you that, if you like to kill people so much. You might pull the plug on him just to get your money.”
“Not . . . I wouldn’t do something like that for money. I mean. . .”
“No, no,” I said, and looked around the room. “You seem to have plenty. Of course, doctors make a fortune these days, don’t they. No, you don’t need any more money.” I hesitated, then said, “But what I don’t understand is if Pighee’s been out of the way for so long, why is Seafield only homing in now?”
She lowered her head. “Lee’s all right,” she said.
“Oh, yes?” I said. And I stood up. She did nothing to react. Her hands rested limply on the gun, but didn’t move. She seemed to have forgotten it was there. Even if I hadn’t.
“I can’t say that I understand things precisely,” I said. “But what I wanted to tell you and your people is this: I’m not going to quit poking around in this John Pighee business until I understand what’s going on. And the police are going to be interested, too.”
“Police,” she said, shaking her head. “No.”
“Yes,” I said, but she didn’t seem to hear it. She seemed to hold most of our conversation with herself.
Then she said, “Wait a few days. Wait, will you? You . . . you don’t understand, I’m sure. But you might hurt people, things. Things you would not want to hurt, I’m sure. Give it a few days. Please.” She stood up and left the gun on her chair. “Please! I’ll call you then and we’ll talk about it. Do you have a card? With your phone number on it? I’ll call you, I promise.”
I gave her a card. And, having done more than I could ever have expected, I left. By the front door.
Chapter Twenty Six
I was about to start on the stairs from the second floor to the first when a big hand grabbed my shoulder.
“Hey!”
The hand spun me around.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I asked.
“That’s what I want to ask you.” The hand was connected to a man who was about six by six by sixty. And he was strong with it.
“What’s the problem?”
“You’re the guy what rang my bell, ain’t you?”
“Don’t be absurd,” I said carelessly.
“You are,” he said. “I saw you. Through the peephole. You fucking well woke me up and talked to me over the intercom and then didn’t come to my door. I saw you go by through the peephole. I saw you come down again. And now I seen you come down again. Why you doing all that?”
It was a difficult question to answer. The hand on my shoulder didn’t relax. I had a card in my wallet that said I was a swimming- pool salesman. But I didn’t think he’d be interested.
“I work all night,” he said. “And if I’m gonna get woked up in the day, then I’m gonna know why.”
“I’m a private detective,” I said. “I rang a lot of bells because I was trying to get in the front door. There is someone who lives upstairs that I’m investigating and I needed to get in the front door to get into the apartment.”
He looked up the stairs I’d just come down. “Love nest, huh? Who is it?” He released my shoulder. “No shit,” he said musingly.
“I can’t tell you who it is,” I said piously.
He nodded.
“Only I couldn’t get into the apartment when I got up there. So I came down again and went around to work on the back door.”
He kept nodding. “A lot of these people here, they put pretty good locks on their doors. Ever since about four years ago this guy got killed by a burglar.”
“Yeah?”
“No shit. Right here in this very building. Cripple lived in 3C. Got his neck broke falling off that back porch. Made people very nervous, you know. So a lot of them got better locks than they had before.”
“I understand that,” I said.
“People here, they’re mostly single or people without kids. They all work. Means they have some money, you know. And they got pretty valuable stuff. Me, I’m not afraid.”
“I believe that,” I said.
“I’m what they call a fatalist, you know what I mean? If it’s going to happen to me, it’s going to happen. You really a private detective?”
“You want to see my I.D.?”
He did. I showed it to him.
“I’ll be goddamned,” he said. “I didn’t think people were, you know, that sort of thing any more.”
“It’s a dying art,” I said. We became friends. He let me leave.
I sat for several minutes in my van trying to make notes on the conversation with Marcia Merom. It was more confusing than usual. What with being at her mercy, having my arm twisted, and the damn cat.
Finally I started the engine and pulled back into Washington Boulevard. There I noticed a red Thunderbird in front of the building. I saw Lee Seafield get out. I idled while I saw him go into the lobby. I didn’t need to follow him. I had a good idea what he had in store.
An idea but not much understanding. The story of my life.
“You’ve been gone a long time, Daddy,” Sam said as I came through the office door. She was sitting behind my desk with a pencil in hand and another behind her ear.
“Picked any winners?”
She didn’t understand. But said, “I’ve been working on your list. If you go and make some coffee, I’ll be finished in a few minutes.”
“Where’s your scientific friend?”
“He’ll be back later. He got tired of watching me.”
“When you have a minute,” I said, “I picked up a letter for you on the way up.” I spun an envelope onto the desk.
“For me?” She looked at it. “But it’s addressed to you!”
I went to make the coffee.
As it was perking, she came in with her final list and a look on her face that was all girl. The opened envelope was on top. “It’s my I.D. card,” she said. “I am a real detective now?”
“When you sign it. Next to the thumbprint.”
I lent her a pen.
“I’m a detective now,” she said.
“You retain that card until you get fired, convicted of a crime, or until I lose my license.”
But she just sighed. “A real detective.” What nicer thing could a father do for a daughter?
While we drank our coffee, I looked over the summaries that Sam had extracted from the Fincastle list.
It proved that whatever Sir Jeff paid people, he got his money’s worth. John Pighee had stayed late in the labs every single Thursday the calendar year before he went to pieces.
He’d also been in the lab either Saturday or Sunday each week and on 42 of the available 52 Tuesdays. A total of 147 entries.
It represented a colossal amount of work, considering no one seemed to know what he was doing with his time there.
Or, rather, no one would tell me what he was doing.
Sam had also analyzed the after-hours attendance of other late workers in Research Three. Thee were nine names that appeared 12 times or fewer. Then three between 29 and 48 times, headed by Raymond McGonigle, technician. It included an S. Grace: I presumed the technician Sonia I’d run into in the lab.
And three names appeared more often. M. Merom, 93; L. Seafield, 118; and J. Dundree, 140. But more curious than the totals, Merom was in the lab every Wednesday night; and every Sunday that Pighee was in the lab, Seafield was there, though not the other Sundays. As a rule, Seafield was in on Tuesday night—though, unlike Merom and Pighee, he missed some. And Dundree’s night was Friday, though his late appearances were more evenly distributed over the nights of the week than any of the others.
Henry Rush’s name appeared, too, but only seven times during the year.
I was excited when I digested the information. Not because I knew what the pattern meant, but because it meant there was a pattern. Something was being done on a regular schedule.
“You’re smiling, Daddy.”
“You’re very observant,” I said.
“You’re happy, aren’t you? Did I do good work?”
“Very good,” I said. “You’ll make a terrific detective. Good thing I didn’t lose my license today.”
“What do you mean?”
“I broke into an apartment and got caught. Detectives lose licenses for that sort of thing.”
I got my notes and told her about how I’d carried on about the gang and its business.
“You don’t know anything about their business,” she said.
“But they know. So the problem becomes motivating them to tell me, instead of finding out directly. Do you see what I mean?”
“More or less.”
“Sometimes it pays to make people believe you know things you don’t. It changes their assumptions about you. It changes the way they act to you, and the changes depend on just what they think your knowledge is. By seeing what they do that’s different from what they did when they thought you were ignorant, you learn things.”
“O.K.”
“I told Marcia Merom I knew she and the other people at Loftus were in some business. And I threatened to go to the police. Instead of treating me as if I was crazy, she took me seriously. So now I know something.”
“Are you going to the police?”
“What for? To confess I broke into her apartment?”
Later, Ray came to take Sam out. To avoid getting lonely, I went to visit Linn Pighee.
I found she had been moved to the Loftus Pavilion wing of the hospital. But upstairs in the hospital part. Not in the Clinic.
“It’s something to do with the insurance,” she said, in a fragile echo of a voice. “Because John is a Loftus employee.”
“How are you?”
“How do I look?”
“Terrific,” I said. Terrible.
“Well, I feel as good as I look.”
“Are you eating well?” I asked. “For a change. Sam is unhappy that she let you get away with not eating while you were with us.”
“She told me. She shouldn’t feel bad. I just haven’t been hungry. It’s hard for me to eat when I’m not hungry. It makes me sick.”
“You’re in a bad spot,” I said. “Sick if you eat and sick if you don’t.”
She nodded acquiescence.
“When do you get out?” I asked. “Have they told you?”
“They say they’re still doing tests.”
“I hope they pass,” I said. But it passed over her. Her eyes fluttered.
“I’m going to go to sleep now,” she said.
I sat and watched her do it.
Chapter Twenty Seven
Sam and Ray weren’t back when I got home.
I spent five minutes making a list of some things I wanted to know. Then I waited for my legwoman to finish her fun and games for the week.
They wandered in about
a quarter past eleven.
“Hey, funny man, how you doing?”
“Hi, Daddy. We’ve had a super time.”
“Your little girl is a terrific athlete.”
“We went to visit Grandma,” Sam said, “and then we played miniature golf.”
“She had three holes in one and she’d never played before,” Ray said.
“I’d never even touched a golf club before, Daddy!” Sam shone.
“You’ll be the next Babe,” I suggested.
“Who?”
“Hell,” McGonigle said. “Babe Ruth didn’t play golf. She said you liked sports.”
“I am a sport,” I said.
“Maybe he was just being funny,” Sam said.
“Didrikson,” I said. But decided not to try to cap their energy. Or turn it off. I stood up. “Sam, you’ve got work in the morning.”
“I do?” she said. “What, Daddy? Oh, what?”
I went to bed.
“But how do I find out those things. Daddy?”
“You’re a private detective now. You’re supposed to know how. Is there any orange juice left?”
“But—!”
“Work out what you know. Then what you want to know. Think about who knows it. Then move. Pass the margarine, will you?”
“Well, there was this man who died four years ago. He was killed or died when there was a burglar, right?”
“Yes. Is there any more guava jelly in that jar?”
“So the police would know all about it.”
“Bound to. Do you know anyone on the I.P.D. who would help you?”
“No. But . . . but . . .”
“Can I have that knife, please?”
“But I could go in and pretend to be his daughter. They’d tell me all about it then, wouldn’t they?”
“Do you know his name?”
“Ahh. Well.”
“You know more or less when it happened. Something about what happened. Where it happened.”
“You mean I could go to the building and ask there.”
“Isn’t there some sort of place that might have done most of the work for you? At this time. Something you could just go and consult”
“What do you mean?”
“Pass the newspaper, please, will you? The newspaper.”
“Ahh.”
I sent her off to the library to look up old paper reports on the incident. A good place to start, and also cool in a hot summer.
The Silent Salesman Page 15