I retired to the office with the last of the orange juice to consult my own filed paper, my notebook. My researches lasted as long as the juice. I decided to follow Sam’s good example and get out into the field. To try to find out something about Seafield.
There was only one in the phone book. Which made it look as if it was going to be easy to find. But when I got to the right place on the right street, the address listed in the phone book didn’t seem to be there. Until I found it behind a house that was there. It was a converted carriage house from days long gone everywhere, but particularly distant in that part of north central Indianapolis. You could just make the building out from the sidewalk when you knew where to look for it.
I walked away. Until I found a telephone box.
“Loftus Pharmaceuticals.”
“Lee Seafield in Research Three, please.”
It took a full minute to ring the right bell, but when the call was answered, the answerer said, “Seafield.” A deep, quick voice.
“Who?” I asked.
“Seafield. What do you want?”
“I didn’t ask for Seafield. I asked for Sealy.”
“You haven’t got him,” Seafield said, and hung up.
I was able to stride up the path to his door with a calm heart.
The building was substantial. Closer inspection showed it was not all used for accommodation. The entire ground-floor area was garages, space for four cars. Above it was a full second story. There was an attic above that, with large windows flush with the sloping roof on the southwestern side. It suggested the sort of studio required by an artist or an indoor naturist. As far as I knew, Seafield wasn’t artistic.
The garages opened on an alleyway, and at one end of the façade of doors an electric bell glowed next to a residence entrance.
Though I knew Seafield to be at work, I rang. And knocked loudly. And rang again. He might share with his mother.
Nobody answered from within. I examined the lock on the door.
“Looking for Mr. Seafield, are you?”
“What?” The voice came from behind me, where I saw an old man, stooped to the shape of a gibbet. He could only look at me by facing sideways. He stood at the corner of the path I had used, but behind him I saw an open door at the back of the main house.
“Looking for Mr. Seafield?”
“That’s right,” I said. “He doesn’t seem to be at home.” I held my notebook in clear sight. To make me look a bit official.
“He’s to work,” the man said. “Don’t rightly know what time he’ll be back. Keeps unlikely hours, you know. Sometimes here and sometimes not. Sometimes comes late. Three, four, five in the morning.”
“Wakes you up as he comes in, does he?”
The old man smiled and nodded. “Light sleeper. Say, care for a cup of coffee, stranger? I got some on the boil.”
“I’d appreciate it,” I said, and followed him through the open door to his first-floor room.
The boil turned out not to be an exaggeration.
“You get to be a light sleeper as you get on,” said my host. I put him at seventy-five. “It kind of balances the heavy sleep coming later.”
“Too true,” I said. “My name’s Samson.”
“Walker,” he said. “Thomas Jefferson Walker.”
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Walker. Do you know Mr. Seafield well?”
“Not that way, no. But I can’t help but keep track on his comings and goings. I do the maintenance around here. For my son, which owns the property.”
“Well,” I said, “I’m trying to get a little background on Mr. Seafield.”
“Are you now? Which side do you work for?”
“Which side?”
“The federal or what?”
I didn’t get his drift, but continued on the line I had planned. “I’m a personnel investigator. Mr. Seafield has applied to us and we’re trying to fill in our picture. Lifestyle, that sort of thing.”
“I see,” Walker said. But didn’t volunteer.
“So. He rents the place, does he?”
“That’s right. From my son Tommy, Jr. Tall fella.”
“Your son?”
“Naw, Mr. Seafield. Real tall and thin. My boy’s only about six foot, despite my height. I’m six foot four and one half inches,” he said. “That is . . . I was. Seafield has inches on me.”
“Does he have a lot of friends?”
“Friends? I don’t know. He seems to draw the womenfolk and there’s a lot of beer cans in the trash.”
“Easygoing kind of guy?”
“He treats me like a piece of dung,” Thomas Jefferson Walker, Sr., said. “Course my age, and I’m only caretaking for the place.” He indicated the rest of the big house. “He don’t have to treat me human, so he don’t. No, he don’t strike me as an easy guy. Flashy clothes.”
“Dresser, is he?”
“Seems like they make them out of what they used to make little girls’ dresses out of in my day.” Which took inches off Lee Seafield in Walker s eyes.
“What kind of car does he run?”
“T-Bird. I s’pose it’s from the company. My boy used to get one.”
“Your son worked at Loftus Pharmaceuticals?”
“That’s right.”
“He’s not a scientist, is he?”
“No. He’s an executive. Had big plans when he joined up with them fifteen years gone, but he got stuck, dead end. In part of the quality-control section.”
“That sounds pretty important,” I said.
“May sound that way, but he says it was really fancified potwashing. Killed his ambition. So he up and quit. Puts his energy into other things. Works with some people in Detroit a lot, and he’s got him half a dozen properties around town. This is the littlest.”
“Tycoon, your boy,” I said.
“Yeah,” the old man said. He wasn’t very interested.
“Don’t you get on with your son, Mr. Walker?”
“Comes right down to it, Tommy, Jr., treats me like a piece of shit, too. Probably because he got treated like that where he worked. Sir Jeff couldn’t look after everyone.” Walker continued, “But it’s not right a boy shouldn’t reckon his father.”
Chapter Twenty Eight
Sam wasn’t home when I got back. With the amount I’d given her to do, she could take a week.
I sat and brooded. Reviewed my notes. A lot of things troubled me. Then the phone rang.
“Al?”
“Albert Samson, Private Investigator. Debts collected. Divorces sought. Discounts for minority groups. Like policemen.” It was Miller.
“You finished?”
“Not finished, but the count has just reached nine.”
“Can you come over? I want to talk to you.”
“When?”
“Now,” he said. His tone was serious. More serious than usual.
“What’s up?”
“I’d prefer to talk to you in person.”
“I don’t like surprises, Jerry.”
“It’s about your case. Pighee, the guy that had the accident.”
“What about him?”
“Come over, Albert,” he said quietly. Then, “Don’t make me make a federal case out of it.”
I left a note for Sam and walked to the City-County Building.
Miller sat at his desk waiting for me. Not even pretending to do anything else. That made it the most important business conversation we’d ever had.
“So what gives?” I asked. I sat down.
Instead of answering right away, he folded his hands.
“I’ll come back later when you’ve learned English,” I said. Surprises are bad enough, but long-drawn-out surprises are intolerable.
“This is hard,” he said.
My turn to wait quiet.
“You were right about the Pighee case,” he said, at last.
“What? You mean the fingerprints show it isn’t Pighee?”
“No, it’s Pighee, all right You
were right that something bigger was going on than seemed to be going on.”
“You’ve found something out” I said. You sometimes need a divining rod to locate what people are getting at.
“I’ve been in conference with Captain Gartland about it twice today. I just want you to know that your nose is unerring.”
“They’re giving me a police medal or what?”
“Did you know that Pighee was . . . is . . . that he is a federal agent?”
“A what?”
“A federal agent.”
“I wouldn’t swear in court that I know now,” I said.
“Well, he is.”
“Who says?”
“Gartland says,” Miller said in such a way as to leave no room for doubt.
“You mean, F.B.I.?”
“I mean F.B.I.”
It gave me something to think about I talked instead. “Even if it’s true, it doesn’t explain the things I wanted explained. Unless you’re going to tell me that Loftus Pharmaceuticals is a subversive front and the F.B.I. infiltrated it with Kamikaze chemists.”
“I don’t know what he was doing there or why he got blown up.”
“What do you know, Jerry?”
“Gartland called me in this morning. He said he’d been filled in about your interest in Pighee, and in particular about your visit to the hospital. He said he’s looked up your file and—”
“My file!” I interrupted.
“Yeah.”
“What file?”
“Well,” he said uneasily. “The file we have on you. We picked you up a few years ago on breaking and entering.”
“And the charges were dropped and that isn’t what you were talking about.”
“Well,” he said. Then bit the bullet. “We keep records on local private detectives.”
“Bull. The state police are the licensing body. You might keep lists, but—”
“Honest, Al. Files.”
“On people in suspicious professions, then, is it? An unofficial file? Or maybe just on all suspicious people.”
“Well,” he said. “Kind of”
“Maoists, Minutemen, amd Albert Samson?”
“You’re making too much of it. In our shoes you’d want access to information about—well, interesting people around town. It’s really files on people who might know things, or who have helped us in the past, or—”
“Nixon had his hate list. I shouldn’t be surprised that you have yours. From what I read about in the Star.”
He let me have that without response. Compensation. A couple of years ago, the Star had spent months having to fight hard for the simple truth that the Indianapolis police had gone over their quota for graft. For a while it looked as if the pair of reporters involved might end up in jail on bum raps. But justice outed. Part of justice, anyway. The police were cut back to size and the rest of the graft infrastructure had due warning to be careful despite times of economic hardship. Judges, people like that.
“I’m caught in the middle, Al.”
“You’re breaking my heart. Get on with it. Pighee the G-man.”
“Why are you giving me a hard time? I thought we were supposed to be friends.”
“Where did you read that?”
“All right! That’s it. Gartland says you’re to get off the Pighee case. Pighee and some of the people involved are F.B.I., and you’re to give them peace.”
“And if I don’t?”
“You don’t seem to understand the situation, Al.”
“Damn right I don’t.”
“Gartland wanted to act direct, but I said it would be better to talk to you, that you were a reasonable guy. That if there was a good reason not to stick your nose in somewhere, you could be convinced. You concede there are things in the world you don’t have a right to know about, don’t you?”
“I guess so.”
“Well, this is one of them. But don’t take it from me. You see Gartland.”
I thought about it for a minute. Then asked, “What do you mean, Gartland wanted to act ‘direct’? What’s ‘direct’?”
“You ask him. Come on.”
“Now?”
“Now.” He got up and led. I could but follow.
From the detective dayroom, the Homicide captain’s office is the first past reception. Gartland, a career officer in his late fifties, was enjoying his fourth-floor view over the roof of the City Market when Miller led me in.
“Shall I stay?” Miller asked.
Gartland turned and waved me to a seat. He said, “In the building, Miller, but not in the room.” Miller closed the door behind himself.
“Well, what’s the story, then?” Gartland asked.
He was trying to put me off balance. Having had me brought in, he acted as if I was the one who sought him. I didn’t say anything, just sat.
After a few moments, he smirked and turned to a top desk drawer. “Smoke?”
“No.”
He took a single cigarette out of the drawer, lit it deliberately with a pocket lighter, inhaled deeply, and leaned back in his chair.
“Lieutenant Miller has filled you in?”
“He says you want me to stop a perfectly legal investigation I’ve been hired to make.”
“You’re old friends, I understand.”
“Out of business hours.”
“Which means, I would have thought, that you have some trust in his judgment?”
“Up to a point.”
“Miller is a good officer, I think,” Gartland said;
“He isn’t any better than anybody else at making decisions without good information. My impression is that all he knows is that you want something and that you are his superior officer.”
“There is more to the situation than that.”
I sat silent again.
“For some time now,” Gartland said, “the Federal Bureau of Investigation had been engaged in a special project centered in the Loftus Pharmaceutical Company.”
“For ‘some time’?”
“For about seven years. Slightly more.”
“And when did you first hear about it—today?”
“We,” he said, “were informed at the beginning. The two agents leading the case came in to inform us in rough detail of the nature of the work they were doing and—”
“Two? F.B.I. agents?”
“One Washington-based. One local man specially recruited for this project. A man whom, I must say, I know well. Whom I worked with in the war, and whose personal credentials are of the very highest rank.”
“You say they informed you. Does that mean the police haven’t been asked to participate?”
“You may conclude that, yes.”
“And I take it these guys produced I.D.s.”
He inhaled, then said, “You may take it.”
“Who is the specially recruited agent?”
“That, Mr. Samson, is not properly your business. But,” he said with directness that was emphatic, “you may also take it that the subject of your investigation, John A. Pighee, was involved, and that your further inquiries about his functions at the Loftus Pharmaceutical Company would endanger the lives of other people working on the project. Your continued investigation would, in all respects, be contrary to general public interest.” He stared at me with his lower lip pushed out, to push the point home.
“What,” I asked, “is the nature of the project?”
“Negative.”
“But how am I supposed—?”
He interrupted. “I am obliged, in the public interest, to ask you to terminate your investigation and to satisfy your client as best you can without revealing even as much as you know already.”
“That’s not going to be easy,” I said.
“I sympathize,” he said.
“Look, you’re telling me Pighee was involved in an F.B.I. project.”
“I am.”
“He was working for the F.B.I.?”
“He was. Is. Naturally, we share everybo
dy’s hopes that he will make a complete recovery.”
“And he knew it was dangerous work?”
“One presumes so.”
“All right,” I said. “Just tell me the general area of the project and I’ll do my best for you.”
Gartland nearly jumped out of his chair, reversing his previous success at self-control. “Samson, you don’t seem to understand your situation. I’m not asking you to do anything. I’m telling you.” “I hear you trying to give orders to a civilian proceeding lawfully about his business. But what I do is my decision.”
“You have no choice,” he said.
“I don’t?”
“The only decision is mine. Whether I trust your sacred promise to cooperate enough to let you out of the building.”
“You can’t arrest me.”
“I wasn’t planning to,” he said darkly. “But if you are likely to be a danger to the public, I can take you out of circulation. Make no mistake about that. I can and I will.”
“I want a lawyer,” I said. I got up.
“Sit down, Samson!”
“Am I under arrest?”
“Sit down,” he said again, but more quietly. I took the “please” as meant but unuttered. I sat down.
“The reason,” he said, “that you are here at all is because you are not entirely unknown to us.”
There was a lot I could have said to that, but I was worrying less about making my points than about getting back home to take care of my crippled daughter.
“You have assisted us, I understand, a number of times over the last few years. And Lieutenant Miller vouches for what he calls your scrupulous honesty, as well as for your basic intelligence.”
I gave Miller silent thanks for that.
“Set against that, studying the records of the cases brought by you and against you—”
“Now, just a minute—”
“Set against the good things,” Gartland insisted, waving some papers, “there is in this file clear evidence of a tendency to irresponsibility. Honest irresponsibility, but irresponsibility nonetheless.”
I stopped protesting. He had the ball.
“You have an unwillingness to consult with people, to listen to their judgment. You seem to draw your own conclusions and then take rash actions on them.”
“If something holds water, I drink out of it.”
The Silent Salesman Page 16