The Silent Salesman

by Michael Z. Lewin

  “I don’t, but I have a phone book.”

  “Won’t do you much good. He’s unlisted. But it’s up to you.”

  She gave me the number and an address on Roland Road.

  “What about contacts? Police record? Shady stuff?”

  “Nothing yet. But I thought you had friends at the police.”

  “Friends is not what I would call them at the moment,” I said, and sighed audibly for her benefit.

  “You don’t sound very happy.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You want me to keep at it?”

  “Well, I don’t want you to stop. And add a name to the list. Thomas Jefferson Walker, Jr. He used to work at Loftus, but doesn’t now. In property and things.”

  “O.K. Call me again in a couple hours.”

  I had hoped for a bit more for my ten cents, but you’ve got to be an optimist to be a private detective at all.

  I went out to the drugstore’s counterman and asked for change for my quarter.

  He acted as if I’d asked for the key to his wife’s chastity belt. “Not unless you buy something,” he said, shaking his head.

  I was stupid enough to play. I looked at the quarter and two pennies in my hand. “What can I buy for seventeen cents?” I asked.

  “A Popsicle,” he said.

  “All right,” I said.

  He put down the magazine he was leafing through and put out his hand. “Gimme.”

  I handed him the quarter and the two pennies. He got me an orange Popsicle and a dime.

  I left the Popsicle wrapped on the counter and went back to the phone booth. The phone directory gave me the number I wanted. “Federal Bureau of Investigation. May I help you?”

  “Can I speak to an agent, please?”

  “One moment, please.”

  After one moment the same voice said, “May I have your name, please?”

  “Are you an agent?”

  “Yes, I am. May I have your name, please?”

  I gave it.

  “And your address, Mr. Samson?”

  I gave it.

  “All right. How can we help you?”

  “There is a man at work who wants me to help him with some rather unsavory things he’s doing.”

  “Unsavory?”

  “Illegal,” I said. “And I don’t want to do it, but he says he is working for the F.B.I. on an undercover project.”

  There was a pause. “How old are you, Mr. Samson?”

  “Forty. Why?”

  Bluntly: “Are you sober?”

  “Damn right,” I said. “It doesn’t sound very good to me, either.”

  “All right. Go on.”

  “He says it’s a very big, important secret project. What I want to know is how I can check out whether he is telling me the truth.” “I can tell you,” the agent said. “He isn’t.”

  “He’s pretty convincing. And he has some identification.”

  “F.B.I. credentials?”

  “That’s what they look like, but I don’t know how to tell whether they’re genuine. And he has some letters from Washington. Signed and all that. He showed them to me.”

  “What’s this man’s name, Mr. Samson?” The voice sounded marginally more interested.

  “Rush,” I said. “P. Henry Rush.” I gave the address on Roland Road. “He’s a director of Loftus Pharmaceutical Company, here in town.”

  I was too eager. The voice said, “You sound like you have something against this man, Mr. Samson. Is that so?”

  “Look,” I said, “I’m just trying to find out whether I should believe him and help my country or whether he’s just trying to take me for a long ride off a short pier. He says the project is too big for your office to know about, but he’s got the police believing him.”

  My agent didn’t respond at once. I knew what the silence was telling me, though. It was just possible that what I was describing was for real. Finally, he said, “This is beginning to sound pretty serious, Mr. Samson.”

  “Do you know anything about this guy? Does anybody there know anything? Is there some way to check?”

  “I . . . I don’t think it very likely that the man is working for us. We would surely know about any operations in our area. And you can rest assured that the F.B.I. doesn’t involve itself in illegal operations. We leave that to the criminals.”

  “Somehow you don’t really convince me,” I said.

  “But I think it would be prudent if we checked this out.”

  “I agree,” I said truly.

  “Can you come into our office here now? Where are you, Mr. Samson?”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to them immediately. “I’m in Muncie,” I said. “But I’ll come right in.”

  I sat in the booth for a few minutes thinking about what I wanted to do. Then faced facts and worked myself up to the hard task I had in front of me.

  I walked back to the man behind the counter. He was sharpening a pencil. “That sure is a sharp pencil you got there.”

  He looked up at me. My Popsicle was gone. That made me mad. I took a ten-dollar bill out of my wallet. I put it on the counter. I pointed my finger at the guy, which is rude. I said, “I am a dangerous criminal. I am wanted by the police. I want to call them and turn myself in. Give me change for the phone. Give it to me now.”

  He hesitated. Then he put his pencil down and got me change. I shoved the two quarters back at him and said, “More.”

  “You want to call the cops, there’s an emergency number and you get your dime back.”

  “Maybe I want to call Dial-a-Prayer,” I said.

  “Just trying to be helpful.” It was the kind of help I’d been getting for a week. I went back to the booth with the makings of ten local calls.

  The first was to my office. I wanted a word with Sam. But she wasn’t there; Dorrie, on my answering service, cut in on the call, but I hung up without talking to her. I didn’t want to leave a message. Sam was probably at Entropist Hospital.

  Then I called Miller. “Made it back to your office, then?” Enough had happened to me since our early-morning encounter for me to recall it lightheartedly.

  Not him. “You’re in trouble, Albert.”

  “That’s what I am reputed to have said to myself when I first realized I’d been born.”

  “Cut the crap. Get your ass in here. We’ve got a full county alert out for you.”

  “For giving you a little push? That’s a bit excessive, isn’t it?”

  “You knocked one of my teeth out,” he said.

  “I didn’t realize. Sorry.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m not coming in to headquarters just yet, Jerry,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “You used to be rational. Unless you’ve suddenly gone berserk, I have to think that you think you know what you’re doing.”

  “I’ve been finding things out,” I said.

  “What kind of things?”

  “That one of the Loftus scientists killed John Pighee. For instance.”

  “Did Pighee die? When did it happen?”

  “He’s always been dead,” I said.

  “You said that before, but what the hell is it supposed to mean? Has Pighee gone and died or not?”

  “Well, his condition hasn’t changed, if that’s what you mean. But the emergency doctor and Marcia Merom have both told me that he always was dead from the time of the accident, and that they’ve just kept his heart and vital functions going by machine.

  There were a lot of things I could feel pass through Miller’s mind. He said, “Can you prove this?”

  “To people who start out thinking it’s not impossible. But not to your friend Gartland.”

  “My superior officer,” Miller said.

  “Does the F.B.I. do things like that?” I asked him. “Or if they do, are they allowed to get away with it?”

  “You on about that again, are you?”

  “I don’t believe things just because
somebody tells me. Even your . . . superior officer. Even if he’s been told by someone with superior personal credentials. And especially things that don’t fit with my concept of the way life is supposed to happen. Somebody is conning somebody here and unless you people know a lot more than you seem to, you may be some of the people being conned.” “That’s not very likely,” Miller said.

  “What does it take to get you guys to see the noses on your faces?”

  “Mirrors.”

  “Has the Merom woman come in to tell you about how I abducted her yet?”

  “No.”

  “If she does come in, will you interrogate her about her supposed F.B.I. activities?”

  “No,” Miller said. “Not only is it more than my job is worth, but I don’t think it’s necessary.”

  “Will you ask her about John Pighee’s real condition?”

  He didn’t say no right away. So it was possible.

  “Jerry, what would it take, exactly, to get you to consider bucking the superior Captain Gartland?”

  “More than you’re likely to be able to give me.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Physical evidence, I guess. The stuff you haven’t got.”

  “You wouldn’t consider sending an independent medical man up to look at Pighee’s body, would you?”

  “On your say-so?” That meant no.

  “How about taking the pickup on me off, so I can go and use my van. I’m getting tired of walking.”

  “It’s out of my hands now,” Miller said ominously. “But if you come in, you can make your case and we’ll see what we can do.”

  “Why does that not inspire me with confidence?”

  I don’t know whether he answered. I hung up on him. At least he’d still have people looking for my van, not Linn Pighee’s car. Poor old Linn. I wondered if I’d have time to visit her. I sat in the booth and tried to think. I saw the man behind the counter in the drugstore looking at me. I opened the door and called to him, “I’ll be out in a minute, only there’s a rat gnawing on my foot.” I closed the door again.

  Lots of dimes and a phone box in working order. By modem standards, riches. I called my office again, on the off chance that Sam had come back. But Dorrie took the call over after four rings. This time I talked to her.

  “Hello, Mr. Samson. There is a message,” she said. “Well, sort of”

  “From my daughter?”

  “No, from a man. He . . . he sounded angry. In fact, he was angry. He said you’d be in trouble when he caught up with you.”

  “Did he leave a name?”

  “No. I guess he thought you’d know.”

  “It’s just there are so many people angry with me now, it’s hard to choose.”

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “I’ve had a bad week with my Rod, but nothing like that.”

  “Did this man sound like a policeman?”

  “Gosh. I don’t know. Not really.”

  “Well, at least that narrows the field to about a hundred.”

  I used another dime to call Entropist Hospital. There was just a chance that I might be able to catch Sam there, visiting Linn Pighee. I got through to the ward nurse, who was very helpful.

  “I’m trying to contact my daughter,” I said. “I think she might be there visiting Mrs. Linn Pighee. My daughter’s in her late teens with reddish-brown hair, brown eyes, freckles. Ordinary height. The hair is long, looks like a boy’s.”

  The nurse knew her immediately. “Yes, the young lady was here. But she left,” the nurse said, “just after I told her that Mrs. Pighee died in the night.”

  Chapter Thirty Eight

  I spent more than two hours at Entropist Hospital. I got no satisfaction. Linn had died unexpectedly. They didn’t really know why, and machinery was in hand to arrange an autopsy to find out. I spent a lot of time questioning nurses about the possibility of unauthorized visitors, the chance that someone had come in to. . .

  To what? I had trouble explaining my suspicions to them. Afterward I went to their canteen for some coffee, and I had trouble understanding my suspicions myself.

  It was pushing one o’clock.

  The coffee break made me feel more relaxed, if no less confused. I was either on a compulsive course of self-destruction or I was the only man who saw what was happening. I had no choice but to go ahead. The time for discretion had passed.

  I drove out to Roland Road.

  I had trouble finding Rush’s house. Not because the address was wrong, but because the house was secluded, to put it mildly. There were high unkempt hedges, and the only roadside sign was an unmarked mailbox between the boxes for 112 and 92 Roland Road.

  I left Linn Pighee’s car a hundred feet from the mailboxes and walked back to the driveway path through the hedges. It was not a rural setting; only about half a mile from the intersection of Interstate 65 and 38th Street. Interstate 65 is the expressway into the city from the northwest side of town; 38th Street is mostly divided highway across the northside.

  Behind the porcupine hedge was a ranch-style house. Not apparently special. The line of hedging went all the way around the property.

  Isolation was not what I’d expected, but I appreciated it.

  I had walked to the middle of the driveway before I realized that I might be behaving rashly. I had assumed there would be nobody there. How the hell did I know?

  I became discreet. I moved to what vegetative cover I could find and approached the house slowly. There was no window on the garage door, so I couldn’t see if a car was at home. I walked round the house, window to window. I edged cautiously past each frame. There were no curtains or blinds. I saw clearly that there was nobody in any of the rooms.

  But there was still the problem of getting in.

  For fear of some sort of alarm on the doors, I broke a kitchen window and climbed in over the sink.

  I cleaned up the glass and put it in the wastebasket, even removing the few remaining jagged edges of the broken pane. It was not impossible I might want to make a quick exit through the same hole. I was not overconfident.

  But a careful walk through the house showed that I was indeed alone. And there was no car in the garage.

  I went back to the kitchen and started looking for objects smaller than people. And I tried to get a sense of this man.

  The life-style as expressed in his living conditions contrasted with Merom’s and Seafield’s places. They covered their spaces with small and valuable and flashy things. Most of Rush’s things were large.

  The kitchen had all the appliances, surfaces, design features. But there was no food. No cooking or eating utensils. Apart from a case of White Rock lemonade and two two-pound boxes of Mrs. Wiggins’ Fancy Cookie Assortment, there was nothing to eat at all. There was one glass tumbler.

  There were three bedrooms, but the only beds were singles in each of two bedrooms. Both were made, but only one looked as if it had ever been used. There were slippers under it, and a bathrobe on it. There were some blue suits in the closet, two white Stetson hats on a shelf. It was where the man slept. There were some prescription-medicine bottles on a table by the bedside, and a lamp, but no books.

  The room with the other bed seemed more clearly an office. Here there was a desk and a telephone. A filing cabinet. Some paper. There were no clothes in the closet.

  The third bedroom had a stack of cardboard boxes in a corner but was otherwise bare.

  The living room was large and open-plan, but what furniture there was was in a circle at one end. A television set, four deep upholstered armchairs ringing a thick rug over a more basic carpet. But nothing else. No table, no standard lamps, no newspapers, no books.

  The only other fitting I found was an American flag in a holder inside the front door.

  Nobody spent much time in this house.

  To think about what I wanted to do, I sat in one of the armchairs. It was very comfortable, which was balm for the body that housed a troubled mind. It was nearly three o’clock.
/>   I went to the office bedroom and used the phone.

  “I hoped it might be you,” Maude said. “I haven’t found a lot, but I’ve found something.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “Who do you want first? Rush, or the others?”

  “Rush,” I said.

  “He was in Intelligence during the Second World War. For about three and a half years.”

  “Interesting,” I said. “What did he do?”

  “I haven’t got details, but it wasn’t codes or propaganda or evaluation of data received. The implication is that it was in some phase of preparation of operatives.”

  “Well, well.”

  “Apart from that, he’s deep in Masonics, Legion, and that kind of thing. He’s a widower. And about ten years ago he refused to leave the Loftus board when they were doing everything but fire him. Apparently he was in charge of plant security when they uncovered systematic theft by an organized ring of employees. He said he ran security the way Sir Jeff Loftus wanted it, but he nearly went out on his ear, only he had some kind of protection in his contract. They offered him a big lump payment to help him on his way, but he turned it down. He made a deal to stay on at a frozen salary and only in a specialized capacity involving personnel development, It was the same thing that took Sir Jeff out of active company management. O.K.?”

  “Yeah. How about Rush’s friends and associates?”

  “I haven’t listed any.”

  “Don’t give me that. The fraternal Hoosier always has friends and associates.”

  “I don’t say he hasn’t got them. I just haven’t found them. And he’s certainly kept very much to himself in the last fifteen years. Since his wife died, in fact. I understand that he’s really cut himself off on a personal basis. They say he thinks about work and nothing else, and since his work became isolated, well . . .”

  “Can you tell me something else?”

  “Give me a try.”

  “Where does he eat?”

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “He doesn’t eat at home. You say he hasn’t got any friends. I just wondered where he eats.”

  “I can try,” she said doubtfully. It wasn’t the usual kind of detail she worked on.

  “Don’t bother,” I said. “Just thinking out loud.”