The Silent Salesman

by Michael Z. Lewin

  “Right,” he said.

  “All I want is that you don’t make me die unhappy, O.K.?”

  “What is this? Last-request time? Last meal? I wouldn’t waste the food.”

  “It’s just a couple of questions. Like whether Henry Rush realizes that he isn’t really a G-man.”

  This amused Seafield. He was about to speak when Merom reappeared. He risked a glance at her winter bathrobe, then said, “Go back into the bedroom. Close the door. Get into bed. Turn the TV on low and wait until I call you.”

  “But, Lee,” she whined.

  “Do it!”

  “I don’t want to miss anything and—”

  “Do it!”

  “—and besides, there was something that I remembered.”

  I saw her face. She was staring at me.

  “Goddamn it,” Seafield shouted. “Go to your goddamn bedroom and do what I goddamn told you to.”

  She didn’t want any trouble. She did what she was told. In a moment we heard the drone of the television.

  “So she doesn’t really know, either,” I said.

  “For someone so smart, she’s fucking stupid,” he said.

  “And Henry Rush?”

  “He thinks he’s a cowboy getting revenge for what they did to Custer.”

  “So he thinks what he told me is the truth?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you set this thing up?”

  “Hell, no,” he said. “Much too big for me. This was set up by the big drug boys in Detroit who went through Tommy. He’s the one who sold it to Henry. A real patriot, Henry. He’d do almost anything to help the country.” Heavy sarcasm.

  “And they recruited you?”

  “That’s it. They saw I wasn’t happy stuck like I was. They recruited me and I jumped at it.”

  “Only you saw through it.”

  “Damn right.”

  “And made your own kind of contact with . . . who, Walker?”

  He shrugged acknowledgment. His tolerance of my questions was slipping.

  “And made your own financial arrangements with him,” I said. “Did he know you were already planning to go?”

  “Planning to go?” Seafield said.

  “I saw the Portuguese books in your apartment. I figured Brazil.”

  “Quite a place,” he said. “Especially for a man with some brains, some knowledge, and some capital.”

  I nodded.

  “Only you’ve made it necessary for me to go sooner—six months and about twenty-five thou sooner—than I intended.”

  “What about her?” I asked, and nodded to the bedroom.

  “No way.” He shook his head. “She’s kind of goofy. I don’t know whether you noticed.”

  It was hard for me to keep from telling him a lot of things I had noticed. But a cheap shot could be my last.

  I asked, “How did Pighee move in there, with you around?”

  “When they brought her in, I didn’t think about her. I was kind of otherwise occupied. But then this Pighee guy comes in and he thinks he’s hot shit and he spends a lot of time telling me what a compliant piece she is if you handle her right.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “Funny him saying that, when she’s the one rats on him and tells us he’s up to something.”

  “What was he up to?”

  He shook his head. “In this sort of setup, you can’t wait for the details. One thing I’ll give him, he wasn’t a bad talent scout. Though he didn’t even scratch the surface with her.”

  Merom knocked lightly on the door. Seafield tensed immediately. He’d never moved out of the line between me and the kitchen. I’d never had a chance to run for it. With a bottle in his hand and size, strength, and youth to burn, he would be a certainty in a fight.

  “Look,” I said, “I’m a little tired. Is it all right if I sit down?”

  “Lee?” came the voice through the door. “You haven’t forgotten me, have you? Can I come out now?”

  “Don’t worry about being tired,” he said. “I’ll take care of that for you.”

  “You’re really going to do it, then?”

  “I’m really going to do it.” He slapped the bottle in his hand. “All I have to do is think about the money you cost me and I’ll enjoy doing it.”

  “Lee?”

  “Almost as much as she’ll enjoy watching it.”

  He stretched a hand to the bedroom door.

  I stepped sharply forward, to make him respond to me. He did. I didn’t want Merom back in the room.

  “Look,” I said. “If you’re really going to do it, won’t you at least let me say my prayers?”

  Astonishment passed over his face. “What?”

  “If I’m going to die, let me get right with God.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “Please.” I put my hands together, palm to palm, to show my good faith.

  He smiled. “Say your prayers,” he said. A last magnanimity.

  I dropped to my knees and then waddled to the couch. My back was to him as I leaned on it.

  I heard the door open behind me. Seafield said, “Hey, look at this. He wants to say a fucking prayer.” I heard Merom shuffle into the room, grunting at her displeasure at being caged when she could have been playing with the mouse.

  I heard her stop shuffling, stop grunting. I heard her gasp. I heard her say, “No, Lee! No!”

  Chapter Fourty Two

  I lunged toward the cushion at the end of the couch. I felt all around under it for the gun that Merom had put there the last time I’d been with her in the apartment. It wasn’t there. I couldn’t find it.

  I couldn’t have been wrong, could I? I dived for the cushion at the other end. It couldn’t have been under that one. I remembered clearly. But then my fingers found cold hard metal.

  I juggled for the handle. Found it. Pulled the trigger as I tried to turn it toward Seafield.

  The gun went off into the arm of the couch.

  I turned it, pulled at it. It went off again and took a lampshade and a picture frame. I got it up. I saw a big shadow over me, an arm falling. I tried to pull the trigger again. All my strength.

  There were crashes. The shadow fell hard on the gun and my hands. Glass sprayed all over me. Everything stung. Light glowed and faded. Seafield—it must have been Seafield—balanced above me.

  He seemed to rise, to float, to fall.

  Then he sank away to my right. Light came on strong again. I saw Merom standing behind where Seafield had been. She was watching, half curious, half petrified, half smiling. She was covered with blood. Everything was covered with blood. Wall, pictures. I looked to myself I was covered with blood.

  My legs were pinned underneath the huge hulk that used to be Lee Seafield. I knew that he was dead. There was a small pulsing fountain of blood spouting out of his back, but I knew he was dead. Then the fountain stopped. Explosions had ripped him apart. Explosions had taken his life, saved mine. Saved mine.

  I looked up at Merom again. She stood exactly where she’d been before. Nothing happened. I watched, wondering if I had hit her. Whether something that had gone through Seafield had hit her.

  Then I realized I wasn’t holding the gun any more. At least I couldn’t feel it in my hand. I looked at my hand. There was no gun in it. I didn’t know where it was.

  I was afraid again. I pushed forward, growling, and tried to move Seafield’s body off me. It wouldn’t move. I got panicky.

  The gun was beside me, on the floor in a dust of glass. I grabbed it gratefully, I found it hard to grip, between the glass and the blood. I used both hands and turned back to Merom.

  She still hadn’t moved.

  I raised the gun. I pointed it.

  I knew in my mind that I was free to pull the trigger if I decided to. I aimed at her heart.

  Then I relaxed, and bent my arms.

  In front of me Merom began to fall. Then she dropped heavily and hard.

  It was as if I’d pul
led the trigger when I’d wanted to. As if I’d been the kind of people they had been.

  For a while I wondered if I had pulled the trigger.

  Chapter Fourty Three

  “Hello, Daddy.”

  “If it isn’t the kid. Hello, kid.”

  “Lieutenant Miller is outside, but he said I could come in first just for a minute. You’re better today, aren’t you?”

  “I’m awake. They tell me I’ve been unconscious for two days.”

  “It’s Sunday. They found you early Friday morning.”

  “So I understand,” I said.

  “I’m so sorry,” Sam said. She began to snuffle.

  “Sorry? What for?”

  “Grandma said that you went out looking for me. That you thought I’d been kidnapped or something.”

  “It crossed my mind.”

  “And that’s why you got involved with those people.”

  “I was already involved with them. They didn’t like me very much.”

  “No,” she said.

  We both stopped talking for a moment. I was thinking that physically I’d come out pretty whole. Some cuts and a couple of broken fingers.

  “I’m supposed to go now. They only gave me a minute.”

  “O.K., honey,” I said. “Look after your grandmother for me.”

  “I will.” She kissed me and left.

  Miller entered as Sam left. He didn’t kiss me. He didn’t even hold my hand.

  “Nice of you to stop in,” I said. “What’s new in the Indianapolis police department? You chief yet? Or are they holding the appointment open for me?”

  “We don’t usually appoint murderers to be chief of police,” he said.

  “Murderers?”

  He mistook my question, thought I was emphasizing the plural. “That’s right. Marcia Merom died thirty-six hours ago.”

  “I didn’t murder anyone,” I said.

  “What do you call shooting unarmed people to death?” “Unarmed people who were about to kill me. I call it self-defense.” “Well,” he said.

  I waited.

  “I call it self-defense, too, but Captain Gartland wasn’t very happy about it.”

  “Gartland’s not happy when he gets two prizes in his Cracker Jacks, but it doesn’t change the facts.”

  “Fortunately there are some supporting details. Rope marks on your wrists and ankles. Bruising where you may have been beaten. Window glass in your hands.”

  “Along with broken bones.”

  “And broken bones. The fact that the gun was Merom’s and not yours.”

  “I don’t own one. Maybe I should.”

  “Everybody else in the world has one.”

  “You’ve talked me out of it.”

  “You know Seafield bent the gun barrel when he hit it with that wine bottle?” Miller asked. He was showing me that he’d reconstructed much of what had happened.

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

  “Doctor says he must have hit the gun with the bottle. Broke your fingers on reverberations. If he’d hit your hand, we’d still be picking up the pieces. And all that with three holes in him.”

  “Three!”

  “That’s the number after two and before four.”

  “I couldn’t have shot him three times. I wasn’t sure I’d shot him once.”

  “You mean after you finished off the couch arm and the picture on the wall?”

  “No comment.”

  “The gun does hold six shots, you know. And good thing you didn’t fire the last one.”

  “Why?”

  “Because with a bent barrel the gun would have blown up on you, that’s why. The bullet wouldn’t have got out. Things get nasty when that happens.”

  I lowered my head. “I don’t remember very well.”

  “Gartland may get your license,” Miller said. “But you should be all right on any charges.”

  “You’re trying to cheer me up, are you?”

  “Don’t worry about the cop outside the door. Just a precaution.” “What cop?”

  “Well,” he said. “We’ve got a guy out there, that’s all. Gartland’s orders.”

  “Terrific,” I said. I was getting tired.

  Miller saw my eyes fluttering. “You should know that we found those letters.”

  “What letters?”

  “The letters from the F.B.I. to Rush, in your jacket pocket.” As he told me I remembered. “The F.B.I. here says they don’t think they can be real, but we’re checking them out.”

  “What about Rush?”

  “He’s been in all day answering questions.”

  “And Walker?”

  “The guy with Rush and Seafield when they caught you in Rush’s house? We’re looking for him.”

  “For Christ’s sake, don’t let him get away, Jerry.”

  “Is he important?”

  “Damn right He’s the linkman. He’ll be away if you give him the chance.”

  Miller got up. “I’ll let you rest now.”

  I drifted in and out of sleep. Half my waking periods I thought about happier days. The other half I spent trying to reconstruct how I’d got myself into this.

  In the middle of the afternoon, I realized that Linn Pighee was dead. Dead. Linn Pighee, who had slept in my bed, been cared for by my crippled daughter.

  “Nurse! Nurse!” I called, I cried, I rang the bell.

  A child in white appeared. “What’s wrong?”

  “She can’t be dead,” I said. “She can’t be.”

  The child hovered, not knowing whether there was anything she should do, could do. Comfort me, get someone to doctor me, or wait me out. Indecision made her wait. And I subsided.

  Later in the afternoon I woke up properly. I asked a nurse to send me someone in authority. I had the head nurse in mind. Instead they sent me Miller.

  “You ready to make your statement?” he asked.

  “I’ve been thinking,” I said.

  “I can see why you wanted someone to mark the occasion.” “John Pighee’s wife, Linn Pighee. She died the other day.”

  “I heard she died,” Miller said.

  “I need to talk to the guy that did the autopsy.”

  “You need to! Just who the hell are you, then?”

  “I’ve got to know why she died.”

  “You shot her, too, or something?”

  “Look,” I said, “I’m not making any statement until you arrange for the guy that did the autopsy to come up here.”

  “People are supposed to mellow when they get to your age.”

  “Or get cantankerous. I feel pretty cantankerous.”

  “All right, all right, I’ll go arrange it. But you get your strength up. I’ve got a stenographer outside. When I get back, we take your preliminary statement, before you shoot yourself. You been shoot¬ing everybody else lately.”

  Forty minutes later, fortified by a glass of orange juice, I started telling them, step by step, how being hired by Mrs. Thomas had led me to the people John Pighee was involved with. It was a long and grisly interview and when I got to the last bit it hit me, hard, for the first time, just what a slender thread of circumstance had made the difference between my being alive and being dead.

  “You won’t get me knocking the power of prayer now,” I told them.

  I woke up in the night. I remembered things. I was due to be evicted. My license was in real danger from Gartland. My savings had been stolen. Sam would have to go back soon. I had killed two people.

  Killed two people. I couldn’t fathom how that had come to happen. I couldn’t—in the abstract—conceive how I could do any such thing. But I had. It had just happened. I’d killed to save my own life. It drove home the fact that I was mortal. That Linn Pighee was dead. That Sam would die one day.

  I must have been crying out. Somebody came to my bedside in the night. I remember my forehead being wiped, being soothed. I felt better for it. Comforted.

  I dreamed again later, but without t
he same anxieties. Mrs. Thomas burst into my room. I saw her come to my bedside and take my hand and smile from beneath the leather folds of her face. She said, “Job well done,” and she patted my head. She didn’t say it, but I knew she was congratulating me for shooting Marcia Merom. “She was no better for John than Linn was,” Mrs. Thomas said in my dream. “She’s well out of the way. When John gets well, we’ll try to find him someone else,” she said, “someone more like me.”

  Chapter Fourty Four

  “Mr. Samson.” A gentle urgent voice accompanied gentle urging hands.

  “Careful,” I said, “or you’ll wake me up.”

  “Mr. Samson, Doctor is here.”

  I sat up to face a short bald man with an aquiline nose and a droopy mustache. He wore a white coat and a frown.

  “What can I do for you?” I asked. “Pulse? Blood pressure?”

  “You,” he said, “you apparently demanded to see me. I don’t know who you are or why you have a police guard on your door, but I don’t have much time and I don’t have any to waste.”

  “Ahh,” I said. “You’re the man who did the autopsy on Linn Pighee.”

  He did a double take. Then said, “I am.”

  “What did she die of?”

  He decided not to buck the authority that had brought him to my bedside. He just answered, “A bone cancer.”

  “Not malnutrition?”

  “Malnutrition is a side effect.”

  “How common is it?”

  “Not common,” he said. “Rare. Even for a bone cancer.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because the malignancy involves the outside of the bones, not the marrow.”

  “How does it happen? What causes it?”

  “Next time I have an audience with God, I’ll ask him.”

  “That’s not quite what I meant. Is it the sort of thing that some kind of radioactive material could cause?”

  He was suddenly alert. “Certain beta emitters. Are you saying that this woman worked with radioactive materials?”

  “Her husband did,” I said. “Did you check for radioactive stuff in her body?”

  “I did not,” he said crisply. “But I will.”

  He left me to my dreams. They were no less vivid just because I was awake.

  I started causing trouble. I asked for Miller, but he wasn’t at the hospital. I demanded a telephone so I could call him.