The Silent Salesman

by Michael Z. Lewin

  The nurse didn’t want to bring me one.

  “Look,” I said. “I’m a V.I.P.”

  “You are?”

  “They don’t put a police guard on everybody’s room in this hospital, do they?”

  She thought about it. “Who are you, then?”

  “Just bring the phone. Autographs later.”

  Miller wasn’t at police headquarters. I kept the telephone. I told them I was calling a lawyer.

  But it wasn’t my own lawyer.

  “A couple of questions arise,” I told Walter Weston, “following the death of Linn Pighee.”

  “I was shocked,” he said. “Stunned.” And I believed him, because it had happened to me.

  “Do you know that John Pighee is also dead?”

  After a pause, he said, “I’ve talked to the police, who said you’d suggested something of the sort. I’m not prepared to accept it as established until further investigation has taken place.”

  “Who gets the money and property left by Linn Pighee?”

  “If you have an outstanding claim on her estate, then submit it to me and I’ll try to deal with it as soon as I can.” He hesitated. “Samson, don’t underestimate the amount, of your . . . um . . .”

  “That’s not why I was asking. Is there much to her estate?”

  “Not a lot. She was not a rich woman.”

  “But the house, the money her husband left?”

  “Ahh,” he said. “That all depends on when—and if—John Pighee dies.”

  “But he’s been dead since the accident seven months ago,” I said.

  “But not certificated as dead.”

  “So he inherits from her.”

  “It would seem so.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I tried Miller again. Was told he was due soon.

  I rested.

  Third time lucky. “Tell me. Lieutenant,” I said. “If I was to suggest you went to look in a closet somewhere and you found something interesting, would you come and tell me all about it?”

  “Albert,” he said, sounding tired for so early in the morning, “we got a clown here who works in Missing Persons. He spends most of his time making up hypothetical questions and cornering people to ask them to. I just got caught in the elevator. I’m not in the mood. Do you have something to tell me?”

  I told him to go look in Mrs. Thomas’s cupboard. “And while you’re about it, check out the booze bottles, food containers—that sort of stuff—in the main house.”

  “Check them out?”

  “Start with a Geiger counter. I didn’t mean sample them.”

  “A Geiger counter! What the hell are you on about?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “You don’t like hypotheses, so I can’t tell you.” I hung up.

  Chapter Fourty Five

  Miller walked in two and a half hours later. Before I’d finished my lunch. He looked distinctly happy. I didn’t remember him looking like that since before he made lieutenant.

  “You look like a chocolate Cheshire cat,” I said. “You just catch a chocolate Cheshire mouse?”

  “I’ve got a lady outside wants to kill you,” he said.

  “No wonder you look so happy. Anyone I know?”

  “A lady called Dorothea Thomas. John Pighee’s sister.”

  “Ahh,” I said.

  He handed me a leather-bound book. “I can give you about twenty minutes with this before I take the lady to her new home.” I nodded. “Thanks,” I said.

  “I’ll be outside.” He walked to the door. “By the way, those letters from the F.B.I. were forgeries and Henry Rush tried to kill himself. They brought him here; he’s five doors down the hall.” He left.

  The book was the journal of John Austin Pighee. He had begun it the day Henry Rush recruited him to work on Project Bagtag. “I guess the F.B.I. has to do its work somewhere,” he wrote. “I feel the luckiest darn man in the world that it happens to be the place I’m working. And when this is over, when the culmination of all the work ahead pays off, I feel sure that the world will want to know what it owes to people like Henry. That’s why I’m writing this diary. I’ll write in it every day. I’ll keep it in my sister’s trailer and stop in each day either before or after I go to work.”

  And he had. The enthusiasm for his work showed. He believed throughout that he was working for the F.B.I. He felt obliged to sell the importance of the project, its mission as he saw it, at every opportunity. The man had been a salesman, after all. And in this journal he was silently preparing the product that would be the big sale of his life.

  It was clear that he intended to turn the journal into a true-life undercover book. He figured to make his fortune.

  From the beginning it was full of personal details about the people involved with him. I suspect that he made approaches to Marcia Merom in the first place only so that he would have juicy details to write about. And write about them he did.

  He found her solicitous and flexible. And he claimed to feel alive with her and excited by her. “Which I don’t with Linn, my wife, and haven’t since our tragedy.” The only reference I found to his wife.

  The tragedy being the loss of their kids to a car.

  But the week before he died, he wrote, “The pressure for secrecy is so steady, so complete, that I haven’t even fold Marcia about this diary. Should I, I wonder? I don’t know. There are depths to her that even I haven’t plumbed. Until then . . .

  “But I’ve been worrying,” he continued. “When this journal goes to a publisher, will they believe me? I’m wondering if I shouldn’t start accumulating supplementary evidence, to prove—against official denials, should they take place—that this is a real operation and not just the product of my fevered imagination. Occasional notes, a few samples of materials we use. That kind of thing.”

  I called Miller in. “You like?” he asked.

  “It would have saved me a lot of trouble if I’d known it existed,” I said. “What else did you get out of the cupboard?”

  “Some samples of an illegal white powder. And an empty container of some radioactive stuff. Some scraps with notes on them. Some invoice copies. I don’t know quite what.”

  “What about the stuff in the house? Anything radioactive?”

  “We didn’t go out there with your Geiger counter, if that’s what you mean, but we brought a lot of stuff back and we’re looking into it. What do you think happened? What’s it all about?”

  “When I sent you out there, I thought you’d find stuff to show that John Pighee fed his wife radioactive calcium that led to her bone cancer.”

  “My God. Killed by the dead.”

  “But I’m not so sure now,” I said. “Let Mrs. Thomas in here, will you?”

  “Let her in? You sure?”

  “Yeah. Come in with her, but stay out of the way.”

  He shrugged and went out to bring her in. My stock had risen.

  Mrs. Thomas came in red and raging; her face looked as if it had just been shorn of fur and was smarting at the abuse.

  “You!” she said, and nearly hit me. “You betrayed my trust. It should be against the law to betray a client’s trust.”

  “It is,” I said, “except when it involves information relating to a crime.”

  “What crime?” she asked, suddenly coy.

  I held up her brother’s journal. “You read this day by day, didn’t you?”

  She thought about whether she should deny it. Then said, “Yes.”

  “So when you hired me, you knew this group he was working with was why John was not allowed to have visitors.”

  “Well,” she said.

  “But you put me on the scene to pressure them so they would give you money, maybe the money you had been getting from John.”

  “He would have wanted them to,” she said emphatically. “There I was getting nothing, and they were making her a wealthy woman for as long as he was sick. It wasn’t her he cared about.”

  “No. It was you, and Marci
a Merom, but definitely not Linn.”

  “Definitely not. She was bad enough at the beginning, trapping him with . . . the way she did. But after the children died she was nothing, nothing to him.”

  “She was holding him back. With her out of the way, there were no limits on him.”

  “She was an anchor,” she said.

  “Only he wouldn’t do anything about getting rid of her.”

  “No,” she said heatedly, “so—” She caught herself.

  “So you helped him, as you always helped him, since he was a baby.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “And besides,” I said, “if John died—”

  “He won’t die.”

  “But if he did. Linn would inherit everything. Unless she died first.”

  She sat and glared. As clear as a silent confession can be.

  Chapter Fourty Six

  Sam visited me in the afternoon. Ray McGonigle was with her. “Hey, man,” he said. But stood back as Sam came close and sat at my bedside.

  I could see she’d been crying.

  “Daddy,” she said. “Daddy.”

  “What is it, kid?”

  “I talked to Mummy this morning on the phone. She says I have to go home. I’ve got to go back to school.”

  “Of course you do,” I said.

  “I mean I’ve got to go now. Ray’s taking me to the airport.”

  “A better father would keep track of these things,” I said. In a wave, I felt like crying. But so as not to pressure her I fought it, and won. Then decided I should cry if I felt like it. But by then I couldn’t.

  “I almost told Mummy I wasn’t going back to school,” Sam said. “But with only one year to go for my diploma, I think I should probably stick it out this year.”

  “Of course you should,” I said.

  “Daddy,” she began. But we were interrupted by motions outside the door to my room. They went on for half a minute while we all watched the door and waited. I had a moment’s fearful trembling. It passed through my mind that Gartland had come to the hospital to do a rash thing.

  But instead, when the door opened, a short old man walked in. He carried a cane but hardly let it touch the floor. He was wiry and his hair was bright white.

  He came to the bed and, ignoring Sam, said to me, “How’s the patient, then?”

  I couldn’t think of anything snappy to say except, “All right.” “How long are you in for?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Treating you well, are we?”

  “Fine.”

  “Frightful fuss I had getting in here. I told the policeman outside I’ve been visiting patients fortnightly for twenty-three years and I was damned if I was going to leave anybody out, no matter how dangerous.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  He turned to Sam and Ray. “Family visitors. Always good for morale, I think. Well, mend quickly.” Abruptly he left.

  Ray’s excitement carried him halfway to the door. “Do you know who that was? Do you know?”

  “I have the feeling,” I said, “that I am about to be told.”

  “That was Sir Jeff! Sir Jeff Loftus himself! Wow!” He looked fondly at the closed door.

  “Wow?”

  “Imagine an important guy like that taking time to visit patients in a hospital. Wow!”

  The way Ray was staring at the door through which the great man had passed, it crossed my mind he was going to take it off its hinges. And fix it.

  I said, “Ray, go help Sir Jeff.”

  “What?”

  “It’s your big opportunity. He might stumble and you’d be there to pick up his crown. Go on.”

  Ray hesitated but wanted to follow Sir Jeff as much as I wanted to be left alone with Sam. He went out.

  “I was telling you,” I said to her, “that you should get your diploma.”

  Sam sat quietly for several seconds. Then burst on me, “When I graduate, I thought—I thought it would really be good if I came back here and helped you.”

  “Helped me?”

  “With the detective business.” She sat up eagerly as she said, “While you thought I was kidnapped, I was out buying the sign.”

  “Sign?”

  “It’s a present. To put outside over your door and sell yourself better. It’s neon and people will see it, and know you’re there.”

  “I expect they will,” I said.

  “It says ‘Albert Samson, Private Investigator.’ And”—real excitement—“it came this morning!”

  “It came?”

  “They delivered it to the office. It’s really lovely. I plugged it in and it flashes!”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “The great thing about it is you can plug another line into it.”

  “Another line?”

  “So it could read ‘Albert Samson & Daughter,’ ” she said. Then she got shy. “If you’d be willing to have me around. Daddy.”

  “You don’t have to ask that,” I said.

  She didn’t say anything. Neither did I, feeling too warm.

  “It’s a pity,” I said, at last.

  “What is?”

  “That I didn’t get my way when your mother and I were fighting about what to name you.”

  She hesitated. “What did you want to name me?”

  “Delilah,” I said. “Now, that would be a great sign. ‘Samson & Delilah Detective Agency.’ ”

  She smiled. “I can always change my name,” she said.

  “I could always get another Delilah,” I said.

  “Why?” Hurt.

  “You don’t think I’m going to take on a partner with only a high school diploma, do you? I wouldn’t consider a partner who didn’t have a college degree.”

  “You wouldn’t?”

  “Nope.” Good deed for the day.

  “Oh.”

  “I’ve got to maintain standards.”

  “But you don’t have a college degree.”

  “I don’t need another dummy like me in the business. I’m a luxury I can ill afford. Tell you what, I’ll hold the place open for you. How’s that?”

  “I’ve got lots of ideas how to make it better,” she said.

  “It makes me tired just to think of you doing all that thinking.” I realized I was tired. I sagged and she noticed it. “When do you go, did you say?”

  “I should have gone yesterday. There’s a plane in . . .” She looked at her watch.

  “Give me your hand, kid.”

  She bent over and kissed me.

  “Keep your detective card dusted.”

  “I will.”

  “Your visit was much appreciated,” I said. “Knowing I have a grown-up daughter makes me feel ten years younger.”

  When Sam walked out the door, it felt like the end of a lot of things. But I couldn’t get myself depressed about it and for a while I couldn’t understand why. I had no money, would shortly have no place to live, and probably no license. I’d killed two people, and a third, a good one, had died. I was alone and childless again.

  But the negative blanket of events just didn’t envelop me. They were all opportunities, in their own way, to shuffle life’s pack. To deal a new hand. Maybe with some of the old cards in it, maybe not.

  And I realized what I was really looking forward to was Sam’s neon sign. Bright and garish, a flashing silent salesman outside a new office, telling the world, day and night, that I was still in business, still alive.

  About the Author

  MICHAEL Z. LEWIN is the award-winning author of many mystery novels and short stories. Most have been set in and around Indianapolis, Indiana, where he grew up. Albert Samson is a low-key private eye and the stories focus on humane understanding of the cases and problems Samson encounters. Leroy Powder is an irascible Indy police lieutenant who truly wants his colleagues to become better cops. They’re bound to be grateful, right? Both central characters have an abiding wish to see justice done. One of the features of the series novels, and some
stand-alones, is that that main characters from one book often appear in lesser roles in other books.

  Since 1971 Mike has lived in the West of England, currently in Bath where his city-centre flat overlooks the nearby hills. Both his children have made careers in the arts. Masses more information and silly stuff is available on www.MichaelZLewin.com.

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  Copyright

  First published in 1978 by Harper & Row, Publishers

  This edition published 2015 by Bello

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

  Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

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  ISBN 978-1509-8166-82 EPUB

  ISBN 978-1509-8166-68 HB

  ISBN 978-1566-75 PB

  Copyright © 1978 by Michael Z. Lewin

  The right of Michael Z. Lewin to be identified as the

  author of this work has been asserted by him in

  accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means

  (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise)

  without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations

  and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.