by Howard Engel
“What kind of tea is that?” I asked her. It smelled of wet straw.
“Lapsang Souchong,” she said. “For the refined palate.” She smiled at me over her cup.
As we drank, we speculated about what might have happened to Beverley.
“Which of the people we had dinner with last night does she know best?”
“She’s been seeing Chester Ranken a lot recently.”
“Tall, blond, and handsome. You know where he lives?”
“Somewhere on the waterfront, in an old warehouse that’s been made into flats.” She opened a few drawers looking for the address, finally locating it in a flat black book. Fiona wrote it out for me. While she’d been rooting around, I’d scribbled the number on the phone into my book. “Benny, you’re not really worried about her, are you? I mean really worried.”
I did my best to put her mind at ease. Then, after I felt she was reassured, Clay and I left.
There was an offshore breeze in the air when we came out into the light. I took the opportunity to thank Clay for all his help. I meant it. Tonight he’d been the right man in the right place for me, and so I was grateful. I also hoped to give him an out, in case he wanted to disengage before he became more involved. I put it to him and he thought it over.
“You know, Benny, the best times of my life, apart from grooving with my axe or my woman, is this time between when we break up the last set, sometime after three or four, and when I hit the sack. Sometimes it’s only a bite to eat with the men, sometimes it’s a walk in the rain. Usually a couple of hours, you know, to unwind.” I nodded. “So, if you got no objections, man, I’d just as soon see where this is goin’ to take us. I don’t know why, but I think you’re into some scary shit. You goin’ to need a cool dude like me along.”
“You might shorten your career.”
“Right now, I don’t care if I never see another smoky nightclub ever again. With drunk dudes asking for ‘Perdido.’ You hear what I’m sayin’? Anyway, you don’t even know your way home.”
“Okay. I warned you.” I passed the slip of paper Fiona had given me to Clay, who glanced at it and stuffed it into his pocket. We found the car and got in.
We drove in the direction of the harbor, the only direction I could recognize. After a few turns and some abrupt stops, the Morgan came to a standstill in front of an ancient warehouse. It stood solidly on its block, showing no ground-floor windows, but regular rows of them above. It was a wooden building, but one in which wood had been used the way we use bricks. It was built like a grain elevator, but instead of mounting straight up, it made a solid mass, adding a major weight to the spongy ground above tidewater. Its one entrance in the middle of the main floor gave the warehouse balance and what dignity it possessed. We left the car near the end of the block and walked back to the entrance. A light across the street was flickering from pale yellow to not much more than a glimmer. Both of us looked over our shoulders more than once.
I pushed the intercom button, which was fortunately working. “Who is it?” A male voice.
“It’s Ben Cooperman. I’m looking for Beverley Taylor. Is she with you? Have you seen her since dinner?”
“You’d better come up. Suite 313. Take the elevator to your right,” he said and buzzed the door open.
“This is very fancy digs, Benny. Bet it’s got a bath and a shower.” The elevator was slow, but functioning. Unlike the one in my hotel, this looked like it had been built in the present century. Like the rest of the building, the elevator had been adapted from heavier carrying and lifting.
“You know this dude we’re calling on, Ben?”
“Met him at dinner last night. Name of Ranken. Chester Ranken. American.”
“Maybe I should stay with the car. What d’you think?”
“Clay, you’re with me. I can get you killed better than anybody.”
“That’s what I thought. Was the voice on the intercom the voice you met at dinner?”
“Good question. I’m not sure. Maybe you should make the call and I’ll wait in the car.”
“I thought you’d say that.” The elevator rose slowly if not majestically through the three floors as though it had been designed to move French royalty from château to château and back. It wasn’t even called an elevator, it was an ascenseur.
The hall was dark when the doors opened at last. Clay pushed a button and a light at the end of a long hallway came to life. We moved down the corridor counting the numbers. I rang the bell marked 313. Clay had a sprinkling of perspiration on his forehead and upper lip. When I made a pass at my face with the hand that wasn’t tightly made into a fist in my pocket, I found that I was sweating too. The single light caught our joint naked fear.
I rang the doorbell again, trying to look pleasant to the tiny glass spyhole in the door. We waited a minute. I tried again. Again, there was no answer. It was about then that the hall light switched off. The hallway went dark and no sounds were coming from inside. “Damn it! They must be waiting for us!”
“It’s just the minuterie. The light turns itself off. It’s on a timer. Light’s doin’ what it’s paid to do. You never run into a minuterie before, Ben?”
“I’ve lived a sheltered life, up to now.”
After I pushed the bell a fourth time, Clay tried the door. It was unlocked, and light was burning inside.
The apartment was small: a bedroom and kitchen–living room. Oriental rugs were everywhere, some even hanging on the walls like pictures. A number of framed samples of Japanese calligraphy added light, as did a few watercolors of chrysanthemums and bamboo trees. Apart from that, the rest of the furnishings were simple, almost Spartan.
An interior hand grasped at my liver as I opened the bedroom door and let the light spill in from the other room. Inside, we found Chester Ranken rolled up in a fetal ball, on a small antique Persian rug, like a child with a stomach ache. A pool of blood that seemed to begin with his shirt told us what we already knew. I didn’t see a murder weapon, but then, I didn’t really look until after I had used the bathroom. Clay followed me there after I came out with a towel, wiping my face, which was still smarting from the cold water.
NINETEEN
THERE WAS NOTHING we could do for Ranken. From the freshness of the blood—it had just started to get tacky—and from the normal warmth of the body, I figured that the murderer’s might not have been the voice I’d heard on the intercom. It was a tough call. It may have been the murderer on the intercom and, again, it may have been another unlucky passerby. Like us. I didn’t probe to see the wound. My stomach couldn’t take it. But it was clear that the weapon had been taken from the scene. My knees cracked noisily as I got back to my feet. “We’d better have a look around. If you get the closets, I’ll get the drawers.”
All of that oriental stuff made the apartment seem smaller that it really was. Apart from the rugs already mentioned, brass plaques hung from the walls, a hubble-bubble water pipe filled one alcove, and Chinese calligraphy hung on the walls near the windows. The walls were decorated with brass plaques, which reflected the light from the floor lamp. There were plenty of books about; he’d obviously been settled here for some time. When I saw the telephone, I wondered about calling the police. I asked Clay. He shook his head. “When I reported finding a dead junkie back of the club where I park the car, they kept me on ice for two days. I didn’t even know the guy.”
I keep telling myself I’m in the wrong business: what’s wrong with ladies’ ready-to-wear? I still felt a clutching at my stomach; I’d been feeling it since the minuterie turned off in the hall. I looked around, to see if there was any sign of Beverley. I wasn’t seeing as clearly as a hardened professional, but I didn’t detect any trace of Beverley or any other female presence. The bathroom was a mess: not the john of somebody expecting company. There were no signs of a struggle either. The victim knew his murderer and had welcomed him into the flat. Just the way the murderer—if it was the murderer—welcomed us up the slow elevator while he m
ade an exit down the stairs. The murderer not only knew his victim, he knew the flat and the building.
When I returned to the main room, Clay was hunkered deep down in the middle of a large oriental settee, his long hands and wrists dangling from his sleeves in a hopeless way. “What’s the matter?” I asked.
“This the way you live, Ben? People in dark cars after you? With bodies and violence and all? Your head is as littered as the beach after the tidal wave, no shit.”
“Why have you been helping me, then?”
“I collect stray cats too. Man, I never seen anybody as helpless as you when you first walked into the club hopin’ there was a back door. All I could see was the whites of your eyes. You choose to live like this?”
“Mostly it’s more like bookkeeping. In the twenty years I’ve been doing this, I haven’t seen a lot of blood. You don’t get used to it. Maybe cops do.”
“You do this for a living, then? What you know about the law down here?”
“Not enough to hurt, I guess.”
I hadn’t meant to tell him, but I wasn’t thinking straight. “Yeah. Hell of a way to make a dollar, isn’t it?” I thought for a minute, listening to the sounds filtering into the room. “I think I’m a tidier at heart. I like to straighten the messes in people’s lives. People come to me with problems. I’m a fixer, I guess. It’s what I do.”
For a while we both stared at the floor carpets, only because they provided a neutral place to focus on. We didn’t talk. I tried to think about the sequence of events: I had said too much at dinner, got an SOS call from Beverley, who then vanished, heard that she was well acquainted with Chester Ranken, and then found Ranken dead in his apartment. What could I add to that? Ranken had been dead for some time; not hours and hours, but at least one. The blood was just getting tacky. So who was it who let us into the building? Not the murderer. He would not have waited. Someone else who had an interest in the dear departed. Who could that have been? It looked as though Beverley’s disappearance had caused a lot of activity. I thought about the characters in this story I hadn’t even met yet. There was a Papa Doc figure at the top of things. I couldn’t remember his name. There was his current man-of-all-works, whose name I couldn’t remember either. Had Ranken been doing any business with them? The government people had forced the—yet again, my memory failed me—my client and her husband to relinquish their business. I think they did. It was when the local strongman couldn’t get things working that he tried to force Rick—good, I’d saved at least one name!—to manage his old business for them. Did they know about the drug exchange that was going on under their noses out at the reef? The last question was the one I always kept coming back to: what had happened to Rick What’s-his-name? I was just beginning to feel on top of this mess of confusion when I remembered that there was no Rick in this walking headache. Rick was in a movie. Jake was the guy I was looking for. I must try to keep things straight.
“You goin’ to sit there for much longer? I say we’re through here, Ben. This guy’s beyond his problems. Things ain’t goin’ to get any worse for him. Who was he, anyway?”
I told Clay what I knew, which wasn’t much. Soon we both heaved our way out of the deep leather seats and across the carpets to the door. This time, like the murderer, or whoever it was who had buzzed us in, we took the stairs to the outside door.
“Where to now?” Clay asked, after he had closed the driver’s-side door of his Morgan. Now, instead of feeling privileged to drive in one of the great tiny cars of the past, I felt exposed and vulnerable. This was time for an old bone-crusher like my ancient Olds. When Clay repeated his question, I couldn’t think of anything. The only move I suggested was to get as far away from this neighborhood as possible. And while I sat back to let the car move me away from the scene of the crime, I wondered whether anybody would associate the car with the murder scene. A Morgan is a rare car in New York, Paris, Toronto, or London. Here in Takot, there couldn’t be two of them. Another thing: whoever opened the apartment door to Clay and me heard me say my name loud and clear. I was deep into this now, with both feet.
We ended up at a place I’d never seen before and which I could never find again on my own: Clay explained that it was an early-risers’ club. Most of the clientele were chefs from the best restaurants in town. This is where they met and gossiped about who had won or lost a bonnet or star in the last Michelin guide. We took a seat and felt the eyes of the other customers upon us. The chef here, a chef’s chef, passed around a large terrine of pâté with stale pieces of toast. When they asked me where I came from and I told them, I expected no interest. But no, all of them began asking after the health of dear old Lij Swift, who ran the bootlegger’s after-hours place along the Niagara Frontier, the one I’d mentioned the other night to Chet. When everything became very friendly, and I was asked what I wanted, I spoiled it all by asking for a chopped-egg sandwich. How was I to know it was an insult?
We ate heartily from the morning’s specialty—a sort of omelet with mixed herbs—and some of the best coffee ever. When the novelty of having Westerners on board for the morning’s entertainment began to wear thin, Clay turned to me with a question. “What are you going to do now? You goin’ get you’self killed if I turn you loose?”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. And backed it up with a frail grin. “You’ve got to get some rest or you’ll never be able to play tonight.”
“Yeah, me and Dracula stay clear of the sun. Don’t shit me, man, are you goin’ to get your white ass shot up if I pull the plug for a few hours?”
“Give me your number. I’ll try to keep in touch.” We exchanged phone numbers and got back in the car. After another ten minutes, I was imagining myself peeling off my rumpled tuxedo and climbing into bed. In fact, I did only the latter. I went directly to sleep. I didn’t pass Go. I didn’t collect two hundred dollars.
TWENTY
THE COFFEE BY MY BED was still hot when I got to it. The croissant was fresh inside the golden crust. I reached for my Memory Book and gave the front desk the number I’d taken down from Fiona’s phone last night. Or was it two days ago? When did I arrive, anyway? Time was swimming in my head like a hard-boiled egg in chicken soup. Maybe it was the earliness of the hour, I thought, and checked my watch. I’d slept in again. While waiting for Fiona to pick up the phone, I rehearsed in my head all the things going on: my “dead” client, her dead husband, the treasure in the tea tin. It helped. So did another swallow of coffee.
“Hello?”
“Fiona, it’s Benny. Have you heard from your former roommate?”
“What time is it? I must have fallen asleep.” I glanced at my watch and worked out the time. As I was doing it, I was aware that I had just checked the time, but I had no memory of what I had found out. That was the way it was with almost everything. I was getting bored with my affliction.
“About ten after one in the afternoon. Have you heard anything?”
“Sorry, Benny. Not a word. And I’ve been home all day. I’m worried. This isn’t like her.”
“Look, I want you to be careful who you let into your apartment.” Here confusion smacked me again between the eyes. Fiona was at her own place, not at the apartment she had shared with Beverley some time ago. She was at the place by the gate. By the drum tower.
“I keep the door locked. Why are you warning me?”
“I’ll tell you when I see you. Okay? You have my number here at the hotel?” I gave it to her again. She repeated the digits after me in a child-like way. Rather appealing. Before I hung up, I asked my question in reserve. “Did the people who used to run the diving excursion place down on the harbor—”
“You mean the Granges, Vicky and Jake?”
“Yeah, I think so. I keep forgetting their names. Did they have a place back of town, up in the mountains? I ran into some people who were talking about such a place.”
“That’s right. They called it ‘Barnaby,’ for some reason. Lovely place. You can see for miles out to sea.
”
“What happened to it since they died?”
“Nothing, as far as I know. Talk to their lawyer. I can’t remember his name at the moment. I’m catching it from you. German-sounding name.”
“I’ll see what I can do. Do you know how to get there?”
“You go up the mountain road, past the first leveling-out place, then you climb for another mile or so. There’s a chainlink fence. You don’t see many of those. The house is painted to look like a Swiss skiing chalet—blond wood and cuckooclock trim. Are you thinking of going up there?”
“I might,” I said. “I’ll bet it’s cooler than down here.”
“It’ll be heaven to be out of the heat.” She gave a bad reading of the line, as though she didn’t believe it.
“Would that lawyer have keys?”
“I suppose. Most likely they’re somewhere under a brick near the door. You know the way Canadians are.”
“Great! I’ll be talking to you. Keep the door locked.”
“If I sniff trouble, I’ll bang out a tattoo on the old drum. If it still works.”
I still didn’t have a clue, but there was a new direction looming, marked “hold” for the moment.
I returned to the croissant crumbs. I was thinking what a sensible idea a continental breakfast is, when the phone went again. “Yes?”
“Ah, good! I’ve caught you in.”
“Father O’Mahannay! How are you?”
“Forget the banalities, Benny. You are in trouble. I saw it from the start. No matter. You need a safe place to stay. I have room here at the school. It’s not the Ritz, mind, but most of our guests survive the night. Where you are? I don’t want to think about it. Do you know where to find us?”
“I’m afraid your place is one of the sights Billy didn’t show me.”