The Last Private Eye

by John Birkett

  “It was good seeing you again,” she said.

  “Like old times,” Rhineheart said. “Any last-minute instructions?”

  “I can’t think of any,” she said. “And you’d probably just ignore them anyway.”

  She was right. “I’ll be in touch, Kate,” Rhineheart said, and walked out of the place.

  CHAPTER THREE

  On the way to Carl Walsh’s apartment Rhineheart tried to recall what he knew or had heard about Duke Kingston. An ex-coal baron from eastern Kentucky, Kingston, the story went, had married money and in the course of a decade or so had become respectable. He had built Cresthill Farms into one of the finest racing stables in America. Cresthill horses had won most of the big stakes races in the country, but none had ever won the Derby. Kingston’s desire to win the Kentucky Derby was legendary. There was nothing he wouldn’t do, it was said, to see his colors in the winner’s circle on the first Saturday in May.

  Rhineheart didn’t know if that were fact or racetrack rumor or what it had to do with a stable hand named Carl Walsh. Maybe in the course of things, he would find out.

  Walsh lived in a squat redbrick apartment building that sat on a quiet, tree-lined street in the city’s South End. Rhineheart parked his car—a beat-up ’76 Maverick—out front, climbed the stairs to the second floor, and found Walsh’s apartment at the end of a narrow, empty corridor.

  He knocked on the door, waited, knocked again, waited a few minutes longer, then took out a credit card and went to work on the lock. Thirty seconds later, he stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

  The place was a one-room studio apartment with a shag carpet, a bathroom off to the left, and a small kitchen area in an alcove near the front door.

  An unmade double bed divided the room in two: sofa, end tables, an armchair, and glass-topped coffee table on one side; night table, dresser, and a small walk-in closet on the other. A portable TV sat next to a phone on the night table.

  Rhineheart gazed around the room. Nothing looked out of place. Not exactly. There were no obvious signs that the apartment had been searched, but he could tell that recently it had been taken apart and put back together. Systematically and methodically. By pros.

  Operating on the notion that he might find something they had overlooked and on the principle that you had to begin somewhere, Rhineheart went into the bathroom and began looking through the medicine cabinet. He found a bottle of aspirin, a Gillette razor, a Lady Bic razor, a packet of throat lozenges, a can of Edge shaving cream, a tube of lipstick, a bottle of mouthwash, a box of Band-Aids, a tube of toothpaste, a thing of eye makeup, a plastic bag full of hair rollers, an empty shampoo bottle, a jar of Vaseline, a tube of lip ointment, and a small bottle of Absorbine Jr.

  The bathroom hamper contained dirty towels.

  The bathtub was dry. There was no soap in the soap dish.

  He left the bathroom and walked back into the main room. Stacks of old Daily Racing Forms sat on the coffee table alongside back issues of Cosmopolitan and Playboy and People. He flipped through the Forms and the magazines, but found nothing significant, no clues or secret messages hidden between the pages.

  Rhineheart ran his hands down the back and sides of the sofa and the chair. No loose change. Nothing.

  Like a lot of investigative work, searching a place was a pain in the ass. Even if you knew what you were looking for. And he didn’t.

  On one of the end tables, he noticed a pack of matches lying there in plain sight for everyone to see. The purloined matchbook? He picked it up. The cover advertised the Red Wind Motel on Dixie Highway. Weekly Rates. On the inside of the cover someone had written Room 24.

  Rhineheart stuck the matchbook in his pocket and walked over to the other side of the room. Hanging on the wall above the dresser were two framed color photographs. One was a shot of Walsh and a pretty frizzy-haired blonde. They were standing on the deck of a houseboat, their arms around each other, smiling at the camera. The words Love, Rhonda were scrawled in pen across the bottom of the photograph.

  The other picture was one of those standard racetrack photographs: a shot of the winning horse, his owner, the owner’s entourage, the trainer, the jockey, the horse’s groom, and whatever stable help happened to be around.

  The horse in the photograph was a rangy chestnut. There was no identification or date on the photo but Rhineheart was sure it was a shot of Royal Dancer taken after his stakes victory in Florida earlier in the year. There were eight to ten people standing posed in a semicircle around the horse. In the middle of the group stood Duke and Jessica Kingston, looking well dressed and rich and handsome. Rhineheart had heard she was a real beauty, but you couldn’t tell a whole lot from the photo.

  On the far left of the frame Carl Walsh stood looking solemnly at the camera.

  Rhineheart went over to the dresser and began going through it drawer by drawer. The top drawer contained men’s clothes, jeans, T-shirts, socks, underwear. The second and third drawers were full of women’s stuff—sweaters, scarves, lingerie, all the same size. Walsh’s wife had left her clothes behind. She must have left in a hurry.

  The next two drawers were filled with letters and papers, gas bills and rent receipts, canceled checks and old pay stubs. Rhineheart rummaged around and came up with a pay stub dated March 12 from Saint Anthony’s Hospital. It showed that Rhonda Walsh had cleared $213.23 that week.

  The bottom drawer contained half a dozen programs from the recent Keeneland meeting and some uncashed mutuel tickets. On the back of one of the tickets was a telephone number written in ballpoint. It was a 548 number, which was a South End exchange. Rhineheart stuck the ticket in his pocket and wandered into the kitchen.

  He opened drawers and cabinets, looked in the refrigerator. There were two full bags of garbage under the sink. He spread some newspaper out on the kitchen floor, dumped out the bags, and slowly and carefully went through the eggshells and empty milk cartons and food scraps. At the bottom of the pile he found something; a penciled list of words and initials on a stained and blotted sheet of lined paper.

  It read:

  DR. G10:30 Wed.

  LewisWC

  LANCELOT

  Rhineheart smoothed out the sheet of paper, folded it, and stuck it in his pocket. He had no idea what any of it meant. He put the garbage back in the bags, washed his hands in the kitchen sink, then went into the main room, picked up the phone, and dialed the number of the Red Wind Motel.

  The desk clerk answered.

  Rhineheart asked the clerk to connect him to room 24.

  “Just a minute, please.” The phone rang half a dozen times. The clerk came back on the line. “I’m sorry, sir. Mr. Sanchez seems to be out. Can I take a message?”

  “No thanks.”

  Next Rhineheart tried the 548 number. The phone rang twice, was picked up, and a man’s nasal voice said, “Yeah?”

  Rhineheart recognized the voice. It belonged to a small-time bookie he knew named Marvin Green. Marvin said, “C’mon, c’mon, what do you want, who is this?”

  Rhineheart hung up and checked his watch. It was 4:15. He had been in the apartment a full hour. It was time to go. Rhineheart went into the bathroom, got a dirty towel, and wiped off everything he had touched. Then he walked over to the door and let himself out.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Downstairs, on the first floor, the second door on the left had a brass plate that had MANAGER on it. The young woman who answered Rhineheart’s knock had shoulder-length black hair, sexy eyes, good breasts, a slim waist, nice hips, and long shapely legs. She was wearing a red T-shirt, no bra, and skintight cutoffs. The trained investigator’s eye for details, Rhineheart thought. Once again it had come in handy.

  He wanted to talk to her about her body, tell her about her legs, say something about those fine hips, something on the order of “You’ve got a beautiful ass,” but he was there on business. So he asked her if he could see the manager.

  “Ah’m the manager.” Her voice was s
oft, Southern. “My name is Karen Simpson.”

  “Mine’s Rhineheart,” he said. “I’m a private eye.”

  “A whut?” She did something with her eyelashes. They were thick and dark. Her eyes were large and violet-colored.

  “A private detective.”

  Ms. Simpson looked amused. “This some kind of joke?”

  “No joke.” He took out his wallet and showed her his license.

  She studied it carefully. “Oh, wow,” she said finally, “you really are a private eye. Like Marlowe,” she added. “Are you familiar with Marlowe?”

  “Who?”

  “Philip Marlowe, the private eye.”

  “Philip Marlowe. Trouble is my business. Twenty-five dollars a day, plus expenses. For walking the mean streets of L.A.” Rhineheart kept a straight face. “Does he have an office here in town?”

  Ms. Simpson laughed. “You know perfectly well he doesn’t have an office here. He’s not real. He’s a character in fiction. The Big Sleep. Farewell, My Lovely.”

  “You a private-eye fan?” Rhineheart asked.

  She nodded eagerly. “I was an English major in college. I did my senior term paper on the hard-boiled detective novel. I’ve probably read every private-eye novel ever written. Chandler. Hammett. Ross Macdonald. I’ve seen all the movies too.”

  She’d seen all the movies and read all the books.

  “You know the part,” Rhineheart said, “where the dick says, ‘You mind if I come in and ask you a couple of questions?’?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “This is it.”

  She laughed and opened the door and showed him into a room that was a duplicate of Carl Walsh’s apartment. Even the furniture looked the same. On the floor next to the bed was an exercise pad and some barbells.

  “Excuse the mess,” Ms. Simpson said. “You caught me in the middle of a workout.”

  “You lift weights?” Rhineheart asked.

  “Just for muscle tone.”

  They look toned to me, Rhineheart barely stopped himself from saying. He took a seat in an overstuffed wing chair that turned out to be as uncomfortable as it looked. Ms. Simpson perched on the edge of the bed.

  “Is this about the couple on the second floor?” she asked.

  “How’d you guess?”

  She shrugged. “First the reporter, then the police, now you.”

  “The police?”

  She nodded. “This morning. Two of them. They searched Mr. Walsh’s apartment.”

  “They ask you about Walsh?”

  “Not really. All they seemed interested in doing was searching the place thoroughly. They were up there for hours.”

  “They leave with anything?”

  “I don’t think so, no, but I don’t know for sure.”

  “What’d these police look like?”

  “Two big guys. Wearing suits. One had a beard, the other was bald-headed.” She paused and gave Rhineheart a look. “They weren’t cops, were they?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Were they bad guys?”

  “Probably.”

  “They looked like cops,” she said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Rhineheart said. “Tell me about Walsh and his wife. What kind of people are they?”

  “There’s not much to tell. I don’t know them very well. Hardly at all. I see them coming and going is about all. He left very suddenly a couple of days ago. I saw him come home around five o’clock Wednesday. He went upstairs for about an hour. Then he came downstairs, got in a cab, and left.”

  “A cab? What kind of a cab?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “What color was it?”

  She shrugged. “I’m sorry. I don’t have a very good memory.”

  “What about his wife?”

  “She works in a hospital. As a nurse’s aide, I think.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “Thursday.”

  “Did you see her leave?”

  Ms. Simpson nodded. “She came downstairs around nine-thirty Thursday evening. She got into her car and drove off.”

  “What kind of car was she driving?”

  “One of those Japanese cars. Yellow. I’m not good on makes. Or years.”

  Rhineheart stood up. “You’ve been very helpful, Ms. Simpson. I’ll let you get back to your workout.”

  She smiled at him. “You could stay if you like.” She fluttered her lashes. “I’ve never balled a real private eye before,” she said.

  Rhineheart liked to think of himself as a fairly cool person who wasn’t surprised by a whole hell of a lot. Still, there were times. It took him a moment to think up a reply. “We do it just like everyone else,” he said.

  “You know who you look like?” Ms. Simpson said. “The actor. Big, rough-looking guy. How tall are you, anyway?”

  “What’s height got to do with it?” he asked.

  “Six two?”

  Rhineheart nodded. “You’re not going to ask me what I weigh, are you?”

  Ms. Simpson shrugged. “I might.” She stood and took off her T-shirt.

  Rhineheart had been right. No bra.

  “You want to do it on the floor or on the bed?”

  It was one hell of a choice. “You don’t want to get into anything with me,” Rhineheart said. “I’m an old guy. Way over thirty.”

  “I’ve always had this passion for older men.”

  It was a great line. Rhineheart couldn’t remember what movie it had come from.

  He gave it one last shot. “You sure about this?”

  “Are you all talk,” Ms. Simpson said, “or do you do anything?”

  Rhineheart stood up and took off his sport coat. He began to unbutton his shirt. “I got an hour or so,” he said, “then I got to be someplace.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “How about I just ride along with you,” McGraw said. “That way I’d be getting some practical experience, and you’d be getting some, ah, company.”

  “I don’t want any company,” Rhineheart said. He took a bite of cheeseburger, a sip of Coke. Rhineheart and McGraw were sitting in a back booth at O’Brien’s Bar & Grill, a neighborhood bar in the East End. McGraw was drinking beer. It was seven-thirty according to the clock above the bar.

  “You know what you are, Rhineheart?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “I know what I am. You know what you are, McGraw? A pain in the ass.” Rhineheart looked around for Wanda Jean, the waitress. “You want another beer?” he asked McGraw.

  “No,” McGraw said. “I want to ride along with you. You promised me next time you got a case, you’d let me come along and help. You said you’d show me the ropes. You said you’d teach me how to become a private eye.”

  “You can’t teach somebody to become a private eye,” Rhineheart said. “Either they’re a natural-born private eye or they’re not. And you’re not. For one thing, you’re too small.”

  “Too small?” McGraw repeated angrily. “What the fuck are you talking about ‘too small’? Where do you get off with that kind of shit?”

  “How tall are you?” Rhineheart asked.

  “I’m five feet one.”

  “Bullshit,” he said. “You’re four ten. Tops.”

  “Five one.”

  “Stand up.”

  McGraw stood up. Rhineheart was surprised. McGraw looked taller than usual. He glanced down at McGraw’s feet and saw that she was wearing five-inch spike heels. They were red and they went with her black slacks and her white blouse. They were cute—like McGraw with her fried hair and her shapely little body. McGraw’s first name was Sally. She was Rhineheart’s secretary.

  McGraw’s big ambition in life was to become a private detective. She certainly had no future as a secretary, Rhineheart could swear to that. She typed twenty words a minute and misfiled every other piece of correspondence that came into the office. Rhineheart knew why he had hired her: she had bullshitted him into believing that she was a competent worker. W
hat he couldn’t figure out was why he kept her on. Pity, probably.

  “Don’t be looking at my shoes,” McGraw said. “I’m five feet one, and besides, height’s got nothing to do with it. You promised.”

  “I felt sorry for you,” Rhineheart said. “You going to hold me to something I promised when I was feeling sorry for you?”

  “Yeah,” McGraw said, “I am.”

  “All that shit about being a woman and how tough it is and how nobody respects you.”

  “It’s the truth, Rhineheart.”

  Wanda Jean came over to the booth. Wanda Jean had curly brown hair, a heart-shaped face, and a figure that overflowed whatever outfit she was wearing. She and Rhineheart were old friends.

  To Rhineheart, Wanda Jean said, “You signal me, darlin’?”

  “Give McGraw here another beer.”

  Wanda Jean said sure, but first she wanted to know how come Rhineheart never called her up anymore. Rhineheart said it was because he’d been busy. Wanda Jean said yeah, sure, she’d heard that shit before. She wanted to know when they were going to go out and hit some honky-tonk bars and do some serious drinking and dancing and who knew what else.

  Rhineheart said that sounded good to him.

  Wanda Jean winked at him and wandered off. Rhineheart looked over at McGraw, who was drumming her tiny fingers impatiently on the tabletop.

  “You going to keep your promise to me, or not?”

  “Where I’m going tonight,” Rhineheart said, “it might be dangerous.”

  “That’s fine with me,” McGraw said.

  “What do you mean, that’s fine with you? Are you crazy?”

  “Rhineheart, I’m sick of being just a secretary. Sitting around the office doing the same stuff day after day. It’s boring and it’s stupid.”

  “And you don’t do it very well anyway,” he added.

  “Don’t be a smart-ass,” McGraw said. “It’s not the kind of job anyone with any intelligence would do well. It’s like being a housewife. It’s a rotten job, Rhineheart. I want to do something different. Something exciting. I don’t care if it’s dangerous or not.”