by Ross Thomas
“Consider it done. By the way,” he said, “I’ve been experimenting with a new kind of—”
“Later,” I said and hung up.
Li and I ignored each other on the Philippine Air Lines flight to the island city-state whose Chinese premier, armed with a double first from Cambridge, was still groping for a formula that would make his tiny Republic a viable, thriving, unaligned community. It could scarcely be called a nation.
It wasn’t hard for Li and me to ignore each other because Li flew first class while I settled for tourist, or economy, as the going euphemism had it. When we landed I left a note for Li at the airline’s counter. It told him where to go and when to be there. I took a taxi to the old hotel and walked up a broad flight of stairs to the second floor where Shoftstall and Bourland had rented a large room.
At twenty-six John Bourland was twenty pounds overweight, which wouldn’t have been so bad had it not all settled into a paunch that, because of his small frame, made him look as if he were trying to conceal a soccer ball under his jacket. It was Bourland who answered my knock and greeted me in Mandarin. He still seemed amazed that when he opened his mouth another language might pop out.
“You staying over?” Bourland asked.
“Not if I can help it,” I said.
“How are you, Luci?” Shoftstall said from his prone position on the bed. Tail and lean, Shoftstall had once been a second-string guard on a losing Northwestern basketball team and was considered something of a prodigy in the electrical engineering field, although he had had to hire someone else to take his final examinations in history, English, and political science. I tried not to wince at the Luci, but failed. It didn’t really matter because Shoftstall didn’t notice. He didn’t notice much of anything unless it had a wire connected to it.
“Is all your stuff set?” I said.
“We checked everything out at the office. Perfect.”
“Who’s the pigeon?” Bourland asked.
“Just a man.”
“You want me to help with the questioning?” Bourland said. He was pressing too hard, I thought, and once again wondered what they were teaching them these days in that in-service training program. Not enough, it seemed.
“Just help with the gadgets,” I said.
Shoftstall swung his long legs over the side of the bed and sat up, stretching and yawning mightily. Our nation’s yearning, blue-eyed pride, I remembered from somewhere. Cummings, I decided. Or cummings.
“When’s he due?” Shoftstall asked, yawning again.
“Any minute if you can stay awake.”
Three minutes later there was a rap on the door and I opened it. Li Teh came in quickly, his eyes darting as he catalogued and classified the occupants, the furniture, and the equipment. “This is Mr. Jones,” I said, not trying to be clever, only simple. “My associates.”
Li didn’t even nod at them. “Let’s get on with it,” he said in English.
I nodded at Shoftstall, who moved to a writing desk which held the lie detector in its gray metal case. “Would you remove your coat and roll up your sleeves, Mr. Jones?” he said. “Then please sit in this straight chair in front of the desk.”
Li removed his coat, folded it neatly, and put it carefully on the bed. He sat in the chair. Gingerly, I thought. Shoftstall bustled around, readying his equipment and giving out with an endless line of chatter which he seemed to think would soothe the obviously nervous Li, but which, in fact, only made him more jittery. Li obviously wished that the American fool would shut up.
I let Shoftstall talk. “The purpose of this machine, Mr. Jones, is simply to establish validity. That’s all. Nothing else. It’s painless, and there’s absolutely no reason to worry—Mr. Dye here will just ask some simple questions to which you can answer either yes or no. That’s all. Just yes or no. Before you know it, we’ll be through.”
Li said nothing. Bourland plugged his tape recorder into the outlet under the desk. Shoftstall continued to chatter away as he affixed the lie detector’s attachments to Li’s chest, forearm, and palm. “Now if you’ll just turn your chair a little this way—to the right,” Shoftstall said. “Fine. That’s just fine.”
“We brought the big Ampex,” Bourland said. “I thought you might want the fidelity and its mike will pick up everything.”
“Good,” I said, not really caring, eager only that the entire sorry scene end itself as soon as possible.
Shoftstall stepped back from Li as if to admire his work. “Okay,” he said to Bourland. “You can roll the tape.”
Bourland turned a knob on the recorder, made a couple of adjustments, and said, “Tape one and rolling. Interview with Mr. Jones.” He looked at Shoftstall. “It’s rolling.”
Shoftstall dropped to his hands and knees and groped for the polygraph’s plug that dangled down behind the writing desk. He glanced up at me. “As soon as I plug it in, you can start,” he said.
“All right.”
He groped again for the electric cord, found it, and plugged it into the wall socket, the same one that powered the Ampex.
The flashes were cobalt blue, I suppose. Whatever the color, they leaped three feet out into the room, twice, and they were accompanied by a series of sputtering, wet-sounding plops. The lights in the room died instantaneously, but it took Li Teh a little longer. He screamed only once. It really wasn’t much of a scream; it was more like something that a dying kitten would make.
I groped my way over to Li Teh and held the lighter before his face. His eyes were open but they didn’t see the flame. I stood there and stared at him until the lighter burned itself out. Shoftstall and Bourland were moving around, cursing and muttering as they rummaged for their equipment. It seemed that we were there in the dark with the dead man for a long time, but it was really only a matter of minutes before the police began pounding on the door and I moved over to open it before they broke it down.
CHAPTER 5
They handed Carmingler the chore of telling me that I was finished. He said so when we were about halfway through the debriefing at Letterman General. I don’t think he relished doing it, but then it didn’t bother him much either. Nothing did really, unless it was when one of his horses came down with the croup or rale or whatever it is that horses get. He sat there behind a gray metal desk in the bare tan room and fiddled with his Phi Beta Kappa key which most thought came from Princeton, a misconception that Carmingler never discouraged, but which actually came from Louisiana State. There was one thing about Carmingler though: he had shucked his bayou accent.
“It’s a pity, of course,” he had said. “Especially since it wasn’t your fault. Not your fault at all. But I’m sure you appreciate our position.” If he had been smoother, or if that course in sensitivity that he had once taken had had any effect, Carmingler would have said their position, not ours. I let it pass.
“After they issued the initial denial that none of you belonged to them, well, I’m afraid we got stuck with it.”
“You could fix it,” I said, again not really caring, but willing to argue a little for the sake of form.
“I’m afraid not.”
“You’ve fixed worse ones.”
He frowned and gave up on his Phi Beta Kappa key and started to mess with his pipe. “Not recently,” he said.
“What about the other two?” I said.
“What other two?”
“Those two clowns you sent me. Shoftstall and Bourland.”
“Oh, yes, of course,” Carmingler said, as if I had just recalled two mutual acquaintances who really didn’t quite belong in his social set. “The same thing for them, although we’re not being quite as liberal. Financially, I mean.”
“Why should you?” I said. “They’ve only got eighteen months in. I’ve got eleven years and when I go looking for a job I can’t very well tell a prospective employer that I’ve had amnesia for the past eleven years.”
Carmingler had finally got his pipe lighted and he was sucking away on it. “That does
present a bit of a problem and if it weren’t for all that publicity—”
“My name was never mentioned,” I said.
“Of course not. But that insurance company’s name was. Minneapolis Mutual. People remember. Possibly we can work something out, a few letters of reference from some firm or other saying that you’d been employed by them. That kind of thing. Let me think about it.”
“You do that,” I said, and never brought it up again because I knew that there wasn’t any use.
Carmingler glanced at his watch. “Well, I suppose that’ll wrap it up for today.”
“Just one other thing,” I said.
“What?”
“I hope those eleven years that I put in were worth it.”
“Worth what?”
“Worth that million dollars you spent getting me out of jail.”
I thought or perhaps brooded about Carmingler and the past three months of my life as I stood there on the seventeenth floor of the Sir Francis Drake and watched the fog roll in. Even with the windows closed, I could hear the anachronistic clang of the cable cars as they ground their way up and down Powell. The streets were still visible, but the Bay Bridge had disappeared. In a few more minutes the fog would settle down for the evening and all I’d have left to admire would be the insurance company tower whose electric sign informed me that it was 64° outside and 3:59 P.M., both inside and out. I checked my new watch and found that the tower was right.
The brisk knock on my door came at precisely 4:02 P.M., according to the tower sign. I opened the door and he was younger than I’d expected. Much younger.
“Mr. Dye,” he said and smiled pleasantly enough. “I’m Victor Orcutt. May we come in?”
I opened the door wider and moved back. “Sure,” I said. “Come in. We can either have a party or a rubber of bridge.”
There were three of them. First came Victor Orcutt, then the man in the brown suit with the two-tone eyes, and last the honey blonde. She was still several years under thirty and her hair came as close to that shade of honey that bees make from yellow clover as nature or her beauty parlor could get it. She let a small smile play around her full mouth, but her mild brown eyes failed to back it up. They seemed sad, even hurt, but then I hadn’t even had a woman glance at me in a hundred days or so, and if I’d stared at her a little longer, I probably could have found anything that I was looking for, even my own private version of the land of Prester John.
Once in the room Orcutt spun around gracefully and waved a hand at the man in the brown suit. “I believe you’ve met my associate, Homer Necessary. I always delight in introducing him to people because of that wonderful surname. Don’t you think it’s wonderful, Mr. Dye?”
He didn’t give me a chance to say what I thought because he kept on talking. “And this is my executive assistant, Miss Carol Thackerty. Miss Thackerty, Mr. Dye.” I had nodded at Necessary and now I said how do you do or hello or how are you to Carol Thackerty who merely smiled and looked past me at something more interesting. The radiator perhaps.
Orcutt started to talk some more. “Well, I must say that you look awfully fit for having spent three months in what I understand to be a perfectly wretched prison.” He moved quickly to the window. Or flitted. “And this view should be simply glorious when the fog’s gone.” He spun around again and if it weren’t for his height, or rather lack of it, I would have been almost sure that at one time or other he’d spent a few years in the chorus line. He had the build, but not the height, not even with the elevator shoes. He stared at me for a moment and then smiled again. “I should confess, Mr. Dye, that I did expect you to be more—well—shall we say, emaciated?”
“We’ll say that,” I said and turned to Carol Thackerty. “Won’t you sit down?”
She managed that fleeting half-smile of hers again and gracefully lowered herself into a chair by the window with a murmured, “Thank you.” Her legs were fine, I noticed, long and well moulded. She wore a beige dress that was topped by a tweedy sort of cape-coat and she carried a tan leather bag that looked large enough to be a briefcase. It matched her shoes. She had a kind of finishing-school poise and she knew how to sit and wasn’t at all worried about what to do with her hands.
“Sit down, Homer,” Victor Orcutt said to the man in the brown suit. Necessary looked around and found a chair that he seemed to like and was about to sit in it when Orcutt snapped, “No, not that one. Use the couch over there.” Necessary’s expression didn’t change. He seemed not to have heard Orcutt; at least he didn’t respond or even look at him, but he did move to the couch.
“Let’s see now,” Orcutt said, surveying the room with his right forefinger pressed against his lower lip. “I think I will sit—” He looked around some more. “Over there. Yes!” Over there was the seat that Necessary had chosen first.
Even with the elevator shoes Victor Orcutt wasn’t much over five foot three and I can’t say that I ever saw him walk anyplace. He glided instead. He wore a dark blue suit which looked as if it might be velvet, but on closer inspection turned out to be cashmere. I had never seen a cashmere suit before. An odd jacket perhaps, or an overcoat, but never a suit, especially one that was buttoned up the front with twenty dollar gold pieces. Six of them. Underneath the suit was a Lord Byron shirt, probably silk, and a carefully knotted cravat as red as ox blood and twice as rich that only a boor would have called a necktie. For shoes he favored black alligator, blunt-toed loafers which boasted buckles that were probably real gold too. I assumed that his drawers were also silk, but I never found out.
He perched on the edge of the chair to make sure that his feet could touch the floor. I bet myself another bottle of Scotch that he wasn’t a day over twenty-six, if that. His poise reminded me of an actor’s whose ego will never allow him to be offstage. His hair was curly and blond and he wore it long, I suspected, because someone had once told him that it made him look like Byron. He had the same thin nose, sensual mouth, and strong, jutting chin which, for some reason, I decided was made out of glass. He smiled a lot, but it didn’t mean anything, and I had the feeling he would smile just like that if a dog got run over. He looked, all in all, a little prissy until you noticed his dark blue eyes which he may have borrowed from the local hangman, if there were one. They were eyes that rightfully belonged to a gunfighter or a pirate or perhaps an astronaut gone slightly mad. They were eyes that valued human life cheaply, including his own, and if he had any intelligence at all, he would be an enemy to respect. I doubted that you could ever count on him as a friend.
“I’m not Jewish,” he said in a completely ingenuous manner. “Are you?”
“No,” I said.
“Necessary isn’t either. And, of course, Miss Thackerty is just pure WASP. I do so wish you were Jewish. Even Italian would do.”
“Sorry,” I said. “By the way, I have Scotch, and water to mix it with. If you want anything else, I’ll have to call down for it.”
“Carol?” Orcutt said.
“Nothing, thank you,” she said.
“Homer?”
“Scotch is okay,” Necessary said. It was the first time he’d said anything since he arrived.
“I would like—let’s see now. Yes! I would like a Dr Pepper.”
“Dr Pepper,” I murmured and moved to the phone. I got room service and told them to send up a Dr Pepper, a bucket of ice, four glasses, and some Pall Mall cigarettes. Two packs. I thought that the cigarettes made the order a little more respectable. “Hold on,” I said into the phone and turned to the girl. “You sure you wouldn’t like something—tea perhaps?”
She smiled again—or almost did. “Why, yes, tea would be nice.”
“And a pot of tea with—” I looked at her.
“Lemon,” she said.
“With lemon,” I said.
“This is extremely kind of you, Mr. Dye,” Orcutt said as he patted a few curls into place.
“My Southern upbringing,” I said as I took a seat on the opposite end of the couch
from Necessary.
Orcutt waved his right forefinger at me as if I’d said something naughty. “You were born in Montana, Mr. Dye. In Moncrief, Montana.”
I didn’t bother to answer and I suppose it was the girl that kept me from kicking them all out. It had been a long time since I’d been near a woman, more than three months, and Carol Thackerty seemed to be as pleasant a prospect as I could hope to encounter. Carmingler, flushing a little and staring out the window, had once offered to run a whore into Letterman General for me, although he’d said that she was an Army nurse. I’d passed it up, more out of pique than moral squeamishness.
After the bellhop came and left, the one who looked as if he cried whenever they played “Melancholy Baby,” I served Carol Thackerty her tea, handed Orcutt a glass of Dr Pepper, and mixed two Scotches with water for Necessary and myself. They all said thank you, even Necessary.
“Now then,” Victor Orcutt said as he wriggled around in his chair to make himself more comfortable. “Let me tell you something about me. I won’t tell all, of course. No one does that, not even to their very best friends. But I will tell you quite a bit because I know you’re curious and I just love talking about myself, don’t you?”
“Not especially,” I said, “except when I’m drunk.”
“Do you get drunk often?” he said.
“Probably not often enough. It’s one of my failings.”
“You’re teasingl” Victor Orcutt said. “I like that. But now let me give you a little personal background and then we’ll talk about the proposal.”
I was looking at Carol Thackerty. She was looking out the window at either the fog or the insurance company tower. “All right,” I said.
“Well, I was born in Los Angeles twenty-six years ago. Not Los Angeles exactly. It was actually in the San Fernando valley. You know where that is.”
It wasn’t a question, so I said nothing.
“Now then, I was graduated—summa cum laude I might add, if you don’t think it’s boasting—from the University of Chicago Law School seven years ago—”