by Ed McBain
I did not make the acquaintance of Mercer Grant till the next day. That is not his real name. He told me right off it wasn’t his real name. He said it would be too dangerous for him to give me his real name. Grant (or Lee or Jackson or Jones or Smith or whatever his real name might have been) was a tall, light-skinned Jamaican with a neat little mustache under his nose. He came up to the squadroom around ten o’clock on that Tuesday morning in question, and he asked to talk to a police detective, of which there were only eight or nine in the squadroom that minute, it’s a wonder he didn’t trip over one of us. I signaled him over to my desk, and offered him a chair, and asked him his name.
“My name is Mercer Grant,” he said. “But that is not my real name.”
“Then what is your real name, Mr. Grant?”
“I can’t tell you my real name,” he said. “It would be too dangerous to tell you my real name.”
All of this in that sort of Jamaican lilt they have, you know? Like Harry Belafonte doing “Hey, Mr. Taliban.”
“Because, you see,” I said, “we’re required to fill in the name and address spaces on these complaint forms. Plus a lot of other information.”
“I am not making a complaint,” Mercer said.
“Then why are you here?” I asked.
“I am here because my wife is missing,” he said.
“Well, that’s a complaint,” I said.
“Not in the case of my wife,” he said, and grinned, because he was making a joke, you see. He was saying nobody was complaining that his wife was missing. He had a gold tooth in the center of his mouth. The tooth had a little diamond chip in one corner. His mouth lit up like a Christmas tree when he grinned. He thought his little joke was pretty funny. He kept grinning.
“Well,” I said, “what is your wife’s name then?”
“I can’t tell you her name,” he said. “It would be too dangerous.”
“Then how am I supposed to find her if you won’t give me her name?” I asked reasonably.
“You’re the detective, not me,” he said reasonably. “Although I must tell you I’ve never dealt with a female detective before, and I’m not sure how happy I am about it,” the sexist pig.
“What kind of detectives have you dealt with before, Mr. Grant?”
“I have never been in trouble with the law,” he said. “I’m reporting my wife missing because it’s my duty as a citizen. My cousin Ambrose said I should report her missing.”
“Ambrose what?” I asked at once.
“Ambrose Fields. But that’s not his real name, either.”
“Does anyone in your family have a real name?”
“Yes, but these names would be too dangerous to reveal.”
“Can you tell me where you live?”
“No.”
“Can you give me your phone number?”
“No.”
“Well, Mr. Grant, let’s suppose by some weird stroke of luck—me being a female detective and all—I do find your wife. How am I supposed to let you know I’ve got her?”
“I will stay in touch.”
“I have to tell you, you don’t sound too eager to find her, now do you?”
He thought this over for a moment. Then he said, “The truth is I don’t think you will find her.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I think she may already be dead.”
“I see.”
“Yes.”
“So you’re here to report a murder, is that it?”
“No, I am here to tell you my wife is missing. As is my duty.”
“But you think she may be dead.”
“Yes.”
“Do you also think you know who killed her?”
“No.”
“It wouldn’t be you who killed her, would it, Mr. Grant? This wouldn’t be a confession here, would it?”
Grant, or whatever his name was, leaned closer to me.
“Have you ever heard of the RUF?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Once. Last night, in fact. Why? Do you think the RUF had something to do with your wife’s death?”
“No.”
“If, in fact, she is dead?”
“Oh, she’s dead, all right, oh yes.”
“How do you know that?”
“She wrote me a note.”
“Saying she was dead?”
“No. Saying if I didn’t hear from her by Tuesday, she might be dead.”
“Today is Tuesday,” I said.
“Yes. So she must be dead, am I correct?”
“Well, she only said she might be dead.”
“She must have had an inkling,” Grant said.
“What else did she say in this note?”
“Here, read it for yourself,” Grant said, and took a folded sheet of paper from his pocket, and unfolded it, and smoothed it neatly on my desk top. The note read:
Dear Mercer…
“That’s not my real name,” he said at once.
“Then why did she address you as such?”
“I told you. She must have had an inkling.”
Dear Mercer,
By the time you read this, I will be gone.
Do not try to find me, it is too dangerous.
If I am not back by Tuesday, I guess I will be dead.
Your loving wife,
Marie
“That’s not her real name, either,” Grant said.
“I know. She must have had an inkling.”
“Exactly.”
“So you think the RUF had something to do with her disappearance, is that it?”
“No,” Grant said.
“Then why did you bring them up?”
“I thought you might have heard of them.”
“Is that diamond in your mouth a so-called conflict diamond?” I asked.
“What is a conflict diamond?” Grant asked.
“Is your wife—or was she, as the case may be—involved in any way with the sale or transport of illicit diamonds in Sierra Leone or Angola?”
“My wife and I never discussed her private affairs. You will have to ask her personally. When you find her. If you find her. But you won’t find her because it’s Tuesday and she said she’d be dead.”
“Well, you’ve filed a complaint…”
“I’m not complaining,” he said, and grinned again.
“…so I guess I’ll have to investigate. Can you tell me what your wife looks like, please?”
“If she’s still alive, she is a dark-skinned woman of about your height and weight, with black hair and brown eyes.”
“How old is she?”
“About your age.”
“Twenty-nine?”
“I should have thought twenty-five,” he said, and grinned his charming gold-and-diamond grin.
“Any visible scars or tattoos?”
“None that I ever noticed.”
“How long have you been married?” I asked.
“Too long,” he said, and then suddenly ducked his head, perhaps to hide a falling tear. “She was a good woman,” he murmured.
The challenge now seemed clear: Find a good woman in this city. Which was not as simple as it first appeared. With all due respect, Commish, nothing is ever simple in police work, nothing is ever uncomplicated.
To begin with, if this woman…
Now hold it right there, Emilio thought.
Before things get too complicated here, let’s just take a peek at the phone book and see if there really is a person or persons named Mercer Grant or Marie Grant or, for that matter, anybody named Olivia Wesley Watts, though he didn’t think a detective would be so stupid as to list herself in the phone book. Emilio had only two directories in the apartment, one for Isola, the other for Riverhead, and neither one of them listed either a Mercer or a Marie Grant, which wasn’t surprising since the guy in Livvie’s report (Emilio was already fondly thinking of her as Livvie) had himself told her it wasn’t his real name. There was no Margie Gannon in either of the books, either, nor anybody n
amed Frank Randuzzi or Jerry Aiello, or Ambrose Fields, so he had to figure Livvie had made up these names for her own protection.
There was no O’Malley’s Bar, either, hey, big surprise!
But Livvie had written:
Let’s start with Margie Gannon and me, or perhaps Margie and I, having an after-hours beer last Monday night in a bar called O’Malley’s a few blocks from the station house.
So okay.
Somewhere in this city, a few blocks from a police station, there was a bar. Find that bar, whatever its real name was, and Emilio would be well on the way to finding a redheaded detective named Olivia Wesley Watts.
Let the games begin, he thought.
The clock is ticking!
8
FIRST THING OLLIE DID that Thursday morning was hit the pawnshops again. This time, he had a double incentive. Not only had someone possibly hocked the dispatch case his dumb sister Isabelle had given him two Christmases ago, but someone else (presumably not the same asshole junkie) had also possibly hocked a gun that had been used in a bank heist five years ago. He did not expect to win the daily double, and was in fact surprised when even one of his horses came in.
Of course, nobody knew anything at all about the gun.
It would have been a miracle if anyone had.
Not that a great many .32-caliber Smith & Wessons hadn’t been pawned in this fair city over the past five years, plenty of which could be traced through their serial numbers. But whereas a reluctant Detective Hogan had been persuaded, ah yes, to bring up the numbers on the piece that had caused the untimely demise, ah yes, of Councilman Henderson, those serial numbers had presumably been filed off before the bank robbery, lo, those many years ago. So, assuming the gun had been requisitioned, so to speak, from the Property Clerk’s Office by some enterprising police officer who knew that a weapon without a serial number was the equivalent of a naked man in a busy whore house, and further assuming that the weapon had been sold on the street by said opportunistic cop and had eventually found its way into a pawnshop, it would still be unidentifiable without any numbers on it, and therefore untraceable, a clean gun that had remained clean five years after it had done its dirty deed.
So he knew the answer to the first gun question even before he asked it.
“Anybody buy a .32 Smith & Wesson from you recently?”
“Sure. Vot’s the serial numbers?”
Fat Jew pawnbrokers wearing yarmulkes who only three weeks ago had celebrated Passover, when they were closed for religious reasons, and not even a poor alcoholic writer on a so-called lost weekend could hock his typewriter to buy a bottle of booze. True high artists sure had it tough all over these days. He could just imagine how difficult it was for poor Jonathan Franzen, whom Ollie admired a great deal because he’d dissed a Negress like Oprah Winfrey.
Even when Ollie gave them the serial numbers Hogan had brought up, he knew they wouldn’t ring a bell because if the gun had by some amazing phenomenon been hocked, with the serial numbers filed off it was like trying to identify a bare-assed newborn baby who hadn’t yet been given a name.
He asked the gun questions only because he had to.
The dispatch case was another matter.
“A Gucci dispatch case,” he told them, “tan pigskin, single brass clasp, monogrammed with the letters OWW.”
First ten pawnshops he hit hadn’t seen hide nor hair of a pigskin dispatch case from Gucci.
“Hide nor hair, you get it?” one of the pawnbrokers asked him, chuckling, making witty reference to the pigskin, Ollie guessed, which in any case Jews weren’t allowed to eat, pig, nor Muslims, either, same as Catholics weren’t allowed to eat meat of any kind on Good Friday, man, these religions. Ollie sometimes felt if everybody in the world was allowed to eat whatever the hell he wanted, there wouldn’t be wars anymore. It all got down to eating. Which reminded him that it was almost twelve noon and he was getting hungry again.
He struck paydirt of sorts in the eleventh pawnshop he visited that morning.
A bell over the door tinkled as Ollie entered, causing him to look up in an attempt to identify the source, encountering at first glance a ceiling hung with musical instruments of every persuasion. Well, no pianos. But here in front of the counter was a gleaming brassy array of trumpets, tubas, trombones, and other alliterative instruments Ollie could not identify. And behind the counter was a hanging woodwind section of saxophones, clarinets, oboes, and bassoons, not to mention more guitars than could be found in a strolling mariachi band. A young woman with a sweet ass was standing at the counter, expectantly watching the shop owner, Ollie presumed, who had a jeweler’s loupe to his eye and what looked like a diamond ring in his hand.
He put down the loupe. He handed the ring back across the counter. “It’s glass,” he said. “I can’t give you a nickel.”
Ollie felt like telling the woman there was a massage parlor up the street where she could get work if she was really hard up.
“Guy gave it to me last night,” she told both the pawnbroker and Ollie. “Which means I got stiffed.”
Which meant she was already a working girl.
Ollie wondered if he should arrest her.
Years ago, he used to arrest hookers just to scare them into freebie blowjobs. Nowadays, they all had civil rights lawyers who took their cases all the way up to the Supreme Court. Well, what could you do?
“Girl can’t be too careful these days,” he suggested.
“Tell me about it,” she said, and swiveled her splendid ass out of the shop.
Ollie flashed the tin.
The pawnbroker nodded.
“Pigskin dispatch case,” Ollie said. “Gucci label. OWW monogram. Seen it?”
“Came in Monday afternoon,” the pawnbroker said. “Sold it in a minute.”
Ollie looked at the framed license on the wall behind the counter.
The name on it was Irving Stein.
“Tell me, Irv,” he said, “was there anything in that case when you received it?”
“Nothing.”
“Did you know the case was stolen?”
“No, I did not.”
“Didn’t you receive a flier I sent out Tuesday?”
“I didn’t see anything on any flier about any dispatch case worth a big five dollars.”
“Oh, is that what you thought a stolen Gucci dispatch case was worth, Irv?”
“That’s all it was worth to me. And I didn’t know it was stolen.”
“Cause you didn’t see my flier, right?”
“I get fliers from all over the city. Every fecockteh precinct gets a Timex wrist watch stolen, they send me a flier. If I read every flier I got, I’d have no time for anything else,” Irving said. “What’s so important here, anyway? Whose dispatch case was this? Bin Laden’s?”
“No, it was mine. And my book was in it.”
“Must be some book, all this commotion.”
“It’s a book I wrote,” Ollie said.
“I thought you were a cop.”
“I am a cop.”
“But you also write books, huh?”
“Is that so strange? There are many cops and former cops and district attorneys and lawyers who write mystery novels. In every corner of this great nation, there are former…”
“A mystery book writer, how about that?” Irving said. “Next you’ll be telling me you play trombone.”
“No, I play piano.”
“Piano, I shoulda guessed.”
“I play ‘Night and Day’ on the piano.”
“You play night and day, when do you find time to write and be a cop?”
“Did you get my flier, or didn’t you?”
“I told you no, I don’t remember getting it. I don’t remember seeing anything at all about a pigskin dispatch case.”
“Cause pork is against your religion, right?”
“No, cause I don’t remember seeing it.”
“Cause if you did get the flier, and you did know the case was
stolen, and you knowingly received stolen goods, you’d be looking at a goodly amount of time in the slammer. Want to think about that one a while, Irv?”
“Give me a break, willya?” Irving said. “A piece of dreck worth five dollars? Who’s kidding who here?”
“You won’t think I’m kidding if I go after your license.”
“So go after it. For what? For making a bona fide purchase for value?”
“Ah, the man suddenly understands legal distinctions,” Ollie said to the ceiling full of hanging musical instruments.
“I didn’t know the case was stolen,” Irving said. “Period.”
“Because if you knew it was stolen, you knew you’d be looking at a D-felony, am I right?”
“Yes, Detective, you are perfectly right. If I knew the case was stolen. Which I didn’t.”
“Who brought the case in here, can you tell me that?”
“A girl named Emmy.”
“Emmy what?”
“I didn’t get her last name.”
“You buy and sell goods without taking last names, is that it?” Ollie said.
“So I didn’t ask her last name, so sue me,” Irving said. “She gave me the case, I gave her five bucks, end of transaction.”
“What’d she look like?” Ollie asked.
“Like any other hooker comes in here.”
“Oh, she was a hooker, huh?”
“Yes.”
“She marched in and said, ‘Hi, I’m a hooker, I have this Gucci dispatch case, I want to…”
“Please, I don’t know a hooker when I see one? They come in here day and night, night and day. Black, white, Puerto Rican, Chinese, they all look the same.”
“What was this one?”
“Puerto Rican. Short skirt, high heels, net stockings, purple blouse, a hooker.”
“Describe her.”
“I just did.”
“What color eyes, hair…?”
“Brown eyes, blond hair.”
“A blond Puerto Rican, huh?”
“Bleached blond. Frizzy. Long earrings, thick lipstick, tits out to here.”
“When did this bona fide purchase for value take place?” Ollie asked.
“I told you. Monday afternoon.”
“And you sold the case when?”
“Tuesday.”