I stopped now to inhale air, and also, I confess, to see whether Zwingli might make some expression of regard for my felicitous phrasings. He did not. I went on: “But what strikes me here, even more than these abominable accusations, is your moral position as a police officer. How do you justify the pursuit of narcotics dealers when you are yourself an addict?”
“Superior force,” he answered flatly, drawing from under his plaid shirt an enormous automatic pistol. But then, in the tone of supreme regret, he added: “I truly hoped I would not have to use it on you.”
7
Staring into the muzzle of Zwingli’s blunderbuss, as if in a dream I heard my name called in a strident female voice. I did not grasp the fact of Peggy Tumulty’s arrival until she had rushed across the room, boldly thrust the scrawny detective and his big gun out of the way, and clasped me to her splendid bosom.
“You lay off him!” she ordered. “I’m from a long line of municipal employees, and the accident rate among sanitation workers is a lot higher than with you bums, and yet you fight parity, and you’re all on the take anyway, so go out and steal apples from a fruit stand.”
Zwingli said, “Yes, ma’am,” and put away his gun.
“Peggy!” I cried, belatedly but with enthusiasm.
Zwingli asked shyly: “This is the lady in question?”
Of the mixed emotions of the moment, I chose mirth. “He thinks,” said I, “hahaha, he thinks you are a hook—” I claimed control: “Tell him what you are to me.”
She extended her chest towards Zwingli, causing him to recoil in more fear, I think, than lustful awe, junkies having a notoriously feeble sex drive. “I happen to be Mr. Wren’s associate in business.”
“No,” I pointed out, “that’s still ambiguous in this context, Peg…Miss Tumulty is my secretary.”
“O.K., so I’m getting uppity,” Peggy cried. “I’m entitled.”
“She can confirm my story,” I told Zwingli.
He rolled his bloodshot eyes. “What is your story?” To Peggy he said: “You see, miss, I’m not asking much.”
Peggy drew back and squinted suspiciously at me. “Are you being weird again, Russ? Just tell him the facts. Nobody’s asking for Shakespeare.”
So I repeated the account I had given Knox in vain, and Peggy did support me on every detail, though she had not been a witness to any event but the initial appearance of the man who called himself Bakewell and the interview with Washburn. As to the latter, I soon had reason to wish she had not been conversant with the particulars of that visit.
“Washburn Two,” she told Zwingli at the conclusion of my narrative, “exposed himself. Then he gave Russ a retainer of three hundred dollars.”
The scrawny detective nodded his psoriatic nose. “Well, Miss Tumulty, I want to commend you for coming for ward. Were there more citizens like you, the serpent of crime would not hold this city in its loathsome coils.”
As he said this, I felt a touch at my sleeve on the side towards him, not a grasping so much as the tentative maneuvers of a squid to find a point at which to fasten a tentacle full of suckers. I saw it was rather Zwingli’s small claw.
He asked Peggy: “I wonder whether I might have a private word with your associate?” He gave her his grotesque smile.
I might have known she would by now be enchanted with his deference. She even bobbed her body slightly in what I took to be the parody of a curtsy, and said, predictably: “Be my guest.” Then she turned and spotted Knox, who was fondling the lingerie from the suitcase. She marched across the room, snatched a black bra from his fingers, threw it in the valise, and closed that container. Rubicund shame suffused Knox’s beefy face, and he slunk away.
“Looks like a hot piece of poontang,” said Zwingli, smirking horribly. “I suspect you are living the legend of the private eye, which I confess I had always believed mythical. You’ll be happy to know that I’ll accept the alibi provided by your so-called secretary, but I’m afraid I’ll be obliged to impound that retainer given you by this man named Washburn Tew.”
“What?”
“It’s evidence, you see.” He threw up his hands. “Oh, I’ll certainly give you a receipt.” He searched in his jeans for a moment and then brought out a filthy, crumpled piece of yellow paper. He found a fragment of pencil in his lumberman’s shirt. “Turn your back, please.” He put the paper between my shoulder blades and scratched upon it. I happen to be ticklish in that odd place, and I did a little inadvertent dance.
“Now the money, please.”
“It’s all I have in the world!” I protested. “How can I do the job for which it was paid me?”
Zwingli winced compassionately. “Were the rules of the NYPD my own, I should alter them instanter, you know that. Alas, we are all pawns on the chessboard of ineluctable reality.” His fingers were extended and twitching.
I surrendered the two hundred-dollar bills. “Peggy has the third,” I said vengefully. “Go get it out of her.”
He shrugged. “I’m in no condition for that.”
Which reminded me to ask: “Are you really a heroin addict?”
“Fortunately for you, I’m the new breed of officer,” said he, frowning. “Knox would punish you severely for asking such an insensitive question.”
“Was that just a ruse? And what about Big Jake the Wop?”
“No, Jake the Wop or Big Jake. To combine them is superfetation.”
Damn him. I had never heard that word in speech, and never read it but in the text of T. S. Eliot.
“Was he a dealer in narcotics—or was that too merely part of your shtick? —Show-business jargon, derived from the Yiddish.”
He sneered: “I know that!…As to the burden of your question, that’s a police affair.” He added curtly: “You’ll be informed if we have further use for you.”
“But I must stay in town?”
“If you don’t have the fare to go elsewhere,” the little detective told me. “Good God, man, I’m not obliged to give you a guide to life.” He turned and made a kissing noise towards the other officers, and with a hooked finger conducted them out the door.
My apartment lay in ruins; the contents of every drawer were strewn on the floor and the pillows slit and emptied. Fortunately the latter had been stuffed not with goose down but with solid slabs of foam rubber. I lifted the end of the bed and hurled it through the crazy-angled process by which it became a sofa. I threw the naked foam cushions in place, for they too had been flayed of their nubby fabric. Then I dropped myself onto them. I was suffering from what by my count was the third beating of the morning.
I remembered Peggy and looked for her just at the moment she emerged from the bathroom. For an insane instant I couldn’t recall whether I had myself ever got to use the toilet.
“Peggy! You saved my skin, coming in just when you did.”
She was habitually modest about her actual accomplishments. “Forget it, Russ. You’d do the same for me.” “I hope I would, Peg.”
She was about to sit down in the suede chair when I warned her of the oil spot. I felt more bitter about that than even my three beatings: it could never be used again; oil does not evaporate, and the blotterlike hide would hold it in suspension forever.
Rather than share my couch, Peggy went to the kitchenette and got the high wooden stool I kept there and from which I ate my mean repasts—Fritos, cottage cheese, and raisins—off the counter. She clattered. The police had even emptied the compartmented plastic container in which I maintained my cutlery, and hurled my Melamine dishes and cups to the floor as well.
She brought her stool before the couch and climbed onto it. She was unaware that with her shoes on the top rung, I could see the underside of her substantial thighs.
“The first thing,” she said, “is to explain how I happened to turn up here, uh, you know, unchaperoned and all.”
“That’s right. That’s pretty fresh, Peggy.” I winked raffishly.
“I shadowed you.” Her smirk was vain.
“Yes I did, Russ, all the way. Soon’s I got across Twenty-third, I turned right around and came back and followed you, maintaining a distance of half a block. When you stopped to look in the pet-store window, I stepped into the line waiting at the bus stop. Whenever I saw a girl with a nice figure coming toward you, I got ready to hide behind a pole or in a doorway, because I knew you’d turn and watch her hips when she had passed.”
I felt myself blush, though why I should be embarrassed by that, I do not know. It was normal. It was harmless. But nobody likes to be observed in secret.
“You obviously had a purpose in this, Peg. I mean, surely you didn’t follow merely to catch me in some degrading and/or humiliating situation.” Knowing I could do so with impunity, I made a joke: “I might have been on my way to a golden shower.”
“I don’t care what brand of soap you take baths with, sir!” she said indignantly, making, as she often did, a commercial interpretation of a term alien to her. “I got to thinking: a strange and sinister series of events has been taking place, Russ, and you are somehow involved, without your own volition, like the hub of a wheel which is forced to turn around and around yet doesn’t travel anywhere itself, even if the car reaches California.”
“What poetic understatement,” said I. Yet I was not unimpressed by the image; as long ago as when I taught freshman composition I had become aware that no sensibility is so banal as never to have eloquent instants, though only to a Keats are they routine.
“I thought maybe if I kept an eye on you—without you knowing it, so you would act natural—I might be able to get some clue. Maybe”—she put out her hand—“now don’t get mad, maybe there was something peculiar that you were doing that attracted freaks to you like jam attracts flies. Maybe—and you’ll get ever madder at this, probably—maybe you did misinterpret some perfectly ordinary things. Because, you know, Russ, I never did really see with my own eyes anything out of the ordinary but a few drops of blood in the elevator, and they could have come from a cut finger. Remember that time I cut my finger and you got me a Band-Aid? You can be real nice when you want to be.”
She wore the kind of expression that people assume when they want to look sweet; most children and all dogs can do this; it has no reference to feeling sweet, and in fact hoodwinks nobody. But suddenly I was struck by the thought that perhaps it was not intended to dupe or gull—that what one was supposed knowingly to accept was the gesture as gesture, ars gratia artis, and as such it had a certain gallantry.
Often enough I fashion such elaborations, arriving at an original and profound insight, only to experience a sequel in which I am proved wrong, the simply and obvious motive having been the operative one: self-aggrandizement. Peggy wanted something.
“I discovered I have a natural gift for investigative work, Russ. You must admit you never suspected I was tailing you.”
“True, Peg. But let me point—”
“As you are the first to say, I’ve never been much of a typist. And shorthand, forget it.” Here Peggy spoke with utter justice. I really did not need a secretary. I had kept her on for sentimental reasons, as one keeps an old pair of sneakers.
“And the advantage for you in a full partnership,” Peggy continued, “is that you won’t have to worry about coming up with my salary any more. After expenses have been met, we’ll split what’s left right down the middle.”
I was gingerly going over my face with ten finger tips. I didn’t yet have the nerve to look in a mirror. The ache in my right kidney was quiescent at the moment, but the left one, which had not been struck, throbbed in pain.
“I’ll tell you, Peggy. In view of your having got me out of a sticky mess, and considering your implied threat to tell the police that you, on second thought, not having actually witnessed many of the salient events of my morning, cannot confirm my account of them, I’ll—well, I’ll definitely think about your suggestion. I’m not saying no, mind you. But I had almost reached the conclusion that unless business improved drastically, I’d have to go it alone, sans even a secretary.”
I breathed regret. “Now that that detective has impounded the remainder of Washburn’s retainer, I’m down to my original seven dollars—and this receipt, which looks far from official.”
I examined the yellow rectangle of paper. On the obverse was printed the name of a business (characteristic of cacophonous New York: Nedick’s, Gristedes, Bohack); “Krachlich Hardware” and its Third Avenue address. On one of the horizontal lines below was scrawled, in ball point blue, Bug & Tar remover, a price of ninety-nine cents, a tax of eight, and yet a total of $1.59.
Reversing it, I read what Zwingli had written with his stub of pencil: “Rec’d of T. Villanova, one cargo of slaves.” It was signed, “A. Lincoln.”
“That little swine!” I cried, balling the slip and hurling it across the room. “I suppose it’s typical: the police have got even more corrupt since the Knapp Commission.”
“You’re sure right about that,” said Peggy. “But these guys weren’t the police, as it happens.”
“What?” I howled: “Don’t tell me—no, it’s not possible again. No, Peg, no. There were too many of them this time. Also, there were two black ambulance orderlies, also in uniform. And they had a stretcher with an authentic zippered body-bag.”
She narrowed her eyes. “I’ll tell you, Russ. I’m not saying no, mind you. I’m thinking about it.”
“Oh, come on. This isn’t the time for satire. You know something.”
“Well, how would I know the explanation if I’m just a secretary, and only good enough to take your phone calls and type your letters, while you’re the big macho, because you were raised from childhood with the idea you would become one of the people who ran things, who are always men, whereas I was given toys that kept me in my place, little muffin tins and bassinets, and do you know what I got one Christmas? A tiny sink, which came with a stain already in it and a little can of Comet and a miniature cellulose sponge, also a bottle of more stain so when you scrubbed out the original you could put more on.
The women’s-lib frenzy had crested a couple of years before for everybody else in the urban areas of the nation, but Peggy lived in a pocket that caught and retained cultural runoffs. For her not only “hippie” but “beatnik” were currently usable words.
At this point I decided to try a piece of cunning. I realized that her aggressive address was based on something firmer than, say, the premenstrual unease which she might believe it fashionable to blame on the testicled sex. She could well be in possession of the key that would release me from the fell imprisonment of ignorance, which remained my worst problem.
“You’ve got your deal, Peggy. For that hundred-dollar bill in your purse I’ll sell you a half interest in the agency, a full partnership.”
She chewed her lip. “You’re some sheeny, you know that?” She brightened. “O.K., so that’s the sum total of the assets on hand. I’m a full partner, so half is mine. Wait a minute, half the profits after expenses goes to each one of us. The main outstanding debt at this time is three hundred and seventy-five dollars in delinquent wages. So I keep the hundred, and am owed, from future remittances, another two seventy-five.”
“No, no, no,” I cried. “If you’re going to figure that way, then we split the debt, you see, and your share is half of three seventy-five.” Amazingly enough, I worked this out in my head. “So you give me the hundred, and you owe an additional eighty-seven dollars and fifty cents.” I made a gesture. “But, look, I want to be fair. You collect the two hundred impounded by Zwingli; I’ll take my half, and you can have yours.”
Peggy gave no evidence of following this argument, having begun to root in her purse when I started to speak. Now she raised her head and spoke earnestly.
“The hundred is gone. I must have lost it in the street.”
I put my face in my lap.
“Aw, the heck with it, Russ. I’ll tell you for free. The movies.” “Pardon?”
“They’re filming
a movie. They got a great big truck outside. You must of seen it when you came in, now that I think about it. Come on, Russ, you’ve been putting me on all day.”
“No, Peggy,” I said slowly, pounding one of the naked-foam cushions.
“It’s called The Reformers. It’s about this pair of detectives, one little and one heavy, you know, like Laurel ‘n’ Hardy, only they’re not supposed to be funny, I don’t think.”
“Something’s rotten in the state of Dane—I mean Denmark! Don’t tell me Bakewell, or Jake the Wop, Big Jake, et al., was some actor, playing dead?” I hurled myself erect, in a burst of pain. “That was real money that Zwingli took from me, and Knox really beat me savagely. Don’t tell me cinema-verite goes that far.”
Peggy was disgusted—with me. “For crying out loud, Russ, I only know what they told me when they pulled up in that movie truck. I was on my stakeout of your building, see.”
“You didn’t happen to spot a dog outside? A great big dog, a great Dane, in fact?”
“Never,” said Peg.
“He, or rather she—it’s a bitch, I gather—” Peggy screamed.
“That’s the standard English designation for a female bowwow, for heaven’s sake. Ophelia—”
Peggy scrambled off the stool and raised her fists. “You try feeling me and you’ll get a knuckle sandwich.” She showed her teeth. “I don’t have to kowtow to you any more, buster. We’re partners, remember?”
“Peggy, I’m trying to bring a train of thought into a station,” I said loftily. “This female canine may be a clue, the only reliable clue if so—in the sense that she cannot speak for herself and thus weave a tissue of lies, like all the other principals in this case.” I took out my billfold. “Forget the movie, and take a look at this.” I handed her the dog license issued by the ASPCA. “They’ve gone to a lot of trouble—that came from a computer, if you observe.” With difficulty, owing to my bruises, contusions, and aches, I bent and picked up the volume of Ruskin and showed her the flyleaf. “The name is in at least one other book as well.”
Who is Teddy Villanova? Page 10