5 Client

by Parnell Hall

  I got back in the elevator.

  I went down to the lobby. There was a pay phone there. I went to it, punched in information, asked for the number of Farber Kennelworth Development.

  I called the number.

  A female voice answered the phone. “Farber Kennelworth Development.”

  “Mr. Farber, please.”

  “Who’s calling, please?”

  “Mr. Acres.”

  Asshole. Acres is what you’re selling.

  “One moment, please.”

  She put me on hold.

  Idiot. Acres selling acres. Why couldn’t you say Mr. Thompson? You could be Thompson selling acres. You can’t be Acres selling thompson.

  She clicked back on. “Mr. Acres?”

  No, Mr. Thompson. “Yes.”

  “Mr. Farber is on another line. Would you care to hold?”

  “No, I’ll call back.”

  “Would you like to leave a number?”

  “No, I’ll call him later, thank you very much,” I said and hung up.

  All right. So far so good. There was a Farber. Did it follow that there also was a Kennelworth?

  I dropped a quarter in the phone and punched in the number again.

  The same female voice said, “Farber Kennelworth Development.”

  I disguised my voice slightly. “Mr. Kennelworth, please?”

  “Who’s calling, please?”

  This time I was ready for it. “Mr. Thompson.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Thompson, I didn’t recognize your voice. How are you?”

  “I have a slight cold.”

  “I could tell. One moment, please.”

  So. There was a Kennelworth. There was also a Thompson, and Kennelworth would think I was him.

  Seconds later a man’s voice said, “Hi, Charlie?”

  I hung up the phone.

  So. There was a Kennelworth and a Farber. The voice of Mr. Kennelworth was not the voice of the bogus Marvin Nickleson. I hadn’t heard the voice of Mr. Farber, but assuming he had managed to get into his office this morning without flying, he wasn’t Marvin Nickleson either.

  But now I had a new lead. Charlie Thompson. Who the hell was he? He knew Kennelworth. The secretary there certainly knew him. That should make him pretty important, shouldn’t it?

  Could he be Marvin Nickleson?

  I called information, asked them if they had a Manhattan listing for a Charles Thompson. They had six of them—did I have the address? No, I did not. And who was to say this Charlie Thompson had to live in Manhattan? In all probability, he didn’t. Which made tracking him down only slightly more unpromising than tracing five hundred POPs.

  I hung up the phone and took stock of my situation. The way I saw it, it was gonna be a long day.

  It was.

  I hung out in the lobby most of the afternoon, trying to look like I belonged there. I don’t know if I did that great a job or not, but at least nobody hassled me. Staking out an office building in the lobby is probably a no-no in the detective biz, but I just couldn’t hack the sidewalk. I tried it right after the phone calls, and I was out there turning blue when a guy went by with a ghetto-blaster on which the weatherman was announcing a wind-chill factor of minus twenty-eight. What a guy with no gloves was doing carrying half a ton of radio in that cold was beyond me, unless maybe it was frozen to his hand. At any rate, that was enough for me. I spent the rest of the afternoon inside. And while no one hassled me, in my head I envisioned building security guards holding whispered conferences about the suspicious gentleman on the premises, and every now and then I couldn’t help glancing out the door to see if the cops they’d summoned had arrived to pick me up.

  Naturally, they never did, and the afternoon passed, and rush hour arrived. And elevators started coming down and people started streaming out, and then the lobby wasn’t the place to be anymore, ’cause someone might get by me in the crowd, whereas outside I couldn’t miss anyone coming out the door. So I hit the sidewalk again, and while it was still cold it wasn’t that bad, because there was a constant stream of people coming out to watch, so I was occupied.

  Till rush hour ended. And the people stopped coming out. At which point I was finally able to convince myself it was time to pack it up and go home.

  Except for one thing. It occurred to me I should check the office of Farber Kennelworth Development to make sure no one was still there.

  I headed for the elevators. Just as I got there one came down and a man got out. I’d never seen him before, but his coming down reminded me that stragglers were still coming down. And there were half a dozen elevators. If I went up in one, I could miss Marvin Nickleson coming down in another. But if I didn’t go up, how was I gonna find out if the office was closed?

  I started for the elevator. Stopped. Started. Stopped.

  Shit.

  I said it out loud. I do that now and then when I get frustrated. As I said, I sometimes talk to myself out loud, particularly in moments of stress. This was just one manifestation of it. I’ll recognize some personal failing in myself, or I’ll recall some past instance when I acted like an asshole, or some decision of mine which I have cause to regret, and I’ll say, “Shit.” Or if the personal failing is humiliating enough, or the past experience embarrassing enough, or the cause for regret deep enough, I’ll say, “Fuck.”

  As I grow older and older, naturally these past experiences grow more and more numerous, and the instances of my recalling them grow more and more frequent, making the spaces between these instances grow shorter and shorter, and it occurs to me what is happening is I am gradually evolving into one of those pathetic old men you see walking down Broadway, compulsively muttering a constant stream of obscenities. I think there’s a name for that. If I were a better writer, I’d know it.

  Shit.

  I got in the elevator, went up to the sixth floor. There was no one in the corridor, and no light from under the door of Farber Kennelworth Development. Unless the bogus Marvin Nickleson had gone down in an elevator while I had come up in mine, he hadn’t been in today.

  But Farber and Kennelworth had. So he wasn’t them. Or they weren’t him. Or whatever.

  I took the subway home, which is always a bitch from the upper East Side, because you gotta go down to Grand Central, shuttle to Times Square, and then back up again.

  And the homeless are patrolling the cars in force these days. You can’t ride from one station to the next without hearing some person’s tale of personal woe. It’s as if they had it choreographed. The train will pull out of the station, the man who’d been working the car will disappear through the door at the front of the train, and the door at the rear of the car will slide open and the next performer will appear. “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I’m your personal bummer from 79th to 86th Street, here to remind you of the pain and misery and suffering in the world.” And the guy knows he’s working a hard house, and his only chance is the people who just got on, ’cause the people who’ve been on since 42nd Street have already had three or four tales of woe, and compassion has shut down and numbness has set in, and unless this guy’s got a particularly good spiel, he’s not gonna move ’em.

  Needless to say, I was feeling like hell when I got home. Alice was on the computer again, natch, but for once I didn’t care. I didn’t feel like talking to her. I was so bummed out, I didn’t feel like much of anything.

  She stopped though, and said, “Hi.”

  “Hi,” I said.

  She shook her head. “I don’t have to ask, do I? A total washout.”

  “Total.”

  “Hey, it’s your first day, you know you’re right, it’s gonna work out.”

  “Sure.”

  I must have looked really gloomy, because Alice got up, put her hands on my shoulders and leaned against my chest. She was wearing a sweat suit. I find women in sweat suits incredibly sexy. Their bodies move around in them freely in particularly attractive ways.

  “Hey,” she said, “don’t lo
ok so depressed. What do you need, a pep talk?”

  A pep talk was not exactly what I had in mind. I hugged her a little tighter.

  “Stanley,” Alice said. “Tommie’s still up.”

  Ah, the simple joys of parenthood. Tough on a man who still has trouble thinking of himself as a grownup.

  Over Alice’s shoulder I noticed some checks lying on the desk next to the computer.

  “What’s that?” I said.

  Alice looked. “Oh, I was just entering those checks.”

  “Checks?”

  “Yeah. Into the computer.”

  “What?”

  Alice turned around and pointed to the screen. “It’s ’Managing Your Money.’ A program. I enter all the data from the checkbook into the computer. Then when we do our taxes, we don’t have to add up the checkbook, the computer does it for us. Just call it up and print out all the totals and we’re done.”

  That sounded so good there had to be a catch to it somewhere. “Oh?”

  “Sure. Let me show you.”

  Alice picked up one of the checks. “All right. Look. I made ten bucks today for running off some form letters.”

  Alice bent over the keyboard. “So I type it in here in the proper blanks. Date. Amount. Name. Category. Then at tax time the computer calls it up. What do you think?”

  I thought her ass looked great in that sweat suit.

  “Terrific,” I said. “So you made ten bucks today. That’s ten better than me. What’s the other check?”

  “Oh, that’s a dividend.”

  Alice picked it up and began typing it in.

  “Oh,” I said.

  More small potatoes. Some five or six years ago one of Alice’s great uncles died and left her a hundred shares of National Fuel and Gas. As a result, four times a year we got a whopping thirty-one dollar and fifty cents dividend check. I can’t say it changed our lifestyle much, though for a while I got some mileage out of facetiously referring to Alice as “The Heiress.”

  I’d dismissed the check and gone back to admiring the contours of the sweat suit when it hit me.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  Alice stopped typing and turned around. “What?”

  “That check.”

  “What check?”

  “The dividend check.”

  “What about it?”

  “You know what it makes you?”

  Alice frowned and looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. “Thirty bucks richer.”

  “Yeah, but what else?”

  Alice looked totally exasperated. “I give up. What?”

  “You’re a stockholder.”

  33.

  THE FIRST TIME I met Leroy Stanhope Williams he had a cast on his leg. Leroy was one of the first clients I signed for Richard. He was also the only one I ever kept in touch with. That was because, aside from being an agreeable and intelligent person, Leroy had one outstanding characteristic that made him invaluable to a person in my profession. You see, Leroy was a thief.

  I hate to say that, because it immediately conjures up petty images. And there was nothing petty about Leroy. He was a grand thief on a grand scale. He robbed only from the rich, and he gave only to himself. He stole mainly art objects. Leroy was a connoisseur and a collector. Unfortunately, coming from a background on the streets of Harlem, Leroy had no money. At least, no money of his own. And having developed a taste for fine art through an education which began in reform school and ended with a degree from NYU, Leroy had attempted to combine both worlds in order to change his life style. In this endeavor, he was entirely successful.

  Leroy was a black man some five to ten years my junior, with a high sloping forehead that gave him an intellectual look, and a speech pattern that did nothing to belie it. He dressed impeccably, tastefully, conservatively. He always looked like some foreign dignitary about to address the U.N.

  Leroy had done me some favors in the past. The last one had almost gotten him killed. This one, I hoped, at worst would only get him arrested.

  It was a quarter to five. Leroy and I were standing on the sidewalk outside the office building of Farber Kennelworth Development. I knew what time it was because Leroy had a watch, one that I’m sure cost more than my entire wardrobe. I didn’t know what the wind-chill factor was because no one had walked by with a radio, but you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. Suffice it to say it was cold.

  Leroy blew out some frosty air, clapped his gloved hands together, bounced up and down in a manner that managed to be agitated and dignified at the same time, and said, “Would you mind explaining it to me again, why we are standing here in the freezing cold when there is a warm lobby not ten feet away?”

  “If the man I’m looking for comes out we don’t have to do this.”

  “Why can’t we wait for him in the lobby?”

  “We might miss him in the lobby.”

  “You really expect him to show?”

  “Quite frankly, it’s a long shot.”

  “It’s rather cold out for a long shot.”

  “I know. But if he were here and I missed him, I’d never forgive myself.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Are you kidding? It’s perfectly clear.”

  “It’s perfectly clear, it just doesn’t make sense.”

  “Why not?”

  “You admit there’s only the slimmest chance the man might show up at all.”

  “This is true.”

  “If we were to wait for him in the lobby, and if by the very slimmest chance this man might show up, there is then an even slimmer chance we might miss him. Is that correct?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “And the reason we are holding out for this minuscule chance is that, were it to occur, in that unlikely event you should never be able to forgive yourself?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Hmmm,” Leroy said. “But for that to happen, since you know what he looks like, it occurs to me the only way for you to miss him would be not to see him at all.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But if you didn’t see him at all, you wouldn’t know you’d missed him, would you?”

  We waited in the lobby.

  At five o’clock, people began to stream out. Of course, never having ventured beyond the doors of Farber Kennelworth Development, there was no way for me to recognize anyone who worked there. On the other hand, there was no way for them to recognize me.

  With the exception of the bogus Marvin Nickleson. I tried to spot him in the crowd. Naturally, I couldn’t. And though I was vigilant as hell, the thought occurred to me that Marvin Nickleson was a shrimp of a guy who could easily vanish in a crowd. And Leroy’s fine logic notwithstanding, I couldn’t shake the nagging fear that somehow he’d been there and I’d missed him.

  After a while the elevators began coming down with only stragglers.

  Leroy turned to me and said, “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “What do you think? Are they closed?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, what time was it when you went up and found them closed before?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t got a watch.”

  “That’s unfortunate. Well, approximately then. Would you say it was approximately now?”

  “More or less.”

  “Well. Shall we?”

  I hesitated. I was reluctant to go up because, of course, while we went up in one elevator, Marvin Nickleson might be coming down in another. But I didn’t feel like mentioning it to Leroy somehow.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  We went up in the elevator and walked down the hall way to Farber Kennelworth Development. There was no sound from within and no light under the door.

  The lock, however, looked formidable.

  “Think you can handle it?” I asked.

  Leroy gave me a withering look.

  “Sorry. I withdraw the question. You want me to stand guard?”<
br />
  “I would prefer it if you were to stand casually next to me as if we were two legitimate businessmen about to enter our office.”

  I did that. At least I tried. As an experiment sometime, try to act casual. I never felt so self-conscious in my life.

  Leroy, however, had no problem. Humming softly, he fished two metal strips out of his pants pocket, inserted them in the lock as if they were a key, and seconds later the door clicked open.

  “After you,” Leroy said.

  I pushed the door open and stepped inside. Leroy followed, closing the door behind him.

  It was pitch dark. I pulled a flashlight out of my coat pocket and snapped it on. I hunched over and kept my hand around the front, shielding the beam.

  Leroy snapped the light switch on.

  I wheeled around. “What are you doing?”

  Leroy smiled. “You are an amateur. In the event someone were to walk down the hall and see the light on under the door, they would assume someone was working late. If they were to see the flickering beam of your flashlight, they would assume the office was being robbed.

  “With the light on we are relatively safe. Nonetheless, I have no real wish to be here. Have you any further use of my services?”

  “Only if the offices or files are locked.”

  “Then let’s see.”

  They weren’t. It was a small suite consisting of two offices, presumably those of Farber and Kennelworth, and the reception area. Neither of the offices were locked, nor were any of the desks or cabinets or files.

  Leroy excused himself, pleading a desire not to reside in jail. He also added the suggestion that I be brief.

  I tried, and I probably was, though it seemed an eternity to me.

  I did the offices first. I found nothing there. The desks yielded an assortment of papers and notes, which might have been interesting, but it wasn’t what I was after and I didn’t want to take the time.

  That left only the waiting room. There were two desks and the files. The files were a last resort. I’d tackle them if I had to, but there were twelve drawers full, and going through them was going to be a bitch. So I was rooting like hell for the desks.

  The first one was a washout. The top drawer, yielding lipstick, tissues, and a movie magazine, told me this was the receptionist’s desk and it wasn’t going to be here. I jerked the other drawers open and proved myself right.