by Ed McBain
The two young women agents, one white and the other honey brown, looked from me to the young man as he made his way past them and through a door at the back of the garden room.
I was missing my seminar on the History of the West but that didn’t bother me much. I could always get the notes from my friend Claude. And working for Lawless promised to hone my investigative potentials.
“Making sense out of a seemingly incomprehensible jumble of facts.” That’s what Professor Ortega said at the first lecture I attended at Columbia. His class was called the Art in Article.
I wasn’t sure what Lawless was looking for but that didn’t worry me. I knew enough from my father’s practice to feel safe from involvement in any crime. The test was that even if I went to the police there was nothing concrete I could tell them that they didn’t already know.
I was beginning to wonder where the agent had gone when he and a small woman in a dark blue dress came out of the door in back. He veered off and the woman walked straight toward me.
“Mr. Orlean?” she asked with no smile.
“Ms. Lox?” I did smile.
“May I see some form of identification?”
This shocked. When did a real estate agent ask for anything but a deposit? But I took out my wallet and showed her my student ID and Louisiana driver’s license. She looked them over carefully and then invited me to follow her into the back.
The head woman’s office was no larger than an alcove, there was no skylight or window. Her workstation was a one-piece, salmon pink high school desk next to which sat a short black filing cabinet. She sat and put on a telephone headset, just an earphone and a tiny microphone in front of her mouth.
I stayed standing even though there was a visitor’s chair, because I had my manners to maintain.
“Sit,” she said, not unkindly.
I did so.
Valerie Lox was a mild blend of contradictions. Her pale skin seemed hard, almost ceramic. Her tightly wound blond hair was in the final phase of turning to white. The hint of yellow was illusive. The face was small and sharp, and her features could have been lightly sculpted and then painted on. Her birdlike body was slender and probably as hard as the rest of her but the blue dress was rich in color and fabric. It was like a royal cloak wrapped around the shoulders of a white twig.
“Why did you need to see my ID?”
“This is an exclusive service, Mr. Orlean,” she said with no chink of humanity in her face. “And we like to know exactly who it is we’re dealing with.”
“Oh,” I said. “So it wasn’t because of my clothes or my race?”
“The lower races come in all colors, Mr. Orlean. And none of them get back here.”
Her certainty sent a shiver down my spine. I smiled to hide the discomfort.
She asked of what assistance she could be to my father. I told her some lies but I forget exactly what. Lying comes easily to me. My aunt Alberta had once told me that lying was a character trait of men on my father’s side of the family. That was why they all became lawyers.
“Lawyer even sounds like liar,” she used to say. “That’s a good thing and it’s a bad thing. You got to go with the good, honey chile, no matter what you do.”
I spent forty-five minutes looking over photographs and blueprints of offices all over the Madison Avenue area. Nothing cost less than three hundred and fifty thousand a year and Ms. Lox got a whole year’s rent as commission. I was thinking maybe I could marry a real estate agent while I worked the paper trade.
Ms. Lox didn’t press me. She showed me one office after another asking strategic questions now and then.
“What sort of law would he be practicing?” she asked at one point. “I mean would he need a large waiting room?”
“If he did,” I answered, “I wouldn’t be here talking to you. Any lawyer with a waiting room is just two steps away from ambulance chasing.”
That was the only time I saw her smile.
“Is your father licensed to practice in New York?” she asked at another time.
“You should know,” I said.
“Come again?”
“I gave your assistant my father’s name and he came back here for five minutes or more. If I were you I would have looked up JP Orlean in the ABA Internet service. There I would have seen that he is not licensed in this state. But you must be aware that he has many clients who have investments and business in the city. A lawyer is mostly mind and a license is easy to rent.” These last words were my father’s. He used them all the time to out-of-state clients who didn’t understand the game.
It struck me as odd that Ms. Lox was so suspicious of me. I was just looking at pictures of commercial spaces. There was nothing top secret that I could steal.
The young Asian man, Brian, brought me an espresso with a coconut cookie while I considered. And when I was through he led me to the front door and said good-bye using my name. I told him, as I had told Valerie Lox, that I would be in touch in a few days after my father and I had a chance to talk.
As I was leaving I saw Valerie Lox standing at the door in back looking after me with something like concern on her porcelain face.
The next stop was a construction site on 23rd Street. Kenneth Cornell, the man I came to see, was some kind of supervisor there. The crew was excavating a deep hole getting ready for the roots of a skyscraper. There were three large cranes moving dirt and stone from the lower depths to awaiting trucks on a higher plane. There was a lot of clanging and whining motors, men, and a few women, shouting, and the impact of hammers, manual and automatic, beating upon the poor New York soil, trying once again to make her submit to their architectural dreams.
I walked in, stated my business, was fitted with a hard hat, and shown into the pit.
They led me to a tin shack half the way down the dirt slope. The man inside the shack was yelling something out of the paneless window at workers looking up from down below. I knew that he was yelling to be heard over the noise but it still gave me the impression that he was a man in a rage. And, being so small, I always stood back when there was rage going on.
Cornell was tall but a bit lanky for construction I thought. His pink chin was partly gray from afternoon shadow and his gray eyes were unsettling because they seemed to look a bit too deeply into my intentions.
“Yeah?”
“Mr. Cornell?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m Orlean,” I said pronouncing it or-leen as Lawless had done.
“That supposed to mean something to me?”
“I called your office last week—about getting a job,” I said.
His eyes tightened, it felt as though they were squeezing my lungs.
“Who are you?” he asked me.
It suddenly occurred to me that I was way out of my depth.
Cornell’s hands folded up into fists as if to underscore the epiphany.
“Get the hell out of here,” he said.
I didn’t exactly run out of that hole but if I had been competing in a walking race I wouldn’t have come in last.
6
Lana Drexel, fashion model, was the last name on my list. She was the one I most wanted to see but I didn’t make it that day.
Henry Lansman was my second to last stop. He was an easy one, a barber at Crenshaw’s, a popular place down in Greenwich Village. There was almost always a line at Crenshaw’s. They were an old time barbershop that catered to the conservative thirtysomething crowd. They gave classic haircuts in twelve minutes and so could afford to undercut, so to speak, the competition.
The shop, I knew from friends, had nine barber chairs that were all busy all of the time. But because this was a Tuesday at two-thirty there were only about ten or twelve customers waiting in line at the top of the stairwell of the shop. You had to go down a half flight of stairs to get into the establishment. I can’t say what the inside of the place looked like because I never made it there.
“Hey,” someone said in a tone that was opening to f
ear. “Hey, mister.”
“Excuse me,” a man in a red parka said before he shouldered me aside hard enough to have thrown me down the stairwell if there hadn’t been a portly gentleman there to block my fall.
“Hey, man! What the fuck!” the big man I fell against hollered. He was wearing some kind of blue uniform.
I wanted to see who it was that pushed me. I did catch a glimpse of the top of the back of his head. It had partly gray close-cut hair. He was crouching down and the parka disguised his size, and, anyway, the big guy I slammed into needed an apology.
“I’m sorry …” I said and then the shouting started.
“Hey, mister. Mister! Hey I think this guy’s havin’ a heart attack!”
The big man had put his hand on my shoulder but the terror in the crackling tone distracted him long enough for me to rush to the side of the young man who was screaming. I wish I could say that it was out of concern for life that moved me so quickly but I really just wanted to save myself from being hit.
The screamer was a white man, tall and well built. He was tan and wore an unbuttoned black leather jacket and a coal colored loose-knit shirt that was open at the neck revealing a thick gold chain that hung around his throat. He had a frightened child’s eyes. His fear was enough to convince me to clear out before the danger he saw could spread. I would have run away if it wasn’t for the dying man at my feet.
I crouched down on one knee to get a closer look at the heart attack victim. There was a fleck of foam at the corner of his mouth. The lips were dark, the panic in his wide eyes was fading into death. He wore a short-sleeved nylon shirt which was odd because this was late October and on the chilly side. His gray slacks rode a little high. He was almost completely bald.
The struggle in his eyes was gone by the time I had noticed these things. I cradled the back of his head with my hand. A spasm went through his neck. His back arched and I thought he was trying to rise. But then he slumped back down. Blood seeped out of his left nostril.
“He’s dead,” the someone whispered.
Men and women all around were voicing their concern but I only made out one sentence, “Mr. Bartoli, it’s Henry, Henry Lansman!” a man’s voice shouted.
I was watching the color drain from the dead man’s face thinking that I should clear out or tell somebody what I knew. But all I could do was kneel there holding the heavy head, watching the drop of blood making its way down his jowl.
“Out of the way! Let him go!” a man ordered.
A round man, hard from muscle, pushed me aside. He was wearing a white smock. At first I thought it was a doctor. But then I realized it must be someone from the barbershop.
I moved aside and kept on going. The screamer with the gold chain was leaning against the window of the shoe store next door. His tan had faded. I remember thinking that some poor woman would have to have sex with him all night long before the color came back.
Henry Lansman was dead. People were shouting for someone to call an ambulance. I stayed watching until I heard the first far-off whine of the siren then I walked away from the scene feeling guilty though not knowing why.
I went over to Saint Mark’s Place, a street filled with head shops, twelve-step programs, and wild youths with punk hair and multiple piercings. There was a comic book store that I frequented and a quasi-Asian restaurant that was priced for the college student pocketbook.
I ordered soba noodles with sesame sauce and a triple espresso. I finished the coffee but only managed about half of the entrée. I sat there thinking about the ceramic woman, the angry man, and the dead barber. That morning I was just a college student looking for a job. By afternoon I had witnessed a man dying.
I considered my options. The first one was calling my father. He knew lawyers in New York. Good ones. If I told him what was wrong he’d be on the next plane. JP would be there. He’d body block anyone trying to hurt me. He’d do anything to save me from danger. But then he’d take me back down to Louisiana and tell me how stupid I was and which law school I was to attend. He might even tell me that I had to live at home for a while.
And how could I say no if I begged him to save me?
And anyway it looked like a heart attack that killed Lansman. I decided that I was just being oversensitive to the paranoia of Lawless and Red Tuesday.
The man was just sick.
“Didn’t you like it?” the slightly overweight, blue-haired, black waitress asked. Actually her hair was brown with three bright blue streaks running back from her forehead.
“I like you,” I said, completely out of character.
She gave me a leery look and then walked away to the kitchen. She returned with my bill a few moments later. At the bottom was her telephone number and her name, Sharee.
I called Lawless’s answering machine from a pay phone on the street.
“Lox and Cornell are fine,” I said after the tone. “But Lansman died of a heart attack. He fell dead just when I got there. I didn’t get to Drexel and I quit too. You don’t have to pay me.”
From there I went up to the special lab room that was set up for us at Columbia. There were three computers that were connected to AP, UPI, and Reuters news databases. There were also lines connected to police and hospital reports in Manhattan. Lansman’s death wasn’t even listed. That set my mind at ease some. If there was no note of his death it had to be some kind of medical problem and not foul play.
I followed breaking news in the Middle East and Africa until late that night. There had been a car bomb near the presidential residence in Caracas, Venezuela. I wondered, briefly, what Red Tuesday would have made of that.
It was midnight by the time I got to 121st Street. I made it to our apartment house, the Madison, and climbed six floors. I was walking down the hall when a tall man in a dark suit appeared before me.
“Mr. Orlean?”
“Yes?”
“We need to speak to you.”
“It’s late,” I complained and then made to walk around him.
He moved to block my way.
Backing up I bumped into something large and soft so I turned. Another obstacle in the form of a man in a suit stood before me.
The first man was white, the second light brown.
“We need to talk to you at the station,” the brown man informed me.
“You’re the police?”
Instead of speaking he produced a badge.
“What do you want with me?” I asked, honestly confused. I had put my dealings with Archibald Lawless that far behind me.
“You’re a witness to a possible crime,” the man behind me said.
I turned and looked at him. He had a big nose with blue and red veins at the surface. His breath carried the kind of halitosis that you had to take pills for.
The brown man pulled my arms behind my back and clapped handcuffs on my wrists.
“You don’t arrest witnesses,” I said.
“You’ve been moving around a lot, son,” the white cop said, exhaling a zephyr of noxious fumes. “And we need to know some answers before we decide if we’re going to charge you with something or not.”
“Where’s your warrant?” I said in a loud voice intended to waken my roommate. But I was cut short by the quick slap from the man I came to know as August Morganthau.
7
They took me to the 126th Street station. There were police cars parked up and down the block. I was taken past a waiting room full of pensive looking citizens. They weren’t manacled or guarded so I figured they were there to make complaints or to answer warrants. I was a felon in their eyes, cuffed and manhandled, shoved past them like a thief.
They took me to a Plexiglas booth where a uniformed officer filled out what I came to know later as an entry slip.
“Name?” the sentry asked.
I was looking at the floor to avoid the nausea caused by Morganthau’s breath.
“Name?”
I realized that I was expected to answer the question. It seemed
unfair. Why should I tell him my name? I didn’t ask to be there.
“Felix Orlean,” I said taking great pleasure in withholding my middle names.
“Middle name?”
I shook my head.
“Case number?”
“I don’t know,” I said, trying now to be helpful. I regretted the childish withholding of my name.
“Of course you don’t, stupid,” Morganthau said. He shoved me too.
“Case six-three-two-two-oh, homicide,” the chubby brown man, Tito Perez, said.
“Charges?”
“Pending,” Officer Morganthau grunted.
There was a Plexiglas wall next to the booth with a rude door cut into it. The edges were all uneven and it had only a makeshift wire hanger handle. I got the impression that one day the police realized that if someone got loose with a gun there would be a lot of casualties unless they put up a bulletproof barrier between them and the phantom shooter. So they bought some used Plexiglas and cut it into walls and doors and whatnot. After that they never thought about it again.
Perez pulled open the door. It wasn’t locked, couldn’t be as far as I could see. They pushed me along an aisle of cubicles. Men and women wearing headsets were sitting behind the low-cut walls talking to the air or each other. Some of them were in uniform, some not. Mostly it was women. Almost all of them white. The room was shabby. The carpet under my feet was worn all the way to the floor in places. The cubicles were piled high with folders, scraps of pink and white papers, coffee cups, and small heaps of sweaters, shirts, and caps. The tan cubicle walls weren’t all straight. A few were missing, some were half rotted away or stained from what must have been water damage of some sort.
If this was the nerve center of police intelligence for that neighborhood, crime was a good business opportunity to consider.
I see how slipshod the police seemed now. But that night, while I merely recorded what I saw with my eyes, my mind was in a state of full-blown horror. As soon as I got to a phone I was going to call my father’s twenty-four-hour service. Betty was the woman on the late night shift. She’d get to him no matter where he was.