by Ed McBain
“I don’t have time for your rules, Mr. Insurance Man. People have been dying out there and your government is covering it up. There’s something rotten in this business and I’m the one’s going to sanitize and bleach it clean.”
“What do you mean about the government?” Vialet asked.
“You answer me, Mr. Insurance Man, and then I’ll share.”
“That’s hardly fair, you know,” Vialet said. “What if I give you all my information and then you turn around and leave or tell me that you really don’t know anything?”
“I’m not the liar here,” Lawless said. “You are. This whole building is a lie. Your pale-faced boy and your snotty secretaries are lies. Maybe if you ate raw flesh at your desk and kept a pot of shit at each doorway then maybe you’d be halfway to the truth about something. No. I’m not a liar, Mr. Insurance Man. I’m the only true thing you’ve seen all year.”
His voice sounded a little high, strained. I worried that maybe one of his psychological maladies was manifesting itself.
“Mr. Lawless,” I said.
When he turned toward me I could see the madness in his eyes.
“What?”
“We don’t have the briefcase with us so I won’t be able to make complete notes.”
For a moment he was bewildered but then his mind grabbed hold. He laughed and said, “It’s okay, Felix. We’ll just wing it until we have the case.” He looked back at Vialet and said, “Tell me, who do you suspect in the theft?”
Vialet looked at us and sighed. He sat down and so did Lawless.
“A man named Lamarr,” the insurance man said.
“Benny,” Lawless agreed. “Him and Lana Drexel. And Valerie Lox, Kenneth Cornell, and Henry Lansman. We know the soldiers. What we want is the bankroll.”
I could see that Vialet was concentrating on the names Lawless threw out.
“You seem to know more than I do,” he said.
“Who is the man who has been traveling with Lamarr lately?” Archibald asked. “A white man in his forties. He has short hair, maybe graying, maybe not.”
“Wayne Sacorliss,” Vialet said without hesitation. “He’s been around Lamarr for a few years. Just a toady as far as we can tell. He has an office on Lexington, just south of Forty-first.”
“Who’s the buyer?” Lawless asked.
“We think it’s a Canadian named Rudolph Bickell. He’s a very rich man and a collector of rare gems. He lives in Las Vegas half the year.”
“How does he make his money?”
“Buying and selling,” Vialet said. “Your grain to bakeries, cotton to sweatshops in Asia, metal to gun makers and guns to the highest bidder.”
“Weapons?”
“Anything,” Vialet said. “He’d been making noise to Strangman about buying the gemstones until about three months ago. We figure that when he came up with the plan he stopped calling.”
“How much?” Lawless asked.
“We’ll go as high as three million. That’s all the stones in perfect condition. No trouble to cover either.”
“Will corroboration by the police about my central role in reclaiming the jewels be enough?” Lawless asked in flawless business contract style.
“Certainly,” Vialet allowed.
“Come on, Felix,” Archibald said.
We were out of the gray insurance building in less than five minutes.
16
“I thought that you were an anarchist,” I was saying, “a political purist, a man of the people.”
Lawless was sitting next to me in the back seat of Derek Chambers’s limo, scanning the white pages.
“That sounds right to me,” he said. “But mostly, Felix, like I told you before, I walk that line.”
“So the three million means nothing to you?”
“That money will pay for a lot of walking, son. Slaves walking across borders, bound men dancing again—that’s what it’ll pay for, and more.”
He gave Derek an address on Lexington.
Sacorliss ran an optical glass frame distribution business on the fourteenth floor. Many of the offices around him were empty. The reception room had been uninhabited for some while. There was dust on the blotter and no evidence that the phone was even plugged in. I wondered if Wayne Sacorliss had moved on to LensCrafters or some other larger optical business.
“Hello,” I called.
There was a doorway beyond the reception desk leading to a passageway formed from opaque glass panels. This hallway was in the form of an L that one would suspect led to the main office.
“Who’s there?” a mild mannered male voice inquired.
“Archibald Lawless,” I said, “and his assistant.” I couldn’t get my tongue around the word scribe.
A man appeared in the glass angle. From the front he could have been the man I saw running from the death of Henry Lansman. Only this man wore a light brown suit instead of a red parka.
“Who?” he asked.
“We’ve come to ask you about Benny Lamarr,” Lawless said.
Sacorliss had light blue eyes and a broad face. His eyes were elliptical in both shape and manner. His lips were so sensual they belonged on a younger man, or a slightly perverse demigod. His features were all that he showed. There wasn’t even a glimmer of recognition for the man he assisted.
He didn’t respond at all.
“Can we go into your office, Mr. Sacorliss?” I asked.
“Are you here to buy frames?”
“No.”
“Then I don’t see what we have to talk about.”
“Henry Lansman for one thing,” I said.
From the corner of my eye I saw Lawless swivel his head to regard me.
“I don’t know who that is,” Sacorliss was saying, “but if you must come in then follow me.”
At the end of the L-shaped glass hall was a round room lined on one side by waist-high, old fashioned windows that were furbished with brown tinted glass. I could see people in offices not twenty feet away. Some were working and others talking. It was a pleasant proletariat view of the inner workings of a big city’s commerce.
This room was also quite desolate. One maple desk with a square-cut oak chair, a telephone with a bare cord that ran across the room to find the jack in the opposite wall. There was a laptop computer on the floor and not one scrap of paper anywhere.
Sacorliss was a few inches taller than I and maybe twenty pounds more than he should have been. But he moved with grace and self-confidence. Once we were in the room he closed the door.
Lawless’s eyes never left the smaller man. His wariness made me nervous but I didn’t know what to do. So I perched myself on the edge of the maple desk while Wayne Sacorliss and Archibald faced each other.
“What is it you want from me?” Sacorliss asked the amber king before him.
“There’s no need for trouble here, Wayne. I’m just interested in why the government wants to cover up Lansman’s death, his and a few others whom you might or might not know.”
Lawless’s mouth turned up in a smile but his eyes were dull.
The baby finger of his left hand twitched.
Sacorliss moved a few inches to his right so that his back was turned fully toward me. Seeing his head from this position I was sure that he was the same man I saw fleeing the scene of Henry Lansman’s death. I wanted to signal Lawless that we had what we needed but all of his attention was on the killer.
“I furnish frames for optical lenses, Mr., um, Lawless, wasn’t it?”
“There’s no need for conflict between us, Wayne,” Lawless said in a uncharacteristically placating tone. “Felix here and I just want to know about who would want to hide the murders of international criminals. Especially when those murders were so well executed that no doctor would suspect foul play.”
What happened next took me a few days to work out. Sacorliss lifted his right shoulder in a way that made me think he was about to deny any knowledge of Lawless’s insinuations. Then Archibald took half
a step backwards. Sacorliss moved the same distance forward by taking a step with his left foot. Then the assassin shouted and I felt a powerful impact against my chest. I flew backward over the desk, hit the floor and slid into the wall.
While I was still en route to the wall Sacorliss produced a very slender ten-inch blade from somewhere in his suit. He lunged at his anarchist inquisitor and stabbed him in the chest.
Lawless wasn’t slow, however. He grabbed Sacorliss’s arm at the elbow so that the tip of the blade went less than half an inch into his body.
I struggled to my feet coughing hard. The vision I saw was surreal: Before me the two men were struggling like the titans in Goya’s black painting. Sacorliss’s knife was still piercing Lawless’s chest but the larger man was managing to impede the progress of the blade. Through the window two women were talking, a whole office full of workers were walking back and forth, there was even a man looking up from his keyboard staring dreamily toward the battle.
Sacorliss kicked Lawless in the thigh with a quick movement. He did this twice more and I knew that sooner or later the man I came in with would be dead. I tried the door but it was locked. I was still coughing and stunned from the roundhouse kick the killer had hit me with. I looked for something to hit him with. I tried to lift his oak chair but it was too heavy to get up over my head.
I was about to go for the laptop when Sacorliss tried another kick. Lawless moved his thigh and the assassin lost his balance. Lawless then lifted him up over his head. That’s when the most amazing thing happened. Somehow Archibald managed to disarm Sacorliss so that when he slammed him down on the floor he also stabbed him through the chest.
Sacorliss kicked Lawless away and jumped to his feet. He looked at me and then at the computer. He took a step toward the laptop but his foot betrayed him and he went down on one knee. He looked at his killer then.
“Who are you?” I heard him ask. And then he fell face forward and I think he was dead.
Blood seeped toward the laptop.
Lawless turned Sacorliss over with a toe.
“Get the computer,” he said to me.
While I did that, he wiped the haft of the knife clean of fingerprints.
People were still gabbing and working in the office building across the way.
On the way out, Lawless made sure that the doorknob was clean of prints. By the time we were back in Derek’s limo, I was so cold that my teeth were chattering. Soon after that I lost consciousness.
17
When I woke up it was dark. I was still dressed and on my back on a bed that was fully made. There was a scented candle burning and mild recorder music wafting in from somewhere. I felt odd, both peaceful and numb. My hands were lying at my sides and I felt no need to move them. I remembered the death of Wayne Sacorliss and the bizarre witnesses from the windows across the way. I thought about the blood across the barren wood floor but none of that bothered me. I supposed that Lawless had given me some kind of sedative from his medical case; something to relax my nerves. I was grateful for whatever he’d done because I knew that unaided I would have been in the depths of anxious despair.
A feathery touch skimmed my brow. I turned to see a woman, somewhere near fifty but still very attractive, sitting at my side.
“You had quite a scare,” she said.
“Where am I?”
“Have you ever been to Queens?” she asked with a smile.
“Kennedy Airport.”
She was slight and pale with crystalline blue eyes and long fingers. She wore a cream colored dress. The bodice was raw silk and the rest was made from the more refined version of that material. It seemed as if her hair were platinum blond instead of white.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“A friend of Archibald,” she said. “He’s downstairs now. Would you like to see him?”
“I don’t know if I can get up.”
“Once you start moving it wears off,” she said.
She took my hand and stood up, pulling me. She had no strength but I followed her lead. I worried that when I got to my feet I’d be dizzy but I wasn’t. As a matter of fact I felt very good.
Outside the bedroom was a short hallway that shared space with a staircase leading down. Everything was covered in thick green carpeting and so our footsteps were silent.
On the first floor was a sitting room with two sofas and three stuffed chairs. Archibald Lawless, wearing a gold colored two-piece suit and an ochre shirt was sitting in one of the chairs with his feet up on a small stool.
“Felix. How are you, son?”
“You killed that man.”
“I certainly did. Maybe if you hadn’t told him about Lansman I could have kept him alive but—”
“You mean you blame your killing him on me?”
“As soon as you mentioned Lansman he was sure that we had identified him as the assassin. It was either us or him. I tried to tell him that I didn’t care but he was a professional and he had to at least try and kill us.”
I sat down on the corner of a sofa nearest to him.
“How can you be so cavalier about a murder?” I asked.
“I did not murder him,” he replied. “I saved our lives. That man was a stone cold killer. If I hadn’t been keeping up with my tai chi he would have gutted me and then cut your throat.”
I remembered the impact of his kick against my chest and the speed with which he attacked the seemingly unassailable Lawless.
“What about all those witnesses?”
“There were no witnesses.”
“The people in the windows across the way. We were in plain sight of them.”
“Oh no,” Lawless said, shaking his spiky head. “Those windows were one-way panes. I’ve used the same brand myself.”
“So no one saw?”
“No. And even if they did. He was trying to kill us. That was self-defense, Felix.”
“Would either of you boys like to have some tea?” our hostess asked.
“I’d like some English Breakfast if you have it, ma’am,” I said.
She smiled at me and said, “I like this one, Arch. You should hold on to him.”
“He doesn’t want to work for me, Red. Thinks that it’s too dangerous.”
She smiled again. “Green tea for you?”
Lawless nodded and she made her way out of the room.
“What did you call her?” I asked.
“Red.”
“Red Tuesday?”
“Has she asked you if you were Catholic yet?”
For some reason I hadn’t thought that Red Tuesday was a real person. At least not a beautiful middle-aged woman living in a standard working class home.
“If she does,” Lawless continued, “Tell her that your parents are but that you have lapsed in your faith.”
“Okay.”
“Now,” he said. “Let’s talk about what we have to do tonight.”
“Tonight? I’m not doing anything with you tonight or any other time. You killed that man.”
“Did I have a choice?”
“I have a choice,” I said. “The choice not to be in the same room with you.”
“Yes,” he said, nodding at me. “But this is a deep problem, Felix. You can see that even I’m in danger here. Sacorliss was an assassin. We certainly ran the danger of a violent confrontation with such a man. But now we’re going to a sanitarium, to see a sick man. There’s no danger involved.”
“Why the hell do you need me in the first place?” I said. “You never even knew me before three days ago. How can I possibly help someone like you?”
“My kind of work is lonely, Felix. And maybe it’s a little bit crazy. I’ve spent a whole lifetime trying to fix broken systems, making sure that justice is served. Lately I’ve been lagging a little. Slowing down, breaking down, making mistakes that could be fatal. Having you by me has given me a little bit of an edge, some confidence that I hadn’t even known was eroded.
“All I ask is that you stick wi
th me until we find the answer to why Sacorliss was activated. Just stick with me until the police believe they have the killer of Henry Lansman.”
“I thought he had a heart attack?”
“No. He was accosted by an aerosol toxin. The autopsy showed that last night. And there’s a warrant out for your arrest in connection with that killing.”
“Me?”
“English Breakfast,” Red Tuesday said as she came into the room. “And green tea for man who watches his health and the health of the enslaved world.”
She carried the delicate teacups on a silver tray, proffering us our drinks.
“Felix?” she said.
“Yes, Ms. Tuesday?”
“Are you a Catholic by any chance?”
“My parents are, ma’am, but I never went after I was twelve.”
Oberman’s Sanitarium had only a small brass sign on the wall to identify itself. Otherwise you would have thought it was a residential prewar building like all its neighbors on the block.
It was twelve-fifteen by the time Derek dropped us off.
Lawless rang the bell and stood there in his gold suit, carrying his medical briefcase. He looked like a rattlesnake in a Sunday bonnet, a stick of dynamite with chocolate coating up to the fuse.
I was sickened by the events of the day but still I knew I had to stay with the anarchist because that was the only way for me to keep on top of what was happening. If I left then, even if I ran and went back to New Orleans, I would be vulnerable to dangerous people who could get at me without me ever knowing they were near. And there would still be a warrant out for my arrest.
The door was opened by a woman wearing all white. She was young, tall, and manlike in her demeanor and visage.
“Lawless?” she asked me.
“It’s him,” I said.
“Come quickly.”
We hustled into the building.
She led us to an elevator made for two and took us to the sixth floor.
When we got out she said, “Do you have it?”
Lawless took out a large wallet from his front pocket and counted out five one-hundred-dollar bills. He handed these to the manly nurse.