* * *
—
Compulsively he lowered his eyes to his desk blotter and reread the note he knew by heart. “Hank Monroe, Jr. and Fran will meet you at the opening of the convention at 6. They’ll have you paged. Fran would prefer that you don’t bring anyone else.” The implications—I have Fran, don’t bring the police—were clear enough to Parker, but phrased euphemistically enough to inspire no sense of urgency if he did involve the police. And if he didn’t come up with a severely edited version of what was going on, it might be impossible to involve the police at all. He checked his clock radio: ten to four; he’d leave himself a full ninety minutes to get there. The best thing to do, he decided, was go there alone and phone 911 just before he went in—a bomb threat if he couldn’t think of anything else.
He stared as if to unravel more from the bunched narrow loops of the receptionist, who couldn’t remember whether the caller (a man) had a Southern drawl—let alone a fake Southern drawl. He closed his eyes, the vibration of a mufflerless car in the lot passing through him like a mild electric shock.
For the second time in five minutes he called Fran. He’d been holding down his panic with the thought that she wasn’t really a hostage—that Monroe, Jr. knew her schedule and knew she’d be unreachable by phone all afternoon. Her machine came on; he said, “Call me at my office—urgent,” broke the connection, got Marcy’s number from directory assistance, punched it. While it rang he looked at his briefcase, his books, the collapsing heaps of papers on his desk, cars in the lot glistening under a drizzle—all of it so prosaic, so authentically dull he’d mistaken it for his real life.
Marcy wasn’t answering, so he called the law school. By pretending to be Fran’s brother and referring vaguely to a family emergency, he managed to get her schedule: Her last class of the day had ended at two, an hour ago. On a long shot he asked the secretary if she could tell him where Fran was interviewing that day. For some reason she couldn’t grasp the question and he had to keep rephrasing it. “You mean, you’d like a list of all the firms who interview our students?” she asked on his third attempt. Perhaps he was more distraught than he realized. He managed to get the idea across on his next try. She summed up: “You want to know if we keep a schedule of Fran’s interviews?” “Yes!” he exclaimed, relieved that he was still capable of communicating even a stupid question. “Now why would we do that?” she asked, her drawl and her temper intensifying as she told Parker that she and Fran had discussed their families and she recalled now that Fran had mentioned three sisters but never a brother. He hung up and phoned Fran again.
“If you can’t reach me, get out of there,” he said at the beep. “Go stay with a friend. They sent me a threatening note, and I think they might be coming after you. And don’t tell me there’s no Them!” It occurred to him that he couldn’t help arguing even with her answering machine, and that he was anticipating objections she was past making. He thought of adding, “I just hope there’s an Us,” but it didn’t seem like the moment. A new scenario occurred to him. “If you got a phone message from the law school receptionist about meeting me at the convention, ignore it, it wasn’t from me. And for Godsake don’t go!”
The phone rang as he set it on its cradle. To his shouted “Yes!” John Standell replied, “Jeez. The world’s most sophisticated security system,” he announced with a flourish, “is now operational. If you’re desperate, press the red button under the light switch in the living room or the bedroom. Say, buddy—don’t get curious. Uh, the bodyguard will be at your place between five and six. Stay on your toes till then and the two of you can crack open some beers, put on the news, and laugh at the guys in the funny beards.”
Parker filled him in.
John thought about it. “Oh, shit. Do you have a picture of Fran?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Fax it. They’ve got a fax there, right?” (Parker said yes and wrote down the number John dictated.) “Okay, the bodyguard will meet you at the convention. There won’t be time for him to get to Skokie and then for the two of you to get downtown by six. I’ll have him leave as soon as your fax comes in.” Some people display their sensitivities in a crisis; John went to the War Room. “Maybe he can find Fran and your pal before you get there. Fran’s pretty noticeable—hope she has her hair down. So anyway, page Todd when you get there.”
“This is Todd Woolcurt who went with me to Tolerance Management? Who was so proud of existing and then didn’t?”
“Todd told me about what happened last time, and he’s sorry. He was watching the door of that room you were in when a guy walked up and asked him if he’d mind answering a few questions—market research, the guy said. Todd said he didn’t care, as long as he could keep watching the door.”
“Okay. Could we—”
“So the guy’s asking Todd about his car, his clothes, his hobbies, favorite movies, and suddenly Todd’s nervous. I mean, Todd doesn’t get nervous, and he’s scared of a guy with a clipboard. He ran out of there—still gets headaches and ringing in his ears. I don’t know what they did to him, but you said these guys study how much crap people can take. I guess they have ways we’ve never heard of to dish it out. So, anyhow, Todd’s a good guy and he wants to make it up to you.”
“He’ll have to do more than exist this time—though he even flubbed that.”
“This time it’s the whole package. Like I said, he wants to make it up to you. The fact that he fucked up last time makes him even more reliable this time.”
“I dunno, John. I wouldn’t try that one on a résumé.”
John laughed. “To tell you the truth, I didn’t have much time to line this up and Todd’s the only one available…You know what? I think I’ll come down with Todd.”
“I appreciate that, but I’m supposed to go alone. How will it look if I’ve got a Michael Jordan lookalike and the Wonder Bread Boy for bookends?” Parker had decided that if there were no other way to keep his enemies from killing Fran, he’d force them to kill him instead. He didn’t want to have to figure John’s life into the calculus. “Thanks, pal, but go home. Some guys’ll do anything to avoid changing diapers. Oh, uh—”
Parker stood up. Ken Fletcher was walking briskly between parked cars toward the building, briefcase stuffed under the arm of his raincoat, jaw bulging around his pipe, smoke like a frazzled thought balloon scattering round his head. He caught sight of Parker, averted his eyes and increased his stride.
“Call you back!” Parker made it out the door and round the turn in the hallway in time to spot Fletcher’s retreating back.
* * *
—
“Ken!”
Fletcher stopped, turned, waved, pointed to his watch, and bolted. Parker ran after him, dodging through the crowd coming out of the classrooms. Ken had a quick, surprisingly graceful stride—prep school track, Parker recalled—and would have had time to lock himself in his office if he didn’t have to pat himself down for his keys. Parker just managed to block the closing door and pushing against it gasped, “C’mon, Ken, I just…” He gave it his shoulder, and to his surprise Fletcher stumbled backward.
Backed up against his desk, Ken reached into his raincoat pocket and aimed a small blue-black barrel which in a moment of utter confusion Parker recognized as the lighter he’d seen in Jan Cohen’s office.
“Well, as long as you’re here, Jeff, have a seat.” Keeping the thing aimed, Fletcher picked his pipe off the floor, set it on the blotter, stamped out some live ashes on the linoleum, backed around the desk, pushed a shock of damp hair off his forehead, and sat down. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” he quipped nervously, his smile waning. He held the grip with both hands as he had the last time, but this time he didn’t put it down. He was probably doing what Parker had done in his position—frantically reviewing his cop shows. It was out of the question that this doofus with a lighter trembling in his fists had anything to do
with kidnapping Fran.
“That’s not a gun, it’s a lighter,” Parker said. “So be careful.”
“If that’s a witticism, I’ll have to analyze it later.” Fletcher looked awful—eyeballs blood-rimmed and -splintered, the lines in his brow gouging deeper. “Will you kindly sit down?” He gestured with the barrel at the chair in front of his desk.
Parker had remained standing. “There’s a flame regulator on the handle and a hole on top of the barrel.”
“That’s the oldest trick in the…” Fletcher nonetheless glanced down. “Oh.” Failing to elicit any sympathy with his sheepish look, he clamped the dead pipe in his mouth. “Last time—was that—?”
“Last time was a gun. Where’d you get the lighter?”
Fletcher unbuttoned his raincoat, shrugged it onto the back of his chair, and tugged at the sleeve of his tweed jacket, aligning it with his cuff. “When my angry friend—John Connor Murray?—gave me the gun last time he said something about ‘keeping a spare’ under some file folders in Jan Cohen’s desk. The nuts you turned loose on me keep calling, so yesterday I snuck in there and took it. And when I saw you coming with that agitated look, I thought…I thought some firepower might keep things collegial. Sorry. Why did he keep a lighter there? Forget it, I don’t want to know.” He turned the “gun” sideways and held it over the remains in his pipe.
“Hold it!” Parker yelled; Ken froze. “Jack had it turned up to the Jerry Lewis setting. Just put the thing down, okay?” While Ken knit his eyebrows at the lighter, and placed it, slowly, next to the phone, Parker sat down, leaning his forearms on the desk. “Where’s Fran?”
Fletcher was hauling out his other lighter, his tobacco, his tamper. “The last time I saw Frances was at one this morning.” He kept his eyes on the filling of his pipe. “I answered the doorbell and she grabbed me—not a word, just stood there for a full minute with my pajama front in her fists, glowering, then walked away.” He actually winced at the recollection—whether out of shame or because Fran had scared him wasn’t clear. “I gather you found some way to make her believe you?” Fletcher sucked in the flame of his lighter and expelled smoke through a bleary close-lipped smile. “I don’t suppose she’ll let me speak to her again, but tell her I’ve never been so ashamed of anything I’ve done. I do care about her, you know.”
“Swell. Where is she?”
“I don’t know. If she’s done with classes maybe the library. I think she might be interviewing this week. Why?”
Parker told him about the note, and, watching the space between his eyes tighten, thought this was the first he’d heard of it.
“Oh, God,” Fletcher whispered.
“You can help her,” Parker said, “by telling me everything you know about this convention. I’m going to assume that you’re a decent guy who was just trying to protect his family and that you’ll tell me the truth. I might as well—I doubt if I can scare you more than they can.”
“All right.” Fletcher set his pipe on the ashtray, touched his palms together and picked it up. “I suppose you got a call last night, too?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Mr. Hank Monroe, Junior is on the warpath. Someone’s been speaking to the FBI about him. They paid him a visit last night, and now he’s threatening us. Even Harry Krell’s plain scared—I mean scared without seven kinds of ambiguity and nine kinds of irony.” He’d been holding the pipestem in front of his mouth; he emptied the bowl, clanging it against the ashtray, and dropped the pipe into his side pocket.
“What about the convention?” Parker asked. There was no time to be paralyzed by the thought that his own actions—the visit to Ed Vishoolis, the threat to embarrass the FBI—might have driven Fran’s kidnapper into a rage. “What’s the point?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Hank Monroe, Junior has nothing to do with it.”
“Maybe pigs fly!”
“He’s made use of it, of course, starting with the night he improvised that story about his face. But if he’s behind the convention, I’ve heard nothing about it.”
“I’ve been seeing these men everywhere I go.”
“Everyone sees them everywhere; they’re all over town.”
Hadn’t they already had this discussion?
“Then why,” Parker asked, “is he so anxious to get me there?”
“From what I know about him I can make an informed guess. Jeff, I’m so sorry I had any part in this. I think of you and Fran as my friends. I’ve concentrated on my work since the divorce, and you’re really the only—”
“If my family was being threatened,” said Parker, conscious that this might be his last opportunity for an act of charity, “I might have done the same thing. I don’t think you’re a bad man. What,” he added immediately, embarrassed to see to the other man gulping tears, “is your educated guess?”
Fletcher tried to cover with another of his wan smiles. Looking at him for what was probably the last time, Parker noticed that whenever Ken smiled he looked ill at ease, as if trying to get across in barely recollected scraps of a foreign language.
Fletcher said, “Our man likes to put on a show. I think it appeals to his sense of humor to commit a murder whose only witnesses are the thousands of identically disguised suspects.”
* * *
—
In his office he buttoned up Fletcher’s raincoat and checked himself out in the closet mirror. The lighter-gun in the flap pocket, the next-best thing to the real gun he’d left in Steve Dobbs’ glove compartment, didn’t present a conspicuous outline. Considering that all he’d done with the real thing was point it at people who didn’t take him seriously anyway, the lighter would probably serve just as well. He believed it would look convincing to anyone who didn’t examine it closely or wasn’t expecting a fake. And it might make an actual weapon if the enemy were sporting enough to stand still and be ignited. He supposed this breezy interior monologue was another form of protective obtuseness; well, it seemed to be keeping his dread manageable, like not looking down from a height.
Fastidious about his clothes, Ken had given up the coat without protest but with obvious distaste. He’d thought it over just long enough to avoid being reminded that he’d ruined Parker’s life and at the very least owed him a fucking raincoat. He’d looked equally pained in turn as he squirmed into Parker’s coat.
Ken’s raincoat—a pricey tan Thornhill & Thornhill—was a bit roomy in the shoulders, but Parker was conscious of coming out ahead in the trade. He tried to recall the distinction between a raincoat and a trenchcoat. A trenchcoat, he believed, was a baggy raincoat. The Thornhill & Thornhill looked a bit upscale compared to the grungy trenchcoats he’d been seeing. The important thing, he supposed, was to look like a man in disguise; he’d fit right in once he had his beard and sunglasses. Shut up, he thought, stop prattling.
He pushed the closet door till the room in the mirror was empty and tried to assure himself that not existing would be as easy as that.
There was a knock at the office door; he gripped the lighter in his coat pocket as he turned the knob.
“It’s time for us so-called paranoids to stand together,” said John Connor Murray. “Let’s prove that even a paranoid’s enemies can have real enemies.” He wore his own Thornhill & Thornhill unbuttoned over his blue blazer. At his side, Mrs. Slansky wore a baggy discount-store knockoff. She stared at Parker voraciously, determined to let nothing he did escape her.
Parker decided to split a cab with them—he wasn’t going to stake Fran’s life on the CTA—and lose them at the convention. “Okay. Let’s go.”
Jack looked disappointed, gassed up with arguments he couldn’t use now.
Parker had always suspected that Jack didn’t truly believe his own paranoia; that his rants about Lionel Trilling were just a way to let off steam, Jack having stored up more rancor than the real world had provocations. T
hen why was he going to the convention? Even if he were nuts, he was still a snob, and he surely found the Legion’s populism offensive. So he must have been accommodating Mrs. Slansky’s genuine paranoia—letting his date pick reality.
Outside it was still drizzling. As Mrs. Slansky unfolded her plastic rain hat, Jack produced a collapsible umbrella from his briefcase and snapped it open smartly above her head.
She put up her collar. “Is this how they wear it? Like in the movies?” The coat was too big; she must have bought it before her illness. If you squinted, Mrs. Slansky—with her moist inflated eyes, her blazing makeup, her slack hollow face looking tiny in the coat and collar—resembled a child playing dress-up. “What do you think, Jeffrey?”
“I think up,” he said, raising his own collar. He still had no plan.
Jack transferred the umbrella to his other hand while he straightened out her collar. “There. Now we’re cool.” Bound by iron laws of nattiness, he kept his own collar down.
They cut across the lot toward Oakton, the plinked cars sounding like a glum steel band. Wondering if Jack was sane and sober enough to be of help, Parker ventured, “Lionel Trilling’s dead, you know.”
“Stipulated,” Jack sang merrily and smiled at his friend. She gave his arm a squeeze; they were headed for their Woodstock.
Mrs. Slansky lowered her voice confidingly. “You know who looked good in a trenchcoat? Lawrence Tierney.”
“Toughest guy in the movies,” Jack recalled.
“Gable? You can have him. My friends and I all thought Lawrence Tierney was so handsome.” She might have been blushing if her cheeks weren’t already bright orange. “You know who looked like Lawrence Tierny? My Harry. Don’t you think so, Jeffrey?”
The late Harry Slansky was a short round Jewish guy who smoked noxious cheap cigars and bore as much resemblance to Lawrence Tierney as he did to, oh, fill in the blank. But she was looking up at Parker with a girlish smile he found both scary and touching. “Now that you mention it.”
The Blindfold Test Page 25