Six
Driving Nickie down to headquarters in my Olds, I chatted about an article I’d read on interplanetary travel.
“There’s more than an even chance we’ll go to the moon in our time,” I said.
“What for?”
“What?”
“What does anybody want to go to the moon for?”
“I feel we’ve been put on this earth for a purpose,” I said, trying to control my temper. What the hell did I care whether anybody went to the moon, or when? I was only trying to make conversation. I was tense over the impending interview, with another of those headaches that fought aspirin four ways. Nickie seemed a bit mumpish, possibly out of a feeling that he was being railroaded. He had on a green corduroy hat of Alpine derivation and a tweed jacket from a pocket of which protruded a volume of Sartre which he had been commissioned to review for a quarterly which had meanwhile become defunct. He had the blackthorn walking stick along but I made him leave it in the car. That was for later, when he had arrived. That was for when he would be retained by a family of means anxious to prove that the father had not been a suicide, or flown to England to examine the spot where a village postman had been beaten to a jelly on the moors above Ipswich.
Captain Carmichael’s office was of the kind that is known as comfortably cluttered. Sunlight slanting through Venetian blinds lay in bars of dusty gold across a carpet from which the figure had long since been trampled. Carmichael’s scoured face rose like a moon over a parapet of papers on his desk as we were shown in. He was of medium height and wore a suit of a shade of brown resembling a mustard of intermediary strength. After introductions and handshakes he was a few minutes removing stacks of paper from his desk to the floor, so as to make himself visible in his swivel chair. “Cleaning out a lot of old records. Takes forever,” he said.
“Frank’s not afraid of work—he’ll go to sleep alongside of it any day,” I said.
“You old bastard,” Carmichael returned with a grin. “Still the same old goofer.” We had a few reminiscent didoes while Nickie turned to inspect a series of etchings of noted cathedrals. Then Carmichael asked what he could do us for.
“Well frankly, Frank, I want to get this boy off my hands,” I began humorously. “I can’t make a move but he knows where, can’t turn my back but he knows what I’m up to. I figure get the pest into something where his talents’ll be taken up eight hours a day where they belong, and maybe he’ll get his eagle eye off yours truly. Seriously, though, the thing is he’s been running a small business, sales agent for more lines than you can shake a stick at, but he’s so damned—modest may not be the word exactly—and from what I read in the papers police forces are after a better type of personnel. Won’t you bear me out on that, Frank?”
“Yes, I will, Chick. We’re endeavoring to attract a better grade of apple. We definitely need new blood.” Carmichael unsheathed a fresh pack of cigarettes from its cellophane and looked at Nickie. “Had any previous experience at all along those lines? House dick or anything?”
Nickie was watching the Captain’s hands.
“Had your after-lunch snort at Steve Kitchell’s, Captain?” he interjected, crossing his legs and leaning back in the chair he sat in.
Carmichael regarded him blankly. I sprang into action.
“Oh, come now, Nickie, how in the world could you know that?” I said, my eye on Carmichael.
“Simple matter of deduction.” Nickie pointed to the cigarettes the Captain was opening. “They tell me the whole story.”
“Surely you must be fooling,” I said, watching Carmichael like a hawk. “Nobody could be that observant, acute, quick to draw logical conclusions from insignificant details that would escape other people and I don’t know what all. Tell us how you figured it out.”
“There are two pennies in the cellophane wrapper. It is the method by which cigarette vending machines give you your change of a quarter. Steve Kitchell’s is the only place around here that would be likely to have a vending machine. Ergo, the Captain undoubtedly got them there.”
“But how does that prove he drank anything at Kitchell’s? Explain that.”
“You will observe that the ashtray on the Captain’s desk has only two cigarette butts in it. At three o’clock in the afternoon, that means he’s anything but a heavy smoker. He’d never be ‘dying for a smoke,’ and so it’s unlikely that he’d go out just for cigarettes. But he might pick some up if he happened to be in a place that had them. Such as a tavern.”
I laughed and shook my head, to confess myself utterly floored. “If you knew what it was living with this man! Nothing gets by him.”
There was a sense, however, of Captain Carmichael’s not yet having been heard from. The cigarettes now lay on his desk, nor was he smoking. He sat in his swivel chair with his hands clasped behind his head, estimating the caller.
“Go to Biddle?” he asked at last.
“Yes, I went to Biddle High,” Nickie answered.
“They stop teaching them manners there?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t see that a shot now and then is anything to apologize for; certainly not anything for anyone else to put their two cents into—speaking of that amount of money.” Carmichael’s eyes, normally the lusterless gray of pellets of chewed gum, glittered sharply. I rolled mine to the ceiling.
“He doesn’t mean it that way, Frank,” I said, maneuvering my way around behind Carmichael where I signed to Nickie with a slicing motion of my hand to cut it short, drop this method of approach. “What he means is that most people see but do not observe. You know—inference. So important in criminal detection. And he’s not saying but what you only had a glass of beer.”
“No, I rather think the vehemence of the Captain’s response rules that out. I’m afraid we must lean to the theory that it was for schnapps that he called on Mr. Kitchell,” Nickie put in affably.
I shook my fist and made a mouth at him over the Captain’s head. Then strolling once more into view of the latter I said, “Of course he’s pulling your leg. He knows the police aren’t supposed to drink on duty. Heh heh heh.”
That did it. Or it might have if Nickie hadn’t put in, “The Captain wouldn’t have been on duty during lunch hour. He usually, of course, takes his lunch, but he didn’t, I notice, today.”
“That boy!” I struck my brow in what was now quite bona fide despair. “Come now, Nickie, how did you know that?” I asked, playing to the bitter end the role for which I had long ago lost all stomach.
“No paper in the wastebasket And no lunch pail in evidence.”
By now it had been borne in on the recovering Carmichael what this was all about, and he took it in somewhat better part He understood at last that he was “auditioning” an applicant. Swinging from side to side in his swivel chair, his hands still laced behind his head, he sat assessing the talented prospect.
“I suppose what you had in mind was something in plainclothes,” he said, taking in the pink shirt, black knit tie and Tattersall vest for which this term would have to do.
“That is correct.”
Carmichael sat a moment tugging thoughtfully on a verdant eyebrow. Then he rose and, crossing the room slowly with his hands in his pockets, said:
“Decency has eighteen men on the detective bureau and we’re thinking of expanding it to twenty or more. Yes, we need new blood. There’s a future in this growing town, sure enough.” The Captain paused and studied Nickie again—as did I, only I was wishing Carmichael would stop using that word “blood” all the time. “There’s of course tests to pass, physical and others, and, assuming he’d do all right on them, which I see no reason why he shouldn’t, why, yes, I’d be personally happy to see a fellow of his caliber in the department.”
“Done and done,” I said, reaching for my hat, which hung on a rack.
“There’s just one thing.” Carmichael pulled his eyebrow a moment again, and looked at the floor. “See, we have a rule, a kind of seniorit
y. See, I can’t hire my detectives cold. They have to advance to that point.”
I was uncertain. “You mean …?”
“I can only promote them there from my boys in blue.”
Nickie was on his feet and reaching for his own hat. “In that case we needn’t waste any more of one another’s—”
“Now wait! You wouldn’t have to be a cop long. It’s just a formality. I’m the one who kicks them upstairs and I can kick them anywhere, including on to a special training at the National Academy in Washington. You could go far,” the Captain said, shouting now, for Nickie had already gone far: he had sailed out the door into the hall. “I could almost guarantee, I might even personally—”
On the sidewalk., it was Nickie who led the way this time and I who galloped in his wake. I trailed him with preachments, taunts, Pepigrams, anything that came to my mind as I addressed that adamant back.
“Can’t get started for fear of failure,” I said. Then: “There are dreams we must follow, others we must wake up from”—backsliding to a less modish day as I grasped for ammunition. Then (satirically): “Quite a hustler when you’re running away, aren’t you?” Then nothing for fifty feet. I swung from side to side of that brilliant chap, expostulating with spread hands like a merchant of ideas, and always a step behind. “You’re driving me crazy. There was once a fanner who was advised on the latest scientific methods by a representative of Uncle Sam. At last he said to the government man, ‘Don’t bother to advise me. I ain’t fanning as well as I know how to now.’ Are you that fanner …? Just a minute! I will be heard!”
We had passed my parked Olds and I went back for it, letting the genius fly on. I turned the car around in the street in a series of violent maneuvers, caught up with him and continued the guerrilla warfare from inside it. Slowing at the curb, I cranked the window down and hooted through it: “All wishbone and no backbone just about says it for you, brother! And I’ll tell you one more thing. You’ll get out of my house and not set foot inside it again until you’ve got a steady job. That’s final. I believe this is yours.” And I flung through the window the blackthorn stick which I had edited out of his getup earlier in the afternoon.
Now he was within an inch of being a cop. For God does indeed write straight with crooked lines, as the Portuguese proverb has it. Nickie ran a bookstore for a few months with backing from his aunt and some financial chaperoning from myself, and it was in that brief loop in the divine beeline that I was gathered into a train of events bearing us on to theft, blackmail, adultery, and some days in hell for everybody. Oh, Nickie Sherman got his chance at Euclidean logic all right, but in forging its propositions for the Captain he cooked my goose. That would never have happened had it not been for the bookstore; more particularly, had I not left my office and dropped in for a look at the books (not the ones for sale) at the precise moment when a woman named Mrs. Thicknesse was on her way there too, to ask for one that was. What makes life seem such a rigmarole is its being a whole. But it is only after a private or domestic ruin that the elements leading to its manufacture can be seen coming together, as, from the vantage point of the chastened present, I can see ours coming together now, and even, in the corporate peace of restitution, begin to savor them a little.
Nickie’s view of a bookstore was that of a place where ideas were exchanged, not merely merchandise sold, and among the hangers-on at his were a youth named Rupert Blue who was writing a novel about an impotent stallion, a sort of allegory of our time, entitled Poor Splendid Loins; an in-between kind of artist (he was better than a Sunday painter but hanging was too good for him); and a burgeoning composer whose name I have also forgotten, who claimed to have first heard and been unable to stand Bartók, then liked him, and finally outgrown him, all in the course of a single composition. He felt himself personally to be going a step beyond current modernity while at the same time taking one back to his native American roots, just as Bartók had for inspiration to his native Hungarian folk rhythms. He was at work on a Western Suite one movement of which, for instance, was marked Pronto.
I had but to enter the shop to send any or all of these scuttling, and I sent them all scuttling when I went in to look at the ledger. I was browsing over it when the front door opened and this Mrs. Thicknesse walked in. She wrote musical criticism for the Pick, and I knew her to nod at, from the few times I’d seen her Bringing her copy to the office. We exchanged nods now and I returned with a frown to the ledger, which showed a profit of nineteen cents for the month.
Out of one ear, I heard Mrs. Thicknesse ask for the latest novel by a writer of historical romances, and Nickie answer that he didn’t have it, in a way that hinted that he wouldn’t have it.
“It’s a best seller,” Mrs. Thicknesse reminded him somewhat stiffly.
“Not alone that—” Nickie began in explanation of his viewpoint, but I clapped the ledger shut and revolved smilingly into view.
“I’m sure Mr. Sherman can get it for you, Mrs. Thicknesse,” I said, removing and pocketing my cheaters.
“Of course I’ll get it for Mrs. Thicknesse if she likes,” Nickie chaffered from a hot plate on which he was brewing tea, “but I’ll have it on my conscience. How about a cup of tea, Mrs. Thicknesse, and we’ll talk the whole thing over. Here’s a novel I like, just out. It’s about a Southern girl and a young schoolteacher who, entrusted with her defloration—”
“Why oughtn’t Mrs. Thicknesse read the book she asked for, eh, Nickie?” I asked. Having drawn his attention with these words, I shook my fist at him from behind a stack of volumes which screened me from Mrs. Thicknesse. “I can well understand this taste for historical novels,” I then chatted remedially, sauntering into view of the latter again. “They recreate a bygone era into which we can escape from the tensions of our own. What century does your man write about this time, eh, Mrs. Thicknesse?”
“The eighteenth,” Mrs. Thicknesse replied a shade loftily.
“For a picture of the eighteenth century, read Fielding,” Nickie said. “These historical novels today,” he continued, pouring hot water into the teapot and all down my neck and shoulders, “are supposed to be reflections of other eras, but in reality they are reflections on our own.” He felt the conversation to be going well; this was what, a bookstore should be, a place where ideas were aired, ruminations gracefully traded over cups of tea, in an atmosphere of civilized ease. Not so I, off whose hide this was skin just as much as it was off his aunt’s, though indirectly.
“Have you read this author your customer is asking for?” I asked him with a wink at Mrs. Thicknesse, who smiled back at me under tautening nostrils.
“Yes,” Nickie said. “He combines the humor of Dreiser with the tragic insights of P. G. Wodehouse.”
“Don’t go, Mrs. Thicknesse! Mrs. Thicknesse—” But she had gone, and I turned on Nickie a face from which the color had drained. “I swear I have never in all my life …” I said in a rapture of exasperation. “And what’s more I won’t put up with it any longer. You think you’re being idealistic about everything but you aren’t. You’ve got to take people and things as they are. Surely this town can support another bookstore. There’s a great hunger for books in this country.”
“The more hunger, the less taste.”
I wished I had said that, and so there was real anger in my voice as I answered, “When will you grow up!” —and clapping my hat on my head, darted through the door in pursuit of Mrs. Thicknesse, to tell her we would be glad to order the volume in question.
More of that in a moment. Suffice it to say here that we closed the bookstore when Lila had another baby, and, tiring by now of doing without, threatened to leave Nickie if he didn’t get a steady job. Meanwhile, the seeds of my salesmanship had begun to do their work, and the life of a sleuth secretly to tantalize him, so much so that he was finally prepared to swallow its requisite preliminary—a brief apprenticeship in blue.
Thus it was that the trio principal to this were once again assembled in Captain Carmi
chael’s office, to which Nickie had flown on the first glimpse of himself in uniform—for a clarification of the terms and some estimate of the speed with which he could get out of it. What was there for the Captain but to say that he would keep an eye on him and kick him upstairs the minute he could; and for the Lamplighter but to remind him that promotion was two-thirds motion? The Captain circled his new rookie for inspection as the latter stood stiffly, then sat despairingly, in the middle of the room; the Lamplighter, sitting on the window sill with his legs hanging down, slipped his hands under his thighs and beamed approval of the scene. It was the moment for which he had waited, a dream come true.
“How soon will I be eligible for nomination to this Academy you say you can get me a scholarship to?” Nickie asked. That was the F.B.I. special training school in Washington, concerning which I had earnestly besought Carmichael to keep using the terms “academy” and “scholarship.”
“Everybody has to cut his eyeteeth,” the Captain said. “You wouldn’t expect to get a Ph.D. no more’n you matriculated, would you?”
Nickie dug out his nightstick which had got wedged under one haunch. “I believe I saw a statement of yours in the paper recently about the trouble you have getting young men to go into police work. These lures aren’t part of your modus operandi, are they?”
“What are you talking about? And isn’t this better than burying yourself in some damn burglike New York and having all that corruption to buck?”
“Meanwhile there’s the transfer to plain-clothes, of which, of course, you have given me your word,” Nickie reminded him as he rose and walked to the window. A sudden sense, from it, of the public daylight he would daily have to brave sent a shudder through him. “This uniform is traumatic.”
Comfort Me with Apples Page 7
