Eight Million Ways to Die

by Lawrence Block

Page 33

 

  It wasnt a strong drink urge and I never considered acting on it, but it put me in mind of what Id promised Jan. Since I wasnt going to have a drink I felt no compulsion to call her but decided to anyway. I spent a dime and dialed her number from a booth around the corner from the main public library.

  Our conversation had traffic noises for competition, and so we kept it brief and light. I didnt get around to telling her about Sunnys suicide. I didnt mention the bottle of Wild Turkey, either.

  I read the Post while I ate dinner. Sunnys suicide had had a couple of paragraphs in the News that morning, which is as much as it merited, but the Post would hype anything that might sell papers, and their hook was that Sunny had the same pimp as Kim, whod been chopped to pieces in a hotel just two weeks ago. Nobody had been able to turn up a picture of Sunny so they ran the shot of Kim again.

  The story, though, couldnt fulfill the promise of the headlines. All they had was a suicide and some airy speculation that Sunny had killed herself because of what she knew about Kims murder.

  I couldnt find anything about the boy whose legs Id broken. But there was the usual complement of crime and deaths scattered throughout the paper. I thought about what Jim Faber had said about giving up newspapers. It didnt seem like Id be giving up all that much.

  After dinner I picked up my mail at the desk. The mail was the usual junk, along with a phone message to call Chance. I called his service and he rang back to ask how things were going. I said that they werent, really. He asked if I was going to keep at it.

  "For a while," I said. "Just to see if it goes anywhere. "

  The cops, he said, had not been hassling him. Hed spent his day arranging funeral services for Sunny. Unlike Kim, whose body had been shipped back to Wisconsin, Sunny didnt have parents or kin to claim her. There was a question about when Sunnys body would be released from the morgue, so hed made arrangements to have a memorial service at Walter B. Cookes on West Seventy-second Street. That would take place Thursday, he told me, at two in the afternoon.

  "I should have done the same for Kim," he said, "but I never thought of it. Its mostly for the girls. Theyre in a state, you know. "

  "I can imagine. "

  "Theyre all thinking the same thing. That business about death comes in threes. Theyre all worrying about whos next. "

  I went to my meeting that night. It struck me during the qualification that a week ago Id been in a blackout, wandering around doing God knows what.

  "My names Matt," I said when my turn came. "Ill just listen tonight. Thanks. "

  When the meeting broke up a guy followed me up the stairs to street level, then fell into step with me. He was about thirty, wearing a plaid lumber jacket and a peaked cap. I couldnt recall seeing him before.

  He said, "Your name is Matt, right?" I allowed that it was. "You like that story tonight?"

  "It was interesting," I said.

  "You wanna hear an interesting story? I heard a story about a man uptown with a broken face and two broken legs. Thats some story, man. "

  I felt a chill. The gun was in my dresser drawer, all rolled up in a pair of socks. The knives were in the same drawer.

  He said, "You got some pair of balls, man. You got cojones, you know what I mean?" He cupped his groin with one hand like a baseball player adjusting his jock. "All the same," he said, "You don wanna look for trouble. "

  "What are you talking about?"

  He spread his hands. "What do I know? Im Western Union, man. I bring the message, thas all I do. Some chick gets herself iced in a hotel, man, is one thing, but who her friends are is another. Is not important, you know?"

  "Whos the message from?"

  He just looked at me.

  "Howd you know to find me at the meeting?"

  "Followed you in, followed you out. " He chuckled. "That maric?n with the broken legs, that was too much, man. That was too much. "

  Chapter 24

  Tuesday was largely devoted to a game of Follow the Fur.

  It started in that state that lies somewhere between dreaming and full consciousness. Id awakened from a dream and dozed off again, and I found myself running a mental videotape of my meeting with Kim at Armstrongs. I began with a false memory, seeing her as she must have been when she arrived on the bus from Chicago, a cheap suitcase in one hand, a denim jacket tight on her shoulders. Then she was sitting at my table, her hand at her throat, light glinting off her ring while she toyed with the clasp at the throat of her fur jacket. She was telling me that it was ranch mink but shed trade it for the denim jacket shed come to town in.

  The whole sequence played itself off and my mind moved on to something else. I was back in that alley in Harlem, except now my assailant had help. Royal Waldron and the messenger from the night before were flanking him on either side. The conscious part of my mind tried to get them the hell out of there, perhaps to even the odds a little, and then a realization screamed at me and I tossed my legs over the side of my bed and sat up, the dream images all scurrying off into the corners of the mind where they live.

  It was a different jacket.

  I showered and shaved and got out of there. I cabbed first to Kims building to check her closet yet again. The lapin coat, the dyed rabbit Chance had bought her, was not the garment I had seen in Armstrongs. It was longer, it was fuller, it didnt fasten with a clasp at the throat. It was not what shed been wearing, not what shed described as ranch mink and offered to trade for her old denim jacket.

  Nor was the jacket I remembered to be found anywhere else in the apartment.

  I took another cab to Midtown North. Durkin wasnt on duty. I got another cop to call him at home and finally got unofficial access to the file, and yes, the inventory of impounded articles found in the room at the Galaxy Downtowner included a fur jacket. I checked the photos in the file and couldnt find the jacket in any of them.

  A subway took me downtown to One Police Plaza, where I talked to some more people and waited while my request went through some channels and around others. I got to one office just after the guy I was supposed to see left for lunch. I had my meeting book with me, and it turned out there was a meeting less than a block away at St. Andrews Church, so I killed an hour there. Afterward I got a sandwich at a deli and ate it standing up.

  I went back to One Police Plaza and finally got to examine the fur jacket Kim had had with her when she died. I couldnt have sworn it was the one Id seen in Armstrongs but it seemed to match my memory. I ran my hand over the rich fur and tried to replay the tape that had run in my mind that morning. It all seemed to go together. This fur was the right length, the right color, and there was a clasp at the throat that her port-tipped fingers might have toyed with.

  The label sewn to the lining told me it was genuine ranch mink and that a furrier named Arvin Tannenbaum had made it.

  The Tannenbaum firm was on the third floor of a loft building on West Twenty-ninth, right in the heart of the fur district. It would have simplified things if I could have taken Kims fur along, but NYPD cooperation, official or otherwise, only went so far. I described the jacket, which didnt help much, and I described Kim. A check of their sales records revealed the purchase of a mink jacket six weeks previously by Kim Dakkinen, and the sales slip led us to the right salesman and he remembered the sale.

  The salesman was round faced and balding, with watery blue eyes behind thick lenses. He said, "Tall girl, very pretty girl. You know, I read that name in the newspaper and it rang a bell but I couldnt think why. Terrible thing, such a pretty girl. "

  Shed been with a gentleman, he recalled, and it was the gentleman who had paid for the coat. Paid cash for it, he remembered. And no, that wasnt so unusual, not in the fur business. They only did a small volume of retail sales and a lot of it was people in the garment trade or people who knew somebody in the trade, although of course anyone could walk in off the street and buy any garment in the place. But mostly it was cash because the customer didn
t usually want to wait for his check to clear, and besides a fur was often a luxury gift for a luxury friend, so to speak, and the customer was happier if no record of the transaction existed. Thus payment in cash, thus the sales slip not in the buyers name but in Miss Dakkinens.

  The sale had come to just under twenty-five hundred dollars with the tax. A lot of cash to carry, but not unheard of. Id been carrying almost that myself not too long ago.

  Could he describe the gentleman? The salesman sighed. It was much easier, he explained, to describe the lady. He could picture her now, those gold braids wrapped around her head, the piercing blue of her eyes. Shed tried on several jackets, she looked quite elegant in fur, but the man-

  Thirty-eight, forty years old, he supposed. Tall rather than short, as he remembered, but not tall as the girl had been tall.

  "Im sorry," he said. "I have a sense of him but I cant picture him. If hed been wearing a fur I could tell you more than youd want to know about it, but as it was-"

  "What was he wearing?"

  "A suit, I think, but I dont remember it. He was the type of man whod wear a suit. I cant recall what he was wearing, though. "

  "Would you recognize him if you saw him again?"

  "I might pass him on the street and not think twice. "

  "Suppose he was pointed out to you. "

  "Then I would probably recognize him, yes. You mean like a lineup? Yes, I suppose so. "

  I told him he probably remembered more than he thought he did. I asked him the mans profession.

  "I dont even know his name. How would I know what he did for a living?"

  "Your impression," I said. "Was he an auto mechanic? A stockbroker? A rodeo performer?"

  "Oh," he said, and thought it over. "Maybe an accountant," he said.

  "An accountant?"

  "Something like that. A tax lawyer, an accountant. This is a game, Im just guessing, you understand that-"

  "I understand. What nationality?"

  "American. What do you mean?"

  "English, Irish, Italian-"

  "Oh," he said. "I see, more of the game. I would say Jewish, I would say Italian, I would say dark, Mediterranean. Because she was so blonde, you know? A contrast. I dont know that he was dark, but there was a contrast. Could be Greek, could be Spanish. "

  "Did he go to college?"

  "He didnt show me a diploma. "

  "No, but he must have talked, to you or to her. Did he sound like college or did he sound like the streets?"

  "He didnt sound like the streets. He was a gentleman, an educated man. "

  "Married?"

  "Not to her. "

  "To anybody?"

  "Arent they always? Youre not married, you dont have to buy mink for your girlfriend. He probably bought another one for his wife, to keep her happy. "

  "Was he wearing a wedding ring?"

  "I dont remember a ring. " He touched his own gold band. "Maybe yes, maybe no. I dont recall a ring. "

  He didnt recall much, and the impressions Id pried out of him were suspect. They might have been valid, might as easily have grown out of an unconscious desire to supply me with the answers he thought I wanted. I could have kept going- "All right, you dont remember his shoes, but what kind of shoes would a guy like him wear? Chukka boots? Penny loafers? Cordovans? Adidas? What?" But Id reached and passed a point of diminishing returns. I thanked him and got out of there.