The Man in the White Linen Suit

by David Handler

  “Does Tommy know how to write a thriller?”

  “Did you read The Girl Under the Bed?”

  “No, I don’t go in for that sort of thing.”

  “What do you go in for?” Norma leaned forward, intensely curious.

  “Good writing. E. B. White, John O’Hara . . .”

  “Who’s on your nightstand right now?”

  “Shaw.”

  “George Bernard Shaw?”

  “Irwin Shaw.”

  She looked at me in surprise. “You mean Rich Man, Poor Man Irwin Shaw? He was kind of a schlockmeister, wasn’t he?”

  I reached for a cocktail napkin, uncapped my Waterman fountain pen and wrote Merilee’s home phone number on it, pushing it across the table to her. “Go home and read a short story he wrote called ‘The Eighty-Yard Run.’ Then call me at this number and say, ‘Hi, it’s Norma, and I’m a big fat idiot.’”

  “Okay . . .” She jotted the title down on the napkin before she put it in her shoulder bag. “The point I was trying to make is that Rose Ellen Hartmann will never be mistaken for Daphne du Maurier. The uncredited work that Tommy’s been doing for Addison James is of a much higher literary caliber. I have zero doubt he can write an even better thriller than The Girl Under the Bed. And when he does, Deep River will owe him big-time. I’ll be able to sign him to write the novel he’s always dreamed of writing.”

  “You’re trying to set him free, in other words.”

  Norma nodded her head convulsively. “I’m trying to set him free.”

  “I assume Tommy told you what’s happened to Tulsa.”

  She nodded again, this time unhappily. “Somebody mugged him and it’s gone.”

  “Do you know anything more about it?”

  “Why would I know anything more about it? And why would you even ask me that?”

  “Because Sylvia’s hired me to find it.”

  Norma’s eyes widened in shock behind her heavy horn-rims. “I can’t believe that a man of your literary stature is working for that awful woman.”

  “Norma, you’re talking to someone who’s been ghosting celebrity memoirs for the past decade. I’ve had to do all sorts of things I never thought I’d be doing. They have a word for that. It’s called survival.”

  “In answer to your question, I don’t know anything more than Tommy told me, which was that a couple of young black guys jumped him and stole his briefcase. I told him that he should have called the police, but he said a big scary guy with a gun threatened him.”

  “And you truly have no idea who’s behind this?”

  “None. Why do you keep insinuating that I do?”

  “Because it’s in your financial interest. If Sylvia fires Tommy in a fit of pique—not an unlikely scenario given her volatile personality—then he’ll be free to write your Rose Ellen Hartmann thriller. You’ve already hurled a Stanley Bostitch stapler at Sylvia and nearly blinded her. What’s stealing Tulsa in the grand scheme of things? You’d not only set Tommy free but totally mess up Guilford House’s bottom line for next year.”

  Norma’s thin lips tightened angrily. “I don’t know what you’ve heard about me, but I’m not that sort of person. I don’t steal. I don’t lie. I love the publishing business. I love working with writers. I’m living my dream. I had absolutely nothing to do with what happened to Tulsa. I wouldn’t even know how to go about setting up a street mugging or whatever the heck that was.” She breathed in and out for a moment, recovering her composure. “Why don’t you like me? Is it because Tommy’s married?”

  “I like you fine. And if you and Tommy love each other, I’m genuinely happy for both of you. But there’s more at stake here than just Tulsa. Addison James is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He has a greedy young tootsie of a wife and he has Sylvia around to watch over him like a hawk. I’m fully aware that Sylvia can’t be trusted, just as I’m fully aware that Addison is as mad as a hatter. But I’m also convinced that whoever stole Tulsa is working some sort of a major scheme, and prior experience tells me that this is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better. What I am, Norma, is afraid that you may end up exactly where Tommy is.”

  Norma Fives gazed at me in bewilderment. “Which is where?”

  “In way, way over your head.”

  Chapter Four

  The rain had finally let up, leaving behind a stifling blanket of warm, moist air and the exotic scent of Eau de Locker Room that emanated from the overflowing storm drains. Since I’d spent most of the day sitting in a succession of places listening to a succession of people tell me things I really didn’t want to hear, I decided to walk through Central Park back to Tommy O’Brien’s temporary hideout in my crummy fifth-floor walk-up.

  Wan-Q was practically around the block from the park. Lulu and I went in at the 59th Street entrance and strolled along, me inhaling the freshly watered greenery, Lulu the damp soil alongside of the footpath as we made our way uptown past Strawberry Fields, which had been christened in 1985 to memorialize John Lennon’s shooting death in 1980 outside of his apartment at the Dakota right across Central Park West. Some sicko named Mark David Chapman shot him. I’d heard the horrible news from none other than Howard Cosell, same as millions of others had. It was Cosell who’d broken it to us during an otherwise routine telecast of a New England Patriots/Miami Dolphins game on Monday Night Football. One of those cultural oddities that you never, ever forget.

  We walked, exiting the park at the American Museum of Natural History and working our way west toward Columbus Avenue, then Amsterdam and eventually Broadway, where the Loews 84th Street Cineplex was still showing the summer’s biggest hit films—Sleepless in Seattle, a treacly romantic comedy starring the erotically charged duo of Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, The Firm, a John Grisham thriller starring that adorable thirtysomething teenager Tom Cruise as a young lawyer who’s all tied up with the mob, and The Fugitive with Harrison Ford, a blockbuster remake of the 1960s television series that starred David Janssen. The huge box office success of The Fugitive worried me. Since Hollywood is incapable of not devouring its own entrails, I couldn’t help but wonder what other vintage hit series would soon be headed to the big screen. The Mod Squad? Charlie’s Angels? My Mother the Car?

  After we’d reached Broadway and West 93rd we turned left, crossed West End Avenue and started toward the river. There were patches of blue sky now and the September sun was still high enough over the New Jersey Palisades that I had to tug at the brim of my fedora and lower my gaze. When Lulu let out a low growl of warning, I looked up. Two blue-and-white squad cars were double-parked outside of my building and twenty or thirty people were clustered on the sidewalk there. My neighbors across the street—most of them Yushies, the Young Urban Shitheads who’d been invading the neighborhood like an army of smug cockroaches—were gathered on their stoops watching what was going on.

  I elbowed my way through the crowd and discovered that someone was lying facedown under a blue tarp on the sidewalk there. A man’s bare foot stuck out from under the blue tarp, a narrow trail of blood running from his body down to the gutter. A baby-faced cop in uniform stood grim watch over him while two others tried to keep the lookie-loos moving along.

  “Something I can do for you?” he asked me.

  “I live here. What’s happened?”

  “Somebody jumped off of the roof, is what’s happened. He’s got no ID, no keys, no nothing. None of the other tenants seem to know who he is. Mind having a look?”

  “Go ahead,” I said, trying, and failing, to keep the dread out of my voice.

  He pulled back the tarp, and . . . well, it seemed that Tommy and I weren’t going to be having that beer and huge laugh at the White Horse after all. He was still dressed in the oversize T-shirt and gym shorts I’d lent him. His nose and cheekbones were flattened from making direct high-impact contact with the pavement. Blood trickled from his nostrils and from the corner of his mouth. But he didn’t look too bad. Most of his injuries were internal, I imagined,
although I did notice that he also had a raised welt on the back of his head.

  Lulu let out a low, unhappy whimper standing there next to me.

  “Know who he is?” the young cop asked.

  “His name’s Tommy O’Brien. He didn’t live here. He was crashing at my place for a few days because he and his wife, Kathleen, were having some problems. He lived in Stuyvesant Town. No. 11 Stuyvesant Oval.”

  “Okay, thanks. And you are . . . ?

  “Stewart Hoag, apartment 9.”

  “He was having marital problems, you said?”

  “I did.”

  “Was he despondent?”

  “I’ve seen him happier.”

  “Unhappy enough to take his own life?”

  “Yo, Procter, open your freaking eyes, will you?” a familiar-sounding voice hollered from behind me. “Dude’s got a fresh wallop the size of a golf ball on the back of his bean, yet he’s lying facedown. No way he’s a jumper. Somebody whacked him and then gave him a helpful shove.”

  I turned to discover someone who chewed bubble gum with his mouth open standing there astride a racing bike. He was in his twenties, deeply tanned and had a lot of thick black hair, three or four days of stubble, an earring and those soft brown eyes that women get woozy over. I doubt he was more than five feet six, but his biceps and pecs rippled, his thigh muscles bulged and he had an air of hyperintensity about him. His head nodded rhythmically, as if he heard his own rock ’n’ roll beat. Clad in his yellow tank top and electric-blue spandex shorts it would have been easy to mistake him for a bike messenger who was mainlining speed. Easy, that is, if he wasn’t also wearing a navy blue NYPD windbreaker so that the public couldn’t see the shoulder holster that held the Sig Sauer P226 semiautomatic that he and a lot of the new breed had started packing instead of the trusty old Smith & Wesson revolver.

  Lulu let out a low whoop and moseyed over to say hi, her tail thumping. He bent down and patted her before he turned his gaze on me, his head nodding, nodding. “Long time no see, dude.”

  “Very.”

  He frowned at me. “Yeah, dude?”

  “It’s been a very long time,” I said to Detective Lieutenant Romaine Very, who worked homicides out of the 24th Precinct on the Upper West Side. Officially, that is. Unofficially, he was the top homicide detective in the entire city—especially when there were celebrities involved. He’d achieved that status even though he was not yet thirty because he possessed a rare combination of brains, instincts and guts. Not to mention a BA in astrophysics from Columbia. It also didn’t hurt that his rabbi was none other than Inspector Dante Feldman, the man who’d caught Son of Sam and was now the commanding officer of all of Manhattan’s homicide detectives.

  Romaine Very and I had crossed paths before on what turned out to be the biggest literary hoax in modern publishing history. Four people had ended up dead. Maybe you read about it.

  Lulu, who had a real soft spot for him, continued to whoop and moan until he got off his bike, knelt down and gave her jowls and ears a good rub.

  “Speaking the real, Procter,” he said to the cop in uniform as Lulu tumbled over onto her back and let him scratch her tummy. “If you ever want to get out of your sack into plain clothes, then you need to use all of the sense organs that God gave you, especially your eyes. What do you have for me?”

  “We’re just getting started, Lieutenant,” Procter replied nervously. “Happened maybe twenty minutes ago. Neighbors in the building didn’t hear an argument or see anything. And we’ve got nothing from the neighboring buildings either. Crime scene units and coroner’s men are on their way. There’s a high-rise apartment building on the corner of Riverside four, five houses down.”

  “So . . . ?”

  “So I’m kind of thinking maybe someone was looking out their window from a high floor and saw activity on the roof.”

  “Kind of good thinking, Procter. Get some more men over here to canvass the building. Also canvass the top-floor tenants of the brownstones on West 94th, the ones who live in back. They might have seen something.”

  Procter went off to his blue-and-white to phone it in.

  Very shook his head at me irritably. “Half of these guys, they just stand around like department store mannequins waiting for someone to tell them what to do. They have zero initiative.” He gave Lulu’s tummy a final pat, then stood back up, his jaw working on his bubble gum. “How’ve you been, dude?”

  “I was doing great right up until about ten minutes ago. Merilee and I are getting along really well, and I’m working on a novel.”

  “Is it good?”

  “It’s good.”

  “Super glad to hear that.”

  “And how are you, Lieutenant?”

  Very made a face. “I’ve got insomnia like you wouldn’t believe.” Romaine Very paid a heavy price for his hyperintensity. He also suffered from migraines and chronic prostatitis. He rode the bike to try to burn off some of his extra steam. It didn’t seem to help. “I need to have a look at your apartment. Stay with me.” He carried his lightweight bike through the vestibule and propped it against the wall in the ground-floor hallway. Then we started up the stairs.

  “How did Tommy’s killer force him up onto the roof from my apartment?” I asked Very as we climbed.

  “A gun makes for a pretty good persuader. Was Tommy really having marital problems or was he hiding out here from somebody?”

  “Both. He was afraid to go home to the studio in Hell’s Kitchen he’s been renting since he moved out. The guy who staged the Tulsa theft Friday night warned him, ‘We know where you live.’ And showed him a gun.”

  “Okay, pull over, dude. I have no idea what we’re talking about.”

  “Tommy was Addison James’s ghostwriter.”

  “Wait, wait . . . the Addison James?”

  “The Addison James, who is seventy-eight, senile and no longer capable of producing pages on his own. Tommy secretly wrote the man’s last two bestsellers and had just finished a third, Tulsa. He took the only copy of the finished manuscript to a copier place on Broadway Friday evening to make a Xerox to submit to Addison’s editor, who happens to be the old geezer’s daughter, Sylvia. As soon as Tommy walked out of the door, a couple of street kids snatched his briefcase and handed it off to someone waiting in a cab. Tommy started toward the cab until he was warned not to by the aforementioned guy with the gun. He’s been hiding out ever since.”

  Very grinned. “This is why I like working with you, dude. I can go two, three months without hearing anyone use the word aforementioned when they’re running a case for me.”

  “He hid out in a cheap hotel near the Port Authority Bus Terminal for a few nights, then hid out on my roof last night. When I let him in this morning he was soaked and scared to death,” I said as we reached the fifth-floor landing. Lulu and I were puffing slightly, Very not at all. The rooftop door was open. So was my apartment door. The lock didn’t appear to have been tampered with.

  “Jeez, it’s hot in here,” Very observed, grimacing as he glanced around at my living room.

  “Lulu and I prefer tropical climates.”

  “I take it Tommy didn’t report the mugging to the police.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Did he know who this gee was? The one with the gun?”

  “No, but I may have an idea who he is.”

  “And this would be because . . . ?”

  “Tommy’s description—a huge, fleshy guy, maybe fifty, with curly red hair turning gray—matches a PI who works for the South Shore lawyer who’s representing Addison’s tasty young wife, Yvette. It seems she’s trying to get a do-over on her prenup.”

  “Have you got a name for me?”

  “Jocko Conlon.”

  Very made a face. “Yech.”

  “Yech?”

  “He’s slime. Used to be on the job here until he got bounced for being a small-time shakedown artist. You know the type: ‘Give me a free three-course dinner or I’ll ca
ll the health department and tell them I saw mouse droppings.’ After that, he went to work for the Nassau County sheriff, where he got bounced yet again. And trust me, you’ve got to be serious slime to get bounced in Nassau County.”

  “You think he threw Tommy off the roof?”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me in the least. Who else besides you knew that Tommy was here?”

  “His girlfriend, Norma Fives.”

  Very thumbed his jaw, his head nodding, nodding. “How?”

  “He phoned her. I warned him not to use the phone. I thought there was a chance it might be bugged. But he didn’t listen to me. Tell me, if someone with Jocko Conlon’s skills wanted to bug my phone, how would he go about doing it?”

  “One of two ways. Sophisticated or unsophisticated. The sophisticated way is to splice directly into your phone line down in the basement.”

  “And the unsophisticated?”

  “Pick the lock to your front door when you’re out and insert a mike into the mouthpiece of your phone. Those can transmit only two, three hundred yards, so it means he’d have to double-park outside in a van, listening in through a set of headphones. If we’re talking Jocko, then I’d wager that’s what he did.” Very fished a pair of latex gloves from the pocket of his windbreaker, put them on, unscrewed the mouthpiece of my rotary phone and pulled out a small round transmitter. “See? He must’ve figured Tommy would come to you for help.”

  I thought this over, my mind working through the progression of steps that might lead Jocko to think Tommy would end up here.

  “Did Tommy bring anything with him?” Very asked me.

  “His wet clothes were hanging from the back of the bathroom door when I left this morning. His wallet and keys should be in his pants pockets, unless his killer took them. He didn’t have anything else.”

  Very went and had a look. “His clothes are still here. Wallet and keys, too. We’ll bag and tag them. I’m afraid this apartment’s a crime scene. You’ll have to find somewhere else to stay for a couple of days.”