three
THE DOORMAN WHO CAME out to open the cab door knew Wickler, saluting him and saying his name and calling him Mister and Sir. Wickler preened in it, unable to resist glancing over his shoulder at me to see how I was taking it. I was irritated, and regretted having come along, which may or may not have shown in my face.
This was a new high-rise apartment building in the East Fifties, with a red canopy under which Wickler led me, and the doorman followed us into a small glass and chrome foyer with a complex control panel in the left wall as though we had entered a space ship. The doorman went to this panel, and while Wickler and I waited, used a telephone to check Wickler’s admissibility and then a cream-colored plastic button to release the lock on the glass doors. We went on through.
The elevator in which we rose to the seventeenth floor continued this age-of-tomorrow feeling, its chrome walls giving back blurred Technicolor reflections of Wickler and me standing side by side and not speaking. But no matter; years ago I gave up being bitter about the comparative incomes of successful crooks and successful cops; it’s a cheap and irrelevant comparison anyway, since wealth is the goal of the crook but presumably something else is the goal of the cop.
It was even more irrelevant now.
The hall was gray, the door of 17C was black. Wickler rang the bell and we waited. I felt a small itch in my spine after a moment, the sign that someone was looking at us through the peephole disguised on this door as a miniature carriage lamp, and then the door opened and we were let in by a very tall and broad young man who looked like one of those personable professional football players who makes television commercials for insurance companies.
Entering, Wickler said, “Ernie’s expecting us. Tell him I brought Tobin. Uh, Mister Tobin.”
The young man closed the door, turned flat gray eyes on me, and said, “I’ll have to frisk you, sir.” Very polite.
Not polite, I said, “No.”
He was neither surprised nor offended. His flat gaze flicked to Wickler, who said, “It’s okay. I’ll take the responsibility.”
He put it from his mind as though it had never been, moving to a large doorway on our left and saying, “If you’d wait in here—”
“Two minutes,” I said.
Wickler said to me, “Sure thing, Mister Tobin. I’ll go along and talk to Ernie myself.”
I went through the large doorway into a small sitting room with furniture of a very slender and almost spindly sort, all in dark wood, an approximation of something two or three hundred years old, I suppose. I’m not much good at periods in furniture.
Left alone in there, I sat in a thin chair with spidery wooden arms and a round upholstered seat and found it surprisingly comfortable. I lit a cigarette and put the match in a round glass ashtray and looked at my watch to time the two minutes. I’d given up smoking for nearly two years, but six months ago I started again. Now this was my first cigarette since I’d decided on the wall.
In one minute and forty seconds Ernie Rembek came into the room, a narrow and amiable czar in a two-hundred-dollar suit. With vest. I’d seen him on television a few times, taking the Fifth Amendment in front of Congressional committees, but this was the first time I’d seen him in the flesh and I was surprised at how young he looked. He must be nearly fifty, but he looked hardly my age, trim and hard and lean, with sharp features and a spring to his walk. He reminded me most of those actors who portray sharp young executives in business or ad agency movies.
The smile he came in with was a complex thing, compounded of hospitality, apology, and self-satisfaction. He said, “Mister Tobin, thank you for coming. I don’t imagine you want to shake hands.”
That threw me off; I’d been steeling myself to the rudeness of refusing his hand. I said, “It wouldn’t make sense, would it?”
“I suppose not.” He shrugged easily and said, “Believe me, Mister Tobin, I appreciate your position here. I’m the enemy. It’s like a retired general going to work for the Russians.”
“Something like that.”
“I’ll try to make the arrangement no more painful than is absolutely necessary,” he said. “I realize you don’t want to be here, you’re simply in a bind. Before we got down to business, I wanted to assure you that I do understand and I hope you’ll find it possible to…call some kind of truce with us while this is going on.”
“Wickler told me about a murder,” I said.
He held up a hand to stop me, smiling apologetically. “I’m sorry, but not yet. That’s business, and I never discuss business without my advisors. All I wanted to do now was thank you for coming and let you know I understood the situation and won’t put any…unnecessary strain on you.”
I know that the popular image of a syndicate chieftain is a surly overweight undereducated immigrant, and I also know that the popular image of almost everything is wrong, but still I hadn’t been prepared for the charming and well-educated affability Ernie Rembek was presenting. I was off-balance, and I disliked him for that almost as much as for his record. I said, “Let me worry about the strain for myself.”
“Before we go into the office,” he said, “I’d like to tell you a brief story. With a moral. May I?”
I shrugged. “Go ahead.”
“Once when I was a kid,” he said, “I took off from school one day and rode the ferry over to Staten Island. Half a dozen of us went. And coming back, you know how kids are, impatient, last one ashore’s a rotten egg, all that jazz, we were crowding up front, telling the guy on duty there to go to hell, and just as we were coming in, one of the kids went over. Howie Zlotkin, his name was. He went in between the pilings and the side of the ferry. So they’re backing in and out, they’re trying to save the kid, and it wound up they mashed him three times between the ferry and the pilings. We’re all on the rail, watching, and Howie’s in the water like a pound of hamburger. Can you see the picture?”
I could, though I saw no point in it. I said, “What’s the connection?”
“You,” he said. “Every time I see a guy with your kind of pride, I think about Howie Zlotkin down there between the metal ferryboat and the wood pilings.”
“You mean I’ll be ground up.”
“I’ve never seen it to fail,” he said. “Not once. Wood and metal are tougher than skin. Anybody’s skin.”
I said, “You didn’t tell me about Howie. What was he going home to?”
His smile was very thin. He said, “You know yourself better than most people, Mister Tobin. Come along to the office.”
four
THE OFFICE WAS JUST that, an office, with desks and phones and filing cabinets and Venetian blinds, a fairly large square room set off by itself in one corner of the apartment. It already contained three men when we entered, who stood for Rembek to make the introductions.
“Mister Mitchell Tobin, this is Eustace Canfield, this is Roger Kerrigan, this is William Pietrojetti.”
The three all bowed their heads in turn, and smiled me welcome, but none offered to shake my hand, and I recognized there the work of Ernie Rembek, a fast briefing before he’d come out to see me. I should have been pleased at an unpleasantness avoided, but I was not; I’d been cheated of my chance to express moral superiority by refusing to touch their hands. It did no good to remind myself that moral superiority, once expressed, has been lost. I felt cheated anyway.
Having introduced the three, Rembek now described them for me: “Canfield is my attorney, Kerrigan is an observer from the corporation, and Pietrojetti is my accountant.” He waved a hand. “Sit down, gentlemen, please.” More formally, he motioned me to a chair directly in front of the main desk, saying, “Would you sit here, Mister Tobin?”
I didn’t like it, it put both Canfield and Kerrigan behind me, out of my range of vision. Of course, Rembek immediately sensed my dislike and its reason, and said, “But sit wherever you want,” gesturing this time vaguely in the direction of a brown leather sofa along the right wall, farther away and with a clear view of
the entire room.
It was time to stop permitting Rembek to treat me like an expensive race horse. I said, “No, this is fine,” and sat in the chair he’d pointed to first.
I’d already seen enough anyway of the other three, sufficient to recognize their types now and their faces in the future. The attorney, Eustace Canfield, was a distinguished façade, even to the gray hair at the temples. Surely he wore a corset. He was undoubtedly a first-rate textbook lawyer with a brilliant memory and no imagination, the sort of man who can prepare a case as intricate as a house made of matchsticks but who, in court, would blunder his matchstick house into ruin.
As to Roger Kerrigan, he was a younger Ernie Rembek, a bright sharp silent young hood with a business-college education. Federal agents very often have something of the same appearance, but without the ferret eyes. And the “corporation” for which he was an observer here was the mob, the syndicate. Rembek was only a regional czar, and how he handled crises in his territory was of moment to the men at the top. Roger Kerrigan, a man who surely had no record and never would have one, a man who likely had a key to the Playboy Club and a membership at a gym, a man with a bright executive future in the “corporation,” was serving here as the eyes of the men at the top. I was sure he’d do a good and thorough job.
William Pietrojetti was something else again. He wore a brown suit, as rumpled and baggy and ashes-strewn as if he’d just completed a cross-country bus trip while wearing it. He had a heavy five-o’clock shadow, and probably had one immediately after he shaved. He also had dandruff, and his black hair was a bit shaggy. He was a one-track man, obviously, the sort of accountant who in his spare time made up mathematical puzzles and sent them to Scientific American, whose light reading was biographies of mathematicians, and whose way with the tax laws would be a sort of intellectual rape. He would be underpaid, because his kind is always underpaid, but he wouldn’t care; the only money that would interest him would be the sort he could turn into numbers on sheets of paper.
Once we were all settled down, Rembek leaned forward with his elbows on the desk and said, “How much did Wickler tell you, Mister Tobin?”
“As much as you wanted him to tell me. There’s been a murder, of somebody close to you, not connected with the—corporation. You want the murderer found, but not to handle him yourself. If he is found, you have no objection to his being turned over to the police.”
He nodded. “That’s right. And that’s all he told you?”
“Yes. He wouldn’t tell me why the police aren’t called in anyway, since you don’t mind the murderer being turned over to him at the end.”
“It’s a complicated situation. Before I say anything, I’ll need your word that you won’t ever talk about any of this on the outside.”
I shook my head. “I can’t promise that.”
He said, “I’m not talking about covering up anything illegal.”
“I don’t care what you’re talking about, I won’t make any promises in the dark.”
Canfield interrupted then, saying, “Mister Tobin, I think it would be sufficient if you would merely assure us you will treat whatever you’re told here today with…discretion. Wouldn’t that be enough for you, Ernie?”
Rembek seemed troubled. “This is important to me, Eustace,” he said.
“I believe we can trust Mister Tobin’s sense of fair play.”
Rembek looked at me. I said, “If all you want is for me to say I won’t carry gossip, I agree.”
Rembek nodded curtly. “Okay,” he said, “that’s good enough.” Then, with an obvious effort, he managed an amiable smile, saying, “This thing’s very close to me. You’ll understand by the time you hear it all.”
“I’m willing to listen,” I said.
Canfield said, “There’s one last detail, Mister Tobin. A legal nicety I’d like to cover. Do you have a dollar bill handy?”
“I think so. Why?”
“I wish you to give it to me, and to state to me that you are hiring me to represent your interests in this affair.”
I twisted around in my chair, the better to see him, and said, “What’s that for?”
“Information exchanged between attorney and client,” he said, “is a privileged communication. If at any time in the future you are asked to describe this meeting, and it is your desire to refuse, this will give you the legal grounds to do so.” At the expression on my face he said, “Please, Mister Tobin, this is not shyster trickery, I assure you. I am merely making it possible for you to have the full protection of the law at some future date, should the situation arise and you desire it. By paying me the dollar you do not lose the right to talk all you want to anyone in the world. This merely gives you the choice.”
I said, “But Rembek’s going to tell me the story.”
“No, sir, Mister Tobin, I am.”
Rembek said, “Everything kosher, Mister Tobin. For your sake.”
I felt obscurely like a fool but I did what they wanted, getting a dollar bill from my wallet and handing it to Canfield and asking him to represent me. He agreed gravely to do so, I went back to my chair, and he told me the details:
“Mister Rembek is a married man, Mister Tobin. I may say, a happily married man. But perhaps not entirely a faithful man. Mrs. Rembek is a somewhat nervous woman, she has her troubles, for which we are all deeply sorry, and Mister Rembek finds it necessary for his own physical and mental well-being to maintain a second establishment, where he can relax from the cares of his workaday position and enjoy the companionship of a close friend.”
Rembek interrupted to say, earnestly, “I still love my wife, I want to make that clear. This has nothing to do with my wife, she’s a wonderful woman.”
I felt a buzzing in my nerves. If my own case were not so totally known to Rembek—to everyone in this room—surely Rembek would have said to me something along the order of man-to-man-you-understand-how-it-is. The absence of that appeal glared in the silence like an empty wall from which a painting has been stolen.
Canfield at last broke into the silence, saying, “For the last two years the close friend has been a young woman named Rita Castle, a sometime television actress. Mrs. Rembek, of course, has known nothing of the existence of Rita Castle, nor of any of her predecessors, and still knows nothing today.”
“I want to keep it that way,” Rembek said. “That’s why I wanted you to promise to keep your mouth shut.” Again he didn’t say that I would understand.
Canfield said, “Mister Rembek perhaps placed too great a confidence in Miss Castle’s good will. For whatever reason, he made it possible for her to put her hands on a rather large sum of money. Cash.”
I said, “So she took it and ran out.”
Canfield took a legal-size envelope from his pocket and brought it over to me, saying, “Three days ago she left this note in the apartment.”
It was handwritten, in green ink on gray stationery, and in rotten handwriting. I made it out with some difficulty:
I am going away. I have found a real man and we are going to find a new life together far away. You’ll never see either of us again.
I said, “It’s definitely from her?”
Rembek said, “Did you ever see handwriting like that before? It’s her, all right. And that crack about a real man, that’s her style, too.”
He sounded really bitter. Looking at him, I thought it likely he’d had more genuine feeling about this close friend of his than he did for his wife, his protestations notwithstanding. It was guilt that kept him tied to his wife, but it was desire that had linked him with Rita Castle.
Canfield said, “Early this morning Miss Castle’s body was found in a motel room outside Allentown, Pennsylvania. Fortunately, the motel manager has some connections with us, and when he found a reference to Mister Rembek among the effects in the young lady’s purse, he called the corporation rather than the police.”
I said, “Were the police ever called?”
“Not yet. If you take the job
, that will be up to you, either to call them or not.”
“Where’s the body now?”
“Still in that motel room. Nothing has been touched.”
Rembek said, bluntly, “The money’s gone.”
I said to him, “You think the man she went away with killed her and took the money.”
“That’s obvious, isn’t it?”
“No. It’s likely, but it isn’t obvious. What about the motel manager, could he have taken the money? If it had been there when he went in, would he have taken it?”
Rembek looked at Kerrigan, who said, “I would say no. He’s number one, trustworthy, number two, small-time, number three, nervous. Number four, he did all the right things he would have done if the money hadn’t been there, and he isn’t smart enough to have the money and still do all those things right.”
I said, “There are other possibilities. But it’s likeliest it happened the way you think. She ran off with him, he killed her, he took the money.”
Rembek said, “And I want him.”
I said, “For the money?”
“No.”
“Because he killed her?”
Rembek shook his head. “I might have done it myself,” he said, “if I’d caught up with her.”
“Then why?”
“Because he took her. She was mine.”
Canfield said smoothly, “Mister Rembek has no desire for personal vengeance, but he does wish this case cleared up as soon as possible. If he could get the money back, so much the better, but the primary task is to learn the identity of the man involved. Once he is known, you may turn him over to the police with our blessing.”
I said, “Then why not let the police handle it from the beginning?”
Canfield said, “Frankly, Mister Tobin, I believe the local authorities in Allentown, Pennsylvania, will have a bit of difficulty solving the case. Obviously we cannot tell them the full background, as we are telling it to you, and without the full background they are unlikely to get anywhere.”
Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death Page 2
