“The answer will be no.”
“I know that. As soon as the police get to Rembek, I want him to call me and tell me the girl’s been found dead. I want him then to hire me to help look for the killer.”
Kerrigan smiled. “Everything neat and tidy, huh?”
“I don’t want to muddy the waters if I can avoid it,” I said.
“Sure. Okay, I’ll go over and set that up right now. You want the car to drive you home?”
“Yes. I brought that suitcase along, I’d rather not tote it on the subway. It’ll be less obvious than having me walk down my block carrying it. I don’t have an explanation for it, so I’d rather no neighbor noticed it, just in case some completist decides to ask questions around my area.”
We went down in the elevator together, Kerrigan spoke to the chauffeur, and then we separated, he walking up toward the corner, I getting into the car.
After we went through the Midtown Tunnel and got on the Long Island Expressway, I leaned forward and said to the chauffeur, “Have you been driving for Mister Rembek long?”
“Yes, sir. About three years.”
He was about thirty, black-haired, with a strong-looking and somewhat heavy body. His face was dominated by a large Mussolini-type jaw, which gave him a stupid look, but when he spoke his manner was brisk and educated.
I said, “Did you know the woman who lived in the building we were just in?”
“Miss Castle? Yes, sir.”
“Did you sometimes drive her places without Mister Rembek?”
“Yes, sir, very often. Shopping, or to rehearsals when she was in television shows, or going downtown to see her old friends.”
“What did you think of her?”
He glanced at me warily in the rear-view mirror. “I’m not sure I can answer that, sir,” he said.
“You can. It won’t get back to Mister Rembek. I need to know as much as I can about her.”
“Yes, sir.” He hesitated, then said, “Well, I would say…I would say she was a dangerous girl, sir.”
“Dangerous?”
“She was, uh, I suppose, bored, sir. She didn’t know what to do with herself a lot of the time.”
“You mean she made passes at you.”
He looked embarrassed. “It sounds sort of dumb when you say it that way.”
“But she did.”
“Yes, sir. Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“Well, it was more like a game she was playing. I think she only did it because she could be sure I wouldn’t take her up on it. I figure she didn’t want me to take her up on it.”
“Did you?”
“Who, me?” He seemed really surprised. “I know when I’m well off!”
“What do you think she would have done, if you had responded?”
“Hollered her head off. Got me some lumps.”
“Rembek wouldn’t have been happy.”
“Mister Rembek would have wanted my balls, sir.”
“Okay. Thank you.”
“Yes, sir.” After a minute he said, “Sir, this what I said, this won’t get back to Mister Rembek, will it?”
“No. It’s none of his business.”
“Thank you, sir.”
We rode the rest of the way in silence. When we got to the house I hurried inside with the suitcase and found Kate and Bill in the living room, watching a spy show on television. I told Kate I wouldn’t be staying away after all, at least not now, and then I went upstairs to make my phone call to Eddie Schultz, a guy I went through Police Academy with who now works in the Missing Persons Bureau. I called him at home and ignored the strain in his voice as we went through the necessary it’s-been-too-long-we’ve-got-to-get together-sometime preliminaries. Then I asked him my question: “Could you find out for me if there’s been any report of a young woman named Rita Castle on the missing list? Actress, lives in Manhattan.”
“I could find out for you. Where are you, at home?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll call you back.”
“Thanks, Eddie.”
I went back down to the living room and found that Kate had gone out to the kitchen to make me a cup of coffee. I sat down and tried to chat with Bill about school, but it was hard work. He was willing to talk, open and amiable with me, but I felt the strain in my own voice, and my thoughts were distracted by the constant questions in my head: What is he thinking? What does he think of me? What is in his mind about me? But if there was anything to learn, I knew of no way to learn it.
Eddie called back a few minutes later, and I was thankful for the interruption. He told me there was no such name as Rita Castle on the list, and I thanked him and went back to the living room. Kate was there now, and so was my coffee.
I drank the coffee, looking at the television screen without really seeing it, and then I went out to the emotional calm of the backyard. With the porch light on, there was enough illumination for me to do a little more digging, though I couldn’t do the finishing work, the leveling and smoothing and measuring. But I did get some work done, and cleared my mind, and felt somewhat better.
I came in at eleven o’clock, shortly after Bill had called goodnight to me out the back door. Kate and I sat at the kitchen table and I told her what I’d done, what I’d thought, what I’d learned. She handed me an envelope and told me a man had brought it to the house a little after six. Inside it was a check for five thousand dollars, made out to me and drawn on the account of something called Continental Projects, Incorporated, with a Grand Central Terminal box number for an address. On the left side of the check face there was a space for the check’s purpose to be written in, and in that space had been typed the words “For Professional Services.”
I wrote my name on the back and gave it to Kate to put in the account in the morning. All I felt by now was tired, and a little later I went upstairs to bed.
eight
THE CALL CAME AT nine-thirty in the morning. I was at work on my wall again when Kate came out on the porch and said, “There’s someone on the phone for you.”
It was Rembek himself. He said, “Well, they came to see me.”
I said, “Who?”
“Two detectives.”
“What about?”
“Huh?”
“Two detectives came to see you about what?”
“About the girl, what do you think?”
“What about the girl?” I asked him.
He finally understood. He gave a sigh of exasperation and said, “Okay, Mister Tobin, we’ll do it your way.” He then told me Rita Castle had been found murdered in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and he had been empowered by George Lewis, the man in Los Angeles, to make private inquiries into the details of her murder. I agreed to take the job, and he said with a touch of sarcasm in his voice that he was glad to hear it.
I said, “Now I’m going to need two things.”
“Name them.”
“First, an office in Manhattan. Someplace small. All I need is a room with a desk and a phone.”
“No problem. What’s the other thing?”
“I want you to make a list of everybody you know who also knew Rita Castle. I want the name and address and phone number and occupation.”
“That’s the list of suspects, right?”
I said, “We’re starting off with the assumption that the way she phrased her note meant the man was someone you knew. For the moment, we’ll make the further assumption that you also knew that she and this man were acquainted. So that’s the list we’ll make now. If it isn’t any of those people, we’ll have to change our assumptions.”
Rembek said, “Is this the way cops always work?”
“Part of it.”
He laughed and said, “Then how come I’m a free man?”
“You have a lot of money.”
“That’s right,” he said soberly. “That’s the edge, isn’t it? All right, Mister Tobin, I’ll make up that list right now. You’ll hear within the hour about your office. Yo
u want the car today?”
“Not now. I don’t know about later on.”
“Let me give you the number you can call if you want it. The chauffeur’s name is Dominic Brono.”
He gave me a Plaza number, which I wrote down. I said, “Can I reach you at this number, too?”
“No. I’ll be at this number here most of the time. If I’m out, you can get a message to me through here.”
He gave me that number, too, and then we both hung up.
I immediately called the Missing Persons Bureau and asked for Eddie Schultz, knowing he’d be on duty now. When he came on, I said, “I just got word about that girl, the one I asked you about last night. She was found killed.”
“Killed? Here in Manhattan?”
“No. Someplace in Pennsylvania. But she was connected with Ernie Rembek some way, so I suppose our people will get involved in it.”
He said, “Mitch, what’s your connection with this?”
“Rembek hired me yesterday to look for her.”
“You going into the private detective business, Mitch?”
I said, “No.” You need a license in New York State to operate as a private detective. Even if I wanted to I couldn’t see myself applying for such a license, not with my record. I said, “It was strictly off-the-cuff, to use my experience and contacts to see if I could make the girl turn up.”
“You think Rembek bumped her off? And he’s trying to use you as part of an alibi, maybe?”
I’d thought of that myself, and rejected it for a number of reasons. I said, “I don’t know, Eddie, could be. It isn’t likely, though. Anyway, Rembek wants me to keep interested in it.”
“The Homicide people won’t like that, Mitch.”
“I’ll keep my place,” I said.
“Okay. Don’t make trouble for yourself, fella.”
He was truly concerned for me; old friendships die hard. I said, “I’ll watch myself, Eddie. Thanks.”
Then I went out to the yard again to work on my wall while waiting for the detectives to show up.
nine
THEY CAME SHORTLY BEFORE noon, quite a while after I got the second call from Rembek, in which he informed me my office was at 493 Fifth Avenue, room 703. I should ask the elevator operator for the key. The list I’d asked for would be in the desk drawer. If I wanted anything else I should just holler
The Police Department is rarely subtle, but this time they did show a certain subtlety: two plainclothes men came to see me, one a stranger and the other an old friend. That way, they were ready to take any tack with me that might be necessary, depending on how I behaved.
I behaved like a man who wants to co-operate. The three of us sat in the living room, they politely declined Kate’s offer of coffee, and we settled down to talk.
The one I knew was Marty Kengelberg. We’d worked out of the same precinct for seven years, before he got reassigned to Manhattan Homicide South. He introduced the other one as “my partner, Fred James.” We didn’t shake hands.
Marty said, “I suppose you know what we’re here for.”
“You want to talk about Rita Castle,” I said.
“Right. Tell me the story, Mitch.”
So I told him the story. It didn’t entirely have the ring of realism, but that couldn’t be helped. The truth was equally unreal-sounding.
When I was done, Marty cautioned me against operating as a private detective, and I told him I intended to be careful about that. Then he asked me how much Rembek was paying me, and when I said five thousand dollars, he and Fred James looked at one another and James was the one to ask the next question, saying, “That’s a lot of money for such a vague job. How you supposed to earn it?”
“I don’t think I will earn it,” I said. “It was their figure, not mine.”
James said, “Why do they think it’s worth so much?”
“I think Rembek was hung on the girl. He says not, but I think he was. I think at first he figured she’d ducked out on him and what he wanted was to get her back. He’s got more money than he knows what to do with. I can see him saying to himself, ‘I’d give five grand to get Rita back.’ And then looking around for somebody to give the five grand to.”
“And you were there.”
“Right.”
James made that delicate eyebrow motion that means you’re-a-liar. He said, “That was very lucky for you.”
“I don’t think it was luck,” I said. “My name got pretty well known six months ago, so when Rembek decided what he wanted was an ex-cop, I was the one he thought of. I took the job because I need the money.”
James said, “It’s the job that has me a little confused. What are you supposed to do? I mean, generally speaking.”
“I’m doing it now,” I said. “Generally speaking.”
Marty said, “Take it easy, Mitch. You know we’ve got to do this.”
“Of course. I think what Rembek wants is a kind of liaison between him and the Police Department. I think the girl meant so much to him that now he feels he wants to be right on top of the investigation. Also, there’s one other thing.”
James said, “There’s always one other thing.”
This was the first time I’d been on this end of the hard-soft routine and I could see now why it was so effective. I made an effort to ignore James, turned back to Marty and said, “Rembek thinks there’s a possibility she was killed by somebody in his mob. If so, he’s in a bind. He can’t invite you boys in to snoop around without making trouble for himself, but if he keeps you out, the guy who killed Rita Castle may never be found.”
Marty said, “So he wants you to do the investigation in the mob.”
“Right. I’ve agreed not to use anything else I might learn, and they’ve agreed if the killer does turn out to be one of theirs, I can go ahead and turn him over to you.”
James said, “That’s sporting of you.”
Marty said, “What I can’t get over is how you were hired the day before she was found. She was already dead by then, but she wasn’t found yet.”
I said, “I really don’t think Rembek is trying to set up a false trail or anything like that. So far as I can judge, he’s clean. I wouldn’t have taken the job otherwise.”
James said, “What’s that hole for, out in your backyard?”
I looked at Marty. I said, “Marty, can we skip this scene? I already know all the lines.”
Marty said, “Mitch, you just don’t fit in the picture. Don’t blame Fred, he’s trying to figure out what you’re doing here. So am I.”
James said, “If you don’t want to tell me about the hole you don’t have to. It’s your privilege.”
I said, “Is there anything else, Marty?”
He said, “Yes. Don’t try to use friendship, Mitch.”
I got to my feet. “Don’t come back without a warrant, you bastard.”
James said, “Keep cool, friend.”
Kate came into the room then, saying, “Is something wrong, Mitch?”
“No. Marty and his friend were just leaving.”
Marty got slowly to his feet and a second later so did James. Marty said, “I guess you’ve forgotten what the job is, Mitch. I’m not doing anything here you wouldn’t do, not anything you haven’t done a hundred times yourself.”
I said, “What you’ve forgotten is who I am. There are questions you can ask me and know the answer is absolutely going to be straight. You used to know that.”
Marty glanced at Kate, and then hesitated, and then went ahead anyway: “You forfeited that, Mitch. When you weren’t there to back up Jock.”
Kate said, “Marty!”
“No,” I said to her. “He had the right to say that. He didn’t have the need, but he did have the right.”
Marty said, “Mitch, I’ll ask you a question, one that deserves a straight answer. Are you holding anything back?”
I said, “You’re asking me in front of your partner? If I say yes, you can put me away as a material witness till it�
�s all over.”
“Okay. Fred, I’ll be out in a minute.”
James nodded. He said to me with heavy sarcasm, “Nice to’ve met you, Tobin.” Then Kate went with him to the door.
Marty said, “Well? Are you holding anything back?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“My judgment. I don’t want to confuse the issue.”
“What are you holding back, Mitch?”
“I’m not sure I can trust you any more.”
“Then we’re even. What are you holding back?”
I said, “The body was found fourteen hours before. That motel has a tie-in with the mob. When the owner saw Rembek’s name in the girl’s purse he called the mob instead of the law. She was Rembek’s girl and she ducked out and she took some cash with her. I suppose unreported income. Rembek hired me to find the guy, both to get even and to get his money back. I said the murder had to be reported. I was the one set up the second discovery. To keep it simple.”
Marty nodded. “All right, that makes more sense. It didn’t feel right, you being hired a day early. You went out there yesterday?”
“Yes. Nothing was touched, not by me or anybody else. The rediscovery made no substantive change. And if the couple at the motel had reported finding a body and waiting fourteen hours to report it, you’d all be wasting your energies now on a lot of irrelevancies.”
“We are anyway,” he said.
“You can stop now.”
He said, “And you’re going to run an investigation inside the mob, is that it?”
“That’s what Rembek wants. If I find anything I’ll turn it right over to you.”
Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death Page 5
