“Hold on a second,” I said into the phone, cupped my hand over the mouthpiece, and said to Marty, “What is it?”
“We don’t want you to quit, for God’s sake!”
“I don’t have any choice.” I could hear Rembek still yammering away, but I ignored him.
Marty said, “We’ll lay off, Mitch. Guaranteed.”
“What kind of a guarantee?”
Fred James said, sarcastically, “You want it in writing, Mitch?”
Marty surprised him by turning on him and snapping, “Shut up, Fred! This man isn’t kidding, he’ll do what he says.”
“I’ll always do what I say.”
Marty turned back to me. “So will I. And I guarantee you won’t be followed any more, and the people you saw last night won’t be questioned. When you’ve got something you want to tell me, you just get in touch, that’s all. Otherwise, we’ll leave you strictly alone.”
“That’s a promise you can’t make, Marty, and we both know it.”
“Let me make a call,” he said.
Rembek was still yammering. I said into the phone, “I’ll call you back,” broke the connection, and gave the phone to Marty.
It took him two calls to do it, one to his headquarters and one to Centre Street, with complicated explanations both times, but when he was done I was a free agent again. He hung up from the second call and said to me, “There. You satisfied?”
“Completely.”
“I’ll see you, Mitch,” he said.
“I’ll be in touch, Marty.”
Fred James and I didn’t exchange farewells.
After they left I called Rembek back again. He came on the line and said, “Did it work?”
“Yes.”
He chuckled. “You had me going for a minute there. I thought you meant it.”
“If it hadn’t worked,” I told him, “I meant it.”
eighteen
THE DOORMAN RECOGNIZED ME now. I’d taken a cab from the subway, because of the rain, and he came and opened the door and touched his cap brim and called me sir, treating me with the same deferential respect he gave notaries like Wickler, the messenger who had brought me the first news of this job. Getting out of the cab and standing under a canopy that protected me from the rain, following the deferential doorman into the building, I remembered Ernie Rembek, in our first meeting, assuring me that no one wanted my cherry, and I wondered if I wasn’t perhaps somehow losing it anyway, through no fault of anyone.
I must find the murderer very quickly, and get out of this world. With my wall lay safety.
Upstairs, Rembek himself opened the door for me. He told me my new office was to be right here, in his apartment, and he escorted me to it, saying, “Nobody’s going to mine this place, I guarantee it.”
He led me to a small room with a view of an air shaft. There was the same sort of furniture as in the first office, desk and filing cabinet and chair and typewriter stand. Rembek stood in the doorway with me, looking at it, and said, “How is it?”
“It’s fine.”
“There’s your gun in the bottom desk drawer. I’m sorry, I couldn’t get a permit for you.”
“That’s all right.”
I went over and opened the drawer and took out the gun, a Colt Cobra, a snub-nosed revolver chambered for the .38 Special. It was about the same size and weight as the gun I’d worn for the last several years on the force, a Smith & Wesson Chief’s Special which had also fired the .38 Special, the only difference being that this Colt had a hammer shroud and my old S&W hadn’t.
There was a good plain hip holster in the drawer, too. I threaded it into my belt, tucked the nose of the holster into my hip pocket, and slid the revolver into place.
Memories flooded back like the sudden blare of a radio.
Rembek said, “Well, how is it? Okay?”
“Go away for a while,” I said. “Come back in five minutes.”
He didn’t understand me. “What? What’s the matter with you?”
I turned on him, talking loudly in order to be able to talk at all, shouting, “Damn it, Rembek, get out of here! Go away for five minutes!”
I don’t know if he understood then or not, but at least he went away, shutting the door behind him, leaving me alone in the little square room with the weight of the gun on my right hip.
How could I have forgotten about that? For eighteen years I had worn a gun, most of the time right there, on my hip, the weight known and familiar and comforting. The first month or two after…afterward, I walked oddly, feeling wrong and misshapen because that weight wasn’t there, almost as though a hole had been bitten into my hip.
But the body forgets, too, as does the mind, and as time had gone on I had grown used to that emptiness on my hip, and had stopped noticing that anything was missing there, and so I was unprepared when I put this new gun on, my guard was down and the memories came in with long brass nails and clawed the inside of my chest.
Everything passes. Soon it was possible for me to breathe again, and to move, and to distract my attention with thoughts of other things. When, five minutes later, the knock sounded at the door, I was sitting at the desk, looking at the alibi reports on the six from Rembek’s second list, which had been in a manila envelope atop the desk, waiting for me.
I called, “Come in,” and Rembek entered, looking hesitant. “It’s all right,” I told him. “Come on in.”
He came the rest of the way in, leaving the door open. “Sometimes you confuse me, Mister Tobin,” he said.
“If I were an entirely rational and comprehensible man,” I told him, “I would still be on the force, and someone else would be working for you.” I motioned at the alibi reports. “I see we’ve eliminated four of those.”
“Three,” he said.
“We can cross Mickey Hansel off now,” I said.
“Oh, yeah. I’m sorry, I didn’t make the connection.”
I looked again at the alibi reports. One of the two remaining suspects from this list was William Pietrojetti, the accountant I’d met my first time up here, who claimed to have spent the evening at home alone, and the other was a man named Matthew Seay, occupation bodyguard, who stated he’d been with a friend all night Wednesday but who would give no further details.
I said, “This Seay, is he the one opens your door here?”
“No, that’s Burger, he stays here all the time. He never met Rita at all. Seay’s gone with me sometimes to social affairs and like that.”
“I want to see him. And Pietrojetti, too. In their homes, like the others.”
“This afternoon good?”
“The sooner the better.”
He nodded. “Done.”
I said, “What about George Lewis? Was he on the Coast Wednesday night?”
“Definitely.”
“Good.” I got out pencil and paper, started to make up a list
Rembek said, “I’ve got you a new gopher. He’ll be here in less than an hour.”
“No, that’s all right, I don’t need one any more.”
He looked at me. “You feel bad about Hansel, huh?”
“Naturally. Will I get copies of the police reports on the explosion?”
“As soon as there are any.”
“Good.”
I finished my list, the seven active names:
Roger Kerrigan
Frank Donner
Louis Hogan
Joseph Lydon
Paul Einhorn
William Pietrojetti
Matthew Seay
I gave the list to Rembek, saying, “I’d like a complete rundown on the police records, if any, of these seven.”
He took the list almost greedily, studying the names. “It’s down to these, is that it? It’s one of these seven.”
“Maybe. If we read that note right.” I shook my head. “I’m sorry to lose that note.”
“You left it in the office?”
“Yes.”
“If you want to know what it
said,” he said bitterly, “just ask me. I know it by heart.”
“That’s good.” I went over and sat down and pulled the typewriter close. “Reel it off.”
He did, in a monotone, and if it gave him pain he made no sign of it. “‘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.’”
“Okay, fine.” I took the sheet out of the typewriter and laid it face down on the desk. “Look at that list I just gave you,” I said. “Which of those seven would have known about the cash Rita took?”
He studied the list, frowning. “Well, Roger would. And Frank, Frank Donner. Pietrojetti would, naturally. Matt Seay might, he’s my bodyguard sometimes, he might have been along once or twice when I unloaded some of it. Lou Hogan wouldn’t. Neither would Joe Lydon, Paul Einhorn, neither of them.” He looked at me. “But she knew about it, she could have told the guy herself.”
“Then he wouldn’t have been after the money from the beginning,” I said. “She wouldn’t have told him about the money before they were…close. So if he was after it from the beginning, he had to know it from somebody other than her.”
“So these three are out? Lou, and Joe, and Paul?”
“No. They’re just more unlikely than the others. It could still be one of them, and the affair started out of passion, and the money didn’t come into it until later.”
He looked at the list some more. “For one reason or other, you could cross off every name on this list.”
“That’s why I’m not crossing any of them off yet. Tell me about the building.”
“What building?”
“Where my office was yesterday. Does the corporation just have that one office there, or the whole building, or what?”
“We’ve got maybe half a dozen offices in there, for this and that. The rest of the building is square.”
“The corporation owns it?”
“As a matter of fact, Joe Lydon owns it. I told you, we lease a lot of property from him here and there.”
“So he’d have a key to let him into the building.”
“He wouldn’t need a key. It’s a twenty-four-hour building, there’s an old guy on duty at the door and elevator all night long. And he wouldn’t need a key for the office door either, that kind of lock you can go through with a toothpick.”
I said, “So that doesn’t cut it down any.” I looked around at my new empty desk and said, “There’s some paperwork I’m going to have to replace. You’ve got another copy of the alibi reports from your first list, haven’t you?”
“Right. In my office. I’ll bring them in to you.”
“Good. And the police reports from Allentown, I’ll need to replace those.”
“Is that a definite must? It’ll be tough to get another set by now.”
“We’ll have to try,” I said.
He shrugged. “If you say so.”
I took out my notebook and opened to the section where I’d copied the names from the address book in Rita Castle’s apartment. I said, “What was the name of Rita’s boy friend when you met her, do you remember?”
“What the hell do you want with him? She hasn’t seen him in two years.”
“I want to talk to him. What was his name?”
“Quigley. Something Quigley, I forget the first name.”
I flipped through the notebook. “Ted,” I said. “Ted Quigley.”
He frowned at me and at the notebook. “Where’d you get that?”
“Maybe she didn’t see him,” I said, “but she kept his name and address and phone number in her address book.”
“She did?” He half shook his head, then shrugged it off, saying, “It was a fossil, it was left over, an old address book.”
“Probably,” I said. I got to my feet. “I’ll be back after a while.
“Why? Where are you going?”
“To talk to Ted Quigley.”
“What’s the point?”
“I’ll tell you when I come back.” I stopped and looked at him and said, “Don’t get excited about it, Rembek. I don’t think Ted Quigley came out of the past and took Rita away.”
“Then what do you want to see him for?”
“I want to find out who he thinks she was. I feel a little confusion about her sometimes.”
He started to say something, fast and angry, and then abruptly stopped. “Yes,” he said, in a different tone. “So do I. Maybe I had her wrong all along. I did, I had her wrong all along.”
“I’ll be back soon,” I said, and started out the door.
He said, “Hold on, I’ll get Roger.”
“I don’t need Kerrigan this trip.”
“But—”
“He observes me when I talk to people in the corporation. Ted Quigley isn’t in the corporation.” That reminded me of something. I stopped and said, “Just for the record, where did you meet Rita Castle?”
“At a backers’ audition. She was reading one of the parts.”
“There’s no links there that I don’t know about?”
“No. I didn’t invest in the production, and she didn’t play in it when it was performed. I heard it died in New Haven.”
“All right. I’ll be back soon.”
As I was going out the door he called after me, “Mister Tobin?”
I turned and looked at him.
He said, “Tell me what Quigley says, will you? Who he thinks she was.”
nineteen
TED QUIGLEY LIVED ON East 10th Street, way over between Avenue A and Avenue B, facing the blacktopped and link-fenced playground called Tompkins Square. It is deeply within the section known as the Lower East Side, a slum area of low rents and crowded apartment buildings. The area around East 10th and Avenue B has come to be the closest thing to an artists’ colony in Manhattan today, as the high rents paid in Greenwich Village by the white-collar workers have forced the artists and bohemians out.
Quigley lived in a third-floor walk-up in a narrow old building with a coffee house on the first floor. I knocked on his door and got no answer, tried the knob and the door was locked. On the off-chance, I went downstairs to the coffee house, which was nearly empty at this time of day—just a little after one P.M.—and asked the woman washing cups in the sink at the back if she’d seen Ted Quigley around today.
She looked at me and I could see her smelling the odor of cop on me, an aura that doesn’t strip away as easily as does the badge. I smiled and said, “No, I’m not a cop. On the level.”
She wasn’t sure whether to believe me or not, but my candor was in my favor. She hesitated, looking me over, and then shrugged and said, “Okay. If he isn’t upstairs, he’s probably at his girl’s place. You know where that is?”
I shook my head. “No. And I don’t know her name either. I’ve never met Ted Quigley.”
She was both curious and apprehensive. It wasn’t that Ted Quigley was a criminal—my assumption was that he was not—it was just that I was on the short end of a pair of prejudices, smelling as I did of cop. People in poor neighborhoods are prejudiced against the police because they believe—sometimes with reason—that the police are prejudiced against them. Artists and bohemians, although not usually breakers of society’s laws, are incessantly breakers of society’s customs, which involves them with the police almost as much as the lawbreakers, with total lack of sympathy and comprehension on both sides. Being in a neighborhood of poor bohemians, I was feeling the brunt of these prejudices combined.
Still, I had given every indication of open honesty, and I was alone—policemen rarely enter such neighborhoods as this alone—and it seemed to her worth taking the chance on me. She said, “I’ll give you the phone number, you can call and see if he’s there.”
“Thank you.”
She had to look it up. I followed her to the cash register, where she got a dog-eared phone book and made a point of looking in it in such a way that I couldn’t see the page. She wrote the number down on the ba
ck of an envelope with a stub of pencil, and then had an idea for further security, saying, “I’ll dial it for you.”
The pay phone was on the wall nearby, not in a booth. I gave her a dime and she dialed the number, then handed me the phone. She retired to the cash register, where she could hear my half of the conversation without making a point of it, and I listened to seven rings before the phone was answered by a girl whose voice sounded as though she were too young to be out of school. I said, “I was told Ted Quigley might be there.”
“Hold on,” she said, sounding very bored and world-weary, as though matters of moment in which she was engaged were constantly being interrupted by calls for Ted Quigley. Away from the phone I heard her holler, “It’s for you!”
His voice sounded older, and yet with something very youthful in it, a sort of querulousness. He said, “Hello? What is it?”
“Ted, did you hear about Rita Castle?”
“Naturally,” he said, as though I’d reminded him of an unanswered insult. “The cops told me.”
“They’ve been around.”
“You bet they’ve been around.”
“Now I’m around,” I said.
His voice immediately got more guarded. “What are you? More cops?”
“No. I’m on a kind of assignment. I’m supposed to find out who Rita Castle was.”
“What for?” he demanded sarcastically. “Screen Secrets?”
“No. For Ernie Rembek. You know who he is?”
Silence.
“Ted?”
“Yeah.” Very small voice. “I know who he is.”
“He didn’t kill her, Ted.” Out of the corner of my eye I could see the woman at the cash register react to the word “kill” and then very quickly recover.
Meanwhile Ted Quigley said, in a loud voice, “Well, I didn’t either!”
“Of course not, I know that.”
“I’ve got an alibi. Even the cops had to take it.”
“Ted, I never thought for a minute you killed her. All I ask from you is conversation. I want to know who Rita was.”
“Why?”
“Because Ernie Rembek hired me to find out.”
“Why does he want to know?”
“Ask him.”
Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death Page 11
