He finished out the evening by raising his voice in song:
"So make it one for Hugo Stockelbrinner, the acned, beaver-toothed prick…
"And one more for the road."
Digger hung the Do Not Disturb sign on the door to keep the maid at bay, and so he slept until 11:00 A.M. When he woke up and glanced at his watch, he was pleased with himself. Usually, he slept fitfully, grabbing sleep in three-and four-hour snatches. An eight-hour unbroken sleep was an event in his life.
He felt still better after a shower. His head was clear. He had no hangover, although that didn’t mean anything since he never had a hangover. He had decided early hi life that this was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it meant he didn’t have to pay a next-day price for his excessive drinking. On the other hand, it had just made it that much easier for him to become an alcoholic.
Digger had thought once of how to head off the next generation of alcoholics. It would be simple. Congress should pass a law requiring a small amount of Antabuse to be mixed with every bottle of liquor sold. Antabuse was the anti-alcohol drug used in clinics; after taking it, people got violently ill if they drank alcohol.
A little Antabuse might head off a whole generation of lushes, Digger thought. He confided this in a letter to his congressman, who wrote back, thanking him for this thoughtful suggestion, promising to look into it and commending Digger for his interest in the governmental process, because without such active citizen participation no government could succeed and the spark of freedom would die in the world.
In other words, the congressman hadn’t read Digger’s letter. Digger wasn’t discouraged. His was an idea ahead of its time. Its day would come.
His good mood lasted until he started to get dressed and he realized he would not be able to postpone it any longer. He would have to go to see Louise Gillette today. From the bottom of his big suitcase he took out a small pocket-sized tape recorder and attached it to his bare right side with two strips of surgical tape from a roll he kept in his shaving bag. He might as well record the ravings of this woman who was going to turn down a half million of Old Benevolent and Saintly’s money. After dressing, he put on a bright red-and-black regimental striped tie and fastened to it a gold tie clip, designed like a frog with an open mouth. It was a singularly ugly tie clip, but it was unique, for a wire ran around from the back of it, under Digger’s shirt and connecting into his tape recorder. The open mouth of the frog was covered with a thin mesh, under which was a tiny but high-powered omnidirectional microphone. Digger had had the gadget made when he had gone on his first case for Brokers Surety Life Insurance Company. He traveled nowhere without his tape recorder. One never knew when one might need it; he always seemed to.
Dressed, he looked out his window. The residual haze still hung over the downtown section of Belton at the bottom of the bowl, but at this elevation the air was clean and fresh. He opened his window and breathed deeply and coughed. He smoked four packs of cigarettes a day; now he should start worrying about air pollution? He cheerfully accused himself of being a hypocrite, cheerfully agreed that the accusation was right on the mark and went downstairs.
Gus was mixing drinks behind the bar, but he took a moment out when Digger fished Vernon Gillette’s insurance application from his inside jacket pocket and asked him how to find the house.
"North Church Street," Gus said. "That’s across the bowl. You can either drive down into the town and then up the other side or you can drive around the edge of the bowl."
"Which way’s quicker?" Digger asked.
"Down into town. The main drag is Church Street. You just follow it through town and then up the other side. When you get above the smoke, start looking for numbers. This number should be pretty high up."
"Thanks. I’ll see you later," Digger said.
"You staying another night?"
"I don’t know. Yeah," Digger said. "Keep me booked up. I hate to have to hurry things."
Driving through the town, Digger figured out how Belton worked. At the bottom of the bowl were the stores, movie houses, offices and the homes of the proletariat, hidden under the continuous haze generated by the Belton and Sons industrial works at one end of the bowl. As you spiraled upward out of the bowl and away from the smog, you got to the better residential districts, and the nearer you got to the top of the bowl, the more expensive the homes became.
The Gillette family lived about three quarters of the way up the bowl in a house that was about two windows and two hundred feet of elevation short of being a mansion.
Digger parked on Church Street in front of the big yellow stucco structure, hoping he could wrap everything up neatly, then call Koko and let her apologize for his bad temper, and then spend some time with her, without invoking the memory of Humphrey Stickel-maker, or whatever his name was.
When he got out of the car, he looked down the road he had just driven along. The smog made the center of town almost invisible and Digger began to wonder if Louise Gillette wasn’t turning down a half million dollars, not because of her husband’s memory but just because living in Belton, PA, had driven her crazy.
Lucius Belton might own the town and almost everyone in it, but if this had been a Caribbean island, right now there would be rebels massing in the hills to overthrow him. Digger had an idea for a movie. The Revenge of the Smog People. Film it in Belton. Pay off all the townspeople with bottles of air flown in from the outside.
Digger rapped once, hard, on the big heavy oak door with the brass knocker, which sounded like Big Ben, and after a moment the door slid open easily and quietly. A small girl stood in the doorway. She was blond and her eyes were a brilliant green. Her long hair was done up in two braids that hung down over her shoulders. Her T-shirt read "Save the Whales" and her jeans had raised piping around the pockets and down the outside seams. She was barefoot and held one hand behind her back.
"Hello," she said.
"Hi," Digger said. "Is the lady of the house in?"
"Oh, dear. You’re not selling anything, are you?"
"No. Why?" Digger asked.
"Because my mother is busy. Only certain things are important enough to interrupt her for. Salesmen aren’t one of them. I’m empowered to deal with salesmen."
Digger remembered from the newspaper obituary on Gillette that Ardath Gillette was eight years old. Did eight-year-olds talk like this nowadays? Maybe this wasn’t Ardath, but a midget maid?
"Are you Ardath Gillette?" Digger asked.
"Yes. Who are you?"
"My name is Julian Burroughs."
"That’s very interesting," the girl said.
"Why?"
"Because Julian is probably a Catholic name. But Burroughs is usually Anglo-Saxon and not Catholic. What are you? So you have two names that suggest two different things? What are you?"
"I’ll give you a clue. I’m half Jewish."
"Oh, my, you are a very complicated man." Digger noticed that she still had her right hand on the doorknob and her left hand behind her back.
"Actually, I’m very simple," Digger said. "To know me is to see right through me. The incredible transparent man, that’s me. What kind of a name is Ardath?"
"That’s interesting too. When my parents gave me that name, they thought it was Welsh because they once had a Welsh friend named Ardath. But I looked it up and my name is from the Hebrew. It means flowering fields. Isn’t that interesting?"
"Inordinately," Digger said.
"We’re both very complex individuals," Ardath said.
"Too bad," Digger said. "I like simple women."
"I don’t believe that for a moment. Your eyes laugh, and men whose eyes laugh like life to be complicated. My father had eyes that laugh."
"Ardath," said Digger, "I think I’m falling in love with you. We’d better get on with our business before I stick you in my pocket and run off with you."’
The girl seemed, for a moment, to consider Digger’s offer.
"It would never work," she said s
olemnly.
"The age difference?" Digger said.
"I don’t really think age matters much," she said. "No. You have the look of a possessive man and I don’t think I could let you stand in the way of my career."
"What career is that?" Digger asked.
"How would I know? I’m only eight. You just said, get on with our business. What is ’our business’?"
"I’m with the Brokers Surety Life Insurance Company," Digger said.
"Oh. The insurance company. She won’t take it, you know."
"Take what?"
"The extra five hundred thousand dollars," Ardath said. "That’s a lot of zeros, isn’t it? There’s five before the decimal point and two after. Seven zeros. That is a terribly large amount of money."
"After the decimal point, you can have as many zeros as you want," Digger said. "You can make it an infinite number if you want."
Ardath Gillette thought about that for a moment. She said, "If the decimal is just a decimal, you can. But if it stands for the line of separation between dollars and cents, you can only have two zeros after it. Unless you want to get fractional."
"And who wants to get fractional?" Digger said. "I never thought of it in just that way."
"Most people don’t. Then again most people don’t think about anything. I suppose you insist on talking to my mother."
Digger nodded. "I guess so. I’ve come all this way; I might as well go through with it."
"Well, come on in," Ardath said. "I’ll take you to her. She’s playing with her trains."
Digger was sure he hadn’t heard her right. Ardath stepped behind the big door and pulled it open wide for Digger to step through, then closed it behind him. He noticed that the left hand which she had kept behind her body while running him through her screening process was holding a paperback book.
Ardath walked off crisply, obviously expecting Digger to follow. They walked down a long hallway to the left. Digger heard what sounded like a train whistle and he guessed that he had heard Ardath correctly after all.
Ardath slid open large double doors at the end of the hallway and Digger heard the slightly constipated whoop-whoop of an electric train. He reached under his jacket and pushed the button turning on his tape recorder. Without evidence, no one would believe this—least of all, Walter Brackler. Somehow, Digger doubted that Brackler’s last emissary had reported that Louise Gillette played with toy trains. Brackler was the kind of person who, had he been king, would kill the bearer of bad news.
Digger followed Ardath into the room. Obviously designed as a library, it was as large as his room at Gus LaGrande’s Inn, and the walls were lined, floor to ceiling, with bookshelves packed full with books, magazines, paperbacks, newspapers. While the room had once been a library, almost every available inch of floor space was taken up now by an electric train layout. Track ran all around the floor. Portions of other track rose from the floor on steel supports until they were six feet high. Digger looked around and saw a section of track against one wall, as close to the ceiling as it could be and still allow the trains to fit in the narrow opening.
But there was something odd about the train layout, and Digger looked at it hard to figure out what it was. Then he realized what it was. Train layouts generally included a lot of bucolic towns, pastoral scenes, plastic cows grazing on Astroturf grass, ceramic farmers leaning on styrofoam plows and watching the trains passing by. Not this train set. There were no farms or pastoral scenes. There were elevated platforms with garbage overflowing trash baskets, with little two-inch-high people in business suits standing cheek by jowl with people in cutoff jeans who wore bandannas around their heads. He saw a train steaming by at waist level right in front of him. There was no traditional toy engine pulling a string of cars. Instead, the train was led by one car identical to the string of cars that followed it, little oval windows making them look like something used to transport prisoners. And on the outside of each car every available square inch of space was covered with brightly colored graffiti. Digger recognized RICO 177. He saw REMO LIVES before the train whisked past him and into a tunnel constructed through the base of a building. In the window of the last car, he saw the letters AA.
Mrs. Gillette’s train set was a replica of the New York City subway system, complete to graffiti, people packed into cars, and yes… Digger looked down at one of the platforms. Behind a turnstile was a replica of a city subway token booth and a two-inch-high armed robber was splashing gasoline on it. In his free hand he held a lighted match. Inside the booth, the woman token clerk was screaming silently, her face distorted in terror. Past the turnstiles, in a darkened corner of the miniature subway platform, Digger saw a man being mugged by four denim-jacketed toughs. Another ceramic figure urinated against a wall.
Digger looked around for the architect of all this madness.
To the left, he saw the back of a figure, hunched over a control board, shoulders scroonched up in a parody of a mad scientist chortling over some particularly evil arrangement of test tubes. The figure wore a red-and-white vertical-striped silk shirt. A railroader’s blue-and-white cap sat atop its head, and from under the cap stray tendrils of dark hair twisted down onto the neck.
Digger glanced at Ardath, who was staring at him coolly.
"Mrs. Gillette?" he called out, but the sound of his voice was drowned out by the cacophony of trains whooping around the room, huffing out their asthmatic whistles.
Ardath gave him a look of great pity, then walked to a section of track that almost reached her shoulders and flicked a switch. The sounds of the trains diminished and died as everything rolled to a stop.
Digger saw the person at the control panel pressing buttons furiously, presumably wondering what act of God had halted the entire New York City subway system.
"Mother," Ardath called out, her voice echoing in the high-ceilinged room.
The train engineer turned. Digger would not have been surprised to see a twisted Phantom-of-the-Opera leer on a lipless face, with eyes sunken deep into sockets and a Singer sewing machine scar stitched neatly down one cheek.
What he got instead was a beautiful brunette woman. Digger remembered that she would be in her mid-to late-thirties, but this woman could have been only twenty-one. Her lightly tanned skin was smooth and wrinkle-free. Her eyes were, like Ardath’s, a brilliant green and there was a quizzical look in them, as if she detected humor where no one else could see it. Her lips were lightly glossed with a beige-colored lipstick. Long natural lashes made her large eyes seem even larger, and they appeared somehow luminous, as if a tiny pair of spotlights were shining on them from somewhere in the room.
"Mother," Ardath repeated, "this is Mr. Julian Burroughs. He’s from the insurance company."
"I see," Mrs. Gillette said. Her face frosted over but was still without wrinkles. She said to Ardath, "Suppose you leave us, dear. I imagine we’ll be talking business."
"Don’t sign anything," Ardath said.
"I won’t, dear. Run along now."
Ardath nodded, but as she turned and walked past Digger, she looked up at him and shrugged, a shrug that contained two million years of hurt and resentment and said, "See, treated like a juvenile again." She closed the sliding doors behind her as she left the train room.
"I’m sorry," Louise Gillette said. "Your name was…"
"Julian Burroughs, Mrs. Gillette. I’m with Brokers Surety Life Insurance."
"I know the name of your company, Mr. Burroughs," she said. "It seems my life is doomed to be one of never-ending correspondence and conference with you people."
"Not we people," Digger said. "I think this whole thing is stupid. I think we ought to give you the five hundred grand, call it quits and let you get on with rebuilding the New York subway system."
"Good. Have you brought a check?"
"No. They wouldn’t trust me with that much money. Actually, they wouldn’t trust me with the price of a pack of cigarettes."
"It’s funny, you don’t look like
a corporate vice-president," she said.
"Perish forbid," Digger said. "Actually, I’m kind of an investigator for Br—for that insurance company whose name you know so well."
"And just what is it you’re investigating?" Louise Gillette asked.
"I’ll tell it to you the way it was told to me," Digger said.
"I wish you would."
"Go up there and find out what it takes to convince this crazy broad to take an extra half a million. I was also told that your elevator doesn’t go to the top floor."
She studied him with a measured gaze, then rose from her seat in front of the control panel and walked toward him, stopping only when there was a thin section of track separating them.
"That still doesn’t explain why they sent you. You’re an investigator."
"But I am fabled for my tact and diplomacy," Digger said. "It’s why they keep me around."
"I don’t think you’re going to last long enough to collect your pension," she said. "Tell me why you think wanting to protect my husband’s reputation makes me a crazy broad."
"You misunderstand, Mrs. Gillette. I didn’t say you were a crazy broad. My boss, Walter Brackler, complain to him—I’ll give you his home address and phone number—he said you were a crazy broad. I came out here because I needed an excuse to drive to Pennsylvania and see my girl friend."
She was silent for a moment, and Digger said, "Mrs. Gillette, let’s get it straight. I’m sort of a consultant for Old Benevolent and Saintly. I solve problems for them. They asked me to try to solve this problem concerning your insurance payment. I frankly don’t give a rat’s ass whether you take the million or the half million or if you send them money. It’s all the same to me. I came out here for personal reasons. But I’m the company’s last best hope, and yours, too, I suspect. After me, it goes to the legal department and then it’ll be in court for a hundred and fifty years until senility lowers Ardath’s IQ to five hundred and fifty and you finally get your first wrinkle. But just to touch the bases and tell them I tried, I did want to see you and find out exactly what were your reasons for refusing the extra five hundred thousand. It seems like kind of a large commitment to an arbitrary principle."
Lucifer's Weekend (Digger) Page 3
