Ask the Right Question

by Michael Z. Lewin

  But not a single crack.

  I headed for Clinton Grillo’s.

  We didn’t spend very long on my position with the police. Only on the facts and essential strategy. None of the “Why did you do it?” stuff. That’s not really law—so Senior doesn’t bother much with it. In law, he says, you accept what appears to be the truth, combine it with what you want to be the truth and try to settle out of court. Besides I don’t think the old man wants to know too much about me. He still thinks of me as Junior’s disadvantaged friend.

  Clinton Junior got pretty good grades when we were in high school and he went to Yale. But he never came back. I went to see his father when I first came back to Indianapolis; to tell him about his son who was selling computers in New York while I lived there. Now Clinton Senior is my lawyer and kind of a friend. And he doesn’t send me bills. I take him bottles of good booze.

  In this case the strategy was to delay. The longer we could stall “this guy Ames” the less likely he was to be upset and want to take the trouble to keep up prosecution.

  Fair enough.

  I also used the meeting to find out that the statute of limitations on inheritance fraud is six years in Indiana.

  Happiness is a relative thing, of course, but as I headed back to my office I was happier than I’d been in some time. In work like mine, in which so much is so dull, you become afraid that your mind becomes dull with it.

  Having gotten an unusual job I was pleased to have made progress. To have beaten part of it, if my guesses were correct. To have earned the fee by a little application, and a little daring, however inept. I didn’t worry too much about being jailed. I have a fair number of friends in the city and they can help if you’re not too important. Which I’m not.

  I whistled in the car as I drove back.

  I walked up the stairs rather than wait for the elevator. And I almost never walk up the stairs.

  My only shadow was that for some reason Eloise had not been able to hang around. I thought that the note would be enough to keep her. I was glad I’d left such a positive one. I’d hurried back, so I was approaching the office door by 4:45.

  I could see the door ajar. When I saw that my heart fluttered a little, as hearts will. That surprised me. I was, after all, an old man who was supposed to have better self-control than that.

  I shook my head in wonderment at myself. I smiled, I strode into my office.

  Sitting on the corner of my desk, with my note to Eloise in his hand, was Leander Crystal.

  The sight cut me dead. I just stood there and started to shake. I don’t know if he could see that.

  After a minute’s silence, I mumbled, “I need a drink,” and tried to figure out how to get to my desk drawer. It shouldn’t have been hard—I can see that now. But the sight of him there, where my Eloise, my client, should have been, it frightened me.

  It took me another full sixty seconds to realize that I was in no immediate physical danger; he had no gun and he wasn’t holding it on me. I was sure he knew I was shaking. I wanted him out. I wanted him away. We knew that we were enemies.

  I said, “Get off my desk.”

  He got off and stood by the chair. Eloise’s chair. I went behind my desk, sat down and did my thing. I went through three drawers before I found the bottle. The seal seemed inordinately strong. I can’t say I felt better after the belt. It’s just the only thing available to do. I don’t take surprises very well.

  “You expected my daughter, I believe.” He spaced the words, enunciated clearly. Mr. Cool. “I sent her home. The poor child was very agitated. The surprise of seeing me. I must say I was surprised at seeing her here. But I decided to stay so that we could talk.”

  “I’m not sure that we have much to say to one another,” I said, because it was my turn to talk and I am instinctively polite.

  “I think this note you left for my daughter suggests the contrary.”

  “Ah, the note.”

  “Just what do you know about Eloise’s parentage, Mr. Samson?”

  “I’m still working on how you got here.”

  He shifted impatiently, and then decided to sit down. “You did break into my office last night. I have an unlisted phone number which I gave the night watchman to use in case anything suspicious goes on at the office. Your activities were deemed suspicious. I got your name from the police. I must say, I’m fascinated by the lengths to which you go for an article. But we’ll drop that little fiction for the moment, shall we? You are a private detective, thirty-seven years old, originally of this city. You went away to college but dropped out when your father died. He was a guard at Marion County Jail. After some security work you went back to college, flunked out, wrote a book about your “experience” which was something of a cause célèbre. You married above you, had a daughter and dropped out of that because the pressure was more than you could take. Seven years ago you came back here, took out a detective license and have been living off that and other varied ventures. Your mother is alive and runs Bud’s Dugout. She owns it outright. I presume on money you had left from your better days. I came here today to find out what you were doing in my office last night.”

  “Your secret office,” I said, and then felt petty.

  “My secret office. But I think your note told me that. I also wanted to know who put you up to it, and Eloise told me that. Now I want to know what you know. You can tell me that.”

  “Can I?” I was trying desperately to regroup.

  “Don’t try to play with the privacy of your client. Eloise gives you her permission to speak. Quite apart from the fact that she is a minor and I am her father. What, I repeat, what is it that you presume to know?” He was losing patience. I decided to give him one of the versions which fit the things I knew.

  “I know that you are not her real father. I know she was conceived in France, and I believe her father was a man called Jacques Chaulet to whom you payed twenty thousand dollars for the service.”

  It stunned him slightly, but he was quick.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “In order that you and your wife inherit under the terms of Estes Graham’s will, which required you to have a healthy child in wedlock. I believe you found out that you were sterile.” It was worth a try, under the circumstances.

  We paused together, studied each other intently. It was the kind of moment which someone interrupting us would have found comical. We did not find it comical.

  I was waiting for him to speak. He, it turned out, for me. “Go on,” he said.

  Go on? I wished I could. He was only telling me what I already knew—that there was more. But I figured what I had given him was enough to get some attention. It had to be. Didn’t it? I was almost glad he’d come.

  I played it cool. “What else do I need? All I can add is that a copy of this information and instructions on how to use it are in a safe place, so don’t get any ideas.”

  At this his eyebrows went up, creating seven wrinkles across his extensive forehead. He sighed the sigh of a rich man for dumb hired help. “If you think that I would harm you over a question of silence or a matter of money, you are the victim of delusions about your profession.”

  A put-down, but it worked. He made me feel foolish for feeling danger. But what the hell, it was my office and my chair.

  There was another, though shorter, pause, after which he got up. “OK,” he said, “please give this project a rest for the day. You will hear from me.” And he walked out. With the walk of an assured man who knew what he wanted, knew how to get it and knew how to hang onto it. Everything I lacked.

  Two hours of sitting later, and no booze, I had some idea of what happened. Of why I felt near death.

  I had been futzing around in my own delusionary little world. I had accidentally locked bumpers with the real world, and the kind gentleman had come around to help straighten me out.

  I had thought I was pretty big stuff. I had thought I was on the verge of the big time. Now I didn’t feel I wa
s anything.

  I had met the enemy head on and I was his. I had accepted his terms. I had told him what I thought I knew; I had tacitly agreed to await his bidding.

  He had said there was no danger for me. All he had done was say it, and I had accepted it.

  I mean, what kind of turn of events was this for a self-respecting man?

  Which brought up the larger question of whether I was, in fact, a self-respecting man.

  The only thing that I wasn’t sure of was that just because he said so, I had Eloise’s permission to tell him the things I had already told him. That worried me too. That I had, with no hesitation, abandoned the discretion my client was entitled to. The discretion that I am legally obliged to give a client according to the Detective Laws of the State of Indiana which prohibit us from telling anything to anybody without authorization of client—except to police about crimes.

  There was some excuse. It had been after the very first shock of his presence. But I didn’t feel right about it. Two hours later, I decided to take some wild action. Strike back.

  I dialed the Crystals’ number. A man answered. I didn’t recognize the voice. I asked for Eloise. There was a pause, some muffled talk and I was speaking again to Leander Crystal. I was sorely tempted to hang up on him, but that seemed unduly childish, even to me.

  “Is that you, Samson?”

  “It is I,” said I.

  “I’m sorry, but Eloise can’t come to the phone at the moment. I was going to call you. Can you come to the house tomorrow morning around eleven? I’d like to straighten this situation out.”

  “I can be there. Will Eloise be there?”

  “You will be able to talk to her then.” And then he asked a question. “Your relationship with my daughter, it isn’t anything that it, well shouldn’t be, is it?” Downright fatherly.

  I drew myself up to my full telephone height. “Mr. Crystal. My relationship with Eloise is that of client and detective. I call her now because I am not convinced that I should have told you today what I did and I wanted to explain to her why I spoke to you. However if tomorrow we are to receive a full explication of this grimy situation then I believe her best interests will be served, and I will be satisfied. I shall be present tomorrow. Good-bye.”

  The thud of my hanging up reverberated through the hallowed halls of my office.

  I felt rotten.

  23

  On a hunch I arrived at Crystal’s house early, about nine o’clock. I’m not sure what I hoped to find—frenzied packing up and people running away—but it didn’t pan out. I didn’t see anything untoward.

  On the other hand what I had simultaneously feared didn’t take place either. That Crystal would spot my car down the street and come out and say, “If you insist on arriving early, then at least come in and wait where it’s a bit warmer.”

  That happened to me once. One of the virtues of being small-time is that you don’t have to have the same ethics that the big outfits have. You don’t have to take every case that comes in, every old lady who wants her “boy” of thirty followed so she can get her hooks into the woman leading him astray this time.

  And you don’t have to play each case exactly straight. You can give personal service. The time I am thinking of, a wife hired me to get some divorcing evidence, if there was any, on her husband.

  It was winter and I’d been sitting outside his girlfriend’s house all night. By seven I was almost asleep and almost frozen when I looked up and the guy was tapping on my window. I didn’t see him come out of the house. Maybe he saved me from freezing to death. I rolled down the window and he said to me, just like that, “If you’re going to wait for me, you might as well come in where it’s warm and have a cup of coffee.”

  So I did. We got to talking. And I failed to find evidence of any transgression for his wife. I told her how hardworking he was—he sells auto parts on Illinois Avenue—all those late nights alone at the store. I made it good. She almost believed me. I let her pay me, of course. After all, it was his money.

  I still get my auto parts at cost.

  Now an operative for a big agency couldn’t work like that, couldn’t afford to jeopardize the outfit’s reputation.

  But I’ve got no reputation that that sort of thing can hurt. Being small-time makes it much easier to play God, if you’re so inclined.

  Much easier to get your ego stomped too, but that’s the other side of the coin.

  At eleven o’clock, promptly, I rang the Crystal bell.

  At eleven o’clock, promptly, Leander Crystal opened the door and ushered me into the living room from which he had so expertly ushered me in the recent past.

  Eloise was there, sitting on a chair by the French doors. She was not the Eloise I had come to know. She was pale and tired and carried two bloodshot eyes. But her face was fixed in a kind of placid expression that it had never borne in my presence before.

  Her father was a contrast. Ever the well-cared-for man of fifty, his eyes were clear and his voice was strong. Still Mr. Cool. He stood. I sat on the couch, the same place I’d sat when I talked to Fleur. He faced me and made a speech.

  “I have talked to the other principals in this business and we have decided that the proper thing is that you be told the whole story.”

  I just listened. Skeptical, of course, but no longer surprised by anything.

  “We aren’t happy to have to bring you into our confidence—endow you with the family secrets, as it were—but Eloise assures us that you are honest and, we trust, discreet. We know that you are reasonably capable.” Gracious concession. It made me a little proud.

  “You know that Fleur and I married in 1949. You may not know that it was a love match and still is. Not perfect, but human. Part of the imperfection was through the agency of Fleur’s father. While he lived he tried to control Fleur’s mind and spirit.”

  A former bouncer speaking ill of the dead? I shifted my position. I crossed my legs. He continued.

  “After he was dead, he asserted his values through the terms of his will. As you know Fleur’s inheritance was conditional on our marriage producing a child.” I nodded gratuitously, as if in time to the rhythm of his enunciation.

  “He spoke of this condition on the will frequently while he was alive. In my opinion, he tried to cause trouble with it.” One correct guess: they had known about the will before Estes’ death.

  “Then, in 1952, I found out that I could not have children.” Another one right.

  “Learning this, Fleur and I arranged a trip to Europe. There a friend I made during the war contacted a French doctor, who impregnated Fleur by artificial insemination.

  “Fleur became pregnant at the end of January. When all appeared normal, we returned to Indianapolis, and announced the good news.

  “So there it is. You have uncovered an impropriety. But surely the moral questions involved are not simplistic. Of course avarice was involved, but it’s not Fleur’s fault that I am sterile, and any other course of action would have made her suffer a life-style much diminished from what her father had accustomed her to.

  “A larger mistake remains, our lies about Eloise’s parentage. But we love her; she is our daughter in every real sense of the term. There can be no question that we wanted her, and that we hated the deception. We thought it best not to tell her, but we were wrong. Our greatest sin was that we underestimated our daughter and overestimated our ability to hide things from her, things about which our emotions were very strong. We won’t underestimate her again. I just hope it’s not too late. She thinks not; we hope not.

  “There remains then only one basic problem: you. I don’t know what you would intend to do with this information. There is not much you could do with it. ‘Justice’ cannot be further served; you have uncovered our skeleton and satisfied your client’s requirements. All you could do with the information is cause us some social trouble. But the onus of the gossip would fall on Eloise, and not on us. And that would be doing her a grave injustice.”
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br />   “I’ve thought the problem over. What I propose is this. We, as a family, would very much like to obtain your silence. I will drop all legal charges pending against you, and give you a check for fifty thousand dollars. Both should be more than you would expect under other circumstances. In return, you will give back to me all records pertaining to this case, both those held by you and those which the police will return to you when I drop charges. And, naturally, we would expect your silence.” At last he was silent; he was tired too. The whole business was costing him emotionally.

  And it was a lot of money.

  “May I ask you a question?”

  “Of course.”

  “How does what you’ve told me square against your wife’s recent miscarriage?” I’d thought it would hit him a little—I mean I didn’t think he knew about that.

  The man did rub his eyes. But he said, “Mr. Samson, my wife is not a well woman.”

  “Which means?”

  “Which means there was no miscarriage.”

  “She’s pregnant?”

  “There was no pregnancy.”

  For the first time since he had begun to speak I shot a look at Eloise. Still pale but placid.

  He said, “Eloise didn’t know. Clearly there has been a great deal about us Eloise hasn’t known.” He sighed. “My wife has recently been obsessed with a fear that we are going to leave her. She has wanted to be pregnant again very badly. I have had treatments but.… Well, a few months ago she decided she was pregnant. She told Eloise. Her doctor and I cooperated. For as long as we could.”

  We stared at each other, man to man. I was feeling more and more out of place. The guy was either a great actor or.…

  But why be charitable? So maybe he was a great actor.

  He made a rueful face, not exactly a smile. “You note that the ‘miscarriage’ was of ‘twins’?”