A Father's Kisses

by Bruce Jay Friedman

  “Oh yes,” he said. “You’ve no doubt noticed a collection of antique canes and walking sticks in the foyer of the flat. There’s one in particular, a tan-and-white Alaskan silkwood, quite lovely in its design. It’s actually a weapon, and there’s not much to it. Simply unscrew the cap at the head of it, and then it’s point and shoot. It’s not quite hair-trigger in its response, but the pull is light, and you shouldn’t have much trouble with it. The projectile works in two stages—it feels like a mosquito bite at first and there’s an eight- to ten-minute delay before it takes full effect. So there’s plenty of time for you to slip away. What you might do is pretend you’re bored, yawn, that sort of thing … the proceedings are quite dull anyway, and then you’re safely off.”

  I recalled him saying that we would be working closely on this one, and I asked him if he would be there with me.

  “I’m afraid not. Something’s come up. I have to attend a meeting on some new Holocaust museum they have planned for Staten Island. Seems I volunteered to be a sponsor. Much as I looked forward to our working together in a very real sense, I’m not going to be able to manage it.”

  Once again, I found him to be a barrel of contradictions. He had made a face when he said Jewish repertory theatre, and yet here he was, showing up as the sponsor of a Holocaust memorial. At least he was consistent in his inconsistencies.

  “Well then, I guess I’ll have to take care of it alone.”

  Chapter Twenty

  For some reason, as I walked back to the apartment to get the walking stick, the business about the photograph still nagged at me. The resemblance between the artistic director of the Jewish theatre and Thomas Gnu, as I recalled seeing him in the slide projection, was too close to be a total coincidence. And now I knew that Peabody used the apartment from time to time. Was it possible that he was the one who clipped the photograph out of the theatre brochure? And then showed it to me as a slide projection, claiming that it was Thomas Gnu? And why would he do that?

  Still, this was no time to be worrying about such things. I had much more serious matters to attend to.

  As I suspected, Lettie had raced through the expensive magazines featuring homes in the Costa del Sol and was now lying on the canopied bed, listening to her tapes and singing along with them. She stopped immediately when I entered the apartment, not wanting to be caught singing in front of her father.

  I found the tan-and-white walking stick without difficulty and told her that I would be going out for a while.

  “I thought you were just out,” she said.

  “I was, but I have to go out again, just this last time.”

  “Hold it a second,” she said, taking off her earphones and vaulting down from the bed.

  Then she gave me the biggest and longest hug I could remember in our time together. It was as if I was going off to war, which in a way I was.

  “Just be safe,” she said, during the hug.

  It was as if she had sensed what I was about to do. I knew she was smart—I had seen that demonstrated in the William Morris offices—but it may be that she was even smarter than I realized.

  I locked her in and then strolled uptown to the Warwind Hotel, carefully tucking the walking stick under my arm so that it did not go off accidentally. But as I approached the hotel I decided I had better start using it, which I did, breaking into my limp, as though I had trouble with my hip and the walking stick was my only means of getting around.

  The lobby was buzzing with activity when I got there, and unless I was mistaken, there was a faint smell of chutney in the air. Many of the people who stood around had the same ID badge as I did. Most were dark complected, the men wearing turbans and the women dressed in colorful saris. But for the most part they spoke English, the main topic of discussion being movies I had never heard of and film festivals they had just attended. Had Lettie been there, I doubt that she would have gotten much out of it, her interests being more in the area of mainstream American film fare.

  After about fifteen minutes, the crowd started to drift up a flight of stairs; I limped along, following them into an auditorium, where I assumed the ceremony was to take place. Since it was of utmost importance that I get a clean and unimpeded view of the stage, I waited until most of the people had sat down and then took a seat about ten rows back and over on the extreme right aisle. It gave me the angle I was looking for and at the same time I didn’t feel I was too conspicuous sitting there.

  Once the crowd had settled in, a young woman came out and introduced herself as Gail Parsons, the president of the film society. She had short blonde hair, a trim and shapely body and a toothy smile that I imagine would be attractive if you liked seeing all those teeth. She said they had all gathered there to honor Masroor (he went by one name, like Cher) not for any single film he had produced but for a whole lifetime of achievement, some of it charitable. She said some other nice things about Masroor, notably his contribution to the growing film industry on the subcontinent and the helping hand he had extended to actors and actresses, herself included. Finally, she introduced the honoree himself, who came out from the wings to a huge round of applause, Gail Parsons joining in on it.

  Masroor was a stocky and energetic-looking fellow with long biblical-style hair whose powerful body made him seem much taller than he was. Gail Parsons shook hands with him, gave him a hug, kicking back one shapely leg as she did so, and then walked back to take a seat on the platform.

  I leaned forward to make sure I was positioned correctly and overheard a snatch of whispered conversation in the row in front of me.

  “Held up quite nicely, hasn’t she?”

  “I’d say. She’s still got the best bum in Karachi.”

  When I heard the second fellow’s remark, I froze in my tracks as if I was the one who had been shot with the walking stick.

  He had used Peabody’s very words in explaining to me why he had remained tied to his wife, despite her flagrant infidelity.

  I could still recall his anguished wail.

  “How can I leave her, Binny? She’s got the best bum in Karachi.”

  It was a description you don’t forget.

  I felt as if someone had taken the bandages off my eyes, and I saw clearly that Gail Parsons was Peabody’s estranged wife. And Masroor was her lover. And it was Peabody who wanted them killed, not Thomas Gnu. The same held true for Dickie Moué and poor Mr. Matsumoto. It was Peabody who’d been humiliated at Groton by Dickie Moué, Peabody who’d been thrown off the board by Mr. Matsumoto. For all I knew—and now I was sure of it—there was no Thomas Gnu. Peabody had invented him, arbitrarily using as his likeness the photograph of a fellow who was innocently heading up a Jewish repertory theatre in New Jersey.

  And all this had been done to mislead me. What it meant is that I’d been trotting around the globe, trying to settle Peabody’s old scores, and not those of the nonexistent Thomas Gnu.

  A good question is what difference did it make?

  In one sense, very little. So I was working for Peabody and not Thomas Gnu. That didn’t change the dollar amount I was being paid. But he had deceived me and I did not enjoy being played for a fool. How could I possibly trust him in any future endeavors? How could I trust him on this one? For all I knew I would never get the $250,000 and be paying interest on the advance for the rest of my life. Maybe he had arranged to have me arrested on the spot, the second I disposed of his faithless wife and her Indian lover.

  Or who knows, maybe I just wasn’t cut out for this type of work and was just looking for a way to get out of it.

  Out of curiosity, I stayed around to listen to a little of Masroor’s speech. Not that there was any way I was going to harm a hair on the man’s head—or on that of Gail Parsons.

  As I listened to the famed Indian filmmaker, I thought back to the start of the program, when Gail Parsons had crossed the stage to embrace him. I recalled her bum as having a decent shape to it, but as to whether it was the best Karachi had to offer I could not testify. May
be it was the best at one time and had fallen off a bit over the years.

  Masroor spoke about how honored he was to be honored by the film society and got a big laugh by saying he hoped the award wasn’t a hint that he was supposed to retire.

  “Rest assured,” he said. “I have a lot more to say on the screen.”

  There was a great deal of animal magnetism to the man, and I could see why Gail Parsons might have chosen him over the quirky and in many ways passive Peabody. But under the circumstances, it was difficult for me to concentrate on the long acceptance speech. So when he got into the main body of it, which had to do with actors having to be treated like children, I stretched out a bit, yawned conspicuously and covered my mouth with an open palm.

  Then I got up and prepared to make my exit.

  As I did so, a fellow in the row behind me gave me a hard look.

  “Rude bastard,” he said under his breath.

  Normally, I would not have let him get away with a remark like that, but in this instance I thought it best to keep my feelings to myself and left the auditorium without firing off a rejoinder.

  As I walked back to the apartment, I felt more strongly than ever that Peabody had used me, as he had probably taken advantage of others like me. (Kevin Kurosawa would be a perfect case in point.) And who knows how many of us there were, chasing around the globe, settling his petty grievances for handsome fees we were promised and would probably never see. I only wished I could contact that poor slob in Rawalpindi and let him know what was going on.

  The first thing I planned to do when I got back home was tear up that Global Enterprises coupon book. And then sit back and watch Peabody try to get the advance money back. I’d like to hear him tell me I hadn’t earned it, with all the hassle I had gone through.

  And I wanted to confront Peabody, too, and let him know how I felt about him, although he’d probably taken off by now and was sunning his butt in some vacation spot for the elite, like Biarritz or Portugal or some place like that.

  It shows you how wrong you can be.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  He was sitting calmly at one end of the living room couch when I unlocked the door of the apartment. Lettie was at the other end, wearing her New York City Police Department T-shirt and panties and flipping through the pages of one of the expensive magazines I had bought her. She barely looked up when I entered, but I could tell that the light had gone out of her eyes, like the firefly in her movie idea.

  “Binny, dear friend,” said Peabody. “That Holocaust business was over in short order so I thought I’d pop by and say hello to your daughter. How did it go at your end?”

  “It didn’t,” I said.

  And then I asked Lettie what had happened.

  “Nothing,” she said, not looking up from her magazine.

  “I think you’d better tell me.”

  “You promise you won’t get angry?” she said, looking up now.

  “That depends.”

  “He wanted to smell my finger.”

  “There you are, old fellow,” said Peabody. “All quite harmless. Certainly nothing to get into a hissy about.”

  I told Lettie to get dressed and to meet me at the police-equipment store. I knew she would be safe there. Then I reached into my pocket for some money and told her to pick out a few items for herself and that I would be right down to get her.

  “Here now,” said Peabody, reaching into his own pocket, pulling out some bills and pushing my hand aside. “Let me help out with that.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” I said.

  Lettie got dressed quickly, gave me a kiss on the cheek and left the apartment.

  “Lovely child,” said Peabody when she was gone.

  “I always thought so.”

  Then the phone rang and Peabody got up to take it.

  “Peabody here,” he said.

  He listened and then covered the receiver.

  “It’s for your daughter.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “Lettie’s not here,” I told the caller. “This is William Binny, her father.”

  “Oh, hi. This is Ken, the assistant agent you met at the Morris office. I have some good news. We had a meeting about your daughter’s idea and decided we’d like to run with it.”

  “Where to?”

  “Where to?” he repeated, sounding puzzled. “Oh, I see. You’re joking. We’d like to option the material for a feature film and get started on signing a writer as soon as possible. We’re all thrilled with the project, and I for one knew it was a home run when I heard it. To hell with the sequel is what I feel.”

  “I’ll let her know. And I’m sure she’ll be thrilled, too.”

  I thanked him for the call and hung up, amazed once again at the great balance wheel of life. Something awful would happen and then, inevitably, the sun would come up. All you had to do was make sure you were around when it did.

  “That sounded like good news,” said Peabody.

  “It was.”

  “May I ask what it concerned?”

  “No harm in asking,” I said.

  And then I shot him with the walking stick. It had a light trigger pull, just as he said it would, but it did not take any eight to ten minutes for it to take effect. I had gotten him in the throat, and he did gurgle out a few words—“You’ve got this all wrong”—a sentiment I felt he had been a little late in expressing. But the effect was almost instantaneous.

  So once again, he had deceived me.

  I found some copies of Barron’s financial newspaper in the utility room and spread them out on the kitchen floor. Then I dragged him in there and laid him out on them. After that, I went to work with my powered Super V Turkey De-beaker, which I had felt from the start would come in handy.

  I did him up in three sections, singing a little ditty to myself as a distraction.

  I loved you Valentine Peabody

  How can I that deny?

  But you stole my daughter’s inn-o-cence

  Therefore you had to die.

  Using double-lined garbage bags that I found in a cabinet beneath the kitchen sink, I carried the three units out to the incinerator, one by one. As luck would have it, there was nobody out there on the landing to see the operation. Then I did a complete cleanup, working primarily with chlorinated household bleach, which had also been conveniently stored beneath the kitchen sink.

  After scrubbing my hands with Dial soap, I got Lettie and me packed, straightened up the apartment (which out of simple courtesy I would have done in any case) and went downstairs to meet my daughter.

  I did not delude myself into thinking that I had eliminated all traces of the crime, if indeed, it was a crime. I was fully aware of the advances that had been made in criminal investigation, and I am not talking about DNA evidence alone, which often doesn’t stand up.

  As an example, they have something called electrophoretic toxicology or something like that, which can really put the screws to a wrongdoer. I remembered that from one of my truecrimers.

  But then again, you never knew how events would unfold. Considering the way Peabody covered his tracks, renting an office, closing it up, showing up here and there, slipping around the globe like a will-o’-the-wisp, there might not be much evidence that he had ever existed. Who knows if his name was really Valentine Peabody? If I took the time to look into it, I might discover that he was really Joe Jones.

  Or maybe the Karachi police would come after me and I could just about imagine how effective they’d be.

  For the moment, I was not about to lose any sleep over making a clean getaway. I had made a reasonable effort to cover my tracks, and it would have to do. All I could think of at the moment was how calm and unruffled I had been in getting him out of the picture and the way in which several thousand years of civilization had melted away when I entered that apartment and saw my daughter’s face. I was convinced that anyone in my position—except perhaps the most hardened churchgoer—would have acted the same
way.

  The potential is there in all of us. All you have to do is push the right button. And Peabody had certainly pushed mine.

  It occurred to me that I would have to have a few words with Ed Bivens as well. If it turned out that he was the one who had scouted my daughter for Peabody, I was prepared to deal with that accordingly—even going so far as to use my de-beaker, which thus far had afforded me so well.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Lettie was examining some riot gear when I entered the police-equipment store.

  “How come we’re all packed?” she said.

  “I finished up my work.”

  “But what if the William Morris Agency calls and wants to option my story?”

  “They already did. You hit a homerun.”

  “That’s amazing,” she said. “And it’s not even my best idea.”

  “You can do that one next.”

  “Possibly. But what do I do about school?”

  “You keep going to it. And you do the producing on the side.”

  “I don’t know if I can pull that off. I’ll have to think about it.”

  We had an open return on our tickets and there wasn’t any rush to get to the airport. So I put my arm around my daughter, and we started out on one of our great walks.

  Then I got the idea of seeing a Broadway show.

  “Which one should we pick?” she asked.

  “Let’s just go over to the Broadway area and we can decide then.”

  And that’s what we did. The first theatre we came to was featuring Show Boat, which I thought would be a good choice because of its racial theme and its contribution to an understanding of our early culture. Lettie said that although she didn’t know much about the show, she was willing to give it a try. But when I went up to the box office, the ticket seller said that the evening performance was all sold out. Lettie said fine, we’d find another show that had some tickets available and might be just as good as Show Boat. But I could tell she was disappointed.

  We bought some hot chestnuts from a vendor and then we stood outside the theatre and ate them, watching the lucky people who did have tickets file in. And then I spotted a little fellow in a sharkskin suit and old-fashioned spats who was shuffling tickets and mumbling as if he was talking to himself. I decided to approach him.