The Touch of Treason

by Sol Stein

  Perry felt he had to say something. “I told you Professor Fuller was doing important work.”

  “That’s a big help. What’s in this room next to the bathroom?” He jerked a thumb at the closed door of Fuller’s study.

  “That’s where he worked,” Perry said.

  Cooper used a handkerchief to try the knob. It wouldn’t turn.

  Over Cooper’s hunched back, Randall mouthed to Perry, “I relocked it.” Perry nodded his approval.

  “Somebody better find the key,” Cooper said.

  *

  Twenty minutes later Cooper asked to talk to the three people upstairs, one at a time. Jackson Perry suggested that Widmer be present. Widmer asked to speak to his old friend privately.

  “I don’t have experience in police matters,” Widmer said. “Shouldn’t we get someone in?”

  “There isn’t time right now. It’s either you or me or Randall. Neither of us is a lawyer. If we object to anything this cop does, it won’t carry the same weight.”

  And so Widmer listened to Cooper ask a list of questions, first of Melissa Troob, then Scott Melling, then Edward Porter. Miss Troob objected to a third round. Cooper showed his badge. “This one’s official.”

  The first questions were routine: Spell your name. Where do you live? How often have you slept over here? How did you get here yesterday? What means will you use to get home? In each case the questions then took a different turn. What time last night did you get to this room? Did you fall asleep right away? Did you wake up at any time during the night?

  “Miss Troob,” Cooper said, “could I see the keys you have on you?”

  “They’re in my purse.”

  Cooper nodded, a patient man who expected all things to go his way in time.

  She showed him the ring of three keys.

  “What’s this one for?” Cooper asked.

  “My apartment.”

  “And this one?”

  “That’s for the Fox lock, also my apartment.”

  “New York’s a tough place to live, eh Miss Troob?”

  “I’d rather have two locks there than no locks in a lot of other places.”

  Smartass. He liked the old days when people said “sir” to a detective because they didn’t want more trouble than they already had. “What’s the third key?”

  “What does it look like?”

  “A car key,” Cooper said.

  “Very good,” Melissa Troob said. “It’s parked outside.”

  “Same key work the door and the ignition?”

  She nodded.

  “Any other keys?” Cooper asked.

  “There’s a duplicate of the car key in a magnetic holder under the bumper of the car.”

  “If we took you down to the police matron, any chance she’d find the key to Professor Fuller’s study in one of your body orifices?”

  That got to her, he could see that. It didn’t mean a thing. All women reacted that way. Keep out of my orifices.

  She said, “I’ve never seen the key to Professor Fuller’s study. And there’s no reason for you to be vulgar.”

  “Miss Troob, I’m paid to find out who kills people. If you can figure out a real genteel way of doing that, write a book for young detectives.”

  *

  In the hallway, after they’d questioned Melissa Troob and Scott Melling, Widmer touched Cooper on the sleeve. “I’m not quite following your line of questioning.”

  “No line,” Cooper said. “I’m just trying to find out what each one is tempted to lie about.”

  “What makes you think any of them is lying?”

  “Those two, the ones we just saw,” Cooper said, “they’re a couple. You heard him say his wife drove him up here?”

  “Surely,” Widmer said, “you’re not investigating the extramarital habits of these people?”

  “I’m investigating what you people call an accident. And what I call a death under very suspicious circumstances.”

  “May I ask what circumstances you find suspicious?”

  Cooper looked at the chain across Widmer’s vest. “You,” he said. “You and Mr. Perry and Mr. Randall. I still don’t understand what any of you are doing here, or the two we just saw.”

  Widmer followed Cooper toward Ed Porter’s bedroom, wishing George Thomassy and not he were in attendance. Thomassy knew how to deal with policemen.

  Widmer followed Cooper into the room.

  “Shut the door behind you,” Cooper ordered. Then as an afterthought, “Please.”

  Ed Porter was lying face down on the bed.

  “Turn over,” Cooper said.

  Porter must not have heard him. Cooper poked the young man’s back with his finger. Slowly, Ed turned around. His eyes were red, his freckled face a devastation of grief. He reached for the crumpled handkerchief on the night table and blew his nose several times.

  “What’s your name?” Cooper said, his notebook at the ready.

  Ed started to speak but it was as if his lips were stuck together. He rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. “Porter,” he said, closing his eyes.

  “That your first name or your last name?” Cooper asked.

  “Ed Porter. I want to sleep.”

  The words echoed strangely for Widmer. When Priscilla intuited an overture from him, she sometimes said, “I want to sleep,” as if that was the kindest way to fend off the possibility of unwanted lust.

  Cooper said, “Didn’t you sleep last night?”

  Ed didn’t answer him. He asked, “Who are you?”

  “Cooper.” The detective pocketed his notepad. He removed his wallet from his hip pocket and snapped it open, revealing a badge. “Where do you keep your gear?” he asked.

  “What gear?” Ed started to sit up, then let himself fall back on the bed.

  “Your overnight stuff. Your shaving kit. Your pajamas. Your fresh underwear. You wear clean underwear every day?”

  “Do you?”

  Widmer admired the young man’s brashness in the face of authority.

  “Don’t get smartass with me, kid,” Cooper said. “I’ve brained guys twice your size.”

  For the first time Porter seemed fully awake. “You heard his implied threat of violence, Mr. Widmer?”

  Widmer believed his role to be that of a calming influence. “Gentlemen,” he said, “wouldn’t it be better if Mr. Cooper asked his questions and Mr. Porter got them over with?”

  “I’m sorry,” Ed said, his chest heaving. “I’m upset.” He turned to Cooper. “My gear’s in that blue duffle.” He pointed to a small overnight carrier of ripstop nylon parked on the dresser.

  “Empty it,” Cooper said.

  Ed looked at Widmer, who shrugged. He didn’t know what the rules were.

  Ed zipped open the duffle and turned it upside down on the bed. It contained some books, a notebook, a shaggy cable-knit sweater, undershorts, two white T-shirts, a toilet kit.

  “Don’t you put your stuff in drawers when you stay some place?” Cooper asked.

  “I leave things behind. I prefer to live out of the bag if I’m staying a night or two.”

  “What’s in the closet?” Cooper asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ed said.

  Cooper, angered, pulled open the closet door. There were wooden and wire hangers in it but no clothes. There appeared to be some things on the shelf. “Get them down,” Cooper said.

  “Mr. Widmer,” Ed said, “can I see Mrs. Fuller now?”

  Before Widmer could reply, Cooper snapped, “You’re not seeing anyone now. Get those things down from the closet shelf.”

  Ed got off the bed and pulled the cane-webbed chair over to the open closet. “Be my guest,” he said.

  Cooper looked at the cane seat as if it might not hold his weight. Gingerly he got up on it, holding onto the top of the door for balance. From the shelf he threw off a blanket, then a pile of magazines that scattered over the floor. Widmer was surprised to see the kind of magazines they were. Cooper laughed.
He reached around with his hand to the back of the shelf and brought out a half-pint curved flask. “This yours?”

  Ed shook his head.

  “Whose is it?”

  “How should I know?”

  Cooper unscrewed the top, which was attached to the body of the flask by a short metal chain. It was empty. He sniffed, then turned the flask every which way looking for identification of some kind. “Anybody in this place named Dunhill?”

  Widmer stifled his laugh. Ed did not.

  “What’s so funny?” Cooper asked.

  “It’s the name of a store,” Widmer said.

  Cooper thumped down off the chair amid the debris of the magazines, strode over to the bed, and said to Ed, “Open that drawer,” pointing to the bedside table.

  Widmer thought he saw a stroke of fear in Ed’s eyes.

  “Open it!” he bellowed.

  Ed slid the drawer open. Widmer saw a deck of cards, a nail file, and a small plastic bag. Cooper went for the plastic bag. “What is this?”

  “I don’t know,” Ed said quietly.

  “Whose is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Ed repeated.

  “What does it look like to you?”

  “It looks like tobacco.”

  Cooper picked up the plastic envelope, opened it, lifted it to his nose. “This is a controlled substance,” he said.

  “So’s spit,” said Ed. “What the hell are you supposed to be doing here, searching people’s drawers or investigating someone’s death?”

  “It doesn’t belong to the Fullers, does it?” Cooper said.

  “I doubt it,” Ed said. “It could belong to any one of dozens of people who’ve stayed here.”

  *

  Widmer, Perry, and Randall were conferring in the living room when Cooper came back in from giving the garage a going-over. He looked disheveled. His raincoat was dirty. His suit pants looked like he’d been on his hands and knees.

  Perry was about to launch into Cooper about wasting time on a couple of ounces of marijuana when the detective preempted him.

  “Gentlemen,” he said, “one last time. Is there some official federal involvement here I don’t know about?”

  “In what sense?” Perry asked.

  “Kidnapping, interstate traffic, anything like that?”

  “Nothing like that.”

  “In that case, I want to remind you that unless the constitution’s been thrown out the window in the last couple of hours, this is a police matter in our jurisdiction. We always cooperate with other law enforcement agencies if there’s a reason, but we haven’t been told that reason yet. Anybody want to volunteer any information?”

  Widmer looked away. Randall again deferred to Perry.

  “I’m sure you understand that some matters must be treated in confidence.”

  Cooper was a stone wall.

  Perry said, “Professor Fuller was preparing a document for the President’s national security adviser. His accident came at a most unfortunate time.”

  Cooper let out a profound sigh. “In this county most deaths aren’t convenient. This wasn’t an accident.”

  It was Widmer who said, “What do you mean?”

  Cooper took two corked plastic vials out of his raincoat pocket, removed the cork from one, and walked over to Widmer, holding the plastic vial right under Widmer’s nose. Widmer instinctively took half a step backward.

  “What does that smell like to you?” Cooper asked.

  “Gasoline,” Widmer said.

  Cooper recorked the vial and uncorked the second one. “And what does this smell like?”

  “Different, I’d say.”

  “Kerosene,” Cooper said. “No mistaking the difference. I took those samples from the two cans in the garage. The labels on them are two inches high, kerosene and gasoline. What I think is somebody mixed some of the gas in with the kerosene in Mr. Fuller’s heater. Murder isn’t a federal offense. It’s a nice local crime. I want to see those three brains upstairs again.” To Widmer, “You’re not their lawyer, too, are you?”

  “No,” Widmer said.

  Perry stepped forward. “Mr. Cooper, maybe I can get someone from Washington to talk to you on the phone before this goes any further.”

  “I don’t care if you get J. Edgar Hoover’s ghost on the telephone. This is my jurisdiction. Let’s go upstairs and find out who put the gas in the kerosene.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  When his private line rang, Thomassy knew it was Francine.

  “Where are you?” he said.

  “Your place.”

  Before Francine Widmer he’d given no woman the key to his house. You let a woman feel at home in your house and the next thing she’s running around the perimeter peeing, marking off her turf. He wasn’t about to give anyone an exclusive on his life.

  “I’ll need a key in case you’re late,” she’d said, and he’d taken his duplicate off the peg and handed it to her. That was safer than telling her there was a duplicate under the edge of the third flagstone outside. The peg key he could always ask for back when it was over.

  Was that what he was expecting, that this, like the smoke over an extinguished fire, would eventually drift away, as the others had? If she has your key, he told himself, your privacy is shot. You can’t ask for that key back; it’s a terminal message. You want her to keep coming. But when he’d asked her, on the spur of one glorious moment, if she’d like to move more of her things in, maybe give up her apartment, it was she who’d said no thanks to the only gift he’d kept for himself.

  Her voice, those resonant chords within her gracefully long neck that caused, as now, an answering vibration he would prefer to control, said ever so casually, “I want you to do something for me.

  The women before Francine were all askers. They’d never have said There’s something I’d like you to do for me. The authority in her voice, something he’d always thought of as a masculine attribute, had attracted him. Judge Turnbell had said to him in chambers, “Thomassy, you’re the only lawyer I’ve had out there whose voice doesn’t have a whisper of subservience.” Turnbell was black. He’d learned all about role playing long before he’d got his law degree. “Weak people,” Turnbell had said, “reek with deference. Deference shows a deficiency of respect. They like to be surrounded by niggers and women. Who are you afraid of, Thomassy?”

  “What would you like me to do for you?” Thomassy said to Francine.

  “Remember that bar of glycerine soap you brought home from San Francisco?”

  “Rain.”

  “Blue soap that smelled of rain. I found one in a pharmacy on Forty-eighth Street today. I’d like you to come home and lather my back when I shower.”

  “Your back?”

  “My legs too if you like.”

  “You can reach your legs.”

  “Not as well as you reach them. Come home.”

  *

  He drove a bit faster than usual. The streets were slick. A slight rain had brought oil out on the surface of the road. He liked his silver-gray Buick Electra, a heavy car that held the road, a solid defense against any errant made-in-Japan tinbox that crossed the double yellow line in his direction. Slow down, his head told him, you’re not a kid anymore.

  *

  Before Francine he’d gone with women who’d say things like, “How about if we went to the movies tonight and had dinner at my place afterward?” That was okay, he preferred that to having them in his place, where they’d be tempted to get domestic and try to show him they belonged. In their places he could watch their ploys with a certain detachment. Joanne, who overdid the candlelight business; candles on the table, okay, but on the sideboard and windowsills, too? Your place reminds me of church, Joanne. Or Florence, who wore a bra with cut-outs that let her nipples show against her dress. If you wear something like that again, I’ll come in wearing a codpiece.

  Joanne and Florence were figurines. Nora was dangerous, a malpractice specialist, an independent who made more mon
ey from her one-third share of insurance settlements than Ned Widmer did down on Wall Street. He liked her crazy energy till he realized that it was all real for her, not a game; she wanted to bring every doctor who made a mistake—and who didn’t?—to his knees because her father had been a great surgeon who, when she was a kid, never once held his daughter in his arms, or smoothed her hair, or made her feel like an incipient woman. Not even Thomassy, with all his skill, could unlock the steel box in which her sexuality rattled like ball bearings. Maybe there was a safecracker for her somewhere, but it wasn’t him.

  Oh there were good ones, Elaine and Louise and others who had their own careers and lives and strengths. It was Elaine more than the others who made him realize that women seemed to see life in stages: this is what it’s like now, this is what it’ll be after we get married. Didn’t they see that every time they gave him a glimpse of the future, they unnerved him because he liked them as they were? In New York City, on the occasions when he couldn’t avoid the subway, Thomassy would watch the row of seated women opposite and pick out the long-married ones, the not-so-long-married ones, and the ones that were still single. How do you find a wild animal you can keep at home that won’t domesticate? Marry a Siamese cat.

  Francine was as direct as Nora had been, with a difference. Somewhere along the line Ned Widmer had given her the keys. Hell, she was as direct as a straight line. Lather my back in the shower. I want to eat. I want to be eaten. She didn’t advertise her desires, she announced them when he was a little off guard, because she knew the value of surprise. And he had to admit that the most erogenous physical attribute he had ever encountered were the convolutions of Francine’s brain, the light-and-sound show of Francine talking, flashes of insight that explained the world to a mere lawyer who hadn’t learned how to get her high-watt stations on his dial. “George,” she’d said to him, “you’re smart, why don’t you think?” and he’d wrestled her lovingly down to the bed, and she’d flicked the head of his ready member with her finger and said, “It’s your other head that needs the exercise, George.” Cracks like that turned him on, and she, the bastard, knew it. “I’ll suck your brain dry,” he’d answered, and she’d said, “That’s not where my brain is, George, but keep looking.” You don’t find a woman like Francine twice, he warned himself. Don’t let her get away.