Bleeding in the Eye of a Brainstorm m-13

by George C. Chesbro

  MacWhorter mulled it over for a time while he drummed his fingers on the desk, finally said, "All right, Frederickson, there was a man killed in your neighborhood last Tuesday night. He was shot once in the back of the head, and then tossed into the Dumpster in the street down by Carnegie Hall."

  So Mama Spit had been absolutely right when she'd said he'd been tossed into the air and disappeared, been thrown away. I said, "It sounds like a professional job, an assassination. Did you find the slug?"

  "Twenty-two, but tinkered with to lower mass and velocity. It didn't even exit from the skull."

  "No mess."

  "That's right."

  "Unusual. Definitely the work of pros."

  "I'd say so."

  "What was the victim's name?"

  "Unknown. If he had any identification, his killers took it with them. He had a dollar and seventeen cents in his pockets."

  "What about his clothes?"

  "Not exactly designer label. He wasn't killed for his money."

  "Fingerprints?"

  "No match with anything on file."

  "Age?"

  "Around fifty. Caucasian."

  "Did the M.E. do an autopsy?"

  "On a homeless stiff with a bullet hole at the base of his skull? They cut him to remove the bullet, but that's all. Why do you ask? It sound to you like he might have been poisoned?"

  "Sorry. It was a stupid question. Thanks for your time, Captain."

  "Hold on, Frederickson."

  I'd made it as far as the door, and when I turned back I didn't at all like what I saw. Captain Felix MacWhorter had a very hard look on his round, florid face, and that did not bode well. It seemed I was not a very clever mongoose; I had been all too willing to meander into close quarters with this dangerous opponent, lulled by his seeming reasonableness and willingness to share information. I had asked too many questions too soon, and now he was loaded up with a few sharp questions of his own. I smiled. "What is it, Captain?"

  "You lied to me," he said in a voice that had suddenly gone as cold as his eyes.

  "I lied to you? I don't know you well enough, or like you enough, to lie to you."

  "You told me you came in here to find out if a man had been killed near your place last Tuesday night. I told you there was. If you'd been telling the truth, that should have been the end of the matter. But you verify that there's been a homicide victim, and then you really start asking questions. Christ, you even want to know if there's been an autopsy."

  "Just idle curiosity."

  "Bullshit. You're working a case, Frederickson, some angle, just like you and your brother usually are when you stop by here to see if the police can make things easier for you. I want to know what you're working on, including the name of your client, and I want to know what you think it may have to do with this particular homicide. I want to know why you're in here asking all sorts of questions about a murder victim who ended up with a city Dumpster for his grave."

  "I'm not working on any case," I replied evenly. "There's nobody paying me any money to look into this, and I'm not sticking my nose into any police business. I investigate things for a living, and when something like this happens virtually on my doorstep, I just get naturally curious."

  "More bullshit. I know as sure as I know my ass is sitting in this chair that there's something you're not telling me, something I should know. That's obstruction of justice, and I don't have to tell you that's a serious matter. Actually, I think I'll be rather glad if it turns out you're trying to fuck me around, because I'd love to nail you. Somebody should have clipped the wings of the high-flying, shithead Frederickson brothers a long time ago."

  This dim-witted mongoose's mental feet were getting tired from all the tap dancing I was having to do in front of the venomous fangs flashing in my face, but I just kept smiling; the object now was safe retreat, not to trade insults with the mysteriously-but seriously- aggrieved Felix MacWhorter. "You've got both Garth and me wrong, Captain. I don't understand why you're so hostile. Did Garth do something to you? I know I didn't. So where's all this pique and piss coming from?"

  "Where's Mama Spit?"

  "I don't know what's happened to Mama Spit," I replied evenly, considering this a not completely untruthful statement.

  "You're lying!"

  "Damn it, MacWhorter, if you think I'm lying, go check out her grate for yourself. You know which one it is. Maybe witnessing the killing unnerved her. For whatever reason, Mama Spit has moved on. If you don't mind, I'd like to move on too."

  "I know you're lying to me, Frederickson. If I find out you're stunting on this one, if I catch you withholding evidence and obstructing justice, I'll have your license. And I'll press charges. I'll bring you down."

  "Have a nice day, Captain."

  I used a pay phone on the corner to call the office to see if Margaret was all right. Francisco had just left her; she'd eaten breakfast, including some liver, and was now sleeping. Her pulse wasn't exactly beating at jackhammer level, but it was steady. I thanked Francisco, hung up, and then, as if I didn't have other, more important things to ponder, I thought about Captain Felix MacWhorter as I rode the subway downtown to Washington Square Park.

  I couldn't understand MacWhorter's animosity. The one man who would know if there was a valid reason, my brother, hadn't seen fit to discuss the matter with me when I'd once asked him about it, so I'd subtly checked around with other cops. The line on MacWhorter was that he could undermine his considerable intelligence by being pigheaded, but for the most part he was a good cop, respected and honest, one who'd never been involved in any scandal or charged with corruption. He ran a clean operation in the most high-profile precinct in the city, and any cop who wanted to make a little extra money on the side by going on the pad was well advised to steer clear of his command. He certainly had nothing to fear from Garth or me, and he didn't seem like the type to be so apparently jealous of an ex-cop's good fortune, so I figured maybe he was just overreacting in an attempt to protect his turf from a notorious set of brothers with a residence in his precinct and whom he must perceive as smart-ass interlopers and headline grabbers.

  My concern with MacWhorter's hostility was for professional reasons, not personal. Private investigators do indeed need to keep lines open to the police for information that might not be available to reporters or the public, but, as I'd told the commander, providing useful information was a two-way street, and it was not unusual for a private investigator involved in a criminal case to provide the police with important leads they might not otherwise have found, or which would have proven expensive and time-consuming in terms of man-hours to develop. MacWhorter knew this as well as anyone, but in my case he had made it clear he did not want to play the game.

  It wasn't that I didn't have a goodly number of reliable and friendly police sources in the five boroughs, including uniforms and detectives in Midtown North, who were happy to barter information with me. But MacWhorter was the precinct commander in my neighborhood, and I wanted to be able to freely approach him when the need arose. Perhaps it was simply a matter of local pride, in addition to the fact that I didn't need any NYPD captain angry with me and constantly looking over my shoulder.

  I was finally able to put MacWhorter out of my mind when I reached the Washington Square Park station. I emerged from underground into bright, cold sunlight and walked to the southwest corner, where I found Theo Barnes and his "protege" with the brown hair, high forehead, and plastic shoes sitting at adjacent stone chess tables hustling tourists just as I'd known they would be. I stayed back for a time and watched.

  The "protege" was now wearing a threadbare wool jacket that I recognized as Barnes's over the same Hawaiian print shirt, also belonging to Barnes, I'd seen him wearing the week before at the Manhattan Chess Club. If anything, he was even faster on the chess clock-actually a two-faced clock with a separate push-button control for each player-than Barnes, who was no slowpoke, moving his hand with lightning speed to stop his clock and s
tart his opponent's each time he completed a move. He may have been playing in a beginners' tournament at the Manhattan club, but he looked to me to be no less skilled than his mentor; during the half hour or so that I watched him, he easily dispatched seven opponents, pocketing a five-dollar bill each time. Only once did I observe more than three minutes elapse on his clock. Finally I stepped out from behind the tree where I had been standing and lined up behind three two-legged pigeons, two men and a woman, waiting to challenge Theo Barnes.

  "Your money's no good here, Frederickson," Barnes said as my turn came and I stepped up to the table. He didn't even look at me as he returned the pieces to their starting positions on the board. "Go play somebody else-unless you're willing to give me the odds I mentioned before. My five minutes to your one, fifty bucks a game."

  "Let me see if I can't change your attitude toward my money," I said, reaching for my wallet. I found a ten-dollar bill and laid it out on the stone battlefield between the marshaled white and black armies. "Here's ten bucks, twice what you'd normally win in one game. A game between us would probably go the limit, ten minutes. So I'm willing to pay for ten minutes of your time, twice what you'd usually make."

  "Five minutes," he said, picking up the bill and stuffing it into the pocket of his worn leather jacket. He pushed the button on his side of the two-faced clock, and the clock on my side started ticking. "That's all you'd have in a ten-minute game. The rest would be mine. So talk."

  "Not here," I said, reaching out and stopping the clock.

  "Hey!"

  "At two bucks a minute, I want to be able to savor the sound of your voice in relative privacy. Let's go sit down on a bench."

  "I can't leave. I'll lose my table."

  Click.

  I went to my wallet again, took out two twenties. I held them up for Barnes to see, but did not put them down on the table. "I'll make it worth your while. Fifty bucks for you, and fifty for your partner over there if he'll talk to me too."

  Click.

  Barnes combed the fingers of both hands back through his long, stringy blond hair as he stared at the bills. "Where's the rest of the money?"

  "That goes to your partner, if he'll talk to me. If you two have some kind of management agreement, you can work out the commission with him."

  "All right," he said as he pushed his button, then snatched up the clock and started to walk away. "Let's go."

  "Hey!" I shouted as I hurried after him. "Travel time shouldn't count! You should at least stop the clock while we're walking!"

  "Time is money, Frederickson!" he called back over his shoulder. "It's going to take me a while to get my table back!"

  I made sure we walked fast, but not far, a couple of dozen yards beyond the playing area, where all I had to compete with to be heard was a country band and two singing jugglers. We sat down on a stone bench, and Barnes placed the clock between us. I had four minutes left on my clock before the minute hand tripped the red flag at the top.

  He held out his hand. "Let's have the rest of my money."

  I gave him the two twenties, and quickly said, "First, I want to make sure you don't lie to me, Theo. I goddamn well know what you're up to. You've found yourself some very gifted but unknown natural talent, and you're giving him a crash course in what competitive chess is all about. You put him in that tournament at the Manhattan Chess Club to get him a provisional rating, but that rating is going to be well below his real strength. You're going to enter him in one of the lower-class sections at the New York Open, and you figure he has a good chance to win his section, even against the other sandbaggers who've been deliberately losing rated games and dropping their ratings for that tournament. You figure he's got a good chance to pocket eight thousand dollars, which I assume you'll share."

  Click.

  Theo Barnes didn't appreciate my observation, and blood rose to his pockmarked face. "You're full of shit, Frederickson. But even if you're right, I'm not doing anything illegal."

  Smack.

  "Right. But if I find out you've lied to me, I'll go to the tournament directors and blow the whole thing. They don't like sandbaggers. He'll be forced to enter the Open section, and he's not going to get very far playing against grandmasters. What's his name?"

  Click.

  "Michael."

  Smack.

  "Give me a break, Theo. Michael what?"

  Click.

  "Michael Stout."

  Smack.

  "Tell me about him."

  Click.

  Barnes laughed, then grinned at me as if he'd just executed some marvelous combination that would give him a forced checkmate. "You're not going to get much for your fifty bucks, Frederickson. I don't know a damn thing about him except his name, the fact that he's the most gifted natural chess player I've ever met, and he'd never played in a single tournament before he met me. Who gives a shit about anything else? He will win his section of the Open. You can bet on it. The people he'll be playing are probably two or three hundred rating points below him in real strength."

  Click.

  "Where does he come from?"

  Click.

  "I don't know."

  Click.

  "How did you meet him?"

  Click.

  "Your flag's going to fall pretty soon."

  Click.

  "It hasn't fallen yet. I'm paying big bucks for this little game, Theo, so answer the damn question."

  Smack.

  The chess hustler shrugged, then leaned back on the stone bench and crossed his legs. "He just came walking into the park a couple of weeks ago. He saw us playing, came over and stood around watching. He was wearing rags, and he looked like shit-scared, maybe a little dopey. But he was paying real close attention to what was going on. At first he was standing back quite a ways, but after a couple of hours he started coming closer-like a few inches at a time. He was real interested in the games. Finally he ended up actually standing between two tables, looking back and forth at the games on either side of him. We were busy playing, so nobody gave a shit where he stood as long as he didn't interfere with the paying customers. Then he lines up at the table where Buster Brown is playing. It comes his turn, and he takes sixty-seven cents out of his pocket and challenges Buster to a game. Can you believe it? Well, there's nobody else waiting, so Buster takes him on. Damned if the guy doesn't beat Buster." Click.

  "Buster isn't that strong." Click.

  "You've got that right. Buster's only a C, maybe low B player. But he talks trash, he's intimidating, and he's pretty good at speed chess, where the other guy is under pressure. Still, he's just been beaten by this dopey-looking guy, and we're all laughing our asses off at him. Buster Brown doesn't like that. He gives the guy sixty-seven cents, challenges him to play for double or nothing. They play again, the guy beats him again. Well, before you know it he's got ten bucks in his pocket. That's enough to interest me, so I challenge him to a game for the ten bucks, figuring I'll blow him away. Then the son of a bitch beats me! How would you rate my strength, Frederickson?"

  Click.

  Smack.

  "Any questions you have get answered on your time, not mine. We've never played a serious game, but I'd rate your strength in the mid-nineteen hundreds, close to expert."

  "I like you, Frederickson."

  "I'm aware of that, Theo. You're a man who wears his heart on his sleeve."

  "You're a player. You don't let the fact that you're little get you down."

  "That's very good, Theo. A real howler."

  "What?"

  "Play me the rest of the story."

  Barnes shrugged. "He ends up beating every one of us, over and over. By the time it got dark he's won close to a hundred and fifty dollars. Now we're not laughing anymore. Some of the other guys are getting downright pissy. Nobody hates being hustled more than a hustler, and that's what we figure he's been doing. I mean, like maybe this guy is a grandmaster from Liechtenstein or someplace like that, and he's come downtown to pick up som
e pocket money while he makes fools of the poor, dumb local yokels. Buster Brown's getting ready to clean his clock, but this guy-"

  "Michael Stout."

  "Yeah; that's who I'm talking about. He swears he hasn't played chess in years, not since he was a kid. He didn't say where he'd come from, only that he'd been kind of out of it-those were his words-for a long time. He swore he wasn't very good when he did play. He swore he'd never played in any tournaments, and had never heard of the United States Chess Federation or FIDE. By this time Buster Brown's got his fist up against the guy's nose, but the guy sticks to his story, says he doesn't have any idea why he's suddenly so good; he says he just discovered that afternoon that he was able to glance at a position on the board and know what each player had to do in order to defend or win. Well, who's going to believe a total bullshit story like that? Buster Brown still wants to punch his lights out. But, you know, there was something about him, something about the way he kept swearing that this fucking fairy tale was all true, that made me kind of start to think that maybe he was on the level. I mean, I've got a good bullshit antenna, and I wasn't picking up liar vibes."

  "I'm constantly amazed by your fine-tuned sensibilities, Theo."

  "Yeah. So, anyway, I get Buster Brown out of his face, and him and me cut a deal. What the hell. The guy's already taken thirty-five bucks from me, so I didn't have anything to lose by checking him out. If he was telling the truth about never having played in competition, he'd make the perfect sandbagger. We could clean up in at least one big tournament-and maybe even two or three, if they came close enough together, and if we could get him into the lower-class sections before his adjusted rating from the first tournament was published. He didn't have a place to stay; he'd been living on the street, picking food out of trash cans and riding the subway all night. The deal was that he could stay with me, and I'd teach him the ropes about hustling so he could start to earn his keep. We'd get him signed up with the USCF, put him in a beginners' tournament where he'd intentionally lose most of his games to ensure him a low provisional rating, and then enter him in the C or D section of the New York Open, and maybe a couple of others around the country if they offered decent prize money and fell within the next month or so. I was to be his manager. Since he was flopping at my place and eating my food, it seemed only fair that I get a percentage of his winnings at tournaments, or at hustling down here. Hell, I was giving him career training and a job. That's it, Frederickson. I don't know a goddamn thing about where he comes from or what he used to do. I think he may be either sick or psycho, or something like that, because he's on some kind of medication. He takes these pills-big suckers. But I don't give a damn about that just so long as he keeps his shit together long enough to earn us some big money. How come you're so interested?"