“Not you, Lou. You’re strictly ten bucks in the maid’s apron pocket and five minutes alone with the boss’s ledger.”
He remembered his cigar and stuck it in his face. Tilted upward it gave him a jaunty look, like the famous Roosevelt profile or Ed Muskie before New Hampshire 1968. “Think you know me, huh?”
“Six years ago I was you.” I tapped the printout sheet. “Where do you get this stuff?”
“I’m a detective, son. Lessons cost extra.”
“What’ve you got on Wally Petite? He runs Acme.”
“Only what I hear. He was chief mechanic in the service department of a car dealership downtown till he set up in Royal Oak three-four years ago. Hasn’t got all the grease out from under his fingernails yet. Was a time there just after the new law when pit monkeys with state certification could name their own price. His was a full partnership.”
“What about his late partner? Philip Niles?”
“Before my time.” He relit the cigar, which had gone out. “I was stealing cars for Reliance in those days. Cheap bastards still owe me forty bucks out-of-pocket expenses.”
“It’s a big club.”
He grinned around the chewed stump. “Where’d those big shiny operations be without sleazes like me and bloodhounds like you?”
“Stinking up somebody’s tin hut with a four-for-a-quarter stogie, probably.” I got up. “It’s a start, Lou. I’m into you.”
“I’ll take it out in trade sometime. You haven’t told me what it’s about.”
“That’s right.”
“Oho, a client with ears.”
On my way out I spotted the red light on his telephone answering machine. “Oh, you need a new recording. One you got sounds like a lady moose in labor.”
“I’m coming up on my second year on this tape.” He reshuffled the papers in the folder. “You going up to Royal Oak?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Watch for low-flying engine blocks. Those choppers play for money.”
13
THE DOOR TO MY outer office was ajar. I went in ready to give my wino the guided tour into the hallway and looked at an elderly party seated on the bench with his feet flat on the floor and his hands folded on the crook of a Malacca cane with a brass tip. He wore a straw Panama tilted two centimeters over his right eye and a tan suit of some light knobbly material and gold-rimmed glasses and a short white beard trimmed neatly to conform to the angle of his jaw. The neck of his lavender shirt was open, exposing a corner of one of those nitro patches heart patients wear, that feed medication into the system constantly. He looked at a big gold watch on his left wrist, stood up with difficulty, introduced himself by the name of Harold Konschuh—something on that order—and announced that just because a person was retired didn’t mean his time wasn’t valuable. Quite the contrary.
I apologized and unlocked the inner door and held it as he went through, taking little nibbling steps. I was behind my desk before he made the customer’s chair. He lowered himself into it and said: “I thought you’d be older. I picked your name out of the book because Amos sounded like someone of my generation.”
“I’m not, sorry.” I drew a pencil out of the cup on the desk and began thumbing the eraser.
He settled and resettled his cane tip between his feet. “I want you to take a picture of Mr. Ford for me.”
“Mr. Ford?”
His mouth twitched. “Henry Ford. He visits me in my house nightly and stays to all hours. An old man needs his sleep. The police won’t listen to me. I want you to take Mr. Ford’s picture so I can show it to them and then they’ll make him go away.”
“Are we talking about Henry Ford the Second?”
“Did I say Junior? There is only one Henry Ford.”
“Henry the First is dead, Mr. Konschuh.”
“I know that! Tell him!”
I reversed ends on the pencil and doodled on my calendar pad. “Approximately how long has Mr. Ford been bothering you?”
“Eight months. It started right after I left Ford’s. They made me retire because of my heart. I was an engineer there for thirty-eight years.” His head tilted back sharply. His glasses flashed.
“What’s he do, moan and rattle chains?”
“That’s only in the movies. My doctor has me down to one cigar a day. I generally smoke it just before bed. If Mr. Ford is there at the time he blows out the match. He didn’t hold with smoking, you know.”
“I didn’t know.”
“That’s why there were no ashtrays in the Model T.”
“Try a lighter.”
“I did. He hid it. The rest of the time he just sits there in my good leather chair giving me that provincial look, like a Maine farmer sitting on his front porch. It’s very unsettling.”
“I can imagine.” I made another doodle. “I’m on retainer to someone else right now, Mr. Konschuh. I’ll have to pass.”
“I’ll pay you well. I’ve made some sound investments over the years and I have no one to leave it to.”
“Sorry, Mr. Konschuh.”
He refolded his long pale hands atop the cane. “A man needs his little pleasures, Mr. Walker. I haven’t many left. The situation is intolerable.”
His beard quivered. I did some more scribbling, then laid down the pencil and got up and opened the top drawer of the file cabinet. From it I drew a Pentax 35-mm. camera, fiddled with the slides and buttons for a moment, and put it down on his side of the desk. “I’ve set the meter for indoor light at evening,” I explained. “You focus by looking through here and turning the lens until the image clears. Work this lever to advance the film. It’s all loaded and ready to go. When you’ve got your picture, have it developed and bring the camera back here. We’ll discuss payment then.”
He stood, pressed his fragile fingers into my hand, and went out with the camera under one arm. It took him five minutes to reach the hall even with me holding both doors. I saw him safely down the first flight of stairs and went back inside. I didn’t expect to see the camera again. I had dropped it out a window of the Pontchartrain Hotel a year or so back, cracking the case and shattering the lens. It was ideal for the picture he wanted to take with it.
I paid a couple of bills, called my service for messages —I didn’t have any—and went home carrying Barry’s typescript. I was through for the day.
14
THERE ARE RESTAURANTS in Saigon that if you visit them in civilian clothes and no MPs are present can make you forget for an hour that you’re not home. The hanging plants look familiar and the music is western and the percentage of waiters who don’t speak English is not that much higher than in many establishments in New York or Detroit. I am dining with a Laotian woman whose tilting features and straight black hair pulled back with combs make her resemble an American Indian. She wears pearls and a low-cut gown of some black unreflecting material and my evening with her is costing me two hundred dollars American. Everything is higher in Saigon.
As we start the second course a girl of perhaps fifteen, in a sleeveless flowered dress caught on one ivory shoulder and a red sash around her waist, her face painted like a doll’s, enters the restaurant and stops at a table. The G.I. seated there tells her to go away. She starts to talk. He shouts it and throws something from his plate at her. It bounces off her face. She goes to another table where two servicemen are sitting. One snaps his napkin at her, stinging her in the eye. They are laughing as she turns away, rubbing at the eye with a knuckle. The laughing has a relieved sound.
She is approaching yet a third table when the headwaiter appears and closes a brown hand on her arm, jabbering away in a harsh dialect quite unlike the one in which he greeted us. At length he releases her with a shove. Glaring, she leaves, her platform shoes clomping.
“What was all that?” I ask my companion.
Through it all she has continued sipping a tall gray drink through a straw. She casts a cool glance in the girl’s wake. “A country whore,” she replies in good English. “She
is not licensed to work the better restaurants.”
“She doesn’t appear very good at it in any case.”
She shrugs, stirring her drink. “The Americans call her Kitty Catastrophe.”
It is the first time I have heard her stumble over a word in English. “Why do they call her that?”
“Tonight she has business with an American soldier, tomorrow he is dead. Mines, gunfire, bombs. It has happened four times. Tonight, love. Tomorrow, death. Four times, four deaths. She is famous for it now.
“I think she must starve,” she reflects.
The door buzzer razzed. I looked at my watch. Eight-fifteen. Sunlight was slanting in through the east window, throwing a bright yellow trapezoid across the table in the breakfast nook, one corner drooping Dalilike over the edge onto the floor. I drained my coffee cup and reshuffled Barry’s script and went into the living room to answer. I was wearing pajamas and a robe and slippers.
I had a dream on my doorstep. The dream had on a tailored beige jacket and matching skirt that caught her at mid-calf, with a slit up one side and a row of brown leather buttons along the slit and an ivory-colored silk scarf around her neck, or maybe the scarf was beige and the suit was ivory-colored; I have trouble separating those shades. I wasn’t much looking at the outfit anyhow, but into deep blue eyes with a lavender tinge. The make-up was minimal and her hair, pinned up, was the color of light reflecting off gold through a sheen of clear water. It was all packaged by someone who knew his work and couldn’t be rushed. It was a dream I’d had before and I smiled in my sleep.
“I’m sorry to bother you at home, Mr. Walker. I should have called.” The lavender-blue eyes barely flickered over my attire and unshaved condition. “Louise Starr, remember? We met last spring. I was Fedor Alanov’s editor.”
I got the smile off my face somehow and my body out of her path. “I remember, Mrs. Starr. I’m not that far gone yet. Come in.”
She entered, turning her head only slightly to look around. I scooped a smeared shot glass off the coffee table from the night before and sat her down on the sofa and asked if she’d like a cup of coffee.
“I’d prefer juice if you have it,” she said. “In New York I have to drink coffee. I haven’t developed a taste for it yet and I’ll bet I’ve drunk ten thousand cups.”
“I have orange juice. But it’s the frozen kind.”
She smiled and said that would be fine. I left her to get the juice. I damn near bowed.
In the kitchen I searched through the cupboards until I found a juice glass of one of those pressed designs that are supposed to look like cut glass, one of a set of six that Catherine had bought when we were moving in and that I hadn’t used in years. It looked okay, but I washed it anyway and dried it and filled it from the pitcher I’d prepared earlier that morning and brought it to her on a tray with a paper napkin. I didn’t have any linen ones and it was the first time I’d regretted that.
She sipped, smiled her approval. “That’s refreshing. In New York they feel obliged to serve it to you with the pulp floating in it so you know it’s fresh squeezed. Now they’re telling us the pulp is good for you. If I want an orange I’ll peel one myself.”
“Everybody worries about everybody else’s health. It’s the times we live in. Are we going to talk much more about orange juice? I’m running low on ammunition.”
She laughed lightly, genuinely, and said, “I’d forgotten your dry humor. Where I come from, everyone just thinks he’s funny.” She ran a gently tinted nail up the seam of the glass. “I’m here on business, but I don’t want to talk about it just yet. Am I keeping you from something?”
“I’ve got an appointment this morning, but not for another hour and a half. How’s Tolstoy?”
“You didn’t know? That’s right, you couldn’t. After we went to so much trouble to protect Alanov and ensure that his book got finished, he paid us back our advance and went with another publisher. Our lawyers are talking to his lawyers. In the end we’ll get the bill for their lunches and no Alanov. We don’t need him anyway. We’ve got Andrei Sigourney. He’s one of the reasons I’m in town. He’s having trouble with his novel and I’m his shoulder to cry on.”
“He’s going with the name Sigourney?” His real name was the reason I knew him and Alanov and Louise Starr.
“It’s what he’s comfortable with. He’s visiting his grandmother these days,” she added, and sipped at her juice.
There had been evidence that he had had more than her shoulder in the past. I didn’t press it. Instead I said, “He’s one reason you’re here. What’s another?”
“Yes, your appointment.” She set down her glass and looked at me. The room was full of jasmine, as any room would be that contained her. “I’ll talk to you about it if you’ll sit down. Standing like that with your hands in your robe pockets you look like George Sanders.”
“I’m in no condition to sit with ladies, Mrs. Starr. I’m a razor and a clean shirt away from that.”
“Dear, I didn’t think anyone troubled about such things these days. I’ll wait, if you want to go ahead and shave and get dressed. My plane landed two hours ago. I haven’t been in town long enough to make any appointments I’d be late for.”
“I’ll just be ten minutes,” I said. “There’s more juice in the refrigerator and some magazines there on the table. No Publishers Weekly, sorry.”
“Thank you. I’m all right on my own.”
I didn’t argue with that. In the bathroom I hung up the robe and washed and scraped my face until it shone. I brushed my hair and looked at the gray and opened the medicine cabinet and considered a bottle of cologne in a box wrapped in green and gold foil, a present from a grateful client, then closed the door on it without touching it. I put the robe back on for the short trip to the bedroom and selected a powder-blue dress shirt and the pants to my gray suit and put them on. I wiped off my shoes with Kleenex and returned to the living room. She was still on the sofa, reading that week’s TV magazine.
“Those are some pretty old movies you’ve circled,” she said, laying it aside. “I would have guessed you’re a buff. You talk and act just a little like a character in a black-and-white film.”
I broke a pack of Winstons out of a carton in the drawer of the telephone table and held it up. She nodded with a smile. “It has its advantages,” I said, stripping off the cellophane. “Sometimes it pays to let the people you meet in this business think you’re into some kind of trip. When they think they’ve pegged you your job’s half over.”
“It’s not all an act, though, is it? You’re really that way.”
I lit up and sat down in the easy chair, said nothing. She got the hint.
“Someone called my office a few days ago and spoke to my assistant,” she began. “I was in a meeting at the time, but when I learned who it was I called him right back. He was writing a book and he wondered if we’d be interested in publishing it. He said you’d given him my name.”
I uncrossed my legs. “Barry Stackpole?”
“He’s syndicated across the country. A book with his name on it carries a guaranteed sale of fifty thousand. His biography alone—Vietnam, the attempt on his life that crippled him, his personal enmity with known gangsters—would assure it a sale to a major book club. I want that book, Mr. Walker.”
“So buy it.”
“That’s the problem. I told him to send me what he had and we’d talk contract. Right after I hung up I realized I’d been foolishly cautious. I should have had an agreement drawn up then and there, sight unseen. Like all dying enterprises, the book business is getting highly competitive.
There was no telling how many other publishers he was talking to.
“I tried to call him back, but he’d left or he wasn’t answering his phone. I’ve tried several times since with no luck. Someone at the News told me he was on a leave of absence. This morning I rented a car at the airport and bought a map and drove out to his house. It’s locked and his lawn needs mowing. I thought
maybe you’d know where I could get in touch with him.” She leaned forward a little with her hands in her lap. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.
“What day did he call?”
She thought. “I was with the board that day. Monday. Late Monday afternoon.”
That was the day I’d been with Barry in the Press Club, the day before he dropped out of sight. I ground out my cigarette and put the ashtray on the stand next to the chair. “Did he say what the book’s about?”
“He was reluctant. I think that’s why I wanted to see a sample. I assumed it’s autobiographical, but maybe that’s just because he’s led such an interesting life.”
“They’re a lot more fun to read about than to lead,” I said. “I don’t know where Barry is. I’m not alone. His employers have hired me to try to find him. He may have gone underground because of a hot potato he was working on. The hot potato may be the book. It may be he’s trying to duck a grand jury investigation. He’s had some personal problems lately and it may be those. In any case you could be the last person he had contact with before he slid offstage.”
“I have an alibi. I was in New York at the time.”
I stared at her.
She colored just a little. “Sorry. I plead jet lag. Do you think you can find him?”
“I’ve been in this line a long time, Mrs. Starr. I get asked that question twice a week. I’m fresh out of answers. I can’t see through walls or read the future in sheep intestines. I’m pretty good, but I’m not that good.”
“It would be worth a great deal to the firm I work for if you could answer the question,” she said. “It would be worth a great deal to me.”
I sat there for another second. Then I stood and picked up her empty glass. “More juice?” She shook her head. I took the glass back into the kitchen and rinsed it out and wiped it off and put it next to the others in the cupboard. I didn’t even look at the fresh bottle of Hiram Walker’s on the same shelf. Back in the living room I sat down and said, “Your job’s that thin?”
She crossed her ankles in that way she had that could empty a gentlemen’s smoker across town. “I edited a biography of a dead movie star by the movie star’s daughter. It contained two lines on the movie star’s affair with a captain of industry I’d thought was dead. The biography was a Book-of-the-Month-Club featured alternate and two producers were bidding for motion picture rights. Then the captain of industry came out of the woodwork with a battery of corporate lawyers and got every copy yanked off the stands. The publishing business isn’t the automobile industry; it isn’t equipped to handle a one hundred percent recall. Yes, my job’s that thin. Thin enough I don’t dare put this trip on the pad. I’m just hoping that when I get back I won’t find some bright young thing who cut her capped teeth editing westerns sitting at my desk.”
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