by Ross Thomas
“How’s your daughter?” I said, and took a sip of my tea.
“Next month. She starts next month.”
“Where?”
“Ohio State. I’m going to drive her out.”
“It’s a good school.”
“Yeah. That’s what I hear. God knows, it costs enough.”
“Why didn’t she go closer to home?”
Ogden waved his left hand. “Ah, Christ, you know kids. They don’t wanta stay home and go to college. They wanta get away, out of the state somewhere, at least out of town. That’s half of it, I guess.”
“I suppose,” I said, and took another bite of my sandwich. “So what brings you around here at two-thirty of an afternoon when you’re supposed to be out rousting vice lords, if that’s what they still call them?”
“I been hearing some things,” he said.
“From where, Washington? From Demeter?”
“He called Monday. He wanted to know about you. I said you were okay, just a little careful.”
“I thought you told him cautious.”
“Maybe I did. I don’t remember. Careful, cautious, it doesn’t matter.”
“Did he tell you what I was on?”
“Yeah. Some kind of shield. African. You’re trying to buy it back for two hundred and fifty thousand. Some shield.”
“It has quite a history.”
“Demeter seemed to think you could use a little help.”
“Are you offering?”
Ogden drained his drink and placed it on the carpet beside his chair because there wasn’t any table handy. “Not officially.”
“Unofficially?”
“If you think you need it.”
“I don’t.”
He shrugged. “I just thought I might do a little moonlighting. I got a day off tomorrow.”
“What makes tomorrow so special?”
“I hear that’s when you buy it back.”
“You hear from whom?”
He smiled for the first time. His teeth were white and regular and even. Too white and regular and even. They were false. I felt better, somehow glad that Ogden wore false teeth, or dentures, as the television ads insisted on calling them. It made him more vulnerable. Ogden closed his lips quickly, turning off the smile as if he were concerned that I might notice the teeth.
“When you’re a cop for twenty-three years you hear things,” he said. “Now when you used to be on the paper, you used to hear things, didn’t you? You know, some jerk would call up with an anonymous tip and then you, knowing he was a jerk, would still go ahead and check it out and find that he was telling the truth after all. Well, let’s say it was something like that. Accidental like.”
“Why did Demeter call you?”
“We’re old pals. We went to the FBI academy together. In ’fifty-four.”
“I don’t buy that anonymous-tip business,” I said.
Ogden cocked one eyebrow at me; his left one. It was a polite enough expression and its tone carried over into his voice. “Don’t you now?”
“No. I don’t. I think that after Demeter called and told you how high the payoff was you started to check with every pigeon in town. Maybe you found one that knew something, not much, but something, enough for you to figure that you could cut yourself a slice of the pie. Not a big slice probably, but something that would make sacrificing a day off worth while. How much did you have in mind?”
Ogden smiled again, but this time he kept his lips together. “Let’s say that what you say is true. Now I’m not saying it is, but if it was, then I’d say that five thousand would be just about right.”
“And just what would you do to earn it?”
“I’d help keep you alive, St. Ives. Now that oughta be worth five grand to you, if not to anybody else.”
“Do you know who the thieves are?”
Ogden shook his head. “No, I don’t and that’s the truth. I just hear that the switch will take place tomorrow and that they play a little rough sometimes—whoever they are.”
This time I smiled at him. I tried to make it friendly; I’m not sure that I succeeded. “Or it could have been another way, couldn’t it? It could have been that you called Demeter down in Washington about an hour or two ago and Demeter had just talked to Frances Wingo of the museum who’d told him that the switch will take place tomorrow. That’s all you really needed to know, wasn’t it? Then your mind starts working and you figure a way to cut yourself in. For five thousand—on your day off. So you drop by here with a story about how rough the thieves play, which is supposed to turn me into a lump of JELL-O, and I agree to pay you five thousand dollars for whatever protection you can give me tomorrow. Now, it could have been like that, couldn’t it, Ken?”
Ogden shook his head sadly. “I feel sorry for you, St. Ives.”
“Why? Because of my suspicious nature?”
He rose from his chair. “One of these days you’re going to play it too safe, too careful, too cautious. One of these days you’re not going to trust somebody when you should, then pffft! No more St. Ives.”
I put the empty teacup and sandwich plate on the floor and rose. “But that’s not today, is it?”
Ogden picked up his Borsalino hat from the hexagonal table and brushed it against the sleeve covering his left arm. “Not today, maybe. Maybe not even tomorrow. But sometime soon.” He put his hat on his head, tilted it slightly to the left, gave me the opportunity to examine his false teeth again, said “Thanks for the drink,” and left. I went over and picked up his glass and my dirty dishes and put them in the sink where I began to wash them slowly, as neat and as tidy as the old maid after the vicar has left.
It was a respectable enough building twenty-nine stories high that had been designed by some long-forgotten architect who apparently had never heard of the Bauhaus. It looked like what it was, an office building on Park Avenue where people went to work in the morning at nine and left at five after having sold or bought or traded or even created something, perhaps an advertisement for a new cemetery. The directory in the marble lobby said that Mesa Verde Estates was on the eleventh floor. I looked at my watch and it was three minutes before four so I got in one of the automatic elevators along with a stenographer who was carrying a white paper bag that was brown around the bottom where the coffee had slopped out of the paper cups. She got off at six; I got off at eleven.
Mesa Verde Estates was in 1106, which turned out to be four doors to my left from the elevator. A sign on the door of 1106 read MESA VERDE ESTATES, FRANK SPELLACY, PRESIDENT. I knocked, and when no one said “come in” or “who’s there” or even “go away” I tried the doorknob. It turned easily so I pushed the door open and walked in. It was a medium-sized office, big enough for two persons perhaps, a man and his secretary, if he wasn’t worried about privacy. Green steel shelves lined one side of the office, the left side, and they were choked with what seemed to be four-color brochures advertising Mesa Verde Estates. There were three windows at the rear of the office and their Venetian blinds were half up, so that the light from the afternoon sun spilled onto the large executive desk that was placed in front of the windows. Three leather arm chairs were arranged in front of the desk. The floor was carpeted with some speckled brown and black synthetic fiber. On the right wall were some handsome color photos of desert scenes, four of them. Below them was a couch and a glass-topped coffee table. There was no secretarial desk or typewriter, only the executive walnut desk that had a high-backed judge’s chair behind it. A man sat in the chair, but the upper part of his body was bent over the desk, his bald head resting on a green blotter, his left arm extended toward a beige telephone, his left hand clutching a yellow pencil. I walked over to the desk and looked at him. The blotter was trying to soak up all of the blood, but it wasn’t doing too well. I reached over and felt for a pulse in the wrist of the hand that clutched the pencil; there was none. The phone rang and I jumped. It rang seven times before it quit. Frank Spellacy was too dead to hear it.
&nb
sp; He had been a plumpish man, dressed in a gray pin-striped suit. Gold-rimmed glasses still rested on a thick nose. His eyes were closed and his mouth was slightly open and I almost expected to hear him snore. He was around fifty and the sun, beating in from the windows, made his bald head seem pinker than it really was. Underneath the hand that held the pencil was a small white pad. He had written something on the pad, one word. From the way the letters straggled and ran together, he may have written it as he sat there, half sprawled over his desk, dying. There was only the one word and I read it upside down. The one word was “Wingo.”
CHAPTER TEN
THERE SEEMED TO BE no reason for what I did next, no reason other than that I felt that the one word, the name, scrawled on the white pad by a dying man, was meant for me. It was mine, so I took it. I pulled the pad from underneath the lifeless hand that still clutched the Eberhard Faber yellow pencil and slipped it into my jacket pocket. And then, remembering lessons learned from five thousand hours before the tube and perhaps from another three thousand or so in darkened buildings that sold sustenance (popcorn) along with escape, I took out my handkerchief and used it to shield my palm and fingers from the doorknob. In the hall I looked around and then hastily wiped the outside doorknob, found the stairs, scurried down two flights, rang for the elevator, waited and fretted, and then tried to look nondescript to the three passengers who were already aboard when it finally came and also to the three others who got on at the seventh, fourth, and third floors.
Outside, the Nickerson Building looked just like what it was, an ordinary office building, perhaps 43-years-old or older, built in the late 1920’s on Park Avenue by a contractor who was doubtless dead by now, as dead as Frank Spellacy, and designed by an architect who didn’t give a damn about Mies van der Rohe or Walter Gropius or even the infamous Marcel Breuer who had threatened to saddle Grand Central Terminal with a 55-story mega-structure which I could have inspected if I cared to look over my shoulder, which I didn’t. Instead I walked quickly down Park Avenue for two blocks and then turned right, looking for a bar, any bar.
It was an ordinary place called The Cold Duck or The Green Rooster or something like that. The bar itself ran along the right-hand side and there were some tables and booths and checkered tablecloths and Chianti bottles that held half-burned candles. It was ten minutes after four and only a couple of dedicated topers were in attendance. I sat at the bar’s far end, near the door, away from the drinkers, and when the bartender waddled down my way I ordered a double Scotch.
“What kind?” he said.
“Bar Scotch.”
“On the rocks?”
“Just a straight shot with a glass of water.”
I should have told him to serve it in a large glass because when I picked it up my hand shook so that it sloshed a little of the whisky over the rim which chattered against my teeth. But I got it down, all of it down in two gulps, and then I signaled the bartender. He was in a deep conversation with the two tipplers, talking learnedly, no doubt, of sports or cars or politics, or whatever drunks and bartenders talk about at four in the afternoon, and he seemed reluctant to come all the way down to where I sat, or it may have been that his feet hurt.
“Another double?” he said.
“Make it a single. Where’s your phone?”
He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “In the back, near the men’s John.”
I didn’t even have to search for a dime on the way to the phone. I just picked it up, dialed 911, and when the voice answered—a policeman’s voice—I said, “I’m only going to say this once. There’s a dead man in room 1106 in the Nickerson Building on Park Avenue. His name’s Frank Spellacy. S-p-e-l-l-a-c-y. Spellacy.” Then I hung up.
The drink was waiting for me when I went back to my end of the bar. I didn’t really want it, but it was there so I drank it, put three one-dollar bills and some change next to the empty glass, and left. I caught a cab back to the Adelphi and once there, up in my de luxe efficiency on the ninth floor with its Pullman kitchen and its yellow-tiled bathroom, I took the pad from my pocket, the pad with the one-word, one-name message on it, and read it for the first time right side up. It still said Wingo. I tore the page off the pad, ripped it into small pieces, and flushed it down the toilet. Still remembering lessons well learned from screens both large and small, I tore the rest of the pad up and spent five minutes in the bathroom flushing the toilet six times. There was a cardboard backing for the pad, but it seemed too much trouble to tear up, so I tossed it into the wastebasket.
I slumped into my favorite chair, the one where scarcely two hours before I had been eating a cucumber sandwich, drinking a cup of tea, and demonstrating to a New York cop on the make just how smart I really was. I wondered about that for a while. When I discovered a dead man, a small-time grifter, in his office, killed by either a knife or a gun, I stole the one-word message that he used up his life writing because with magnificent egoism, I assumed that it was meant for me. Not for his wife or children or even the cops, but for me, someone he didn’t know, someone he had spoken to once, over the telephone, for forty-five seconds, perhaps a minute. That proved how smart I was. And instead of calling the police and reporting the murder, if that’s what it was, and waiting for them to get there and giving them all the information that I could, which might possibly have helped them find whoever killed the man, the small-time grifter who sold desert lots for ten dollars down and ten dollars a month, and then probably discounted the paper to some finance company, I instead acted like a fool who ran when he should stay and stayed when he should run. I was smart all right. Even brilliant. No wonder the country was going to hell.
I sat there in my favorite chair, smoking a cigarette and brooding and thinking about the one-word message that Spellacy had left for someone, possibly me, but probably not. I spent fifteen minutes thinking about it and then I picked up the phone and dialed O for long distance.
When she came on I told her that I would like to call the Coroner’s Office in Washington, D.C. There was some more palaver while she asked whom I wished to speak to and finally I told her that I would like to speak to the coroner himself, but would settle for whoever answered the phone. A man’s voice answered with “Coroner’s Office.”
I told him my name and then asked, “If a man were killed in an automobile accident, would he immediately come under your jurisdiction?”
“Yes, he would,” the good solid civil-service voice said.
“Would you perform an autopsy?”
“Yes, that’s automatically done in accidents, homicides, suicides, and what-have-you.”
I didn’t ask him what a what-have-you was, although it seemed to take in a lot of territory. But he wasn’t through yet; he warmed to his subject. “Now in the case of illness, if the deceased hasn’t seen a doctor or been attended by one within the last ten days, an autopsy is automatically performed. That also holds true if the deceased has not been seen by anyone—you know, vanished—for a period of twenty-four hours or more prior to his death.”
“I’d like to get some information on a man who was killed in a car wreck about four weeks ago.”
“Are you the next of kin?” the civil-service voice said.
“No. I’m a reporter. With The New York Times.” There was no use in going second class.
The voice relented a little. “What was the deceased’s name?”
“Wingo,” I said.
“His first name?”
That wrecked it. “Well, we haven’t been able to find out his first name. He died under rather mysterious circumstances.”
There was a pause at the Washington end, at the District of Columbia’s Coroner’s Office at 19th and E Streets, Southeast. It was a long, chilly pause. “I’m sorry, but in such cases the next of kin must grant permission for the release of such information.”
“Well, thanks anyway.”
He said that I was welcome, but I don’t think he really meant it.
I sat there in the chair wi
th my hand on the phone thinking about all the influential persons that I knew in Washington who could pry the information out of the Coroner’s Office without going to the next of kin. For some reason I didn’t think that Frances Wingo would appreciate my attempt to find out why she had become a widow. But the influential persons whom I knew were probably too busy or too inept to get the information today and I was too impatient to wait for tomorrow so I called Myron Greene, the lawyer.
“I need a favor,” I told him after we said hello and he informed me that Spivack had deposited the check from the Coulter Museum.
“What kind of a favor?” Myron Greene said, and there seemed to be suspicion and distrust in his voice, but that was really how he always talked.
“I need to get a coroner’s report in Washington so I can find out how somebody died.”
“That takes the permission of the next of kin,” Myron Greene said.
“I know. I’ve already tried. That’s why I’m calling you. I need the information this afternoon.”
“That’s impossible.”
“No it isn’t, Myron, not for you, it isn’t. You have the influence down there and I don’t. That’s why I called.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m just too busy. Maybe I can do something tomorrow.”
“If I don’t get the information this afternoon, or this evening at the latest, then I’m walking off this thing.”
“What’s that—what’s that?” Myron Greene said, and began to wheeze at me over the phone.
“I’m through. Finished. Somebody else can get the shield back.”
“Something’s happened,” he said. “What’s happened? I have a right to know. I have every right—”
“Somebody else has been killed.”
“Who?”
“The name would mean nothing to you.”
