Brass Go-Between

by Ross Thomas

  “Was he connected with the … the thieves?”

  “I don’t know. But he probably knew who they were.”

  “God damn it, St. Ives, can’t you ever tell anything straight?”

  “Get me the information I want and I’ll tell you the entire story. You may get to be a criminal lawyer after all. If I don’t get the information, it’s as I said. I quit. Now. This afternoon.”

  Myron Greene gave me a long wheezy sigh. “Well, there’s one possibility. A good friend of mine is now an assistant U.S. attorney down there. He could probably get it.”

  “This afternoon?”

  “If I asked him. He was a year behind me at school.”

  “Ask him.”

  “What do you want exactly?”

  “I want to know the cause of death of a man named Wingo. He supposedly was killed in a car accident about four weeks ago.”

  “Wingo? Isn’t that the name of the woman who—”

  “The same.”

  “Her husband?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think that she—”

  I interrupted him. “I don’t think anything, Myron. I’m just trying to find out what to think.”

  “All right, all right. What’s his first name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Christ.”

  “There shouldn’t be too many Wingos who died in a car wreck four weeks ago. Just have your friend find out what the autopsy says.”

  Myron Greene was silent for a moment, except for a couple of wheezes. “Is this just a hunch on your part or do you think you really have something?”

  “I don’t have a thing,” I said. “It’s just a hunch.”

  “I’ll be back to you,” Myron Greene said, and hung up.

  Myron Greene called back at six thirty-five that evening.

  “I’ve missed my train,” he said. “Margaret will be furious.” Margaret was his wife.

  “Want me to call her?”

  “No, I don’t want you to call her. She thinks you’re a—a bad influence.”

  “She’s probably right.”

  “That hunch you had.”

  “What about it?”

  “It seems to have paid off.”

  “How?”

  Myron Greene was excited. I could tell from the way that his wheezes rasped over the phone in short, quick bursts as he fought for breath. “Just take it easy, Myron,” I said. “Try for a deep breath.”

  He was silent for a moment, as if holding his breath, and then there was a long, shuddering wheeze. “I talked to my friend,” he said in between the next gasp. “He called the Coroner’s Office. They didn’t like the idea of giving out the information, but he was persuasive.”

  “What did he get?”

  “On July 26th, George Compton Wingo, 44, was found dead in a one-car automobile accident on Circumferential Highway 495 near exit 13. That’s in Virginia. The automobile, a new Chevrolet Impala, was a total loss.” Myron Greene sounded as if he were reading from notes and he paused to wheeze a couple of times.

  “An autopsy,” he went on, “was performed on July 27th and it was determined that Wingo was already dead when his car turned over three times as it rolled down an embankment. He had died several hours earlier from a massive overdose of heroin.”

  “Was he hooked?” I said.

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Was he a habitual user?”

  “Oh. Multiple punctures in both his left and right arms indicated that he was a habitual user of narcotics, probably heroin.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “Almost,” I said. “Almost. Myron, do me another favor, will you?”

  “What now?”

  “Take a cab home to Darien and put it on my bill.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  FRANCES WINGO WAS PROMPT. She knocked on my door at two thirty-five the following day, Thursday, which meant that she had flown by private plane or had caught the one o’clock shuttle from Washington and that it had had no trouble landing and that taxis had been plentiful at LaGuardia.

  “Come in,” I said.

  “Thank you.” She came in, carrying with some difficulty an inexpensive man’s two-suiter in her left hand. A striped blue and white raincoat was draped over her right arm.

  “Heavy?” I said, reaching for the suitcase.

  She let me have it, a little reluctantly, I thought. “Heavy,” she said. I turned in the room, wondering where to put the suitcase, which seemed to weigh between 55 and 60 pounds. I finally decided to put it in the tub in the bathroom. Before I put it there, I weighed it on the scale. Fifty-eight pounds.

  When I came back out she said, “Why there?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it’s because it would be the last place I would look if I were looking for it.”

  “Aren’t you going to count it?”

  “Did you?”

  “No.”

  “Did you look at it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Pretty?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Since you don’t care much for money, maybe you’d care for a drink.”

  “I think I would.”

  “Bourbon or Scotch?”

  “Bourbon.”

  “Pick out a chair,” I said. “Or the couch. They’re all about the same.”

  “Thank you.” She draped her raincoat over a wingbacked chair and sank into it. She wore a blue dress that was neither too complicated nor too simple, blue shoes that seemed to both match and complement the dress, and in her lap she held a blue purse that seemed to be made of the same leather as the shoes. When I turned from mixing the drinks she was slowly surveying the room and she managed not to grimace at the prints on the wall which had been supplied by the color-blind management of the Adelphi.

  “Horrible, aren’t they?” I said as I handed her a drink.

  “A bit.”

  “The management’s choice.”

  “Not yours?”

  “No. I’m still hung up on Maxfield Parrish.”

  “He was 96 when he died. In 1966.”

  “Do you like Parrish?” I said.

  “No. Do you?”

  “Probably because I know I shouldn’t.”

  “Double reverse snobbism.”

  “Really? I never thought of it like that.” I was seated on the couch opposite her. I put my drink on the glass-topped coffee table and lit a cigarette. “I’m sorry you couldn’t make it for lunch.”

  She didn’t bother to make an excuse. “Will you get it back today?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Haven’t they been in touch with you again?”

  “No.”

  “Will they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you plan to do, or do you believe in plans?”

  I took a swallow of my drink. “I’m going to rent a car. I don’t own a car, you know. I’m going to rent a car and drive to the third Howard Johnson on the Jersey Turnpike. I’m going to check in by six o’clock this evening accompanied by fifty-eight pounds of used tens and twenties. I will sit by the phone until they tell me what they want me to do. Then I will do precisely that because if I don’t, I could wind up just like your husband. Dead.”

  She was either a very good actress or she didn’t know what I was talking about. “I’m afraid you’ve lost me, Mr. St. Ives. What does my husband have to do—or what connection is there between his death and the shield?” There wasn’t a blink, or a tremor, or even that oversupply of calmness which most good liars have. She merely sat there, a politely interested look on her face, as if she had just asked whether I thought she should take the four or the five o’clock shuttle back to Washington.

  “Your husband was an addict. A junkie. He didn’t die from the wreck he was in. He died from a massive overdose of heroin.”

  That didn’t bother her either. She smiled slightly; it was a cool, almost pityin
g smile. “You seem inordinately interested in my husband, Mr. St. Ives. Why?”

  “Maybe I’m interested in knowing what kind of man would marry someone like you. Or rather, what kind of man would you consent to marry. Somehow a junkie doesn’t fit.”

  “Is it really any of your business?”

  I put my drink down on the glass-topped table with a clatter. “You’re damned right it’s my business. One person has already died because of this shield, two if you count his wife who hanged herself. Now with your husband dead from an overdose of heroin, I think the score is now three dead and I don’t want me to make it four.” I purposely left out Spellacy although his death would have helped to run up the total.

  “You do become belligerent, don’t you?”

  “It’s only one of many failings.”

  “You should try to correct it.”

  “I’ll work on it this Fall. You think group therapy might help?”

  “I’m sure it would do you a world of good.”

  “You knew he was an addict?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I knew. It would be most difficult not to know.”

  “Where’d he get it?”

  “I never inquired.”

  “How’d he pay for it?”

  “May I have one of your cigarettes? I quit smoking three years ago, but—” If this was a crack in her composure, it was a small one. She sat in the wingbacked chair, the barely tasted drink on a table, her hands folded over the blue purse in her lap. I rose and offered her a. cigarette and lit it for her. She inhaled deeply and then blew the smoke out in a thin stream.

  “Silly, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “Wanting something like that suddenly, wanting it so bad that—well, never mind.” She inhaled some more smoke and blew it out. “I’m going to tell you about my husband, Mr. St. Ives. I’m going to tell you about him because I don’t want you poking around in my life. There are too many snoops abroad in the land today who seem bent on destroying privacy. I resent it. I wholeheartedly subscribe to the right to be let alone, as someone phrased it several years ago. So after I tell you about my husband, I sincerely hope that you will do just that—let me alone.”

  She paused, as if expecting me to assure her that I would take the next plane to El Paso and never come back once she had told me about her husband. I only nodded.

  “My husband, before he became addicted, was not only a brilliant artist, he was also—or could have been—one of the nation’s leading museum directors or curators. He studied with Paul Sachs at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard in the early 1940’s. He was very young then, no more than a precocious sixteen or seventeen, and in 1943 he joined the Marines and saw action as a combat artist, I think they called them, at Iwo Jima where he did an unusually good series of water colors which were reproduced in Life and which brought him nationwide attention. After his discharge from the Marines he was offered a post as director of a small but good museum in the Midwest. From there he went to a better position in Chicago and then to New York as head of a private museum. It doesn’t matter to you which one, does it?”

  “No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”

  “We met here in New York at some party. I had wanted to paint, but I wasn’t good enough to be good and I had enough sense to realize it. So I did the next best thing. I turned to museum work. George was extremely helpful. He was painting almost every spare moment that he could find and he was good. Terribly good. Some of his friends who had seen his work begged him to hold an exhibition, but he always refused, claiming that the time wasn’t quite right. When I finished my studies we were married and I was appointed director of a small museum here in New York—largely on George’s recommendation. A few years later the offer came from the Coulter Museum. He turned it down.”

  “He?” I said.

  “Yes. They wanted George. He recommended me. Strongly. And with a few misgivings on Mr. Spencer’s part, I was hired.”

  “Why did he turn it down?”

  She shrugged. “He’d decided that he no longer was interested in museum work. He wanted to paint full time. I agreed, of course, and we moved to Washington. The salary was more than adequate and for a while things worked out quite well.”

  “Then what?”

  “George went into a deep depression. He stopped painting, drank too much, sometimes disappeared for days at a time. Finally, about a year and a half ago, he told me that he was addicted to heroin. I don’t know when it really began; he would never tell me.”

  “How big was his habit?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “All right. How much did it cost him a day?”

  “Toward the end it was around two hundred dollars.”

  “Where did he get it?”

  “He sold his paintings. All of them, one by one. They brought very good prices. As I said, he was brilliant.”

  “But he finally ran out of paintings.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then what?”

  “I gave him money.”

  “For how long?”

  “Several months.”

  “Until it ran out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then?”

  “Then one day he said that he didn’t need any more money. That he’d found a private supply of heroin.”

  “When was this?”

  “Two months ago, perhaps two and a half months.”

  “How many people knew about it?”

  “About what?”

  “His addiction.”

  “Not many. His doctor. A few old friends who’d moved to Washington when Kennedy was elected. Mr. Spencer. I told him; I thought it only fair.”

  “What did Spencer say?”

  “He was most understanding and sympathetic. He even offered to pay for George’s treatment in a private sanitarium.”

  “What happened?”

  “George refused.”

  “What did Spencer say then?”

  “Nothing. He never mentioned it again.”

  “And that’s all who knew—a few friends and Spencer?”

  “Yes.”

  “There was somebody else,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “The guy who furnished the private supply.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  FRANCES WINGO LEFT AT three-fifteen to catch the four o’clock shuttle back to Washington. At the door, just before she left, she turned and said, “You really do think my husband was somehow connected with the theft of the shield, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I thought I’d made that plain.”

  “How?”

  “How was he connected?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I have an idea, but I’m not sure. I don’t really know that I’ll ever be sure.”

  “It has something to do with the guard, the one who was killed, hasn’t it?”

  “I think so.”

  “Will you tell me what your theory is?”

  “No, because right now that’s all it is, just a theory.”

  “And if it becomes more than a theory?”

  “Then I’ll tell you; if you still want to know.”

  She looked at me carefully for several seconds. “I assure you, Mr. St. Ives, I will want to know. Very much.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “And you’ll let me know what happens this evening?”

  “Yes.”

  “Call me at home,” she said. “I’ll give you my number.”

  She gave me her number and I wrote it down. “I would walk you to the elevator,” I said, “but I don’t want to leave the suitcase by itself.”

  “That’s quite all right. Good-by, Mr. St. Ives.”

  “Good-by.”

  I stood in the doorway and watched her walk down the hall, a tall, blonde woman with short-cropped hair, a widow of four weeks who now could cry herself to sleep every night because her husband, brilliant but dead, had been not only a junkie, but probably the accomplice
of thieves. There was, I decided, a lot of waste in the world.

  I was not as blasé about the suitcase and its contents as I had pretended to be before Frances Wingo. Despite inflation, a quarter of a million dollars was still a fortune to me, an immense one, and I was always amazed that those who used my services could raise such staggering sums so easily. If someone were to kidnap my kindergarten-bound son, I could, thanks to the check from the Coulter Museum, scrape up fifteen thousand, but not a dime more. My son, it seemed, was safe unless his new stepfather turned out to be embarrassingly wealthy which, knowing my ex-wife, was not at all unlikely.

  I took the suitcase out of the tub and carried it to the bed. The case wasn’t locked so I opened it and stood there for long moments staring at a quarter of a million dollars in used tens and twenties, all carefully wrapped in brown paper bands which said that each bundle contained five hundred dollars. I didn’t count it. I didn’t even touch it. Winfield Spencer’s Washington bank had already counted it and when it comes to sums like that, banks make no mistakes.

  At four o’clock I drove out of the Avis garage in a rented four-door Plymouth, and fought my way to the New Jersey Turnpike which is, in my opinion, the most unlovely strip of superhighway in the nation. It’s also a road that demands grim defensive driving unless you have a very strong death wish, which will be happily fulfilled by either members of the Teamsters Union who like to let their twenty tons of steel nibble at your rear bumper or by the lane jumpers who flit back and forth, oblivious of their rear-view mirrors, ignorant of their directional signals. Most of the vehicles, I noticed, wore New Jersey license plates.

  At 5:15 I turned into the third Howard Johnson motel and restaurant which, like the rest of its breed, was all orange and white and dyspeptic-looking. I was handed a key to room 143 in exchange for $16 plus tax, got back in the car, drove past 143, and parked in front of 135. I unlocked the trunk, took out the suitcase, and walked back to 143. There was nothing in the motel room that I hadn’t expected. There was a bed and a dresser and some chairs and a 21-inch television set (black and white) and some lamps and a carpet. Everything was either nailed down or securely fastened so that it couldn’t be carted off at three o’clock in the morning. I looked in the bathroom and saw that it contained the usual equipment fashioned out of bright blue tile. I came out of the bathroom and placed the suitcase in a closet. Then I stretched out on the bed and waited for the phone to ring so that I could give somebody a quarter of a million dollars in exchange for a 68-pound brass shield that was at least 1,000 years old or older, or about as old as I felt.