by Ross Thomas
“You going up?” Ogden asked.
“I thought I might; you want to tuck me in?”
“No, I just wanted to make sure you got home safe and sound.”
“And you took part of your day off to do it.”
“That’s right,” he said, “I did. You know what else I did today on my day off?”
“What?”
“I went to a funeral. Frank Spellacy’s. You knew Frank.” It wasn’t a question the way he asked it.
“No. I didn’t know Frank.”
“Funny. I thought you did. I thought you might have written him up in your column. He was a kind of a character, always operating on the edge. Funny how he died.”
“How?”
“Somebody stuck a knife in his throat and he bled to death all over his desk and rug. He had an office in the Nickerson Building over on Park Avenue. He was hustling lots out in the desert somewhere. That’s what he did mostly, but he had a sideline. You know what it was?”
“No,” I said, wishing that the elevator would come so that I could vanish into it.
“He ran a reference bureau. You know, if somebody wanted something done then Frank could put them in touch with who could do it. Or if somebody wanted to check out somebody, and they didn’t want to bother with the Better Business Bureau, why they’d call up Frank and he’d find out for them. A lot of bookies used him.”
“Sounds like a character,” I said, and punched the elevator button again, hard.
“He had a nice funeral. Over in Queens. Lots of friends. And you say you didn’t know him?”
“No. I didn’t know him.”
“That’s funny.”
“What?”
“He knew you. He had a whole file on you, homicide says. A new one.”
“I’m in a funny business. Maybe that’s why he had a file.”
“Maybe. But the homicide boys also found something on his calendar—you know, the appointment book that he kept on his desk.”
“What?”
“Just your name with four o’clock beside it on the day he died. Yesterday. But homicide’s not much interested; old Frank had been long dead by four o’clock as near as the medical report could figure, which, of course, isn’t too accurate.”
I’d had enough. “What do you want, Ogden? Spell it out.”
He glanced around the lobby, leaned toward me, and tapped a manicured forefinger against my lapel. I don’t like to be tapped. “I want in.”
“There’s no room.”
“Make it.”
“Not a chance.”
“Two hundred and fifty thousand’s a lot of money.”
“I don’t like jails.”
“No jails. You make the switch, the money for the shield. The museum’s happy. But you take me along to make another switch. The money into our pockets, an even split, and who’s to squawk?”
“The thieves. They wouldn’t like it at all.”
“Who they gonna complain to?”
“Christ, they could write a letter to the editor and even if it weren’t published, it would be turned over to the cops who’d be swarming around for the next ten years.”
The greed was back on Ogden’s face. His wet lips moved, making little smacking noises, and his eyes squinted at me as if I gave off some blinding but irresistible glow. “The thieves don’t have to be around after it’s over,” he said, running his words together. “That’s the beauty of it. They don’t have to be around to complain.”
I could only stare at him, at the wet lips and the squinted eyes and the hunched, almost supplicating stance. “I believe you’d do it,” I said. “Goddamn, I believe you’d do it.”
He looked around the lobby once more. It was an almost furtive glance. “I’m fifty-three years old, St. Ives, and I want in on this. I’m gonna retire in a couple of years. A hundred and twenty-five grand would make it livable.”
“Get it from your whores, Ogden. Not from me.”
“I’m cutting myself in.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“I’ve got a kicker.”
“I thought you might.”
“You see, St. Ives,” he said in a hoarse whisper after conning the lobby again. “I know who the thieves are.”
It was his exit line and he had been working up to it all evening. He grinned at me with all of those terrible teeth, nodded a couple of times, happily, I thought, turned and strode across the faded lobby, through the door, and out into the summer night.
“The elevator, Mr. St. Ives,” Charlie called from the desk. “It ain’t working.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
IT WAS RAINING WHEN I awakened at seven the next morning, a hard stinging rain whose drops committed mass suicide against my ninth-floor window where I stood and watched while the water boiled on the two-burner stove for instant coffee. Armed with the coffee and the day’s first cigarette, I picked up the phone and called Eastern Airlines, which answered on the fourteenth ring. All flights to Washington had been canceled. It was raining hard in Washington too. It was probably raining all over the world.
That left the bus or the train. I called the Pennsylvania Central Railroad and the man who answered on the twenty-second ring was indifferent about whether I ever got to Washington, or it may have been that he was preoccupied with what kind of cake his great-great-granddaughter would serve when he got home that night to celebrate his ninety-second birthday. He finally admitted, after some coaxing, that there was a train leaving for Washington at eight that morning and if I were nice, he might even sell me a ticket.
I called down to the desk and got Eddie, the day bellhop. “It’s worth two bucks if you’ve got a cab waiting for me when I get downstairs in ten minutes,” I said.
“Jesus, Mr. St. Ives, I’ll get all wet.”
I sighed. “Three bucks.”
“Okay. Three bucks. By the way, that horse you picked the other day.”
“What about it?”
“It didn’t win.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it. You want to get down on something today?”
“No time.”
“You want I should pick one for you?”
“The cab, Eddie.”
I dressed in four minutes, packed a shirt, underwear, socks, and toilet articles into an overnight bag in two minutes, added a fifth of Scotch, waited for the miraculously repaired elevator for a minute, and was in the lobby at the desk asking for the suitcase nine minutes after I had talked to Eddie. I was also unshaved, unwashed, and unhappy.
The bellhop had somehow managed to find a cab. “I got all wet,” he said as I handed him three dollars. It was as close to thank you as he ever got. The cab driver grunted when I told him where I wanted to go, then mumbled to himself all the way to Penn Station. It took fifteen minutes to go the mile which, on a rainy morning in Manhattan, might have broken some kind of speed record. At seven-forty I queued up at the ticket counter behind a woman who wanted to take a train to Cutbank, Montana. She didn’t want to go today, and she didn’t know whether she would leave next week or the week after, because she wasn’t sure when her daughter’s baby was due, but she thought that she’d get all the information now and decide later, after she heard from her daughter. The man behind the counter became interested in her story and they gossiped about babies for a while and then he thumbed through some thick black books which told him whether a train went through Cutbank. After he figured out her route and she wrote it down they chatted some more, this time about the weather. I didn’t think that he was the same man whom I’d talked to over the phone because he wasn’t much over seventy-five.
When the Montana-bound woman finally left, the man behind the counter looked at me suspiciously, as if I wanted to buy a ticket or make him an indecent proposition. I think he would have preferred the proposition.
“Washington, a parlor seat.”
“Don’t know if I got one left,” he said, glancing up at the clock and then over at his rack
of tickets. “You’re a little late, you know.”
“It’s all my fault.”
“Parlor car, huh. That costs more’n coach.”
“I know.”
“You still want it?”
“I still want it,” I said, not even yelling.
“Only got one left.”
“I wouldn’t want to run you short.”
“Coach’d only cost you $10.75. Parlor cost you $19.90. That’s a lot of money.”
“I just came into an inheritance.”
“Huh,” he said, and slid the ticket over to me as I handed him a twenty-dollar bill. “Look after the pennies, I say, and the dollars will take care of themselves.”
“You think that up all by yourself?” I said as he slid my dime to me.
“Been saying it all my life.” He looked at the clock again. It was three minutes until eight. “If you hurry,” he said comfortably, “you might still make it.”
I hurried, the fifty-eight-pound suitcase banging against my right knee. There was really no need. The train was ten minutes late in pulling out.
The last train ride I took was the Trans-Europ-Express from Cologne to Paris. The food had been good, the service excellent, the ride fast, and the track smooth. The Pennsylvania Central Railroad offered none of these. I had paid $8.15 extra for the privilege of sitting in a chair that swung 360° so that I’d miss none of the megalopolitan mess that was the eastern seaboard of the United States. There were some factories to look at, some junk yards, several vistas of rather interesting slums, and one cow.
I’m not sure when it was that American railroads went to the bad. Some claim that it started as far back as the twenties, but it was probably just after World War II when they began building super-highways and you could buy a car again and an airplane ride was no longer much of an adventure. It must have been a gradual decline. The coaches and the Pullmans that wore out were junked and not replaced. The crack train became a joke. The help got old and died and nobody much wanted to work for the railroads anymore. Then suddenly, sometime in the mid-sixties, the country awakened to learn that its skies and highways were choked while its rails were empty. At least of passenger service. Between Washington and New York they finally got one new high-speed Metro-liner running, but only once a day, and it was supposed to make the 227-mile trip in two hours and fifty-nine minutes—an hour faster than the Greyhound bus. Someday they may even run it all the way up to Boston.
Meanwhile, in car or bus, you could creep along highways that were built for the traffic of the early fifties or go by planes that stacked up for hours over airports that turned obsolete as soon as they were completed.
Many of the good ones were gone, I thought. The Commodore Vanderbilt and the 20th Century Limited, for instance. Even the Wabash Cannonball. Yet elsewhere in the world trains were still running, most of them on time. You could go from Tokyo to Osaka, 320 miles, in three hours and ten minutes on the New Tokaido Line. The Blue Train still ran luxuriously from Johannesburg to Capetown, and on the Rheingold you could go from Amsterdam to Geneva, 657 miles, in a little more than eleven hours and dictate to a secretary who spoke four languages while you stared out the window at the castles on the Rhine. I doubted that I could even get a decent cup of coffee on the Penn Central.
At one o’clock we pulled into Washington’s rococo Union Station, almost an hour late. It was still raining hard and I had to wait fifteen minutes for a cab. By the time I got to the Madison and into my room, it was a quarter to two. I called down for a large breakfast and then went into the bathroom to get rid of my beard and the grubbiness of the train.
After breakfast, I called Lieutenant Demeter. “Nice of you to check in,” he said. “How’s the bag-man business?”
“They called a fake switch in a motel about halfway across New Jersey to see how well I follow instructions.”
“But they didn’t show.”
“No.”
“Maybe you’d better drop around and tell me about it.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I was supposed to check in here at twelve-thirty, but the planes aren’t flying and I had to take a train so I was late. They’re supposed to call me here.”
“Have you got the money with you?” Demeter said.
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Here. In my room.”
Demeter exploded. “For Christ sake, St. Ives, get it into the hotel safe. Maybe it’s different in New York. Maybe the people up there are all beautiful and gentle and fond of flowers, but I wouldn’t walk across the street in this town with more than forty bucks cash in my pocket.” He seemed to turn his head away from the phone. “He’s got the money in his room, for Christ sake.” He must have been talking to Sergeant Fastnaught.
“I’d planned to put it in the safe.”
“Quit planning and do it. Where you staying, the Madison again?”
“Yes.”
“What’s your room number?”
I told him.
“We’ll be there in half an hour.”
With the money safely stored in the Madison’s vault, I went back up to my room and stood by the window and watched it rain some more. Twenty minutes later there was a bump at the door; not a knock, but a bump that was followed by a dry, scratching sound as if someone were trying to peel off the paint. I moved to the door and opened it. It was Ogden and his face was screwed up into a wrinkle of pain as the tears ran down cheeks that had all the color of old paste.
“Lemme in,” he said. “Lemme in.”
I let him in, and he stumbled. He was wearing a tan raincoat and he pressed it tight against his belly with both hands, but even the raincoat didn’t stop the blood from seeping through his fingers.
“On the bed,” I said, and grabbed his arm and helped him over to it. He wouldn’t lie down. He sat there on the edge of the bed and held his stomach.
“Oh, God, I hurt! Get a doctor, get me a doctor.”
I picked up the phone and dialed the operator. “Send a doctor up to 429,” I said. “A man has been injured.”
She didn’t argue or ask questions. “I’ll call the emergency ambulance.”
“Do something,” I snapped.
Ogden had fallen over on the bed, his head rested on the pillow, his feet were still on the floor, and his hands still clutched the widening red stain on his raincoat.
“In the lobby,” he muttered. “He used the goddamn knife right in the lobby.”
“Who?”
“Both of them were there. That bitch giggled when he did it.” Ogden groaned and the groan grew into a scream. “Why do I have to suffer so?” he moaned, but I couldn’t think of an answer.
“Who was in the lobby, Ogden?” I said.
“Get me a doctor. Get me a goddamn doctor.”
“He’s on his way. Who was in the lobby?”
“You got the money?” he said, and struggled to get up. “You got the money? Lemme see it. Lemme see the money.”
“It’s not here; it’s in the vault. Who stabbed you, Ogden?”
“I saw ’em on the train and then they came here and the bitch giggled when he did it.”
“Who, goddamnit?” I said.
“That pimp, Freddie. That pimp and his whore.”
“Freddie who?”
Freddie something he started to say but the blood bubbled out of his mouth, and then there was a big gush of it that went all over the pillow, and Lieutenant Kenneth Ogden of the New York Police Department’s vice squad lay still on the bed, very still and dead.
The phone rang and I picked it up. “We’re downstairs and on our way up,” Demeter said.
“You’re too late,” I said, and hung up.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE ASSISTANT MANAGER OF the Madison gave me another room on another floor and looked as if he wished that I would go to another hotel, preferably in another town. After I had told my story to three plain-clothes detectives from the homicide squad who had been summoned by Lieutenant Demete
r, I told it again. And then, just to make sure that I’d left nothing out, I told it a third time. When one of the homicide detectives asked for a fourth rendition, I turned to Demeter, who leaned against the door and stared at the body of his former FBI Academy classmate, Lieutenant Kenneth Ogden of the New York Police Department. Fastnaught was at the window looking at the rain.
“The fourth time won’t be any different from the third or the second or the first,” I said.
Demeter didn’t look at me; he kept on staring at the body on the bed. “Just tell it, St. Ives. Just tell what happened.”
So I told the three homicide detectives how Ogden had died on the bed in my room. One of the detectives was a weary fifty, a stocky man with spiky inch-long gray hair that formed a kind of a dull halo around his face. It was the face of a disappointed listener who had grown tired of waiting for punch lines that never came.
“Start with last night this time, Mr. St. Ives,” he said. “When Ogden approached you in your hotel in New York.”
After I told it for the fourth time they removed the body of Ogden on a wheeled stretcher. Technicians and blue coats had been in and out of the room, poking into the medicine cabinet, counting my socks in the bureau, and making themselves generally useful. Somebody took some pictures of Ogden’s body, but no one bothered about fingerprints. The assistant manager had been in and out twice, looking mortified the first time and despondent the second. The third time he showed up while they were wheeling the body out and this time he looked alarmed. “Down the service elevator, please, down the service elevator,” he said, turning to Demeter. “Can’t you tell them to take it down the service elevator?”
“We’re parked out front,” one of the ambulance attendants said.
“The service elevator,” Demeter said, and I thought the assistant manager might kiss his hand.
“It’s awful,” the assistant manager said to no one in particular. “It’s just God-awful.”
“Tell you what you do,” Demeter said.
