by Ross Thomas
“What?”
“Maybe I do owe the twins’ older brother a favor.”
“He’s dead and you’re not that sentimental.”
“That’s right,” Padillo said. “I’m not, am I?”
Padillo showed me the letter when it arrived by special White House messenger the next afternoon. It thanked him for his services, but after that it got a little vague. In fact, it was as fine a piece of obfuscated prose as I’d ever read.
Padillo held it up to the light to admire the watermark. “Did you ever hear of the guy who signed it?”
“No.”
“I think he’s in charge of the second-floor washrooms.”
“It’s on White House stationery though. That’s what you asked for.”
“So I did.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
Padillo refolded the letter and put it back in its envelope. “Do you still have your safe-deposit box?”
I nodded. Padillo handed me the letter. “Put it in there for me, will you?”
“Sure,” I said. “It’s a pretty valuable document, all right.”
“What do you keep in that box?”
“My own valuables.”
“Such as?”
“Well, there’s my eighteen-ninety-eight Indian head penny.”
“My.”
“And there’s the original manuscript of my prize-winning essay entitled, ‘What America Means to Me,’ written at age nine.”
“Priceless.”
“There’s also my Army discharge and twenty shares of Idaho Power and Light, and one thousand dollars case money in small bills. And should something happen to Fredl, she gave me the only copy in existence of her secret recipe for Denver chili.”
“That letter’s going to feel right at home,” Padillo said.
“Of course, if he’s not reelected, the letter won’t be worth much.”
“I’ve already got that figured out.”
“How?”
“Next time he runs, I plan to vote for him.”
We dropped the White House letter off at my bank on our way down to police headquarters where we spent an hour making statements for Lieutenant Schoolcraft. Sergeant Vernon wasn’t around, nor was I interested enough to ask whether it was his day off.
Padillo and I dictated our separate statements into a tape recorder and while we waited for them to be transcribed we sat in a small office on the third floor of Metropolitan Police Headquarters on Indiana Avenue, Northwest. Time slows down once you start dealing with the police. It slows down even further if they manage to put you someplace where they can turn a key in a lock. The office that we waited in contained nothing to hurry time up. It contained three desks, three telephones, a couple of aging manual typewriters, some chairs, and Lieutenant Schoolcraft.
He sat behind one of the desks. Padillo and I sat in a couple of chairs that didn’t match each other or any of the rest of the furniture in the room. No one had said anything for several minutes, possibly because none of us could think of anything that would be mutually encouraging or enlightening. Or even pleasant.
“It’s just like I thought,” Schoolcraft said finally, putting his feet up on the corner of his desk.
“What?” Padillo said.
“The way you two dudes acted last night. Real cool and calm. Too cool and too calm really—just like it was nothing new to get home from work and find a dead body in the living room. Or maybe the bathtub.”
“We both have low blood pressure,” Padillo said.
“That wasn’t why they called me at six in the morning to tell me about you two.”
“Tell you what?” I said.
“It wasn’t so much about you, McCorkle, as it was your partner here. Did you know that you got a special kind of partner, the kind they’ll bend the rules for?” Schoolcraft’s tone was almost as bitter as the expression on his face. “If I remember right, they told me—not asked me—they told me to ‘extend every courtesy’ and to ‘expedite the normal investigatory routine.’ It’s just like Padillo here was something more than a guy who owns half of a fancy gin mill.”
“He’s got a host of friends,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” Schoolcraft said and closed his eyes and massaged them with his thumb and forefinger. “Well, after I got that call, I couldn’t get back to sleep. I’m not cool and calm like you two. I get sort of excitable.”
I decided that he was about as excitable as wallpaper.
“Well, anyway, I couldn’t get back to sleep so I came on down here about seven thirty just to make sure that everyone was going to be courteous enough for you. Guess who got here five minutes later?”
“Wanda Gothar,” Padillo said.
Schoolcraft didn’t like Padillo’s answer and he didn’t seem to care whether both of us knew it. Maybe he was tired of being courteous. Or maybe he was just fed up with a job that brought him phone calls at six o’clock in the morning instructing him to be nice to persons that he didn’t want to be nice to. His dark face twisted itself into a grimace that almost lapsed into a sneer. Then it relaxed and returned to its normal, expressionless pattern. It was a look that he could wear nicely to a funeral or a christening. But Schoolcraft couldn’t keep the sneer out of his voice. I don’t think I could have either.
“I just can’t seem to come up with any surprises at all for you this morning,” he said. “But seeing that you’re so good at guessing, maybe you can guess what Miss Gothar wanted.”
“She wanted you to give me a message,” Padillo said.
Schoolcraft nodded his head several times, his eyes never leaving Padillo’s face. “You know something,” he said. “She reminds me of you. You two don’t look anything alike, but she sort of reminds me of you. Her brother’s just been killed and all and there’re a couple of questions that I thought I’d like to ask her when she’s still shook, you know—such as where’s she been and does she maybe have some idea about who might have wanted her brother dead. Questions like that. But before I even get my mouth set she’s giving me a message to give to you.”
“Wanda’s like that,” Padillo said. “She’s always held up well under pressure.”
“Well, since I didn’t have any instructions to treat her special, I went ahead and asked my questions.” Schoolcraft fell silent for a few moments, as if recalling the questions he’d asked and the answers he’d received. “You know how long I’ve been asking questions? I mean, professionally?”
“How long?” I said.
“Seventeen years. I’ve questioned all kinds: motherfuckers and stiff screwers and childbeaters and highgrade con artists and people who just cut up other people because they thought it was fun. You name it and I’ve asked about it. But I never questioned anybody like her.”
“She’s special all right,” Padillo said.
Schoolcraft nodded and it made him look even more unhappy than before. “She wasn’t shook,” he said. “Not the least little bit.”
“She wouldn’t show it,” Padillo said.
“No tears, no voice tremor, nothing. She flat refused to make a positive ID of the body, her own brother. Now with anybody else I’d say that maybe they couldn’t stand the sight, you know. But with her—” Schoolcraft broke off his sentence and was silent for another moment or so as if deciding how he wanted to describe Wanda Gothar’s attitude. “She just didn’t really give a shit,” he said finally.
“That’s right,” Padillo said.
Alertness flickered in Schoolcraft’s dark eyes and his nose wrinkled a couple of times as if he had just smelled something he liked. “You mean she hated her own brother—twin brother, at that?”
Padillo shook his head slightly. “They were close. Very close.”
“Then why doesn’t she give a shit that he’s dead?”
“Because he is.”
“So?”
“When somebody’s dead, there’s not much anyone can do about it, is there? Wanda’s what might be called the ultimate realist. F
or her, dead is dead.”
Schoolcraft moved his head slowly from side to side several times. “It’s not natural.” He raised his eyes to the ceiling as if thinking about what he had just said. “Maybe that’s not the right word. Normal. It’s not normal.”
“It is for her,” Padillo said.
“When I asked her where she was last night—all night—you know what she said?”
When neither of us replied, Schoolcraft looked pleased. “She said, ‘Out.’ That’s all. Just one word, ‘Out.’”
“You leaned on her pretty hard, I suppose,” Padillo said.
Schoolcraft nodded. “Hard enough for nearly an hour. But all I got was that one word, Out. No explanation, no evasions, not even an apology. Just that one word.” He paused to shake his head, perhaps at the wonder of it all. “Guess what she said when I asked her if she had any idea about who might have needed to kill her brother?”
“I can’t,” Padillo said.
“She said no. Just one word again, n-o. No. She said it fourteen times in a row because I started counting.”
“You gave up on fourteen?” I said.
“I gave up at six, but went on to fourteen and then quit because all I’d get to number fifteen or sixteen or even thirty-two was that same one-word answer, no. So I didn’t get much this morning, not from her, not from you, not even from the people who run this place, except some bad advice, but I can get that from them every day.”
“You got something else,” Padillo said.
“What?”
“A message for me.”
A broad white smile split Schoolcraft’s dark face. It was a boy’s smile really, a happy boy, and I felt that he seldom had much cause to show it off.
“That’s right,” he said. “I did get that. It’s some message. You ready?”
“I’m ready,” Padillo said.
“She said to tell you, ‘In or out by four in six-two-one.’ Isn’t that some message?”
“Some message,” Padillo agreed.
“You got it?”
“I’ve got it.”
“You know what it means?”
“Yes.”
“But you’re not going to tell me.”
“No.”
“You want me to tell you what it means?”
“All right.”
Schoolcraft put his feet back on the floor, rose, and leaned over his desk toward Padillo. “It means that you and me will be seeing a lot more of each other.”
7
IT WAS fifteen past three when we came out of police headquarters and started walking west toward Fourth Street in search of a cab. I was about to tell Padillo that I thought I’d figured out Wanda Gothar’s message, and ask whether he wanted to be dropped off at her hotel, when a green Chrysler New Yorker sedan pulled up a few feet in front of us and a man got out of the seat next to the driver.
Padillo touched my sleeve and said, “If I say go, run.”
“Friends of yours?”
“Acquaintances.”
The man who got out of the Chrysler wore a spade-shaped beard that was running to gray, and which almost compensated for the high gloss of his cream-colored scalp. A pair of dark glasses rested on his long white nose and his mouth seemed to be trying to smile through the beard at Padillo. He was neither tall nor short and he moved easily as if he still liked to make hard use of his body, even though it was more than fifty years old.
When he got within a few feet of us he stopped smiling long enough to say, “How are you, Padillo?” and then turned the smile back on before Padillo had the chance to reply, rotten or awful or even tolerable fair.
The only other thing I noticed about the man was that he kept his hands motionless and in plain sight, well away from his body.
“Down to pay a traffic ticket?” Padillo said as he turned his left side to the man, his own hands relaxed, but held at belt level so that he could either block a quick left or wave for a cab.
“Actually, we were looking for you,” the man said, not offering to shake hands, but still smiling when he wasn’t speaking as his own hands moved slowly and carefully behind his back.
“Why?” Padillo said.
“We thought we should talk.”
“About Walter Gothar?”
The man brought his hands out in sight again and used them to help him shrug. “Walter—and other things.”
“Where?”
There was that smile again, a glint of white porcelain through a well-kept forest of gray and black. “You know my preference,” he said.
Padillo, not taking his eyes from the man, said, “Do you know a sleazy bar close by, Mac? Mr. Kragstein prefers to conduct his business in them. The seedier the better.”
“Sixth Street,” I said. “I can think of several.”
“Name one.”
“The Chatterbox.”
“Sleazy?”
“Foul,” I said.
“Excellent,” Kragstein said.
“He’s coming along, you know,” Padillo said, nodding his head toward me.
“Of course, of course,” Kragstein murmured and turned toward the Chrysler. He opened the rear door for us. Before we got in, Padillo said, “My partner, Mr. McCorkle; Franz Kragstein.”
“Hello,” Kragstein said, but didn’t offer to shake hands. I didn’t mind. He waved toward the man at the wheel. “You know Amos, don’t you, Padillo?”
“We’ve met,” Padillo said and ducked to enter the back seat. I followed and when I’d closed the door, Padillo said, “How are you, Amos?”
The man called Amos turned slowly in the front seat to look at Padillo. He was the youngest one in the car, still in his late twenties. He looked at Padillo for a moment and then nodded to himself, as if resolving some question that had long bothered him. He looked at me next and the dismissal whipped across his face so quickly that I wasn’t really sure that it had been there at all. He smiled faintly at Padillo and said, “Fine, Mike, and you?”
“Okay,” Padillo said. “Mr. Gitner, Mr. McCorkle.”
Amos Gitner gave me a nod before turning back to the wheel. “Where to?” he asked Kragstein.
“It’s a place called The Chatterbox, on Sixth Street, I believe.”
“I hope it’s crummy enough for you,” Gitner said.
“Mr. McCorkle assures me that it is.”
The Chatterbox drew a mixed clientele in that half of the customers were drunk while the other half were trying to get that way and would soon succeed, if their money held out. We took the last booth in a row of seven that lined the left side of the room. I sat next to the wall, facing Kragstein. Padillo and Gitner, in the outside seats, faced each other across the booth’s formica table top.
The Chatterbox must have been a retail store once, a none too prosperous venture that couldn’t sell enough hard ware or work clothes or maybe notions. Now it sold a little food and a lot of cheap wine, beer, blended bourbon, and gin. I didn’t think there was much call for Scotch.
Remodeling had been kept to the absolute minimum: there was the row of cheap booths; an L-shaped bar with a dozen or so stools; a kitchen which I could smell and had no desire to inspect; a jukebox, and a cigarette machine. I figured that the jukebox and the cigarette machine took care of the rent. The beer companies had taken care of the decorations.
There were six customers at the bar, four of them black, two of them white. No women. One of the blacks was drunk, but pleasantly so, if that’s possible, and both of the whites, their necessary cigarettes all but forgotten between their fingers, had reached the point where they huddled morosely over their wine and perhaps hoped that these were the drinks that contained oblivion. Clean them up a little, find them some new clothes, and they could join the morning Bloody Mary crowd at Mac’s Place and nobody would know the difference until they fell off their stools, and perhaps not even then.
The bartender was probably the owner. He wouldn’t need much hired help: a relief bartender, a cook, a couple of dishwashers who co
uld also swamp out the place, and maybe a waitress or two at noon and at night. It was a cheap place that catered to hard drinkers and the only difference between it and the saloon that I owned half of was a couple of clean shirts and a $100,000 line of credit.
“Admirable,” Kragstein said, looking around. “Really excellent. I’m surprised that you know such places, Mr. McCorkle.”
“I use them to think in,” I said.
Kragstein nodded approvingly, as if he believed me. “I myself find them conducive for business purposes.”
Before he could tell me how business was, the bartender came over, took a couple of cursory swipes at the table with a fairly clean rag, and asked us our pleasure. Kragstein’s was gin. Padillo and I asked for bottled beer. Gitner wanted a Coke, perhaps because he was driving. Nobody said much until the bartender returned with the drinks. He was a stocky, dark-complexioned man, possibly a Greek, and he wasn’t much impressed with his uptown trade. He served the drinks and then waited to see who would pay. They don’t run tabs in places like the Chatterbox.
I kept my hands on the table and so did Padillo and when the Greek started to whistle “Carolina Moon,” Kragstein got the idea and handed over a five. The bartender put 52.80 change on the table and went back to his regular customers. The same drinks in our place would have cost $1.35 more, but that’s how it is with a steep overhead, which some insist on calling atmosphere.
“Well, now,” Kragstein said as he peered about. “This is rather nice. But would it be possible to speak German or French?”
“Either one,” Padillo said, “although McCorkle’s German is better than his French.”
“Then we shall speak German,” Kragstein said in German and I was surprised that he spoke it with an American accent. His English was easy, but also slightly accented, although I hadn’t been able to determine what flavor.
“It was too bad about Walter, wasn’t it?” Kragstein said after he had taken a sip of his gin.
“Terrible,” Padillo said.
“And I believe that it happened in your apartment, Mr. McCorkle.”
“In the living room,” I said.
