Smoke

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Aaaaa!” said many people in the room.

  A mad scramble took place to find the remote, while onscreen the four naked people displayed various mathematical formulae. Two into one does go, as it turns out.

  The remote was in a midwestern lady’s purse, which caused her to turn as red as Rudolph the Reindeer’s nose. “I’m sure I—I’m sure I—I’m sure I—” was all she could manage to say.

  “No one blames you, Edith,” her husband assured her, patting her arm.

  Mrs. Krutchfield had, the instant the remote was in her hands, used it to off the TV, with extreme prejudice. “I think,” she said, “that’s enough television for this evening.”

  No one disagreed. One of the ladies, on quitting the parlor, said rather waspishly in Mrs. Krutchfield’s ear, “I don’t think much of that colonel of yours.”

  “I don’t know what to think of him,” Mrs. Krutchfield replied, which was only the truth. A dubious character from two dubious sources, dubiously yoked together into one fanciful whole, and now was it to come to life? Would Mrs. Krutchfield never be able to watch television peaceably in her own parlor ever again? Would she have to remove those handsome write-ups about the colonel from her guest rooms, the ones the guests were free to take along with them on departure, if they so chose? (No one from this group would so choose, you could be sure of that.)

  How did one find an exorcist? Were they in the Yellow Pages?

  Mrs. Krutchfield went to bed with a severe headache, and tossed and turned all night; alone, at least, thank heaven.

  Most people, including the grinning snip from Brooklyn, left the parlor when Mrs. Krutchfield did, but a few of the midwestern gentlemen stayed behind to try to find those naked people on the bed in the airwaves just one more time. They never did succeed.

  20

  “That wasn’t very nice.”

  “Then how come you’re still laughing?” came the unrepentant voice from the rear of the van.

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t funny,” Peg pointed out, “I said it wasn’t nice.”

  In both exterior mirrors, The Sewing Kit and its collar of pine trees receded in bright morning sunlight, appearing to shiver slightly, as though not yet over last night’s trauma. Everyone had seemed subdued at breakfast this morning in the overly cutesy sunroom, and Mrs. Krutchfield most subdued of all. As she brought out platter after platter of scrambled eggs and sausage and English muffins and fried potatoes and heavily buttered toast, her professional smile had been less than perfect and her doting attention to her guests hampered by an unremitting distraction. Jugs of orange juice and coffee and milk sloshed as she brought them from the kitchen, and she constantly darted glances over her shoulder. From time to time, she trembled all over, like a hard-ridden horse.

  Peg had offered to sneak some food back for Freddie, but he’d said that was okay, he could wait until they left and get something at a deli somewhere, so Peg ate by herself while Freddie packed, and now they were on their way north in their continuing search for a nice place to spend the summer.

  The problem was, most nice places were already gone. To be looking for a summer rental in the mountains north of New York City in the last week in June was an exercise in frustration. Most real estate agents had nothing left to show, and those few rentals that were still on the market were there for a very good reason: nobody could possibly want them.

  Still, they were here, so, once they’d gotten Freddie a sandwich and a Coke to eat in the back of the van, on they went in their quest.

  Most of the real estate agents Peg talked to wanted to use their own cars, naturally, to show this potential client around, but she always refused, saying she just wasn’t comfortable as an automobile passenger anymore, not since that horrible accident that had led to so much reconstructive surgery; you can’t see the scars, can you? Tell the truth, now.

  So the real estate agents invariably agreed to travel with Peg in the van, unaware of the naked Freddie, lolling in the back. And wherever they went to look at a house, Peg would always leave her van door open. That way, Freddie could look the places over, too, and once Peg had returned the agent to his or her office, they could discuss what they’d seen.

  Not that there was much to discuss. Kennels and chicken coops, chicken coops and kennels, and that was how the morning sailed by. For lunch, they picnicked on opposite sides of the van in a field full of flowers, with cows on the other side of a barbed-wire fence, and in calling back and forth to one another, their mouths full of take-out sandwiches, they admitted a certain discouragement. And not just with the house-hunt, either.

  “I’ll tell you the truth, Freddie,” Peg called from her side of the van, waggling a pickle for emphasis, “this eating business is getting to be a drag.”

  “For me, too, Peg,” Freddie’s voice came back, floating around the van. “I’d like to go to a restaurant again, the two of us. I’d like to eat with you even at home sometimes, order out Chinese like we used to.”

  “That’s the way I feel, too, Freddie.”

  Freddie could be heard chewing thoughtfully for a while, and then he said, “Peg, the fact is, there’s a lot of advantages to this invisibility thing, I don’t deny it, but there’s a whole bunch of disadvantages, too.”

  “That’s the truth.”

  “If I could turn it on or off, you know, whenever I wanted, it would be a different thing.”

  “Exactly.”

  “On the other hand, Peg,” Freddie said, “I think maybe all these doghouses we’ve been looking at the last couple days have depressed us.”

  “Even more, you mean.”

  “Yeah. Even more. Maybe we should pack it in. Quit now, and go back to the city.”

  “We’ve only got one more guy on the list around here,” Peg said. “Let’s go see him, take a look at what he’s got, and then we’ll give it up, we’ll go home and forget it.”

  “We can take a plane somewhere,” Freddie said. “First Class is never full, we’ll take one First Class seat, and I’ll sit beside you.”

  “And spook the pilots, just for fun?”

  “Did you like that? The ghost and Mrs. Muir?”

  Peg laughed, and then Freddie laughed, and things were all right again for a while.

   

  * * *

   

  “I have something you’re going to love,” said Call Me Tom. He was a hefty amiable guy in a small office in what had once been a gasoline station back before OPEC, and he’d jotted down Peg’s particulars on a form, asked her about price range, and then he’d smiled and said he had something she was going to love.

  Fine. On the other hand, every other real estate agent had also had something to show Peg that she was going to love, and every one of them had been wrong. So Peg was restrained in her joy. “I’ll look at it,” she allowed.

  “It just came on the market,” Call Me Tom explained, “or it would have been snapped up already. The owners didn’t leave till Tuesday, we needed the cleaning lady to go through, so it’s only today I can start to show it.”

  Peg said, “How come the owners left in such a hurry?” Because if it didn’t mean the owner was on the run from the Mob so the house was likely to get itself firebombed, it must mean the house was full of asbestos that the owner just found out about.

  But Call Me Tom said, “He’s a scientist with a big pharmaceutical company, they had some kind of problem in their plant out on the West Coast, all of a sudden he had to transfer out there for the next four months. He doesn’t like to leave the place empty, so that’s why it’s for rent. Fully furnished. Within your price range.”

  “Let’s take a look,” Peg said.

   

  * * *

   

  Okay. Here’s the house: It’s a small old farmhouse, built in the early nineteenth century, a center-hall Colonial with entrance and second-floor staircase in the middle. Downstairs is a big living room, medium-size dining room, small kitchen, and tiny bath. Upsta
irs, two bedrooms and two more baths.

  Modern windows and screens and central air. A wooden deck behind the house. The swimming pool, small but very nice, was in a wooden-fenced enclosure just beyond the patio. The circular asphalt drive in from the secondary country road included a spur to a two-car garage, built to match the style of the house; it contained a 1979 white Cadillac convertible up on blocks and space for another vehicle, such as Freddie’s van. The house, tastefully furnished with American antiques and every known modern appliance, came with a cleaning woman and a guy to mow the lawn and take care of the pool, each showing up once a week.

  All the way through the place, while Call Me Tom was pointing out features and Peg was trying to see and listen and comprehend, she kept getting insistent little jabs in the side and taps on the elbow from her invisible playmate. In the master bathroom, just as Call Me Tom was leaving and Peg was about to leave, steam appeared on the medicine cabinet mirror, which would be Freddie’s breath, and a moving but not observable finger wrote TAKE IT.

  Peg, who already knew that, rolled her eyes and would have left the room, but Call Me Tom had turned back to remark on something or other, and when Peg looked at him he was frowning past her toward that mirror.

  Immediately, she turned back. Keeping her own head visible in the mirror, blocking Call Me Tom’s view of the message, she stepped forward, saying, “I forgot to look in the medicine cabinet.”

  “That’s funny,” Call Me Tom said, musing, following her.

  As Peg neared the medicine cabinet, an invisible palm swiped over the steam, removing it. Peg opened the door fast, hoping to whack her playful companion a painful one, but missed. The interior of the cabinet was empty. All the personal goods the owner had not taken with him had been stored away in the attic.

  “Very nice,” Peg said, and shut the cabinet door, to see in its mirror Call Me Tom’s face looming over her right shoulder, frowning deeply at his own reflection. She lifted an eyebrow.

  “I could have sworn,” he said.

  She lifted both eyebrows. “What?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  The tour continued, and so did the jabs and jostles, until finally, back downstairs in the kitchen, while Call Me Tom was pointing out the food disposal in the sink, Peg yanked away from one poke too many, and cried out, in exasperation, “I know! I know!”

  Call Me Tom gazed at her, hurt. “You don’t have one of these in New York,” he said, justifying himself. “They’re not legal in the city.”

  “I’m sorry,” Peg told him, “I just, uh, I didn’t mean that, I was thinking about something else. Anyway, we’ll take it.”

  “Good,” Call Me Tom said, well pleased, but then looked confused. “We?”

  “My boyfriend,” Peg explained. “He couldn’t come up today, he’s working, but he’ll visit me on weekends. We’ll share the cost.”

  “Are you sure he won’t want to see it first, before you take it?”

  “Oh, no. I know Freddie’s taste,” Peg assured the agent. “I’m as positive of how he’ll feel about this place as if he were standing right here next to me.”

  “That’s beautiful,” Call Me Tom said. “When a couple have that much understanding of one another and confidence in one another.”

  “We understand each other pretty good,” Peg said, and on the way out she did at last manage, with a sudden unexpected shove of the front door, to give Mr. Smartaleck a satisfying whump. She distinctly felt and heard it hit, and definitely heard that sharp intake of breath.

  Peg smiled, all the way back to the van.

  21

  At just about the same moment that Peg was looking into the empty medicine cabinet up north in Columbia County, “A very frustrating guy, your Freddie Noon,” Barney Beuler was telling Mordon Leethe in the backseat of a maroon Jaguar sedan in the underground garage where they’d met before. Barney liked this way of meeting, except for the dental bills; he really did have to keep those appointments. On the other hand, his teeth had needed work for some time, as both his wife and his lady friend had more than once pointed out. And the main point was, he liked the idea of these secret meetings in the underground garage here, these shadowy figures together. Like he was Deep Throat, in the backseat of this car here. The other Deep Throat.

  Anyway, “A very frustrating guy,” he repeated, and settled more comfortably into the luxurious cordovan-tone leather of the Jaguar upholstery.

  “Is that right,” said Leethe. Sour as ever, which was his problem, wasn’t it?

  The other nice thing about meeting here instead of at the restaurant was, down here Barney didn’t have to do his restaurant grovel with this asshole. They could meet as . . . what? Partners.

  “Lemme tell you about Freddie Noon,” Barney told his partner. “He’s got no phone listed in his name, he isn’t registered to vote—”

  “That’s a surprise,” Leethe said, with deep sarcasm.

  “No, there’s a lotta guys registered you wouldn’t think so,” Barney told him. “Your serial killers, for instance, they tend to be very scrupulous voters. I dunno, maybe it’s a way to meet people.”

  “You were talking about Fredric Noon.”

  “His pals call him Freddie,” Barney said. “And he’s got a true scoundrel’s take on life. No vehicle registered in his name, no account with Con Edison, no way to get a handle on him. A guy that’s ready to cut and run at any second.”

  “Are you saying it’s impossible to find this fellow?”

  “Well, we know he’s in town,” Barney said, “with those fingerprints of his showing up in all the wrong places. Pretty good, huh? The invisible burglar.” Barney’d been getting a kick out of that idea ever since he’d browbeaten Leethe into telling him the secret.

  “We would prefer him,” Leethe said, “to be an invisible burglar for us.”

  “Well, naturally. Okay, the other thing is, besides he’s in town, we can figure he’s got himself a lady friend. Somebody’s got to get those electric bills, put their name on the apartment lease. The question is, how do you find the lady friend?”

  “I take it,” Leethe said, “you wanted to speak to me because you’ve succeeded.”

  “Wait for it,” Barney told his partner. He refused to let Leethe’s sourness spoil the occasion. “It happens,” he said, “I have a friend in the department has a friend in probation has a client that’s an old pal of Freddie Noon. So my friend asks his friend to ask Freddie’s friend how Freddie’s doing these days, and Freddie’s friend says he thinks Freddie went straight—”

  “Hah.”

  “Well, yeah, but what would you expect the guy to say? Except, he says he thinks Freddie went straight when he took up with a dental technician named Peg.”

  “There must be a lot of such people,” Leethe said.

  “Yeah, but they’re all licensed,” Barney said. “Dental technicians are licensed. So we’re talking about somebody that lives in New York, that’s named Peg, that’s on the list of licensed dental technicians, that’s the right age and race and sex and marital status.”

  “She could be black,” objected Leethe. “Or Asian. Or married. Or the wrong age group.”

  “You go with the probabilities,” Barney said. “And when you go with the probabilities, you find she’s a single white broad in her twenties named Peg Briscoe and she lives in Bay Ridge.”

  “Very good,” Leethe allowed, which was about on a par with a normal person having an orgasm.

  “On the basis,” Barney said, “of those fingerprints found at the furrier and the diamond center, and on the basis of Peg Briscoe being a known associate of Fredric Urban Noon, and on the basis of I’m the one that found the connection, I got an okay to go question Peg Briscoe on her knowledge of the whereabouts of one F. U. Noon.”

  “F.U.?”

  “Think of him as F.U.N.”

  “Slightly better,” Leethe acknowledged. “But why go through all that hugger-mugger?”

  Barney pointed at the top of hi
s head. “See this scalp? There’s shooflys want to wear this on their belt. Everything I do, every goddam thing, I gotta take it for granted they’re watching me. So I always cover my ass.”

  “If only my corporate clients,” Leethe said, “could absorb that concept into their thinking.”

  “Civilians think like civilians,” Barney said, and shrugged. “There’s no point trying to change them.”

  “You’re probably right. What happens now?”

  “When I’m done at the dentist,” Barney said, “I’ll go see this Peg Briscoe. You wanna come along?”

  “What about those shooflys of yours?”

  “I’ve already signed out that I’m going to interview Peg Briscoe. That’s where I’ll go, and when they see that’s where I’m going they’ll forget me for today. They don’t have the manpower to watch every red-flag cop twenty-four hours a day.”

  “I should think not.”

  “So you’ll go there, too, you’ll drive, and you’ll park near the place—”

  “Where is it?”

  “Bay Ridge, I’ll give you the address. When I get there, I’ll go around the block a couple times, make sure I’m alone. Then I’ll park and go in, and when you see me go in you go in. Then we go talk to Briscoe together. And with any luck our pal Freddie.”

  “This is very good news.” Leethe said. He damn near smiled, the bastard.

  22

  Driving south toward New York City on the Taconic Parkway, the keys to their new summer house in her pocket, Peg said, “I thought he looked a little funny when I gave him cash.”

  Beside her, Freddie was being Dick Tracy again, always a sign he was in a cheerful mood, sometimes a sign he was in too cheerful a mood, might decide to get playful or something. But at the moment he was just sitting there, being a good boy, wearing his head and his pink Playtex gloves. Using a gloved finger to scratch Dick’s nose, he said, “Whaddaya mean, money? Why wouldn’t he want money? You’re telling me they still use wampum up here?”