Smoke

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Checks,” Peg said. Having lived a more or less normal life until she’d met Freddie, it was frequently her job to explain the straight world to him. “Nobody uses cash anymore,” she explained.

  “Whadda they use?”

  “When you go the supermarket, you use your credit card.”

  “Don’t have one.”

  “I know. When you rent a house, you pay by check.”

  “Don’t have a checking account.”

  “I know. Freddie, we might have to get us one.”

  Freddie really and truly didn’t get it. “Why? Peg, cash is money. You know? The green stuff, that’s the actual money.”

  “But nobody uses it.”

  “Big companies don’t use it.”

  “Nobody uses it,” Peg insisted. “So when you use it, you stand out, people look at you.”

  “They don’t look at me, Peg.”

  “You know what I mean, Freddie, don’t be a smartaleck. You know, I used to have a checking account.”

  “What, and you miss it?”

  “The problem is,” Peg said, “when you move a lot of money around in a bank, they have to report it to the feds. I forget, it’s either five or ten thousand. You move more than that, whichever it is, the bank tells the IRS, and they look at you to see what’s what.”

  Dick Tracy’s mask managed to look astonished, even skeptical. He said, “Regular citizens they do this to?”

  “Anybody. Sure.”

  “And the citizens put up with it?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  The Dick Tracy head shook, in mournful wonder. “Peg,” Freddie said, from down inside there, “that’s a world I never wanna be a part of.”

  “I don’t think you’ll be asked,” Peg told him. “But what I think I’ll do, I’ll reactivate my old checking account, or start a new one, and put three or four grand a week in it, so we can pay our bills like regular people.”

  “Peg, I don’t know about this,” Freddie said.

  “And I’ll get a credit card,” Peg said. “Dr. Lopakne’ll give me a reference, if I ask.” Dr. Lopakne was the dentist she’d most recently worked for.

  “Peg!” Freddie cried. He sounded really alarmed now. “I don’t like this, Peg. In our life, we don’t need all this stuff.”

  “I tell you what I’ll do,” Peg said. “I’ll use the address in the country. That way, when we move back to town, I can just cancel everything.”

  “Okay,” he said, but he still sounded dubious.

  “We don’t want people wondering about us, Freddie,” Peg said.

  “Yeah, you’re right, I know you’re right,” Freddie said. “It’s just such a weird way to live, though. Afraid of the feds. Don’t believe in cash money. Putting stuff down on paper all the time. How do the squares stand it?”

  “They get used to it,” Peg said.

   

  * * *

   

  The deal was, they were taking the house for four months, July through October, two thousand a month, and the owners were throwing in the last week in June, but they wanted a one-month deposit, so, four thousand in front. It was when Peg had opened her shoulder bag and taken out the envelope with five grand in it and counted it out on the desk until she got to four thousand, and then put the rest away again, that Call Me Tom began to look a little glassy.

  Peg had seen that reaction, and understood it, and explained that her boyfriend was avoiding checks and normal paper trails at the moment because he was in a legal battle with his ex-wife, which was why Peg was signing the lease by herself and her boyfriend had given her cash to seal the bargain. Call Me Tom understood, of course, about legal battles with ex-wives, so that was okay, but still, at the end, after the signature and the handshake, as he escorted Peg out of his office, and over to her van, parked where the gas pumps used to be, he said, “I hope your friend’s legal problems get worked out.”

  “Me, too,” Peg said, and smiled, but she knew what he meant. Normal people really and truly don’t trust cash.

   

  * * *

   

  The place was theirs right now, to move in whenever they wanted. Driving back, they discussed their plans. It would be nice to make the move, do it and be done with it, but on the other hand did they want to drive another hundred and some miles today? Probably not. So they go home to Bay Ridge, pack, make grocery lists and stuff, sleep in the apartment, and tomorrow morning head north.

  It might have worked out that way, too, if they hadn’t been interrupted. Freddie was in the bedroom, his two beat-up suitcases on the bed, drawers open as he transferred stuff, and Peg was in the kitchen, deciding what to take from the refrigerator and the shelves and what to toss out, when a banging sounded at the front door. Freddie and Peg both moved, meeting in the living room, giving each other wary looks. Peg called at the door, “Who is it?”

  “Police!”

  Already Freddie’s head was coming off, as he dashed back into the bedroom. Peg called, “Just a second till I get dressed!” Then she returned to the kitchen, closed the cabinet doors, and ran some water from the sink over her head, dabbing it quickly with a dish towel.

  Meanwhile, the pounding started up again at the front door. Crossing the living room, Peg called, “Here I come! Here I come!” Opening the door, she said, “I just got out of the shower.”

  It was plainclothes cops, which was worse than usual cops, because that meant already they were taking it seriously, whatever it was. One of them was your typical beefy cop, tough guy, looking for a chance to throw his weight around. He came in first, flashing his shield in its leather case, saying, “We’re looking for Freddie Noon.”

  “Not here,” Peg said. “You came to the wrong place.”

  “No, we didn’t, girlie,” the tough cop said. He put away his shield, then pulled out a folded document on thick paper. “This is the warrant,” he said, waving it around like an incense holder, sanctifying the apartment for his search. “It says we can go through this place, look for your boyfriend.”

  “He isn’t my boyfriend.”

  “Oh, yeah?” The cop opened his warrant and studied it, as though for the first time. “Are you,” he said, frowning over the document, “Margaret Elizabeth Briscoe?”

  Hard to believe; oh, well. “Sure,” Peg said.

  “Then we’re in the right place,” the cop said, and some ghostly stew came floating across the room; it looked something like chicken à la king.

  Uck—she hadn’t known about that. “Let me see that paper,” she demanded, to distract both the cops and herself.

  The cop held it up, so she could see but not touch, then frowned and said, “What are you standin there with the door open?”

  “This all of you?” Peg made a production out of leaning out to look up and down the hall. A voice whispered in her ear, “Train, tomorrow, Rhinebeck.” Ghostly lips touched her cheek. She grinned at the air, winked, and turned back, saying, “The way you came in, I thought you had like an army with you.”

  The tough cop ignored all that. “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in weeks,” Peg said, which was, of course, the literal truth. “I threw him out, I didn’t like the way he carried on.”

  The tough cop said to his partner, “Keep an eye on her, I’ll toss the place.”

  “Right,” said the other one.

  The tough cop left, to thud through the other rooms of the apartment, and Peg now took a closer look at his partner, and was surprised by what she saw. An older guy, sour-looking, deeply lined face, sloping shoulders. Not in good physical shape at all, but not in bad shape in that beer-and-weightlifting way that cops get. There’s something weird about this guy, Peg thought. She said, “What did Freddie do this time?”

  The guy shook his head. He seemed faintly embarrassed. “We don’t have to have a conversation,” he said.

  What? Cops always want to have a conversation, particularly when they’ve got t
he upper hand. Now Peg was really leery of these guys. “I want to see that warrant,” she said.

  “Oh, it’s real,” the guy told her.

  Meaning you’re not, Peg thought, and the tough cop came back into the living room. “The bedroom’s full of some guy’s stuff,” he said. “Freddie Noon’s stuff, right?”

  Peg said, “Don’t you see the suitcases on the bed? I’m packing that crap up, taking it to the Good Will.”

  “He left without his things?”

  “I threw him out, I told you. Let me see that warrant.”

  The tough cop laughed, fished it out, handed it to her. “Always happy to help a citizen,” he said. “Especially if the citizen’s gonna help us.”

  Peg looked at the warrant. It seemed real, but what did she know? “I think,” she said, looking at the tough cop, “I think this is legitimate, and I think you’re a cop, but who’s this other guy?”

  “Detective Leethe,” said the tough cop.

  The other one, “Detective Leethe” bullshit, said, “Let me handle this, Barney.”

  So this is the power, he’s letting the cop march around and be tough out in front. Peg said to him, “You’re no cop.”

  “I want to talk to Freddie Noon,” the guy said, and took a little leather case from his inner pocket. From it, he withdrew a business card, extended it toward her. “I mean him no harm. It’s to his advantage to talk to me.”

  Peg took the card. Leethe, that part was right. Mordon Leethe. The guy was a lawyer! Wishing she had a crucifix to hold up, Peg said, “You still came to the wrong place.” She held the card out, wanting him to take it back. “You’ll have to get the message to him some other way.”

  The tough cop wasn’t finished. “Don’t waste our time with all this shit, okay, Peg?” he said.

  The lawyer wouldn’t take his card back. Still holding it, Peg said to the cop, “I won’t be seeing Freddie, all right? I guarantee it.”

  The lawyer said, “Is that some sort of joke, Miss Briscoe?”

  Peg was so startled that she let him see she was startled, which was of course stupid. He knows! she thought, as she saw the look of satisfaction touch his sour face. Trying to save the situation, even though they both knew it was too late, she said, “Whaddaya mean, a joke? Freddie Noon’s the joke, that’s why I threw him out.”

  “If you have the opportunity to speak with him,” the lawyer said, “would you tell him I represent the doctors?”

  Peg shut down. This lawyer already knew too much. “I’m not going to see him,” she said.

  The lawyer offered a wrinkled kind of little smile, as though he didn’t use those muscles often. He nodded at Peg, nodded at the card she still held, then looked at the cop. “Come on, Barney,” he said. Once more, he nodded at Peg. “Sorry to disturb you,” he said.

  After they left, Peg went back to the kitchen to try to concentrate on what she’d been doing before those two had come crashing in here. But it was hard not to be distracted. And she couldn’t bring herself to throw away the lawyer’s card.

  23

  “Frankly,” the attorney said, “I believe you’ve been avoiding me.”

  Well, of course Mordon had been avoiding the fellow. It was sufficient reason merely that this attorney, one Bradley Cummingford, had left a series of messages over the past week describing himself as representing the doctors Loomis and Heimhocker, and leaving a number at Sachs, Fried, one of the most prestigious old-time law firms in New York. However, had Mordon known that Cummingford was also someone who said “frankly,” he would have gone on avoiding him forever.

  Anyway, so far as Mordon was concerned, Loomis and Heimhocker were cut out of this matter, no longer involved. Besides which he was their attorney, through the beneficent goodwill of NAABOR; the idea that the doctors might feel the need for outside counsel—independent counsel, if you will—was aggravating, but no more.

  At least, not until today’s phone memo, which had been waiting on Mordon’s desk when he’d arrived this morning. He hadn’t returned to the office after yesterday’s unsettling session with Miss Peg Briscoe, a self-possessed tart with rather a quicker brain than Mordon had expected. After they’d left Miss Briscoe’s residence yesterday afternoon, with a pretty good idea that Fredric Noon had been somewhere in the vicinity, but was no more, Barney had said, “Leave it to me from here,” and Mordon had been happy to agree. He knew his own uses for an invisible Fredric Noon were essentially benign—NAABOR would pay the fellow well, for what amounted to no more than industrial espionage—and he suspected that Barney’s ideas were cruder and probably more dangerous and less legal, but they could work out their differences later, once they actually had their hands on the man.

  In the meantime, Loomis and Heimhocker were no more than irrelevancies, if irritating ones. But now, this morning, the latest message from their “attorney,” Bradley Cummingford, was: The doctors intend to go public.

  Go public? With what? To whom? How? Nevertheless the threat was enough to force Mordon at last to return Cummingford’s call, only to hear him say “frankly.”

  Twice. “Frankly,” Bradley Cummingford said, “I had expected more courtesy from a firm of your standing.”

  Had you. “What surprises me,” Mordon said, “is that you represent yourself as attorney for my clients.”

  “I believe,” Cummingford said, “your client is NAABOR.”

  “I represent Drs. Loomis and Heimhocker,” Mordon said, “in matters concerning their employment by the American Tobacco Research Institute. Any invention, discovery, product, commodity, or theorem they produce as employees of the institute naturally belongs to the institute. It is my job to protect the interests of both the institute and the doctors in any matter concerning or relating to that employment.”

  “And if the interests conflict?”

  “How can they?”

  “Frankly,” Cummingford said, doing it again, “I was thinking of the invisible man.”

  Mordon blinked rapidly, several times. “I’m not sure I—”

  “Frankly, Mr. Leethe, my clients are afraid you have it in mind to make off with their invisible man.”

  “Their invisi—”

  “Leaving them to fret over questions of medical ethics, not to mention laws that might be, perhaps have already been, broken. My clients have no intention of being made the goats in this matter, which is why, against my advice, they have expressed the desire to go public with the facts of the case.”

  Against Cummingford’s judgment; well, at least there was that. “What do they hope to gain by going public, as you put it?”

  “Frankly, they hope to distance themselves from any legal fallout that might ensue.”

  “Have you told them, Mr. Cummingford, that they’ll simply make fools of themselves? That either they won’t be believed, which will ruin them as researchers forever, like those cold-fusion idiots from Utah, or they will be believed, in which case they are already at legal risk?”

  “Frankly,” the damn fellow said, over and over again, “my clients have, I would say, minds of their own. Which is why, Mr. Leethe, I strongly suggest a meeting among the four of us, before my clients do anything irrevocable.”

  No way out of it, Mordon saw. But Cummingford, apart from his infernal “frankly”s, seemed rational enough. “Where?” Mordon demanded. “When?”

  “The sooner the better. Four this afternoon?”

  “Fine. Where?”

  “The conference room here is very—”

  “Bugged.”

  A tiny silence, and then a laugh. “Well, yours over there will be, too, won’t it?”

  Mordon didn’t dignify that with a response.

  Cummingford said, “How about the doctors’ facility? You’ve been there before, I understand.”

  Facility—oh, yes, that place. “The townhouse, you mean.”

  “At four?”

  Damn you all. Is Barney Beuler accomplishing something or not? Is there any point in delay? Or is th
ere too much danger? “At four,” Mordon agreed.

  24

  Rhinebeck. What was the damn woman doing in Rhinebeck? Meeting three trains so far, and so what?

  Yesterday, after tossing Peg Briscoe’s apartment and reassuring himself that Freddie Noon actually did live there, Barney had sent lawyer Leethe on his way and had then driven slowly and purposefully around the neighborhood. He had earlier collected, from Motor Vehicle, the make, model, color, and tag number of a van registered to Margaret Briscoe at that Bay Ridge address, so all he had to do now was find it.

  But that took a lot longer than he’d expected. It was over an hour before he saw the damn thing, so smug and demure and unnoticeable and safe, tucked away in the parking lot next to the local firehouse. “Goddam, Freddie,” Barney said out loud, driving by, grinning at that van behind the chain-link fence. “You’re a pretty clever fella, Freddie. But so am I.”

  Barney parked half a block away, and from the glove box he took the tailing transmitter he’d lifted years ago from Stores at Organized Crime Detail, for just such a situation as this. The tailing transmitter came in two parts, one being a tiny dome-shaped black bug with one sticky side when you peeled off the tape, and the other being a small flat metal box, about the size and shape of a TV remote control, but with a round compass dial where the remote would have had all its buttons. Leaving the compass in the glove box, Barney pocketed the bug and took a walk.

  At the firehouse, Barney ID’d himself as a member of a collateral uniformed force. He explained that a blue Toyota had been involved earlier today in a fender-bender with a car driven by a well-known mafioso, and that the Organized Crime Squad was trying to find that Toyota to tell its driver he might be facing more retribution than he expected. No, Barney didn’t have the Toyota’s tag number, but there was a blue Toyota of the right model parked next to that van in that parking lot there that matched the description. Okay if he looked it over?