Suddenly I thought of Charlie Sleet and the group he had told me about, the group on the make for guns and explosives, the group that was going to pay cash, big cash, for that kind of ordnance. It seemed possible that the Kottle kidnapping would be the source of those funds, that Karl Kottle was the trade-off for enough munitions to blow the lid off Mt. Diablo, enough to make every person of wealth or power in the city lie awake at night wondering if they would be shot the instant they left the house.
But I couldn’t go to Charlie Sleet with what I had, or thought I had, because there wasn’t any proof at all and because even if there was I couldn’t do it without Max Kottle’s approval. All I could do was sit and wonder. One thing for sure, if international terrorists were really behind the kidnapping, then the chances of Karl Kottle being found alive after the ransom was paid were as slim as parchment.
“Why the hoax that Max had died?” I asked after a while, grabbing a question that was floating past.
A grim smile appeared briefly above the set of her jaw. “That was Walter’s idea. He said if the kidnappers thought Max was dead, then maybe they would release Karl and try something or someone else. He prepared a press release that stressed how control of Collected Industries had passed to the Executive Committee and that all the current projects were suspended until the committee could convene.”
“The SEC won’t like Max issuing a statement like that. I’ll bet the price of the stock is dropping like crazy.”
“Max doesn’t care what the SEC thinks. He just wants to see Karl alive. Walter said the Sons and Daughters might not want to deal with a committee. Max thought it was worth a chance.”
“Was he right?”
“We don’t know. No one’s heard from them since the first call.”
“The five days won’t be up till tomorrow,” I pointed out.
“I know that,” she said.
I took a deep breath and held it for a minute, trying to clear my head before the last round. “What is it you want me to do, Mrs. Kottle?” I asked softly.
She looked at me for the first time in a while, her eyes shining like sun on snow. “I just …” she stammered. “There’s no one I can turn to. Max is my only friend, really, and my family is, well, they have nothing to say to me except ‘Come home.’ I thought you might have some experience in these matters. I thought you might help me, tell me if Max is making a mistake.”
“In paying off the kidnappers?”
“Yes.”
I shook my head. “I can’t say it’s right and I can’t say it’s wrong. Sometimes paying off takes care of it. Other times it doesn’t. I don’t know what the odds are. No one does, really, since lots of times when the ransom is paid the case never becomes public knowledge. There are probably twice as many kidnappings as the number reported to the police. There’s just no way I can tell you what to do.”
She nodded as though she had expected that answer, had expected me not to be of help. All of a sudden I found myself wanting to help her more than I had wanted anything in a long while.
“Would you do this, then?” she asked wistfully. “Would you go along when the money’s delivered? To see that nothing goes wrong? Walter thinks he can handle it, but I’m not sure.”
I thought that one over. Again, there were a lot of reasons not to do it, not to enter a contest where the only prize was guilt if anything went wrong, but there was one big reason to agree and she was sitting right in front of me. “Does your husband want me to?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I haven’t discussed it with him. I didn’t want to get his spirits up if you weren’t willing.”
“Why did you think I wouldn’t be willing?”
“Well, it could be dangerous, couldn’t it? I thought you might prefer not to get involved.”
The drawl had slipped back into her voice. I smiled and she smiled back. “Where’d you go to college?” I asked.
“LSU,” she said. “Why?”
“Whoever taught you psychology did a good job.” I met her eyes. She just kept smiling. “I’m on another case now,” I explained. “There are things I have to do.”
“Please? For Max?”
“Not for Max.”
“For me?”
I didn’t answer.
She looked inside me then, with those red and black orphan’s eyes. I tried to make everything in there invisible but I doubt if I succeeded. “I suppose your motives are unimportant,” she concluded finally.
“To Max. To you. But not to me.”
She just nodded.
“Okay,” I said briskly. “I have to be out for a while tomorrow. Have your husband call me and hire me back. If I’m in on this and things go wrong, I don’t want him blaming me.”
“He won’t.”
“He might.”
“Perhaps you’re right. I guess I don’t know him that well.”
“No one knows anyone that well.”
“I’ll talk to him,” she said. “But you must be ready. They could even call later tonight.”
“I’ll be ready. If I’m not in, my service will take the message. I’ll check with them every half hour.”
Belinda stood up, pressing her skirt to her thighs, patting her hair to her temple. “I appreciate this, Mr. Tanner,” she said uneasily. “But you should know, there are certain forms of payment that are not available, not as long as Max is alive. I hope you understand.”
“I understand that; you understand this. I’m strictly a capitalist. Cash and carry. No barter involved. Never.”
She kissed me lightly and said good-bye.
TWENTY-FOUR
If you make your living as a detective you tend to write off mornings. No matter what’s involved in the case—money, sex, love, hate—nothing of significance ever happens before noon. So by the time I found myself strolling down Columbus on the way to the office it was already past lunchtime.
I’d drifted in and out of sleep all night, alternately listening groggily for a telephone call about a kidnapping and dreaming fitfully of sailing to sea on a sloop called Idiot with an all-girl crew and a tattered mainsail. As a result, I was hung over and tired. Life had gotten complicated. Two eases were active, two people were dead, two men were missing, and one puzzle was unsolved, which was one more than I felt capable of solving at the moment.
The situation was simple enough. Karl Kottle was still missing, only this time in order to find him I would have to find his kidnappers. Mark Covington was missing also, most likely because he wanted to be, and to find him I was going to have to be a lot luckier than I felt.
As a result of Belinda’s visit my attention had shifted almost entirely back to the Kottle case. There seemed to be danger there, as imminent as a winter storm, and on top of that there was a client I wanted badly to please, so I ran the previous week’s activity through my mind and picked out some threads that were loose enough to grab onto. At the same time I tried to dilute my guilt over my temporary abandonment of Chet Herk with the thought that the little volume of Howard Renn’s poetry I’d found in Mark Covington’s files might mean there was a connection of some sort between the two cases. That thought diluted my guilt the way sweat dilutes the sea.
I had one stop to make and I made it. Jerry was wearing the usual smile on his face and the usual apron over his clothes. He knew what I was there for and he ducked into the back room for a moment, then brought them out immediately.
“These are pretty lousy pictures, Marsh,” he told me as he emerged from behind the curtain. “Even for an Instamatic. The backlight from the window washes everything out, the subjects were moving, and whoever pressed the shutter must have had third-degree palsy.”
“Other than that, how are they?” I joked.
“See for yourself.”
Jerry tossed a flat gray packet on the counter and I opened it up. He’d blown them up to five by seven, and they weren’t bad, really, but only because Jerry was a wizard with a negative, any negative. The one on top was of Amber, t
he one I had taken, full face, dimly desperate. “I shot this one,” I said, showing it to Jerry.
“Well, it’s better than the others, but if I were you I wouldn’t count on displacing Avedon.”
“I don’t count on finding a clean shirt, Jerry.”
I leafed quickly through the rest of the pictures, then went through them again, more slowly. About half were individual shots and half groups of two or three. Some were identifiable, but a lot were so blurred or hazy I couldn’t tell one form from another. Still, I got a nice surprise: souvenirs of Karl Kottle’s appearance at The Encounter with Magic.
Thanks to Jerry I could recognize three different people. One was Amber and one was Howard Renn. One was Rosemary, Karl Kottle’s half-sister, the girl I’d trailed from Cicero’s. Which meant one must have been Karl. I looked at that one the longest.
Mrs. Renn was right. He had changed a lot since high school. He was slim, almost emaciated, with a receding hairline and an aquiline nose and small, black eyes that tried but failed to look pleased at the frolic the rest of the group was engaged in. The only trace of his boarding school days was in his posture. He was sitting stiffly on the edge of the bed in Amber’s room, staring reluctantly and sadly into the camera, Torquemada at a satyrs’ reunion.
“Two bucks,” Jerry said.
“It should be more, Jerry.”
“It should be what I say it is, Marsh. Two.”
I gave him the money. “How’s your search for the mysterious Madonna coming?”
“Slowly,” Jerry said. “Oh, so slowly. I’m positive she shops at the Marina Safeway. One of these days I’ll ambush her in the finger food department.” Jerry was still nodding happily to himself when I left his shop.
When I got to the office I turned up the heat and put on the coffee and opened the mail, then nestled next to the telephone. My first call was to Gwen Durkin, my companion of Monday night past.
She answered the phone after the first ring. She said she was doing fine, was busy, was tired, and was looking forward to the next week when she would begin working two evenings a week at the Hunter’s Point Medical Clinic.
At the first gap in the conversation I told Gwen I wanted to see her again sometime soon. She asked if I had anything specific in mind. When I said that because of a case I was on I couldn’t make any time commitments for a while, the smile went out of her words. When I asked if she’d reconsidered her refusal to tell me about why Karl Kottle had been seeing Doctor Hazen on a regular basis, she said she most definitely had not. Her voice hardened with each phrase.
I asked if Doctor Hazen was in. Gwen said he was over at the hospital. Then she said she had better things to do. Then she hung up.
My gut started to swirl a little, the way it does whenever I’ve hurt someone unnecessarily, but I had to get on with my job.
I dialed again, this time to a stockbroker I’d defended once back in my lawyer days. A semisenile widow whose husband had compiled the biggest portfolio of losers since ’29 had been persuaded by a Market Street shyster to sue Clay Oerter, the broker, for churning her account. Clay told me he had just been unloading the losers as advantageously as possible, and we put together a chart that proved it. I got the case tossed out on a summary judgment, but Clay was still out a lot of embarrassment and a lot of business and a lot of money for my fee. Now he’s a confirmed member of one of the largest clubs there is: The Lawyer Haters. The club will keep growing as long as any lamebrain can put a person through the agony Clay went through just for the price of a filing fee.
“How you doing, Marsh?” Clay said. His voice popped like bacon frying. “Want me to put you onto a sure thing? Amalgamated Synthetics. Five-and-an-eighth bid. Zero downside risk. Also Milton Mufflers. Sell short against the box.”
“No dice, Clay,” I interjected before he could go on.
“Why not?”
“No money.”
“Don’t feel like the Lone Ranger. The only people with money these days are selling drugs or writing horror stories or bought gold at ninety-five. What can I do for you besides pray?”
“How about Collected Industries?” I asked.
“How about it? Max Kottle’s dead. Big transition problem. Got to be. I haven’t checked our research on it, but off the top I’d recommend staying away.”
“I’m not planning to buy, Clay. But do some checking. Find out what’s been happening to the stock since the news got out that Kottle is dead. Find out who’s been buying, if anyone.”
“The first is easy, Marsh. The stock’s dropping, I’m sure of it. Kottle put that bundle together all by himself. As far as I know, no one in lower management has anything like his genius. They’ll have to bring someone in from outside. It’ll take time.”
“How about the stock buyers?”
“Not easy. Most shares are bought in a street name, you know. I’ll have to get some breaks to have anything for you very soon. When do you need it?”
“Yesterday.”
“This afternoon’s as good as I can do. I’ll have to try to reach the specialist in the stock, and he won’t be available till the exchange closes. I’ll get back to you.”
I thanked Clay in advance and broke the connection and dug another number out of the directory. The line was busy. I gulped down some coffee and tried again. Still busy. I checked my watch. The address was reasonably close to the place I was headed next, so I grabbed a very late lunch at McArthur Park, flirted ridiculously with a waitress who was half my age and twice my sophistication, then got my car out of the lot and drove to an apartment building on Buchanan, in the Western Addition.
I parked behind a Falcon that had been left for dead for at least three months, then climbed the stairs to Apartment 12. The halls smelled of urine and something worse. The walls were streaked with finger marks that could have been dirt or could have been blood. In that neighborhood there’s not much difference between the two. The door I wanted didn’t open till the sixth knock.
She didn’t look much different, except that the stocking cap was gone and the fire in her voice had burned down to coals and ash. The only signs of mourning were her black brows.
“I was sorry to hear about your husband,” I began. “I’m the guy you talked to outside his house a week or so ago.”
“I remember.”
“Do you mind talking with me for a few minutes?”
She glanced at her watch. “I’m moving tomorrow,” she explained. “There’s a million things to do. Will it take long?”
“It depends on what you know.”
She looked at me speculatively, dubiously, then asked me to come in.
She turned and walked into the living room. It was as dreary as you’d imagine it would be, except that the boxes stacked all around the room indicated the dreariness was about to be passed, like seisin, to the next tenant. Over in the corner a little blond girl was stacking blocks. She paid no attention at all to me. I didn’t blame her.
“I’m rich all of a sudden,” Mrs. Renn declared. “Did you know that? Howard’s parents bought a big insurance policy for him when he was small. The fat fool never got around to replacing me as the beneficiary. Too busy mauling eighteen-year-olds. Well, thanks to dear old Howard I may maul a few eighteen-year-olds myself.”
“Lucky for you. Lucky for the boys. Lucky for everyone but Howard.”
“Oh? Am I supposed to pretend I’m bereaved? Am I crass to speak ill of the dead? Bullshit. He treated me like scum, so good riddance. I just wonder how lily-livered Howard got up guts enough to make someone mad enough to kill him.”
“I wonder about that, too. I thought you might be able to help me find the answer.”
“Why on earth would you want to do that?”
“Because whoever killed Howard may be involved in a case I’m working on.”
“And what case would that be?”
“That would be a confidential case. Like all cases.”
She smiled, smug and complacent. “My, my. How mysteri
ous. I’m trying to think of a reason why I should tell you anything, but I’m having trouble. Perhaps you can help. If not, perhaps you can leave.”
I got a little hot. “Whatever happened between you and Howard at the end, at the beginning you loved each other and had a child together and presumably one or two months of joy. He’s dead. You’ve got his money. You’ve got your child. What do you have to gain by concealing his killer?”
She didn’t say anything, but she was thinking. I threw another stick on the fire, a big stick. “I didn’t read anything in the papers about you sitting outside Howard’s house all day every day for the past month. The cops will be interested to learn that. The killer will be even more interested.”
The flames were back, and she was mad as hell at me, but she was also scared just a little. “What do you want to know?”
“I want to know what you saw while you were sitting out there all those days. Who went in there? What went on that was unusual? Anything.”
She walked over to the couch and wedged herself in between two boxes. One of them tilted as she sat down and something slid out of the box and onto the floor. I picked it up. It was a picture of her husband. He was smiling happily. Beneath his beatific face he’d written a couplet. It was pretty funny and pretty erotic. I handed her the picture. She looked at it and swore.
“I saw a bunch of girls,” she said sarcastically, “and the only thing any of them could kill is a marriage. I saw some nut driving around in the dark with his sunglasses on. And I saw the guy who was there the day you were, the one in the lumber jacket. Remember?”
I remembered. Then I remembered something else. “Who’s Woody?” I asked.
Mrs. Renn smiled. “Rosemary. Rosemary Woods, you know? Only this is Rosemary Withers. She’s Karl Kottle’s half-sister. She leeched around Karl like a groupie.”
Another connection. Karl and Rosemary. Rosemary and Cicero’s. Cicero’s and Renn. Renn and Covington. The links were being forged, but not rapidly enough. The chain was too short for anything but scrap. “Who was the guy in the sunglasses?”
Death Bed Page 17
