Death Bed

by Stephen Greenleaf

  “You should have gone on,” Hedgestone said valiantly.

  “I’ve found it’s not generally a good idea to run away from gunfire. Not until you know who’s shooting and why.”

  Hedgestone shrugged. “I’m sorry,” he continued. “I should be grateful, I suppose. He might have harmed me further if you hadn’t come along.”

  “He might,” I said. Absurdly, I glanced at Mrs. Kottle for some assurance of my own. Her nod made me warm and cozy. “I’ve got a question,” I said to Hedgestone.

  “What?”

  “What did he look like? The guy who shot you.”

  The smooth brow wrinkled. “If you were to ask me what the gun looked like I could tell you exactly. It was big and black. The size of a howitzer, it seemed. But the man. Tall. Black curly hair. Plaid jacket. Handsome, in a vicious sort of way. I don’t know. I guess I was too afraid of him to look at him.”

  A lot of people could fit that description, of course, but one of them was the guy I had seen come out of Howard Renn’s house and go with him to Cicero’s bar. I tucked the possibility away somewhere behind my desire for a good night’s sleep. I rubbed my eyes and made them sting even more. I needed a third cup of coffee. What I got was a question.

  “What could have happened?” Mrs. Kottle asked me. “How could anything have gone wrong?”

  “Two possibilities,” I said. “One, the money didn’t go to the wrong people at all, and this is just a ploy to allow them to hit you again. That, or else someone sold out to another bidder and leaked the plan for the drop. Either way, it’s going to cost your husband more money if he wants Karl back.”

  “He’ll pay,” she said resignedly. “He’ll pay anything. It’s as though finding Karl has become some kind of last rite for him.”

  “The obsession is typical of the mental aberrations that afflict terminal patients,” Hedgestone said heavily. “Obsessive neuroses, possibly of physiological origin. I still believe we should ignore it, and devote our time to making Max’s last days as pleasant and as diverting as possible.”

  “What if it’s not neurosis at all?” I said. “What if he just loves his son?”

  Hedgestone smiled tolerantly and Mrs. Kottle got up to pour some more coffee. I watched her do it.

  From somewhere over the sink a buzzer sounded, low and harsh. “Max is awake,” Mrs. Kottle exclaimed, and hurried out of the kitchen through the far door.

  “He won’t be pleased,” Hedgestone predicted needlessly. “It might be better to omit any reference to your presence at the beach this evening, in fact. I could say I consulted you after I returned. It might prevent Belinda from being hurt.”

  I shook my head. “It’s too early in the morning to lie. I don’t get good at it till after lunch. And I think Belinda can take care of herself.”

  Hedgestone shrugged and Belinda came back in the kitchen. “He wants to see you. Both of you,” she said. “I told him why you’re here, Mr. Tanner. Not the details, but he knows I’m responsible. He wasn’t happy about it,” she added, echoing Hedgestone.

  I got up and followed the group into Max Kottle’s bed chamber. It was like a stage set, dark as dirt around the perimeter but white and bright in the center, the lace-white hospital bed lit by a single Tensor lamp that rested on the table beside it.

  Max Kottle looked the same or worse, propped up by the inclined bed, pillows billowing behind his head like muffins, his smoking jacket smooth and rich across his chest. He stared at me in silence until I’d taken a chair. “Is my boy dead because of what you’ve done?” he asked roughly.

  I shook my head. “If he wasn’t dead before, I don’t think he’s dead now. They still want money, and since they apparently didn’t get any tonight Karl’s still their best bet. They can’t be certain you won’t demand proof of his existence before talking further. In fact, I’d suggest just that, in case anyone’s interested in my opinion.”

  “For the sake of your professional reputation you’d better hope you’re right,” Kottle said.

  “Look,” I said. “I’m not Captain Marvel. Something may well have happened to Karl. But neither you nor I can be sure that it was because of something I did or because of something you didn’t do, like call in the authorities. We’re both playing it by ear. Recriminations are premature and pointless. In my opinion I didn’t do anything that had any impact at all on what happened tonight, except maybe prevent your economist over there from having his Gross National Product perforated.”

  A guilty conscience brings out the worst in me, and a semiguilty one isn’t particularly attractive either. Luckily, Kottle ignored my taunt. “If the kidnappers don’t have the money, who does?” he asked, to no one in particular.

  “As I told your wife,” I said, “it’s likely that someone who used to be in the gang decided he deserved a larger share, or maybe someone made him a better offer. What I didn’t tell her, but what someone in this room should be thinking about, is that the leak of the plans for the drop could have been on this end. Not likely, but a possibility.”

  “Nonsense.” Kottle and Hedgestone spoke simultaneously.

  “I’m not saying it happened,” I said. “I’m just saying someone should think about it.”

  Kottle shook his head, as if to expel the possibility from his skull. “What can we do now?” he asked.

  “Wait,” I said.

  “Nothing else?”

  “Call the cops. The FBI, specifically. These people don’t seem all that sophisticated to me. The group is evidently split by greed already, and who knows what else might be going on. The FBI is pretty good at exploiting that kind of thing, given half a chance. Plus, if you wait much longer, you’ll never see the money you dropped tonight, regardless of what happens to Karl.”

  Kottle looked at Hedgestone. “I don’t care about the money. We went over all this before, didn’t we, Walter?”

  “Yes, sir,” Walter said obediently.

  “We decided no risk was acceptable, however small, did we not?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Kottle looked at me. “The money is not important. My son is.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I just wanted my recommendation on record.”

  “What do you think they’ll do?” Hedgestone asked me.

  “Ask for more money. Do you have it?”

  “I can get it,” Kottle said firmly. “It won’t be easy. I’ll have to sell more stock, and since I’m supposed to be dead it will violate every section of the Securities Act to do so, but I’ll do it. The other stockholders will suffer because the stock price will drop even further than it has already, but I’ll do it. I have to.”

  “Do you want me in or out?”

  Kottle surveyed his retinue in turn, lingering on his wife, then turned to me. “Belinda assumed a large risk in inviting you to join our dilemma, Mr. Tanner, the risk that I’d be violently angry when I discovered what she’d done. She was completely out of line.” Kottle looked at his wife and suddenly smiled. “It was the kind of risk I often used to take when I was younger,” he continued. “She evidently saw something in you that merited her trust. I value her concern and her courage. You’re in if you want to be.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” I said. “But I have another case that’s active. I can’t promise you my undivided energies. On the other hand, the other case may not be altogether divorced from this one. There seem to be connections.”

  “What connections?” Kottle asked.

  “A couple of things. I’ve been hired to look for a man who’s been missing for several weeks. The man kept a secret apartment under an assumed name. I found the place and checked it out. In one of his files he had a book of poems by a man named Renn. Howard Renn was your son’s best friend when they were at Berkeley. I should also tell you that Renn is dead. He got that way quite recently.”

  “Dead? How?” Kottle’s interest in the subject was tempered by fear.

  “Murdered.”

  “By whom?”

  “No
one knows.”

  “What else?” Hedgestone interjected. “What other connection is there?”

  “A girl came to the apartment while I had it under observation. She was followed when she left. It turned out she was Karl’s half-sister. Your first wife’s daughter.”

  “Good Lord,” Kottle said. “Rosemary? The last time I saw her she was in rubber panties and red ribbons.”

  “Not anymore,” I said. “Not panties, at least.”

  “What’s that mean?” Hedgestone asked.

  “Private joke.”

  “Who’s the man you’re looking for?” Mrs. Kottle asked quietly.

  I shook my head. “There’s no point in going into that now. I haven’t put all the pieces together, but there are some leads I want to work on. One of them may turn out to tell me something about Karl. Keep your fingers crossed.”

  I looked at Mrs. Kottle. She was looking at her hands. There were tensions in the air I couldn’t fathom, a solution in which I couldn’t remain buoyant.

  I stood up. Max Kottle sighed. “The treatments yesterday took a lot out of me,” he said. “The pain is getting worse. I don’t mean to bore you with my symptoms, Mr. Tanner, but please proceed with all deliberate speed. Do whatever you can, but do not interfere with the process of my son’s return. Do whatever they ask. We must conclude this soon. Quite soon.”

  Kottle’s head lay back on the pillow. Belinda stood and beckoned for me to leave the room. I followed her to the elevator. She took my hand in hers and squeezed it. I squeezed back. Neither of us said a word before I left for home.

  TWENTY-NINE

  I crawled into bed at eight and out again at ten without having accomplished my mission; it’s been years since I’ve slept in the daytime. After a bowl of Grape Nuts and a cup of Yuban and a glance at headlines about the new police chief and a kid who survived a jump off the bridge I went to the office.

  It was empty, the way it always is in the mornings, a silent repository of the partially recorded past of the small number of people I’ve been hired to chronicle over the years, a collection of historic fragments of interest only to me and my clients. I read the mail, then wandered around trying to avoid making a decision about what to do next. When I finally got a form around my melted brain I sat down at the desk and made some notes. They didn’t amount to a damned thing. I picked up the telephone and called the Encounter with Magic.

  The frizzy-haired girl told me Amber wasn’t due in for another hour. She said there were other girls available. I said I was sure there were, then hung up. As I was fixing a cup of coffee the phone rang. It was Clay Oerter.

  “I got something for you, Marsh. On Collected Industries.”

  “Shoot.”

  “The exchange has been open for about three hours now, and guess what? All of a sudden there’s a steady market for Collected Industries. In fact, yesterday the exchange had considered suspending trading in CI because there were so many more sellers than buyers, but when they looked at the orders this morning they changed their minds. Steady buy orders all day.”

  “What’s happened to the stock price?” I asked.

  “Well, it opened two dollars lower, at twelve, then moved back to fourteen and it’s hanging right around that level. Even went up a point over that about an hour ago. Understand, if it wasn’t for Max Kottle being dead this wouldn’t be any big deal. It’s not a major move into the stock or anything. But in the circumstances, any market at all is unusual.”

  “Okay, Clay,” I said. “Let’s have it. Who’s the buyer?”

  He laughed. “It cost me a case of Bordeaux to find this out, Marsh, on top of using up a lot of favors.”

  “Put it on my tab.”

  “It’s a corporate buyer. A nominee. No one knows who’s behind it, at least that I could get to. Whoever it is hasn’t come on strong enough to call it a takeover move, but another day like today and that’s what it’ll be. Sooner or later they’ll have to make a filing under the Williams Act, though, if they really want the company and are going to make a tender offer for the shares. Hard to tell what they’re up to at this point.”

  “What’s the name of the nominee?”

  “The Biloxi Corporation.”

  I’d known it, somehow, the way you know it’s going to rain after you wash the car, the way you know you’re going to dribble all over your silk tie the first day you wear it. The link to the Covington disappearance, once as flimsy as Howard Renn’s volume of verse, was now as strong as tempered steel. Covington had been looking into Biloxi, and Biloxi was moving into Collected Industries, which put Covington and Kottle in the stands at the same game. I was there, too, but I didn’t know which game it was. Yet.

  “How many shares has Biloxi bought?” I asked.

  “As of twenty minutes ago about fifty thousand. And still buying. At the market.”

  “That’s better than half a million, right?”

  “Right.”

  I thought it over a minute. “Let me ask you something, Clay, just between you and me. What if it turned out Max Kottle wasn’t dead?”

  “What?”

  “Just suppose. What if that story got out for some reason that didn’t have anything to do with the company or the stock or anything like that?”

  “Well, if that really happened, Max Kottle would be as good as dead anyway. The SEC would go after him immediately, to enjoin him from having anything to do with a listed company, and the Justice Department would indict him for issuing false and misleading statements, and some New York lawyer would file a class action on behalf of all the sellers of stock and ask for a few hundred million in damages. And that’s just for starters. Kottle would be finished on Wall Street, and he’d probably end up in jail.” Clay paused for a moment. “But that just can’t be true, about his not being dead. Can it?”

  “No comment,” I said.

  “Jesus, Marsh. That’s unbelievable.”

  “You don’t know the half of it.”

  “Hey, Marsh. If the SEC ever asks, we never had this conversation. Okay?”

  “Okay. One more thing. What’s the word on Max Kottle’s right-hand man? Hedgestone.”

  “Walter? A good second banana. Brilliant, particularly on the multinational aspects. Why?”

  “How would he be as the head of the company?”

  “Collected Industries?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Lousy. Too much a specialist to bring it all together.”

  “Does he want it? Control of the company, I mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Clay answered. “Probably. You ever meet an intellectual who thought someone else could do a job better than him? Any job? But why don’t you ask him?”

  “Maybe I will,” I said.

  Clay told me he had a few more orders to execute and hung up. I dialed Harrison Quale. His secretary told me he wasn’t in, wasn’t expected back for the rest of the day, could not possibly be reached at home. I thanked her for the noninformation and hung up and tried again. Frizzy-hair told me Amber had just walked in. She also told me to make it snappy. I didn’t tell her what came to mind, for fear she wouldn’t let me talk to Amber.

  Amber’s voice was soft as pudding, as uncertain as an immigrant’s. I asked her how she was.

  “I’m okay, Mr. Tanner,” she said. “I’m leaving here at the end of the week. For good. I’ve got a job at Macy’s, selling perfume. It’s not much, but it’s better than this, I guess, even though the money’s a lot less. No more sugar daddies, you know? Now I’ll have to put up with their wives.” Her laugh was hollow as a gourd.

  I told her she’d made the right decision, then asked if she’d heard anything from Karl.

  “No. Nothing. Every time the phone rings I jump, but it’s never him. Have you found him yet?”

  “No. But I think he’s in trouble, Amber. If you can remember anything, anything at all, it might save his life. I mean that.”

  “His life?” Amber exclaimed. “What’s happened to him? Is he hu
rt? Are the cops after him? What?” Concern drove her voice into a higher register, momentarily reestablishing innocence and youth. I calmed her down.

  “He’s fine as far as I know. Now think. Can you recall anything about Karl that might tell me where he is? Anything about the time he came to see you there at the Encounter?”

  She considered what I was saying. “Is he really in trouble? Are you being straight with me?”

  “I’m being straight.”

  “Well, I didn’t want to tell you before, but maybe this will help you get a line on him.” She paused for effect. “Karl’s a junkie.”

  “What! Are you sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure. He shot up right here in this room. It’s weird, you know. He spent all that time back when I was his old lady trying to get me off the stuff, and now he’s on it himself, worse than I was. I looked around and there he was with a needle in his arm. He’s really sick from it, too.”

  “How sick?”

  “I think it’s screwed up his nerves or his veins or something. He hurts. He couldn’t even hug me without it hurting him. He kept groaning, you know? And he limped, too. Or not so much limped, but didn’t walk right. Like he was walking on fire, you know? He’s real strung out.” Amber’s voice bubbled with eagerness. “I think I could help him, now, don’t you?”

  “It sounds that way,” I said. “If he calls you, or if anyone calls you about him, get in touch with me right away, will you? It’s very important.”

  “I will, Mr. Tanner. Hey. Don’t let anything happen to Karl, okay? I think I’m getting my shit together now. Maybe Karl would want to make it with me again, you know?”

  “Good luck with the perfume.”

  “Thanks. It’ll be nice to smell something pretty for a change.”

  I hung up on her hopes and thought over the possibilities and put on my coat and walked over to Sutter Street. The entrance to the building I wanted looked like something stolen from the temples at Karnak under cover of night. A golden canopy etched with hieroglyphic designs jutted over the sidewalk, beckoning in triumphant rococo. Inside, the black marble walls were streaked with trails of marshmallow. The lighted building directory stood out from the dark like a tablet of divine origin. I looked over the list of names until I found the one I wanted, then entered the elevator and pushed the button for the fifth floor.