by Thomas Ross
“And the cops?”
“Less.”
“What’s the FBI doing?”
“Their usual.”
“You have lines into both places, I take it.”
“Well, yes, I’ve cultivated several sources, of course, and then I can always call on a few old friends, if need be.”
“Slick?”
“What?”
“Just how many old friends have you got? A rough guess.”
He thought about it for a moment, sipped his martini, and then said, “Well, I really don’t quite know how to answer that. I send out around eight hundred Christmas cards each year and I receive approximately that many. But they’re not all close friends, of course.”
“Eight hundred?”
“Why, yes. How many do you send?”
“Last year I think we sent around nine.”
“Nine hundred?” He was impressed.
“No, just nine cards. We got ten, so we’re still ahead.”
“They are beautiful cards.”
“Ruth does each one individually.”
“That remarkable woman.”
“You said you turned up virtually nothing. What does virtually mean?”
“Well, first, of course, there was the possibility of a kidnapping. The union has scads of money now, you know. Not quite like the old days. But there’s been no ransom demand. Then, of course, I totted up Mix’s enemies and, I must say, they’re absolutely legion. He seems to have a most acerbic personality.”
“Any particular enemies? As you say, he has a lot.”
My uncle shrugged and finished the last swallow of his martini. “Well, there’re at least a dozen governors, fifteen or twenty mayors, and perhaps a couple of dozen city managers to whom he is simply anathema—not to mention a host of county officials. Then, too, there seem to be a couple of hundred dissidents within the union. I’m not talking about the rank and file members, but rather about local and regional officers of varying power and prestige who absolutely loathe him. I don’t think loathe is too strong a word.”
“Probably not,” I said.
“And then, of course, there’s Audrey, the woman scorned.”
“When did you find out about them?” I said. “It was supposed to be a secret.”
“Dear boy, it was common gossip around town at least six months ago. Certain friends of mine even delighted in giving me regular reports about the affair’s progress. It almost got into the papers, in fact, especially after Mix broke it off.”
“Well, Audrey isn’t much of one to sneak around.”
“No, she isn’t. I’ve often wondered how she ever met him.”
“I introduced them,” I said.
“You?”
It took a lot to surprise or startle Slick, but when I saw that I’d succeeded I smiled. “It was a cocktail party,” I said. “One of those fund-raising things that Audrey sometimes gets involved in until she gets bored. I don’t even remember what it was for. Something chic and wholesome. Anyway, Ruth was in town to see her dentist and we called Audrey just to say hello and she insisted that we go to the thing.”
“Ruth and you at a cocktail party?” Slick shook his head in mild wonder. I was full of surprises that day.
“It was the first one we’d been to in three years. Maybe even more. Arch Mix was there and he came over to me, probably to trade insults, and I introduced him to Audrey who was on her best behavior. You know, all wit and sex and charm.”
Slick nodded. “The woman can be an absolutely fascinating voluptuary when she chooses.”
“Have you ever seen Mix’s wife?”
He nodded again. “I’ve talked with her several times.”
“I suppose Audrey was on the prowl. She gets like that occasionally. Well, Mix didn’t stand a chance. Not many men would. So that’s how it started.”
“And lasted a year?”
“About that.”
“And how is Audrey?” he said. “I know I’ve already asked that, but what I mean is how does she look to you?”
I shrugged. “All right. Somebody seems to have her under surveillance of some kind.”
“What do you think it is, drugs or Mix?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I ran one of them off with a rube act that shouldn’t have bothered anyone. He showed me a badge and some ID that said his name was Knaster. James Knaster—with a K. He’s supposed to be a detective. About thirty.”
Slick stared at me for a moment. Then he picked up the phone, dialed, and asked for Clarence. I couldn’t tell whether Clarence was the first name or the last, but when Clarence came on they chatted for a while like old friends and then Slick said, “I was just wondering if you could give me a bit of information about a young chap who works for you people. His name is Knaster—that’s with a K. Detective James Knaster.” He waited, listened for a while, then thanked Clarence profusely, and hung up.
Slick looked at me and then held up his fingernails and gave them a close examination. While he was still admiring them he said, “They have no one named Knaster. They’ve never had anyone by that name.”
CHAPTER SIX
SLICK AND I speculated for a while about why anyone with a fake police ID would want to keep a watch on my sister’s house. We ran through several ideas, all of them rather unimaginative, and we seemed to be running out of any ideas at all when the phone rang. Slick answered it, said, “Of course,” and then handed it to me. It was Max Quane.
“How’d you know where to find me?” I said.
“I called your wife and she said you might be at your sister’s and your sister gave me this number. I told her it was important.”
“Well, is it?”
Something had crept into Quane’s voice. It made him talk too fast and run some of his words together. “I’ve got to see you, Harvey,” he said.
“Why?”
“I’ve just got to, damn it!”
“All right. When?”
“Right away,” Quane said. “Now.”
“Well, I suppose I can get down there in fifteen minutes.”
“No,” he said quickly. “I’m not at the office. I’ve got a little apartment over on Mintwood Place. You know where Mintwood Place is?”
“Just give me the address,” I said.
He gave it to me and, as usual, I had nothing to write with so I repeated it. It sometimes helps, but not always. Then I said, “Max.”
“What?” he said and his voice was so low and indistinct that I had trouble hearing him.
“Just give me a hint, will you? A small one will do.”
There was a silence that lasted several seconds. I thought I could hear him breathing harshly and for a moment I was afraid he might be hyper-ventilating. But a phone can play tricks. Finally, he sighed and it was a deep one that seemed to have a sob clinging to its end.
“I—” He started, stopped, and finally when he spoke again it came out in one tumbling rush, the words jamming themselves up against each other.
“I think I know what happened to Arch Mix.”
The phone went dead. Apparently Quane had hung up. He had been very mysterious and very dramatic and possibly even very silly, which wasn’t at all like him. Over the years, Quane had turned into what I couldn’t help thinking of as a rather cool number, what with his vested suits, his tab collars, and his empty grey eyes that seemed to price everything and find it all far too cheap.
I tried to keep what I was thinking, or perhaps feeling, off my face when I turned to Slick and said, “I’ll make you a deal.”
“What kind of deal?”
“A trade-off.”
“Yes,” he said and nodded. “I see. You’re suggesting more of a pool than a trade-off, aren’t you?”
“All right. A pool.”
“And what do you propose to drop into our little pool?”
“I’ve already dropped Knaster. That should be something.”
“Possibly, providing Knaster has something to do with Mix as
well as Audrey.”
“It’s all I’ve got.”
“And now it’s my turn?”
“Yes.”
“Very well, Harvey, what do you need?”
“An appointment with your client.”
“Gallops?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Today,” I said. “The earlier the better.”
There was that about Slick. You didn’t have to spend the afternoon explaining things to him. He thought for a moment, working up his pitch, I assumed, then picked up the phone, dialed, and after a few more moments got through to Warner B. Gallops. It was a pleasure to listen to Slick sell. First he was charming, then he was winning, and finally he was convincing—especially when he lied, which he did beautifully, particularly about what a valuable contribution I was making to the investigation.
“Well?” I said after he hung up.
“Eleven o’clock tomorrow.”
“Not today?”
“No. Not today.”
“All right then. Tomorrow. What was that Gallops called me when you first mentioned my name?”
“A shitbird, I believe,” Slick said. “After that it got somewhat less complimentary.”
The last I had heard, Max Quane was still living with his wife and two sons out in the Bannockburn section of Bethesda, Maryland, just off Wilson Boulevard not too far from the old Chesapeake and Ohio canal. It was a fairly upper middle-class section whose residents had tended to shun grapes, boycott lettuce, and now worried a great deal about what the Japanese were doing to the whales.
On the other hand, Mintwood Place was a fairly seedy block of row houses just off Columbia Road back of the Hilton about half a block from Kalorama Park. The block that contained the address that Quane had given me was partly black, partly Cuban, and partly white. If you didn’t know where to look it was a street hard to find, hard to get to, and impossible to park near. It was also, I decided, a rather good place for a man to keep a small furnished apartment that was none of his wife’s business.
It was nearly two o’clock by the time I found a place to park on Nineteenth Street near Biltmore. I took off my coat, loosened my tie, and walked up Nineteenth to Mintwood where I turned left. It was hot—hot for Washington, hot for New Orleans, hot even for Africa, and by the time I had gone half a block my shirt was damp. By the time I had gone a block it was wet. A couple of small, dark Cubans without shirts sat quietly on a small stoop and shared a bottle of something in a brown paper sack. They watched me carefully as I went by, probably because they had nothing better to do and I was something to look at. Not much, just something.
The address that Quane had given me was a three-story row house built out of beige brick. It still had a porch and on it two small children, a boy and a girl with solemn Spanish eyes, were trying to screw a lightbulb into an empty wine bottle. They weren’t having much luck, but they seemed interested in their problem.
I went through a screen door into a small foyer whose only furnishing was a stolen supermarket cart with a missing wheel. There was a row of six mailboxes with locks, but most of them had been pried open at one time or another. The mailboxes had small spaces for the names of the building’s tenants. Four of the spaces were filled in; two weren’t. In the space for number six, which supposedly was Quane’s, someone had printed in Johnson.
I started up the stairs and didn’t meet anyone until I reached the second landing and turned to go up the remaining flight to the third story. A man came down the stairs. He was in a hurry, maybe even a rush, because he took the steps two at a time. I stepped back out of his way. He didn’t see me at first because he was watching his feet, making sure not to trip. He looked up finally, saw me, hesitated—or seemed to—and then kept on going. I thought he even picked up a little speed.
He was a wide, stocky man with short legs. He had heavy black eyebrows and a dark face that could have been tanned, but wasn’t. He was about thirty-five. He wore a suit. A light blue one. I turned to get a better look at him because I thought I’d seen those heavy eyebrows somewhere before. But all I got was a glimpse of the back of his head. There was a round, white bald spot in his crown about the size of a cookie.
I went on up the stairs to the third floor trying to remember where I had seen the man before. Quane’s apartment, number six, seemed to be toward the back, to my right. I started down the hall. It had the smell of sour milk and Spanish spices. When I reached number six I found the door open. Not much. Just an inch or so. I knocked, but when nobody said anything and nothing happened I went in.
The place wasn’t much of a love nest. It was merely a kitchen to the right and a bathroom to the left. The furnishings were simple, almost rudimentary. There was a table of Formica and chrome, which I think they still call dinettes, and four matching chairs. It looked fairly new as did the sofa, which was the kind that could be made into a bed. On the floor was a cheap rug. A green one.
There were a couple of other chairs, a lamp or two, and in front of the sofa was a coffee table. On it was a phone, the black push-button kind. Next to the phone was a full cup of black coffee with a saucer and a spoon.
I said, “Max?” and then I said, “Anybody home?”
I was looking toward the kitchen, thinking that Quane perhaps had forgotten the cream or the sugar for his coffee. There was a sound to my left. I looked. Max Quane came out of the bathroom.
He came out slowly, on his hands and knees, crawling, although he looked as if he might just be learning how to crawl, the way a baby learns. He was crawling toward the phone. It was hard. The phone was far away, at least eight feet, perhaps even nine. Quane made a yard, crawling on his hands and knees. Then he stopped crawling and collapsed on the green rug, facing my way, his gray eyes open and staring up at me although I don’t think they really saw me. I don’t think they saw anything.
Ear to ear. That’s how throats are cut. “His throat was cut from ear to ear.” I had read it many times, but I couldn’t remember where. Max Quane’s throat had been cut, but whoever had done it must not have been much of a reader, because he hadn’t bothered about ear to ear. There was a deep, short slash on each side of Quane’s throat. The slashes had reached the big arteries. There was a lot of blood on Quane, and he had left a trail of it on the green rug as he had tried to learn how to crawl all over again and had made a yard before he had quit trying and died.
The rest of the blood must have been in the bathroom and I remember thinking that it would be easier to clean up there. It wasn’t much of a thought, but I wasn’t thinking too clearly. I stood there, not moving, staring down at Quane. He stared back up at me, or seemed to, but his eyes didn’t move and they didn’t blink and after a moment or so I knelt down and felt for his pulse, but I didn’t find any. I hadn’t really expected to.
I rose and went into the kitchen. There was nobody there. Just a kettle and a jar of Yuban instant coffee and a box of sugar cubes. I felt the kettle. It was warm, nearly hot. I made myself go look into the bathroom. There are five quarts of blood in the human body, but there seemed to be more than that in the bathroom. It was all over everything, the tub, the toilet, the sink, the floor, even the walls.
Bathrooms are where you go when you’re going to be sick. But I couldn’t go in there so I hurried back into the kitchen and threw up in the sink. After that I ran some cold water and washed my face and dried it with a paper towel.
I went back into the living room, skirting Max Quane, trying not to look at him, but not succeeding. I moved toward the phone that rested on the coffee table next to the cup and the saucer and the spoon. I was going to use the phone to call the police and tell them that Max Quane was dead.
It was then that I really saw the spoon. I stared at it, picked it up and looked at it closely. I must have looked at it for almost half a minute. It made me remember many things and wonder about even more. I put the spoon in my pocket.
I then turned to leave the apartment where Max Quane lay dead with his
throat cut. I was going to leave without either calling the police or looking at Quane again. I didn’t call the police, but I couldn’t help but look at Quane. Although they didn’t want to, my eyes went to his throat where the slashes were. Below the slashes was his tab collar with its neat little gold pin. There didn’t seem to be any blood on the pin.
CHAPTER SEVEN
I DON’T KNOW why I went through Georgetown. I didn’t even remember getting there. But when I realized where I was I pulled into a gas station on M Street and used a pay phone to call the police. I told whoever answered that they could find a murdered man in the apartment on Mintwood Place. I didn’t say who the murdered man was, I didn’t say who I was, but I did say that the dead man’s throat had been cut and then I made myself hang up because I had the feeling that if I didn’t, I would add that the dead man’s throat had been cut from ear to ear and that wasn’t at all the way it had happened.
It got a little better after that. But only a little. I remembered that there was something I had to do. I couldn’t quite recall what it was until I was almost to Key Bridge and then I remembered that Ruth had told me that we needed some gin. Well, that was true. We did need some. Quite a lot, in fact, so I stopped in a liquor store and bought two fifths of Gilbey’s. Or perhaps it was Gordon’s. I really don’t remember.
I do remember getting one of the bottles open and taking my first gulp before I was halfway across Key Bridge. I gagged on the straight warm gin, but it stayed down, and after a few minutes it did what it was supposed to do to my nerves because my foot no longer twitched on the accelerator.
It wasn’t until I’d had my second gulp of gin that I realized that I was going the long way—out the George Washington Parkway to the 495 beltway and then west on Leesburg Pike to Leesburg where I would pick up Route 9 to Harpers Ferry. It wasn’t really the long way in miles, but it was the long way in time. The quicker way was to use I270 to U.S. 340 and then head south. That was longer, but quicker.
I took out my tin box and rolled three cigarettes with one hand because I knew I’d smoke at least that many before I got home and probably more. I had to roll the windows up so that the tobacco wouldn’t blow around and by the time I’d finished rolling the cigarettes it was stifling in the pickup and I was sweating all over. I imagined that I could feel the gin oozing from my pores. I lit one of the cigarettes, rolled the windows down, and had another drink.
