361

by Donald E. Westlake

  “I was in an accident.”

  “When?”

  “Come along, Linda,” said her mother.

  “Two months ago,” I said.

  “Where?”

  “Your mother wants you.”

  They trailed by us, across the lawn toward the path. The middle-aged woman said, “I’m coming, Arthur.”

  They trailed diagonally up the lawn. The last thing, the ash-blonde made the little girl empty the water out of her pail. Then they were gone, between the trees.

  He told us to sit down, and we did. He kept his head back, twisted at an odd angle on a faded flower-pattern pillow. His voice was just above a whisper, no louder than his breathing. “Your father is dead,” he said.

  I said, “I want to know about Eddie Kapp.”

  “He went to jail. Years ago.” The head shook back and forth, slowly. “The Federal Government is a different proposition, Eddie.”

  “Is he still in jail? Eddie Kapp, is he still in jail?”

  “Oh, I suppose so. I don’t know. I have taken the final sabbatical, young man. I am no longer chained to the office, I—” His wandering eyes and wandering mind touched Bill again, and he frowned. “Willard? You shouldn’t be here, you know that.”

  Bill was scared. He said, “No, you mean my father.” He broke the mood before McArdle said anything useful.

  McArdle’s face started to close up. He was in the present again, and he remembered what he’d said. He watched me warily.

  I said, “Why shouldn’t he be here?”

  “Who? What are you talking about? I am retired, an old man with a bad heart...”

  “My father shouldn’t have come to New York, should he? Why not?”

  “I don’t know. My memory wanders sometimes, I’m not always responsible for what I say.”

  The boy and girl came dripping out of the water. McArdle’s head twisted to glare at them. “Go out there! Stay out there! This is none of your business!”

  “We’re going up to the house,” said the girl. She was snotty. She’d had money all her life, she didn’t care if she inherited or not. “Come on, Larry.”

  They paused to fiddle with towels and cigarettes and sunglasses. I said, “Better hurry.”

  The girl was going to be snotty to me, but then she wasn’t. She grabbed her gear and hip-jiggled away. She looked discontented, frustrated. The boy flexed his muscles at me, frowning because he’d been left out, and followed her.

  When they were gone, I turned back to McArdle. “Who would know if Eddie Kapp was out or in?”

  “I don’t know. So long ago.” The eyes misted again, cleared a little. “Maybe his sister. Dorothea. She married a chain-market manager.”

  “What name?”

  “I’m trying to remember. Carter, something like that. Castle, Kimball... Campbell! That was it, Robert Campbell.”

  I wrote it down. “That was in New York?”

  “He managed a chain market in Brooklyn. A Bohack? I don’t remember. A young man. She was young, too, much younger than her brother. A pretty thing, black hair. Glowing.”

  He was starting to dream again. I said, “Who told Willard Kelly to stay out of town?”

  “What? What?” His head nearly raised up from the pillow, and then subsided. “Don’t shout so,” he said. His breathing was louder. “I am an old man, my memory is failing me, I have a bad heart. You cannot rely on what I say. I should have told Samuel no. I should have refused.”

  “Samuel Krishman? He doesn’t know the answer, does he?”

  The belly laughed, shaking him. “He never knew anything. A fool!”

  “But you do.”

  He started the old man routine again. I said, “Tell me who told Willard Kelly to stay out of town.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who told Willard Kelly to stay out of town?”

  “Go away. I don’t know.”

  “Who told Willard Kelly to stay out of town?”

  “No. No!”

  I kept my voice low. “Tell me or I’ll kill you.”

  “I’m an old man—”

  “You’ll die. Here and now.”

  “Let me go. Let the past alone!”

  I bowed my head, covered my face with my hands. I plucked the glass oval out. I closed my left eye, and then I was blind. I kept the right lid open, but it was a strain with the eye out. It was warm in my palm.

  I lowered my hands in my lap. Still blind, I raised my face toward him. I smiled. “I can see your soul this way,” I said. “It’s black.”

  I heard a choking. I opened my eye and he was gaping, staring, choking, his face turning bluish red. I put the glass eye back in.

  Bill was already running up the path, shouting for the family.

  Nine

  I had meant to frighten him. He was afraid of death, and I think he would have answered me. I had no idea how strongly it would affect him. I hadn’t meant him to die.

  We had to stay and wait for the doctor. I told them our father had once worked for McArdle, Lamarck & Krishman. I told them he had died recently, but I didn’t tell them how. I told them he had told us once to look up his old bosses, they could maybe help us get a start in life.

  They believed me. It was believable. Bill listened to me tell it, and then he knew it too. But he wasn’t meeting my glance. He thought I’d done it on purpose. I’d have to tell him, once we got away from here.

  While we waited, I talked with Karen Thorndike. She was the ash-blonde. She was the daughter of Arthur and the woman with the beautician’s smile, as I’d supposed. She was divorced from Jerry Thorndike. She said, “You don’t want to come to New York.”

  “Why not?”

  “There’s nothing here but people clawing each other. Everybody wants to get to the top of the heap, and it’s a heap of human beings. A big hill of kicking, struggling human beings, trying to crawl up one another and be at the top.”

  “You’re thinking of Jerry Thorndike,” I said. “You got burned. Not all the people in a city are like that.”

  “They are in New York.”

  Linda, the little girl, came over and started asking stupid questions. She was like her mother, interesting until she opened her mouth. I thought of taking my eye out for her, but not seriously.

  The doctor was big and hearty. People paid him to be like him. His name was Heatherton. He wanted to know what we’d been talking about when the old man had had his attack. I said the weather in New York.

  Nobody was really upset. He was eighty-two years old. They’d all been hanging around waiting anyway. After a while, I asked Dr. Heatherton if there was any reason for Bill and me to stay there any longer. He said no.

  As we went out the private road, a gray Cadillac hearse purred by us, going in.

  It wasn’t yet three. But it was Friday afternoon, so there was quite a bit of traffic headed toward the city, most of it in late-model cars.

  We rode in silence for a while, and then I lit a cigarette and handed it out to Bill and he said, “No, thanks,” without looking away from the road.

  I stuck the cigarette back between my lips and said, “Don’t be stupid. I didn’t want to kill him.”

  “You said you were going to.” He glowered grimly at the road. “You told him you would and you did. I don’t know you any more, the Air Force did something to you. Or Germany.”

  “Or being in the car with Dad.”

  “All right, maybe that. Whatever caused it, I don’t like it. You can have the money in the bank. I’ll need the car, I’m going back to Binghamton.”

  “You don’t care any more.”

  “I’ll stop off and talk to that state cop, Kirk.”

  “And tell him what?”

  “I won’t tell him anything. Don’t worry, I’m not going to inform on you.”

  “I’m not worried.”

  “I’m going to ask him how they’re doing.”

  “They aren’t doing. Tuesday it’ll be two months. They don’t have a lead
, a clue, a chance, or a hope. If they did, it wouldn’t take two months. It’s us or nobody.”

  “I can’t stay with you. I can’t be around you, with you pulling things like that.”

  “I told you, that was a mistake. I didn’t mean for him to die.”

  “Sure.”

  “You’re a cluck, Bill. You’re three years older than me, but you’re a cluck. He knew who chased Dad out of town. Did you hear what he said?”

  “I heard him.”

  “He knew. Do you think I wanted him dead?”

  He frowned at the wheel, thinking it over. After a while he glanced at me. I looked innocent. He glowered out at the highway again. “Then what the hell did you do it for?”

  “I was trying to scare him. I didn’t know it would hit him that big. It must look pretty bad.”

  In some out-of-the-way corner he found a grin. He took it out, dusted it off, put it on his face. It looked good there. “You don’t know how bad, Ray,” he said. “I about had a heart attack myself. You looked like something out of hell.” He glanced at me again, back at the traffic. “A little worse than usual,” he said.

  “You want a cigarette?”

  “I need one,” he said.

  We went back to the hotel and sat around. We went out for dinner and bought some more Old Mr. Boston. We drank and smoked and talked and played gin a penny a point. He won.

  After a while, we finished the booze and went to bed and turned the lights off. But I saw McArdle’s face, bluish red, the eyes bulging bigger and bigger. I got up and told Bill I was going out. He was asleep already, and he just grunted.

  I went out and it was one o’clock in the morning. No liquor stores open. I found a bar, but the only thing he’d sell me to go was beer. I had five fast Fleischmann doubles on the rocks, and then I bought two quarts of Rheingold beer and brought them back to the room. I knew they’d make me throw up and they did, but after that I could go to sleep.

  Ten

  Johnson was around in the morning again. He wanted to talk. I had a split head, I told him to wait. He sat smoking in a chair while Bill and I hulked around and washed our faces and got dressed. Then the three of us went out for coffee.

  We went up Broadway to a Bickford’s, and filled our trays. Johnson just had coffee. Bill and I had eggs.

  At the table, Johnson stuck a spoon in his coffee and stirred for five minutes without paying any attention, while he talked. “I want to give you a little background on me,” he said. “I run a one-man agency. Maybe one or two jobs a month, enough to stay even with the bills. Last year I made thirty-seven hundred dollars. I hate the job, I don’t know why I stay in. Same way a little grocer down the block from the A&P won’t close up and go get a warehouse job. You keep waiting for something to happen, like in the paperbacks.”

  He held the spoon against the side of the cup with his thumb and drank. The spoon handle jabbed into his cheek. He kept watching me while he drank. Then he said, “Most of the time, it’s sitting around waiting for that one or two jobs a month. It’s boring as hell. So sometimes I get interested in something. Like you two. Upstate accents, with the broad A, and you’re living in a medium-price hotel and you’ve got medium-price clothes and a whole middle-class feeling to you. You aren’t the idle rich. And you’re too mad at everybody to be con artists. Besides, you paid me. You’re checked into the hotel by the week, for the cheaper rate. You figure to be here longer than a little, but not long enough to sign a lease on an apartment or get a job or anything like that.”

  He swallowed coffee again. When the spoon stuck into his cheek, it made him look wolfish. Otherwise, he looked soft.

  “You’re not salesmen or anything like that,” he said. “I’ve been in your hotel room twice, and there’s not a thing there to say somebody’s employed you. There would be. Display case, envelope from the main office, something. You go out late in the morning, you spend all day away. At night, you drink quietly in the room. One of you hires me to check a license plate, and the other one gets mad. Doesn’t want his business told around. The license plate turns out to be stolen. I’m told to go away.”

  “Why didn’t you?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “I told you. A ratty office in a ratty neighborhood downtown. It depressed me. You two puzzled me. So I looked you up.” He grinned, bringing the wolf look back. “You’re Willard and Raymond Kelly,” he said. “Sons of a mob lawyer who pulled out of town way back when. Is it your father you’re working for?”

  “Not exactly. He’s dead.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “Not at all.” I finished the toast and the last of the coffee.

  He sat there chewing a thumbnail. He was stupid, but shrewd. I should have left, but I waited. Bill lit us cigarettes.

  Then he stopped chewing the nail and said, “Oh.” He looked at me, grinning again. “Do you tell me, or do I go look it up?”

  “All right,” I said. “He was shot.”

  “Sure. I knew you were looking for something. I couldn’t figure what.” He leaned forward. “All right. I’m a cheap fifth-rate investigator. I can barely scrape up the license fee every year. But I’ve been in this business for twelve years. I have the contacts, I know how to look and where to look. I could maybe save you time.”

  I said, “I have one question. Why should we trust you?”

  “Because I’m fifth-rate. Poor but honest, that’s me. I’d like to do a job because it’s interesting.”

  I chewed my cheek. “There isn’t anything I can think of for you to do.”

  His grin was sour. “You two talk it over. You probably won’t find me in the office, but leave a message with the answering service. If you want me for anything, that is.” He got to his feet, took his coffee check, nodded to us both, and left.

  Bill said, “I trust him, Ray. I think he’s all right.”

  “I want to trust him,” I said, “but I’m not going to.”

  “Maybe we could use his help.”

  “We’ll worry about that when the time comes.” I lit a new cigarette. We paid our checks and went out to the sidewalk. “I tell you what,” I said. “You go on down to the library and look him up in the New York Times Index. He said he’d been working twelve years. Maybe he made the paper once. I’d like to be able to check him out.”

  I told him how to get to the library, and then I went back to the room.

  I was there half an hour when Krishman called. He was mad, but controlling it. “I read in this morning’s paper,” he said, “that Andrew McArdle was dead.”

  “Yes. Heart attack.”

  “Did you have anything to do with that? I want the truth. Were you there?”

  “We were there.”

  “Andrew had nothing to do with your father’s death.”

  “And I had nothing to do with Andrew’s. I didn’t want him dead. He knew something. He would have told me, if he’d lived.”

  “Knew something? About what? Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Somebody told my father to get out of New York. Back in 1940. McArdle knew who.”

  “That’s nonsense.”

  “He said you were a fool. He said you never knew anything.”

  “What? That’s a lie. Andrew wouldn’t say such a thing.”

  I said, “Goodbye.” I hung up.

  When Bill called, he said, “Twice. Once, he was along as witness for divorce evidence. With a husband breaking in on a wife in a hotel room. Somebody’d killed the wife when they went in. Johnson was mentioned as a witness, that’s all. There were a couple more stories on the murder, but nothing about him.”

  “Okay. Any police names?”

  “Detective Winkler. Homicide West. They have two homicide offices here, did you know that? East and West.”

  “Winkler,” I said, writing it down. “What about the other one?”

  “His car was blown up. About three years ago. There was a policeman named Linkovich at the wheel. There wasn’t any explanation, and I couldn’t find an
y later stories on it at all.”

  “Okay, I’ll call Winkler. You come on back. How long ago was this?”

  “The divorce evidence thing? Four years ago. April or May, I forget which.”

  It took a while to get through to Winkler and then he said, “Johnson? Private detective? I’m not sure.”

  “There was a woman found killed in a hotel room,” I said. “Four years ago. Her husband and Johnson found her. They were there to get divorce evidence.”

  “Yeah, wait a second,” he said. “I remember that. Edward Johnson. Vaguely. What about him?”

  “I’m thinking of hiring him,” I said. “But I wanted to get a recommendation I could trust first.”

  “Did he tell you to call me?”

  “No. I found your name in the Times. The story on that hotel killing.”

  “Oh. Because I barely remember the guy. Hold on a minute.”

  I held on. After a while, a man named Clark came on the line. “You want a recommendation on Edward Johnson, is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Okay. He’s honest. He’s also stubborn, and a coward. He’s efficient, but don’t ask him to do anything dangerous because he won’t.”

  “But he is honest.”

  “I think you can count on it, yes.”

  I thanked him. Then I looked up Robert Campbell in the Brooklyn phone directory. There were two of them. I dialed the first one and asked for Dorothea and the woman said, “This is she.”

  “Wrong number,” I said, and hung up. Then I copied down the address: 652 East 21st Street. I got out the Brooklyn map and the street guide. I found the address, and penciled a route to it. Then Bill came back and we got the car out.

  Eleven

  It was a decayed genteel apartment building, with iron grillwork on the front doors and no elevator. We climbed the stairs to 4A and rang the bell.

  Dorothea Campbell was about fifty, tall and stocky and gray-haired. Decayed genteel, like the building. She wore a housecoat and an apron and scuffed slippers. Her face was cold. She had the right and the power to close the door in our faces if she felt like it. She wasn’t used to power, she might abuse it.

  “Hello,” I said. “I’m Ray Kelly. This is my brother, Bill. Our father used to be your brother’s lawyer.”