by Matt Witten
"Yes, no one is a saint, and no one is immune. A man can get free Ethiopian anywhere, if he knows what cards to play."
There was nothing else on the page but price lists for exotic coffees. I sat there and reread Penn's last three sentences. Then I reread them again.
If I understood them right, The Penn had gotten his free Ethiopian by blackmailing people.
Suddenly that crazy idea of mine, that Penn had been murdered, came back to me. But this time it didn't seem so crazy.
Two burglaries, alleged death threats, and now, for icing on the muffin, blackmail.
I got up and paced the kitchen floor. Where had The Penn drunk free Ethiopian? City Hall, the Arts Council, and maybe Madeline's too, if she had lied to me about him paying for his coffee.
Had blackmailing these people led to The Penn's death?
Had one of them, say, poisoned his coffee?
But wait a minute. The county medical examiner had already checked the body out and ruled it a heart attack.
On the other hand, though, how carefully would the local medical examiner check a corpse from the town bum, a guy with no money and no family? He probably wouldn't bother to check for poison or anything like that. Sure, the dead man was only fifty-three, relatively young for a heart attack, but no doubt the M.E. would figure that Donald Penn's lifestyle aged a man quickly.
I got some milk from the refrigerator to calm my nerves. Then, all of a sudden, I began to laugh at myself. What was I doing here? Who did I think I was, Columbo?
Then the telephone rang.
The kitchen clock said 2:00 a.m. At first I had the wild feeling it must be the murderer himself, or herself. But then I realized that made no sense. It had to be my agent; no one else would be rude enough to call me this late.
As I rushed to get the phone before it woke up Andrea, my mind fast-forwarded to all the stuff I'd be doing in the next few days. First I'd FedEx the contract to Andrew—to his house, since it was Friday already. Then the producer would FedEx me the script and call me up to tell me how terrific I was and how ecstatic she was to be working with me. I'd tell her how terrific she was and how ecstatic I was to be working with her. Then we'd have a marathon three-way phone conversation with the director to make sure we all shared the same artistic vision about mutant beetles. Good old mutant beetles—soon they'd rule my life. Soon I'd be working twenty-four/seven, and I'd have no time for anything else.
Including playing Columbo.
"Hi, Andrew," I sighed into the phone.
"You told someone, didn't you?"
Whoa. Definitely not Andrew—it was a woman. But who? I was mystified. "Told someone what?" I tried.
"About the application, damn it," the woman sputtered furiously, but her voice sounded girlish, and I figured it out—Molly Otis, the funeral home daughter. "It had to be you. I didn't talk to anyone else. Now you got me in trouble!"
"What kind of trouble? Who's bothering you?"
"I don't know. Nobody." Molly's anger turned into a whine. "Just don't ever say my name again, okay? Please?"
"Molly, I have got to know what the hell—"
"I'm not talking to you anymore!"
And she slammed down the phone.
I looked in the phone book. Molly wasn't listed, so maybe she still lived at home, but I doubted it. Any girl who grows up in a funeral director's house is going to get her ass out of there as fast as she can.
I called the Skidmore operator, an uptight-sounding, middle-aged woman who confirmed that Molly did indeed live in the dorms and had her own phone number. But she wouldn't give it up to me. "I'm not authorized," she said. Her voice sounded familiar—was Ms. Thin Lips moonlighting as an operator?
"Look, I need to talk to her. It's imperative."
"If you'd like to leave a message, I can connect you to her voice mail."
I racked my brain. Sick uncle? Dead grandmother? No, this was the 90s, I needed something fresh. "The thing is, I'm afraid she won't call me back, and I really must talk to her immediately. See, I'm her ex-boyfriend, and I just tested positive for HIV. Not the kind of message you can leave on voice mail."
There was a moment's silence. I had her. I smiled to myself.
"I'm sorry, sir. I can't help you."
How aggravating. What would Hercule Poirot do now? I borrowed an idea from the movie Kids. "Ma'am, this is literally life or death. I just heard that Molly went out with my cousin Pete tonight, and I better reach her before she sleeps with him. Pete is a real mover, you know what I mean? I need to get in touch with them before it's too late."
"Sir, would you like to leave a voice mail message?"
Screw you, lady. "Yeah. Tell her to use a condom." I hung up in disgust. No doubt old Hercule would have already solved the murder—assuming there was one. Maybe I should just take some aspirin, go to sleep, and call Dave the Fish in the morning.
But then I had an incredibly, amazingly brilliant idea. I called Information.
And got Molly's phone number.
When I dialed it, either she was gone or she was screening my call, because her machine picked up. It was one of those cutesy messages you get from college students, with people giggling in the background and Molly saying, "Hello, if you believe in sex before marriage, please leave a message at the beep."
I pictured her father listening to that message. Thank God I don't have daughters. Beep! I lowered my voice, trying to sound menacing. "Molly," I growled at her machine, "something very fucked up is going on, and I plan to find out what. If you don't tell me the truth, and I mean the whole truth, I will call the cops immediately. I will use your name and tell them everything you've told me—"
"You bastard!" Molly shouted. "You lousy creep!" And then she started to cry. I certainly felt like a lousy creep, blackmailing a scared little college girl. So now The Penn and I had yet another thing in common: We were both blackmailers.
Finally, after I did some more cajoling and haranguing, Molly poured out her story. About half an hour previously, while she lay in bed asleep, someone had heaved a brick through her window. The brick landed right on her forehead, bruising it painfully. And she had bad gashes on her arms, hands and knees from when she jumped out of bed, terrified, and fell on some shattered window glass.
She would have gone to the hospital, except she didn't want to have to tell anyone what had happened. The brick had a typewritten note taped to it which read, quite succinctly, "You talk any more, bitch, we'll kill you."
"Who do you think did it, Molly?"
"I don't know."
Exasperating. This girl knew a lot more than she was admitting. I understood she was traumatized, so I tried to sound patient. "Listen, Molly, you can trust me. I never told anyone you talked to me. Nobody knew about it except your dad."
"Well, somebody must have known, otherwise why would they do this to me?"
"Molly, help me get to the bottom of this. You told me at the funeral, you promised someone you wouldn't say anything about the application. Who did you make that promise to? Was it Gretchen?"
"I don't want to get in any more trouble," Molly whimpered.
I couldn't say I blamed her, but that didn't stop me from pushing even harder. "Look, I know The Penn was blackmailing somebody. You've got to tell me who it was."
"I told you, I don't know anything about it!" Molly shouted.
Like heck she didn't. "For God's sake, Molly, what did Penn write on that application? Why is someone so desperate to hush it up?"
"I just want to go back to sleep!" Molly screeched hysterically. "I want everyone to leave me alone!"
She was about to hang up on me again. I backed off. "Look, I'll make you a deal: Just tell me one thing, and I'll leave you alone. Where can I find this grant application?"
For a few moments there was no answer. I thought maybe she'd hung up. But finally she said, "At the Arts Council. In the NYFA file. But don't tell anyone I told you."
Jeez, enough already. I sympathized with the girl, but I
was getting sick of her. "Hey, I get the message. Your secret is safe with me."
I hung up the phone. The puzzling part was, I really hadn't said a word about Molly, or Penn's application, to anybody. So why did someone throw a brick through her window with a warning not to "talk any more"? How did someone know she had talked to me in the first place?
Had Virgil, for some obscure reason, thrown a brick at his own daughter? Or did that mysterious person lurking behind the McDonald's sign see Molly and me talking together in the cemetery parking lot? Or did Gretchen—or the Mayor—somehow guess that Molly must have told me something, and that's why I'd confronted Gretchen about The Penn?
Too many questions, and not a single goddamn answer. Totally infuriating. And beginning about forty-eight hours from now, I'd be too busy dealing with mutant beetles to find out what the fuck this was all about.
I looked up from the kitchen table, my eyes fastening on the broken windowpane to our side door. I sat there, my anger building, then stood up and threw on my jacket. I stuck my trusty Adirondack Lumberjacks cap on my head and pulled it down low, then grabbed work gloves and a hammer from my tool box. I left Andrea a note on the kitchen table—"A, Gone fishing. Back soon, J." Then I headed outside.
I mean, heck, everybody else in town seemed to be into burglarizing these days. Maybe I should try it myself.
14
The building that had housed the Arts Council office for the past fifteen years, and would continue housing them for two more months until they moved into the new Arts Center, was on Broadway. But the wrong end of Broadway, next to the Goodwill store and a vacant garage. Even during the shank of the evening, there was virtually no traffic there; and I was confident that at this hour the place would be deserted. I'd simply break in the back door, and there was no way anybody would see me. I'd have plenty of time to search the Arts Council—and even Penn's old apartment upstairs for good measure.
And if by some amazing freak I actually got caught, I figured on getting a break for sure. After all, not only was I more or less the executor of Penn's estate, but I'd been burglarized twice and I was just trying to catch whoever did it. So I got into my rusty old '85 Camry and drove off. The muffler needed fixing, which was highly noticeable in the silent night streets. One of these days I'd have to accept the fact that I really was rich now, and could afford a new vehicle.
The Arts Council was a mile and a half away, but I only spotted a single moving car, a nondescript mid-sized sedan which followed me down Franklin for a while, but then turned off onto Washington. There's not a lot of action in Saratoga Springs on a late Thursday night in mid-May.
I parked on a narrow backstreet one and a half blocks away from what would soon become the scene of my crime. Hammer and gloves in hand, I stepped out into the eerie three a.m. darkness, then eased along an old nineteenth-century alley toward the rear of the Arts Council building.
The alley was pitch black. The streetlights didn't make it back there, and the moon and stars were smothered by clouds. The rain that had drizzled off and on for two days had stopped for now, leaving behind a strong wind that whooshed down the alley, rattled a fence, and whistled through a couple of half-open garbage cans. The only other noise I could hear above the wind was a solitary streetlight buzzing way off in the distance.
But then I heard a scream.
I stood still. Then came another scream, from the direction of the Arts Council, even more bloodcurdling than the first.
I gripped my hammer tight. Somewhere in the darkness ahead of me was a damsel in major distress. My duty was clear: charge forward, attack the villain, save the girl, and maybe get on Oprah.
On the other hand, I could always just sneak back into my car and hightail it the hell out of there. Maybe dial 911 after I made it safely home and locked the doors behind me. As Groucho Marx used to say, "Are you a man or a mouse? Squeak up!"
Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), I didn't get the chance to find out which I was, because life intervened. There was a scrambling noise in the alley. Then something slammed hard into my ankle.
I jumped severed feet high, and screamed myself. And then the cat—that's what it was—screamed, too.
The same scream I'd heard earlier. My damsel in distress. As the cat tore off for parts unknown, I felt my heart come back down to its usual spot. I even managed a laugh, but stopped quickly because it sounded so hollow. I gripped my hammer more tightly than ever as I headed up the alley toward the Arts Council.
Just as I had remembered, the building's back door was well hidden. On one side of it the wall jutted outward, and on the other side were some large yew bushes that hadn't been trimmed in years. I'd been inside the building several times before, while judging children's poetry for the annual Saratoga County Apple 'n' Arts Festival, and I didn't recall seeing any alarm systems. I was about to find out for sure.
The back door had a large glass panel that glinted invitingly in the darkness. This whole Donald Penn business is a real boon for local glaziers, I reflected, as I took a deep breath, brought back my hammer...
And walloped the windowpane. Smash—the whole pane jumped right to the floor. I waited breathlessly for an alarm. But nothing happened. I couldn't believe how easy this was. I put on my gloves and reached in, felt around for the lock, and opened the door.
Broken glass crunching under my feet, I stepped inside the dark forbidden hallway. Every nerve in my body was tinglingly alive. People who say burglary is as exciting as sex are full of shit; burglary is much more exciting. To heck with writing, this was my new career right here.
I edged upstairs, holding on to the rails. Next time I'd bring a flashlight. So far as I knew, the first floor was unoccupied; the Arts Council office was on the second floor, and Penn had lived on the third.
On the second-floor landing, my gloved hand felt a doorknob. I tapped above it hoping to find a windowpane, and did. Yes. I bashed the pane, unlocked the door and stepped inside the Arts Council. Piece of cake.
I closed the two window shades that faced onto Broadway and turned on Gretchen's desk lamp.
And then, feeling like an old pro, I got down to business.
The Arts Council office had the kind of haphazard look you find in a place where everything is donated. Classy oak chairs were sitting alongside cheap blue plastic ones. A state-of-the-art color laser printer was hooked up to a hopelessly outdated late-80s Mac. Beneath the side window was an antique rolltop desk that looked pretty nifty—except for a broken leg that was propped up by World Book Encyclopedia volumes from 1958. A variety of desks, file cabinets, and bookcases covered every available square inch, and they were bursting with hundreds or maybe even thousands of files. Where in the middle of this whole mess would Gretchen keep this year's NYFA grant applications?
I started with the biggest file cabinet in the room, but all six feet of it were devoted to the new Arts Center. A quick gander at the files showed that getting the Arts Center up and running had taken up a major portion of Gretchen's life for more than a decade. And other people's lives, too; the files were full of memos and letters from such familiar figures as Bonnie Engels, Antoinette Carlson, and even Mike Pardou, the King of Spoons. They had all served on the Arts Center Advisory Board and put in a lot of grassroots grunt work promoting the project.
It was fun snooping on people I knew. In another cabinet I found a drawer marked "National Bookings of Local Artists." Gretchen had files on a lot of local artists, but the biggest one belonged to George Hosey, the ersatz Uncle Sam. How could Gretchen possibly take this guy seriously? But evidently she did, because the file contained correspondence from Gretchen to arts councils, city halls, and business conventions all over the world promoting Hosey's dubious services. And sometimes she succeeded. I found a letter from a marching band in Auckland, New Zealand, offering Hosey five thousand dollars for a one-day gig.
Five grand? For a guy whose major talent was wearing a long white goatee? Wasn't that just a trifle excessive?
> I mean, New Zealand is basically full of kiwis and sheep. Couldn't they just make a goatee out of wool and tape it to someone's chin? Or if that failed, maybe they could make a goatee out of glued kiwi fuzz.
I was curious to read up more on Hosey, but it was closing in on 4:00 already. Where were those damn applications?
I ran around the room like a chicken with its head cut off, throwing open drawers and files, until finally, in the very bottom shelf of the very last bookcase in the room, I struck gold. Underneath a batch of files about local community theaters there was a plain cardboard box, about as high as a shoe box and twice as wide, with nyfa, 98 written on the cover.
I tore the box open. Sure enough, it was full of applications, each one five pages long, stapled together. I lifted them all out.
I quickly skimmed the top one, from "Albanese, Albert." "... Requesting one thousand dollars... support me while I write poetry... need money." Jesus, artists are so desperate. At the top of his application were two boxes, "Accepted" and "Rejected", and Gretchen, or someone else on the grant panel, had put a check mark in the "Rejected" box. Another dream dead. I briefly pictured poor Albert Albanese coming home from his lousy day job and discovering the rejection letter from the Arts Council in his mailbox. I'll bet his girlfriend had to listen to him bitch for weeks.
I tossed Albanese aside and zipped through the pile, searching for Penn. Applebaum, Atwater... Alphabetical order. I jumped ahead. Engels, French... I jumped again. Orsulak, Pardou, Preller...
Wait a minute. Where the hell was Penn?
Molly had said his application would be here, hadn't she? I checked again. Orsulak, Pardou, Preller...
Shit.
Maybe it had been misplaced. I went through the entire pile of applications carefully, one by one.
But Donald Penn's application wasn't there.
Someone had taken it away.
Great. This was just perfect. Now what?
I checked my watch: 4:15. A wave of exhaustion poured through me. The top of my head was radiating dull throbs and my eyes ached. Outside the wind was picking up again, rattling the windowpanes. There was some kind of unpleasant smell in the air, probably dust from all those old files.
