Timothy Files

by Lawrence Sanders

  So the morning crawls away. Around eleven o’clock he pours himself a brandy to stun the butterflies in his stomach. It isn’t impatience so much as anger, and he knows his furies will devour him if he can’t narcotize them with caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol—a well-balanced diet for what ails him.

  The phone rings a little before noon, and he walks toward it slowly, too proud to send up a prayer that it’ll be the call he’s waiting for.

  “Yeah?” he says.

  “Everything’s coming up roses,” Davenport sings. “The two local banks worked through the night. They figure that in the past year, Clovis has clipped them for about fifty million. The out-of-state banks are still figuring their losses. We grabbed the computer at New World, and some hotshot expert in the DA’s office says it’s got a complete record of everything. I mean they were flying those checks, and had to use a computer to keep track of deposits, withdrawals, and interest earned.”

  “What about the people?” Cone demands.

  “We picked up Constance Figlia this morning. Then, about an hour ago, we moved into the Clovis apartment and grabbed Stanley, Grace, and Lucinda.”

  “Find anything?”

  “Oh, yeah. A packet of happy dust in Grace’s handbag.”

  “Did she break?”

  “Even before we could question her. She went hysterical on us, and she’s in the hospital. Under treatment and under guard. I think she’ll spill.”

  “Sure she will. What about Bonadventure?”

  “After I left you yesterday we put a tail on him. Our guy says that right now he’s in his brownstone. We’re going to take him at twelve-thirty. Want to watch the circus?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Cone says. “I’ll be there.”

  “As an observer,” Davenport warns. “Just stand back and watch. This is our job.”

  “Of course,” Cone says.

  It’s a drizzly day, the sky steel, the light brass, the air tasting of a copper penny. Cone is wearing his black flapping raincoat over his corduroy suit.

  He’s there before Davenport arrives, leaning against a lamppost one door down from Bonadventure’s brownstone. He spots the police tail: one guy in an old, dented Plymouth parked across the street. Cone waits as patiently as he can, chain-smoking. He leans down once to touch the shin holster through his pant leg. It’s there.

  Then two cars pull up, moving slowly, and double-park in front of the brownstone. The squad car has two blues in the front seat. The other is a smart, clean Buick with three men in mufti. Davenport gets out of the Riviera first and looks around. He spots Cone and waggles his fingers. Then he directs the others.

  The squad car goes around the block. The three cops trudge up the stoop and disappear into the vestibule. Cone straightens up and moves closer.

  He waits almost ten minutes, tense and agitated. Then the front door opens and a procession comes out: the three NYPD detectives and Anthony Bonadventure, hands manacled behind him. He’s coatless, but wearing a beautifully tailored suit of silvery sharkskin. One of the detectives is gripping him firmly by the upper arm.

  Cone has a surge of hot blood, feels his face flushing. A wild, violent thought: He could bend swiftly, slip the Magnum from the ankle holster, and plug Bonadventure. He’s close enough so that he wouldn’t endanger the detectives. Just take one step forward, point, and pow!

  But Davenport is staring at Cone and sees something in his face. He steps quickly to put himself between his prisoner and the Wall Street dick. He moves to Cone and gives him a fierce, stern look. He stands there a moment, not speaking, his eyes locked with Cone’s.

  Then, apparently satisfied with what he sees, he turns away, and Anthony is hustled into the Buick. But as he goes, he looks back at Cone, his handsome features distorted with puzzlement and fear.

  Timothy, madness passing, contents himself with giving Bonadventure the finger, twisting his hand in the air.

  “Ta-ta,” he calls.

  He still stands in the drizzle after the police car has pulled away. Then, when his trembling has eased and he has control, he goes back to his Honda. He knows how close he came, and wonders if he’s ever going to grow up.

  He has shopping to do, up and down lower Broadway, and in all the funky little stores in his neighborhood. He buys a couple of barbecued chickens, some salad stuff, a package of potato skins, which he dearly loves, and a smoked chub, which Cleo dearly loves—including head, skin, bones, tail, and all.

  He also buys a bottle of Korbel Natural champagne.

  Samantha Whatley shows up a little after five o’clock. She brings dessert: four rum balls covered with chocolate sprinkles, sinfully rich but looking like elephant droppings.

  “Well?” she demands. “What happened? Tell me this instant!”

  “A drink first,” he says. “My first of the day.”

  “Ha-ha,” she says.

  He mixes vodkas and water. They sit at the desk, slouched on the wooden kitchen chairs, while he tells her all about it. She listens intently, not interrupting. They’re on their second drink before he finishes with an account of Anthony Bonadventure’s arrest.

  “I almost blew him away,” Cone confesses. “Maybe I would have if Davenport hadn’t stepped in.”

  “But why Bonadventure?” Samantha asks curiously. “You say it was Constance Figlia who pushed Griffon onto the tracks.”

  “Sure it was, but don’t you see—Bonadventure engineered the whole thing. I’m convinced of it. I mean, here were all these people—Constance, Stanley, Grace, and Luanda—no more larcenous than the rest of us—and then Bonadventure appears on the scene with his get-rich-quicker scam and ruined all their lives.”

  “You think he hooked Grace on coke?”

  “I’d bet on it. And Stanley and Lucinda probably made no objection. Anthony took Grace out of the picture, and they could go on holding hands forever.”

  “Gross,” Sam says.

  “Yeah. All it took was a devil like Bonadventure to lead the way. That’s why I wanted to blast him.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t.”

  “I am, too—I guess. But I’ll probably spend the rest of my life regretting it.”

  “An unarmed prisoner with his hands cuffed behind him? You’d have blown him away?”

  “Hell, yes,” Cone says. “You’d shoot a rattlesnake just lazing on a rock, wouldn’t you?”

  She looks at him a moment, then shakes her head. “Tim, you scare me. You keep forgetting you’re back in civilization.”

  “Is that what it is—civilization? But enough of this; let’s celebrate the happy ending. Isaac Evanchat escaped a fate worse than death, and Haldering and Company did its civic duty. Maybe H. H. will get a scroll or plaque or something from the city, saying what an upright citizen he is.”

  “He’d love that,” she says, smiling.

  “I’ll talk to Davenport. He’ll put in a good word for us. Listen, I have barbecued chicken and champagne. How does that grab you?”

  “Just right,” she says, “but let’s eat later.”

  It’s really raining now; they hear the drumming on the roof, but the loft is dry, warm, shadowed.

  “This place is like a cave,” Samantha says, undressing. “There’s something primitive about it.”

  “Yeah,” Cone says. “The plumbing.”

  They’re naked together on the mattress and she is reaching for him when he suddenly rolls away and climbs to his feet.

  “Now what?” she wails. “Where are you going?”

  “Forgot something.”

  He goes to the kitchen cabinet and comes back with a gift-wrapped package tied with a bow. He lies down beside her again and pokes the gift at her.

  “For you,” he says gruffly.

  She looks down at the package, then looks up at him, not believing.

  “For me?” she says. “What is it?”

  “Open it, for God’s sake.”

  She strips the wrapping away with shaking hands, lifts the
lid, finds a necklace of chunky beads, alternating ebony and crystal. She takes it out, eyes widening, and strokes it tenderly, then puts it around her neck. They both see the shine and glitter against her dark skin.

  “It’s beautiful,” she says in a choked voice, and begins weeping.

  “Aw, shit,” the Wall Street dick says, taking her into his arms.

  There is joy and shouting that night.

  BOOK TWO

  The Whirligig Action

  1

  LATE IN OCTOBER OF that year a dramatic story from Glendale, California, titillated and bemused the entire nation. As reported in newspapers, magazines, and on network television, the facts were these:

  Laura Bentley (nineteen) and Gerald McPhee (twenty-two), residents of Glendale, had met at a church barbecue and were attracted to each other. They dated for a period of ten months and then became engaged.

  In addition to their youth and good looks (both blue-eyed and flaxen-haired), they had other commonalities. Both were transplanted easterners. Laura had been born and spent the first fourteen years of her life in Baltimore, Maryland. Gerald had been born and lived in Washington, D.C., for fifteen years.

  In addition, both young people were fatherless, both living with their mothers. Laura’s father had deserted his wife and daughter when she was nine years old. Gerald’s father had died when the boy was thirteen.

  During their courtship Laura and Gerald had several times discussed the possibility that both might have been adopted. It seemed all the more reasonable to them because neither resembled their mothers, and they could find no physical likeness in the photographs that had been preserved of their fathers.

  Both questioned their mothers. Mrs. Bentley refused to discuss the subject with her daughter. Mrs. McPhee continually assured Gerald that he was, in fact, her natural child.

  So the young people were married. Both being employed, they decided to wait a period of time until they could afford a small home before having “at least two children and maybe more.”

  Approximately a year after the marriage, Mrs. Bentley became seriously ill. She was diagnosed as suffering from an ovarian tumor, and surgery was scheduled. On the day before the operation, frightened and wanting to prepare for any eventuality, she confessed to her daughter that she, Laura, had been conceived by artificial insemination with sperm from an unknown donor.

  Laura reported this to her husband, and they stared at each other, both suddenly aware of a dread possibility. Gerald McPhee then confronted his mother again and demanded to know the truth about his birth. Mrs. McPhee, in tears, finally admitted that Gerald, too, had been conceived by artificial insemination.

  Thoroughly distraught, the young couple consulted an attorney. He immediately wrote the Washington, D.C., fertility clinic where both mothers had been impregnated. While awaiting a reply from the clinic, the lawyer sternly urged Mr. and Mrs. McPhee not to have sexual intercourse, even with contraceptive devices.

  The worst fears of the young people were realized. A check of the fertility clinic’s records revealed that Laura and Gerald had been conceived with live sperm from the same anonymous donor. They were half-brother and -sister. Their marriage was annulled.

  This unusual incident was a brief sensation in the news media, but gradually faded from interest as more earthshaking stories took over the headlines.

  But it was to have an unexpected and dramatic effect on several financial institutions on Wall Street.

  “How could such a thing have happened?” Lester Pingle asks. He strokes his bare upper lip with a knuckle. That flap of flesh had once borne a scraggly black mustache—until the night his wife, emboldened by two brandy stingers, told him it made him look like a moth-eaten Groucho Marx. Since then the lip has been naked. “Don’t you people keep records?”

  Dr. Victor January tries to smile. “We at Nu-Hope certainly keep records. Computerized, I might add. We also warn patients of the possibility of incestuous relationships between offspring of the same donor. The whole subject is covered in our presentation.”

  “Pages thirty to thirty-four,” Dr. Phoebe Trumball says.

  “The chance always exists,” January goes on, “but it can be minimized by the exchange of sperm, fresh or frozen, between fertility clinics in different cities, or in different countries.”

  Ernest Pingle stirs in his heavy club chair. He sweeps a palm over a brush of white hair, cut as short as a drill instructor’s. “Tell me, Wictor,” the old man starts, then asks, “You don’t mind if I call you Wictor?”

  “Not at all, sir,” Dr. Victor January says.

  “You ship this—this stuff to other countries?”

  “Frozen human sperm? Yes, we airlift it in special containers. Foreign fertility clinics sometimes have requests for an American donor.”

  “And you buy sperm from foreigners?” Lester Pingle says, rather indignantly.

  “Very infrequently,” Dr. January says. “New York is a cosmopolitan city. We have an extensive file of available sperm donors of almost every nationality. If a Liberian, Korean, or Icelandic client requests impregnation by a male of her country, we can usually provide it. We had an odd one about a month ago. A woman of the Navaho Indian tribe requested she be inseminated by the sperm of a Navaho male. We were finally able to locate frozen Navaho sperm in a Phoenix, Arizona, sperm bank.”

  “Look,” Lester Pingle says hesitantly, “suppose a woman wants a tall guy with blond hair and blue eyes. You can provide that?”

  “We try to answer all our clients’ requests,” Dr. Trumball says. “No guarantees, of course; genetics is not that exact a science. But we’ve found that a woman who requests a blond, blue-eyed donor is perfectly satisfied if she gives birth to a dark-haired, brown-eyed baby. Motherhood conquers all.”

  Old Mr. Pingle shakes his head dolefully. “I can’t keep up,” he complains. “The world changes so fast. When I was young, boys worried about getting a girl knocked up. You wanted sex without pregnancy. The girl did, too. Now women want to be pregnant without sex.”

  “More and more of them every day,” Phoebe Trumball says, nodding. “Including many single women who, for a variety of reasons, don’t wish to be married but do want a child of their own. Our Artificial Insemination Department has never been busier.”

  “Understand,” Dr. January says hastily, “frequently the donor is the husband, where for one reason or another the couple cannot conceive by normal sexual intercourse.”

  “Tell me this,” Lester Pingle says. “Suppose that young couple in Glendale had never discovered they had the same donor as a father, and they had a baby. Would it be normal?”

  Dr. January shrugs. “No one can say. The Egyptian Ptolemies frequently entered into incestuous marriages. But I would hardly recommend it. Too much danger of genetic damage.”

  “Their having a child together would be only one danger,” Dr. Trumball says thoughtfully. “What about this possibility: The young married couple never discover they are half-brother and half-sister. But, for whatever reasons, the man discovers he has infertile sperm, and they decide the wife will have artificial insemination. Given the improvements in the technology of freezing human sperm, she might have been impregnated by her father. That’s a very remote possibility, I admit, but it does exist.”

  The four stare at the walls, no one wishing to comment. Finally old Mr. Pingle looks at his son and says, “You have more questions, Lester?”

  They are on the eighth floor of a Water Street office building that has all the grace and delicacy of a woolly mammoth excavated from a Siberian bog. But the conference room of Pingle Enterprises, Inc., is comfortable enough, with oak wainscotting, leather chairs, and a fireplace that appears to be veined white marble and is actually a very artful vinyl compound.

  “If it’s the morality of our business that bothers you;” Dr. January says, “let me say this—that up to five years ago, we also provided an abortion service. But the hassle proved more than we could handle—what with the c
onstant picketing and demonstrations. Today we are solely concerned with pro-life activities, helping people have healthy babies. There can be no legal or moral objections to that. We’ve included all the recent judicial decisions on our activities in the presentation.”

  “We’ve already read it,” Lester Pingle says, “and we are interested. Aren’t we, Father?”

  “Interested,” the old man says. “Not conwinced.”

  “As I understand it,” Lester goes on, “you want to expand the Nu-Hope Fertility Clinic into a nationwide chain, either privately owned or by franchise.”

  “A worldwide chain,” Dr. January says earnestly. “Eventually.”

  “And these fertility clinics would be located in shopping malls and other high-traffic areas?” Lester asks.

  “For maximum exposure,” Dr. Phoebe Trumball says.

  “More important,” Dr. January says, “we see a growing need for an organization that dominates the human fertility business. It would enable us to have a centralized computer system that could help prevent potential tragedies like that Glendale incident. Also, the various clinics could exchange fresh and frozen sperm, eggs, and embryos much more efficiently than a hundred clinics operating under individual ownership. We have given you our balance sheet. You can see how our business has boomed in the past three years.”

  “Our pregnancy rate is the best in the country,” Dr. Trumball says. “Perhaps the best in the world. And, as head of our Research and Development Department, I can assure you that our successes with artificial insemination and in-vitro fertilization will continue to increase as we refine our techniques and improve quality control.”

  “Tell me, Wictor,” Ernest Pingle says, “how did you come to pick our company for this project?”