Out of Time

by Michael Z. Lewin

  ‘The elevators are out of order,’ I said. ‘You should report them.’

  The smile finished its short life and was replaced by something rockier. ‘So what do you want?’

  ‘Do I get to come in?’

  He led me into his sitting room. He sank into his rotating upholstery and left me to use my initiative on the straight-backed chair at his computer table.

  Instead of moving the chair I felt the keyboard unit, the disk drive and the monitor. They felt cold.

  ‘They feel warm. What you been up to?’

  He said nothing. The bright eyes watched me closely.

  I sat down. ‘How do I get information out of this thing?’

  He didn’t answer for several seconds. I began to try switches.

  ‘Stop that,’ he said. Then one by one he told me which switches to throw and what keys to hit.

  When we got as far as ‘Talk to me, baby,’ I typed, ‘Lance Whisstock’ and hit the ‘enter’ key.

  The monitor screen filled with the information which I had printed a copy of on my first visit to Bates’ apartment.

  ‘How do I clear the screen?’

  ‘Hit “execute,” then “k” for clear.’

  When I was ready to start again, I typed ‘Albert Samson’ and entered it.

  I was rewarded with a screenful of details. All the personal facts one could think of including my reported net income for the last six years and my current bank balance.

  At the bottom it said ‘Space Bar to continue.’

  The continuation listed the names associated with the important cases I’ve worked on over the years and my ‘known friends’.

  A third visual ‘page’ gave a ‘Personal Evaluation’, including an IQ and comments on my reliability, honesty and personality.

  I read everything carefully. It represented an impressive piece of research, of private detection.

  When I turned to face Bates, he was gazing at the city through that wonderful window.

  I said, ‘My daughter has moved. How do I correct her address?’

  He swivelled slowly to face me.

  ‘She lives in Austria now.’

  He took me through the procedure. I put in Samantha’s current address.

  ‘You going to harass me some more by having goons shoot her place up too?’ I asked. ‘What do I type to make that happen?’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said sharply. He also looked puzzled. Maybe I was wrong about that; but I wasn’t wrong about other things.

  ‘Why have you got all this stuff on me, Mr Bates?’

  ‘I’m writing my memoirs.’

  I nodded agreeably. I turned back to the machine where I cleared the monitor of my life story and then typed and entered ‘Vera Wert.’

  The screen read, ‘No listing.’

  I tried ‘Daisy Wines,’ ‘Vera Edwards,’ ‘Mrs George Raymond Bennett Edwards.’

  No listing for any of them.

  Without looking at Bates I said, ‘Come on! Tell me how I access the data on your biggest case.’

  ‘Turn it off, Samson.’

  Obligingly I turned the computer off. I moved my chair close to his. I sat, faced him, and leaned forward. ‘Maybe you remember everything about the Edwards case so clearly you can write it straight off for your memoirs.’

  ‘I’m tired,’ he said. ‘I want you to leave.’

  ‘If I do, I’ll be replaced by cops questioning you about a murder investigation.’

  ‘You keep talking in riddles,’ he said. ‘If you won’t leave, then please tell me what it is that you want.’

  ‘To talk.’

  ‘So talk.’

  ‘O.K. I feel like talking about your testimony in the Edwards murder trial.’

  He didn’t speak.

  ‘Mrs Vera Edwards. Tried for the murder of her husband. We are agreed that you are the Normal Bates, private investigator, who stated under oath that he had followed her for four months?’

  ‘I told you about that before,’ he said.

  ‘You told me Mrs Edwards didn’t do anything which suggested she was being unfaithful.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Let’s talk about that. For instance, you testified that the night of the shooting Mrs Edwards took a taxi to a concert at the Indiana Theater, didn’t talk to anybody while she was there, and took a taxi home.’

  He said nothing.

  I said, ‘But Mrs Edwards didn’t like concerts. And even if she went to this one, there was no reason for her to go by taxi when the family employed a chauffeur and none of the other members of the family was out of the house that night. Comment?’

  Bates said nothing.

  ‘Seems to me,’ I said, ‘that if she travels by taxi, it can only be because she doesn’t want anybody in the household to know where she’s going. There’s no one easily available to confirm where she went. Except you. Am I bringing it all back?’

  To my utter astonishment I saw tears begin to form in the old man’s eyes. He lifted his hands to his face, and he whirled away from me to face his window, his city. Wet snow, not heavy, was falling.

  I stopped talking. I had more to say, but little by way of hard facts. Mostly inconsistencies as I tried to join up the things I’d been told. But I also had my anger, from being used and lied to, and from having been gullible.

  Almost as abruptly as he had turned away he moved his chair to face me again. With a voice which hardly betrayed recent exposure of emotion he said, ‘You, of all people, know what a mean job this is.’

  ‘This?’

  ‘Don’t be obtuse. Private investigation.’ He shook his head. ‘For our working lives we do routine or boring or dubious or dirty jobs on behalf of people with problems they mostly create for themselves. The pleasure in it is the occasional success of proving one person is a cheater or thief and we sell the news to another cheater or thief. I know men in this business who spent twenty years with the idea that a good case was one where the people they were taking pictures of didn’t punch them on the nose. Maybe some guys get women flinging their bodies at them day after day. Maybe some guys get a lot of genuinely interesting jobs. Maybe you’re one of them. But I wasn’t. I only once got a case where there was a beautiful woman who didn’t look at me like I was a piece of shit.’

  He breathed heavily a few times and coughed. The coughing grew violent and the vast stomach rocked. I worried that the man might be dying before my eyes.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  By way of an answer, he grew still. He said, ‘I followed her, like I said, long hours. She wasn’t stupid and knew her husband was looking for an excuse to dump her. So she took precautions when she went out. Circuitous routes. Changing means of transportation. But she wasn’t hard to follow for a pro and I stayed with her all the way on her first visit.’

  ‘This was to the house on New York Street?’

  ‘Yeah. Murchison’s.’

  ‘So why didn’t you report it?’

  ‘I’m not finished,’ he said venomously.

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘The target goes into the house. But that’s not what my client wants to know, not just that. He wants to know what she’s doing in there and who she’s doing it with.’

  He stopped to scratch his forehead, hard.

  ‘So I see her go in and I decide to have a look around. A sign in the window says there are rooms to let, and it looks like an ordinary rooming house. She could be visiting anyone. I walk around the place to see what I can see. Only I get caught.’

  ‘Caught?’

  ‘Earl Murchison. Mrs Murchison’s husband. I walked into him. I was careless, too pleased with having trapped the target so quickly.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘So after a little toing and froing about who I am, what I’m doing and do I want the cops or fist in the face, I let him take me inside. I think maybe with a little money I can get him to help me out and I’ll have the case wrapped up with a bonus in
record time.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And we go into the living room and instead of a private chat about which boarder’s room Mrs Edwards has gone to, there is the target herself She’s shooting the breeze with Ella Murchison and playing with a little kid.’

  ‘I see.’

  Normal Bates closed his eyes. ‘Samson, she was the most beautiful thing there was. I’d never seen anyone like her, not up close. She had a natural presence, carriage, yet when she talked it was just like real people. Not snobby. Just people.’

  He sat for some moments before he opened his eyes and faced the world again. Me.

  He said, ‘I might have tried to hide what I was except I had already told too much of the truth to Earl. So I played it straight. And in return, they played it straight with me.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘The little girl was Vera’s from before she met her husband, who didn’t know anything about the kid. She only married Edwards to guarantee the little girl’s security.’

  He paused.

  ‘That was it?’ I asked.

  ‘No. She told me about her husband. That he was crazy. That she tried her best for him, to keep up her side of the deal but that he kept changing the rules and that the Murchisons and her daughter were her only refuge.’

  I sat and watched while he worked himself up to continue.

  He said, ‘That night after we talked, I drove her home. I hadn’t agreed to anything. There had been no offer to me although it was clear that they wanted me not to report what I’d learned to her husband. On the way home we didn’t say anything about the situation. We just talked about where we grew up. Radio shows. Little stuff. Friendly stuff.’

  He pointed a finger at me. ‘I’m telling you, Samson, I was a cut above the others. Most of the guys in our job then were trash. Greedy and heartless and with no feelings for human beings. I was better than them. I had position, but I didn’t take advantage.’

  Quietly I guessed, ‘So she took you to bed.’

  He said, ‘The only time in my life.’ He remembered, but briefly. ‘But it wasn’t a trade-off. It may look like it. It may sound like it. But it wasn’t. For one thing, it didn’t happen until after I had already made two weekly reports to her husband. For another it was her idea. No, not idea, because . . . well, it was in my head from the first minute I was in the room with her. But she was the one who said it. She said, “I want to go to bed with you,” right up, like that. I couldn’t believe it. I was so surprised that all I could say was, “Thank you.” ’

  ‘It doesn’t sound like such a bad thing to say,’ I said.

  ‘Only happened four times,’ Bates said, but he said it as if it put him four ahead of the rest of humanity.

  But however much I might respect the way he treasured the memory, delicacy was not what I was there for.

  ‘And in return, you perjured yourself,’ I said.

  ‘It wasn’t like that. I did my job. I followed her exactly as I said I did. We rarely met. And I saw nothing at all which suggested that she was unfaithful to her husband.’

  ‘Except with you. You thought your client would accept the distinction?’

  He looked at me, disgusted that I could try to sully the thing which was, perhaps, the most beautiful in his life.

  ‘And the child she was pregnant with in April, 1940, was yours,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ Normal Bates said.

  I looked surprised.

  ‘Not mine.’ He was quiet but definitive.

  ‘How can you be so sure?’

  ‘She was sure. That was enough.’

  ‘Whose was it then?’

  ‘Her husband’s,’ Normal Bates said.

  I didn’t like that. My face showed it. ‘I’m pretty sure,’ I said, ‘that the child wasn’t her husband’s.’

  ‘Then you’re wrong,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t understand your certainty.’

  ‘These things are calculable.’

  ‘When was the child born?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  I didn’t like that either.

  I said, ‘Why not?’

  ‘I never saw or heard from her again. After the trial.’

  I spent a full minute doodling in my notebook. I asked, ‘Did you ever marry, Mr Bates?’

  ‘Not for any practical purposes.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I eloped with a girl I knew in high school when we were both seventeen. Her parents and my father knocked sense into us by not separating us. It only lasted two years.’

  ‘Any kids?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Never tempted to marry again?’

  ‘Not marry,’ he said.

  ‘But you’ve participated in meaningful relationships?’

  ‘One or two,’ he said.

  ‘And,’ I said, ‘a woman you adore, who might be pregnant with your child, walks out of your life one day and you settle for never seeing or hearing from her again?’

  ‘It wasn’t a question of settling for it. She left. I didn’t know where she had gone.’

  ‘A capable private detective,’ I said.

  ‘I looked for her. I tried to find her,’ he said.

  I said, ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘An intelligent woman with money can get lost, Samson. You ought to know that.’

  ‘It takes time and planning. When was she sorting it all out? In the spare hours between sessions in court? Saying to herself, just in case I get off I will do this and that and thus, so I can vanish from sight within a couple of days?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Like hell you don’t know. Someone who can’t shake a tail is not going to succeed in leaving a city where she’s notorious, without anybody noticing. No way. You obviously helped her, Mr Bates. You probably worked it all out for her.’

  ‘I deny that,’ he said.

  ‘Just like you got her off in court.’

  ‘Now just—’

  ‘You tell me,’ I said, with my finger pointing between his eyes, ‘you tell me what the jury would have done to her if you had told them about the dutiful wife who kept a premarital child secret, who took her husband’s private eye to bed. A wife who happened to be carrying a gun the night her husband happened to find out she was pregnant and he knew it couldn’t be his. Just let me ask you this, Mr Bates. Did anybody at the time ask you where the hell you were the night of April 21st, 1940? And don’t you think that somebody might have if they had known what you’ve just told me?’

  My passion and feeling seemed to calm his, just as often someone being more afraid than you makes you braver. He sat with a faint smile on his face and when I had been quiet for a few moments he asked, ‘Do you accuse all your clients of murder, or just the select few?’

  ‘It’s not a joke,’ I said.

  ‘I murdered nobody. Nor did I conspire to murder anybody. Nor did I conspire to assist Vera Edwards at her trial. No one asked me to do anything. What I did was my own idea. I expected nothing for doing it and I did it because it was the only way I could see of helping justice to be done.’

  ‘Perjury?’

  ‘Justice as I understood it when I took a hard look at my job and made a moral decision. Maybe you’ve never done that and don’t understand it. I’m not even asking you to believe it. You have ferreted various things out and would have been left without accurate facts if I had kept silent. I’ve told you the truth now. So if you go the wrong way, it’s your own responsibility.’

  ‘And what is the right way to go, Mr Bates?’

  ‘Just a manner of expression, Mr Samson.’

  ‘The way I want to go is to find Vera Edwards.’

  He shrugged. ‘If she’s still alive, you mean?’

  ‘You say you don’t know where she is?’

  ‘First you insist that I knew where she went in 1940,’ he said. ‘Now it’s knowing where she is today? Honestly, I cannot help you.’

  ‘Whatever portion of
your story I come to believe, Mr Bates, I believe least that your contact with Vera Edwards ended after the trial in 1940.’

  He shrugged again.

  ‘And it’s not only that you wouldn’t let her get out of your life that easily.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘Where do you get your money, Mr Bates?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘An apartment with a view like this is one of the priciest ways to live in Indianapolis. Where’s the cash come from?’

  ‘I worked hard for a long time,’ he said.

  Chapter Twenty Three

  As I got off the elevator I saw a tall young man in a suit that looked too good to take out of the box. He was outside the locked door studying the apartment list, but when he saw me, he moved to the door, waiting for me to come out.

  I opened it but stood in the doorway. ‘You don’t live here,’ I said suspiciously.

  He hesitated, assessing me. Then he said, ‘No, I’ve come to see a Mr Bates.’

  ‘Normal Bates? The private eye?’

  He smiled slightly. ‘That’s right. Do you know him?’

  ‘I should say I do. Hey, you aren’t a private eye too, are you?’

  ‘I am, as a matter of fact,’ he said.

  ‘Jeez,’ I said. ‘That must be real interesting. Is it like it looks on the programmes and that?’

  ‘I find it unfailingly fascinating,’ he said.

  ‘Gosh,’ I said.

  ‘Do you know Mr Bates well?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, I have a lot of time for Mr Bates. A terrific kidder, he is.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said.

  ‘And he’s interested in computers too. But I bet you private eyes all know about computers these days. I bet you hardly ever have to go following anybody. You just put your computers on them, huh?’

  ‘Computers can be very useful,’ he said, beginning to show impatience.

  ‘Golly, its wonderful to be alive in this day and age, isn’t it? That’s what I tell Norm all the time and he agrees. Hey, I do envy you guys, doing the interesting jobs you do all the time and meeting all those girls. Is it easy work to get into?’

  ‘Like everything these days,’ he said, ‘standards have risen out of sight.’

  ‘Need to be a high school graduate now, huh? Not good enough any more to be an ex-boxer or cop?’