Monkey on a Chain

by Harlen Campbell

  A long time passed in the dark before our breathing calmed. Just before I drifted off, I heard her laugh quietly to herself. It sounded like the tinkling of silver bells.

  It was early when I woke. I showered and dressed before shaking April. I told her I’d meet her in the restaurant and left. She smiled at me, said nothing about last night, and was all business at breakfast.

  We began at the county records office. I made a list of the properties and corporations I remembered Roy owning and the names he’d used. Time had passed, though, and it was a short list. A woman named Felicia showed us how the deeds were filed, and we began working our way through the land titles.

  The idea was to follow the transfers of title. One of the properties was the Paseo Del Norte Office Complex. I had helped Roy buy it in 1972, using a middleman named Teletex Investments. At that time the price had been six hundred thousand, with a hundred down and an assumable note for five hundred. It was immediately traded to a New Mexico corporation named Quintana Holding Company. In 1973, Quintana traded it to Grimmuth Investments for a ranch near Tierra Amarilla.

  Grimmuth operated the property until 1981, when it was sold to Pascuale Enterprises. In 1988, Pascuale sold to Prism Corporation, and three months ago Prism had sold to De Angelus Holding Company. The chain ended with De Angelus. They had paid $2.4 million and assumed what was left of the note. So, in nineteen years, Roy had turned a $100,000 down payment into over $1.75 million. He had gotten a decent income while he was waiting, and he probably still hadn’t paid a dime in taxes. All more or less legally. That was Roy.

  We followed the same routine for the other four properties I could remember. A couple of the names involved were familiar to me, but they were all suspect. Roy could be anyone he wanted, just by signing a couple of pieces of paper. I knew that better than anyone.

  The work was tedious and slow. It was early afternoon by the time we finished. We broke for lunch, then returned to the hotel and dug out the phone book. Eight of the names we’d found were still listed.

  I copied out their addresses and we went out to do some drive-bys. Most of the names were easy to eliminate. They were legitimate, going businesses. Large offices, receptionists, secretaries, managers. Not Roy’s style at all. Only Prism Corporation looked promising. Its office was a post office box in the downtown area.

  I drove to a pay phone and called the appropriate branch of the post office and asked to speak to the postmaster. I identified myself as an attorney, James Madison. You can get away with anything, given the present state of education. I could probably have been George Washington if I’d wanted.

  I told him I was trying to settle the estate of John Arbuthnot, who had owned stock in Prism. I needed to contact them about a stock repurchase, but the post office box was the only address I had and my letter had been returned. I asked if they were still using that box.

  The postmaster excused himself and returned in a few minutes. The box had been closed, he told me. There was no forwarding address. I asked what name had been on the card when the box was rented. He sounded annoyed, but excused himself again. When he returned, he told me the card had been signed by the vice-president of Prism, Mr. Walter Johnson.

  There were several Walter Johnsons listed. I called each number in turn and asked for Mr. Johnson. There was no response at any of them, but at one the woman who answered spoke only Spanish. She said there was no Señor Johnson there.

  Bingo.

  By that time, it was late in the afternoon. We were both tired, and we called it a day. We headed back to the hotel and dinner. April watched television for an hour or so, then crawled into bed. We went to sleep without conversation.

  The next morning I called the Texas State Corporation Commission with a list of all the corporations we hadn’t eliminated the day before. Only one of the fourteen suspects on the list was currently in the telephone book, Prism Corporation. The others were either no longer in business or no longer looking for business. To chase them down, I called the state government.

  The clerk at the corporation commission was only willing to look up three names for each call. Policy, she said. She seemed to feel that a polite citizen would make her job easier by asking his question through the mail. That would have given her four to six weeks to get the information I wanted instead of the three hours, five phone calls, and half a roll of Tums my curiosity wound up costing me.

  Every corporation doing business has to have a registered agent for service of notices. In case somebody wants to sue, they know who to deliver the papers to. I got the name, address, and telephone number of the registered agent for each of those fourteen corporations. The agents all had different names and addresses, but eight of them had the same telephone number, the one answered by the Spanish-speaking lady who didn’t live with Señor Rodgers. The problem was finding a way to get past her.

  The direct approach is always nice, when it doesn’t get you killed. I thought it might be a good idea at least to scout it out, so I ran April through a fast-food hamburger joint that wasn’t fast and was only food in the FDA’s rather loose definition of the term.

  April ordered a cheeseburger, large fries, and a Coke. She dug into them while I picked at my burger, Tums, and coffee. As soon as she finished her fries, she started talking. She seemed to think the job was all but done. I told her to slow down a bit. Enthusiasm is a fine thing if you can sit back and watch, preferably with a drink in your hand, but it can be painful if you’re expected to share it.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked. “We’ve almost got him, haven’t we?”

  “What would you do next?” I asked.

  “Call the number again. Make that woman put him on, or at least give him a message!”

  I shook my head. “If he’s involved, that’ll just tell him we’re in town, maybe let him set us up. And say he isn’t. Roy is a lot spookier than Walker ever was. If he gets a third call on that line, he may just close it down. Hell, he may have closed it when he got the call asking for Johnson.”

  “What do you want to do, then?”

  “Let’s see if he has a back door. Let’s find his phone. If that doesn’t work, there’ll be plenty of time to call again.”

  After we finished lunch, I found a business in the neighborhood that had a reverse directory and didn’t mind letting me take a peek at it, but the number was unlisted. That left the telephone company. I called the business office, gave the operator Roy’s number, and told her I was interested in getting information on some of their extended services.

  She was happy to oblige. “What services in particular, sir?”

  “Well, you have call waiting, call forwarding, automatic messaging, and I’ve been thinking some about getting WATS service. Are those available in my area?”

  “Of course. They’re available to all our customers. Which one do you want?”

  I asked her for details on them, then asked about prices. She talked for a while and I listened politely, then told her that it sounded like I already had the call waiting. I wasn’t sure. My bills were higher than I thought they should be, and I hadn’t been getting them regularly. She called up the records for the number and told me that I had only the basic service. I asked her to verify my billing address. She gave me a post office box number and I confirmed that it was correct.

  “But why am I getting so much static on the line?” I asked her. “Really, I’m not sure that something like WATS would work when I can’t hear people calling from across town as it is.”

  She was concerned and offered to have a service man check my line. “Of course,” she told me, “if it turns out that the problem is your telephone equipment and not our line, we’ll have to charge for the trip.”

  “That’s fine. I don’t care what it costs, as long as I can talk to people without all that damned hissing. Does your serviceman have the right address?”

  “Of course he does.”

  “Verify it for me, will you?”

  She repeated the service
address. I told her that was the wrong address. She insisted it was right. I asked her what telephone number we were talking about. She read it back to me. I got mad at her. “Damn it,” I said, “that isn’t the number I gave you. I’m not even in that area!”

  She apologized and asked for the right telephone number. I told her to forget it and hung up.

  The billing address wouldn’t be of much immediate use unless I wanted to stake it out and wait for a pickup. The service address could be checked immediately, but not without proper equipment.

  I found it in the classified section of last Sunday’s paper. Three garage sales included hunting rifles. I called the first number and asked if they had been sold. He had one left. I asked about its condition and the price. When he told me, I thought that was a little steep and asked if he had anything else he wanted to get rid of. He didn’t, but I struck gold on the next number. An hour later, I had an old Browning automatic and a box and a half of cartridges, and I felt more comfortable. Roy had been a friend a long time ago, but I wasn’t sure he still was. And even friends can behave unpredictably when they have uninvited guests.

  April was the next problem. I didn’t want her along when I invaded Roy’s turf. I took her to a coffee shop downtown and explained the next step.

  “It will be like Los Angeles,” I said. “You drop me off in front of the building. Twenty minutes later, you drive by again. I know you want to see him. If it’s safe, I’ll be standing by the entrance. You park and I’ll take you up. If there’s a problem, I’ll be at the corner. Slow down for me. If I’m not at either of those places, come back in ten minutes. If I’m still not around, go back to the motel, pack, and get the hell out of Texas. Check into the Albuquerque Hilton downtown. If I don’t show by noon, the day after tomorrow, go to my lawyer. You met him. He’ll have some things to tell you. Listen to him. Then get out of town. Hide.”

  She listened seriously, nodded, and we took off. The phone we were interested in was on the third floor of an old office in a slum near the International Bridge. The building was in the middle of a block of brick-faced offices and stores that dated from early in the century. The store next to it sold used clothes, ropa usada. April pulled the car up in front of it and stopped. I got out. So did she.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  She ignored me. She headed for the entrance. I cut her off, grabbed her arm. “Get back in the car,” I hissed. “You agreed to let me go in alone.”

  “No, I didn’t. I just nodded that I understood you wanted to go in alone.”

  She twisted out of my hands and pushed through the door. I caught up with her on the stairs. “Please don’t do this,” I said.

  “I’m going to see my father.”

  We stood there for a few minutes, breathing heavily, glaring at each other. Any kind of commotion would have attracted attention. There was no choice, so I gave in with my usual grace. “Okay, damn it, but you follow my lead. If there’s any trouble, you run. Do you agree?”

  She nodded.

  I shook her. “Nodding doesn’t cut it anymore, sweetheart. Tell me you’ll do what I said. If you don’t, I’ll carry you out of here!”

  “I’ll do it,” she promised.

  The third floor was not well lit. Faint voices filtered up the stairwell, but there was no sound on the floor. Dirty windows at either end of the hall showed an old linoleum floor that hadn’t been swept recently. Four doors opened off the hall. Room 303 was on the left, halfway down. The paint on the door had peel through three colors without showing wood.

  I stood just to one side, listening and thinking. To knock or not to knock, that was the question.

  After about ten minutes, April, behind me, began to move impatiently. I motioned sharply to her to be still. A little later, a telephone in the room rang once. There was no indication it had been answered, but it didn’t ring again.

  I began to get an idea of what lay inside and puckered my lips. Roy was about as cagey as they come. I reached for the knob and twisted it gently. Locked. It was an old lock, almost no lock, but putting anything new on a door in that neighborhood would beg for a break-in. I pulled my pocketknife and pushed it into the crack by the latch, levering the blade outward until I felt the tip bite into the tongue. The only sound was the muffled traffic outside and the hiss of my breath. April didn’t seem to be breathing.

  I stood in front of the door, exposed to anyone who wanted to put a round through it, and lifted on the knob and pulled it to the side at the same time I twisted the knife. I felt the tongue slide back and the door shifted slightly. I stepped quickly to the side and pulled the Browning, then pushed on the door with my knife hand. It swung open a few inches. There was no reaction.

  I went through it fast and low, and dropped into a crouch, pushing the door against the wall with my back and waving the pistol vaguely around the room. The door went all the way to the wall behind me. I looked around. I was alone. I stepped to the door and waved April in, then closed and locked it behind her. We stood side by side, looking around.

  The room held only an old metal desk. No chair, no filing cabinets, no wastepaper basket. There was a telephone and a small machine the size of a VCR on the desk. There were three telephone lines leading into the machine. Two led to jacks on the wall. The third was connected to the telephone.

  April looked at the setup without understanding. “What is it?” she whispered.

  There was no need to whisper, but something made me do it anyway. “A call forwarder,” I answered. “People call this number, and it automatically forwards the call somewhere else. Anywhere in the world. They don’t know the call is being forwarded. Even the telephone company doesn’t know.”

  She sagged. “He isn’t here, then.”

  “I told you he was cagey.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “You search the desk. I’ll look at the equipment.”

  She pulled out one drawer after another. There was nothing but dust in any of them. I looked at the machine. Without instructions, I had to wing it, but one of the buttons was a three-way switch. The panel under it read PROGRAM—ANSWER—TEST. After trying to think of an alternative without success, I decided what the hell and flicked the switch to the test position. A number appeared on the digital display just above the switch. It was not the kind of number I wanted to see. It was a Juarez number. The telephone rang. I jumped and April let out a small scream. I flicked the switch back to the ANSWER position. The phone rang again, the machine blinked, and then nothing happened.

  April grabbed my arm. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Back at the coffee shop, April was fighting an adrenaline high from the excitement of entering Roy’s office. At the same time she was disappointed that it had gotten us no closer to her father. She sat at the counter, sipped coffee, and talked nonstop. I grabbed the yellow pages and ignored her as much as I could.

  The likeliest man for the job I needed done was named Archuleta. He had a small listing under DETECTIVE AGENCIES. The office was about five blocks away. If he did business in this neighborhood, I figured he had to be hungry. I called to make sure he was in, then walked back to the counter and told April we were going.

  Disappointment must have won the battle with excitement for domination of April’s mood. She waited in the car while I went in. Archuleta’s office building was almost identical to Roy’s. It had the same dingy exterior, the same unswept floors, even the same worn gray vinyl flooring. The only real difference was the number of stairs. His office was on the second floor. The door had a frosted glass panel with B. ARCHULETA, INVESTIGATIONS stenciled on it. I had a feeling I’d seen the place before, only the name had been Spade. It wasn’t a good feeling.

  B. Archuleta was on the phone, speaking in the low, suggestive tone usually reserved for new lovers. He looked up and murmured, “Gotta go. See you later.” He stood and offered his hand. “You the fellow who just called? Mr. John Smith?”

  I nodded, shook, and said his
name politely. He was a couple of inches shorter than I was and had maybe twenty pounds on me. He looked like he’d been in pretty good shape ten years ago. Now he looked soft. He smelled good, though. On the whole, my impression was very favorable. I wouldn’t trust him with a nickel till payday, and the sun would die before he’d make a moral judgment. I cut the amount I was going to offer him in half.

  He motioned to a chair. “Call me Ben,” he said. “You have a very common name, Mr. Smith. Or should I call you John?”

  “Call me anonymous.” I laid a fifty on his desk.

  “You’re a nonamus.” He said. He didn’t reach for the bill, but it was on his mind. “So, what’s your problem?”

  “A man owes me money. I want to know where he is.”

  “He got a name?”

  “A telephone number.”

  “You don’t look like the kind of man who’d pay me to look up a number. So there’s a catch, right?”

  “It’s a Juarez number. You have contacts over there?”

  “Contacts is my stock in trade, compadre. And in exchange for this lonely little general on my desk, you expect what?”

  “A street address, directions, and a description of the layout. That’s all.” I smiled at him. “General Grant will get some company if you do the job. Maybe a Ben, Ben?” I could be just as cute as he could.

  He pretended to think about the offer. He was wondering how much more I’d stand, how much I was hurting. “Make it two Franklins,” he said, “and you got a deal.”

  “Double or nothing,” I offered, “if you perform before ten in the morning.”

  “No problem, my friend.” He reached for the bill. “Where do I collect?”

  “I call at ten. Make me happy and I’ll make you happy.”

  He shook his head. “Come by. Show me what I want to see and I’ll tell you what you want to hear.”

  I nodded and left him fingering the bill.

  The car was like an oven inside. April wiped her forehead and asked, “What was he like?”

  “Cool. Real cool.” I described the man to her.