by David Daniel
The logjam on the city side had vanished as neatly as if someone had poked a big button and the ground had opened to let the traffic fall through. I wheeled north on 93 with nary a stomp on the brake. The clouds had broken, and the last of daylight was slanting through inspirationally. I tuned in the Sox, letting my mind fray out. Clemens had taken a break from shaking down kids who were asking for his autograph and was earning a piece of his ridiculous salary. He had six strikeouts after three and a half innings. It must be nice to be that good at something, I thought. Like a Gretzky or Navratilova or Michael Jordan. Or a John Potter. The way the Tran investigation was moving, I was not going to win any sleuthing prizes. Which needled me back to mulling. I shut the game off. The western horizon was ablaze with the sunset, and I moved with the other traffic toward it, like moths drawn to some final conflagration.
At the office I had a message to call someone about a problem a condominium association was having with its property manager. I put it on the blotter for the morning. I fished the business card for the Haskell and MacKay Gallery out of my wallet. Another woman answered but put Syd Keyes on without asking who was calling. Just as well; Ms. Keyes apparently still had me figured for the Castle killing. It took me awhile, but she was a smart enough cookie to agree that I would not be free and phoning if the police felt the same way. I reminded her that she had mentioned she kept evening hours by appointment. “Can I make one for tonight?”
She was silent a moment, then I told her what I needed. I thought I heard a snide little purr in her voice when she asked if I could be there in forty minutes.
I locked up and hiked across Kearney Square to the Sun. Bob Whitaker was off, so I wrote a note for him and sealed it in the brown government envelope with the faxed photograph and printed Bob’s name on the outside. The receptionist promised it would be on the photo department desk waiting for him when he got in for his shift at seven the next morning.
* * *
Haskell and MacKay had a CLOSED sign in the window. No need for Sorry We Missed You, Please Call Again; if you did, you did. I knocked and after a minute Syd Keyes peered through the glass, then unlocked the door. I was wrinkled from rain and driving, and running a few hours behind my next shave, but I could not gauge how far wanting I was in the woman’s cool appraisal. Evidently the notion that I was a killer was gone, at least. Maybe she had checked my Dun and Bradstreet. What I did know was that late hours did not mar her finish at all. The burnished-oak hair swooped smoothly, softening the patrician planes of her face. Her crimson lips gleamed. She relocked the door, and I trailed her across the big oriental rug.
“Would you care for some sherry?” she asked.
I said I didn’t mind and she poured. Amontillado. It went with the objets d’art: the table with its tooled-leather-inlay top and the Tiffany lamp and the French telephone. An antique chessboard had been added, carved ebony and ivory pieces arranged on the sides near which we settled facing one another.
“So, what did you want to know about the Stewart fortune?” she asked, her breath misting the rim of the crystal glass poised before her lips.
“Whatever you can tell me.”
Some of it I knew already from Ada, the rest was news. The family seemed to have inherited its seed money from King Solomon, but Charles Blaine Stewart had turned it to Big Money with his clipper ships. His descendants had expanded into investments and real estate. With the generation of Ada’s father, however, the old Scottish drive had lost momentum, and with Ada and her brother it had hit an abutment.
“The brother, Chad, took up anthropology,” Syd Keyes said with dramatic distaste. “The last thing I knew, he was in Africa someplace, or South America. Living among primitives.”
“Like Ada,” I said.
She gave me an arch look. “You have to admit, to turn one’s back on that kind of destiny is both irresponsible and rash.”
“At least.”
“And to compound irresponsibility the way Ada did…”
She paused, checking me closely to see how much I knew. I took a shot. “With her marriage.”
“Her father disapproved, of course. Ada’s parents had been the example of where that kind of marriage usually goes. They’d divorced when Ada and Chad were barely in their teens. So when Ada married—which must have seemed to flout him—he reacted.”
I thought about Ada’s overdue bills and her checkbook balance. “Cut off her inheritance?”
“What other leverage did he have? The family had long since lost physical control of her. Ada had grown up to be totally independent.” Syd made it sound like a felony. “Of course, the inheritance could be restored someday, I suppose. That could be dangled like a carrot. God knows there’s more money than her parents could have squandered. But any reinstatement would have to be at Ada’s initiation, and when I remember that little girl who refused to come down out of the beech tree … well, I’m doubtful.”
She angled her glass, gazing at the amber liquid as if it contained all the important answers to life—which is to say the ones pertaining to money. I tasted mine, but it was only old Spanish wine.
“When you said her parents’ marriage was ‘that kind,’ you meant the fact that her mother was Chinese?”
“And the daughter of a servant. But at least they married for love. In Ada’s case I’ve heard it was neither love nor money. No one knows for sure, because it happened out West a number of years ago, and Ada never kept any ties to Andover—but the rumor was they married to avoid trouble.”
“She was pregnant?”
“No. The trouble was his. I had no idea what kind before you called tonight, so I made a call of my own. I’ve got a reliable source who makes a hobby of keeping track of the old families. Ada knew the man from Berkeley. The trouble he was in was for drugs.”
“He was arrested?”
“For cocaine. He was going to be deported. Ada married him to give him citizenship.”
I don’t know if my jaw fell open or not. “Do you know his name? Or what nationality he was?”
“Those particular details weren’t available.”
I sat there, letting it all sink in. In her cool voice, Sydney Keyes said, “Rasmussen, I’ve been making all the moves so far. You haven’t told me what your interest in this is.”
“I’m hoping to keep some people out of trouble.”
“That’s rather ambiguous. Even noble perhaps. Would it do any good to ask you to go on?”
“I can’t. Sorry.”
She sipped amontillado, her long fingers with their blood-red nails curled around the glass’s thin stem, and I had a helpless feeling for Ada, an ugly feeling about myself for having done it this way. Sydney Keyes’s eyes were on mine. I slid a chess piece forward, set my glass on the vacant square and stood up. “I think you’ve answered my questions. Thanks.”
“You weren’t … looking for anything else?” she asked in a voice that made the words tickle my underbelly.
“Nothing I can think of.”
She lowered her eyes and smiled with faint disappointment, like a teacher brought to frustration by a dim pupil. She locked the door behind me.
28
“JUST GETTING DONE,” Bob Whitaker said from the doorway of the Sun’s darkroom. He pointed to a desk, where I saw a batch of black-and-whites. “Something to keep you occupied.” I knew by the quiet way he said it that they were his personal work. He ducked back into the darkroom and shut the door. It was seven-thirty A.M.
The prints were of a girl whom it took me a few seconds to recognize as the young cashier at the Owl Diner. So they had gotten together after all. The shots had been taken around the city, though everything in the backgrounds was wisely understated, the camera having found its true subject in the girl. Without the cigarette-smoke pall and china-plate clatter of the Owl, there was just the radiance of her face, framed by the clocksprings of Botticelli hair. Both of them should be doing it for a living, I thought.
There was a second pile of photo
s on the desk, which I realized had been taken the previous day, at Joel Castle’s burial. These too were Bob’s own, not the official stuff the paper had used last night. I flipped through them. Crowd studies, character shots. The great American way of death.
“How’s this?” Whitaker asked.
The print was still tacky from the fixer, and without a negative to work from, the clarity was not crisp, but the picture was a leap over what John Potter had handed me. Bob had cropped Suoheang Khoy from the group of refugees at San Francisco Airport, and he had enlarged the print. I studied Khoy’s face with more scrutiny now.
“I did up half a dozen for you,” he said. He never would have fished for my reaction to the other work he had let me see, but I gave it anyway. He took the praise modestly, though I sensed his pride. My opinion mattered to him, so I never offered it lightly. As he got the other prints of Khoy into an envelope, he said, “Who is he, anyway?”
“Nobody you’d want to know.”
* * *
I drove with my four-window AC on. The sun was back in force: drier, hotter, baking tar and brick and the vinyl upholstery I sat on. On Lawrence Street someone had opened a hydrant and a multicolor flock of kids was sporting in the thick gout that washed flattened beer cans and trash toward the storm drains. At the DSS office the sunburned receptionist told me Ada had not been in today, would not be until tomorrow. I wanted to ask her if Ada was in New York, but the taste of last night was still on my tongue like dirt. She let me go back to Ada’s cubicle, where I left one of the prints face-down on her desk with a yellow stickum note asking her to call me as soon as she got back.
On the chance of catching St. Onge, I drove down to JFK Civic Center, where the locust pods hung limp and wasted-looking in the heat. I pulled into the lane behind the library and the police station, past a buzzing Dumpster to where I could scope the window of Ed’s office. The lights were off, the door closed. As I was about to back out, Gus Deemys and a man I did not recognize came out of the station, heading for a car. As always Deemys was immaculate, two-tone shoes, his snappy attire so wrinkle-free I could almost picture him sitting at his desk in his underwear until the intercom tipped him, then bustling into his clothes. I called to him.
He stopped and squinted. “Rasmussen,” he said, making it a long slow sound. The guy with him was looking too, as if putting a face to a name he had heard.
“Seen St. Onge?” I said.
Ignoring the question, Deemys strolled a few steps nearer, but not too many. He had not forgotten our last encounter. Castle jokes would be in bad taste now, so he got inventive, pointing at the Dumpster. “Looking for lunch?”
I thought about just giving him the photo of Khoy to give to St. Onge, but I was tired of explanations. I put the car in reverse and slowly backed up.
“You can eat shit, man,” Deemys called, growing brave.
I stopped and turned to meet his gaze. “What’ll I do when I get to your bones, Gus?”
“Come out here and say that,” he said.
I put the car in park and got out and shut my door. I walked over and stopped. “Here I am,” I said.
His feet shifted, but he didn’t take the shot—as I had known he wouldn’t. Guys like him get their bravery from groups. The clothes were his way of telling the world to keep its distance. Shaking his head, muttering something too low to hear, he headed for the parking lot. The other guy followed. Big man, Rasmussen, I told myself, feeling diminished by cheap victory, withered all of a sudden by the heat. How long would it go on, this undeclared war? Attrition, with the occasional skirmish. Wouldn’t life be easier someplace else?
I crumpled that idea fast and pitched it away. This was my territory. I got in my car. I backed out of the lane and drove away.
From my office I left a phone message for St. Onge to call me. I spread the Tran case notes on my desk and sat there in a funk. Information overload. It was the antithesis of boredom, yet in its effect it was the same: a dulling of the mind, a glazing of the eyes, a vast indifference to the world at large. The Sunday newspaper could do it, or a visit to a large museum. I was feeling it now. There were too many loose threads, and somehow the one I was most interested in tying up was the one which spooked me a little too. I needed to speak with Ada.
I might have let it ride. I might have called on George Dickel. But sometimes doing the little task when the big one is weighing on you restores balance. I returned the call I had received on the condominium matter. The number had a New Hampshire area code.
“Artificial Intelligence,” a young woman said.
“Some days I think so too,” I winged it.
“Sorry?”
I gave her my name and glanced at the note. “Karen Dubay, please.”
The next voice was older. “Hi. Thanks for calling back. I wasn’t sure of the protocol. I got your name out of the book. I’ve never dealt with an investigator before.”
“This is a first for me, too. Artificial intelligence?”
She laughed. She was with a high-tech project, she said. Hush hush. On the home front, she went on, she was a trustee of her condo association in Nashua, a small one, ten units, which had self-managed for a few years before deciding to hire a pro. Now, after six months, they suspected the manager was skimming their accounts.
“Do you have evidence?” I asked.
She didn’t. Mostly it was a vague unease that had them all nervous. Lately the manager was not returning calls, and they had just learned that his P.O. box hadn’t been cleared in two weeks. I got details and said I would be in touch. I made a few calls and by leaning on the manager’s message service got the name of a relative. That earned me the news that the manager had been in an accident while on vacation and was in a hospital in Denver. I called the hospital to discover the man was in guarded but stable condition, expected to recover—slowly. I did not talk with him. Next I contacted his bonding agency and explained the situation. The person I spoke to gave me a profile of the manager as an honest guy who unfortunately kept slipshod accounts. The agent agreed to meet with the condo trustees to reassure them. I called Ms. Dubay again and gave her the score.
“I’m amazed at what you’ve learned so quickly,” she said.
“It’s all there for the asking. The good news is your money’s safe. The bad news is that for all practical purposes you don’t have a manager.”
“What would you advise us to do?”
“You’re not buying advice,” I said, “but your contract does call for thirty days’ written notice. If you’re unhappy, buy his month and can him and go back to running the show yourselves, or get someone else. At any rate, meet with the agent and see what he says.”
She thanked me excessively, and when we had talked fee she thanked me some more. How much are you going to sell a half hour of phone hassling for? “You can send the bill to me,” she said.
“You won’t forward it to the manager?”
After I hung up I could not help mulling Pascal’s quip about the world’s problems coming from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room. I was saved by the bell.
“Hello, Mr. Rasmussen? This is Walt.”
The voice was familiar but different somehow. “Walt.”
“Rittle,” he said.
“Got you, Walt. What’s up?”
“I’d like to see you if I could.” I realized what sounded different: the exuberance was gone. He sounded like he was talking so no one would overhear him.
“All right.”
“Is twenty minutes too soon? At your office?”
“It’s fine. What’s it about, Walt?” I asked, but he had already hung up.
29
TWENTY MINUTES was not soon enough. I was pacing by the elevator when the door slid open and Rittle stepped out onto the worn carpet, looking as nervous as I felt. I jumped on him. “What’s going on? Where’s Ada?”
The soft brown eyes behind his glasses blinked up at me in puzzlement. “She’s in New York, isn’t she?”
“Oh … yeah.”
“She’s taking a late flight back, I thought.”
“So what’s this about?”
“Well, I saw the note and—”
“Note?”
“Yeah … sorry.”
It was a sitcom script. We were on different pages together. “What note?” I said.
“The stickum you left on Ada’s desk. I looked at the photograph.”
I relaxed a little; he wasn’t here about Ada.
“Alex,” he said, “I think I may have seen him.”
“Khoy?”
“Is that his name?”
“Yes. Where’d you see him?”
He rubbed at his arms, bare in the blue Izod shirt he had on. “Here in town, yesterday. I couldn’t talk freely back in the office just now, on account of client confidentiality.” He glanced toward the lawyer’s door where a murmur of voices was coming through. I motioned him through my waiting room into my office, gestured to a chair and took my own.
“Has Khoy been a client?” I asked.
“No, no. I’d never seen him before yesterday. I was visiting a family over on Broadway. I think I passed him in a tenement stairway, just for a moment. He was going upstairs. I didn’t think twice on it, but when I saw your photograph…”
I took another copy out of the batch Bob Whitaker had given me. “Is that him?”
Rittle studied the picture, angling it to catch the sunlight. He adjusted his glasses and breathed in and out deliberately through his nose several times. “The staircase was dim. But when you’ve worked with people a long time, you notice a lot of particularity in them. I got so’s I used to see it with the Montagnards in Nam. I see it now with Cambodians.” He touched the glossy face. “The eyes are similar. The shape of the face. I’m pretty sure. Though the person I saw looks older.”
