Of Mice and Murderers

by John Stockmyer

  College was pulling them apart.

  Increasingly uneasy with each other, even what they'd always had in common -- sex -- was no longer all that good, these facts so depressing he again had the feeling he was losing her.

  After Susan said goodbye, he'd found only a measure of peace in burning the wreckage of the coffee table. Nor did needing to use less ice on his knee put him in a better frame of mind.

  Sunday. A day of rest and aspirin, the day when smaller bruises on his lower back fused into a massive, tender, purplish display. A long day to think about the possibility that, if the detective business was what was driving Susan away, he'd have to find new work.

  The question was, what could he do that would make a lot of money?

  So much for Sunday.

  Monday morning -- the weather warming, the streets melted off -- things picked up. Feeling better generally, Z drove to the office to balance his SF reading with detective fiction, Z keeping mostly mystery novels in his file cabinet.

  Inside the "shop," his coat off and laid out on his "secretary's" desk, he leaned over to trigger the rewind on his answering machine -- after the whine and beep, heard a voice say: "45-637 ...."

  Distorted as the tape sounded, it was the receptionist at International Imports, the place where Johnny Dosso never worked.

  A pause ... and another beep. "This is Hugh Calder." Why did answering machines have to fuzz up people's voices like they did? "Would it be possible for you to call me Monday morning? At Bateman, about 9:30?"

  Those were the calls -- two more than he'd gotten all last week.

  Going down the hall to use the public restroom -- still blood in his urine -- Z returned to call the college at 9:20; got routed to Calder's impersonal secretary, then punched through to Calder's office.

  "Hugh Calder speaking."

  "This is Bob Zapolska."

  "Right, Bob. I was wondering if we could have dinner together some place on Wednesday evening. My treat. There's an illness in my wife's family in Kentucky and she flew back there this morning. She'll be gone all week. With the weather clearing up, I thought Wednesday night might be a good time to do a little ghost light hunting. If you're free, that is. I also owe you some money for what you've done so far in looking into Tommie V's death."

  "Fine."

  "Tippin's?"

  "Yeah." Tippin's was more "upscale" than Z could usually afford; but if Calder was buying ....

  Then, too, a payment from Calder would help Z buy an expensive present for Susan, the kind that would patch things up between them while he sorted out his life.

  "About 6:00? The weather report says we're to have this good run of weather throughout the rest of the week. Just right for ghost hunting." Z heard Calder's soft chuckle. A regular laugh or a nervous one? He couldn't tell over the phone.

  "See the light last Wednesday?"

  "No. I didn't get out." As Z had figured. "But I did get up to the campus later in the week. No light then. What I figure is that Wednesday night is still our best shot."

  "Sounds like fun." Not really, but more "fun" than anything else he had to do that week. "Any more rumors?"

  "About Tommie V?"

  "That, and other rumors."

  "Nothing about Tommie. I did get a chance to talk to Lucas. As I figured, he's all broken up about Beth's death."

  "The boyfriend."

  "Right."

  "She didn't have two boyfriends, maybe?"

  "Not that I know of. Have you found out anything ...?"

  "Just asking."

  "Did I get a hint from you that you think there was something ... funny ... about Beth's death?"

  "Maybe."

  "You're not alone. Lucas said as much. He blames himself because he was going to go over to her place that night and got drunk instead.

  "He said if he'd been there, the tragedy would never have happened. If it's any help, he said he couldn't understand her going out after dark that way."

  "Yeah."

  "He's taking it hard. Has missed all his classes since. I found him where I knew I would: in a bar near the campus. By the time I got there, he was stinking. Said he couldn't sleep and he looked it. Said he kept going over and over it in his mind; that he couldn't rest until he knew what happened." A pause. Calder shifting thoughts? "I could give him some hope there. I told him about you. That you had worked for the lady. He knew that. Knew your name. I told him you were fond of the lady, too, and maybe would look into her death. I told him I'd let him know if you found out anything. He seemed ... pleased to hear that."

  Cynically, Z wondered if there would soon be an announcement from U.N. headquarters that Big Bob Zapolska was looking into the Ogden death. And the Tommie Victor death. And, of course, that Z was a suspect in the Monet heist. Didn't anyone pay attention to the word private in the title Private Detective?

  No harm done this time, he supposed. Realistically, you had to expect loose talk when dealing with civilians.

  "What does Terbrugghen look like?" Though Z knew it wouldn't help to know, his plan was to keep Calder talking in hopes the prof would add an interesting detail. A long shot, but ....

  "Look like?"

  "Just curious."

  "Oh." Another pause. Calder turning inward to think. "He has longish, straight blond hair. Used to be blond. Mostly gray now. Average size. Stocky. Not as much of a beer belly as he should have. Blue eyes. He's very Dutch-looking, if that means anything. That's his lineage. Dutch. I think women find him attractive. ... Will that do it?"

  "I guess."

  "Listen. On Wednesday night, I'll bring a Bateman yearbook. All the faculty are pictured there. I'll show you Terbrugghen's picture."

  "If it's too much trouble ...."

  "Not at all. On one condition."

  "Yeah?"

  "That I don't have to show you my picture."

  "Yeah."

  "Wednesday at Tippin's at 6:00?" Calder was a teacher alright. A little review was always to be expected from teachers.

  "Right."

  One call down, one to go. The hard one.

  With a sigh, Z reached for his coat. At least it was a nice day for a drive to the pay phone at the Antioch Shopping Mall.

  This time, ten rings. "That you, Z?" Johnny Dosso's sleepy voice, the number Zapolska had dialed no doubt to the apartment of Johnny's latest bimbo.

  In some ways, Bob Z wished he could trade women as easily as Johnny D; that is to say, he wished he didn't love Susan as much as he did.

  "It's me."

  "Hey, good to hear from you, Z-man."

  "Yeah."

  "I got something, but nothin' you want to hear."

  "Shoot."

  "Remember, Z. It was your idea I should ask around." What was Johnny leading up to?

  "Yeah."

  "Remember what I told you before? How we've got a shitty bunch of pimpled peckers working for us these days?"

  "You said scary."

  "If they had any brains to blow out, I myself would be in the market for dynamite fuse." You just had to wait Johnny Dosso out. "But it's worked out in the end."

  "What?"

  "That shit-ass punk kid name of "little Antony"; Antony Caetani. The one somebody told me came after you." Though the home base of the thug wasn't a major topic on Z's mind, this answered the question.

  "You send him?"

  "Hell no! Nobody sent him. That nutcase got it into his head that he'd impress somebody if he rousted you. Must have overheard someone -- could even have been me, since I've been asking around -- say you had an interest in the painting. Took that to mean you were the one who stole it. And hey, Z. What'd you do to him?"

  "Nothing."

  "Nothing, my ass! Before we shipped him off to Chicago, I got a first-hand look at him. This being my deal, sort of."

  "What did he tell you?"

  "Nothing. Hell, he don't talk. Don't make anything but noises. Just sits and shakes. They don't make 'em like you and me anymore."

  "H
e OK physically?"

  "I guess. Got a couple of bruises. Maybe a cracked rib. Big lump on his jaw. Knot on his head where a pro would have tapped him. The only reason I know this punk is connected to you at all is that another piece of filth that we got working for us heard him braggin' that he was headed your way."

  Idly, Z wondered how the thug had kept from catching fire.

  No matter. What was important was that Z had been right; he no longer had anything to fear from "little Antony."

  "Anything on the painting?"

  "You still after that? After this sleazeball came lookin' for you?"

  "I need to know."

  "Nothing. I asked around, like you wanted. And the feeling here is that it wasn't a professional job. Certainly not local. I put the word out and, near as I can tell, the job's not connected to associated enterprises. It's almost sure to have been a private party."

  "I appreciate it, Johnny."

  "I'm sorry about that pissant who thought he was some kind of old-time pistolero."

  "Not your fault."

  "Just in case I could've been more careful, I owe you one, Z-man."

  "Accidents happen."

  "Some kind of fuckin' accident happened to the punk, that's for sure. His head's all messed up. Small loss, though."

  "Yeah. Well ... thanks again."

  "See ya, Z-man." Click and click.

  Now, Bob Zapolska had another call to make.

  Feeding in more coins, he pushed the steel buttons and waited.

  "I'm calling Detective Addison," he said to the female voice that finally answered.

  "May I have your name, Sir?"

  "Bob Zapolska. The detective wants to talk to me."

  "I'll see."

  It took awhile.

  "Addison here." Amazing! A Kansas City dick at his desk.

  "Bob Zapolska."

  "I know. You got something for me?" By the sound of him, Addison was bone-tired.

  "It's not good. My lead says, not a professional job. Checked all over the country, he said." Johnny hadn't said exactly that, but that was what he meant."

  "You trust him?"

  "Yeah."

  "It's good to know anyone you can be that positive about." Z heard the detective sigh. "Knowing what something isn't is a step toward knowing what it is." Not a hell of a big step, Z thought, though a man on Addison's kind of hot seat had to keep thinking positive. "If you hear anything else, I'd appreciate a call."

  "You got it."

  "Like I said, it's good to know someone who gives you straight answers." Click.

  Funny. But over the phone, even though Z knew Addison was black, Z couldn't tell. Just another cop that anybody'd invite out for a beer. Of course, it'd be a shock to a Klans-man to invite Addison over the phone, and have a black show up. Still, Z could sympathize with the Klan; lower-class guys calling themselves Imperial Wizards and Grand Dragons and who dressed up in funny-looking Halloween suits did have to be careful who they associated with. Had to take care to choose friends from people as dumb as them -- so they wouldn't be shown up.

  Thinking about the three calls on the short drive back to his office, the only thing he'd learned was that the thug was gone for good. Other than that, no one was getting anywhere, including him. If misery loved company, Z's circle of friends was widening.

  Back at the office, he remembered one more thing. Johnny wasn't kidding about owing Bob Z a favor; Johnny D didn't kid about favors. Now that Z was thinking of quitting his dead-end detective job -- for Susan -- and about how to make big money -- for Susan -- he wondered if he shouldn't try to cash in on Johnny's favor.

  Cash. More and more, the most important word in Big Bob Zapolska's bleak life.

  Still besieged by dark thoughts as he left his office, he was too upset to notice the old car back of him.

  All the way home.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 16

  After his bladder got him up Tuesday morning -- Z with less back pain but still leaving considerable urine-blood in the stool -- he was as depressed as he'd ever been. For obvious reasons. Nothing in his life was going right.

  Heading the "wrong" list was losing Susan, Z coming to realize that going to college was a symptom of Susan's discontent with her life: a life that included Big Bob Zapolska.

  Contributing to Susan's unhappiness was the unsavory nature of Z's work. Though it was the detective business that had brought them together, what he sometimes had to do as a P.I. scared Susan. Or to be more accurate, because of the pressures of his job, there were times when he scared her.

  The work itself was going nowhere, Z no nearer a solution to the Ogden/Victor "murders" than ever. (To say nothing of the missing rental tools.) On top of that, there seemed no prospect of other more-solvable cases coming his way. And why should they? People hired private detectives who got results. If word of mouth said no results: no new cases.

  He'd even been too paralyzed to do routine things -- like check on Ms. Ogden's lover.

  Depression was not new to him, of course, anyone living in a hovel -- worn linoleum floors, cracked, violet-painted walls, cast-off furniture -- anyone with as few prospects for a better life as he, was bound to get discouraged now and then.

  As he ate his peanut butter sandwich that morning -- the sandwich not tasting good to him, either -- he knew what he must do to get himself going: inject beauty into his life, the only way to do that, take a trip to the Nelson Art Gallery.

  By nine-thirty that morning, driving to the Nelson on autopilot -- I-35, Southwest Trafficway, Plaza, and into the Nelson's parking lot -- Bob Zapolska's attitude had improved.

  He felt better still as he walked up the broad front steps of the Nelson to enter the deep shadow of the building's soaring limestone-pillared portico.

  After entering the building through its always impressive glass-and-bronze doors, Z checked his overcoat at free checking to the right. (Gallery security prevented patrons from taking loose-fitting coats into the gallery proper, clothing in which they might hide a stolen object.)

  Buying an admittance ticket, he went past an aged ticket-taker and through the turnstile.

  Normally, he would have swung to the right to enter a short, dark, squiggly corridor leading to the large room called "Classical Hall," Classical's out-sized, rectangular room housing the gallery's display of ancient artifacts: from Sumeria, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, Greece, and Rome.

  Today, however, he was feeling so "down" that he wanted to get where he was going -- fast. So he walked straight ahead through the cavernous space of Kirkwood Hall, centering himself between the room's widely spaced double row of sixty-foot, Corinthian-style columns: four-foot-in-diameter pillars of glassy smooth, black granite, their mirrored surfaces crazed with brilliant lightning strikes of white.

  He was headed for the second floor and much needed therapy in the room of the Impressionists.

  It was a quiet day at the gallery, stray people wandering here and there, teachers herding small groups of children, little kids stopping to look up in awe at the antique suits of armor on their tall stone pedestals.

  A right at the back of Kirkwood took him to the slow 30s elevator. (People who weren't cripples took the sweeping, worn, white marble stairway.)

  Arriving on second, he went through the vestibule, then down the long room of modern art, past the free-standing "Old Guard" and the life-sized, stick horse, past large canvasses that could only have been painted by drug-maddened lunatics.

  At the end of "Modern," he took another right into the Spencer Impressionist Gallery, a brightly lit, elongated space filled with paintings that were the envy of the world. Susan said the reason there were so many fine impressionist paintings in America was that American collectors began to buy this style before Europeans realized this, too, was "art," the paintings on this side of the Atlantic eventually finding their way into American museums.

  Padding slowly around the room's perimeter, Z paused at the early Van Gogh, "Head of A Peasa
nt." But soon moved on. He didn't need to see paintings that mirrored his own depression. He stopped at Van Gogh's "Olive Grove," painted just a year before the deranged artist committed suicide by shooting himself in the groin.

  Z hurried on.

  Seurat's "La Baignade" had never impressed him. Gauguin's "Reverie" was, as its title suggested, more peaceful, Gauguin painting this portrait of his placid South Seas "wife" in her rocking chair.

  Z spent a little time looking at Pissarro's "Le Jardin Des Mathurins, Pontoise." A French garden. Restful. Colorful.

  Farther on, the giant "Nympheas" of Monet dwarfed him. Water lilies. Painted on an heroic scale because the old man's sight was failing.

  Finally, to stop before a work painted in Claude Monet's youth: "View of Argenteuil."

  Nice, but no comparison to the "Boulevard des Capucines."

  Seeing the "inferior" Monet made him realize that another part of his discontent was his inability to do anything to track down the stolen masterpiece.

  Except become a suspect himself!

  Logically, there was nothing he could do; it was just that this was not a day for rationality.

  It was then, forcing himself to look, that he saw what he'd been dreading ... the blank space on the central, wood partition where the "Boulevard" had always been displayed.

  Though he thought he'd prepared himself, the shock of seeing empty space where his favorite painting used to "live" caused him to be even more depressed.

  For instead of experiencing the "rightness" of the universe -- how he often felt in the gallery -- all he could sense today was ... loss. Loss, and a grudging respect for the "guard" who'd stolen the "Boulevard des Capucines." At least, the thief had the brains and the nerve to take something beautiful, at little risk to himself, apparently.

  Sitting down on the bench in the middle of the room, rubbing his sore knee, he stared at the vacant central panel.

  Sat and thought. About the sorry life of one Bob Zapolska, that big, dumb, old, ugly guy who was trying, against the odds, to live an honest life. Trying to live by his own code, his concept of morality being to stretch legality no more than he had to. And only then, to solve his client's problems. That, and making it a point not to hurt innocent people in the process.