Final Notice

by Jonathan Valin

  I parked on Delta beneath a blood-red maple and walked up a long concrete stairway to the apartment complex. A kid with stringy brown hair, wire rims, and a wispy moustache—like those moustaches you see in Chinese miniatures, the ones where you can count every hair on two hands—was raking leaves beneath a redbud. He seemed to be more interested in making designs than in getting the job done, which made me think that he might belong to the place or to one of the families in it. He was wearing a red-plaid lumberjack shirt and faded denim jeans and looked like a gypsy who had been kidnapped by merchants when he was a baby.

  I walked up to him and said, “Hi.”

  He said “Hi” back and continued to make lazy S's in the leaves.

  “You live here?”

  He nodded gravely and stirred the leaves with his spoon. He wasn't a talker, this kid. But then I guess I didn't look as if I had much to say that would interest him. I asked him if he knew a Mr. Sachs and, for some reason, that got his attention.

  He planted the rake at his side, leaned on the handle and eyed me suspiciously. “Are you here to make trouble, mister?” he said in a snippety little boy's voice. He looked me over a second time and said, “You're with the I.R.S., aren't you? You're going to try to cheat that old man out of a few more dollars.”

  It sounded like something he'd overheard at the dinner table. Which meant that Leo Sachs was one of those amiable old men who've become community property, like scruffy dogs. Everybody's meat.

  “Just tell me where he lives, O.K.?”

  ‘‘Find it yourself,” the kid said and went back to work with a vengeance.

  I looked at him a minute and said, “What the hell.” And off I went to find Leo Sachs.

  ******

  His name wasn't listed on the shiny brass mailboxes of the first apartment house in “Le Village” complex. Or on the second. But the third was the charm. Leo Sachs. Number Seven.

  I walked through the glass entry door and down a narrow hall that smelled vaguely like a hospital corridor of disinfectant and overheated air. There was a brass buzzer on the door of Number Seven. I pressed it and waited—a long time—until I heard somebody fiddling with the chain. The door opened a crack and a hearty, thickly accented male voice said, “What is it you want?”

  “Mr. Sachs?” I said.

  “Yeah. I am Sachs.”

  “My name's Stoner. Could I talk to you?”

  “No,” he said with great finality and slammed the door shut.

  I pressed the buzzer again.

  “You go away,” Leo Sachs said from behind the door. “You go away or I'll phone the police.”

  I hated to do it, but I had the feeling it was the only way, short of a subpoena, that I was going to get in. So I cleared my throat and said, “I am the police,” in my deepest, most authoritative voice.

  It worked.

  He said, “You are the police?” And I heard the chain sliding out of the catch. The door opened wide. “Why don't you say you are the police in the first place?” Leo Sachs said with offended dignity. “You should say this when you ring. Then I would open the door.”

  He was a huge, robust man. About as big as I am. With a square, ruddy face and short-cropped gray hair and the kind of bull neck that terminates in rolls of flesh at the nape. He looked, for all the world, like an Ashkenazic Victor McLaughlin. A big, ham-fisted old man in a white dress shirt and black suspenders, with round, frameless spectacles on his nose.

  “So come in,” he said and showed me through the door into a living room that was all polished mahogany and pile rugs, sideboards, secretaries, cabinets that had the gloss of patent leather and smelled of lemon oil.

  Sachs lowered himself into a wing-back chair with a crocheted cushion and pointed to a small armchair beside him.

  “Sit,” he said.

  I sat.

  There was an octagonal table between us with a crusty pipe rack on its top. Sachs pulled a meerschaum from the rack and scoured the bowl with his thumb.

  “So?” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  I'd already lied about being a cop, so there was no sense in playing it any other way. I flashed my detective's license at him took a notepad from my coat pocket, flipped it open, and pretended to read nonchalantly from a blank page.

  “You belong to the Hyde Park library, Mr. Sachs?”

  “Sure. Yes.”

  He'd gotten that pipe going and his words came out in puffs of cherry-flavored smoke. Between the lemon wax and the pipe tobacco, it was beginning to smell like a burning orchard in his room, which was heavily draped and carpeted and very hot. I explained the situation to him, trying to make it appear as if the interview were part of a larger investigation. When I mentioned the damaged books and the fact that he had taken some of those books out, he began to puff out smoke like a smudge pot. And when I got to the part about his police record, he exploded. Literally. Spewing sparks and ashes over his clothes and over the chair.

  “When will you people stop tormenting me about this!” he said in an agonized voice. “How many times must I explain? That shtarker Segal is going to kill me with his lies.”

  His face was livid. The wattles of flesh about his neck had actually expanded, like a cobra's hood, and one of his cloudy blue eyes had become slightly unmoored. For a brief second, I thought he was about to have a stroke. Since all I was really interested in was clearing up the indecent exposure business, I made soothing noises and asked him gently if he wouldn't like to explain what had really happened. He nodded violently.

  “I have a car,” he said angrily. “This car—for thirty-four years I have driven this car. Not one accident. Not one!”

  I told him that was commendable and he snorted with disgust.

  “Wait!” he said. “Wait ‘til you hear! Two years ago I moved to this building. It's a little more money, but what the hell, I deserved it. I worked hard. Thirty years I was a butcher. My own meat market in Avondale. I figured I deserved it. The pool. The sauna. Nice location, too. Right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Wrong!” he exploded. “One afternoon, three years ago, I'm coming home from downtown. Every Saturday I go downtown. I shop Shillito's. I eat at the Cricket. Like clockwork. So I'm coming home and I see this shtarker Segal, who can't hardly walk, standing by the driveway. Sixty-two and he can't walk! Like a baby. He's standing on the sidewalk by the driveway. I honk at him and he waves like ‘Go ahead.’ So I pull in. Only as I pull in, he falls across the hood. I didn't hit him. How could I hit him? I'm only going maybe two miles an hour. I'm telling you, he falls across the hood! I stopped. Sure, I stopped. Got out. I say, ‘Segal, what's the matter with you? Are you sick?’ ‘You hit me,’ he says. ‘I’ll sue.’ ‘So, sue,’ I tell him. What the hell do I care if he sues? The man's crazy. From generations back. Who'll believe him? A man never has an accident in his life is suddenly going to go crashing into people who can't even walk!

  “Only your friends—the policemen—don't see it that way. Segal makes a complaint. They come out. I tell them exactly what happened. And before I can park the car, they say I'm to blame. That it's my fault Segal can't stay on his feet! A man who can't even stand up has got the right of way before a man never even got a parking ticket. Do I complain? No. I got insurance. I got coverage. Fifty-dollar deductible. So I got cheated. Listen, boy-chik, you can't live seventy-four years and not get cheated. I go inside. Drink some wine. Call my agent. And I figure that's the end of it. Only that's not the end.”

  “No?” I said.

  Sachs snorted again. “This shtarker Segal gets a lawyer named Kraus. Belonged to the Bund, this Kraus. A Nazi. He gets Segal a doctor. The doctor says Segal has a slipped disk from where he fell on my hood. I'm going one-and-a-half miles an hour and he's got a slipped disk! Segal comes to my apartment and says, ‘I been to the doctor. He says I got to go to French Lick for the waters.’ I say, ‘French Lick is in Indiana. Why not some place close?’ He says, ‘It's got to be French Lick. For the waters
.’ I say, ‘My insurance won't pay for that.’ And he says, ‘The waters or I sue.’ So I call up my agent and he says, ‘They got you over a barrel. It'll cost you more in court than to send the shtarker to Indiana.’ I say, ‘That's not fair.’ He says, ‘Fair ain't in the law books. Pay up.’ What am I going to do?”

  “Did you pay him?” I asked him.

  “Sure, I paid. But that night...” Sachs held up one finger and smiled. “That night I went down the hall to Segal's apartment and I knocked on the door. At first he won't open it because he's afraid I'm going to punch him. ‘What do you want?’ he says. He says, ‘Talk to my lawyer.’ I say, ‘Who needs lawyers? You win. I'll give you the waters.’ So he opened the door and I unbutton my fly and—”

  I started to laugh. “You didn't?”

  “Sure I did,” Leo Sachs said triumphantly. “I gave him the waters. I pissed all over his goddamn rug.”

  I laughed so hard that Sachs started to laugh too. “And that's why you were arrested?”

  He nodded. “Segal said I exposed myself. Some woman in his apartment—his cousin, I think—she says she seen me do it.”

  “For chrissake!”

  We kept laughing for another minute. And between the smoke and the laughter, my eyes started to tear. “Mr. Sachs,” I said to him, “I'm sorry. I wouldn't have bothered you if I'd known the details.”

  “Oh, it's all right,” he said, tamping his pipe. “Only next time, tell your friends, O.K.?”

  “I promise.”

  I got up from the chair and wiped my eyes.

  “About those books,” he said. “They're ruined?”

  “I'm afraid so.”

  “That's terrible!” Sachs said. He looked at me sympathetically. “Listen. If I tell you something else you won't say I said it?”

  “Tell me what?” I said.

  “Because I don't want no more cops coming to my door.”

  “All right,” I said. “I give you my word. No more cops.”

  He tapped his pipe on a glass ash tray. “Two, three years ago,” he said, lowering his voice, “I seen some kid cutting up a book.”

  I stopped wiping my eyes and looked at Sachs as if I were seeing him for the first time. “What kid?” I said.

  “Some kid. It was in the john. On the second floor. I walk into a stall and there's a kid with a book on his lap and a razor blade. I say to him; ‘What are you doing?’ And he slams the door. What am I going to do? Push the toilet door open?”

  “What did he look like?” I said. “How old was he?”

  “A kid,” Sachs said. “Maybe twenty, twenty-five. Just a kid.”

  “Would you recognize him again if you saw him?”

  Sachs shook his head. “Three seconds—that's how long I saw him. And he had his head bent down.”

  “Did you report him to the librarian?” I asked.

  Sachs flushed slightly and said, “I didn't want to get him in trouble.”

  “Look, Mr. Sachs,” I said. “This could be very important. If I was to bring you some photographs or drawings, do you think you might be able to identify this boy's face?”

  “I only saw him for two seconds,” he said helplessly. “And this is years ago.”

  “Would you look anyway?”

  “Sure, I'd look,” he said. “But don't expect nothing.”

  I wanted to tell him that he'd already given me a lot more than I'd expected. But he'd had enough of private detectives for one afternoon. I thanked him for his help, apologized again for bothering him, and walked back out into the brisk fall air.

  6

  ONE SUMMER not too long ago, I was invited to join in a symposium at Oberlin University on ‘‘Investigative Techniques in Police Work.” Of course I was flattered by the invitation, but eventually I turned it down. Partly because I don't enjoy lectures and lecturers and partly because I had the feeling that nobody at this conference would be particularly pleased with what I had to say. The symposium was designed for the high-powered techno-freaks, the gadget gang who are into computer-assisted analysis and voice-printing and galvanic skin measurement, as if criminal investigation were just another way of dissecting a frog. Now I have very few illusions left about my work or about my life and, on most days, am willing to acknowledge that being happy in your work or happy about anything is mostly a matter of self-deception. Nevertheless, I get on with the job, which is rarely pleasant and sometimes more unpleasant than you can imagine. I do it because it's what I do best, what I have a talent for. And by God, I'm not willing to bend that talent to any computer analyst's prejudices.

  I started to write it down—what I would say to that symposium crowd. Of course, I ended up writing an apology for my life, full of arrows and dots that all pointed shamelessly back to me. And I realized that what I was trying to get at was the nature of jobs themselves—how we appropriate and become them, the way a bird or an insect becomes a part of his surroundings. It seemed to me, then, that vocations were a kind of camouflage that most people evolved throughout a lifetime of little hurts and little triumphs, spun out of themselves the way a spider spins its web. And that for me, with my ingrown passion for finding things out, the job was no more or less than my way of tackling the mystery of knowing anyone at all. That, in spite of the cynical cracks, mine was essentially a lively business and, deep down, a moral art.

  Now, who in that crowd would have listened to that kind of thing with a straight face? For that matter, who can listen to it now? And, yet, it's true, shameless, and very possibly absurd. But it helps to explain why I left Sachs feeling elated and to point up how much of that elation was a self-congratulatory pleasure in my work. Realistically I knew that it was pure chance that Leo Sachs happened to be in the second-floor john when my Ripper was at work. And it was most certainly an accident, and a piece of outright cheek, that I'd come to Sachs in the first place. And yet I wasn't denying the accidental quality, just adding to it a kind of serendipitous contentment—the way you feel when you go back over a letter or a report you've written and discover that it's phrased more clearly than you thought at the time you wrote it.

  What the hell, I said to myself, as I walked down the concrete stairs to Delta Avenue. Why not just admit it? After thirty-seven years, it's still all a mystery to you. Accidental or intentional, unexpected or predictable, it still comes as a surprise. But that's the advantage of not growing too far up, of not looking too critically into your own mechanisms. Like the monkey who presses the button and gets his banana—it was that kind of circuitous satisfaction I was feeling. And, of course, I knew immediately where to go next.

  Back to the Hyde Park library, which was gleaming like a chrome fender in the afternoon sun. I parked the Pinto in the little asphalt lot beside the rear door, got out, still feeling lucky, and walked up to the glass entry way.

  Inside it was already beginning to look like night. The fluorescent lights were taking hold, drying out the color of the carpeting and of clothes and the woody sheen of the big card catalogues next to the door. I waved to Miss Moselle, who was perched like a night owl on a stool behind the circulation desk, and walked up the staircase to the second floor. I'd started back to the art section on the east wall when someone called my name.

  “Mr. Stoner?”

  I turned around and saw that the gray-haired woman behind the Juvenile Desk was smiling at me. She had lipstick on her teeth and just about everywhere else beneath her nose; but she was jolly-looking in her loose print dress cinched at the waist with one of those perforated plastic belts that are made to fit any size. I smiled back at her and she said, “Were you looking for Kate?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.”

  “I thought so.”

  She held out a chubby pink hand. There was a slip of paper in it. “She told me to give this to you, if you came in.”

  I plucked the paper out of her hand as if I were plucking it out of a piece of risen dough, smiled at her again because she was so obviously expecting a reward, and walked over to
one of the window chairs looking out on Erie Avenue. It was beginning to irritate me that so many people seemed to be in on my case. I mean Kate Davis was one thing. In a sense, I figured I was in on her case. But Miss Moselle and her coterie of old ladies was something else. And it wasn't simply a question of my professional pride being hurt, although if I'd been being very frank with myself I suppose that would have been a good deal of it. It was a question of safety, too. In spite of the cockamamie way the library was run, the Ripper thing wasn't just another piece of gossip. He was a proven vandal and potential dynamite. And the old ladies should have known that. Ringold should have known it. And so should Kate Davis. Who, the note informed me, had walked the three blocks to Paxton Avenue to talk with Twyla Belton's parents.

  I had the feeling that Kate Davis liked the Belton connection a little too well, that, like a cub reporter or a rookie cop, she wasn't going to be satisfied with the slightly crazy kid Leo Sachs had helped me come up with. Now that I knew his approximate age, he could be singled out fairly quickly. He might even be on Ringold's list. And Kate could be a help winnowing out the chaff on that list. On the other hand, I told myself cynically, maybe it's best to let her go off on her own. I wasn't used to working with a partner and the chances of her turning up anything but bad memories about Twyla were very slim.

  It would be a little like sending her out for a left-handed wrench. Not a nice thing to do. But it would keep her busy. And I had the feeling that Kate Davis was never busier or more content than when she thought she was in full command, like that general she was descended from. Not like you, huh? I said to myself. And after thinking that over for a second, I walked back downstairs and out to the car.

  ******

  The Belton house was a green frame bungalow with a mansard roof and a dormer window set like a hooded eye in the center of its second story. I sat in the Pinto staring at that eye and thinking that I should have been back at the library, culling Ringold's list with Miss Moselle. I should have been doing my job, instead of wet-nursing a green girl detective. But when it came down to it, I didn't have it in me to send Kate Davis on a snipe hunt, even if it was her own idea. It didn't look like fun—going up there and prying her loose from what was probably a sad and embarrassing scene. But the fact was I'd begun to like the girl.