The Second Longest Night

by Stephen Marlowe

  “You are not. You were doing nothing but staring out at the Treasury Building when I came in.”

  “That's the way I think,” I said. “I think of all the money I'm going to make from all the suckers who think they need something investigated.”

  “You don't.”

  “Cross my heart. They have a special series of money, just for me.”

  “Oh, come on, Mr. Drum.”

  “I was busy, I said.”

  “This won't take long. If you don't answer my questions now, though, I'm going to haunt you just like a—” she smiled at me for the first time—“a private detective. You don't believe me?”

  I felt a little sorry for her. Getting a story like that was the same as private snooping in a lot of ways. But I felt sorrier for myself. I said, “The answer is no.”

  “All I want to know is—”

  “No, Miss Wilder. She's dead. Let's not make like Frankenstein.”

  “But everyone was saying nasty things about her. I want to write the truth.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “The truth.”

  “I mean that. I happen to think it would make good copy.”

  I walked over to the archway. There's no door separating it from my waiting room, but I stood there like an usher. I peeled a strip of flaking paint off the-archway and powdered it between my fingers, letting it sift to the floor. “Good-by, Miss Wilder,” I said.

  She stood up uncertainly. I was a man, young enough, with eyes. She hadn't expected this. The telephone rang.

  This time I knew it would be the right call, the one I was waiting for. This time I didn't want to answer it. She was standing there, looking at the telephone. It rang five times. Outside, a horn blew. There was a squeal of brakes and I thought I heard someone yell.

  “The telephone is ringing,” said Miss Wilder. “Don't mind me. I'll wait.”

  She sat down again and crossed her legs. She balanced the pad and pencil half on and half off the edge of my desk. My eyes said four letter words at her, but she was so persevering, I had to grin. I picked up the phone and said, “Drum Investigations.”

  “This is Alex Lubrano, Mr. Drum,” the voice said. “Hello, Alex.” Miss Wilder parted her lips and moistened them with her tongue. She leaned forward, watching me. “You haven't gone to the police or nothing like that?” Alex asked me. He had a loud, nervous voice which rang in my ears like a whistle. I thought Miss Wilder would be able to hear what he said. I jammed the receiver against my other ear and watched Miss Wilder light a cigarette. She still looked interested.

  “Nothing like that,” I said.

  “You're a pal, Mr. Drum.”

  “I'm a private investigator,” I said. “That's why.”

  “You called me before?”

  “Yeah. Meet you the usual place? Right away?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Alex Lubrano.

  I hung up. Miss Wilder put her cigarette out. “I have to be going now,” I said.

  Miss Wilder got to her feet. “Is it about Deirdre Hartsell?”

  “I said I was on a case, remember?”

  “Can I go along with you? I might get some pointers on how to conduct an investigation. There's a similarity between our lines of work, you know.”

  I gave her my best straight face as we walked out to the elevator together. “I'm terribly sorry,. Miss Wilder. How do you think my client would like it if he knew I was taking a reporter along?” . “I'm not a reporter.”

  “It's the same thing. Miss Wilder, why don't you do some digging on your own? That's the way I'd get the facts if I were you. Go out and dig.”

  Miss Wilder was self-consciously silent while we rode the elevator down. “Elevator operators make me quiet like that,” she said as we got out on the street floor. “I always think they're listening to me.”

  “Bless them,” I muttered. “What did you say? Mr. Drum, I have the impression you're making fun of me.”

  “Miss Wilder,” I said, as she turned up the collar of her trench coat and got lost in it. The snow was falling softly, steadily. The wind had slunk back across the cold Potomac. Girls in gay topcoats hurried by with gayer Christmas packages.

  “I go this way,” I said. Miss Wilder shook hands with me. I walked half a block to my Chewy and warmed her up for a minute, then drove north along 14th Street. Miss Wilder had already started her digging. She was following me one block back in a Studebaker coupe. I reached Thomas Circle and took it around twice like a merry-go-round before I hit the brakes as hard as I could with the snow on the ground and turned west along M Street. In the rearview mirror I caught a glimpse of the Studebaker fishtailing smoothly off the road. I took M Street past the weather bureau, which had predicted fair and warmer for today, and across the Rock Creek Bridge into Georgetown, which is still Washington's best address although it wasn't named after the father of our country but the dumpy English king who bore that name and the numeral II.

  I parked near Jackson's Tavern. The snow had obscured the cobblestones of the street and the red bricks of the sidewalk and Georgetown, which took pride in these, would never forgive the elements. The sign which hung above the tavern door was of wood with Old English lettering. Georgetown eschewed neon lights. Georgetown has always reminded me of a fat old dowager of the eighteenth century, when high society used to drive down the trail called Pennsylvania Avenue of a bright Sunday morning to gawk at the White House, a palace in the wilderness.

  It was warm inside Jackson's Tavern. The place smelled of tap beer and frying fish. I recognized an admiral, a general, a handful of Senators and more Congressmen than you might find in their wing of the Capitol except when the roll-call bell sounded: I smiled at the headwaiter, who thought he had seen me before. Probably he had. Jackson's is an institution in Georgetown, which dotes on institutions, and also the neighborhood in which the Hartsell family happens to live.

  “Here I am, Mr. Drum,” Alex Lubrano's voice beckoned me. I excused myself as I moved around a party which included the Undersecretary of State in a lampblack suit. I sat down across from Alex Lubrano in a booth and stared at him and didn't like what I saw.

  Alex Lubrano. Age indeterminate, someplace on the wrong side of forty. Nervous, hyperthyroid eyes. A pinch-nostriled nose which had been broken up near the bridge and not repaired properly. Thin nervous hands fluttering like moth wings near a fire. Dark sallow skin stretched tight over a small-boned frame with very little intermediary flesh. Fished from the river at high tide, he might weigh a hundred pounds.

  “You sure you haven't gone to the police or nothing?”

  “I'll let you know when I go.”

  “I keep on thinking I ought to go to the Un-American Committee or something.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I got a wife and three kids, Mr. Drum. You think they'd like it?”

  “No,” I said. “How's the shoemaker business?”

  “Lousy. They call me a cobbler and like to gawk down at my place, but don't take their shoes there. Georgetown. Some crazy place. Did you ever try working on Eighteenth-century equipment?”

  “I carry a musket wherever I go.”

  “Ha-ha,” said Alex. “You're the greatest, Mr. Drum.”

  “Still in the Party?”

  “Shh. Yeah.”

  I leaned forward across the table and stared at Alex. He looked away. He's always looking away. The waiter brought two glasses of beer, green from a fresh keg. Jackson's wasn't the sort of place in which you complained. We didn't complain.

  “Deirdre Hartsell,” I said.

  “Cells,” said Alex. “You know how it is.” He licked lips which could have been hidden behind the edge of a razor blade.

  “Deirdre Hartsell.”

  “Five, maybe six people in a cell. You never get to meet many of them. Say, you mean Senator Hartsell's daughter? Weren't you . . .”

  “Yeah.”

  “She must of been some piece of . . .” He stopped, not liking my eyes. “Well, you know.”

  I got two
twenties and a ten out of my wallet. Living in Georgetown is expensive. “That's what it's worth,” I said. “It isn't worth more.” I nudged the money across the table.

  He sucked in his breath. He did things, quick things, with his hands. The bills disappeared. “She was a member,” he said.

  “You sure?”

  “Would I tell you? Would I?”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Not very active, but a big money contributor. They treated her like royalty. She didn't use her real name, but everybody knew her anyway.”

  “What name did she use?”

  “Joan Chambers, I think. Something like that. Maybe it was Chandler. I can find out.”

  “Find out and call me.”

  He nodded, gulping his beer. “She was always with a guy from one of the South American embassies. He looked like Cesar Romero.”

  “Which one?”

  “Venezuela, it was. A third secretary or something. He didn't rate. We all thought she was warm for him. You know how it is.”

  “Did the Venezuelan know who she was?”

  “Him? I don't know. I guess so.”

  “He's here in Washington now?”

  “No. It's funny—he was recalled all of a sudden.”

  “When?” I said.

  “I'm not sure exactly. About two weeks ago, I think.”

  “Find out and call me,” I said again. Two weeks ago was two weeks after Deirdre had died. “What's his name?”

  “Francisco Del Rey. Paco, she called him. He always called her his blonde-haired troublemaker and got a big charge out of it. I couldn't figure why.”

  “That's what Deirdre means in Celtic. Troublemaker.”

  “I'll be damned.” Probably he would.

  “Were they going together recently?”

  “All the time, up until she shot herself. Hell, I'm sorry, Mr. Drum.”

  “How long did they know each other?”

  “Ever since he got to Washington. It must of been two years ago.”

  “Was Del Rey very active in the Party?”

  “Him? Hell, no. If you ask me, he was a big dope. They gave him the red carpet treatment, though. You know, because he's a Latin. It's very important to them, South America.”

  I didn't finish my beer. I imagined all sorts of smells in there, not beer and frying fish. I stood up and left a dollar on the table. I liked the waiter much better, but Alex had earned fifty times as much. “I'm going to call you in a couple of days if you don't call me first,” I said. “Find out everything you can about Francisco Del Rey.”

  “You want me to poke my head in a noose for fifty bucks?”

  “I want you to do a guy a favor who's doing you a favor.” I didn't like putting it that way because I didn't feel that way, but I only work near the Treasury Building, not in it.

  “Sure, Mr. Drum. I'll do it for you.”

  I got out of there in a hurry. The Undersecretary in the lampblack suit was just leaving too. We nodded at each other.

  Chapter Three

  TALL SYCAMORES and elms rattled their winter-bare branches in the wind which had returned from its siesta on the Potomac. People were already out shoveling the brick sidewalks, even though it was still snowing. They had fought a long, hard legal battle to keep those bricks, and they had to bed them in cement to do it; they weren't going to let anything like snow cover up their pride and joy for long.

  The Senator Hartsells lived in a small mansion which from the outside was all ivied brick, arched doorway and tall round-topped windows, with a wrought iron railing leading to the white door, its enormous brass knocker gleaming with the glow from a hanging carriage lamp. Latrobe and Thornton in their architectural heyday had envisioned houses like this, I thought, but Latrobe and Thornton have been dead these two hundred years.

  You'd have expected a butler to answer a door like that, but almost the only butlers in Georgetown are of the hired-by-the-day variety. The door was opened for me by a young blond fellow wearing a plaid flannel shirt and jeans. He was carrying a cocktail glass, expensive Steuben, in his right hand. The olive said it was a Martini. The color, clear as water, said it was a strong one.

  “Yes?” he said. He had a scrubbed pink face which looked as if it had been shaved twenty minutes ago or wouldn't have to be shaved for a week. He had Deirdre's big blue eyes, but on her they had looked better. He was tall and wide across the shoulders and tapering like in the menswear ads. I didn't like him and I didn't know why and I don't think he liked me either.

  “You must be Blairy,” I said.

  “I don't believe I know you.”

  “You don't. I'm here to see your father.”

  “It's rather late.”

  I looked at my wrist watch. “It's just eight o'clock.”

  “Is he expecting you?”

  “All the time,” I said.

  “See here . . .”

  “Do we go inside or would you rather lick a Martini icicle?”

  He swirled his drink expertly in the glass, as if to prove it hadn't frozen and wouldn't freeze. He stood still in the doorway.

  “Besides,” I said, “we were related once.”

  His big blue eyes made like a pair of camera shutters in reverse. He said, “Don't tell me you're Chester Drum?”

  We shook hands coolly after I nodded. He led me inside with dispatch and left me in a large living room which I had seen before. It was cluttered with Russian icons and genuine treasure chests from the coast Down East and Singapore jade and other assorted knickknacks of Blair Hartsell's senatorial travelings and a few hard-to-find items of a more functional nature. I helped myself to one of these, pouring myself a Martini from Blairy's pitcher. I was right; it was veddy, veddy dry. Soon after I had ascertained this, I heard Blair Hartsell padding down the marble slab stairs.

  “Chester,” he said. He was wearing a dark blue quilted smoking jacket and smoking a big briar pipe. “You've met Blairy, I take it?”

  I said I had. Blairy looked at the Martini in my hand and said nothing.

  “You've found out something already?” Senator Hartsell asked me.

  “Not much. Can I talk?”

  “Of course you can talk,” Blairy said.

  “Deirdre belonged to the C.P.”

  “That's dandy,” Blairy said. Senator Hartsell let him see two cold eyes. He didn't say anything else for a while.

  “You're positive, Chet?”

  I shrugged. “It's the best information I have right now. It's probably accurate.”

  Senator Hartsell went over to the mantle and poured himself a drink. “I thought I could make a political comeback,” he said. “Now it's hopeless. Chet, why did she go and do a thing like that?”

  “You were her father,” I said.

  “You were her husband.”

  “I wasn't married to her long enough. I don't know why she did it. The more I think of Deirdre, the less I know about her.”

  “They're all like that,” Blair Hartsell said. “All three of them,” he added, frowning into his Martini with a look of self-pity. “They're my children, but I don't know them at all. Is it that way with all fathers, Chet?”

  “I've never been one.”

  Senator Hartsell three-worded me. Blairy snickered and finished his Martini and poured another. “I'm sorry,” Senator Hartsell said. “Does that finish your investigation?”

  “Not unless you say it does.”

  “No. You still have to find out if—” Just then the brass knocker thudded. Blairy said he would get it and did so. He returned to the living room with Marianne Wilder, who had snow in her hair. Blairy had been a less scrupulous gatekeeper this time.

  “She told me you told her to come here and ask us some questions, Drum,” Blairy said.

  Marianne Wilder seemed surprised to see me. “Mr. Drum,” she said.

  “Then it's true?” Blairy was looking at me. “Sort of,” I said. Marianne Wilder gave me a grateful look. She took out her pad and pencil. I don't know w
here she went after I ditched her at Thomas Circle, but the pad was still blank.

  “Mrs. Hartsell is quite ill,” the Senator said. “She sleeps restlessly. Why don't you come back in the morning, miss?”

  Marianne Wilder nodded and thanked him. “I'll walk you to the door,” I said. “I was just going.”

  “I'll walk you to the door,” Blairy told me. I shook hands with Senator Hartsell and said I would call him. He stood there fingering a jade Buddha and backtracking down the corridors of time with it. Marianne Wilder waited in the snow on the street while Blairy and I stood on the doorstep.

  “What are you after, Drum?” he said. “Information for your father.”

  “No. I mean, what's in it for you?”

  “Fifty dollars a day plus expenses.”

  “Come on, Drum.”

  “That's all.”

  “I don't believe you.”

  I gave him my very best smile and said, “I don't give a damn if you believe me or not.”

  “Maybe it would be better if you didn't come around here again.”

  “Maybe it would, but I will.”

  “I'll give you five hundred dollars, right now.”

  I didn't know what his game was, but I liked him less and less. I said, “When did you ever earn that kind of money?”

  Color came up from the collar of his flannel shirt and spread all over his face. He looked almost purple in the harsh glare of the carriage lamp. Marianne Wilder was leaning on the wrought iron railing, tapping one of her feet in the snow.

  “Or I'll give you a punch in the nose,” he said in a subdued whisper. The whole family wanted to give me punch in the nose, but all I had ever done was marry one of them.

  “That's better,” I said. “Sold.”

  He lunged at me. I caught his fist and got the fingers open and forced them back. He reeled and banged against the white door. His face was now pale but looked green in the carriage light. I let go of his hand.

  “I'll get you,” he said without conviction.

  “You can find me in the Farrell Building on F Street,” I said, and went down the walk toward Marianne Wilder. The door slammed shut.

  “I'm going to turn in early tonight,” I informed her, “if you still want to follow Me.”