Ralph, speaking for the first time, explained, “You see, you’ve got the best motive we know about.”
“Only motive we know about,” said Steve.
“So naturally,” said Ralph, “we’re disappointed about you not knowing about the inheritance in advance.”
“And naturally,” said Steve, “we’d like to bust that story if we could, because then we could have our number one suspect back.”
Feeling the faint flutter of butterfly wings in my belly, I said, “You don’t really suspect me, do you?”
“Well, that’s just it,” said Steve. “We can’t, can we?”
“It’s not having the choice,” Ralph explained, “that’s what bothers us so.”
“And of course,” said Steve, “there are what you might call weird elements to the case.”
“Which we don’t like either,” said Ralph.
“Weird elements make us nervous,” said Steve.
I said, “I don’t know what you mean, weird elements.”
Steve said, “According to our information, you never met your Uncle Matt, is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Never even heard of him, in fact.”
“That’s right.”
“Yet he left you almost half a million bucks.”
“Three hundred thousand,” I corrected.
“Before taxes,” he said. “Half a million before taxes.”
“Yes.”
“To a nephew he’d never met, a nephew that didn’t even know he existed.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“That strikes us,” Ralph explained, “as a weird element.”
“Then there’s this business about not telling you about the inheritance until a couple weeks after the old guy’s dead. Right in the will it says this.” Steve spread his hands. “That’s also what we like to call between ourselves a weird element.”
“Not to mention Gertie,” said Ralph.
“Exactly,” said Steve. “Here you have this old guy dying of cancer, he’s got about as much get up and go as a wet noodle, and yet he—”
I said, “Dying?”
“Isn’t that something?” said Ralph. “One foot in the grave already and the proverbial other one on a banana peel, and somebody has to hurry him along.”
“I didn’t know about that,” I said.
“So that’s another element of the sort we call a weird element,” said Steve. “Bumping a guy going in a day or two anyway. Not to mention Gertie, like Ralph said.”
I said, “Was he really that close to death? A day or two?”
“He’s been that close the last five years,” Ralph told me. “That’s what his doctor says. He was down in Brazil, Matt Grierson was, and he found out he had cancer, and he came home to die.”
“Not to mention Gertie,” said Steve. “Except I think maybe it’s time we did mention Gertie.”
I said, “What about her?”
“That’s what your uncle picks for a nurse,” said Steve. “Gertie Divine, the Body Secular.”
“Was she really a stripper?” I asked.
Steve was surprised at me. “Certainly,” he said. “I seen her myself, over in Passaic, not so many years ago. And you ask me, she’s still got the old pizzazz.”
Ralph said, “Steve’s had the hots for Gertie ever since we come on this case.”
“Longer,” Steve said. “Since Passaic. But anyway, that isn’t the point. The point is a terminal cancer patient, what the doctors call a terminal cancer patient, and an old bozo to boot, that’s what he picks for his nurse. Then he gets bumped and his nephew gets all his loot, and when we come around for a nice talk with the nephew, who’s here? Gertie. There’s another weird element, what we think of around the station house as a weird element.”
Ralph said, “How long have you known Gertie, Fred?”
I wanted to call him Ralph, I really wanted to call him Ralph. I wanted to start my answer with Ralph and end my answer with Ralph and put Ralphs in here and there in the middle of the answer, and answer only in words which were anagrams of Ralph. But I’m a coward. I didn’t even call him Ralph once. I said, “I just met her today. She was here when I came back from the lawyer’s.”
They blinked at me, in unison. Steve said, “You mean, she just walked in? Cold?”
“Not cold, Steve,” said Ralph.
“All right,” conceded Steve, “not cold. But just walked in. You never saw her before.”
“Let me show you something,” I said, and got to my feet.
“I’d be delighted to see it,” said Steve. “We both would.”
“Delighted,” said Ralph.
I went over to the desk and took Uncle Matt’s letter of introduction out of the pigeonhole I’d filed it in, and brought it to Steve, and handed it to him. He read it, and grinned, and said, “Now, isn’t that something new.” He handed the letter to Ralph. “Here’s something entirely different, Ralph,” he said.
Ralph read the letter. When he was done he said, “There’s a thing I notice about this letter.”
Steve said, “What’s that, Ralph?”
“It doesn’t seem to have a date on it,” said Ralph. “She just brought it here today,” I said, somewhat defensively.
“I accept that,” said Ralph. “What I wonder about, I wonder when he wrote it. You follow me?”
“Why don’t we ask her?” I said.
Steve said, “I don’t think that’ll be necessary, Fred. Do you, Ralph?”
“Not at the moment,” said Ralph.
With me standing up and then sitting down I felt better than before, and more sure of myself. I said, “If my uncle was dying anyway, and if he was hit with a blunt instrument, isn’t it likely he was killed in a quarrel with somebody? Some sort of rage, no real motive at all.”
“It is a possibility,” said Steve. “I certainly do go along with you on that, Fred, what you bring up there is a possibility. And I believe we’re doing some work along those lines already. Aren’t we, Ralph?”
“Routine work along those lines,” said Ralph. “That’s what we’re doing, yes.”
“Of course, at the same time,” said Steve, “I admit to you in all frankness and honesty I wouldn’t mind turning up with somebody saw you and your Uncle Matt together six months ago. Or you and Gertie. Right, Ralph?”
“Help us considerably,” said Ralph.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I’m telling the truth.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt it,” Steve said fatalistically. “But a fella can dream, can’t he?”
Ralph said, “You wouldn’t have anything you might want to tell us that we don’t already know, would you?”
“About the murder?”
“That’s the case we’re working on, yes.”
“I never heard about it myself till this afternoon, I don’t know a thing about it. Only what Reilly told me and what you told me.”
“And what Gertie told you.”
“Gertie doesn’t tell me a thing. At least, she hasn’t yet.”
Steve laughed. “A good old girl, Gertie,” he said. He heaved to his feet, looking very strong and tough. “Don’t let me hear about you giving her a bad time, Fred,” he half-joked.
“I don’t think that’s the way it’ll go,” I said.
Ralph also stood up. “I guess we’ll be going along,” he said. “Any time you want to get in touch with us, call Homicide South. Or try through your friend Reilly.”
“I will,” I said. “If I have any reason to call.”
“That’s right,” said Ralph.
As they headed for the door, Steve said, “Tell Gertie so long for us, Fred. Tell her she’s still my girl.”
“I’ll do that,” I said, and stood fidgeting from one foot to the other until they finally left.
The slamming of the door brought Gertie out of the kitchen, looking around, saying, “They’re gone?”
“Steve said to tell you so long.”
&nbs
p; “Cops are bums,” she said philosophically. Then she frowned at me, saying, “Sweetie, this place is a mausoleum. Haven’t you got a record player?”
“I doubt you’ll care much for my records,” I said.
“Honey, I figured that out already, but like the fella says, music is better than no music at all. Put on some of your string quartets, will you?”
I put on Beethoven’s Ninth, full volume. If it was rock and roll she wanted, it was rock and roll she was going to get.
8
THE NEXT FEW HOURS were for me a time of muted panic. How totally Gertie had made herself at home! All I could think about was bed, and what she thought the sleeping arrangements were going to be. Though I did not consider myself a prude, and though technically I was not a virgin (I mean my abstinence had now lasted so long I could be thought of as having returned, at least honorarily, to virginal status), the notion of casually hopping into the sack with a stripper from the Artillery Club within a few hours of first meeting her—or even within a few months of first meeting her, to be honest—was paralyzing. On the other hand, to refuse any woman, much less a woman with the blunt strength of Gertie, is an extremely delicate operation at which I have not had a whole heck of a lot of practice.
Not that Gertie’s presence was all bad, not by a long shot. She’d saved me from Wilkins, for instance, and the more I thought about that episode the more it seemed to me I had been in the process of being conned after all, via remote control, by the fellow who had offered to publish Wilkins’ book for him at a price.
Besides that, Gertie turned out to have a really unexpected genius at cookery, producing a dinner the like of which I hadn’t eaten for years, if ever. The basic ingredients were steak and potatoes and broccoli and salad, but the extras turned these basics into so many variations on manna. I ate myself round-faced.
During dinner, to make conversation and thus to distract myself from my panic, I asked Gertie what she thought about Uncle Matt having been murdered, and if she had any idea who might have done it.
“Not a one,” she said. “Nobody saw nobody, nobody heard a thing. I wasn’t home when it happened and nobody else was around.”
I said, “It’s been almost two weeks. I guess the police must be stuck.”
“Cops,” she said, in offhand contempt, and shrugged her shoulders, as though to say what-do-you-expect?
I felt as though I should take some sort of interest in Uncle Matt’s death, since he had given me over three hundred thousand dollars, but it was hard to concentrate with Gertie over there carving away on her steak with such gusto. Nevertheless, I managed to keep on the track, saying, “Do you suppose it might have been someone he swindled? You know, getting revenge.”
“Matt was retired for years,” she said, and filled her mouth with salad.
“Well, out of the past,” I said. “Someone who finally caught up with him.”
She held up a hand for me to wait, sat there chewing salad, swallowed, put the hand down again, and said, “You mean a mark? From like twenty years back?”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Forget it, honey,” she said. “If a sucker catches on while he’s still in the store he might take a poke at you, but not later on. That’s the thing about suckers, they’re suckers. They just go home and feel sorry for themselves, they don’t go around tracking people down and bumping them off.”
I felt my face getting red. She had described me so accurately that the next time I brought a forkful of potatoes up to my mouth I stuck the tines into my upper lip.
Meanwhile, Gertie was going on in a reminiscing sort of way, saying, “That’s what Professor Kilroy used to say all the time, ‘A sucker is a sucker.’ It was like a philosophy with him.”
“Professor who?”
“Professor Kilroy. Him and Matt was partners for years.”
“Where’s he these days?”
She shrugged. “Beats me. Probly still in Brazil. What’s the matter, you don’t like your food?”
I had put my fork down. “I’m full,” I said. “It was delicious, but I’m full.”
“What an appetite,” she said in disgust. “Why’d I waste my time?”
We finished the meal with nectar reminiscent of coffee, and then I staggered to my reading chair in the living room, where I lolled for the next hour, digesting and trying not to think about the events yet to come tonight and holding this morning’s Times in front of my face upside down.
Until, at about seven-fifteen, Gertie appeared before me with her black jacket on and her patent-leather purse dangling from her left forearm. “Put yourself out a little,” she said. “Walk me to the subway.”
I looked up uncertainly and said, “Where are you going?”
“Home,” she announced. “You think I got nothing better to do than hang around here all the time?”
A feeling of such relief washed over me then that I very nearly tossed my Times into the air and shouted whoopee, refraining only for fear it might hurt her feelings. But to know that Gertie was leaving, that she considered somewhere other than this place home, that she did not intend to remain here permanently like Bartleby, there was good news indeed.
Smiling, I said, “I’ll be glad to walk you, Gertie.” I folded the newspaper, got out of the chair, put my jacket on, and we left the apartment.
I felt strangely comfortable walking along the sidewalk with Gertie, felt none of the embarrassment I’d anticipated on the way downstairs. We walked to Eighth Avenue in companionable silence, and up to 23rd Street, where the subway entrance was and where it belatedly occurred to me—as I may have mentioned before, the word belatedly is my capsule autobiography—to offer Gertie money for a cab instead.
She instantly overreacted. Putting her hand to her heart—a not easy thing for Gertie to do—she pretended to be on the verge of a faint, and cried, “Oh, the spendthrift! He throws it around like it was pianos.”
I knew how to handle Gertie now, so I said, “Of course, if you’d feel more at home in the subway—”
Her answer was to put two fingers in her mouth and give a whistle that shattered windows as far away as the UN Building. A cab yanked itself out of traffic and stopped, panting, at our feet.
I handed Gertie a dollar, at which she looked as though she’d never seen anything so small before. Then she said, in weary disgust, “A Hundred-twelfth Street, big spender.”
In some confusion, I handed her another dollar, saying, “Is that enough?”
“No more,” she said. “You’ll spoil me.”
I held the cab door for her, and after she got in I said through the window, “When will I see you again?” More in trepidation than anything else.
“Never,” she said. “Unless you get my phone number.”
“Oh,” I said, and patted myself all over for paper and pencil, finding neither. (I rarely carry pen or pencil, as it makes it too easy for me to sign things.)
Finally the cab driver, who was probably Gertie’s brother, or at least her cousin, leaned toward me with a filthy pencil stub and a gum wrapper in his outstretched hand, saying, “Here you go, Casanova.”
I smoothed the gum wrapper out on the cab roof, and copied down Gertie’s number as she reeled it off to me with all the care of instructions being given to a retarded child: “University five—that’s U N, you know—University five nine nine seven oh. You got it?”
She wouldn’t take my word for it, but made me read it back to her. Then I put it in my wallet, stepped back up onto the sidewalk, and the cab driver called to me, “Hey, Willie Sutton!”
I bent and squinted at him. “Eh?”
“The pencil,” he said.
So I took his pencil out of my pocket and gave it to him and at last they raced away uptown. I could—although I didn’t want to—imagine the conversation between them as they traveled, and my ears burned in sympathy.
And what was this other feeling? Jealousy? Jealous of Gertie Divine (the Body Secular, let’s not forget that) and a ca
b driver? I felt like taking out my wallet again and checking to see who I was.
That’s why I was so distracted as I walked back home, and why I paid no attention to the things around me. I was thinking about Gertie, whose phone number was unexpectedly in my wallet, and I was wondering what I was going to do about that phone number in future.
I had been far from tranquil about the apparent arrangements up till Gertie’s abrupt departure, but one thing could be said in their favor: I wasn’t in charge. Whatever was happening or going to happen was completely out of my hands, which can be a really liberating feeling, particularly for a tongue-tied recluse.
But now all that had been changed. All at once everything was up to me. I had no doubt Gertie would never re-enter my life without a specific invitation from me, and that fact left me hip-deep in a quandary. Did I want to call her? And if I did, what on earth for?
These questions took about ninety-five per cent of my attention, leaving very little for the world around me. I did hear the backfire as I crossed 21st Street, but paid it no mind. And I heard the second backfire as I turned into 19th Street, almost simultaneous with the sound of someone breaking glass nearby, but ignored that one as well.
The third backfire should have made more impression than it did, particularly since it was immediately followed by a brrringgg sound from a trash can in front of the building I was passing, but I paid it no more attention than the others, and so I was totally unprepared when a street urchin of about twelve came up to me, tugged at my sleeve, and said, “Say, mister. That car just took a shot at you.”
I looked at him, my mind still full of Gertie. “What’s that?”
“That car,” he said, pointing down the street. “They just took a shot at you.”
Assuming I was being kidded, I said, “Of course. Very funny.”
“You think I’m lying? Take a look at the garbage can there.”
Was he serious? I said, “Why?”
“’Cause that’s what they plugged,” he said. “Take a look at the hole.”
Suddenly I remembered the backfires, the sound of glass breaking, the ringing of the trash can. The boy was right, somebody was shooting at me!
God Save the Mark Page 5
