God Save the Mark

by Donald E. Westlake

  “She isn’t in right now,” I said.

  “Ah. Well, she may have told you I’d be calling.”

  “She didn’t say anything,” I said.

  He raised an eyebrow. “Mitchell?” he suggested. “Neighborhood Beautification Committee?”

  “No, I’m sorry,” I said. “She didn’t say anything at all.”

  “That does create a problem,” he said, tapping his pencil against his clipboard. “We have her down here for a fifteen-dollar donation. She didn’t leave the money with you?”

  I felt obscurely as though he half-believed I’d been given the money and was planning to keep it. I said, “No, she didn’t leave anything, didn’t even mention it.”

  “Mmm. That’s ungood. All this stuff has to be in by noon today.”

  I remembered having seen some bills tucked away in a change purse in a bureau drawer in Karen’s bedroom. I said, “Just a minute. I may be able to get the money for you.”

  There was more than enough there, over thirty dollars. I took three fives and gave them to the man at the door. “Thank you, sir,” he said. “Here, I’ll give you the receipt, you’ll need that for tax purposes. Do I make it out to you or Miss Smith?”

  “Miss Smith,” I said.

  He wrote out the receipt and gave it to me and I went back to lie down on the sofa again.

  Twenty minutes later I sat up and looked at the receipt on the coffee table beside me. Fifteen dollars! I’d just bought another receipt!

  And this time I hadn’t even used my own money.

  I dashed from the apartment and ran up and down the stairwell, checking all the halls, but of course he was gone.

  I’d have to replace that money, but how? I didn’t have enough cash on me, and to give her a check I’d have to admit having poked through her personal things. But I couldn’t just permanently steal fifteen dollars from her.

  I went back to the apartment and paced the living room and thought about it, and I promised myself—as I had done once or twice in the past—that from now on I was going to be suspicious.

  Sure.

  At eleven-thirty the doorbell rang again, the street bell this time, and this time it was actually Steve and Ralph. When they came up they let me know they were unhappy about my not calling them right away when I’d been shot at, but I apologized and said I knew they were right and it wouldn’t happen again, so they dropped the subject and went on to other things.

  Such as why anybody would want to kill little me. Ralph said, “What we like to do, Fred, you understand, we like to start with a theory, just to have a place to start.”

  Steve said, “Kind of a direction to move in, Ralph means.”

  “That’s what I mean,” agreed Ralph. “Naturally, if in the subsequent investigation we happen to run across facts that don’t fit in with this theory, we change the theory.”

  “Or maybe sometimes the facts,” Steve said, and he and Ralph both laughed.

  When he was done laughing, Ralph said, “Now, in this particular case we do have a theory. About the guy that shot at you last night.”

  “Our theory,” said Steve, “is he’s the same guy that did for your uncle.”

  “That’s just our theory,” Ralph explained. “Admittedly, it’s got features we aren’t too crazy about.”

  “Like modus operandi, for instance,” said Steve.

  Ralph looked at Steve and frowned. “Steve,” he said, “I don’t think Fred is really interested in this sort of technical details. I think what he’s more interested in is what you might call the overall design.”

  “In other words,” said Steve, “the theory.”

  “Exactly,” said Ralph. He looked at me, raised his eyebrows, and said, “Well?”

  I looked back at him, having no idea what he wanted, and said, “Well what?”

  “Well, what do you think of the theory?”

  Steve added, “We’d like your opinion of it, Fred, since you’re involved, you might say.”

  I shrugged and said, “I guess it sounds all right. It makes sense, the same person both times.”

  Ralph said, “Why, Fred?”

  “What?”

  “You say it makes sense, the same guy killed your Uncle Matt and shot at you. Why does it make sense?”

  “Well,” I said, at a loss, and instead of finishing the sentence I waved my hands around a little. “It just makes sense, that’s all,” I said.

  “Less sloppy,” Ralph suggested. “One murderer for the whole thing. Like a blanket policy.”

  “I suppose so,” I said.

  Ralph said, “Then he’d have the same reason, I guess, both times. Kill your uncle, kill you, both the same motive.”

  “It might be,” I said. I had the uncomfortable feeling these two wanted to trap me somehow, but I didn’t know where or why.

  Steve said, “What do you figure, Fred? Is he after the money?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know who he is or what he’s after.”

  “But that looks like a good bet, doesn’t it? Maybe he’s some second cousin, he figures he’ll just keep bumping people off till he inherits.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “It’d be too obvious.”

  Ralph said, “Then let’s try another theory. He doesn’t want to kill you for your money, Fred, he wants to kill you to shut you up.”

  Steve smiled happily and said, “How’s about that one, Fred? Better?”

  “Shut me up? Shut me up from saying what?”

  Ralph said, “You tell us, Fred.”

  Well, I couldn’t tell them, which made them unhappy again. We went around in circles awhile longer and finally they left, telling me to keep in touch and to let them know if I moved anywhere else. I promised I would, and sat down on the sofa, and started a new crossword puzzle.

  At ten minutes to three that afternoon the phone rang. I picked it up and a muffled male voice said, “Fred Fitch?”

  “Yes?”

  “So there you are,” he said, and chuckled, and the phone clicked as he hung up.

  13

  GERTIE opened the door and said, “Well, if it isn’t the Eagle Scout. How’s your knots coming?”

  “Loose,” I said, and stepped into her apartment. “I don’t think I was followed,” I said.

  She raised a caustic eyebrow. “Not followed! How do you stand such obscurity?”

  I said, “Would you like to hear what’s been happening, or would you rather go on with this endless chain of exit lines?”

  “Well, you’re nasty for a ninety-seven-pound weakling,” she said, “I’ll say that much for you. Come on to the kitchen, I’m making supper.”

  This apartment, on West 112th Street down the block from St. John’s Cathedral, was much smaller and cheaper than Karen’s place, and not at all like my own neat den on 19th Street, but I felt immediately at home in it, and shortly found myself sitting with my elbows on the kitchen table, a white mug of coffee in front of me, as I filled Gertie in on what had been happening to me since I’d put her into a cab Saturday night. When I got to the part about the telephone call from the muffled male voice she turned away from the cheese sauce she was making and said, “How’d they get onto you?”

  “I don’t know. But when I got the call, I panicked. All I could think of was I had to find some place else to go, and fast. I couldn’t go back home, they might still be watching there. I didn’t want to take the time to call the police or anything, because I didn’t know how close these people already were. They could have been calling from the drugstore on the corner.”

  “So you called your old pal Gertie,” she said.

  “I remembered I still had your phone number in my wallet. I called and you said come up and here I am.”

  “Here you are.” She nodded. “Little man,” she said, “you’ve had a busy week. So what now?”

  “Now I call Reilly,” I said.

  “Are you sure?”

  I looked at her. “Why not?”r />
  “I still ask you how they got onto you. You never knew this Smith broad till Saturday, so how’d they know you were there?”

  I winced at her calling Karen a broad, but I also considered the import of her question. I said, “Reilly? Not Reilly.”

  “Why not? He hates money?”

  “Reilly’s my friend,” I said.

  “Honey,” she said, “there’s something your Uncle Matt used to say, and he was right. ‘A man with half a million bucks can’t afford friends.’ Money changes things, that’s my words of wisdom for today.”

  “Reilly wouldn’t do a thing like that,” I said.

  “I’m glad to hear it. How’d they get onto you?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe your friends Steve and Ralph.”

  She nodded judiciously. “Could be. I never figured those two were exactly priests.”

  I felt a chill breeze blow across the back of my neck. I said, “What you’re saying is, I can’t trust anybody in the world.”

  “You got a pretty way with a phrase, honey,” she said.

  “So you don’t think I should call Reilly or anybody else and tell them I’m here.”

  “Not unless you want another phone call. Or maybe this time a visit in person. Which believe me, sweetheart, I don’t want. Not here. The landlord’s down on show-biz people as it is.”

  “Then what should I do?”

  “Stick here till it blows over,” she said. “I can get you an army cot from someplace, we’ll work it out.”

  “How will it blow over? When’s it going to be safe?”

  “When they get the guy knocked off your Uncle Matt. He’s the one behind all this, that’s the safest bet of the month.”

  “But what if they never get him?”

  “They’ll get him. He keeps doing things, agitating, moving around. A guy that can’t quit, him they’ll get.”

  “I hope you’re right,” I said.

  “Sure I’m right.”

  But I wasn’t convinced, one way or the other. On the one side I felt I should call Reilly right away—or, instead of Reilly, Steve and Ralph—and tell him what had happened and where I was now, because if the police didn’t know what was going on, how could they possibly help me? On the other side there was the problem of how the killer had found out where I was, and the real possibility that Gertie was right, that I could trust absolutely no one now that I was a hundredthousandaire.

  I couldn’t think about it yet, I was still too confused. So I changed the subject, asking Gertie to tell me about my Uncle Matt, which she was more than willing to do. As he came across in her exuberant description, he was a happy-go-lucky sharpie with a heart full of larceny but without any vestige of a mean streak, a chipper quickwitted con man with a deck of cards in one hand and a stack of uranium stock in the other, a heavy drinker but not a sloppy one, a big spender and a good-time Charlie, a man whose sense of responsibility and need for security were about as well developed as that of the lilies of the field.

  “He made it big down there in Brazil,” she said. “Him and Professor Kilroy. He never talked about it much, how he did it, but I knew him before he went south and he never had that kind of cabbage before in his life. I figure he must of hit a couple of those absconding big businessmen, those Wall Street tycoons that duck out to Brazil with a million or two when things get hot. And when he come back he was already sick, he knew he could go any day, and he was what you might call retired. He did some like consultant work for kak, but that was just for kicks.”

  “For what? He did what?”

  “Consultant work,” she said.

  “No,” I said, “the other word. Kak?”

  “Oh, yeah. Citizens Against Crime, you heard of them.”

  “I did?”

  “They’re one of these reform outfits,” she said negligently. “You see about them in the paper all the time.”

  “I didn’t recognize the name,” I explained. “What was it you called it? Kak?”

  “C,” she spelled, “A, C. Kak. Citizens Against Crime.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ve got it now.”

  “You are fast,” she said, not entirely as though she meant it.

  I said, “What did Uncle Matt do for, uh, kak?”

  “Told em about cons, how the stores work these days and like that.”

  “Oh. So he wasn’t actually working anywhere.”

  “Naw. Strictly retired, Matt was. Used to play gin sometimes, with me or the elevator man, just to keep his hand in, but he had the shakes so bad the last couple of years he couldn’t even deal seconds any more.”

  “Deal seconds?”

  “Dealing the second card from the top,” she explained. “When Matt was on, sauced just enough and in his health, he could deal fifths all night long and you’d never hear a rustle.”

  “Fifth card from the top?”

  “You know it,” she said, and the doorbell rang.

  We looked at each other. She said, “Just keep cool and don’t make a sound.”

  “I won’t,” I promised.

  She left the kitchen. I sat at the table and didn’t make a sound.

  High on one wall was the kind of white plastic kitchen electric clock you get for trading stamps. It had a red sweep second hand, which I watched go round fifteen times, then didn’t watch for a while, then watched five times more.

  When I figured half an hour had gone by, and when in all that time I hadn’t heard a sound from the front of the apartment, I went investigating, moving cautiously through the rooms, listening, pausing, looking around corners.

  The apartment was empty. The hall door was ajar. I went to it and peeked outside and the hall was also empty, except that lying on the floor out there, on its side, was a shoe made entirely of white plastic straps and a red plastic wedgie heel.

  The other one must still have been on Gertie’s foot.

  14

  NOW WHAT?

  I stood in the middle of Gertie’s crowded messy tiny living room, I held Gertie’s wedgie in my right hand, and I asked myself that question aloud: “Now what?”

  There was no answer.

  When a peron has been kidnapped—and with this shoe for mute testimony what else was there to believe but that Gertie had been kidnapped by party or parties (probably parties) unknown?—one’s first reaction is, “Call the police!” so that on coming back into the apartment I’d headed straight for the phone. But in the nick of time I’d brought myself up short, remembering something Gertie herself had pointed out to me just a few minutes before she’d disappeared:

  Only four people had known I was at Karen Smith’s apartment, and three of them were cops.

  Dare I call the police? Dare I let the likes of Steve and Ralph know where I was? I’d instinctively mistrusted those two from the very first time I’d met them, and now it seemed probable my instinct had been—for once—correct.

  Then what about Reilly? He was my friend, he’d been my friend for years, surely he wouldn’t betray me.

  But hadn’t Reilly been acting oddly the last few days, grumpy and sullen and strangely distant? And didn’t he turn out to be living some sort of double life, with Karen on one side and an invisible wife on the other? And hadn’t I always suspected him of containing at least as much con man as the criminals he was charged with apprehending? Was this a man I could completely trust?

  Or what of Karen herself? Hadn’t she, on our very first meeting in Madison Square Park, lied to me and gulled me? What did I know about her, after all, other than that she was a convincing liar and was having an affair with a married man?

  No, no, I could trust none of these people, not if I valued my skin.

  To whom, then, could I turn? I went farther afield, to my so-called lawyer, the brave Attorney Goodkind; there was a man I wouldn’t trust with a subway token in the Sahara. And when my neighbor Wilkins had come to me with his trunk full of novel had he in actuality been casing the joint for the mob? Was that less unlikely than his clai
m to have written a book about airborne Roman legions dropping rocks on the primitives of Gaul? And what about Mr. Grant, wasn’t he in a way too good to be true, melting into the background, seeming so meek and inoffensive, the surest sign of the arch-conspirator? Couldn’t he or Wilkins—or both, why not?—have been planted in my building years ago, just waiting for the right moment?

  Was all this far-fetched? Of course it was, but three hundred thousand dollars was far-fetched in the first place. Being shot at and hounded was far-fetched. Gertie’s being kidnapped from under my nose was far-fetched. My Uncle Matt’s murder was far-fetched.

  As far as that went, my Uncle Matt’s very existence was far-fetched.

  And who knew to what lengths some people might not go to get their hands on three hundred thousand dollars?

  Very well, Uncle Matt had been right; a man with three hundred thousand dollars can’t afford friends. From now on, whatever happened, I would be able to rely on no one but myself.

  The thought was not encouraging. I was aware of my capabilities and of my limitations, and I knew which was the longer list.

  But what was I to do? And if I didn’t even dare report Gertie’s kidnapping, how would anyone ever find her?

  Somehow or other that was now up to me too, and I knew it, and I quailed before the responsibility. How would I go about finding Gertie, and rescuing her, and bringing her kidnappers to justice? How would I even begin? All I knew anything about was library research, and I strongly doubted I’d be finding Gertie in any library.

  In true researcher style, I tried marshaling my facts, and found them in short supply. Fogs and suspicions and confusions littered the landscape all around me, but of facts there were very few. Only three, in fact: (1) Gertie had been kidnapped. (2) I had been shot at. (3) Uncle Matt had been murdered.

  Was that a starting point, number three? The murder of Uncle Matt actually had been the beginning of all this, so was that where I should begin? At the very least it was, in this sea of shifting ambiguities, a fact that stood firm, something that could be studied, something I could be sure of: my Uncle Matt had been murdered.

  Had he?

  Oh, come on. After all, something had to be true. If you couldn’t believe anything at all, how could you move, how could you think, how could you act? It was necessary to start somewhere.