Margie

by Howard Fast

  SINCE PATROLMAN RALPH CONTENSO had been left behind at the Plaza Hotel to prevent the out-of-town citizenry from overrunning poor Joey Montoso’s mortal remains, there was a lamentable lack of police rank and file on upper Fifth Avenue. In fact, when Lieutenant Rothschild looked around him, he found himself ranked by everyone present except Sergeant Adrian Kelly. Whereupon he snapped at Kelly:

  “And who the hell is that recumbent guardian of law and order?”

  “Sweeny, sir,” Kelly replied.

  “Our own Albert Sweeny?”

  “Our own, sir.”

  Patrolman Sweeny then sat up painfully, blinking his eyes. Obviously the victim of a nightmare, he saw his own precinct lieutenant, the captain of the Fourth Detective Squadron, an unknown person—Larry Cohen—and someone who possessed more than a striking resemblance to the Commissioner of Police. He grinned at this likeness of the Commissioner of Police, but the likeness did not grin back.

  “For a moment,” he said, “I was thinking that you’re Mr. Comaday, the Commissioner of Police.”

  “At times I have thought the same thing,” Comaday answered grimly.

  “Can you get up?” Rothschild asked. “Help him up, Kelly.” Kelly helped the man to his feet and found his hat. Captain Bixbee told the gathering crowd of curious citizens to stand back, and Rothschild said to Sweeny, “All right, what happened?”

  Sweeny then proceeded to tell Rothschild what had happened—meanwhile casting suspicious glances at Comaday. As Rothschild listened to the tale unfolding, he felt that familiar pain in his stomach that informed him of a need to consume a glass of milk and to retire for a little while from a world that was neither logical nor sensible.

  Instead of such sensible retirement he told Kelly to follow him into the house; and Kelly, whose youth, good nature, and good health proscribed such things as ulcers, drew his service revolver and went after Rothschild, pointing out to the lieutenant that someone had forcibly opened the door not very long ago.

  “Knocked right in through the frame,” Sergeant Kelly said. “That’s no kid’s trick, Lieutenant. Those old doorframes were oak. This door wasn’t forced. It was just opened by someone who went through the wood like it was balsa.”

  “Could be the same animal knocked over Patrolman Sweeny.”

  “If it was,” Kelly said, “then I don’t want to meet up with him in the dark.”

  “Or in the light,” Rothschild said to himself.

  He took out his pocket flashlight, and by this sickly beam, augmented with a few old bulbs and what daylight came in through the grime-covered windows, they explored the house.

  “This is the old Ridley house,” Rothschild told Kelly. “The last one of its kind left below Seventy-second Street—I mean still an old private home. It’s been tied up for years in some kind of litigation, ever since old man Ridley died some twenty years ago.”

  “John Ridley—the steel tycoon?”

  “Right. Friend of old Carnegie—past ninety when he died. Daughter of his married into some second-rate European aristocracy. I don’t remember all the details. As a matter of fact, it was before my time. I must have picked it up in a magazine article somewhere.”

  “Here’s something interesting,” Kelly said. They were on the third floor rear now, and Kelly bent over and picked up some soiled bandages and a couple of broad pieces of adhesive tape. He handed them to Rothschild, who looked at them curiously and said:

  “Like everything else, it fits nowhere.”

  Comaday and Cohen and Bixbee were inside now, Sweeny having recovered to a point where he could cover the entrance, along with the cops from a prowl car that had just driven up, and Comaday called up, “Find anything, Rothschild?”

  Kelly completed the search, while Rothschild joined the others with the bandages.

  “Movie stuff,” Bixbee said contemptuously.

  “So they’re clowns,” Rothschild agreed. “Why did they kill Joey Montoso?”

  “The cookie who pushed in that door,” Comaday said, “did not need a knife with Montoso. He could have just tapped him on the jaw.”

  Kelly came back, and Comaday asked him, “Anyone live here, Sergeant? I don’t mean in a family manner, but has anyone been using this as a quick pad?”

  Kelly shook his head. “Plenty of tracks in the dust, but no sign of anyone bedding down. No food. No bedding. No toothpaste. Not even a shot of liquor. It looks like strictly in and out.”

  “I think we’ll call at the Dravinian Embassy,” Comaday said.

  Bixbee shook his head, and Rothschild looked glum.

  “I like it no better than you,” Comaday told them. “Do you think it’s any dilly, trying to catch up with a city that just happens to contain the UN? I got work stacked up three feet high on my desk, and you might just think that I would practice being a police commissioner, so that I would know what the hell I am talking about if the necessity ever came along. Oh no. No. Instead, I am chasing a Republican fur coat that has turned into a murder that has turned into a diplomatic incident. Bring him in!” Comaday snapped.

  “Who?”

  “The one we found sleeping on the steps.”

  “Sweeny.”

  “That’s right—Sweeny.”

  But Sweeny could offer no consolation. Yes, the Dravinians had a big car like the one the doorman at the Plaza had described. They had three large black cars, but he had not seen any of them pull up to this house. As for the Embassy, Sweeny knew the doorman whose name was Oscar.

  “A real buddy of yours?” Comaday demanded.

  “Well—well, sir—you know …”

  They went over to the Dravinian Embassy then, while Cohen whispered to Comaday that it might be better to call Washington.

  “You want me to call them every time I sneeze? Every time these characters pick up a traffic ticket? The hell with that! I got a murder now.”

  “Then let Rothschild handle it,” Cohen insisted. “Let him take the heat, and then you can turn it off.”

  “Look, Larry,” Comaday said, “you’re a smart district attorney, but not every cop is an idiot. Let me show you how a little smooth police work is as applicable to sovereign government as to anything else.”

  Comaday rang the bell at the Embassy door himself. After a wait of almost a minute the doorman appeared, his face and body plugging a six-inch break in the door.

  “That’s Oscar,” Sweeny said helpfully.

  “Hello, Oscar,” said Comaday.

  Oscar said nothing.

  “Oscar, suppose you tell the Ambassador that the New York City Commissioner of Police would like to see him—just a word or two.”

  “Not here,” said Oscar.

  “His assistant?”

  “Not here.”

  “An attaché?”

  “Not here.”

  “Well, who is here?”

  “Nobody,” said Oscar, slamming the door. And Comaday, who had not been an active, neighborhood cop for twenty years, had forgotten to put his foot in the opening.

  Bixbee looked at Rothschild. Rothschild then looked at Kelly, and Kelly said rather sadly, “You know, Lieutenant, you remember that back window open upstairs where the bandages were. I think maybe somebody skipped through that window.”

  “Why don’t you tell me about it tomorrow, Kelly, when I got nothing on my mind?”

  II

  Once they were out of the back of the building, at the same moment that Rothschild was intrepidly leading Kelly through the front door, it occurred to Hy Golden that possibly he had killed Officer Sweeny, even though he did not know Officer Sweeny’s name and rank, only that here was a New York City cop that he had slugged. While Compton led him along approximately the same route that Margie and Gerald Macbain had traveled, Golden remembered how often his father had said to him:

  “Hy, you must never hit anyone—never—never under any circumstances. No matter what the provocation, never.” That was when Mr. Golden senior had to write out a twelve-dollar check to the
Athletic Equipment Purchase Fund of Stuyvesant High School because Hy had hit the sandbag too hard and had turned it into pieces of canvas and globs of treated sand. In later years the football coach at Rutgers had said to Hy, “You are holding back.” “My nature is non-violent,” Hy replied. After that he had three sessions with the college psychiatrist who pleaded with him, “Is there nothing you hate?”

  “To tell you the truth, although it hurts me when I think about it, I hate my mother’s chicken soup,” Hy confessed.

  “Then for heaven’s sake,” the psychiatrist told him, “think about your mother’s chicken soup when you hit that line.”

  He tried thinking about his mother’s chicken soup and about the twenty-four-hour heartburn it caused him, but that still did not unleash the power that the coach prayed for. Yet as the coach often put it, on even four out of eight cylinders he was a bulwark to the team and well worth the athletic scholarship the school had presented him with.

  When they were out on the street, he put it to Compton. “Suppose I killed that cop?”

  “Don’t be an idiot. He was snoring.”

  “Well, maybe that was his death throes or something.”

  “Did you ever hear of death throes that was snoring?”

  “You can’t tell. You know, I hate violence. It makes me miserable. I should not have hit him.”

  “You had to hit him.”

  “No, I didn’t,” Golden protested. “We could have worked something out without me hitting him. Now I don’t know whether he’s alive or dead. Alan, suppose we walk around to Fifth Avenue.”

  “To that nest of cops? I’ll bet every cop in New York is there.”

  “Well—I mean nobody can identify us.”

  “Except the cop you slugged.”

  The argument went on and on, until finally Hy Golden turned and walked up the block to Fifth. He stopped on the corner, peered around it, and then turned back.

  “They’re gone,” he told Compton.

  “Even the one you killed?”

  “That’s nothing to joke about,” Golden said. “It seems to me to show very poor taste to joke about something like that.”

  “O.K.—forget it.”

  They walked toward Madison, and Compton said, “Shall we get a cab?”

  “Where?”

  “Well, we’re supposed to find Margie—or have you given that up?”

  “It’s just about the most important thing in the world for me,” Golden said. “It seems to me that you fall into hostile attitudes too easily.”

  “You’re too sensitive,” Compton protested. “They say that the little guy is oversensitive, but as far as I am able to see it is mostly an affliction of the behemoths …”

  “There you go again.”

  “All right—forget it. All I asked you was whether we should get a cab.”

  “You got to tell a cab where we want to go. Where do we want to go? That’s the problem.”

  Compton shook his head, and they walked on down Madison Avenue in silence. At Sixty-fifth Street, Compton looked up at the street sign with a gleam in his eyes.

  “Sixty-fifth Street,” he announced.

  “It’s been there for years,” Golden said glumly.

  “Did you ever hear of the Compton Foundation?”

  “No. What is it?”

  Compton had turned east on Sixty-fifth Street, and for want of a better direction, Golden tailed after him.

  “It’s a foundation,” Compton said.

  “For what?”

  “For nothing. It’s a foundation.”

  “It’s got to be for something,” Golden insisted.

  “Who said?”

  “Well, why else is it a foundation?”

  “I’ll tell you why. Because my great-uncle Ezra Compton hated his wife so much he wouldn’t leave her a nickel, so he took his million dollars and set up the Compton Foundation. Then he died before he had decided what the foundation should do; but he specified that two members of the family should operate it. That was in eighteen ninety-seven. It gave a very nice living to Joseph Compton and to Meynard Tibbyman, who was related to the Comptons on his mother’s side. When Joseph died, Harsangle took over——”

  “Who?”

  “Harsangle. It’s an old family name.”

  “Oh.”

  “Then Meynard died and Harsangle ran it with some creep whose name slips my mind. There was another one too. Right now Cullent and Fenton run it.”

  “Who?”

  “Cullent and Fenton. They are second or third cousins of mine.”

  “Oh? What do they do there?”

  “They make a very nice living,” Compton said.

  “I mean, what do they do to make a very nice living?”

  “Not very much. They do research, but they have a couple of girls helping. It’s a nice, warm place. Wonderful place for a party.”

  “But what do they research?” Golden insisted.

  “What do you think? Everything. They’ve spent the past sixty—seventy years looking for a function for the foundation. So that’s what they research.”

  “What they should do?”

  “More or less. The point is that they are very informed. They are probably the most informed people on the face of the earth, and what they don’t know is in their files. But I must say that they know practically everything.”

  “You’re not going to tell me they know where Margie is?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You are out of your mind.”

  “Maybe. So we don’t do this. What do we do?”

  “You mean you just walk in there and ask your cousin—what’s his name, Cullent?—you just ask him where Margie is?”

  “Not Cullent, Fenton. Cullent is a little inbred. He knows a lot, but he’s stupid. Well, I don’t just ask him where Margie is. I fill him in.”

  “You fill him in?”

  “That’s it.” Compton nodded firmly, “I fill him in.”

  Golden began to nod as they walked east on Sixty-fifth Street. He ingested what Compton had said, and he turned it over in his mind as many times as the walk allowed.

  “I’m just a salesman,” he said finally.

  “I don’t think it’s a question of you being a salesman,” Compton replied generously. “I just don’t think you have faith in things that are new to you. Instead of finding the new refreshing, you argue with it.”

  “How the hell can the new be refreshing?”

  “That’s what you have to fight out with yourself, Hy.” They had just crossed Park and were on Sixty-fifth heading toward Lexington. Compton waved his arm in a wide sweep. “There you are, foundations—wherever you look. Think rich, and you will accept the foundation as a part of modern life. Think poor, and it will continue to confuse you. Ah—here we are. The Compton Foundation. We enter.”

  Compton held the front door open, and Golden followed him in. A pleasant, middle-aged lady sat at a reception desk in the wide antique hallway, and her face lit up when she saw Compton.

  “Alan,” she said, “you’ve been naughty—”

  “Indeed I have,” Compton admitted.

  “Very naughty. Oh, very, very naughty. Oh yes indeed. Do you know how long it is since he’s been here?” she asked Golden.

  Golden shook his head.

  “Over a year. Yes indeed—over a year.” She was staring at Golden now. She had a long, thin nose that appeared to lead her face to a finish line at a pouting but good-natured lower lip. “You are big,” she said finally. “Do you have glandular trouble?”

  “Not that I know of,” Golden answered.

  “You know,” she said to Compton, “Fenton almost decided on a ductless gland. A completely new one. Oh, it excited him so. It was just a joy to see him so excited. Then the Ford Foundation set aside three hundred thousand dollars—just for the one ductless gland, and they weren’t even sure of what purpose it served. You know, that was part of it, but you can’t argue with the Ford Foundation, can you?”
r />   “Never,” Compton replied. “Is Fenton—”

  “I mean, it can’t be food,” she said to Golden. “Was your father as tall?”

  “He is five feet, six inches. He lies a little, you know, but you got to understand that. Says he’s five-seven. Never.”

  “Isn’t that odd? Now suppose—”

  “Please, Aunt Katherine,” Compton insisted, “is Fenton in?”

  “Well, of course he’s in. He’s certainly no flitterer, like some I know. Of course he’s in.”

  Compton nodded quickly and dived through the door at the other end of the hall. Golden rushed after him. In a wide, attractive room, lined with books, and fitted with overstuffed chairs and two library tables, Cousin Fenton sat reading. He sat in one of the larger leather easy chairs, a skinny, long-legged man in his fifties, long-nosed—evidently a family characteristic—and clad in expensive tweeds and steel-rimmed glasses. He looked up from his book, nodded at Compton, and waved them to chairs.

  “Do sit down. You’re looking well, Alan.”

  “This is Hy Golden, our vice-president in charge of sales.”

  “Delighted. The Auk now—the Great Auk …” He tapped his book. “Dead? Gone? Extinct? I mean, how can one be sure? Suppose we were to review—”

  “Look, Fenton, I do hate to interrupt you, but some kid’s life may be in danger. We need your help desperately.”

  “Oh, of course,” Cousin Fenton nodded, dog-earing a page and closing the book. “Love to be of some use.”

  “Good. Good. Now listen—this kid’s name is Margie, a nice little girl from upstate who models the ensembles down at M.P. Creations. She was coming to work this morning …” And he went on, detailing the events of the day with a precision and accuracy that amazed Hy Golden. Finished, finally, he said, “And that’s it. Dead end—so we came to you.”

  “Fascinating—absolutely fascinating. Of course, Dravina evokes this kind of thing. You know, the only bit of humor I ever heard attributed to Josef Stalin concerns Dravina, and it’s probably apocryphal. It seems that the Russians were holding one of their great diplomatic bashes in Moscow, and among the guests was the Dravinian Minister. He stormed over to Stalin, complaining indignantly of some real or fancied slight to his nation. To which Stalin replied, ‘My dear sir, Dravina is not a nation—it is a profession.’”