Jade in Aries

by Donald E. Westlake

  “He is out,” she said.

  At the office doorway I switched off the flashlight and gestured for her to precede me. I wanted to shut the door behind me and close us in, as though to keep us from being seen by eyes in the darkness, but I left it open. I said, “Are you living with him?”

  She turned in the middle of the room. “Of course,” she said. “He’s my husband.”

  “Does he know about us?”

  “About you?” I noticed the change of pronoun; she said, “Yes, he does, Mitch. We’ve gotten past it.”

  “Good,” I said, and hoped the regret didn’t show. “Sit down.”

  In addition to a couple of desks and swivel chairs and filing cabinets, the office contained a maroon leatherette sofa and armchair; Linda took the chair, and I sat near her at one end of the sofa.

  “Danny has a job,” she said, and was suddenly embarrassed, I couldn’t think why. “He’s working for a cardboard box maker over in Brooklyn.”

  “That’s fine,” I said.

  “He doesn’t want to get involved in all that old stuff again.”

  “I’m glad,” I said. These were just sounds I was making, true enough but superficial: the police officer pleased to hear of the ex-con going straight. But at the same time I was trying to understand the source of her embarrassment.

  Then she said, earnestly, “He’s really doing very well, Mitch. This time he’s going to make it, I know he is.” And I finally saw why it was she was so embarrassed; it was difficult for her to show me, the ex-lover, just how totally Dink Campbell was the center of her life.

  I knew, of course, that if Linda had come back crying to start our affair again, I wouldn’t have done it, I would have pushed her away with fear and an utter lack of desire. I knew that even now I didn’t truly want her back, and would make no attempt to recapture her. But her unavailability was so complete that it permitted other feelings to rise in me, undampened by fear of consequences; we had been together for three years, and it had not been through the desire of either of us that it had come to an end.

  So that what I was feeling wasn’t truly desire, but merely regret, which is desire’s shadow, and to be ignored. The easiest way to ignore it would be to focus myself entirely in the present, so I said, “If Dink is doing well in an honest job, and if things are good between the two of you, then it has to be something else. Somebody putting pressure on him?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Old friends,” I suggested, “wanting him to come back in with them, work a few jobs.”

  “That’s part of it,” she said. “You know he was always the lock specialist.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “We’re saving our money now,” she said, “so he can open a locksmith’s shop.”

  I suddenly found myself grinning, with tension almost completely gone. I said, “Dink Campbell as a locksmith. He’ll be a good one.”

  Her answering smile agreed to the comedy, but also took pride in her man. “Yes, he will,” she said. “If they give him the chance.”

  “They don’t have another lockman, is that it?”

  “That’s right. Then there’s some money they want.”

  “From Dink?”

  “I don’t really understand it,” she said. “There was a job they were on one time, and they had to split up, and two of them say Danny had the money, and now they all want their shares.”

  “He says he didn’t have it?”

  “He didn’t have it. He doesn’t have it.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “They say Danny should either give them the money, or help them on a few more jobs until they make it up.”

  “And if he won’t?”

  “They’ll lean on him,” she said. “Beat him up sometime. Maybe come beat me up while he’s at work. They gave him time to think it over.”

  “How much time?”

  She shook her head. “Until they come back,” she said. “Maybe tomorrow, maybe next month.”

  “What’s Dink’s attitude?”

  “He doesn’t want to go back,” she said. “If he gets caught again, he’ll spend the rest of his life in prison and he knows it, and he doesn’t want it.”

  “But?”

  “He doesn’t want me to get hurt,” she said. “I know that’s what it is. If he was on his own he wouldn’t worry, he’d handle it somehow, but he hates the idea of going to work and leaving me alone.”

  I said, “How many of them are there?”

  “Four.”

  “You know their names?”

  “Partly.”

  I got up and went to the nearest desk and found pen and paper. “Okay,” I said.

  She said, “Mitch?”

  I looked across the room at her.

  She said, “Danny doesn’t know I’m here. He wouldn’t like me asking you to help him.”

  “All right,” I said.

  “You can understand that.”

  The things I had done to Dink made me look down at the blank sheet of paper again. “Yes, I can,” I said.

  “So if you can do something—”

  “Dink shouldn’t know it’s from me.”

  “I’m sorry, Mitch, I wish—”

  Quickly I said, “It’s all right. I can’t do anything officially myself anyway, so my name will have to stay out no matter what.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Who are they?”

  “One of them is named Fred Carver. He’s the one in charge.”

  “I know him,” I said, and wrote his name down.

  “Then there’s one Danny calls Knox. I don’t know his first name.”

  “Right,” I said, putting the name down. It was new to me.

  “And one called Mort.”

  I looked at her. “Mort Livingston?”

  “I don’t know.”

  It was too common a first name, and I didn’t know if Mort Livingston was even around any more. Dink had been put away seven years ago, and I myself had been off the force three years; a lot of faces change in three years. I just wrote down the first name, and let it go at that.

  “The fourth one is just a kid,” she said. “Named Willie Vigevano.”

  “Never heard of him,” I said. “How do you spell the name?”

  She spelled it, and said, “He’s just a kid, no more than seventeen or eighteen. But he’s the one who scares me. Him, and Fred Carver.”

  I remembered Fred Carver as a bruiser, a fairly unintelligent man who became leader of small groups by cowing them with the threat of his fists. He’d been sent up once or twice, but not as yet for anything serious, though that was clearly in his future.

  I said, “That’s four. That’s all of them?”

  “Yes.”

  I put the paper away in my wallet, and said, “I was making my rounds when you knocked. Walk with me, I want to ask some questions.”

  “All right,” she said.

  The rounds could have waited, I suppose, but I did feel a certain responsibility to do the job well, and I had already made myself late. Also, there was a strangeness and discomfort in being alone in a room with Linda, the two of us in a conversation so unlike the past, our eyes of necessity meeting from time to time; it had been easier while walking down the dark hall with the flashlight, and I wanted to reconstruct that.

  I didn’t go back to where I’d left off, but started at the beginning again, doing the ground floor first and going up the rear stairs afterward. The rounds took longer than usual, Linda being distracted from time to time by different things on display, as I had been myself the first week here. I allowed us to move at her pace, shining the light on whatever took her interest, and made no hurry out of asking my questions. I wanted to know her address, and the address of the paper-box factory where Dink worked in Brooklyn. I wanted to know where Fred Carver and the others hung out these days, and where they had met Dink, and what had been said on both sides, and whether or not they had been to Linda and Dink’s apartme
nt; they had. I wanted to know what the chances were of Dink moving away to some other city, and she said they were very poor, Dink still being a man full of the wrong kind of pride, who would wither and die if he ever allowed himself to be driven away from his home by threats.

  We had come this far when we entered “Advertising in the Fifties,” this being the room I had cut through to reach the main stairs when Linda had knocked at the door. We were now coming in from another direction, and would cross that earlier route of mine.

  Linda was the first to see it. She was slightly ahead of me, and I bumped into her when she stopped and said, “Oh.”

  The physical contact between us—our first—confused me for just a second. Then I looked past her and saw the naked dead man lying on his face in the middle of the floor, and forgot all that.

  2

  THE FIRST PATROL CAR was there in seven minutes. They were both young and already beginning to be a little too heavy in the torso; riding in the car so much is what does it. When I saw them I felt a surprising embarrassment, one I hadn’t expected. All three of us were in uniform, theirs dark blue and mine a medium gray, and although mine was quiet and restrained, I nevertheless felt dressed up like a parody of them, a burlesque cop. The old phrase “You don’t deserve to wear the uniform” went through my head, and of course that was it, the same guilt about Jock in yet another way.

  One of them said, “We had a report on a death.”

  “This way.”

  In coming downstairs after finding the body, I had turned on every light I’d passed, so we went upstairs now in a white glare. The room with the body was square and small, about ten feet on a side, with white walls and ceiling, dark wood floor, a backless black-upholstered bench against one wall, and mounted magazine advertisements from the fifties all the way around. The bench was the only furniture, so that the pale body on the wooden floor was completely alone. It was strange how small and unreal it looked; in the setting, it could have been a modern sculpture rather than a man.

  “Did you touch it?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  Neither did they. Standing on either side of it, gazing down for a moment, they looked like the paranoid dream of a police state; a pair of brutal cops over their prostrate victim.

  One of them glanced over at me. “You know who it is?”

  “I haven’t seen his face.”

  “You call anybody else?”

  “My office.”

  They both frowned at me. “What office?”

  “Allied Protection Service.” I patted my shoulder patch, with the company name on it in yellow letters in a triangle formation. “They’re sending somebody over,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “To protect their interests, I suppose.”

  They looked at each other, and one said, “I’ll call in.”

  “Right.”

  He said to me, “Come along,” and I went with him. Going down the stairs he said, “Any other entrances?”

  “Two.”

  “Check them recently?”

  “Not since I found the body.”

  “Take a look now,” he said, “and then wait by the front door.”

  “All right.”

  There was a fire emergency exit that opened onto the garden beside the building, and a rear door that led to an alley between two apartment houses and out to the next street. Both were locked and undisturbed. I went up the rear stairs to check the fire-escape windows on both the second and third floors, and the metal gates remained closed and locked over both of them. I took the front stairs down from the third floor and found the patrolman waiting for me just inside the main entrance. He frowned when he saw me coming down the stairs, and said, “Where’d you go?”

  I told him about the fire escape. He nodded and said, “Okay.”

  “I can’t think how he got into the building,” I said. “He wasn’t here the last time I made my rounds.”

  “Kept ahead of you,” he suggested.

  “Naked? What did he have in mind?”

  He shrugged, and I remembered the credo of the uniformed patrolman: leave the thinking to the Detective Squad. He changed the subject then, saying, “You ever on the force?”

  “I used to be.”

  “You’re better off the way you are,” he said, and went on to tell me anecdotes illustrating the public’s lack of respect for the police.

  He was interrupted a few minutes later by the arrival of two plainclothesmen. One was short and wiry and Italian, and said his name was Grinella. The other was big and heavy-set and truculent, and he didn’t give his name. The uniformed patrolman gave them his report, and Grinella told him, “Stay on the door.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Grinella turned to me. “Lead the way, will you, Mr. Tobin?”

  “Of course.”

  We went upstairs, where the other uniformed patrolman turned from reading a Volkswagen ad mounted on the wall, and for a minute we all studied the dead body some more. Grinella asked a few questions and I answered them. Still no one touched the body.

  I was still in the room when the assistant medical examiner arrived. He knelt beside the body, touched it, satisfied himself it was dead, and then rolled it over. Then we could see what had been done to it. It was as though someone had killed him by injecting gallons of purple paint into his head, so much paint that it had bulged his face outward, the eyes popping, fat tongue straining out of the mouth, cheeks bulging. The paint had discolored the flesh, and some of it had seeped out around the eyes and from the nostrils and the corners of the mouth.

  Except, of course, that there was no purple paint. It was blood, and it was the result, not the cause. The assistant medical examiner, still kneeling beside the corpse, looked up at the detectives and said, “Clipped him on the jaw here, where this mark is. Knocked him out. Then wrapped wire around his neck. Did a good tight job.” He pointed, and the line where the wire was embedded in the skin of the neck was just barely visible. The wire couldn’t be seen at all, only the crease it caused.

  Detective Grinella said, “In this room?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “Why not?”

  “When this happens, bowel and bladder release. It’s just automatic. Somebody cleaned him up after he was dead.”

  “And brought him here,” Detective Grinella said.

  “Yes.”

  The detectives looked at one another. The bigger one said, “I’ll call. You talk to the keyhole.”

  He meant me. Since he was referring to the kind of private detective whose livelihood comes from gathering divorce evidence, and since I had never done that kind of work in my life and never would, the insult missed its target. Still, the very fact that a gratuitous insult had been tossed in my direction was enough to make me bristle, though I tried not to show it.

  Grinella, a more easygoing type, said to me, “You have someplace we can sit down?”

  “Sure.”

  I took him down to the office, where we repeated the positions that Linda and I had taken less than an hour before; I again on the sofa, Grinella on the chair. He started filling a pipe—I would have guessed him to be a cigarette man, too quick-moving for a pipe—and said, “Looks like a hell of a lot of activity around here tonight.”

  “I don’t understand it,” I said.

  He kept poking his thumb into the bowl of the pipe, watching himself do it. “Somebody got in,” he said, “left a body, went away again.”

  “Through locked doors,” I said.

  He nodded, and kept watching his hands with the pipe. “Makes it tougher,” he said. “When was the last time you saw that room empty?”

  “Ten forty-five.” That was when Linda had arrived.

  “And you found the body?”

  “Eleven seventeen.”

  “Half an hour. Lot of activity for half an hour.” He glanced at me. “You recognize him?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Hard to tell, of course,” he s
uggested, “with his face like that.”

  “I’m pretty sure I don’t know him.”

  He nodded, and at last put the pipe in the corner of his mouth, but made no move yet toward lighting it. “You got chain locks on all the doors? Or could a man get in with a key?”

  I said, “The front door you could get in with three keys. The rear door has a chain and a bolt. The emergency door on the side you could get in with two keys. The fire-escape windows are latched on the inside, but once you opened the window you could open the gate with a key. It’s closed with a padlock.”

  “Windows disturbed?”

  “No. Still latched.”

  “Where were you between ten forty-five and eleven seventeen?”

  “Partly here, partly doing my rounds.”

  He glanced around the room, as though pointing the unfit pipe at different pieces of furniture. “Would you hear somebody coming in the front door?”

  “From this room? Not if they were reasonably quiet.”

  “What about the side door?”

  “Not at all, not from here.”

  He looked at me. “Anybody else in here with you tonight?”

  Here came my lie. “No,” I said.

  When we had first found the body, it had been necessary to make a decision. Keep Linda with me and tell the complete truth, or send her quickly home and play it as though she had never been there. The complete truth—and normal police questions would have brought out the whole thing, from our past affair and Jock’s death and my dismissal in disgrace down to Dink’s current trouble with his former friends—would have, it seemed to me, not only complicated and confused the issue of the dead man with a huge red herring, but would also have strained several lives unnecessarily: Linda’s, Dink’s, Kate’s and mine. Since I had nothing to do personally with the dead man, but was merely the hired guard who had found him, it seemed to me simpler to keep my own story to a minimum. So I had sent Linda away, and now I was telling Detective Grinella one simple lie.

  He accepted it without visible qualms, and said, “Anything missing that you noticed?”

  “Stolen?”

  “Missing. Not here.”

  I shook my head. “I’m pretty sure the displays are still intact,” I said. “If you take one picture down from a row, the blank spot is pretty noticeable.” I gestured toward the desks. “If anything was taken from a desk drawer, or from the storeroom downstairs, I wouldn’t know about it.”