“Everybody at The Institute,” said Rachel without a glimmer of a smile, “calls him Hugo. You’re no exception.”
On the first floor, we turned down a wide, cream colored hall. The carpets were Oriental and looked expensive. Rachel stopped outside an unmarked door from behind which I heard a low murmur of voices. She knocked softly, and the voices died.
“Come in,” called a familiar voice, a bit impatiently. When I pushed the door open, Fischer was sitting facing the door behind about a quarter acre of executive-style desk, flanked by Carey and the hard man in black, Don Moffitt. Pops Martin, a couple of pink petals still lodged in his thin locks, sat on an easy chair in front of a bay window, one leg cocked over the opposite bony knee. Mark Kinsey was perched on the opposite window sill, practicing an institutional rock and looking insecure. The walls of the office were crowded with framed 9-by-12 inch signed photographs of that same quartet and others who I assumed were big shots of The Institute. It looked like a parody of a third-rate movie producer’s office.
Rachel followed me into the room and shut the door. For lack of anything else to do, I stopped in front of Fischer and waited for him to say something. He didn’t disappoint me.
“What the hell do you want here, Goodwin?” he demanded.
A fair question that deserved an honest answer.
“The name is Goodey, Mr. Fischer, G-double-o-d-e-y, Joe Goodey, “I said. “And I’ve come here to find out which of you murdered Katharine Pierce.”
Fischer soaked it up without showing much response at all, but his honchos each reacted in a typical way. Carey let his jaw drop at my rudeness and started thinking about getting angry; Moffitt balled his fists ready for action; Kinsey rocked back a bit abruptly, hit his head against the windowpane and looked embarrassed. Only old Pops Martin did anything very active. He uncoiled himself from the chair faster than I’d have thought possible and came toward me like a small dog on a short leash. Planting both gnarled hands on the top of Fischer’s desk, he got a fierce expression on his old mug and snarled: “Watch your lip, shamus—or you’ll find yourself waking up in the gutter with your head on a dead cat.”
The word shamus went out of style in about 1938 and Martin couldn’t have whipped his weight in macaroons, but I had to give him points for originality. I’d have to think about that one. He was about to get off something even more horrific when Fischer yanked gently on his leash.
“Easy, Pops,” he said. “Don’t forget that this is your wedding day. I’m sure our visitor isn’t being deliberately provocative.” Pops retired to his chair with a nonchalant slouch, but his eyes served notice that I was on probation.
Fischer turned back to me and then had to lower his line of sight because I’d sat down on a very nice chair nobody seemed to be using. He didn’t much like the idea, but he’d get used to it. Rachel had retired to a couch out of the line of fire, and Carey was sending her obscure signals with his eyebrows. She was too busy eyeing Fischer with nervous apprehension to notice.
“You take a radical line of approach, boy,” Fischer said. “It may have been a success with the San Francisco Police Department,” he added, not without irony, “but it won’t get you far in my house. What makes you think I won’t have my good friends here pitch you right back on Highway One?”
“Because I’ve got a feeling that you’d like this mess cleared up once and for all if only to get Crenshaw off your back.”
“Mr. Crenshaw,” Fischer said, “is a very unhappy man. When he was here, we did everything we could to convince him that Katie’s death was an accident, a tragic accident, but nothing more. No one here could have or would have killed Katie. There is no mess here to clear up, Mr. Goodey.”
“That’s your story,” I said, “but I imagine that you can understand why Crenshaw feels a bit differently. And why he hired me. Sure, you can throw me out of here, but it won’t satisfy Crenshaw a bit. He’s got the idea that I can find out exactly how she died. He may be mistaken, but I’m the best bet you’ve got right now. That is, unless you’d like to be a perpetual target for Crenshaw’s paranoia.”
Fischer thought that over for a moment. He reached up and scratched his skull through his close-cropped hair. “Mr. Goodey,” he said at last, “you may have something. Frankly, I’m tired of holding open house for nosey private detectives. We’ve got nothing to hide here, but I get kind of tired of answering the same stupid questions. How long do you think it’ll take you to satisfy yourself and Mr. Crenshaw?”
“I couldn’t say,” I answered. “With luck, you may not have to feed me tonight. Or I could stay around to be your oldest living guest.”
“Just do your best,” Fischer said, a bit wearily. “Mark, please find Mr. Goodey some place to sleep.”
Kinsey leapt off his window sill, and I got the uneasy feeling that we’d both been dismissed. I wasn’t quite ready yet.
“I’m assuming, Mr. Fischer,” I said from my comfortable chair, “that I’m going to be given a certain amount of cooperation in my investigations.”
Fischer looked back toward me as if I were an ashtray that he distinctly remembered ordering to be emptied. “Mr. Goodey,” he said, “to you The Institute is an open book. You have only to ask. If anyone gives you any problems, I will solve them for you.” He quickly glanced to see if his minions had taken this in. “Now,” he said emphatically, “I will be very happy to see you later.”
Kinsey was already at the door, dancing with eagerness to carry out his orders, so I got up and prepared to follow him.
“One little thing, Mr. Goodey,” Fischer said to my back. I turned around. “You wouldn’t happen to be carrying some sort of firearm on your person, would you?”
I admitted as much, my police special being at that moment tucked snugly under my armpit in a shoulder holster.
“We’ve got a few rules here, Mr. Goodey,” he said. “One of which is no firearms of any kind.” He held out a large hand. “I’ll just keep your weapon here for you until you leave.” He was doing me a favor.
I thought for a moment, and then handed it over. I hadn’t been planning to shoot anyone anyway. He slid open a desk drawer, and my pistol disappeared. I turned back toward the door. “So long, Rachel,” I said. “See you later.” But she wasn’t paying much attention.
Kinsey set off down the hall at a fairly good pace, and I ambled along behind him, taking in the luxurious surroundings. When he discovered that somebody was dogging it, he dropped back reluctantly to my side.
“You people do all right for yourselves here,” I said, just to make conversation. “This place must have cost a fortune.”
“The mansion was given to us,” he said, rather sniffily. “Besides, it’s not the surroundings that count.”
“All the same,” I said, “it probably beats sleeping rough. How many acres has the place got?”
“Something over four hundred and fifty,” he said, “including the land on the other side of the highway. With nearly a half mile of beachfront.” He said it with a quiet pride.
“Tell me,” I asked him, “how’d you come to join a place like this? You weren’t a secret glue sniffer, were you?”
“Not exactly,” Kinsey said, not too unfriendly. “A couple of years ago, the Institute jazz band—you heard them playing in the marquee on the lawn—made a record album. I was doing public relations for the record company, and I came up here from L.A. to do research for the liner notes. I met Hugo, took a look at what he had going here, and discovered that my life was shit, my work was shit and my future was shit.”
“That sounds pretty shitty,” I said.
“It was. So I went back to Los Angeles, finished the album notes, quit my job, piled everything I owned into my car and drove back up here. I’ve been here ever since.”
“And happy with it?” I asked.
“Not entirely,” he said honestly, “but it beats being a whore for a record company.”
Kinsey led me down a dark flight of stairs into what must
have been household work area in the old days. We paraded along a deserted hallway until we came to a small room with “Housing Office” painted on the wall beside an open Dutch door. Inside the closet-like room, an olive-skinned guy in his mid-twenties was hunched over a ledger, biting his lower lip. He looked up as we approached. He had a biggish nose, a hard mouth and streetwise eyes. His hair was chopped into something spikey, and he looked as though he could handle himself. He wore his dark blue coveralls with natural authority.
“Jack,” said Mark Kinsey, “this is Joe Goodey. He’s a guest of The Institute. Find him a bed to sleep in, will you?” He turned to me: “This is Jack Gillette. He’ll take care of you.”
Gillette looked down at his ledger book. “I’ll just put you in the Starlight Suite, if that’s okay with you.”
“Sounds fine.”
He looked back up at Kinsey. “Thanks, Mark. I’ll take care of him and bring him along to the front desk later, okay?”
“That’s fine,” said Kinsey. “See you later,” he added to me and disappeared down the hall.
“Let’s go,” said Gillette, taking a big ring of keys from a nail on the wall.
As we walked up the back stairs, Gillette asked: “You got a suitcase?”
“In my car,” I said.
“Give me your keys,” he said, “and I’ll have somebody bring it up to your room.”
“I can do it myself,” I said. “I don’t need looking after.”
“No sweat. If there’s one thing we’ve got around here, it’s manpower.”
“All right, then,” I said, giving him my keys. “It’s the—”
“Beat-up gray Morris convertible, right?”
“Right. What else do you know?”
“You’re a private cop from San Francisco who’s come down here to try to prove old man Crenshaw’s theory that somebody at The Institute gave Katie Pierce the big shove.”
“I’d hate to be trying to go undercover,” I said. “Does everybody know what I’m up to?”
“They will. The rarest thing here at The Institute is a secret.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I can think of one.”
“You’re going to play hell proving it. The sheriff and those superstars from L.A. were all over this place and they didn’t find out a thing.”
“How do you know?”
“You’re here, aren’t you? If those Brazewell dudes had proved anything, we’d have had a lot more sheriff’s department around here, and not a lone-star operator like you. Frankly, I think Crenshaw is getting a bit desperate.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Did you talk to the Brazewell people?”
“No,” he said, reaching a landing and starting up yet another flight of steps. “But they thought I did. I don’t like cops—private or otherwise.”
“That’s too bad. You going to talk to me?”
“I haven’t made up my mind yet.” At the next landing, he turned down a faded corridor and stopped in front of a tall, narrow doorway. “Here we are.” He shoved the door inward, releasing a musty, off-color smell. He moved into the room, shoved aside some mucus-colored drapes and opened the window wide. “It’s not luxury,” he said, “but you’ll be okay in here.”
It sure wasn’t luxury. You could have swung a cat in the room, but not a big one, and the sallow wallpaper had been new about the time Teddy Roosevelt fell up San Juan Hill. Some drudge of an under-butler had lived—and probably died—in this room.
“What’s that?” I asked, indicating a small, round metal box on the wall above the bed. It was about the size of an old-fashioned car-radio speaker.
“Bitch box,” he said “We don’t want you to miss anything while you’re here, do we?”
“I’ll try to live with it.” Gillette looked as though he were about to leave, but I asked him: “What did you do before you came here?”
“I hit people on the head and took their money,” he said. “That is, if they were small enough and I could get out of jail to do it.”
“It’s probably the question you hate most,” I said, “but how did you find yourself in a sissy outfit like The Institute?”
“I don’t mind,” he said, thumbing a cigarette up out of a soft pack and offering me one, which I refused. “I can answer that one in my sleep. I was doing a little street-nodding in downtown Los Angeles nearly three years ago, just looking for a nice, soft gutter to lie down in, when I found myself leaning against the plate glass of a storefront The Institute was running down there. A couple of passing cops wanted to do me for molesting the window, when one of the residents came out and made a better offer. Any bed but one in the city slammer looked good to me, so I took it. I figured that once I came down I could rip something off to hock and split.”
“Sound thinking,” I said.
“It seemed so at the time,” Gillette said, exhaling smoke, “but it didn’t work out that way. It took a long time, but I really went for the okee doke and stuck around for the ride.”
“Been a pretty good ride, has it?”
“I suppose it depends on what you’re used to, but if you look out for flying horseshit, it can be a hell of a lot of fun. Of course, you don’t want to get caught up in the insanity too much. That can mess with your oatmeal something terrible.”
“I can imagine,” I said. “I hope this isn’t too personal, but what’s the deal with all those gaudy coveralls?”
“Well, as it originally came down from on high about three months ago,” he said, thumbing a lapel, “these colorful outfits—to quote Hugo—are a graphic representation of each individual’s position on the Rainbow of Life, or some shit like that. Myself, I think he just ran into a fire sale on coveralls that he couldn’t resist. Either that, or he just wanted to see what some of these pencil-necks looked like in lime green or magenta. I’m not bothered myself; it saves wear and tear on my own duds.”
“You don’t seem to take the situation here at The Institute very seriously, Jack,” I said.
“Oh, I’m serious enough,” he said, “about the big things. I know what I’d be doing if I hadn’t fallen in here by accident.”
“What’s that?”
“Time,” he said. “This is the longest I’ve been out of the slammer since I was eleven years old, and to me that says something. Maybe when I’ve been here a bit longer, I’ll know exactly what. Come on. I’ll take you down to the front desk, and Mark will probably pick you up and give you the big picture. I’m not authorized to deal with the big picture.”
As we left the room, I asked: “Don’t I get a key?”
“There are no keys at The Institute,” Gillette said. “Hugo’s policy.”
“But don’t things get stolen?”
“Sure they do,” he said. “But not as much as you’d think. We call it redistribution of wealth.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said, but I wasn’t crazy about it.
As we walked down the staircase, I asked: “Did you know Katie Pierce?”
“Yeah, I knew her,” he said. “I make it my business to know everybody who comes to The Institute.”
“Did you know her well?”
“No,” he said. “She was cute, but a bit too ring-a-ding for me. Speed does things to your mush that I don’t understand or appreciate.”
“Who do you think shoved her off the roof?”
“I don’t,” he said curtly, “and don’t come at me with off the wall questions like that. I told you: I think you’re wasting your time and Crenshaw’s money, but it’s okay with me. As long as you don’t expect me to get caught up in your insanity. Okay?”
“Okay,” I agreed, and we walked the rest of the way downstairs in silence. I didn’t know how useful Gillette was going to turn out to be, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to do my job for me. When we were on the main floor again, Gillette led me into a big, plush room full of residents and guests chattering and having a good time. Nobody paid any attention to us. One corner of the room had been turned into a kind
of office festooned with typed notices, pigeon holes for letters and notes and official looking paperwork in neat stacks.
Behind the desk at that moment was a black dude seven feet tall with a shaved head. He didn’t look any too thrilled when Gillette said: “Roscoe, this is Joe Goodey, a guest in the house. Mark said he’d probably pick him up here. Joe, this is Roscoe Matson. He’s the house manager. I’ll leave you with him.”
7
Gillette walked away, leaving me propped against the desk like a beach umbrella. Matson seemed to be bearing up under the responsibility. For quite a while, he doggedly stuck to his knitting and didn’t even look up to say howdy.
I passed the time eyeballing what looked a lot like any other exquisitely furnished drawing room full of lounging drug addicts and social misfits. Stuck at various strategic locations on the heavily embossed wallpaper were butcher-paper banners carrying an eclectic variety of quotes from usually reliable sources ranging from Mao Tse-tung to Bob Dylan. A big favorite seemed to be Henry Thoreau. His “I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born” from Walden was block-printed on a bedsheet hung over the mock-Adam fireplace at one end of the room. I remembered that from a night class at San Francisco State College, but I always figured that Henry was a bit of a nut.
Everybody in the big room seemed to be having a jolly time except for one character whose very lack of animation grabbed the eye. He was slumped in a big armchair next to the fireplace like a doll that had been hastily abandoned. Sitting down as he was, it was hard to tell how big he was, but the shoulders in a new loud sports jacket were broad and square, and the arms hanging with inert power on either side of the ornate chair looked too long for his trunk. He had enough gray in his tightly curled hair to be forty or a bit older, but his sallow face had a blank agelessness marred only by dark pockets around each expressionless, unblinking eye. He sat alone, but his thick lips were moving with sporadic twitches that should have come with sounds.
Charles Alverson - Joe Goodey 02 - Not Sleeping, Just Dead Page 6
