The Listener

by Robert McCammon

  “That’s a comfort to know,” said Pearly, who thought Keep blowin’ hard and I’ll take out your other eye with a fuckin’ icepick.

  “Pleasure,” Hartley said as he opened the door and got out. “You get some time, we should talk about the work.”

  The work? Oh, yeah. “You were a detective in Houston?”

  “Flatfoot for ten years. That was my speed.” He peered up toward the house. “Here’s the mister. Enjoy your meal.” He nodded and tipped his cap at the man who was coming down the stairs.

  “Thanks, Clay. Find the place all right, Jack?” Ludenmere looked freshly-scrubbed and was wearing a short-sleeved cream-colored shirt and brown trousers.

  “Could hardly miss it.” Pearly forced a smile. He got out of the car and closed the door behind him. A glance at Hartley showed the chauffeur ambling away to the right. Pearly thought everything was okay and no alarms had gone off, and he’d made sure there was nothing in the car to raise any suspicions if Hartley smelled smoke and decided to amble back and go through the Ford.

  Ludenmere shook Pearly’s hand. “Glad we could do this.” He cast his voice a little quieter when he spoke the next. “I’ve told Jane the same thing I told my company lawyer…you’re here to sell me on some new refrigerated shippin’ containers. I don’t think Victor bought it, but he won’t ask any questions until I tell him he can. Come on in.” Three steps up, and he asked over his shoulder, “You settled into the Lafayette?”

  “I am. I didn’t know that string could be pulled.”

  “It had to be done. No sense in you havin’ a hotel room with no telephone.”

  Pearly stopped on the next step. It was time to throw another punch. “As a matter of fact, I got a call from Chief Arlen around four. We have a name: Enrico Orsi. We know him. A would-be racketeer wanting to impress the Chicago bunch. Have you hired any Italians in the last couple of weeks?”

  “What? Italians?” Ludenmere had stopped on the next step up, just short of the porch. His confident demeanor had been clubbed with a spiky baseball bat. His face sagged. “I don’t…um…I’m not sure if we—”

  “Here’s our caller!” the front door had suddenly opened and a smiling, sleek and attractive woman in a summery yellow-and-green-print dress floated out onto the porch. “Jack, let Mr. Parr come on in, it’s too hot to stand there and gab about business! Mr. Parr, we’ve got some cold iced-tea with mint in the parlor, so come on!” She motioned the men into the house. As Pearly approached her and she smiled broadly at him he thought he could throw her down and fuck her right then and there because she was a fine looker, with her pretty oval-shaped face framed by waves of chestnut-colored hair and her soft brown eyes sparkling with Old South hospitality.

  But as he followed her into the house he simply allowed himself a wan smile while his imagination tore her dress and her undergarments off and he spread her open as wide as a juicy melon about to be split in two. “Thank you, Mrs. Ludenmere,” he said. “I sure do like iced-tea.”

  Keep your mind on the job, Ginger had said when they’d talked by phone this afternoon. When you walk into that house, you’d better be ready and you’d better be careful.

  Who do you think you’re talkin’ to? he’d asked. A virgin punk? I’m not Donnie Baines, sweetheart.

  I told you already…Donnie Baines did you a good one today, babycakes. He stayed on the phone with Ludenmere for about three minutes tellin’ him why it was against police policy for him to pay for your goddamned room at that hotel, and he played it as smooth as a butter salesman. So you can thank him yourself when you get back here, and anyway it’s good you’ve got a phone in your room and we don’t have to pay a cent for it.

  Hi-de-ho, Pearly had said, and then hung up the telephone in Room 424 of the very exclusive and expensive Lafayette Hotel on St. Charles Avenue. The room smelled of clean linens and lime soap and it had a window that looked down upon the life and traffic of the avenue. After Pearly’s meeting with Ludenmere, he’d used the payphone at the King Louis—which really was a dump, after all—to check in with Ginger and found that Ludenmere had called the fake Shreveport Police Department number, which Ginger had figured might happen so that was why she and Donnie had hung around the phone in the hallway at the Clementine for an extra half-hour.

  Ludenmere had asked first to speak with Chief Bazer. “Ruth” the operator said that the Chief was in a city council meeting but would he like to speak with Captain Arlen? As Pearly understood it, the kid had done pretty trim, but then again Ginger had been standing by his side probably ready to kick him in the balls if he said anything she didn’t like. Donnie in the guise of Captain Arlen had tried to talk Ludenmere out of paying for the hotel room but in the end had said he would run it by Chief Bazer after lunch. So then a message went to the King Louis’s front desk from Ginger to call home, Pearly had called Ludenmere at his office in the early afternoon to thank him and say the Chief had given the okay, and that was how the little game had gone. But that card with the fake phone number on it was a danger. They had to get this job done before Ludenmere took it upon himself to call it when some other occupant of the Clementine might pick up the receiver and tell the caller he must be either drunk or out of his mind.

  The trick, Ginger had said, is to make Ludenmere believe you’re the only cop he needs right now. And by-the-by, I’ve got a name for you to spring on him. Italian, like the big-time gangsters. That’ll put a scare into him. You come up with a background.

  Whose name is it?

  Some old dead painter lived about three hundred years ago, Ginger told him. Found it in an art book at the library. So paint him up good, honeypie. He won’t mind.

  “It has been so hot this summer!” said Jane Ludenmere, as she guided Pearly through the mansion’s high-ceilinged foyer. Everything seemed to him to be made of light-colored wood, the floor was covered with a blue-and-gold Oriental rug and a wide staircase carpeted in blue ascended to the second floor. An ornate grandfather clock quietly ticked the time away. The air within the house smelled of sassafras and maybe the mint tea that was waiting for him. He was amazed…stunned would be more accurate; he’d never set foot in a house like this before, and now he was absolutely certain Ludenmere was a crook…had to be, to afford this kind of living. “I imagine it’s been the same in Shreveport,” Jane said, pausing before the open double doors that led into another room to the right.

  “John, I told her you’re from Shreveport,” Ludenmere said, maybe too quickly, “but I didn’t want to bore her with the business details.”

  “My husband thinks my mind can’t hold his business details. I’d like to see him run the details of our house and keeping up with the children for a few days. Mavis, would you take our guest’s hat?” A Negro maid had appeared from a hallway beyond the stairs. “John, do you want to take your coat and tie off and be comfortable? We’re informal here.”

  Pearly gave his fedora to the maid. “I’ll keep my coat and tie on, thank you.” For whatever reason, he felt more comfortable fully dressed in his detective suit. “Not bein’ formal,” he said. “Just my way.”

  “Absolutely fine. Come on in here, the parlor’s always been a cooler room.”

  It was, because a large electric fan with wooden blades turned slowly but efficiently from the pale blue ceiling. The walls were painted white and held densely-populated bookshelves. Above the white fireplace mantel was a huge gold-rimmed mirror that Pearly thought made both himself, Ludenmere, the wife and probably everybody who looked into it appear both younger and more elegant than they were; his reflection even made him look like he had some noble timber in there where the termites gnawed. The parlor’s furniture was every bit as refined as he’d even seen in a movie where the rich folks invited the common man to the mansion on whatever twist of plot lay ahead; upon a sand-colored rug was a glass-topped coffee table, and around the table were arranged two light brown leather easychairs and a white sofa that had nearly the curve of a semi-circle in it. Pearly hankered to si
nk into one of those leather easies, so he took the nearest one and thought that something like this was the first thing he would buy to go in the Mexican mansion. To be able to sit in one of these and look through his window down at the blue bay, with no more worries and no more scrabbling to survive, that would fit him to a—

  “Tea?” Jane had gone to a sideboard table and poured a tall glass nearly full from a silver pitcher, and now she plunked ice cubes into the glass with tongs from a silver ice bucket. “Would you have some sugar syrup?”

  “I would, please. Just a dash ought to be fine.” When Jane brought him the glass he said, “You have a very beautiful house.”

  “Thank you. We do love it.” She gave her husband the second glass of tea she was carrying and returned to the sideboard to make her own.

  From where he was sitting, Pearly could look through a pair of windows not at a blue Mexican bay but at the green Ludenmere lawn, the oaks and that big brute of a stone wall protecting the estate. The damned place was a fortress, no doubt about it. It was his task tonight to get in deeper, case the house, and figure out where the weak place might be. But it wasn’t going to be like whoever snatched the Lindbergh kid, using a ladder to climb up to a window and take a baby out of a crib. No way. Here you had a fortress with a glass-eyed ex-Marine sharpshooter as a guard, two older kids with loud voices and that damned beast of a wall. How would you get in and out with two kids kicking and screaming under your arm?

  He recalled something Ginger had said: So we figure out how to take ’em in broad daylight, and in a way that they won’t be hollerin’ for Daddy.

  Good luck with that, he remembered saying.

  Before Pearly had left Shreveport, Ginger had taken hold of his lapels and kissed him on the lips, peered into his face with her champagne-colored eyes and said in that way of hers both demanding and coquettish: Come back with somethin’.

  “Good tea,” he said as he sipped at it, but his mind was on the mission. “Yes, it’s been hot in Shreveport, too. But that’s Louisiana, isn’t it?”

  “John, you might know my father,” Jane said as she settled herself beside Ludenmere on the curved white sofa. Pearly cautioned himself not to be caught looking at her legs. “Yeager Grandier?” she prompted. “The attorney?”

  Pearly felt his face freeze. She was smiling at him, waiting for an answer. In the space of about two seconds he realized this might be someone a detective was supposed to at least have heard of—a prosecutor or a defense attorney, maybe—but damned if he knew how to reply.

  Unwittingly, Ludenmere came to his rescue. “Honey, not everybody in the world or in Shreveport knows the great Grandier family,” he chided. Then, to Pearly: “He’s a corporate attorney for the Beecham Timber Company, no reason you would’ve heard of him.”

  “Oh. No, that’s kinda out of my territory.” He thought there might be a shine of sweat on his forehead, even under the fan’s cool breeze. He took another drink of the tea and was grateful for its chill. Relax, he told himself. There’s nothin’ here you can’t handle.

  “John, Jack tells me you have a fiancee?” Jane asked. “Can we see a picture?”

  He glanced at Ludenmere but saw that the master of the house was staring off into space with a dazed expression. Still thinkin’ about Enrico Orsi, Pearly figured. When they got some private time together he would have to paint the racketeer up, as Ginger had said. Have to point out that they were not dealing with just one man, but likely with a gang of four or more, and have to point out too that the word in Shreveport was that Orsi was right now somewhere in New Orleans.

  “You do have a picture?” Jane prodded. “In your wallet?”

  Ludenmere came to life again. Pearly knew why: he didn’t want Jane to catch any glimpse of the badge if it was in the wallet. “Jane, come on! You’re interrogatin’ our supper guest! John’ll show us a picture when he gets good and ready! Isn’t it time for food to be on the table?”

  “Actually,” said Pearly with a soft smile, “I had a picture but Emma didn’t like that one, said it made her look too citified…and she’s just a country girl at heart…nothin’ uptown about her at all, and I like that. So…I took it out of my wallet, like she wanted, ’cause she knew people would be askin’ to see it and that’s not what she wanted to…” He paused, making a show of finding the right word when he already had it in mind. “To present,” he finished. “She’s promisin’ to get me a new one this next week.”

  Jane nodded her approval. “Very gentlemanly of you, and that is a dying attribute in this day and time.”

  Pearly heard whispers.

  They were coming from the entrance foyer. When he peered in that direction he caught sight of a small face and head quickly pulling back from the open door’s edge.

  “Children, come in and say hello to Mr. Parr,” Jane said. There were further whispers but no movement.

  “Nilla! You and Little Jack come on in here.” Ludenmere’s voice was more that of the stern father. “Be gracious, now,” he added, in a softer tone.

  She came in first, with her little brother a few steps behind.

  And there they were. Pearly smiled at them, seeing one hundred thousand dollars each standing on two legs.

  The ten-year-old girl was tall for her age, with a lanky frame likely taking after her basketball star daddy, but otherwise she was nearly a miniature model of her mother. She had the same shoulder-length chestnut-colored hair, the same oval-shaped face, the same finely-etched nose as her mother, but she had her daddy’s light blue eyes. Just about the same color as the ceiling in this room, Pearly thought. Nilla Ludenmere was wearing a pink dress with a silk rose stitched on the right side of her lapel, and there was something uncomfortable in her expression that told Pearly she might rather be wearing overalls than that frilly getup.

  The eight-year-old Little Jack resembled his father except he had his mother’s brown eyes.

  Pearly thought this kid looked like a rounder, the kind who sneaked lizards into the house and let them run loose just for the fun of the uproar. Pearly bet this one gave his mama triple fits. Little Jack had reddish-blonde hair a few shades lighter than his daddy’s, and its thickness obviously defied a comb because it was everywhichaway on that head. It looked to Pearly like six red-tailed squirrels and a beaver or two were having a war up in there. Little Jack wore neatly-pressed gray trousers, shiny black shoes and a white short-sleeved shirt with a button-down collar, and the way he chewed on his lower lip while he stared at Pearly made Pearly think he secretly wanted to break the skin and spit blood across the room.

  “Our young lady and our wild Indian,” Jane said. “Say hello, children.”

  They did. Pearly said hello back, and kept his smile fixed in place.

  He hated them.

  They were everything he detested about life: the unfairness of it, the brutal and merciless wheel of fortune that doled out the good luck to the haves and the bad luck to the have nots, the false cleanliness and faked uprightness of the upper crust, when it was obvious to one and all that Ludenmere had made his money down in the mud that had mired Pearly to a state of near-poverty and certainly at times a numbing desperation. Oh no, Ludenmere wasn’t clean, he thought. Far from it. And these two kids standing here smiling under this electric fan in this parlor room in this mansion fortress are going to make their daddy pay for his crimes. They’re going to make life pay, he thought, because it is time the wheel of fortune favored a man who was thrown away as a baby and never ever had a chance to breathe air that didn’t have the stink of despair in it.

  Oh yes, he vowed, as he looked at the smiles and considered that they were not smiles, they were smirks because these privileged punks smelled on him the rotten peaches odor of the unwashed working-class, everyone in this goddamned room will pay.

  “Nilla,” he said easily, with all these thoughts locked in his head like lions in their cages. “That’s kind of a different name, isn’t it?”

  “Want to tell him, honey?” Jane prom
pted.

  The girl might have been whispering outside the room, but she wasn’t shy before a stranger. She looked him in the face and said in a firm voice, “Before I was born, mama had cravings for vanilla cookies. And…she liked to dip them in hot pepper sauce.”

  “That’s why she’s so darn mean to me,” Little Jack piped up. “Too much—” He stopped because his sister popped him on the back of the head with the flat of her hand, and his eyes shot devils at her.

  “Hey!” Ludenmere said sharply. “None of that!” He gave Pearly a smile and a shrug. “They’ve had too long a vacation and not enough structure. Well, they start back to school on Monday, so in four days we’ll be seein’ some changes around here.”

  You bet, Pearly thought, and when he looked at the children again he saw them with their eyeholes stitched up and green tongues of money hanging out of their mouths. Suddenly an idea hit him; it was such a simple thing that it almost robbed him of his breath. He imagined he heard the wheel of fortune turning, but maybe it was only an errant noise from the fan. He asked, “They go to the same school?”

  “Yep. The Harrington School.”

  Pearly nodded. Another glance at the kids and their faces were made of decayed meat covered with crawling flies. “How far away is that school?”

  Ludenmere was slow in answering. “About three miles, give or take.” He had realized what the detective from Shreveport was getting at. He drank his iced-tea and said, “Stop that!” when Little Jack reached out a quick hand and gave his sister a shove.

  A Negro butler came in and announced that supper was served. Pearly watched the kids hop and bounce with the fierce energy of childhood on their way to the dining room.