by Ben Rehder
About then Tommie got home from a playdate at a friend’s house, and then we were into what I call the crazy hours, the period from five to nine during which we have to have dinner and get Tommie into bed. It always seems long. Today it seemed interminable.
As if he read my mood—I don’t know how kids sense these things but they do—Tommie chose tonight to stall. By the time I finally got him to brush his teeth and wash his hands and face and put on his pajamas, it was after nine-thirty. Then I had to read him a bedtime story. I don’t know about other fathers, but after years of reading bedtime stories I find I can put my mind on automatic pilot and read perfectly well and with expression while thinking of something else. I read Tommie Yuck by James Stevenson, complete with cackling witches and a bear that goes oobopadop, and all the while thought about Marvin Nickleson.
What I thought about was not the whole mess I was in, but just how much it had cost me. Discounting the obstruction of justice charge—Richard, for all his stinginess, has never once billed me for professional services for coming to my aid, and I didn’t expect him to now—I had still not acquitted myself with valor. The bogus Marvin Nickleson had advanced me two hundred dollars. What with garages, taxis, tolls, gas, motel reservations, etc., that was long gone and I was into my own pocket. Which left me having worked four days for free. With more on the horizon, if I ever expected to get out of this mess. I don’t know how other private detectives conduct business, but I had a feeling this wasn’t it.
I finished Yuck, kissed Tommie goodnight, and went in the bedroom to find Alice. She wasn’t there, but by then it was ten o’clock, so I turned on Channel 5 to see if the murder of Julie Steinmetz had made the news.
I shouldn’t have wondered. It was one of the lead stories. Julie Steinmetz was an attractive young woman, and turned out to have been both a high fashion model and an executive for a prominent Manhattan agency. As Richard predicted, Channel 5 had dispatched camera crews to Poughkeepsie, and I was treated to the smiling face of Chief Creely, chewing his gum a mile a minute and confidently asserting that he was pursuing a number of leads, and expected to have the murderer in custody before long. That might have cheered me some if I hadn’t known damn well the son of a bitch was talking about me.
I went back to the office to tell Alice, and she was on the computer again.
She heard me come in and turned around. “I’m sorry,” she said defensively. “You wanna talk, we’ll talk. I don’t mean to be insensitive. I’m upset by what you told me. This is like therapy, to get my mind off it. You know?”
I did know. I go to the movies to get my mind off things. I didn’t feel like going to the movies now. And I didn’t feel like raining on her parade either.
“So what are you doing?” I asked. I figured it couldn’t hurt to show some interest, although I didn’t really care.
“You wouldn’t be interested.”
“No, you’re right. Take my mind off things.”
“You sure?”
“Sure.”
“O.K. Look at this.”
Alice punched some buttons. A straight line appeared on the screen. She punched a button—it got longer. An other—it got shorter. Another—it tilted on its side. An other—it rotated 360 degrees. Another and the pattern it had traced doing all that appeared on the screen.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Line-sketch.”
I frowned. “You bought another program?”
“No. I designed it.”
“What?”
“I programmed it myself. It’s my own program.”
“You did that?”
“Yeah. Look what else it can do.”
Alice pushed more buttons. Various geometric shapes appeared, turned, rotated.
“Neat,” I said.
“It’s not done,” Alice said. “When I get finished, I gotta make copies and then print out the documentation.”
“Documentation?”
“Yeah. Like an instruction manual. I’ll type it up in WordPerfect and print it out. I’m trying to get it ready for next month’s meeting.”
“What for?”
“To exchange with people for other programs.”
“Oh.”
“I’ll show it off and talk it up, and they’ll advertise it in the newsletter.”
“Newsletter?”
“Yeah. The group’s getting a mailing list and putting out a newsletter. I can advertise my program in it and sell it to people on the mailing list.”
I was rapidly losing interest. Another harebrained scheme, just like the resumes and letterheads. And that only wasted paper. For this, Alice would be using up floppy disks at two or three bucks a pop.
“I see,” I said. I tried to underplay my lack of enthusiasm. I’d had it with computers and computer programs. It was time to tell Alice nice job, kiss her on the cheek, and go back in the bedroom and give some thought to my own problems.
“That’s real nice,” I said. “Tell me something. How much would someone pay for a program like this?”
Alice shrugged. “I don’t know. The more complex programs go for anywhere from fifty to seventy-five bucks.”
I pulled up a chair and sat down. “Tell me more.”
23.
SERGEANT MACAULLIF UNWRAPPED a cigar and surveyed it gloomily. His doctor had ordered him to give up cigars. He hadn’t. He’d just given up matches. He smelled the cigar, put it in his mouth and chewed on the end.
“What a crock of shit.”
“That’s what Richard said.”
“Richard?”
“Rosenberg. My boss.”
“Oh. Him.” MacAullif snorted. “He says a lot, don’t he? Well in this instance, he happens to be right.”
“No argument there. It’s a crock of shit. It’s a holy mess.”
“And you seem to have acquitted yourself with something short of valor. Well, I guess you just chalk it up to experience.”
“I can’t chalk it up to experience. I’m on the hook for obstructing justice. That charge could be changed to murder.”
MacAullif waved it away. “I wouldn’t think so. They got you dead to rights on means and opportunity. But they’ll have a little problem with motive. Why would you wanna kill her? That’s gotta be a little difficult to buy.”
“Even so, I got a local cop in charge of the investigation. It’s probably his first murder case, and he doesn’t seem particularly swift.”
“Now, let’s not sell a fellow officer short,” MacAullif said. “Standing up to the state boys took guts. Besides, if you don’t like him, it’s practically an endorsement. I mean, your judgment of character’s so bad. I remember what you thought of Sergeant Clark.”
“That was different.”
“How so?”
“Never mind. The point is, if this guy can’t find anyone else, I wouldn’t put it past him to charge me with murder.”
“He hasn’t charged you yet.”
“He would have, if Richard hadn’t threatened him with adverse publicity.”
“From what I remember of Rosenberg, the guy has my profoundest sympathies. But the hell with that. What are you here for?”
“What?”
“You didn’t come down here just to tell me your troubles. Whaddya want?”
“Well. So far I’ve just given you the facts. We haven’t talked about what it all means.”
MacAullif’s eyes widened in mock surprise. “You’re going to let me in on your theories of the case? What a treat.” He dropped his cigar and snatched up a pencil. “Perhaps I should take notes.”
“Shit.”
“Wait a minute,” MacAullif said, pretending to write. “Shit. Is that one ‘t’ or two?”
“Maybe I should skip the summary and just tell you what I want.”
“See, I knew you wanted something,” MacAullif said. “Well, if you think you’re gonna get it without telling me why, you must be dreaming. I happen to have an ax murder on my hands, and I’m not in a particul
arly good mood.”
“An ax murder. Do you know who did it?
“Yeah. The guy with the ax. No, I don’t know who did it, and I have to find out before he does it again. The only thing that gives me any satisfaction at all is, as far as I know, you’re not involved.”
“I swear to god.”
“Good. Now lay this on me, ’cause I gotta get back to work.”
“Fine. Now to begin with, I was set up as a patsy.”
“This is your expert analysis? Let me help you out here, ’cause I’m pressed for time. This guy who posed as Marvin what’s-his-face wanted a fall guy for murder. So he got himself a private detective hungry enough to want the money and credulous enough to buy the story. He fed you a bullshit spiel, ran you around town a couple of days to get you used to the idea, and then at the first opportunity pulled the job. The idea was to leave you with the murder weapon and an impossible story. By rights, the perfect frame.
“Which tells us a lot. To begin with, this guy must have had a reason for killing the woman that on the one hand isn’t obvious, but on the other could be uncovered with a little effort. Why? Because he bothered to frame you. It’s a kind of clumsy, half-assed frame. But in a way, that’s the beauty of it. Everything you know just tends to confuse the situation. The more you explain, the more ludicrous it gets. The cops may not be able to nail you for this murder, but chasing you mixes things up. That’s what the murderer wanted. To ball up the investigation and keep the police from going off on the right track.”
“Which is?”
“How the hell should I know? We’re talking theory here. Where was I? O.K., we know for certain that messing up the investigation is important to the murderer, because in order to do it he took a big risk. He saw you in person. Face to face. You can identify him. Now you can say even if you did it would be your word against his, but that’s not good enough. Once you find him, find out who he really is, he’ll be sunk. ’Cause he must have some connection with the dead woman, and once you know who he is it wouldn’t be that hard to figure it out. So he must be counting on never seeing you again.”
“All that’s obvious,” I said.
“Yeah, but with your track record for seeing the obvious, I like to state it just the same. All right. That’s the situation as I see it. Whaddya want?”
“All right. Here’s the thing. The dead woman. Julie Steinmetz. I was told she lived on 83rd Street and she did. But I was also told she worked at Artiflex Cosmetics on Third Avenue. I was told that because that’s where the real Monica Dorlander works.”
“So?”
“But she didn’t work there. She worked at another place a few blocks up the street. But I was told to stake out that building and pick her up leaving work. Well, she wasn’t there often, and now I know why. But she was there once. Tuesday, my first day on the job. She showed up around three-thirty, went in, and was out about ten minutes later.”
“She had business in the building.”
“Right. But how did this guy know that? The way I see it, that’s the weak link. Either the woman had a real appointment and he knew it, which is too farfetched and I can’t buy it, or he set upan appointment for her to get her into the building, just so I’d see her and pick her up. If so, he must have a confederate in the building. Maybe an unwitting one, but still a confederate. And that’s the link.”
MacAullif frowned. “Sounds farfetched to me.”
“Yes, I know. But there’s one other thing. The guy really wanted me to start work on Monday. Only when I absolutely refused did he agree to let me start Tuesday. The way I see it now, the reason he was so hot for Monday was he had already set up this bogus appointment, and when I wouldn’t come around, he had to somehow get it switched to Tuesday.”
MacAullif frowned again. “I see the point. I don’t buy it, but I see it. So whaddya want?”
“I want to know where she went. I wanna know if she had an appointment in that building on Tuesday. More particularly, if she had an appointment for Monday that was changed to Tuesday.”
“So?” MacAullif said, suspiciously.
“So, she was a businesswoman. She must have had an appointment book and—”
“Forget it,” MacAullif said. “I thought I saw where this was going, and the answer is, forget it. This is a murder investigation. It’s outside my jurisdiction. You may think that upstate cop’s a doofus, but he happens to be in charge. I can’t go poking my nose into this woman’s business, asking to see her appointment book.
“And neither can you. You’ve already been charged with obstructing justice. You try to get your hands on that book, not only is that charge gonna stick, but the counts of it are gonna mount up.”
“I gotta know where she went.”
“I doubt if it’s gonna do you any good. Most likely this was all arranged by phone. Whoever arranged it was a dupe and won’t know beans.
“But if you really wanna do it, why don’t you start from the other end?”
“Whaddya mean?”
“You got a picture of the dead woman, right?”
“Yeah.”
“So go in the building and ask people where she went.”
I thought that over. It wasn’t my idea of a good time, but it was something I could do.
“I guess so,” I said.
“Fine. So go do it. Get out of here. I got work to do.”
“There’s one more thing,” I said.
“Shit. There’s always one more thing. What is it?”
I told him about the license plate named POP.
MacAullif wasn’t pleased. “You held this out on the cops?”
“Well, I wasn’t sure it meant anything, and—”
“Save it for the judge. Jesus Christ. Yet another obstruction of justice.”
“All right. I’m a bad boy. The point is, can you trace it?”
“Trace what? You got three letters there. You got any numbers?”
“No.”
MacAullif stared at me. “You want me to trace every license plate number starting with POP?”
“How many of them can there be?”
“A thousand, you moron. Three digits is nine hundred and ninety-nine, triple zero makes a thousand.”
“They don’t issue ’em all, do they?”
“They issue enough. Say it’s only five hundred—what the hell good’s it gonna do you? You’ll have names and addresses of people spread out all over the state, and what’s the point? How are you gonna pin ’em down?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, let me help you. What make of car was it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?“
“I was being arrested. I was a little distracted at the time.”
“You saw the car. You saw the plate.”
“Yeah.”
“So what kind of car was it? Big? Small? A foreign job?”
“I’m not sure. Medium size. I think it was American.”
“That’s a big help. What color?”
“A light color. Gray or tan.”
“Gray or tan?”
“Or light blue or green.”
“Shit.”
“Sorry.”
“It ever occur to you you’re in the wrong line of work?”
“Constantly.”
MacAullif rubbed his head. “Great. You got no way to pin it down. So what’s the point?”
“I don’t know the point. I’m desperate. It’s my only lead. If you don’t wanna do it, you don’t have to do it.”
I got up to go.
“Wait a minute,” MacAullif said. “Don’t get so huffy. Did I say I wouldn’t do it? I just asked you what’s the point.”
“I tell you, I don’t know.”
“Fine. That’s good enough for me. Call back this afternoon. I’ll get you your damn numbers. Now, was there anything else?”
“No, that will do.”
“Jesus Christ, I should hope so. Now get the hell out of here,
will you? I wasted enough damn time already. Now I gotta run a thousand license plates.”
MacAullif picked up the cigar again and leveled it at me as if it were a gun. “Let me tell you something. If there’s another ax murder, it’ll be your damn fault.”
24.
IT WASN’T THAT BAD. Actually, it was kind of fun. Going into the office building and asking people if they’d seen the woman in the picture. It was almost like real detective work somehow. After my usual initial nervousness, I kind of got into it. By the fourth or fifth office I was even asking the receptionist relevant questions, like, “Were you working here last Tuesday?” No one was remembering the woman in the picture, but no one was throwing me out on my ear either. So it was almost fun.
I had a feeling most of the receptionists thought I was a cop. Of course, I was doing my best to promote that image. I wasn’t saying I was a cop, but I wasn’t saying I wasn’t, either. In a crunch, no one could accuse me of impersonating a cop. In point of fact, the only misleading word I was using at all was the pronoun ‘we.’ As in, “Excuse me, but we’re trying to trace the movements of this woman. Have you seen her?” Somehow that one small word made me sound like the whole damn police force. But I could justify it—I knew a private detective in Atlantic City who used the word ‘our’ to refer to his one-man operation, so I guess I could use the word ’we’ to refer to mine. At any rate, it sure worked. No one asked to see my I.D., and receptionist after receptionist was damn cordial.
Of course, some of them recognized the picture as that of the woman they’d seen on the news or in the morning paper, but that didn’t hurt me any. If anything, it helped. But not many made the connection. I guess a lot of people just don’t equate what they see in the media with real life.
I struck pay dirt on the sixteenth floor. I’d started at the bottom and worked my way up, and by that time the thrill had worn off and I was damn glad to get a nibble.
It was an ad agency, and if I were smart, that was where I would have started, looking for a place a high-priced fashion model might be expected to go, rather than checking all the offices in turn. But then again, if I were smart, I wouldn’t be in this mess to begin with.
