The Skelly Man

by David Daniel

  * * *

  I parked the car near Harvard Yard. On the leaf-strewn grass, overweight pigeons and squirrels scampered, oblivious to the tread of urban combat boots, Birkenstocks, and moldy sneakers. A gumshoe seemed to make no difference. On the phone Judy Bishop had said that she hadn’t found a current address for Paul Chapman, the student who had dropped out last year. However, she had talked with the Harvard campus police and learned that Chapman had gotten into trouble before he left school.

  “What kind of trouble?” I asked.

  “He was standing out on his balcony shouting obscenities and throwing things.”

  “I thought that’s what college is about.”

  “Stark naked in the middle of winter?”

  “Yeah, hmm.”

  “I spoke with the tutor at Eliot House, where the kid lived, and he says Chapman was superbright, apparently. A whiz at electronics. Used to fix things for classmates—computers, stereos, so on. His goal was opening his own company. But he lost interest in his studies after his father’s death, became antisocial, quit attending class. The tutor said Chapman took most of his belongings when he dropped out, but left a couple boxes in storage. Would taking a look be of any use to you?”

  I figured it was worth a ride to Cambridge.

  Eliot was one of the undergraduate living quarters; at Harvard, Judy said, they didn’t call them “dorms.” She was waiting for me with the storage-room key.

  “The tutor just told me that before he left school Paul Chapman got his head shaved and spent his time listening to angry music.”

  “You know anything about his father’s accident?” I said.

  “Only that he was alone on his sailboat. Turns out he was broke, evidently keeping solvent by moving paper around. The body wasn’t found.”

  Judy unlocked a door under a stairway and found a light switch. We picked our way past footlockers and steamer trunks with prep-school decals on them, back to where some steel shelves had been erected. Chapman’s things were in two cardboard boxes with his name printed in marker pen on the outside. There wasn’t much. A small tool kit, some course papers—all A’s, I noted—computer magazines, books. Judy exhumed a few Polo dress shirts.

  I looked through the books. They appeared to be course texts, mostly: electronics, some engineering. Among them I found a small green leather-covered volume that looked quite old. It had a cross design on it in faded gold leaf, the cross tipped at an angle, its equal-length arms split at the ends and curved back.

  “It’s a moline cross,” Judy said. “A heraldic design.”

  I looked at her. “How’d you know that?”

  She shrugged. “One of the perks of my job—I get to take free classes in the extension school.”

  “In heraldry?”

  “We’re talking Harvard here.”

  The print inside was in a language I didn’t recognize. It stumped Judy, too. “It looks a little like books my dad had,” she said. “He was a Mason. It’s different, though.”

  We looked through the remaining items, then put everything away. We locked the storage room behind us. As I walked Judy back to her office, where she said she was involved with the alumni canvass, she asked, “What would you like to have found?”

  I looked at her. “You thinking about a career change?”

  “I enjoy what I do, but that was kind of fun. I kept imagining we were the characters in Out of the Past.”

  “As long as you don’t shoot me in the end,” I said.

  She smiled. “Then ’fess up. What did you hope to find?”

  I shrugged. “Dead man’s gold? Or a key to the tower room where a princess used her fingernails to scratch out a secret code? Something to tie Paul Chapman to the case I’m on would’ve been nice.”

  “So that probably wasn’t very helpful, huh?”

  “Kid”—I gave it my best Robert Mitchum—“you never know.”

  21

  I ARRIVED AT the Lowell campus at 2:00. I’d been spending so much time at colleges lately, I could probably make the dean’s list. In the auditorium, carpenters, electricians and painters were doing their thing, getting the stage ready for tomorrow night. The guest panelists were up there too and included a former Red Sox player—though not Jackie Jensen—and a small, wire-haired woman who several years before had been on a sitcom I couldn’t remember the name of. I couldn’t remember her name, either. I did recall having seen her more recently in a commercial, slipping doggie snacks to a drooling Gordon setter. Maybe the New Gong Show represented a step in the climb back, but with lines like she’d been given, she’d be better off with a pair of basset hounds for straight men.

  There was no sign of Chelsea. Morrie the accountant and Phil Gripaldi sat off to one side, playing cards. Morrie’s face was screwed up in concentration as he studied his hand. Over on the little desk where he generally sat there was a paper coffee cup and a doughnut box. I hadn’t eaten. I opened the box but found only the stale husk of a corn muffin and a lot of cigarette butts. Crinkled among them were a couple of paper streamers. Calculator tapes, I realized. Morrie and Gripaldi were intent on their game, so I took one of the tapes out and pulled it open. Predictably, it was strings of numbers, but next to various items I saw that someone, presumably Morrie, had written words—abbreviations, actually. The bottom was a debit. The other strip had more of the same. I wasn’t sure what they meant, but I put them in my pocket.

  When the rehearsal ended, Corbin asked me to drive him back to the hotel. He seemed preoccupied and said little in the car. When we got to his suite, he called room service and ordered a bottle of champagne. “Not impressed with the show, are you?” he said to me.

  “How do you like my marksmanship?” I said.

  He scowled. “Okay, TV isn’t your thing. You’re no kind of judge. I am. The show isn’t much—I admit it.” He sighed. “Maybe I should just hang it up, go out gracefully.”

  “But?” I said.

  He looked at me.

  “I’ve watched you. When you’re up there under the lights, you’re different. Forget the crappy lines, the bottom-of-the-barrel jokes. You become as close to happy as I’ve seen you get.”

  He eyed me with an expression I couldn’t read. “It’s not just for myself I do it,” he said. “It’s for my people, too.”

  “Whatever.”

  “No, I mean it. They depend on what I do. Chelsea’s like the child I never had. And Justin and Morrie … hell, I’m thinking of offering Gripaldi a full-time gig. There could be room on the team for a certain private eye,” he said.

  “Gosh, would I get an ostrich-hide wallet for my license?”

  Anger flickered on his face a moment, then was gone. He went into the bathroom. I wandered over to a window and looked out. On the ledge of a building across the canal I could see pigeons, the same soft gray as the old stone lintels, strutting and cooing in the mild sun. They could have been retirees on a bench in Sarasota for all they seemed to care that winter was seven short weeks away. A bellhop brought the champagne and set it in ice. Corbin called out from the bathroom for me to pop it. He came in wiping makeup from his face with a towel, swallowed a quick glass and poured another.

  We drank champagne. He drained a third glass and began to wander about the suite, looking at the furnishings and decor as if noticing them for the first time and not finding much of interest there. If his new show worked, he was going to be seeing a lot of hotel rooms. When he spoke, his voice was softer than usual, his words slower. “Some nights you lie awake in the wee small hours, and the mind monkey gets climbing. The questions start. What’s it all mean? How long before the prostate blows? Can I ever afford to retire? Like that. Will anyone remember me when I’m gone? And that little drum in your chest going, ‘I want … I want…’” He looked at me. “Am I full of shit, or does any of that make sense?”

  I shrugged. “I’ve hitched that highway a few times.”

  He poured more champagne. “You figured out who’s sending the notes y
et?”

  “No.”

  “Justin’s convinced it’s Westrake.”

  “He still think Westrake’s angry at being upstaged?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Is that why Justin went on his little mission over there last night?”

  I said it casually. Either Corbin was truly surprised, or he was a very good actor. I told him about following Ross to the university, but ending up missing the conversation between him and Westrake. Corbin said he had gone to bed early last night; he knew nothing of the trip, but he hadn’t had a chance to talk with Justin yet today. He was sure Justin would tell him. He speculated that Ross was acting on his instincts, telling Westrake to butt out. I wasn’t wild with the thought that Ross’s instincts might be truer than my own, but I accepted the explanation for now; it made a kind of sense. Like the others on Corbin’s team, Ross was fiercely loyal.

  “Let’s talk about you, then,” I said.

  “What about me?”

  “You got stock in Moët and Chandon?”

  Corbin stepped forward so abruptly that champagne sloshed over his hand. He ignored it and drew his bulk into a pose of threat. “What’d you say?”

  We were close enough so I could see the artery throbbing in his neck, the fine sheen of sweat on his lip above the capped teeth.

  “I could deck you, you know that?” he growled. “I could put you through that goddamn wall!”

  “And I could do stand-up comedy on network TV. Come on, Jerry, let’s each stick with what we’re good at.”

  He held the pose a few seconds. Then he sighed and his shoulders sank. He retreated.

  “Forget the booze,” I said. “Let’s talk about the money.”

  “The money,” he said tonelessly. “You want more?”

  “You go around playing Mr. Beverly Hills, but little indicators say you’re in the red, or pretty close to it.”

  “Dammit, I warned you about probing my personal affairs. How would you like it if I went digging into your finances.”

  “You discover any, I’ll give you a finder’s fee. Okay, maybe your money situation’s shaky, yet you toss it around like a third-term Democrat. You pay me ten days up front when a flat retainer would’ve done.”

  “I thought I was buying loyalty.”

  “For a handshake you would’ve got confidentiality, which is more practical.”

  “I was buying that, too. How do you think I found you?”

  I thought back to the night Ross hired me. He said he’d been asking around, tracking me all day. Had he got a referral from the Crime Busters Hall of Fame? “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Is the name Devlin known to you?”

  “The Belvidere Devlins?”

  “I know Basil,” Corbin said. “Some juice, huh?”

  The Devlins had been in the juice business around town for generations, guiding hands in industry, politics, and business. Basil was the last of the breed; patron of this, benefactor of that, trustee to most everything, though less visibly in recent years. He had to be eighty by now, and probably worth half a million for each of those years.

  “Dev and I go way back,” Corbin went on. “My parents worked for him and his family. We keep in touch. He arranged for these rooms, got the phones and fax installed. Your name apparently got some press a few years ago, Basil told me, but you’ve also earned a reputation for keeping your counsel. Discretion’s hard to come by these days. There’s always some traitor willing to flap his lips to the media.”

  “The friend who asks not to be identified,” I said.

  “That’s the sonofabitch.”

  “My discretion also means you can pay me and then bury my report,” I pointed out. “Nothing says you’ve got to talk to anyone else.”

  “I admit it,” Corbin said.

  “Wouldn’t be the first time someone has. I’ve got more paper sitting in the bottoms of drawers than a college poet. But what I think doesn’t matter a sneeze in a snowstorm. I’m paid for what I do. If that’s not acceptable, you’re the one who says so.”

  There was a knock on the outer door. Corbin looked at me, and I went over and opened the door a crack. It was a hotel valet with a black academic robe and mortarboard in dry cleaners plastic. I gave it a rustle. Expecting what? For a bomb to fall out? I took it inside. “Dr. Corbin, I presume?”

  He ignored it. “Rasmussen, in your trade you’ve got certain … rules, haven’t you?”

  I hung the robe on a clothes rack. “They’re mostly unwritten,” I said.

  “In my trade, that’s true, too. The show must go on. Give them more than they paid for. And never ever let them see you sweat.” He paused, then exhaled. “My contract runs out the end of the year. Nothing’s been announced formally, but the inside betting is my guest host is going to get my chair on Good Night next season. The producers want a change.”

  Welcome to the land of the little people, I thought. My contracts went day to day. “They consult you?”

  “They don’t have to. The network owns my contract. I practically had to kiss their ass to get a shot at this new show. Why the hell you think I’m in Lowell?”

  “Hometown pride?”

  He made a sour face. “I’m here because this is the market I’ve got to score in. Lunch-bucket cities. The Jell-O wrestling and Candlepins for Cash set. No offense. I’ve got to start from zero and build an audience, like some goddamn cheese ball.” He picked up a bottle and upended it over his glass, letting the last of the champagne drizzle in. “You’re right. I am walking a thin line. It’s still black, but not by much, not for long. How’d you find out?”

  Why get Morrie in trouble for being careless with calculator tape? I said, “I’m a highly trained sleuth.”

  He didn’t seem to notice. “Another few weeks,” he said. “After that, I won’t be worrying about them seeing me sweat. Yeah, the new show has all the looks of a turd. If it sinks, I’ll be stumbling, falling down, peeing my pants. I’ll be a zoid. An old man, with a laundry bag full of snotty hankies and no one to talk to but myself. You know Sally Reed?”

  “Who?”

  “Woman on my show today. Former sitcom actress.”

  “Ah, that Sally Reed.”

  “Know how she pays the bills these days? Hawking dog food and those ridiculous lounger chairs on cable TV. I’ll be out of the business, gone, forgotten. And by God, Rasmussen, I’m scared.”

  His face had a splotchy pallor, and his shoulders drooped; but I couldn’t be sure he wasn’t acting, or just a melodramatic drunk. This show-biz crowd was getting to me. Still, in spite of it all, I found myself drawn to him. Maybe it was the personal force he could exude when he was on, or that in his own anesthetized way, he was in pain. Maybe I just liked him because he seemed to like me.

  “What would a couple grand buy?” I asked.

  He laughed. “Serious? God, not much. What’re you talking? Your retainer?”

  “Call it a loan.”

  “Well…” He rubbed his chin. “It’d keep ex number three off my ass about a week. Or buy us all some more bubbly.”

  “Deal with the ex first,” I said.

  His smile went most of the way across. “Rasmussen, you’re a prince, you know it? A goddamn prince.”

  I managed a little tap step on the carpet. “There’s no business like show business,” I sang.

  22

  “DOES THIS MEAN I can prescribe for my own hemorrhoids?”

  So went Jerry Corbin’s opening shot upon being conferred with an honorary doctor’s degree. The jokes didn’t get much better, but nobody seemed to notice. The assemblage on stage, sitting in their black robes, beamed like a coven of happy witches, and the audience roared. Corbin’s speech was classic Mr. Good Night stand-up, with shots fired in all directions, several of the choicest aimed at Harvard and the Ivy League. Amid the laughter, Gripaldi and I drifted around the darkened hall on informal patrol.

  “It’s his timing,” Gripaldi confided admiringly. “Man’s got tha
t elegant, offhand effortlessness.”

  “And he makes it look easy, too,” I said.

  Chelsea sat with Justin Ross and Morrie. I didn’t see Professor Westrake. When the affair broke up, there was a reception line. Then we got the in-crowd herded into limos which took them to the Speare House for dinner. The mayor and half of City Hall hogged Corbin’s table, so I slipped out after the salad course to use a lobby pay phone.

  “Thank you for calling,” sang the voice that answered. “This is Ms. Bishop speaking. How may I help you?”

  “It’s Rasmussen,” I said, never without a glib opener.

  “Thank God.” Her voice dropped a weary octave. “I’ve had a hundred people say no to me today. Twenty hung up in my ear, a dozen called me names, and one elderly gent, class of 1919, told me to perform an act Candy Samples couldn’t do.”

  “And the alumni canvass?”

  “Funny. Pretty dire, actually. We’ve had only fifteen in pledges all afternoon.”

  “Fifteen grand’s not bad.”

  “Million,” she said.

  I whistled. “You weren’t panhandling at my old school.”

  “No? What college was that?”

  “You’ve seen it on matchbooks.” I took my pen out of my pocket. “Listen, hi.”

  “Hi.” She laughed.

  “Have you had a chance to—”

  “Alfred Westrake. I did. He never went to school here.”

  “Well, it was a long shot,” I said, putting my pen back.

  “Not so fast. If it’s the same person, there was an Alfred Westrake at Harvard in the early 1950s.”

  “I thought you just said—”

  “Not a student, he was an instructor.”

  I mulled that a moment, then asked, “What field?”

  “Elizabethan dramatic literature.”

  I asked if she knew anything more, like why he had left or where he had gone, but she didn’t. She did say that she had mentioned the green book with the moline cross on the cover and odd writing in it to a few colleagues, but no one had any idea what it was. I thanked her for her efforts. We chatted about old movies for a few minutes, and then she had to go. “Quota to make,” she said. “Bart Stahl, class of ’67, is breathing down my neck.”