Transgressions Vol. 3: Merely Hate/Walking the Line/Walking Around Money

by Ed McBain

  She looked me up and down with and said, “You’re not Lansman.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “But he’s dead.”

  I had practiced that line for two hours. Lawless had given me the job of getting in to see the fashion model and of convincing her to come to his office and share what she knew about the other names on his list. It was my idea to pretend that I was the dead man. I also decided that shock might loosen her tongue.

  But if she was in any way alarmed I couldn’t see it.

  “He is?” she said.

  “Yeah. The people around thought that it was a heart attack but then the police arrested me and said something about murder.”

  “So he was murdered?” she asked.

  “I thought I’d come here and ask you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the police for some reason suspect me of being involved with you guys and your business. You see, I’m just a journalism student and I’d like them to leave me alone.”

  “Excuse me,” she said, still holding the door against my entrée, still unperturbed by the seriousness of our talk, “but what is your real name?”

  It was her turn to frighten me. I thought that if she was to know my name then she could send someone after me. I lamented, not for the last time, agreeing to work for the anarchist.

  “I’m a representative of Archibald Lawless,” I said, “anarchist at large.”

  Lana Drexel’s confident expression dissolved then. She fell back allowing the door to come open. She wandered into the large room behind her.

  I followed.

  I began to think that you could understand the strange nature of denizens that peopled Archibald Lawless’s world by their sense of architecture and design. The room I entered was as beautiful and intense as young Lana Drexel. The ceilings were no less than eighteen feet high and the room was at least that in width—and more in length. The outer wall was one large pane of glass. There was no furniture in the room except for the wide, cushioned bench that ran from the front door to the picture window. Nine feet up on either side were large platforms that made for rooms without walls. Underneath the platform on the right everything was painted dark gray. The room formed underneath the platform on the left was white.

  Miss Drexel threw herself down in the middle of the banquette. She was wearing a maroon kimono that barely came down to the tops of her thighs. This garment exposed shapely legs and powerful hamstrings. Her toenails were painted bright orange.

  I sat down a few feet from her, near the window that looked south upon midtown.

  “What does he want?” Lana said covering her eyes with an upturned hand.

  “I don’t really know,” I said. “But he seems to think that you and Lansman and a few others are in trouble.”

  “Who?” She sat up and leaned toward me. The intensity of her stare was captivating and cold.

  “Valerie Lox, Henry Lansman, Kenneth Cornell, Benny Lamarr, and you,” I said. “Lamarr is also dead.”

  “How did he die?”

  “A car accident I think. He was with a woman.”

  “What was her name?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The beauty lowered her face to her hands, causing her hair to fall forward. I could see her breasts under the mane of hair but somehow that didn’t matter much.

  “What does he want from me?” she asked.

  “He wants to see you,” I said.

  She looked up at me again. “Will you protect me from him?”

  “Yes,” I said without hesitation. My heart went out to her and I think I might have even challenged A. Lawless for her smile.

  12

  We reached the Tessla building at about two in the afternoon. There were various business types coming in and out. The guard sitting in front of the Joan of Arc mural was an elderly white man with a big mustache and a head full of salt and pepper hair.

  “Hello, Mr. Orlean,” he hailed. “Mr. Lawless is expecting you and the lady.”

  “He is?”

  “Yes sir.”

  The guard’s eyes strayed over to Lana. She wore a Japanese ensemble of work pants and jacket made from rough cotton. The color was a drab green but still it accented her beauty.

  “What’s your name?” I asked the guard.

  “Andy.”

  “I thought Lawless was in trouble with the building, Andy.”

  “No sir, Mr. Orlean. Why would you say that?”

  “It was something about the rent.”

  “Oh,” he said. Andy’s smile was larger even than his mustache. “You mean the owners don’t like him. Well, that might be true but you know the men in this building, the union men, they love Mr. Lawless. He’s a legend in unions all over the city and the world. The reason they can’t trick him outta here is that no real union man would ever turn a key on him.”

  In the elevator Lana stood close to me. When the doors slid open she squeezed my left forearm. I touched her hand. She kissed me lightly on the lips and smiled.

  In the six seconds between the door opening and our departure she raised my blood pressure to a lethal level.

  Archibald was waiting for us. He opened the door before I could knock and ushered us into chairs in the outer room.

  I was later to learn that Lawless never had anyone but his closest confidants in his office.

  “Miss Drexel,” he said, smiling broadly.

  Timidly, and leaning toward me on the hardback sofa, she said, “I hope that you’ll be kind.”

  “I’ll do you one better, lady,” he said. “I’ll be honest and I’ll be fair.”

  She shivered.

  I put a hand on her shoulder.

  Archibald Lawless laughed.

  “Let’s get something straight from the start, Lana,” he said. “Felix is working for me. He won’t jump, lady, so straighten up and talk to me.”

  Lana did sit up. The woman who met me at the pink door returned. She was self-possessed and distant, a European princess being held for ransom in a Bedouin camp.

  “What do you want?” she asked.

  “Why did you come?” he replied.

  “Because your employee told me that Hank Lansman and Benny Lamarr had been murdered.”

  Lawless smiled. I think he liked Lana.

  “Why would that bother you?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  He shook his head then shrugged his shoulders. “Someone in the government has gone to great lengths to hide the accidental deaths of your two friends. You got precious gems, hide away real estate, explosives, security, and a siren all mixed up together and then the hammer drops …”

  Lana’s eyes cut toward me for a moment then she turned them on the madman.

  “What are you in this for?” she asked.

  Walking the line, I said in my mind.

  “I’ve been hired by the insurance company to locate some property that has been—temporarily misplaced,” he said.

  I was lost. Every step along the way he had presented himself as a dedicated anarchist, a man of the people. Now all of a sudden he was working for the Man.

  Lana sat back. She seemed to relax.

  “How much will they pay?” she asked.

  “Five percent with a conviction,” he said. “Eight if I can keep things quiet.”

  “Four million is a lot of revolution,” she said. “But the full fifty could topple a nation.”

  “Are you worried about surviving or retiring?” Archibald asked the beauty.

  It was her turn to smile enigmatically.

  “Because you know,” Lawless continued, “whoever it was killed Lansman and Lamarr will certainly come to your door one day soon.”

  “I’ll die one day anyway,” she admitted with a half pouting lower lip. “But to stay alive you have to keep on moving.”

  How old was she? I wondered. Four years and a century older than I.

  “I ask you again,” Lawless said. “Why did you come here?”

  “No one says no to Mr
. Archibald Lawless,” she opined. “Just ask Andy downstairs.”

  “What do you want?” Lawless asked Lana.

  “Hardly anything. Two hundred and fifty thousand will pay for my ticket out of town. And, of course, I expect exemption from arrest.”

  “Of course.”

  Lana stretched, looked at his murky eyes, and then nodded.

  “Who were you working for?” he asked after an appreciative pause.

  “Lamarr.”

  “To do what?”

  “To go with him to a party in the Hamptons,” she said sounding bored. “To meet a man named Strangman. To make friends with his bedroom.”

  “And did you?”

  Her stare was her response.

  “And then what?” Archibald asked.

  “I met with Lansman, told him where the hidey hole was and collected my fee.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I met with the other people on your list,” she admitted.

  “When?”

  “The morning after I spent with Strangman,” she said. “He was really a jerk.”

  “Where did you meet?” Lawless asked.

  “A vacant house that Val was selling. They wanted to go over the layout with me.”

  “And this Strangman,” Lawless asked. “He was in the same business that Lamarr was in, I suppose?”

  “I suppose,” she replied.

  “And was the operation a success?”

  “I was paid.”

  “By who?” Lawless asked.

  I wanted to correct his grammar but held my tongue.

  “Lamarr.” Lana hesitated. Her vast eyes were seeing something that had been forgotten.

  “There was a guy with Lamarr,” she said. “Normal looking. White. Forties.”

  “Was his hair short?” I asked.

  “I think so.”

  “With a little gray?”

  She turned to me, bit her lower lip, and then shook her head.

  “I don’t remember,” she said. “He didn’t make much of an impression. I thought that maybe he worked for Lamarr. Actually I’m pretty sure of it.”

  “So we have Stangman and a fortyish white man that might have worked for Lamarr,” Lawless said.

  “And Valerie Lox and Kenneth Cornell,” I added.

  The existentialist detective shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “Cornell made a mistake with a blasting cap yesterday afternoon and took off the top of his skull. Valerie Lox has disappeared. Maybe she’s just smart but I wouldn’t put a dollar on seeing her breathing again.”

  “What about me?” Lana Drexel asked.

  “You’re still breathing,” he said.

  “What should I do?”

  “Nothing you’ve ever done before. Don’t go home. Don’t use your credit cards. Don’t call anyone who has been on your phone bill in the last three years.”

  The young woman had a slight smile on her face as she listened to the anarchist’s commandments.

  “Do you have a suggestion of where I should go?” she asked.

  “Sure. I’m full of advice. You just wait out here for a few minutes while I give my operative here his walking orders. Come on, Felix,” he said to me. “Let’s go in my office for a minute or two.”

  13

  “She needs to be put somewhere very safe,” Lawless told me, his profile set against the New Jersey landscape.

  “Where?”

  “There’s a small chapel in Queens,” he said. “Run by a defrocked priest I know.”

  “A friend of Red Tuesday’s?”

  He turned toward me and smiled. “That’s why we’re going to get along, kid,” he said. “Because you know how to be funny.”

  “Do you want me to take her there?” I asked.

  “No. If I let her spend more than an hour with you the next thing I know there you’d be face down with a knife in your back in some back alley in Cartagena.”

  His swampy eyes were laughing but I knew he believed what he said. I believed it. Inwardly I was relieved that I didn’t have to accompany Lana Drexel to Queens.

  “No,” Lawless continued, “Lana can take care of herself and besides—I might have a little job for her.”

  “What kind of job?”

  “The kind I wouldn’t give you,” he said.

  “What should I do?”

  “Follow the same plan I laid out for Miss Drexel. Don’t do anything that you’ve done before.”

  “How can I not do anything I’ve done?” I asked. “I only have seven dollars on me. I don’t know anything but my routine.”

  The anarchist smiled.

  “Your first baby step outside the lies they have you living, young man.”

  “That doesn’t help me.”

  “There’s a hotel on East Thirty-fifth,” he said. “Over by Park. It’s called the Barony. Go there when you get tired. Tell Frederick that I told you to stay there tonight. Other than that you can do anything. Anything that you’ve never done before.”

  “Can I get an advance to eat with?”

  “Frederick will feed you.”

  “What if want to go to a movie?”

  Lawless shook his head. I could see his thoughts: Here the child could do anything and all he can come up with is a movie.

  “Or maybe opera tickets,” I added.

  “I never carry more than ten dollars in cash myself,” he said.

  “But I don’t have a credit card.”

  “Neither do I.” He held his pious palms upward.

  “How do you make it with only ten bucks in your pocket?”

  “It’s a challenge,” he said. “And challenge is what makes life sing.”

  I must have looked miserable because he gave me his quick laugh and said, “In your office. The bottom half of the pink file. Eighteen, eighteen, nine.”

  With that he rose and went to the door.

  “When do I see you again?” I asked.

  “I’ll call you,” he said. “Be prepared.”

  With that he left the office. I heard him say a few words to Lana Drexel. She laughed and said something. And then they were gone.

  I felt uncomfortable staying in his private office. It seemed so personal in there. There were private letters on his closed laptop and all those curiosities along the walls. I went to the storage room, what he called my office, and sat at the long table in a chair that seemed to be made from stoneware pottery clay. It was glazed a shiny dark red and slender in every aspect. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it broke under the weight of a man Lawless’s size.

  I perused a couple of Red Tuesday’s newsletters. The paranoia struck a note with me though and so I put them down.

  I wondered about what Lawless had said; that we lived in a skein of lies. So many things he said seemed to be anchored in some greater truth. In many ways he was like my father, certain and powerful—with all of the answers, it seemed.

  But Lawless was wild. He took chances and had received some hard knocks. He lived with severe mental illness and shrugged off threats that would turn brave men into jellyfish.

  Don’t do anything you’ve done before, he told me. I experienced the memory of his words like a gift.

  I picked up the phone and entered a number from a slip of paper in my pocket.

  “Hello?” she answered. “Who is this?”

  There was a lot of noise in the background, people talking and the clatter of activity.

  “Felix.”

  “Who?”

  “The guy you gave your number yesterday at lunch … I had the soba noodles.”

  “Oh. Hi.”

  “I was wondering if you wanted to get together tonight. After work I mean.”

  “Oh. I don’t know. I was going to go with some of the guys here to … But I don’t have to. What did you want to do?”

  “I’m pretty open,” I said. “Anything you been really wanting to do?”

  “Well,” she hesitated.

  “What?”

&nb
sp; “There’s a chamber music concert up at the Cloisters tonight. It’s supposed to be wonderful up there.”

  “That sounds great,” I said, really meaning it.

  “But the tickets are seventy-five dollars … each.”

  “Hold on,” I said.

  I stretched the phone cord over to the tiny pink file cabinet. The drawers were facing the wall so I turned it around—it was much heavier than I expected.

  I could see that the bottom drawer was actually a safe with a combination lock.

  “Are you still there?” Sharee said.

  “Oh yeah. Listen, Sharee …”

  “What?”

  “Can I call you right back?”

  “Okay.”

  It took me a moment to recall the numbers eighteen, eighteen, nine. The combination worked the first time.

  There was more cash in that small compartment than I had ever seen. Stacks of hundred-dollar bills and fifties and twenties. English pounds and piles of euros. There were pesos and other bills in white envelopes that were from other, more exotic parts of the world.

  “Wow.”

  I took two hundred and fifty dollars leaving an IOU in its place. Then I hit the redial button.

  “Felix?” she answered.

  “What time do you get off work?”

  Sharee was a music student at Juilliard. She studied oboe and flute. There was an oboe in the quartet and a violin that made my heart thrill. After the concert we walked along the dark roads of the Cloisters’ park. I kissed her against a moss covered stone wall and she ran her hands up under my sweater scratching her long fingernails across my shoulder blades.

  We took a taxi down to the Barony. At first the desk clerk didn’t want to get Frederick but when I mentioned Mr. Lawless he jumped to the task.

  Frederick was a tall man, white from his hair to his shoes. He guided us to a small elevator and brought us to a room that was small and lovely. It was red and purple and mostly bed.

  I must have kissed Sharee’s neck for over an hour before trying to remove her muslin blouse. She pulled the waistband of her skirt up over her belly and said, “Don’t look at me. I’m fat.”

  That’s when I started kissing around her belly button. It was an inny and very deep. Every time I pressed my tongue down there she gasped and dug her nails into my shoulders.