The Wabash Factor

by Howard Fast

  “What on earth ever gave you such a notion, Lieutenant?”

  “I had reason.”

  “I would like to know what your reason was!” he said angrily. “Do you realize what you are doing, accusing me of prescribing a drug that was not indicated? I’ve been decently open and fair with you, and this is what it leads to. Well, get the hell out of here! I am through with you and your questions!”

  When I told it to Fran afterward, she pointed out that he was quite right. He had answered my questions openly and fairly, and as Fran put it, I had responded not to the words of the man, but to his somewhat sinister appearance, his long face and thin mustache and dark, steady eyes. “Nonsense framed by film and television,” Fran said. Perhaps she was right.

  I have often longed for an occasion to wander around my precinct on foot, but when a lieutenant of New York City’s police moves, he moves in a car, linked by radio phone to his precinct house. Occasionally, I’ve struck out on a very limited mission on foot, but not without temerity. It was only a few blocks from the doctor’s office to L. D. BRONSTEIN, CHEMIST, on Madison Avenue. On the West Side, a drugstore is frequently called a drugstore and infrequently a pharmacy, but never a chemist. On the East Side, a drugstore is frequently called a pharmacy, infrequently a chemist, but never a drugstore. Pharmacies carried everything from tunafish sandwiches to nuts; chemists, self-consciously occupying a higher level, sold only drugs and toiletries. Such was Bronstein’s, established in 1915. The white-haired Mr. Bronstein was evidently a son of the founder, and he greeted me courteously if not warmly. When he discovered my errand, he froze up.

  “My prescriptions are very confidential.”

  “You know I can get a court order to unfreeze your prescription file. Come on, Mr. Bronstein. It will be much simpler if you dig up that single prescription—and it’ll be a sort of public service.”

  “What are you after?” Bronstein asked me. “I’ve known Dr. Hyde for years. He’s an excellent and responsible physician.”

  “I’m not sure what I’m after, and I’m not sure it reflects in any way on Dr. Hyde. Please believe me, Mr. Bronstein, I’ll try to keep this confidential.”

  Bronstein stared at me a long moment, and then he went into his back room and returned with the prescription. “There it is. Placebo. A little sugar pill, in case you don’t know what a placebo is, and the prescription was phoned in by the doctor.”

  He showed it to me, and it was exactly as he said. Placebo, and under it, By phone.

  “Wouldn’t he have to mail a confirmation?”

  “Not for a placebo, Lieutenant. That’s not a prescription drug, although you can rest assured that it has its place in medical practice.”

  “Is this your handwriting?”

  “No. The prescription was taken by my assistant.”

  I nodded at a young man behind the counter. “Him?”

  “No. Fellow named Richard Bell.”

  “Did you check the prescription, I mean the filled bottle?”

  Bronstein smiled tolerantly. “I had other things to do. The placebos are bright vermilion, marked with a p, unmistakable. Bell was quite capable of counting out fifty pills. In fact, Bell is a very capable man.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He called in sick this morning. He’ll be here tomorrow.”

  “I’d like his address and phone, and if a detective called Bolansky comes after the same thing, tell him I have the information and that I’ll see him at the precinct.”

  Sighing deeply, Mr. Bronstein produced what I’d requested. Bell had an apartment on 88th Street between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. It was a shabby, depressed street, crime-ridden but not excessively so for the West Side, and the corners held splendid if somewhat unkempt old apartment houses. Bell lived not in one of the fine old buildings but in a converted brownstone. I found his name in the hallway listing, and I pushed the button several times. No answer. Then a departing tenant conveniently opened the hall door for me and I went inside. Bell’s apartment was listed as 4B, which meant climbing four flights of stairs. At the door to 4B I pressed the button again. No answer, although I heard the ring clearly. I tried the knob and the door opened. The living room, which faced the street, was about sixteen feet square, furnished with inexpensive but not tasteless Scandinavian furniture, and in one of the severely designed chairs, Mr. Bell was sprawled. He was not sick; he was quite dead, a bullet hole in his head and a trickle of dried blood across his forehead and face. He was a tall man, middle thirties, with one of those good-looking, characterless faces that you see in network shows. His hair was blond, his wide-open, staring eyes blue, and he wore gray flannels and an old turtleneck sweater. His hand was cold, and on the floor, apparently dropped from his hand, was a copy of Sports Illustrated.

  West 88th Street is covered by the West Side precinct, where Lieutenant Joe Finelli runs the detective squad. I knew Finelli well enough to know that he was tough, rigid, and generically suspicious, so it was no surprise that he greeted me with “What the hell are you doing on my turf, Golding?”

  “Just take it easy, Joe. The city’s the city. I didn’t know a crime had been committed. I had an address on Eighty-eighth Street. I went there. I rang a bell and got no answer, so I turned a knob and went in. The occupant is dead. His name is Richard Bell, he’s a pharmacist. When you get here, I’ll tell you more.”

  Finelli had cooled down when he arrived with a convoy of uniforms, detectives, fingerprint, and forensic. He took me aside, and after I had given him as much information as I thought wise to give him, he sort of apologized. He was a big man with sloping shoulders, a very dark beard, and a sour, unlit cigar that lived in his mouth.

  “All right, Harry. I’m sorry I blew at you. Let’s have dinner some night. We’ll bring the wives and tell each other how rotten the profession is.”

  “Soon as I can free a night.”

  I stayed until forensic came up with a surmise. Mr. Bell had been shot through the head with a large-caliber revolver or automatic, sometime between nine-thirty and eleven. He was dead and the back of his skull was on the chair behind him. All of which I had guessed. Forensic did not bother to comment on his hypo tracks, assuming that I knew a doper when I saw one. I softened Finelli a bit more by remarking that as much as Fran and I loved Italian food, we’d never hit a really good restaurant.

  “Then you got a surprise coming to you, Harry. I know the best goddamn restaurant in this city, Italian, but up in the Bronx. You don’t mind coming up to the Bronx?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Only at this place, I take the check. I’m hot shit there, and no way do I let them see someone sitting with me grab the check. On me. Don’t argue. I’ll pick up you and Fran. When?”

  “As soon as I consult with Fran.”

  Fran was not crazy about Italian food, but she would, I hoped, serve the cause, and I made a note in my book to select the date. There were enough notes there now to be confusing. I was tempted to write, Don’t offend the Finellis of this world. You will need them.

  It was almost five o’clock when I got back to the precinct, and things had lagged. Toomey, left alone and in command, never pushed things, even though he was smarter than most cops and reasonably responsible. Anyway, there was not much to grab at as he ran through the day’s doings. As for Keene, he had been to both restaurants, and both of them had destroyed the checks. “Common decency,” they told Keene. In Curtis’s case, the waiter could not remember anything he had ordered, except that he was fairly certain one of the men at the table had downed well over an entire bottle of red wine. The waiter recalled that it was a modestly priced California Zinfandel, a heavy red peasant wine. The waiter recalled some remarks by others at the table when Curtis insisted on the California Zinfandel, and the waiter also remarked on the odd fact that no one skimped on the dishes, the restaurant being a very expensive one. He did not recall what the dishes were, but he did remember the contradiction in the quality of wine and food. />
  “I could talk to his wife,” Keene said. “She’d remember.”

  I shook my head. “Not yet. I’ll get around to talking to her myself.”

  As for Asher Alan, the waiter’s memory was much better. Alan had started with one of their specialties, a large plate of mushrooms vinaigrette, followed by broiled liver with Spanish sausage, and then a very odd dessert, not on the menu but specifically ordered, sliced bananas with sour cream and sugar. The waiter sliced two bananas into a bowl—he did this himself because the pastry chef was miffed at the inelegant nature of the dish—and then he added a large gob of sour cream and two tablespoons of brown sugar.

  “You got name, address, and telephone of the waiter?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “All right, start a file. Type a full report, names and addresses where we have them, and remind me to give you the stuff on Dr. Hyde, Oshun—”

  “Oshun, Lieutenant?”

  “James O-s-h-u-n, Bronstein, and Richard Bell. Bell is a dead junkie, a homicide over on the West Side. So you remind me and I’ll fill you in on all of them before I go home. Also, tomorrow, you go over to the West Side and lick Finelli’s ass, because they don’t like to share. But get everything they have on Richard Bell. Also, get a full, formal statement from each waiter.”

  “I got it.”

  I looked at Keene thoughtfully, and then I nodded. He was good, and that was all the praise, he needed.

  “And your wife called.”

  “Thanks.” I called Fran then, telling her that I would be home in about an hour, and then I went into Alex Courtny’s office.

  It was Courtny’s boast that he paid two dollars each for his cigars, that the leaf was grown in the Canary Islands from the finest Cuban seed, that they were better than the Cuban originals, and that they smelled as sweet as a summer evening. Myself, an ex-smoker these past fifteen years, rigid as only a convert can be—well, for myself the fumes in Courtny’s office were unbearable and to sit there was a mild form of torture. But sit there I did until I had spelled out every detail of my investigation.

  When I had finished, Courtny sat silent for a while, puffing on his cigar; then he pushed the cigar at me and asked whether I saw this as some sort of conspiracy.

  “Maybe. I don’t know yet.”

  “You want to know what I see, Harry?”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “I see a junkie who got a bullet in his head, which is a destination that a lot of junkies in this town are headed for, and then I see a couple of coincidences, and then I see—you got to forgive me on this one, Harry—then I see two guys who are maybe first-rate public guys, but who also pig out every chance they get. As for that medicine, Harry—what do you call it?”

  “Pargyline.”

  “Yeah, pargyline. Well, a thing like that can be confusion. I never been to Beverly Hills. You know, funny thing, I never had any big urge to go back to Europe. I was there as a kid in W. W. Two, and they can shove it if they can find an asshole big enough, but America is something else, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, San Francisco and the cable cars, and Hollywood. Never been to any of them. My army training was in a shithole state called Georgia, and since then I been a cop, and Washington, D.C., been my travels. But Hollywood, that’s something I want to see. Beverly Hills—stuff it. It’s a little bugass town that almost don’t exist, so I am not impressed by what any Beverly Hills cop tells you over the telephone, not impressed one damn bit.”

  I ignored the fact that he had wandered all over the map, and said, “I could send Keene or Toomey. They’d be back the same day.”

  “Beverly Hills?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “No way.”

  “All right. But can I continue the investigation?”

  “How many troops?”

  “Just Keene. And myself.”

  “You were out on the town all day, Harry. Was it this business?”

  “Yes.”

  “Harry, you’re an old pro, a down-to-earth cop. You got brains and talent for the job, and I think the world of you. But there’s nothing in this, and the doper’s misfortune belongs to Finelli, not to us.”

  “Alex,” I said to him, “do this for me. I only met Asher Alan once, but he was one of the good guys and Fran thinks he was Jesus Christ returned to earth. I don’t like the thought that a man like that comes into our city and is murdered—”

  “You don’t know that!” he interrupted sharply.

  “No, but damn it, let me find out. I’ll pay for a trip to Beverly Hills and do it on my own time. But let me run this a few days.”

  “I’m weeping for you. If you pay for a trip to Beverly Hills, the smartasses will think you’re on the pad. Do you know what airfare is today? Ah, the hell with it! Put in a tab and the city will pick it up.” Then he added, “If you’re right, Harry, he died here, but he was murdered in L.A.”

  Courtny was no fool. A bigot, yes, a man still controlled by all the hates of his childhood, but no fool. “Harry,” he said, “you buy all this conspiracy crap, and it is bullshit, pure unadulterated bullshit. The dagos, the Russians, the Arabs—they go in for this conspiracy shit, but it is not American. No way. Those jugbunnies in Hollywood fill the TV screens with it, but that is pure, unadulterated bullshit. It is not the American way.”

  “No, and Kennedy was killed by one brilliant marksman with a rifle that couldn’t possibly hit the target, and his brother was murdered as an interesting coincidence, and Martin Luther King was zapped by one nut who hated blacks—”

  “And you’re going to tell me that the kid who shot Reagan was part of some conspiracy? No, sir. I read all the books on Kennedy, and I reject all of them. Jack Kennedy, God rest his soul, was killed by a nut named Oswald, and that’s it, and don’t get me pissed off any more than I am, Harry. I gave you the trip to California and you can put Keene on it for three days tops.”

  “I’m leaving the house,” I said to him. “I’ve had a long day.” That’s the word for the precinct. Mostly, a cop talking to another cop calls it the “house.”

  I left my car parked in front of the precinct, one place where I would be spared a ticket, and I walked home. It was one of those splendid March evenings, a wind not too cold to be uncomfortable whipping through the city, the last of a good sunset muted by the twilight in the canyons, the streetlights going on, the home-bound citizens brisk and alive, as they always are on an evening like this. There was an electric current in the air that New Yorkers understand, part of what makes this city what it is.

  Outside my door, I smelled Normandy chicken and scalloped potatoes, both done at the hand of a master. But after I had acknowledged that to Fran, I told her that she worked as hard as I did, and once in a while it wouldn’t hurt to let me do the cooking.

  “Two reasons I don’t do that. Firstly, I get home before you do.”

  “We don’t eat much before eight.”

  “Second reason …” She hesitated.

  “Well?”

  “You’re a lousy cook, Harry.”

  “That’s a real nice, positive thing to say. What about my ham and eggs?”

  “I do believe you’re hurt. We haven’t had ham or bacon for ten years. We’re on a low salt diet. Harry, darling, no one expects you to be a good cook. You’re a Jewish American Prince.”

  “What!”

  “Oh, Harry, come on. I don’t mean anything nasty. But your parents, God bless them, were as poor as church mice. Your mother—and you know I adored her—well, she worked her fingers to the bone, scrubbing, cleaning, knitting sweaters for her kids, and your father worked himself to death and borrowed money he couldn’t pay back, all to raise their two sons as if they really were of royal blood and send them to college—”

  “Oscar,” I interrupted. “I never went to college. I grew up to marry a shanty-Irish kid who went to college—”

  “Hunter! Free! No tuition, and I waited tables.”

  “I never got there. I was working and paying
Oscar’s tuition. And furthermore, you’re an anti-Semite.”

  “Me? Me with two beautiful Jewish kids who tore me apart birthing them, and you have the chutzpah to call me an anti-Semite!”

  She always fell into that phony brogue when she wanted to impress someone with her ancestry. Chutzpah was one of a dozen Yiddish words she knew, and she used them to death. The insertion in the midst of the brogue was an indication that she was truly angry. In a moment, she would deliver her pedigree.

  “You bastard,” she said to me. “I am Francesca O’Brian O’Brannigan Murphy, and with the blood of kings on both sides, and you dare to call me an anti-Semite!”

  “I take it back, I apologize, and I love you, and if you don’t cool down, I’m not taking you to Beverly Hills with me.”

  “It’s a joke.”

  “No joke. And if you’re nice and sweet and get dinner on the table, and if you can work a couple of days’ sick leave from the college, I’ll let you sit next to me on the airplane. The city pays my fare and we can afford yours. Providing you can get the two days. We can leave on Sunday, have Monday and Tuesday working days in L.A., and be back on the late plane Wednesday morning.”

  “You have me,” Fran said. “Don’t worry about the two days. I’m on the plane with you. And I take back all the terrible things I said.”

  During dinner, I brought her up-to-date on the day’s developments and asked her what she thought.

  “I don’t know, Harry. There’s a way to agree with everything Courtny said. He was talking from a lot of experience. We all expect doctors to be smart, but smart is not a requirement for being a doctor. A retentive memory is much more important. Doctors are not trained in logic, in the art of reason—if indeed anyone can be trained in those disciplines. So it could very well be that your Dr. Green—by the way, does he have a first name?”

  “Herbert.”

  “Well, it could well be that your Dr. Green is simply a very inept and stupid doctor. They exist. My grandmother Maureen was killed in a hospital when they pumped her full of penicillin without finding out whether she could tolerate it. Doctors give stupid and dangerous prescriptions sometimes, and it may well be that your Dr. Green did that. Tragedy but no crime.”