The Wabash Factor

by Howard Fast

  “That could be, yes.”

  “As for the junkie—what was his name?”

  “Richard Bell.”

  “Well, he might have been high,” Fran suggested. “Switched bottles with no evil intent.”

  “That could happen.”

  “Then from that point of view the case comes apart at the seams, and Courtny was right.”

  “Is that what you think, Fran?”

  She took a moment or two before she said, “No. No, I’m on your side. I think there’s something awful here. I think there’s something here that kills without thought or conscience. It terrifies me.”

  “Why,” I persisted, “when you gave such a logical explanation?”

  “Because there’s nothing logical here. By the way, did you call information in Los Angeles or Beverly Hills? They might have a Dr. Green listed.”

  “They might, but it won’t be our man. The Beverly Hills cops are not idealists.”

  “You’re convinced?”

  “Pretty much. But suppose there were five Dr. Greens out there? What could I learn over the telephone?”

  “Well, what will you learn when we go there?”

  “I’ll find one of the women or men at the party who saw him talking to Asher Alan. When a man like Asher Alan is at an affair, he becomes the center of attention. People gather around him, not necessarily to talk to him but to hear what he is saying to someone else.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “One more thing,” I said slowly. “You owe me one. Instead of getting down on your knees and apologizing for calling me a Jewish American Prince, you just passed over it.”

  “That’s right,” she admitted. “Maybe I owe you one, but I’m not getting down on my knees. If I owe you one, let’s go to bed.”

  “Your students should hear you talk like that. No, I want payment in kind. I told Lieutenant Joe Finelli that we’d join him for dinner at an Italian restaurant in the Bronx, and it has to be tomorrow night because the next day we’re going to Los Angeles.”

  “Oh, no. I’ll get down on my knees and apologize.”

  “It’s too late.”

  “Harry, do you know what an evening with Joe Finelli and his idiot wife is like? It happened to us already; why does it have to happen again? I didn’t mean to cut your heart out when I called you a Jewish American Prince. I meant it as a kind of compliment.”

  “Why can’t you take your punishment with grace and honor—as for example, Kevin Barry?”

  “Who is Kevin Barry?”

  “You don’t know, you with the blood of kings on both sides?”

  “You’re skating on thin ice, Harry.”

  “Kevin Barry, the boy hero of the Irish Rebellion, hanged by the Brits in 1920, and on the gallows, he shouted, ‘Shoot me like an Irish soldier, do not hang me like a dog!’”

  “Did he? Good for him. But he didn’t have to spend an evening with Joe Finelli.”

  “A coward dies a thousand times, the brave man only tastes of death but once.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Shakespeare or something. And it’s important. I need the good graces of Joe Finelli. You might even enjoy it.”

  “That will be the day.”

  The following morning, I called Mrs. Stanley Curtis, and she agreed to see me at two o’clock. Then I called Oshun and tracked him down in the pathology lab of New York University medical school. My interest at that moment was fixed on the pill bottle that Mrs. Curtis had shown. If the murdered pharmacist-junkie had deliberately switched the placebos, why put the name of the dangerous drug on the bottle? Was it to cover his own action? Would he then claim that the prescription was for pargyline and that he was innocent of any wrongdoing? I put it to Oshun once he was on the telephone. “This time, Oshun, I want the facts, not any of your damn surmises. Did you clearly see the medicine bottle at the Curtis place, and did you read the name plainly?”

  “I’m not sure,” he replied after a long pause.

  “You’re not sure? Damn you, you’re not sure?”

  “Hold on, Lieutenant. You said ‘clearly.’ I’m not in a position to say I saw it clearly. I’m trying to be honest with you. She showed it to me and then she snatched it back. I only had a glimpse of it.”

  Beautiful, I thought, beautiful, beautiful. He only had a glimpse of it. What had been a house of cards began to shiver. I called Mr. L. D. Bronstein at his drugstore. “If you make up a placebo, what do you put on it?”

  “What? What? What on earth are you talking about, Lieutenant?”

  I explained by pointing out that a bottle of medicine had to have a label and that something had to be put on that label.

  “I see. We put a code mark on it and in my case, I use the name plebo. That is related to no known drug, just in case the patient should try to renew it somewhere else.”

  “No chance that you would put pargyline on the label?”

  “Good heavens, no!”

  “Could Richard Bell have done that?”

  “Why, Lieutenant? Why would he? Anyway, poor soul, he can’t answer that question, can he? He was a decent man, a quiet man.”

  “Does he have any relatives that you know about?”

  “None. And I’m not sure that was his real name. He had some kind of accent, maybe Hispanic.”

  So there I was. Oshun unsure of what he saw, Bronstein telling me that the label said plebo, and the whole thin fabric of conspiracy ready to dissolve into thin air. One more loose end, and then I would drop the whole thing and forget it. The loose end was Mrs. Curtis. I had made the appointment and I might as well go through with it.

  The Curtis apartment was on Madison Avenue between 66th and 67th streets, in one of those wonderful old buildings that have somehow survived New York’s maniacal urge to tear down and replace anything more than ten years old. The elevator was still an open cage, and the apartment was huge, with ceilings twelve feet high, all of it furnished in gold-leaf Italian and French baroque, the last thing in the world one would expect from a man like Stanley Curtis. You might expect it from his wife. Curtis was fifty-four when he died; his wife was three years older. He had met her when he was a freshman at Harvard and she was a senior at Wellesley, and he had fallen madly in love with her. At age twenty-two, Felicity Curtis, according to what I read, had been a very beautiful young woman. Now she was fat and not very attractive, her hair badly bleached and showing gray at the roots. She was dressed in a diaphanous gown that suited her poorly, and she wore too much harsh makeup for a woman of her age. The gown was pink, and she waved the color away, telling me, “Lieutenant, I hope you didn’t expect me to appear in widow’s weeds. I am not mourning the saintly Stanley Curtis. There are four little amateur whores in this town who will mourn him sufficiently, and if I am not upgrading his memory, I am no longer bound by his need to be elected. A political wife is a doozy, Mr. Lieutenant, and I’ll bet Mary Todd Lincoln could have told a story or two if anyone had listened to her.”

  I didn’t know how to reply to all this, whether to defend Stanley Curtis, which was certainly not my obligation, or to join in her denunciation, which I considered a nasty price for her cooperation. The result was that I listened and waited.

  “As a matter of fact,” she went on, “you are fortunate to catch me here today, Lieutenant. Tomorrow I’ll be on the Queen Elizabeth, embarked on a marvelous ninety-day cruise around the world. Stanley had a tidy little insurance policy of three hundred thousand dollars, and I’m selling the apartment because I am absolutely nauseated by this baroque junk which was my taste twenty years ago and which I clung to because Stanley hated it so. The apartment goes up for sale at a selling price that is positively indecent, a million two. Of course, we have twelve rooms and you could play tennis in some of them, but still the price is preposterous. Yet the real estate folk tell me we’ll sell it within two months. Dear old suffering, noble Stanley has made me a millionaire. What do you think of that?”

  “Very nice,” I agreed. “I ga
ther you were not fond of your husband?”

  “Only the people were fond of Stanley.” She stared at me thoughtfully out of two large, baby-blue eyes. Time had ravaged the rest of the face, but the eyes were young and clear. Finally, she said, “I am going to open my heart to you, Lieutenant. I am not making any public statements about Stanley, but if you want to whisper this around, why whisper away. About a month before he died, he received a large sum of money. Fifty thousand dollars. I know how large it was because after he died, I found the money, in cash in one hundred dollar bills in a locked drawer in his desk. My attorneys have paid the proper amount to the tax people and the rest I have. But think of it—Mr. Clean picking up fifty grand so dirty he couldn’t deposit it or even trust his safe deposit box. No.” She smiled. “I was not fond of Stanley. Now, what are you here for? Have you found out whose fifty thousand that was, and do you want to grab it?”

  “As far as I can see, the fifty thousand is yours, and since the feds have taken their bit, there’s probably not too much left.”

  “Bless your heart. You know, Stanley did not leave me without debts.”

  “I’m sure of that.”

  “And what are you here for, young man?”

  The flattery was going both ways. When you call a beat-up city detective “young man,” you are either totally nearsighted or cozening. I quickly put an end to her modest flirtation by telling her that I was interested in seeing the medicine bottle containing the pills that Dr. Hyde had prescribed for her husband.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed. “Oh, no, not the bottle again.”

  “What do you mean by not the bottle again?”

  “My dear Lieutenant, I am thoroughly exasperated by that business of the bottle. First a snotty kid from some medical school—”

  “Did you show him the bottle? Did you put it in his hands?”

  “I started to, and then I said to myself, what business is it of his or anyone’s? So I snatched it away.”

  “Did he look at it?”

  “I don’t know. What does it matter?”

  “It matters, believe me, dear lady.”

  “You’re very charming for a policeman,” she said, smiling. “And very polite.”

  “We try.”

  “Well, he may have caught a glimpse of it. Then, a week later, Dr. Hyde called and asked whether I still had the medicine bottle.”

  “When was that, exactly?”

  “I’m such a rattlebrain—two weeks ago?”

  “Can you pin it down?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “What happened?” I asked, unable to conceal my eagerness. “I mean, after Dr. Hyde called you? Did he have someone pick up the pill bottle?”

  “Well, that’s certainly what he intended. But after the incident with the young man, I was thoroughly annoyed. It was one thing for Stanley to treat me like garbage during our married life, to refuse me the joy of having children and to stay married only because his career could not endure a divorce; it was another thing to have me pestered and pestered after his death. So when the young man left, I threw the bottle in the refuse can.”

  “What!”

  “Of course. I got rid of it. What good was it? Stanley was dead.”

  For a long moment, I sat facing her with my eyes closed.

  “Lieutenant, did I do something awful? It won’t interfere with my cruise, will it?”

  “No, it won’t interfere with your cruise. What did Dr. Hyde say when you told him you had thrown the bottle away?”

  “He was very provoked. I don’t care. I never liked him anyway. He kept pressing that I be absolutely sure I had thrown it away. I finally convinced him. He wasn’t my doctor. I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him. But Stanley had faith in him. Stanley thought he was such a great judge of character. But I think Stanley was a total dud in that department.”

  “Yes.” I started to rise.

  “Lieutenant. That was not the end of it. Yesterday, Mr. Bronstein, our pharmacist, called, and he said he would like to look at the bottle, if I would permit it. He’s a very nice little man, and I said I would be delighted, but that I had thrown the bottle away. He sounded so disappointed. I told him that if it was to complete a bill, he could put down any reasonable price and I would be glad to pay it. You know what medicine costs these days, and I didn’t want the poor man stuck with the bill. But he said no, it was not that. He sounded so upset.”

  “Mrs. Curtis,” I said to her, “you are a sensible, attractive, and bright woman—”

  “Flattery will get you everywhere.”

  “—and therefore, you must remember what was written on the label of that bottle.”

  “No. I never bothered to look at the label. I’m a very vain woman, Lieutenant. I seem to be confessing everything to you, and I never put on my reading glasses unless I intend to do some reading. So the words on the bottle were simply a blur to me. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.” I sighed. “I think I do.”

  Chapter 5

  I GOT HOME EARLY and took a bath and changed my clothes. I owed that much to Finelli, and I have found that whenever I put down someone, even in my own mind, my Jewish guilts begin to work me over until I have placed myself among the worst anti-ethnic bastards. Fran came in and remarked that she had read in the Sunday Times that most men prefer showers. “I don’t,” I told her. “The only time I shower is over at the precinct house, and I hate it, and what I would do if I had my druthers would be a whole day in a nice hot tub.”

  “It would play havoc with your skin. What are you so depressed about?”

  “Being a cop.”

  “Tell me about it outside. It’s too hot in here.”

  I sat in the bedroom later and watched her dress and told her about the day. She had a good figure, not very different from the figure on the girl I married. She would go out of the house at seven-thirty, winter, spring, or summer, and jog for half an hour—something I would not do if my life depended on it.

  “So what do you think, Harry? Is the case blown?”

  “I don’t know. What’s left except our guesswork?”

  “Los Angeles.”

  “And tonight Finelli’s sure to tell me that Bell was a simple, ordinary Mafia job, same as you get four times a week.”

  “I said Los Angeles. Beverly Hills. Our trip. Being together and maybe getting to the bottom of this.”

  I shook my head. “It’s just not enough.”

  “Harry,” she said, “I will absolutely kill you. I already lied my way out of three days at the university and I’ve spent a hundred and thirty dollars for two new summer dresses and thirty-one dollars for a pair of sandals, and I’ve never been to that peculiar place, and if we don’t go with the city paying half our fare, we’ll never go; you know that.”

  “I suppose not. I can’t think of any reason why we should go to Beverly Hills.”

  “Exactly,” Fran agreed. “But we made up our minds about it, and we have the tickets, and I’m as excited as a kid about it because it’s been two years since we’ve gone anywhere except to the old shack up on the lake, and it has to be a real kitsch thing, like that fat lady’s apartment you were telling me about—and please, Harry.”

  “Let me think about it.”

  “Please, Harry,” she begged.

  “Let me think about it.”

  Finelli arrived at seven-thirty, and Fran and I got into his big four-door Olds after the necessary hugs and kisses with his wife, Paula, who was not quite the idiot Fran held her to be. She was a round, warm woman, marvelously put together and with a devastating effect on most men, black hair, black eyes, and a delicious smile—nothing to entice an Irish lady in her early forties with small breasts and red hair. Fran suspected that I would like nothing better than to jump into bed with Paula Finelli, and I will admit that the notion had crossed my mind; but I’m sure it crossed the mind of every man who laid eyes on Paula. The “idiot” reputation came from the fact that Paula hardly ever said an
ything, but as I told Fran, that was hardly proof that she was an idiot and Finelli’s two hundred and forty pounds of truculent muscle was enough to dissuade any sane man from thoughts of conniving at adultery.

  “You know, Harry,” Finelli said to me as we pulled away from the house, “I’m glad about this evening. I always looked at you as one of those guys who passed the lieutenant’s test the first time. I took it three times, so I put myself down. But Jesus God, I don’t enjoy hanging out with the apes. I like you and Fran, and Paula says your Fran is the most first-rate lady she’s ever been with. Paula’s from Tuscany, and why she ever agreed to marry a Sicilian bum like myself, I’ll never know. But like I said, we’ll have fun tonight. You never ate such food, never.”

  We had turned up First Avenue, and were driving north.

  “Pasta,” Finelli said. “What you get in most Italian restaurants is not pasta. Garbage. Italian junk food. You’ll eat a cozze alla marinara like you never tasted, a fettuccine alla romana that will spoil you for what they call pasta, a calarmari ripieni—you like squid, Harry?”

  “Love it.”

  “Good. That’s stuffed squid, but women don’t like squid. For the ladies, they got a dish called braciole all’oreste cianci—not just one dish a lady can enjoy, but this is Paula’s favorite, beautiful thin steak, it melts in your mouth.”

  Finelli, revealing a poetic bent I had never suspected, drove across the Willis Avenue Bridge, swinging left onto the Major Deegan. “Best way to the North Bronx,” he explained. “It misses Apacheland. I don’t like to be reminded. I spent two years there.” A moment or two later, he said to me, “Harry, turn around and have a good look. There’s a four-door black sedan that was with us up First Avenue. I deliberately missed a light, and he did the same thing. He stayed behind me over the bridge, and when I slowed here on the Major Deegan, he slowed too.”

  I twisted around. “Black Buick, I think.”

  “Could be a Buick.”

  “About fifty, sixty yards back.” The Buick was in the access lane. We were in the middle, and now Fran was kneeling on the back seat next to me. “Move to the fast lane,” I told Finelli, and as he swung over the Buick shifted into the middle lane.