Transgressions

by Ed McBain

  “I . . .” I said.

  “Here we are,” Derek announced.

  The building must have been considered futuristic and quirky when it was newly built. It still had a personality, if somewhat cold. Gray steel and stone relieved by thick glass windows that were accented by just a touch of green tinting. Two guards sat at a violet kidney-shaped desk with computer screens embedded in the top.

  “Yes?” the smaller one asked me.

  “Lawless,” I said. “Archibald and associate for Mr. Vialet.”

  There were lights on in the entranceway but darkness hovered at the corners of the room. That gloom ascended to the roof.

  The guard flipped through a screen, found a number and then dialed it on an old-fashioned rotary phone.

  “A man named Lawless and somebody else for Mr. Vialet,” the guard said.

  He listened for a beat or two and then said to us, “Please have a seat. Someone’ll be down to get you.”

  There was a whole tree that had been split down the middle and then cut to the length of a twelve-foot bench for us to sit on. The tree-half had been heavily lacquered and fitted with dowels to keep it from rolling around when someone sat on it.

  “They rule the world,” Archibald Lawless hissed.

  He was sitting next to me with his hands on his knees. He still wore black slacks and an army jacket buttoned half the way up his chest. Now that his jacket was open I noticed that he wore a necklace too. It was strung with chicken bones that were white from age and being exposed to the sun. The bones had a crazy clattery way about them. There wasn’t much doubt why the security guard decided to ask me about our business.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “People in buildings like this one. They own farms in Turkey and solar generation plants in the Gobi desert. They decide on foreign legislation and cry over the deaths of their children. Even their love is hypocritical. Even with their deaths they cannot pay for their crimes . . .”

  He would have said more but a young man in a lavender suit approached us.

  “Mr. Lawless?” he asked me.

  “No,” I said.

  The kid was pale and definitely an ectomorph. But he’d been doing his exercises. There was muscle under his lapels and on his toothpick shoulders. In his eyes however he was still a ninety-pound weakling. He stared at Lawless as if the big man were a plains lion hungry for a pale-boy snack.

  “You’re Lawless?”

  “Mr. Archibald Lawless.”

  “Yes,” the young man said. “I’m Grant Harley, Mr. Vialet’s assistant. Please follow me.”

  He led us through a hallway that had as a path a raised ramp that went over a hall-long pond filled with oversized, multicolored carp. Bamboo sprouted from planters along the sides of the walls. We entered into a large room inhabited by five secretaries, each at her own pastel colored desk. The were windows in this room and classical flute playing instead of Muzak.

  One of the secretaries, a forty-year-old black woman with a broad chest and small eyes, got up and approached us.

  “You Lawless?” she asked me.

  “I’m Mr. Lawless,” Archibald said.

  The woman didn’t seem to like his sense of self-worth but I think she was more intimidated by his size and growl.

  “This way,” she said.

  We went through a smallish doorway into a long dark hall. At the end of this hall was a white door. The secretary opened the door and brought us into a large room with a sunken office at its center. We had to walk down five stairs to get on an even plane with the desk behind which sat a man who was almost indescribable he was so plain.

  He stood to his five foot nine height and looked at us with bland brown eyes. His hair was brown and his skin was off-white. His hands were as normal as you could be. The suit he wore was medium gray and the shirt might have had a few blue threads in the depths of all that white.

  “Archibald,” he said to the right man.

  “Do I know you?” my would-be employer asked.

  “No. But I sure know a lot about you. There was an emerald necklace that we lost in Sri Lanka six years ago that no one ever thought we’d recover. One day you just walked in and dropped it off. Gave the fee to some charity as I remember.”

  “Can we sit down, Mr. Vialet?”

  “Certainly. Forgive me. What is your friend’s name?”

  “Felix,” I said. “Orlean.”

  “Have a seat, Felix, Archibald. Right here on the sofa.”

  It was a fuzzy white sofa that sat across from his desk. There was a dark stained walnut coffee table before us. Vialet sat in a plain walnut chair.

  “Anything to drink?” he offered.

  “Lets talk about red diamonds,” Lawless replied.

  “I like a man who gets down to business,” Jules Vialet said. “Business is what makes the world turn.”

  “. . . like a stone over the bones of the innocent,” Lawless added. “Who do you suspect in the theft?”

  “I’m really not at liberty to discuss the disposition of any active case that we are pursuing, Mr. Lawless. But if—”

  Archibald stood up.

  “Come on, Felix,” he said.

  Before I could rise the insurance investigator was on his feet, holding up both hands.

  “Don’t be like that,” he said. “You know there are rules that I have to follow.”

  “I don’t have time for your rules, Mr. Insurance Man. People have been dying out there and your government is covering it up. There’s something rotten in this business and I’m the one’s going to sanitize and bleach it clean.”

  “What do you mean about the government?” Vialet asked.

  “You answer me, Mr. Insurance Man, and then I’ll share.”

  “That’s hardly fair, you know,” Vialet said. “What if I give you all my information and then you turn around and leave or tell me that you really don’t know anything?”

  “I’m not the liar here,” Lawless said. “You are. This whole building is a lie. Your pale-faced boy and your snotty secretaries are lies. Maybe if you ate raw flesh at your desk and kept a pot of shit at each doorway then maybe you’d be halfway to the truth about something. No. I’m not a liar, Mr. Insurance Man. I’m the only true thing you’ve seen all year.”

  His voice sounded a little high, strained. I worried that maybe one of his psychological maladies was manifesting itself.

  “Mr. Lawless,” I said.

  When he turned toward me I could see the madness in his eyes.

  “What?”

  “We don’t have the briefcase with us so I won’t be able to make complete notes.”

  For a moment he was bewildered but then his mind grabbed hold. He laughed and said, “It’s okay, Felix. We’ll just wing it until we have the case.” He looked back at Vialet and said, “Tell me, who do you suspect in the theft?”

  Vialet looked at us and sighed. He sat down and so did Lawless.

  “A man named Lamarr,” the insurance man said.

  “Benny,” Lawless agreed. “Him and Lana Drexel. And Valerie Lox, Kenneth Cornell, and Henry Lansman. We know the soldiers. What we want is the bankroll.”

  I could see that Vialet was concentrating on the names Lawless threw out.

  “You seem to know more than I do,” he said.

  “Who is the man who has been traveling with Lamarr lately?” Archibald asked. “A white man in his forties. He has short hair, maybe graying, maybe not.”

  “Wayne Sacorliss,” Vialet said without hesitation. “He’s been around Lamarr for a few years. Just as toady as far as we can tell. He has an office on Lexington, just south of Forty-first.”

  “Who’s the buyer?” Lawless asked.

  “We think it’s a Canadian name Rudolph Bickell. He’s a very rich man and a collector of rare gems. He lives in Las Vegas half the year.”

  “How does he make his money?”

  “Buying and selling,” Vialet said. “Your grain to bakeries, cotton to sweatshops in Asia, me
tal to gun makers and guns to the highest bidder.”

  “Weapons?”

  “Anything,” Vialet said. “He’d been making noise to Strangman about buying the gemstones until about three months ago. We figure that when he came up with the plan he stopped calling.”

  “How much?” Lawless asked.

  “We’ll go as high as three million. That’s all the stones in perfect condition. No trouble to cover either.”

  “Will corroboration by the police about my central role in reclaiming the jewels be enough?” Lawless asked in flawless business contract style.

  “Certainly,” Vialet allowed.

  “Come on, Felix,” Archibald said.

  We were out of the gray insurance building in less than five minutes.

  16

  “I thought that you were an anarchist,” I was saying, “a political purist, a man of the people.”

  Lawless was sitting next to me in the back seat of Derek Chambers’s limo, scanning the white pages.

  “That sounds right to me,” he said. “But mostly, Felix, like I told you before, I walk that line.”

  “So the three million means nothing to you?”

  “That money will pay for a lot of walking, son. Slaves walking across borders, bound men dancing again—that’s what it’ll pay for, and more.”

  He gave Derek an address on Lexington.

  Sacorliss ran an optical glass frame distribution business on the fourteenth floor. Many of the offices around him were empty. The reception room had been uninhabited for some while. There was dust on the blotter and no evidence that the phone was even plugged in. I wondered if Wayne Sacorliss had moved on to LensCrafters or some other larger optical business.

  “Hello,” I called.

  There was a doorway beyond the reception desk leading to a passageway formed from opaque glass panels. This hallway was in the form of an L that one would suspect led to the main office.

  “Who’s there?” a mild mannered male voice inquired.

  “Archibald Lawless,” I said, “and his assistant.” I couldn’t get my tongue around the word scribe.

  A man appeared in the glass angle. From the front he could have been the man I saw running from the death of Henry Lansman. Only this man wore a light brown suit instead of a red parka.

  “Who?” he asked.

  “We’ve come to ask you about Benny Lamarr,” Lawless said.

  Sacorliss had light blue eyes and a broad face. His eyes were elliptical in both shape and manner. His lips were so sensual they belonged on a younger man, or a slightly perverse demigod. His features were all that he showed. There wasn’t even a glimmer of recognition for the man he assisted.

  He didn’t respond at all.

  “Can we go into your office, Mr. Sacorliss?” I asked.

  “Are you here to buy frames?”

  “No.”

  “Then I don’t see what we have to talk about.”

  “Henry Lansman for one thing,” I said.

  From the corner of my eye I saw Lawless swivel his head to regard me.

  “I don’t know who that is,” Sacorliss was saying, “but if you must come in then follow me.”

  At the end of the L-shaped glass hall was a round room lined on one side by waist-high, old fashioned windows that were furbished with brown tinted glass. I could see people in offices not twenty feet away. Some were working and others talking. It was a pleasant proletariat view of the inner workings of a big city’s commerce.

  This room was also quite desolate. One maple desk with a square-cut oak chair, a telephone with a bare cord that ran across the room to find the jack in the opposite wall. There was a laptop computer on the floor and not one scrap of paper anywhere.

  Sacorliss was a few inches taller than I and maybe twenty pounds more than he should have been. But he moved with grace and self-confidence. Once we were in the room he closed the door.

  Lawless’s eyes never left the smaller man. His wariness made me nervous but I didn’t know what to do. So I perched myself on the edge of the maple desk while Wayne Sacorliss and Archibald faced each other.

  “What is it you want from me?” Sacorliss asked the amber king before him.

  “There’s no need for trouble here, Wayne. I’m just interested in why the government wants to cover up Lansman’s death, his and a few others whom you might or might not know.”

  Lawless’s mouth turned up in a smile but his eyes were dull.

  The baby finger of his left hand twitched.

  Sacorliss moved a few inches to his right so that his back was turned fully toward me. Seeing his head from this position I was sure that he was the same man I saw fleeing the scene of Henry Lansman’s death. I wanted to signal Lawless that we had what we needed but all of his attention was on the killer.

  “I furnish frames for optical lenses, Mr. um, Lawless, wasn’t it?”

  “There’s no need for conflict between us, Wayne,” Lawless said in a uncharacteristically placating tone. “Felix here and I just want to know about who would want to hide the murders of international criminals. Especially when those murders were so well executed that no doctor would suspect foul play.”

  What happened next took me a few days to work out. Sacorliss lifted his right shoulder in a way that made me think he was about to deny any knowledge of Lawless’s insinuations. Then Archibald took half a step backwards. Sacorliss moved the same distance forward by taking a step with his left foot. Then the assassin shouted and I felt a powerful impact against my chest. I flew backward over the desk, hit the floor and slid into the wall.

  While I was still en route to the wall Sacorliss produced a very slender ten-inch blade from somewhere in his suit. He lunged at his anarchist inquisitor and stabbed him in the chest.

  Lawless wasn’t slow, however. He grabbed Sacorliss’s arm at the elbow so that the tip of the blade went less than half an inch into his body.

  I struggled to my feet coughing hard. The vision I saw was surreal: Before me the two men were struggling like the titans in Goya’s black painting. Sacorliss’s knife was still piercing Lawless’s chest but the larger man was managing to impede the progress of the blade. Through the window two women were talking, a whole office full of workers were walking back and forth, there was even a man looking up from his keyboard staring dreamily toward the battle.

  Sacorliss kicked Lawless in the thigh with a quick movement. He did this twice more and I knew that sooner or later the man I came in with would be dead. I tried the door but it was locked. I was still coughing and stunned from the roundhouse kick the killer had hit me with. I looked for something to hit him with. I tried to lift his oak chair but it was too heavy to get up over my head.

  I was about to go for the laptop when Sacorliss tried another kick. Lawless moved his thigh and the assassin lost his balance. Lawless then lifted him up over his head. That’s when the most amazing thing happened. Somehow Archibald managed to disarm Sacorliss so that when he slammed him down on the floor he also stabbed him through the chest.

  Sacorliss kicked Lawless away and jumped to his feet. He looked at me and then at the computer. He took a step toward the laptop but his foot betrayed him and he went down on one knee. He looked at his killer then.

  “Who are you?” I heard him ask. And then he fell face forward and I think he was dead.

  Blood seeped toward the laptop.

  Lawless turned Sacorliss over with a toe.

  “Get the computer,” he said to me.

  While I did that, he wiped the haft of the knife clean of fingerprints.

  People were still gabbing and working in the office building across the way.

  On the way out, Lawless made sure that the doorknob was clean of prints. By the time we were back in Derek’s limo, I was so cold that my teeth were chattering. Soon after that I lost consciousness.

  17

  When I woke up it was dark. I was still dressed and on my back on a bed that was fully made. There was a scented candle burning and
mild recorder music wafting in from somewhere. I felt odd, both peaceful and numb. My hands were lying at my sides and I felt no need to move them. I remembered the death of Wayne Sacorliss and the bizarre witnesses from the windows across the way. I thought about the blood across the barren wood floor but none of that bothered me. I supposed that Lawless had given me some kind of sedative from his medical case; something to relax my nerves. I was grateful for whatever he’d done because I knew that unaided I would have been in the depths of anxious despair.

  A feathery touch skimmed my brow. I turned to see a woman, somewhere near fifty but still very attractive, sitting at my side.

  “You had quite a scare,” she said.

  “Where am I?”

  “Have you ever been to Queens?” she asked with a smile.

  “Kennedy Airport.”

  She was slight and pale with crystalline blue eyes and long fingers. She wore a cream colored dress. The bodice was raw silk and the rest was made from the more refined version of that material. It seemed as if her hair were platinum blonde instead of white.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “A friend of Archibald,” she said. “He’s downstairs now. Would you like to see him?”

  “I don’t know if I can get up.”

  “Once you start moving it wears off,” she said.

  She took my hand and stood up, pulling me. She had no strength but I followed her lead. I worried that when I got to my feet I’d be dizzy but I wasn’t. As a matter of fact I felt very good.

  Outside the bedroom was a short hallway that shared space with a staircase leading down. Everything was covered in thick green carpeting and so our footsteps were silent.

  On the first floor was a sitting room with two sofas and three stuffed chairs. Archibald Lawless, wearing a gold colored two-piece suit and a ochre shirt was sitting in one of the chairs with his feet up on a small stool.