Him in. When I opened the apartment door and listened, only one set of footsteps was trudging up the stairs. But didn’t cops always travel in pairs?
Apparently not. When he rounded the turn at the landing I saw a stranger, a chunky middle-aged man in brown topcoat and black hat, looking something like Martin Balsam in Psycho. And coming up the stairs toward me; so I should quick put on my Granny drag and run shrieking out to stab him.
In fact I should have, but of course I didn’t. Instead, I stood in my doorway looking open and honest and innocent and friendly, and when he reached the top of the stairs I said, in a we’re-here-to-help-you manner, “Yes?”
“Morning,” he said, and smiled. He was puffing a bit from the climb, and seemed in no hurry to get his words out. “Mr. Thorpe, isn’t it?”
“That’s right. Can I help you?”
“Well, sir,” he said, “I think it’s the other way around. I think I can help you.”
Not a cop? What was he, some sort of salesman? I said, “What’s this about?”
“This,” he said. Taking a white envelope from inside his coat, he extended it toward me.
Frowning, I said, “What’s that supposed to be?”
“You left it behind.” He was still smiling, in a casual self-contained way. “Last night,” he added.
“Last night?” Unwillingly I took the thing from him and turned it over to see what was written on the other side. Return address: Warner Brothers, 666 Fifth Ave. Neatly centered, neatly typed, my own name and address.
The envelope! I’d remembered the damn letter, but not the envelope. Where had it been?
He answered my unasked question: “Under her.”
“Um,” I said.
“Why don’t we talk inside?” he suggested, still smiling, and walked into the apartment. I had to move aside or we would have bumped. Then I closed the door and followed him into the living room, where he stood nodding and smiling, looking at the movie posters, the one wall of exposed brick, the mirrored alcove that gives the apartment its illusion of space, the projector and screen set up at opposite ends of the room, the unfinished breakfast on the small table by the kitchenette. “Nice place,” he said. “Very nice.”
I moved reluctantly closer to him. He didn’t look like cops in the movies, but what else could he be? “Are you from the police?”
He gave me a quick amused glance. “Not exactly,” he said, and sat down on the sofa. “The fact of the matter is, I’m a private investigator.”
“A private detective?” Several thousand private eye films swirled through my head, most of them starring Dick Powell.
“I was on surveillance last night,” he told me, “outside that apartment.”
I didn’t feel like standing any more. Sinking into my leather director’s chair I said, “So she did put a tail on me.”
His smile grew puzzled. “What say?”
“My wife.”
“Oh, well,” he said, “I wouldn’t want to make trouble for an innocent party. No, sir, it didn’t have anything to do with you. It was Mrs. Penney’s husband put the agency on the job.”
“Husband?” I’d known Laura had at one time been married, but everybody has a marriage or two somewhere in their past and I’d always assumed hers was long since over and done with. “You mean, she was still married?”
“That’s my understanding,” he said. “Legally separated, I believe.”
And she’d been nagging me to break the old ties. Now I saw the whole plot; she’d hold on to husband number one until I was lined up to take his place. Devious devious women, they’re all alike. Josef Von Sternberg knew what he was talking about.
The detective spoke through my interior monologue. “The point is, I was there. I watched the two of you go into the building, and then quite some time later I watched you come out alone, and I must say, Mr. Thorpe, rarely have I seen a man act as guilty as you did. I didn’t know what it was all about, of course, but I thought probably I ought to keep an eye on you.”
“You followed me.”
“That’s just what I did,” he agreed. “And I noticed another peculiar thing. You must have let half a dozen empty cabs go by, but then when you got to Sheridan Square you were suddenly in a real frantic rush to hail a cab and jump in and holler out your address.”
He paused, with a bright alert smiling look, as though offering me a chance to compliment him on his powers of observation. I refrained.
He went on. “Well, it seemed to me you didn’t want anybody tracing you from Mrs. Penney’s apartment, and I thought that a little peculiar. So I followed you uptown here, and waited to see which lights went on, and got your name from the doorbell. You really ought to ask who’s there before you let anybody in, you know, just as a by-the-by.”
“The intercom’s broken.”
“Then you ought to get it fixed. Believe me, it’s my business and I know, you can’t have too much security.”
“I’ve talked to the super and the landlord both. Wait a minute! What are we talking about?”
“You’re right,” he said, “I got myself off the subject. I’m a bug on safety, I take all kinds of precautions for myself and I’m all the time pushing safety on everybody else. Let me see, now. After I got your name from the doorbell I went back downtown and let myself into Mrs. Penney’s apartment.”
That surprised me. “You had a key?”
“Well,” he said, with another of his little smiles, “I have a whole lot of keys. Generally there’s one for the job.”
“You broke in, in other words.”
“Well, sir, Mr. Thorpe,” he said, “I don’t think you ought to start using harsh words, you know. There’s two of us could do that.”
“All right, all right. Get to the point.”
“Well, you know what I found in the apartment.”
“This envelope,” I said, waggling the fist in which I had it imprisoned.
“Yes,” he said, “and a body on top of it. From the marks on the coffee table and the floor, it looked to me as though there’d been some sort of fracas. You struck her—there’s a bit of gray spot on the side of the jaw, she was dead before it could swell up any—and she hit her head on the coffee table going down.”
“It was an accident,” I said.
He did a judicious pose, pursing out his lips and stroking the line of his jaw; Sidney Greenstreet. “That’s a possibility,” he said. “On the other hand, you did run away, and you did try to cover your presence in the apartment, and if you’ll look at this picture here you’ll see you do just look guilty as all hell.”
From inside his coat he had taken a photograph, which he now leaned forward to extend toward me. I took it, with the hand not crushing the envelope, and looked at a grainy but recognizable black-and-white picture of myself emerging from Laura’s apartment building. By God, I did look guilty as all hell, with my mouth open and eyes staring and head half-twisted to look over my shoulder. I also looked very bulky, as though I’d just stolen all the silver. Mostly I reminded me of Peter Lorre in M. “I see,” I said.
“Infrared,” he told me. He seemed very pleased with himself. “The negative’s in my desk at the office.”
I looked up from my own staring eyes into his calmly humorous ones. “What now? What are you going to do?”
“Well, sir,” he said, “I think of that as being up to you.”
And suddenly we were in a situation I recognized from the movies. “Blackmail,” I said.
He looked a bit offended. “Well, now,” he said, “there you go with the harsh words again. I just thought you might be interested in buying the negative, that’s all.”
“And your silence?”
“I wouldn’t want to get a man in trouble, if I could avoid it.” He shifted his bulk on the sofa. “Now, I’m supposed to turn in my report by twelve noon, and it seems to me I could handle it one of two ways. Either I could say a gentleman—that would be you—brought Mrs. Penney home but left her at the street d
oor and went away, or I could report that you went in with her and came out without her and please see photo attached.”
I said, “How much?”
“Well,” he said, “that’s a very rare photograph.”
“And I’m a very poor man.”
He chuckled at me, disbelievingly. “Oh, come along now.
You’ve got a nice place in a rich part of town, you’ve—”
“This isn’t a rich part of town. A couple blocks west of here is rich, but not here.”
“This is the Upper East Side,” he informed me, as though I didn’t know where I lived.
“Look,” I said. “You just walked up the stairs yourself, do you think they have walk-ups in a rich part of town?”
“On the Upper East Side of Manhattan they do. Besides, you’re a writer.”
“I’m a movie reviewer. There isn’t any money in that.”
“You’ve had books out.”
“Film criticism. Did you ever see a book of film criticism on the best-seller list?”
“I don’t believe I’ve ever seen the best-seller list,” he said, “but I do know from my years with the agency that successful writers tend to have nice pieces of money about themselves.”
“I don’t,” I said. “For God’s sake, man, you’re a detective, surely you could check into that, find out if I’m a liar or not. I’ll show you my checkbook, I’ll show you letters from my wife screaming for money, I’ll show you my old income tax returns.”
“Well, sir,” he said, “if you’re too poor, I think I’d be better off going for the glory of making the arrest.”
A cold breeze touched me. “Wait a minute,” I said. “I didn’t say I don’t have any money. Obviously, if I can afford to pay I’d rather do that than go to jail. It just depends how much you want.”
He frowned at me. He studied me and thought it over and glanced around the living room—and to think I’d been pleased at how expensive I’d made the place look—and at last he came to a decision: “Ten thousand dollars.”
“Ten thousand dollars! I don’t have it.”
“I won’t bargain with you, Mr. Thorpe.” He sounded rueful but determined. “I couldn’t falsify my report for a penny less.”
“I don’t have the money, it’s as simple as that.”
He heaved himself to his feet. “I’m truly sorry, Mr. Thorpe.”
“I’ll tell them, you know. That you tried to blackmail me.”
He gave me a mildly curious frown. “So?”
“They’ll know it’s the truth.” I jammed the photograph into my trouser pocket. “I’ll have this picture for evidence.”
He shrugged and smiled and shook his head. “Oh, they’d probably believe you,” he said, “but they wouldn’t care. Funny thing about police, they’d rather catch a murderer than a blackmailer any day in the week.”
“They’ll have both. I may go to jail, but you’ll go right along with me.”
“Oh, I don’t think so.” He could not have been more calm. “I’d be their whole case, you know,” he said. “Their star witness. I don’t think they’d want to cast any aspersions on their own star witness, do you? I think you’d generally be called a liar. I think generally people would say you were doing it out of spite.”
I thought. He watched me thinking, with his curly little smile, and finally I said, “Two thousand. I could raise that somewhere, I’m sure I could.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Thorpe, I told you I won’t bargain. It’s ten thousand or nothing.”
“But I don’t have it! That’s the Lord’s own truth!”
“Oh, come on, Mr. Thorpe, surely you’ve got something set aside for a rainy day.”
“But I don’t. I’ve never had the knack, it’s one of the things my father’s always hated about me. He’s the squirrel, I’m the grasshopper.”
He frowned, deeply. “What was that?”
“I don’t save up my nuts,” I explained, “or whatever grasshoppers save up. You know, you know, the children’s story. I’m the one that doesn’t save.”
“Well, Mr. Thorpe,” he said, “it seems to me you should have listened to your father.” And turning away, he crossed the room toward the front door.
I should have killed him, that would have been the most sensible thing to do. Picked up something heavy—that can containing North By Northwest, for instance—and brained him with it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t sufficiently used to being a killer, so what I did was grit my teeth and get to my feet and say, “Wait.”
He waited, turning to look at me again, the same patient smile on his face, letting me know I could have all the time I needed. But that’s all I could have.
I said, “I’m not sure I can do it. I’ll have to borrow, I’ll have to—I don’t know what I’ll have to do.”
“Well, sir,” he said, coming back to me, “I don’t want to make things difficult for you if I can possibly avoid it. Here’s my card.”
His card. I took it.
He said, “You call me at that number before eleven-thirty if you decide to pay.”
“You mean, if I can pay.”
“Any way you want,” he said. “I’d mostly like a cashier’s check, made out to bearer.”
“Yes, I suppose you would.” I looked at the card he’d given me. Blue lettering read Tobin-Global Investigations Service—Matrimonial Specialists. In the lower left was a phone number, and in the lower right a name: John Edgarson.
“If you do call,” John Edgarson told me, “ask for Ed.”
“I’ll do that.”
“And Mr. Thorpe,” he said, “do try to look on the bright side.”
I stared at him. “The bright side?”
“You’ve had an early warning,” he told me. “If you decide not to pay, you’ve got almost three hours’ head start.”
* * *
It’s amazing what you can do in an hour when your life depends on it. By eleven o’clock I’d converted into cash the following:
Savings account
$2,763.80
Checking account
275.14
To pawnshops: (Projector 120.; Leica camera 100.; 8mm camera 70.; portable tape unit 160.; 8mm projector 50.; stereo system 180.; typewriter 50.; watch 40.; wedding ring & jewelry 90.)
860.00
Films, posters, stills, etc.
450.00
Loan from publisher against future earnings
1,500.00
$100. bad checks to liquor store, florist, grocer, dry cleaner, barber & hardware store
600.00
GRAND TOTAL
6,448.94
Needed
10,000.00
Shortage
3,551.06
Eleven o’clock. Five after eleven. I was back in my apartment, my pockets full of cash. But where was I going to get three thousand five hundred fifty-one dollars and six cents?
My grandmother’s trust fund? Not a chance. I’d cried wolf with the people at the bank two or three times already, and they’d made it perfectly clear my well-being didn’t matter to them one one-hundredth as much as the fund’s well-being.
My father? Another blank. He had the money, all right, and plenty to spare, but even if he was willing to help—which he wouldn’t be—the cash would never get here from Boston in the next twenty-four minutes. Besides, if I did ask him the first thing he’d say—even before no—would be why.
Would Edgarson take less? Six thousand dollars in the hand was surely better than ten thousand dollars in the bush. I dialed the number on the card he’d given me, and when a harsh female voice answered with the company’s name I asked for Ed. “Minute,” she said, and clicked away.
It was a long minute, but it finally ended with a too-familiar voice: “Hello?”
“Edgarson?”
“Is that Mr. Thorpe? You’re a few minutes early.”
“All I can raise is, uh, six thousand, uh, dollars. And four hundred. Six thousand four hundred dollars.”
�
��Well, that’s fine,” he said. “And you’ve still got twenty minutes to get the rest.”
“I can’t. I’ve done everything I could.”
“Mr. Thorpe,” he said, “I thought we had an understanding, you and I.”
“But I can’t raise any more!”
“Then if I were you, Mr. Thorpe, I’d take that six thousand four hundred dollars and buy a ticket to some place a long way from here.”
South America. The Lavender Hill Mob. But I liked the life I had here in New York, my career, my girlfriends, my name on books and magazines. I didn’t want to run away to some absurd place and learn how to be somebody else.
“Well, goodbye, Mr. Thorpe,” the rotten bastard was saying, “and good luck to you.”
“Wait!”
The line buzzed at me; Edgarson, politely waiting.
“Somehow,” I told him. “Somehow I’ll do it.”
“Well, that’s fine,” he said. “I’m really relieved to hear that.”
“But it might take a little longer. You can give me that much.”
He sighed; the sound of a just and merciful man who knows he’s being taken advantage of but who is just too darn good-hearted to refuse. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Mr. Thorpe,” he said. “Do you know a place in your neighborhood called P. J. Malone’s?”
“Yes, of course. It’s three or four blocks from here.”
“Well, that’s where I’ll have my lunch. And I’ll leave there at twenty after twelve to go turn in my report. Now, that’s the best I can do for you.”
An extra twenty minutes; the man was all heart. “All right,” I said. “I’ll be there.” And I broke the connection.
And now what? I went to the john to pop another Valium—my second this morning—and then I sat at my desk in the living room, forearms resting where my typewriter used to sit, and waited for inspiration. And nothing happened. I blinked around at my pencils and reference books and souvenirs and trivia, all the remaining bits and pieces of the life I was on the verge of losing, and I tried to think how and where to get the rest of that damned money.
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