McNally's Secret (18 page)

“Suppose I have my friend give you a call,” I said. “Then the two of you can set up a time.”

“Sounds good to me,” he said, and I wondered if he slept with that genial smile.

“Thank you, Mr. Bingham,” I said, started to leave, then turned back. “Oh, by the way,” I said, “is there any place nearby where I can buy lottery tickets?”

The smile expanded. “You play the lottery, do you?”

I nodded. “Since I’ve been in Florida I’ve been hooked.”

“Me, too,” he said cheerfully. “Totally addicted. I play Lotto, Fantasy Five, the scratch-offs—everything. It keeps me poor. Sure, there’s a liquor store on the corner that has a computer. They’ll sell you as many tickets as you want. As they say in the commercials, ‘You never know.’”

“That’s right,” I agreed. “Hit once and you’re set for life.”

“Now you’re singing my song,” he said, and I left him with his smile intact.

I still wasn’t ready to forget his complicity in the Horowitz heist. If playing the lottery kept him poor, he could be in as deep as Kenneth Bodin and Sylvia, and the two men had elected the woman to try to sell the swag. But one thing I definitely knew to be true: Thomas Bingham hadn’t been cured of his compulsion to gamble by those years he had spent in the slammer.

I pondered these things on my homeward drive. I decided the biggest puzzle was this: What on earth did Jennifer Towley, a lady of taste and discernment,
see
in this guy? There was nothing exceptional about him that I could spot. He was a loser, a salesman of plumbing supplies and hurricane shutters, an ex-convict with a monkey on his back. But Jennifer had married him, sent him birthday cards in prison, taken his phone calls after his release, met him for lunch. She was demeaning herself and I couldn’t compute it.

Does that make me an elitist snob? I guess so.

I drove directly to the Pelican Club. It was then about three-thirty, and the place was deserted except for Simon Pettibone behind the bar. He was reading
The Wall Street Journal
through his B. Franklin specs. I waved to him, went to the public phone, and called Sgt. Al Rogoff.

“So
nice to hear from you,” he said. “Have you had a pleasant day? A tennis match perhaps? A chukker of polo?”

“Oh, shut up,” I said. “I think you and I better get together and have a talk.”

“No kidding?” he said. “What a brilliant idea. Where are you now?”

“In the bar of the Pelican Club.”

“I should have known. Can you stay sober for a half-hour until I get there?”

“I never drink to excess,” I said stiffly.

“Now you
are
kidding. If I ever need a liver transplant, with my luck I’ll get yours. Wait for me.”

I returned to the bar and swung onto a stool. “Mr. Pettibone,” I said, “you have a few years on me and infinitely more wisdom. Tell me, what do
you
do when life threatens to overwhelm and problems become too heavy to be borne?”

He thought a moment, peering at me over his square glasses. “I usually kick my cat, Mr. McNally,” he said.

“Good suggestion,” I said. “I must purchase a cat. Meanwhile I’ll have a wee bit of the old nasty in the form of an Absolut on the rocks, splash of water, chunk of lime. And if I attempt to order a refill, I want you to eighty-six me. An officer of the law has just cast aspersions on my liver.”

I carried my drink over to a booth and nursed it until Sgt. Rogoff came stalking in. He looked around, saw me, and came lumbering. He slid in opposite me and stared stonily.

“What are you drinking?” I asked.

“Hemlock,” he said. “I know you’re not totally to blame, but every time you drop something on my plate I start thinking about early retirement. You know how I spent yesterday?”

“Haven’t the slightest.”

“Checking out the whereabouts of Doris and Harry Smythe at the time Rubik was iced. They claimed they left Meecham’s yacht and went to Testa’s for what Harry called ‘a spot of lunch.’ Bushwa! No one at Testa’s remembered them. So I went back to the Smythes, and they finally admitted they had lunch at a Pizza Hut. So I checked on that, and the people at the Pizza Hut remembered them all right. You know why?”

“They left a nickel tip?”

“That, too. But mostly they were remembered because they asked for two plastic glasses and uncorked a bottle of champagne they had brought along. Archy, can you believe this insanity?”

“Easily,” I said, laughing. “They swiped the bubbly from Meecham’s yacht. So you figure they’re cleared?”

“Looks like it.”

“Al, have you started checking out Gina Stanescu and Angus Wolfson?”

“Not yet. You believe Wolfson’s story?”

“Not completely,” I said. “He flared up when I started to ask questions. There really was no need for it if he was totally innocent. But maybe he was just being crotchety. I think the man is sick.”

“Sick?”

“Ill. He seems to be in pain. Get out your notebook, Al; I have more for you.”

While I had waited for him, sipping my vodka daintily, I had decided how much to tell him. Everything about Hilda Lantern, Kenneth Bodin and Sylvia, but nothing about Thomas Bingham. That’s all Rogoff would have to hear: an ex-con possibly implicated in crimes under investigation. He’d have zeroed in on Bingham like a gundog on point. And I didn’t want Jennifer Towley involved in any manner whatsoever.

When I completed my recital, Al looked at me thoughtfully. “What made you go to the stamp dealer in Lauderdale?”

I pondered my answer carefully. I really needed the sergeant’s cooperation and didn’t want to stiff him or send him sniffing along false trails. But there were things I didn’t wish to reveal at this stage of the investigation. My reasons will, I trust, become apparent later.

“Take your time,” Al said, peeling the cellophane from a cigar. “Meditate. Cogitate. Consider all the permutations and combinations. And what about your karma? I can wait.”

“Look,” I said, hunching forward, “when I hired Rubik I fed him a farrago. I told him my firm was handling an estate that included Inverted Jenny stamps, and we wanted to establish an evaluation. I asked Rubik to make inquiries and see if he could determine the current price. That’s what I
told
him. What I hoped was that he’d discover a block of Inverted Jennies had recently come on the market. You follow?”

“Way ahead of you,” Rogoff said, lighting his cigar. “You figured the thief would try to unload as soon as possible. Right?”

“Right. And Rubik obviously discovered something of importance but was killed before he could pass it along to me. So I decided that if Rubik could get the information, another stamp dealer might be able to do the same thing. I just happened to pick Hilda Lantern’s name out of the Yellow Pages, and she came through. How do you like that bit about the stamps being counterfeit?”

“Love it,” Al said. “You think that was the important information Bela Rubik uncovered and wanted to tell you before he was iced?”

“Possibly,” I said.

Rogoff thought a moment, then puffed a plume of blue smoke over my head. “That Palm Aire dealer who examined the stamps—do you think he told Bodin’s girlfriend they were fakes?”

“Hilda Lantern said he didn’t.”

“That means the villains still believe they’re holding loot worth half a million. I think what I better do is contact every stamp dealer from Miami to Fort Pierce and tell them to stall anyone who comes in and tries to sell a block of Inverted Jennies. They can say they need a day or two to raise the cash. Then the dealer can give me a panic call, and I’ll have someone in the store and the place staked out when the crook returns. How does that sound?”

“It’s got to be done,” I agreed. “It’s a big job, but it’s doable. I think you’ll nab Bodin and Sylvia, but that’s my opinion—not something you can take to the SA. The only way you’re going to make a case is to pinch the thieves in the act of trying to sell. The fact that the stamps are fakes doesn’t change things; they’re still stolen property.”

“Yeah,” Al said, sighing, “all that work for itty-bitty pieces of worthless paper. Well, I better get back to the palace and start the wheels turning.”

“Just two more short items,” I said. “I struck out with Lady Horowitz. She just won’t tell me where she was when Bela Rubik was killed. And she refuses to let you take a look at her last will and testament. But my father said I could tell you that there’s nothing in that document that could have any possible effect on your investigation.”

“How does he know?” the sergeant said bitterly. “He’s no cop.”

“True,” I said, “but he’s no simp either. And he’s also a man of probity with a high regard for the law. Believe me, Al, if there was anything at all in the will that would help solve a theft and a homicide, he’d reveal it even if it meant breaching client-attorney confidentiality. My father’s morals are stratospheric. Sometimes I think he’s training to take over God’s job in case He resigns.”

Rogoff laughed, flipped a hand at me, and strutted out, chewing on his cigar. I went back to the bar and slid my empty glass toward Mr. Pettibone.

“Another, please,” I said.

“You told me to cut you off,” he reminded me.

“I lied,” I said.

But the second was a sufficiency. Florida police are rough on even slightly tipsy drivers, and I had no desire to get racked up on a DUI charge. I drove the Escort back to the McNally Building at a sedate pace, switched to the Miata, and continued my homeward journey.

I had time for an abbreviated ocean swim and arrived bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at the family cocktail hour. I dined with my parents that night and made a mindless jape about feeling exactly like our entree—soft-shelled crabs. Mother and father smiled politely.

I retired to my suite and scribbled furiously in my journal until I had recorded everything that had happened, including my last conversation with Rogoff. Then I phoned Jennifer Towley and was happy to find her at home.

“I miss you,” I told her.

“And I miss you, too,” she replied. Divine female!

“Good,” I said. “Then how about lunch tomorrow?”

“Oh Archy, I’d love to,” she said, “but I just can’t. I’ve
got
to get caught up on my bookkeeping: billing, clients’ accounts, my own checkbook, and nonsense like that. I simply
must
spend the day at it.”

Suspicion flared, and I wondered if she was actually meeting her ex-husband for lunch.

“You’ve got to take a break in your accounting chores,” I said. “Why don’t I pick up some edible takeout food and show up at your place around noon. We can have a nosh together, and then I’ll take off and leave you to your ledgers.”

“Marvelous idea,” she said at once. “Absolute genius.”

“I thought so,” I said with a considerably leavened heart. “See you at noon tomorrow. Sleep well, dear.”

“You, too,” she said, then added faintly, “darling.”

I hung up delighted with her response and mortified at my initial jealous reaction. I must, I thought, learn to trust this woman who had invaded my right and left ventricles. It was not yet a Grand Passion but, like my mother’s begonias, my love needed only TLC to flower.

I idly flipped the pages of my journal, resolutely turning my thoughts back to the theft of the Inverted Jennies. I set to work brooding, an activity aided by a very small tot of marc and the haunting wails of a Billie Holiday tape.

Maybe, I acknowledged, Sgt. Al was right after all, and I did have a taste for complexity. Because I found I could not really believe that this whole foo-faraw was simply a case of a lamebrained and resentful chauffeur stealing from his employer. I didn’t
want
to believe that, perhaps because it reduced the entire investigation to banality and my own role to that of an office manager catching a junior clerk swiping paper clips.

But it wasn’t complexity I favored so much, I finally decided, as intrigue and the convolutions of human hungers. I wished the Case of the Inverted Jennies to hold hidden surprises, unexpected revelations, and a startling denouement.

I should have remembered what Aesop once told me:

“We would often be sorry if our wishes were gratified.”

I
BREAKFASTED WITH MY
parents on Friday. Then my father departed for the office in his Lexus, mother scampered into the greenhouse to bid a bright “Good morning!” to her begonias, and I moved to the kitchen to have a heart-to-heart with our cook-housekeeper.

“Ursi, luv,” I said, “I’ve contracted for a picnic today—a very special picnic for two. What would you suggest?”

She accepted my question as a serious challenge, as I knew she would, and inspected her refrigerator and the shelves of her cupboards.

“Lemon chicken,” she decided. “Baked, then chilled. German potato salad. The greens should be arugula and radicchio. For dessert, maybe a handful of those chocolate macaroons your mother bought.”

“Sounds super to me,” I said. “I’m hungry already. Where’s our picnic hamper?”

“In the utility room,” she said. “And don’t forget a bottle of wine.”

“Fat chance,” I said.

I brought her the wicker picnic hamper that had been in our family since Year One and contained enough cutlery, accessories, and china to supply an orgy of eight. I also selected a bottle of white zinfandel which I tucked onto the bottom shelf of the fridge. Our table wine was stacked in the utility room. The vintage stuff was kept in a massive temperature-controlled cabinet in my father’s study, protected by a combination padlock. R5-L8-R4, as well I knew.

I hopped into the Miata and, as usual, turned its nose toward the Horowitz manse. There was one little question I had to ask Lady C. It had been bedeviling me since that talk with Rogoff.

I banged the brass Bacchus on the front door, and eventually it was opened by the saucy housemaid, Clara Bodkin. She still had sleep in her eyes and looked all the more attractive for it.

“Good morning, Clara,” I said.

“Hi, Mr. McNally,” she said, and yawned. “The party’s not till tonight.”

“I know,” I said, smiling, “and we’ll certainly be here. Is Lady Horowitz up and about?”

“She’s in the sauna.”

“Oh,” I said, disappointed. “I guess I better come back another time.”