Authors: Donald E Westlake
Koberberg said, “So what do we do now? It goes without saying, I hope, that I’ll do anything I can to help. And so will Cary.”
“I don’t know what to do,” I said. “I don’t know what
can
be done.” I was pacing the living-room rug, trying to think. For the first time in a long while, something outside my own head—other than my wall, or the sub-basement—had distracted me from myself. I became aware of that suddenly, and came to a stop, confused.
Koberberg misinterpreted my expression: “Have you thought of something?”
I feel I don’t have the right to stop punishing myself,
I thought.
What a fool.
“Mr. Tobin?”
I said, “No, nothing useful. Excuse me a minute, I want to make a phone call while I think.”
“Certainly.”
I went out to the hall to use the phone by the stairs, and Kate emerged from the kitchen to say, “Would you like coffee?”
“Yes,” I said. I remembered the number; I dialed it, and asked for Marty Kengelberg. Marty is an old friend of mine from the force, who kept on being a friend after Jock was killed. So far from objecting to my playing detective without a license, Marty had even once sent me someone to play detective for; a psychiatrist who was having trouble at a halfway house he ran for former mental patients.
Marty came on the line after a minute, and I said, “Hello. How are you doing?”
“Don!” he said. “Good to hear from you!”
I said, “This is Mitch. Mitch Tobin.”
“For God’s sake,” he said. “Hiya, Mitch. You sound just like Don Stark. You don’t know him, do you?”
“No, I don’t.”
“I never realized it before,” he said. “It’s incredible. What can I do for you, Mitch?”
I said, “How impossible would it be for me to get a private investigator’s license?”
Happily, he said, “Mitch! You mean it?”
“I’m not opening an office,” I said. “But just to have for self-protection, in case I need it.”
He said, “Any pressure I can use to push it through, Mitch, you know I’ll do it. Listen, it’s been three years, hasn’t it?”
“Twenty-seven months,” I said. He was talking about my dismissal.
Ruminating, he said, “And you’ve helped out a couple of times since then. On that mob business two years ago, and the kid killed in the Village. I don’t see why we can’t get a couple of the right recommendations on it, and get it approved.”
I said, “While the application’s in process, can I practice?”
“That’s a tricky area,” he said, “but you could take a chance. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“Good.”
“I’ll send you the form,” he said. “You fill it out and send it back to me, not the address on the form.”
“What if I come down there today and fill it out?”
“Even better.”
“I’ll see you in a little while,” I said, and hung up, and went back to the living room, where I told Koberberg, “My wife is making coffee.”
He was sitting in the same chair as before, perched on the edge of it, deep in frowning thought. He said, “If we could get Bruce to make some sort of move, if we could just get him active again.”
“That’s the problem,” I said. “He’s got things worked out so he doesn’t have to move at all. The official investigation is closed, they’ve got their murderer, Maundy can just stay out of sight and the whole thing will blow over.”
Koberberg said, “I keep wondering, what if we went to his mother? That’s what he’s been afraid of all this time, that his mother would find out. What if we went to her, and … I don’t know what. Hinted at things?” He shook his head. “I’m not thinking rationally.”
Suddenly a part of the conversation with Marty came back into my head, and brought with it a possibility. I said, “I’ve heard Lane do imitations of voices a couple of times. You once, and Remington. Can he do anybody else?”
“Cary? Yes, of course. He’s very talented, as a matter of fact, he can do all sorts of people, the most astonishing things. Walter Matthau, believe it or not. Can you imagine Cary doing Walter Matthau? And Bette Davis, of course, and William F. Buckley.”
“What about other people in the group, besides you and Remington?”
He said, “I really believe Cary could do just about any voice on earth, if he set his mind to it.”
“You said before, he’d collapsed and he was at your place. What kind of condition is he in? Could he be helpful?”
“Cary would do anything to help at this point,” Koberberg said. “That’s what he needs, of course, something to do, something to take his mind off his troubles.”
Like me? Kate walked in at that point with a tray holding coffee and cookies. We drank and ate and talked, and worked it out, and then Koberberg called Cary Lane and told him what to do in part one of the plan, and then we left for Manhattan.
I
STOPPED OFF TO
see Marty and fill out the application form; a pink folder, it was, and half the questions set my teeth on edge, but I answered them. Marty wanted to know what I was involved with at the moment, naturally, but I told him I didn’t have the time to talk to him right now, which was true, and promised to have him and Gail out to dinner very soon and fill him in then.
That was a strange moment, the first time in twenty-seven months that I’d invited anyone to dinner. I felt like a snake in the spring, just after shedding last year’s skin: new, and raw, and cold, and strange, but somehow good, better than I’d felt in a long long time.
What had caused this change? I didn’t know, and I was afraid to look at it too close, afraid it would vanish if I tried to touch it. The thought
I am happy
was still invariably followed by the thought
I don’t deserve to be happy.
We drove uptown, in Koberberg’s roomy Jaguar sedan, to his apartment in the East Sixties, one of the most expensive sections of an expensive city. The block was similar to Brooklyn Heights in appearance, though somewhat wider and with wider and more obviously wealthy houses. We went inside, and I remembered someone having said this apartment was like living inside a giant plant. That was true; there were plants everywhere, from large rubber-tree plants in room corners that brushed the ceiling, to tiny ferns in pots on end tables and the grand piano. The style of the place, what could be seen of it through all the greenery, was traditional and elegant, very different from the other apartments I’d seen the last few days. I remembered that Koberberg and Ross were both interior decorators, and were in partnership together, and I guessed that this living room was primarily a reflection of Koberberg. Ross would be less likely to devote his attention inward at his own home.
Cary Lane looked almost normal. If he had looked, yesterday, as though the skull within his plastic face had been removed, creating an emptiness into which his face was collapsing, today he looked as though most of that empty space had been refilled. Not all, but most. There was still some hollowness in his cheeks and around his eyes, but he did look human again.
“She was home,” he announced. “Bruce was at work, of course. She said he’d be home around six, and I left the message. Are you
sure
it was him?”
Koberberg answered. “We’re sure, Cary,” he said. “We have to go down through the rush hour; if we’re going to get there before six, we’d better start now.”
Lane put on a Dynel fur coat and matching hat and knee-length boots with brass chains around the top, and we left.
The snow was coming down again in the same endless slow windless fall. So far the city had managed to keep up with keeping the streets clear, but it was piling up on the sidewalks and roofs throughout the city, and every time one went anywhere in a car it was first necessary to push a wet heavy thickness of the stuff off the windshield; it was too heavy for most cars’ wipers to move against.
We were in stop-and-go traffic, with the wipers beating back and forth across the windshield. Koberberg and I were in the front seat, and Cary Lane was in the back. He was very agitated, and spent most of his time leaning forward with his forearms on the seat back between Koberberg and me. Finally, during the time we were on FDR Drive, he said, “This goddam snow! Doesn’t it ever stop?”
“There’s no wind,” Koberberg said. “The same storm center’s been over the city for a week.”
“When does it empty, for Christ’s sake?”
“I don’t believe it ever does,” Koberberg said. “It’ll be blown out to sea eventually. When we get some wind.”
The short days of winter are made even shorter by thick heavy cloud layers and steadily falling snow. We drove through an elongated twilight and an early night, the headlights of oncoming cars splintering in the water drops on the windshield. The interior of the car became too hot and stuffy, but when I opened a window a crack the air that came in was gravelike: damp and cold, reaching immediately through flesh to bone. I rolled up the window again.
We were stopped for a while in the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, part of an endless double row of murmuring smoking cars waiting like cows at milking time for the gods to solve whatever problem had arisen out of sight ahead. But then the lines began to creep forward again, and we emerged from the tunnel, and there was no sign of whatever the problem had been. There never is.
We had told Lane to call Jerry Weissman at Jammer, which he had done, and Weissman was waiting for us when we got to Ronald Cornell’s apartment at ten to six. He buzzed to let us in, and when we went up the stairs he was in the open doorway, saying, “It hasn’t rung at all.”
“Good,” I said.
We trooped into the living room. The one window shade studied us with an expressionless open eye, the other one closed its eye against us. The 747 still soared at us through a blue sky with puffs of cloud. There was still the feeling of floating, of no solidity; a queasy feeling.
I said, “Is there a second phone?”
Weissman said, “Upstairs.”
“They both ring?”
“Sure.”
To Lane, I said, “When he calls, answer immediately after the second ring, and I’ll pick up at the same time. I don’t want him to hear two separate clicks.”
“All right.”
Weissman said, “I’ve got the cassette.”
“Fine.” I turned back to Lane. “Are you all right?”
He looked pale, that was all. It was so difficult to read that face. He said, “I’ll be all right.”
“Do you want someone in the room with you when you do it?”
“I’ll be better off by myself,” he said. “Not so self-conscious.”
“We’ll all wait upstairs, then,” I said. “Good luck.”
“Thank you.” As I started for the stairs, he said, “What if he doesn’t call?”
I looked back. “He’ll call. Maybe not exactly at six, but he’ll call.”
“All right.” The voice was a truer witness than the face, and the voice was scared. Too scared to do the job? If so, there was nothing to be done about it. I nodded to him, and went on upstairs, followed by Weissman and Koberberg.
The phone was beside the bed. I took a fairly heavy book from the bookcase and put it in the phone’s cradle, so I’d be able to work on the mouthpiece without a caller getting a busy signal. Then I got adhesive tape and cotton gauze from the bathroom and covered the mouthpiece so no sound from this room would be transmitted. Then I had Weissman show me the operation of the cassette tape recorder, a small compact machine containing its own microphone. Then there was nothing to do but wait.
We had turned on only the one light, a fixture that hung low on a maroon cord from the ceiling over the bedside table containing the phone. The light it gave was muted, and tinged with red. I sat there on the side of the bed near it, the phone receiver and cassette on the bed beside me, and I could look straight ahead at the wall of windows across the rear of the building, facing the lights of lower Manhattan. They seemed to wink and sputter tonight, like a guttering flame on the verge of going out, as the snowflakes descended and descended past them. And reflected in the glass I could see us shadowly defined: three men in a room where a murder had been committed, waiting for the killer to call.
T
HE PHONE RANG AT
twenty past six. I picked up the receiver and cassette and held them close together in my two hands, switching on the cassette. Weissman, standing beside me as I sat on the bed, held his hand poised over the book resting in the phone cradle. The first ring ended, after what seemed an extraordinarily long time, and then there was a long impatient silence, and then the second ring, again too long, and at the end of it I nodded to Weissman, and he lifted the book from the cradle.
The phone in my left hand clicked. A voice I didn’t recognize, tinny and fey, spoke from it: “Hello?” From the way Weissman’s eyes widened, the voice I was hearing had once belonged to Jamie Dearborn.
The other voice I did know: Bruce Maundy’s. It said, with fury and something else, “Who is this?”
“It’s Jamie, sweetness.” The cassette’s tiny tape reels turned, tape feeding through. I had thirty minutes on each side, more than enough.
“I want to know who this is.” Maundy sounded like a man at the end of his rope. He sounded as though he might suddenly begin to pound the telephone against the wall.
“Listen, sweetness, I told you it’s Jamie. Guess who’s gone to Atlanta?” The voice was seductive, arch, comic; a sexy come-on combined with a sexy put-on. I was remembering that Cary Lane had been one of the people Jamie Dearborn had slept with during Cornell’s visits to Atlanta; Lane was like this tape cassette, playing back conversations he’d had with the real Dearborn.
I felt a chill up my back. I
knew
what the situation was, I’d structured it myself, and still it was getting to me. How could it fail to get to Maundy, who couldn’t know anything about the stage machinery, who had to recognize the voice, and who—even more important than the mere sound of the voice—had to recognize the things it was saying and the way those things were being said?
“I don’t know who you are,” Maundy was saying, gritting the words out, almost swallowing the telephone, he was crowding it so much, “but if I ever get my hands on you, I’ll kill you. I swear I will.”
“Oh, you already did
that
,” Dearborn’s voice said carelessly. “Tonight, let’s have fun. You know who misses you? Calcutta misses you.”