Brass Go-Between (12 page)

“No. Friday at three’s no good. This afternoon at four is fine.”

“I just told you—”

“I know what you told me. A couple of important conferences. Postpone them.”

“Look, Mr. St. John—”

“Ives,” I said. “St. Ives.”

“Ives then. I’m not in the habit of having strangers call me up and tell me how to run my business.” He managed to get some real indignation into that.

“But I’m not exactly a stranger, am I? I believe we have some mutual friends. We have the art dealer, Mr. Albert Shippo, and that man about town, the noted sportsman, Mr. Johnny Parisi. In fact, I had dinner with Johnny just last night.”

“You mention my name?” Spellacy said, and all the cheerfulness and goodwill were gone.

“That’s something I thought we might talk about. This afternoon.”

There was another pause, this time a long one, and then Spellacy said, “All right. Four o’clock. Here.”

“At four,” I said, and hung up.

I was boiling some water for a cup of tea and slicing up some cucumbers for a sandwich when I heard the knock at the door. The tomato soup and crackers hadn’t been enough and I was hungry again. I had been half watching some English film on TV where the principals sat around drinking tea and eating cucumber sandwiches, which I happen to like, and it had provoked my appetite, but then I’m highly susceptible to fictional portrayals of food, whether written or filmed. In my youth the passages that Thomas Wolfe wrote about food had made me ravenous. And once, while reading Tom Lea’s
The Brave Bulls,
I had put the book down, left my apartment, and walked four miles to find a Spanish-American store that sold canned tortillas and frijoles. Now I found myself craving a cucumber sandwich. I laid the knife on the minuscule drainboard, went to the door, and opened it. Lieutenant Kenneth Ogden of vice stood there, wearing one of his three-hundred-dollar suits and a smile that only made him look a little less angry than usual.

“Would you like a cucumber sandwich?” I said.

“A what?”

“A cucumber sandwich. Come on in.”

He came in. “The trouble with you, St. Ives, is that you live alone. It’s not natural. It’s against nature and God.”

“If you don’t want a cucumber sandwich, would you like a drink? I’ve got Scotch, vodka, and bourbon.”

“Bourbon,” Ogden said. “And water.”

I mixed him a bourbon and water and then went back to my sandwich. I cut the crusts off the bread, spread butter on both pieces, placed the cucumbers carefully on one slice, covered it with the other, and then cut it diagonally both ways into four parts—just like an old maid expecting an afternoon call from the vicar.

Ogden stood to one side and watched me work. I glanced at him once and there didn’t seem to be any admiration in his gaze. I found the tea bags and placed one in a cup and poured it full of boiling water. When it had steeped enough I carried it and the cucumber sandwich over to my favorite chair and lowered myself into it carefully, holding the cup of tea in one hand, the cucumber sandwich in the other.

“You oughta get married again,” he said. “Or get a job. Cucumber sandwiches at half-past two in the afternoon and the goddamned TV set on along with it. Christ.” He moved over to the set and switched it off. “You’re coming apart, St. Ives. Your seams are splitting.”

“I like cucumbers,” I said. “I also like tea and cucumber sandwiches.” I took a bite and chewed it slowly. It didn’t taste as good as I’d thought it would. If I could have eaten it alone while watching the actors in the English film eat their sandwiches, it probably would have tasted all right.

“What’s on your mind?” I said.

Ogden took a small swallow of his drink. “That’s good bourbon,” he said.

“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I don’t drink bourbon. It’s another one of my idiosyncrasies probably brought about by a monklike existence.”

Ogden quit wandering around the room and sat in a chair opposite me. Although pushing fifty or five years past it, he wore his clothes well, but they did nothing to disguise the gray in his short-cropped hair or the lines in his face, all of which seemed to turn down, as if in constant disapproval. It was an oblong face, almost as wide at the chin as it was at the forehead. It was also a tough face, a hard one, which had heard all the lies and witnessed all the depravity that New York had to offer. His Captain Easy nose, a little red at the tip, snuffled every few minutes as if he had just smelled something rotten but couldn’t quite tell what it was. The eyes that looked at me over the rim of his glass were blue with all the color and warmth of a dreary day in February.

“How’s your daughter?” I said, and took a sip of my tea.

“Next month. She starts next month.”

“Where?”

“Ohio State. I’m going to drive her out.”

“It’s a good school.”

“Yeah. That’s what I hear. God knows, it costs enough.”

“Why didn’t she go closer to home?”

Ogden waved his left hand. “Ah, Christ, you know kids. They don’t wanta stay home and go to college. They wanta get away, out of the state somewhere, at least out of town. That’s half of it, I guess.”

“I suppose,” I said, and took another bite of my sandwich. “So what brings you around here at two-thirty of an afternoon when you’re supposed to be out rousting vice lords, if that’s what they still call them?”

“I been hearing some things,” he said.

“From where, Washington? From Demeter?”

“He called Monday. He wanted to know about you. I said you were okay, just a little careful.”

“I thought you told him cautious.”

“Maybe I did. I don’t remember. Careful, cautious, it doesn’t matter.”

“Did he tell you what I was on?”

“Yeah. Some kind of shield. African. You’re trying to buy it back for two hundred and fifty thousand. Some shield.”

“It has quite a history.”

“Demeter seemed to think you could use a little help.”

“Are you offering?”

Ogden drained his drink and placed it on the carpet beside his chair because there wasn’t any table handy. “Not officially.”

“Unofficially?”

“If you think you need it.”

“I don’t.”

He shrugged. “I just thought I might do a little moonlighting. I got a day off tomorrow.”

“What makes tomorrow so special?”

“I hear that’s when you buy it back.”

“You hear from whom?”

He smiled for the first time. His teeth were white and regular and even. Too white and regular and even. They were false. I felt better, somehow glad that Ogden wore false teeth, or dentures, as the television ads insisted on calling them. It made him more vulnerable. Ogden closed his lips quickly, turning off the smile as if he were concerned that I might notice the teeth.

“When you’re a cop for twenty-three years you hear things,” he said. “Now when you used to be on the paper, you used to hear things, didn’t you? You know, some jerk would call up with an anonymous tip and then you, knowing he was a jerk, would still go ahead and check it out and find that he was telling the truth after all. Well, let’s say it was something like that. Accidental like.”

“Why did Demeter call you?”

“We’re old pals. We went to the FBI academy together. In ’fifty-four.”

“I don’t buy that anonymous-tip business,” I said.

Ogden cocked one eyebrow at me; his left one. It was a polite enough expression and its tone carried over into his voice. “Don’t you now?”

“No. I don’t. I think that after Demeter called and told you how high the payoff was you started to check with every pigeon in town. Maybe you found one that knew something, not much, but something, enough for you to figure that you could cut yourself a slice of the pie. Not a big slice probably, but something that would make sacrificing a day off worth while. How much did you have in mind?”

Ogden smiled again, but this time he kept his lips together. “Let’s say that what you say is true. Now I’m not saying it is, but if it was, then I’d say that five thousand would be just about right.”

“And just what would you do to earn it?”

“I’d help keep you alive, St. Ives. Now that oughta be worth five grand to you, if not to anybody else.”

“Do you know who the thieves are?”

Ogden shook his head. “No, I don’t and that’s the truth. I just hear that the switch will take place tomorrow and that they play a little rough sometimes—whoever they are.”

This time I smiled at him. I tried to make it friendly; I’m not sure that I succeeded. “Or it could have been another way, couldn’t it? It could have been that you called Demeter down in Washington about an hour or two ago and Demeter had just talked to Frances Wingo of the museum who’d told him that the switch will take place tomorrow. That’s all you really needed to know, wasn’t it? Then your mind starts working and you figure a way to cut yourself in. For five thousand—on your day off. So you drop by here with a story about how rough the thieves play, which is supposed to turn me into a lump of JELL-O, and I agree to pay you five thousand dollars for whatever protection you can give me tomorrow. Now, it could have been like that, couldn’t it, Ken?”

Ogden shook his head sadly. “I feel sorry for you, St. Ives.”

“Why? Because of my suspicious nature?”

He rose from his chair. “One of these days you’re going to play it too safe, too careful, too cautious. One of these days you’re not going to trust somebody when you should, then pffft! No more St. Ives.”

I put the empty teacup and sandwich plate on the floor and rose. “But that’s not today, is it?”

Ogden picked up his Borsalino hat from the hexagonal table and brushed it against the sleeve covering his left arm. “Not today, maybe. Maybe not even tomorrow. But sometime soon.” He put his hat on his head, tilted it slightly to the left, gave me the opportunity to examine his false teeth again, said “Thanks for the drink,” and left. I went over and picked up his glass and my dirty dishes and put them in the sink where I began to wash them slowly, as neat and as tidy as the old maid after the vicar has left.

It was a respectable enough building twenty-nine stories high that had been designed by some long-forgotten architect who apparently had never heard of the Bauhaus. It looked like what it was, an office building on Park Avenue where people went to work in the morning at nine and left at five after having sold or bought or traded or even created something, perhaps an advertisement for a new cemetery. The directory in the marble lobby said that Mesa Verde Estates was on the eleventh floor. I looked at my watch and it was three minutes before four so I got in one of the automatic elevators along with a stenographer who was carrying a white paper bag that was brown around the bottom where the coffee had slopped out of the paper cups. She got off at six; I got off at eleven.

Mesa Verde Estates was in 1106, which turned out to be four doors to my left from the elevator. A sign on the door of 1106 read
MESA VERDE ESTATES, FRANK SPELLACY, PRESIDENT.
I knocked, and when no one said “come in” or “who’s there” or even “go away” I tried the doorknob. It turned easily so I pushed the door open and walked in. It was a medium-sized office, big enough for two persons perhaps, a man and his secretary, if he wasn’t worried about privacy. Green steel shelves lined one side of the office, the left side, and they were choked with what seemed to be four-color brochures advertising Mesa Verde Estates. There were three windows at the rear of the office and their Venetian blinds were half up, so that the light from the afternoon sun spilled onto the large executive desk that was placed in front of the windows. Three leather arm chairs were arranged in front of the desk. The floor was carpeted with some speckled brown and black synthetic fiber. On the right wall were some handsome color photos of desert scenes, four of them. Below them was a couch and a glass-topped coffee table. There was no secretarial desk or typewriter, only the executive walnut desk that had a high-backed judge’s chair behind it. A man sat in the chair, but the upper part of his body was bent over the desk, his bald head resting on a green blotter, his left arm extended toward a beige telephone, his left hand clutching a yellow pencil. I walked over to the desk and looked at him. The blotter was trying to soak up all of the blood, but it wasn’t doing too well. I reached over and felt for a pulse in the wrist of the hand that clutched the pencil; there was none. The phone rang and I jumped. It rang seven times before it quit. Frank Spellacy was too dead to hear it.

He had been a plumpish man, dressed in a gray pin-striped suit. Gold-rimmed glasses still rested on a thick nose. His eyes were closed and his mouth was slightly open and I almost expected to hear him snore. He was around fifty and the sun, beating in from the windows, made his bald head seem pinker than it really was. Underneath the hand that held the pencil was a small white pad. He had written something on the pad, one word. From the way the letters straggled and ran together, he may have written it as he sat there, half sprawled over his desk, dying. There was only the one word and I read it upside down. The one word was “Wingo.”

T
HERE SEEMED TO BE
no reason for what I did next, no reason other than that I felt that the one word, the name, scrawled on the white pad by a dying man, was meant for me. It was mine, so I took it. I pulled the pad from underneath the lifeless hand that still clutched the Eberhard Faber yellow pencil and slipped it into my jacket pocket. And then, remembering lessons learned from five thousand hours before the tube and perhaps from another three thousand or so in darkened buildings that sold sustenance (popcorn) along with escape, I took out my handkerchief and used it to shield my palm and fingers from the doorknob. In the hall I looked around and then hastily wiped the outside doorknob, found the stairs, scurried down two flights, rang for the elevator, waited and fretted, and then tried to look nondescript to the three passengers who were already aboard when it finally came and also to the three others who got on at the seventh, fourth, and third floors.

Outside, the Nickerson Building looked just like what it was, an ordinary office building, perhaps 43-years-old or older, built in the late 1920’s on Park Avenue by a contractor who was doubtless dead by now, as dead as Frank Spellacy, and designed by an architect who didn’t give a damn about Mies van der Rohe or Walter Gropius or even the infamous Marcel Breuer who had threatened to saddle Grand Central Terminal with a 55-story mega-structure which I could have inspected if I cared to look over my shoulder, which I didn’t. Instead I walked quickly down Park Avenue for two blocks and then turned right, looking for a bar, any bar.