Brass Go-Between (13 page)

It was an ordinary place called The Cold Duck or The Green Rooster or something like that. The bar itself ran along the right-hand side and there were some tables and booths and checkered tablecloths and Chianti bottles that held half-burned candles. It was ten minutes after four and only a couple of dedicated topers were in attendance. I sat at the bar’s far end, near the door, away from the drinkers, and when the bartender waddled down my way I ordered a double Scotch.

“What kind?” he said.

“Bar Scotch.”

“On the rocks?”

“Just a straight shot with a glass of water.”

I should have told him to serve it in a large glass because when I picked it up my hand shook so that it sloshed a little of the whisky over the rim which chattered against my teeth. But I got it down, all of it down in two gulps, and then I signaled the bartender. He was in a deep conversation with the two tipplers, talking learnedly, no doubt, of sports or cars or politics, or whatever drunks and bartenders talk about at four in the afternoon, and he seemed reluctant to come all the way down to where I sat, or it may have been that his feet hurt.

“Another double?” he said.

“Make it a single. Where’s your phone?”

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “In the back, near the men’s John.”

I didn’t even have to search for a dime on the way to the phone. I just picked it up, dialed 911, and when the voice answered—a policeman’s voice—I said, “I’m only going to say this once. There’s a dead man in room 1106 in the Nickerson Building on Park Avenue. His name’s Frank Spellacy. S-p-e-l-l-a-c-y. Spellacy.” Then I hung up.

The drink was waiting for me when I went back to my end of the bar. I didn’t really want it, but it was there so I drank it, put three one-dollar bills and some change next to the empty glass, and left. I caught a cab back to the Adelphi and once there, up in my de luxe efficiency on the ninth floor with its Pullman kitchen and its yellow-tiled bathroom, I took the pad from my pocket, the pad with the one-word, one-name message on it, and read it for the first time right side up. It still said Wingo. I tore the page off the pad, ripped it into small pieces, and flushed it down the toilet. Still remembering lessons well learned from screens both large and small, I tore the rest of the pad up and spent five minutes in the bathroom flushing the toilet six times. There was a cardboard backing for the pad, but it seemed too much trouble to tear up, so I tossed it into the wastebasket.

I slumped into my favorite chair, the one where scarcely two hours before I had been eating a cucumber sandwich, drinking a cup of tea, and demonstrating to a New York cop on the make just how smart I really was. I wondered about that for a while. When I discovered a dead man, a small-time grifter, in his office, killed by either a knife or a gun, I stole the one-word message that he used up his life writing because with magnificent egoism, I assumed that it was meant for me. Not for his wife or children or even the cops, but for me, someone he didn’t know, someone he had spoken to once, over the telephone, for forty-five seconds, perhaps a minute. That proved how smart I was. And instead of calling the police and reporting the murder, if that’s what it was, and waiting for them to get there and giving them all the information that I could, which might possibly have helped them find whoever killed the man, the small-time grifter who sold desert lots for ten dollars down and ten dollars a month, and then probably discounted the paper to some finance company, I instead acted like a fool who ran when he should stay and stayed when he should run. I was smart all right. Even brilliant. No wonder the country was going to hell.

I sat there in my favorite chair, smoking a cigarette and brooding and thinking about the one-word message that Spellacy had left for someone, possibly me, but probably not. I spent fifteen minutes thinking about it and then I picked up the phone and dialed O for long distance.

When she came on I told her that I would like to call the Coroner’s Office in Washington, D.C. There was some more palaver while she asked whom I wished to speak to and finally I told her that I would like to speak to the coroner himself, but would settle for whoever answered the phone. A man’s voice answered with “Coroner’s Office.”

I told him my name and then asked, “If a man were killed in an automobile accident, would he immediately come under your jurisdiction?”

“Yes, he would,” the good solid civil-service voice said.

“Would you perform an autopsy?”

“Yes, that’s automatically done in accidents, homicides, suicides, and what-have-you.”

I didn’t ask him what a what-have-you was, although it seemed to take in a lot of territory. But he wasn’t through yet; he warmed to his subject. “Now in the case of illness, if the deceased hasn’t seen a doctor or been attended by one within the last ten days, an autopsy is automatically performed. That also holds true if the deceased has not been seen by anyone—you know, vanished—for a period of twenty-four hours or more prior to his death.”

“I’d like to get some information on a man who was killed in a car wreck about four weeks ago.”

“Are you the next of kin?” the civil-service voice said.

“No. I’m a reporter. With
The New York Times.
” There was no use in going second class.

The voice relented a little. “What was the deceased’s name?”

“Wingo,” I said.

“His first name?”

That wrecked it. “Well, we haven’t been able to find out his first name. He died under rather mysterious circumstances.”

There was a pause at the Washington end, at the District of Columbia’s Coroner’s Office at 19th and E Streets, Southeast. It was a long, chilly pause. “I’m sorry, but in such cases the next of kin must grant permission for the release of such information.”

“Well, thanks anyway.”

He said that I was welcome, but I don’t think he really meant it.

I sat there in the chair with my hand on the phone thinking about all the influential persons that I knew in Washington who could pry the information out of the Coroner’s Office without going to the next of kin. For some reason I didn’t think that Frances Wingo would appreciate my attempt to find out why she had become a widow. But the influential persons whom I knew were probably too busy or too inept to get the information today and I was too impatient to wait for tomorrow so I called Myron Greene, the lawyer.

“I need a favor,” I told him after we said hello and he informed me that Spivack had deposited the check from the Coulter Museum.

“What kind of a favor?” Myron Greene said, and there seemed to be suspicion and distrust in his voice, but that was really how he always talked.

“I need to get a coroner’s report in Washington so I can find out how somebody died.”

“That takes the permission of the next of kin,” Myron Greene said.

“I know. I’ve already tried. That’s why I’m calling you. I need the information this afternoon.”

“That’s impossible.”

“No it isn’t, Myron, not for you, it isn’t. You have the influence down there and I don’t. That’s why I called.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m just too busy. Maybe I can do something tomorrow.”

“If I don’t get the information this afternoon, or this evening at the latest, then I’m walking off this thing.”

“What’s that—what’s that?” Myron Greene said, and began to wheeze at me over the phone.

“I’m through. Finished. Somebody else can get the shield back.”

“Something’s happened,” he said. “What’s happened? I have a right to know. I have every right—”

“Somebody else has been killed.”

“Who?”

“The name would mean nothing to you.”

“Was he connected with the … the thieves?”

“I don’t know. But he probably knew who they were.”

“God damn it, St. Ives, can’t you ever tell anything straight?”

“Get me the information I want and I’ll tell you the entire story. You may get to be a criminal lawyer after all. If I don’t get the information, it’s as I said. I quit. Now. This afternoon.”

Myron Greene gave me a long wheezy sigh. “Well, there’s one possibility. A good friend of mine is now an assistant U.S. attorney down there. He could probably get it.”

“This afternoon?”

“If
I
asked him. He was a year behind me at school.”

“Ask him.”

“What do you want exactly?”

“I want to know the cause of death of a man named Wingo. He supposedly was killed in a car accident about four weeks ago.”

“Wingo? Isn’t that the name of the woman who—”

“The same.”

“Her husband?”

“Yes.”

“Do you think that she—”

I interrupted him. “I don’t think anything, Myron. I’m just trying to find out what to think.”

“All right, all right. What’s his first name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Christ.”

“There shouldn’t be too many Wingos who died in a car wreck four weeks ago. Just have your friend find out what the autopsy says.”

Myron Greene was silent for a moment, except for a couple of wheezes. “Is this just a hunch on your part or do you think you really have something?”

“I don’t have a thing,” I said. “It’s just a hunch.”

“I’ll be back to you,” Myron Greene said, and hung up.

Myron Greene called back at six thirty-five that evening.

“I’ve missed my train,” he said. “Margaret will be furious.” Margaret was his wife.

“Want me to call her?”

“No, I don’t want you to call her. She thinks you’re a—a bad influence.”

“She’s probably right.”

“That hunch you had.”

“What about it?”

“It seems to have paid off.”

“How?”

Myron Greene was excited. I could tell from the way that his wheezes rasped over the phone in short, quick bursts as he fought for breath. “Just take it easy, Myron,” I said. “Try for a deep breath.”

He was silent for a moment, as if holding his breath, and then there was a long, shuddering wheeze. “I talked to my friend,” he said in between the next gasp. “He called the Coroner’s Office. They didn’t like the idea of giving out the information, but he was persuasive.”

“What did he get?”

“On July 26th, George Compton Wingo, 44, was found dead in a one-car automobile accident on Circumferential Highway 495 near exit 13. That’s in Virginia. The automobile, a new Chevrolet Impala, was a total loss.” Myron Greene sounded as if he were reading from notes and he paused to wheeze a couple of times.

“An autopsy,” he went on, “was performed on July 27th and it was determined that Wingo was already dead when his car turned over three times as it rolled down an embankment. He had died several hours earlier from a massive overdose of heroin.”

“Was he hooked?” I said.

“I beg your pardon.”

“Was he a habitual user?”

“Oh. Multiple punctures in both his left and right arms indicated that he was a habitual user of narcotics, probably heroin.”

“Is that all?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“Almost,” I said. “Almost. Myron, do me another favor, will you?”

“What now?”

“Take a cab home to Darien and put it on my bill.”

F
RANCES WINGO WAS PROMPT.
She knocked on my door at two thirty-five the following day, Thursday, which meant that she had flown by private plane or had caught the one o’clock shuttle from Washington and that it had had no trouble landing and that taxis had been plentiful at LaGuardia.

“Come in,” I said.

“Thank you.” She came in, carrying with some difficulty an inexpensive man’s two-suiter in her left hand. A striped blue and white raincoat was draped over her right arm.

“Heavy?” I said, reaching for the suitcase.

She let me have it, a little reluctantly, I thought. “Heavy,” she said. I turned in the room, wondering where to put the suitcase, which seemed to weigh between 55 and 60 pounds. I finally decided to put it in the tub in the bathroom. Before I put it there, I weighed it on the scale. Fifty-eight pounds.

When I came back out she said, “Why there?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it’s because it would be the last place I would look if I were looking for it.”

“Aren’t you going to count it?”

“Did you?”

“No.”

“Did you look at it?”

“Yes.”

“Pretty?”

“Not particularly.”

“Since you don’t care much for money, maybe you’d care for a drink.”

“I think I would.”

“Bourbon or Scotch?”

“Bourbon.”

“Pick out a chair,” I said. “Or the couch. They’re all about the same.”

“Thank you.” She draped her raincoat over a wingbacked chair and sank into it. She wore a blue dress that was neither too complicated nor too simple, blue shoes that seemed to both match and complement the dress, and in her lap she held a blue purse that seemed to be made of the same leather as the shoes. When I turned from mixing the drinks she was slowly surveying the room and she managed not to grimace at the prints on the wall which had been supplied by the color-blind management of the Adelphi.

“Horrible, aren’t they?” I said as I handed her a drink.

“A bit.”

“The management’s choice.”

“Not yours?”

“No. I’m still hung up on Maxfield Parrish.”

“He was 96 when he died. In 1966.”

“Do you like Parrish?” I said.

“No. Do you?”

“Probably because I know I shouldn’t.”

“Double reverse snobbism.”

“Really? I never thought of it like that.” I was seated on the couch opposite her. I put my drink on the glass-topped coffee table and lit a cigarette. “I’m sorry you couldn’t make it for lunch.”

She didn’t bother to make an excuse. “Will you get it back today?”

“I don’t know.”

“Haven’t they been in touch with you again?”

“No.”

“Will they?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you plan to do, or do you believe in plans?”

I took a swallow of my drink. “I’m going to rent a car. I don’t own a car, you know. I’m going to rent a car and drive to the third Howard Johnson on the Jersey Turnpike. I’m going to check in by six o’clock this evening accompanied by fifty-eight pounds of used tens and twenties. I will sit by the phone until they tell me what they want me to do. Then I will do precisely that because if I don’t, I could wind up just like your husband. Dead.”