Brass Go-Between (18 page)

“You sure could have,” Demeter said. “We had to go see Mrs. Wingo last night and tell her what we thought. She didn’t like it; she didn’t like it worth a damn. But then she let us go through her husband’s papers and we ran across some correspondence between him and Spellacy.”

“What kind of correspondence?” I said.

“About some stocks that Wingo had bought through Spellacy maybe six or seven years ago when he was still in New York. It seems Spellacy sold Wingo short on some stocks that were supposed to go down. They went up instead. Spellacy owed Wingo quite a hunk of money. So we called New York about Spellacy. It was the only thing we had and they told us that Spellacy had just been done in. They also gave us a run down on him and he seemed to be the kind of a guy who might have lined up a couple of thieves for Wingo.”

“And a go-between,” I said. “He checked me out for Wingo.”

“And you didn’t bother to tell anyone about that either,” Fastnaught said. “You’re not much of a gossip, are you, St. Ives?”

“Well, what do you expect from a high-priced go-between, Fastnaught?” Demeter said. “You expect him to go around blabbing everything he knows to cops who’re probably crooked even if they don’t wear three-hundred-dollar suits?”

“I suppose you’re right,” Fastnaught said. “I shouldn’t expect that.”

I got up and mixed myself another drink. I didn’t ask either of them if they wanted one. “Now what?”

“You want to hear our theory?”

“I thought I’d just heard it,” I said. “Wingo masterminded the theft of the shield to keep himself in heroin. He got himself an inside man by getting the guard hooked. Then he got in touch with Spellacy who set him up with a couple of thieves, the man and the woman who’ve been calling me on the phone. When everything was planned, the pair got greedy, gave Wingo an overdose of heroin, and then rolled him down an embankment in his car. They took over then and when the guard had done his job, they blew his head off. Spellacy figures most of it out and threatens to talk unless he gets a bigger cut so they shove a knife into him. They did the same thing to Ogden an hour or so ago down in the lobby. I don’t know how Ogden found out who they were, if he really did, but then I don’t really care.”

“What do you mean, you don’t care, St. Ives?” Demeter said in a quiet voice.

“Just what I said. There’re too many dead bodies.” I got up and walked over to the far wall and examined a print of some medieval gateway. “I’m bowing out,” I said. “Quitting.”

“He’s getting carefully cautious again, Lieutenant,” Fastnaught said.

“Uh-huh,” Demeter said. “So it seems.”

“You can find someone else,” I said. “Someone who might enjoy the risk.”

“Sit down, St. Ives,” Demeter said, and his voice sounded like thick ice cracking. “Sit down and I’ll tell you why you goddamn sure as hell aren’t quitting.”

S
ERGEANT FASTNAUGHT LEFT HIS
seat at the window and moved over to the door. He leaned against it as though it were the most comfortable spot in the room. An itch seemed to develop between his shoulder blades because he rubbed his back against the molding of the door without shifting his gaze from me. Demeter leaned forward in the chair, his big, tightly curled head thrust forward, his red lips slightly parted as he breathed through his mouth. The cigar burned unnoticed in his right hand.

“What you’d really like me to do is to put the Scotch in my bag and try to go through that door,” I said. “That’s really what you’d like.”

“Get off it, St. Ives,” Fastnaught said.

Demeter looked at him. “Well, now, Sergeant Fastnaught, what do you expect him to think? I’ve just told him that he’s not going to quit and there you are at the door, looking for all the world like you’d like to bust him in the mouth if he tried to go through it. St. Ives has got a point and we ought to respect it. After all the talk about police brutality, what do you expect him to think?”

“Sorry,” Fastnaught said in a voice that was a couple of blocks away from being contrite. “I forgot about the role assigned to us by society. Of course, busting him in the mouth could help us pad out our scrapbooks. Paste in some clippings with headlines like ‘Police Pummel New York Go-Between in Hotel’ or even ‘Cops Clobber New York Man in Posh Hotel.’”

Demeter nodded gravely. “You’ve got a flair, Sergeant Fastnaught. I’d say you’ve got almost a real genius for public relations. Don’t you agree, St. Ives?”

“He’s a wonder,” I said.

“Now then,” Demeter said, leaning back comfortably in the chair and drawing on his cigar. “I was going to tell you why you’re not going to back out, wasn’t I?”

“You did mention that, but maybe I’d better go first. Maybe I’d better tell you why I
am
going to back out.”

Demeter waved his cigar at me. “The floor is yours.”

“If your mathematics are right, four people have been killed over this shield. The reason that they were killed is that they either knew or had a pretty good idea who stole it. So there’s a very good chance that anybody who’d shove a knife into a New York cop in the lobby of the Madison Hotel would be less than queasy about getting permanently rid of a go-between about three o’clock in the morning on some lonely road in Virginia or Maryland. But even if they come up with a safe switch, one that involves no contact, I’m still the loose end, the one they’d wake up at five o’clock in the morning and start worrying about, wondering if they’d somehow made a slip and that I just might be able to identify them. Now that’s only a slight chance, maybe a ten-to-one shot, but it’s more than I’m willing to take for twenty-five thousand or even fifty thousand. I’m sure you follow me.”

“Perfectly,” Demeter said.

“Then that’s it; I’m out.”

“No,” Demeter said. “You’re not.”

“Don’t push it,” I said.

Demeter got out of his chair and walked over to the window. “Washington’s a funny town,” he said. “It’s not like New York or Chicago or even Philadelphia. When you get right down to it, a handful of congressmen run this town and if anybody’s got a hold on those congressmen, then he’s got a pretty good grip on Washington, too. You follow me, St. Ives?”

“I follow you.”

“You notice how polite the homicide boys were? Not many questions, not much excitement, just kind of a quiet routine even though a cop was killed and an out-of-town cop at that.”

“I noticed.”

“It’ll probably be about two paragraphs back with the leg-sore ads. No more. You see, St. Ives, the word’s come down. They want that shield back without any fuss. Now you’re going to ask where’d it come down from and I can’t answer that because I don’t know, but if I was to guess I’d say it came down from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, drifted up to Capitol Hill, and sort of trickled down to Fastnaught and me. We got the riot act read to us the other day—day before yesterday, wasn’t it, Fastnaught?”

“Day before yesterday,” Fastnaught said.

“They used the carrot and the stick on us. They told about all the nice things that were going to happen to us if we got the shield back and then they told us about all the not-so-nice things that were going to happen if we didn’t. They weren’t bothered that some people were dead because of a hunk of brass. That didn’t worry them one bit. All they want is the shield back and they gave us carte blanche—that’s the right expression, isn’t it? So Fastnaught here speaks up and says, ‘What happens if the go-between gets cold feet and wants to back out?’ Well, they just looked at us for a long time and then one of them said, ‘I trust you’ve heard of harassment, Lieutenant Demeter?’ So I said yes, I’d heard of it. And then they just looked at us some more.”

“Being harassed is better than being dead,” I said.

Demeter turned from the window and shook his head, a little sadly, I thought. “You’re not going to be dead, St. Ives. Not if Fastnaught and I can help it. Let me tell you something. My whole future’s riding on you. Fastnaught’s younger; he could do something else, but I’m past forty-five and that’s too old to start all over again. Now when they say harassment, they mean it. They’ll drag you through courts on income tax. You’ll spend every dime you’ve got on lawyers. And if you go on living in New York—or anyplace else—they’ll send some buttons after you at three o’clock in the morning with a warrant for your arrest for jaywalking or spitting on the sidewalk. Your life won’t be worth living. I don’t say I like the idea, but there’s lots of things in this country I don’t like.”

“It’s just your job,” I said.

“That’s right, St. Ives, it’s just my job and some days I don’t have to like that either.”

It was still raining and for what seemed to be a long time the rain on the window was the only sound in the room. Demeter went back to his chair; Fastnaught maintained his vigilance at the door, and I crossed to the window and stared down at Fifteenth Street and the shiny tops of wet cars. The pressure could have come, as Demeter said, from the White House, from one of those faceless aides who’d been chivvied by someone at State. Or it could have come from a senator or a matched pair of congressmen who owed their re-election to someone, someone who wanted the shield back and not too many questions asked. But the pressure was there all right, strong enough to bend a couple of tough cops and leave a sour taste in their mouths. And the threat of harassment was real, too. I’d seen harassment before, a couple of times, and one had wound up in a sanitarium and the other had fled to Italy, which he didn’t much like but which he liked better than what he’d gone through in New York for eighteen months before his nerves shattered.

I turned from the window and looked at Demeter, who was staring at the floor. “You win,” I said.

“Some prize,” Demeter said to the rug on the floor. “I win a go-between. A brass go-between.”

The phone finally rang at three-thirty. Fastnaught was stretched out on one of the twin beds. Demeter was still in his chair reading a newspaper that I’d sent down for. The voice on the phone was the man again and he still had a mouthful of wet cotton.

“Do you know Washington?” the voice asked.

“No.”

“There’s a golf driving range in the northwest section.” He gave me the address. “Do you have that?”

“Yes.”

“Be there at exactly ten-fifteen tonight. Have the money in a suitcase in the back seat of a four-door sedan. Park your car, but don’t get out of it. At exactly ten-twenty the back door will be opened. Don’t look around. I mean it. Don’t look around. The shield will be put in your back seat. Wait five minutes and then you can do whatever you want to do. Have you got all that?”

“I’ve got it.”

The phone went dead and I hung up. Fastnaught was sitting up on the bed; Demeter had put his paper on the floor. Both of them were looking at me.

“Tonight at ten-fifteen,” I said. Then I told them what the cottony voice had told me.

“Sort of a public place, isn’t it?” Demeter said.

“Not if it’s still raining,” I said.

Fastnaught went to the window and peered out. “It’s stopped,” he said. “Looks like it might clear up.”

Demeter rose and stretched. “Ten-fifteen tonight, huh?” he said. “How’s your golf game, Fastnaught?”

“Lousy.”

“Maybe you’ll get a chance to improve it tonight, but right now we’ve got some work to do.”

“You’re not leaving?” I said.

“Sorry to rush off like this, St. Ives, but we’ve got things to do, people to see, and plans to plot.”

“You’ll be around tonight, I suppose.”

“Just look for the car with the flashing lights and the extra-loud siren,” Fastnaught said.

They moved to the door. “St. Ives hasn’t got a thing to worry about now, has he, Fastnaught?” Demeter said.

“He should be worry-proof,” the Sergeant said.

“Just one item, Lieutenant,” I said.

“What?” Demeter said as he opened the door.

“Try not to screw it up.”

He turned from the door and let his bright black beanlike eyes run from the tips of my cordovan shoes to the top of my head where my hair lay in a neatly trimmed pile that could have been a little thicker, but was nicely touched with gray at the temples. From the expression on Demeter’s face, he could have been measuring me for a casket. A cheap one. “We’ll try not to screw it up, Mr. St. Ives,” he said with something that almost resembled a smile. “We’ll try not to very hard.”

When they had gone I picked up the green telephone book and looked up a number. I dialed and when it answered, I said, “What time do you close?”

“At ten o’clock,” a woman’s voice said. “The stacks close at seven forty-five.”

I said thank you and hung up and went to the window to see if Fastnaught had told the truth about the rain. He had so I left my raincoat hanging in the closet, took the elevator down to the lobby, and flagged a cab from the sidewalk. After I was in, the driver turned and gave me a questioning look. He wanted to know where I was headed so I said, “Library of Congress, please.”

If you had enough time and enough patience, I suppose you could find out all about everything at the Library of Congress. I spent two hours in its periodical section, guided in my search by an elderly gentleman with a hearing aid who didn’t mind scurrying back and forth bearing back issues of some rather esoteric and extremely dull publications. When the periodical room closed at 5:45 I went to the main reading room and spent another hour with the bound back issues of some more tedious publications which looked as if no one had leafed through them in 20 years. When I finished at 7:30 I had acquired a sizable chunk of information and some of it might even prove useful.

I caught a cab to the Hertz place, rented a four-door Ford Galaxie, and parked it in the Madison’s garage. In my room I tried to call Frances Wingo at home, but there was no answer. I poured a mild Scotch and water and then telephoned down for a steak sandwich and a tall glass of milk. I chewed the sandwich and drank the milk and tasted neither. Afterwards, I stretched out on the bed and studied the ceiling and watched some thoughts go galloping through my mind, stumbling a little now and again, but galloping around and around and winding up at the same place because they had nowhere else to go.