“Like what?”
“Like your whole story is bullshit.”
Scott set his cup down. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve been looking at your yearbook, Scott. Track, football, lacrosse, basketball. You say you saw Allie in Hyde Park and ‘gave chase,’ no pun intended. ‘Gave chase’? Nobody talks like that. That’s the sort of thing cops say when they lie on the witness stand.”
“She didn’t beat me, exactly. She ran into the subway.”
The kid was lying. Person looks up and to the right when they’re telling you something, they’re making it up as they go along.
“The subway? In Hyde Park?”
“Hyde Park Corner. There’s a station there.”
A hint of that wonderful teenage defensive whine had snuck into his voice. Neal didn’t answer him.
“I didn’t have a token,” Scott continued.
“You mean a ticket.”
“Yeah, okay, a ticket.”
Neal played with the salt and pepper shakers on the table, moving them in lazy figure-eight patterns.
“I’m not a cop,” he said. “If you tell me that’s the story, we finish our coffee and it’s over. But we’ll both know you’re holding back.”
Scott took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh.
“You won’t tell anyone?”
“The dean of admissions will never hear it from me.”
“If this ever got out-”
“It won’t.”
“A friend and I-he doesn’t go to this school-stayed over a few days after the school trip. We got kidding around one night…”
“Go ahead.”
“We called one of those services. You know, they have phone numbers in the paper? We called one of them.”
Neal’s heart bounced. “And they sent a couple of ladies over,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“And did you…”
“Yeah.”
“And was one of them Allie Chase?”
Scott looked shocked. “No! No way! Really!”
“Okay, okay. I believe you.”
“After we… we got talking a little, and we asked these girls if they knew where we could get some hash.” This last tidbit came out in a rush and Neal could see the kid relax.
“Hey, Scott, I’ll bet they knew, huh?”
“Yeah.” He sort of chuckled. “They called this guy who said to come meet him.”
“And you went?”
“I know it sounds dumb, but it was right out in public. Right by this movie theater in Leicester Square. We even knew the place, because we’d seen the new Bond movie there.”
“Where does Allie come in?”
“She was with him.”
“With who? The dealer?”
“Him and two others. A guy and a girl.”
“Did you talk to Allie?”
“No. When she walked up with this guy, she was laughing and all, but then she saw me and she turned away real quick, behind the other girl, and they backed off into the alley.”
“Scott, are you sure it was her?”
Scott nodded. “Real sure.”
“How come?”
“Allie and I… you know… we’d partied.”
“Then what happened?”
“We bought the hash and took off.”
“Did you try to approach Allie?”
Scott blushed. “Her friends were pretty punk-looking. I didn’t want to push it.”
“You were right. You did the right thing.”
“Anyway, when I got back, I thought I should tell Mrs. Chase, but I didn’t want to-”
“Tell everything. Sure.”
“So I made up the story about seeing Allie in the park.”
“How did Allie look? Okay?”
“Yeah, I guess so. A little ratty maybe. Sweatshirt and jeans.”
“Was she stoned?”
“Yeah, maybe. She was laughing a lot.”
“What about the dealer? What did he look like?”
“Cool. Very cool.” Scott smiled.
Some detectives can deal with “civilians,” others can’t. They get impatient and scream things like, “‘Cool. Very cool.’ What the hell does that mean?” Such detectives love to get clothing-store robberies, because the witnesses are perfect. (“This forty-two long in a cheap maroon blazer, gray polyester slacks, and Buster Browns comes in and
…”)
“What was cool about him?”
“He had real short hair and was wearing a double-breasted suit with a T-shirt! He was real slick with the money and the dope, like it was all a big joke, like he was selling hot dogs, or something.”
“Big guy? Little?”
“About your size. Bigger-boned.”
“If he plays football, what position is he?”
“Halfback, maybe a small tight end.”
“Did he have a name?”
“Not that I heard.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah, he had three safety pins stuck through his ear.”
I’m glad you brought that up, Scott. That might just help identify him. “Three safety pins?”
“Yeah,” answered Scott with unmixed admiration.
“What about the girls? You remember their names?”
“Ginger and Yvonne.”
Swell.
“The name of the service you called?”
“Sorry.”
“C’mon. You do this a lot?”
“No! We were drunk! You know.”
“How about the hotel?”
“The Piccadilly Hotel.”
Never ask a witness more than two questions in a row he can’t answer. Make sure you pitch him a watermelon every once in a while. Builds his confidence. The Gospel According to St. Joseph. Graham.
“Did the two hookers seem to know Allie? They say hi or anything?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Did the dealer say anything to her?”
“No. Not a word.”
“Anything else you remember or you want to tell me?” “It was kind of a blur. You know?” Neal nodded. He knew.
“Thanks, Scott,” he said, going through the ritual “You’ve been a big help.” “Can I go?”
“Hey, you have an exam tomorrow.” Scott started to slide out of the booth.
“One more thing,” Neal said, realizing he was doing a Columbo imitation. “The hash, how was it?”
Jack Armstrong Ail-American Boy grinned. “Primo.”
Neal‘s motel room was nothing special, but it had the essentials-a bed with a rationally placed reading light, a phone within easy reach, and a color TV that brought in the Yankees game. It also had clean glasses. Neal was feeling semicivilized, so he used one of them to belt down three slugs of scotch before dialing the phone.
Ed Levine answered after seven rings. He said hello with the voice of a man who doesn’t like being called at home.
“Ed?”
“Yeah?”
“Keep your fat fingers off my fucking case.”
Neal hung up the phone and sat back in bed as Guidry smoked another Angel. Maybe, he thought, maybe he could find the aptly named Alison Chase if she was still with this dealer.
The dealer was a pro, no question. He had good technique and some connections. He screened his first-time customers coming in and did small-time courtesy deals for business connections. And if he had turned Allie on, he hadn’t turned her over-yet. Definitely a yet, because a businessman doesn’t waste a commodity as valuable as a beautiful young girl. Unless he really loves her, then it will take a little longer.
So there was a place to start. Find the dealer and you have a shot at finding Allie. A long shot, indeed, but you’ve seen them hit before.
Just to encourage him, Guidry threw a curve that didn’t, which the batter pulled right and put over the fence as the base runner trotted contemptuously home.
Neal consoled himself with chapter seven of The Making of the English Working Class and another scotch.
Neal spent a very boring day and a half waiting for the FedEx package from Graham to arrive. He killed time with chapters eight through fifteen, Travis McGee, and Mr. Ed reruns. The desk rang him when the package came.
In it were three Xeroxed pages from a rag called the London Daily Leveller. the classified ads for May 7, the night that Scott Mackensen and his friend had let their fingers do the walking. Most of the ads were of the “for a good time, call” variety, but there were a number of specialty acts: mother/daughter teams, B amp;D mistresses (“Imelda knows you’ve been a bad boy”), a wide world of ethnic specialties (Neal wondered what a “full treatment Bulgarian hour” could possibly entail). There were bad little girls who wanted to be spanked first, some who wanted to be spanked afterward. Many had cute names. There were three Bambis, but to Neal’s intense relief, no Thumpers. A goodly number had French names, and not a few had threatening ones. Neal thought that any man dumb enough to call up a woman named Stiletto and invite her into his room deserved whatever he got.