Stan Getz’s saxophone backing Astrud Gilberto woke me up. Leo had pulled up next to me, wearing a Panama hat and the kind of big plastic sunglasses they give to old people after cataract exams. In his enormous purple Hawaiian shirt, he would have looked like a retired jeweler who had wandered away from an assisted living facility in Miami Beach, except that he was driving a brand-new Porsche Carrera convertible with the top down.
“How many miles did last year’s Porsche have on it, Leo?” I asked out the open window of the Jeep.
He grinned up at me. “Fifty-four hundred. But Endora saw this color and said I ought to snap it up before they discontinued it.”
I stepped down from the Jeep and walked around Leo’s new car. It was silver, with a pinkish cast to it. I looked at Leo, still seated behind the steering wheel, in his ridiculous straw hat and black septuagenarian sunglasses and smiled.
“Endora said I’d grow to love the color,” he grinned.
I nodded. One of the many reasons I liked Endora was that she melded her eccentricities with Leo’s, encouraging Leo to be Leo, only more so. If that meant a pink Porsche once in a while, so be it.
Leo was buying, so I ordered two hot dogs. “My billing client may go under indictment, so you might have to feed me until I collect Social Security,” I said as we waited by the window.
“Makes sense.” Leo slid the sagging tray carefully off thecounter and carried it to a table in the shade of the viaduct. “Tell me what you learned about Michael Jaynes,” he said, shooing away a pigeon and sitting down.
“Don’t you want to talk about the Bohemian?”
“In due time. First Jaynes.” He picked up a hot dog.
“He calls.”
That stopped him. He set down the hot dog.
I told him about Nadine who became Lucy Vesuvius, about the random arrivals of the ten- and twenty-dollar bills over the years, and about the man named Michael who called the store in Clarinda every few months.
“No telling, though, whether it is your Mr. Jaynes?”
“Nor, if it is, if he ever gets up to Lucy’s place.”
“There’s never a letter with the cash?”
“And such a modest amount, at that.”
Leo took a bite. “Meaning?”
“Meaning once again this case is defined by 1970 dollars. Dollars that don’t make sense.”
Leo’s eyebrows inched up from behind his cataract glasses, waiting.
I went on. “I believe the money demands-the ten thousand, the fifty thousand, the five hundred thousand-were written back then.”
Leo nodded. “You’ve said that.”
“Why use those old notes at all, Leo? Why not write new letters-letters demanding much larger dollars?”
“You’ve said that, too.” He started on his second hot dog.
“Then there’s the money Nadine’s been getting all along. Ten or twenty bucks would have bought a big bag of groceries back in 1970, but it’s not even a tank of gas today.”
“It’s all he can spare.”
“Could spare, Leo. The last envelope was postmarked three days after the half million was left behind Ann Sather’s. If Jaynes hadjust come into half a million dollars, wouldn’t he have stuffed a lot more into the latest envelope?”
Leo’s dark eyebrows were all the way up now, poised just under the brim of his straw hat. “Unless?” he prompted.
“Unless the bombings are not about money at all.”
Twenty-one
I called the Bohemian’s office from Kutz’s parking lot. Griselda Buffy answered the main line, put me on hold, and, in less time than it should have taken, came back on and told me Mr. Chernek would see me whenever I could make it. I told her I could make it right away. I hopped on the Eisenhower for the third time that day and got down to the Bohemian’s building in the same time it took to chew a roll of Tums.
I stepped around a young man in a too-tight dark suit studying the building directory in the foyer, punched the elevator button, and rode up.
The reception area was empty. I sat on one of the creased green leather wing chairs and picked up a two-week-old issue of Business Week. Several subscription cards fell out. Two weeks old, the magazine hadn’t been touched.
Fifteen minutes passed. The phone didn’t ring; no one came through the reception area. The only sound came from the grandfather clock in the corner, slowly ticking as if it were fighting the loss of each minute.
I got up and opened the walnut door to the general office. Notyping on keyboards, no opening of drawers, no talking on telephones. The office was dead, like a bus station in the middle of the night after the last bus has pulled away. I walked down a row of empty cubicles to the private offices in back.
Griselda Buffy stuck her head around a filing cabinet, her face startled. In that morgue, I must have sounded like a brass band.
“Mr. Elstrom. I didn’t know you were here.”
“There’s nobody up front.”
“I’ll tell Mr. Chernek you’ve arrived.”
She went down the corridor, tapped on a door, and went in. I looked around. The secretarial desks were deserted, cleared of papers and pencil cups like the cubicles. The doors to the private offices along the back were closed. I wondered if Griselda Buffy and the Bohemian were the last ones there.
The door down the hall opened. Griselda stepped out and motioned me to come to the Bohemian’s office.
“Vlodek,” he called out while I was still five feet away, rolling the vowels in his usual robust way. When I walked through his doorway, though, I almost stopped at the change in his appearance. His bronzed country club tan had gone pale, and the white collar of his apricot shirt lay loose around his neck. He sat behind an enormous paneled walnut desk, in a high-back burgundy leather chair that looked too big for him. It had only been three days since I’d seen him, but he looked like he’d shrunk in that time.
“Please, sit,” he said. Cardboard file boxes, some with their lids removed, were stacked on the floor and on the four guest chairs. Opened manila folders were spread everywhere. I took two boxes off one of the side chairs, set them on the floor, and sat down.
The Bohemian set down the sheaf of papers he was holding and looked at me across the desk.
“Tell me what’s going on,” I said.
I thought I saw a faint tremor in his big hands as he folded them on his stomach. “I am accused of stealing from a client, tocover the losses I, and my other clients, have suffered from my poor investments. And, though I have not as yet been accused of anything more, the losses also give me an excellent motive to set off bombs and extort money from Crystal Waters.”
“What have you told the F.B.I.?”
“The truth, Vlodek. My accuser, Miss Terrado, suffered losses in her portfolio as a result of my advice. That I do not deny. But so did many other of my clients, as well as many of the people who work here, including myself. I admit I am guilty of not being able to predict the future, but all of Ms. Terrado’s investments have been intact; none have been removed from her account. The records will prove that.”
“Did you show those records to the F.B.I.?”
“I have not been given the chance. One would assume they would have wanted to review my files before they launched a grandstand play like a public arrest. But they did not.”
“Because they like you for the Crystal Waters explosions.”
“Yes. They need a suspect on hand, in case another house blows up. I’m available, here and now, unlike our elusive Mr. Jaynes. And because of my undeniable market losses, I do have cause for a motive. Unfortunately, since this is a criminal matter, my lawyers and I don’t get to depose my accuser, the government, or their source, the troubled Miss Terrado. I’ve got to be tried to fight back.”