"I'm looking for Jerry Congram," I said. "I couldn't find his name on the mailboxes."
"No Congram lives here."
"Do you recall when he did?"
"Don't have to think hard to remember him," Tog-gins said. "Curly-haired young guy, nifty dresser. World by the tail."
"That's him."
"Moved out about four months ago without a forwarding address. And he still owes me three months on his lease." The barrel chest puffed out in resentment.
"Did he live here alone?"
"Ha! Signed the lease alone, but he always had company." Toggins smoothed the front of his shirt with an outspread hand, as if sensitive about his paunch. "Not the sort of company to cause trouble, though. Upstanding-looking young people, like from good homes. Course, Jerry Congram seemed that way, too, and he vamoosed without paying his rent."
"How many of these people would visit him at a time?"
"Sometimes seemed like a dozen, men and women. Never had any complaints, though. They were quiet types, like I said." He narrowed pink-rimmed eyes at me. "You ain't no friend of his, are you?"
"I'd like to find him, just like you."
"He owe you money?"
"You might say that." I reached into my wallet and got out a photo of Joan Clark. "This one of the young women who visited Congram?"
Toggins gave the snapshot his same narrow-eyed glare. "Yeah, sure is! She was in to see him all the time, like the rest of them. Hey, they didn't have anything goin' up there, did they?"
"Like what?"
"I don't know. You ain't a cop, are you?"
"No, a private detective."
Toggins backed up a step. "You puttin' me on? I never met one of you guys."
"There aren't many of us."
"If you find this Congram, will you let me know? Because of the rent."
"Sure. Did he keep pretty regular hours while he lived here?"
Toggins scratched the freckles on his forehead. "Well, that's pretty hard to say for sure, but he seemed to. Like I said, a typical clean-cut young guy, like you'd want your daughter to take up with. If I had what he does, I'd be doin' somethin' with it."
"How long had Congram lived here?"
"Nine months of a one-year lease." Toggins clamped a long cigar in his teeth and fired it up with a silver lighter. I wished he hadn't. The thick gray smoke that clouded the air around us gave off a pungent, sickening odor.
"Cherry-scented," he told me. "I smoke these and my wife don't bitch."
"Do you have any idea what Congram did for a living?" I asked him.
He did a George Burns with his cigar. "I couldn't say. He left here every day with his sharp suit and little briefcase. We got a lot of 'em here, captains of industry, if you know what I mean. I shouldn't be surprised when they skip out on their rent."
I told Toggins I appreciated his cooperation and got away from his cigar's fallout.
It had begun to rain, an insincere sort of drizzle from a half-blue sky. I stood for a while beneath the awning outside the Executive Towers, waiting for the rain to stop. The sidewalks were clear of people, and the tires of passing cars hissed on wet pavement. After Toggins' cigar, the rain-freshened air seemed especially sweet.
The deeper I delved into Talbert's murder and Joan Clark's disappearance, the more Congram emerged as a catalyst. I had no idea yet as to how he was involved, but I was almost certain of his involvement. Be it awe, envy or fear, the man had made an impression on everyone I'd talked to who'd known him.
The rain stopped as if it had been turned off, and I jogged across the bright, puddled street to my car.
I turned the ignition key and pulled out behind an old Ford full of teenagers. Most of the paint had been sanded from the Ford, giving it the appearance of a camouflaged military vehicle. I turned on my wipers to clear the windshield of raindrops and stopped behind the old Ford at a red light. Even a car-length behind I could hear the deep bass rhythm of the Ford's radio at high volume. A miniature figure with outstretched arms and legs dangled by a thread or rubber band from the rearview mirror, like an obscene crucifix.
The traffic light flashed to green, and the Ford's tires whirred on wet cement. I didn't know why the driver was in such a hurry; there was a stop sign a block away.
The Ford braked to a nose-diving halt at the stop sign and had just stopped rocking when I pulled up behind it. Cross traffic had the intersection blocked for a few minutes, and I sat staring at the silhouetted, gently bobbing, spread-armed figure suspended from the Ford's rearview mirror.The dangling figure loosened something on the edge of my memory, and suddenly that something illuminated into image in my mind-the image of a newspaper photograph, a man in a dark business suit, plummeting to his death, limbs outstretched and body arced as if in a last desperate and maniacal attempt to soar. A man the photo's caption had identified as Robert Manners.
Dale Carlon had been examining the newspaper in the Star Lane house, but he'd been concerned mainly with the idea of a top business executive's pressures driving him to suicide, relating the story to his own problems. So he hadn't remembered the man's name, as I hadn't until my memory had been flicked by the sight of the dangling rearview mirror ornament. And Robert Manners was the name penciled on the back of a business card lettered GRATUITY INSURANCE. "Ingerence," as Melissa Clark had mispronounced it.
I tried to remember some details of the story. Manners had been a Los Angeles business executive, member of a long list of boards and committees. Had he been depressed over something specific? Had he left any family? I couldn't remember.
I stopped at a service station and got directions to the Chicago Public Library, at Michigan and Washington.
The Chicago papers had carried the Robert Manners story on the same date as the Layton paper. The library had it on microfilm. Manners had been district manager of a big firm called Witlow Cable, the exact business of which wasn't stated. He had leaped to his death from the roof of Witlow Cable's twelve story office building. Business associates said he had been unusually tense lately, though the business was going well. And Manners' widow reported that he had seemed depressed lately, but not to the point of suicide. No note had been found, but Manners' personal effects had been removed from his pockets and arranged neatly on a corner of his desk. Police had no reason to suspect foul play but were investigating.
I leaned back from the microfilm viewer. I knew how the police investigated that sort of case. How much time and manpower did they have to waste on a violent death that was almost certainly a suicide? Not all of the troubled who choose their own time to leave this world are considerate enough to leave behind notes of explanation.
Back at my motel, I looked in the Chicago telephone directory for a Gratuity Insurance. There was none listed. I phoned a few national insurance organizations for information about Gratuity, but as far as they could determine there was no such company.
The direction I had to take was clear. West to Los Angeles, the City of Angels. I didn't like that allusion to an afterlife.
I got in touch with Dale Carlon and brought him up to date on developments. He said that at the Star Lane house he'd been interested in the Layton paper's photo and news account of Manners' death because of the business-pressure angle, the presumed motive for suicide. Everyone involved in high level decision-making had felt that pressure, Carlon told me, including himself. The prospect of suicide was considered, if only fleetingly, by many who shouldered such responsibility. It was difficult for me to imagine someone as wealthy and self-serving as Carlon contemplating suicide, but bearing in mind the fifty thousand dollars, I didn't tell him that.
He did agree with me that it was now hard to believe the newspaper's being folded to that page at the Star Lane house was coincidental. Either the paper was deliberately left arranged that way or, more likely, someone had been reading the account of Manners' death with interest and had put down the paper still folded to the story.