“Well, kid, you might say I’m a personal representative.”
“That’s the last straw!” She picked up her glass of Donald Duck orange juice and heaved it in my face. We stared at each other for a moment, and then she collapsed into weeping. “Oh, Trig, I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right, honey. Go below now. We were wrong. You aren’t quite ready yet.”
I had thought she was ready, but occasionally I’m wrong about those things. You might have thought I was provoking her needlessly, and it may be that I was because deep down I wanted her to stay. Actually, what I do for a living is no great secret. But I feel that if she couldn’t stand up under this minor amount of friction, she probably couldn’t stand up to the Chill Warlocks of the world without more preparation. In my own mind I feel I did the right thing, but then rationalization comes fairly easy even to a realist like me.
Anyway, I decided it would be cruel not to follow her below and explain to her just what it is I do.
“Now, kid,” I told her, “this Chill Warlock cheated your father out of a lot of money, didn’t he?”
“Yes,” she whimpered. “His life savings for that worthless pay-TV stock. Daddy shot himself when he found out.”
“Now let’s say I was to go out and find Chill Warlock and get back the money—”
“Oh, Trig, would you?”
“Sure, for a price. You see, if I recovered the money I would give you half and would keep half for myself. And that’s the business I’m in. That’s how I keep the Flustered Blush seaworthy.”
“Oh, I get it,” she said, sniffling. “But, Trig, why didn’t you say so before? It would be worth it to me to get back that money.”
“Well, sweetheart, when you first turned up I didn’t really need the money. I’d just finished a big job.”
“Oh, I see. But, Trig, it’s been seven months. By now, who knows where Chill could have gotten to? You could never find him.”
I gave her a grim and determined look. “I can find him. And I will find him, kid.”
“Oh. Is your money running low?”
“Well, of course, there’s that, too. But mainly I can’t stand injustice. It makes me sick, and like the twentieth-century Sir Galahad I am, I cannot re§t until that injustice has been avenged.”
“Trig, in all candor, you did do rather well for seven months—”
“But you needed me. I couldn’t leave you.”
“And I still need you, Trig! After this morning I know I do.”
“Sure, but I can afford to get away for a few days to go after Warlock, while you mind the Blush.”
“I guess I could, Trig.”
“So, can I consider you a client? At the usual percentage?”
“All right, Trig.”
“That’s the spirit, honey. I’ll have the usual contract for you to sign, and by noon I can be out and after Chill Warlock.”
“Oh, Trig, you’re so good.”
Chill Warlock was one of the most undesirable products of our sick society. There have always been swindlers, sure, but there was a day when swindlers had a little class. Chill Warlock was the kind of a mar; who could beat up a defenseless girl with one hand and sell her father worthless pay-TV stock with the other. You had to say one thing for Chill Warlock — he may have been crude and filthy and ugly and antisocial, but he was one hell of a salesman.
My contacts told me Warlock had been last heard of in Chicago where he was working his pay-TV swindle on a new crop of suckers. An hour later I was on a jet for the so-called Windy City.
Fifty years ago aviation was fun, I suppose. Adventurous. Young men with goggles and the dusty wind blowing their hair climbing into two-cockpit biplanes and smiling for the newsreel cameramen and flying into a great beyond you could feel and taste and if you didn’t come back at least you’d done something, experienced something. Now, fat middle-aged businessmen and women and children sit in luxuriously furnished, obscenely spacious jet-powered vehicles and watch “Mary Poppins” on the screen and read the Reader’s Digest and feel pangs of fear about dangers they can’t even see. They can still die, but if they die they’ve done nothing, experienced nothing.
We got into O’Hare Airport in early evening. I put through a call to Tim Dugan, an old friend of mine who was a television commentator in Chicago.
“Tim, this is Trig.”
“Trygve McKee! It’s good to hear your voice, buddy.” It was good to hear his voice, too. It brought back memories of lazy days and fishing amid the Florida Keys, nights of laughter and beautiful girls and sweet life. It brought back to me the beauty that is friendship.
“Tim, I’m on the trail of a chap named Chill Warlock, a very nasty sort of character. He’s running a phony pay-TV stock racket. I hear he’s in your town.”
“He was, Trig. I had him on the program, gave him a hard way to go, told him to shinny up a tree.”
“And did he?”
“I understand he shinnied up a Central Park elm tree. I’d like to say more, Trig, but I hate to say anything on the phone. I think they have my line tapped. Come out to the apartment?”
“Sure, Tim. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
“Okay, buddy. Take two and hit to right.”
A yellow cab carried me through the Chicago twilight, but the real way to see Chicago is by El train, whizzing past the hanging laundry of dirty slum backyards and filthy prehardened slum kids like some of us were and nobody should have to be. Chicago is that El ride and that El ride is Chicago, because Chi is a dull, decaying, dying town these days, a town with a racy past and no perceptible future. I longed for a little wisp of wind to relieve my boredom.
Tim Dugan lived in a classy apartment on Sheridan Road. The penthouse. Tim doesn’t live there any more. Tim doesn’t live anywhere any more. Because in the half hour between the time I hung up the phone at the airport and the time I entered the apartment somebody had put an end to Tim Dugan. The big gaping hole in his head left little doubt of this fact.
I didn’t know who had done it, but I had a hunch it had to do with Chill Warlock. Then I knew I’d get him. You don’t murder Trig McKee’s friends and get away with it. Up to now the hunt for Chill Warlock had been strictly business. Now it was pleasure, too.
I thought perhaps I should call the police. I dialed headquarters and asked for an old buddy of mine on the Chicago police force. They’d never heard of Captain von Flanagan. Well, there’s quite a turnover of police these days. Mostly in dark alleys.
I set out to find Chill Warlock, following the one clue Tim Dugan had given me: an elm tree in Central Park.
There was garbage in the streets in New York. I don’t mean that metaphorically; there was a garbage collectors’ strike at the time I was there and the stuff was piling up all over town, creating a health hazard. It was a kind of symbol of New York, because there’s been garbage in the streets there for a long time and New York’s always been a health hazard, physically, mentally, and spiritually. Those pictures you see of New York’s skyline may be beautiful and inspiring, but you have to be there to know that what’s at the base of those vaunted skyscrapers is ugly and rotten, and that lady with her torch raised heavenward and her welcoming speech carved in stone gets more and more ironic, more and more absurd as the years go by. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shores and I will smother them in the ghettos of New York and make the more intelligent of them leaders of the underworld...”
New York is full of rats, but there was one rat it didn’t have: Chill Warlock. The word was he’d headed west, to California. Only a few minutes after I’d landed at Kennedy Airport, I was watching “Mary Poppins” again.