“Put the gun away, Joey.” Phoneblum—this time I was sure it was Phoneblum—entered the room through the bedroom doorway and stubbed out a cigar in an ashtray on the desk. When it was out, he held it to his nose and sniffed at it, then put it carefully alongside the ashtray. His fingers were fat but graceful—I reserved judgment on the rest of him. There must have been the skeleton of a colossus under that flesh, but if there was a bone or a sharp edge of any kind in him, I couldn’t find it. He was wearing a shirt and pants but, stretched over that much bulk, they looked like a tarpaulin or sailcloth. There was an enormous sweater over that, and then a matching scarf around his neck to pin his white beard against his expansive chest. His forehead was high, but a plentiful thatch of hair rose up above it to sweep back over his skull, and his eyebrows were cocked intelligently above eyes that were nearly buried in flesh. Despite all this he carried himself with a kind of grace or vanity that contained within it a memory of something that once was: the suggestion of a young, thin man entombed inside this old, enormously fat one. “Go upstairs,” he said to Joey, and the kangaroo went obediently back to the elevator. I stood staring. The fat man turned to me and smiled without malice. “Have a seat, Mr. Metcalf.”
I sat down in a chair and left the couch for Phoneblum. He’d need it. When the elevator closed on the kangaroo, the fat man moved to a position behind the couch and gripped the back of it with both hands, then tilted his bulk over it. His scarf tumbled loose across the cushions. “You say we have something to talk about,” he said. His voice was deep and theatrical, with a quality of burnished wood, but the tone was neutral.
“I keep turning corners and bumping into your kangaroo,” I said. “That’ll do for starters.”
“You are an inquisitor;”
“That’s right.”
“Do questions make you uncomfortable? I prefer to relax the conventional strictures.”
“Fine with me. Questions are my bread and butter.”
The fleshy pie of a face laughed. “Very good. And I’ll help you to understand which side your questions are buttered on, and who it is that does the buttering. You see, I’m old enough, Mr. Metcalf, to remember a time when—ah, but you’ll grow impatient if I allow myself to reminisce. Permit me to offer you a drink…”
I nodded. He pushed his bulk away from the couch with surprisingly little effort, and opened a cabinet full of amber bottles and matching beveled glass tumblers. Without asking he poured me a glassful of what turned out to be scotch, and I took it without saying thank you. I sucked down about half of it while he settled himself into the couch.
“Joey has an egotistical streak,” he said, almost apologetically. “He doesn’t mean any harm. He tries to please, and he’s quite intelligent. I have to help him learn to curb his enthusiasm.”
“Where I come from, you don’t teach puppets. You just pull their strings.”
“Oh! That’s not fair to either of us, Mr. Metcalf. Joey’s far more than a puppet, and I prefer to think of myself as something more subtle than a puppeteer. A catalyst, perhaps.”
He was a talker, in an age where talkers were few and far between. I was a talker myself, but I was a jaded professional. Phoneblum looked to have a hobbyist’s passion for it.
“I’m not really that interested in your opinion of yourself,” I said. “You sent Joey to muscle me off the case. I’ve got a chipped tooth to show for it.”
“I would think that sort of thing was a part of your chosen profession.”
“It doesn’t mean I have to like it. You want me off this case. Why?”
“I don’t care one way or another about the case. You were upsetting people I care for, and I asked you to stop.”
“People you care for. Who would that be?”
“Dr. Testafer, Celeste Stanhunt, and the children at Cranberry Street.”
“There’s only one child now at Cranberry Street, Phoneblum, and that’s the kitten. The people you say you care for—it’s the same bunch that turns white at the mention of your name.”
That slowed him down. His eyebrows knit together and then rose skeptically across the broad canvas of his forehead—they seemed to have developed compensatory powers of expression as the rest of his body grew blunt. He raised his drink and took a sip, drawing it out until he could think of a reply.
“My life is complicated,” he intoned. “The inquisition has taken my most cherished possessions from me. I live at cross-purposes to society. I do my best to maintain the fragile connections between what was and what is, but as often as not, the thread is broken…” He squeezed his eyes shut in pain.
He was a ham. I was a method actor, but he was a ham. “Dr. Testafer called you a gangster,” I said. “He’s not so young—”
“Dr. Testafer may not appreciate my benevolence,” he interrupted angrily, “but rest assured, he lives his life out according to my good graces.”
I threw a curve ball. “I was up there tonight. Somebody butchered his sheep.”
Phoneblum looked momentarily startled. He stretched out and put his glass on the wooden arm of the couch.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’ll pin it on Angwine. It’s made to order.”
“You lose a client,” he said.
“That’s right. You may live at cross-purposes to the Office, but from where I stand you both look to benefit from Angwine’s frame.”
“I’ve never even met Angwine.”
“You’ll never get a chance to now. His time is up. You and the Office went to dinner and he’s footing the bill.”
“Then what, if I might ask, is the purpose of continuing your inquisition?”
“I’m restless. I think the frame is jerry-rigged. If I find the right nail to pry out, the whole thing’ll come crashing down around your shoulders.”
“A beautiful image. I wish you luck. You don’t seriously think the Office will entertain your suspicions for long, once they’ve closed the case themselves, do you? How good is your karma?”
“My karma is none of your business. It’ll hold out long enough.”
“Oh my.” He picked up his drink again, and sighed philosophically—he was the kind who could do it. “You remind me of myself, once upon a time. We’re not really that different even now. We chafe at our bits—but you’re stubborn, inflexible. Stupid, finally. I’ve learned to compromise. In negotiation lies power, viability. Your inflexibility has rendered you marginal.”
“It isn’t me who lives underground, Phoneblum.”
“That’s it. Growl and nip. It’s very frightening.”
“I didn’t need to growl to frighten Celeste Stanhunt,” I said. I wanted to bring, it back to the facts of the case, the clues, if they could be called that. “She was scared because she got me confused with one of your goons. What’ve you got on her?”
“You misunderstand our relationship. I introduced Maynard Stanhunt to his future bride. You might say they were my creation. Celeste is very forgetful, but she owes me a great deal, and in her more lucid moments she’ll acknowledge it.”
“Towards the end your creation wasn’t doing so well. Stanhunt hired me to keep tabs on Celeste when she ran away to Cranberry Street.”
“Yes,” he said darkly. “She is like that. We were always ‘keeping tabs’ on Celeste.”
“Is Pansy Greenleaf Celeste’s girlfriend?”
His eyebrows almost managed to tie themselves in a knot. “No, no. Nothing like that. A friend of the family.”