“I’ve got a punch in the stomach that belongs to him,” I said. “It’ll keep. Who stepped into his shoes—or am I looking at her?”
“That might be accurate,” she said.
I looked over at Surface. He shot me his sourest look.
“Then you’re the one I want to talk to,” I said. “Nothing to do with before.”
“You have five minutes of my time.”
“I’m sure you’ll lose track of the time,” I said. “It gets good at the end.”
“I’ve got a short attention span,” she said.
“It’s pretty simple. There’s some murders nobody ever bothered to solve right, and a guy in the freezer who doesn’t belong there.”
“If you say the name Stanhunt, you have three minutes.”
“How about six minutes for two Stanhunts?”
“Get on with it.”
“I’ll talk fast and in a high-pitched voice, and you can record it and slow it down later. I solved the Stanhunt case. Both of them.”
Surface groaned like he was on her side.
“It’s a beauty,” I said. “A carefully balanced mechanism that faltered and collapsed in on itself. And it begins and ends with Danny Phoneblum.”
“You were obsessed with Phoneblum,” said Catherine. “I looked into it. It was hopeless. You can’t shoehorn him into the case.”
“I was obsessed with the truth,” I said. “Phoneblum is the case. Phoneblum and Celeste. The first time I met her, I could see she was trying to shake a past that wouldn’t shake. It took a while, but I figured it out. She was Phoneblum’s moll, for I don’t know how long, but for a while. He loved her, and she might have loved him back. She gave him a son. Testafer was the doctor who handled the delivery.”
“You’re straining my credulity already,” said Catherine.
“Give me a minute. The boy’s name was Barry. Phoneblum was looking for an heir, and he wanted Celeste to stick around and bring the kid up. But he was abusive, a wifeslapper, and Celeste ran away to stay with the doctor. I confirmed as much with Testafer yesterday afternoon.”
She made a face.
“She took the baby with her, and she didn’t leave Phoneblum a forwarding address. Dr. Testafer was grooming a new boy named Maynard Stanhunt for his practice, and when Stanhunt and Celeste met, the sparks flew. Testafer advised Celeste against it in private, but he didn’t bother to let his golden boy know he was romancing the estranged girlfriend of an angry gangster;”
“This is pretty tired stuff, Metcalf.”
“Get ready,” I said. “This is where the Office comes in. When Phoneblum locates his wayward madonna and child, he’s pretty steamed. He wants her back but she says no, and he gets ready to put boyfriend Maynard out of the picture. Only the fat man suddenly gets an idea. He runs a business where he defrosts karma-defunct bodies, courtesy of your old pal Kornfeld, to populate a little slavebox bordello. And he needs doctors to tend to the frostbite. So he takes the kid back and blackmails Stanhunt and Testafer into running his medical facility.”
I took a deep breath and went on. “Phoneblum has a junkie girl working for him running drugs. He buys her the house on Cranberry Street and converts her to a nanny for the kid.”
“Pansy Greenleaf,” said Surface.
“Right. So Phoneblum’s got his heir, he’s got his doctors, and he’s got Celeste back under his screws. Which by this time in their relationship is probably all he requires.”
Both Catherine and Surface were suddenly quiet and still. I had them going. I had myself going, for that matter, and now all I had to do was bring it off. I hoped I wouldn’t disappoint all three of us.
“Only problem,” I continued, “is Celeste has a habit of bailing out. She packs her bags and leaves the doctor, which makes Stanhunt and Phoneblum both pretty antsy. She’s what balances the equation between them. They put their heads together and start hiring detectives to keep tabs on her, to try and keep their little triangle intact.”
“You and me,” said Surface.
“You and me,” I said. “Only Celeste doesn’t turn out to be the leg of the triangle that gets permanently missing. When Stanhunt turns up dead in the hotel room, the balance is thrown in the other direction. Phoneblum no longer has a reason to keep away from Celeste. She knows it, and gets nervous, and mistakes everybody who looks at her funny for one of Phoneblum’s goons—me included. When she figures out I’m an independent operator, she tries to hire me for protection, and I nibble, but I don’t bite. It’s too bad too. The night she died, I ran into Testafer and the kangaroo creeping around town together on Phoneblum’s orders, looking for Celeste.”
“Celeste Stanhunt was killed by a stranger she picked up in a sex club,” said Catherine. “He raped her and killed her. She’d been asking for it and it finally happened.”
“Phoneblum found her that night and paid her back for leaving him,” I said. “There was nothing in his way once he lost the doctor. He’d been holding his rage in reserve, because of the beauty of their arrangement. And with Kornfeld and the Office in his pocket, he didn’t have to fear punishment. I can’t prove it, but that’s the way it went.”
“This case is starting to come back to me,” said Catherine. “The junkie girl had a brother. He came up from L.A. and killed Stanhunt in the hotel. He’s still guilty. The rest of this material is irrelevant.”
“Orton Angwine couldn’t have less to do with the case if he’d never come to town,” I said. “The stuff in that hotel room bugged me until yesterday morning. I didn’t spend six years thinking about it, but I might have and still not come up with the answer.”
I pointed at Surface. “It was something you said in your kitchen yesterday that did it. All the clues were in place, but I needed a little push to make the conceptual leap.”
“Jesus Christ, Metcalf,” said Surface. “You sure do like to talk.”
I didn’t tell him I was sweating out my addiction. I had too much pride. But if I’d stopped talking, I probably would have passed out.
“The two of you had my head spinning with theories,” I said. I looked at Catherine. “You had Stanhunt having the affair in the hotel, and you”—I looked at Surface—”you had Celeste doing the same thing.” I laughed. “You were both half right.”
“Let’s hear it,” said Catherine. She wanted to rush me.
My five minutes must have been over by now, but I knew I had all the time in the world.
“I’ll get there. But first I have to backtrack. There was a progression in the way Stanhunt and Phoneblum hired their private inquisitors, and it’s important. I came first, and I dealt with Stanhunt, and all he wanted me to do was lean on Celeste and suggest she go home. But hiring gumshoes wasn’t Stanhunt’s strength, and when I didn’t pan out, he turned the job over to Phoneblum. The fat man hired Walter here.” I gestured at Surface. “When the report came back that Celeste was getting some on the side, Phoneblum offered Surface good money to find the new boyfriend and put him in the ground. But Walter said no. And he left the job without ever having met Stanhunt. Isn’t that right?”
Surface grunted confirmation.
“Phoneblum was having trouble on another front. His son and protégé had gone babyhead, run away to Telegraph Avenue to sip whiskey and talk gibberish. Phoneblum still had hopes of reclaiming his flesh-and-blood heir—he was investing in a babyhead quarters for the backyard at Cranberry Street—but he was also looking around for another candidate. He found one in a young kangaroo named Joey Castle. Joey was an all-too-willing pupil.”