I sat down on a footstool and negotiated in earnest. At last he agreed to do it for double his normal fee, payable in advance. “Forty dollars. I cannot do it for a penny less.”
I tried to appear incredulous, as if I thought I was being gouged. The fabric alone had cost double that. Finally I pulled two twenties from my wallet. He told me to stop in at noon on Monday. “But next time, no rushes.”
Murray had left a note under my windshield wiper, informing me that he’d caught a cab downtown and that I owed him sixteen dollars. I tossed the paper in the trashcan and headed for Skokie.
Uncle Stefan had been moved to a regular room that afternoon. That meant I didn’t have to go through a routine with nurses and Metzinger just to see him. However, the police guard had also been removed-if his attackers were ordinary B & E men, he wasn’t in any danger, according to the cops. I bit my lip. Caught by my own story, damn it. Unless I told the truth about the forgeries and the Mob, there was no way to convince the police that Uncle Stefan needed protection.
The old man was delighted to see me. Lotty had been by in the morning, but no one else was visiting him. I pulled out the photographs and showed them to him. He nodded calmly, “Just like Hill Street Blues. Do I recognize the mug shots?”
He selected Novick from the pile without hesitation.
“Oh, yes. That face is not easy to forget. Even though this picture is not totally clear, I have no doubt, no question. That is the man with the knife.”
I stayed and talked with him for a while, turning over in the back of my mind various possibilities for his protection. If I just gave Novick’s picture to the police… but if Pasquale wasn’t willing to let him go, then he’d get both me and Uncle Stefan without any compunction or difficulty.
I abruptly interrupted a reminiscence of Fort Leavenworth. “Excuse me. I can’t leave you here without a guard. And while I can stay until the end of visiting hours tonight, it’s just too easy for someone to get in and out of a hospital. If I call a security service I trust and get someone over here, will you tell Dr. Metzinger it’s your idea? He may think you’re a paranoid old man, but he won’t turn your guard out the way he will if I put it to him.”
Uncle Stefan was disposed to be heroic and fought the idea, until I told him the same hoods were gunning for me: “If they kill me, and you’re dead, there isn’t a soul on earth who can go to the police for me. And our detective agency will vanish.” Put as an appeal to his chivalry, the idea was palatable.
The service I used was called All Night-All Right. In a way, its employees were as amateurish as their name. Three enormous brothers and two of their friends made up the entire staff, and they only took jobs that appealed to them. No North Shore weddings, for example. I’d used them once when I had a load of rare coins I was returning to an Afghani refugee.
Jim Streeter answered the phone. When I explained the situation to him, he agreed to send someone up in a couple of hours. “The boys are out moving someone’s furniture”-one of their sidelines. “When they get back I’ll send Tom up.”
Uncle Stefan obediently rang for the night nurse and explained his fears to her. She was inclined to be sarcastic, but I murmured a few words about hospital safety and malpractice suits and she said she would tell “Doctor.”
Uncle Stefan nodded approvingly at me. “You are a very tough young lady. Ah, if only I had known you thirty years ago, the FBI never would have caught me.”
A gift shop in the lobby yielded a pack of cards. We played gin until Tom Streeter showed up at eight-thirty. He was a big, quiet, gentle man. Seeing him, I knew I’d stopped one hole. At least temporarily.
I kissed Uncle Stefan good-night and left the hospital, checking carefully at each doorway, mixing with a large family group leaving the building. I inspected my car before opening the door. As near as I could tell, no one had wired it with dynamite.
Driving down the Edens, what puzzled me was the connection between O’Faolin and the forgeries. He hires Novick from Pasquale. How does he know Pasquale? How would a Panamanian archbishop know a Chicago mobster? Anyway, he hires Novick from Pasquale to back me off the forgeries. But why? The only connection I could think of was his longterm friendship with Pelly. But that made Pelly responsible for the forgeries and that still didn’t make sense. The answer had to be at the friary and I had to get through Sunday somehow before I could find it.
Back at the Bellerophon, I plugged my phone into the wall. It seemed to work. My answering service told me Ferrant had tried phoning me as well as Detective Finchley.
I tried Roger first. He sounded subdued. “There’s been a disturbing development in this takeover attempt. Or maybe it’s a relief. Someone has stepped forward and filed five percent ownership with the SEC.” He’d been closeted with the Ajax board all day discussing it. One of the other managing partners from Scupperfield, Plouder would be flying in tomorrow. Roger wanted to have dinner with me and get my ideas, if any.
I agreed to meet him. If nothing else, it would give me something to think about until Monday.
While I ran water in the bathtub I made my other call. Detective Finchley had left for the day, but Mallory was still at work. “Your lawyer says you’re ready to make a statement about Stefan Herschel,” he growled.
I offered to see him first thing Monday morning. “What did Detective Finchley want?”
I could get my gun back, Bobby said grudgingly. They’d gotten the Skokie police to send it down to them. They were confiscating the picklocks, though. It hurt Bobby physically to tell me about the gun. He didn’t want me carrying it, he didn’t want me in the detective business, he wanted me in Bridgeport or Melrose Park with six children and, presumably, a husband.
XXI
ROGER POKED MOODILY at his steak. “By the way, thanks for the note you left yesterday. How was the archbishop?”
“There were two. One was fulsome, the other ugly. Tell me about this filing.”
I had met him at the Filigree and been moved by his total exhaustion. We had drinks in the bar before dinner, Roger so worn that he hadn’t felt like talking. Now he rubbed his forehead tiredly.
“I am baffled. Totally and utterly baffled. I’ve been dealing with it all day, and I still can’t understand it… It’s like this. If you own five percent or more of a company’s stock, you have to file with the SEC and tell them what you mean to do with your holding. You know you asked me a week or so ago about a Wood-Sage company? Well, they’re the ones who made the filing.
“Now they did it late yesterday, just so they wouldn’t have to answer a lot of questions or be in the Journal or anything. But of course, our lawyers got all the material. Such as it was. Wood-Sage isn’t a corporation that does anything apparently. They’re just a group of people who buy and sell stocks for their mutual benefit, figuring if they pool their investments they can do better than they would alone. It’s not that unusual. And they’re claiming they only bought so many Ajax shares because they think the company’s a good buy. The trouble is, we can’t get any kind of line on who owns Wood-Sage.” He ran his fingers through his long hair and pushed his plate away, much of the steak uneaten.
“The disclosure to the SEC should include the owners, shouldn’t it?” I asked.
He shrugged. “The owners are the shareholders. There is a board of directors, but it seems to be made up of brokers, including Tilford and Sutton.”
“The buyers must include their customers, then.” I thought back to my burglary of their offices. “I don’t have a list of all their customers. And I don’t know what it would tell you, anyway. The one strange thing about them is they do business for Corpus Christi. Corpus Christi bought several million dollars of stock last fall. It might have given them to Wood-Sage.”