“And Masetti,” said Cathy softly, “is gone.”
“In maybe ten minutes,” I said, getting to my feet, “I’ll find out where the CCG stands in all this.”
“Should I come along?” said Bill.
“No. You wait here. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Twenty-Eight
Danile had already arrived at the hotel. I got his room number from Charlie, the desk man, and told him to never mind announcing me, I’d announce myself. Then I took the elevator up and knocked on his door.
The door opened after a minute, and I came face to face with my second example of the Citizens for Clean Government. This one, Archer Danile, turned out to be a huge, full-faced, red-haired, florid individual who looked upon all the world, it seemed, with the same high degree of impersonal contempt. His eyes were small and pale blue, set deep beneath shaggy red brows, and his mouth was a thin wide line, permanently down-curved at the corners. The backs of his fingers were underbrushed with straggly red hairs, and the red-hair motif was followed through in thick waves atop his head. His massive chest and stomach were covered by a broad expanse of white shirt, with a black tie draped precisely down the middle of all the whiteness. He wore a black suit, the jacket open, and on his red-haired left wrist was a watch with a gold band.
“Archer Danile?” I said.
He nodded, slowly and with dignity.
“I’m Tim Smith,” I said. “Mr. Masetti may have mentioned me.”
“Licensed investigator,” he said. It was a category, and I’d just been filed away in it, and that took care of me.
I nodded and stuck out my hand, to see what he’d do with it.
He shook it. His handshake was too strong to be natural, and I got the idea this was a man who constantly tested his fellow beings for the degree to which they had failed to reach perfection, the yardstick being, quite naturally, himself.
I felt somewhat more optimistic. Judging by Masetti, a prerequisite for an honest, unbribable reformer was a miserable personality. Danile seemed to have that qualification to excess.
He frowned, puckering his lips out the way Sidney Greenstreet used to do, and when he said, “Come in,” I knew it was only after a long interior struggle.
He turned away into the room, leaving me to close the door after myself. I did so and went down the two-pace-long hall to the living room of the suite. Danile, ahead of me, settled himself down upon the sofa with the weighty dignity of Henry the Eighth at a rural court of high justice, and motioned with one hand for me to take the armchair to his right.
I did so, and he said, “Quite frankly, Mr., uh, Smith, I am not as yet fully apprised of the situation here in Winston. I haven’t yet read Mr. Masetti’s report, and so I honestly don’t know just what the current status is in this city, nor where you stand within it.”
“Masetti asked me to co-operate with the CCG,” I said. “I turned him down, thinking my loyalty was more to the people in the town than to outsiders.”
He nodded heavily. “An attitude, unfortunately, that we quite often have to contend with.”
“But there’ve been a number of changes since then,” I went on. “Two people have been murdered in attempts to kill me. I no longer have any feeling of loyalty to stop me.”
“And now you do wish to co-operate with us, is that it?”
“That’s it.”
He pursed his lips again, thinking, his eyes gazing off into the middle distance. At last he said, “And of what would this co-operation consist, Mr. Smith?”
“Information,” I told him. “Kickbacks, nepotism, fake construction bids, mismanagement of municipal funds...”
“I see.” He rested his hands in his lap, and tapped the tips of his fingers together. He studied the effect for a while, and then said, “You have learned of all these things in the time since Mr. Masetti talked to you?”
“No. I have comprehensive files for the last fifteen years.”
“Files?” He looked at me. “You mean you have known of these things for fifteen years?”
“I’ve kept complete files,” I said.
“Have you ever, before this, attempted to get this information into the hands of the proper authorities?”
I shook my head. “That wasn’t my job. My job was—”
“Not your job?” He sounded honestly shocked. “Surely, Mr. Smith, it is every citizen’s job—”
“No,” I said. For all his individual personality and appearance, completely unlike Masetti, he wound up spouting the same tired civics-class garbage. “My job,” I told him, “was to be a confidential investigator. If the facts I learn wind up in court, I’m not useful.”
He shook his head slowly back and forth, the lips once more pursed. “I don’t know, Mr. Smith,” he said. “I have no idea what sort of arrangement Mr. Masetti had in mind, or what offers he made you, if any, but I’m afraid I’ll have to know quite a bit more about the situation here in Winston before agreeing to do business with you. If you are attempting now to gain immunity for yourself by making some sort of deal with the Citi—”
“Immunity? What the hell kind of immunity?”
“Now, really, Mr. Smith,” he said ponderously. “After all, you have just stated to me that you have in your possession a record of governmental crimes in this community covering the last fifteen years, and that you have, until this very moment, never once attempted to reveal this information to the proper authorities. Quite the reverse. You have gone so far as to admit to me that you have actively concealed the evidence of these crimes.”
“Never!” This interview wasn’t going at all as I’d expected, and I was beginning to lose my temper. “I have never,” I told him angrily, “concealed the evidence of any crime. The evidence has always been there, and is there now. And any proper authority who’s interested can go find it exactly the way I did, by looking for it. It isn’t my job to do the proper authority’s work for it.”
“Your job, as you describe it, Mr. Smith,” he said pompously, “is a dishonest one.”
“As a matter of fact,” I went on, talking over him, “what lousy proper authorities anyway? The District Attorney? He’s one of the biggest crooks in the state. The Mayor? The Chief of Police?”
“That isn’t the point,” he said.
“Why the hell isn’t it? I live in Winston, in the real world. I have to make my living in Winston, in the real world, and that means I have to make my peace with the people who run Winston, and who run the real world. I tried that, and it’s always worked pretty well. Now you people have come in and rattled this town out of its wits, and that arrangement doesn’t work any more. I’m adapting myself to the new conditions, that’s all. I’m no more honest or dishonest, in the vague abstract total way you use those terms, than anybody else alive in the world. I have a job, an honest and proper job, licensed by the state of New York and the city of Winston, and I do that job as well as I can. And a part of that job is its confidential nature. My job is confidential in exactly the same way that a lawyer’s job or a doctor’s job or a psychiatrist’s job or even a priest’s job is confidential. Is a lawyer supposed to report every crime he hears described in his office? Is a priest supposed to report every crime he hears described in the confessional?”
“That is not the same thing, Mr. Smith!” And from the shocked, wide-eyed way in which he said that, I knew I had blasphemed.
“And just why the hell isn’t it the same thing?” I shouted. I was on my feet now, without knowing how or when I’d stood up, and I kept shaking my fist as I shouted at him. “I’ve been responsible for crimes solved, reparations made, injustices corrected, without the people involved getting into a lot of bad publicity, and without anybody getting a useless jail sentence, and I’ve—”