Gregorio and Seidenwall looked down. Leo Haig looked up. Hard. Gregorio and Seidenwall looked away.
Haig said, “Sir. I assume you have no warrant. I further assume your contingency privileges obviate the necessity for a warrant to intrude upon my property. But, sir, I now ask you to leave. You cannot seriously entertain the notion that I or my associate did in fact bomb our own building.
“We are not witlings. Each of us can vouch for the other’s presence at the time of the bombing, as can my associate Mr. Wong Fat.” Wong was at that moment cowering under his bed saying the rosary. “You can, sir, as your estimable colleague suggests, take Mr. Harrison into custody. It would be an unutterably stupid act. You could, on the other hand, quit these premises. It appears to me that these are your alternatives. You have only to choose.”
I never heard the like. Neither, I guess, did Gregorio. They scooted.
I always wanted to call someone a witling,” Haig said later. “Wolfe does it all the time. I always wanted to do that.”
“You did it very well,” I said.
“I have my uncle to thank for that,” Leo Haig said. “I have my uncle to thank for many things, but one fact sums it all up. But for him, I would have gone through life without ever being able to call a policeman a witling.”
We had a beer on the strength of that.
Eight
I spent the night in Haig’s house. It was late by the time we were done with the fish, even later before we finished talking about the bombing. We agreed that it was possible someone had bombed the whorehouse on purpose, and we also agreed that we didn’t believe it had happened that way. That bomb had gone through the wrong window. It had been meant for us, and whoever threw it had his signals crossed.
Which was one of the reasons I spent the night on the couch. Somebody was trying to kill us, and I really didn’t want to give him any encouragement.
“You ought to move in here,” Haig said over breakfast. “It would expedite matters.”
“Not if I have to spend any time on that couch.”
“It was uncomfortable?”
“It was horrible,” I said. “I kept waking up and wanting to stretch out on the floor, but moving was too painful.”
“Of course you’d have a proper bed,” Haig said stiffly. “And a proper room of your own, and the implicit right to entertain friends of your own choosing. In addition—”
He paraded the usual arguments. I paid a little attention to them and a lot of attention to breakfast. Corned beef hash, fried eggs, and the world’s best coffee. I don’t always like coffee all that much, but Wong Fat makes the best I’ve ever tasted. It’s a Louisiana blend with chicory in it and he uses this special porcelain drip pot and it really makes a difference.
After breakfast Haig gave me a list of things to do regarding the fish. While I was upstairs attending to them he was on the phone in his office. I finished up and was sitting on my side of the partners’ desk at a quarter after eleven. Haig was reading one of Richard Stark’s Parker novels. I forget which one. He said, “Formidable,” once or twice. I spent ten minutes watching him read. Then he closed the book and leaned back in his chair and played with his beard. After a few minutes of that he look one of his pipes apart. He put it back together again and started to take it apart a second time, but stopped himself.
“Chip,” he said.
I tried to look bright-eyed.
“I’ve made some calls. I spoke with Mr. Shivers and Mrs. Vandiver. Also with several other lawyers. Also with Mr. Boll and a man named LiCastro. Also — no matter. There are several courses of inquiry you might pursue today. You have your notebook?”
I had my notebook.
Indulgence was on the second floor of a renovated brownstone on 53rd Street, between Lexington and Third. The shop on the first floor sold gourmet cookware. I walked up a flight of stairs and paused for a moment in front of a Chinese red door with a brass nameplate on it. There was a bell, and another brass plate instructed me to ring it before opening the door. I followed orders.
The man behind the reception desk was small and precise and black. He had his hair in a tight Afro and wore thick horn-rimmed glasses. His suit was black mohair and he was wearing a red paisley vest with it. His tie was a narrow black knit.
It was air-conditioned in there, but I couldn’t imagine how he could have come to work through all that heat in those clothes. And he looked as though he had never perspired in his life.
He asked if he could help me. I said that I wanted to see a girl named Andrea Sugar.
“Of course,” he said, and smiled briefly. “Miss Sugar is one of our recreational therapists. Do you require a massage?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Very good. Are you a member?”
I wasn’t, but it turned out that I could purchase a trial membership for ten dollars. This would entitle me to the services of a recreational therapist for thirty minutes. I handed over ten of Leo Haig’s dollars and he filled out a little membership card for me. When he asked me my name I said “Norman Conquest.” Don’t ask me why.
“Miss Sugar is engaged at the moment,” he said, after my ten dollar bill had disappeared. “She’ll be available in approximately ten minutes. Or you may put yourself in the hands of one of our other therapists. Here are photographs of several of them.”
He gave me a little leatherette photo album and I looked through it. There were a dozen photographs of recreational therapists, all of them naked and smiling. In the interests of therapy, I guess. I said I would prefer to wait for Miss Sugar and he nodded me to a couch and went back to his book. It was a collection of essays by Noam Chomsky, if you care.
I sat around for ten minutes during which the phone rang twice. The desk man answered, but didn’t say much. I leafed through Sports Illustrated and read something very boring about sailboat racing. He went into another room and came back to report that Miss Sugar was waiting for me in the third cubicle on the right. I walked down a short hallway and into a room a little larger than a throw rug. The walls were painted the same Chinese red as the door.
The floor was cork tile. The only piece of furniture in the room was a massage table with a fresh white sheet on it.
Andrea Sugar was standing beside the table. She wasn’t the girl I had seen at the funeral. She was wearing a white nurse’s smock. (I think that’s the right word for it.) She was tall, almost my height, and she looked a little like pictures of Susan Sontag. She said hello and wasn’t it hot out and other convention things, and I said hello and agreed that it was hot out there, all right, and she suggested I take off all my clothes and get on the table.
“I’m not really here for a massage,” I said.
“You’re not supposed to say that, honey.”
“But the thing is—”
“You’re here for a massage, sweetie. Your back hurts and you want a nice massage, you just paid ten dollars and for that you’ll get a very nice massage, and if something else should happen to develop, that’s between you and me, but I’m a recreational therapist and you’re a young man who needs a massage, and that’s how the rulebook reads, Okay?”