Ten
When I got back to the house on 20th Street, Haig was on the top floor playing with his fish, repairing the leakers with rubber cement. When I asked if he wanted me to help, he grunted. I stopped in the kitchen where Wong was hacking a steak into bite-sized pieces with a cleaver. I left without a word. When he’s chopping things he looks positively dangerous and I try to stay out of his way. I went downstairs and talked a little with some of the girls.
“Why they wanna blow up Maria?” Carmelita wanted to know. “She don’ never hurt nobody. One guy, he say she give him a clop, but Maria never give nobody no clop. He get his clop somewhere else. Maria tell him, you get your clop from your mother, she say.”
That was even more of a down than watching Haig swearing at his fish tanks, so I went over to Dominick’s and had a beer and watched the Mets find a new way to lose. Matlack had a one-run lead going into the bottom of the ninth, struck out the first man, hit the second man on the arm, and got the third man to hit a double-play ball to short.
That was his mistake. They had Garrett playing short and he made the play without the ball. The ball went to left field and the runners went to second and third, and some- body walked and Bobby Bonds hit a 2–2 pitch off the fence and Dominick turned the set off.
“Shit,” he said.
So I went back and read a couple chapters of an old Fredric Brown mystery until Haig came down, and then I gave him a full report. He made me go over everything a few hundred times. Then he closed his eyes and fiddled with his beard and put his head back and said “Indeed” fifteen times and “Curious” eighteen times. He wouldn’t tell me what was curious.
I spent most of the night walking around the Village looking for somebody to sleep with. It was hotter than hell and there wasn’t much air in the air. I didn’t have any luck. I have a feeling I wasn’t trying very hard. I had a couple of beers and a few cups of coffee and called Kim a couple of times, but no one answered.
I went back to my room and played a Dylan record over and over. I remember thinking that a little grass would be nice and regretting having flushed it to oblivion. It was a rotten night. I had run all over town and hadn’t accomplished anything much. I was sorry I hadn’t spent twenty of Haig’s dollars on a massage and realized I would have been just as sorry if I had.
I thought about going downstairs to give Kim one more call, and I decided the hell with it, and eventually I went to sleep.
Nothing much happened Sunday. I slept late and had breakfast around noon and walked over to Haig’s house because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I got there in time to watch Wong devastate him at backgammon. Wong beats hell out of me, but that was nothing compared to the way he routed Haig. It was pathetic to watch.
“There’s nothing for you to do,” he said.
Which would have been all right except that I felt like doing something. I hung around for a while and did some routine maintenance on the fish, although Sunday was supposed to be a free day for me. Just before dinner I called Andrea Sugar at home to find out if she had managed to get the records. She wasn’t in. I called her a couple of hours later and reached her and learned that she hadn’t had a chance to do anything yet.
I read a couple of books at Haig’s. After dinner I caught a movie. I don’t remember which one.
On the way home I stopped at a pay phone and called Kim. I was a little worried about her, if you want to know. I also just found myself thinking about her a lot. I asked her if she had thought of anything significant, or if anybody had been following her or anything. She had nothing to report.
“The thing is,” I said, “I’d like to go over things with you sometime. When Gordie’s working or something, if you follow me.”
“I think I follow you.”
“Because he’s not exactly crazy about me, and it’s hard to get anyplace with him around. I mean as far as a conversation is concerned.”
“He’s here right now. He’s in the other room. I don’t think I’ll tell him it’s you on the phone.”
“That sounds like a good idea.”
“He’ll be working tomorrow from noon to eight. I have a couple of classes during the afternoon, but the evening’s clear.”
“Don’t you have a performance?”
“Monday’s the dark night off-Broadway. Anyway, the play closed today.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Well, it wasn’t very good. The critics hated it. Would you want to come over around six tomorrow?”
I said I would.
I went home and decided Gordie was the killer and that meant Kim was safe. He wouldn’t kill her now. First he would kill Caitlin, and possibly her husband as well, and then he would marry Kim, and then he would kill her.
Monday there were things for me to do and places for me to go, so of course it rained. Haig had made appointments for me all over the place. I had to see a couple of lawyers, one on Fifth Avenue and one near City Hall just a block from Addison Shivers. I decided to drop in on him and let him know how we were doing, but he was in conference with a client when I got there. I went out and had fish and chips for lunch and dropped in on him again, but this time he was out having lunch, so I said the hell with it and took the subway uptown as far as Canal Street, which is not all that far. I walked up Mulberry to the address Haig had given me.
It didn’t look like a place where I was going to feel tremendously welcome. It was the Palermo Social and Recreation Club, and there were a couple of old men playing bocce over to the right, and two other men sitting over a lackadaisical game of dominoes, and a fifth man watching the curl of lemon peel swim around in his cup of espresso. They all looked at me when I walked in. There was no discernible gleam of welcome in their eyes.
I went to the man sitting alone and asked him if he was John LiCastro. He asked who wanted to know, and I told him who I was and who I worked for and he smiled with the lower half of his face and pointed to a chair. I sat down and he told me I was privileged to work for a great man.
I agreed with him, but I wasn’t too sure of this at the moment, because it was beginning to seem to me that the great man was not accomplishing a whole hell of a lot. The great man had not left the house yet, which certainly gave him a lot in common with Nero Wolfe, but neither had the great man called any suspects together, or even established that there were any suspects, for Pete’s sake. The great man was spending a lot of time on his fish while I was keeping the New York Subway System out of the red, or trying to.
I didn’t say any of this to Mr. LiCastro. I had a pretty good feeling that it was extremely unintelligent to say anything to Mr. LiCastro that Mr. LiCastro didn’t want to hear. I told him what I had been instructed to tell him, and asked him what I had been instructed to ask him, and he took in my words with little darting affirmative movements of his head. At one point his eyes narrowed as he fixed on some private thought, and I realized that I was sitting across the table from a man who could kill a man at five o’clock and sit down to a huge dinner at five-thirty and not even worry about indigestion.
Then he ordered espresso for both of us and leaned back in his chair and asked some questions of his own, and there was a warm glow in his eyes and a look of complete relaxation on his face.
It was really something to see.
“So LiCastro is crazy about tropical fish,” I said later. “I was wondering how on earth you would know somebody like him. His discus spawned, but a fungus got the eggs.”
“That usually happens.”
“He was tickled enough that he got them to spawn in the first place. He’s trying a new fungicide and he wants your opinion of it. He didn’t remember the name. He’s going to call you later.”