I nodded. “A few times. Once it was an African shield. Another time it was an old sword in London.”
“What did you do?”
“What do you mean, what did I do?”
Spivey made an impatient gesture. “I mean did you just drop it or did you try to do something about it?”
“Sometimes I messed around a little.”
He nodded. “And after you got through messing around, what did you have?”
“Some answers. That’s about all.”
“A deal,” Spivey said.
“What kind of a deal?”
“You’re out twenty-five thousand dollars, right?”
“Plus my pride.”
“Yeah, your pride. I almost forgot about that. You come up with the answers on this one — all the answers — and Pacifica insurance will pay you twenty-five thousand. You come up with some answers that lead to our recovering both the book and the quarter of a million, and we’ll go ten percent of everything.”
“That’s seventy-five thousand.”
“A lot of money.”
“You could hire a bunch of guys for that — guys with licenses that they hang on their walls. I’m not a private investigator.”
“I’ll put some private guys on it,” Spivey said. “I’ll have to. And probably all they’ll come up with is their bill. You — you’re my outside chance and you don’t cost anything unless you produce.”
“Expenses,” I said.
Spivey shook his head. “Not even expenses.”
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do.”
“What?”
“I’ll think about it.”
10
Dr. Ogletree didn’t have any clothes on, which was all right with me because Dr. Ogletree was not quite thirty, not quite five-foot-one, and not quite as blond all over as the tight golden curls on her head would have one assume.
Dr. Mary Frances Ogletree was a nice Southern girl, from Sylacauga, Alabama, to be exact, who even now, at twenty-nine, looked as though she might very well be out there on a crisp autumn afternoon in short skirt and sweater, turning handsprings every time the Crimson Tide crunched through with another six points against Ole Miss or Tennessee or whoever it is that Alabama plays.
Although she still looked like a cheerleader, Dr. Ogletree was actually a much respected psychiatrist who specialized in autistic children. I thought that she was a little young to be a psychiatrist until I learned that she had been graduated from high school at fifteen, from college at eighteen, and from medical school at twenty-three. When I had met her six months ago I also thought that she was a bit young to be doing what she was doing just then, which was gutting me with three queens in a stud game up at Joe Awful’s place on One Hundred and Nineteenth Street in Harlem, which isn’t exactly where one would expect to run into a nice Southern girl.
Joe Awful’s name wasn’t really Awful, it was Joe Ophelle, and he had once played pro basketball a long time ago. He now gambled for a living and was quite good at it. His youngest daughter was a patient of Dr. Ogletree’s, which was how she had come to be invited, although the invitation had been Joe Awful’s idea of a pleasant little joke.
His little joke had cost him $1,400 that night and it had cost me $900. I had offered to see Dr. Ogletree home, providing that she paid for the taxi since I couldn’t because she had just won my last dime. She had not only paid for the taxi, but she also had bought our breakfast at an all-night coffee shop on East Seventy-third, about a block from her apartment, which was where I now watched her as she tiptoed around in search of some cigarettes.
“We really should quit off our cigarette habit,” she said as she came back with a package of Lucky Strikes and sat down cross-legged on the bed.
“My list of don’ts is already too long,” I said.
“You want to know what the biggest bad habit I ever shucked was?”
“What?”
“The South.”
“You didn’t get rid of it, you just left it. You still talk as though you have a mouthful of hot grits.”
“Actually, Mr. St. Ives, I can talk in virtually any manner that I choose,” she said, doing a rather good Mayfair accent.
“That’s because you’re a mimic and that’s not talent, it’s a gift.”
“When I say I shucked off the South I mean I got rid of the bad parts. I hung on tight to the good parts.”
“What good parts?”
“Manners, acquired sociability, natural sympathetic concern, stuff like that. Some of it was real and some of it was artificial, but what I liked I kept. I don’t know whether it’s still there like it was when I was growing up and learning it all from my grandmother. You have to learn it, you know. She used to say that the new wave of discrimination would be aimed at the gently born.”
“I thought your father was a riverboat gambler. That’s not exactly what I’d call quality folks.”
She shook her head and smiled. “There weren’t any real riverboats left or he would have been. I just tell some people that. He gambled his way through Princeton, then through the Army Air Corps, and then through what was left of a very short but one hell of a merry life. He and my mother died in a car wreck outside of Miami when I was seven, but by then he had already taught me a profession — card-gaming, as he called it. God, he was good. I’ve talked to people who played with him. He was a natural gambler. There aren’t many of them, you know.”
“What’s the composition of one?” I said. “I mean, if you were speaking professionally.”
She thought about it a while. “Almost total self-acceptance. That’s one. You combine that with an almost complete lack of guilt, throw in a good mind, an inclination toward risk-taking, and you come up with a successful gambler — or almost a successful anything else, except possibly a poet. You could almost gamble for a living, you know.”
“I’ve thought of it.”
She shook her head and ran her finger down my bare chest until it tickled. “Don’t try it, sugarplum. Not for a living anyhow. You couldn’t stand the guilt.”
“I don’t mind losing once in a while.”
“You wouldn’t feel guilty about losing,” she said. “It’s the winning that would be your problem. You wouldn’t ever be quite sure that you deserved it.”
I thought about that for a moment. “Maybe I should turn poet.”
“Why don’t you just stay what you are — gentleman go-between and awfully good screw.”
“That thing I was on down in Washington.”
“Last week?”
“Uh-huh. Last week. It didn’t turn out too well.”
She nodded. “I could tell.”
“How?”
“A mild hesitancy here and there. It would take a trained eye to notice it.” She grinned. “Or a trained body.”
“I’m thinking about giving it another shot.”
“Can you?” she said. “I mean, can you pick it up and screw it back together?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to?”
“Uh-huh. I think so.”
“But what?”
“It might be messy.”
“How messy?”
“I’m not sure. One guy’s already been killed. If I stir things up some more, it might get nasty.”
“For you?”
“There’s a chance, but there always is with that much money involved.”
“When did you get back from Washington?”
“Thursday.”
“And today’s Sunday. What’ve you been doing, sitting up there in that cave of yours, throwing rocks at the lions and tigers?”
“Something like that.”
“All by yourself, of course.”
“I had a little gin for company.”
“And when you couldn’t stand you and the gin anymore, you called me and came over here to make sure that what you’ve already made up your mind to do is really just one hell of a good idea. That’s what you’d like me to tell you, isn’t it? Except you’d like it to be frosted over with a little professional jargon.”