He lit a Camel from a crumpled pack, a real Camel, not one of those sissified things they push these days. No wonder his teeth looked the way they did.
I went over to the couch and sat on the edge while Stokes finished examining a Chagall lithograph I own, my only expensive indulgence since the divorce.
When he finished, he turned around and said, "Guess where I was last night."
"Your mom's?" I joked.
For the first time since I'd met him, he showed anger. He pushed his body forward. His eyes flashed. "I don't make jokes about my mother." He had to somewhere near fifty. That he was that sensitive about his mother made me very suspicious, made him all the more odd and dangerous in my mind.
"Sorry," I said, "if I offended you." I could not quite get the irony out of my voice, a problem I sometimes have.
I decided not to let him rest. He'd been no help to me. I'd left my card last night and he hadn't called back. I wanted him off the case and out of my life.
"I want you to submit your bill," I said.
A kind of smirk touched his mouth. "You firing me?"
"You could call it that."
He looked around again. "Guy lives in a place like this, he gets the idea he can do anything he wants, push anybody around, I guess."
"Yeah," I said, "that's me OK. A regular Mussolini."
He faced me. "You know something, Ketchum?"
"What?"
"You're a punk."
"Gee, thanks."
"You got a fancy apartment, fancy business, you think you know everything. You don't know shit."
"That's been pointed out to me. Many times."
"Well, it's true."
"So you've told me."
He reached inside his coat and pulled out a manila envelope. "I'm gonna have you do me a little favor," he said. "I don't think so, Stokes. You're done."
"I wouldn't count on that."
"I would, Stokes."
"A little bitty favor. Or else."
"Or else what?"
"Or else I phone the police."
"And say hi?"
"And tell them who happened to be at Denny Harris's house last night about the time he happened to get murdered."
Ever since talking to his mother and finding out that he'd been late bringing her his treat-a ritual I assumed he treated with utmost respect-I'd wondered where Stokes had been that night.
Maybe I was about to find out.
"Meaning what?" I said lamely.
"Meaning what?" he mocked. "Shit, c'mon, Ketchum, you think I'm some moron?"
"I think you're a lot of things, Stokes, but I guess a moron isn't one of them."
"Hey," he said, "you're really crushing me, you know?" He waved the manila envelope again. "Meaning you were out at Harris's last night, and if I have to, I can prove it."
"Gee, I was always under the impression that when you paid a private detective, he went to work for you. I didn't know that blackmail was a part of the deal."
"Like I said, Ketchum, there's a lot of things you don't know."
What I really wanted to talk about was what Merle Wickes was doing at Stokes's place last night-but I knew better. Despite my naivete, I was beginning to see that in a sleazy game like this one, the less you said the safer you were. I'd already said and done way too much.
"What's in the envelope?" I asked.
"That isn't important. It's what I want you to do with it that matters."
"Which is?"
"I want you to take this someplace for me."
"Where?"
"You know the duck pond in Bridges Park?"
"Yeah."
"Next to the duck pond there are all these feeders where seed is stored for the birds. The feeders are marked A, B, C, and so forth. I want you to take this envelope and put it in there at a quarter till noon tomorrow."
"What if I look inside?"
"What you see won't make any sense to you."
"I may not be as dumb as you think."
The smirk again. "I'll bet you are, Ketchum, I'll just bet you are."
"Your mommy didn't think so."
Immediately he was tight. "Like I said, leave my mother out of this."
"Nice lady. You must think so, too. Giving up a wife for her."
He flushed. "She was a bitch."
"Mommy knows best."
"I don't really give a damn what you think of me, you know that? All I really give a damn about is you delivering this envelope tomorrow."
"And if I don't?"
"Then I call the police and tell them where you were around the time your partner was murdered."
I put out my hand. He put the envelope in it.
He looked at my face and smiled. "Life's a bitch, ain't it, Ketchum? Right now you look like somebody just injected you with a quart of sour pickle juice."
I tapped the envelope against my fingers. "I assume I'm being used in some kind of blackmail number."
"Mr. Genius."
"I also assume that whoever picks this up is the person who killed Denny."
"You're on a roll. Keep going."
"I also assume that once you get paid off, you'll probably keep right on bleeding them."
'Too bad you didn't kill him, Ketchum. You'd be fun to squeeze." Instead of anger there was now a look of torment in his eyes. For a moment I regretted my ugly crack about his mother.
I nodded to the door. "So long, Stokes," I said. "I'm tired."
"Bridges Park. Quarter to twelve. Feeder A."
He had regained his angry edge. He examined the apartment once more before he left. "Really is kinda nice up here. Maybe someday I'll have a place like it." He smiled. "See you, Ketchum."
TWELVE
When I pulled into my parking space in the morning, Tommy Byrnes swung in a few stalls away.
We met near the exit door leading to our floor. He smiled. "You in better spirits today?" I tried hard to smile back. "Sorta, I guess."
"You really had me worried."
The butt-kissing tone was back in his voice. I had probably had Tommy worried about as much as George Bush worries about the derelicts in the Bowery.
I decided to let his bowing and scraping pass.
When you come in from the parking garage, you walk through the art department, which is where in most agencies you find both the highest number of prima donnas and the highest number of everyday, sensible people-the worst and the best.
At 8:23 it was still too early for the prima donnas to be here.
Instead, gathered in the coffee area the artists had made for themselves, stood half a dozen of the people in production, who looked and generally acted more like factory hands than agency types. Which was great as far as I was concerned.
Ab Levin, a sixty-two-year-old World War II veteran who kept a faded photograph of himself in uniform on his desk and who was probably the best traffic manager in the city, glanced up from his coffee and said, "Talk to you a minute, Michael?"
"Sure," I said.
"Well, see you," Tommy said, walking on.
So much for demonstrations.
"Yeah, Ab," I said, "what can I do for you?"
The other employees looked at Ab, then at me, then back to Ab again. Obviously they'd been talking among themselves.
Ab was a barrel-chested and hairy man whose physical strength belied the extra pounds he'd put on. He always wore clip-on ties. He had shiny black eyes and a voice that sounded sore.
"The people in the back of the shop generally don't hear things right away," he said. "Not usually, anyway. But a couple of us stopped in at The Cove last night and what we heard was…" He flushed, seeming embarrassed and ill at ease, as if he were going to tell me he'd betrayed the agency in some way. "Well, we got to drinking, and we got to talking with some people from other agencies and, well, the consensus seemed to be we stood a good chance of losing the Traynor account, now that Denny Harris is dead."
The Cove was a splashy downtown bar where agency people and media types drank. It was the model of the leper colonies I'd mentioned before, the place where both Denny and my ex-wife had spent too many of their hours.