“Yes.”
“How much?” It’s not something you ask, but Myron Greene did. If I were ahead enough, it might be even better.
“I don’t know,” I said. “About six hundred.”
“That much?”
“That much. Would you like to sit in?”
Myron Greene moved toward the bathroom door, toward the wife and the kids and the firm and the Chris-Craft up in Maine. “No, I guess not. Not this time anyway. I’m really awfully late. Is it a regular game?”
“More or less,” I said. “There are about fifteen of us, but usually only five or six can make it at any one time. They drift in and out. Come on, I’ll introduce you.”
“Well, I don’t think—”
“Come on.”
He met them all. He met Henry Knight who had the lead in a play that had managed to run for fourteen weeks despite the critics’ indifference, if not their hostility. Knight, cast in yet another juvenile lead at forty-two, agreed with the critics and considered each pay check to be pure lagniappe. He spent his money as quickly as he got it and poker was not only fast, but pleasant, and didn’t necessarily entail a hangover. Knight was down almost two hundred dollars and when Myron Greene told him that he liked his current play, Knight said, “It took a lot of wonderful people to create such a wonderful piece of shit.”
Myron Greene met Johnny Parisi, recently paroled from Sing Sing where he had been doing a three-to-seven on an involuntary manslaughter conviction. Parisi ran with the Ducci brothers over in Brooklyn doing, as he had once testified in court, “this and that.” Parisi had played basketball for some small college in Pennsylvania and even made it through his junior year before they caught him shaving points. He was now in his mid-thirties, almost six-foot-five, still lean, and somehow vaguely handsome. He kept a long amber cigarette holder clenched between his teeth even when he wasn’t smoking and talked through or around it. I had to keep asking him what he said. He was into the game for about four hundred and most of it was piled in front of the man on his left who, by rights, should have arrested Parisi for parole violation. The man was Lieutenant Kenneth Ogden of the vice squad, sometimes known as Ogden the Odd, and nobody ever asked him where he got the money to play table-stakes poker although a couple of his cronies claimed that his wife had money. If she did, she had a lot. Ogden was over fifty, looked older, and dressed better than either Knight or Parisi, both of whom were regarded as dudes in their respective social circles. Parisi mumbled something around his cigarette holder when I introduced Myron Greene; Ogden said “hi yah” and kept on shuffling the cards.
The fourth man that Myron Greene met wore chinos, a sweat shirt emblazoned with “Bluebird Inn Keglers,” and dirty white sneakers. He was Park Tyler Wisdom III, and he did absolutely nothing for a living because his grandmother had left him a seven-million-dollar trust fund when he was twenty-two. Occasionally, Wisdom would join some protest march or other and once he had been hauled in for burning what he claimed to have been his draft card, but no charges were lodged after the Federal authorities were quietly reminded that Wisdom held the Silver Star and the Purple Heart with a cluster for something he had once done during the two years he had spent with the First Air Cavalry in Vietnam. Now twenty-nine, Wisdom was a little below average height and a little above average weight. To me he looked like nothing more than a rapidly aging Puck for whom the joke got better every year. He said “hello” cheerfully enough to Myron Greene despite the fact that most of my six hundred dollars had come from him.
None of them was interested in the lawyer if he didn’t want to sit in, so I walked him to the elevator and when we were in the hall he stopped, turned to me, and said, “Isn’t that the Parisi who—”
“The same,” I said.
The real Myron Greene stood up. Gone was the dream of the carefree, reckless life. This was Citizen Greene, an officer of the court. “Gambling is a parole violation,” Citizen Greene said. “That detective should—”
“Lieutenant,” I said. “He’s in vice. Besides, he’s winning all of Parisi’s money.”
Myron Greene shook his head as he punched the button for the elevator. “I don’t know where you find them.”
“They’re friends and acquaintances,” I said. “If they weren’t friends and acquaintances, I wouldn’t be of much use to you, would I?”
He seemed to think about my question for a moment and apparently concluded that it didn’t deserve an answer. He had his own question. “You’ll read that memo I gave you?”
“When the game breaks up.”
“They expect you in Washington Monday.”
“So you said.”
“Call me at home tomorrow and let me know what you decide.”
“All right.”
“You need the money, you know.”
“I know.”
Myron Greene shook his head sadly as he waited for the elevator. “A killer and a cop,” he said.
“It’s the kind of world we live in.”
“Your kind maybe; not mine.”
“All right.”
For Myron Greene the sound of the different drummer had faded. The elevator came and he stepped into it, turned, and stared at me. “The least you could do is answer your phone,” he said as we waited there for the doors to close. If I started answering my phone when it rang, I might be on the path to redemption.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll answer it tomorrow.”
“Today,” he insisted. “Something might happen.”
I was six hundred ahead so I could afford to lose a little. “Okay,” I said. “Today.”
The doors began to close and Myron Greene nodded at me brusquely. I took it for a gesture of encouragement, one that would help me to shed my slothful ways, shun my evil companions, and even answer the telephone on its first ring.
Chapter two
There must be a few places hotter than Washington in August. The Spice Islands, I suppose. Death Valley. Perhaps Chad down around Bokoro. The Washington Post that I read in the nonair-conditioned taxi that bore me from National Airport to the Madison had a small feature on page one boasting about how yesterday had been the hottest August day on record and that today should prove even hotter than that.
Congress had given up for a while and gone home the week before after accomplishing neither more nor less than usual. It wasn’t an election year, not that it mattered, and home — wherever it was, even Scottsdale, Arizona — was probably cooler than Washington. The Capital’s two major attractions, the Cherry Blossom Festival and the annual riot, had come and gone, the first in April, the second in July. So with Congress adjourned, the lobbyists on vacation, and even the tourists skittish of sunstroke, the lobby of the Madison was virtually deserted except for a couple of bored bellhops who looked as though they were seriously considering another profession.
The clerk at the reservation desk seemed delighted to have something to do when I asked if there was a reservation for Philip St. Ives. There was and I sneezed at the abrupt change in temperature all the way up to the sixth floor where one of the bellhops fiddled with the air-conditioning controls while making some pertinent comments about the weather.
After he left, the richer by a dollar, I took out the envelope that Myron Greene had given me Saturday and checked a name and a phone number. I dialed the number and when the operator’s voice said, “Coulter Museum,” I said, “Mrs. Frances Wingo, please.” After the operator there was only one secretary to go through. Then the next voice said, “This is Frances Wingo, Mr. St. Ives. I’ve been expecting your call.” It was a good telephone voice for a woman, a shade above contralto with a confident, penetrating quality which convinced me that no one ever called her Frannie.