“I suppose,” I said, and took another bite of my sandwich. “So what brings you around here at two-thirty of an afternoon when you’re supposed to be out rousting vice lords, if that’s what they still call them?”
“I been hearing some things,” he said.
“From where, Washington? From Demeter?”
“He called Monday. He wanted to know about you. I said you were okay, just a little careful.”
“I thought you told him cautious.”
“Maybe I did. I don’t remember. Careful, cautious, it doesn’t matter.”
“Did he tell you what I was on?”
“Yeah. Some kind of shield. African. You’re trying to buy it back for two hundred and fifty thousand. Some shield.”
“It has quite a history.”
“Demeter seemed to think you could use a little help.”
“Are you offering?”
Ogden drained his drink and placed it on the carpet beside his chair because there wasn’t any table handy. “Not officially.”
“Unofficially?”
“If you think you need it.”
“I don’t.”
He shrugged. “I just thought I might do a little moonlighting. I got a day off tomorrow.”
“What makes tomorrow so special?”
“I hear that’s when you buy it back.”
“You hear from whom?”
He smiled for the first time. His teeth were white and regular and even. Too white and regular and even. They were false. I felt better, somehow glad that Ogden wore false teeth, or dentures, as the television ads insisted on calling them. It made him more vulnerable. Ogden closed his lips quickly, turning off the smile as if he were concerned that I might notice the teeth.
“When you’re a cop for twenty-three years you hear things,” he said. “Now when you used to be on the paper, you used to hear things, didn’t you? You know, some jerk would call up with an anonymous tip and then you, knowing he was a jerk, would still go ahead and check it out and find that he was telling the truth after all. Well, let’s say it was something like that. Accidental like.”
“Why did Demeter call you?”
“We’re old pals. We went to the FBI academy together. In ’fifty-four.”
“I don’t buy that anonymous-tip business,” I said.
Ogden cocked one eyebrow at me; his left one. It was a polite enough expression and its tone carried over into his voice. “Don’t you now?”
“No. I don’t. I think that after Demeter called and told you how high the payoff was you started to check with every pigeon in town. Maybe you found one that knew something, not much, but something, enough for you to figure that you could cut yourself a slice of the pie. Not a big slice probably, but something that would make sacrificing a day off worth while. How much did you have in mind?”
Ogden smiled again, but this time he kept his lips together. “Let’s say that what you say is true. Now I’m not saying it is, but if it was, then I’d say that five thousand would be just about right.”
“And just what would you do to earn it?”
“I’d help keep you alive, St. Ives. Now that oughta be worth five grand to you, if not to anybody else.”
“Do you know who the thieves are?”
Ogden shook his head. “No, I don’t and that’s the truth. I just hear that the switch will take place tomorrow and that they play a little rough sometimes — whoever they are.”
This time I smiled at him. I tried to make it friendly; I’m not sure that I succeeded. “Or it could have been another way, couldn’t it? It could have been that you called Demeter down in Washington about an hour or two ago and Demeter had just talked to Frances Wingo of the museum who’d told him that the switch will take place tomorrow. That’s all you really needed to know, wasn’t it? Then your mind starts working and you figure a way to cut yourself in. For five thousand — on your day off. So you drop by here with a story about how rough the thieves play, which is supposed to turn me into a lump of JELL-O, and I agree to pay you five thousand dollars for whatever protection you can give me tomorrow. Now, it could have been like that, couldn’t it, Ken?”
Ogden shook his head sadly. “I feel sorry for you, St. Ives.”
“Why? Because of my suspicious nature?”
He rose from his chair. “One of these days you’re going to play it too safe, too careful, too cautious. One of these days you’re not going to trust somebody when you should, then pffft! No more St. Ives.”
I put the empty teacup and sandwich plate on the floor and rose. “But that’s not today, is it?”
Ogden picked up his Borsalino hat from the hexagonal table and brushed it against the sleeve covering his left arm. “Not today, maybe. Maybe not even tomorrow. But sometime soon.” He put his hat on his head, tilted it slightly to the left, gave me the opportunity to examine his false teeth again, said “Thanks for the drink,” and left. I went over and picked up his glass and my dirty dishes and put them in the sink where I began to wash them slowly, as neat and as tidy as the old maid after the vicar has left.
It was a respectable enough building twenty-nine stories high that had been designed by some long-forgotten architect who apparently had never heard of the Bauhaus. It looked like what it was, an office building on Park Avenue where people went to work in the morning at nine and left at five after having sold or bought or traded or even created something, perhaps an advertisement for a new cemetery. The directory in the marble lobby said that Mesa Verde Estates was on the eleventh floor. I looked at my watch and it was three minutes before four so I got in one of the automatic elevators along with a stenographer who was carrying a white paper bag that was brown around the bottom where the coffee had slopped out of the paper cups. She got off at six; I got off at eleven.
Mesa Verde Estates was in 1106, which turned out to be four doors to my left from the elevator. A sign on the door of 1106 read MESA VERDE ESTATES, FRANK SPELLACY, PRESIDENT. I knocked, and when no one said “come in” or “who’s there” or even “go away” I tried the doorknob. It turned easily so I pushed the door open and walked in. It was a medium-sized office, big enough for two persons perhaps, a man and his secretary, if he wasn’t worried about privacy. Green steel shelves lined one side of the office, the left side, and they were choked with what seemed to be four-color brochures advertising Mesa Verde Estates. There were three windows at the rear of the office and their Venetian blinds were half up, so that the light from the afternoon sun spilled onto the large executive desk that was placed in front of the windows. Three leather arm chairs were arranged in front of the desk. The floor was carpeted with some speckled brown and black synthetic fiber. On the right wall were some handsome color photos of desert scenes, four of them. Below them was a couch and a glass-topped coffee table. There was no secretarial desk or typewriter, only the executive walnut desk that had a high-backed judge’s chair behind it. A man sat in the chair, but the upper part of his body was bent over the desk, his bald head resting on a green blotter, his left arm extended toward a beige telephone, his left hand clutching a yellow pencil. I walked over to the desk and looked at him. The blotter was trying to soak up all of the blood, but it wasn’t doing too well. I reached over and felt for a pulse in the wrist of the hand that clutched the pencil; there was none. The phone rang and I jumped. It rang seven times before it quit. Frank Spellacy was too dead to hear it.
He had been a plumpish man, dressed in a gray pin-striped suit. Gold-rimmed glasses still rested on a thick nose. His eyes were closed and his mouth was slightly open and I almost expected to hear him snore. He was around fifty and the sun, beating in from the windows, made his bald head seem pinker than it really was. Underneath the hand that held the pencil was a small white pad. He had written something on the pad, one word. From the way the letters straggled and ran together, he may have written it as he sat there, half sprawled over his desk, dying. There was only the one word and I read it upside down. The one word was “Wingo.”