I sat there in the chair with my hand on the phone thinking about all the influential persons that I knew in Washington who could pry the information out of the Coroner’s Office without going to the next of kin. For some reason I didn’t think that Frances Wingo would appreciate my attempt to find out why she had become a widow. But the influential persons whom I knew were probably too busy or too inept to get the information today and I was too impatient to wait for tomorrow so I called Myron Greene, the lawyer.
“I need a favor,” I told him after we said hello and he informed me that Spivack had deposited the check from the Coulter Museum.
“What kind of a favor?” Myron Greene said, and there seemed to be suspicion and distrust in his voice, but that was really how he always talked.
“I need to get a coroner’s report in Washington so I can find out how somebody died.”
“That takes the permission of the next of kin,” Myron Greene said.
“I know. I’ve already tried. That’s why I’m calling you. I need the information this afternoon.”
“That’s impossible.”
“No it isn’t, Myron, not for you, it isn’t. You have the influence down there and I don’t. That’s why I called.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m just too busy. Maybe I can do something tomorrow.”
“If I don’t get the information this afternoon, or this evening at the latest, then I’m walking off this thing.”
“What’s that — what’s that?” Myron Greene said, and began to wheeze at me over the phone.
“I’m through. Finished. Somebody else can get the shield back.”
“Something’s happened,” he said. “What’s happened? I have a right to know. I have every right—”
“Somebody else has been killed.”
“Who?”
“The name would mean nothing to you.”
“Was he connected with the… the thieves?”
“I don’t know. But he probably knew who they were.”
“God damn it, St. Ives, can’t you ever tell anything straight?”
“Get me the information I want and I’ll tell you the entire story. You may get to be a criminal lawyer after all. If I don’t get the information, it’s as I said. I quit. Now. This afternoon.”
Myron Greene gave me a long wheezy sigh. “Well, there’s one possibility. A good friend of mine is now an assistant U.S. attorney down there. He could probably get it.”
“This afternoon?”
“If I asked him. He was a year behind me at school.”
“Ask him.”
“What do you want exactly?”
“I want to know the cause of death of a man named Wingo. He supposedly was killed in a car accident about four weeks ago.”
“Wingo? Isn’t that the name of the woman who—”
“The same.”
“Her husband?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think that she—”
I interrupted him. “I don’t think anything, Myron. I’m just trying to find out what to think.”
“All right, all right. What’s his first name?”
“I don’t know.”
“Christ.”
“There shouldn’t be too many Wingos who died in a car wreck four weeks ago. Just have your friend find out what the autopsy says.”
Myron Greene was silent for a moment, except for a couple of wheezes. “Is this just a hunch on your part or do you think you really have something?”
“I don’t have a thing,” I said. “It’s just a hunch.”
“I’ll be back to you,” Myron Greene said, and hung up.
Myron Greene called back at six thirty-five that evening.
“I’ve missed my train,” he said. “Margaret will be furious.” Margaret was his wife.
“Want me to call her?”
“No, I don’t want you to call her. She thinks you’re a — a bad influence.”
“She’s probably right.”
“That hunch you had.”
“What about it?”
“It seems to have paid off.”
“How?”
Myron Greene was excited. I could tell from the way that his wheezes rasped over the phone in short, quick bursts as he fought for breath. “Just take it easy, Myron,” I said. “Try for a deep breath.”
He was silent for a moment, as if holding his breath, and then there was a long, shuddering wheeze. “I talked to my friend,” he said in between the next gasp. “He called the Coroner’s Office. They didn’t like the idea of giving out the information, but he was persuasive.”
“What did he get?”
“On July 26th, George Compton Wingo, 44, was found dead in a one-car automobile accident on Circumferential Highway 495 near exit 13. That’s in Virginia. The automobile, a new Chevrolet Impala, was a total loss.” Myron Greene sounded as if he were reading from notes and he paused to wheeze a couple of times.
“An autopsy,” he went on, “was performed on July 27th and it was determined that Wingo was already dead when his car turned over three times as it rolled down an embankment. He had died several hours earlier from a massive overdose of heroin.”
“Was he hooked?” I said.
“I beg your pardon.”
“Was he a habitual user?”
“Oh. Multiple punctures in both his left and right arms indicated that he was a habitual user of narcotics, probably heroin.”
“Is that all?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“Almost,” I said. “Almost. Myron, do me another favor, will you?”
“What now?”
“Take a cab home to Darien and put it on my bill.”
Chapter eleven
Frances Wingo was prompt. She knocked on my door at two thirty-five the following day, Thursday, which meant that she had flown by private plane or had caught the one o’clock shuttle from Washington and that it had had no trouble landing and that taxis had been plentiful at LaGuardia.
“Come in,” I said.
“Thank you.” She came in, carrying with some difficulty an inexpensive man’s two-suiter in her left hand. A striped blue and white raincoat was draped over her right arm.
“Heavy?” I said, reaching for the suitcase.
She let me have it, a little reluctantly, I thought. “Heavy,” she said. I turned in the room, wondering where to put the suitcase, which seemed to weigh between 55 and 60 pounds. I finally decided to put it in the tub in the bathroom. Before I put it there, I weighed it on the scale. Fifty-eight pounds.
When I came back out she said, “Why there?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it’s because it would be the last place I would look if I were looking for it.”
“Aren’t you going to count it?”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“Did you look at it?”
“Yes.”
“Pretty?”
“Not particularly.”
“Since you don’t care much for money, maybe you’d care for a drink.”
“I think I would.”
“Bourbon or Scotch?”
“Bourbon.”
“Pick out a chair,” I said. “Or the couch. They’re all about the same.”
“Thank you.” She draped her raincoat over a wingbacked chair and sank into it. She wore a blue dress that was neither too complicated nor too simple, blue shoes that seemed to both match and complement the dress, and in her lap she held a blue purse that seemed to be made of the same leather as the shoes. When I turned from mixing the drinks she was slowly surveying the room and she managed not to grimace at the prints on the wall which had been supplied by the color-blind management of the Adelphi.
“Horrible, aren’t they?” I said as I handed her a drink.
“A bit.”
“The management’s choice.”
“Not yours?”
“No. I’m still hung up on Maxfield Parrish.”
“He was 96 when he died. In 1966.”