“No,” I said, wishing that the elevator would come so that I could vanish into it.
“He ran a reference bureau. You know, if somebody wanted something done then Frank could put them in touch with who could do it. Or if somebody wanted to check out somebody, and they didn’t want to bother with the Better Business Bureau, why they’d call up Frank and he’d find out for them. A lot of bookies used him.”
“Sounds like a character,” I said, and punched the elevator button again, hard.
“He had a nice funeral. Over in Queens. Lots of friends. And you say you didn’t know him?”
“No. I didn’t know him.”
“That’s funny.”
“What?”
“He knew you. He had a whole file on you, homicide says. A new one.”
“I’m in a funny business. Maybe that’s why he had a file.”
“Maybe. But the homicide boys also found something on his calendar — you know, the appointment book that he kept on his desk.”
“What?”
“Just your name with four o’clock beside it on the day he died. Yesterday. But homicide’s not much interested; old Frank had been long dead by four o’clock as near as the medical report could figure, which, of course, isn’t too accurate.”
I’d had enough. “What do you want, Ogden? Spell it out.”
He glanced around the lobby, leaned toward me, and tapped a manicured forefinger against my lapel. I don’t like to be tapped. “I want in.”
“There’s no room.”
“Make it.”
“Not a chance.”
“Two hundred and fifty thousand’s a lot of money.”
“I don’t like jails.”
“No jails. You make the switch, the money for the shield. The museum’s happy. But you take me along to make another switch. The money into our pockets, an even split, and who’s to squawk?”
“The thieves. They wouldn’t like it at all.”
“Who they gonna complain to?”
“Christ, they could write a letter to the editor and even if it weren’t published, it would be turned over to the cops who’d be swarming around for the next ten years.”
The greed was back on Ogden’s face. His wet lips moved, making little smacking noises, and his eyes squinted at me as if I gave off some blinding but irresistible glow. “The thieves don’t have to be around after it’s over,” he said, running his words together. “That’s the beauty of it. They don’t have to be around to complain.”
I could only stare at him, at the wet lips and the squinted eyes and the hunched, almost supplicating stance. “I believe you’d do it,” I said. “Goddamn, I believe you’d do it.”
He looked around the lobby once more. It was an almost furtive glance. “I’m fifty-three years old, St. Ives, and I want in on this. I’m gonna retire in a couple of years. A hundred and twenty-five grand would make it livable.”
“Get it from your whores, Ogden. Not from me.”
“I’m cutting myself in.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“I’ve got a kicker.”
“I thought you might.”
“You see, St. Ives,” he said in a hoarse whisper after conning the lobby again. “I know who the thieves are.”
It was his exit line and he had been working up to it all evening. He grinned at me with all of those terrible teeth, nodded a couple of times, happily, I thought, turned and strode across the faded lobby, through the door, and out into the summer night.
“The elevator, Mr. St. Ives,” Charlie called from the desk. “It ain’t working.”
Chapter fourteen
It was raining when I awakened at seven the next morning, a hard stinging rain whose drops committed mass suicide against my ninth-floor window where I stood and watched while the water boiled on the two-burner stove for instant coffee. Armed with the coffee and the day’s first cigarette, I picked up the phone and called Eastern Airlines, which answered on the fourteenth ring. All flights to Washington had been canceled. It was raining hard in Washington too. It was probably raining all over the world.
That left the bus or the train. I called the Pennsylvania Central Railroad and the man who answered on the twenty-second ring was indifferent about whether I ever got to Washington, or it may have been that he was preoccupied with what kind of cake his great-great-granddaughter would serve when he got home that night to celebrate his ninety-second birthday. He finally admitted, after some coaxing, that there was a train leaving for Washington at eight that morning and if I were nice, he might even sell me a ticket.
I called down to the desk and got Eddie, the day bellhop. “It’s worth two bucks if you’ve got a cab waiting for me when I get downstairs in ten minutes,” I said.
“Jesus, Mr. St. Ives, I’ll get all wet.”
I sighed. “Three bucks.”
“Okay. Three bucks. By the way, that horse you picked the other day.”
“What about it?”
“It didn’t win.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it. You want to get down on something today?”
“No time.”
“You want I should pick one for you?”
“The cab, Eddie.”
I dressed in four minutes, packed a shirt, underwear, socks, and toilet articles into an overnight bag in two minutes, added a fifth of Scotch, waited for the miraculously repaired elevator for a minute, and was in the lobby at the desk asking for the suitcase nine minutes after I had talked to Eddie. I was also unshaved, unwashed, and unhappy.
The bellhop had somehow managed to find a cab. “I got all wet,” he said as I handed him three dollars. It was as close to thank you as he ever got. The cab driver grunted when I told him where I wanted to go, then mumbled to himself all the way to Penn Station. It took fifteen minutes to go the mile which, on a rainy morning in Manhattan, might have broken some kind of speed record. At seven-forty I queued up at the ticket counter behind a woman who wanted to take a train to Cutbank, Montana. She didn’t want to go today, and she didn’t know whether she would leave next week or the week after, because she wasn’t sure when her daughter’s baby was due, but she thought that she’d get all the information now and decide later, after she heard from her daughter. The man behind the counter became interested in her story and they gossiped about babies for a while and then he thumbed through some thick black books which told him whether a train went through Cutbank. After he figured out her route and she wrote it down they chatted some more, this time about the weather. I didn’t think that he was the same man whom I’d talked to over the phone because he wasn’t much over seventy-five.
When the Montana-bound woman finally left, the man behind the counter looked at me suspiciously, as if I wanted to buy a ticket or make him an indecent proposition. I think he would have preferred the proposition.
“Washington, a parlor seat.”
“Don’t know if I got one left,” he said, glancing up at the clock and then over at his rack of tickets. “You’re a little late, you know.”
“It’s all my fault.”
“Parlor car, huh. That costs more’n coach.”
“I know.”
“You still want it?”
“I still want it,” I said, not even yelling.
“Only got one left.”
“I wouldn’t want to run you short.”
“Coach’d only cost you $10.75. Parlor cost you $19.90. That’s a lot of money.”
“I just came into an inheritance.”
“Huh,” he said, and slid the ticket over to me as I handed him a twenty-dollar bill. “Look after the pennies, I say, and the dollars will take care of themselves.”
“You think that up all by yourself?” I said as he slid my dime to me.