“So when can we start using it?”
“In an hour or two.”
“Well, shit,” said the assistant manager and headed for the stairs. Bryant gave the dead Sloan a final close look and rose. “While we’re waiting for Doc Emory, Chief, I thought maybe Ivy here could tell us some more about his new pal, Francis the Plumber.”
“I already told you,” Settles said.
“We’d like to hear it again,” Bryant said, looking for support to Huff, who was adjusting his Minolta. The black detective looked up just long enough to nod and went back to his camera.
“One more time, Ivy,” the chief of police said.
Settles gave Fork a reproachful look and said, “He was about forty and short and fat-five-one and maybe two hundred and ten. Wore dark blue coveralls with Francis the Plumber across the back in red letters-and a phone number I don’t remember. He carried an old beat-up black toolbox. Had tinted prescription glasses, the kind that go from real light gray to real dark gray depending on the light. Had a gimme cap from Copenhagen snuff. Had a thin nasty mouth. Drove a pink Ford van with a stick-on ‘Francis the Plumber’ magnet sign on one side-maybe both sides, but I don’t know that for a fact. And no, I didn’t get the license number this time either.”
“You forgot his nose,” Huff said, still working on his camera.
“Yeah. Right. The nose. Well, it was kind of squashed up, like I told you, and had this one big nostril and this regular size one and they both looked about a mile deep. They were also hairy. He had a regular forest growing in there and most of it was gray.”
“Tell us again why you let him skip, Ivy,” said Wade Bryant, whose increasingly sly tone matched his too-tall-elf looks.
“I didn’t let him. I showed him my shield and told him to stay put while I went and called Vines here. The guy was a plumber and possibly-just possibly-a solid citizen. What you two guys would’ve done, of course, is make him kiss the floor right off. With all your experience you know for a fact that plumbers are automatic suspects.” Settles paused, glared at Bryant, and added, “Oh, yeah. One more thing.”
“What?” Bryant said.
“I watched Soldier’s elevator all the way up. I mean I watched its numbers light up. It stopped at three on the way up and the other elevator, the one the plumber rode, stopped at three on the way down. So I’d say the plumber got on Soldier’s elevator at three, killed him on the way up to four, got out, took the stairs back down to three and rode the other elevator from there to the lobby, where, for some reason, I neglected to beat the shit out of him.”
Chapter 25
After a grateful swallow of the bourbon and water Kelly Vines had handed him, the chief of police looked at Jack Adair and said, “Tell me something. Was Soldier ever a soldier?”
“In two wars,” Adair said, turning from the window in Vines’s room where he had been inspecting the ocean. “And Soldier, incidentally, was his real name.”
“Couldn’t be,” Fork said.
“Years ago I saw his birth certificate. It was back in the early fifties when a certain Mrs. Shipley in the State Department was suspicious of almost anyone who applied for a passport, but particularly suspicious of applicants who’d served in the Lincoln Battalion in Spain and later with the OSS, which is why Soldier’d come to me.”
Fork made no effort to hide his surprise and disbelief. “What the hell was he doing in Spain?”
“Purely by chance Soldier’d landed a job to shepherd nine Dodge ambulances from Detroit down to Mexico and over to Spain. They’d been bought for the Loyalists by some folks who, I think, were later called premature anti-Fascists.” Adair smiled. “Soldier always said his old pal Hemingway helped raise some of the money.”
“How old was Soldier then?”
“When he went to Spain? He’d have been just twenty. He was born April sixth, nineteen seventeen, and I remember the date because it was the day we declared war on Germany.” Adair smiled again, rather gently, and added, “World War One.”
Sid Fork’s impatient nod indicated he knew all about World War One. “And that’s why his folks named him Soldier?”
Adair nodded. “His full name was Soldier P. Sloan. The ‘P’ was for Pershing. A general-in World War One.”
“And he joined up after he got the ambulances over to Spain?”
“So he claimed. Anyway, it was his experience there that got him commissioned a second lieutenant in the OSS just after the war started.” Adair gave Fork another almost apologetic smile. “World War Two.”
“So what’d he do-or claim he did?”
“In the OSS? Engaged in all sorts of hugger-mugger-at least when it didn’t interfere with his black market operations.” This time Adair’s smile was more knowing than apologetic. “Black markets and wars always seem to go hand in hand.”
Fork neatly cut off any further discussion of black markets by asking, “Why’d he want a passport in the fifties?”
“Debts,” Adair said.
“Wanted to skip out on ’em probably.”
“Something like that. So I called in a favor that a certain Republican congressman owed me and Soldier got his passport. When he came back from Europe four years later in ’fifty-five he was thirty-eight years old and suddenly a retired lieutenant colonel. He promoted himself two more times after that, impressing a never-ending series of gullible but wealthy widows who provided him with clothes, cars, cash and whatever remaining charms they had to offer.”
“I sort of inherited Soldier from Jack,” Kelly Vines said, putting his drink down carefully on the coffee table and leaning forward to stare at Fork. “Where’d you run across him, Chief?”
“He was our first hideout customer,” Fork said. “And afterwards he sent us about a third of our other clients, including you two. He sort of adopted the three of us-B. D., me and Dixie-and liked to take us out for Sunday dinner. Well, that got old pretty quick for me and B. D., but Dixie always went until she married Parvis. She said she liked Soldier’s manners.” He looked at Vines coldly. “Satisfied?”
After Vines replied with a shrug, Fork asked, “So what do we do with him after the autopsy-bury him, cremate him, donate him-what? He have any kids, ex-wives, brothers, sisters, anybody?”
Adair sighed. “He had a thousand acquaintances and Kelly and me. But from what you say, he also had you, the mayor and Dixie. So I suppose we should bury him with a headstone and all.”
“‘Soldier P. Sloan,’” Vines said. “‘1917-1988.’ Then a line or two after that.”
“We’ll leave the wording up to you, Kelly,” Adair said and turned to Fork. “So what’ll it cost, Chief-the plot, the stone, a cheap casket and a few words by a not overly sanctimonious priest?”
“Soldier a Catholic?”
“Fallen away, I’m afraid.”
“Then I know just the priest. As for how much, well, he had about five hundred and fifty in his wallet, but that won’t quite cover what we’re talking about.” When he felt Kelly Vines’s hard stare, he hurried on. “He also had a thousand-dollar bill in his watch pocket, but I’m not sure you can spend that.”
“It’s perfectly legal tender,” Adair said. “And since you’re the chief of police, the bank shouldn’t ask any questions.”
“There was something else in Soldier’s watch pocket,” Fork said. He fished the folded-up diary page from his shirt pocket and handed it to Vines. “Except it doesn’t make sense.”
Vines unfolded the page and studied the numbers and capital letters, as if for the first time. “I was never any good at crossword puzzles,” he said, “but this first notation, ‘KV 431’ and ‘JA 433’ is pretty obvious. It’s Jack’s room number and mine.” He looked up and handed the page to Adair. “The rest is gibberish.”
Adair read the other line of capital letters silently, then aloud, “C JA O RE DV.” He read it aloud again, rose, walked to the window, as if its light might help, silently read the letters yet again, stared out at the ocean for a few moments and turned to Vines. “Maybe it’s simpler than it looks.”