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Frisbee in the Middle

R. D. Brown

R. D. Brown is a professor of English at Western Washington University. His mystery novel Prime Suspect, a paperback original published by Belmont-Tower in 1981, has been republished by Dorchester Publishing Company.

Besides frequent contributions to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Professor Brown has a long list of academic publications, including The Heritage of Romanticism (1983), and Guide to Better Themes (with Robert A. Peters, 1970).

Glendora dropped it on my blotter where it spun like a to, while she talked.

“He says his name is Schmettler.”

Glendora is almost the perfect secretary. She’s prettier than a red pickup, but she has a mind like a computer. That means she presents facts, follows instructions to the letter, and only offers conclusions when asked. Sometimes, that makes her a little irritating. Like now, when some Godzilla tears the knob off our office door to show he’s eager to do business, she makes him give her his name before delivering the message. Why? Because I once said I liked to know who wanted to talk to me.

“The man with him didn’t say anything, but he should probably be indicted for the way he looked at me.

As you would imagine, Glendora is doing very well in law school. Between classes, she helps out as a secretary while I turn over enough skip tracing to pay the rent and cover her tuition. Evenings, we discuss the US Tax Code and other fun things. When she passes the bar exam, we’ll set up as Biggart and Frisbee, Corporation Taxation Specialists. She’ll handle the trial work, while I do research in the back room because I want, but seldom get, a tranquil life.

It had been a slow week, so I was willing to forgive Mr. Schmettler’s enthusiasm. The knob was still spinning, just now starting to show the occasional wobble.

“Think of this as opportunity knocking,” I told her.

When Schmettler came through the doorway like a transcontinental truck on a one-lane bridge, I changed my mind, not about him, but the bad news that came as part of the package, a little fellow about five feet high with a bad reputation about twice as tall.

The last I heard, Arnie Buttons had been under indictment on seventeen counts of larceny, counterfeiting, procuring, trafficking in controlled substances, felony, murder, and suspicion of worshiping graven images. A slow week had become a bad one.

“We don’t want any,” I said, standing up to move in front of Glendora while Arnie looked around the office and decided not to buy it.

“Get the broad out of this dump,” he said.

Personally, I find our decor is very pleasant; rental furniture, true, but not too much of it. I didn’t quarrel with his taste, though I did take charge of the situation.

“I don’t think these people want coffee, Glendora, but I do. Double cream with a prune Danish.”

Glendora is brighter than I am, but before she met me, she had to spend a lot of time pretending to be dumb. She did it now, popping some nonexistent chewing gum and flouncing out of the room after a wide-eyed look at our guests.

When the door closed behind her, Arnie brought me up to speed. “You’re a hunter. The best. I want you to hunt somebody.”

“I’m a finder,” I said. “A hunter goes for blood, but I like solving puzzles. If you want to get in touch with somebody on a civil cause, I’m your man. I serve processes, catch bail jumpers, repossess cars, and find wandering spice, but nothing more.”

Arnie picked up the doorknob and Schmettler looked interested. “I know about you, Frisbee. You don’t play in the traffic these days. Take a walk, Bruno.”

Schmettler lost interest in me. Since his boss hadn’t told him to remove it, he left the knob on the inner door as he left. Arnie sat down in the client chair.

“I got a target you might like. Looey Flowers.”

I had reasons not to like Looey Flowers, almost as many as I had to dislike Arnie Buttons. They were two of a kind, and until I came along, they’d been rivals in the same organization. But Looey had taken out a competitor in front of a witness, an innocent citizen who had the bad luck to be present when Looey was acting out with a sawed-off shotgun. Being of normal intelligence, the witness left the area fast.

The state attorney gave me the job of finding him. I did, five hundred miles off and two weeks later. After I brought him back, he was put in protective custody. The story was he managed to climb out a tiny bathroom window to throw himself out of a hotel suite also occupied by three policemen. I left the business because he rightly prophesied when I took him in that I was signing his death warrant.

After that, with a kind of irony I still don’t appreciate, things worked out. Once he was in jail, Looey decided to recite his memoirs. On the basis of the stories he told under immunity, he should have been chained to a rock for all eternity for birds to peck at, but he did something that made it worthwhile. He nailed Arnie Buttons — but good. I wondered why Arnie wasn’t in jail. He watched my memory banks work through all this dreck.

“They had to reduce my bail because Looey is the only witness left against me. The rest of them came down with amnesia or absence. That’s why I’m hiring you.”

Just then the phone rang. Glendora was calling from the café across the street.

“You don’t drink coffee, and you never touch refined sugar. I conclude you want me to do something. What?”

“Take the afternoon off,” I said, making the automatic protective move that this liberated woman frequently finds vexing. “Mr. Buttons is just leaving.”

“Oh!” she said in a startled voice.

“Don’t hang up the phone, Bruno,” Buttons called across the room. “Mr. Frisbee and I will get back to you in a few minutes.”

I’ve been dealing with middle-class types lately, so I’m out of practice. Arnie had enjoyed demonstrating that. Despite my views on the subject, it was in the cards that I was going to have to find Looey Flowers so Buttons could kill him.

Arnie opened the haggling by saying “She’s cute, your secretary.”

He paused to let my mind fill with an X-rated movie that would be banned in Port Said.

“You find Flowers, you get ten big ones and the broad back in one piece. You don’t, and — ahh — let’s not talk about it.”

I had some violent thoughts myself, which involved tightening Arnie’s necktie till his eyeballs popped out to join the doorknob on my desk. But that wouldn’t help Glendora.

“Okay, Arnie. Glendora goes someplace safe where neither of us can reach her or it’s no deal.”

He didn’t like the sound of that, and he fingered his necktie, nervous about the way I was glaring at him.

I explained. Glendora was to go immediately to the YWCA. After she talked to me on the phone from there, I’d look for Flowers. I pointed out that as long as she was in his hands, I had no reason to trust him. Because Arnie knew me pretty well and he very badly needed Flowers dead, he told Schmettler to take her to the YWCA.

While we waited for Glendora’s return call, Arnie gave me the story till now. The federal strike force marshals had kept Flowers secure during his testimony by bringing him from the local air base to the roof of the courthouse via helicopter. By the time Arnie’s people had discovered Flowers was being kept at the base infirmary, the hearings were over and Flowers had vanished.

Then he told me why it was impossible for Looey to vanish as he did. Arnie’s security around the base was perfect: tape monitors on all the exit gates, a radio and telephone watch; even people watching the flight lines. Still, Flowers was gone, and Arnie couldn’t understand it.

“How do you know he’s gone?”

“His protection left — all those marshals. Somehow, they did it. And don’t say he just slipped by us. Looey weighs in over three hundred pounds and getting bigger. They couldn’t hide him in a flyboy uniform or get him in the trunk of a car, but they faked me out somehow.” He paused to let me see the glint of switchblades in his eyes. “This is important to me, Frisbee!”

As long as Glendora was at risk, it was important to me, too, which I didn’t need to tell him. I was wondering how I could keep from being instrumental in Looey’s violent demise. Then Glendora phoned from the YWCA, wondering why she was in the penalty box while I had all the fun.

“Some fun,” I said. “Either I find Looey Flowers or someone near and dear has bad trouble. Listen carefully and maybe you can help. Arnie says Looey left the air base. Anyway, a solid ring of Arnie’s men say they didn’t see him. All the gates were covered, the flight lines, and Looey’s too big to go into a car trunk.”

“Are you sure he’s gone?”

“Arnie tells me the federal marshals left.”

“You mean Mr. Flowers evaded all Mr. Button’s people?”

“No, I think he avoided them. It’s a case of how you hide a three-hundred-pound gorilla who belongs in jail. I expect to find Looey by this afternoon or tomorrow at the latest. Take care. Arnie promised me ten big ones, but don’t count the money till I phone again.”

Glendora went “humph!” and hung up. Arnie was thoughtful. “Why you telling her all this?”

“She’s my auxiliary brain. If I can’t figure it out, she can.” For the moment, I felt pretty confident.

When Schmettler lumbered in, I could see that Arnie had reason to be confident too.

“I forgot to tell you,” he said. “Bruno goes with you. Everywhere. And my people will be all around the YWCA. Maybe I couldn’t catch Looey, but I can sure catch a broad.”

I wondered what other surprises were upcoming, but I didn’t bother to ask because Arnie was no more into full disclosure than I was.

“Let’s go, Bruno,” I said. We did, in one of those black limousines Arnie was so fond of. Bruno drove me out Claiborne Avenue to an Army and Navy Store that’s been there as long as I can remember. A retired first shirt from maybe the War of 1812 runs it.

Fortunately, I was wearing black shoes. While Bruno inspected camping equipment, I bought a shirt and pants in blue cotton wash material and a web belt. I didn’t need a cap. The owner was pretty bored till I started sorting through the samples of military decorations.

“You got authorization for those things, Mac?”

Bruno joined us. The owner shut up when Bruno started making speech. “Why you buying all this war surplus, Frisbee?”

“Looey vanished from the air base. That’s where I start looking. I want to fit in.” I turned back to the ancient clerk.

“I want one of those, one of those, and that neat red one with the white stripes.” I’d pointed out ribbons for the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Medal, and the Good Conduct badge. The clerk gave me a sour look and said he’d run them up in the back room.

I put on the shirt and pants and inspected electronic gear that was sold by the pound while Schmettler went back to the camping equipment. The clerk returned ten minutes later, in a dead heat with a couple of air police, a sergeant and a corporal.

“This the guy trying to impersonate a hero?” the sergeant said, as much to me as anybody.

When Schmettler came up to see what was going on, the APs undid the flaps of their holsters.

“Who’s this guy?” the sergeant wanted to know.

“You may well ask,” I told him.

But the sergeant didn’t like my answers when he asked for leave papers and dog tags. Then he noted I wore no cap and consequently was out of uniform. Without any further ado, they shoved me ungently into the air police jeep and away we went. Schmettler pursued us in the black limo and only broke off at the main gate. In the provost marshal’s office, I was cooperative but not too talky. They had about decided to nail me for impersonation until the provost asked if I had a serial number.

When I gave it to him, they took my fingerprints. That was the end of due process. They decided the stockade was where I belonged. I spent the remainder of the afternoon sitting on a bare mattress waiting for chow.

It wasn’t jambalaya, and the only exotic sauces offered were catsup and mustard, but it was plentiful, whatever it was. The armed forces have changed since my day. They seem to be accepting Boy Scouts, even though some of the young men looked as if their camp-out had been rained on.

Except for me, only one of the men in the dining hall was over thirty. He filled one side of a mess table all by himself, something like a basking sea lion. The food hadn’t struck me as all that remarkable, but he was shoveling it in as if Julia Child did the catering. Unlike the other diners, he seemed happy. I took my tray over to join him.

“Looey,” I said, “Arnie Buttons wants to know where you are.”

He didn’t stop chewing. “Thass tough,” he said. “They frisked you, so get lost, shortie.”

“I’m not going to be here long,” I told him. “I got in by making them think I was AWOL. When I get out tomorrow, people will be coming to see you. He’s putting up a lot of money to lower your shades.”

Looey finished his tray and looked at mine as he continued to chew. I passed it over and took a medicinal sip of something similar to coffee as he vacuumed up my supper.

“Whass he got on you?” he asked. “You’re Frisbee, state attorney’s office, right?”

I confessed my career change and my new assignment.

“A broad as hostage? Arnie’s good at that. Well, like I always say, win some, lose some. Take me. They say I got something germinal. Six weeks or six months at the best to go. I can’t remember which, so thass bad. But I been on a diet all my life. Now I eat as much as I want, no worries about hypertension or nothing. Arnie pro’ly can’t tag me here, and all my tapes and depositions are going to stick it in his ear good. I go, and he follows. On the whole, thass good. You tell him for me.”

I wondered how Arnie was going to take the news that modern medical science was going to achieve what he couldn’t.

“Looey,” I said, preparing to become persuasive, “Arnie tells me you’re the only witness left. The others are missing or forgetful. They’ll put you in a civilian hospital at the end. Then Arnie will do his number on your deathbed. After all, he found you here.”

Looey’s eyes were tiny slits in his enormous face. “I got this plan. I hit four hundred pounds, real sick, they won’t move me out of here because they can’t. In the meantime, I catch television and eat and think about Arnie sweating. Too bad about your broad.”

In a lot of ways, Looey Flowers resembled a sea slug. The only place he was vulnerable was in his hatred of Arnie. Just as he was telling me he was maybe ninety percent sure his evidence would send Arnie down, I interrupted.

“I can make it one hundred percent.”

He stopped eating to ask how.