He thanked me for sending Kenny to him, his voice wary as he did so. I wasn’t on the force, and he shouldn’t have to kick any of it back to me.
I set his mind at rest. “You could do me a little favor in return. You can find someone to make a few phone calls or look in the right books. I could probably do it myself, but it would take me three times as long.”
I spelled it out for him. It was an easy way for him to balance the books with me, and he was glad to grab it. He said he’d get back to me, and I told him I’d hang around and wait for his call.
It came almost exactly an hour later. J.J. Cottrell, Inc., had had offices in the Kleinhans Building at William and Pine. The firm had published a Wall Street tip sheet for about a dozen years, going out of business at the time of the proprietor’s death. The proprietor had been one Arnold P. Leverett, and he’d died two and a half years ago. There had been no one named Cottrell connected with the firm.
I thanked him and rang off. That rounded things out neatly enough. I hadn’t been able to find a Cottrell because there had never been one in the first place. It was reasonable to assume that Leverett had played some sort of role in Wendy Hanniford’s life, but whether it had been a large or a small role was now no longer material. The man couldn’t be reached for comment without the services of a medium.
For the hell of it I put through a call to the Eden Roc and got the manager again. He remembered me. I asked him if he could check the same register for Leverett, and it didn’t take him as long this time because he knew right away where to find the records. Not too surprisingly, his records indicated that Mr. and Mrs. Arnold P. Leverett had been guests of the Eden Roc from the fourteenth to the twentieth of September.
So I had the name of one of the men in her life. If Leverett had left a widow, I could go and annoy her, but it would be hard to think up a less purposeful act. What I’d really accomplished was more negative than positive. I could now forget about tracing the man who had taken her to Florida, and I could quit wondering who in hell J.J. Cottrell was. He wasn’t a person, he was a corporation, and he was out of business.
I went around the corner to Armstrong’s and sat at the bar. It had already been a long day, and the drive to Mamaroneck and back had tired me more than I realized. I figured on spending the rest of the night on that barstool, balancing coffee and bourbon until it was late enough to go back to my room and go to sleep.
It didn’t work out that way. After two drinks I thought of something to do and couldn’t talk myself out of doing it. It looked to be a waste of time, but everything was a waste of time, one way or another, and evidently something in me demanded that I waste my time in this particular fashion.
And it wasn’t such a waste after all.
I caught a cab on Ninth and listened to the driver bitch about the price of gasoline. It was all a conspiracy, he said, and he explained just how it was structured. The big oil companies were all owned by Zionists and by cutting off the oil they would turn public opinion in favor of the United States teaming up with Israel to seize the oil-rich Arab territory. He even found a way to tie it all in with the assassination of Kennedy. I forget which Kennedy.
“It’s my own theory,” he said. “Whaddaya think of it?”
“It’s a theory.”
“Makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know that much about the subject.”
“Yeah, sure. That’s the American public for you. Nobody knows from nothing. Nobody cares. Take a poll on a subject, any subject, and half the people got no opinion. No opinion! That’s why the country’s going to hell.”
“I figured there was a reason.”
He let me out in front of the library at Forty-second and Fifth. I walked between the stone lions and up the stairs to the Microfilm Room. I checked my notebook for the date of Arnold P. Leverett’s death and filled out a slip. A sad-eyed girl in jeans and a plaid blouse brought me the appropriate spool of film.
I threaded it into the scanner and started going through it. It’s almost impossible to go through old issues of the Times on microfilm without getting sidetracked. Other stories catch your eye and waste your time. But I forced myself to locate the proper obituary page and read the article on Arnold Philip Leverett.
He didn’t warrant much space. Four paragraphs, and nothing tremendously exciting in any of them. He had died of a heart attack at his home in Port Washington. He had left a wife and three children. He had gone to various schools and worked for various stockbrokers before leaving in 1959 to start his own Wall Street newsletter, Cottrell’s Weekly Analyzer. He had been fifty-eight years old at the time of his death. The last fact was the only one that could possibly be considered pertinent, and it only confirmed what I had already taken pretty much for granted.
I wonder what makes people think of things. Maybe some other story caught the corner of my eye and jogged something loose in my mind. I don’t know what did it, and I wasn’t even aware of it until I had already left the Microfilm Room and gone halfway down the stairs. Then I turned around and went back where I’d come from and got the Times Index for 1959.
That was the year Leverett started his tip sheet, so maybe that was what had triggered it. I looked through the Index and established that it was also the year in which Mrs. Martin Vanderpoel died.
I hadn’t really expected to find an obituary. She had been a clergyman’s wife, but he wasn’t all that prominent, a minister with a small congregation out in the wilds of Brooklyn. I’d been looking for nothing more than a death notice, but there was a regular Times obit, and when I had the right spool in the scanner and ran down the page with her obituary on it, I knew why they’d thought she was worth the space.
Mrs. Martin Vanderpoel, the former Miss Frances Elizabeth Hegermann, had committed suicide. She had done so in the bathroom of the rectory of the First Reformed Church of Bay Ridge. She had slashed her wrists, and she had been discovered dead in the bathtub by her young son, Richard.
I went back to Armstrong’s, but it was the wrong place for the mood I was in. I headed uptown on Ninth and kept going after it turned into Columbus Avenue. I hit a lot of bars, stopping for a quick drink whenever I got tired of walking. There are plenty of bars on Columbus Avenue.
I was looking for something but I didn’t know what it was until I found it. I should have been able to tell in advance. I had had nights like this before, walking through bad streets, waiting for an opportunity to blow off some of the things that had been building up inside me.
I got the chance on Columbus somewhere in the high Eighties. I had left a bar with an Irish name and Spanish-speaking customers, and I was letting myself walk with the rolling gait that is the special property of drunks and sailors. I saw movement in a doorway ten or twelve yards ahead of me, but I kept right on walking, and when he came out of the doorway with a knife in his hand, I knew I’d been looking for him for hours.
He said, “Come on, come on, gimme your money.”
He wasn’t a junkie. Everybody thinks they’re all junkies, but they’re not. Junkies break into apartments when nobody’s home and take television sets and typewriters, small things they can turn into quick cash. Not more than one mugger out of five has a real jones. The other four do it because it beats working.
And it lets them know how tough they are.
He made sure I could see the knife blade. We were in the shadows, but the blade still caught a little light and flashed wickedly at me. It was a kitchen knife, wooden handle, six or seven inches of blade.
I said, “Just take it easy.”