Free Live Free

Washington Calling

“Okay, Cliff. I’ve got a little something going to keep me occupied, but if you should need somebody to fill in, I could probably make the time.” Stubb hung up the phone.

“You look tired,” Murray said sympathetically.

“I ought to. I’ve been walking my dogs off all morning.”

“In this cold?”

Stubb shrugged and pushed back his hat. “That part wasn’t bad. A lot of the time I was in somebody’s house. Hell, I was sitting down then, so what am I bitching about?”

“You get paid yet?”

“Not yet. Couple of days. Thanks for the coffee.”

“Hey, I didn’t mean that. You’re good here. Hell, Jim, you ran up a big tab and paid it all off. When was it? Day before yesterday?”

“I guess,” Stubb said. “Jesus, I am tired. I guess it’s the cold. Gimme a B.T.L., Murray.”

“Fries on the side?”

Stubb shook his head. “I had a big breakfast.”

The door flew open, admitting a few snowflakes and a blast of frigid air. “Mr. Stubb! Mr. Stubb!” and then, “Oh, God!”

The steamy air of the sandwich shop had fogged Sandy’s glasses. She jerked them off and rubbed them on her sleeve.

“Winter’s hell, isn’t it?” Stubb said. “Same thing happened to me. Same thing happens every time I go inside anyplace. Over here.”

“Mr. Stubb, I have to talk to you. It’s important—terribly important. It really is.”

“Sure. Important to you or to me?”

“To both of us. Something’s happened.”

“In that case, we’d better get a booth in back. Bring my sandwich back there, will you, Murray?”

Murray nodded and asked Sandy, “How about you? Wanna have anything?”

“Just coffee. Gosh is it time for lunch already? A hamburger and some tea.”

“Regular or bellybuster?”

“Regular. Will you have lunch with me, Mr. Stubb? It shouldn’t offend your sense of chivalry. I’ll put it on my expense account. Usually I have a lot of trouble with that, but I don’t think I will now.”

Stubb was carrying his cup toward the rear of the sandwich shop. Over his shoulder he said, “I don’t have one. Sure, I’ll eat on your dough.”

“Really, this is very good of you, Mr. Stubb. Do you know you’re a very hard man to trace? You’re not in the telephone book, and the front desk at the Consort didn’t seem to know a thing about you. I went to the Journal and looked through their morgue—I know a man there—and you had a couple of clips, but none of them indicated where you could be reached. And you’re a detective! You’re not investigating Madame Serpentina, are you? If you are, what you said about false psychics last night has a very unpleasant double meaning.”

“Don’t worry about a thing,” Stubb said. He had taken out his pencil and battered little notebook, and had begun to write as she spoke. “I’m working for Madame Serpentina. She’s my client.”

“Why that’s wonderful!” Sandy paused, her plump fingers fumbling in her purse for her own notebook. “But why would a psychic need a detective?”

“For the same reason detectives need psychics. You said last night that the cops go to psychics for help in finding bodies, missing weapons, and that kind of stuff, remember?”

Sandy nodded.

“And it’s absolutely true. They do. But did you ever hear of a psychic telling the cops that the body was in the basement at four twelve West Forty-Eighth? No, what the psychic sees, maybe, is an old trunk and a broken clock.”

Sandy nodded again.

“Swell. So suppose this time it’s the psychic that wants to find somebody. She sees the trunk and the clock, right? Or whatever.”

“I see.”

“As Madame S. would say, I doubt it. But that’s what’s going on. I’m looking for a certain party, on behalf of Madame S. Those other people you met, Candy and Ozzie Barnes, are working for me.”

“Are they detectives too?”

Stubb grinned. “Sure. But they don’t know it.”

“What are you writing?”

“This.” Stubb ripped a page from his notebook and handed it to Sandy. “Maybe you’ve forgotten, but last night you promised Madame S. a full-page ad in both magazines—”

“One!”

“Both. You know damn well you’re going to spread that material out over at least a couple of issues, which in your case means the two magazines. Anyway, you promised the ads, and I told you I’d take you up on them. That’s the ad copy. Run it as soon as you can.”

Sandy looked at the paper. “‘It will be to the advantage of anyone knowing the whereabouts of Benjamin Free, formerly of the High Place, to communicate with us. Box XXX in care of this magazine.’ That’s it?”

“You assign Madame S. a box number so you can keep the replies together, if there are any. Every so often I’ll send somebody to pick them up.” Stubb took a sip of coffee. “Murray! This is getting cold. How about warming it up?”

“Who is Benjamin Free?”

“The man Madame S. is trying to find.”

“I don’t claim to be Sherlock Holmes, Mr. Stubb, but even I deduced that. What is the High Place?”

Stubb shrugged. “You’ll have to ask Madame S.”

“This man Free lived there?”

“He said he did, yeah.”

Murray brought Sandy Duck’s tea and poured steaming coffee into Stubb’s cup.

“Hell of a day, isn’t?” Stubb said. “Freeze the tits off a boar hog.”

“Are we going to discuss the weather, Mr. Stubb? I’d much rather talk about Benjamin Free.”

“If we’re going to fight, we might as well use first names. Mine’s Jim.”

“I’m Sandy—short for Alexandra. As you’ve probably noticed, I’m short for Alexandra myself. Alexandra should be nearly six feet and use a lorgnette. But I know a little karate.”

“No, I don’t want to fight, Sandy. I was just trying to fill in with that crack about the weather. Murray was still close enough to hear. I can tell you everything I know about Ben Free in two minutes, and why shouldn’t I? You could find it out yourself in ten. What I’d rather do is get some information from you. Last night you said I’d come to your rescue a couple of times—something like that—and you said you’d give Madame S. the ad. If I really helped you, how about helping me? Tell me what’s going on. Why were you looking for me?”

“How do you know I was? Maybe I just dropped in here for a cup of tea.”

“You saw me at the counter and called my name before your glasses had a chance to fog. The windows are pretty foggy too, but I think you saw me through them before you came inside. Because after you came in, you weren’t hungry. And you switched your order from coffee to tea. You weren’t thinking about food while you were out there on the street; you were thinking about me.”

“You know, you’re really a pretty good detective.”

“Yeah, but nobody in the world knows it but you and me.”

“Madame Serpentina must, since she hired you. Anyway, you’re right. I was looking for you. A few minutes ago I ran into one of the bellmen from the hotel, and he told me he’d just seen you walking past. I decided nobody would want to walk very far in this cold, so I started looking in the shops for you.”

“Why?”

Sandy lowered her voice. “Something big, really big, happened at the office this morning.”

Stubb nodded, sipping his coffee.

“Mr. Illingworth—he owns and edits both magazines—old Mr. Illingworth got a call from the Government. From someone very highly placed in the Federal Government.” Her voice was tense with excitement. “They had heard about my story. They wanted to see an advance copy.”

Stubb leaned back, his eyes nearly closed behind the thick lenses of his glasses.

“Mr. Illingworth was—was just beside himself, if you know what I mean. I mean, government repression, after all these years! He has this friend on The New York Times he hasn’t seen since I don’t know when. They just exchange cards at Christmas, but Mr. Illingworth called him up. They must have chatted for half an hour. Mr. Illingworth looked ten years younger.”

“Swell. Are you going to let these Government people look at your story?”

“Of course. We’re going to cooperate—at least for a while—and keep records of everything. Then maybe we’ll publish an exposé of the whole business. With luck, we’ll make the big papers and some of the journalism reviews—the Times promised Mr. Illingworth they’d hold off until we gave the word. We’ve already started a thing for the next issue of Hidden Science. He and I finished it just a minute ago. We say the magazine is in desperate trouble—not financial—and we ask all our precognitive readers to look into the matter for us, and to advise us how to act as well as tell us how it will come out.”

“Shrewd.”

“One of the things we really want to know, of course, is how they found out. The Government, I mean. If there’s some sort of agreement among the various psychics about that, well, we’ll be watching for it carefully.”

“I’m psychic too,” Stubb said. He raised his right wrist and pressed it to his forehead. “I can tell you right now.”

“You can?”

“Sure. When the wreckers were tearing down Ben’s house, he got himself on TV. I’ll tell you about that some other time. The tape ran on the five o’clock news. Somebody saw it and came looking for him. You remember Mrs. Baker, the crazy old lady that came up to Madame S.’s room about the same time you did? She was there because they had contacted her, and she knew our names—she had them wrong, thought I was Ozzie Barnes and so forth, but the names themselves were all right. They picked one of us up. It’s just a guess, but mine would be that they got Candy at the precinct before she was sprung. But it doesn’t matter, because all four of us went to Madame S.’s room in the Consort. Hell, it couldn’t have been hard, because that crazy cop …”

“Mr. Stubb? Jim?”

“I just had an idea, that’s all. It’s something that happens to me about once a month. Listen, Sandy, do you want to buy into this?”

“Yes, certainly, if I can. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I don’t know why this very important government agency is interested in Madame Serpentina, but if they are, it’s a big story. I may be able to sell it to the Times or one of the national news magazines. If it’s really good, I might even be able to use it to get a job on one of those magazines. I wanted to ask you to help me go after it.”

“Sure. Was I just supposed to do that from the greatness of my heart?”

“I was hoping for your help, yes. I suppose I could say that I hoped we’d find some area of mutual interest.”

“Fine. Money.” Stubb grinned at her.

“I haven’t got much.”

“Compared to me, you’re probably rich. Listen, I know you think a lot of Madame S., but she hasn’t been a damn bit generous about bread for expenses. So here’s what we’ll do. You’ve already offered to pay for my lunch.”

Sandy nodded.

“That’s fine, that’s a start. I want you to give me a hundred bucks now, with the understanding that it’s not mine. It’s a loan that I’ll pay back when—and if—I collect from Madame S., and I can use it as expense money while I’m working on her case.”

“I don’t have a hundred dollars in my purse, or anything like it.”

“You can write a check. They’ll cash it for us at the currency exchange down the street, which is good because we’re going to need a hunk of it for a cab right away.”

“And what do I get, besides a ride in a taxi?”

“Information. I tell you what I know about Free, and I let you tag along, shoot pictures if you want to, until the hundred runs out. When it does, we talk. You can buy in again for another hundred or so, or we can break up the act. What do you say?”

She sat staring at him and gnawing her lipstick. Half a minute passed, and Murray brought their sandwiches and a greasy bill on greenish paper. At last she said, “It’s not the magazines’ money, you know. It will be mine. My own.”

“You’re talking about selling the story and maybe even getting a new job. The magazines pay you to do that?” Stubb picked up a quadrant of his club sandwich and smeared salad dressing down the side. “You got that little camera with you?”

“Yes, I always carry it. You didn’t say you’d call Mr. Illingworth if I didn’t give you the money.”

“That’s because I won’t. I’m no blackmailer. I’m offering to let you buy into the story. If you want to, fine. If you don’t, that’s fine too. But if you don’t, don’t come around with your hand out.”

“You’ll tell me what that idea you just had was?”

“Sure. That’s the first thing I’ll tell you. Then you come along and watch me try to make it pay off. If I find out anything, you’ll hear what it is. Only you’ll have to keep the lid on it until I say you can write about it—which shouldn’t be long.”

“All right, a hundred dollars. You’re hoping for a clue to the whereabouts of this Mr. Free?”

“Indirectly, yes. More specifically, I’m hoping for a clue to those government people who called about him. So now, cooperation cuts both ways. What did they tell your boss?”

“I don’t know a lot of it. He wouldn’t tell me.”

“That’s what I figured. Did he say what agency?”

Sandy shook her head.

“Department of Justice? FBI? CIA? Treasury? Internal Revenue?”

“He didn’t say.”

“Just that it was a government agency?”

“Something like that.”

“Man or woman?”

“I don’t know.”

“But it could have been a woman?”

“I told you, I don’t know.” She gave a little shake of exasperation. “If he didn’t say, how could I? I wasn’t listening in.”

“Not even to his end of the conversation?”

“No. He was in his office with the door shut.”

“And you didn’t ask him questions when he told you your piece was going to get checked over?”

“Of course I did. It’s just that he didn’t answer them. He was full of the idea of letting them have their head, then springing the whole thing on the readers and making a big splash. He didn’t want to talk about the call. Mr. Stubb—”

“Jim. »

“Jim, I can see you mean well, but you don’t know Mr. Illingworth. He’s an old man—over seventy—and cranky. He was running the magazines before I was born, and he knows perfectly well that he’ll still be running them when I leave for a better job. He keeps the business under his hat.”

“They must have told him where to send your article on Madame S. Wouldn’t he have made notes? A name and address? Maybe a phone number?”

“I suppose so.”

“In a pocket notebook, or in something he’d leave there on the desk?”

Sandy pursed her lips. “Probably on his blotter. Really important things—printer’s deadlines and meetings with the distributor, things like that—he usually writes on his blotter. It’s a habit he has.”

“Any reason we couldn’t go in and have a look at it?”

“After he’s gone home, you mean? I don’t see why not. I’ve got a key. But, Jim—”

“Yeah?”

“It wouldn’t be fair for you to concentrate on that part of the story. I could do that myself. The reason I came to see you, and the reason I’m giving you a hundred dollars of my own money, is that I need you to help with the part that concerns Madame Serpentina. She’s the one they’re interested in, after all. Not Mr. Illingworth. Not me.”

“Not her either,” Stubb said. “I just told you, and if you’re going to write about this, you’d better learn to listen. It’s Ben Free. And don’t worry about me concentrating on one part of the case or another—I concentrate on all the parts. Now finish your hamburger and we’ll cash your check and take a ride over to Belmont Hospital.”

“Belmont?”

“Sure. That was my idea of the month. I told you already—these government people must have been watching Madame S.’s room at the Consort. They saw you come in, or maybe go out, and that’s how they got onto you. Swell. But somebody else was watching too. Hell, you got stopped by him while you were leaving, remember?”

“The policeman with the bandaged head!”

“That’s right. Sergeant Proudy. He was watching us, and there’s a damn good chance he saw whoever else was. This morning, when I was giving out assignments to the gang, I told Candy to go over and have a word with him, but that was just because she’d helped the old doc patch him up and he seemed to like her better than the rest of us. I wanted her to find out what he knew or thought he knew that made him think he ought to stake us out. She’s probably been and gone by now—I hope she softened him up for us.”