Buyer beware

15

The stench was the first thing that hit me. Stale sweat and the fetidness of something rotting.

Behind the half-open door a young girl stood staring blank-faced at me, unaware of the stench. She had narrow, bare and bony shoulders above a red halter that covered child's breasts. Her patched jeans appeared to be stained with grease. Behind her I could see a few pale faces in the dimness, some litter banked against one wall as if it had been swept there. The building was one of the few still occupied in a block of aged brick buildings that mercifully were due to be torn down.

"I'm looking for Smit," I told her. "There's money in it for him."

She laughed, spoke almost without moving her narrow lips. "What's he gotta do?"

"I'll talk to Smit about that."

"He ain't here anyway." The door closed.

I turned to walk down the graffiti-scrawled hall to the exit. A round peace symbol in fresh red paint had been brushed awkwardly over the door by somebody who hadn't heard we'd pulled out.

"You, Mister!"

My head jerked around to look behind me. A skinny, pinch-faced man in dark pants and a too-small sweater stood just outside the door the girl had closed. I waited and he walked toward me with that skinny man's ginger lightness in his step. He had protuberant dark eyes, curious despite fear.

"I'm Smit," he said.

"Nudger." I held out my hand and he shook it.

"So what do you want to talk to me about?"

As he spoke he was walking ahead of me, his head half turned, like a dog leading its master. He stopped when we were in the vestibule, where there was sunlight, cracked plaster and complete privacy.

"Congram," I said. "I'm not police and I'll pay."

I watched him think about it. The flesh of his slender face was mottled as he moved in a nervous little dance in the dust-swirled sunlight. From certain angles he was thirty-five, from others, fifty.

"Why do you want the information?" he asked and gnawed his lower lip as if he had something against it.

"Private matter."

Smit grinned and shook his head. I was aware of his gaunt hands, unafraid of him because of his slight-ness-as long as he didn't reach for a weapon.

"We're talking about a hundred dollars," I said.

The grin stretched, giving his face a cadaverous look. "Haven't you heard of the code of the underworld?"

"Two hundred dollars," I said, knowing Carlon would consider that cheap.

Smit's yellow grin contracted to a thin line, and he fondled a dimple on the point of his chin with a dirty forefinger.

"I can always say you talked anyway," I told him.

His face contorted as if he'd been stabbed. "Hey, Nudger, you wouldn't do that!" He began his nervous shuffle again.

"No," I said, "I wouldn't."

His nervous body was still. He'd come to a decision. "All right. It don't matter by now."

I placed a pair of hundred dollar bills in his skeletal, stained hands.

"How do I know this'll spend?" he asked, holding up the bills to the sunlight.

"How do I know you're going to tell me the truth?"

"Because I'm not going to tell you anything you can hang on Jerry. I don't know of anything."

Smit had already supplied me with a first name. I stood and waited for what else he had to say.

He nervously twisted the two bills into a cigarette-size roll and slipped them into his pocket. "I met Jerry at the Poptop Club, right after I got off on a possession charge. I guess that's how he found out about me and wanted to use me for an in on his business deal."

"Business deal?"

"This was over a year ago, understand. It can't do no harm to tell now, or I wouldn't be telling it. Jerry wanted to buy into the middle of a connection; I don't exactly understand how. I think he was going to supply the capital to buy from the big dealer for a percentage of everything right down the line."

"How about some names?"

His eyes seem to contract in their sockets. "That I don't tell you, for any price. What I will say is that the' operation no longer exists. It hasn't for almost a year. The law made some key busts and somebody knew when to quit. At least that's what I was told."

"Did you set it up for Congram to talk to the people involved?"

"Sure," Smit said with a hint of pride, "that I could do. But they turned Jerry down."

"For what reason?"

"They had no way to trust him. And it didn't help him being so clean-cut straight-city, hair above his ears and all that."

I waited for Smit to continue, there in the syrupy sunlight of the vestibule. A few cars passed outside, beyond the door's cracked glass, and in the distance a truck's air horn sounded three long notes. Smit crossed his arms over his sunken chest, squeezing in on himself nervously. He saw I wasn't satisfied.

"I was told you could be trusted," I said. He wondered who might have told me, and I wasn't about to tell him.

"Jerry tried to talk them into a deal," Smit said, "but they refused, and he finally gave up and forgot the idea. I ain't seen him since-almost a year…"

"You brought Congram to the operation's attention," I said. "Didn't they ever ask you about him?"

"Sure. I told them what I told you. It was good enough."

I breathed out, loudly. "I'd have wanted to know more if I'd been them."

He uncrossed his arms and flexed his fingers, but he didn't go into his dance. "Okay," he said, "they wanted to know where he lived, so once they had me follow him when he left the Poptop."

"Where did he lead you?"

"Hey, I don't remember the address! It's been a year!"

I drew another hundred of Carlon's money from my wallet.

"I'll have to take you there," Smit said, snapping the bill from my hand. "Money is the root of all evil, you know?"

"I'm not in any position to argue with you."

I drove the rental while Smit gave me directions, pointing the way with a lean and dirty-nailed finger. He sat leaning forward, pulled by his eagerness to be done with the unpleasantness of our agreement.

We didn't have to travel far, only out of the depressing, blighted area of the city and through the marginal neighborhoods that marked the boundary. I pulled to the curb where Smit told me to, and he pointed to a tall apartment building that had had a recent face-lift, up to the third floor only. EXECUTIVE TOWERS, a block-lettered sign proclaimed, a bit too grandly for the condition of the building.

"Which apartment?" I asked.

"I don't know," Smit said with almost desperate sincerity. "Only the building… They had me follow him to the building, is all."

"What does Congram look like?" I asked.

"Hard to describe. Average height, build, nice-looking, nothing unusual about him except he's a great dresser. But there's something to him that tells you he's sharp."

"What color eyes?"

"Blue. His hair's dark and curly, cut short."

When there was a break in the traffic, I made a U-turn and drove Smit back to his own neighborhood and whatever his three hundred would buy. As he got out of the car, I assured him that our conversation would be kept confidential, but he knew there was no such thing and had the money in his pocket to prove it. He would worry for weeks, maybe months, in the shabby room where he lived with the thin, sad girl and whoever else slept there. Maybe he'd worry about our conversation for the rest of his life, as part of his collective worry. Some world.

I drove back to the Executive Towers.

The lobby of the face-lifted apartment building had also been remodeled recently. The walls seemed to be freshly painted, and the few cigarette butts and scuff marks were like a sacrilege on the gleaming red-and-white tile floor. I walked to the bank of brass mailboxes and scanned the name plates. No Congram. I pressed the button lettered MANAGER.

After a short wait I head a door open around a corner, and I walked toward the sound.

The manager's name was Toggins. He was a barrel-chested man wearing a leisure jacket and shirt open at the collar to reveal reddish hair that seemed to grope to reach his neck. He could have used that much hair on his head, bald but for some reddish strands combed sideways, like pencil lines, over his crown.

"I'm looking for Jerry Congram," I said. "I couldn't find his name on the mailboxes."

"No Congram lives here."

"Do you recall when he did?"

"Don't have to think hard to remember him," Tog-gins said. "Curly-haired young guy, nifty dresser. World by the tail."

"That's him."

"Moved out about four months ago without a forwarding address. And he still owes me three months on his lease." The barrel chest puffed out in resentment.

"Did he live here alone?"

"Ha! Signed the lease alone, but he always had company." Toggins smoothed the front of his shirt with an outspread hand, as if sensitive about his paunch. "Not the sort of company to cause trouble, though. Upstanding-looking young people, like from good homes. Course, Jerry Congram seemed that way, too, and he vamoosed without paying his rent."

"How many of these people would visit him at a time?"

"Sometimes seemed like a dozen, men and women. Never had any complaints, though. They were quiet types, like I said." He narrowed pink-rimmed eyes at me. "You ain't no friend of his, are you?"

"I'd like to find him, just like you."

"He owe you money?"

"You might say that." I reached into my wallet and got out a photo of Joan Clark. "This one of the young women who visited Congram?"

Toggins gave the snapshot his same narrow-eyed glare. "Yeah, sure is! She was in to see him all the time, like the rest of them. Hey, they didn't have anything goin' up there, did they?"

"Like what?"

"I don't know. You ain't a cop, are you?"

"No, a private detective."

Toggins backed up a step. "You puttin' me on? I never met one of you guys."

"There aren't many of us."

"If you find this Congram, will you let me know? Because of the rent."

"Sure. Did he keep pretty regular hours while he lived here?"

Toggins scratched the freckles on his forehead. "Well, that's pretty hard to say for sure, but he seemed to. Like I said, a typical clean-cut young guy, like you'd want your daughter to take up with. If I had what he does, I'd be doin' somethin' with it."

"How long had Congram lived here?"

"Nine months of a one-year lease." Toggins clamped a long cigar in his teeth and fired it up with a silver lighter. I wished he hadn't. The thick gray smoke that clouded the air around us gave off a pungent, sickening odor.

"Cherry-scented," he told me. "I smoke these and my wife don't bitch."

"Do you have any idea what Congram did for a living?" I asked him.

He did a George Burns with his cigar. "I couldn't say. He left here every day with his sharp suit and little briefcase. We got a lot of 'em here, captains of industry, if you know what I mean. I shouldn't be surprised when they skip out on their rent."

I told Toggins I appreciated his cooperation and got away from his cigar's fallout.

It had begun to rain, an insincere sort of drizzle from a half-blue sky. I stood for a while beneath the awning outside the Executive Towers, waiting for the rain to stop. The sidewalks were clear of people, and the tires of passing cars hissed on wet pavement. After Toggins' cigar, the rain-freshened air seemed especially sweet.

The deeper I delved into Talbert's murder and Joan Clark's disappearance, the more Congram emerged as a catalyst. I had no idea yet as to how he was involved, but I was almost certain of his involvement. Be it awe, envy or fear, the man had made an impression on everyone I'd talked to who'd known him.

The rain stopped as if it had been turned off, and I jogged across the bright, puddled street to my car.

I turned the ignition key and pulled out behind an old Ford full of teenagers. Most of the paint had been sanded from the Ford, giving it the appearance of a camouflaged military vehicle. I turned on my wipers to clear the windshield of raindrops and stopped behind the old Ford at a red light. Even a car-length behind I could hear the deep bass rhythm of the Ford's radio at high volume. A miniature figure with outstretched arms and legs dangled by a thread or rubber band from the rearview mirror, like an obscene crucifix.

The traffic light flashed to green, and the Ford's tires whirred on wet cement. I didn't know why the driver was in such a hurry; there was a stop sign a block away.

The Ford braked to a nose-diving halt at the stop sign and had just stopped rocking when I pulled up behind it. Cross traffic had the intersection blocked for a few minutes, and I sat staring at the silhouetted, gently bobbing, spread-armed figure suspended from the Ford's rearview mirror.The dangling figure loosened something on the edge of my memory, and suddenly that something illuminated into image in my mind-the image of a newspaper photograph, a man in a dark business suit, plummeting to his death, limbs outstretched and body arced as if in a last desperate and maniacal attempt to soar. A man the photo's caption had identified as Robert Manners.

Dale Carlon had been examining the newspaper in the Star Lane house, but he'd been concerned mainly with the idea of a top business executive's pressures driving him to suicide, relating the story to his own problems. So he hadn't remembered the man's name, as I hadn't until my memory had been flicked by the sight of the dangling rearview mirror ornament. And Robert Manners was the name penciled on the back of a business card lettered GRATUITY INSURANCE. "Ingerence," as Melissa Clark had mispronounced it.

I tried to remember some details of the story. Manners had been a Los Angeles business executive, member of a long list of boards and committees. Had he been depressed over something specific? Had he left any family? I couldn't remember.

I stopped at a service station and got directions to the Chicago Public Library, at Michigan and Washington.

The Chicago papers had carried the Robert Manners story on the same date as the Layton paper. The library had it on microfilm. Manners had been district manager of a big firm called Witlow Cable, the exact business of which wasn't stated. He had leaped to his death from the roof of Witlow Cable's twelve story office building. Business associates said he had been unusually tense lately, though the business was going well. And Manners' widow reported that he had seemed depressed lately, but not to the point of suicide. No note had been found, but Manners' personal effects had been removed from his pockets and arranged neatly on a corner of his desk. Police had no reason to suspect foul play but were investigating.

I leaned back from the microfilm viewer. I knew how the police investigated that sort of case. How much time and manpower did they have to waste on a violent death that was almost certainly a suicide? Not all of the troubled who choose their own time to leave this world are considerate enough to leave behind notes of explanation.

Back at my motel, I looked in the Chicago telephone directory for a Gratuity Insurance. There was none listed. I phoned a few national insurance organizations for information about Gratuity, but as far as they could determine there was no such company.

The direction I had to take was clear. West to Los Angeles, the City of Angels. I didn't like that allusion to an afterlife.

I got in touch with Dale Carlon and brought him up to date on developments. He said that at the Star Lane house he'd been interested in the Layton paper's photo and news account of Manners' death because of the business-pressure angle, the presumed motive for suicide. Everyone involved in high level decision-making had felt that pressure, Carlon told me, including himself. The prospect of suicide was considered, if only fleetingly, by many who shouldered such responsibility. It was difficult for me to imagine someone as wealthy and self-serving as Carlon contemplating suicide, but bearing in mind the fifty thousand dollars, I didn't tell him that.

He did agree with me that it was now hard to believe the newspaper's being folded to that page at the Star Lane house was coincidental. Either the paper was deliberately left arranged that way or, more likely, someone had been reading the account of Manners' death with interest and had put down the paper still folded to the story.

Carlon also agreed that the answers to some of our questions were in Los Angeles and that I should travel there immediately. He would spare no expense to find his daughter. He would spare no one.