No Questions Asked

4

The thief called at 8:32 that night, and I couldn’t decide whether the voice belonged to a countertenor or a low contralto. Whoever it was seemed to have put something into his or her mouth to alter the voice. All you really have to do, if you want to do that, is stick your finger into your mouth and talk around it. But some of them use marbles and handkerchiefs and even voice-altering devices, although none of them works much better than a finger.

“Are you ready to start?” the voice said.

“You’re a little early,” I said. “The insurance man hasn’t got in from California yet. I don’t know if he’s bringing the money with him, or if he’s arranged to get it from a bank here.”

“His plane touched down at Dulles three minutes ago,” the voice said.

“I wasn’t even sure he could land in all this snow.”

“The plane had to circle for an hour.”

“You do keep in touch.”

“That’s right, we do,” the voice said. “We’d also like to take a look at you.”

“I’m not so much,” I said. “Five-eleven, a hundred and sixty-five pounds, fair complexion, dark blond hair, and shy brown eyes.”

“That’s nice,” the voice said. “At nine o’clock you can take your brown eyes down to the lobby where a dinner meeting will have just let out. At exactly nine-oh-five we want you to go over to the newsstand and buy a copy of Time magazine, a Hershey bar, and two packs of Kents. Then we want you to go right back up to your room.”

“Then what?”

“We’ll be in touch,” the voice said. After that there was a click, and the phone went dead.

Because I had some time to kill and because life has taught me not to be quite as trusting as I was when I was six, I called Dulles and found out that a United flight from Los Angeles had indeed touched down just a few minutes before, after having circled the airport for nearly an hour. After that I stood at the window and watched it snow on the statues in Lafayette Square.

At 9:01 I was down in the lobby. A small crowd of fifty or so well-dressed people were milling about, putting on their coats, and telling each other what a wonderful speech it had been and how glad they were that they had braved the snow to hear it. I stood there in the lobby trying to decide if there were a politician whom I would go out to hear on a snowy night, or even a nice warm one, decided that there wasn’t, and then moved slowly through the crowd over to the newsstand. I stood there for another moment and looked around casually, trying to sense rather than see whether there was anyone watching me. But there were too many people still putting on their coats and chattering to each other about the speech and the snow. I could neither sense nor see anyone staring at me, so I looked at my watch and saw that it was 9:05.

I took a copy of Time from the magazine rack, told the newsstand clerk I would like a Hershey bar and two packs of Kents, paid for them, and moved back through the thinning crowd to the elevator. I looked around again but nobody was even looking my way. They were all still talking to each other, and none of them seemed to care whether I went up to my room and took a nap or out into Sixteenth Street and built a snowman.

Back up in my room I turned on the TV set and ate the Hershey bar while I watched a rerun of a cops and robbers program that seemed to be taking place out in Los Angeles under smog-alert conditions. I turned the TV set off after a few minutes and settled down with Time, reading it from back to front as I always did. I was about halfway through the magazine and learning all about what names had made news last week when the phone rang.

A deep male voice asked me if I were Mr. St. Ives, and when I said I was he said that he was Max Spivey, that he was a vice-president with the Pacifica insurance company, that he had just had a rotten flight in from Los Angeles, and an even worse trip in from Dulles, and that he needed to see me, but that he needed a drink even worse.

“Do you drink Scotch?”

“I drink anything.”

“I’ve got some J and B up here that you’re welcome to.”

“I’ll be up in five minutes,” he said.

He was knocking on the door in a little less than that. His deep voice went with his size, which was large, very large, even massive. He held out his hand and said, “I’m Max Spivey,” and his voice seemed to rumble up out of his chest.

“Philip St. Ives,” I said as my hand vanished inside of his.

“I’ve heard about you,” he said. “You’re supposed to be good.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Sit down anywhere.”

The room seemed to shrink in size by half after he came in. He looked around and nodded at the bed. “I’ll use that,” he said. “I don’t like to sit on hotel chairs until I’ve tested them.”

He wasn’t much less than seven feet tall, possibly four inches less, maybe even five, but no more than that. He sat down carefully on the bed, but the springs protested anyhow, and it seemed to embarrass him a little. Even though he was huge he was well proportioned, all 275 pounds of him at least, and when he leaned forward to rest his arms on his knees his pants legs stretched tight, revealing thighs as thick as telephone poles. They went with the rest of him.

“It’s a nice hotel,” he said when I came back out of the bathroom carrying two glasses. “I decided to get a room here when your lawyer said that this is where you’d be staying.”

“They keep it up,” I said. “How do you want your Scotch? I’ve got water, but no ice.”

“Just pour some in a glass,” he said.

“How’s that?” I said and handed him a water tumbler that was a third full.

He said that was fine, waited until he was sure that I had a drink of my own, raised his glass in a small salute, and then knocked back half of his drink in a gulp.

He was somewhere past thirty-five, a year or two past it, which was long enough to have got him accustomed to the idea that he was going to have to make his way in a world that was designed for a smaller race. His moves were smooth and careful, almost delicate, as if he were afraid that he might squash something if he moved too fast.

If he hadn’t been so big, his looks wouldn’t have turned any heads. Although he wasn’t exactly ugly, there was a bit too much chin and forehead, and something should have been done for his nose, which arced down and to the left toward a thick-lipped mouth that turned up at one end and down at the other as if it couldn’t decide whether to snarl or smile. But when he did smile, as he did now after having drunk some of my Scotch, it was a merry one that showed a lot of splendid white teeth.

If you looked at him only casually, you might take him for just another huge hulk of a man who hadn’t quite grown up to be a giant. But if you looked again, you would have noticed his eyes, and then you would have known that somewhere inside that huge frame was a cool, watchful intelligence that liked to puzzle things out on its own. They were green eyes, almost sea green, and what they had seen so far of life may have robbed them of most of their warmth.

After he had taken another swallow of his drink, Spivey produced a pack of unfiltered Camels, lit one, and then used his thumb to indicate the window.

“We’re not exactly used to snow out in L.A.,” he said.

“Well, they’re not too sure what it is here either.”

“Yeah, I took a cab in from the airport. It cost me twenty bucks and I think that half the time we were going sideways. A hell of a trip.” He took another swallow of his drink. “You heard from them yet?”

“The thief — or thieves?”

“Yeah. I figure it’s two. At least two. It would take two to get through Jack Marsh.”

“I understand that you’re pretty high on him.”

He nodded. “He’s one of the best private operators on the coast. I guess we’ve used him maybe a dozen times.”

“In what capacity?”

“You know much about us?”

I shook my head. “Not much. Just what my lawyer told me. You seem to be taking away some funny business from Lloyd’s of London.”

“You mean the tits and ass stuff?”

“Is that what you call it?”

“Uh-huh. The guy who started us doing it about twenty-five years ago used to be a talent agent, one of the top agents in L.A. And he kept on being an agent until somebody took the trouble to explain to him one day just how a life insurance company works — I mean really works. Well, as you probably know, a life company’s a license to steal, and I’m not giving away any trade secrets.”

“No,” I said, “you’re not.”

“Well, this guy who used to be an agent — his name’s Ronnie Saperstein and now he’s chairman of the board — well, the first thing he did was to go looking for a small life company, and he ran across Pacifica Life and Casualty up in Santa Barbara, which was just sort of noodling along and dozing in the sunshine up there. Well, he worked a deal with them and the first thing he did was to insure each of his clients — he had about thirty of them then — for one million dollars each on a special group rate. Now that was one hell of a chunk of business for a little company like Pacifica was then, and the next thing you know Ronnie’s a vice-president. Well, he used to have this one female client who was still a pretty fair actress but whose career had sort of hit the skids. But she still had this terrific set of jugs. So Ronnie insures them for five million bucks — each. Well, she made the wire services on that and the next thing you know every flack in town is wanting to insure everything from their clients’ crossed eyes to their barks. And that’s how the tits and ass business got started.”

“But you’re primarily a life company?”

“Primarily. The casualty’s sort of a sideline, but it makes us a lot of money because over the years the tits and ass publicity, believe it or not, has drawn us just one hell of a lot of good conservative business — museums, storage companies, people like that.”

“What have you used Jack Marsh on, casualty or life?”

“Both,” Spivey said. “But mostly life. Whenever some guy gets the notion to insure his wife for a couple of hundred thousand and the wife gets killed in a car wreck the next week, well, we sort of like Jack to go talk to the guy. He’s pretty good at it.”

“I understand he’s a good friend of the Goodwater woman who owns the Pliny book.”

“I guess Maude Goodwater and he are a little more than just good friends,” Spivey said. “They’re living together.”

“I also understand that it was okay with you that she sent Marsh to pick up the book.”

“If we could’ve chosen between him and a company of marines, I think we probably would’ve still taken him. He’s that good. Or at least I think so.”

“He picked up the book yesterday,” I said.

“Yesterday morning.”

“And the next thing you know, somebody with a high voice and a mouthful of marbles is on the phone to your company claiming that they’ve got the book and that they’ll sell it back to you for a quarter of a million. What’d they say about our Jack Marsh?”

“Who do you figure it is?” he said. “A woman or a guy trying to sound like a woman?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Well, whoever it was said that Jack was safe.”

“Is that all?”

“And that they’d let him go when they got the money.”

“Did you believe her?”

“Her?”

“That’s what I call the voice,” I said. “Her.”

Spivey looked down at his glass. It was empty. I took the bottle and poured him some more whiskey. He tasted it and this time he rolled it around in his mouth before swallowing it. “It’s a kidnapping, too, isn’t it?”

“Uh-huh. It looks that way.”

“I’ve never dealt with kidnappers before,” he said. “I’ve had some dealings with the common garden variety of hardcases, but no kidnappers. You’ve done business with them before, I guess.”

“A few times.”

“How was it?”

“Nasty.” I imagine.

“They kill them about half the time,” I said. “Maybe a little more than half.”

“You figure that’s what Marsh’s chances are, fifty-fifty?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “They’re not ransoming him. They’re asking a quarter of a million for the book, not for him.”

“That’s a lot of money,” Spivey said.

“It’s even more when you add on my twenty-five thousand.”

“I’m not forgetting that.”

“My lawyer gets ten percent of it.”

“Is that how you work it?” Spivey said. He seemed interested.

I nodded. “I was just wondering. You know him. Would a quarter of a million dollars be a whole lot of money to Jack Marsh?”

Spivey stared at me. “That’s crossed my mind,” he said.

“Well?”

“I’m not sure. People do funny things for that much money. Jack’s people. Maybe he decided to do something funny.”

“It’s a possibility, huh?”

“Yeah,” Spivey said. “That’s just what it is. A possibility.”

“What about the money?”

“We made arrangements with the Riggs bank here,” he said. “I can get it anytime tomorrow any way the thieves want it. They didn’t say how or when that would be, did they?”

“No.”

“What about the cops?”

“They’re trying to keep a lid on it,” I said. “The guy who’s in charge of the lid is a Lieutenant Fastnaught.”

“You know him?”

“I worked with him one time before.”

“How is he?”

“He’s all right.”

“That’s not exactly the warmest recommendation I ever heard.”

“Well, let’s put it this way,” I said. “He’s better than some and worse than others.”

“One of those, huh?”

I nodded. “One of those.”

“That leaves one other thing,” he said.

“What?”

“The FBI. If it’s a kidnapping, it’s in their ball park, isn’t it?”

“That’s how I understand it.”

“Has this Washington cop, what’s his name—”

“Fastnaught.”

“Yeah, Fastnaught. Has he filled them in?”

“I didn’t ask,” I said. “I didn’t ask because I didn’t want to remind him if he hadn’t.”

“Sounds as though you don’t much care for the FBI.”

I shrugged. “They sometimes come on pretty strong.”

“So you wouldn’t care if they weren’t brought in?”

“No, I wouldn’t care.”

“Well, if you don’t care, then I don’t care, and I don’t suppose whoever stole it would care either.”

“No,” I said. “They wouldn’t care at all.”

“That leaves Jack Marsh. What do you think?”

“Maybe he’s already past caring.”

Spivey stood up. “Yeah,” he said, “maybe he is.”