No Questions Asked

9

The police arrived in a swarm of blue and white cars. There must have been six or seven units not counting an ambulance. After they were through figuring out what had happened they sent me over to George Washington University Hospital in the company of two very young uniformed policemen.

A pair of equally young doctors who were working the emergency room that night turned my head this way and that, took some X rays, cracked a couple of jokes, and gave me a small brown packet of pills.

“You’re going to have a hell of a stiff neck for a few days,” one of them said. “These might help a little.”

“What are they?”

“Muscle relaxants.”

“Nothing’s broken though?” I said.

“Not even cracked.”

The two young policemen took me down to headquarters on Indiana Avenue, where they handed me over to a pair of homicide detectives who took turns asking questions tor nearly an hour. After they were through I signed a statement that one of them typed up. By then it was a little after two o’clock.

“Wait here,” one of the homicide detectives said. “I’ll go see if I can find somebody to run you back to your hotel.”

He was gone quite a long time, at least a quarter of an hour. I sat there in the hard grey metal chair and waited. People wandered in, most of them men with pistols on their belts. Some of them looked at me, but there was little curiosity in their glances. I was just somebody else who had brushed up against violent death, and that was nothing to get excited about. Violent death was their business.

When the homicide detective came back Fastnaught was with him. “Okay, Mr. St. Ives,” the detective said. “You can go now. Lieutenant Fastnaught here will drop you by your hotel.”

“Anything else?” I said.

“Not now.”

“If there is, I’ll be in New York.”

He stared at me suspiciously. It was probably the only way he knew how to stare. “I know where you’ll be,” he said.

Fastnaught touched my arm. “Let’s go.”

I followed him out to the elevator. By the time it came, Fastnaught was humming to himself. I couldn’t make out the tune because he didn’t hum very well. He was still humming when we got into his car and he took the fifth from the glove compartment. He stopped humming long enough to put the bottle to his lips and take a deep swallow.

“You want a drink?” he said.

I shook my head. “They liked it, huh?”

“What?”

“Your story.”

“Oh, yeah. That. They liked it just fine. They liked it even better after they sent a couple of guys over to your hotel to talk to Max Spivey. I’m not gonna get any commendation, but with what you told ’em and with what Max Spivey told ’em, I came up smelling like that rose they keep talking about. You’ve gotta talk to Spivey now, don’t you?”

“That’s right.”

“From what I hear, he’s not too happy.”

“No. I suppose he’s not.”

“You gonna talk to him tonight?”

“Yes.”

“What’re you gonna tell him?”

“I’m going to tell him my version of what happened.”

“You wanta know what I would do if I was you, after I got through telling him that?”

“What?”

“Duck.”

After he got through chuckling over that, Fastnaught took one more drink, put the bottle back in the glove compartment, and started the engine. He was humming to himself again as he drove me back to the Hay Adams. It had stopped snowing by then and here and there a few street-cleaning crews were out. They looked cold and discouraged.

“They’re gonna put me on administrative leave, you know,” Fastnaught said as he turned down Sixteenth Street.

“They are?”

“It’ll look better that way. I told ’em I could use a couple of weeks of it while they got everything cleared up.”

“That’ll give you more time to spend with your wife, won’t it?”

Fastnaught looked at me. “You’re funny, St. Ives. You know that, you’re funny as hell.”

“Sure.”

He pulled up into the driveway that runs in front of the entrance to the Hay Adams. I looked at my watch. It was nearly a quarter to three. I wanted to get out of the car and go into the hotel and up to my room where it was warm and quiet and where nobody wanted to ask me any more questions about how stupid or careless I had been. I very much wanted to be alone, but Fastnaught needed to talk some more. Or maybe the liquor did.

“Two weeks,” he said. “That oughta be enough.”

“Plenty of time,” I said.

“Yeah, two weeks from now, maybe right about this time, I might be giving you a call. You be in New York?”

“That’s right. New York.”

“You in the book?”

“Yes.”

“Well, don’t be surprised if I give you a ring about then.”

“What’re we going to talk about?”

“We don’t have to talk about anything. I’ll just tell you who he is.”

“Who?”

“The other guy. The one who drove off in the car tonight with all the money.”

“Oh,” I said. “Him.”

“What’s the matter, don’t you wanta know who he is?”

“Look, I’ve had a long night. My neck hurts and so does my pride. I don’t know which hurts more. But it’s not doing either of them any good to sit here and listen to you or the booze, or maybe both, tell me how clever you’re going to be two weeks from now. For me, it’s over. I’m out of it.”

I was halfway out of the car when Fastnaught spoke. I turned to look at him. The booze had gone from both his voice and his eyes. His voice had a snap to it and his eyes were bright and hard and somehow cunning.

“Let me tell you something, St. Ives.”

“All right.”

“I’m going to find him.”

“Fine. I wish you luck.”

“No you don’t. What you’re hoping is that I’ll stumble around and make a mess of it. That’s what you’re really hoping, isn’t it?”

I shrugged. “I’m not sure. Maybe.”

He nodded as if my answer satisfied him. “Let me ask you something else,” he said. “Have you ever thought of maybe going into some other line of work?”

“That very thought occurred to me only tonight,” I said, got out of the car, and closed the car door without quite slamming it. Fastnaught nodded and waved at me as he drove off. He was probably humming again.

Max Spivey was half dressed. I couldn’t tell whether he had been on his way to bed when he stopped taking off his clothes or whether he had been rudely awakened and just pulled on whatever was available. He had on a tee shirt and a pair of pants and socks. The tee shirt had a small hole in it down near the waist. His beard was heavy and his hair was damp and rumpled as though he had had time to shower, but not to shave. He didn’t smile when he opened the door to my knock.

“You look awful,” he said.

“Then I look like I feel.”

“You got slugged? That’s what the cops said.”

“By your good friend.”

Something moved across Spivey’s face, something like pain or regret or perhaps even guilt. “Funny,” he said. “I should be mad as hell at Jack and I guess I am a little. But mostly all I can feel is sorry that he’s dead. The son of a bitch.”

“There was somebody in it with him,” I said. “Have you got any ideas?”

“The cops told me,” Spivey said. “I’ve been thinking about it. In fact, I haven’t been thinking about anything else. Jack knew a lot of people and a lot of them were bent all out of shape. Any number of them would have jumped at a chance like this.” He stared at me curiously. “You want to sit down? You don’t look so good.”

“Maybe I’d better,” I said. I sat down on a chair near the writing desk.

“What about a drink?” he said. “I’ve got some Scotch and some ice. I don’t think it’s all melted yet.”

“Thanks,” I said.

He poured two drinks, mixed them with water from the tap in the bathroom, and handed me one. “I heard what the cops had to say,” he said. “What’s your version?”

I told him my version and when I was through, Spivey had some questions. Some very good questions.

“You say the car trunk was locked?”

“That’s right.”

“Then it wasn’t because they panicked or anything like that was it?”

“No.”

“I mean they never intended to come up with the book.”

“It looks that way.”

“The money. The money bothers me. It bothers me quite a lot.”

I nodded. “I can imagine.”

“After you were slugged, you were sitting down in the snow. Right?”

“That’s right.”

“Now are you absolutely sure that you saw Marsh throw the suitcase into the car?”

“I’m sure,” I said. “He threw it into the back seat.”

“What about this lieutenant what’s his name — uh—”

“Fastnaught,” I said.

“Yeah, Fastnaught. That was an awful lot of money being tossed around. You had just been slugged hard, very hard, I’d say from the size of that lump under your ear. Are you sure you didn’t black out for maybe five or ten seconds?”

“You mean just long enough for Fastnaught to somehow get his hands on the money?”

Spivey shrugged. “It’s a possibility.”

“There’s an even better one,” I said. “A quarter of a million dollars is an awful lot of money. Let’s say I’ve known Fastnaught for a while and so we get together and decide to go for it. In this version, Jack Marsh is all by himself. We go through with it just like it was set up, except that when Marsh gets out of the car Fastnaught blows him in two. Then to make it look good, Fastnaught bangs me on the neck, but not too hard, and we dump Marsh’s car somewhere, tuck the money away safe, and call in the cops. How do you like that possibility?”

“It’s not the first time that it’s been entertained tonight,” Spivey said. “When the cops came to see me they brought it up, but only as a possibility.”

“The snow,” I said.

He nodded. “That’s right, the snow. If it hadn’t been for the snow, I think they might still be working on it, but the car tracks didn’t fit. If you had dumped Marsh’s car someplace, that means you would have had to come back and that would have meant another set of car tracks. There weren’t any.”

“We could have walked,” I said.

“They checked that out, too,” he said. “You didn’t walk.”

“So that means that somebody somewhere in this town has got a quarter of a million in a suitcase and an old book. The book bothers me.”

“It bothers the hell out of me,” Spivey said. “If I don’t get it back, it means we’re out seven hundred and fifty thousand bucks — not just a quarter of a million.”

“You mean the insurance. You’ll still have to pay off Maude Goodwater.”

“That’s right.”

“Does she know yet?”

“You mean about what happened tonight?”

I nodded.

“Yeah, I called her earlier while the cops were here. They talked to her, too. She took it hard — about Jack Marsh, I mean.”

“Fastnaught has another theory,” I said. “He thinks she might have been in on it from the start.”

“Maude?”

I nodded. “Maude.”

He shook his head. “Jack — well, yes. Jack’s maybe my fault and maybe he’s Maude’s fault a little, too. It was a big score — a quarter of a million dollars and Jack probably needed the money. He always needed money. But Maude—” He shook his head and didn’t bother with the rest of the sentence.

“Why not Maude?” I said.

He thought about it for a moment “Probably because she’s just too honest.”

“That’s one reason,” I said. “It’s probably as good as any and better than most. But it still leaves the book.”

Spivey put his drink down, clasped his hands behind his neck, and gave himself a tremendous stretch that made his chest bulge out until it threatened to fill half the room. I wondered what his chest was fully expanded — at least fifty-five inches. Maybe even more. When he was through stretching, he said, “I wonder what a hot copy of Pliny’s Historic Naturalis would bring?”

“They wouldn’t take that kind of a chance,” I said.

“Then why go to all that trouble, if they’re not going to peddle it? Why didn’t they just ransom it back?”

“Maybe the only reason they won’t go around trying to peddle it is that they don’t have to. Maybe they already have their buyer.”

Spivey got up quickly and started pacing. The room wasn’t large enough for him to do a proper job of it so he settled for three strides one way and then three strides back. He ground his right fist into his left hand as he paced. I don’t think he knew that he was doing it. If he had, it would have been a little theatrical. “Yeah,” he said. “That makes it work. Otherwise it wouldn’t.” He spun around and pointed a big forefinger at me. “Jack could have dug him up. A buyer, I mean. He would’ve known where to find one. Or who to go to, anyway. Maybe a middleman.”

I yawned. I couldn’t help it. “You’ll be looking for a nut,” I said. “Or maybe only an eccentric. But there’s one thing you can be sure of about him.”

“What?”

“He’ll be rich. Very, very rich.”

Spivey started pacing again. I watched as he used three paces to cover twelve feet one way and then back again just like before. He must have traveled the equivalent of a couple of blocks before he stopped again, whirled around, and once more aimed his huge forefinger at me like a pistol.

“You fucked up, St. Ives.”

“I was wondering when you were going to get around to it. I’ve been thinking about it and you’re right, I did fuck up. If I’d worked at it a little harder, I should’ve been able to shake Fastnaught. And if I’d lost him, then Jack Marsh would still be alive, but you’d still be out a quarter of a million dollars — and the book.”

“The switch,” Spivey said. “You could have set that up better.”

I shook my head. “The switch is always the thief’s option. Sometimes you can refine it, but you can’t originate it because he’ll smell double cross and probably refuse to deal. So all you can do is work within the framework of what he sets up and take your chances. And that’s what I get paid for, taking those chances.”

“Did you ever have one go sour like this before?” Spivey said.

I nodded. “A few times. Once it was an African shield. Another time it was an old sword in London.”

“What did you do?”

“What do you mean, what did I do?”

Spivey made an impatient gesture. “I mean did you just drop it or did you try to do something about it?”

“Sometimes I messed around a little.”

He nodded. “And after you got through messing around, what did you have?”

“Some answers. That’s about all.”

“A deal,” Spivey said.

“What kind of a deal?”

“You’re out twenty-five thousand dollars, right?”

“Plus my pride.”

“Yeah, your pride. I almost forgot about that. You come up with the answers on this one — all the answers — and Pacifica insurance will pay you twenty-five thousand. You come up with some answers that lead to our recovering both the book and the quarter of a million, and we’ll go ten percent of everything.”

“That’s seventy-five thousand.”

“A lot of money.”

“You could hire a bunch of guys for that — guys with licenses that they hang on their walls. I’m not a private investigator.”

“I’ll put some private guys on it,” Spivey said. “I’ll have to. And probably all they’ll come up with is their bill. You — you’re my outside chance and you don’t cost anything unless you produce.”

“Expenses,” I said.

Spivey shook his head. “Not even expenses.”

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do.”

“What?”

“I’ll think about it.”