On the Other Hand, Death

17

I tried to focus on the luminous dial of my watch, but it kept blurring out. I rubbed my eyes furiously, squinted, brought the watch up to within six inches of my better eye, backed it out to ten inches, and saw it. I squeezed my eyes shut, opened them, looked again, and said, "Christ."

It was ten to five.

I poked my head out of the bushes and saw Bowman standing with two cops on the veranda of the farmhouse.

The sky was gray above, pink in the east. I crawled out, shook and stretched as I moved, and crossed the lawn.

"You look like shit, Strachey."

"Where is he?"

"Where Izzy? Dunno. Where Heimie?"

"Greco. Is he inside?"

"Hey, Strachey, did I ever tell you the one about the rabbi and the monsignor who were up in a plane that flew through a storm? This plane is bangin' and bumpin' all over the sky, see, and the monsignor starts crossing himself, and-"

"They got away, didn't they?"

"— and then the rabbi, he starts crossing himself too, and the monsignor, he looks over at the rabbi and he says-"

"Spit it out, Ned. Who fucked up?"

He yawned lightly. "Your money's safe, pal. Not to worry. It's in the kitchen."

"Good. So what happened? I fell asleep."

That brought him to life. "Is that a fact? Fell asleep. Well, I'll be mothered! Hey, you guys hear that? 'Travis McGee takes a Nap.' 'The Deep Blue Snooze.' Hope you didn't flake out too early to miss the late show up by the pond last night, huh, Strachey? You didn't let that get by you, did you? Huh?"

He chuckled lewdly, and the two cops with him picked up the cue and joined in. They looked like shit too.

I said, "What happened? With Greco. Where is he?"

"Beats me. As a matter of fact, not a goddamned thing happened. It was no show. No pickup, no drop-off". The department paid out a lot of overtime, though. Boys don't mind that at all."

"Nothing happened? No car, no phone call, no nothing?

"Zilch."

"Yeah. Well. I guess that could mean a lot of things. So, what's your next step, Ned?"

"Wait. Get some sleep and wait. We'll talk to the Deems again, and this Wilson character. And, I suppose I'm obliged to pay a call on your employer Mr. Trefusis, for the sake of neatness. But you'll see, Strachey, this is outside the neighborhood, only indirectly connected to this Millpond business. It's some tetched boyo who read the papers and got an idea in his head. Even dressed up like a police officer to make the snatch. He's a psychopath, but he wants that hundred grand, and he'll be in touch. The department is checking out all the weirdos we know of who might think up a stunt like this, and we might just land him fast. If not, my guess is he just got nervous last night, and he'll be back. We'll be here when he gets here."

"What about Greco in the meantime? These people are nuts. They might saw off another appendage."

"Well, it's not that I'm not concerned about that. Believe me, I am. But what choice have we got at this point in time?"

He still wasn't onto the finger scam. Nor was he aware of my suspicions about McWhirter. I thought, Should I tell him? I said, "Where's McWhirter? How's he reacting?"

"He was real twitchy a while ago. But he bounced back pretty good. He just jumped in Mrs.

Fisher's car and went over to Central to pick up some doughnuts. The guy is tougher than I figured somebody like that would be."

One of the other two cops jerked his head around and said, "Hey, that's the radio!" He trotted over to Bowman's car, now parked out in the driveway. "Lieutenant, you better take this."

We all jogged puffing over to the car. Bowman spoke with an officer at Division Two Headquarters who told him that a phone call had been placed to Dot Fisher's house six minutes earlier and that the dispatcher had been trying to reach Bowman since then.

"Well, who was it, goddamn it? What was it?"

"I'll play you the tape."

"So play it, play it!"

"Here it is."

McWhirter's voice: Hello?

Male voice; harsh, tense: You want your lover back?

McWhirter (pause): Y-yes.

Voice: In three minutes, call this number I'm gonna give you. Call from another phone. Call 555-8107. And bring the fuckin money!

McWhirter: Let me write it down -

Click. Click, dial tone.

Bowman snapped, "You get a trace?"

"Sorry, Lieutenant. Not enough time."

"What's 555-8107? You get that?"

"It's a pay phone on Broadway in Menands."

"Did you send some men out there, I hope?"

"As soon as the call came in. We tried to raise you, too, but-"

"Well, what have you heard from that car? What's the report?"

"We're… uh, we're trying to raise him now. Hang on."

Bowman's face was all purple again and I could see his pulse pounding on his left temple. I said,

"The caller. On the tape. I've heard that voice somewhere."

"Whose is it?"

"I don't know," I said. "I can't place it. I can't remember."

The money was gone. No one could recall McWhirter's carrying anything when he drove off.

Bowman said they would have noticed that and checked it out. One of the other cops said McWhirter had been wearing fatigues with oversized pockets and a jacket. Whitney Tarkington's hundred grand had slipped away. My hundred grand.

Three minutes later Bowman's radio squawked to life again. "We've still got two cars out at the pay phone on Broadway, Lieutenant. So far, no show."

"Weeping Jesus, we missed them! Crimenee! Damn it! Damn it to hell!"

I squatted on the dewy grass and tried to think. The air was heating up again. I waited for Bowman to ventilate. He took out his frustration on his underlings. They shifted from foot to foot and appeared to be thinking unclean thoughts. I was having a few myself.

When the junior dicks had slunk away, I stood up and said to Bowman, "There are a couple of things I should tell you about Fenton McWhirter."

The eyes in his potato face grew beadier than usual. He said nothing.

"This might or might not have anything to do with the last half hour's developments, but…

McWhirter is not entirely trustworthy."

Now his eyes opened wide and he began to take on his purplish hue again.

"What! You held something back from me, Strachey? What was it? What?"

I described McWhirter's history of well-meaning duplicity. As I laid it out, Bowman's face registered all the colors the Times fashion supplement said would be big in the fall: burgundy, plum, fauve, fuchsia, and finally, disconcertingly, olive.

Through clenched teeth, he hissed, "I was set up."

"Maybe," I said. "Could be. Es posible."

"You-you-you will pay for this!"

I squatted again, looked up at him, and said, "I already have."

That seemed to please him.

Driving back into the city, I caught the WGY six o'clock news, which had it already. Bowman had been swift.

"Capital area police," the newscaster said, "are mounting an all-out search for Fenton McWhirter and Peter Greco, two gay activists from San Francisco, who are wanted in connection with an extortion scheme involving a phony kidnapping.

"A hundred thousand dollars belonging to Albany private investigator Donald M. Strachey was taken in the scam. Strachey was unavailable for comment, but Albany police described the theft as a sophisticated operation in which the two alleged perpetrators tricked Strachey out of the cash, which was paid as ransom after a staged abduction of Greco. The two men planned on using the money for radical political purposes.

"According to police," the report went on, "McWhirter and Greco may be armed and are to be considered dangerous." A description was given of the car they were thought to be driving Dot's little red Ford-and listeners were urged to phone Albany police if the car was spotted.

The weather forecast was for a hot and humid Sunday, followed by a hot and humid Sunday night, and then a hot and humid Monday. I switched over to WMHT, which had on a Schubert octet.

"Armed and considered dangerous." Bowman was having a lovely time.

And yet, something was not right. Before I'd left the Fisher farm I wakened Dot and told her what had happened. She said simply but firmly, "I do not believe it. It isn't true. Fenton would not cheat you or me. Perhaps his judgment has been bad, but his principles are unbending. If he ever stole, it would be from the people he considered to be his enemies. And Peter steal? Oh, my stars, what silliness! No. What you're telling me is all stuff and nonsense, and you should know it!"

Should I? Or was Dot Fisher so sweetly naive that her schoolmarm's imagination was incapable of absorbing an act so cynical as the one Fenton McWhirter now stood- thanks to me-accused 77 of. Dot had met bitterness in her life, and stupidity and small-mindedness, but not, so far as I knew, desperate cunning. If she had never seen it, how could she recognize it?

On the other hand, Dot had spent most of her life among children, who can be as sophisticated in their treachery as the Bulgarian secret police. Maybe she did know cunning when she saw it, and she had not seen it in McWhirter.

And, there was yet another troubling matter: If McWhirter had staged the kidnapping, then who was this third party in the affair, the man who had written the notes, mailed the finger, and then called McWhirter from the pay phone in Menands? The ransom notes had been in neither McWhirter's nor Greco's handwriting; I'd checked that when I went through their belongings.

And the voice on the tape had not been Greco's. I knew that because it was another voice I was certain I had once heard. Somewhere. Sometime. Briefly. I tried again, but I couldn't bring it back.

A local co-conspirator? Or were Dot's instincts sound, and I was missing something again, ignoring the obvious for the seemingly obvious. Crane Trefusis? Maybe. But Dale Overdorf, his thug-about-town, had not been…

My mind shut down. I'd had enough for a few hours. More than enough. I wanted only to sleep.

I stopped at my office, phoned Bowman, and said I'd had second thoughts. I summarized them. I said I was nearly certain that McWhirter and Greco were not conning us all, gave my reasons, and said that both of them were probably in trouble now. I urged him to do something about it. He said he would consider my ideas after he napped for a couple of hours. I understood.

I drove over to Delaware. At the apartment, Timmy's car was not in his space. Nor was it in anyone else's, nor in Visitor Parking. I looked for the rental car he'd had but couldn't spot it either.

The apartment was airless, silent, dead. I wrenched open a window. I put some Bud Powell on the turntable but never got around to switching on the amplifier.

The bed hadn't been slept in. Or had it? He might have changed the sheets. I checked the hamper for dirty sheets. Two were in there-folded, naturally, probably in triangles, like the flag in repose. They could have been in there for days, though. I didn't know. Laundry was his job, not mine. Whenever the subject of household chores came up-had come up-I'd say, "You wash and clean, and I'll keep the windmill oiled and the hogs fed." A cushy deal I had. Had had.

His clothes were in their assigned places in closets and drawers, his luggage stacked beside the vacuum cleaner in the "pantry-ette." I searched for a note, a message on a mirror, a letter(-bomb), and found none.

In the bathroom the towels and washcloths were fresh and symmetrically arrayed, as at the Ritz-Carlton. His four varieties of shampoos and conditioners were lined up along the end of the bathtub: Maxine, Patti, LaVerne and-Zeppo.

Only his toothbrush and Aim were missing. Mister Sweetmouth. Mister Oral Hygiene. Clean Callahan, the Germ-Free Child.

I went back to the bed, fell onto my side of it, lay staring at the ceiling for thirty seconds, or half an hour. And then slept.

The ringing sound went on and on for days, weeks, months, and when I realized that it was not in my dream I reached out, snatched up the receiver from the bedside phone, and placed it in the vicinity of my head. A mighty act of will enabled me to focus on the alarm clock, which read two thirty-five. I knew it had to be P.M., because fierce sunlight fell across my legs, roasting them inside the khakis I still wore.

The caller was not Timmy. It was Dot Fisher, speaking in a trembling, tearful, frightened voice.

She told me that Peter Greco was dead. end user