The Brass Go-Between

Chapter twelve

Frances Wingo left at three-fifteen to catch the four o’clock shuttle back to Washington. At the door, just before she left, she turned and said, “You really do think my husband was somehow connected with the theft of the shield, don’t you?”

“Yes. I thought I’d made that plain.”

“How?”

“How was he connected?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I have an idea, but I’m not sure. I don’t really know that I’ll ever be sure.”

“It has something to do with the guard, the one who was killed, hasn’t it?”

“I think so.”

“Will you tell me what your theory is?”

“No, because right now that’s all it is, just a theory.”

“And if it becomes more than a theory?”

“Then I’ll tell you; if you still want to know.”

She looked at me carefully for several seconds. “I assure you, Mr. St. Ives, I will want to know. Very much.”

“All right,” I said.

“And you’ll let me know what happens this evening?”

“Yes.”

“Call me at home,” she said. “I’ll give you my number.”

She gave me her number and I wrote it down. “I would walk you to the elevator,” I said, “but I don’t want to leave the suitcase by itself.”

“That’s quite all right. Good-by, Mr. St. Ives.”

“Good-by.”

I stood in the doorway and watched her walk down the hall, a tall, blonde woman with short-cropped hair, a widow of four weeks who now could cry herself to sleep every night because her husband, brilliant but dead, had been not only a junkie, but probably the accomplice of thieves. There was, I decided, a lot of waste in the world.

I was not as blasé about the suitcase and its contents as I had pretended to be before Frances Wingo. Despite inflation, a quarter of a million dollars was still a fortune to me, an immense one, and I was always amazed that those who used my services could raise such staggering sums so easily. If someone were to kidnap my kindergarten-bound son, I could, thanks to the check from the Coulter Museum, scrape up fifteen thousand, but not a dime more. My son, it seemed, was safe unless his new stepfather turned out to be embarrassingly wealthy which, knowing my ex-wife, was not at all unlikely.

I took the suitcase out of the tub and carried it to the bed. The case wasn’t locked so I opened it and stood there for long moments staring at a quarter of a million dollars in used tens and twenties, all carefully wrapped in brown paper bands which said that each bundle contained five hundred dollars. I didn’t count it. I didn’t even touch it. Winfield Spencer’s Washington bank had already counted it and when it comes to sums like that, banks make no mistakes.

At four o’clock I drove out of the Avis garage in a rented four-door Plymouth, and fought my way to the New Jersey Turnpike which is, in my opinion, the most unlovely strip of superhighway in the nation. It’s also a road that demands grim defensive driving unless you have a very strong death wish, which will be happily fulfilled by either members of the Teamsters Union who like to let their twenty tons of steel nibble at your rear bumper or by the lane jumpers who flit back and forth, oblivious of their rear-view mirrors, ignorant of their directional signals. Most of the vehicles, I noticed, wore New Jersey license plates.

At 5:15 I turned into the third Howard Johnson motel and restaurant which, like the rest of its breed, was all orange and white and dyspeptic-looking. I was handed a key to room 143 in exchange for $16 plus tax, got back in the car, drove past 143, and parked in front of 135. I unlocked the trunk, took out the suitcase, and walked back to 143. There was nothing in the motel room that I hadn’t expected. There was a bed and a dresser and some chairs and a 21-inch television set (black and white) and some lamps and a carpet. Everything was either nailed down or securely fastened so that it couldn’t be carted off at three o’clock in the morning. I looked in the bathroom and saw that it contained the usual equipment fashioned out of bright blue tile. I came out of the bathroom and placed the suitcase in a closet. Then I stretched out on the bed and waited for the phone to ring so that I could give somebody a quarter of a million dollars in exchange for a 68-pound brass shield that was at least 1,000 years old or older, or about as old as I felt.

When the phone rang I looked at my watch. It was exactly six o’clock and the voice on the phone belonged to the woman who had called me what now seemed to be a long time ago, a couple of years back, at the Madison Hotel in Washington. She then had sounded as if she were reading the words that she had to say to me, but now the conversation was informal, almost chatty.

“You follow instructions very well, don’t you, Mr. St. Ives?”

“What about the shield?”

“Is that really money in the suitcase that you carried into your room?”

“It’s money.”

“It’s such a lot of money, isn’t it?”

“The shield,” I said.

She giggled then. It was a high-pitched giggle that went on for a long time and made her sound like a preadolescent girl who has heard her first dirty joke and found it to be quite funny. “The shield of Komp-o-reen.” She had lowered her voice and tried to make it as dramatic as possible, but she wasn’t a very good actress and the effect wasn’t humorous, only embarrassing, which she seemed to realize because she giggled again.

“The shield,” I said, as patiently as I could, as if talking to a drunken friend who thought it would be a splendid idea to seek out some after-hours joints now that it was four o’clock in the morning and the bars were closed.

She said something then, not to me, but to someone else who was there with her wherever she was, next door in room 141 for all I knew. I couldn’t understand what she said, but when she came back on the phone, she sounded as if she were reading again, although her voice was a little more singsong than before, as though she was trying to burlesque the whole thing.

“The exchange will not be made tonight. You will go to Washington tomorrow and check into the Madison Hotel by noon. At twelve-thirty you will receive further instructions. Do you want this repeated?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t want it repeated; all I want is the shield.”

“Tomorrow, Mr. St. Ives,” she said, again bringing her voice down into that pseudodramatic register. “Tomorrow you will have the shield of Komp-o-reen.” Then she giggled again for what seemed to be a long time and hung up.

I sat there on the edge of Mr. Howard Johnson’s overly soft bed and wondered if I was too old to enroll in an International Correspondence School course, one that would teach me to be a bookkeeper or a draftsman or a sheet-metal mechanic. Earn big pay. Learn in your spare time. That was something that I had a lot of. I had eighteen hours before I had to be in Washington, before I had to talk to Giggles again or to her friend with the cottony voice. I could probably get halfway through lesson one before then.

I tried to recall the woman’s voice. It hadn’t been Bryn Mawr nor had it been East Side New York nor magnolia southern. It was just the voice of some female who probably had made it through high school and who thought that $250,000 was a great deal of money and who was willing to be mixed up in two or three murders to make sure that she got her share.

The giggle bothered me. I had heard people giggle like that before when they were high on pot or heroin, although with heroin there usually were more beatific smiles than giggles. Or she could have been slightly drunk except that there had been no slur in her voice, that voice with the all-American California-Midwest accent which could have belonged to someone who was 20 or 30 or a what-the-hell 40.

I took some foresight out of my jacket pocket, a half pint of J&B, and went into the bathroom where I struggled with the sanitary wrapping on a water glass. I poured some of the whisky into the glass, added water, went back into the bedroom, checked the closet to make sure that the suitcase was still there, and sat back down on the edge of the bed to brood some more.

The thieves could have worked it a half-dozen ways, I decided. Both of them could have followed me from New York and called from a pay phone. Or they could have checked into the motel that morning and watched me arrive. Or one of them, the man with the voice that sounded as if he had a mouthful of Band-Aids, could have sat in a parked car, followed my movements through his sunglasses, called the woman, and had her telephone me from their twelve-room duplex on East 62nd Street where she lolled around on the chaise longue while eating hashish-flavored bonbons. Only that didn’t wash because she had talked to somebody when she called me, and it was probably the man with the cottony voice. Or the cat.

My theories had all the substance of a badly spun cobweb so I put down my drink, picked up the phone, and placed a long-distance call to Frances Wingo in Washington. When she came on I said, “This is Philip St. Ives. It was a dry run.”

“You didn’t get the shield?”

“No.”

“But you still have the money?”

“Yes, I still have it.”

“What happened?”

“They tested me to see how well I follow instructions. They’re to get in touch by twelve-thirty tomorrow in Washington at the Madison Hotel. You can do me a favor and make me a reservation.”

“Yes, I will,” she said. “But what happened?”

“I drove to the motel and checked in just like they instructed. A woman called at six, giggled a little, and then told me to be at the Madison tomorrow.”

“Giggled?”

“She seemed to think it was all very funny.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I. But I have no choice except to do what they say.”

“I’ll call Mr. Spencer and tell him what’s happened,” she said.

“All right.”

“He’s growing quite concerned, you know.”

“So am I. You can tell him that I’m just as concerned as he is.”

“Yes,” she said, “I can imagine that you are.” For the first time the tone of her voice edged up above the freezing mark. Not warm yet, but at least some of the chill was gone. “Why do you think they want you back in Washington?”

“I assume that’s where the shield is,” I said. “I also assume that’s where it’s always been. I don’t think it ever left Washington. It’s not something that one would like to lug around part of Manhattan and half of New Jersey.”

“What do you think the chances are for recovering the shield tomorrow? Mr. Spencer will ask.”

“I don’t know. They’re being awfully cagey, but they’re running out of time. I’d guess that there’s a fifty-fifty chance. No better.”

“When will you call tomorrow?”

“When I get the shield back. Or when I’m sure that I won’t get it.”

“Do you want me to call Lieutenant Demeter?”

I thought about that for a moment. “No, don’t call him. I’ll talk to him myself tomorrow.”

We said good-by and I replaced the phone and looked at my watch. It was six-thirty and because I could see no future in fighting the rush-hour traffic, I decided not to leave until seven. I mixed another drink and turned on the television set to a news program which did nothing to cheer me up, but at least gave me the consolation, for whatever it was worth, that a very large number of persons all over the world also had problems, most of which were worse than mine.

At seven I turned the set off, put the key to the room on the dresser, got the suitcase out of the closet, and headed for the rented car. It was still light, daylight-saving-time light, but he materialized at my elbow as if by some kind of magic just as I slammed the lid on the trunk where I’d stored the suitcase.

“Good evening, Mr. St. Ives.”

I turned to look at him. He was wearing a severely cut dark blue suit, white shirt, and a tie that just missed being bashful.

“Ah, the ubiquitous Mr. Ulado. I almost didn’t recognize you in your new suit.”

He smiled and fingered the knot in his tie. “We decided that our other garments had served their purpose.”

“By we, I suppose you mean you and Mr. Mbwato, who must be lurking nearby.”

“Surely not lurking, Mr. St. Ives.”

“It’s a good word and I haven’t had the chance to use it in a long time. Or ‘stealthily’. Another good word that I seldom have the chance to use. It describes the way you move, Mr. Ulado. Where were you hiding, up on the roof?”

“I was waiting behind the next car for you to come out or for the shield to go in.”

“You must be disappointed.”

Ulado smiled politely at that. “If you have a few moments, Mr. Mbwato would like to visit with you.”

“No gun this time?”

“No gun, Mr. St. Ives. Not even a fountain pen.”

“And where is Mr. Mbwato?”

“Just around the corner.”

“I suggest that if Mr. Mbwato wants to talk to me, he can come here. I don’t like to leave my car unattended.”

“Or the $250,000 in its trunk,” Ulado said, smiling again.

“There’s that, too.”

Ulado nodded and disappeared around the corner of the motel. In a few moments the black rented seven-passenger Cadillac drew up alongside my car and the rear door opened. I climbed in and once again Mbwato’s huge presence seemed to transform the Cadillac into an overcrowded Volkswagen.

“Good evening to you, Mr. St. Ives,” he said. He was wearing a medium gray mohair suit, white shirt, and dark blue tie, and the complete outfit had cost him no more than five hundred dollars. They might be starving in Komporeen, I thought, but they still managed to send their emissaries out into the world well draped and well shod.

“I haven’t got the shield,” I said.

“So Mr. Ulado informs me. Pity, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I suppose it is.”

“What happened, Mr. St. Ives?”

“Nothing happened. They just didn’t show up.”

“They?”

“I suppose it’s a they.”

“This was only to test your reliability then?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they spotted you flouncing around in the Cadillac. Neither you nor it are exactly inconspicuous.”

“Do you mean that they were here at the motel?”

“I didn’t say that. I don’t know where they are. They just called me on the phone and told me the deal was off.”

“But they made another rendezvous, of course.”

There was nothing for me to say to that and Mbwato seemed to realize it. He reached over and patted me on the knee with his left hand which was not much larger than a ping-pong paddle. “Let me assure you, Mr. St. Ives, that if we had been successful in securing the shield this evening, we would have also made certain that you would have retained the funds that are in your trust.”

“You don’t know how relieved I am.”

He gave me the smile then, the one that promised to glow for a thousand hours. “There may come a time when you will welcome our interest and even our participation.”

“I doubt that,” I said.

The smile had vanished. Mbwato was serious now, even grave. “Don’t be too certain, Mr. St. Ives,” he said in a deep, melancholy voice that seemed to rumble up from some forgotten sepulcher.

“I’m not certain about anything.”

That seemed to cheer him up a little. He smiled again and said, “By the way, I took the liberty of ordering a wreath for the funeral of Mr. Frank Spellacy. Anonymously, of course. I hope you approve.”

“I don’t know any Frank Spellacy.”

“That’s right. You saw him only once. And even then, I believe, he was already quite dead.”

I opened the door to the Cadillac. “You do keep busy, don’t you?” I said to Mbwato.

He smiled again. “Yes, Mr. St. Ives. We do keep busy because we have so little time. So very little time.”