The Brass Go-Between

Chapter thirteen

It had been a long, fretful drive back to Manhattan, made doubly grating by a spectacular five-car pile-up that had killed two persons and slowed three miles of New York-bound traffic to a creep. By the time I drove into the Avis garage I was irritable; by the time I arrived at the Adelphi by cab, toting the fifty-eight pounds of money, I was testy; and when I spotted Lieutenant Kenneth Ogden of vice slumped comfortably in one of the chairs in the lobby, looking as if he had just taken squatter’s rights, I suffered a severe internal implosion which, everything considered, was kept under pretty fair control. I could have stamped my foot.

Ogden slowly got out of his chair when I came in and permitted me another long examination of his false teeth. “No luck, huh?” He seemed happy about it.

“No.”

“Just feeling you out,” he said. “They do that sometimes.”

“I know.”

“It’s in there?” he said, gesturing toward the suitcase.

“It’s in there,” I said.

Ogden licked his lips and I tried to remember where I had last seen that look. It’s an unusual look; really quite rare. The eyes narrow, the lips grow wet and move a little, there’s sometimes a faint smile plus an air of total concentration and an obliviousness to everything but the satiation soon to come. I remembered then: it was a fat man in a cafeteria. He had weighed a little more than three hundred pounds and he had had that same look when he sat down to an assortment of dishes that would have stuffed four persons with ordinary appetites. With the fat man it had been food; with Ogden it was money. With both it was greed.

“What’re you going to do with it?” he said.

“The hotel’s got a safe.”

“I saw it. You could open it with a corkscrew.”

“There’s somebody on duty all night.”

Ogden snorted, his eyes still fixed on the suitcase which was growing heavy. I switched it to my left hand. “Hell, he must be seventy-five and besides, he sleeps all night.”

“Would you like to keep it for me overnight?”

“Well, we could for Christ’s sake at least take it down to the precinct station. It’d be safe there.”

I walked over to the hotel desk. Ogden followed. “You remember the Baxter kidnaping out in Omaha about fifteen years ago?” I said.

He looked at me and a sour, suspicious look crept across his face. “Look, St. Ives—”

“Baxter was kidnaped, you remember, and held for $200,000 ransom.” The room clerk appeared at the desk, an aged, frail man whom I knew only as Charlie.

“Evening, Mr. St. Ives.”

“Hello, Charlie. Any messages.”

He glanced at my box. I could have done it just as easily, but I always asked him because he liked to be asked and at seventy-five there aren’t many things that anyone will ask you for. “Not a thing,” he said.

“Will you put this in the safe?” I said, and swung the suitcase up on the counter. He tried to pick it up with one hand, failed, and barely managed to get it off the counter with two. I watched him unlock the safe and store the suitcase inside. Ogden was right. It looked as if it could be opened with a corkscrew. Or a hairpin. But it was safer than my bathtub. I turned to Ogden, who was also watching and who looked as if all the dreams that he’d ever had in his life were being locked away, out of sight forever.

“So when Baxter was kidnaped,” I said.

“Who?” Ogden said.

“Baxter. The man out in Omaha.”

“Oh. Yeah.” He didn’t seem very interested.

“When Baxter was kidnaped they asked two hundred thousand and the family agreed to pay. They turned the money over to a cop, a lieutenant of detectives, as I recall, who was supposed to make the money drop, pick up some instructions about where he’d find Baxter, and then fetch him back to his hearth and home. Well, this lieutenant dropped off the money okay and he picked up the directions about where he could find Baxter. But he was the ambitious type, so he staked out the money drop until the kidnapers showed up. He tried to take them, and there was a gun fight. According to the lieutenant there were three of them and he killed two. The other one, again according to the lieutenant, got away with the ransom money. About an hour after he was supposed to be there, the lieutenant finally drove up to the deserted farmhouse where Baxter was held. He was about an hour too late. Baxter had choked to death on the gag that the kidnapers had placed in his mouth. At least that’s what the autopsy said.”

Ogden gave me one of his mean looks, the one that he probably used on whores and pimps and the sad-faced, middle-aged men who hung around the toilet at the YMCA. It was a look in which all the lines in the face seem to run downward. “You trying to say something, St. Ives?”

“I’m telling a story.”

“Has it got a point?”

“I think so; it might even have a moral. So there was the Baxter family, out not only $200,000 but minus its breadwinner as well. They never caught the third kidnaper; they never recovered any of the money; and the lieutenant of detectives resigned two months later and retired to Hawaii at age thirty-eight.”

Ogden grunted. “I remember it all right. The cop got a lot of guff about if there really was a third man who took off with the ransom. And there was even some who thought that he might have helped the guy — what’s his name, Baxter — that he might have helped him to choke to death a little. If he was gagged real good, and tied up real good, all the cop would have to do is hold his nose for five minutes or so.”

“But it was convenient, wasn’t it?” I said. “With Baxter dead, no one could ever be sure — except the lieutenant, of course — about whether there really was a third man.”

“You said it had a moral. I don’t see any moral.”

“How about: the wise man resists temptation but for a moment; the dull man for an hour, and the fool forever?” Another none-too-pithy aphorism. Perhaps I could soon start talking in parables.

“Did you make that up?” Ogden said.

“I think so.”

“What is it, some kind of a crack?”

“Not really.”

“That story about the Omaha kidnaping was.”

“All right.”

We had walked over to the elevators and I punched the up button. There was no one else in the lobby except Charlie behind the desk. The night bellhop was hiding somewhere and the cigar counter, out of stamps again, no doubt, had closed promptly at its regular hour of six.

“You going up?” Ogden asked.

“I thought I might; you want to tuck me in?”

“No, I just wanted to make sure you got home safe and sound.”

“And you took part of your day off to do it.”

“That’s right,” he said, “I did. You know what else I did today on my day off?”

“What?”

“I went to a funeral. Frank Spellacy’s. You knew Frank.” It wasn’t a question the way he asked it.

“No. I didn’t know Frank.”

“Funny. I thought you did. I thought you might have written him up in your column. He was a kind of a character, always operating on the edge. Funny how he died.”

“How?”

“Somebody stuck a knife in his throat and he bled to death all over his desk and rug. He had an office in the Nickerson Building over on Park Avenue. He was hustling lots out in the desert somewhere. That’s what he did mostly, but he had a sideline. You know what it was?”

“No,” I said, wishing that the elevator would come so that I could vanish into it.

“He ran a reference bureau. You know, if somebody wanted something done then Frank could put them in touch with who could do it. Or if somebody wanted to check out somebody, and they didn’t want to bother with the Better Business Bureau, why they’d call up Frank and he’d find out for them. A lot of bookies used him.”

“Sounds like a character,” I said, and punched the elevator button again, hard.

“He had a nice funeral. Over in Queens. Lots of friends. And you say you didn’t know him?”

“No. I didn’t know him.”

“That’s funny.”

“What?”

“He knew you. He had a whole file on you, homicide says. A new one.”

“I’m in a funny business. Maybe that’s why he had a file.”

“Maybe. But the homicide boys also found something on his calendar — you know, the appointment book that he kept on his desk.”

“What?”

“Just your name with four o’clock beside it on the day he died. Yesterday. But homicide’s not much interested; old Frank had been long dead by four o’clock as near as the medical report could figure, which, of course, isn’t too accurate.”

I’d had enough. “What do you want, Ogden? Spell it out.”

He glanced around the lobby, leaned toward me, and tapped a manicured forefinger against my lapel. I don’t like to be tapped. “I want in.”

“There’s no room.”

“Make it.”

“Not a chance.”

“Two hundred and fifty thousand’s a lot of money.”

“I don’t like jails.”

“No jails. You make the switch, the money for the shield. The museum’s happy. But you take me along to make another switch. The money into our pockets, an even split, and who’s to squawk?”

“The thieves. They wouldn’t like it at all.”

“Who they gonna complain to?”

“Christ, they could write a letter to the editor and even if it weren’t published, it would be turned over to the cops who’d be swarming around for the next ten years.”

The greed was back on Ogden’s face. His wet lips moved, making little smacking noises, and his eyes squinted at me as if I gave off some blinding but irresistible glow. “The thieves don’t have to be around after it’s over,” he said, running his words together. “That’s the beauty of it. They don’t have to be around to complain.”

I could only stare at him, at the wet lips and the squinted eyes and the hunched, almost supplicating stance. “I believe you’d do it,” I said. “Goddamn, I believe you’d do it.”

He looked around the lobby once more. It was an almost furtive glance. “I’m fifty-three years old, St. Ives, and I want in on this. I’m gonna retire in a couple of years. A hundred and twenty-five grand would make it livable.”

“Get it from your whores, Ogden. Not from me.”

“I’m cutting myself in.”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“I’ve got a kicker.”

“I thought you might.”

“You see, St. Ives,” he said in a hoarse whisper after conning the lobby again. “I know who the thieves are.”

It was his exit line and he had been working up to it all evening. He grinned at me with all of those terrible teeth, nodded a couple of times, happily, I thought, turned and strode across the faded lobby, through the door, and out into the summer night.

“The elevator, Mr. St. Ives,” Charlie called from the desk. “It ain’t working.”