The Brass Go-Between

Chapter fifteen

The assistant manager of the Madison gave me another room on another floor and looked as if he wished that I would go to another hotel, preferably in another town. After I had told my story to three plain-clothes detectives from the homicide squad who had been summoned by Lieutenant Demeter, I told it again. And then, just to make sure that I’d left nothing out, I told it a third time. When one of the homicide detectives asked for a fourth rendition, I turned to Demeter, who leaned against the door and stared at the body of his former FBI Academy classmate, Lieutenant Kenneth Ogden of the New York Police Department. Fastnaught was at the window looking at the rain.

“The fourth time won’t be any different from the third or the second or the first,” I said.

Demeter didn’t look at me; he kept on staring at the body on the bed. “Just tell it, St. Ives. Just tell what happened.”

So I told the three homicide detectives how Ogden had died on the bed in my room. One of the detectives was a weary fifty, a stocky man with spiky inch-long gray hair that formed a kind of a dull halo around his face. It was the face of a disappointed listener who had grown tired of waiting for punch lines that never came.

“Start with last night this time, Mr. St. Ives,” he said. “When Ogden approached you in your hotel in New York.”

After I told it for the fourth time they removed the body of Ogden on a wheeled stretcher. Technicians and blue coats had been in and out of the room, poking into the medicine cabinet, counting my socks in the bureau, and making themselves generally useful. Somebody took some pictures of Ogden’s body, but no one bothered about fingerprints. The assistant manager had been in and out twice, looking mortified the first time and despondent the second. The third time he showed up while they were wheeling the body out and this time he looked alarmed. “Down the service elevator, please, down the service elevator,” he said, turning to Demeter. “Can’t you tell them to take it down the service elevator?”

“We’re parked out front,” one of the ambulance attendants said.

“The service elevator,” Demeter said, and I thought the assistant manager might kiss his hand.

“It’s awful,” the assistant manager said to no one in particular. “It’s just God-awful.”

“Tell you what you do,” Demeter said.

“Yes, yes,” the assistant manager said. “What? What?” He was very nervous and he ran a thin pale hand through his ample black hair, which looked as if it had been cut by a razor, teased, and sprayed.

“Get him another room,” Demeter said, and jerked a thumb at me.

“He’s going to stay?” and there was shock and disapproval and even a touch of horror in the question. “You’re not taking him with you?”

“No, he’s not coming with us. He likes it here, don’t you, St. Ives?”

“Because it’s so homey,” I said.

The assistant manager shook his head and this time he registered despair. He had an extremely mobile face. “I’ll send a man up with a key,” he said, and left.

Demeter turned to the detective with the spiky gray hair. “You got what you need from St. Ives?” he said.

“Such as it is.”

“I like the part where Ogden wanted in on the $250,000,” Demeter said.

“They’re going to like that up in New York, too,” the homicide detective said. “Oh, they’re going to like it all just real fine. What they’re really going to like though is Ogden’s wanting to zing the thieves after he got the money and the shield. They’re going to eat that right up.” He got up from the chair he’d been sitting in, walked over to me, and stood there for a few moments. “Anything else you’d like to add, Mr. St. Ives?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“We’re going to need a formal statement from you.”

“All right,” I said. “When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“When?”

“Oh, say ten o’clock? Or is that too early for you?”

“That’s fine.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, and turned to Demeter. “You knew Ogden, you say?”

“I knew him,” Demeter said, and his tone was flat and careful.

“Well?”

“We went through the FBI Academy together, back in the fifties.”

“What do you think?”

“Nothing,” Demeter said. “I think absolutely nothing.”

“That’s a big help,” the homicide detective said. “If you get around to thinking something, let me know.” He made a brusque wave with his hand at the other two homicide detectives who were younger and taller and not quite so tired-looking. “Come on,” he said, “let’s go down to the lobby and find out how many eyewitnesses we got.” He turned to Demeter once again. “You know how many we’re going to have?”

“How many?”

“Less than one. Zero.” He moved to the door, opened it, and let the two other detectives through. Then he turned and looked at the bed with its blood-soaked pillows and spread. “God, the paperwork,” he said. “You know something?” he said to Demeter.

“What?”

“A cop should get killed in his own home town.”

A bellhop arrived shortly after the homicide detectives left, ogled the blood, picked up my overnight bag which I had repacked, and led Demeter, Fastnaught, and me past the uniformed cop stationed outside the door, down the hall, into the elevator, up two floors and into another room. “Lot of blood,” he said as he unlocked the door. No one seemed to want to contradict him so he stood around until I remembered to give him a tip. Fastnaught walked over to the window and resumed his inspection of the rain. Demeter selected a chair and eased himself into it as if the dampness made his joints stiff. I opened the overnight case and took out the bottle of Scotch.

“You want a drink?” I said.

“Water,” Fastnaught said.

“Just water or Scotch and water?”

“Scotch and water.”

“Lieutenant?”

“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”

I mixed three drinks and handed them around. Fastnaught turned from the window and rested his rear on the sill. Demeter produced one of his cigars and ritualistically lighted it. I sank into an arm chair opposite Demeter.

“Well, what do you think, Sergeant Fastnaught?” Demeter said.

Fastnaught took a swallow of his drink before answering. “I think,” he said slowly, “that we got ourselves a whole new ball game.”

“What makes you say that, Sergeant Fastnaught?” Demeter said, and wiped some of his drink from his Ronald Colman mustache.

“Your friend Ogden,” Fastnaught said.

“My friend Ogden,” Demeter said softly. “I wonder what happened to my friend Ogden. When I first met him more than fifteen years ago all he wanted to do was show you pictures of his baby daughter. He was enthused about the whole thing then, a hell of a lot more than I was. I wonder how he felt the first time he got hold of some of that easy money. When you’re on the vice squad it’s always floating around. Just stick out your hand and somebody will lay a couple of hundred in it. And around Christmas, I suppose, with a wife and a baby daughter, a couple of hundred can make a lot of difference. Maybe it was around Christmas that my friend Ogden stuck his hand out for the first time. What do you think, St. Ives?”

“He was a crook,” I said. “He was a crook who for a slice of $250,000 wouldn’t mind becoming a murderer.”

“Is that a moral judgment, St. Ives?”

“It’s only what he told me he was.”

“And were you shocked, maybe a little surprised?”

“No,” I said. “Not particularly.”

“Why not, St. Ives? Didn’t you have even a bit of what the editorials call ‘moral indignation’ or outraged sensibility? Why didn’t you report him? Why didn’t you go down and see his superior and say, ‘By the way, this Ogden that works for you. I’m afraid he’s something of a wrong one, a shade dishonest, you might say.’”

I found a cigarette and lit it. “How much do you pay for your suits, Lieutenant?”

“Seventy-five tops, and that’s the one I wear to Mass.”

“How about you, Sergeant Fastnaught?”

He smiled a little. “I paid one twenty-five once, but then I’m not married.”

“Ogden paid at least $300 for his suits. He drove a Lincoln Continental. His wife had a Buick. He played table-stakes poker and could drop $500 without a blink. He lived in a co-op apartment that cost God knows how much, but not less than $80,000 and that doesn’t include maintenance. I knew this and I didn’t see Ogden but maybe a dozen times a year when we played poker. Now if I knew this, then the people he worked for knew it, so why should I play Morally Outraged Citizen? And just who the hell do I tell about it? His superior, you say. For all I know his superior had cut himself in for twenty-five percent.”

“Suppose,” Demeter said, and looked up at the ceiling, “suppose Fastnaught here and me made you a proposition, maybe something like you say Ogden made you?”

“He made it,” I said.

“Suppose we made it then. Would you be surprised?”

“I’d be surprised.”

“Why? Because we wear cheap suits?”

“No.”

Demeter leaned forward in his chair and stared at me with his beany eyes. “You got something built into your head, St. Ives? Some kind of a gauge that tells you this cop’s honest and this one’s a crook? You got something like that?”

“No.”

“Then how about me and Fastnaught? How can you tell we’re honest?”

“Because I don’t know any differently.”

“And you’d be surprised if we made you a proposition?”

“I’ve already said that.”

Demeter finished his drink and placed it on a table beside his chair. I didn’t ask him whether he wanted another one. He tapped off an inch of cigar ash into a tray, looked at Fastnaught who nodded, and then leaned back comfortably in the chair.

“Fastnaught and me,” he said, “are going to make you a proposition. We talked about it on the way over here, even before we knew that Ogden was mixed up in the deal. Now we’d like to get your considered opinion. You say that Ogden knew who the thieves were?”

“He said he did.”

“And you figure they killed him because he knew?”

“Probably.”

Demeter puffed on his cigar. “Now that he’s dead, you think they’ll go ahead with the switch?”

“How should I know?”

“I think they will,” Demeter said. “What do you think, Fastnaught?”

“Another dead one won’t bother them,” Fastnaught said.

“You’re probably right,” Demeter said. “How many does that make now?” He stuck the cigar in his mouth and started counting on his left hand. “There’s Sackett, the spade guard, that’s one. Ogden makes two. And there was this guy, Frank Spellacy, up in New York. You forgot to mention him to the homicide boys, St. Ives.”

“So did you,” I said.

“Well, we’re not sure about him.”

“Who told you? Ogden?”

“No, Not Ogden. Ogden’s not the only cop I know in New York.”

“He even knows a couple of honest ones,” Fastnaught said.

“Let’s just say that we found out that you had an appointment with Frank Spellacy the day he got killed and that Ogden put in a word or two for you.”

“All right,” I said.

Demeter was counting on his left hand again. “Now how many’s that? The guard, Ogden, and Spellacy. That’s three. Any more, Fastnaught?”

“One more,” Fastnaught said from his seat at the window. “George Wingo.”

“That’s right, George Wingo. Mrs. Wingo’s husband. But you knew about him, didn’t you, St. Ives? I mean you knew he was a junkie?”

“I knew,” I said.

“The Coroner’s Office said you were asking, and that you had some assistant U.S. Attorney General call up and find out for you.”

“You get around,” I said.

“Just routine police work. Even the Coroner’s Office thought it was something of a coincidence when Fastnaught here asks for the autopsy report one day and the assistant attorney general asks for it the next. So the guy at the Coroner’s Office calls us, we call the assistant attorney general, and he says he did it as a favor for that lawyer of yours… what’s his name?”

“Myron Greene,” Fastnaught said.

“Greene,” Demeter said. “So what’d you think when you found out that both Sackett, the guard, and Mr. Wingo were junkies?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Bullshit,” Fastnaught said.

“Come on, Fastnaught,” Demeter said. “Maybe St. Ives hasn’t got a keen deductive mind like yours. You know what Fastnaught thought?”

I sighed. “That Wingo got the guard hooked and then talked him into being the inside man when the shield was stolen. That’s what a five-year-old would think anyway. At least what my five-year-old would think, but then he’s got a high IQ.”

“Probably got it from his daddy,” Demeter said. “So the way Fastnaught figures it is that Wingo is desperate for a wad of money that’ll keep him in smack. Because he’s something of an art expert he decides to steal the shield and then sell it back to the museum. But he needs help; he needs not only the inside man but the outside thieves. Now where’s he going to find them?”

“Spellacy,” I said.

“You’d be a credit to the force, St. Ives. How’d you figure that?”

“When I was in Spellacy’s office, he wrote Wingo’s name on a pad. It was the last thing he ever wrote.”

“And you didn’t tell anyone?”

“No.”

“You could have saved us a lot of trouble,” Fastnaught said. “A hell of a lot of trouble.”

“You sure could have,” Demeter said. “We had to go see Mrs. Wingo last night and tell her what we thought. She didn’t like it; she didn’t like it worth a damn. But then she let us go through her husband’s papers and we ran across some correspondence between him and Spellacy.”

“What kind of correspondence?” I said.

“About some stocks that Wingo had bought through Spellacy maybe six or seven years ago when he was still in New York. It seems Spellacy sold Wingo short on some stocks that were supposed to go down. They went up instead. Spellacy owed Wingo quite a hunk of money. So we called New York about Spellacy. It was the only thing we had and they told us that Spellacy had just been done in. They also gave us a run down on him and he seemed to be the kind of a guy who might have lined up a couple of thieves for Wingo.”

“And a go-between,” I said. “He checked me out for Wingo.”

“And you didn’t bother to tell anyone about that either,” Fastnaught said. “You’re not much of a gossip, are you, St. Ives?”

“Well, what do you expect from a high-priced go-between, Fastnaught?” Demeter said. “You expect him to go around blabbing everything he knows to cops who’re probably crooked even if they don’t wear three-hundred-dollar suits?”

“I suppose you’re right,” Fastnaught said. “I shouldn’t expect that.”

I got up and mixed myself another drink. I didn’t ask either of them if they wanted one. “Now what?”

“You want to hear our theory?”

“I thought I’d just heard it,” I said. “Wingo masterminded the theft of the shield to keep himself in heroin. He got himself an inside man by getting the guard hooked. Then he got in touch with Spellacy who set him up with a couple of thieves, the man and the woman who’ve been calling me on the phone. When everything was planned, the pair got greedy, gave Wingo an overdose of heroin, and then rolled him down an embankment in his car. They took over then and when the guard had done his job, they blew his head off. Spellacy figures most of it out and threatens to talk unless he gets a bigger cut so they shove a knife into him. They did the same thing to Ogden an hour or so ago down in the lobby. I don’t know how Ogden found out who they were, if he really did, but then I don’t really care.”

“What do you mean, you don’t care, St. Ives?” Demeter said in a quiet voice.

“Just what I said. There’re too many dead bodies.” I got up and walked over to the far wall and examined a print of some medieval gateway. “I’m bowing out,” I said. “Quitting.”

“He’s getting carefully cautious again, Lieutenant,” Fastnaught said.

“Uh-huh,” Demeter said. “So it seems.”

“You can find someone else,” I said. “Someone who might enjoy the risk.”

“Sit down, St. Ives,” Demeter said, and his voice sounded like thick ice cracking. “Sit down and I’ll tell you why you goddamn sure as hell aren’t quitting.”