The Brass Go-Between

Chapter four

When the young negro secretary with the pleasant smile brought the machine-signed check in, Frances Wingo merely glanced at it and then pushed it across her desk to me with the eraser of the unsharpened yellow pencil that she kept bouncing against the inlaid wood.

“You may still back out, right?” she said as I put the check away in my wallet.

“I’ve been thinking about it.”

“Because of what happened to the guard?”

“It did give me a new perspective.”

“The obvious one?”

“Obvious to me anyway.”

“You mean whoever killed the guard stole the shield?”

“That’s one.”

“What’s two?”

“That it was all a carefully planned operation which suggests professionals.”

Frances Wingo tapped the eraser some more. “They had three months to work it out.”

“Why three months?”

“Because that’s when we first knew that we were going to get the exhibition. Up until then, we weren’t sure.”

“And you announced it then?”

“Yes,” she said. “It made quite a nice splash.”

“Did the shield get more publicity or attention than any other piece?”

“The Jandolaean Embassy saw to that.”

“Then whoever stole it had three whole months to find themselves an accomplice,” I said. “You can do a lot of persuading in three months.”

Frances Wingo quit tapping the pencil and I almost thanked her. “Why do you think they killed the guard — provided they killed him?” she said.

I shrugged. “Probably to save money and to keep him from talking. Or maybe he planned the whole thing himself and someone got greedy, but that seems a little farfetched.”

“But the murder hasn’t yet changed your mind?”

“Not yet.”

“You mean it could later?”

“At any time.”

Frances Wingo didn’t like that so she started tapping the eraser on her desk again. “You didn’t mention that before.”

“An oversight,” I said.

“I thought that’s what you were being paid for, to take such risks.”

“No. You’re paying me to get the shield back, not to run risks. My principal problem is to arrange the transaction so that the risks are minimized. If I find that I can’t do that, then I’ll back out.”

She looked at me for a long moment. “You’re not exactly the boy adventurer, are you?”

“Not exactly,” I said, but the topic was beginning to bore me so I asked her a question. “What do I do if I suddenly find that I need a quarter of a million dollars in relatively small bills at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon in Pittsburgh?”

She didn’t hesitate or stop tapping the eraser. “You call me,” she said. “Mr. Spencer will either arrange for a corresponding bank to supply the money or it will be flown to you by private plane from Washington.”

“To wherever I need it?”

“To wherever you need it. Anything else?”

“A couple of things. If you get any more calls from the man with the muffled voice, tell him he can reach me at the Madison until nine in the morning; after that I’ll be at my place in New York.” I gave her the number and she stopped tapping the pencil long enough to write it down on a buff-colored pad.

“All right,” she said. “What else?”

“The last item. If you’re free this evening, you might drop by the Madison and I’ll buy you a drink.”

She leaned back in her chair and looked at me speculatively. This time I was no longer a slightly audacious water color; I was a forgery trying to pass as an old master and not a very good forgery at that.

“Don’t you think my husband might object, Mr. St. Ives?”

“No,” I said, “because I don’t think you’re married, at least not any more.”

“Why not?”

“You just don’t look married.”

She rose then and there was nothing else for me to do but rise with her. “If you need any more information about the shield, Mr. St. Ives, please feel free to call at any time.”

“If you change your mind, the offer for the drink still stands,” I said.

She looked down at her desk, picked up the yellow pencil, and began to tap the eraser against the wood. “Thank you, but I don’t think so.”

At the door I paused and looked back. I don’t know why I bothered because I really didn’t care whether I bought her a drink. “But you’re not married, are you?”

“No, Mr. St. Ives,” she said, “I’m not. Not any more. My husband died in an auto accident four weeks ago.”

It had warmed up a little, I noticed, as I stood outside the museum and vainly waited for the miracle of a cruising cab. I stood in the shade of a telephone pole, and wondered what the temperature was in Leadville and San Francisco and Nome and some other fine places. After a quarter of an hour or so a cab came along with its windows rolled up which meant that it was either air-conditioned or the driver had gone mad. It was twenty degrees cooler inside and I asked to be driven to police headquarters.

“Wait a minute,” the driver said, and pointed at his radio which was blasting an acid rock number so loud that the speaker vibrated.

“Your song?” I said.

“No, man, the temperature’s coming on.”

We waited, not moving, until the number was nearly through and then the disk jockey’s voice came on, crackling hard over the fading dissonance: “Now it is warm out there. Man down at the weather bureau says it’s one hundred and two, that’s t-w-o, degrees right here in the nation’s Capital. That’s uh-one-uh-oh-uh-two degrees and Mr. Weatherman says that’s the all-time record for this August date. So why don’t you lean back, grab something tall and cool — to drink, I mean — and listen to—” The driver switched it off and looked at his watch.

“If it don’t get no hotter, I won,” he said.

“Won what?”

“The weather pool. I had a hundred and two at 3 P.M. Twenty-five-dollar pool.”

“Let’s hope you won. Now how about the police station?”

He turned to look at me then, a dark brown man with his hair worn natural bush, I suppose, and the blackest pair of sun glasses over his eyes that I’d ever seen.

“Now we’ve got a lot of police stations,” he said. “We’ve got the Park Police and the Capital Police and the Metropolitan Police and we’ve got fourteen precinct police stations plus the harbor unit down on Maine Avenue and that’s still not counting the FBI and the CIA out in Virginia. Just make your choice and I’ll be happy to take you to any one of them.”

“Let’s try the Metropolitan Police headquarters,” I said. “If that doesn’t work out, I’ll give the rest of them a go.”

The cab moved away from the curb with something of a racing start. “The Metropolitan Police headquarters is located at 300 Indiana Avenue,” the driver said. “A very nice neighborhood out of the high-rent district and within easy walking distance of the Capitol and a lousy sixty-five-cent ride from here.”

It was a brief ride and the driver kept up his running commentary until we pulled up before a large, six-story granite building whose architectural style leaned toward Midwestern municipal. “How much?” I said.

“Like I said, sixty-five cents unless you’re a big spender from out of town.”

“You figured it out after all,” I said, and gave him a dollar.

“Thank you, my good man, and I hope you have a pleasant visit with the friendlies.”

“And I hope you win the pool.”

Inside there was the usual number of people who had reason to come calling on the police at three o’clock in the afternoon. They avoided each other’s eyes as they waited before the bank of four elevators that would take them up to talk to someone with a badge about something that had turned out differently from what they had expected. About something that had turned out wrong.

The halls of the building, which also seemed to contain the city’s tax division, were covered with brown marble that ran halfway up the wall and then turned into pale green plaster. The floors were covered with black and white speckled marble and it all seemed solid and secure and as if it were meant to last for a long time. A directory said that the robbery squad was on the third floor so I took one of the elevators up and when I emerged the first thing that I saw on the right was a brown shield about eighteen inches high with gold lettering that read ROBBERY SQUAD. The door was open and I walked into a small waiting area that was bounded by frosted glass and plywood partitions. A worn brown bench, something like a pew in an old church whose building fund suffered a deficit, was placed against one of the walls, apparently for the use of robber and victim alike. At the left was a door and a window that was very much like a bank teller’s cage without the bars. I approached the window and a man in a white shirt, blue tie, and a holstered gun under his left arm wanted to know if he could help me.

“I’d like to see Lieutenant Demeter,” I said.

“Your name?”

“Philip St. Ives.”

“How do you spell it?”

I spelled it for him, he wrote it down, and disappeared. In a few moments he was back. He opened the door at his right and motioned me through. “This way,” he said. I followed him into a room that contained some desks, chairs, and telephones. He pointed to a door at the far end of the room. “Right through there,” he said. I went through that door into a smaller room that contained two gray metal desks, some matching chairs, and two men in shirt sleeves who sat behind the desks. There was one window, but the Venetian blind was lowered and I couldn’t tell whether they had a view of the Capitol.

“Lieutenant Demeter?” I said.

The older of the two men looked up from a sheet of paper he was reading. He was in no hurry. “I’m Demeter,” he said. “What’s your problem?”

“I’m Philip St. Ives,” I said. “I’ve been hired by the Coulter Museum to buy the shield back from whoever stole it.”

Demeter carefully put the paper he had been reading in the exact center of his desk, leaned back in his chair, rested his hands on its arms, and inspected me with small, black beanlike eyes that darted around my face until they finally decided to settle on my nose. He was built like a stubby tube, I noticed, as thick as he was wide. Meaty shoulders sloped abruptly from the size-seventeen neck that supported a big-jawed head which had a nice crop of black hair that looked as if it had been wet-combed in a vain attempt to get a few of the curls out. His jumbo nose, all angles and flaring, hairy nostrils, jutted out over a wide mouth with thin red lips. He also had a carefully trimmed mustache that would have done credit to Ronald Colman if one could remember back that far. Lieutenant Demeter could; he was at least forty; maybe even forty-five.

“You look hot,” he said. “You’re sweating. Take a chair.”

I took a chair and, still looking at me, or at least at my nose, he said, “Call the Wingo woman at the Coulter Museum. See if she’s got a St. what?”

“Ives,” I said.

“See if she’s got a St. Ives working for her.”

The other man in shirt sleeves picked up his phone and dialed a number. He was younger than Demeter, somewhere in his early thirties, and he also had curly hair, but it was blond, and his eyes were blue. He didn’t wear a mustache under his snub nose, which was peeling a little from sunburn, so I decided that Demeter might not be his idol.

When the younger man got through dialing, he said, “This is Sergeant Fastnaught, Mrs. Wingo. We have a party here who says he’s been hired by the museum in connection with the stolen shield.” He paused. “What’s your first name, mister?” he said to me.

“Philip.”

“That’s right,” Fastnaught said into the phone. “Philip St. Ives… I see… thank you, Mrs. Wingo.” He hung up the phone, leaned back in his chair, and locked his hands behind his head. “She said that they hired him this afternoon.”

Demeter nodded, still fascinated by my nose. “We get a lot of nuts in here,” he said. “You got any identification?”

I took out my wallet and handed over a New York driver’s license, which he read all the way through before handing it back.

“He’s who he says he is,” Demeter said to Sergeant Fastnaught, shifting his black eyes away from my nose for the first time. Fastnaught shrugged and Demeter resumed his inspection; this time he focused on the knot in my tie. “They’re going to try to buy it back, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“And you’re the money man?”

“I just carry it.”

“How come you?”

I got up from my chair and started toward the door. “Forget it,” I said.

“Just hold on, St. Ives,” Demeter said. “Don’t be so goddamned sensitive.”

I turned at the door. “You knew who I was when I walked in the door. The Wingo woman told you about me yesterday or the day before. But you’ve got to go through your act. The sergeant over there even makes like he’s calling Frances Wingo. The only thing wrong with that is her prefix begins with 23 and he dialed 67 or 78 or something. What did he call, the weather or the time?”

Sergeant Fastnaught grinned at me. “The weather. It’s a hundred and two outside.”

“I know,” I said.

“All right, St. Ives,” Demeter said. “You can jump down off of your high horse now. You want us to apologize? I’m sorry and Sergeant Fastnaught is sorry, aren’t you, Fastnaught?”

“Extremely,” Fastnaught said.

“It’s just that we don’t get many big-time go-betweens from New York,” Demeter said, “and we sort of like to see how they tick. In fact, I don’t think we ever had a big-time go-between from New York in here before, have we, Fastnaught?”

“Never before,” Fastnaught said. “Not from New York. Or from any place else for that matter.”

“So, Mr. St. Ives,” Demeter said, folding his arms across his chest, “what can we do to make your stay in Washington as pleasant as possible?” His voice dropped from a mellow baritone, to a harsh bass. “What’re you getting, your usual ten percent?”

“That’s right.”

“That would be twenty-five thousand,” Demeter said.

“Less expenses,” I said. “I pay my own.”

“Twenty-five thousand,” Demeter said, a little dreamily this time. “Fastnaught and I together hardly make that much in a whole year.”

“And on top of that you have to buy your own bullets,” I said.

Demeter unfolded his arms and leaned across his gray metal desk toward me. “Today I called a guy I know in New York about you,” he said. “You know what he told me?”

“No, but something sweet, I hope. You mind if I smoke?”

“Go ahead. Light up. Just be sure you throw the ashes and the butt on the floor. You got to remember this is a police station. This guy in New York I talked to. He said that you’re okay in the go-between trade as long as everybody acts like at gentleman. You know. Nice. He said he didn’t know how you’d be if things got, well, you know, a little crude. He said you’d never run into one like that.”

“That’s right,” I said. “I haven’t.”

“That’s what my friend in New York said. He also said that you’re cautious.”

“I thought he said careful,” Fastnaught said.

“Fastnaught here was listening in,” Demeter said. “Maybe he did say careful, but I thought he said cautious.”

“I’m both,” I said.

“My friend said you handle these go-between deals just like you play poker. Cautious.”

“Careful,” Fastnaught said.

“What else did Ogden have to say?” I asked.

“Nothing much; just to tell you hello.”

“You going to handle this one in a carefully cautious manner?” Fastnaught said.

“That’s right.”

“Uh-huh,” Demeter said, nodding his big head in a satisfied manner. “Fastnaught and I were hoping you would because whoever stole that shield, what’s it called, the shield of—”

“Komporeen,” Fastnaught said.

“Yeah, that’s right. Komporeen. Sounds like something you’d see about midnight with Maureen O’Sullivan, doesn’t it? Well, anyway, Mr. St. Ives, whoever stole the shield of Komporeen might turn out to be just a little crude. You’ve heard about the dead spade, haven’t you?”

“You mean Sackett the guard?”

Demeter nodded. “John Sackett, age 32, Negro, five-feet-eleven, 178 pounds, no visible scars, 430 5th Street, Southeast. Wife, Marthal, and three children. No record. Discovered just off Beach Drive in Rock Creek Park at 10:30 A.M. today by William Ferkiss, eight, and Claude Dextrine, who claimed to be almost nine but was really eight and a half. I didn’t see the spade, but Fastnaught here did. Tell him about it, Fastnaught.”

The blond sergeant shrugged. “They’d wired his hands behind his back. They’d used a coat hanger to do it. Then they blew the top of his head off with a forty-five. He was a mess, a real mess.”

Demeter reached into his desk drawer and took out a cigar in a metal tube. He opened it slowly, licked it with pleasure, and then stuck it in his mouth. After a while he lighted it with a wooden match and blew some smoke up toward the ceiling. “I smoke three of these a day,” he said. “I can’t afford them really, but I think everybody’s entitled to at least one vice. Take Fastnaught here. He’s not married so he could afford good cigars but he doesn’t even smoke. But he’s got a vice. You know what he does? He indulges himself in women, girls really. Real young ones. But like I said, everybody’s entitled to at least one vice. What’s yours, St. Ives?”

“Punchboards,” I said.

“You mean those things where you stick a little metal key in and then get a piece of paper that tells you if you won anything or not?”

“That’s right; punchboards.”

“They’re illegal here,” Fastnaught said.

“In New York, too, but I’ve got my own private supply.”

“You’re bullshitting me,” Fastnaught said.

I smiled at him pleasantly and Demeter took his cigar out of his mouth and waved it around as if he wanted the floor. “Now wait a minute, Fastnaught… isn’t that a hell of a name? Fastnaught.” He chuckled a little in appreciation. Fastnaught rose and went over to the window and peeked out through the Venetian blind; maybe they had a view of the Capitol after all.

“Like I said,” Demeter went on, “everybody’s entitled to at least one vice. Now I’ve got cigars and Fastnaught’s got his little girls and St. Ives says he’s queer for punchboards. There’s nothing wrong with that. But what do you think the spade’s vice was?”

“You know what it was,” Fastnaught said, still peering out through the slats of the Venetian blind.

“Yes, I know, but St. Ives here, he doesn’t know.”

Fastnaught turned and stared at me. “Punchboards,” he said. Then suddenly he smiled and went back to the chair behind his desk. “Sackett had a habit. A hundred to a hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-day habit and it was getting bigger. That’s what his wife said. And he fed it, that’s the funny thing. He didn’t go out boosting department stores on Thursday night; he didn’t stick up any Safeways or gas stations. He just got up about noon and went down to work at four with his needle and his sweet grape soda and his candy bars in his lunch bucket. Now the Coulter Museum pays its guards about six bills a month so where do you think Sackett got the money to feed his habit?”

“How long had he been hooked?” I said.

Demeter waved his cigar around. “Two months; maybe a little more.”

“What’s his wife say?”

Demeter looked at his watch. “Well, at about eleven o’clock this morning she was telling Fastnaught here that she didn’t care whether the son of a bitch was dead or not because he’d gone off to work Friday and left her without a speck of heroin in the house. She ought to be screaming her head off by now because we got her locked away and she’s got a habit just about as big as her husband’s. Now just where do you think they managed to get two or three hundred dollars a day to keep the nasties away?”

“It’s not hard to guess,” I said.

“No,” Demeter said, “it isn’t, is it?”

It was quiet in the small green office for a while. Sergeant Fastnaught took out a stick of gum, unwrapped it slowly, folded it into thirds, popped it into his mouth, and chewed rhythmically while he studied the well-polished toes of his black shoes that he had propped up on one corner of his gray desk. Lieutenant Demeter swiveled his chair so that he had a view of the drawn Venetian blind. I admired the back of his neck and the way that his hair curled in tight little waves over his white collar. Demeter sighed, got out of his chair, and moved the two feet to the window where he peeked out through one of the slats in the blind.

“You want to know how Fastnaught and I figure it?” he said to the blind.

“How?” I said.

“We checked on the guard, Sackett, you know. He worked the four-to-twelve shift at the museum, Tuesday through Saturday. His wife wouldn’t or couldn’t tell us much. She didn’t even know the name of the pusher. The neighbors said that the Sacketts were quiet, sent the oldest kid to the first grade every morning and all. The two youngest aren’t old enough to go to school yet. The only thing they noticed, the neighbors, I mean, is that the Sacketts the past few weeks have just got quieter and quieter. They didn’t go out, not even on Sundays and Mondays when Sackett was off. You can do that on dope, you know. It’s not like booze. You can keep going through the motions of everyday living, wash the dishes, clean the house, go to the job, and all. Everything’s fine as long as you got your supply.”

“What was that doctor’s name?” Fastnaught asked. “The one who was hooked and kept on operating, three, maybe four or five times a day.”

“His name was Mager,” Demeter said. “Now there’s one who really had a habit, but he just kept on carving away and nobody ever suspected anything.”

“What happened?” I said.

“He scheduled ten operations for one day, woke up, and decided he couldn’t face it so he turned himself in. Right here. Well, not exactly here, it was down the hall. He’s down in Lexington still, I understand.”

“He was a hell of a fine doctor,” Fastnaught said.

“Uh-huh,” Demeter said. “Well, we checked out the guys that Sackett worked with at the museum and they hadn’t noticed anything different. Sackett had always kept to himself kind of and he just got to be more of a loner, they said. He did his work all right, but that just meant punching in every twelve minutes while he covered his area.”

“He was assigned to the African Exhibition?” I said.

“Right,” Demeter said. “It’s a pretty big exhibit. You get a chance to look at it?”

“No,” I said.

“You ought to drop by. They got some real interesting stuff although it’s a little weird in my opinion.”

“I liked the masks,” Fastnaught said. “They got some of the goddamndest masks you ever saw. Real Halloween stuff.”

“Well,” Demeter said, “Sackett asked to be assigned to the African exhibit. It wasn’t anything unusual. They change the guards around all the time. Some come off the day shift and go on nights. Some trade off from the midnight-to-eight shift with those who work the four-to-midnight. The museum closes at six and then the guard complement is reduced by forty percent. Sackett was assigned to the African exhibit because he was the first to apply for it. Fact is, he applied for it a month before it opened.”

“He’d been hooked by then?” I said.

“Probably,” Demeter said. “The way I figure it is that the bunch who stole this shield knew they couldn’t get into that place without inside help. It’s wired with the goddamndest alarm system you ever saw. Electric eyes all over the place. Pressure plates. You name it. So they picked Sackett, promised him a fat share, got him hooked on heroin, even got him to get his wife hooked, kept him well supplied, and the day after the exhibit opened they waltzed off with the prize piece.”

“How’d they get in,” I said, “through the front door?”

“I don’t think they ever got in,” Demeter said, and puffed some cigar smoke at the ceiling and cocked an eye at me to see how I liked his last statement.

“Why not?”

“The doors,” Fastnaught said. “They’re electrically sealed at six o’clock.”

“Except one,” Demeter said.

“That’s right,” Fastnaught said. “Except one.”

“It’s an emergency door that leads from the basement up a ramp to the loading area in the rear. It’s electrically sealed only one way. What I mean is that the door can be opened from the inside without touching off the alarm system, but it can’t be opened from the outside without all hell breaking loose. You follow me?”

I said that I did.

“The guards use the door to change shifts and it’s also got something to do with fire-department regulations. I figure that since Sackett had twelve-minute check-in intervals he could use one of them to carry the shield down to the ramp that led to the emergency door. A couple of punch-in intervals later he could carry it up the ramp, open the door, hand it to the thieves, and then make it back upstairs in time to punch in again. He’d give his buddies a half hour or so to get clear and then report the shield as stolen.”

“Did he report it?” I said.

“He reported it.”

“And there was no full-time guard on that emergency door?”

“No.”

“Did you talk to him? Sackett, I mean.”

“Me and Fastnaught were off. I was home in bed when it happened; God knows whose bed Fastnaught was in.”

Fastnaught chewed his gum a little more rapidly, making it pop on every third or fourth chew. “She’d just turned eighteen,” he said. “In fact, it was her birthday. I gave her a real nice present.”

“You don’t have to lie to us,” Demeter said mildly.

“When were you assigned to the thing?” I said.

“Friday,” Demeter said. “When we came on our shift. We went looking for Sackett, but by then he’d disappeared. You know something, St. Ives?”

“What?”

“About all we’ve got on this is the Sackett woman.”

“Shit, she doesn’t know anything,” Fastnaught said.

“Well, I might go along with that, but maybe she does and maybe she doesn’t. But I didn’t say she was the only thing we’ve got. I said she was about the only thing.”

“What else is there?” Fastnaught said.

“Why, we’ve got ourselves a fancy New York-type go-between, Sergeant Fastnaught, that’s what we’ve got.”

Fastnaught took his feet from the desk and put them back on the floor. He leaned forward, his jaws moving rapidly on his stick of gum, and stared at me with his blue eyes. I noticed that they seemed a little bloodshot. “That’s right,” he said, “we have Mr. St. Ives.”

“Who’s going to be most cooperative,” Demeter said, and smiled at me in a happy, friendly way as if I’d just told him that the promotion had gone through after all and he would be Captain Demeter come next Wednesday morning.

I decided it was time to go. I got up and moved toward the door. “Thanks very much for the information, gentlemen. If you break the case before eight-thirty this evening, I’ll be at the Madison. After that, I’ll be in New York.”

“Did you hear that, Sergeant Fastnaught? Mr. St. Ives will be at the Madison until eight-thirty.”

“I figured the Madison,” Fastnaught said. “The Hilton’s getting too commercial.”

“If you hear of anything from the people — probably just some irresponsible kids who thought it’d be a good joke — anyway if you hear anything from the people who stole the shield of Komporeen, you’ll let us know, won’t you?” Demeter said, waving his cigar again. “Through no fault of your own, you’re sort of mixed up in a murder now, Mr. St. Ives, and we’d more or less like you to stay in touch, if it’s not too much trouble.”

“No trouble at all,” I said. “I always like to support my local police.”

“Well, that’s good to hear because I’m sure we’ll be seeing a lot of each other,” Demeter said. “Just one more thing.”

“What?” I said.

“You be careful,” he said, and then grinned at me around his cigar as if he had just told a very funny and extremely dirty joke.

“And cautious, too,” Fastnaught called as I closed the door behind me and went down the green and black marble hall, into the bronze-doored elevator, and out into the yellow sunlight. I walked around until I spotted the window with the lowered Venetian blind, and when I found it I was pleased to note that the only view it had was that of a parking lot.