The New Black Mask (No 6)

Frisbee in the Middle R. D. Brown

R. D. Brown is a professor of English at Western Washington University. His mystery novel Prime Suspect, a paperback original published by Belmont-Tower in 1981, has been republished by Dorchester Publishing Company.

Besides frequent contributions to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Professor Brown has a long list of academic publications, including The Heritage of Romanticism (1983), and Guide to Better Themes (with Robert A. Peters, 1970).

Glendora dropped it on my blotter where it spun like a to, while she talked.

“He says his name is Schmettler.”

Glendora is almost the perfect secretary. She’s prettier than a red pickup, but she has a mind like a computer. That means she presents facts, follows instructions to the letter, and only offers conclusions when asked. Sometimes, that makes her a little irritating. Like now, when some Godzilla tears the knob off our office door to show he’s eager to do business, she makes him give her his name before delivering the message. Why? Because I once said I liked to know who wanted to talk to me.

“The man with him didn’t say anything, but he should probably be indicted for the way he looked at me.

As you would imagine, Glendora is doing very well in law school. Between classes, she helps out as a secretary while I turn over enough skip tracing to pay the rent and cover her tuition. Evenings, we discuss the US Tax Code and other fun things. When she passes the bar exam, we’ll set up as Biggart and Frisbee, Corporation Taxation Specialists. She’ll handle the trial work, while I do research in the back room because I want, but seldom get, a tranquil life.

It had been a slow week, so I was willing to forgive Mr. Schmettler’s enthusiasm. The knob was still spinning, just now starting to show the occasional wobble.

“Think of this as opportunity knocking,” I told her.

When Schmettler came through the doorway like a transcontinental truck on a one-lane bridge, I changed my mind, not about him, but the bad news that came as part of the package, a little fellow about five feet high with a bad reputation about twice as tall.

The last I heard, Arnie Buttons had been under indictment on seventeen counts of larceny, counterfeiting, procuring, trafficking in controlled substances, felony, murder, and suspicion of worshiping graven images. A slow week had become a bad one.

“We don’t want any,” I said, standing up to move in front of Glendora while Arnie looked around the office and decided not to buy it.

“Get the broad out of this dump,” he said.

Personally, I find our decor is very pleasant; rental furniture, true, but not too much of it. I didn’t quarrel with his taste, though I did take charge of the situation.

“I don’t think these people want coffee, Glendora, but I do. Double cream with a prune Danish.”

Glendora is brighter than I am, but before she met me, she had to spend a lot of time pretending to be dumb. She did it now, popping some nonexistent chewing gum and flouncing out of the room after a wide-eyed look at our guests.

When the door closed behind her, Arnie brought me up to speed. “You’re a hunter. The best. I want you to hunt somebody.”

“I’m a finder,” I said. “A hunter goes for blood, but I like solving puzzles. If you want to get in touch with somebody on a civil cause, I’m your man. I serve processes, catch bail jumpers, repossess cars, and find wandering spice, but nothing more.”

Arnie picked up the doorknob and Schmettler looked interested. “I know about you, Frisbee. You don’t play in the traffic these days. Take a walk, Bruno.”

Schmettler lost interest in me. Since his boss hadn’t told him to remove it, he left the knob on the inner door as he left. Arnie sat down in the client chair.

“I got a target you might like. Looey Flowers.”

I had reasons not to like Looey Flowers, almost as many as I had to dislike Arnie Buttons. They were two of a kind, and until I came along, they’d been rivals in the same organization. But Looey had taken out a competitor in front of a witness, an innocent citizen who had the bad luck to be present when Looey was acting out with a sawed-off shotgun. Being of normal intelligence, the witness left the area fast.

The state attorney gave me the job of finding him. I did, five hundred miles off and two weeks later. After I brought him back, he was put in protective custody. The story was he managed to climb out a tiny bathroom window to throw himself out of a hotel suite also occupied by three policemen. I left the business because he rightly prophesied when I took him in that I was signing his death warrant.

After that, with a kind of irony I still don’t appreciate, things worked out. Once he was in jail, Looey decided to recite his memoirs. On the basis of the stories he told under immunity, he should have been chained to a rock for all eternity for birds to peck at, but he did something that made it worthwhile. He nailed Arnie Buttons — but good. I wondered why Arnie wasn’t in jail. He watched my memory banks work through all this dreck.

“They had to reduce my bail because Looey is the only witness left against me. The rest of them came down with amnesia or absence. That’s why I’m hiring you.”

Just then the phone rang. Glendora was calling from the café across the street.

“You don’t drink coffee, and you never touch refined sugar. I conclude you want me to do something. What?”

“Take the afternoon off,” I said, making the automatic protective move that this liberated woman frequently finds vexing. “Mr. Buttons is just leaving.”

“Oh!” she said in a startled voice.

“Don’t hang up the phone, Bruno,” Buttons called across the room. “Mr. Frisbee and I will get back to you in a few minutes.”

I’ve been dealing with middle-class types lately, so I’m out of practice. Arnie had enjoyed demonstrating that. Despite my views on the subject, it was in the cards that I was going to have to find Looey Flowers so Buttons could kill him.

Arnie opened the haggling by saying “She’s cute, your secretary.”

He paused to let my mind fill with an X-rated movie that would be banned in Port Said.

“You find Flowers, you get ten big ones and the broad back in one piece. You don’t, and — ahh — let’s not talk about it.”

I had some violent thoughts myself, which involved tightening Arnie’s necktie till his eyeballs popped out to join the doorknob on my desk. But that wouldn’t help Glendora.

“Okay, Arnie. Glendora goes someplace safe where neither of us can reach her or it’s no deal.”

He didn’t like the sound of that, and he fingered his necktie, nervous about the way I was glaring at him.

I explained. Glendora was to go immediately to the YWCA. After she talked to me on the phone from there, I’d look for Flowers. I pointed out that as long as she was in his hands, I had no reason to trust him. Because Arnie knew me pretty well and he very badly needed Flowers dead, he told Schmettler to take her to the YWCA.

While we waited for Glendora’s return call, Arnie gave me the story till now. The federal strike force marshals had kept Flowers secure during his testimony by bringing him from the local air base to the roof of the courthouse via helicopter. By the time Arnie’s people had discovered Flowers was being kept at the base infirmary, the hearings were over and Flowers had vanished.

Then he told me why it was impossible for Looey to vanish as he did. Arnie’s security around the base was perfect: tape monitors on all the exit gates, a radio and telephone watch; even people watching the flight lines. Still, Flowers was gone, and Arnie couldn’t understand it.

“How do you know he’s gone?”

“His protection left — all those marshals. Somehow, they did it. And don’t say he just slipped by us. Looey weighs in over three hundred pounds and getting bigger. They couldn’t hide him in a flyboy uniform or get him in the trunk of a car, but they faked me out somehow.” He paused to let me see the glint of switchblades in his eyes. “This is important to me, Frisbee!”

As long as Glendora was at risk, it was important to me, too, which I didn’t need to tell him. I was wondering how I could keep from being instrumental in Looey’s violent demise. Then Glendora phoned from the YWCA, wondering why she was in the penalty box while I had all the fun.

“Some fun,” I said. “Either I find Looey Flowers or someone near and dear has bad trouble. Listen carefully and maybe you can help. Arnie says Looey left the air base. Anyway, a solid ring of Arnie’s men say they didn’t see him. All the gates were covered, the flight lines, and Looey’s too big to go into a car trunk.”

“Are you sure he’s gone?”

“Arnie tells me the federal marshals left.”

“You mean Mr. Flowers evaded all Mr. Button’s people?”

“No, I think he avoided them. It’s a case of how you hide a three-hundred-pound gorilla who belongs in jail. I expect to find Looey by this afternoon or tomorrow at the latest. Take care. Arnie promised me ten big ones, but don’t count the money till I phone again.”

Glendora went “humph!” and hung up. Arnie was thoughtful. “Why you telling her all this?”

“She’s my auxiliary brain. If I can’t figure it out, she can.” For the moment, I felt pretty confident.

When Schmettler lumbered in, I could see that Arnie had reason to be confident too.

“I forgot to tell you,” he said. “Bruno goes with you. Everywhere. And my people will be all around the YWCA. Maybe I couldn’t catch Looey, but I can sure catch a broad.”

I wondered what other surprises were upcoming, but I didn’t bother to ask because Arnie was no more into full disclosure than I was.

“Let’s go, Bruno,” I said. We did, in one of those black limousines Arnie was so fond of. Bruno drove me out Claiborne Avenue to an Army and Navy Store that’s been there as long as I can remember. A retired first shirt from maybe the War of 1812 runs it.

Fortunately, I was wearing black shoes. While Bruno inspected camping equipment, I bought a shirt and pants in blue cotton wash material and a web belt. I didn’t need a cap. The owner was pretty bored till I started sorting through the samples of military decorations.

“You got authorization for those things, Mac?”

Bruno joined us. The owner shut up when Bruno started making speech. “Why you buying all this war surplus, Frisbee?”

“Looey vanished from the air base. That’s where I start looking. I want to fit in.” I turned back to the ancient clerk.

“I want one of those, one of those, and that neat red one with the white stripes.” I’d pointed out ribbons for the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Medal, and the Good Conduct badge. The clerk gave me a sour look and said he’d run them up in the back room.

I put on the shirt and pants and inspected electronic gear that was sold by the pound while Schmettler went back to the camping equipment. The clerk returned ten minutes later, in a dead heat with a couple of air police, a sergeant and a corporal.

“This the guy trying to impersonate a hero?” the sergeant said, as much to me as anybody.

When Schmettler came up to see what was going on, the APs undid the flaps of their holsters.

“Who’s this guy?” the sergeant wanted to know.

“You may well ask,” I told him.

But the sergeant didn’t like my answers when he asked for leave papers and dog tags. Then he noted I wore no cap and consequently was out of uniform. Without any further ado, they shoved me ungently into the air police jeep and away we went. Schmettler pursued us in the black limo and only broke off at the main gate. In the provost marshal’s office, I was cooperative but not too talky. They had about decided to nail me for impersonation until the provost asked if I had a serial number.

When I gave it to him, they took my fingerprints. That was the end of due process. They decided the stockade was where I belonged. I spent the remainder of the afternoon sitting on a bare mattress waiting for chow.

It wasn’t jambalaya, and the only exotic sauces offered were catsup and mustard, but it was plentiful, whatever it was. The armed forces have changed since my day. They seem to be accepting Boy Scouts, even though some of the young men looked as if their camp-out had been rained on.

Except for me, only one of the men in the dining hall was over thirty. He filled one side of a mess table all by himself, something like a basking sea lion. The food hadn’t struck me as all that remarkable, but he was shoveling it in as if Julia Child did the catering. Unlike the other diners, he seemed happy. I took my tray over to join him.

“Looey,” I said, “Arnie Buttons wants to know where you are.”

He didn’t stop chewing. “Thass tough,” he said. “They frisked you, so get lost, shortie.”

“I’m not going to be here long,” I told him. “I got in by making them think I was AWOL. When I get out tomorrow, people will be coming to see you. He’s putting up a lot of money to lower your shades.”

Looey finished his tray and looked at mine as he continued to chew. I passed it over and took a medicinal sip of something similar to coffee as he vacuumed up my supper.

“Whass he got on you?” he asked. “You’re Frisbee, state attorney’s office, right?”

I confessed my career change and my new assignment.

“A broad as hostage? Arnie’s good at that. Well, like I always say, win some, lose some. Take me. They say I got something germinal. Six weeks or six months at the best to go. I can’t remember which, so thass bad. But I been on a diet all my life. Now I eat as much as I want, no worries about hypertension or nothing. Arnie pro’ly can’t tag me here, and all my tapes and depositions are going to stick it in his ear good. I go, and he follows. On the whole, thass good. You tell him for me.”

I wondered how Arnie was going to take the news that modern medical science was going to achieve what he couldn’t.

“Looey,” I said, preparing to become persuasive, “Arnie tells me you’re the only witness left. The others are missing or forgetful. They’ll put you in a civilian hospital at the end. Then Arnie will do his number on your deathbed. After all, he found you here.”

Looey’s eyes were tiny slits in his enormous face. “I got this plan. I hit four hundred pounds, real sick, they won’t move me out of here because they can’t. In the meantime, I catch television and eat and think about Arnie sweating. Too bad about your broad.”

In a lot of ways, Looey Flowers resembled a sea slug. The only place he was vulnerable was in his hatred of Arnie. Just as he was telling me he was maybe ninety percent sure his evidence would send Arnie down, I interrupted.

“I can make it one hundred percent.”

He stopped eating to ask how.

My fingerprints came back from Washington the next morning. The provost marshal was pretty vexed when he discovered I hadn’t been a member of the armed forces for some time. He felt better when he saw I had a right to the decorations. I said I was free-lancing what would be a very positive article about the efficiency of the local military police. Then I made a careful note of the way he spelled his name.

Arnie, on the other hand, wanted to be sure I knew he was mad. “You weren’t supposed to lose Schmettler!”

“He lost me. He didn’t want to go off with the air police. I did find Looey, though.”

Arnie’s sudden laugh wasn’t reassuring, and neither was the golf bag in the back seat, large, with many zippered compartments. He handed me a briefcase that was indeed full of dirty money — old bills, all tens and twenties. I didn’t like thinking where they came from.

“Now, let’s go see Looey,” he said, a tic jumping around his face.

“First, the call to Glendora,” I told him. “Just to make sure, I’ll use the pay phone on the corner.”

Arnie shook his head no. Schmettler put his hand on my shoulder like a jail door slamming while Arnie explained.

“You call from the phone in the car, and I listen to every word. You’re supposed to be tricky, and I’m taking no chances.”

The black limousine was parked in a tow-away zone, but no tickets fluttered under the windshield wipers. I got in back while Schmettler locked all the interior doors from the driver’s seat. The locks were child- and people-proof, which was not reassuring. Schmettler started up and Arnie handed over the phone. “No tricks, Frisbee.”

“I found Looey and I’ve played all my tricks already,” I said. Glendora came on immediately, and I felt better. I was sure she’d set up a phone trace. I can always count on her to show initiative.

“I found him, right where I thought he’d be,” I said.

“And I’m still here,” she said coolly. I had a sudden feeling something was very wrong. Arnie was connected everywhere, maybe even in the YWCA.

“What was I going to fix for supper last night?” I asked. If anything wasn’t right, she’d give me a wrong answer.

“Jambalaya,” she said and broke the connection.

Arnie inspected his fingernails. “We told her to hang up quick because you might have some idea of having the call traced. You’re playing in the traffic again, Frisbee. You took dirty money to finger Looey Flowers. Where is he?”

Glendora was safe, so I told him. As Schmettler moved us back to the military reservation rapidly, Arnie began unzipping the golf bag. He was ready for anything — pistols, a carbine, a deer rifle, and what looked like a rocket launcher next to a machine pistol. There were even a couple of grenades. Arnie rubbed his jaw as he contemplated his armory. “Where’s his cell?”

“I don’t know, but he has the exercise yard all to himself from two till three every afternoon.”

I went over my plan as we drove out to the brick buildings on the edge of the reservation where military delinquents put in hard time. About eighty yards off the roadway, his face a pale blob in the afternoon sun, a huge man leaned against the wall holding an orange Frisbee across his chest like a target. Even though it wasn’t necessary, I pointed. “Looey Flowers. That takes care of my part of this.”

Schmettler glanced at me through the mirror. I was the last pork chop on the plate. Arnie took my arm for emphasis. “That’s a dummy stuffed with pillows.”

Looey did look like a dummy, a fat scarecrow. “You’re right,” I said. “But I told you he had a serious weight problem. It’s an effort for him just to breathe. Look, he moved.”

Looey had dropped the Frisbee.

Arnie had reached the heights of his organization by being careful, which I had counted on. He told Schmettler to drive on.

“Frisbee,” he announced, “I don’t like not having a string on somebody who works for me, which is what you’re doing from now on. We’re going to shoot that loudmouth into pieces. But before we shoot, you shoot. That way, you’re using a firearm during the commission of a felony, as guilty as we are.”

I didn’t have to search my memories of first-year law school to know he was right. I figured if Arnie didn’t want a handle on me, I’d be dead by now, so I was glad he wanted a longer relationship.

After our stop at a turnaround for final instructions, we came back for the money run. Looey still looked like a sloppy bundle of clothes, just as I’d planned. After the fireworks, Arnie and Bruno would be arrested on the spot for all sorts of gun-law crimes and attempted murder. Since I wasn’t a policeman, I hadn’t entrapped them. Also, I wouldn’t have compromised my pacifist principles. The plan was complicated, but it was working nicely.

The dummy leaned against the brick wall as if looking at cloud formations to the west. Schmettler readied the rocket launcher while Arnie nudged me out with his machine pistol. His instructions when he gave me the deer rifle were clear.

“You fire one round. Otherwise, we leave you here. To make sure, we don’t fire till you do. Fire within the next five seconds or you get the first pill.”

I drew a bead on a ventilation pipe sticking out the roof and squeezed off. Then the noise commenced. Arnie emptied a magazine into the target and nodded to Schmettler, who took his time and fired the rocket. There was whoosh and a giant slam! A hole appeared in the wall where the dummy had been leaning. Arnie took the deer rifle from me. I noticed he was wearing gloves.

About this time, a sufficient number of police of various jurisdictions were scheduled to rise out of the weeds and solve all my problems.

But nothing happened.

We drove off in silence. I missed the company of the law-enforcement types, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Just as I’d put a hole in the steel ventilator, the dummy had raised an arm to make an international gesture at us.

I’d earned ten thousand the hard way. Looey Flowers was dead and Arnie had a hook in me. Things were very bleak indeed. I wondered how Arnie expected to get away with all that shooting, even on a military reservation. We drove back to the scenic turnout. As we parked, Arnie carefully put the deer rifle on the back seat, along with the rocket launcher and the machine pistol.

“We leave the guns here, especially the rifle with your prints on it.”

We got out of the car and Schmettler started waving his tent-sized coat. Then I heard the flat! flat! flat! of a helicopter coming in. I felt really bad when Arnie punched my biceps.

“Sweet, hey? I reported the car stolen this morning right after your call. Us? When all this happened, we were riding over scenic Lake Pontchartrain in a helicopter you rented. The wise money will know what happened, but our story is Bruno and me flew down here to pick you up. You need me now, Frisbee.”

I felt an unimprovable fool. I build a trap like the Taj Mahal and then put my own foot in it. Before I could feel sorry for myself, a loud hailer came on from overhead.

“Don’t move! Federal agents! You’re under arrest!”

Two other helicopters were coming up from other points of the compass. It was about time. Arnie started to break for the car, but I caught his collar and slammed him down. While I reached in to get the money, Schmettler looked at me, waiting for advice from Arnie.

I kept my foot on Arnie’s neck while I explained things. “Bruno! Listen hard! You tell people Arnie hired you to kill Looey Flowers. If you turn state’s evidence, you’re safe. If you don’t, it’ll be Old Sparkie. Plus, for a limited time only, I give you this ten grand, tax-free.”

As soon as the first chopper landed, I let Arnie up. He watched in disgust as Schmettler, his pockets stuffed with money, started telling his story to the first uniformed person who walked up.

“I want my lawyer!” Arnie shouted, but without much conviction. “When Glendora got out of the last bird, he turned purple.

“There was no way you could get a message to that broad. What’s she doing here? You didn’t tell her a thing on the phone!”

Glendora was on the arm of Ralph David Luna, the special agent from the Plaquemines District across the river, a handsome devil with silver hair and a great tan. Arnie was being a bad loser. “There was no way you could trace that call!”

Glendora gave me an I’ll-get-around-to-you-in-a-minute wave as she turned to Arnie. “We didn’t have to trace calls, Mr. Buttons. As soon as my beau here told me Mr. Flowers had avoided a solid cordon of your people who were watching every possible exit on the base, I knew where he was.”

If Arnie had turned purple when he saw Glendora, he was puce now. She took pity on him.

“Mr. Frisbee told me to listen carefully. He made quite a point that Looey had avoided your men. In law, evade and avoid are two different things. Tax evasion, for example, is a crime, but tax avoidance is not. That was the first clue. Since it wasn’t against the law, that meant the forces of law were helping Mr. Flowers. The second clue was he said he’d see me today, and he’s doing that. So it had to be someplace close. The base was close, so all I had left to do was work out where Mr. Flowers belonged. He belonged in jail. So he had to be in the base stockade.”

Arnie turned to me. “You told her?”

Glendora explained further. “If Mr. Flowers had evaded your people, he’d have gone through them. But he avoided them by not leaving the base. Since he was in the stockade, they didn’t need those marshals anymore. I figured Mr. Frisbee intended to bring you out here for reasons of his own. So we got in touch with the military and they told us the whole plan.”

After they led Arnie away, she patted the cheek of the special agent from Plaquemines and nodded at the two large men in business suits who were still holding me. “He did a good job for us, you can let him go now.”

“All right, Glendora,” I told her.

“Why didn’t I have them arrest you all at the scene of the crime? Well, Mr. Buttons sent a horrible woman to the YWCA to kill me. I decided if he was going to be like that, he couldn’t be trusted not to kill you, so we decided to catch him with the helicopter he was expecting.”

If she wanted me to interrupt and ask how she’d disposed of the threat in the YWCA, I wasn’t going to cooperate, so I stood there pouting.

“You look real nice in blue,” she said. “Anyway, after your call, I explained things to this nice Mr. Luna. When I told him for all intents I’d been kidnapped and left to languish in the YWCA, he saw the federal component right away. Especially after that call to the FBI about your fingerprints. So, this morning, we talked to Mr. Flowers, and he told us what you had in mind. They liked your idea of using a dummy, but then I guess Mr. Flowers thought it would be a real good joke all around if he stayed there. He had his first bad attack last night.”

“The helicopter,” I said.

“You must think that deep down I’m just a rattlebrain. When Mr. Buttons reported his car stolen, we knew he was going to use it for the crime and he’d need another way off the military reservation. So we checked all the heliports and, sure enough, he’d chartered a whirlybird in your name. So we decided to give him a real surprise. That way, he wouldn’t try to shoot you with all those awful guns he had.”

I finally got my serious question out. “Why’d you pat Luna’s cheek?”

There came one of Glendora’s super smiles guaranteed to make everything all right. “Why, I do believe you’re jealous! Mr. Luna said after I finish law school, he’d like me to join the FBI. I told him I have other plans.”

I’m sure she does, but I’ve been afraid to ask what they are.