The Spy in the Ointment

31

They were both still asleep, Murray smiling and Papa Ten Eyck snoring. Angela rushed to her father and there was a joyful reunion; perhaps a bit livelier on one side than the other. I let it go until she began to pat the old walrus on the cheek and tell him to wake up, and then I said, “Not him. He can sleep till Christmas for all of me. It’s Murray I want. My mouthpiece, my solicitor, my shyster.”

“Shylock,” she said.

“Nonono, that’s a moneylender. Lawyers never lend money, it’s part of their Hippocratic Oath.”

“Are you sure, Gene?”

“Take Murray’s ankles,” I said.

We carried Murray to the kitchen, thumping him into lots of door jambs on the way, and propped him into a more or less sitting position at the kitchen table, and spent a while trying to wake him up. Splashing water in his face, pulling his hair, dribbling coffee into his mouth (and down his chin), slapping his cheeks. He snorted every once in a while, but that was all.

Next we carried him to a bathroom and stripped his outer clothing off, leaving him in his shorts and undershirt. (A clean, neat suit is the lawyer’s basic tool, the way chalk is to a teacher or an airplane to a pilot. Lawyers can’t do a thing unless they’re dressed right, and I figured I’d want Murray to do lots of things for me before this night was over, so I was a lot more careful with his suit than I was with him.) Next we dumped him into the shower stall, turned on the cold water, and five minutes later he was pretty nearly awake. He could even hold a coffee cup, and blink his eyes, and say, “Whuzza? Whuzza?”

Angela by now had gone back to see what she could do with her father. I walked Murray slowly and gingerly back to the kitchen, sat him down at the table again, sat across from him, and kept telling him to drink his coffee. Every time I told him, he raised the cup and took a slurp; he kept reminding me of Lobo.

All at once the dull film over his eyes was replaced by a bright glaze and he said to me, “Gene.”

“Right,” I said.

He put the cup down. He pressed his palms together, as though helping something inside himself snap back into place, and then he turned abruptly brisk and insane. “Well,” he said. “Good to see you. I’m glad you came to me.”

“Murray—”

“You don’t have to tell me you didn’t kill her, Gene. I’m sure you didn’t. But the point is—”

“Murray,” I said.

“Don’t interrupt,” he said. “The point is, they’ll be holding you for first degree murder, which means no bail can be set, even if you do give yourself up, so the prospect—”

“Murray,” I said.

“Let me finish. I believe the claim is you killed her in New York and transported the body to New Jersey, so the trial would be held—”

“Murray,” I said. “If you don’t shut up I’ll put you back to sleep and hire your father.”

He said, “For a man charged with murdering a socially prominent young lady, you—”

“Look around you, Murray.”

“What?”

“Look around,” I told him. “Where are you?”

He looked around. The glaze began to crackle. “Well,” he said. “It seems— I don’t— Of course, if you— On the other hand—”

Angela came in, then, and said, “I can’t get him to wake up, Gene.”

“You’re lucky. This one did and look at him.”

Murray stared open-mouthed at Angela. “You’re alive,” he whispered. “My God, you’re alive!”

“Murray, will you either wake up or go back to sleep? You’re driving me crazy. Of course she’s alive. You’re in her house, you idiot, you already knew she was alive.”

The glaze crackled even more, and then fell off his eyes entirely, leaving them bloodshot and somewhat confused. He looked at me and said, “Gene? What happened? A lot of Chinamen came in, and—”

“That about sums it up,” I told him.

For the next half hour we drank coffee and filled one another in on recent events, while waiting for Murray to feel well enough to perform. When he pronounced himself ready, Angela drove down into town and got the police and brought them back to the house.

So the first thing they did upon arrival was arrest me for the murder of Angela Ten Eyck.

Then, when Angela tried to help me by pointing out that she was Angela Ten Eyck, they arrested her, too, as accessory after the fact.

I guess a lawyer needs more than just a suit. Maybe a briefcase is necessary, too; Murray didn’t have his with him. And Murray was arrest number three, also accessory, for claiming the other accessory was who she said she was.

Then the police wanted to know who all these other bodies were, and it was kind of tough to explain it all in a rush. We were all milling around in the front hall, near the big staircase, when a sudden bellow from above froze us in our confusion. We looked up, and there was Tyrone Ten Eyck, looming and leaning and tottering at the head of the stairs. He’d managed to untie himself, and from somewhere he’d found a new weapon, a huge rusty old sword, which he waved above his head now as he came charging down the stairs at us.

What was it I’d been told at the training site by Rowe, my fencing instructor? “If they come at you with swords you’ll die, that’s all.”

Uh.

The assassin came down like the wolf on the fold... and kept on going. Wild-eyed, roaring, swinging that sword around his head, he charged down onto us and right on through us without so much as slowing down — I don’t believe he even knew we were there — and swooped on out the front door, leaving half a dozen cops and their three prisoners blinking and open-mouthed in his wake.

Abruptly, from outside, we heard a spatter of shooting. Bang bang. Bangity. And then silence.

Angela said, as though someone had been trying to pull her leg, “You can’t shoot a sword.”

We all looked at her, until the front door opened and in came one of the cops who’d stayed outside. He carried a pistol in his right hand and he looked as startled and bewildered as the rest of us. “Well,” he said, as though he’d been talking already for a few sentences, “this big fella came at me all of a sudden with a sword. Well, I didn’t have time to tell him to stop or anything. Well, I had to shoot him. Well, he kept running so I had to keep shooting. Well, he’s laying out there and I guess he must be dead.”

The cop in charge said, “You did what you had to do, Rooney.”

“Well,” said Rooney, with the reasonableness of lunacy, “he come too fast for me to point out to him that I was armed.”

“It’s all right, Rooney,” his leader assured him. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Well,” said Rooney, “he was on me before I knowed it, so I had to shoot him.”

The cop in charge said to one of the other cops, “Take Rooney out to the car.” Then he looked around and said, “We’ll all go out to the car. We’ll straighten this mess out in the morning.”

Angela then demanded something be done about her father, who was still out and didn’t know how lucky he was, and the cop assured her he’d have an ambulance take the old man to the hospital right away. As for the rest of us, it was town for us, and the county jail.

When we got there, I discovered my rights had gone off duty for the night. “Even Benedict Arnold,” I told the phlegmatic desk sergeant, “would get a phone call, one phone call.”

“In the morning,” he said stolidly.

“Wait till the Supreme Court hears about this,” I muttered.

“Who do you want to wake at this time of night?” he asked me.

“The FBI,” I said.

He was unmoved. “Seems to me you’ve got police enough already,” he said.

“I need the FBI,” I told him, “to complete my collection.”

Then they put us all in separate cells, and Murray — the rat — went back to sleep.