Ask the Right Question (14 page)

And the idea of leaving a cozy place like Imports-Exports to go back on a tail, well …

I decided to stick around. I found a pay phone and made some calls.

The first to my office.

It was a 4:46, prime time. The phone rang twice before it was picked up. A tentative, female, familiar voice coughed and said, “Mr. Samson's office.”

“Miss Crystal, this is Albert Samson.”

Immediately more confident she said, “Gee, you've never called me Miss Crystal before.”

“I hoped I'd catch you. I wanted to let you know I was on the job, and that I'd probably be in tomorrow. There are some things I want to ask you.”

“Like about what?”

“Mostly about your environmental father and what he does with his day.”

“He goes to the office in the morning and then to the country club for the afternoon.”

“Every day?”

“Yes. Except weekends.”

“Can you get in touch with him at the country club?”

“Only in an emergency. He doesn't like to be bothered. But if we have to, we call and ask for him.”

“And when does he come home at night?”

“Sometimes early or sometimes he stays late. You can't tell.”

“Well, we'll talk more about it tomorrow, if that's convenient.”

“Oh, sure, I guess so.”

“Maybe I should hire you as my secretary while we're about it.”

She giggled. Not as charming a giggle as I'd heard through my Import-Export door. Too childish.

“Did you mind? I mean me answering the phone like, that? I thought when it rang it might be something important.”

“That's just fine, no problem. I'm glad you did.”

“Yes, so am I.”

And thus we parted.

For my edification I looked up the number of the Broadland Country Club.

“Is Leander Crystal there please?”

A formal male voice answered passionlessly and immediately. “Mr. Crystal is on the golf course.”

“Is it possible to have him paged? It's a matter of life and death.”

“If you'll leave your name and number, I'll have him call you back when he comes in.”

“About how long will that be please?”

“Should be within an hour.”

“Well,” I said huffily, “it's not all that important.” And I hung up.

Crystal was presumably returning to the club. More prerogatives of the rich.

Loath to leave a machine which had rewarded me so handsomely, I dialed the number on the notice posted in the Crystal Secret Office Building. I got through to Armor Realtors and learned that there were two choice offices that happened to have fallen vacant last week. I inquired about the rent because one must, and made an appointment to see them the next morning.

Twenty offices and two vacancies; yet only seventeen were identified on the register in the lobby. I was willing to bet which office the odd one was.

19

On my way back to town I stopped at Bud's Dugout for food and to make sure Mom was keeping my bail money warm. I took my time and had a big meal. A last supper, one might say.

And I fed the pinball machine until the teacher couple came in. There is something that depresses me about people keeping regular schedules for their pleasures as well as their labors. But I may have been in a tenuous mood. It had been a long day, and the day was getting longer. A sunny, deceptively warm day.

After Bud's I stopped briefly at my office. The mail provided nothing which attracted my affections apart from a circular from something called Cosmic Detectives offering a course with Special Features. I dropped the bulk of my tailing gear and picked up my camera's close-up kit and keys and bag of tricks. I also divested myself of all identification.

By 8:00 p.m. I was back in South Indianapolis. I parked in the Southern Plaza shopping center, and bought a lot of film in the drugstore there. Then I took the walk to my moonlight adventure.

Outside the window of Crystal's office I felt a certain oppression from my own repetitiveness. I would have gone in the front—I have the keys to do it—but I didn't want to spend time standing in front of the door picking out the right key. The back was the better bet, and there was less chance of an alarm on individual windows than on the front door.

I was getting practice. It was good for me; I got in without my stool.

The room was not big, but he made plenty of use of it. Storage files, books, a big desk. Clothes. There was a washbasin with a fully stocked medicine cabinet—all the ablutionaries. He had his own private john. A single bed.

There was no trace of any woman.

The items of most interest looked to be the contents of the desk and files. I decided to photograph it all, and sort it out later.

There was plenty to take. Page by page through interminable financial records. Three drawers of the file. None of it meant anything to me offhand. I saw occasional names and dollar signs, but mine was not to reason why, for the moment. The bottom dawer was correspondence. I had shot seven rolls of film by the time I got to the desk.

In the desk drawers I got more goodies. Like a drawer of cash. A scrapbook in another and an address book and a pornography collection in the bottom.

For modesty's sake I started with the money. It was all twenty-dollar bills. I shot it so I could count the number of edges, and I took a few random serial numbers. Next drawer …

By ten thirty I had shot thirteen rolls of 36-exposure film. I had had to plug in my electronic flash.

I was about halfway through the pornography when a key slipped in the lock. I bolted upright. I'd been over-confident, uncautious. Being interrupted was the farthest thing from my mind. The door flew open and a voice of authority said, “Hold it right there, buster.”

I was so surprised, startled, that I reacted with the intelligence of a small boy caught pinching Donald Duck at the comic rack. I guess I tend to panic under pressure. A failing. I ran for the door.

That was dumb, incredibly dumb. He was in the door I tried to run through.

More than that he had a gun on me.

Christ, he could have killed me!

I'm glad he was cooler than I was. Instead of shooting he clobbered me on the side of my head with the side of his gun.

I thought it had gone off. I have a vague recollection of some sort of strange feeling. I must have been falling.

They say I fell on my electronic flash. I must have hit it with my head. It broke.

20

I woke up with fuzz in my face. Fuzz, fuzz everywhere, and not one with a peach's blush. They were not delicate or sympathetic or brutal. They were just two big bullocks, one blond, one gray. But even they had a sense of the irony of the situation. Shows the higher class of cop the brutality stories are attracting these days.

The young one drove; Old Folk led the conversation.

Their big decision was whether they could book me as a Peeping Tom. I had been caught photographing another man's pornography. Old Folk looked back into the cage and drooled, “I ain't never had one just like you before, buddy. You do a lot of this sort of thing in my territory or you just started lately?”

“Go claim your pension,” I suggested.

“Tough guy,” he said, turning back to stare at the 11 p.m. traffic. “Tough guy. Wonder what he does for kicks.”

The booking sergeant was in a surly mood. His wife must have kicked him in the balls as he left home for the night shift.

Of course I wasn't feeling any too pleasant myself. I was desperate for my film.

“You bastards are the scum of the earth,” said Numb Nuts, hissing after my captors had delivered me and described my offenses. While I stood by they held a cop conclave and decided on “breaking and entering” and “invasion of privacy” as offenses, and “you fucking pervert” as a description of the captive.

But Numb Nuts really cheered me up. “Wait till you hear my name,” I said, “then you'll really like me.”

“What's your name?” he growled.

“Donald Duck,” I said. “Honest. I was born in 1932 and my parents liked the alliteration.”

“The allewhat? Fuck. Lock the bastard up.”

“Hey, what about my call? I get a call.”

“Call some of the guys downstairs. They're your kind.”

Things were getting a little out of hand. I half expected a night on the city, but I didn't want to spend it with no machinery working for me. “Now look, I'm sorry if I offended you,” you big shit. “But if you lock me up without a call, these kind gentlemen who brought me in aren't going to get their conviction. They can tell you. Or is Miller in? Jerry Miller. He can tell you my name. He's on tonight, ain't he?”

He squinted at me. “You know Miller? He knows you?” Spittle sploshed on floorboards behind the desk. “Figures. OK, you guys,” to my arresting officers, “take him down the hall to the nigra.”

Jerry Miller was a high school classmate of mine. He is also sergeant of police. I will never forgive him for showing no surprise at seeing me brought into his cubbyhole.

He was churning out some paperwork. They sat me down on a chair in front of him and flopped my file on his desk, and left. Jerry doodled a bit, then, without looking up again he picked up my file and skimmed it.

“Big bust like this,” he said. “Wish I was in on it.”

“This place smells,” I said.

“Would have been promotion for sure. Want a smoke?”

“Screw your smoke.” He knows I don't smoke. “I want to get out of here. I have an appointment in half an hour.”

“Ah, we get them all here. Murderers, rapists, litter-bugs, trespassers.” He basked in it as we both remembered the hard times I have, on occasion, given him about being stuck for nine years as a sergeant. Think of it this way, he says, I've got more seniority than any other sergeant on the whole stinking force.

“Donald Duck, eh? No ID. I take it you expected to get caught.”

“Not expected. It's a matter of protection, just in case. I've never been booked under my real name. Not since I was a kid. It helps out the license.”

“Not so sure about the license on this one. What the hell are you up to anyway?”

“I'm trying to find out some secrets.”

“Secrets of anatomy?”

“Secrets of the guy who rents that office. Very deep, very dark.”

“Sounds right up my line.”

We exchanged smiles. I was not in a bad mood considering my recent past and the prospects for my immediate future.

“Still on nights, I see.”

“Yeah. It beats a beat. But it's not the easiest side of life. I get all the jobs that have filtered through everybody else and that nobody wants. Never any chance for anything big. I'm going to be here forever, unless I stumble onto something big by accident. Like, you know, drugs in a ski pole or something.”

“Or in a stool leg,” I said.

His face turned sharp. “What do you know about a stool?”

I sighed. “You don't have that one, do you?”

He got up and went to a cupboard. And brought back a very familiar-looking stool. “Somebody left a calling card in a north-side doctor's record room.”

“I've never seen that stool before in my life.”

“No drugs taken, nothing stolen. No fingerprints. We tell him to try and relax. Oh, I get all the trespassing cases.”

“I've never seen that stool before in my life,” I said. “But I could use one, when it gets unclaimed. Keep me in mind.”

He sat down and shook his head. More for himself than for me. He propped up my booking sheet. “So what are we going to do about this? You going to tell me anything true so I can make like I beat it out of you and raise my standing around here?”

“Who rents the office?”

“Guy called Ames, according to the night watchman. That the guy you're working on?”

“Guess so. Give them my real name, and get me a phone call.”

“That all you want me to do?” I was made the object of the bitter blade of irony. I spat it back; I thrive on irony.

“No. I want information. I want the Army records of a Leander Crystal and any Ames, Iowa, police record he has. You got that name?”

“I got it. You're sure I can't do anything else for you?” I sensed sarcasm but ignored it.

“If you can't get me out now, call my mother and ask her to bail me out tomorrow morning.”

If it hadn't been his own office, he would have spat at my foot. Miller is a good spitter. “Now think carefully,” he said. “Sure there's nothing else I can do for you?”

So I sat back and thought. “Also Army Records of Windom, Sellman and Joshua Graham.” I wanted to see if Crystal really was in the same outfit as Joshua. “Let me write those names down for you.” I wrote them down. He waited patiently. On reflection I think he was interested.

“Care to tell me what's going on?”

“No.”

“Care to tell me what I'm going to get out of this? You know I can't just walk in and order Army records without some sort of reason.”

“I may get you a fraud. And anything I do get will be yours.”

“Such great temptations you offer.” He sighed. “Still, it'll be interesting to see if anybody does notice what I'm asking for.”

“I also need that film I took tonight.”

“I figured that. You can't have it.”

“I've got to have it.”

“I'll see what I can do. But don't count on it.”

I left quietly. For my night's rest.

By 1 a.m. I was making my one call. Privilege finally granted by Numb Nuts, the desk sergeant. I was getting pretty annoyed. Miller had identified me for them but his shift finished a little after midnight. I hadn't been caught doing violence. I thought they could let me go on my own recognizance. Numb Nuts wasn't buying any.

In return for his avowed failure to trust me—despite Miller vouching for me—Numbie decided that with one phone call I could hardly do a lasting damage to the community. So he gave me his phone. It was hard for him, I'll say that. He didn't want to see me go.