Ask the Right Question (15 page)

Which was handing me a problem. I could count on bail in the morning, but I could hardly expect my mother to come running down to the pokey in the middle of the night. When a kid is thirty-seven a mother's affection will only carry her so far.

I could call my lawyer, but I didn't have anything to say that couldn't wait.

So I resigned myself to a night courtesy of the city. I don't like bail bondsmen's breaths, or their 10 percent fee, which I didn't have on me, anyway.

Which left me with my phone call, which I damn well wasn't going to waste. I decided to use it on my next most pressing need—nights are pretty long in jail.

“Do you have a phone book?” I asked my cheerful bobby.

“Shit,” he said, “you mean a bird like you don't know his mouthpiece's phone number by heart?”

I shuddered as he handed me the book. There was something about his turn of phrase. An old movie word like “mouthpiece” put so close to a touching first-grade notion like “by heart.”

I opened the book. The police department and the jail across the street are in my territory. They're walking distance from home. I know the area. I looked up my local all-night Chuck-a-Chunk-a-Chicken, dialed the number and took a breath.

“Would you please deliver a whole chicken and an order of french fries to the City Jail, please. The name is Duck, D. Duck.

It blew Numbie's mind. He clobbered me with the back of his paw, he gave me the look reserved for people who defile his phone.

I laughed inside, all the way across the street.

Jail is not exactly a homey place, but if you know what to expect and have a degree of emotional reserve a night or two isn't that disorienting. I do recommend that you sleep as much as you can. It's without doubt the fastest way to pass time.

It's not exactly the first time I'd been in the Indianapolis jail. But I hadn't been there recently. It hadn't changed a bit. They still needed to arrest a decorator.

I never got my chicken.

21

Miller made a special trip in for me about ten thirty. That was the nicest thing anybody had done for me in quite a while. It meant that he hadn't forgotten me.

He was in high school with me, in my class. But I never met him until near the end of the summer after we graduated. One Saturday I had nicked a convertible from a Broad Ripple parking lot after a movie at the Vogue. I was heading out Westfield Boulevard going no place in particular and I recognized him hitching. I knew I'd seen him somewhere. So I stopped and picked him up. He'd been going to watch a baseball game at North Central. We got to talking. He had to pitch against one of the teams in a few days and he didn't have anything else to do.

We learned that we had some interests in common. Like exploring foreign neighborhoods.

We decided to take a ride. We drove that damn car about a hundred and fifty miles. Up to Kokomo and through Muncie, all around the northeast of town until we ran out of gas just outside of Oaklandon. From Oaklandon we walked back to the city. Ten miles. That sort of thing does something to a couple of people. No matter how different you are when you meet, and what ways you go after you part, you have a community of feeling that you never forget.

He had called my mother for me and when I was called in she'd already been and gone leaving the five-hundred-dollar bail.

I was in Miller's office by eleven forty five.

He gave me a fat manila envelope full of pictures. Prints from the rolls I popped the night before. “I've been reviewing your case,” he said. “I think you may need these to prepare a proper defense.”

I smiled. “Bet the lab loved this.”

“It kept them out of trouble last night. They get horny if they just sit around and read Shakespeare all night.”

We had a little more chatter and then he told me about Crystal's lawyer. “That guy, Ames. His lawyer's apparently been around here all morning finding out whatever he can.”

“What'd he find out?”

“Finally, your name. Not much else that he didn't know. When you were caught, doing what. He wants the pictures and he's talking tough about prosecution. By the way, they've added possession of burglar's tools to your charge sheet. Thought you'd like to know. They picked up your car in that shopping center. It's in the pound. You'll owe thirty bucks towing charges plus a parking ticket for leaving it there overnight.”

I shrugged it off. I wanted to get going, but I'd had a night to think on my experiences. “Something else. Can you tell me what the problem is with the desk sergeant who was on last night?”

“Yeah. His old lady split the sheet with him. Took off. After twenty-three years. He doesn't know where. Every night when he comes on he checks at missing persons.”

“Kind of rough on the people he books.”

“Yeah, but it's kind of rough on him too.” All heart, that Miller, too soft to make it against the odds. But a good man. I would still have trouble gleaning myself for sympathy for the sad-sack sergeant.

“You better go,” he said. “I got to get home. I don't go on duty till four, you know.”

“I know,” I said. And I knew.

22

With no money in pocket, I decided to walk home and let the car ride. I stopped at my bank and convinced them to let me use one of their checks to draw out a little of my own money.

I took a hundred. Car money, when I got around to it, plus a little mad money.

Then I bought the highest-power hand magnifying glass I could find quickly, and I picked up a whole chicken with a double order of french fries. In the office, I made a call to make an appointment with my “mouthpiece” for four.

I ate my chicken. But I just stuffed it in. I was eager to get to the pictures that I had braved the bedbugs for.

Thirteen and a half rolls. Thirty-six negatives to the roll. Two or more pages pictured on each negative. My manila envelope contained prints of four hundred and ninety-one negatives, images of more than twelve hundred sides of pieces of paper.

I cut the prints up, so I had each photographed item separate. I set about arranging them in piles.

By three I had ten stacks of surreptitious snaps.

Scrapbook

Pornography

Money

Letters

Canceled checks

Tax records

Ladies' names and phone numbers

Legal documents and bills

Accounting record book

Leftovers

I also had my first rewards. Four canceled checks dated from 1954 to 1956. Totaling twenty thousand dollars. Made out to a Jacques Chaulet; cashed, as well as I could make out, at a bank in Toulon.

I noticed the first one because of the French name. The others just followed. Not that I knew exactly what they meant, but they made me feel great.

Great enough to leave a note for Eloise:

Sorry to be gone today, but it's a good sign: I am working. I think I have a key to your parentage. Will be back as soon as possible after four. Wait if you can.

I debated signing it “Love.” I mean I did feel good. But I decided to save it.

I paid for the car without a single crack, but couldn't help noticing that it wouldn't be hard to steal some of the cars the cops had in their emporium. It's not that I steal cars all the time. But my father showed me how to start them without keys and five or six times in high school …

But not a single crack.

I headed for Clinton Grillo's.

We didn't spend very long on my position with the police. Only on the facts and essential strategy. None of the “Why did you do it?” stuff. That's not really law—so Senior doesn't bother much with it. In law, he says, you accept what appears to be the truth, combine it with what you want to be the truth and try to settle out of court. Besides I don't think the old man wants to know too much about me. He still thinks of me as Junior's disadvantaged friend.

Clinton Junior got pretty good grades when we were in high school and he went to Yale. But he never came back. I went to see his father when I first came back to Indianapolis; to tell him about his son who was selling computers in New York while I lived there. Now Clinton Senior is my lawyer and kind of a friend. And he doesn't send me bills. I take him bottles of good booze.

In this case the strategy was to delay. The longer we could stall “this guy Ames” the less likely he was to be upset and want to take the trouble to keep up prosecution.

Fair enough.

I also used the meeting to find out that the statute of limitations on inheritance fraud is six years in Indiana.

Happiness is a relative thing, of course, but as I headed back to my office I was happier than I'd been in some time. In work like mine, in which so much is so dull, you become afraid that your mind becomes dull with it.

Having gotten an unusual job I was pleased to have made progress. To have beaten part of it, if my guesses were correct. To have earned the fee by a little application, and a little daring, however inept. I didn't worry too much about being jailed. I have a fair number of friends in the city and they can help if you're not too important. Which I'm not.

I whistled in the car as I drove back.

I walked up the stairs rather than wait for the elevator. And I almost never walk up the stairs.

My only shadow was that for some reason Eloise had not been able to hang around. I thought that the note would be enough to keep her. I was glad I'd left such a positive one. I'd hurried back, so I was approaching the office door by 4:45.

I could see the door ajar. When I saw that my heart fluttered a little, as hearts will. That surprised me. I was, after all, an old man who was supposed to have better self-control than that.

I shook my head in wonderment at myself. I smiled, I strode into my office.

Sitting on the corner of my desk, with my note to Eloise in his hand, was Leander Crystal.

The sight cut me dead. I just stood there and started to shake. I don't know if he could see that.

After a minute's silence, I mumbled, “I need a drink,” and tried to figure out how to get to my desk drawer. It shouldn't have been hard—I can see that now. But the sight of him there, where my Eloise, my client, should have been, it frightened me.

It took me another full sixty seconds to realize that I was in no immediate physical danger; he had no gun and he wasn't holding it on me. I was sure he knew I was shaking. I wanted him out. I wanted him away. We knew that we were enemies.

I said, “Get off my desk.”

He got off and stood by the chair. Eloise's chair. I went behind my desk, sat down and did my thing. I went through three drawers before I found the bottle. The seal seemed inordinately strong. I can't say I felt better after the belt. It's just the only thing available to do. I don't take surprises very well.

“You expected my daughter, I believe.” He spaced the words, enunciated clearly. Mr. Cool. “I sent her home. The poor child was very agitated. The surprise of seeing me. I must say I was surprised at seeing her here. But I decided to stay so that we could talk.”

“I'm not sure that we have much to say to one another,” I said, because it was my turn to talk and I am instinctively polite.

“I think this note you left for my daughter suggests the contrary.”

“Ah, the note.”

“Just what do you know about Eloise's parentage, Mr. Samson?”

“I'm still working on how you got here.”

He shifted impatiently, and then decided to sit down. “You did break into my office last night. I have an unlisted phone number which I gave the night watchman to use in case anything suspicious goes on at the office. Your activities were deemed suspicious. I got your name from the police. I must say, I'm fascinated by the lengths to which you go for an article. But we'll drop that little fiction for the moment, shall we? You are a private detective, thirty-seven years old, originally of this city. You went away to college but dropped out when your father died. He was a guard at Marion County Jail. After some security work you went back to college, flunked out, wrote a book about your “experience” which was something of a
cause célèbre
. You married above you, had a daughter and dropped out of that because the pressure was more than you could take. Seven years ago you came back here, took out a detective license and have been living off that and other varied ventures. Your mother is alive and runs Bud's Dugout. She owns it outright. I presume on money you had left from your better days. I came here today to find out what you were doing in my office last night.”

“Your secret office,” I said, and then felt petty.

“My secret office. But I think your note told me that. I also wanted to know who put you up to it, and Eloise told me that. Now I want to know what you know. You can tell me that.”

“Can I?” I was trying desperately to regroup.

“Don't try to play with the privacy of your client. Eloise gives you her permission to speak. Quite apart from the fact that she is a minor and I am her father. What, I repeat, what is it that you presume to know?” He was losing patience. I decided to give him one of the versions which fit the things I knew.

“I know that you are not her real father. I know she was conceived in France, and I believe her father was a man called Jacques Chaulet to whom you payed twenty thousand dollars for the service.”

It stunned him slightly, but he was quick.

“Why would I do that?”

“In order that you and your wife inherit under the terms of Estes Graham's will, which required you to have a healthy child in wedlock. I believe you found out that you were sterile.” It was worth a try, under the circumstances.

We paused together, studied each other intently. It was the kind of moment which someone interrupting us would have found comical. We did not find it comical.

I was waiting for him to speak. He, it turned out, for me. “Go on,” he said.