Lover Man: An Artie Deemer Mystery (12 page)

I played a blazing Sonny Rollins-McCoy Tyner duet and smoked half a bone to smooth the waters while I tried out various lies. I felt better now it was over, now that I had decided to bring in the police. I'd had enough time with Billie's photographs to know they carried implications beyond a message to me, and now it was time to pass them along. Yes, that was the sane thing to do. So what the hell, I decided. Might as well smoke the rest, now I'm near the end, only a phone call away.

Billie sat down on the red Iranian carpet beside Jellyroll. Warm morning sunlight glinted on the ends of her short black hair. The sound of her voice was lush and soft. She whispered in Jellyroll's ear, "I love Artie. We both love Artie, don't we." His tail thumped twice against the floor in agreement. Billie had just gotten out of bed. There remained the vague imprint of a sheet fold in her cheek that I found enormously erotic. She wore only her Mets jersey. She smiled up at me, and the fleck in her iris shone like a chip of sunlight. She sat in my lap and put her arms around my neck. I could smell her hair. In a moment she would remove the shirt with her cross-handed grip of the bottom hem and drop it over her shoulder. I would feel her breasts compress, nipples hardening, against my own bare chest. This was what I always wanted, a sweet retreat; never mind that it precluded real awareness. She would sigh contentedly. So would Jellyroll. Me, too. We'd return to the bedroom soon, but meanwhile someone would sing "Lover Man," Lady Day or Ella, and we'd have before us a lifetime of sunny summer mornings.

TWELVE

I
 SNAPPED AWAKE, rigid with fear, in the morris chair. Nightmare images—dead faces, ashen faces, disembodied, floating up from the river-bottom ooze, breaking the surface, crossing the park, and pounding on my door. They came for me, faces, the kind of faces you just don't blackmail, their frozen foreheads ripped away. Time to make the call.

The room was dark and silent, so I switched to WKCR and cranked up the power on Duke's birthday celebration. "Do Nothing Till You Hear from Me." Ray Nance on cornet, Russell Procope on alto, Gus Johnson on drums. I waited until Ray Nance ended his solo, then I went for the phone. But the wait was just long enough. If I'd not listened, if I'd gone straight to the phone, things would have happened differently, I guess, but that's the same old tune, barely noteworthy.

The phone rang.

Two words in and I knew the voice. It was squeaky and nasal. Stretch said, "Are you the gentleman who visited Acappella Productions? If you should be that man, we may have grounds of mutual interest."

"Yeah? Where are you now?"

"Ten minutes away"

"From me?"

"Yes."

"I'll be here." He was the smallest person I knew in a position to tell me things I still wanted to know.

I went into Jerry's apartment, fed his lonely cat, and searched for a gun. I found two in the foyer closet. A shotgun and a powerful-looking rifle. One weekend a year Jerry and a carload of other sports motor up to the Catskills to murder deer, and I feed his cat. I figured he owed me use of a gun. Considering the pros and cons of rifles and shotguns, I settled on the latter, because accuracy was less crucial. The hefty weight of the shells I found in a box near the gun surprised me. I worked the pump thing back and forth several times. Nothing came out. I shoved in three fat shells and wondered if it was now ready for use. Who did I intend to shoot? I ignored that question as I removed a pair of Jerry's pants, hung fastidiously in the pants section of his bedroom closet, and stuck the loaded shotgun down one leg. It makes people nervous to see their neighbors roaming the halls heavily armed.

I returned to my place and leaned the gun out of sight behind the French doors that, when closed, separate the dining room from the living room. Then I changed my mind. The whole idea of deterrence turns on your enemy understanding that you're not to be fucked with. So I leaned it up against the middle of the white living-room wall, where it stood out like a shotgun against a white wall. I had the tiniest taste of a gasper for clearheadedness and a sense of context.

When Stretch rang the downstairs door, I buzzed him in. He stood tiny and dripping in the hallway. He seemed to be alone, no nightmare faces hanging behind him. Without showing myself, I opened the door a crack barely wide enough for the little man to sidle through and planted my foot behind it. After he squeezed in, I shoved the door shut and bolted it twice.

His cheap, shapeless raincoat was saturated to the point of uselessness. Little puddles were forming at his feet. His eyebrows, stiff and brushy, met in the middle.

"My name is Dr. Harvey Keene."

"How do you know mine? You had to know my name to call."

"May I remove my outerwear?"

I pointed to the hook behind the door. Keene wore a tiny tweed sport coat over a blue shirt and crumpled pants soaked from the knees down. I sat on the windowsill. Stretch was dwarfed in my Morris chair.

"Are you a sportsman, Mr. Deemer?"

"Me? No. Why?"

He gestured at the shotgun.

"Oh, that. That's just for casual killing. I've got bazookas in the bedroom. Tell me how you know my name?"

"I've been following the man Palomino. He led me to you only a short while ago in the park. I followed you back here."

Everybody
was following me. "That doesn't get you my name."

"That wasn't difficult, merely tedious. I noted the names on the buzzer in the lobby, then I looked up and phoned each party. Inevitably, I came to you. Are you aware that you are being followed by a large Negro man?"

"I'm a regular mother duck. Why were you following Palomino?"

"In the hope that he might lead me to Barnett Osley." He said the name with quiet emphasis and stared into my eyes from under his steel-wool eyebrows.

"Am I supposed to know him?"

"I hoped you might."

"I don't. Who is he?"

"He's my partner."

"As in business partner?"

"In every sense of the word. He has disappeared."

"When?"

"I last heard from him on the night the Burke woman was killed."

"There's a connection?"

"I believe so. But I don't believe he killed her. Dr. Osley saves lives; he doesn't take them."

"Was someone blackmailing you?"

"Please, Mr. Deemer, I'm wet and cold, and I've had quite enough of this covert activity. You have appeared too often. At her apartment in disguise and still again at Renaissance Antiques. Casting you as innocent bystander strains credulity."

"I don't give a rat's ass about your credulity, Doctor. I'm tired, too. You invited yourself over here. If you have something to say, say it now."

"Very well. There's a war on. You've probably not seen all the combatants, but they've seen you, be sure of that. You've seen the dead, however. I heard you say so to Mr. Palomino, not gently." He paused. "It's difficult to find a sound basis for communication with you. You do not inspire trust. You go about in disguise, you have no furniture, you leave a gun leaning against your wall. However, I will tell you what I want. I want to find Barnett. He was very upset by this business. He is not well. I fear for his mental stability. Perhaps he is dead. If you know anything, I will pay to hear it." His eyes pleaded with me.

"I don't know anything about Barnett Osley. If I did, I'd tell you for free. I don't want money."

"Then what?"

"I want to know about Billie."

"What do you want to know?"

"Did she literally come to you and say if you don't pay me money, I'll tell so and so such and such?"

"No, not to me and not directly. Her go-between spoke to Barnett, and he paid this creep to keep quiet."

"Go-between? What was his name?"

"I don't know that."

"Did Barnett pay him?"

"Yes, several thousand dollars."

"That's when Barnett vanished?"

"Yes."

"Why was Billie blackmailing Barnett in the first place?" I asked, but Stretch just shook his head. "That's the obvious question, isn't it?"

"Obvious, yes, but there we confront a problem. I could tell you about our transgression. Perhaps you'd even sympathize with our side of the story, but to what end should I explain? If you don't know already, it would not be in my interest to tell you. Perhaps you are an incipient blackmailer. You're clearly associated with blackmailers."

"I don't believe that Billie was one."

"Then I'm sorry to tell you differently. The go-between has been traced directly to her. Besides, didn't she die a blackmailer's death?"

"Traced by whom?"

"By my friends."

"Like who?"

He shook his head.

"This conversation's not getting us very far," I said, trying to think.

He was thinking. I let him do it without interruption. "Barnett Osley is a great healer. Under different circumstances he would be celebrated, not excoriated. I fear for his state of mind. I want to find and protect him. That's my only purpose."

"I'm not threatening him."

"If you have the photographs—the ones Palomino asked you about—then you represent a very great threat indeed. To me, as well, and to others far less civilized in their approach to getting what they want."

"Like who?"

"Mr. Deemer, I have ten thousand dollars. Not on me, of course, but I can have it in your hands within the hour. That's all I have without selling my assets."

"Billie used those photographs to blackmail you? Is that what you're saying?"

"Basically, yes."

"Then you've already seen them?"

"No. I merely heard about them. I believe they might bring a ceasefire to the war they have started before Barnett becomes a casualty. If you try to use them in any other way, you will most certainly become one yourself."

"So Leon told me."

"Sage advice from an unlikely source."

"Then why shouldn't I take them to the police? After all, I'm innocent. You're not. When the partners of innocent people disappear, innocent people call the cops."

"Do you mean you have them?" He leaned forward, eyes glistening; then he covered his obvious excitement and leaned back in my Morris chair. His toes barely touched the ground.

Jellyroll had been staring into the old man's eyes. Dr. Harvey Keene smiled sadly at him, then began to stroke his head.

"I have them," I said. My thinking, if that's the word, ran thus: I was going to turn them over to Cobb anyway, maybe tonight, so why not try to learn something from little Dr. Keene before I gave them up? I desperately didn't want Billie to have died a blackmailer. "But I don't want money."

"So you said."

"Who's Pine?"

"Harry Pine is a very old friend of ours, Barnett's and mine. He is like a son to us."

"Was he part of your transgression?"

"I've yet to see a single photograph."

"I don't have them here."

"What!"

"Don't you think it's occurred to me that Billie was killed over them? I don't leave things like that lying around."

"Where are they?"

"In a safe place. If anything happens to me, they go straight to the police."

He sighed deeply.

"Suppose," I continued, "I tell you about them."

..."Okay."

"Renaissance Antiques. They were all photos of the store and its staff. Jones, Ricardo, Frederick and Leon Palomino, and your pal Pine. Then there was you making a phone call from the street."

"Yes, what else?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing? You're lying."

How did he know?

"What about the home?" he demanded.

"What home?"

"A nursing home, Mr. Deemer!" he snarled.

"Bright Bay Nursing Home?"

"Yes!"

"What do you have to do with—?"

"I own it. Well, I'm a silent partner with Barnett Osley. There are innocent, helpless people living there, and we are helping them! They should be protected!"

"I—I don't mean to jeopardize them."

"But you are! If you don't give me the photographs, you are!"

"Do you know that Billie's mother lives at Bright Bay?" I asked simply. And I decided to go a step further. "Her real name is Beemon. She was married to a dead pilot named Danny Beemon."

Stretch responded as if I'd whipped him across the face with a wet towel, but he quickly recovered, and his face went blank. "Danny Beemon? I never heard of him."

"Come on, Dr. Keene, you about fell out of the chair."

He stood up. "You're right. I knew Danny Beemon. In fact, we were very close. But he was killed. Mr. Deemer, please don't mention that name to anyone. If you do, innocent people will suffer."

"I don't understand."

"I'm going now. Do you intend to stop me?"

"No, of course not. But what about the photographs?"

"Yes, the photographs. I'll be back in touch with you about that."

"Back in touch? Christ, that's why you came!"

"Good-bye, Mr. Deemer." He headed for the door. Jellyroll followed. He turned and petted Jellyroll on the side. Dr. Keene's face was gray. He stared at me as if he were collecting his thoughts before speaking, but he didn't speak. He gathered his rain gear from the hook and fumbled with the locks. I made no move to help. Jellyroll sniffed his shoes. He finally got the dead bolts synchronized, the door open. He said, "If Barnett Osley should—" But he never finished the sentence. He left, letting my door fall shut. I quickly bolted it.