Garvy couldn't count the times he'd sat patiently one place or another in similar situations. There were hundreds of thousands of suspicious husbands or wives in the city, cheating husbands or wives, wondering, never sure. Every weekend in the
Security, Private Investigators
column of the paper's classified section Garvy ran his short, simple ad. Bait cast out into the sea of the city; and invariably some of those countless husbands or wives came to him.
Immediately Garvy's mind tuned out the soft radio music entirely as Janet Windemer walked from the Sanders Electronics building into the hot, late-afternoon sun's harsh, angled glare. She was striding
loosely, swinging her long-strapped purse carelessly. There were a few men around her, but none seemed to be paying too much attention to herâonly a word exchanged now and then. She was prettier than her photograph suggested, heavier and more shapely, but still extremely young-looking. She appeared to be the type that might giggle a lot.
Garvy watched her walk to the red Volkswagen, roll down the windows, then stand outside the hot car as if waiting for someone.
Within a few minutes a short, dark-haired girl emerged from the building and walked with quick mincing steps toward Janet Windemer. They talked for a while, then Janet rolled the Volkswagen's windows back up and both girls got into a tan convertible with the top down and drove away. Garvy followed.
The first stop was an Italian restaurant where the girls each had pizza and salad, then on to a department store where they spent an hour browsing, making Garvy's feet ache. From the department store they drove to a popular gangster movie,
MARIJUANA
MAMA, that had been showing for three months at a midtown theater. Garvy rather enjoyed the movie.
After the movie the two girls drove to a nearby lounge and had two whiskey sours each while they talked, interrupting each other with animated gestures. Then Garvy followed them back to Sanders Electronics' dark parking lot where Janet Windemer said goodbye to the brunette and drove off in her Volkswagen. She went straight home; a modern-looking, cheap apartment in the north end, and by one a.m., she was, no doubt, in bed beside her husband where she belonged. After the apartment lights had gone out, Garvy fired up a cigar, waited another half hour, then drove away listening to the radio.
It was Thursday, just before Garvy was ready to leave the office, when Dan Windemer came for the report on his wife's activities. He seemed even more nervous than on his first visit as he sat down jerkily in the chair before Garvy's desk and waited.
"No need to act like it's the end of the world," Garvy said with a smile.
No return smile. "Where did she go?"
Garvy rested his elbows on the desktop and looked steadily at Windemer. "To a restaurant, a department store, a movie, a lounge, then to bed."
At the word "bed" the pale flesh beneath Windemer's eyes ticked, remained drawn.
"You're not the first husband this has happened to," Garvy said.
"Who was the man?" Windemer's voice was high and tight.
Garvy handed him a large brown envelope. "Description's in
there."
Windemer leaned forward in his chair, within an inch of tottering. "What did you actually... see?"
"I saw them go into a motel room, then come out an hour later," Garvy said calmly. "That's all."
"That's
all!"
Windemer's face was contorted with barely harnessed rage.
"I couldn't very well go up and peek in the window," Garvy said. "And you only hired me to follow your wife and report on her activities. For all I know, nothing went on in the motel room."
"Nothing went on? Are you serious?"
"I suppose not," Garvy said, spreading his hands. "I see your point. It's just that in this business I know you can't assume anything. You have no real proof. Why don't you take the report home and read it, cool off some, then you can decide where you go from here. I'll be glad to help if you feel you have to know more, have definite proof, photographs. But first cool off, and think about it."
"What did he look like?" Windemer asked.
"Medium height and build, maybe a little tall, middle-aged, dark sport coat, bit of gray in his hair."
They always worry about the young ones going for the middle-aged men,
Garvy thought as he talked, and his description was vague enough to include most middle-aged men; only enough detail to make the man seem real in the client's mind, though there was plenty of meaty, lurid suggestion in the report.
Windemer's jaw muscles worked relentlessly as he nodded his head several times. He clutched the brown envelope tightly and stood. In a choked voice he thanked Garvy.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Windemer," Garvy said. "1 tried to warn you that sometimes the truth can be something other than what we want."
"I just had to know," Windemer said as he opened the door. "It was driving me crazy. I don't regret finding it out for sure." He left quickly, close to tears.
Garvy had a drink from the fifth of Scotch he kept in his bottom desk drawer, then after a few minutes he stood and turned out the office lights. He knew that Windemer would return. They were always driven to find out more, to try to obtain enough evidence for divorce, seek the lurid details. Morbid curiosity usually prevailed in types like Windemer. His wife's unfaithfulness would be like an irritating scab he couldn't leave alone, and at thirty dollars a day it was, for Garvy, a profitable irritation. The Windemer kid would be good for at least another couple hundred dollars before he had to be told it was simply impossible to obtain photographs, that his wife and her lover suspected they were being followed. Suppose Windemer, or any of Garvy's clients, figured out he'd been swindled? (Not that it had happened yet.) What could he do? Make it all public, confess to his wife he'd hired a private detective to watch her? Slim odds on thatâand even then it would he the wife's word against Garvy's.
Garvy was humming as he locked the office door behind him and walked jauntily down the hall.
The next morning, as was Garvy's habit, he didn't glance at the paper he'd bought until he'd reached his office and was seated behind his desk with a cup of black coffee. A bomb might have exploded at the unfolding of the paper for the shock it caused Garvy. He sat blanched and stunned, confusedly frightened.
A picture of a smiling Dan Windemer peered out at him from the front page, along with two other photographs and the headline: MAN SHOOTS WIFE, SUITOR, SLAYS SELF. Garvy bent forward, pinning the outspread paper to his desktop as if holding it against a wind as his eyes raced over the print.
Last night at Sanders Electronics, Windemer had been waiting for his wife in the parking lot. Without a word he'd opened fire on her with a revolver, then walked past her body into the office of the president and shot one Raymond Sanders three times. Windemer then locked himself in a washroom down the hall and, as the police entered the building, he turned the gun on himself. Police said that Windemer had left a note.
Garvy's eyes darted to the two other photographs at the top of the page: Janet Windemer, and a handsome, middle-aged man with a touch of gray in his hair.
One of the perils of making the description so general
, Garvy thought. Only this time it hadn't been general enough.
Sitting back from the paper, Garvy tossed down his steaming coffee in one long gulp. It helped jolt him into a frame of mind where he could think more clearly, try to reason out the mess. The paper had said that Sanders was married and the father of three daughters, the oldest one sixteen. The man was wounded only superficially in the arm and side, and from his hospital bed he was denying everything found in the suicide note of his secretary's husband.
Garvy walked to the electric percolator and slowly poured himself another cup of strong coffee. Would anybody believe Sanders? His wife? Friends? Business acquaintances? Some would, some wouldn't; but enough wouldn't. The main thing was whether the police believed him, and whether they would track down Garvy's connection with the murder-suicide. If that happened, Garvy had to be prepared to testify that he'd observed Sanders and Janet Windemer conduct an illicit affair.
The story made good newspaper copy, and for the next week or so it occupied a position of prominence on the front page as Raymond Sanders' personal life was dragged out and shaken before the eager public. His neighbors said that he'd always seemed a loving husband and father, but on the other hand there'd been a coolness about him, and he was seldom home. At the end of the third week the papers reported that Sanders' wife had left him.
At the beginning of the fourth week a mustached homicide detective named Soreno knocked on Garvy's office door. They had found the report beneath one of the floor mats in Dan Windemer's car.
Somehow the newspapers got hold of snatches of the report, and they appeared in the evening edition alongside Garvy's photograph. Garvy stood by his report, signed a statement for the police, and refused adamantly to talk to reporters.
That Friday, as he was eating lunch in a small quasi-western steak house near his office, Garvy was surprised to look up from his sirloin and see that Soreno had taken a seat across the table. The dark, mustached detective was looking at him with professional blankness, but Garvy disliked the faint glitter in his brown eyes.
"Mr. Garvy," Soreno said evenly, "you are one rotten operator."
"I've been told that several times," Garvy said calmly, taking another bite of steak.
Soreno's large eyes were fixed like painted mannequin
eyes
.
"We checked out that report of yours. A girl named Fay Colter says she was with Janet Windemer all that evening. The waitress at Harmon's
Restaurant remembers serving them because they forgot to leave a tip. The barmaid at Rico's Lounge remembers serving them whiskey sours. The desk man at the Kingsland Motel doesn't remember either of them at allâ
or
Mr. Raymond Sanders."
"The world's a busy placeâwho pays attention?"
"Mr. Galloway does."
Garvy sipped his iced tea. "So who's Mr. Galloway?"
"The man Raymond Sanders was talking business with most of the evening of your report," Soreno said, a brittle note of hatred edging into his voice.
Slowly Garvy chewed another bite of steak, then just as slowly dabbed at his mouth with his white napkin. "Okay."
"Okay what?"
"I lied. It isn't a crime to lie, only a sin."
Soreno stared at him now with open disgust. "It's a sin and a crime to murder, Mr. Garvy!" he said in a low voice. "Sure as that two-dollar steak is tough, you just murdered two people and almost ruined a man's life!"
"Not technically," Garvy said, matching Soreno's rigid stare. "Not legally, either."
"After the publicity you're going to get, you won't be in business in this state tomorrow!" Soreno said viciously. "You won't have an investigator's license or a shred of professional respect! The law can't touch you because you didn't pull the trigger, but you're a murderer all the same!"
"You're getting carried away," Garvy said. "It was Windemer who killed his wife and himself. He was unstable."
Soreno stared at him unbelievingly, as if it were Garvy who'd sat down uninvited at
his
table. Then the homicide detective stood abruptly, whirled and walked away.
After watching Soreno angrily push aside the restaurant's thick wooden door and disappear into the street, Garvy started on his dessert. The worst had happened, and he knew he could live through it, could let most of it roll off him. One of the benefits of long years in his business was the formation of a very thick skin. He had endured the worst before.
S
oreno was right about the unfavorable publicity. Then came the revocation of Garvy's investigator's license pending further examination. Garvy finally made a formal statement of the truth rather than continue to be hounded by the police and reporters. The truth exonerated Janet Windemer of suspicion of adultery, and in the papers the next morning Garvy read that Raymond Sanders had been reunited with his wife and daughters. A genuine Hollywood ending, Garvy decided, as he cleaned out his desk.
For Garvy, however, it would be the beginning of a new script. There was always some business a clever operator could pursue profitably, maybe even another detective agency in another state. It was a big country, with plenty of fools waiting to be parted from what Garvy wanted. He realized, as he packed his files and office equipment, that the whole mess had taken more of a toll on his nervous system than he'd let himself believe. It would feel good to make a fresh start in some distant, anonymous city.
As Garvy was reaching back into the shadowed depths of his bottom desk drawer to make sure he wasn't forgetting anything, he heard a peculiar sound from the hall on the other side of the doorâa sort of hollow, ripping sound. Garvy straightened in his chair, stood, and was about to go investigate when the office door opened.
On the floor behind the man who stood in the doorway, Garvy saw the leather gun case whose zipper he'd heard. The gun itself was a long and expensive, beautifully carved, twelve-gauge double-barreled skeet gun, the kind wealthy sportsmen used to shatter clay pigeons on boring weekends. It was held expertly in the hands of Raymond Sanders, and he didn't look bored.