Authors: William G. Tapply
Next to the elevator a glass-covered black velvet panel listed all of the businesses located in the building. Twenty-two stories, six offices per floor.
I wandered over to the sofa and sat down. Now what? I could visit each of the 132 offices, show the photograph of the man who might have run over Les Katz, and see who’d be willing to identify him. On what pretext? Should I announce that this man might be a murderer? Gauche at best. Perhaps I could pass myself off as an emissary of John Beresford Tipton, bearing in my hand a check for one million dollars that was intended to screw up the life of the lucky man in the photo.
Anyway, assuming my man had actually come out of this building—an assumption that itself was a long shot—what had he been doing in it? Probably nothing memorable. A business call? Was he some kind of salesman? Or somebody’s client?
Maybe he just ducked in to take a leak.
Perhaps I should go back and have another drink with the Australian barman and see if the lady with the Dutch boy haircut might like to go upstairs with me for a slab of Durgin Park roast beef.
A janitor wearing a starched gray shirt and matching pants puttered nearby. He was pushing a big canvas basket on wheels. He bent close to me and emptied an ashtray into his basket. He was whistling softly.
“Pachelbel,” I said.
He turned. “Huh? You talkin’ to me?”
“The canon by Pachelbel. It’s what you were whistling.”
“Just something I heard on the radio,” he muttered. “Only station I could get that wasn’t playin’ that awful stuff.”
“Can I talk to you for a minute?”
He was a thin, wiry man. Close to seventy, I guessed. An uneven stubble of white whiskers sprouted from his jaw. “Me?” he said. “You wanna talk to me?”
“Yes, sir. If you can spare one minute.”
“Nope.”
He turned away and resumed whistling. “Wait a minute. Please. Sir.”
“Me still?” He had caved-in cheeks. His mouth was a thin, sour line.
“I just want you to look at a picture.”
He cocked his head. “Whatever you’re sellin’, I ain’t buyin’. Son of a bitch in the bank says his goddamn clocks are out of sync. I gotta go set ’em. Already I’m behind, having all these conversations.”
I held up the photograph of the man’s face to him. “Do you recognize this man?”
“Ain’t got time for games,” he mumbled. He started to push his basket away.
I fumbled for my wallet and withdrew a twenty-dollar bill. “Do you recognize
this
man, then?” I said, holding it in front of the photo.
He glanced over his shoulder. His eyes narrowed. “That’s Andy Jackson. Old Hickory hisself.”
I held out the bill to him. “Please look at my photograph.”
He made Old Hickory hisself disappear. Then he squinted at the photo. “Yeah,” he said slowly, “I maybe seen this guy.”
“Can you tell me his name?”
He shrugged. “It ain’t comin’ to me very good.”
I sighed and fished out another twenty. His eyes watched my hands. “Please try to remember.”
He scratched his head. “It’s comin’. Kinda blurry, but I’m gettin’ it.”
I handed the bill to him. It joined its predecessor. “Mr. Hayden,” he said promptly. “Mr. Derek Hayden. Seventh floor. American Investments. Knocks his pipe out on the floor. Burns holes in the rug. Otherwise a nice fella.” He gave his basket on wheels a shove and ambled away, whistling something from
Oklahoma!
A well-rounded man, musically.
I
FELT PRETTY SMUG.
The feeling didn’t last.
The fact was, I hadn’t actually expected to learn the name of the man in the photo, so I had not planned my next move. But here it was, four-thirty on a Friday afternoon, and here I was, just downstairs from this Derek Hayden’s office.
Derek Hayden. Once I was able to attach a name to the face in the photo, I composed his biography with quick, broad brushstrokes in my head. It was a harmless and sometimes satisfying hobby of mine to fashion life stories on the thinnest of evidence, such as a name and a picture and the little snippets I got from Les Katz. What was instructive was comparing my imaginings with the reality after I learned it.
It was amazing how rarely I even came close. A humbling lesson in my own proclivity to stereotype.
But I kept doing it.
Derek Hayden’s father, I guessed, was a Wall Street attorney. Specialty in mergers and bankruptcies. Expert on Chapter Eleven. Raised his family on a safe, maple-lined cul-de-sac in Scarsdale, from where he commuted every day. He also rented à pied a terre in the city, where he managed to rendezvous occasionally with a certain secretary from his firm. His wife, Derek’s mother, suspected but preferred not to know, inasmuch as she was well contented with the status quo, especially since it included membership at The Club with the attendant opportunities to study the moves of the young tennis pro.
Father Hayden sent his silver-spoon-fed only son to Andover, where the lad captained the crew and served as dorm monitor. On to Williams (early admission), a narrow choice over Princeton (wait-listed), where he earned leisurely B-minuses, majoring dutifully in economics, charmed the faculty wives, and interviewed so well that Harvard Business School accepted him in spite of his barely competitive academic record.
The Mount Holyoke gal to whom he was betrothed waited bravely for him to finish graduate school. They agreed that it would be sensible for her to find a nice job, live at home, and, of course, remain faithful because Derek would be studying so terribly hard. They met one weekend a month (a weekend that coincided conveniently with the young lady’s menstrual cycle, although she was, of course, fitted for a diaphragm), usually in Cambridge, where Derek would rent a room for Kimberly (for that is what I named the future Mrs. Hayden) and they would screw each other into exhaustion from Friday evening until Sunday afternoon, when Derek put Kim tearfully back on the bus.
From the B. School it was inevitable that Derek, with his rugged good looks, his skill at racquet games and golf, and his presentable young bride, should rise quickly.
All the way to the seventh floor over my head.
I stubbed out the cigarette that had burned down to the filter while I was composing Derek Hayden’s life story. The part about how he ran over Lester Katz one winter night seemed as if it would fit right in. And now that I knew him, I figured it was time to meet him.
I went to the elevator and jabbed the button for the seventh floor. A moment later I was deposited into a broad corridor swathed in the same cranberry carpeting I had seen in the bank on the ground floor. Somebody had a special on the stuff, or had a brother-in-law in the business.
I stood at the hub of a sort of hexagon, each side an office space with the elevator shaft at the center. I walked halfway around the core and found what I was looking for—a door with “American Investments, Inc.” painted on it. Under that legend were printed the names of Arthur B. Concannon and Derek R. Hayden.
I lacked a plan. I compensated with confidence. I was pretty good at what we attorneys—and, I suppose, people in most other occupations—call “winging it.” My best summations were always ad lib efforts in which I responded to subliminal cues from the judge or the jury or my learned adversary. I was always a little more keyed up when I felt less than fully prepared. The adrenaline surged more powerfully. I got psyched. It was a matter of trusting the subconscious to do its thing, to let the training and experience assert themselves.
Sometimes, to be sure, it bombed. But not usually.
So I pushed open the door and entered the hush of the office. I stood staring at the woman I had pictured when I imagined the blushing Kimberly being greeted at the bus stop by young Derek. It was, actually, uncanny, from the studiously casual styling of her short blond hair to her vanilla complexion to her tennis-trim figure that her conservative printed cotton blouse revealed but did not exploit.
She appeared to be in her midtwenties. Her name, I cleverly deduced by reading the little plaque on her desk, was Ms. Walther. And she was smiling at me.
“May I help you, sir?” Her voice contained a hint of challenge, an awareness that she was female and I was male and that there was a difference. It was not the way the imaginary Kimberly would have spoken. This one was sexier. Perhaps a shade less wholesome, and correspondingly more interesting.
“I was hoping to catch Derek before he left. He’s still in, I hope.”
“Mr. Hayden, you mean?”
“Right. Sure. Derek Hayden. You got a lot of Dereks who work here?”
She shifted her smile from friendly to polite. “Nope. Just Mr. Hayden.”
“Well, then”—I pretended to squint at her nameplate for the first time—“Ms. Walther, it is, huh? Does your family manufacture firearms? James Bond, a dear old friend of mine, carries a Walther PPK, you know.”
“Don’t be silly, Mr….”
“Pardon me. Coyne. Brady Coyne. At your service.” I extracted one of my business cards from my wallet and with a small bow handed it to Ms. Walther. She accepted it as if it were something breakable. She read everything on it, which wasn’t much. My name, business address, telephone number. She ran her forefinger over the embossed lettering. The whole process seemed to take her a long time. I sensed she was sizing me up.
Finally she looked at me. “Well, Mr. Coyne, I’m not sure that Mr. Hayden can see you just now. He’s quite busy. But perhaps if you could tell me…”
I nodded and gave her an aw, shucks grin. “Sure. Understand. But, see, this is personal, miss. Not business. I’d truly appreciate if you could just poke your head in and tell him I’m here and that I really think he’d like to have a chat with me. Tell him I am Lester Katz’s lawyer.” I hesitated and made my face serious. “Lester Katz,” I repeated. “That’s K-a-t-z. Okay?”
“I can spell quite well, actually, Mr. Coyne. One of the things I do around here is spell words for the rich guys who never learned how. But what I’m trying to tell you is that I don’t think Mr. Hayden will see you regardless of why you’re here or who this Lester Katz is.” She cocked her head and smiled prettily. “But I will make sure he sees your card. I’ll ask him to call you. How would that be?”
I placed my hands on the front edge of her desk and bent to her. “Tell him,” I said, my voice conspiratorial, “that I want to discuss the photographs he recently purchased from Les Katz. Okay? Just tell him that.”
She frowned and gazed past my shoulder. Then she looked thoughtfully at me. She reached for the telephone console on her desk, hesitated, and let her hand drop. “No,” she said. “I’m not supposed to. Not if you don’t have an appointment. They are very specific about this.”
I smiled broadly. “I think Derek’d appreciate it if you used some independent judgment on this one.”
She stared at me for an instant, then nodded. “Excuse me, sir.” She rose from her desk and disappeared around a corner behind her, where it looked as if there was a suite of offices.
I took the opportunity to look around the reception area. I wondered what sort of enterprise American Investments really was. It sounded like one of those things private investigators like to print on their phony business cards. An impressive-sounding cover to get past certain doors and persuade folks to confide in them.
In an alcove to the right of the door grew a potted plant in a tub. It had leaves the size of a newspaper page. A fern swung from a hook in the ceiling. There were two easy chairs and a love seat upholstered in what Charlie McDevitt calls “genuine Naugahyde, from domestically reared naugas.” A glass-topped table bore the current issues of
Fortune, Business Week,
and
Time.
There were several framed prints of Audubon birds on the beige-painted walls. Otherwise the place was as antiseptic as an operating room.
I sat on one of the chairs and lit a Winston. I was disappointed they didn’t stock
New Yorker
magazines. I had thought every office in America subscribed to
The New Yorker.
Julie always insisted that we had to. I don’t recall ever seeing a
New Yorker
except in a waiting room.
Ms. Walther returned before I finished my cigarette. She was taller than I had judged when she was sitting. My favorable judgment on her figure, however, appeared to have been accurate.
She resumed her seat. I stood up and went to her desk.
“Well? Can I go in now?”
She shrugged. “He’s not in, Mr. Coyne.”
“You mean he won’t see me.”
She leaned forward and peered up at me. I noticed that her eyes were dark bluish-green, a most unusual color for eyes, the color of Bermuda grass, which is used on some of our better golf courses. “I mean,” she said, spacing out her words for emphasis, “Mr. Hayden is not in. Which is what I said.”
I shrugged. “You could have said that right at the beginning. You can appreciate my confusion.”
She sighed and didn’t answer. She shifted some papers on her desk.
“I mean,” I persisted, “if you have to go check with somebody to ask them if they’re in, a less trusting person might actually assume you’re checking with the person who’s not in. Except, of course, then he’s in. So I figured you went in to old Derek’s office. ‘There’s this guy, name of Coyne, says something about photographs, mentions somebody named Lester Katz, and you wanna see him, or what?’ And old Derek says, ‘Tell him I’m out, Beth, honey. Guy’s probably selling brooms or something.’ And you say, ‘Well, he gave me his card, and it says on it that he’s a lawyer.’ And old Derek would laugh and maybe pinch your cheek or something, and he’d say, ‘Well, that’s probably how he fools receptionists so he can get in to sell his brooms.’ And you might say, ‘Well, Derek, kid, this guy looks more like a lawyer than a broom salesman,’ and Derek says, ‘Well, Bethie, who the hell wants to talk to a lawyer this time on a Friday afternoon, huh? I mean, TGIF, right, sweets? So you wanna get rid of this guy for me? Tell him I’ll call him sometime.’ ”
She was smiling. “Melanie,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“My name is not Beth. It’s Melanie. And Mr. Hayden is really and truly not in. And when he is in, he does not pinch my cheek. Or anything else. And he doesn’t call me sweets, or honey, either.” Her head was lowered, but I could see that she was grinning broadly. She looked up, still smiling. “Honest.”