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He held the spoon against the side of the cup with his thumb and drank. The spoon handle jabbed into his cheek. He kept watching me while he drank. Then he said, “Most of the time, it’s sitting around waiting for that one or two jobs a month. It’s boring as hell. So sometimes I get interested in something. Like you two. Upstate accents, with the broad A, and you’re living in a medium-price hotel and you’ve got medium-price clothes and a whole middle-class feeling to you. You aren’t the idle rich. And you’re too mad at everybody to be con artists. Besides, you paid me. You’re checked into the hotel by the week, for the cheaper rate. You figure to be here longer than a little, but not long enough to sign a lease on an apartment or get a job or anything like that.”

He swallowed coffee again. When the spoon stuck into his cheek, it made him look wolfish. Otherwise, he looked soft.

“You’re not salesmen or anything like that,” he said. “I’ve been in your hotel room twice, and there’s not a thing there to say somebody’s employed you. There would be. Display case, envelope from the main office, something. You go out late in the morning, you spend all day away. At night, you drink quietly in the room. One of you hires me to check a license plate, and the other one gets mad. Doesn’t want his business told around. The license plate turns out to be stolen. I’m told to go away.”

“Why didn’t you?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “I told you. A ratty office in a ratty neighborhood downtown. It depressed me. You two puzzled me. So I looked you up.” He grinned, bringing the wolf look back. “You’re Willard and Raymond Kelly,” he said. “Sons of a mob lawyer who pulled out of town way back when. Is it your father you’re working for?”

“Not exactly. He’s dead.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Not at all.” I finished the toast and the last of the coffee.

He sat there chewing a thumbnail. He was stupid, but shrewd. I should have left, but I waited. Bill lit us cigarettes.

Then he stopped chewing the nail and said, “Oh.” He looked at me, grinning again. “Do you tell me, or do I go look it up?”

“All right,” I said. “He was shot.”

“Sure. I knew you were looking for something. I couldn’t figure what.” He leaned forward. “All right. I’m a cheap fifth-rate investigator. I can barely scrape up the license fee every year. But I’ve been in this business for twelve years. I have the contacts, I know how to look and where to look. I could maybe save you time.”

I said, “I have one question. Why should we trust you?”

“Because I’m fifth-rate. Poor but honest, that’s me. I’d like to do a job because it’s interesting.”

I chewed my cheek. “There isn’t anything I can think of for you to do.”

His grin was sour. “You two talk it over. You probably won’t find me in the office, but leave a message with the answering service. If you want me for anything, that is.” He got to his feet, took his coffee check, nodded to us both, and left.

Bill said, “I trust him, Ray. I think he’s all right.”

“I want to trust him,” I said, “but I’m not going to.”

“Maybe we could use his help.”

“We’ll worry about that when the time comes.” I lit a new cigarette. We paid our checks and went out to the sidewalk. “I tell you what,” I said. “You go on down to the library and look him up in the
New York Times Index.
He said he’d been working twelve years. Maybe he made the paper once. I’d like to be able to check him out.”

I told him how to get to the library, and then I went back to the room.

I was there half an hour when Krishman called. He was mad, but controlling it. “I read in this morning’s paper,” he said, “that Andrew McArdle was dead.”

“Yes. Heart attack.”

“Did you have anything to do with that? I want the truth. Were you there?”

“We were there.”

“Andrew had nothing to do with your father’s death.”

“And I had nothing to do with Andrew’s. I didn’t want him dead. He knew something. He would have told me, if he’d lived.”

“Knew something? About what? Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Somebody told my father to get out of New York. Back in 1940. McArdle knew who.”

“That’s nonsense.”

“He said you were a fool. He said you never knew anything.”

“What? That’s a lie. Andrew wouldn’t say such a thing.”

I said, “Goodbye.” I hung up.

When Bill called, he said, “Twice. Once, he was along as witness for divorce evidence. With a husband breaking in on a wife in a hotel room. Somebody’d killed the wife when they went in. Johnson was mentioned as a witness, that’s all. There were a couple more stories on the murder, but nothing about him.”

“Okay. Any police names?”

“Detective Winkler. Homicide West. They have two homicide offices here, did you know that? East and West.”

“Winkler,” I said, writing it down. “What about the other one?”

“His car was blown up. About three years ago. There was a policeman named Linkovich at the wheel. There wasn’t any explanation, and I couldn’t find any later stories on it at all.”

“Okay, I’ll call Winkler. You come on back. How long ago was this?”

“The divorce evidence thing? Four years ago. April or May, I forget which.”

It took a while to get through to Winkler and then he said, “Johnson? Private detective? I’m not sure.”

“There was a woman found killed in a hotel room,” I said. “Four years ago. Her husband and Johnson found her. They were there to get divorce evidence.”

“Yeah, wait a second,” he said. “I remember that. Edward Johnson. Vaguely. What about him?”

“I’m thinking of hiring him,” I said. “But I wanted to get a recommendation I could trust first.”

“Did he tell you to call me?”

“No. I found your name in the
Times.
The story on that hotel killing.”

“Oh. Because I barely remember the guy. Hold on a minute.”

I held on. After a while, a man named Clark came on the line. “You want a recommendation on Edward Johnson, is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“Okay. He’s honest. He’s also stubborn, and a coward. He’s efficient, but don’t ask him to do anything dangerous because he won’t.”

“But he is honest.”

“I think you can count on it, yes.”

I thanked him. Then I looked up Robert Campbell in the Brooklyn phone directory. There were two of them. I dialed the first one and asked for Dorothea and the woman said, “This is she.”

“Wrong number,” I said, and hung up. Then I copied down the address: 652 East 21st Street. I got out the Brooklyn map and the street guide. I found the address, and penciled a route to it. Then Bill came back and we got the car out.

It was a decayed genteel apartment building, with iron grillwork on the front doors and no elevator. We climbed the stairs to 4A and rang the bell.

Dorothea Campbell was about fifty, tall and stocky and gray-haired. Decayed genteel, like the building. She wore a housecoat and an apron and scuffed slippers. Her face was cold. She had the right and the power to close the door in our faces if she felt like it. She wasn’t used to power, she might abuse it.

“Hello,” I said. “I’m Ray Kelly. This is my brother, Bill. Our father used to be your brother’s lawyer.”

“My brother?” Her voice was cold, too. “What brother?”

“Eddie Kapp.”

She shook her head. “I don’t have any brother.” The door started to close.

“We don’t have any father,” I said.

The door stopped midway. “What do you mean?”

“He’s dead. He did wrong things when he was young. But we never turned our backs on him.”

“Eddie Kapp put me through hell,” she said angrily. But she was being defensive about it. I waited, and then she let go of the door and turned away. “Oh, come in if you have to,” she said. “Tell me what you want.”

“Thank you.”

We went in, and I was the one who closed the door.

The living room was small, and the furniture was all too big for it. The colors were dull. The metal-cabinet television set looked as though it had been left in that corner by accident.

We sat down on a fat green sofa, and she sat facing us in a matching chair. I said, “Did you ever know Willard Kelly? Your brother’s lawyer. People say Bill here looks a lot like he did.”

“I was eight years younger than my brother,” she said. “Even if we’d been the same age, we wouldn’t have known the same people. I never had anything to do with his cronies at all.”

“This wasn’t exactly a crony. It was his lawyer.”

She shook her head stubbornly. She didn’t intend to think about 1940.

I shrugged. She probably didn’t have a memory to avoid, not one that was useful to me. I said, “Is Eddie out of jail yet, do you know?”

“September fifteenth.”

“That’s when he gets out?”

“He sent me a letter. I threw it away. I don’t care what happens to him. Let him rot in prison. I don’t care. I don’t want his dirty money!”

“He offered you money?”

“I don’t need his pity. A man twenty-two years in prison! And he has the gall to pity
me!
” She remembered she was thinking out loud, and there were strangers present. Her mouth twisted shut like a tricky knot.

“He’s still in Dannemora?”

“How do I know who you are?” she demanded.

I took out my wallet and tossed it into her lap. She looked suddenly ashamed. “I don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes, I don’t think there’s any justice in the world at all. I don’t know what to think any more, I don’t know what to do.”

“He’s in Dannemora?”

“I wish he’d stay there. I wish he wouldn’t write me. After twenty-two years of silence.”

“And he’s getting out next Thursday, is that right? The fifteenth?”

“So soon?” Desperation flickered in her eyes. “What am I going to do?”

“He wants to stay here?”

“No, he—He wants me to leave my husband. Brother and sister. He wrote that I was all the family he had. That he had plenty of money. We could live in Florida.” She looked around at what Robert Campbell had given her. “My daughter works for the phone company,” she said suddenly. She looked at me again. “I didn’t realize it was so soon. Next Thursday. I didn’t write him back. I threw his letter away.”

She looked at the window. It faced an airshaft running down through the middle of the building.

I got to my feet, walked over, took my wallet back from her lap. “Thank you,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, distracted. She kept looking out at the airshaft.

Bill and I walked over to the door. I opened it, and then she turned and stared at us as though she’d never seen us before. She said, “What am I going to do?”

I told her, “Don’t count on Eddie.”

She started to cry.

We went downstairs and walked back to the car. Bill said, “Now where?”

“Morris Silber,” I said. “I didn’t find any obituary on him, but there’s nobody by that name in the phone book.”

“Who was he?”

“The landlord Dad defended when he got the write-up in the
Times.
”

“Hell, kid, that was thirty years ago. He died in Florida long ago.”

I took a cigarette out, but it broke in my fingers. I threw it out the window, and got another one. “I can’t get hold of the story,” I said. “It was all so goddamn long ago. People have died, changed, forgotten, reformed, moved away. Nobody cares any more. Dad had a whole file of regular clients, and most of them came from the underworld. We know two of them. Eddie Kapp and Morris Silber. Kapp’s in jail. God knows where Silber is. Nobody knows or cares who the rest of the clients were. We can’t even be sure it was Eddie Kapp that Dad meant. Or what exactly he was tying to say. Eddie Kapp did it? Eddie Kapp would know who did it? Maybe he meant Eddie Kapp would be on our side. We don’t know enough about anything. And nobody else knows any more, either.”

“Somebody must, or they wouldn’t have started killing people.”

“Morris Silber,” I said. “He might know a couple other clients. They might know some more. With a starting point, after a while we could probably have the whole list.”

“That would take a lot of time, Ray.”

“Time’s the only thing I’ve got.” I looked at him, but he didn’t say anything. I said, “I know, it’s different for you. You’ve got the job, and the kid. House and car and the whole thing. I don’t have any of that.”

“I’m going to have to go back pretty soon, Ray. I’m sorry.”

“If only we had a starting point.”

He scratched his nose and said, “What about the guy who did the profile in the
Times?
”

Every once in a while, Bill said something brilliant like that. I said, “Let’s go back to Manhattan.”

His name was Arnold Beeworthy. I found him in the Queens directory, on 74th Road. He was the only Arnold Beeworthy in New York City. NEwtown 9-9970. I called from a drugstore, and a sleepy, heavy baritone answered. I said, “Did you used to work for the New York
Times?
”

“I still do. What the hell time is it?”

“A little after one.”

“Oh. All right, I ought to get up anyway. Hold on a second.”

I heard the click of the lighter, then he came back. “All right, what is it?”

“You once did a profile of my father, Willard Kelly.”

“I did? When?”

“1931.”

“Holy hell, boy, don’t talk like that!”

“It wasn’t you?” He didn’t sound old enough.

“It was me, but you don’t have to remind me.”

“Oh. Can I come out and talk to you?”

“Why not? But make it this afternoon, if you can. I have to go to work at eight.”

“All right.”

We had lunch first, but didn’t go back to the hotel. Then we went out to Queens. We started on the same route as yesterday, when we went to see McArdle. Then we turned off onto Woodhaven Boulevard.

The cross-streets were all numbered. Some of them were avenues and some of them were roads and some of them were streets. We saw 74th Avenue. The next block was the one we wanted, 74th Road.

Beeworthy lived in a block of brick two-story houses all attached together at the sides. His was in the middle. There was a white-painted, jagged-edged board on a stick set into the middle of the narrow lawn. Reflector letters were on the board: BEEWORTHY. It looked like one name, and sounded like another.