Ask the Right Question (18 page)

“A few weeks later he had a stroke. I think he expected to die, not too long after that. Maybe if the youngest child, Fleur, had been a boy things would have been different.

“In 1946 Mr. Crystal came to Indianapolis to go to Butler and get his college degree on the GI Bill. And as soon as he arrived he called on Estes. He was a friend of Joshie's in the war, you know. And when Mr. Crystal started showing some interest in Fleur, well … I think Leander Crystal is responsible for Estes' living another six or eight years.

“I don't know many young people. And there will never be another Estes Graham. But the only one I know who ever came close was Leander Crystal.” She paused for a moment. And looked at me with a wetness in her eyes. “I always sort of thought of Eloise specially. As if she were the child I might once have had.”

The rest of Fleur's accusations I let go.

We parted with our understanding intact—and even expanded to contain a degree of mutual admiration for Leander Crystal.

When I got back to my office it was pushing four. With a degree of nostalgia I decided to make myself a pot of tea, for teatime.

The nostalgia was more than for Mrs. Forebush's Victorian perspicacity. It was in memory of clients gone by. Four o'clock was Eloise time for me. I set and wound the cuckoo clock.

The little bird came at four, but not Eloise.

Eloise, my Eloise. My million-dollar client. My million-dollar baby. Why is money so corrupting? Because I guess one expects to be corrupted by it. I was glad it was after three. Another day gone by safely. I didn't intend to deposit the check for at least two more days but ….

The notion of having, sometime, to tell the story of how I let fifty thousand dollars get away just by being slow to deposit it really hurt.

Think of telling Maude. She'd never forgive me. I thought how an upholstered chair in the office would be a lot less likely to show the dust.

But I cut myself off. If I went on like that, exaggerated to myself, I would be in debt before the banks opened in the morning. Keep busy, I said to myself. Keep busy. Keep what portion of your mind is operable busy.

In my second mug of tea, instead of adding milk, I added bourbon. It grows hair, I figured; would make me strong. And I dialed Jerry Miller.

When I got through to him he told me he had some things for me.

I was feeling a little giddy: I asked him when he ate, and invited him out to dinner at Cappy's;

“What's the matter with you, find ten bucks in the street and want to see how fast it'll go?”

“It was eleven dollars and thirty-two cents, but I think it's counterfeit. You coming or do I have to go down there and try to get through my friendly desk sergeant?”

“At eight,” he said. And then he added, “Got to go now, there's been this rash of trespassers,” and he hung up, so I knew he loved me.

Between four thirty and setting off by foot for Cappy's I wrote a letter to my daughter, and spent between a hundred and sixty and a hundred and eighty thousand dollars.

My man Miller is not, basically, a happy man. He's married to his second choice, for instance. When we came out of high school he was in love with this girl who was highly lovable and who loved him and wanted to marry him. That was the problem—he wanted to go to cop school and she didn't want to wait.

So she married a musician and turned him into a suit salesman and lived happily ever after.

Not that Jerry's wife—it's been almost twenty years now—is not a fine wifely specimen. But somehow he's never quite made it where he wanted to make it.

I understand his problems.

We settled down to dinner and he gave me a folder. I set it aside and didn't look at it through the whole meal.

“I'm sorry I haven't got anything to trade you for this,” I said. I was sorry. I felt fairly bad about it.

“But you've been digging around with these people?” He tapped the folder by my salad plate.

“Not digging uninvited. I was hired by one.”

“But you found something.”

“The way it stacks now I maybe did. But the friendly people from the statute of limitations have cut out anything there might have been.”

He tapped the folder again. “You're under arrest. Obtaining information by promising me a fraud and then not delivering. That's fraud.” In our younger days at such a moment he would have pulled out his cuffs and slapped them on me. But we've both mellowed, and we just sat in silence and thought about things.

“The best I can do is offer to confess to trespassing. But I won't unless you promise to give my stool back.”

“The hell of it is,” he said, “when I requested those records nobody turned a whisker. I think I could file for a Washington police report on the President and nobody here would notice. I must be the most experienced sergeant on the whole force. And what do I get?”

“Night shift,” I said. “Probably nobody notices anything that night shift puts in.”

“Aw shit,” he said. “Al, do you make any money in that racket of yours?”

I must have blushed. He was hitting very close to home. “Sometimes,” I said, “but not very often. I was thinking of asking you the same question.”

“There must be something better that we can do. Some way to get along without taking all the crap we take. If I had some money I'd throw in with an uncle of Janie's. He's got him a lake down in Kentucky that he's working up into a resort. You know, motorboats and fishing and special buses to the Kentucky Derby.”

“You gotta offer free coffee, year round. So people will come out of season.”

“I'm not kidding, Al.”

“Neither am I. Why don't you become corrupt for a few years to build your stake?”

“Nobody ever offers me anything.”

“I'll give you five bucks for my stool and a guarantee nobody will raid my joint at three in the morning.”

He gave an involuntary bristle. He can't help it. He's mellowed some but he's basically an honest cop. That's the real reason he doesn't get on. Not because he's black but because he's so bloody self-righteous about his business. A long time ago I considered trying to act as go-between with him and Maude. She could have used an ear at HQ. But it wouldn't have gone. What he does occasionally for me as a friend, he never would have done for money on a committed basis. Maude wouldn't have paid that much anyway, and now she has an ear a little closer to the mainstream.

Daydreams of little country cottages with gardens filled out our chow.

At the end I reached for the check and he reached for the folder of information.

“Hey,” I said, and I grabbed for it too. We stood there each with a hand on the folder.

“Thought you said you were off it.”

“Well, I don't have a client anymore, but I'm giving it another day or two.…”

“You've either got it bad, or you're not telling me everything.”

“Or both,” I said. We let it go at that.

27

I walked home pretty quickly. That's fair enough. A fellow's entitled to walk at any speed he wants, isn't he?

So I had it bad. So? So. I clutched the records Miller gave me to my bosom. So? So maybe I was just looking for enough to justify cashing in on what was available. So maybe this and maybe that. So maybe I just have an irrational need to check and cross-check.

Home; stairs; office; bourbon; glass (!); dining-room chair.

The police file was on top. Ames, Iowa. Surprisingly Leander Crystal had a police record. Picked up twice in 1939 the first time for grand theft auto (charges dropped). The second time for petty theft. “Charges dismissed when subject agreed to join the Army.”

So the missing year was filled in. Born 1920. Graduated from high school in 1938. Interesting in itself, that he had been able to stay in school. Joined Army in 1940. Intervening year: bum. Motivation for enlistment: better than jail.

And it had been. The Army can serve some excellent social functions. Apart from reducing population.

It was hard to believe that the exceptional man I knew as Eloise's father had started that way. Time and tenaciousness:

And we had something in common. We had both pinched cars—but I was never caught. It made me feel smug.

Crystal's Army records indicated that he had had an active and heroic fighting career in which he was twice decorated, which I knew. At the end of the war he had been on supply duty in southern France, which I hadn't known.

There were indications from various of his superiors that Crystal had expressed interest in an Army career. In fact the only blot on his record happened in basic training. Someone had accused him of fathering her child. Suit was initiated, but “the claim, contested by the soldier, was subsequently dropped.” He had been shipped out of Europe shortly thereafter.

No further claims of that sort had been made during his stay in the Army. Had he but known then what he knew now.

As a matter of fact, that happened to Bud when he was in. He was an MP in London in World War I and a lady purported that her impending child shared a father with me. And she dropped the claim too, after a miscarriage. I guess it can happen to anyone.

I had a drink and waxed ironic.

I took the Army records of Sellman and Windom Graham. I'd asked for them for completeness—more to annoy than to edify.

Good soldiers, brave soldiers, dead soldiers.

Joshua Graham I studied.

He had enlisted late for the war, but early for a man, shortly after his eighteenth birthday. He had finished high school and joined. He got to Europe in December, 1944, celebrated his nineteenth birthday in March of 1945 and was killed in August when a supply truck he was driving detonated a previously undiscovered German mine. The Army adjudged the death accidental.

The story as reported in the Army records was identical to that which Leander Crystal had written to Estes.

My main inquiry was satisfied. Crystal had been in the same Army administrative unit as Joshua had. Fact as advertised. Moreover, Joshua had worked under Crystal in supply.

I checked my notes and went on further in Joshua's file. The only thing that did not check was Leander's claim that he had been on the scene and had heard Joshua's last words. According to the Army's records there had been a man on the scene, a witness who had been by Joshua's side when he died. A doctor, the doctor who had later certified Joshua's death. A Henry Chivian.

But Leander had written the Grahams and taken the witness's place. I found that interesting. That Leander had seen fit to place himself by Joshua's side. It seemed quite a step from the Iowa petty burglar, from the daring hero.

It represented planning ahead. What else could it mean? Leander had spotted Joshua and had identified him as the son of a rich man. He had befriended the boy, so obviously unsoldierly. Probably gone out of his way to befriend him. And when he died, rather than let this friendship's potential die too, Leander had laid the groundwork for arriving in Indianapolis to make himself a place in the world of the Grahams.

“Educational plans.” Had he known ahead that Joshua had a sister? Had he decided to court her while pondering what Joshua's death would do to his prospects?

It was a little extra dimension to Leander Crystal, husband in a “love match.” Perhaps having fought as a man who didn't worry about death, he had made the transition. The man with a master plan. Maybe he had learned to love life while he had it.

He had come a long way.

I paused to refill my glass and I looked back over Joshie's records. I looked again at the real witness's name. Dr. Henry Chivian.

I consulted my notes, and found where I had seen it before. There it was: Dr. Henry Chivian, the man who had certified Estes Graham's death ten years and five thousand miles later.

Another irony. I bourboned ironic again. And after a while I just bourboned.

Saturday is not the best night of my week.

I stayed conscious deep enough into the a.m. to see the Pacers lose to the Utah Stars on television, but the telecast was not the only reason I slept past Sunday morning.

The afternoon I spent with my woman and her daughter.

28

Monday morning brought business: A nine o'clock call to serve a stack of subpoenas. For some reason I said yes and by ten I was on the trot.

I guess I was trying to get away a little. Sure I was still on the Crystals and the Grahams, but I wasn't happy about it.

Basically because the drift seemed to be away from the fifty thou, not toward it. I was so much happier when things looked like taking the money. Maybe I took the subpoenas so that I wouldn't succumb to the recurring urges to go and cash the check.

How could I stop at the bank if I was busy with subpoenas?

What was so special about me that I wouldn't take, the money and run?

I guess just that I had some money once, and it's not all it's cracked up to be. Or maybe the thought of getting money again opened up the mental possibilities of getting some of the other things back again. Like my daughter.

At one I permitted myself to stop for lunch. By pie time it occurred to me that what had seemed so strange a couple of nights before was not all that strange. Dr. Chivian. What would really have been strange would be if his signature had appeared on death certifications in France and Indianapolis a week apart.

But ten years? It's a lot of time.

And it began to fit.

Suppose Crystal knew Chivian in France, as well as Joshua. Suppose Crystal and Chivian got along. Suppose, when Leander found he was sterile, or suspected it, he contacted Chivian to make the tests because he could count on Chivian's keeping the results quiet. It fit with the abrupt change of doctors which had shown up in Fleur and Leander's medical files. Chivian arrived and stayed on as their family doctor. And Chivian had happened to be around when Estes breathed his last.