Ask the Right Question (25 page)

OK. Swiss accounts and half people.

I thanked the kind gentleman, hung up and waited at the bus stop trying to figure out ways I could screw him out of his hundred and fifty bucks.

Maybe break and enter.

The bus came. Miller lives in a little house on Illinois Avenue above what would be Thirty-first Street, if there were a Thirty-first Street there. It's not far from a storefront café where I first heard live jazz. You take the Meridian bus to Thirtieth Street and walk. It's the Children's Museum stop.

I walked fast because I wanted that coffee and I had to go to the john.

The real high-level talk started at the breakfast table.

“You want anything to eat?”

“No, thanks. Just the coffee.”

“You haven't been here in a long time.”

“I haven't been invited.”

“You weren't invited this time. What's up?”

“I had to pee.”

“Pee? Pee, no less. That's what a couple of years in the East does to people. They start peeing. Excuse
me
a minute. I got to go piss.”

“So go piss, Sergeant.” He stayed put.

“I don' got to go no mo'.”

I went. When I got back we drank coffee. I don't really like coffee. But I like Miller. Janie had left the room when I came in, to clean house or something. She doesn't like me. That's why I haven't been around. I'm not a good influence, or something. No ambition, or something.

“How strong are you on getting information from foreign countries?” I asked.

He shook his head like a little mother. “You got everything there is to know from here?”

I smiled and shrugged. “How easy is it?”

“Not easy. Not without reason. That I can't just put in for. It costs a lot of money, comparatively. The chief doesn't like it.”

“Less graft to spread around if you spend money on business?”

“Don't push it, Al. I can't do it without opening a file and clearing the case strategy with Captain Gartland. What stuff you want?”

“I want to locate a missing alien.”

“Ah. Your immigration file. I looked through that. It's been a long time.”

“If I could, I'd like to have her hometown checked to see if there has been any record of her since she got lost in this country. If she had the kind of money the consulate says, she must have had some possessions or family or something that had to be disposed of or that she had to make arrangements for after she decided to get lost. Somebody there has to know something. If she went back, fine. If she hid out here she must have given them some indication of that too.”

“I can't, Al. I can't walk in one evening and open a fifteen-year-old missing-alien case just for the hell of it. I may be invisible down there, but files and foreign information requests aren't.”

“OK,” I said. I hadn't really expected him to do it. Not quite. Oh, all right, I had expected him to do it.

“How about checking out bodies here?”

“Any special bodies?” Janie was out of the room, he could bait me at no risk to himself. Janie is also a trifle suspicious when I am around. That's because I was a good friend of the lady Miller had really wanted to marry all that time ago. It wouldn't have worked out. All parties except Janie know that.

“Yeah. Dead ones. I want my alien's prints checked against all unidentified women's bodies discovered between September first, 1954 and, say, January first, 1955.

Policemen get warped. They have strange senses of humor. I didn't even feed him a joke line and Miller laughed and laughed. “C'mon,” I said, “that's in the country. You can do that.”

“Any special places you want these moldy bodies checked, or all over the country?”

“All over the country. How the hell do I know where she is?” You can do that, can't you? Don't they have some sort of central clearinghouse for storing prints on unidentified bodies all over the country?”

“Not that I know of yet. Not a bad idea though. I'll check it out. Until then, why don't you pick three or four cities and I'll give it a whirl.”

“OK. Try Indianapolis, New York, Lafayette and Ames, Iowa. When do I get the info?”

“Big Al, believe me, if anything matches, you'll be told.”

“Ah, such assurances. I haven't been so reassured since the time the dean told me that he was sure that if I worked hard I could pass all my subjects and stay in school.”

“Which time was that?”

“The second time.” I went to college twice. For brief periods. A year and a half and half a year, respectively.”

“Little did he know.”

That did it. I shut up like a clam. I was real sensitive about knowing little that noontime. And I was impatient to know more. I asked, “You going to drive me to the library now?”

“Sure.”

Only he didn't, because Janie had taken the car. I believe they get along pretty well. I just bring out the worst in them. For all his passivity, which I admire, Miller would not have stuck twelve years with any woman he didn't have something going with.

I walked over to the bus stop. I was impatient. Though for what I knew not. But I could tell I was impatient because I didn't stop in the Children's Museum to look at the dinosaurs and the Indian tidbits. I had half planned to when I walked by the first time. There have been times that I have done some heavy thinking in that museum. It is one of my places in Indianapolis. But not that day.

I hopped the bus and bombed back down Meridian to St. Clair Street and the library.

38

I sat in front of the Indianapolis
Star
in the browsing area. Once I tried to get them to subscribe to the
Morning Telegraph
. For the theater reviews, I said, and movie reviews. I don't know how far it got, but either the seventy-five cents a day or the fact that it really dwells on the ponies killed it. I thumbed through the
Star
.

I mulled through my own case while I skimmed the world's cases. I perused my notes.

Then I migrated to Arts where I acquired the New York
Times
microfilms for September I through December 31, 1954. I began to skim them. A lively era. Lots of Presidential golf.

The
Times
is inordinately long for a newspaper. So soon after I began, I stopped. Not only was I increasingly sure that miscellaneous bodies didn't make news in New York, but I was also convinced that this was not my kind of work. Damn it, Miller was going to do it for me, more efficiently and probably more rapidly.

By starting to do the crap myself, I was just being impatient. Very childish. Who was being the kid now? Good old Albert. How could I knock a poor sixteen-year-old kid for having a childish streak, when I had one myself. When everyone has them. I felt a moment of tenderness for her.

Then I reminded myself that it's the quantity of the childishness, not its existence, that counts.

I realized I was dissembling.

I put the microfilm away, back in its little boxes, and turned the viewer off. I tried to think about just what the hell I was doing and what I should be doing.

I tried to ask myself some pertinent questions. Like, Big Al, what are you meant to be doing?

It occurred to me that I was initially hired to find the biological father of Eloise Crystal.

Had I done that?

No, in all likelihood I had not. I'd found lots of other things instead. Half people and like that.

Hmmmm. Now that I thought about it, no half people at all. Those were just halves of round-trip tickets. That just meant one-way tickets.

One-way tickets. I pictured a rather slight, rather pretty little French girl walking around her apartment in New York, now, this afternoon, fifteen years later. Probably married, no doubt long over the details of how she got there in the first place. Well dowered, totally oblivious to the curiosity of the hack detective in Indianapolis who was trying to work out just where she was, just how she got nine thousand dollars to show to the consulate, and how she related to the real question that he had been hired to answer in the first place.

I picked up my notebook in one hand, and the pile of
Times
microfilms in the other, set off for the Science and Technology Division on the west end of the second floor. I almost forgot to drop the microfilm off. Such was the state of my absent-mindedness.

In Science I got down to basics. I picked out a book with the index entry “Blood types—inheritance in humans,” page 297.

On Page 297 I was treated to the following:

“Children's blood types are limited by the blood types of their parents.”

O and O parents can have O or A children

OK. The Fleur and Leander I was interested in had B and O blood. That meant they could have B or O children.

And Eloise had A blood. So she was not their child.

I knew that already.

But something else bothered me. The table didn't distinguish between the parents.

I read on.

“Blood typing has been used as evidence in legal cases of questioned parenthood since 1935. Blood types are ‘exclusive' tests; that is, they can not prove which two people did conceive a child, but they can prove that two people did not conceive a child. Used in conjunction with other evidence, they are often useful in establishing the correct biological parentage, especially since the identity of the mother is not normally in question. By themselves blood tests cannot distinguish the genetic contribution of the mother from that of the father, nor can it identify
all
the people who were in fact not parents of a given child.”

It was enough. No, it was too much. All the facts in the world won't do a thing for you if you don't interpret them correctly, if you don't separate
fact
from presumption.

I got madder as I was putting the book back on its shelf. That's because I remembered a little part of a twelve-day-old conversation I'd had with Dr. Harry: “The adults cannot be the parents of the child.”

You got to keep awake in this world.

I walked the seven blocks home. I picked up my car. It was still pretty early and there was driving to do.

I made good time out to Broadland Country Club. I'd been over the road before and I was impatient.

After I drove in the gate, I parked in the space closest to the door to the clubhouse. I recognized the lot attendant, the same one who'd been on duty my last visit. I neglected to exchange nods with him.

Inside the door was a desk with a buffalo on duty. I told him to page Leander Crystal. I gave him my name. He asked if I'd been invited by Mr. Crystal. I said I had.

At least he hadn't told me, “Mr. Crystal is on the golf course.” I wondered if Crystal was still keeping up his extracurricular office on the south side. In his place I didn't know whether I would give it up or not. Maybe he was actually spending more time playing golf. I wondered if his scores were getting worse.

Crystal's face, as he came from the inner recesses to meet me, showed that the pressure was on.

“It
is
you,” he said. His face was less simple than his sentence.

“Who did you expect from the name? You got some perverted friends who like to play practical jokes on you?”

“Yes,” he said simply. “What do you want?”

“That's not very friendly to a fellow who has come all this way from town to give you another chance to buy him off.” He looked dubious. “At a bargain price,” I said. “C'mon.”

“Where is there to go?” I was beginning to think the man didn't like bargains.

“Not far. To my car. Then we'll drive outside the front gate and park on the road. Then I'll ask you some questions and if the answers are right I'll bring you back here and vanish from your life.”

“And if they're not right?”

“Then you'll probably kill me and I'll vanish from your life.”

“Kill. You?” He shook his head and sighed. For an Army guy he seemed to present a pretty consistent notion that he wouldn't do anybody any harm. He'd said something like that before, in my office. I had it in my notebook. It's one of the things that induced me to trust him. No, not trust. It gave me the predisposition to justify what he had done, up to a point. Maybe Le Chatelier's principle applies: forced to kill in war—would never kill in peace.

I hoped.

“Surely,” he said, “surely it is I who have more to fear from you than the other way. Even physically. Why do we have to go in your car?”

“Because there's not likely to be a place we can talk here in private, and even if there is I prefer to be on my own turf.”

“No tape recordings?”

“I must come across a lot fancier than I feel.”

We went to the car.

Outside the club I parked where I'd parked the last time, by the golf course.

We faced each other, each back against a door. The way you do in a car when you've been poking the other party where the other party doesn't want to be poked.

“You lied to me,” I said. “I don't like that.”

He shrugged. He was not as I had seen him before—neither efficient protector nor tired family manager. Somewhere between, maybe a little nasty.