Brass Go-Between (14 page)

She was either a very good actress or she didn’t know what I was talking about. “I’m afraid you’ve lost me, Mr. St. Ives. What does my husband have to do—or what connection is there between his death and the shield?” There wasn’t a blink, or a tremor, or even that oversupply of calmness which most good liars have. She merely sat there, a politely interested look on her face, as if she had just asked whether I thought she should take the four or the five o’clock shuttle back to Washington.

“Your husband was an addict. A junkie. He didn’t die from the wreck he was in. He died from a massive overdose of heroin.”

That didn’t bother her either. She smiled slightly; it was a cool, almost pitying smile. “You seem inordinately interested in my husband, Mr. St. Ives. Why?”

“Maybe I’m interested in knowing what kind of man would marry someone like you. Or rather, what kind of man would you consent to marry. Somehow a junkie doesn’t fit.”

“Is it really any of your business?”

I put my drink down on the glass-topped table with a clatter. “You’re damned right it’s my business. One person has already died because of this shield, two if you count his wife who hanged herself. Now with your husband dead from an overdose of heroin, I think the score is now three dead and I don’t want me to make it four.” I purposely left out Spellacy although his death would have helped to run up the total.

“You do become belligerent, don’t you?”

“It’s only one of many failings.”

“You should try to correct it.”

“I’ll work on it this Fall. You think group therapy might help?”

“I’m sure it would do you a world of good.”

“You knew he was an addict?”

“Yes,” she said. “I knew. It would be most difficult not to know.”

“Where’d he get it?”

“I never inquired.”

“How’d he pay for it?”

“May I have one of your cigarettes? I quit smoking three years ago, but—” If this was a crack in her composure, it was a small one. She sat in the wingbacked chair, the barely tasted drink on a table, her hands folded over the blue purse in her lap. I rose and offered her a. cigarette and lit it for her. She inhaled deeply and then blew the smoke out in a thin stream.

“Silly, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“Wanting something like that suddenly, wanting it so bad that—well, never mind.” She inhaled some more smoke and blew it out. “I’m going to tell you about my husband, Mr. St. Ives. I’m going to tell you about him because I don’t want you poking around in my life. There are too many snoops abroad in the land today who seem bent on destroying privacy. I resent it. I wholeheartedly subscribe to the right to be let alone, as someone phrased it several years ago. So after I tell you about my husband, I sincerely hope that you will do just that—let me alone.”

She paused, as if expecting me to assure her that I would take the next plane to El Paso and never come back once she had told me about her husband. I only nodded.

“My husband, before he became addicted, was not only a brilliant artist, he was also—or could have been—one of the nation’s leading museum directors or curators. He studied with Paul Sachs at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard in the early 1940’s. He was very young then, no more than a precocious sixteen or seventeen, and in 1943 he joined the Marines and saw action as a combat artist, I think they called them, at Iwo Jima where he did an unusually good series of water colors which were reproduced in
Life
and which brought him nationwide attention. After his discharge from the Marines he was offered a post as director of a small but good museum in the Midwest. From there he went to a better position in Chicago and then to New York as head of a private museum. It doesn’t matter to you which one, does it?”

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”

“We met here in New York at some party. I had wanted to paint, but I wasn’t good enough to be good and I had enough sense to realize it. So I did the next best thing. I turned to museum work. George was extremely helpful. He was painting almost every spare moment that he could find and he was good. Terribly good. Some of his friends who had seen his work begged him to hold an exhibition, but he always refused, claiming that the time wasn’t quite right. When I finished my studies we were married and I was appointed director of a small museum here in New York—largely on George’s recommendation. A few years later the offer came from the Coulter Museum. He turned it down.”

“He?” I said.

“Yes. They wanted George. He recommended me. Strongly. And with a few misgivings on Mr. Spencer’s part, I was hired.”

“Why did he turn it down?”

She shrugged. “He’d decided that he no longer was interested in museum work. He wanted to paint full time. I agreed, of course, and we moved to Washington. The salary was more than adequate and for a while things worked out quite well.”

“Then what?”

“George went into a deep depression. He stopped painting, drank too much, sometimes disappeared for days at a time. Finally, about a year and a half ago, he told me that he was addicted to heroin. I don’t know when it really began; he would never tell me.”

“How big was his habit?”

“I don’t know.”

“All right. How much did it cost him a day?”

“Toward the end it was around two hundred dollars.”

“Where did he get it?”

“He sold his paintings. All of them, one by one. They brought very good prices. As I said, he was brilliant.”

“But he finally ran out of paintings.”

“Yes.”

“Then what?”

“I gave him money.”

“For how long?”

“Several months.”

“Until it ran out?”

“Yes.”

“Then?”

“Then one day he said that he didn’t need any more money. That he’d found a private supply of heroin.”

“When was this?”

“Two months ago, perhaps two and a half months.”

“How many people knew about it?”

“About what?”

“His addiction.”

“Not many. His doctor. A few old friends who’d moved to Washington when Kennedy was elected. Mr. Spencer. I told him; I thought it only fair.”

“What did Spencer say?”

“He was most understanding and sympathetic. He even offered to pay for George’s treatment in a private sanitarium.”

“What happened?”

“George refused.”

“What did Spencer say then?”

“Nothing. He never mentioned it again.”

“And that’s all who knew—a few friends and Spencer?”

“Yes.”

“There was somebody else,” I said.

“Who?”

“The guy who furnished the private supply.”

F
RANCES WINGO LEFT AT
three-fifteen to catch the four o’clock shuttle back to Washington. At the door, just before she left, she turned and said, “You really do think my husband was somehow connected with the theft of the shield, don’t you?”

“Yes. I thought I’d made that plain.”

“How?”

“How was he connected?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I have an idea, but I’m not sure. I don’t really know that I’ll ever be sure.”

“It has something to do with the guard, the one who was killed, hasn’t it?”

“I think so.”

“Will you tell me what your theory is?”

“No, because right now that’s all it is, just a theory.”

“And if it becomes more than a theory?”

“Then I’ll tell you; if you still want to know.”

She looked at me carefully for several seconds. “I assure you, Mr. St. Ives, I will want to know. Very much.”

“All right,” I said.

“And you’ll let me know what happens this evening?”

“Yes.”

“Call me at home,” she said. “I’ll give you my number.”

She gave me her number and I wrote it down. “I would walk you to the elevator,” I said, “but I don’t want to leave the suitcase by itself.”

“That’s quite all right. Good-by, Mr. St. Ives.”

“Good-by.”

I stood in the doorway and watched her walk down the hall, a tall, blonde woman with short-cropped hair, a widow of four weeks who now could cry herself to sleep every night because her husband, brilliant but dead, had been not only a junkie, but probably the accomplice of thieves. There was, I decided, a lot of waste in the world.

I was not as blasé about the suitcase and its contents as I had pretended to be before Frances Wingo. Despite inflation, a quarter of a million dollars was still a fortune to me, an immense one, and I was always amazed that those who used my services could raise such staggering sums so easily. If someone were to kidnap my kindergarten-bound son, I could, thanks to the check from the Coulter Museum, scrape up fifteen thousand, but not a dime more. My son, it seemed, was safe unless his new stepfather turned out to be embarrassingly wealthy which, knowing my ex-wife, was not at all unlikely.

I took the suitcase out of the tub and carried it to the bed. The case wasn’t locked so I opened it and stood there for long moments staring at a quarter of a million dollars in used tens and twenties, all carefully wrapped in brown paper bands which said that each bundle contained five hundred dollars. I didn’t count it. I didn’t even touch it. Winfield Spencer’s Washington bank had already counted it and when it comes to sums like that, banks make no mistakes.

At four o’clock I drove out of the Avis garage in a rented four-door Plymouth, and fought my way to the New Jersey Turnpike which is, in my opinion, the most unlovely strip of superhighway in the nation. It’s also a road that demands grim defensive driving unless you have a very strong death wish, which will be happily fulfilled by either members of the Teamsters Union who like to let their twenty tons of steel nibble at your rear bumper or by the lane jumpers who flit back and forth, oblivious of their rear-view mirrors, ignorant of their directional signals. Most of the vehicles, I noticed, wore New Jersey license plates.

At 5:15 I turned into the third Howard Johnson motel and restaurant which, like the rest of its breed, was all orange and white and dyspeptic-looking. I was handed a key to room 143 in exchange for $16 plus tax, got back in the car, drove past 143, and parked in front of 135. I unlocked the trunk, took out the suitcase, and walked back to 143. There was nothing in the motel room that I hadn’t expected. There was a bed and a dresser and some chairs and a 21-inch television set (black and white) and some lamps and a carpet. Everything was either nailed down or securely fastened so that it couldn’t be carted off at three o’clock in the morning. I looked in the bathroom and saw that it contained the usual equipment fashioned out of bright blue tile. I came out of the bathroom and placed the suitcase in a closet. Then I stretched out on the bed and waited for the phone to ring so that I could give somebody a quarter of a million dollars in exchange for a 68-pound brass shield that was at least 1,000 years old or older, or about as old as I felt.

When the phone rang I looked at my watch. It was exactly six o’clock and the voice on the phone belonged to the woman who had called me what now seemed to be a long time ago, a couple of years back, at the Madison Hotel in Washington. She then had sounded as if she were reading the words that she had to say to me, but now the conversation was informal, almost chatty.

“You follow instructions very well, don’t you, Mr. St. Ives?”

“What about the shield?”

“Is that really money in the suitcase that you carried into your room?”

“It’s money.”

“It’s such a lot of money, isn’t it?”

“The shield,” I said.

She giggled then. It was a high-pitched giggle that went on for a long time and made her sound like a preadolescent girl who has heard her first dirty joke and found it to be quite funny. “The shield of Komp-o-reen.” She had lowered her voice and tried to make it as dramatic as possible, but she wasn’t a very good actress and the effect wasn’t humorous, only embarrassing, which she seemed to realize because she giggled again.

“The shield,” I said, as patiently as I could, as if talking to a drunken friend who thought it would be a splendid idea to seek out some after-hours joints now that it was four o’clock in the morning and the bars were closed.

She said something then, not to me, but to someone else who was there with her wherever she was, next door in room 141 for all I knew. I couldn’t understand what she said, but when she came back on the phone, she sounded as if she were reading again, although her voice was a little more singsong than before, as though she was trying to burlesque the whole thing.

“The exchange will not be made tonight. You will go to Washington tomorrow and check into the Madison Hotel by noon. At twelve-thirty you will receive further instructions. Do you want this repeated?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t want it repeated; all I want is the shield.”

“Tomorrow, Mr. St. Ives,” she said, again bringing her voice down into that pseudodramatic register. “Tomorrow you will have the shield of Komp-o-reen.” Then she giggled again for what seemed to be a long time and hung up.

I sat there on the edge of Mr. Howard Johnson’s overly soft bed and wondered if I was too old to enroll in an International Correspondence School course, one that would teach me to be a bookkeeper or a draftsman or a sheet-metal mechanic. Earn big pay. Learn in your spare time. That was something that I had a lot of. I had eighteen hours before I had to be in Washington, before I had to talk to Giggles again or to her friend with the cottony voice. I could probably get halfway through lesson one before then.

I tried to recall the woman’s voice. It hadn’t been Bryn Mawr nor had it been East Side New York nor magnolia southern. It was just the voice of some female who probably had made it through high school and who thought that $250,000 was a great deal of money and who was willing to be mixed up in two or three murders to make sure that she got her share.

The giggle bothered me. I had heard people giggle like that before when they were high on pot or heroin, although with heroin there usually were more beatific smiles than giggles. Or she could have been slightly drunk except that there had been no slur in her voice, that voice with the all-American California-Midwest accent which could have belonged to someone who was 20 or 30 or a what-the-hell 40.