Nightmare in Pink (3 page)

"I don't get the point," he kept saying, as he teetered and patted his stomach. "Whadaya tryna complish?"

I tried again. "Lieutenant, you know what a veteran is?"

"Don't get smart with me."

"This veteran is in a veterans hospital. Ever since Korea. Blind and busted up. Plummer was going to marry this veteran's kid sister. I'm the veteran's best friend. He asked me to find out how Plummer got killed."

"Whadaya tryna complish? It was in the papers. You want to make out we're not doing a job around here? You want to tell us something we don't know already? I don't get the point."

"Lieutenant, please, imagine that you are a blind veteran in a hospital. Your sister's fiance gets killed."

"Better than she should have married him, the one my sister married."

"Would you be satisfied with hearing somebody read you a little newspaper item, or would you want to have a friend go see where and how it happened and come and tell you about it?"

Comprehension began, twinkled, flowered into a smile. "Hey, you just want to tell him how it was covered, hey?"

"That's it."

"Let's see your identification again, McGee." He studied my Florida driver's license. There is a space for occupation. It is a challenge to invention. This year I had written Executive in the little box. As he handed it back, the cop-eyes took the practiced flickering inventory-tailoring, fabric, shirt collar, knuckles and fingernails, shoe shine, haircut-all the subtle clues to status.

"What kind of work you in, Mr. McGee?"

"Marine fabrications consultant."

"Yeah. You sit over there and I'll see what I can do." He walked heavily away, portly, whiteIi aired, slow of wit. I sat on a worn bench and watched the flow of business. It is about as dramatic as sitting in a post office, and there are the same institutional smells of flesh, sweat, disinfectants and mimeo ink. Two percent of police work is involved with blood. All the rest of it is a slow, querulous, intricate involvement with small rules and procedures, violations of numbered ordinances, complaints made out of spite and ignorance, all the little abrasions and irritations of too many people living in too small a space. The standard police attitude is one of tired, kindly, patronizing exasperation.

Thomas Rassko, Detective Sergeant, looked and acted like a young clerk in a fashionable wen's store. Quiet, bored, indifferent, quietly dressed, pale and cat-footed. Bree had cleared me, but I was obviously a waste of time. He led we to the visitor's chair beside a bull-pen desk, went away and came back with a thin file packet.

He sat down and opened it and sorted the contents and said, "Deceased- white male American age twenty-seven. Estimated time of death, between eleven and midnight on Saturciay August tenth. The body was found just inside the truck driveway to a warehouse at three eighteen West Nineteenth Street. There was a notification by the warehouse watchman at one thirty-five." He sorted some eight-by-ten glossies and handed me one. "This will give you the best idea of it."

Howard Plummer lay in the harshness of the electronic flash, face down on asphalt, close to a brick wall. He was turned slightly toward the wall, legs sprawled loose, one arm under him, the jacket of his pale suit hiked above the small of his back. Both side pockets of his pants and one hip pocket were pulled inside out.

"You could practically call it accidental death," Rassko said. "A standard mugging that went wrong. The way they work it, there are usually two of them. They pick somebody welldressed, maybe a little bit smashed, and follow along close, and when the situation is right, no traffic, and a handy dark corner, the stronger of the two takes him from behind, an arm around the throat, yanks him into the dark corner, and the other one cleans him-wallet, watch, everything. By then, if he hasn't blacked out, they yank his pants down around his ankles, give him a hell of a shove and then run like hell. This Plummer was husky. Big enough to make them nervous, maybe. Or maybe he struggled too hard. Or maybe they were amateurs. Like sometimes we get sailors who get rolled and then try to take it back from anybody who comes along. That forearm across the throat can be very dangerous. They probably thought he had just blacked out, but the larynx was crushed. They let him drop and they ran, and he strangled to death."

"No leads at all?"

"This is a very low category of crime, Mr. McGee. Punk kids come in from way outQueens, Brooklyn, even Jersey-so it isn't necessarily a neighborhood thing. Maybe they never even found out the guy died. They aren't newspaper readers. Our informants came up empty so far. There was nothing for the lab to go on. We couldn't find anybody who saw anything. We estimate he had about fifty dollars on him. His wallet never showed up. Nobody, not even his girl, could tell us the make wristwatch he was wearing, so we don't know if it was pawned."

"What was he doing in that neighborhood?"

Rassko shrugged, "It was a hot Saturday night. His girl had to go to some kind of a business dinner at a hotel. He left his apartment about six. We couldn't trace him. Maybe he was just cruising. We don't know whether he was walking east or west when he got hit. Maybe he took a girl home and he was walking looking for a cab. Too bad. Nice fellow, I guess, good education, good job and about to be married. Like I said, it's almost like accidental death. But it was no place for a well-dressed man to be walking alone at night, especially if he'd had a few drinks. That's asking for it."

"Did you have any trouble identifying him?"

"No. His name was written on the label in his suit, and the name was in the phone book. What we do to speed it up, we take a Polaroid flash of the face and send a man to check with the neighbors. The first contact verified the identity. I don't know where else we can go with it. Tomorrow or next year we may break somebody in connection with something else and hear all about this one, so we can close the file. There's only so much work you can do on a thing like this, and then it stops making sense to go further on account of the rest of the work load. But we don't forget it. We keep the live cases posted."

I thanked him for giving me so much time. I went out into the bright beautiful October day and walked slowly and thoughtfully back toward midtown. It was just past noon and the offices were beginning to flood the streets with a warm hurrying flow of girls. A burly man, in more of a hurry than I was, bumped into me and thrust me into a tall girl. They both whirled and snarled at me.

New York is where it is going to begin, I think. You can see it coming. The insect experts have learned how it works with locusts. Until locust population reaches a certain density, they all act like any grasshoppers. When the, critical point is reached, they turn savage and swarm, and try to eat the world. We're nearing a critical point. One day soon two strangers will bump into each other at high won in the middle of New York. But this time they won't snarl and go on. They will stop and stare and then leap at each others' throats in a dreadful silence. The infection will spread outward from that point. Old ladies will crack skulls with their deadly handbags. Cars will plunge down the crowded sidewalks. Drivers will be torn out of their cars and stomped. It will spread to all the huge cities of the world, and by dawn of the next day there will be a horrid silence of sprawled bodies and tumbled vehicles, gutted buildings and a few wisps of smoke. And through that silence will prowl a few, a very few of the most powerful ones, ragged and bloody, slowly tracking each other down.

I went back to my sterile cheerful miracle plastic automated rectangle set high in the flank of a new hotel. I shucked my jacket and!ay cradled on foam, breathing air made by careful machines, supine in a sub-audio hum that silenced all the city sounds.

I thought of death and money and blue-eyed tears. And some other blue eyes gone blind. This emotional obligation did not fit me. I felt awkward in the uncomfortable role. I wished to be purely McGee, that pale-eyed, wire haired girl-finder, that big shambling brown boat-bum who walks beaches, slays small fierce fish, busts minor icons, argues, smiles and disbelieves, that knuckly scar-tissued reject from a structured society, who waits until the money gets low, and then goes out and takes it from the taker, keeps half, and gives the rest back to the innocent. These matters can best be handled by the uninvolved.

But I was involved in this. While Missy, neckdeep in the steaming old stone bath, had been giggling and clasping Travis McGee within her sturdy little legs, somebody had blinded Mike Gibson and chopped him up.

I frowned at my sound-proofed ceiling and thought how they could improve the hotel service. Make the rounds-manager, technician and chambermaid. Are you happy enough, sir? Not quite. Gather around the bed, open the little compartment in the headboard, pull out the joy tubes and slip them into the veins, unreel the joy wires and needle them into the happy-making part of the brain. Adjust the volume. Is that better, sir? Enormously. When are you leaving us, sir? Turn me off next Tuesday. Thank you, sir. Enjoy your stay in New York, sir. Happy hallucinations.

I detected the reason for my reluctance to make the next move. I was afraid that, through ignorance, I would blow the whole thing.

And the next move was Robert.

Nina had told me that if I could make him talk to me, he could tell me more about Howard Plummer's job than anyone else. Robert t mber. He worked in the Trust Department of a Fifth Avenue bank.

Robert received me in a junior shrine of his very own, a leathery little church-lighted opaque box, filled with a hush of money. He sat waxen in his dark suit, his pale little mouth sucked in, a steep and glossy wave in his dark brown hair. No one had ever called him Bob or Bobby. He was a Robert, brown-eyed and watchful.

"Yes, a dreadful dreadful thing," he said. "This city is a jungle. I hope Miss Gibson is… recovering. I really hardly know her. You see, I left Armister-Hawes almost a year ago, and that was about the time Howard began to go with Miss Gibson."

"I don't yet understand what Armister-Hawes is."

He blushed as though caught in dreadful error. "It isn't really Armister-Hawes. It used to be, years ago. It was an investment banking house with branches in London and Brussels and Lisbon. But it is still in those same charming old offices, and the brass plate at the entrance says Armister-Hawes and one gets in the habit. Really, it's just the headquarters from which the Armister financial affairs are handled."

"They need a headquarters for that?"

"Oh yes indeed, Mr. McGee. And quite a large staff. It's very old money, and quite a bit of money. There are the real estate holdings to manage, and quite a complex structure of holding companies, trusts, foundations, corporate investment entities, and several very active portfolios, of course. Charles McKewn Armister, the Fourth, as head of the present family, takes an active interest."

"Why did you leave?"

He studied me. He was so motionless, I wondered if he was breathing.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I wasn't trying to pry. I just thought it must have been very interesting work."

"Oh, it was. Excellent training, too. You get into so many ramifications of so many things. But this opportunity opened up for me. And there was the chance they wouldn't have been able to keep me on had I stayed. You see, I was junior to Howard Plummer."

"You mean they were cutting down?"

"Not exactly. It's rather difficult to explain it to a layman. They had embarked on a longrange program of cutting-down on active management responsibilities. For example, a large office building can mean a great deal of paper work, leases, maintenance contracts, tax matters and so on. They had begun to divest themselves of that sort of thing, a bit at a time. And they had begun to simplify the securities holdings, cutting down the number of transactions there too. And they had stopped going into new ventures."

"If that's the way it was going, I wonder why Howard didn't leave too."

"I have reason to believe he was considering it. But he was making quite good money. And he had a strong feeling of loyalty toward Mr. Armister. I imagine he would not have remained there much longer. He was a very sound man, Mr. McGee. Excellent investment judgment."

"Speaking as a layman, Mr. Imber, I wonder about one thing. If the policy changed, if they started selling off stuff, wouldn't it give somebody a better chance to siphon off some of that Armister money?"

His eyes bulged. "What an extraordinary thing to say!"

"Wouldn't it be possible?"

"Surely you are joking, Mr. McGee. You have no idea of the impossibility of doing anything like that. There is a practically continuous tax audit of transactions. There are checks and balances within the accounting system. Mr. Armister is very alert. The head of the legal staff, Mr. Baynard Mulligan, is a very able and respected man. Mr. Lucius Penerra, head of the accounting staff, is totally competent and respected. And nothing of any importance happens without Mr. Armister's personal investigation and approval. No, Mr. McGee, it is not only rather stupid to make a formless accusation like that, it could even be dangerous. I suspect it always is dangerous to slander any important and respected organization."