Until You Are Dead (18 page)

"Chief Gladstone agreed it might be a good idea to call you in on this," Emily said, "when I told him we were old friends and you're a private detective in the city."

When I glanced over at Gladstone's gone-to-fat craggy features, my impression was that he hadn't had much choice.

"Larry's been kidnapped," Emily said.

I waited while she paused for what they call in drama circles "a beat." Emily had always been stagy in an appealing way. Larry Stein was the man she married five years ago, a wealthy importer of leather goods, dark-haired, handsome, in his thirties. I'd been at the wedding.

"Or do you use the term 'kidnapped' for a grown man?" Emily asked.

"You do," I told her. "When was Larry kidnapped?"

"Yesterday at three P.M., by the statue of Admiral Farragut in the park."

"Was there a ransom demand?"

"Even before the kidnapping," Gladstone cut in.

"Three days ago," Emily said, "Larry got a letter in the mail here at home. It was to the point and unsigned. If he didn't deliver five thousand dollars to the sender at three yesterday afternoon near the Farragut statue, I would be killed."

Gladstone stood up from his chair, moved to a secretary near the window, and handed me a white envelope. "It's already been checked for prints," he said. "Nothing there. Postmarked locally, widely sold cheap typing paper, typed on a Royal electric portable."

The folded note inside the envelope was as Emily had
described
          
short, direct, neat, and grammatically correct.

I asked her, "Did Larry follow these instructions?"

Emily nodded. "And he told me to call you if anything happened to him. He thinks a lot of you professionally."

I found it odd that he'd think of me at all, since I'd only met him twice. But then I'm sure he knew, in that instinctive way husbands have, that I greatly admired Emily.

"Larry knew something wasn't right about it, even as a straight extortion demand," Emily went on. "He said the amount of money they demanded was too small and what they really might want was an opportunity to grab him with enough money on him for them to be able to hold out while they waited for a huge ransom."

"It turns out Larry was right," Gladstone said. "Emily got this in this morning's mail." He handed me another envelope, identical to the first — same paper, same typing — but this time with a demand for $100,000. Otherwise dead
Larry. The kidnappers ended the note by assuring Emily they'd stay in touch.

I looked at the postmark. Yesterday's date, time 11:00 A.M., local.

"Right," Gladstone said, following my thoughts. "Mailed before Larry was snatched. So it was planned, not spontaneous."

"How about the F.B.I.?" I said.

Emily shook her head no, her lips a firm, thin line.

"She refused," Gladstone told me. "She wants you instead."

I sat back in my chair, digesting what I'd learned. It gave me a stomach ache. Extortion, kidnapping, threatened murder, a ransom demand from someone or some group that seemed to know what moves to make. I didn't have the nerves for my profession. Automatically, I reached into my shirt pocket, peeled back some tinfoil, and popped a thin white antacid tablet into my mouth.

"Call the F.B.I., Emily," I said. "The odds are better that way."

"Larry told me not to do that. He said it would be a sure way to get him killed. The F.B.I. has a file on him. In the
sixties he was what you might call a student radical nothing serious, but his photograph was taken with the wrong people and he was in the wrong spot when a building burned down. It's all behind him, but they might not believe that."

From student radical to Larry the capitalist.

"What now?" Emily asked in a lost voice.

"We wait for instructions and take it from there. It wouldn't be a bad idea to get a recorder on the phone in case they decide to stop using the mail."

"That's been taken care of," Gladstone said.

"Can you get the hundred thousand?" I asked Emily.

"I can." No hesitation.

"Do you have any idea who might be doing this? Sometimes a kidnapping is a personal matter."

"No one I can think of." Outside a jay started a shrill chatter on the patio. The strident notes seemed to set Emily more on edge. "Larry never told me much about his business; he knows people I don't know. But he was — is — the type who never made enemies."

"Except for the F.B.I.," I said, rising from my fragile chair. The sheer curtains were parted slightly, and beyond the brick patio I could see a tilled garden about twelve by nine feet, lined with cabbage, lettuce, and staked tomato plants. Near the center of the garden were two rows of young tomato vines that would mature toward the end of summer and keep the Stems in tomatoes all season long. The garden was neglected now and needed weeding. Still, it was a garden. I smiled. Plainton, Missouri. A part of Emily would always remain a country girl.

"Maybe somebody ought to stay here with you nights," Gladstone said.

"No," Emily said, "I'll be fine. The house is equipped with dead bolt locks and has a burglar-alarm system. And I have Bruno."

I raised my eyebrows. "Bruno?"

Emily got up and walked to the door at the other end of the room. When she opened the door, a huge black and tan
German shepherd ambled in and sat, his white teeth glinting against his black lips and lolling pink tongue. Bruno was a factor.

Before I left, I gave Emily and Gladstone each one of my printed cards with my home and office phone numbers. I told Emily to try to keep occupied and worry as little as possible. Hollow advice but my best under the circumstances.

T
he Volkswagen's oil-starved engine beat like a busy machine shop as I drove past Marlville's exclusive shopping area of boutiques, service stations bordered by artificial green grass and shrubbery that would fool you at a thousand feet, and a red-brick and yellow-plastic McDonald's harboring half a dozen scraggly teenagers with nothing better to do on a sunny June day in swank suburbia.

I turned onto the cloverleaf and headed east toward the city, glad to be away from all that manicured spaciousness.

From a phone booth on Davis Avenue, I checked with my answering service. No one had called, and I didn't feel like returning to my desolate office to reread my mail.

My apartment was also a lonely place, but the loneliness was in me, wherever I went. I phoned a colleague at police headquarters who had an F.B.I. connection and promised to get me information on Larry Stein in a hurry and call back. Then I took a quick shower, leaving the bathroom door open so I could hear the phone.

It rang while I was toweling myself dry.

Larry Stein had been a member of a short-lived left-wing student organization called LIFT, Leftist Insurgents For Tomorrow. He had attended some demonstrations that turned violent and had been photographed near the R.O.T.C. building at Washington University when it burned down. He was never formally charged with arson, and someone else eventually was convicted of the crime. This was in 1966. Who cared now? Probably no one.

I cooked up some hamburger steaks and stewed tomatoes and sat down with it and a glass of beer to watch a ball game on television.

At a few minutes after five, the jangle of the phone woke me from a sound sleep in front of the TV.

"Nudger?"

"I think."

"Chief Gladstone. I got a call from the city police. Larry Stein is at the morgue."

I could think of nothing to say. I wasn't sure myself how I was taking the news.

"Refuse collectors found his body this afternoon in a big cardboard box behind a restaurant. He was shot to death. How about going down and making the I.D.?"

"Does Emily know?"

"Not yet."

"I'll tell her," I said. "I'll let you know when I get done at the morgue."

I replaced the receiver and stood for a moment, despising myself. I knew that hidden in my compassion for Emily was a secret joyous voice reminding me that she was a widow now, she was free.

B
ut when I got to the morgue and old Eagan slid Drawer #16 out on its metal casters, I found that I wasn't looking at Larry Stein. This man had been close to Stein's height and weight, and his hair was dark brown if not black, but his face was broader than Stein's, and slightly pockmarked.

Whoever he was, he'd been shot five times in the chest.

When I phoned police headquarters and told them it wasn't Stein, they told me to come down. I took an antacid tablet and went.

Lieutenant Jack Keough, an old friend from when I was on the force, talked to me. He's a few years older than I am, with candid brown eyes and an often-broken nose that wasn't Roman to begin with. His office is so barren and battered that even after the morgue it was depressing.

"We sent the prints to Washington," Keough said, "so we should know soon who we've got chilled." Then he dumped
the contents of a large brown envelope onto his desk. He didn't have to tell me it was what was found in the pockets of the corpse. An expensive kidskin wallet — Larry Stein's wallet with all his identification, credit cards, driver's license, photographs of Emily, and a few worn business cards. There were two tens and a five in the bill compartment. Besides the wallet, there were a leather key case, a black pocket comb, and some loose change. While I was sorting through it, I told Keough about the kidnap case.

"Now it's in our ball park too," Keough said. "We can help you."

"I wish there were a way," I told him. "You'd better phone Chief Gladstone and let him know about this. Maybe he can put a name on the dead man."

"We're never that lucky," Keough said.

A
rmed with some head shots of the corpse, I drove the next morning to Marlville to talk to Emily. As I was about to turn into the semicircular driveway, I saw a dark blue Pontiac sedan turning out of the other end of the drive onto the street.

When Emily answered my knock, I could see that she was badly shaken. I wished I'd had the presence of mind to jot down the license number of the Pontiac.

"Have you found out anything?" she asked, opening the door wide.

"I'm not sure," I told her, stepping inside. Bruno ambled over and licked my hand. "I'm afraid I have to show you some unpleasant photographs, Emily."

She backed a step, supported herself with exaggerated casualness on a low table. "Not . . ."

"Not Larry," I said quickly. "A man was killed, and Larry's identification was in his pockets. We need to know who that man was."

"Killed . . . how?"

"Shot to death." I removed the photographs from the envelope and showed them to her.

She seemed relieved to find herself staring at a peaceful composed face. "I don't know him," she said. "At least, not that I can recall."

I followed her into the living room, where she sat bent and exhausted on the sofa.

"Do you know someone who drives a blue Pontiac?" I asked.

She used a graceful hand to brush her hair back from her face. "No, I don't think so. Why?"

"I thought I saw one pulling away from the house as I drove up."

Emily shrugged. "He must have been turning around. We're the end house; they do that all the time."

But she had said "he," and there had been a man driving the car.

T
hat night I began keeping watch on the Stein house. And learned nothing. At midnight, when all the lights in the house had gone out, I went home.

The next morning I learned from Keough that the man in the morgue was still unidentified. His fingerprints weren't in the master files, which meant that he had never been in the armed forces or acquired a police record. His good behavior had earned him five bullets — according to Keough, thirty-eight caliber bullets, probably fired from a Colt automatic.

I watched the Stein house most of the next day and that evening until Emily went to bed at 11:45. Again nothing. Maybe Emily had been telling the truth; maybe the car I'd seen had only been using the driveway to turn around.

But on the way home I saw the blue Pontiac in the Mc-Donald's lot in Marlville. Of course I'd only caught a glimpse of the car at Emily's and couldn't be positive this was the same one, but after writing down the license number I parked in a spot near the rear of the lot where I could watch it.

McDonald's was closing. After a while some of the parking-lot lights winked out and the swarms of insects that had been circling them disappeared.