A Nasty Piece of Work (7 page)

“Or buying in order to get caught in the act.”

“You are one crazy hombre, you know it? Why would somebody in his right mind set up a buy to get caught in the act?”

“What if I told you the police were tipped off about the sale in the Blue Grass? What if I told you that a third party has identified the voice tipping off the police as Gava’s?”

“You got a wild imagination,” Jesus said. “You ought to go and write movie pictures.”

Later, with Jesus safely back in the holding pen, I took Awlson to a local bar for a beer. “What did you find out?” he asked.

“I found out his arms bend back more than most people’s. I found out I’m not in the right line of work—I ought to be writing scripts for films.”

Awlson was one of those old-fashioned cops who learned the trade before electric typewriters existed. He flipped open a small notebook and set it down on the table. He uncapped a thick fountain pen, the kind that sucks up ink from an inkwell, the kind that he might have gotten for a birthday present when he graduated from high school. “Let us summarize the situation,” he suggested.

“We are dealing with a joker who moved into the East of Eden Gardens eight months ago and kept a low profile,” I said.

Awlson moistened the ball of a thumb and flicked through the notebook to another page. “He ordered in from a pizza joint, he ate out once in a while, he played poker with neighbors Sunday nights, he shacked up two, maybe three times a week with a blonde who made funny noises during sexual intercourse.”

“Now I know who interviewed Alvin Epley before me,” I said. I picked up the thread of the summary. “Then, seemingly out of the blue, Emilio Gava sets up a purchase of cocaine, after which he puts in an anonymous call to the police to make sure he would be nabbed in the act.”

“After his arrest,” Awlson went on, “he makes a single phone call from the police station. The next morning a big-city lawyer turns up to plead him not guilty. At which point Gava is released on bail and disappears into the woodwork.” Awlson raised his eyes, his mouth scrunched up in thought. “If he wanted to disappear, why didn’t he just up and disappear? Why did he have to go to all the trouble of getting himself arrested for buying cocaine?”

We both nursed our beers thinking about this. Finally I said, “Gava needed to disappear in a way that made it look as if he had a good reason to disappear. He wanted someone or some organization to think he was running away from a drug conviction and jail sentence. Which must mean he had another reason to disappear but wanted to mask it.”

“Maybe Jesus was right after all,” Awlson said. “Maybe you ought to write for the movies.”

“If we can figure out
why
Gava wanted to disappear,” I said, “maybe we can figure out where he disappeared to.”

Out on the sidewalk, Awlson offered a hand. He hadn’t done this before with me. I shook it. “I didn’t fall for your Santa Fe All-State Indemnity crap,” he remarked.

“Didn’t think you would,” I said. “At least not for long. But we’re on the same page when it comes to bail jumpers.”

He thought about that. “Yes and no. You’re a private eye. You’ve got a client who needs to find this Gava clown before I do.”

I shrugged. “Sorry I didn’t come clean.”

He shrugged back. “What’s next on your Santa Fe All-State Indemnity agenda?” he asked.

“I probably ought to have a heart-to-heart talk with the out-of-state lawyer who turned up to spring Emilio Gava.”

Eleven

On a porcelain-brittle morning I wedged myself into a seat between a pasty-faced anesthetist returning from a tax-deductible medical convention and a waif-woman who could have passed for female from the neck up but looked like a twelve-year-old boy from the neck down. Coming into Chicago, with the wheels about to graze the tarmac, the three of us were scared out of our skins when the plane was clobbered by a sudden rainsquall and wind shear. Gunning both engines so hard the wings seemed to flap like a bird’s, the pilot circled around for a second go. I mention this because the fright I experienced was nothing compared to the mortal terror I felt when, an hour and a quarter later, an aluminum space capsule moonlighting as an elevator whisked me up eighteen—count them, eighteen—floors without my realizing it had even moved. The thing that gave it away was the decor. On the ground floor I’d been gazing dumbly out at another bank of elevators and a fancy sign that said
CRESSWELL BUILDING
. When the doors slipped soundlessly open a few moments later, I assumed I’d see the same bank of elevators and reached over to punch eighteen again. Instead I found myself staring at a silver wall with giant silver letters on it that read
FONTENROSE & FONTENROSE
. A wispy brunette with streaks of silver in her teased hair (“Receptionist wanted, experience helpful, silver streaks in hair a must”) and enough mascara to ballast a pocket battleship was holding fort behind an aluminum table in front of the wall. Coming at her from the side, I could make out a very short and very tight skirt and a pair of very knobby knees. The receptionist tore her eyes away from her fashion magazine with an obvious effort.

“Talk about coincidences,” I said. “That girl in that picture”—I twisted my head so I could make out the page she was reading right side up—“I was sitting next to her in the plane this morning.”

“You have got to be kidding! I’d give up not smoking to meet Julia Crab. What was she like?”

“Don’t know. She put a mask over her eyes and slept the whole way. The only time she said anything was when we almost crashed. What she said was not something I can repeat to a lady.” I leaned over the desk and lowered my voice as if I were sharing a state secret. “I’m here to see Mr. Fontenrose.”

“I could have guessed that,” she purred, eyeing me with interest. “We’re the only ones on the floor. Which Mr. Fontenrose?”

“How many are there?”

“Seven, not including the two sons-in-law with different last names.”

“R. Russell is my man.”

“Whom shall I announce?” she asked with a slightly breathless Marilyn Monroe lisp.

“DSC Lemuel Gunn.”

She screwed up her mouth in disbelief. “And what, pardon the prying, does the DSC stand for?”

“Deputy station chief, darling, which happens to have been the last rank I held before the Central Intelligence Agency fired me for conduct unbecoming.”

As her pointed bosom thrashed around inside a blouse that had been bought one size too small or had shrunk in the wash, she directed me to an enormous leather couch and then stabbed at numbers on her house phone. There was a shoelace-high aluminum-and-glass table in front of the couch with copies of an economic review set out on it like cards in a game of solitaire. I flipped through one to pass the time. It was filled with pages of graphs showing that if the money supply got tighter, interest rates would get looser. Or was it the other way around? Either or, I didn’t understand a word. France-Marie, my lady accountant in Las Cruces, would have felt right at home.

After what seemed like an eternity, a well-groomed older woman with white hair tied up in a bun and one ankle bound in an ACE bandage limped through a door I hadn’t noticed the existence of. She lowered her head, a gesture that suddenly added a second chin to the one she already had, and sized me up over the silver rims of large oval eyeglasses. I was wearing faded khakis, loafers without socks, and a threadbare sports jacket over a particularly shabby sports shirt that I was very attached to because the collar didn’t chafe my neck.

Apparently my attire brought out the latent arrogance in her. “Naughty, naughty,” she purred, wagging an accusing finger. “You haven’t phoned ahead to make an appointment, Mr. Gunn.”

“Who are you, dear lady?”

“My name is Miss Godshall. I am the secretary to Miss Wyman, who is the principal secretary to R. Russell Fontenrose. If you care to state your business, perhaps I can put you out of your misery.”

“Are you a trained attorney?”

“I am a trained secretary. I am trained to spot people who are unable to afford three hundred dollars an hour to talk with the gentleman who employs me.”

“Look, Miss Godshall, why don’t you duck back through your secret door and tell Miss Wyman to tell R. Russell that Lemuel Gunn has come all the way up from Las Cruces, New Mexico, to talk to him about a bail jumper name of Emilio Gava. I lay you odds he’ll squeeze me in.”

Pouting in disapproval, Miss Godshall raised her head in a huff, reducing her chins to the number God had distributed at birth, pivoted on the heel of a sensible flat-soled lace-up shoe and limped back through the secret door. Five minutes later I was ushered into the presence of Miss Wyman, a tall, elegant, flat-chested woman who looked like the dowager madam of a high-class brothel. Her hair was dyed red but I suspected it was already rusty underneath. Miss Wyman, in turn, ushered me into the presence of the man himself, R. Russell Fontenrose.

His corner office came with wraparound windows double glazed to keep out everything except the sob of sirens, and even those sounded as if they came from another planet. The room was so vast I thought I’d need a motorized golf cart to get across it before he went out for his two-martini expense account lunch. Picture ankle-thick wall-to-wall carpet. Picture a king-sized mahogany desk. Work in the usual family photographs in the usual mother-of-pearl frames, a small Chinese bowl filled with monogrammed matchbooks, the usual law books in the usual leather bindings, a collection of antique globes on a long low glass shelf. Don’t forget to include the smell of saddle soap and furniture polish and money. Especially money. Through a partly open door, I caught a glimpse of a minigym—a rowing contraption, a pile of towels, a set of golf clubs. On one side of his desk was an electronic monitor listing the waiting phone calls, which were stacked up like jetliners in a holding pattern. R. Russell was perched against the edge of his desk, his back toward me, murmuring into a telephone. “I’ve laid the options out for him, Kenneth. He can snipe at them from the safety of the trees with writs of this and that, which will slow them down but won’t stop them. Or he can grab the bull by the horns and sue the trousers off them for breach of contract and watch them squirm.” He noticed my reflection in the window behind his desk. “I have someone with me. Let me get back to you.” He hung up and dog-paddled around to the front of the desk to get a better look at me, during which time I got a better look at him. R. Russell was an ungainly man—wide waist, broad chest, broad in the beam—in his late thirties or early forties. Neither his seventy-five-dollar haircut nor his nine-hundred-dollar suit could disguise the fact that he was seriously ugly, which is how Ornella Neppi, who’d seen him that one time in court, had described him. He had fat jowls and beetle brows and tiny eyes and a gnarled nose, all of which gave him the allure of a hagfish, which is one of those eel-like creatures you come across now and then in the Bermuda Triangle. If you’re lucky, you come across it when it’s dead. Its most distinctive feature is a mouth filled with horn-shaped teeth for boring through the flesh of fishes in order to feed off their innards. For some reason I couldn’t put my finger on, this accumulation of ugliness only seemed to make R. Russell very, very sure of himself. I’d run into people like him before—they think, for their ship to come in, they only have to put to sea. He didn’t offer to shake hands. Neither did I. He glanced at a wafer-thin wristwatch that he wore on the inside of a fleshy wrist. I supposed he was checking the time so he could bill me later.

“Your secretary’s secretary told me you get three hundred bucks an hour.”

“That’s correct.” He gave me the once-over, guessing the size of my bank balance from the cut of my trousers. I was very fit and reasonably tan, both attributes that come in two basic models—playboy prosperous or down-on-his-luck indigent. It was easy to see which he had me pegged for.

“The three hundred an hour put me off,” I admitted. “I was worried you couldn’t be much good at what you do if that’s all you charged.”

He didn’t crack a smile. He didn’t even look as if he had one in his inventory of expressions. “Perhaps you ought to get to the point. I’m a busy man. What’s this about Emilio Gava jumping bail? And what does it have to do with you?”

“I represent the Neppi bail bond company, which stands to lose $125,000 if Emilio Gava doesn’t turn up for his trial. We have reason to believe he skipped out on his bond. He never returned to his condo in Las Cruces after you pleaded him not guilty. Nobody seems to have any idea where he is or how to get in touch with him. Being his lawyer, I thought you might have an address or a phone number.”

“Are you familiar with the legal concept of attorney-client privilege, Mr.—what did you say your name was?”

“Gunn. Lemuel Gunn. I’ve heard of attorney-client privilege but I thought, all things considered, you might waive it in Mr. Gava’s case and give me a helping hand. As his attorney, you are also an officer of the court. You asked the judge to release Gava on bail. As I understand it, it’s not in your interests to have him jump bail.”

R. Russell stabbed at the sleeve of his jacket and took another look at his watch. “Thank you for stopping by, Mr. Gunn. I’m sorry I can’t be of assistance to you. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ll have my secretary show you to the elevator.”

“I do mind.” The horns of our stares locked. “In fact, I mind a great deal. I came a long way to see you. It would be a blow to my ego to have to go home empty-handed.” I drifted over to the glass shelf running along one wall and absently plucked one of the antique globes off of its cradle.

“Be careful with that—it’s a three-hundred-year-old Lorenzo da Silva. It’s worth more than you earn in ten years. There are only three da Silvas in the world in anything like this condition—the second is in the Louvre, the third is in the Metropolitan. I’ll sue the trousers off you if you so much as scratch it.”

“I don’t know much about law but I know enough to know the difference between actionable and collectable. If I were to drop this—always assuming the judge doesn’t buy my story that you tried to physically throw me out of your office and the globe got busted in the altercation—you could sue the trousers off me, as you put it. But as I own nothing in the way of equity, and as my bank balance, last time I looked, was in the neighborhood of minus seven hundred and fifty dollars, the only thing you’d collect would be my trousers. I’m not sure they’d go with your haircut, Mr. Fontenrose.”