Final Notice (3 page)

It took me about twenty minutes to drive over there, park, get cleared and tagged by one of the desk sergeants, and locate Lieutenant Alvin Foster, who was manning a desk in a spare dry-walled office on the second floor and not looking terribly happy about it. Al Foster seldom looks happy about anything. He is one of the least congenial men I've ever known. Between the cigarettes that dangle from his lips like a second tongue, his long dour Buster Keaton-like face, and the thatch of greasy black hair on the top of his head, he does not make a good first impression. But he's not interested in good; he's interested in lasting. And in that respect he always succeeds. I'd known him for better than a year, ever since the Hugo Cratz case. And while we were hardly close friends, we did do some friendly drinking together.

He had a cigarette in his mouth, as usual. When he spotted me coming through the door; he made a stab at a smile, landing somewhere on my side of bare tolerance.

"Harry," he said in his high-pitched, achy voice.

And I said, "Al. How you been?"

"Oh, you know."

And that was it.

I sat down on a padded metal chair across from his desk, and for a minute or two we didn't say anything. He just sat there with blue smoke crawling up his face, brooding over his desk as if he'd lost the key to the top drawer. And I examined a discolored spot on my thumbnail and stared out the window at the autumn sky.

"You need some help, Harry?" he said after a time.

I gave it a beat or two and said, "Yeah, Al. I could use some help."

He snapped the cigarette he'd been smoking into a tin ashtray, where it continued to burn, dug into his rumpled black coat, and pulled another Tareyton from his pocket like a magician plucking a dove from his sleeve.

"Got a light?"

I gave him a light.

"Yeah," he said and picked at a loose strand of tobacco on his lip. "You were saying?"

"You know, Al," I said to him. "You're a fun guy."

"Thanks, Harry. That means a lot to me, your saying that."

I laughed. "I need some information. George DeVries over at the D.A.'s office seems to remember an open case of homicide from about two years ago. Up in Eden Park. A real messy killing with a razor."

"Belton," he said and looked at the cigarette. "Twyla Belton."

We sat in silence for another minute and I finally said, "All right, Al. I'll bite. Twyla Belton who?"

"Why do you ask, Harry?"

I told him. Why not? There was nothing confidential about what I'd been hired to do. And even if there had been, I would have spilled most of it eagerly.

Foster listened to me without looking up, stubbed out his cigarette, pulled out another and said, "So what? So somebody's tearing up a few books."

"The Belton thing wasn't my idea, Al. It was DeVries who saw a connection. I told you my story, now you tell me about Twyla."

"Not much to tell," he said. "Female, Cauc. About twentythree. Was a student at Lon Aamons' commercial art school in Walnut Hills. No known enemies. You know -just your standard single girl. We found her body on the Overlook about two years ago." He flicked.the ash off his cigarette. "She'd been worked over bad."

"How bad?"

"Let me put it this way, Harry. Don't ask where we found I the bat."

"Good Lord," I said softly and shuddered up and down my spine. "Did you have any leads?"

"Not a one. She just wasn't a real likely target for that kind of thing. No boyfriends. Shy. Just a girl who went up to the park on the wrong day. The guy she ran into. .." Foster shifted in his chair and looked up at me for the first time since I'd sat down. "I'd like to meet him sometime."

And I'd bet he would, too. "I don't remember anything about this in the papers. Why'd you put a lid on it?"

"Figure it out for yourself," he said daintily. "Dead girl. Sexually molested and then cut to ribbons. No motive. No suspects."

I saw what he meant. "So you thought you were up against a real psycho."

He nodded. "Those guys love publicity. And you know the kind of panic a newspaper story can start. What we did was dress up some of our policewomen as marks and quadruple the patrols at municipal parks. But the son-of-a-bitch never showed up again. He just vanished."

"That's strange," I said. "You'd have thought he'd keep at it until he got caught."

Foster grunted.

"Where'd the girl live?" I asked him.

"On Paxton."

"That's in Hyde Park."

"So?"

He was right. It wasn't very much. "She have a family?"

"Father and mother."

We sat for a few moments more in silence.

"You might let me know if you find anything interesting," he said laconically.

"You figure I'm going to follow up on this, huh?"

"You're the type," Al said.
 
 

An awful lot of people know your type, Harry, I said to myself, as I walked back to the car. Which is what? Out of touch? Hopelessly old-fashioned? Naively sentimental? All of the above?

Chances were that there was nothing to the Belton connection. Crazies generally don't turn to books after they've torn up real people. But there was a correlation -a similarity. And the girl had lived in Hyde Park. And, anyway, I'm the suspicious type. On the way down to the Riorley Building I decided to check with Ringold to find out whether Twyla Belton had belonged to the Hyde Park Library. And if so, just what kind of books she'd liked to read.

There weren't any messages for me on the answerphone in my office. So I went down to the lobby coffee shop and had a sandwich with Jim Dugan, a lawyer with offices on the sixth floor of the Riorley. He was still upset about Pete Rose and Dick Wagner. Before he signed with the Phillies, two years ago, a motion was made in city council to have Pete named a municipal monument. That way, it was argued, the Reds would have had to sign him, since the citizens of Cincinnati would have been picking up the tab for maintenance of city property. I suppose you've got to like Cincinnatians just for that. They're small-minded and drab and about as hopelessly parochial as any large group of people can be, but they elected Carl Klinger mayor after he was caught in a Newport brothel and they tried to make Pete Rose into a city park. You explain it.

About five o'clock I left Jim to his dark mood and took mine home with me to Clifton and the Delores -the four-story, U-shaped brownstone apartment house I've lived in for the past ten years. I drove out Reading Road because I didn't want to see what was left of that Monday afternoon through the smog that hangs over the expressway. But smog or no smog, the day had lost some of its luster -its freshness all mixed up with torn pages and a murdered girl and a smart-ass lady detective who'd gotten my dander up. And all of a sudden I realized that I'd found that something to mourn over I'd been looking for since the start of the day. It wasn't anything new. Just one almost-middle-aged and generally-well-meaning man, who'd discovered for the umpteenth time that he couldn't even make it through a beautiful fall afternoon without stepping in it. It. The stuff that most people's bad dreams are made of, which he tracked around like fresh mud on his shoes. It's enough to drive that man to drink, I thought. So I turned west on Taft and drove myself to the Busy Bee and drank.
 
 

The Scotch which I'd drunk neat at the dark, horseshoeshaped bar left me feeling warm and lucid and just a bit out of kilter, as if my joints weren't quite tight enough or my skin too loose. Anyway, I was feeling fine and silly when I stepped into my two-and-a-half room apartment at about nine-thirty that night. I kicked at a Gold Toe sock that had found its way into the living room, switched the Zenith Globemaster to WGN in Chicago, made myself comfortable on my green plaid couch, and thought about Pete Rose and Dick Wagner and Three Mile Island and the Arab sheikdoms and the cost of gas and a very nice-looking blonde girl I'd seen at the Bee.

I was just drifting off into a fat, alcoholic sleep when the phone rang. It got me up too quickly, and I sat back down hard. All that sweet, musical liquor was starting to boil, and suddenly I didn't feel so dreamy and good-tempered. I worked my way like a blind man to the roll-top desk beneath the front window and picked up the receiver.

"Mr. Stoner?" a husky, familiar voice said.

"A piece of him."

"Kate Davis, here. I hope I didn't wake you up."

I glanced at my watch, which was showing a little past ten, and did a slow burn. "You figure a man of my years needs his sleep, is that right, Ms. Davis?"

She laughed prettily. "Not exactly. I just thought you might turn in early like I usually do. After a day's work, I'm bushed. And I owe it to myself and the job to be as fresh as possible in the morning."

My right hand began to tremble and I eyed it with horror. I couldn't tell if it was the liquor or Kate Davis, who had a very nice talent for saying the wrong things. "I'll bet you're a vegetarian, too," I said with spite.

"As a matter of fact," she said equably, "I eat just about anything. Within reason. The only vanity I deny myself is liquor."

"It figures."

"Oh, it's not as though I'm morally opposed to it. Hell, I'd go out every night and get as stewed as a Detroit assemblyline worker, if it weren't for the job."

"Well, it's nice to have ideals," I said, suddenly feeling very drunk and very old.

"I have to have them," she said. "Especially on a job like this one. You see, most people feel as you do -that the security
business is not 'woman's work'."

"It was swell of you to call like this," I said. "I mean I don't get to talk to a lot of young people. But it's getting way past
my bedtime, so if you wouldn't mind getting to the point ...?"

"Listen," she said. "What I wanted to say can wait till tomorrow."

"Noooo. Let's not wait until tomorrow. I may not be alive tomorrow."

"Are you O.K.?" she said with concern. "You're not sick, are you?"

"Just what do you want!" I almost shouted.

There was a pause, then she said, "To work together?" in a very small voice.

I didn't say anything.

"Jessie told me about the meeting you had with Ringold," she said sheepishly. "And some friends of mine told me that. .. well, that you know what you're doing."

I started to ask her how Jessie Moselle had known about that conversation, but let it slide.

She took a deep breath and said, "Could be I was wrong about you."

"You mean I'm not as venal and sexist as you thought?"

"Could be," she said.

"And how would our little partnership work?" I said with morbid fascination. "What would we do -split shifts on that
stool of yours?"

"It doesn't have to be that way," she said defensively. "I'm open to suggestions. We could pool our information."

"All right," I said. "Then let me do some pooling right now. Ahout two years ago a twenty-four-year-old girl named Twyla Belton was brutally murdered in Eden Park. She was cut up like one of those art books of yours. And the guy who did it was never found."

"What makes you think her death has anything to do with the library?"

"It doesn't have to have anything to do with the library. She was from Hyde Park, but that doesn't necessarily mean a thing. The point I'm trying to make is that, whether or not our Ripper killed Twyla Belton, he could be capable of killing. And sitting on that chair of yours and practically inviting him home, just doesn't make good sense."

"You think I should be scared," she said stiffly.

And I realized that I had scared her and that I'd wanted to scare her. It made me feel like a bully playing a cruel game, but it was somehow comforting to know that behind that sexual armor she was capable of a healthy fright. Most people with a point to prove give up their feelings because they think that having feelings makes them weak. Some of them give up feeling for the rest of their lives. It was nice to know that Kate Davis wasn't one of that clan.

"Not scared," I said. "But wary."

I tried to sound conciliatory, but I'd knicked her pride the way she'd knicked mine earlier in the day. And she didn't want me to know it.

"This girl, Twyla Belton," she said in a businesslike voice. "Did she belong to the library?"

It was a smart question, one I'd wondered about myself. "We'll check it out," I said.

"It would be interesting," she said. "If she were on Ringold's list."

"She probably won't be on the list. The Belton girl was killed over two years ago and I don't think Ringold went back
that far. We'll just have to do some digging."

"All right," she said. "Then I'll see you tomorrow."

"Yes. See you tomorrow."

"Bright and early?"

"Jesus," I said.

She laughed. "Try a raw egg in a glass of tomato juice with a dash of Tabasco." And she hung up, leaving me wondering vaguely just who had been playing games with whom.
 

I woke up feeling as if someone had tied sandbags to my hair.