The Body Looks Familiar (14 page)

Jim Latson had a social obligation to perform Saturday night. The capital city chief of police was visiting him; and if there was one thing Jim understood, it was what a visiting chief of police expected in the way of entertainment.

He rented an apartment on the roof of the Belmont, filled it with snitzels and liquor and food, and he and the visiting chief and a few choice and durable cronies had at it.

Everybody had a wonderful time—except the host. Suddenly, at two in the morning, Jim Latson lost his taste for endless highballs, and for the inevitable flattery of any of the call girls he deigned to notice. He had never before wondered what they really thought of him. It didn’t matter; they were paid, weren’t they?

But now—I’m over fifty, he told himself. I’m still thin to my friends, but I’m probably just scrawny to these chicks, these snitzels, these whores.

His mind twisted down into a mood of black, furious despair. Silently he called the girls he had hired all the synonyms for prostitute he had ever heard; called the men every variety of mug he knew.

It didn’t do any good.

He had never kidded himself; there was no percentage in starting now. It was himself he hated, not his associates. He was not acting his age, and he despised himself for it.

He could hardly leave a party where he was host, but tomorrow night, he’d stay in his apartment, read a book, look at television.

Jim Latson remembered that he had to write to the Hotel Plaza in New York for his bank books. He’d do that tomorrow night.

One of the girls settled on his bony knees, and, absent-mindedly, he began removing her clothes, hardly hearing her giggles. Too bad he had had to remove Marty. Fink could be handled, but he would need help if anything very complicated came up in Homicide. Unsolved murders did nobody any good.

His hands became aware, then, of what he was doing to the girl, and hot blood flooded his neck, interest rose in him, fast. “What’s your name, darling?” he asked.

She said that it was Carolle. She spelled it for him.

THE WEEKEND PASSED. Monday passed, and Tuesday and Wednesday. Ralph Guild continued to work two shifts, coming home almost too tired to admire the new baby.

Jim Latson continued to run the police department.

Dave Corday attended daily conferences with the D.A. and Frederick Van Lear, helping pass the control over.

Planes flew the Atlantic and carried mail.

Captain Martin took over the Gardens Precinct, No. II, and had lunch with the director of the Zoological Park, the curator of the Botanical Gardens. They seemed delighted at having such an intelligent police officer to work with, and each of them lent him books on zoos and garden parks. He began to wonder if he hadn’t been a fool not to get a job like this a long time ago.

On Thursday morning, Jim Latson’s secretary put a small stack of mail on his desk. It was so small that he could not long avoid opening the letter with the Italian stamp. He unfolded the flimsy
Par Avion
paper, expecting the usual report on the Pope’s health and the usual request for money.

But this was a little different. This was kind of final. This was the request for a divorce.

“I have consulted a Vatican lawyer and—”

He didn’t want to read any more. This could be the end, this could be the sort of trouble that couldn’t be handled… The end of political pull, the end of power, but not the end of his life.

Automatically, he unlocked the drawer where he kept his bank books. But they weren’t there, of course; he’d mailed them to a cover name in New York.

It didn’t worry him that they weren’t there, though he would have liked to know how much money he could count on if all his sources of revenue were suddenly cut off.

But it did worry him that he had expected them to be in their usual place; that he had forgotten something as important as that. He flipped his squawk-box and said, “I’m going home for a while…”

During the day the front door of Jim Latson’s apartment house was kept open, and a clerk sat at the desk. At night they locked the front door, and there was a night watchman who prowled the lobby, the basement garage, and the halls. If you forgot your key, you had to ring for him.

But this was day, and the desk clerk was on duty. He stood up straight as Chief Latson approached him, and said, “There’s a man to see you, Chief!” He was twenty-two and would have liked an appointment to the police department, but could not pass the physical.

Jim Latson turned slowly, and stared at the man rising from the straight-backed Spanish chair and ambling toward him. In the years since he had left the house he had bought for his wife, nobody had ever come to his apartment without an invitation.

So this was a new thing to him, but no more alarming than any of the other new things he’d met in all his years; neither was it stimulating. New things were much like old things to Jim Latson.

The man was a complete stranger; there was not the slightest twinge of memory as his face came into full light. “I’m James Latson. You were waiting for me?”

“Yes, Mr. Latson. I’ve got a matter to discuss with you.”

“Come on to my office tomorrow. I work for the police department.”

This was sarcasm. But the man neither flinched nor smiled. “It’s a private matter, Mr. Latson. I’d better see you in your apartment.”

“Mister, anything you’ve got to say to me—”

The stranger was staring at Eddie, the day clerk. Then he turned his head slowly and looked straight at Jim Latson. Even more slowly the lid of the stranger’s right eye came down and rested; then it raised again. He had, Latson realized, extraordinarily large eyes, a small nose, a tight mouth, a weak chin.

Jim Latson said, “Let’s get upstairs. I’ll give you five minutes.”

The man bowed. He didn’t just nod his head, which is what most Americans think of when they think of bowing; he bowed from the waist, in the European fashion.

Latson pushed past him and into the elevator. He pressed the button to close the door, and his visitor just managed to push past the sliding gate.

The car went up to Latson’s floor, stopped, the doors started opening by themselves. Latson pointed with his chin for the stranger to get out first, but the man gave him a queer, confident smile, and Latson shrugged and went ahead of him, fishing the apartment key out as he did so.

He opened the door, started in; he could almost feel the other man’s breath on his neck.

Then Jim Latson stopped abruptly, turned, brought his shoulder up under the stranger’s chin, caught the man’s wrists and jerked.

The stranger was caught up sharply, his Adam’s apple banging into Jim Latson’s shoulder, his head snapping back.

Latson shoved the door closed, brought the stranger around in front of him and slapped his face, hard, with each hand.

The man went backward, out of the little hall into the living room. Jim Latson kept after him, jabbing him in the wind with stiff fingers, rapping his belly with hard knuckles, cutting at the bridge of his nose with the edge of a hand.

The man got to a chair, collapsed in it, sobbing for breath. Blood was running from both nostrils.

Jim Latson tore at the heavy cloth of the stranger’s blue serge suit till he had the man’s wallet. Then he went into the bathroom, got a hotel towel, and threw it hard into the bleeding face. “Keep your dirty blood off my furniture.”

There was silence then, as the man mopped at his nose, finally got his breath back. Latson thumbed through the wallet, grunting once or twice, then threw it into the blue serge lap, and went into the kitchenette.

He returned with a highball in his hand. He didn’t offer one to his visitor, nor a cigarette; just lit up for himself, and sat in the best chair, crossing his legs, sipping at the highball, puffing on his cigarette. Finally he said, “All right. Your name is Neal Harrison, you’re from Chicago and you’re licensed in a half dozen states to be a private detective. Any part of that give you the idea you ran force me into letting you in my apartment? Anything in your past experience give you the idea you can wink at an executive police officer and not get a bloody nose?”

Harrison had pulled himself together a good deal. The bloody towel lay on the floor next to him; his hands were square on his knees, and his face was composed. A shadow under one eye indicated he might well have a black eye by tomorrow. “All right,” he said. “You’ve had your fun, Chief. I came here to do you a favor, and I get a beating. So all right. Now I don’t do you the favor. Now I’m getting out of here.”

Latson laughed. “Just like that?”

There was a remarkable amount of calm self-confidence in Harrison’s voice. “Just like that, Chief. Guys know I came up here; if I don’t come back, they’ll know who to tell. So now, good-by.”

Jim Latson said, “Twenty-five years a cop. I’m the top of the heap in this town.”

Harrison told him what it was a heap of.

Jim Latson started forward, and then stopped. He said, “I’m fascinated, little man. A two-bit private detective! You’ve been around. You know what I can do to you, and not a mark on you that you could show anybody. A double hernia, a rib in your lung, a ruptured kidney. You want all those things?”

Harrison said calmly, “Sure, I been around. So have you, Chief. You know I got the cards or I wouldn’t be here.”

“Play ’em.”

“No, sir,” Harrison said. “No, sir. I came here to do you a favor. It woulda cost you some money. Sure. You think I want to work all my life? But money, you got plenty of it. You got a bank account in New York, in the Union Bank, you got one in Chicago, in—”

Jim Latson sat quietly, his cigarette smoking in his fingers, his highball warming in his palm, while Harrison recited a list of Jim Latson’s bank accounts. When he finished, Harrison added, still in a monotone, “Want to know the amounts? In New York you got—”

“Let it go,” Latson said. “How much?”

Harrison shook his head. “I’m being a sucker,” he said. “Noses heal, a black eye turns white again. Money, it sticks to your ribs, but I’m being a sucker; I’m going to see you where you sent so many guys. In the State Pen.”

He stood up, moved to the door. His hat had never come off in all the trouble.

Latson said, “You’re a good man. The district attorney’s office needs one. He doesn’t have to come from the police ranks.”

Harrison was nearly to the door. “District attorney’s office? I don’t need you to get in there. It was your pal, the assistant D.A., that tipped Mrs. Latson off.” He gave his foreign bow again—it was obvious now that he used it for the mockery that sustained his meager soul—and started for the door.

“Wait a minute,” Jim Latson said. “You’re working for my wife.”

“Right the first time,” Harrison said. “Twenty-five years a cop, and he figures things out fast. Sure. I’m to get divorce evidence. She’s got a list of your dames; your friend Corday sent it to her in Rome. I hear around town he’s about your best friend—and I’m not surprised. By, now.”

Latson said sharply, “Drop the cheap patter. We can do business. I just want to get everything straight. Corday sent her a list of the women I’ve been seeing.”

“That’s a nice word for it—seeing.”

“It smells like Corday,” Jim Latson said. “Sneaking to my wife. But how come the checkbooks?”

“You are not very fast,” Harrison said. “Not very sharp. A list—what’s that? She needs evidence. She sends us—my agency—the list. They give it to me. They say, watch this jerk. What they say do, I do. And I am watching when you write the Hotel Plaza in New York.”

“Robbing the mails,” Jim Latson said. “A federal squeal.”

“You’re not likely to turn it in,” Neal Harrison said. “Those books go to the opposition politically, or they go to a newspaper, or even to your own party—and you’re through. You are eating in a prison messhall. And don’t say squeal, Chief. Say case. Squeal is language for gutter types like me. Lowdown private detectives without social standing.”

Latson went ahead of him, put his thin, high shoulders against the door. “All right. The bank books are no good without my signature. How much do you want, and I’ll write a check on any bank you name—and you are the little man who can name them.”

Harrison said. “Little, but I got my pride. Isn’t it a funny thing, I didn’t know it? But I’m sore now, and likely to stay so. The evidence on your dames goes to Mrs. Latson. But the other—I ought to send it to her, too. It would raise her alimony, wouldn’t it, and she’d like that, she could give it to the church, and my grandma was a Catholic, I think.”

“Stop clowning.”

“Little guys always clown. It saves their dignity. Out of my way, Chief.” He walked to the door, put his hand on it. “But I’m not going to send the dope on your bank accounts to your wife, ’cause she wouldn’t know what to do with it. I’m sending it to the opposition. Your party’ll have to ditch you or lose the next election. You’re through, Chief.”

Jim Latson began to laugh. The deep creases of his face got deeper. “You’ve overplayed, small fry. I think you’re lying.”

This was so astounding that it turned Neal Harrison around, the doorknob forgotten. “Lying? Mister, I didn’t make up that list of banks. I couldn’t.”

Jim Latson felt genuine amusement coming up in him. It was going to be all right. He had never had more trouble in one day than he could handle in that day. He said, “Not lying about the list. You intercepted the letter all right. But you are lying about—Let’s see what you said—guys knowing you came here. You never told a soul. Cheap chiselers don’t.”

He stood there, chuckling, and moved forward, his hands swinging at his sides, enjoying the fear that grew in Neal Harrison’s eyes. “You don’t matter, chiseler. Corday doesn’t matter. It’s the second time he’s tried to get me, and he can have three tries for his dime. You can’t touch me, any of you.”

He caught the front of Harrison’s cheap coat, as he had before, but this time he lifted him off his feet. “You haven’t got a gun, and you think that saves your life. But I’ve got a half dozen pistols in my bedroom, and none of them registered. I plant one on you, and you’re a dirty-necked holdup man. Eddie downstairs’ll believe what I tell him. I’m his hero.”