Called by a Panther Read online

  Michael Z. Lewin

  CALLED BY

  A PANTHER

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Chapter Thirty Four

  Chapter Thirty Five

  Chapter Thirty Six

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  Chapter Thirty Eight

  Chapter Thirty Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty One

  Chapter Forty Two

  Chapter Forty Three

  Chapter Forty Four

  Chapter Forty Five

  Chapter Forty Six

  Chapter Forty Seven

  Chapter Forty Eight

  Chapter Forty Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty One

  Chapter Fifty Two

  Chapter Fifty Three

  Chapter Fifty Four

  Chapter Fifty Five

  Chapter Fifty Six

  Chapter Fifty Seven

  Chapter Fifty Eight

  Chapter Fifty Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty One

  Chapter Sixty Two

  Chapter Sixty Three

  Chapter Sixty Four

  . . . if called by a panther,

  Don’t anther.

  From “The Panther”

  —Ogden Nash

  You’re never first;

  you’re never last;

  you’re just next.

  —Lt. J. D. Jones, I.P.D.

  Chapter One

  LORING, THE BUTLER, brought the bad news.

  His timing was particularly poor as far as I was concerned. Parties like this always have a garrulous Brit and tonight's was finally resting his mouth by using it to eat. That had allowed the more interesting guests, like the Chief of Police, to open up a bit.

  The subject was terrorist bombs.

  “In Indianapolis!” the hostess, Mrs. Vivien, had said. “How could we ever imagine that terrorists would turn up here?” She fiddled with the basic white pearls that hung below the neckline of her basic black dress. She didn't sound afraid, but I was pleased she was encouraging talk about the subject rather than dismissing it as too, too boring.

  “But they haven't managed to blow anything up yet, have they. Chief?” the man on Mrs. Vivien's left said. “That's right, isn't it?”

  The Chief, no doubt, would have picked a happier subject than the Scum Front given the choice. But he spoke easily and said, “In fact, Dick, their first bomb was planted and detonated in a cornfield out Lebanon way.”

  Mrs. Vivien laughed. “Planted? In a cornfield?”

  I had had a sip of preprandial Scotch myself, so I said, “Do you think there is significance in the fact they picked the `Lebanon' area, Chief?”

  As he turned to me, his brow furrowed. Like a fallow cornfield. He said, “My bomb unit team just figures it was an easy place for them to get to.”

  “So do you think they're based on the northwest side of town?” Dick said. “That's pretty worrying for all of us who work out that way.”

  The Chief sipped from his water glass. “Course it could also mean that they aren't from the northwest and they're trying to put us off the scent.”

  Dick was a lawyer in his fifties with a leathery brown face and the build that I take to mean no matter what he drinks tonight, he'll be out jogging tomorrow morning.

  I said, “I didn't realize that you had a bomb unit. Chief. Or has it been formed specially to cope with the Scummies?”

  “Been around for years,” he said. “Why do you think we've gone so long with so little of this kind of trouble?”

  “Because there's nothing worth terrorizing?”

  He fixed me with what a friend of mine in the force calls the Chief's baby-killer look. “Indianapolis may not be the first target for your average psycho terrorist, but that's no reason not to be alert. Specially as we get more and more big events here, the conventions and concerts, the Pan-Am Games . . .”

  “Olympic track and field trials,” Dick said, nodding vigorously.

  “We're not just the Indy 500 town anymore. And please don't forget,” the Chief said, “these pollution nuts may only have blown up a cornfield, but all five of the other bombs were left in big buildings and if any of them had gone off . . .” He looked at us in sequence, allowing time to think about the genuinely awful implications of explosions in our city. “But of course,” he said, “we got to each one of them in time.”

  However, Mrs. Vivien looked up from her pearls to undercut the impact of the accomplishment. She said, “I thought the story on Channel 43 was that the explosive material in the last five bombs wasn't actually wired up.” She looked to the Chief for confirmation but continued without it. “And don't they call Channel 43 each time, to tell where they left the bombs?”

  I said, “If you've got to have bombers, I suppose ones whose bombs don't go off are the best kind.”

  But the Chief ignored me and turned to Mrs. Vivien. His smile was so broad and toothy and poisonous he could have been practicing to run for elective office. “Well, Charlotte,” he said, “I know there's an element of the populace that doesn't take the Scum Front seriously because they claim to be fighting for wholesome things like pure water and because, so far, they've called in warnings. But if you think we ought to treat people who say, `We could have blown the Hoosierdome to smithereens but we didn't,' as some kind of heroes or good guys, I believe you and me are going to have a falling-out.”

  “Now, Chief, you know I didn't mean that,” Charlotte Vivien said. But I never learned what she did mean, because that was when Loring came in with his bad news.

  Still, he had his instructions, the butler. There is probably a protocol for this sort of thing, like bad news only between courses. Could be that, after training, butlers suffer not a moment's angst.

  But me, my heart was pounding away. And it wasn't even love.

  “Madam?”

  “Oh,” Mrs. Vivien said. “Yes, Loring? What is it?”

  “Madam, I am distressed to have to inform you that Mr. Ripley . . .”

  Loring took a breath. He was good. Everybody studied his face and waited for the air to come out again.

  “Oh dear,” Mrs. Vivien said. “Mr. Ripley.” She looked down the table to the empty setting. “He didn't come through and I never noticed. Oh, what a terrible hostess I am!”

  At the other end, the Brit laughed twice, a goosey kind of laugh.

  “Be quiet, Quentin,” Mrs. Vivien said.

  Quentin sucked on a bread stick while most of us glanced toward the empty chair and untouched consommé and lobster parfait and tried to remember who wasn't sitting there.

  And although this was a dinner party for twenty-two where nobo
dy knew everybody and some of us knew nobody, everybody placed which one Ripley was; the loud drunk who had used the big F word about lawyers, who had been pulled off the Chief's lapels and who had kicked Mrs. Vivien's Siamese cat.

  “Unfortunately, madam,” Loring continued, “I have the distinctly unpleasant duty to inform you that at the present moment Mr. Ripley is lying behind the love seat in the drawing room.”

  “Good heavens,” Mrs. Vivien said.

  A murmur trotted around the table. Myself, I made no sound, but that's because I'm a tough guy and am experienced in the chicane of life.

  “I regret, madam,” Loring continued, stressing each word, “that there is a small ebony-handled dagger protruding from Mr. Ripley's chest and that there is a pool of what I presume to be blood on the small Turkish rug. I regret to inform you, madam, that Mr. Ripley has expired and that there is prima facie evidence of murder.”

  Response here was varied. A few intakes of breath, some wide eyes and the odd nervous smirk. I heard “golly” and “gosh.”

  Mrs. Vivien allowed herself an ember of a smile but before she could respond the Brit said, “Well, to paraphrase Noel Coward, if a murderer found Wilmer Ripley's heart with a knife, he, or she, must have had marvelously good aim.”

  Then a heavy man down the table, who wore the kind of gray suit that would cost me a year's rent if I was still paying rent, said to Mrs. Vivien, “Oh, very good, Charlotte. Very good.”

  Mrs. Vivien's smile burst into flame with this zephyr of approbation and she rose from her seat. She spoke to the butler but addressed the assembled company. “Well, Loring, I suppose we will all have to go into the drawing room and have a look at the body.”

  People looked first at each other.

  Raising her voice to preempt premature movement, Mrs. Vivien said, “What very good luck that we just happen to have among us a real private detective. Everybody, may I introduce Mr. Albert Samson. Stand up please, Mr. Samson.”

  Slowly I stood to “oohs” and “aahs” and a few tentative claps of hand.

  “Mr. Samson is that rarity and anachronism, a true-blue old-fashioned private eye, isn't that right, Mr. Samson?” I gave one nod, the minimum.

  “He has an office on Virginia Avenue near Fountain Square, above a luncheonette, and he has been following people on the mean streets of Indianapolis for years and years and years. I had advance warning that somebody at my party tonight might be in danger, so when I noticed one of his little ads in the Star I took the liberty of inviting Mr. Samson along just in case. Of course we also have our esteemed Chief of Police here tonight but he was invited strictly as a guest and because he is a friend, so I'm sure that he won't mind if, for once, we don't rely entirely on him.”

  A gracious smile from the hostess was traded for a gracious smile from Indianapolis's Chief of Police.

  “So, if you will all follow Mr. Samson to the drawing room—being careful not to disturb any clues!—I believe Mr. Samson has brought along his fingerprinting kit and he is about to take the prints from the murder weapon. Not that I wish to tell you how to do your job, Mr. Samson.”

  She bestowed one of the smiles on me, for which I traded one of my own, along with two draft picks and a player to be named later. Her “gracious smiles” were a lot better than mine.

  “After we've examined the scene of the crime, I'm sure we'll be able to get back to our meal while Mr. Samson makes further investigations, although it's quite possible that he will need to call each of us out of the room for an interrogative third degree. And please, while we're moving around, try not to get in the way of . . . Ben! Our cameraman!”

  Mrs. Vivien turned to a tapestry screen in the corner of the dining room and from behind it emerged a tall man with a video camera resting on one shoulder and the bottom of a dangly earring resting on the other. “In the next couple of days,” Mrs. Vivien said, “each household will be getting a copy of the tape.”

  News of this party favor was greeted with a chorus of surprise and approval from the guests as they realized they were present at and part of a special social occasion.

  The plan, as scripted and rehearsed in the afternoon, was that Ben would stay with me while I analyzed the scene of the crime and collected evidence. Then, when the guests were back at the trough, I would call the diners out singly or in couples for very short interviews. I had been provided with supposedly telling, even risqué personal questions to ask each interrogatee. After dinner we would watch a replay of the interrogations together, solicit further questions and win prizes if we were acute enough to spot the right clues and deduce the solution which I would reveal. The prizes were various quantities of champagne. Oh, it was going to be one hell of a party.

  And the low point of my life.

  “All right?” Mrs. Vivien said. “After you, Mr. Samson.”

  Chapter Two

  WHEN YOU FINALLY DECIDE to try to sell your soul, the only way to do it is with enthusiasm, right? Am I right?

  Or is that just another piece of bull-tonk like, say, “The easiest kind of lie to remember is the one that is true”?

  Architects have mock-Georgian; Chelonia have mock-turtle; why shouldn't Samson have mock-profound?

  I got home well after two, having been sustained only by the knowledge that time is one-dimensional and unidirectional and that all human events will end no matter how much one's intense misery makes them seem endless.

  The butler was the murderer, by the way, in league with Quentin, the Brit. Quentin was in Indy as a “writer in residence” and it was he who had written the party scenario. He had been here more than four months, since the first of January. It was time for him to make a unidirectional move too.

  Home was dark when I arrived. A timer switches my neon sign— “Albert Samson Private Investigator”: snazzy, huh?—off at midnight. There were no lights in either Mom's or Norman's room.

  When I got inside, I called my woman. “No matter what the time,” she'd said. “As soon as you get home. I'm dying to know how it went.”

  “So how do you think it went?” I asked, as soon as she woke up enough to remember who I was.

  “I'm sure you did wonderfully.”

  “It was distilled humiliation. The pure stuff. Sheer essence.”

  “But did the Vivien woman pay you?”

  “Yes,” I said, “she paid me.”

  “Well, that's terrific! It puts you weeks ahead on your financial projections.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “in my new business as a performing sea lion. Great.”

  Just for the one evening. Name your price, Charlotte Vivien had said to me. I closed my eyes and dreamed and named a price. It's a deal, she'd said.

  “It wasn't nearly enough,” I said.

  “Oh, come off it, Al,” my sympathetic beloved said. “Stop moaning. Be . . . be anything! Relieved it's over. Angry at social inequality based on money. Filled with desire. Anything but sorry for yourself.”

  “I sneezed while I was applying the fingerprint dust. It went everywhere. Everybody laughed.”

  My woman giggled.

  “I'm not joking,” I said. “I really sneezed. Well, what can you expect? I've never taken a fingerprint in my life. Not for real.”

  “You should have practiced more.”

  “I should have practiced doing it bent down behind a couch—oh, excuse me, a love seat—with twenty people and a cameraman watching me.”

  She laughed again.

  “Try to control yourself. Prove you're compassionate no matter what they say about social workers.”

  “I'll try,” she said.

  She failed.

  “Your compassion is why I stay with you, you know.”

  “Why you stay with me? So why do I stay with you?”

  “If you'd seen me tonight, you wouldn't.”

  “Don't you get a copy of the tape?”

  “I told her not to make me one.”

  “I'll call her.”

  “Please don't,” I said.
Suddenly I was tired. “God. Suddenly I am exhausted.”

  “Good,” she said. “That's good, Al.” And then, “Come on now. Remember it was your idea to `go for it.’|”

  I remembered. I said, “Yeah.” I must have said it funny. The bitch laughed some more.

  Chapter Three

  I AWOKE TO THE PHONE.

  “I didn't wake you up, did I?” she asked.

  “No. I'm still unconscious, so it's not a problem.”

  “I'm sorry I laughed at you last night.”

  “If you laughed, I guess it was because I was funny.”

  “Yup.”

  “At least it's over.”

  “And you got your money.”

  “This is true.”

  “That's good, Al.”

  “Is it?”

  “Baby, even if the new regimen doesn't end up better, you'll have changed your problems.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “I've got to go cook now. I just wanted to say hello.”

  “Cook? As in food?”

  “You can't come over, Al.”

  “I can't?”

  “You're talking to Frank at three.”

  “Oh hell. Was that this year?”

  “Good luck.”

  I held my face in my hands for a couple of minutes. Frank.

  I found the Sunday Star inside the door that connects my rooms to the rest of the living quarters above the luncheonette. Mom must have brought it up before she went out for her Sunday Expedition. Its presence was recognizable as a gesture of support.

  Bud's Dugout empties on a Sunday. Mom goes to anything, preferably something with a bit of spectacle. Because it was May she would be at the time trials for the 500 but at other times of year it could be a Colts game or even the Children's Museum—she likes the interactive exhibits. She used to frequent the zoo. But that was before that nasty male polar bear ate one of its cubs.

  Norman, her twenty-year-old live-in tattooed rude inarticulate griddle man, uses his Sundays off to prowl. He might go out causing spectacle, for all I know, but I don't get along with him well enough to ask.

  I made coffee and took the paper back to bed. It was full of the Scum Front because there had been yet another antipollution bomb. That made six. One a week. Each timed to make the Sunday paper. Seven including the one in the Lebanese cornfield.