Ask the Right Question Read online

  After Bud’s I stopped briefly at my office. The mail provided nothing which attracted my affections apart from a circular from something called Cosmic Detectives offering a course with Special Features. I dropped the bulk of my tailing gear and picked up my camera’s close-up kit and keys and bag of tricks. I also divested myself of all identification.

  By 8:00 p.m. I was back in South Indianapolis. I parked in the Southern Plaza shopping center, and bought a lot of film in the drugstore there. Then I took the walk to my moonlight adventure.

  Outside the window of Crystal’s office I felt a certain oppression from my own repetitiveness. I would have gone in the front—I have the keys to do it—but I didn’t want to spend time standing in front of the door picking out the right key. The back was the better bet, and there was less chance of an alarm on individual windows than on the front door.

  I was getting practice. It was good for me; I got in without my stool.

  The room was not big, but he made plenty of use of it. Storage files, books, a big desk. Clothes. There was a washbasin with a fully stocked medicine cabinet—all the ablutionaries. He had his own private john. A single bed.

  There was no trace of any woman.

  The items of most interest looked to be the contents of the desk and files. I decided to photograph it all, and sort it out later.

  There was plenty to take. Page by page through interminable financial records. Three drawers of the file. None of it meant anything to me offhand. I saw occasional names and dollar signs, but mine was not to reason why, for the moment. The bottom dawer was correspondence. I had shot seven rolls of film by the time I got to the desk.

  In the desk drawers I got more goodies. Like a drawer of cash. A scrapbook in another and an address book and a pornography collection in the bottom.

  For modesty’s sake I started with the money. It was all twenty-dollar bills. I shot it so I could count the number of edges, and I took a few random serial numbers. Next drawer …

  By ten thirty I had shot thirteen rolls of 36-exposure film. I had had to plug in my electronic flash.

  I was about halfway through the pornography when a key slipped in the lock. I bolted upright. I’d been over-confident, uncautious. Being interrupted was the farthest thing from my mind. The door flew open and a voice of authority said, “Hold it right there, buster.”

  I was so surprised, startled, that I reacted with the intelligence of a small boy caught pinching Donald Duck at the comic rack. I guess I tend to panic under pressure. A failing. I ran for the door.

  That was dumb, incredibly dumb. He was in the door I tried to run through.

  More than that he had a gun on me.

  Christ, he could have killed me!

  I’m glad he was cooler than I was. Instead of shooting he clobbered me on the side of my head with the side of his gun.

  I thought it had gone off. I have a vague recollection of some sort of strange feeling. I must have been falling.

  They say I fell on my electronic flash. I must have hit it with my head. It broke.

  20

  I woke up with fuzz in my face. Fuzz, fuzz everywhere, and not one with a peach’s blush. They were not delicate or sympathetic or brutal. They were just two big bullocks, one blond, one gray. But even they had a sense of the irony of the situation. Shows the higher class of cop the brutality stories are attracting these days.

  The young one drove; Old Folk led the conversation.

  Their big decision was whether they could book me as a Peeping Tom. I had been caught photographing another man’s pornography. Old Folk looked back into the cage and drooled, “I ain’t never had one just like you before, buddy. You do a lot of this sort of thing in my territory or you just started lately?”

  “Go claim your pension,” I suggested.

  “Tough guy,” he said, turning back to stare at the 11 p.m. traffic. “Tough guy. Wonder what he does for kicks.”

  The booking sergeant was in a surly mood. His wife must have kicked him in the balls as he left home for the night shift.

  Of course I wasn’t feeling any too pleasant myself. I was desperate for my film.

  “You bastards are the scum of the earth,” said Numb Nuts, hissing after my captors had delivered me and described my offenses. While I stood by they held a cop conclave and decided on “breaking and entering” and “invasion of privacy” as offenses, and “you fucking pervert” as a description of the captive.

  But Numb Nuts really cheered me up. “Wait till you hear my name,” I said, “then you’ll really like me.”

  “What’s your name?” he growled.

  “Donald Duck,” I said. “Honest. I was born in 1932 and my parents liked the alliteration.”

  “The allewhat? Fuck. Lock the bastard up.”

  “Hey, what about my call? I get a call.”

  “Call some of the guys downstairs. They’re your kind.”

  Things were getting a little out of hand. I half expected a night on the city, but I didn’t want to spend it with no machinery working for me. “Now look, I’m sorry if I offended you,” you big shit. “But if you lock me up without a call, these kind gentlemen who brought me in aren’t going to get their conviction. They can tell you. Or is Miller in? Jerry Miller. He can tell you my name. He’s on tonight, ain’t he?”

  He squinted at me. “You know Miller? He knows you?” Spittle sploshed on floorboards behind the desk. “Figures. OK, you guys,” to my arresting officers, “take him down the hall to the nigra.”

  Jerry Miller was a high school classmate of mine. He is also sergeant of police. I will never forgive him for showing no surprise at seeing me brought into his cubbyhole.

  He was churning out some paperwork. They sat me down on a chair in front of him and flopped my file on his desk, and left. Jerry doodled a bit, then, without looking up again he picked up my file and skimmed it.

  “Big bust like this,” he said. “Wish I was in on it.”

  “This place smells,” I said.

  “Would have been promotion for sure. Want a smoke?”

  “Screw your smoke.” He knows I don’t smoke. “I want to get out of here. I have an appointment in half an hour.”

  “Ah, we get them all here. Murderers, rapists, litter-bugs, trespassers.” He basked in it as we both remembered the hard times I have, on occasion, given him about being stuck for nine years as a sergeant. Think of it this way, he says, I’ve got more seniority than any other sergeant on the whole stinking force.

  “Donald Duck, eh? No ID. I take it you expected to get caught.”

  “Not expected. It’s a matter of protection, just in case. I’ve never been booked under my real name. Not since I was a kid. It helps out the license.”

  “Not so sure about the license on this one. What the hell are you up to anyway?”

  “I’m trying to find out some secrets.”

  “Secrets of anatomy?”

  “Secrets of the guy who rents that office. Very deep, very dark.”

  “Sounds right up my line.”

  We exchanged smiles. I was not in a bad mood considering my recent past and the prospects for my immediate future.

  “Still on nights, I see.”

  “Yeah. It beats a beat. But it’s not the easiest side of life. I get all the jobs that have filtered through everybody else and that nobody wants. Never any chance for anything big. I’m going to be here forever, unless I stumble onto something big by accident. Like, you know, drugs in a ski pole or something.”

  “Or in a stool leg,” I said.

  His face turned sharp. “What do you know about a stool?”

  I sighed. “You don’t have that one, do you?”

  He got up and went to a cupboard. And brought back a very familiar-looking stool. “Somebody left a calling card in a north-side doctor’s record room.”

  “I’ve never seen that stool before in my life.”

  “No drugs taken, nothing stolen. No fingerprints. We tell him to try and relax. Oh, I
get all the trespassing cases.”

  “I’ve never seen that stool before in my life,” I said. “But I could use one, when it gets unclaimed. Keep me in mind.”

  He sat down and shook his head. More for himself than for me. He propped up my booking sheet. “So what are we going to do about this? You going to tell me anything true so I can make like I beat it out of you and raise my standing around here?”

  “Who rents the office?”

  “Guy called Ames, according to the night watchman. That the guy you’re working on?”

  “Guess so. Give them my real name, and get me a phone call.”

  “That all you want me to do?” I was made the object of the bitter blade of irony. I spat it back; I thrive on irony.

  “No. I want information. I want the Army records of a Leander Crystal and any Ames, Iowa, police record he has. You got that name?”

  “I got it. You’re sure I can’t do anything else for you?” I sensed sarcasm but ignored it.

  “If you can’t get me out now, call my mother and ask her to bail me out tomorrow morning.”

  If it hadn’t been his own office, he would have spat at my foot. Miller is a good spitter. “Now think carefully,” he said. “Sure there’s nothing else I can do for you?”

  So I sat back and thought. “Also Army Records of Windom, Sellman and Joshua Graham.” I wanted to see if Crystal really was in the same outfit as Joshua. “Let me write those names down for you.” I wrote them down. He waited patiently. On reflection I think he was interested.

  “Care to tell me what’s going on?”

  “No.”

  “Care to tell me what I’m going to get out of this? You know I can’t just walk in and order Army records without some sort of reason.”

  “I may get you a fraud. And anything I do get will be yours.”

  “Such great temptations you offer.” He sighed. “Still, it’ll be interesting to see if anybody does notice what I’m asking for.”

  “I also need that film I took tonight.”

  “I figured that. You can’t have it.”

  “I’ve got to have it.”

  “I’ll see what I can do. But don’t count on it.”

  I left quietly. For my night’s rest.

  By 1 a.m. I was making my one call. Privilege finally granted by Numb Nuts, the desk sergeant. I was getting pretty annoyed. Miller had identified me for them but his shift finished a little after midnight. I hadn’t been caught doing violence. I thought they could let me go on my own recognizance. Numb Nuts wasn’t buying any.

  In return for his avowed failure to trust me—despite Miller vouching for me—Numbie decided that with one phone call I could hardly do a lasting damage to the community. So he gave me his phone. It was hard for him, I’ll say that. He didn’t want to see me go.

  Which was handing me a problem. I could count on bail in the morning, but I could hardly expect my mother to come running down to the pokey in the middle of the night. When a kid is thirty-seven a mother’s affection will only carry her so far.

  I could call my lawyer, but I didn’t have anything to say that couldn’t wait.

  So I resigned myself to a night courtesy of the city. I don’t like bail bondsmen’s breaths, or their 10 percent fee, which I didn’t have on me, anyway.

  Which left me with my phone call, which I damn well wasn’t going to waste. I decided to use it on my next most pressing need—nights are pretty long in jail.

  “Do you have a phone book?” I asked my cheerful bobby.

  “Shit,” he said, “you mean a bird like you don’t know his mouthpiece’s phone number by heart?”

  I shuddered as he handed me the book. There was something about his turn of phrase. An old movie word like “mouthpiece” put so close to a touching first-grade notion like “by heart.”

  I opened the book. The police department and the jail across the street are in my territory. They’re walking distance from home. I know the area. I looked up my local all-night Chuck-a-Chunk-a-Chicken, dialed the number and took a breath.

  “Would you please deliver a whole chicken and an order of french fries to the City Jail, please. The name is Duck, D. Duck.

  It blew Numbie’s mind. He clobbered me with the back of his paw, he gave me the look reserved for people who defile his phone.

  I laughed inside, all the way across the street.

  Jail is not exactly a homey place, but if you know what to expect and have a degree of emotional reserve a night or two isn’t that disorienting. I do recommend that you sleep as much as you can. It’s without doubt the fastest way to pass time.

  It’s not exactly the first time I’d been in the Indianapolis jail. But I hadn’t been there recently. It hadn’t changed a bit. They still needed to arrest a decorator.

  I never got my chicken.

  21

  Miller made a special trip in for me about ten thirty. That was the nicest thing anybody had done for me in quite a while. It meant that he hadn’t forgotten me.

  He was in high school with me, in my class. But I never met him until near the end of the summer after we graduated. One Saturday I had nicked a convertible from a Broad Ripple parking lot after a movie at the Vogue. I was heading out Westfield Boulevard going no place in particular and I recognized him hitching. I knew I’d seen him somewhere. So I stopped and picked him up. He’d been going to watch a baseball game at North Central. We got to talking. He had to pitch against one of the teams in a few days and he didn’t have anything else to do.

  We learned that we had some interests in common. Like exploring foreign neighborhoods.

  We decided to take a ride. We drove that damn car about a hundred and fifty miles. Up to Kokomo and through Muncie, all around the northeast of town until we ran out of gas just outside of Oaklandon. From Oaklandon we walked back to the city. Ten miles. That sort of thing does something to a couple of people. No matter how different you are when you meet, and what ways you go after you part, you have a community of feeling that you never forget.

  He had called my mother for me and when I was called in she’d already been and gone leaving the five-hundred-dollar bail.

  I was in Miller’s office by eleven forty five.

  He gave me a fat manila envelope full of pictures. Prints from the rolls I popped the night before. “I’ve been reviewing your case,” he said. “I think you may need these to prepare a proper defense.”

  I smiled. “Bet the lab loved this.”

  “It kept them out of trouble last night. They get horny if they just sit around and read Shakespeare all night.”

  We had a little more chatter and then he told me about Crystal’s lawyer. “That guy, Ames. His lawyer’s apparently been around here all morning finding out whatever he can.”

  “What’d he find out?”

  “Finally, your name. Not much else that he didn’t know. When you were caught, doing what. He wants the pictures and he’s talking tough about prosecution. By the way, they’ve added possession of burglar’s tools to your charge sheet. Thought you’d like to know. They picked up your car in that shopping center. It’s in the pound. You’ll owe thirty bucks towing charges plus a parking ticket for leaving it there overnight.”

  I shrugged it off. I wanted to get going, but I’d had a night to think on my experiences. “Something else. Can you tell me what the problem is with the desk sergeant who was on last night?”

  “Yeah. His old lady split the sheet with him. Took off. After twenty-three years. He doesn’t know where. Every night when he comes on he checks at missing persons.”

  “Kind of rough on the people he books.”

  “Yeah, but it’s kind of rough on him too.” All heart, that Miller, too soft to make it against the odds. But a good man. I would still have trouble gleaning myself for sympathy for the sad-sack sergeant.

  “You better go,” he said. “I got to get home. I don’t go on duty till four, you know.”

  “I know,” I said. And I knew.

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sp; 22

  With no money in pocket, I decided to walk home and let the car ride. I stopped at my bank and convinced them to let me use one of their checks to draw out a little of my own money.

  I took a hundred. Car money, when I got around to it, plus a little mad money.

  Then I bought the highest-power hand magnifying glass I could find quickly, and I picked up a whole chicken with a double order of french fries. In the office, I made a call to make an appointment with my “mouthpiece” for four.

  I ate my chicken. But I just stuffed it in. I was eager to get to the pictures that I had braved the bedbugs for.

  Thirteen and a half rolls. Thirty-six negatives to the roll. Two or more pages pictured on each negative. My manila envelope contained prints of four hundred and ninety-one negatives, images of more than twelve hundred sides of pieces of paper.

  I cut the prints up, so I had each photographed item separate. I set about arranging them in piles.

  By three I had ten stacks of surreptitious snaps.

  Scrapbook

  Pornography

  Money

  Letters

  Canceled checks

  Tax records

  Ladies’ names and phone numbers

  Legal documents and bills

  Accounting record book

  Leftovers

  I also had my first rewards. Four canceled checks dated from 1954 to 1956. Totaling twenty thousand dollars. Made out to a Jacques Chaulet; cashed, as well as I could make out, at a bank in Toulon.

  I noticed the first one because of the French name. The others just followed. Not that I knew exactly what they meant, but they made me feel great.

  Great enough to leave a note for Eloise:

  Sorry to be gone today, but it’s a good sign: I am working. I think I have a key to your parentage. Will be back as soon as possible after four. Wait if you can.

  I debated signing it “Love.” I mean I did feel good. But I decided to save it.

  I paid for the car without a single crack, but couldn’t help noticing that it wouldn’t be hard to steal some of the cars the cops had in their emporium. It’s not that I steal cars all the time. But my father showed me how to start them without keys and five or six times in high school …