Out of Time Page 4

‘Is that a fact.’

  ‘But I was told that he might be able to help me out.’

  ‘In that case I hope you find him,’ the barman said.

  ‘I’m not a cop,’ I said.

  ‘Go on!’

  I took out my ID and laid it on the bar. ‘I’m a private detective.’

  The man studied my documentation. ‘O.K., son. I’ll accept that you are over twenty-one.’ He raised his eyes to mine.

  I said, ‘No fuss. No bother. He may be able to help me and if he can there will be something in it for him.’

  I downed the rest of my beer, gathered my cash and left.

  It was after three-thirty when I crossed my threshold again. While I was out, there had been a phone call. Before listening to the message, I hung my coat in the closet.

  The telephone rang.

  I picked up the receiver and cut in over the machine as it was saying, ‘Albert Samson is not in his office.’

  ‘Yes he is,’ I said.

  ‘Make your mind up,’ Miller said.

  I switched off the tape.

  ‘I just came in.’

  ‘What do you want me to do about it?’

  ‘You don’t sound very happy with life,’ I said. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing. Everything. What should be the matter? You want such dope as I have on your requests for assistance or not?’

  ‘Dope doesn’t mean “information” these days, lieutenant. Be careful how you speak. Somebody might be listening.’

  ‘I’ll give you your vice raid first. All right?’

  ‘Sure.’

  He read out the names of six women, none familiar to me.

  ‘What charges?’

  ‘Prostitution.’

  ‘Only the troops? No officers?’

  ‘There’s nothing on record.’

  ‘Would that mean somebody influential intervened?’

  ‘Probably only that some money found the right outstretched palm. Not that things work that way these days.’

  ‘Is there any indication who owned the building? Or about who really operated the business?’

  ‘I’ve got nothing here. And I don’t recognise the names of any of the arresting officers as current.’

  ‘It was a long time ago.’

  ‘I was on the force then,’ he said.

  I let it pass.

  ‘Which brings me nicely to Lance Whisstock.’

  ‘O.K.,’ I said.

  ‘He has no record of any kind. Not even a speeding citation.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘But I placed the name.’

  I waited. Finally I said, ‘And?’

  ‘He’s a cop, Al. One of my estimable colleagues. College boy. A sergeant.’

  ‘The hell he is!’

  We shared a silence.

  This time Miller broke it. He asked slowly, ‘What is your interest in him?’

  ‘At this point I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘You have a client with an interest?’

  ‘I have a client who told me Lance’s grandad says Lance is mixing in bad company.’

  ‘Whisstock is undercover so that’s not surprising.’

  ‘Undercover?’ The surprise inevitably showed in my voice.

  ‘He’s a narc,’ Miller said. Then sternly, ‘You know better than to put him at risk with this information.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And for the record grandpa is Captain Warren Foley, retired.’

  ‘Captain, as in . . .’

  ‘Indianapolis Police Department.’

  ‘I see,’ I said. Which was a lie.

  ‘I think you might have a question or two for your client, Al.’

  ‘I think you’re right,’ I said.

  ‘And Albert, keep me informed.’

  I almost passed on the message on the answering machine, assuming that it had been from Miller. But then I thought again and gave it a play.

  ‘Oh, a recording,’ a male voice said. ‘I’ll be brief then. In a nutshell, I am the long-lost Lindbergh baby. I have evidence. If you help me prove who I am, you can have 50 per cent of the profits from the story and a share of the estate. Call me between seven-fifteen and seven-fifty tonight.’

  He left a number. I didn’t make a note of it. After all, what do you find in a nutshell?

  I decided to sit for a while, to try to sort out the day’s results. On both cases. I retreated to my desk.

  In the inner office.

  As advertised on television.

  I began to work through my activities, making complete notes, ultimately for use in the reports I would make to my clients.

  I got as far as the Murchisons’ first house. The big one. The brothel.

  After a few minutes sitting, pen in hand, over that unfinished page, I got up, put on my coat and went out.

  With a certain awareness of irony, I parked my van in the lot which now stands on the site of the first office building I operated from as a P.I. And it was ten to five by the time I got myself through the door at the Marion County Birth Certificates Office.

  With a deep sigh a tall man with a bushy red moustache approached the inquiry counter. ‘You want to know the way to somewhere else, right?’ he asked.

  ‘I want some information about a birth,’ I said.

  He looked at his watch. He shook his head. He sighed again. ‘I’ve been here all day long. Half of it sitting on my hands. Now, ten minutes before I’m due to go home, have a shower, go out to dinner, see a movie and get laid, you come in. What’s wrong with nine in the morning? Or even three in the afternoon? Jesus! I can tell by looking that you want action now. Tomorrow ain’t good enough. Am I right? Jesus!’

  ‘Can you tell by looking at me that there’s twenty bucks in it for you?’

  He took a second look. ‘Maybe I can do without the movie.’

  The notion was simple enough. The names on Mrs Douglas Belter’s birth certificate were wrong, but maybe the date and place of birth were right.

  The twenty-dollar investment was for a list of the details of all females born in Marion County on February 5, 1936.

  Whether it would produce anything depended on the reason the names were changed on the phony certificate.

  I had a scenario, based on my discovery of the kind of business which had been operating in the New York Street house fifteen years after Ella Murchison had moved out of it. Suppose the brothel was a venerable establishment, founded in the thirties. Suppose it had been run by Big Ma Murchison and her old man, Big Pa. Suppose one of the ‘girls’ got pregnant. Girls do. Suppose, for some reason. Big Ma had decided to take the child on.

  It seemed worth a shot. At least it included a reason for obscuring the background of a child.

  My moustached clerk earned his twenty.

  He found it under ‘W’. A girl of six pounds and nine ounces had been born that day to ‘Miss Daisy Wines’. No father listed.

  The child was named Paula Helen Wines. The mother’s address was that of the Murchisons’ house on New York Street.

  Chapter Six

  With a photocopy of the Paula Wines birth certificate in my pocket, I drove home.

  I felt a degree of satisfaction because I’d learned something directly from having deduced the right question to ask.

  There had been two more phone calls while I was out. I rewound the tape and had a listen.

  The first was from Tanya Wilkerson.

  Tanya!

  She said, ‘Thanks for the note. I don’t think my director is interested in your experiences, but I’ll pass the idea on to him. Maybe I shouldn’t say this, but what little mail we’ve had about the piece on you seemed to think the item was a gag and you were an actor. Might you consider a new career? Ha ha.’

  She shouldn’t have said it.

  The second call was from Douglas A. Belter. He said, ‘I’ve been worried all day about the best thing to do. Paula is supposed to be making those notes for you, but if you were to come to the house at seven
, you could ask her directly anything that might fill . . .’

  The message finished there, because he’d overrun the space on the tape. He had been speaking slowly and hesitating over words. I felt sorry for the man.

  Belter’s evident distress took the shine off my self-congratulations. There is a game-playing side to my work which provides occasional pleasures. But in the end I am dealing with things that have painful meanings to the people involved.

  My self-examination was interrupted when my landlord, Albert Connah, packed his Caddy out front. He came in and demanded beer.

  The premises my office-home is a part of used to be a lumber yard. Albert uses the storage bays to keep a huge stock of glass. He thinks the price will rise sharply with the cost of energy. I pay no rent, and in exchange I keep an eye on his property. There is an unwritten side to our contract which gives him access to my beer stock. We also keep a basketball and shoot some hoops occasionally in a basket mounted out back – well away from the glass.

  ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘I stopped by ’cause I wondered if you wanted a ticket to the Pacers tonight. Or are you already going?’

  The Indianapolis pro basketball team. Glass Albert is a fan. I have a mild interest.

  ‘Working tonight,’ I said. ‘Sorry. Thanks.’

  ‘Working,’ he said, pushing the top of his nose up with a finger to suggest the word had an unwholesome odour. ‘Since when?’

  He drained the beer and left.

  I arrived outside the Belter house at four minutes before seven. The place, on Meridian Hills Boulevard just south of 73rd Street, was spectacular, and reminded me of my daughter’s postcards from Alpine ski lodges. Vast porches and huge windows underneath steeply angled roofs, the whole wooden structure perched on supports which raised and levelled it above a gentle slope. It was too dark to see what sort of kingdom it surveyed, but when I’d looked it up on my map before setting out, it had seemed likely to overlook the Meridian Hills Country Club’s golf course.

  Sitting in my van in the driveway I felt extraordinarily out of place. I took my notebook and went to the front door.

  Before I could ring the bell the door was opened by a pale petite elderly Oriental woman with hazel eyes and black hair.

  ‘I’m Albert Samson,’ I said. ‘I have an appointment with Mr and Mrs Belter.’

  ‘We’re expecting you, Mr Samson,’ she said. ‘Would you come with me, please?’

  Her voice bore no accent other than a mild Hoosier one.

  She led me to a room which, though at the back of the house, appeared to be the main living-room. It was as big as my entire office and living quarters. On two sides ceiling-to-floor drapes provided undulating walls. A massive open-sided fireplace hived off about one-third of the space to give semi-isolation to an enormous dining table. There was a substantial glowing wood fire.

  Douglas Belter, in suit and tie, approached me from the far side of the room as the woman who had to be the housekeeper Tamae and I entered. About six feet from me he stopped. ‘Thank you for coming,’ he said.

  ‘No problem.’

  He half-pivoted to lead my attention back to the area of the room he’d just come from, and there a light and lithe woman, who looked younger than the forty-six I knew her to be, rose from one of a half-dozen deep chairs. She had sandy hair which was short and in tight little curls. Her dress was black and plain.

  ‘How do you do, Mr Samson?’ she said. She extended her hand and shook mine warmly. ‘I’m Paula Belter. What a bit of a mess, eh?’ She smiled briefly and turned to her husband. ‘Perhaps you’d get Mr Samson a drink, Doug. I don’t know about him, but I’m so keyed up I wouldn’t say no myself.’

  ‘Of course,’ Belter said. ‘What would you like, dear?’

  ‘A gentle g and t, I think,’ she said.

  Belter looked at me.

  ‘Beer, thanks.’

  ‘Tamae?’

  ‘A Bloody Mary please, Mr Belter.’

  Belter disappeared behind the fire. The rest of us settled in the cluster of chairs, which encircled a coffee table made from a polished cross-section of a tree trunk.

  The other major piece of furniture in the room was a grand piano which was well away from the drapes and centred on an oval deep-pile rug.

  Belter brought the drinks on a tray and served them from the table.

  It was the first time I’d ever drunk beer from cut glass.

  I became more relaxed.

  Paula Belter downed most of her beverage in one go. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘Bite the bullet time.’

  ‘I think –’ her husband began.

  Mrs Belter interrupted him without hesitation. ‘Doug said that you wanted me to make a list of facts from my childhood, and I tried,’ she said. ‘But as a request, it seemed vague and likely I would put down a lot of things that you didn’t want to know. So it seemed better to let you ask more directly for the information you want.’

  Belter looked uneasy and Tamae sat still with her red drink perched on a knee.

  The three of them watched me closely. I said, ‘What I intended was information which might help me place your family, as close to the time you were born as possible. When the starting point is a false document, with misleading “facts” . . .’ I stopped as they all grew visibly more tense. My eyes flicked from one to another before I soldiered on. ‘It is difficult to know how best to reconstruct the details you want established.’

  No one said anything.

  ‘But,’ I said, ‘I’ve had a little luck and I think I can tell you things you don’t already know.’

  I explained briefly what I had done during the day, calling on Mrs Murchison, getting addresses from telephone books and then taking a chance on a short cut.

  ‘The result is that I have found a birth certificate for a girl, born the same date as on the false certificate. It gives Mrs Murchison’s as the home address, and the child’s first and middle names are Paula and Helen.’

  I took the birth certificate copy from my pocket and passed it across the table towards Mrs Belter.

  ‘I have no conclusive proof yet that this is your real birth certificate but it seems a pretty good bet. And, of course, it proves nothing about the origin of the other one.’

  All three of them made slight movements to take the paper, but Douglas Belter and Tamae acceded to Mrs Belter’s natural right to be first.

  She took up the copy and read it through, blinking several times. She read it again.

  Then she put it gently on the table and leaned back in her chair. She folded her hands in her lap and looked at me. As her husband took the document, she said quietly, ‘So you think that I am Paula Helen Wines.’

  ‘It seems very possible to me,’ I said.

  ‘Good heavens,’ she said. She breathed deeply. ‘Who would ever have thought that deciding to go on a little trip would mean I suddenly became a whole new person.’ She changed the position of her hands. Then seeming not to be able to settle, she rubbed and wrung them. ‘What a thing to happen,’ she said loudly. ‘Nearly fifty years old and . . .’

  The agitation spiralled and she stood up. Immediately Belter too rose and moved to her.

  ‘It’s like a cliff crumbling,’ Paula Belter said. ‘And I’m falling.’

  Belter didn’t speak, but he led her out of the room.

  Tamae and I watched them leave.

  Then Tamae tilted forward and took the sheet of paper from the table top. She read it quickly, and put it down. She stared at me for several seconds. She said, ‘I am Tamae Mitsuki.’

  ‘Hello,’ I said. I offered my hand.

  She hesitated before she shook it as lightly as a butterfly kiss.

  ‘I am the housekeeper and I helped Mrs Belter bring up the two boys.’

  ‘Mr Belter said that you were one of the family.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Is Mrs Belter all right?’

  ‘Oh yes. She’ll be back before you leave and you won’t know there was anything wrong.
She will lie down for two minutes and then it will be O.K.’

  ‘Good,’ I said genuinely.

  ‘She’ll realise that she is the same person and has the same life. She’ll think of the boys.’

  ‘Of course.’ Then I said, ‘I don’t know whether I could have presented it in a less startling way.’

  Tamae shrugged lightly.

  Douglas Belter returned to the room but didn’t sit again. ‘She’ll be better in a bit,’ he said.

  I nodded. I said, ‘This doesn’t automatically solve your initial problem, but it should give you a good start.’

  He seemed uncertain. ‘Which problem was that?’

  ‘Getting a passport for your trip. Your lawyer will be able to find out what procedures need taking care of, once you’ve confirmed the identity.’

  ‘Yes . . .’ he said, without absorbing. ‘And how does one go about that?’

  ‘I haven’t had a chance to look into it,’ I said. ‘But I’m sure that you need a little time to get your bearings. Meanwhile I’ll make a formal report on what I’ve done, cost the time, and by then you’ll know if there’s anything else you want me to do.’

  ‘All right,’ Belter said vacantly.

  I rose to go. And wondered whether the turmoil might have longer-term effects on the husband than on the wife.

  We made our way to the front door.

  But as I was about to leave, a rush of footsteps caught all our attentions.

  Paula Belter, half wrapped in a silk kimono dressing gown, burst around a corner. ‘You’re not going!’ she said.

  ‘I thought . . .’

  ‘I want you to find her,’ she said. ‘Find . . .?’

  ‘This . . . this Daisy Wines. I want you to find my mother.’

  Chapter Seven

  Before I left it was arranged that Douglas Belter would come to my office in the morning.

  He arrived just before ten. I was sitting at the old upright piano, poking at it with my typing finger. I had prepared Belter’s report after breakfast. It hadn’t taken long, so I was giving the digit a little extra exercise, to try to keep it supple.

  Belter stood inside the door as if stunned when he found me playing. And I’ve never had a lesson.

  I stopped and greeted him. He appeared serious and clean, as he had each time I’d met him, but now, with his wife’s developing history, there was an odd look about him too. I wondered whether he had anywhere to go to relax, any friend to turn to.