Called by a Panther Read online

  “That's what we were afraid of. But he didn't seem like a policeman either.”

  “So what happened?”

  The Bear said, “When we carried the bags back to our car, I didn't get in. I circled round the house to see if the guy stayed put or followed us or what.”

  “And?”

  “He moved to where he could see us on the street.”

  “Well, well,” I said. “What did he look like?”

  “Black. Or rather, African-American. Quite tall, over six feet. Very thin. Dark. Short hair with a razor-cut part. He was maybe thirty. And his clothes were not very good.”

  “Did he see you?”

  “No.”

  “And then?”

  “He walked to the garage and looked around. Then he walked down the alley to 24th Street. There was an old flat-back there.”

  “Flat-back?”

  “Pickup truck. That's what we called them when I was a kid. Where I grew up.”

  I didn't ask where that was.

  The Bear said, “I got the license plate number.” She had slip of paper ready. Like the telephone number they'd given me before, it was a paste-up job.

  I said, “The guy showed interest at a critical time. Do you have any other reason to believe he's involved?”

  The Frog said, “I think I saw the man again later.”

  “Where was that?”

  “No,” she said. She shook her head. “I'm not going to tell you.”

  “Near where you live?”

  “Yes.”

  “What was he doing when you saw him?”

  “He stood in the street and looked at the house. He stayed there for quite a long time.”

  I asked, “How would he know where you lived?”

  “I think,” she said, “because the car we moved the explosives in was mine. We thought there was no risk. It was a lesson. I got rid of it right away.”

  If he had located her from her license plate it would raise questions about who the guy might be and who he might know.

  The Frog said, “I could be wrong about it being him.”

  “But you don't think so.”

  “No.”

  “How long ago did you buy the dynamite?”

  “The beginning of February,” the Frog said.

  “And when did you see the man again?”

  “About a week later.”

  “So nothing has happened for nearly three months?”

  “Not until now.”

  Not exactly a hot lead. I said, “How did you find a cooperative dynamite salesman?”

  “The original contact was not made here,” the Bear said.

  “So the man you dealt with wasn't local?”

  “Oh, he was local,” the Bear said. “But I made the initial contact in Boston.”

  I frowned. “What are we talking about? An Irish connection?”

  “Our plan,” the Bear said, “was to use a plastic explosive called semtex. That turned out to be hard to get, but in Boston I found someone who gave me the name of a man who would sell us dynamite here. But he's not involved, I'm sure.”

  The Frog nodded, so I said, “Is there anything else at all that might help me?”

  They looked at each other. “No,” the Frog said.

  “O.K.,” I said. “But I want to tell you something.”

  “What?” the Frog said.

  “Tomorrow I am having lunch with a friend of mine in the police. I don't know if you are going to waste more time and energy following me around but I just thought I'd tell you now so you don't get the wrong idea.”

  Ah, but what constitutes the rightness or wrongness of an idea? As soon as I closed the door behind them I got the idea to call my woman.

  She was home but she said, “I didn't expect to hear from you tonight. Is there some problem?”

  “I've just been talking to the Scum Front,” I said. “But don't tell anybody.”

  “Al, I've had a hard meeting and I'm not feeling very well and I'm in the middle of a conversation with Lucy. I'm not really in the mood for jokes.”

  I said, “No, I can see that. Sorry, kid. Poor taste.” Shortly afterward we hung up.

  Chapter Twenty Four

  HOW SIMPLE IS LIFE MEANT to be?

  In the morning I went to the Merchants Bank Building. I took the elevator to the fourth floor. I got off. I faced a young woman who sat behind a crescent-shaped desk.

  And as soon as I approached she looked up and said, “May I help you?”

  I said, “I hope so.”

  And she said, “I hope so too.”

  Life isn't like that. There had to be a catch.

  “May I ask,” I said, “were you here Friday afternoon?”

  “Oh, it's about the bomb scare.”

  I smiled. “Are you the Scum Front? Do I claim my reward?”

  “They didn't leave one, and if they did it wouldn't have gone off,” she said, “but it's awful scary, isn't it? I mean, the idea of a bomb, here. It's . . . like an intrusion.”

  “It is indeed,” I said. “But I'm not interested in bombs.”

  “Oh good,” she said. “I was so upset I couldn't keep my mind on my dancing all weekend.”

  “You danced all weekend?”

  “It's my other job.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “What do you want?”

  “It's about a woman. She got off the elevator here a little after three-thirty on Friday.”

  “Oh, you mean the woman in the houndstooth coat?”

  “You remember her?”

  “She must be real popular,” the dancing girl said.

  My heart beat faster because I knew what she was going to say next. I delivered my cue: “Why do you say that?”

  “Because somebody else asked me about her.”

  “When?”

  “Friday afternoon.”

  “What time? Do you remember?”

  “Oh, just a couple of minutes after she got off.”

  “The somebody else . . .?”

  “It was this Negro woman in a very expensive café au lait dress with tiny covered buttons down the front.”

  “And what did she want to know about the woman in the houndstooth coat?”

  “If I'd seen her and where she went.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “That she went to the stairs.”

  “And did the second woman go to the stairs too?”

  “Yup.”

  “Did she say why she was asking?”

  “No. She just asked,” Dancing Girl said. “Like you.”

  We looked at each other.

  I said, “I'm just a guy trying to do a job, miss, and if you can describe the second woman who came through around three-thirty Friday, that job would be made easier.”

  “Oh well,” Dancing Girl said. “Let me think now. The skirt was cut on the bias and draped sarong style. It was a real light jersey knit. She wore black suede boots and she had these gold earrings, three loops one inside the other. And she was wearing funny gloves.”

  “Funny?”

  “They were wool. They didn't go at all.”

  “Oh.”

  “She was maybe five six. Not fat or thin. And she wasn't one of the blue-black Negroes but she was pretty dark.”

  “Would you recognize her again?”

  “Her? The person?”

  “That's right.”

  “I don't know about that,” she said. “I know I'm not supposed to say it these days, but they look kind of the same to me, those people.”

  All the affirmative action in the world wasn't going to make Dancing Girl more interested in human beings than in the clothes they wore.

  “I'm going to level with you,” I said.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “I'm a private detective.” I took my license out and held it up for her to study.

  “Gee,” she said, “you know, I thought you were weird.”

  “That woman in the café au lait dress is someon
e I need to find. I think you could help a lot if you would let me come back with an artist.”

  “An artist?”

  “Someone to try to draw her from what you tell him.”

  “Oh, I don't know.”

  “We could do it here. Or we could do it after work. Whatever would be convenient for you.”

  “I don't want to get mixed up in anything.”

  “There won't be any trouble. It's not like that.”

  “I still don't know.”

  “I can pay you for your time, if that would help.”

  It helped.

  I used her telephone to call Graham Parkis.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I got a little gal who does stuff like that. She's terrific. She ought to be able to get downtown by, oh, two-thirty, three.”

  But Dancing Girl preferred to do it after work, so we arranged a meeting in the building lobby shortly after five.

  “It's going to cost you, Samson,” Parkis said to me.

  “How much?”

  He said a number. I agreed without dickering.

  I left Dancing Girl and walked up the stairs to the sixth-floor landing.

  I found the fire hose closet and opened the door.

  It was exactly as described, filled with looped cloth hose.

  A bomb taped to the back wall would only be found by somebody looking for it.

  Chapter Twenty Five

  MILLER, IN THE MIDDLE of a Monday, looked far less jaunty than he'd sounded on the phone the day before.

  “Don't even ask,” he said as I sat across from him.

  But I'd had a good morning. “I wouldn't believe what's been going on inside IPD, right?”

  “Damn right you wouldn't.”

  I laughed for a moment, but he seemed to think I was about as amusing as an ayatollah.

  I said, “You got to think about the good things in life, Jer. You got to remember there can't be flowers without rain.”

  “What's the deal here? You going to order, or what?”

  We ordered.

  But I persisted. “Cheer up,” I said. “I've got a favor to ask, just like the old days.”

  He narrowed his eyes and tried to see inside my brain. That was like the old days too. It constituted an advance of mood.

  “It's a license plate number. I want to know the name and address of the owner.”

  “Oh yeah? What's that about?”

  “It's a hot lead to finding the Scum Front.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  I wrote the number on a napkin.

  “Yeah, all right. If I get a chance,” he said. He put the napkin in his pocket.

  I said, “One day you're practically humping the phone with jokes and the next day I can't hardly get no civil word outta ya. Is something up? Janie come home early? Did the fair Wendy tell you about her other boyfriend, or her girlfriend?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that.”

  “Well, what is it like?”

  He stirred the sugar bowl. “I went into work today.”

  “That'll do it every time.”

  “See, the politicians are fuckin'-A bitched off because we haven't caught the Scummies yet. We were all pulling together there for a while, but now guys that patched up arguments are back fighting for territory. The whole thing's shit.”

  “So what is happening with the Scum Front?”

  He looked at me. “Happening? Nothing's happening, that's what's happening.”

  “So there wasn't a bomb?”

  “They called one in. Merchants Bank Building. Did I tell you?”

  “Yeah. But you said when your guys went to collect it no one was home.”

  “Right.”

  “So there really wasn't one?” I asked. “It's not that they found it but decided to say they hadn't? To cut off the publicity?”

  “That was considered a few weeks ago,” he said.

  “Was it?”

  “Nobody wanted to take the responsibility, in case it made the Scummies angry and pushed them into blowing someplace up.”

  “I can see that,” I said.

  “But the same nobodies are happy to put thumbscrews on everybody else. And when pressure is applied to people who are already busting their guts to catch the bad guys, all that happens is they begin to think about protecting their butts.”

  That too I could see.

  “So by screaming blue murder the politicians make it less likely they're going to get what they want.”

  Our food came.

  Miller and I have had more entertaining conversations. I might have done his mood some good by changing the subject to childhood or Vice President jokes. But I had my own problems. I asked him whether IPD had any serious leads on the Scum Front.

  “Leads?” He laughed, but it wasn't for fun. “They got nothing and they spend all day looking at it. They go through every place they know the Scummies have been and pick up every scrap of paper and piece of fingerprint and bit of dust and they fill the labs with it. They got a whole computer full of information. But they got no knowledge whatsoever.”

  “You sound like a fortune cookie.”

  “Yeah,” he said. A little smile. “You know what I think?” he said. “You want to know what I think?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think we're not going to catch them till they do goddamned blow something up. That's what I think.”

  “Oh.”

  “I just hope it's themselves. Or the goddamned people protecting them.”

  “Protecting them?”

  “Come on, Al! Somebody knows who they are. Got to. But in the last four weeks we haven't had a tenth the phone calls we had at the beginning. That's because the bombs don't go off. The public likes them now. It's crazy, because they're fucking dangerous. But people aren't worried the way they used to be. And if they don't make a mistake, it's going to take somebody getting killed.”

  I nodded with sympathy.

  “Meanwhile the Department goes from bad to worse. Used to be merely the troops not getting support from the top. Now the whole thing's coming to pieces.”

  I waited for him; he had more to say.

  “Hey, you know what the psycho guys say?”

  “What psycho guys? I thought all you guys were psycho.”

  “The Criminal Psychological Profile Consultants, Albert. You don't think in a major investigation we're not going to take advantage of the brainy gentlemen who think they can close their eyes and mental up a picture of our perpetrators. Just pass them a sketch pad and a set of fucking crayons.”

  “What do they say?”

  “You'll like this,” he said.

  “Promise?”

  “They say the Scum Front is made up of people who aren't normal.”

  I laughed for him.

  “Not normal. Good stuff, huh? See, they don't fit the `typical terrorist profile.’ ”

  “Oh.”

  “Most terrorists set off bombs, see. These don't.”

  “Got it.”

  “They think we're dealing with `disaffected middle-class sociopaths.' Maybe guys who lost their jobs at one of the big companies, and maybe went nuts being at home with their wives.”

  “Oh.”

  “Ever since we got this high-powered analysis there have been guys doing nothing but working through lists of people that lost their jobs in this city the last couple of years. Think about the phone calls: `Hello. You lose your job last year? Still out of work? Too bad. You haven't been leaving bombs around by any chance?’ ”

  I smiled.

  “You want to know how much the psycho-ologists charge to come up with crap like that?”

  “Yeah. What?”

  “I wish I knew. I'd go to fuckin' night school. I really would.”

  Chapter Twenty Six

  CAPTAIN MILLER WENT back to work. I stayed behind. The waiter asked if I wanted anything else. I ordered another napkin.

  “Was that to use here or shall I wrap it to go?” he said, talking himse
lf out of a tip. But he probably thought it was worth it.

  I needed the napkin to doodle on while I thought about the woman in wool gloves that didn't go with her café au lait dress. She was the hot favorite as the person who picked up the bomb. Discovering her existence was a major piece of luck.

  But there was no time for celebration. Delay might result in just the explosion and death Miller was so confident of. I felt the pressure; I needed to find Wool Glove Woman.

  Of course the artist's drawing was the next big step, but I would need to show it to someone. Here the Animal brigade was clearly my best bet. If Wool Glove Woman knew to follow the Frog, the Frog might well know who Wool Glove Woman was.

  The problem was that I did not yet have a way to get in touch with the Animals.

  So I packed my napkin and went home. Maybe the Scummies had acceded to my requirement. Maybe I was still on a roll.

  I had a visitor when I returned to my office, all right. But it did not hop, growl or beat its chest.

  Quentin Quayle looked awful. Sleeplessness did not agree with him. Nor, perhaps, did sitting on my office stairs through May showers.

  He stood up as I opened the door.

  I unlocked the office and went in.

  He didn't need an embossed invitation.

  “I'm so cold,” he said. “Where have you been?”

  “Working, Poet. I told you I'm busy.”

  I went to my desk. There had been seven calls but I didn't want to play the messages in public. I found an earplug and said, “Excuse me a minute,” while he sorted himself out on the chair.

  Five of the calls were from him. But another was from Frank, who said that he'd pulled a few strings and that the first of my TV ads would be broadcast on Cab-Co tonight. The seventh call was without a message.

  By the time I began the rewinding procedure, Quentin Quayle was comfortable enough to be irritated.

  “I am paying you,” he said.

  When I didn't answer—it wasn't a question, was it?—he said, “Well?”

  “You want your money back?”

  “Have you achieved anything with this work you've been out doing all day?”

  “Quite a lot,” I said, “but I haven't looked for Charlotte Vivien's gentleman friend yet.”

  “Why not?”

  “For one thing, your instruction was to follow her late afternoons and at night.”

  For another I had forgotten about her, but good Go-for-It Detectives don't share that kind of tiny truth with clients.