Bitter Truth (21 page)

“What can I do for you, Mr. Carl?”

“I’m a lawyer,” I said.

“Oh, a lawyer. Had Burford only known he would have negotiated a better deal. I think he mistook you for a man of principle.”

“I’m representing the sister of your former neighbor, Jacqueline Shaw.” That was technically a lie, but it wouldn’t matter to Peckworth. “I wanted to ask you some questions about what you saw the day of her death.”

“Nothing,” he said, turning his slack face away from me. “I already told the police that.”

“What you originally told the police was that you saw a UPS man in the hallway the day of her death. Which was interesting since no UPS guy had signed in that day. But later you changed your story and said you saw the guy two or three days before. The change conveniently matched the guest register at the front desk, so the police bought it. But the change of memory sounded peculiar to me and I wanted to ask you about it.”

“It happens,” he said. “I’m older than I was, my memory has slipped.”

“This man you saw, can you describe him?”

“I already told that to the police.”

“So you shouldn’t mind telling it to me.”

“Tall and handsome, broad shoulders, dark curly hair. His brown shirt and slacks, I remember, were impeccably pressed.”

“As if they had just come out of the box.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

I opened my briefcase and took out a file. Inside was a folder with eight small black-and-white photos arranged in two rows and glued to the cardboard. The photos were head shots, all of men between twenty-five and thirty-five, all with dark hair, all facing forward, all aiming blank stares at the camera. It was a photo spread, often used in lieu of a lineup in police investigations. I stepped down onto the base of the passion pit with the photo spread. The ground tumbled when I stepped on it and then pushed back. It was a giant water mattress. I fought to remain upright while I stumbled over to where Peckworth reclined. Standing before him, maintaining my balance steady as she goes, I handed the spread to him.

“Do you recognize the UPS man you saw in these photos?”

While he examined the photos I examined his eyes. I could see their gaze pass over the photos one after another and then stop at the picture in the bottom left-hand corner. He stared at it for a while and then moved his eyes around, as if to cover the tracks of his stare, but he had recognized the face in the bottom left-hand corner, just as I suspected he would. I had received the spread in discovery in one of my prior cases and that figure on the bottom left had a face you wouldn’t forget, dark, sculpted, Elvesine. A guy like Peckworth would never forget the likes of Peter Cressi or his freshly pressed brown uniform. I wondered if he had made him an offer for the uniform instantly upon seeing it on him.

Peckworth handed me back the spread. “I don’t recognize anyone.”

“You’re sure?”

“Perfectly. I’m sorry that you wasted so much of your time.” He reached for the phone console beside him and pressed a button. “Burford, Mr. Carl is ready to leave.”

“Who told you to change your story, Mr. Peckworth? That’s what I’m really interested in.”

“Burford will show you out.”

“Someone with power, I bet. You don’t seem the type to scare easy.”

“Have a good day, Mr. Carl.”

Just then the door behind me opened and Burford came in, smiling his smile, and behind Burford was some gnomelike creature in a blue, double-breasted suit. He was short and flat-faced and impossibly young, but with the shoulders of a bull. I must have been a foot and a half taller than he but he outweighed me by fifty pounds. Look in the dictionary under gunsel.

“Come, come, Mr. Carl,” said Burford. “It’s time to leave. I’m sure you have such important things to do today.”

I nodded and turned and made my careful unbalanced way across the great water mattress. When I reached the wraparound steps leading to the door I turned around again. “An operation like this, as strange as it would appear to authorities, must pay a hefty street tax. Probably cuts deeply into your profits.”

“Let’s go, Mr. Carl,” said Burford. “No time for nonsense. Time to leave. Everett, give Mr. Carl a hand.”

The gunsel skipped by Burford with an amazing grace and grabbed hold of my arm before I could grab it away. His grip was crushing.

“I might be able to do something about the tax,” I said. “I have certain contacts in the taxing authority that might be very grateful for your information.”

Everett gave a tug that nearly separated my arm from its socket and I was letting him pull me up and out of that room when Peckworth said, “Give us a minute.”

After Burford and Everett closed the door behind them, Peckworth asked me, “What could you do about it?”

“How much are you paying?”

“Too much.”

“If the information proves as valuable as I expect, I might be able to convince my contacts to reduce your tax substantially.”

“Is that so? And do we even know who is in charge after yesterday’s dance macabre on the expressway?”

“I’m betting the old bull holds his ground.”

“And if he does, and you get me the break you say you can get me, what do you get out of it?”

I was about to say nothing, but then realized that nothing wouldn’t satisfy the suspicions of a man like Peckworth. There had to be an angle to it for him to buy in. “I get twenty percent of the reduction.”

“That seems steep.”

“My normal contingency fee is a third, but I’m giving you a break out of the goodness of my heart.”

Peckworth nodded and said, “I understand.” They always know you have an angle when you say you’re doing something out of the goodness of your heart. “You must understand something, Mr. Carl. We don’t choose the things that give us pleasure in this life, we only choose whether or not to pursue them. I have chosen to pursue my pleasures and with the money I earn in my side enterprise I am able to do just that. But the life is more precarious than you can imagine and those thugs are killing my cash flow.”

“Well, that’s the deal,” I said. “Take it or leave it.”

He thought about it for a moment, I could tell, because his brow knitted.

“I had some visitors,” he said, finally. “Two men, one very well dressed, short and dapper. The other a stooge in an impossible maroon suit. They suggested that I was mistaken as to the date I saw the UPS man outside Miss Shaw’s door. After they explained it all to me I realized that I must have been.”

“Did they give you their names?”

“No, but they did give me the names of a few of my suppliers.”

“You mean from the auctions.”

“Yes.”

“And that troubled you.”

“Yes.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “Were these suppliers maybe under a certain legal age?”

“Never underestimate the delicate piquancy of the young, Mr. Carl.”

“So suddenly the entirety of your pleasure quotient was at risk.”

“Exactly, Mr. Carl. You’re very quick for a lawyer.”

“Any idea who these men were, or who they represented?”

“None, but I knew enough to step away. There is an aroma that follows particularly dangerous men.”

“And the stooge smelled bad, huh?”

“Not the stooge, Mr. Carl. They are a dime a dozen. Beside being monstrously strong, Everett is very loyal and can handle those that come my way with relative ease. It was the well-dressed man, extremely handsome, with even white teeth and groomed gray hair. There was something frightfully languorous about him, but even that languor couldn’t hide the scent of danger he carried.”

“What did he look like, an accountant?”

“Oh no, Mr. Carl. If he was anything he was a funeral director, but one who never had to worry about supply.” He leaned forward and said, “If your friends can lower my tax and take care of these men for me, Mr. Carl, you can take your full one third.”

“That’s very generous of you,” I said. I reached for the door and then stopped reaching and turned around. “Bottom left picture was your UPS guy, wasn’t it?”

“There was a brutality to his native good looks that I found unforgettable.”

“Mr. Peckworth, I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but for someone who has chosen to pursue his pleasures with such devotion, you don’t seem so very happy.”

“Mr. Carl,” he said, with a straight, stolid face, “I’m so happy I could burst.”

25

E
VERETT LUGGED ME through the apartment and spun me into the hallway. Burford blew me a kiss before he closed the door. A fond farewell, I’m sure, but I was glad to be left alone in the hallway. I didn’t take the elevator down, instead I went into the emergency exit. The stairwell was ill lit and smelled furry. The door hissed slowly shut on me. When I tried to open it again I discovered, as I had expected, that it was locked.

I started climbing up the stairwell, twisting around the landings as I rose. I tried each door on my ascent and discovered each to be locked, until the last. This one I opened, slowly, and found myself on the roof. It was flat and tarred, with assorted risers here and there, and a three-foot ledge all the way around. Scattered about were plastic lounge chairs, which I imagined were used by bare-chested sunbathers on hot summer afternoons. The knob on the outside of the door wouldn’t turn, but all those melanoma seekers would need a way to get back inside once the sun dimmed. I searched the floor and found a wooden wedge, well worn, which I jammed into the crack. With the door stuck open I stepped onto the roof.

I wasn’t really concerned with the roof of the Cambium. What I wanted to see were the surrounding roofs. The building fronted on the park and one side bordered on Nineteenth Street, as the road continued its way south after being interrupted by Rittenhouse Square. Behind the Cambium was a building three flights shorter, so that was probably out. But to the side opposite Nineteenth Street was another fancy-pantsed doorman building, whose roof was roughly the same level, separated only by a six-foot gap. The drop between the two was deadly enough, but six feet was not too long a jump for an athlete with a brave heart. Too long for me, of course, as I was no athlete, which I learned painfully enough in junior high gym class, and my heart was more timorous than brave, but not too long for a committed gunman out to kill an heiress, for my client Peter Cressi.

It was the cellophane candy wrapper Cressi had tossed out in the Reptile House of the zoo that clued me, of course, one end open, one end still twisted, just like the wrapper Caroline had found behind her sister’s toilet. It took a dose of meditation for my unconscious to show it to me because to my conscious mind it didn’t make any sense, Cressi killing Jacqueline Shaw. He had nothing to gain. But others did, others who may have been hunting for a fortune. Maybe Eddie, maybe Oleanna, maybe some other legatee in line for a great deal of money with one or more of the heirs to the Reddman fortune dead. There was someone, I figured, who had enough to gain from Jacqueline’s death to pay for it. And that someone paid enough to allow the killer to purchase a hundred and seventy-nine fully automatic assault rifles, three grenade launchers, and a flamethrower from an undercover cop. This was where Cressi’s money had come from, I now was sure. He had probably run into whoever wanted to do the killing while shaking down Eddie Shaw for the half-million Eddie owed Jimmy Vigs. He had been nosing around, harassing Eddie, harassing his relatives, making his presence known, when an offer was made. And then, after the offer and an acceptance and a meeting of the minds, Peter Cressi had dressed in a UPS outfit and gone to the roof of that building over there and jumped the six-foot gap and rushed down the stairs of the Cambium to knock casually on Jacqueline’s door with the words, “UPS, ma’am.” And after the door was opened and Peter had entered and done his lucrative wet work, he had gone into the bathroom to straighten up, to smooth back his hair, to tuck in his shirt, all the while with Jacqueline hanging there, twisting from the chandelier, probably still moaning out loud. And to freshen his breath, of course, Cressi would pop into his mouth one of the mints he had boosted from Tosca’s and, from force of habit, toss aside the wrapper, just as he had tossed aside the wrapper at the zoo. Sweet Peter.

Dante was in it with him, that was clear too. It was Earl Dante who went to cover Cressi’s tracks after Peckworth had spotted Cressi outside Jacqueline’s door. It was Earl Dante who had convinced Peckworth to change his story and so it must have been Earl fucking Dante who was directing Cressi as Cressi hired himself out as a hit man to get the bucks to purchase the guns that would allow Dante to win his war against the boss. What a little scab, that Dante. He had picked me as a pallbearer and probably advised Raffaello to have a chat with me, all the while knowing there was a white van with a hole in the side waiting to slide up to the Cadillac and blast away. What a murderous pus-encrusted little scab.

I only had one question left now, as I backed away from the edge of the roof and stepped toward the open door. Who, I wondered, had left the little wedge of wood in the door crack for Peter Cressi before Cressi made his leap?

I went back down the stairs, checking each door all the way down. On the third floor the door opened, even though the knob wouldn’t turn. The latch was taped down, as at the Watergate the evening Nixon’s hoods were discovered by the night watchman. Someone moving surreptitiously between floors, I guessed, a little hanky-panky that the elevator operator had no business knowing. It wasn’t much of a tape job, but it was all that was needed and I was sure that whoever had left the wooden wedge had done the same type of tape job to let Peter into the eighth floor. I ripped the tape off the lock with a quick jerk, just as Cressi must have done on his way back up from Jackie’s apartment.

When I came out of the emergency exit in the lobby, the doorman gave me a look. I guess he was wondering what I was doing in the stairwell. I guess he was wondering where I had left my tie.

“Nice building,” I said.

He nodded and said nothing.

“I hope you’re not still sore about how I spoke to you earlier. I had never met Mr. Peckworth before so I didn’t understand.”

“Everything, it is fine, sir,” he said with a formality that let me know everything, it was not fine. I would need to build some bridges with the doorman.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

His eyes slitted. “Roberto,” he said.

“You like cigars, Roberto?”

He tilted his head at me. “A good cigar, sure, yes.”

“You like them thick or thin?”

“You can tell much about a man, I’ve found, by the cigar he smokes.”

“Thick then, I take it. I’ll be back in a minute.”

I walked across Rittenhouse Square and then east to Sixteenth Street and down to Sansom. A few steps east on Sansom Street I walked into the Black Cat Cigar Company. It was like walking into a humidor, warm and dry and redolent of fall leaves. “I need to buy an impressive box of thick cigars,” I told the stooped gray man with an unlit stogie in his teeth.

“How impressive?” he barked.

“Oh, about a hundred dollars impressive,” I said. “And I’ll need a receipt.”

Roberto took a bowie knife out of his pocket and slit open the seal on the box. He held up one of the thick and absurdly long cigars and rolled it in his fingers, feeling the texture of the tobacco. He smelled it carefully, from one end to the other and back again. With the knife he cut off a piece of cellophane and licked the end of the cigar as if it were a nipple and then licked it again. He finally smiled and put the cigar back into the box.

“I have a few questions I’d like you to answer,” I said.

“Surprise, surprise,” said Roberto.

“Jacqueline Shaw, your former tenant. I represent her sister.”

“And you think you can buy me with a box of cigars. You think my honor can be bought so cheaply?”

“Of course not. They’re yours, whether you help or not. And I wouldn’t call them cheap. I just felt bad about how I snapped at you before and wanted to make amends.”

He pursed his lips at me.

“Now, in addition to that, I do just happen to have some questions about Jacqueline Shaw.”

“I’ve already told the police everything.”

“I’m sure you did, Roberto. And Detective McDeiss has even provided me with a copy of your guest register for the day of her death. What I’d like to know is whether anybody ever went up to her place without signing in?”

“All guests and visitors must to sign in.”

“Yes, so you’ve already told me, Roberto. But I noticed Mr. Grimes didn’t sign in that day.”

He stared at me stiffly. “He was living there.”

“Yes, but I figure he wasn’t a listed owner of the co-op so, technically, he was a guest. What I want to know, Roberto, is who else could pop up to her apartment without signing in.”

He hesitated a moment, stroking the smooth top of the box with his fingers. “These are Prince of Wales, fancy cigars just to make up for a harsh word.”

“I have an overactive conscience. And like I said, they’re yours whether you help or not. All I’m trying to do is figure out exactly what happened the day of her death.”

I smiled. He examined my smile carefully, searching not for the insincerity that was surely there but for the glint of disrespect that was not. “Well, Mr. Grimes could just walk in,” he said finally, his right hand on the box of Macanudos as if it were a Bible. “And since it was a family place, her brothers, Mr. Edward, Mr. Robert, and her sister, were allowed up whenever they wanted. Mrs. Shaw of course went up often.”

“The mother, you mean.”

“Yes, and the grandmother, too, before she died. She used to come visit the old lady who lived there before, years and years ago. Mr. Harrington, too, came frequently. He paid the maintenance fees each month to me personally, gave out the Christmas tips. And the gardener would come up to take care of her plants. She had many plants but she wasn’t very good with them.”

“Nat, you’re talking about.”

“That’s right. With the red eye. A quiet man, but he always smiled at me and said hello.”

“You told all this to the cops?”

“They did not ask.”

“All right, the day of Jacqueline’s death, who came up and didn’t sign in?”

“I didn’t start work until twelve that day. The only one I remember coming in was Mr. Edward. He seemed to be in a hurry, but he left before Miss Jacqueline arrived.”

“You sure of that?”

“Oh yes, I remember. He rushed in very harried, like he was being chased. I told him Miss Shaw was not home but he insisted on checking for himself. I opened the door for him on the way out and he didn’t even nod at me.”

“Did you tell that to the cops?”

“They did not ask.”

“You said it was an old family place?”

“Yes, the Shaws had it for as long as I’ve worked here. The old cripple lady was in it and then it was empty for a while before Miss Jacqueline moved in. The family only recently sold it, after the unfortunate accident.”

“It’s funny how many hangings are accidental. Is it a nice place?”

“Very.”

“Well lucky for the Hirsches, then. One last thing. Any of your tenants besides Jacqueline belong to some New Age religious group out in Mount Airy?”

“How the tenants pray is none of my business. I’m just the doorman.”

“Fair enough.” I winked. “Enjoy the smokes, Roberto.”

“Yes, I will. You come some afternoon, we can savor one together,” he said, as he stepped from behind his desk and opened the door for me.

“I’d like that,” I said.

I walked again through Rittenhouse Square and down to Walnut. I headed east for a bit and then quickly turned on my heels and headed west. I saw no one behind me similarly turn. I darted into a bookstore on Walnut, just east of Eighteenth. As I browsed through the magazines I checked the plate window and saw nothing suspicious. Then I took the escalator to the second floor and went to an area in the rear, by the mysteries, and found the phone. With the receiver in my hand I swung around and saw no one paying the least bit of attention to me, which is just the way I liked it. I dialed.

“Tosca’s,” said a voice.

“Let me talk to table nine,” I said, roughing up my throat like I was Tom Waits to confuse the guys at the other end of the tap.

“I’m’a sorry. There’s no one at’a table nine right now.”

“Well when you see the man at table nine again tell him the scout needs to talk to him.”

“I don’t’a know when it will be
occupato
again.”

“Tell him the scout knows where the money came from and who’s behind it all,” I said. “Tell him I need to talk to him and that it’s urgent,” and before he could ask for anything more I hung up the phone.

It was as I was walking out of the bookstore that I spotted the late edition of the
Daily News,
whose front-page photograph instantly set my teeth to clattering.