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Authors: Eric Wight

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BOOK: The Last Hand
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“His wallet?”
“Empty of cash. Everything else was there.”
“Was there a sign of any fight?”
“Forensic said he was clean. No skin under his fingernails, that sort of thing. They collected a few hairs and fibers from his bathrobe, but they will all be his, probably.”
“So he allowed someone to get close to him and they stabbed him. Who found him?”
“The janitor and the police. It was Saturday morning and on Saturday mornings Jerry Lucas–his friends called him Jerry–always went for a walk with a friend he had known in law school, a widower. It was their weekly constitutional. On this morning the friend waited at home for Lucas's knock, but Lucas, usually so punctual, hadn't appeared by ten-thirty and he became concerned. At first he was concerned that he had forgotten that Lucas had told him he would be away in Greece or somewhere for a couple of weeks. He was afraid he was reaching the age of forgetfulness, as he put it.”
“How old is he?”
Smith consulted his notes. “Fifty-five, sir. But he was more concerned because he belongs to the school of psychology which says that if you forget an appointment you are making a statement about your feelings for the person you are meeting. Some such crap. But this was a regular date, so to speak, so he phoned Lucas's apartment
and got no answer. He went off on his walk alone then, because nine times out of ten these things have a simple explanation, nothing psychological at all.
“When he returned from the walk, he phoned Lucas again, and when he got no reply he phoned Lucas's law partner, a man named Derek Fury, who would know if Lucas had gone away, but he knew about nothing like that, so the partner asked the police to rouse the superintendent to take a look, and that's when they found him. You don't want the patrol car's report, do you, sir? What I've told you is my own amalgam of all the reports I've read so far.”
“I'm getting the story. Keep going.”
“Now we move on to our investigation, starting with the scene-of- the-crime boys, I think. We found no signs of a struggle, some evidence of a minor robbery, nothing much in the way of other evidence beyond the knife.”
“They got fingerprints?”
“The knife was wiped clean. They got some from the knife block on the counter, but they don't match any on file. So if they find a suspect they'll be able to say pretty clearly if she held the knife, but not having the prints on file rather damages the idea that it was a whore, doesn't it? It would in Glasgow.”
“I don't think every hooker is on file. You can check it with the Vice Squad, but these girls come and go. New ones arrive from the country every day.”
“This one must have been here long enough to get connected to Lucas. She came to the apartment, he was waiting, so he must have ordered her up. It sounds to me like a regular appointment.”
“Suppose she's just a girl he ran across in a bar, making a little extra on the side, a student, maybe.”
“We're dealing with a ‘hoor,' though, are we not? It's hard to fit the painted image even onto a theater arts student, say, trying to earn her tuition.”
“Keep going.”
Smith returned to his notes. “The Homicide Unit obviously had to begin by looking for this woman, and they've spent a long time and a lot of manpower. They had a description of her. Did I tell you
she had blond hair with silver streaks, maybe to match her boots? It all adds up to a striking picture.
“They had lots of pictures of Lucas, of course, though he wasn't so memorable, the kind of face you see in the business section every day having just been made chairman of some company: heavy jowls, grey crinkly hair, white teeth.
“They showed his picture and her description around, but they found no one who recognized them, and they did not have the feeling that the ladies on Jarvis Street were clamming up, either. The other women on the street had no ideas, and none of them had been cruised by Lucas, so the squad came up blank. Either the woman had disappeared after a very short stay, or she had never worked in the area.” He looked up at Salter expectantly.
“That's it?”
“Somebody else thinks she worked the street. Several of the women interviewed by the squad reported that someone else had been around, asking the same questions, with the same description.”
“Someone who knew what she looked like?”
“Apparently so.”
“That doesn't make sense.”
“Of what, sir?”
Salter knew he looked confused and tried to make light of it. “I have a feeling about this woman that she was no hooker at all, but someone dressed up to kill Lucas. Maybe even sent by someone else.”
“A
plot,
do you think, sir?” Smith gave the word an ironic resonance.”
“The last time it happened, it was, yes.”
Smith waited for an explanation.
“This reminds me of another case I had.” Salter swallowed his embarrassment. “Come on, Smitty. Think. If I'm right, who would have been hawking her description up and down Jarvis?”
“Someone who thought she
was
a hooker and had her description? Someone not acquainted with your theory that she was just dressed up for the night?”
“You think I'm full of shit?”
“I'm trying to grapple with the problem, sir. There's only one
answer, is there not? It was someone who saw her that night who hasn't told us about it.”
“Keep going.”
“Lucas's killer, in fact.”
“Why is he looking for her now?”
“He thinks she can identify him. That right?”
“It works, doesn't it?”
“We'd better find her before he does.”
“If I'm right, then she's disappeared, or her costume has.”
“So while he's looking for her, we'll look for him?”
“Let's keep thinking about it.”
“In case you're wrong, you mean? In case she is a whore, like the squad believes.”
“Then who is this guy?”
“Her pimp?”
Salter wasn't listening. “
Now
I'm glad you're here, Smitty, because you can cover my ass, see. While I follow my hunch, you will go the regular route. Assume she's a hooker, and go find her.”
“We'll stay in touch, will we? You and me?”
Salter grinned. “Oh, sure. Let's get back to your report now. You finished with the homicide investigation?”
“Nearly. They've interviewed everyone except the sister, Flora Lucas, who was away at the time of the homicide, and hasn't found time to talk to them since she returned. They interviewed Lucas's law partner, who is mystified as to why anyone would want to kill Lucas, and feels sure it was a random act. He says he knows nothing about Lucas's sex life. He was surprised by the idea of a prostitute, though in the absence of a girlfriend or mistress he had always assumed that Lucas had an ‘arrangement' as he called it, though nothing as flashy as a ‘hoor.'”
Salter said, “What's all this about Flora Lucas being too busy to see us? Since when did homicide detectives take that kind of crap? Her brother's been stabbed, and …”
“She's an MPP, sir. Her appointment book is crammed, especially after she's been away. She didn't get back until a couple of days ago, because when she got the news she was sick, in a Costa Rican hospital. She came back as soon as she could travel.”
“Call her office and tell her I'll be there at ten, or eleven or twelve, whatever is the least inconvenient for her. But I will talk to her tomorrow morning.”
“Aye, so you will. In the meantime, will I …”
“Talk to the detectives who had the case-Barlow and Jensen?–about the net they put out for Miss Silver Boots. See if it's worth following up. Maybe you and I should have a look at the area. But tonight, when the tenants are home, go around the block again, find anyone who saw her, that night or any other time. Especially Lucas's neighbors. Were they aware of hookers calling on a regular basis? Did they see any other visitors? Ever? Did they know anything at all about him? Did they hear anything through the walls? I'll catch up with you here tomorrow.”
A feeling that he had not been fully briefed ought to have made Salter wary, but it was having the opposite effect. He was fairly sure now that if Marinelli had thought the case was easily wrapped up, then he, Salter, would not have gotten it. The reason that he
had
gotten it was the probable difficulty of solving it–homicide investigations decay rapidly after the first day–and the possible peripheral involvement of politicians. If he blundered he would make headlines.
Having come to the conclusion that he could wind up as the goat, Salter considered his position calmly as he confirmed to himself that, this close to retirement, he didn't care, and certainly had no intention of proceeding cautiously.
Salter watched Joe Lichtman tuck himself into the corner of the back court, ready to spring forward and smash back his serve. For twenty-five minutes (about as long as he could play these days) Salter had been hitting his right-hand service as hard as he could to the same spot on the wall so that it came back to Lichtman at shoulder height. It gave him a big advantage over Lichtman for the first ten minutes. Then, as always, the serve had slowed down, just enough to give Lichtman a chance to hit it, but not so easy as to make Salter need to search for a different serve to finish the game. So far they were even in games, and he was ahead by two points in the third and final game, and needed a point to win. Salter decided that now was the moment to see if Lichtman was watching carefully.
They had been playing together for fifteen years. Salter's partners had steadily diminished in number, through death or retirement from the game–retirements that were usually a giving in to age, or obesity, or the fear of a heart attack. Only two men were left with whom he played regularly, only two who were prepared to die with their sneakers on: Lichtman, the lawyer, and Toogood, the chartered accountant. Toogood had become egg-shaped and bald over the years, but he remained light on his feet and retained an extraordinarily hard backhand–it was his only decent shot–which Salter couldn't return. They also were about even.
If anything, Lichtman had lost weight over the last ten years as he had become absorbed in the pastime of exercising his body, a
pastime which had become a preoccupation. Nowadays when Salter arived at the club, he found Lichtman in the exercise room stretching himself, and after their game he moved on to the rowing machines to work on his stomach. Unlike the swelling elliptoid of Toogood, Lichtman in the shower looked to Salter like an arrangement of various-size balls, joined with rope and covered with skin. His biceps and his calves were fist-size iron balls, jiggling up and down. His buttocks were two cannonballs that looked as if they would hurt to sit on. Two lines of ping-pong balls rippled down the center of his stomach on either side of his navel. Balls appeared on his shoulders when he raised his arm to soap his head, and recently he had completed the effect by shaving his head, claiming it was more comfortable in the summer; but Salter suspected it was actually because Lichtman liked to present the image of a hard iron ball growing out of his shoulders.
Lichtman was fit; it was his big advantage over everyone in the club over fifty (he was sixty-four). So far he had never beaten Salter decisively; that is, never twice in a row. Today he hoped to.
Salter had more modest ambitions. He didn't mind if Lichtman, who had been gaining on him steadily since Salter's easy victories of ten years before, finally beat him, he told himself. He would satisfy his own long-held ambition simply by continuing to play. When he had learned to play, late in life as he thought then, in his early forties, he had read in the club magazine of a member of seventy who “still played twice a week.” The phenomenon was referred to in the same admiring way people used to speak of the old king of Norway, who continued to play tennis at ninety.
Salter had no idea at the time whether the seventy-year-old member had achieved something of real significance, but as the years passed he remembered the story of that old member and set himself the lifetime objective of playing two games in the week after his seventieth birthday. In the meantime, his day-to-day ambition was to continue to keep Lichtman and Toogood at bay.
Now Salter lifted his racket, Lichtman crouched ready to spring, and Salter patted the ball just hard enough to make it plop off the wall into safe territory three feet in front of Lichtman's racket, as the lawyer waited for the fast smash at shoulder height that Salter
always
served. Lichtman sprang, but not in time; he connected, groveling, so poorly that the ball banged into the tin.
“Motherfucker,” Lichtman said. (He was the exception among Salter's partners, using obscenities lavishly and with relish.) “Prick,” he added in a conversational tone. “Try that again.”
“I don't need to,” Salter said. “That's game.”
“Cocksucker!!” Lichtman agreed, then leaned on his racket for a second, smiling. “All right. I had you, you know that?”
Salter affected a look of puzzlement. “When?”
“The whole game. Right from the first couple of points. You know that. I had you. It was my game right up to the end.”
“I got lucky then, I guess.”
“That's
exactly
what happened. You got lucky. Fuck-pig. I was playing
way
better than you today.” Lichtman smiled again. “Ah, shit. Still, if you don't take it seriously, it's just a game, isn't it? Come and buy me a drink.”
 
 
In the health club's bar, Lichtman sipped on a large glass of orange juice while Salter swilled his beer. “When do you allow yourself a beer?” Salter asked.
“I
allow
myself one anytime. I just don't drink the stuff.”
“Or any other booze, or coffee, or tea, eh? What do you eat, Joe? Are you a vegetarian?”
“I don't eat carcass meat, if that's what you mean.”
“What other kind is there?”
“I don't eat fish, either. Eggs are okay once in a while. I'm not rigid about it.”
“Yes you are. You're a fanatic, you know that?”
“That's what my wife says, too.”
“She has to cope with you.”
Lichtman shook his head. “She left me when I stopped eating chicken.”
“What's it in aid of, Joe? Are you a Buddhist? Or trying to live forever? Or just want to improve the quality of the few years you have left?” Salter assumed a mock-solemn tone for the last few words.
“I'm doing it for its own sake.” Lichtman's fatless, knobby face
grew dark with shyness. “I'm interested in my body. It started out with just getting in shape, but I got involved in it. I'd like my body to work as efficiently as possible, so I keep it tuned up and try to provide the best kind of fuel.”
“Why? You thinking of winning the seniors' marathon?”
“I just want to get nature's best performance out of myself. The marathon would be too much of an overload. Think of it like this: for me, my body is a garden, something I cultivate. I fertilize it, water it and keep the soil receptive to new growth. I'd no more feed it liquor or meat juice than I would feed them to a rose bush. They are poisons. Am I making sense?”
“You're mad, you know that? We've been playing for twenty years, so I'm entitled to say that. Why do you play squash, then? There must be a more efficient set of exercises.”
“Two reasons. One: the real test of a garden is what it will grow. Squash allows me to test my body, to see if the latest modifications of exercise and diet have measurably improved my game.”
“And the other reason?”
“To eventually beat the shit out of you.”
Salter laughed. “In the meantime, I, sack of putrifying carcass meat laced with chemical additives that I am, will continue to whip your ass, even when I'm hung over. So cultivate your garden, and much good may it do you.”
Lichtman smiled, knowing that in the end he must win, all of it. “I hear you're investigating the Lucas murder,” he said.
Salter, slightly jolted, said, “Where would you have heard that? I thought you stayed away from criminals.”
Lichtman nodded. “I do contracts, mainly. Actually, I picked it up at a lunch club I belong to. Mainly retired lawyers. One of them was asking did anyone know you. I told him we played squash. He said Calvin Gregson had asked him about you, and then it came up that you were on the Lucas case.”
“You know Gregson?”
“A little bit.”
“He seems a bit of a dandy.”
“How do you mean?”
“The suit, the tie with horses on it …”
“Tie? With horses? What color?”
“Yellow, I think.”
Lichtman laughed. “That's new. I haven't seen that. Is he still wearing riding shoes? Yes? I've got a theory about Calvin. He reminds me of a character in a story somewhere who is slowly being transformed–what's the word? metamorphosed?-into someone else. You know the story.”
“Pinocchio?”
“No, but that's the idea.”
“A werewolf story? You know–one day he looks down and his hands are sprouting hair.”
“Maybe that's what I'm thinking of. Whatever it is, I'm convinced Calvin is changing his shape, bit by bit. We'll have to wait to see where he ends up. At the moment it looks like ‘English country gent.'”
“I'll let you know if he gets there when I'm watching.”
“If he buys one of those flat caps, that would tell you.”
The two men enjoyed Lichtman's fancy for a few moments, then he resumed. “Maybe he's just bored. You know, reached fifty with all the money he'll ever need and not getting a kick out of it anymore.
“There are people you can go to, consultants who specialize in remaking you from the outside in, kind of the opposite of psychiatrists. They start by changing your wardrobe. They've analyzed Gregson's problem and come up with a new image for him. If you see him walking through the Eaton Center with a pack of foxhounds, give me a call.” Lichtman sipped his juice. “Actually, I kind of like the guy. He's fun to watch, in court or out, and most of the lawyers I know are boring as hell.”
“You ever meet Lucas?”
“Oh, yes, I knew him a little bit, too, but he was much more of a social type than I am. Moved in diferent circles, you might say. You wouldn't see him in a place like this, for example. But he used to belong to my book group, before I joined. I saw him at a concert once, talking to another member of the club, woman named Louise Wilder. They weren't together, just chatting.
“Is there anyone in your group who was there when Lucas was a member?”
“Most of them. I'm the new boy. But Sylvia Sparrow, our leader, is the one you might want to talk to. She's the one who organizes us. I think she set it up in the first place.”
“Do you have her number with you?”
“No, but she works for the provincial government, something to do with the Human Resources Department. You know–personnel.”
Salter finished his beer, but he was still sweating. He'd need to take a few more minutes if he was going to come out of the shower with his pores closed.
He motioned to Lichtman's glass. Lichtman shook his head, and they moved away from the bar and walked over to watch a game in progress on the adjacent court.
“This book group,” Salter said. “How does it work? You all read the Book of the Month Club selection and talk about it?”
“More or less. But we choose our own books. Each of us puts in the name of a book before the season starts, and then we draw them out. I'm up next month.”
“What's your book?”
“It's called
Elective Affinities
.”
“By?”
“Goethe.”
Salter said, “Gertha who? Sorry. No, I know the name. Famous old German, right? You do all classical stuff?”
“Last month we read
The Human Factor
, a Graham Greene thriller. Do you know it?”
“No, should I?”
“Some of them thought it was too lightweight for us. But the whole point was to discuss if a book like that has any meat in it.”
“Has it? Did it have?”
“I thought so.”
They were nearly dry now. “What do you do, then? Sit around in a circle while the leader of the discussion explains what to look for? Like in college?”
“Not in our club. What the leader of the discussion does in our group is prepare questions, maybe a dozen or twenty. Then we just
see where we go. For instance, tell me the name of a book you've read lately.”
“I can't remember the name of a book I've read lately. I'll come clean. I haven't read any books lately. How about a play? I saw
The Merchant of Venice
last summer.”
“Perfect. So your first question would be, ‘Was Shakespeare anti-Semitic?' If you've got any Jews in the group that could keep you going all night. What else have you seen?”
“
As You Like It.
Back up a minute. How about, ‘Do you feel sorry for Shylock?' or rather, ‘Are you supposed to feel sorry for Shylock?'”
“Great. Now.
As You Like it.
Got a question?”
“I overheard a good one in the intermission. ‘Is Rosalind gay?'”
Lichtman shook his head. “In a mixed group you want to stay away from sexual interpretation. People start looking at the wall, or they get noisy to show they're not diffident. But you get the idea.”
BOOK: The Last Hand
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