Death of a Flack Read online

  I went to make money. I said, “Good-bye, good luck” to Sherry’s maid. I said, “Give my regards to Greco. Tell her Peter Chambers.” And I went to Cobb Gilmore, Inc., 599 Madison Avenue, to make money, but the one from whom I was to make money was not there. “But, damn, he just called me,” I said to a marcelled young man with more swish than a johnny mop. “He said he wanted to see me. Peter Chambers.”

  “I don’t blame him, dearie. I’d like to see you myself.”

  “Honey,” I said, “I’m not here to flirt with you.”

  “I wish you were.”

  “Now come on. Get me Gilmore.”

  His voice took on a querulous note. “But dear, if he’s not here, what do you want me to do?”

  “Maybe he’s not here for the customers,” I said, “but he’s here for me. Now just go into the back room and tell him Chambers.”

  “Sweetie, do you think I’m lying? Is that it? Sweetie, I wouldn’t lie to you even if those were my instructions, you’re too cute. He’s not here. He hasn’t been in today. Have you tried him at home?”

  “No, I haven’t tried him at home.”

  “Well, try him at home. Try me at home sometime too. Want the address?”

  “I have his address.”

  “My address.”

  “No,” I said and I pinched him gently and discreetly and he smiled appreciatively and I went out into the dank clamminess of springtime in New York. The mist-drizzle swirled. The world was wet and sunless. The taxi stank of leather, sweat, mildew and lack of ventilation.

  Cobb Gilmore lived in six rooms on the seventh floor of 820 Fifth Avenue. The lobbies were vast, hushed, carpeted, spotless; the automatic elevators were pin-clean, mirrored, smooth, silent, and instantly responsive to button-touch. I rode up to seven without any feeling of motion. I mushed through carpets soft as snow to Gilmore’s door. Beneath the metal rim of the mother-of-pearl doorbell a small square of folded paper clung unobtrusively. I extracted it and unfolded it. It stated in small, neat, blue-ink print: “Peter, door’s open. Come right in, snap lock shut. I’m in bed. C.G.”

  I entered, snapped the lock, and let the door slam.

  “Peter?” he called from far off.

  “It’s me,” I called back.

  “Come in. The bedroom. I’m here.”

  The bedroom was warm and dry and air-conditioned and Cobb Gilmore sat in a huge bed, pillow-propped, rosy-faced, and smiling-eyed, and looking for all the world like a benign Santa Claus without whiskers and in mufti. Mufti consisted of yellow silk pajamas, jacket unbuttoned and exposing curls of wispy grey hair on a background of flabby pink chest.

  “Are you sick?” I said.

  “No sicker than usual,” he said. “I’m fine, or as fine as I can be.”

  “Where’s Miggie?” Miggie was Miguel, his Mexican houseman of twenty years’ employ.

  “Off. Tuesday’s his day off. He asked if he could sleep out last night, and I let him. I had that ballet thing, didn’t expect to be home until late, didn’t need him. It’s good for a man to take a full twenty-four hour break. I hear he has a new young Puerto Rican sweetheart who just eats him up. All right with me, as long as he’s not eaten up more than once a week. Nobody ever said Cobb Gilmore was a bad boss.”

  “So what’s with the bed bit?” I asked.

  “I’m sick,” he said and grinned.

  “You just said you weren’t.”

  “Chronically sick, dear Peter. A ticker like mine is about as dependable as the word of a harlot. I am a man who crawls along the edge of death at all times.”

  “You do all right.”

  “Every morning I say thank you when I awake and I’m alive.”

  “But in between you kind of have fun.”

  “On the other hand, I take care of myself, dear boy. I’m always conscious of my precarious heart. I’ve been warned, and I’ve taken heed. For instance, yesterday was a sort of hectic day for me. There was the press of business during the day, the ballet in the evening, Miss Greco’s party at night. There was also the pressure of my daughter’s predicament—whether or not she regards it as predicament—and my final conversation with Henry Martell. A full day, quite a full day, for a man with a deadly weak heart. I think even you will grant me that.”

  “I grant,” I said. In his own cockeyed way, the old boy was gallant.

  “When I arose this morning and took a look at the weather, I decided not to push my luck. I decided upon a day of bed rest, toddling about here and there for a bite of food, but bed rest, reading, and contemplation. Which is why I called you.”

  “Do you want me to read for you, dad? Or climb into bed with you and we contemplate together?”

  “Heh, heh,” he said, “always the card, aren’t you? What is it with you? Do you fear to fall out of character?”

  I sat in a soft chair beside the bed. I said, “You called me, Cobb. I don’t have a weak heart. This is part of my working day. Let’s cut the small talk and the philosophy. What’s the pitch?”

  “Henry Martell,” he said.

  “You worked it out?” I said.

  “In a way, I admire that man,” he said. “An admitted, unmitigated scoundrel. Somehow, all of us grudgingly admire honesty, no matter it is a most perverted form of honesty.”

  “Stick the philosophy, man. Why am I here?”

  “Patience, dear young Peter.” He sighed and smiled. “My talks with Martell were most productive. We understood one another quite quickly.”

  “Two of a kind,” I said.

  “Now is that nice?” he said.

  “Cobb, do you have a job of work for me, or not?” I looked at my watch. “I have things to do.”

  “The romance of Henry Martell and Lori Gilmore is no romance at all.” He chuckled. “Mr. Martell’s interest in Lori was no more than an interest in me. He was shooting at me through Lori, the clever little bastard.”

  “Just straighten that out a little for me, Cobb.”

  “Cute blackmail,” he said, “but so cute, it charms me. He knew who she was and therein lay his interest. He told me so, quite candidly. He knew that sooner or later I would come around to dealing with him. He doesn’t care for her a whit, but knowing how much she means to me, he cultivated her. He knew that when I got to know of him I wouldn’t approve. I was the target not she. He told me all of this quite frankly. Of course, he added that if I imparted this information to Lori, he would deny it and proclaim it the lying fancies of a doting parent.” He chuckled again, shook his head as though to discourage a hovering fly. “Quite a man. I could use a man like that if his honesty were not so perverse. Two of a kind, you said? Perhaps. But it made our negotiations comparatively simple. There was no haggling. We understood one another. There was no fencing, seeking for position, discovering check-points—none of the interminable beating about bushes. We made our deal and we closed our deal.”

  “What’s my job, Cobb?”

  He pointed to a suit hung over a hanger hooked over the top of a partially open closet-door at a far corner of the room. “There’s an envelope in the inside pocket of that jacket,” he said, voice shifting from bland to peremptory. “Get it, please.” I rose and went to that far corner and kicked past a tiny clump of mud and reached my hands to that marvelous suit. It was beautifully tailored and hand-stitched and softly sodden of exquisite light-weight cashmere, pinstriped gray, narrow-lapelled, and silk-lined. The top half of a long white envelope protruded from the silk-lined inside pocket of the jacket. I withdrew the envelope and returned to Cobb. “Open it,” he said.

  It was not sealed. I opened it. There were three hundred-dollar bills, and a check to the order of Henry Martell signed by Cobb Gilmore to the whistling tune of one hundred thousand dollars.

  “The cash is your fee, the check is for him,” Cobb Gilmore said. Ah, the vagaries of the varied clients of the private Richard. From Jefferson Clayton I had cash to deliver and a check for myself. From Cobb Gilmore, a check to deliver and cash for myself
. “Do you know where he lives?” Cobb Gilmore said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Deliver the check and we’re rid of him. He takes the check and walks out of his apartment and he’s never again in touch with Lori. He takes off for London within three days. His passport is in order, I’ve verified that. He stays out of this country for eighteen months, not once being in touch with the girl. By then she’ll be cured of him, I promise that. It’s a lot of money, but under the circumstances, worth it. That’s what he was shooting for and now he’ll have it.” He shrugged. “I’ve earned larger stipend for lesser effort. More power to the slimy son of a bitch. Every now and then, the tables turn. Every now and then, the magician is tricked, the deceiver turns dupe, the rogue is beaten at his very own game. I’m old enough and wise enough to bear no umbrage. I’m too civilized—perhaps the word is sophisticated—to rant or rave at the successful accomplishment of a clever knave. Tit for tat, and the hell with it. I give due credit where credit is due, and this stinking little man is due his credit. Now deliver his check and let us get it over with. He said he’d be in all day.”

  I took up my silly umbrella and departed.

  NINE

  Swirling dim mistiness. Dark day of clamminess. Gloomy Tuesday. Fine rain of impalpable skin-soaking drizzle. My useless umbrella dragged like the flag of a vanquished state as I headed for West 47th Street where Barry Miller’s two rooms served as home and office on the second climb-up floor of an ancient, ramshackle brownstone. I knocked on a door tainted by tarnished brass plate on which was indented the deathless legend: b. miller—confidenital investigation. I waited and knocked again and then B. Miller grumpily croaked, “Come in.”

  He was seated in an oak armchair. He did not rise to greet me. He could not rise to greet me. The confidenital (sic) investigator had good and obvious reason for grumpily croaking. His face was a mass of welts, dried blood over his eyes giving it a hideous appearance. His chin was sunk to his chest, his little eyes peering upward through crusts of blood. He was tied to the oak armchair, wrists to the arms of the chair and ankles to its legs, by what appeared to be cords of Venetian blinds. A glance at the drawn blinds verified that. As I moved, quickly, to untie him, I saw the back of his bald head and I had to hold back vomit as the sickness hit me. His head was open to the bone, the fissure clotted by jellied blood, and blood was a wide thick viscous scarlet collar on the back of his neck.

  “Pete …” he said.

  “Shut up. Don’t talk.”

  I unbound him.

  “Pete …”

  “Don’t talk. You’re hurt bad, man.”

  The weapon was nearby on the floor—a replica in brass of a famous, modern, abstract sculpture: a standing nude with only a nose for a face and two holes for breasts.

  “Pete …”

  “Quiet,” I said.

  I crossed a littered floor to a phone on a littered desk. I called emergency for an ambulance—special emergency I told them but I knew how long that would take and I wondered if he would last that long. The room was in wild disorder. Every drawer of the desk was out and dumped. A tall metal cabinet was open, its contents strewn. Every file from a metal filing cabinet gaped naked of its contents strewn about in the shapeless shambles of the room. Somebody had given that room an efficient workout if not a tidy one.

  I went to a dingy bathroom and came back with a wet towel, a dry towel, and a tumbler of water. As gently as I could, I wiped his face with the wet towel and cleaned the lids of his eyes. I laid the cool wet towel on his hands. I brought the tumbler to his caked lips and he drank thirstily until water gurgled back from the side of his mouth. I set the glass away and laid the clean dry towel lightly over his head. Strangely, he looked like a little wizened old woman wearing a prayer shawl.

  “Who did it?” I said.

  “Henry Martell.”

  “Okay. Shut up.”

  “No.” He wiped his hands with the wet towel and dropped it to the floor. He pointed toward the tall cabinet. “Bottle. In there.”

  There was a bottle of brandy. I brought another glass, poured brandy, held it to his lips. He sipped slowly but he managed a good deal of it. He waved it away, said, “Okay. Here’s the story.”

  “Save it. Hang on to your strength.”

  “The hell with my strength.”

  “You can die.”

  “So at least they’ll get the guy who killed me.”

  I pulled over a straight oak chair and sat knees to knees with him. “All right, Barry. But easy.”

  “I crossed him.”

  “Martell?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How?”

  “The girl wanted me to do a rundown on him. I done it.”

  “The girl—Lori Gilmore?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How did you cross him?”

  “You don’t do a rundown on a friend.”

  “Martell was your friend?”

  “Nobody’s my friend.”

  “Then you didn’t cross him.”

  “Okay. So I didn’t cross him. Did the rundown. Never done a rundown on him. Had no interest. Turns out the son of a bitch is married, got a wife and kid tucked away up in Connecticut. I typed it out yesterday, put the stamp on, and was gonna mail it when the bartender from Athena drops in here. He lives up this way. Told me there was gonna be some kinda shindig down there, that she’d be there. Figgered I’d hand it to her and get my fee paid. Took a retainer a couple of weeks ago, small piece, fifty bucks. Saw she carried a checkbook with her. Figgered I’d deliver and get paid on the line.” He coughed. A thin trickle of blood crept from a corner of his mouth.

  “Barry, let me pick it up from there,” I said. “You just nod if I’m right.” He nodded. “Martell saw you there last night talking with the girl, figured you were up to something. So he came here today and wanted to know what it was all about.”

  “Yeah. Was here about a quarter to ten. Asked.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Told him nothing. Then, when I turned around, he belted me with that statue. I went down and out. When I came to, I’m tied to the chair, and he’s frisking the joint. It didn’t help him.”

  “Didn’t you make a copy of your letter to the girl?”

  “I don’t make copies. That’s for fancy Dans like you.”

  “Then?”

  “He belted me around, slapped the shit out of me, wanting information.”

  “Did you tell him?”

  A proud look came into the withered eyes. “What do you take me for? I’m a private detective. I do not divulge my client’s confidences.”

  “But Martell was a client too.”

  “I did not divulge no confidence of Martell. I didn’t give her no information that I got in confidence from him. Whatever I give her was stuff I went out and dug up fresh, stuff I did not know, stuff Martell never told me. That was confidential information, in a confidential dealing with her, and I do not divulge my client’s confidences—to no one.”

  There are times a thrill shivers through you as though your very blood cells are screaming a paean of applause. There are times you want to stand up and cheer. There are times that sweet tears sting the eyes in a joy of approbation. There are times—not too often—when you are pleased and proud to be a member of our stumbling, bumbling, ever-inconsistent human race. This was one of my times—and the pure, sheer, beautiful thrill was engendered by a crooked old man in a crooked old game. There are tiny sparks of glory in all of us and they explode to grandeur at inexplicable moments. These were Barry Miller’s moments. The paramount ethic of our profession is that we do not violate the confidence of a client. Barry Miller’s reasoning may have been as convoluted as the coils of intertwined serpents but his ethic shone through, fierce and prideful and beatific as a nimbus. “He belted the bejazzus out of me,” said Barry Miller, writing his epitaph, “but I did not divulge the confidence of my client.”

  “Then what, Barry?”

  “
He must of got arm weary. He blew.” The light went out of his eyes. His chin sank back to his chest.

  “Barry!”

  “Yeah?” Chin remained on chest.

  “Why did you go to Jefferson Clayton this morning?”

  “I tried to cash in a little extra.” He chuckled, raspingly. “Martell was married. The girl would have to break it up. Figgered I’d give Clayton some advance information—before it broke wide open—and pick up two G’s, and he could never kick, because what he was getting was legit information. But the sucker wouldn’t go for it.” He chuckled again. The dribble of blood from the corner of his mouth became a gush. “I was hoping,” he burbled, “hoping …”

  He fell forward. I caught him. He was dead.

  I laid him on the floor and covered his face with the towel. I searched through his pockets. I knew what I was looking for. He had had a busy morning. I hoped he had not had time to get to the bank. He had not had time for I found what I was looking for, a neatly folded check to Barry Miller from Lori Gilmore for one thousand dollars. I appropriated the check. It would be a pity to involve an ingenuous young girl in the dirty investigation of the dirty death of a dirty old private detective.

  There was a rap on the door and I stood up.

  “Come in,” I said.

  The door opened for the ambulance attendant, a tall young woman, a Negro. I pointed to Barry and she went to him quickly and examined him and arose frowning. “He’s dead,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “Death by violence, I must so report it.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “This is a matter for the authorities.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “You will remain right here, sir. You may not leave.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  She went to the phone and called the cops.

  TEN