Requiem for a Realtor (7 page)

“Friend of yours?”

“Father Dowling knew him.”

“Ah.”

Phil's expression changed, the look of a man who had not been made privy to what the pastor of St. Hilary's knew of the dead man.

“I'll look into it,” Cy said.

“Good idea. At least have someone do it.”

“Someone” in this instance turned out to be Agnes Lamb. She was capable of showing surprise and proved it.

“A hit-and-run?”

“So far as we know.”

Her eyes widened and she nodded. “I'll look into it.”

It turned out that no one else had. Traffic was on an Italian strike. One of the meter maids had Chief Robertson's wife's SUV ticketed and towed. It had been a clear violation—two hours in a one-hour handicap place—but Mrs. Robertson had come to think that the law did not apply to the wife of the chief of police. Robertson had preferred to take on the Traffic division rather than his wife, and the result had been an unannounced slowdown. It had been a week since a traffic ticket had been issued. The officer who held out the longest was promised the Gracie Robertson Prize, a blowup photograph of the chief on which target rings had been superimposed. A set of darts was included. Agnes's courtesy call at Traffic was meant to forestall any complaint of encroachment. In the event she was given carte blanche.

“What do you have on the accident?”

“Nothing.”

So she started with the newspaper report.

The body had been found on Bailey Street, which ran parallel to Dirksen Boulevard, a major downtown street, but Bailey was all but unknown except to the patrons of the Rendezvous Club, one of the places of business that had transformed the street from the residential haven it once was. The reporter had found that Collins was well known at the Rendezvous and had been there the previous evening. What condition had he been in when he stepped into the night from the club?

“Condition?”

“Had he been drinking?”

“This is a bar.”

“Was he drunk?”

No answer. The inquiry conjured up the picture of a man reeling out of the Rendezvous and heading up the street on foot toward the parking lot. He would have been all but invisible to approaching vehicles.

“Was his car in the club parking lot?” Cy asked when Agnes told him this.

“Yup.”

“So he never got to it.”

“Maybe it got to him.”

When Agnes explained, Cy returned to the parking lot with her.

The lot occupied a place where a building had been removed, like a tooth extracted from the row of once residential houses now converted to office space for a variety of small businesses. Agnes was driving and she pulled into the lot. At this time of day it was all but deserted. The car they had come to see was parked in the center of the lot, at an angle. It had the look of having been parked hastily and then left. Had Stanley Collins been that anxious for a drink? And then Cy noticed the fender.

It was the far side of the car, the left fender. There were streaks of blood on the hood. Cy circled the car in silence. The sturdier sort of weed lined the edges of the lot and, in the afternoon sun, filled the air with sweetness of a sort.

“What do you think?” Agnes said.

“Looks like it hit something.”

“You mean someone.”

Cy nodded. Agnes was waiting for him to say it. Had Stanley Collins been run over by his own car?

“Well?” Agnes said.

“I don't think this one was an accident.”

“I'll have the car taken downtown.”

“We can wait for them to get here.”

In the meantime, Cy circled the car again. It seemed best not to touch anything. The car had tinted glass, but the windshield permitted a look at the front seat.

“What's that?” Cy asked Agnes. He stepped aside so she could take a better look.

“A scarf?”

“Maybe.”

It took half an hour for the tow truck from the police garage to show up. The driver wore a greasy baseball cap, Ben Frank-lin glasses, and a tee shirt that stretched over his enormous belly.

“Whose car is it, Mrs. Robertson's?”

His smile revealed a gap between his upper teeth. He turned and released a spray of tobacco juice. His assistant, a college kid hired for the summer, danced out of range. The two did not inspire confidence.

“Maybe we should have the lab send a crew here, Agnes.”

The driver took umbrage at this. “Even if I touch the damned thing my prints are on record.”

“What were you in for?”

“Oh, come on.”

Even so, Cy stayed close as they hooked up the car and then pulled it onto the flatbed truck.

“My fingerprints are on the car,” Agnes said to Cy when they had stepped away.

The car had been unlocked when she found it and the registration had told her it belonged to the deceased Stanley Collins.

“That's how I know it's a scarf on the front seat.”

Before they left, Cy went over to check out those sweet-smelling weeds. Who decides if something is a weed and not a flower?

“Why did you ask if it was Mrs. Robertson's car?” Agnes was asking the driver when he came back.

“It's a long story.”

Cy told Agnes the story on the drive downtown, following the flatbed with Stanley Collins's car aboard.

“I thought they were a little funny in Traffic.”

“They always are.”

He had Agnes drop him at the morgue.

2

At the morgue Cy tried not to notice how beautiful Dr. Pippin, the assistant coroner, was. Would he have stayed if Lubins were performing the autopsy? Pippin's lab coat hung to her knees but could not conceal her graceful body. Her tawny pony tail tossed as she went about her grisly task, talking into the microphone suspended above her. Why would someone go through medical school and then settle for a job as assistant coroner? It was one of those mysteries that fascinated Cy about Pippin. Of course, he was waiting for her to finish so they could talk. She represented an occasion of sin of sorts, not that he would ever say or do anything, but there are sins of thought and Cy fought against them manfully. He loved his wife, and Pippin now had a husband, a double protection against anything stupid on his part. On her part, there was only a cheery friendliness. She might have been his sister.

“Poor devil,” she said, when she emerged. “Hungry?”

“Are you?”

“Famished.”

“I'll buy you lunch.”

“You will not. It's my turn.”

They went across the street to the sports bar, another precaution. It was filled with cops and reporters, and no one would wonder what he was doing having lunch with Pippin. Her own attitude was so devoid of anything romantic that Cy had only to mimic it. She ordered a Reuben and a beer, and Cy had the goulash.

“Is it Hungarian?”

He put his ear near the plate. “Can't tell. What killed him?”

“A car.”

She chewed her sandwich and smiled at the same time. Very distracting, but Cy was a Hungarian whose face betrayed nothing. In fact he had only one expression. Well, maybe one and a half. He was wearing the half.

“Dead on the scene?”

“He whacked his head on the curb. The car drove across his rib cage. It would have been quick.”

“It was reported at six-thirty.”

“He probably lay there for hours.”

“How many?”

She shrugged, chewed, looked at the ceiling. “Four, five.”

“Early morning?”

“Probably. After midnight.”

“His name was Stanley Collins.”

“Did you know him?”

“He was a Realtor. He sold me my house.”

She put down her sandwich. “Tell me about your house.”

“It's just a house.”

“Well, you must have been an easy sale.”

“My wife picked it.”

“I'd like to meet her.”

Cy nodded, making no promises. What would it be like with her if she knew his wife? That was ridiculous. Cy got down to business on the hit-and-run. He had had one adolescence, and he didn't want another.

The body of Stanley Collins had been found on a downtown street, parallel with Dirksen Boulevard. Not much open there at night except a couple of bars. There was the possibility that Collins had been in one of them, a possibility that Officer Agnes Lamb was checking out.

After lunch he looked over what had been found on the body—a wallet, a separate leather container for business cards, a pack of Marlboro Lights, a plastic lighter, keys, change, lint. Of course, there was the scarf that had been found on the front seat of his car. There was a handkerchief in a pocket of his suit jacket, along with a matchbook from the Rendezvous, one of the bars on the street where the body had been found.

There are bars and bars, the spectrum running from clean well-lighted places with windows through which to look in and look out to bistros where small lights embedded in the ceiling obscure rather than illumine the scene below them. The Rendezvous was of the ill-lit sort, but when Cy walked in, the door behind the bar was open and beyond that a door to the alley, where a truck was unloading supplies. The big guy behind the bar was a silhouette.

“What took you so long, Cy?”

“I recognize the voice but I can't see your face.”

“You get used to it.”

When he turned, light from behind revealed his face. “Perzel?”

Joe Perzel had been a cop for twenty years. Apparently tending bar was his retirement occupation.

“It's about Stanley Collins, right?”

“Where can we talk?”

“I got to keep an eye on that delivery.”

“So let's go back there.”

Perzel shrugged. “Okay. Anyone comes in, I'll see them.”

“Who you expecting?”

“Customers. And the cops, of course.”

“What do you know about the hit-and-run up the street?

“When did it happen?”

“Last night.”

“I work days. But I listened to the news this morning.”

“And heard about Stanley Collins.”

“The name jumped out at me.”

“So you do know him?”

“He was a regular. Around the clock. Not a lush, he just liked the place. He did a lot of business here.”

“Real estate?”

“Cell phones.” Perzel made a face. “You know those hotels that have phones in the bathroom? Imagine getting a call from someone sitting on the pot. Nowadays a call could be coming from anywhere.”

“Somebody ran over him, Joe.”

“Last night?”

“Midnight or after.”

“This street is pretty dark then.”

“You know anybody who'd want to run over him?”

“Someone he sold a house to?” But Perzel let his pixie smile die. “No. He was full of bull, you know, but a nice guy. People liked him.”

“I bought a house from him.”

“Is this a confession?”

Cy was glad to get out of there, although he liked Joe Perzel. Or maybe because he did. Was some such future as that in store for him, tending bar? He'd rather be run over first.

3

It was the fate of David Jameson, D.D.S., to think of such phrases as “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” when his defenses against remembering the night at the Frosinone Hotel broke down and those bitter hours came flooding into his mind in all their humiliating detail. How absurd all his prudent precautions beforehand seemed. They would arrive in a rental car, he would pay cash, he would use an assumed name, no one would ever know that he and Phyllis had each finally succumbed to the attractions of the other and meant to anticipate the joys of matrimony in a rented bed.

“Compatibility is essential,” Phyllis had assured him. “I know.”

David did not want to know more. When he thought of possessing Phyllis it was a vague concept, something like a cloud enveloping her. And he would feel even more intensely the pleasure holding her in his arms gave him, her upper body pressed against his, her eyes looking up beseechingly. It was disconcerting that whenever he tried to kiss her, she opened her mouth. She might still be his patient. He kissed around its rims, missing the pressure of lips on lips.

“I do not want to make another mistake.”

“You shall have children,” he promised.

“Yes, that too. But first of all I want compatibility.” She nibbled on his chin, standing on tiptoe to do it. She was such a little thing. He lifted her from the floor, and she squealed in delight. His eyes blurred at the thought of what lay before them at the hotel.

The first annoyance had been with the rental car. They would not take cash. It had to be a credit card. It was company policy. It was the policy of all the rental car companies except maybe Rent-a-Wreck. He turned over a credit card. That was no great problem. The point of the car was to protect their identity at the hotel.

Why the Frosinone? Phyllis had been surprised when he told her where they were going. Well, they couldn't saunter into the Hilton or the Radisson and count on not meeting someone they knew or, worse, being seen by but not seeing someone who knew them. He had heard of the Frosinone when he was in dental school as a place that accommodated couples when hotels were still snooty about whether a man and woman who showed up at the registration desk were married. Now, whenever David traveled, he was routinely asked how many keys to the room he wanted, as if he might make a trail of them like the colored beans in the story, and have a bevy of compliant females beating on his door. It was unlikely in the extreme that anyone at the Frosinone would recognize them.

“I think this is one of the hotels Stanley took his women to.”

Phyllis said this when the rental car was parked in the hotel garage and they were ascending to the lobby in an elevator that seemed unsure whether it wanted to go up or sideways or maybe just straight down again. The mention of Stanley and his women was a blight on what they were doing, establishing a moral equivalence between Stanley Collins and David Jameson. For the first time Jameson fully realized what they had booked the room to do.