Final Notice (2 page)

"It's a good thing we didn't have kids, then, isn't it?"

She smiled into The Women's Room. Not a big grin, but a start.

I said, "Ringold aside, just what is it about me you don't like?"

"That's a bit like the joke about Mrs. Lincoln and the play, isn't it?" she said and closed the book. "Let's just say I don't trust Leon Ringold or anybody who works for him."

"What if I told you that I don't trust Ringold either?"

"You're taking his money, aren't you? You don't need to trust him."

She had a point. An insulting point, to be sure. But, then, she didn't know me; and men in my profession don't have reputations for virtue, if that's your idea of a reputation.

"I didn't ask for any help on this case," she said, eyeing me frostily. "And I don't need any macho cops coming around and queering it for me now."

I began to think she was right. We wouldn't ever get along. "Take another look, Ms. Davis," I said stiffly. "You'll notice that I'm not walking on my knuckles. And my brow may be a little craggy, but there's a decent brain behind it. You've got me all tagged and pigeon-holed before you've given me a chance to prove you're right. You call that fair?"

She glared at the floor for a second and thought it over. "All right, security consultant, what do you have to say?"

"Well, for starters, when I walked up here just now I wondered why you'd made yourself so visible. Sitting on a stool in front of the art shelf may scare this guy away for awhile, but the longer you stay here the more familiar you'll become. If the Hyde Park Ripper is a real psycho and he's still lurking around this place, he may start to make all kinds of unpleasant connections between you and the books you're guarding. He may even decide to follow you home one night with his trusty penknife."

"I'm counting on it," she said flatly.

That stopped me. Cold. I looked again at that pretty girl with the studious face and said, "You mean to say you're baiting him? You want him to come after you?"

She nodded. "I'm a third degree brown belt in karate, Mr. Stoner." She held up two pretty white hands. "In California, I'd have to register these as weapons."

I laughed. She sounded so damn silly I couldn't help it, although I could have bitten my tongue off afterward.

Kate Davis lowered her mitts and looked me squarely in the eyes. "You know there are all kinds of pigeon-holers and some of them ought to grow up and look around them. These are different times, Mr. Stoner. But, then, you wouldn't understand."

And with that she turned on her heels and walked away, down that dark aisle lined with oversized art books.
 
 

I'm not a particularly vain man, but I like to think I understand the etiquette of the eighties as well as the next he/she or "ter." If I err, it's usually on the side of caution; and I usually apologize for it when it's pointed out to me. But Ms. Davis was one of those arrogant young people who not only wants to point out your mistakes to you but to refuse all apologies. The kind who thinks that only she can see the rocks hidden in every snowball of a metaphor. With someone like that, male or female, etiquette goes out the window and I say, "Forget it."

All of which meant that she'd made me mad. Mad enough to act unprofessionally. Instead of asking her whether she'd checked out the list of names Ringold had given me or whether she'd consulted with the police, who keep tidy files on sex offenders, I stamped downstairs to the first floor reading room, plunked myself down in one of the nubby orange chairs they'd sunk beside the picture windows, and stared at the cars nosing along Erie Avenue. Outside it was a beautiful fall day and, after a minute or two, I decided it was damn foolishness to waste it, brooding over Kate Davis. I'd do the job I was paid to do; and if the lady thought I was too much of an antique to deal with, that was too bad for the lady.

"Karate!" I said aloud.

And a sweet little voice replied: "It's not just a sport."

I looked up.

The owl-faced woman with the red cardigan sweater was standing in front of me.

I grinned at her. "What do you know about karate?"

"Oh," she said. "I know quite a number of odd facts. You can't work in a library for thirty years without picking up a great number of facts. One year I read all the way through `R' in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica. I would say that I'm an expert on facts through `R. "' She held out her hand and for a second I thought she expected me to kiss it. "I'm Jessie Moselle. Like the wine."

"Harry Stoner," I said.

"Oh, dear, that's an `S,"' she said with alarm. "I don't know my `S's.' It sounds like an English name, though. Randolph is an English name."

"Is it?" I said. "I believe I am part English. With a little Irish thrown in, too."

That pleased her. "Moselle is a German name. My parents were born in Lvov. That's in the Soviet Union, now. Of course, when they were born, it was part of Austria." She blinked once, very slowly, and said, "Davis is an English name."

"Indeed?"

"Oh, yes. Davis or Davies has quite a pedigree. Kate doesn't like me to mention it, but I once traced her family tree -that's a hobby of mine, tracing family trees -and she has a general in her past."

"Was he any good?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact, he was. He was rather impetuous, but he won many battles. He was a Leo. Kate is a Leo, too. Leo's are fiery, you know."

I liked Jessie Moselle. "And what sign are you?" I asked her.

"I'm a Sagittarius. Many philosophers were Sagittarians."

"I'm not surprised."

She smiled demurely. "I have to go, now. We're picking up reserves for visible shelving."

As she toddled off, I thought that the morning hadn't been a complete waste. I'd made one new friend. And now, I said to myself, as I got out of that surprisingly comfortable chair, it's time to look up an old one.
 
 

I drove west down Erie, that stately street full of red brick colonials and towering oaks, to Madison, where I turned south past the high-rises and the old yellow-brick apartments that are set above the boulevard on grassy slopes. Sun-burnt leaves were falling everywhere on the lawns and sidewalks. Red maples and orange oaks, shaped like hands, drifting down through the brisk October air, full of sunlight and the sound of the leaves in the wind. I felt like trailing a stick down those sidewalks and stirring the leaves into whirlwinds. Fall has that effect on a man not quite middle-aged. Or it has on this man. I guess I'm just not that far away from a kid with a stick. Especially on an October day with everything going to pieces of color, like a tinted mirror broken in the street.

But I didn't get out of the car and kick at the leaves. I did the manly thing, the adult thing, and went ahead with my business, although I did stay on Madison, taking the long way to town. Through the fringes of Hyde Park, where the beer barons had built their rococo mansions. Through East Walnut Hills, itself once a rich suburb and still populated on its fringes by white-collar types -the rebuilders, the FHA renovators who want to turn their little communities into walled islands with white sand beachheads. Drove back through successive layers of money and its subsidence, until I got to the part where the money just dried up and blew away. The place where it's burning summer all year round. McMillan Street. Peebles Corner. Looted during the '68 riots and never rebuilt. A little burntout spot about two miles square. One of several dozen in this city that no one will ever touch again. Not even with a stick on a crisp fall day. And from there, it was just a long rollercoaster ride down Gilbert Avenue to the city and to the fresh, highly visible cash that made the trip seem like coasting into a bank.

What they're doing to this city is a crime. The downtown money-men, I mean. With those magic wands that marbelize everything, turning good red brick into skyscrapers of polished stone and plate glass. Or maybe it isn't a crime. Maybe you're just getting old, I thought, and need something to feel bittersweet about on this fine fall day. Feeling nostalgic for demiGothic buildings and WPA frescoes didn't quite fit the bill. But, just the same, I was glad I was headed for the old Court House on the north side of town well away from the part of the inner city that's been torn down and rebuilt.

Once I hit the east side, it only took me five minutes to work my way up Court Street to the square. I parked the Pinto on one of the visitor's stalls and walked up the steps to the Court House -a huge Greek-revival temple, decked with stirring mottoes and Corinthian pilasters. Inside the lobby it was as cool and dark as a sick room. Well-fed lawyers passed mildly away, across Twelfth Street to the Traffic Court in the Alms & Doepke Building. I didn't see a familiar face until I got up to the fourth floor, and then it was all smiles and good cheer. I'd worked for the District Attorney's office for two years, right after I'd gotten out of the Army; and there were still enough old-timers around to make me feel at home. I slapped a few backs and pressed a few hands and kissed a secretary or two on the cheek and made a sweet, triumphant progress down the hallway to George DeVries's office.

You wouldn't have been able to tell it from his face -he looks like a carrot-topped Carl Sandburg- but George DeVries was and is, a very brutal man. When he first came over to the D.A.'s office from Station X, it was rumored that he'd been shuffled backstairs to avoid a shooting board. At the time I didn't believe it. But that was more than a decade ago, and I was young and fresh out of the service and just not very smart about civilian police. It didn't seem possible to me, then, that a taciturn Southerner like George DeVries, with his weathered face and antebellum good manners, could have killed two black teenagers in an Avondale apartment house simply because one of the boys had refused to kick back some narcotics money. Twelve years have gone by and I've learned to suspend my disbelief about what other human beings are capable of doing in anger or in despair, although a part of me -the Cincinnati moralist side of Harry Stoner- can still get mightily outraged when appearances and realities drift too far apart. When they loose their moorings entirely, I become just as devoted to the cosmetics of the established order as the most pious burgher. Sometimes it's useful to pretend that the world ought to be a better place than it is, even if it is an imperative founded exclusively on schoolboy good wishes and the quirks of the subjunctive mood. Deep down, I didn't approve of George DeVries's brand of toughness. On the other hand, I knew that he was a smart, well-connected cop and that he still had friends on the vice squad. And you don't have to love a Chevrolet to catch a ride in one.

George was gazing out the window at the sunlit street when I came through the door.

"Beautiful day, huh?" I said to him. He swiveled in his chair and looked up at me with surprise.

"Well, I'll be damned." He broke into a wrinkled grin. "Harry! How you been, boy? How's the world treating you?"

"Good, George. Real good."

"Take a seat," he said, sweeping his hand across the desk. "And tell me what's new."

I sat down and told him the news -about Ringold, the Hyde Park library, and the mutilated books. When I got to the books, he perked up.

"You know something I ought to hear, George?" I said to him.

He rubbed his chin savagely and said, "I'm not sure. Goddamn it, I must be getting old." He tapped his forehead as if he were trying to knock something inside back in place. "I may be wrong, but I think there's an open case of homicide from a couple of years back that could tie in with this business."

"A murder?"

"A real nasty murder, Harry. In Eden Park, I think."

Swell, I said to myself. "I guess you better find out for sure, George. I didn't tell you this, but there's a crack girl detective on the case who thinks she can handle it all by herself."

"And just how the hell does she plan to do that?"

"With her hands, George," I said wearily. "With karate."

"Karate!" DeVries burst into laughter. "The guy we're talking about used a forty-ounce baseball bat and a barber's razor."

I reached into my sports coat and pulled out Ringold's list.

"You'd better run makes on this crew, as well."

DeVries took the slip of paper and looked it over. "Nobody familiar here," he said.

"I didn't think there would be. But run them anyway. They're people who've taken out art books over the last couple of years. Maybe you'll get lucky and come up with a ringer."

"All right, Harry," he said. "I'll give you a call tonight or tomorrow about this. If you want the details of that homicide, you might go down to Central Station and talk with A1 Foster."

"Thanks, George."

"Don't mention it," he said. "Things have been too damn slow around here to suit me."

I didn't share his enthusiasm.
 

THE CINCINNATI Police Building is located rather picturesquely on Ezzard Charles Drive, where it intersects Central Parkway on the northwest side of the city. Music Hall, red as a brick kiln and domed and gabled like a mosque, sits across the Parkway from it; and on its right, going south into town, is the sleek new building which houses the local public T.V. station. There is nothing sleek about the Police Building itself, which has the grim, foreshortened look of a fifties high school. But then the men who work there don't pay a hell of a lot of attention to the color of the walls. Which are yellow, by the way, the dull, penal yellow of glazed brick.