The Cutie (9 page)

I looked at him. “Show me somebody I have to justify myself to.”

“Okay,” said Grimes. “Let’s go. Let’s go for a ride.”

I shrugged and got to my feet. I carefully avoided looking at Ella, sitting on the floor beside me, looking up at us all. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll go for a ride with you. And when you refuse me the phone call the law allows me, and when you keep me moving from precinct to precinct, ahead of my lawyer, you’ll be breaking the law all over again. You’ll be a crook all over again.”

He grimaced and made a disgusted sound, as though he’d just tasted something rotten. “Stay here,” he said. “Stay here, you smart boy, and kid yourself. But just be sure to tell Ed Ganolese what I told you. Produce Billy-Billy Cantell by tonight. Produce him, or you’ll see just how crooked I can be.”

“I’ll tell him,” I said. “When I see him.”

“You do that.”

Grimes led the way, and the five of them marched out of the apartment. I stood looking at the closed door.

Ella stood up beside me. “You didn’t have to do that, Clay,” she said. “You didn’t have to antagonize him.”

“He got under my skin,” I said. “Besides, I’ve been antagonizing Mr. Grimes for years. It’s a game we play. The funny part of it is, he
is
an honest man. And there is nothing in this world more vulnerable than an honest man.”

She was studying me in a way I didn’t much care for. “You aren’t vulnerable, are you, Clay?” she asked me.

“I try not to be.”

She stood looking at me for a minute longer, and I waited, wondering what decision was being made behind those level eyes of hers. Then she looked away from me, and crossed the room to where she’d left the tray. She picked it up and went to work, gathering up the glasses of iced tea.

I watched her, and I felt the heaviness and the weariness pressing down on me. It was no time to try to think, to try to talk to this woman. “I’ve got to get some sleep, Ella,” I said. “I’ll be okay when I wake up.”

“All right,” she said.

“Wake me at four, will you?”

“I will,” she said. But she didn’t look at me.

I was on board this gray ship, surrounded by fog, and an alarm bell was ringing. I was standing on deck, the wet railing on one side of me and a metal wall punctured with portholes on the other, and Ella was saying, “It’s all glue,” and somewhere the alarm bell was ringing.

Then the alarm bell stopped and Ella said again, “It’s all glue.” The fog pressed in tighter, and I thought, “I’ve got to get off this damn ship!” I opened my eyes and sat up and there was Ella. “Where’s the lifeboat?” I asked her.

She looked blank. “What?”

Something was wrong, but I couldn’t figure out what. We had to get to the lifeboat. Then I saw that Ella was holding the telephone out to me, and I woke up. I realized what the alarm bell had been, and this time Ella said, “It’s for you.”

“Thanks,” I said, I took the phone from her, and glanced at the bedside clock. It was just a little after one. I’d only been asleep a little more than two hours.

I put the phone up to my face and said, “Clay here.”

“Ed, Clay.” He sounded annoyed and impatient. “You better get up to see Tesselman right now.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked him.

“The cops are going out of their goddam minds,” he said. “That’s what’s wrong. They pulled two raids on collection points, one uptown and one downtown. Picked up over forty grand of heroin and a whole batch of pot.”

“What for?” I asked him. I was only just barely awake.

“They want Cantell,” he said. “There’s been a general call. They’re dragging people in by the dozens. Clancy’s going nuts trying to get them all sprung again. And Archie Freihofer is tearing out his last six hairs. Half of his girls have been picked up, and the others are afraid to answer the phone.”

“All this over Billy-Billy Cantell?”

“No, all this over Mavis St. Paul. Because she was Tesselman’s.”

“Ed, Grimes was waiting for me when I got home this morning.”

“Grimes? Who’s Grimes?”

“A cop. I’ve run into him before. He’s working on this job. He told me he was giving us till tonight to cough up Billy-Billy, and then he’d start making life rough for everybody.”

“Well, somebody jumped the gun. They’re making life rough right now. So far today, they’ve cost me damn near a hundred thousand dollars.”

“Grimes said we had till tonight, Ed.”

“I don’t care what Grimes said! I’m telling you what the lousy cops are
doing
.”

“Okay, Ed, okay.”

“And let me tell you something. Joe isn’t happy. He isn’t happy at all.”

“Joe?”

“The guy from Europe. Are you awake?”

“Not really.”

“Well, get awake. Joe doesn’t like the way this thing is going. You know what that means?”

“Yeah, Ed. Sure.”

“You go on up to see Tesselman right now. I told him you were coming. I’ll call him again and tell him you’re on your way. You go tell him to call off the goddam dogs.”

“All right, Ed,” I said.

“And find out who the hell started this whole thing.”

“All right, Ed.”

“I want that son of a bitch. I want that cutie nailed to a wall.”

“Me, too, Ed.”

Ernest Tesselman lived way the hell out on Long Island. It took a long while to get to the right neighborhood, and an even longer while to find his house. I asked directions a few times, but nobody knew anything. I finally got a sensible answer from a kid playing with a top. He told me how to get to Mr. Tesselman’s house, and he was right.

The house, when I eventually did get to see it, was at one and the same time both impressive and a little awkward. You looked at it, and you knew the people inside had money. But you also knew they didn’t have much taste.

The house was set back from the road, hidden by rigidly pruned hedges and heavily leafed trees. A blacktop drive curved in a U-shape up to the front door of the house and back to the ornamental stone gate posts at the entrance from the road. The house itself was red brick, two stories high, and had four white columns marching across the front. The front door was white, with a phony brass knocker centered on it. Ernest Tesselman’s land fell away on all sides, dotted with trees and bushes and hedges. Nary a neighbor could be seen.

I drove the Mercedes in and parked midway around the U, by the front door. I got out, walked around the car, and up the two steps to the pseudo-Southern-plantation veranda.

The brass knocker, as I said, was strictly ornamental and nonfunctional. A gold and white doorbell was to the left of the door. I pushed it, and heard chimes inside, playing something I didn’t recognize. After a minute, a butler opened the door for me. He was decked out in a tuxedo and a supercilious expression. This was the type of butler who also doubles as a bouncer, and the tux didn’t quite fit him. He bulged inside it, particularly under the arm, the same kind of bulge Joe Pistol had been wearing.

Fortunately, I don’t have a face to go with my profession. No movie director would ever cast me as a “right-hand man and troubleshooter for crime czar Ed Ganolese,” to quote that idiot reporter again. I’m more the insurance-salesman type, and I have no bulges under my coat. I never carry a gun on my person. It’s the cheap way to a fast conviction. I have a Smith & Wesson .32 hooked under the dashboard of the Mercedes, with all the proper licenses and signatures, and I very rarely touch it, except to leave it at the apartment while I’m having the car washed. I don’t want any car-wash flunky starting a new career with my gun.

I told my friend with the undersized tux who I was and that Ernest Tesselman was expecting me, and he let me into the house without a whimper. I got a quick glimpse at a living room done in
Life
-magazine contemporary, all tubular steel furniture and a hoked-up mantelpiece, and then Tux ushered me by and into a small room off to the right. He asked me, please, to wait a minute, and then he went away.

This room had been, in a previous reincarnation, a wealthy doctor’s waiting room. Bookcases, ashtray stands, leather armchairs, coffee tables piled with old magazines, the works. I read the movie reviews in an old issue of
Time,
leafed through a copy of the
Post
looking for a funny cartoon, and then Tux came back. He asked me if I would come this way, and I said I would.

I followed him up a broad flight of stairs straight out of
Gone with the Wind,
and down a hall fresh from an old horror movie. It looked as though architects and interior decorators had worked on this place in relays, and no two of them were working from the same plans. A house like this would make me very nervous after a while.

Ernest Tesselman was in the last room on the right, down at the end of the hall. It was a large room, with lots of windows and a skylight, and was almost painfully bright. It looked like a supermarket for fish. There were straight rows of benches lined across the room, with narrow aisles between the rows. The benches were covered with aquariums, all of them filled with water and fish. Most of the aquariums had lights in or on or under them, and they all had filters attached at one end. The filters were all going
bubble-bubble,
most of the light sources were under water, I was surrounded by glass in the windows and the aquariums and the skylight, and the total effect was a little overpowering. I felt as though I were underwater myself.

I blinked a couple of times, trying to get used to the place, as Tux receded softly down the hall. Then I saw somebody swimming toward me down one of the aisles, holding a midget butterfly net in one hand and a box of fish food in the other. He was pausing now and again to cluck at the fish.

This was my first meeting with Ernest Tesselman, and he wasn’t at all what I’d been expecting. I’d figured Tesselman to be somebody from the same approximate mold as my boss, tough and hard but lightly covered by a shiny veneer of social grace and civilized manners.

But this Tesselman was something else entirely. He was a little guy, gray-haired, with a small round pot belly, wire-framed spectacles, and bony hands on which the veins stood out like mounds of blue clay. He was dressed in scuffed brown bedroom slippers, faded and baggy-kneed corduroy trousers, a too-large undershirt, and a ratty white terry-cloth robe loosely tied around his middle.

I stood in the doorway, watching this fussy little Professor of Latin Literature scuffle up and down aisles and peek through his spectacles at the fish, and I waited for him to notice that he wasn’t alone with the gills any more.

He did, finally. He blinked at me over his glasses, and said, “Are you the man Ed Ganolese called me about?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Come in,” he said. He waved the butterfly net at me. “Come in, come in.”

I walked down the aisle toward him. By the time I’d reached him, he’d forgotten me again. He was peering into one of the smaller aquariums. All of the occupants of all of the tanks in the room were tiny, the things that are called tropical fish, and there was only one of them in this particular tank. This one was a sort of hazel color, with a red tail. It darted around, back and forth, as though it were looking for the exit and had just about lost its patience.

Tesselman tapped on the glass side of the tank with his fingernail, and the fish shot over to investigate the noise. Tesselman chuckled, a wheezy little sound, and looked up at me. “She’s going to have babies soon,” he said. “Sometime today.”

“She’s a good-looking fish,” I said. I felt as though a compliment of some kind was called for, and what do you say about a fish?

“I have to watch her,” he confided. “If I don’t move the babies as soon as they’re born, she’ll eat them.”

“There’s Momism for you,” I said.

“They’re all cannibals,” he said. He waved the midget butterfly net around at the rest of the room. “All of them. It’s a very fierce world they live in. I want to save these babies. The mother is a red-tail guppy and the father is a lyre-tail guppy. They should have beautiful children.”

I looked around at some of the other tanks. Most of them had five to ten fish swimming around inside, and it looked as though they were all chasing one another. “What happens when one of them catches another one?” I asked.

“One gets eaten.”

“Oh.”

“Come take a look,” he said. He shuffled down the aisle a little way and stopped at another aquarium. This one was full of fish, a dozen or more, of all different sizes and colors. Tesselman tapped on the glass, and they all flocked over to see what was doing. He shook a little fish food into the water, and the fish went nuts, trying to get at the stuff. One of them went out of his head completely, and started to swell up like a balloon. “That’s a Beta,” Tesselman told me. “Siamese fighting fish. They actually do fight them in Siam, like cock-fighting in this country in the old days. I’m told it’s a fine gambling sport. No likelihood of a fixed fight.”

“Good-looking fish,” I said, repeating the compliment. This Beta was good-looking at that. He looked like a new car, with all the pastel colors, and the fins, and all the rest of it.

“They’re my beauties,” said Tesselman. Then he looked up at me again. “You want to talk about poor Mavis.”

“Yes, sir.”

“A terrible thing,” he said. He puttered away from me again, his head turning from side to side as he looked at his fish, and I tried to connect him with Mavis St. Paul or anyone like her, but I failed. Then I tried to picture this fuddy-duddy little man as a political power, and I failed there, too. There had to be more to this man than he was showing me.

I walked along after him. “The police are looking for a man named Billy-Billy Cantell,” I said.

“I know. They say he’s a dope addict. He came to burglarize the apartment, and killed poor Mavis when she discovered him.” He tapped at another aquarium and poured some more fish food in among the cannibals. “They haven’t caught him yet, so far as I know,” he said.

“I’m probably the only one who has seen him since the murder,” I said.

I had his attention at last. He looked at me through his spectacles, no longer blinking. “You’ve seen him? Talked to him?”