The Hour of the Cat (23 page)

Donovan's secretary brought him the file for his next appointment. He put the two books together and passed them to her.

“Shall I put them on the shelves or file them away?”

“File them.”

“Where?”

“Wherever you wish.”

“How about under A for
Auf Wiedersehen
?” She dropped them in the wastebasket beside the desk.

 

Donovan made no protest, nor did he retrieve the books. Though he didn't doubt Anderson's sincerity, he hadn't forgot the shameless exaggerations—often as effective as they were outrageous—with which the British had painted Germany during the last war, portraying the conflict as a struggle between light and dark, the defenders of civilization versus a horde of evil “huns.”

The morning after his encounter with Brannigan, Dunne had come to with a fuzzy recollection of crawling out of the bathroom and lifting himself into bed. He attempted to stand but his head ached so badly he fell back on the pillow and stopped trying. He slept a long time. Finally able to get up, he showered, changed, and forced himself across the street to Doctor Finkelstein's office.

The old man gently poked at Dunne's head with his fingers. “What the hell happened to you?”

In the mirror above the Doctor's sink, a raccoonlike face, puffy with two black eyes, stared back at Dunne. “The moon fell on me.”

“Must have been a full one.” The Doctor sutured a line of black stitches into Dunne's head. “Probably got a concussion,” he said. He gave Dunne a prescription and told him to stay in bed with his eyes closed.

Back home, Dunne took the phone off the hook and crawled under the covers. He woke up sweating the next morning. It was going to be a scorcher. He phoned the Medical Examiner's and asked to speak with Doc Cropsey. “Hang on,” a voice said. A moment later, the voice came back on. “He wants to know who's calling.”

“His mother.”

There was another pause. “He says he doesn't have a mother.”

“He does now.”

Doc Cropsey came on the line, gruff and annoyed, but amused when he discovered it was Dunne taking him up on the offer to stay at his place in Southold.

Dunne mopped up the blood and threw out the bloody towel, sheets, and pillowcases. He looked through his suit for the envelope Elba had given him. Brannigan had performed his magic.
Abracadabra:
it had disappeared. He took the coffee can out of the refrigerator and removed the bulk of the money he'd stashed there. He threw some clothes in a canvas grip and was about to leave for Penn Station when the phone rang.

“May I please speak to Mr. Fintan Dunne.” A woman's voice.

He thought he recognized the honeydew tone. “Depends who this is.”

“It's Doctor Sparks's office, Mr. Dunne. Please hold a moment.”

Sparks came on. “You're a hard man to reach, Mr. Dunne.”

“Now I'm not.”

Sparks paused. “This is difficult for me, but I need to see you on a matter I'm not comfortable discussing on the phone. Could you come to my office?”

“Who said I make house calls?”

“Please, Mr. Dunne. I'll reimburse any expenses you might incur.”

“Cab fare?”

“Certainly. This won't take long. I promise.”

 

 

Sparks's secretary was stouter and older than the slither-hither quality of her voice suggested. Her immaculate white dress was crisp and freshly pressed. The knot at the back of her head held her hair in tight, stringent order. She directed Dunne through a waiting room across a thick, richly textured Persian rug into Dr. Sparks's office.

Sparks didn't get up. He indicated the chair next to the desk. “Please, Mr. Dunne, have a seat.” He wore a yellow linen jacket and a green silk ascot, the same color as his pants. If he owned one of those white coats beloved of meat cutters and medical men, it was nowhere in sight. “You look as though you've had a rather bad accident.”

“Jack fell down and broke his crown.”

“Head injuries should never be made light of. It's important to rest.”

“I'm on furlough soon as I leave here.”

“I like your style, Mr. Dunne. Very direct.”

“You're in a distinct minority.”

“Today's minority is tomorrow's majority. Isn't that what history teaches?”

“The Republicans hope so.”

“Let me get to the point. I want to hire your services.”

“I'm booked.”

“Last time we talked, Mr. Dunne, you seemed eager for work. ‘Whatever it takes to stay afloat' was, I believe, the phrase you used.”

“My ship came in.”

“At the risk of sounding unduly skeptical, I can't imagine a cut-and-dried case like the Lynch murder could have occupied much of your time.”

“Things aren't always as cut-and-dried as they first appear.”

“The police thought they were, and the judge and jury, and the Court of Appeals.”

“Grillo won't be the first innocent man to go to the electric chair.”

“There's another thing I like about you, Mr. Dunne, your persistence. In difficult situations, when it appears there's little chance of success, the instinct of the intellectual is to give up. But men like you pursue what they want, no matter the odds or opposing forces, and more often than not it's their will that triumphs.”

“I work on a per diem. Don't persist, don't get paid.”

“If you persist on my behalf, you'll be paid promptly and well.” Sparks opened a leather-bound register and lifted a pen from the marble stand on his desk. He poised the pen above a page of corn-colored bank checks. “What do you require as a retainer?”

“What makes you think you need a private detective? Most times what people need is a lawyer, not a snoop.”

“I'm being blackmailed.”

“Then you need the cops.”

“I can't risk the publicity. For a physician, reputation is everything. I need someone trustworthy and discreet who can deliver my message in person; someone whose whole demeanor conveys how serious I am and how final my answer.”

“If you need a goon, your chauffeur, Bill What's-his-name, seems a natural.”

“Bill Huber? Reliable in his own way, but he lacks discretion.”

“That's not all he lacks.”

“This has been a difficult time for me: a woman who worked for me is savagely murdered. Along with my name, one of those vile newspapers even published my picture. As a result, I'm approached by blackmailers who threaten to expose an embarrassing incident from my youth. My sense of security has been badly shaken, so if Bill on occasion acts in an overprotective way, I apologize. I feel required to have someone like him around. Unfortunately, I can't trust him with an assignment like this. He has no capacity for subtlety.”

Sparks scratched the pen across the open page of checks. He pressed a blotter on it that was encased in the same leather as the register and detached the check along its perforated edges. “I suppose a retainer of a thousand dollars might suffice.” He laid the check directly in front of Dunne.

Pay to the Order of Fintan Dunne
. Drawn on the Corn Exchange Bank, its three zeroes were aligned in happy sequence, like the cherries on a slot. Sparks's florid but legible handwriting spilled across the face of the check and helped give it the same impressive feel as the framed diplomas and certificates on the walls, a document to be preserved and enshrined instead of cashed.
We hold these truths
.

“I didn't know a doctor's hand could be so clear.”

“I despise sloppiness in all its forms.”

“You might not like my style as much as you think.”

Sparks pushed the check closer to Dunne. “Aren't you interested in why I'm being blackmailed?”

“If it involves a criminal matter, I'd prefer not to know. That way, there's no chance the cops can get it out of me.”

“It's personal, not criminal, but could be used to hurt my practice. I made a payment with the understanding that would be the end of it and the blackmailers would go away. Now they're back and want more.”

“That's the way the game is played.”

“I'm willing to make one more payment but no more after that. I need to locate where these bloodsuckers are hiding and have my decision delivered in a calm and convincing manner.”

“Sorry, I got a train to catch.” Those zeroes: no small-time tip, two-bit exchange, the New York version of hello. But real money.

“What about when you return?”

“I don't play with blackmailers. Either you go to the cops or they'll keep coming back. It's that simple.” Dunne slid the check toward Sparks. He remembered his father's refrain, while he was still Big Mike, before he shriveled into a wizened, exhausted wreck:
Learn the difference between being paid and being owned. A slave is bought. So is a scab. A taint no bath or shower could remove.
On the way out, the secretary handed him an envelope. “This is for today's expenses,” she said. “I trust we'll see you again soon.”

“You never know.” He laid down the envelope and left.

 

 

It was a decade since he'd last been to Southold. Doc Cropsey had taken him and two other detectives for a summer's weekend. They fished in the day (and caught nothing). At night they played cards by the light of a kerosene lamp and listened to the regular drone of the launches circling in from the ships parked outside the territorial limit to land illegal booze on Shelter Island.

Doc had fixed it so that Clem Payne, a sour, leather-skinned, tight-lipped, East-Ender, was waiting for Dunne at the Southold station. They stopped in a general store for provisions. A woman with a constipated frown filled a large cardboard box with milk, bread, eggs, crackers, jam, and other staples. Clem loaded the box on the back of his beat-up Ford truck. Dunne sat next to him on a torn seat. In several places the springs had popped through, their sharp, menacing corkscrew tips sticking straight up. They traveled east on the highway for a mile or so and turned onto a dirt road. Clem held the wheel tightly in his denim gloves as they jolted over the cratered, rutted surface, raising a cloud of dust that filled the cab.

Doc's place hadn't changed much. Inside were the same ripped screens and cork walls; same collection of secondhand furniture. The only noticeable improvements were the light bulbs that hung from the ceiling and the radio above the icebox. Outside, east of the small house, was an expanse of Sweet William. Closer in, the delicate leaves of a patch of Maiden Pink covered the ground like a mat. To the rear, by the fringe of trees that shielded the shack from the potato fields, a spread of lupines thrived. Peconic Bay was a hop, skip from the drooping screened-in porch.

It wasn't till he'd stored away the provisions that Dunne realized he forgot to bring any booze or cigarettes. He could walk to town, but it was getting dark and he was tired. He lay down and was quickly asleep. In the morning, he went for a swim and dried off on the front stairs. The sun, like the bay, was at flood tide. The trees swayed in the breeze off Peconic Bay.

The flowers were as fragrant as in the garden of the Catholic Protectory where Brother Flavian had tried his best to make them learn the names and characteristics of everything they grew. It was a prized position to be on his “garden squad.” Unlike the Brothers who ran the laundry, the printing office, and the machine shop, big-handed, short-tempered Irishmen who didn't hesitate to cold-cock a kid, Brother Flavian was an old Frenchman who never raised his hand or voice. As tough as the boys of the Protectory insisted they were, as unafraid, they loved his gentleness and competed to be around him.

“Pleeze, repeat again ze names after me,” he said, his accent thickened by the red wine that stained his teeth and sweetened his breath. Plants without a true stem.
Names that sound like Italian saints.
Narcissus, Hyacinth. Plants with stems twenty-four inches or above.
Names from a burlesque marquee.
Canass, Lily, Blackberry Lily. Flowers irregular, unsymmetrical.
Prizefighters' monikers.
Canna, Gladiolus, Anthonyza.