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FIVE

WILLIAM BOYD WINKLE was as much an anomaly in his way as Marla Trent was in hers. In a profession dominated by plug-uglies William Boyd Winkle was also a Doctor of Philosophy who had majored in abnormal psychology and whose thesis for his doctorate, like Marla’s, had been concerned with criminology. Unlike Marla, however, William Boyd Winkle had been an all-American fullback at Notre Dame, an intercollegiate wrestling champion, and an undefeated wrestler three years running at the Olympic Games. He stood perfectly balanced at six feet two, massive-shouldered, flat-bellied, and homely-handsome with a broken nose. Naturally, he had been nicknamed Wee Willie Winkle. He was soft of speech and easy of manner and slow to anger but when the fuse gave out he could be dangerous. Adding anomaly to anomaly, he was a scholar of the Bible and a scholar of Shakespeare and he had turned down a full professorship at Michigan State for the dubious distinction of private detection, joining with Marla in founding the richly successful Marla Trent Enterprises. It was common knowledge that there had never been a romance between them—each had previously been married, Marla divorced and Willie widowed—and it was common knowledge that there would never be a romance between them, first because their appeal to one another was strictly cerebral, and second because they both subscribed to the pragmatic adage that sexual byplay in commercial venture tends to befoul the business nest.

“To what do we owe the pleasure?” said Willie to Marla.

“Mr. Chambers is representing Mrs. Kiss,” said Marla.

“Why does she need representation?” said Willie.

“She was of the opinion she was about to be blackmailed,” said Marla.

“Can you blame her?” said Willie.

“No,” said Marla. “She’s outside in the library.”

“But Peter is inside here.”

“Give him the file.”

“Are we about to breach a confidence?”

“We are about to trust a fellow worker.”

“Well said, dearly beloved,” said Willie as he gave me the portfolio.

It contained sixty-six full-sized photos, in color yet. It was a peep-show for a pornographer, in glossy color yet. It was no wonder that Marla Trent knew Valerie Kiss and Valerie Kiss did not know Marla Trent. Valerie Kiss had never before seen Marla Trent but Marla Trent had seen all of Valerie Kiss, and in superb action. Valerie Kiss was a beautiful woman who had passed the paramount screen test: she was more beautiful unclad than clad. There were long shots, close shots, high angle shots, and very low angle shots: sexual intercourse in all its aberrations and ungraceful positions was graphically delineated in sharp, stark, sweaty, ungrained, excellent focus.

I looked at the pictures and Willie and Marla looked with me. We made comments but our comments were rigidly clinical. An amateur might have been titillated but we were professionals. We had seen many such pictures; lamentably, we had made many such pictures throughout our careers; somebody has to scrape the sewers, somebody has to mash the garbage, somebody has to clean the purple refuse in the bloody slop-pans of an operating room. There are private detectives who boast that they do not practice in divorce. They are either silly dilettantes with private incomes, or they are hypocrites giving out with the big lie. Divorce work is the backbone of the business. Sly, dirty, disgusting but perfunctory, it is the bread and butter of the profession. Ninety percent is matrimonial work, five percent is even worse, and the remainder is the glamor that the writers write about. What else would writers write about: snapping dirty pictures of dirty people at fun and games, working to prevent the alimony or aggrandize the alimony, tapping telephones, tailing miscreants, unearthing forgotten filth, digging to find where a political body is buried?

There were sixty-six photographs and the further we proceeded the more dour we became, and then silent. We were experienced professionals unremittingly exposed to the nether side of the good, gay, simple life, and our temporary silence was the loud language of our permanent shame: for Valerie, for her partner, for ourselves, for you. “Who’s the guy?” I said.

“Richard Robinson Jackson known as Ritchie,” said Wee Willie Winkle.

“Like how old?” I said.

“Forty-one.”

“How old is the husband?”

“Forty-two.”

“The husband is ugly?”

“The husband is quite as beautiful as the paramour,” said Marla. “Similar type, as a matter of fact, except for the interesting color of the hair.”

The hair was white. Richard Robinson Jackson known as Ritchie was tall, long-legged, broad-shouldered, blue-eyed, straight-nosed, and youthful, with an imperious well-shaped head of prematurely white hair worn close, crew-cut. Except for the neat narrow scar of an appendectomy, the body was clean, lean, long, muscular, and hairless.

I moved away from the pictures. Willie put them back into the portfolio. Marla lit a cigarette. I refused to let the silence happen again. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s not get melancholy again. What’s the story here?”

Now Willie lit a cigarette and smiled. “Same old story. A married gal, an unmarried guy. The gal has dough, the guy has nothing. Two pretty people with a lot of sex going for them.”

“What kind of guy?” I said.

“A nothing. A bartender.”

“There are bartenders that aren’t nothing.”

“This guy was nothing.”

“How do you know?”

“Preliminary research. Upon that basis, the guy was nothing. Handsome, worldly, and stupid.”

“That’s a lot to get out of a little preliminary research.”

Willie turned down the corners of his smile to lugubrious. “Peter,” he said evenly, “I need your criticisms like I need a hole in the head.”

“Willie,” I said, “don’t go superior on me.”

“Marla,” said Willie, “with your permission I’ll throw this oaf the hell out of here. Bodily.”

“Oafully nice of you,” I said, “but big as you are, I don’t think you can make it.”

“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” said Marla, “Saturday morning is always rough. Let’s try to hang on to our tempers and temperaments.”

“Well, he . . .” said Willie.

“Well, he . . .” I said.

“See?” said Marla.

We laughed, all of us, uncomfortably.

“Saturday morning with the sun shining is not exactly propitious for pornography,” said Marla, “especially when the lady is sitting outside in the library worried about blackmail with no idea of what we actually have in here.”

“I apologize, Mr. Chambers,” said Willie. “Acrimony is frequently nothing more than the rattling of guilt.”

“I apologize in return, Mr. Winkle,” I said. “Okay, we’ve rattled. So how do you know the guy is stupid?”

“In the line of my duty I listened to the tapes. The intellectual badinage was suffocating.”

“What do you expect in the dialogue of lovers? Wit, wisdom, and the profundities of Plato?”

“Hear, hear,” said Marla applauding by tapping out her cigarette.

Willie shrugged. “I should have stood in bed, huh? This is not my day. Once more I apologize and this time also to the handsome bartender in absentia.”

“I’m still stuck with the preliminary research,” I said.

“You’re not stuck with anything,” said Marla. “The preliminary research was practically nil. Jonathan Kiss came here in January with a feeling that his wife was cheating. A spouse rarely misses on that sort of feeling. I questioned him but he had no idea of the possible lover. The best he could come up with was the bartender. Seems last summer the Kisses vacationed up near Darien, Connecticut. Mrs. Kiss seemed to cotton to a bartender in a tavern called the Pink Poodle and the bartender in the Pink Poodle seemed to cotton to Mrs. Kiss. The palpable flirtation had annoyed Mr. Kiss but he had no proof that it had been anything more than a summer flirtation. In the fall the Kisses went home and that was that until the feeling of cheating crept up on friend husband.”

“I’m still stuck with the preliminary research.”

“The preliminary research was exactly this.” Marla snapped fire to a new cigarette. “In January, the day after we were retained, I went up to Darien to the Pink Poodle. The husband had described the bartender as a good-looking guy with a white crew-cut. There was no such bartender but there had been. His name was Richard Robinson Jackson, known as Ritchie. He was a big boozer when he wasn’t working. He was a hip character who was a bear with the women and he had quit the job in October. Period.”

“So where did you get the line on him?”

“Willie got the line.”

“Routine,” said Willie. “I tailed the dame. Ritchie now had a sweet little apartment at 222 East Sixty-second Street, discreet with no doorman, and his name as big as life downstairs in the bell-bracket.”

Marla took it up. “Routine established that she saw him afternoons, Monday, Tuesday, and Friday, and on sporadic evenings. She would come over at about eleven and stay until three, afternoons. Then they’d go out for some drinking at discreet little bars until five or so; then she’d go home.”

“Once the routine was established,” Willie said, “I dropped in while they were out and gave the joint the gander. Sweet little setup. Furnished apartment, but charmingly furnished. Three rooms. Ritchie now had a slew of new clothes, new jewelry and stuff, and lots of pocket money—all donated by my lady fair.”

“And how did you get educated?”

“By studying my lessons—from the tapes. But that first visit, all I did was give the place a gander, and take down the number of the unlisted phone.”

“And then?”

“We used Mike Rommel, Elsie Axelrod, and Artie Stouffer. Know them?”

“Very well. Aces.”

“We used them to rotate as tails on her. We supplied them with his phone number. When the loving couple went out, I went in. When the loving couple would give up on one of the watering places, one of the tails would wag by calling that phone number, and I would move right out.”

“Like that you set up the bugs for the tapes?”

“Correct. Then I had Manhattan Photo, Inc. set up automatic cameras for the pictures—”

“Manhattan Photo is top price.”

“We could afford. Our fee was ten thousand, in case you forgot.”

“I remember. How long did the deal take?”

“In six weeks we removed the equipment. The husband got the tape and one set of pictures on March 1.”

Marla shrugged. Her thronged blouse shrugged with her. “After that we expected a quick call from a lawyer arranging a raid, but the call never came. Yesterday another call came.”

“The husband,” Willie said.

“Yesterday at four,” Marla said. “Urgent, could I see him at four-thirty. That’s when he came and that’s when he registered as a weirdo.”

“Like how?” My turn for a cigarette. I lit up.

“He wanted me to call his home at nine-fifteen this morning.”

“Why nine-fifteen, did he say?”

“Yes. Because he wouldn’t be there then. I was to call her and he didn’t want to be there for her to ask him any questions. I was to ask her to come here at eleven.”

“And you were to show her the photos.”

“I was to give them to her.”

I tapped ashes to the carpet. “Marla, would you mind if I broke this to her alone? Rough, this kind of deal—”

“Mind? It’ll be a favor. You don’t think I like this, do you? Willie, where in hell are those photos?” Willie took the photos from the portfolio and transferred them to a large yellow string-clasp envelope. “The husband laid a thousand bucks on the desk for this little deal,” Marla said. “And he also laid this on the desk.” She opened a drawer. “Together with the pictures, I was to give her this.”

It was an ordinary envelope, letter-sized, white.

It had no writing on it and it was sealed.