Читать книгу The Bessie Blue Killer - Richard A. Lupoff - Страница 7

CHAPTER TWO

The International Surety suite was upstairs in a glittering office tower just off Speer Boulevard. The receptionist had a sign on her desk. Mrs. Blomquist. She wore her hair on top of her head like a Gibson Girl. Lindsey could not remember ever seeing a woman with skin that looked so pale and powdery. He wondered what she had to do to make it look like that, and why she did it.

The thin air made for a snappy morning even in May, but Lindsey had packed his topcoat and taken a cab wearing a medium-weight gray suit. He usually dressed a little more casually than this, but he was on his way to visit his new boss and he didn’t want to look like a California swinger.

Mrs. Blomquist made Lindsey wait while she buzzed Mr. Richelieu, then made him wait some more. Lindsey browsed through the Rocky Mountain News, looking for stories with California datelines. He could care less about scandals in the Colorado state legislature, shakeups in the Denver Police Department, new real estate developments in Arapahoe and Elbert Counties, or the draft strategy of the embryonic National League baseball team that seemed to have the local papers in a complete tizzy. He was eager to get home.

Richelieu stood up when Lindsey walked in. The sign on the inner door said simply, Desmond Richelieu. Nobody called him Ducky to his face. He wore a neatly-trimmed moustache and rimless bifocals that glinted in the sunlight pouring through his office window. He looked like a steel-engraving of the French Cardinal Lindsey had once seen in a high school library edition of The Three Musketeers. There was even a shadowy suggestion of the Cardinal’s dark, pointed goatee. He gestured Lindsey to a seat.

“I always like to have a chat with each of our graduates before they head out on their first assignment. I imagine you’d heard that.”

Lindsey nodded. He’d carried his attaché case with him and he placed it carefully on the carpet beside his chair.

“The way the Chief used to do it when I worked for the Bureau.” Richelieu made a barely perceptible motion with his head. His hair was very black with just a tuft of pure white above each ear. Richelieu had combed his hair with some sort of pomade that made it look like glossy corduroy.

Lindsey followed Richelieu’s gesture with his eyes. A tastefully-framed, diploma-like document stood out against the elegant paneling. Beside it hung a blown-up glossy of a boyish Richelieu shaking hands with a dumpy, bulldog-faced man in a double-breasted pinstriped suit. The picture was cropped so you couldn’t see either man’s feet.

“It’s a funny thing,” Richelieu said. “The FBI is like the Mafia. Once you’re in it, you’re never really out.” He shook his head sadly. “But once John Edgar was gone, the Bureau was never the same. Mixed up in Watergate, White House interference. They never got away with that when the Chief was alive. He took on everybody. The Kennedys, everybody. But once he was gone, why, it was never the same.”

Lindsey had heard that J. Edgar Hoover had been sensitive about his height, had stood on a box for photo-ops with his underlings. Bureau photogs knew that they had to keep the focus up and not show the box. Agents knew that they had to keep their eyes up and not see it, either. Failure to comply could cost a man his career. He might not get tossed out of the Bureau, but he’d reach age sixty-five counting pencils in the Fargo, North Dakota, branch office.

Richelieu leaned his forearms on the glass top of his desk. The glass was polished to a perfect sheen. There was nothing beneath the glass but polished mahogany and nothing on top of it except for Richelieu’s spotless sleeves. “When Harden at Regional recommended you for SPUDS, he said you were reluctant to take the job, Hobart. Is that right?”

Lindsey hated his first name. He preferred Bart, didn’t mind Lindsey, hated Hobart. He said, “Yes, sir.”

“That’s all right, a lot of my people join up reluctantly. What happened to your job in Walnut Creek?”

Richelieu didn’t have Lindsey’s personnel folder on his desk. He must have studied it before Lindsey was admitted to the inner sanctum. Lindsey said, “I was hospitalized.”

“Yes. Shot in the shoulder, wasn’t it?”

“Mr. Harden brought someone else in to run the office. I thought Ms. Wilbur could handle it until I got back, but Mr. Harden brought in Elmer Mueller instead. When I reported back, Mueller had my job and I wound up in SPUDS.”

Richelieu leaned back. Lindsey half expected to see a flunky run in and polish the desk-glass. Richelieu said, “You’ve doubtless heard that we have a high rate of attrition in SPUDS.”

Lindsey nodded.

Richelieu kept on going. He had not waited for the nod. “It’s true. You’ll get tough cases. Some people think SPUDS is International Surety’s own little Gestapo, its own little Gulag. Neither of those is true, Hobart. We’re not police. We don’t torture anybody. We’re very law-abiding. We are a little bit like detectives, but then I understand that you like to play Sherlock. Is that true?”

“No, sir. I just try to do my job, sir. I’m a claims adjuster, that’s all. Somebody’s store is burgled, we pay for the loss. Somebody’s car gets stolen, we pay fair value.”

“Yes, yes. But if you can recover the stolen goods you can save International Surety a lot of money. You’ve done that, haven’t you?”

Lindsey nodded. The man was playing cat and mouse with him. He had to know that Lindsey had saved the company a fortune in rare 1940s comic books and an even bigger fortune on a stolen 1928 Duesenberg. Each case had involved a murder, as well, but the company paid him to save money, not to catch killers. He did that on his own time, and Harden had used it against him more than once.

“I’m not going to spend a lot of time reviewing material that you learned in your seminars,” Richelieu said. “If you do a good job for me, you can make a good thing out of SPUDS. You’ll have lots of freedom. I understand you have a penchant for breaking rules, Hobart. You should be happy working for me.”

Richelieu swung around in his heavily padded leather chair. He seemed to be gazing out the window. Lindsey followed Richelieu’s glance. The sunlight glinted off Cherry Creek. Lindsey wondered if he would see Perry Mason pacing regally beside the waterway, a black Burberry concealing his girth, a polished walking stick in his hand. TV shows and motion pictures, magazine covers and record sleeves. Mother had kept him tied to her for so many years, where other kids grew up riding bikes and playing ball he’d lived a life of media images and his perception of the world was permanently formed. Sometimes it was useful, sometimes frustrating, but there it was.

“I think I’m ready for my first assignment,” Lindsey said.

Richelieu whirled back. The eyes behind those rimless bifocals flashed. Clearly, he did not like having anyone else take the lead in a conversation. Last night at the Broker he’d deferred to Ms. Johanssen, but as Lindsey knew, she represented the Corporate structure. Richelieu had saluted not the man—or woman—but the rank. And Richelieu outranked Lindsey, and expected Lindsey to acknowledge that relationship.

Once upon a time Lindsey would have quivered and apologized for his faux pas.

Now he stood up and said, “I have to catch a flight for Oakland. If there’s nothing else.…”

A smile flashed across Richelieu’s lips so fast that Lindsey would have missed it if he hadn’t been watching for a reaction. “Sit down, Lindsey.” That was an improvement! “Mrs. Blomquist can phone Stapleton and take care of that. Harden is still running Regional and Mueller is running Walnut Creek but you’re working for me now. For me. You get that?”

Lindsey hesitated for a moment before slipping back into his chair. This wasn’t the FBI, despite what Desmond Richelieu might think. And it wasn’t the army and it wasn’t the Mafia. It was a corporation, for heaven’s sake, and if Lindsey just decided to walk out of here, there was nothing that International Surety could do to stop him.

Richelieu smiled. “This is your first assignment for SPUDS, and I’m going to make it a nice easy one for you. Just to help you get your feet wet. You understand?”

Lindsey nodded. If he answered verbally, even grunted, Richelieu could turn away and still continue the conversation. But if Lindsey spoke only in body language, Richelieu would have to stay focused on him. It was a subtle tug-of-war. Maybe it was something in the Rocky Mountain air that was changing Lindsey. Maybe it was his encounter the night before with Aurora Delano.

What kind of man would break his wife’s arm because he’d lost a job? A common enough type, if the TV feature stories about battered women were to be believed. Was that the kind of man who ran the governments and corporations and families of the world? What kind of man was Hobart Lindsey? What kind of man had he been since Hayward State, and what kind of man was he becoming?

“Make it a good one,” he said.

The ghost-smile flickered across Richelieu’s lips again. He reached under the edge of his desk. Lindsey assumed he was pushing a button to summon Mrs. Blomquist. Lindsey wondered whether Richelieu had a telephone in his office, or a computer, or any of the other tools of the modern corporation. Maybe he let Mrs. Blomquist deal with machinery.

The door opened behind Lindsey and he swung around to see Mrs. Blomquist carry in a folder. Lindsey chewed the inside of his lips. He’d lost a point to Richelieu. He followed Mrs. Blomquist’s progress as she carried the folder to Richelieu and laid it on his desk. Lindsey didn’t follow her as she retreated to the outer office. He figured that he’d got back maybe a quarter of the point he’d lost. It was really getting complicated when you had to calculate fractions of points.

“This is practically in your backyard,” Richelieu said. He hadn’t opened the folder, just left it lying on his desk. “Elmer Mueller has written a special policy for a film company that’s going to shoot some footage at the Oakland airport. You can stop and check this out on your way home today, Lindsey.”

“How much is involved?”

“Ah, this is a big policy. Cost of the aircraft, indemnity to the Port of Oakland, personal liability, life coverage of people involved in the film.”

“Why didn’t the movie company set up their own coverage?”

Richelieu tapped the folder with one fingertip. The folder was of tobacco-brown cardboard. Richelieu’s fingernails were perfectly manicured and coated with clear polish that caught the sunlight coming off Cherry Creek. “It’s an odd situation. Not a commercial studio. Somebody got a line on a bucket of foundation money, put together an ad hoc organization to make a film.”

He ran a polished fingernail over his neatly-trimmed moustache.

Lindsey said, “I don’t understand. Is there a claim on the policy?”

Richelieu shook his head. “If there were it would be Mueller’s problem, not mine. This is a risky operation. We’re getting a nice premium out of it, but if we have to pay off, we’ll be in a deep hole. We’re covering their aircraft, the flight crews, ground crews, passengers, the film crews, bystanders, physical plant—the works.”

He pulled his rimless glasses down his nose and peered at Lindsey over their tops. “What if a plane crashes and takes out a schoolyard full of kids? Or an office building? You had a light plane crack up in a shopping mall out there, didn’t you?”

“I remember it,” Lindsey said.

“Well, what if—say, what if one of these people pancakes into the ballpark out there during a baseball game? Can you imagine the claims? It could cost us millions. It could put us out of business!”

“And you want me to go out there and baby-sit these people? Make sure they run a nice safe operation? Is that it?”

“That’s it,” Richelieu said.

Lindsey said, “I’ll need to study the file.”

“Take it.” He shoved the tobacco-brown folder across his desk. Lindsey peered at him questioningly. Richelieu said, “It’s all photocopies.”

Lindsey locked the folder in his attaché case and stood up. This time Richelieu didn’t try to stop him.

Mrs. Blomquist hadn’t changed his reservations, but he caught a United 737 as he’d planned and he was in Oakland in time to face the afternoon rush hour on his way home to Walnut Creek.

Marvia Plum had offered to pick him up at the terminal if she could clear her schedule with the Berkeley Police Department, but Lindsey had promised Mother that she could come out to the airport. She’d been staying in the present most of the time, a slow, steady improvement over her condition in recent years, and he wanted to reward her for staying connected.

He didn’t think it was really her fault, the way she strayed through time. He hadn’t understood when he was little, and she had managed somehow to cope with everyday realities. But as he’d grown up, Mother had got more and more disconnected from the calendar.

Her point of reference was always that dreadful day in 1953, the day she had received word of her husband’s death in the China Sea. Sometimes she knew what year it was and what day, and connected with people around her perfectly. Other times, she thought Jack Kennedy was in the White House, or Harry Truman, or Ike. Most often, Ike.

But as Lindsey had grown away from her, as his relationship with Marvia Plum had ripened from a partnership to a friendship to a troubled and intermittent romance, Mother had somehow regained her grasp on the reality of time. She was still young enough to build a life for herself, and Lindsey wanted to do all that he could to help her.

Now he made his way down the faux terrazzo corridor. He carried his attaché and flight bag. No dealing with luggage carousels! He spotted Mother, a thinner, older, female version of himself. But not really very much older. She’d been a young bride, just a teenager, when her husband had died and her son was born.

With her was Joanie Schorr, their neighbor. Joanie had babysat with Mother when Lindsey had to go out at night. Mrs. Hernández came during the day. Lindsey stayed with Mother most nights and weekends. But Joanie had been the real lifesaver. Even today, she had driven the Hyundai from Walnut Creek. With a start, Lindsey realized that little Joanie was as old as Mother had been when she’d given birth to him.

Both women waved.

Attaché case in one hand and flight bag in the other, Lindsey couldn’t wave back. He hoped they could see his smile. He wanted to get in the Hyundai and get home.