Masquerade in Blue, page 4
“Well, listen I appreciate – “
“Quint,” he hesitated, choosing his words carefully, “I don’t know how involved you are in this, and I don’t want you to tell me, but I’d be real closemouthed about what I knew if I were you. That cell Barlowe’s in can hold two just as well as one.”
“I get the picture. Cal, thanks a lot. Really.”
I hung up the phone and considered our conversation while I stared at a coffee stain on the counter.
“Quint?” Elaine was standing next to me. “What was that all about? Who’s the Fox?”
I told her what I could about the case, omitting the meeting with Julia, which was really most of it so far.
“Are you going to meet the Fox?”
I avoided her intense gaze and she caught right on. “You did. You did meet him, didn’t you?”
Still looking away, I said, “I can’t talk about that.”
“Well, you can at least tell me if you met him.” Elaine loved hearing about my cases. I think she used them to test her problem solving skills.
I finally looked at her and it was hard to resist the eagerness. But I did. “I’m sorry. This is real confidential.”
“You did! You did meet him. What’s he like?” She went pensive for a few moments. “I picture this middle-aged guy who looks kind of like Gene Hackman.”
“Gene Hackman?”
“Am I close?”
I shook my head, then before she could interrupt I said, “I don’t know. I mean, I couldn’t say even if I did know. For all I know, it may be Gene Hackman.”
“What else can you tell me?”
“Nothing. Elaine, I really shouldn’t have brought it up. This is all really confidential.”
She paused then nodded and as I watched her walk across the room to the window overlooking the river I could see that her buoyancy was gone. There was nothing I would have liked better than to tell Elaine everything I knew. Tell her about Julia, Cal Maitlin’s doubts, everything. Not only did she have a good head for this stuff, but this was the first time since I’d seen her that just for a few minutes it had been just like before. Maybe we needed to work this out somewhere other than at my apartment.
“You hungry?”
“I’m starved,” she said, continuing to stare into the darkness outside the window.
“God, you look nice.” We were sharing a bottle of wine, which had cost more than I usually pay for a pair of shoes. Elaine wore a plum-colored dress and a silk scarf with the dreamy, muted pastels of an impressionist painting. Her auburn hair was longer than when I’d last seen her – just past her shoulders. It was thick and, depending on the weather, could be unmanageable. She was always threatening to cut it, and I was glad she resisted.
She accepted the compliment with a smile and let her gaze wander over the restaurant. A relatively large section of Foxport’s population falls into the “quite comfortable” to “stinking rich” range. There are a few restaurants with white linen tablecloths, subdued lighting and small portions, which cater to this group. I had taken Elaine to one which was given four stars and as many dollar signs in Chicago Magazine. I’d asked for a corner table and told the waiter to give us plenty of time; a request that I’d backed up with what I considered a generous bribe, but which he had pocketed with irritating nonchalance. But it had been a good investment. I hadn’t seen him in fifteen minutes and during that time, Elaine’s mood seemed to have improved. I’d been talking about some of the people I knew in Foxport and some of the other cases I’d worked on. She was smiling, asking questions, making little jokes. I was feeling pretty comfortable and was setting in for a nice long evening with many possibilities when she changed the subject.
“How did you wind up owning part of an import shop?”
“I had a case about six months ago involving a woman who couldn’t collect a substantial insurance policy on her husband because he had apparently committed suicide. Well, it turned out to be murder and I was able to prove it. She was a big tipper. Louise had been trying to find someone to buy out part of the Jaded Fox. It seemed like a good investment to me, so I did.”
“And is it?”
“A good investment?” She nodded. “Yeah, it is. Though I really can’t take any credit for it. It’s built on Louise’s reputation, which is a good one.
Elaine regarded me for a moment, frowning thoughtfully, then said, “You’re putting roots down. That’s not like you.”
The waiter arrived and placed our entrees in front of us. Thinking I had successfully evaded a response, if one was expected, I dug into the salmon with dill sauce. As I chewed, I couldn’t help but notice Elaine watching me, her brown eyes cool and amused. “That’s not like you,” she repeated.
I swallowed and continued to poke around the fish, avoiding her scrutiny. “They’re roots, all right. But they’re pretty shallow.”
“You’ve got two businesses going simultaneously. If that’s not getting in a little deep, I don’t know what is.” When I looked up at her, she was leaning on the table, her head cocked, waiting for more than a brush-off.
Shrugging, I said, “I could close down the P.I. business tomorrow if I wanted to. As for the shop, Louise really runs it. It doesn’t tie me to Foxport. Not really.”
Unconvinced, she nodded, “What about Peanuts?”
“Peanuts is portable.”
“But he’s still a responsibility.”
“I can handle him.”
“Well, I know you can. It’s just that it isn’t like you. You don’t go out of your way to, you know, take things like that on.”
Now she was eating her chicken while I waited for her to continue. I set my fork down. “No, I don’t know. What do you mean?”
After a swallow of wine, she gave it a small shrug and said, “You don’t accumulate things. You like your things disposable.”
“Elaine, since when are you an expert on Quint McCauley?”
“I guess I’m not. We were only together for two months. Doesn’t mean much at all, does it?” She ripped off a piece of bread and dabbed at the Madeira sauce.
“How much do you expect it to mean? Two months is barely enough time to find out what you like on your pizza.”
She regarded me for several moments, then said, “You know, Quint, you can’t blow everything off with a line.”
Mercifully, the waiter appeared to ask if everything was all right. Elaine looked away and I managed a grim smile and a nod. He poured the remainder of the wine into our glasses. I wondered what it would take to rescind my earlier directive. Slip the guy a twenty and tell him to cut to the coffee? He’d probably seen stranger things. But I held on to my money and watched him disappear.
Sitting with my hands clasped and my elbows resting on the arms of the captain’s chair, I tried to think. The food was sticking in my throat and Elaine wasn’t helping. I drained my glass. “All this ‘roots’ stuff sounds kind of funny coming from someone who went tearing off to Santa Fe like they just discovered gold out there.” The minute it was out of my mouth I was sorry.
She placed her knife and fork on her plate and pushed it back a couple inches. With her chin resting in the palm of her hand, it occurred to me for the first time that she looked tired. No, it was more than tired. She looked drained.
I leaned forward, “Elaine …”
Before I could start the sentence, she said, “I’d like to leave.”
I’d pictured a lot of ways for this evening to end, but this wasn’t one of them. Dropping my napkin on the table, I leaned back and tried to make eye contact with her. But it takes two, and after a while I figured it was time to make eye contact with the waiter.
“Is everything all right, sir?”
“Yes, fine. We’ll take the check now.”
He looked perplexed, almost sympathetic, but obeyed.
Before I had to ask, Elaine said, “Is there a reasonable hotel in this picturesque little town?”
The Fleetwood Inn is on the east edge of town. It’s not anywhere near plush, but it’s clean. And reasonable. There really wasn’t much of a choice. When I’d first moved to Foxport, I’d stayed in another one that was a little farther east. It was called the Motor Inn and had the misfortune of being situated right next to a bar that had burned down right before the jello wrestlers got there. The marquee still stood, announcing their arrival on March 24 of some year gone by.
Before she checked in, I gave her forty dollars. “For the cab.”
She hesitated, then took it, adding, “It was only thirty-two dollars so I owe you eight. I’ll pay you later.” She refused my offer to help her to her room.
I pulled my tie off, folded it, and tossed it in the back seat. Then, with the window rolled down, I lit a cigarette and stared at the sky. The moon was full and the night hazy, and it looked as though someone had tried to erase the big white disk and only succeeded in smudging it up.
Elaine had gone to Santa Fe with barely an explanation and had returned without one. Was that the sign of a committed person? What kind of person was that? Why was I the one being put through the third degree?
I was about to flick the half-finished cigarette out the window when I thought of Julia and smothered it in the ashtray.
It was ten fifteen – too early for bed, but I wasn’t in the mood for a visit to the Tattersall Tavern. At some point it might require an exchange of pleasantries. I pulled out of the lot. Maybe it was a good night for watching someone else’s life turn to muck.
I went home, cracked a beer, turned on the VCR and spent the next two hours telling Willy Loman how he could turn his life around. Easy for me to say.
Chapter 4
LEONARD NOVOTNY HAD NEVERaimed to impress clients with plush furniture and framed posters of defunct art exhibits. Someone was going to a lot of trouble to correct that. The smell of paint hit me the moment I walked into the office of Novotny and Associates, which was one in a row of connected, one-story stucco buildings. What furniture remained in the large outer office was covered with either plastic or canvas. At first I wasn’t sure whether the walls were going from beige to peach or from peach to beige. A painter dressed in jeans and a red T-shirt turned as the heavy door fell shut behind me. He was husky with a ruddy complexion and wore a DeKalb Ag cap, which boasted their famous winged ear of corn. The brush in his hand dripped peach.
“Secretary’s in there,” he jerked his head toward one of the three doors I assumed opened to offices. A fourth was apparently a back entrance. A sheet of typing paper was taped to the door he indicated, and written on it in green highlighter were the words: Excuse our mess. I did, and knocked.
A pleasant-looking middle-aged woman pulled the door open, glanced at me, and peered into the large room, checking out the progress of the painter. Then she turned back to me and smiled. “Please forgive this awful mess.” She was small and plump with gray hair lacquered into tight curls. Her dark red lipstick looked freshly applied. “We’re in a state of transformation.” From the tone of her voice, she wasn’t too pleased.
I told her not to worry about it, introduced myself, and asked to see Rebecca Novotny.
“Why don’t you come in here?” She stepped back a couple feet, allowing just enough room for me to sidle into the office. It was crammed with file cabinets, furniture, and a copying machine that probably belonged in the room getting the paint job.
She squeezed between a file cabinet and a bookcase to get to her desk, a cluttered island in a sea of chaos. Precariously balanced on the desk was a plastic woodgrain plate with white lettering, which read Mary Mulkey. She brushed past it, knocking it to the floor. I retrieved it and set it on top of an overflowing basket of files.
Taking a seat behind the desk, she said, “What was it you wanted to see Rebecca about?”
“Her father,” I said and added, “I’m investigating his death for a client.”
“I see.” She wasn’t through listening, but I kept my mouth shut and gave her my best lopsided grin.
After a few seconds, she said, “I’ll just let Rebecca know you’re here,” then turned all her attention to the phone, picking up the receiver like it was a strange variety of shellfish someone had dared her to eat. She squinted at the dial and, after consulting a card taped to her desk, tentatively pressed three buttons. “Don’t know what was wrong with the old phones either,” she muttered. After a moment she said, “Yes, Rebecca, there’s a gentleman here to see you. A Quint McCauley.” She looked like she was about to go on but was cut off and closed her mouth, waiting. Then she said, “Well, he said he’s here about your father’s death.” A pause. “Yes.” Another pause. “Well, I don’t know. Shall I ask? … All right.” She might have been listening to the part of the weather forecast she didn’t care about. “No, I haven’t found it yet, but I’m sure it will turn up soon. What with all the confusion … yes, I will.” She rolled her eyes and listened for few seconds, said, “All right” again and hung up.
“Rebecca’s just finishing something up now. Would you mind waiting a few minutes?” I found an empty corner of a chair and eased myself into it.
I could feel her gaze on me as I studied an oil painting that was leaning against a wall. Its subject was a man in his fifties with heavy-browed eyes and a thick head of wavy hair that was just starting to gray. He had been a large man; probably just big when he was younger but had gone a little soft later in life. There was something about the way his chin thrust out that gave him a military bearing.
“You work for Mr. Novotny for very long?”
She nodded with a solemnity that was sort of touching and said, “I was his first secretary. His only one. Of course he had temporaries while I took some time off to have Billy, and then when God took Harold, but we’d been together for twenty-seven years.” She swallowed and wrested a tissue from a plastic-covered box. Dabbing at her eyes, she sighed and said, “You’ll have to forgive me. He was such a fine man. Hardworking and God-fearing.”
“Did you find him?”
She didn’t have to answer. Except for swatches of an unnatural shade of pink highlighting her cheekbones, her face lost all color. “I came in that afternoon to finish up some correspondence for Len. I often come in on Saturdays to do a few things, you know, get a head start on Monday.”
“Did Mr. Novotny often work on Saturdays?”
“Sometimes. Never on a Sunday, but it wasn’t unusual for him to come in on Saturdays. Maybe just for a few hours, but he often came in. I think he enjoyed it. He felt comfortable here.” Glancing toward the door, she added, “I wonder what he’d think of all this.”
“Probably not much. I’d bet that peach wasn’t his favorite color.”
She rolled her eyes. “Nor mine.”
“So you weren’t surprised to see his car here that Saturday?”
Pausing, she cocked her head in another pigeon gesture. “Actually, like I told the police, I was surprised. He was supposed to go fishing that day. I don’t know with who though. Perhaps alone. I just assumed he’d changed his mind.”
“Was he in his office?”
She swallowed and closed her eyes. “Yes.” The phone warbled. Starting, she placed a hand on her chest to calm herself, then answered.
When she hung up, she said, “Rebecca can see you now.”
Rebecca’s office was in stark contrast to her secretary’s. Not only was it much larger, but there probably wasn’t a piece of furniture that didn’t belong. Even the computer had its own rosewood table. Seated at a large, pristine desk was the new head of Novotny and Associates.
Rebecca Novotny was her father’s daughter with heavy brows and a square jaw that jutted out into a pointed chin. Her eyes were small and penetrating and if she was wearing makeup, you couldn’t tell. Straight brown hair hung past her shoulders, reminding me of the ears on an Afghan hound. The jacket of her tan linen suit was draped over the back of her chair and the pink blouse she wore had flecks of tan in it. The look was conservative and expensive. She didn’t get up.
“Are you with the police?” was the first thing she said after offering me a seat.
“No, I’m a private investigator.” I showed her an ID. She nodded, unimpressed, and I went on. “I’m working for Jeff Barlowe, the reporter who …”
“I know Jeff Barlowe. I know all about him.” From her expression I gathered Jeff wasn’t high on her list of people she dropped down on her knees for every night.
Shifting in the chair, I returned the ID to my hip pocket. Rebecca’s face, for all its shadows and angles, was difficult to read. “He doesn’t think the Fox did it.”
She removed a cigarette from a slim, silver case, lit it and leaned back in her chair. Then she shot a stream of smoke up toward the ceiling and said, “I think he’s wrong. You should have seen his office. There’s no doubt in my mind it was the Fox’s work.”
“Yeah, I guess it doesn’t look good for the Blue Fox, but I like to consider all the options before I get to my conclusions.” There was no softening in her gaze, nor a glimmer of what was going on in her head. I went on. “Let me put it this way, if I’m convinced the Fox did it, that’s what I’ll tell my client. Then he can do what he pleases.” I waited for a reaction, got none, then asked, “Were you in the office the Saturday your father was killed?”
“No. I wasn’t.” She studied me through a cloud of smoke. “You mentioned options. What are they?”
“Like maybe someone wanted to make it look like the Fox killed your father. Maybe there’s someone else who wanted to see your father dead.”
Again, the dispassionate stare. This woman belonged in a game of five card stud. “Who did you have in mind?”
I shrugged. “Nobody. Everybody. I’m going into this with an open mind.”
Abruptly she leaned forward, crushed her half-smoked cigarette out in a marble ashtray, and said, “Well, it’s not easy to have an open mind when it’s your father who has been murdered. That damned Fox has become such a folk hero, he could blow up the National Oil Building with everyone in it and his followers would cheer.” Just as the embers from her last cigarette were fading, she lit another. Her chair creaked slightly as she settled back. The corners of her mouth turned up in a mocking smile. I imagined she was conjuring up various ways to dismember the Fox. Finally, she said, “But I’m willing to bet there’s at least one member of the flock who’s got his or her priorities straight.”
