But, even for nickels, don’t bet against him, because he isn’t ever going to lose, not before 1999.
Wapshot’s Demon
HE KEPT ME WAITING on a hard wooden bench for three-quarters of an hour before his secretary came wandering out, glanced casually at me, stopped to chat with the switchboard girl, drifted in my direction again, paused to straighten out the magazines on the waiting-room table, and finally came over to tell me that the Postal Inspector would see me now.
I was in no mood to be polite, but I was very good. I marched in and put my briefcase on his desk and said, “Sir, I must protest this high-handed behavior. I assure yon, I have no client whose activities would bring him in conflict in any way with the Post Office Department. I said as much to one of your staff on the phone, after I received your letter ordering me to appear here, but they.”
He stood up, smiling amiably, and shook my hand before I could get it out of the way. “That’s all right,” he said cheerfully. “That’s perfectly all right. We’ll straighten it out right away. What did you say your name was?”
I told him my name and started to go on with what I had to say, but he wasn’t listening. “Roger Barclay,” he repeated, looking at a pile of folders on his desk. “Barclay, Barclay, Barclay. Oh, yes.” He picked up one of the folders and opened it. “The Wapshot business,” he said.
The folder seemed to contain mostly large, bright-colored, flimsy-looking magazines entitled Secret, Most Secret, Top Secret and Shush! He opened one of them where a paper clip marked a place and handed it to me.
There was a small ad circled in red crayon. “That’s it,” he said. “Your boy Wapshot.”
The ad was of no conceivable interest to me; I barely glanced at it, something about fortune-telling, it looked like, signed by somebody named Cleon Wapshot at an address in one of those little towns in Maine. I handed it back to the Postal Inspector. “I have already informed you,” I said, “that I have no client involved in difficulties with the Post Office Department; that is not my sort of practice at all. And I most certainly have no client named Cleon Wapshot.”
That took some of the wind out of his sails. He looked at me suspiciously, then took a scrawly piece of paper out of the folder and read it over, then looked at me suspiciously again. He handed over the piece of paper. “What about this, then?” he demanded.
It was a penciled letter, addressed to the Postal Inspector in Eastport, Maine; it said: Dear Sir:
Please send all further communications to my Attorney, Roger Barclay, Esq., of 404 Fifth Avenue, New York, and oblige,
Yours sincerely,
Cleon Wapshot
Naturally, that was a puzzler to me. But I finally convinced the Postal Inspector that I’d never heard of this Wapshot. You could see he thought there was something funny about the whole thing and wasn’t quite sure whether I had anything to do with it or not. But, after all, the Post Office Department is used to cranks and he finally let me go, and even apologized for taking my time, after I had assured him for the tenth time that I had nothing to do with Wapshot.
That shows how wrong you can be. I hurried back to my office and went in through the private door down the hall. When I rang for Phoebe I had already put the affair out of my mind, as the sort of ridiculous time-waster that makes it so difficult to run a law office on schedule. Phoebe was bursting with messages; Frankel had called on the Harry’s Hideaway lease, call him back; Mr. Zimmer had called three times, wouldn’t leave a message; the process server had been unable to find the defendants in the Herlihy suit; one of the operatives from the Splendid Detective Agency was bringing in a confidential report at 3:30.
“And there’s a man to see you,” she finished up. “He’s been here over an hour; his name’s, uh, Wapshot, Cleon Wapshot.”
He was a plump little man with a crew cut. Not very much like any Down-East lobsterman I ever had imagined, but his voice was authentic of the area. I said, “Sir, you have caused me a great deal of embarrassment. What in heaven’s name possessed you to give the Post Office my name?”
He blinked at me mildly. “You’re my lawyer.”
“Nonsense! My good man, there are some formalities to go through before”
“Pshaw,” he said, “here’s your retainer, Mr. Barclay.”
He pushed a manila envelope toward me across the desk.
I said, “But I haven’t taken your case”
“You will.”
“But the retainer scarcely know what the figure should be. I don’t even know what law you break, what allegations were made.”
“Oh, postal fraud, swindling, fortune-telling, that kind of thing,” he said. “Nothing to it. How much you figure you ought to have just to get started?”
I sat back and looked him over. Fortune-telling! Postal fraud! But he had a round-faced honesty, you know, the kind of expression jurymen respect and trust. He didn’t look rich and he didn’t look poor; he had a suit on that was very far from new, but the overcoat was new, brand-new, and not cheap. And besides he had come right out and said what his business was; none of this fake air of “I don’t need a lawyer, but if you want to pick up a couple bucks for saving me the trouble of writing a letter, you’re on” that I see coming in to my office thirty times a week.
I said briskly, “Five hundred dollars for a starter, Mr. Wapshot.”
He grinned and tapped the envelope. “Count ‘er up,” he said.
I stared at him, but I did what he said. I dumped the contents of the manila envelope on my desk.
There was a thick packet of U. S. Postal Money Orders a hundred and forty-one of them, according to a neatly penciled slip attached to them, made out variously to “Cleon Wapshot,” “Clion Wopshatt,” “C. Wapshut” and a dozen other alternate forms, each neatly endorsed on the back by my new client, each in the amount of $1.98.
There was a packet, not quite so thick, of checks, all colors and sizes; ninety-six of these, all in the same amount of $1.98.
There was a still thinner packet of one-dollar bills thirty of them; and finally there were stamps amounting to 74c. I took a pencil and added them up: $279.18
190.08
30.00
.74
$500.00
Wapshot said anxiously, “That’s all right, isn’t it? I’m sorry about the stamps, but that’s the way the orders come in and there’s nothing I can do about it. I tried and tried to turn them in, but they won’t give me but half the value for them in the post office, and that’s not right. That’s wasteful. You can use them around here, can’t you?”
I said with an effort, “Sit down, Mr. Wapshot. Tell me what this is all about.”
Well, he told me. But whether I understood or didn’t understand I can’t exactly say. Parts of it made sense, and parts of it were obviously crazy.
But what it all came to was that, with five appointments and a heavy day’s mail untouched, I found myself in a cab with this Cleon Wapshot, beetling across town to a little fleabag hotel on the West Side. I didn’t think the elevator was going to make it, but I have to admit I was wrong. It got us to the fifth floor, and Wapshot led the way down a hall where all the doors seemed to be ajar and the guests peeping impassively out at us, and we went into a room with an unmade bed and a marble-topped bureau and a dripping shower in the pint-sized bath, and a luggage rack and on the luggage rack, a washing machine.