We could use it. Business had been slow for a month or so. I said, “Looks like you took the job already. Not that I blame you.” I put the check back on the desk. “That’s a pretty strong argument.”
“No, I didn’t take it. Ollie Bookman had the check already made out when he came, and put it down while we were talking. But I told him we weren’t taking the case till I’d talked to you.”
“Ollie? Do you know him, Uncle Am?”
“No, but he told me to call him that, and it comes natural. He’s that kind of guy. Nice, I mean.”
I took his word for it. My uncle is a nice guy himself, but he’s a sharp judge of character and can spot a phony a mile off.
He said, “He thinks his wife is trying to kill him or maybe planning to.”
“Interesting,” I said. “But what could we do about it—unless she does? And then it’s cop business.”
“He knows that, but he’s not sure enough to do anything drastic about it unless someone backs up his opinion and tells him he’s not imagining things. Then he’ll decide what to do. He wants you to study things from the inside.”
“Like how? And why me?”
“He’s got a young half brother living in Seattle whom his wife has never met and whom he hasn’t seen for twenty years. Brother’s twenty-five years old—and you can pass for that age. He wants you to come to Chicago from Seattle on business and stay with them for a few days. You wouldn’t even have to change your first name; you’d be Ed Cartwright and Ollie would brief you on everything you’ll be supposed to know.”
I thought a moment and then said, “Sounds a little far out to me, but—” I glanced pointedly at the five-hundred-dollar check. “Did you ask how he happened to come to us?”
“Yes. Koslovsky sent him; he’s a friend of Kossy’s, belongs to a couple of the same clubs.” Koslovsky is chief investigator for an insurance company; we’ve worked for him or with him on several things.
I asked, “Does that mean there’s an insurance angle?”
“No, Ollie Bookman carries only a small policy—small relative to what his estate would be—that he took out a long time ago. Currently he’s not insurable. Heart trouble.”
“Oh. And does Kossy approve this scheme of his for investigating his wife?”
“I was going to suggest we ask Kossy that. Look, Ed, Ollie’s coming back for our answer at two o’clock. I’ll have time to eat and get back. But I wanted to brief you before I left so you could think it over. You might also call Koslovsky and get a rundown on Ollie, whatever he knows about him.”
Uncle Am got up and got the old black slouch hat he insists on wearing despite the season. Kidding him about it does no good.
I said, “One more question before you go. Suppose Bookman’s wife meets his half brother, his real one, someday. Isn’t it going to be embarrassing?”
“I asked him that. He says it’s damned unlikely; he and his brother aren’t at all close. Hell never go to Seattle and the chances that his brother will ever come to Chicago are one in a thousand. Well, so long, kid.”
I called Koslovsky. Yes, he’d recommended us to Bookman when Bookman had told him what he wanted done and asked—knowing that he, Koslovsky, sometimes hired outside investigators when he and his small staff had a temporary overload of cases—to have an agency recommended to him.
“I don’t think too much of his idea,” Koslovsky said, “but, hell, it’s his money and he can afford it. If he wants to spend some of it that way, you might as well have the job as anyone else.”
“Do you think there’s any real chance that he’s right? About his wife, I mean.”
“I wouldn’t know, Ed. I’ve met her a time or two and—well, she struck me as a cold potato, probably, but hardly as a murderess. Still, I don’t know her well enough to say.”
“How well do you know Bookman? Well enough to know whether he’s pretty sane or gets wild ideas?”
“Always struck me as pretty sane. We’re not close friends but I’ve known him fairly well for three or four years.”
“Just how well off is he?”
“Not rich, but solvent. If I had to guess, I’d say he could cash out at over one hundred thousand, less than two. Enough to kill him for, I guess.”
“What’s his racket?”
“Construction business, but he’s mostly retired. Not on account of age; he’s only in his forties. But he’s got angina pectoris, and a year or two ago the medicos told him to take it easy or else.”
Uncle Am got back a few minutes before two o’clock and I just had time to tell him about my conversation with Kossy before Ollie Bookman showed up. Bookman was a big man with a round, cheerful face that made you like him at sight. He had a good handshake.
“Hi, Ed,” he said. “Glad that’s your name because it’s what I’ll be calling you even if it wasn’t. That is, if you’ll take on the job for me. Your Uncle Am here wouldn’t make it definite. What do you say?”
I told him we could at least talk about it and when we were comfortably seated in the inner office, I said, “Mr. Bookman—”
“Call me Ollie,” he interrupted, so I said, “All right, Ollie. The only reason I can think of, thus far, for not taking on the job, if we don’t, is that even if you’re right—if your wife does have any thoughts about murder—the chances seem awfully slight that I could find out about it, and how she intended to do it, in time to stop it.”
He nodded. “I understand that, but I want you to try, anyway. You see, Ed, I’ll be honest and say that I may be imagining things. I want somebody else’s opinion—after that somebody has lived with us at least a few days. But if you come to agree with me, or find any positive indications that I’m maybe right, then—well, I’ll do something about it. Eve—that’s my wife’s name—won’t give me a divorce or even agree to a separation with maintenance, but damn it, I can always simply leave home and live at the club—better that than get myself killed.”
“You have asked her to give you a divorce, then?”
“Yes, I— Let me begin at the beginning. Some of this is going to be embarrassing to tell, but you should know the whole score. I met Eve…”
HE’D MET Eve eight years ago when he was thirty-five and she was twenty-five, or so she claimed. She was a strip-tease dancer who worked in night clubs under the professional name of Eve Eden—her real name had been Eve Packer. She was a statuesque blonde, beautiful. Ollie had fallen for her and started a campaign immediately, a campaign that intensified when he learned that offstage she was quiet, modest, the exact opposite of what strippers are supposed to be and which some of them really are. By the time he was finally having an affair with her, lust had ripened into respect and he’d been thinking in any case that it was about time he married and settled down.
So he married her, and that was his big mistake. She turned out to be completely, psychopathically frigid. She’d been acting, and doing a good job of acting, during the weeks before marriage, but after marriage, or at least after the honeymoon, she simply saw no reason to keep on acting. She had what she wanted—security and respectability. She hated sex, and that was that. She turned Ollie down flat when he tried to get her to go to a psychoanalyst or even to a marriage consultant, who, he thought, might be able to talk her into going to an analyst. In every other way she was a perfect wife. Beautiful enough to be a showpiece that made all his friends envy him, a charming hostess, even good at handling servants and running the house. For all outsiders could know, it was a perfect marriage. But for a while it drove Ollie Bookman nuts. He offered to let her divorce him and make a generous settlement, either lump sum or alimony. But she had what she wanted, marriage and respectability, and she wasn’t going to give them up and become a divorcee, even if doing so wasn’t going to affect her scale of living in the slightest. He threatened to divorce her, and she laughed at him. He had, she pointed out, no grounds for divorce that he could prove in court, and she’d never give him any. She’d simply deny the only thing he could say about her, and make a monkey out of him.