“No, it wasn’t.”
“You made somebody dead.”
I didn’t say anything.
She took her time thinking it over. She took out a cigarette, tapped its end on a well-manicured nail. I guess she was waiting for me to light it for her. I remained in character and let her light it for herself.
Finally she said, “It might work.”
“I’d be putting my neck in a noose. You wouldn’t have to worry about me running out and yanking on the rope.”
She nodded. “There’s only one problem.”
“The money?”
“That’s the problem. Couldn’t we lower the price a little?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I just don’t have that kind of money.”
“Your husband does.”
“That doesn’t put it in my handbag, Matt.”
“I could always eliminate the middleman,” I said. “Sell the goods directly to him. He’d pay.”
“You bastard.”
“Well? Wouldn’t he?”
“I’ll get the money somewhere. You bastard. He probably wouldn’t pay, as a matter of fact, and then your hold’s gone, isn’t it? Your hold and my life, and we both wind up with nothing, and are you sure you want to risk that?”
“Not if I don’t have to.”
“Meaning if I come up with the money. You’ve got to give me some time.”
“Two weeks.”
She shook her head. “At least a month.”
“That’s longer than I planned on staying in town.”
“If I can have it faster, I will. Believe me, the faster you’re off my back the better I like it. But it might take me a month.”
I told her a month would be all right but I hoped it wouldn’t take that long. She told me I was a bastard and a son of a bitch, and then she turned abruptly seductive again and asked me if I wouldn’t like to take her to bed anyway for the hell of it. I liked it better when she called me names.
She said, “I don’t want you calling me. How can I get in touch with you?”
I gave her the name of my hotel. She tried not to show it, but it was obvious that my openness surprised her. Evidently the Spinner hadn’t wanted her to know where she could find him.
I didn’t blame him.
Chapter 7
On his twenty-fifth birthday, Theodore Huysendahl had come into an inheritance of two and a half million dollars. A year later he’d added another million and change by marrying Helen Godwynn, and in the next five years or so he’d increased their total wealth to somewhere in the neighborhood of fifteen million dollars. At age thirty-two he sold his business interests, moved from a waterfront estate in Sands Point to a co-op apartment on Fifth Avenue in the Seventies, and devoted his life to public service. The President appointed him to a commission. The Mayor installed him as head of the Parks and Recreation Department. He gave good interviews and made good copy and the press loved him, and as a result he got his name in the papers a lot. For the past few years he’d been making speeches all over the state, turning up at every Democratic fund-raising dinner, calling press conferences all over the place, guesting occasionally on television talk shows. He always said that he was not running for governor, and I don’t think even his own dog was dumb enough to buy that one. He was running, and running very hard, and he had a lot of money to spend and a lot of political favors to call, and he was tall and good-looking and radiantly charming, and if he had a political position, which was doubtful, it was not far enough to either the left or the right to alienate voters in the great middle.
The smart money gave him one shot in three at the nomination, and if he got that far he had a very strong chance for election. And he was only forty-one. He was probably already looking beyond Albany in the direction of Washington.
A handful of nasty little photographs could end all that in a minute.
He had an office in City Hall. I took the subway down to Chambers Street and headed over there, but first I detoured and walked up Centre Street and stood in front of Police Headquarters for a few minutes. There was a bar across the street where we used to go before or after appearing in the Criminal Courts Building. It was a little early for a drink, though, and I didn’t much want to run into anyone, so I went over to City Hall and managed to find Huysendahl’s office.
His secretary was an older woman with wiry gray hair and sharp blue eyes. I told her I wanted to see him, and she asked my name.
I took out my silver dollar. “Watch closely,” I said, and set it spinning on the corner of her desk. “Now just tell Mr. Huysendahl exactly what I’ve done, and that I’d like to see him in private. Now.”
She scrutinized my face for a moment, probably in an attempt to assess my sanity. Then she reached for the telephone, but I put my hand gently atop hers.
“Tell him in person,” I said.
Another long sharp look, with her head cocked slightly to one side. Then, without quite shrugging, she got up and went into his office, closing the door after her.
She wasn’t in there long. She came out looking puzzled and told me Mr. Huysendahl would see me. I’d already hung my coat on a metal rack. I opened Huysendahl’s door, went in, closed it after me.
He started talking before he raised his eyes from the paper he was reading. He said, “I thought it was agreed that you were not to come here. I thought we established—”
Then he looked up and saw me, and something happened to his face.
He said, “You’re not—”
I flipped the dollar into the air and caught it. “I’m not George Raft, either,” I said. “Who were you expecting?”
He looked at me, and I tried to get something out of his face. He looked even better than his newspaper photos, and a lot better than the candid shots I had of him. He was sitting behind a gray steel desk in an office furnished with standard City-issue goods. He could have afforded to redecorate it himself — a lot of people in his position did that. I don’t know what it said about him that he hadn’t, or what it was supposed to say.
I said, “Is that today’s Times? If you were expecting a different man with a silver dollar, you couldn’t have read the paper very carefully. Third page of the second section, toward the bottom of the page.”
“I don’t understand what this is all about.”
I pointed at the paper. “Go ahead. Third page, second section.”
I stayed on my feet while he found the story and read it. I’d seen it myself over breakfast, and I might have missed it if I hadn’t been looking for it. I hadn’t known whether it would make the paper or not, but there were three paragraphs identifying the corpse from the East River as Jacob “Spinner” Jablon and giving a few of the highlights of his career.
I watched carefully while Huysendahl read the squib. There was no way his reaction could have been anything other than legitimate. The color drained instantly from his face, and a pulse hammered in his temple. His hands clenched so violently that the paper tore. It certainly seemed to mean that he hadn’t known Spinner was dead, but it could also mean he hadn’t expected the body to come up and was suddenly realizing what a pot he was in.
“God,” he said. “That’s what I was afraid of. That’s why I wanted — oh, Christ! ”
He wasn’t looking at me and he wasn’t talking to me. I had the feeling that he didn’t remember I was in the room with him. He was looking into the future and watching it go down the drain.
“Just what I was afraid of,” he said again. “I kept telling him that. If anything happened to him, he said, a friend of his would know what to do with those… those pictures. But he had nothing to fear from me, I told him he had nothing to fear from me. I would have paid anything, and he knew that. But what would I do if he died? ‘You better hope I live forever,’ that’s what he said.” He looked up at me. “And now he’s dead,” he said. “Who are you?”