Slick nodded. “The woman can be an absolutely fascinating voluptuary when she chooses.”
“Have you ever seen Mix’s wife?”
He nodded again. “I’ve talked with her several times.”
“I suppose Audrey was on the prowl. She gets like that occasionally. Well, Mix didn’t stand a chance. Not many men would. So that’s how it started.”
“And lasted a year?”
“About that.”
“And how is Audrey?” he said. “I know I’ve already asked that, but what I mean is how does she look to you?”
I shrugged. “All right. Somebody seems to have her under surveillance of some kind.”
“What do you think it is, drugs or Mix?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I ran one of them off with a rube act that shouldn’t have bothered anyone. He showed me a badge and some ID that said his name was Knaster. James Knaster — with a K. He’s supposed to be a detective. About thirty.”
Slick stared at me for a moment. Then he picked up the phone, dialed, and asked for Clarence. I couldn’t tell whether Clarence was the first name or the last, but when Clarence came on they chatted for a while like old friends and then Slick said, “I was just wondering if you could give me a bit of information about a young chap who works for you people. His name is Knaster — that’s with a K. Detective James Knaster.” He waited, listened for a while, then thanked Clarence profusely, and hung up.
Slick looked at me and then held up his fingernails and gave them a close examination. While he was still admiring them he said, “They have no one named Knaster. They’ve never had anyone by that name.”
Chapter Six
Slick and I speculated for a while about why anyone with a fake police ID would want to keep a watch on my sister’s house. We ran through several ideas, all of them rather unimaginative, and we seemed to be running out of any ideas at all when the phone rang. Slick answered it, said, “Of course,” and then handed it to me. It was Max Quane.
“How’d you know where to find me?” I said.
“I called your wife and she said you might be at your sister’s and your sister gave me this number. I told her it was important.”
“Well, is it?”
Something had crept into Quane’s voice. It made him talk too fast and run some of his words together. “I’ve got to see you, Harvey,” he said.
“Why?”
“I’ve just got to, damn it!”
“All right. When?”
“Right away,” Quane said. “Now.”
“Well, I suppose I can get down there in fifteen minutes.”
“No,” he said quickly. “I’m not at the office. I’ve got a little apartment over on Mintwood Place. You know where Mintwood Place is?”
“Just give me the address,” I said.
He gave it to me and, as usual, I had nothing to write with so I repeated it. It sometimes helps, but not always. Then I said, “Max.”
“What?” he said and his voice was so low and indistinct that I had trouble hearing him.
“Just give me a hint, will you? A small one will do.”
There was a silence that lasted several seconds. I thought I could hear him breathing harshly and for a moment I was afraid he might be hyper-ventilating. But a phone can play tricks. Finally, he sighed and it was a deep one that seemed to have a sob clinging to its end.
“I—” He started, stopped, and finally when he spoke again it came out in one tumbling rush, the words jamming themselves up against each other.
“I think I know what happened to Arch Mix.”
The phone went dead. Apparently Quane had hung up. He had been very mysterious and very dramatic and possibly even very silly, which wasn’t at all like him. Over the years, Quane had turned into what I couldn’t help thinking of as a rather cool number, what with his vested suits, his tab collars, and his empty grey eyes that seemed to price everything and find it all far too cheap.
I tried to keep what I was thinking, or perhaps feeling, off my face when I turned to Slick and said, “I’ll make you a deal.”
“What kind of deal?”
“A trade-off.”
“Yes,” he said and nodded. “I see. You’re suggesting more of a pool than a trade-off, aren’t you?”
“All right. A pool.”
“And what do you propose to drop into our little pool?”
“I’ve already dropped Knaster. That should be something.”
“Possibly, providing Knaster has something to do with Mix as well as Audrey.”
“It’s all I’ve got.”
“And now it’s my turn?”
“Yes.”
“Very well, Harvey, what do you need?”
“An appointment with your client.”
“Gallops?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Today,” I said. “The earlier the better.”
There was that about Slick. You didn’t have to spend the afternoon explaining things to him. He thought for a moment, working up his pitch, I assumed, then picked up the phone, dialed, and after a few more moments got through to Warner B. Gallops. It was a pleasure to listen to Slick sell. First he was charming, then he was winning, and finally he was convincing — especially when he lied, which he did beautifully, particularly about what a valuable contribution I was making to the investigation.
“Well?” I said after he hung up.
“Eleven o’clock tomorrow.”
“Not today?”
“No. Not today.”
“All right then. Tomorrow. What was that Gallops called me when you first mentioned my name?”
“A shitbird, I believe,” Slick said. “After that it got somewhat less complimentary.”
The last I had heard, Max Quane was still living with his wife and two sons out in the Bannockburn section of Bethesda, Maryland, just off Wilson Boulevard not too far from the old Chesapeake and Ohio canal. It was a fairly upper middle-class section whose residents had tended to shun grapes, boycott lettuce, and now worried a great deal about what the Japanese were doing to the whales.
On the other hand, Mintwood Place was a fairly seedy block of row houses just off Columbia Road back of the Hilton about half a block from Kalorama Park. The block that contained the address that Quane had given me was partly black, partly Cuban, and partly white. If you didn’t know where to look it was a street hard to find, hard to get to, and impossible to park near. It was also, I decided, a rather good place for a man to keep a small furnished apartment that was none of his wife’s business.
It was nearly two o’clock by the time I found a place to park on Nineteenth Street near Biltmore. I took off my coat, loosened my tie, and walked up Nineteenth to Mintwood where I turned left. It was hot — hot for Washington, hot for New Orleans, hot even for Africa, and by the time I had gone half a block my shirt was damp. By the time I had gone a block it was wet. A couple of small, dark Cubans without shirts sat quietly on a small stoop and shared a bottle of something in a brown paper sack. They watched me carefully as I went by, probably because they had nothing better to do and I was something to look at. Not much, just something.
The address that Quane had given me was a three-story row house built out of beige brick. It still had a porch and on it two small children, a boy and a girl with solemn Spanish eyes, were trying to screw a lightbulb into an empty wine bottle. They weren’t having much luck, but they seemed interested in their problem.
I went through a screen door into a small foyer whose only furnishing was a stolen supermarket cart with a missing wheel. There was a row of six mailboxes with locks, but most of them had been pried open at one time or another. The mailboxes had small spaces for the names of the building’s tenants. Four of the spaces were filled in; two weren’t. In the space for number six, which supposedly was Quane’s, someone had printed in Johnson.