I made a long blink for effect. “It might interest you to hear that the yoga wallah denies any acquaintance with her name, that furthermore he is a dealer in narcotics.”
Washburn threw up his hands. “Oh, come off it, Wren. Who doesn’t sniff a little coke these days? I mean, we’re all under the pressure of a sense of futility. No wars worth fighting, no causes that are not obviously farcical.”
“I’m speaking about heroin.”
“Oh,” sighed Washburn again, wrinkling his tan brow. “Surely you have got your geography wrong? I believe that comes from Marseilles, like Allons enfants de la patrie, and not, like duck, from Bombay.”
I decided his purpose in speaking so exotically was to be incomprehensible to Alice, if she were listening from the bathroom. Therefore I said in an undertone, with the knowledge that “Bombay duck” was not fowl but rather a piscine dish: “This whole affair is quite fishy. I’ve hit a few snags while trolling the gong-tormented sea. Do you suppose you might chum the water again?”
“You’re being obscure, Wren. Is that deliberate?” Washburn wore a thin, insinuating smile.
I thrust my thumb towards the entrance to the bathroom, to which Alice had not closed the door; neither was she making a sound inside, though she seemed the kind who would be brazenly noisy about private matters. Reassuming my sotto voce, I said: “I’m afraid I was robbed of your retainer.”
Washburn’s smile turned definitely chilly. “Suddenly,” said he, “I see something very chicane in your manner. Blackmail, is that it? All right, Wren, I’ll pay it.” He started into the bedroom, halted, glared over his shoulder, and raised one finger. “But my respect for you has taken a precipitous plunge.”
“Just a minute—” But I was talking to the unresponsive groove between the muscle masses of his back, which swooped to a narrow waist below which his naked hams were in the tense movement of departure.
I tried again. “You misinterpret me, Mr. Washburn.”
He had squatted to go, like a savage grubbing for roots, through a heap of clothing on the floor beside one of the single beds. On the bed itself, that nearer the doorway, Natalie’s, was a varicolored taffy-twist of intermixed spread, blanket, and sheet. Whereas Alice’s place of repose, under the window, was made up tight as a trampoline. The Venetian louvers were shut, but a bright sun against their translucent plastic furnished adequate light for these observations. No, the tangled bedclothes were not of sufficient mass to conceal a person, as for an instant I found myself suspecting. Natalie was indeed gone, whatever she had done before leaving.
“You are a thoroughgoing scoundrel,” said Washburn, defining his jacket from the bundle.
It might be wondered why my efforts to disabuse him were so feeble. If he believed me a blackmailer, he would hardly continue to employ me as investigator. But he would undoubtedly pay me more for the new role than he had for the old, and I might do worse at this juncture than accept money for refraining from what I anyway had no intention of doing. However, if he had used that bed while it was also occupied by Natalie, taking payment from him would, I suppose, be tantamount to declaring myself, at least to myself, as a pimp and thus confirming the accusation, erroneous at the time made, of Knox.
The foregoing deliberations were rendered nugatory by Washburn’s coming up from his naked squat with a fistful of gun, not money.
“You won’t get a sou from me, you contemptible cur.” Despite his arch terminology, he appeared authentically grim; and though I was genuinely frightened, I replied in kind, subtly trying to curry his favor by emulation of idiom.
“I’m not the knave you take me for, sir. The day is not more pure than the depth of my heart!”
But he was not mollified by the famous line, and it is a general pity that Racine, like Goethe, is notoriously banal when Englished. He proceeded to put the gun’s muzzle so close to my own that I could smell the fluid with which its riflings had been sluiced and, judging from the strength of the sweet reek, recently.
I had to do better. I called out for Alice. In response I heard the sudden torrent of the shower.
“Once she has toweled,” I assured Washburn, “she can vouch for me.”
“For all I know,” said he, “you and these tarts may be in cahoots. How did you track me here, Wren?” He lowered the pistol to my breastbone, permitting me a clear view of his complete grisly grin. “I didn’t accept your story for a moment. Naked and unarmed, I was only playing for time.”
“Are you speaking literally or simply in pique?” I asked, wondering whether to be seriously dumfounded. “Prostitutes?”
“You squalid little coxcomb,” said he, rapidly switching hands with the gun and offering to cuff my jowls.
“Please,” I cried, recoiling. “I’m here by accident. No— I’m here on purpose, but have encountered you by accident. May I possibly ask you to lower your weapon? I assure you I am unarmed. I did not trail you here. Actually—I admit this freely—I haven’t yet been able to do much about the assignment for which you hired me. I have been blocked at every turn of a very tortuous road.”
“You’re whimpering incoherently, Wren. You’re not the man for this dangerous game.”
“No, I’m not, Mr. Washburn,” I confessed, trying to enunciate more precisely. “I am pleased that you now realize that. I’m no more blackmailer than I am—uh— well, pander.”
He stared at me for a long moment. “I’d like to believe you, Wren,” he said at last. “My natural tendency is to trust my fellow man.”
“So, in spite of all, is mine,” I averred.
He grimaced. “How’s that?…You know, Wren, if I might take the liberty, your style of speech does little to inspire faith. It tends to suggest that your modest if not downright humdrum appearance is a mask. For example, at the moment you look as if you spent the night in a doss house. Yet you often speak as though quoting Thomas Babington Macaulay.”
He should talk. But the balance of power was not such that I could rebuke him.
“A moment ago,” I said, “you used the term ‘tarts.’ Having been acquainted with these ladies for several weeks, at least with Miss Novotny—”
He bent and swooshed up a T-shirt from his cairn of clothing. He continued to clutch the pistol in his other hand, aiming it, in turn, at floor, wall, window, and ceiling, as his head went into the garment. A mummy-impress of his face appeared in sharp relief and then blurred as it ascended behind the fabric. Only after the summit of his blond thatch had emerged from the neck-hole did he endeavor to find an accommodation for his left arm in the wad of stuff bunched between shoulder cap and neck. For a moment the gun in his right hand, resembling the bill of a Canada goose, pointed at his own gradually emerging skull.
It looked very like that weapon of mine, which I had dropped down the dumbwaiter shaft.
His eyes emerged, the whites slightly pinked from the ordeal. He spoke through the fabric, which gave him a minor lisp.
“Take this piztol, Wren. You’re reinztated. You could have jumped me then.” His mouth was at last free. “Sorry I doubted you, but probity is rare these days.”
I did as he asked. It seemed even more like my own automatic when I held it: the clip was missing. He had threatened me with an unloaded gun.
“Did you know this was empty?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t carry any other kind,” said he, at last smoothly white-swathed from clavicles to navel. “Else there’d be corpses all over town. My dander is easily aroused, I’m afraid. Only yesterday I put my shoe through a TV screen. I could not endure the haircut of the popinjay on the six o’clock news.”
“Getting back to Natalie Novotny,” said I.
He chose next to find and put on his shirt. In a like condition I should first have clothed my groin. Whether he was an exhibitionist or merely an opportunist in practical matters—the shirt being at the top of the heap— I could not decide. Of course he had appeared at my office with an open fly.
“Which seems,” he said, “
to be another of those names you ask me to identify, none of which I have ever heard before. Don’t tell me you have intercepted another letter purportedly written by me?” He sat down on the edge of the bed, groped on the floor, and came up with a sock. He determined that it was inside out and plunged his fist within. “I’ve given the first one some thought. It’s undoubtedly the work of Freddie. She’s a sinister woman.”
“But the chronology is wrong, I’m afraid. I received that letter before you appeared at my office, which visit you anyway kept secret from her—am I right? Surely you would not have told her you were hiring me?”
“Surely,” said Washburn, reversing his sock. “But she may have acquired certain telepathic powers under the tutelage of that depraved little Hindu, whom you so negligently dismiss as an influence. He seems to have gulled you.”
I was still holding the gun. Whether or not it was my own, I might have use for it if things continued to go as they had for almost twenty-four hours.
“Do you mind if I borrow this?”
Washburn squinted as if he had forgotten the weapon. “Oh…well, it will leave me at a hideous disadvantage…I don’t know whether,” he went on, swooping the sock up his calf, “I have made it evident that I am passionately in love with Freddie. My consorting with a prostitute is precisely an expression of that love.”
He finally put on his second sock. He took his trousers from the floor and rose to step into them. I now saw why he had not begun to dress, as I should have, by donning drawers: he wore none.
“Bear with me,” said he. “I do have a point. To put it starkly, I suspect I have a social disease.” He zippered gravely, as it were making an event of the passage of each tiny metal tooth through the fastener. Still shoeless, he fetched up his jacket and entered it. He took from a pocket a tangle of necktie, which was of such fine thread that when he had hurled it around his throat and mixed its elements in a fat knot, soon slimmed by half, its silken skin was sleek. Neither had his shirt and trousers suffered from their low exile.
“I have reason to believe,” he went on, “that I contracted this disease, if such it be, from my wife. The inconvenient thing is that we have a doctor in common, and he is a family friend as well. I don’t dare consult him, you see. I don’t suppose you know some obscure sawbones to whom I could go anonymously or failing that, under a nom de guerre? The sort of practitioner who, until the change of law, one slunk for the abortion of an underage girl, gaining admittance to his sordid abattoir by password, paying in cash of course.”
“I could take you to my Aesculapius, old Doc Humphries, curved pipe under a walrus mustache, dusty rubber plants in his waiting room and historic copies of The American Mercury and other extinct periodicals.” The physician named was but a product of my fancy. My purpose was to exceed Washburn in cliched imagery; a bit of baseness, no doubt, but his narcissism had begun to smart.
“Uh-huh,” Washburn muttered indifferently, scanning the floor, surely for his shoes; he was otherwise completely outfitted—in the same ensemble in which he had appeared at my office. I wondered whether it would be politic to ask if he had been home at all; he seemed the sort who would necessarily practice a diurnal change of attire. “Now where in the world?”
At length he descended to his knees and lowered his head to the floor. In this situation, peering beneath the bed, he resumed the subject of his possible distemper. “The symptoms are these: my teeth feel furry even after a brisk brushing; the Achilles’ tendon in my left ankleaches; a tic comes and goes in my left eye; and I have a visible pulse in my forearm. I put it to you whether these details, inconsequential enough when isolated each from each, in sum don’t give the classic picture of syphilis.”
“If so, an ancient case,” said I, strolling between the beds in support of his search. “The kind that in the days of primitive medical practice brought down Oscar Wilde, among others. Quite rare now, I should say, in this era when one is exhorted everywhere to have his annual physical checkup: I even saw it the other day in skywriting over New Jersey. I remember thinking: why should they care? And furthermore, who are they so intimately to address ten million strangers?”
I came upon a windfall: Washburn’s shoes. They were neatly aligned under the edge of Alice Ellish’s bed, which furthermore, I only then recognized, was, though blanketed neatly, without a spread. I picked up the footgear, a hand inserted to the wrist in each upper, and jocularly “walked” them in the air before me as I went back to a position above his crouch. It was quite possible for him inordinately to have hurled his garments across Natalie’s bed before plunging to extinguish his lust in her roommate. It was indeed probable—which accounted for my lightening of spirits—though shameless of course, if Natalie were coincidentally recumbent.
Meanwhile, he had reclaimed the arm with which he had penetrated the under-bed space, bringing back a sleeve coated with hairy dust to the shoulder and a fist from which he had subtracted all but two fingers as he elevated it in demonstration: these pinched, at the crotch-piece, an undergarment that would seemingly be, from its size and immateriality of substance, feminine. Why this discovery should necessarily have served as petard to hoist to kingdom come my lovely theory, only just completed to the last jot and tittle, is perhaps a matter for the psychopathologist. For they could easily have been Alice’s rather than Natalie’s. Not having a panty fetish (though I might well acquire one if underwear continued to appear inexplicably in this case), I could not anyway have associated them with any particular owner after close inspection—unless, which was improbable, they were vulgarly embroidered with initials or nickname, like those available among the multitude of offerings in the catalogue of Pierre’s of Broadway, which nevertheless operated out of a box number in Los Angeles.
At any rate, I did not make an attempt to examine the wispy briefs depending from Washburn’s forefinger and thumb. Losing utterly the self-possession which until that moment surely deserved to be called heroic, I dropped the shoes and struck him on the jaw just as that prominence of bone was, in his ascent to the floor, level with my abdomen. He was hurled first to a seat of heels; then he toppled forward, putting brow to ground, like a Muslim at sunset.
He stayed in that situation for a moment, offering me his nape, and then slowly raised his head.
“I seem to have irked you,” said he. “Believe me, it was not by design. I’ll try to be more careful in future, but my difficulty is the basic one of having no idea of what will trip your hair trigger. Why retrieving my athletic supporter from the floor has earned me a punch, I have no clue. Or was it a retroactive response to my having doubted your good faith a moment ago? I thought I had apologized for that?”
His lack of anything resembling resentment evoked my contrition.
“These sudden accesses of paranoia frighten me,” I said, fingering my temples and sinking to a seat on the end of the bed.
“Poor devil,” Washburn said with compassion. He erected himself and probed his front teeth with his thumb. “No damage,” he announced cheerfully.
“Let me explain something,” said I, “now that I have broken the ice but not, fortunately, your teeth. I believe you disregarded my early attempts to say that a girl, an airline stewardess named Natalie Novotny, has, at least for the the last three weeks, lived in this apartment and occupied this bed. She is slender. She is very blonde. I have never had reason to believe she was a prostitute. I have on several occasions accompanied her to the curb outside, she in uniform, and seen her picked up by the limousine sent around by the airline to collect their crews.”
Washburn worked his lower jaw while the remainder of his face stayed static, as one does when secretly tonguing, say, a poppy seed lodged between one’s teeth.
“This inquiry seems frivolous,” he said suddenly and left the room, in stockinged feet: his shoes were where I had dropped them. I plucked them up, thumb against the inner wall of one upper, third and fourth fingers in the other, index over the junction. Try this; and if the shoes are
as heavy as those I so carried, an excruciating cramp will soon claim your wrist. I seemed to chase Washburn down the hall though to catch him was not my especial motive.
During the short dash to the living room I realized, as I should have done when lifting them for the first time, even though their weight was then distributed by both hands, that Washburn had never worn these shoes unless in some jolly masquerade as a clown, his own modest hoof being obviously no better than a size larger than my own nine and a half, if that; while these brogans must have run, or tramped, to a good fourteen. They were also of a rugged, even brutal, model unlikely to have been favored by my chic client, being higher-topped than the fashionable jodhpur boot; and from the beginning of their vertical rise onwards, the lace holes gave way to stout hooks as broad as the nail of my little finger. They were gravel-grained and, I suspected from their weight, metal-toed. They suggested the professional footgear of an outsized construction worker.
As I debouched precipitately from the hallway, I saw that Washburn stood before the modular sofa, addressing someone seated thereupon, someone so large that my client, between him and my eye and much nearer me, failed to obscure him in any degree.
This someone was Bakewell, or—but I haven’t the patience here to go through that roster of aliases again. There he was, breathing cavernously, a huge hand twitching on the enormous kneecap that terminated a gigantic thigh.
His massive feet wore only white socks. Obviously it was his shoes I carried: that actually occurred to me, such are the vagaries of consciousness, before I received the shock of finding him alive after having thrice discovered him apparently dead. When I did feel that tremor, I dropped the heavy shoes. A short moment later, the tenant underneath replied with a series of enraged blows on his ceiling that suggested he kept ready a bludgeon for that exclusive purpose.
“See,” disgustedly growled Bakewell to Washburn. “We should of scratched that little punk in the first place.”
Though particularly cryptic, as had been virtually everything I had yet heard in this case, like all else its general significance seemed not to my advantage.