Slattery Will Get You Nowhere
Ralph McInerny
Slattery: A Soft-Boiled Detective

1

I'm Slattery. But call me Ishmael, it's my name. I'm serious. My mother was frightened by a white whale when she was carrying me. My mother, not the whale. I'm lucky she didn't call me Queequeg. Or Dick.
That's what I am. Dick, as in PI. You're not impressed. Neither was Wendell Streeter when the large redhead with the bun in back told me I could go right in. The inner office was like a bowling alley with Streeter's desk way back in the strike zone. Halfway there I said, "I thought this was an emergency."
"I've been running a check on you."
"You hired another PI?"
His head sat on his shoulders like an off-color egg, splotchy, hairless, tilted to one side. His arms were on the desktop, one hand over the other. Splotchy hands too, liver marks.
"You said you'd done work for Nugent."
"I can explain that."
"Coffee?"
It was the redhead, halfway to us, carrying a tray. I sat down, she poured. Streeter waited for her to finish.
"Is that bun real?" I asked her.
"Bun?" said Streeter.
When she handed me my coffee, her back was to him. She rolled her eyes. Dissension in the ranks? I was watching her rhythmic exit, when Streeter began to talk.
"You've got a terrible reputation, Slattery. I'm told it's only a matter of time until you lose your license."
"Everything's only a matter of time. Why did you send for me?"
"I'm looking for someone untrustworthy."
A reputation is all you have in this game and I might have been offended if Streeter's insults didn't sound like compliments. Or at least sound as if I were about to get a job. Maybe if things were going better for me I would have gotten up and gone. Things were about to get worse because I didn't, but it was a while before I realized that.
He had telephoned the night before. I had just stepped out of the shower and was touching up my hair. I hunched my right shoulder to hold the phone and went on working on my roots.
"Slattery," I said.
"The private investigator?"
"Who is this?" I asked, speaking falsetto.
Irate spouses are an occupational hazard. Working on divorces makes you friends and enemies in equal number. The enemies tend to bear grudges. Six months before, I'd gathered evidence for a marriage counselor whose wife, his partner in the business, was spending afternoons convincing a client that he wasn't impotent. I got it all on film and with the evidence in hand he unloaded her and ran away with the judge in family court. The wife's first retaliatory move was delayed and childish. I came out to my car to discover four flat tires. Two days later, I slipped a pizza into the microwave and didn't see the stink bomb already there. I spent the night in a motel. Waking up to the leaping flames outside my window caused by a couple gallons of gasoline set afire was too much. The following afternoon I confronted Dr. Auvarie in her office.
"I think I love you," I said.
"Do I know you?"
"Does the sky know the earth? Does the sun know the shadows?"
"Who are you?"
"Someone fool enough to dream that you could learn to care. One more practical joke and I'll break every bone in your body."
She had a face like a Barbie doll. Her cheeks rounded into pink peaches and plastic teeth were framed by her violet lips.
"Is that a threat?"
"Doubt that the stars are fire, doubt truth to be a liar, but never doubt my love."
"Who said that?"
I looked around. "Aren't we alone?"
"Who are you?"
I lifted my handheld camera and held it to my eye. "Remember?"
She brought her hands together in a clapping motion. Her smile seemed genuine. She pushed the camera aside and kissed me.
"You saved my life."
"Oh well."
"I had to provoke him into a divorce. He thought it would be bad for business."
Her husband, Dr. Seaman. Who ran away with the judge. He had come back of course and now the firm of Auvarie and Seaman was swamped with unhappy spouses.
"Why are you playing tricks on me?"
She dug a longish nail into my side. "I'm not that kind of girl."
At her age she was no kind of girl. But what if she was telling the truth? She was. It turned out that my tormentor was Seaman. A few months with the judge and he hated me for helping him get the goods on his former wife. Auvarie had married the putatively dysfunctional client.
"Why pick on me?" I asked Seaman.
"It makes no sense."
"That's my line."
"I miss my wife."
"Complained the errant rifleman. How can you miss her? You work together all day."
"And at night go home to the judge. I feel I'm being arraigned."
He promised to quit picking on me. His Jeep was in the parking lot of the clinic. I let air out of all four tires.
Last night's caller had been Wendell Streeter, asking me to come to his office, it was an emergency.
"It's my daughter, Slattery," Streeter said now.
He opened the drawer of his desk and slid a large black and white across to me. I had to stop it before it sailed onto the floor. But the girl in the picture stopped me. There are faces that set off music in the brain, that start small drums to beating in the blood. Would her hair have looked as blonde if it had been a color photograph? This was chiaroscuro, an art shot.
"Nice," I said.
"She's been missing three months."
"Tell me about her."
He opened the drawer again. This time he brought out a manila folder. He laid it on the desk before him, put his crossed hands over it and leaned toward me.
"She's being held prisoner, Slattery. I want you to free her. I want you to bring her home to me." He dug in his eye with a knuckle. He pushed the folder toward me. "It's all there. Call me."
"Ishmael?"
"What?"
"Do you know Herman Melville?"
"Who the hell is he?"
"Another missing person. I'll study this," I said, standing. I slapped the folder against my leg, spilling the contents on the rug. I stooped to gather them up. I walked the length of the office and, at the door, turned. "I'll call you."
The redhead with the bun was named Priscilla. I made a date with her for five-thirty in the lounge of the Bonaventure.
"Can you see Mr. Norris for a few minutes?"
"Norris."
"The firm is Streeter & Norris."
"Ah."
She picked up her phone and spoke into it. "I'll send Slattery in now, Phil."
Phil? She called Streeter Mr. Streeter. I checked her hands again. She wore half a dozen rings but none of them suggested plighted troth or even the proximate intention to plight. Was the date in the Bonaventure unwise nonetheless?
Philip Norris looked like a member of the cast from The Wizard of Oz. A munchkin. He got off his chair when I came in and nearly went out of sight behind the desk. He came around it, looking up at me.
"You've talked to Streeter?"
"My name's Slattery."
"I know your name," he said impatiently. "Who do you think recommended you?"
He went back around the desk and climbed into his chair and regained the appearance of an adult.
"He told you his daughter is missing, didn't he? He told you that she is being held captive."
"What do you do, bug his office?"
"Streeter has no daughter. The only kind of daddy he is is a sugar daddy. Lois finally came to her senses and left him. Let it be, Slattery, let it be."
"Then why did you recommend me?"
He smiled despite himself. "I asked around."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"I figured Lois would be safe if he hired you. But a dog will have his day, Slattery. What if you got lucky? I'll pay you not to find her."
I shook my head. "Conflict of interest. Streeter just hired me."
"To find Lois. I'll hire you not to find her. Where's the conflict?"
I opened up the manila envelope and took out the black and white. "Is this Lois?"
He had to put on his glasses. He asked to have a closer look. I passed it to him. Tears began to leak from his eyes as he studied the photograph. "She's an angel," he breathed.
"Who is she?"
"My daughter."

2

"They're both nuts," Priscilla said. She held her glass at chin level and was moving the speared olive around with the tip of her tongue. "Nuts about Lois."
We were in a booth in the Bonaventure lounge, sitting in a cone of light that descended from a recessed fixture above our heads.
"Whose daughter is she?"
"She's more Streeter's than Norris's. She came with his second wife but he never adopted her. Lois." She pursed her lips and inhaled the olive, taking the toothpick on which it was skewered and bringing it forth unloaded. She winced as she chewed. "I hate pimento."
I ordered another round. "Skip the olives." Priscilla emitted a little cry so I amended the order. "Bring her a dish of unpitted olives."
The way to a girl's heart, as it turned out. I asked her to tell me all about Streeter & Norris, the firm. It was her ninth year with them: receptionist, secretary, Jill of all trades. They were in import/export. It sounded like respiration. Breathing in and breathing out. What did they import?
"You name it."
"And they export the same?"
She nodded. Now that that was cleared up, I returned to the topic of Lois.
"What's Norris's claim on her?"
"He says he's her godfather."
"Isn't he?"
Priscilla shrugged. She had broad shoulders and a massive bosom. A shrug was a seismic event. She settled down.
"What is Zeno's Porch?"
I had studied the contents of the folder Streeter had given me, constantly distracted by the beautiful visage of Lois. Finally I turned the photograph over so I could concentrate on the report that had been drawn up by a rival named Nugent. Actually, I had worked for him before setting up as an independent.
"I taught you all you know," Nugent had growled when I told him I was opening my own office.
"And all you know as well. It took an exciting five minutes."
It was a messy parting. He owed me months of back salary. He had totaled my car, and my insurance was one-hundred-dollar deductible.
"I'll see that you lose your license, Slattery."
"What license?"
I left him in a sea of doubt. Of course I had a license. In the Army I had been an MP; when I got out I enlisted in the police academy. On graduation, I applied for a private investigator's license.
"The tertium quid between cops and robbers," Brunswick the academy instructor sneered.
"What's that mean?"
"Ever hear of the excluded middle?"
He hadn't made much sense as an instructor either. Nugent was happy to take me in. Why not? I didn't cost him a cent. He, like Brunswick, was angry when I left.
"This town is big enough for both of us," I told him.
I was glad I knew Nugent as I read the report he had prepared for Wendell Streeter. It was barely possible that there was no place called Zeno's Porch for Lois to be held captive in.
"It's like a retreat house," Priscilla said. "A nice place."
"You've been there?"
"Only twice. For weekends."
"Tell me about it."
"Don't laugh."
Priscilla was attracted to Zeno's Porch by the promise of mystical experiences. The brochure did not of course attempt to describe them. The brochure was in the folder Streeter had given to me. Come Listen to the Silence, the cover urged.
"Did you hear it?"
"What?"
"The silence."
"You said you wouldn't laugh."
"I'm serious."
She gnawed on an olive and then a pit appeared and she plucked it from her mouth.
Nugent's report said that Lois was in residence at Zeno's Porch. Residence was put in quotation marks. I asked Priscilla if Lois could be at Zeno's Porch.
"Could be? She is."
"Streeter says she's being held prisoner."
Priscilla began to hum, wagging her brows. Her breasts began to sway. Drunk already? And then I realized what tune she was attempting to carry.
"A prisoner of love?"
"Sophos. She has a crush on him."
Sophos, I knew from Nugent's report, was the founder, director and chief priest of Zeno's Porch. Nugent said it was a stork cult. I asked Priscilla about that. She laughed.
"Stoic. Stoa means porch."
"Does it?"
"In Greek. Sophos is Greek too. Zeno's Porch is a haven for Stoics."
"What do they do?"
"Go find out."

3

There is a willow grows aslant a brook, which acts as a pointer when you come up the winding road from the highway. The eye alights upon the willow and is drawn irresistibly toward the flat-roofed one-story building, which sat upon the crest of the hill as if it belonged somewhere else on the planet. It was chalk white, the windows were flanked by olive green louvered blinds, the entrance was a shadowy indentation accentuated by stubby shrubs bearing bright red berries.
I came to a stop, turned off the motor and prepared to listen to the silence. But a 747 lowering its cumbersome self toward O'Hare caused the air to reverberate with its roar. I looked up and saw approaching planes stretch into the distance, separated by the interval mandated by air traffic control. Silence?
The drive on which I had approached revealed nothing more than the front of the building. It could have been a false front so far as I yet knew, an Aegean illusion set up on an Illinois hillside on the landing pattern of the busiest airport in the world. Its architecture was out of place. Something was etched over the door reminiscent of fraternity houses on campus, but there were more than three Greek letters.
My arrival seemed to have gone unnoticed and when I got out of the car I had half a mind to roam about a bit, get the lay of the land, see something more than the facade of the place. But before I could set off, the door opened. Out flew a yapping dog, coming right at me, a furious ball of fur with sharp little teeth visible as it barked. Too late I thought of getting back into the car. The little dog was nipping at my pant leg. I kicked out and caught him in the side and abruptly his barking changed to a whine and he slunk away from me. That is when I became aware of the man who had emerged from the doorway.
The whining dog ran cringing to him and the man began to stoop, then stopped. He cocked his head toward the dog but his eyes stayed on me.
"I recognize the voice." His own voice was resonant; he spoke with great distinctness as if he were an elocution instructor.
"He bit me."
He waved his hand and concentrated on the mewling pup.
"Williams," he said, standing erect and nodding agreement with himself. "I'm sure of it."
"No," I said. "Slattery."
"Williams's soul is in that dog. It is the fate he fashioned for himself during his previous life." He shook his head and a look of great pain came over his long, creased face. His thick wavy hair was shot through with grey. Momentarily I toyed with the idea of letting my own grow out. He advanced toward me, his eyes half shut.
"You come with suspicion in your heart. Slattery, you said?"
"Ishmael Slattery."
"An unusual name."
"Are you Sophos?"
He inclined his head slightly.
"I have come for Lois."
His expression changed entirely. He took my arm and spoke in normal if urgent tones. "You've come to take her away?"
"If that is her wish."
"Her wish? It is mine. Have you authority to remove her?"
"Up to a point." Sometimes truth is a weapon.
I had disappointed him. He took me inside, down a hallway with a deep red tile floor and into what could only be called a study. A large desk, the walls lined with books, an odd smell. I sniffed.
"The oil in the lamps."
It wasn't that the house was devoid of electricity. No sooner had I noticed the oil lamps hanging near the fireplace than the pulsing green cursor on the screen of the computer monitor caught my eye. A red light on a surge protector glowed in the dim room.
"Who sent you?"
I was confused. Streeter had told me Lois was being held prisoner here but Priscilla said Lois was gaga over Sophos. His reaction suggested that Priscilla's version was the correct one. If she was not being held prisoner, it was difficult to know how I was to earn a fee rescuing her. On the other hand, I might be able to dun Norris for leaving her put. A third possibility was offered me.
"I will pay you twice what you have been offered if you will only take her away from here."
I tried to imagine the blonde in the black and white photograph Streeter had shown me eliciting such a reaction. Streeter's slobbering over her made more sense, as did Norris's ambiguous but protective concern. I decided to play for time.
"Tell me about Zeno's Porch?"
"How much do you know about Stoic philosophy?"
"Why don't you start at the beginning?"
He talked, I listened, don't ask me what it all meant. The name Marcus Aurelius rang a bell, remotely, but Seneca was a town in upstate New York as far as I was concerned, and a tribe of Indians. Sophos shook his head.
"Seneca was born in Spain. His lifetime spans that of Jesus. He corresponded with St. Paul. He was the wisest pagan who ever lived."
Zeno's Porch was founded on the philosophy of Seneca. It fostered a philosophical attitude toward life. Roll with the punches, expect little and avoid disappointment, when age and illness come, check out.
"Suicide?"
"It is demeaning for a rational animal to permit matter to overshadow his reason. Death is certain. One does not rush to meet it, but one must not shun it either."
His voice grew dreamy as he spoke of death as if it were a destination rather than destruction.
"And come back as a dog?"
"Williams? I warned him to use his time well. He did not. Things will go harder with him as a dog."
"What's the alternative?"
"The astral journey. Does the Dream of Scipio mean anything to you? Of course not. We live in an illiterate age. We imagine that makes us superior." He gestured toward the computer. "An electrified abacus. But what of the soul?"
The question did not call for an answer.
"Now that you're here, I will show you around."
He spoke with reluctance, but he rose and so did I. It was either that or kick the dog again, but the beast had slithered under the desk where she lay regarding me with bright malevolent eyes. Sophos had addressed her as Martha Nussbaum, doubtless her canine name, but I half believed there was a human being inside her, hating me.

4

Lois was enveloped by the toga she wore, which flowed with her movements, now revealing the line of her body and now catching her up in a cloud, as if to conceal her from mortal eyes. In living color she made the black and white photograph obsolete. She was blonde but dumb in neither sense of the term.
"Willard is after the money that will be mine when I turn twenty-five. A month from now."
I managed not to express my surprise. She was at best tolerating me. We had exited the building in the rear, where a paved patio led to steps giving on a garden descending step wise down the hill.
"Money?"
"My father was determined that my mother would not benefit from his death. Once she remarried, he felt his obligations to her were over and he meant to prevent any future claim on him from her. He made Streeter trustee of my money, and my beneficiary if something should happen to me before then."
"He said you've been kidnapped and are being held here against my will."
A wry smile sufficed as answer to this. "I am out of harm's way here."
"Had Streeter threatened you?"
"The situation was threatening."
"So you have come here."
"I would have come in any case."
Her manner remained chilly. I asked if I could ask her about other things.
She sighed. "Do ut abeas."
"Gesundheit."
It surprised a laugh from her. She loved Latin and had from the time she was a child and came upon a copy of Winnie Ille Pooh.
"Winnie the Pooh in Latin. I learned to form the words long before I knew what they meant. I felt I was communing with someone I once had been."
She had studied the classics, Greek and Latin, and had written a doctoral dissertation on Seneca. Hence the attraction to Sophos.
"He is Seneca redivivus."
We had entered the terraced garden that descended the hill behind the building. I became aware of others in the garden, catching glimpses of them among the greenery. The men obese and aged, their togas looking no more impressive than nighties. The women were bent and brittle, their white hair swept back from faces marked with pain.
"They have come here to die."
In keeping with Seneca's views on suicide, Zeno's Porch offered assisted suicide to those wishing to shuffle off life's mortal coil. I became aware of the way the graveled paths kept leading to urns enshrined in little groves, some raised on plinths, others half buried in the ground. The urns were filled with ashes. This garden was in fact a cemetery.
"I hope that isn't your intention."
She threw back her head when she laughed, lifting her arms and moving them behind her in a swimming motion. The ripe line of her body pressed against the fabric of her toga. She might have been modeling for Nike—the goddess not the tennis shoe.
She was full of life and intent on living it, yet she had an odd indifference to death. This came from her conviction that death was merely an exchange of one body for another. She would never get a better than the one she had. I wondered if she ever thought that she might return as a distempered dog.
"How much money are we talking about?"
"From Daddy? It started at three million."
"Started."
"It grows."
"What happens if something happens to you after next month, when you're twenty-five?"
"Phillip Norris replaces Streeter as trustee and heir. I told you my father was determined that my mother would get nothing. If not me, then Wendell Streeter or Phillip Norris."
"What will you do with all that money?"
She turned, causing her toga to swirl and then compose itself about her. Her eyes moved up the terraced garden to the house.
"Something worthwhile."
"How long have you known Sophos?"
"His real name is Riley."
"Really?"
"Riley. Whatever 'real name' means. He taught in a prep school until he got in touch with his real self and discovered who he was."
"Seneca?"
She wrinkled her nose disapprovingly. Or it might have been against the afternoon sun. Above, planes continued to descend toward O'Hare, a statutory space between them, being brought home by air traffic control.
You will wonder why I had waited until afternoon to pay this visit to Zeno's Porch. Priscilla and I had sat over several more drinks in the Bonaventure Lounge and when we finally went in to dinner my taste buds were in no shape to care what I ate. I have no gustatory memories of the meal. Even my tactile memories are dulled. In the manner of such occasions, she became beautiful as the evening progressed, her words seemed witty if not wise, her bejeweled hand was often on my arm, we leaned toward one another as if for support. And oh how we laughed. Finally we went off to her place and sinned together.
When I managed to open my sticky eyes, the place beside me was empty. A note was pinned to the pillow. When I left I put it in my pocket, stumbled out to my car and drove home where fully clothed I collapsed in my own bed and slept the sleep of the unjust.
At the time I was speaking with Lois, my body clock was at midmorning. We returned along the gravel walks among the urns of ashes and elderly candidates to be contents of similar containers. I found it all very depressing and the presence of the lovely Lois did not completely compensate for my mood.
"What does Reddunt delirum femina, vina virum mean?" I asked her.
My pronunciation conveyed nothing to her. I handed her the slip of paper.
" 'Wine and woman madden a man.' Where did you come upon that?"
"In a misfortune cookie."
The quotation had been the sole contents of the note Priscilla had pinned to her pillow before leaving that morning. I shook Lois's hand, we might have been making a bet, and moments later was directing my car down the winding driveway to the county road.
My head was all aroar with conflicting information. Wendell Streeter had hired me to rescue his kidnapped and imprisoned daughter. She was not his daughter, she hadn't been kidnapped and while you and I might find Zeno's Porch a prison, it was clear that she did not. His eagerness to retrieve her, given the significance of her approaching birthday, was ominous. It was difficult not to think that Lois felt threatened by her mother's former husband and soon to be former trustee of three million dollars and growing. I resented Streeter's attempt to make me the instrument of his greed. But the fateful birthday would provide Norris rather than Streeter with temptation.
Sophos, nee Riley, was a puzzler. Presuming he was a charlatan—could anyone sincerely think he was a twentieth century version of a first century pagan?—and given that money is the root of all evil—there is doubtless a Latin adage to that effect—he should be a prime predator and Lois his prey. Yet the roles seemed reversed. He professed to find her a pesky female and urged me to take her away from Zeno's Porch; she had indicated that when she came into her fortune she would lay it at his sandaled feet. As for Priscilla, I preferred to keep my mind a blank in her regard. Troubling little memories were making forays into consciousness. Ah well, wine and women make a fool of one.
Before its delirious denouement, yesterday had been amazing. I will not pretend that I am run off my feet by clients, but my work, if not rare, is routine and not wildly remunerative. Yesterday I had been hired by Streeter, offered a job by Norris and given to understand by Sophos that he would reward me if only I got the lovely Lois off his premises. A less scrupulous PI would have accepted all three offers. Nugent, for example.
When I compared what I had learned in so short a time with the uninformative account Nugent had provided Streeter, I could not help wonder what my old nemesis was up to. It was time I found out.

5

Like repels like, of course, competitiveness overcoming whatever camaraderie plying the same trade might foster. My dislike for Nugent had a hundred sources, not least being his easy assumption that I was as crooked as he.
"Proximity to sacred things creates indifference. Wallowing in crime lessens one's distaste." He turned over one hand as if QED were stamped on its palm.
"Sure."
"You grasp my meaning?"
He meant that his having become a crooked PI was the result of some law of nature.
I parked behind the building in which he had his office and, eschewing the elevator, took the stairway to the sixth floor. When I came into his office, I found that only Gwen Probst was there. Her hair was the shape of an NFL helmet and the tips of her teeth were visible in repose. When she smiled, teeth and gums became visible, and her eyes behind the contacts sparkled. She was the kind of girl of whom it is said, fatally, that she has a lovely smile. As for the rest, well, one might once have said that she would have been safe in the Navy.
The computer from which she had turned was a frieze of numbers. A hacker of the more endearing sort, Gwen's presence had enabled me to last as long as I had with Nugent. She turned toward the computer and tapped a key that swept from the screen what she had been working on. No doubt she was engaged in cooking the books.
"He's not here."
"I was counting on that. Care to eat?"
"I'm not finished."
"How long will it take?"
Indecision. She raked her lower lip with her teeth.
"I'll give you five minutes," I said, going into Nugent's office. Seated behind the desk, I called out, "How long's he been working for Norris?"
"He's not."
I put my feet on the desk. How I loathed this office. There had been moments when I worked with Nugent that I doubted I was meant to be a private investigator. Perhaps I should return to the police and redeem myself in Brunswick's eyes. But he had laughed when I told him I aspired to be a detective on the force.
"Maybe bunko," he said speculatively, then shook his head. "Naw. Ish, why does everyone want to play Hamlet?"
"I just want to be a detective."
"That's what I mean. You're a natural born patrol officer."
Twenty years tooling around the city streets in a police special, hoping I didn't get shot, pulled forward into the future by the promise of a pension, my work too bland even to excite a decent disgust? Such was the prospect he put before me. No wonder I conceived the dream of becoming a freelance, a solitary figure sallying forth to do battle against iniquity and crime. But now the romantic glow was gone. If I got shot in this line of work, it would be by an irate spouse. Streeter's call held the promise of a new direction. So far it had as many directions as a compass.
There are places possessed by their occupants even in their absence. Nugent's office was empty but he was there. His thoughts hung in the air as palpably as did the fetid odor of cigar smoke. I sat in the chair behind the desk and it tipped backward. It kept on tipping and in a desperate effort to right myself I went backward, ass over teakettle, and landed painfully in the uncarpeted corner. Gwen's upside-down face came into view.
"Ready to go eat?" I asked.
"What are you doing on the floor?"
"Have you ever heard of Stoicism?"
We went to Vitello's where the minestrone is a meal in itself and were served enough spaghetti carbonara for a platoon of Italian prisoners of war. Every customer left with a Styrofoam carton containing at least half an entree.
"Nouvelle cuisine," Gwen said, looking cross-eyed at the heap of pasta that had been put before her.
"No. Italian." Was she playing dumb? I was feeding her to gain the right to question her. Would a meal suffice to make her disloyal to Nugent? Disloyal to Nugent. That would be like snitching on Benedict Arnold.
Her lips and teeth and tongue were incarnadine with red wine when she shed her moral inhibitions and told me all she knew.
"Nothing."
"Who are his current clients?"
"He hasn't had a client for a month and a half."
"I know he wrote a report for Streeter."
"Wendell Streeter?"
"Yes."
"That was just a report."
"For a client."
"If you want to look at it that way. Remember Jaspers? That's my idea of a client."
An austere standard. Jaspers had been the highpoint of Nugent's practice while I was with him. Jaspers' life had been threatened, by telephone, persistently, but he did not know who his caller was. It could be anyone. Unlikely, of course, and Nugent made Jaspers admit it couldn't have been Pope John Paul II, the Secretary General of the United Nations (an obscure fourth-world figure whose name escapes me), millions of others. Jaspers observed that that still left millions.
"Name one."
"My wife."
Call it an oral Rorschach test. Jaspers just blurted it out. Nugent laughed. Mrs. Jaspers was a quadriplegic, totally dependent on Jaspers, filthy rich and helpless. The caller turned out to be her nephew. This occurred to me after Jaspers and his wife were dead and it emerged that the nephew was the sole surviving heir.
"The case I'm on is like that," I said to Gwen.
"At least you're on a case."
From which I deduced that whatever Nugent was working on, it did not fulfill Gwen's expectations of our craft. The fact that I saw similarities between the byzantine ambiguities of what I was now doing and the practices of Nugent was borne out when I arrived home and found myself convoyed from parking lot to my apartment door by three uniformed officers. Lieutenant Brunswick sat importantly before my television set.
"Black and white," he growled.
This was not a slur against my discount color set. He held up the photograph of Lois.
"Where'd you get this?"
"A client."
"You don't have a client."
This was just a way of prying information out of me, of course, but I rose to the bait. "There you are wrong. My client is Wendell Streeter."
"Was. Streeter's dead."

6

Priscilla had reported the death of her employer. She was about to leave for the day and hesitated to interrupt him to tell him she was going, since the light indicated he was on the phone. He had been on the phone since she had brought him in the late lunch he'd ordered from the deli below.
"I might have just gone home."
Instead she cracked the door and looked in. Even at the great distance from door to desk, she knew something was wrong. The phone lay open on the desk, the paper sack stood open before him and, she noticed as she warily approached, the coffee carton was on the floor, its contents staining the rug. Streeter, it was clear, was wherever bosses go when they check out for the last time.
"I didn't even scream."
She picked up the phone and dialed 911. She remembered the number because it was Notre Dame's record for the year. 9-1-1. Brunswick scowled: his wife had left him, he had entered the Church to marry her, illogically he blamed her unfaithfulness on the faith she had lost. Trying to hate Notre Dame was part of his reaction.
Talking with Priscilla came hours after I arrived home to find Brunswick ensconced in my living room. I had not seen Streeter that day. I had been working for him approximately thirty hours. I told Brunswick the story in its broad outlines: the call from Streeter, the appointment, talking with Norris, the visit to Zeno's Porch to talk to Sophos and Lois, dinner with Gwen. Brunswick drew attention to all this to show Priscilla the kind of account he wanted from her. The great bosom heaved as she inhaled noisily at the mention of Gwen. Brunswick noticed this.
"You know Gwen?"
I said to Brunswick, looking at Priscilla, "I took her to dinner to pump her for information."
"Is that how you do it?" she asked.
I had an urge to stuff a hankie in Priscilla's mouth. Providing a tempting prurient tangent during an investigation is always a mistake. The National Enquirer cannot compete with your ordinary cop in curiosity about the loins of others. Brunswick was perfectly capable of wasting the taxpayers' money trying to figure out why this Rubenesque receptionist was pouting like a girl because I had eaten with her counterpart in a firm where I had lately worked.
"What did Streeter die of?"
"Strychnine in his decaffeinated coffee."
Priscilla's eyes met mine. The coffee in question was that from the deli which she had taken in to him. Her mouth opened when Brunswick said that of course they had no way of knowing whether her story that she had not removed the lid from the coffee container was true.
"Who brought the order?" I asked Priscilla.
"She doesn't know," Brunswick said, altering his voice. Was he imitating Priscilla?
"I was in with Mr. Norris when it came. I found it on my desk and took it in to Mr. Streeter."
"Who would want him dead?" Brunswick asked, making a shaving motion against his chin with one of Streeter's business cards.
I excused myself. I had accompanied Brunswick to Priscilla's and the two of them to the offices of Streeter & Norris to find out what I could. Now I wished to slip away.
"You want to take the lady home?" Brunswick asked.
There was no gallant way to refuse. In my car, Priscilla unexpectedly burst out crying. Had I toyed with a neurotic woman and was now about to pay the price? Not at all. Her apparent pique at the mention of Gwen was gone. Tears at the death of her boss seemed somehow fitting, but she was really going at it.
"It's a shock," I offered.
"Oh, I expected it every time I went into that office."
"That he would be dead?"
"He swore me to confidence. His heart was in such bad shape that even surgery was ruled out. He had had angioplasty so many times he said he felt like the Michelin Man." She dabbed at her eyes. "Who is the Michelin Man?"
"You're sure no one else knew?"
"I asked Phil."
"Asked him what?"
"Who the Michelin Man was. He didn't know either."
I counted to ten. Priscilla was certain Lois hadn't known of Streeter's illness either. But all those visits to doctors, the procedures he had undergone, put the thing in the public domain. No one blabs like people in the medical profession. Besides, hospital records are hardly confidential. It was wiser to assume that everyone had known about Streeter's heart. But then why poison him? Time would have widened all wounds, in his case a mortal one. Or a good scare might have been enough to do him in.
As I drove to Zeno's Porch, yawning, wishing I'd gotten some sleep before all this happened, I pondered who might welcome the death of Wendell Streeter. Lois had lost her nemesis, even if it meant only a month of freedom from what she had portrayed as Streeter's acquisitive interest in her capital. Phil Norris was rid of a partner and now became the trustee of the three million and growing Lois possessed. Priscilla had told Brunswick that Norris was on a business trip and she had sent faxes far and wide to alert him to what had happened and tell him to return. Was I surprised or not surprised to find the gnome-like Norris enubilated in a toga made festive with a scarlet border design?
"My heart goes out to you in your grief," I said.
He squinted at me. "All right, I give up."
"This isn't an arrest."
"What the hell are you talking about?" Gravel had worked its way into his sandal and he balanced on one foot as he dug it out: aged boy removing a splinter from his foot. There was a replica of the famous statue in the terraced garden of the dead.
"Your partner has been poisoned."
I would award him an Oscar for the actor best depicting stunned disbelief. Lois took the news with more equanimity.
"It was not a very dignified way to die. He should have come here and prepared for it."
"How do you prepare for death?"
"I never answer sarcastic questions."
"Touchy."
"Do you mean touché?"
"Or not to shay, as the case may be. I find myself among the unemployed. Phillip Norris did not renew his offer that I work for him."
"Doing what?"
"Not rescuing you from here."
"Phillip Norris has come a long way," Lois said.
Apparently Norris had scoffed at Zeno's Porch when he first heard of it, displaying the practical man's disdain for anything lacking quantifiable results in a predictable future. Did he hear time's chariot drawing near?
"What lies beyond?"
Lois stopped and looked out over the valley. "Des Plaines. And O'Hare, of course. This was once a virgin wilderness."
"Who wasn't?"
She made a face. This did nothing to disturb her beauty to which, I realized, I was getting used. Thus do museum guards yawn their way past the treasures of the ages, longing for a saloon, rough talk, advertisements. What else is beauty than a slightly different shaping and arrangement of standard equipment? Thoughts of plain Gwen Probst drove such heresy from my mind.
"No need for you to stay here now," I said.
"More importantly, there is no need to go. To work would be simply to seek distraction; I do not need money."
It seemed an odd twist on the hermit vocation—endowed otherworldliness.
I said, "I've been reading Seneca."
"What do you think?"
"Smug, self-satisfied, self-congratulatory."
She nodded in apparent agreement. I had glanced at a page or two in the Penguin edition and launched these airy judgments on nothing more.
"That is because you expect a pagan to talk like a Christian. He has the pride of a man who has conquered the flesh."
"How humbling."
"It is an ideal never perfectly achieved."
"Ah. One continues to feel attracted to members of the opposite sex?" I felt I had expressed myself badly. "Like Sophos?"
"You wouldn't understand what I feel for him."
"He wants you out of here."
She smiled. "My presence disturbs him."
"You enjoy that, don't you?"
"Maybe I am meant to be a test for him."
"One you hope he fails."
"Nothing that happens is a failure. It is meant to be."
Hmmm. Sophos was engaged in the ritual of installing an urn of ashes in the little grove prepared for it. The procession was just visible through the yew trees. I had had enough of the ethereal. From my car I telephoned Nugent's office. Gwen answered.
"Is he there?"
"Can you come at once?"
"What's happened?"
"I think he's been poisoned."

7

My professional advice to Gwen was to get the hell out of there. We met at a McDonald's halfway between Zeno's Porch and the late Nugent's office. The scene she had come upon was very much like that Priscilla had discovered when she found Streeter's body. "Coffee?"
"I'll stick with this." She was drinking Diet Coke despite the fact that she was a study in malnutrition.
"I meant was Nugent drinking coffee?"
She nodded.
"Sent in from outside?"
She shook her head. "It must have been the pot I'd left for him."
"But the same contents?"
"I didn't put poison in it, if that's what you mean. Why would I kill Nugent?"
"Don't get me started on that."
For the moment what was needed was an alibi. Nugent's body was stiff when she found it.
"You were doing research," I suggested. "At the newspaper, at the courthouse."
She shook her head. "You sign in and out."
"So where were you?" It suddenly dawned on me that she had discovered Nugent's body, meaning she had been out and come back. "What's wrong?"
"I'd rather not say."
Well, well. "Let me ask you simply this. If you had to tell where you were, would it establish that you couldn't possibly have killed Nugent?"
"All it would prove was that I went away. I could have poisoned the coffee before leaving. If it was the coffee."
"Do you doubt it?"
"You just think that because of Streeter."
I suppose I did. Who would have killed Nugent and why? If he had been run over or shot from a passing car I could imagine it was one of his satisfied customers, but killing him with strychnine in his coffee within twenty-four hours of the similar murder of Wendell Streeter was meant to say something, and I hadn't the faintest idea what it was. But there was a connection between the two men. Streeter had hired Nugent to do an investigation of Lois. I might have thought Nugent had poisoned a man who had the nerve to replace him, particularly me. But this would have to be a murder-suicide to accommodate such a theory. Besides, as far as I could see, Nugent and Streeter had parted amicably. And Streeter hired me. I remembered something Norris had said.
"What did Nugent have to do with Phillip Norris?"
"He smokes cigars."
I explained that Norris was Streeter's partner.
"How does he look?"
"Up. He's about three feet tall."
Gwen smiled. "Oh, him."
Apparently there had been a longstanding relation between the two. This made me uneasy. Norris's recommendation of me seemed now to have its origin with Nugent, and Nugent would not have intended to do me a favor.
From the McDonald's we went to an all night movie where I fell asleep. Gwen woke me when she had had a sufficiency of entertainment and we drove to a hot sheet motel where as a security precaution I rented a unit, put Gwen in it, and drove home like a zombie. I was trying not to come fully awake so when I hit the sack I would immediately drop off. My parking space is in the garage in the basement of the building. I slammed the door and moved among the concrete pillars toward the steel door that would admit me to the lobby. Just after I passed the second pillar, I was hit from behind, lights went on, then off, and I was dropping as I had dreamed into unconsciousness.
I came to God knows how much later lying on the oily floor of the garage. Before attempting to get up, I lay listening, wondering what had happened. I seemed to be alone. I supported myself against the pillar and looked back the way I had come.
My car was missing.
I tried to think about that, but my head felt so badly, I had to get up to my apartment. There I took four aspirin, stripped to my underwear and got into bed. Did I sleep at all? It was four o'clock when the sound of bells awoke me. I found the phone but that was not it. The door? I tried to ignore it, certain it must eventually stop. When it did not, I pulled on my pants and went to the front door and looked through the peephole. It was Brunswick.
The expression on his face was that of a man with his finger stuck in a bell which he does not intend to remove until the door is opened. I let him in.
"Call your lawyer, Slattery. You're under arrest."
"Couldn't this wait until morning?"
But he was reading my rights to me. He seemed serious. He was, very. Nothing that happened during the next twenty-four hours made him less serious. Au contraire.
I was under arrest for the murder of Nugent, whose dead and abused body had been found in my car in the parking lot of the motel into which I had checked Gwen Probst just hours before the time of death. The clerk had looked out to see who I was with and found Gwen so improbable a companion for a bout in such a place that he remembered us both.
"Why would I kill Nugent?" I asked Brunswick, wondering if he would ask me to count the ways.
"I leave motive to the prosecutor."
You and I know that I was innocent, but even I had to concede that Brunswick would have been a damned fool not to suspect me of the murder of a girl I admitted having an assignation with at McDonald's and then—my story—stashed her in the Triple X Motel for safekeeping, drove home, was hit over the head...But you can imagine how all these simple truths sounded to Brunswick.
It got worse. A check of the coffee can at Nugent's office revealed that it was richly laced with strychnine. I had recently visited the office. There is a principle of parsimony in such investigations that demanded that one suspect account for the two deaths Brunswick now had on his hands. If I had killed Nugent, why not Streeter as well?
"Why would I take him out to my car and drive around with him in the trunk?"
"I'll leave that to the psychiatrists."
Even my lawyer treated my story as a lie he would do his hopeless best to make plausible to a jury.
"We can plead insanity," Fisher said, dragging on his cigarette. Jails are the last places on earth that do not have no-smoking areas.
"If this goes on, it may become true."
Fisher looked at the blank sheet of paper before him. "Let's get back to your defense."
"Fisher, I have no motive."
Like Brunswick he dismissed this. I had opportunity, I alone seemed to be a link between the two murders. Maybe I was crazy. Had I, unbeknownst to myself, killed two people? Nonsense. I had hated Nugent's guts, but killing people is not one of the things I do. As for Streeter, he represented income. And why would I have involved Gwen Probst by loading the coffee can and then compromising her by taking her to the Triple X with Nugent's body in the trunk? I liked her. In a way unintelligible to the clerk at the Triple X, I loved her. I would not have harmed a hair on her head.
And then Gwen confessed to killing Nugent, stealing my car and everything. Her effort was met with laughter.
"If only the strychnine hadn't been found in the trunk of your car," Brunswick sighed.
As it turned out, that was what saved me. Gwen did the kind of dog work the police were disinclined to do, having me snug in a cell. She tracked down the sale of the poison and produced a clerk who remembered the buyer. He was certain it had been Nugent. This turned the tables. Gwen also introduced a reporter with bulging eyes that never blinked who wrote a series of stories for a lesser newspaper in which Nugent's ire at being replaced by me as Streeter's PI, added to the stormy nature of our relations when I worked with him, were developed into sufficient motive for a man eaten up by envy. A sensational TV program picked this up, that in turn got it into the mainstream and soon it was received opinion that Nugent had killed Streeter and then himself, contriving to make his suicide look like murder with me the apparent agent.
"It doesn't make a lot of sense."
Poppe, the exophthalmic reporter, didn't blink. But then he had suggested a rivalry between Nugent and me over Gwen.
"Where did he get that?"
"Reporters," Gwen said and shrugged. Her shoulders lifted, her sticklike body seemed to be folding up for storage.
So I was out of the slammer, behind my desk, thinking. Gwen put a cup of coffee before me. I pushed it toward her. "Taste it."
She thought I was serious. Maybe I was. She delicately tasted the brew. She hated coffee. What a girl. If only she had a female body.
"One," I said, "I didn't do it. Two, this was not murder-suicide. Nugent couldn't shoot himself in the foot without missing. Three, the only motive that makes sense is the three million."
She put a fanned hand of travel brochures on the desk. "I like the Acapulco ones best."
I brushed them aside. "This is a matter of honor, Gwen. I owe it to my dead client."
"Oh bushwa."
"Gwen, my purpose in life was not to exonerate myself."
"By locating the man who sold the strychnine?"
"That was a good piece of work. I'm grateful." And then it struck me. "I was a diversion. Who's the real target here?"
Gwen did not offer a guess.
"Lois," I whispered.
"Oh bushwa."
I ignored her. I sent her on an errand, to the courthouse, to get photocopies of the marriages and divorces that formed the tangled background out of which three million and growing had emerged. I myself arranged to meet Priscilla in the bar of the Bonaventure. I picked it for its convenience. She reacted as if it were a sentimental choice.
"Don't try to get me drunk again."
"It was effortless."
"Oh you." She giggled.

8

Somewhat to my surprise, Phillip Norris was with Priscilla. The little man had been given several phone books to increase his height so he could look over the table. "Thanks for visiting me in jail." 
"Your lawyer prevented me," Priscilla said.
Norris was there to ask me what the chances were that Gwen had killed Streeter and Nugent. "She sounded pretty plausible to me." He had heard her confession on TV.
"Why would she do it?"
Priscilla said, "That's why Phil wanted to come along."
"I liked you better in a toga."
The import/export entrepreneur paused as if to let the pain subside. "It's about Zeno's Porch that I have come to speak."
He said he appreciated my surprise at finding him there. Direct action had seemed called for in the matter of Lois's impending inheritance. With Streeter dead, Norris's trusteeship had begun and, he assured me, he intended to take his responsibilities seriously.
"That charlatan could easily persuade her to sign over her fortune to his absurd operation."
"Now, Phil," Priscilla said in a wheedling voice.
"If he isn't a fraud, I am a nine-foot giant."
I laughed. I couldn't help myself. Once more Norris waited me out. He went on. He made a plausible case, the obvious case. Sophos was a sophist interested in power, money and self-indulgent pleasure. More or less in that order. Professing to be disinterested in Lois, asking me to take her away, could be merely a shrewd move. I told Norris of it. He snorted.
"Is that why I came upon them in a clinch behind a juniper tree?" he growled.
"In flagrante delicto?" Priscilla asked.
"No, in the garden."
Absent from his theory was any explanation of the deaths of Streeter and Nugent. I complained about this.
"They're explained. Nugent bought the strychnine. Slattery, I want you to get the goods on Sophos." He slapped an envelope on the table. I raised the flap. A check. I shook my head.
"Cash."
He agreed and on the strength of that I agreed, and then Norris left me with Priscilla.
"It was nice of the Probst girl to try to save you."
"Yeah."
"You used to work together?"
I found that I was embarrassed to have this middle-aged charmer connect me with Gwen Probst. It was not simply that Gwen left my concupiscence unaddressed whereas Priscilla absurdly did not. More absurdly still, there was a rivalry between Gwen and myself. Oh yes. I had felt it from the first. Gwen, unconsciously I am sure, resented the subservient, gopher role Nugent cast her for. She had been with him several years when I joined the agency. To say she knew as much as Nugent is not to say much. I found myself brooding on this when Priscilla, lips moist with martini, suggested that we adjourn to her place.
"I'll put something in the oven," she breathed, pressing her knee to mine.
"Give me a rain check."
"It's not raining."
"I've got a headache."
"Oh, you."
Oh me, indeed. But in the billiards of the mind my thoughts had bounced from Streeter to Lois to Norris to Nugent. I turned my car in the direction of Nugent's office. No one was there, but my old key let me in. Two hours later I found what unconsciously I had been seeking. A second report to Streeter. Being careful, I got comfortable in Nugent's chair and read with grudging admiration what he had dug up.
This was first class detective work, no doubt about it. Nothing fancy, no dramatic moves, just dogged pursuit of the obvious. Streeter had given me a quick statement of Lois's parentage. This report tracked back through the marriages and divorces and remarriages that had involved Edwina Maltby prior to her marriage to Wendell Streeter. This woman had been a veritable Chaucerian figure, taking on and discarding husbands with breathtaking rapidity, always trading up, until she was able to write the will that made Lois heir to three million. Not that her marital career had been over at the time, there were three husbands to go, of whom Streeter had been the penultimate. Simply disentangling the spousal strands was an achievement. Out of it emerged a startling fact. The report gave reason to doubt that Lois was indeed the legal daughter of Edwina and this made it doubtful that she fulfilled the description of the heir to be found in Edwina's will. The report first established that Lois was not Edwina's natural child. In fact, she was a child adopted by Edwina's second husband in an earlier marriage. What was lacking was any evidence that Edwina had adopted Lois either during that marriage or at any time afterward. What did it all mean? The report ended with the enigmatic suggestion that a true heir might be in existence.
I was sitting there lost in thought when Gwen came in.
"I thought you left."
"I came back."
"I see that. What are you reading?"
"Obviously you never read this."
She scarcely glanced at the report when I handed it to her. "I wrote it."
I felt a flicker of annoyance. Gwen's manner suggested that the contents of the report were unimportant. Why trouble to spell out its implications for her? If she had typed up this report without appreciating its significance for recent events, why tax her mind now?
I dropped her at the Y where she had a room, dismissing her grinning suggestion that we catch a movie at the Triple X. Apparently the motel had closed-circuit television and pumped entertainment worthy of its name into the units. I needed solitude. I wanted to think. It occurred to me to sign in at Zeno's Porch, where I could both meditate and check out some of the initial implications of Nugent's second report to Streeter.
The receptionist asked me to wait. I sat in a simple but carefully engineered chair and closed my eyes, letting the music engulf me. Is there a more sensual medium than music? Yet it manages to lift the soul free of the body. When I heard my name I was almost surprised that I had ears to hear and eyes to open. Sophos stood there, enveloped in a scarlet cloak. He waited for me to tell him what I had already told the receptionist.
"I would like to stay here for a day or two."
"This is not a motel."
"I can afford it."
"That is not what I meant. Why are you here?"
It was like being called before the principal. Before I had spoken with him on the same level, a nosy intruder against whom he had to defend himself. Now I was a suppliant.
"I feel lost," I began. "I don't know exactly who I am."
"Don't." That was all. Just don't. He said I could stay the night.
"On one condition. That you persuade Lois to leave with you."
Poor Lois. Of course I promised, for whatever good that was. Lois had lost what he must unconsciously think her trump. The ultimate persuasion. Three million plus. I was issued a toga and led off to a room. Spare and Spartan would describe it. A single mattress on a frame that raised it only inches from the floor. No chairs. A straw mat on which to sit, kneel, stand on one's head. The room might have been designed for Phillip Norris. During the first minute I was alone, the dreadful thought struck.
Sophos had renewed his request that I take Lois away. Was it possible that he knew she was not an heiress, that all she had to commend her now was her heart-stopping beauty? This would explain his indifference. It seemed impossible that he could be indifferent to both money and beauty. I felt awful. I felt deprived of the power knowledge confers. Gwen might dismiss or fail to see the significance of the alleged doubtful status of Lois as heir, but Sophos would draw the obvious conclusion. A darker thought came. If Streeter had communicated the contents of the report to Sophos and if Sophos had designs on Lois's money, then the deaths of Nugent and Streeter removed the chance that her inability to inherit would become known. What stood in the way of this line of thought was Sophos's reiterated wish that Lois be removed from the premises.
Clad in my toga, I left my room and the building and gained the terraced garden down whose levels I meditatively descended. On the lowest level, with twilight brightening the beams of landing planes above and turning the greenery of the garden into shadowy clusters, I became aware of voices. A female voice, then a male's, then silence. I moved in the direction I had last heard them. I stopped. Shading my eyes from the landing lights, I grew accustomed to the darkness. I was unobserved. It was the first time I had seen Sophos without a toga. Lois was no longer wearing hers either. They clung to one another as they stood over a sprinkler from which rose a silvery ever-altering aqueous flower; it encompassed them, a species of liquid fig leaf.
Discreetly I withdrew. In that light, you may not have seen the smile on my face. So much for Sophos's alleged indifference to Lois.

9

Why such romping in the out of doors, love among the burial urns? Because the house itself was run on the model of a Trappist monastery, heavy on reminders of mortality, getting ready to die. Memento mori. Hanky-pank in such a setting would be doubly unwelcome. Not that I would wish to press the parallel with the Trappists too far.
"Do all these people believe in reincarnation?" I had asked Sophos.
"Oh no. Half the time I don't believe in it myself."
"They just want to die?"
"It's more vale than ave, yes. Farewell to this life, rather than greetings to another. I encourage such clients to think of it as a redistribution of molecules. Lucretius can act as patron for them."
A pagan sage for all tastes. I suppose some Stoic advocated going out on a wave of venereal excess, but perhaps Sophos thought that would be a hard case to make with the septuagenarians and even older clients who crept about the place getting ready to make the great goodbye. Not that I was troubled any longer by thoughts that Sophos believed all the bunk he preached. Lois and three million plus interest provided explanation enough. And motive. Standing between him and those twin goals had been Wendell Streeter and the unfortunate Nugent. Making public the claims of Nugent's second report would have removed Lois's legal claim to all that money and not even her beauty could compensate for such a loss. At last I had motive. But what of opportunity? I needed more before I went to Brunswick.
Back in my room I shuffled off the mortal toga, dressed for the twentieth century, and left.
Despite the hour, I decided to work out of my office. I phoned Gwen but could not reach her at the Y. On a chance I called Nugent's office and, after half a dozen rings, Gwen answered in a disguised voice.
"Slattery."
"Did Priscilla reach you?"
"No." The nerve of that woman, using Gwen as go-between. It was not beyond Priscilla to suggest that there was something going on between us. With a mind unclouded by alcohol, I could see that for the ridiculous conjunction it was. And it embarrassed me to think that Gwen would think I was susceptible to the aging wiles of the bosomy Jill of all trades at Streeter & Norris.
"I think you should talk with her."
"Yeah."
"Where have you been?"
"Gwen, I think that I have the solution Brunswick has sought in vain."
"The report you found here?"
"That's right. I'm glad you see its significance. Gwen, how many copies of it are there?"
"Printed out? Just this one."
"Did Nugent turn it over to Streeter?"
"He gave him the contents orally. You know what Nugent was like."
At the moment I was grateful for his unwillingness to turn over what a client had paid for when he saw a way of turning it to a greater profit.
"And I have it on my computer."
"Good. That thing is dynamite. You might get that copy out of the office."
"Why did you call?"
"What do we know about the whereabouts of Sophos and Lois when Streeter and Nugent were killed?"
She made an impatient noise. "I wish you'd concentrate on Priscilla."
"Does she know what those two were doing?"
"Nugent's first move was to put tails on everyone. By the time Sophos came into it, he needed extra help."
"Who?"
She hesitated. "Halper?"
Ye gods. If Nugent was several circles down in the hell of private investigation, "Hamburger" Halper would have been in the circle of ice except for the lack of malice. With him it was simply stupidity and an aversion to the good. Anyone who made the mistake of enlisting his services became fitting prey. Like Nugent, he assumed that anyone hiring an investigator was himself a worthy subject of investigation. Customers began by paying a retainer and ended by paying blackmail. Nugent would have used him only because there was honor among thieves. A kind of postponed gratification of the acquisitive impulse on the theory that any present curbing of appetite would lead to bigger bucks in the future. Nugent had put Halper on Sophos!
"What did he dig up?"
"Do you have a fax?"
Minutes later Halper's report was curling out of my machine. I began to read it before the pages were clipped. It was more than I had expected. Halper had followed Sophos to the building which housed Streeter & Norris on the day Streeter was poisoned. Sophos left with Norris and the two men were driven back to Zeno's Porch by Lois. Halper followed them back, stayed on the trail; it was easy duty and he was on Nugent's payroll and he might have been dreaming of ways to extort money out of so prosperous-looking an operation as Zeno's Porch. He was a round-the-clock tail, catnapping his way along. And he was on duty when Sophos slipped away for what had to be the final visit to Nugent. It was eerie reading a report addressed to the victim of the murder.
I looked up Halper and dialed the number and found myself getting mad at an answering machine. "Call me as soon as you get this message, Hamburger, I don't care if it's night or day..."
"Yo," an unrecorded voice broke in. "Don't pop a vessel, Ish, I'm here."
"At your office?"
"I work out of my home."
"Where's that?" In the Yellow Pages, there was only the number I had called.
"What's up?"
"You heard about Nugent?"
"Nugent," he said ruminatively, as if the name were unfamiliar.
"He's dead. Your report shows you saw the assailant enter his building."
"Where you at, Ish?"
The question was preface to his proposal that he come to my office. This was a point in a case when a.m. and p.m. have lost their meaning. Now was the time to press forward and wrap it up. How I was going to gain anything other than a citizen's satisfaction from nailing the murderer of Streeter and Nugent was difficult to see. No matter. There was the sheer intellectual satisfaction of finding the truth.
Halper arrived and settled his seedy self on my couch. He accepted a paper cup of bourbon, tossed it off and immediately handed it back for a refill. His tie looked as if it had been knotted by a hangman, his open suit jacket revealed a shirt pocket stuffed with pencils, pens, slips of paper, cigars. The American flag in his lapel glittered with sequins.
"Tell me all about tailing Sophos."
"Why should I?"
"Good question."
"What's the answer?"
I went around my desk, pulled open a drawer and took out a checkbook. I wrote rapidly, tore the check free and handed it to Halper.
"Is it rubber?"
I consulted my watch. "The bank opens in six hours. I will accompany you there when you cash it."
"Ten thousand dollars." He crooned it as if he were seeking the right tune for the words.
"Sophos," I reminded him.
He folded the check and filed it in his shirt pocket. This loosened his tongue. Not that I wanted him to reiterate what was already in his report.
"Did you wait for Sophos to come out?"
"Naw. I figured Nugent could take it from there."
"He took it all right."
Halper shrugged. I edged up to the fact that what he knew amounted to decisive testimony in a murder case. Two murder cases. Even as we sat there, I called Brunswick, waking him from a deep sleep.
"My office tomorrow at ten, Brunswick. I'll wrap up the Streeter and Nugent killings for you."
"Who is this?"
"Nice try, Brunswick."
"I'm serious. Who is this?"
I turned away from Halper and whispered angrily. "Slattery."
"That's what I thought."
He hung up. I turned back to Halper. "Ten o'clock in the morning. Here."
"After we go to the bank."
"Or before. Right now if I don't get some sleep I'll die."
Halper left and I made my bed on the couch, cutting the blinds, drowning out the sound of traffic already starting up below. With luck I could catch four or five hours of sleep before the ten o'clock meeting. Provided Brunswick showed up. And Hamburger Halper. That uncashed check would bring him and, if it didn't, I had his report. A cushion spring was trying to get intimate with my ear. I rolled over, lay on my back and just like that was asleep.

10

Gwen called at nine, having unsuccessfully tried to reach me at my apartment.
"Did you call Priscilla?" she asked.
"No, but I got hold of Halper."
"You didn't talk to Priscilla."
Priscilla be damned, why this obsession with the large-breasted receptionist? Was this a variation on penis envy?
"I'll bring her with me when I come."
Of course I did not object. There should be an audience for this. Brunswick called as soon as I put down the phone, his manner altered beyond recognition.
"Good work, Slattery. I'll bring Sophos to the meeting, of course. And Lois. Norris too."
It was getting better. And I still had time to rehearse. Brevity is the soul of wit, but suspense had to be provided too. Presentation is everything. How to begin? Call me Ishmael...
At ten o'clock, I had a fresh pot of coffee ready. I had shaved with cold water and found it bracing. Perhaps I would make a practice of it. I imagined myself lean and ascetic, bloodstream free of alcohol, clear-eyed nemesis of crime. There would be media coverage, of course. Police reporters would doubtless follow Brunswick to my office. By the time he arrived he would have an entourage.
It was a stern faced Priscilla who showed up first. I offered my cheek for her kiss and she walloped me.
"What's that for?"
"Starters."
She slumped sulking into a chair. A woman scorned? If she embarrassed me in front of the others, I would kill her.
Suddenly the room was filled with people. Brunswick came in and was followed by Sophos escorted by a cop. Lois too was being accorded police protection. From the closet I brought out folding chairs. The general cordiality was a pleasant surprise. Several times Brunswick slapped me on the shoulder. Gwen slipped in, taking a chair next to the cop who sat behind Priscilla. Hamburger Halper looked in, ducked out, came back, then slithered along the back of the room and stood in a corner.
"Shall we begin?" I asked. "I've asked you here to reveal the murderer of Wendell Streeter and of my old friend Nugent." I was careful not to look at Sophos. Suspense, suspense. "First the murder weapon."
"A masterful piece of detective work!" Brunswick sat behind my desk. He waved some papers.
"Strychnine had been purchased by none other than Nugent."
"And delivered to Priscilla," Brunswick broke in. "Let me just read your report, Slattery. Your account is worthy of its subject." Brunswick let his gaze travel around the room. He might have been a teacher about to announce that there had been cheating in the last exam. But his eyes dropped to the pages he held and he began to read, not without dramatic overtones. By the time he turned to the second page, I had lifted my buttocks onto the window ledge. From time to time I was the recipient of admiring glances from Brunswick. But he went on.
Whatever ruse Priscilla had used to wangle the poison from Nugent it had worked. In her desk drawer was a spoon on which small deposits of strychnine had been found. This, Brunswick said unctuously, corroborated my hunch. But there was more. The rubber gloves Priscilla wore while doctoring Nugent's coffee had been found in a dumpster behind the building.
"Were my fingerprints in the gloves?" Priscilla demanded, addressing the question to me!
"As good as. Your scent still clung to them, moreover they had picked up telltale traces from the contents of the purse in which you brought them."
"Don't forget the video," Gwen said. "Is that in the report?"
"It's here!" Again Brunswick shook the papers, smiling an oh-you-rascal smile at me. "Slattery got it all in."
The video, a makeshift security item Nugent had installed, had captured Priscilla in the very act of putting strychnine in Nugent's coffee.
"Priscilla, why?" It was Lois and never did voice contain such anguish.
"To prevent your getting money that doesn't belong to you!"
"Damn it, shut up," Brunswick cried. "This is Slattery's moment and I intend to make sure he gets full benefit."
As long as he could read the report, that is. I found that I had concluded from Nugent's second report, not simply that Lois was not the heir, but that a real heir was in existence.
"Who?" It was Philip Norris's voice, though only his forehead was visible.
Priscilla stood and turned. "I did it all for you," she cried, and she opened her arms to Gwen. "You are the legally adopted child and the rightful heir of Edwina's money!"
Pandemonium, not simply at the announcement, but because Gwen fainted, falling like a clothes pole across the lap of the cop beside her. He eased her to the floor, the better to keep an eye on Priscilla. But Priscilla's only thoughts were for Gwen. She pushed her chair aside and knelt beside the unconscious Gwen. A reporter stepped over them, drawn by Brunswick's commanding gesture. I felt Brunswick's arm go round my shoulders as the bulbs went off. Speaking for the record, he kept congratulating me on the help I had been to the department in bringing an indictment against Priscilla for the murders of Streeter and Nugent.
"What made you suspect her?" he asked me, showing his good side to the camera.
"It was no one thing," I managed to say. Gwen was coming to. All I wanted was to get these people out of my office and talk with her.
But I was not to be spared this moment of undeserved glory. Brunswick was describing the report from which he had been reading minutes before. He praised it as a model of investigatory technique as well as summation of the results of an investigation.
"We couldn't keep him on the force," he said, hitting me on the back for the twentieth time. "But he remains an asset to the community, and I mean the peace-keeping community."
Lois came forward and was induced to kiss me for the cameras. "I never cared about the money," she murmured.
"It is no longer an obstacle between us," Sophos said. Like Brunswick he addressed the thrusting microphones and the camera with the light lit.
"You have brought us together," Lois cried.
I thought of the two of them, in the buff in the sprinkler the night before.
"May nothing come between you."

11

"I'm out of a job," Gwen said.
"You're a millionaire."
We were in a booth at McDonald's having the breakfast that tastes like the carton it comes in. My equivocal triumph in bringing Priscilla to justice sat heavily upon me. Was I the only one who knew I had gone into the great showdown prepared to prove that Sophos and Lois had conspired to remove all obstacles to her inheriting that massive amount of money? Nugent had dug up for Streeter facts which jeopardized her status as heiress. It followed as night the day that first Streeter and then Nugent, the messenger, had to be removed.
"The video of Sophos entering Nugent's office might have thrown me off," I said.
"Of course Priscilla sent him."
"Not everyone would understand why he would run errands for her."
Was that awe and admiration swimming in Gwen's eyes as she looked up at me? She sat on the floor at my feet, hugging her knees as if she wished they were mine, savoring my hour of triumph.
"You said you were unemployed."
"I remember how nice it was to work with you when you were with Nugent."
"You helped him with that second report, I suppose."
She spoke carefully. "I typed it up. On the computer."
It was easy to admire her mind, of course, no matter how off-putting that great helmet of hair and stick-figure body. But what the hell, I wasn't proposing marriage.
"We could work together again." I yawned as I said it, the better to make it sound matter of fact. "You could type up things on the computer."
"Or share a shingle."
"Herpes?"
"Partners."
Slattery & Probst? "I was thinking of special assistant."
"What's in a name?"
"Ask my mother."
We shook hands, Slattery and Probst, Ishmael and Gwen. In all but name. But as she said, what's in a name. Call me Ishmael. And say goodbye.