The door opened and a man about my age stood smiling at me. He was wearing wire-rim glasses and had curly hair that looked a bit “longish” for a man his age. I myself sport a ponytail so I don’t know where I get off by that remark, except he was wearing a well-tailored suit and possessed what I would describe as a “dignified bearing.” Need
I say more?
“Brendan Murphy,” he stated. “Yes, sir.”
The man smiled broadly and held out his hand. “How do you do?” I was immediately struck by his accent. There was something slightly Germanic about it. I’ve seen a lot of sub-titled movies.
“How do you do, sir,” I replied, shaking his hand. He had a firm handshake.
“Step into my office,” he said. “Thank you so much for coming here on your day off.”
“No problem,” I said, then wished I hadn’t said it. When you say a thing like that it spreads like a virus.
“Please have a seat,” he said, as he walked around his desk. The office was nicely appointed. That’s as far as I’m willing to go in terms of descriptive prose. You’ve seen offices. Believe me, they’re all the same.
He sat down behind the desk and got a serious look on his face. I knew what he was doing. He was “cutting to the chase.” He held his torso very erect. This too struck me as Germanic. Let me say here that I have no bias against Germans. I love Billy Wilder movies even though he was Austrian. But I suddenly became leery.
Let me explain:
When I’m in my taxi I have a tendency to start talking like the people I meet, and in this situation I was afraid that given enough time and rope I might start talking like Colonel Klink. This has to do with ingratiating myself with my fares in order to increase the size of my tips, talking the way they talk, agreeing with their views on politics, economics, or any other subject that can be crammed into a ten-minute ride. This is just an “act” of course. In reality I don’t talk like anybody I know, and I don’t agree with anybody on anything, so I’m pretty flexible.
But I knew I had to do my best to act mature during this sad encounter with Mr. Zelner’s lawyer, which was not beyond the realm of possibility. I’ve had quite a bit of experience acting mature, mostly in the presence of detectives.
“Again, zank you for coming in on your day off,” he said.
His accent wasn’t actually that thick, but I did hear the faintest whiff of a “Z” in his voice. Rod McKuen couldn’t have said it with more contrived subtlety.
“You’re welcome, sir,” I said.
Mr. Heigger then frowned a businesslike frown. “Could you describe for me the circumstances of the taxi ride during which Mr. Zelner passed away?”
“Certainly,” I said. “I picked him up at Union Station and drove him across the Fourteenth Street viaduct. He wanted to go to a location called Diamond Hill, which is just across the Valley Highway. When I got to the address though, I found out that ...” I stopped. I felt foolish stating that Mr. Zelner was dead. It always bothers me when people state the obvious in my presence as if I was some kind of a dolt—but Mr. Heigger was a lawyer so he was probably used to it. “... that Mr. Zelner was dead,” I concluded.
“I see,” Mr. Heigger said. He nodded and looked down at some papers on his desk, then looked up at me. “I have a few questions that I would like to ask of you, Mr. Murphy.”
I nodded.
“What was the disposition of Mr. Zelner’s luggage?”
“Mr. Zelner didn’t have any luggage.” Heigger’s eyebrows arched.
“He did not?”
“No, sir.”
“Do you mean to say that when he came out of the railway station he was not carrying a suitcase?”
“No, sir.”
“Perhaps he might have been carrying a small valise?”
“No, sir. When he climbed into my backseat he didn’t have any luggage at all.”
As I was replying I was thinking that this may have been the first time in my life that anyone had actually said the word “valise” to me. Fares usually said “carryall” or “travel case.”
An expression flitted across Heigger’s face that I would describe as “perplexed.” But it quickly went away.
“May I ask if Mr. Zelner might have been carrying anything at all in his hands when he came out of the railway station?” he said.
I wanted to reply “Yes, you may ask” but somehow I managed to say, “I didn’t see him come out of the station.”
“What do you mean?” Heigger said. “Were you not parked at the taxi stand in front of the station?”
I cleared my throat with the same preparatory misgivings that I often incorporate when being interrogated by the police. I described my initial encounter with Mr. Zelner: the call from half a block away, the fast drive to the station, the slap of the windshield wipers that couldn’t keep up with the driving rain, the darkness, the sudden opening of my rear door, the trench coat, the hat, the note handed to me, the face thrown into shadow. I was starting to overdo it in the drama department but Heigger interrupted my narrative by asking me to describe the note.
“It was just a small piece of paper that had an address for Diamond Hill written on it,” I said.
“What was the address?” he said.
I swallowed hard. I suddenly felt like I was being interrogated by a cop—or a nun. The cop’s name would have been “Duncan,” whereas the nun’s name would have been “Xavier,” as in “Sister Mary.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You do not know the address that you were going to?” he said with a disapproving lilt in his voice.
I started to get rattled because Heigger now sounded like my Maw. This in turn kick-started the general wariness and disdain that I have for all forms of authority except Leonard Maltin. When I was in the army, a lieutenant colonel once asked me to recite the chain-of-command from the President on down to my battalion commander. I nearly fainted.
“I knew the address last night but I didn’t memorize it,” I said. “Why not?” he said.
An electric bolt of umbrage welled up inside me, thank God. Umbrage has always helped me to pretend to be mature. “Mr. Zelner handed me a piece of paper with the address written on it, so I used that as my guide.”
“Could you possibly recall the address?”
The answer was no, but I pretended to think it over. I always know what I don’t know, and I knew I didn’t know the address. I had glanced at the slip of paper only long enough to read the number, which was like hearing a fare articulate an address that remained inside my brain long enough to haul the customer to the destination. My brain is like the print-spooler on my word processor, which holds a failed novel long enough to print it out before it is deleted from the RAM and replaced by a rejection slip.
“All I can recall is that it was an address on Diamond Hill,” I said. “After I found out that Mr. Zelner was dead I sort of forgot everything else.” “If I were to accompany you to Diamond Hill could you point out the building to me?” Heigger said.
I stared at Heigger in silence for a few moments. I began to experience a number of emotions that, while not conflicting, certainly were different from each other. One of the emotions was amusement. Heigger had made the classic blunder of offering me a chance to say no. But he was also suggesting that I take time out of my three-score-and-ten to go somewhere on my day off. I might as well admit here that asking me to do anything at all is a risky proposition, which may explain why I have so few friends. On top of all this, his attitude communicated to me an assumption that I would do this favor for him because he was a lawyer and I was a lowly cab driver, which, while not necessarily untrue, didn’t sway me. He seemed awfully determined to find out where Mr. Zelner had been going the previous evening, and since I was starting to be irked by his officious attitude, I decided to yank his chain.
“Why would you want me to do that?” I said.
“It may be that Mr. Zelner had his luggage sent on ahead, perhaps by another taxi. If so, his family would like me to retrieve his personal belongings.”
“I don’t think any of the office buildings were open for business last night,” I said.
“He may have sent his luggage along earlier in the day,” Heigger replied.
So far every answer he had given made perfect sense. I was out of my element.
“I vill pay you of course,” Heigger said.
The V-sound in the word “will” wasn’t really there, yet I heard it.
also heard the word “pay.”
“Would twenty dollars compensate you for your time and trouble?” Heigger said.
I made a quick calculation. As bad as I am at math, I am a whiz when it comes to mileage/money calculations. If I had been taught cab driving in grade school I might not have failed arithmetic. I calculated that the mileage from 10th Street to Diamond Hill would be twelve dollars, which meant I could scam Heigger out of eight dollars. Not really, of course. This was a legitimate offer that he was making, but it did have the delightful odor of a rip-job.
“You got a deal,” I said.