I had the taxi drop me off a few blocks from my office and walked the rest of the way, keeping an eye out for anyone who might be watching or following me. Once inside with the doors locked, I took a screwdriver from a desk drawer, opened my safe, and pried open the false back. I grabbed the notebook and put it in my pocket, fitted the false back into place again, closed the safe, and drove home. I poured myself a stiff belt of scotch and took a harsh swallow to calm my nerves, then opened a can of pork and beans and heated them up in a pan on the stove. I hadn’t had dinner yet and the excitement of the evening had made me hungry. I had a little more scotch while I stirred the beans, and considered standing over the sink and eating right from the pan. I forced myself to grab a plate and silverware, slice off a piece of cheese, butter some bread, and sit down at the table like a civilized man.
I had another look through the notebook while I ate. About the first fifteen pages were filled with rows of letters on the left and numbers on the right. At the top of each stack of rows was what appeared to be a heading of some kind, and each heading ended with eight numbers separated by dashes after the second and fourth numbers. It was the way people often write dates, but as there wasn’t likely to be a forty-fifth month even by the time we reached the year Twenty-One Sixteen, either my hunch about them being dates was wrong or the numbers were coded same as the letters.
Beneath each heading were anywhere from three to a dozen rows of entries, and each row was split into one to three groupings of letters. Were the groupings names of people?
Places? Events? After the last row in a series, there was a break of two blank lines before the next heading and stack of rows started. Most of the letters were in black ink, a few were in red, but the colors didn’t mix within the same row from what I saw.
To the right of some of the rows in each stack, numbers were clumped together in a single grouping, separated by commas every third digit from the right. Again, some in black, some in red, but no mixing within a sequence. A symbol I didn’t immediately recognize preceded each group of numbers. The whole thing looked a little like an accounting ledger. The image of the man in the warehouse office working by the light of the banker’s lamp came back to me. Had he put this together?
I finished my supper and made short work of the dishes, then grabbed a cold bottle of beer from the refrigerator and headed into the bedroom, taking a few sips while I shimmied out of my clothes and tossed them into a pile on the floor of the closet. There was blood on the elbow of my suit jacket; my cleaning guy was going to want extra for that. I went into the bathroom and got the shower going good and hot, then stepped inside, taking the beer in with me. For ten minutes I relaxed under the steaming spray, letting the hot water hit my neck and shoulders. I gargled some of the beer and made funny noises in my throat to get the extra juice out of my nerves, then grabbed the soap and lathered up. I rinsed, toweled off, put the empty bottle in the trash can, and went to bed, not bothering with pajamas.
I woke up to see Melinda Graham standing at the foot of the bed, staring at me. I wasn’t sure how long she’d been there, but somehow I wasn’t startled. She was dressed in the same black trousers and white blouse I’d seen her in that first time by the fountain, even down to the charcoal-stained rag wrapped around her left hand. She was saying something to me but no sound came from her mouth, which made me angry. I yelled at her to speak up, raising my voice until I yelled myself awake. I sat up in bed and rubbed a hand across my face, staring at the spot where she’d been. I threw the bedclothes back and padded into the kitchen for another beer. Damn weird dreams.
I felt well enough the next morning, though my elbow was a little tender. I went to the gym for some exercise and a steam, then drove to three different stationery shops until I found one that carried the kind of black pocket notebooks I was looking for. I bought three of them, along with two cheap pens and two bottles of ink – one red, one black. I stopped in at the office for a couple hours to take care of a few things. Jennings had called in asking if there was any work to be done, so I had Gail call and tell him to drive out to Excelsior Springs to check on a possible lead regarding Mrs. Pintner’s long-lost sister. I could have handled it with a phone call, but if Jennings got to too restless I could lose him to steadier work. I went through the mail, returned a few telephone calls, scratched out some notes on a pad, then tore those pages off and burned them in the ashtray. The flames were just flickering down when Gail walked in with a letter for me to sign. She sniffed contentedly.
“That’s what I love about fall,” she said, “the smell of burning secrets.”
“Secrets, hell, I thought we kept some marshmallows in this dump.”
I signed the letter and handed it back, then stood up and walked over to the coatrack, telling Gail I’d be out for the rest of the day.
“What else is new?” I stopped and stared at her with one arm in my jacket sleeve. It was a funny tone coming from her.
“Something on your mind, Gail?” She shrugged and sat on the edge of my desk.
“You’ve been out of the office a lot, lately.”
“I’m usually out of the office a lot. That’s how I pay for it.” I finished putting on my jacket and grabbed my hat.
“Did you get the telephone message from Melinda Graham?”
“I got it. Which reminds me, I’ll be out most of tomorrow, too. I’m on bodyguarding detail this week.”
“You’re bodyguarding Melinda Graham, the society heiress?”
“No, I’m bodyguarding Melinda Graham, the professional alligator wrestler. What are you getting at?” I was genuinely confused, but I’ve been dealing with women long enough to be used to that.
“I thought you hated bodyguarding.”
“I do, but I also enjoy regular meals.” She followed me to the outer office.
“According to the newspaper, she’s what, nineteen?”
“Who is?”
“Melinda Graham.”
“Sounds about right. And?”
“I thought you told me I was too young for you, and I’m three years her senior.” Part of me admired her for saying it outright like that, the part that wasn’t annoyed as hell. I took a breath and walked closer to her.
“Gail, we went through this when I hired you. You want to marry the boss, you need to find a different job. Looking after this girl is work. Maybe not important work and damned sure not exciting work, but it pays the bills and things have been slow lately.”
“Things don’t seem slow,” she complained. “You’re out of the office most days, you’re carrying your gun again, strange men are showing up looking for you—”
“Those guys show up here again, you call the police.”
“They bad news, Mr. Caine?” She looked worried.
“Bad enough, but don’t worry, sweetheart, a blue uniform will scare them off fast enough.” I hoped.
“How bad are things right now?” I felt a twinge of guilt at the worry still in her eyes. I tend to keep my people in the dark a lot of the time, for their own protection as well as for my client’s privacy. Still, maybe I’d been carrying it a bit far of late. I gestured for Gail to take her chair while I sat on the edge of her desk and sketched out some general details of the past week and a half. I left things out, of course, but she knew now who I’d been working for and roughly what I’d been doing for him.
“He’s in with some shady people, isn’t he?”
I laughed. “He’s a rich businessman, honey. If he wasn’t in with his share of shady people, he’d be one of us.”
“That guy they found in the river last week, they said on the radio he was one of Ronald Graham’s employees.” Sometimes I regret hiring sharp people. Not often, but sometimes. I reached out and put a hand on her shoulder.
“Gail, this is my fault. You’ve been cooped up alone in this office for too many days in a row, and nothing to keep you company but your imagination and pictures of shirtless movie stars. Tell you what, take the rest of the day off. With pay. Lock up after I leave and go to the park or go see a matinee with your mother. Get some fresh air.”
“What if somebody comes by?”
“They can see we’re closed and decide if they want to come back tomorrow.”
¥ ¥ ¥
Back at my apartment, I started the percolator and made myself some lunch: a sandwich, a glass of milk, and an apple for dessert. When I finished eating, I cleared the table, washed the dishes, poured myself a large cup of coffee, and went to work. I took out the two pens I’d bought and filled them – one with black ink, one with red – then opened Carlton’s notebook and practiced on some loose sheets of paper. I gave up on any first-class job of forgery. I could do well enough with a signature or a short note, but fifteen pages was liable to make me cross-eyed. Besides, I doubted anyone knew this person’s handwriting well enough to recognize it from just block letters and Arabic numerals. I got the general slants and spacing down well enough, and made sure to draw short, horizontal lines through the sevens and zees. It was painstaking and monotonous work, but by the end of three and a half hours I had transcribed all the coded information into three reasonable facsimiles of the notebook. None of the copies would cut ice with whoever had made the original, but they’d do for anyone else. More importantly, if I lost the original somehow (say leaving it in a cab or getting it taken from me at gunpoint) I still had the information.
I’d allowed the slow swirl of red and black symbols to drift through my mind these past few hours, but any meaningful patterns within were hiding like a gambler who owed his bookie. I’d make a genuine stab at decoding it all later, and hope that the bit of cryptography I’d studied in the Signal Corps would give me a leg up.
I wandered into the living room, picked up the telephone, and had the operator put me through to the Muehlebach Hotel. I got lucky: Benny Pearson was working. He informed me that Harold Draymore kept a room at the Hotel President on Baltimore and gave me the number. I promised him a twenty next time I saw him, then put my feet up and had a cigarette. After a few minutes, I called the President and asked for Draymore’s room.
“Mr. Caine, what a pleasant surprise,” I could see the smug smile on that baby face as his voice came down the wire.
“Uh huh. I give that ratfink bellhop enough time to call you first?”
“Indeed you did,” he chuckled dryly. “What can I do for you?”
“You still want me to find Carlton’s notebook for you?”
“Most certainly.”
“Let’s meet and discuss it,” I suggested.
“We could have dinner at my hotel this evening. Around eight o’clock, shall we say?”
“Suits me. I’ll see you then. And Draymore? That’s dinner for two. Your bulldog can watch from the sidelines.” I hung up without waiting for a reply.
It was late afternoon when I returned to my office, half expecting Trianna’s goons from the night before to be there. My exit from the warehouse hadn’t been one of my subtler moves; all I’d really accomplished was to pay for my own ride back. Maybe they’d get the message that I wasn’t quite so easy to push around, which could just mean they’d be sure to push a hell of a lot harder next time. Still, it wasn’t as though I’d escaped from the place, just saved them a little gas money. If they were that offended by my departure, they’d have found my home address and paid me a visit by now. They hadn’t, and my office was empty as well (though I did walk in carefully, gun drawn, to check). It occurred to me that Trianna hadn’t given me a telephone number or any specific method for getting back to him. That would be as good an excuse as any when his apes showed up again, as I was sure they would at some point.
I locked the outer door and went into my private office, locking that door behind me as well. I took the screwdriver from my desk, secured the original notebook in its snug behind the safe’s false back, and placed one of the copies on the floor of the safe. A second copy was hidden in my apartment. The third was in my jacket pocket, next to the slim brown notebook I usually carry. I sat down at my desk and fished out the third copy for another look, but the tension from the night before, the quiet of my office, and the late afternoon sun conspired to make me drowsy. I woke up in my chair to the sound of the telephone jangling on the desk. The office was dark now and I fumbled for the receiver.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Devlin, it’s Melinda Graham. I hope I’m not disturbing you.”
“Not at all. I was just finishing up for the day.”
“At seven-thirty at night? You keep long hours.”
“Not long, just irregular. What can I do for you, Melinda?” I picked up the telephone base and leaned back in my chair.
“Well, it’s just that you never returned my message from this morning. I wanted to confirm our appointment tomorrow.” I smiled to myself. I seriously doubted that the men on her father’s payroll had a habit of missing appointments.
“I’m sorry, it’s been a busy day. Yes, tomorrow at eleven. I’ll be there.”
“Wonderful. I’m looking forward to it.”
“Me, too.”
Neither of us closed the line right away. After a moment, feeling the need to say something, I asked what she’d had for dinner tonight, then felt like a dope bringing up something so trivial.
“Oh, the usual,” she said airily. “Lobster Thermidor with quails’ eggs covered in a light cream sauce, some caviar and toast, truffles, and a bottle of very old champagne iced in a silver bucket.” I reached for the lamp but stayed my hand. There was something about hearing her voice in the dark I liked.
“What did you have?” she asked.
“An egg salad sandwich that fell off the back of a truck. It only had one tire tread on it. I washed it down with half a bottle of flat beer somebody left on the sidewalk.” I had no idea why we were talking like this.
“A gourmand’s delight,” she said.
“Maybe, but I’d prefer it if you didn’t bring religion into this.” Yes, that lovely laugh again.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Devil.” Somehow that nickname didn’t sound so bad coming from her.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Melina.” I pressed down on the hook before I could think of anything else stupid to say, then looked at the luminous markers on my watch. I had just enough time to make my dinner date with Draymore.
¥ ¥ ¥
Three quarters of an hour later I was sitting in the restaurant on the ground floor of the Hotel President, digging into some excellent prime rib and getting down to business.
“You think Ronald Graham has the notebook?” Draymore watched me carefully through the round lenses of his spectacles as he helped himself to a forkful of chicken and rice.
“That’s where I plan to start,” I told him, looking down as I worked my knife and fork.
“Why’s that?”
“As you already know, Graham was preparing to do some business with Carlton. Graham’s personal secretary was meeting with Carlton on a daily basis. He may have been the last person to see Carlton alive, outside of whoever killed him.”
I watched Swelk pass by the entrance to the restaurant for the twentieth time, peering in. Draymore saw me looking and glanced over his shoulder.
“You did say he could watch from the sidelines,” he smiled.
“He could be a little less obvious about it.”
“I’m not paying him to be inconspicuous, Mr. Caine.”
“I hope you’re not paying him much. He was no great shakes guarding Carlton.”
“Returning to the matter of the notebook,” Draymore said, “if Graham does have it, how do you plan to get it from him?”
“I’m already working for him. Getting close to him is not a problem. And if this notebook is as valuable as you seem to think it is, he’s keeping it close.”
“And you’re willing to steal it from him and sell it to me?”
“For the right price. And from what I can tell, no one living has any legitimate claim to it, so I don’t really consider it stealing.”
He took another bite of food, then said casually: “I had an interesting conversation with Joe Trianna today. You met him last night, I believe.”
“In his office,” I nodded. “Kind of a forced invitation.”
“He said you told him that I have the notebook.”
“That’s right, just like you told him I have it.”
“I don’t know for a fact that you don’t have it.”
“I don’t know for a fact that you don’t,” I lied, taking another bite of prime rib. They really do a grand job with beef in this city.
“But if you think Graham has the notebook, why tell Trianna you think I have it?”
I put my fork down and took a drink of water.
“Let’s think about this, Draymore. If I tell Trianna that Graham has it, Trianna either sends some two-bit second story man out to Graham’s mansion or cuts a deal with Graham directly. Either way, you never see it again, which means I don’t collect on the generous offer you’re about to make me.”
“Why are you willing to make a deal with me?” It was a reasonable question; Draymore hadn’t gotten rich by not asking them.
“Who else is there?”
“There’s Trianna.”
“I try not to do business with gangsters. They’re too temperamental, too unpredictable, and too dangerous. It’s even money whether he’d pay me or shoot me once I handed it over. Besides,” I added, “he’s a cheapskate. Offered me five thousand for it.”
Draymore settled back in his chair and sipped his wine.
“I’m sure I can do better than that.”
“You will if you want it.”
“Apart from Trianna,” Draymore suggested, “there’s also Ronald Graham.”
I put down my fork again and gave him a withering look.
“Try to follow me on this. I can’t sell it to Graham if he already has it, which is good odds, because unlike you and Trianna, he hasn’t asked me to find it for him. If it goes missing and a man who’s been in his house recently offers to sell it back to him, you think he’s not going to put two and two together?”
Draymore slowly chewed another mouthful of chicken and rice, looking me in the eye the whole time. Eyes, they say, are the windows to the soul, but there aren’t too many people in this town who haven’t learned to put up shutters. Draymore swallowed, wiped at his lips with his napkin, and made me an offer, a respectable one. I picked up my water and made a show of thinking it over before I accepted.
“That’ll do, for the money side of it anyway.”
“What more do you want?”
I explained to him that I needed time to locate the notebook and get it away from Graham, and told him where he came in.
“I need you to keep Trianna off my back while I’m working. I want you to call him tomorrow. Tell him you can get the notebook and you’re willing to cut a deal with him, but you need some time. Tell him you’re more certain than before that I have it, or that I at least know where it is. Tell him you can get it for him but it has to be done your way. Snatching me off the street and working me over isn’t going to help anything. It’ll just make the situation worse. Make him understand that. You with me so far?”
“Yes.”
“Explain to him that you have a plan to have me framed and put away for a long prison stretch, but your plan won’t work with his people hounding me. I’ll get spooked and rabbit on you. He has to go along on this or there’s no deal, tell him.” I let him absorb the rest. It didn’t take him long.
“Why would I want to have you framed?”
I turned both palms up and rolled my eyes. “I have to think of everything? I stole a girl from you once. I kicked your dog. Maybe it’s necessary to make your plan work. Or just make it simple: tell Trianna the reason is your own personal business.”
“And if Trianna says no?” I almost mouthed it with him; it was the next reasonable question.
“Then tell him fine, you’ll go with your original deal with Graham.”
“I don’t have a deal in place with Mr. Graham.”
“Trianna doesn’t know that. Keep up, Draymore.” I asked him how much time he thought we could buy with this story.
“Perhaps a week. Possibly a day or two beyond that.”
“Push him to the limit. I’ll need all the time I can get to do this right. And for God’s sake, ask a lot for it so he doesn’t get suspicious.”
He chewed another mouthful of food, still looking at my shutters.
“And if Ronald Graham doesn’t have the notebook?” I’d let just enough line out on this one. Time to pull back on the rod.
“Then someone close to this mess does, and I will find it.”
“You’re confident of that?”
“Positive.”
“And you’ll turn it over to me.”
“For the money we agreed on.”
“How do I know I can trust you?”
“You don’t. Anything else?”
“Mr. Caine,” he said after a moment, “if I do as you ask and you don’t deliver the notebook to me, I will retaliate. And it won’t be a prison stretch you’ll be looking at.”
“Fair enough.” I grabbed my hat and stood up. I’d had enough dinner and more than enough of the company. I walked past him, then turned back and leaned in close.
“Make sure you sell this to Trianna. If I walk down the street and see one of his people so much as getting his shoes shined, the deal’s off. I’ll hand the notebook over to Trianna once I find it and tell him I got it from you.”
I walked out of the restaurant without looking back, sidestepping Swelk on his next pass and telling him his boss wanted to see him. Hell, maybe his boss did want to see him, but Swelk needed something to do besides step on my heels all the way to the car.
I drove over to my office building, parked the car, and strolled around the corner to Lonnigan’s for dessert, which turned out to be the lengthiest and most generous course of the evening. Lonnigan and I gloated over the World Series, both of us happy that we’d pocketed a little green thanks to Dizzy Dean pitching that shutout against the Tigers in the seventh and final game yesterday. Eleven to zero after the top of the seventh inning, and the Cards held the score all the way to the bottom of the ninth. That was finishing things up in style, we agreed.
I shot the breeze with a few regulars, keeping my stool as they left and striking up new conversations with the strangers who came in after them. I made up stories to suit my interest in the person next to me. For the dowdy, middle-aged woman I was an insurance salesman, just transferred in from Dubuque. When the office clerk sat down, I was a handmade doorbell magnate from Cincinnati. I’m pretty sure I told one particularly ripe young twist that I was a Hollywood talent scout, but I couldn’t swear to it. Lonnigan smiled to himself but never contradicted me. Towards the end of the evening I ordered another scotch and Lonnigan returned with a steaming cup of coffee. I reached for it and breathed in the aroma.
“Ah, the new single malt from the island of Java,” I said, finding myself terribly witty. I took another sniff. “Eastern shore, if I’m not mistaken. Excellent choice, sir, but it does seem to be missing something.”
“You’re drunk, Mr. Caine,” Lonnigan smiled at me. “Finish that up and go home.”
Cops and bartenders are two categories of people you don’t want to argue with, and that rule went double for the man who ran my favorite haunt (and who could probably throw me through the plate glass window if he’d a mind to). Besides, he was right: I was drunk. I downed some of the coffee and settled my bill.
“Will ye be wantin’ a taxi, then?”
I shook my head a bit carefully. “Thanks, think I’ll just hoof it over to the office tonight.”
I stumbled around the corner, breathing in the cool night air to clear my head – or at least lift the top layer of fog. The city really comes alive at night. Bright lights, the bustle of pedestrians, the noise of motorcars, music coming down the street from the open door of a club here and there. The promise of adventure behind every neon sign and in the eyes of every pretty stranger. How easy it would be to wander into one of those open doors and enjoy the music and the company of someone new.
But no, I told myself, I had to work tomorrow. No rest for the weary, tomorrow it was right back to the salt mines, toting those barges and hauling those bales. I pictured Melinda Graham trying on hats while I stood around keeping an eye out for Bashmore and Sperry. I started to laugh, hiccupped, found my way to my office, and passed out on the couch.
I woke early, the morning sun hitting my face through the window. My head was pounding and my mouth felt like it was lined with dry cotton and sandpaper. I brought my watch into focus and decided to beat it out of there before Gail showed up. Not that she hadn’t caught me sleeping it off on the sofa before, but I didn’t want her keeping count. I took my folded suit jacket from under my head, shook it out and put it on, then grabbed a bottle of aspirin from my desk. I shook five tablets into my palm and started crunching them up dry in my mouth before walking to the outer office and draining about a third of the water cooler.
I stopped at the gym and sweated out the rest of the alcohol in the steam room, then headed home for a very hot shower. After rinsing off, I closed the hot water tap and stood under the ice-cold spray for as long as I could stand it. A shave, fresh clothes, a few bites of plain toast and some coffee, and I was feeling almost human again.
When I pulled into the driveway of Graham Manor and saw the Pierce-Arrow gleaming out front, I was feeling pretty damn good.