HE GRINNED AS I LOOKED at him. The expression was that of a pleased child.
“Out,” I said.
“No, no! It's all right, it really is. It's nothing illegal.”
And for the first time I felt a spark of interest. It kindled the Go-for-It Detective in me enough to ask, “You want to hire me, as in money?”
“Yes.”
“American legal tender?”
He sat in my Client's Chair and hummed to himself.
The Go-for-It Detective unlocked his desk and found his organizer while he reflected on the “drunkard's walk” path that his life had followed to bring him to this moment. The Go-for-It Detective asked himself yet again whether money was really worth what it cost to earn it. But then the Go-for-It Detective thought about the face he would lose with his woman if he turned away a paying client without hearing him out.
I said, “You'd better explain what this is about.”
“The first thing you have to understand is that I am a poet.” Quentin rocked back in the chair and flopped his hair away from his face for a moment once again.
The accumulating stress got to me.
I said, “Name, I. M. A. Poet. Now, Mr. Poet, I understand that you want me to bump off a troublesome spouse. How would you like that done? Poison? Hanging? Bazooka? The real issue is whether you want her put out of her misery quickly or whether you want it to be long and agonizing. If the latter, perhaps I could recommend a death by natural causes because I can't think of anything that could make her suffer more than death by lingering marriage to a jerk-off like you.
Quentin leaned forward at this. The hair fell back over his face and I wondered if watching it would hypnotize me. “Please, Albert!” he said. “I need your help.”
I waited.
“I am a poet,” he said. “Not exactly honoured in my own land, but not a nobody. I also have a little inherited money. And as the proverb has it, money makes the mare go, so I have been able to devote myself fully to my art, provided I restrain any desire for personal luxury.”
He squirmed to establish the luxury of greater comfort in the chair.
I said, “Go on.”
“A year or so ago one of my verse collections fell into the hands of Mrs. Charlotte Vivien. Charlotte isn't sophisticated in the ways of poetry but she knows what she likes.”
“And she liked your poems?”
“Happily, yes,” he said.
“And?”
“Charlotte, as you undoubtedly know, is extremely wealthy in her widowhood and that allows her to indulge her fancies. She set the machinery going that brought me to Indianapolis. I am now entering the fifth month of an extended writer's residency. I do a few workshops, in libraries and high schools, but mostly I just write.”
“That sounds pretty comfortable. So what's the problem?”
“My problem is that I have fallen in love.”
This was not what I expected. I'd been thinking more in the territory of, say, gambling debts.
“To be in love!” He stretched his arms out and looked to the heavens. Well, to my ceiling. But he looked for the first time like poets are supposed to look. “That is the last thing I ever expected to say about an American woman.”
“Who exactly are you in love with?”
“With Charlotte, of course. Wasn't it obvious last night?”
“Not to me.”
“Ah, you were much too engrossed in the humiliating performance you had been engaged to give.”
“I guess so.”
“You did it beautifully, I thought. You gave off the most impressive aura of world-weary hackdom, the honest journeyman reduced to extreme expedients but retaining enough dignity not to sell out completely. They can buy my body but not my heart. I thought that your sneeze into the fingerprinting powder was a moment of minor genius. A brilliant piece of theatre which said, `I may be a trained monkey but you can't make me do it your way.’ ”
I felt various things, but among them was surprise that he had applied so much attention to someone other than himself.
And then he said, “You are surprised I saw what you were going through, aren't you?”
In the circumstances I had to say “Yes.”
“So you see, we are soulmates, you and I.”
“And you have a wife you want murdered.”
“Yes,” he said. “And no.”
I expelled a world-weary sigh.
“I've always felt that poetry needs freedom, so I have never actually contracted myself in matrimony.”
“You want your wife murdered, but you've never been married?”
“Yes.”
I said no words. My face might well have expressed something.
“Whenever I meet a new woman, I tell her that I am married. It keeps her from expecting too much.”
“Oh.”
“But never for a single moment did I consider that this Middle American fortress of self-righteous materialism would contain a woman so thoroughly captivating as Charlotte. I am completely and utterly taken. So I want to get married. I need to get married. Therefore I must shed my `wife.’ ”
“O.K. You tell her you aren't married after all.”
“No.”
“Too simple?”
“Charlotte is well off. Vulgarly wealthy, in fact.”
“Men have coped with marrying rich women before.”
“Ah, but it's a problem for her. It affects the way she looks at men. Especially poorer ones. Like myself.”
“Sounds a good, sensible Hoosier girl.”
“So when I declare my love, Charlotte may have me investigated. She's done that before with men.”
“I'm liking this gal better and better.”
“Therefore, I need to be rid of my `wife' in such a way that there is no risk that she will come back to haunt me.”
“You are worried about being haunted by the ghost of a made-up wife?”
“I will devise a story to account for my wife's death. But I am not a storyteller. I am a poet. So what I need you for is to troubleshoot. I want you to analyze it from an investigator's point of view. To identify weaknesses from the perspective of how an investigator might work.”
“But can't you just say your wife died suddenly and leave it at that?”
“I have decided,” Quentin said, “to have her murdered.”
“Why?”
“Because it will make Charlotte sorry for me.”
“You want me to help make a fictitious murder so convincing it will fool the woman you love into being sorry enough to marry you?”
“I know it sounds pathetic,” he said.
“I don't like it,” I said.
“I'll pay you well.” He took an envelope from his pocket. “I brought you a retainer. Cash. That's how it's done, isn't it? So you can avoid paying tax on it. Is a thousand dollars enough?” He pushed the envelope across the desk to me.
“A thousand dollars? For something like this?”
“I know it's not nearly as much as you got for last night.”
“I'm going to have to think about it.”
“Well, why don't you keep the money until you decide. You can give it back if your scruples won't allow you to do the work. Less fifty, say, for your thinking time. Fair? Wait till you see exactly what I come up with.”
I thought about it. My woman would say, “Fifty for nothing.”
I said, “All right.”
“Wonderful.”
“But we do the paperwork. And, for your information, I pay my taxes.”
“It's a deal,” he said. “And Albert, I'm sure you'll find no objection to what I ask of you in the end. I always know about things like that.”
“You know shit, Poet,” I said, in my head.
I took out my receipt book. I counted the money in the envelope. Twenty new fifty-dollar bills. I copied their serial numbers onto the receipt. “Now,” I said, “your name.”
“Quayle,” he said,
“What?”
“Quentin Quayle. I have a middle name. Crispian.”
“Your surname is Quayle? Like . . .”
“That's right.”
“Are you related?”
“Not as far as I know, but it is a Manx name and I understand he has Manx antecedents.”
“Manx?”
“From the Isle of Man. It's part of Great Britain.”
“Oh.”
“It's what first drew Charlotte's attention to my work. The name. The coincidence.”
“Oh. Right.” I made the receipt out to Quentin Crispian Quayle, took an address and phone number and sent him on his way.