Oliver Bleeck - Brass Go-Between

“That’s right, George Wingo. Mrs. Wingo’s husband. But you knew about him, didn’t you, St. Ives? I mean you knew he was a junkie?”

“I knew,” I said.

“The Coroner’s Office said you were asking, and that you had some assistant U.S. Attorney General call up and find out for you.”

“You get around,” I said.

“Just routine police work. Even the Coroner’s Office thought it was something of a coincidence when Fastnaught here asks for the autopsy report one day and the assistant attorney general asks for it the next. So the guy at the Coroner’s Office calls us, we call the assistant attorney general, and he says he did it as a favor for that lawyer of yours… what’s his name?”

“Myron Greene,” Fastnaught said.

“Greene,” Demeter said. “So what’d you think when you found out that both Sackett, the guard, and Mr. Wingo were junkies?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Bullshit,” Fastnaught said.

“Come on, Fastnaught,” Demeter said. “Maybe St. Ives hasn’t got a keen deductive mind like yours. You know what Fastnaught thought?”

I sighed. “That Wingo got the guard hooked and then talked him into being the inside man when the shield was stolen. That’s what a five-year-old would think anyway. At least what my five-year-old would think, but then he’s got a high IQ.”

“Probably got it from his daddy,” Demeter said. “So the way Fastnaught figures it is that Wingo is desperate for a wad of money that’ll keep him in smack. Because he’s something of an art expert he decides to steal the shield and then sell it back to the museum. But he needs help; he needs not only the inside man but the outside thieves. Now where’s he going to find them?”

“Spellacy,” I said.

“You’d be a credit to the force, St. Ives. How’d you figure that?”

“When I was in Spellacy’s office, he wrote Wingo’s name on a pad. It was the last thing he ever wrote.”

“And you didn’t tell anyone?”

“No.”

“You could have saved us a lot of trouble,” Fastnaught said. “A hell of a lot of trouble.”

“You sure could have,” Demeter said. “We had to go see Mrs. Wingo last night and tell her what we thought. She didn’t like it; she didn’t like it worth a damn. But then she let us go through her husband’s papers and we ran across some correspondence between him and Spellacy.”

“What kind of correspondence?” I said.

“About some stocks that Wingo had bought through Spellacy maybe six or seven years ago when he was still in New York. It seems Spellacy sold Wingo short on some stocks that were supposed to go down. They went up instead. Spellacy owed Wingo quite a hunk of money. So we called New York about Spellacy. It was the only thing we had and they told us that Spellacy had just been done in. They also gave us a run down on him and he seemed to be the kind of a guy who might have lined up a couple of thieves for Wingo.”

“And a go-between,” I said. “He checked me out for Wingo.”

“And you didn’t bother to tell anyone about that either,” Fastnaught said. “You’re not much of a gossip, are you, St. Ives?”

“Well, what do you expect from a high-priced go-between, Fastnaught?” Demeter said. “You expect him to go around blabbing everything he knows to cops who’re probably crooked even if they don’t wear three-hundred-dollar suits?”

“I suppose you’re right,” Fastnaught said. “I shouldn’t expect that.”

I got up and mixed myself another drink. I didn’t ask either of them if they wanted one. “Now what?”

“You want to hear our theory?”

“I thought I’d just heard it,” I said. “Wingo masterminded the theft of the shield to keep himself in heroin. He got himself an inside man by getting the guard hooked. Then he got in touch with Spellacy who set him up with a couple of thieves, the man and the woman who’ve been calling me on the phone. When everything was planned, the pair got greedy, gave Wingo an overdose of heroin, and then rolled him down an embankment in his car. They took over then and when the guard had done his job, they blew his head off. Spellacy figures most of it out and threatens to talk unless he gets a bigger cut so they shove a knife into him. They did the same thing to Ogden an hour or so ago down in the lobby. I don’t know how Ogden found out who they were, if he really did, but then I don’t really care.”

“What do you mean, you don’t care, St. Ives?” Demeter said in a quiet voice.

“Just what I said. There’re too many dead bodies.” I got up and walked over to the far wall and examined a print of some medieval gateway. “I’m bowing out,” I said. “Quitting.”

“He’s getting carefully cautious again, Lieutenant,” Fastnaught said.

“Uh-huh,” Demeter said. “So it seems.”

“You can find someone else,” I said. “Someone who might enjoy the risk.”

“Sit down, St. Ives,” Demeter said, and his voice sounded like thick ice cracking. “Sit down and I’ll tell you why you goddamn sure as hell aren’t quitting.”

Sergeant Fastnaught left his seat at the window and moved over to the door. He leaned against it as though it were the most comfortable spot in the room. An itch seemed to develop between his shoulder blades because he rubbed his back against the molding of the door without shifting his gaze from me. Demeter leaned forward in the chair, his big, tightly curled head thrust forward, his red lips slightly parted as he breathed through his mouth. The cigar burned unnoticed in his right hand.

“What you’d really like me to do is to put the Scotch in my bag and try to go through that door,” I said. “That’s really what you’d like.”

“Get off it, St. Ives,” Fastnaught said.

Demeter looked at him. “Well, now, Sergeant Fastnaught, what do you expect him to think? I’ve just told him that he’s not going to quit and there you are at the door, looking for all the world like you’d like to bust him in the mouth if he tried to go through it. St. Ives has got a point and we ought to respect it. After all the talk about police brutality, what do you expect him to think?”

“Sorry,” Fastnaught said in a voice that was a couple of blocks away from being contrite. “I forgot about the role assigned to us by society. Of course, busting him in the mouth could help us pad out our scrapbooks. Paste in some clippings with headlines like ‘Police Pummel New York Go-Between in Hotel’ or even ‘Cops Clobber New York Man in Posh Hotel.’”

Demeter nodded gravely. “You’ve got a flair, Sergeant Fastnaught. I’d say you’ve got almost a real genius for public relations. Don’t you agree, St. Ives?”

“He’s a wonder,” I said.

“Now then,” Demeter said, leaning back comfortably in the chair and drawing on his cigar. “I was going to tell you why you’re not going to back out, wasn’t I?”

“You did mention that, but maybe I’d better go first. Maybe I’d better tell you why I am going to back out.”

Demeter waved his cigar at me. “The floor is yours.”

“If your mathematics are right, four people have been killed over this shield. The reason that they were killed is that they either knew or had a pretty good idea who stole it. So there’s a very good chance that anybody who’d shove a knife into a New York cop in the lobby of the Madison Hotel would be less than queasy about getting permanently rid of a go-between about three o’clock in the morning on some lonely road in Virginia or Maryland. But even if they come up with a safe switch, one that involves no contact, I’m still the loose end, the one they’d wake up at five o’clock in the morning and start worrying about, wondering if they’d somehow made a slip and that I just might be able to identify them. Now that’s only a slight chance, maybe a ten-to-one shot, but it’s more than I’m willing to take for twenty-five thousand or even fifty thousand. I’m sure you follow me.”