Джон Макдональд - More Good Old Stuff

“Good. I’m assigning you to Mr. Quinn. Have Miss Willington take over your desk. Explain the ropes to her. You are at liberty to give Mr. Quinn any information he may request. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

I was still standing. Chief Fosting stood up too. He stuck his hand out, and I took it. “When she’s given you all she knows, come to me to get the blanks filled in.”

I sat patiently on the bench again while Miss Calder finished a few letters and got hold of a chubby item named Willington and gave her the routine. Willington acted nervous, but pleased.

She sat on the other side of the booth.

I think of women in terms of music. I don’t know why. Gloria was barrelhouse piano with a driving bass.

There have been women who were bright, raw trumpet, or the gutty blast of a trombone. One or two have been a tom-tom beat.

But this Janet Calder was something else. A string section. Violins. The longhair brand of music. But neither cool nor faint nor dull.

She was nineteen or twenty. Blond. A wide, sensitive mouth, with a flare to her nostrils and wide eyes of a blue-violet shade. Keen eyes. They didn’t look as if they’d miss a great deal.

Her young body was almost excessively feminine, but she didn’t throw it around. She carried herself in a way that showed she could swim, play tennis, ride. Her hands and arms were tanned. Her eyebrows made her hair look dyed, which it wasn’t. They were thick black eyebrows, unplucked. They made me want to lean across the table between us and run the tip of my finger along them. They looked as though they would feel like fur.

Fosting knew what he was doing when he attached me to her for information. I scribbled in my prop notebook while she filled in the background.

It was an unusual background. Law degree. FBI before Vietnam. G-2 during that war. He had come back to his hometown in late ’77 just as the merit system went in. And he had become a rookie cop. With his talents, he passed the competitive examinations with a rating and performance record that got him up to sergeant in the middle of 1978, lieutenant by the spring of 1979, captain by Christmas of 1979. Oddly, the other men on the force didn’t resent his extremely rapid rise. When the Chief died, his grading was tops, and he moved into the hot spot.

I asked a few questions, scribbled down the answers.

“How come you know him so well, Janet?” I asked.

I saw the faint blush. She spun her Coke glass in a wet pool on the black marble tabletop, making a pattern of interlocking rings. She watched those rings as though they were very important and said, “My dad was a policeman for years. I was in business school when Dad was shot and killed on New Year’s Eve in 1977. Chief Fosting, then a rookie, took an interest in me and saw that there was enough money for me to finish the course. Then he helped me get a job.”

“Nice guy,” I said casually.

“It’s stronger than that!” she snapped. “He’s — he’s a wonderful man. I respect him and admire him more than any man I’ve ever met. He’s fair and honest and...”

I grinned at her. “How long have you been in love with him?”

For a minute I was afraid I had gone too far. Her face got white and her lips were firmly compressed. She had been calling me Tom, as per agreement, but she said, “Mr. Quinn, I hardly think that your job gives you any right to—”

“Hey, wait a minute, Janet!” I said. “I was just kidding. Take it easy. He’s a nice-looking guy and I thought you two maybe had some arrangement.”

Her anger faded. She looked rueful. “You know, he doesn’t even know I’m alive. As a woman, I mean. I’m just an efficient piece of office equipment. Sorry I flared up. I guess — well, I guess I am in love with him.”

There was no reason under the sun why her words should irritate me. But they did. It was certainly none of my business who she was in love with.

To cover up, I asked quickly, “Where does he live?”

“In a little room in the Stanley Hotel. It’s a horribly bare little room. He doesn’t seem to care about his environment. He’s so wrapped up in his work.”

That gave me a jolt. Fosting right in the same hotel with me. It might be a break.

“Any wine, women and song?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I sometimes wish he’d — well, get out sometimes. He looks so tired. But he says that there’s too much for him to do.”

“You live with who?” I asked.

She tilted her head to one side. “What has that got to do with your write-up, Tom?”

“I just wondered who you’d have to call to tell them I was taking you to dinner.”

“Are you?”

“You heard the Chief’s orders, Janet.”

Her smile was a little-girl grin. It wrinkled her nose and made me want to kiss her. “Okay,” she said. “Chief’s orders. If you must know, I live all by myself in an apartment complex for singles on Maple Terrace. And now you can take me back there so I can change.”

I compromised by putting her in a cab and promising to call for her in an hour.

I found myself singing in my shower, and wondered why. I picked the answer up an hour later.

Funny how it happens to you. You think you have the world cased, have yourself all set from here on in. And then somebody throws a blond monkey wrench into the machinery. I decided that I was silly to keep the car out of circulation. So I took it out of the garage and called for Janet.

Janet came down looking like one of the girls they should put on magazine covers and don’t because they can’t find them often enough.

“Yours?” she asked when I opened the car door for her. When I told her it was, she said, “Writing must be pretty profitable. Maybe I’m in the wrong business.”

The steak house she suggested was fair, and, over the coffee, in order to make my story look good, I hauled out the notebook again.

I asked her to describe each of his movements on an average day. The guy was a bear for punishment. To the office by seven-thirty, on foot. Half an hour for lunch. Usually not through until nine. I casually worked in the idea that, since he had clamped down so hard on gambling, he must fear personal reprisals and go around with a bodyguard.

She laughed at that one. “Heavens, no! Jim — I mean Chief Fosting has put the fear of God into all the sneaking little men in this town. He’d consider it beneath his dignity to go around with a guard.”

I smiled. “Maybe I hadn’t ought to put that in the article. It might encourage somebody to potshot him.”

“I think he’d like them to try. He carries his own revolver and he’s an expert shot with it.”

That was an important fact to file away. Not that I was going to gun him down. I had better plans.

I folded the notebook, slipped it into my side pocket. “Working day over?” she asked.

“No. Not by a long shot. Now you’ve got to give me some of the local color. I can’t write a good chapter on Fosting until I know what the city is like. Where do we go from here?”

“I’m going to demand overtime!”

“Am I that bad?” I asked her.

“You’ll do, Quinn,” she said softly.

Some dregs of a long-forgotten conscience stirred me. Maybe some of it showed on my face.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

I smiled. “Where do we go?”

“There’s one place I’ve always wanted to go,” she said, “and I’ve never had an excuse before. But this could come under the heading of local color. I want to go to the Key Club.”

“Sounds interesting,” I said. “What is it?”

She had a pixie look in her eyes. “A disco where they gamble upstairs,” she said in a conspiratorial tone.