Эд Макбейн - Jigsaw

“Ferguson. She runs an art gallery on Jefferson Avenue. I’ve busted into her apartment maybe six or seven times already, couldn’t find the picture. I wouldn’t be surprised she stuck it up her twat,” Weinberg said, and burst out laughing. Brown laughed with him. They were still good old buddies and still thrilled and amazed by the fact that their two separate pieces fit together as neatly as Yin and Yang.

“Have you got a print of this?” Brown asked.

“Naturally,” Weinberg said. “And you?”

“Naturally.”

“You want to exchange pieces, is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“Done,” Weinberg said, and picked up the section Brown had placed on the tabletop. Brown picked up the remaining section, and both men grinned again. “Now let’s go down for a drink,” Weinberg said. “We got a lot of strategy to work out.”

“Right,” Brown said. As they went toward the front door, he said — casually, he thought — “By the way, how’d you happen to get your piece of the snapshot?”

“Be happy to tell you,” Weinberg said.

“Good.”

“As soon as you tell me how you really got yours,” Weinberg added, and began chuckling.

Brown suddenly wondered which of them was the straight man.

It was all happening too quickly and too easily.

If getting seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars was always this simple, Brown was definitely in the wrong racket. He almost wished that he and Weinberg were truly partners. There was something about the big man that Brown liked, despite the fact that he was a felon. He did not leave Weinberg until 2:00 the next morning. By that time, each of the men had consumed a fifth of scotch between them, and were calling each other Artie and Al. They had also decided that Brown should be the one who made the next approach to Geraldine Ferguson. Weinberg had been to her gallery several times with offers to buy the segment he was certain she possessed, but each time she had professed ignorance of the photograph, segmented or otherwise. Weinberg told Brown that he knew the girl had the goods they were after, but he would not reveal how he knew. Brown said that was a hell of a way to start a partnership, and Weinberg said Brown had started in an even worse way, giving him all that bullshit about a lifer at Utah State, man, that was straight out of Mickey Mouse, had Brown expected him to believe it? Brown said Well, I guess we both got our reasons for not wanting our sources known, and Weinberg said Well, maybe when we get to know each other better, and Brown said I hope so, and Weinberg said Man, I never thought I’d be partners with a spade.

Brown looked at him.

It was hip these days, he knew, for white men to call Negroes “spades,” but to Brown this was simply another of the words that had once been considered — and which he still considered — derogatory. Weinberg was smiling in a boozy happy friendly way, and Brown was certain the slur had been unintentional. And yet, the word rankled, the whole fucking thing rankled.

“That bother you?” he asked.

“What bother me?” Weinberg said.

“My being a spade, ” Brown said, hitting the word hard.

Weinberg looked him square in the eye. “Did I say that? Did I call you that?”

“You did,” Brown said, and nodded.

“Then I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it.” He extended his hand across the table. “I’m sorry, Artie,” he said.

Brown took his hand. “Forget it.”

“I may be a shit,” Weinberg said. “I may go around beating up people and doing rotten things, but I like you, Artie, and I wouldn’t hurt you by saying no dumb thing like that.”

“Okay.”

Weinberg was just gathering steam. “I may be the crumbiest guy ever walked the earth, I may have done some filthy things, but one thing I wouldn’t do is call you no spade, Artie, not if I wasn’t so piss-ass drunk and didn’t know what I was saying that might hurt a good friend of mine and a partner besides.”

“Okay,” Brown said.

“Okay, excuse it, Artie. Excuse it. I mean it.”

“Okay.”

“Okay,” Weinberg said. “Let’s go home, Artie. Artie, I think we better go home. I always get in fights in bars, and I don’t want to get in no trouble when we got our little deal cooking, okay?” He winked. “Okay?” He winked again. “Tomorrow morning, you got to go visit little Geraldine Ferguson. Tell her she don’t give us that picture, we’ll come around and do something terrible to her, okay?” Weinberg smiled. “I can’t think of nothing terrible right now, but I’ll think of something in the morning, okay?”

On Saturday morning, Brown put the new photo scrap into an envelope together with Geraldine Ferguson’s name and address, sealed the envelope, and dropped it into a mailbox in the hallway of 1134 Culver Avenue, three blocks from the precinct. The name on the box was Cara Binieri, which was Steve Carella’s little joke, carabinieri meaning fuzz in Italian. They had decided between them that Brown was to stay away from the squadroom, and whereas he hoped to call Carella later in the day, he wanted the information to be waiting for him in the mailbox this morning, when he would pick it up on his way to work.

Brown’s own day started somewhat more glamorously.

It also ended in a pretty glamorous way.

Geraldine Ferguson was a white woman, petite, with long straight black hair and brown eyes and a generous mouth. She was in her early thirties, wearing purple bell-bottom slacks and a man-tailored shirt done in lavender satin. She had big golden hoops looped into her earlobes, and she greeted Brown with a smile nothing less than radiant.

“Good morning,” she said. “Isn’t it a beautiful morning?”

“It’s a lovely morning,” Brown said.

“Are you here for the Gonzagos?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” Brown said. “What are the gonzagos?”

“Luis Gonzago,” she said, and smiled again. “He’s a painter. I thought you might have wanted to see his stuff, but we’ve already taken it down. Will you be going to Los Angeles?”

“No, I hadn’t planned to,” Brown said.

“Because he’ll be having a show at the Herron Gallery out there starting next Tuesday. On Sepulveda.”

“No, I won’t be going to Los Angeles.”

“That’s a shame,” she said, and smiled.

She was perhaps five-two or five-three, with a perfectly proportioned figure for her size. She moved with a swift feminine grace that he found delightful, her brown eyes flashing in the sunlight that streamed through the front plate-glass window, the smile breaking as sharp and as fast as a curve ball. She threw her arms wide, and said, “But we’ve got loads of other stuff, so if you’d like me to help you, I’d be happy to. Or you can just look around on your own, if you like. What were you interested in? Paintings or sculpture?”

“Well,” Brown said, and hesitated, wondering exactly how he should play this. “Is this your own gallery?” he asked, stalling.

“Yes, it is,” she said.

“Then you’re Miss Ferguson. I mean, this is the Ferguson Gallery, so I guess...”

“Well, Mrs. Ferguson, really,” she said. “But not really,” she added, and the smile broke again, swift and clean. “I was married to Mr. Ferguson, Mr. Harold Ferguson, but Mr. Ferguson and I are no longer sharing bed and board, and so whereas I’m still Geraldine Ferguson, I am no longer Mrs. Ferguson. Oh hell,” she said, “why don’t you just call me Gerry? What’s your name?”

“Arthur Stokes,” he said.

“Are you a cop, Arthur?” she asked flatly.