Росс Томас - The Singapore Wink

“Not my part.”

“She goes.”

“Why doesn’t she go by herself? She can talk Angelo into getting married and they can spend their honeymoon in Pago Pago.”

“I don’t think so,” Cole said.

“Why not?”

“Because Angelo married a Chinese girl in Singapore a year and a half ago.”

After that there was some more conversation, but nothing important, and Joe, the ubiquitous bodyguard, escorted me to the elongated Cadillac where I was faintly surprised to find that the polite Mr. Ruffo was absent, but I decided that even Yale law school graduates needed their rest.

At the hotel I undressed and sat in a chair by a window and stared out at the quiet Washington scene. I thought about Charles Cole in his huge white-columned house and wondered why there wasn’t a family and a wife in a pleasant room in one of the wings, playing Monopoly perhaps, while the head of the household plotted in the library to keep himself from getting killed. I thought about Cole for a while and what he wanted me to do, and then I thought about Angelo Sacchetti and speculated about how he was spending all of his money. Unwisely, I hoped. Then I quit speculating and went to sleep and I was doing quite well at it until eight o’clock the next morning when somebody started to bang on the sitting room door. I got up, struggled into a robe, and stumbled towards the noise.

“Who is it?” I yelled through the door.

“The FBI. Open up.”

“Christ,” I said and opened the door.

He needed a shave for one thing, and for another his blue suit, stained and unpressed, had a hard time buttoning itself over his belly. He shoved past me into the room, asking: “How’s it going, Cauthorne?” as he moved.

I slammed the door shut. “You’re not the FBI. You’re not even the house dick.”

“Don’t kid yourself, buster,” he said and tossed a shapeless felt hat on one of the chairs.

A few thick strands of black hair were matted across a wide, white dome and the rest of the hair was going grey above the ears. He had a big round face and a double chin with a Major Hoople nose that glowed merrily. Some capillaries had exploded in his cheeks and his eyes, despite the redness of the whites, offered deep blue pupils that were steady and calculating.

“I’m Sam Dangerfield.”

“Not Dangerfield of the FBI?”

“You got it right.”

“Never heard of you. Is there anything to prove it?”

Dangerfield looked up at the ceiling. “Every goddamn one of them has seen that lousy TV series.” Then he looked at me and his eyes seemed not only calculating, but curiously alive and intelligent. “I’ve got something to prove it. You want to see?”

“Even then I wouldn’t believe it.”

Dangerfield started to search his pockets, finally produced a folding, black case from his hip pocket, and handed it to me, but even it was a little dogeared. It said that he was Samuel C. Dangerfield, special agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I handed it back to him.

“So what can I do for you?”

“You can offer me a drink, for one thing,” Dangerfield said and headed for the Scotch that still sat on the coffee table. “I got a bad one.” He poured three fingers of Scotch into a glass, emptied some of the melted ice from the bucket into another, and downed the drink, chasing it with the water. Then he poured another one, moved over to the chair where his hat rested, tossed it on the floor, and sat down with a sigh. “That’s better,” he said. “Much better.”

I went over to the phone. “I’m going to have some breakfast sent up. Do you want some or will you just drink it?”

“You buying?”

“I’ll buy.”

“Four fried eggs, a double order of bacon, home fried potatoes, lots of toast and some coffee. And see if you can get another bottle.”

“At eight in the morning?”

“I’ll try when the bellhop gets here.” He gave the bottle on the table a judicious glance. “There’s enough left to coast on.”

“How about some ice?”

“Never use it.”

While I phoned the order in Dangerfield searched his pockets again and finally found a crumpled package of cigarettes in one of them, but it turned out to be empty. “You got a cigarette?” he asked after I had hung up.

I found a pack on the coffee table and tossed it to him. “Anything else?”

“If you got an electric razor, I’ll borrow it after breakfast,” he said, running a thick-fingered hand over his stubble.

“Did you really want to see me, or is it just that your check was late this month?”

“I want something,” he said.

“What?”

“I’ll tell you later. Go take a shower, get dressed. You look like a goddamned ponce in that silly looking robe.”

“Go to hell,” I said and started towards the bedroom. I paused at the door. “If the breakfast comes, forge my name. You ought to be pretty good at that. And add a twenty percent tip.”

Dangerfield waved his drink at me and grinned. “Fifteen percent’s plenty.”

Mr. Hoover’s finest was attacking his breakfast when I came out of the bedroom. I pulled a chair up to the room-service table and took the metal cover off my plate and regarded my poached egg without enthusiasm. Dangerfield poured a shot of Scotch into his coffee and sipped it noisily.

“Eat up, but if you can’t, I’ll take care of it for you.”

“I need the strength,” I said and started on the egg.

Dangerfield finished the four eggs, the bacon, the potatoes, the toast and a third cup of Scotch-laced coffee before I finished my egg and one cup of coffee. He leaned back in his chair, patted his belly, and said: “By God, I might live.”

I put my fork down and looked at him. “What do you want?”

“Information, Brother Cauthorne, information. It’s how I make my living, such as it is. You know what I am after twenty-seven lousy years in the bureau? I’m a lousy GS-13, that’s what. And you want to know why? Because I haven’t got what they call managerial potential. You know what a GS-13 makes? With a five-step increase like I’ve got he makes a lousy $16,809 a year. Christ, punks right out of law school make that much. And you know what else I’ve got to show for it? I got a Levittown house out in Bowie with a twenty-year mortgage, two kids in college, four suits, a five-year-old car, and a fat wife.”

“And a thirst,” I said.

“You got it right. A thirst.”

“But for more than booze.”

Dangerfield grinned at me. “You’re not as stupid as I thought, Brother Cauthorne.”

“I studied hard at night school. But one thing I don’t get. Why the fake lush act? You’re no lush; not even a good fake one. You eat too much and the last thing a lush thinks about is food.”

“I thought it was a pretty good show,” Dangerfield said, grinning once more. “It’s supposed to disarm people — make them think that maybe I’m not really listening or don’t understand what they’re saying. It usually works.”

“Not with me,” I said.

“Okay,” Dangerfield said, unlodged a morsel of bacon from between his teeth with his little finger, and inspected it carefully before flicking it to the carpet “You’ve got trouble, Cauthorne.”

“Everyone has trouble.”

“Not your kind.”

“It’s got a name?”

“Sure,” Dangerfield said. “It’s called bad.”

“Thank God you’re here to help, Special Agent.”

He looked at me sourly. “You don’t like it much, do you?”

“What?”

“The fat man in the forty-nine fifty suit who busts in and drinks your booze at eight in the morning.”

“You can drop the lush act,” I said. “They wouldn’t keep you on the payroll five minutes if you were a real drunk.”