Warren Murphy: Bottom Line

Stevens began twisting his gloves again.

"But you believe me, don't you?" He made it seem very important to him.

Meadows thought for a moment. "Yeah, I believe you. I don't know why but I do."

This turned out to be critical because Jasper Stevens had no money with which to pay Zack Meadows for his lime, but the deal they quickly arranged was a fifty-fifty split of anything they got from the Lippincott family. Stevens nodded glumly. He had apparently been expecting a bigger share.

After Stevens had gone, Meadows sat for a long time in his chair, trying to avoid the lumpy tape patches that covered the rips in the chair, which he had found in the street one night several blocks from his ratty office on Twenty-sixth Street. Then he got tired of all that thinking and decided to save himself the bookie's vigorish and went to Belmont where the

Italian-surnamed jockeys in the first and second races ran dead last.

Flossie was lying on her bed, eating chocolates and watching television, when Meadows let himself into her apartment, using an entire ring of keys to get past her battery of anti-burglar locks and bars and alarms. He and Flossie had been "going together" for five years. Meadows spent most nights at her apartment and even though she was the one person in the world he totally trusted, she did not have a key to his apartment farther downtown. Nor had he any plans to give her one.

She looked up as he finally got past the last burglar barrier. She was wearing a pink negligee that was frayed at the edges. On her ample belly were chips of chocolate from the family-sized bar of Nes-tle's Crunch she was eating. Her dyed blonde hair was uncombed.

"If it isn't the world's greatest gumshoe," she said. Meadows carefully relocked all the security devices before turning around and announcing, "I've got a big case."

Flossie looked interested. "Oh? How much retainer?"

"None yet," Meadows said.

She looked away from him in disgust and turned back to her black and white television set where four people, obviously chosen for serious genetic defects, were attempting to win a dollar and change by making fools of themselves, something God had already seen to at the moment of their births. "Yeah," she sneered. "Real big case." "It is," he said. "It really is." "I'll believe it when I see some green."

7

"Green, hah? Well, let me ask you this, lady. You ever hear of the Lippincott family?"

"Of course I heard of the lippincott family. You think I'm stupid?"

"Well . . ."

"They hired you?" Flossie asked. She adopted a pose of full attention as if ready to make the great effort to rise from the bed if the answer was what she wanted to hear.

"Not exactly."

Flossie collapsed back onto her three pillows, like a punctured balloon.

"But I'm going to save their lives," Meadows said.

Rising almost up once had been enough for Flossie, particularly when it turned out to be a false alarm. She contented herself with "Yeah, sure. And Idi Amin wants me to marry him."

"Not likely," said Meadows. "He likes his women skinny."

"Oh, yeah," said Flossie. She choked on a rice krispie imbedded in the chocolate and coughed a lot. When her breath returned, she said, "Oh, yeah? Well, you want yourself a skinny blonde, you go get one. See if they put up with you for long, big gumshoe."

Suddenly it became very important to Zack Meadows that he impress Flossie. He went to the kitchen table, swept aside the debris with his arm, and picked up a yellow pad and a ballpoint pen that commemorated the opening of a new ribs joint on Twenty-third Street.

"What are you doing?" Flossie demanded.

"Important case. Got to put it all down."

"Oh, yeah. The Lippincott case," she said.

8

"It really is," said Meadows. He wondered why he went to such lengths to please Flossie, who had been a stripper till she got old and a prostitute till she got fat, and then was just a barfly hanging around the West Side bars, cadging drinks, when Meadows met her. She held the space in his heart that some men filled by owning a dog. Meadows didn't trust dogs; they seemed always to be conniving, preparing to bite him. And if Flossie's disposition wasn't exactly the unquestioning devotion of a Great Dane, it wasn't bad either. Meadows had always mistrusted women, but somehow he felt sure that Flossie wasn't about to go tipping on him.

And besides, her dirty little apartment was only two blocks from his office and it was a good place to flop when he didn't want to ride the subway home.

He worked on his notes for two hours, trying to write out the story Jasper Stevens had told him. The floor near the table was covered with crumpled yellow sheets that Meadows threw away because they didn't have just the touch he wanted.

"What's that?" Flossie asked. "A Tan letter to Elmer Lippincott?"

"Business," Meadows said.

"Yeah, sure," Flossie said. Meadows heard her flicking channels on the TV set, looking for the most insipid of the game shows, turning up the volume to annoy him. He smiled to himself; she wanted him to pay attention to her, that was all.

But he had other things to do.

When he was finally done with the letter, whicH turned out to be half the size he expected it to be, he stood up and looked over at her with a triumphant smile.

9

"You got an envelope around here?" "Try the drawer under the sink. There's Christmas cards and things in there," she said.

Meadows rooted around in the drawer until he came up with a blue-tinted envelope almost six inches square and he folded his yellow pages neatly and stuffed them into the envelope. It already had a stamp on it. Meadows knew Flossie was watching as he sealed the envelope and printed an address on it.

He walked to her side and casually dropped the envelope onto her big belly.

"If anything happens to me, I want you to promise that you'll see that gets delivered."

Flossie glanced down. The envelope was addressed to: "The President of the U.S., Washington, Personal and Confidential."

He expected her to be impressed. She looked at him and said "What's going to happen to you!"

"You never know," he said. He turned toward the door.

"Hey, you're serious, aren't you?" Flossie said.

He nodded without turning.

"You going to take care of yourself?"

"You know it," he said.

"I wouldn't want anything to happen to you."

"I know," Meadows said.

"Before you leave, would you get me the bottle of Fleischmann's under the sink?"

He handed her the bottle, let himself out through all the burglar barriers, and started downstairs. Inside the apartment, Flossie took a swig from the bottle of rye, looked at the envelope, smirked and tossed it toward the corner. It landed on a pile of clothes.

Meadows allowed himself the unaccustomed lux-

10

ury of a taxicab to get to the Lifeline Laboratory. It was in a brownstone building on East Eighty-first Street, a building distinguished from its neighbors only by the visible fact that it had a small identifying, plaque next to the front door, and the invisible fact that it alone, of all the buildings on the block, was not overrun with roaches, a condition New Yorkers accepted with their accustomed stolidity despite the fact that apartments on the street rented for $275 a room.

There was only a small light in the front window of the Lifeline Laboratory, and Meadows walked quietly around the back. There was no sign of a burglar alarm on the back door. This probably meant one of three things: one, there was a hidden burglar alarm. This was highly unlikely because the primary use of a burglar alarm in New York City—where the police could take thirty minutes to respond to a call, thus allowing burglars to strip everything including the wallpaper from the walls—was as a deterrent. Therefore, the more visible the alarm the better.