Donald Westlake - Smoke

Leethe lived, as Barney had made it his business to know, on the Upper East Side, Park Avenue in the nineties. It wasn't a neighborhood he thought of as being rich in bars. "Oh, yeah?"

"It's called Cheval. It's a bit of a bistro, really."

Sure it is, Barney thought. "I'll see you there at eleven," he snarled. "You and the rest of the Foreign Legion."

Derriйre du Cheval, if you asked Barney. As with most small side-street Manhattan restaurants, this one was built into the ground floor of a former private dwelling, which meant it was long and narrow, with a not very high ceiling. This particular example of the type was warmed with creamy paint and goldish fixtures and woodlike dark trim. The bar was a C-clamp near the front, against the right wall; beyond it, one would go to the dining area with its snowy tablecloths, most of them not in use at this hour.

In fact, aside from the Israeli owners and Hispanic employees, most of the people still here at 11 P.M. on a Friday night were the adulterers at the bar, hunched in murmuring guilty pairs on the padded high square stools with the low upholstered backs. Among these semilost souls, Mordon Leethe looked like Cotton Mather in a bad mood, nursing a Perrier and brooding at his own reflection in the gold-dappled mirror above the back bar, as though hoping to find somewhere on the map of his own glowering face the path that would lead him out of all this.

But no, not tonight. Sliding onto the stool to Leethe's right, Barney bobbed two fingers at the Perrier and said, "Letting it all hang out, eh, Counselor?"

Leethe glowered at Barney's reflection in the mirror, then turned his head just enough to give him the full treatment from those bleak eyes. "You wouldn't want me to let it all hang out, Barney," he said.

By God, and that was true, wasn't it? "Keep it buttoned, then," Barney advised, and turned his attention to the fourteen-year-old barman with the black pencil mustache. "Beer," he said.

"Yes, sir?"

"Imported. In a bottle."

"Any particular brand, sir?"

"What've you got that's from the farthest away?"

The barman had to think about that. He wrinkled his mustache briefly, then said, "That would be the one from China."

"Mainland China? Where they have the slave labor?"

"Yes, sir."

"I'll have that," Barney decided, and as the barman turned away he gave Leethe his own bleak look and explained, "I like the idea that a lot of people worked long and hard, just for me. Fifteen thousand miles to give me a beer."

"This isn't why you phoned me," Leethe said. "At home."

"No, it isn't." Barney looked at the hunched backs all around them. "Isn't this kind of public?"

"These people," Leethe said, "don't care about our problems. I take it something went wrong when you tried to follow the Briscoe woman."

"Oh, everything went ducky," Barney said. He'd had three hours to cool down from his rage, and it was true his rage had cooled, in the sense that it had hardened, but it hadn't abated one dyne, and would not abate until honor — or something — was satisfied. "Just ducky," Barney repeated, and showed his teeth. At moments such as this, he didn't actually look like a fat man at all.

The barman brought the Chinese beer the last few feet of its journey, poured some from the bottle into a glass, and went off to provide more Kleenex for the hefty blond woman at the end of the bar. Barney drank, nodded, put the glass down, and said, "That invisible son of a bitch is pretty cute, I'll give him that. When I do get my hands on him, I just may strangle him to death."

"He wouldn't be much use to us then."

"Almost to death."

"What did Mr. Urban Noon do to you, Barney?"

One thing Barney had learned in his years with the NYPD; how to give a succinct report. Succinctly, he described his day, finishing with the dead Impala sprawled on its broken ankles in Rhinecliff and he himself coming back to the city alone, by train.

At the finish, there was a little silence. In it, Barney sipped more Chinese beer and Leethe sipped more French water — Barney's liquid might have traveled farther, but Leethe's had arguably made a sillier trip — and then Leethe said, "It may be we've been misjudging Mr. Noon."

Barney looked at the grim profile, studying itself again in the mirror. "How do you figure?" he asked. "I've been judging him to be a cheap crook, and he's a cheap crook."

"We've been judging him," Leethe said, "to be stupid because he's small-time. But he didn't bite on that excellent letter of yours, and he understood how you were managing to follow his friend Briscoe, and he threw you off his trail with, you must admit, dismaying ease."

"I'm not off his trail, " Barney snapped. "I'm on that son of a bitch's trail, don't you worry."

"All I'm suggesting is, we shouldn't underestimate the man."

"Fine." Barney shrugged, making his jacket jump. "I'll brush up my Shakespeare for when we meet," he said, and made a small sword-type gesture. "Have at you, Fauntleroy!"

Leethe gave him a skeptical, even disgusted, look. "And where is that," he asked, "in Shakespeare?"

"How the fuck do I know? The question is," Barney said, lowering his voice as he became aware of the adulterous herd around him disturbed at their grazing, "where is Noon in New York State? I had my maps on the train—"

"Why?" Leethe asked, surprised. "You were on a train."

Barney lowered an eyebrow. "I may practice my strangling on you," he said.

"Never mind," Leethe said, unintimidated. "I understand what you meant. You've determined the area Noon must be in"

"On the basis of the railroad station he picked," Barney said, "I worked out an area where he's got to be. No," he corrected himself, "I'm forgetting, he's a genius. So maybe he took the train north to Rhinebeck because he's actually staying on the Jersey shore."

"I don't think so," Leethe said.

"I don't think so, either," Barney admitted. "I think I'll go with the probabilities here, and the probabilities here are limited to four rural counties in New York state plus maybe a little bit of Connecticut."

What might have been a smile ruffled Leethe's features. "So Mr. Urban has gone rural."

"Yeah, and we'll find Mr. Noon at midnight. What are you drinking there? What'd they put in that stuff?"

"Barney," Leethe said, sounding impatient all at once. "Why are you telling me all this? Why are we in this place? If your target area is four counties in New York State and a little piece of Connecticut, why aren't you there, nose to the ground, tirelessly searching?"

"Because I figure we want to find Freddie Noon within this lifetime," Barney told him. "It's all little villages up there, dairy farms, shit like that, spread out. A lot of people rent summer places up there, a lot of New Yorkers have weekend places there. It's not the kind of territory I know, and it's not a place where I got any clout, and it's not a job for one guy anyway, no matter."

Leethe considered this as he turned the little Perrier bottle around and around on its circle of water on the bar. "You're saying," he decided at last, "that you want to hire somebody, or some several somebodies, to canvass the area, and you couldn't wait till tomorrow to talk to me because I have to approve the expense."

"You got it in one."

"I hired you," Leethe pointed out, "and all at once you're my partner. Now you're suggesting we should hire somebody else."

"I see your problem," Barney agreed, "but let me reassure you."

"I find it very unlikely, Barney," Leethe said, "that you could ever reassure me, on any subject, at any time."

"Let me try, anyway. There's a bunch of private detective agencies—"

"My God. You're going to bring in Mike Hammer?"

"Not like in the movies," Barney told him. Now he was getting impatient. "In real life," he explained, "licensed private detectives do guard duty at small museums or private estates, they do industrial espionage to find out who's stealing the lawn mowers or the secrets or whatever, they repossess cars and boats and stuff that people don't make their payments on, but what they mostly do is find deadbeats. Skip-tracing is their real art, and they do it all on the phone, and they never ask why the customer wants to find so-and-so, they just do it. Mostly, they're little shops with three or four or five people, and that many phones, and the boss has the license, and he's a retired cop. They're all over the country, and they all have WATS lines so they don't care if they have to call Alaska or Florida or whatever, and in a situation like this I wouldn't even use a New York outfit. New York City, I mean. I'd use one from Boston, or maybe Albany or Syracuse, and all they know is they're looking for Margaret Briscoe, formerly of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and we believe for the summer she's somewhere in this area. So they'll charge me for the time — overcharge me, that's how they are — and a bonus when they find her, and in the meantime we sit back and wait."