'All fifty or more?'
'How did you know?'
'Just a guess.'
'Well, it's a good one. I'd place them all between fifty or sixty. And they look their years, poor devils, unlike those of us who have bathed in the fountain of youth.'
'It all fits.'
'How?'
'Too complicated to explain.'
'Meaning bugger off? I don't mind. The mere satisfaction of knowing I've been helpful, Matthew, is reward enough for me. It's not as though I'd want a story to tell my grandchildren in my old age.'
Chapter 12
Eddie Koehler was away from his desk. I left a message for him to call me back, then went downstairs and picked up a paper at the newsstand in the lobby. I had worked my way through to Dear Abby when the phone rang.
He thanked me for sending Kenny to him, his voice wary as he did so. I wasn't on the force, and he shouldn't have to kick any of it back to me.
I set his mind at rest. 'You could do me a little favor in return. You can find someone to make a few phone calls or look in the right books. I could probably do it myself, but it would take me three times as long.'
I spelled it out for him. It was an easy way for him to balance the books with me, and he was glad to grab it. He said he'd get back to me, and I told him I'd hang around and wait for his call.
It came almost exactly an hour later. J.J. Cottrell, Inc., had had offices in the Kleinhans Building at William and Pine. The firm had published a Wall Street tip sheet for about a dozen years, going out of business at the time of the proprietor's death. The proprietor had been one Arnold P. Leverett, and he'd died two and a half years ago. There had been no one named Cottrell connected with the firm.
I thanked him and rang off. That rounded things out neatly enough. I hadn't been able to find a Cottrell because there had never been one in the first place. It was reasonable to assume that Leverett had played some sort of role in Wendy Hanniford's life, but whether it had been a large or a small role was now no longer material. The man couldn't be reached for comment without the services of a medium.
For the hell of it I put through a call to the Eden Roc and got the manager again. He remembered me. I asked him if he could check the same register for Leverett, and it didn't take him as long this time because he knew right away where to find the records. Not too surprisingly, his records indicated that Mr. and Mrs.
Arnold P. Leverett had been guests of the Eden Roc from the fourteenth to the twentieth of September.
So I had the name of one of the men in her life. If Leverett had left a widow, I could go and annoy her, but it would be hard to think up a less purposeful act.
What I'd really accomplished was more negative than positive. I could now forget about tracing the man who had taken her to Florida, and I could quit wondering who in hell J.J. Cottrell was. He wasn't a person, he was a corporation, and he was out of business.
I went around the corner to Armstrong's and sat at the bar. It had already been a long day, and the drive to Mamaroneck and back had tired me more than I realized. I figured on spending the rest of the night on that barstool, balancing coffee and bourbon until it was late enough to go back to my room and go to sleep.
It didn't work out that way. After two drinks I thought of something to do and couldn't talk myself out of doing it. It looked to be a waste of time, but everything was a waste of time, one way or another, and evidently something in me demanded that I waste my time in this particular fashion.
And it wasn't such a waste after all.
I caught a cab on Ninth and listened to the driver bitch about the price of gasoline. It was all a conspiracy, he said, and he explained just how it was structured. The big oil companies were all owned by Zionists and by cutting off the oil they would turn public opinion in favor of the United States teaming up with Israel to seize the oil-rich Arab territory. He even found a way to tie it all in with the assassination of Kennedy. I forget which Kennedy.
'It's my own theory,' he said. 'Whaddaya think of it?'
'It's a theory.'
'Makes sense, doesn't it?'
'I don't know that much about the subject.'
'Yeah, sure. That's the American public for you. Nobody knows from nothing. Nobody cares. Take a poll on a subject, any subject, and half the people got no opinion. No opinion! That's why the country's going to hell.'
'I figured there was a reason.'
He let me out in front of the library at Forty-second and Fifth. I walked between the stone lions and up the stairs to the Microfilm Room. I checked my notebook for the date of Arnold P. Leverett's death and filled out a slip. A sad-eyed girl in jeans and a plaid blouse brought me the appropriate spool of film.
I threaded it into the scanner and started going through it. It's almost impossible to go through old issues of the Times on microfilm without getting sidetracked. Other stories catch your eye and waste your time. But I forced myself to locate the proper obituary page and read the article on Arnold Philip Leverett.
He didn't warrant much space. Four paragraphs, and nothing tremendously exciting in any of them. He had died of a heart attack at his home in Port Washington. He had left a wife and three children. He had gone to various schools and worked for various stockbrokers before leaving in 1959 to start his own Wall Street newsletter, Cottrell's Weekly Analyzer. He had been fifty-eight years old at the time of his death. The last fact was the only one
