name?’
Four
Abe Clinger was a businessman, not a crook. It was his nature to be a businessman, and only the force of circumstances had him temporarily playing the part of a crook, a temporary condition that had lasted now about twelve years.
Television was to blame. Television was a blot and a rotten thing, ruining the eyes of young America, an insidious monster in living rooms all across the nation, showing sex and sadism, people smoking and holding glasses full of beer, destroying the livelihood of honest businessmen trying to make an honest dollar even with the minimum wage going all the time up up up and taxes getting worse every year. Even with government intervention and payments for workmen’s compensation and social security and all the rest of it, it might have been barely possible to keep an honest man’s head above water, except for the rotten box, television.
Abe Clinger had owned a movie theater. But a movie, theater, the real thing, with a kiddie matinee on Saturday with twelve cartoons and a Western and a chapter, and beautiful dinnerware given away to the ladies on Wednesday evening, and always a double feature plus cartoon plus newsreel plus coming attractions, changed twice a week on Wednesday and Sunday. A nice friendly neighborhood theater that was like an institution almost, like the branch of the public library or the post office substation, a part of the neighborhood.
Until television.
Then, to make matters worse, when he burned the theater down for the insurance he did several things wrong and he got caught. His wife of twenty-six years, when she learned he’d borrowed to the hilt on his life insurance and was also letting it lapse because he was going to jail, divorced him. His two sons looked at him with disgust and reproach, said, ‘Pop’, in long-suffering voices, and went away to change their names.
But in jail he met a couple of people who made a new life possible for him, and when he got out on parole after spending the minimum time behind bars he was pretty sure he would never be bankrupt again. There was always work in the armed robbery line for a man who looked like a businessman or a bookkeeper or a general manager or whatever in the office type the job might require. Carrying guns always made him nervous nevertheless, and he was yet to fire one of them, but he understood it was necessary in this trade, like being a Democrat in his previous occupation. Still, the new line of work had its advantages, like no employees and no overhead and no long hours, and his blonde was a hell of an improvement over the former Mrs Clinger, and generally speaking he had no complaints.
Except he was not a detective. Snoopyfooting around after people’s whereabouts was not his line of work, and not about to be.
So why? Parker and Kifka and the others were all doing it, working away at this like it was a sensible job of some kind instead of craziness. Pete Rudd last night had made an excellent amount of sense, but the others all talked him out of it, and if the truth be known, Abe Clinger wasn’t in all that much of a hurry to kiss the money good-bye either. As he’d said last night, twenty thousand dollars is twenty thousand dollars.
So here he was, walking down a cold street with a gun in his pocket, playing detective like Lloyd Nolan in all the second features he used to show, looking for somebody to ask stupid questions, carrying a clipboard for a prop.
This was an apartment-house block, a long block used up on the right side by four massive shouldered brick apartment houses, the front all acne’d with air conditioners. The one Clinger wanted was third, with a fine old stone arch over the entrance, the building number carved into the keystone of the arch, the whole thing looking like an ad for Pennsylvania.
There was an elevator, slow, trembling, painted red inside. Clinger rode it to the seventh floor, found the door he wanted, and rang the bell. He was no longer self-conscious about giving the spiel, he’d already done it eight times in other doorways. This time, of course, was the first time with someone from the policeman’s list, but if there was one person he looked not a bit like, it was Parker, so what was to worry?
A young man in khaki trousers and a flannel shirt opened the door and stood like his skeleton was disjointed at the hip. He said, ‘Yeah? Something?’
Clinger held his clipboard and ballpoint pen very prominently in front of him. He said, ‘Are you the man of the house?’
‘Yeah?’
Apparently it wasn’t just a question, but also the answer, Clinger said, ‘If you have a minute, I represent Associated Polls. We’re running a little survey. This shouldn’t take up much of your time at all.’
‘You wouldn’t be selling nothing? Encyclopedias, nothing like that?’
‘Word of honor, I am not selling a thing. You have a television set?’
‘Sure.’
Sure. Everybody has a television set. Ask a man does he go to the movies, see what happens. But everybody has a television set, even beatniks. It offended Clinger, it made him feel like the butt of a joke to have to play the role of a television pollster, but Parker was right that this was the best way to handle it. In any case, he couldn’t think of any better way.
He said, ‘I could come in?’
‘Yeah, sure, what the hell.’
Clinger smiled his thanks and went on in.
From here on, it should be smooth sailing. The bit was, he would ask about television viewing habits, and in the course of it he’d find out whether the suspect was watching television this Tuesday night when Parker’s woman was killed. If the suspect was, then he wasn’t a suspect anymore. If he wasn’t, a few sly questions might find out what he was doing, or, if the suspect insisted on being vague about his movements Tuesday, then Clinger would so report to Kifka, and someone else would try a different lack.
In any case, Clinger’s part shouldn’t lake: more than five minute’s and was safe as house’s.
Except for the two bulky men who got to their feet as he walked into the living room, look their hands from their topcoat pockets, and began to walk toward him. One of them opened his mouth and said something to Clinger about showing his company identification.
