I approached him, and he said, “Mr. Scudder? Hal Hart. If you weren’t with a law firm I’d guess you might be with the investment house. Very reputable line of mutual funds. But I don’t suppose there’s any connection.”
“Nor with the Scudder Falls Bridge.”
“Well, I’d be more worried that you might try to sell me mutual funds. I’ve already bought my quota of bridges.”
His tie had narrow diagonal stripes of red and navy, and it wasn’t skinny, and neither was anything else about him. He’d replaced the cocaine with food and drink—beef and beer, by the look of him, and plenty of both. His face was round and red, and there was a Rorschach of broken capillaries in both cheeks.
I sat at his invitation, and when the waiter appeared I ordered club soda. Hart’s glass stein was still half full of dark beer, but he tapped it with a forefinger and gave the waiter a nod. “Dos Equis,” he told me. “Best legal substance ever to come out of Mexico. Sure you won’t have one?”
“Not right now,” I said.
I could have crossed him off the list then and there, because there was no way this hearty stockbroker had put two holes in Jack Ellery. But that was the subject at hand, and I might as well get to it. The room was noisy, and the place smelled of booze and cigars and avarice, and I didn’t want to stay in it any longer than I had to.
We talked sports until the drinks came. He too had watched the Giants lose to Green Bay, and had stronger feelings than I about the coaching. He was draining his glass just as the waiter arrived with a replacement, along with my club soda in a matching glass stein of its own. Hart beamed at both our drinks, picked up his, and said, “Mr. Scudder, I hope I’m wrong, but if I ever had an Uncle Kelvin this is the first I heard of him.”
“I think I said Kelton,” I said, “but it doesn’t matter, because he never existed. And I’m not an attorney.”
“Oh?”
“I’m an investigator,” I said, “looking into a recent homicide.”
“Well, Jesus Christ. Who got killed, if it wasn’t my long-lost uncle Kelvin?”
“A man named Jack Ellery.”
He was slightly pop-eyed, but I hadn’t really noticed it until I said the name. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “You can just go ahead and fuck me with a stick. Why in the hell would anybody kill Jack Ellery?”
“Uh—”
“If that crazy bastard doesn’t wind up giving me a stroke,” he said, “it’s not for lack of trying. He’s surprised the shit out of me twice in the past month. First by turning up alive, and then by turning up dead. How’d he die?”
“He was shot to death.”
“And they ruled out suicide?”
“Two bullets,” I said. “One in the forehead, the other in the mouth.”
“If that’s suicide,” he said, “it shows remarkably strong will. Jesus Christ.” He drank some beer. “I never expected him to turn up. Never gave him a thought in God knows how many years. Then one night I get home from the office and my doorman points to a guy sitting in the lobby, says he’s waiting for me. I turn and look, and he stands up and says, ‘Crosby?’
“So it has to be somebody from way back when, because it’s that long since anybody called me Crosby. That’s my middle name. I never liked Harold, which is what everybody called me all through high school, and as for Harry, well, forget it. So when I got to Colgate I met my freshman roommate and stuck out my hand. ‘H. Crosby Hart,’ I announced, ‘and everybody calls me Crosby.’ And from then on, everybody did.” His eyes sought mine. “Until I got into a little trouble. You know about that, right?”
I nodded.
“I was lucky enough to get out of it,” he said, “because I had a clean record, and because I was a white middle-class guy with a house in the suburbs. I got a fresh start, and I decided I ought to have a new name to go with it, and what’s funny is I already had one, because my wife had been calling me Hal all along. You know, Prince Hal? Shakespeare?” He shook his head. “These days it’s Harold, as in Harold-you’re-late-with-the-child- support.”
“But this guy in the lobby called you Crosby.”
He grinned. “Bringing me back on track, aren’t you? Very nicely done, and I can see why they named that bridge after you. Across the Delaware, isn’t it?”
“I believe so.”
“Guy in my lobby, and he calls me by a name I never hear anymore. I can’t place him right away. He looks vaguely familiar, and he also looks, you know, a little bit seedy, a little bit down on his luck. Somebody I used to know who maybe didn’t do so good for himself in the years since. He’s dead, huh?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a shame,” he said, and took a moment to think about it. “So he tells me his name, which doesn’t register at all, not right away. And he’d like to talk to me, and could we maybe go somewhere private?
“So here’s a guy, clean shirt but the collar’s frayed, his shoes are polished but they’re down at the heels and scuffed under the polish, he shaved that morning but he’s overdue for a haircut—you get the picture?”
“Respectable but broke.”
“Exactly. So this has to be a touch, right? Old time’s sake, gotta be good for a couple of bucks. I figure fifty, maybe a hundred, and then he’ll stay away from me until he’s in a position to pay it back, which means forever, and you’d have to call it a bargain. Fine, but I don’t need him inside my apartment. Right here’s private enough, I tell him, and I take him over to the corner, where there’s two sofas at right angles to each other. And we sit down, and I find out it’s not a touch after all, because what he says is he owes me an apology. And maybe something more than that, he says.”
He tilted his head, looked me over. “You know about this, right? You’re an investigator, which I guess means
