through the Center City traffic on bikes, came charging out, wearing an optic-orange vest over his worn parka. Jake and I stepped in, now alone.
'I want to be sure we're singing from the same hymnal,' said Jake. He jammed the button labeled 'Doors Close' and turned to face me when they had.
'Bert?' I asked.
'That matter,' he replied.
The elevator began to move and Jake pumped the button for the floor below.
'You know what I want — make this tidy,' Jake said. 'And if Kamin really doesn't turn up?'
'Yes?'
He took a step so that he was no more than a foot from me, his finger still anchored on the door-close button as the car slowed.
'No one up here has to hear any more.' He looked at me solemnly before the doors peeled back slowly and he stepped again into the brighter light.
XII
A. Boys and Girls Together
'SOS,' I said as I poked my head into Martin's office. His secretary was gone and I'd given a quick knock and leaned in from the hall. Glyndora was standing there with him.
'Oh shit,' I said. It just sort of popped out and they both stared. It was an odd little moment. Glyndora shot me a look that might have contemplated my death, and my first thought was that she was here complaining about my investigative technique. That was one of Martin's many roles, Mr Fix-It, in charge of the disgruntled, the waylaid, the weak. Our first year can't cut in practice, a partner flips out or has a problem with substance abuse, Martin takes care of you. You'd say compassion, but there's no there-but-for-the-grace; it's more his Olympian thing. I'm here, the mountain.
But Martin seemed unconcerned when he saw me. He actually smiled and casually waved me into his office with all its funny overstated objects. He said something about Glyndora showing him yesterday's numbers on cash received, the Managing Partner and the head of Accounting measuring our progress at year end. Somehow, though, I remained struck by the pose in which I'd initially found them. Nothing untoward: she was at a distance from him, a few feet from his chair. But she was on his side of the desk, and Martin was facing her and the milky light coming from the broad windows behind her, sitting with his legs outstretched, hands on his tummy, relaxed, open to her in an uncharacteristic way, less our Martin, ever on alert. Maybe, though, it was just the shock of seeing Glyndora, who was still charged up for me like a magnet.
Martin, at any rate, said they were about done, and with that hint she arranged herself and strode past me in the door without so much as turning my way. I admit I was disappointed.
'I just had a conversation with Jake,' I told Martin when she was gone. 'Troubling?'
He could see it in my face, I imagined. My heart was still skittering around like a squirrel. Jake in his own way had given off quite a sinister air. I began to describe my encounter with Jake, and Martin listened, absorbed. When you actually study him, Martin has distinct ethnic looks; he's one of those hairy darklings you'd expect to see loading a truck, with a dense beard that lends his face a bluish cast. His father was a tailor who cut the clothes of various gangsters and Martin refers now and then to his upbringing when it is availing to charm a client of humble roots or to worry an opponent; he has a number of racy stories about delivering tuxedos to the famous Dover Street brothel in the South End. But unlike me, Martin takes no refuge in the past and allows it to make no claim upon him. He evinces the airy noblesse of a fellow who grew up summering in Newport. He is married to a graceful, tall British woman by the name of Nila, whom you sort of picture in a garden with a Pimm's Cup the minute you see her. Large hats and shirtwaist dresses, with petticoats. He is thoroughly the man he decided on being, and that fellow showed little reaction to what I related, except that something abruptly caused him to interrupt.
'Better save this,' he said. 'My colleagues and I should probably hear it together.' He meant the Committee. 'Carl is in town again today.'
Martin proposed a meeting at four and left me to arrange it. I went back to Lucinda to ask her to make the calls, though I tried to reach Pagnucci, since I wanted a word with him myself. Then I stood over my secretary's desk for a moment, examining the list of my credit card issuers she'd reached. It struck me for the first time that the Kam Roberts card had been in my wallet too. I had no idea what to do about that.
Brushy came ambling by in her sturdy fashion and did a double-take when she saw me.
'Jesus, Mack, you look horrible.' No doubt that was true. Jake had stirred my adrenaline but it still felt like my heart was pumping motor sludge. 'You sick?' she asked.
'Maybe a touch of the flu.' I turned away, but she followed me into my office out of concern. 'Could be I'm depressed.'
'Depressed?'
'From our conversation yesterday.'
'Hey,' she said, 'you know me, spirited Mediterranean type. I say things.'
'No,' I said, 'I thought you had a point.'
She looked herself, little chopped-down hairdo, big pearl earrings, honest face, solid and peppy like she could step out of her heels and give you a good block.
'Maybe I did.' She sort of smiled.
'Yeah,' I said, ‘I even went out and had a minute last night where I thought I might practice my hokey- pokey.'
I could have filled in her dental chart.
'And?' she demanded.
''And' what?'
'And?' she said once more, Ms Mind Your Own Personal Business.
'And I ended up getting rolled.'
She actually laughed out loud. She asked if I was okay,
then sang, far off-key, a few bars of 'Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places'. 'You don't have to gloat.'
'Why should I gloat?' she asked and laughed again.
I turned my back on her to look through the mail. More memos from the Committee about the lagging pace of collections; the Blue Sheet. I heard her close the door, and the click of the bolt gave me a weird little amorous thrill, some vagrant inspiration from our conversation and the last twenty-four hours, an idling recall of what happened when men and women were alone. Brushy, however, did not have anything like that on her mind.
'Did you see the paper?' she asked. Apparently there'd been another small piece this morning about Archie, basically just saying he still hadn't been found. She described it and asked, 'Do you think that's the guy? The one they talked about at the steam bath?' She never missed a detail.
‘I think,' I said, and then, not quite understanding myself, added, as I thumbed through the mail, 'he's dead, by the way.'
'Who's dead?'
'Him. Archie. Vernon. Dead-dead.'
'No,' she said. 'How do you know?'
So I told her. 'Bert has a problem in his refrigerator that baking soda will not help.' She took a seat on my worn-out sofa, threshing her fingers through her short hair as I described the corpse.
'How could you not tell me this?' she asked.
'Hey, get real. The better question is why I tell you anything at all. This one's attorney-client, no kidding. The coppers'll sweat me if they find out I was anywhere near that body.'
'Did Bert kill him?'
'Maybe so.'
