God Save the Mark Page 2

  My relationship with women has also been affected, and badly. Since high school I have avoided any but the most casual acquaintance with the opposite sex, and all because of my gullibility. In the first place, any girl who became close friends with me would sooner or later—probably sooner—see me humiliated by a passing bunco artist. In the second place, were I to grow more than fond of a particular girl, how could I ever really know her opinion of me? She might say she loved me, and when she was saying it I would believe her, but an hour later, a day later …

  No. Solitude has its dreary aspects, but they don’t include self-torture.

  Similarly my choice of occupation. Not for me the gregarious office job, side by side with my mates, typing or writing or thinking away in our companionable white-shirted tiers. Solitude was the answer here as well, and for the past eight years I have been a free-lance researcher, numbering among my clients many writers and scholars and television producers, for whom I plumb the local libraries in search of specific knowledge.

  So here I was at thirty-one, a confirmed bachelor and a semi-recluse, with all the occupational diseases of my sedentary calling: round shoulders and round spectacles and round stomach and round forehead. I seemed inadvertently to have found the way to skip the decades, to go from the middle twenties to the middle fifties and there to stay while the gray years drifted silently by and nothing broke the orderly flow of time but the occasional ten-dollar forays of passing confidence men.

  Until, on that Friday the nineteenth of May, I received the phone call from the lawyer named Goodkind that changed—and very nearly ended—my life.

  3

  IN AN EFFORT to eliminate, or at least contain, my pot belly, I’ve taken to walking as much as possible whenever I go out, and so on Saturday morning I walked from my apartment on West 19th Street to the office of the alleged lawyer, Goodkind, on East 38th Street. I made one stop along the way, in a drugstore on the corner of West 23rd and Sixth Avenue, where I purchased a packet of tobacco.

  I’d gone half a block farther up Sixth Avenue when I heard someone behind me call, “Say, you!” I turned, and a tall and rather heavy-set man was striding toward me, motioning at me to stay where I was. He wore a dark suit, the jacket flapping open, a white shirt bunched at the waist, and a wrinkled brown tie. He looked like an ex-Marine who has only recently started to get flabby.

  When he reached me he said, “You just bought some tobacco in the store on the corner, right?”

  “Yes, I did,” I said. “Why?”

  He pulled his wallet from his hip pocket and flipped it open to show me his badge. “Police,” he said. “All we want you to do is cooperate.”

  “I’ll be happy to,” I said, with that sudden flutter of guilt we all feel when abruptly confronted by the law.

  He said, “What sort of bill did you use back there?”

  “What sort? You mean—? Well, it was a five.”

  He pulled a crumpled bill from his jacket pocket and handed it to me, saying, “This one?”

  I looked at the bill, but of course there’s no way to tell one piece of money from another, so eventually I had to say, “I guess it is. I can’t be sure.”

  “Take a close look at it, brother,” he said, and he suddenly sounded much tougher than before.

  I took a close look, but how did I know if this was the bill I’d used or not? “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling very nervous about it, “but I just can’t be positive one way or the other.”

  “The counterman says you’re the one passed it on him,” he said.

  I looked at him, saw him glowering at me. I said, “Passed it on him? You mean it’s counterfeit?”

  “That’s exactly right,” he said.

  “It’s happened again,” I said, sadly studying the bill in my hand. “People pass counterfeit money on me all the time.”

  “Where’d you get this one?”

  “I’m sorry, I just don’t know.”

  I could tell by his face that he was somewhat suspicious of me, and he confirmed it by saying, “You don’t seem too anxious to co-operate, brother.”

  “Oh, I am,” I said. “It’s just I don’t remember where I got this particular bill.”

  “Come over to the car,” he said, and led me to a battered green unmarked Plymouth parked near a fireplug. He had me get in on the passenger side in front, and then he came around and slid in behind the wheel. A police radio under the dashboard was crackling and giving occasional spurts of words.

  The detective said, “Let’s see some identification.”

  I showed him my library and Social Security cards, and he carefully wrote down my name and address in a black notebook. He’d taken the five-dollar bill back by now, and he wrote its serial number on the same page, then said to me, “You got any more bills on you?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Let’s see.”

  I had thirty-eight dollars in bills, two tens, three fives and three ones. I gave them to him and he studied each of them at length, holding them up to the light, rubbing them between thumb and finger, listening to them crinkle, and then putting them atop the dashboard in two piles.

  When he was done, it turned out three more of them had been counterfeit, a ten and two fives. “We’ll have to impound these,” he said, and gave me the other bills back. “I’ll give you a receipt, but of course you know you can’t collect good money for these. If there’s ever a conviction based on these bills it’s possible you’ll be able to make a partial recovery from the people who made them, but otherwise I’m afraid you’ve been had.”

  “That’s all right,” I said, and grinned weakly. In the first place, I was used to being had, and in the second place, I was delighted that he no longer thought I was potentially a member of the gang passing them.

  He had a receipt book in the glove compartment. He got it out and wrote out an involved receipt, including the serial numbers of the bills, and when he handed it to me he said, “You want to be more careful from now on. Look at your change when it’s given to you and you won’t make these costly mistakes.”

  “I’ll do that,” I promised. I got out of the car, looked at my watch, and saw I’d have to move fast if I intended to reach Goodkind’s office by ten o’clock. I began walking briskly uptown.

  I reached 32nd Street before it occured to me I’d been taken. Then I stood stock-still on the sidewalk, and as I felt the blood drain from my head, I took out the receipt and looked at it.

  Twenty dollars. I had just bought this scribbled piece of paper for twenty dollars.

  I turned around and ran, but of course by the time I got to 24th Street he was long gone. I started looking around for a phone booth, intending to call Reilly at Headquarters, but then I remembered I’d be seeing him at the supposed lawyer’s office a little after ten.

  A little after ten? I looked at my watch and it was just one minute before the hour. I was supposed to be there now!

  I flagged a cab, which meant another dollar the bogus policeman had cost me. I got into the back seat, the driver started the meter, and we raced uptown directly into the middle of the garment center’s perpetual traffic jam.

  I got to Goodkind’s office at twenty after ten. The hallway and reception room and Goodkind’s private office were all crawling with Bunco Squad men, who had sprung the trap before the cheese had arrived. I threaded my way through them, muttering hello to the ones I knew and identifying myself to the rest, and found Reilly in Good-kind’s office with two other Bunco Squad men and, seated at his desk, a hungry lupine sharpie with onyx eyes who had to be Goodkind himself.

  Reilly said to me, “Where the hell have you been?”

  “A phony policeman worked the counterfeit ploy on me for twenty dollars,” I said.

  “Oh, Christ,” said Reilly, and suddenly looked too weary to stand.

  Goodkind, grinning hungrily at me, said, in a voice like the one Eve must have heard from the serpent, “Hello there, Fred. It’s really too bad you’re my client.�
�

  I looked at him. “What?”

  Reilly said, “He’s legit, you goofball. He’s on the up-and-up.”

  “You mean—?”

  “What a suit I’d have against you,” Goodkind said gleefully. “And you with all that money.”

  “It’s square,” Reilly told me. “You really did inherit three hundred and seventeen thousand dollars, and God help us all.”

  “Still,” said Goodkind, rubbing his hands together, “maybe we can work something out.”

  I stretched out on the floor and became unconscious.

  4

  JACK REILLY is a great bear of a man, sprinkled with pipe tobacco. Two hectic hours after my subsidence on the floor of Attorney Goodkind’s office, Reilly and I entered a bar on East 34th Street, and he said, “Fred, if you’re going to drive me to drink, the least you can do is pay for it.”

  “I guess I can,” I said. “Now.” And my knees got weak again.

  Reilly steered me to a booth in the back, hollered till a waitress came, ordered Jack Daniels on the rocks for both of us, and said to me, “If you’ll take my advice, Fred, the first thing you’ll do is get yourself another lawyer.”

  I said, doubtfully, “That doesn’t seem fair, does it? After all, he’s the one handling the estate.”

  “He handles it the way I handle my girl,” he said, and made a fondling motion in the air. “Goodkind’s a little too much in love with your money, Fred. Unload him.”

  “All right,” I promised, though secretly I doubted if I had the nerve to just walk into Goodkind’s office and fire him. But maybe I could hire another attorney and he could fire Goodkind.

  Reilly said, “And the second thing you better do, Fred, is figure out a safe place to put that money.”

  “I’d rather not think about it,” I said.

  “Well, you’ve got to think about it,” he told me. “I don’t want you calling me every hundred dollars till it’s gone.”

  “Let’s talk about it later,” I said. “After I’ve had a drink and a chance to calm down.”

  “It’s an awful lot of money, Fred,” he said.

  I already knew that. It was three hundred and seventeen thousand dollars, give or take a nickel. Not only that, it was three hundred and seventeen thousand dollars net, after inheritance taxes and legal fees and all the rest of it, the actual amount of the inheritance being nearly five hundred thousand. Half a million.

  Five million dimes.

  It seems I really did have an Uncle Matt, or that is, a grand-uncle by that name. My great-grandmother on my mother’s mother’s side married twice and had one son by the second marriage, who in his turn had three wives but no children. (A quick phone call to my mother in Montana from Goodkind’s office had garnered this information.) Uncle Matt, or Matthew Grierson, which was his real name, had spent most of his life as a ne’er-do-well and—presumably—alcoholic. Every single relative he had reviled him and snubbed him and refused him entry to their homes. Except me, of course. I never did an unkind thing to Uncle Matt in my life, primarily because I’d never heard of him, my parents being too genteel to mention such a bad character in the presence of children.

  But it was this kindness by default which had produced my windfall. Uncle Matt hadn’t wanted to leave his money to a dog and cat hospital or a scholarship fund for underprivileged spastics, but he detested all his relations just as severely as they had all detested him. Except me. So it seems that Uncle Matt took an interest in me, studying me from afar, and decided that I was a loner like himself, cut off from the rotten family and living my own life the way I wanted. I don’t know why he never introduced himself to me, unless he was afraid that close up I’d turn out to be as bad as the rest of his relations. At any rate he studied me, and thought he sensed some sort of affinity between us, and in the end he left his money to me.

  The source of the money itself was a little confusing. Eight years ago Uncle Matt had gone off to Brazil with an unspecified amount of capital which he’d apparently saved over a long period of time, and three years later he’d come back from Brazil with over half a million dollars in cash and gems and securities. How he’d done it no one seemed to know. In fact, so far as my mother had been able to tell me over the phone, no one in the family had even known Uncle Matt was rich. As Mother said, “A lot of people would have treated Matt a heap different if they had known, believe you me.”

  I believed her.

  In any case, Uncle Matt had spent the last three years living right here in New York City, in an apartment hotel on Central Park South. Twelve days ago he had died, had been buried without fanfare, and his will had been opened by his attorney, Marcus Goodkind. Among this document’s instructions, it had commanded the attorney to complete all the possible legal rigmarole before informing me either of my uncle’s death or of the bequest. “My nephew Fredric is of a sensitive and delicate nature,” the will read on this point. “Funerals would give him the flutters and red tape would give him hives.”

  It had taken twelve days, and so far as I felt right now I wished it had taken twelve years. Twelve hundred years. I sat in this booth with Reilly, a hundredthousandaire waiting for a Jack Daniels on the rocks, and all I felt was sick and terrified.

  And there was worse to come. After the belated arrival of our drinks, and after I’d downed half of mine in the first swallow, Reilly said, “Fred, let’s get this business of the money straightened away. I’ve got some other things to talk to you about.”

  “Like what?”

  “The money first.”

  I leaned forward. “Like where the money came from?”

  He seemed surprised. “Haven’t you figured that out yet?”

  “Figured it out? I don’t get you.”

  “Fred, have you ever heard of Matt ‘Short Sheet’ Gray?”

  The name rang a faint distant bell. I said, “Did Maurer write about him?”

  “I don’t know, he might. Midwest con man, over forty years. Spread a swath of receipts across the middle of the country as thick as fallen leaves in October.”

  I said, “My uncle’s name was Matthew Grierson.”

  “So was Short Sheet’s. Matt Gray was what you might call his professional name.”

  I reached unsteadily for my drink. Though it was half gone I still managed to slop some on my thumb. I drank what was left, licked my thumb, blinked at Reilly, and said, “I’ve inherited three hundred thousand dollars from a con man.”

  “And the question is,” he said, “where’s a good safe place for it.”

  “From a con man,” I said. “Reilly, don’t you get it?”

  “Yeah yeah,” he said impatiently. “Fred, this is serious.”

  I chuckled. “Talk about casting your bread on the waters,” I said. I laughed. “A con man,” I said. I guffawed. “I’m inheriting my own money back,” I said. I whooped.

  Reilly leaned across the table and slapped me across the face. “You’re getting hysterical, Fred,” he pointed out.

  I was. I took two pieces of ice from my glass, put one in my mouth, and held the other against my stinging cheek where Reilly had given me his Irish hand. “I suppose I needed that,” I said.

  “You did.”

  “Then thanks.”

  The waitress came over, looking suspicious, and said, “Anything wrong here?”

  “Yes,” Reilly told her. “These drinks are empty.”

  She picked up the glasses, looked at us suspiciously some more, and went away.

  Reilly said, “The point is, what are you going to do with the money?”

  “Buy a gold brick with it, I suspect.”

  “Or the Brooklyn Bridge,” Reilly agreed gloomily.

  “Verrazano Narrows Bridge,” I said. “Only the newest and most modern for my money.”

  “Where’s the money now?” he asked me.

  “The securities are in a couple of safe-deposit boxes, the gems are in the Winston Company vault, and Uncle Matt had seven savings accounts in diff
erent banks around town. Plus a checking account. Plus he owned some property.”

  The waitress brought our fresh drinks, looked at us suspiciously, and went away again.

  Reilly said, “The securities and gems are all right where they are. Just leave them there and have your lawyer switch the paperwork over to you. The cash we’ll have to work out. There’s got to be a way to keep you from getting your hands on it.”

  I said, “There was something else you wanted to talk to me about.”

  “You haven’t had enough to drink yet,” he said.

  “Tell me now,” I said.

  “At least drink some of it,” he said. “You’ll spill it all over yourself.”

  “Tell me now,” I insisted.

  He shrugged. “Okay, buddy. A couple of people from Homicide are coming to see you at your home at four o’clock this afternoon.”

  “Who? Why?”

  “Your Uncle Matt was murdered, Fred. Struck down with the well-known blunt instrument.”

  I poured cold Jack Daniels in my lap.

  5

  HALF AN HOUR later, as I walked homeward through Madison Square Park, a girl with marzipan breasts flung herself into my arms, kissed me soundly, and whispered in my ear, “Pretend you know me!”

  “Oh, come on,” I said irritably, “how much of a fool do you think I am?” I pushed her roughly away.

  “Darling!” she cried bravely, holding her arms out to me. “It’s so good to see you again!” Panic gleamed in her eyes, and lines of tension marred her beautiful face.

  Could it be real? After all, strange things do happen. And this was New York City, with the United Nations just a few blocks away. For all I knew, some sort of spy ring could—