361 - Donald E. Westlake [19]
He held the spoon against the side of the cup with his thumb and drank. The spoon handle jabbed into his cheek. He kept watching me while he drank. Then he said, “Most of the time, it’s sitting around waiting for that one or two jobs a month. It’s boring as hell. So sometimes I get interested in something. Like you two. Upstate accents, with the broad A, and you’re living in a medium-price hotel and you’ve got medium-price clothes and a whole middle-class feeling to you. You aren’t the idle rich. And you’re too mad at everybody to be con artists. Besides, you paid me. You’re checked into the hotel by the week, for the cheaper rate. You figure to be here longer than a little, but not long enough to sign a lease on an apartment or get a job or anything like that.”
He swallowed coffee again. When the spoon stuck into his cheek, it made him look wolfish. Otherwise, he looked soft.
“You’re not salesmen or anything like that,” he said. “I’ve been in your hotel room twice, and there’s not a thing there to say somebody’s employed you. There would be. Display case, envelope from the main office, something. You go out late in the morning, you spend all day away. At night, you drink quietly in the room. One of you hires me to check a license plate, and the other one gets mad. Doesn’t want his business told around. The license plate turns out to be stolen. I’m told to go away.”
“Why didn’t you?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “I told you. A ratty office in a ratty neighborhood downtown. It depressed me. You two puzzled me. So I looked you up.” He grinned, bringing the wolf look back. “You’re Willard and Raymond Kelly,” he said. “Sons of a mob lawyer who pulled out of town way back when. Is it your father you’re working for?”
“Not exactly. He’s dead.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Not at all.” I finished the toast and the last of the coffee.
He sat there chewing a thumbnail. He was stupid, but shrewd. I should have left, but I waited. Bill lit us cigarettes.
Then he stopped chewing the nail and said, “Oh.” He looked at me, grinning again. “Do you tell me, or do I go look it up?”
“All right,” I said. “He was shot.”
“Sure. I knew you were looking for something. I couldn’t figure what.” He leaned forward. “All right. I’m a cheap fifth-rate investigator. I can barely scrape up the license fee every year. But I’ve been in this business for twelve years. I have the contacts, I know how to look and where to look. I could maybe save you time.”
I said, “I have one question. Why should we trust you?”
“Because I’m fifth-rate. Poor but honest, that’s me. I’d like to do a job because it’s interesting.”
I chewed my cheek. “There isn’t anything I can think of for you to do.”
His grin was sour. “You two talk it over. You probably won’t find me in the office, but leave a message with the answering service. If you want me for anything, that is.” He got to his feet, took his coffee check, nodded to us both, and left.
Bill said, “I trust him, Ray. I think he’s all right.”
“I want to trust him,” I said, “but I’m not going to.”
“Maybe we could use his help.”
“We’ll worry about that when the time comes.” I lit a new cigarette. We paid our checks and went out to the sidewalk. “I tell you what,” I said. “You go on down to the library and look him up in the New York Times Index. He said he’d been working twelve years. Maybe he made the paper once. I’d like to be able to check him out.”
I told him how to get to the library, and then I went back to the room.
I was there half an hour when Krishman called. He was mad, but controlling it. “I read in this morning’s paper,” he said, “that Andrew McArdle was dead.”
“Yes. Heart attack.”
“Did you have anything to do with that? I want the truth. Were you there?”
“We were there.”
“Andrew had nothing to do with your father’s death.”
“And I had nothing to do with Andrew’s. I didn’t want him dead. He knew something. He would have told me, if he