361 - Donald E. Westlake [57]
Saturday morning the papers reported, without knowing it, the results of a major battle the night before. The News, the Mirror and the Herald Tribune all reported the Athletic Club blaze in Brooklyn. The Herald Tribune and the Times reported the boiler explosion in the East Side night club half an hour after closing. Two more of the Lake George insurgents had run into fatal accidents, one in his home and one in his car. All in all, I had clippings on eleven incidents in the battle, no one of them found sufficiently newsworthy to be mentioned by all four of the morning papers.
When I called Johnson at three, he sounded nervous. “What the hell were you setting me up for, Kelly?”
“Why? What happened?”
“Nothing. I stuck my nose in and pulled it right back out again. Something’s going on.”
“I know.”
“You could’ve warned me.”
“I did. I told you to be careful.”
“Listen, just do me one favor. Don’t call me any more, okay?”
“All right.”
“Whatever the hell it is, I don’t want any part of it. I don’t even want to know about it.”
“All right, Johnson, I understand you. I won’t bother you again.”
“I’d like to help you out,” he said, and now he sounded apologetic. “But this just isn’t my league.”
“You said that before.”
“It’s still true. I’m great on divorce.”
“In other words, you don’t know where Ganolese is.”
“I got both his addresses. An apartment in town here, and a house out on the Island. But he isn’t at either one of them. And whatever’s going on, this doesn’t look like a good time to ask where else he might be.”
“All right.”
“I’m sorry. I did my best.”
“I know. Don’t worry about it. This shouldn’t be anybody’s league.”
We hung up, and I lit a cigarette and decided I’d have to do it the other way around. I looked in the phone book and found William Cheever’s law office listed, but no home phone. He wouldn’t be there on Saturday afternoon.
It was a long weekend.
Twenty-Four
Cheever’s office was on West 111th Street, the edge of Harlem. Monday morning I took the subway uptown.
I got off at 110th Street, the northwest tip of Central Park, and walked north into the ghetto. I wore my raincoat over my suit, bulky enough so Smitty’s gun made no bulge under my belt. It was daytime, so no one looked at me twice.
The building was eight stories tall. A large record store chromed the first floor. The rest of the building, ancient brick and dusty windows, stuck up out of all that chrome and glass and gaiety like a wart.
The door I wanted was off to the left, stuck under the record store’s armpit. I went up narrow-canted stairs for three flights, each time looking up toward a bare twenty-five watt bulb.
William Cheever’s name was fourth of four on the frosted glass panel of the door. It wasn’t a law firm, it was one of those set-ups where a number of unsuccessful professional men get together to share the rent and the receptionist and the futility.
The receptionist was as light as a Negro can be and still have Negroid features. She had relentlessly straightened her hair and then recurled it in neo-Grecian twists. She wore a high-necked and lace-fringed blouse designed for the bustless girls of midtown, and she was far too ample for it. Looking at her dressed in it, the first word that came to mind was “unsanforized.”
She smiled at me and closed a slim volume of Langston Hughes, one finger marking the place. “May I help you?” Her accent was softly British, so she was probably Jamaican.
“William Cheever,” I said. I hoped the attorneys at least had separate offices.
“He isn’t in this morning.”
“Oh.” I frowned as worriedly as I could. “I wanted to get in touch with him. As soon as possible. Would you have any idea when he’d be back?”
“Mister Cheever? Oh, no. He very seldom comes to the office.” She withdrew the finger from the Langston Hughes book. “In fact, to tell you the honest truth, I sometimes wonder why he has an office here at all.”
“Doesn’t he meet his clients here?”
“Not so’s you’d notice it.” She’d been dying to talk