The call came-according to the digital clock next to my bed-at 2:28 a.m.
By the time I'd reached bed I'd been exhausted enough to sleep till noon.
Responding to the call was not easy. I had to swim upward through several miles of subconsciousness and then groggily figure out where the phone was and how to operate it.
He might have been selling insurance, the way he sounded so chipper and bright. A deal I couldn't refuse.
"Mr. Ketchum," he boomed.
"Huh, wha-"
"Mr. Ketchum, I realize it's late-or early-depending on your point of view-but I have got to talk to you about something that both of us have a mutual interest in."
And then I realized who I was talking to. The queer bird with the Coke-bottle glasses and the pale flesh and the sinister black clothing.
Stokes. The private detective I'd hired.
"I'd like to come over, Mr. Ketchum."
"Now?" I said, startled.
"If you wouldn't mind.''
"God. Can't it wait until morning?"
"By morning, Mr. Ketchum, you could very well be out of business."
"Damn," I said.
"Twenty minutes," he said.
And hung up.
Coffee, cigarettes, soaking my face in cold water, and a terrible certainty that Stokes wasn't kidding about his bad news brought me awake in less than fifteen minutes.
Because patience is not among my chief virtues anyway, the remaining twenty-minute wait caused me to get a workout by pacing the living room. I was eager to ask him what Merle Wickes had been doing at his office.
I was glancing out the window when I saw headlights wash against the naked trees running along the edge of the parking area.
Then it was another few-but interminable-minutes before I heard steps trudging up the stairs. Stokes had a knock like somebody throwing an anvil against a piece of fiber-board. I half expected to see the door sag in the middle under the pressure of his fist.
When I opened the door and saw him, I wondered for the first time if Stokes ever changed clothes. His attire contributed to both sinister and comic impressions. He wore the double-knit black sport coat with lapels wide enough to play shuffleboard on. His tie was one of those striped jobs that men used to affect with leisure suits-except his stripes ran to the funereal-a gray stripe, then a black stripe, then a gray stripe. Real festive stuff-as Stokes was festive. The doughy face was half-covered by huge eyeglasses thick as the bottoms of drinking glasses. Behind them swam two eyes that seemed to be half blind, squinting. The rest of his face was pinched-a sharp, disapproving nose; a thin, disapproving mouth-sitting on top of a pear-shaped body that, like his face, managed to convey the sinister and the comic.
As he came in, he said, looking around, "Shoulda figured you'd have money, Ketchum."
Which told me a lot about Mr. Stokes. If he thought I had money-the furniture was mostly from secondhand stores, literally-then he must really be from hunger. Maybe he was responding to the decor, which had been done free of charge by a onetime girlfriend of mine. But whatever his reason for saying it, he made the remark unpleasant, full of envy and even menace.
"You want a drink?" I said. I didn't sound any happier about seeing him than he'd sounded about seeing me.
"Just a minute," he said, waving me off.
He stood in the middle of my living room, smelling like a wet dog.
"People's places," he said, almost to himself, "they tell you secrets sometimes. All you have to do is stand still and look them over."
Stokes was one of those people who give other people the creeps-though you might not exactly be able to say why. You wouldn't be surprised to see his photo on the tube in conjunction with the ax deaths of a suburban couple and their children. I'd picked a honey when I'd called Federated Investigation Services. He'd been smart enough-each of us has some advertising instincts-to pick the Federated name, which gave him a lot more weight in the Yellow Pages than A-l or Nocturne, which is way too dramatic. Federated sounds vaguely like a bank. I'd expected somebody in pinstripes with a college degree who just happened to carry a Mauser. Instead, I got Stokes here.
"You learn all my secrets yet?" I said, more harshly than I'd intended.
A smirk parted his lips, revealing teeth the color of a urine specimen. I had hoped he would take the money I paid him and go straight to his dentist's. "You'd be surprised what I know," he said.
To hell with him. I went over and fixed myself another drink. Meanwhile, he kept looking around my apartment.
As I was coming around the tiny wet bar, I saw the newspaper clipping I'd taken from my suitcoat earlier. The one about the robbery I'd found in Denny Harris's desk. I studied it a moment, then decided to leave it where it was. I had no intention of sharing it with Stokes. I'd already decided to pay him off and get rid of him.
He lit a Camel from a crumpled pack, a real Camel, not one of those sissified things they push these days. No wonder his teeth looked the way they did.
I went over to the couch and sat on the edge while Stokes finished examining a Chagall lithograph I own, my only expensive indulgence since the divorce.
When he finished, he turned around and said, "Guess where I was last night."
"Your mom's?" I joked.
For the first time since I'd met him, he showed anger. He pushed his body forward. His eyes flashed. "I don't make jokes about my mother." He had to somewhere near fifty. That he was that sensitive about his mother made me very suspicious, made him all the more odd and dangerous in my mind.
"Sorry," I said, "if I offended you." I could not quite get the irony out of my voice, a problem I sometimes have.
I decided not to let him rest. He'd been no help to me. I'd left my card last night and he hadn't called back. I wanted him off the case and out of my life.
"I want you to submit your bill," I said.
A kind of smirk touched his mouth. "You firing me?"
"You could call it that."
He looked around again. "Guy lives in a place like this, he gets the idea he can do anything he wants, push anybody around, I guess."
"Yeah," I said, "that's me OK. A regular Mussolini."
He faced me. "You know something, Ketchum?"
"What?"
"You're a punk."
"Gee, thanks."
"You got a fancy apartment, fancy business, you think you know everything. You don't know shit."
"That's been pointed out to me. Many times."
"Well, it's true."
"So you've told me."
He reached inside his coat and pulled out a manila envelope. "I'm gonna have you do me a little favor," he said. "I don't think so, Stokes. You're done."
"I wouldn't count on that."
"I would, Stokes."
"A little bitty favor. Or else."
"Or else what?"
"Or else I phone the police."
"And say hi?"
"And tell them who happened to be at Denny Harris's house last night about the time he happened to get murdered."
Ever since talking to his mother and finding out that he'd been late bringing her his treat-a ritual I assumed he treated with utmost respect-I'd wondered where Stokes had been that night.
Maybe I was about to find out.
"Meaning what?" I said lamely.
"Meaning what?" he mocked. "Shit, c'mon, Ketchum, you think I'm some moron?"
"I think you're a lot of things, Stokes, but I guess a moron isn't one of them."
"Hey," he said, "you're really crushing me, you know?" He waved the manila envelope again. "Meaning you were out at Harris's last night, and if I have to, I can prove it."
"Gee, I was always under the impression that when you paid a private detective, he went to work for you. I didn't know that blackmail was a part of the deal."
"Like I said, Ketchum, there's a lot of things you don't know."
What I really wanted to talk about was what Merle Wickes was doing at Stokes's place last night-but I knew better. Despite my naivete, I was beginning to see that in a sleazy game like this one, the less you said the safer you were. I'd already said and done way too much.
"What's in the envelope?" I asked.
"That isn't important. It's what I want you to do with it that matters."
"Which is?"
"I want you to take this someplace for me."
"Where?"
"You know the duck pond in Bridges Park?"
"Yeah."
"Next to the duck pond there are all these feeders where seed is stored for the birds. The feeders are marked A, B, C, and so forth. I want you to take this envelope and put it in there at a quarter till noon tomorrow."
"What if I look inside?"
"What you see won't make any sense to you."
"I may not be as dumb as you think."
The smirk again. "I'll bet you are, Ketchum, I'll just bet you are."
"Your mommy didn't think so."
Immediately he was tight. "Like I said, leave my mother out of this."
"Nice lady. You must think so, too. Giving up a wife for her."
He flushed. "She was a bitch."
"Mommy knows best."
"I don't really give a damn what you think of me, you know that? All I really give a damn about is you delivering this envelope tomorrow."
"And if I don't?"
"Then I call the police and tell them where you were around the time your partner was murdered."
I put out my hand. He put the envelope in it.
He looked at my face and smiled. "Life's a bitch, ain't it, Ketchum? Right now you look like somebody just injected you with a quart of sour pickle juice."
I tapped the envelope against my fingers. "I assume I'm being used in some kind of blackmail number."
"Mr. Genius."
"I also assume that whoever picks this up is the person who killed Denny."
"You're on a roll. Keep going."
"I also assume that once you get paid off, you'll probably keep right on bleeding them."
'Too bad you didn't kill him, Ketchum. You'd be fun to squeeze." Instead of anger there was now a look of torment in his eyes. For a moment I regretted my ugly crack about his mother.
I nodded to the door. "So long, Stokes," I said. "I'm tired."
"Bridges Park. Quarter to twelve. Feeder A."
He had regained his angry edge. He examined the apartment once more before he left. "Really is kinda nice up here. Maybe someday I'll have a place like it." He smiled. "See you, Ketchum."