Third man out - Stevenson Richard. Страница 37

"Is he dead? Was he killed by the falling mirror?"

He got red again. "I told you, buster, none of that is any of your business, and I'm not about to say a word about it. It's not connected to this Rutka guy, so I don't have to tell you or the police a goddamn thing, and I'm not about to, either."

"You'd refuse to cooperate with the police, Art? An upstanding citizen like yourself? What would your boss think? Old Bill Byrne? Wouldn't old Bill be disappointed in you?"

He'd had enough of me. "Get out of here! I want you out of here now!"

"If I refuse to leave, will you call the police?"

"I'll call the goddamn Albany police. I have friends in the department and I can tell you right now, if they come out here they'll make hamburger out of you, all right. You better just beat it, buster. Go on!"

"Hey, no need to get nasty about it." I got up.

He stood, trembling, and pointed at me. "You said you were a private investigator. Is that the truth?"

"Yes, it is."

"Well, who you working for, anyway? Who hired you?"

"That's confidential."

He glared at me, red-faced again. Then suddenly he started shaking his head and his arms and waving everything away-me, the papers on his desk, whoever had gotten him into this. He just shook and waved, shook and waved. He was mad as hell and he wasn't going to take it anymore, except all he knew to do was stand there and shake and wave, shake and wave.

I left him like that and went out and drove away. I hoped Art Murphy didn't have a stroke or a heart attack, and I wished my headache, which was back, would go away and stay away too. end user

22

I was mixed up and it was time to stop and think.

Whether or not Ronnie Linkletter's boyfriend was the Ail-American Asshole Mega-Hypocrite-and Ronnie's behavior suggested strongly that he was-and whether or not the Mega-Hypocrite had committed the murder of John Rutka-and he was still the most logical suspect despite the missing files maybe being a part of a scheme to frame whoever the mirror man turned out to be

— I knew I couldn't begin to confirm or eliminate Linkletter's falling-mirror man as anything at all-Mega-Hypocrite, murderer, victim of a frame-up-until I knew his identity and could check his mud flaps and his alibi or lack of one for Wednesday night.

Assuming for the time being that the motel mystery man was the Mega-Hypocrite, I needed to know if he was even alive.

I drove into town and went into the Albany Public Library. I checked all the obituaries in the Times Union file for mid-June. No pillars of the community had expired on or soon after the date of the falling mirror. Any number of those who had joined the majority during this period-Mrs. Tillie Levitsky, age eighty-seven; Franklin Moneypenny, age ninety-four; Arline M. Reilly, age one hundred and three; and several dozen others-might well have been considered hypocrites by their survivors if it came out that they had been spending Wednesday nights in a Central Avenue hot-sheet motel.

But not mega-hypocrites whose hypocrisy was so monstrous as to earn them a place at the top of Rutka's list of danger-to-society closet cases.

Then a headline about a gangland shooting on the front page of a mid-June T-U caught my eye, and for a few excited minutes I thought I'd figured it all out. From a pay phone, I called an acquaintance in New York City who specializes in the intricacies of mob life. I asked him if any Mafia figure might have visited Albany every Wednesday night for a year until mid-June, and if such a figure might have then died or disappeared with no explanation.

The reporter said no, none of that made any sense. No major mob figure needed to visit Albany (which didn't even have a good clam house), since those politicians beholden to the mob traveled without objection to wherever their bosses were situated, making it unnecessary for their bosses to journey out to visit them. Nor had any major mid-level mobster in the Northeast died or disappeared during the month of June, other than the one I'd just read about who'd been gunned down while visiting Miami. I thanked the reporter for his disappointing information and hung up.

The mirror man, I decided, was probably alive. Though maybe badly scarred. Maybe what I had to find was a deeply closeted gay man with hideous scars on his back and buttocks. Maybe the state police could put out an all-points bulletin. Or I could go around pulling down the pants of respectably dressed gay men and checking their buttocks. I felt as though that's what I was about to be reduced to.

Back at the house on Crow Street, I slapped together a two-day-old-runny-tuna sandwich and ate it with two aspirin. Two messages were on my machine, one from Joel McClurg at Cityscape reminding me of our agreement that I'd tip him off if I was closing in on the killer-I thought, Fat chance of my doing that any time soonand one message from Bub Bailey asking me to phone him with any new leads I'd come up with and telling me that he, regrettably, had none. He said he hoped to see me at the Rutka funeral the next morning and we'd catch up on each other's developments.

While I was eating, Federal Express showed up with a package from New York City. I signed for it and set it on the kitchen counter, unopened.

After lunch, I got out my list of local sources and worked the phone. Art Murphy still seemed like the best route to the identity of the motel-mirror man, so I got busy trying to find out who Art hung around with, who his family members were, and who he might lend his car to every night for a year.

Art's credit was in order, I learned, and he owned his house on Flint Street, with just two years to go on the mortgage. Art was sixty-one years old. The credit agency was also able to tell me that Art earned $42,570 the previous year, that his outstanding debts were a Key Bank car loan with monthly payments of $289, and that his unpaid Visa balance was $721. A second card-holder was a Mrs. June Murphy, age fifty-nine, same address as Art.

Through a friend in the school department records office, I found out that the Murphys had three daughters, Linda, Connie, and Joyce, who, I calculated, would now be thirty-eight, thirty-seven, and thirty-one. None was listed in the Albany phone book; they'd either married and changed their names, or moved away, or all had unlisted numbers. Or maybe they all lived at home with Art and June, happy never to leave the simple pleasures of Flint Street.

I used the street address-name of occupant guide to search for an acquaintance of mine in Art's neighborhood, but could find none. I was luckier, though, when I phoned a friend who was a bookkeeper for another car dealer up the highway from Byrne Olds-Cadillac; he told me he knew Art only slightly, but his brother had a friend who had once dated one of Art's daughters and he'd have the brother's friend give me a call, if he could reach him, which he did. The friend, Lou Ptak, soon called, a tad suspicious of who or what I was, which he should have been.

I told him I worked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and one of Art's daughters had applied for a position with the agency, necessitating a full-field security check.

"Which daughter?" Lou Ptak asked.

"Joyce," I said, taking a chance, and he started laughing. "It figures," he said, and chortled off and on throughout our conversation.

The Murphys' family life was unexceptional, according to Ptak. Art and June had devoted their lives to raising their daughters, all of whom had fled Albany at the earliest opportunity. Ptak didn't know who Art's friends were, but he thought they were the men from Byrne Olds-Cadillac and those who shared Art's interests in golf and bowling.