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| Jorge Ryan, (Wiki.) |
Louis
Shalako
One more trip up the stairs, and one more trip on the
fire escape. Hopeful that it would be his last, Mark stowed the horn in its
place of honour in the corner of the living room.
It was shocking to realize, upon close examination of
his finances, that he’d earned two-seventy-five in a little over two hours. It
wasn’t often you got paid to practice.
He still had a little money of his own.
It solved one immediate problem. There were fresh
nickels in there for the phone. He was also thinking of a pen and some kind of
pad. He’d written a few songs on the inside, but one day, in a fit of
depression, he’d torn them all up and thrown it all away. Looking back, that
might have been foolish. At the time, he had honestly thought he’d never get out. Review boards did some
amazing things, or so he’d been told by other patients—or prisoners, which is
what he certainly was. Six months later, they were cutting him loose. One or
two of those tunes had stuck with him. The odds were he could come up with
something, and maybe even do a better job of it when it was real—when he had a
place to try it out.
The first practice in four years had done him some
good, or so he thought as he locked the door behind him and went out and down.
First things first. He was looking for a phone booth with the phone book still
intact, one not stolen, shredded in place by people tearing the pages out or
even just pissed on by kids out past their bedtimes and raising a little hell.
The trouble with phone booths was the exposure to the
weather and every sort of person. The first one he tried, the book was there,
but the pages were all curling from moisture. Pages were falling apart in his
hands as he tried to look up Olivetti. He might want to wash the hands after
this one.
“Argh.” He gave up in disgust.
Three blocks further up the street, there was another
booth. The phone book was in better shape. Mark found a couple of hundred
Olivettis in the Greater New York area.
There were a good fifty R. Olivettis, a handful named
Roy or Ray, which made him question his own ears and memory. But he was pretty
sure the guy had said Roy. Half a
dozen lived within a few blocks. A couple of the names were female. It was
difficult to visualize Olivetti with a wife, and yet he probably had one. The
home phone might just be in her name. He was definitely over-analyzing. Some of
those buildings had secured entrances, possibly doormen on duty. It wasn’t so
much a dead end as a last resort. There were just too many of them.
There must
be a way. On a hunch, he looked up property management in the Yellow Pages.
He
could also look in the newspaper Want Ads under apartments.
The text in the typical phone book was unbelievably
small, something he’d always hated. The New York phone book was one of the
worst in terms of sheer, physical size and population, all those boroughs and
suburbs and surrounding cities contributing to a book that weighed a good
twenty pounds.
There it was: Olivetti Property Management
Incorporated. Mark had had the impression that Mr. Olivetti owned the building
on Easy Street. The fact that Olivetti had a separate office implied ownership
of a few more buildings at least. He could also be managing it for a fee or a
percentage for some old fucker living in Florida. He wasn’t sure if anyone
really did that, but it didn’t seem too outlandish and it wasn’t Mark’s real
problem anyway.
Mark tried the number but no one picked up. That
didn’t always mean anything. Some places had more than one line and they might
have been busy. The receptionist might have stepped out for a moment. The
answering service didn’t kick in. The secretary might have just gone out for a
coffee or something. Olivetti might be taking a leak…
Six blocks wasn’t too far. On the way, he’d find a
stationer’s. If he could get into the place, he could always leave Olivetti a
note. Mister Olivetti would be out showing prospects different units, he would
be playing golf, he would drinking up his profits. It could be a million
things.
It struck him, somewhere along the way, that Olivetti
had his own version of a seven-day hold.
In which case, why not just say so?
Mark was just desperate enough. It wouldn’t have been
a deal-breaker, although it would have been a tough call to make.
I
would almost have to flip a coin on that one.
Maybe Olivetti’s way was better after all. It sort of
hung on to all the power, a typical Establishment
trick.
He’d been hearing all about the Establishment lately.
***
It was still early in the season, and the lobby
security guard didn’t give Mark a second look in his ratty white coat.
The pad in his hand might have helped. It made him
look as if he was someone, a person
with places to go and something to do when they got there. Maybe he looked like
a job-seeker, quite the depressing thought. Mostly because he wasn’t and didn’t
have a hope in hell anyways. Not with his record. Not any sort of job he would
be interested in, although there was always the question of desperation. He
could unload produce down at the food terminal, starting off on dollies and
hand-carts and working his way up to forklift driver first-class.
There was
always work out there for the desperate. Much of it was even legal, although
often done by illegal immigrants. Mark had trouble conceiving of any real need
to take thirty newspaper routes, work from before dawn until well after dusk,
living in a flop-house for the rest of your life, and yet people did. You just
couldn’t pick enough worms off golf courses and cemeteries at three cents per
thousand to make a living.
And yet stranger things happened.
It happened to some of them.
Things happened to people and you couldn’t do much
about it sometimes.
An Art Deco building clad in concrete and
multi-coloured brick, inside and out, it was beautifully maintained, unlike the
building on Easy St. Roy Olivetti would have a beautiful wife, and he would
neglect and ignore her. Unless he was drunk and in a bad mood, in which case
he’d have plenty to say, maybe even slap her around a bit…an amusing thought.
Being rich was such a terrible burden to bear, when
you really thought of it.
A quick glance at the signboard confirmed that
Olivetti was on the eighth floor, and he headed for the elevator.
There were two other people in the elevator with him,
a middle-aged man with balding head and extremely conservative pin-striped
suit. The girl now. was a young secretary in an impossibly-short skirt,
high-heels and bare legs that had been shaved just that morning by the look of
the smooth, creamy skin.
He quite liked the dress after looking at tough and
competent mental-health nurses in pastel uniforms for the last four years. Mark
was tired of women in flat, sensible shoes, just trying to make a living, Buster. He thought of Amy and repressed
an audible sigh. Theoretically, she could make a pretty good living as an
anthropologist.
The thing was to get in there and stick to it long
enough to make a go of it. That was about all he knew.
The two of them got off on the fifth floor and the
elevator hesitated before going on up again.
Judging by the studious way they had ignored each
other, they worked for different companies.
It was a fairly busy place, and with only the one
elevator, someone would always be pressing that button. He was locked inside a
rattling steel cage. The doors always took forever to open.
Hitting the buttons never seemed to do much. They were
mostly for show, he concluded.
The eighth floor, way up above the street, was an
oasis of peace and quiet.
He really ought to rent a utility closet with taps and
a sink or something. He could crap in a bag and take it out with him in the
morning. Toss that in any alley and no one would ever know the difference. The
walls were roughly-textured grey blocks, probably twelve inches thick.
It could only be to the left or to the right. Picking
right, he was gratified to see the numbers going up in the proper order.
Olivetti’s office was down at the end, back from the
street. Mark raised a hand to knock, not knowing whether it was a suite or just
a one-roomer. Slowly his hand fell.
It was dead quiet up there.
Somewhere down the hall, a phone rang. The ringing
stopped. He thought he heard a voice, and that somehow made it better.
Olivetti Property Management Incorporated. While not
completely unfamiliar with appearances and companies that existed largely on
paper—he’d once had an agent after all, the building was big enough that there
really ought to be four or five rooms behind that door.
Trying the knob, it turned. The lights were on and the
first thing he saw were houseplants on the top of a long row of black filing
cabinets. So that was all right, then.
“Hello. Hello?” He stepped into the opening.
Nothing.
Somewhere off in the distance, on the street down
below, a dump truck going forty miles an hour hit a manhole cover. The slap of
the heavy tailgate penetrated like no other sound. Even the rich couldn’t
escape that one.
There was an interior closer and the door was pulling
itself insistently shut. The carpet was thick and lush.
There was no secretary, although there was a proper
desk and a small waiting area replete with couch, and some institutional
settees framed up in three-seated arrangements. All the red and yellow leather
reminded him of Nero Wolfe. The smell of tobacco smoke and a coffee table with
scattered magazines attested to human occupation. There were table lamps and
chic Scandinavian end tables.
“Hello?”
There was nothing but silence, and yet the place was
unlocked.
The door in the middle of the wall was clearly
labeled, Roy Olivetti, President. You
could get a sign like that made up in any hardware store.
Mark went over and knocked.
“Hello? Hello? Mister Olivetti?”
There was no response and he had visions of the guy being
on the phone—either that or boning his secretary. It was just about lunch hour.
He might have been the type to squeeze in a nap.
Anyways, he had a legitimate reason for being there,
just in case anyone should ask.
Turning the knob, he opened the door and had a look.
***
Roy Olivetti had been shot once, right between the
eyes. He was very dead.
His spacious corner office looked across the alley to
an equally-anonymous office block, this one in a more serious and modern style.
All the blinds were down over there and there wasn’t a sign of life.
“Oh, fuck.” Mark looked down at his hand on the
door-knob. “Aw, for fuck’s sakes.”
The man was clearly dead, those heavy-lidded eyes
staring directly into his. Olivetti’s chair was pushed back, away from the
desk, as if he’d tried to rise. He was sprawled all over the place, limp,
halfway off the chair and yet not going anywhere anytime soon…you weren’t going
to get much sense out of a dead man, but Mark had one or two questions.
Mark didn’t have a heart attack, but the shock was
considerable. Slowly the truth sank in.
This was bad—the smell of shit in the air underlying
this conclusion in fine counterpoint.
The man’s brains were all over the wall behind him,
and a thin brown line of dried blood had come down the sides of the neck and
soaked his white shirt. There was another faint, acrid smell in the air. His
arms hung straight down, like a puppet discarded. Theoretically, Mark should go
over and check for a pulse, see if there was any chance of doing something, anything, for the guy.
“Fuck.”
Aw,
Jesus.
He’d never see his money now…shit.
 |
| "Fuck. I'll never see my money now." |
There was just no way—no way. No way to look for a
fucking key or his money or anything, although there was one wild second of
temptation to go through Olivetti’s pockets.
There’s just no way I’m touching that.
Mark backed out into the other room.
He had no choice but to call the cops. He had touched
things in here, he’d touched things on the way there. He’d touched doorknobs,
the button in the elevator—and Mark Jones’ prints were on file. He lived in the
area and was out on parole. Someone would come knocking for sure. People had
seen him coming in.
They would also see him going out.
All the while, wearing that damned white parka,
fringed in streaky faux fur on the hood, cuffs and hem, narrow in the shoulders
and wide in the tails, making him a marked man pretty much everywhere he went.
There was a phone right there on the desk.
Shit.
(End of Part Nine.)
Okay, here we are on Smashwords. Do you like mystery novels? Readers may wish to check out The Inspector
Gilles Maintenon Mysteries on Smashwords.
Thank you for reading.
Thanks for reading.
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