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Chapter 42

 

 

 

It was a good thing we had a suite, because the bedbug was up all night with the television while I was trying to sleep in the bedroom next door.

I didn't sleep long enough. The bedbug woke me early, scratching at the covers over me and whimpering, "I have nothing here to eat, Mr. Stennis. My metabolism is not like yours. I must eat."

Room service wasn't open yet. If it had been, they probably wouldn't have had any raw fish on the breakfast menu; so there wasn't any help for it. I struggled into my clothes, cursing, and went out into the barely dawning morning outside.

If I had not been so cold and so sleepy, I would have been pretty happy. I was home! This was my own turf. My old apartment was only a few blocks away. There was my favorite sushi bar, next to it the neighborhood's best pie bakery. I had a quick cup of coffee in my regular coffee shop on Second Avenue, and found that the Korean open-all-night fish store was still there where I had last seen it, with the same busy, quick little Korean couple running it and the same display of Sun Myung Moon's ginseng elixir stacked on the counter next to the cash register. They didn't seem to recognize me. But then, they never had.

It was a homecoming. When I got back to the hotel room my shoes and socks were soaked from the melting snow, but I had a shopping bag full of seafood for the bedbug, a huge jar of instant coffee for myself, and about a hundred sheets of hotel stationery from the drowsing bell captain in the lobby.

I knocked on Irene's door to invite her to join us before letting myself into my own room. By the time I had finished laying out my purchases on the bathroom floor for the bedbug's examination, with its claws scratching excitedly on the tiles, she came in, yawning and looking rumpled, "I have to have some clothes," she said drowsily.

The bedbug chittered in consternation over the fish. "It's all dead," it exclaimed.

"We don't usually eat our breakfasts here until they're dead," I informed it. Glumly it pawed over the slimy things. It nibbled at a filet of redfish, sniffed a cardboard dish of smelts, and finally, reluctantly, devoured three little squid and a dozen bay scallops, while I fixed Irene and myself some instant coffee out of the hot-water tap.

"That's a step in the right direction," she said, swallowing, "but I'm going to need more than that."

I nodded. I pulled the stolen dispatch case from under the bed, unsnapped it, and counted out a thousand dollars for her. "Get some breakfast for yourself," I instructed, "and then see if you can find any stores that open early on Twenty-third Street. Have you got that shopping list?"

She nodded, but protested, "I can't carry everything on the list! I don't know your sizes, anyway."

"Just get what you need. Then, when you come back, you can stay here with the bedbug and I'll go out."

"No," said the bedbug forcefully, appearing between us with half a squid in its foreclaws. "You cannot leave me confined in this place when it is my duty to observe and experience. Take me with you!"

Irene scowled at him. "Later, okay? I'll take you anywhere you want—well, more or less—but I'm not really awake yet."

"Now," the bedbug said firmly. "Where is my costume? And, oh, yes, what is the excretory custom on this planet for 'pets'?"

"Maybe you'd better take a little more money," I offered, grinning. "You might have to buy a pooper-scooper."

She glared at me, then turned it onto the bedbug. "You," she commanded, "are to excrete into the toilet in the bathroom, and then flush it; that's a law, and do it before we go out. And close the door behind you," she called after the bedbug as it meekly turned to obey. Then she looked at me. "I'll take that extra money, though," she said. "It seems to me I'm going to deserve it."

 

They were gone for nearly four hours.

It wasn't really enough time for what I had to do. I was busy writing out my story on the hotel stationery. I started with the very first conversation with Woody Calderon, told of his "death," then of hearing from Irene, of having lunch with Vic Ordukowsky, bearding Davidson-Jones in his den, meeting Irene in southern France . . . I had filled twenty-five pages by the time Irene and the bedbug got back, and had only reached the point where I saw Norah Platt's dismembered body in Dr. Boddadukti's tub.

When they came in I quickly hid my notes under the desk blotter, because they weren't alone. Two bellboys followed them, laden with packages. Irene was not only carrying some bags of her own, she was wearing some of her purchases: red leather boots, calf high; a leather overcoat, with a fur Cossack hat on her head; and when she took the coat off I saw she was wearing a brand-new pants suit in a pale gray fabric. The bedbug, too, had a handsome new plaid wool overcoat buckled over his fleecy disguise.

"You both look very nice," I told Irene.

"Thank you, but will you tip the bellmen, please, Nolly? I don't think I have any money left," she said. While I was doing that she went into the bathroom and began running water into the tub. The bedbug scurried excitedly after her.

As soon as the bellmen were gone it began shedding overcoat and dog suit, chittering, "The fish! Please, put the fish in!"

"I'm doing it as fast as I can," Irene assured it, returning to the living room for a transparent plastic sack filled with water, in which three live ten-inch trout were agitatedly writhing and waving their fins. She untied it, dumped them into the filling tub, turned off the water, and left the bedbug in there. She closed the door, but we could hear the splashing and scratching noises anyway as it happily devoured its first decent meal on Earth.

"It's your turn to go out now if you want to," she told me.

"All right," I said. I showed her what I'd been doing. "You can start making your own report. We'll get them all Xeroxed and mailed out this afternoon. And remember, don't let anybody see the bedbug without his dog disguise. Above all, don't let him talk. When the maid comes to clean the room, tell her to do the other one first, then you and the bedbug can go in there while she cleans up here, and be sure you take the money with you."

"Nolly," she said, sounding exasperated, "I'm really a grown woman. I can take care of myself. Just go."

And I went, feeling a little good-naturedly embarrassed at her reproof, but also feeling pretty good because things were going so well. It was even colder out than it had been earlier that morning, but I didn't head first for a men's clothing store to get a coat. I turned up my collar and walked briskly to the street telephone in front of the post office, because there was a call I had wanted to make all along and hadn't dared risk from the hotel room.

The street phone was still there. Remarkably, no one was using it; even more remarkably, it worked. I dialed the familiar telephone number for L. Knollwood Stennis & Associates, and waited for the ring, rehearsing the way in which I would disguise my voice in case of listeners and speak to Marlene in words she alone would be able to understand. . . .

The phone didn't ring.

Instead, there was a sort of clashing sound of ill-tuned chimes, and a mechanical voice told me, sounding like a more musical version of Barak's gaspy delivery, "The number you have called . . . is no longer in service . . . please consult your directory."

But I did, and the number wasn't there. The firm of L. Knollwood Stennis & Associates was no longer listed in the telephone book.

 

Almost anything could have happened in the best part of two years, I told myself.

But something certainly had, and none of the possible explanations I could think of were encouraging. I hesitated, then tried her home number.

"That was a little better. I didn't get her, but I got her recorded voice, saying that although she couldn't come to the phone at that moment I should leave my name and telephone number, and the day and time I was calling.

I hung up. I was beginning to shiver violently in the open phone cubicle, anyway.

So I went down the block to a men's clothing store and bought a fleece-lined jacket and a hat; I needed more than that, but nothing as desperately. I stopped in the stationery store across from the post office for large envelopes. I picked up some more live fish for the bedbug, made sure the Xerox place was still there . . . and then dialed Marlene's home number again.

I got the same recorded announcement from her machine, but this time I was ready. "This," I said, "is Harrison Cham, Sylvia's husband." Sylvia Cham was an old client, which Marlene would remember, and she would not fail to remember that her husband, Harrison, had died five years earlier, because we'd gone together to the funeral. "It is important that I speak to you, but I must be in and out all day. Please call me at this number at three, six, or nine p.m. " And I gave the number of the phone booth.

 

At three o'clock I was there. So was a small teenage girl, on tiptoes to reach the phone, having a long conversation in Spanish with, it sounded like, her mother. Three o'clock came and went and she was still on the phone. At five after she finally hung up, gave me a hostile glance, and departed. I took over, pretending I was talking with my finger on the hook.

But by twenty after there was still no ring. I took the statements Irene and I had written to the Xerox place and left them there as I went back to the hotel.

We spent the next hour or so taking Polaroid pictures of us with the bedbug. It didn't mind. It seemed to enjoy posing, and even climbed up in my lap so that Irene could snap us together a dozen times.

The photos looked pretty convincing to me. I suppose any Hollywood special-effects wizard could have created even better pictures with trick photography, but I couldn't think of any way of making them better.

At five-thirty I went out again. This time the bedbug insisted on coming along, and Irene decided she didn't particularly want to be left in the hotel by herself. All three of us picked up the Xerox copies, the bedbug obediently slinking under a table when I commanded, "Sit!" Irene and I stuffed the copies in the addressed envelopes, twelve copies going to twelve different people, and I left her waiting in line at the post office for stamps while the bedbug and I made the six o'clock check on the phone.

It didn't ring.

There was no particular reason for us to go right back to the hotel, and we were getting used to being out in the cold. Even the bedbug was contentedly doing his job for the Mother, sniffing at the tires of parked cars, rearing up to gaze into windows, pausing to investigate the aromas that came from pretzel vendors and hot-dog salesmen, and out of bars and restaurants. We strolled aimlessly down Third Avenue toward Union Square, and although people stared at the beast we had on a leash, and the hurrying crowds divided to let us through, no one offered any unwelcome questions.

"I guess I don't really have to talk to Marlene," I said after a while.

"I suppose not," Irene agreed.

"But I wish I could! I'm worried about her. She wouldn't close down the office unless she absolutely had to."

"Well," she said practically, "what's our next step?"

Fortunately I didn't have to answer that just then. I frowned and shook my head, pointing down at the bedbug.

Which was whining up at us. I looked around. No one was very near. I bent down to listen, and it whimpered, "How does one manage with only four legs, Mr. Stennis? I'm getting tired, and this solid-phase water is very cold."

So we took it back to the hotel, and there I had plenty of time to answer Irene's question.

Or would have had. If I had had an answer. I was glad when it was time to go out again for a last check on the phone. There was no one in the cubicle this time, and not many people on the street at all, and I stood there wondering just what I was going to say to Irene when I got back to the hotel. I went over all the things we had done. We had distributed copies of our accounts in places where even the resources of Narabedla weren't going to find them. That was our insurance policy; Davidson-Jones would have to reckon with that before doing anything violent to us. The people we had chosen were good people. We could trust them . . .

But what should we do next?

I was so deep in concentration that the ringing of the phone was only an annoyance at first. Then I almost dropped it when I picked it up.

But then I heard Marlene's voice saying, "Nolly? It is you, isn't it? Oh, God, honey, I'm so glad you're alive."

***

On my way back to the hotel I almost ran, but when I passed the pet store on Lexington Avenue I stopped long enough to buy a few dozen tropical fish.

The bedbug was delighted. He promised to stay in the room while he enjoyed his meal at leisure, and I took Irene down to the hotel restaurant to celebrate. We found a quiet table in a corner, and over a drink I told her about my conversation with Marlene. "She sold the business," I told her, "to raise money to pay for private detectives. She didn't give up. She's been building up a whole dossier on Narabedla and Henry Davidson-Jones."

"Which will help support our story?" Irene put in.

"Which will damn prove our story," I corrected her. "She's going to get all the papers out of her safe-deposit box tomorrow morning. Then I'm going to go up to see her with a copy of our stuff, and we'll figure out what to do from there."

"Sounds good," Irene said, looking at me thoughtfully over her old-fashioned glass. "You know, Nolly," she commented, "you're really some kind of guy." 

I shrugged modestly.

"I mean it," she said. "You're a regular Clark Kent. One day you're a mild-mannered accountant, and then all of a sudden you're taking on sixty-dozen wizard alien creatures with all sorts of high-tech jazz and rescuing the girl. I never expected it of you."

I said honestly, "I didn't really expect it of myself."

"It's a nice trait in a man. Is your drink empty, too?" That was easily enough taken care of. When the waiter brought us the second round she frowned. "The funny thing is," she said, "I always thought I didn't really like jocks. You know? The kind of guy that figures he can take care of anything just by throwing some weight around? Do you suppose . . ."

She hesitated, fiddling with the orange slice in her new drink. Then she looked up at me with a peculiar expression, a little bit amused, a little bit embarrassed. "Tricia told me about your, uh, operation," she said. "Do you suppose that's why you're doing all this?"

Well, if I'd thought at all (I hadn't, actually) I would have been damn sure Tricia would not have missed the chance to gossip a little with her cousin. I didn't like that thought, but there wasn't anything I could do about it. I said shortly.

"How would I know if it was?" Then I said, more carefully, "I can tell you what lit my fuse this time. What got me going, Irene, was you. When I found out they had kidnapped you I wanted to—well, hell, I was willing to do anything I had to do to get you out."

"Thank you," she said, smiling at me.

"Don't mention it. Uh, what else did Tricia tell you?"

"Oh, well," she said vaguely. "Different things."

I was flustered. "I guess she told you that she and I—"

"Really, Nolly," she said, "what difference would that make? It's not important, is it?"

"Um," I said. "Uh. Well, Irene, you see, I didn't think there was any way that, for instance, you and I would ever see each other again—"

"Of course not."

"And we really didn't know each other very well, did we? You and I, I mean."

"Hardly at all."

"The only thing is," I said, "I felt kind of tacky about it, all the same."

"No reason you should have," she said firmly. "Don't you think we might order now? I'm starved."

And we ordered. And we ate. And we had a brandy with our coffee to finish it off. And when we were all done and the check was paid and we were lingering over the last brandy I said, "Well, we've got a busy day tomorrow. Do you want the room with the bedbug or the room by yourself tonight?"

And she said, "'He's probably going to keep the TV going all night again, isn't he? So why don't we just let him have one of the suites all to himself?"

 

 

 

 

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Framed