well-shaped head of prematurely white hair worn close, crew-cut. Except for the neat narrow scar of an appendectomy, the body was clean, lean, long, muscular, and hairless.
I moved away from the pictures. Willie put them back into the portfolio. Marla lit a cigarette. I refused to let the silence happen again. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s not get melancholy again. What’s the story here?”
Now Willie lit a cigarette and smiled. “Same old story. A married gal, an unmarried guy. The gal has dough, the guy has nothing. Two pretty people with a lot of sex going for them.”
“What kind of guy?” I said.
“A nothing. A bartender.”
“There are bartenders that aren’t nothing.”
“This guy was nothing.”
“How do you know?”
“Preliminary research. Upon that basis, the guy was nothing. Handsome, worldly, and stupid.”
“That’s a lot to get out of a little preliminary research.”
Willie turned down the corners of his smile to lugubrious. “Peter,” he said evenly, “I need your criticisms like I need a hole in the head.”
“Willie,” I said, “don’t go superior on me.”
“Marla,” said Willie, “with your permission I’ll throw this oaf the hell out of here. Bodily.”
“Oafully nice of you,” I said, “but big as you are, I don’t think you can make it.”
“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” said Marla, “Saturday morning is always rough. Let’s try to hang on to our tempers and temperaments.”
“Well, he . . .” said Willie.
“Well, he . . .” I said.
“See?” said Marla.
We laughed, all of us, uncomfortably.
“Saturday morning with the sun shining is not exactly propitious for pornography,” said Marla, “especially when the lady is sitting outside in the library worried about blackmail with no idea of what we actually have in here.”
“I apologize, Mr. Chambers,” said Willie. “Acrimony is frequently nothing more than the rattling of guilt.”
“I apologize in return, Mr. Winkle,” I said. “Okay, we’ve rattled. So how do you know the guy is stupid?”
“In the line of my duty I listened to the tapes. The intellectual badinage was suffocating.”
“What do you expect in the dialogue of lovers? Wit, wisdom, and the profundities of Plato?”
“Hear, hear,” said Marla applauding by tapping out her cigarette.
Willie shrugged. “I should have stood in bed, huh? This is not my day. Once more I apologize and this time also to the handsome bartender in absentia.”
“I’m still stuck with the preliminary research,” I said.
“You’re not stuck with anything,” said Marla. “The preliminary research was practically nil. Jonathan Kiss came here in January with a feeling that his wife was cheating. A spouse rarely misses on that sort of feeling. I questioned him but he had no idea of the possible lover. The best he could come up with was the bartender. Seems last summer the Kisses vacationed up near Darien, Connecticut. Mrs. Kiss seemed to cotton to a bartender in a tavern called the Pink Poodle and the bartender in the Pink Poodle seemed to cotton to Mrs. Kiss. The palpable flirtation had annoyed Mr. Kiss but he had no proof that it had been anything more than a summer flirtation. In the fall the Kisses went home and that was that until the feeling of cheating crept up on friend husband.”
“I’m still stuck with the preliminary research.”
“The preliminary research was exactly this.” Marla snapped fire to a new cigarette. “In January, the day after we were retained, I went up to Darien to the Pink Poodle. The husband had described the bartender as a good-looking guy with a white crew-cut. There was no such bartender but there had been. His name was Richard Robinson Jackson, known as Ritchie. He was a big boozer when he wasn’t working. He was a hip character who was a bear with the women and he had quit the job in October. Period.”
“So where did you get the line on him?”
“Willie got the line.”
“Routine,” said Willie. “I tailed the dame. Ritchie now had a sweet little apartment at 222 East Sixty-second Street, discreet with no doorman, and his name as big as life downstairs in the bell-bracket.”
Marla took it up. “Routine established that she saw him afternoons, Monday, Tuesday, and Friday, and on sporadic evenings. She would come over at about eleven and stay until three, afternoons. Then they’d go out for some drinking at discreet little bars until five or so; then she’d go home.”
“Once the routine was established,” Willie said, “I dropped in while they were out and gave the joint the gander. Sweet little setup. Furnished apartment, but charmingly furnished. Three rooms. Ritchie now had a slew of new clothes, new jewelry and stuff, and lots of pocket money—all donated by my lady fair.”
“And how did you get educated?”
“By studying my lessons—from the tapes. But that first visit, all I did was give the place a gander, and take down the number of the unlisted phone.”
“And then?”
“We used Mike Rommel, Elsie Axelrod, and Artie Stouffer. Know them?”
“Very well. Aces.”
“We used them to rotate as tails on her. We supplied them with his phone number. When the loving couple went out, I went in. When the loving couple would give up on one of the watering places, one of the tails would wag by calling that phone number, and I would move right out.”
“Like that you set up the bugs for the tapes?”
“Correct. Then I had Manhattan Photo, Inc. set up automatic cameras for the pictures—”
“Manhattan Photo is top price.”
“We could afford. Our fee was ten thousand, in case you forgot.”
“I remember. How long did the deal take?”
“In six weeks we removed the equipment. The husband got the tape and one set of pictures on March 1.”
Marla shrugged. Her thronged blouse shrugged with her. “After that we expected a quick call from a lawyer arranging a raid, but the call never came. Yesterday another call came.”
“The husband,” Willie said.
“Yesterday at four,” Marla said. “Urgent, could I see him at four-thirty. That’s when he came and that’s when he registered as a weirdo.”
“Like
