The Referral Game (A Frank Randall Mystery) Read online

  The Referral Game

  Steven Ehrman

  Copyright © 2012 Steven Ehrman

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN:1490396772

  ISBN-13: 978-1490396774

  DEDICATION

  To Jean, for her devoted encouragement

  My gat belched forth lead pellets faster than the speed of sound. Marko was dead before he heard the gun that killed him. I caught the girl as she fainted and held her close with my free arm. The cops were gonna roast me for this, but I had no choice.

  From Blood on Venus

  Chapter One

  The Call

  Chapter 2

  The Client

  Chapter 3

  The Neighborhood Watch

  Chapter 4

  The Club

  Chapter 5

  The Ex Wife

  Chapter 6

  The Ride

  Chapter 7

  The Meeting

  Chapter 8

  The Hospital

  Chapter 9

  The Fox

  Chapter 10

  The Tip

  Chapter 11

  The Girl

  Chapter 12

  The Truth

  Sneak Peak

  The Next Frank Randall Mystery

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To all of the hard-boiled writers who led the way.

  Chapter One

  The Call

  “…To recap, seven year old Sylvia Hanson remains missing at this hour. The Washington Heights youth was abducted from her front yard yesterday morning while playing with a puppy she had received for her birthday only two days before. Police report several active leads are being vigorously pursued. While police spokesman, Dennis Schmidt would not speculate on a motive for this crime, this station has learned that no ransom note has been received by the family. The distraught parents have made a public appeal for the return of their daughter. Mrs. Hanson, in an emotional statement today…”

  I clicked the radio off. There’s almost never a happy ending for that sort of case. It was one of the reasons that I didn’t miss being a cop any more than I did. Dealing with parents in a situation like that was as close as you can get to impossible. I had quit the force three years earlier after a tough case of that kind. That little girl had been named Debbie Martin. I can still see her picture in my mind. A tiny wisp in pigtails with a beautiful smile. She had disappeared from a playground near her home. With no real leads to go on, we rounded up the usual known perps. We grilled dozens of suspects, ran down dead end leads, and checked stories for holes. It was grunt work, but it was all we had. Whether it was good police work or dumb luck, I caught a suspect in a lie about his whereabouts at the time of the abduction. Homing in on him, I hammered him for hours catching him in one false statement after another. Finally, he broke down and confessed that he had taken the girl, and strangled her in a panic, after she began screaming. He led us to the body. He had buried her at an abandoned landfill. By the time we got to her she had been there for weeks. She didn’t look like her picture anymore. But we had our man; case closed.

  I was the hero of the day. The papers lauded my detective skills and had me on the fast track to big things. But I didn’t feel like I was on my way to anywhere. At least nowhere I wanted to go. I found that I couldn’t go a day without Debbie’s face in my thoughts. Maybe I wasn’t as hard, wasn’t as strong as the other guys. They were affected to, but they could let it go and I couldn’t seem to. It killed my career in the department. My superiors took it as a sign of weakness, maybe even instability. Captain Vince Woodward, my immediate superior, especially felt that I didn’t have what it took to be a good cop. He had never liked me. He didn’t like young cops and he thought that I had made detective too quickly, too easily. He made it clear to me that he was going to be on my back

  “Randall,” he said, “if you’re going to moon around this squad room forever over one murder case, then you’re no good to me, yourself, or anyone else in this department.”

  I hated him for saying it, but maybe he was right. So, before they chained me permanently to a desk or squeezed me out altogether, I quit. I don’t like that word, but that’s what I did. I still don’t like to think about it.

  I leaned back in my chair to let the rest of the day wash over me. If I could just get through this Friday that was ahead of me I would have the weekend to recover from these forty-eight hours days life was throwing at me lately. But I was going to have to take a case soon or next month’s service charge was liable to wipe out what was left in the bank. I could always sell my car. That would tide me over for a few months. A car in city was a luxury anyway, parking was hard to find, and expensive when you did. Looking around at the office nothing looked like it would bring any coin at a hockshop. A desk, a few high back chairs, filing cabinet and a couple of paintings that looked as if they were from the Holiday Inn collection. It was depressing to look at it so I stopped. Being a private investigator, many of my clients never even saw the place. In some ways it was just a phone booth and a mailbox. All this for $195 a month, and that included a cleaning lady I had never seen in all the time I’d been there. But for the client who expected an office this was it.

  It was almost five on Friday afternoon when the telephone rang. I jumped a bit in my seat because the phone hadn’t rung since that morning, and that had been a woman with a missing French poodle. I had passed. I picked up the newspaper on my desk from yesterday and scanned the headlines. Nixon was going to China for some reason. That didn’t sound like money. It had been raining all day and I had spent the last couple of hours watching rain drops slide down the window pane, and betting which one would get to the bottom first. I was about fifty in the hole to myself, and I was glad that I had declared happy hour open at three o’clock as I always did on Friday when there was nothing going on. The caller on the other end probably just wanted to sell me some life insurance. But in the unlikely event that it was a client, I answered it.

  I had barely gotten the phone to my ear when I heard someone say. “Frank, this is Bill.”

  Two things; first, he didn’t let me say hello before he started talking. I hate that. And second, there was no need to tell who it was. I would have recognized that monotone delivery anywhere. Bill Vinson and I had been partners on the force about a hundred years ago. In all the time I had known him I couldn’t remember him breaking out of that voice. The guy was totally unflappable. You would have thought he was bored as hell, if you didn’t know him. He was a fifty-eight year old bachelor, with a flair for the ladies, and a weakness for the horses. He was a great guy and my best friend.

  He had argued with me to no avail during the aftermath of the Martin affair. He didn’t think that I should have quit. He said that I just thought too much. He even went to bat for me with Capt. Woodward, endangering his own status on the force. When he found that he couldn’t talk me out of leaving it had been he who suggested that I use my skills to start a private detective agency. He helped me set it up, and he steered clients my way when he could.

  “Listen,” he said, without waiting for a response from me, “I got a call from an old friend of the family, a retired professor out at the university, guy named Edgar Pomeroy, came to me with a problem that’s more in your line.

  “So, what’s the story?”

  “It’s sort of a missing person case,” he said warily.

  “Yeah,” I replied, “ And why isn’t that a police matter?”

  “Because he’s looking for his ex-wife.”

  “So she’s not missing so much as he just doesn’t know where to find her, is that it?”

  “In a nutshell,”
he replied blandly.

  “Aw, come on, Bill, you know I don’t like domestic cases. It’s like volunteering for a Purple Heart. You can get better insurance rates as a Brinks driver, and they’ve got body armor,” I said, with feigned exasperation. “Couldn’t you just get me a job as a third shift convenience store clerk?”

  Bill chuckled a bit, but I could tell that he wasn’t going to be stopped, and true to form he steamrolled right ahead.

  “Listen, it’s not like that. Take my word for it, this guy’s harmless. He’s come into some money and he thinks his ex deserves a cut.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked. “Don’t guys usually think they got the short end of the stick in these cases?”

  “Yeah, I guess, but this is kind of an unusual situation. See this guy Pomeroy lived with his mother and his brother, a guy named Silas, in a mansion down off Brookline.”

  “I thought you said he didn’t have any bread. That’s a pretty ritzy neighborhood for a pauper. Wait a minute, I know the place.”

  I remembered driving by the Pomeroy place a few times. When the old man had died it, was in the news and I found myself in the area soon after and took a gander at the mansion. It was an old mausoleum that looked more like an old castle than a residence.

  “Well, that’s part of it. You see, the old lady was the one with the money, once her husband died. The boys had nothing. And the story is she held the purse strings pretty tight. These boys are both getting up there, Edgar is about fifty and Silas must be almost sixty, and neither one had ever married.”

  “Mama didn’t approve?”

  “Right, she was happy just to have them to herself. Anyway, Edgar meets this woman named Paula Wray a few years ago, and falls hard for her. You know how a guy that age can get. He only sees her for a month or so and bang, they get married without telling anyone. And to top it all off it turns out this Wray broad is, let’s just say an exotic dancer and leave it at that. They were only married for a year or so, and then split. Couldn’t take the frost job she was getting from his family, I guess. Anyway the mother died a couple of weeks ago and she split the money between the two brothers. So now that Edgar has some of his own he wants to see that his ex gets what he feels was coming to her all along.”

  “It’s still got that divorce work feel to it,” I said.

  “Listen,” Frank went on, “all I told him was that you would talk to him. If he gives you bad vibes, then skate. I just thought you could use the work.”

  He was right about that, but it rankled a little anyway.

  “All right, when does he want to meet?”

  “Tonight, he’ll be there at six. I already set up an appointment for you. No charge,” he said, with a laugh.

  “What if my dance card had been full?”

  “Is it?”

  I let that hang fire.

  “Okay, you win. But if he turns out to be a screwball you’re buying the next round.”

  “I’ve bought the last ten times, why break a streak.”

  “Okay, okay, then we’ll make it eleven,” I said. “How are things at the old precinct?”

  “It’s pretty tense,” he replied. “The media is all over us to make an arrest on this Hanson thing. And Captain Woodward is pushing for an arrest too.”

  “Anything look promising?”

  “Are you sure you want to hear about this, Frank?”

  “I’m not a kid, Bill. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t want to know,” I replied, with a little heat.

  “Frank, we both know you’ve got a problem in this area.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Okay, but if Woodward hears that I leaked anything to a PI, and you most of all, he’ll burn me good.”

  After all this time Woodward still had it out for me. He had gotten his way. He had practically run me out of the department. I wondered why he still hated me. Well, at least it was one thing I could count on. I didn’t have many of those.

  “Consider me the Sphinx,” I said.

  “All right, there’s not much to tell anyway. We pulled in the usual suspects on this kind of case. We got half a dozen in interrogation right now, and they’re just what you’d expect under the circumstances, child molesters and various sex offenders. I don’t have to tell you the recidivism rate for these guys. One of them lived right around the corner from the Hanson place and just got out of the pen on a sexual battery charge involving a minor. You know the type.

  “Yeah,” I sighed. I had seen enough of them in my time in uniform as he well knew. An hour-long shower at the end of a day like that and you still felt dirty. You wondered how these guys lived with themselves. At least Lady Macbeth had the good taste to go mad, and all she did was put the knife in her old man’s hand. Even so, the blood stuck to her. Something like that, maybe I heard it wrong. That Shakespeare was a riot.

  “It’s a crazy world, Frank. Don’t let it get to you.”

  “Thanks for the analysis,” I shot back. “And, Bill, about the referral…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it,” he said, and hung up without saying goodbye. I hate that.

  Chapter 2

  The Client

  Thanks to Bill, I now had an hour to kill. I pulled my travel chess set out of my desk and stared at it. It was one of those fold up cases where the men have magnets on the bottom so they don’t slide around. It looked pretty chintzy, but it was a nice time waster, and I could carry it with me. I had been playing some guy I’d never met, except by mail, for the past two months. I saw a notice in the back of a magazine for a chess partner and replied to it. I never could talk anybody into playing for real. He was beating the pants off me, but what really bothered me was he was probably some twelve-year-old kid, who went around at the school playground telling his buddies he how he was scamming me into believing he was an adult, and winning the chess game all at the same time. I was in a rotten position all over the board. I was up a rook and a pawn, but he had taken my queen. When a queen doesn’t have to worry about another queen, that’s bad news.

  Something made me feel like I was being watched. I looked up from my desk, and there she was. She was standing in the doorway, staring at me. She didn’t say a word. She never did. She was a woman of roughly twenty-five years. Long brown hair parted down the middle and brown eyes. She had high cheekbones and clear skin. I don’t know what her teeth looked like, because she never smiled. She was wearing a dark blue dress belted at the waist and black low heel shoes. Her arms were at her side and she looked so sad. I don’t remember anymore when I first saw her. She just showed up at times. I used to try and talk to her, but I had long since given up on trying to get a response. I leaned back in my chair and stared back at her trying to match her own placid demeanor. My head began to throb and I shut my eyes tightly for a minute as the pain washed over me. When I opened my eyes, she was gone.

  I poured myself a drink; out of the bottle I kept in my desk, took a pull, and stared out of the window. I was still doing both when I heard a man clear his throat.

  “Mr. Randall?”

  I looked up to find a tall, thin man standing in the doorway. The office was dim from the approaching dusk. I hadn’t had the overhead light on during the day and the harsh light from the hallway silhouetted the man against it. It gave him a curious halo effect. But the face was hidden; it could have been anyone. For some reason the hair on the back of my neck stood up. Sometimes this office building gets to me at night when I’m all alone in it. Kid stuff, walking over your grave kind of stuff. I don’t know what got into me, but I realized that I hadn’t answered him when he asked again.

  “Mr. Randall?”

  “Yeah, I’m Randall. Excuse me. You caught me a bit off guard,” I replied. “Would you get the lights? It’s on the wall to your right.”

  He flipped the switch and the room sprang into view. Instead of a sinister dark figure, I saw him as he was, a man in a gray suit with a gray vest and a gray bow tie. Bill said
he was fifty, but he looked like an old fifty. His pale face was craggy with a large reddish nose and thin lips. His eyes under his black frame glasses were red rimmed and a watery brown. As he strode forward to the desk I noticed that he walked with a slight stoop that made him lean forward and seem anxious. His hair was gray on the side, with the most preposterous brown toupee I had ever seen. It screamed rug. Why can’t some guys just accept that they were balding? Everybody he knew must have wanted to tell him how silly he looked. But, I’ll bet no one ever did.

  As he reached my desk he stuck out his hand and announced: “I’m Edgar Pomeroy. I believe I have an appointment.”

  I rose and grasped his outstretched hand. It was large, but without strength or calluses. This man had never done a days labor in his life.

  “Yes, Mr. Pomeroy, I was expecting you. Or is it Dr. Pomeroy? In any case, have a seat,” I said, pointing to either of the two chairs facing my desk.

  He chose the one on the left and sat down.

  “I am a Ph.D.,” he admitted. “But, Dr. Pomeroy seems to make people nervous, so please, let’s do without it. The only worse title is Professor. Once folks hear that they are convinced you’re an old fossil who has spent his entire life with your nose in a book.”

  Since that was exactly what I had been thinking I broke from his gaze and shifted uncomfortably in my chair.

  “Besides,” he continued, “I’m only a poor Professor Emeritus. It’s a fancy way for the university to say ‘Don’t come to work anymore.’”

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Pomeroy?” I asked, to get back on track.

  “Well, it’s somewhat embarrassing and personal. I need to be assured of discretion.”

  “I’m not a priest, Mr. Pomeroy. Testimony can be forced from a private investigator, but only in a grand jury or a court trial. Other than that I can promise anything you tell me, or that I discover while acting as your agent, will remain private in the absence of a criminal act.”