The Bessie Blue Killer. Richard A. Lupoff
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and looked at Lindsey. The roll baskets were empty. The waiters were clearing away the dinner plates. At the head table a major corporate big shot, Ms. Johanssen from National, was looking around. Clearly, she was getting ready to make a speech.
Lindsey asked Aurora, “What did he do?”
The spotless white linen tablecloths were still spotless. International Surety people ate carefully at corporate banquets.
Desmond “Ducky” Richelieu, the director of International Surety’s Special Projects Unit/Detached Status, was on his feet, waiting for the room to quiet so he could introduce their distinguished guest, Ms. Johanssen from National.
The murmured conversation dropped to a dead silence. Huh, maybe it was Cole Porter, not Gershwin and not Jerome Kern either.
Aurora Delano said, “He came home from a job interview. I knew it had gone badly and the poor lamb was so upset, he had to do something. So he broke my arm.”
CHAPTER TWO
The International Surety suite was upstairs in a glittering office tower just off Speer Boulevard. The receptionist had a sign on her desk. Mrs. Blomquist. She wore her hair on top of her head like a Gibson Girl. Lindsey could not remember ever seeing a woman with skin that looked so pale and powdery. He wondered what she had to do to make it look like that, and why she did it.
The thin air made for a snappy morning even in May, but Lindsey had packed his topcoat and taken a cab wearing a medium-weight gray suit. He usually dressed a little more casually than this, but he was on his way to visit his new boss and he didn’t want to look like a California swinger.
Mrs. Blomquist made Lindsey wait while she buzzed Mr. Richelieu, then made him wait some more. Lindsey browsed through the Rocky Mountain News, looking for stories with California datelines. He could care less about scandals in the Colorado state legislature, shakeups in the Denver Police Department, new real estate developments in Arapahoe and Elbert Counties, or the draft strategy of the embryonic National League baseball team that seemed to have the local papers in a complete tizzy. He was eager to get home.
Richelieu stood up when Lindsey walked in. The sign on the inner door said simply, Desmond Richelieu. Nobody called him Ducky to his face. He wore a neatly-trimmed moustache and rimless bifocals that glinted in the sunlight pouring through his office window. He looked like a steel-engraving of the French Cardinal Lindsey had once seen in a high school library edition of The Three Musketeers. There was even a shadowy suggestion of the Cardinal’s dark, pointed goatee. He gestured Lindsey to a seat.
“I always like to have a chat with each of our graduates before they head out on their first assignment. I imagine you’d heard that.”
Lindsey nodded. He’d carried his attaché case with him and he placed it carefully on the carpet beside his chair.
“The way the Chief used to do it when I worked for the Bureau.” Richelieu made a barely perceptible motion with his head. His hair was very black with just a tuft of pure white above each ear. Richelieu had combed his hair with some sort of pomade that made it look like glossy corduroy.
Lindsey followed Richelieu’s gesture with his eyes. A tastefully-framed, diploma-like document stood out against the elegant paneling. Beside it hung a blown-up glossy of a boyish Richelieu shaking hands with a dumpy, bulldog-faced man in a double-breasted pinstriped suit. The picture was cropped so you couldn’t see either man’s feet.
“It’s a funny thing,” Richelieu said. “The FBI is like the Mafia. Once you’re in it, you’re never really out.” He shook his head sadly. “But once John Edgar was gone, the Bureau was never the same. Mixed up in Watergate, White House interference. They never got away with that when the Chief was alive. He took on everybody. The Kennedys, everybody. But once he was gone, why, it was never the same.”
Lindsey had heard that J. Edgar Hoover had been sensitive about his height, had stood on a box for photo-ops with his underlings. Bureau photogs knew that they had to keep the focus up and not show the box. Agents knew that they had to keep their eyes up and not see it, either. Failure to comply could cost a man his career. He might not get tossed out of the Bureau, but he’d reach age sixty-five counting pencils in the Fargo, North Dakota, branch office.
Richelieu leaned his forearms on the glass top of his desk. The glass was polished to a perfect sheen. There was nothing beneath the glass but polished mahogany and nothing on top of it except for Richelieu’s spotless sleeves. “When Harden at Regional recommended you for SPUDS, he said you were reluctant to take the job, Hobart. Is that right?”
Lindsey hated his first name. He preferred Bart, didn’t mind Lindsey, hated Hobart. He said, “Yes, sir.”
“That’s all right, a lot of my people join up reluctantly. What happened to your job in Walnut Creek?”
Richelieu didn’t have Lindsey’s personnel folder on his desk. He must have studied it before Lindsey was admitted to the inner sanctum. Lindsey said, “I was hospitalized.”
“Yes. Shot in the shoulder, wasn’t it?”
“Mr. Harden brought someone else in to run the office. I thought Ms. Wilbur could handle it until I got back, but Mr. Harden brought in Elmer Mueller instead. When I reported back, Mueller had my job and I wound up in SPUDS.”
Richelieu leaned back. Lindsey half expected to see a flunky run in and polish the desk-glass. Richelieu said, “You’ve doubtless heard that we have a high rate of attrition in SPUDS.”
Lindsey nodded.
Richelieu kept on going. He had not waited for the nod. “It’s true. You’ll get tough cases. Some people think SPUDS is International Surety’s own little Gestapo, its own little Gulag. Neither of those is true, Hobart. We’re not police. We don’t torture anybody. We’re very law-abiding. We are a little bit like detectives, but then I understand that you like to play Sherlock. Is that true?”
“No, sir. I just try to do my job, sir. I’m a claims adjuster, that’s all. Somebody’s store is burgled, we pay for the loss. Somebody’s car gets stolen, we pay fair value.”
“Yes, yes. But if you can recover the stolen goods you can save International Surety a lot of money. You’ve done that, haven’t you?”
Lindsey nodded. The man was playing cat and mouse with him. He had to know that Lindsey had saved the company a fortune in rare 1940s comic books and an even bigger fortune on a stolen 1928 Duesenberg. Each case had involved a murder, as well, but the company paid him to save money, not to catch killers. He did that on his own time, and Harden had used it against him more than once.
“I’m not going to spend a lot of time reviewing material that you learned in your seminars,” Richelieu said. “If you do a good job for me, you can make a good thing out of SPUDS. You’ll have lots of freedom. I understand you have a penchant for breaking rules, Hobart. You should be happy working for me.”
Richelieu swung around in his heavily padded leather chair. He seemed to be gazing out the window. Lindsey followed Richelieu’s glance. The sunlight glinted off Cherry Creek. Lindsey wondered if he would see Perry Mason pacing regally beside the waterway, a black Burberry concealing his girth, a polished walking stick in his hand. TV shows and motion pictures, magazine covers and record sleeves. Mother had kept him tied to her for so many years, where other kids grew up riding bikes and playing ball he’d lived a life of media images and his perception of the world was permanently formed. Sometimes it was useful, sometimes frustrating, but there it was.
“I think I’m ready for my first assignment,” Lindsey said.
Richelieu whirled back. The eyes behind those rimless bifocals flashed. Clearly, he did not like having anyone else take the lead in a conversation. Last night at the Broker he’d deferred to Ms. Johanssen, but as Lindsey knew, she represented the Corporate structure. Richelieu had saluted not the man—or woman—but the rank. And Richelieu outranked Lindsey, and expected Lindsey to acknowledge that relationship.
Once upon a time Lindsey would have