Detective

was desperate to hear them, but if I stood up the client, the repercussions would make my life so complicated, that in my present state of mind, I’d probably never be able to straighten everything out. I felt like a juggler trying to keep seventeen balls going at once. The line of least resistance was to keep the appointment.
    It was in Manhattan, which helped. I went over the Third Avenue Bridge and took the FDR downtown.
    I parked the car at a meter two blocks away from the address. I must have been really rattled by that time, because the implications of the address “Bowery” never dawned on me till I got there.
    The hotel was a flop-house. The entrance was just a narrow stairway up to the second floor. I climbed it, and when I reached the top I felt as if my mind had given way.
    I was in a ’40s movie. The desk had a wire-mesh screen around it. The old man behind the desk wore a faded, wide-lapelled suit and a visor. A cigar butt was stuck in his mouth.
    The desk was at the top of the stairs, and was in between the hallway and staircase that led to the rooms in the back, and a medium-sized common room at the front.
    The common room was what blew my mind. It had a row of old wooden school desks along one wall, the kind that are a chair with a small oval top curving out from the right side, the kind I used to sit in in high school. On the opposite wall was a coffee and hot soup machine, and I knew it! The identical machine had been in the rec room of my old school. When I was twelve years old, I used to stick my hand up through the cup dispenser, and pull out packets of powdered chicken soup.
    A half-dozen men were sitting in the school desks. A few others were milling around, walking in and out. One young, black man with no shirt and his pants unbuttoned kept parading around for no discernible reason. But most of the men were old. Old, filthy bums, just like the ones who stopped you in the street. Or passed out in doorways. Or cleaned your windshield against your will, if you stopped at a red light.
    On a table by the front window was an old color TV. It had twisted rabbit ears, but the reception was still pretty good, although the color was almost indiscernible. And the men in the room were all watching it. Devoutly. Quietly. Glued to the set. These ragged old men, so help me god, were all watching “The Newlywed Game.”
    My client wasn’t home yet, so I sat down at one of the school desks, and watched with them.
    The wives had already answered the questions, and now the husbands were trying to match their answers. The question was, “In your neighborhood, does the sun rise in the east or the west?”
    One husband, a dumb, goofily handsome type, who had already gotten everything else wrong, said, “The east.” His wife, a young blonde, cried, “No, stupid!” and held up her card which said, “west.”
    “It said, in your neighborhood,” she cried in exasperation, and everyone on the show laughed at him.
    The bums watched all this without expression or comment. None of them volunteered any theories about the sunrise. They merely watched.
    I sat there as if in a dream. Is this real or just fantasy? Are these bums real? Are the people on TV real? Am I really a detective? Is Pluto real? Or illusion? Is that the fantasy and this the reality?
    I really didn’t know.

30.
    U NTIL I P LAYED THE T APES .
    I sat in my office, shivering from the rain, or from fear, or probably both, and played the tapes.
    They picked up right where the other had left off. Tony called Murphy, fed him the bullshit line Pluto had suggested, and got the name Nathan Armstrong and the phone number of the Whitney Corporation of Miami. Tony called the Whitney Corp. and, strangely enough, was told they had no such employee as Nathan Armstrong.
    After that phone call, I switched back from the phone tape to the room tape. I sped past the repeats of the two phone conversations, and got to the part where Tony hung up.
    TONY: “No such person.”
    PLUTO: “You’re sure?”
    TONY: “They’re sure.”
    PLUTO: “Any chance Murphy was wrong about the company?”
    TONY: “Not at all. He says he sat with the guy and went over the account. The guy knew all about it.”
    PLUTO: “You mean the guy learned all about it by stringing Murphy along. This is one slick customer.”
    Praise from Pluto was somehow the last thing I needed at the moment.
    TONY: “So this is the guy.”
    PLUTO: “It’s gotta be. It all fits. It’s the night