The Referral Game

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 of 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 him 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 said. “Don’t guys usually think they got the short end of the stick in these cases?”
    “Yeah I guess, but this 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 of 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