Ice Blues

"Not always," I said. "Someone he trusted killed him."
She didn't flinch, just stared at me with eyes full of suppressed rage, the cigarette poised in the air, smoke curling around the feathery close-cropped hair, which was the color of the smoke. She was sixtyish, small-boned but full-breasted, with a long worn face and a slight overbite. She wore jeans and a brown UCLA sweatshirt and was not so tanned as Gail Tesney, though her slight body gave off an aura of tensile strength. She came across as a woman capable of remarkable feats of work or pleasure, and a woman not to be messed with.
She said, "I'll pay your expenses. But there is no fee, Mr. Strachey. I'm sorry, but your client is dead."
"Who killed him?"
"I don't know. Nothing anyone in Albany does surprises me.
"You think it was one of the politicians he was bargaining with?"
"I suppose."
"But not dope dealers?"
"Jack wasn't doing that anymore. He told me. And he never lied to me. He didn't have to. We were like that."
"His death must be very hard for you to accept."
She blew smoke out the side of her mouth, turned to watch it trail away, and said, "Yes. It is."
"Did Jack know he was in danger? Did you?"
A faint shiver passed through her. "No. No, not that kind of danger."
"In his letter to me, Jack said someone was very angry with him. You said you read the letter before he mailed it. Who was he referring to?"
She sat there seeming to work at manufacturing a careful response in her mind. "Perhaps he meant me," she said.
"Why you?"
"Because I was against this whole business from the very beginning. Jack was like a giddy child with it, and I was the mother telling him it was foolish and irresponsible. There is no way to save Albany. I told him that. The place is rotten to the core, and Jack was wasting his time. There are people in Albany who can kill you just by touching you. The only thing you can do is stay away from them. I know this."
"I take it your own experience there was not a happy one."
A hard look. "Not happy? Don't trivialize what I am telling you, Mr.
Strachey. Yes, I was a young Catholic lesbian on Walter Street married to a drunk, and there was not a day that passed from my twenty-third year to my forty-first year when I did not consider sticking my head in the oven and letting the Lenihans try to explain it to the neighborhood. If it hadn't been for Jack and Corrine-for their needing me, and for the love they gave to me-I would have done it. Except for my children, I detested my life in Albany, and until my husband died I was too weak a person to change it.
But my own experience was my own doing. It was all I knew at the time, and I would have done the same thing in any town. Albany's rottenness is bigger than that."
Tesney was sitting with her chin in hands, listening hard, trying to make sense of what we were hearing, as was I.
I said, "I think I get the drift of what you're saying, but I'm not sure. Can you elaborate?"
She said, "No. I can't. It's not worth it."
"All right. For now, then, who is Al Piatek?"
She blew smoke toward a half-open window where the breeze made the smoke shudder suddenly and vanish. "Albert Piatek was a very sad young man. He should not have died. But he's gone now, and it's better that you let him rest. Can you understand that?"
"That can't be. You know it."
Her look was bitter. "Do I know that? I didn't know I knew that."
"An Albany police detective by the name of Bowman is on his way out here.
He'll want to question you, and he'll be checking on Piatek. It's better that I discover first whatever there is to know. I think you understand that."
Her face reddened and she abruptly stubbed out the cigarette. She stood, her whole body working, uncertain about whether to leave the room or smash a lamp over my head. She left the room suddenly and a door slammed down the hallway.
Gail Tesney sat gazing fiercely at the ceiling, tears streaming down her face. She looked over at me after a moment and said, "Please leave now.
Would you mind?"
"I'll have to come back. I'm sorry you're caught in the middle of this."
"It's all right. I choose to be where I am. I'm sick of it, but it's all right."
"The money is in those bags in the dining room, isn't it?"
She quickly shook her head. "No. No, those bags are empty."
"Joan said Jack showed her his letter to me. Five keys were taped to the bottom of it. It is my belief that just before Jack shipped the bags, his mother removed the keys from the letter, opened the bags, took the money, filled the bags with newspapers, locked them, and replaced the keys in the letter. Why?"
"I don't know! I don't know! I don't know! Please-" She snatched a Kleenex out of a box with one hand and gestured toward the door with the other. As I moved toward it, Tesney turned toward me and blurted, "I can only take so much of this. Wait." She went to the bookshelf, pulled down a copy of Michener's Space, and removed a newspaper clipping that had been stuck inside the jacket. This she handed to me and said, "If you can put an end to this damned confusion, please do it. I know I can't. I've tried and I just can't get through to her. You try. I've had just about as much of this insanity as I can take. "
I said, "I guess you know that you might have to take some more," and her look said she knew it.
Outside, I studied the newsclip, an obituary for Albert R. Piatek, Funston Lane, West Hollywood, who had died the previous October 28 "after a long illness."
 ELEVEN 
Back at the motel I phoned an LA investigator who'd done some work for me, as I had for him, in times gone by. I asked him to use his phone-company contacts to get a list of calls made from Joan Lenihan's number to Albany, New York, over the previous weekend when Jack had been there. It was 2:25 when I called and he said he'd have the list by five o'clock.
I phoned my service in Albany, which had two messages. One was from an unnamed caller with a muffled voice who asked the operator to inform Mr.
Strachey that "you are dead." The other was from my contact at the Department of Motor Vehicles notifying me that the license plate number I'd asked him to track down belonged to a Mrs. Bella Kunkle of North Greenbush, New York, and that she had reported her station wagon stolen from a supermarket parking lot Thursday evening. The theft appeared to have been professionally done.
I consulted a West Hollywood street map in the motel office, then trekked the eight blocks down Sunset to Funston Lane, where I turned right along a narrow residential street lined with small wooden beige bungalows set close together. The tiny houses looked as if they should have had a Lionel train whooshing this way and that way among them. Here and there a lawn sprinkler exhaled a misty spray over a six-foot square of green-bearded earth, though most of the water, having nearly completed its circuitous journey from the Rockies to the Pacific, ran into the gutter and down a grate.
Number 937 Funston Lane had a walkway leading up to a three-by-four-foot side porch with some bougainvillea clinging to a sagging trellis. I rapped on the door, which had a square of window in it with the view inward blocked by a curtain the color of the house. The curtain was shoved aside and a male face peered out at me. The door opened.