Ice Blues

I drove toward my office on Central. The odd snowplow was to be seen here and there, but the wind kept whipping snow back onto the roads, which were slick in the eight-degree wet air. An old Ford Fairlane turned out too fast from the Westgate shopping plaza, hula-hula-ed into a new Mazda in the lane next to mine, and the Mazda's front end tinkled to the pavement. When both drivers emerged intact from their crumpled machines, I drove on.
The door to my office was off its hinges and leaned against the wall. Before I surveyed the mess beyond, I re-hung the door. The damage in the office was slight; the intruders were after five good-sized suitcases, not a microdot. So when they hadn't found them readily they'd given up and left.
The pie tin under the leaky radiator valve had been kicked aside, and the puddle of rusty water on the floor looked like about forty-eight hours' worth, which meant Thursday afternoon or thereabouts, back when Hankie-mouth still thought I had the money. I wanted to move about Albany freely now and was counting on Hankie-mouth's having been in touch with Joan Lenihan and lost interest in me-provided, of course, that that part (or any part) of her story had been true and that she hadn't kept the money, if she'd ever had possession of it in the first place. I, among many, had never actually set eyes on the cash.
I parked up the street from the house on Crow Street and slogged homeward for the first time in three days. The front door was ajar. Home is the place where, when you have to go there, the door occasionally falls in.
It did. The hinge bolts were on the floor nearby, so I completed my second door-hanging job of the afternoon. I brushed the blown snow off the hall table and toured the untidiness beyond. Timmy surely would reprimand me for carelessly leaving an overstuffed chair atop the couch, so I lifted it off.
Actual breakage was minimal but the disorder was spectacular, and I spent half an hour setting pieces of furniture upright, returning drawers to their chests and cabinets, and putting books back on their shelves in an order probably not recommended by the Library of Congress. With the front door shut now the place was starting to warm up. I gave the picture of the fire a poke and sat by it for a time.
I thought about the meaning of the housebreaking. Bowman had agreed to have his cops search the place on Thursday. This was a charade to discourage Hankie-mouth from a fruitless-to-him but aggravating-to-me break-in, and to leave the impression that I'd brought in the authorities and the law was on my side. Bowman perhaps had failed to carry out his duties.
Or, it occurred to me, the cops themselves had made this mess, though I doubted that; their sensitivity to property was higher than it was to people.
The other possibilities were: Hankie-mouth had simply gotten there before Bowman did; or Hankie-mouth was utterly unimpressed by the presence of the Albany police department and went in after the cops had left, believing- or perhaps knowing from experience-that the cops' skills as searchers were imperfect and they were likely to miss something. Or Hankie-mouth had been privy to inside police information and knew full well how meaningless and perfunctory the cops' visit had been. That one bothered me.
I showered, got into clothing appropriate for tramping around on the face of a glacier, fixed a plate of eggs, ate them, and made some phone calls.
The first was to Los Angeles, where I learned from my investigative contact there that three toll calls had been placed from Joan Lenihan's number during the period Tuesday through Friday night. Two of them-Thursday at 9:11 A.M. and again Thursday at 11:55 P.M.-had been lengthy calls placed to a number listed under the name Edward McConkey in Albany. I guessed that was Joan speaking to Corrine and reacting to the news of Jack's death. I'd find out. The third call had been placed on Friday at 4:36 P.M., Pacific time, to the same number in Troy, New York, to which a call had been placed on Monday, when Jack had been alive and still in LA. The phone company subscriber at that number was Florence Trenky. More and more, Flo seemed like a person worth getting to know.
Stevenson, Richard
Stevenson, Richard — [Donald Strachey Mystery 03] — Ice Blues
I dialed the Troy number.
"Yes?"
"This is Air Freight calling. Did one of our employees call you a short while ago? There's a lot of confusion down here, what with the snowstorm."
"No, but Mackie's upstairs waiting for you guys to call, been down here every five minutes. Did his delivery come in?"
"To whom am I speaking?"
"Flo Trenky. You the fella Mackie talked to this morning?"
"No, that must have been Bill."
"You want me to get him? Mackie's delivery come from LA?"
"I'm sorry, it hasn't. I just wanted to let him know that there are delays through Chicago, but we're doing everything we can under extremely difficult circumstances. Mr. Mackie is planning to pick up his parcels, have I got that right?"
"That's what he told me. It's Fay-Mack Fay's his right name."
"Oh, yeah, I see it here now. Well, if we haven't called yet, I suggest Mr. Fay check back with us early this evening. Could you relay that message, please?"
"Yeah, I'll tell 'im."
"Thank you, ma'am."
"Okay, sure."
I wrote the name in my notebook, Mack Fay, dug out my Troy phone directory, and copied down Flo Trenky's street address. I checked, but no Mack Fay was listed in the Troy, Albany or Schenectedy phone books.
When I called the Federal Building I was told by the duty officer in the drug-enforcement office that my friend the narc wouldn't be in until Monday morning but that I might reach him at home in Clifton Park. When I called there a tiny voice said to try again around six. I said I would and left my name.
I called American Airlines and was informed that O'Hare was expected to reopen in midafternoon and the first flight into Albany would arrive around 7:30 P.M., provided that Albany Airport itself didn't shut down. This was good. I had a few hours, at least, to get organized.
Except for the occasional lunatic, traffic crept along at a realistically fainthearted thirty-five in the fast lane of the interstate going north along the river. Near Menands a car had slid off the roadway into the median gulley and the tow truck trying to pull it out looked stuck in a drift. I eased in behind a plow and sand truck and followed it to the Green Island bridge.
The snow was still coming down in flakes the size of pages from the Farmers' Almanac.
Florence Trenky's place on Third Avenue was an old three-story row house with white aluminum siding on the flat front wall and a sign in the window that said ROOMS. I cruised four houses up to the end of the block and parked across the street at a Cumberland Farms convenience store. I bought eight dollars' worth of gas, a sodium-nitrite sub made with a stale bun, a foam cup of black vinegar the clerk casually referred to as coffee, and dined in the car with the engine idling, the lights off and the heater humming. The snow had begun to let up a bit by then, and I had a clear view of Florence Trenky's front door and the vehicle parked in front of it the green pickup truck that had followed me from Crow Street to the Albany main post office on Thursday.
I watched the lighted windows of the Trenky house, ate, drank, and listened to Garrison Keillor's good jokes about the weather in Minnesota. Whenever anybody began to play a dulcimer, I switched over to the six-o'clock jazz show on WMHT. At 6:40 I phoned my DE A contact from the pay phone in front of the store.
"Mack Fay. Name ring a bell?"