The Company She Keeps by Mary McCarthy Read Free Book Online

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    O’Bannon was a friend of Mr. Sheer’s, a private detective who was known in the trade for having a particularly choice collection of strikebreakers on call, but who had lately achieved a wider notoriety when he had been jailed for an attempt to burgle the district attorney’s safe during a political investigation. I had seen him once or twice waiting for Mr. Sheer, a short, thick-set man with flat feet who smoked a black cigar and wore his hat on the back of his head. With these salient occupational characteristics, he had intensified the sinister air of our outer room as he sat in a red velvet chair and stared pugnaciously at the glittering priests’ robes on the wall. (Mr. Sheer generally had a friend waiting for him in the outer room—there were a silver forger, a racetrack tout, a typewriter salesman, a men’s tailor, a professional gambler, and there was also, of course, Billie, Mr. Sheer’s red-haired mistress who drank. He would keep them there for hours while he talked to me in the office or made phone calls or “stepped out” on mysterious errands. When he was finally ready to see them he would come out and beckon them into the inner room with that hushed, ingratiating, yet faintly sadistic air that a dentist uses to summon his patients from the anteroom. At this time, however, O’Bannon, though fully qualified by his unprepossessing appearance, was not an habitué.)
    After this day, there was a lull during which O’Bannon was supposed to be looking for Carew. At length, Bierman began to call again, and soon Bierman was replaced by his lawyer, whose telephone manners were more suave but also more ominous. Still O’Bannon reported no success. I was growing frightened, and Mr. Sheer took on a hunted look; his nose stood out more sharply in his sunken face and his pale-green eyes burned with a desperate light. We stopped writing letters altogether and made no attempt to solicit business. I took to bringing a volume of Proust to the office with me, and Mr. Sheer passed the days listlessly reading the Social Register. But finally one morning Mr. Sheer brought the news that O’Bannon had got on the track of Carew’s girl. Carew himself, he said, had completely disappeared. The girl had the diamonds all right, but she demanded five hundred dollars before she would give them up. She and Carew had had a fight, Mr. Sheer said, and she maintained that Carew owed her money, and she was holding the diamonds as security.
    “But the diamonds don’t belong to her,” I exclaimed. “She will have to give them up.”
    Mr. Sheer shook his head sadly. “It’s just a hold-up,” he explained, with a certain worldly resignation.
    “I wouldn’t do it, Mr. Sheer,” I protested. “And where are you going to get the five hundred dollars?”
    For it seemed obvious to me that if Mr. Sheer had had anything salable he would already have sold it.
    “Well,” he said thoughtfully, “there’s that bronze.”
    “What bronze?”
    “Oh, you know, Custer’s Last Stand, ” he answered impatiently.
    I had never heard anything of this bronze before, and it was a surprise to find Mr. Sheer dealing in Americana. His tastes in general were sumptuous and European, and while every other dealer of Mr. Sheer’s category would feature a portrait of Lincoln or a Revolutionary bedspread showing the Continental Congress, Mr. Sheer, for some reason, eschewed anything with a patriotic theme, and would even speak contemptuously of Paul Revere silver. But what I did not yet realize was that he would sell anything he could get his hands on. Now and then he would sell a live dog, and on the day I was displaying the Rembrandt in the hotel room, I was also empowered to offer an Isotta-Fraschini for a thousand dollars. And, of course, if he were telling the truth, he had been trying to sell Bierman’s diamonds.
    When the colored boy had gone out and returned with a huge bronze, showing one tall American with a gun and a cowboy hat