A Man With Clean Hands

The man who came to my office had clean hands. I noticed that first, the way you notice the one thing in a room that doesn't fit, because in my line of work clean hands are rarer than honest ones, and a man who keeps his that clean usually has a reason. It was raining, which in this city is not a detail, it's the weather and the mood and the lighting all at once. The rain had been going three days and the gutters had given up and the whole town had that drowned, patient look it gets, like it was waiting for something to float past that it could blame. My office is two rooms above a dry cleaner's, which I have always found funny in a way that gets less funny the longer I sit in it. He didn't take the chair right away. He stood in the doorway and looked at the office the way a man looks at a suit he's decided not to buy. "You're Quennell," he said. "The investigator." "Sol Quennell. And you'd be the gentleman my answering service said wouldn't give a name." "Vendler." He sat down then, finally, folding himself into the chair with the care of a man who paid a great deal for his coat and didn't want the chair to forget it. "Arthur Vendler. You'll have heard the name." I had heard the name. Everyone in the city had heard the name Vendler — it was on a construction firm, and a charity gala or two, and, more recently and more quietly, on the edge of a story about a warehouse down on Pell Street that had burned to its bones eleven nights ago with a night watchman still inside it. The watchman had not come out. The papers had used the word tragedy, which is the word papers use when they haven't decided yet whether to use the word crime. "I've heard it," I said. "What do you need, Mr. Vendler?" "I need an alibi proven." He said it plainly, the way you'd order a coffee. "On the night of the fourth, the night that warehouse on Pell Street burned, I was nowhere near it. I was at my house, on the north side, the entire evening. I have people who will say so. I want a professional — a credible, independent professional — to confirm it, document it, and be prepared to stand behind it. The police have not charged me with anything. I'd like to keep it that way, and I'd like the keeping of it to look like it came from somewhere other than my own lawyers." It was a strange request and we both knew it. Most men who want an alibi proven want it because they've been accused. Vendler hadn't been accused of anything, not on paper. He was hiring me to build a wall before anybody had thrown a stone — and a man who builds a wall that early has usually heard the stone being picked up. "That's an unusual job," I said. "I'm an unusual man. I pay unusually too." He set an envelope on my desk, and it was a thick envelope, and he did not slide it across, he just left it there, in the middle, so I'd have to be the one to reach. "Half now. Half when you've done it. All I'm asking you to prove, Mr. Quennell, is the truth. I was at home. Surely a man can be paid for confirming the truth." He could. That was the thing. Everything he'd said was reasonable, and the money was real, and there wasn't one word in it I could point to and call a lie. But I've been doing this a long time, long enough that the job has worn a groove in me, and the groove was telling me something while my mouth was still being polite. It was telling me that Arthur Vendler had walked up the stairs past the dry cleaner's, in the third day of the rain, to hire me to prove he was innocent — and that the only kind of man who needs that proved so badly, so early, and so carefully laundered through a stranger, is a man who already knows that he is not. I reached out and I took the envelope. I'm not proud of it. But the rent on two rooms above a dry cleaner's doesn't pay itself, and besides, I wanted to know. That's always been my trouble. I wanted to know. "All right, Mr. Vendler," I said. "I'll prove where you were on the night of the fourth." I didn't say the rest of it. I didn't say: and if your alibi is as clean as your hands, I'll start wondering who scrubbed it.