A Private Party

by William Ard

  Bannerman stared at the holes in the mouthpiece.

  "Yes, Tim," he said dully. "You convince them."

  The friends said goodbye and hung up. Bannerman sat silently at his desk for several minutes, his hands flat on the top and immobile, his eyes gazing at nothing. Then, via the intercom, he sent for Bill Weir.

  The young detective entered the office slowly, closing the door behind with a careful whoosh, and Bannerman's gaze followed him across the room. But when Weir was at the desk, the older man looked past him.

  "When are you and Ann planning to get married?" he asked.

  "Pretty soon, Lieutenant. Why?"

  "I'd do it right away, Bill."

  "Right away?"

  For a moment, their glances met. Bannerman turned his head away.

  "Yes," he repeated, "right away."

  A wife, he added to himself, can't be made to testify against you. Even if you've killed a man for her.

  CHAPTER 3

  It looks like you've bought a boy," Timothy Dane told the three men grouped irregularly around his desk. It was a statement of fact, unenthusiastic, spoken in a tone of voice that made his sentiments clear though unspoken.

  He sat unrelaxed in the swivel chair, his tall body seemingly on guard, his fingers toying restlessly with a silver letter opener.

  "I didn't know you were so well connected," said Bert Hill darting his eyes to the just-replaced telephone.

  “You know it now, Mr. Hill. Want to call it off?"

  "No," said the lawyer tentatively. "Not unless there's been some misunderstanding about what you're supposed to do for us."

  It won't be my misunderstanding. You want to know who killed Al Stanzyck."

  Hill's voice cut over the investigator's sharply.

  "We want value received," he said. "We're not interested in who didn't kill him."

  “Meaning your theory about a policeman." Dane bent forward, his lean, good-looking face serious. "Why did you come to me if you think that? Do I have a reputation as a cop-hater?"

  “As far as we're concerned," said the lawyer, "you haven't got any reputation at all. We came to you to satisfy the Fidelis Life Insurance Company."

  "You did what?"

  "There's a policy involved," said Hill. "A technical one. Stanzyck and ourselves took out a revolving life-insurance policy at the time we became officers of the Loaders' Union. It's a type of partner's insurance, but as I say, there are technicalities."

  "Covering the circumstances of death?"

  "And other things, Dane. But the death clause is what concerns us now."

  "How couldn't Stanzyck be killed?"

  "You mean the policy's intent?"

  "Exactly. Fidelis was concerned about the—ah—risk involved with officers of an independent loading union. And while the terms of the policy rule out death by misadventure, the intent is toward misadventure in union activity. Stanzyck was not on union business when he was shot and killed."

  Timothy Dane's angular face was warmed by a grin.

  "You say," he said to Hill.

  "I know," answered the smaller man. "The four of us were the business of the union. We had just concluded a very amicable meeting of the officers. We left Stanzyck in the meeting room, all business concluded for the night. Five minutes later he was viciously murdered in a room at the opposite end of the hall—"

  "Why?"

  "That," drawled Nick Mayer, "is for you to find out, bright guy."

  Dane's wide-set eyes swept the blond man's face and came back to Hill.

  "How much was Stanzyck insured for?" he asked.

  "Each of us," said Hill, "is insured for one million dollars."

  "Payable how?"

  "Equally to the surviving members of the executive committee," was the answer.

  Dane's lips pursed in a silent whistle. "An expensive death," he said, looking slowly at the three of them. "Three hundred and thirty thousand apiece."

  "What's that supposed to mean?" asked Nick Mayer.

  "It means it was worth while, for somebody."

  Mayer stood up.

  "Personally," he said, "I scratch this guy."

  "Take it easy, Nick," said Bert Hill. "We want to play ball with the insurance company."

  "How about you?" Dane asked Limey King, his voice plainly disinterested in whatever the man thought.

  But King chose to ignore the affront. His unhappy glance settled on Dane's face and he slowly traced his bony fingers over the visible skeleton beneath his skin.

  "Al was cut down by a cop," he intoned, the voice echoing in the small office. "All you got to do is dig up the cop."

  “What makes you think it was a cop?" Dane asked.

  King's round eyes settled on Hill. The lawyer opened his briefcase and handed Dane a Manila file.

  In it were photostats of letters, all typed on plain paper, all addressed to the President of the Loaders' Union.

  Dane read the first one: "Stanzyck is guilty. Don't try to spring him. Yours truly, J. Lex."

  "We received that," said Hill, "two days after Al was arrested on that phony rap."

  Dane's eyes widened quizzically. "Phony?"

  "Of course it was phony. It was just another trick to discredit our union."

  "By whom?"

  "By everybody! The big pier union, the stevedores, the bosses—"

  "And the lousy cops," added Nick Mayer venomously.

  The dark-haired investigator and the blond man studied each other quietly. Finally Dane shrugged and read the photostat of the second note.

  "You're throwing good money after bad," it said. "Stanzyck is not going to beat this rap. Yours truly, J. Lex."

  "That one arrived," said Hill, "the day after that so-called witness killed himself."

  "Is that what you think? That he killed himself?"

  "All I know about it," answered the lawyer blandly, "is what the District Attorney told the newspapers. The man had lied about Al and was worried about the consequences."

  Dane couldn't restrain a laugh. "So he jumped out of a window to keep from being killed."

  "Those weren't the consequences I meant," Hill said quickly.

  "Of course, not." Dane read the next short letter. "You are going to a lot of unnecessary trouble. Stanzyck is going to get what’s coming to him no matter what." And once again, "Yours truly, J. Lex."

  Dane laid the photostats aside. "What makes you think a policeman is writing these?"

  "The name 'J. Lex' for one thing," said Hill.

  "Meaning John Law? That's not proof."

  "And this letter here, for another," said the lawyer, taking the last letter from the group. Clipped to it was the stat of the envelope. "Notice the postmark," he told Dane.

  On the postmark was the information: "City Hall P.O." and at the bottom of the small circle, "7 P.M."

  "That letter," said Hill triumphantly, "was in the mail before seven o'clock the night the second stevedore was shot. The time of the actual shooting was six fifteen—but the District Attorney didn't reveal the identity of the stevedore until ten o'clock that night. And until that time, the only people who knew who had been shot were in the police department."

  Dane nodded slowly and read the final note: "All you bought for your money was trouble. Yours truly, J. Lex." The detective tossed it back. "Okay," he said. "If what you say about the time element is true, then it does look like someone who got his information from the police teletype."

  "Exactly. And we want that someone found."

  Dane stood up, his face clouded. "I'll do what I can," he said uneasily.

  "How about your fees?" asked the lawyer. "Fifty per diem and expenses? Is that satisfactory?"

  "Sure." His mind was elsewhere.

  "Keep in mind that there's a great deal of money involved, Dane. One million dollars . . ."

  "Sure, sure."

  "Then we'll be hearing from you," said Hill.

  The detective nodded and watched the three men begin to file out of his o
ffice.

  Nick Mayer paused at the door and turned around. Tilted across his face was a humorless smile.

  "Don't give us a rooking, will you, detective? Remember, you're not playing around with little boys."

  "I'll try to keep it in mind," Dane told him. "Close the door on your way out."

  He sat down at the desk again, staring at the strange series of letters and thinking of what his visitors had told him about them.

  Visitors, hell! They were his clients now. Three friends of Al Stanzyck, partners with him in a racketeering union. Hoodlums, each of them, for all the law degrees and business titles they claimed.

  But what if they were right?

  He pushed himself to his feet angrily, began pacing the floor with restless strides. They couldn't be right! Al Stanzyck had killed that reporter—what's-his-name. It had been Joe Bannerman's arrest. Two witnesses. Joe Banner—man wouldn't even think of rigging a job like that, let alone go through with it.

  Dane looked down from his seventeenth-floor office at the busy scene of Broadway below. For all its garish battling, its eternally snarled traffic, its Coney Island reality, the street gave him a feeling of quiet.

  Al Stanzyck had been guilty. Nothing else made sense. And the three men who just left had done the only thing they could to get him free. But now Stanzyck was dead and that was the part that made no sense at all.

  But it did make sense—if you wanted to believe that some cop had taken the law into his own hands.

  "Yours truly, J. Lex," he thought, and the feeling of quiet was gone.

  Donning hat and topcoat, Dane left the office and went reluctantly to work.

  CHAPTER 4

  The young couple stepped from the exit door of the motion picture theater, halted for a moment beneath the marquee while the man extended a hand to examine the intensity of the springtime drizzle, and started off down the dark block with her arm linked familiarly beneath his.

  They walked in silence, oblivious to the rain, each preoccupied with separate thoughts, and when they turned left it was an automatic movement that did not interrupt their quiet mood.

  Their unhurried steps carried them to the dimmed entrance of a small apartment building, and once again they swung left. Inside the foyer the girl took a key from her purse and handed it to the young man. The door opened and she passed through, leading him wordlessly up one flight of thin-carpeted stairs, a second, then a third. Again they stopped before a door and again he unlocked it and pushed it noiselessly ajar. Set in the door was a nameplate and a typewritten name, Miss Ann Bogan. The door closed and he secured it with the night lock while she crossed the foyer-dining room and switched on a lamp that rested on a table beside the living room couch.

  The light revealed a very small, very comfortable-looking flat that had been made into a home by the simple desire of its tenant to have a home. The furniture was inexpensive, the rug was worn in the center, the pictures on the wall were unimaginative, mass-produced prints, the curtains were sun faded, but aside from a stain on the arm of a couch, a damp spot in the corner of the ceiling and a mustiness that was part of the building itself, this small cluster of rooms was clean and warm and flooded with livableness.

  While he stripped off his army-style trenchcoat and draped it over a chair in the dining alcove, she entered the tiny bedroom, turned on a pair of pink-shaded lamps on a pink-skirted vanity, and began to comb the rain out of her short, tightly curled brown hair.

  Ann Bogan was short and small boned. So short, and so perfectly proportioned, that her waist could truly be surrounded by a man's two hands and her 32 bosom looked pert and more than ample to men and women alike.

  Beneath the uncountable mass of curls was a vivacious, blue-eyed, snub-nosed, freckled Irish face that was woefully incapable of serious guile and had plagued her from infancy by betraying her every thought and emotion. It was a face that laid her heart bare for all to see, that revealed a temperament that was at once innocent and devilish, fun-loving and worrisome, faithful and—and what? Not faithful and unfaithful. Behind the sparkle in those eyes there was depth, and in the jut of that chin was the unmistakable hint of that sometimes unreasonable loyalty that an Irishman means when he calls another Irishman thick. Say, that Ann Bogan was faithful and frivolous. But not frivolous tonight. Nor last night. Nor, except for some fleeting moments when she was outside of herself, any night or day during the past three months. For one, her brother Ralph was dead. Not dead—a person can live with the death of a brother, the resilience of brains adjusts to the shock of bereavement—but a brother .murdered, killed obscenely at the end of a filthy, rat-infested pier.

  For another, not allowed to suffer her heartaching tragedy decently. To see it screamed before strangers, ballyhooded, exploited, angled for millions of nameless, faceless .newspaper readers who shared her grief for twenty minutes and left it stuffed in a trash can or on the grimy floor of a subway for a hundred rubber heels to twist her three-column picture grotesquely.

  For another, she had fallen in love. Not storybook, movie-type love, but the real thing, the honest-to-god, deadly serious kind of falling in love that can lead only to one of two things: Marriage or suicide. She was not romancing Bill Weir, or having an affair with him. She was in love with him, and he was in love with her, and it hurt hard that she would rather be dead—except then she wouldn't be with Bill.

  For another, a man named Al Stanzyck had been arrested for the murder of her brother, released when there were no more witnesses to testify against him—and, last night been murdered himself. Ann Bogan could have kept him in prison.

  Ann Bogan, as she turned from the mirror to enter the living room, was not frivolous.

  Bill Weir sensed her presence, did not see her. He sat deep in the couch, his eyes fixed unseeingly on some object across the room.

  "Do you want a drink?" she asked him, her voice low and resonant in the silence of the room.

  He shook his head.

  She went to the chair that faced him and sat down in it.

  "Do you want to talk about it?" she asked him.

  His eyes found her face and lingered there.

  "Talk about what?"

  "What else do we have to talk about?"

  "About us!" he said, shouted, his voice charged with repressions. "Not about Stanzyck, not about the case . . ."

  "Then we won't talk about Stanzyck," she told him softly. "Can't I mix you a drink?"

  Again he shook his head from side to side. "I couldn't hold it down," he said.

  "What is it that's bothering you?" Overwhelmed by his depression, her own was forgotten.

  "Nothing's bothering me, Ann."

  "It is Stanzyck."

  She watched his nice face harden, and for a moment she was afraid of him.

  "Why should Stanzyck bother me?" he asked, his voice deliberate and unreal.

  "But he is, Bill. I know he is."

  "Why should he bother me?" Weir asked again.

  "I don't know! He's dead, isn't he? It's all over, isn't it?"

  "Yes," he said some seconds later. "It's all over. Stanzyck is dead and it's all over."

  "Then it's me you're thinking about!" Her body was jackknifed over the chair, her arms dug into her thighs, and her small, heart-shaped face was as urgent as a small child's.

  "No!" he protested.

  "Yes! You're saying that I should have told about Ralph being threatened—that I should have said that Stanzyck came here one night and warned Ralph "

  "No!" Weir's big body came out of the couch. He crossed to her, towered above her. "I'm not thinking any of those things! You were only important to the case so long as Kline and Lane were alive. They saw it done, all you could supply was the motive and the intent . . ."

  "That's not true, Bill," she said, recovering her calm, forcing her voice to be natural. "I could have told the District Attorney what Ralph was afraid of—what he said to me about Stanzyck and that union he ran?"

  "Ann, stop thinking about i
t! Stanzyck is dead. You're out of danger?"

  "What do you mean?" Now she was on her feet, close to him.

  "I mean he's dead. Your information isn't important."

  "But the way you said it." Her honest eyes searched his face.

  He swung around, stood with his broad back to her, wall-like.

  "That drink you mentioned," he said stonily. "I think I’d like it."

  Ann didn't move at once, but stared at him curiously— at the way his feet were planted, the set of his amazingly wide shoulders, the unhappiness expressed by the very look of the back of his head. What had she said? What had he said? Ann couldn't remember, and she walked into the tiny kitchen and prepared a drink for each of them.

  "Thanks," he murmured, taking one of the glasses from her hands and moving again to the couch. Ann followed him and let herself down close beside him, her back and and legs intimately pressed to his own. She waited for him to drink deeply of his highball.

  "What do you think's going to be done about it?" she asked conversationally. “About what?"

  "About Stanzyck," Ann said. "Aren't you going to find out who killed him?"

  "Let's talk about something else."

  "But aren't you?"

  "I'm not going to do anything," he said. "It happened in a town called Newchester."

  Again there was something in his voice that unsettled her, made her feel that he was distant, shutting her off.

  "Good," she said, with a brightness she didn't feel. "Let's discuss us." She turned, snuggling her body into his and he put his long arm around her. "When are we going to get married?"

  "You, too?" His arm lost contact with her shoulder. Her own voice had been light, giving the question no consequence. But his answer—if that was what it was—had been harsh-sounding.

  "What do you mean, me, too?"

  "Everybody wants to know! The lieutenant, Mike Stern—everybody!"

  "Well, what do you tell them?"

  “I tell them I'm not getting married."

  "Oh, you do!" Ann sat erect, her face fiery.

  "Until it's over." He suddenly, unexpectedly, stood up.

  "Until what's over?"

  "The whole thing!" he shouted. "The whole lousy, goddamn thing!"