A Private Party

by William Ard

  "Bill!"

  He had turned away from her, but now she jumped to her feet, and with her hand on his arm, pulled him around.

  "Bill. Look at me. What is it you're worrying about?"

  "Nothing, Ann. I'm just out of step tonight."

  She looked up at his stricken face, her eyes intently trying to read the answer in his own.

  "Maybe I'm callous," she said. "Or revengeful. But when I read the news this morning it gave me a—a thrill, sort of. I looked at that picture of him and I didn't feel horrible at all. I felt good. I even thanked whoever it was who did it."

  "Did you?"

  "Yes, I did," she said defiantly. "Didn't you feel any of that, darling? Down deep weren't you satisfied—" Her voice broke off abruptly. "No, I guess you wouldn't feel that way."

  "What way?"

  "You're a policeman," she said. "All you thought about was that there's another murderer at large. Isn't that right?"

  "Yes, another murderer at large."

  She smiled, lifted a hand to touch his big face.

  "You know," she said, "I really think that women are tougher than men. They're harder."

  "I don't think you're very tough," he said softly, pressing her palm flat against his cheek.

  "I hide it from you," she said, her eyes twinkling in her face. "You'll find out about it on our honeymoon."

  Once again, having said something lightly, Ann was dismayed to see the look of trouble that passed over his features. She thought of a cloud obscuring the sun.

  "What is it, Bill? Are you losing interest?"

  "You know better than to even think of a thing like that, Ann."

  "Then I don't understand. What has his being dead got to do with our life?"

  "Nothing."

  "Okay," she said. "I guess I just don't know the rules about marrying policemen. Another drink?"

  "I'll make it," he said and carried the glasses inside. A moment later she followed him.

  "Who do you think it was?"

  "Who do I think what was?"

  The kitchen's proportions were for Ann. Weir moved in it, from sink to refrigerator, refrigerator to sink, like a grizzly in a dollhouse.

  "Who do you think killed him?"

  "I don't know," he said.

  "You don't have to use that detective's voice with me," she told him cheerfully. "I'm not a reporter." She came close to him. "Or am I a prime suspect?"

  He handed her a highball.

  "You're not a suspect," he said.

  "That's a relief." She led him back to the living room couch. "What about that other one," she said then, "the one you were looking for after that man was shot in the restaurant?"

  He shook his head. "Not a trace. Just a vague description we got of that so-called waiter."

  "What waiter?"

  "The one who got into the hotel room with Kline. The one who hit him on the head, dragged him to the window and pushed him out."

  "Is that what happened?"

  "That's Bannerman's theory. Naturally, the D.A. sticks to suicide." He took an angry pull at his drink. "He has to."

  "Why couldn't the same man have killed Stanzyck?"

  "What?"

  "Sure, Bill. He wasn't helping Stanzyck all that time for love, was he?"

  "It cost somebody plenty to get rid of those witnesses," Weir said.

  "But suppose Stanzyck backed down after he was set free?"

  "No. It was cash on the line. That killer was thousands of miles from here by the time Stanzyck got out. And he-had his money."

  "But suppose, Bill. Suppose he wanted more money and Stanzyck wouldn't give it to him?"

  "All right, suppose he did."

  "Then when you find him you'll have solved three murders," she said.

  He looked at her for a long moment. "I wonder if that's what Bannerman is thinking," he said.

  "Why not? It could have happened that way."

  "Sure," he said. "It could have happened that way." Though he didn't exactly smile, his face looked more relaxed as he turned to her.

  "Are you going to suggest it to him, honey?"

  "No. I'm going to let him figure it out for himself."

  "You and your politics!"

  "Not with Joe Bannerman, Ann. You always know where you stand with him."

  "With me, too," she said. She raised her hands and clasped them behind his neck, pulling his face down to her own and kissing him intimately. "There," she said. "That's how Bill Weir stands with me."

  "He doesn't seem to have anything to worry about."

  "Not a thing. Have you decided where you're going to sleep tonight?"

  "I haven't thought about it."

  "It's late," she told him. "The subway will be running slow."

  "Then I guess I'll stay here."

  She carried the empty glasses into the kitchen, and when she returned he was unfolding the double-duty couch into a bed. Ann entered the bedroom, switched off the lamps and undressed slowly in the dark. In the closet she found a nightgown and negligee.

  He was in the bed when she came back into the living room.

  "Good night, darling," she said, bending down to kiss him.

  "Night."

  "Bill . . ."

  "What?"

  "You—you've never asked me," she said, her voice a soft whisper. "But you don't have to sleep out here."

  "Should I have asked you?"

  "I just wanted you to know. All the other nights you've been here because you were afraid something might happen to me. But now you're here because it's too late to go home.”

  He didn't say anything.

  “I just wanted you to know," she said again. She turned then walked across the room and into the bedroom. She left the door open and climbed noiselessly into the bed, her heart beating inside her breast with a furious rhythm. But the moments passed, became minutes, and there was no other sound in the apartment.

  Later—she had no recollection of the passage of time, remembrance of dozing off—Ann slipped from the bed and went on tiptoe to the doorway. Bill sat in a chair turned toward the window, his, body hunched forward thoughtfully, framed in the rays of the street lamp, a cigarettes glowing and fading as it passed to and from his lips.

  Somehow, she resisted the impulse that would have sent her to him. Dressed as she was, all but naked in a flimsy nightgown, he would have taken her. She had been there for the taking before, but something had held him back. The something, whatever it was, that he brooded over now.

  Ann returned silently to her bed, lay there staring fixedly at the ceiling—and, without understanding why, began to cry softly until she went to sleep.

  CHAPTER 5

  Timothy Dane had spent part of the day acquainting himself professionally with a case that had involved him only impersonally—no more and no less than it had involved any other newspaper reader.

  Lieutenant Bannerman was not on duty at the West Side precinct house, but had left a folder marked simply "Stanzyck" with a plain-clothes man. He was allowed to study the folder at a desk in the squad room but was not permitted either to make notes from it or take it out of the station house.

  Within two minutes the private detective saw that the things he really wanted were in some other folder marked "Stanzyck." This sheaf of papers contained none of the confidential and highly informative memos that he knew passed back and forth in any "newspaper case." Nor were there the daily work sheets from Bannerman's squad that would have given Dane a timetable of the case between the hours that Ralph Bogan was killed and Al Stanzyck arrested and that would have helped to familiarize him with the early phase of it. But what the investigator missed most were Bannerman's own personal exchange of memos with his superiors and with his assistants. More than anything else, Dane wanted the homicide expert's opinions on each of the various deaths connected with the violent case—and especially the most recent one.

  What the folder did contain was a transcript of the interrogation of the two eyewitnesses, Kline and
Lane, and Dane's attention focused on those frequently repeated passages in which Bannerman personally guaranteed their safety and the protection of their families.

  There was also the stenographer's copy of the various interrogations of Al Stanzyck himself. He examined the first one:

  Bannerman: Do you know why you're here, Stanzyck?

  Stanzyck: I don't know a goddamn thing.

  Weir: Watch your language.

  Stanzyck: You watch it. I'll have you busted by noon tomorrow. You'll be riding to work on the Staten Island ferry.

  Bannerman: How about me, Al?

  Stanzyck: Get yourself a good mouthpiece, Bannerman. The days are gone when the two-for-a-nickel cops in this town can push Al Stanzyck around. I'm connected.

  Bannerman: You're connected with the electric chair right now, Al.

  Stanzyck: Is that what this is? Another phony squeal for some killing you can't solve?

  Bannerman: Where did Detectives Stern and Weir pick you up?

  Stanzyck: Ask them. Only call them ex-detectives.

  Stern: The lieutenant's asking you, Stanzyck.

  Stanzyck: I was in a restaurant.

  Bannerman: What restaurant?

  Stanzyck: What the hell! I was in the Longchamps restaurant at Forty-first and Broadway.

  Bannerman: How long had you been there?

  Stanzyck: I was there all night.

  Bannerman: Doing what?

  Stanzyck: Eating my goddamn dinner. What do you think I was doing?

  Bannerman: By yourself?

  Stanzyck: Me? Having dinner alone?

  Bannerman: Who were you with?

  Stanzyck: Some friends.

  Bannerman: Name them.

  Stanzyck: Sure. I was with Nick Mayer and he had a friend. I was with Bert Hill and he had a friend. I was with Limey King but he didn't have a friend.

  Bannerman: Did you have a friend?

  Stanzyck: You know me, buddy.

  Bannerman: What is her name?

  Stanzyck: Leave the ladies out. All the way out.

  Stern: The woman with Stanzyck was a Miss Roxanne Garde. Her address is 321 West Forty-Fourth Street. Profession unknown.

  Stanzyck: What the hell do you mean, unknown? You trying to call Roxy something?

  Stern: Just keep your trap closed till you're told to open it.

  Stanzyck: Cop, you're going to be bounced so hard they won't know where to find you.

  Bannerman: Cut it. You say you were at this restaurant all evening?

  Stanzyck: All evening.

  Bannerman: We say you were at the Forty-sixth Street Pier with Ralph Bogan.

  Stanzyck: Then Ralph Bogan is a liar.

  Bannerman: We say you shot and killed him.

  Stanzyck: Then you're a liar.

  Bannerman: We've got two witnesses who saw you shoe Ralph Bogan.

  Stanzyck: You what?

  Bannerman: They were on the pier. They saw you.

  Stanzyck: I want my lawyer.

  Bannerman: Why did you kill Bogan, Stanzyck?

  Stanzyck: Get Bert Hill down here.

  Bannerman: You're in the bag, Al. Why did you kill him?

  Stanzyck: Call Murray Hill 8-3258. I want Bert Hill.

  Bannerman: Weir, take him down to the line-up.

  Dane counted eight more pages of testimony from Al Stanzyck—if testimony was the word. From the time of his first questioning—from the moment Bannerman informed him of the eyewitnesses—Stanzyck would admit nothing. Then, Dane presumed, the District Attorney took custody, but what he got out of the prisoner was not in the folder.

  The last thing it contained were the minutes of the Grand Jury session during which the indictment was obtained. The meeting consisted of little more than the testimony of Kline and Lane and the Assistant District Attorney's request for an indictment charging murder in the first degree.

  Whatever else the investigator wanted to know about the case, apparently, would be in the newspaper room of the public library. He returned the folder to the watchful plain-clothes man, thanked him dryly, and left with the name and address of Miss Roxanne Garde clear in his memory.

  But Al Stanzyck's friend wasn't at home at 321 West Forty-fourth Street and the doorman was so vague as to her whereabouts and probable return that Dane was certain he had had his instructions. That didn't trouble the detective overly much because he hadn't met a doorman yet who couldn't be bought twice, three times or until the market gave out. But it wasn't that important, yet, to see Roxanne Garde and Dane left with his wallet intact. He went uptown then, rented a Chevrolet from his friend Curry, and continued on out of the city toward the little town of Newchester some forty miles north. It was dusk when he arrived.

  The town fathers had economically lodged the Newchester Police and Fire Departments in a single barn-like building on the inevitable Main Street. The fire-fighting equipment was jammed into the right-hand side and consisted of a Lafayette hose truck, vintage 1926, a 1940 Ford station wagon painted red and lettered in three-dimensional gold block, and three paid firemen absorbed in a pinochle game.

  Dane pushed open a green wooden door on the left marked POLICE HEADQUARTERS and found himself in a large, peaceful-looking square room. In it were two benches set against a wall. Beyond was a wooden railing, and just inside the railing a large desk occupied by a jacket-less, bareheaded, most uncoplike-looking cop Dane could remember seeing. His bald head lifted at the sound of the door's closing and he raised wide, round eyes from the copy of the afternoon New York paper spread below him.

  "Yes, sir," he said politely.

  "My name is Dane. I'm here from the city . . ."

  Dane stopped, puzzled at the vigorously nodding head on the other side of the railing, the knowing look in the man's face. The policeman, his head continuing to bob, sipped from the chair and turned to a glass door behind him. In gold leaf, it read: CHIEF OF POLICE, JACOB R. PURDY, and below, smaller, DETECTIVE BUREAU. Still lower on the door was: LOST AND FOUND.

  The policeman knocked quietly on the door and, at a murmur from inside, opened it. Dane, looking beyond the man's shoulder, was surprised to see only a small office, three files and the edge of a single desk.

  "He's here," the policeman said to someone out of Dane's vision.

  "Good," came the booming reply. "Send him in here."

  Dane went forward at the policeman's urgent signal, stepped through the railing gate and on into the Chief, the Detective Bureau and the Lost and Found, without the slightest idea of why he was awaited.

  "Jake Purdy's the name," and Dane went forward to shake the outstretched hand of a blue-and-gold mountain. Purdy stood six feet five inches from the floor and his three-hundred-pound frame was encased in a blue uniform featuring five oversized gold buttons down the center of the jacket, a single gold star on each shoulder and a dazzling gold badge bearing the word Chief across its center. Perched importantly on the desk was a black-visored cap with a chin strap an inch wide and a replica of the jacket badge.

  "Glad to know you, Chief. My name is Timothy Dane." "Sit down, Dane, sit down." He waved Dane to a chair facing the desk. "You got up here in good time." "I did?"

  "I expect there'll be traffic tomorrow. For the funeral."

  "Oh?"

  "Surprises me they want him buried in Newchester," said Purdy. "From what I hear of those bigshots they like to make a holy show of being planted under."

  "You mean Stanzyck's funeral," said Dane.

  "Imagine a couple of you fellows will be here, eh? Kind of watch faces and all that stuff?"

  "I hadn't thought of it, Chief," said Dane. "Might not be a bad idea at that."

  But the tremendous man, wheezing asthmatically, had moved from the desk find his interest was on unlocking one of the metal files. He withdrew a dark green folder from it and brought the folder back to the desk.

  "Well, here it is, my friend," he announced. "And welcome to it. We're not geared for these high-pressure investigations around here, and I do
n't mind telling you I'm happy you're taking it off my hands."

  Dane sat quite still in the chair, his eyes a question mark as his glance traveled from the chief's face to the folder on the desk. Then, with a shrug, he reached out for it because that was what seemed to be expected of him.

  He withdrew several sheets of paper fastened together with a paper clip. The first was a report from someone named Officer Samuel Jenks. Officer Jenks noted that he had been dispatched to The Inn at 10:35 the previous night and on arrival found the body of one Al Stanzyck, shot several times through the head and stomach. A Doctor Morton had arrived and pronounced Stanzyck dead. Officer Jenks had then made a preliminary investigation which consisted of getting the names of everyone present in The Inn at the time of the shooting. His report ended with the laconic sentence: "Nobody seemed to know anything."

  Next was the medical examiner's certificate, signed by George Morton, M.D., testifying that an autopsy on the body of Al Stanzyk had established the cause of death to be multiple gunshot wounds.

  A follow-up report by Officer Jenks stated that the last known persons to see Stanzyck alive were Nicholas Mayer, Bert Hill and George King. Then, as an afterthought, "Besides whoever shot him."

  The next was on the letterhead of Jacob R. Purdy, Chief of Police, Newchester Police Department. Dane read: "The County Coroner's Jury, called in special session, has this morning returned the following verdict: 'That one Albert Stanzyck met his death at the hands of person or persons unknown by instrument of a .32 caliber revolver fired at the range of less than ten feet.' I, Jacob R. Purdy, acting in my official capacity as Chief of Police, Town of Newchester, have thereby ordered to be issued a warrant for the arrest of John Doe and accomplices for the murder of Albert Stanzyck. Signed . . ."

  Dane laid the clip of papers aside and lifted a Manila envelope from the folder. Inside the envelope were five dented slugs that the investigator agreed were reasonably the size of a .32. With the slugs was a small piece of notepaper folded double. He opened it and read, in a clear, firm handwriting: "What are you waiting for?"

  "And that," said Purdy, "is the beginning and the end of your evidence. Five spent bullets and a note that don't mean a thing. Leastways, not to me."