Harlingen said angrily: “How did we get into this in the first place? Do you want to drop the case? Is that what this is all about?”
“No, not as long as I’m wanted.”
“All right then. Let’s get down to facts and skip theorizing.” Harlingen leaned back in his chair, clasped his hands on his head, and turned his face up to the ceiling. “Now, about this woman, I don’t know. What I’d like to do is let it go for the time being. Maybe Lundeen will come to me about it himself; maybe something’ll turn up that’ll help us get around it. Meanwhile, we’ll roll it up and put it on the shelf.”
“What about Floyd?” Murray asked. “Won’t he be talking to Lundeen about it?”
“Well, I told him not to discuss it with anybody until I spoke to you. I’ll call him up tonight and make sure he keeps mum even with Lundeen.”
“That’s sound policy,” Murray said. “As far as my end goes, I’m getting together with Strauss and Manfredi first thing Monday. Manfredi hasn’t gotten anything worth while on Miller so far, but he’ll be working on him over the week end, and that’s a good time for things to happen. I’ll keep in touch with you, anyhow.”
“And that about ties it up, doesn’t it?” Harlingen said. He came forward in his chair with a jolt, and flexed his shoulders pleasurably. “Now, how about that drink I owe you? Say, if you don’t have to rush away—”
“We’ll take a rain check on that,” Murray said. “We’ve got an important appointment with genius.”
Didi arranged herself behind the wheel of the car in stony silence, and drove three blocks without saying a word. That, as Murray knew, was something of a wonder in itself.
“Are you sore about something?” he asked.
“No.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means no, that’s what it means. And please stop trying to sit on my lap. If you’re cold you can just turn on the heater. That’s what it’s there for.”
“I am trying to turn on the heater,” he said. “It doesn’t seem to work.”
“That heater.”
“No, you’re not sore,” Murray observed placidly. “Just a little more than wrought, and a little less than overwrought.”
“How nice people like that,” said Didi in a choked voice, “can raise such a wretched little brat and not be tempted to strangle her in her sleep, I for one do not know. Of all the insufferable—”
“Megan?” said Murray. “Why, I wasn’t gone long enough for her to kick you in the shins.”
“She did not kick me in the shins, sweetie,” Didi said between her teeth. “You just listen to this. She sat there after you were gone—she just sat there and glared at me. It was like waking up and finding something from Mars on the foot of your bed. And then when that Dinah woman stopped talking for one second to catch her breath, this thing said in that deep, fake, throbbing voice of hers: ‘I think it’s vulgar to wear mink so early in the day.’ She thinks it’s vulgar! Of course, when she goes off to that idiot school of hers in the morning she just throws on an old Persian lamb! Who the hell does she think she is at her age?”
“That’s the point,” Murray said. “At her age she thinks she’s Marilyn Monroe. Or you. Jesus, you aren’t going to let a kid get under your skin with some stupid remark she picked up somewhere, are you?”
“Picked up where?”
“Oh, God,” sighed Murray, “how do I know where? From somebody who can’t afford a mink coat and wishes she could, I suppose.”
“Well, I don’t have to suppose. That child is getting her notions from that schoolteacher of hers. That frozen beauty. The one who stopped you dead in your tracks when you walked into that room.”
Murray shrugged. “I cannot tell a lie. I have a fatal weakness for a pretty ankle.”
“Oh, she’s got more than a pretty ankle, pet. She’s got a pretty everything else, right up to the last pretty hair on her head. And don’t you make a doubtful face as if you don’t know that. Any time I see a man make a face like that when I’m talking about a good-looking female I can see through him like glass.”
“Didi,” Murray asked, “are you being bitchy?”
She looked at him wide-eyed. “Me?”
“Yes, you.”
She shook her head solemnly. “Now, that hurts,” she said. “It truly does. Here I am, thinking only of your good—”
“What a question!”
“—thinking only of your good, and you can say something like that. Murray, you listen to me. I know that kind of girl. She might look as good as whipped-cream cake, but when you get real close you can tell it’s all sugar and cardboard like those fake ones in the store window. You trust my womanly instincts, pet, and stay away from that kind. In their hearts they’ve just got no use for any man. I mean that, Murray.”
“Who the hell cares what you mean?” he said. “Will you please watch where you’re driving!”
“Ho!” said Didi. “Now who’s a little more than wrought?”
7
Time was not of the essence when Bruno Manfredi prepared to make a report. Long ago he had cultivated a ritual of preparation—much like that of a nurse laying out the instruments for an operation—in answer to Frank Conmy’s bristling impatience during conferences. Frank would sit there gnawing his mustache, fingers drumming on the desk, face mottling with pent-up fury, while Bruno would solemnly open his leather envelope, extract the pages of written report from it, place them next to the envelope, grope through the envelope for any photographs and photostatic prints, arrange them next to the report, repeat the process for newspaper clippings and other sundries, place them next to the photographs, and then, with the air of a man who has completed the first step of an exhausting job, close the zipper on the leather envelope and put it on the floor next to his chair.
It was only the first step. Then came the search through various jacket pockets until the small black notebook was found and added to the row on the desk. This was followed by a pack of cigarettes, a lighter, a package of chewing gum, a pencil, a ball-point pen, and an eyeglass case, and by now Frank’s face was usually a fine shade of purple.
The eyeglasses wound up the performance with a flourish. Heavy of frame, splendidly executive in appearance, they would be removed almost tenderly from their case, held up to the light for inspection, breathed on, polished, and finally donned by Bruno with an air of rich satisfaction that was the last straw to Frank.
“Are we ready now, Mr. Manfredi?” he would roar, and the thunder of that fine, round baritone would freeze new stenographers at their desks.
Nor, as Frank had discovered, was there any way of speeding up the routine. Any effort to do that seemed to wreak havoc with Bruno’s otherwise efficient memory, send him fumbling helplessly through his papers with pathetic, long-winded apologies, and take twice the usual time to clear up the business at hand.
“Of course, I know why he’s doing it,” Frank had once complained to Murray after a particularly harrowing session. “And if I was a little bit hard on him when he started here it was only because I like to see a man sit down, spit out his business fast, and be on his way. But he’s made his point now, so let him be done with it.” Then he added after morose reflection, “You know, I don’t even believe the crazy son of a bitch needs glasses.”
The trouble was that by the time Frank was dead and gone what had started as a way of badgering him had become ingrained habit. Watching Bruno neatly lay out his materials in the familiar row on the desk, Murray felt a weary sympathy for everything Frank must have felt on such bygone occasions. But, wiser than Frank, he waited until Bruno had finished the ritual, and then waited another full minute on his own account before saying anything.
“Where’s Lou?” he asked mildly. “He was supposed to be here with you, wasn’t he?”
“Right now he’s on that trucking deal. You know, that Dawson guy who thinks his drivers are hijacking his deliveries.” Bruno unwrapped a piece of gum and popped it into his mouth. Then
he lit a cigarette and inhaled luxuriously, his jaw never missing a beat. “About those records, he made contact with the clerk, but so far no dice. He can’t say why. He figures maybe the heat is on because of Wykoff.”
“Maybe.” Murray nodded at the assortment of papers on the desk. “Who helped you put all this together? You didn’t do it yourself, did you?”
“Jesus, you’re getting worse than Frank,” Bruno said indignantly. “That new kid Rigaud backtracked some of the leads I gave him, but the legwork is all mine. Here, you want to see my shoes?”
Murray declined the offer. “What does it add up to?”
“About Miller? I don’t know. As far as catching him with the goods right now, we don’t have a thing. Either he’s a reformed bookie, or he’s putting up the best front anybody ever did. But there’s some items here that might be interesting. Let me run through it, and you’ll see for yourself.”
“Run,” Murray said pointedly. “Don’t walk.”
“Sure, Speedy.” Bruno dug into his papers. “Here’s his birth certificate. Born New York, 1915. And his high-school record, and some poop from the yearbook when he graduated. Honors in mathematics—that’s the bookie blood starting to show—member of the tennis team, member of the dramatic society.”
It struck Murray that Arnold Lundeen, one way or another, had a surprising affinity for people who were interested in dramatic societies. He found himself thinking of Ruth, and impatiently thrust the thought aside. “So far,” he told Bruno, “all that’s missing is the gray-haired mother and the faithful old dog. When do they come in?”
“Will you let me do this my own way?” Bruno demanded. “Now, listen. In September, 1933, Miller enrolled at N.Y.U. Three months later they gave him the heave-ho right out of there.”
“Why?”
“For peddling examination papers. Him and two other guys were in a little racket to steal test questions and sell them off to the other schoolboys. It all came out in the newspapers when Miller’s people sued for readmission, and I’ve got a couple of clips about it here. Think they’re worth anything to Harlingen?”
“I’ll leave that up to him. What happened to Miller after that?”
“Well, we lose him for a couple of years, and then we pick him up doing office work for the Bindlow Resort Corporation. That’s the company that runs the Acres—you know, that billion-dollar hotel up in the Catskills. Private airport, private swimming pool for every customer, private dining room for left-handed people—you ought to see the book they put out. It’s like Radio City with trees.”
“What’s Miller got to do with all this?”
“Plenty. The guy who owns it is Daniel Bindlow, and he’s got no family of his own, but he’s got one niece, Pearl. In 1940 Miller hit the jackpot; he went and married this Pearl. She’s not much to look at maybe, and she’s five, six years older than Miller, but he must have figured that, what the hell, half the time he’s with her the lights’ll be out, and the other half he can sit and read her uncle’s bank account. Anyhow, he played it for keeps.
“Then in 1942 the army grabbed him, and he was in for about a year. He got out on a hardship appeal. His wife kept having nervous breakdowns or something while he was away, and she was in and out of sanitariums until the Red Cross put in a pitch for her.
“After that he went to work for Bindlow again, and here’s where it gets interesting. Bindlow was having all kinds of trouble running his place those years. The help was looking for more pay, so he had a couple of strikes, and he also had basketball trouble.”
“Basketball trouble?”
“I thought that would goose you. You know how those hotels hire college teams to play for them in the summer; it’s one of the biggest things up there. The kids are supposed to be waiters and bellhops and such, but they’re getting their dough to play ball, and everybody knows it. Bindlow’s trouble was that he couldn’t buy himself a winner. The customers wanted to bet on the home team, but every time they did it they lost their shirts. So Bindlow dug himself up a guy who could take care of everything for him. The labor trouble, the basketball trouble, everything in one nice package. A real little miracle worker. Who do you think?”
“Miller,” said Murray. “Who else?”
Bruno stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray before him and leaned back in his chair smilingly. “Guy name of George Wykoff,” he said gently, “that’s who else. Fix you up with the union, fix you up with a basketball team, fix you up with anything you want, if you can pay for it. Which Bindlow could.”
“Where’d you learn all this?” Murray asked.
“I got hold of a program for a game they had up there around that time, and Rigaud located one of the guys listed on it. I had a long talk with this guy for the price of a drink. It’s all written down there. He says you can use whatever you want of it, he don’t care. He says the way they got a winning team at the hotel was that Wykoff paid other teams to dump games to them now and then, but at the end of the season Wykoff ran off with most of the pay-off money. They all hated his guts.”
“And what’s this got to do with Miller?”
“Well, when Wykoff took off at the end of the season, Miller and Pearl went along with him. That must have been the beginning of their tie-up. Then Miller showed up in New York making book over on the West Side and using this Songster Company for a front. Songster is still in business, by the way. Miller sold it to a guy named Billings last summer, and I had quite a parley with this Billings. Know what kind of outfit it is?”
“Theatrical agency?”
Bruno waved a disdainful hand. “Nah, that’s way out of Billings’ class. This is a real sucker trap. What it claims to do is write words to music or music to words, whichever way the suckers want it. A lot of noodles in the farm land figure they can write songs, see? If they send the music to Billings he writes the words for them, or if they send the words he writes the music. They pay plenty for this, and in the long run they wind up with some copies of the song, and no harm done. Billings says what the hell, there’s nothing against it in the postal regulations, so he don’t worry. He’s got a broken-down piano in there and a rhyming dictionary, and he says as long as the supply of suckers holds out he figures to make a living. When Miller ran the place, Schrade used to handle the song-writing angle for him.”
Murray reflected on that. In a way, he thought, you had to admire Miller for the unerring way he gravitated toward the graft, the payola, the swindle. Even in choosing a front for an illegal operation he was driven to choose something which was a swindle in itself. It was the kind of fine instinct that would let him know exactly what cop to pay off, and how much to pay him, and how to have the cop take the rap when the time came. A very smooth fish swimming easily in very hot water, because that was his natural habitat.
“What’s he up to now?” asked Murray. “I mean, Miller.”
“He’s back with Bindlow again. Mostly he’s in the New York office here, but when there’s a big holiday rush at the Acres he goes up there for a stretch. Kind of assistant manager.” Bruno lit another cigarette, and bent over the desk to study his report. “Anyhow, let me fill in the details.
“He and his wife live over on West End Avenue. No kids, but they got a little poodle dog. There’s some kind of nurse for Mrs. Miller, too; from what the doorman said, she was taken pretty bad around Thanksgiving. Miller works ten to five, takes a cab home about five-thirty, stays in mostly, and then goes for a walk with the dog around eleven. Dresses fine, reads the Times in the morning, the Telegram at night, also weekly Variety. Eats lunch in that classy place downstairs from Bindlow’s office, Terwilliger’s. And the whole time I tailed him he never said a word to a living soul outside of the waiter there. What do you make of that?”
“Just playing it safe,” Murray said. “Bindlow probably took him back on that basis.”
“I guess so. Anyhow, Bindlow should talk. He’s the one who got Wykoff into the picture in the first place.” Bruno handed a photograph to Murra
y. “Here’s how Miller used to look around then. I had the lab blow this up from a snapshot in an old advertising book the Acres put out. He looks about the same now. Heftier, and without so much hair, but you could still tell him from the picture, all right.”
The picture was that of a tall, well-built young man in shorts standing before a tennis net, a sweater thrown casually over his shoulders, a pair of tennis rackets held under his arm. He was squinting into the sunlight, a smile flashing whitely out from a tanned face, blond hair tousled in the breeze. It was obviously a picture aimed at luring hopeful spinsters to the Acres, and, thought Murray, must have been highly effective in its function. He could imagine the cloud of despair that had risen over the Catskills when Pearl Bindlow herself had grabbed off this prize.
Bruno came around behind Murray’s shoulder to study the photograph with interest. “Don’t look much like any bookie you ever met, does he?” he commented. “Looks more like he’s getting ready for the Olympic Games or something.”
Murray said: “You have to be an amateur for that. This one was born a professional.” He tossed the picture on the desk. “Is that the works?”
“That’s it.”
“Nothing about Lundeen? No reason why Miller might have wanted to frame him? No possible tie-up between them?”
“What’s that mean?” Bruno protested. “You know I gave you everything I had. It’s all right down here.”
“All I saw right down here,” Murray said, “is a smart bookie who pays off the cops when he has to.”
“Well,” said Bruno, “that’s the whole story, isn’t it?”
Murray smiled. “I know. I just wanted to hear you say it, that’s all. It shows what a smart detective you are.”
“Smart enough to know when I’m being conned,” Bruno said coldly. He thumped the leather envelope back on the desk and started to load it. “You want me to work on Miller any more?”
The Eighth Circle Page 8