by Wolfe, Gene
“Ben was your uncle?”
“Yes. I’ll explain in a moment. You see, I feel that even if a man—or a woman—is a professional, he can feel, he is capable of feeling, a real loyalty. If not to his employer then to the cause of justice. To the right, if I may put it so. Don’t you agree, Mr. Stubb?”
“Call me Jim, Ms. Whitten.”
“Only if you’ll promise to call me Kip. My father, the late General Samuel Whitten, always said the most loyal soldiers were the career soldiers, those who were practically mercenaries. His men called him ‘Buck’ Whitten, though not to his face to be sure. He liked to believe it was because he had never lost his rapport with the rank and file. Do you consider yourself a mercenary, Mr. Stubb?”
“I consider myself a day laborer, Kip. Did Ben have money?”
Cliff raised a hand. “Wait a minute, Jim. A briefing’s okay, but you ought to answer a few questions yourself. Was it your impression he did?”
Stubb shook his head. “Not a cent.”
The blond girl’s fingers touched his. “Are you quite sure, Jim?”
“His house was falling apart, and he loved that house. A couple of times I tried to raid his refrigerator, but there wasn’t a damn thing to eat. Every once in a while one of us would feel sorry for him and buy him something.”
“You lived with my uncle?”
“For a few days,” Stubb said. “Yeah.”
“Did he ever speak to you of having—I don’t know, it could be anything. Something valuable. Something hidden.” She pressed his hand.
“He was your uncle, and you don’t know what he had?”
Cliff said, “Watch your mouth, Jim.”
“That’s all right, Mr. Rebic—perfectly all right. He has a right to ask these questions, a right to understand. No, Mr. Stubb—Jim—I don’t know. Only Daddy knew, and he’s no longer with us.”
“I think you’d better explain,” Stubb told her.
“I’ll try to. Many years ago, when they were quite young men, my uncle chose to leave our family. To go off on his own, as it were. He was under something of a cloud, if you understand me.”
“They didn’t like him.”
“He had been wild, I suppose. He and my father were twins, Mr. Stubb. As happens so often, one twin sought attention through accomplishment, the other through rebellion. My great-grandfather was a Rockefeller partner, and our family is still very well off.”
Stubb nodded. “Yeah, I kind of thought it might be.”
“My uncle Benjamin—that was his real name, Benjamin Whitten—apparently announced that he meant to make his own fortune and tell the rest of them to go to Hades.”
“Good for him.”
“But when he had gone, they discovered that a certain extremely valuable article had disappeared. Please don’t ask what it was, because I don’t know. I wasn’t even born when all this happened; and by the time I was old enough to care, no one was left but Daddy, and he wouldn’t tell me.”
“Whatever it was,” Stubb said, “it’s probably long gone.”
The girl pursed her lips. “I don’t think so. You see, before he died, Daddy was conducting certain investigations of his own. He said that if Uncle Ben sold what he had, he would know. And that he hadn’t sold it yet, not in all those years.”
Cliff leaned forward, rubbing his hand. “That means it just about has to be a piece of art or a rock, Jim.”
“If he was sharp enough, maybe willing to go to Amsterdam and take in a partner, he could get a rock cut up without anybody knowing.”
“He might, okay, but it would be tough. Anyhow, my first guess is art. If it had been a rock, it would probably have been in a safe or a safety deposit box someplace, and they wouldn’t have let a wild kid get at it. Art you’ve got hanging on the wall, even if there’s a lot of insurance. He could just take it down and stick it under his coat. A nice little Rembrandt, maybe.”
Stubb cocked an eyebrow at the girl. “What about insurance, Kip? Your folks collect any back then?”
She shook her head. “We—I, now that Daddy’s gone—do own certain valuable paintings, Mr.—Jim. The same company has insured them ever since I can remember, and at Mr. Rebic’s urging I called them. We’ve never had a large claim. Ever.”
Cliff said, “It’s obvious, isn’t it? To collect, they’d have had to say Ben stole it, and they didn’t want to. Hell, he was old General Buck’s brother. They kept their traps shut, hoping he’d come home. Then the rest died, and Buck started looking for him, only he didn’t find him.”
“Then the General died himself,” Stubb finished for him. “And Kip learned—someway—that Uncle Ben had been murdered. I’d like to hear about that, Kip.”
The blond girl suddenly looked a little tired, though her back was as straight as ever. “I didn’t learn that Uncle Benjamin was murdered, Mr. Stubb. I saw him on TV and went to look for him.”
“Sure. You spotted him right off, even though he had left the family before you were born.”
“But I did. Don’t you understand, Mr. Stubb? He and Daddy were identical twins. Daddy passed away only last September. This man had a beard, but otherwise he looked precisely the way Daddy had.”
Stubb nodded, half to himself. “Last night two women came to talk to a woman named Mrs. Baker, looking for Ben Free. Were you one of them?”
“I had a right to search for my uncle!”
“Sure. Did you? Was one of them you?”
Kip nodded.
“Who was the other one? Some girl working for Cliff?”
“No. I—I hadn’t engaged him then. A friend.”
“Not an investigator?”
“No.”
Cliff said, “Then she hired us, and we got on it right away.”
“Not quick enough to save him,” Stubb said softly.
“Hell, Jim, we couldn’t have. He was already dead by then. But we found him and took the picture you saw.”
“Yeah. You call the cops too?”
“We had to. Anyway, Ms. Whitten didn’t want to leave him lying there. He was her uncle, for Christ’s sake.”
“For Christ’s sake, I hope he was. What time?”
There was a discreet tap at the door.
Stubb opened it, and the Agatha Christie fan pushed in a cart redolent of beef.
“Hell,” Cliff said. “Your sandwich—I’d forgotten about it.”
“I hadn’t.”
“Ms. Whitten, will you take the other coffee, please?”
“Certainly not. Anyway, I much prefer tea.”
Cliff extended a ten. “Bud, you think you could get the lady a pot of hot tea, fast?”
“Quite so,” the Christie fan said, taking the ten. “I should be delighted.”
Stubb was already chewing a bite of beef and bread. He swallowed as the door closed. “What time, Cliff? When’d you find him?”
“This afternoon, around two.”
“Where?”
“The basement of his house, by the stairs. You know where the house was—you were staying there with him until last night.”
“I also went back this morning and checked over the house. He wasn’t there.”
“Including the basement?”
“Including the basement.”
“That’s worth knowing. Was this for the other client, Jim?”
“Let’s say it was for me. I was worried about him. He was an old man, we had liked him, and we thought nobody knew where he was.”
“You thought?”
“Somebody knew. Somebody took him back there and wasted him after I left. You want my guess about it?”
“Hell yes, if you’ve got one.”
“Somebody was looking for whatever it was Free had. Call it the McGuffin. They got hold of him sometime yesterday, slapped him around. He said, okay, take me back to my house, I’ll show you where it is. That basement was dark as hell—I had to light matches, and they probably hadn’t known to bring a flashlight. Free made a break for it. When he g
ot close to the steps there would have been a little light, and somebody panicked and shot him.”
Cliff looked dubious. “An old guy like that?”
“Yeah, an old guy like him.”
“Jim, I can’t buy it.” Cliff looked at Kip, but Kip did not return the look; she was watching Stubb, her piquant face expressionless.
Cliff said, “Sure, amateurs get panicky, but just the same.”
“I didn’t say it was an amateur. I don’t think it was. You said maybe a forty-five, and that’s not an amateur’s heat. Your mistake is that you think it must have been somebody like you.”
“Get on with it.”
“Free must have been nearly eighty.” Stubb was no longer talking to Cliff, but to Kip. “That would make your daddy close to sixty when you were born, Ms. Whitten—not really impossible, but not likely either. Anyway, he was about eighty, but big, and I’d guess that for an old man he was still pretty strong. Cliff here could have tied him up and put him on a shelf. I could have handled him myself if I had to, and I’m no giant. But I don’t think you could have.”
Kip’s hand was inching toward her purse.
Stubb rose, knocking over his chair, and suddenly held Sergeant Proudy’s gun. “Don’t touch that,” he said.
The hand relaxed.
“That’s better. Now take it by the strap and toss it very gently right at my shoes. I’ve never shot a woman, and I don’t want to start now.”
The purse hit the floor with a thump.
“That’s better. I hate to tell you this, but that was the first thing that gave you away. That big bag didn’t go with the rest of your outfit, so I started wondering what you had in it. Then too, last night I talked to Mrs. Baker, after you and your girlfriend did. She’d been questioned by a couple of proms, not by two society girls.”
Kip said, “Jim, I can explain this.”
Stubb crouched by the purse, opened it one-handed, and whistled. “You must have raided Grandpa’s bureau. A Colt New Service. Looks like it’s been jerked off the deck of a battleship. Cliff, you packing?”
Cliff shook his head and held out his arms so that his jacket hung open.
“Fine. Kip, I won’t ask you what happened down in that basement. Maybe he knocked you down before he tried to run. Maybe he tried to take you, and lost you in the dark. But who are you really?”
There was a tap at the door, and for an instant Stubb turned to look. The carpet flew at his face. When it hit, he did not even feel it.
Chapter 51
BLOOD MONEY
The older man behind the desk nodded. “So you have. It’s the truth.”
Illingworth asked, “Do you require anything further from me?”
“You mean you want to be paid.”
“I would not have put it so crudely.”
The older man chuckled. “You didn’t.”
“But since you yourself have raised the issue …”
“Did she say anything?”
“Very little.” Illingworth took a slender tape recorder from his coat pocket and handed it over.
“Wonderful gizmos,” the old man said. “Just amazing. You didn’t try to pump her?”
“I was instructed not to.”
“Uh huh.” The older man leaned back in his chair, his fingers making a steeple over his vest. (Illingworth noted with approval that he wore a watch chain.) “I’m afraid I’ll have to listen to this before you leave. But first your pay, right. If you want, we can see that the money is deposited in any account you want. Just give me the number.”
“If it is all the same to you, sir,” Illingworth said, “I should prefer cash.”
The older man smiled faintly. “Yes, the income tax.”
“Would cash be convenient?”
“Very.” The older man slid open a drawer and tossed a bundle of money onto his desk. “Count it,” he said. “Should be old bills, mixed numbers.”
“There is no need of that. I have confidence in you, sir.”
“Glad to hear it. Then I can make you a better deal, if you want. This’s five thousand, right?”
“That was the agreed-upon sum, yes.”
“Say the word and we’ll more than double it. You own those two little magazines. Well, it turns out an eccentric millionaire set up a five-thousand-dollar grant in trust, at interest, for them quite some time back. To be paid this year, if they were still being published. A grant to encourage your kind of science. Not taxable, of course. All you’ll have to do is use it for your operations and put the money you’d have used if you hadn’t got it into your pocket.”
“I see.”
“It’s all the same to us.”
“I see,” Illingworth said again. “The grant, I suppose.” He sighed. “There should be a good deal of prestige, too, in the grant.”
“You do have confidence in us. I’m glad to see that.”
“Not really. It’s just that throughout my life I’ve prided myself upon being a civilized man, and this would seem to be some sort of test of it.”
The older man (who was so much younger than Illingworth) chuckled. “You’re right, anyway. If we wanted to chisel you, we could chisel you a dozen different ways, whether we gave you cash or not. We could arrange for a stickup, for example, when you got home.”
“I’d prefer you not do that.”
“Well, chacon à son goût, Mr. Illingworth. Now you wait out there while I run the gizmo. I’ll phone and give somebody the word when you can go.”
Illingworth went out. The younger man was no longer at his desk, and there were noises from outside. The windows were white with frost, but the lights that flashed against them, vanished, then flashed again appeared to proceed from the headlights of automobiles.
The door to the inner office opened, and the older man came out, pulling on a duffel coat. Without nodding to Illingworth or so much as looking in his direction, he hurried out into the cold. For a moment, Illingworth was tempted to reenter his office and take the bundle of money from his desk. Caution and more than thirty years of petty journalism intervened. He went to a window instead and used the heel of his hand to melt a peephole in the frost.
There were several cars and several men with flashlights too. He tried to identify the older man by his duffel coat, but almost any of the crowding figures could have been his.
A car door opened. Rather surprisingly, Illingworth thought, the overhead light came on inside the car. A small man in a trenchcoat was pushed out and fell in the snow, his hands still clasped, as it seemed, behind his back. Two men lifted him to his feet again. Perhaps he said something—Illingworth could not be certain. One of the men struck him hard enough to twist his head around, the sound of the blow coming faintly through the frozen glass. A door in the building opposite opened, and a man led the small man inside.
Illingworth heard the rattle of the door at his elbow just in time to step back. The man in the duffel coat came in, followed by a big man in a black raincoat and a petite blonde in blue mink. All three went into the inner office, and someone shut the door.
Plainly the man in the duffel coat—whoever he was—was not listening to the tape. Illingworth speculated vaguely on what might occur should he attempt to leave. He looked through his peephole again. The cars that had brought the small man were gone; it might be possible for him to return to his own car, to back it from that alley between the buildings.
It might not, as well. He might be killed, he thought, if he tried. Almost certainly the grant in trust would be lost. He found he did not believe in that grant anyway. He believed in poltergeists and shapeshifters and all manner of impossible things, but he did not believe in the grant. He would never see a penny of it. He thought of going back and asking the older man for the cash instead, but the humiliation would be too great. If only he escaped, got out without being ruined, perhaps …
As a young man he had been a good judge of time, so good that once when his watch, his beautiful gold watch with the fine-china dial an
d the double lids, had failed him, he had carried no substitute while it was being repaired. Now time seemed to slip away. Time was running faster. “Time is, time was, time’s past.” He recalled many afternoons when he was twenty that had been longer than the longest days were now. He mused on them for a moment, how they had tied the Airedale to Dr. Cooper’s bulldog to make them fight, watching, later, from the white bench under the elm.
There was more noise outside. He rose to look, drawing his coat about him; it was cold in the outer room, so cold his peephole had frozen again.
Cars, one black, or gray, or perhaps green—in the headlights, the dancing flashlights, it was difficult to say. The prisoner was a slightly larger man this time, nude, Illingworth thought, under a blanket. His hands were tied in front of him, so he was able to hold the blanket around him, but he was blindfolded like the other. Illingworth wondered if they had blindfolded the Gypsy princess too, after they had led her away.
A big, handsome woman followed the blindfolded man carrying his clothes, or at least carrying a bundle of clothes that were presumably his. She talked for a moment with one of the men with flashlights while their prisoner did a little dance in the snow, lifting one bare foot, then the other. The man with the flashlight took the clothes from her, and she started toward Illingworth’s building.
He backed away from his peephole and lit a cigarette, but she seemed to pay no attention to him when she came in, though she paused to stamp the snow from her boots. He thought her extraordinarily attractive for a woman of her size—she must have been almost six feet—despite a complexion nearly as dark as the Gypsy’s. On her shining black hair she wore a little fur hat with a peacock’s feather, a hat made to match her sweeping coat; even the tops of her boots were trimmed in the same spotted fur. Their heels rattled like musketry as she marched into the older man’s office.
When she had gone, Illingworth went to his peephole again; almost at once he heard the click of the latch behind him. The big man in the black raincoat was coming out. Illingworth nodded to him in a way he hoped was reserved yet friendly.
The big man’s hand went to his shirt pocket, but came away empty. “You wouldn’t have another cigarette, would you?”