by Kane, Henry
“Like what?” said Parker.
“He dug the dirt, and he put it into a letter, and he gave it to her at Sherry’s party. She read it, paid him a thousand bucks for it. Then she lost the letter. She came to me today, for me to find it, because, as her father has stated, she’s a hard-headed little gal. She knew the contents of that letter could kill her.” I dug the envelope out of my pocket with a flourish that almost sprained my wrist. I removed one check, folded it, and returned that to my pocket. “Lieutenant,” I stated in stentorian tone, “first Miss Lori Gilmore’s check to the order of one Barry Miller in the sum of one thousand dollars.”
I pulled the check and presented it. Parker looked at it. “Where did you get this?” he said.
“Barry Miller’s donation to the solution of two murders—his own, which he may have known was in the process of happening, and Henry Martell’s, of which he could not have had any idea.”
“Cut the fancy crap,” said Parker.
Official disparagement did not deter me. “And now,” I continued as pearly-toned and round-voweled as an auditioning amateur, “that which you are seeking—conclusive evidence of motive. Barry Miller’s letter to Lori Gilmore!”
Parker grabbed.
The girl gasped.
Cobb Gilmore soared from the couch as though by levitation.
“Let me see that,” he screamed.
Parker’s elbow hit him in the tattersall vest but that did not stem the tide of swelling Gilmore. They read the letter together. Then Parker hit him again in the tattersall vest, which produced a belch of grief, but put sufficient distance between them for Parker to pocket the evidence. Sadly he said, “Young lady, you’re dead. Kindly get your jacket.”
“Brassiere too,” I said. “Turnkeys are notoriously lecherous.”
“Bastard,” said Gilmore.
“Me?” I said.
“Bastard,” said Gilmore.
“Me? I’m a pure young fool with stupid scruples.”
“Bastard,” he said.
“Are you ready?” I said.
“I am ready,” he said.
“Downtown,” I said.
“What?” said Parker.
“I think it best we adjourn to more propitious precincts.”
“Like what?” said Parker.
“Like jail,” I said.
TWENTY-FOUR
After the tender of Gilmore’s confession had been duly inscribed and fully accepted we sat around in friendly conclave and discussed it. Gilmore had brandy for his heart, I had Scotch for my reward, and Parker had a stogey upon which to bite in ambivalent consternation.
“When did you know?” said Gilmore.
“When I saw the dead Martell,” I said.
“So why didn’t you tell us?” said Parker.
“There was nothing to tell. I had absolutely no proof. If I broke it, we’d botch it. I had to play along and wait. I had to hit this guy in his Achille’s heel.”
“The daughter?” said Parker.
“Mr. Gilmore loves his daughter. Mr. Gilmore is a man of sixty with a heart that can conk out at any time. His daughter is young and beautiful with a full life in front of her. Actually, there was very little sacrifice involved for Mr. Gilmore.”
“But why in hell didn’t you tell us?” said Parker.
“Because if I opened it up, the pressure would be on him, relieving some of the pressure on the girl. They could discuss it and poke for the loopholes. Actually, your case against the girl was not as strong as you made out.”
“You’re telling me?” said Parker.
“A wronged gal can kill, no question, but that kind of killing is a crime of passion, a crime in the heat of argument and recrimination; the gal wouldn’t steal a Smith and Wesson the night before in calm procedure for murder. As a matter of fact, she was cockeyed drunk at Sherry’s party, too drunk for the calm procedure required. But not my friend Mr. Gilmore. My friend Mr. Gilmore had just concluded his negotiations with Henry Martell. Martell had informed him that he was the pigeon—that the daughter was just the means to the end. Knowing my friend Mr. Gilmore, that very slight upon his daughter would be enough for him to want Martell dead, without the blackmail.” I sipped Scotch. “But don’t frig around with Cobb Gilmore. That was really
carrying coals to Newcastle. What Gilmore forgot, Martell would yet have to learn—and he’d never make it.”
“Why, thank you,” said Gilmore.
“When he broached the blackmail, he was already dead. The potted Clayton’s loose gun put the deed and time into focus. Mr. Gilmore pinched the gun, which would help becloud the issues, came to Martell’s apartment supposedly to pay blackmail at—”
“Eleven o’clock on Tuesday,” said Gilmore.
“He sat down, chatted with the guy, drew the gun, and popped him. It explains that look on Martell’s face—annoyance and surprise. When Gilmore drew the gun, Martell was annoyed. He didn’t know the meat of Cobb Gilmore. To him this was an old fogey bothering him with a gun—he’d quickly talk him out of that. The surprise was when he realized it was going to happen.”
“And after it happened?” said Parker.
“He threw the gun on the floor, went home and went to bed, and claimed he hadn’t been out all day, that he was spending the day in bed resting his heart—but he sent out an S.O.S. for me.”
“For what?” said Parker.
“Mostly, I’d say, to fix the alibi, to have it set solid, to have a witness who, if necessary, could testify.”
Parker bit upon his cigar with energy. “You’re off and running, my boy, but I do hope you’d get into the stretch.”
“They had agreed upon a price, for which Martell would tie the can to the gal, and get out of the country. A hundred thousand bananas.” I brought out the folded check, unfolded it, gave it to Parker. “A hundred thousand bananas,” I said.
“You’ve made the turn,” said Parker. “You’re still not in the stretch.”
“The stretch,” I said. “Yesterday, Tuesday, during the rainy part—it rained all morning, remember—I came to Gilmore’s apartment at about noontime. There was a note in the bell-bracket telling me to come right in, that he was in bed.”
“Was he?”
“In yellow silk pajamas, yet. It was his man’s day off. He told me, what with the weather being so bad, he hadn’t gone out, was going to spend the day resting in bed.”
“Come on,” said Parker. “Pick it up. Start heading for the wire.”
“He told me he had settled with Martell; that for a hundred thousand bucks, Martell was clearing out of the country for eighteen months. He pointed across the room, to a far corner, where his suit was hanging, and told me to bring out an envelope from his jacket pocket. The envelope contained three hundred dollars for me and the check for Henry Martell. My job was to deliver the check to Martell at his apartment where he was waiting. Right then and there, I knew something was wrong.”
“Like how?” said Parker.
“First, psychologically.”
“Hooray for Freud,” said Parker.
“First, psychologically,” I said. “This was a payment of blackmail without any form of security and my friend Mr. Gilmore was far too wise a bird to flip for that. Martell was to quit the country within three days and stay away for eighteen months, and the gal was supposed to realize what a rotter he was by then. What guarantee, pray? A hundred thousand bucks is forked over, and then suppose Martell doesn’t leave the country, or if he does, returns in a couple of weeks? No, no. Friend Gilmore was far too wise to go for a deal like that.”
“But obviously he was going.”
“Which stank it up somewhere.”
“Finished with the psychology?”
“No. Two more points. One, nobody pays blackmail by check. Martell would be too slick to accept a check and Gilmore too wise to offer a check—yet, that’s what I was supposed to deliver—a check. Two, my fee was three hundred dollars. Three hundred bucks to play delivery bo
y. Mr. Gilmore has always been a liberal client, but this wasn’t liberal; this was, to put it mildly, downright extravagant. Mr. Gilmore was way out of line, over-excited to a point where his sense of values was out of kilter, and his sense of values is practically his stock in trade. Something stank, but I couldn’t place the odor. Furthermore, it was none of my business.”
“Hooray for Freud,” said the iconoclastic Parker. “Are we through with psychology?”
Parker was old-fashioned. Or perhaps it is new-fashioned. Parker, I knew, had a respect for S. Freud, but Parker, I also knew, was weary to the bone of the symbol-spouting devotees who had made a religion of the good doctor’s findings and a deity of the good doctor.
“Don’t read in,” I said. “There were people before Freud. Ordinary, or extraordinary, psychologists. William James, say.”
“Cut,” said Parker. “What the hell is this? A seminar? Or a cheerful chat about murder?”
“Getting back to gloomy Tuesday and Mr. Gilmore, I also knew he was lying when he had said that he hadn’t been out.”
“Now what the hell!” This from Gilmore. He pushed away, momentarily, from the solace of brandy. “Now, really!” Perhaps it is in all of us to seek center stage, even if center stage means death. Perhaps he felt I was taking the blush of the spotlight off him. He was actually sarcastic. “There is no clearer sight than hindsight, is there, Lieutenant?”
“Talk it up,” said Parker. “You’re getting to the wire.”
“I knew he was lying,” I said.
“Now how in hell?” said Gilmore.
“He told me to get the envelope from his suit,” I said. “I had to touch the suit. The suit was sodden. Sodden, you know? Damp, moist, slightly wet. A beautiful pin-stripe cashmere, but sodden, damp right through. This was a dry, air-conditioned room—that suit couldn’t have been wet unless he’d been out. To cap the conclusion, there was a little hunk of mud, right there on the floor, in that far corner of the room.”
Grudgingly Gilmore murmured as he returned to the palliation of brandy: “The son of a bitch.”
“None of it at that time,” I said, “was any of my affair. I had an easy fee of three hundred clams, and that was my affair. There was no hurry with Martell, and I had business with Miller, so I stopped there first. You know that part, Lieutenant. Then we went to Martell. You also know that part, Lieutenant. When the gun turned out to be Clayton’s, everything fit into place.”
“Why?” said Parker.
“Because Sherry Greco relieved Jeff Clayton of his gun in her bedroom at a time when Mr. Gilmore was in the room. I got that information from Clayton himself. So Q.E.D. Everything fit. Dear Mr. Gilmore had got rid of Martell and then built up a beautiful alibi. In bed all day, resting that bad heart. Willing to pay the blackmail with a written check to prove it. Messenger-boy Chambers who was given the check to deliver, plus a resounding fee so he wouldn’t forget. I knew who had murdered Martell, but go prove it. Impossible. The only way was to get his own admission, and the only way to get that was through the daughter. Luckily, the wrong facts piled up in the right direction. The daughter was in peril and the old boy had to come through.”
“Son of a bitch,” said Gilmore and now it was a clear and naked compliment. “I know how to pick my people, don’t I, Lieutenant? This boy is a young fool with stupid principles but he’s a brilliant little bastard, isn’t he?” He set away his brandy and stood up. “Time, I believe, to call the first of my lawyers. Oh, there shall be many, a veritable battery. There is homicide and homicide and some of it is justifiable homicide and there’ll be a damned fine array of attorneys to try to prove that. And if not, perhaps they’ll prove I’m crazy. Sitting around, chatting with you like this, may even help prove that. Demented. Perhaps I am, after all, a sick and demented old man. Let’s give my chaps a chance to begin to prove that. May I call the first of my lawyers, if you please, Lieutenant?”
“You have that right,” said Parker.
TWENTY-FIVE
In my own small way, in the opinion of a restricted few, I was a hero. Through my efforts, however bumbling, Mr. Skahnos-Demetrios was under lock and key, booked for murder. Through my efforts, however fumbling, Mr. Cobb Gilmore was similarly incarcerated, booked for murder. Through my efforts, however stumbling, a priceless object of art was in the hands of loving experts being artfully welded together prior to its reinstitution in a museum called Bargello in a town called Florence in a country called Italy. A stockbroker with a Princeton-type haircut was in gleeful possession of a receipt from the authorities for a certain Smith and Wesson which was being held as an item of evidence concerned with the murder of a rotter who once bore, as one of his names, Henry Martell. A smoke-eyed young lady with pear-shaped breasts was finished with flighty girlhood and over the threshold of the serious business of being a woman. A serious young woman with a tiny child was ready for re-entrance into Toledo as a sweet young widow unbesmirched by scandal.
Me? No kick except unfinished business. From Monday to Wednesday I had delivered two murderers and in the practice of my profession I had earned from Jefferson Clayton, $5500; from Skahnos-Demetrios, $500; from Cobb Gilmore, $1300—a sizable sum in total aggregate of $7300, but if any of you, inspired by this reading, are overcome with the desire to rush into the business of private-eyeing, I must hasten to promulgate the harsh facts of the interminable succession of rank, blank days between bonanzas which flatten the average to exactly that—average. You want to make money? Invent a toilet paper with a new scent for each day of the week and sit back and wipe up the profits.
But please, if you please, my unfinished business. My unfinished business entailed a long afternoon nap, several urgent telephone calls, a shower (of course), a shave (of course), a dabbing of virile perfume to the vital parts, a dressing in slick slacks and a silk sport shirt he-manfully open at the throat, a spraying of my apartment from a pressure can with a sexy odor, a dimming of the lights, a setting up of Clayton’s projector, Clayton’s screen, and Martell’s film, a poising upon the heated-up record player of an album of seductive Turkish music, and an impatient pacing-about at two o’clock of a Wednesday night going on Thursday morning. And then my buzzer sounded and I opened the door for an annoyed, superior-frowning Sherry Greco attired in a tight green dress and a silver mink stole.
“Man,” she said, “I pleaded sick for my last show because of your crazy phone calls. What is it with you? What’s with so urgent? Man, creep out of my life, will you? You’re becoming like a pest.” She removed the stole to reveal glistening white shoulders.
“Would you like a drink?” I said.
“I would like nothing,” she said, “except to know what’s with all the telephone messages and the urgent. Christ, when a supposedly sophisticated guy gets a case of hot pants he’s worse than a simp from Peoria. Now what’s with the urgent, handsome?”
“Please sit down.”
She sat and pulled up the tight skirt and crossed beautiful legs all the way up to the crotch and said with disdain, “With the sexy lights and the whole bit, huh? What have you got on your mind, as if I didn’t know?”
“Just sit,” I said. “I have a film.”
“That’s urgent?”
“It’s an urgent film.”
I dimmed what was left of the dim lights, pushed Clayton’s button, let the thing roll, and hoped. I was beginning to enjoy the damned film all over again when she screeched: “Turn it off!”
I turned it off.
I put on the lights.
I removed the screen, removed the projector, removed the film.
I said, “Care for a drink?”
“Bourbon,” she said. “A lot of it. Straight, with ice.”
I obliged. She rammed it down as though it were soda pop.
“Care for a refill?” I said.
“What goes here?” she said.
“Henry Martell was putting the clamp on you. On you and Jeff Clayton. Two rolls of film. Duplicates.”
“So?”
“Jeff retained me to capture them.”
“So?”
“I captured them.”
“So?”
“Jeff Clayton paid me five thousand dollars for one roll of film.”
She stood up. She came toward me swaying like a sturdy tower in a slight earthquake. Sweet syrup replaced tartness in the tart voice of the tart. “And you want five thousand bucks from me for this other roll?”
“All I want is a roll. Like I earned it.”
“You’re losing me, sweetie. I don’t dig.”
“Or gaining you?”
“I don’t dig.”
“You want that film?”
“But yes.”
I touched the button of my record player and we were suffused by soft strains of seductive Turkish music.
“What the hell is that?” she said, but with syrup.
“Music,” I said.
“Are we going to dance?”
“You’re going to dance.”
“I’m going to dance?”
“Belly dance,” I said.
“Are you out of your mind?”
“Sane as a psychiatrist, sane as that may be. Belly dance for me alone. Solo. Start taking off your clothes.”
“But I don’t have my costume.”
“You don’t need your costume.”
“But for my dance I do.”
“Not for this dance,” I said. “Remember me, beloved? I’ve earned it.”
If you liked Death of a Flack check out:
Dead on the Level
CHAPTER ONE
The whole thing started with a dream, a cockeyed, crazy dream….
THE WAY Casey figured it, life was a sour deal. It was something with a beginning you didn’t ask for, an ending you couldn’t help, and nothing in between that would sell even at a charity auction. But it came in a package, like a Christmas tie, and once the package was opened you were stuck with it.
Casey Morrow was thinking again, and that was bad. What he needed was another drink.