Killer's Payoff

by McBain, Ed

  “Haven’t we? Try us. What’ll you go for? Extortion or homicide?”

  “I stopped for a brew,” Torr insisted.

  “We’ve got your voice on tape.”

  “Try to make that stick in court.”

  “Where are the pictures?”

  “I don’t know anything about pictures.”

  “Why’d you follow me?” Hawes asked.

  “I didn’t follow you.”

  “The tape said you’d be wearing a brown sharkskin suit. It said you’d be reading the Times. Guess what you’re wearing, and guess what you were carrying.”

  “It ain’t admissible in court,” Torr said.

  “Who were the big marks?” Meyer hurled.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Kramer’s bank account had forty-five grand in deposits. Was that only half of it, Torr? Did the total amount to ninety grand?”

  “Forty-five grand?” Torr said. “So that’s—”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Was Lucy Mencken paying more than the five bills a month?”

  “Is that all she—?” Torr stopped abruptly.

  “Hold it,” Hawes said.

  The other men looked at him.

  “Hold it a minute.” The light of pure inspiration was on his face. “This son of a bitch doesn’t even know how much Lucy Mencken was paying! I’ll bet he doesn’t even know for what she was paying. You didn’t know there were pictures, did you, Torr?”

  “I told you already. I don’t know nothing about it.”

  “You son of a bitch,” Hawes said. “You’ve been conducting your own little investigation, haven’t you? You’ve been following the bulls of this squad to get onto Kramer’s marks!”

  “No, no, I—”

  “The only thing you knew was that there were marks. And with Kramer dead, you figured to latch onto them. But you didn’t know who or how much.”

  “No, no, I told you—”

  “You followed us to Lucy Mencken and then called her to say you were taking over from Kramer. She was so scared she automatically assumed you knew all about the pictures. That was when she began snooping around, trying to locate them. Kramer was something she knew how to deal with. But you told her there’d be changes, and she didn’t know how far you were planning to go—and so she made a last try to get those photos.”

  “I don’t know what you’re—”

  “When you followed me the other night, you were looking for more of Kramer’s marks.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “How does this sound, Torr? You knew Kramer had a sweet deal, and you wanted it. You were tired of being a laborer, earning whatever the hell you earned a week. You wanted the big loot. Kramer probably talked a lot about big living. You were green with envy. You got a rifle, and you got a car. And then you—”

  “No!”

  “You killed him,” Hawes said.

  “I swear—”

  “You killed him,” Carella shouted.

  “No, for Christ’s sake, I—”

  “YOU KILLED HIM!” Meyer bellowed.

  “No, no, I swear to God. I followed you, yes, almost every one of you, yes, I hit you the other night, yes, I tried to get in on the Mencken squeeze, yes, yes, but Jesus Christ, I didn’t kill Kramer. I swear to God, I didn’t kill him.”

  “You tried to extort money from Lucy Mencken?” Hawes asked.

  “Yes, yes.”

  “You hit me the other night?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Book him for extortion and felonious assault,” Hawes said.

  Torr seemed happy it was all over.

  16.

  IT SEEMED EVIDENT at this point that Lucy Mencken and Edward Schlesser, the soda-pop man, had no further worries. Neither did the third, eleven-hundred-dollar mark who had contributed monthly to Kramer’s checking account. Extending this further, now that Kramer was dead and the sham extortionist Torr exposed, the big mark had nothing to fear, either. The big mark who had furnished Kramer’s apartment, bought his cars, and paid for his clothes, and then swelled his bank account to $45,000 was off the hook. Kramer was dead. No one had inherited his lucrative racket.

  Everybody should have been extremely happy, and perhaps they all were. Everybody but the cops.

  Kramer was dead, and someone had killed him, and that spelled homicide. And the cops still didn’t know who or why.

  Every post office in the city had been checked, as well as every bank. Unless Kramer had kept a box under an unknown alias, it seemed fairly certain the documents were being kept elsewhere. Kramer was a precise man who kept bills going back as far as last September. It did not seem likely that he would have been sloppy in the matter of keeping important papers and photographs. But where?

  His apartment had been searched by a crew of four detectives who worked for two days going over every inch of the place. Nancy O’Hara’s presence did not help the search. She was a mighty pretty girl, and cops are human. But the search was nonetheless a thorough one, and it turned up neither the missing documents nor a key to a possible deposit box somewhere in the city.

  “I don’t know,” Carella said to Hawes. “The whole goddamn thing seems to have bogged down.”

  “He’s got to have them someplace,” Hawes said.

  “Where? He doesn’t belong to any clubs.”

  “No.”

  “He hasn’t got a summer place, just that one apartment.”

  “Yes.”

  “So where?”

  Hawes thought for a moment. “How about the cars?” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The cars. The Caddy and the Buick.”

  “You mean maybe he’s got the stuff in the trunk, or the glove compartment? Something like that?”

  “Why not?”

  “It doesn’t sound like Kramer,” Carella said, shaking his head. “I get the impression he was neat, careful. I don’t think he’d leave important stuff in the trunk of a car.”

  “It’s worth a try, isn’t it?”

  Carella sighed heavily. “Anything’s worth a goddamn try,” he said. “Let’s hit the garage.”

  GEORGE’S SERVICE CENTER in Isola was located three blocks away from the late Sy Kramer’s apartment. It was there that Kramer had had his cars serviced. It was also there that he had boarded them. George was a wiry little man with grease on his face.

  “Let’s see your badges,” was the first thing he said.

  Carella and Hawes showed their shields.

  “Now we can talk,” George said.

  “We want to look over Kramer’s cars,” Hawes said.

  “You got a search warrant?”

  “No.”

  “Go get one.”

  “Let’s be reasonable,” Carella said.

  “Let’s,” George answered. “Is it illegal to conduct a search without a search warrant?”

  “Technically, yes,” Carella said. “But it won’t take us—”

  “Is it illegal to be doing thirty miles an hour in a twenty-five-mile-per-hour zone?” George asked.

  “Technically, yes,” Carella said.

  “Technically or otherwise, would you call it speeding?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “All right. I got stopped in a speed trap the other day. I’ve never sped in my life. I’m a careful driver. I was doing thirty miles an hour. Technically, I was speeding. The cop who stopped me gave me a ticket. I asked him to be reasonable. He was reasonable, all right. He gave me a ticket. You want to search those cars, go home and get a warrant. Otherwise, it’s an illegal search. I’m being as reasonable as your pal was.”

  “A speeding ticket makes you a cop hater, huh?” Carella said.

  “If you want to put it that way.”

  “I hope nobody ever tries to hold up your gas station,” Carella answered. “Come on, Cotton. Let’s get the warrant.”

  “Go
od day, gents,” George said, smiling.

  His revenge had been sweet. It delayed a murder investigation by almost four hours.

  THEY CAME BACK with the warrant at four in the afternoon on Monday, July fifteenth. George looked at the paper, nodded, and said, “The cars are inside. They’re both unlocked. The keys are in the dashes in case you want to open the trunks or the glove compartments.”

  “Thanks,” Carella said. “You’ve been very helpful.”

  “One hand washes the other,” George said. “Tell that to your traffic cops.”

  “Do you know what impeding the progress of an investigation is?”

  “All I know is you had to have a warrant,” George said. He shrugged. “If you’re in such a hurry, now that you got your warrant why don’t you go look at the damn cars?”

  “We will,” Carella said.

  Together, he and Hawes went into the garage. The Caddy and the Buick were parked side by side. The Caddy was white, the Buick black. Together, they looked like an ad for good Scotch. Carella took the Caddy, and Hawes took the Buick. They searched the interiors of the cars with patient scrutiny. They removed the seats and looked under them. They felt along the material covering the roofs of the cars, in the hope that Kramer had inserted something between the cloth and the metal. They lifted the floor pads. They took everything out of the glove compartments and everything out of the trunks. The search of both cars took three quarters of an hour.

  They found nothing.

  “Well, that’s that,” Carella said.

  “Mmm,” Hawes said disgustedly.

  “At least I’ve been inside a Caddy,” Carella said. “That’s the closest I’ll ever get to owning one.” He studied the white convertible. “Look at that baby, will you?”

  “It’s a beauty,” Hawes agreed.

  “And it’s got power,” Carella said. “Have you ever seen the engine on a Caddy? It looks as if it could power a destroyer. Here, take a look at it.”

  He went to the front of the car, unclasped the hood, and raised it. Hawes went over to where he was standing.

  “It’s something, all right,” he said.

  “Kept it clean, too,” Carella said. “A neat guy, Kramer.”

  “Yeah.”

  Carella was closing the hood when Hawes said, “Hold it. What’s that?”

  “Huh?”

  “There.”

  “Where?”

  “Stuck to the engine block.”

  “What?”

  “Lift that hood all the way up, Steve.”

  Carella raised the hood, and then looked at the engine. “Oh,” he said, “that’s his extra key. It’s just a little magnetized box you stick somewhere on the car. An extra key fits into it. In case you lock yourself out of the car by accident.”

  “Oh,” Hawes said, disappointed.

  “Sure.” Carella reached for the commercially marketed device. “See? The key fits right into this little—” He stopped. “Cotton,” he said softly.

  “What is it?”

  “That’s no car key,” Carella said. “Holy God, cross your fingers!”

  THE KEY STUCK to the engine of Kramer’s Cadillac convertible had the round, unmistakable yellow, numbered top of a key to a railroad-station locker. There were two big railroad stations in the city, several smaller ones, and several subway stops in which there were pay lockers. It was not necessary to visit each location in an attempt to match the key with the correct locker. Carella put in a call to the company supplying the lockers to the various spots. He gave them the number of the key on the phone, and the locker was pinpointed within five minutes. Within the half hour, Carella and Hawes were standing in front of the locker.

  “Suppose there’s nothing in it?” Hawes said.

  “Suppose the roof of the station caves in right this minute?” Carella said.

  “It’s possible,” Hawes answered.

  “Bite your tongue,” Carella said, and he inserted the key into the locker and twisted it.

  There was a suitcase in the locker.

  “Old clothes,” Hawes said.

  “Cotton, my friend,” Carella said, “do not joke. Seriously, my friend, do not joke. I am a very high-strung nervous-type fellow.”

  “A bomb, then,” Hawes said.

  Carella pulled the suitcase out of the locker.

  “Is it locked?”

  “No.”

  “Well, open it.”

  “I’m trying to,” Carella said. “My damn hands are shaking.”

  Patiently Hawes waited while Carella unclasped the bag. There were four big manila envelopes in it. The first envelope contained a dozen photostated copies of the letter to Schlesser from the lawyer of the man who’d drunk the mousy sarsaparilla.

  “Exhibit A,” Carella said.

  “Tells us nothing we don’t already know,” Hawes answered. “Open the next envelope.”

  The second envelope contained two pages from the ledger of a firm called Ederle and Cranshaw, Inc. Both pages were signed by a C.P.A. named Anthony Knowles. A comparison of the ledger pages showed that the second page was a revision of the first page, and that the first page did not exactly balance. It did not exactly balance to the tune of $30,744.29. The second page balanced very neatly, thank you. Mr. Knowles, whoever he was, had robbed the firm of Ederle and Cranshaw of thirty grand, and then balanced the books to cover the deficit. Sy Kramer had, in his own mysterious way, managed to get a copy of both the original entry and the fraudulent one—and had been using both to extort money from Knowles, who was undoubtedly the $1,100-a-month mark.

  “Larceny rears its ugly head,” Carella said.

  “The skeleton in every closet,” Hawes said.

  “We’ll have to pick up this Knowles.”

  “Damn right, we’ll have to,” Hawes said. “He may be the one who done in our friend Kramer.”

  But, of course, they had not yet opened the remaining two envelopes.

  Envelope number three contained six negatives and prints of Lucy Mencken in an attitude close to nudity. Hawes and Carella studied them with something unlike mere professional interest.

  “Nice,” Hawes said.

  “Yes,” Carella answered.

  “You’re a married man,” Hawes reminded him.

  “She’s a married woman,” Carella said, grinning. “That makes us even.”

  “Do you think she killed Kramer?”

  “I don’t know,” Carella said. “But that last envelope better have a lot of answers.” He lifted it out of the suitcase. “I think it’s empty,” he said, with astonishment.

  “What? You haven’t opened it. How can you—?”

  “It feels so light,” Carella said.

  “Open it, will you? For God’s sake!”

  Carella opened the envelope.

  There was a sheet of onion-skin paper in the envelope, and that was all. The sheet of paper carried a very faint typewritten carbon impression of three words. The three words were:

  I SAW YOU!

  17.

  YOU CAN CARRY DEDUCTION only so far.

  You can add two and two, and get four. And then you can subtract two from four, and get two. You can square two, and get four again. And then you can take the square root of four, and get two again—and you’re right back where you started.

  There comes a time when your personal mathematics don’t mean a damn.

  There comes a time, for example, like immediately after the arrest of Anthony Knowles. There comes a time when Knowles admits to the theft and the fraudulent entry in the ledger, and then comes up with a perfect alibi for the night Sy Kramer was killed.

  There comes a time when you’re right back where you started, and no matter how you add the facts you always get the same answer, and the same answer is no damn good at all.

  When that time comes, you play a hunch.

  If you’re a cop who isn’t particularly intuitive, you’re up the creek without a paddle. Because then you can only add up the facts, and the
facts come out like this: Kramer was extorting money from three known victims in various amounts, the amounts arbitrarily decided by Kramer in an attempt to make the punishment fit the crime. Three hundred bucks for putting out sarsaparilla that had flavor and body—the body of a mouse. Five hundred bucks for getting undressed—before a photographer. Eleven hundred bucks for making an erasure—to cover a theft.