Silent Scream df-6

by Michael Collins

  I sat. “Hal, have you remembered anything? Something you picked up near Diana’s new apartment? Someone who acted funny?”

  “Nothing, Dan. Nothing!” He looked now toward where Emily Green lay so silent. “Doorways, that’s my speed. I’m good at watching from doorways. Right outside when it happened!”

  “What the hell should you have done? Dashed in to do battle? A paintbrush against Bagnio’s forty-five?”

  We waited in silence after that, the odor of death growing thick in the sleazy room.

  Captain Gazzo straddled a chair, faced us both. The M.E. was still working over Emily Green. Gazzo’s men had been combing the bare room for an hour, not looking hopeful. Gazzo added it up.

  “She got a call from Bagnio. Said nothing, and came here. Why did Max kill her? She wouldn’t talk, and he hit too hard persuading her? Then had to finish the job? Or did he let her know something dangerous to him and have to kill her?”

  “A forty-five automatic is heavy enough to do it,” I said.

  The M.E. looked up. “Possible, but not likely. Something thicker, a bottle or club. Nothing in this room looks right. About three hours ago now, I’d estimate. First or second blow did the job, the rest were fun or panic.”

  The morgue men packed Emily Green up, took her out. Gazzo’s men had all quit, stood around. Except the fingerprint man.

  “Ten different sets already,” he said. “A transient flop. Why don’t I ever get a neat, high-class murder?”

  Gazzo ignored the fingerprint man, scowled. “Why did she come here at all? How did Bagnio make her come? A threat? Told her he had something important that would help Hal, or hurt him?”

  I told him what Charley Albano and Mia had said uptown.

  “Irving Kezar ties to Charley, if Pappas’s kid is telling it true, and Sid Meyer ties to Kezar,” Gazzo mused. “Charley Albano would lie about anything, but if he says Max Bagnio killed Andy, and not alone, he could know, too.” Gazzo looked at Hal. “Any chance your wife could change her mind, decide to come back?”

  “How would I know? She’d started the divorce, moved in with Pappas.” His voice was stiff, as if it hurt even now to mention Diana and Pappas together.

  “You think Emily could have hired Bagnio?” I said. “To kill Diana? Pappas was the extra murder?”

  “Maybe Max had two partners,” Gazzo said. “One for each.”

  “Captain!”

  A call from down in the back yard. Gazzo and I went and looked down. One of Gazzo’s men held a sawed-off baseball bat. I saw the blood on it. Gazzo looked around the barren room. He opened both windows. One of them wouldn’t stay open.

  “Windows never work in a dump like this,” Gazzo said. “The bat was a brace to hold the window up. Lying around handy.”

  Gazzo went out to go down to the back yard. I turned to Hal. I described Charley Albano and his yellow gloves.

  “When you were watching Diana’s new place, did you see a man like that? See him do anything strange? Did he see you?”

  “Well,” he thought, then nodded, eager. “I think maybe I did. With that paunchy guy, what was his name-Kezar? And, Dan, I might have seen the small guy with the gloves around St. Marks Place, too. After the murders. Sort of watching.”

  I said, “Tell Gazzo I had to go. And stay hidden, you hear?”

  CHAPTER 17

  I called Irving Kezar’s office from the candy store. He was out, his efficient secretary didn’t know where he was this time. She never gave out his home address.

  In the rain, seven empty taxis passed me up. Lunch hour, they were heading midtown for more lucrative short hauls. I cursed them all the way to the subway at Astor Place, rode uptown to Sixty-eighth Street, and walked north to Seventieth.

  In the bare lobby of Kezar’s building, a young man in a hat and brown overcoat was studying the mailboxes as if he had just come in and was looking for the apartment number of some tenant. But his hat and coat were almost dry. That made me alert, and I recognized him-the man who could have followed Kezar from his athletic club a month ago, who looked like a young lawyer, but had a gun under his coat.

  That had to mean Kezar was now upstairs. I went up, and was wrong again. Not even Jenny Kezar answered my ring. I went back down, using the stairs, but the young man was gone. Puzzled, I walked out into the rain and turned west. Maybe Kezar had used another exit to give the young man the slip. Which had to mean that Kezar was up to something he wanted quiet and hidden.

  I turned south on the avenue, looked for the first tavern where I could call Gazzo-and then I forgot about Gazzo. The young man in the brown coat was behind me! He hadn’t been staked out for Kezar, but for me! Jenny Kezar. She must have reported my earlier visit. Not as beaten-down as she seemed? Having Kezar tailed-or did she have some other reason for being nervous?

  Brown overcoat wasn’t a bad tail, but he wasn’t the best, and this was my city. I led him to an art gallery I knew on Madison Avenue. It had a concealed back-room exit into an areaway that served the next building, too. I came back out on Madison. Brown overcoat emerged from the gallery looking annoyed. He began to wave at taxis in the rain, and I got a break-he had no more luck than I’d had. He had to walk, and I followed him. He went south and west, bent into the rain, and started across the Park at Sixty-sixth Street.

  I would be too easy to hear and spot on the sunken roadway unless I stayed so far back I could lose him on the other side of the Park. So I took to the sodden grass and bare bushes and tailed from up above the roadway. On Central Park West he went north to Sixty-ninth Street, and west to Columbus, where he went into a bar. I watched him enter the telephone booth. He came out, walked back to Central Park West, sat on a bench across from a big apartment building. In the rain, he watched the entrance.

  I went in through the service entrance on Sixty-ninth. The rows of apartment bells listed a Mr. K. Irving in 17-B. The elevators had operators, and in a building like this they would ask questions of a one-armed man in a duffel coat and black beret. I used my keys on the stairs door, walked up the seventeen flights.

  In a narrow service corridor, I listened at the back door of 17-B. I heard no sounds, used my keys again, slipped inside. I stood in a large kitchen that had not been used much recently. In the rest of the apartment there was a heavy, empty silence. I moved on cautiously.

  It was a large apartment-six rooms-with the packaged air of a hotel suite. Rented furnished, cleaned by maids, used but not quite lived in. A big living room had a well-stocked liquor cabinet, the dining room was formal. One bedroom seemed used on some regular basis, its closet full of expensive suits and jackets, its one tall bureau containing shirts, underwear, men’s accessories. I was in the right apartment, Irving Kezar’s name was on various items.

  The other two bedrooms were furnished but unused, closets and drawers empty. A final room, a kind of office-den, was the only really lived-in room. It was busy, messy, with papers on a desk and empty glasses on a coffee table in front of a comfortable couch. There were no filing cabinets. If Kezar had a second set of files or books, they were in still a fourth place. I went to work studying the papers in the desk.

  After an hour I had a better picture of Irving Kezar’s work-and no picture at all. A man who was “called in” to consult, got people “together.” Expediter of collaborations, arranger of contacts-the oil in the wheels of a lot of “projects” and deals. But the details seemed to slip away, elude definition. Not one concrete fact or specific company, not one reference to exactly what he expedited or arranged. And nothing remotely related to Andy Pappas, or an Albano, or Max Bagnio, or anyone else I knew.

  I sat back to think, and the sound of the key in the front door almost caught me flat-footed. Not quite. My subconscious had sensed the elevator stopping at the floor without actually being aware of it, and when the key scraped in the lock, I was alert, had a few seconds. Not time to reach the kitchen and rear door across the living room, but just time to slip through the connecting door between the
den-office and one of the unused bedrooms. Not even time to close the connecting door, risk its sound, but only to flatten against the door, breathe softly.

  Two men came into the den-office. I had a tiny space between the hinged door and the frame, like seeing a movie screen through a keyhole. A back, a shoulder, the creak of the desk chair, and the sigh of the couch. A few seconds of silence that seemed like an hour. The snap of a cigarette lighter, smoke billowing.

  “I told you I don’t like you coming here.” Irving Kezar’s voice. “I take the risks, I say when we contact.”

  “You don’t contact,” a crisp voice said. “We don’t like it.”

  “I report when I’m ready, damn it.”

  “We like to keep better touch. It’s what we pay for.”

  “You pay for results,” Kezar said. His voice was worried. “You’re sure no one saw you waiting down in the lobby?”

  “We’re not amateurs,” the crisp voice said, disdainful. “The building’s watched.”

  I tried to see through the narrow crack of the partly open door. I could see Kezar’s hand, pudgy and flashing with his diamond rings. I saw a foot and ankle of the other man-a well-shined brown shoe and a neat gray sock.

  “Well, do you have a report on the operation, Kezar?”

  “It’s moving just as planned.”

  “Even with the complication?”

  Silence, then Kezar’s voice again, “Pappas doesn’t change anything. A little slowdown, that’s all. No real change.”

  “They know who killed him?”

  “Not a clue,” Kezar said.

  “That’s good,” the crisp voice said. “Ramapo Construction Company has the contract?”

  My ear twitched-a name! I listened for another name. It takes two to make a contract. It didn’t come.

  “All signed,” Kezar said.

  “But not paid yet?”

  “I’ll tell you when it’s time.”

  Another silence, and I watched the brown shoe and neat ankle swing in the air, impatient or annoyed or both.

  “So you have no real information to give me?” the crisp voice said. “Sometimes I wonder who you really work for, Kezar.”

  “I work for me, I told you that all along,” Kezar said.

  “Dangerous work,” crisp voice said. “Everyone cheats everyone in this kind of thing, but don’t cheat us too far.”

  “You’ll get your money’s worth.”

  “After you cream off your share from the other side,” the unseen man with the well-shined shoe said. “When do you plan to see Dunlap again?”

  “When it’s right,” Kezar said. “It’s not so easy with a guy like Dunlap. I have to step careful around him. He’s not dumb.”

  “Yes he is,” crisp voice said. “Dumb enough.”

  “All right, but I need a few more days. He’s the one place Pappas matters, slowed it down. You don’t want him suspicious.”

  There was movement. The unseen man with the crisp voice had stood up, and now I saw him. He leaned on Kezar’s desk.

  “That’s for you to handle, and don’t make a mistake. No mistakes, but get it moving. We’ve waited long enough now.”

  He was a tallish man, authority in his crisp voice. In his early fifties, dressed like a low-echelon executive in an ordinary brown suit, with close-cropped graying hair and the command of a man higher up than he looked. An Anglo-Saxon face, more mid-western than Ivy League. He reminded me of a successful small city lawyer, an older version of the young man I’d tailed to the building. Some Anglo-type gang, moving in on the brotherhood?

  “You’ll get your results, make your score,” Irving Kezar said, not backing down. “I have to go on working, cover myself.”

  “Make sure you do,” the stranger said.

  He vanished from my narrow view, and a moment later I heard the outer door close. Out in the den-office, Irving Kezar’s hand tapped the desk, his rings shining. He sat there for some time in the heavy silence. I breathed as quietly as I could, it was the critical time. If he heard, sensed…

  Kezar got up. I tensed.

  He walked around his desk-and out of the den-office. The outside door closed once more, and the whole apartment became as silent as when I’d come in. I didn’t wait. I went out the way I had come in, down the seventeen flights, and out the side. I went to the corner of Central Park West. The young man across the street was gone, the park bench empty in the rain. I took the subway down to my office.

  I checked the street carefully, and the entrance. No one was around I could see, especially not Max Bagnio. I went up, and someone was in the corridor. He came out of the shadows. Hal Wood. His face was neither boyish nor ruddy anymore. As tight and constricted as his eyes.

  “The police called Emily’s folks, made me wait,” he said. “They hate me, Emily’s folks. I don’t blame them. They brought her up strict about men, and then I came along. Corrupted her, then got her killed. I’d hate me, too.”

  “Come on in. You shouldn’t be wandering around.”

  In my one-window office I sat behind the desk. Hal stood, paced. He was wound so tight he could break apart at any moment. If he was a danger to anyone, they might not have to kill him, he’d do their job for them.

  “What should I be doing?” he said. “Hiding in an empty apartment? Try again, Dan? Pick a girl I don’t really care about this time? When she gets killed, it won’t matter?”

  “Go back to work.”

  “I can’t work! I want to know!”

  “All right. You ever hear of Ramapo Construction Company?”

  “No, never.”

  I called Lawrence Dunlap’s office. He’d gone for the day. I got his home address-32 Elm Drive, Wyandotte, New Jersey. I called John Albano. He was there. I told him about Emily Green and Max Bagnio, asked when he’d left Mia and Levi Stern. He’d left right after I had. All of them alone when Emily Green had been killed. With maybe just enough time?

  “You know a Ramapo Construction Company?”

  “One of Charley’s companies,” John Albano said. “Out in North Caldwell, New Jersey. Charley lives there, too.”

  “Get your car, pick me up at my office. When I talk to Charley, maybe it’ll help to have you with me.”

  My map showed that Wyandotte was a medium-sized city-not far from North Caldwell, or from Newark, where Sid Meyer had run his trucking company. This time I took my old gun.

  “I’m going, too,” Hal said. “I can’t just sit around, Dan.”

  His face was almost hollow. Maybe he’d be as safe with me as anywhere. We went down to the street to wait for John Albano.

  CHAPTER 18

  We drove through the Lincoln Tunnel and out across the Jersey Flats, the salt marshes and automobile graveyards and smoking factories stretching in all directions. Past Newark and Elizabeth, and into the rolling hills and open fields farther south where low buildings of the new, clean, light industries dotted the landscape among the bare trees.

  The rain had slackened, and we reached Wyandotte first. It was a city from the past-wide, tree-lined streets, older brick buildings, and the sprawl of supermarket and automobile franchises confined to a separated strip on the northern outskirts. Some cheaper tracts had gone up around the town, and some large signs announced the coming of light industry, but the city was still spacious on its meandering river, pleasant even in the slow rain.

  Elm Drive curved up a series of hills in what was one of the richer residential sections, and Thirty-two was an ugly, three-story brick mansion that had stood among its trees and lawn for a long time. Lawrence Dunlap’s blue Cadillac was parked in front of an open garage, a smaller red Mercedes was inside. John Albano stopped under a porte-cochere at the front door.

  An elderly woman with floury hands and rimless glasses answered our ring. There was nothing subservient about her manner.

  “And what can I do for you, eh?” Brisk.

  “We’d like to see Mr. Dunlap.”

  She looked me up and down. “Yo
u have a name, young man?”

  I gave my name. She closed the door. It opened again in about a minute, and the housekeeper nodded us inside.

  “In the breakfast room with Miss Harriet. Wipe your feet, go straight through to the rear hall, turn left. You’ll see it.”

  The old retainer, and from the way she said “Miss Harriet” instead of Mrs. Dunlap, I guessed whose old retainer she was. She had probably come with the marriage. We followed her directions and came out on a glassed-in side porch where Dunlap and his patrician wife were having tea and small sandwiches on a blue-and-white tea service that must have come over from England with one of Harriet Dunlap’s ancestors before New York ceased being Dutch.

  The wife smiled politely at us, and Dunlap stood up with a faint frown as if wondering what I could want now. When he saw Hal Wood, his whole face changed, seemed to fall apart. He recovered, but forgot to greet us. His wife looked up at him curiously. Not critically, but concerned. I saw again how she doted on him. The happy couple, and she helped him smoothly.

  “Mr. Fortune, isn’t it?” A lady always remembered names.

  “Dan Fortune, Mrs. Dunlap,” I said.

  Dunlap looked away from Hal. He was sweating, trying to pull himself together. I decided to let him sweat a moment.

  “That’s some view you have, Mrs. Dunlap,” I said.

  The rain had all but stopped, and beyond the brisk terrace outside the glass walls there was a far and wide view of the wooded hills and valleys along the curving river. It reminded me of the Roosevelt house at Hyde Park. Smaller and neater, not as grand as the Hudson Valley, but even a denser green in summer. An old view, unchanged for centuries.

  “I expect Indians to come out of those trees,” I said.

  “I know what you mean,” Harriet Dunlap said. Her pretty scrubbed face studied the view, enjoyed it. “My family’s been in this house since before the Revolution. One branch.”