Violence Is My Business

by Stephen Marlowe

  She repeated: “A great man. But Judson was never a great one for details. That’s where I came in. You believe it, a great li’l old head for details?” She tapped the side of her head to prove it. “Then Dygert.” She said an ugly word and hoped Dygert could apply it to himself. “I didn’t turn up anything in my investigation of Duncan Lord. Maybe I would have, but Judson became impatient, because if we didn’t hurry, Lord and what Lord believed would become entrenched in U.S.N.A. Around that time, Dygert came to my husband.”

  She paused, smoothed her red hair with one hand and went on. “Oh, Christ, Judson wanted to get something on Duncan Lord. Because Lord was dedicated to the shameful misuse abroad of government funds, something Judson’s been fighting all his life. Anyhow,” she admitted grudgingly, “Dygert’s a good detective, ft was Dygert who got the goods on Lord, not me. My methods are old-fashioned and soft, that’s what Dygert said. He actually laughed.”

  She stuck out her chest. “Me, old fashioned.” There was nothing old-fashioned about her chest. “The son of a bitch sold my husband a bill of goods. He was taking over. He was going to handle our investigations, not me. He got a fat retainer to do it. He—”

  “Even after the Lord affair backfired?”

  “More so then. Because—” here she stopped, set her lips firmly, and went on—“Judson became frightened. If we weren’t going to be involved in the Lord thing, after it went wrong, only Ernie Dygert could keep us out. That’s what he said, and Judson believed him.” She glared at me in drunken fury. “Before you knew it, Dygert was practically running the show. That did it. It—it was like retiring me to the farm. Do I look like I’m ready to retire to any old farm?”

  “Exactly what do you want me to do, Mrs. Bonner?”

  “You have your reasons for hating Ernie Dygert, just as I have mine. You’re in his business. You know how he operates. I want you, to get him for me. I want you to ruin him. I don’t care what you do. I won’t care how it’s done. I just want you to get Dygert.”

  I took a wild stab. “What about your boys—Gilbert and the blond fellow? Can’t they do the job?”

  First her face reddened. Then she smirked, and the smirk turned into that smile which did the wrong things to her face. “You see?” she said triumphantly. “You’re astute. I knew it! I knew you would be.”

  “Thanks, but that doesn’t answer my question.”

  “Them? They’re a couple of kids.”

  “But they work for you? You hired them? You pay their bills?”

  HER smile wasn’t pretty now, and it had nothing to do with how she showed her teeth. “Oh, I see what you’re getting at. Money. It’s money you want to talk about now.” She leaned forward, and the plain gray dress obediently fell away from her skin to show the deep shadow between her full breasts. “Well, I don’t have much money of my own. Not that Curt and Gilbert ever needed much of that so satisfy them.”

  The wild stab had been a good one. If Mrs. Bonner thought she had the merchandise I wanted, I’d have an ally—and maybe some information. “Curt and Gilbert work for you, then?”

  “Yes. What difference does it make?”

  “And get paid for their efforts in the nearest bed, of which there must be plenty in that big house of yours?”

  She got up, still smiling, and came around the desk arid stood in front of me. Then she slapped my face so hard the swivel chair made a quarter-turn.

  “That’s for being too smart too fast,” she said. Then she dropped in my lap and her lips started grazing on my face. When they reached my lips she gave me what she must have thought was a bride’s kiss. I thought it was a whore’s kiss.

  “And that,” she said, “is for proving you’re smart enough to be the man I need.” She sat up straight, still on my lap, and pulled my head against her breast. She was trembling with excitement, but that was no credit to my virility because she had something else on her mind. “Ruin him for me, Chester!” she cried. “You can do it! I know you can, I just know it.” She stood up and leaned on the desk. “Forgive me,” she said, “I’m a little drunk. But that way you can get down to fundamentals so quickly. Can’t you?”

  I said that you could. Then I said, “How do I go about ruining your friend Ernie Dygert?”

  She licked her lips. Then, while she applied more lipstick to them, I wiped it off my face with a hand kerchief.

  “You’ll do it?”

  I leered at her. She lived in a simple world with an old man for a husband and two strong young punks barely out of their teens as lackies-of-all-trade. I said, “If you get fundamental enough, often-enough.”

  That was what she wanted to hear. She stood in front of me with her hands planted on her hips and said in hardly more than a whisper: “I’ll bet you know how to do things Curt and Gilbert haven’t even dreamed of.” She waited. I smiled. It must have been the right kind of smile. She said, “We’ll have to do it together,” then laughed nervously but brazenly. “To Ernie Dygert, I mean. Because he’s going to get himself out on a limb again, and when he does I’ll be there.”

  “And when he does, you’ll let me know.”

  “I’ll let you know. You’ll drop everything and come running?”

  “I’ll come running.”

  The words sounded familiar. For a moment I couldn’t place them. Then I remembered.

  Call me, Chet.

  I’ll call you.

  I’ll come running.

  And Bobby Hayst blowing me a kiss outside her apartment building.

  “… because, naturally, I wouldn’t have to pay you,” Mrs. Bonner was saying. “You want to get Dygert as much as I do. You, because of what he did to you. Me, because I want things to be how they were before Dygert horned in. Right?”

  “Right as rain,” I said.

  Mrs. Bonner went to the door.

  “Don’t forget.”

  “How could I?”

  Satisfied, she took her nymphomania and got out of there. I hadn’t even learned her first name, but she had left the scent of her perfume in the office. I couldn’t open the window wide enough to get fid of it.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THANKSGIVING weekend came and went. There was no snow in Washington, though it grew cold enough to snow. In the papers they told about early snows blanketing New England and Northern New York and wrote copy about a real old fashioned winter and copy about the satellite race and more purges in Red China and fruitless talk in the U.N. and how the consumer price index had gone up another fraction of a percent.

  I lived off what was left of my bank account and drank too much and never managed to be tired enough for a good night’s sleep. After a week, I closed the office and listed the telephone number with an answering service which I checked every afternoon out of habit. Now that I was out of business, cases really piled in. I referred them to friends in the trade and got words of thanks and sympathy and a few free lunches.

  It was one of those times in your life when you’d chew a dinosaur’s leg if you had a dinosaur’s leg to chew, just to break out of the lethargy that was smothering you. I called Bobby every day, but there was no answer. I went over there the day after Thanksgiving, but the building manager told me she had checked out leaving no forwarding address. I glared at my dwindling bank account and called Hank Marshall, who runs a two-man agency on New York Avenue and asked him to trace Bobby for me. Because I’d given Hank a couple of cases in the last few days he insisted on doing it for free.

  Hank Marshall called me on a Sunday afternoon. “Chrissake,” he complained, “what did you get me into?”

  It sounded like trouble. I thought of Bobby. “What’s the matter?” I said.

  “Chrissake, boy. I go up there. The Hayst dame, her place. I show the buzzer and give the building manager a fin. He just looks at me. It winds up being a sawbuck.”

  “What happened?”

  “The apartment ain’t been rented yet. He leaves the passkey on his desk and turns around to mumble at the wall. You know the o
ld pitch.”

  “Why didn’t you just ask to see the place, to rent it?”

  “Couples or single broads. That’s all. Don’t you think I tried? Anyhow, I take the key and go up there. Chrissake, they’d been through the place with a bulldozer. Bedding torn. Rugs ripped up. Frames stripped off the pictures.”

  “Had she left anything behind?”

  “Chrissake, if she did they got it. Whoever the hell they were.”

  “No. I mean clothes, things like that.”

  “You already told me she checked out. It was bag and baggage, boy. Well, then this manager gets a kind of guilty reeling, you know how they sometimes get. And me standing there with my goddam hand in the cookie jar someone else took all the cookies out of. He almost passes out on me. He starts in hollering bloody murder. I finally shove it through his thick skull that I wouldn’t of had the time to do a job like that. Chrissake, I was only in there five minutes. Five minutes. Six guys working with bolos couldn’t of done all that damage in five hours! What the hell were they looking for?”

  I said I didn’t know.

  “You want I should make like a skip-tracer, Chet?”

  “If you’ve got the time, Hank. It’s important.”

  “Time I got. But she left a trail as cold as a frigid bride’s first night. Chrissake.”

  Hank complained some more, but knowing him, that meant he was mad at himself for not being able to find Bobby. I thanked him in advance for anything he could do, and hung up.

  I took a long, stiff drink. That didn’t help. I was scared, because Bobby was up to her lovely blonde hair in trouble. She’d propositioned Jerry Trowbridge for a job, and he’d agreed. Too willingly, of course. Which meant that either Jerry or Dygert had seen right through her. What they’d been hoping to find in her apartment I didn’t know. Something which would explain what she really wanted, maybe. Or something from me. There probably hadn’t been anything to find, but that didn’t matter. They were on to her.

  They were on to her.

  I CALLED Jerry Trowbridge’s apartment, intending to play the heavy. Lay off Bobby Hayst, or else. Deliver her safe and sound, buddy, or you’re dead. I was that scared, and I would have meant it. But there wasn’t any answer.

  Dygert’s office would be closed on Sunday, so I looked up a home address for him in the directory. There wasn’t any. Information told me it was an unlisted number. No, sir. Not under any circumstances. We cannot give it out. That is why it is unlisted, sir. I’m sorry.

  I tried Jerry again that night. When there was no answer, I drove over to his apartment just off Rhode Island Avenue in a big old house which had been split up for eight or ten tenants.

  “He’s gone,” the landlord said.

  “What do you mean, gone?”

  “Don’t jump down my throat, mister. Been gone three days. Out of town.”

  “Where out of town?”

  “Search me, mister. Just out of town, he said.”

  I held out a five-dollar bill, which disappeared the usual way: “Look,” I said, “give it some thought. He must have done something which would tell you where.”

  The landlord was a stout man with a face made for scowling. He scowled. “Can’t think of anything right off.”

  Well,” I said desperately, “if he was going fishing, he might take a fishing pole.”

  “He didn’t take no fishing pole.”

  “I just meant that to give you an idea. Was there anything in the way he packed which might have indicated where he was going?”

  “I didn’t watch him pack, mister. Saw him come down.”

  “Yes?”

  “Got picked up in a cab by a real big guy. Not the driver. The guy waiting in back. He got out to help them load up Mr. Trowbridge’s stuff. That’s how I happened to see him. I don’t snoop.”

  “Of course not. A real big guy? Bigger than me?”

  He considered it. “Yup. Even bigger.”

  “Dark hair, beetling brow and a broken nose?”

  “Well, heck, mister. I guess you know him.”

  “What kind of cab was it?”

  “Heck, I don’t remember. You sound like a detective.”

  “Veterans’ Cab? Capitol Transit? Durant’s?”

  “I just don’t remember, mister.”

  “He traveling light or heavy?”

  He scowled again. “Light, I guess. A couple of pieces, but he couldn’t stuff all his gear into them. There were these ski boots.”

  “Ski boots?” I said. I almost grabbed him.

  “Yeah, like I said. Had the laces tied and the boots over his shoulder. Can’t miss ski boots, can you?”

  That was all I got out of him. Jerry and Dygert had gone north. For skiing. And Bobby?

  MONDAY morning I called Dygert’s office. He was out of town, indefinitely, whereabouts unknown. I tried my luck with Ike Wilson, the gossip columnist for the Star-Courier.

  “Bobby Hayst?” he said. “Oh, my, the hard life you detectives lead.” Apparently he hadn’t seen the small article in the papers. I didn’t have the heart to disillusion him. “A funny thing,” he said. “She just walked out. I happen to know, because a friend of mine just flew in the other day from Caracas with a bundle of money and—the wife should only hear me—a hankering for a blonde girl. I thought of Bobby right away, but her number’s been disconnected.” Ike stopped talking. I could, picture him blushing. “Hey, don’t get the wrong idea. I do this only for my friends, I assure you. Anyway, two or three of her girl friends didn’t know where she was, either. They said she’d been out of circulation for a couple of weeks.” Ike paused again. “Come to think of it, ever since you asked me for her number.”

  He tried to pump me to find out if that was a coincidence. The idea seemed to both startle and amuse him. “Pumping a dry well, huh?” he said finally. “I can take a hint. Well, so long.”

  The posters in the window of the Capital Travel Bureau on E Street showed gay young things in scarlet or aqua ski togs swooshing down white hills. The skiing season was on its way, all right. I went inside and got taken into tow by a tall mannish woman with severely plastered back black hair with a wide white part as straight as a ski jump, or maybe I was just projecting.

  “Skiing?” she said, in answer to my question. “Oh yes, we know a number of good places this time of year.”

  “I’m interested in a place where there’s bound to be snow, even now, in November.” Jerry, I thought, had taken his ski boots. They’re bulky and get in the way and if skiing or not skiing depended on the weather, he could have rented boots as needed. I began to feel like a detective again.

  “Well, I could recommend some mighty fine places in New England or upper New York State.” The mannish woman frowned. “But to tell you the truth, don’t believe all you hear about all the fine skiing snow in those districts this early in the year. They have wonderful press agents. If you really want a guarantee of good skiing snow, in November, I’d say the Laurentians every time.”

  That sounded reasonable enough, because the Laurentians were due north of Montreal, Canada. “There many places up there?” I asked.

  “Goodness, I could give you a list of seventy or eighty. What sort of place did you have in mind?”

  “I don’t exactly know. Luxury, probably. Sure, a luxury place. I like to ski, but I like to rub elbows with people who count, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yes, naturally. I know what you mean.”

  “Like, if there was a place you just knew had some VIPs right now, because you booked them … congressmen, maybe, or big operators around Washington? The wife would go for that.”

  I waited. The mannish face frowned. “Umm, no, I can’t recall right off any people like that I booked.”

  “Well, I guess that really doesn’t matter.” I let it go for a second, then asked: “Say, what’s the best way to get up there, anyway?”

  “You’d be flying? Anything else just takes days.”

  I said I would be flying.<
br />
  “Well, there are three airlines flying from Washington to Montreal. From there smaller chartered flights take you to Mount Tremblant or the other skiing areas.” She brought out some brochures and quoted airline rates. She gave me an envelope so full of brochures it was almost as thick as a telephone directory. I said I’d let her know and got out of there.

  I STRUCK paydirt on my second telephone call.

  “That’s it,” I said, after I’d been put through to the right person. “I’m Mr. Dygert’s assistant. You see, we left these goggles out of his bag, and while I know you can get ski goggles anywhere, these are special goggles, made in Austria. Mr. Dygert is prone to snow-blindness.” I waited. Then I said in a rush, “Frankly, it was my fault. I mean, Mr. Dygert told me to see that the goggles were packed, but I just forgot.” I tried to sound worried. Hell, it was easy. I was worried. “I’m liable to lose my job,” I said.

  “Exactly what do you wish us to do, sir?”

  “I want to know where to send the goggles.”

  “But surely you know where your employer went.”

  “That’s the funny part of it. You don’t know Mr. Dygert,” I groaned. “When he finally does get away, he really wants to get away. He didn’t leave any address. All I know is he went skiing in the Laurentians.”

  “Well, just a moment, sir.” I waited, and sweated. Then: “I’m sorry, sir. Trans-Canada booked a party of six, including your Mr. Dygert, as far as Montreal. We did not book them further. You see, although we do run a service into the mountains, it’s only a short run over good roads and a party of six might well have decided to hire a private car in Montreal. That method of travel, especially for a party of that size, is very popular in the Laurentians.”

  The string had run out. I thanked Trans-Canada’s man and hung up. I had a destination now, which was-something. The Laurentians. And a party of six. I mulled it over. Dygert and Jerry, of course. And Bobby makes three. Judson Bonner and his wife would bring the total to five. If they were going to Canada to put the screws on someone as they had put them on Duncan Lord, the sixth man wouldn’t be their victim. He’d already be there, waiting. If there was to be a victim. Because Bobby Hayst could be enough. But why Canada? And how the devil could I find out where, among all the skiing resorts in the Laurentians, they had gone?