Killer's Payoff

by Ed McBain

  “Alice was one. I don’t remember her last name. She was a nice girl. He should have married her. Then he wouldn’t all the time be moving around.” The woman glanced across the street. “I have to get back to my mowing. Did Phil do something?”

  “You’ve been very helpful, Mrs.—”

  “Jennings,” she said. “Did Phil do something?”

  “Can you direct us to the local post office?” Carella asked.

  “Sure. Just drive straight into town. You can’t miss it. It’s right on the main street as you come into town. Did Phil do something?”

  “Thank you for your time, Mrs. Jennings,” Carella said. Both men got into the car. Mrs. Jennings watched them as they drove away. Then she went to her next-door neighbor and told her some cops were around asking about Phil Kettering.

  “He must have done something,” she told her neighbor.

  THE POST OFFICE CLERK was a harassed man trying to keep pace with the mushrooming developments on Sand’s Spit.

  “No sooner do we get mail service going to one development, than another one springs up,” he said. “Where are we supposed to get all the mailmen? This isn’t like the city, you know. In the city, a mailman steps into one apartment building and he gets rid of half his bag. Just pulls down the boxes, zing, zing, zing, files in the letters. Here, the mailman has to walk up the block, and he’s got to go up each front walk and put the letters in the box, and then walk down the path, and then to the next house, and then up the path—and he picks up letters from the boxes, too, takes them back to the office for mailing. Half the time he’s battling dogs and cats and what-not. A dame in one of the developments has a pet owl, would you believe it? The damn thing flies at the mailman’s head every time he goes up that front path. It’s murder. And every day there’s a new damn development. We can’t keep up with it.”

  “Do you deliver mail to a man named Phil Kettering?” Hawes asked.

  “Yes.” The clerk’s face lighted up. “Did you come for his mail? Did he send you for his mail?”

  “We—”

  “Jesus, am I glad to see you,” the clerk said. “We’ve got mail for him stacked to the goddamn ceiling. We had to stop putting it in his box because it was falling all over the front stoop. We finally brought it all back to the office. We’re hoping the stupid bastard’ll contact us with a forwarding address. You should see that pile. We’re not crowded enough, we’ve got to keep stacking his damn mail for him. Did you come for it?”

  “No. But we’d like to see it.”

  “I can’t let you take it out of this office,” the clerk said. “It’s addressed to him. We can’t deliver it to nobody but him.”

  “We’re cops,” Carella said, and he showed his identification.

  “It don’t make any difference,” the clerk said. “This mail is Government property. You’ll need a court order to take it with you.”

  “Can we look at it first?”

  “Sure. You’ve got an afternoon’s work cut out for you. That stuff’s been piling up since last September.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Back there in Kettering’s Korner. That’s what we call it. We’re thinking of starting a substation just to take care of that damn pile of mail. Why don’t people leave forwarding addresses? It’s the simplest thing in the world, you know. All you do is fill out a card.”

  “Maybe Kettering didn’t want anyone to know where he was going,” Hawes said.

  “What reason could he have for that?”

  Hawes shrugged. “Can we see the mail?”

  “Sure. Come on back with me.” The clerk shook his head. “It’s murder. Absolute murder.”

  “Which is one good reason for not leaving a forwarding address,” Hawes said.

  “Huh?” the clerk asked.

  TOGETHER, CARELLA AND HAWES went through the stack of mail. There were circulars, bills, magazines, personal letters. The earliest postmark was August twenty-ninth. Some of the personal letters were from a man named Arthur Banks in Los Angeles. Some of the personal letters were from a woman named Alice Lossing in Isola. They copied her address from the envelope flaps. At this stage of the game, it did not seem necessary to obtain a court order granting possession of the mail.

  At this stage of the game, it seemed necessary to visit Kettering’s office in Isola. They thanked the clerk and went out to the automobile.

  “What do you make of it?”

  “You don’t think he could have planned a murder as far back as September, do you?” Carella asked.

  “I don’t know. But why else would he disappear?”

  “Maybe he hasn’t. Maybe he’s just changed his residence. I doubt if a guy’s going to pick up and leave his business just because he had a little argument over a dinner table. Does that sound likely to you, Cotton?”

  “It depends on what kind of a guy Kettering is. A patient hunter might do it. Wipe out all trace of himself, and then plan to kill Kramer. Who knows, Steve? There’ve been weirder ones, that’s for sure.”

  “He’s a photographer, you know. That’s interesting, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. You thinking of the Mencken woman?”

  “Um-huh.”

  “A guy named Jason Poole took her pictures.”

  “Sure. But she thinks they’re in somebody else’s hands now, somebody who took over from Kramer.”

  “Kettering?”

  “Who knows? I’ll tell you one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m very anxious to talk to this guy. I think he may have a lot of the answers.”

  Hawes nodded. “There’s just one thing, though, Steve,” he said.

  “Um? What’s that?”

  “We’ve got to find him first.”

  12.

  PHIL KETTERING’S OFFICE was on one of the side streets of midtown Isola, off Jefferson Avenue. There were a good many big and prosperous firms with offices in the building. Phil Kettering’s was not one of them.

  His office was at the end of the hall on the third floor, and his name was on the center of the frosted-glass door, and the word PHOTOGRAPHER was lettered in the lower right-hand corner just above the wooden portion of the door.

  The office was locked.

  Carella and Hawes found the superintendent of the building and asked him to open the door for them. The super had to check with the building management. It took forty-five minutes from the time of the request to the actual opening of the door.

  The office was divided into three sections. There was a small room with a desk and filing cabinets in it. There was another room in which Kettering undoubtedly took his pictures. And there was a darkroom. The office did not carry the sweet smell of success. Neither did it carry any dust. Each night, the building’s cleaning woman came in to empty the waste baskets and wipe off the furniture. The office was spotlessly clean. If Kettering had been there recently, the cleaning woman had wiped away all traces of his visit.

  There was no mail outside the entrance doorway. There was a pile of mail inside the door, just below the mail slot. Several printed postal forms in the pile informed Kettering that the post office was holding packages too large to put through the slot. In the silence of Kettering’s office, Carella and Hawes illegally opened his mail. There was nothing significant in the pile. All the letters had to do with his business. Even the manila envelopes contained photographs that were coming back from magazines. The photos were not of the cheesecake variety. Nor did any of Kettering’s mail indicate that he was fond of photographing girls. His forte, apparently, was do-it-yourself pictures. Most of the correspondence was from service magazines, and all of the photos in the manila envelopes dealt with subjects like “How to Put up a Hammock,” and “Refinish That Old Table!” The photos showed how to do it, step by captioned step. If there was a connection between Kettering and Lucy Mencken, it seemed rather remote at the moment.

  There were some opened letters on the desk in the smallest room. The letters were dated the latter
part of August. None of them had been answered. Evidently Kettering had opened these before he left for his hunting trip. Some of the new letters were letters wanting to know why a request made in August had not yet been answered.

  A workbench had been set up under the lights in the studio room. A paint brush with a hole drilled through the center, a long stiff wire, and an empty coffee tin were on the center of the workbench. A plate was in the camera, loaded with film, ready to go. In the darkroom, there were negatives and prints of the first stages of the do-it-yourself project Kettering had been shooting. This one was teaching the reader how to keep a paint brush in good order by drilling a hole, putting the stiff wire through it and using the wire to support the brush over the coffee tin without bending the bristles. The photographic essay had not been finished. Apparently Kettering’s hunting trip had intruded upon its completion.

  Apparently, too, Kettering had not been back to his office since last August.

  Carella left the office with Hawes, and both men went down to see the building manager. The building manager was a well-groomed man in his thirties. He seemed unhurried and unruffled. His name was Colton.

  “I’m going to dispossess him,” Colton said. “Hell, he hasn’t paid his rent for all these months. That office is losing revenue for me. I’m going to dispossess him, that’s all.”

  “You sound as if you don’t want to,” Carella said.

  “Well, Phil Kettering’s a nice fellow. I hate like hell to throw him out into the street. But what can I do? Can I continue to lose revenue? He’s skipped town, so I lose money. Is that fair?”

  “How do you know he’s skipped town?”

  “He’s not around, is he? I’m going to dispossess him, that’s all. I called the building’s lawyer already. We’re going to post a copy of the summons and complaint on the office door. We can stick it there with Scotch tape or with a tack, the lawyer said. That’s called ‘substitute service’ in this state.”

  “Will you sue him for the back rent?” Hawes asked.

  “How can I get a judgment for the back rent?” Colton asked. “He has to be served papers in person for that and who the hell knows where he is? But I can get a judgment evicting him. Substitute service. That’s what they call it in this state. I hate to do it to Phil, but can I lose revenue? You can bet your life the building doesn’t like to lose revenue.”

  “Did Kettering give you any idea he was leaving?” Hawes asked.

  “None whatever. How do you like that? Skips town. Doesn’t even have the decency to tell me he doesn’t want the office any more. What’s he hiding from? Is it the police? Is he hiding from you? Is he planning a bank robbery or something? A murder? What? Why does the man suddenly skip town like that? That’s what I’d like to know.”

  Carella and Hawes nodded almost simultaneously.

  Carella said it for both of them. “That’s what we’d like to know, too,” he said. Then they thanked him and left his office.

  There was nothing to do but question the other men who had been on the hunting trip.

  They divided the men between them, and then Carella and Hawes split up.

  * * *

  THE ADVERTISING AGENCY was called the Ruther-Smith Company. It was a going concern, with twenty employees. Frank Ruther was a partner in the firm, and the man who wrote most of the company’s copy.

  “I’d rather be writing books,” he told Hawes. “The trouble is, I can’t.”

  He was a man in his early forties, with dark hair and brown eyes. He did not dress at all like a Jefferson Avenue advertising man. He dressed, instead, like the stereotyped idea of an author, tweed jacket, soft-collared shirt, quiet tie, dark flannel trousers. Too, like someone’s stereotyped idea of a writer—perhaps his own—he smoked a pipe. He had greeted Hawes cordially and warmly, and they sat now in his tastefully furnished office, talking and smoking.

  “My grandfather made a hell of a lot of money,” Ruther said. “He sold pots. He traveled from town to town selling his pots, and pretty soon he could afford to hire people to sell his pots for him. He left a lot of money to my dad.”

  “What did your father do?” Hawes asked.

  “He parlayed it into even more money. He was a dog fancier. He began importing French poodles. It doesn’t sound as if there could be much money in it, but he had the biggest kennel on Sand’s Spit. Quality dogs, Mr. Hawes. And my dad was a shrewd businessman. When he died, I inherited money earned by two generations of Ruthers.”

  “What did you do with it?”

  “I wanted to be a writer. I wrote dozens of novels, which I threw into the wastepaper basket. At the same time, I was living big. I’d always lived big when my father was alive, and I saw no reason to stop living big when he died. I went through quite a lot of money. In a little less than twenty years, I spent almost the entire fortune two generations had worked to build. I stopped writing novels when I had about fifteen thousand dollars left. I started this company with Jeff Smith. It’s earning its keep now. I’m beginning to feel as if I’m finally accomplishing something. It’s a bad feeling, Mr. Hawes, when you know you’re not accomplishing anything.”

  “I suppose so,” Hawes said.

  “A good copywriter could outline the history of my family in three words, if he wanted to. At least, the history of my family until I started this agency—when I was still fooling around writing books.”

  “And what are those three words?” Hawes asked.

  “My grandfather, my father, and me,” Ruther said. “Three generations and three occupations. The three words? A peddler, a poodler, and a piddler. I was the piddler.”

  Hawes smiled. He had the feeling that Ruther had used these words many times before, and that his seeming originality was not at all spontaneous. He felt, nonetheless, that it was clever—and so he smiled.

  “I’m not a piddler any more, Mr. Hawes,” Ruther said. “I write copy for my firm now. I write damned good copy. It sells the product. Jeff and I are making money at last. Not money I inherited. Money I worked for. Money I worked damned hard for. It’s a good feeling. It’s the difference between being a piddler—and a man.”

  “I see,” Hawes said.

  “I’m sorry,” Ruther said graciously. “I didn’t mean to take up your time with a family portrait.”

  “It was very interesting,” Hawes said.

  “But what did you want to know?”

  “What do you know about Phil Kettering?”

  “Kettering?” Ruther’s brow creased. He looked at Hawes in puzzlement “I’m sorry. I don’t think I know the name.”

  “Phil Kettering,” Hawes repeated.

  “Should I know him?”

  “Yes.”

  Ruther smiled. “Can you give me a clue?”

  “Kukabonga Lodge,” Hawes said.

  “Oh! Oh, for God’s sake, yes. Of course. Forgive me, please. I’m not good on names. Especially at that time…well, I was in something of a fog. I’m afraid nothing made a very clear impression on me.”

  “What kind of a fog?”

  “My wife and I were having trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Personal trouble. We thought we might split up.”

  “Have you?”

  “No. We’ve worked it out. Everything is fine now.”

  “About Kettering. When did he leave Kukabonga?”

  “Early one morning, I forget which day it was. He said he wanted to do a little shooting before hitting the road. He had his breakfast, and then left.”

  “Anybody go with him?”

  “No, he went alone.”

  “Then what?”

  “Well, we had our breakfast, and then we went out.”

  “Who?”

  “Me and the two other fellows who were there. I don’t remember their names.”

  “There were three other fellows, weren’t there?”

  “Kramer, you mean? Yes, he was the third fellow. But he didn’t come with us that morning.”


  “Why not?”

  “I’d had an argument with him the day before.”

  “What about?”

  “Clams.”

  “You remember Kramer’s name, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Because we had the argument.”

  “Did you see anything about him in the papers recently?”

  “No. Why?”

  “He’s dead.”

  Ruther was silent for a moment. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said at last.

  “Are you?”

  “Yes. We’d had an argument, true, but that was a long time ago, and I was touchier than I should have been. Because of the trouble Liz and I were having. I certainly wouldn’t wish his death.” Ruther paused. “How did he die?”

  “He was shot.”

  “You mean accidentally?”

  “Purposely.”

  “Oh.” Ruther paused again. “You mean he was murdered?”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “Who did it?”

  “We don’t know. Have you seen Kettering since last year?”

  “No. Why should I? He was a stranger. I only met him at the lodge.”

  “Then you wouldn’t know where he is now?”

  “No, of course not. Did he have something to do with Kramer’s death?”

  “We understand Kettering took your part in the argument and that he and Kramer almost came to blows. Is that right?”

  “Yes, that’s right. But that was a long time ago. You can’t believe he’d harbor a grudge all this time.”

  “I don’t know what to believe, Mr. Ruther. Can you remember the names of the other two men who were on the trip?”

  “No, I’m sorry, I can’t. One of them had a very strange name, but I don’t remember what it was.”

  “I see. When did you leave the lodge?”

  “On a Saturday, I think.”

  “Do you remember the date?”

  “The eighth or the ninth, I guess. This was the first week in September.”

  “When did Kramer leave?”

  “The same day, I think.”

  “And the other men?”

  “We all left at the same time, I believe. We’d only gone up there for a week. I’m a little hazy on all this because I was more concerned with my wife than with hunting. The only thing I shot all the while I was there was a crow.”