Triple Slay

by Lawrence Lariar

  And now? I could have given Max Ornstein this gun last night. Instead, I had sent him out to be knifed.

  I went down to the hospital and shouted at the head nurse who insisted that I stay out of his room. I made a big noise until she took me in hand and explained the seriousness of Max’s condition. He was in real trouble. He was cut up viciously, brutalized. The serious wound was in his back. He had been stabbed before he had a chance to strike back. Max would have made the try. He was an expert at judo and an old hand at boxing. His reflexes would have moved him toward his adversary and if there was a chance, he might have marked the thug who felled him.

  “You’ll do him no good by seeing him now,” she insisted. “Your friend is in a coma.”

  “There was a nurse with him?”

  “Of course. From the time he was brought in until about a half-hour ago.”

  “I want to see her.”

  “She’s off duty.”

  “She reported nothing? He said nothing at all?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Do you think he’ll be able to talk?” I asked. Her calm was beginning to irritate me, her damned professional nonchalance. Max was only a routine case for her floor, as unimportant as a stray drunk. I was wasting my time with her.

  “He’s a very sick man right now,” she said. “Perhaps later. I’ve seen cases of this type that seem to revive, almost come out of it so that they talk a bit. We must have patience and hope for the best.”

  Patience? Hope? I badgered her until she gave way to me, and phoned the nurse who had attended Max. She reported nothing.

  On my way over to the local precinct I allowed myself a few quick cups of coffee and a try at calm. It would not be easy to slow down. I would be running from now on.

  At the precinct they told me that the young cop who discovered Max was named Gordon and that I could find him on his beat in the Bleecker Street area.

  I got to him a half-hour later. He showed me where he had found Max.

  “He must have fallen down from the top floor landing,” he said, leading me up the narrow stairway to the second floor. It was a three-story place, an ancient stable converted into studios for creative folks who could afford nothing better. The hallway stank from a combination of odors—cooking, dirt, and general neglect. I had noted six names on the rusted index downstairs: Levine, Harms, Bonaventure, Sloane, Nowick and Reed.

  “He was here,” the cop said. He was pointing to the bottom of the stair landing. “He was knifed up on top there. Fell back and down when he was hit. Friend of yours? Too bad.”

  “Did you talk to the two tenants upstairs?” I asked.

  “Only one,” he said. “The boys from the precinct had a few words with Miss Harms in 3D. She phoned for the ambulance. Nobody in 3C right now. Rented to Nowick.”

  “What happened when you got to him?” I asked. “Did the injured man say anything? Anything at all?”

  “Say?” Something about a girl, that’s all.”

  “Just that?”

  “The girl. That was about it.”

  “No name?”

  “I don’t recall any name.”

  “Gretchen MacGruder?”

  “No, there wasn’t any name.”

  The door marked 3D was opposite the stairs and the woman who answered my knock appeared in an artist’s smock. She told me about the incident of the man in the hall, how she was awakened by the young policeman and phoned for the ambulance as instructed. She insisted that she had heard nothing before the patrolman rang her bell. She was a sound sleeper and usually awoke at about nine in the morning. Her appearance gave her tale authenticity. Miss Harms looked about fifty years old, lived alone with her parakeets and made her living painting china. She patiently answered my questions about the residents of the house. She knew them all, described each of them for me in detail, and threw in a few sidelights on their domestic life without being asked.

  “The tenant in 3C?” I asked. “You know Nowick?”

  “Funny you asking me that,” she smiled. “Exactly what the police detective asked. About Nowick, I mean.”

  “What about Nowick?”

  “No such animal.”

  “I don’t understand, Miss Harms.”

  “Nowick. Don’t you get it? A made-up name, of course.”

  “You know the tenant’s real name?”

  “Of course I do. Everybody in the Village does. Nowick means Nowist, naturally. The apartment was rented by that crazy woman, MacGruder. She lets her Nowist friends use it when she doesn’t use it herself. Crazy woman.”

  “Did she use it last night?”

  “I didn’t see her last night.”

  “I didn’t think so,” I said. “Because I saw her last night, in her basement apartment and with her cats. I’d say that her home is where her cats are, wouldn’t you, Miss Harms?”

  “How clever,” she smiled. “And Mrs. MacGruder moved her cats out of here quite some time ago. Her studio is empty most of the time.”

  “She allows her studio to be used by friends? Is that what you’re trying to tell me, Miss harms? Men friends?”

  “That is exactly what I mean.”

  “And do you know any of them?”

  “I most certainly do not.”

  “Yet, you’ve seen them come and go?”

  “Not them. There’s only one, in the past few weeks. I imagine he lives up here.”

  “A man with a beard?”

  “Yes,” she said. “A man with a reddish beard.”

  “Is he up here now?”

  “How would I know?” she said with some indignation. “I don’t sit around keeping tabs on Mrs. MacGruder’s tenants.”

  I knocked at the door marked 3C. It was an outstanding door, painted a brilliant red and featuring a large brass door knocker. I pounded it lustily, setting up a skittering echo in the empty hall. Nobody responded. There were stairs to the right of the door and I took them to the roof and found myself in a network of clothes lines. A large studio skylight was open before me, affording me a bird’s-eye view of the MacGruder art nest beneath. On the right, a large easel featured a portrait of a hawklike woman, a badly done job of the features of Gretchen MacGruder herself. Beyond the easel was a studio couch, a small table, and a few odd chairs. On the table, a modern ashtray holding a pipe. Masterson’s pipe? And what was the binder alongside the ashtray? The manuscript he was reading last night? Curiosity moved me toward the edge of the skylight.

  I eased myself through the open space and dropped down into Gretchen’s studio sanctum.

  My hunch paid off. The binder contained Masterson’s Nowist manuscript and the pipe was his, too. There was a tiny kitchenette beyond the studio, a dirty room containing the leavings of a Bohemian picnic, foul cans and dirtied paper plates and the whitening bones of a barbecued chicken. I returned to the main room and sat for a while and let it speak to me. It said very little except that Jeff Masterson had been here last night. It also said that Masterson was not alone. There were several lipsticked cigarette butts in the ashtrays.

  “Shades of Nick Carter,” I mumbled. “All I need now is a woman who smokes a rare type of cigarette—Camels.”

  Sometimes the threads to murder are woven in a scatterbrained pattern, a design compounded of intricate subtleties. Yet the routine investigator cannot afford the delights of quiet speculation and Sherlock Holmes deduction. The business of crime is cut and dried in every police investigation; the pursuers follow a deliberate path; the clues are analyzed and classified; the suspects watched and weighed.

  But the individual pursuer, the private detective, is always at a disadvantage in the mechanics of pursuit. You cannot be in two places at one moment. You cannot follow two roads with one pair of legs. And that was why I found myself calling on an old friend, John Drummond, a private investigator who occasionally
helped me.

  Drummond was a veteran pro, keen and quick. He was willing to help me because Max and he had worked together often in the old days. But Drummond no longer relished the idea of personal danger. He would be sixty soon and in no condition for fighting off casual thugs of the type who had slugged Max Ornstein.

  “And no night work, Steve,” he said. “Hell, I can still run pretty well and my eyes are okay. But I don’t want the dark stuff. I quit at night. Fair?”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “And you’ll be finished in one day, I’m quite sure.”

  I told him my ideas. He was to stand on a plant immediately, outside Gretchen MacGruder’s basement Nowist nest. He would be waiting for a big lad with a red beard. He would stay with the bearded man all day. It was as simple as that.

  “I’ll expect a report from you this evening, Drummond.”

  “After sundown,” said Drummond. “Just after dark, Steve.”

  It was almost ten when I leaned on the bell marked A. Haddon in the hall of the brownstone on Eleventh Street. From inside a mad set of chimes sounded a melody, over and over again. I muttered an obscenity at him. He was in there, he had to be in there. A copy of The New York Times lay folded at the door sill. I kicked at it and continued to press the bell buzzer and after a very long time the door opened and he looked out at me, blinking stupidly.

  “Urraagh,” he mumbled and tried to close the door against me. “Urrunngh …”

  But he stepped back under the pressure, all the way back to the wall of the small foyer, rubbing his rheumy eyes and trying to focus on me. Beyond him, the combination living room and bedroom of his apartment, the studio couch in disorder and a girl asleep, her back to us, her body shapely under the sheets.

  “Cloak and dagger,” he muttered angrily. “What the hell are you playing, Connick, the first scene of a horror movie? Get the hell out of here.”

  “Conacher,” I corrected. “I had to see you, Haddon. You’re a tough man to catch sober.”

  “At this hour of the morning? It isn’t decent.”

  “Save the Noel Coward dialogue,” I said, showing him my impatience. “Is there a room in this dump where we can talk? Or do you want to wake your lady friend?”

  “Can’t it wait? I can talk to you in the office.”

  “Now.”

  “I have no other room. The john?”

  “The hall,” I said. “I’m not much good in washrooms.”

  “Not like this? Not in my damned fool pajamas.” He was beginning to awaken, but it would take hours for his eyes to lose the rum-red hue. He had the blurred and half-whispered speech of the seasoned dipso, a mouthful of feathers and a headful of air. He forced his mind to a conclusion and walked to the studio couch and shook the girl awake. She sat up and gaped at me and I recognized her as one of the Nowist broads from Gretchen’s place, the girl in the yellow blouse. She must have been through this scene before because she only yawned and stretched and got out of the sheets, surveying me with great boredom. He whispered a word to her and she grabbed at her clothes on the chair and retired behind the door to the bathroom. Haddon sat wearily on the edge of the couch, massaging his scalp.

  “A night to forget,” he murmured. “Have you got a cigarette, friend?”

  I gave him a Chesterfield and let him suck the smoke deep. He went through a paroxysm of frantic coughing that subsided in a wheezing gasp. The shades were drawn and in the half-light from the street he looked like something out of a documentary on dope addiction.

  “Only a few questions,” I said.

  “And why the hell should I answer your questions?”

  “Let’s not start that gambit, Haddon. I’m in no mood for clever talk. I’m sorry I had to barge in on you this way. I don’t usually annoy people. But this thing I’m on is different—urgent. I want to ask you a few questions about last night. How’s your memory?”

  “Just dandy. Especially after a barrel of Scotch.”

  “You recall what happened after you left Gretchen’s?”

  “I recall.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Across town. I headed for Margaret Lane.” He was talking with his eyes closed, his fingers pinching the bridge of his long nose, giving the impression of intense concentration or a very bad headache. “I was heading for Gretchen’s upstairs studio, a very angry man. One of the Nowist boobs had told me that I might find Jeff Masterson up there, that Gretchen was letting him live there. And last night I was determined to pay Mr. Masterson a social call.”

  “Why last night?”

  “Because last night I was determined to spit in his eye.”

  “And did you spit?”

  “I did not. I entered the hall, started up the stairs and then suffered a change of heart. And do you know why? Because I preferred to return here with the wench you just saw. She was waiting for me, in the street.”

  “Call her out of the john.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “You were stiff, Haddon. Call the girl out.”

  He rapped on the door and she came out, half dressed and undisturbed by the interruption of her toilet. She took the cigarette out of his fingers and puffed it. She was shockingly young, much too young for bedroom dramas with middle-aged lochinvars. She planted her shapely buttocks on the arm of a chair and appraised me with eyes that were much older than her figure.

  “Mr. Conacher wants to ask you some questions,” Haddon said wearily.

  “About last night,” I said. “After you left Gretchen’s.”

  “You want me to answer his questions, Arthur?”

  “Answer them, doll.”

  She answered them and her story checked with his. She had waited outside the doorway on Margaret Lane until Haddon came out. He did not stay long. Five minutes? Less than five minutes.

  “Did you see anybody on the street while you waited?”

  “Yes, I did. There was a man walked down Margaret Lane, across the street.”

  “What did he look like?”

  And then she gave me a fairly good description of Max Ornstein, a biggish man, not young, wearing a gray hat because she could see the color when he passed under the street lamp on his way down the pavement. Was she sure of the hat? She was positive. She was an artist, a painter, and painters observe well. And did she observe anything else? She most certainly did.

  “A woman,” she said. “As we were walking away, a woman crossed the street and went inside.”

  “Tell me about her.”

  “I didn’t see her very well, man.”

  “What sort of a woman? How old?”

  “I didn’t notice. Arthur and I were talking and I was distracted. How about another cigarette? Mind?”

  “You can’t remember anything at all about her?” I asked. “Her figure? Young? Old? Short? Tall?”

  “I’d be making it up, man. You don’t want me to do that?”

  “What’s the gimmick?” Haddon asked, putting a paternal arm on the girl where no paternal arm should ever be. “Gloria’s told you all she can recall, Conacher.”

  “One more question, Gloria. Think carefully. Try to remember. Is it possible that the woman you saw was Gretchen MacGruder?”

  She adjusted her youthful face for severe concentration, adding the proper amount of befuddlement the question inspired.

  “I honestly didn’t take that good a look,” she said. “It was very quick. It could have been Gretchen MacGruder or Marilyn Monroe, honest to God.”

  The desk man in the main reception room at Cushing’s departmental office talked quietly with me about Max’s bad luck. Most professional policemen are not at all as hard as they’re painted in fiction and drama. Statistics show them to be family men in the main, good fathers and husbands, invariably soft and sentimental.

  “I’d like to meet the bastard who
slugged poor Max,” the desk man said. “Any leads, Steve?”

  “Ice cold,” I said.

  “Sit down, boy. You’re knocking yourself out.”

  “Buzz Cushing again, will you please?”

  He buzzed Cushing and it was time for me to go in and say my little piece. Harry Gahan remained at the window, looking down into the street gloomily, much too upset to face me. He was an old friend of Max Ornstein’s. Dave Cushing didn’t open his mouth to interrupt my narrative of the Mari Barstow locate problem. The phone kept ringing and he finally got very angry and told the switchboard to leave him alone until further notified. He apologized for the delay and heard me out, punctuating my lines with a pencil, tapping out his nervousness on the desk blotter.

  “As you can see,” I said, “I was following two leads to this Jeff Masterson character. I figured Helen Calabrese might take me to him. Then again, Max might have reached Masterson by way of Arthur Haddon. It never occurred to me that there would be the slightest risk in the job for poor Max. I feel like a damned fool, Dave. If anything happens to him—”

  “Easy, Steve. It isn’t all your fault.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “Tell him, Harry.”

  “We knew about the Barstow job,” said Harry Gahan. “We knew you were on it, Steve. Linda Karig spilled it when we questioned her. But we wanted to give you your head. We felt it important that you make a locate on her. We figured there might be a link between the Barstow disappearance and the Flato murder.”

  “You should have told me,” I said.

  “It was a mistake, Steve.”

  “I wouldn’t have sent Max out,” I said. “But hell, it’s not your fault. I should have used my stupid head. It was all there for me to see, really, the possibility of the link to Flato’s death.”