“Who?” I asked.
“Anonymous.”
“Any idea who she was? Any small idea?”
“A very small one. Because of her voice. She was guttural, Steve, real heavy. She sounded like Gretchen MacGruder to me.”
“I think I’ll be leaving now,” said Oliver Silverton.
“Not yet.” I held him where he stood and watched his dignity dissolve. He gave me his cold, executive eyes, struggling to wither me with his authority. He shook my hand off and stood there waiting for my next line. “You told me in Luigi’s office that Mari was due in from Chicago, Oliver. Why the big upset? Didn’t you speak to her from Chicago?”
“I did not,” he said. “Helen Calabrese got the message.”
“Then why are you twitching?”
“Mari hasn’t been in touch with me, Conacher.”
“Which led you here?”
“Exactly. Mari has mentioned Linda, often. They’re old friends. It’s as simple as that.”
“Is it?” He was making no further effort to move toward the door. “Or is it because you’re in love with her?”
“Do you need diagrams?” smiled Linda. “It’s as obvious as a slap in the face.”
I let him go after that. He had become a tragic figure for me, suddenly, the frigid executive gone warm for love. We watched him walk down the street, his usually erect figure slightly stooped now. We stood at the window, Linda and I, until Silverton turned the comer and disappeared beyond the line of the buildings across the street.
“Miserable,” she shivered, her voice a whisper. “Mari levels them.”
“I’ve built a fantastic picture of her in my mind,” I said. “She’s beginning to come to life for me. Could it have been Mari who phoned you today?”
“I doubt it.”
“Why? She could have disguised her voice. She’s an actress. What did she say? The voice, I mean?”
“She just asked whether I had seen Mari.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.”
“Tell me about Mari,” I said. “Finish the picture for me. I want to bring her into focus.”
“Offbeat,” said Linda. “A character, Steve, from the very first moment she walked into my room at college. Mari always tried for effect. She stuns. She startles. She must hold all eyes at any gathering, a natural performer out of her natural drives. She had it made with her face and figure. Yet she never relaxed, never stopped trying for the spotlight. And when she couldn’t make it, when there was a rival, Mari’s temper erupted. She has a horrible temper, mean and vindictive and animal. She actually fought at times, and with rival girls. She scratched and bit. She connived. Her basic nature never made her popular at college, but she and I got along fine. I understood her, mean as she was.”
Certain memories were eating at her. She subsided, quiet and frightened looking. She was not the type to lacerate an old friend.
“You’re ice cold, Linda.”
“I’m frightened, Steve.”
“Silverton scared you?”
“Bad day. Horrible afternoon. First Arthur Haddon, then the phone call.”
“Have another.”
But a drink would not help her. She was far gone under the tension of the day’s events, really weakened and ready to crack up. She held back the tears for a long time and clung to me. The big release came in great bursts of sobbing as she let herself go. She was afraid, horribly afraid. It was dark outside and the night lay uncharted ahead of her and there would be no rest for her alone in this apartment. She told me about all this, her hands tight on me, her eyes desperate.
“I can’t stay here,” she whispered. “Don’t leave me, Steve.”
“You’ll be all right, Linda.”
“No. Not alone.”
“You want to come with me?”
“Please.”
“Put on a skirt,” I said. “I’ll take you with me.”
CHAPTER 12
I took Linda to dinner, hoping that an hour or so of relaxation would calm her. But she was still tense and frightened after the black coffee.
“Let’s walk to my office,” I said.
“I’m a horrible pest, Steve. I’m sorry.”
“A man could live a happy life with pests like you, Linda. Relax, will you?”
It was almost eight when we arrived at my office. John Drummond had left a note under my door:
Steve
The man with the beard left MacGruder’s and went to a bar (Haystack) for a couple of drinks. He came out in a rush and went to the L.I. railroad at Penn Station and bought a ticket for Bay Shore. I followed him there, where he took the ferry to Fire Island. He had a few more drinks at a bar on the Island and then went to a place west of the village and near the water. It was a big house with a high sapling fence all around it. I stood on a plant near the entrance gate until it got late, I didn’t want to miss a ferry back to Bay Shore before dark, so I left. (I told you I would leave when it got dark.) I took a train back to New York and find I have to go out of town for about a week, on a locate. See you when I get back.
John Drummond
“Dandy,” I said. “Good old John has left me his crumb and disappeared. And all I’ve got from him is a house with a sapling fence, on Fire Island.”
“A good place for a house with a sapling fence,” Linda said. “Makes for real privacy.”
“Do you happen to know the place?”
“I’m not much for Fire Island, Steve. Too many manly women out there.”
“Who might Masterson know out there on Fire Island?”
“What a question!” She laughed for the first time and it looked good. “Fire Island, of all places, has more potential queers per square foot than any other island on earth. I can think of dozens of peculiar people who might be sympathetic to the Nowist king out there.”
“Can you think of anyone? Anybody I’d know?”
“Arthur Haddon plays there, almost every weekend, according to the theatrical small talk.”
“Anybody else?”
“Oliver Silverton has a home out there.”
“Of course. You’ve been there?”
“Who hasn’t? Oliver throws mad parties.”
“Remember the place?”
“Quite nice,” she said. “Really avant-garde modern, but in excellent taste. I arrived there at night. And I must confess I’d had a few down in the Village.” She tried to dig deep in her memory. “I don’t think Oliver’s place would have a sapling fence, Steve. It wouldn’t go well with the bare-as-bones modern decor.”
The challenge of the will-o’-the-wisp Masterson would not let me rest.
“I’m afraid we’ve got to get on the merry-go-round again, Linda. Can you take another visit to Gretchen MacGruder’s?”
“Why Gretchen’s?”
“I have a feeling she knows where the Nowist king is hiding.”
Gretchen’s basement beehive was bouncing again when we arrived. The noise and the mob were the same as last night. There were familiar faces around us: the arguing intellectuals, the young chicks in various stages of undress—and behind the bar, Gloria, the girl in the yellow blouse.
Gloria seemed dedicated to her job tonight. Her blouse remained open at exactly the right button so that when she leaned across the bar her male customers got a premium with each glass of liquor. She bustled at her work, however, dispensing drinks with efficiency and good nature.
“The quiz man,” she smiled. “Drink?”
“And talk, Gloria.”
“More talk, man? I’m busy now.”
“Where’s Gretchen?”
“That’s a hard one, cat. I just don’t know.”
“And Masterson?”
“Crazy Brains? He was in, man, way in—and flying.”
; “How long ago, Gloria?”
“Two hours? Three? No—about two.” She closed her eyes to check her mental gymnastics. Then she laughed her high, erratic girlish laugh. “He was a happy cat, old Crazy Brains. Bought drinks for the group. Two, three rounds. Then they jumped out of here.”
“They?”
“Gretchen and the king.”
“And Gretchen didn’t come back?”
“I’ve been busy, question-man, real gone with the drinks. Maybe she came back, maybe not.”
She slid away from me, wanted by the customers at the other end of the bar. I yielded my place to a yammering young Nowist nudnick and joined Linda at the wall. Unfortified by drink, she seemed frightened and tense watching the madness around her. She took my hand and let me lead her off through the clots of noise, moving steadily toward the rear of the place where the Nowists sat with Gretchen’s cats. A door opened into a narrow all on the right and we stepped through and found ourselves in a sudden pocket of quiet.
“Back there,” I whispered. “Gretchen lives back there.”
A blue light glimmered in the hall, bathing the place in a macabre glow. We were easing forward slowly when another door opened at the end of the corridor and Fletcher stepped out. He was carrying his usual pitcher of liquor.
I grabbed him as he approached.
“Gretchen is in?” I asked.
“The doom drops down …” he said. “The black pit …”
“Get lost, punk!”
I turned his nose toward the front rooms and gave him an assist in that direction by way of the seat of his pants. He shot forward and the pitcher dropped out of his hands and crashed against the far wall. He rolled after it in a foolish pratfall, sloshing in the spilled liquor and coming to rest in a seated position under the misted blue light.
“All is doom …” he groaned, “… all is death.”
It was crazy and the laughter rose in me and I was tempted to grab him again and shake some sensible prose out of him. But at that moment a door clicked open behind me and when I turned, Gretchen was standing there.
“Leave him alone, cat,” she said. “And shake your tail out of here.”
“I’ve been looking for you, Gretchen.”
“You found me, man.” She stepped forward to squint hard at Linda, struggling to identify her and failing. “What now?”
“You want to talk here?”
“I didn’t say I wanted to talk.”
“You’ll talk.” Her ample figure was planted in an attitude of military arrogance before her door. It was open, but only a crack. She wore a short apron, incongruous against her garish dress. In the hallway gloom, her face seemed older, more wrinkled. She breathed erratically, her great breasts rising and falling. “Either to me,” I said. “Or the police.”
“You’re flipping. Police don’t want me.”
“They will, Gretchen.”
“You’re way out, cat. You mean about my place on Margaret Lane? We talked that over. Man from the police.”
She was beginning to relax now, cocky, self-assured. She lit a cigarette and in the quick flick of the flame, she was smiling at me. But there was something wrong with her eyes. I thought I caught the strained, red-rimmed look of recent tears.
“I told him,” she said, “that Margaret Lane place is for my friends. All kinds of keys. I know at least five artists use that studio. So what? But me? Never. Haven’t been there in weeks.”
“You didn’t go there last night?”
She laughed, a high and chirping giggle, “Listen, cat—was here. I’ve got witnesses.” She half turned, hoping to end the interview. When I didn’t move, she stiffened and sucked hard at her cigarette. “What else, man?”
“Jeff Masterson.”
“I don’t dig you.”
“Where is he?”
“Ask me something easy,” the said nervously. “I don’t know where he is, man.”
“Concentrate.”
“You’re wasting your time.”
“How about in there?”
“You got a warrant?”
“Be nice, Gretchen. Let me talk to him.”
“He’s not in there, I tell you. I don’t know where Crazy Brains is.”
“And I don’t believe you.”
She was unprepared for my next move, an old trick but an effective one. I sidestepped her and slid against the door so that when she turned to block me she practically pushed me inside. I caught a look of panic in Linda’s eyes and saw her step backward as Gretchen’s big right arm flailed out at me. But she was too late because I had already moved inside. She came running after me, screaming a torrent of Nowist abuse. She pulled up short, suddenly paralyzed by her overpowering frustration.
“Louse!” Her voice quivered with emotion and in the normal light her eyes no longer puzzled me. She had been crying in the recent past. “Why don’t you give up on Jeff, man? Leave him alone, for God’s sake! He’s a good boy, I tell you. Drop him. Forget him, will you?” And all the time she continued to slip slowly toward the right, toward a chair in the corner of the room.
But I arrived at the chair first.
“Masterson is going to the cleaners?” I asked.
I lifted a jacket from the chair. It was certainly Masterson’s, an oversized and dirtied green corduroy with the familiar elbow patches. Underneath the jacket, the black and shiny pants Masterson had worn last night. His checkered shirt was on the arm of the chair.
“No shoes?” I asked.
“Under the table,” Linda said.
“He’s gone, man. He’s far gone.” Gretchen tried to laugh her lines, but her attempt failed. She was quivering with upset; unable to root herself, to stand firm against me: She began to pace the room and her talk became a half-soliloquy, a bumbling, fumbling outpouring of her grief—the shaking upset of a woman grown suddenly old. “You’ll never get him, never, never, never.”
“What’s he running from, Gretchen?”
“You’ll never get him, never catch Crazy Brains, you fool, you fool …”
She had slumped into the chair and was clutching his jacket and cradling it in her arms and crying. The mascara already blackened her cosmetic cheeks and she was beginning to look like an overheated wax dummy in a sideshow.
“Let’s get out of here,” Linda whispered. “I’ve had it, Steve.”
I bought her a drink but she was restless and disturbed. The strange dramatics of Gretchen MacGruder puzzled her and the noise around the bar didn’t help the headache she had developed. She stood on the edge of the crowd, obviously uncomfortable.
“I’m going home for a Miltown and my bed, Steve.”
“A sensible idea.”
We nudged our way through the wall of bodies and against the tide of newcomers around the entrance. We had just reached the narrow vestibule when I saw Helen Calabrese on her way out the door. She was elbowing her way ahead of us and skipped up the steps to the pavement.
I put Linda in a cab and set off in pursuit of Helen, allowing her the lead she had established, about a half-block ahead of me and traveling at a good clip toward Seventh Avenue.
She was entering The Haystack when I touched her elbow.
“Steve! You startled me.” She did her best to adjust her pretty face for composure, the gay smile, the surprise of meeting me. But it didn’t quite come off. She let me lead her inside The Haystack and up to the bar, her eyes searching the place for something important.
“You won’t find him in here, Helen.”
“Who would that be, detective?”
“Jeff Masterson.” I signaled the bartender and he waved a hand at me and came over. “The man with the red beard,” I said. “Is he here tonight?”
“Not yet, mister.”
“You see, Helen?”
“Buy me a drink, Steve?”
“Monotonous,” I said and gripped her elbow and pulled her firmly away from the bar. She seemed to tighten under my hand. I was obviously in no mood for social double-talk and showed it. “You want him? Maybe we can find him together, you and I. But we’ll get nowhere sitting on our behinds and sipping drinks and fencing with each other. I’m a couple of jumps ahead of you, Helen. I know where he was today, up until nightfall. Interested? Stop butchering me with your beautiful eyes. Just step outside with me and we’ll take a little walk together and discuss him. Or would you prefer to discuss him with a couple of my friends on the city police?”
“Police?” The word was a sighing whisper. We were out on the street and walking down the darkened pavement, away from the bright lights of Seventh Avenue. “Why the police?”
“Because he could be a murderer, Helen.”
“No. Not Jeff.”
“You’ve got it pretty bad, haven’t you?”
“He isn’t a murderer, Steve.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” I said. I pulled her close to me under the street lamp. There were big tears in her eyes. “You’re in love with him, aren’t you?”
“I guess so.”
“You had a date with him tonight? At Gretchen’s?”
“We had a date,” she said, avoiding my eyes. “I made a date to meet him. But I had a feeling he might not show up, because of Grippo. You see, Luigi sent Grippo down to Gretchen’s last night to frighten off Jeff, to scare him away from me for good. Still, Jeff didn’t seem too much concerned about Grippo’s threats. He found them more or less amusing, it seemed to me.”
“An act,” I said. “Grippo’s no amateur at threats.”
“I know,” she shivered.
“And your friend Masterson probably turned chicken. What would you say if I told you Jeff was leaving town?”
“I wouldn’t believe you.”
“You’ve tried two of his hangouts,” I said. “Where else do you hope to find him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you tried Margaret Lane?”
“Not yet.”
Triple Slay Page 12