by Goulart, Ron
"You can desert right now, scamper right off the sinking ship. I don't give a fiddler's damn."
"Tinker's."
"Huh?"
"A tinker's damn. That's what people don't give."
"Just go home if you want, pull the quilt over your melon-shaped head. I'll carry on alone."
"Hey, I'm not going to abandon you. I'm just trying to point out the sensible thing to—"
"Kvetching is what you're doing, as is your wont."
"Really, H. J., we should alert the cops."
"No, what we should do is solve Lloyd's murder." Her fingers tightened over his. "That's the only way we can be certain the gang that wrecked my cottage will be locked away."
"Playing detective isn't the smartest, or safest, thing to do."
"Worked before."
"More or less."
"All right, we'll compromise," suggested H. J. "We'll work on this, oh, for a couple of days or so. If we don't come up with anything, then we'll go, hand in hand, I promise, to Detective Ryerson."
"In, oh, a couple of days, we may both be stretched out in some cozy funeral parlor."
"A sourpuss, true, might well look at things that way," she admitted. "But I think we make a good team."
In his old-time radio announcer voice he said, "'And now it's time once again for Mr. and Mrs. North. In tonight's thrilling episode lovely scatterbrained H. J. Mavity moves even further from reality, while her long-suffering husband finds himself waist deep in—"
"Former husband."
"A slip, excuse it. The point, however, is that—"
"Please, let's try it my way." She looked hopefully at him. "No police. Not yet anyway."
Giving up, he lifted his hand away from the phone. "Okay." In his stern judge voice he added, "'And may God have mercy on our souls."
H. J. found the book.
It was in a spill of books the ransacker had left dumped near a foot of the easel.
"Bingo," she announced, scooping up Great American Kidnappings and sitting down cross-legged on the mat rug, "here it is."
As Ben sat down next to her, she handed him Dobkin's book. "It was one of the earlier chapters," he said, thumbing rapidly but carefully through the pages. "Yes sir, here's the picture I was thinking of."
She leaned closet "Does look similar, doesn't it?"
The photo illustration showed a blonde baby girl of about a year and a half lying on a flowered blanket. She was stretched out on her stomach, and an arrow had been drawn in pointing to the birthmark on her buttock.
"'The distinctive butterfly birthmark of the missing Timberlake baby,'" read Ben. "Of course, I should have remembered—this is Sue Ellen Timberlake. Got a magnifying glass?"
"Someplace." Rising up, H. J. rummaged in the scatter of stuff atop the taboret. "Here." She tossed him a small reading glass. From her shoulder bag she took the photograph that Lloyd Dobkin had entrusted to her.
Ben was studying the baby's bottom through the lens. "Let's compare this with the Best Girl."
"Are they the same?" She sat, holding the color blowup next to the book page.
"Sure seems to be, taking into consideration that more than twenty years have passed between photo sessions."
Squinting at the page, H. J. nodded. "Sure, it's the same, identical tush," she said. "Didn't you do a radio spot for one of the Timberlake products?"
"Several." He was continuing to compare the birthmarks. "Timberlake, Inc., manufactures Sudz, Bubble, Kleenz, Scrubz, and several other products that help to keep this great nation of ours clean and sparkling. The Forman & McCay agency, for whom I now do the Chumley stuff, also handles the Sudz account. That alone bills $87 million per year. Matter of fact, the last batch of radio commercials I did for Sudz, wherein I portrayed a dirty argyle sock, are up for an—"
"And who exactly is Sue Ellen Timberlake?" She took the book away from him. "'Only child of the widowed Anson Timberlake . . . inventive genius who founded Timberlake, Inc. . . . amassed estate estimated at $270 million . . . estate and the controlling interest in the company went to the two children of his only brother at the time of his death in 1980.' Gosh.
"One of the two heirs is Don T. Timberlake, who is what is known, technically, as a first-class prick. One of his homes is near here over in Southport."
Ben took the book back. "The other is his sister, Laura Timberlake Barks, who resides in Chicago and the Bahamas. It's likely though, that Laura will be in Manhattan for—"
"Suppose Sue Ellen really is alive?" H. J. tapped the color photo with her forefinger. "She'd be worth a heck of a lot of money."
"True," he agreed.
"It's possible the Timberlakes wouldn't want her found."
"'Also true," said Ben.
Chapter 6
The rain had softened to a drizzle by dawn; the new morning was fuzzy and gray. The small, rutted parking lot alongside Fagin's Diner on Post Road in Westport was even bleaker than usual, and next to the rusted green Dumpster crouched a forlorn calico cat who was suffering from a head cold.
H. J. turned up the collar of her tan windbreaker. "How did you come to pick Fagin's as a hangout in the first place?"
As they climbed the brick steps to the door, Ben replied, "I've repressed all memory of that."
Fagin himself, a small fifty-five-year-old man with a pale, stubbly face, was hunched in the middle of the center aisle. "Okay, okay, you mothering horsefly, light somewhere." He clutched a spatula in his right hand.
Ben and H. J. eased around the crouching proprietor and headed for a rear booth, where their friend Joe Sankowitz was seated.
"Fresh from the motel, huh, Spanner?" called Fagin, his narrowed eyes on the circling fly.
"You're looking especially dapper this morning, Fagin," Ben said. "Are you shaving every three days now instead of every four?"
Fagin lunged at the fly, swinging the greasy spatula and whapping a spot on the counter. "Missed. Shit."
Sankowitz was a lean, dark man in his early forties. He had a copy of the Brimstone Pilot spread out before him. "You folks look like you've been up to no good," he observed. "Are you dragging him into another morass of mystery and intrigue, Helen?"
H. J. smiled innocently. "Just because we're up with the lark and happened to drop into this pesthole for coffee, that's no reason to assume—"
"I bet the lark was murdered. Is there a lot of money involved?"
"Matter of fact," said Ben, sliding in opposite him, "we are sort of mixed up in something, Joe."
Their cartoonist friend nodded, grinning. He poked at the front page of the folded newspaper. "Does it maybe have something to do with the murder of Lloyd Dobkin?" he asked them. "It says here H. J. was the leading witness."
"It does, yep." Reaching across the tabletop, Ben borrowed the newspaper.
"You knew Lloyd, didn't you?" H. J. asked.
Sankowitz said, "In my earlier, struggling days, prior to becoming the darling of The New Yorker, I used to sell gag cartoons to Bare. I still saw Lloyd for lunch now and then. I even dropped in at the Dahlman Building and risked getting bonked by whatever Eva was hurling at him that day."
"Seeing the car bearing down on him and not being able to do anything," said H. J., "was pretty terrible."
"There are a lot of things in life you can't do anything about," said the cartoonist. "It's too bad, but that seems to be one of the ground rules. Best thing you can do, Helen, is to forget that—"
"The police found the Audi that ran him down," said Ben, who'd been reading the story.
"Probably stolen," guessed H. J.
A thin waitress appeared and set down two more cups of coffee. "'Avoid the sausage," she warned in a side-of-the-mouth whisper before departing.
Ben said, "Yeah, it was stolen from a dentist in Westport. Cops found it abandoned on a road in that nature preserve about a half mile up from the Dahlman Building. No prints, no clues. At least not any they're talking about."
H. J. took a tentative sip of her co
ffee. "Uck. How can you guys drink this stuff?"
"Well, I figure anything that tastes this bad," explained Sankowitz, "must be good for you."
"Describes you here as 'a lovely redheaded commercial artist,'" Ben told her.
She took the paper from him. "No color sense. Auburn isn't red."
"Be thankful they at least got the lovely part right," advised Ben.
"Oh, here's a story about the spill," she said, pointing to it. "The stuff was molasses and not toxic sludge. A truck rolled over and burst just after 12:40 P.M. That was just minutes after I drove by on my way to meet Lloyd."
Sankowitz said, "Took them hours to clean it up. Good thing it wasn't this part of Post Road or there'd be molasses in all of Fagin's syrup pitchers this morning."
"That's like the joke about the spillover in the chocolate factory," said Ben.
"No more parables," requested H. J., leaning back wearily. The cartoonist asked, "'Are there perhaps things you know that the paper doesn't?"
"There are things we know," answered Ben, "that even the police don't know."
"You'd better tell them," he advised.
H. J. assured him, "Oh, we're going to."
"But first?"
"First we have to do a little more investigating."
"You're dealing with somebody who steals cars to use as murder weapons," he reminded them. "Very few people with that personality trait take kindly to amateur sleuths—even lovely redheaded ones."
"Lloyd just wasn't my editor, you know. He was my friend, and I think I owe it to his memory to help find out who did this to him."
"Possibly there are a few people I'd risk life and limb for," said Sankowitz. "But there's not one editor on that list."
"I feel differently," she told him, "obviously."
"How much money is involved?"
"Money has absolutely nothing to do with it," she insisted. "Well, let me clarify that. Money is not the primary motivation."
"It's probably a very strong contender for second place, though."
Ben said, "We think Lloyd was on to something big."
"Lloyd continually believed he was on to something important and lucrative," their friend pointed out. "Far as I know, however, none of his discoveries or schemes ever paid off."
"This may have been the exception," said H. J.
A frown touched the cartoonist's face. "'And that's tied in with his getting killed?"
"We think so."
"Show him the picture," suggested Ben.
She reached into her shoulder bag. "Lloyd gave this to me yesterday."
"Aha!" cried Fagin. "Got you at last, you little bastard!" After scraping the remains of the fly off the counter with the side of the spatula, he withdrew to the kitchen.
"What the hell is this?" Sankowitz was eyeing the blowup. "Explain it to him." H. J. took back the picture, returned it to the envelope, and put them away.
"Okay, here's what we've found out." Ben told him what H. J. had witnessed, what they'd been up to since last night, and the conclusions they'd come to.
When Ben finished, Sankowitz asked, "And where is this heiress now?"
"That's one of the things we don't know yet," admitted H. J. "But we're going to find her."
"What'll you do if you locate the woman?"
"Talk to her, tell her she's the long-lost Timberlake baby."
"'At which point she hands you a handsome reward, huh?"
"Is that such an improbable scenario, Joseph? If somebody came and told me I had a legitimate right to a ton of money, I'd sure as heck be grateful."
Sankowitz drank some of his vile coffee. "Suppose this whole business was just another of Lloyd's half-assed schemes?"
"Meaning?"
"Meaning maybe he hired some skin model, tattooed a butterfly on her butt, and was planning to pass her off as—"
"What the heck would that gain him? Her fingerprints, her footprints, her blood type—all that's on file someplace."
"You can get a whole stewpot of national publicity before anybody gets to the fingerprinting stage." Sankowitz framed a headline in the air. "Bare editor finds missing heiress. Sex mag solves twenty-year-old mystery, See latest issue of Bare for details."
H. J. rested both elbows on the table. "People don't usually kill you just for planning a hoax."
"Who says his death had a damn thing to do with the Timberlake baby? Lloyd was a world class philanderer," he pointed out. "'An irate husband could have knocked the guy off. I've run into a few of those myself, and some of them can get pretty violent over being cuckolded. Or, which also makes considerable sense, maybe Eva got tired of his sleeping around and decided to bench him permanently. Or perhaps old man Dahlman, dismayed at the way Lloyd was so flamboyantly unfaithful to his only daughter, called on a couple of his old underworld cronies to—"
"Maybe little green weirdos from Mars killed him to keep him from telling where their flying saucer was parked," cut in H. J., annoyed. "C'mon, Joe. Lloyd gave me this photograph, he told me he was on to a big story and that there'd been attempts on his life. Then—bam!—he's killed."
"Just because two things seem to be linked, it doesn't mean they actually are," Sankowitz persisted. "Let the police really find out what the truth is." He glanced over at Ben. "'Are you buying all this?"
"I accept the notion that Lloyd had discovered something important," he said. "Further, somebody really has been trying to find his files. Now, maybe he was killed for an entirely different reason—which I sort of doubt—but I still think he'd found the Timberlake girl."
"Tulip mania," muttered the cartoonist.
"Eh?"
"When a delusion starts rolling, lots of otherwise rational people hop aboard."
"Hey," called Fagin from the depths of his kitchen, "this isn't the goddamn Christian Science Reading Room. Chow down or ship out."
"Hotcakes," called Sankowitz.
"Same," called Ben.
"Pass," said H. J.
Chapter 7
H.J. was driving them home. "Well, of course you have stomach cramps," she told her erstwhile husband. "Anyone who'd willingly eat at Fagin's has to expect that."
"You still haven't comprehended the idea of Fagin's." Ben was hunched in the passenger seat, gazing absently out into the gray morning. "The food is vile, certainly, and so is Fagin. The thing is, that diner has become a hangout, a habitual place to go."
"Teenage boys need hangouts, not old coots like you and Joe."
He reached into her shoulder bag, located the roll of Pepto-Bismol tablets and availed himself of another one. "Fagin's is the equivalent of a gentlemen's club, minus the armchairs."
"Speaking of Joe, he sure has a negative attitude." She guided the car onto the road that led to his house.
"Practical is what it is."
"Hooey."
"Could be he's right, H. J. Maybe this time we ought to—"
"I'm going to find Sue Ellen Timberlake. You can sit around and mope, but—"
"Okay, okay. So what's our first move?"
"We have to get hold of Lloyd's files on this business," she said. "He had other photographs of the woman, pictures that must show more than just her fanny. There should also be addresses and phone numbers, maybe hers and certainly those of the nitwit who submitted the pictures to Bare. And probably he had notes on what he had done thus far and how he was planning to proceed. Right now we don't even know if he'd contacted her."
"Not likely he'd leave that stuff at his office, is it?"
"No, I doubt he'd leave anything important there."
"Unless he was using the purloined letter dodge."
"Nope, that wouldn't work with dear Eva, since she's the kind who looks in all the obvious places first. I'm sure she snooped around his office on a regular basis."
"Then he probably wouldn't have left the stuff around home either."
"Not likely, Ben, though we'll have to check out his office at the Dahlman Building and his den at home to be absolutely
sure," she said. "Lloyd hated computers and refused to use one, so it's not likely he stored anything in one."
"Then where would he stash important material? Maybe with one of his lady friends?"
"Yeah, that's my notion. I think we better start with Micki and Terri first. Do you happen to know their last names?"
"Micki Wilder, former flight attendant, married. Resides in nearby Wilton."
"How do you know all that?"
"With you Lloyd was discreet about his ladies. With guys he sometimes bragged."
"And Terri, who's she?"
"Terri Walters, but she left Connecticut about a month ago to take a job as a librarian in Seattle."
"Seattle's an unlikely place for Lloyd to keep the stuff."
"Wait a minute. He recently started a new romance."
"With whom?"
"Joe mentioned it the other day, expressing surprise that this particular lady would go within a hundred feet of Lloyd. Alicia Bertillion."
"The children's book illustrator? The lady who won a bunch of medals for Tammy the Turtle?"
"That Alicia Bertillion, yes. She also wrote and illustrated Tammy the Turtle's Picnic. Lives on a high hill over in Redding Ridge."
"She must be the one he was leaving when his brakes went out."
"Reminds me about the old joke about the eunuch who guarded the harem. Seems—"
"We're home," announced H. J., halting the car in the gravel drive.
"Might as well put it in the garage."
"We'll be going out again soon."
"Aw, Helen Joanne," he said in his Wallace Beery voice. "I don't intend to leave home until I do some serious sleeping. It's been several days, feels like, since—"
"Notice our front door." She slid out of the parked car.
"Oh, Christ." He jumped free and started running for the steps.
The heavy wooden door was a good two feet open.
H. J. bent and gathered up another spill of books. "You ought to seriously consider donating most of these to some charitable book fair."
"That's covered in my will, yes, but right now let's just get the damn things back on the shelves. I'd like to be ready for the next wave of burglars."