16-Murder Can't Wait

by Lockridge, Richard

  “Whoever says that’s lying.”

  “Could be,” Forniss said. “Don’t think much of private ops myself. Why would he be, though?”

  Patchen didn’t know.

  “Any idea why Fleming would sick private ops onto you? He did that. Paid five hundred to them, and they’ve got more coming, they say. Nobody’s lying about the two payments, Mr. Patchen. Fleming entered them in his checkbook. What put us onto it.”

  Patchen didn’t get any part of it.

  “Know a man calls himself Jones?”

  “Half a dozen. On account of they’re named Jones.”

  “Jones I’m thinking of maybe isn’t,” Forniss said. “You gamble much, Mr. Patchen?”

  “Bridge at the club sometimes. If you call that gambling. Put a few dollars on a horse now and then. Who doesn’t?”

  “Bet on basketball games, maybe? Football games? Things like that?”

  “What the hell is all this?”

  Forniss was, for a moment, a man thinking. Then he said, “Well. There was this, apparently. Seems Fleming got word about a fix. Attempted fix. Of a kid plays football for Dyckman University. Seems Fleming was looking into it, for a friend of his.”

  He watched carefully. Patchen’s face was blank. Then expression came to it, and Forniss thought the expression was one of relief. Nothing to go on, expressions on faces; one’s own interpretation of expressions on faces. But somebody had told Forniss once about seeing a fox, sitting on a rock with his tail curled around him, listening to the hunt go off where he had tricked it into going. The fox, the man had told Forniss, looked as if he were laughing, the laugh one of relief.

  “Stu Fleming must have been nuts,” Patchen said. “If what you’re saying is he thought I was mixed up in anything like that.”

  “You’ve no notion about any other reason Fleming would have had for putting a tail on you?”

  “If he did,” Patchen said. “All I’ve got is you say he did.”

  “You never saw anything to make you suspicious? Like, say, the same car several times? Always going the same way you were? Most of the time in sight behind you?”

  “No,” Patchen said. “Most of the time I look where I’m going, sergeant. Most of the time I—”

  Then he stopped and listened, and Forniss heard what had stopped him. It was the sound of someone moving—a kind of scrambling sound. It came from behind a closed door in the far wall of the living room.

  “Seems you’ve got a guest,” Forniss said. “Sort of wondered when I saw the other car—”

  Then he stopped. The door opened and a heavy man, who looked to be rather a flabby man, opened the door and came into the room. He had a wooden mallet, such as is sometimes used for crushing ice, in his right hand.

  The man had thick yellow hair, parted in the middle. He wore a white shirt and dark trousers. He did not pay any attention to Forniss. He went heavily, but a little uncertainly, toward Patchen. As he went he told Patchen what he was, what varied kinds of bastard he was. He knew all the words—all the familiar words.

  “Try to give you a break,” the man said, when he had told Patchen what he was. “Came all the way here to give you a break. Kind of break I’m gonna give you now won’t be—”

  He was quite close to Patchen and lifting the mallet, before Forniss moved. He didn’t think Patchen was in much danger, and Patchen did not seem to think he was. But Patchen’s face seemed somehow to fall apart. It didn’t look boyish any more.

  “All right,” Forniss said, and moved toward the flabby, heavy man. “Don’t try to use it. I’m the police. Or have you been listening at the door?”

  The man turned and looked at Forniss. Then he lowered the mallet, let it dangle from his hand. Then he dropped it and it clattered on the tile floor of the living room.

  “All right,” Forniss said, and moved closer to the man. “That’s your car outside, isn’t it? Got the license number. So—what’s your name, mister?”

  The man smelled like a man who had been drinking. They seemed, around here, to do a lot of morning drinking.

  “Frank,” the man said. “What’s yours?”

  His speech was a little thick. Forniss suspected his mind was a little thick.

  Forniss told him his own name. He said, “Frank what, mister?”

  “Frank Pesco,” the man said. “Something to you?”

  “Yes,” Forniss said. “Heard about you, Mr. Pesco. Bartender at a place called the Cavalier Lodge. That right? Man who said Stuart Fleming was up there in January asking questions. That right? Man who said he didn’t have the answers to the questions Fleming asked him. Right so far?”

  “This bastard,” Frank Pesco said. “Slugged me when I wasn’t looking. Heard a car coming and looked out the window and then turned around and slugged me.”

  He touched the right side of his jaw. It was beginning to swell, Forniss noticed.

  “Come here to do him a favor,” Frank Pesco said. “Whangs me when I’m looking the other way.”

  Forniss looked at Patchen.

  “Drunk,” Patchen said. “Used to be bartender at the club. Came around for a handout and fell down and knocked himself out.”

  “Yep,” Forniss said. “Can happen. Let’s see your right hand, Mr. Patchen.”

  “What the—” Patchen said, but Forniss was quick. He took Patchen’s right wrist and looked at the back of Patchen’s right hand. The knuckles were beginning to swell. The skin was a little scraped from one.

  “Yep,” Forniss said, and let the man’s wrist go. “Sort of thing can happen. Didn’t this time, though. Why’d you slug Mr. Pesco, Mr. Patchen? Knock him out and drag him across the room—easy on a tile floor; nice slick floor—and put him out of sight? Because you knew I was a cop? Whip antenna gives a car away, doesn’t it? Didn’t want me to talk to him?”

  “All right,” Patchen said. “Some goddamn lie he wants—” He stopped. His face didn’t look boyish at all now.

  “So,” Forniss said. “What’s this—lie, Pesco? And—how much did you want for it?”

  “Not a lie,” Frank Pesco said. “Wanted to do him a favor. Maybe—hell, maybe let him tell his side of it. On account of, I don’t want to get mixed up in—in a thing like this?”

  “Like what? Murder, maybe?”

  “So the guy’s dead, ain’t he?”

  “If you mean Fleming, he sure is. What’s it to do with you? Or Mr. Patchen here?”

  “Came to ask him,” Pesco said. “What I wanted to know too, captain. On account of, if he’s—well, I don’t want no part of it. See?”

  “Get it said,” Forniss told him.

  “Fleming comes around trying to find out who used his name at the lodge. You know about that, captain?”

  “Sergeant,” Forniss said. “I don’t know about that.”

  “Told this cop from town I didn’t know who the couple was,” Pesco said. “Like I promised Fleming I’d do. Only—well, I got to thinking. With Fleming dead and all. So I thought, don’t want to get mixed up in anything but better give the guy a break. Like anybody’d do.”

  “You did know? And told Fleming?”

  “Made me promise I wouldn’t say I had. Wouldn’t show anybody the—” He stopped and looked at Patchen. “Hell,” he said. “No good now, is it, Mr. Patchen? Gave you a chance, didn’t I?”

  “You’re a crummy bastard, Pesco,” Patchen said. “A chance to pay you a thousand bucks. For—for something you thought was worth a thousand bucks. Isn’t worth a damn to me, if you want to know. Suppose we did—oh, show him the picture you think’s worth a thousand bucks.”

  Pesco fumbled in his left hip pocket. He came out with a small photograph and gave it to Forniss, who moved to the light with it.

  It showed two people sitting at a bar, rather obviously having their pictures taken—with smile for the picture, with a woman’s chin held up for the picture. Not that she had needed to hold her chin up. Forniss had never seen either of them before.

  But beyo
nd them, not having their picture taken, talking to each other, clearly assuming themselves out of the camera’s range, were two other people. They were a little out of focus, but the man’s face was clear enough. The man was Patchen. The woman, almost as certainly, was Enid Fleming.

  “Takes them himself, Johnny Spiros does,” Pesco said. “People he knows. Maybe like celebrities he thinks. Takes their pictures and gets them framed. Whole cocktail lounge hung with them.”

  “Well,” Forniss said. “Quite a hobby, this Johnny Spiros has. Keeps the dates he took them, shouldn’t wonder.”

  “Sure he does. This one he took last October.”

  “You showed it to Stuart Fleming?”

  “Nice guy, Fleming was.”

  “Paid well, probably,” Forniss said. “You showed it to him? You having recognized Mrs. Fleming and Mr. Patchen all along? From knowing them the summer you worked at the club. And he told you to keep quiet about it?”

  “You got it right, captain. Except about his paying. Wouldn’t ask a man—”

  “Sure not,” Forniss said. “Wouldn’t come here to shake Mr. Patchen down because—because Fleming got killed? And you thought maybe what you knew could be worth a grand?”

  “Didn’t want to get mixed—” Pesco said, but Forniss turned away from him, to Patchen. He said, “Well, Mr. Patchen?”

  “O.K.,” Patchen said. “O.K. Enid and I went there that once. Her idea to sign in as Mr. and Mrs. Stuart Fleming. Her idea of a joke. Knows a lot of jokes, Enid does. Rest of it I didn’t know a damn thing about until this crumb shows up and wants a thousand bucks. A thousand bucks.”

  “Stiff price,” Forniss said.

  “And for what?” Patchen asked him. “So, I’m not a saint. So she’s not, maybe. Poor kid’s got a husband’s no good to—” He shrugged that off. “No law against a roll in the hay, is there, sergeant?”

  “As a matter of fact,” Forniss said. “One on the books in New York. Against adultery. Never heard of its being enforced.”

  “So?”

  “So,” Forniss said, “I think we’d better go along and tell Captain Heimrich about this, Mr. Patchen. Think he might find it interesting. Might feel there are a few points need clearing up.”

  Captain Heimrich said he was sure Mrs. Fleming had loved her husband. He said he knew how difficult all this was for her. He said, “Do you feel up to telling me how you found him yesterday, Mrs. Fleming? When you and Mr. Patchen came back here?”

  “He—he was unconscious. I thought he was already dead. And—and I called Mr. Patchen and we tried to revive him and it—it wasn’t any good. Didn’t Mr. Patchen tell you about this?”

  “Something about it,” Heimrich said. “That you played a round of golf, but were worried all the time about Mr. Fleming. That, when you found he wasn’t at the club, you had Mr. Patchen drive you here.”

  “That’s all there is,” she said. Energy seemed to have drained out of her.

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “You were surprised he wasn’t at the club when you and Mr. Patchen finished?”

  It wasn’t that, she told him. Not really surprised. He often went to the club and had a drink and lunch and then went home—“came back here”—to rest.

  “But yesterday you were worried? Were you afraid he might—harm himself?”

  She nodded her head. She said, “I told you why. Only—all the time I suppose—I kept on hoping. Hoping he—he had just been for a drive that morning. That—that the gun’s not being there didn’t really mean anything. But I was afraid. Afraid this would happen.”

  “When he came home to rest he sometimes had a glass of warm milk to relax him?”

  “Oh, yes. Often. Only—only it sometimes wasn’t enough. Then he took a sleeping pill. I kept telling him he shouldn’t but—but he said, ‘What difference does it make? What—what damn difference does it make?’”

  “He warmed the milk himself?”

  “I suppose there’s some point to this? It’s—I can’t take an awful lot today, captain.”

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said. “I’m sorry. We have to get everything straight, you know. Even when a man obviously has killed himself. About the milk?”

  Usually, Enid Fleming warmed the milk, poured it into the vacuum jug. The day before she had not. “The milk hadn’t come,” she said. “So he must have warmed it himself and filled the jug and then—and then—”

  She put her hands over her eyes, holding her head, moving her shining head slowly from side to side.

  Heimrich said again that he knew how difficult this was for her; this scraping together of little meaningless facts. He said again that they had to get even the most inconsequential things straightened out. For example—her husband must have warmed the milk in a pan. When they—“one of our men”—had looked into the kitchen—“not with anything in mind; we look everywhere”—there had been no dirty pan. Had she washed the pan, or had her husband? Or, conceivably, Mr. Patchen?

  She had not. Did he think it was a time she would be cleaning up the kitchen? So, she supposed, Angus might have. It would have been like him. She couldn’t imagine that Mr. Patchen would have. She spoke dully, mechanically, about dull things.

  The telephone rang and she moved to get up from the chair.

  “Never mind,” Heimrich said. “The trooper will answer it.”

  She looked at him then, and he thought her eyes widened. She said, “A trooper? There’s a state trooper here?”

  “Now, Mrs. Fleming,” Heimrich said. “It’s a matter of routine in—yes, Nick?”

  “Sergeant Forniss calling you, sir,” Trooper Nicholas told Heimrich from the doorway.

  Heimrich went to the telephone in the hall. He closed behind him the door between living room and hallway.

  Enid Fleming sat and looked at the closed door.

  XVI

  Heimrich waited on the porch after he had talked to Sergeant Forniss and was quite aware that Enid Fleming was waiting behind a closed door and, he supposed, wondering, turning things over and over in her mind; trying to get things tidy in her mind. Heimrich did the same with his own, and did not find his mind tidy. There was, actually, only one thing to go on and it was not really a “thing”—only the absence of what one could call a thing. Something more tangible than a theory, and a theory with holes in it at that, would be useful to have, Heimrich thought, waiting for Forniss to bring a couple of men a reasonably short distance. It would help if one of them would turn out to be a rat, and there was that to hope for. People put under pressure are likely to talk too much. There was that to hope for. The police car came up the drive and parked. Patchen and a heavy man with yellow hair, who would be the bartender, and Forniss got out of it. Patchen, Heimrich thought, looked wary. The other man looked a little wobbly and the right side of his jaw was swollen.

  “Try not to keep you long, Mr. Patchen,” Heimrich said, and the remark did not lessen the wariness of Patchen’s expression. “Just come along in.”

  He looked at Frank Pesco. He said, “Get to you later.” “Listen, captain,” Pesco said. “I’m not mixed up in anything.” “Fine,” Heimrich said. “Keep it that way,” and went behind J. Henry Patchen into the house, and opened the living-room door for Patchen.

  Enid Fleming was still in the chair he had left her in. She was not hiding her eyes now. She said, “Why, Mr. Patchen,” and then looked at Heimrich and raised her eyebrows. Then she stood up.

  And Patchen shook his head and said, “It’s no good, Enid. What they’re trying to make out of it, I’m damned if I know. But they’ve found out about last October.”

  She looked at him and her blue eyes widened and she said, “October? What about October?”

  She couldn’t have done it better, Heimrich thought. He was going to need his rat.

  Patchen shook his head slowly, sadly. He said, “I told you it was no good, baby. Stu found out and now they’ve found out.”

  She looked at him and shook her head, and her eyes were wide. Ther
e was bewilderment in her eyes. She turned to Heimrich, eyes still very wide, very bewildered. She said, “I don’t know what Mr. Patchen is talking about. What is he talking about?”

  “He says,” Heimrich told her, “that you and he spent a couple of days together last October at a place called the Cavalier Lodge. Fifteen miles or so upstate.”

  “Mr. Patchen and I?” she said. “He—you mean he says that? Really says a thing like that?”

  “Registered as Mr. and Mrs. Stuart Fleming,” Heimrich told her. “The records show somebody—”

  But she was not listening. She was looking at Patchen, staring at Patchen as if she had never seen him before.

  “Why?” she said to Patchen. “Why are you telling these awful—these vicious—lies? That I would go to some place with—with you?”

  “It’s no good,” Patchen said. “I keep telling you it’s no good. Why they’re trying to make so much of it I don’t know. But listen to me, Enid. You’re only making it—”

  “What have I ever done to you?” she said, and her voice went up. “What that would make you—” She did not finish. She made, with both hands, a gesture of bewilderment, of hopelessness. Then she turned to Heimrich. “You’ve got him to say this,” she said. “Why have you got him to—to tell this awful lie? This man I barely know?”

  “Now, Mrs. Fleming,” Heimrich said. “Is it a lie? Didn’t you go to the lodge with Mr. Patchen? Didn’t you use your brother-inlaw’s name on the register? Or get Mr. Patchen to register that way? Planning somehow to get word to the executors of your father-in-law’s will that Stuart had been what the will calls misbehaving? So that the trust would revert to your husband? Didn’t you—”

  “So that was it,” Patchen said. “Not just one of your little—jokes.” He looked down at her. “My God,” he said, and spoke slowly. “Was that why you went at all? The only reason you went at all?”

  “Have you taught him these lies?” she said to Heimrich. “What are you trying to do to me? My husband’s dead. I’m—everything’s fallen apart. What are you trying to do to me?”