Trouble in Rooster Paradise

by T. W. Emory

  People I met in my line of work let you into their life a keyhole at a time. And, I was used to being lied to between those brief peeks. I was lied to all the time. People don’t usually divulge very much unless they think you know something that might hurt them. Then they’ll chat and jabber with the intent of persuading you that you’re mistaken or that you’ve heard things wrong. They’ll lie when they don’t need to. And sometimes especially then. That’s what usually trips them up.

  I was still holding the paper bag containing our empty milk cartons. I uncrumpled it, dug around inside, and pulled out a small receipt from the Big Bite Café on Greenwood Avenue. It was proof of purchase for two milks and two sandwiches. Our lunch was no Chit-Chat Café freebie.

  If de Carter had lied to me about something as trivial as where and how he’d gotten the lunch, what else had he lied about?

  I’d left the Chevy in the zoo’s nearby south gate parking lot. I scouted the area before I turned the motor over. All was quiet on the zoo’s southern front.

  I wended my way southeast then headed over toward the water and Ballard. I figured to stop in at my office. Spotting a phone booth, I pulled over.

  Britt Anderson was delighted to be hearing from me again so soon. She didn’t say those words exactly, but I like to think I’m a fair translator of female inflections.

  I told her I’d just come from talking with Guy de Carter. “He says he seldom comes into the store. What say you?”

  She thought for a moment. “I’ll admit I’ve encouraged him to keep his visits strictly business.”

  “He thinks you don’t like him very much.”

  She sighed and hesitated to answer. “I don’t dislike him. Not really. It’s just that … well, I guess I don’t know him very well. But, he’s been known to distract some of the girls when they should be working. I’ve talked with him about it. He seems to have gotten the point. But maybe he stops in when I’m not aware of it. After all, Sloane and Associates is just two floors up. It is rather convenient for him. Why? Is it important?”

  “Just clearing up a small discrepancy. You started to say something about de Carter, but didn’t. What were you going to say?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing really. It’s just that there’s a certain … menacing quality about him. I’m sure it’s nothing. Please forget I even said it. Like I said, I don’t know him well.”

  “Any luck with your staff?”

  “I’m sorry, Gunnar. I’ve only had time to talk with Peggy. A minor emergency came up. A colossal mix-up with one of the orders. Peggy did say that as far as she knew, Dirk Engstrom was the only serious suitor Christine had. She emphasized the word ‘serious,’ and I was going to press her on it when I got called away. But before the day is through I’ll be sure and get back to her, and to a couple of the other girls as well.”

  I said I appreciated it, and asked if she’d call me later. “Let me give you my home phone number,” I said.

  “Better still, are you busy tonight?” she asked.

  I told her I wasn’t particularly busy, so she invited me over to her place. “We’ve both got to eat. I’ll just fix a little extra. We can talk over a meal.”

  I said it sounded good to me.

  “Do you like Chianti with your macaroni and cheese?”

  “Is this some kind of test?”

  She laughed. “I’m teasing. I’m not too elaborate in the kitchen, but I’ve been told I’m actually a fair cook.”

  We agreed that 7:00 would be just ducky. She gave me the address to her apartment off Queen Anne Avenue.

  Before we hung up, I remembered another reason why I’d called.

  “Your girls probably won’t know a Packard from a Studebaker, but when you’re talking to them, ask if they know of any man they’ve come in contact with who drives a newer model Packard.”

  “Why, I do. I don’t know makes or models, but I know that Len Pearson bought a Packard just last year. The reason I’m even remembering it is because that’s all he seemed to talk about for probably two weeks straight.”

  We hung up and I called Pearson’s office.

  When he picked up I told him who was calling and said, “Do you mind telling me where you were between ten and ten thirty last night?”

  “Why should I?” he asked.

  “Someone driving a newer Packard tried to run me down around that time.

  “And you think it was me?” He was clearly annoyed and flustered. He was also a bit drunk. I almost didn’t catch it. But, his was came out as wus. “That’s absurd. Why would I want to run you over?”

  “You still haven’t answered my first question.”

  “This is ridiculous. I resent what you’re insinuating.”

  “Humor me.”

  He was silent for a moment.

  “Why … if you must know, I was with an old college buddy of mine. We were at my club. Afterward we went to dinner and a show.”

  I listened more attentively. He was making his statements like an expert drinker trying to show he’s in control—carefully putting words together, despite the booze-induced limits.

  “I was with him till well after midnight. He can vouch for me.”

  “What was the name of the show?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “I can make it my business.”

  “Just screw off,” he shrieked, though he didn’t hang up.

  “Suit yourself, Len. But if I have to find out your whereabouts by digging around, there’s no telling who else will find out. So, whatever you’re trying to hide, is it really worth the possible ballyhoo?”

  I heard him groan on his end. He was silent for a moment.

  “We … we were at the … the Menagerie. But it’s not what you think. And we’ll both deny it if you make an issue of it.”

  It was my turn to be silent. When people tell you it’s not what you think, it usually is. But I pegged Len as the unusual exception to that rule.

  “Keep your shirt on, Len. Your secret’s safe with me.”

  “But it’s not my secret! You don’t understand. It was strictly Jack’s idea. He’s always been somewhat of a skylarker. We went as a joke. A gag. I do have a wife and kids, after all. You … you do believe me, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, Len, I believe you.”

  And I did believe him. He was too readily befuddled. He told the truth needlessly. He could just as easily have lied and told me he was simply at a girlie show. But he didn’t. Plus, I was pretty sure I’d read him right at our first meeting. His unbridled gazes at Britt Anderson and his pathetic yearning for her were too oafish to be anything but genuine.

  In San Francisco before the war, I’d gone once to see a drag show at Finocchio’s. My youthful curiosity and wet earlaps didn’t make me one of nature’s misfires. But Len’s pal Jack was no longer making his first grand tour. His salad days were long over. I wondered how well Len really knew his old buddy.

  “Were you driving your Packard last night, Len?”

  “The whole night. I swear it. Look. Jack is staying at the Meany Hotel. I’ll give you his number if you like. He’ll tell you the same story. Just be discreet about this. Swear you will.”

  I swore I would and hung up.

  I wrote down the number Len gave me but scrunched up the note a minute after the phone was back in its cradle. Len was suited for the role of unwitting tour guide to a double-gaited pal, but he didn’t strike me as a killer—at least not one nervy enough to kill on the fly. Too high strung. A guy like Len would need weeks, maybe months to plan. And I didn’t think Christine’s murder took that kind of calculation. But I’d been wrong before. So, I unscrunched the note and put it in my wallet.

  “You have two messages,” Cissy said when I opened the door to Dag’s office. “One from Detective Sergeant Milland. The other is from Rikard Lundeen.”

  Cissy stood in front of a filing cabinet, her chest level with an open drawer. She turned and reached for some notes on her desk.

&nbs
p; I took the slips of paper from her. I could feel her watching me as I read.

  “When did Milland’s come in?” I asked.

  “About an hour ago.”

  It was 2:30 by my Longines.

  “How about Lundeen’s.”

  “Twenty minutes ago. Tops.”

  I thanked her and headed to my pigeonholes and telephone.

  Cissy’s note from Milland read, “Call. Urgent.” Lundeen’s message was simply, “Call me.” You had to admire their economy of words if not their imaginations.

  I rang Milland first.

  “About time you called.”

  “Been busy. What’s up?”

  He told me someone took a shot at Addison Darcy.

  “When? Did you catch the guy?”

  “Not so fast. Me first. I want an account of your whereabouts. Darcy says you left his house around eleven. Where’d you go from there?”

  “Straight to Fifth and Pine, and Fasciné Expressions. After I talked with Miss Anderson I went and talked with Guy de Carter. Made a couple of phone calls after that, and now I’m talking to you. So what happened to Darcy?”

  “He says he left his place about thirty or forty minutes after you took off. He was no more than a hundred yards outside the front gate of The Highlands when someone put a bullet through his windshield.”

  “Was he hit?”

  “Nah, but he wrapped his Lincoln around a telephone pole. He’s all right, but the Lincoln needs major surgery. Lucky for him he wasn’t going too fast. Guard on the gate phoned it in.”

  I recalled Darcy saying he’d received some kind of summons just before I’d arrived.

  “Where did Darcy say he was headed?”

  “To a hotel downtown. He said one of his son’s war buddies had phoned him. The guy said he was going to be in town just overnight, and had a few things that belonged to Darcy’s son. Wanted to know if Darcy would meet him.”

  I told Milland about Cissy’s call from someone posing as one of my war pals.

  “That army buddy ploy is no happenstance. It’s got to link both attempted murders,” I said.

  “Damn.” I took that for agreement. “A little too coincidental,” Milland added.

  “Just a tad.”

  “Any good ideas who’d want to kill both you and this Darcy?”

  “Nary a one, Frank.” It wasn’t really a lie. He’d asked for good ideas. “But I have a suggestion for you we both might profit by.”

  “Spill it.”

  “Like I told you, the car that tailed the Johanson girl and me was a late model Packard. Walter said the car that nearly pulverized me could have been that model as well.”

  “I sense a hunt for a needle in a haystack coming my way,” he said.

  “Not really. Come up with the registrations for all Packards for the past couple of years in the greater Seattle area. Check the owners’ names against the Johanson girl’s repeat customer list. See if you come up with a match.”

  He let out with an animal noise of approval.

  “You carrying?” he asked.

  “Yep.”

  “Well, keep your powder dry and your eyes peeled, you dumb Swede.”

  “Why Frank, I’m touched. If people should overhear us, they’d think you care.”

  “Ah, shaddup.”

  I called Rikard Lundeen.

  He’d heard the news about Addison Darcy. I told him about my own close call.

  “Well son, it looks like a tiger’s getting beat out of the brush. It also goes to help young Dirk’s case, don’t you think?”

  “It’s starting to look that way.”

  “So, what’s your next move?”

  Hell if I knew. But what I told him was that I’d look up Christine’s repeat male customers and check on their whereabouts for the past couple of days.

  “What’s the connection to Addison Darcy? Any thoughts there, son?”

  I told him I had none. At least none I wanted to share at the moment.

  “Didn’t you trust him? Was that it?” Kirsti asked. She had stopped her recorder and was flipping the cassette over.

  “No that wasn’t it,” I said. “Oh, I’ll admit I didn’t care for the man, but I believed in doing a good job for someone whether I liked him or not.”

  “Been there, done that,” she said, nodding.

  “No, the thoughts I was mulling over just weren’t ready to be passed on. That’s all.”

  “Well, tell me. I want to know. What had you figured out by then?” She’d turned the recorder back on.

  “Well, young lady, I hadn’t figured out much of anything. It was plain Guy de Carter had lied to me. Greenwood Avenue was halfway between Woodland Park and The Highlands. So I knew he could easily have taken a shot at Addison Darcy and still made our rendezvous at the rose garden.”

  “But why? What was his motive?” she asked as she handed me a plastic water bottle.

  “That’s what I wondered. It didn’t make sense.”

  “You make Guy de Carter out to be a real sex addict. Did you think maybe he had a thing going with Christine Johanson?”

  “Oh, sure. At first it crossed my mind that they’d been lovers. I pictured Christine as the smitten nuisance who wouldn’t let go till de Carter killed her. But I dismissed that pretty quickly. Too drastic. To a man like Guy de Carter, promises and hearts were meant to be broken. No, he didn’t need to murder to end a relationship.”

  “Yeah. A little too way out there for a theory. And besides, how would that tie in with Addison Darcy?”

  “Exactly. Either de Carter or Christine had to have had some tie to Darcy.”

  “Maybe they both did?”

  I nodded. “Life is far less happenstance than we care to believe, Blue Eyes.”

  “How do you mean?”

  I took a big swig from the water bottle she’d handed me. As I screwed the cap back on I said, “What I mean is we’re not hermits living in a vacuum. We’re more like trailblazers in a vast wilderness.”

  “Sounds like happenstance to me,” she said as she put the bottle back in her tote bag.

  “Wrong. As we blaze our personal trail through life, paths cross and merge. It gets messy.”

  “Like the bumpersticker? Shit happens? Is that what you mean?”

  “That’ll work. Look, we all do stupid and selfish things at times. Some souls make it their career. Most of the time our actions play out to a rather harmless finale. As they say, we luck out.”

  I could see in her eyes she’d experienced just such luck.

  “But like it or not, our actions touch others. Sometimes, the things people do are so half-witted or so self-seeking, they set events in motion that quietly start to percolate.” I switched from a coffee metaphor to a weather one: “One day, a bolt strikes someone out of the blue. Except it’s not out of the blue. All along the beanie they were wearing was a lightning rod.”

  Kirsti had a direct intent stare that bore right through me.

  “A small thunderbolt you were hoping to dodge, Blue Eyes?”

  She shook her head, and the brooding moment seemed to pass.

  “Whether it’s just plain reaping what was sown, or taking the consequences when someone from the past surfaces with a vendetta, the results are often unpleasant and sometimes disastrous.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “Well, Blue Eyes, at that point I wasn’t saying much at all. And I’m not going to rush my story by telling you the end out of sequence.”

  She smiled.

  “No, at the time an analysis of what little I knew didn’t provide me with a whole lot of answers. I had more nosing around to do. Let’s see now, where was I?”

  After I got off the phone with Rikard Lundeen, I grew extremely tired. I yawned a monster yawn. I fought to keep my eyes open.

  I looked up at the picture hanging on the wall across the room. It was a short distance, so I could make out the details easily—although I knew them by heart. The picture showed nubile girl
s in a majestic outside setting. One was dressed and reclining. She was looking up at the other girl, who stood naked and was leaning over the first—her arms conveniently placed to cover up her pudenda. When I was a kid I’d make up conversations for them. I later learned that the girl on her feet was the artist’s daughter and the other was William Jennings Bryan’s granddaughter. The artist called the picture Daybreak. It was a favorite of my grandmother’s. Agnette had been a fan of Maxfield Parrish. This particular print had hung above the fireplace in the home where I was raised.

  Most of the time, looking at this picture gave me mixed feelings. At that moment it made me feel good. I needed to feel good.

  I started to nod off till I quit fighting it and gave in to a catnap.

  The clacking of Cissy’s typewriter coming in through the transom woke me up. By my watch I must have dozed in my chair for ten minutes.

  I pulled the Damon Runyon paperback out of my drawer. As Cissy pounded away on her machine, I spent fifteen minutes with good guys and nice Judys before I put the book back inside the desk.

  Cissy’s typing stopped. I pictured her getting ready to button things up and go home early. I decided to say goodnight and head for home myself. That would give me plenty of time to spiff up for my dinner date with Britt. It was the second time in a week that a spur-of-the-moment decision saved my life.

  My Longines read 3:15 when I locked my outer door and went over to Dag’s office, not bothering to knock as I entered. As I imagined, Cissy had her coat on and wasn’t wearing her reading glasses—indicators that she was making moves to take off for the day.

  “Clearing out early, eh?” I asked.

  “Dag’s still tied up in court. He phoned and told me that when I finished my filing I could pack it in if I wanted to. I want to.”

  “You’ve got my vote.”

  She smiled and said, “I meant to ask earlier—any luck on your investigation?”

  I’d shut the door behind me when I came in. My body blocked Cissy’s view of the door’s frosted glass window; otherwise she might have seen someone walk by.