“This – ah – gentleman is the police, Mr Grandfils. He has demanded information I simply haven’t the right to—”
“That will be all, Marvin.”
I didn’t even hear him leave.
“I can’t stand that two-bit diplomat,” the little man said. “He makes the bottom of my foot itch.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Unfortunately he happens to be useful,” he went on. “The women gush at him and he gushes back. Good for business.”
“I thought you only sold men’s suits,” I said.
“Who do you think picks them out? Take off that coat and sit down. I don’t know your name.”
I told him my name and got rid of the trench coat and hat and drew up a teakwood chair trimmed in silver and sat on it. He made a quarter-turn in the big chair and his glasses flashed at me in the soft light.
“Police, eh?” he said suddenly. “Well, you’ve got the build for it. Where did you get that ridiculous suit?”
“This ridiculous suit set me back sixty-five bucks,” I said.
“It looks it. What are you after, sir?”
“The address of one of your customers.”
“I see. Why should I give it to you?”
“He was murdered. The address on his identification was incorrect.”
“Murdered!” His mouth dropped open, causing the glasses to slip down on his nose. “Good heavens! One of my people?”
“He was wearing one of your coats,” I said.
He passed a tremulous hand across the top of his head. All it smoothed down was scalp. “What was his name?”
“Andrus. Franklin Andrus.”
He shook his head immediately. “No, Mr Pine. None of my people has that name. You have made a mistake.”
“The coat fitted him,” I said doggedly. “He belonged in it. I might have the name wrong but not the coat. It was his coat.”
He picked a silver paper-knife from the silver trimmed tan desk blotter and rapped it lightly over and over against the knuckles of his left hand. “Perhaps you’re right,” he said. “My coats are made to fit. Describe this man to me.”
I gave the description, right down to the kidney-shaped freckle on the lobe of the left ear. Grandfils heard me out, thought over at length what I’d said, then shook his head slowly.
“In a general way,” he said, “I know of a dozen men like that who come to me. The minor touches you’ve given me are things I never noticed about any of them. I’m not a trained observer and you are. Isn’t there something else you can tell me about him? Something you’ve perhaps inadvertently overlooked?”
It hardly seemed likely but I thought back anyway. I said, “The rest of his clothing was a little unusual. That might mean something to you.”
“Try me.”
I described the clothing. By the time I was down to where the dead man hadn’t been wearing socks, Grandfils had lost interest. He said coldly, “The man was obviously some tramp. None of my people would be seen on the street in such condition. The coat was stolen and the man deserved what happened to him. Frayed slacks! Heavens!”
I said, “Not much in his pockets, but I might as well tell you that too. A dark blue necktie with a Marshall Field label, a pair of gold-plated tweezers, several transparent envelopes about the size of a postage stamp, a pocket comb and some change . . .”
My voice began to run down. A. Cullinham Grandfils had his mouth open again, but this time there was the light of recognition in his eyes. He said crisply, “The coat was a gray flannel, Mr Pine?”
“Yeah?”
“Carlton weave?”
“Hunh?”
“Never mind. You wouldn’t know that. Quite new?”
“I thought so.”
He bent across the desk to move a key on an intercom. “Harry,” he snapped into the box. “That gray flannel lounge suit we made for Amos Spain. Was it sent out?”
“A week already,” the box said promptly. “Maybe ten days, even. You want I should check exactly?”
“Never mind.” Grandfils flipped back the key and leaned into the leather chair and went on tapping his knuckles with the knife. “Those tweezers and envelopes did it, sir. He’s an enthusiastic stamp collector. Less than a month ago I saw him sitting in the outer room lifting stamps delicately with those tweezers and putting them in such envelopes while waiting for a fitting.”
“Amos Spain is his name?”
“It is.”
“He fits the description I gave?”
“Physically, exactly. But not the frayed slacks and dirty shirt. Amos Spain wouldn’t be found dead in such clothes.”
“You want to bet?”
“. . . Oh. Of course. I simply can’t understand it!”
“How about an address on Spain, Mr Grandfils?”
He dug a silver-trimmed leather notebook out of a desk drawer and looked inside. “8789 South Shore Drive. Apartment 3C. It doesn’t show a telephone, although I’m confident he has one.”
“Married?”
He dropped the book back in the drawer and closed it with his foot. “We don’t inquire into the private lives of our people, Mr Pine. It seems to me Mrs Spain is dead, although I may be wrong. I do know Amos Spain is reasonably wealthy and, I think, retired.”
I took down the address and got up and put on my coat and said, “Thanks for your help, Mr Grandfils.” He nodded and I opened the door. As I started out, he said:
“You really should do something about your suits, Mr Pine.”
I looked back at him sitting there like one of those old Michelin tire ads. “How much,” I said, “would you charge me for one?”
“I think we could do something quite nice for you at three hundred.”
“For that price,” I said, “I would expect two pairs of pants.”
His chin began to bob and he made a sound like roosters fighting. He was laughing. I closed the door in the middle of it and went on down the hall.
5
The address on South Shore Drive was a long low yellow-brick apartment building of three floors and an English basement. A few cars were parked along a wide sweep of concrete running past the several entrances, and I angled the Plymouth into an open spot almost directly across from 8789.
The rain got in a few licks at me before I could reach the door. Inside was a small neat foyer, complete with bright brass mail boxes and an inner door. The card on the box for 3C showed the name Amos Spain.
I pressed the right button and after a longish moment a woman’s voice came down the tube. “Yes?”
That jarred me a little. I hadn’t actually expected an answer. I said, “Mrs Spain?”
“This is Mrs Monroe,” the voice said. “Mr Spain’s daughter. Are you from the post office?”
“Afraid not. I’m an officer, Mrs Monroe. Want to talk to you.”
“An officer? Why, I don’t believe . . . What about?”
“Not from down here, Mrs Monroe. Ring the buzzer.”
“I’ll do no such thing! How do I know you’re a policeman? For all I know you could be a – a—”
“On a day like this? Don’t be silly.”
There was some silence and then the lock began to stutter. I went through and on up carpeted steps to the third floor. Halfway along a wide cheerful hallway was a partially open door and a woman in a flowered housecoat looking out at me.
She was under thirty but not very far under. She had wicked eyes. Her hair was reddish brown and there was a lot of it. Her skin was flawless, her cheekbones high, her mouth an insolent curve. She was long and slender in the legs, small in the waist, high in the breasts. She was dynamite.
I was being stared at in a coolly impersonal way. “A policeman you said. I’m fascinated. What is it you want?”
I said, “Do I get invited in or do we entertain the neighbors?”
Her eyes wavered and she bit her lip. She started to look back over her shoulder, thought better of it, then said, “Oh, very well. If you’ll be
brief.”
She stepped back and I followed her across a tiny reception hall and on into an immense living room, with a dinette at one end and the open door to a kitchen beyond that. The living room was paneled, with beautiful leather chairs, a chesterfield, lamps with drum shades, a loaded pipe rack, a Governor Winthrop secretary, a fireplace with a gas log. Not neat, not even overly clean, but the right place for a man who puts comfort ahead of everything else.
I dropped my coat on a hassock and sat down on one of the leather chairs. Her lips hardened. “Don’t get too comfortable,” she said icily. “I was about to leave when you rang.”
“It’s a little chilly out for a housecoat,” I said.
Her jaw hardened. “Just who do you think you are, busting in here and making smart remarks? You say you’re a cop. As far as manners go, I believe it. Now I think I’d like to see some real proof.”
I shrugged. “No proof, Mrs Monroe. I said officer, not policeman. A private detective can be called an officer without stretching too far.”
“Private—” Her teeth snapped shut and she swallowed almost convulsively. Her face seemed a little pale now but I could have imagined that. “What do you want?” she almost whispered.
“Where’s Amos Spain?” I said.
“My . . . father?”
“Uh-huh.”
“. . . I don’t know. He went out early this morning.”
“He say where?”
“No.” Whatever had shocked her was passing. “Tom and I were still sleeping when he went out.”
“Tom?”
“My husband.”
“Where’s he?”
“Still asleep. We got in late. Why do you want to know where my father is?”
I said, “I think it would be a good idea if you sat down, Mrs Monroe. I’m afraid I’ve brought some bad news.”
She didn’t move. Her eyes went on watching me. They were a little wild now and not at all wicked. She wet her lips and said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about. Bad news about what?”
“About your father. He’s dead, Mrs Monroe. Murdered.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said quickly. Almost too quickly.
“He’s been identified. Not much chance for a mistake.”
She turned away abruptly and walked stiffly over to a lamp table and took a cigarette from a green cloisonné box. Her hand holding the match wavered noticeably but nothing showed in her face. She blew out a long streamer of smoke and came back and perched carelessly on an arm of the couch across from me. The housecoat slipped open slightly, letting me see most of the inner curve of a freshly powdered thigh. I managed to keep from chewing a hole in the rug.
“There’s been some mistake, Mr Pine. Dad never had an enemy in the world. What do you suggest I do?”
I thought back to be sure. Then I was sure. I said, “The body’s probably at the morgue by this time and already autopsied. Might be a good idea to send your husband over. Save you from a pretty unpleasant job.”
“Of course. I’ll wake him right away and tell him about it. You’ve been very kind. I’m sorry if I was rude.”
She hit me with a smile that jarred my back teeth and stood up to let me know the interview was over and I could run along home now and dream about her thigh.
I slid off the chair and picked up my hat and coat. While putting them on I moved over to the row of windows and looked down into the courtyard. Nobody in sight. Not in this weather. Rain blurred the glass and formed widening puddles in thin brown grass that was beginning to turn green.
I turned and said, “I’ll be running along, Mrs Monroe,” and took four quick steps and reached for the bedroom door.
There was nothing wrong with her reflexes, I’ll say that for her. A silken rustle and the flash of flowered cloth and she was standing between me and the door. We stood there like that, breathing at each other, our faces inches apart. She was lovely and she smelled good and the housecoat was cut plenty low.
And her face was as hard as four anvils.
“I must have made a mistake,” I said. “I was looking for the hall door.”
“Only two doors,” she said between her teeth. “Two doors in the entire apartment. Not counting the bathroom. One that lets you out and one to the bedroom. And you picked the wrong one. Go on. Get out of here before I forget you’re not a cop.”
On my way out I left the inner door downstairs unlocked. In case.
6
The rain went on and on. I sat there listening to it and wondering if Noah had felt this way along about the thirty-ninth day. Smoke from my fourth cigarette eddied and swirled in the damp air through the no-draft vent.
The Plymouth was still parked across from 8789, and I was in it, knowing suddenly who had killed Amos Spain and why Spain had been wearing what he wore and why he wasn’t wearing what he hadn’t worn. It was knowledge built piece by piece on what I had seen and heard from the moment I walked in and found the body on the couch. It was the kind of knowledge you can get a conviction with – if you have that one key piece.
The key piece was what I didn’t have.
Now and then a car came into the wide driveway and stopped at one of the entrances to let somebody out or to pick somebody up. None of them was for the rat hole to which I was glued. A delivery truck dropped off a dinette set a couple of doors down and I couldn’t have cared less.
I lighted another cigarette and crossed my legs the other way and thought about hunting up a telephone and calling Lund and telling him to come out and get the knife artist and sweat that key piece out in the open. Only I didn’t want it that way. This was one I wanted to wrap up myself. It had been my office and my couch and almost my client, and I was the one the cops had tromped on. Not that the tromping had amounted to much. But even a small amount of police displeasure is not what you list under assets.
Another twenty minutes floated by. They would still be up there in that apartment wearing a path in the rug. Waiting, sweating blood, hanging on desperately, risking the chance that I had known more than I let on and was already out yelling for the cops.
I would have loved to know what they were waiting for.
When the break did come I almost missed it. An ancient Ford with a pleated front fender wheezed into the curb. A hatless young man in a rained-on gray uniform got out to look at the number over the entrance to 8789. He had a damp-looking cigarette pasted to one corner of his mouth and a white envelope in his left hand. The local post office dropping off a piece of registered mail.
And then I remembered Mrs Monroe’s first question.
I slapped open the glove compartment and got out my gun and shoved it under the band of my trousers while I was reaching for the door. I crossed the roadway at a gallop and barged into the foyer just as the messenger took a not too clean thumb off the button for 3C. I made a point of getting out my keys to keep him from thinking Willie Sutton was loose again.
He never even knew I was in town. He said, “Post office; registered letter,” into the tube and the buzzer was clattering before he had the last word out. He went through and on up the steps without a backward glance.
The door was off the latch, the way I had left it earlier. By the time the door to 3C opened, I was a few feet away staring vaguely at the closed door to 3B and trying to look like somebody’s cousin from Medicine Hat. The uniformed man said, “Amos Spain?” and a deeper voice said, “I’m Mr Spain,” and a signature was written and a long envelope changed hands.
Before the door could close I was over there. I said, “It’s me again.”
He was a narrow-chested number with a long sallow face, beady eyes, a thin nose that leaned slightly to starboard, and a chin that had given up the struggle. Hair like black moss covered a narrow head. This would be Tom Monroe, the husband.
Terror and anger and indecision were having a field day with his expression. His long neck jerked and his sagging jaw wobbled. He clutched the edge of the door, wanting to slam it but
not quite daring to. The silence weighed a ton.
All this was lost on the messenger. He took back his pencil and went off down the hall, his only worry the number of hours until payday. I leaned a hand against the thin chest in front of me and pushed hard enough to get us both into the room. I shut the door with my heel, said, “I’ll take that,” and yanked the letter out of his paralyzed fingers. It had sealing wax along the flap and enough stamps pasted on the front to pay the national debt.
Across the room the girl in the flowered housecoat was reaching a hand under a couch pillow. I took several long steps and stiff-armed the small of her back and she sat down hard on the floor. I put my empty hand under the pillow and found a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson .32, all chambers filled and dark red nail polish on the sight. I held it loosely along my leg and said, “Well, here we are,” in a sprightly voice.
Monroe hadn’t moved. He stared at me sullenly, fear still flickering in his small nervous eyes. The girl climbed painfully to her feet, not looking at either of us, and dropped down on the edge of a leather chair and put her face in her hands.
The man’s restless eyes darted from me to the girl and back to me again. A pale tongue dabbed furtively at lips so narrow they hardly existed. He said hoarsely, “Just what the hell’s the bright idea busting in here and grabbing what don’t belong to you?”
I flapped the envelope loosely next to my ear. “You mean this? Not yours either, buster.”
“It belongs to my father-in-law. I simply signed for it.”
“Oh, knock it off,” I said wearily. “You went way out of your league on this caper, Tom. You should have known murder isn’t for grifters with simple minds.”
A sound that was half wail, half sob filtered through the girl’s fingers. The man said absently, “Shut up, Cora.” His eyes skittered over my face. “Murder? Who’s talking about murder? You the one who shoved in here a while ago and told Cora about Amos Spain?”
The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction Page 60