Headed for a Hearse
Page 5
Richard Bolston stood up. “I’ll be glad to look for him.” He was built like a prize fighter: broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waist. “I can get him if anybody can.”
Finklestein raised his hand. “I have a better idea. I imagine M. G. is some sort of a criminal, a prowler, probably, and it won’t be easy for a man to get in touch with him. But—” Finklestein simpered at Miss Martin—“if a lovely lady should ask for him, she’d be certain to find him.”
Westland said, “I won’t have her wandering about in that district—not for anything.”
Emily Lou pouted.
“I’d like to look for him,” said Miss Brentino. Her voice was exquisitely modulated, her accent slightly foreign. “I’m not afraid—that is if you think I’m pretty enough?”
“Neither am I,” said Emily Lou.
“Wait,” said Finklestein. “Why not let both ladies go?” He continued before Westland could interrupt, “They’ll be perfectly safe. I’ll send Mr. Crane and Mr. Williams as escorts.”
“What’s the matter with me?” Bolston demanded. “Or Woodbury? Or Wharton?”
“Dammit, yes,” said Wharton.
“These men are trained detectives,” Finklestein insisted. “Once Miss Martin contacts M. G., they’ll never lose sight of him. How would one of you gentlemen follow him in case he refused to talk to Miss Martin?”
Woodbury said, “He’s right, Bolls.”
“I don’t like the idea,” Westland said.
Crane slipped off the window sill. “They’ll be safe enough. One of us will be with them all the time.”
Finklestein said, “Now look. Here’s the way we’re going to operate.” He adjusted his glasses with both hands. “All reports are to be made to Mr. Westland here. The warden is willing to let us see him once a day. He is going to be a detective in his own case.” He paused for a second. “Of course, we are to help him with any theories we evolve.” He wiped his hands with the silk handkerchief. “I am to be outside commander, and you are to take assignments from me. Is that agreeable?”
Everyone said it was.
Finklestein examined his thin gold wrist watch. “It’s nearly time for lunch,” he announced. “I suggest Mr. Crane arrange with the two young ladies to dine at Joe Petro’s. The rest of us will wait for the results of their search.” He folded his handkerchief and pushed it in his breast pocket. “You might be thinking about the case, however, even if you aren’t doing anything in a physical way.”
Surprisingly, old Mr. Sprague spoke. “It’ll be brains, not brawn,” he said, “that will solve this matter.”
Wharton opened the door. “You can reach me in Lake Forest.” He stepped into the warden’s room. The warden was not there.
Emily Lou Martin lingered behind the others. She kissed Westland. “Everything is going to be all right, dear.” Her yellow feather tickled Westland’s ear. He ducked his head, kissed her, said: “I hope so.” They walked hand in hand to where William Crane was waiting in the warden’s office.
CHAPTER IV
Monday Noon
William Crane was solicitous on the broad steps of the Criminal Courts Building in front of the jail. He held Emily Lou’s fur-covered elbow, guided her down each step. Her hair was more red than brown in the pearl-gray daylight.
“How’ll we get to this fellow Petro’s place?” he asked.
“We’ll have to go in a cab.” Tears pooled in her eyes, trickled down the soft hollows between her nose and her cheeks, leaving delicate green smudges of mascara. She daubed at the moisture with a linen square and smiled forlornly at William Crane. “I try to be brave, but I just can’t help it,” she said. “The odds are so great.”
Crane said, “It is a long shot. But it’s better to do something than to sit back and wait.”
They reached the sidewalk and looked about for Williams and Miss Brentino. It was only a few minutes after noon, but the sky, blanketed with sleazy gray clouds, was somber. The air was chill, no wind blew; it seemed as though they were standing in a gigantic electric ice box.
Miss Martin shuddered. “I’m frightened. I feel as though something terrible was going to happen.”
“It’s just the cold,” William Crane said. “Some lunch will do you good.”
Williams was admiring a huge tan convertible touring car parked against the curb. “It’s an English Bentley with a Rolls-Royce body,” he announced with awe as they approached. He made a circular motion with his right thumb toward the radiator. “It’s the fastest semi-stock car in the world. I seen one like it on Long Island last month. I’d almost trade my old Chevy in for one.”
“That’s Mr. Bolston’s car,” said Emily Lou. “I wonder where he is?”
“I don’t see him, but there’s Woodbury down the street a way,” Williams stated. “He’s talking to that black-haired dame.”
Woodbury and Miss Brentino had their heads close together, as if they were whispering, but they drew apart quickly when the others came up.
Emily Lou said, “You look like conspirators.”
Woodbury spoke to Crane: “Just some office business. Miss Brentino has been acting as my secretary since Mr. Westland…”
“Sorry to interrupt you,” Crane said, “but we ought to get going on that letter.”
Woodbury agreed. “You should. Why don’t you let me go along? I could drive you down to the restaurant and, besides, three men would be safer than two.”
“I don’t think they would,” said Crane. “The more men, the more suspicious Petro will be. That’s why we’re taking these young ladies.” He looked into Miss Brentino’s liquid black eyes. “You’ll be perfectly safe.”
“I am not afraid.”
Williams shouted, “Hey!” A yellow cab swerved in, halted beside the curb with a scream of rubber on cement. Williams opened the door with a flourish. They got in; William Crane between the women and Williams on one of the metal pull-down seats.
“Nine hundred and one South Halstead Street,” Crane told the driver.
As they jerked away, Woodbury called, “Good luck.”
Miss Brentino waved at him through the rear glass.
It was only a five-minute run to the address. Crane tossed the driver a fifty-cent piece and said, “Keep the change.” Chest-high green-and-white awnings ran around the glass windows of Petro’s restaurant. Inside, the upper halves of Italian men drinking beer at a mahogany bar could be seen. William Crane opened the front door. There were linen-covered tables in a back room. Crane held the door while the others went in. The air in the barroom was strong with the smell of bourbon whiskey and stale beer.
“Can we get something to eat?” Crane asked the frowsy bartender.
“Why not?” said the bartender.
Splintered boards creaked under their feet as they went into the back room. The Italians at the bar stared at the two women. At one small table, a tubercular blonde and a swarthy man wearing a green fedora hat were holding a passionately angry conversation. Crane picked a table as far away from the couple as possible.
As Williams was helping Emily Lou out of her fur coat, a waiter with a snap-brim hat on his head came out of the kitchen, stared at them in surprise for a moment, then went back through the swinging door. “What the hell,” said Williams, “maybe we better put our hats back on.” He smiled at Miss Martin. “Someone’s liable to shoot us if we don’t.”
“If we put our hats on, they’ll take us for newspaper reporters,” Crane said. “I’d rather be shot.”
The waiter reappeared and distributed four glasses of water. He was unshaven; his eyes squinted, and the lobe of his left ear was missing. He still wore the snap-brim hat. “Whacha want?” he demanded. He looked suspiciously at Williams.
“Bourbon,” said Williams.
“How would martinis go?” William Crane asked the ladies. Both said they would go very well. “Three dry martinis and a bourbon,” Crane said.
The waiter’s face was composed. He opened his mouth. “Three oli
ves and a Kentucky straight,” he shouted. He held himself rigid in an attitude of listening. In the distance, the bartender roared, “You betcha, comin’ right up.” The waiter’s face relaxed. “You goin’ t’ eat?”
William Crane’s suggestion of antipasto, green noodles and mushrooms, and endive salad was accepted by everyone, even the waiter. The latter was turning away when Williams observed: “He wears a hat because the Indians scalped him during the Fort Dearborn massacre.”
The waiter halted, said, “What was that, buddy?” His dark face was surly; a snarl twisted his lips.
“Nothing,” Williams said hastily. He took a drink of water. The waiter went out through the swinging door to the kitchen. “I seem to talk too much,” Williams observed.
“You not only seem to,” Crane observed, “but you do.”
After the drinks, the antipasto tasted fine. There were salty anchovies bedded on a firm slice of tomato; scarlet peppers soaked in wine vinegar; thin bologna sausages; fat white shrimps; transparent slices of ham; and celery stuffed with cottage cheese; all going perfectly with the crusty Italian bread, the unsalted butter, and the peppery Chianti from a wicker-embraced bottle.
Emily Lou ate with a good appetite. “I never tasted anything as nice!” she exclaimed. She looked like an excited high-school girl with her disordered red hair and her lively blue eyes. She looked as though she ought to have freckles. “You all don’t mind if I make a hog out of myself, do you, Mr. Williams?” She spoke with a Georgia drawl.
Williams was enchanted. His sly, bulging eyes expressed adoration. “Lady,” he said, blotting cherry-colored drops of wine on his lips with the napkin, “you just go ahead and eat.”
The wine tasted as though it had been sprinkled with cayenne. It tasted dry and clean, and each time, after he had swallowed some, Crane’s mouth felt puckery, as it would have after he had sucked on a lemon, only there was not that feeling of wanting to cry. He sipped his wine, and looked at the two women.
He thought he had never seen two women with such large eyes. Miss Brentino’s were more remarkable; perhaps because there was nothing else in her face to detract from their uniqueness. Her lips were exquisitely shaped, full and crimson and sullen, but they moved little even in speech. Her skin was unrouged. Her face was a pale ballet mask which, Crane thought, might have been made by Benda of Dolores Del Rio, but back of it there were alive those magnificent, duskily luminous eyes.
It was different with Emily Lou Martin. Her blue eyes were quite as large, but they were only a part of a face alive with movement. Dimples winked on her cheeks; her smiling lips disclosed small, perfect teeth; she even wriggled her nose.
When they had finished the green noodles with mushrooms, William Crane asked the waiter if the boss was around.
“What’s a matter?” the waiter demanded. “Somethin’ wrong with the food?” He placed one hand on the table, crushed a piece of bread.
Williams pushed back his chair, stood up. “I think I’ll kill this guy,” he announced. He laid his napkin beside his plate. Crane caught his arm, saying to the startled waiter, “Being Mr. Petro here.” The waiter backed away, and Williams subsided in his chair.
“Would you really have killed him?” Miss Martin asked excitedly.
William Crane said, “I thought I told you to leave your rod at home.”
“I just slipped it in my pocket.” Williams patted his coat. “It’s kind of a habit.…”
A big Italian stood beside the table. He had a pockmarked face and crafty eyes, and his neck was too big for his shirt, so that three quarters of an inch of skin showed under his red tie where the collar failed to meet. “I’m Joe Petro,” he said. He wore a violet shirt.
“My name’s Crane,” William Crane replied. He introduced the others and pulled up a chair for Mr. Petro. After a compliment on the food, Crane said, “We are looking for a friend of yours.”
Mr. Petro shrugged his bulky shoulders. “I have many friends.”
“This one wrote Miss Martin’s fiance a letter. He signed it M. G.”
The Italian’s pudgy hands slapped his chest. Brown flesh bulged around a tight diamond ring. “Oh, sure, I know that letter. Mannie wrote it to him.”
“Mannie who?”
“Mannie Grant.” Purple eyelids fell over sunken eyes. “Why should I tell you his name?”
“Miss Martin would like to talk with him.”
Miss Martin’s eyes were innocently wide. She said, “Can’t you find him for me, Mr. Petro?”
“I don’t know.” Petro eyed the white skin above her breast. “He’s a ver’ hard fellow to find. I don’ know if he wants to see you now.” He stared hard at Williams. “How do I know you ain’t G-men?”
“Do I look like a G-man?” Miss Martin asked. She laid a hand on Mr. Petro’s violet shirt sleeve. “I just know you are going to help me, Mr. Petro. I can see you are the kind of a man who would go out of his way to help a poor helpless girl.”
The restaurant keeper scratched his ribs. Perspiration had made half moons under his arms. “I tell you what I do,” he said at last. “I fix it up. You know the Café Monmarte?” Miss Martin said she did. “You go there tonight for dinner. Mannie, he’ll be there too. Then, if he wants to speak to you after dinner, when he look you over, he can.”
Miss Martin pouted. “Can’t we see him sooner than that?”
“No, ma’am. That’s the very best I can do.”
William Crane asked, “How will he know us?”
“He will know these women anywhere, the Titian and the black Da Vinci.” Mr. Petro raised his hands, palms upward, to a group of pink-and-gold cherubs on the ceiling. “I am at soul an artist, and I will describe their beauties so Mannie will know them.”
In getting on his coat, Williams said to Mr. Petro, “I don’t like your waiter.”
“Don’t mind him; he’s just a punk,” said the artist-proprietor.
On the sidewalk outside Crane arranged to call for Miss Martin and Miss Brentino at seven-thirty that evening.
The current of damp air flowed remorselessly along the shadowed corridor. It was almost evening again, and the cells were in a soft semidarkness. From his narrow cot, Westland watched the subtle changes of light in the corridor, thinking of his case abstractly and quite oblivious of the sobbing of Isadore Varecha. He thought of the days he had left—Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday—and he felt an impersonal impatience with the shortness of the time. The puzzle could be solved, he thought, but perhaps not quickly. He hoped Attorney Finklestein had started work on whatever evidence had been obtained from the “M. G.” of the letter. He felt a curiosity about the man, and he wondered what he had been doing in the apartment building on the night of the murder. He wondered if he had seen the real murderer. If he had, he thought, it would simplify things. The man’s testimony would at least obtain a reprieve for him, and then it would be merely a matter of building up evidence against the real murderer.
Reflected from the gray evening sky, the light in the corridor was the color of wood smoke. Footsteps, quick and nervous, echoed from Connors’ cell: one, two—one, two, three—one, two—one, two, three—as the gangster paced a rectangular course. Isadore Varecha broke the even cadence of his crying with a convulsive cough.
The real murderer! Westland’s mind refused to picture anyone for the role. He knew it must have been someone close either to him or his wife. Either the murderer had wanted to get rid of her and he had been accidentally implicated, or the murderer had killed her to get rid of him. It seemed unlikely that anyone would have a motive to kill her because her money went to him, but his mind boggled at the alternative. Why didn’t the murderer, he wondered, simply kill him if he wanted him out of the way?
Varecha was sobbing noisily now, and his throat rattled like a dying man’s as he gasped for breath.
Connors pressed himself against the front of his cell. “You goddam sheeny,” he yelled, “I’m going to kill you if you don’t shut up.” His eyes wer
e wild.
Astonished silence hung briefly over Varecha’s cell. Then he returned to his minor-key crying.
Westland tried to picture his cousin Lawrence Wharton as the plotting murderer; then, in succession, broad-shouldered Richard Bolston; suave Ron Woodbury; his chief clerk, Amos Sprague …
Was one of them a murderer?
Gold letters on the opaque glass door read:
Westland, Bolston & Woodbury
Members: New York Stock Exchange
New York Curb Exchange
Chicago Board of Trade
Chicago Curb Exchange
Attorney Finklestein turned the chromium knob. A saucy phone girl arched her penciled eyebrows, paused in her gum chewing. The steel clamp holding her ear phones made a valley in her brown bobbed hair.
“Is Mr. Bolston in?” Finklestein asked.
“Mr. Bolston?” The girl acted as though she was hearing the name for the first time. “Mr. Bolston?” She chewed reflectively on her gum. “It’s pretty late for him.”
“I don’t care if it’s past his bedtime.” Finklestein tapped his gold-headed cane on the chromium rail beside her black metal telephone switchbox. “I asked you if he was in.”
The girl put her saucy face up to the hanging speaker. “I’ll see. What’s the name?”
“Charles Finklestein.”
“And what’s it about?”
Attorney Finklestein pushed against the rail like an enraged bantam rooster. “I’ll tell him you asked,” he said, “and if he wants you to know, I’m sure he will be glad to tell you himself.”
The girl flicked a switch, moved her red lips against the black mouthpiece, then said brightly, “Mr. Bolston will see you, sir.”
French windows pinpointed with lights from other office buildings austerely decorated two sides of Bolston’s room. Yellow roses bowed from a silver vase on his large walnut desk. Attorney Finklestein’s feet sank in the deep green rug.
Bolston walked around the desk and shook the lawyer’s hand. “What’s up?” he asked. His brown tweed suit smelled of peat smoke.