“You sold it to two people at once? Who was the other buyer?”
“I don’t know.”
* * * *
The window was open. Distant voices drifted up from the street, but nobody in the room stirred. A troubled expression had appeared on Sam’s face. Moberg was a shade redder than I’d ever seen him before, but the lieutenant’s tone was patient as he said, “Very well. Just explain to us, Leroy, how you sold the same documents to two people simultaneously. And how you could be unaware of the identity of one buyer.”
“I’ll try. A few days after I started doing business with Jax I got a call at Metropolis. I think it was a man, but the voice was muffled and I’m not entirely sure. This person said, ‘How’d you like an extra twenty bucks a day?’ I said, I’d like it fine. What am I supposed to do for it?’ The caller said, “Each night, put everything you find in Ames’ wastebasket into a sack, and leave the sack on top of the trash in the can in the alley. In the morning, the sack will be gone and an envelope with twenty bucks will be in its place.’ I said, ‘How do I know you’re leveling?’ The caller said, ‘There’s twenty bucks in the can now—go see. And there’ll be twenty more tomorrow if you put the first batch in tonight.’”
“You agreed?”
“Sure, and it worked pretty good. I’d split Ames’ stuff, half for Jax and half for the can. The twenty turned up every morning like clockwork. Each buyer got part of the stuff and I got paid by both.”
“You have any more contact with the second buyer?”
“No. Just the one phone call.”
“Take him downstairs,” Moberg told the detectives, “and put a stakeout on the trash can. I got a hunch, though, that nobody will be back.”
Slowly Leroy got up. “Honest, Sam. If Jax hadn’t threatened to get tough, I wouldn’t have done it. But once I started—well, when the second buyer came along, it didn’t seem to make much difference. And an extra twenty a day, six days a week, is one-twenty a week. That, plus the fifty a week from Jax—I was doin’ real good.” The handyman paused and then ventured, “I don’t suppose you’ll hire me back after this.”
“I won’t prosecute,” Farrar said wearily, “but you’re exactly right. You’re fired.”
When they were gone, Moberg asked, “What about it, Sam? You’re an old hand at crime stories. You still think there’s no connection between Jax’s murder and what happened here this afternoon?”
“Decidedly.” Farrar’s composure had returned. “What’s unusual about two people being curious enough to pay money to learn what was in Pete’s article? When Nalon kept Irene in the Skyline Towers, she met a lot of important people. I think the Mystery Man…” Farrar permitted himself a smile. “That’s what he’ll be called you know. It’s trite, but apt. The Mystery Man is probably another private detective, acting for one of those important people. Some poor guy wanted to be tipped off in advance if his name was in the story, so he could explain to his wife or leave town or whatever.”
“I,” Moberg said, “think you’d better come down to earth.”
“Why? It’s reasonable. Twenty a day, six days a week—that’s big money just to see what’s in a wastebasket. It takes a rich man to think in those terms, and all of Nalon’s old friends are rich men.”
“A rich man, sure. Or it could be worth twenty a day to a killer. Someone who had the same idea Jax and Nalon had—to steal the story the minute Ames finished it. Someone who might have seen Jax leave Metropolis with the story under his arm, or even surprised him in Ames’ cubicle. Or maybe Jax did the surprising…” Moberg looked at me. “All of a sudden, I’m interested in this source of yours. I’ve been getting odd tips from Express staffers lately about Missouri and a place called Ox River. That stuff originate with you?”
“Pete,” Sam put in quickly, “has a good source but can’t disclose it. I’ll back him to the hilt in that too…”
“Uh-huh. I want the three of you to go downtown and make formal statements right now. When you get to the Bureau, ask for Lieutenant Cahill.”
“I don’t see why it has to be tonight. Tomorrow morning…”
“Tonight.”
* * * *
Farrar’s mantle of calm faded as soon as the lieutenant left us. He got up and began pacing the room, rubbing his hands together.
“Sam,” I asked slowly, “did you mean what you just said? That you don’t think there’s a connection between Jax’s murder and my article?”
“Of course not. At this point nobody can be sure of anything, but the coincidence—Jax getting shot an hour or so after he steals your manuscript—is damn suggestive. And that business about the second buyer spooking you is even more ominous.”
“That’s what I think too. But why’d you tell Moberg I was at a country club this afternoon? When the police take my statement, that story won’t hold up more than a few minutes.”
“I know. Poor old Dan will explode. I’m afraid I may have ruined a beautiful friendship, but we’ll have to work fast now. In any event, you don’t have anything to worry about.”
“I don’t?”
“No. When the time comes, we produce your alibi—Joanna Reinholt.”
“She’ll be in California.”
“I can always get her. Relax.” Sam sat down and reached for a telephone book. “Stash, would you be willing to spend the next thirty-six hours as a fugitive from justice? Hiding out with Ames in an isolated lakeside cabin?”
“That,” Stash replied, eyeing me in a speculative way, “would be all right, if it’s what you want.”
“It is.”
Farrar found his number, picked up a phone and dialed. “Mr. Nalon in? Tell him it’s Sam Farrar, the editor of Metropolis.” He waited a moment. “Nalon? I presume you’ve heard about Jax. Yes, I’m sure the police were there, but there may be more you haven’t heard. My handyman made a full confession, implicating Jax in the theft of certain papers from my magazine. You know what I could do, don’t you, if I went to court? Naturally you understand—I’m not vindictive. Ill drop the whole thing on one condition. Namely, that you bundle up what Jax stole and give it back. Fine. I see. Ames will be there in a few minutes.”
The editor hung up. “Everything Leroy gave Jax is in Nalon’s apartment. All you have to do is go get it.”
“What am I supposed to do with it?
“Refer to it when you rewrite your article. At least you’ll have something to work with besides your memory. And polished prose isn’t so important any more, not with the publicity this story will generate. The story Jax may have been murdered for—it’ll put Metropolis on the front page of every paper in town. It’s the best thing that’s happened to the magazine since we founded it. You’re going to rewrite the article between now and noon Monday, in a cabin owned by a friend of mine, and Stash will help you. She types more than a hundred words a minute—you can practically dictate it to her.”
“Just a minute,” I said. “In case you’ve forgotten, Lieutenant Moberg wants all three of us to go straight to the Detective Bureau.”
“We’ll go there. But not until you’ve finished the article and I’ve placed it in the hands of the printer. Don’t worry—I’ll assume full responsibility.”
“Uh-huh. And what about Joanna?”
“Who,” Stash asked, “is this Joanna?”
“I’m afraid,” Sam said, ignoring Stash, “Joanna is out of luck. After you write the article we’ll have to tell Moberg everything.”
“And Irene’s killer? You said you had a theory…”
“I don’t want to distract you with it now. Anyway there’s no evidence to support it yet, although I’ve looked for it hard enough.” He winked smugly. “I made an out-of-town trip myself, last weekend, all the way to Missouri. I…” From outside, the sound of talking grew louder. An argument was going on, and Sam rose and strode to the window. “Now,” he
announced, “we are in trouble. Deuce and Hargrove are down there. They have the same theory about Irene’s murder that I have, and since there’s been another murder, they won’t let me out of their sight until we can kick it around some more. They’ll want to check, to see if our man has an alibi for this one. He didn’t for the last one…”
“I don’t get it. How do you know they have the same theory?”
“We discussed it.” He turned to me. “To a limited extent, we’ll have to take them into our confidence. Nothing about Joanna of course, not yet, but when we get downstairs you and Stash slip away and pick up those papers from Nalon. Then meet us at Luigi’s Restaurant on Carling Street. We’ll make a brief assessment of Nalon’s stuff before you take off for the cabin.” He had an afterthought. “Where’s Kells?”
“Outside, covering the story.”
“Take him with you. He’s likely to ask someone the wrong question and give Joanna away prematurely. It’s too bad. I’d hoped to give him an exclusive on how you were going to hide out and rewrite your article, and also, when the time came, on the fact your source is the Mystery Woman in the Bowser case. But now Hargrove will have it in the Journal and Deuce will probably get the by-line in the Express. Come on…”
As we moved toward the door I asked Stash, “By the way, where were you this afternoon? I called a half dozen times.”
“I changed my mind,” she said, “and went to the park to watch swans in the lagoon. Alone.”
* * * *
During the cab ride to Nalon’s apartment I began to get sore. I brought Kells up to date and filled Stash in on who Joanna was and then said, “How do you like that? Those three self-satisfied bastards have been discussing theories about Irene’s murder all along, and not a word to me.”
“Farrar and his Foundlings,” Kells said glumly. “That’s how they are. Very clannish.”
“Hargrove and Deuce are Foundlings?”
“The original Foundlings, the first two guys Sam hired when Dunaway made him city editor of the Express. Hargrove had just got out of an alcoholic ward and Deuce was chief copy boy at the Beacon—but they wouldn’t let him be a reporter because he couldn’t write. Ever since, neither of them does anything important without consulting Sam.”
I shook my head. “He doesn’t seem to give a damn about my word to protect Joanna. Or the fact that Irene’s killer may have been stalking me for some reason.”
“But what can he do?” Stash argued. “You can’t hide from the police forever. He is right—your Joanna has just run out of luck. At least you’ll have time to recreate your article. And as for the murderer looking into your wastebasket, nobody is sure of that…yet.”
“You think,” Kells asked hopefully, “I can still salvage some kind of an exclusive out of this for myself?”
“I doubt it. I’m sure the three old buddies are sitting in Luigi’s right now, having the time of their lives working out the details of this conspiracy. Figuring how to keep the police at bay while I recreate ‘Good Night, Irene’ all so Sam can get some newspaper publicity for the next issue of Metropolis.”
Stash put her left hand over my right hand and squeezed. “I don’t blame you, being a little upset. But it won’t be so bad, when we get to the cabin. You’ll feel much better about it then…”
She and Kells waited in the cab while I took an elevator to the top floor of a luxurious apartment building not far from the Skyline Towers. I was expected. A somber Oriental showed me into a sunken living room, where Gabriel Nalon reclined in an arm chair, a near-empty tumbler in one hand. On the floor beside him were a bottle of hundred-proof bourbon and a big carton loaded with paper stolen from my wastebasket.
The industrialist’s face was mottled and gray. A little saliva glistened at one corner of his mouth, and it occurred to me that he was really quite an old man.
He nodded to the carton.
“There it is. All yours.” His voice was oddly listless, as though the fight had gone out of him. “Have a drink?”
“No, thanks.” I sat on the sofa, which was so soft and deep it practically engulfed me.
“That’ll be a big story, won’t it? About Jax.”
“Very big. He was an important man.”
“I guess so. News is relative, though. You ever look at the financial page?”
“I look at it every day. Mr. Nalon, I…”
“If you looked at it,” Nalon went on, unaware I’d even answered “you’d see the story of the whole world there, in agate type. But young guys like you don’t care about such things—all you care about are murders and scandals. There’ll be quite a story on tomorrow’s financial pages, though. With very big headlines, all about my project. How it fell through, and what it’ll mean to me…”
“I don’t give a damn about your troubles. As far as I’m concerned, you earned ’em.”
The promoter’s little eyes grew very alert. “How’d you expect me to play? I spent years and a small fortune trying to get that project off the ground—I had to know what was in your article. Are we off the record?”
“We are.”
“Okay. You got a right to be curious about this. Jax went to you the night of Irene’s murder because I’d seen her picture on television and I wanted information, even the vaguest, about whether or not my name figured in what she had in her envelope. If it did, my position might be much worse than otherwise. Later I told him to learn what you were putting in your article because I didn’t want my name brought back before the public weeks after the murder. I thought negotiations for the project would be at a very delicate stage then…”
“I can understand that. But what you had Jax do to Joanna Reinholt…”
“Who?”
“You must know who she is. The ex-call girl who gave me most of the stuff for my article. My prime source.”
“No, I don’t know, not by name anyhow. Jax never bothered me with details. He came to me once and said your source was an old girlfriend of Irene’s, someone selling real estate now, and did I know who she could be? Vaguely, I recalled helping find a job for a tall brunette. Jax said he’d check that. I said if you do track down his source, take care of her.”
“She was taken care of, all right. Jax hired a pair of hoodlums to rough her up and threaten her with worse if my article appeared.”
“I didn’t know it.” Nalon put his glass down; he seemed sincerely appalled. “Really, I didn’t. A woman beaten—yeah, Jax would be capable of it, but he misunderstood. It was what you guys call a failure of communications. I assumed he’d buy her off, so she wouldn’t talk to you any more. He assumed I wanted him to do something else. Believe me, I’d never order anyone to beat a woman…”
A lot of things occurred to me then, in a rush. Nalon went on talking. He said he was sorry about what had happened to Joanna and was there anything he could do to make up for it, but I hardly heard him.
Finally I said, “Misunderstood?”
“Yeah. Sure you won’t have that drink?”
“Positive.”
Awkwardly, I shoved myself up from the deep sofa, nearly losing my balance.
“You dropped something.”
I turned. Sure enough the gift box that held the little .22, the one Nalon had given Irene, had fallen out of my pocket. I reached down.
For the first time, I looked at the bottom of the box. Stamped there was a tiny legend: BOWSERMANN’S LADY BOUNTIFUL LODGE, STARK, MO.
“What’s in it?”
“A revolver.” I tried to keep my voice steady. “You gave it to Irene once. You give her the box too?”
“No. She was afraid of the gun, and the day I brought it over she rummaged through a lot of old stuff and found a box for it.”
“If you don’t mind,” I said, “I think I’ll just hold onto this…”
* * * *
There was a public
telephone in the lobby of Nalon’s apartment building. I put the carton of stolen papers on the floor and dialed Connie Thurlow’s number.
“Pete? What’s going on over at Metropolis? According to the radio, Herman Jax…”
“Look, there’s no time to explain, but all of a sudden it’s essential that I borrow someone else’s car right away. And it would be even better if I had a girl to go with it.”
“Is this,” she asked cautiously, “one of Farrar’s schemes?”
“No, it’s all mine. If he knew about it he’d have a fit.”
“When and where do you want this car? And the girl?”
“The northwest corner of Nineteenth and State, in about fifteen minutes.”
I hung up and carried the carton of papers outside. At the curb, the taxicab’s rear door swung open. I leaned over, but I didn’t get in. Instead I deposited the carton on Stash’s lap.
“Here. You take it.”
“Aren’t you coming with us?”
“No.”
“But Sam…”
“Sam,” I said, “is your boss, not mine. He hired me on a probationary basis for three weeks. It was probationary both ways. The three weeks are up, and now I’m exercising my option. I’ve just decided I don’t work for Metropolis any more.”
“I cannot allow this. Sam will be furious.”
“That’s too bad. It’s not my fault his handyman was a crook and the manuscript got stolen. When you get to Luigi’s, tell him there’s what’s left of his story—he can do what he likes with that junk. I’m a free agent now and I’m going after another story.”
“About what?”
“Irene’s murder, but from a different angle. Sam can have first crack at the magazine rights, provided he continues to protect my original source’s identity. And tell him he needn’t worry. If I score, I’ll give our man a chance to explain before I lower the boom, but from now on I’m doing everything my way.”
“Where,” Kells asked, “are you going?”
“A fair question. When Sam asks it, just say I’ve gone to consult Lady Bountiful. Let the three great sleuths ponder that for a while.”
The James Michael Ullman Crime Novel Page 35