by Paul Ernst
Ryan shrugged a little. The snapshot and bronze mermaid would seem to have nothing to do with Rose. Ryan changed line again. Back to Checckia’s safe.
“You kept quite a little money in your safe?” he asked.
“A fair amount,” the manager answered. “Nothing colossal, but enough. I wouldn’t want to lose it.”
“You haven’t checked to see if any is gone?”
“How could I?” snapped Checckia. “I haven’t been allowed in my own office since you cops came.”
“We’d better go now, and have a look,” said Ryan. “You see—” his stare was almost idle in surface appearance—“Howard Denham has admitted being in your office at least once—when he said he talked to you—and he now turns up with ten thousand dollars in cash on him.”
Given this permission to have a look, Checckia legged it toward the door. Ryan went with him; I trailed after the two.
Checckia wasted no time getting down the corridor, and he crossed his office in three jumps and swung back the safe door. There was a small, flat metal box on the top shelf, and he jerked this open. It was empty; I managed to see that. He put it back and went on through the shelves and then opened a middle compartment. In there I saw the ends of several bundles of money, and Checckia looked these over.
He turned back toward us, and his nostrils were pinched in a little. “Nothing gone,” he said, with a queer metallic note in his voice.
“Nothing?” said Ryan.
“Not a cent missing. So I guess nobody looked in the safe while it was unlocked.”
“Then the cash Denham was carrying had nothing to do with you?”
“Not a thing,” said Checckia, wiping his forehead. “Not a thing. The money’s all there. Everything.”
Ryan nodded and looked at the pale smoke from his cigarette. I wonder why he hadn’t said anything about the hints we had uncovered of the murder’s having been committed in here. For if Rose had been shot in this man’s office and then carried back to her room, there was enough circumstantial evidence against Checckia to warrant an arrest.
The only reasons I could think of for holding off were: A) Ryan thought he’d wait on Checckia till he’d found the murder gun and/or slug, and B) if he pinched Checckia it would in a measure let Denham and Ellen off the hook, and he didn’t want them off yet.
Ryan said easily, “You haven’t yet thought of anything happening in here that might have made you forget to spin the knob on the safe after you closed it at nine-thirty?”
“No,” said Checckia. “Nothing happened that I can remember.”
“Nobody came in at about that time?”
“People are always coming in. At that particular time—” Checckia pinched at his jaws—“I think Parrino, my chef, came in. And Duffy, the orchestra leader… No, that was quite a little later.” He shook his head. “I can’t remember. But I do know that none of them said or did anything that would have made me forget to lock the safe.”
“Okay,” said Ryan. “I guess that’s it, for a while.” He turned to me. “Will you ask Miss Keppert to come back to Rose’s dressing room for a minute? Alone.”
I left the office and went along the dimly lit corridor to the supper room. Ask Miss Keppert to come back—alone. That, translated, meant—without Sam Cates of the Home Protection Company trailing along. Ryan was through with the act.
Ellen was at the table we had occupied before all this whoopdedoo began. She was sitting there with her elbows on the table and her hands balled together and her forehead on her hands. Her eyes were closed and she was still without any color. She had certainly fallen into a mess of trouble when she came to the 50 tonight.
I put my hand on her shoulder, and she started. I hadn’t selected the best possible way of reassuring her at such a moment, putting a hand on her shoulder.
“You’re not under arrest,” I said hastily. “Ryan wants to see you back there again, but I don’t think he has the cuffs out for you.”
Ellen formed a smile, and even in this strain, with the lid blown off her nice, cozy world, she was a safe distance from hysterics and looked as unrumpled and clean as a fresh linen sheet. An awfully scared kid, though.
“What does he want to see me about?”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said, “but taking a long and hazardous guess, I would say that it might just possibly be about the Rose Rosslyn job.”
The words, out plain in the glaring light, proved to be thoroughly unfunny, but she smiled again as if to express her appreciation for the effort, and then she faced the curtained doorway as if it were a firing squad and went back to be interviewed a second time by Lieutenant Ryan.
The supper room was an empty barn now, with the orchestra sitting around at scattered tables and biting their nails, and with Denham alone at another table, and Siltz, looking anxious and ulcerous, at still another. Bohr was gone; Ryan had let him out to attend to his column, it appeared.
The bass fiddle player, Barkasy, was still at the table by the door where he had looked over the miscellaneous customers on their way out, and I went over to have a word with him. I didn’t know if Ryan would approve of this, but Ryan wasn’t around to say anything.
Barkasy looked at me with apprehension on his full-moon face, and I grinned. “I’m no policeman, chum,” my expression was supposed to say. “I’m in this just as deep as anybody. Just thought I’d chew the fat a minute with you. See?”
Apparently he saw. At any rate he didn’t look any more gloomy when I sat down than he had before.
I sighed and shook my head. “I’d wish I’d gone anywhere else in New York tonight,” I said. “This is a fine thing to fall into.”
“You think it’s fine,” Barkasy complained. “I work here. And I’m right in the middle just because I happen to sit next to that damned door. So how do you think I feel?”
I reached into my right-hand coat pocket, where I keep my cigarettes, and offered him one. He refused it, and said, “Anyhow, you’re a sort of cop yourself, I gather. So you’re all right.”
“I work for an insurance company,” I said. “As far as Ryan is concerned I’m no more cop than you are. And he’s got the axe over my neck along with all of those who happened to go down that corridor after Mansfield began what we shall refer to as singing.”
The bull fiddler faintly grinned. “He’s sure a canary, isn’t he?” Then gloom descended once again. “That Ryan! I can tell the way he looks he thinks I’m lying to him.”
“Oh, I don’t know. He took your word for who went back to the dressing rooms and who didn’t.”
Barkasy shrugged plump shoulders. “Maybe.”
“You didn’t forget any, did you?” I asked, trying to sound like a fellow conspirator.
He shot me an irritated look. “I could forget which of the gang working here went back, because they’re in and out all the time. But what outsiders went back? No! Not many of them do go in. So I can be sure of that.”
“Siltz, Bohr, Denham, and Ellen Keppert,” I nodded. “I’m glad you didn’t put the finger on me, too.”
“You mean you went back there?” the man said, mouth open. Then it snapped shut. “No. You didn’t. Not during the time Ryan’s interested in, anyway. You’re just trying to trip me up. You’re in with Ryan.”
“Oh, no, I’m not. And I didn’t try to trip you up. No, I didn’t go back, but I was with a girl who did, and you could have got absent-minded and thought I went with her. So I’m glad your memory is so good.”
Barkasy grunted something unintelligible to that, and continued to look suspicious. I said, “That girl, Miss Keppert, is in a jam tonight, and I’m going to help her if I can. Whether Ryan approves or not. So I’ve been keeping my eyes and ears open—and so I’m talking to you.”
Fellow conspirators again. See? But Barkasy looked so skeptical that I couldn’t think it was going over.
“Now, you must have noticed when customers came back out the door, as well as when they went in,” I continued. “Can you re
member how long Miss Keppert was back there?”
“Not long,” said Barkasy. “A lot less than a minute. She went in and came right out again. Like that.” He snapped his fingers.
“You don’t know what she did back there?”
“Why, no. How would I know that?”
“You might have just happened to glance back—”
“Through the curtain?” he snorted. “The thing fits from one side of the door to the other. Tight. So the clients can’t see back into the dressing rooms corridor. You can’t look back there without moving it, and my hands were busy.”
“And you didn’t hear a shot?”
“As I said to Ryan and about six other guys, no. I didn’t hear anything back there. If I had, I’d have said something about it.”
Dodge Duffy, the orchestra leader, had been watching me and Barkasy talking. He got up now and came over and joined us, wavy hair glinting where the lights hit it.
“Have you fellows come up with any answers to this?” he asked me.
“It is not ‘you fellows,’” I said patiently. “I’m not with the police. I’m an insurance man, an outsider as much any of you.”
“All right, ‘outsider,’” Duffy retorted sarcastically. “Has anybody come up with anything?”
“Not as far as I know,” I told him. “One of your girls, Rose Rosslyn, was shot and killed back there, and so far that’s the only fact anyone can be certain of.”
“Well, I’m glad I was out front when it happened, that’s call I can say.”
At this, Barkasy gazed off into the distance, and I looked quickly at him. So did the orchestra leader.
“Lucky thing Barkasy’s in a position to swear that I was out front all that time,” said Duffy. “You can, of course—Barkasy?”
The bull fiddler glanced at Duffy and then down at the table, and I got the hunch that all was not well between the musician and the orchestra leader. Did Duffy push his men around a little? And in particular the round-faced doghouse plunker? Could be, I decided. And could be that now Barkasy was getting back a bit of his own.
“I don’t know if I could swear to it, Dodge,” he said mildly. “I’ve told Mr.—” he looked at me—“that I could swear to any outsiders going backstage, but that the gang working here are in and out so much I might forget about that.”
Duffy was not amused. He glared at the too solemn moon face. “Of course, you’re right,” he said. “Come to think of it, I don’t know that I could swear that someone of the orchestra hadn’t gone back there at the wrong time.”
This brought up something that I’d been wondering increasingly about for the last hour.
“Where do you fellows go when you’re not playing?” I asked Duffy. “You don’t sit on that dais all the time.”
The orchestra leader nodded toward the end of the room past the doors to the men’s and ladies’ rooms. “Down there. Next to the kitchen. We have a room about the size of a mop closet. But we weren’t in it when Rose stopped a bullet. We were all on tap, though we weren’t all playing, for Mansfield’s number and the cancan. After that we’d have swung into some dance tunes.”
I nodded, and tried to look wiser than I felt—which was easy—and Ryan and Ellen Keppert came from the curtained doorway. Ryan jerked his head to me, and then to Denham and Siltz. We got up from our several places and went over to him and Ellen.
He said to the four of us, “You can run along home, or wherever you want to go. As long as you don’t try to leave New York.”
The gloom lightened a little in Howard Denham’s good-looking face, and I heard Ellen’s sigh of relief. They were feeling too relieved too quickly; Ryan wasn’t through with them by any manner of means. But I saw no reason for throwing a chill into their budding hopes. I said to Ellen, “Want me to see you home?” and she nodded, and we went to the checkroom to get my skimmer.
5
WE WENT out of the Club 50 into the same June night, in the same city, but night and city didn’t seem the same after all that had happened in the space of the last few hours. The night seemed darker and colder, and the city a strange and unfriendly place of shadows and trailing footsteps. Real footsteps? Or imagination? I didn’t know. I didn’t think Ryan would have put a tail on us, but it could be.
I started to hail a cab and Ellen stopped me. “Let’s walk,” she said. “I’d like to get my mind straight before I see my cousin, Marylin.”
It was quite a distance both figuratively and literally from the 50 to Park Avenue, but it suited me fine. We swung east through streets hardly less populated now at one A.M. than they were at one in the afternoon. Ellen’s hand was on my arm, and I was quite conscious of that, and of the way she looked in her trim summer suit, and of the soft, appealing appearance her short upper lip lent to the rest of her mouth.
“Don’t answer if you don’t want to,” I said, “but what did Ryan grill you about that second time he talked to you?”
Ellen looked as if she might not answer, at that, but then she did. “He asked me about the man in the snapshot. Dick, Rose Rosslyn’s brother. And about the mermaid.” She breathed sharply. “I wish I’d never said anything about the silly mermaid. It meant nothing anyway.”
“And did you know Dick Rosslyn?” I asked.
She bit her lip and glanced quickly up at me and then ahead along the sidewalk. “Yes, I knew him.”
“Well?”
“No. I met him and Rose at a friend’s house, and saw them a little after that. Rose more than Dick. I had an idea for a while of trying to sing professionally, and that was a kind of bond between us. They talked me out of it,” she added, “after they heard me try!”
“So you knew Rose at least fairly well, and you came to see her tonight about the mermaid. What has the mermaid to do with anything?”
“You sound like Lieutenant Ryan,” said Ellen. “All I can tell you is what I told him. The mermaid has nothing to do with anything.”
“Then why see her about it?”
She didn’t want to say anything more; I could see that. But I had helped her tonight—she did not yet know precisely how—and I suppose she didn’t want to seem ungrateful.
“I have a picture of her, and I wanted one of Dick. She said she had this snapshot she would give me if I’d drop in at the club for it.”
“And the mermaid?”
“I wanted that, too, if she didn’t mind. A silly thing… When I sang for them, to get their advice as to whether to go on with it, Dick laughed and handed me this mermaid that was on the mantel of their apartment. As a sort of Oscar in reverse—I’m pretty terrible, I guess. So when I phoned Rose earlier today and asked for a picture of Dick, I also asked if I could have the mermaid. She said yes, she’d bring both to the club this evening. And I went there to get them. That’s all.”
I held her hand close beneath my arm as we came to the Fifth Avenue intersection, and I thought how I would like to have that hand there quite a lot, and how it would be nice someday if she’d say something that I could believe. For this certainly did not sound believable.
She knew the Rosslyns only fairly well, Rose more than Dick, yet she wanted a picture of Dick as a memento.
And she wanted the mermaid only because it represented a wryly comic little episode in the Rosslyns’ apartment.
And she had come to the Club 50, looking uncommonly agitated, just for these meaningless trifles, instead of going more conveniently to Rose’s rooms for them during the day.
I said, “Did Ryan like that story?”
“No,” admitted Ellen. “I expect he was looking for something to tie the mermaid in with Rose’s—with what happened to Rose. I guess he was skeptical. And I guess you are.”
The traffic light changed to green, moving us forward across Fifth and saving me from an attempt at a reply.
Ellen said, “I guess I’m really in a jam. But I got the feeling that I was in a worse one before you asked Lieutenant Ryan to step outside the dressing room with you. When he came
back, he didn’t act quite so tough with me. What did you say to him?”
I thought over an answer to that. Should I tell her? I didn’t think so. For whatever reasons, Ryan had taken me a short way into his confidence tonight, and I didn’t think that I should violate it. Also, though everything in me turned over at the mere thought, this charming thing beside me might actually have crooked the finger that sent a slug through the pretty dancer’s brain. Fine thing if this were true—and I armed her with knowledge that she could use unscrupulously.
“I didn’t see him about you,” I lied. “I wanted to show him something else I’d found. It did happen to tie in with you a little.”
“So you’re not talking.” Ellen nodded. “All right. I can not-talk too.”
“You already have,” I said bitterly. “And you’ll find it is the biggest mistake of your life. You ought to tell Ryan everything you know about Rose and the snapshot and the mermaid and, just possibly, about diamonds…”
“Isn’t it a beautiful night?” said Ellen, looking dreamily toward a sliver of sky showing between two tall buildings.
With great effort I kept from shaking her.
It was half-past one when we got to the entrance of the building in which the Kepperts lived. A little late to try for more time with Ellen; the correct procedure would be to leave her at her door, murmur polite good nights, and scram. Not only the correct procedure, but, it would appear, the only possible procedure at that hour.
However, when a man is with a girl who pumps the adrenalin into his veins as Ellen was pumping it into mine, he becomes inventive. I waited on the faint hope that she would ask me upstairs for another minute, and then, when she didn’t, took her arm and went through the building lobby toward the elevators as if I owned the place.
She pulled her arm free and frowned up at me. “I’d better see you right to your apartment door,” I said. “After all, it was only a month ago that two armed men found their way up there and bound and gagged you while they robbed the place.”