by Paul Ernst
I swung pinwheel fashion at the end of my arm, and the figure I’d grasped swung, too, like the hub of the wheel. Then the two of us went in a shapeless sprawl to the bottom of the stairs—and I was the one underneath.
Light burst like blue flash bulbs inside my head. Then there was another shot, seeming very far away. And after that—sweet slumber.
Someone was tapping the back of my head with a rubber hose, first light and then heavy. Plink, bang. Plink, bang. I opened my eyes to protest, and saw nothing. I lay there for a while till the plinks began to outnumber the bangs, and till the jarred gray stuff inside my abused skull began to function slightly, over the plink-banging of my pulse beat.
Dark stairs. Dead end above, a coffin below. Still there? I groped around and felt nothing but stone floor. I moaned, feeling too lousy to care that it was hardly a sane thing to do. The darkness remained tranquil. Murder Inc. had run along about his business. I sat up.
Who? And why?
Till now I’d had no time to ask myself these things. It was enough that someone for some reason had declared an open season on insurance adjusters. Now, who was the someone and what was the reason? Why had Annihilation Anonymous set out to erase a perfect stranger just because he happened to find him in the same stairwell with him?
And where the hell had Checckia been all this time? How could he help hearing, in his apartment, the confined roar of those shots?
The back of my neck got that deep-freeze feeling again, with this thought, and I sat up and started on hands and knees for the stairs. My left hand felt something, fingered it numbly for a moment, then recognized it.
A gun. I didn’t have to lift it to my nose, I could smell it from there. Recently fired. Once at my raincoat, once at my head—at such close range that even in pitch blackness it was miraculous that it had missed. The man holding it must have been positive that it had not missed, or he wouldn’t have left; the enthusiasm with which he’d undertaken the job of killing me was not such as to let him walk off knowing that the job had been only two-thirds done.
I tottered downstairs, resting awhile at the third-floor landing. Here, faint light made its way. The ghost of the lobby light, switched on again so the lobby would look normal from the street.
I got to the door of Checckia’s apartment on the second floor, and was not too much surprised to find that it, like the street door, was not locked. Nothing like unlocked, not-quite-closed doors for a fast exit.
I went in, holding the gun I’d picked up on the stair landing. A stubby .32 revolver.
The living room was large, luxurious and empty. I went across it to a swing door and looked into a kitchen-dinette arrangement, and this was empty, too. I went to another door on the same side of the room, opened it, and there was Checckia.
This was the bedroom. It was big, too, with lots of space around double bed, dresser, wardrobe, small desk, chairs, and a drumtop table. And with lots of space around the body that lay between bed and doorway.
Checckia lay there, sprawled partly on his back, looking up at me out of what seemed three eyes, till I got closer and saw that the third eye was a red-rimmed hole almost exactly over the bridge of his nose.
Still foolishly holding the gun at the ready, I went to him and bent down.
The back of his head was not like Rose Rosslyn’s. This one had not been shot with a little, low-powered .22, but with a more grown-up weapon. The back of Checckia’s head was a mess. I wasn’t feeling steady anyhow, and after a glance I had to turn away for a minute to beat back a wave of dizziness.
Checckia dead, and in death explaining everything.
“Come at three,” Checckia had said to me. And to someone else, “Come at two-thirty.” Or maybe a quarter of three. That one, that first visitor, had come with murder in his mind. And me—I’d been so eager and so cocky that I had to come at that time, too; I couldn’t wait for my own appointment hour. So I’d arrived as he was leaving, and had revealed my presence by the inadvertent sound of my wet raincoat.
That sound had come to the hyped-up ears of a man who had just killed. Had he been seen by whoever was in the darkness on the next floor? Take no chances. Kill him, too. Then leave the gun beside him. Maybe he’d be tagged with the murder of Checckia when found on the landing in the morning. Wouldn’t hurt to try; and the gun had to be got rid of anyway.
I looked at the revolver and wondered what I should do about it. The murder gun, marked all over with my prints now. I could wipe it, of course…
I shrugged. Who would that fool? The police would look at me, and at the gun, cleaned suspiciously… Unless I beat it out of here and ditched the gun in a trash can somewhere.
I wanted to do that very thing, but there was too much chance that the waiter at the 50 had heard me make the date with Checckia, or that Checckia had mentioned it to someone else.
I went to a fancy white telephone on Checckia’s drum-top table and dialed Homicide. Then I sat down before I should fall down, and held my head in my hands and tried to piece things together.
Checckia had on pants and shirt, but the shirt was tieless and over his shoulders was a fancy dressing gown. He had undressed enough to get comfortable and then had put on the robe because he didn’t expect to go to bed for a while.
It looked as though he had anticipated no trouble from the caller who came before me. Maybe the caller had smiled when he walked up to Checckia and shot him in the face. But he hadn’t smiled when he let himself out of the apartment to find a possible witness in the stairwell.
I got up after a minute and went back to the living room. A glance showed nothing disarranged, no evidence of a search in here. I did see the middle drawer of a library table pulled out several inches, and this could have been done by the visitor.
I went over and looked in. A mess of stuff—packs of cards, odds and ends, some Club 30 menus. Nothing of significance…
Then I saw the flashlight—just the end of it. I took it out, a two-celled job, dented at the lens end and with part of the glass gone. Dented where it had hit me on the head.
Checckia had been my caller last night. Checckia had been the one after the diamond. He had been in Rose’s dressing room when Ryan’s attention was diverted and Ellen got her chance to get rid of the stone. He’d seen her slip it into my pocket…
The bell rang.
I dragged over to the stair door, and there was a button over a hanging earphone. I pressed it and heard a commotion downstairs and heavy steps coming up. Stengel and another plain-clothes man came in.
“Bedroom,” I said, and they went off there, after glancing curiously at my head.
I sat down again, and I don’t know how much time passed before Stengel came from the bedroom in answer to another ring at the bell. And then Ryan walked in from the stairs with a lot of other guys behind him, and I looked at him and thought of all the grief that had grown from the impulse I’d had not many hours before to follow a girl into a night club.
It was not quite six in the morning. There were sounds in the street below, but you didn’t know whether they were made by people just wakened or people just going home to bed. The hours in a city like New York overlap in weird and wonderful ways; and of course in a place like the Homicide office there are no hours at all.
I sat in Lieutenant Ryan’s little cell and wished I’d never been born. My head, treated ungently by a police surgeon, still throbbed like a smashed thumb, and I was as frayed as a boarding-house carpet from two nights with very little sleep. And Ryan was officially and actively on my neck, which of itself was enough to make one wonder what he’d done in a previous incarnation to deserve a thing like this.
“So you had an appointment with Checckia and got there early. You got there as the killer was coming out, and he jumped you because he was afraid you’d seen him and could testify later.”
I nodded, and wished I hadn’t; it made the headache worse.
“It’s funny,” said Ryan, “how many things could have two sides. Let’s
turn this one around. It could be that you were the one who came out of Checckia’s apartment and found a witness on the stairs. It could be that you jumped him, and he was too much for you—banged you on the head and got away.”
“And didn’t try to call the police or do anything about it later?”
Ryan shrugged. “I’d listen harder to you if the Duysberg diamond hadn’t turned up in the affair. Turned up in your pocket… Why did you go to Checckia’s apartment in the first place?”
“I told you. I thought he’d killed Rose. I still think he may have. And I thought I could shake some answers out of him with the blackmail angle.”
“And you found him dead. After a fancy fight in a dark stairwell outside his apartment.”
“Yes. I told you about it. Three times, I believe.”
“Tell me again.”
Wearily, I did. “And there’s my raincoat with a hole in it, put there when I dropped it and drew the guy’s fire. You saw the mark in the stair wall where he shot at my head and missed—”
“At a two-foot range.” Ryan nodded.
“It was as black in there as a gallon of ink. Have you got a line on the gun yet?”
“We’ve traced it.”
“Whose is it?”
“You wouldn’t know, of course!”
“No.”
“You didn’t pick it out of the drawer of Checckia’s library table when his back was turned.”
“Checckia’s gun? Again?”
“Yeah. A pessimist, our friend Checckia. Kept a gun in his office and another in his apartment. But I suppose a character like that would be apt to be a bit cautious.”
“So you’re buying the blackmail item,” I said. “That’s good. One small part of my story you believe, anyway.”
“I didn’t say I believed it. Go over that again—why you thought it might be blackmail in the first place.”
I’d had more than enough of repeating these things, and more than enough of Lieutenant Ryan. I said, “A little mermaid told me.”
Ryan’s gaze made me think of bare rooms, kitchen chairs, bright lights and persuaders.
“A pretty dame tells a pretty story of a diamond being stolen from her. You okay the claim. Then you go with her to the Club Fifty where, she admits, she wanted to see Rose Rosslyn. She does see her, and Rose turns up dead. Then the diamond comes to light, in your possession. Then you go to see Checckia and he turns up dead. After you’ve admitted that he was blackmailing your little pal, Ellen Keppert—”
“I didn’t say anything about Ellen Keppert!”
“Who the hell else could it have been?” Ryan lit a cigarette. “All right now, go over the mermaid angle.”
I did, holding back only my knowledge of who the woman was who’d been with Dick Rosslyn last June. It was feeble holding, but for what it was worth I left it out.
“Ellen Keppert, of course.”
“If you don’t want trouble, you’d better not shout that around,” I said. “There is no proof. Besides, it has nothing to do with Rose’s death. It wasn’t Rose who was blackmailing. It was Checckia.”
Then a thought struck me that did not in the least increase my love for Ryan.
Four or five times I had gone over my Sea City trip for him, and not once had he raised any hell about my leaving town against his orders. Hadn’t even mentioned it.
I looked at him, sleek and tough, with the brains to be a lieutenant at thirty. “You slick flatfoot!” I said. I don’t know why it exasperated me so, but it was one last straw. “You didn’t have to be so rough about ordering me not to leave town. I’d have investigated at Sea City anyway.”
He looked at me with those flat, expressionless eyes. “Here’s a silly, obstinate jerk, name of Cates,” I went on hotly. “Order him not to leave town to investigate mermaids and Sea City. Then he’ll be sure to go. Save time and expense for Homicide.”
“That bang on the head jolted your brains,” said Ryan.
“Yeah?” I was reduced to saying. I clipped an inch off the end of my tongue in the effort to restrain myself from saying several other things. Then I remembered something.
I’d told Ryan in detail about the fellow looking in my bedroom closet for the coat I’d worn that first night to the 50, and I had given him the fragment of glass from the lens of the flashlight busted over my head.
“That bunged-up flashlight in Checckia’s table drawer,” I said. “Did the piece of lens fit?”
He nodded grudgingly.
“So it looks as if Checckia was the man who tried to burgle my apartment.”
“If so, he must have used a helicopter to get from my grilling at the Fifty to your apartment at that hour,” Ryan growled. But it could be that the flashlight worked in my favor, for finally he said, “This time I want it thoroughly understood. You can sleep at home instead of in a cell, but if you even go off Manhattan Island I’ll throw the office at you.”
I refrained from thanking him for his big-heartedness, and went home to snatch a bit of sleep.
11
I WOKE at one in the afternoon and showered and dressed. I felt my head, which now resembled the last melon in a supermarket after a hard day. The three previous lumps were down pretty well. The new one at the back stuck out fine, but I still had my hair and the stuff tends to stand up anyway, so I could brush it over the foothills. Like Hallwig brushed his over his bare spot. Better not to wear a hat for a while, though.
I made myself a sketchy breakfast and went out, heading north and east toward the Keppert apartment.
It was a beautiful day; last night’s rain had delivered it clear and clean. I stepped out jauntily, with Ellen, like the fresh day, in my mind. Then I slowed down, because the things I had to ask her were going to be embarrassing to her; but today I had to ask them, today I had to have some answers.
I rang the Keppert bell and found I was in luck. Ellen opened the door herself, and it seemed that Marylin was out with Howard Denham, and the Senator had flown back to Washington on urgent business; and as I stood near the apartment doorway with Ellen, Mrs. Keppert came into the living room hatted and gloved and looking like a million, ready to go out too.
Mrs. Keppert glared at me as if I were something just plucked off a gnawed rose leaf, and hesitated.
Ellen smiled and said, “On your way, darling. I can handle Mr. Cates. He’s only dangerous after nine P.M.”
So Mrs. Keppert, still reluctant, went along, and Ellen and I went to the sofa and chairs near the living room fireplace. She looked as fresh and clean and starched as a new dickey, and I hoped fervently that she would sit on the sofa. She didn’t; she took a chair. I sighed and took another.
I knew something about her that no gentleman should know about a lady because it’s no one’s business but the lady’s. I wished I knew how to handle it subtly, but I didn’t; all I could do was just bull along.
I said, “You’ve heard about the new development?”
She nodded. “I certainly have! Checckia. Lieutenant Ryan was here this morning finding out where we’d all been at two to three A.M. Where we’d all been was home in bed.”
“And Ryan pointed out that any one of you might have sneaked out without the others knowing, so if you thought you had alibis you were crazy.”
She nodded again, fresh red lips twisting in a little grimace.
“You have nothing to worry about in the Checckia thing,” I said. “He was killed by a man, and a much younger and huskier one than the Senator. I know. I was there. In spite of Ryan’s growling, the Kepperts, three women and an elderly gentleman, are automatically excluded.”
“You were there?” Ellen said sharply.
I nodded and, not without a measure of self-importance, turned my head to show the Alp back there. She breathed, “Sam,” with a concern in her voice that almost made the lump worthwhile, then colored a little and sat back in her chair.
“But that’s not what I came about,” I went on. “What I came about was your dealings with Checc
kia over the past year. I need some frank answers to some blunt questions.”
“Why?” she asked, almost inaudibly.
“Because you’re not through with your personal trouble. Checckia lost whatever he was blackmailing you with, before he was killed. Maybe the killer got the dope, maybe not. But someone did, and after the fuss has died down the game will start again.”
I saw her shiver, but her voice was steady. “You keep on thinking the blackmail is tied in with the murders, don’t you?”
“Yes. And I think if we can nail the killer there’s a swell chance he has what’s bothering you, and some chance that we can get it before the newspapers do.”
She said, “All right—Sam.”
“The hold Checckia had on you lay in some pictures and a motel registry card. Right?”
“Yes.”
“When did Dick Rosslyn take the pictures?”
“I think it was the second day—Yes, the second day.”
“At the bronze mermaid?”
“Some of them. Some in front of the Crescent Motel.”
“You were there long enough for the pictures to be developed?”
She nodded, looking with painful fixity at a spot over my head. “Dick picked them up at the Sea City drugstore two days before he had the accident. He sent one, of just himself, along with a souvenir mermaid, to his sister Rose.”
“Rose didn’t know he was down there with a girl?”
She shook her head.
“Did Dick give you a set of pictures?”
“He didn’t give anybody any, except the one to Rose. He kept the one set he’d made, and the negatives.”
“They were with his things at the motel?”
“I—think so. I think they were in his suitcase.”
“Now, this is important. Have you any idea who Dick’s things would have been sent to after his death?”
“Why—to Rose, I guess.”