The Bronze Mermaid

by Paul Ernst

  “Calm down, Joe,” said Mrs. Parrino. “Mr. Cates is no sightseer, he’s asking questions for a reason, not just for the fun of it.”

  I thanked her with a nod, and then sighed. So Barkasy had not lied, and his judgment had been accurate. That someone else had heard about Ellen from Dick’s lips was always possible, but, with these character references, it was not probable. I swerved onto the track that had led me here in the first place.

  “Joe—and I’m Sam if you care for it—tell me about the daytime running of the Fifty, will you? What was the usual schedule of the joint?”

  “Joint is right,” said Joe. “That Gar, he wouldn’t buy the best stuff. Just the second-best. ‘You fix it, Joe. You’re good.’ All right, I’m good. And I fixed it. At least you could eat the stuff if you were hungry…

  “Joe,” said Mrs. Parrino.

  “Oh. Yeah—the schedule. Why, the cleaning women and a few in the kitchen got there about nine. The women were through at noon. The kitchen help stayed on, of course, getting stuff ready. You’ve no idea how much preparation—” He looked at his wife, and got back in line again. “I got there about three in the afternoon, and took over. Stayed till about eleven, sometimes later. The place closed according to the house. As late as four on good nights, as early as two on bad ones. Like last night. Gar must have started pressuring ’em out early, to get up to his apartment by half-past two.”

  I winced at this indication that Joe knew all about last night. “Ryan?”

  Joe nodded. “Here earlier this afternoon. I’d rather go through an ice crusher.”

  Ryan, Ryan, Ryan! If the expression “on the ball” had not already been invented it would have to be now. For Ryan. And what did I think I could dig up that he couldn’t? Oh, well, even a Ryan might miss some little thing…

  I said, “So the service and kitchen entrance was open all day. The club entrance?”

  “Closed. And locked.”

  “Nobody there but kitchen help and cleaning women till late afternoon?”

  “Dodge Duffy and the boys were there often, rehearsing a new number.”

  “How’s your husband’s memory?” I asked Mrs. Joe.

  She beamed at her man. “Remembers everything. Except, once in a while, an anniversary.”

  “I’d spank you,” Joe growled at her, “but the way you’re built it wouldn’t do any good.”

  “You want a skinny wife? And you a cook?”

  “Cook? Cook! I’m a chef. My God, woman, I send mere cooks around on errands—” He turned to me. “Pay no attention to her. What do you want remembered?”

  “A year ago,” I said, “Dick Rosslyn had his accident in New Jersey. His things were sent to the Fifty, probably within the week after his death. If they were delivered any time up till late afternoon they’d have had to be received at the service entrance. Would you happen to remember any such receipt?”

  Joe nodded, and the little prickle inside me blossomed to a tingle of excitement.

  “I remember, all right. Rose had gone down to get him, poor kid, and she’d brought back what she thought was all his stuff. But some place she didn’t know about was another suitcase with clothes and all.” (That would be the Crescent Motel.) “The suitcase came, I think, three days later. Express collect. So I was called to the door. I paid the charges.”

  “And then?” I said, trying to keep calm about it. “Who did you give it to? What happened to it?”

  Mrs. Parrino was looking at me thoughtfully. She said, “Ryan didn’t ask these questions, did he, Joe?”

  Joe shook his head. “Maybe Sam’s onto something the old pro’s missed. Though damned if I can guess what it could be.”

  “The suitcase,” I reminded him. “Where’d you take it?”

  “I didn’t take it any place. I was busy, so I turned it over to a helper to deliver.”

  “Deliver to whom?”

  “Why, to Rose Rosslyn. She was the guy’s sister, after all. He took it back and left it in Rose’s dressing room.”

  “You’re sure of that?” I asked, with the tingle dying.

  “I told him to.” Joe shrugged. “He said he did. Want to talk to him yourself? Maria, see if Amado’s in.”

  Mrs. Parrino got up, lithe for all her weight, and went to the door. I continued with Joe. “What happened then?”

  “Nothing,” Joe replied. “Gar came in a little later, and I told him about the suitcase and got the express charges back from him. He went out, and I got to work.”

  So I had a nice idea—and it had slowly sunk right back into the slough from which I’d started in the first place. Unless someone was trifling with the truth.

  “You can believe what this Amado says?” I asked Joe.

  “I’d better be able to!” He grinned. “Amado’s my nephew. Lives on the floor below. He’s no cook, just took a summer job with me last year, but he’s a good kid, anyway.”

  Mrs. Parrino came back in, with a young fellow behind her, and at the first look I was inclined to agree with Joe that his nephew was a good kid and a believable one. He was seventeen, maybe, cheerful, with lively dark eyes and nice husky shoulders. A worker.

  “Amado, this is Mr. Cates,” Mrs. Parrino said. “He wants to ask you some questions about last year.”

  “Oke, Mr. Cates,” Amado said. “Shoot.”

  “You were with Joe last year in the Club Fifty kitchen?” I asked.

  He nodded. “For a few weeks. Till I could get something more in my line. I’m going to be an engineer,” he announced proudly.

  I thought he’d be a good one. “While you were there, did Joe ever give you a package or suitcase to take back to the dressing rooms?”

  Amado thought a minute, and I could see it was no act. Mrs. Parrino had been a good scout and not tipped him off to what I was going to ask.

  “A suitcase,” he said. “It came express. Yeah, I took it back.”

  “Where did you take it to, Amado? And don’t make any mistake about it!”

  “To Miss Rosslyn’s dressing room, Mr. Cates. That’s where Uncle Joe told me to take it.”

  “She was in?”

  “No. A lot of others were there that day, but not Miss Rosslyn. So I just opened her door, set the suitcase inside, and got back to the kitchen.”

  That was all. That answered everything I’d come here for. I thanked the Parrinos, and I thanked Amado, and I got along. This time when I hailed a cab there was no haste in my manner. I got in and sank glumly down in the seat.

  So Amado had put Dick’s suitcase in Rose’s dressing room. Joe, by asking for the express charges he had paid, had incidentally informed Checckia of the presence of the suitcase. Checckia had gone back to her dressing room, riffled through the suitcase to see what he could see, and thus had got hold of the pictures he’d later held over Ellen.

  It was all exactly as I’d doped it out to start with; it told me nothing that I hadn’t known before. At least it seemed that way at the time; knowledge, like fruit, I guess, has to ripen before it’s of any use.

  I paid off the cab at my address on Madison, and a car door opened and a man got out and stalked toward me. I came out of my abstraction to see that the car was a police car and the man was Stengel.

  “Ryan wants to see you,” Stengel said. “In.” He held the car door for me.

  I had expected to be taken to Homicide, to Ryan’s office, but instead we went west and a little south and wound up in front of the hotel I’d visited not long before. Barkasy’s hotel. We went in, with Stengel giving me about as much information as there is fresh water in Salt Lake, and we went up in an elevator to a room. Barkasy’s room.

  Ryan was there, standing in front of the window, writing in his dime-store notebook; but I had no eyes for him, what with the state the room was in.

  It looked like a schoolroom that had been worked over by a couple of particularly vicious juvenile delinquents. Pictures off the walls. Bureau drawers emptied and the stuff strewn all around. Clothes from the closet
all over the floor. Bedding off the bedstead. Carpet pulled back. Drapes off their rods.

  But the worst was Barkasy’s bull fiddle, lying near the window with a topcoat and a couple of the rumpled shirts tossed at random over its neck. It had been taken from its vast case by someone who had first ripped the lining out of the case and then deliberately put a foot through the back of the fiddle. Made you kind of sick to see the gaping hole splintered in that lovely, fragile wood.

  Ryan added another line to his notes, then closed the little book and put it in his pocket. He nodded toward a chair that was turned upside down to reveal its ripped bottom. I righted the chair and sat on it, and Ryan sat on the bed. Stengel stayed outside in the hall.

  “What happened here?” I said, goggling.

  “What would you think?” said Ryan quietly.

  It had been a silly question. It was obvious what had happened here. Someone had searched for something. Someone had searched like hell for something!

  “Where’s Barkasy?” I asked.

  “Getting his head sewed up. He opened his door while whoever did this was still in the room. Got a knock that would have killed him except that it didn’t hit quite square.”

  “Did he—?”

  “Never knew what hit him. Or who. He came out of it enough to phone the manager, who called a cop. The cop remembered that Barkasy was tied in somehow with the Rosslyn case, and he had sense enough to call me. Bright boy. I’ll remember him.”

  “Well, I’m in the clear this time,” I said. “I was here a little earlier—I suppose that’s why you had me brought here. But I can prove where I was both before and after talking with Barkasy.”

  “Is anybody accusing you of anything?” said Ryan coldly.

  “If not it’ll be for the first time in this silly case. Was this done while Barkasy was down in the bar with me and Hallwig?”

  “He doesn’t know. He says the room was okay when he left to go downstairs and meet Hallwig. He says he was with Hallwig for a half-hour or so at the bar and then you came in. He says he put Hallwig in a cab and came back to the lobby, and met Dodge Duffy there. He says he intended to go up to his room with Duffy, but Duffy suggested the bar and they went back in there. For another half-hour, about. Then he came upstairs, got his door partly open, and was clubbed.”

  “So it could have been Dodge Duffy, while Barkasy was with Hallwig and me. Or it could have been Hallwig while Barkasy was with Duffy.”

  “Barkasy says Hallwig was so drunk he could hardly stand.”

  “It could have been an act.”

  I looked around, and the tingle of excitement began forming again. A search. A wild and heedless one conducted with frantic haste. A search—for what?

  I looked at Ryan and found he had been watching me.

  “Pictures,” I said, “and a motel registration card.”

  Ryan just stared at me, eyes as expressive as a couple of nickels lying on a snowy sidewalk.

  “Somebody thought Barkasy had them,” I said. “Somebody, in fact, was positive of it.” I looked around the wrecked room. “Did he have them, do you suppose? Is he our third party?”

  “I didn’t draw diagrams for him,” Ryan said. “I didn’t say what we thought someone might be looking for. I just asked him what he thought he might have that somebody would want this badly. He says he can’t think of anything.”

  “What else could the bastard say?”

  Ryan shrugged. “Nothing, without admitting he knew what we were talking about. What did you mean, ‘third party’?”

  “Oh, that’s the angle I’ve been working on. The blackmail end of it.” I outlined it then, not knowing whether I needed to; I was well aware by now of Ryan’s habit of listening intently to a thing he already knew all about.

  Some outsider, some third party, learning of the blackmail and long planning to chisel in on it. Taking the pictures and card from Rose, and murdering her in the process. Suspected by Checckia, and killing him to protect himself. Who was the third party, and how had he found out?

  Now it looked as if Barkasy might have been this third party, hiding the pictures in his room against the day when it would be safe for him to start bleeding Ellen for money as Checckia had bled her.

  But if this were so, then still another had somehow found out and tried to get the stuff from him. A fourth party mixing in? I hoped not. I didn’t think I could stand it. I’m too old for that kind of endurance contest.

  “That’s fine,” said Ryan, when I told him what I’d done in following my third-party theory. “Particularly when I seem to remember telling you to haul your nose out of this and keep out.”

  “Did you put in any time on that line?” I retorted. “I think you didn’t. And if you didn’t, wouldn’t any time I spent he of some help?”

  I’d stuck my neck out with this one. Ryan promptly stepped on it. “Help? Like how? You found out that Rosslyn’s suitcase was left in his sister’s empty dressing room where anyone could have had a chance to go through it. That tells us a lot that we didn’t know before, doesn’t it?”

  “Well,” I mumbled, “it might have dredged something up…”

  Ryan lit a cigarette. “Cop’s work. I may be prejudiced, but I like it to be done by cops. Now, what I got you here for—You were with Barkasy and Hallwig at the bar for about a half-hour before Barkasy came up here and got clipped. Did Barkasy act uneasy? Or in any way that might strike you as furtive?”

  “No,” I said. “He was as cool as a dowager’s handshake.”

  “Did he talk about Rosslyn or Checckia?”

  “Sure, when I prodded him.”

  “He didn’t act as if he was in a hurry to get back up to his room?”

  “No.”

  “Hallwig—you say he was tight?”

  “Tighter’n a kid’s balloon,” I said. “At least he seemed to be. He could have been putting it on, I suppose. He could have let Barkasy put him into a cab, and then have got out around the corner and come back and up to the room here.”

  “Barkasy said he told him he was going up to his room with Duffy when Duffy came.”

  “Well, yes, he did.”

  “Then wouldn’t Hallwig put off any searching of Barkasy’s room that he might have had in mind?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe he came back anyway, saw Duffy with Barkasy at the bar after all, and went up.”

  “What did Hallwig talk about while you were with them?”

  “Mostly Duffy. He does not love Duffy. He said—let’s see—something like, ‘Dodge’s goin’ to Checckia’s ’n see about his contract.’” I tried to slur the syllables as the trumpet player had. “‘But if Gar renews, he’s shilly.’ No—‘shtupid.’”

  “Then?”

  “Then he started crooning, ‘Come on-a my house, my house, my house,’ and Barkasy took him out to the cab stand. And after another minute I left the place myself.”

  “Skittering around on your third-party notion,” Ryan said sarcastically.

  “It’s still a good theory.” I could be as stubborn as Ryan. “And speaking of it—Howard Denham would be way up there on the list. Him and his ten thousand! You’ve had a chance to do some bookkeeping by now. Did the ten grand come from Checckia’s safe?”

  “We didn’t have to do any bookkeeping for that one. The bank told us. The money came out of Howard Denham’s bank account, just as he said it did.”

  My lower lip fell down about knee-high. “His own dough? But he couldn’t—Where does that fit in?”

  “I don’t know. I think I’m getting an idea on it, but I don’t know. You’re sure you don’t?”

  “Every idea I’ve had on it has been knocked out now,” I assured him with feeling. “His own money! That’s crazy.”

  Ryan seemed to be through with me, so I left, I think I went along talking to myself, with people staring after me on the street, but I’m not sure. I felt like doing it.

  13

  THE Ventura was like the Club 50 only in that it
too was a New York night spot. Aside from that they were as different as two places can well be. The Ventura is east of Fifth instead of west, for one thing. For another, you have slightly less chance of getting in off the street as a stranger than you have of muscling through the pearly gates without recommendation. For still another, there is no crummy floor show; just music, and that of the best, televised for a half-hour each evening and picked up by a radio network afterward from eleven until midnight.

  I might or might not have been able to get into the joint, but Ellen was familiar and welcome; she had been here often with her and Marylin’s crowd. The headwaiter looked doubtfully at me, smiling at her, and unclipped one end of the velvet rope.

  The place was full but not packed; the Ventura doesn’t harass its customers with the hopeless overcrowding so often encountered in these cages. When we came in the orchestra was playing and there was dancing, and I could see that a couple would have the space of a half-dollar instead of that of a dime to dance on. Real roomy. We got a good table and sat down, and I stared across at Ellen.

  She looked like a million bucks before Uncle Sam gets his hooks in it. She wasn’t quite as vivid as when I’d first seen her the other night; she had been through a lot and she still was confronted by her major worry—those pictures. But there was fair color in her face, and the face itself was very close to beautiful, and the short upper lip was working its usual hypnotic tricks with me. I wondered if I were alone in being so fascinated by the upper lip. I hoped so; I didn’t want to spend all my spare time fighting other guys equally entranced.

  “Is my mouth on crooked?” she demanded, color mounting a little.

  “Nope,” I said, watching it. “Why?”

  “You’re staring so.”

  “Just thinking that orange juice and vitamins are a wonderful thing,” I told her. “What were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking about those news items.”