I said that I would. He motioned to Cleve, who went out swinging his hips.
“Jerry was dependable,” D’Allemand continued, “and we got along very well together. He was handsome and had all the social graces, and he was very popular with the ladies. Then one night this Sandmark girl came, unescorted, into my place on Rush Street—the Peacock Club.”
“Sure,” I said. “Where we had our first interview.”
“Yes. Well, Jerry became acquainted with Miss Sandmark. She was fond of gambling and she usually put down more than she picked up. Quite a bit more. Jerry was always with her, and they were at one or another of my places several nights a week.
“It went on that way until perhaps a month ago. Then they stopped coming in so often. When it got to the point where it was two weeks between visits, I began to wonder a bit.”
Cleve came in with two highball glasses, pulled a large copper ash stand, made to resemble a ship’s binnacle, over where we could reach it, and set the glasses on the edge. D’Allemand ignored his, but I took some of mine. It was all right.
D’Allemand went on: “Jerry was always one to be close-mouthed. But he had a very good friend. I called in this friend and put down some money and asked him a few questions. I did not get a great deal in the way of answers. The friend said Jerry had dropped a hint or two that he was on the edge of something important; that he knew where the body was buried, and when it was dug up there would be a million dollars with his name on it in the coffin. At times Jerry was given to rather grandiose talk.”
“It would seem so,” I said.
He picked up his glass, glanced at it absent-mindedly and put it down again without tasting the contents. I punched out my cigarette in the ash stand, lighted one of my own and glanced at the dial of my wrist watch. Two-twenty-three. All the grocery clerks and necktie salesmen were home in bed. But I had to be a private detective.
“I became curious about all that, Mr. Pine,” D’Allemand continued. “So I had one of my boys follow Jerry around. It turned out to be pretty much a waste of time. Jerry saw the girl almost every night. Sometimes they would go out to the nice places, at times they would just drive around in her car, on occasions they were content to stay in her apartment. He stayed over for breakfast now and then, but that was his business . . . and hers.”
I thought of twin depressions in a rose bedspread, but I didn’t say anything. It did seem a little strange to me, though, that right then I was content to know that Jerry Marlin was dead. . . .
D’Allemand closed one of his huge hands around his glass and this time he drank some of the highball. He set it down and licked his lips and drilled me with those deep-set eyes. “All this leads up to one important point, Mr. Pine. One of my boys was following Jerry the morning he was shot.”
I said, “What am I supposed to do—jump out of my skin?”
He made a noise deep in his throat but his expression did not change. “Let me tell you about it, Mr. Pine,” he said. “My boy was a trifle careless that morning. He had watched Jerry and the girl all evening, and when he saw they were on their way to her apartment, he let down a bit. He stopped in at a tavern for some cigarettes and a beer, then drove on over to the Austin address to make sure Jerry and Miss Sandmark were through for the day.
“He saw a body on the walk and recognized it as Jerry’s. He parked at the opposite curbing and ran over in the rain and made sure. Just as he returned to his own car, you came out of the building, Mr. Pine. Your unconcern at seeing the body was enough. My boy followed you to your hotel, got your name from the night clerk and telephoned me.”
He tested the point of the penknife blade with a careful forefinger and let out his breath with a little whistling sigh. “Now I think you had better do some talking, Mr. Pine. I’m afraid I can’t take no for an answer.”
“Some of it I can give you,” I said; “some of it I can’t. The first thing you can make book on is that I didn’t plug your gigolo. I have a client—you’d better change that to ‘had’—who was interested in Marlin. Don’t ask me his name, because he didn’t have anything to do with the killing, and I wouldn’t give it to you anyway. I was parked in front of the apartment house when the shooting came off.”
I gave him the rest of it, holding back only my reason for being interested in Marlin. He listened without interrupting, concentrating all the while on his nail-cleaning job.
After I finished, he sat there without moving and thought it over. Presently he looked up at me and said, “You didn’t get much of a look at the killer?”
“No.”
“How do you know it wasn’t your client?”
“Reason, mostly. What the books call deduction. He isn’t the kind who would make a good torpedo. There were three holes in Marlin’s back—holes so close together you could cover them with a milk-bottle top. It takes experience to shoot that good, D’Allemand. A professional killed your boy. That’s my guess.”
“Maybe he was working for your client.”
“Then there wouldn’t have been any point in hiring me.”
He nodded slowly. “Very well. . . . I might not take your word so easily, Mr. Pine, except that I asked a friend of mine at police headquarters about you. As nearly as I can recall his exact words, he said Pine was a flip-lipped bastard who should have had his ears pinned back long ago.” He raised his thin brows at me and smiled like a department-store president who had forgiven an assistant buyer. “He went on to say you were reasonably honest and would fight harder for a client than for yourself. He mentioned that you are about half as smart as you like to think, and less than ten percent as tough.”
I said, “You ought to see me when my hair is marcelled.”
He took another pull at his glass, draining it this time, and placed it carefully on the binnacle. He patted his lips with a ten-dollar white handkerchief from the breast pocket of his dark blue coat, tucked it away and leaned back and toyed with the penknife while he said:
“You owe me something, Mr. Pine. But for my interest in you, you would be wearing your brains on your coat collar.”
I put a hand gingerly to the back of my head. “Your boys came pretty near putting them there tonight.”
“I’ll get to that part of it in a moment. You see, because I considered the possibility that you may have been responsible for Jerry’s death, I had the boys follow you when you left your office shortly after five yesterday afternoon. They followed you home; and when you left your car around the corner from the hotel, they concluded you might be going out again later, so they stayed on the job, after telephoning me for instructions.”
“Shortly before midnight, you came out, carrying the same brown-paper parcel you had taken home from the office. They trailed after you until your driving indicated you were becoming suspicious; then they drove past you at Harlem Avenue and turned off at the next intersection and stopped, planning to follow you again when you went by.”
“You ought to have the fender on that blue LaSalle fixed,” I said.
“Yes.” He ducked his head about a quarter-inch in tribute to my perspicacity or something. “As it was, they drove back, surmising you might have turned off at the roadway flanking the cemetery rear. It seemed the only place you could have turned off.”
“They parked the car and Cleve, here, went in on foot. He is a native of northern Michigan and is accustomed to moving around among bushes and trees without making a great deal of noise.”
“I’ll back him up on that,” I said. “I didn’t know anybody was within miles of me until half a second before he wrapped that sap around my ears.”
He ran his thumb lightly along the blade of the penknife. “No, Mr. Pine. Cleve was not the one who struck you.”
“Then who the hell did?”
“I do not know, sir. According to Cleve he arrived on the scene just as a man stepped from behind a bush and struck you down with a blackjack. It was evident that he meant to continue striking you until you were dead. Cleve, believing I
would not want that to happen, considering my interest in you, shouted at the man, who immediately turned and ran away. Ownie, hearing the shout, came in; and between the two of them they got you into your car, and Cleve drove you here.”
“Make no mistake about it, Mr. Pine. But for Cleve’s intervention, you would be quite dead at this moment.”
“Seems as if,” I said. I thought about it for a moment. “What did this guy with the sap look like?”
“It was much too dark to tell, Cleve tells me. Fairly tall and not too bulky, he believes. Although that is not much more than a guess.”
Something else occurred to me then. I said, “There was twenty-five thousand dollars in bills in that brown-paper package. I would like to know about it.”
His eyes chilled and the hollows under his cheekbones grew more pronounced. “What do you want to know about it?”
“It belongs to a client. Since my errand didn’t work out, he’ll want his money back.”
“How do you know there was the amount you stated in the parcel?”
“Don’t give me that,” I said. “I counted it myself. There were two hundred and fifty bills—in bundles of twenty-five. Each bill was a C note.”
“Numbered consecutively?”
“I didn’t notice. It wasn’t my business to notice. My interest only went far enough to check the total. I’m responsible for that money, D’Allemand. Do I get it back or are you figuring to charge me that amount for the pretty story about keeping my brains off my coat collar?”
He clicked shut the blade of his penknife and put it back in his vest pocket. He stood up and crossed the rug and went around behind the desk. He opened the center drawer and took out the brown-paper package and slapped it down on the leather top. One corner of the paper was torn away and greenbacks showed through the rent.
I got off the couch and walked slowly over to the desk and picked up the parcel and ripped away the paper. There were ten bundles of bills, each with its paper band that said First National Bank in neat printed capitals.
D’Allemand watched me, his death’s-head face washed of all expression, while I counted every bill in each bundle. There were two hundred and fifty, exactly as there should have been. I shaped the bundles into a neat pile, squared up the edges and said:
“Not that I meant to embarrass you, Mr. D’Allemand. but I had to be sure. You have a piece of paper handy?”
He continued to stare at me, a sort of puzzled uncertainty shadowing his deep-set eyes. “You are satisfied, Mr. Pine?”
“Just about. I’m taking it for granted that you’re going to allow me to walk out of here with this. Or am I being optimistic?”
“Not at all, sir. Although I must confess I’m a little disappointed in you.”
I tapped the stack of bills gently against the desk top. “The hell with this kittens-and-mice stuff, Mac. What’s the angle?”
For an answer, he reached into the drawer again and brought out a small reading glass on a black rubber handle and slid it across the desk to me. He said, “I suggest you examine a few of those bills, Mr. Pine.”
All of it put together was enough to tell me what I would see through the glass. I looked anyway . . . just to satisfy myself.
By the time I finished going over the fifth bill, I had had enough. I put down the reading glass gently and lighted a cigarette, leaned a hip against a corner of the desk and stared moodily at the neat pile of counterfeit money.
“Well?” D’Allemand said softly.
“It’s wallpaper all right,” I said. “And very good, too. It would have to be good. The sourdough boys don’t usually shoot so high. People have a habit of looking sharp at C notes.”
“You should have acquired that habit, Mr. Pine,” D’Allemand said dryly.
I couldn’t reach that one, so I let it go by. I flicked ashes on the magenta carpeting and talked to the glowing end of my cigarette. I said: “So it was a frame. A nice fancy frame, with scrollwork around the edges. ‘Take these pretty pictures of Mr. Franklin around behind the cemetery wall,’ he says, ‘and give them to the man in the green hat.’ Only he forgot to tell me that the man intended to beat my head off.”
I reached into my coat for my wallet, never doubting it would be there. It was. I took out the three bills Baird had paid me and put them under the glass. They were okay, of course; Baird would have figured I might try to pass them before running his errand for him. I returned the bills to the wallet and put it away and said:
“It seems I owe you something all right. How do you want it paid?”
He pointed to a chair beside the desk. “Be seated, sir. This may take a little time.”
I sat down and he got into the wide-bottomed swivel chair. He folded his hands, one on top of the other, on the desk and bent forward slightly and said:
“I want to engage your services, Mr. Pine. I want you to learn who killed Jerry Marlin. Of course, that might not be to the best interests of your other client.” He gave me another of his sword-point glances.
“I told you he’s not my client any more.”
“Then you will take the job?”
“Yeah. I think so. With the understanding that anything I find out goes to the bulls. I’m not putting the finger on somebody for you to wrap concrete around his toes and drop him into the drainage canal.”
There was a flicker at the bottom of the caverns where he kept his eyes—a flicker like heat lightning on a cloudy night. “I don’t object to having the State of Illinois take care of my executions for me, Mr. Pine. I prefer it that way. Only . . . I want the story first. All the story.”
He turned up his right hand and stared fixedly at the palm and his voice went down a few notches. “You owe me something, sir. I will settle for that.”
I can see across the street when the wind is right. The erudite Mr. D’Allemand didn’t give a cracked roulette chip whether Marlin’s killer was caught. What he wanted was information—information about the million dollars Marlin had expected to pick up when the body was found . . . whatever that meant. Mr. D’Allemand figured maybe he could get his hand in that coffin first.
I punched out the cigarette and got off the chair. I said, “I’ll do what I can. How do I get in touch with you?”
He stood up with an effort and came around to my side of the desk. “Leave a message with Larson at the Peacock Club. You will hear from me.” He slid a hand into a trouser pocket and brought out a sheaf of bills and took one out of the middle and gave it to me.
Five hundred bucks, all in one oblong piece of paper. “Let us call that a retainer, Mr. Pine.”
“Let’s,” I said.
At a word from D’Allemand, Cleve found me a hunk of paper and I wrapped up the bad money and shoved it into one of my coat pockets. While I was doing that, D’Allemand took a gun from a desk drawer and held it out to me, butt first. He said:
“I took the liberty of holding this for you, sir.”
It was my .38. I took it from him. He was watching me without particular expression on his gaunt face. Instead of putting the gun under my arm, I lifted the short barrel and sniffed at the muzzle. It reeked of fresh powder fumes. I pushed out the cylinder. One of the shells was empty. I looked at D’Allemand. His expression had changed about as much as the Tribune’s opinion of Roosevelt.
I said, “It must have gone off, hunh?”
“Accidentally,” he murmured.
“Sure,” I said. “Accidentally. Only Colt makes these guns so they don’t go off accidentally. You have to pull the trigger, brother.”
D’Allemand said patiently, “No one has been shot with your revolver, Mr. Pine.”
“You’re not telling me anything,” I said. “You fired a test bullet, intending to have your friend at police headquarters match it with the ones taken out of Marlin. You don’t overlook much.”
He smiled slightly. “I have learned not to overlook anything, sir. That is why I put your money under a glass.”
I shoved the gun into the h
olster and buttoned my coat. I said, “I’d better go now. Before you decide to examine the lint in my belly button.”
He nodded distantly. “Show him where you left his car, Cleve.”
I followed Cleve’s swaying hips through the door, along a narrow hall and out the front door. It was pretty dark, but I could make out some lilac bushes in front of the porch and there were three or four big trees between the house and the highway. We went down the three steps and around the corner of the English-type red brick bungalow. After a few yards, I felt a cinder driveway underfoot, and there was the Plymouth.
When I was behind the wheel. Cleve closed the car door and stood by the open window, his face a pale blob in the darkness. “You’re out a ways from town, peeper. Turn right on the highway and keep going till you hit Peterson Road. You ought to know the way after that.”
He moved back and I started the motor and rolled carefully along the cinders to the highway. It had four lanes, and at that hour of the morning there was no traffic to speak of.
Three hundred yards after I was on the pavement, I passed a roadhouse. It had a glass-brick front alongside a circular driveway, and a blue and red neon sign on the roof said: LEON’S. The parking lot to one side was nearly filled with upper-bracket cars and I caught the beat of a dance orchestra above the sound of my motor.
I knew about Leon’s. Dine and dance and drink . . . and if you had a card with Tony Leonardos initials in one corner you could go in the back room and make like you were Nick the Greek—if you had the money.
Maybe it took Tony’s initials to let you gamble at Leon’s. But from where I sat, it looked like the take went to a man named D’Allemand.
CHAPTER 10
There are a lot of hotels like the Northcrest along Dearborn Parkway and North State and as far west as LaSalle. Some go up fifteen or twenty floors and some never get past the third, but they are all the same really. They cater to people who call themselves Bohemians, and the hotel help acquires a permanent leer from long familiarity with the psychopathic antics of some of the guests.
Halo in Blood Page 10