Murder Is My Dish

by Stephen Marlowe

  He had an unctuous voice and I wouldn’t have trusted him with a live curb setter, but it all worked out as he had promised. The man with the exposé magazine was not on duty at the morgue, which was a break. In a little while the undertaker got there. I went out for some coffee and something to eat. When I came back, what was left of Andy Dineen had been taken from the morgue drawer and put in a box. They even had a train schedule for me. The undertaker drove over to Penn Station, offering me a lift. It was late in the afternoon and almost dark when we reached the station. The undertaker shook my hand. His hand was cold and clammy.

  Forty minutes later I climbed aboard a Washington-bound Pennsylvania express. A colored porter came through to say dinner was now being served in the dining car, but I didn’t have any appetite. There was a man I had to see in Washington. Then I almost hoped someone would drop a brand new case in my lap.

  But I knew I would turn down the case, if any. Andy Dineen was riding in the baggage car.

  Chapter Nine

  I MADE the final arrangements four and a half hours later with the representative of the Washington undertaking establishment in Union Station. He was a young fellow with a fast line of chatter. He looked more like a public relations man who had just been graduated from the mail room than an undertaker. There was a splendid little cemetery he knew of halfway between the District and College Park, Maryland. My friend would be entombed on Monday morning. Would that be satisfactory? I said it would and wrote him a check that was very fat—which explained why they had sent a public relations man with the bill.

  Then I went home to my apartment in a converted old brownstone on Florida Avenue. Outside, a couple of young girls with good legs in short ice-skating skirts twinkled by with figure skates hanging over their shoulders, heading for the Uline Ice Arena. They smiled at me. It was nice to know I didn’t look as bad as I felt.

  Upstairs I gave a long, hard, sour look at two rooms of drably furnished efficiency. There wasn’t any mail for me. The mail would be at my office, and time enough for that Monday, after the funeral. I was going to sleep all day Sunday. To hell with the rest of the world. Attaboy, Drum. I couldn’t get comfortable in the club chair. The bed seemed softer than I had remembered. Too soft.

  I picked up a book on the Hittites. Back in college I’d been a bug on ancient history and archaeology. We all have our vices. It seemed too long ago to be part of the same life. Attis, the book said. Attis, beloved of Cybele. The words swam and crawled and wriggled, eluding me. I shut the book and dropped it with a thud. I went into the bathroom and washed up. In the mirror I saw the blond crew cut and the hard-planed face with the scar on the left cheek and the bruised jaw. An interesting-looking face for taking pokes at or smiling at if you happen to be a pretty girl with ice skates over your shoulder.

  “You well-adjusted son of a bitch,” I said out loud, and went into the kitchen for my old friend, Jack Daniels, who was waiting obediently on the shelf alongside the cold cereal. I poured the kind of drink Eulalia Mistral would have poured, and drank it. Eulalia was out over the Caribbean now, winging south for Caracas and Ciudad Grande with Primo Blas Lequerica and Pablo Duarte.

  I had another drink. Attis, beloved of Cybele. Jack Daniels Sour Mash, beloved of Chester Drum. A voice said, “Don’t make up your mind yet.”

  I listened and didn’t answer. The voice went on: “At least wait till you see Preston Baylis. All right?”

  I nodded sagely and took another drink. The voice was quiet now. It had been, naturally, my own voice.

  When Jack Daniels had been emptied of all but the charcoal-mellowed aroma, I went to sleep.

  On Sunday morning I called Preston Baylis’s home in College Park, Maryland. It was a clear, briskly cool sun-filled day, the nicest we’d had in weeks. Mr. Baylis was not available for comment, sir. He had given the press the only statement he would give them, earlier in the morning. I said I wasn’t the press, wondering if I’d taken up the wrong profession, if you can call other people’s troubles a profession. Then I identified myself and asked to speak with Mr. Baylis, anyway, and please. He came on the line a moment later.

  “Chester?”

  “In the flesh and out of a job. I loused it up for you, Mr. Baylis.”

  “You’re telling me,” he said with a nervous laugh.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Oh, I don’t mean that. I mean the whole thing. The D.C. papers played it up big. They’ve never liked me, you know. Chester, do yourself a favor. Never have a famous father.”

  “It’s too late for that. I guess I’m lucky.”

  “They crucified me just because I’m the Paranaian legal representative in this country. As if I’d had a hand in kidnaping or killing Rafael Caballero.” The nervous little laugh again. Over the phone it couldn’t be appreciated, unless you knew what Preston Baylis looked like. He looked like a more intellectual Ernest Hemingway, when Hemingway was in his prime. The nervous little laugh went with his looks like butterscotch topping goes with a rare T-bone steak. But Preston Baylis had the misfortune of being born the son of the late, great supreme court justice of the same name. They said he was the spit and image of his father, on the outside. On the inside the best he had was the nervous little laugh. It was the only thing which hadn’t belonged to his father. The rest was pale shadow and footsteps and shoes much too big for him to fill.

  “I never even met Rafael Caballero.”

  “I know. You told me.”

  “I never even met Indalecio Grande. But that doesn’t stop them from hanging him in effigy outside my house.”

  “From doing which?”

  “The pickets. They’re all over the place. There are cops stationed on the lawn.” He laughed the nervous little laugh again. “I’m practically in a state of siege out here.”

  “I come out?”

  “Is it about Caballero?”

  I said it was about Caballero in a roundabout way.

  “I wish you wouldn’t. I just want to forget it. I have nothing to do with it really.”

  I said I would like to see him anyway.

  “Well, all right, if you must.”

  “How would noon be?”

  He told me noon would be as good as any other time. He said, with his nervous little laugh, that perhaps the pickets would call it a day by then. They had assembled on the street outside his place just after sunrise. They’d been at it for hours.

  I hung up, shaved, showered, dressed, and went outside for something to eat. When I finished it was still only ten-forty. Since it was only about a twenty-minute drive to the Baylis home in College Park, I had more than enough time for a Sunday morning visit to my office and decided to use it. I drove over there in my white De Soto convertible. F Street was almost deserted and the Farrell Building, across the street from the Treasury Department at the corner of 15th Street, was closed for the Sabbath.

  I rang the night bell. When nothing happened, I rang it again. In a little while a sleepy-looking face over a pair of narrow shoulders in a maroon-and-tan elevator operator’s uniform appeared on the other side of the door. The glass of the door had been cleaned and polished and waited, gleaming, for Monday’s fingerprints and smudges. The elevator operator seemed surprised to see anyone.

  His face was a new one to me, so I showed him the photostat of my detective license, signed by no less a personage than Police Commissioner Eric Mann. It seemed to satisfy him. “Important case, huh, Mr. Drum?” he said.

  I gave him my most mysterious nod and he locked the door and took me up in the elevator. “I wait?” he said.

  I nodded again and walked down the corridor to my office. Chester Drum, Confidential Investigations, the black lettering on pebbled glass said. Envelopes were stuffed into the mail slot at the bottom of the door. I knew what they would be. They rarely varied. A detective agency in Philadelphia or somewhere had heard about me and needed operatives. They would be delighted to pay me eighty-five or ninety bucks a week if I signed my life over to th
em. A handful of unhappily married Washingtonians wanted their divorces arranged. They would get the form letter, done up by the mimeograph and photo-offset outfit on the third floor of the Farrell Building, which explained that I didn’t do divorce work. A few flyers advertised everything from fingerprint kits to toupees to authentic Chinese lunches, to go. The Bring-the-Vote-to-Washington Committee was in there pitching with a brochure. It usually ran like that. And maybe, if my luck were running, there might be a case waiting for me and fifty dollars a day and expenses while it lasted.

  But I never got as far as the letters stuffed into the mail slot this time. Something too big to stuff was leaning against the base of the door. It was a rectangular box done up hastily and untidily in old brown wrapping paper with bakery string. I picked it up and saw the New York postmark and the handwriting of the address. It was Andy Dineen’s handwriting, and the last, thing he had ever written.

  The elevator operator hummed something and sang some words in falsetto about towering over the street where I lived. The brown wrapping paper rustled in my hands as I tore the string. Macadam Bond, it said on the box inside. There was a picture of a Sphinx against a blue sky. It was a ream box of typing paper. Inside, on top, a note had been scrawled in pencil on a torn off piece of the brown wrapping paper. It said: Chet, the client is scared stiff. Maybe you better hold this for safekeeping. Regards to the Pinkertons, Andy.

  I remembered what I’d told Pablo Duarte. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. I had said: You killed Rafael Caballero because his book could rip hell out of Indalecio Grande’s regime. You killed him, but you didn’t get the book. And, I had lied: I have the book.

  The sky-blue box contained several hundred sheets of paper, typed on, with much crossing out and many marginal jottings, if the first few sheets were any indication. I riffled through them. There were also a couple dozen crisp, shiny photostatic positives of letters. I didn’t read them. I opened the office door with my key and went inside. I looked at the office safe and shook my head. It might do for some things, but it wouldn’t do for this. I found an attaché case, two years old and never used, which a satisfied client had given me, or maybe it had been my aunt in Spokane, Washington, I didn’t remember which. I put the box in the case and snapped the lid.

  Rafael Caballero’s book. Me and my big mouth.

  I returned to the elevator with the attaché case under my arm. The elevator operator looked at the case and gave me a knowing smile. He hummed the one about the rain in Spain falling mainly in the plain. “Seen it?” he asked me. I shook my head. He’d made his point. The road show of My Fair Lady had come to town. He had seen it.

  Outside, I tooled the De Soto up 15th to Thomas Circle and then to Logan Circle and along Rhode Island Avenue under the railroad trestle and beyond. Pretty soon I crossed the Maryland border. I wouldn’t have been too surprised if the attaché case burned a hole in the leather upholstery of the De Soto on the way out to College Park.

  The Baylis house wouldn’t have disappointed an antiquarian who took his ante-bellum houses straight and Georgian, with red brick walls, a real live portico out front, Victorian iron deer prancing on a lawn which rolled back from the street in a big curving swoop like a matronly breast and was shaded by sycamores, elms and even a couple of force-fed Southern magnolias growing about as far north as magnolias will deign to grow. But the view was spoiled by coffins.

  I parked my car across the wide street and went over there. The coffins were of soft yellow pine and unfinished and about one-third death size. Men and women marched back and forth in front of the swooping lawn with them. The marchers also had some straw-stuffed figures and a piggy bank as big as a dog house with the figure $40,000.00 painted in black on its side. The straw-stuffed figures were all hanging by their necks and placards proclaimed them to be effigies of Indalecio Grande. A saner picket carried a sign which said What really happened to Rafael Caballero? Most of the pickets had slick dark hair and tan skin and were probably refugees of the Parana Republic and Republican Spain. Many of them hadn’t passed safely through their teens yet.

  A line of them snake-danced toward me as I crossed the street, brandishing their signs and effigies like weapons. A couple of cops who had stationed themselves behind the iron deer on the lawn moved in my direction, their billies ready.

  “Preston Baylis gets forty thousand bucks a year in blood money,” an effigy-carrying boy said.

  “Blood money!” a big girl near him snarled.

  “You take it easy now, you know what’s good for you,” one of the cops said.

  The other one asked me, “The name Drum?” And, when I had nodded, “Servants passed the word out you’re expected.”

  “Bloody money!” the big girl snarled again. She came close and shook her fist in my face. When I neither cringed nor tried to get tough, tears sprang to her eyes. “Blood money,” she said softly, unconvincingly.

  The first cop took her by the elbow. The second cop went up the walk with me. The door was opened by a fellow in a butler’s livery, and the cop went away.

  “Upstairs, please, sir,” the butler said. “Mr. Baylis has taken to bed.”

  I wanted to say “taken what to bed,” but it would have sailed over his head and out into the leftfield seats. With my attaché case I went up the stairs. When I reached the top a door opened in the hallway on my left and I heard: “Psst! Mr. Drum.”

  It was Fawn Baylis, Preston Baylis’s daughter, a spoiled but pretty and physically precocious sixteen year old I’d met once or twice while doing legwork for her old man. They shared the house with a platoon of servants now. Mrs. Baylis had been one of Preston Baylis’s many mistakes: the courts had granted the father custody of their teen-aged child without even a token fight.

  Fawn came into the hallway. It was dim there, but not so dim I couldn’t see her. “I’m wearing a peignoir,” she said, and giggled. “Like it?”

  She wore her precocious assets with a certain ingenuous charm and the peignoir fit her like Cellophane fits a pack of cigarettes. She said, “I’m so bored in this big house with nothing to do. Christmas vacation. All the other girls in school look forward to it, but I don’t. I’m glad those nasty men are outside. I’m glad. I’ve been watching them from the window. What’s the matter, don’t you like it?”

  “It’s the nicest peignoir I ever saw a teen-ager wearing.”

  She advanced, more threateningly than the pickets had.

  “But it’s also the only peignoir I ever saw a teen-ager wearing.”

  She had over-extended her supply lines. She came up short. Her big innocent eyes glistened. I told myself they only looked innocent. “Here I am practically throwing myself at you,” she said, giggling again. This close I could smell the Scotch. It was still a few minutes before noon and she was sixteen. I felt some of Preston Baylis’s inadequacy then. Inadequacy as a son. Inadequacy as a husband. Inadequacy as a father. It hovered with the smell of Scotch and expensive perfume in the dim hallway.

  “Don’t tell Father,” she pouted when she saw I wasn’t going to catch what she had thrown.

  “All right. Get back into your room.”

  “Don’t tell him about the peignoir. It belonged to my mother. She left it for me when she went away.”

  I said nothing. She went back into her room. The door closed softly. The mingled scents of Preston Baylis’s inadequacy lingered. I went down the hall with the attaché case under my arm and knocked on the door of his room.

  “Come in, Chester.”

  He sat up in bed with four pillows behind his head. The Sunday papers were in an untidy pile on the floor, where he had flung them.

  I said, “Caballero is probably dead.”

  “I know. The papers.”

  “A big shot in the Paranaian Security Forces was in New York to handle the job. Did you know that?”

  “No!”

  “I think Lequerica knew it.”

  “I can’t believe that. I’ll phone him.”


  “He went back home.”

  “Why are they doing this to me, Chester? Downstairs?”

  “They probably have a contingent over at the Parana Embassy too. Don’t take it so personally.”

  “I’m only their legal representative in this country. The internal state of affairs in the Parana Republic isn’t my business. Cold morning, isn’t it?”

  “It’s warm in here.”

  “Got a chill, I guess.” His eyes went to the attaché case and looked up, expectantly. I didn’t enlighten him. “There was something?

  I went over to the window. Preston Baylis’s bedroom faced the front of the house. I saw bare sycamore branches, a sweep of lawn, the parade of coffins. “There’s a girl named Eulalia Mistral,” I said. “She was Caballero’s secretary. She’s visiting her mother in the Parana Republic. I want you to do me a favor. I want you to guarantee her safety.”

  “Guarantee? How can I do that?” He laughed the nervous little laugh. “Besides, what does she have to be afraid of Jaguars?” Again the nervous little laugh.

  “The Paranaian Security Forces. They killed Caballero for his book. They didn’t get the book. They may think she knows something about it.”

  “But what can I do? I’m only their legal—”

  “I know what your job is, Mr. Baylis.”

  “Then you must know I couldn’t—”