Rook Takes Knight (The Howie Rook Mysteries)

by Stuart Palmer

  “The absolute hell with it!” exploded Howie Rook. You couldn’t write a story when it was still going on. And perhaps he had let himself get too personally involved in it. Either he didn’t have the facts or else he hadn’t fitted them together. He had an unreasoning belief that the key to the mystery lay somewhere within reach of his fingertips—or at least of the phone. He went into Hal’s office and there found Deirdre’s personal belongings in a big envelope, ready to be locked away for safekeeping. Feeling like an intruder he searched until he found her little address book of worn leather. Yes, there was one stateside address for Lieutenant Richard Church—it was Coronado Island.

  In desperation Rook spent too much time with Information, and then with the long-lines operator. The number had been disconnected. “Well, try anybody with that last name who’s Navy or Marine Corps,” he pleaded. The operator said she’d call back. Then he called Evelyn, on another wild hunch. She happened to be at home, and ready for anything. “Howie, you did keep your promise! I can be dressed in twenty minutes and—”

  Rook explained that all he wanted was to locate a blond movie actress, prominent in Poverty Row movies some four or five years ago, known only as “Bubbles.” “What’s she got that I haven’t got?” demanded Evelyn, perhaps intentionally misunderstanding his purposes.

  “She cried at the Charteris funeral. You’ve been around since the Year One, do you remember her? Or could you look in your old Casting Directories?” Evelyn said it wasn’t her idea of a gay way to spend Saturday night, but she’d try. “Anything for you, dear.”

  Rook hung up hastily. The things he did for Deirdre! But now he had to call Lou Elder. When he had got him on the line he said, “Lou, I’m afraid I have to let you down—”

  “Well, you sure sent us one hell of a photo!” Lou interrupted happily. “It knocked everybody here on their respective behinds, and it’s being rushed through now.”

  “With no story? Give me a rewrite man, anyway—”

  “Hold it, Howie. You haven’t heard about Ruggles, then?”

  “You mean his giving Deirdre Charteris an alibi, hours ago?”

  “No, no! He—”

  “They’ve arrested him? He hasn’t confessed?”

  On the contrary. Danny Ruggles had made his last voluntary contribution to the records of the Charteris murder when he had gone on into the West Los Angeles police station, on his way back after the funeral, and sworn to his affidavit. He had remained cold sober for these public appearances. Afterward he had taken a bus home, written a postcard to Jeannie and then—somewhat ahead of his usual schedule—had set out southward toward the friendly bistros scattered along the Coast Highway.

  He had no idea that he had left the apartment only a few minutes before a police car came there and set up a stakeout, with orders to take no chances in his apprehension. Nor did he have any idea that a maroon Pontiac was tailing him and kept tailing him, all the way down to the Phoenix.

  There he had settled down at the piano, with Joe the bartender keeping him well supplied with drinks. But tonight the usual state of lovely euphoria eluded him. To justify the free drinks he had to honor request numbers from the patrons now beginning to trickle in—they always wanted the cornball stuff, “Daisy” or “Tea for Two.” But he would play one chorus straight, and then tear the whole number apart. And he had a compulsion to break into music that fitted his state of mind—“Her Tears Flowed Like Wine,” and “Don’t Get Around Much Any More” and “Heart of Stone.”

  Joe gave him a warning, finally, when he set down a fresh highball on the piano. “Straighten up and play right, Danny! You’re making cash customers cry! They want stuff they can sing to.”

  Danny nodded. But somehow everything he played came out like “Gloomy Sunday.” He broke into a gut-bucket rendition of “Muskrat Ramble” and then “Love Makes the World Go Round,” transposing it into a weird minor key, and then suddenly broke off with a crashing chord of purest cacophony and walked out of the place, leaving a perfectly good drink on the piano. He might as well pick up a fifth of vodka on the way home and slug himself to sleep …

  By running half a block he caught a northbound bus. He dozed fitfully all the way up through Ocean Park and Venice and Santa Monica, got off at the last stop and hurried down into the canyon and toward home, almost as if he had an appointment he’d suddenly remembered. He’d forgotten the bottle now. Maybe he could get Jeannie on the phone long-distance, bring it over to the Ivers and Pond and play for her what he hadn’t been able to put down on the postcard …

  He almost stopped in at the Grotto for a quick one, but the cheerful blast of the juke box drove him away. Up the street to Adelaide, and across toward the apartment. He didn’t notice the stakeout car with the two officers, and only at the last minute did he see the maroon Pontiac roaring out of nowhere. Though he tried to twist out of the way, the Juggernaut struck. As he himself would have put it, it was Painsville and then suddenly it was Darksville. Danny Ruggles had kept his appointment.

  The essentials of this had been given to Rook by Lou Elder. “He’s dead, then?” asked the big man.

  “As good as. The policemen only saw that the Pontiac was driven by a man—or somebody wearing a hat. It was out of sight before they could get going. Ruggles is in Mercy Hospital, Santa Monica, condition critical. So take your time on the story, we’ll go to bed with what we’ve got.”

  “Wait, Lou! I—” But the city editor had hung up. Rook had muffed that assignment too. He looked up to see that Hal Agnews, bearing a sandwich already soaking through its paper bag, had entered in the midst of it all.

  “I heard the news over the radio,” the attorney said. Typically, he added, “Now if Wilt Mays had the sense God gave geese, he’d release Deirdre fast. There goes his case.”

  “Yes, Hal. But why would anybody knock off Ruggles?”

  “You figure that out. But there’s no doubt about it, the murderer of John Charteris has struck again. So we can scratch Danny Ruggles as a suspect, and Mays will have to give up his notion that Deirdre had any part of it. So how can Mays justify holding her?”

  “But you and I both know that he’d pretty much given up the theory that Deirdre actually drove the car that killed her husband. He’ll figure out that Ruggles was just a pal trying to come forward and give her an alibi! Mays will still stick to her as an accomplice, only now he’ll try to link her with some other of her gentleman pals!”

  “He’s up to something. Anyway, he’s been keeping himself incommunicado from the press and even from me. I’ve left calls at the D.A.’s night office switchboard and his answering service and his home and all his known hideouts …” Agnews looked at his watch. “It’s almost ten thirty. We should have heard from Mike Finn.”

  “We should have done a lot of things—like calling every one of the remaining suspects as soon as the flash came in on Ruggles, to see who wasn’t at home. Anyway, that’s up to the police or the D.A.’s men now, they’ll probably be too late but they’ll be checking out alibis for everybody on that list I almost wish I’d never made. But, Hal, I feel we’ve missed something obvious. I sense an alarm signal flashing away in the back of my mind, but I can’t pin it down.”

  “And no doubt there’s a newspaper clipping somewhere in your files, if you could only remember it! But keep thinking, Howie—as long as the beer holds out. Me, I’ve got to get over and see Deirdre and break the news to her about Danny Ruggles. I’ve already pulled strings and got her a private cell.”

  “That ought to win her undying gratitude!”

  “Don’t be sarcastic!” Both men’s tempers were short.

  “You could ask her one thing. See if she can remember any delivery boy, any service man from the utilities, anybody who could possibly have had a crush on her. I know it sounds wild, but there was a case out in Van Nuys a year or so ago where a pretty young housewife was murdered by the man who originally sold them the color TV set, and who dropped by now and then on the pretense of makin
g sure it worked okay. He’d fallen in love with the lady, through no fault of her own. And after all, Hal, a woman as damn lovely as Deirdre can turn on a man without even dreaming that she’s been more than just casually polite!”

  “Anything more you want me to say to her?”

  “What is there to say? That we’re leaving no stone unturned, or that we’ll have her out by tomorrow morning, even if we have to mastermind a jailbreak?” Rook was almost snarling now. “You’re the golden-tongued orator, think of something.”

  “Okay, Howie. I’ll just say that neither of us is going to sleep or even rest until this thing is broken and her name is cleared. Which isn’t much but the literal truth.” And Agnews was gone.

  Rook sat there glowering at the phone, which stubbornly refused to ring. Too bad, really, that Hal had only a shower and not a tub in his adjoining private bathroom; the surest way to get a phone to ring was to climb into a tubfull of warm water. He opened another can of beer, then carried it with him into the other office. Idly he studied the massive leather-bound legal tomes in Hal’s mammoth bookcase. But the Statutes of the State of California had no inspiration for him.

  On the top shelf were some of the books which the attorney presumably kept for his own pleasure. Rook noted the detective stories of Conan-Doyle, he who had created the greatest detective (and some of the thinnest plots) in literary history. Good old Agatha Christie, whose Roger Ackroyd and Witness for the Defense had broken all the rules; a set of Raymond Chandler, and what would the great Philip Marlowe do at a time like this? Certainly not sit around looking in old novels for inspiration. Rook came next to one of the old Sax Rohmer books about the insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu, and took it down and opened it, to find a line leaping out at him: “We know a house where tongues may be loosened!” Would that there were such a house, and Rook could take a short-term lease on it!

  And here was Chesterton. The Father Brown stories had always seemed too mystical, and too far removed from actual detective work as Rook knew it, to have much appeal. But there was one memorable tale—the story about the postman, the invisible man. He took it down and leafed through it.

  At moments like this Rook wanted to be in his own cluttered diggings, among his myriad old newspaper clippings with which he could prove almost any point he wanted to prove, to his own satisfaction at least …

  The phone rang, and he leaped to answer it. But it was the long-distance operator, advising him that there was only one “Church” in the entire San Diego area—a Rear-Admiral (Retd.) Hector M. Church in El Cajon …

  Rook asked to be connected with that number—and soon regretted it. It seemed that he had got a retired Navy Admiral out of bed, who could only tell him with stiff dignity that his son Richard had been killed in combat in the Gulf of Tonkin over three years ago. “I’m sorry, sir,” said Rook. And he was, in more ways than one. But another name on his list had been eliminated. If it went on this way the whole case might solve itself by the sheer process of elimination. In desperation Rook went back to studying the photo of Deirdre again, the only real clue in the entire case. It was ample motivation for anyone to kill Charteris—anybody who cared enough about Deirdre, that is. But why would the killer go on, make an attempt on Rook’s life, and then smash Danny Ruggles? Either somebody wanted to wipe out everyone Deirdre was fond of—Rook remembered that her kissing him on the cheek under the porch light on the night of their first meeting could have been overseen and misunderstood—or else the killer had a misbegotten and misconceived idea that if the killing cycle continued at times when Deirdre couldn’t possibly be involved, she’d have to be cleared.

  But before he could pursue this train of thought, the phone rang. This time, at long last, it was the missing Mike Finn. “Mike, where have you been?” Rook shouted.

  “All over, Howie. Right now I’m in a phone booth in a nice little saloon in Pomona—”

  “You tracked Booth there and lost him?”

  “I did not! He headed for the San Berdoo Freeway from the funeral and I stuck with him. I trailed him out here, where he had dinner in a little hash-house and in the middle of it he took out a little transistor radio so he could listen in on the day’s race results. Then he jumped up and tore out of the place and went hell-bent out to the fairgrounds and I caught up to him in the stable area, where he was, believe it or not, kissing a horse—or practically.” Finn’s voice was fuzzy.

  “Mike, are you all right?”

  “Never better. You see, this nag, Carbon Copy, won a router this afternoon—a two-mile allowance race for colts and geldings. Broke his maiden and shaved the track record.”

  “Oh, great!” snapped Rook. “But listen—”

  “Carbon Copy stumbled at the gate and almost lost his rider and then went on to win by fourteen lengths!”

  “Okay, if I’d been Booth I’d have kissed the horse myself. But what I want to know is—were you actually with him all evening, especially around nine P.M.?”

  “I sure was, and I still am!”

  “Then he couldn’t have been involved in what happened to Danny Ruggles, so we can eliminate one more suspect. You get back here fast, I may need your strong right arm tonight, being somewhat hors de combat myself …”

  “I don’t think I’ll make it back to the city tonight, Howie. It’s very drunk out. You see, I been helping Booth celebrate the horse’s winning and also help him drown his sorrows about Deirdre being in trouble. He had a nice sentimental bet on the horse, even if he couldn’t be here in person to see it run, and he also has a big thing about Deirdre. One thing led to another and we’re lifelong buddies and he’s still going strong only I can’t take it any more like I used to, and I don’t think I ought to drive, so I just wanted to know if you’ll okay the expense of my going to a hotel to sleep it off, because—”

  “You can sleep with Carbon Copy, if the horse doesn’t mind!” And Rook hung up with a crash. He not only had to scratch Charley Booth as a suspect, he had to scratch Mike Finn as an aid. He was on his own. And Deirdre, who had trusted him, was still in a stinking cell in the Hall of Justice. Rook could see the building from Hal’s open window, squat and square and implacable as a fortress … the Princess in the Dark Tower.

  Her back and shoulders might have healed, but the marks of even one night in Women’s Prison might never heal. Rook took out the photo again, though by this time he could have drawn it from memory, blindfolded. He glanced through all the other photos of the set—Deirdre with her back turned, Deirdre in profile, Deirdre with Lancer the little cocker spaniel getting into the picture and staring up at her with the sentimentality of the breed …

  “The dog!” yelped Howie Rook. Then he swore for a good minute, quietly and eloquently and without repeating a single phrase. And he went over to the typewriter and wrote:

  “Hal, this is it! I’m going to don my rusty armor and go forth to do battle with Sir Mordred the Dark Knight …”

  That was too flowery, and he threw it out. He began again, and wrote: “Hal, it’s almost 11:30 and I’ve got to check out something. So don’t go home until I call back. If you don’t hear from me in say half an hour, cry the alarm and come a-running. The one I’m after is—” Here he paused. There really should be a two-color ribbon on the machine, so he could type the rest in red. But being at heart a sensible man he completed the message and left it propped up against the typewriter where Hal Agnews couldn’t possibly fail to see it the moment he got back.

  Howie Rook took another pain pill, was about to wash it down with beer and then decided on coffee instead. He had, however, forgotten Murphy’s First Law—which is to the effect that if anything can possibly go wrong, it will.

  It was just after midnight when Hal Agnews came back to the office, shoulders slumped with fatigue. It had been a grueling session with the client—Deirdre had been on the verge of hysteria anyway and the news of Danny Ruggles had made it worse. She had hardly listened to him at all, didn’t appreciate the private cell or the sleeping pill he
had wangled out of the night matron, and had hardly listened to him at all. She’d even insisted that first thing tomorrow she was going to drop him as her attorney of record and call upon Harry Holtz or even Hardy and Wolff. Having a divorce lawyer, or even a pair of corporation lawyers, handling the defense of a criminal case was the equivalent of suicide, and he hoped he had made that clear to her. Maybe she would feel differently in the cold light of morning …

  Meanwhile Agnews was spoiling for an argument. “Howie, you still here?” he called, standing in the open doorway of his office suite. No answer—but past him went a small and vagrant breeze, to wander through the reception room and down the hall and through the offices, ruffling the pages of the Chesterton book open upon the desk, stirring the crumpled pages of the abortive beginnings of the news story in and around the wastebasket, and finally to whisk up Howie Rook’s note with idle abandon and bear it away …

  The phone rang. But it wasn’t Rook, it was Evelyn something or other, who wanted to report that she hadn’t been able to locate any actress named Bubbles but would he have Howie call her back? “I’ll tell him that and a lot more, when and if I locate him!” promised the attorney. It wasn’t like Howie to walk off and leave the lights on, the windows open, and the phone unattended, and not a word. The place reeked of stale beer and old pipe tobacco, and was otherwise a mess. Agnews started straightening up the worst of it, throwing out beer cans and coffee cups and an uneaten sandwich that had cost eighty-seven cents plus tax. In the midst of his labors he came upon the first note that Rook had started, which was somewhat tantalizing in its crumpled incompleteness.