by Henry, Kane,
“A man changes,” he said. “You guys are all alike.”
“A man?” I said very distinctly.
“I don’t like insinuations, Mister.”
“You don’t like insinuations, don’t you? You’re a fairy, a phony, a queerie, a pervert. Play that on your insinuator.”
He pulled his breath in and held it and let it out slowly and twitched his nose twice, and he said slowly, purringly: “Harsh words to a man that was married for five years, who has a son, who’s been divorced, who’s practically engaged right now …”
Then he stopped. Fast.
I had produced something that didn’t mean a thing to me. “So you’re a half and halfer. You’re practically engaged to what?”
Very unpleasantly, he told me what I could go and do to myself.
I said, “Look, chum, I’m a private dick with a license and everything. You’re a bum with a phony name and a very naughty history. If I pull this thing, you get popped. You could get killed or you could get a hole in you that’ll need a hell of a lot of fixing. Either way, it’s messy. I came here on a case, you pulled a gun on me, I took it away from you and I let you have it. I’d use the phone and the boys would come up and I’d go downtown and I’d be out in thirty minutes.”
He said nothing.
I stood up, my legs on either side of the little chair. I stuck my arm out straight. I aimed at his shoulder. For half a second I was sorry for this crooked, corrupt, white-faced half-man. I said it and I meant it: “When you call a bluff and it’s not a bluff, crumb, you lose. I’m going to pull the thing, Grandma.”
“Secret,” he piped.
“I can keep a secret.”
“Edith Wilde.”
I sat down.
“You’re hysterical,” I said.
“Why?” he snapped. “I’ve been crazy about that dame since I met her, way back. I’ve asked her a hundred times and she’s laughed at me. Now she says yes.”
“It’s impossible. But what the hell. When is it coming off?”
Color swarmed back in his face. He giggled. “No date set. Not yet. But not for some time, I know that.”
“Why?”
“She says that now that she’s consented, she’s got to get used to the idea.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “All right, Romeo, I’ll keep your secret. If you’re on the up-and-up about everything you’ve told me, which I don’t think you are, I’ll play ball. If I find out different, I’ll blab my head off, among other things. Here’s your gun. I’m dying for a cigarette.”
I gave it to him, and watched him. He looked at the gun, looked at me, looked back at the gun. Then he put it back into the right-hand desk drawer. I lit up and pulled the poison deep into my lungs and said through smoke: “What about Pineapple?”
“I haven’t seen him in years. He used to work for me in the old days, as a youngster. Torpedo.”
“Did he know you worked for Curtis Wilde?”
“I don’t know. It could be.”
“Maybe that’s what he thought he had on Curtis?”
“Could be. It’s a high-class outfit. It wouldn’t do them any good with their stylish clientele if it broke that one of their managers was an ex-racket boy.”
“But Joe knew prices. Would that be worth two hundred G’s?”
“I don’t think so. But even that could be.”
“How come you never thought of it yourself?”
“It figures very simple, Mr. Sleuth. I told you I’m reformed, but also I’m on a long-distance make for a pigeon I’m nuts about. Also, I’ve learned to live quite happily on what I earn. Add it up — no percentage,”
I went for my hat. I said, “So long, Grandma. I’ve got a date. I believe that part about being practically engaged, and that’s plenty crazy. The rest of it plays like crap. We’ll see how it works out.”
He came around the desk. “So long, Chambers. Stay clammed up, will you please? If either one of them finds out about me, it’s curtains, and if she ever learns I’ve talked about our personal plans, that’s the end of that.”
“Okay.”
He put his index finger into his mouth and touched some sore spots and made faces and took it out and looked at me aggrievedly. “I really think you’d have let me have it if I wouldn’t have spilled. I play those hunches. What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing’s the matter with me. You just worked me into a spot.”
“Who worked who into what spot? Me, shooting off about personal business, and I worked him into a spot.”
“Okay, so long, sweetheart.”
I put my hat on. I said, “That Edith Wilde dame must be nuts.”
5
BLAIR CURTIS was tall and broad shouldered with a full head of beautiful silver hair, large smooth jowls, a high nose, small keen gray eyes and thin black articulate eyebrows; with a soldierly carriage and a figure that was young and limber except for what could have been two small temporary pillows stuck in his pants front and back.
“You don’t mind trains?” he asked.
“Of course not.”
“I prefer it to being driven. It’s cleaner and faster. It isn’t a long ride at all.”
We walked through four cars and we couldn’t find a double seat that was unoccupied. Curtis smiled dourly and sat down alongside a young sandy-haired second lieutenant. Directly behind him, I said, “Excuse me” to a round woman in an orange dress who had her legs spread wide. She grinned encouragingly and closed her knees. I squeezed in. I looked straight ahead of me.
Straight ahead of me was the back of Blair Curtis, bent over his newspaper. I looked at his ears, up and out and away from his head, and how large they were, and I thought about what goes on between those ears when you sit, bobbing on a rattling train, reading newsprint and your wife got killed yesterday. Then I snuggled closer to the warm soft lady in orange and listened to the clack of wheels on rails and went to sleep.
I woke to a poke on the arm.
Smiling, Curtis stood over me. “We’re almost there.”
I got more fully awake and snatched myself together.
We took a cab to a house that covered a lot of ground. The taxi stopped at high gates. Curtis paid the driver and pushed a bell. A rangy Doberman loped to the gate and wriggled his stump of tail. A stooped, whitehaired man in overalls started a long trudge down a gray gravel roadway.
Curtis called, “Hi, Dick,” and the dog stopped and stood rigid and then wriggled and sniffed and turned and broke for the man in overalls.
The man opened the gate and Curtis said, “How are you, Lee?” and the old man answered, “As well as can be expected, thank you, sir,” and locked the gate and started shuffling, not to the house, but toward a row of greenhouses to the right of the house. Curtis went down on one knee and put his arms around the dog’s neck and whispered in his ear and rubbed his head and neck and withers, and stood up.
He said, “His name is Dick.”
I said, “Hello, Dick,” in my best dog manner and the dog ignored me and went to the side of his master and trotted beside him as we walked up the gravel path to the house.
A butler, who was bone thin and tall and bald and who looked at Curtis like Dick had looked at him, opened the door and said, “Good afternoon, sir.”
“Good evening, rather,” Curtis said. “Conrad, this is Mr. Chambers.”
“How do you do, sir.”
Conrad looked at the dog and looked back at Curtis.
“I know,” Curtis said. “Not in the house.” He patted Dick’s neck. “You’ll have to stay here, my friend. Down, boy.” Dick hesitated, then thumped full length to the floor of the veranda.
Conrad took our things and slowly followed us to the library. “Dinner, gentlemen?” he asked.
Curtis turned to me.
“Not me,” I said. “Thank you. I couldn’t go dinner.”
Curtis said, “I don’t think I could either. What say to sandwiches and cold beer?”
“Fine.”
“And a drink?”
“Fine,” I said.
“You heard the man.” Curtis smiled at the butler and the butler smiled back, gravely. “And make them double, or triple, please. Big ones. I can stand a large drink right now, and Mr. Chambers demonstrated a rather amazing capacity this afternoon.”
We sat on leather chairs in the dim cool cavernous library and we ate delicious liverwurst sandwiches and drank cold beer.
I said, “Excellent, excellent,” and I offered Curtis a cigarette and he said, “No, thank you.”
Conrad came in noiselessly and inquired, “Finished, gentlemen?” and Curtis shook his head yes, and Conrad rolled out the serving table and came back with a long curved meerschaum pipe and a humidor and Curtis filled the bowl and said, “Thank you very much,” and the lank quiet Conrad nodded and went away.
I said, “That guy is quite a help.”
“Conrad? My right arm. He’s been with us — with me — for twenty-five years. He runs this house, and when I’m here, he runs me.”
I said, “I should like to ask you a question. An impertinent question. I was thinking about it on the train. May I?”
Softly he asked, “What is it?”
“This thing. The death of your wife. You’re a difficult man to read. I don’t like the impression I have, but I can’t get away from it.”
“What’s that?”
I inhaled cigarette smoke. “There’s a look, a feel about you. You’re a self-contained man, yes. But I’ve met self-contained men before. There’s an absence of grief. There’s no shock. There is no normal reaction. It’s not nice to say to a man, but hell, I’m working on a case.”
He stood up and came over close.
“The fact of murder, man born of woman extinguishing the life of another human being, is brutal and shocking. Any murder. Do you understand that?”
“Yes.”
“But the fact that it was my wife who was murdered has not shocked me, nor has her death affected me particularly. Please listen carefully, Mr. Chambers.”
I smoked, I nodded, I kept my trap shut.
“I abominated that woman.”
He said it standing close over me, I could feel him tremble. He went back to his chair and sat down clumsily.
He struck a match and held it to his pipe and the flame shook. “My wife, my dear sir, was a vile, vicious woman. She was pleasure-loving, pleasure-seeking, without shame, without propriety, without conscience, without morals. I became aware of all of it a long time ago, and at that time, I tried everything. I was utterly patient. She was incorrigible. I detested her.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t move.
Words came thickly: “The parties, the orgies, the things that took place in this house. My children knew and scurried away as soon as they acquired the blessed release of maturity. Even they … which was mine …”
He rang for the butler and he said. “Please bring a decanter of brandy, Conrad.”
Conrad came silently with a silver tray and brandy and two glasses. Curtis poured, handed me half a glassful and I smelled it and sipped it.
He went back to his chair. He said, “She wanted neither quiet divorce nor legal separation. For the sake of convention and public opinion, we were seen together upon occasion, as last night at the Nevada. But please remember that this woman was the worst kind of bad woman; drunkard, narcotic dilettante, nymphomaniac, respecter of no person, no thing, no household, not God or the Devil.”
“That’s enough,” I said. “Now I’m clear. Now I understand about private detectives and why you went to Pineapple and how little co-operation you’re going to give to the police.”
The brandy took some of the thickness out of his voice. “Last night, Lieutenant Parker and several policemen came out here with me. It was their purpose to examine my wife’s things. They found nothing that aided them.”
“Don’t be too sure of that. Parker is a smart cop.”
“Mr. Chambers, I am the father of three wonderful children. Notoriety, sensationalism, tabloid exploitation is the last thing in the world I would want to inflict upon them. Rather would I let a murder go unpunished. Much rather. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly,” I assured him.
He leaned forward and took his pipe out and shook the point of the stem at me. “It happens to be part of my education, part of my training, that no crime go unpunished. That is why I am trying to help. If you can apprehend whoever did this, if you can bring him to justice — without disclosure of that side of my wife’s life which I’ve made plain to you, all well and good. If you find your man, and you discover that he cannot be brought to book without such disclosure — then, at that time, you must come to me. If necessary, I shall perhaps take things into my own hands.”
“You’re the boss, sir,” I said, “but wouldn’t that be foolish?”
“Foolish, foolhardy — we’ll meet that problem if and when it arises. If you find your murderer and you are convinced that he cannot be convicted without recourse to the public exhuming and examination of that part of my wife’s life which I desire to remain hidden — then you come to me. If the contrary is true, then by all means, you may go directly to the police. Do I have your promise?”
I finished the brandy. I said, “You have my promise.”
“Thank you.”
“All right. Let’s get down to business. Your wife must have had a list of enemies a yard long.”
“Only one, I think. A chap named Xavier Hoy Ginsburg.”
6
“XAVIER HOY GINSBURG,” I said. “Tie that, if you please.”
Curtis sucked on the unlit meerschaum. He spoke sharply and quickly like a small boy called upon in class to deliver a recitation. “Last night, when you brought her up and we knew she was dead, after you had called the police but before they had come, I telephoned Conrad. I told him what had happened and I told him to go to his mistress’ rooms and collect every scrap of paper, every writing, every photo, everything, and pack them into a valise and put it away somewhere, hidden, in one of the greenhouses. I knew that they couldn’t find much in the town apartment.”
I brought fire to a cigarette. “And the good Lieutenant swings thrice and strikes out.”
“They came home with me, Parker and some men. I told them that it had been my wife’s custom, periodically, to clean up and dispose of loose ends and things and that, presumably, she had done just that within the last few days.”
“The Lieutenant must have been fit to bust wide open.”
He moistened his lips with brandy. “Of course, I was eager to be of any assistance; he had just to ask, I couldn’t do too much for him. What could he say? He wasn’t angry, not with me, yet despite my avid solicitude, ‘fit to bust wide open’ expresses perfectly, if quaintly, the vignette that was the Lieutenant.”
I pulled in smoke and let it out. “From the little you’ve told me about Mrs. Curtis, I don’t know how you can state with such assurance that there was but one person that you believe hated her — the fellow with the funny name.”
He said, “Hated her? There must have been others. I meant that I believe that she had only one implacable enemy, one capable of killing her.”
“Why?”
He knocked cold ashes from his pipe, reloaded and relit and blasted bunched smoke toward me. “I knew everything about my wife. She knew she could horrify and torment me, and she enjoyed that, and she knew I was helpless to do anything more than listen. There is very little I didn’t know about her, strange as it may sound. In fact, I’ve given her advice at times.”
Conrad came in silently and Curtis said, “Please get that valise you packed last night, and bring it here.” The old man nodded once and went out.
“You were saying …”
“Yes. The relationship between my wife and myself had devolved somewhat to the relationship of confessor and priest. Whatever; except for the one I mentioned, I don’t believe she had an actual unrelenting enemy. I mean some
one who could kill her. She was clever. She knew how to salve those she hurt deeply. She had looks, charm, money, influence.”
“Yes. No one else besides this Xavier guy?”
“I’d say no. I’m about as sure as I can be.”
“Well, what about him?”
“She met him through Eric Gorin at a visit to the race track.”
“Eric Gorin,” I said, “is Professor Gorin, Wesley Gorin’s brother, and Wesley is the guy that got lumped last night.”
His eyebrows moved far up. “Correct,” he said.
“Miss Wilde gave me the picture,” I explained. “There’s Wesley and Mrs. Wesley Gorin, there’s Professor and Mrs. Professor Gorin and there’s a Professor Brewster and his Missus — all scrambled up in happy domesticity in a town house in the sixties owned by Wesley Gorin.”
“I presume you’ll want to meet them. I shall arrange that.”
“It’s all arranged. There’s some sort of little nonsense party being thrown tonight. Miss Wilde invited me.”
“Good, good,” he said. “You’re my man, sir. I like the way you work.”
“Thanks. Now, where did that guy get the name? Xavier Hoy Ginsburg?”
“I can tell you some of it. I had him thoroughly investigated. He is a Spaniard whose real name is Xavier Hoy Gaspard. He has been in this country twenty-one years, three of which he spent in jail. When he got out, about ten years ago, he changed his name to Ginsburg.”
“For what?”
“I have no idea why he chose Ginsburg.”
“I mean for what was he jailed?”
“Some sort of shooting scrape that developed during a card game.”
“And what is his business?”
“He is a bookmaker, a betting commissioner. A very successful one. Before that he was a gambler who lived on his wits and his good looks. He has an office in town which you can check under his name at any time in the phone book.”
“Just hold it a moment. Do you have a Manhattan phone book?”
“If you will excuse me.”
He went out and came back with the phone book and laid it on the table and went to the leather chair and sat down. I riffled through the book and ran a finger down the page and mumbled the number.