It took all of ten seconds for Mitch to realize what The Duchess had said. “Dave Singer!” he yelled, and almost fell off his chair. “That was Dave Singer prowling through Pinky’s kitchen!”
“I thought you’d be interested,” The Duchess observed.
“You didn’t follow him by any chance?”
“On what? A broomstick?”
It didn’t matter. Dave was back in circulation again, and that in itself was interesting. But Dave prowling about in Pinky’s kitchen was a lot more incriminating than Dave making remarks over the counter. This boy just couldn’t seem to stay out of the picture—and then Mitch remembered something Rita had said in Mexicali. Maybe he wasn’t and maybe he was. Maybe he was making a play for Virginia for the obvious reasons; but there was another possibility that pulled Mitch off his chair in a hurry.
“Sit down!” The Duchess ordered. “I haven’t finished.”
“Neither have I,” Mitch said. “I just remembered an invitation I got down in Mexicali a few hours ago. Dave’s girl friend is lonely. I think it’s only neighborly of me to go over and talk to her awhile.”
The Duchess gave him a peculiar look—the kind that might have come from eating Pinky’s cooking. And then she let him have it all at once.
“In that case you’ll need Mamma Molina’s Ouija board,” she said. “Rita Royale is dead.”
9
SO THAT WAS IT. That was the reason behind all those phone calls to the El Rey; that was the news that wouldn’t wait until morning. The rest of the story was just a build-up for the climax, because The Duchess liked her punch lines loaded. When Mitch realized he wasn’t going anywhere, he sat down again.
But Rita dead! A thing like that took time to understand. It was such a little while ago since she’d grabbed his arm and tried to get cozy at that Mexicali bar. But a fat-faced clock on the kitchen wall said it was three hours ago, and anybody can die in three hours—with help. Now Mitch was remembering the way she had paled at the sight of Herbie, and the way Herbie had slapped her to silence before they left. The silence was permanent now.
“What happened?” he demanded. “How do you know she’s dead?” And across the table The Duchess dropped a cigarette butt into her coffee cup and shuddered.
“I found her body,” she said.
This was the incredible part of her story; the part she couldn’t understand herself. She had no business walking into Rita’s apartment when there was no response to her knock—not even if the door was ajar and a light burning. And it was all Mitch’s fault. If he’d been at home when she tried to reach him with that report of Pinky’s prowler, she wouldn’t have gone to Rita at all.
“I don’t know what I had in mind,” she admitted. “A woman-to-woman talk, maybe. After all, Rita has a charge hanging over her—” The Duchess paused and then brought her tenses up to date. “Had a charge hanging over her,” she corrected. “I thought reminding her of that might encourage a little co-operation. But knocking on the door caused it to come open, and the temptation was too much. She could have gone out without realizing the latch hadn’t caught. It seemed a wonderful opportunity to look for clues.”
Mitch was trying to follow, but this was something new. “Clues?” he echoed. “What clues?”
“Use your imagination! Little black books and such. A woman like Rita could have some very interesting memoirs, and some of them might concern Virginia Wales.”
“I yield,” Mitch said. “Go ahead.”
“That’s exactly what I did. I went straight ahead to where the light was coming from—the bedroom; but all I found was a half-empty bottle of rum and Rita’s remains.”
She tried to sound casual, but for all her outspoken ways The Duchess did lead a sheltered life. Turning up an unexpected corpse didn’t come under the heading of social events, and her hand was trembling as she lit up a fresh cigarette.
But now that he was getting used to the idea, Mitch’s spirits rose. “That’s it!” he cried. “That’s the break I’ve been waiting for! Killing Rita only proves there’s something behind Virginia’s death!”
It was all very clear to Mitch, but The Duchess failed to share his enthusiasm.
“Outside of you and me,” she observed, “just who associates Rita Royale with the Wales case? And who said anything about her being murdered?”
“But you just said—” Mitch began.
“—that she was dead. Listen to me, Mitchell. Just close your mouth again and listen to me.
“Rita was in bed when I found her, all tucked in for the night. I thought she was asleep until I tried to awaken her. The rum bottle and a glass were on the bedside table—the whole room smelled like a cheap saloon—and also a small box containing a few pellets of what Auntie Atturbury analyzed as sleeping-pills. I hate to be a-kill-joy, but I’ll bet a month’s pay this one draws a verdict of accidental overdose while intoxicated, or just plain old-fashioned suicide.”
That was The Duchess. Straight to the point and to hell with his sensitive nature. But it just couldn’t be. Rita’s death was too convenient, and there was that little scene in Mexicali to remember. There was a limit to how far credulity would stretch.
But there was nothing wrong with The Duchess’s reasoning. He could just see Ernie leaning a sympathetic ear toward any claim to a tie-in between the deaths of these two blondes! The burden of proof rested with Mitch Gorman.
“What time was all this?” he demanded.
The Duchess came up with a quick frown. “I really didn’t take time to look at my watch,” she recalled, “but maybe I can track it down. After leaving Pinky’s alley I went directly to your place, but you weren’t home. Then I remembered that you had a pile-up on your desk this afternoon, so I drove back uptown to the office. I was rattling the doorknob when a prowl car came along and turned the spotlight on me. It was that big policeman who found Virginia’s body—Hoyt. When I told him what I wanted, he said you’d gone to Mexicali with Mrs. Wales and hadn’t come back yet so far as he knew. I looked at my watch then and it was after eleven. It must have been eleven-thirty when I left her.”
Mitch was about to make a point, but this last statement brought him up short. “When you left her?” he repeated.
“Did you just walk off and leave her there?”
“I didn’t exactly walk. What did you expect me to do? Take her home with me?”
“It’s customary to notify the police when you find a corpse.”
“Not when you’re housebreaking! For your information, Mitchell, I intend to be the most surprised mortal in town when Rita’s body is discovered!”
“Then nobody knows about Rita’s death,” Mitch mused, “except you and me—and whoever slipped those pills into her nightcap.”
Half an hour ago he’d been annoyed by that telephoned invitation. Half an hour ago he’d been tired and ready to hit the sack. But now the night was getting young again, and Mitch was getting ideas. The Duchess seemed to sense trouble on the way.
“Maybe it really was an accidental dosage,” she suggested.
“At that hour?” Mitch challenged. “I saw Herbie hustle Rita out of that bar in Mexicali somewhere around ten o’clock. At eleven-thirty you find her dead. Use your head, Duchess. A night-blooming flower like Rita Royale doesn’t woo the sandman in what, for her, is practically the middle of the afternoon. Even if it was an accident, which I don’t believe for an instant, Rita didn’t take those pills herself.”
It sounded good when he said it, especially when he said it real loud. The Duchess sighed and dropped another cigarette butt into her coffee.
“All right.” She sighed. “Let’s go. I don’t know what that gleam in your eye means, but I’m going to find out.”
The night was just a baby out at the Club Serape, where life was an upside-down affair and dawn was just the signal to close the doors and count the take. The parking-lot was crowded, as usual, but Mitch waved aside the white-coated attendant and drove around to the service entrance. Tha
t’s where he found what he was looking for—Dave’s speedster with the open top all zipped over with a cute canvas cover like a baby in its bunting.
“Look familiar?” he suggested, and The Duchess bore him out. “That’s it!” she cried. “That’s the car I saw racing away from Pinky’s!”
Of course it was, and unless Mitch had missed a signal somewhere the owner wasn’t far away. “Wait for me,” he said, slipping out from behind the wheel. “I won’t be long.” The Duchess was raising a protest when he left, but this was one time Mitch wanted to go stag. Anything could happen if too many questions made Dave nervous.
Everything was normal inside the club. The usual people were burning candles at both ends and not enough light came from the lot to find one’s weary way home. Mitch tried the bar first, but Dave wasn’t there. Since he was back in circulation something must have convinced him the heat was off, or else he was getting careless—a trait Vince Costro vigorously discouraged. Mitch didn’t expect volunteered information in any event; he just wanted one good look at Dave’s face when he mentioned Rita Royale. Rita’s death was neat—too neat for Herbie’s horny hand unless it really was an accident, and Dave had been in Valley City at the right time.
Mitch was checking the dining-room while giving these thoughts a trial run, and it was a bit of a surprise suddenly to have that same horny hand fastened on his shoulder. But Herbie couldn’t help being menacing. That was nature’s mistake.
“Vince wants to see you,” he said, “in his office.”
Herbie the errand boy, the nursemaid, the handyman. Mitch might have known he couldn’t set foot in the club without his presence being reported. “You really get around, don’t you?” he remarked, as Herbie led the way to Costro’s office. “How’s Rita? Sleeping it off?”
Herbie looked right at him as he opened the door, but his face didn’t register a thing.
Vince Costro appreciated the simple things of life, things that could be had for nothing but money. Everything in his office was big, expensive, and without taste—a perfect example of matching the surroundings to the man. But Vince wasn’t alone, and Dave looked a little silly swimming in that huge leather chair.
“Look who’s back,” Mitch murmured. “What’s the matter? Forget your water colors?”
Apparently Dave wasn’t up on the latest repartee because his frown didn’t change at all. But Vince’s smile was big enough for both of them. “Dave didn’t know you were looking for him,” he explained. “He hurried back as soon as he heard.”
“That’s nice of him,” Mitch said.
“Sure it is, but that’s Dave all over. Always anxious to get along with everybody. Ain’t that right, Dave?”
Dave looked about as friendly as an embittered cobra; but if Vince said he wanted to get along, he wanted to get along. “I just went for a drive,” he muttered. “It was a nice day for a drive.”
“In more ways than one,” Mitch agreed. “But you should have taken your girl. She got lonesome.”
“He means Rita,” Herbie volunteered. “You remember Rita.”
Herbie only meant to be helpful, but the awkward silence following his contribution to the friendship club suggested that nobody here was supposed to know Rita from the president of the P.T.A. But that wouldn’t work; not after the touching scene in Mexicali.
“Sure, we all remember Rita,” Vince said, switching back to a full-face smile. “But I didn’t call you in here to shoot the breeze about some bar fly, Mr. Gorman. I got to thinking about you chasing all the way out here today just to see Dave, and a hard-working man like yourself shouldn’t have to go to all that trouble. So I asked Dave to drop around and explain things. You happened in just at the right time.”
Mitch wasn’t the man to call Vince Costro a liar—not in his own territory—but he had the distinct impression that the time was anything but right. These boys needed a rehearsal. Herbie had opened his mouth at the wrong time, and Dave looked as if he’d just arrived at a formal party without his pants. But the show was going on, hot or cold, because Vince wanted it that way.
“That was me you saw at Pinky’s,” Dave admitted grudgingly. “I drop in for coffee sometimes, and I used to kid around with Virginia like everybody else. She was always friendly and good for a laugh. So I got mad when I heard she’d been killed. What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” Mitch said. “All I want to know is who it was you had in mind when you started cussing.”
“What do you think? The rat that killed her!”
“Whose identity you didn’t know.”
“I didn’t then, but I read the papers.”
“There, you see.” Vince beamed. “Nothing for anybody to get excited about.”
Nothing at all. Dave was as innocent as a babe in arms, and his story would stick until somebody blasted it. At the moment Mitch didn’t even have a fuse, but those bright and shining faces were getting on his nerves. “Nothing to get excited about,” he repeated, “and no reason for Dave to be so touchy when I tried talking to him last night.”
“I thought you were trying to pin something on me,” Dave wailed. “You know how it is. Have a little trouble with the law and everybody’s always trying to pin something on you!”
“Sure, I know. Any little thing from breaking into a Main Street hash house right up to murder.”
Mitch let that drop just to hear it land. The silence was such a welcome relief. Now everybody waited, watching to see how far he was going to go and how well he was taking to the yarn. Have it any way you like, Vince’s eyes were saying. Have it easy or have it rough; there’s always a choice with Vince Costro.
But Mitch wasn’t one to be the life of somebody else’s party—especially when it was so private. “If that’s all you wanted I’ll be moving along,” he said. “It’s getting late for a man who has to be on the job in the morning, and you never know whose body may turn up next.”
Mitch almost took a few random fenders with him when he jockeyed the coupé back to the highway and headed for home, and he was too mad to care. Not that he’d expected the truth from Dave Singer, but that bland trio back in Costro’s office was a little too smug for their own good. They didn’t seem to realize the fire hazard in pouring too much oil on troubled waters.
“You don’t believe that yarn, do you?” The Duchess asked. This was after he’d calmed down enough to relate the great unburdening.
“Like I believe Vishinsky,” Mitch muttered. “But what difference does it make? They’re three against one. What puzzles me is why Dave had to tell any story at all. Why not go on avoiding me instead of waving that olive branch? I don’t have a thing on anybody.”
“Maybe they don’t know that. Nobody recorded that conversation you had with Rita.”
That was an interesting thought, and a rather unpleasant one in view of what had happened to Rita. But The Duchess was right. They couldn’t know what Rita had said. Even if Herbie pumped her, she was in no condition to remember. If only she had said something! If only she’d been just a little more drunk and a little less careful—and then Mitch remembered what he’d been thinking of just before The Duchess announced her untimely demise.
“Did it ever occur to you,” he mused, as they approached the city limits, “that there must be a lot of money changing hands in this town? Off the record, I mean.”
“Meaning protection?” The Duchess suggested.
“Well, that, too. But that’s not all I meant. Vince Costro runs his own little empire. An empire has to have an emperor and a palace guard, but it also has to have peasants. Small fry. Expendables.”
“Like Virginia?”
“Perhaps. Like Rita, certainly. But there are others. There must be.”
The Duchess was a bright girl; she caught on fast. “But the money,” she said, “shouldn’t it show?”
“That’s what I’m driving at. You know most of the big brass in this town. How would you go about checking the status of anybody’s piggy bank?”
“Then you know him well enough to ask questions.”
The Duchess grinned wickedly. “That’s exactly what led to our divorce,” she said. “But anything for the cause of justice.”
That helped some. Just having one small iron scheduled for the fire took some of the sting out of that family circle meeting at the Club Serape, but Mitch wasn’t finished yet. Rita was dead. Suicide, accident, or murder, it was still a job for the police. Seeing the inevitable patrol car when he turned onto Main Street was a reminder of that; but before the law and the meat wagon took care of Rita, Mitch wanted one unhampered look at that apartment. The Duchess had gone in to look for a little black book. Her mission wasn’t accomplished due to a slight detour by way of the bedroom, and even at this hour the idea had merit.
Outside of the police car and an ancient truck with one weak taillight, there wasn’t a sign of life anywhere. At this hour you could die of loneliness on Main Street, and Rita’s apartment was several blocks off the thoroughfare. “We’re going the wrong way!” The Duchess protested, when he made a quick right turn; but that was only because she didn’t know Rita was going to have company again. She didn’t like the idea a bit when he told her.
“Suppose we’re caught,” she protested. “How do we explain being in there with a corpse?” But by this time Mitch had switched off the lights and was making the rest of the way by moonlight—just in case any of the neighbors had insomnia.
He parked and pulled a flashlight out of the glove compartment. “Come on,” he said.
“I’ll wait here and be lookout,” The Duchess offered.
“You’ll come with me and be lookout—and be quiet about it, too.”
They made it to the building without incident, and once through the entrance it was easy. Rita’s door was deep in the shadows of that dimly lighted hall where nobody would pay attention to a couple of late homecomers fumbling with the lock. The catch was still off. When they were both inside and the door closed behind them, Mitch switched on the flash.
Obit Delayed Page 7