“John? Never.”
“Or why they were being sent?”
There was a long moment of silence. Then the old banker spoke softly.
“Mr. Ross, I detest gossip, but if what I’m about to tell you will help young Billy, I’ll indulge. Mary Emerich was a hellion. We had a good many soldiers around here during the war. One day, for no good reason, Mary went up to Canada. Ten months later she came back with a husband and a baby she said was one month old, but it was awfully big for a one-month-old baby. She moved in with her folks—her and her new husband—and sponged off them until Mary and her husband were killed. Riding in John’s car, incidentally.”
Ross frowned. “I don’t understand. You mean, Billy Dupaul was born in Canada? That he isn’t an American citizen?”
“No, sir. That’s precisely what I don’t mean. Billy Dupaul was born in Chicago, Illinois. I know, because the money orders for the nursing home and the doctors cleared through me. John Emerich knew he could trust me.” The round face looked a bit forlorn. “Or he could until today …”
Ross disregarded the statement.
“What you are saying, Mr. Howard, is that Pierre Dupaul was not Billy’s father. And in your opinion it was the real father who kept sending Emerich money for the boy’s support. Until he came of age.”
“That’s right, Mr. Ross.”
“And you have no idea who that man was?”
Again there was a long pause from the elderly banker. Ross suddenly knew he was on the verge of discovery.
Mr. Howard spoke slowly.
“Mr. Ross, you asked me before if John ever told me who was sending the money that supported Billy, and I said he didn’t. Nor did he. But even us old codgers in these small towns get to banking conventions once in a while, and the chief cashier of the Hudson River Bank is a friend of many years. And one night, over cocktails, I asked him who was sending these cashier’s checks to a little bank like ours in Queens-bury—”
“And he told you?”
“Blame the infernal martinis, Mr. Ross, and my unconscionable curiosity. Don’t blame my cashier friend. But he told me.”
It was like squeezing blood from a rock; then he saw the hazel eyes twinkling and he knew Mr. Norwood Howard was purposely keeping him on tenterhooks.
Ross smiled. “And it was?”
“His name was Quirt,” Mr. Howard said evenly. “Charles Quirt.”
Ross saw Mike Gunnerson’s grizzled head appear at the cabin door of his plane as it stopped in Albany to take on passengers. Ross noted his friend with pleasure. For one thing, they would be able to discuss the case on the flight to the city and thus save time; for another, Mike must have started the Quigley Agency on the job or he wouldn’t have been on the plane. Mike never left jobs half finished.
Gunnerson looked about the small cabin, located Ross, and dropped into the adjoining seat. He found his seat belt and fastened it, and then faced Ross.
“Well? Any luck tracing Old John’s money?”
“You first,” Ross said. “I gather you got the Quigley Agency working on Anne—and Grace—Melisi. Are they any good?”
“Who? The Melisi girls?”
“The agency!” Ross said with a touch of asperity.
“Oh, I didn’t bother with them for that. I’ve got them on something else,” Mike said airily. “I found Grace Melisi myself.”
Ross grinned. “You dog! Holding out on me! Where did you find her? And when do we get her to New York?”
“We don’t,” Mike said, his face now somber. “She’s dead. I found her in the cemetery.”
“Dead!”
“That’s right.”
“Since when?”
“A little over two years.”
“Natural causes?”
“Completely,” Gunnerson said with conviction. “I spoke with the doctor who signed the certificate, as well as with the coroner, although they didn’t need an autopsy. She died in the county sanitorium. Tuberculosis. She’d had it for years.”
“Damn!” Ross bit his lip and stared from the window, thinking. All the triumph he had been feeling at having discovered Quirt’s identity in the matter was wiped away by the news of Grace Melisi. Ross suddenly realized how much he had been depending on locating the woman. The plane was lifting off; he turned to Gunnerson. “Where do we go from here?”
“I’m still having the Quigley Agency check on her background. Her sister moved some time ago, and we’re looking for her. Maybe she can tell us something. If we find her. When does the trial start?”
“The day after tomorrow. You know that.”
“I guess my subconscious was trying to protect me by making me forget,” Mike said with a smile.
“Anything on a boyfriend?”
“That’s another thing the agency is checking out. I spoke with a few of her friends at the sanitorium; apparently she never married.”
“Well, pray they come up with something.”
“Right,” Mike said. The lighted seat-belt sign went off; Mike loosened his belt without removing it. “Your turn, now. What did you find out about John Emerich and his money?”
“Billy Dupaul was born out of wedlock,” Ross said quietly. “Pierre Dupaul apparently was a husband of convenience. It seems the true father sent a monthly check from the time Billy was a baby until he came of age.”
“Anyone we know?”
“Charley Quirt,” Ross said evenly.
“Quirt!”
“That’s right. It explains a few things that have been bothering me, but it complicates a lot more.” Hank raised a finger. “One, it probably explains what Marshall told Billy that night in the hotel that got him started off on that binge—”
“I can see where, to a kid like Billy Dupaul, someone telling him his folks weren’t married—and with liquor in the place—would not only get him mad but start him making a few inroads into the bottles,” Mike said. “There’s only one question.”
Ross looked at him without speaking.
“How would Marshall have known? Was it common knowledge in Glens Falls? Or Queensbury? And if it was, how come Billy never heard it?”
“It wasn’t common knowledge,” Ross said slowly. “You’ve just raised a damned good question. Obviously, somebody used Marshall. Told him the story and asked him to pass it on to Billy.”
“But even so, why would Marshall do it? I thought that up until then they were supposed to be good friends?”
“I’d guess that the operative word in that sentence is ‘supposed,’” Ross said. “My hunch is that Marshall probably hated Billy all his life. It’s pretty tough taking favors all your life.” He suddenly snapped his fingers. “And I have another hunch—”
“We have another hunch,” Gunnerson said. “If Marshall had been paid to start Billy off on that binge, then Marshall could also have been paid to hand over the gun to the payer. Right?”
“Very right,” Ross said. “And when Don Evans started nagging Marshall for information, someone got nervous. And that was the end of Marshall.” He turned around to Gunner-son. “Mike, what do you think?”
“I think it only leaves one question.”
“What’s that?”
“Who,” Mike said, and turned to look out the window across the plane.
CHAPTER
14
Hank Ross entered his office the following morning to find a strange girl in charge of the telephone switchboard. She was extremely young, slight, and very blue-eyed. He frowned and started to walk past the small barrier into the central offices, when she held up her hand. It was tiny with long red nails that looked as if they had been honed, but the gesture was authoritative.
“I’m sorry,” she said haughtily. “It isn’t permitted that people who are strangers should just barge in unannounced, like. Might I ask to whom you desire to speak?”
Hank shook his head in disbelief at the language, biting back his first comment.
“I’m sorry,” he said finally, trying to sound
contrite. “You’re quite right, of course. Is Miss McCloud here?”
“Half a sec.” A cord was inserted into the board and a switch depressed. “Honey? Are you in? Who? I don’t know. Should I ask him? Sure, honey.” The baby-blue eyes came up. “What’s your name, mister?”
“Ross,” Hank said politely. “Hank Ross.”
A pad was obtained and a pencil picked up. Blue eyes came up, anxious to do the job properly.
“How do you spell it?”
“The same as on the top of the pad you’re using,” Hank said, trying to be helpful.
“Oh? Gee, thanks.” The girl spoke into the mouthpiece of her headset. “He says his name is Hank Ross, honey. R-O-S-S. What’s that? What!” She dragged the cord from the switchboard, looking at Hank with justified resentment. “You should have told me you were the boss. I was told to keep people out unless they were announced—”
“And you did very well,” Ross said hastily, and escaped past the barrier.
Sharon was grinning widely as he came into his office, shedding his coat.
“Sic transit gloria mundi,” she said. “Imagine! A telephone operator who doesn’t recognize the great Hank Ross on sight!”
“Merely the generation gap,” Hank said with a smile. “I’ll bet her mother wouldn’t have made that mistake. By the way, where is Molly?”
“She doesn’t have the iron constitution I gave her credit for,” Sharon said. “Dancing, yes. She can dance all night and still come into the office bright and fresh. But she’ll never make it on skid row. One drink is about her limit.”
“And how many did she have?”
“When I had an unlimited expense account at my beck and call? And instructions to ply them both with liquor and worm out their secrets? She had six,” Sharon said. “Doubles.”
“My God! I hope she gets back to work in a week!” Ross sat down at his desk. “I told you to entertain them, not to poison them!”
“Oh, she liked them at the time,” Sharon said airily. “And her boyfriend Jimmy didn’t turn a hair.”
“What about her boyfriend Jimmy?”
“You mean, Target-for-Tonight? Well, Jimmy is a very nice man who honestly dances as well as Molly says. I also do not believe he is married, because he has that same unworried look you have, H. R. And my guess is that he came here looking for a dentist the other week about as much as he flew to the moon last Sunday.”
Ross frowned. “You’re sure?”
“Positive.”
“What makes you so sure?”
Sharon grinned. She said, “We spies usually don’t give away our secret methods, but considering the amount of money we spent last night, I expect you have a right to know. While we were dancing, I asked him how he finally came out with Dr. Gross, his dentist. And he said fine, all he needed was one small filling.”
“So?”
“So, to begin with, the last time he was here the dentist’s name was Ross, not Gross. And in the second place Jimmy suffers from never having been married; he’s had too little practice in lying. He stumbled over words and things like that.”
Ross frowned. “So what was he doing here?”
“That I never discovered,” Sharon admitted. “But at least we know he came here under completely false pretenses.”
“Did he ask about any of our current cases?”
“Well, he claimed to be a baseball fan. He said he remembered Billy Dupaul when he first came up to the Mets. Said he read you were handling the case, and said he hoped you’d get the boy off.”
“That’s all?”
“Well, he asked if you had any plans for the trial; said since he’d been going around with Molly he’d gotten interested in law. It was a natural enough question, I suppose. In any event, I told him you had no special plans, and that was that.”
Ross drummed his fingers restlessly on the desk top.
“It all sounds natural enough, but I don’t like it. I’d still like to know what brought him to the office, and with such a flimsy story. And making up to our telephone girl like that. What’s he after?”
“Maybe another night on the expense account would help, H. R.,” Sharon said, grinning. “Maybe we didn’t ply him with enough liquor.”
“I doubt we could justify it to the income tax people as a deduction,” Ross said, smiling, “let alone Charley Quirt. And speaking of Charles Quirt, would you get him on the line?”
Sharon drew over a telephone and managed to get the new girl to understand. A few minutes later she turned, the receiver cupped in her hand.
“He’s away for a few days.”
Ross’s eyes narrowed. Charley always seemed to be away when Billy Dupaul went to trial. Allergic to trials, possibly?
“Any message?” Sharon said.
“No,” Ross said shortly. “Get Steve in here. We have a trial coming up tomorrow!”
“So where do we stand?” Steve asked. His usual voluminous file of papers was beneath his hand, ready for instant reference. Both men were in their shirt sleeves; empty coffee cups were scattered about the long conference table. Hank Ross ran a hand through his thick hair.
“Out in mid-air,” he admitted. “Damn! We know the boy was the intended victim of a swindle scheme; both Bukvic and that private detective, Jennings, admitted it openly. But they won’t testify.”
“Can’t you subpoena them and make them testify?”
Ross shook his head definitively.
“No. If we have to put Coughlin on the stand, we’ll have one hostile witness. If all our witnesses were hostile we wouldn’t have a prayer with a jury no matter what we dragged out of them.”
“Mike Gunnerson was with you when you talked to Bukvic and Jennings,” Steve said. “Couldn’t you put Mike on the stand?”
“All that would do would be to ruin Mike as a private investigator without helping us a bit. With the relationship between my firm and his for the past years, Gorman would tear him apart. Not to mention that Bukvic would never talk to him again.”
“So what do we do?”
“I don’t know.” Ross bit his lip. “And Grace Melisi dead … Although she wouldn’t have testified if she weren’t.”
“Why not?” Sharon asked. “After all, even if she admitted taking part in a swindle eight years ago, the statute of limitations would have handled that. She couldn’t be charged.”
“Not on the swindle charge,” Ross said, “but the indictment here is murder, and she would have to admit handing the murder weapon to Billy. I doubt she’d do it. Anyway, she is dead, and we’re just wasting time.”
Steve said, “Maybe the sister—Anne Melisi—might know something when you locate her.”
“If Grace Melisi didn’t put it in writing—and I’m sure she wouldn’t have—then we wouldn’t be able to use it as evidence, anyway.” Ross shook his head. “Besides, we always come back to that damned pistol. Even if Marshall took it and gave it to somebody, who did he give it to?”
There were several moments of silence; then Steve spoke thoughtfully.
“I have an idea. What difference does it make about the gun? Suppose Billy admits he had the gun with him. Suppose he admits he was caught playing around with Neeley’s woman—”
“Neeley’s wife was in court,” Sharon pointed out. “Ex-wife, rather, and Dupaul denied it was her.”
“I said woman, not wife. Suppose we work on the basis that Neeley caught Billy with Neeley’s girlfriend, and in the argument Billy shot Neeley—no, in the struggle, Neeley got shot.” Steve began to warm to his defense. “That’s it. Neeley wouldn’t want to admit he couldn’t even go to the movies without his girlfriend putting out for a complete stranger; that’s why he made up that weird story about meeting Billy outside the bar. How’s that? On that basis couldn’t we still make a strong case for self-defense?”
“On that basis,” Ross said, “the first thing we would face is the fact that our client lied to the jury in his first trial. And the basis of our defense has been that he t
old the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Once we tore the fabric of his veracity, we’d undermine ourselves completely. That’s out!”
There were several minutes of silence. Ross sighed and reached for the phone.
“Molly—”
“She isn’t in today,” a bright voice said. “Would you care to leave a message?”
“No, thank you,” Hank said hurriedly, and hung up. He reached for the outside phone on his desk, looking at Sharon sheepishly. “I forgot. Where did you get her, by the way? Woolworth’s?”
“You won’t think so when you get the bill,” Sharon said, grinning. “She just happens to be a blithe spirit.”
“So let Noel Coward keep her,” Ross said, and dialed a familiar number. It rang once and was picked up. “Mike?”
“Hi, Hank.”
“Hello, Mike. What’s new? Wait a minute—I’ll put you on conference. I’m here with Sharon and Steve. We’re up here with all the papers on the Dupaul case, trying to discover how to walk on water.”
Mike’s deep voice filled the room as Ross pressed the conference button on the telephone, switching it through the small conference box.
“With what I’ve got for you, Hank, my suggestion would be real tall stilts. Oh, yes, for whatever help it is, I may have been a bit hasty up there in Albany yesterday—”
Steve leaned forward. “You mean, Grace Melisi isn’t dead?”
“If she isn’t, she should sue,” Mike said, “because they buried her. No, I mean I talked to some of her friends at the sanitorium, who said she’d never married. Quigley’s man up there had a little more imagination—not to mention time—and he checked out her pastor. It seems Grace was married and then divorced.”
Ross sat erect, his eyes sharp. “Who to? And when? That could be our missing boyfriend! That could be damned important!”
“The pastor didn’t know. I’ve got people working on the records here as well as in Albany, but they could have gotten married anywhere. And without the man’s name, it’s one hell of a lot of work to find it. Even if it was here or in Albany, it would take days and days. Maybe weeks.”
“Mike, that could be the answer! And we don’t have weeks, damn it! You should know that!”
A Handy Death Page 15