My Business is Murder

by Kane, Henry

  There was a curious last paragraph to the clipping. Earlier that evening, at eleven o’clock, Henry Moore’s home in Queens had been burnt to the ground. The fire had broken out in four of the seven rooms of the wooden edifice and was “undoubtedly of incendiary origin.”

  I finished and leaned back.

  Casey Moore said, “Nice, huh?”

  I didn’t say anythingthing. I returned the clipping.

  Casey Moore said, “Impossible. Absolutely crazy. It couldn’t happen.”

  “What have you done about it?”

  “Couldn’t happen,” he said. “Nobody can talk me into it. I knew my old man. I loved the guy. It … it must have been someone else.”

  “Think so, Casey?”

  He shook his head slowly. “No.”

  “What have you done? Up to now?”

  “Went to the cops. To find out. To get squared away on this thing.” His voice moved up a notch. “No question. It was my father.”

  “Whom did you speak to there?”

  “A Captain Weaver at Police Headquarters. I saw photographs, everything. I told him it couldn’t happen, not my father, it couldn’t happen, something was wrong, something was crazy …” His voice dribbled out. He was silent, staring, looking at the blank wall over my head. Then he said: “Captain Weaver was a nice man. He was kind and sympathetic. But he said it did happen, that the proof was all in, that the case was closed, and that one way or another, my father was dead, and why didn’t I leave it alone?”

  I pushed back out of my swivel chair, stood up, stretched my legs, went to the window and looked out on the many people scurrying along the New York street. It was a warm spring day, one of the best kind of days in the city. The sun was a dappled yellow blanket, there was a soft breeze, and the colors of the city were bright and clear. I kept looking out the window, the breeze on my face. I said, “What do you want me to do, Casey?”

  He said, “Two years in a prison camp. It’s a lifetime.”

  I said nothing.

  “You get old like that,” he said. “You think old. Things come into perspective. You’ve got a lot of time to think. You grow up, you’re not a boy any more.”

  “What do you want me to do, Casey?”

  “Things come into perspective; the virtues you toss off as corny when you’re a boy. Love, honor, respect, integrity, stuff like that.” He rose and came near me at the window. “My father’s dead. But he’s dead as a murderer. That’s dreadfully wrong. And it’s important to me to prove that it’s wrong. Can you understand that, Mr. Chambers?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s what I want you to do for me. The police won’t—because for them it’s over. The proof is perfect and the case is closed. All they’ve got now is me ranting that it couldn’t happen. I suppose every son thinks it can’t happen to his father.”

  “Casey.”

  “Yes?”

  “What makes you think I won’t agree with the concept of the police?”

  “I don’t think anything. I’m appealing to you. I tell you my father was not a thief and he was not a murderer. I tell you that and you must believe me. I want you to prove that. Prove that for me.”

  “And if I can’t? If it’s impossible?”

  “Then at least I know I tried. And I don’t want you to work for nothing. I have no money now, no real money, But after you’re through—win, lose or draw—you’ll send me your bill and I’ll pay it, if it takes me a couple of years to pay it.”

  “Forget that bill stuff, will you, Casey?”

  “But—”

  “For now, forget it.” I moved away from the window. I reached for his pack on the desk, gave him a cigarette and took one for myself. I was about to offer him a light but thought the better of it. I lit mine. He lit his. I said, “Henry Moore. You say he couldn’t steal.”

  “That’s right. It wasn’t in him.”

  “Could he kill?”

  Smoke flickered from his nostrils. He was quiet a moment, thinking. He said, “My father would be capable of killing … in self-defense, perhaps.” Silence again, then: “And, I believe, in one other case. Euthanasia.”

  “Youth and what?”

  “Mercy killing. He was bugged on the subject. Talked about it often. For instance, if I, his son, were incurably ill and in pain, and the doctors said there was absolutely no hope, my father believed that someone like that, even if it were his own son or himself should be put out of his misery.”

  “I’m not talking about that. I mean, killing, putting a gun to a human being and pumping bullets. Like what happened to Mrs. Adams.”

  “He couldn’t do it. Absolutely not. He couldn’t have broken into a house, and murdered a strange woman.”

  “But he did, didn’t he? The police aren’t crazy. According to you, they had it foursquare, and it’s stacked away as closed.”

  “Sure. That’s the way it looked, and maybe … maybe that’s the way it was. But I won’t believe it. I want it checked again. By you. From the beginning. I’d do it myself, if I knew how. Will you give it a try, Mr. Chambers? Will you, sir? Please?”

  “Yes, I will.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Forget it.”

  “And now … is there anything I can do to help?”

  “You can go on about your business, and don’t broadcast that you’re around the town. And don’t talk about this to anyone. I know where I can reach you and I’ll report to you—as you put it—win, lose or draw. Fair enough?”

  “The best.”

  I took him to the door. I said, “Good-bye, lad. I’ll be in touch.”

  Caper, they call it. When a private detective goes to work on a case they call it a caper. I once looked it up in a dictionary. It means: “a playful leap or spring, a prank.” Well, how do you go about leaping and springing on a matter like this? Where do you begin on a playful little springing prank that already involves arson, burglary, and two violent deaths?

  You start by walking the office carpet and you scratch your head. You think of a kid with old eyes and faith in his father and you wonder whether it isn’t just that: faith—splendid and soul-deep and unswerving, but hopeless against the impersonal logic of the law. You think of a father who went all the way out for a kid, who brought him up strong, who lost him to a cockpit over fighting armies; and then you think of a kid who comes back out of the dead to find his father branded a thief and a murderer; and you hope with all the miserable hope that is in you that you can do something for him. You kick once at the carpet, march through to the outer office, slam on a hat, wave to your secretary, and you go to the source. You go to Police Headquarters.

  Captain Edgar Weaver was a detective out of Homicide, practiced in his profession for thirty years. He was bald and thin with black lashes around white-gray uncompromising eyes: when he turned them up at you they hit like sudden headlights out of the dark. Weaver gave a man his due—plain citizen, incorrigible hood, suspected murderer, or private detective. He said, “What do you figure to do that cops can’t do? Or haven’t done?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I want to do whatever I can to give that kid a break.”

  “That’s an excellent notion. But I repeat—it’s open and shut. So how are you going to change it?”

  “Open and shut—that way you don’t have to dig too hard.”

  “You can’t dig when you’ve hit bottom, Mr. Peeper. That file is sitting there right in front of you.”

  “File,” I said. I looked at it a bit. Then I said, “How come you people have a file on it? It happened up there in Westchester. Mamaroneck. That’s not New York City business.”

  “No, but Henry Moore was a Queens resident. That’s New York City business. We were called in, and we’ve got duplicates of everything in the Westchester file.”

  “The cops there satisfied?”

  “Perfectly. Plus the Coronet Insurance Company paid out two hundred thousand dollars. The woman was insured for a hundred with double indem
nity for accidental death. They paid the double indemnity in full. So you see you’ve really got it stacked against you, Mr. Peeper. You’ve got cops satisfied, and an insurance company satisfied. You think you can break that down?”

  “Tell you the truth, I don’t. But I’d like to give it a whirl.”

  “I’ve got nothing against that.”

  “Anything you can tell me on it?”

  “You’ve got the file in front of you.”

  “Files make me dizzy. Any angles?”

  His grey eyes shot up at me. “One. The guy didn’t have to break in. The front door was open.”

  “Any explanation?”

  “Well, Mr. Edward Adams got home about an hour before the attempted burglary. He had been in New York. Maybe he was a little tanked up. Maybe he left it open. He has no recollection on it.”

  “Happens. But how’d the cops know that door was open?”

  “Because there was no forced entry and the dead man had no key to the premises on his person.”

  I glanced down at the file again. I said, “Two hundred thousand dollars. That’s a lot of potatoes. Who’s this Edward Adams?”

  “Owns the Stardust Room over in Jersey.”

  “That Eddie Adams?”

  “You know him?”

  “Never actually met him but I’ve heard enough about him, and I know that Stardust Room, know it well. Beautiful joint.”

  “Only opened about six months ago, and it took them six months before that to build it. Eddie Adams and a partner, Jack Rawlings.”

  “Don’t know him either. But I know the manager of the place, Matt—.” I grabbed at the file again, read one of the sheets and put it down. “Anything smell, Captain?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like Matt Bennett being the witness?”

  “Might, except for Mrs. Adams’ statement. She gave the Westchester police a full statement before she died. Coincided exactly with the facts as given both by Adams and Bennett.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah.” I brought out a cigarette and put fire to it. “How old is this Eddie Adams now?”

  “Sixty-three. Playboy type. Has been all his life.”

  “And the wife, Dorothy Adams?”

  “She was sixty when she died. That’s a year ago remember.”

  “Any one of them have the acquaintance of this Henry Moore?”

  “Not a one. Complete stranger. You got the statements right there in front of you. And you got a statement there from a Robert Crawford that sort of fixes the whereabouts of Henry Moore that day. Actual date is May 10th. Happened at two o’clock that night, which makes it May 11th. Take a look at that statement.”

  I looked.

  Robert Crawford owned a roadside motel and tavern in Mamaroneck near the Adams home. A man, since identified as Henry Moore, had checked into the motel at six o’clock of the evening of May 10th. He had retired to his room with no baggage. He came out again at about midnight, had a few drinks and a meal, lingered over another few drinks until about one-forty-five, and then left. He never returned. The next day, after the attempted burglary and the shootings, Robert Crawford saw a picture of him in the local newspaper, and identified the body in the morgue as the person who had been his recent lodger.

  “Satisfied?” Captain Weaver said.

  “Certainly puts him at the scene of the crime. What about that other thing?”

  “What other thing?”

  “The house that burnt down. Henry Moore’s. That happened at eleven on the evening of the same May 10th.”

  “Burned. Period. A wooden firetrap. Burned all the way down, and everything in it that was burnable.”

  “Any dope on that?”

  “Somebody put the torch to it, no question. Maybe an enemy, maybe vandals, maybe crazy kids.” Weaver closed his eyes and leaned back. “Not much for you to go on, is there?”

  “No, sir, there ain’t.”

  “It’s open and shut, Chambers. Open and shut.”

  “You don’t mind if I nose around on it anyway?”

  “Not at all. That’s a nice kid, that Casey Moore.” His eyes opened and he came forward in his chair. “Call me if anything pops.”

  “Eddie Adams.” I collected my hat and went to the door. “That’s a guy with a lot of loot.”

  “They all have their ups and downs.”

  “He used to own the Diamond Circle, didn’t he?”

  “That’s the guy but that joint folded.”

  “Stardust Room’s a bang-up success though.”

  “Couldn’t last a day in New York. It’s in the municipality of Lake Manor. Local government covers it and those babies cover local government. By those babies, I mean Eddie Adams.”

  “He still live up there in Mamaroneck?”

  “No. He’s nearer our bailiwick now. Moved to an estate out at Lido.” He reached across his desk for the file, pulled it to him, closed it and spread his hands across the cover. “That’s it, Mr. Peeper. It’s my hunch you’re banging your head against a wall. You figure to bounce off bruised. Maybe I’m wrong. I’ve been wrong before. Good-bye and keep in touch. Have fun.”

  I called the office for messages but there were no messages because the office was closed. I checked the time: it was six o’clock. I came out of the phone booth and into the air and I breathed deep of the soot of springtime in New York. I had time to kill. I had nothing to do until at least eleven o’clock. I took a cab up to 46th Street and had a meal of Mexican food. I practiced my Spanish with the waiter, paid, went out and walked home. Home is 59th Street off Sixth Avenue which is Central Park South when you wish to be impressive. The pall of twilight was descending. Twilight. Romantic word. Twilight can mean the setting of a red ball of sun, the haze of sweet-smelling dusk, distant mountains folding into vapor, the hypnotic aroma of flowers going to sleep: the soft, restful, fragile, precariously beautiful moment of pause as the long day merges into night. Not in New York. In New York, twilight is dirty; there is the smell of gasoline exhaust, the honking of horns, the rumble of buses, the screech of brakes, the gutters clogged, the streets black with the hurrying people, the shift from day to night, the break from work-time to play-time, the eight million souls doing the switch, the feeding of eight million mouths, the fury accelerating, the people of the night beginning to come alive. Eight million people clustered on a pinpoint of the universe, each an individual enclosed in his own thoughts and wrapped in his own desires; and one, without an arm and with a crevice in his stomach, holed up somewhere in a second-rate hotel on upper Broadway, eating his heart out because he came back from the dead to be slapped by the shock of an incredible incident, fresh to him but ancient to the rest of us, already a year old and a closed item in a musty file.

  I went home and I showered and shaved. I tried to nap but I couldn’t sleep. I watched a night baseball game on television and sipped beer from the cans. Then I dressed carefully, in a blue suit, black shoes, white shirt and dark tie. I thought about wearing a holster and gun but rejected that. I put out the lights, locked up and walked across to Eighth Avenue where my garage was located. I don’t often use my car. There are traffic problems in New York and parking problems. But I was going out of New York. I was going to Jersey, to the town of Lake Manor, the chief industry of which was a night club called the Stardust Room.

  It was only six months in existence, the Stardust Room, but already it was the most notorious trap on the East Coast. It was a small but beautiful establishment built at a reputed cost of a half million dollars. The entertainment was the best and most exclusive in the land, the food superb, the service obsequious, the music distinguished, and the soft lighting and intimate décor could convert a left-handed lady tugboat queen to a glamour doll with poise. The Stardust Room had most of the qualifications necessary for the assured success of a night club but it had added one more. Within two months of its opening, word wafted over to the big town that if you had a taste for gambling and decried the furtive hush-hush of the usual floating
crap games, you didn’t have to journey to Las Vegas: the basement rooms of the Stardust were running lush and wide open. There had been a change in the political administration of the town of Lake Manor—and the wise boys had moved in. It was a half hour’s ride from midtown Manhattan through the Lincoln Tunnel. I had been there several times before, but this was the first time I was going on business.

  I turned the car over to the parking attendant, crunched across on gravel and walked up six marble steps into the wide anteroom that housed the bar. I ordered Scotch and water and looked across the bar into the room proper. It was going full blast, crowded with dancing couples in evening clothes.

  “Busy,” I said to the bartender.

  “Never let’s up here.”

  “Matt Bennett around?”

  “Who’s asking?”

  “Peter Chambers.”

  His smile was more sneer than smile. “Who’s Peter Chambers?”

  “Me.”

  “Who’re you?”

  “Peter Chambers.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Friend of Matt’s.”

  Unenthusiastically, he said, “Don’t mind if I check that, do you?”

  “I wish you would.”

  The smile stayed on his face as he looked me over, then he lifted a phone from a hook attached to the inner part of the bar. He talked into it but I couldn’t hear him. Then he hooked the phone back and now his smile had more respect. “He’s in his office, Mr. Chambers. You know where it is?”

  “Yes.” I paid my bar tab and left no tip. That finally killed his smile.

  To the left of the long bar was a carpeted stairway going down. The office of The Manager was at the foot of the stairs. I knocked on the door and it was opened by a slender man with a broken nose. He had a white scar over one eyebrow and squinting eyes like blue agates. He took one look at me, put a fist against my chest and shoved.

  “Out,” he said.

  I flicked off the fist and closed the door behind me. I said, “Remember me, Frankie?”

  “I remember you, fink. Too good I remember you.”