by Craig Rice
“Keep him here,” Bingo said, “until those seven days are up—well, six days, now. And you’ve got to help us, Baby. We can’t do it without you.”
She looked at Bingo, at Handsome’s appealing eyes; at Mr. Pigeon’s friendly smile, and said, “Well, how?”
“You can fix it up with Ma about my sick uncle,” Bingo said. “Now that we paid her a little of the rent, it won’t be so hard.”
“You know Ma,” Baby said, “but I’ll try.”
“Then,” Bingo told her, “you can help us guard Mr. Pigeon. Somebody’s got to be with him all the time. Me ’n’ Handsome have to go out some of the time, to tend to different things. So when one of us can’t be here, why, you can be here and look after him.”
“Because we can’t let him get away,” Handsome put in, “in case he should run out and get murdered.”
Baby and Mr. Pigeon looked at each other for a long moment.
“Do you play cribbage?” Mr. Pigeon asked her, almost timidly.
“You’re darned right I do,” Baby said enthusiastically. “I used to play all the time with my uncle when his ship put in to New York. I’ve got a board downstairs, too. Want I should run down and get it?”
A happy light came into Mr. Pigeon’s eyes. “Do,” he said happily.
“You see,” Bingo told Handsome fifteen minutes later, as they went down the stairs, “there’s a way of handling everything. Even women.”
Baby and Mr. Pigeon had finished the breakfast dishes while Handsome put the finished photographs in envelopes and addressed them, and Bingo put on the stamps. Then Baby had gone downstairs for her cards and cribbage board, and she and Mr. Pigeon had settled down for a game. She had promised not to let Mr. Pigeon out of her sight until either Bingo or Handsome, or both, returned.
“Problems,” Bingo went on, as they reached the sidewalk, “exist only in your imagination. There never was a problem yet that couldn’t be disposed of like—that!”
Handsome nodded. He was silent for about half a block. Then suddenly he began walking slowly, hands in his pockets, chin on his chest.
“You know, Bingo,” he said at last, “there’s one thing I’m kind of beginning to think that maybe we ought to do, if you think it’s all right.”
“Huh?” Bingo said.
“It seems to me,” Handsome said, “that, unless you don’t think so, we ought to, maybe, find out who murdered that Penneyth guy, that is, if we can do it.”
Bingo stopped dead-still in his tracks. “What’s got into you, Handsome?”
“It’s like this,” Handsome said, gazing intently at the toe of his shoe. “He can’t stay in that icebox forever, and sooner or later people are going to find out he’s been murdered. And the way things look now, maybe Baby and Mr. Pigeon are going to think perhaps we did it ourselves.”
He looked at Bingo, half embarrassed, and finished, “I wouldn’t mention it, Bingo, except I’m afraid if they do think so—they aren’t going to like it!”
CHAPTER TEN
Mr. Pigeon didn’t know that Harkness Penneyth had been murdered, Bingo reflected. And neither did Baby, of course. If they did know—that might alter everything.
“Let’s walk over to the park,” he told Handsome. “I want to think.”
They found an empty bench near the foot of Bolivar Hill and sat down. The place was deserted, save for an attendant engaged in picking up the litter left over from yesterday, a grim-looking nursemaid engaged in showing her charge how to toss peanuts to the friendly squirrels, and an elderly drunk asleep on the bench across the path.
There, just in front of one of the big trees, at the point where the path curved up Bolivar Hill, was the place where little Mr. Pigeon had come every Sunday to feed the birds. The place from which he had disappeared, almost seven years before, and to which he had mysteriously returned, only yesterday, to be accidentally caught in one of Bingo’s photographs.
“I wonder where he’s been all this time,” Bingo murmured. “I wonder why he ever went away in the first place, the way he did.”
Handsome said, “I wonder why he came back.”
Bingo nodded.
“And,” Handsome said, in the same, half-dreamy tone, “I wonder who got that letter we wrote to Mr. Penneyth, and how we’re gonna get it back. And I wonder why those gunmen picked us up last night, and what they wanted. And I wonder why that dame was following us around. And I wonder who’s gonna get that half-million bucks, with Mr. Penneyth dead, and how we’re gonna find out who it is. And,” he finished on a mournful note, gazing into the treetops, “I wonder who murdered that poor Mr. Penneyth.”
“You’re too damn curious,” Bingo growled. He lit a cigarette and flipped the match into the gravel path.
Handsome looked at him, his eyes wounded. “I was just thinking, Bingo. Did I—”
“No,” Bingo said hastily, “you didn’t do wrong. Go on thinking of the questions, and maybe pretty soon you’ll start thinking of the answers, too.”
“Not me,” Handsome said honestly. “I’m too dumb, Bingo.” There was a long silence, and then he said, “Maybe those gunmen killed him.”
Bingo shook his head. “Not those boys. They wouldn’t have hung around if they had. They were up there all right though—” He paused, scowled. “They were the guys who got our letter and called us up to come right over. Or else they wouldn’t have been hanging around outside, waiting for a ‘guy named Riggs.’ Which proves that they couldn’t have murdered him.”
“If you say so,” Handsome said, and then, “Why, Bingo?”
“Because,” Bingo said patiently, “Mr. Penneyth was murdered quite a while before, and they wouldn’t have been hanging around all that time. We figured that out last night. So it must have been they just happened along and were there when our letter came and decided to invite us over to join the party.”
“Why?” Handsome asked. “And why did they beat it when we got there?”
“I’ll figure that out when I get to it,” Bingo said severely.
“O.K.,” Handsome said, “O.K. But, Bingo, if they just happened to come in and found Mr. Penneyth, why didn’t they call the police?”
Bingo drew a long breath and said, “Why didn’t we?”
Handsome said, “Why, because—” And there was another long silence.
“Maybe the dame killed him,” Bingo said at last. “Maybe his being murdered doesn’t have anything to do with Mr. Pigeon, after all.” He was silent for a moment, his brows knit in thought. “She could have killed him and beat it. But maybe she forgot something and came back for it. Then she ran into us there and had to bluff it out. It could have been that way.”
“Bingo!” Handsome turned on him, genuinely shocked. “A girl like that wouldn’t murder anybody.”
“Wouldn’t she?” Bingo said. “That shows what you know about women.” There was just a faint touch of bitterness in his tone.
Handsome sighed, “Why did she follow us around the way she did, then?”
“I don’t know,” Bingo said. “Maybe she was lonesome.” He snapped his cigarette ten feet down the path. “Maybe she’s lonesome right now, Handsome. Let’s go and call on her, like she asked us to.”
“Sure,” Handsome said with alacrity. He rose and stood waiting while Bingo fumbled in his pocket for the address. “Only why, Bingo?”
“Because I’m lonesome, too,” Bingo said. He found the address, glanced at it, and began leading the way down the path. “And because she was Harkness Penneyth’s girl friend, and so she might know who’ll get that insurance with him dead. And if she does know, she might break down and tell us. And if she does tell us, then all of our troubles—well, hell, most of our troubles are over.” He thought of June Logan and was glad he’d put on the tan gabardine suit.
June Logan lived in a big apartment building near Seventy-second Street and Riverside Drive. Bingo and Handsome walked down to Seventy-second Street and then took a bus over to the drive. It had turned out to be anothe
r hot, steamy day, the bus was crowded and suffocating. By the time they reached the building and stepped into the elevator, Bingo felt uncomfortably sticky and soiled. He looked in the elevator mirror to see if the suit had become badly wrinkled, but it was hard to tell in such a small mirror. Oh, well, June Logan would be looking at Handsome anyway, not at him.
A cute little colored maid let them into the apartment and informed them, in an accent straight from Trinidad, that Miss Logan would be with them in a jiffy, and would they have rye, Scotch, bourbon, or gin, and with what.
Bingo said that he’d have Scotch and soda, and Handsome asked for gin, with a small beer on the side.
“I can’t help it,” he apologized to the disapproving Bingo after the maid had gone, “I like gin with a beer chaser, and she asked me, didn’t she?”
The maid came back with a tray. Bingo sipped his Scotch and soda, wished that he too had gin and beer, and looked around the room. It would probably have given an interior decorator nightmares, but Bingo admired it. The walls were paneled, dark-brown wood and dark-green plaster, up to a wide plate rail on which reposed a collection of odd-shaped teapots. Above the plate rail was a papered frieze, a hunk of woodland, a water mill, another hunk of woodland, and a picturesque cottage, repeated over and over all the way around the room. It hadn’t come out exactly even in the papering, and part of one of the water mills was missing.
There was a dark-red brick fireplace, with a collection of china dogs on the mantel; there were enormous overstuffed plush chairs and sofas, and highly polished walnut tables. There was a mahogany cabinet victrola, circa 1922, and a reproduction of The Angelus over the glass-enclosed bookcase in which reposed a complete set of the works of Sir Walter Scott.
Bingo reflected that June Logan had excellent taste. He didn’t know that she’d copied it, to every last detail, from a room in a house where her mother had gone twice weekly to do the heavy cleaning, back in Rock Island. To Bingo (as to June) it was a very beautiful room.
He felt a sudden twinge of something like disloyalty and hastily added, in his mind, that Baby could have fixed up just as beautiful a room, if she had the dough to spend on it.
“This would make an elegant undertaking parlor,” Handsome said under his breath. He intended it as a particularly high compliment.
Bingo said, “Ssh,” fast, because June Logan was coming in.
She was a very gorgeous girl, Bingo thought for the second time in two days. She’d evidently been brushing her hair when they arrived, and it was a thick cloud over her shoulders, so dark a red that even in daylight it appeared almost black. She might have just gotten out of bed, since she was wearing a deep-blue chiffon negligee over a lighter-blue chiffon nightgown that didn’t make any secret of her exquisite figure, but on the other hand, she had on a complete make-up job. A very artistic job, too, Bingo thought approvingly. He didn’t know that the mascara around her lovely blue eyes was navy blue instead of black, but he enjoyed the result.
“Well, boys,” she said, “I was expecting you to drop in this morning.” She sat down on one end of the big davenport before the fireplace and mixed herself a drink of bourbon and plain water. “And it wasn’t because a little bird told me, either.”
Bingo winced slightly at that “bird.” Because “bird,” to him, meant “Pigeon,” and he’d hoped June Logan didn’t know anything about that.
“Nor,” she said, “do I go to the expense of keeping a swami. It was just my feminine intuition. I had a hunch you’d want to come around and tell me the truth about things. So”—she lit a cigarette and leaned back against the cushions of the davenport—“give.”
“You’ve got it all backwards,” Handsome said earnestly. “We came to see you because we wanted you to tell us the truth.”
“That isn’t quite right,” Bingo said quickly. He wished he’d left Handsome at home, with Mr. Pigeon. “We do want to tell you the whole truth, Miss Logan. That’s really why we’re here.”
She smiled at him. “You’d better start calling me June,” she said, “because I’ve a feeling we’re going to be great friends. And for a long time. Go on.”
Bingo cleared his throat and gulped down the rest of his Scotch. “You see, it’s like this. We aren’t friends of Harkness Penneyth. We’ve never even seen him.” He caught himself just in time before adding “alive or dead.”
“This is more like it,” June said. “Keep it up, you’re interesting me.”
Bingo said, “We’re lawyers. We—represent someone who has reason to believe he is one of Mr. Penneyth’s heirs. So we’re interested in finding out who is named in Mr. Penneyth’s will.” He mixed another Scotch and soda. “That’s why we were in his apartment last night. We hadn’t been able to contact him in person, so we went to look around and see if we could find his will. That’s all.” He cleared his throat again, avoiding Handsome’s eyes. “So we came to see you today, because we thought maybe you’d know something about it.”
She sat bolt upright and looked at him very thoughtfully. “What does his will matter, when he’s alive? He might change it a dozen times.”
“Our client,” Bingo said stiffly, “believes in looking out for the future.”
“So much so,” she said scornfully, “that he sends his lawyers to do a piece of second-story work.”
Bingo put down his glass, hard. “In the legal profession,” he said, “anything can be expected.”
June Logan rose, walked over to the mantelpiece, and draped herself against it in a pose approved by every dress model since long skirts came back. “You two boys,” she said pleasantly, “are the most unconvincing pair of liars I’ve met in a long lifetime of meeting liars.” She stretched her arms along the mantel, leaning back and smiling a little.
Handsome got up and walked over to her. “Golly,” he said, “you’re beautiful.”
“That’s the first truthful word I’ve heard out of either of you,” June Logan said. Suddenly she cupped her hand under Handsome’s chin, kissed him quickly, but not lightly, and then moved away from him.
Handsome said, “Hey!” and sat down again.
“It’s a funny thing,” June said meditatively, “but I like you boys. So why don’t you stick to walking around in the park and taking photographs, and not go mixing up in things like this?”
Once in a movie Bingo had heard an indignant gentleman bark, “I beg your pardon,” with considerable dramatic force. He tried it now himself. Somehow, it didn’t come off convincingly. He added, out of another movie, “What do you mean?”
“You’re not only a terrible liar,” June said, “you’re a worse actor. I know you two. You go up and down Central Park West, especially around the museum, and take pictures with a silly little camera and hand out little cards. And you say”—she struck an attitude—“‘See how you would look in the newsreels. An action picture has been taken of you—’”
“How do you know,” Bingo said weakly.
She shrugged her beautiful shoulders. “I’ve seen you. I get around, too.”
“We never took your picture,” Handsome said earnestly. “We’d have remembered.”
She smiled at him and said, “Thanks.”
“That’s just our disguise,” Bingo said coldly. “You don’t understand.”
“O.K.” She sat down on the arm of an enormous overstuffed chair. “That’s your story. But all the lawyers I ever met in my life had a different disguise, and don’t ask me what it is, because I won’t give away trade secrets.”
Bingo rose, looking indignant and a little insulted. “We came here,” he said, “to ask a few simple questions.”
“And you’re not getting the simple answers you expected,” she said. “Sit down.” She sat down.
“Now you listen to me,” June Logan said, putting her hands on her hips. “I don’t know what kind of a game you boys are up to, but you’d better lay off. Because you’re messing up with high explosives. Guys like Marty Bucholtz and Art Frank don’t fool.”
Bingo felt a little electric tingle go up and down his spine. “Neither do we,” he said.
She ignored him. “You and your phony story about somebody being an heir to Harkness Penneyth’s dough!” She laughed harshly. “What dough? You’d have done better with a make-believe client he owes money to, because he owes money to everybody.” She paused, and then added, “Why, he owes about a hundred thousand bucks to the gambling syndicate alone.”
The electric tingle along Bingo’s spine became a series of cold, unpleasant shocks. Would Penneyth’s debts have to come out of that half-million bucks before the split was made?
He reached for a cigarette, lit it, and took a long drag before he spoke. “I’m afraid we aren’t getting anywhere,” he said stiffly.
She smiled and said, “Maybe we’d just better talk about each other.”
“Maybe we had,” Bingo said. There was a bare chance that he could jolt her into giving him some information. It was risky, but the only thing he could do. “Or maybe,” he said, “we’d better talk about the murder. Unless you don’t know anything about the murder.”
“Know about it!” she said. Her face stiffened. “Of course I know about it. I saw him!”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
One great advantage in being a woman, Bingo thought, was that you could scream and faint at a time like this. Being a man, all he could do was to crush out his cigarette and say, “You don’t tell me!” in a mildly surprised tone.
It wasn’t, of course, a shock to be told that Harkness Penneyth was dead. But it was a distinct shock to learn that June Logan knew about it. He wished that he could think of something to say.
Handsome said, without a trace of surprise in his voice, “You saw him, huh? Where did you see him and how did he look?”
“He looked dead,” June Logan said, “and he was stretched out on the floor of the bathroom, naked as a worm, and with a knife in his back.” She ran a hand through her thick hair. “Anything else you boys would like to know, and is it any of your business?”