Contempt permeated his whole being.
“All those measurements you write, with some tale about efficient workers. Watching. Timing. Is it the count you plan to assassinate, or is your President coming to this hotel while he’s in town?”
Several things clicked into place. I stepped back cautiously.
“Bartoz, you’ve got it wrong. And whatever it is you and the count are up to, we’re getting in each other’s way. Keep your hands on your head and turn around slowly. Legs farther apart. Another step this way... and shoulders back against the wall.”
I’d denied him the balance he needed for quick moves. His single eye blazed at me.
“Those measurements you found in my room don’t matter a hill of beans. I’m working on something for the hotel. I needed a reason to wander around. FDR saved this country. He’s got my vote any time he wants it. I don’t know thing one about Count Szarenski, except if he’s who he claims to be, he’s some sort of war hero.”
I’d lowered the Smith & Wesson. His eye flicked to it.
“Don’t try,” I said softly. It was aimed at his midsection. “Across from the hotel parking lot there’s a luggage store. There’s a sign at the side of it that says Chiropractor with an arrow pointing down at some stairs. It’s an after-hours place. You know what that is?”
“A bar. So what? You want us to drink together?”
“Yeah. I’ll buy. I’ll tell you exactly what it is I’m doing. What you tell me is up to you. Sorting this out might keep the two of us from working at cross-purposes.”
He frowned. As good as his English was, my slang had thrown him.
“Keep us from getting in each other’s way,” I clarified.
Reading his expression was impossible.
“And if I don’t?”
“After fifteen minutes, I call the police.” I let my gun hand drop to my side. “Your choice.”
With the toe of my shoe, I skimmed back the object he’d dropped. It was a garrote. I stuffed it into my pocket. Locking eyes with him, I turned my back and walked away.
It was a risk. I knew it. I’d taken one of his toys, but he could have a gun or a knife in his pocket. Dry mouthed, I kept walking. A display of nerve was the thing I thought most likely to work with someone like Bartoz.
* * *
The Chiropractor was faintly stuffy with a hint of dampness. Unable to crack a window, lest noise from its illegal trade draw attention, its only ventilation came from an open door into a storage room under the business upstairs.
I sat at a corner table, watching the door and sipping whiskey. Since I hadn’t told Bartoz the password, I’d slipped the doorman a buck to let him in if he showed. Just as I was wondering what my next move should be if he didn’t appear, he did. A few heads turned to look at him, then lost interest.
“So.” He dropped into the chair across from me and lounged back with the confidence of a man who could hold his own in the roughest of dives. “You want to take me to bed? Where I come from, when a woman buys you a drink she wants to take you to bed.”
“Don’t flatter yourself. You’re in America now.”
He was trying to throw me, to gain the upper hand, but my gambit already had proved more effective than his. It had gotten him here and I hadn’t taken a slug in my back.
The flesh-colored eye patch that didn’t match his skin was, if possible, more unsettling up close than it was at a distance. On opposite sides of the patch, the ends of an angry red scar testified to the slash of a blade. Apart from the patch and the scar, he was good-looking. A chin that was firm without being defiant. A mouth that looked like it might have laughed before it was twisted by bitterness.
“How long have you worked for the count?” I asked, when he’d ordered whiskey too and the waiter had brought it.
“Two years. A lifetime. Why do you ask?”
“Just breaking the ice.”
He considered it.
“Small talk.”
“Yes.” I crossed my arms on the table and leaned across them. “See I’m trying to figure out why you’d get such a crazy idea about me. Even considering the measurements.”
His single eye stared at me without blinking.
“The reason I’m at the hotel, Bartoz, is that the owners think someone has gotten into the safe.”
For the first time he looked startled. Interested even.
“Robbed, you mean?”
“They’re not sure. Nothing appears to be missing. They hired me to investigate. They don’t want me spooking the guests, so I’m pretending to be an efficiency expert.”
His wariness, which I hadn’t noticed was fading, returned full force.
“You are police?”
Shaking my head, I slid him the leather holder displaying the license that said Special Detective. He read it and thrust it back in a fury.
“Secret police!”
Tamping down frustration with him was becoming a challenge.
“No. ‘Special’ means private. A private detective. People hire me to find somebody who’s missing, to see if a family member’s stealing from their business. Things like that.”
He considered a minute. He drank some whiskey as if he needed it.
“Then why are you sneaking around in the alley?”
“When someone goes out a back window – or in – they’re usually up to no good. What are you doing back there?”
“Protecting the count.”
“From what?”
“He has enemies.”
“That’s why you tried to kill me? That’s why you killed that poor girl they found in the trash? To protect the count from enemies you won’t even tell me about?”
He started so the dregs of his whiskey splashed to the rim.
“What girl? I haven’t killed anyone!” His head lowered and he studied his hands for a minute. It made him look almost human. “Not in this country.”
Bartoz drained his glass. I raised my hand and signaled the barman to bring him another. My own head I preferred to keep clear.
“I don’t know anything about a dead girl,” Bartoz said. “I go with the count and some men pick us up. They take us to another part of the city. They think he – the count – can muster support for Poland. Raise money for tanks and equipment since the United States seems content to see Europe bombed without lifting a finger.”
“Raise money how? By selling expensive jewelry?”
He snorted mirthlessly.
“Women’s play, back when the count and his friends were still in their homes. Donating bracelets and necklaces to buy bullets. Stripping them off at tea parties, dumping them into bags. So naive — all of us — imagining such efforts could buy enough rifles and ammunition to hold off the Germans for even a day.”
The waiter delivered a full glass to him along with a murmured advisory. “Twenty minutes till closing.”
Bartoz tilted the whiskey at me in acknowledgment. He sipped.
“The men he meets with organize gatherings,” he said at length. “He speaks. They take a collection.” He looked into the distance the same way I’d seen Mick Connelly do when longing for the country he’d left. “All as futile as the women back home donating their jewelry.”
He tossed back half his refill.
“What’s he looking for at the bank and the post office every morning?”
Caught off guard, Bartoz turned as snooty as a butler.
“That’s not yours to know.” He finished his drink. “We should leave. They close soon.”
I rattled the ice in my glass to show him I had a few sips left. And was still the one with the upper hand.
THIRTY-ONE
Freeze wasn’t pleased when I showed up in his office unannounced the next morning. I figured turn-about was fair play.
“Glad I caught you before your dance card for the day had you waltzing away,” I said. “We need to have a chat about Polly Bunten.”
The homicide lieutenant was in his shirtsleeves. I wouldn’t have f
igured him for a loden green suspenders man. His elbows were propped on his desk as if they were the only things keeping him upright. It was the first time I’d seen him without a cigarette going. I felt a flicker of sympathy for him.
“Your client’s off the hook,” he said wearily. “The girl had a boyfriend. They quarreled. Next thing you know, she’s dead and he’s taken off, nobody knows where. We’ve bumped her case to the Unsolved file”
There was a chair in front of his desk. It seemed like a shame to waste it when he and Boike and two other detectives were the only ones in the room. I sat down.
“Anyone happen to mention the boyfriend left two weeks or more before she was murdered? There are witnesses.”
“Witnesses,” he repeated morosely.
I gave a quick recap. What Polly’s acquaintances had told me. What I was really doing at The Canterbury. For reasons I couldn’t explain, I skipped the parts about Count Szarenski and being attacked in the alley and Bartoz thinking I was a Nazi sympathizer.
“Let me get this straight,” he said when I’d finished. “Nothing’s been stolen out of the safe. But since there’s jewelry in there and a jeweler’s dead, you think this has something to do with Lagarde?”
Put that succinctly, it did sound far-fetched.
“And Polly Bunten. And the hotel guest buying thrift store jewelry. Look, Freeze, I didn’t have to tell you any of this. The last thing my clients want is trouble, for their guests or for their business if word gets out about their safe. They thought it was right to let you know. So did I.”
At last he scraped a match to life and started a cigarette. He took a drag. The haze of smoke between us reassured me I hadn’t been talking to an imposter.
“You’re a pain in the neck, you know that? Right about things just often enough I can’t afford to toss you out on your ear without listening.”
My percentage was better than that, but since he seemed to be getting soft on me, I didn’t correct him.
“What I didn’t hear—”
“Was anything that will stand up in court.”
“Bingo. Look...” He pulled himself erect with effort. “In case you haven’t heard, we’ve got the President of the United States coming to town. That means on top of the whole department already being short-handed, every cop in town now has meetings to go to, detective division has extra planning, all while I’ve got an uptown homicide I’m trying to solve. The Bunten case stays in the Unsolved file.”
“Okay if I keep poking around them? As long as I bring you anything useful I turn up?”
He hesitated. The cigarette was between his teeth again.
“Yeah. Okay. But between you and me, that shrimp in the loud suits is crazy as a bedbug. He’s probably imagining the whole business with the safe.”
“He didn’t imagine Polly’s body.”
Freeze didn’t have a reply for that. I stood.
“Since you seem to think he made up the story about the missing man too, are you sure no bodies turned up around the time he reported that man missing from his hotel?”
Freeze glowered. Several seconds went by. He beckoned to Boike who trotted over with a file. Slapping it onto his desk, Freeze opened it and ran his finger down a page, flipped to another page and then another.
“Not unless the guest from the fancy hotel was a darkie who got a knife in his ribs for cheating in a crap game or a bum who ended it all in a flophouse down by the bus station.”
“Anyone know the bum?”
“Nope. Drifter. Probably hopped off a freight.”
“If I bat my eyelashes, any chance you’ll give the flophouse address?”
Freeze once had claimed my detective work amounted to nothing more than batting my lashes to get information I wanted. It hadn’t set well. The look he was giving me now indicated I’d worn out my welcome.
“If the missing man didn’t exist, how about telling me what was in the envelope from the hotel safe?”
The smugness spreading over his face told me I’d stepped in it.
“Since you’ve been such a font of information, I guess it won’t hurt to tell you. It was empty.”
* * *
The encounter with Freeze had left a sour taste in my mouth. Returning to the hotel in my current humor probably wasn’t the smartest thing I could do. It was still too early for the count and Bartoz to leave on their morning stroll anyway. If Nick Perry left, Smith would tell me which direction he’d gone. I went to my office and called Ab at Rike’s, but he wasn’t at his desk and he hadn’t left any messages.
For the moment, I pushed aside questions I couldn’t answer about the empty envelope and concentrated instead on Count Szarenski. What if I assumed he was waiting for some sort of deposit to his bank account, as opposed to being up to something fishy? If so, today he’d return to the same bank he’d visited yesterday. I found a small drugstore across from the bank but up the street and in the direction he would come from The Canterbury. Then I sat at the soda counter and sipped lukewarm coffee for fifteen minutes while keeping my eyes peeled on the route he’d followed the previous day.
I almost missed them.
It was the count’s distinctive gait which caught my attention. They were coming at right angles to the way I’d expected, taking a different route. Caution on the part of Bartoz?
They went into the bank. They came out. As far as I could see, the count wasn’t stuffing wads of money under his jacket. I expected the post office to be their next stop, and it was.
As on the previous day, the count came out with slumping shoulders. This time, though, they made another stop on their way back to the hotel. While Szarenski waited outside, leaning on his cane and looking dignified, Bartoz entered a small grocery store. A short time later he emerged with a bulging shopping bag in which I saw the round shapes of apples, or maybe pears, and what looked like a long loaf of bread.
Odd, carrying food back to a hotel overflowing with it, I thought. I went back to where I’d left my DeSoto, then circled a couple of blocks until I spotted the two men I was following. Driving slowly back to The Canterbury, I found a parking spot where I could watch.
They came back. They went in. I returned to my office and tried Ab again.
“Hey,” he said. “I’ve been trying to reach you. One of the women who worked at Lagarde’s came in and filled out a job application.”
“Let me talk to her in your office and I won’t charge for the background check.”
“Or you’ll rush one when I need it?”
“Deal.”
“As it happens, one of the clerks in fine jewelry’s retiring next month. We will have an opening to fill, so she won’t be wasting her time coming.”
“It wouldn’t be Mona retiring, would it?”
“Sure would. Kind of surprised you remember her.”
“Every time I walked by, she expected me to pinch something.”
Ab laughed.
“Want to see if the Lagarde’s lady is available this afternoon?”
“Three-thirty if you can swing it.”
“I’ll try. Call and check, though.”
THIRTY-TWO
The sun was shining. The air had the crisp, dusty smell it gets in fall. It was a perfect morning to visit a man who made cheap fake jewelry. A man Skip thought was shady, possibly even dangerous.
“Delbert Rose?” I asked when he appeared from a back room.
He had an unpleasant mouth and eyes set too close together. He nodded across the counter separating us.
“At your service, sweetheart.” He sounded so bored I wondered whether he ever slipped and used the line on men who walked in. “What do you need?”
“Oh...” I touched my hat and looked around as if overwhelmed by the place.
In contrast to the theatrical supply store’s colorful jumble of items that teased with promises of enchantment to come, this place was drab. A mannequin to one side of the counter wore a jeweled headpiece guaranteed to strain the neck of the showgirl
it adorned. From the neck down the same dummy wore a medieval frock with a belt of fake gemstones circling the waist. Wooden supply cabinets with drawers of assorted sizes lined a wall behind the counter.
“Well, you see, my employer’s going out of town to a house party,” I began. “She wants a copy made of a necklace. A friend recommended a jeweler, but he’d had a attack or something. Someone mentioned you—”
“I don’t do copies, honey.” He pointed to rods overflowing with flimsy metal shapes. “Three sizes of crowns, necklaces, bracelets, rings. Got plenty of chalices and swords. The costume person or whoever tells me what they have in mind. I show them what I’ve got in stock, tell them what else I could order. They pick the color of stones, maybe the size. That’s all I do.”
“But you could— Oh, jeez, this shoe is killing me.” I tugged one off and kicked my leg up a little to massage my toes as his eyes followed. “You could match a shape though, right? Of a stone I mean.”
“What? Sure. Maybe.” He blinked and brought his attention back to what I was saying.
“I’ll bet she’d say it was fine to just replace the ruby, this big, fat oval thing. The stones around it are just teensy little diamonds. They wouldn’t matter much if something, um, you know, happened to it. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t even cross her mind, but she doesn’t know the people who invited her all that well. So since she really needs it, in kind of a hurry, could you replace just the ruby? Right in her necklace, but with one of your stones, I mean?”
I put my shoe back on and looked at him earnestly. He rubbed his lip.
“I’d have to look at it first.”
“Oh, sure.” I suspected he was weighing the odds. I put my thumb on the scale. “I guess maybe I should look at some of the glass ones like you’d put in. Make sure they’re nice and all.”
“Good idea, sweetheart.”
Crossing to the supply cabinet, he pulled out a drawer and brought it over. Inside were glittering red stones of assorted shapes, all about an inch at their widest spot.
“I’ve got two larger sizes if these don’t do.”
I stared in fascination at the pretty fakes. As far as I knew, I’d never seen a real ruby, except maybe in some little oval earrings Rachel wore. In a nice setting the ones I was looking at would be enough to fool me.
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