Including Jazz. A few words with my secretary, and I could go home, shave, wash the stink off me, and maybe even get a little sleep before Lieutenant Martin got back.
It turned out like most of my plans.
“My God, Matt,” Jazz said when she saw me. “You look like you’ve been up all night.”
“How about that,” I said. “Look, Jazz...”
“There’s a visitor in your office,” she said, interrupting me.
“Who?”
“Take a look.” She grinned. I wasn’t really in the mood for games, but I was less in the mood to assert myself. I took the line of least resistance, and went into my office.
My visitor had white fur on his face, a little black nose, and pointy ears.
“Spot!” I said, “what are you doing here?” exactly as though I expected him to answer me.
“Woof!” he replied, which served me right. Spot was sitting on my swivel chair, shuffling papers around on my desk with his forepaws. He had precisely the right vacant smile on his face. Put a tie on him, and you could move him into my job tomorrow. Spot agreed to vacate my chair if I would scratch him behind his ears.
I resisted closing my eyes as I sat down, because I knew I’d go to sleep the second I did. And, I figured, as long as I had my eyes open, I might as well look at something with them. Spot was no help. He was making a contented, purring growl deep in his throat, and had no qualms about closing his eyes. He made me jealous. I tried looking out the window, but all I could see was the Brant, and I didn’t want to worry about that place for a while. The walls of my office carry a lot of bad abstract art that I had wished on me by the official Network decorator. That left my desk.
Spot’s pawing around had made my desk even messier than usual, so I noticed what was missing before I noticed what was there.
What was missing was Ken Shelby’s wallet, which I’d left on my desk earlier that morning. I was moving things around, looking for it, when I found Llona’s note.
“Dear Matt—Missed you. Looked here, looked in Master Control. They tell me you’re off somewhere with Millie Heywood, looking at some kines, so I’ll do some of your work for you, and return Ken’s wallet. The Network can watch Spot for a couple of minutes—Love, Llona.”
I reached for the intercom three times before I hit it. “Jazz,” I said at last, “come in here right away!”
Jazz said, “Right,” and appeared in the office two seconds later.
“How long ago was Llona Hall here, Jazz?”
She looked at her watch. “About twenty, twenty-five minutes ago. Right after I got to work, she came here looking for you. I told her what your note to me said, and she asked if she could go into your office to leave a note for you. I said okay. Did I do something wrong? You look mad.”
“Not at you, Jazz,” I assured her. “Did Llona say she was coming back for the dog?”
“Chure.” It always amazed me how Jazz had conquered her Cuban accent on everything but that one word. “In fact,” she went on, “I expected her back a lot sooner than this.”
“Yeah,” I said, biting my lip. There went my shower. “Okay, Jazz, back to work.” I sat down at my desk again, and Spot closed his eyes, expecting the scratching to continue. I double-crossed him, by picking up the phone instead.
Things were no better at Police Headquarters. No, Lieutenant Martin was not yet back, though he was expected any minute. No, Detective Gumple was not yet finished interviewing the witness.
“Look,” I said, “I have to talk to Martin. Can’t you plug the phone into the radio?”
“Do what, Mr. Cott?” the voice asked.
“Cobb,” I said. “Can’t you patch the phone into the radio system? Christ, they used to do it on ‘Police Woman’ all the time. Call Martin on the radio, and plug my phone call in. Hell, just hold the microphone to the receiver, okay?”
“Oh,” said the voice, suddenly enlightened. “One of those. Gee, I haven’t done one of those in a long time. I’ll get right on it.”
“Thanks,” I said sincerely. While I waited, I felt my face and debated if I shouldn’t grow a beard, with such a good head start.
“Mr. Codd?”
“Cobb. Yes?”
“Sorry. Can’t get him on the radio. He must be in a tunnel or something.”
I looked at heaven. It occurred to me that one day, I was going to get a history-making stroke of luck. I was due for one.
“Okay,” I said bitterly. “Thanks for trying. Take a message, okay? When you finally get through to the lieutenant, or when Gumple comes up for air, tell him to meet Matt Cobb, M-A-T-T C-O-B-B, as in corn-on-the, in room twelve-oh-three of the Brant Hotel. Got that?”
He read it back to me, and had it right.
“As soon as either of them can.” I hung up the phone. “Damn!” I said. “Damn!”
I picked up Spot’s leash. “Come on, boy,” I said. “You don’t want me to rescue Llona from the clutches of a killer all by myself, do you?”
Spot said, “Woof!”
CHAPTER 28
“Where everything doubles, and the scores could really change.”
—ART FLEMING, “JEOPARDY,” NBC
I’VE ALWAYS THOUGHT OCTOBER weather is the best weather of the year, and I offer that Monday morning as evidence. The air was pleasantly cool and sweet, even down on the street among the cars and buses, and the sky was so blue it vibrated at the edges of the buildings. It was as though the sky resented New York City for cutting it up into wedges, and partitioning it between skyscrapers.
It was the kind of day that would have made me feel glad to be alive, assuming I felt alive in the first place, and assuming I weren’t already so worried about Llona that I had no room for any other kind of feeling.
A haughty doorman tried to tell me no pets were allowed in the Brant, and I called him a liar to his face.
It didn’t faze him for a second. He brushed his lovely gray mustache into place with a white-gloved finger and said, “That has always been the Brant’s policy, sir, I assure you.”
I looked at him. We both knew the Brant’s policy had nothing to do with pets, especially expensive pets like Spot. Now that the show was over, and the autograph seekers had mostly gone, the policy of the Brant was back to keeping the undesirables out; and smelly guys needing a shave, with feverish excitement in their eyes, definitely qualified as undesirables.
For some reason I can’t recall, I had a fifty-dollar bill in my wallet. I gave it to him, and became desirable immediately.
Spot had no such problem; he was an aristocrat, and took the admiring glances he got from people in the lobby as nothing less than his due. He even deigned to let his fur be stroked occasionally. It made things easier for me—if anyone wondered about me now, I was just some schnook returning a rich guest’s pet from his morning walk.
In a way, I was grateful for the delay, because outside of rescuing Llona, if she needed any rescuing, I didn’t have the slightest idea of what the hell I was going to do.
I decided, finally, to play it by ear—or rather by mouth. In the great tradition of American Entertainment, I was going to hold the fort until the cavalry arrived. All the way up in the elevator, I asked the fates to provide smooth roads and light traffic for the police.
On the twelfth floor, I scouted the layout before I did anything else. There was one strategic recess in the wall, where the door to the maid’s closet was, that a person would have to pass to get to the stairs or the elevator. I told Spot to park his little carcass there, and told him to stay. He looked at me quizzically, but he obeyed. That little pooch was the closest thing I had to an ace in the hole, and if I had to play him, I wanted to know where he was.
Ken Shelby answered the door. I took a careful look at him. I dismissed it as too much imagination and too little sleep, but now that I knew he was a killer, he looked different to me. He seemed to be a different color around the edges, the way a sharp razor gleams more intensely than a dull one.
&
nbsp; He showed me a little amused smile when he admitted me, which made him seem even more dangerous. I told my imagination to cut it out.
We exchanged good mornings, then he said, “Well, what can I do for you, Matt? You don’t look so well. Haven’t you been home yet?”
“Home?” I said. “I haven’t even been to the bathroom. The Network has come up with a variation on the forty-hour week. They call it the forty-hour day.”
He laughed, as though what I said had been funny. A mistake, I thought. A professional comedian should have been able to top that one without thinking twice. He did have things on his mind.
“I’m looking for Llona Hall,” I said. “She’s supposed to be bringing your wallet back.” I looked around the sitting room. Llona wasn’t there, and a sudden fear jumped into my chest and started crowding my lungs.
A voice from the patio fixed that. “Out here, Matt!” Llona sounded very happy to hear my voice. I was ecstatic to hear hers.
Shelby pointed and said, “After you,” so I led the way through the open sliding glass door, past the curtain, and out on the balcony.
The Brant is famous for its views of the park, but I didn’t want to see anything but Llona. She was safe, if a little worried. She was sitting on a wrought-iron chair at a round marble table, drinking coffee. Over the rim of her cup, she gave me a curious look. I couldn’t tell if it was worry, relief, or something else.
Ken Shelby opened the curtain as he joined us on the balcony. “Might as well let some sunshine into the room, right? Have a seat, Matt—no, not that one, I want to sit there. I like the fresh air, but I don’t like looking out over the railing. It’s a long way down.”
I shrugged, and sat opposite Llona. Shelby made it a triangle by squeezing into the chair that was backed up against the balcony’s low railing.
Shelby offered me some coffee; I refused. “The reason I’m here,” I said, “is to bring Llona back to the Tower. Ritafio is crying real tears all over the PR department. Making the blotters soggy.”
Shelby picked up his cup. “And they send a vice-president as an errand boy?” He turned to Llona. “You should be honored. What’s the matter, Matt? Telephones all broken?”
“I was going on a coffee break. Why should two switchboard girls know Llona’s playing hooky from her job to bring you a wallet?”
Llona should have said something. In a normal conversation, she would have made a remark about how taking care of celebrities was part of her job. Or something. This wasn’t a normal conversation.
Ken poured himself some more coffee. “You wouldn’t happen to be jealous, now, would you, Matt? Because if you are, I swear having coffee is the only proposition I’ve made.”
“What makes you think I’ve got a right to be jealous?”
He smiled around the rim of his cup. “Never mind. None of my business, anyway. But I’d appreciate it if you’d let Llona stay. I want her help with a statement for the press about Lenny’s death.” He shook his head sadly. “Such a short comeback.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Ritafio’s got first claim on her. Llona?” I wanted that woman out of there, preferably before the police arrived.
I was prepared to force the issue, but the issue got forced for me. Shelby put down his cup, pushed his saucer aside. Then he took his other hand from under the table, and put it down where the saucer had been. The hand had a gun in it.
A sarcastic voice somewhere in my head said, “Who was going to bullshit whom, Cobb?” I hated myself fully as much as the voice did, but I couldn’t go on listening to it, because the man with the gun was speaking.
“Back away from the table, both of you. No, don’t stand up, slide backward in your chairs. I want to see your hands, Matt. That’s it. Now bring your chairs together side by side. Until your thighs touch. No reason this can’t be a pleasant experience for all concerned, right?” Shelby’s glasses gleamed above a very nasty smile.
The legs of the chairs Llona and I were sitting on were straddling the track of the sliding door to the suite. We formed a nice obstacle to anyone who might want to approach him, and by looking over our heads, he had a clear view of the front door. And twelve stories up from the street, no one was about to sneak up on him from behind. He’d taken a very strong strategic position.
“You called the police before you came here, didn’t you, Matt?”
“Sure,” I said. “I have four detectives and a deputy inspector in my vest pocket.”
He scratched his gray hair, thinking about it. “Well,” he said, “if they come, I’ll still have you two to talk about with them, won’t I?”
“They don’t make concessions to people who hold hostages in this city, Ken. Besides, I didn’t call anybody. Why should I?”
He ignored the question. “Well, it probably doesn’t make any difference. The tickets will be here soon.”
There was an airline ticket office down the street. “Going somewhere?” I asked.
“To the airport. You two can see me off, if you behave.”
That, I knew, was a crock. Granted, the staff of the Brant might be obliging enough to get his ticket for him, even deliver it to his room, but he had no reason to think Llona and I would be obliging enough to let his plane fly out of U.S. airspace to some convenient country (Costa Rica, for example) with our little mouths tightly shut.
The way it looked from where I sat on the iron chair, if I was going to the airport at all, it would be as a corpse in the trunk of the car the hotel would probably also rent for him. The parking lots of the New York airports have replaced the Hudson River and the Jersey Swamp as the unmarked grave capital of the world. Hostage or not, I’d like my chances a lot better after the police arrived. I had to play for time until then.
I tried again. “How about answering this one, then? What happened this morning that prompted all this? The maid short-sheet your bed or something?”
He was enjoying this. I don’t think anyone had ever seen Ken Shelby this relaxed, on screen or off. He shook his head, mockingly. “Nothing like that. Llona told me you found the kinescopes.”
“So?”
He had to think about it for a minute. “I...reacted, and gave myself away to her. Unfortunate.”
“And extreme.” Even though I knew what time it was the effort it took not to look at my watch was sheer agony. Where were the cops? “So I found the kines. If it hadn’t been me, it would have been a janitor, or an exterminator.”
He adjusted his collar with his free hand. “Ah, but by then I would have been long gone.
“Don’t try to make me underrate you, Matt. I’ve been watching you from the start, and I’ve been very impressed. Do you ever notice that, the way you tend to impress people? Melanie spoke very highly of you. So did poor Lenny. So did my wife.”
Llona was distracting me. She wasn’t crying, or trembling, or anything, but she was watching the interplay between Shelby and me in the same intent way a little girl watches the jump rope turn before she hops in. I could only hope she didn’t do anything drastic.
“Your wife,” I said to Shelby, “spoke very highly of you, too, you know.”
“I’ll bet. You were in bed with her at the time, of course?”
“No,” I said. But I could almost feel Alice’s kiss burning my lips again.
“No?” He seemed surprised. “Well, you missed a golden opportunity there, my boy. Alice is irrepressible in showing young men how much she admires them.”
“And not-so-young men.”
“What’s that mean?”
“Your late partner. That’s at least part of the reason you killed him, isn’t it? Otherwise you could have left the country right after you killed Jim Bevic. Couldn’t you?”
Shelby must have found that question a regular poser. He tilted his head back, and got such a dreamy look on his face, I thought he was going to give me a chance to jump him.
He didn’t. He bit the tip of his tongue, looking for the right words. At last, he said, “Alice and I have had
an understanding—a tacit understanding, but real all the same. Alice has always needed...ah...more than one man could give her.”
“Or at least more than you could, right?”
That stung him. His face turned ugly and hot, and for the first time since I’d known him, he looked like a killer.
Shelby raised the gun. Llona gasped beside me.
The knuckle of Shelby’s trigger finger whitened. Where are the cops? I wondered feverishly, stupidly. Where in the name of God are the cops?
I had resolved to face my last moments with my eyes open, so I had a great view of the storm passing from his face.
“I’ll ignore that,” he said quietly. “But another part of that tacit understanding was that it would be completely private. The men were to be made aware of that. No rumors. No stories. But now, one of her ruts has been turned into one of the classic laughs of show business.”
“I don’t follow you,” I said.
“He even had the nerve to tell the story to me. As if I wouldn’t know when my own wife had stopped using hair spray.”
“Ah,” I said. “So Alice is the woman in the toilet bowl story.”
That was too much for Llona. “What toilet bowl story?”
“Quiet, Llona. Still, Ken, you ran a hell of a risk just to revenge a little joke.”
He leaned forward in his chair, very earnest, eager to be understood. “Well, that isn’t all of it, of course. I knew I was leaving the country, leaving Alice, my business, and especially show business forever. I wanted to give the public something to remember me by. I wanted to leave them...well, gasping. As I have.” He sat back again, looking pleased with himself.
I nodded. “I should have realized that when I spoke with your wife.” Where are the cops? “She told me everything I needed to know, really. How smart you are. How creative you are. How you like to be the unnoticed power behind the scenes—hell, it was all summed up for the world to see in that poster of the actor with his pants down, wasn’t it? How you have a penchant—no, Alice said a need—to ‘dazzle’ people.”
“Very perceptive, my Alice.” He smiled as though he were proud of her. For all I knew, he was.
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