For a moment Friday looked at me without expression. Then he lifted a newspaper from his desk, thumbed through it until he found the item he wanted and began to read in a toneless voice :
“A young gunman identified as Alberto Thomaso, 21, of 1812 Sixth Street was killed in a gunfight with police at Swert’s Tavern, Fifth Street and Martin shortly after eleven P.M. last night, the police reported today. Approached for questioning as he left the tavern by radio-car patrolmen Thomas Healey and George Thompkins, Thomaso drew a gun and fired, inflicting a minor shoulder wound on Healey. He then fled back into the tavern and was driven upstairs into a flat above the tavern by fire from Patrolman Thompkins. The latter summoned assistance by means of his car two-way radio and police quickly surrounded the building. In attempting to shoot his way out of the trap, Thomaso was killed by Patrolman Donald Murther.”
Friday looked up at me calmly. “It doesn’t mention Miss Moreni. Further on the item says the reason the cops were looking for
Thomaso was to question him about an attempted kidnaping. But it goes on to say he died before he could be questioned. I always read the paper first thing in the morning, Mr. Moon.”
I conceded the first round. “Let me put it this way then. Thomaso didn’t live long enough to say he worked for anyone, but all indications point to you as his boss.”
I used my fingers to tick off points. “First, it keeps recurring to me that you tried to get me to leave town the minute you suspected I might begin looking into the Ford case. Second, the motive behind Fausta’s kidnaping was exactly the same thing: to force me to leave town. Third, of all the people involved in this case, you’re the only one likely to have underworld connections with a hood like Thomaso. Any comments?”
“Yes,” Friday said in his rubbery voice. “I’ve been pretty patient with you up to now, Moon. But now that you’re actually accusing me of engineering two murders and a kidnaping, my patience is exhausted.” He looked at his bodyguard. “Max, throw him out. And this time I mean physically.”
For an instant the big man looked puzzled, but then he apparently decided if I wanted to make it easy for him, he wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Moving forward, he snaked both enormous hands toward my shoulders.
I smashed the sole of my left foot against his right knee.
The blow should have cracked his kneecap, but apparently the man was strung together with piano wire instead of ordinary muscle. Instead of his knee buckling backward, his foot just flew out from under him.
As he started to fall forward, I let him have an elbow across the forehead. His head jolted back and his hands plunked down on the wooden arms of my chair to support himself. Bringing up my aluminum foot, I planted it in his stomach and pushed.
This was a mistake, because Max had a weight advantage of approximately sixty pounds. Instead of hurling him across the room as I intended the kick to, it merely straightened him up so that he could regain his balance. But it tipped my chair over backward.
I did a complete back somersault and bounced to my feet with my back in the corner of the room farthest from the door. Seeing that he had me treed, Max took his time about renewing the attack. First he shook his right leg tentatively to determine if it still worked. Apparently it did, though it must have been sprained from the terrific kick I had landed on his kneecap.
Deciding it would support him, he limped toward me with a snarl on his face.
I ducked a whistling right, slipped under his arm and planted a solid left hook on his jaw as he swung around to face me again. He didn’t even change expression.
The next thirty seconds were a nightmare. I hit him six times with blows that would have put most pro fighters down for the count, but the only damage I could detect was to my knuckles. During the same time I managed to avoid four of his swings, any one of which would have knocked me through a wall if they had connected. Three times I ducked under his swinging arm and changed sides, catching him with solid hooks as he spun to face me again.
I had the advantage of speed and a professional knowledge of boxing, but it was only a question of time before one of his powerhouses connected and ended the fight. Fortunately Max picked a time when my back was to the corner to change his tactics.
Tiring of swinging at a moving target, he suddenly lowered his head and charged. I skipped aside, added impetus to his charge by grabbing his shoulder and heaving as he went by, and he crashed head on into the wall.
He knocked himself out.
As violent as the action had been for a few moments, it had been a relatively silent fight. Our feet shuffling on the carpet had made little sound, and the only noise aside from our panting had been the splat of my knuckles against his jaw and the crack of Max’s head against the wall. Apparently no one in the outer office heard anything, for no one came to investigate and the continued clatter of typewriters from the outer room indicated work was going on as usual.
Ed Friday had sat quietly behind his desk watching while the fracas went on. Now he looked from his recumbent bodyguard to me, glanced thoughtfully at the door, then looked back at me again as though he realized he couldn’t expect much help from an office full of women. From his expression you couldn’t have told that he was in the last disturbed.
I rolled Max over on his back, felt his pulse and thumbed back an eyelid.
“That should have fractured his skull, but he’s only knocked out,” I decided. “He must have a steel plate in his head.”
Friday asked in a calm voice, “You plan a little violence on me now, Mr. Moon?”
“It’s your choice,” I told him. “We’re going to have a talk. If you like, I’ll slap you around until you feel conversational, but I’d prefer to skip further exercise.”
He let a slight smile form on his lips. “Sit down, Mr. Moon.”
Righting my chair, I resumed my seat and lit a cigar. “Let’s start with why you wanted me to go to Mexico.”
Thoughtfully he contemplated his bodyguard’s horizontal figure. Finally he said, “I’m going to be frank with you, Mr. Moon. Not because I’m afraid of getting slapped around, as you put it, but because my concern in this matter isn’t worth getting involved in a possible murder rap. I want you to understand I had nothing to do with Ford’s death and don’t know who killed him. But I do have a reason for not wanting anyone to delve too closely into Ford’s background. I was afraid you might turn up something that would louse up a business deal I have cooking. I’m not going to tell you what that deal is, because it’s still cooking. But if it comes to the point where the police actually accuse me of having Ford killed, I’ll sacrifice the deal in order to clear myself. That will lose me some money, and it still won’t solve your murder. I think you can understand why I don’t want to talk about it unless it becomes necessary to clear myself.”
I thought this over for a few moments. “I’m not a blabbermouth,” I said eventually. “Suppose you get me off your neck by explaining the deal, with the understanding that I keep it confidential?”
He shook his head. “You couldn’t keep it confidential. After our conversation at your place the other night, I had you thoroughly investigated, and my report is that you have an almost unreasonably rigid code of ethics. If I’d known it at the time, I never would have attempted to bribe you. However, I know it now, and I’m certain if I told you about my business deal, you’d feel morally obligated to report it to the police.”
“You mean the deal is illegal?”
“Not on my part. I suspect one of the other parties to the arrangement has done something illegal though, and if it ever came to light, my part of it would blow up too. I haven’t any actual knowledge of my associate’s illegal act. It’s only a suspicion, and you can’t be held liable as an accessory for concealing a mere suspicion. I myself haven’t done a thing I could be charged with, and I don’t have your moral compulsion to report suspected illegal acts of others to the police. Particularly when it would cost me money.”
When I merely s
at looking at him for a time without speaking, he went on, “Your theory that no one but me would be able to contact a professional criminal like Thomaso is hogwash anyway. Anybody can contact any type of criminal he wants to hire simply by making the rounds of the slum taverns, keeping his ears open and dropping a few discreet hints when he runs into a likely prospect. If this Thomaso kid was a free lance and in the habit of hanging around the rattier bars, anybody might have hired him.”
Max, seemingly intent on disproving my estimate of how long he would be out, groaned again and sat up at that moment. He was still groggy, however, and he kept his eyes closed while he pressed both hands to the top of his head.
With his powers of recuperation he probably would be on his feet and raring to resume activities within another minute or so, I thought. And since it looked as though I had obtained as much information from Ed Friday as I was likely to get unless I planned to tie him up and hold burning cigarettes against his feet, I decided to take my departure while Max was still in a daze.
Rising, I said to Friday, “Thanks for nothing. You’ve been damn little help,” and walked out just as Max began to open his eyes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
BUT ACTUALLY WHAT Ed Friday had told me had been of some help. Not much, but at least it gave me the glimmer of a new idea.
While it was possible that everything he had said was pulled out of thin air in order to stall me off until his bodyguard rejoined the conversation, it was equally possible that he had been telling the truth. I inclined to take a middle course and accept his story as embroidered truth.
Never having been quite happy about Friday as the engineer of Ford’s murder, I was inclined to believe his explanation that his attempt to steer me away from the case stemmed from concern that I might uncover something in Ford’s background which would upset one of Friday’s business deals. But I was equally inclined to doubt that the illegal act Friday mentioned was merely suspected by him. I believed that whatever the illegal act of his “associate” had been, Friday did not merely suspect it, but had proof of it. It seemed unlikely to me he would have gone as high as two thousand dollars to get me to refuse Ford’s case if he had only a vague suspicion that his business deal was in danger.
What particular deal he had been talking about, it was of course impossible to say, as his interests were so varied; it could be anything from stock-market shenanigans to a corporation merger. However, it was just possible Friday’s “business deal” was his backing of the Huntsafe Company. The possibility made it at least worth looking into.
Stopping at a drugstore, I phoned Madeline Strong.
“You just caught me going out the door,” she said. “I was on my way over to the jail to see Tom. Anything new?”
“Nothing concrete. I just developed the beginning of a wild new theory. Tell me, Madeline, where did your brother Lloyd live just before he died?”
“With me. We always lived together.”
“At the apartment you live in now?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “In our old family home over on Euclid. We were both born there, and after the folks died we just continued to live there. After Lloyd was killed, the place was too big for just me alone, so I moved here.”
“And sold the house, I suppose.”
“Well, it’s for sale, but there haven’t been any takers. It’s too big for what most people want nowadays.”
“Lloyd’s stuff still there? His papers and records, I mean?”
“Everything’s there. Except dishes and a few pieces of furniture I moved here. I’ve been meaning to have a household sale one of these days but just haven’t gotten around to it.”
“Forget your visit to the jail,” I said. “I want you to meet me at the house. What’s the address?”
“Fourteen twenty-one Euclid.”
“Suppose we meet there in twenty minutes?”
“All right,” Madeline said.
“Don’t forget the key,” I advised, and hung up.
When I arrived at 1421 Euclid, I understood why the place had been unable to find a taker. It was an attractive enough white frame building in apparently good condition and with a wide, tree-shaded lawn on all four sides. But it was big enough to serve as a hospital. From the outside I judged it contained at least twenty rooms.
On the front lawn there was a slim metal post supporting a horizontal bar from which hung a gold-lettered sign. The sign read, “C. Maurice Strong,” and the moment I saw it I suddenly realized where all Madeline’s money had come from, and why she had seemed so surprised that I didn’t know who she was the day I had asked her if she could afford my fee.
In the field of electronic invention, C. Maurice Strong was about second in line to Thomas Edison. Both he and his wife had died in an auto accident about four years before, I recalled, and I remembered that in the feature articles appearing in all the local papers after his death, the list of his inventions had been longer than his obituary. Just to mention a couple of random items, he owned about half the patents in the fields of radio and television, and once had received a citation from the government for turning over to it without charge his patents on radar and automatic gun control.
I had been waiting for about five minutes when Madeline arrived in a taxi.
“Why didn’t you tell me your father was C. Maurice Strong?” I asked as we walked toward the broad front porch.
She looked at me in surprise. “Didn’t you know?”
“How would I know?” I asked reasonably. “Strong’s a fairly common name.”
“I guess I just take it for granted everybody knows.”
Inside the house was pervaded by the unused, dusty smell of having been locked up a long time. White dust cover were over all of the furniture.
Madeline led the way through a huge front room, a slightly smaller dining room and into a wide back hall.
She opened a door leading off the hallway and preceded me down a flight of stairs to the basement.
“Lloyd’s laboratory is down here in the basement,” Madeline explained. “He kept all his records in the lab.”
We had to pass through a game room and a laundry room before we reached the laboratory, which was under the front part of the house. It was a large room, about twenty by fifteen feet, with an electrical workbench similar to the one I had seen in Barney Amhurst’s apartment along one wall.
“He kept everything in there,” Madeline said, pointing to a single dusty filing cabinet in one corner. “What is it you’re looking for?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I’ll just have to go through everything.”
Madeline drew a chair away from the workbench, looked at the dust on it and decided to continue standing. “It’s already been gone through once, you know. After the funeral we had to check through his papers for the will, insurance policies and so on.”
“Who’s we?” I asked.
“Well, me, I mean actually. But Walter Ford helped me.”
I had just pulled open the top drawer of the filing cabinet, but instead of looking down into it, I looked over my shoulder at Madeline.
“What was that?” I asked
“I said Walter Ford helped me go through the papers.”
I frowned at her. “How did that happen? I thought you only knew Ford casually before he came into the Huntsafe Company.”
“I did,” Madeline said. “Well, it was a little more than casually. He’d had some business relationships with my father and was a great admirer of his. Lloyd and I had known him for years, but he was older than we were so we never went around in the same crowd. I think he came to Lloyd’s funeral more because of admiration for my father than because Lloyd meant anything to him. But he was very considerate. You know how people at a funeral always ask if there is anything they can do?”
I nodded in indication that I knew.
“Well, my lawyer had told me I would have to go through all Lloyd’s papers, and I was thinking about it and dreading the task when Walter came up
and asked if there was anything he could do. So I said, yes, he could help me sort through Lloyd’s papers.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Why him particularly? Don’t you have any close relatives?”
She shook her head. “None that live here. And because of Walter’s feeling for my father, I kind of felt that he was like an uncle or something. I don’t mean all the time. But during the emotional stress of the funeral. About the only other person I could have asked was Barney, and he was so broken up over Lloyd’s death I couldn‘t ask him.”
“I see. And I suppose Ford did most of the sorting?”
“Well, yes. I’m not very good at that sort of thing.”
Since Walter Ford had been at the file before me, there was little chance I would find what I was looking for, I realized. With his propensity for blackmail, it would have gone into his inside pocket the moment he found it. Nevertheless I doggedly went through every drawer of the cabinet.
In a manila folder marked “Tax Returns,” I found duplicate copies of Lloyd Strong’s Federal forms 1040 for the three years before he died. Since there were no forms for previous years, I assumed that prior to that whatever income he had was included on his father’s annual return.
Checking over the three 1040's, I found that most of the income reported was from royalties on patents inherited from his father, and from stock dividends and interests. The totals, I noted, came to quite impressive amounts. In each of the last two returns there was also included a Schedule C showing profit and loss on his own patents. For both years gross income amounted to less than two thousand dollars and, after deducting business expenses, both years showed a substantial net loss.
The item which interested me most was line eleven of Schedule C, “Salaries and wages not included in line four.”
For both years Lloyd Strong claimed salary payments of $3,770.00.
I said to Madeline, “Did you know your brother was losing money in the inventing business?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “But that was only temporary.” “How do you mean?” I asked.
Give the Girl a Gun Page 14