Die Laughing: 5 Comic Crime Novels

by Steve Brewer

  I looked through the rest of the shots. Some were better than others, but all of them were essentially the same.

  I put the pictures back in the envelope, marked it with an X so I could tell it from the others, and looked at the rest of the rolls. None of the others were Barbara.

  I put the packets of photos in the plastic bag, and shoved it into my suitcase.

  All right, I thought, what the fuck do I do now? I mean, I’d retrieved the photographs, that was good, but the threat of the Weasel still remained, and I still wasn’t any closer to the root of Harold’s problems.

  I got in the car and drove over to the Dunleavy house. There was no sign of the Weasel. The station wagon was also gone, so Barbara was out. What I didn’t know, of course, was whether the Weasel was following her.

  I had to do something. After all, if the Weasel got some more photographs, all the good I’d accomplished would go right down the drain.

  MacAullif didn’t want me talking to Barbara or Harold, but he hadn’t said anything about talking to the Weasel.

  I drove back to Atlantic City, parked my car, and went up to the Minton Agency. The antisocial secretary was still typing a letter. I wondered if it was the same one.

  This time I didn’t bother waiting for her to glance up. “Joe Steerwell,” I said.

  She didn’t glance up then.

  “Not in yet,” she grunted, and went on typing.

  I got back in my car and drove out to the Weasel’s house. It was a two-story affair out in Margate. I went up on the front porch and rang the bell.

  There was no answer. I hadn’t expected any. The blue Chevy wasn’t parked in the driveway. I rang the bell a few more times just to be sure.

  As I was coming down off the front porch, a fortyish woman with teased red hair and too much lipstick came out on the porch next door.

  “You looking for Joey?” she called.

  “Yes,” I said. “You seen him?”

  “He’s not home.”

  I could have guessed that. But I smiled anyway, as if she had imparted some useful information.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Yes, he went out early this morning.”

  “Any idea when he’ll be back?”

  “Could be any time now. That’s the way he is. In and out, in and out, all day long.”

  “I’ll try back later,” I said.

  “I’ll tell him you were here,” she said.

  I knew she was going to say that. She was a busybody, the type of nosy biddy that makes my blood boil. She was trying to find out my name.

  I didn’t give it to her. I smiled, nodded, said, “Thanks” and hopped in the car and drove off, leaving her disappointed.

  I figured I was doing good works and all, as far as MacAullif was concerned, and had he known he’d have no reason to complain. But seeing as how it was getting on toward noon, I figured it was time for me to obey the prime directive.

  I drove to Harold’s office, parked the car, and put a quarter in the meter. I stood and watched the front door.

  Some fun. Right, MacAullif. Ninety percent of surveillance is just hanging around. They also serve who only stand and wait.

  Harold came out at 12:30, and this time he came out alone. He also went in the opposite direction that he usually went for lunch. I stuck a quarter in the meter and tagged along behind.

  Harold went down Atlantic Avenue a few blocks and turned on St. Charles. He went into an office building. This time I hit the lobby just as the elevator door closed. I was in time to see there was no one else in it. The elevator indicator stopped on three.

  Next to the elevator was a stairs. I sprinted up them, and pushed the door open a crack, just in time to see Harold walk down the hall and into an office.

  He was out in five minutes.

  I had a moment of panic when I thought he was headed for the stairs, but he rang the elevator instead. I ran down the stairs and was waiting across the street when he came out.

  He went back past his office building to the restaurant where he’d gone the day before.

  I left him there having lunch and walked back to the building I’d tailed him to. This time I took the elevator. No reason to wear myself out.

  I walked down the hallway to the door where I’d seen Harold go in. On it was emblazoned, “FREDERICK NUBAR, INVESTMENT COUNSELOR.”

  I went through the door and found myself in a small waiting room. Two men were sitting in chairs reading magazines. A young secretary was sitting at a desk. Behind her was a closed door.

  “May I help you?” she said.

  “Yeah, I’d like to see Mr. Nubar,” I said.

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “No, but I’d like to make one.”

  “Then you’ll have to wait. These gentlemen have appointments.”

  “That’s fine,” I told her.

  “May I have your name?”

  “Phil Collins.”

  She gave me a look, then smiled and wrote it down.

  I’d already sat down and picked up a magazine before it dawned on me I’d given her the name of a rock singer.

  I was halfway through my second issue of People magazine when the door behind the desk opened and a man in a suit came out. He went on out the front door. A moment later another man appeared in doorway of the inner office, and stood there talking to the secretary.

  It was the Bear.

  I waited until he’d gone back into his office and one of the men who was waiting had been ushered in, before I got up, smiled at the secretary and said, “I don’t think I can wait, after all. I’ll be back.”

  I got to my car just in time to see Harold return from lunch and go into his office, and just in time to realize I hadn’t called Rosenberg & Stone.

  I did, and went through the usual bullshit. Richard was out to lunch, but Wendy and Cheryl got on extensions and gangbanged me. It was too bad. Richard would have been mollified by learning that Floyd Watson fell in the casino, but Wendy and Cheryl couldn’t have cared less. They gave me another picture assignment, tremendously urgent I was sure, and I finally got off the phone.

  When my ears stopped ringing, I got in my car, turned on the air- conditioning, and gave some thought to my problem.

  I needed to find out about Frederick Nubar. But I didn’t know how to do it. Tailing him was no good. That’s what I would have done if I hadn’t known his name. I’d have followed him to his address, looked it up, and found out who he was. But I knew his name. And I knew what he did: he was an investment counselor. I knew who he was, but I didn’t know who he was, that was the thing.

  There was one way to find out. I could go back, masquerade as Phil Collins, and keep my bogus appointment. But that would be risky as hell. Investment counselor. What the hell was an investment counselor? What could I say to him? Why was I there?

  I didn’t know.

  I thought about it some more, and finally it came to me. There was only one thing to do. And it was something I’d never done before, and something I’d never dreamed of doing in a million years. But it seemed the only thing to do, so I did it.

  I hired a private detective.

  13.

  “MY RATES ARE TWO hundred bucks a day, plus expenses.”

  I wished mine were. Jesus Christ.

  His name was Mike Sallingsworth. He ran the Sallingsworth Detective Agency. I’d picked it out of a phone book. I didn’t know if it was a good firm. As far as I was concerned, it had one basic thing going for it.

  It wasn’t Minton’s.

  Mike was about seventy. He had a thin face with a shock of white hair perched on the top. It gave him a somewhat whimsical look. He was wearing a light cord suit that looked old and faded, and a thin tie of the same vintage. His jacket was open and I could see the strap of his shoulder holster. I wondered when the last time was he’d pulled his gun. Or whether he was still waiting for his first.

  I also wondered how much work there was for an emaciated, seventy-year-old gu
mshoe in Atlantic City.

  “That’s too high,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Those are our rates. Take it or leave it.”

  I wondered what he meant by “our.” It was a small, one-room office, and he seemed to be the only one in it. I assumed it was the equivalent of the editorial “we”—the investigative “our.”

  I pulled out my I.D. and laid it on his desk.

  “Look,” I said. “I’m a visiting fireman from the City, and I need a little help. I need some information. If you can get it for me, fine, but I can’t spring for any two hundred dollars. I can’t write this off on expenses. It’s coming out of my own pocket.”

  “Why?”

  “I haven’t been retained in this case. I’m doing it as a favor.”

  He stared at me. “You’re down here from New York on a case with no retainer?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You out of your mind?”

  “Yes. But that doesn’t affect our relationship. If you can get the information, I’m willing to pay for it. But none of this two-hundred-dollars-a-day shit. I can go fifty bucks, tops.”

  He looked at me. Chuckled. Shook his head. “What is it you need to know?”

  “Frederick Nubar,” I told him.

  “No shit.”

  “None. I need to know about Nubar. All I know is he’s an investment counselor.”

  He chuckled again. Thought for a moment. Grinned. “O.K.,” he said. “Twenty bucks.”

  I took a twenty out and laid it on his desk. He picked it up, folded it, and stuck it in his pocket.

  He cocked his head at me. “Investment counselor is a euphemism,” he said. “For your information, Frederick Nubar is a loan shark.”

  “Loan shark?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “The worst kind of loan shark. The kind that breaks heads.”

  14.

  I WENT OUT, SAT in my car and thought things over. I had the picture now. Harold Dunleavy had gambled and got in over his head. Then he’d gone to a loan shark and borrowed God knows how much money to cover his debts. He couldn’t meet the payments and was in serious danger of bodily harm. He’d fallen in with a crooked blackjack dealer who was helping him milk money out of the casino to pay off the Bear. The blackjack dealer was attractive enough that Harold was set on dumping his wife and kid for her and had hired a detective for that purpose. Meanwhile, his wife, abandoned and bored, had taken up playing doctor with a tree surgeon.

  My task, should I choose to accept it, was to get the loan shark off Harold’s back, set Harold on the straight and narrow, extricate him from the clutches of the blackjack dealer and reconcile him with his wife, after first ridding her of the attentions of the tree surgeon, at the same time forestalling the private detective and preventing him from reaching Harold’s ears with reports of his wife’s transgressions.

  It was a task, I felt, that called for the wisdom of a Solomon. I didn’t feel I had the wisdom of a Solomon. At the moment, I felt I had the wisdom of a game show host.

  I went to a pay phone and called MacAullif.

  “Harold’s in hock to a loan shark.”

  “What?”

  “That seems to be the root of your son-in-law’s problems. He’s in deep with a loan shark, an ugly fucker named Frederick Nubar with a reputation for breaking heads.”

  “You sure of that?”

  “No, it’s just surmise. But it stands to reason. I tailed Harold to Nubar’s office. I wouldn’t imagine it was just a social call.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yes. There’s every indication this afternoon Harold paid Nubar off to the tune of anywhere up to seventy-five hundred dollars. And from the way Harold’s acting, that would appear to be just a drop in the bucket.”

  “You’re kidding. Where the hell would Harold get seventy-five hundred bucks?”

  “Cheating at blackjack.”

  “What!?”

  “Harold’s in collusion with a blackjack dealer at one of the casinos. He put in four and a half hours at the table last night. He made seventy-five hundred. From the way he’s acting, he must be pretty desperate. He’s concentrating as if his life depended on it, which it may. The dealer’s cheating for him.”

  “You can’t cheat at blackjack. The cards come out of a shoe.”

  “Yeah, but they get shuffled before they get put in the shoe. The dealer’s stacking the deck somehow. Harold sits there concentrating like a Buddhist monk until the cards get down near the end of the deck. Then if they’re lying right, he bets the big one.”

  “What makes you think he’s in deep?”

  “Because he started last night with virtually no stake money and had to build up gradually.”

  “So?”

  “If he were doing it for fun and games, he’d hold out enough stake money to play the next day. Apparently he’s in so deep to this loan shark, he’s forking over every cent he gets.”

  “Why wouldn’t he hold out on him?”

  “Nubar isn’t the type of guy you hold out on. Maybe he’s got a spy in the casino telling him how much Harold’s knocking down. Or maybe Harold’s just too scared to think straight. I don’t know.”

  “Wait a minute. Wouldn’t Harold be splitting the take with the blackjack dealer?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the blackjack dealer’s a cute little blonde number that’s apparently Harold’s current outside interest. I tailed him back to her place last night.”

  MacAullif sounded skeptical. “They left together?”

  “No. Harold got his car out of the garage and parked two blocks away. She showed up twenty minutes later, hopped in the car, and they took off for fun and frolic.”

  There was a pause. I could almost hear MacAullif thinking all that over.

  “Now,” I said. “You told me to find out what was going on and report to you, and then we’d figure out what to do about it. All right I’ve reported.”

  Another pause. “Right.”

  “So what do you want to do?”

  “Well, we have to keep Harold from getting his head broken.”

  “I’m not a bodyguard.”

  “I never said you were.”

  “That’s less than helpful.”

  “I know, I know,” MacAullif said. “Jesus. All right. What about the private dick Harold hired?”

  “What about him?”

  “He still on the job?”

  “He wasn’t when I checked this morning. That’s the best I can tell you. I’ve been rather busy.”

  “So I see.”

  There was another pause.

  “So what do you want to do?” I said. I had the feeling of having said it before.

  “All right, look,” MacAullif said. “This thing about Harold and the loan shark—I gotta think about it. At the moment it seems to be status quo. Harold’s just made a payment, that should hold the guy at least twenty-four hours, anyway.

  “But this private dick he hired is another thing. We can’t let him give Harold any hard evidence on my daughter. Harold’s a slime and a shit, and he’d use it.”

  “No argument there.”

  “So that’s your main concern for the moment. Keep tabs on the dick and let me know if he makes a move on my daughter.”

  “That’s a roundabout and highly ineffective way of doing it. The only way to be sure is for me to talk to your daughter.”

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  “I can make up a story. She doesn’t have to know who I am.”

  “No, no. It wouldn’t work. Barbara’s too sharp. You do it just the way I tell you. You don’t keep her away from Steerwell. You keep Steerwell away from her.”

  “But—”

  “Look, I got three murders on my hands here. I gotta go. You’re doing fine. Just play it the way I said.”

  He hung up the phone.

  I must admit I slammed the receiver down.

  Hell!

  Doing fine, was I
? Well, it was sure nice of him to let me know.

  I thought about it some and decided, hell, if that’s the way MacAullif wanted me to play it, that’s how I’d play it.

  Wonderful. Around and around Atlantic City, the private dick chased the Weasel.

  It was three o’clock, so I checked in with Rosenberg & Stone and then drove out to Margate City. I must say I wasn’t happy. Aside from everything else, MacAullif had seemed strangely reticent on the phone. It wasn’t like him. Even in this case, and even though it was family. He’d seemed confused before and not quite himself, but not reticent.

  I didn’t like it.

  On Ventnor Avenue a car passed me going back the other way that looked a lot like Harold’s, and I realized I’d left him alone since after lunch. I wondered if it was really him. I wasn’t about to turn around and find out, however. I kept going to the Weasel’s house.

  This time his car was parked in the driveway. But I didn’t stop. I drove on by and parked a couple of houses down the street.

  Because another car was parked in front of the Weasel’s house. A Chevy station wagon. One I thought I knew.

  I got out of my car. As I did, I heard a bloodcurdling scream. It came from the direction of the Weasel’s house.

  Barbara MacAullif Dunleavy came running out the front door. She was screaming hysterically. She stopped on the front porch and looked around, frantically. She had a gun in her hand. She seemed to see it for the first time. She looked at it, screamed, and threw it on the ground.

  Miss Busybody from next door came out on her porch. Barbara saw her, screamed again, ran to the station wagon, jumped in and drove off.

  I jumped in my car and gave chase. I probably would have caught her, but just my luck, I got stopped by a cop. How he let her go by and stopped me is beyond me, but the guy did. He gave me a speeding ticket, too.

  It occurred to me it wasn’t my day. It also occurred to me not many of them were.

  It also occurred to me Barbara MacAullif Dunleavy was in deep shit. I figured I’d better find out how deep.

  I turned around and drove back to the Weasel’s house.

  I didn’t turn into his street. I didn’t have to. Just driving by I could see a half a dozen police cars with flashing lights on top and a meat wagon parked out front.