McNally's Alibi

by Lawrence Sanders

  Ursi: “Did the Beaumont boy put you wise, Archy? I’ve had a dozen calls since the news broke on the TV. The local network sent a camera crew there when Binky alerted them as to what was happening. It looked so exciting. The images were all dark and shaky because it was real life.”

  Father: “I don’t think the police appreciated the presence of the TV crew.”

  Jamie: “Tommy Ambrose is being held until bail is set. Do you know him, Archy?”

  Ursi: “What can I get you, Archy?”

  “A black coffee and three extra-strength aspirins, please.”

  If Al had pulled the graveyard shift and indulged in the drug bust, as Ursi—or was it mother?—had labeled it, he should now be at home. I knew from experience that Al did not go directly to bed after patrolling our fair island all night, but had a bit of breakfast before nodding off, Al’s breakfast being a Bud and two franks with mustard and kraut. Covering Batman and Robin with a rugby shirt in blue and white, I drove to the Palm Court.

  “I was expecting you,” Al said, opening the door to his trailer. The background music was loud and tumultuous. In a robe and barefoot, Al went to the stereo and toned it down. “Boito’s Mefistofele,” he told me. “The peasants are cuttin’ up.... ‘Tutti vanno alia rinfusa/Sulla musica confusa.’ It translates, ‘All is going to dire confusion/With the music in collusion.’ ”

  Great. The guy’s English is atrocious, but he can spout Italian librettos. In a tartan robe Al looks like Smokey the Bear in a tartan robe. “Dire confusion is what I’m here about, Al. What the hell happened last night?”

  “You wanna beer, pal?”

  “At ten in the morning? No, thanks.”

  “How about a foot-long dog?”

  “You’re turning my stomach. Is coffee even a remote possibility?”

  “On the stove, help yourself. So you heard, eh?”

  I poured myself a cuppa and added a drop of milk. “Heard? It was the talk of our breakfast table. Where’s the sugar?”

  “I’m out,” he said.

  “Go borrow a few lumps from Eliot Ness.”

  Al roared. “You shoulda seen him, Archy. He looked like he was directing World War Three and lost the script. Kept running in circles. I had to put him in the patrol car to keep him out of the way.” Al lit a cigar and puffed contentedly.

  I took a seat at the table. “I heard he alerted the TV station.”

  “The captain wanted to kill him.”

  “Why didn’t you let him?”

  “Don’t be unkind, Archy. Binky is your biggest supporter. He told the TV guy that you was onto the scam before us.”

  A drug bust at the Beaumont house and now Al defending Binky. I had heard two impossible things before lunch. What next?

  “I had shoved him into the patrol car, so he had to give his statement looking out the window. Then he spots the Ambrose kid being led off in handcuffs and he shouts, ‘Hey, Tommy, whatta you doing here?’ ”

  Al’s grin broke into a raucous laugh. A moment later, I joined him. It was the Keystone Kops, with Binky leading the chase. When our giggles subsided, I asked Al to sock it to me from the beginning.

  “I told you I kept thinking about the light in that upstairs window. What I didn’t tell you was that I talked to the captain about it.”

  Knowing that Al Rogoff was the PBPD’s biggest asset, the captain let Al in on the fact that the odd couple Al had arrested at the Beaumont site had not gone onto the grounds to engage in sex, but to purchase drugs from the back door of the Beaumont mansion.

  “The Bennett dude, on the advice of his lawyer, fessed up in return for pleading guilty to unlawful trespassing. Mitand, who had the dope in his purse, also copped a plea.” From that point on, the house was being watched by the vice boys from Miami.

  When Al read that Tyler Beaumont was in town, he came to me to find out what Tyler might know about the operation. When I told him my version of Tyler’s quest and added that I had set Binky the task of keeping his eye on that window, Al got the picture. I also told Al that Binky had run into Tommy Ambrose while on duty. Knowing his neighbor, Al suspected that Binky had told Ambrose that he was snooping, thus alerting Ambrose to the fact that his safe house maybe wasn’t so safe anymore.

  “We had been watching Ambrose and his crowd, giving them enough space to incriminate themselves. They was comin’ and goin’ like they owned the joint.”

  It seems the gang had been using the former nursery, on the second floor, to store their wares, even bringing in portable battery-operated lamps. A few times during the summer, and since, it got so hot up there they foolishly opened a window and loosened the shutter to let in some air. Hence the mysterious and occasional light in the upstairs window. And, wouldn’t you know it, the nursery window.

  Al was puffing away, occasionally tapping his ashes into an ashtray that looked suspiciously like a huge terracotta flowerpot coaster because that’s what it was. Judging from the mound of cigar ash it contained, I would guess it hadn’t been emptied in weeks. Al was in need of a domestic engineer.

  “With Binky hanging around and yakking it up with Ambrose, we knew we had to strike last night or lose the game. And we was right. We caught ’em moving out like their lease was up and they was going to greener pastures.”

  Amazing. Just amazing. “I never did like the Ambrose boy,” I admitted.

  Al chuckled. “He was takin’ book on your chances of zapping Alejandro, and now the bank’s gone bust. How is Connie, anyhow?”

  “Don’t ask, Al.”

  “Bad as all that, eh?”

  “Worse,” I told him.

  “So there ain’t gonna be no wedding.”

  Did Al realize that a double negative made a positive? “There might yet be a wedding,” I said, “but the face under the veil is still a question mark.”

  “Careful, it might turn out to be Binky’s mug. Now, get outta here, I gotta get some shut-eye.”

  “Thanks for the Java,” I said. “And for the record, I didn’t know a damn thing about what was going on in that house.”

  “I know that, Archy.”

  “Your boss told the TV people it was a joint effort.”

  “He was talking about us and the vice boys from down south.”

  “Have a good snooze, Al.”

  Before the door closed behind me, I heard the musica confusa swell and wondered if Dr. Faustus was dancing with the devil.

  Binky pushed his mail cart into my office all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. “The Unmasked Avenger,” I said in awe. “May I have an autograph?”

  “What a night, Archy. Did you see me on the TV?”

  “No, Binky, I missed the first performance. Perhaps I’ll catch you on the late show. Now tell me why you told the reporter I had you watching the house because I suspected what was going on there?”

  “Well, didn’t you?”

  “No, I did not. I told you why I had you snooping around here.”

  “I didn’t believe you,” Binky said.

  “I never lie to you.”

  “You always lie to me,” he contested. “And you don’t believe in ghosts, do you?”

  “No. But my client obviously does, and the client always gets the benefit of the doubt.” Here I remembered that it was my duty to call Tyler and give him the bad news, which, I was sure, he had already heard. I really liked that boy, and so did Georgy.

  “After last night,” Binky informed me, “I think I’ve served my apprenticeship and graduated. I’m a shamus, Archy.”

  “A shameful shamus, you mean. I heard you had to be locked in a patrol car.”

  “I wasn’t wearing a bulletproof vest, that’s why.”

  “I don’t believe any shots were fired,” I said.

  “How do you know?” he accused. “You weren’t there. You were smooching with the blond trooper at the Colony.”

  Did I hear him correctly? Of course I did, and I wanted to retreat into denial. But how do you deny the truth when it’s being decree
d by a guy with the face of Bambi, the movie star fawn? That would be un-American. “How do you know where I was and with whom?”

  “Connie told me. She called me this morning to make sure I was okay. Some people care, Archy.”

  “After your face appeared framed by me window of a patrol car, I think you will have a legion of caring fans. Yes, I was at the Colony with my client Tyler Beaumont. I met the officer in the lobby and invited her to sit with us. Also, it was hours before the assault on Dunbar Road and it was a business meeting.”

  Were I Pinocchio my nose would be longer than Palm Beach Island. “I will call Connie and explain. I trust she’s at home today.”

  “You trust wrong, Archy. By this time she’s halfway to Miami.”

  “She’s gone to Miami for the weekend?”

  “That’s what she told me. She’s going to a political rally with Alejandro. He wants to run for mayor.”

  With Connie at his side, I thought. “I think I’ll kill myself,” I said to our mail person.

  “Well, don’t let me keep you,” he encouraged, backing out with his cart. “You have no mail, Archy.”

  “Thanks—and I would like to borrow your cell phone before I leave today.”

  “Okay. But be careful with it. It’s not fully paid for. Why do you need it?”

  “Business,” I said.

  “The Capote case?”

  It had now become the Capote case, and the poor man had been gone all these years. “If you must know, yes,” I said.

  “Will you need me, or just my phone?”

  “Just your phone will do, Binky.”

  “Good, because the girls are taking me to dinner tonight.”

  “What girls?”

  “The girls in the typing pool are treating the hero to vitello alia Milanese at Bice on Worth Avenue.”

  Now Binky was spouting Italian menus. Seated at my desk, I buried my face in my arms and wept.

  The ringing phone interrupted my crying jag, which I was really enjoying. It was the reception desk in the lobby. A Mr. Milo Wentworth wanted to see me.

  “I don’t know a Milo Wentworth,” I told her, anxious to get back to my crying.

  “He says you met him last night at the Colony, sir,” she responded.

  Caramba. It was the man who had horned in on our little cocktail party. The man I thought might be Tyler’s sentry. With Tyler on the loose and the house all over the morning news, Mr. Wentworth must be tearing his hair out. “Send him up,” I said, hoping my eyes weren’t puffy.

  When Tyler introduced him to us, I vaguely remembered hearing the name before in connection with the Beaumont family. In fact, I think the Wentworths are the Beaumonts’ poor cousins; however, with this crowd, poor is relative, especially when applied to relatives.

  He knocked before entering, and when he did I was able to appraise him more carefully than I had last night. There was nothing poor about his designer jeans and lightweight blazer that bespoke tailor-made at Chipp’s. Milo Wentworth was near six feet tall, possessed a full head of layered brown hair, I believe lightly hennaed by the barber who layered it. He also had clear blue eyes and an affable smile.

  I would guess his age to be about thirty. His handshake was manly, an approach most likely learned at the fraternity house of some Ivy League school when greeting hopeful candidates for admission into the brotherhood. That same hand could drop a black ball with all the aplomb it had offered friendship.

  “I hope you forgave my intruding on your little party last night,” he said, “but we all have to do our jobs.”

  “And your job is to be intrusive in the life and times of Tyler Beaumont.” It was blunt, but I wanted to get back to my crying. “Please have a seat, Mr. Wentworth, and excuse the cramped quarters, but my office is being refurbished.”

  His smile told me he didn’t believe me. So, you win some and you lose some, and I was on a losing roll. “You know what my job is, Mr. McNally?”

  “I’ve heard rumors, and I’ve talked with Tyler, and I agreed to help him,” I said.

  “Why did you agree to help him, Mr. McNally?”

  “As you said, we all have to do our job. Also, I rather like the lad.”

  “Most people who know him like him,” Wentworth said. “He’s perfectly normal, you know, in every way except for his obsession with the death of his twin brother. The family has spared no expense in getting him help, believe me, but all to no avail. He insists on keeping Maddy, his late brother, alive. They talk, you know.”

  “So he told me. Does he have to be watched constantly?”

  Wentworth shook his head, causing the layers to ripple. “Constantly is a very exacting word. Let’s say he has to be monitored so he doesn’t run off to Palm Beach and hire detectives to find out if his brother is roaming the halls of the family house. All the doctors, and there have been many, agree on one thing: keep Tyler away from the scene of the accident. So you can understand my apprehension when he disappeared from New York and came here. His arrival was noted in your local newspaper and friends called me.”

  “Now the mystery of the light in the window has been solved,” I said. “Will that help Tyler cope?”

  “For a while, but not for very long. I talked with Sarah and Madison, who are currently in London. They’ve given me permission to deal with the police and again secure the house. I’ll do what has to be done and then get Ty out of here as quickly as is possible. If you give me your bill...”

  “There is no bill, Mr. Wentworth.”

  “How generous. Did Tyler tell you what happened in that house some twenty years ago?”

  “He did.” I briefly related what the boy had reported.

  Wentworth thought a moment before answering. “Tyler was not at the bottom of the staircase, Mr. McNally. He was at the top of the staircase.”

  The hair on my neck bristled. “You mean...”

  “Maddy was in the new fire truck the boys received for Christmas. Ty was pushing him across the upstairs hall. The truck’s bells clanging—the boys shouting—children seldom look where they’re going...”

  I could see the scene as clearly as if I were watching it on a movie screen.

  “The truck toppled on the first step, tossing Maddy out, headfirst—”

  “Please. That’s enough.”

  “I didn’t mean to upset you, Mr. McNally. I just wanted you to know why Ty is so desperate to bring his brother back to life. Like Lady Macbeth, the damn spot won’t go away. Even under hypnosis Ty swears he was at the bottom of the staircase, looking up.”

  Poor Ty. Poor, adorable Tyler Beaumont.

  “Well, it’s been a pleasure, Mr. McNally,” Wentworth said, extending his hand. “I must be going, as we all have our jobs to do, don’t we?”

  Yeah, we all have our jobs to do.

  23

  I STOOD IN FRONT of the Pelican Club in a slouch hat, a raincoat with a bulging left-hand pocket that contained Binky’s cell phone, not a .38, and toting a briefcase. The only thing missing from the scene was a foggy mist and a cigarette dangling from between my lips, but times change and we must change with them or get left behind. As I saw the approaching headlights, I wished I were getting left behind.

  It was a black mini-limo the car service people refer to as a Town Car. It stopped where I stood on the curb. I opened the passenger door, and before I entered another car pulled up behind us. The glass partition between the driver and his fare was raised. The driver wore a black jacket and cap. He didn’t turn when I got in but pulled away as soon as I had closed the door. The car behind us followed.

  I didn’t like this one iota. I felt as if I were being led up the garden path with an escort to see that I got there. I tapped on the partition, and it lowered a fraction. “Do you know we’re being followed?” I said.

  “It’s the people who hired me.” The partition went back up.

  The response was barely audible, and the faux basso made me believe my driver was a woman. I am aware that woman chauffeurs
are no longer an oddity, but if my conjectures were correct this particular one was our odd man out. If not, why the closed partition and bogus voice? My C.S.O. was off to a good start. Now all I had to do was stay alive to see it to completion.

  When I had asked Whitehead why he hadn’t made the trade with Swensen, he told me: “... you are a babe in the woods. Claudia Lester would never trust me to get my hands on the money and the manuscript at the same time....”

  The money and the manuscript were once again poised to be in the same place at the same time; ergo, in the car behind us were all or two of the following: Claudia Lester. Matthew Harrigan. Rodney Whitehead. I ticked off my candidates as we drove through the dark streets of Palm Beach and West Palm Beach, crossing the Flagler Memorial Bridge and returning on the Royal Palm Way Bridge.

  We did the South American circuit—Brazilian Avenue, Chilean Avenue, Peruvian Avenue—and traversed Seminole Avenue, Atlantic Avenue and even Dunbar Road, where a patrol car stood guard at the gates of the Beaumont house. Sergeant Rogoff? Up Worth Avenue, where all the storefronts were ablaze with lights to display their costly wares, we passed Bice, where the hero was eating veal.

  It was all very boring, and just as I was about to tap once more on the glass partition a glance out the window told me we were now heading back to where we had started. We pulled up to the club’s entrance and stopped. Our tail car stopped at a distance that made it impossible for me to see who was in it. The partition came down and, without turning, the driver passed over the familiar package. It was still wrapped in brown paper and tied with string. I took it and put the handle of the briefcase in the driver’s now empty hand, which hovered over the padded black shoulder.

  Very clever. First the almost one-hour car ride to be sure we were not being followed, and now the exchange in the car so I would never see the face of the person I was dealing with. But I had seen the hand of that person with its perfect manicure and tinted nails. Flamingo pink, if I wasn’t mistaken.

  The car drove off immediately. The second car lingered until I had turned my back, heading for the lot and my Miata. I heard it rev past before I reached my car. Taking Answered Prayers, which I had checked out of the library this afternoon, from the car, I headed back to the club with it and the package wrapped in brown paper. The moment of truth.