The Second Longest Night

by Stephen Marlowe

“What did you do that for?” Marianne said.

  “Well, it's not part of my usual investigative procedure. I don't know why I did it.”

  “He doesn't like you.”

  “Is your car all right?”

  “Yes, no thanks to you.”

  “Maybe you ought to write a book on the whole crazy Hartsell family.”

  “Maybe I ought to, Mr. Drum.”

  “Call me Chet. And always pat your brakes when you're stopping in snow,” I said as she climbed into the Studebaker. “Never jump on them.”

  “I'll see you, Chet.” The motor growled to life.

  I winked at her through the closed window. “I guess so,” I said, but she couldn't hear me.

  I spent most of Thursday mating a nuisance of myself with the police. I have friends there but they're busy people and I don't bother them unless I have to. Deirdre Hartsell was a suicide, they said. Routine coroner's investigation. The suicide weapon was a .22 automatic which she had received as a gift from one Francisco Del Rey of the Venezuelan Embassy, present whereabouts unknown. The small bullet had gone in through her right temple and entered the brain. Death was instantaneous. There were powder burns on the right side of her face and traces of powder on her right hand. She had been all alone in her own bedroom of the Blair Hartsell residence in Georgetown when she did it. The note was genuine. Did Francisco Del Rey make a habit of giving away .22 automatics? As a matter of fact, they told me, he was a collector. Two other girls had similarly been presented with tokens of his affection, but they were both still alive.

  They were cleaning the snow from F Street with big power-driven shovels below my office window. Tiny figures wearing mackinaws were cleaning the sidewalk in front of the Treasury Building with muscle-driven shovels. A bright sun bounced off the snow piles and dazzled everyone in the streets. I had put a call through for the personnel man at the Venezuelan Embassy. He was going to call me back but hadn't so far, although it was now late in the afternoon.

  I picked up a soft-cover shamus book and began to read it. Mike Somebody never waited for people to call him back to confirm appointments. He barged in everywhere with a lewd, expectant grin bisecting his face and always found naked women waiting for him. I sighed.

  The telephone caught me midway in Chapter Five. Mike was spitting nasty words at a member of the Mafia. I dog-eared him and picked up the telephone and announced myself and my line of business.

  “We've got one of your boys, Drum.” I pricked up my ears. I had been reading too much of the shamus book. The voice sounded sinister, almost like something out of Mike's pages.

  “I don't have any boys,” I said. “This one you don't have. We have him.”

  “You must have the wrong number,” I said. That always got results when they were being coy.

  “Alex Lubrano. Does that mean anything to you, Drum?”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Say a few words for Mr. Drum,” the voice said.

  “Hey,- Mr. Drum,” Alex's voice wailed over the phone. “Listen, Mr. Drum. I'm in bad trouble.”

  “That's enough, Alex,” the other voice said.

  I asked, “What's the gag?”

  “No gag, friend. Alex was poking his nose where he shouldn't have. He said it was your idea. Was it?”

  “I don't know where he was poking his nose.”

  “You better come down here, Drum. If you want to see your boy again.” The voice gave me an address across the Virginia line in Alexandria. I took it down and grunted. I didn't say if I would be there or not. I hung up and picked up the shamus book and flung it across the room at the wastebasket. It hit the rim and fell to the floor, the leaves spilling open, the spine up with the big word MURDER on it.

  I took my .45 and the cleaning kit from a drawer in the desk. I ran a rod and a patch through the .45 and the patch came out with flying colors, clean and slightly stained with oil. I checked the clip and the safety catch, put the .45 in the shoulder holster and climbed into the rig. It was uncomfortable. It had always been uncomfortable.

  Why worry your head about Alex Lubrano? I thought. You have enough problems. But I was going down to Alexandria and I had known I would go the moment I heard Alex's frightened voice over the telephone. I didn't like him. I didn't like his friends or the associations he made in life, but that was his affair. Except for other Communists and perhaps his family, I was the only one who knew Alex Lubrano was a member of the Party. I could tap him for information whenever I needed that kind of information, but that wasn't the reason I was going down to Alexandria.

  Alex was in trouble. I had got him into trouble. What the hell, I'm not like Mike in the shamus book. I'm a sucker.

  From a long way off you could see the Masonic National Memorial stabbing its big blunt spear against the crisp winter sky. Route I became Henry Street and I got snarled in rush-hour traffic. I made a left turn on Queen Street and a sign pointed in the direction of an old white ante-bellum house which had been the home of General Lee, not the Confederate general but his father, Light-Horse Harry, who had fought in the Revolutionary War under Washington.

  There were fewer houses and more space between the houses as I neared the Potomac River. A block this side of Union Street and south of Queen I came to the address I had been given over the phone.

  It was one of a group of brick garden apartment buildings with a narrow colonnade and white wood pillars out front meant to look Georgian. I parked the car and stepped onto the sidewalk, from which the snow had been recently shoveled. It was the cleanest sidewalk I had seen in a long time. The only one I saw around the place was a mailman toting a big bag over his right shoulder like Santa Claus.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “You're on the job kind of late, aren't you?”

  “That's the Christmas rush for you, mister.” He was skinny. You'd need three of him to make one Santa Claus.

  I clucked sympathetically. “You wouldn't happen to know who lives in Forty-seven-B, would you?”

  “Not me,” he said. “I don't know anything like that. It could be the President and I wouldn't know the difference. I'm not the regular man here.”

  I watched him go on his appointed round. From the back he looked more like Atlas holding up the world than Santa Claus. Two kids came walking down the street from the direction of 47-B. One of them said, “There is so a Santa Claus, stupid.”

  “Wanna bet?”

  “Yeah, I wanna bet. Ask him, wise guy.”

  “I don't wanna. I know there ain't. You ask.” So the first fellow looked up at me and said, “Mister, isn't there really a Santa Claus?” He added, “Huh?”

  “I wouldn't know,” I said. “This isn't my regular route. But I tell you—” I took out a quarter and let them see how the fading winter sunlight made it shine—“You can get an early Christmas present if you know who lives in Forty-seven-B.”

  “Him?” said the first kid, and snatched the quarter. That funny guy?”

  “What's funny about him?” I said.

  “Seen-yor, eef you theenk . . .” said the second kid, rolling his eyes. The first kid giggled.

  “He talks with a Spanish accent?” I suggested.

  “Yeah. You know.”

  “You wouldn't happen to know his name?”

  “My mother says it means like of the king.”

  I found another quarter in my pocket and gave it to the second kid. They went down the street, still arguing about Santa Claus, calling each other seen-yor as if it was a dirty word.

  There was a light on behind the heavy drapes in the window of 47-B, which was a ground-floor apartment in the two-story building. The name in the doorslot was F. Del Rey. I went around to the back of the building, but the only entrance there led to a small basement room with two washing machines, a clothes dryer and a cigarette vendor in it.

  I went around to the front of the building again and listened. There wasn't a sound except for the muted hum of snow tires across town on Henry Street. Somewhere out of sight, a car door
slammed. I poked my thumb at the bell button and heard two chimes inside. It was a very suburban sound.

  A man with big ears and a squashed nose opened the door. “Well, well,” he said. “You must be the shamus, the detective himself.”

  “I'm Drum,” I admitted. “But if you're Del Rey then I'm Francisco Pizarro.”

  “You're who?”

  “I kidnapped Atahualpa and killed him,” I said.

  He made a head-scratching face, but his hands remained down near his pockets, where he could reach whatever was inside them. “What in hell are you talking about anyway?”.

  “It was a test and you flunked. I came to get my boy, as you suggested.”

  He nodded. He was about to say something, possibly even to invite me inside, when a voice called from behind him, “Is that the detective?” There was no “seen-yor, eef you theenk” in the voice, but the accent was Spanish, all right.

  “It's Drum,” said Squashed Nose.

  “Send him in, Max. You can go now.”

  I entered the apartment. Max departed. The living room was Swedish modern, not expensive but in good taste. It was all dark and light with black lacquered pieces and high-grained white ash.

  Francisco Del Rey was sitting on a sectional sofa, smoking a cigarette in one of those long holders which has another cigarette in its barrel. He did look like Cesar Romero. He looked picturesque. He had sleek black hair which was graying in picturesque tufts at the temples. He had a trim, picturesque mustache. His eyes were picturesquely Latin. They were dark and I thought they would look moody on occasion. He was big, as big as I am, and I can call most people shrimp and make it stick.

  Yma Sumac was going through her vocal acrobatics on the phono half of the radio-phono. She sounded like a bird.

  Alex Lubrano was on the twist beige carpet between the phonograph and Del Rey. He lay on his' side with his hands and feet bound together behind him like a bunch of carrots. Welts the color of grape juice blotched the tight skin over his cheekbones. A white handkerchief held a gag in place in his mouth, but he managed to make low noises which competed in exoticness with Yma Sumac's offerings.

  “How do you do, Mr. Drum?” Francisco Del Rey said, completely ignoring the trussed-up little man on the floor. He unneedled the Sumac voice with a look of regret and came over to shake my hand. “Untie him,” I said. “But he runs all around making noises.”

  “I said, untie him.”

  “Well, I will take the gag out and you will see.” Del Rey squatted on his heels behind Alex's head and worked for a moment over the knotted handkerchief. It came loose and Alex spit the gag, another handkerchief, out of his mouth and started yelling. Del Rey stood up and gave me an I-told-you-so look and kicked Alex in the back of the head hard with the toe of one gleaming black loafer exactly as you might kick a stone out of your way. Alex's head jerked forward. He whimpered and shut up.

  “You see?” Francisco Del Rey said.

  The strains of Silent Night drifted down faintly, from the apartment above us. I reached Francisco Del Rey in two strides and grabbed the front of his shirt with both my hands. There was a ripping sound but I couldn't see any damage. We stood there and swayed, almost to the music. Del Rey disengaged my hands and said, “I could have kept Max here for that kind of foolishness, you know.”

  “Why did you send for me? To show me what a big boy you were and how you could kick his head in?”

  “Perhaps. I understand Max told you on the phone you could come and pick up your boy. That isn't quite right.”

  “No?”

  Alex began to groan again. He sounded like a domestic animal who wished he was housebroken but hadn't quite learned the trick yet.

  “No. You see, Alex had access to certain information—”

  “What information?”

  “That's why I sent for you, Mr. Drum. Alex is only a middleman. His curiosity doesn't matter, you see. Your curiosity does. Did the way I kicked Alex frighten you?”

  “It must have scared hell out of him,” I said.

  “I wonder. I wonder exactly how tough you are. Do you know anything about diplomatic immunity, Mr. Drum?”

  “What is this, a guessing game?”

  “I only wanted to point out that I have it. Diplomatic immunity. I could slit your throat and drink your blood if I liked drinking blood and then I could board a plane for home—which, incidentally, I am going to do this evening—and the worst they could do here in your country is discharge me persona non grata, which hardly matters since I am leaving. Does it?”

  He was a queer one. I didn't know how queer. I said, “What do you want?”

  “What I want doesn't matter. What do you want?”

  “You gave Deirdre Hartsell a gun, with which she killed herself. Is that all you gave her? Did she join the Communists because you suggested it?”

  “That is exactly what I wish you would forget about. If certain facts were now at your disposal, you would not have sent Alex Lubrano to ferret them out. Si?”

  “Si,” I said.

  “You have Spanish?”

  “Only a little.”

  “That's too bad. Sometimes I find it difficult to express myself in your language.”

  “You're doing fine.”

  “But no. I don't think so. When I leave here tonight and fly back to Venezuela, you're going ahead with your investigation, aren't you?”

  “Yeah.”

  Francisco Del Rey smiled and walked over to a low high-grained ash drawer unit on a long table with black lacquered legs. When he came back he was holding a medium-sized revolver in his hand, probably a .32. “I purchased this in Bogota, Colombia. A bargain, don't you think, for seventeen dollars?”

  “Oh, I don't know,” I said. He wasn't pointing the .32 at me, but just holding it in his hand and studying it. I took my automatic out and held it too. “Mine's bigger.”

  “You may free Alex now,” he said.

  I kneeled behind Alex and held the gun in my left hand. I looked at Del Rey, who was back rummaging through the draw unit, and unfastened the knots with my right hand.

  “Are you all right?” I asked Alex.

  He groaned an answer and sat up.

  “Get on your feet,” Francisco Del Rey said.

  Alex stood up unsteadily. “Thanks, Mr. Drum,” he said.

  Thanks for what? I thought. I hadn't done a thing for him. Del Rey came around in front of us. Upstairs, they had exchanged the record for Come All Ye Faithful. “I have quite a collection of firearms,” Del Rey said. “Unfortunately, I can't show you the rest of it because it is in Venezuela. You believe me?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I didn't see what difference it made.

  “This silencer, for example.” He had attached the flaring tube of a silencer unit to the muzzle of his .32. “I had it made up specially by a gunsmith in Caracas. It was expensive, but then everything is expensive in Caracas. Have you ever been there?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Well, you must come some day. There is much business for a private detective in Caracas. It is that kind of city. Too bad you don't have much Spanish.”

  “Can we get out of here now?” Alex Lubrano asked me. “I need a drink.”

  Francisco Del Rey beamed at him. His upper lip all but curled up and hid the trim mustache. “I have just the thing,” he said. He went to the same drawer unit which had held the gun and the silencer. He poured a drink in a glass and handed it to Alex, who gulped it and screwed up his face as the strong liquor burned its way down his digestive tract and said, “That's just what I needed.”

  “So is this,” said Francisco del Key, and pointed his .32 at Alex's face and squeezed the trigger twice. It made a sound like pfft, pfft, no louder than you could say it with your pursed lips. It made a hole above Alex's left eye and a hole where his right cheekbone had been.

  Alex fell down as if he had taken hemlock, first his feet going dead, then his calves, then his upper legs, then the rest of him. He didn't reach out with
his hands to break his fall as they do on television. He would not slither offstage when the camera panned away from him. I did not bother going to him. With two holes in his face like that he was dead before he felt the warmth of the drink in his stomach!

  “You crazy dumb goddamn son of a bitch,” I said, but Francisco Del Rey was pointing his gun at me, the silencer looking as big as the horn of one of those old fashioned phonographs. I could bring my own .45 up and shoot him, but he would shoot me too.

  “Put the gun back in its holster,” he said. I did so. It still felt uncomfortable. “Inside,” he said. “The bedroom. You'll find two cowhide valises on the bed. Get them.”

  Now I knew. Now I knew how queer he was. I was dealing with a lunatic. At the very least, with a psychopath. He followed me into the bedroom. The furniture was limed oak Chinese modern. The bed was oversized. The two tan valises were on the bare mattress as he said they would be. I picked them up, one in each hand. They were heavy.

  “If you put them down before I tell you to, it will mean to me you are reaching for your gun,” he said. “In that case, I will kill you.” He would; no doubt about it. “Outside.”

  “"He put on a black sport jacket with brass buttons on the sleeves. It went very well with his Oxford gray trousers and black loafers. He took the silencer off his .32 and put it in the left-hand pocket of his jacket. He put the revolver in the right-hand pocket. His hand went in there with it. With his free left hand he opened the door for me.

  “Do you have a car?” he said. “We'll have to hurry. My plane leaves in forty-five minutes.”

  I almost expected Alex Lubrano to get off the floor and say it was all a joke. He didn't.

  Chapter Four

  THE TWO VALISES were on the back seat of my Chewy. Francisco Del Rey was alongside of me in front, whistling. For some reason, the sound reminded me of Yma Sumac. I turned left on Queen Street and right on the corner of Washington Street, which would take us north to the Washington National Airport.

  “Don't try anything at the airport,” Del Rey said. “In the first place, it wouldn't work. In the second place, I have diplomatic immunity. They couldn't hold me long enough to investigate. They couldn't hold the plane. They know all about diplomatic immunity at the Washington National Airport. By the time they can work their way through protocol, I will be in Venezuela. Tell me, Drum. Do you think they will try to have me extradited?”