The Last Man to Die (The Micah Dunn Mysteries)

by Malcolm Shuman

  Kelso squinted at me like I’d just uttered the sophomorism of the century.

  “Men’ve got killed for thinking that way. Here.” He handed me the keys. “Open the door.”

  I started to say something, then realized he was right: He had two hands and I only had one. Better occupy it with the keys.

  I found the master and fitted it into the lock. I turned it, heard the lock click, and then pushed the door open.

  “Miss Marsh? Are you in there?”

  I caught a glimpse of the living room and realized it probably wouldn’t do any good to call out again. Everything was spilled out onto the floor, as if a hurricane had come through.

  “Stand aside and cover me,” Kelso ordered. He advanced through the doorway, all the Irish blarney suddenly gone. I dropped the keys into my pocket and drew my Colt. It seemed like a joke next to his magnum.

  When he was into the living room he motioned for me to follow. I came forward, stepping over books and cups and what looked like a partly completed afghan.

  “Shit.”

  I jerked my head toward him and then saw what he’d seen.

  Something lay on the floor, halfway in the bedroom and halfway out. It looked like a laundry bag, with a mop sticking out the top. Then I realized the mop was hair and the laundry bag was Idola Marsh’s body.

  “Take care of her while I try to call. I don’t trust that rent-a-cop downstairs,” Kelso said.

  I knelt beside the old woman. For an instant I imagined I detected a faint breath, but then I realized she was already dead. There was blood on her bodice, and when I looked I saw what appeared to be a stab wound.

  I let her go back onto the floor and returned to the living room to join Kelso.

  “Look at this mess,” he said. “Old scrapbooks and I don’t know what all.” He held one up for me to see. “Now what do you suppose was in these things?”

  I took the book from him. It was the volume for 1949.

  I had seen it only a couple of days ago, but today it looked different. All of a sudden I realized why: When I opened it, it flopped open to a blank page. A page where little tabs of roughened cardboard told me a photograph had once rested.

  Somebody had ripped out the picture of Max.

  Kelso swore under his breath and went over to the phone, which lay on the rug, receiver out of the cradle.

  He pushed down on the button, then punched in a number.

  “This is Deputy Chief Jake Kelso,” he barked. “I want a uniform patrol and a homicide team.” He read the address. “Send the coroner and a D.A., too.” There was a half-second of silence. “Where am I? I’m at the crime scene, you damn fool. It looks like you monkeys need help and I’m here to give it to you.”

  He hung up the phone and turned to me with a smile.

  “Ah, it feels good to be back.”

  CHAPTER 21

  This time it wasn’t Mancuso, but a captain with a walrus mustache, trailed by a lieutenant and a couple of sergeants. The captain, a big man with a bigger belly, took one look and started to curse.

  “God damn it, Jake, what have you gotten yourself into?”

  “That’s a hell of a way to thank a man for doing your job for you.”

  “Doing my job?” The captain turned red in the face and the lieutenant and sergeants frowned. “You mean walking all over a crime scene? Picking things up? Fucking with the evidence?”

  “Now, don’t get a spastic bowel, Arthur. We already know who done the crime. You’d do better to put your crime-scene techs in uniform and send them after this guy than waste all day looking for fingerprints. Man this smart wears gloves, anyway.”

  The captain looked like a balloon ready to pop.

  “Jake, by God …!”

  “ ‘By God’ is right. Didn’t you learn anything when you were a rookie and I was your sergeant? Did I fail that much? Did I?”

  The captain’s pig eyes narrowed.

  “Will you excuse us?” He took Kelso’s arm and guided him toward the hall, but before he reached it he called back over his shoulder:

  “Don’t let the other one go anyplace.”

  The other policemen skewered me with their eyes. Now and again I heard angry voices from the hallway, but I couldn’t make out any words. After five minutes the captain reappeared.

  “Get out,” he told me. “We’ll be talking to you. And tell your friend to get his ass to that camp his daughter has. That’s where he belongs.”

  Two hours later I was back at my office. I hadn’t gotten to the car before the captain changed his mind and had me whisked downtown to sign a statement. I expected a grilling, but what I got was pro forma. Maybe, I thought, they’d already put hands on the killer. Or maybe there was some other reason.

  Now I checked my answering machine, which blinked angrily at me for not being there to take my calls. But when I tried to play back the tape there were no messages. I stared at it for a few seconds, trying to sort out my thoughts. There was no sense being paranoid, because I got lots of calls from people who decided at the last minute not to follow through. And a lot of prospective clients with personal problems would never talk to a machine, which was understandable. But someone had been remarkably persistent.

  I got out the bug detector and did another quick sweep, but nothing came up this time. Then I took a beer out of the refrigerator and sat down and tried to make sense of what I had.

  Somebody had been threatened by Idola Marsh. It was not necessarily someone who had previously known of her existence; it might have been someone who had simply chosen to follow me and had wondered what information she might have had. But I thought that was too much happenstance. More likely they knew about her existence, but they had not known where she was until I’d led them there.

  The bugging of our cars had been a professional job, done by somebody who knew that in big-city traffic, especially at night, one car could lose another. But it didn’t take a lot of smarts to slap a magnetic directional beeper under a bumper.

  I picked up the phone and called Gerald Sessoms at his shop. I described the device and asked him where they could be bought.

  “You mean legal or illegal?” he asked.

  “Does the government use them?”

  “FBI and others, sure. But they can be got on the black market. Hell, they can even be manufactured by somebody who has the right equipment and know-how.”

  It was what I thought he’d say. I thanked him and hung up.

  I went back to Idola Marsh. Whoever had done it had stolen an old photo of Max. They had probably taken other things, but I didn’t have a complete inventory; all I knew was that the picture of Max was missing.

  What was there about that ancient newspaper photo?

  I tried to remember what it showed, but all I recalled was that Max was on his way somewhere and the camera had caught him in mid-stride. I didn’t even remember the caption.

  By now I was sure the guards at the place Sandy, Carol, and Sam were staying had been informed about Idola Marsh’s murder, and I was sure they’d passed it on. There was no urgency there, so I decided to concentrate on the photograph.

  I went back to the Tulane Library and got a roll of microfilm for the year 1949. Finding the photo wouldn’t be easy: In those days, I recalled, New Orleans had been a three-newspaper town. I’d have to search the Picayune, the States, and the Item.

  It was well into lunchtime when I found it, tucked away on the second page of the States. And it was just as I’d recalled: a grim Max, leaning slightly forward as he walked, his police guards trying to keep up, and a few faceless press people looking at him with the eternal surprise of those caught by the camera’s flash.

  I read the caption.

  “Member of reform group on way to testify.”

  Next I scanned the story, but there wasn’t much to it, just a couple of paragraphs saying Max had insisted on appearing before some legislative committee in Baton Rouge in connection with an anticorruption bill. I ran through the next
few issues for follow-up, but didn’t find anything. I copied the page number and date and took the roll to the librarian and asked for a photocopy.

  A few minutes later I had it, but holding it in my hands didn’t tell me anything I hadn’t known before.

  I stared down at the man with the limp. I didn’t look like Max, but Idola Marsh, in her clouded brain, had confused me with him. Was it that we both had a discernible handicap? Or was it something else?

  Whatever it was, she hadn’t wanted me to leave. Something had scared her, something she sensed …

  What was there between her and Max, and why was she being kept on a pension?

  Of course, she might have had money of her own. There was no way of finding that out until the cops had gone through her records and bank box, if she had one.

  I had an image of the romance novels strewn across the floor. She had lived in a fog of romantic fantasy. But that didn’t make her unique. Yet taken with the rest—the ancient radio, the scrap-books—it gave me the picture of someone fixed in a time long past, for whom the events of forty years ago were more real than the world of today. And that made her a threat to someone.

  Then I thought of the cool, elegant Lydia. She had moved on in her life, remarried. When Max’s bones were found they brought back an unwelcome memory of a dead past. And yet when Idola Marsh had thought I was Max, she had become terrified that I would leave, and thus rend the fantasy world in which she still lived.

  My God, I thought, had Idola loved him that much?

  Then I remembered how she had mistaken me for him, and I suddenly felt dizzy. I wasn’t Max: Max was an idealist, a man who wouldn’t bend. I was just a middle-aged P.I. following a dead trail because I didn’t want to be left with the thought of how I had failed with the woman I loved.

  Max was different. He had gone off to the war as a young idealist and had returned with his ideals intact, and he had paid a terrible price. But it was the kind of thing people of his generation did. I could imagine my father doing the same thing. It was a job, called fighting for democracy. And it was a job they’d done well.

  Of course she would have loved him.

  I wondered if he’d loved her back.

  What was it Herb Levinthal had told me? That Lydia had been in a social class that didn’t accept Max, a poor boy from the Irish Channel with a chip on his shoulder about fair play? I thought of the old man in the painting, scowling down from Lydia’s wall: He couldn’t have approved of a man who was stirring things up, casting aspersions on his colleagues. Had he advised her against marriage to this upstart? Moved afterward to wreck it? With a wife caught in the middle, it wouldn’t have taken long for Max to feel the strains in their marriage. An adoring secretary doting on him every day might well have caused him to plunge into an affair. And after Herbert Senior had been killed they would have been drawn together more closely.

  My mouth went dry as I let my mind follow the thread.

  Was Lydia the kind of person who could kill?

  For that matter, was her father?

  I knew I had to talk to her again, try to get past the façade. But she was ill and it would be hard to do.

  What I needed was more information. It was time to talk to Herb Levinthal again.

  It was mid-afternoon when I got out of the elevator and walked down the labyrinthine hallway to his office. This time his door was closed; one of the cubicle dwellers told me he was in a meeting. I said I’d wait, and took a seat.

  I could have had a job in Naval Systems Command, in a building like this one. The Captain would have taken care of it. I went for an interview and I knew they’d been favorably impressed by my military bearing and my paralyzed arm. But when I got out of the elevator on the ground floor and handed my pass to the guard I almost ran for the fresh air outside.

  All the faceless people in their little boxes scared me. The Captain had listened and his lip curled up in disapproval, yet there wasn’t much he could say, because he would never have taken such a job himself. But then, all his body parts worked.

  Max wouldn’t have worked here either, I told myself.

  Half an hour passed and the door finally opened. Two women and a man came out, talking about some meeting in Washington. Levinthal saw me and frowned slightly.

  “Mr. Dunn?”

  “I’m back,” I said. “I need some more of your time.”

  Levinthal glanced at his watch. “I have another meeting in five minutes,” he said.

  “You haven’t heard, then,” I said. “Idola Marsh is dead.”

  His face went white and his hand dropped from the doorknob.

  “You’d better come in.”

  He shut the door after me, went to his desk, and raised the telephone.

  “Hold all my calls, and tell them just to wait. I’ll be a little late.”

  Seated in the easy chair, he looked smaller than I remembered, and his eyes seemed slightly glazed.

  “You knew where she was all the time,” I said.

  He took a deep breath.

  “Yes. I’m sorry, I just didn’t want …” He raised his hands to explain and then gave up. “What happened?”

  “She was murdered,” I said. “Somebody hired a killer to make sure she didn’t talk to anybody else.”

  He closed his eyes and a wave of pain wrinkled his features.

  “But she talked to you,” he whispered. “Didn’t she?”

  “She talked to me.”

  “My God. I never thought this thing would …” His voice trailed off. “She was an old lady. I didn’t want her bothered. You have to understand that. Have they caught the murderer?”

  “No, but they will.”

  His eyes came up slowly to meet my own.

  “What exactly did she tell you?”

  “Enough,” I said. “I know she was in love with Max. I suspect they were having an affair.”

  “Is that what she told you?”

  “Not in so many words.”

  “And you think somebody killed her because of that?”

  “Because of something she knew. If she was that close to Max she probably knew everything about what he was doing. But there’s another angle. It may not have been the Mob at all.”

  “You mean Lydia.” Levinthal shook his head and ran his hands over his thinning hair. “My God, what have I done? What have I started?” He raised his hands again, as if in supplication. “Look, Lydia didn’t kill Max. She didn’t have a motive.”

  “The spurned wife,” I said. “That’s as old as they come.”

  “Yes,” he said, some of the color back in his face now. “But that’s just it: She wasn’t.”

  “What?”

  “You’re half right,” he went on, with a bitter laugh. “Idola was passionately in love and she was having an affair. But it wasn’t with Max. It would never have been with Max. Max was too puritanical. It was with my father.”

  It was my turn to blink.

  “Your father?”

  “Yes. It wasn’t any secret, least of all to us kids. My parents didn’t get along. They were both good, decent people, but just too different. Idola was everything Mom wasn’t, at least for Dad. Idola met Dad before he even met Max. The affair was going on when Dad brought Max aboard, kept on right through the war and afterward, until Dad was killed. In those days divorce was more of a stigma than it is today and you didn’t leave your family to go live with some woman. So everybody acted civilized and just played along. He disappeared for weekends and we all knew they were at the vacation cabin at Biloxi. Sometimes he even borrowed Max’s car. I know Max couldn’t have approved, but he didn’t say anything. Nobody said anything. It must have hurt my mother, but she never made an issue. Dad took care of her and was good to the children, so she managed without his passion. After all, he loved her. Just not the way he loved Idola.” The engineer shrugged. “It’s not unheard-of. In fact, it’s rather European.”

  “No,” I said, seeing all the parts of the puzzle dissolve once m
ore into a shower of tiny pieces. “It’s not unheard-of. What did Max think of it, do you know?”

  He shrugged. “No. But Max was against a lot of things. I’m sure adultery was included. But, on the other hand, he cared for my father and for Idola. Maybe he made an exception.”

  “Like you did?”

  “Why not? We called her Aunt Idola. After Dad was killed we kind of drifted apart. But Dad left us pretty well off. A few years ago I ran into her downtown. She was living hand to mouth and I felt sorry for her. So I managed to provide her with a little help.” His eyes pleaded for understanding. “You’ve got to understand: Whatever it was between her and my father, she was a part of my life.”

  I dug out the copy of the newspaper story and handed it over to the other man.

  “Is there anything about this that seems out of place?”

  Levinthal took out a pair of eyeglasses, put them on, and scrutinized the photograph.

  “No. For a while there, wherever Max went he had an entourage because the guys at City Hall were scared to death something would happen and they’d get blamed. But after a while Max made them agree to cut the bodyguards down to one or two, and finally they cut them out except for trips and special occasions.”

  “What about the other people in the picture?”

  Levinthal shrugged. “Looks like it was taken at the state capitol. I imagine they were politicians or maybe journalists.”

  He handed back the picture. “God, he looks young there. And yet at the time he was always Uncle Max, a grown-up, infinitely wise and always middle-aged.” He managed an uneasy chuckle. “Imagine, thirty years old, middle-aged.”

  “Do you think Idola Marsh had a security box at a bank?”

  “Possible, but I doubt it. Idola lost track a long time ago. I think everything that was important to her was in that apartment of hers.”

  I turned to look out his window at the river, and I remembered what he had said the first time I’d come here, about how the river was invincible. I felt as if I were on the river and being swept steadily downstream.

  When Levinthal spoke again there was a catch in his voice:

  “Look, those bones they found: They were sure it was Max?”