by Brian Meeks
“I’m not saying I don’t enjoy a steak,” Francis replied as he patted his belly. “I do, but it’s widely known that the best chefs in the world are French.”
Mike rolled his eyes. “If you love French food so much, why aren’t you a food critique in Paris?”
Francis finished the last of his beer, slammed his glass down on the table, and exclaimed, “Because I love baseball and beer! Go Dodgers!”
The bar erupted with cheers. Henry and Mike laughed. Mike patted Francis on the back and said, “Wasn’t that a great game today?”
“How many in a row is it now?” Mike asked, knowing Henry wanted to revel in the Dodgers’ great season.
“Today’s 3-1 win was the Dodgers’ fourth in a row. They are 28 games above five hundred. Man, that was a good win.”
Henry, Mike, and Francis had started drinking before the game and saw no reason to stop once it was over. Henry had no open cases; he had just closed a simple and unusually lucrative case on Monday and had given Celine, his secretary, and Buttons, the office cat, the rest of the week off, paid. Since she had joined the Henry Wood Detective Agency, business had been better than he ever could have imagined. She had earned the time off, or, more to the point, Henry wanted to spend a few days reveling in Dodgers baseball. Celine didn’t quite understand the life of a private detective. She was under the impression he should work all the time. Henry missed being poor and napping at his desk. Well, he didn’t mind having some money in the bank, but he did miss the afternoon siestas.
Francis staggered up from his chair when Rosemary Clooney started playing on the jukebox. He held his hand out to the wife of one of Mike’s buddies on the force. She looked at her husband who said, “You show that frog how to dance, baby,” and off they went.
Mike and Henry continued to discuss baseball until the front door opened, and a woman ran in screaming. Everyone went quiet. They knew her. Mrs. Robert Ward, the 23-year-old wife of a second year patrolman. Her makeup was running; her blouse was torn. Mike jumped up and was the first to reach her. He grabbed her arms and tried to get her to stop screaming.
“He’s killing Robert,” she screamed, “right now, down the street, on the corner!” She frantically waved her hand. Mike gave a look to Francis and ran out of the bar, followed by two dozen members of New York’s finest. Henry let the men with guns lead, but he was right on their heels.
Francis and the wives gathered around Robert’s wife, trying their best to calm her down. Outside, the mob of cops arrived at the corner and saw Robert Ward, lying on the pavement, staring up into the muggy New York night, expressionless.
Mike knelt beside the young officer. He yelled, “Split up and shut this block down!” The cops knew better than to trample the crime scene and did as they were told. In groups of four or more, they spread out and moved in all directions, hoping to spot the attacker. One man ran back to the bar to call it in. Mike closed the fallen officer’s eyes.
In a few minutes, the corner was bathed in the red light of a dozen patrol cars. Mike had blocked off the area around the body and Henry was now standing by his side. “Any sign of the attacker?”
“Nope, he didn’t hang around.”
“You think it was a mugging?”
“Probably,” Mike said, shaking his head. “Maybe, I don’t know…He’d have to be pretty stupid to kill a cop.”
Henry looked at the young man lying in a pool of blood. “What’s that in his pocket?”
Mike carefully knelt down and pulled out a piece of folded up paper. He opened it and showed it to Henry.
“Why would he have French money on him?” Henry asked.
Mike looked at the bill and shrugged. “He wouldn’t. I don’t think Robert ever made it out of the five boroughs.”
“You mind if I take a look?”
Mike handed it over. The bill was folded in thirds, and blood was on only one side. “It looks like this was slid in afterward, “ Henry said, pointing at the fallen officer’s shirt pocket. “Look how the pocket has a hole through it, but the bill doesn’t.”
Mike looked closer, “You’re right. You’d think a stab to the chest would have bled more.”
Henry looked at the body riddled with knife wounds, “Maybe the wound wasn’t very deep. I don’t know, but I can’t see any way he could have had the money in his pocket as he was being stabbed.”
Mike agreed. He didn’t want to say it aloud, but it was his job. “Henry, I’m going to need you to keep this to yourself. We both know what this means.”
Henry nodded, handed the evidence back to Mike, and made his way back to the bar. The day no longer felt like a win.
CHAPTER 2
It had been a short night, barely long enough for the beer-drinking dullness to fade. Henry didn’t much feel like taking another day off and made his way down to his office in the Flatiron building. It was strange not seeing Celine busy at her desk. In the few months she had been working for him, he rarely arrived before she did. He tried to get her to ease up a bit, to stop being so damn efficient and hard working, but she was an unstoppable force. Just getting her to agree to take four days off took several hours of reasoning and a very stern look. Even then, she giggled. Henry was sure she had given in out of pity.
Henry sat down on one of the chairs in his waiting room. The plant next to his chair looked healthy, and he was sure it would be long dead, were it not for Celine’s care. Henry closed his eyes, but there wasn’t silence. The other offices and the streets outside were going about their normal business. The buzz of the city doesn’t pause for one dead cop, Henry thought.
The hollow steps of a woman in heels on the hallway floor cut through the clutter of sounds. Henry kept his eyes closed while trying to guess which office she was going to disappear into. The walking slowed, picked back up again and then started down the hall with purpose. She stopped right outside his office. If I just keep quiet, she might leave, he thought, but the voice in his head, which sounded suspiciously like Celine’s, said, “You better stand up and open the door.” Henry opened his eyes and pulled himself up. The office was still mostly dark, which was probably why she hadn’t come in.
Standing tall and getting into a polite frame of mind, Henry pulled open the door, much to the surprise of the woman outside.
“Oh - oh my, I was just looking for a pen and paper. It didn’t look like you were open.”
“I just arrived. Please, come in.”
Henry showed her to his office and turned on a couple of lights. “Would you like a cup of coffee?”
“No, I’m quite fine. Thank you though.”
Henry didn’t want to be there, and he certainly didn’t want to take on another client, even one with legs like hers. He started the coffee and, dreading his next question, asked as he turned around, “How may I be of service today?”
The woman cocked her head to the side. She tucked a strand of red hair, which had been minding its own business, behind her ear. “I’m not sure if you can help me or not.”
Henry thought she seemed too casual to be a woman who suspected the man who had given her the huge diamond of infidelity. Her blue eyes held his gaze. Henry waited until it was almost uncomfortable, then smiled. “Why don’t you tell me your problem, and I’ll let you know.”
She didn’t look like a woman prone to fidgeting, but her discomfort was obvious. Henry let her get to it in her own time. Finally she said, “I suspect that there is a plot to kill my husband.” She let the words hang in the air, thinking they were quite the proclamation.
Henry resisted the urge to yawn but noted her concerns on a yellow pad. It seemed like it was Henry’s turn to talk, so he asked, “Do you have any idea who is behind this plot?”
The woman, not quite happy with Henry’s lack of interest, said, “I believe the man behind the plot is my husband.”
The look on Henry’s face was brief, but she seemed satisfied that he was appropriately surprised. There were a few seconds of silence. Henry slowly wrote
down what she had said while considering his next question.
“I have to admit, Mrs.…I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”
“You didn’t ask,” she said with a wry smile, “but that’s all right. I should have introduced myself. I’m Mrs. Catherine Palmeroy.”
Henry wrote down her name and asked, “So tell me why you think your husband is planning to commit suicide.”
“I didn’t say he was going to commit suicide. I think he is trying to arrange for his murder.”
The first thought that entered Henry’s mind was insurance fraud. “Have you been having money problems?”
She looked at him strangely. “No, Mr. Woods, we’re not having money troubles.”
“It’s Wood.”
“Sorry, Mr. Wood. My husband has more money than we could spend in two lifetimes.”
Henry pulled the pad away from the desk and leaned back in his chair. Henry was a little intrigued, but his mind was really on the dead cop. It was sometimes better to let people answer the unasked questions. Long silences usually did the trick.
“Those in polite society would describe our marriage as a November-May romance. The rest would call me a gold digger. It isn’t that simple, but I can tell you I do love my husband.”
“I’m sure you do. Do you have any idea why your husband would want to be dead?”
“No, I don’t at all.”
“What is it exactly that caused you to suspect something was going on with your husband?”
“I saw a few letters on his desk. They were to our attorney and were asking all sorts of strange questions. I can’t remember them all, but one was about his will.”
Henry was starting to think she was not all together sane. It looked like Mr. Palmeroy was considering moving on but not to the great beyond. Henry was about to tell her he couldn’t help when she added, “The next day, I went back for the letters and they had been burned.”
She started to sob, and Henry was sunk. He hated to see a dame cry.
“I’ll see what I can do. I could come around and talk to the staff. Of course, I get…”
Before he could explain his rates, she had an envelope out of her purse. One didn’t need to be a detective to judge the girth of the envelope was more than enough.
Mrs. Catherine Palmeroy stood and leaned over the desk, taking the pen out of Henry’s hand. Henry noticed her nails were painted a muted red. She wrote her address and number on his pad. Henry wasn’t sure if she was flirting or just used to making men do her bidding, but the look she gave him as she handed the pen back made Henry’s temperature rise.
She showed herself out. Henry didn’t bother counting the money. It was quiet again, and Henry couldn’t help but look out the window just to watch her leave.
CHAPTER 3
After the warm glow of his new client wore off, he picked up the phone to call the station. He felt a bit of regret at having taken on the new client.
It would surely be an exercise in futility. He was sure he would find out the husband was cheating on her or feeling a little bored by his young wife. Henry had seen it before - older men getting won over by a long leg and pretty smile. Often they had little in common, and, when there were fewer and fewer calendar pages remaining, the man started to want to spend the last few with someone who had seen the same decades unfold. It seemed unlikely Mr. Palmeroy was plotting his own murder.
"Hello, is Mike around?"
Henry waited as someone went to find out if Mike was in the building. He wasn't, so Henry left a message and returned to the relative quiet of his office. Henry pulled out two manila folders from his desk and labeled the first one “Mrs. Catherine Palmeroy.” and put his notes in it. The second folder he labeled “Mrs. Robert Ward.”
Henry jotted down a few notes about the scene from the night before on his pad of paper. He tried to list everyone he could remember seeing at the bar. Most of the regulars he knew by name but a few he just knew by their faces. He added a description for those he couldn't name, then wrote down the time Mrs. Robert Ward had come screaming into the bar. He tried to recall the most inane details; it was hot and muggy; the street was empty except for the people from the bar. He hadn't seen any cars drive by, or was there a cab, he couldn't remember, so he just wrote, light traffic. Since Mickey's death, his old mentor, he had always checked for piles of cigarettes around the crime scene, but he hadn't seen any this time. That meant the killer either had not been waiting for the Wards, or he wasn't a smoker.
It wasn't much to put in the file, and she wasn't really a client, but the young officer who was slain worked with Mike and that was good enough. If he could help find the killer, he would.
The chair creaked against the wood floor as Henry stood up, still hung over, and went to the safe. He put Mrs. Palmeroy's retainer inside, closed the safe, and dropped her file on Celine's desk. The Ward file would stay on his desk under the latest Sport magazine. Henry took out two small notebooks and wrote new entries in each.
Henry locked the office door and left. He figured he could get a newspaper, eat something, and head on over to see if Mike had come back to the precinct. His usual favorite place to eat was the other direction, so he popped into a new cafe. It was crowded, and the waitress seemed a bit overwhelmed, but she still smiled and said, "I'll be right with you. It'll be a little while for a booth, but if you want to sit at the counter, there is a spot on the end."
"Thanks, I'll take it," Henry said, smiling back. The place couldn’t have been open more than a few weeks as he couldn't recall having noticed it before and everything looked new and shiny.
Henry pulled out the sports section, hoping a little Brooklyn Dodgers news would lift his spirits, but the June 11th headline wasn't about baseball. It was about the 24 Hours of Le Mans auto race. The picture was of flames and tragedy.
Henry read, "Tragedy strikes at the 23rd racing of the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Known as the ultimate road race, drivers compete across several classes where all are trying to survive the most grueling test of man and machine. It’s the proving ground where names like Alfa Romeo, Bentley, Bugatti, Jaguar, and Ferrari flex their muscle.
“Just two hours into the race, 6:26 pm local time, sudden braking in the pack ahead of Pierre Levegh, in the #20 Mercedes-Benz 300SL, caused Lance Macklin to drastically slow his Austin Healey 100. In a split second, the 300 SL and Pierre Levegh crashed into the rear of Macklin, sending Levegh and his car air born. Levegh was thrown from the car and died instantly upon hitting the track. The car, having burst into flames, flew into the crowded stands, killing 79 men, women, and children and injuring scores of other race fans. Most of the crowd spread around the track didn't know of the tragedy until much later.
“It’s truly the darkest day in Le Mans history..." Henry put down the paper, unable to read further. He thought about Francis who had loved going to Le Mans as a child. He could talk for hours about the drivers and the cars. Henry and Mike usually gave him a hard time since he rarely ever drove and currently didn't have a car. Francis would be crushed by the news. Henry wondered if any of his family might have been in the stands. It was too much to think about.
No longer hungry, Henry got up and left.
CHAPTER 4
The sticky heat was bad outdoors but at least there was a bit of a breeze. It was oppressive inside the precinct. The ceiling fans were doing their best to help, but it was a losing battle.
A woman was filing a complaint against her neighbor or, more specifically, her neighbor's yappy dog. Two kids were being held apart by a tired sergeant who wasn't at all interested in why they had started fighting in the street. Henry walked past a man with an ashen face who seemed to be filing a missing person's report.
One of the guys saw Henry and yelled, "Mike's in the captain's office. He'll be done soon. You can wait at his desk."
"Thanks," Henry said, not sure he remembered the guy’s name. He grabbed a chair and sat down. Mike's promotion to detective had gotten him a desk and apparentl
y a huge stack of files. After a long career as a beat cop, the adjustment had taken a little while, but he was closing cases and making a name for himself in the department. People often underestimated Mike because of his size. They assumed that all the brawn meant there wasn't any brain, and it was their downfall.
The week before, Mike had been questioning a suspect in a string of burglaries and picked up on something the guy said. It took two phone calls, and Mike had verified the flaw in his alibi. When he pressed the guy about lying, the man caved and confessed. There was something about Mike that was both intimidating and endearing. People wanted him to like them. He used that to build up trust with the suspects and ultimately make them feel guilty when they let him down. The guys were starting to tell stories about his interrogations down at The Dublin Rogue. Mike didn't care for the attention.
Mike sat down in his chair and dropped another huge file on top of one of the piles. "Hey, what brings you down to the sweat box today?"
"It does feel like a brick oven in here. You got time to talk about last night?"
Mike slumped into his chair and said, "That's all I've been doing since you left."
"You been here all night?"
"It's my case. When I called the captain and gave him the report, he came right down and put me in charge."
Another detective came by and handed a folder to Mike. He said, "Thanks," and turned back to Henry. "This is my first time running the investigation. I'm still the new guy among the detectives."
"They giving you a hard time?"
“Nope, everyone has put that sort of crap on hold until we find the bastard who made Robbie's wife a widow.”
“Did you find any witnesses?”
“Other than his wife, no.”
“Did you get a description from her?”
“Medium height and build and dark hair was all she could remember”. Apparently, he pushed her down then started stabbing Robert. She tried to grab the guy and pull him off, but he cracked her in the face with his elbow. That's when she ran for help."