No, the thing to do was get out of the neighborhood, get uptown, and call from there. And for once in my life I was going to do the thing that was the thing to do. Back on went my coat, into my pocket went Professor Kilroy’s note, and out the door went I.
23
I KNEW just the place to go: the newspaper library. At least when I began to read a newspaper it didn’t put itself to sleep on me or start auctioning its information. And it had occurred to me that some of the characters in this cast of thousands might from time to time have been newsworthy. Professor Kilroy, for instance. Or Uncle Matt. Or Gus Ricovic. Anything I found out about their past activities might be of help to me.
Or, on the other hand, it might not.
In any case, it seemed best to leave the apartment, and the newspaper library was as good a place to go as any, and better than some. So I left my snug lair once again, and as I hurried away toward Eighth Avenue, I found myself amazed at the neighborhood’s continued lack of assassins. It seemed I’d just managed to double-think them somehow; I was a sort of living purloined letter, hidden in the most obvious place and therefore unseeable.
It was twenty past three when I arrived at the library. By five o’clock, when I left, I’d learned a little but I’d also run across some surprising blanks. Professor Kilroy, for example, hadn’t appeared at all, nor—except for his murder—had my Uncle Matt. Reilly had showed up a few times, in connection with Bunco Squad arrests, but Karen Smith had never appeared at all. Wilkins had appeared once, having something obscure to do with the 1949 Berlin airlift. Mr. Grant had never made the Times. I’d expected Goodkind to be in constantly, but he appeared only once, when a former client for whom he had successfully prosecuted a damage suit against a large elevator corporation turned around and sued him for having kept over half the proceeds. Neither Gertie nor Gus Ricovic appeared, but Dr. Lucius Osbertson did, just once. Seven years ago he’d been the physician for a man named Walter J. Cosgrove, a financier whose testimony was wanted in a fraudulent stock deal. Dr. Osbertson had sworn his client was too ill to testify at that time. I looked up Cosgrove, and discovered that three days after Dr. Osbertson’s testimony Cosgrove escaped to Brazil, taking with him, in the newspaper’s estimation, “upwards of two million dollars in cash and negotiable securities.” I’ve never been sure whether upwards of means more than or almost, but I got the general idea.
Cosgrove’s departure for Brazil took place a year after Uncle Matt’s, and two years before Uncle Matt’s return. I wondered if Cosgrove and Uncle Matt had gotten to know one another down there in Brazil, if it was Cosgrove who had called Osbertson down to see to Uncle Matt when Uncle Matt had fallen ill.
I wondered if any of the money Uncle Matt had brought back had at one time belonged to Walter J. Cosgrove.
It seemed to me likely that the name Cosgrove was what Dr. Osbertson had been hiding this afternoon; he was probably still trying to live down the blot to his reputation. But if that was all it was, his action seemed a little extreme. No, there was still more to this than I understood.
When I left the newspaper library, I walked over to the gas station at Tenth Avenue and 42nd Street and used the phone booth there. I dialed the number on Professor Kilroy’s note, and it was answered after three rings by a gravelly voice saying, “Yes? What is it?”
“Professor Kilroy, please,” I said. The name sounded as foolish in its way as did Fred Nedick, but I didn’t feel as silly pronouncing it; I wasn’t Professor Kilroy.
The gravelly voice said, “Who is this?”
“Fred Fitch,” I said. “Is this Professor Kilroy?”
“Where are you? You to home?”
“Never mind where I am. Is this Professor Kilroy?”
“Sure. Who do you think it is? You think I give you somebody else’s number? Where you want to meet, your place or mine?”
“Neither,” I said. I’d thought about this part of it, and had finally decided on the safest place to meet this man, whoever he was. “I’ll meet you,” I said, “at Grand Central, the main waiting room.”
“How come?”
“I have no way to be sure who you are.”
“Listen, kid, all I’m doing is helping out the nephew of an old pal, that’s my only interest in this.”
“My only interest,” I told him, “is protecting myself. I’ll meet you at Grand Central or nowhere.”
“Sure, what the hell, Grand Central. Any special time?”
“I’ll leave that up to you.”
“Eight o’clock, okay? After the rush hour.”
“All right by me,” I said. “How will I recognize you?”
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll recognize you.”
Click.
24
NOW FOR Uncle Matt’s apartment.
I had waited this long to go there because I was fairly certain that Goodkind would be spending at least part of today hanging around its vicinity in hopes of getting my ear for a fast lesson in hypnosis. I had no idea what his role in all this might be, whether he was connected with the murderer/kidnappers or if he had some separate plot of his own afoot, but I did know enough about my own gullibility and I had seen enough of his smiling face to know that my only safety lay in avoiding him.
But he couldn’t stake out Uncle Matt’s apartment forever. Sooner or later he would have to give it up, called away by the pressure of his business. Surely by now he had to be somewhere suborning a jury, or foreclosing on a widow, or pursuing an ambulance. Hoping this assumption was correct, I sidled under cover of the rush hour up to that part of West 59th Street known as Central Park South, found the right building, and lurked around until I was fairly certain Attorney Goodkind was nowhere in the vicinity. Then I approached the doorman, who looked mainly like an admiral in the Bolivian Navy.
At first he pretended I wasn’t there, as I’m sure he fervently wished. I suppose I just didn’t look the Central Park South type, and I assume he thought me a tourist, wanting him to point out to me the passing celebrities: Killer Joe Piro, Barbra Streisand, General Hershey.
When I finally took the tactic of standing directly in front of him and obstructing his attempt to flag cabs, he reluctantly acknowledged my existence by giving me an impatient, “Yes? What is it?”
“The keys to the Grierson apartment,” I said.
If I’d expected any sudden change in manner, any abrupt shift to bowing and scraping, I was to be disappointed. With the same gruff impatience, he reached into the trouser pocket of his admiral’s uniform, produced two keys attached by a bit of dirty string to a round red tag, and handed it to me without a word or a look. Then he stepped around me and blew his whistle violently at the world.
Inside, I was stopped by another naval officer, this one a mere commander in the Swiss Maritime, who with barely concealed hostility wanted to know who it was I hoped to see.
“Nobody,” I said. “I own an apartment in this building. The Matthew Grierson apartment.”
This time there was a change, to a rather offensive sort of chumminess. The commander said, “Oh, yeah? You inherited, huh? Rags to riches, huh?”
How was it that people like this instinctively knew they could get away with such treatment of me? Money isn’t everything, a fact of which rotters like this one were endlessly eager to remind me.
I said, “Not exactly,” knowing it to be a weak response, and went on by him and across the long low-ceilinged lobby to the elevators. I told the operator, “The Grierson apartment,” he slid his doors shut, and up we went.
On the way, the operator—green uniform, possibly a passed-over captain in the Merry Men Brigade—said, “You the nephew?”
Not another one. With a sinking heart I said, “Yes, I am.”
But he wasn’t exactly another one. He was simply the garrulous type. “Mr. Grierson used to talk about you a lot,” he said. He was a gnarled and weatherbeaten man of about fifty, thin and somewhat stoop-shouldered. “We used to play cards together sometimes,” he w
ent on, “when my tour was done. Sometimes he’d be reading a report on you.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes, sir,” he said. “My favorite tenant, your uncle. Never uppity, like a lot of these people. Paid his debts, too, on the button. If he’d lose, he’d write you a check right then and there.”
“Did he lose a lot?” I asked, wondering if this little man had been picking my uncle in a small-time way.
But he said, “No, sir, he mostly won. He was real lucky, your uncle.”
It seemed as though that last had been said with some kind of an edge in the voice, but I couldn’t be sure, and before I could say anything more the elevator came to a stop, the doors opened, and he was pointing away to the left, saying, “That’s it there, sir, 14-C. It’s really the thirteenth floor, but most people are superstitious, you know? So they call it fourteen.”
“That’s interesting,” I said, as I stepped out of the elevator.
“But it’s still the thirteenth floor,” he said. “Ain’t that so? You go outside and count the windows, this here’s the thirteenth floor, ain’t it?”
“I suppose it is,” I said.
“Sure it is,” he said. Then he shook his head, said, “Rich people,” shut his doors, and went away.
It took two keys on two locks to get into Uncle Matt’s apartment, which had the musty smell of disuse and which, when I began switching on lights, sprang into existence like a series of no-longer-needed movie sets.
The style represented here was surely not Uncle Matt’s, not from all I’d heard about the old man. Undoubtedly the building itself had an interior decorator on tap who had designed and furnished this apartment. It was the sort of thing Uncle Matt would more than likely leave to someone else to take care of; I doubted he cared very much what his surroundings looked like, so long as they sufficiently had the appropriate smell of money.
The rooms went on and on. A long broad living room on two levels, with a lot of long low sofas and on the walls long abstract paintings, and great drape-flanked windows at the end giving a beautiful long view of Central Park. Following a curve of wrought-iron railing away from all this grandeur, one came to a small formal dining room with dark red fabric wall covering and heavy wood antique furnishings. A shiny white compact but very complete kitchen was off this, through a swinging door with a porthole in it.
Away from the dining room in the other direction one came to a game room, with a pool table and a poker table, the latter with chip trays and glass holders. Past this were two large elaborate bedrooms, both with canopied king-size beds and outsize views of Central Park. Each bedroom had its own Pompeiian bathroom, in one of which was a sauna. Beyond the second bedroom was a sort of den or office, with a desk and with built-in bookshelves containing books I’m sure no one had ever read. And off in yet another direction was a smallish plain bedroom with its own attached prim bath; servant’s quarters, no doubt.
Uncle Matt had done well for himself. He’d spent his declining years in comfort.
I wandered around the rooms, not sure what I was looking for and not sure what I was finding. If it was Uncle Matt’s personality, some aura of him, I had hoped to find here, I doubted I was getting it. The dominant personality here was the interior decorator’s. Other than that, I suppose I mostly just wanted to take a look at the scene of the crime.
Which was the game room. Uncle Matt had been found, according to the text and photo in the Daily News, face-down in the game room, between the pool table and the poker table. A pool game had been in progress, with only one cue out, so it was assumed Uncle Matt had been shooting a solitary game of pool when he’d been struck down.
I stood looking at the very spot on the carpet for a while, learned nothing, theorized nothing, and finally went away to wander through the other rooms, getting nowhere until I settled down at the desk in the office.
Then I’m not sure where I got. I found a few odd pieces of stationery here and there, letters from this person and that, nothing very enlightening. There was a bill from Goodkind, with an ingratiating, palsy-walsy, yet obsequious letter accompanying it that made me think most of Uriah Heep. There was a letter from another attorney, a Prescott Wilks, taking exception to Uncle Matt’s having done with the service of his firm, and one paragraph of this letter struck me as a little odd:
You know the circumstances as well as I, Mr. Grierson, and I needn’t tell you our mutual friend is as upset as I am at this abrupt and unjustifiable termination of your relationship with this firm. I have been asked to communicate to you the information that any alteration in the arrangements or any plans you might have for “striking out on your own,” as it were, will not be treated lightly. Kindly bear this in mind in your future dealings with Latham, Courtney, Wilks & Wilks.
Apparently there had been no future dealings with Latham, Courtney, Wilks & Wilks; the letter was dated four months ago, there was no more recent correspondence that I could see, and Goodkind seemed securely in control of the situation by the time I had entered the affair.
What interested me was the veiled threat I seemed to distinguish in that one paragraph of Wilks’ letter. Who was the mutual friend? What sort of relationship had Uncle Matt had with Prescott Wilks’ firm? What exactly did the phrase “will not be treated lightly” mean? Did it mean murder?
I was bothered a bit by the knowledge that surely Steve and Ralph had seen this letter and had investigated its meaning, but against this fact I put the uncertainty I felt about Steve and Ralph, who might have sold out to the gang, who might have been the ones to tell the gang where I was hiding, and who might be covering for the murderers instead of seeking them out. After all, as Gertie had said, nobody was likely to accuse Steve and Ralph of being priests.
Thinking of Gertie, I decided to try her apartment again, but when I picked up the phone the line was dead. Goodkind must have seen to cutting off the service, which was very alert and thrifty of him, but with three hundred thousand dollars I could surely afford to keep the phone going in my other apartment.
Would I live here? Somehow I thought not; the place was too much like the lobby of Radio City Music Hall. I’d keep expecting tourist groups to be led through by guides. Besides, I couldn’t spend my entire life being cowed by doormen. No, I’d have Goodkind put the place up for sale. All in all, I thought I’d stay in my own place on West 19th Street. I’d never found it less than satisfactory before, so why should I change it now?
Ah, but that was in the future, when all this mess was over and I could lead my normal life again. As to now, I was allegedly investigating Uncle Matt’s apartment, for reason or reasons unknown. Therefore I copied the address of Latham, Courtney, Wilks & Wilks from the letter onto a piece of scrap paper, tucked the paper into my pocket, and went on with my search.
I made my next discovery in the closet off the maid’s bedroom. That’s where I found the crumpled-up body of Gus Ricovic.
25
AT FIRST I didn’t realize he was dead. He was sitting on the floor, knees up, back against the wall, chin on knees, all tucked in the corner. His eyes were open, wide open, and on his face he had a sort of bland and faintly quizzical smile. He appeared to be looking at my ankles, and all in all the naturalness of his expression and posture had me absolutely fooled for perhaps ten seconds, during which time I was (a) amazed and (b) cynical.
I was (a) amazed because who wouldn’t be, opening a closet door and finding Gus Ricovic tucked away on the floor inside? And I was (b) cynical because the immediate explanation for his presence which came to me was, “Oh ho! He’s come looking for something to sell.” That is, in the instant of seeing him I leaped to the assumption that when he had offered to sell me information he had actually been possessed of no information to sell and had therefore come rushing over here to see if by some rare stroke of luck he might find some information I’d later be willing to buy. This thought took much less time to think than it does to describe.
In any case, it very quickly became supers
eded by (c) horror. That was when I noticed that Gus Ricovic wasn’t moving, his eyes weren’t blinking, and there seemed to be something stickily wrong with the top of his head. “Oh,” I said, and slammed the door.
Then the noise of the slam scared me. Was the killer still somewhere close by? Had I spent the last half-hour playing hide and seek, all unknowing, with a multiple murderer? And now that I had found the latest body, would this murderer think it necessary to add me to his collection?
No, that couldn’t be right. Whoever had killed Uncle Matt was already out to kill me and had made his intentions perfectly plain. And could there be any doubt that the same Mister X had done for Gus Ricovic? Whether Ricovic had come here hoping to find information to sell, or whether he had been killed as a result of trying to blackmail the killer, there was still no doubt that the same murdering hand had clubbed down both Uncle Matt and the thing in the closet.
So I had to be alone in the apartment, just me and Gus Ricovic. I didn’t open the closet door any more, I already knew what he looked like. I turned by back, started walking, and three rooms later my brain at last caught up with me.
The first thing my brain wanted to know was what now? Call the police? No, for the same reasons that I hadn’t called them when Gertie was kidnapped. In fact, I could handle this the same way, getting to the safe ground of a neutral phone booth somewhere. Aside from its other advantages, this plan had the admirable feature of getting me out of this apartment, in which the air suddenly seemed to have gotten both damp and chilly. Clammy. Like a mausoleum.
Gus Ricovic’s body seemed to vibrate way back in its dark closet at the far end of the apartment. As though invisible strings were attached to it, leading to every other room, the air seemed to ring and echo with his presence. It was like being in a cave inside an iceberg, with something rotting off in a corner.
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