Kiss Me Twice

by Thomas Gifford

“I want to know about Benedictus.”

  “How will you manage that?”

  “I know just the man to ask.”

  The telephone rang. Cassidy jumped, surprised.

  Not Me said, “Late for callers, what?”

  Cassidy picked up the phone. “Hello?”

  It was Terry Leary.

  Dr. Rolf Moller was dead.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THERE WAS AN OLIVE-DRAB army blanket covering most of the lumpy shape on the Park Avenue sidewalk. A bare foot and a slippered foot stuck out at one end of the blanket. The bare foot was scratched and bent at an unpleasant angle. It could have been anyone, anyone who was dead. There was blood seeping out from beneath the blanket. It looked like a black stain in the light of the streetlamps.

  Two police cars were pulled up at the curb. The medical examiner’s meat wagon was parked behind the squad cars. There was a fine mist in the air. It was a warm night, the air thick and cloying. Staring down at the blanket and the blood Cassidy smelled the recent death and felt his stomach turning. Not Me stood behind him looking anywhere but down. He walked over to a potted plant in a cement tub and from its mulchy surface withdrew the missing slipper. He came back to Cassidy dangling the leather slipper from an extended forefinger. He dropped it on the sidewalk, not too far from the bare foot. Not Me looked up at Cassidy. “Funny,” he said. “He looks so dashed cold, so pale and beastly cold.”

  Terry Leary, still wearing his tuxedo, was standing near the meat wagon engaged in conversation with a couple of uniformed cops. They were world-weary vets, guys Terry had known for a long time. They were not deeply moved by death although they would be—in the words of Waldo Lydecker—sincerely sorry to see their neighbors’ children eaten by wolves. They were both nodding as Terry talked to them, using his hands, pointing up to the windows of his apartment on the twelfth floor.

  An unmarked car pulled up and a plainclothes dick Cassidy knew by sight got out and strode over toward Leary and the two uniforms, who’d been joined by a couple of guys in coveralls from the ME van. The suit said, “When did this character go off the high dive?”

  One of the uniforms said, “We got the call about four hours ago. Got right over.”

  “Four fucking hours?” The detective looked up the side of the elegant facade. “Four?”

  “They were trying to figure out where he came from,” Leary said.

  “I don’t get it—”

  “Where he jumped from, Murphy. Not what planet he called home. We weren’t home, you see, and it was my terrace.”

  “You know the diver personally?”

  Leary nodded. “He was a German, survivor of the recent hostilities.”

  “Kraut bastard,” Murphy observed. “Died of a guilty conscience, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Murph, you’re one stupid mick.”

  “Takes one to know one, Terry.”

  Leary laughed, shook his head.

  “Let’s see the deceased,” Murphy said.

  Cassidy and Not Me edged closer. Leary winked at Cassidy and took his arm. “Murph, you know Lew Cassidy.” Murphy nodded. “And this odd duck with the fruity monocle goes by the alias of Not Me Nicholson.”

  “Gotta be a con man,” Murphy said.

  “I say—” Not Me blurted.

  “Something like that,” Leary said. “In this case, an old friend.”

  “I want to meet this kraut,” Murphy said. “Danny, the blanket, please.”

  “Grab your guts, Lew,” Leary said. “Rolf has taken quite a turn for the worse.”

  One of the uniforms pulled the olive-drab blanket back.

  Not Me peered down at the corpse. “Oh, I say,” he said, a small gurgling sound bubbling in his throat. “Excuse me, old bean,” he muttered, backing away. He got to the curb just in time. Leaning against the fender of a squad car he left his dinner and several drinks in the gutter. One of the men in coveralls went to him, spoke softly. The other laughed behind his hand. Not Me finished and leaned back, bracing himself against the fender. “Awfully sorry,” he said, wiping his face with his handkerchief. “Christ. Caught me by surprise. Made a bit of a mess.” The monocle swung from the black ribbon.

  Cassidy stared down at the mess that had until four hours before been a civilized German doctor. He really wasn’t seeing the remains, he was remembering his first view of the man, out on the terrace at the Westchester mansion MacMurdo had occupied as a kind of spoil of war. Karin had been standing alone, waiting beneath the gathering storm clouds, purple with black at the center like enormous flowers, and Cassidy hadn’t seen her in so many years. She’d been wearing a straw hat with the colorful ribbon wafting in the wind. And then Rolf Moller had joined her, so straight and severe in his brown English tweeds, and within a couple of hours the man had told Cassidy the story of Karin’s war, the details of her survival. He remembered how he’d heard of Karin’s almost dying, the carnage and fire and smoke of Cologne, Rolf finding her in the street, well along the dusty road to death, her head broken open. … It was Rolf who had made her live, forced her to live. …

  He thought of all the times he’d found the good doctor an irritating, officious prick, but always, always, Rolf’s concern had been for Karin, for Karin’s safety. …

  Now the poor bastard had gone off the terrace head first and there he lay, skull split open like a cantaloupe, the features loosened, pulled out of shape, nearly obliterated, neck broken. The remnants of his face, bloody shreds, a kind of jelly running from the battered skull. Both of his eyeballs were gone. Just gone. Spilled into the streets perhaps, crushed and smeared by the passing cars.

  It was pretty awful. He could see the headlines. GOOD KRAUT DIES.

  Cassidy turned away, saw Not Me pale, sagging. He went to him. “Hell of a day,” Cassidy said.

  Murphy said: “Funny, this one is. Never saw a brain diver go by way of a swan. They usually go feet first, see. Or if they do a header they usually get their hands up to block the fall, you always get your broken wrists, shit like that, but here you got your world-class swan dive. So, you know the geezer, Terry?”

  “Like I said, Murph. He was a houseguest of mine. He came by way of the express from my terrace, sad to say.”

  Murphy sighed, looked around at the passersby who couldn’t help stopping for a look. It was the middle of the night but it was a warm and damp October and there were always people out for a walk, frequently with dogs. Dogs seemed to find a corpse at least as interesting as their masters did.

  “Well, Terry, I guess we’d better have a chat.”

  “Let’s adjourn to the drawing room,” Terry said. “We could all use a drink.”

  The picture of the evening’s events, which had culminated in the death of Rolf Moller, emerged beclouded by vagueness, uncertainty. Cassidy had the feeling that it was like finding yourself surrounded by a noxious gas, something you couldn’t see or contain or identify, something that was going to evaporate before you ever traced it back to its source. But it was something that had left Moller in ill-matched pieces on the sidewalk.

  Terry Leary, MacMurdo, and Karin had left Moller alone in the apartment. He’d been tired and edgy, had said he wanted a night alone. They went on to Heliotrope. Cassidy had called and spoken with Moller, learned that everyone else was at the club, and he and Harry Madrid had gotten to Heliotrope an hour or so later. Harry Madrid left the club early, then Not Me Nicholson and Cassidy had started talking and, subsequently, been the next to leave. By that time Rolf Moller had already been dead more than an hour, nearly two hours, in fact.

  Leary, MacMurdo, and Karin stayed on at Heliotrope for another hour or so. Karin was enjoying the music, had wanted to prolong the evening. Terry Leary had taken this as a positive sign of her mental state; maybe she was putting some of the fear and tension behind her, that was the way Terry was looking at it. He had danced with her once and remembered that she’d been almost asleep, and when he asked her what she was thinking about she said she was just “try
ing to remember” and she’d smiled sleepily at him, her eyes nearly closed. Terry said she wasn’t completely there but he’d thought she was as happy as she’d been since he’d known her. Cassidy knew he meant this time around.

  When they’d got back to the building on Park Avenue they’d driven directly into the underground garage and taken the elevator, never having seen all the activity at the front of the building. In the apartment Karin had gone sleepily to her room, assuming that Moller was asleep in the other guest room. Terry Leary and MacMurdo had stepped onto the terrace for fresh air. It hadn’t taken long to notice the crowd gathered on the sidewalk below, hadn’t taken long to see the body.

  The night doorman hadn’t known Rolf Moller. The police had begun checking apartments. Terry and MacMurdo had looked in Moller’s room and found him missing.

  Karin had heard them, come out of her room, sensed the situation and, in her robe, accompanied them to the lobby. At the sight of her doctor’s body, her brother-in-law’s body, she had fainted. MacMurdo carried her back to the elevator, up to the apartment. Terry Leary had routed out his own doctor, Frank Carnochan. He’d come immediately, given Karin a hypo that put her out in moments. Carnochan was still on the scene, arranging for a nurse to come and spend the night with Karin. “Fainting, hypo, amnesia, you can’t be too careful,” Carnochan said.

  How much could Karin take?

  That was the only question that mattered anymore. Cindy’s eyes had kissed him and said good-bye and now Karin had been given back to him and he was doing his best to put the good-bye look in her eyes, too, doing his best to kill her, too, and all he wanted to do, poor sap, was save her. …

  “I say, steady on, old man.” Not Me laid his hand on Cassidy’s arm. “Here.” He plucked his handkerchief from his sleeve.

  Cassidy realized there were tears streaking his face.

  “You need a stiff one, old bean.”

  Not Me slid another snifter along the bar.

  The cops had gone, Rolf Moller had been scraped off Park Avenue and put in a sack, the nurse had gone to watch over Karin, and Carnochan had taken his black bag and bid them good night.

  “Well, it looks like Rolfie got himself all depressed and chucked himself off the terrace.” MacMurdo stopped pacing, lit the stubby black pipe he seemed to favor, got it going, and ran the fingers of his left hand through the heavy layers of wavy hair. “Anybody here believe he killed himself?” Nobody said anything. “Anybody have any ideas why he might kill himself? Has he been depressed? Frightened? Unstable in any way?” No one said anything. Not Me Nicholson was sitting on a beige couch, listing to his left, monocle wedged into the socket, eyes nearly closed. “Damn,” MacMurdo went on. “I go away for a few days I lose my feel for everything. So now I’m back for the duration. We’ll see this thing through. Excuse me if I’m a little obvious but I’m getting back in here, getting my feet wet. Washington always gets a fella all turned inside out. So, let’s see. … If somebody got into the apartment, unseen by the doorman—which doesn’t seem insurmountably difficult with the garage having no full-time attendant—and then pushed the doctor off the terrace, if all that is true, then Rolf knew the man who killed him. No sign of any kind of struggle, not even out on the terrace. ’Course he was probably dead before he went over, judo chop or some damn thing. So, pards, we gotta ask ourselves, who the hell did Rolfie even know? And, why would anybody want to kill him? He’s a doctor, he’s Karin’s keeper—what could he have done to warrant getting killed?

  “Yet, if somebody killed him, that somebody knew him enough to have a reason to kill him. Terry says the place is unchanged. Nothing messed about or rearranged, nothing stolen.” MacMurdo puffed, walked over to the grand piano. The thick carpet seemed to be growing up around the legs. He picked out something that seemed tuneless until it resolved itself into “Deep in the Heart of Texas.” “Well, dammit, he knew us. It’s like one of those mystery novels I used to read back during planning days, when we were putting together the cross-channel invasion.” It was like him not to call it by its code name and to assume you’d know he had a hand in the planning. “You get a small group of people in a snowbound English country house. Then Sir Godfrey Bindlestiff is found drowned in the mustard pot and all around the house the snow is fresh and unblemished—ergo, one of the houseguests did it. Rolf Moller knew us. But we’re all accounted for. Yet someone he accepted dropped him off the terrace. Makes me want to wish to God he killed himself.”

  Not Me snored and woke himself up. He looked around with a false brightness on his round face, smiling confidently as if to assure everyone he hadn’t missed a thing.

  “Are you asleep?” Leary inquired.

  “Not me.”

  Cassidy swiveled around on the bar stool. He’d been watching MacMurdo in the mirror behind the bar. Now he looked at all of them. MacMurdo puffed his pipe. Terry Leary was playing with a large black cat he’d picked up somewhere along the way. It was chewing on his thumb. “There’s someone else he knew here in the states,” Cassidy said. MacMurdo’s head snapped around. “His brother … and we know his brother is a killer.”

  MacMurdo stared sourly at Cassidy. “His brother.” He poked at the gray ash in the bowl of his pipe, yanked his finger back, burned. “His bloody damn brother. Why would Manfred Moller kill Rolf? Why would Manfred find Rolf and not stick around to see Karin?”

  Cassidy shrugged. “Maybe he knows what you’ve got planned for him. I don’t know why he’d kill Rolf. I don’t know a damned thing.”

  Not Me Nicholson peered from face to face, covering his mouth with an open palm. “Dashed odd lot of chaps you run with, Cassers. A man feels not quite safe. Makes a fella’s hackles rise and so on.”

  MacMurdo stared at him as if he were speaking a foreign tongue. He turned to Cassidy. “Manfred. I don’t like it. But the hell of it is I haven’t got a better idea.”

  Not Me had conked out full length on the couch. His black patent pumps were set neatly side by side on the carpet. He snored softly through his mouth, apologetically.

  MacMurdo didn’t feel like calling it a night yet. He asked Cassidy some probing questions, confirming things Harry Madrid had told him. Then he went back out onto the terrace, poking more tobacco into the black pipe. He looked down at the street again. Warm night breezes rustled the trees in their pots. Somewhere a clock struck three. The wind blew out a couple of MacMurdo’s matches before he got the tobacco properly lit and then he paced back into the room. Cassidy decided he did indeed look like a character from one of those mystery novels. Detective Inspector MacMurdo of the Yard. It was a three o’clock kind of thought.

  “Let me sorta run through this,” MacMurdo said. He went to the bar and sniffed the decanter of cognac to judge whether it met his standards. He finally drizzled half an inch into a snifter. “I know,” he said, “he hates those bloody Germans, but Benedictus-as-Vulkan is our best angle, it seems to me. And now he’s gone. Well, we’ll find him sooner or later, I suppose. We’d better.

  “Manfred Moller. Somebody tipped him off as to what was going on. That there were people looking for him, namely us. Manfred went and got his minotaur from Brenneman, then killed him—the timing on this is all a little scary for Manfred. He very nearly killed both of you, as well. One wonders,” MacMurdo said, sucking noisily on the pipe, “why didn’t he kill the two of you straightaway? But we don’t know the answer to that. In any case, like Tash Benedictus, Manfred Moller is gone. Whereabouts unknown. Unless he was here tonight and murdered his brother.

  “How does the late Karl Dauner fit in? Benedictus, as the first one to make contact with Manfred, must have contacted Dauner, who was a link in the Göring escape network. Then somebody close to Dauner must have gotten word back to Benedictus and/or Manfred Moller about the slaughter of what we may without intending a pun call the Dauner Party. At which point, with Benedictus’s approval or not, Manfred decided he wanted his minotaur back.

  “I figure that Manfred gave up the minotau
r the first time around because he’s a good soldier and that was his job—to deliver the minotaur to Vulkan, to set up the Göring network.

  “What happened was that Cassidy here scared Dauner shitless out on the old tennis court. Dauner saw the possibility of being exposed as a Nazi unless he played ball with Lew—he sure as hell didn’t know a bunch of ragtag Gypsies were gonna have his ass. Leaving out Gypsies, Dauner would have gotten the word to Benedictus and Manfred, who would doubtless have killed you at their leisure, dumped you in the lake up there in Maine, and gone right ahead setting up their network. But the Gypsies killed Dauner and somebody got word of it to Benedictus and/or Manfred so when you showed up Manfred had probably decided the network was shot to hell and he’d better grab the minotaur for himself and go to ground. … He’s hiding, one assumes, from Gypsies, from us, and from Benedictus, or call him Vulkan, who would probably want some of the minotaur for himself. …

  “So, our work’s cut out for us. All we have to do is find Benedictus and Moller, or just Moller. … I reckon Manfred Moller could lose himself real easy, but Benedictus is different. Don’t forget, Benedictus doesn’t know you got the true story from that maid, what’s her name, Dora. … So Benedictus thinks he’s safe so far as you’re concerned. And he, too, may just be out there somewhere wondering where the hell Manfred Moller went. … Unless, of course, he already knows …”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CASSIDY WOKE LATE, FUMBLED OUT of the bedclothes, and staggered into the living room where Not Me Nicholson reclined still, softly snoring, black mask over his eyes. He threw the draperies open and blinked in a brightness that was deceiving because it was in fact raining lightly, whispering in the fallen leaves. The sun burnished the foggy haze, turning Washington Square old gold, like a hand-colored photograph from another age. Strollers in the square, walking their dogs, seemed to move slowly, as if they were not wholly formed, figments of a dreamer’s imagination.

  “I say,” a voice from the couch said unhappily, “up awfully early, aren’t we? Rather a long and beastly night …” The voice coughed and trailed off.