by Angel Eyes
“Oh, that. I got everything there is. What you want to know?”
He didn’t have everything or he’d know I was a suspect. Diplomatically I said, “The radio says the cops are treating it as a robbery. How are they handling it really?”
“I’ll be damned. The radio finally got something right. You called it, shamus.”
I rumpled my already rumpled hair. It didn’t make my thoughts any less confused. “What about suspects?”
“Zilch. Zip. Police Are Baffled. The butler was in the pantry with the downstairs maid and Cousin Roderick was at the polo matches. In other words, they don’t have the proverbial pot.”
“Sure they aren’t holding out on you?”
“Listen, Walker.” His tone grew raspy. “I’ve been covering cophouse six years. The commissioner doesn’t change his brand of toilet paper I don’t know about it. The uniforms are out pulling in the usual ex-cons and hopheads and the C.I.D. is making out its robbery statistics. If they were handling. it any other way you’d read it in the afternoon edition.”
“Thanks, Ted. This makes us even.”
“That’s what you think, gumshoe.” He banged off.
I sat and thought and reached inside my shirt pocket for a smoke, then realized I’d used my last one the night before. It wouldn’t have helped. Ted Getner was a bastard, but he was the best reporter I knew after Barry Stackpole. If he said the cops were approaching Krim’s murder as a robbery, that’s the way they were approaching it. The cop at the diner had mentioned a lieutenant. I wondered if that was Fitzroy. If it was, there was no way the janitor would sell him on a screwy angle, and in any case there was no reason he should want to, especially not after I had promised him a hundred bucks and delivered an Excedrin headache. I considered calling John Alderdyce to find out what was what, but as long as there was a bare possibility that Getner was wrong and there was a warrant out for me I wasn’t about to risk a trace.
That left the question of a trap, but I wasn’t worth all that time and trouble even if I had murdered Jefferson and Krim. Anyway, there’s no need for that Mission Impossible stuff when standard operating procedure is so effective.
There were two ways I could play it: Lie low and let whatever was going to happen happen without my interference, or keep my appointment with Mrs. DeLancey and proceed until the long arm of the law snared me—or not, as the case may be.
There was never any choice in it, not while I still had two thousand dollars’ worth of Ann Maringer’s diamond ring in my pocket. A private eye with a code may be nothing more than a pebble on the beach, but at least he stands out from the grains of sand. I washed and shaved and hailed a cab for home and my own means of transportation.
The house looked innocent enough. There were no machine guns poking out of the windows, no unmarked vans parked in the neighborhood, no lineman looking nervous and uncomfortable atop the corner Edison pole. I peeped inside my car. No one was hiding in the back seat. There was no reason for anyone, not even Fitzroy or Cranmer, to plant a bomb under the hood, but I opened it and checked anyway before I got in and started the engine. I was halfway to Grosse Pointe before the back of my neck stopped tingling, and even then I made an ass of myself circling blocks twice when I was sure I was being followed. Paranoia is easier to catch and harder to shake than the common cold.
I’d calibrated each of the five buttons on my car radio to give me a jazz station. Today four of them were playing progressive—Miles Davis and Bird Parker with music to shoot up by—and the fifth had on Sarah Vaughan. I hummed along with “Dancing in the Dark” and found myself identifying with the lyrics. I hadn’t the faintest notion what I hoped to gain from this morning’s visit.
A mile of private road wound among sixty-foot pine trees to the DeLancey estate, a sprawling brick ranch style on the shore of Lake St. Clair, really just a broad spot in the Detroit River separating Michigan from Canada. It was the first nice day of spring. Last night’s rain had washed away the oppressive humidity. Sailboats sprinkled the lake, tiny bursts of color against the reflected blue from the sky. Birds greeted each other in the trees, and a squirrel bounced across the road in front of the car, paused, and got going again just as the left front wheel was bearing down on it. They all play like that, but they don’t always win. Squirrels are the private investigators of the animal kingdom.
A bright red Trans Am, parked in the circular driveway, was being waxed by a chauffeur straight out of P. G. Wodehouse—powerfully built, in puttees, jodhpurs, and a white shirt open to the navel and folded back at the cuffs. I pulled up behind the car far enough back to prevent my trail of dust from drifting over its spotless finish and got out. The chauffeur, dark-complexioned, black of hair and moustache, and handsome in a Gulf Stream kind of way, stood kneading his yellow chamois cloth and sneering at my car and, as I approached, at my suit. It hadn’t borne the wrinkles nearly as well as I’d hoped.
“Nice car,” I said. “They pay you to drive it?”
The sneer sharpened. No one sneers quite like a Puerto Rican. “I weesh,” he replied. “The car, she belong to Señor Jack, the señora’s son. He drive, I take care. Eef not for me, the engine she seize up for no oil, the block she crack for no water. I drive the Mercedes for the señora.” He indicated the attached garage.
“Not the same.”
He rolled his eyes. “Ees like drive the jar of mayonnaise.”
“How long have you been working here?” I stripped the top off a fresh pack of cigarettes and stuck one in my mouth.
“Siete años. Seven years.”
“Then you knew the Judge.”
His face shut down like a ticket booth window at a sellout. I’d taken him for no more than thirty, but when he did that his skin broke into dozens of sharp creases. He was older than I was, though by how much I couldn’t say. “I drive the Mercedes, I take care of the sport car. You have questions you go up to the door and ring the bell. The maid, she is mi esposa. My wife. She take you to see the señora, you ask her the questions. Comprende?”
“Comprendo. Y saludo.”
His features crumpled up some more. “Por que?”
“It takes hard work, twenty-four hours a day, to hold on to a Spanish accent after seven years in Grosse Pointe. Or do you have a coach?”
He said something you won’t find in a Spanish-English dictionary, but by then I had my back to him and pretended not to hear.
The porch was built of redwood planks ten inches wide and ran the length of the building. I pushed a doorbell button of artificial mother-of-pearl set in bronze scrollwork. Distant chimes played a familiar tune I couldn’t quite remember. A lot of silence followed. I had my cigarette half smoked and was about to ring again when the door opened its full width. A pretty, brown-skinned girl in a maid’s uniform said, “Yes?”
I said, “He has good taste.”
A little line appeared between her rather thick brows. “I’m sorry?” It was the voice that had answered the telephone last night. Though she had an accent it wasn’t nearly as obvious as the chauffeur’s, nor as phony.
“Su esposo. He is a fine judge of feminine beauty.”
She blushed, or seemed to. It had been so long since I met a girl who could that I was no longer any kind of judge.
“Gracias, Señor—?I
“Walker. I have an appointment with Mrs. DeLancey.” I handed her a card with just my name printed on it. They still pass them around in Grosse Pointe, though not as much as they used to. She glanced at it, asked me in, and took my hat and coat. Her high heels clicked efficiently on the parquet floor going away.
The entrance hall was horseshoe-shaped, closed in by curving walls of crinkled yellow plaster made to look like adobe. A ceiling of translucent colored glass or acrylic allowed sunlight to cast a mosaic over the floor’s glossy surface. Arches opened on either side, the one to my left affording a glimpse of rust-colored carpet, more artificial adobe supported by what looked like real redwood columns, more redwood in the furniture, a
nd framed Russells and Remingtons depicting Indians and buffalo and hell-for-leather cowboys and red-eyed steers pounding clouds of fine yellow dust out of parched desert. They might have been originals. The arch opposite that one led into a room or passage paneled with knotty planks eighteen inches wide and rough as forty acres of unplowed field. The barn they had come from had been old at the time of Pontiac’s siege.
I had finished the butt and opened the door to ditch it when the maid returned. “Mrs. DeLancey will see you now.”
Her English was impeccable, if a little too precise. I had a notion to advise her to slur her consonants and toss out such lines as if all the newness had worn off them on their way to her lips, but it would have sailed right past her. Give her another seven years. I followed her along the rustic passage and through another arch into the damnedest room I had ever been in.
It was an acre across, sunken, and carpeted in mottled orange and black. The walls were paneled in the weathered stuff of the passage and hung with paintings commemorating more dusty scenes from the Old West. A diorama of Custer’s Last Stand fully eight feet square dominated the space above the mantel of a fireplace large enough to play handball in, the latter built of charred, angular stones a little smaller than the ones Polyphemus hurled at the fleeing Argonauts. A flintlock Hawken like the ones mountain men used to carry was perched horizontally below the painting, a powder horn hanging from a leather thong beside it. There was no ceiling; the roof peaked seven feet above my head, the airspace between webbed with rafters, again of redwood, from which hung a chain attached to a chandelier made from a Conestoga wheel. The rim was studded with candles that I suspected hadn’t seen a flame in nearly a century.
Something was missing. I looked around and finally spotted it mounted over the arch I had just come through, a set of long-horns with a twelve-foot spread, black at the tips, and polished to a high ivory gloss. Burnt-orange curtains obscured a picture window across from me and, presumably, a view of Lake St. Clair beyond. I was tempted to stride across and draw them open just to make sure they didn’t conceal a desert dotted with yucca and bleached buffalo bones. Whoever had decorated the place had not taken the term ranch style lightly.
“Are you properly impressed, Mr. Walker?” asked the woman standing below me in the middle of the great room, next to a man in a soft gray suit. “The frontier was my husband’s first love. Perhaps his only love. Like all hobbies, I’m afraid it carried him away at times. Will you have tea?”
I said I might be persuaded. She said, “Three teas, Carmen.”
The maid favored me with a polite glance that was as good as a curtsy and passed me on her way out.
“I’m Leola DeLancey. This is Daniel Clague, my attorney.” Smiling the way she had in her photograph, as if she felt like blowing up at somebody but was too refined to do so in polite company, the woman held out a slender hand. I descended the three steps to take it. Her grip was strong and cool. She was my height and thin as a wire, and the simple one-piece sheath she wore with a cord knotted loosely around the waist did nothing to detract from her gauntness. If anything, it accentuated it. She had very high cheekbones and straight thick brows over gray eyes, and her chin came almost to a point. Her hair, pulled back as before and caught with combs behind her head, was silver with a bluish tint.
Clague was two inches shorter, squarely built but beginning to sag in all the standard places. His hair was brown going dirty gray. He had a broad, sad face with slack jowls and dewlaps over the corners of his downturned mouth and bags that pulled at his milky eyes to reveal scarlet crescents beneath the whites, which he sought to hide by wearing black horn rims. His hand was spotted and flabby, and after grasping it I wanted to mop my palm with my handkerchief but couldn’t think of a way to do it without offending him. He didn’t look happy to see me. I had a hunch he wouldn’t have looked happy to see the Second Coming of Christ if he had ringside seats and a cut of the gate.
“Thank you for consenting to this interview, Mrs. DeLancey,” I said.
Her eyes scoured the back of my skull. “You’re welcome. Now that we’ve been gracious to each other, we can sit down and attend to business. Let’s talk about Janet Whiting.”
13
I TOOK POSSESSION of a chair upholstered in an Indian rug design, canted backward slightly and closed in on three sides with flat wooden panels like a box. Opposite this and its mate on the other side of a Wells Fargo strongbox reincarnated as a tea table stood a couch modeled after the same design, on the edge of which perched Leola DeLancey. Clague remained standing behind it. I asked if she’d mind my smoking.
“I’d rather you wouldn’t, Mr. Walker. My husband was the last person to use tobacco in this house. I don’t approve of the habit.”
I had one out already. I put it away. It was a shame. If ever a room was designed to be smoked in, this was it.
“Now then,” she said. “What’s your interest in the late Mr. DeLancey’s relationship with the Whiting woman? You said something over the telephone about a murder.” She saw me glance at the lawyer. “You can speak in front of Daniel. I asked him to be here.”
“As a matter of fact I insisted upon it,” put in Clague. His speech was slow and monotonous, like a record winding down. “It was a concession on Mrs. DeLancey’s part after refusing to take my advice and cancel the interview. As her attorney I feel that any contact with this woman or her representatives would be detrimental to her interests, particularly at this time. Mrs. DeLancey’s interests.”
“Those interests being Mrs. DeLancey’s attempt to have her husband declared legally dead,” I prompted.
He looked surprised. Anyhow, his lower lip descended a quarter inch, opening a black inverted U in the bottom half of his face. It made him look like a fresh-caught bass. “Where did you learn that?”
“Don’t act like you’re shocked,” his client commanded. “We’ve been at it a solid year now. It was bound to get out.” Her eyes darted back to me. “I’m waiting for an answer to my question.”
The maid came in with three white china cups on a silver tray, put it down on top of the strongbox, and fussed about laying out white linen napkins and silver spoons and a mirror-finish antique sugar bowl worth as much as my car. I waited for her to leave, but the lady of the house was staring at me impatiently. I tasted my tea and set the cup down in its saucer and never touched it again. Even so, that put me one up on both of the others.
“First I’d like to make it clear that I never said I was representing Miss Whiting, nor anyone else, for that matter.”
Clague said, “Are you saying that you’re acting on your own behalf?”
“No, I’m not saying that. I’m telling you what I didn’t say.” I took a deep breath and told as much of it as I thought they were entitled to hear: Of my being called by a woman who gave her name as Ann Maringer and her reasons for hiring me, of my finding the dead man in her apartment, of my interview with Phil Montana, who told me that Ann Maringer was Janet Whiting and that she had vanished last year as Judge DeLancey’s heirs had begun proceedings to have the Judge declared legally dead. I was still talking when Mrs. DeLancey interrupted.
“You say that as if you think the two incidents are related.”
“Are they?”
“Don’t answer that, Leola.”
She didn’t look at the lawyer. The maid shifted her weight delicately to remind her mistress that she was still there. Mrs. DeLancey asked her to open the drapes. Lake St. Clair leaped out at me, so blue it hurt to look at it.
“If there is any connection I know nothing about it.” She switched to the offensive. “What led you to Phil Montana?”
“Didn’t I say that the dead man in the apartment was Montana’s personal bodyguard?” I rewound the conversation in my mind. I had said that. She shook her head.
“It’s too thin. If that were what put you onto him you would have gone to see him right away, the palace guard notwithstanding. By your own admission you waited more than twelv
e hours. Something else happened to make you think he was involved. What was it?”
I met her level, level gaze. The cops could take lessons from the widow DeLancey. I got the box out of my pocket and opened it, holding it out. Her eyes remained on mine for an instant, then lowered to take in the jewelry. Clague leaned over her shoulder, adjusting his glasses.
“Ann Maringer—I’ll call her Janet Whiting, for clarity’s sake—gave me the ring as a retainer,” I said. “I took it to an expert, who identified the setting as the work of a jeweler Montana uses exclusively. Montana told me he’d had the ring made for Miss Whiting as a favor to the Judge. Do you recognize it, Mrs. DeLancey?”
“No,” she said dryly. “But then a man doesn’t usually ask his wife for her opinion on a gift for his mistress, does he?”
“That depends on the man. Or the wife.”
“Or the mistress.”
“The world thrives on contrast.” I closed the box and put it away. “Have you ever met Miss Whiting?”
“Careful.” Clague laid a pudgy, speckled hand on her shoulder. She didn’t shake it off right away. Well, they were old friends. She opened her mouth, then closed it. When it opened again:
“I almost said no. I’ve nothing to gain by lying. I met her twice. The first time was at the coast guard station the day Arthur’s plane was reported missing over Lake Superior. I don’t recall what was said; we were both in too much shock over what was happening. Of course I recognized her from her photographs. The second time was a year ago in Probate Court. Daniel and I were in the judge’s chambers, discussing the procedure involved in having Arthur declared dead. Jack was there as well. My son. She burst in unannounced and demanded to be heard. Babbling something about a later will naming her as Arthur’s chief beneficiary. When the judge summoned the bailiff to remove her she became hysterical. She had really to be carried out bodily, screaming imprecations all the way.”
“Imprecations?”
“At the judge, me, everyone. Daniel?”