by Angel Eyes
“You didn’t know if he was dead or alive,” I pressed. “You wanted to open an investigation, all right, but you wanted it to show that DeLancey’s wife arranged for his death. Why?”
“Because she had it coming.”
She’d stopped rocking now, and was looking up at me with a face taut with hatred. Even her eyes couldn’t spoil it.
“I was living in an apartment in Grosse Pointe Woods the day Arthur left on that trip. A six-room suite with a live-in maid and a choice view of the lake. The next day I was back on the street. Mrs. DeLancey cut off the rent and told the landlord if I wasn’t out of the building by nightfall she’d throw him to her lawyers like a bone. That was when her husband was still considered missing, not dead.”
“When’d you find out he was still alive?”
“I always suspected it. I found out for sure eight months ago, in Tucson.”
“What were you doing out in Arizona?”
“Looking for Arthur, what else?” she said. “He was always interested in the West; I figured if he went anywhere it would be there. I hit all the historic spots: Dodge City, Abilene, the Custer battlefield, Tombstone. I showed his picture around all the museums and souvenir shops. Nothing. I was in Old Tucson and almost broke when I saw him.”
There was an electronic digital clock somewhere in the room. A constant cooking noise, punctuated at regular intervals by soft clicks as the numbers changed, ticking out the Judge’s life like a death-watch beetle. Tim and his partner, bodyguards down to their socks, had stationed themselves at both exits. Clendenan stood behind me and to my right. Montana was out of my sight-line, but I could hear his heavy breathing, louder and more regular than DeLancey’s shuddering gasps. Janet Whiting continued.
“They were putting on a show for the tourists, a phony bank robbery with a lot of shooting and men pitching off rooftops. He was standing in the crowd on the other side of the street. He’d darkened his hair and changed his face, but I recognized him. Even forty pounds lighter there was no mistaking him, not for me. When things quieted down finally I hurried over there, but he was already gone. I did some asking around and found out what hotel he was staying at. The clerk there said he’d just checked out to catch a two-thirty flight. I called the airport. The only plane they had leaving at that time was bound for Detroit Metropolitan Airport. I missed it, but I caught the next one. It’s taken me this long to track him down. And now—” She smoothed a hand over his matted hair and lowered her face, her body convulsed with sobs.
“That’s because he was lying low in your home town, afraid someone might recognize him here,” I explained. “What made you go to such lengths to find him?”
“I loved him.” Her voice was barely audible through the tears.
“Maybe. Or maybe you loved his millions. It doesn’t much matter now.”
“Why, Mother?”
I looked at Clendenan. His tan eyes were riveted on the woman. She raised her face. Her pretty eyes were red and swollen.
“Why did you tell me there was another will when he never made one out?” he demanded.
“Would you have helped me otherwise?” She watched him levelly. “You didn’t inherit many of his qualities, William. Just his faults. Greed especially.”
“You bitch!”
“I never pretended to be anything else.”
“How did he help you?”
There was a pause. I repeated the question. Clendenan responded hastily.
“I looked into Griffin Carbide’s affairs. The union keeps extensive files on all its investments.”
“What about Jack Billings?” I was looking at her. “What did he do for you?”
“Jack,” she said, smiling wistfully. “Dear Jack. He went through his stepfather’s papers, including a few that got mixed up with the inventory of Arthur’s firearms collection when he sold it. That was where he found the name of the doctor Arthur had paid to change his face. But by the time he reached him the doctor was long dead. Suicide, the police said. That was a year ago. When I got back from out West I had to start all over again, by talking to Arthur’s old acquaintances. It was just a fluke that I remembered his pilot’s real name and looked up his brother at The Crescent.”
“Why didn’t you talk to Montana?”
Her mouth hardened. “Phil was one of the men who would have liked to see Arthur dead. I wasn’t going to tell him I thought he was still alive.”
“That’s not true,” the union chief protested.
She ignored him. “That’s why I called you when I recognized Phil’s bodyguard from pictures I’d seen of him in the newspapers, posing as a waiter.”
“That, and because you knew Montana had reason to resent your stringing him along to find out what you could about DeLancey’s supposed death,” I added. “He thought you were after the will, but the result was the same.”
She drained the tumbler and put it back on the table. “I’m not denying it,” she said. “I’d have done anything to make sure Arthur was safe.”
“Anything,” I echoed. “Including promising to cut Jack Billings in on the nonexistent inheritance. Manipulating him the way you did Montana and your son. Making the reward seem so sweet that when you dropped out of sight, Billings went out to Huron in the hopes of picking up your trail and wound up killing a private investigator who went out there for the same reason.”
She raised her eyebrows, not very far. Her eyes were deep pools of innocence. “I don’t know anything about that. Was he a friend of yours?”
“It doesn’t much matter. Any man’s death diminishes me.”
Clendenan looked green. “I’m going to be sick.”
“The time for that is past,” I snapped. “You had your chance yesterday afternoon, when you killed Krim.”
He shifted his attention back to me, and he wasn’t green anymore. His face was skull-white.
26
“YOUR TIMING’S GETTING worse,” said the secretary slowly. “But as long as you’ve started, you may as well go on to the punch line. You’d better hope I laugh.”
His verbiage was pure Warner Brothers, another example of life imitating art. I let my eyes drop to the floor, pretending to be choosing my words. After a moment I located the cord to the lamp where it plugged into the wall. It was good to know for future reference.
“There’s a bushel of motives to choose from,” I began. “For now I’ll stick with the one that’s worked so far. You said Krim boasted of having killed Jefferson. I’d call it a progress report. Your mother said the bodyguard’s presence worried her, so she called me for protection. Wrong. For that she went to Krim. She couldn’t have used the phony will to win him over, because he knew the Judge was still alive and he had a good thing going as it was. My guess is she used those great big baby blues of hers. He was hard, but he wasn’t hard enough to resist those.
“She used some story to get Krim to agree to lay a trap for Jefferson, who he probably didn’t know from Adam, and then she lured the bodyguard back to her apartment and straight into the Arab’s line of fire. If it looked bad to have a stiff in her home, she left little clues to indicate that she hadn’t departed voluntarily—her purse, money, and bank book, all her clothes. Why not? She stood to gain far more. I was the clincher. No one who was planning a murder would hire a private investigator to nose around and uncover things—no one, that is, who was less devious than Janet Whiting.”
Montana said, “Why didn’t she just have Krim ambush him on the street?”
“No good. She wanted an investigation that would eventually lead back to Leola DeLancey, and to swing that she had to make it look like more than another street killing. How were you going to implicate her, Janet? By getting Jack Billings to plant his stepfather’s derringer in her bedroom?”
She daubed at the Judge’s quaking face with the blood-soaked handkerchief and pretended not to hear.
“She told me she got off at two,” I said to whoever was listening. “The odds are she left at least an hour
earlier, to be sure and finish the job and clear out before I showed up. That shouldn’t be too hard to check.
“Getting the Arab to do it accomplished two things: It got Jefferson out of her way, and it gave her leverage against the killer. In court it would be her word against his, and he knew what would come of that. He had to let her see DeLancey or go to jail. What happened when they got together, only she knows. It doesn’t matter. The point is her plan worked.
“The problem with using a snake to catch a rat is what do you do with the snake afterwards? As long as there was a bare possibility the police might buy Krim’s story, he couldn’t be left to talk. But a mother can always count on her son.” I met the secretary’s gaze. “Did you really use a claw hammer?”
He had regained a great deal of his composure, though his complexion was still unhealthy. “What makes you think it wasn’t DeLancey?” he asked. “Blunt objects were no strangers to him.”
“You do. You said he wasn’t so good at killing when he was close to his victim. I imagine that was one of the qualities your mother says you didn’t inherit. And like all good secretaries you kept a cool head, not forgetting to collect your father’s derringer afterwards, so that your mother could carry out the plans she had for it. But you should have taken time to search his office and grab the account book he used to record DeLancey’s blackmail payments.”
“Who’d have thought he was stupid enough to bank them?” Clendenan brought out the little Forehand & Wadsworth.
I fired the .38 through my jacket pocket. He fired at the same time, but his shot went wild and shattered the front window behind me. Then he folded onto his knees and pitched forward, still holding the now-useless single-shot. His mother screamed.
I didn’t bother to look and see what the bodyguards were up to. Instead I twirled the lamp cord around my ankle and jerked the china-base lamp off the end table beside Janet Whiting’s chair. We both hit the floor at the same time, I rolling, the lamp shattering and plunging the room in darkness. A .45 roared, orange flame slashing the night. I fired at the flash once, twice. I heard a loud grunt. There was another roar from a different quarter. Something hot raked my rib cage. I rolled again and squeezed one off in the direction of a fading phosphorescence. Then I rolled back the other way, an instant before the second .45 opened up again, the bullet slapping the floor where I’d been.
Silence throbbed louder than any of the explosions. I stuck a finger in one ear and waggled it to clear out the wad of noise that was stopping it up. Now I heard the Judge’s labored breathing and the digital clock clunking out the minutes.
Some light was leaking in through the broken window. It glinted off a pair of eyeglasses moving beneath the sill. I released two rounds for good measure. There was a gasp and a thud.
Suddenly the room was full of light. I looked up, blinking, at Tim standing beside the wall switch next to the door. One hand was gripping his big automatic, the other his abdomen, where bright arterial blood was squirting between his fingers. I aimed the .38 carefully and squeezed the trigger. The hammer snapped on an empty shell. I tried twice more. Same story. His eyes were wild as he leveled his .45 at me.
The room shook with a fresh explosion. I jerked spasmodically, positive I’d been hit. The towheaded bodyguard held his position a moment longer, seeming to hang there, still pointing the gun. Blood from a huge hole in his left temple drained down his neck into his collar. Then he crumpled into a heap.
I turned my head. Phil Montana stood in front of the window, gripping the other bodyguard’s Army Colt. Smoke blurred his image.
The bespectacled guard was sitting on the floor beneath the window with his back propped against the wall, cradling his left arm in his right hand. His jacket sleeve was soaked where one or both of my bullets had shattered the elbow.
Bill Clendenan lay twitching where he had fallen. I couldn’t tell if he was alive or if it was just nerves.
On the sofa, the Judge was still gulping air.
I was dimly aware of a keening sound in the distance growing louder. My shirt felt warm and wet. I opened my jacket and looked down to see that it was smeared bright red. I began to lose consciousness.
The last thing I saw before darkness overtook me was Janet Whiting sprawled in an unladylike position on the sofa, her head to one side and a hole in her left breast that could only have been made by a .45. Her eyes had already begun to cloud over.
27
THE NURSE, IF THAT’S what she was, frowned prettily as she helped me on with my shirt. I was wearing enough tape around my ribs to star in a remake of The Mummy. Late-morning sunlight bounced perkily off the pastel walls of my room at Detroit Receiving Hospital.
“Doctor wasn’t happy to sign that release order,” she complained. “He wanted to keep you under observation.”
“Doctor can take a flying leap at the moon. He’d have been a lot less happy to face charges of unlawful imprisonment.” Ignoring the twinge in my right side, I reached for a cigarette and found my shirt pocket empty. I’d forgotten about having smoked my last. I was still groggy from the anesthetic.
She glared at me reproachfully. She was a petite blonde in a pale pink pantsuit and track shoes, and she looked about fifteen. These days you can’t tell the nurses from the candy stripers, the doctors from the orderlies.
I said, “Don’t say I should be grateful to him for pinning my rib back together. I’ll be paying him for it for the next six months. It isn’t as if the bullet was still in there when he cut me open. And if you try to take me out of here in a wheelchair—” She stalked out before I could finish.
Lieutenant Fitzroy was waiting for me in the pastel corridor. He was holding his porkpie hat.
“I’m not here to see you, so don’t go getting touched,” he snapped, falling into step beside me. “I had orders to hang around until Judge DeLancey died, just in case he had anything to say.”
“Fat chance.”
“Yeah. The quacks say he checked out ten minutes ago. You and I know he hasn’t been around since he took that slug. Cranmer’s down there now, hearing in Latin how a tenth of an ounce of lead made spaghetti out of the inside of the old man’s skull.”
“What about the others?” I put my hat on and smoothed the brim.
“That bodyguard you shot sang us a pretty aria, which was awful nice of him considering he might lose that left arm. His story checks out with Montana’s. The secretary, Clendenan, is still out from the operation, but it looks like he’s going to pull through. He’ll make a hell of a file clerk up at the Jackson pen. Jesus, that living room was straight out of the last act of something by Shakespeare.”
“How would you know?”
“Smart guy. Just don’t forget to drop by headquarters. There’s a steno and a tape recorder just dying to meet you. They’d like to put your autograph next to Phil Montana’s.”
“Later, if that’s all right. After I sleep off the dope.”
“Of course it’s all right. We aren’t about to give some damned lawyer the chance to say we drugged any of our witnesses.” We stopped before the elevators. He pressed the Down button. “You’ll never guess what airport they picked up Jack Billings at.”
“Honolulu.”
He stared at me. For once he wasn’t smiling. I shrugged, wincing at the sudden pain in my side. “Lucky guess.”
The doors slid open. We stepped aside to let out a frizzy-headed orderly in a white coat pushing an empty gurney. On our way down to the lobby, Fitzroy said: “He’s waived extradition and he’s on his way back here to sign a confession. Says he didn’t mean to shoot the op; the gun went off while he was covering him. Could be. It was a thirty-eight Remington, ninety-two years old, with a shaved hammer and a hair trigger.”
“Have you looked into why DeLancey rented the Kitchner place last year?”
“Not yet. I figure he bought it while he was laying low there to use as a safe house close by if he got hot.”
I didn’t say anything. He reached out and
pressed the Stop button. The car lurched to a halt between floors. He faced me, smiling again, not comfortingly.
“Your playing cop got people killed, Walker. The D.A. thinks it’ll complicate his cases against Billings and Clendenan if we charge you with obstruction of justice, so we’re to lay off. But you better hope you don’t get caught spitting on the sidewalk from here on in, because I’ll pull so many strings you’ll be dancing for the next ten years. Today a letter is going to State Police Headquarters in Lansing about your conduct. It’ll go into your file along with all the others. Someday there’ll be so many of them, they won’t be able to squeeze the folder back into the drawer. Which is when you stop being a private investigator in this state. On that day I’ll spring for champagne down in the squad room.”
“What if I had backed off?” I challenged. “How many more bodies would be clogging up the statistics while Janet Whiting went around covering her tracks and you sat around waiting for warrants?”
“I get it. You’re Zorro, right? A guy in a big cape on horseback swinging a sword to help out when the cops fall down.”
I said, “No, just a guy earning his living. A woman who called herself Ann Maringer hired me to find her. It doesn’t matter that she didn’t really want to be found. Every time I take on a job I mortgage a piece of myself to my clients and I can’t get it back until it’s paid off. I have to do that and yet try not to step on the toes of the people who keep me in business. Sometimes that’s impossible. I can’t help it; it’s the way I operate.”
“So you’re in it for the money.”
I sighed and gave up. “If that’s the only way you can handle it.”
“We want that diamond ring, by the way. Now more than ever, for evidence.”
“You know what I want before you get it. Signed by a judge.”
“You’re a son of a bitch,” he said flatly.
“That’s my excuse. What’s yours?”
We finished the ride in silence. He stayed on after I had alighted. My last impression of him was a smiling face with sparkling eyes just before a group of doctors and nurses entered the car, crowding it from view.