Cat on a Cold Tin Roof

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Cat on a Cold Tin Roof Page 15

by Mike Resnick


  It sure as hell sounds like a mogul who was going broke until this week . . . and the only things that had changed were that his friend Malcolm Pepperidge was dead and he seemed to have an influx of money.

  I ate a quick, noncommittal lunch with Sorrentino, then went back to Delahunt’s home turf. His private golf club told me he’d let his membership lapse but had called them this week to say he’d be renewing it when spring rolled around. The local Republicans assumed he hadn’t made any donations in the past year because he didn’t like their candidates, but of course he was loyal to the core Republicans.

  Every place I checked and every answer I got led me to the same conclusion: he was a formerly wealthy man who’d been hurting for cash for a couple of years and was suddenly, in the past few days, starting to drag his fallen credit rating back up by its bootstraps.

  By midafternoon I’d done enough checking. I went home, popped open a beer, poured another into Marlowe’s empty food bowl, turned on one of the lesser ESPN channels, and watched some girls in and almost out of bikinis play beach volleyball for a wildly enthusiastic audience who probably didn’t even know the rules and certainly didn’t know the participants’ names. If you were a breast man you cheered for the girl on the left; if you were a leg man you cheered for the one on the right. If you liked them both, as I did, then you were a nonpartisan.

  The game ended, they switched to bowling, and I switched to reading a secondhand paperback I’d bought at a local Book Nook, in which the hard-boiled hero shot a bad guy in odd-numbered chapters and bedded one or more women who looked even better than Mitzi Cramer in the even-numbered ones.

  Finally it was about half an hour before I was due to have dinner with Sorrentino. I considered taking Marlowe for another walk, but as I approached him he looked up from his couch cushion and gave me one of his don’t you dare come hither looks, so I walked to the car, almost bumped into Mrs. Garabaldi as she was coming over to discuss very current literature—like this morning’s—with Mrs. Cominsky, and twenty minutes later I parked a couple of blocks from the Montgomery Inn, which specialized in ribs, celebrities, and Reds and Bengals jerseys—the ribs were for eating, the others for being impressed by.

  Sorrentino was already there, and we were soon seated at a table.

  “How’d your day go?” I asked.

  “Same as the last few,” he said grimly. “Zip. How about you?”

  I decided I couldn’t hide what I knew any longer. If there was one guy besides the Brazilians I didn’t want mad at me, I was sitting across the table from him.

  “I’m pretty sure I know who killed Palanto,” I said.

  He leaned forward. “Tell me about it.”

  “I’ve been doing some detective work,” I said. “I didn’t want to say anything before I had something concrete.”

  “And now you do?”

  “I think so.”

  “Well?”

  “I managed to trace one of the diamonds,” I said.

  “Where is it?” he asked.

  “In a ring on the finger of a girl who makes Pam Anderson look like a boy.”

  He nodded his head thoughtfully. “Isn’t it always? So was Palanto her sugar daddy? Did she knock him off?”

  “No,” I said. “I doubt that she ever met him.”

  “Okay,” said Sorrentino. “So who killed him?”

  “There’s a guy, Abner Delahunt, who lives three doors down from Palanto,” I replied. “A guess is that just about everyone on that street belonged to the same golf club and probably the same church. The guy was a realtor, had a dozen offices around town . . . but he fell on hard times, had to close a few of them, hadn’t been paying his bills. Looked for sure like he was about to go down the drain.”

  “And he’s been paying them since Palanto’s death?” asked Sorrentino.

  I nodded. “And the girl’s only had the ring a few days.”

  “Sounds good to me,” he said. “Why the hell didn’t you fill me in while you were tracking all this info down?”

  “I know what you did to those kids who jumped you the other day,” I said. “Just in case this was a bad lead or a dead end, I didn’t want you getting rough with the girl. I’d have had to testify, and you’re my friend. I didn’t want you going to jail for nothing.”

  Suddenly a grin spread across his face. “And you didn’t want me beating you to the diamonds.”

  “That, too,” I admitted, returning his grin.

  “Well, what the hell, what you have sounds good. What’s our next step?”

  “We pay him a visit,” I said. “If we send the cops there and he’s got any of the diamonds left, they’ll confiscate them and there goes our reward.”

  “Makes sense,” he agreed. “Let’s go now.”

  “And miss the best rib dinner in the country?” I said. “Don’t worry. The blonde’s not going to warn him.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Because she knows if we nail him, her ring’s evidence. She’s probably hoping I’ll go after someone else, or that Delahunt will buy me off.”

  “Or kill you.”

  “I don’t think it’d bother her a bit,” I said as the waiter came by and I gave him my order. Sorrentino, who hadn’t looked at the menu, just said, “The same,” and a few minutes later we were gorging ourselves on two slabs of ribs.

  When we were done we walked out onto the street, and Sorrentino turned to me.

  “I assume we’re going there to make, if not a citizen’s arrest, a citizen’s search, authorized or otherwise?”

  “We’ll play it by ear,” I said. “But remember: if we search the place without permission, we probably won’t be allowed to keep what we find long enough to turn it over to the insurance company.”

  He patted the slight bulge under the arm of his sports jacket. “Oh, I think they’ll give us permission.”

  “Just follow my lead and don’t threaten anyone,” I said.

  “So how the hell are we going to do this legally.”

  “Theoretically I’m working for Velma,” I answered. “If I claim that you’re my assistant, and we’ve been tipped that the murder weapon is there and we’d like permission to do a quick search for it, I’m sure that’s the one thing that’s so well hidden, if it’s on the premises at all, that Delahunt will give us the okay and plan to trash the damned gun tomorrow if he hasn’t already. And once we have permission to search the place, then if we find the diamonds, we should be in the clear for turning them in.”

  “I hear a lot of ‘ifs,’” said Sorrentino.

  “If you’ve got a better plan, tell me now so if there’s anything illegal I can point it out.”

  “No, we’ll play it your way.”

  “Okay,” I said, reaching my car. “Follow me. We’ll park a few blocks away, and then you can get in my car.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “You’re supposed to be my assistant. It makes sense that we’d arrive together.”

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  We got into our cars, I drove down Interstate 71 to the Dana Road exit, went a little less than a mile to Edwards, turned right, and a couple of minutes later we passed by Palanto’s house. Delahunt’s was three houses down the street, and I could see that there was no “For Sale” sign on it. I drove another block, parked, waited for Sorrentino to park behind me and climb into my car, and then I circled around and parked in the street in front of Delahunt’s huge Tudor.

  “Something wrong with the driveway?” asked Sorrentino.

  “I’m making two assumptions,” I replied. “One, that Delahunt is a murderer, and two, that he operated alone. If I’m wrong about the first, it’ll be embarrassing as hell, but no real harm done . . . but if I’m wrong about the second, I don’t want his accomplice to trap us in the driveway.”

  He smiled. “I got to start thinking more like a cop.”

  “A shamus,” I said. “If they still use that term.”

  “Only in old Bogey movies,
I think.”

  We got out of the car and walked up the winding flagstone path to the front door. I touched the bell and heard chimes suddenly play the opening notes of “Hail, Hail, the Gang’s All Here.” A moment later a middle-aged woman wearing a maid’s outfit opened the door, and even in the dim light I could tell that she had a lousy dye job.

  “May I help you?” she asked.

  “We’d like to see Mr. Delahunt,” I said.

  “I’m afraid he’s not here.”

  “Is Mrs. Delahunt at home?” I asked. If the maid was alone, I’d already decided to show her my license, which everyone seems to think makes me a cop, and tell her we had a search warrant.

  “I’ll get her,” she said. She stood stock-still, as if trying to decide whether to shut the door in our faces until she could hunt up her boss. “Won’t you please come in?” she said at last.

  “Thank you,” I said, and Sorrentino and I stepped into the large tiled foyer.

  A moment later an elegant woman of perhaps fifty approached us. She wasn’t pretty, but she sure as hell was as handsome as money, grooming, and bearing could make her.

  “You wish to see me?” she said by way of greeting.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “My name is Eli Paxton, and this is my assistant, Mr. Sorrentino.” I flashed my license. “We came here to see your husband, but I wonder if we might ask you a couple of questions.”

  “What is this about?” she demanded.

  “I’ll get right to the point,” I said. “This is an inquiry into the whereabouts of a certain diamond, about which we believe Mr. Delahunt may have some information.”

  “I knew it!” she exploded. “That stupid son of a bitch!”

  “I beg your pardon?” I said, genuinely surprised.

  “Him and that damned bimbo of his!”

  “Are you perhaps referring to a Miss Cramer?” I asked.

  “I don’t know her name!” she spat. “But I know that we’re down to one car and one servant, and we’re probably going to have to move to a smaller place, but he’s got enough money to give a diamond to that blonde bitch! He thought I didn’t overhear her thanking him for it on the phone!”

  “Are you fully aware of what you’re saying, ma’am?” I asked.

  “Hell, I’ll say it in court! I’m leaving that bastard! He can have the bimbo and the diamond, and I hope they’ll keep him warm in his goddamned jail cell!”

  Sorrentino and I exchanged looks. Each said the same thing: I do believe we’re in business.

  21.

  She gave us permission to search the house. Not many people are as good at tossing a room or a house as I am, but Sorrentino was one of them. We found a lot of stuff that didn’t belong in the house of a wealthy, happily married business tycoon—love letters from a pair of girlfriends hidden in one of his business folders in a desk drawer, a warning from the electric company that they’d be cutting off his service if he didn’t bring his bill up to date, dunning letters from half a dozen stores and creditors, all of them relatively recent. I turned the love letters over to his wife to thank her for her help and to give her a little extra ammunition against him.

  But when we’d finished two hours later there were two things that we hadn’t found—the diamonds and anything that might conceivably have been the murder weapon. Mrs. Delahunt was almost as disappointed as we were and told us we had carte blanche to come back, alone or with the cops, whenever we wanted. I asked where her husband was, but all she could answer was: “In one of his offices that hasn’t been shut down yet, or with one of his whores who hasn’t been shut down yet. I don’t know and I don’t care.”

  I dropped Sorrentino by his car, and he followed me to a bar in Clifton, the university area, about four miles away. We both parked on the street, tried not to feel too ancient as we made our way past all the late teens and early twenty-somethings standing at the long bar, and took a table as far from the noise as we could get.

  “Well, what do you think?” he asked as we waited for the bearded waiter to approach us.

  “We’ve probably got enough for Simmons to arrest him, especially with his wife on our side,” I said. “But with no gun and no diamonds . . .” I just shook my head. “He’d be lawyered up and out the next morning. Always assuming he has enough money to hire a lawyer.”

  “I don’t give a shit about that,” said Sorrentino. “I’m not a cop, and neither are you. What about the diamonds?”

  I shrugged. “He sure as hell doesn’t have them in the house. If he’s hiding them, we have to figure out where. If he sold them—and he has to have sold at least some of them, since none of his creditors have taken him to court yet—we have to figure out who he sold them to.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Our next step is easy enough. I get him alone and beat the shit out of him until he talks.”

  I shook my head. “This isn’t Chicago, Val,” I said. “The cops won’t look the other way. You beat the information out of him, at worst you’ll be up for battery, at best the cops will claim you were trying to steal the diamonds and you’ll lose all claim to a finder’s fee.”

  He frowned. “Then what do you suggest?”

  “We keep trying to find the diamonds,” I said. “They’re what we’re after. If we don’t have any contact with Delahunt, no one can claim bribery, extortion, intimidation, or anything else.”

  “Your cops would actually do that?” he asked.

  “Absolutely. Like I say, this isn’t Chicago.”

  He shook his head in wonderment. “Strange city.”

  “We’ll look for the gun, too,” I added.

  “Why do we care?” replied Sorrentino. “All we want is the goddamned diamonds.”

  “We find the diamonds and you’re in Chicago a few hours later. But I’ll be staying in Cincinnati with a very bitter man who’s already killed someone with that gun and who will be convinced that I’m the only reason he couldn’t stop his life from going down the tubes.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” he admitted.

  I smiled. “Why should you? You’re going to be safe and sound three hundred miles away.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “So what about the diamonds?”

  “I think if he’d left them with any of the Cincinnati fences I’d know by now, and while I haven’t spoken to Simmons I’m sure he has a man on the job too,” I said. “So I have a feeling we’re going to need your organization’s connections to find them. We’ll keep looking here, of course, and I think it might make sense for us to take turns keeping an eye on Delahunt, but I really don’t know what else we can do.”

  “You think his wife knows anything?”

  I shook my head. “She’s so mad at him, she’d be first in line to tell us anything that would put him away for life.”

  “Yeah. I suppose so,” he agreed. “Well, my people aren’t without their resources. I can find out within, say, forty-eight hours how much he’s got in the bank. I can probably even find out if he’s visited a safety deposit box. He must have one; there was no safe in the house. And of course we can check his business accounts too.”

  And suddenly, as he was speaking, I began to get an idea. Maybe it would amount to nothing, but we were running out of approaches. And if I was right, I’d have to do it alone.

  We talked a little more, wound up comparing the Big Red Machine to the 1959 White Sox, and Walter Payton’s Bears to Boomer Esiason’s Bengals, and finally we finished our beers and walked out to where we’d left the cars.

  “So where do we meet for lunch?” he asked.

  I knew it would have to be within a few minutes of the river, so I thought for a moment and answered, “Joe’s Diner, over on Sycamore Street.”

  He laughed. “Come on, Eli. Where are we really meeting?”

  “I just told you: Joe’s Diner. You’ve got a Global Whatever. You’ll find it.”

  “There’s actually a place called Joe’s Diner?”

  “It’s a landmark,” I told him.
>
  He snorted. “Is there anything in this town that isn’t a landmark?”

  “Not much,” I answered.

  “Okay. Noon?”

  “Make it one o’clock,” I said. “I’m running a little short on sleep, and I don’t want you waiting alone at a table for half an hour. Hell, you might get so bored you decide to run off with Mrs. Delahunt.”

  He grimaced. “Okay, one o’clock.”

  He climbed into his car, and a moment later I did the same. I’d bought myself maybe three and a half hours before lunch tomorrow. I hoped it was enough time.

  22.

  When I left the bar I waited until Sorrentino was out of sight, then drove straight to police headquarters. Jim Simmons had gone home for the night, but Bill Calhoun was there, and I walked over and sat down opposite him at his desk.

  “You know, Eli,” he said, “you really ought to learn to use a computer one of these days.”

  “I’m a detective, not a typist,” I said.

  “Well, I’m a police officer, not a typist—but I know how to work a computer.”

  “Good!” I said. “Then you’re just the man I want.”

  He signed deeply. “Okay, okay, what do you need this time?”

  “The guy you hunted up for me . . .” I began.

  “Delahunt?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about him?” asked Calhoun.

  “I got to thinking,” I said. “He’s got a bunch of real estate offices.”

  “Had a bunch,” Calhoun corrected me. “Most of them are closed now.”

  “I know. But they’re all in Cincinnati, right?”

  “Right,” he said, looking at me curiously.

  “His house—hell, the whole Grandin Road area—can’t be more than five or six miles from the river, right?”

  He frowned. “Yeah, I’d say six miles, tops.”

 

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