The balance of the party was on the explosive side. It consisted of Bill Brackett, who seemed to be in great good humor; Bradley; and Joe Egan, white, unapproachable.
Brackett slapped Cain on the shoulder when they came in. “Stiff upper lip, pal. You’re among friends.”
“If I live through this, I’ll give you the finest Shetland pony money can buy,” Cain said. “That was the golden bait my father hung out for me as a kid.” He glanced at Egan in the corner. “Any target practice yet?”
Bill laughed. “Not yet. I think Old Massa Bradley has convinced Joseph he was a little hasty. I’ve been doing some detective work today myself. I’m full of hunches about Lydia’s boyfriend and they amuse the hell out of me.”
The next hour Cain passed in a sort of anesthetized daze. He remembered Royce pumping his hand and saying “Hello, old man.” He remembered being introduced to the petite Madame Rosokov, who compared his chest expansion favorably with her husband’s, evidently a high compliment. He remembered Mrs. Wilder burbling something about his choice of a musical career being “quite sound … quite in harmony with the influences.”
Then the chief sang. At any other time this would have reduced the flow of cold sweat on Cain’s body. The six foot six Mr. Wolf had a high tenor voice that came close to sounding like a boy soprano. He sang some weird tribal chants with an accompaniment of solemn gestures that had Bill Brackett hiding in the reception room.
Madame Rosokov was next, and she sang charmingly and was generous with encores.
“All right, Pat, up and at ’em,” Summers’ voice came through a fog. Somehow Cain got to his feet and faced the little group. He leaned against the piano, clutching it for support. He heard the introduction to Mandalay, but his mouth and throat were dry. Summers played it over. The hell with it, Cain told himself. The hell with it, and them, and the whole proposition. He wound up and let go. It was loud anyway.
When it was over he dove for the reception room. People kept blocking his way and saying how good it was. In the reception room Bill met him with a double hooker of whisky,
“You’ve got something there,” Bill said grinning.
“Oh, God,” said Cain, and drank the whisky.
Margo Reed was standing at the curtained kitchenette arranging plates of sandwiches. Apparently there were to be drinks also. Rosokov was singing inside … which meant they could talk without disturbing anyone.
“It was much better than you imagine, Cain,” Margo said.
“I couldn’t make a sound till I decided to get sore,” Cain said.
“I wouldn’t have missed it for anything,” Bill said. “I’ll bet the piano frame is bent where you hung on to it.”
The whisky made Cain feel better. “Semi-chum!” he said.
When Rosokov had finished singing the party became informal. Margo and Carol passed sandwiches. Liquor, ice, and glasses were set up on the round table in the reception room and everyone helped himself. A second whisky had restored Cain to normal. He spotted Joe Egan alone in the corner of the room and went over.
“Sorry I had to get tough with you last night, Egan,” he said, “but you didn’t leave me much choice.”
Egan moistened his lips. His eyes kept shifting around the room. “I … I guess I was hysterical,” he said. “You don’t know what it’s like, Cain, to know that somewhere, perhaps in this room, is a man who has murdered your own sister and not to be able to do anything about it.”
“You’ve given up on Brackett?”
“I haven’t given up on anyone!” Egan said. “But I’m giving Bradley a chance. That sort of thing is his business.”
“Smart guy,” said Cain, “and if he does find out I’d let him handle the rest of it too.”
Someone in the main studio had turned on the radio and they were getting the late war news. It was routine stuff and Cain made his way back to the liquor supply. Summers was standing there with Bradley.
“Listen, teacher, I’m taking your advice about the evils of alcohol,” Cain said, “but just this once …”
“Help yourself,” Summers said.
“We used to have a cop with a voice in my old precinct,” said Bradley, “who never could sing in public on account of nervousness. Then we hit on the idea of giving him a small length of iron pipe to hold. It worked fine, but while he was doing a number he’d twist that pipe into a pretzel.”
“You get over that after a while,” Summers said. “You get as oblivious to an audience as an athlete. Just don’t know they’re there.”
“That’s what you say,” said Cain.
“Make me a scotch and soda for Bill, will you, Arthur?” It was Carol, holding out an empty highball glass.
Summers fixed the drink and Carol went off with it. Cain glanced at his wrist-watch. “What’s Bill doing here now?” he asked. “He goes on at the Tinsel Club in about five minutes.”
“He takes Wednesday nights off,” Summers said. “Speaking of nervousness, I remember a performance of Bohême a number of years ago. It was the début of a young Italian prima donna. The opera was being sung in French. In the middle of the first act she froze up like a clam. DesJardines was singing with her. Grand performer, that fellow. He switched from French into Italian without batting an eyelash and when the girl heard her own tongue she came out of it.”
“I’ve seen that in our business,” Bradley said. “A green cop will often get buck fever his first time in a gun battle. It usually takes an old-timer to snap him out of it. Even the commissioner… ”
But Bradley never got to tell about the commissioner. There was a scream, high-pitched, terrified, from the next room. Summers and Bradley both made for the door with Cain at their heels.
“The market closed one to three points lower today on a volume of two hundred and thirty thousand shares …”
The radio announcer’s voice was clearly audible over the stir in the room.
Bill Brackett was down on his hands and knees on the floor. He looked up at Cain, and his eyes, bulging in their sockets, had a frightened pleading look in them. Then his face contorted in an agonized spasm and he rolled over on his side.
Cain and Bradley knelt beside him.
“It’s undoubtedly an acute appendix,” said Emily Stoddard’s chill, efficient voice. “Edgar! Call Dr. Peabody at once.”
Bill lay still now, a broken whisky glass near one outstretched hand on the rug. Cain reached out to move a piece of jagged glass.
“Don’t touch that!” said Bradley, so sharply that Cain drew back his hand as if it had been burned. “And it won’t be necessary to phone for the doctor,” Bradley added, sounding suddenly very tired.
“And now,” said a new announcer, bubbling with vigor, “we take you to the Tinsel Club, where as usual on Wednesday nights, Johnny Franklin substitutes for Maestro Bill Brackett.”
Soft music. A low baritone not unlike Bill’s, crooning:
“A pretty girl is like a melody
That haunts you night and day … ”
“Turn that God-damned thing off!” said Arthur Summers, in a shaken voice.
Chapter Seven
1
Inspector Bradley stood up. The radio clicked off. It was Edgar Stoddard, standing by, who had silenced it.
“Of course we need a doctor!” Emily Stoddard was shrill. “What on earth are you talking about?”
“But he’s quite dead,” said Bradley.
That broke the ice.
“Impossible!”
“Must have been his heart!”
“ … right in the middle of the story he was telling!”
“I’m sorry,” said Bradley. His voice cut through and silenced them as though on a theatrical cue. “It was poison.” His eyes went from face to face. “I’m not qualified to say what kind of poison. That’s up to the medical examiner.”
“Then it was Brackett!” said Joe Egan wildly. “He knew you’d found out!”
“Found out?”
“About Lydia! So h
e killed himself!”
Bradley sighed. “I’m afraid it’s not as simple as that, Egan.”
“He was murdered, wasn’t he, Inspector?” Edgar Stoddard asked.
“That’s the way the odds lie,” said Bradley. “I’m going to ask you all to put down your drinks and go into the other room.” He gave them a wry smile. “It might be safer to forego eating or drinking till we’ve had more chance to find out just how this happened.”
Glasses clattered on table tops and no one needed urging to make for the reception room. Bradley followed, closing the door behind him. He picked up the phone on Margo’s desk and called headquarters. When he put it down and turned to them, they braced themselves as if for physical shock.
“Of course I don’t have to tell you that none of you must leave,” he said. “Two radio policemen are coming to go through the routine of taking your names and addresses for the record. If the newspapers get wind of this, there will be reporters. I suggest that you do as little talking as possible for your own sakes. Mr. Cain, will you come back into the studio with me, please?”
Cain had seen men die before. One minute he had been smoking and chatting with a friend on the battlefield, and the next minute had seen him blown to pieces. Somehow, this was worse. That last desperate plea for help in Bill’s eyes haunted him.
Bradley closed the door. The room was hushed, breathless. A neglected cigarette burned in an ash tray, a curl of smoke rising in the still air. Bill lay where he had fallen, his eyes closed from the last spasm of pain.
“Nothing we can do till the squad gets here,” Bradley said. “I don’t want him moved or anything handled that might take fingerprints.”
Cain struck a match for his cigarette with his thumbnail. “You must have to hate a guy’s guts to kill him this way,” he said.
“There is hatred behind all murder, Mr. Cain. What does impress me is the desperate urgency of this one. Why choose a time when things could so easily go wrong? A time when there were so many people watching? A time when there was an inspector of the homicide division on deck?”
“That’s not what I was thinking,” Cain said.
“No?” Bradley’s eyes lifted in mild interest.
“I was thinking,” said Cain, “that it was kind of cuckoo of the inspector from the homicide division not to arrest Joe Egan on the spot. Egan didn’t care about crowds of people last night.”
“A point,” Bradley agreed, “but not a good one, I think. If Brackett had been shot or stabbed or heaved out the window, I’d say you were right. Egan is quite ready to murder to square accounts for his sister. But then I don’t think he’d bother to protect himself against the consequences, Mr. Cain. This murderer” — and there was a hardening of the inspector’s voice — “wanted Brackett dead, but he wants to go on living himself.”
“Which brings me,” said Cain, “to a question of my own. Why am I in here with you?”
“Oh, that!” Bradley took out his pipe. “I hate to be alone.”
“Why not save your comedy act for amateur night?” said Cain.
“I’m serious,” said Bradley. “I like to talk when I’m thinking.” His eyes were on Brackett’s body. “Like to see how someone else reacts to what I see and think.”
“And you picked me because you liked the color of my eyes,” said Cain.
“On the contrary,” Bradley said. “I picked you because you happen to be the one person here this evening I know didn’t poison our friend.”
“Well, I’m damned!” said Cain. The question of his being under suspicion hadn’t entered his head. “You’re right,” he said. “But how do you know?”
Bradley pointed with the stem of his pipe toward the pieces of the broken highball glass on the rug. “The poison was in that glass,” he said. “When I was kneeling beside the body I got a whiff of it. A bitter peach-stone odor. If it’s prussic acid, the first touch of it to his tongue would have done the job.” He looked at Cain again. “Make anything out of that, Cain?”
Cain shook his head.
“You and I saw that drink made,” said Bradley, “and we saw it carried to him. In less than thirty seconds it hit him …”
Cain began to see the rest and he didn’t like it. “Go ahead,” he said.
“The poison couldn’t have been in the whisky bottle or the soda siphon. A dozen other people have had drinks out of both. Just that glass, Cain. It wasn’t in the drink he had finished or he’d not have lived to start the next one.”
“Then you think either Carol or Summers …”
“Or anyone Miss Stoddard passed going back and forth,” said Bradley. “Anyone but you.”
Cain exhaled a lungful of smoke. That was better. Not so open-and-shut as it had sounded at first. Not that he would want to defend Carol if she was a murderess. “I have only had one friend who was ever honest with me, Mr. Cain … a cocker spaniel.”
“I knew it wasn’t you,” Bradley was saying, “because you were standing by me listening to my dull anecdote when Miss Stoddard brought the glass to be filled. I was concentrating on you” — he spread his hands — “hoping that my story was holding its audience.”
“Could Summers have managed it? Right under our eyes?” Cain asked.
“Did he walk a step or two away from the table with Miss Stoddard? Had he been waiting for just that moment, holding a tablet, a phial, something in his hand? Would we have noticed?”
“Not me,” Cain admitted.
“So we begin, certain of only two people … you and me,” Bradley said. He sighed.
“Do you always get your man, Inspector?” Cain meant it as a gag, but Bradley didn’t appear to take it that way.
“Often enough to hold my job,” he said, quite seriously.
2
For the next half hour Cain saw the police department in action. It seemed like confusion at first: a fingerprint man, a photographer, an assistant medical examiner, and a bull-necked plainclothes officer whom Bradley introduced as “My assistant, Sergeant Snyder.” Snyder hunched his shoulders forward at the introduction, and the look he gave Cain suggested he could already smell the sizzling flesh in the electric chair.
The medical examiner did not fit the picture Cain had come to expect from reading detective stories. He did not complain about being dragged away from dinner or a bridge game. As he was leaving, Cain heard the tag end of a conversation between him and Bradley.
“And it couldn’t have been a drink he’d had, say fifteen minutes earlier?” Bradley asked,
“Not if our guess about the HCN is right … and I think you can count on the tests proving it is. One sip … and boom!”
Bradley glanced at the other men. The photographer was already packing his equipment. The fingerprint man nodded. Cain realized it had been anything but confusion.
“All right, Doctor,” Bradley said.
Two white-coated stretcher bearers were summoned from the hall outside. Bill was placed on the stretcher and covered with a sheet.
“Poor bastard!” Cain said. “His look was begging me to help him as we came into the room.”
“Perhaps you still can,” said Bradley. The headquarters crew had all left with the exception of Sergeant Snyder. “Why was he killed, Cain?”
“Yeah,” said Snyder fiercely, “why’d you do it?”
Bradley gave his assistant a look. The sergeant’s red face grew redder. “Sort of leave this to me, will you, Rube? As a matter of fact, Mr. Cain is the one person here in the clear.”
“Sorry,” said Rube. “I just figured … ”
“ ‘Yours not to reason why,’ ” said Bradley. “I have a job for you, Rube. Those people in the next room. I want them searched. Phone for a matron for the women.”
“Right.”
“Well, hop to it!”
“Right,” said Rube. “Only what am I lookin’ for?”
“My apologies, Rube,” Bradley said. “Fact is, I’m not sure. Something that could have contained a tablet, a powder,
a few drops of liquid.”
“You mean a bottle?”
“A bottle … a box … a crumpled piece of paper. Only don’t go tasting things, Rube. I wouldn’t want to lose you.”
“Leave it to me, Red,” said the sergeant. “I’ll find what you want if it’s anywhere in this dump.”
Bradley grinned at Cain when Rube had gone. “Rube’s okay when he’s told what to do. I never like to search people myself. They resent it … even though they know it’s your job. And I’m hoping for a little cooperation from this mob. I always hope for cooperation, although I seldom get it. Let’s see, I was asking you why Brackett was killed.”
Cain shook his head. “No dice,” he said. “Except …”
“Except what, Cain?”
“When I came in tonight,” Cain said, “I saw Brackett and Joe Egan both here. I asked Bill if there had been any more trouble. He said no, that he thought you’d convinced Egan he’d been hasty. Then he said he’d been doing some detective work on his own.”
Bradley groaned. “Why will they do it! You’d be appalled, Cain, if you knew how many people die unnatural deaths simply as a result of taking over the functions of the police department. Was Brackett trying to put his finger on Lydia Egan’s boyfriend?”
“That’s it,” said Cain, “I was too jittery about my singing act to pay much attention to him. But he said something about being amused by a couple of leads he’d discovered.”
“Amused, was he? Well, the joke curdled!” Bradley knocked out his pipe in an ash tray.
“Do I rate a question?” Cain asked. “Because there’s something I’d like to know. Had you really crossed Brackett off as Lydia’s love life?”
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