by Janet Roger
She carried two drinks around the davenport and stood in front of me to take a look through the blind. Then she swung around, close enough to let me feel the rustle of her dress. “What do I have to decide?”
She was back in black satin, off-the-shoulder mourning, as fitted for widowhood as for embroidery classes. I took the glass out of her hand. “Two hours ago, the councilor called me into his office to say my job was through and that Willard meant to pay me off. Which is odd considering he was never my client, but then that’s not the message. The message is that Willard doesn’t want me around for what happens next.” The band’s new number drifted in on us, too pale to guess at what it was. “No matter what his police report says, when McAlester arrived in your office this morning, he saw what I saw, and the inspector doesn’t get paid to keep his thoughts from Joe Willard. Your husband was panicked last night about the fix he was in and used some brandy to calm his nerves, but he didn’t turn a gun on himself and it was no professional hit either. Sure, Joe mixes in circles that would relieve him of a million dollars. They might even gun down his lawyer. But they wouldn’t get delicate trying to fake a suicide and a double-cross.”
She stirred her sidelong look. “Meaning?”
“Meaning your husband didn’t try to get out of his chair. Meaning he was killed by somebody who could get close without making him more nervous than he already was. Meaning it was you who pulled the trigger. One shot. Point blank. You put his prints on the gun and went home, then made sure to be back in the office this morning to pick up the boss’s regular call.”
She could have stopped me there or thrown a fit, tossed off the whole idea as ridiculous or tried pleading for an even break. But it wouldn’t be her style, and she did none of those things; only wrapped her arms around her bare shoulders, touched her glass to her cheek and became intent, as if the conversation fascinated her. “After you talked to Willard this morning, he called me, then called McAlester to tell him to be first at the scene when you telephoned City Police. Willard understands you killed your husband, Mrs. Allynson. That isn’t what bothers him. He’d have ordered it done himself if you hadn’t saved him the trouble. What bothers him is the money he was eased out of by four dead men, and he wants it back. He thinks the money would be the reason you murdered his lawyer.”
How do you ever know what makes a difference? Maybe it was the part about never having worked for Willard. Or that tonight at the Paradise Garden she was staring at a busted flush, ready to take whatever help she could get, even mine. She took a sip from the glass. The tip of her tongue peeked between her lips. “If you can believe it, I never did consider my husband and Estelle. I have you to thank for enlightening me. There were his absences of course, but I didn’t ask any more than he cared to tell. Yet when the police said Estelle was dead, I knew my husband had murdered her as certainly as I knew he’d murdered the others. From that moment I understood I could never be safe. By the time of Estelle’s funeral I’d had days and nights to think about it. I was scared half to death, until I decided no one has the right to terrify you for a lifetime, no matter what you have to do. Now Joe thinks that if I killed my husband it had to be about the money. Isn’t that what you’re thinking too?”
Imagine that. The lights are out. A handsome widow in a tight black dress is pressed so close you can look into her soul and she asks what’s on your mind. The last person who really wanted to know was great-aunt Wilma in Wenatchee. Anybody asking since was just checking on how far ahead of me they were. She had her forehead rested lightly on my shoulder, wearied by all the talk of money and murder. “What I think doesn’t matter. What I know is you’re not here tonight to talk to Willard. You’re here to collect the bag you left at the coat check two nights ago, the one with Charlie Ross’s initials. Leaving it in Willard’s front yard for safekeeping was bright of you. Less bright is thinking he’ll let you walk out of here, with or without it. We ought to start for an exit before the councilor’s law and order party breaks up.”
Her head lifted slowly until her eyes leveled on the knot in my tie. But not to ask what I could possibly mean by the bag with the flight lieutenant’s initials on it. She put a hand flat against my chest and her gaze dipped back in an ocean, then surfaced again, dripping its dark purple lights. “Is there an exit?”
I took her wrist and held it down by her side. “The same way I came in. Take a cab someplace there’s a crowd and be in my office by midnight. I’ll bring Charlie’s bag there. Tomorrow, you can go take a first-class cabin, put a slow boat between you and Willard and rent a palace somewhere in the hot sun. Or did you plan to stay on and discuss your future with him?”
The choice didn’t overburden her. She sank the liquor and handed me the glass with her lips still wet, then turned on her heel toward Willard’s desk. Her back made ripples in the satin like water in moonlight. Her finger hooked under the fur and let it trail. “Joe’s hardly going to be thrilled. And you’re taking an awful risk. Are you so sure I deserve it, or are there conditions attached?”
I set the glasses on the sofa arm and followed to where she stood, lifted the fur and draped it around her shoulders. “No conditions. I don’t have to thrill Joe Willard and I wouldn’t know what you deserve. McAlester says your husband killed himself, the commissioner is dining out tonight on a case closed and I can’t prove either one of them is wrong. Besides, when you murdered your husband you saved somebody else’s life and for all I know it balances out, one life for another. Ask the padre. He understands the bookkeeping.”
She fastened the clasp to the fur wrap and thought about that, found her purse on the chair and opened it and held up her check ticket between two fingertips, as if we were trading for her room key. “If I saved a life, shouldn’t I know whose?”
I reached around her to take the ticket and said probably she should, and how it all went back to a past-his-prime hustler her husband had hired to make a Christmastide trick. The band tailed to silence. Another scatter of applause passed around diners on the terrace, faint as paper tearing. “Jarrett knew the professor’s tastes ran young and didn’t follow his instructions. He sent a boy named Reilly in his place, and Reilly was so green that when the professor got hauled from his car he followed the excitement. He trailed Garfield and his killer to the river, saw the shooting start and took off in the car.” I slipped a hand inside her arm, her dress so sheer I could count the goose bumps. “Your husband didn’t leave loose ends. Sooner or later he was going to find out about Reilly. The boy doesn’t know it, but he owes you his life. We ought to go.”
We left the Paradise Garden the way I went in, its backstairs still deserted and the click of her heels along the passages the only sound, her dress cutting her stride so short she practically ran. We moved fast, went out through the kitchen door to the yard, then followed the service lane through to the other side of the block. Headlights drifted by on the street ahead, across a last twenty yards of frozen wheel ruts guaranteed to break a heel. We halted there, breath hanging on the air, waited while she hitched her gown and held on my arm and took the tire ridges on tiptoe as if we were trying not to wake the neighbors. When I waved down a cab and she climbed inside, she pulled down the window, perplexed. “I suppose I must be crazy thinking I’ll ever see you again. Isn’t this where you kiss the lady goodbye?”
She was looking up from under her butterfly lashes, lip pinched white under her front teeth. I reached in the window, tilted up her chin and ran my thumb across her mouth. “You’re not crazy and it’s not goodbye. Be in my office. Look in the book under Boy Scouts.” I slapped a hand against the side of the cab and watched it move ahead, lost its tail lights in the traffic, then turned back into the lane. The fog was still falling. For the second time in one night I was planning to step into Willard’s office uninvited, starting not to care for the odds.
It was ten o’clock. Littomy and the commissioner and the councilor were through dining. The Paradise Garde
n was beginning to stir. No girls were invited over. No one in the party moved on to the greenroom or the veranda bar. The three men got up from the table and filed to the exit, looking cordial. By the time Willard stepped into his office, their table had been re-laid for a foursome.
Willard put on lights as he entered, closed the door and walked up to the window I was at. He glanced out over the diners with a strained look, flopped on the davenport and loosed the stud behind his bow tie. For greeting he looked at the ceiling and asked, “Why would you be here?” I went over to his desk, poured a fresh drink, brought it back and put it in his hand. He tasted it and eyed the glasses on the arm of the sofa, one lip-red around the rim. “Where is she?”
I shrugged. “Mrs. Allynson? An hour ago I showed her out of here and put her in a cab. The cab went south.”
A cloud passed across Willard’s face. He sank back and gave me the tight look he practiced when he cut himself shaving. His glass lifted to where soft lights made the liquor glow. “She couldn’t just walk out of here. You took some trouble. Why?”
“To get your undivided attention. First to hear how to bring her back tonight, along with the money. Then what I want in return.” I moved in front of the window, where I had his eye. “When McAlester arrived at your lawyer’s office this morning, he saw a counterfeit suicide with enough wrong about it to make the widow his murder suspect. But most of all what he saw was opportunity. Fix the detail, let it go as suicide and he could close down a string of murder inquiries right there and then. Reason enough by itself for cleaning up the evidence. Then again, maybe the corkscrew police work was just a sideshow.”
“Sideshow to what?”
Diners were filling the tables. The band took a pause. Moonlight softened the view on the bay and a shooting star skipped across the heavens. Give it another hour and the Garden would be afloat until dawn. “McAlester finally got it through his head that the City killings were fallout from a fraud gone wrong and every new corpse was steering him closer to the money. This morning in the lawyer’s study he was so close he could smell it, and what he saw didn’t only put Mrs. Allynson in the frame for murder it made her a part of the fraud. Overnight she’d become a seriously rich widow, but only if McAlester played along with her story about her husband’s suicide. Did they talk? You could try asking McAlester. Or do this my way and you’ll know. If the detective inspector threw a loop on her, you can take it he no longer has your best interests at heart.”
The maître d’ arrived at the foursome’s table while a waiter flapped a napkin at the linen. The strong-arm presence around the terrace had evaporated. Willard considered a thumbnail, to denote his lively interest. “What’s in this for you?”
I turned away from the view. “I get to see Terry Reilly.”
His eyes hooded, dazzled by the notion. Then, as if it was my idea of a private joke, “Reilly?”
“Since you had him taken out of circulation, being the last person he was seen with is making me nervous. Show me Reilly still lives and Mrs. Allynson can be in my office tonight with the money. Give me two hours, send McAlester to collect her, have him tailed and let him make his move. If they talked, you’ll know it. If I’m wrong, what can you lose?”
There is a moment the emperor takes deciding to like or not to like while the courtier watches, holds his breath and sees his future drifting by like a boat on a slow stream. Willard twisted the jet ring on his finger and put the tight look back in his eyes, and while he thought it over, I leaned against the wall and asked, “Where’d you first run into her?”
It was to end a silence, not to start him reminiscing. But when he thought about her Willard eased up on the bleak look as if he hadn’t considered the subject in a long time. His jaw softened. He set his glass down on the sofa arm in line with the others. “Vivien?”
Even a racketeer will own to a past when he’s the one telling it. He said Vivien Greer had arrived at the Paradise Garden one night late in 1940, on the arm of a film producer after an air raid all-clear. Nobody at the Garden remembered ever seeing her before. And they would have remembered, because she was all her own work; an ice-cool redhead with looks to stop traffic, a put-down in every nerve and a walk Chamberlain would have jumped the barricades for. She’d drawn a crowd that night around any table she moved to. That much was real enough. The film producer was a blind. Vivien Greer had made an impression in a handful of forgettable British pictures, but that was before a war began. On the night she walked into the Paradise Garden her screen days were over already. By 1940 the scripts had turned to home-front heroines, ration book romance, and a new style in pert that wore uniform and flat heels. Nobody doubted she could set a screen alight. She just wasn’t cut out to play Mrs. Miniver. Willard relaxed into the seatback, musing. “The calls from the studios dried up and she didn’t see herself as an army nurse like her sister.” As if it exhausted the possibilities. “So she stayed around the Garden. The arrangement suited us both.”
“Until the day you noticed Councilor Drake had a daughter.”
Willard eyed me to consider if I was out of order. When he couldn’t make up his mind his tone hardened anyway. “I didn’t hear her complain.”
I nodded and lit a cigarette, dropped the match in the lipstick glass and watched it gutter. “Sure you didn’t. You made a new arrangement and had her marry your lawyer. What suited her this time was the home on Lincoln’s Inn Fields, a wardrobe out of MGM and the highlife no regular lawyer could afford. You gave it to her because Allynson knew so much about your operations you needed him watched from the inside. And since it was no affair of the heart, she made it expensive. What did she ever give you that wasn’t?”
Willard got up off the davenport, the glow gone from his reminiscing. He crossed to the desk and leaned his knuckles on the edge. “Two hours. McAlester will be in your office, alone but not alone. Mess this up, Newman, and your credit won’t buy spit to shine your shoes.” He used a buzzer to call the nursemaid forever on hand. I dropped my cigarette in the glass alongside the dead match, the air so full of mutual understanding there was nothing else to taste.
We didn’t leave the building. From Willard’s office there were unfamiliar stairs, a walk along a gaudy corridor spilling glaze-eyed girls and their clients and a heady mix of colognes, and then more stairs to a passage in an attic story closed to the paying customer. It ran ahead in the dim-lit pitch of the roof with small pent rooms on either side, dank and unlit, until we halted outside a wide-open door bleeding yellow across the bare wood floor of the passage. Inside there was a cot pushed up against a wall in a corner, and stretched out on the cot a gaunt figure wrapped in the greatcoat he never left off, gazing blank at a skylight in the pitch of the roof. The rest of the room amounted to an unshaded light, looped over a card table on a threadbare rug, and a second figure seated at the table, playing out a solitaire with an electric heater angled at his knees. The figure was suited tonight, slicked and close shaved, with the look of a man who thought keeping watch over Reilly was work beneath his grade.
Voigt glanced up at where I stood in the doorway, did a double-take and let fall the deck of cards. He kicked the chair back hard, moved fast to one side of the table, then noticed I had company. The chair bounced off the wall and spun around. My escort snorted and jerked his head for Voigt to leave. Voigt looked sheepish, trawled for a cigarette and clamped it in his teeth, then found the swagger to stroll up to the doorway, close enough to rub noses while the tuxedo looked on. He snapped a match alight on the wall behind my ear, hooked the cigarette up between his eyebrows, lit it and filled his lungs. The trick tickled him. Probably it always tickled him. Then he snuffed the match, patted me lightly on the jaw and moved off along the passage in a gurgle of good humor. I heeled shut the door behind him and went over to the cot. Reilly hadn’t taken his eyes off the skylight.
If Terry Reilly owed one of his lives to Mrs. Allynson, he owed at least one more of them
to Willard. Since the first time they met in the Raglan Christmas Day, Reilly had been riding his luck. His history with Jarrett made him a risk from the start. Ignoring a direct order to stay where Willard told him made him look halfway between unpredictable and insane. Yet somehow Reilly’s luck had held, and now a dead lawyer was framed for four murders and the boy was past being a threat. So he still lived, and in one Christmastime had used up more lives than anybody ought to rely on. When Voigt hauled him out of the Pelican his only trouble would have been keeping the boy vertical. Then and now, Reilly looked like death: so sick-yellow around the eyes he glowed in the dark, so still on the cot you doubted he knew or cared where Voigt had brought him. But it wouldn’t be his whereabouts that were laying him low. What currently sapped the boy’s vitality was an unplanned reacquaintance with the ache of being junk-free and cold sober, both at the same time. For the rest, so far as I could tell, he was in one piece.
I dragged the chair where he could see me, leaned close where he could hear and said I had one question for him only, and not a lot of time. His gaze pulled off the ceiling and gave me the baleful look that comes with being three days on the wagon. It had been one whole week since Reilly waltzed Michael Garfield into the docklands and became accidental witness to a murder. And saw what exactly, more than a gun pointed in the shadows, a silhouette behind a tipped-down hat and the turned-up collar of a coat? Take away the gun, and on that night, at that hour, what Reilly had described would fit any adult male still outdoors. Yet hours later when he saw the nurse walk into Cloth Court, he could identify the figure walking with her as Michael Garfield’s killer. So sure of it he took off and ran till dawn came up. That had been Reilly’s story in the Pelican. I leaned closer, where he could read my lips across a yard of gauze that was separating him from all thought, feeling, light and color. “Here’s the question Terry. The night Garfield died you were so far inside the bottle Jarrett had to go dump the roadster himself. And still, from an upstairs window on a dark court in the middle of a snowstorm you recognized a murderer whose face you never saw. Tell me how you did that.”