The Second Reginald Bretnor Megapack

by Reginald Bretnor

  “Very,” Timuroff said softly. “Tell me, my friend, can you describe this small policeman?”

  “His face was very red, with a thin nose, and a mouth like this—” Suddenly, Kielty’s expression was mirrored on Florencio’s countenance. “I had seen him upstairs, giving many orders.”

  “So that’s how the land lies!” murmured Timuroff. “Listen, if anyone asks why you came here to see me—and they may—it was at my request, about a party to be given by my friend Madame Cantelou and myself, a party where the food must be the finest, like that served at the Presidential Palace in Manila.”

  Florencio grinned. “I understand. I hope you speak of a real party, senor. There is no cook, even in Manila, like my Carmencita.”

  Timuroff smiled back. “We will celebrate as in the days after the liberation.”

  “Bueno! The truth is always easier to tell.” Florencio rose. He drained his glass to Timuroff. “Let us hope that Inspector Cominazzo will catch the murderers.”

  “He will thank you,” answered Timuroff. “Now we can only wait and see if Mr. Kielty reports the finding of the key—which will prove most instructive.”

  He sent them off after one more exchange of compliments, and actually managed to get his letter to the major well under way before Liselotte and Olivia arrived parcelladen.

  “I didn’t mean to be so late,” Olivia said. “That is, I hope things didn’t get too rough for you…or, or anything.”

  “Nonsense!” declared Liselotte. “He has been drinking with his customers. Here in the cool shop, while we were trudging the hot streets.”

  “One of the great advantages of the seventeenth century—not the eighteenth, my dear—is that old-fashioned courtesy compels one to drink with all one’s visitors, except perhaps the more hostile members of the police department. I have had an interesting and quite profitable afternoon. I sold a Spanish rapier to Judson Hemmet and an expensive push-dagger to Miranda Gardner.”

  “That woman gives me the creeps.” Olivia shuddered.

  “If Timmy were a gentleman,” said Liselotte, “he would go immediately and mix for each of us a small restorative.” Timuroff growled something about women who boozed in bars all afternoon and then demanded more alcoholic stimulants. “Hogarth would have been interested,” he told them. “It would have given him another horrible picture for his Gin Alley sequence.”

  “He was in the eighteenth century, not the seventeenth,” pointed out Liselotte. “So you must make the drinks for us at once. We have time for at least one or two before Pete arrives.”

  Olivia, reminded of three dry Manhattans and of work left undone, blushed guiltily and began to stammer that, really, she didn’t need anoth—

  The phone rang shrilly. Mechanically, she answered it. “A. A. Timuroff.… A message for him? Yes, of course.” For a few seconds, the phone made subdued noises. “I…see.” Suddenly her voice was practically inaudible. “Th-thank you. I… I’ll tell him.”

  She hung up. She turned around. Her blush had drained away. “That…was the…answering service, Tim. There was a call for you. He…he wouldn’t state his business, but—” Her voice broke. “He said he’d…call again. He…left his name.”

  “What was it?” asked Timuroff.

  Carefully she leaned against the desk. “Van Zaam,” she said.

  Instantly, Timuroff was at her side. “Take it easy. Somebody’s doing his level best to scare us, but it’s not van Zaam. Believe me, van Zaam’s not phoning anyone. Anyhow, I don’t think whoever made that call is dangerous. Dangerous people don’t waste their time on fun and games. They strike and vanish. This fellow sounds to me as if he may be running scared himself.”

  “It sounds to me,” Olivia answered, a shadow of her smile returning, “as if my boss is whistling in the dark.” Turning toward the bar, Timuroff winked at her.

  CHAPTER VII

  Deaf Heaven

  Twenty minutes later—when Olivia, despite Timuroffs reassurances, was beginning to get anxious—Pete phoned to say he was delayed, as usual, and where were they going to have dinner?

  “How much longer will he be?” asked Liselotte. “Perhaps it would be better to call the Jade Pavilion, for a good Chinese dinner to be sent up to the apartment. You will be my guests.”

  Timuroff nodded. “Good, then he won’t have to waste time waiting around a restaurant.”

  Olivia passed the word along, and told her husband—but without conviction—that there’d be no going back to work for him that night if she could help it. She sighed. “He says if you don’t mind waiting he’ll have a squad car drop him here. Then you and he can come on over. He means he wants to talk without us girls.”

  “Yes,” said Liselotte, picking up purse and parcels, “we know when we are not wanted. Olivia and I will go away and prepare the dinner. Come, Olivia.”

  “Don’t think it’s not appreciated,” replied Timuroff. “The thought of you two slaving over a hot martini is downright inspiring.”

  They left, and he settled down to scan the paper Olivia had brought with her and to wait for Pete. The front page glared at him gruesomely with the news of van Zaam’s death, and offered a last-minute boxed editorial suggesting that, in view of van Zaam’s reputation, the Federal Bureau of Investigation drop all other activities to expose the sinister political and economic forces which—doubtless with the connivance of the political party the paper was not supporting at the moment—had driven the great and good Errol Vasquez Munrooney to his martyrdom.

  Timuroff read it and clapped his hands politely; and at that point Pete arrived, so far ahead of time that, for a moment, he suspected him of having waited out of sight just long enough to make sure the girls had gone. However, his friend looked too preoccupied to have authored even this small duplicity.

  “You look very down in the mouth,” said Timuroff sympathetically, pouring cognac for him.

  “I am down in the mouth,” Pete answered.

  “‘When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

  I all alone beweep my outcast state,

  And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries.

  And look upon myself, and curse my fate…

  “And don’t look at me like I was your first talking horse. Haven’t you ever heard a homicide inspector quote Shakespeare before?”

  “Usually,” said Timuroff, “you quote Hamlet or Julius Caesar or one of the Henrys. It must be something really distressing to make you quote the sonnets. However, don’t forget that you are still ‘with friends possessed.’”

  “I haven’t. That’s why I’m here unloading on you.” Pete put his untouched glass down on the desk. “Look, I get almost no men assigned to me, when—hell!—I ought to have the whole detective bureau. And Chiefy not only puts the pressure on—the dumb bastard’s phoned me twenty times today—but he gives Tom Kielty some kind of hunting license to run his own investigation. Everybody from Doc Grimwood and that phony admiral—Melmoth, isn’t it?—to that creep who buggers beasties and calls himself a poet has been calling in to howl about his pushing them around. Honest to God, if that son of a bitch ever takes his hat off he’ll get run in for indecent exposure!”

  “He called on me,” said Timuroff, “and went away without buying anything.” He gave Pete a blow-by-blow account of Kielty’s invasion and retreat “If I’d had the sense God gave a gray goose, I’d have turned the tape on and got it all.”

  “It’s a damn shame you didn’t. We’d have had a piece of first-class evidence.” Pete picked his glass up, drained half of it, remembered it was cognac, looked ashamed of himself. “Tim, this case looked wild enough last night, but it’s a lot worse than that. Chiefy isn’t acting as if he wants it solved—he acts like he wants the whole mess pushed out of sight before anyone can get a good close look at it. Kielty’s leaning hard on Ha
nson, Grimwood’s man. He’s trying to pin the murder of van Zaam on him, I think, and maybe he’ll succeed. Hanson’s naval disability was a Section Eight job, and he has a couple of arrests on the record way back when for beating up on characters—drunk and disorderly, unprovoked assault, that sort of thing. And one time he skipped bail, which makes it worse.”

  “Do you think they’ll actually arrest him?” Timuroff asked, thinking of what Amos Ledenthal had said.

  Pete’s face was gloomier than ever. “They’ll do whatever the people who pull Chiefy’s strings decide they want. You know, Tim, lately the Department’s been pretty clean, at least until the sovereign people elected Lover Boy. If this gang gets in solidly, we’ll really hit the skids.” He groaned. “I wish you could’ve gotten Kielty’s performance down on tape—that threat especially.”

  Timuroff smiled ruefully. “I’m afraid I’m learning rather slowly, Pete. I didn’t even tape the Tim, Judson, and Miranda Show, or Fifteen Minutes with Amos Ledenthal. But I did get A Candid Interview with Mr. and Mrs. Florencio Pambid. Solid entertainment. No commercials—not even my own. You can check it when you get a chance.”

  “How about filling me in right now? Just the high spots.”

  “Well, I guess the ladies will give us a few minutes.” Pete was a good listener. He interjected comments a few times, and asked two or three questions: when Timuroff reported Kielty’s finding of the key, and when he repeated what Ledenthal had told him.

  Finally, when Timuroff had finished, he said, “That’s very interesting; Kielty especially. We’ll talk about him later. As for Ledenthal’s notion about Hemmet and Miranda, forget it. Okay, they acted pretty strangely when they came to see you, and I agree with him about the kind of slugs they are, but otherwise he’s flipped.”

  “I wonder,” Timuroff said slowly. “Amos seems to have been right about their trying to sweep the whole thing out of sight, and he does know them pretty well.”

  “No way,” Pete said emphatically. “With Munrooney they stood to make I can’t even guess how many millions out of that Master Plan.”

  “And without Munrooney?”

  “Without Munrooney, even if they clear the case before election day and get their own man in—Baltesar probably—they won’t have half the chance. Could that be why we’re now without Munrooney?”

  Timuroff stroked the scar under his cheekbone. “Well, when the press gets around to it, I suppose they’ll scream that whoever dunnit, dunnit to keep the poor from getting better parks. But that won’t wash. Anybody against that sort of looting would be too sane to go around murdering. That’s certainly not it. Now, how about you? Did you pick up any leads?”

  “Maybe, maybe no. That weirdo poet—his name’s Elia Stitchgrove, by the way—said one thing when he called that stuck with me in spite of what he is. After he’d sung his song about Kielty and his rights and police brutality, he hinted maybe he’d picked up something so important it scared him. I told him to come in and we’d be good as gold, but he said no, he didn’t trust us enough to come into our lair, but if I was polite, I could go up there to his ashram or whatever. He’s got a place this side of St. Helena, where he’s started up some kind of cult. He calls it Kaula—K-a-u-l-a—and he’d be happy to instruct me. I didn’t argue with the guy. I didn’t even say that we could pull him in for questioning; he sounded scared enough already. Maybe I’ll take a run up there, just in case. Unless, of course, they get the whole case buried before I get a chance.”

  Timuroff frowned. “The Kaulas are a real sect in India, about as nasty as they come. Well, nowadays the worse you are, the easier it seems to be to attract followers. You mix it in with drugs and peace talk and communal living, and kids fall for it.”

  Pete shook his head. “It’s almost enough to drive a poor simple cop to drink. What would Will Shakespeare have thought of a so-called poet none of whose stuff scans or rhymes, and most of which sounds like the chorus lines from ‘Old McDonald Had a Farm’? He got kicked out of the Audubon Society for molesting a young turkey—I’m not kidding! And would you believe his cult’s getting to be real big around U.C.?”

  “A few years ago, I wouldn’t have believed it—but then I wouldn’t have believed there’d be wide-open pony shows in North Beach either.”

  The telephone summoned him peremptorily. Liselotte was offended; she was shocked to find her Timmy full of anti-Chinese prejudice; if he could be so bigoted about his food, how would he feel about his Liselotte, who was mostly Austrian, but also part Hungarian, part Italian, and part Gypsy, with perhaps some French from the Napoleonic wars?

  Timuroff made soft, cooing sounds, and promised that he and Pete would come without delay.

  Pete was already standing when he hung up. “The dinner bell?” he said.

  Timuroff was pleased to see that he was grinning. “I’m glad it cheered you up,” he answered. “Or did you just enjoy seeing a seventeenth-century man put down by an every-century woman?”

  “Believe me, Tim, I know what you mean. But it wasn’t that. It’s just that all day nothing’s clicked, and now all of a sudden a few bits of information—like Kielty tampering with the evidence—look as if they might fit together somewhere.”

  Timuroff started on his routine of locking up. “I hope you’re right, Pete. At least, I’m beginning to see some glimmerings of a picture. Do you remember what I said this morning about our little friend Lucrece almost certainly not stabbing Lover Boy? Well, has it struck you that, except for one small thing—the khanjar—it wasn’t a bad plan at all. If the weapon had been an ice pick like the one that killed van Zaam—or better yet a sharp and narrow knife from Mrs. Hanson’s kitchen—the whole thing might’ve held together and they could have charged Heck directly with the murder, though I think Jake would have seen through the Lucrece bit—in which case they’d have been after Hanson, just as Kielty is now. Anyhow, I think we can assume that their plan was sound—the setting, the confusion, everything was for them. Then the khanjar queered it. Ergo, we can assume that someone brought the khanjar in expressly for that purpose. Therefore we ought to see some more fireworks before too long.”

  “Just what we need,” said Pete.

  “Have your lab men come up with anything?”

  “They hadn’t when I left, but Jake’s working overtime. He said to call him; I guess I’d better, just in case.”

  While Pete made the call, Timuroff went about his business, putting a few precious pieces into the safe, locking the cases, setting his alarms. Pete’s end of the conversation was monosyllabic and uninformative, and he had almost resigned himself to more bootless cries when its tenor changed. “Hey, no kidding?” Pete exclaimed. “Well, I’ll be—!” There was another extended silence. “So that’s the way it was! Okay.… And you say Kielty knows about it?… Yeah, let me know. I’ll be at Tim’s for dinner—you have the number. Thanks, Jake. Thanks a lot.”

  He hung up and turned around. “Well, you were right,” he said. “Lucrece is cleared. Jake says they found a little piece of skin tissue, like perhaps a hangnail, and just a touch of fingerprint. The skin was on the dagger’s handle, where a sharp little piece of gold has been bent out. The print, almost wiped away, was on the door into the secret passage. Neither, Jake says, would’ve been any use to chase anybody down with, but they fit what we’ve got. Munrooney was murdered by van Zaam.”

  Timuroff showed no astonishment. “That’s very interesting, but when you say van Zaam you’re saying what, not whom. He was a useful tool, just like the khanjar; somebody wielded him just as he wielded it. To that extent, we’re still where we started.”

  “Kielty doesn’t think so. Jake couldn’t say much on the phone, but from what he hinted things are going to start happening almost anytime. That’s right in line with what I told you about Chiefy’s great big hurry.”

  Timuroff made sure the door w
as locked. “We’d best get on to dinner before Lise decides to poison me. Besides, I’ve invited Hector Grimwood and his Penny Anne to drop in afterwards.”

  “I’m afraid you’re going to have to cancel that one, Tim. I couldn’t get out there this afternoon, and I promised him for sure I’d try and find out who turned on Muriel Fawzi. Anyhow, I really should be there just in case Kielty tries to pull a fast one.”

  Timuroff pushed the button for the elevator. “Grimwood won’t mind a raincheck, but Lise will be disappointed.

  And suppose Kielty does pull a fast one, with Chiefy’s backing—where would that put you?”

  “Right back in the deaf heaven-bootless-cries department,” Pete answered.

  CHAPTER VIII

  Up in Muriel’s Room

  Long ago, Liselotte Cantelou had learned how to dominate an audience; and what she had accomplished at the Met and Covent Garden and the Staatsoper, she of course managed easily enough at her own table. Murder was not allowed to show its ugly head; and Timuroff and Pete, after a few ineffectual sallies, let her have her way. Liselotte, the cuisine of Szechuan Province, wine and the opera, and the possible love lives of Lucrece, Muriel Fawzi, and Evangeline dominated the conversation; and Timuroff admitted to himself that probably, because of it, a better time was had by all. However, he could see that Pete wasn’t really with it, and when dessert was interrupted by an agitated phone call from Dr. Grimwood, to his own surprise he was glad the play was over. He listened to the doctor’s disjointed recital, asked one or two pointed questions, and promised that he and the inspector would be there immediately.

  “Now what’s happened?” Pete asked.

  “Judson Hemmet just turned up at his front door to tell him that Kielty’s on his way out there to make a pinch. He, Lawyer Hemmet, wants to do all he can to help his old friend Dr. Grimwood. He feels that Hector’s bound to be dragged into it.”