Knife at My Back
Page 13
“The little peeper,” he said. “God’s gift to the girls is back with us again.”
“Still the big fat comic, Jorgenson?” I asked.
“Not me—you. You didn’t think you could waltz out of here, did you?”
“Why not?”
“Didn’t you know? A man’s been murdered, Conacher.”
I laughed. “Are you sure? Wasn’t he a suicide, too? Like Mrs. Lasker?”
“Clever talk,” Jorgenson snapped. “We happen to know that you were the last person to see Repp alive, peeper. One of your girlfriends let her hair down for me. Darlene. Remember?”
“An honest girl. Did she let anything else down for you, handsome?”
“Please, Steve,” Paul said, stepping forward to show me his pallid concern. “Let’s not have another brawl. Jorgenson only wanted you back so you could help us. Is it true that you were with Repp? Darlene says you and he weren’t getting along too well when she left you.”
“Darlene has a memory like a trap. What else did she remember?”
“Just that you and Repp were alone,” Paul said. “Now be a good guy and tell us what happened, will you?”
“Be glad to, Paul. Repp was talking to me when somebody took a shot at him through the window. Whoever did the job was under the trees at the edge of the golf course, close enough so that he couldn’t miss if he tried. When Repp caved in, I ran down to the course and looked around. I didn’t find anybody—or anything. Then I figured I’d better get me some fresh air, because I don’t like to look at blood, even rat’s blood.”
“So Repp was a rat, eh?” Jorgenson smirked my way, showing me that he was adept at the catch-as-catch-can school of deduction practiced by every leading man detective in the cornball television operas. He adjusted his face to register coy suspicion. He leered and sneered. Then, having satisfied himself that his histrionics suited him for a big part in a B picture, he lapsed into a thoughtful silence. After which, he said, “How well did you know him, Conacher?”
“Look,” I laughed. “Why don’t you cut out the smart patter and get down to business, Jorgenson? I didn’t know Repp at all. But I’ve heard of him. Does that make me unique? Everybody in the theatrical belt knew the slob. Repp was quite famous, in an infamous sort of way.”
“Any of his friends up here?”
“Repp didn’t have friends,” I said. “Only in business,” I added. “Repp knew more about the fine and applied art of staging sex shows than any man on earth. He was the leading distributor of stag reels in this country. And the last I heard, he might have gone into production on some originals.”
I was watching Paul Forstenburg, mostly because he suddenly blossomed into prominence as the center of interest in our little scene. He blanched and gulped in an exaggerated reaction to my simple few lines about Repp. What was bothering him? His fingers were all out of kilter as he tried to cover up with the mechanics of lighting a cigarette.
“Originals?” he asked.
“So they say, Paul. I understand he had a team of cameras—operating out of the country.” I let the thought skim into Paul Forstenburg’s intellect. Then I added: “In Cuba.”
“Havana?” Paul asked.
“Where else?”
“I’ve heard about the racket.” He was making a ponderous effort to get over the hump of his emotional upheaval. Part of his discomfort seemed to vanish as he rallied himself with dialogue. “Funny thing, the first time I ever saw one of those horrible films was at Mr. Lasker’s house, Steve. Big surprise to me. I never knew they existed.”
“Big business,” said Jorgenson breezily, faking it now, aware that he had stepped into something far too deep for his rustic experience. “But I still don’t see why a heel like Repp should be murdered up here.”
“Did you examine his suitcase?” I asked.
“Of course I did.”
“Nothing unusual in it?”
“What did you expect me to find, Conacher? A naked dame?”
I let it pass. Somebody had gone up to Repp’s room after I left. And somebody had lifted over twenty-five grand in good green bills.
“Stuff your wisecracks, Jorgenson,” I said. “And you know where. I was thinking maybe Repp had something useful with him. An address book, maybe?”
Jorgenson laughed in his teeth. “Nuts. We didn’t find a thing—nothing but some fancy shirts and pants. This guy Repp was really a dude. Must have paid plenty of money for them shirts.”
“How long ago did you find Repp?” I asked.
He consulted his watch and studied it carefully before he spoke. “About an hour, Conacher.”
Jorgenson had the manner and mood of a persnickety horse trader. He was telling me the truth about the time he discovered the body of Repp, because it checked perfectly with my own calculations. But was he telling me enough? In the brightly lit chambers of my imagination, I saw the big dick alerted down here by somebody who heard the shot. After that, he might have raced across the garden and entered Repp’s room all alone. And what then? Would Jorgenson report a cache of greenbacks to anybody? It would be possible for him to stuff the loot away and play it dumb, waiting for somebody to challenge him. And now that I had tipped him off about Repp’s reputation as a solitary man, would Jorgenson ever admit having rifled the suitcase? His demeanor had changed recently. He seemed salved and soothed. His unusual calmness and good humor worked to convince me that the larded crud might have pilfered the big bundle and was now lying back and playing potsy with me, content to have me discuss the case while he rubbed himself with the prospect of going home with Repp’s money. And this last idea irritated me.
So that I was forced to goad him.
“Who reported it, Jorgenson?”
“One of the guests heard the shot and phoned.”
“Which guest?”
“You know her name, Paul,” Jorgenson said.
“A Mrs. Fulbright, Steve.”
“She phoned you, Paul?” I asked.
“She phoned the switchboard girl. She was hysterical because the sound of the shot almost blew her into the lake. She phoned from The Elms. She ran inside after that, into the main lobby. By that time, the call had been routed through to me and I went and got Jorgenson.”
“You went where?”
“Here, of course,” Jorgenson said. “Where’d you think I’d be, Conacher? Swimming in the lake?”
“You went into Repp’s room alone, Jorgenson?”
“I had to. Paul was too busy with, that Fulbright woman.”
“That’s right,” Paul said. “I got the nurse for her. She was out of her mind.”
“Did she see anybody out near the golf course?”
“She was too scared to notice.”
I shook my head sadly at the bad news. “Too bad. This one is going to stink up The Montord publicity, Paul. How are you going to handle it?”
“Handle it?” Paul rasped desperately. “We’ve got to wrap it up, Steve. Right away. We’ve got to get to work on it right now and stay with it, even if it means no sleep tonight. Schenk will blow his top if this thing ever breaks into print as a whodunit. It’ll cost me my job.”
“Take it easy,” Jorgenson said. “We haven’t given up yet, Paul.”
“You haven’t even started,” I said. Jorgenson shifted uneasily in his chair as I sat down on the edge of the desk. “The deal stinks from the ground up, Paul, all the way from the very beginning. You’ll have to dig deep to get into this, because you’re starting from left field. What have you got? A man is butchered and you draw a blank on him. Repp was always an unknown quantity, even in his business affairs. He operated from a small office under the lining of his hat. He had no friends and no enemies. You’ve got fifteen hundred guests in this hotel and you’d have to sift and classify every one of them to find out who might know a crud like Hugo Repp. Even the i
nnocent ones wouldn’t admit it, because of Repp’s unsavory character and reputation. He was a dealer in perversion. He was a bad apple, as they say in the Western movies.”
“We know one person who’s had business dealings with him, Steve,” Paul said.
“You mean H. M. Lasker?”
“That’s right. Do you think it means anything?”
“Why don’t you ask Lasker?”
“I remembered he was your client, Steve. I thought that you—”
“Nuts!” said Jorgenson, irritated beyond his blood pressure. “I’ll talk to Lasker, Paul. We don’t need Conacher.”
He was showing me his normal noxiousness now and I liked him better that way. It would do no good to have this thick crumb playing games with me on this one, not when I suspected him of plain and fancy larceny. So I let him rant and rave for a while, watching the sickly pale face of Paul Forstenburg as he listened to the mumbo-jumbo of Jorgenson’s double-talk. He ran out of words after a while. He exhausted his supply of snide comments about the New York contingent of private investigators. And when he sat down, finally, I rallied to my purpose.
“Who was the first person to walk into Repp’s room, after me?” I asked Paul.
“Jorgenson,” Paul said.
“Interesting. Are you sure, Jorgenson?”
“Clever, clever, clever,” Jorgenson wheezed, fighting to hold back the explosion behind his tongue. “How in hell should I know if I was first after you? What difference does it make?”
“It could mean something.”
“Why?”
“I’d like to think you weren’t first in after me,” I said. “I’d like to give you the benefit of the doubt.”
“What doubt?” Jorgenson stiffened, swinging around in the swivel chair with a sudden jerk. “What does that crack mean, Conacher?”
“Watch your corpuscles. You went right up to the room?”
“As soon as I got the news.”
“But that was maybe ten or fifteen minutes after the shot was fired?”
“So what?”
I said, “Plenty, Jorgenson. It could be that somebody went into Repp’s room for something valuable, between the time I left and the time you arrived.”
Was he eating it? Was it going down neatly? I waited for him to let it sink in under the hard core of his balding dome. It filtered slowly into his intellect. He was as fouled up as a salad dressing in a Mixmaster. He looked to Paul for some way out of the confusion, but the quick, exchange didn’t tell me. His dead fish eyes sparked and snapped with excitement. It was time to lay it on the line.
“But you found nothing valuable there,” I said. “Nothing of any importance?”
“What was I supposed to find?” Jorgenson asked.
“Money.”
“What kind of money?”
“Money in a big bundle, Jorgenson.”
“In his wallet?”
“Too much loot for a wallet,” I said. “It was a wad, Jorgenson. It was a bale of greenbacks, a stack of them, a pile of them. It was dream money, so much that he had to stuff it away in his suitcase. Somebody waltzed in there and opened that suitcase and pocketed the wad. The way I add it up, there was about twenty-five grand.”
Jorgenson whistled a short and tuneless song between his teeth. Again, in the electric instant of his surprise, he exchanged half of his befuddlement with Paul, who only paled three shades closer to pea-green and began to chew small pieces of his lower lip.
“You saw the dough?” Jorgenson asked.
“I held it in my lily-white hands.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Jorgenson said, on his feet now, slapping his fat fist in his palm and beginning to pace the small room. He paused when his bumbling mind picked up the weight of my insinuation. He came my way and glared at me. “And you thought I went in there and took the dough? Is that it, Conacher?”
“That,” I said, “is about the size of it.”
“I ought to slap your dirty tongue down your mouth!” he raged, making a quick grab for me.
But Paul Forstenburg leaped into action now, a sudden and strange display of muscle and movement for the skinny manager. He put his lean frame between us and pushed back at Jorgenson, hard enough to hold him where he stood.
“To hell with that stuff, Jorgenson,” he shouted. “Never mind the fancy temper. We haven’t got time for it now. The Montord wants this thing cleared up, and it’s my job to keep the wheels moving. You’re not going to get anywhere by fighting Conacher. Answer his question.”
“Are you serious?” Jorgenson rasped.
“Answer his question,” Paul said again.
“And make it snappy,” I added. “I haven’t got all night.”
Jorgenson sucked in enough breath to tide him over the emergency. He eyed us both and shook his big head at us. Then he said, “Of course not, Paul. Jesus, even if I wanted to grab that kind of dough. I’d have to be a halfwit to take the chance. When I opened that suitcase, all I found was shirts and underwear, like I told you.”
Paul said, “That’s better. Now then, Steve, what’s the next move?”
“You’re asking me to help you?”
“It’ll be worth a good fee if you can.”
“Fee, shmee,” I said. “I’ve got a couple of crazy ideas, Paul. It could be that Repp’s murder is tied in with Mrs. Lasker’s suicide. If that’s true, I’ll feel good when I make the locate on the crumb who killed them both. But you’ve got to help me.”
“Anything you say, Steve.”
“The woman who heard the shot,” I said. “Does she know Repp was killed?”
“All she knows is that a shot was fired.”
“Keep it that way. Hold everybody in the hotel.”
“That won’t be easy.”
“Jorgenson will have to issue an order,” I said.
Jorgenson slumped back into his chair, a tired and beaten man. The sting was out of him and he eyed me with the sick and surly distaste of an angry dog, quiet now, but ready to snap and snarl and bite on cue. He jerked out a handkerchief and began a slow and thorough massage of his beefy neck, showing me his distress as he wiped away the steaming fruits of his suppressed rage. His lips moved in a whispered flood of obscenities, but I didn’t hang around to catch them and play the scene his way. I allowed Paul to elbow me to the door.
“Thanks,” Paul said with a weak smile. “And good luck, Steve.”
CHAPTER 14
At three in the morning, a big country hotel heaves its last long sigh of ennui, and fidgets and squirms in the final restless moments before falling asleep. Out on the lawn, in the hush and quiet of the deep night, the last few vagrant revelers hesitated under the trees before bidding good night to their partners in sport. Over near the golf course, the sound of a girl’s laughter rose above the insect noises, a happy gurgle, followed by a masculine grunt. Along the pebbled paths, an assortment of amorous couples wandered willy-nilly toward the softer comfort of their mattresses. The second night of the Labor Day weekend was taking its last hectic twitch before passing into the realm of memory. The Montord would soon be fast asleep and dreaming of tomorrow. And that was why I made haste in the direction of Mr. H. M. Lasker’s room.
He responded to my knock immediately. Lasker was wide awake, but he wasn’t enjoying it. His old eyes were bagged and wrinkled and on the damp and dewy side. He had been weeping recently, but he managed a smile when he recognized me and welcomed me to his room.
“You’re up late,” I said.
“Sleep isn’t easy for me,” Lasker said quietly. “When you reach my age, Conacher, you don’t need it much. But tonight, who can sleep? I keep thinking of Grace, and it hurts.”
“Mind talking about her?”
“Can’t it wait for the morning?”
“I’m afraid not, Mr. Lasker.”
“You first,” I said. “Where have you been the past few hours?”
“I?” he asked himself. “In my room, of course.”
“Alone?”
“Naturally. Why do you ask?” A flutter of suppressed amusement tried to break through his sallow face. But it died. Instead, he lifted his eyebrows and observed me with the sadness that he could not shake away. “This is no time for me to be with people, Conacher.”
“Of course not,” I said. “And please forgive me for sticking my nose in here, Mr. Lasker. But that’s part of my job. I’m doing a little research in my spare moments. It’s all tied up with your wife. That’s why I’m here, to fit the pieces together. I’ve got a lead and it keeps hammering me in the head. It’s all mixed up with a man named Hugo Repp. Know him?”
“Not intimately,” said Lasker. “Repp is the man who sold me some of my stag films.”
“When did he make his last sale?”
“Let me think back,” said Lasker, closing his eyes on the memory of Repp for a moment. “Three months ago.”
“You remember the film?”
“How could I forget it? It was one of my best ones.”
“Was it the reel you sold to Don Trask?”
“Oh, no,” said Lasker. “Trask bought one of the Cuban reels. I remember it well. He told me he was giving a party and needed one good reel. I sold it to him for the price I paid.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Tell you?” He looked at me thoughtfully, the wrinkles crawling up his forehead as though etched by a fine hand. Amusement tried again to gain control of his face, and this time he couldn’t quite bury it. He laughed a bit and said, “You mean the plot, for goodness sake? To me they were all ridiculous, of course.”