I drew an armchair covered with gray tapestry nearer to the table and sat in it. “No more wit. That’s a promise. When did you get in?”
He stared thoughtfully at me. “What makes that your business? And let me tell you something else. I resent the way you pushed in on the Griswolds tonight, forcing me into introducing you to prevent a scene. You and I have nothing for each other, Pine. I made the mistake of trying to help a friend by seeing you. That’s as far as it goes. From now on keep the hell away from me and from the people I know. I mean it.”
“Does that include Bonnie Field?”
His face went slowly blank. “So you know about her.” He cleared his throat. “I know many people, including Steve O’Flynn and his wife. Why bring her into it?"
“Why not? Isn’t she the friend you were trying to help?”
He let the question sink in, trying to decide the best way to answer it. “You mean Grace Rehak?” he said carefully.
“There’s reason to think so,” I said. “When you came to my office yesterday and tried to learn what my interest was in Grace Rehak, you arrived in her car and it picked you up afterward. Bonnie O’Flynn was at the wheel both times. She fits the description I have of Grace Rehak. Bonnie is married to a successful gambler and night-club owner—a man who might kick her out if he learned she was a former bawdyhouse inmate. You see how it adds up, Mr. Whitney?”
Muscles crawled along the slope of his jaw and the sharp edges of his mouth came together. He crossed abruptly to the couch and dropped onto it. A hand came up and drew the already drawn folds of brocaded silk closer about his neck.
“Actually,” he said, selecting his words like a housewife squeezing the tomatoes at the corner market, “it adds up to very little. Let’s say I happened to have lunch with Mrs. O’Flynn yesterday and casually mentioned I had a call to make on Jackson Boulevard. Since she was driving, what could be more natural than for her to drop me off at your office and pick me up there later?”
“Uh-hunh. And that’s what happened?”
He shrugged. “And that’s what happened.”
“The two of you spend the rest of the afternoon together?”
“Why . . . no. She drove me directly home. Here.”
“Did she come up for a while?”
His chin jerked up. “See here, are you hinting—?
“No hints,” I said. “We’re both men of the world. Did she or didn’t she?”
“She did not! Both the O’Flynn’s happen to be my very good—”
”It’s okay,” I said wearily. “I believe you. For my money she was as queer as a square bowling ball. A man was something to pay the bills but useless other than that.”
He had flushed clear to the eyebrows. “Queer? Not—?”
“Yeah. Lesbo queer. There are such people. At one time she was mixed up with a crowd of them. Mary Conrad, Ellen Purcell, Laura Fremont. Even Grace Rehak—only I don’t think she was one of them in that respect. Not a girl in her former line of work.”
His face was still red. “You’ve got a nasty mind!” he said almost primly.
“Hunh-uh. I just come up against some nasty people. And not from choice.” I straightened out my legs and stared at the brown leather of my shoes, resting my eyes. The ache in my head pulsed in tempo with my heart.
When I glanced up again he was lighting a cigarette with a dull silver table lighter from an angular end table alongside the couch. His hand was shaking a little.
“Anyway,” I said, “she let you out in front of the Barryshire and you came up and called Grace Rehak and told her I wouldn’t play ball unless I could do the pitching. Is that it?”
“Something like that,” he said quietly. “I did pass along your suggestion that she meet you personally.”
“How did she take to it?”
“I don’t know. The subject was changed.”
I looked away from him. There was a very thin line of light under one of the two doors in the gray wall. I could see it because the thick carpeting ended just short of the sill and the heavy pile threw a shadow against the bottom crack. The line of light was not an unbroken line. Something was blocking a section of it from the other side—something that moved slightly as I watched, was still, moved again.
I turned my head to drop my cigarette into the three-cornered bowl. I said, “Well-l-I,” without meaning and stood up and shoved my hands loosely into my trouser pockets. I strolled over to the gray wall and studied two large paintings hanging there in blond-wood frames. Impressionistic as all get out. But they went with the rest of the room—if anything could be said to go with it.
When I moved again, I moved fast. The doorknob was turning under my hand before Whitney could get off the couch. I slammed my shoulder against the panel and the door flew back no more than a foot before it hit something soft.
A woman screamed—not loudly, more in surprise than anything else—and the door opened all the way. She was half-crouching, trying to cover everything in sight with her hands and not succeeding. She was wearing a black-net nightgown about half as substantial as the air over Pike’s Peak on a clear day. She had red hair and the kind of figure old men use to circulate their blood. She wasn’t holding a notebook now.
There was a slight odor of acetone in the air. I said, “My mistake, Miss—”
Fingers grabbed my coat collar from behind and yanked, catching me off balance. I fell back a step and swung the back of my hand and caught Stuart Whitney across one cheek. The fingers fell away from my collar and the husky voice said, “You son of a bitch!” and a set of knuckles crashed squarely against my right eye.
After that it was awhile before anybody moved. Whitney’s face was as white as forgiven sins except where the marks of my fingers stood out clearly. The redhead had a white terrycloth robe around her now. I had missed seeing her put it on.
I straightened my coat and waited a long moment for the pounding in my skull to let up. My eye was already beginning to swell, although the punch it had absorbed was nothing special. I turned my back on my host and his invited guest and trudged over to the lamp table and picked up my hat and listened to the restless wind prowl the street.
When I turned around again Whitney was back on the couch, the lower half of his robe parted and hanging off his legs, his knees together. He took a cigarette from a lacquered box on the coffee table and used the silver lighter, his hands shaking. Ruth Abbott stood straight and tall in the bedroom door, the light glistening along her carmined nails. She stared at me out of glittering eyes, with a cold lack of expression worse than open hatred. The silence was growing as taut as an overdrawn violin string.
“Maybe I had that one coming, Mr. Whitney,” I said. “Certainly it’s none of my business who you sleep with on a windy night. But finding Grace Rehak is my business and it’s time you told me where she is.”
He didn’t look up. “Get out of here, Pine. Before I throw you out.”
“You couldn’t throw your weight in Hershey bars,” I said. “Listen to me, Whitney. I’m trying to find a girl. Her name is Laura Fremont. I think Grace Rehak can tell me where she is. Neither of those two wants to be found for reasons best known to themselves. Three different girls who knew them both have died of murder to make sure nobody would find at least one of them. So far I don’t know which one. But I intend to find out.”
Stuart Whitney raised his head slowly. His eyes were a little wild. “You’re insane! Murders—what murders?”
“Until tonight,” I said, “I was more spectator than anything else. But tonight number three died. She died with my head in her lap, Whitney, and I was to be framed for the job. I would have taken the long step too, only the killer was smart enough to realize it might not end there and that whoever was interested enough in Laura Fremont to hire me could just as easily hire a second private dick to take up where I left off. But now I’m in this all the way. I’ve got my own neck to save and I mean to save it.”
I bent and scooped up my topcoat and hung
it over my arm. I walked over and stood in front of him, the coffee table between us. I reached down and took one of the cigarettes out of the lacquered box, shoved it in my face and took the lighter out of his stiff fingers.
“All my leads are gone now,” I said. “All except you. From now on your friends are my friends. Among them will be Grace Rehak or Laura Fremont—or both.”
I snapped the lighter into flame and got my cigarette burning. I let the flame wink out and bounced the lighter on my palm. “So far,” I said, “I know only one of your friends. The blonde babe who likes roulette. Mrs. Eve Shelby Griswold. I kind of like that one. Thirty million bucks and a cloudy background. She’d pay heavy to have you keep her secret, wouldn’t she, Whitney? Heavy enough to pay for Brooks Brothers clothing and a technicolor apartment at six hundred a month. No wonder your tongue is nailed!"
I blew out a ribbon of smoke and watched it settle down across the table. The redhead was breathing audibly and unevenly.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ve done a lot of talking—far more than I’m used to. But I’m going to say one thing more. Tell your blonde friend she’s next. I’m on to her as of right now. She’s going to get backtracked on—all the way back to the day she was conceived. That’s it, Whitney. Short and sweet and right in there.”
I pitched the lighter into his lap. It went between his legs and bounced along the carpet. I said, “Good night, Miss Abbott. It was nice seeing you."
On the way down in the elevator I looked at the chrome trimmings. They glittered as coldly as Ruth Abbott’s eyes.
CHAPTER 20
I WOKE up about ten in a silence that screamed. I sat on the edge of the bed and smoked a cigarette and took inventory of what ailed me. An ache here, a twinge there, a dull pain on top and a burning sensation on the ball of each foot. A man in my line gets used to sore feet.
Outside, the sun was shining and the wind had stopped. That last item would account for the silence. It might even have warmed up. What made that important?
I dragged myself off the bed and crawled into the bathroom. The face in the mirror was a sight for sore eyes. I had a sore eye for the job. Not swollen as much as I thought it would be. Red and a little puffy, but that would go away someday. I put a hand on top of my head and felt the bump there. It seemed a fraction smaller and I could touch it without my knees turning to water.
After a shave and a hot shower I padded into the kitchen and got the coffee going and plugged in the toaster. While they were warming up I put on my best suit and a clean white shirt and tucked a handkerchief in my breast pocket. My shoes could stand a shine and the hair was getting a little too long around the ears and across the back of my neck.
Breakfast lifted the fog enough to get me thinking again. Thinking was worse than the fog. I must have sounded like Hamlet last night. Hamlet at the Barryshire. Hamlet with three skulls to soliloquize over this time. “Alas, poor Ellen and Mary and Bonnie. I hadn’t known them at all.”
Don’t run it into the ground, brother.
I lighted my second cigarette of the day and drifted into the living room to take my hat and topcoat off the couch where I had dumped them at three in the morning. I hung the coat in the bedroom closet and took the Colt .38 out of its holster and went back to the kitchen with it. I tore it apart and cleaned and oiled the works, using very little oil. The fired cartridge case went into the incinerator shaft and I put a fresh shell in its place.
Later I stood looking out the living-room window. The sun was still there, the sky was blue, the birds made a racket, and people went by dressed for the summertime. Nice day for a drive in the country. Nice day to sit in my office and look down into Jackson Boulevard and wait for the phone to ring or the door to open and bring me a job of keeping my eye on the wedding presents or serving a subpoena or getting the goods on some department-store clerk who was knocking down on the till. Anything that had nothing to do with murder and the cops and a flock of dames who figured nature had the wrong slant on sex.
I sat in the easy chair and tried reading last night’s paper. It was the diary of a world out of tune. Crimes between countries and crimes between neighbors. Love nests and houses divided and three men had stuck up a grocery on West Sixty-third. An election year and don’t change horses while you’re cleaning house.
The paper went across the room and I went back to wearing a strip in the rug. Walk out on this, Pine. Give the whole works to the cops and forget it. What is there to hold you in it? Girls disappear every day in the month. You can’t find them all, even if you were hired to. Girls with nice old folks that don’t drink or break any laws, who look on tobacco as the devil’s weed. Tell the Fremonts their daughter is married to the Rajah of Ragoon and wash your hands of the case.
He had been a nice homespun kid. Probably a girl friend and the vague idea of a four-room house and Sundays next to the radio and a pile of papers on the floor. Only a blackjack had spread his brains over a hotel rug and left him to wait for Gabriel’s horn.
I went into the kitchen again. The bottle of Irish whisky was still behind the canned goods on the second shelf. I poured two fingers into a glass and drank most of it. It went down hard and tasted like a farmer’s boots after a day in the cow pasture. I never drank at this hour of the day.
The suburban phone book listed six numbers under Lawrence Griswold’s name. The gate house. The gardener’s cottage. The servant’s lodge. The guest house. The stables. No listing for an airport. I copied down the number of the main house and put the book away. Just call up and ask for Mrs. Eve Griswold and tell her to stick around, that a private detective with clean cuffs and alcohol on his breath would be out to ask her if she’d murdered anybody lately. The scullery maid would probably throw me in the lake.
Eleven-forty-seven. I picked up the phone and put it down again before the girl downstairs could answer. I got out the right book and looked up the number of the Daily News.
This time I didn’t hang up. The society editor was most co-operative. The Lawrence Griswolds? Lovely people. His grandfather had been a world-beater. Founded half the New England textile industry and left it all to his son, who had left it all to his son. Fifty million dollars if a dime. And quite a man with the ladies, it seemed. (I got a simper along with that.) Married four times, the last three being tall statuesque blondes. His present wife? Good heavens, man, don’t you read the papers? Eve Shelby, a night-club singer. Created quite a stir at the time; I’m surprised you missed it. Her background? Well, to tell you the truth, we don’t have much on her. Daughter of an obscure Pittsburgh family. After all, a night-club singer . . . Married late last spring. No, her parents hadn’t attended. Reported traveling in Europe at the time.
I was sitting on the bed, holding the phone in my lap, after thanking the editor for her trouble, and scowling at the closed closet door for no reason, when the hall-door buzzer sounded.
It could be anybody. I put the phone back on the nightstand and went into the living room and opened the door wide enough to see who it was.
I stepped back quickly before they could tramp on me on the way in. Captain Blauvelt needed the door open all the way to get his shoulders through. The sergeant known as Les ambled in behind him like a tugboat nudging an ocean liner into the dock. He closed the door and leaned against it.
I backed all the way to the couch. “Come in,” I said. “Don’t wait to be asked. Of course every man’s home is his castle, but this is the waiting room at the Union Station.”
Blauvelt grunted and took off his hat and let it hang alongside his leg from two fingers. His yellow eyes saw the room and everything in it including a scuffed spot on the toe of my left shoe.
“Didn’t get you up, did we?” he rumbled.
“Matter of fact you did. I was just thinking of getting into my pajamas and running downtown.”
He grunted again. “Chipper this morning. Nice place you got. What happened to the eye?”
“I went into a man’s apartment without an invitatio
n. The rent is reasonable and the furnishings are mine. And I’m not chipper.”
He moved ponderously over to the easy chair and sat down and put his hat carefully on the floor next to it. The sergeant got 03 the door and glided over and leaned against the side of the bedroom door, not neglecting to look in there.
“Sit down,” Blauvelt said. “Go on; you look tired. Out late, I bet.”
I didn’t say anything to that. But I did sit down. He got out a briar pipe and a blue tobacco tin and lighted up. He had the look of 'a man who has arrived for the week end.
“No fooling, Pine. How’d you get that eye?”
“I told you. I wouldn’t lie to an officer of the law.”
“Not much you wouldn’t,” he said, without rancor. “Any old time you wouldn’t.” He puffed on his pipe and surveyed me, dreamy-eyed. Les had gone over to lean against the kitchen doorway. By this time he probably knew how many grains of salt I had on hand.
“I spoke to Lieutenant Overmire about you this morning,” Blauvelt said suddenly. “He said you could find your way around by taking short cuts. He said you would work along with the cops if they used a thumbscrew on you. That’s what he said.”
“He should know.”
He blew out a blue cloud of smoke and went on looking comfortable and complacent. After listening to the wind yesterday I couldn’t get used to the quiet. Blauvelt said, “I thought I’d come by and kick around that killing you were in on yesterday. All right?”
“A Surf Street floozie.?” I said, quoting him. “Somewhere I got the idea you were going to handle that as routine. I was wrong, hunh.?”
“Sometimes routine leads to a place where it stops being routine.” He jerked his leonine head toward the sergeant at the kitchen door without taking his eyes off me. “Les, there, is a good man, Pine. .And a hustler. Takes his job serious. Something about the Conrad bump-ofi rang a bell in him after a while. He got to digging through the back files on homicides not yet cleared up. And he found out what he was after.”
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