Hot Red Money

by Baynard Kendrick

  “Are you reading that from your official report,” Maury asked, “or is it part of a story line you and Greenbaum hope to peddle to TV?”

  Lornegan had the grace to flush, and Greenbaum tried to suppress a smile. Lornegan said stiffly, “If any of the facts are wrong, I’d be glad to have you correct me.”

  “I’ll be damn glad to correct you. In fact, I insist. I went up to the mouth of the alley. It was raining and pitch black. I didn’t see anyone or anything. Then I thought I heard someone move in the alley. I called softly, ‘Shebab, are you there?’ No one answered, but I thought I heard a groan, so I went in to see. My foot touched clothing. I knelt down, felt around, touched something that felt sticky, and a knife hilt, with my fingertips, then was trying to turn the stabbed man over. I’d just thought that he had no jacket on when someone conked me.

  “Now. I lit no light at any time. I’ve told you why I went in the alley—I must have heard whoever conked me, and thought it was Shebab. I had gloves on. I had a tape recorder in my raincoat pocket. Shebab spotted it instantly in the restaurant, so I didn’t turn it on. When I woke up in the hospital, the gloves and the tape recorder were gone.”

  “We have the recorder along with the gloves,” Lornegan said. “I appreciate your straightening out your part of that incident in the alley. We were wondering why you went up in there. So if Shebab was dead when you found him, he couldn’t have said anything that might point to his killer.”

  “No, he couldn’t have—and didn’t,” Maury said earnestly. After all he was only telling one tenth of a lie. Turlock and the Amity Rest Home he considered his personal property. “I’ll be glad to make identification right now, if you want to run me over to the morgue and back. I have no car. Is there anything else?”

  “Just a couple.” Lornegan went to his notebook again. “Captain Knox said you mentioned a man named Pringle who might possibly be a Communist spy.”

  “That was one of the things I hoped I might get from Beshara Shebab—who, or what, this Pringle is—the name of a Commie underground apparatus, or a spy.”

  “Have you unearthed anything more since last Monday that might help us locate this Pringle?”

  Maury shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “Where did you first hear about this man?”

  “I got a tip. Someone asked me if I knew him.”

  “Did you report that tip to the FBI.”

  “No. I didn’t think it necessary.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the man who gave me the tip about Pringle—who called and asked if I happened to know anything about him—is Ed Waters, S.A.C. of the New York office of the FBI.” That was a lie that Lornegan could chew on.

  “Well, that seems to be that,” Lornegan said. “Just one more thing—”

  “From the close-mouthed Captain Knox, I’ll bet,” Maury said lightly. “You fellows certainly are clubby.”

  “Your apartment was searched. You haven’t reported anything missing, according to the Burglary Detail.”

  “I’ll report it now,” Maury said. “Twelve four-by-four color photos of my wife and myself, Mr. Gow and his wife, their two children, and an ex-reporter for the Globe-Star named Erick Sorenson. All taken on a Sunday at Jones Beach, last month. The thief left the films, but took the color pictures. Then there’s our flip-up telephone-address file. I don’t think it will do very much good to trace the pawnshops.”

  Both detectives were staring at him unbelievingly.

  “Most unusual pilfering,” Greenbaum said. “Could you figure an angle?”

  “That wasn’t hard, even though you fellows look like you think there’s something queer.”

  Hal said, “It’s a fact. Both of you look like you’d opened the wrong package. Go on, Maury, tell them your angle.”

  “Nothing queer,” Lornegan protested. “Please go on.”

  “It’s merely that I’ve been in the Commies’ hair for years—blasting them in the paper—digging up facts on my own, and turning information about Party fronts over to the FBI.”

  Greenbaum said, “We know about the work you’ve done. Your standing with the Department is ace high.”

  “Okay, thanks. My wife, Anne, was in San Francisco with her folks, Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Malcolm. Their address was in the missing phone file. I thought someone had taken those snapshots to mail to San Francisco to some comrade.”

  “So she could be identified?” Greenbaum asked.

  “Exactly. Shebab had been murdered. I’d been conked. Maybe I’d stumbled on something hotter than that Red money, and didn’t know it. I was afraid they might start putting pressure on Anne.”

  “What did you do about it?” Lornegan asked.

  “Phoned her long distance, immediately. She flew home yesterday. Now what made you think that pilfering was so unusual, Greenbaum?”

  “Did you check the films that were left in the envelope?”

  “No, why?”

  Lornegan said, “Let’s just take a look at them, if you don’t mind. Don’t you think it would be darned unusual for someone to steal snapshots, for some reason, and leave the negatives behind so more prints could be made right away?”

  “It never occurred to me.” Maury got up and took the envelope from the secretary drawer. “I just thought about Anne—” He was holding the negatives up against the window pane, Hal standing beside him.

  “So you’re detectives,” he said at last. “These are some old pictures taken in California three years ago. These negatives were loose in the drawer—just shoved in the envelope. I suppose to make me think—”

  “Just what you thought.” The officers stood up. “We’ll run you over to the morgue. You want to come along, Mr. Gow?”

  “I appreciate your invitation,” Hal said, “but my stomach’s not in the best of shape this morning. I’d better stay here. In case Mrs. Morel wakes up, I can tell her where Maury’s gone. Do you mind if I ask a question, Lornegan?”

  “Shoot.”

  “I’m more puzzled than ever. If those snapshots weren’t taken to identify any of us at Jones Beach that day, what the hell were they stolen for.”

  “Was the beach very crowded?” Lornegan asked.

  “Jammed, as always, on a broiling Sunday.”

  “My guess is as good as yours,” Lornegan said. “I think if you ever see those snapshots again, which I’m sure you won’t, that somewhere in the background, maybe on the next beach blanket, or close enough to eavesdrop, you’ll see a picture of the man who knifed Beshara Shebab. Maybe a man called Pringle.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  For three days and three nights, after entering Amity Rest Home, Special Agent Leonard Ducro was obsessed with a debasing, corroding feeling of guilt. The more he tried to rationalize his unpleasant reactions, the more difficult they became to explain.

  There was an odor of unbalance surrounding him that was inescapable. He breathed it in with every breath, imagining that he could watch his arms and legs and actually see the gaseous effluvium of insanity coloring his skin, flowing through veins and arteries to penetrate, sooner or later, his heart and brain.

  A reactive depressive!

  He’d had three days of being quizzed by doctors, Rheinemann, and Crill, and of being observed by attendants and nurses—solicitously giving him cigarettes, just as casually lighting them for him, peering into his room at night, making certain that he took every pill.

  Tranquilizers. Barbiturates. Dr. Emerson had given him some stimulants to counteract the sedative effects, but it had proved just as difficult to hide them, and take them, as it had to pretend to swallow a pill.

  Maybe he was getting dopey! Or really ill!

  A reactive depressive! Apathetic. Sit in corners. Prowl around the place at night. Eat poorly. Sleep poorly. Lose weight. Hell, he’d lost his appetite entirely and could stay wide awake even after a second sleeping pill.

  He remembered talking to an agent who had spent a long time incarcerated in a penitentiary trying t
o get information from a murderer who occupied the same cell. The agent admitted that after a while he began to get stir crazy himself. Began to think he’d really committed a crime and been sentenced by a Federal Court to stay here. He’d find himself lying awake at night and planning clever methods of escape, then discussing them quite seriously with his cellmate.

  So in three days tough Lennie Ducro had begun to have flashes that perhaps he wasn’t playing a game. Was he in this place to investigate Igor Sandor? Or had his mind gone black over some great mass murder he had committed? Connie and the children? Ed Waters, and a half dozen special agents? Was he trying to escape justice by faking that he was hopelessly insane?

  The old lady in the dining room. White haired. Rosy cheeked. Had he goofed when he asked her if she’d enjoyed her dinner, and pulled out her chair to help her get up? Miss Kirby, the nurse or dietitian who watched every mouthful of every inmate, hadn’t seemed to notice. But Len had turned white when the old lady cooed like a baby and offered him an exquisite little doll that she’d been holding in her lap beneath the table.

  Harmless! They were all harmless, at least individually. It was the mass effect that was getting Len—the day and night diet of disturbed personalities that was giving him claustrophobia. The doctors, nurses, and attendants could take it, regard it with professional detachment, but only because they were free to check out after finishing an eight hour day.

  Len had seen G.I.’s crack with battle fatigue, but that was different. They were tucked away in neuropsychiatric wards until they snapped out of it. He could understand the cause and effect. That was the army. That was war.

  There was nothing in the manual that gave rules of conduct about dealing with the unfortunate patients who were his companions now. How did you act? What did you say?

  If he’d had an idea that the place was going to be peopled with Napoleons, Julius Caesars and Teddy Roosevelts, it certainly hadn’t worked out that way.

  There was Bruce, a writer, not much older than Len. Brilliant Well informed. Meticulous in manners and grooming—and discussing at length a new book he had just completed every day—a different one every day! Confusing—until you found out he had completed one best-seller fifteen years before, then retreated into alcohol and attempted suicide, and never put a line on paper since. Bruce wove wonderful, intricate belts of leather when he worked in physical therapy.

  Gasque—a musician. Or was he? Gasque discussed Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, von Weber, and Stravinsky with much interpolated technical detail, and an utter disregard for his listener’s replies or reactions. He sat at the piano in the lounge, jotting down notes on any available piece of paper, now and then softly touching a key, entirely oblivious to the blaring TV. No one had ever heard him play.

  Elser—a financial wizard, without portfolio since before the crash of ’29. Ackers—the artist, proud of his unintelligible crayon smears.

  More than a dozen others. Friendly. Suspicious. Antagonistic. Delightful and lighthearted one minute, surly and despondent the next without apparent cause.

  All of them prone, on occasion, to withdraw completely within their secret worlds where they cowered under the weight of private thoughts, sometimes for days, to escape the cares of reality.

  But Special Agent Leonard Ducro had no escape. Hour after hour, sitting stolidly in a corner by day, wandering aimlessly about the dimly lit hall at night, or toying with his tasteless meals, he studied his subject, Igor Sandor.

  Sandor was a complex character, a fanatic and a zealot, if Len had ever seen one. On first impression he might have been weak. His face and frame were emaciated. His arms were long. His shoulders stooped. Yet he wasn’t very tall.

  His nose was a beak, set over a vulture’s mouth, but his sunken dark eyes under drooping lids, while never still, were mystical rather than cruel. His coal black hair was thinning, and his age was anybody’s guess. His hands were talons, with twisted broken fingers. Altogether, if such a combination were possible, he reminded Lennie of a kindly, battered, very dangerous bird of prey.

  Len had no illusions about Igor Sandor’s feebleness. Sandor’s well-cut but rumpled blue serge suit covered a whipcord body that was amazingly strong. Two nights before, Len had seen him bodily lift a patient who was planted a foot from the TV screen blocking everyone’s view, and move the obstruction ten feet away, chair and all.

  It was entirely due to Len Ducro’s knowledge of chess that he made contact with Sandor on the fourth day of Len’s uncomfortable stay.

  Steve Weldon, one of the white-clad attendants, who was helping to pay his tuition through medical school by working in the Amity Rest Home five days a week from four o’clock until midnight, had a theory that chess, properly applied to certain types of mental illness, was a beneficial form of therapy.

  Bruce, the young writer with the psychoneurosis that had blocked his career, had seemed to respond with encouraging progress after Steve had taught him the absorbing game.

  Other patients had developed an interest, taken out for the most part, by watching silently from a distance, giving no indication whether or not they had any idea of chess, or knew one piece from another, except by occasional interruptions of what they might be engaged in for the moment.

  Once Gasque had abruptly left his composing at the piano, walked to the table where Steve and Bruce were playing, stared at the position of the men, and seemed on the point of speaking. Then, while Steve playing white, and Len Ducro playing reactive depressive in his corner chair, were holding their breaths in anticipation, Bruce had looked up with a smile and said: “I can’t beat Steve. Why don’t you try, Gasque?”

  “Beethoven was the only master!” Gasque turned on his heel and went back to the piano.

  “A master of music, perhaps, but not of chess!”

  Len scarcely avoided jumping. The statement had come from a chair beside him. Making every effort to avoid an appearance of interest, Len, who had heard no sound of the chair being occupied, kept his chin on his chest and moved his eyes to the left to find Igor Sandor sitting there.

  It was creepy! Len, with two hard years of training in caution, alertness, and observing behind him felt himself tricked and deluded. There weren’t more than seven people in the big square lounge room, including Steve, the orderly.

  Len had thought Igor Sandor was in his room—Room 22—lying down and staring at the ceiling. Len’s was Room 14, with just three other doors between Sandor and him, on the same side of the hall. He had seen his hawk-nosed subject on the bed less than an hour before.

  Now suddenly Sandor was sitting beside him, talking with unmoving prison lips, materialized like an apparition at Len’s elbow. No doubt in the world, Len thought, this place was really getting him. It was high time he got started and jacked himself up, started red flashes of warning working in his brain.

  The casual, never-ending watchfulness and caution of nurses, attendants, and doctors that had irritated him so, became meaningful now. They weren’t dealing with normal people, and they never let themselves forget it. Len had let himself forget it, or never fully realized it.

  Sandor didn’t move with the stealth of a thief, or the furtiveness of a footpad. His was the built-in, covert, furtiveness of the trained commando, a shadowy swiftness ingrained only by years of battle, and constantly dodging imminent death.

  Abnormal, to normal people and to Len, that quiet sure swiftness of motion had become as natural to Igor Sandor as the crawling through bushes and the lightning strike of death were to the tropical bushmaster.

  With quick forboding, Len grasped the fact that once aroused, once made suspicious, Igor Sandor might prove even more cunning and deadlier than the bushmaster to anyone who stood in his way.

  One fact Len would never forget—all his training, both in the army and the FBI, hadn’t enabled him to see Igor Sandor enter the one door to the lounge, cross or come around the room to Len’s preempted corner, and seat himself in that chair.

  The question now was wh
at line to take since his quarry was there. Len decided that he would have to leave the line to Igor—if there was a line. Let Igor talk if he would, offer nothing himself at first, not show too much interest, but be ready to try to fathom Igor’s thinking, straight or warped, and eventually agree.

  “Neither of those men plays chess.” Igor turned his head on its scrawny neck. Len could feel his sunken eyes burning suspiciously against him. “If you play chess you’ll know that it’s bad to be always defeated. Sooner or later Steve will have to let Mr. Bruce win.” Sandor had a decided accent, but his English was surprisingly good. He could be Polish or Hungarian. Len favored the latter. He pronounced “chess” thickly, and his “p’s” he gave a sound of “b.” It was probably the conglomerate accent of a man who spoke several Slavic tongues.

  Len stayed silent, chin on chest, his black eyes broodingly intent on the game.

  “I can teach you to play a master’s game. Do you want to learn to play?”

  Len shook his head. Still not looking at Igor, he said tonelessly, “I play, but it’s bad to be always defeated. So I do not play anything. I do not want to play chess with you for you will defeat me. Then you will hate me. Everyone hates me, because they have always defeated me.” He raised his head and turned slowly toward Igor. “I do not want you to hate me. I’m afraid of those who hate me. Do you understand what I say?” He spoke more slowly, despondently, spacing his words as though they were dragged from inside with an effort. “I do not want you to hate me because I do not like to be afraid of everyone. Do you understand why I won’t play?”

  “Yes,” Igor said, “you have no need to be afraid. No need to play. You have a woman. She held you tenderly by the arm. I saw you from the window there when you came in. She doesn’t hate you.”

  “How do you know?” Len asked suspiciously. “How can I be sure she doesn’t hate me. She left me here and hasn’t returned I am sure she hates me and has gone, away.”

  Igor was silent a long time, figuring. “No,” he said finally. “You know nothing of hate or fear. This is Monday, It was Thursday when you came in here. I saw you from the window. Not until next Thursday will the jailers let her come to see you. Not until you have been parted for a week to the day.”