by Roy Huggins
Kathy took a quick breath and formed a silent, “Oh.” She whispered, “That’s it. Everyone who came to the stand acted like everyone else. They took their baggage and walked away without giving it a second glance. But one man got a brown bag and took it over to that bench and looked at it as if he’d never seen it before. Then he took it around where those lockers are.”
They were walking toward the big glass exit. At the alcove they stopped, and Blake nodded and said, “Doors leading out to the patio. Nice and dark all the way to the parking lot.”
He put his hands in his pockets and tried to let the thought seep into his mind gradually, like a man stepping into a cold lake. She was gone. She had got what she was after, and there was nothing more he wanted to do about it now. From now on, it was strictly a police show. There was a taste of brass in his mouth.
Beside him, Kathy moved abruptly and stepped into the shadowed alcove. She was kneeling at the corner of one of the lockers. She came back out into the light, unfolding a sheet of yellow paper. She looked at it for a long while and held it out to Blake. Her eyes were dry and hot, her lips pulled fiat against her teeth.
“I noticed some yellow paper,” she said, “attached to that brown bag.”
It was cheap scratch paper with a printed inscription: Write it, don’t say it! Under this, someone had scrawled with grease pencil: “Guy who checked #410886 says to turn it over to police if it’s claimed by a woman. In my book it says we give it to whoever has got the check. Right?” This was followed by an initialed instruction in neat red pencil: “Call me or Jameson if woman presents claim check #410886.”
Blake folded it thoughtfully, and Kathy whispered, “It doesn’t leave much to—to bang onto, does it?” He shook his head and dropped the paper into a pocket.
“You’ve got to tell me,” Kathy said evenly, “what you have to do with all this.”
“That’s right, angel. We’ve got all the time in the world now.”
Her eyes softened then, and she raised her hands and formed them into small hard fists. “I should have followed him!”
“Who?”
“The boy. The one who picked up the bag, but he looked so . . . harmless!”
“Why do you call him a boy?” Blake’s voice was suddenly sharp.
“Why . . . he was. Twenty or so.” And then, seeing Blake’s sudden attention, she added, “He was tall, with red hair.”
Blake reached out and took hold of her shoulders and pressed them. He seemed to have found a sudden new increment of energy. “Go home, angel. I’ll call you later! I haven’t anything but a license number and a vague memory of a man about thirty with plain brown hair. But I’m going up to the city hall now for some help.”
CONCLUSION
IN the hard moonlight the row of court apartments looked like a motel on the edge of a ghost town. Jane pulled the brown bag from the car and hurried up the walk. A dim light shone behind Danny’s door, and she rapped sharply, still holding tight to the torn handle of the bag. A quick movement Hounded behind her and she turned sharply. A cat loped across the walk and disappeared into the dark. She rapped again.
The door opened slowly and Danny’s face was there, pale, unshaven, a little sick about the eyes, the mustache looking like the patch of lawn under Jane’s feet.
She pushed past him and said, “Lock the door, Danny. Pull the blinds.”
He glanced at her dully and licked his lips. “Go away,” he said thickly. “Creep back out.”
Jane put the bag down in the center of the floor and smiled. It was a warm smile, reassuring, unaggressive. She said, “I found the ticket, Danny. It’s all clear sailing now.”
It was profoundly quiet in the room. The endless rhythm of the crickets’ wings sounded all about them, and from across the way a laugh rose and broke crazily in midflight. Danny turned and bolted the door and pulled the blinds. He stepped toward the bag and looked down at it. He lifted it and dropped it on the bed, then turned suddenly, sharply. Jane stood quietly watching, and Danny’s eyes were puzzled now. He stepped close and patted his hands against her pockets and along her sides, and opened her handbag.
Jane smiled when he finished, and said, “Disappointed?”
“Worried. I don’t get it.”
“We’re going to Mexico tonight. A woman traveling alone Would attract too much attention.”
He grinned weakly. “That’s better. For a minute you had me worried. Don’t ever change, tiger. You’re perfect in your way. I don’t think I’d like you with a heart.”
Jane looked hurt. “Open the bag, Danny, It’s all ours!”
He turned slowly, and Jane stepped up beside him. He unbuckled the straps and knocked the clasp away and lifted the dusty top. The money lay as clean and pure and full of promise as Jane remembered it from that night so very long ago. Danny put his hands down through the packets until they rested on the bottom. He shook his head slowly and straightened up.
“Let’s have a drink,” he said huskily.
Jane put her hands on” his arms and pushed him down onto the bed. She sat on the floor in front of him and said, “In a minute, Danny. First you’ve got to tell! me about it. How much is there? And where did it come from? And can we use it safely?” The voice was soft, her face flushed and earnestly beautiful.
Danny looked down at her, absently at first, and then attentively, with eyes that were suddenly bright and dark.
“There should be forty grand, tiger. Forty thousand round simoleons. And I never thought I had it in me,” He stopped abruptly, a closed-mouth grin across his face, “I’ll get us a drink.”
“Danny, wait. Someone threw that money into our car,” she prodded. “It was meant for you. Who was it?”
Danny laughed. “You really do want to hear about it. I’m tempted to blow a brass trumpet, make like I’m one of the big talent. But I’m not. It was luck, old dumb Danny luck. I stumbled onto a racket, tiger. A guy with three floors of mahogany in the Union Building has this racket. He’s a big insurance agent, and a politician on the side. He sells policies on things like bridges, aqueducts and stuff. Who ever heard of anything happening to a bridge, see? He figures he’s as safe as a goldfish, so the policies don’t ever go back to New York. They’re just pieces of paper, and he pockets the premiums.”
Jane sat up, interested. “But . . . how in the world did you ever stumble onto a thing like that?” She had almost emphasized the “you” and had caught it just in time.
“There’s a club I belong to, off and on,” Danny went on. “The county clink. I got friendly with a man who was in overnight for drunk driving. He had something eating him, and I got the idea it was worth a dollar or two. When I got out, I looked him up and bought him a few drinks. His name was Haskell and he was comptroller in this insurance company. He had a copper heart.” Danny winked and said, “That’s just the opposite of you, tiger. It took me less than three weeks to find out he was drinking ’cause he’d found out about the racket and couldn’t make up his mind whether to be honest or bend a little. He bent. I was to be contact man. Two weeks later he drove his car into a lamppost.” He snapped his fingers and leaned back against the wall. “Luck. Like hitting the Irish Sweepstakes. I sold my pigeon a bill of goods: I’d take one payoff and dust. He’d never hear from me again. He bought. And here we are . . . Let’s have that drink.”
Danny got to his feet and reached down and helped Jane up. “All right,” she said. “Make them stiff.”
He went into the kitchen and came out again with two thick glasses and a quart bottle with about a pint of amber liquid in it. He poured each glass about a third full and handed one to Jane.
He grinned and said, “Bight hours ago I swore off this stuff. Well, tiger, here’s to crime.”
Jane nodded, her eyes empty and wide. She lifted her glass, and Danny raised his and drank it down. He lowered the glass slowly and thoughtfully. Jane’s remained untouched in her hand. She held it out stiffly and her eyes were bright and full of incipie
nt terror. Slowly, dull surprise and uncertain panic rose in Danny’s face, and he dropped the glass and stared wildly. He moved and Jane backed against the wall, choking back a scream, holding it in her tortured throat, Danny took another step toward her and retched and pitched forward at her feet where she stood arched against the wall. He was curling up now like a leaf on a hot stove, jaw locked open, eyes staring and glazed, the pale skin turning a bluish gray.
It was a long time before Jane moved, slowly, and stepped around him. She picked up the bottle and went into the kitchen and poured the whisky from the bottle and glass down the drain. She rinsed them both carefully and put the glass in the cupboard and the bottle under the sink. There were other bottles there, and she found one with some whisky still in the bottom and put it on the drain board. From a pocket she took the brown bottle that still held a few grains of cyanide, rubbed it between the palms of her hands and laid it beside the empty bottle of whisky.
SERGEANT LARSON was a large, pink man with orange hair, and eyes the color of skimmed milk. He sat in the back of the police car with Blake beside him and his partner at the wheel. He was thinking about the next police exam and wondering if he should bother to take it. The car was headed tor some place on North Detroit. He wasn’t too clear on why they were going there, but any excuse wan good enough these days if it would get him out of the Homicide office, with its sticky layers of orange varnish and the commingled odors of vice and sanctity.
The car stopped for a red light, a lone man walked jerkily by, and Larson found himself wondering, haunted by a statistic. Was he one of them? Every year in L. A. twenty murders, more or less, slipped quietly into the limbo o£ the unsolved. So there was a large regiment of killers wandering loose in the city now, and although it didn’t trouble Larson particularly, he found that he could never quite forget it.
On Beverly the driver used the red light and touched the siren a few times just for fun. He was young, trap-mouthed, and Larson suspected him of reading books on police administration When they turned on Detroit the red light was off, the siren long silent, and a few blocks up they rolled quietly to the curb. Larson took the lead, walking with a tired, lumbering tread, yet quietly. Light was on inside the place he was looking for, and he rapped a couple of times before he tried the door. It opened under his hand and he went on in.
He stopped to look down at something hidden from Blake by the half-open door. The driver went on in, and Blake could see it now—an arm twisted grotesquely, two legs in the spent, flat significance of death, Larson rumbled, “Close the door,” and his partner kicked it shut. Blake lit a cigarette, and after a while the crickets began a timid roundelay that swelled to a hectic chorus.
They stopped abruptly when Larson opened the door and said, “Come on in out of the cold.”
Blake said, “Thanks. Noisy out here too.”
Larson pointed to the bed and said, “Sit down. I’m not trying to scare you, but I’ll stand.” His partner was using a phone at the end of the room.
“I’m afraid I wasn’t listening like I should of. Tell me again why you expected to find a woman out here and why I should’ve bothered coming out with you in the first place. I don’t think you mentioned any bodies.”
“I mentioned a body, but not that one. I hadn’t expected her to kill him.”
“She didn’t.”
“No?”
“And if you told me anything downtown that proved her husband is dead, I think I missed it. Body in the morgue?”
“I think it’s in McPhearson Park Lake.”
He smiled down at Blake. “How’d she do that? The lake’s surrounded by four of the busiest boulevards in town. Or are you telling me she hired a boat with her husband and brought it back alone?”
“More or less. Our friend on the floor was staked out on shore somewhere. She brought him back.”
“Neat. How do you know all this?”
“I don’t. But I think it’s a hunch worth testing.”
Larson shook his head and grinned. “Body’ll come up in five days. Mind if we just wait?”
“If she put it there, she put it there to stay.”
Larson thought about that for a while, hulking quietly and running a hand through his hair. “How many times you see her with this man?”
“I haven’t seen the man.”
“Take a look.”
Blake stood up and leaned down to look at Danny’s face for a brief moment. He sat down again and said, “Just once.”
“Could you prove that?”
“No.”
“Anyone else ever see them together?”
Blake frowned and waited awhile before he spoke. When he couldn’t feel his pulse pounding in his throat any more, he said, “Help from private citizens is strictly verboten, is that it?”
Larson shook his head. “I think you’re trying to get the help, brother. You asked us to put out a pickup on Mrs.—what was her name?—Palmer. I’ve seen these dodges before—private operators trying to get the department to do their leg work.”
Blake said, “Maybe I’m naive, but that looked like a corpse on the floor.”
Larson turned to the trap-mouthed man at the end of the room and snapped, “Grimes, get ahold of whoever’s working on that Palmer case. Let’s get squared away here and now.” Grimes went to work at the phone again, and Larson said, “There’s only one thing that keeps me from writing this off as plain and simple suicide. You brought us out here, so maybe you know what you’re talking about. If it’s murder, I’ve never seen it done neater. The guy took poison, and he drank it from his glass. There isn’t any in the bottle out there . . . Why you so anxious to put the finger on Mrs. Palmer?” Blake hesitated for a long moment. “I’m a friend,” he said, “of her late husband’s.”
Grimes was talking with someone now in a low flat voice, and there were long intervals of listening.
Larson shot out, “Who you working for?”
“No one. I’m a boy scout.”
“You’re a guy with an angle. What’s this Palmer woman got that you’d like to have?”
Grimes hung up and turned to Larson with a flat grin that carried an overtone of viciousness. He said, “Jim Breach had the case. It’s the old story. Grass on the other side of the fence had more sex appeal.”
“How about the lake?”
“The guy’s sister made a report that got Jim a little worried, so he checked the lake. He says it’s all clear there.”
Larson turned to Blake and scowled as darkly as his orange eyebrows and pink face would allow. “You’d better run along,” he said. “We’ve got your address. Maybe you’ll be hearing from us again.”
Blake stood up. “You don’t do anything about Mrs. Palmer?”
“Maybe. Depends on what we find here.”
“She’ll be out of the state by then.”
“Sad. We’ll send out one of our mounties.”
Blake grinned slowly. “You know, I think you boys were an important part of Jane Palmer’s plans. She’d had dealings with the law. I think she counted on a pattern just like this.”
“Don’t leave town. We may want some more of this charming chitchat.” Blake started toward the door and stopped, and when he spoke there was a note of faint hope in his voice, “Your department drags lakes every day. Can’t you forget the way this all looks and drag McPhearson Lake? There’s at least an even chance you’ll find Alan Palmer down there somewhere.”
“Sorry, Blake. The fire department does our fishing for us. We like to know just what we’re doing before we put them to work. And McPhearson Park Lake is a big business. We wouldn’t know where to look for the body, so we’d have to close the lake down for at least a day or two. You don’t go into that kind of stuff half-cocked.”
Blake nodded. He realized that from Larson’s point of view he was a pretty slim breeze, and he was blowing no one any good.
“If I wanted to drag the lake myself, could I hope for some co-operation from your way?”
/> Larson looked puzzled then, and his tone was almost friendly, “About five years ago a guy thought his daughter was in that lake. He had to rent the lake and hire a crew. Before his daughter turned up in Merced, he’d spent four thousand bucks and had a lawsuit on his hands.”
Blake nodded distantly and the taste of brass was bitter on his tongue again. He turned slowly and someone tapped gently on the door. Larson stepped past Blake and said, “That’s the lab crew.” He opened the door and a slender girl almost stumbled into the room with a paper bag in her hand. The bag dropped and split and four bottles of beer rolled out onto the bare carpet.
She stood shocked and immobile, staring in quick panic that slowly turned to anger and darkened her face. It was a square face with hard bone under it and eyes that were flecked with yellow.
“Who,” she asked, “are you?
“You live here?” Larson shot back. The girl had begun to answer, and then had dropped her eyes. There was a high, sharp catching of breath and the pockets of flesh under the high bones of her cheeks deepened.
Blake stood stiff and cold. The girl stumbling into the room had brought something back: Kathy telling him of Jane’s standing just outside her door with a key in her hand. He knew now what it meant. The sweat was swift and cold on his forehead, and he took conscious hold on himself. She was lying dead now on her kitchen floor, or she wasn’t. There was nothing he could do about it now.
The girl said slowly, “How did it happen?”
“Cyanide,” Larson said gently. “Quick and painless.”
The girl’s eyes widened slowly and tears covered over them and hung tremulously, but did not fall. She whispered helplessly, “Danny—Danny killed his self.”
Larson was quietly casual, “Why do you say that?”
“He—he had his heart set on a big deal—thirty, forty grand. It didn’t come off.”
“That doesn’t mean he killed himself, now does it?”
“He did it. I was with him when he bought the stuff. He wouldn’t tell me what he was gettin’.”
