“You like hunting?” I asked.
“Once in a while.”
“You hunt in department stores?”
The pale head lifted. “What do you mean, Conacher?”
“The guns. You know what I mean. The guns in your desk at Cumber’s.”
The pale eyes searched mine. “Helen told me, of course. You have the guns that were in my desk. Is that why you’re here?”
“Partly. But first, why was Lila here?”
“For the same reason,” he said hopelessly. “Lila knew about the guns in my desk, too. I was fool enough to tell her, last week, when I bought them.”
“And she came up for a bit of fancy blackmail, is that it?”
Carpenter nodded. “Lila’s a strange girl.”
“Not strange. Bitchy. She’d blackmail her mother for a few quick bucks. She’s money-mad. How much did she want?”
“Too much, Conacher.”
“What was her gimmick?”
“She threatened to tell the police about my guns.” He mopped at his brow with a handkerchief. The memory of his talk with Lila Martin must have raised a storm in his gut. He heaved and buckled and went suddenly soft. He began to cry. Not loud and hysterically, but with a sick sorrow that made me feel sorry for the poor dope. “I’m ruined, Conacher,” he wheezed. “This looks like the end of my career as a copywriter. Nobody will ever believe me. Only a damned fool leaves a loaded automatic in his desk.”
“Why was the gun loaded?”
“Stupidity. I had some bullets for it.”
“Just like that?
Chester looked more hopeless than ever. He threw out his hands. “Sounds crazy, of course. But it’s true, Conacher.”
“So you told Lila and Helen,” I said. “And who else?”
“Nobody else.”
“Think. Are you sure you told no one else?”
He thought. He thought deep and long. He got off his tail and strode the room, rubbing his stubbled chin, massaging his watery eyes, scratching his scraggly mop of hair. But when it was all over, he said again: “Only Helen and Lila. I’m sure of it.”
“I’m not so sure it stayed with them, Carpenter.”
“I don’t understand,” he mumbled. His eyes were lost somewhere out through the black window. “I made a bad mistake. They can hang me with that one mistake.”
“Maybe they can’t.”
“You think not?” His voice bounced with hope.
“They can’t hurt you unless they have your gun,” I said. “And I’m not giving it up to Lunt yet. Because I don’t think you killed Wilkinson, despite the fact that you hated him. Why would you bump off the second Santa? And why would you replace the lethal instrument in your desk drawer? It doesn’t make sense, Carpenter. Unless you happen to know the identity of the second Saint Nick?”
“But I don’t,” Chester almost shouted.
“Of course you don’t. Any idea who might know him?”
“Not the slightest.”
“I have,” I said. “I think Helen Sutton knows.”
Chester came alive then. He was a new man now, his normally pallid features beginning to burn with color. A fresh and overwhelming excitement shone in his dewy eyes.
“How could Helen know?”
“Let’s pay her a visit and find out.”
CHAPTER 20
We went out and into the darkened alleys again, down another street and into a narrow cul-de-sac where only a few vague lamps burned in the black wall of buildings around us. Chester knew his way in this neighborhood. We rounded another corner and entered still another corridored avenue. Here he paused and pointed up to the second story line in the row of apartments.
“That’s strange,” he said. “Her light’s out.”
“She could be out too, couldn’t she?”
“Not Helen. She paints at this hour every night. I usually stop by for a drink or a cup of coffee.”
We were running down the canyoned street when we saw the man. He seemed to appear out of nowhere, a dim silhouette halfway down the block. His silhouette bulked strangely against the dim light at the end of the alley. He was carrying something. A package?
“Let’s go, Chester.”
We sprinted down the narrow street. The pavement was slick with the rain, making it slippery going. The end of the street led us into a main artery, a dimly lit section of stores and restaurants of the poorer class. This was the guts of the Village, an area of winding, crawling lanes and cul-de-sacs.
“This way, Conacher. He turned off up there.”
Chester ran ahead of me, moving with a surprising ease, taking long-legged strides and easy jumps over the puddles. We circled through another bleak section of tenements and hovels, moving westward through the drizzle.
Up ahead, a couple of sailors careened drunkenly our way.
“He went thataway,” one of them gagged, pointing an unsteady finger into a gloomy alley.
“Thataway,” contradicted the other.
Chester turned to the left, through a cobbled street. At the end of the pavement, behind a garbage heap, there was a bright fire burning. Three bums sat under a tin shed, warming their tails at the blaze.
“Anybody come through here?” Chester asked.
“I could use a shot of alky,” one bum said.
I handed him a bill. “For the bunch, friend. Drinks and a free load. You see anybody pass here?”
“Man ran through,” the bum said. “He dropped a package into the fire and beat it.”
“A package? What kind?”
The bums shrugged. “Good size, it was. Burned damned fast, chum.”
We left them and ran back where they had seen the mysterious stranger disappear. We searched for another half hour. Then we walked wearily back to Helen Sutton’s door.
“Forget him, Chester,” I said.
But we couldn’t forget him a few minutes later. Because Helen Sutton didn’t respond to our ring. Nor did she answer Chester’s frantic rapping on her door.
She couldn’t respond. We found her on the floor inside, her handsome body asprawl under the long studio window.
She couldn’t swallow the water Chester held to her lips. Nor did she rally when he patted her hand. I tried some liquor and it dribbled down her pale lips and under her chin. She managed to suck at it and taste it. But her head didn’t move at all. Only her eyes flickered, feebly and out of control. Sightless.
“Who hit you, darling?” Chester whispered.
She opened her mouth and the words were a soft and toneless sigh.
“Who hit you, darling?” he asked again.
“Don’t know, don’t know,” over and over again.
“A man?”
“Didn’t see—”
“Think, Helen. Try to remember.”
“Dressing, dressing—”
“Easy,” I said. “Let me try to fill in. You were dressing when he came in? Is that it, Helen?”
“Dressing,” she whispered again.
“You had a date tonight?”
“Only Steve—”
“Anybody else come here?”
“Larry and Lila,” she mumbled. “Vivian and Mr. Kutner—”
“All at the same time?”
She shook her head painfully. “Larry and Lila first. Then Mr. Kutner. Then later, Vivian.”
“Why? What did they want?”
“Drink—” She tried to smile. But something was puffing hard on the corners of her mouth. She was in great pain. “Nothing serious,” she sighed.
“How long ago did Vivian leave?”
“Half hour? I don’t know. Can’t re—”
Then she was out.
Her body lay under the broad window in an attitude of stiffening horror. Chester kneeled beside her, sniffling
quietly, rubbing her hands in quiet-desperation.
She had been in the john, probably, getting ready for me, when the bastard walked in on her. He must have, switched out the studio lights. He had hit her when she came out of her shower. The robe lay loosely around her and she smelled vaguely from the cosmetic odor of bath soap and powder. He must have struck her suddenly, but not hard enough in the first few moments. Because the place was a shambles.
The small coffee table was upturned and standing on its back, the magazines and ashtrays scattered on the gray rug. A bottle of liquor had been thrown clear across the room in the struggle. The cracked half of it lay under the wall near the couch and the couch spread was littered with broken glass. On the floor, not far from her body, there was a big silver candlestick. He could have flattened her with that.
There was a thin trickle of blood now, from behind her neck. She was beginning to mumble and moan, meaningless sounds and phrases. Her naked body did not move at all, only the slow rhythm of her beautiful breasts, rising and falling as she sucked for air. I stood there like a fool, staring down at her. The sight of her clawed at me, renewing the impossible hate that bubbled inside me.
“Who hit you, Helen?” I asked again, on my knees and leaning over her ear.
But she wouldn’t talk again. Her lips were tight and hard and lifeless now. Her face was sinking into that horrible pallor that comes with a serious concussion.
“Is she dead?” Chester gasped.
“She will be if we don’t get her to a hospital right away.”
I dialed the Southside Hospital and barked an order for an ambulance. Then I stepped behind the decorative screen in the corner of the room, near the window. The stockpile of Helen’s oil paintings lay around me. I gathered them all up and began to haul them out into the light.
Chester watched me, puzzled. “What on earth are you doing, Conacher?”
“Helen had a picture of a fat slob among these portraits,” I said. “I saw it the night of the cocktail party. But it’s gone now.”
“You think it was stolen?”
“A good question. Do you think so?”
“Who would steal it?”
“Do you know the character?” I asked. “Do you know the fat man?”
“Wilkinson?”
“Not Wilkinson,” I yelled, holding up her caricatured oil of the advertising manager. “Hess.”
“I never saw it,” Chester said.
“I did. And I’m going out to check the fat crud, right now. Stay with Helen at the hospital, Chester. I don’t want her left alone. Is that clear?”
“Whatever you say, Conacher.”
CHAPTER 21
I ran all the way back to Mama Netti’s. Midge was gone, of course. I phoned her right away.
“Hello?” Her voice was sharp and bright. She must have been sitting at the phone waiting for my call. “Steve?”
“What happened, Midge? Who met Vivian?”
“The great man himself. Kutner.”
“How long ago?”
“Kutner arrived only a few minutes after you left. He went in and came right out again with Vivian on his arm. They walked off in the direction of Bleecker Street. I finished my spumoni and came home. What are you groaning about?”
“You. No guts. No curiosity. Why didn’t you follow them? It could mean a lot if I knew where in hell those two were going.”
“Sorry, boss. Obeying your orders. Anything else?”
I told her what had happened at Helen Sutton’s studio. I snapped my fingers for a glass of Chianti and the young waiter brought me a tall tumbler full of the rich red wine and I sipped it and let it soothe my nerves while I told Midge what I wanted her to do.
“Get this now, sweetheart,” I said. “I want you to take a plant outside Lila Martin’s place. You have the address—the fancy dump uptown. There’s a little delicatessen diagonally across the street from her place. Friendly owner, who keeps the joint open all night. Stay there and watch Lila’s lobby. I have an idea she’s going to have company tonight. I don’t know when, but it has to happen. I’ll reach you at the delicatessen.”
“You want me to wait there?” She chuckled. “No high adventures? You don’t want me to follow Lila if she comes out?”
“She won’t come out.”
A fine and frigid drizzle began to fall when I started up town. The November air was charged with the threat of winter. But November was reluctant to give way to the northern blasts, and the fresh cold only clouded the air with a deep and biting fog, thick enough to lay a veil over the quiet streets and fill the dark corners with a curtain of creeping gloom. Up above the Sixties on the west side of Central Park, the streets were bathed in the gray blanket. The cab moved slowly, not fighting to make the lights. When he pulled up to the curbing I stepped out into a misted void.
Number 46 was a soulless façade in a row of brownstones. Number 46 was only a copper-riveted number on an old-fashioned door under the light of a match. Above me the windows were sightless eyes in a granite body. The ancient house seemed asleep and dreaming of its past. To the right, a few yards away, the place next door showed dull light in the downstairs window. But where I stood, in the black pit of the tiny vestibule, the world seemed miles away. I was moving in a tomb of silence, alone in Sigmund Hess’s doorway.
The front door was easy, operating on the second try in my stock of passkeys, the ancient type of lock that has no special fittings. The venerable latch responded with a dull groan, a sound-effect in keeping with the light and the hour, I pushed it open and stepped inside.
The living room, under the thin light from my pocket flash, resembled a stock background in an Addams cartoon, the furniture covered with pale gray linen, each piece a fantasy of abandonment against the somber background. Sigmund Hess must have been ready to move in the recent past. A few crates and packing cases stood among the chairs and tables, some of them wrapped and ready for shipment, others in the process of final packaging. The tag on one of the crates read: BOLIVAR STORAGE WAREHOUSE.
The dining room, too, featured the same casual disarray. There were two sideboards, built in the classic tradition to harmonize with the house itself, giant pieces that might have served huge families in the dim and distant past. Right now, their drawers were empty, but the silverware still lay in unclosed crates. I fingered a few of the pieces. They were of the best English sterling, out of some baronial home on the snug little isle. They were expensive and ornate, a design that might have satisfied Sigmund’s granddad. But the silver didn’t come out of Sigmund’s family. Each piece bore the monogram B D over a crest, the sort of cutlery collected by antique hunters.
There were other signs of Sigmund’s temperamental background. On the wall, over the long buffet, a great shield hung. The heraldry belonged to sixteenth century England, strange griffons rampant on a field of flowers. Sigmund must have worked hard to gather such items around himself. He was beginning to come alive for me, a jewelry executive who made lavish living his hobby.
I ducked back through the great kitchen and started up the servant’s stairway at the rear of the house. The narrow winding passage led up to the second-floor landing, a large and squarish hall on the way to the two bedrooms. The first door opened into the master bedroom that faced the street. Here Sigmund had created a masterpiece of regal decor. His bed itself must have been built for some ancient chateau, a broad and bulky unit covered with an archaic canopy. The room smelled faintly of decay, a mixture of old wood and older cloth. These windows had not been opened in many weeks. The walls were hung with many oils of an indefinite period, pictures of royal personages of all types and flavors, some French, some British. On one of the smaller paintings, the brass nameplate read: GUSTAVE HESS—1723-1801. A relative of Sigmund’s? Or had he dug this up and hung it because he prayed perpetually for this type of ancestor?
I was bent over the inscri
ption on the frame when I heard the noise downstairs.
Somebody had come in by way of the front door. I could place the sound in my memory easily; the long, sighing grunt of the old latch under pressure. Or had the wind blown it open?
I didn’t wait on the landing. Whoever came in would hear me if I tried the old stairs down to the front door. Instead, I backtracked through the bedroom and down the servant’s stairway.
I saw him as I came through the kitchen door. He had a light in his hands and swung it around the living room. It moved like a giant eye, pausing to survey the covered furniture, the crates and the boxes, and, finally, the entrance to the dining room.
I jumped for him as he entered the dining room. He was a sudden fist in my face. He must have heard me before I crossed the room and dove at him, because his hands were ready for me as I came. His flashlight dropped and rolled away and we went down together, bumping and thudding against the great oak table. He kicked out at me. He caught me high on the leg, under the knee and hard enough to make me yell with pain. He wasn’t playing it the standard way. He would ruin me if he could find my groin with his active toe. His body had no lard. And he was loaded with an itch for perpetual motion, struggling to squirm away from me between lunges and thrusts at my gut.
I caught him as he moved away. I kicked out at him, feeling the soft flesh of his stomach under my foot, and then the sucking, sighing intake of desperate breathing.
“Ooggghhzz—” he whispered. His voice rising on a note of pain. “Ooggghhzz!”
He lashed out at me again, connecting with a right cross. When we rolled off together, he was fumbling for a gun. I kicked that hand.
“No guns,” I said.
“Ooggghhzz—” as I caught his scrawny neck, and then a piercing shriek. I stepped on his gun hand and enjoyed the higher notes of his distress. I mashed the hand under my heel.
“No guns,” I repeated.
“Bloody bastard—” he hoarsed.
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