“You figured wrong,” Pate mumbled, snaking his bloodshot eyes my way. “Unless this clever little crud grabbed Sigmund’s stuff.”
“Sigmund had no gems in his place,” I said.
“How can you be so sure?” asked Malman.
“Because the way I see it, Sigmund’s partner has them.”
“A possibility.”
“It gets me nowhere unless I know who the partner was, Malman.”
“I wish I knew, Conacher.”
“Sigmund never dropped any hints?”
“Sigmund was too clever for that,” said Malman. “I only know that his partner was somebody in the store.”
“A man? A woman?”
“I’m afraid that secret died with Sigmund.”
“Not quite,” I said. “Because I’m going to dig it up.”
“Clever, clever chap,” leered Pate.
“But I don’t want any interference,” I continued. “I don’t want to see either of you again. Because if I find you where you don’t belong, I’m going to spill what you told me to my friend Lunt. Is that clear, Malman?”
Malman shrugged, a tired and beaten man. “I’ll stay out of it, Conacher. The smell of murder frightens me.” He saw that I was concerned about Pate, standing over him and waiting for the Englishman to bow out with his boss. He also saw that Pate was reluctant to do anything that might please me. So Malman leaned over and smacked his skinny errand boy across the mouth again, a flat clap of mayhem that spun Pate’s head back.
“Don’t worry about this character,” Malman said with a laugh. “He doesn’t move unless I give the word.”
“He’d better not,” L advised. “Or he’ll wind up in a worse fog than he ever saw in Piccadilly Circus.”
CHAPTER 23
The November drizzle had solidified into a firm and steady drip when I reached the street. I parked opposite the Warburton and watched the lobby for a while. It would have been bad for Pate or Malman to come out on my tail. It would have uncorked all the burning energy inside me into an outburst of uninhibited fury. Because I was impatient now. I was anxious to get on with my little schedule. All of the recent past began to come into focus for me, so that I operated on a straight line.
And I knew who would be waiting at the end of the line.
The traffic up and down the Avenue of the Americas was fast and purposeful. There were no trucks to hold back the frantic cabbies as they piloted their fares at breakneck speed. It was the hour of great and lonely silences. The hour just before the dawn of a new day. I tapped my driver on the shoulder and had him pull up on the corner of Lila’s street. I walked the rest of the way, down the misted canyon and to the lone storefront that beamed friendly neon words into the foggy air: DELICATESSEN—Open All Night.
Midge waited for me, munching a salami sandwich and engaging the friendly proprietor in conversation. He had fed her royally, glad to have company on his lonely vigil.
“Best place in town for watching a lobby,” Midge laughed. “Mr. Fogelson is the perfect host, Steve. Have a pastrami sandwich? They’re an epicurean delight.”
“Be my guest,” beamed Mr. Fogelson.
“Not right now, thanks. What happened across the street, Midge?”
“The queen arrived.”
“How long ago?”
“Fifteen, twenty minutes ago.”
“Alone?”
“All alone,” Midge said. “You expected her to have an escort?”
“Lila Martin without a man is like bacon without eggs. She’s out of character unless she’s dragging a male around. See anybody we know walk into the lobby after Lila arrived?”
“You’re ahead of me, Steve. Larry Pettigrew was over there about ten minutes after Lila went in.”
“How far did he get?”
“You’re making me blush.” Midge blushed. “But he couldn’t have gotten far.”
“He got in?”
“There you go again. Larry came out about five minutes after he entered the lobby. She may have let him into her flat, but he certainly didn’t stay long.”
“And after Larry? Anybody else?”
“Not a soul.”
“She’s going to have company now, Midge. Me.”
“At this hour, Steve?”
I looked at my watch. It was exactly 4:12. Through Mr. Fogelson’s fogged window, the street lay blanketed in the sticky gloom that comes as a prelude to dawn in New York. The wall of buildings across the street showed black and ominous and dead against the graying sky. But far up in Lila’s apartment house, one oblong of pale yellow glimmered in the darkness. She was still stirring up there. She was on the move, not yet ready for bed.
“Time to go, Midge.”
“Steve!” Midge ran to the door and held me. She was frightened now. “Why don’t you tell Lunt about this?”
“It isn’t that type of deal. Lunt would queer it for me. The queen needs special handling.” I pulled her to me and held her tight for a fleeting second until she quieted down. “Do as I say, Midge. Go home to bed. And stop eating delicatessen. It’ll louse up your bumps.”
The lobby was an empty square of modernity, as soulless as the layout of a furniture store window and twice as quiet. The elevator droned a sad song to the seventh floor. I pressed Lila’s buzzer and the door opened in the next breath. She must have been standing on the other side, waiting for that buzz.
But she couldn’t have been waiting for me.
“For God’s sake,” she said with disgust. “It’s the shamus again. What do you want?”
“In.”
“At this hour?”
“You don’t look sleepy, sweetheart.”
“I wake up fast,” she said artlessly. “But I’m a horror when my beauty sleep’s disturbed.”
“You’re a liar, baby,” I said. “Your light was on before I got here. Who were you expecting?”
“I always sleep with the light on.”
“You’re a sweet and smiling liar,” I said, and pushed in past her.
I caught a glimpse of her lethal eyes, stabbing me as I entered the flat. She needed me like a bottle of milk at this hour. She watched me make myself at home, not liking me at all. She was wearing her stay-at-home pajamas again, the same type of ensemble I had played button-button with not too long ago. The color scheme was changed, but the effect was the same: a blouse that refused to contain her torso charms, and a brilliant pair of sharp crimson pants. She waltzed slowly my way. Her lips were curved in an enigmatic smile.
“Better get out of that mattress outfit,” I said.
“What for? Parlor games?”
“Not with me, baby. I came to take you away.”
She backed off a step, puzzled by my dialogue. She bit her lip, unable to weigh me on the keen scales of her ever-busy intellect.
“Away? Where?”
“You and I are going to see a man.”
“Without me, Steve.”
“With you.” I waited for her to feel the effect of my purpose. She was her usual self now, ready for sly gags and tricky speeches, the gay girl with the flip lip. It didn’t take long for her to react to me. She sat herself slowly in the chair across from me. I said: “The name of the man is Lunt.”
“Who is Lunt?”
“Lieutenant Lunt. Homicide.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“I’m handing you over for a couple of raps, sweetheart. Starting with murder.”
“Oh, please, Steve,” she cooed, crossing to sit beside me, shifting gears so that the soft side of her personality would show, becoming delicate and debonair in the emergency. “Let’s not have jokes. Not at this hour.”
“No jokes. I’m serious. I’m turning you in for murder.”
“Just like that?”
“Forget the whimsy, you
bitch!” I pushed at her face and she fell away from me. “Sex will get you nowhere.”
She backed off. She was stepping slowly toward a little table near the wall, a decorative piece that held a lamp, an ashtray and a package of Chesterfields. But she couldn’t be moving so subtly for a smoke. The little table had one drawer. There was a black knob on the drawer, a decorative dot that might fool an innocent observer. It didn’t fool me. I beat her to the table and opened the little drawer and pulled out an automatic.
I said: “No tricks, baby. No guns, no hits, no errors.”
“I wanted a cigarette, not a gun.”
“Sit down and be nice. Sit down and tell me why you killed Wilkinson and Hess.”
“You’re wrong,” she said in a whisper. She was beginning to understand my purpose now. Suddenly her hands were out of control, fumbling her cigarette, shaking so hard that she couldn’t hold the lighter. When she made it, at last, she sucked hungrily at the smoke. “I didn’t kill Greg. And I don’t know anybody named Hess.”
“Sigmund Hess,” I said, “was the other Saint Nick. And you killed them both. It figures, sweetheart. You might as well break down and tell all.”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“Rather tell it to Lunt?”
“Tell what?” Her eyes clouded with frustration. She was beginning to act it up for me. She had the equipment for convincing anything in pants. She came to me and put her hands on me, gently. Her manner softened and saddened, like an apologetic schoolgirl. “I don’t know where you got your crazy ideas, Steve. But they’re fantastic, believe me. I don’t want to go down to see Lunt. You can’t blame me for that. It would ruin my career. The publicity would cripple me.”
“I’ll cripple you first.” I slapped her hands away and she sagged into a chair and covered her face and began to cry. The sound of her racking sobs didn’t charm me. I lifted her out of the seat and slapped her again. “I’ll cripple you because you killed Chuck Rosen, too. You must have killed him. He was getting close to solving the Cumber store heists. You must have killed him because you’d be the one person he might confide in. What did Chuck tell you? Did Chuck explain that he was closing in on Greg Wilkinson?”
“No, no,” she wailed. “Please, Steve. You’re hurting me. You’re all mixed up. Chuck never told me anything.”
“You were in on the heists with Wilkinson,” I yelled. “You were the third member of the team. It was you and Wilkinson and Hess who split the profit from the robberies. But you got hungry, didn’t you? Isn’t that why you killed them both? Isn’t it because you’re a greedy bitch? You’d kill your own mother for a fee, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you?”
I bore down now. I was hot and out of control, wanting her to spill for me, grinding at her wrists to make her talk, jerking her in close to me so that I could spit the words at her. I told her off in simple diction. I let her know that she was a two-bit whore who had killed my partner, a smiling nympho who could kiss and kill with equal ease. I loaded the air with the heavy freight of my anger. My hands worked out the punctuation for every idea, slapping at her face until her cosmetic veneer became a hot crimson. But instead of breaking her, I was only weakening her.
She began to shake her head at me and mumble, “No, no, Steve. No, no, no, no, no.” Over and over again in tempo to her unhinged head, a fit of hysterical babbling that telegraphed her inner torment. She began to blubber and gurgle at me, but I couldn’t understand the fresh torrent of words. She was reacting the wrong way. She would backfire into perpetual mumbo-jumbo if I kept hammering at her. I didn’t want her that way.
I dropped her to the couch and she sagged and covered her face with her shaking hands and sucked air in great gulps of frustration.
“Why? Why? Why?” she gurgled. “Why me? Why me?”
“The gun, sweetheart.”
“What gun?”
“Carpenter’s gun,” I said. “Only two people in the store knew where he had that loaded automatic. You and Helen Sutton. But Helen Sutton wouldn’t kill anybody. That leaves you, Lila. You knew he had the gun. You took it and killed Wilkinson and Hess. Then you returned it to Chester’s desk for a perfect frame. That was it, wasn’t it? You went to Wilkinson’s house to salvage some of the stones he hid in his wall safe. When you heard me come in downstairs, you faked a faint. You pretended that somebody hit you. It all fits, sweetheart. It fits as snug as your blouse, doesn’t it?”
“I loved Greg Wilkinson,” she said hoarsely. “You’ve got to believe me, Steve. I didn’t kill him. I didn’t kill Hess. Maybe I’m a bigger bitch than you think. Maybe I’m bad, clear through. But not killing bad, Steve. Not bad enough to murder.” She clung to me and wouldn’t let go. She was determined to spill for me, out of a wild and uncontrollable outburst of emotion. She dug her nails into me. “Blackmail, yes,” she mumbled. “I’m a neurotic about money, Steve. I’m cursed with an insatiable hunger for money. I want more and more of it. That was why I went to Chester Carpenter’s tonight. I knew he’d pay off for what I knew about that gun in his desk.”
“Chester won’t pay you a dime,” I yelled at her. “He’s in the clear. He’s going to laugh his fat head off when he finds out that you’re boarding with the dicks, downtown. Because I’m going to take you down to Lunt, sweetheart. I’m going to get you the best room in his jail, with hot and cold running rats. I’m going to have Lunt book you for the whole deal. The papers will pick it up and put your pretty pan on every front page in the country. You’re going to be labeled Killer, in capital letters. From here on out, you’ll be pounding the pavements for pick-ups to earn a buck. No department store from here to Calcutta will hire you for anything better than mopping latrines. You’re done, Lila. You’re all washed up and ready for the salt mines.”
I was letting her have it. She squirmed and wriggled under the impact of my promises. She didn’t like the prospect of a short stay in Lunt’s cozy cesspool. She began to blubber now, really showing me tears. The mascara ran down her cheeks in gray black streaks, converting her face into something out of a bad dream. She whined and sobbed at me. She hoarsed fresh pleas, out of a real fright.
“Please, Steve,” she sobbed. “You mustn’t do that. I’ll talk. Everything. The truth, I’ll tell you the truth.”
“Start at the party. Do you know who slugged me?”
“I have a pretty good idea.”
“You saw him?”
“I saw his silhouette,” she sobbed. “I was walking away from Larry Pettigrew, coming into the corridor. It was Kutner.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m positive.”
“Why would he want to slug me?” I asked. The shock of her statement yanked at my mental switches. She was changing the pattern of my ideas. Completely. There would be fresh and challenging questions now, all of them coming out of her last bit of evidence. If Lila was telling me the truth. “Any idea why Kutner would want to knock me off?”
“Ask Kutner that one,” she sobbed. “Please, Steve, you’re tearing my arm off. Don’t you believe me?”
I let her slide away. She was leveling with me now. She had come over the hill to me, over the edge of her normal emotional range, into wide-open hysteria to tell me the truth. She was lost in the morass of her own tensions, still racking out her impossible grief. She came at me again, clinging to me, pulling at me, anxious to have me change my opinion of her.
“Money, money, money,” she wailed. “I know my own weaknesses, Steve, believe me. I felt like a heel when I visited Chester Carpenter to put the touch to him. And I felt worse when you walked in and caught me at it. But the lust for money is part of my temperament. Do you know what I did when I left you at Chester’s? Do you know what I’ve been up to since then? Fresh blackmail. Bigtime blackmail. This time I’ve tried the jackpot. Only a few hours ago I approached Horace Kutner himself.”
I clapped my hand over her mouth
. The gurgling died. Her eyes brightened with a fresh glow, afraid of me now.
“Say that again, sweetheart. You tried Kutner?”
“Yes, Steve.”
“What was the pitch?”
“The same as with Chester. The gun.”
“Come again,” I said. “The pitch, sweetheart. What was the gimmick you threatened Kutner with?”
“The same as with Chester,” she said again. “You thought, a moment ago, that Helen and I were the only ones who knew Chester had that loaded gun in his desk. You thought wrong, Steve. Kutner knew about the gun.”
“You told Kutner?”
“About a week ago.”
“Why?”
Lila shrugged and shivered. “Just small talk. We were out together. We were drinking and talking, about the store. It was a piece of useless information that came up. I almost forgot about it.”
“What made you remember?”
“Chester reminded me, when he found the gun missing. He thought I had taken it.”
“And you thought Kutner might have nabbed it?”
“I was sure of it, after my visit to Chester’s apartment last night.” She dropped her head and began to sob again. It took time for her to come back to normal. “It was after I left you that I thought of blackmailing Kutner. I failed. Kutner said he had nothing to hide.”
“How long ago was that?”
“About an hour and a half ago.”
Suddenly my head ached with a fresh shock. Suddenly the thin crack in the big black wall began to open. The black wall fell away and I could see beyond it. I reached for Lila and yanked her to her feet. I began to shake her and yell at her. My hands were so tight on her arms that she screamed with pain.
“Of course!” I shouted. “Of course it wasn’t you, Lila! I see it now, all of it, the whole stinking business. Get dressed, sweetheart. You and I have a visit to make.”
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