The Complete Cases of Stuart Bailey

by Roy Huggins

  She said, “Bailey, tell me, are you a little touched? Just slightly, in a harmless, cockeyed way?”

  “Would you like me to be?”

  “No! But . . . what about that?” She was pointing at the ash tray. “Do you find it necessary to carry around your own ash tray? It really isn’t, you know.”

  I laughed, and then I told bar about the tray, not trying to be cagey.

  We finished the drinks and went out to dinner and talked about everything but murder.

  THE relentless ringing of the phone pulled me from Bleep into a kind of resentful coma. I got up and went in and washed my face. When I came back, it was at ill ringing. It was Quint.

  “Had any brainstorms about the Trist deal?” He sounded casual and unhurried, like a man using up some unscheduled time.

  “Not a one.”

  “You’ve been getting around, calling on people, spending time. You ought to have the case wrapped in cellophane by now, a big operator like you.”

  “You must have made an arrest.”

  “No, but we’re thinking about it.”

  “Just somebody you don’t like or someone you can make it stick to?”

  “We think it can be made to stick.”

  “Crukston, hub?”

  “Crukston!”

  “Who else?”

  “Man, you’re off the beam. We checked Crukston. His books are clear and he made Trist a better-than-average return on his investments. We got that straight from Trist’s attorney.”

  “You should have started at the other end.”

  “What have you got, Bailey?”

  “Who are you planning to put the finger on?”

  “Like that, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your stuff had better be good. It’s the Franzen babe.”

  “How did you build that?”

  “Strange doings in that bunch. Trist left exactly one frogskin to his widow. The rest he divided more or less equal between his kid and Sara Franzen. It seems he put her through school and sort of supported her for several years, until she came into a little dough of her own.”

  I didn’t say anything for a while. Then, “Any evidence that Mrs. Franzen knew about the windfall?”

  “The lawyer says she didn’t. But the setup’s clear as day, isn’t it? Trist would have cooed it into her ear one night.”

  “When was the will made?”

  “Let’s hear from you for a change. What’s this about Crukston?”

  “I’ll tell you when it was made. Within the last few weeks.”

  “I guess you’ve been getting around, at that.”

  “You’re making a mistake, Quint. I know that sometime in the past few weeks Trist got the idea that his wife was cheating on him with Crukston. That’s why he called me. But the afternoon Trist was killed, Crukston gave Trist some pretty good evidence that he was wrong about his wife. The will was changed in favor of Franzen before Trist got that evidence, and I doubt if Trist ever told either of them about the change.”

  Silence.

  “Okay,” Quint said. “About Crukston—understand, we’d have uncovered it anyway, don’t get the idea you got away with something.”

  “Several of the rentals that Crukston managed—I don’t know how many—are fronts. I’d guess that most of them are syndicate gambling joints.”

  “Not in L.A.”

  “Could be. The ones I know of are all in the county. I think Crukston was pocketing the premiums those boys are used to paying. Trist wouldn’t have gone in for that stuff. He wouldn’t have to, with his money.”

  “Yeah. Well, thanks, Shamus. I was just baiting you. We didn’t have an arrest in mind.”

  “That’s all right, lieutenant. Crukston didn’t kill Trist, either.”

  I hung up, went in and showered, got dressed, had some coffee, put my ash tray in my pocket, and went to call on Crukston.

  I stepped out of the Wilshire Tower elevator on the eighth floor, and two cops in uniform stepped up and asked me politely where I was going. I glanced to the right. There was activity around Crukston’s door. The door was open.

  I said, “I’m from the Internal Revenue Bureau. Something wrong?”

  “Who’d ya wan ta see?”

  “I think the name was Crukston.”

  “Forget it. He’s dead. Better take the elevator back down. No hanging around up here.”

  I got back into the elevator. The elevator boy said, “Sorry. I knew you wouldn’t get anywhere, but I was told to keep my trap shut.”

  “Crukston, huh?”

  “Yeah. Stabbed.”

  “They find a weapon?”

  “I heard they didn’t. Nobody seen anybody go in, either.”

  We were at the ground floor. In the lobby there were newspapers headlining the Trist case and featuring the weapon that had “slipped through the incompetent fingers of the Detective Bureau.” Tomorrow the headlines would be bigger. I drove home.

  * * * *

  The perfume hit me first, although it isn’t fair to say “hit.” It enveloped me gently as I opened the door, and began to take the edge off my mood. The fount of the fragrance was sitting in my deep chair, looking up at me with eyes that were troubled and unhappy and provocative oil at the same time.

  I sat, flown across from her.

  She smiled. “Your apartment manager’s a friend of mine. She let me in. Of course, I told her you sent me.”

  “I have a place I call an office.”

  “You weren’t there.”

  “How you got in hero isn’t important. The question with the big punch is: Why?”

  “Greg’s been killed.” She said it calmly, and it didn’t sound like the calm that sometimes masks an imminent wing-ding.

  “Sorry to hear it, Mrs. Crukston. Did you do it?”

  She raised her head so that the light fell across her face, and it wasn’t the insipid, nubilous face I’d been thinking of when I thought of Rita Rogell.

  She said, “I like that hard gritty line you’ve developed for yourself, Bailey. Some other time it would be fun to listen to it. But not now.”

  “I take it you didn’t do it. I didn’t think you did.”

  “I like you, cowboy, well enough to rattle a little warning. I’m not really as dumb as you think. I’ve found that it pays to have men think I’m not quite bright.”

  “Thanks, but you didn’t have to tell me. And you didn’t come up here to talk about yourself.”

  “No. I came up to ask you to do something for me.”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you have a drink in the place?”

  I went out and mixed two highballs and brought them back. She had moved over to the davenport and had taken off her coat. She wasn’t wearing a dress. In her circle they call it a “creation.” This one was smooth and clinging, with nothing on it to detract from the main features. She took her drink and smiled at me.

  We drank. We didn’t say anything. A wagon rattled by, a child shouted, and a siren sounded urgently down on Wilshire. We finished our drinks.

  “I like your taste in liquor, Stuart.”

  I went out and made two more drinks.

  When I came back, I said, “You’ve got me tagged all right, angel. I’m a sucker for a babe, especially after a couple of drinks. What do you want done?”

  “Stop it, Bailey. We could be good friends.”

  “I don’t think I’d like that.”

  She turned—just her head—and said, “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  I gave her my warm smile—the one with the leer—and said, “All right, Mrs. Crukston. I know what I get now. How about telling me what I do?”

  She sat up. For a brief hung moment I thought I was going to get the rest of her drink in my face. But Rita was a lady, and she liked my liquor. She took a drink of it and said, “Wrong. The name isn’t Crukston.” She put the glass down and turned toward me. “That’s what I want you to do for me. You’ll be questioned. Can you forget that I was a
t Greg’s yesterday, and that he introduced me as his wife?”

  I didn’t say anything, so she went on, “Oh, we were planning to be married, vaguely. I’ve had those plans before; and we did tell Gordon Trist we were married, to get Greg out of a spot.” She took another drink, not very tidily. “I couldn’t stand that kind of publicity, Bailey. I’d be washed up.”

  “How do I know you didn’t kill him, angel? It’s a murder rap, and I’d be under oath. If they caught me, I’d have a long, long time to wonder if you were worth it.”

  “I didn’t kill him, and you know it!

  If I had stayed in the bedroom the other morning, like I wanted to, you’d have thought Greg was alone. I’m the only one in the world who could contradict you if you tell the story the way I want it told.”

  “Did Mrs. Trist think you two were married?”

  “Of course not . . .” She stopped suddenly and paled, “Oh, Lord, what if he told her? He said he wouldn’t.”

  “Had Crukston been playing her?”

  She, hesitated and said, “I don’t know.”

  “Baby, if you want to play, let’s share our toys. Was Trist right about his wife and Crukston?”

  “He didn’t brag about it, but I think the answer is yes.”

  I stood up. “Thanks. I think you just put the finger on two murders.”

  “I’m not interested in who murdered who! God, and I thought all good-looking heels were actors.”

  “Does anybody—” I asked, “friends, bellhops, maids—know that you were at Crukston’s when I was there yesterday?”

  She looked worried. She stood up with me and looked at me steadily for a long moment. “Yes, damn you,” she whispered. “The bellhop, a hard-nosed little beast. He saw me just after you left.”

  I nodded, and I noticed that her eyes were green, and that they looked like honest eyes, and she had told me the truth when a lie would have been just as easy and twice as safe.

  I smiled and said, “You told me the truth.”

  She laughed a nervous little laugh and said, “I hate you, Bailey . . . I was afraid to lie to you.”

  “You won’t have any trouble with little hard-nose. And as far as I’m concerned, I didn’t see you at Crukston’s. Thanks a lot, but it’s free.”

  She took a couple of steps slowly, a little deliberately, and put her arms around my neck.

  “This is a debt of honor, Stu; don’t ask me to welsh on it.”

  She was a little thing, and her back was hard and smooth under my hands. But something was wrong. It was the ash tray. It was still in my pocket, and it was pressing against a bone.

  I whispered, “Just a minute, beautiful.” I took the tray out and started to throw it on the davenport. That was when I saw it. It didn’t hit me suddenly. At first it was just a realization that something was wrong. And then I knew what it was. The scratch that I had put on the bottom of the tray was gone. It was smooth as glass, I took Rita Rogell’s hands from around my neck and went into the kitchen.

  Rita Rogell yelled, “Hey!”

  I got out a knife and scratched the tray, and then I tried to rub the mark away. But the mark wouldn’t rub away. It was there for good, as the mark on the bottom of the other tray had been.

  I went back into the living room and sat down. I had never really believed the ash tray meant anything. And now here it was, the key to murder. Not the one I held in my hand, but the one that was lifted while I lay in the corridor below Sara Franzen’s apartment.

  RITA ROGELL didn’t understand.

  She thought I was being nasty. She put on her coat, and at the door she said, “Chum, you’ve let that technique of yours get the best of you. It’s become an end in itself. I leave you with it.” She slammed the door as she went out, but I wasn’t paying much attention, because the idea was taking shape. It looked good at first, I don’t know why. By the time I had called Landis Berry, it was beginning to look sick. Berry was an industrial chemist. We had gone to school together for a while. He kept going and got himself a Ph.D.

  After some small talk, I said, “Would it be possible to carve a knife out of plastic and stab someone through the heart with it?”

  “Sure. Steel works even better.”

  “Yeah. Then could you drop that knife into boiling water and get it soft enough to mold it into something else?”

  “Stu, there are plastics and there are plastics. Some you couldn’t touch with boiling water; others would soften up in lukewarm water.”

  But by that time I was thinking again, and was anxious to pretend it was someone else’s idea—the third moron from the end. I said, “Thanks, Landis; it was just a vague idea I had.”

  “Let me know if it works.”

  We hung up.

  You’ve got a right to know. The idea I had was that someone carved a dagger out of plastic. They stabbed Trist with it, dropped it into the teapot, and later, while we were waiting for the Homicide crew to arrive, removed it and molded it into an ash tray. I hadn’t had any breakfast, there was still a bump on my head, I’d been breathing Rita Rogell’s fifty-dollar-an-ounce perfume . . . and someone had taken the trouble to remove a dime-store ash tray from my pocket and substitute another.

  I was out in the kitchen telling myself I should be thinking, and not knowing how to begin, when the answer hit me. Not slowly, as ideas usually come to me, but with a swift and chilling abruptness that took my breath away and left me standing there with an ice cube in my hand until the coldness of it began to hurt.

  I left the drink unmade and went in and sat down and stared at the floor. I wasn’t thinking really, because I was inarticulate before the beauty, the cunning, the utter terrifying simplicity of the method used to kill a man in a room full of witnesses, the witnesses to become suspects, and the case to become boggled in a hunt for a weapon that didn’t exist.

  After a while I went back in and finished making the drink. I was shaking a little, possibly with excitement, but the edge was wearing away, because I didn’t have the ash tray. And without it I was just a man with a theory. Then I realized that I knew who had killed Trist, and I knew where I would find the ash tray. . . if it wasn’t too late.

  It took me eight minutes to drive to Sara Franzen’s apartment. The stout lady wasn’t walking her poodle, so I called from the alcove phone. No one answered. I pushed a couple of other buttons, the door buzzed, and I went in. The elevator was waiting. I got off at six, walked up the stairs and knocked quietly. She wasn’t home or she wasn’t answering doors. I went back down to the sixth floor, went along the hall past the elevator, hesitating a little at the place where the stairs went down to the right, and walked on down to the emergency fire door. I opened it and looked out. No one standing around minding my business. I took the fire escape to the roof. It was quiet up there, and hot with the afternoon sun. The roof met Sara Franzen’s apartment at about window height. I walked over, the gravel-crusted roofing cracking and complaining under my feet. I tried three windows before I found one that was unlocked. It opened into the kitchen, a bright yellow little room without any dirty dishes visible.

  I climbed in and then stood still and waited. Traffic hummed distantly, and from somewhere below a radio agonized over the dull thrum of a vacuum cleaner.

  I went on into the living room. No one there. I looked in the single bedroom. Neat, not too fussy and unoccupied. I went back into the living room and started the search.

  I found it. It was tucked down in one of the deep chairs between the cushion and the back. That was that. It would be nice to go on from there and wrap the case up, like a real-life private detective. I even gave it a couple seconds of thought. But it was time for me to step out; I had a living to make and some good will to collect. I drove down to the City Hall and looked up Quint.

  BUT Quint was a skeptic. He didn’t like my choice of a villain, and he wanted to see it work just the way I said it had been done before he’d believe it. But while we were talking I saw a gleam come into his eye, and Quint
had an inspiration. I had planted the seed of that inspiration as carefully as I knew how, but I hadn’t expected it to flower.

  By five-thirty that afternoon we were on our way out to the pink stucco house in Westwood. The butler was back again, and he ushered us into the Trist library. There was a fire in the grate, a smell of whisky-sour in the air, and two women getting up to greet us.

  Sara Fran ten smiled. Mrs. Trist looked gracefully mournful, but there was a pinched weariness in her face that made it seem genuine. She found us a couple of seats, sat down and looked at us expectantly.

  Quint said, looking more at Sara Franzen than at Mrs. Trist, “Mr. Bailey thinks he’s found the answer for us. He believes that Mr. Crukston was the one who killed Mr. Trist.”

  Sara Franzen frowned and looked over at me.

  Mrs. Trist stared blankly and said, “Oh, no!”

  “Who else could it be, Mrs. Trist?”

  “I——Oh, it’s just that——” She stopped—maybe because she had heard the front door open.

  Freddie came in, looked around, and said, “Making an arrest, or is this just a social call?”

  Sara Franzen said quietly, “Sit down, Freddie.”

  Freddie sat down.

  Quint went on, “That’s just Mr. Bailey’s theory, of course. The department isn’t ready yet to arrest Crukston.” That had been a part of Quint’s inspiration. He watched the three faces. No one looked trapped, no one blurted out the guilty knowledge that Crukston was dead. They listened politely. “But the reason we’re here, Mrs. Trist, is to try out another theory of Mr. Bailey’s. He thinks he’s found the weapon.”

  Freddie had been looking bored. He was suddenly interested now.

  Quint droned on, “We’d like your permission to test the theory here, Mrs. Trist, so the conditions will be the same.”

  Mrs. Trist agreed readily enough, and Quint assured them that he knew they were all anxious to help. We were on our way into the living room. No, no, it was quite all right for them all to be present. Quint was sure they would be able to help correct any errors in Mr. Bailey’s theory. He was almost smiling, and being as subtle as a Mickey Finn. But no one seemed to notice. Quint took the wing chair and the others sat on the chesterfield. It was crowded on the chesterfield, but no one seemed to want to sit in the barrel chair where Gordon Trist had died.