The rest, as they say, is history.
I figured already that Copel had found the withheld photos of Adrian in Eddie’s apartment, recognized the woman and the potential in them, and pocketed them. He would’ve already heard on the grapevine that Crazy Al killed Eddie, and put two and two together. His next step was to try and sell his newfound photos to Manzetti—whose mania put an end to that and all of Copel’s other little schemes.
The ice in Marcie’s glass had melted. She drank the watery liquor and asked in a voice that was fatigued, defeated, lifeless, if that was all, if I would please leave and let her alone, let her sleep. It wasn’t quite all.
“Why did you go to Adrian this afternoon?”
“I … I don’t know … .”
So I grabbed her by the upper arms and tossed her into the couch. Tough guy. I also wrestle bunnies, barehanded. “Then make something up,” I snapped, “but make it good.”
“All right,” she wailed. “With everything, I thought I’d at least tell her that Eddie was dead, okay? Put her mind at ease a little. She wasn’t anything to me, she wasn’t worth anything to me anymore, but there was no point in letting her spend the rest of her life worrying.”
“Aren’t you good?” I came up off the couch and crossed the room.
“Where’re you going?” Marcie wanted to know, and her voice suddenly lost the weariness it had held.
“I wanted to get busy on your Nobel Prize nomination,” I said and picked up the scarred brown suitcase.
“You put that down,” she said threateningly. But impotently, and we both knew it.
I opened the case. It still held the camera case, as well as the jeans and shirt that had been in Bell’s closet. I picked up the camera case, unzipped it.
Right on top was the crumpled brown envelope that Morris Copel had given me the night before last, before he died in my living room. And inside were the strips of negatives I’d given to Adrian Mallory the following morning.
Marcie Bell had grown very quiet. I put down the camera case and the suitcase and waved the envelope at her in true Perry Mason style. “This is what you went after, isn’t it? When I told you how Eddie died, you knew what he’d done, and when you didn’t find the pictures at Eddie’s today you knew that left only two possibilities: Copel took them or I did. And either way, the odds were good that I had them—unless I’d done something stupid like give them to Adrian. If I gave them to her, you knew you could weasel them out of her—you knew she was crazy about you. And if I hadn’t, then you figured you’d eventually weasel them out of me, because I was getting to be pretty crazy about you myself.
“But Adrian was the softer touch, so you started there. And you told her about Eddie’s death. And you told her why he was dead, all about Manzetti, and maybe you even let her know how it was all going to fall apart for her father on account of the Mob. But probably she figured that part out for herself. Just as she figured she’d fucked it all up for good—everything: her life, her father’s life, his career, you name it.”
I threw the envelope at her. She flinched, but it came nowhere near her. “Whose idea was it to cash it in, Marcie? Did Adrian come up with that herself, or did you plant the notion in her anguished brain? Did you two sit around the apartment, her getting sloshed on Scotch while you nursed along a bourbon, and discuss the various merits and demerits of assorted suicide methods? Which of you decided on the blade? Which of you ran the bath? Which of you held the razor and opened the veins?” My voice had grown too loud for the small room; I realized it when Marcie’s voice came and was barely a whisper.
“She killed herself. I was with her, I held her when she did it, I steadied her hand and I waited until she was gone—but she killed herself.”
“Fine distinction,” I muttered.
Marcie tilted her head back, eyes closed, mouth drawn half open. “What happens now? The police?”
What indeed? My civic responsibility was clear; hand her over to the law and let justice weave its tortuous if not torturous course. Which is an attractive proposition only if you have a fairly solid belief in the correlation of law and justice, which I do not, not all the time. Frankly, I couldn’t see what good any of it—or anything, for that matter—would do at this point. So I lowered my voice and tried to sound like Robert Mitchum. “No police,” I said, “if you play ball. I don’t want to see you again, ever, under any circumstances, and the best way you can ensure that is to blow on out of this burg and never come back. Got it?”
She didn’t budge.
“Got it?”
Languidly she lowered her bruised chin and raised her eyelashes. “Yeah, I got it. And if I leave you’ll keep the police off my back?”
“No guarantees, lady. They won’t get your name from me, but whatever they come up with on their own they come up with on their own.”
She nodded slowly, smiled in a superior, self-satisfied, defiant way, and said, “You know I’d probably walk out of a courtroom.”
“Maybe you would,” I allowed. “But then again, who knows. And even if you did walk, you might have to hang around behind bars a hell of a long time before you did. That is, if the Mob let it get that far. But it’s your neck, punkin, your choice.”
“You damn son of a bitch. I’ll go.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Little remained to be done. I left Marcie Bell’s apartment quickly, as if I couldn’t leave quickly enough, and entered the windy world. Down these breezy streets a man must go. I paused at the door of my car and looked up. It seemed even later than it was, on account of the skies having darkened so early. Now they were even darker, half-hidden by black, smoky clouds. The wind, strong as ever, still carried the scent of rain, but continued to hold out on the promise.
I got in the car and went around the block to the Paradise Lounge. It’s one of those cool, dark bars that hasn’t anything going for it except it’s a bar. There’s no floor show, unless you count the color television; no entertainment, unless you count the jukebox and small square of linoleum, much too shiny to have ever had many dancers use it. Of course, the place was nearly deserted, and the lack of attractions may have been why.
At the rear was a pay phone, and that was attraction enough for me. I rang up Mallory’s campaign headquarters. It was late, but they should’ve been working late, I figured. I figured right; I recognized Frank Schell’s voice on the other end.
“Nebraska,” I said. “Get me Mallory.”
“The senator isn’t here,” Schell said guardedly. “Perhaps I can help you …”
“I doubt it, Slim. But I wouldn’t sweat it. If I were you I’d be worrying about whether I could help Mallory. Whether I could save his skin. Not to mention my own.”
“I’m … not sure I catch your drift,” Schell said amiably, and I realized he must’ve been within others’ earshot. “Can you be a little more specific?”
“Can and will. You and Mallory meet me at his daughter’s apartment in”—I checked my watch, for no good reason—“half an hour.”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible. The senator’s speaking at a fundraiser tonight. In fact, he’s probably in the middle of his remarks right now.”
“In the middle of the last remarks he’ll ever make as an officeholder, you mean,” I said tightly. “Half an hour.” I hung up on any reply.
I gave the machine another quarter and called the Walnut Hill station. It was a longish shot, but Oberon seemed to be on night shift these days. Or had been: a somewhat flustered desk sergeant finally allowed as Oberon wasn’t available. I hung up on him, consulted my wristwatch again, then the phone book, figuring Oberon would forgive me the late hour when he heard what I had to tell him. I fished for another coin and phoned his house.
Oberon answered on the second ring. “Yeah.”
I identified myself and apologized for calling at an hour when respectable people are
asleep, or getting ready to be.
“Skip it,” Oberon said curtly. “I was up. What’s the problem?”
“No problem. Just the opposite, in fact. I think we can put the kibosh on the whole Copel-Bell-Manzetti thing tonight.”
“I told you once already, ’bo, there isn’t any Copel-Bell-Manzetti thing anymore.”
“Yeah, but this has gone beyond that now, Ben,” I said. “It turns out that Bell was involved in a blackmail scheme. On account of it he got involved with Crazy Al, and on account of that he got dead. Copel fits in because he tumbled to what Bell was up to and tried to pick up where Bell fell down. With the same results.”
Oberon’s voice was slow in returning to the wire. When it did, it sounded more tired than it had the day before, in Oberon’s office. Worry started gnawing at my guts. Oberon said, “You don’t get it, pal, do you? No one cares about Copel or Bell. They’re small fry. Too small for our glorious police division to get worked up over.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Ben. Yes, Bell and Copel are nothing to get bent out of shape over. But they were involved in something big, very big, and something very, very important. That’s why you got leaned on to back off the case: someone was worried where you might end up.”
“Oh, yeah? And where might I end up.” He’d been at the bottle, damn it; I wasn’t getting anywhere.
“I’m at a pay phone,” I told him, hoping he was sober enough to realize that meant I couldn’t talk freely. I gave him Adrian’s address and told him to meet me there in a half hour. “We can have this thing wrapped up in forty-five minutes,” I assured him.
“Look, pal, take my advice: forget the whole thing. It’s not worth the energy to bust your buttons on it and just get slapped down. Or worse.”
“Ben, what are you talking about?”
“What I’m talking about is that if the big shots don’t want you snooping around in their business, you shouldn’t go snooping around in their business. If you’re fond of breathing, that is. You yourself said this is big enough that someone put the arm on the division to bench the investigation. You think I didn’t know that? You think that I could spend fifteen years on the force and not know a rat when I smell one? Shit, no. But if it’s that big, it’s bigger than both of us, buddy. And I don’t know about you, but I got a wife and three kids and a mortgage to look out for.” There was a long silence. I listened to it, stunned. When Oberon’s voice came back it sounded a long, long ways away. “I turned in my badge today,” he said simply.
“Ah, Ben …”
“I don’t know why, either, I mean, I know why—I just don’t have the stomach for that kind of bullshit anymore—but I don’t know if it’s because of them doing it or me being too gutless to do anything about them doing it, you know?”
I knew. “Ben, if we blow the cover off this, they won’t be able to touch you. We’ll get the goods on anyone involved in the thing. We’ll take it to the city commission—hell, the unicameral—make sure it gets on the news—”
Oberon was laughing, but there was no humor in it. “God, you’re an optimist, all right. What makes you think you know how far something like this can extend? This is a clean town, at least it has that reputation, but is it only because the dirt’s well hidden? Think about it, pal. But do yourself a favor: just think about it. Or write it up into a book and send me a copy sometime.”
“Ben—”
“Autograph it for me, too, okay?”
“Ben—”
The phone went dead in my hand. I cradled the receiver and rested my head on the wall beside the square, squat phone. A woman’s name and number were scratched into the fake wood paneling. I felt like calling her up and asking if I could come over. I certainly didn’t want to have to go to Adrian’s. I didn’t want to see what she looked like by now. I didn’t want to have to think about it anymore. I wanted to go home and go to bed and wake up somewhere else, someone else, someone who had never been in this line of work and never would be. Too much was happening, too much was turning to dust and collapsing when I touched it. Too much.
Somebody had fed the jukebox. A song whose words I didn’t know but whose tune was hauntingly familiar all the same reverberated mildly in the dark and followed me out onto the street. The song was about people moving into and out of each other’s lives, about saying hello and saying goodbye, saying goodbye to Hollywood … .
This sure as hell wasn’t Hollywood, but I could certainly relate to the sentiment.
People with more sense than me were staying off the streets. The WOW announcer said tornadoes had been sighted in the area, but none officially. Let’s hope it rains, he said, because tornadoes can’t strike when it’s raining. Uh-huh.
For a fat man, Frank Schell could get a move on when properly motivated. I had to sit in the car listening to the radio and the wind for only five or six minutes before I saw him and Mallory, huddled against the elements, hands buried in topcoat pockets, scurry into Adrian’s building. I decided to give them some time. I gave them close to ten minutes, then ran to the building. The security door was locked. Mallory must’ve had a key, which they used to get in. I didn’t; I tried the buzzer. Again I recognized Schell’s voice, even over the tinny speaker, even as shaken as it was.
“Ye-ess?”
“Nebraska. Let me in.”
“I don’t—”
“There should be another button on the speaker box. Hit it.”
He must’ve found it, for the door buzzed and I ducked through it. Schell waited at the elevators on Adrian’s floor. His moon face, previously a bright shade of pink, was now the color of soiled linen. His yellow hair looked sweat-dirty, lifeless. His fingers were in constant nervous motion, like animated bratwurst. “She’s dead,” he blurted before I got off the lift. “Adrian. Nebraska, she killed herself.”
“No kidding.” I went past and let him dog-trot after me up the hallway. The door to Adrian’s apartment was open five or six inches. I went in, took a quick inventory of the kitchen and living room, and found Mallory where I’d expected him to be: next to his daughter.
Dan Mallory sat on the carpeted floor next to the tub, his back against the toilet, his eyes looking at nothing on the opposite wall. His right arm was drenched to the elbow. The hand was underwater, holding one of Adrian’s hands. The water was a lot darker than it had been before, and Adrian was a lot paler, bluish and … bloated. I tried not to look at her.
It was harder to look at Mallory. He’d turned old since that afternoon, nothing like the man I’d watched stride triumphantly, confidently, into his campaign headquarters that day. The skin of his face was curiously nerveless, slack, boneless. His forehead was coated with a patina of sweat, but that may have been because he still wore his topcoat.
“She’s gone,” he said, and it was the sound of anguish. “Gone.” He looked at me, through me. “And you knew it, too, you son of a bitch. Didn’t you? You set this up so I’d come and find her … find her … like this.” The bleary eyes spilled over. “You wanted me to see her like this, didn’t you, you motherfucker? Didn’t you?”
I looked from Mallory to the corpse to Schell, whose eyes were locked on the body the way a kid will be glued to a monster movie on the tube. I looked back. She no longer was beautiful. She no longer looked peaceful. She looked horrible. She looked—dead.
“You better believe it,” I said to Mallory with such sudden, unexpected vehemence that I felt my muscles tighten and jerk. “I wanted you to see it just as it is, the slashes, the bloody water, everything. Not in the antiseptic surroundings of the morgue. Here. Where she died. Where you killed her.”
“You bastard!” he yelled and, with a splash of red water, started to scramble to his feet, no doubt to punch me in the nose. But he wasn’t very agile and managed only an ungainly crouch before I shoved him back against the toilet, which he tripped over and then sat down on, hard. He was luck
y the lid was down. “You bastard,” he repeated. “You can’t talk to me that way. I’m a United States senator—”
“For the time being. And I can get away with it, because it’s true. You killed her. You killed her just as surely as if you’d stood here and opened her veins for her.”
Mallory sat on the can, bunched over as if he was going to launch himself off it and butt me in the belly, panting heavily as if exerting himself. His eyes were locked predatorily on me. Not accusingly: hatefully.
I said, “Do you have any idea how much I admired you, how much everyone admired you? Your integrity, your humanity, your vision. The decency with which you seemed to conduct your life. It went beyond all that Camelot crap back then. Yes, you went to Washington during those times, as a part of all that, but you transcended it. You carried the torch, the ideal, after Camelot disappeared. And you illustrated how it could be, how it ought to be.
“Except that it was a lie, all of it, at the root.”
I turned to Schell. “It was you who got me to thinking. This afternoon. You told me not to worry about Adrian and the pictures and the election. You told me Mallory wouldn’t let anything stand in his way. That wasn’t the half of it. Mallory never let anything stand in his way.” I went back to Mallory, who hadn’t budged. “Back in that first campaign you wouldn’t let the lack of money stand in your way. You were sunk, but you wouldn’t let that stop you.”
“We found the money,” Mallory said. “You were there, you remember. A large donation …”
“Anonymous donation. And how well-timed! It never occurred to me to question it, to wonder who the money came from, why he’d stayed in the background until it was almost too late, and how he happened to come forward when he did.”
The Nebraska Quotient (A Nebraska Mystery Book 1) Page 18
