MacNeill said, “You want me to turn her over?”
“No. Don’t touch anything.” I looked around. “All her effects are here?”
“Yes, sir,” he said eagerly. “She just had that one little suitcase there, and a purse.”
“Where’s the purse?”
“I put it in the safe, in the office.”
“Where was it? When you came in here, where did you find it?”
“On the dresser, right beside the suitcase.”
“Before we call the police, put it back where it was.”
MacNeill licked his lips and glanced toward Kerrigan. “We’re going to call the cops?”
Kerrigan shrugged. “If he says so. He’s the boss.”
“I was hoping—”
Kerrigan said, “You think the publicity’s going to hurt? It’s going to help, pal. Everybody’ll want to stay at the murder motel.”
Hopefully, MacNeill said, “You think so?”
I walked on back to the bathroom and glanced inside it. There was a soap wrapper in the wastebasket, nothing more. In the closet were a lot of wire hangers, two holding dresses and one holding a pair of slacks. Nothing on the shelf. A pair of woman’s loafers on the floor. Nothing in the loafers. A pair of stockings hung over a hook on the closet’s rear wall.
I took a quick look around the room, while MacNeill and Kerrigan watched me, and found nothing of interest. When I was done I said, “All right. This is all of it?”
“There’s her car, too.”
“Her car?”
“It’s still out front,” MacNeill said. “A little pale blue Mustang.”
“Let’s go look at it.”
Outside, white lines on the blacktop showed where the guests should angle-park their cars facing the doors of the rooms. The pale blue Mustang was neatly between its white lines, clean and alert, windows rolled down, ready to spurt away as needed. The sun had set completely now, and there was a kind of grayish-green light in the air. Up atop the slope the big rigs still rumbled east and west. A car was just pulling in beside the limousine down at the other end of the motel, near the office. Seeing me look at it, MacNeill said, “My wife’ll take care of them.”
“I’ll want to talk to her later,” I said.
“Yes, sir.”
The interior of the Mustang had nothing to offer beyond a pair of white gloves in the glove compartment and a copy of the Atlantic Monthly on the back seat. But when I went around to the back the keys were there, stuck into the trunk lock.
MacNeill said, “Look at that! I didn’t notice that before.”
“Did you come around this end of the car before?”
“No.”
“Then they were here.” I said to Kerrigan, “She had the money in the trunk, in another suitcase or a bag or something. He was in too much of a hurry to go put the keys back in her purse.”
MacNeill said, “But he went and took the room key with him.”
“Not very far,” I said. “He would have thrown it into some grass somewhere along the line.” A stout woman, jangling keys, was coming toward us, followed at a snail’s pace by the new car, an elderly black Buick with a very nervous young couple in it. I said to MacNeill, “Where can we sit and talk?”
“We have an apartment in back of the office,” he said. To the stout woman, just then reaching us, he said, “Betsy, these are the men from New York. They want to talk to you when you get a minute.”
Betsy—which was a bad name for her—had the beetle-browed look of a woman who’s spent years driving her man the way skinners drive mules and who has been worn out by it. She gave us a graceless nod of acknowledgement, said, “When I get a chance,” and plodded on by us. We stepped out of the way of the Buick, which passed us with the young couple blinking constantly and looking straight ahead.
We walked on back to the office, where MacNeill led us around behind the counter and through a curtained doorway into a small living room crammed with bulky furniture which twenty years ago had been purchased for a room twice this size. MacNeill sat us down and then tried to play host for a minute or two, offering us coffee, beer, ashtrays, a drink, whatever we wanted, until I said, “What I want is to talk to you for a minute.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Of course, you’re right.” He sat down at once and clasped his hands in his lap.
I said, “What kind of description can you give me of the man?”
He blinked. “What man?”
“The man she came with,” I said.
“Oh, no,” he said. “She came by herself. She said somebody would be meeting her in a couple of days, but if he ever showed up I didn’t see him.”
Kerrigan said, “From the looks of things, he showed up.”
MacNeill said, “Is that right? You think he was the one?”
I said, “When did she get here?”
“Monday, just about this time.”
It was now Thursday. I said to Kerrigan, “Would that be right? When did she take off?”
“Our friend found the note Monday night. He’d seen her Saturday night.”
“All right.” I looked back at MacNeill. “So she came here Monday. Did she pick this place because she knew you were connected with the mob or was it just coincidence?”
MacNeill winced at the word “mob,” so I suppose whatever he did in that area of his life he’d worked out a good rationalization for it, one in which he wasn’t really connected with the mob.
It was Kerrigan who answered me, saying, “Rembek does a lot of traveling. He might have stopped here with her once or twice and she remembered it. She wouldn’t have known about any link-up.”
MacNeill nodded eagerly, glad of something to talk about. “That’s right,” he said, “Mister Rembek has stopped here several times. I don’t know if this particular young lady was ever with him, but I do remember Mister Rembek. He has a car like the one you gentlemen came in.”
I said, “Back to the girl. What name did she use?”
“Rita Manners.”
I asked him to spell the last name, which he did, and then Kerrigan asked me what difference the spelling made. I said, “None in particular. She was just doing a pun, and I wondered how far she pushed it.”
“A pun?”
“Her name was Castle. A castle’s a big house. So’s a manor. Rita Manor. But she didn’t want a name that called attention to itself, so she made it Rita Manners, with the normal spelling.”
“What difference does it make?”
“It tells me something about who she was,” I said. “It may help to know about her, so I can maybe figure out what would have been her idea of a real man.”
He made a blunt suggestion. I said, “No. Already I know she was more complicated than that.”
MacNeill’s wife came in, then, making the room seem even smaller than before, and muttering to no one in particular, “If those two are married I’m the Queen of Sheba.”
MacNeill patted the sofa beside himself, saying, “Sit down, Betsy.”
She settled with an audible grunt, thudding backward into the seat and then adjusting herself, pulling the faded skirt down over her thick knees. “If the bell rings,” she said, “I’ll have to go get it.”
“This won’t take long,” I said. “Which one of you checked the girl in?”
MacNeill said, “I did.”
“How long did she take the room for?”
“Just one day at a time. Each morning she came and paid for another day.”
“Did she ever talk with either of you?”
“Chatted like a magpie with me when I was changing the linen,” the wife said. “Asking me about movie houses, how did I like Allentown, had I ever been out West, all of that.”
Mrs. MacNeill had clearly disliked Rita Castle, but I thought I could put that down to impersonal jealousy, the junkman’s nag hating the passing thoroughbred. I said, “Did she spend a lot of time in her room?”
She said, “Nearly all. I think she went out to a m
ovie or somewheres Tuesday night, she asked me what was playing down in town, but that was all.”
MacNeill said, “There’s a diner just down the street here to the right, the opposite way from the highway. We usually send our guests there if they ask for a place, and that’s where she had all her meals.”
“That we know of,” said Mrs. MacNeill.
I said to her, “Do you think she went other places?”
But it had just been the innuendo of jealousy. She said, “No, I guess not. Spent all her time right here. Waiting for somebody.”
“A man,” I said. “And neither of you saw him show up?”
Mrs. MacNeill said, “This time of year, we can count on filling up by eleven, eleven-thirty. We’re in bed ourselves by midnight, our room’s back through there. If anybody came in after that, we wouldn’t hear it unless they rang the bell by the office door.”
“All right,” I said. “Now I’d like to see her purse.”
MacNeill got it and handed it to me. It was a white doeskin pouch, a larger version of a medieval purse, with a thong drawstring to close the top. Inside were the usual paraphernalia, tissues and lipstick and compact and books of matches and so on, plus a wallet of the same pale blue as the Mustang.
The wallet added a number of facts. It contained a driver’s license which gave me her age—twenty-four—and her physical description. Also current membership cards m two of the actors’ unions, Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, SAG and AFTRA. Also an outdated membership card in the third actors’ union, Equity, the union for performers in legitimate theater. Also a New York Public Library card from the Cathedral Branch on Lexington Avenue. Also three pictures of children, smiling and squinting in bright sunlight somewhere where the land is very flat and treeless and the horizon is far away.
When I was done with the purse, I gave it back to MacNeill and told him, “Be sure and put it back before you call the police.”
Mrs. MacNeill began to complain at once, objecting to the idea of police. Why didn’t we merely take the body away and hide it somewhere?
I said, “I was hired to find out who did this. It will help me if the police are brought in. Their lab men and technicians may pick up a lot of information in that room that I couldn’t possibly get myself.” I glanced at Kerrigan and said, “And I imagine you people have channels to get their information back to me.”
He nodded. “Whatever they know,” he said, “you’ll know five minutes later.”
Mrs. MacNeill said, a whine in her voice, “You put us in an awful bad position, mister. How do we explain how come we didn’t call them right away?”
“You do call them right away,” I said. “I don’t like having to fake any of the circumstances, but it will throw them off less if we do. If we tried telling the truth, the investigating officers would get off on a bad tangent right away and they might never get back on the track.”
“So what do we do?”
“You make one small change. Yesterday Miss Castle paid for two days. She came in and said, ‘Looks like I’ll be here longer than I thought,’ and she paid two days in advance. You change that on your books.”
MacNeill nodded. “That’s no problem,” he said.
“This morning,” I said, “the Do Not Disturb sign was hanging on the door, so you didn’t go in to change the linen. In fact, you still haven’t.” I looked at my watch: six-twenty. “About nine o’clock tonight,” I said, “you will be sufficiently worried and disturbed to take a chance on opening the door. You’ll find the body, and you’ll immediately call the police. And do it, go through the whole thing. Go down to that room and knock on the door and call her name and very reluctantly open the door. Come out nervous and upset and run back to the office to make the call.”
MacNeill said, “In case somebody’s watching.”
“Right. And the only thing unusual that happened today was that a chauffeur-driven limousine stopped, the two passengers started to take a room, looked at it first, and changed their mind. Mention that only if you’re asked.”
“Yes, sir.” MacNeill was smiling with relief, seeing how it could all get straightened out after all.
Kerrigan said, “What about us? Do we stay here or what?”
I said, “No. We may want to come back in a day or two, I don’t know. Right now we want to get back to the city.”
Before we left, I said to MacNeill, “Remember not before nine o’clock. I need time to get some things done at the other end.”
He promised, and we went out to the car and headed back for New York.
seven
THE APARTMENT IN WHICH Rita Castle had been maintained was two blocks south and one half block east of Ernie Rembek’s official residence. I wondered if he had ever walked it.
The building was similar to the other, and the apartment was on an even higher floor, the twenty-third. A very wide living room had broad drape-framed windows facing west, giving a panoramic view of midtown high over the black bunched tops of the brownstones that filled out the block westward, looking from way up here like pieces in a grimy Monopoly game. Wine and white were the dominant colors in the room, with wine carpeting and a white sofa the largest blocks of color. A large op art abstraction in shades of gray, with white lines, stood all alone on one long off-white wall. The wall opposite was broken up with doors and doorways, leading to—in order from the entrance—a closet, a small but beautifully equipped kitchen, and a long narrow bedroom with its own panoramic view of the city. A tiny green bathroom with a shower but no tub was off the bedroom. From its position, and the presence of a fan high in one wall, I assumed it shared an airshaft with the kitchen, since neither had any windows.
The living room was as impersonal as a psychiatrist’s office and as luxurious as a resort hotel, but in the bedroom Rita Castle had permitted herself some expression of individuality. The Hollywood bed was covered by a patchwork quilt that looked oddly innocent and old-fashioned and which had certainly been homemade. The shelf at the bottom of the night table was stacked full of a sloppy pile of books and magazines. There were copies of Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Evergreen Review, Playboy and Cosmopolitan. The books, all paperback, included no fiction of any kind, but were fact books of a wide assortment, ranging from studies of Greek mythology through surveys of nymphomania and Lesbianism to biographies of current political figures.
On the bed itself were two more pieces of reading matter: last week’s Variety and the magazine section of last Sunday’s Times, the latter open to the crossword puzzle, which had been about half filled in. And, finally, on the floor at the foot of the bed was a stack of hardcover editions of Broadway plays.
The bedroom also contained a vanity table and a dresser, both full of things appropriate to a young woman whose looks were of paramount importance. Tucked in a corner of the bottom drawer of the dresser were some letters from Rita Castle’s mother, postmarked East Grange, South Dakota. The letters were newsy, but here and there they betrayed the mother’s uneasiness that her daughter’s life in New York City contained elements that were being hidden from the family. There were no references to anyone at all in New York; if Rita had mentioned any of her city friends in her own letters, the mother showed no sign of it.
There was a pastel-blue telephone on the night table, with an address book beside it, containing surprisingly few entries. I copied down what names, addresses, and phone numbers there were, and put the address book back where I’d found it.
The kitchen contained one more book; the I Hate To Cook Book, by Peg Bracken. Refrigerator and cabinet contained only foods that could be prepared quickly and with a minimum of bother; it was obvious that no real meals were ever eaten here.
Piled on the shelf in the bedroom closet were television and movie scripts, each with certain lines underlined in red pencil; apparently Rita Castle actually had done some acting from time to time, though financially she obviously didn’t have to.
Kerrigan
sat patiently in the living room until I was finished. We’d entered the apartment at five to eight, and by twenty to nine I was done. “All right,” I said. “That’s all here.”
Kerrigan got to his feet and stretched, saying, “You getting anywhere?”
“I’m starting,” I said. “Did you know this girl?”
He shrugged. “I saw her with Ernie a few times.”
“What did you think of her?”
“I don’t know. She acted like the original dumb bunny, you know? The real feeble-minded broad. But I think it was a put-on.”
“For Rembek?”
“Maybe partly. I think she was a sharp girl; I think down inside there she had a quick brain. Sometimes I thought she was doing the dumb bunny as a put-on for herself.”
“Playing the part.”
“Right.”
“Do you have the note she left?”
“No, Ernie has that.”
“I want to see it again. As I remember it, it had that dumb-bunny sound. It didn’t lead me to expect…” I gestured toward the bedroom. “She was more complicated than the note sounded.”
“I never thought she rang a hundred-percent true,” Kerrigan said. “But she wasn’t any trouble, and if she got a kick out of putting Ernie on, that was up to them.”
“Get me the note, all right?”
“Will do. Where do we go from here?”
“I go home. You go back to Rembek and get some more things set up. First you arrange it so the police do get to Rembek through this apartment, and they get to him right away. Then he can give them the story about his friend on the West Coast.”
“You’ve got a reason for this?”
“Yes. I want to cover myself, not to get myself off any hooks but just to keep myself from being a red herring for the investigating officers. I want them to be able to concentrate on the killing itself and not waste their time wondering what I’m up to.”
“Fine. How do we do that?”
I said, “This morning the man on the West Coast phoned Rembek, he said the girl who’d been staying in his apartment seemed to have disappeared. There wasn’t anything between him and the girl, but he did wonder if there was any trouble she was in or anything like that and would Rembek, being right here in town, check it out for him. Rembek said yes, had people look around, and when it seemed as though the girl really had disappeared, he hired me to look for her. That’s why I went to see Rembek this afternoon and why Rembek’s chauffeur drove me home. This evening I talked long-distance with the man on the West Coast—you’ll have to get me his name—from Rembek’s apartment, and then I came here and looked around. I will now go home and call a friend of mine in Missing Persons and see if anybody has reported her missing.”
Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death Page 4
