Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death

by Donald E. Westlake

  Next was Louis Hogan, occupation union official, who had driven back to New York Wednesday night from Washington, arriving home at two-thirty in the morning. Allentown would not have been too much of a detour for him to make.

  Then Joseph Lydon, occupation realtor, who claimed to have been with his mistress from eight-thirty Wednesday evening till two-fifteen Thursday morning, in her apartment. She was hardly a witness whose unsubstantiated word could count for much.

  And finally Paul Einhorn, occupation airline executive, who claimed to have been pub-crawling by himself Wednesday night and who didn’t know exactly what time he’d gotten home except that it was after the bars closed.

  The last thing I looked at was Rita Castle’s note. The wording certainly had that dumb-bunny effect Roger Kerrigan had mentioned and which I had seen in two of the photos of Rita Castle that Rembek had sent over:

  I am going away. I have found a real man and we are going to find a new life together far away. You’ll never see either of us again.

  We were making certain assumptions based on the particular wording of that note. We were assuming the man involved was—for Rita Castle, at any rate—a potent lover, or at least more potent than Ernie Rembek. We were assuming he was someone Rembek knew. There didn’t seem to be any reason not to make these assumptions, and to stay with them until and unless they led us into a blind alley. If that happened, we would have to abandon them and start again with a new set of assumptions.

  What would that new set of assumptions be? I studied the note, trying to see other ways to read it, and drew a complete blank.

  Well. Time enough for that if and when we ever got to that blind alley. I put the note away in the filing cabinet, left the alibi reports on the worktable for Mickey to file, and cleared papers and pencils from my desk into the center drawer. Then I shrugged into my coat, and Kerrigan and I left the office and went downstairs to the street. We got a cab, with some difficulty, and went uptown to a very expensive restaurant, named by Kerrigan. When I said something about the price, Kerrigan said, “Forget it, businessman. You’re on an expense account, remember?”

  The food wasn’t worth the price, but then again it couldn’t have been. We didn’t talk until we were on the coffee, and then Kerrigan said, “Now you want to ask me questions.”

  “I might as well,” I said, “since I’ve got you here.” I took a new notebook from my pocket, flipped it open on the table, got out my pen. “Your name is Roger Kerrigan. Was it always?”

  He cocked a half-smile. “Always,” he said.

  “Middle name?”

  “Oscar. After my grandfather.”

  “Age?”

  “Thirty-four.”

  “On my list it gives your job as co-ordinator. What does that mean?”

  “This part you shouldn’t write down,” he said.

  “All right.” I put down the pen and picked up my coffee cup.

  He said, “The corporation has a certain area, mostly the Northeast, down as far as Washington, west as far as Ohio. Then there’s districts, and each district runs itself. Like Ernie Rembek, he runs this district, he never gets any orders from the corporation or anything like that. But sometimes things happen, there’s this kind of trouble, that kind of trouble, and the corporation has to find out it things are okay in the district. So that’s my job.”

  “The corporation sends you in to look around?”

  “Not exactly. I’m here all the time. I live in New York, I know Ernie socially. It’s just every once in a while I get a call, the corporation wants to know what’s going on with such-and-such. Or sometimes Ernie wants to pass the word about something to the corporation, and then he comes to me.”

  “You’re what they used to call a troubleshooter.”

  “Something like that.”

  “But the corporation doesn’t send you into any other districts. This is the only one you worry about.”

  “Oh, no. I’m the co-ordinator for all New York City and Long Island and Westchester.”

  “That’s a lot of different districts.”

  “Nine,” he said.

  “And you know all the other district leaders socially, too? The way you know Ernie Rembek?”

  “Sure, more or less. Ernie I know best, because I live right here in his district. Also, we get along on a personal basis. There’s a guy out in Nassau County, for instance, in a personal way I can’t stand him, so I never go out there unless I have to.”

  I said, “How long have you had this job?”

  “Five—no, six years.”

  “How did you get it?”

  He grinned. “By being sharp.”

  “What did you do before this?”

  “You don’t want my whole history, Mister Tobin.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Well, you’re not going to get it.”

  “All right. Have you got a record?”

  “No.”

  “No arrests?”

  “Not civilian.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  He d suddenly lost his urbanity. “It means I did stockade time in the Army when I was a baby, all right?”

  “How much of a baby?”

  “Nineteen. I did six months.”

  It was an injustice—real or imagined—that obviously still inflamed him. I let it go, saying, “Are you married?”

  “No. Divorced.”

  “How long ago?”

  This subject left him in better humor. Making his crooked smile, he said, “You want that history, too? At the age of twenty-two I married a girl I’d met in night school. The marriage lasted six years, and now the divorce has lasted six years. I’d put my money on the divorce, if I were you.”

  “You went to night school?”

  “I had the idea I’d be a lawyer. But I make a bad student.”

  “Do you still see your ex-wife?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Beverly’s a social worker. I don’t hang out in that kind of neighborhood.”

  “Would you say it would be accurate to call you cynical?”

  With a cynical smile he said, “Not exactly. I like to call myself a realist. I know what’s happening.”

  “How long have you known Ernie Rembek?”

  “Nine years.”

  “Socially?”

  “No. That would be about six years. As long as I’ve been co-ordinator. Before that I was too far down the ladder. The movers and shakers don’t socialize with the hired help.”

  “How long have you known Rita Castle?”

  “Since Ernie bought her.”

  “Bought? That’s a strange verb.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s the only verb that fits.”

  “You didn’t like Rita Castle.”

  He shrugged. “We already talked about her. She was what you’d call cynical.”

  “You made a pass at her?”

  His crooked grin Hashed again. Let’s say I made a shoestring catch of one of hers.”

  “What happened?”

  “She called interference.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means she liked to tease herself behind Ernie’s back, setting things up that she could do and then not doing them.”

  “How badly did she burn you?”

  “Slight singe of the fingertips. I try to take care of myself, and one of the ways to do it is stay away from trouble like that.”

  “Did you ever warn Rembek about her?”

  He shook his head. “When a man buys something new and shiny, and he loves it very much, you don’t tell him he got a lemon.”

  “Do you know of anybody else she threw passes at?”

  “Not from knowledge, no. I would guess she threw a lot of them.”

  “Nobody ever talked to you about her.”

  “No.”

  “There was no rumor about her and anybody else.”

  “Not that I ever heard.”

  “All right.” I put not
ebook and pen away, and finished my coffee. “Is it time for our first interview?”

  “You mean second interview.” He looked at his watch. “Right. Time to go see Frank Donner.”

  He signed the check, and we left.

  twelve

  FRANK DONNER LIVED IN an old co-op apartment building in Washington Heights. From his windows could be seen the graceful arc of the lights of the George Washington Bridge, and the dark river, and the scattered lights of New Jersey. The building itself had lost some of its original elegance, but the Donner apartment was unchanged, a museum to the memory of 1935. The colors were dark, the draperies were massive, the corners were rounded. Amber mirrors glowed darkly from unexpected places, the light sources were many but were individually dim, and the carpet that flowed everywhere, from room to room, from color scheme to color scheme, was a uniform purple, as though there’d been a flood in a wine factory.

  Frank Donner himself, fifty-five and gone to fat, looked almost like a banker or a prosperous businessman, complete to the dark suit and the expensive cigar, but a certain toughness around the eyes and looseness around the mouth gave him away; he was a thug who had made good.

  His wife, who welcomed us to the living room, was an astonishingly stout woman, actually ugly with fat, wearing a bright-colored flowered dress that merely emphasized the breadth of her. In her smile when she greeted us could be seen the faint echo of the girl she had been, always a bit on the plump side but once pleasant to look upon.

  Kerrigan and Donner shook hands, greeting each other with a formality that Donner obviously found natural and that Kerrigan tolerated, and then Kerrigan introduced me, and Donner gravely shook my hand, too, which I gave him after only the smallest hesitation. Donner introduced me to his wife, giving her name as Ethel, and then we all sat down, including Ethel.

  I said to Donner, “I’d prefer to talk just to you.”

  “Ethel knows my entire life,” Donner assured me. “Everything in business I tell her, talk over with her.”

  “I’d still prefer to talk just to you.”

  Donner’s wife beamed at me, full of good will, saying, “I won’t interrupt a thing, Mister Tobin, that’s a promise.”

  I looked at Kerrigan who said to Donner, “Frank, I think Ernie wants us to co-operate with Mister Tobin.”

  Donner’s heavy face took on a mulish look. “I’ve never had nothing behind Ethel’s back in twenty-eight years of marriage. I don’t see no reason I should start now.”

  I got to my feet. “I’ll talk to you some other time,” I said, and started for the door.

  Kerrigan caught up with me in the vestibule. “Hold it a second,” he said. “Let me talk to him. You wait out here.”

  I said, “I want the answers he’ll give when she’s not listening.”

  “I know what you want,” he said, “and you’re right. Except with Frank, believe me the answers won’t be any different.”

  “When I ask him to describe the girl, what he thought of her?”

  “Maybe,” he conceded. “Let me talk to them for a minute.”

  I waited under the chandelier, seeing myself reflected in amber mirrors. What were all these people to me, why should I concern myself with the labyrinths of their minds? I had my own labyrinth to contend with. I had a wall to build. The door was beside me, but I didn’t quite leave.

  After a couple of minutes Kerrigan came back, nodding and saying, “It’s okay.”

  I went back into the living room and Donner was alone in there now, but still looking mulish. He was going to give me a bad time, make it tough for me to do a job I didn’t want to do in the first place, and I disliked him for it. I stood in front of him and said, “If you and your wife are inseparable, how come you’ve got separate bedrooms?”

  He flared up immediately, coming up out of the seat, red-faced and glaring, and then caught control of himself midway, sank back again, opened his fists, looked over at Kerrigan, and still red-faced said, “I got to put up with this?”

  I said, “Donner, what we’re looking for is the guy who stole Ernie Rembek’s woman and then killed her. You’ve got a bad alibi. You spend all your time pushing the idea of how devoted you are to your wife, but my report says you and she have separate bedrooms. That looks to me like a contradiction. It even looks to me like you might be trying to build up the faithful-husband image just to distract people from the notion that you were playing around with Rita Castle on the side.”

  “I never once looked at another woman,” he said hotly. “In twenty-eight years of marriage, not once did I look at another woman.”

  “Not till Rita Castle.”

  “Do you—” But then he stopped, abruptly, and the anger faded from his face, and he looked at Kerrigan and said, “You didn’t have to tell me he used to be a cop. That’s the way they all act.”

  I said, “Why not talk to me, Donner?”

  “Sure,” he said. He sat back in the sofa, ostentatiously relaxed, behaving now as he would if hauled into the station for questioning, sitting there smug and sure of himself, waiting for the inevitable lawyer to come take him away. “Go ahead,” he said. “Ask away.”

  “I will.” I went back to my chair and sat down. I took my notebook and pen out and said, “When did you first meet Rita Castle?”

  He said, “You gonna take notes?”

  Amused, Kerrigan told him, “That’s the way he does things, Frank. Everything businesslike. You should see the office we gave him, everything in files, reports all typed up, it looks like the Motor Vehicle Bureau.”

  I said to Donner, “Will it bother you if I take notes?”

  He shrugged, saying, “Naw, I was just surprised is all.”

  I poised pen over notebook and said, “When did you first meet Rita Castle?”

  This time he answered me, saying, “I don’t know, exactly. A little while after Ernie started going with her.”

  “What were the circumstances of that first meeting, do you remember?”

  “Sure. I met her at a party.”

  “Where was this party?”

  “Here.” He looked at Kerrigan. “You were here,” he said.

  I said, “Rembek brought Rita Castle to this party instead of his wife? What did Mrs. Donner think about that?”

  He said, “The Rembeks have had their share of troubles, I don’t know how much you know about that. Eleanor’s my sister, you know.”

  “That’s Mrs. Rembek?”

  He nodded. “That’s right. Eleanor is a wonderful woman, anybody’ll tell you that, but she’s got problems, had them since she was a kid. Nerves. She’s a very delicate lady. She don’t go out to parties at all any more. My wife and I, we both know the situation, we know Ernie’s devoted to Eleanor, and we understand the situation he’s in. So he has a young woman and he takes her to parties, we’re all couples, you know, some married couples and some like Roger here that bring a date, and a man without a woman wouldn’t fit in, you know what I mean? Some of the wives in our crowd wouldn’t invite Ernie at all if he’d come by himself.”

  I said, “What did you think of Rita Castle?”

  “She was a very pretty lady.”

  “That’s all?”

  He said, “My wife could maybe give you a better impression, she talked to her more than I did. You know how it is at parties, the men wind up in the kitchen talking cars and football, the women wind up in the living room talking God knows what.”

  I said, “Thank you. Could I speak to your wife for a minute?”

  He chuckled and said, “Alone?”

  “Yes,” I said, which surprised him. I turned away from his surprise and said to Kerrigan. “Without you, too.”

  Donner seemed about ready to get outraged again, but I let Kerrigan talk to him and ultimately they left the room and sent Mrs. Donner in. She came in with a hesitant smile on her face, her hands clasped in front of her, saying, “Did you want to speak to me?”

  “Yes, I did. In the first place, I want to apologize f
or my rudeness earlier, but I didn’t have any choice.”

  She accepted that graciously, thanking me, and then I said, “Now I’m going to have to be ill-mannered again, and this time I’ll apologize in advance.”

  She waited, seeming to brace herself but saying nothing.

  “I’m about ready,” I said, “to cross your husband’s name off my list of suspects. You do know the case I’m on, don’t you?”

  “The death of Miss Castle,” she said.

  “Yes. There’s only one question left in my mind about your husband, and he refuses to answer it. I’m hoping you will.”

  “I will if I can,” she said.

  “Your husband,” I said, “gives every indication of preferring to be with you at all times, and if this is true, then obviously he isn’t the man I’m looking for. But if it is false, if it’s simply make-believe, then very likely he is the man I’m looking for.”

  “It isn’t false, Mister Tobin,” she said. “My husband and I are truly very close.”

  “But there’s one contradiction, Mrs. Donner, and your husband won’t explain it.”

  “A contradiction?”

  “According to my report, you and your husband have separate bedrooms.”

  She blushed, very red. “Oh,” she said, her flustered hands going to her red face. “Oh, I see.”

  “If you could tell me—”

  “Oh, I imagine he got very angry when you asked him that,” she said.

  “As a matter of fact, he did.”

  “Yes.” She hesitated, still blushing, still flustered, and then, all in a rush, she said, “The reason for it is, the reason for it is, it seems I snore!”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Oh, it’s really awful,” she said, babbling on to cover her embarrassment. “Sometimes it’s so bad I wake myself up. We even had my room soundproofed. I’ve been to doctors and they say there just isn’t anything to be done about it, not a thing.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Donner,” I said. “I apologize for having to ask the question.”

  “Oh, no, not at all, not at all. I can see why it didn’t make sense to you, why you had to know.”