by Anthony Rome
I sat on the edge of his bed, got out a pack of Luckies, and lit one. “It’s hard to stay away. Your company’s so stimulating.”
“You ain’t changed at all. I told Welch you’d get the girl back to her old man without a beef.”
“What makes you think there’s no beef?”
“I’d’ve heard the squeal by now.”
“You’re hearing it now. She wants the daisy pin back.”
He tongued the dead cigar butt from one comer of his mouth to the other. “The which?”
“The pin you took off her dress. Gold and diamonds in the shape of a daisy.”
His eyes might have been watching a blank TV screen, waiting for the picture to come on. “You got a real high opinion of me.”
I shrugged. “Like you said last night, I know you a long time. That’s why I bought you out of the agency.”
“You’re knocking on the wrong door. I didn’t lift anything off her.”
“Sure you did,” I told him mildly. “The pin and some dough out of her purse. When you went up to her room to check her identity. She didn’t answer your knock, so you let yourself in and saw she was out cold. You pocketed most of her cash while you were looking for her identity. And then you took the pin off her dress. She doesn’t care about the cash. Just the pin.”
“Drunks’re all the same,” Turpin said. “Always losing things and later claiming somebody must’ve robbed ’em.”
“Sure. You figured she wouldn’t remember where she’d parted with that pin. But she wasn’t that far gone when she came in here. She remembers she still had it on when she went into that room.”
“She thinks she remembers.”
“The cab driver that brought her here last night remembers too. He saw that pin on her when she got out of the cab.”
He called my bluff: “She didn’t come by cab. She was walking. Staggering.”
I’d known Turpin to bluff too. I chanced it. “His hack number’s 14-H32. His name’s Joseph Morelli and he lives at 4007 North-West Pine Street and he has a girl just graduating from second grade.”
It worked. “You’ve been busy,” Turpin muttered. “Well, so what? So she was wearing this daisy pin when she come in here. Then she drank herself out of this world. Anybody could’ve gone in her room and lifted it off her.”
“Uh-huh. Anybody named Turpin with a set of keys for all the rooms.”
Turpin took the dead cigar from his mouth, looked at it with distaste, tossed it at the wastebasket. He heaved himself up out of the easy chair. “I think,” he whispered, “I’ll bust open that shoulder of yours again.”
I stood up fast, spreading my feet a bit so I’d be able to move quickly. My insides felt too tight. I’d seen Turpin in brawls in the past. And I’d seen what the men he’d fought had looked like when he got through with them.
“The pin’s only worth three thousand,” I told him quietly. “That’s legitimate retail, selling it out of a plush shop with a lot of overhead. For you it’s hot, and it’ll need time to cool off. You’ll be lucky to get two hundred bucks for it from a fence.”
He started coming at me.
“Don’t be a dope,” I growled. “Two hundred’s not enough profit for the chance you’re taking.”
It stopped him. He looked at me, considering it.
“You’re lucky the girl came to me first,” I told him. “If I don’t turn up that pin, she’ll go to the law. The cops and the insurance boys won’t take long in putting it on you the way I did. You’re getting too old to enjoy that prison food.”
He leered at me. “I ain’t so old yet. I always wondered if I could take you bare hands. What do you think?”
“I’m not in the mood right now. You need to let off steam, go knock down a wall.”
He laughed. But then he cut the laugh short and shook his head stubbornly. “You still’re calling me a crook.”
I saw he was ready to get off the hook if I could give him a way to get off without losing face. I gave it to him: “Okay. You’re not a crook. You’re a private detective, and I’m asking you for some professional help. Somebody lifted the girl’s valuable pin while she was sleeping it off in her room here. Suppose you try to locate whoever did it and persuade him to mail that pin to me. As soon as it comes to me, I’ll send you your fee. A hundred bucks. And no strings attached.” Turpin’s burly shoulders relaxed a little. He rubbed his knuckles thoughtfully against the side of his florid nose. I didn’t add that the hundred dollars, plus the cash he’d stolen from Diana Pines’ purse, was almost as much as he could get for the pin by fencing it—and with no risk for him. We both knew that.
“Sounds pretty good,” Turpin admitted finally.
“I thought it would. I’ll just leave the job in your hands now. Till Monday.” I turned and went to his door.
When I opened the door and stepped out, I almost bumped into a man in the corridor. He was a tall, well-dressed, darkly handsome man in his forties. There was a short, wide scar under his left eye, and the recently barbered hair showing below the brim of his hat was black with gray in it.
He smiled apologetically and murmured, “Pardon me.” He walked around me and went on up the corridor and turned out of sight around a comer.
I looked at Turpin, standing just inside the doorway of his room. “Know him?” I asked.
Turpin glanced in the direction the man had gone and shook his head. “No. Why should I?”
“No reason. See you around.” I went down the corridor and used the stairs beside the elevators. Down in the lobby, I bought a paper at the newsstand and settled down behind it in a chair partially screened by a limp potted palm.
I didn’t have long to wait. The darkly handsome man I’d bumped into in the corridor—the one who could have been listening at Turpin’s door—came down the stairs into the lobby. He crossed it without looking my way, went out the entrance. I left the newspaper behind and tailed him.
He walked to the downtown shopping area a few blocks away. Not once did he glance back to see if he was being tailed. I strolled just half a block behind him, beginning to think I’d been wrong.
Then a man, hurrying up from behind me, suddenly lurched sideways as he passed me. He bumped into me and grabbed hold of my arm for support, stopping me. He was a short, skinny man with a narrow face. His nose was crooked, the tip of it bent to one side. “Sorry,” he mumbled, still hanging on to me.
I jerked my arm from his grasp, shot him a quick, suspicious look. He was either drunk or . . .
But then he stepped away from me, and I saw he limped. It was a bad limp, and he wasn’t faking it.
“S’all right,” I muttered, and hurried around him—just in time to see the man I’d been tailing abruptly turn into a big department store.
I was inside after him moments later, but he’d already merged into the Saturday shopping crowd. I prowled around the store for fifteen minutes trying to pick him up again and couldn’t. It could have been that he’d known I was following him and done a fast and clever job of shaking me. Or he could have just lost me without intending to. Anyway, I’d lost him.
I used up two hours and eleven bucks in a nickel-and-dime stud game in the basement of the Central Tavern near the Dade County Courthouse. It was four thirty when I re-entered my office. Diana Pines showed up fifteen minutes later. I told her I expected to have her pin within the next couple of days and that I’d phone her when I got it. I said it with enough conviction to satisfy her. The delay didn’t seem to worry her much. When she left my office I locked up for the day and went with her. She had a silver Mercedes-Benz parked outside. I waited while she climbed in and pulled away from the curb. Then I got into my Olds and followed her. I’d already botched one tail job that day, and it still smarted.
I didn’t botch this one.
The high brick wall set back from the road was crumbling and overgrown with thick, unkempt weed vines. The heavy iron gate at the driveway entrance through which the Mercedes-Benz had vanished was ruste
d and hung back on one hinge. From what I could make out in the moon-bathed darkness inside, the wall enclosed a small estate that had long ago been abandoned to decay.
Parking off the road under the wall, I switched off my headlights and motor and sat there for a moment, wondering what business Diana Pines could have in a seemingly empty ghost estate. Up till then she’d done nothing to justify my spying on her. She’d spent the afternoon shopping in several of the city’s better clothing shops, had dinner alone in a restaurant that catered mostly to the expense-account crowd, and made a phone call. It had been night when she’d driven south to a section of Coconut Grove where the fine old houses were giving way to low-priced development cottages which in turn were giving way to shack slums.
I got the pencil-size flashlight from my glove compartment and walked from my car past the open and broken gate into the estate. Inside, its appearance of being a place long uninhabited increased. What had once been a small, well-ordered park was now a wild tangle of jungle. Stretching out on either side of the graveled driveway was what had once been lawn. It was now several acres of high weeds. In the deathly stillness, my shoes made too much noise on the gravel. I moved off it and pushed through the weeds toward higher ground where a building, or group of buildings, made a massive dark shape in the night. No light showed anywhere.
I found a path of broken flagstones and followed it. A sudden sound in the high weeds to my right made me jerk around, tensing. A big woods rat skittered across the flagstones and dashed into the weeds on the other side of the path. I let my breath out slowly.
My nerves were on edge. Continuing along the path I came to a row of hedges, shapeless and high as trees, and squeezed between them. Probably they had once formed a neat wall enclosing a tile patio and swimming pool. Weeds forced their way up between the patio tiles. The swimming pool was empty except for dirty puddles left from the last rain. The concrete of its walls and bottom was cracked and crumbling, covered in places by large patches of slimy moss.
Circling the pool, I pushed through the wild hedges on the other side and found myself looking up a weed-choked incline at a hulking, three-story French château large enough to contain about twenty-five rooms. Many of the slate tiles were missing from its peaked roof, the center portion of which was sagging badly. Several of the many slim brick chimneys were down. Most of the windows were shattered, and none of them showed anything but impenetrable blackness inside the mansion.
I waited for a few moments, looking around and listening. There was no sign of Diana Pines or her car—no sound from any direction. I moved up the incline to dispel the irrational feeling that the whole place was closing in around me. The huge, ornately carved, weather-ruined entrance door had a heavy chain spiked across it. I moved along the front of the building, past broken windows till I came to one that had no shards of glass in its lower sash. Hooking a leg over the window ledge, I climbed into the darkness inside the mansion—into the smells of decaying timbers and moldering furnishings and disintegrating plaster.
For the first few seconds I remained still, listening. Hearing nothing, I snapped on the pencil light and flashed its thin yellowish beam around. I was in a vast drawing room that had been furnished long ago by someone with a taste for out- sized, ungainly imported European antiques. A faded and torn tapestry covered the wall to my left. On my right there was a fireplace big enough to drive a truck into. Against the far wall, on a dais flanked by long refectory tables, stood a gigantic carved-oak chair with a back fifteen feet high topped by a carved canopy. The center of the room was dominated by a massive octagonal table surrounded by chairs. Above it, from the twenty-five-foot-high ceiling, hung an elaborate chandelier, with snakes of dust-choked cobwebs dangling from its crystal pendants.
A thick mantle of dust covered everything in the room, and cobwebs were everywhere. An Oriental rug that almost managed to reach from wall to wall was badly decaying, in spots so badly that the timber of the floor showed through. There were several high doorways leading out of the room. I chose one of them at random and began wandering through the ruined, dark, silent interior of the mansion. Dust muffled my footsteps; the tiny beam of my pencil flashlight lighted the way for me. I wandered through a long, narrow passageway with standing iron candelabra, past walls on which hung pictures with the paint shredding off their canvases and the gilt peeling from their frames; through a living room dominated by a great organ that filled one wall; a sitting-room salon walled with antique mirrors; a game room with elephant tusks flanking each doorway and the mounted heads of wild Canadian and African animals hanging on the walls and lying about the floor where they’d fallen; a long, narrow dining room with an inlaid Moroccan tile floor and Italian Renaissance furniture.
Everywhere it was the same: the dust, the cobwebs, the darkness, the odor of decay and mold, and the thick, dead silence.
I found a narrow, curving stairway which led up to the second floor. I climbed it to a short hallway, entered a cluttered, overfurnished bedroom dominated by an outsize bed. The canopy that had once hung over the bed lay around it on the floor; its supports stood stark and bare.
I was about to turn away when I realized I’d seen something strange. Strange for that house, that is. Directing the narrow beam of my pencil light back to the bed, I moved closer to it. There was no cover on the bed. The sheets and the pillow were rumpled, darkly stained, discolored with age.
But there was no dust on them.
I was frowning at the bed when something else caught my eye. Light was coming through the bedroom windows.
I went around the bed to one of the windows and looked down through its cracked pane of glass. Behind the mansion was a stone cottage that must once have served as quarters for the servants. The light I’d seen was coming from the windows and open door of that cottage. A Cadillac convertible, a twelve-year-old model, was parked in front of the cottage. It was in need of a paint job, fender straightening, and a replacement for its patched canvas top.
Beside it, the moonlight shimmered against the sleek silver lines of the Mercedes-Benz.
Between the cars stood two women and a tall man. The light from the open doorway didn’t quite reach the man and made it impossible to distinguish anything about him but his height. One of the women was Diana Pines. She had her back to the light, but I could make out enough of her to be sure.
The other woman was turned toward Diana Pines in such a way that the light from the doorway gave me a clear image of her. She looked about forty-five, had a tall drink in her hand, and was the same height as Diana Pines. The light glinted against the gray in her unkempt black hair. She must have been very pretty once, and she held herself as though she thought she still was.
“Wassa matter?” she was demanding loudly of Diana Pines. “It wouldn’t hurt you t’stay awhile for once.” Her voice was slurred and held the whine of the habitual self-pitier.
“I’m sorry,” Diana Pines said, so softly I could barely hear her. “I’ve got to be getting home.”
“Home!” the other woman growled, as if it were a nasty word. “You never stay any more. Just come and run.”
“Stop it, Lorna,” the man snapped at her. His head turned back to Diana Pines. “It’s all right, Diana. I understand.”
“Oh, sure,” the woman he’d called Lorna grated. “I unner-stand, too. What the hell . . .” She shrugged melodramatically. “Anyway, thanks for bringin’ the dough. Even if it isn’t enough.”
“It’s the best I can do,” Diana Pines said miserably. “You know that’s the truth. I’d bring more if I could.”
“Of course you would,” the man said soothingly. “It’s most generous of you.”
Diana Pines looked from the man to the woman, her face masked from me by shadow. The man opened the door of the Mercedes-Benz for her, shut it after she climbed in behind the wheel.
“Drive carefully, Diana,” the man said. “It was a pleasure haying you visit with us again.”
“A rare pleasure,” the wo
man slurred. “An a brief one.”
Diana Pines turned on the headlights and motor. The man and woman stood aside and watched the Mercedes-Benz glide away.
As the sound of the car’s engine died in the distance, the tall man turned savagely on the woman. “For God’s sake, Lorna! When will you learn to shut up!”
“I can say anything I want to her!” the woman lashed back at him.
“The way you’ve been drinking, you don’t know what you’re saying half the time.”
By way of answer, the woman raised her glass to her lips, tilted her head back flamboyantly, and drained her glass defiantly.
“You’re going to get sick, really sick, if you keep that up,” the man told her harshly.
“I’m not your patient, Doctor,” the woman sneered. “Nobody is any more.”
He slapped the glass out of her hand. It smashed against the gravel of the driveway.
“I hope,” the woman told him viciously, “you ruin your lousy tires on that.” She turned away from him and marched into the cottage. The man stood staring after her for a couple of seconds, then followed her inside, slamming the door shut behind him.
In the sudden silence, I was abruptly aware of the faint, whispering sound of footsteps sliding across the dust-covered floor behind me.
My mouth went dry. I spun around, swinging the pencil flashlight toward the sound. A man froze still at the end of its thin beam of yellowish light. He was tall, a head taller than me. He wore a soiled sweat shirt, faded dungarees, muddy white canvas tennis shoes, and he had the beautiful body of a Greek athlete’s statue.
He blinked a couple of times at the beam of light, and then he came at me. He didn’t look angry or upset. He was as purposeless and remorseless as an avalanche. I tried to slide away, but he was faster. A hand like a steel vise shot out and clamped around my wrist so tightly that my fingers sprang open. The tiny flashlight fell to the floor. I slugged the side of his head with my free fist and yelled to him to wait and talk it over.
