by Anthony Rome
I knew, of course, that he did have the strings to pull. No man could get rich in Florida in his line of business without acquiring some political leverage.
Kosterman nodded. “I’ll begin making some phone calls right away. How much of this mess do I have to reveal?”
“Just that I’m working for you. And you want me free to continue doing so.”
Back in my Olds, the first thing I did was get the flask out of the glove compartment and take a couple stiff slugs from it. I waited till the brandy took hold. Then I drove back to that death-filled bungalow on the Miami Canal.
Everything was as I’d left it. Ruyter in the bathtub, Langley on the living room carpet, and Oscar in the bedroom.
I used the bungalow phone to call Santini at Miami homicide. The bungalow was outside Miami limits, in county territory, which made it a matter for the sheriff’s metro police. But the deaths there were connected with Turpin’s killing. Besides, Santini was the nearest thing to a friend that I was likely to find among the cops that night.
After hanging up the phone I waited ten minutes to give Santini a head start. Then I called the metro police.
Then I waited.
CHAPTER
13
FOR THE REST of the night there were more varieties of cops climbing all over me than you’d find at a policemen’s convention.
You won’t find a law setup anywhere that’s more complicated than what we’ve got in Greater Miami and Dade County. Including Miami and scattered around it are twenty- six independent incorporated communities, some with less than five hundred citizens but each with its own police force. Twisting through and around these communities is unincorporated county territory, which is policed by the sheriff’s metropolitan cops.
They converged on me from all parts of that crazy setup: the metro cops because the bungalow was in county territory; Miami cops because I worked there and Turpin had died there; cops from Hialeah where Hendrik Ruyter had worked and lived; cops from Miami Beach, where Jules Langley had his jewelry store. Plus Petrov and another assistant from the district attorney’s office, a medical examiner, the emergency squad, the fingerprint boys, an official photographer from the sheriff’s office, a couple of police secretaries, and a representative from the state police.
Hour after hour, I was questioned, pushed, pulled, threatened, cajoled. My better instincts were appealed to; my baser fears were tapped. I told my story so many times, to so many badges that it began to sound like the mechanical recitation of a memorized prayer—which, in a way, it was.
I got a little help from an unexpected quarter: the Miami Beach police. They’d been keeping an eye on Jules Langley lately. According to them, the things of which I was accusing the late Langley were quite possible.
It was his connections with the hustlers and more elegant B-girls of Miami Beach that had first attracted the attention of the Beach cops. Langley was working an old racket, one so close to being legal that it was impossible to nail him for it. It was not unusual for a wealthy tourist to get a real yen for one of the luscious creatures working the bars along the Beach and decide to win her with an item of expensive jewelry. When this happened, the girl made sure the sucker bought the jewelry from Jules Langley. Later, of course, she returned the jewelry to Langley—for a commission.
The wallet-milking lovelies of the Miami Beach nights were too much of a prime tourist attraction for the cops to care much about this. What did interest them was a growing suspicion that Langley was involved with some of the gem smuggling for which Miami is a center. The suspicion had been strong enough to set them digging into his background.
Langley had come to Miami Beach from New York a year and a half before, bringing Oscar with him. According to the New York cops, Oscar had done time for various activities ranging from breaking-and-entering to manslaughter. Langley had had a jewelry store near Times Square. He’d sold out and moved South to more tolerant terrain when the New York cops began pressuring him for working his jewelry-gift- commission racket with a couple of the Manhattan call-girl outfits.
This information about the unsavory pasts of Langley and Oscar helped make my story a bit more believable. But it didn’t noticeably lift any of the weight of the law off me.
At six in the morning, groggy and bone-weary, I was taken to one of the sheriff’s offices in the Dade County Courthouse in Miami. The number of cops I carried with me had dwindled by then, but they still made a roomful: Petrov, a metro captain, Art Santini, the sheriff’s special homicide investigator, and a police secretary.
None of them acquired any liking for me in the next few hours. The imitating factor, from their viewpoint, was that nothing I said gave them a tangible case to work on. Yet everything I told them checked out as far as they could check it. They hadn’t enough evidence to pin anything on me and make it stick, and we all knew it. But there was enough there for them to rig something against me, and we all knew that too.
They tried the hard approach and the soft, and both at the same time. Unofficially, I was charged with everything from murder to withholding information in a felony. My answers to their questions remained the same. I stuck stubbornly to my story and sat tight, waiting for the political juice that Kosterman was supposed to be generating to reach me.
Essentially, what I told them was the truth—or as much of it as I’d been able to piece together:
Jules Langley had managed to get hold of the Kosterman jewels, substitute imitations for the real gems, and return them without their ever being missed. It was a neat, painless steal. Because the gems had never been reported stolen, Langley could peddle them for their full value, instead of the cut-rate prices that hot stones bring. He was even able to give the job of switching the real gems for phonies to a legitimate contractor like Ruyter instead of to an underworld gem setter who’d have charged him ten times as much.
It was profit without peril for Langley until Diana Pines lost the daisy pin. Somehow, Langley learned about her losing it and got worried. Whoever had the pin would find out it was a fake, and that might lead to uncovering what Langley had done. He’d tried to get the pin back fast—first through me on Friday night, then by having two men named Nimmo and Catleg tail me on Saturday.
I didn’t know who they were, and the names meant nothing to the cops. But my hunch on one of them leaned to the man I’d run into as I was leaving Turpin’s hotel room that Saturday: the darkly handsome, fortyish man, with the graying black hair and the scar under his left eye. If he was Nimmo or Catleg, he’d overheard me accusing Turpin of having the daisy pin.
Turpin was the one who’d lifted the pin from Diana Pines, of course. He’d taken it to Sands for appraisal that Saturday morning. After I left, Turpin went back to Sands and learned the pin was worthless. It must have struck Turpin as funny that I’d offered him a hundred dollars to return a worthless pin. He mailed it to me and went back to his hotel room.
Meanwhile somebody, probably Catleg and Nimmo, had searched Turpin’s room for that pin, working too fast to be neat about it. Turpin had returned, found the mess, and assumed I’d done the search job to get out of paying him his hundred bucks. Sore as a boil, he’d headed for my office and got there five or ten minutes after I’d left with Diana Pines.
Catleg—maybe together with Nimmo—had tailed Turpin to my office, figuring Turpin had gone there to return the daisy pin to me personally. If my guess was right, Catleg had to be tailing Turpin, whether with Nimmo or without him. Because according to Langley, Nimmo carried no gun.
Catleg—again maybe with Nimmo—walked in after Turpin, waving a gun at him. Now, Turpin wasn’t what you’d call brave. He was too hotheaded to ever get scared enough to have to exercise bravery. He had a fast temper and a fast gun hand. He must have gone for his own gun, got it out, and fired it before he was shot.
Langley never heard from Catleg or Nimmo again. But wherever they went, one of them went with Turpin’s .45 slug deep in him.
On Monday morning, I got the pin
Turpin had mailed me and found it was a phony. Checking all the jewelry outfits led me to Hendrik Ruyter—and the information about the jobs he’d done for Jules Langley.
After I’d left Ruyter, he made his fatal mistake. He was furious at the thought that Langley might have used him for something illegal, and he’d called Langley and told him so. Langley closed up his shop before I got there, took Oscar with him, and sped to Hialeah. They picked up Ruyter, took him to Langley’s bungalow, and drowned him in the tub. Then they waited for me to show up.
And that was my story.
Of course, I left out a few things.
I didn’t mention the fact that the Kosterman jewels had been lifted, worked on, and returned one at a time, over a period of a couple of months—because that would have told the cops someone in the Kosterman family was in on it.
I neglected to tell them I had a lead to the man called Nimmo.
And I didn’t say anything about my hunch that Langley had been planning a follow-up gimmick that would have doubled his already sizable take from the Kosterman jewels. My hunch would explain his getting so upset about the missing daisy pin. And it was such a logical follow-up that I couldn’t see how he could let the opportunity pass.
My guess was that he was planning to have his confederate in the Kosterman home toss all the jewels in the ocean and make it look like an outside robbery. The jewels wouldn’t be found and the insurance company would have to make good to Kosterman. He’d use the dough to replace the missing jewelry. Then Langley could pull the original gimmick again: put phonies into the jewelry and pocket the real gems.
This hunch made me feel a bit better about Ruyter’s death. If I was right, he’d been scheduled to die even if I hadn’t come along. For once the jewelry was reported stolen, the cops and insurance agents would have started asking around for them. Langley must have planned to do away with Ruyter so he couldn’t tell the cops anything, when the time came. I’d just speeded up the doing of it.
The cops in that office with me were all smart enough to sense the soft spots in my story, and they slapped me with them.
I stuck to my version.
At nine thirty Tuesday morning, when the mail arrived at the office of Ben Silver, my lawyer, a metro sergeant was there to pick up the package I’d sent. The daisy pin was appraised and bore out that part of my story at least.
By ten A.M. the cops with me were almost as exhausted as I was. They decided it was time to give me the waiting-and- worrying treatment. I was transferred to a lone cell on the seventeenth floor.
The jail, which takes up the sixteenth to nineteenth floors in the Dade County Courthouse, is not noted for comfortable accommodations. The beds consist of iron slabs—but I had weariness to cushion me. Two minutes after stretching out on that cold, hard metal, I was sound asleep.
I had to be awakened by the Negro trusty who brought my lunch. I wolfed down every ounce of the slop and went back to oblivion.
By suppertime I was slept out and beginning to feel the bruises from my iron mattress. I ate with less appetite than before. Then I started putting in nervous time. I chainsmoked the rest of my package of Luckies and began gnawing on a thumbnail.
It was almost eight o’clock Tuesday evening when I was finally taken out of the cell and back down to that office in the sheriff’s department.
This time the only one waiting for me was Art Santini. He sat behind the desk, eying me as I came in. On top of the desk was my .38 in the clip-on holster, my wallet, keys, and the other items they’d lifted from me.
I grinned at Santini. “I guess you had a talk with Kosterman.”
“In a way,” he snapped. “We talked to him-through the Mayport chief of police. The chief there’s in Kosterman’s pocket.”
I guess he’s not the only one,” I said, gesturing at my things on the desk. “I take it I’m released.”
Yeah, Santini said bitterly. “The word came down. Lay off Kosterman, and let you go. Unless we’ve got something solid on you. We don’t. Not solid enough . . . not yet.”
I sighed and started collecting my things. “It’s nice to have rich, influential friends.”
“Is it? Your father didn’t think so at the end.”
I was picking up my .38 when he said that. For a few seconds I was still as stone, holding the gun in my hands and looking at Santini.
“We’ve been friends,” I said finally. “And you’re upset. I’ll forget you said it. This time.”
“I wouldn’t if I were you,” Santini said, meeting my stare angrily. “I’d remember it. It’s quite an object lesson. You cover up the dirt for a man like Kosterman, and in the end he comes out clean and you wind up with all the dirt.”
I did the job of fastening the .38 holster to my belt slowly, mechanically, studying Santini. “You are worked up.”
“What’d you expect? We all are. That’s why they gave me this little task. They figured I was the only one who might not take a sock at you. I’m not sure they were right.”
“What’re you all so sore about?”
His mouth opened in surprise. “Are you kidding, Tony? You think we don’t know you aren’t being straight with us? You think we don’t realize somebody in Kosterman’s house had to be working with Jules Langley? But you hold out on us, make it harder for us to do a job that’s tough enough anyway. You get Kosterman to pull strings for you, so some lousy politicians start telling us what we can do and can’t do. How do you expect us to feel about you?”
“All right, you sanctimonious bastard,” I told him softly, “let’s play this for keeps. I’ll make a bargain with you. I’ll give you anything I’ve held back. It isn’t much, but you can have it.”
His eyes narrowed suspiciously, “And what’s my end or the bargain?”
“Just ignore the word that came down from the political boys. You’ve got a duty to do. Do it.”
“Like what?” He knew what I meant. He wasn’t enjoying it. “You think somebody in Kosterman’s house was tied in with Jules Langley. I agree with you, but I don’t know which one any more than you do. But you can find out easier than I can. Just pull ’em all in. Kosterman. His wife. His daughter and son-in-law. Sweat each one of them separately. I guarantee you the guilty one’ll let it slip inside two hours. Between you and all the other law around here that’s so sore at me, you can pull it off. Nothing can stop you.”
Santini’s fists were clenched on the edge of the desk. He gazed down at them, his face coloring. “My job wouldn’t be worth a plugged nickel afterwards,” he muttered weakly.
“Sure,” I agreed. “You’re thinking about your future. And I was thinking about mine. But I’m willing to forget that if you are. I’ll stop tidying up Kosterman’s troubles. You stop knuckling under just because he’s passed down the word. A bargain?”
“Okay, okay,” he growled. “You made your point. Now get out of here, will you?”
I got out of there.
CHAPTER
14
A CALYPSO BAND beside the candy-striped bar on the hotel terrace filled the night air with its singing and playing. Guests in tuxedos and evening gowns danced to the music under coconut palms strung with multicolored lights. I skirted the terrace and made my way past the glass-walled hotel night club, along a fragrant, hibiscus-bordered tile walk to the hotel’s cabana club, which faced the dark beach.
More decorated palms lined the deserted sunbathers’ lanai. The pool, embraced by its semicircle of Moorish-design cabanas, had concealed colored lights below the surface, which tinted the clear water with blue and red, green and yellow. Anne Archer was poised on the low board at the other end of the pool. I watched her go up on her toes and dive off, cutting cleanly into the water with hardly a splash. She glided through the length of the pool, breaststroking smoothly.
She surfaced at my end gasping for air. Grasping the iron rungs of the pool ladder, she climbed out shedding drops of water like a small rain. Freckles dotted her shoulders. She wore a tight golden bathing cap
and a one-piece swimsuit of jersey that clung to the soft fullness of her curves, emphasizing them spectacularly. Her legs were even longer than I’d remembered, but just as exquisite.
“My God,” she said when she saw me standing there. “You look horrible.”
“Sorry. I wanted to catch you before you went out for the night. I didn’t take time to shave and change.”
“I don’t mean that. You look like you’ve been in a brawl.”
I touched the tender bruise alongside my nose, the puffed area around my eye. “It was pretty one-sided as you can see. I’ve got some questions to ask you.”
“I should be getting used to that.” Her red hair tumbled down in damp waves as she stripped off her-cap.
“Got a little time before your date?”
“I don’t have a date tonight,” she said, picking up a white terrycloth robe from one of the candy-striped beach mats and slipping into it. “Matter of fact, I didn’t really have one the last time you came around.”
“Why’d you say you did?”
She shrugged, belting her robe. “Female training. Make the man eager through jealousy. It didn’t work out very well.”
“I guess I’m just not competitive enough.”
“Let’s go up to my rooms,” she said. “I’m shivering. They warm the water, and the air is cool.”
We took the pool elevator up to her floor. In her living room she murmured, “Make yourself comfortable,” and vanished into the bedroom.
I lit a Lucky and waited. When she came back she was in white slacks and a white Russian blouse, her hair piled atop her head and held there by an ornamental silver comb. She hadn’t put on make-up and she looked prettier that way. The red hair, green eyes, and golden freckles were coloring enough for her.
“You look worse in the light,” Anne commented factually, surveying me. “Where’d you get so rumpled and dirty?”
“In jail.”
Her eyes widened. “You’ve been in jail? Honestly?”
“Uh-huh. All day. I just got out.”
