Dead in a Bed

by Kane, Henry

  And then there he was, Alfred Surf, waving at me.

  I fought my way to him. “Hi,” I said.

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “Looking for you. Talking, in the meantime, to a dame named Twits.”

  “Gorgeous, huh?” Blue eyes twinkled behind the glasses. “If you’ll be a good boy maybe some day I’ll get you a fix there.”

  “Have you gotten a fix there yet?”

  “Not yet, but I’m working on it.”

  “Yeah, she told me she’s writing a book.”

  He grinned. “What else do I have to offer? My youth? My beauty? Money she’s got.”

  “Ah, the Cornball Cannonball. There’s nothing cornball about you, pal. You just like to give that impression.”

  “Part of my defense. Cornball Cannonball. Hey, that’s good.”

  “It’s not mine. It’s one of your authors—describing you.”

  “Probably one of my poets, in appreciation of my losing money on him.”

  “He was talking about you to a Miss Elgin.”

  “Yeah, yeah, she’s the girl-friend of—”

  From somewhere I thought I heard a voice: Call for Peter Chambers.

  Surf didn’t hear. “Come on,” he said. “I’ve got Barry Howard stashed alone in a little room upstairs.”

  Now the butler’s voice came clear and loud and near. “Call for Peter Chambers.”

  Surf said, “What now?”

  “A friend of mine. I told him to call. Jack Medford.” Surf waved to the butler and pointed at me. The butler stopped his noise.

  “Here, take it over here.” Surf led me to a phone and stayed with me. “I’m not letting you out of my sight. Tell this Jack Medford, if he wants you he can come here. He’s invited.”

  But it wasn’t Jack Medford.

  It was Detective-lieutenant Louis Parker.

  TWELVE

  “HELLO JACK,” I said to the phone.

  “This is Detective-lieutenant Louis Parker, Homicide,” said Detective-lieutenant Louis Parker, Homicide, but primly. “Who’s this? I want to speak to Peter—”

  “Louie?”

  “Pete?”

  “How’d you know to call me here, Louie?”

  “Jack Medford told me.”

  “Jack Medford? What’s with you and Jack Medford?”

  “What do you think? Trouble.”

  “What the hell kind of trouble can he have with you?”

  “What kind of trouble do you think?

  “No!” I said.

  “Look, Pete, it may be bad, it may not be bad—we don’t know. This blasted kid won’t talk.”

  “I know.”

  “You know?”

  “He’s like sick that way. Had trouble as a youngster with the wrong kind of cop and he’s been frightened to death ever since.”

  “You’re a friend of his?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Well, he brought up your name. Said he’d talk—but only to you. He told us where to call you. If you are a friend of his, Pete, then you’d better get down here right away. But right away!”

  “Where?”

  “Penelope Arlington’s place. You coming?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, step on it.” He hung up.

  Surf broke out of a circle of conversation and took my arm. “All right, come on,” he said. “I’m dying for you two to get together.”

  Absently I said, “What? Who?”

  He drew up short, squinted at me. “What the hell’s the matter with you?”

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “Go? Go? I’ve got the guy stashed upstairs, waiting.”

  “What time is it?”

  Surf looked. “Ten to six.”

  “I’ll be back within an hour. Time enough?”

  “Yes. But what the hell’s so confounded important?”

  “I don’t know.”

  That popped his eyeballs right smack against his glasses.

  And I left him like that—perplexed, disgruntled, and eyeball-glass-smacked.

  Penelope Arlington owned a house at 14 Sutton Place, one of the few old, quaint, distinctive houses as yet undemolished in the City of New York. Folded within my cab going down to Sutton Place, I lay chin on knees perilously and dwelt upon Penelope Arlington before going on to Jack Medford. Penelope Arlington had more multiplying millions that she could count, and she had been born to them. Penelope was the last of the Arlingtons, one of the oldest and richest of America’s first families risen to enormous estate in the good old American way—from slave-traders to robber-barons to stock market manipulators, and thence to holier-than-thou interlocking corporate directors, righteous tax-loopholers, secret spendthrifts, and dedicated philanthropists. Penelope was the last of the Arlingtons because she had never married—why keep a husband around the house when you have all the money and all the men you can use? Penelope was now a soft-skinned svelte blonde, fiftyish, but as well-preserved as a butterfly under glass. Penelope was an eccentric, and proud of it. Also she could afford it. A handsome woman and a passionate gadabout, she was strongly addicted to jazz, food, laughter, parties, plays, horses, and the four strata of society, high, low, cafe, and underworld. She was also firmly addicted to men—preferably young, attractive, and virile. She turned up at the various night spots with all sorts of odd-balls: gangsters, potentates, gamblers, painters, Yale-boys, and Alcatraz graduates—but always young, attractive, virile. Years ago she had slept with Charlie Medford, at present she was sleeping with Charlie’s son; a bank president, Donald P. K. Sloan, had spoken of her as a close and personal friend, yet she was acquainted with a cheap little hood like Mike the Pea—there you have examples of the span and scan of the ebullient Arlington. She was a regular item in all of the gossip columns, she had enough color for a museum of Van Gogh paintings, and she was a prime and overdue prospect for involvement in violence.

  The violence was murder else it wouldn’t have been Parker on the telephone because Parker was Homicide. Whom had she killed and why and what did young Jack have to do with it? She had a notorious temper, an unpredictable temperament, and a respect for nothing and no one. On the other hand, Jack—

  “Fourteen Sutton,” said my driver.

  “Yes sir,” I said.

  There was a cop stationed outside the lacquered ebony door of 14 Sutton Place. He was tall and broad and he seemed to grow taller and broader as, after paying off my cab, I approached.

  “Yeah?” he said when we were vis-a-vis.

  “I’m to see Lieutenant Parker.”

  “What name?”

  “Peter Chambers.”

  He opened the door and I passed through into a cool lobby in which a granite-faced cop sat in a marble chair reading a newspaper. He looked up at me and looked back to the paper. Do you know the type? An important man with a shiny badge concentrating on important business while the visiting dignitary cools his heels while toeing the mark in the outer office. The newspaper, of course, was open to the comic page.

  Cool of heel but hot under the collar, the visiting dignitary suffered inner turmoil in the outer office but, admirably, kept a lid on his boiling patience. Finally the dignitary coughed, but dignified.

  “Sick?” said the cop without looking up.

  “Sick and tired.”

  So he looked up. “What’s with the big mouth?” he said.

  “With the big mouth it’s like this. A taxpayer doesn’t pay taxes so that a funny-looking cop should sit around on his fat ass reading the funnies and paying attention to nothing else. That’s how it is with this big mouth and what are you going to do about it?”

  “Oh, one of them guys, huh?” He folded the paper, laid it on the floor, and stood up. “You one of them wise-guy reporters? Is that it?”

  “No.”

  “All right. So talk it up. You got a big enough trap. So what the hell do you want here?”

  “I want here the hell Lieutenant Parker. He’s for real, not in the funny paper
, and I’m here at his specific request. My name is Peter Chambers and the lieutenant is waiting for me. Does any of that meet with your approval, Commissioner?”

  The granite face grew red but it cracked to a stony smile. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place, Mr. Chambers?”

  “Nobody asked me in the first place.”

  “You’re to go in there.” He pointed to a paneled door. “The drawing room.”

  “Thank you.”

  The first person to draw my eyes in the drawing room was Michael Peabody.

  Mike the Pea in person.

  THIRTEEN

  IT WAS not a pretty picture that was framed within that drawing room, sort of a still life—of crime. Standing, motionless, were two uniformed policemen. Seated, motionless, were Mike the Pea and one Sandy Santee, a crooked lawyer with more curves than a road around a mountain. Sandy Santee was a fat man with a pink bald pate surrounded by an aureole-like frizz of white hair. He had a pink face, porcine eyes, a thick nose, and a thin-lipped mouth. He was a well-known criminal lawyer, the adjective applying to him as well as to his clientele. He had been twice disbarred and twice reinstated because he was a power amongst the local politicians. He was a lower-echelon lawyer for lower-echelon criminals, a fixer, a ward-heeler, a sharpshooter, an angle-guy, but keen as the edge of a switchblade knife and a knowledgeable and troublesome (and grudgingly respected) roadblock in the path of the activities of police and prosecutor.

  Sandy Santee gave me a dose of his dun-colored eyes and said nothing.

  Mike the Pea, resplendent in silver-grey mohair, said, “Well, look what we got here. Now it’s a real slumming party.”

  “Shut up,” said Santee.

  “Can’t I even talk to the shamus?”

  “You talk when I tell you to talk, period.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “You just be a nice quiet little punk and listen to teacher.”

  “There’s only one punk in this room and that’s—’

  “Shut up,” said Santee.

  “You tell him, teacher,” I said.

  “What are you doing here anyway?” said Santee.

  “The lieutenant has requested my questionable services,” I said.

  “Questionable is a hundred percent correct,” said Mike the Pea. “And if there’s one punk that I’d like to—”

  “Shut up,” said Santee.

  One of the cops said, “You’re Peter Chambers?”

  “I am,” I said.

  “You know what a chamber is?” said Mike the Pea. “Like a bed-chamber? It’s a pot that you piss in.”

  “That’s a chamber pot,” said Santee, grinning with bad teeth.

  “Well, that’s what he is,” said Mike the Pea. “A chamber pot.”

  “Now why don’t you shut up?” said Santee but still grinning.

  “Okay, okay,” said the cop. “Both of you shut up.” To me he said politely and pleasantly, “Will you come this way, please?” There are polite and pleasant cops, I am happy to report.

  “I don’t envy you having to listen to this bright chatter,” I said.

  “I don’t listen,” he said. “This way, please.”

  He opened a door, led me through a corridor, opened another door, and I passed into a vast book-lined library where, at a long shiny table, were seated Jack Medford, Detective-Lieutenant Louis Parker, and a glowing redhead with green eyes who, even seated, was putting her breast a foot forward. A young uniformed policeman stood as sentinel but his eyes were riveted upon that redhead as though she bore a chest of gold. You couldn’t blame him. That gal was certainly eye-catching. She jutted like a peninsula and the dress she was wearing, green too, was bursting with such expansive cleavage as to prevent a young cop from giving a tittle of attention anywhere else. When I entered all eyes, except of course the policeman’s turned to me.

  Jack Medford said quietly, “Hello, Mr. Chambers.”

  Parker shoved out of his chair. “I’d like a word with you first, Pete.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  We quit the library and I followed him along a hallway and then he touched the knob of a door and he said. “Keep a close hold on yourself, kid, This isn’t going to be pretty.”

  “Just a minute,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You know who that boy is, don’t you?”

  “Jack Medford, and that’s all I know because that’s all he’s told me.”

  I sank a probe. “He’s the son of Charles Medford, the guy who walked out of that bank with the hundred gees.”

  “I don’t care whose son he is. As I’ve told you once before, I don’t deal in larceny. My business is murder.”

  So he didn’t know and I couldn’t tell him. Charlie Medford was Generoso’s case. It was only a couple of hours old. It hadn’t spread out yet to all the other hunters out in the field nosing for the spoors of the murderers who were their assignments. He didn’t know and I wasn’t supposed to know—so how could I tell him? In one sense—the cowardly sense—it was a relief. I couldn’t tell him—I wasn’t supposed to know—so I couldn’t tell it to Jack Medford either. Who among you relishes—wouldn’t prefer to avoid?—the mission of informing a son of his father’s murder?

  Parker turned the knob and we were in a spacious bedroom, one lonely uniformed cop moodily staring out of a window. The bed was occupied but the limp folds of a blanket completely covered its occupant. I repressed a shudder. Hell, I’m in the business and I’ve seen many blankets and many sheets covering a corpse but there is no one in the world, including me, who becomes accustomed to looking upon death. Parker glanced at me, pulled his lips together, strode quickly to the bed, and pulled the blanket.

  The corpse was Penelope Arlington.

  FOURTEEN

  IT WAS bad. Parker deemed it necessary—possibly to enlist my total cooperation—that I view the body, but even as I looked, I could see that he wasn’t, that he was looking past her rather than at her. Her throat was cut so wide open her head was askew, almost decapitated, hinged to her body by the bones at the back of her neck. The pillow, the sheets, and her yellow silk nightgown were soaked in blood.

  “All right,” I said and swallowed hard.

  Parker covered her with the blanket. I moved to the cop at the open window and breathed deeply. Parker, humanely, waited until I was back in control.

  “We can’t move her, we can’t touch a thing,” Parker said. “None of my technical-boys have arrived yet, nor anybody from the Medical Examiners office. We’re marking time.”

  “And you think my boy did this?”

  “He’s one of our suspects.”

  “You’re nuts.”

  “Why?”

  “Louie, I’ve known Jack Medford since he was a boy, a little kid. He couldn’t.”

  “You don’t think he’s capable of murder? Is that it? Pete, you’ve been in the business long enough—”

  “I don’t think he’s capable of this kind of murder, this kind of close-on, intimate, shocking murder. A bullet from a gun, somehow it’s impersonal. But this …” I shook my head. “I won’t buy it. This kid, inside, is too finely-meshed, too sensitive …”

  “Maybe.” Parker shrugged. “But he hasn’t denied …”

  “Has he admitted?”

  “He’s clammed, period. He’s given us his name, he’s told us he wanted you, and he’s told us where we could reach you. Period.”

  “What about the weapon?”

  “We have it. And where do you think we found it?”

  “Where?”

  “In the right hand of the finely-meshed sensitive Jack Medford.”

  “May I see it?”

  “Come here.” I went with him to an ornate dresser where he pointed to an open, bloody, six-inch switchblade. “Don’t touch,” he said. “Till my technicians get here, we don’t touch a thing. Look but don’t touch.”

  It was an ash-wood, oyster-white, intricately-carved dresser. It had two, parallel, half-size upper drawers, an
d, beneath them, a tier of three full-size lower drawers. The right-hand upper drawer was pulled halfway open. The knife lay on top of the dresser between two tall pink vases. The vase on the left contained orchids. The vase on the right contained gardenias. The flowers were wilted and tired.

  “Look,” I said, “if I’m to talk to Medford, I think you’d better tell me what this is all about, what that Mike Peabody is doing here, and that shyster Santee.”

  “Fair enough. You want it from the horse’s mouth?”

  “Who’s the horse?”

  “Denise Monet.”

  “Who’s Denise Monet?”

  “The readhead outside.”

  “Who’s the redhead outside?”

  “Penelope Arlington’s personal maid.”

  “Is she a suspect too?”

  “Not at all. Clean.”

  “Fine,” I said. “From that horse’s mouth I want it, and how.”

  “Just take care, lover-boy. She’s French and excitable.”

  “So?”

  “She’s a married woman.”

  “So?”

  “She’s married to a professional wrestler.”

  “Oh.”

  Parker motioned to the cop. “Would you bring Mrs. Monet in here, please?”

  “Yessir.” The cop went out and returned with the redhead, her hips swinging like ropes off a gibbet, but her face pale and strained as is seemly in the presence of death. She was a big one: tall, top-heavy, muscular, and massively curved, but all in exquisite proportion. If her husband was a wrestler, he probably put in his best practice licks at home.