by John Roeburt
Damn her. She’d borrowed Stephanie’s perfume for the occasion.
* * * *
I poked at the two sunnyside eggs and four strips of bacon on my plate. Ken’s head was lost in the financial pages of the New York Times while Julia and Stephanie finished their own breakfasts and began clearing the dishes. I’d have to get out of here. It didn’t much matter where I went. Anywhere but here.
“Ken,” I said. “Steffy tells me things didn’t work out with Wompler.”
The newspaper folded. Ken made a bridge of his hands over his empty plate and asked, “How did Steffy find out?”
“I told her,” Julia said.
Ken didn’t look surprised. “Well, it was a good try, boy. Apparently you scared Wompler so he’d say anything to get you out of his hair. But as soon as you left, he changed his mind.” He spoke about it matter-of-factly, as if an adulterous wife who was being blackmailed was the most natural topic of breakfast conversation in the world. It hardly seemed to bother Julia, either; she went right on clearing dishes. Stephanie had the grace to blush.
The phone rang.
Ken got up and picked the receiver off the wall-box extension. “Hello? Yes, Barrett… Oh, not about that, eh?… My brother? Yes, he’s here. Just a minute. It’s for you, Jason. Tad Barrett.”
I took the receiver and said, “Jason Chase.”
“Chase, I’m sorry. I’ve got tragic news.”
“Jo-Anne?” I said.
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
I gagged emptily on the sour taste of coffee. I didn’t want to hear the rest of it. I fought a crazy impulse to hang up the phone. I swallowed and felt my heart hammering.
I said, “The worst?”
“The worst.”
“God! How did…”My voice broke. Julia and Ken and Stephanie all were watching me.
“Take it easy, Chase. You’d better come down here.” He gave me the address of a dock on South Street, which I scribbled mechanically on the wall pad hanging by the phone. My hand was trembling so much I had to lean against the pad to steady it.
“I’ll be right down,” I said. I hung up.
Stephanie spoke. “What is it, Jason?”
“Why don’t you just shut up and leave me alone, all of you? I shouldn’t have been here in bed last night while…” My voice broke again.
“Jason. Can I help?”
“Nothing can help. Jo-Anne is dead.” I stood there and bawled. I just bawled like a baby. Then I honked my nose and found Stephanie waiting with a bottle of Canadian. I didn’t look for a glass but tilted the bottle to my lips and kept pulling and pulling.
They knew Jo-Anne. She’d been one of our crowd since I had met her at school.
I said, “I’m going to find the bastard who did it and kill him slow.”
Stephanie stood in the doorway and said, “You’d better not go out like that.”
I smiled at her. A real smile. I got my hands under her arms and lifted her out of the way, depositing her alongside the door.
Outside, the big snow-sweepers were eating up great steel mouthfuls and spraying them up on the Park Avenue mall. I saw a cab letting off passengers at a hotel a block away. I sprinted for it and said, “South Street.”
Chapter Ten
It was nine-thirty when I got there. The hack had had a rough time with the fish-market carts being pushed and dragged across the street and up the street and down the street, loaded with crates of cod and mackerel and maybe sea serpent, for all I knew, all completely ignoring the traffic.
The dock-hands wore mackinaws or leather jackets with baling hooks slung across the shoulders. I got out and maneuvered along the sidewalks stacked solid with crates and barrels, behind which you could see the open fronts of the great downtown fish markets, where naked electric bulbs hung over the stalls of fish and seafood and tried to dispel the gloom under the spanking new expressway which carried traffic overhead.
The cold air reeked of fish as I pushed on, coming to a small dock beyond the last of the stalls, jutting into the river between them and the Coast Guard Station. The police photographic crew was just leaving when I got there, loading their gear into the big weatherproof cases.
“You see all kinds,” one of the boys was saying.
“Yeah, but not like this right after breakfast. They’d of told me, I wouldn’t of had that extra cruller.” He made a face. “I’m gonna be in no hurry to get these shots in the hypo, no sir.”
I walked by. The crowd was ten deep and trying to push closer to the dock. I shouldered my way through and some voices started to protest, but when they looked at my face they changed their minds and gave me all the room I wanted.
The cop standing at the foot of the dock didn’t. “You can’t go any further, buddy,” he said.
“She has no family. I’m her closest friend. I can identify her.”
“Then you must be Jason Chase.”
“That’s right.”
“A private detective out on the dock told the Lieutenant about you, Mr. Chase. It’s all right for you to go on up there.” The cop stamped his feet to keep them warm and waved me on.
The dock sagged and creaked underfoot. There were rot-holes through which you could glimpse the dirty gray water and the barnacle-encrusted pilings.
Tad Barrett came trotting across the rotten wood toward me. A big briar hung slackly from his teeth and he wasn’t smiling. “It isn’t pretty, Chase. A time like this, a man wishes he could say something.”
“Let’s take a look,” I said.
The uniformed police were thick as flies. The plain-clothesmen walked about briskly and efficiently, hopping on and off a big but ancient cruiser which was slapping back and forth against the pilings with the tidewater.
“Down there.” Barrett pointed. “On the boat. A contact I have on Homicide Squad, Manhattan West, tipped me off.”
It was old and weathered, that boat, and looked like something out of those B-movies about steamers which ply the Belgian Congo in search of trouble and exotic romance.
Two plainclothesmen nodded curtly at Barrett and I recognized one of them. He’d been with Pop Grujdzak that night when Phyllis Kirk was murdered. Barrett jerked a finger toward the boat’s cabin, gave one of the cops a questioning look and waited until the man nodded. We stepped down and through a beaten-up bulkhead.
Someone had got a kerosene lamp going inside. You could smell it and had to adjust your eyes to its flickering light.
Pop Grujdzak rasped out of the shadows, “You seem to have a nose for murder, Chase.”
“Can it,” I said. “Where is she?”
Pop pointed. The cops had draped the body with a tarpaulin and I almost didn’t want to look, but I picked up the kerosene lamp by its handle and squatted near the tarp, lifting a corner.
They’d worked over Jo-Anne’s face with a baling hook or something. There were bloodstains on her clothing and the way she lay there indicated some of her bones had been broken. I was glad I’d done my bawling in Ken’s apartment, but I had to turn away and shut my eyes tight and stand off in a shadowy corner of the cabin for a while. They were still talking, the cops. Two men whispering. Pop Grujdzak’s rasp. You could hear the water slapping against the pilings outside. I turned around and looked at Barrett, who had placed the kerosene lamp back on its tin bracket.
“Who did it?” I said.
“We don’t know yet.”
“How did it happen?”
“From what Lieutenant Grujdzak tells me, it happened like this. Someone took her here. Two men, maybe three. They worked her over pretty bad…”
“To get the code out of her!”
“They were going to dump her in the river. See, over there, that pail of bricks? They’d have anchored her with that and it might have been a long time before the body washed up any place, if at all.”
“But they didn’t.”
“No, they didn’t. The Lieutenant tells me a patrolman on the beat last night spotted the light here and heard
what sounded like a woman sobbing. He came running and got knocked down for his trouble. He thought there were two men, but there might have been three, he says. He fired twice and missed them in the darkness. Then he went back and found Miss Stedman.”
“What killed her, Barrett?”
“Loss of blood. Shock. A crushed trachea. The medical report hasn’t been made yet, but when the patrolman found her, she was still alive. She died before the ambulance got here, which was two o’clock this morning.”
“And they made her suffer?”
“Yeah,” Barrett said, “they made her suffer. Hell, look at her.”
I didn’t. I said, “I’m going to get those bastards, Barrett.” I was whispering. I hoped the cops wouldn’t hear. I hoped mostly Pop Grujdzak wouldn’t hear. I was an ex-con and they wouldn’t have too much trouble slapping me in jail on one pretext or another. “I don’t want the cops to get them, Barrett. The law’s too soft and moves too slow and kills too quick. I want to find them. Me. I want to get them.”
“Were you in love with the poor kid, Chase?”
“I’d have done anything for her. Anything. No, I wasn’t in love with her. That’s the worst part of it. She was the best, Barrett. The best there is. It just wasn’t there.”
“About what you said, Chase, I sympathize with you. But hell, man, you ought to cool off. You ought to tell the cops what you know and let them take it from there. Two people have been murdered over this thing already.”
“Like hell,” I said. “I don’t want the cops to find those guys. I’m going to prowl around and keep on prowling till I find something, if it takes the rest of my life. If the cops get close, I’ll try to keep them off the trail. I want those people. Two or three or a hundred, I don’t care. I’m going to get them.”
“What do you mean, you’ll prowl around? How do you conduct a murder investigation, Chase? Do you know anything about it? You’d be batting your head against a stone wall.”
“Then you help me,” I said. “Stay on the case and let me work with you.”
“The cops don’t like one-man vendettas.”
“Then nuts to the cops. I’m going to get them, that’s all. Who owns this derelict?”
“Don’t yell. It’s Wilson Wompler.”
“What!”
“Yeah, Wompler. He bought it for a few hundred a couple of weeks ago, according to what I could find out. Going to shoot a picture story on white slavery or some such fool thing, and this was to be the scenery.”
“Then that means…”
“It doesn’t mean a thing, not necessarily.”
“Has anyone talked to Wompler about it?”
“Not me. The police have, though.”
“What did he say?”
Barrett shrugged. “They didn’t tell me. They don’t tell me everything.”
“Are you staying with the case?”
Barrett was still shrugging. “I don’t see why not. You hired me to find a killer, and maybe the missing Kincaid papers. Sure I’m staying with the case.”
“I appreciate that. Maybe in a day or so I’ll be coming to you saying I don’t know which way to turn.”
“We’ll give you all the cooperation we can, Chase.”
“We won’t.” It was Pop Grujdzak’s rasp. I had no way of knowing how much he had heard, but whatever it was it was too much. “The police don’t tell you Chase boys how to run your construction business, so we don’t want you horning in on our murders.”
“The cops told us how to run it. They sent me to jail.”
“I’ll spell it out for you, Chase. I don’t care what happens to you. I don’t care if you get run over by a steamroller tomorrow. But when you monkey in police business and then get hurt, that I don’t like. Maybe if Miss Stedman didn’t go poking her nose into murder, she’d still be alive.”
“Yeah? And maybe if your cops were able to keep her up in Putnam County like they were supposed to, she’d still be alive.”
“They were there to keep trouble away from her, not keep her away from trouble.”
“It’s the same thing. They lost her.”
“She was like Lot’s wife. That they couldn’t help.”
I cursed to stop from poking him one. Emma had been right. When he was whipped back into a corner, he used the Bible for a shield. You couldn’t tell what, if anything, he really believed in.
Barrett and I got out on deck and climbed back to the dock. “Good luck, Chase,” he said. “And keep in touch.”
I promised I would and headed uptown to Wompler Publications.
* * * *
“Really, Chase. I have an appointment in ten minutes. This whole nasty business is playing hob with my schedule.”
“Sit down,” I said. I poked Wompler back into his chair. He started to bound up again, then changed his mind as he looked at me.
“His blood pressure,” Audrey warned.
I’d barged right by sets One through Five, not even bothering to see if Stephanie had reported for work. Wompler was dressed in a pin-stripe suit and Audrey was undressed in halter and shorts as if she’d just come off the set.
“I want to ask you some questions,” I told Wompler.
“I said I’m busy.”
Audrey moved between us. “I’ll have to ask you to leave, Mr. Chase.”
I wasn’t playing games, with her or anyone else. I made a lewd gesture which told her what I thought of her suggestion. Apparently she forgot how much she wanted to be a lady. What she’d done to little Guido had probably gone to her blonde head. She started to swing at me.
I caught her balled fist in my hand and twisted. She yelped and followed it around, spinning away from me. I yanked the fist up, then shoved, and she took two staggering steps toward Wompler and sprawled across his lap. She glared up at me and whined, “Fighting a lady. Aren’t you brave?”
“It’s all different now,” I said. “You can forget that lady crap. If you get in the way, I’ll kick your teeth in, and that’s a promise.”
She looked at me. Subdued, but seething.
“I heard the cops were here,” I told Wompler.
“About the other girl, yes. That’s a shame, Chase.”
“What did you tell them?”
“Why should I have to tell them anything?”
“Because it was your boat, that’s why.”
“Ask Audrey where I was last night. Ask yourself, Chase. You saw us together.”
“At ten-thirty.”
“All night. Ask Audrey.”
“As far as I know, you were the last one to see Jo-Anne alive. At your place, just before I got there.”
“I told you she went off with the Barrett detective.”
“Barrett denied it.”
Audrey was still glaring at me, standing behind Wompler’s chair. Now Wompler was glaring too. He had no comment to make about Barrett, so I said, “Do the police know of her visit?”
“No.”
“How does this sound?” I asked. “Last night you told Jo-Anne the papers were downtown somewhere. She met you, say, at a bar. You took her down to your boat because you figured there’d be no disturbances there. You had the Kincaid papers, but they were no good to you unless you could get Jo-Anne to reveal the code. So you and Audrey tried to make her talk, then got scared and killed her. Maybe she talked and maybe she didn’t, but a patrolman came along and scared you away before you had time to dispose of her.”
Wompler’s face had drained white. His throat worked, but it was some time before he could talk. Then his face got all red and he was shouting. “You’re crazy,” he cried. “You’re a crazy, no good, meddling louse who has a mad on for me, I don’t know why. I’m clean. I have nothing to do with this. If you don’t stop-bothering me I’m going to call the cops, so help me.”
“Go ahead and call them. But they don’t know you were the last person to see her alive. They don’t know yet.”
“Oh, God,” Wompler moaned. Audrey just stood there, nursing her fo
rearm and not saying anything.
“Listen, Wompler. You shape up as a dirty liar every time you open your mouth. Maybe you’re afraid of something and trying to cover, or maybe it’s a disease with you. I don’t know. But…”
“I’m asking you, Mr. Chase. Please. I’m a publisher. Some people say smut and smear, but I want to go classy. I had enough of that pervert stuff. All I want to do is mind my own business and publish good picture magazines. There’s no reason I should lie to you, no reason at all. There’s no reason you should keep on bothering me like this.”
I grabbed him off the chair by the lapels of his pinstripe jacket. “Get this straight,” I growled in his face. “I intend to find out who killed Jo-Anne.” His lower lip was trembling. His nostrils were flaring with every breath he took. “You better hope you’re not involved,” I said. “You damn well better!”
I let him fall. Audrey caught him and eased him to the floor, where she sat down and ran her long fingers through his wavy hair, cooing to him softly. What the hell, I thought suddenly. That big broad with muscles must be his mother-image.
“You can go to the cops,” she called as I left. “We should care. We were together all night.”
I checked with the girls on the sets and found that Stephanie hadn’t come in to work yet, which wasn’t odd since most of them only put in one or two hours a day, then trotted their cheesecakes and cookies on home. A gent carrying a portfolio was out in the reception room, but I told him I didn’t think Wompler would be seeing anyone for a while.
I needed a drink. I needed a whole passel of drinks.
But first I’d see if Guido could make like an armory and equip me for whatever my snooping might uncover.
Chapter Eleven
I found him at a used-car lot on Bruckner Boulevard in the Bronx, wiping snow from the automobile bargains with a plastic scraper. The boss was drinking coffee in the shed nearby, Guido said. The boss must have been not only of the old school but its president emeritus, for all the time we talked Guido pretended he was conning a potential buyer.
“How about this Chevy?” he said, and “Yeah, I can get you an equalizer. I ask you, ever see anything like it? 1946 model and only forty-seven thousand miles.”
