by John Roeburt
“Stolen,” the fat cop said at once. “No lead there. What did Guido have for you?”
“Well, Guido took me outside…”
“In front of The House That Jack Built?”
“That’s right. I think he was going to tell me something, but he never got the chance.”
“The car came around the corner of Avenue H and they killed Guido and hit you in the shoulder. That much, we know. That’s all you know?”
“I took Guido’s gun and ran after them.”
“Oh. It was Guido’s .45.”
“Of course it was,” I said. “What did you think?”
“And you don’t know what he had in mind when he sent for you?”
They were crowding me. I could tell them what Guido had had in mind: two goons left over from the old days of Murder, Inc. Or I could tell them nothing. An image of Jo-Anne lying there, battered and dead, under the tarpaulin on Wompler’s old boat, was conjured up inside my head. Another image, of Guido with a hand in front of his face, trying to stop the bullets, joined it. I shook my head and said, “I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“Chase, listen. Three floaters already. For your sake, I hope you told us all you know. No one who ever committed three murders will shy away from a fourth. You ought to realize that.”
“I realize it. I hope what I told you has been of some help.”
“Frankly, not much. We’ll probably be back some time soon after we check things with Grujdzak and Manhattan West. Get well now, hear?”
“You give my regards to my good friend Pop Grujdzak.”
One shrugged. One snickered. Fatso shook his head. Pop must have given them a lot of dirty words about me.
“Listen, guys,” I said. “Maybe you could tell me this. After the Kirk kid was killed, I heard a cop say fingerprints were all over the place. I want to ask you—whose prints?”
“Jo-Anne Stedman’s prints,” the fat cop said.
“Nobody else’s?”
“Yours, Chase. Hers and yours.”
He turned and marched out of the room followed by the two tall guys.
I sat up against the pillow and thought hard.
All right, so none of Phyllis Kirk’s prints had been found there—though she lived in the place.
That meant the apartment had been wiped of all prints before Jo-Anne and I had arrived. That was why the killer had hung around after the murder—to wipe. Probably he had been busy wiping away when he had heard Jo-Anne and me fumbling at the door. I pictured his movements in my mind. To make sure we wouldn’t be able to see him, he had rushed to the fuse box in the kitchen, had loosened a fuse or two, but hadn’t finished the job because we’d interrupted by entering. But in the darkness, he had managed to conk me.
Who?
* * * *
On Saturday, Ken and Julia came to visit me, bringing candy and flowers and wearing get-well-soon smiles.
“Damn them,” Ken boomed. “Where did they hurt you? How does it feel, boy? There ought to be police on every corner in a neighborhood like that.”
“Then you know what happened?”
“We read about it in the papers,” Julia said. “Poor Jason.”
“Everything’s going to be all right now,” Ken assured her. “We’ll get Jason out of here and into a good hospital and…”
“The hell you will,” I said. I was thinking about what the doctor had told me. The city gets rid of its patients in a hurry. “I’m comfortable right here.”
“But in a charity ward!”
“It isn’t charity,” I told him, grinning. “When the city finds out who my brother is, they’ll send a bill big enough to choke a horse.”
Ken shrugged. “I’ll pay anything to get you well.”
“Hell, it’s only a flesh wound. I just fell, that’s all.”
“You don’t have to be heroic in front of me,” Ken said. “I’ll understand. Let your hair down, boy. Does a man good.”
Talking with Ken was suddenly like wallowing neck deep in syrup. I listened while he oozed on about how a place was waiting for me with the construction company if I changed my mind and how he hadn’t forgotten about the hundred thousand dollars, even if I had. Mention of the money made Julia’s eyes go big and round, and she turned away quickly as if it wasn’t right for her husband to keep talking about giving away that kind of money after it had been turned down, even if their relationship was miles away from what people had in mind when they spoke of happy marriages.
After fifteen minutes of it, I started hoping they would leave, but they stayed a full hour and then promised to return on Sunday.
But Stephanie was the first to arrive on Sunday afternoon. She smiled at me and plunked herself down on the foot of the bed and said, “They tell me you’ll have to be in bed another few days.”
“I’m leaving tomorrow.”
“You listen to me, Jason. You stay here until you’re well. There’s nothing you have to do that can’t wait, you hear me?”
“I’m deaf,” I said. “But you know what I keep feeling like doing? Like kissing you, Steffy.”
First she smiled, then she scowled, then she smiled again, showing her dimples. She had rosy cheeks and red lips and that beret perched atop her head. “That can be arranged,” she said. She leaned forward and brushed her lips across my cheek, then stood up. “Now stay in bed till the doctor lets you up.”
“Bribery, huh?”
It was the perfume. It was her eyes. It was her voice, the way she spoke. It was the way she stood and how she held her head on one side looking at you and wore the beret on the other side to balance things. It was everything.
Love that gal, I told myself. Aloud I said:
“Steffy, how do you feel about me?”
She knew what I meant. She smiled and squeezed my hand. “I’ll have to sleep on it.”
It cut me a little. “Do that.”
“Get well, Jason!” She blew me a kiss from the doorway and then she was gone.
* * * *
My surprise visitor on Monday was Emma Grujdzak. “I see Steffy wasn’t exaggerating,” she said. “You look fit as a fiddle.”
“That’s what I keep telling the doc. Hey, does that mean Steffy’s back home again?”
“It means nothing of the sort, young man, thanks to you.”
“Pop won’t forgive Steffy?”
“You know Pop. He builds things up inside his head. Pretty soon he’ll get to thinking she wants to marry you or something.”
I lay there and smiled. “I’m thinking, too.”
“Jason Chase, I’ll clobber you with this umbrella. Now, seriously, I came to see you about something Steffy found out.” She’d stopped smiling. “It’s something I think you ought to know. But don’t tell Steffy I told you. She’d skin me alive.”
“I’m listening.”
“You want to know who’s blackmailing your brother Ken?”
“You mean Wompler?”
“No, your brother Ken.”
“Yeah, but…?”
“I told you. Kenneth Lamar Chase is blackmailing himself.”
“Now wait a minute, Emma. Nobody blackmails himself. It doesn’t figure. It doesn’t make sense.”
“I might have known that would be your reaction. There’s lots more I could tell you, but if you…”
“Keep talking,” I pleaded. “Can you prove it?”
“Not me. But I think Steffy can. She told me that Julia knew this Wilson Wompler person back in the old days and took up with him again later. Your brother Ken somehow learned that Wompler—well, you know—with Julia, I mean. Steffy’s guess is that Wompler had no imagination and asked your brother what it was worth to Ken to keep it quiet and away from the newspaper people. Your brother must have got to thinking.”
“Emma, it sounds silly.”
“No. Things had gone sour between Julia and Ken. I’m no psychologist, or anything like that, but your brother Ken is a peculiar person. Julia confided in me once, right after
you went to jail, and said Ken was really guilty and you were taking the rap for him.”
“Julia never should have told you that.”
“Well, is it true?” Emma demanded severely.
“Never mind. Just keep talking.”
“All right. Assuming it true, it would take one queer duck of a man to send his own brother to jail and then go on talking all the time he was away about how you were always a wild kid and really meant well but he should have watched you more carefully. He owed it to the community, was what he said.”
“So?”
“That’s how he is. He’d die for his place in the community. It’s the same way he treats Julia… He doesn’t love her. Oh, maybe there was a time he thought he did, but now he’s just afraid of what the neighbors would think, what all his snooty friends and people he knows would say behind his back if it was ever found out Julia had been unfaithful to him. He can’t let it happen again, don’t you see? So he made an arrangement with this Wompler person to blackmail him.”
“Still too deep for me. I don’t get it, Emma.”
“You see, that’s how he keeps Julia in line. He beats her with the blackmail. He makes believe he’s suffering and paying this Wompler a fortune. He says if she doesn’t behave, he’ll stop paying, and the story will be out in all the papers. She won’t do it again, not with Wompler, anyway.”
“You say Steffy has proof?”
“Here’s the most fantastic part of it. The first time, Wompler must have gone to your brother with nothing but his word. You can’t very well blackmail a man without proof. So for a long time Ken made believe the pictures existed, only there weren’t any pictures. He just told Julia there were. Then Steffy had to help her sister and wound up making everything that much simpler for Ken. Anyhow, Steffy went to work at Wompler’s to see if she could get the pictures back. Just this Friday, she found them.”
“I thought you said there weren’t any pictures.”
“She went snooping around in Wompler’s office and found a file marked Kenneth Chase. There was a negative and a few prints and at first Steffy didn’t get it. Maybe you know Wompler does some of his own modeling, to cut down on expenses. These were some shots Wompler had modeled with Steffy soon after she started working there. With Steffy!”
“Damn,” I said. “You mean they weren’t pictures of Julia at all?”
“That’s right. Steffy recalls how she modeled those scenes with Wompler herself. Something for one of his girlie-girlie magazines about how to kiss in twenty-five different ways. But the pictures were never used. It was all part of Ken’s game to blackmail himself. You know the resemblance between those two girls, their faces and how they’re built and all. From a distance or a three-quarter side view with a lot of shadows, you could hardly tell the difference. Now Ken had pictures he could show Julia, probably just giving her an occasional peek at them.”
“All right, so Wompler took phony pictures with Steffy. That still doesn’t prove Ken arranged it himself.”
“The heck it doesn’t, young man. Excuse me. You see, Ken must have lent Wompler some of Julia’s fanciest lingerie for the purpose. Staying at Ken’s and Julia’s place, Steffy saw the same frilly drawers and things—excuse me—that she wore in the pictures! It was enough to convince her—”
I rolled it around in my mind. I said, “At least she can call it quits at Wompler’s now.”
“Not that girl. Not on your life. Now she’s determined to get the pictures. She was interrupted before she could take them on Friday.”
“Why doesn’t she just let Julia worry about her own problems?”
“Why did you go to prison for Ken?”
“That’s different.”
“You’re a couple of young fools if you ask me, throwing your lives away like that. You, you’re worse than Steffy.”
It made sense, all of it. Almost too much sense. Steffy and Julia did look enough alike. With his mixed-up values, Ken could do something like that. Steffy had placed herself smack in the middle.
“What are you going to do about it, Jason Chase?”
I sat up. I started hollering for the nurse. “First I’m going to get out of here,” I told Emma. “And thanks for letting me know.”
Emma climbed into her fleece-collared storm coat and tested her umbrella tentatively at the door. She smiled at me again and then was gone. A few minutes later I was arguing with a couple of doctors. I was still a patient. My humerus and scapula still needed some mending. Did I lead an active life? I’d rip the bones apart again and all the city’s work would be for naught. Let me worry about that, I said. They’re my bones. Yes, I’d sign a release, any kind of release. The hospital wouldn’t be responsible, nor the ward doctor, nor anyone. Where was my clothing?
The doctors and my nurse wandered off into the hallway and conferred in stage whispers. He’s irresponsible. He’s a glutton for punishment. We’ll have to call his people and see if they can make arrangements to have him cared for at home. He’ll be back. They always come back if they leave too soon. I should have taken up my Uncle Everett and gone into private practice with him. These charity cases. But doctor, don’t you know who his brother is? The construction tycoon, Kenneth Lamar Chase. I might have known. Spoiled. You call his people, nurse.
An hour later, she deposited an offering of suit, topcoat, shirt, tie, underwear, socks and shoes on my bed in stony silence. The clothing was Ken’s naturally, and as I dressed and tested the stiffness in my left arm, I began to wonder. The arm couldn’t have punched its way through a wet Kleenex tissue.
I said goodbye to Plaster Cast on the other bed and marched out toward the elevator on wobbly legs, nodding to the patients who stood out in the hallway in their blue hospital robes, smoking and talking.
Downstairs, the waiting rooms were crowded with cold, soggy people. I crossed the floor to a window and watched the rain pelting down against it. I was on the point of hunkering down in my coat and trying my luck outside when someone tapped my shoulder.
I turned around and saw Steffy smiling at me.
“I’ve slept on it,” she said.
Chapter Thirteen
She was wearing a beige raincoat and a colorful scarf covering her short brown hair. Her cheeks were rosy from contact with the cold outside. I stood there looking and waiting and not saying a word. I was suddenly all choked up inside. Me. The guy who was going to scare the pants off Wompler and get those pictures and who was going to do a slower, more thorough job than the police on Puggie and Five O’Clock.
Steffy placed her hands on my shoulders and held me off at arm’s length. “For a guy who’s been in bed a few days, you’re looking great.”
“I don’t know how I feel yet. It’s up to you.”
“Silly. Kiss me and find out.”
We tried it there in the waiting room, but there were too many people watching. We swung a quarter-turn in the revolving door and tried it again. This worked fine until someone wanted to go through so we found ourselves outside in the chill rain, with Steffy opening a big black man-style umbrella over our heads, where we tried it again.
“I’ll have to admit I didn’t really sleep on it, darling. I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking and thinking about you all night.”
“I love you, Steffy.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to say, Jason. I’m in love with you. Oh, I love you so!”
And then we were exchanging words like darling and sweetheart and honey and all the others which seem so unreal and foolish until you want to use them, and then no other words seem so important or beautiful and you want to pound your chest because the girl you love loves you.
“Now you listen to me, honey,” Steffy finally said, pouting. “I don’t want you getting hurt, but I know you’re out to get whoever stole those papers.”
“Damned right I am,” I mumbled against her hair.
“You mean, you used to be. Let’s not have our first argument right now, so you just forget all about it and le
t the police…”
“Your old man? Are you crazy? Sweetheart, I’m sorry but you wouldn’t want me like that. A coward.”
“You wouldn’t be a coward to let the police do police work.”
“Forget it. I’ll do what I have to.”
“But—”
“Which reminds me. A kid like you shouldn’t go around sticking her nose into other people’s blackmail. I don’t think you ought to go back to Wompler’s. Model gloves or something.”
“Gloves, the man says. With my equipment?”
“Well, that’s not the point. Only don’t go back there, that’s all. Promise?”
“No!”
We stood glaring at each other, with the rain pummeling the big umbrella over our heads. Steffy smiled first. Then we were laughing and the umbrella was bobbing up and down.
“Look,” I began again. “This is different. You’re a girl.”
“I’m so close to getting those pictures now, I wouldn’t promise to stop even if you promised me that you’d stop.”
“I’m not doing this for Ken,” I pointed out. “I’m doing it for myself and for a little guy named Guido who never had a chance and for a girl named Jo-Anne who was the most wonderful kid in the world. Except you. But I don’t owe Ken a thing. Do you realize I spent two years in jail for that guy while he went scot free?”
“Hah!”
“He was desperate. He said he had to keep the business going. He was a cripple; I had crippled him. He couldn’t take it in jail, he said. I was young. A hundred thousand bucks he’d give me. I owed him this, he said. He pleaded. I was nuts.”
“But that’s different. That was criminal.”
“No more criminal than you stealing photos—”
“Jason Chase, Emma’s been here to see you. Wait till I get hold of her, just wait!”
“You’re making the same mistake I made a couple of years ago. Getting yourself in trouble for a brother. I mean, a sister—”
“Call it what you want, but I’ve got to be able to live with myself.” She headed down the steps. “I’m not sore or anything, Jason. It’s just got to be this way. We each have a job we have to get done. Listen, I drove down in Ken’s car. Can I drop you somewhere in Manhattan?”
