The Clairvoyant Countess

by Dorothy Gilman

  “Any trouble lately on the routes?” Pruden asked.

  “Oh no,” she said, “we’ve never had any trouble. I know a couple of other companies had difficulties a few years ago but we’ve never had any.”

  “Any of your trucks move in the Dell section?”

  She shook her head. “That’s Mr. Freezee territory. Our trucks operate only in the city proper.”

  “Who decides all this?” he asked with interest.

  She laughed. “Whoever gets there first, that’s who. We happened to be first in the city, that’s all, and never got around to expanding into the Dell section. Here, I’ll show you.” She walked over to the open door, closed it and showed him a map thumbtacked to the wall. “As you can see—”

  Pruden walked over and looked at the map. The Jack Frost territories were colored in pink, the competition routes in green. He said, “The green areas, what companies have those routes?”

  “Mr. Freezee.”

  “I thought you said Mr. Freezee had only the Dell section?”

  “Oh, they started there,” Mrs. Materas explained, “but over the past several years they’ve been expanding. Buying out other suburban territories here and there.”

  “For cash?”

  Mrs. Materas shrugged. “I really couldn’t tell you. Some of those small independents often run into debt the first year and sell out cheap.”

  Pruden nodded, his face thoughtful. He wondered whether Mrs. Materas had noticed lately that Jack Frost was now completely encircled by Mr. Freezee; almost, he thought, like a noose. “Well, thanks,” he said. “I appreciate your help. One other question: have you many Puerto Rican drivers?”

  She thought a moment. “A fair number, maybe 30 per cent. They’re good workers. Ambitious. You can’t explain why—?”

  “Not yet,” he said with a friendly smile, “but one day I will.”

  He went next to see Maria Ardizzone again, because he was remembering her hesitation when he’d asked if anything in particular had upset Luis just before he became ill. It had been a very slight hesitation but he’d caught it and he decided it was time to find out whether it meant anything. When he looked up her home address he found that she lived at Mrs. Malone’s boardinghouse, which explained how she and Luis had met when the Mendez brothers worked such long hours.

  Her room was smaller than his, and at the top of the house, and hot. It was the sort of room that he might have expected if he’d sat down first to consider her character: she had taken it ambitiously in hand, as she would Luis if he lived, and she had painted and slip-covered and decorated until it looked like one of those magazine photo stories captioned “Turning-an-Attic-Room-into-an-Apartment.” There was a great deal of white shag everywhere and black-and-white flowered cloth, and fat red pillows, and little glass-topped tables. Pruden, who liked to see the bones of a room—bare floors and furniture—thought it rather suffocating but he admitted that it was as pretty as Maria.

  He found her upset. “I just don’t understand about this voodoo business. Luis went with me to church every Sunday,” she complained in a worried voice. “I’m a Roman Catholic and he said he was too. He never mentioned any—any voodoo cults.”

  He agreed that it could be rather a shock.

  “And then to hear—I can’t even see him,” she protested, looking suddenly very young.

  “He was better last night. I saw him.”

  “But I wanted to make him better,” she said simply. “I was praying hard for him.”

  “Then I think your prayers must have—well, brought him the people who could help. Do you still want to help him?”

  Her eyes widened. “But of course! Oh, you mustn’t think it’s made any difference. It’s just I don’t understand why he didn’t tell me.”

  Pruden said gently, “He might have felt a little embarrassed, you know, or thought he’d lose you. You’re not Puerto Rican, are you?”

  She thought about this and appeared to appreciate it. “That’s true.”

  “So let’s get down to facts.” Pruden seated himself in a chair that brought his knees almost to his chin, got up and moved to the couch, which placed a more sustaining weight under him. “You hesitated when I asked if Luis had been upset by anything before he became sick.”

  “Oh, that,” sniffed Maria. “Such a small thing, and yet—and yet you know it was the only time I’ve ever seen him look—well, so changed. Arturo’s death made him sad—he cried, you know, but this—”

  “Tell me.”

  She nodded. “It was the day after Arturo’s burial and Luis had only just gone back to work. I came downstairs—we were going to go for a walk—and I saw a man on the stairs below me. Luis was standing in the door of his room watching the man leave and he had this funny look on his face, as if he’d been hit in the stomach. For about ten minutes after that he wasn’t himself—very quiet, not listening—and then we went out to a movie and after that he was fine.”

  “Had the man been in Luis’ room?”

  “Yes, but Luis didn’t say why. I thought it must have been a friend of Arturo’s come to pay his respects.”

  “You don’t know who the man was?”

  Maria shook her head.

  “Could you describe him?”

  “Oh no,” she said, “I saw only his back. Maybe Mrs. Malone saw him, though. She’s very fussy about keeping the front door locked. Everybody has to ring the bell if they don’t have a key.”

  “I’ll go down and ask,” he said, and thanked her.

  Mrs. Malone, unearthed in the kitchen, wiped her hands on her apron and thought about Pruden’s question. “Someone to see Luis …” she repeated gravely. “Well, I can’t think who that would be, since Luis didn’t get callers, if you know what I mean.” Her brow suddenly lifted. “Oh yes, I remember. A young man, right after dinner. Asked me to tell Luis that Carlos wanted to see him. Yes, that was his name, Carlos.… I told him I was busy and he’d have to find Luis himself, second floor front.”

  “Do you remember what he looked like?”

  Mrs. Malone closed her eyes. “Black hair and mustache. Good-looking young man, twenty-five or twenty-six. What I’d call a sharp dresser. Bright colors. Sharp.”

  “What sort of mustache?”

  “Oh, the dashing kind. You know what they’re wearing these days.”

  Pruden nodded and wrote it down. “Thanks, Mrs. Malone,” he said, and went out to telephone Bill Kane, who was off duty today but had patrolled Fifth Street for three years and might recognize the description. He read it to Kane over the phone.

  “Sounds like Carlos Torres,” Kane said cautiously. “Hangs out a lot at the Caballeros Social Club.”

  This was better luck than Pruden had expected. “Any visible means of employment?”

  Kane sighed into the telephone. “I don’t really know, Lieutenant. At least he’s never done anything antisocial, to my knowledge. Knows a lot of people. Could be a bookie, I suppose, but frankly I’ve never seen him up to anything suspicious. Gets around a lot, now that you mention it. Nice, polite, bright-eyed guy. Neat and sociable.”

  “Mmmm,” murmured Pruden, and decided he would ask for a tail on Mr. Carlos Torres just to see where his getting around took him.

  Twenty-four hours later, by Monday night, Pruden had a neat list on what Carlos Torres had done with his Sabbath evening and with the first day of the new week. It was an interesting list: Kane was right, the young man got around. His tail had picked him up at four-thirty on Sunday when he was walking with a girl named Esperita. He’d returned the girl to her house and stopped at the Hy-Grade Laundry, where overtime was going on in the rear section. He’d had dinner at the Grand Hotel, a decent place on Seventh Street where he lived in a rented room on the ground floor. While he’d been eating a man had stopped to talk to him for fifteen minutes, followed by another, who had coffee with him. Then Carlos had picked up another girl—a blonde this time named Carol—and had taken her to a movie. After that he’d strolled up to a
shop at 1023 Broad Street, gone down an alley next to the shop, knocked on a door and gone inside. One hour later he returned to his hotel. His lights had gone out at midnight.

  In the morning he’d taken the subway to the Dell section, where he’d gone to a business building and entered the offices of one Harold Robichaud, Amusement Enterprises, Inc. He’d then gone on to the office of a John Tortorelli, attorney-at-law, also in the Dell section, and at noon was back at 1023 Broad Street again, this time entering the shop (The Bazaar Curio Shop, Everything Bizarre) by the front door. After another visit to Hy-Grade Laundry he was now at the Caballeros Social Club again, this time with a redhead named Marcia.

  Bookie? thought Pruden. Messenger? Go-between? Wheeler-dealer? The name of Tortorelli was vaguely familiar. He asked for a run-down on Harold Robichaud and John Tortorelli and decided to pay a visit to 1023 Broad Street, which was one item on the list he could check out immediately.

  He found the Bazaar Curio Shop a shabby but perfectly respectable little shop; in fact he’d noticed it a number of times in passing because of the carved masks displayed in a window. One window held rather good-quality secondhand books—Pruden guessed that this had been the shop’s original purpose—while the right-hand window contained masks and figurines as well as a small assortment of necklaces and rings from Africa and the Orient. Small gold-leaf letters on the door announced that R. Ramon was the proprietor.

  Pruden walked inside and nodded to the man who glanced up from a ledger at the counter. There was no one else in the shop. “Good morning,” said Pruden.

  “Morning, sir.” The voice was courteous and pleasing to the ear. “Please feel free to browse, but if there’s anything you wish—” He left the rest unspoken.

  As he thanked the man and turned toward the masks, Pruden gave his face a quick glance and filed it away in his memory. It was a singularly homely face, he thought, yet not a unpleasant one: wire spectacles with very thick lenses, a thin wide mouth, receding chin, and receding hairline. He looked strangely like a frog with extended, magnified eyes, and in some odd way he appeared very much at home among the bizarre and the exotic, like a highly glazed, porcelain gargoyle set down among the other oddities. As Pruden examined masks, his back to the counter, he could feel the man watching him. He turned and said briskly, “Have you a card? I’m completely lost among all this but I’ve an uncle who collects this sort of thing. He’d go mad here.”

  “Oh, one hopes not,” said the man gently. “Yes, I’ve cards.” He indicated a neat stack of them beside his cash register and Pruden walked over and took one. “And you’re Mr. Ramon?” he asked, reading it.

  “Yes.”

  Pruden nodded, tucked the card in his pocket, and turned toward the books, running a finger casually over their spines like a man trying to memorize titles for a nonexistent uncle. Many of them dealt with the occult but there were also musty volumes on colonial history, herbs, theology, and American Indians. With a final nod he walked out of the store, closed the door behind him and continued up the street. So much for that, he thought, and walked back to headquarters to see what might have turned up on Robichaud and Tortorelli.

  He need not have worried: there was plenty, all of it very interesting indeed.

  An hour later, after digesting the reports brought to him, Pruden walked into his superior’s office with a puzzled frown. He said, “Look, have there been any signs lately that the Syndicate might be moving into the Puerto Rican section in Trafton?”

  Startled, the Chief said, “What have you come up with?”

  “Some interesting coincidences.”

  His superior sighed. “That’s how it usually starts: whispers, echoes, rumors and coincidences. I don’t know why the hell they’d want to move in on Fifth Street, though, they had a rough enough time getting into the black section. At least five of their men turned up in alleys with knives in their backs and they ended up making a deal with Bones Jackson, didn’t they?”

  “Maybe they learned something,” said Pruden. “Maybe they’re going about this in a different way, staying out and letting Puerto Ricans take over.” He slipped two sheets of paper on the Chief’s desk. “I had a tail put on one Carlos Torres yesterday, for reasons so microscopic it would be embarrassing to explain, but damned if he doesn’t seem to be leading me into Syndicate territory. I may be wrong but I think something’s up.”

  He sat down and watched the Chief’s face and was not surprised to see it change when he reached the second paragraph. “Tortorelli! He’s certainly Syndicate—their best lawyer. And Robichaud …” He scowled. “That name rings a bell.”

  Pruden nodded. “You’ll find him on the next page. You remember the ice-cream-truck war in the Dell section two years ago? The original distributors lost the battle, filed for bankruptcy, and Robichaud Amusement Enterprises very kindly came along, bought them out, and took over the Mr. Freezee business there.”

  The Chief whistled softly. “And I see that Tortorelli handled the purchase. We suspected the Syndicate connection but this Tortorelli involvement was kept damned quiet.”

  Pruden nodded. “Some crusading news reporter uncovered it a year ago when doing a piece on Tortorelli.”

  “How does this Carlos Torres fit into this?”

  Pruden hesitated. “An ice-cream vendor here in Trafton died ten days ago under strange circumstances. A Jack Frost vendor. Puerto Rican, no enemies. Now his brother, who also owns a Jack Frost ice-cream truck, isn’t expected to live out the week.”

  The Chief’s brows shot up. “But he’s still alive? What does he say? You’ve talked to him?”

  “He’s—uh—unconscious,” said Pruden. “However, the only person to visit him at the time was Carlos Torres, which is why I had a tail put on him.”

  The Chief sat back, eyes narrowed in thought. “And he visits Tortorelli and Robichaud Enterprises.… What about the Hy-Grade Laundry?”

  “I’m asking around.”

  The Chief nodded. “I don’t like the sound of it, frankly. You’d better turn over whatever else you’re working on to Benson. Go after this full-time and let me know what you need.”

  “I could certainly use Swope if he’s available,” said Pruden.

  “You’ve got him. Anything else?”

  Pruden stood up and walked to the door and then with one hand on the knob he suddenly grinned, a sense of mischief overtaking him. “Well, I wouldn’t mind hearing that a certain willow tree on Third Street—that ought to be a banana tree—has shriveled up and died.” He went out, gently closing the door behind him.

  Chapter 10

  Leaving headquarters at five o’clock that same day, Pruden hesitated on the step and then instead of climbing into his car he turned left and began walking toward Eighth Street. He found Madame Karitska at home, with Gavin curled up on her couch with his homework.

  “My dear Lieutenant,” said Madame Karitska, “you look badly in need of coffee. Nothing so anemic as your American brew but something to fortify you. I will also prepare you a cucumber sandwich.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be at St. Bonaventure’s?” Pruden asked, throwing himself into the chair opposite Gavin.

  The boy grinned. “It’s okay. I came over to see Madame Karitska on Saturday but she wasn’t here, so the school said I could come tonight instead. Now that I’m an orphan, you know, they give me special privileges.”

  “Which of course you refuse,” Pruden said with a smile.

  “Not if I can help it,” grinned Gavin. “Have you found out who killed Arturo yet, and made Luis sick? Madame Karitska’s been explaining why she wasn’t here Saturday when I came.”

  “No, but I’ve been finding out a hell of a—excuse me, a heck of a lot of other things.”

  “Such as what, may I ask?” said Madame Karitska, returning from the kitchen with a tray.

  “Well, for one thing,” confessed Pruden, “I have to swallow my considerable pride and admit this isn’t the small neighborhood affair I thought it wou
ld be last Saturday night. My apologies to you,” he added, picking up a sandwich, “but I honestly didn’t think it would amount to more than an ex-boy friend of Maria’s, or a neighbor who was jealous of Arturo’s success. Now it looks like the biggest case I’ve tackled yet. The Syndicate appears to be involved somehow.”

  “The Syndicate! Holy cow!” said Gavin, eyes widening. “You know about the Syndicate, don’t you, Madame Karitska?”

  She seated herself on the couch beside Gavin and inserted a cigarette into a long holder. “It is, I believe, very organized crime?”

  “Very organized crime,” Pruden said dryly. “And not, I might add, a group that usually dabbles in voodoo. We’ve been working our tails off today and it looks as if for some reason they’re after the Jack Frost ice-cream business here in Trafton.”

  Madame Karitska laughed. “What a strange thing to be after!”

  He nodded. “Both Arturo and Luis drove ice-cream trucks, remember? Here, look at the facts,” he said, and brought from his pocket a condensed list of Carlos Torres’ activities. Handing it to Madame Karitska he said, “Two years ago in the Dell section there was what came to be known in the media as the ‘ice-cream war.’ One of the vendors was kidnapped and then released, three ice-cream trucks were bombed on the streets, and the Mr. Freezee garages broken into and expensive machinery stolen or destroyed. This went on for six or eight weeks and then suddenly stopped.”

  “You were not told why?” asked Madame Karitska.

  “No, but one looks for patterns. In this case shortly after the turbulence ended the Mr. Freezee distributorship was taken over by Harold Robichaud of Amusement Enterprises. We know nothing about him except that he bought it, but about the attorney who handled the purchase we know a great deal. His name is John Tortorelli and he’s a Syndicate man.”