16-Murder Can't Wait

by Lockridge, Richard

  The girl had black hair and deeply blue eyes, and she was not, Susan thought, having a very good time.

  Enid Fleming saw that Susan was looking at the two, and said, “Pretty, isn’t she? Steele’s wife.”

  “There’s a table in the shade,” Susan said, and was surprised she said it. It was none of her business. Her business was to see that the dining room was not plunged into a pool of red. No, her business was merely to sell such fabrics as the committee elected to buy.

  Enid Fleming, whose blonde hair shone, but who tanned for all that, had a quick mind—a rather flickering mind, Susan thought. She was much younger than her tall husband, Susan thought.

  (“You wanted impressions,” Susan said. “For what they are worth. I thought perhaps he had been sick.”

  “Was beginning to die,” Heimrich said. “When you said that about the table?”)

  “They always sit there,” Enid had said, when Susan mentioned that there were shady tables. “It’s their favorite table, and then of course—”

  She stopped with that and Angus Fleming, who was sipping from a cocktail glass, held the glass away from his lips. The liquid trembled in the glass, and it was clear he waited for his wife to go on. She did not.

  “The phrase is,” Angus Fleming said, “that they know their place. Not the best place.”

  “Angus,” his wife said. “What a thing to say. Nobody—none of us—would dream….”

  Again, Susan thought, he waited for her to go on, and again she left the sentence hanging. He sipped from his glass, then. Then he said, “Of course not, dear. Or need to, really. About this green print, Mrs. Heimrich. The modern one. Your own, isn’t it?”

  “That ended that,” Susan told the two men listening in the dark, cool taproom of the Old Stone Inn. “It’s nothing, really. Mrs. Steele looked unhappy. I suppose he had his job to do, took this as part of his job. It—well, she didn’t have the job.”

  “He doesn’t take it as part of his job,” Shapiro said. “It’s the sort of thing that’s hard to take with any job. He spoke about being allowed to eat with the—with the white folks. That was it, wasn’t it, captain?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “He said that. Angus Fleming’s brother, the one who was killed—you didn’t run into him at the club?”

  She had not. She had gone there three times before the committee decided on the green print, to her pleased surprise. The days had been Wednesday and Thursday and Friday. The Flemings—Mrs. Fleming she thought it was—had mentioned Stuart, apropos of what Susan could not remember; had said that he was coming up that weekend and was bringing Alicia. To this Angus Fleming said “That’s the dark one, isn’t it,” and had been told that it was the dark one.

  Perhaps that had been said at the same lunchtime when she had, so aside from any point, mentioned the existence of a table in the shade.

  “I remember something else about that,” Susan said. “We were still talking about fabrics. Mrs. Fleming still had the red in mind. We—a waiter had just brought iced coffee, and Mrs. Fleming put cream in hers. I can see her doing it.” She looked at Nathan Shapiro suddenly and smiled. “I think in pictures,” she said.

  A man had come up to the table—a tall young man, a man with a boyish face. He wore walking shorts and a polo shirt and cleated shoes and he stood over them and said, “Hi, everybody” and then, “Ready, Enid?”

  “As I’ll ever be,” Enid Fleming said, and got up at once, leaving iced coffee untouched, and they had walked off together toward the first tee. After a few steps, she had turned and said, “You’re sure you don’t mind, Angus?” and Angus Fleming had shaken his head for answer.

  “I don’t know who the man was,” Susan said. “They didn’t introduce him. Mr. Fleming didn’t say anything about him while we were finishing our coffee. We went back to talking about the curtains. The man was about Mrs. Fleming’s age, I think. Very good-looking in a boyish kind of way. I remember thinking he probably sold cars.”

  “Now, Susan,” Heimrich said. “Why ever?”

  “For no reason at all,” Susan Heimrich said. “It is only what I remember thinking.”

  “His wife’s going off with this younger man,” Heimrich said. “Younger than he, obviously. It didn’t seem to upset Fleming?”

  “No.”

  The waiter brought food. It was good food, although Nathan Shapiro questioned whether his stomach would agree. It seldom did. When they had finished, when Susan and Merton Heimrich were drinking coffee and Shapiro was sipping Sanka, Shapiro asked whether Enid Fleming had seemed to have any special friends among the women at the club.

  “Specifically, maybe,” Shapiro said, “the girl in the tight shorts, or the woman with the tint job? The ones Stahlman, or Steele, seemed to give a good many lessons to?”

  “They were all ‘darling’ to Enid,” Susan said. “She is—was then, anyway—an effervescent person. I know she went around at least once with the one called Isabel. But I didn’t feel there was a special one. You mean one she might have been most likely to confide in, don’t you? Or—blurt to.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said.

  Susan thought a moment and shook her head; she pointed out that she had been around the club only for parts of three days, and during most of her time there showing swatches, suggesting colors; never a part of things. Enid might have had special women friends; one or another of them, or several of them, might have been friendly enough with Robert Steele to pass gossip to him.

  “I haven’t helped a great deal, have I?” Susan said, and looked from one to the other of the two policemen—the two very different policemen. She wondered why the one, not hers, had so sad a face. Perhaps, Susan thought, he is unhappily married.

  Nathan Shapiro’s expression, never precisely radiant, was at that moment particularly depressed because he was thinking he looked like being stuck up here, in this strange and unfamiliar place, and would probably be even later than usual in getting home to Brooklyn and to Rose. Something in the way these two looked at each other, in their voices when they spoke to each other, had made him think of Rose.

  V

  He was the last man for this particular job, Nathan Shapiro thought, and followed the state police car along blacktop roads, each of which looked like any of the others and seemed to be going in much the same direction. Except that there were so many curves in all of them that it was hard to tell in what direction any went. This job, this interview, needed a deft man, a man with a sure touch. Not, therefore and obviously, Nathan Shapiro. But he had been told to nose around.

  And Heimrich was, of course, right in suggesting this division of the immediate labor. Heimrich was going—after he had led Shapiro to where Shapiro was going—to the Willow Pond Golf and Tennis Club, and nose around there; follow there the faint trails which had been left in both their minds by the impressions that pretty wife of his had picked up and passed along. At a club such as this one almost certainly was, Shapiro would be no good at all.

  And what a husband knows a wife may know, even a wife apparently to some degree estranged. For that, there was only what Stahlman-Steele had said, and Stahlman might well have made the whole thing up to cover something else. What the office had got, with surprising quickness, from Florida made it seem more than ever likely that Stahlman had something to cover up.

  The quickness of the report, which they had picked up at Hawthorne Barracks while also picking up Shapiro’s car, had resulted largely from the fact that the Florida police were keeping an eye on one Luigi Pagoni. Not that Pagoni was actually, at the moment, wanted for anything. But Pagoni was, in the opinion of the police of the state of Florida, a man who might at any moment be wanted for something and therefore a man to keep an eye on.

  Pagoni was staying at a resort hotel on the west coast, a little below Sarasota. It was not an especially glittering hotel. It was not really up to what Pagoni had become since he was a smallishtime mobster in Brooklyn, and this in itself was mildly interesting. There was a golf cou
rse at the hotel. It was not a championship course by a considerable margin. Until two weeks ago, Robert Steele had been pro at the course—teaching a little, setting up tournaments for the guests, selling golf balls. His had not been much of a job.

  But it had brought Bernard Stahlman, one-time policeman, and Luigi Pagoni into, again, the same area of activities. Which was interesting. The local police had a suspicion, not as yet verified—and, driving right at a fork in faithful obedience, Shapiro wondered how hard they were trying to verify it—that Pagoni owned at least part of the hotel. The hotel, placid enough by day, appeared to have remarkably busy nights, and remarkably late nights. Which was interesting.

  What a man knows, his wife may know.

  Shapiro followed Heimrich’s car through the cluster of buildings which was North Wellwood, and along a side road for what would have been a block or so in a civilized place. Heimrich’s car slowed in front of a two-story frame building and the righthand direction indicator blinked, pointing. Shapiro pressed his horn rim once to answer, and pulled to the side of the road. Apparently up here you could park any place.

  He climbed a flight of stairs to the second floor of the two-story frame building and knocked on a door lettered: STUART FLEMING, ATTORNEY AT LAW. There was no immediate answer and he knocked again. This time a woman inside said, “Oh, come in. Come in.”

  The voice sounded like a young voice; it sounded as if the woman had been crying. I’m the wrong man for this sort of thing, Shapiro thought, and pushed the door open. There was a small outer office and back of it, the door open, another office, apparently somewhat larger. A young woman whose black hair fitted her small head like a cap, whose eyes were deeply blue, sat at a typewriter desk in the outer office. There was nothing to indicate she had been typing anything. There was an intercom box on her desk. There was, faintly, a smell of paint in the room.

  She had been crying. Her eyes were wet with crying. She said, “Who are you? What do you want?”

  “A policeman,” Shapiro said, and gave his name, gave his rank. “To talk to you. I’m sorry to bother you, Mrs. Steele.”

  She said, “What difference does that make, lieutenant? About—this?”

  She took a folded copy of that day’s World-Telegram and The Sun out of a drawer of her desk, and turned it toward Shapiro and pointed. The headline she pointed to read: “FORMER FOOTBALL STAR SLAIN.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said, “about Mr. Fleming, Mrs. Steele. And, I’m afraid, about your husband.”

  “What’s Bob got—” she began, and her voice broke, and she put both hands on the typewriter and her head down on her hands. And her shoulders shook under the blue and white cotton dress which hugged her slim body. Nathan Shapiro was tempted to say “There, there. There, child.” He said nothing, and after a few seconds the girl lifted her head. Girl was for once the right word, Shapiro thought. She didn’t look more than twenty-two or twenty-three. Which would make her ten-fifteen years younger than her husband. And, of course, only three or four years younger than her employer had been.

  “What’s he got to do with it?” she said, and her voice was steady enough.

  “I don’t know,” Shapiro said. “Perhaps nothing at all. Do you know Steele isn’t really his name?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Perhaps nothing at all,” Nathan Shapiro said. “A place to start. Did you? That his name used to be Bernard Stahlman? That he was once a policeman on the city force?”

  “He had it changed legally,” she said. “Because it sounded as if—” And she stopped. She said, “I’m sorry, Lieutenant Shapiro.”

  “As if he were a Jew,” Shapiro said. “Not a good name for a club pro. I realize that. Particularly for a man who isn’t a Jew. He made rather a point of not being, in the old days.”

  “I’m sorry,” the girl said again, and Shapiro told her she had no reason for being.

  “As to what he may have to do with it,” Shapiro said, and found a chair and pulled it near the girl’s desk and sat down on it, “he came storming around to Fleming’s house this morning with the intention of beating Fleming up. Not, he says, knowing Fleming was dead.”

  “It doesn’t say anything about that here,” she said, and tapped slim fingers on the newspaper.

  “No,” Shapiro said. “It doesn’t. But that’s the way it was, Mrs. Steele. He wanted to beat Mr. Fleming up—kick his teeth in, was the way he put it—because Fleming had come between you and him.”

  “He wouldn’t. Not even Bob—” She stopped for a moment and pressed her fingers against her forehead. “Stu was—almost helpless. With that dreadful thing on his leg.”

  “Your husband says he didn’t know about that. Did you tell him? Yesterday, perhaps? When you told him you weren’t coming back to him?”

  “I didn’t say—” she began, and stopped again, and when she looked at Nathan Shapiro now her eyes were dry. “He talked a lot, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. Quite a lot, Mrs. Steele.”

  “Like a crazy man. Sometimes he’s like a crazy man.”

  Shapiro said nothing to that. What she said next surprised him.

  “I thought men like you were—harder,” she said. “Shouted at people. Pushed people around. I mean policemen.”

  “We come in all shapes,” Shapiro said. “There are all kinds of policemen.”

  Not too many of them like Bernard Stahlman, Nathan Shapiro thought. Oh, too many, but not very many.

  “What didn’t you say, Mrs. Steele?” Nathan Shapiro asked the girl, his voice low—a gentle voice. “That you weren’t going back to him?”

  “Only,” she said, “that I didn’t know yet. Wasn’t ready yet.”

  “That it was because of Mr. Fleming?”

  “No,” she said. “I didn’t tell him that. That wouldn’t have been—” but again she did not finish.

  Shapiro waited and after some seconds said, “Wouldn’t have been true?”

  Again she pressed her fingers against her forehead. This time she drew them slowly toward her temples, pressing hard.

  “Do you have to ask these things?” she said, without looking at him.

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “I’m afraid that’s the way it is, Mrs. Steele.”

  “I don’t know whether it would have been true or not. It’s—it’s all mixed up?”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “Things can get mixed up. Whether Fleming was the reason you and your husband had, say, drifted apart or wasn’t the reason, did your husband think he was?”

  She nodded her head slowly.

  “Accuse you of it yesterday? Accuse him of—”

  “Of everything,” she said. “Shouted things. Things that hadn’t been true. That now can’t—”

  She moved a little, this time, and put her arms down on the desk and her head on her arms, and this time he let her cry. There are a good many ways of answering a question. It was minutes, this time, before she lifted her head and got tissue out of a drawer and dabbed her eyes with it, and then said, “I’m sorry to be like this.”

  Now was the time, of course, to press on with this—with this not exceptional mixed-up relationship, this tangle which was as new, as tormenting, to the girl as if no one else had ever been so entangled. If there was more to find out about it, now was the time to find it out. She was shaken, now.

  “This letter,” Shapiro said, and took from a pocket the letter Stuart Fleming had written the District Attorney of the County of New York. He held it out to her. It was a brief letter:

  “Dear Sir: I have information which indicates an effort to tamper with the football squad of Dyckman University, presumably by gambling interests, with point-shaving involved. I feel I should place this information before you. Unfortunately, I am at the moment incapacitated because of a skiing accident. After you have checked my professional and personal standing, would you care to send a representative to whom I can turn over such information as I have?”

  She read the letter. She said,
“Yes,” and handed it back, and then looked at Nathan Shapiro and waited.

  “Do you know any more about this than’s in this letter?” Shapiro asked her.

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re familiar with what’s in his files? Filed for him?”

  “There wasn’t anything much,” she said. “Not yet. Stu—Mr. Fleming—had just started, you know. It—it takes time to start.” She paused and once more put pressing fingers to her forehead. “It was—it was new and shiny,” she said. “You can still smell the paint. Can’t you smell the paint?”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “There was nothing in the files about this?”

  “No. Nothing about this. He dictated the letter and—and I thought he might want to tell me more about it, but he didn’t. You—are you a state policeman?”

  “No,” Shapiro said. “I’m the representative Mr. Fleming asked to have sent.”

  She said, “Oh”; said it vaguely.

  “Did your husband ever say anything to you about a man named Pagoni? Luigi Pagoni?”

  She looked at him, and he thought her eyes were blank, uncomprehending. But he might, he reminded himself, think that only because he was not very good at this sort of thing.

  “A gambler, probably,” Shapiro said. “Probably a big-time gambler. Perhaps running a big-time joint in Florida. At the hotel your husband was employed by during the winter, Mrs. Steele.”

  “No,” she said. “I never heard of anyone named Pagoni. He never said anything about a man named Pagoni. You think—what do you think?”

  He shrugged his shoulders.

  “That Bob was—mixed up in this?”

  “Years ago,” Shapiro said, “your husband knew Pagoni. Pagoni wasn’t much then. Your husband was a patrolman. Your husband—” he paused for a moment—“did Pagoni a good turn,” he said.