The Triple Shot Box (Goodey's Last Stand, Not Sleeping Just Dead & Fighting Back): Three Gritty Crime Novels

by Charles Alverson

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.” She didn’t protest much when I led her along the side of the room to those big doors and through them onto a small balcony overlooking the gardens. It was getting on toward late afternoon, and the shadows of the fringe of tall evergreens along the drive were reaching like long fingers to a duck pond on the edge of a redwood grove. It was starting to get a bit cool out, too.

  When we got outside, she escaped my grip, moved over to the edge of the balcony and stood staring at nothing much as far as I could see.

  “I am sorry,” I said. “I’ve got this big mouth, and it sometimes runs away with my brain.”

  She took a deep breath of the clear, cool air and turned around. Her eyes were still on the moist side, but she had herself under control.

  “No, I’m the one who should be sorry,” she said. “I’m too emotional. I’m always being told that.”

  “It’s probably not a capital crime,” I said. “Did you know Katie very well?”

  “I think I did,” she said. “She was sort of my little sister, and for a while she worked with me in Mark’s office. It’s just that she was very hard not to like. Katie was so sweet and so vulnerable and…” Susan started choking up again, but then balled her fists, got a good Nordic grip on herself and shook it off. “I still can hardly believe she’s dead.”

  “Do you know why I’m here?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said, looking up into my eyes, “but I…”

  “Don’t you tell me I’m wasting my time, too,” I said. “Try to be a bit more original. The way it’s going, soon every resident of The Institute will be lined up on the lawn like a Greek chorus chanting: ‘You’re wasting your time, Joe Goodey, wasting your time.’ Do you really think it’s so impossible that somebody here could have helped Katie off the roof?”

  “Yes,” she said, looking up into my face, “but I think…”

  Suddenly she was looking past me, not at me, and I turned to see the zombie in the horse-blanket jacket coming through the double doors with a mechanical-man shuffle.

  “Tommy,” she said, in a tone that seemed both affectionate and cautious at the same time. “Did you enjoy the wedding?”

  A salvo of animated gibberish burst from his lips, carrying a fair amount of saliva that lightly stippled the front of Susan’s pale lavender coveralls. She didn’t seem to mind. The wet syllables tumbled over each other in no order that I could appreciate, but from Susan’s face, he could have been telling a fascinating story. In his enthusiasm, he forgot to turn off his legs when he switched on his mouth, and Susan had to continue to back away slowly, until her back was against the cast concrete rail of the terrace.

  Tommy was still shuffling forward, babbling as he went, so I stepped forward and took hold of his biceps to slow him up before he pushed Susan through the railing. It was like trying to get a grip on a moving engine piston, and I had no more effect on Tommy’s forward progress than a gnat throwing itself in front of an express train.

  Without thinking, I kicked him sharply behind the right knee. Anyone else would have been down on one knee wondering what hit him, but Tommy just trundled to a halt and turned to examine me with perfectly blank eyes.

  Susan gave me a slightly dirty look for using such a crude method of saving her from being crushed, and said brightly, “Tommy, this is Joe Goodey, a new friend of The Institute. He came down for the wedding.”

  If that information didn’t delight him, it didn’t make him mad, either. His eyes passed over me without a ripple, and Tommy turned toward the French doors and launched himself in the direction of the living room. His lips began moving again, and nothing was coming out but a fine froth of spit. He didn’t say goodbye.

  “Tommy’s really very harmless,” Susan said, in mild reproach. “He just has to be managed very gently. He’s made incredible improvement.”

  “I’ll bet,” I said, “but I imagine you’ve got a way to go with him.”

  Susan opened her mouth to answer and then shut it again.

  “So there you are,” said a voice behind me, and I turned to see Mark Kinsey coming through the French doors with a forced expression of bonhomie on his flabby face. “How’s the tour coming along, Susan? Are you learning anything, Joe? Isn’t the view from here magnificent? You ought to catch the sea views.”

  “Just f-fine, Mark,” Susan said, a bit nervously, I thought. “I was just about to…”

  “That’s great,” he said. “Susan’s a real asset to The Institute, Joe, even though she’s been here less than a year.” Before I could respond, he added: “Susan, honey, could you go give Lenore a hand in her office? I’ll give Joe the seventy-five-cent tour, and we’ll see you later.” Susan’s expression said that was all right with her, and she was soon gone with hardly a mumbled farewell to me. And just as we were becoming buddies, too.

  Kinsey was as good as his word, and in the next hour or so he took me on an extensive tour of the old mansion. I saw almost everything: the vast dining room, the two kitchens, the laundry room, the Olympic-length pool in the basement flanked by sauna baths and squash courts, a billiard room with velvet drapes the color of vintage port and so much more that it was soon just a blur to me.

  As we looked at each section, Kinsey praised it with the slightly spurious hyperbole of a real-estate agent working on commission. His pride in the place was evident and genuine, but his public-relations spiel tinged everything with phoniness.

  “It’s very nice,” I said as we left the billiard room, “but I don’t think I want to buy it.”

  Kinsey looked at me keenly until he decided that I’d made a little joke, and then gave me a pawnbroker’s laugh. “Ha, ha, yes,” he said, without much humor. “I guess that’s about it for now. There are a lot of outbuildings, but it’s getting late. You can see them tomorrow.”

  “I’ll look forward to that,” I said. “But there’s one stop on the tour I think you’ve forgotten. We could look at that right now.”

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “The roof terrace,” I said, trying not to sound like a keen detective. “Considering why I’m here, I think that might be useful.”

  “Oh, sure,” he said, as if glad to be reminded. “Now you’ll see those sea views I told you about.”

  Kinsey said it was probably best to take the plush little elevator to the roof. As we stepped out, the sun lay like a fried egg on the horizon, and a crimson stain spread from it like blood. From the hills behind us to the wooded coast spreading out on both sides, calm reigned, broken only by faint, disconnected sounds from the wedding guests below. I began to understand why people went to all that trouble to get rich.

  It wasn’t so much a roof terrace as a natural setting for moonlight dancing, three-piece bands and the pop of champagne corks. Some pretty expensive dancing slippers had brushed over that smooth surface. The leading edge of the roof was crenelated mock-castle style, and I stood with both hands on the battlements looking at the sunset. Then I looked down to the rocky beach where they’d found Katie Pierce.

  The tide was in just then; rushing water and swirling foam covered most of the rocks. But my mind’s eye could still see the police photograph of Katie’s battered and bloody body broken on the rocks. My mind’s eye saw too damned well to suit me.

  The sheriff’s report said that Katie had fallen from the right-hand side of the roof. I moved over there and tried to put myself in Katie’s place moments before she’d gone over the edge. I didn’t like the feeling at all. I looked back at Kinsey, who seemed to be communing with some inner spirit.

  I cleared my throat, startling him back to the present, and asked, “Which of the residents have access to this part of the mansion?”

  He understood the question, but he said nothing for a long moment. Then he said: “Uh, Joe, I don’t think I’m the right person to answer that sort of question. Perhaps…”

  “Perhaps,” I said, “you didn’t hear Fischer say that to me The Institute was
an open book. Full cooperation, that was what the man promised. Do I have to go down and tell him that you’re holding out on me?”

  “Okay, okay,” Kinsey said, not exactly liking that idea. “In theory, this roof, along with every other part of the mansion, is open to all residents of The Institute.”

  “But?”

  “But, in practice, it is used only by the top echelon of members and their guests.”

  “That top echelon,” I said, “how far down does it extend? I mean, how exclusive is it? For instance, are you among the happy elite allowed to frolic here?”

  Kinsey brought his slack lips together in a way that told me that he didn’t much like my style of questioning. But he couldn’t think of very much he could do about it just then, so he said: “I have been here on occasion. Hugo likes to hold barbecues up here sometimes on summer evenings, and I have been invited to them.”

  “But you wouldn’t really feel at ease sneaking up here with a girl for a little private necking?”

  “No,” he said judiciously. “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “So, that cuts down the number of people who would have a legitimate reason for being up here, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, it does,” he answered. “But it doesn’t mean that a lot of other people might not use it on the quiet. We don’t lock doors here at The Institute. We have no need to.”

  He was probably right, and that opened my list of potential suspects right up again, and probably included some who weren’t even at The Institute anymore. But then, Crenshaw wouldn’t have been paying me so much money if the job had been a cinch. It would have been a lot easier for me if Kinsey had just confessed right there and then to heaving Katie over the edge and saved me a lot of trouble. Somehow I didn’t think he would.

  It was beginning to feel a bit pointless staying on that roof, not to mention chilly, so I suggested that we carry on with the tour. As we waited for the elevator, I asked him if Susan Wallstrom was always so jumpy and emotional.

  “Not usually,” he said. “I think you made her nervous, and of course she was very fond of Katie. She hasn’t been with us very long, but I think she’s settling in very well.”

  “What did she do before she came to The Institute?”

  “It’s hard to believe,” he said, “but Susan was a guard, or whatever they call them, at the state women’s prison up at Frontera. But she couldn’t take the work.”

  Frontera. I knew someone at Frontera. I’d have to ask her if we had a mutual friend.

  “What’s the rest of today’s schedule?” I asked.

  “Nothing much for the next hour or so until dinner,” he said. “It’s a special wedding dinner for Pops Martin and Genie.”

  “That’s the girl bride, right?”

  “I believe Genie is nineteen,” Kinsey said, a bit stiffly, “but she’s quite old for her years.”

  “I’ll bet,” I said. “What then?”

  “At about nine, we have our usual open house. Guests from the community come in for a party with the residents. The guests of honor are Pops and Genie.”

  “Pops Martin seems to be pretty important here,” I said. “What does he do that’s so special?”

  “That’s a bit difficult to answer,” Kinsey said. “To an outsider, it might appear that Pops doesn’t do much of anything. But I assure you that, next to Hugo, there’s hardly a person at The Institute who has done more to help it to survive and succeed. Not even Lenore or Don Moffitt.”

  “Rachel told me Pops was an old-time member,” I said.

  “Much more than that, Joe,” Kinsey said, getting a bit earnest. “Hugo and he have known each other off and on for over thirty years. They first met back in Missouri, worked on the same ships together at times and even shared a cell in prison once.” The elevator arrived, and we got in.

  “Sounds like a firm basis for a friendship,” I said.

  “But more important,” Kinsey went on, “is that when Hugo was in New York City trying to get The Institute started—he was still calling it The Institute of Mankind in those days—Pops suddenly reappeared. He was drunk, just out of jail and thought the meeting was some kind of a party to crash, but when he sobered up, Pops swore that he’d help Hugo with his dream.”

  “Touching,” I said. “So in exchange for sticking around for ten years or so, Pops Martin has a meal ticket for life.” Kinsey didn’t like that very much, either.

  “Joe,” he said, “your problem is that you’re a cynic. You can’t believe that The Institute could take such apparently useless material as Pops Martin and make it useful. I pity you.”

  “That depends,” I said, “on what it uses them for. To me, Pops Martin looks just like any of the hundreds of old crooks and conmen I’ve seen drift in and out of jail. They usually end up in the gutter. Pops seems to have been a little luckier than most; quite a bit luckier, I’d say.”

  The elevator door slid open at the ground floor to reveal that same reformed character standing there with his blushing bride. That is, she was standing. He was listing heavily to port and using her for a crutch. Her hard little face did not cry out: “Use me as you will.”

  “Hi, Mark,” Pops said. “I’m just going up for a little rest before dinner.” His eyes, the color of stale beer, flicked over me, but he couldn’t think of anything worth saying.

  “Hi, Pops,” I said. “You ought to drop in on the roof. The view is terrific up there.”

  As tired as he seemed to be, Pops found the energy to give me a look that you could have used to open clam shells, and he and the bride disappeared into the elevator.

  8

  Dinner that night was a fancy affair, with Fischer and his leading lights sitting on a raised dais like the officers at a Kiwanis Club luncheon. At Fischer’s side was his wife, and fanned out on either side were Rachel and Dr. Carey, Don Moffitt and a tight-lipped woman with prematurely graying hair pulled straight back from her forehead. She didn’t look happy. There were a number of other faces I didn’t recognize, but to my surprise at one end, looking as if he hadn’t been switched on yet, was Tommy, my friend from the terrace. Sitting next to him was an overdressed, slightly imperious-looking old woman, who was giving Tommy all her attention.

  Pops Martin, who looked to be a bit more rested, and Genie, got up like something that had been won at Coney Island, were sitting slightly higher in a corner of the room at a flower-decked table for two, bathed in its own personal spotlight. Fischer certainly knew how to stage an occasion.

  I was seated at a long trestle table with some of the other peasants, but with a little judicious jostling I managed to sit next to Susan Wallstrom. Mark Kinsey was down the table, not looking entirely at ease, and I spotted Jack Gillette at another table. If he saw me, he kept it to himself.

  While the food—the sort of wholesome institutional stuff you’d find at any third-rate hotel or a good mental hospital—was being served, I leaned on Susan to put names to some of the unknown faces at the head table. The woman with the gray hair—she couldn’t have been much over thirty—turned out to be Mrs. Don Moffitt, like him an old-time resident at The Institute.

  “What’s she so unhappy about?” I asked Susan.

  Susan really didn’t like to say, being loyal and all that, but finally she whispered that she had heard that Aileen Moffitt was restless and was urging Don to leave The Institute and take a job he’d been offered back East.

  “What about the guy at the end of the table who’s a bit puffy around the gills? The one who looks as though he could use a stiff drink.”

  Susan wasn’t crazy about my description, but she identified him as Harold Fischer, Hugo’s cousin, who had just given up a good business in the Midwest to move into The Institute. The faded woman next to him was Mrs. Harold F. Fischer.

  “What’s he want to do that for?” I asked.

  “Why, because he realizes that The Institute is an important social movement, and he wants to take part,” Susan said, as if reading from a tract.


  I let that pass. If I was going to get information from Susan Wallstrom, it wouldn’t do to upset her too much. “What about the old bird sitting next to Tommy?” I asked. “The one who looks like she owns the place.”

  “She did own the place,” Susan said, a bit smugly. “That’s Emma Carter, Tommy’s mother. She’s giving the mansion and the estate to The Institute.”

  I didn’t know which little surprise to deal with first. I suppose people like Tommy have a right to have mothers, too, but you don’t expect it. The other news was slightly more sensational.

  “Just like that?” I said. “She’s giving it? You mean, for free?”

  “The Institute has done an awful lot for Tommy,” Susan said, a little bit defensively. “Emma believes in The Institute and in Hugo,” she added emphatically, “and so do I.”

  “That’s a whole lot of belief,” I said. “But what—”

  Fischer started tapping on his water glass with a butter knife. It had the authoritative rat-a-tat of a machine gun, and it silenced that noisy room just as effectively. Once you could have heard a mouse fart in the big banquet room, Fischer leaned forward with the benevolent dogmatism of a man talking to obedient children.

  “Good evening,” he said. “If you are guests, welcome to The Institute. Welcome to our home. We are happy to have you among us. Before we get on with this evening’s festivities in honor of two of our residents who got married today”—Pops and Genie in their fairy bower looked pleased with themselves—“I want to introduce you to a rather special guest.” I started wondering who it was, when he said: “Mr. Joe Goodey.” No one was more surprised than I was when he followed up with: “Would you stand up, Mr. Goodey so that we can all see you?”

  It would have taken a stronger character than I to have resisted that command performance, so I pushed back my chair and stood up with what I hoped was lithe grace. Probably not. From where I stood, I could see almost universal puzzlement on the faces of the diners. Rachel was looking worried; Pops Martin was just beginning to enjoy himself.