1945 - Blonde's Requiem

by James Hadley Chase

  “Don’t take too long saying good night to that blonde,” he returned. “I want some sleep even if you don’t.”

  When he had gone, I stood over Audrey as she lay on the bed and we smiled at each other. “All right now?” I said. “Anything else you want?”

  “I’m fine—just tired, that’s all. Is it all right about the kidnapping?”

  I sat on the bed by her side and took her hand. “I fixed Wolf. In his position he can’t afford to get tough with me.”

  She looked down at our hands. “I suppose he can’t,” she said, “but you will be careful?”

  “Don’t worry about me. I’ve knocked around too long to let a fat old guy like Wolf upset me.” I stroked her hand absently, thinking how nice she looked. “We’re partners now,” I went on; “only the senior partner. What I say goes.”

  “I suppose I’ll have to let you have your own way,” she said lazily. “All right, I’ll admit I’ve made a mess of things. I’m in no position to get tough with you either.”

  “Now you are being smart,” I said. “In fact you’re not in the position to refuse me anything.”

  “Not anything?” she said, in mock alarm.

  “Not anything,” I repeated, slipping my arm under her head and half raising her. Her head rested in the crook of my arm and our faces were close. “Does that worry you?”

  She looked at me seriously. “No, I don’t think it does.”

  I kissed her. “Sure?”

  She pulled my head down. “I like it,” she said softly. “Let’s do it again.”

  * * *

  Eleven o’clock the next morning we went over to Audrey’s office to plan our campaign.

  “Now let’s see what we have to do,” I said as soon as we had settled down. “It’s a certain bet Wolf will try to stop the investigation. I don’t know what Forsberg will do about that. Maybe he’ll recall me. If he does, then I’ll quit working for him. I’ve chiselled two grand out of Wolf and that’ll keep us off the bread line. Our job is to find the guy who killed Marian, and we’re going to find him. I’ll split the two grand three ways so we’ll all have a little dough, but we’ve got to work fast and get this case cracked before our dough gives out. Is that all right with you two?”

  “Isn’t it foolish to throw up your job with the International Investigations?” Audrey said, looking worried. “I mean, jobs don’t grow only on trees, and you might want…”

  “That’ll have to look after itself,” I broke in. “Maybe Forsberg will let me go ahead. He’s had a retainer from Wolf and he might give me a free hand. Anyway, I’ll wait until I hear from him. I don’t give a damn one way or the other. I wouldn’t mind setting up in business on my own. We three might make a good thing out of it. But never mind that for the moment. I want to run over this case and see what we’ve got.”

  “Not much,” Reg said gloomily. “We don’t seem to be getting anywhere.”

  “And I’ll tell you why,” I said. “Up to now we have all been concentrating on the election angle. But suppose these kidnappings have nothing to do with the election?”

  “But they must have,” Audrey protested.

  I shook my head. “There’s no must about it. Suppose we ignore the election entirely. Never mind about Wolf or Esslinger or Macey. We’ll forget them. Let’s begin from the beginning. Four girls disappear. There’re no clues except a shoe belonging to one of them which is found in an empty house. Then a fifth girl disappears in exactly the same way as the other four, only this time we find her body before the murderer can hide it. If we hadn’t have gone to the house at the time we did we should never have known that Marian had been killed. She would have disappeared in the same way as the other girls disappeared. It’s a safe bet that the other four girls were also strangled and maybe they were all killed in the same house. That gives us something, doesn’t it?”

  “I suppose so,” Audrey said, doubtfully. “It gives us the method, but I don’t see how it helps.”

  I went over to her desk and sat down. “We’ll put this down on paper,” I said, picking up a pencil. “Take the girls first. What do we know about them?”

  “They’re just ordinary girls,” Reg said. “Nothing much there. Why should anyone want to kill them?”

  “They were all blondes,” I said, writing that down. “Maybe that has nothing to do with it, but it’s a point. They were all young and they all belong to the same set except Marian.” I stared at the paper and then added: “Well, that doesn’t get us very far, does it?”

  “I would like to know how the murderer persuaded them to go with him to that empty house. I mean, a girl would be half-witted to enter a lonely, spooky-looking house like that unless she trusted the person she went with,” Audrey said.

  I stared at her for a long moment. “Yeah,” I said, “the nickel drops, You have something there. Someone phoned Marian and arranged to meet her at the house. We know that because she had a phone call and she wrote down the number of the house. Why did she go there without even calling me to tell me where she was going? She knew where I was.”

  “She went there because she knew the person who called her and she thought she could trust him,” Audrey said, the colour going out of her face.

  “Ted Esslinger,” I said softly. “He was the only guy, except Reg, Wolf and me, that Marian knew in this town.”

  “The other girls also knew Esslinger well,” Reg said, his eyes gleaming with excitement. “They all knew him well enough to go with him to an empty house if his story was good enough.”

  Audrey got to her feet and began pacing up and down. “But this is crazy,” she said. “He can’t be doing it. Why should he? It—it’s all wrong. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Take it easy,” I said, lighting a cigarette and inhaling smoke deeply. “We don’t know it’s Esslinger. It just happens that it could be him.”

  “That guy has always run around with the girls,” Reg said, a little bitterly. “But why he should be knocking ‘em off beats me. What’s the motive?”

  “I can’t believe it,” Audrey said. “I’ve known him all my life. Ted isn’t a killer. I’m sure he isn’t.”

  I sat brooding, feeling a rising excitement. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Let’s forget Ted for the moment. Tell me something. Suppose you were a murderer and you wanted to get rid of the body of your victim. How would you do it?”

  “Bury it some place in lime,” Reg said promptly.

  “Somewhere where it wouldn’t be found. Some absolutely safe spot,” I said. “Burying it in lime isn’t safe.”

  “There’s a big furnace in the smelting works,” Audrey said with a little shudder. “Although I can’t imagine how anyone could get body from Victoria Drive to the furnace undetected.”

  I shook my head. “They couldn’t. That would be too dangerous. I tell you where I’d hide a body if I wanted to be sure it wouldn’t be found—in a graveyard.”

  Reg said: “That’s a fine spot, but getting a body to the local graveyard from Victoria Drive would be as dangerous as taking it to the smelting works.”

  “Not if it were handled by the local mortician,” I said quietly.

  They both stared at me, then Reg leapt to his feet. “That’s it!” he exclaimed. “It fits! Of course it’s Ted Esslinger! He’s killing these dames and the old man is burying them. All he would have to do is put them in the hearse, take it out at night over to the graveyard. If anyone saw the hearse they’d think nothing of it. He’d have the keys to the graveyard and he could plant the body in someone’s grave.”

  Audrey had gone very white. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “You don’t know Max Esslinger. He couldn’t do a thing like that.”

  “But it fits,” Reg said. “It explains everything.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I pointed out. “It doesn’t explain why Ted’s killing these girls. What’s the motive?”

  “There isn’t one,” Audrey said. “You’re letti
ng your imagination run away with you.”

  “All right, let’s go over it again. Suppose Ted Esslinger is the killer. Let’s see if we can find a motive. Why should he kill five girls in so many weeks? The obvious answer to that is he is a homicidal lunatic.”

  Audrey shook her head. “I’ve known him all my life. We went to school together. He’s as normal as you are.”

  “We can’t be sure of that,” I pointed out. “Maybe he has suddenly lost control of himself. What sort of a kid was he? Did he have a temper; was he moody, that kind of thing?”

  “He was perfectly normal,” Audrey insisted. “He liked the girls, of course, but that doesn’t make a man a lunatic, does it?”

  “No—all right, let’s forget the lunatic angle. Why else should he kill them?”

  “You don’t think he got them into trouble and to save his skin—” Reg began, but stopped.

  “What, all five of them?” I said. “No, that’s out. Besides, knowing Marian, he wouldn’t have got anywhere with her on those lines.”

  We sat and brooded for several minutes, then I said: “How fond is he of his father?”

  “They’re great pals,” Audrey said seriously. “They’d do anything for each other. But he doesn’t get along so well with his mother.”

  “Does he want his father to become mayor? I mean really want him to get the job?”

  “I think so. I couldn’t say for sure.”

  “This is a fantastic idea, but it hangs together,” I said excitedly. “Suppose Ted wanted to give his father a break with the election. If he could get Starkey out of the running, his father would stand a swell chance, wouldn’t he?”

  Reg said: “So what? You don’t mean he killed the girls so his father could become mayor? That’s just one hell of an idea.”

  “I don’t mean that. Suppose Ted has a kink. Maybe he’s a religious fanatic. Maybe he’s a sex maniac. He could be anything. Suppose he sees a way to fix Starkey and at the same time satisfy his crazy repression.”

  “But he hasn’t got a crazy repression,” Audrey said. “I know him too well.”

  “Listen: if I had a crazy repression I wouldn’t tell you about it. I’d keep it to myself,” I said shortly.

  “Have you?” Reg asked, grinning.

  “Never mind that. Stick to Esslinger. Suppose he is a nut. You remember the Street-Camera Studio? He could have been the guy who tipped Dixon. Come to that, he could have been the guy who killed Dixon. No, it must have been Jeff, because Starkey wanted those pictures back.” I ran my fingers through my hair.

  “Hell! This is driving me screwy! But, wait a minute, it was Ted Esslinger who started the theory about the Street-Camera. He got me thinking that way. Suppose he decided to frame Starkey for the murders he was committing. All he has to do is to watch the Street-Camera window, and when an enlarged picture of a girl he knows appears he gets the girl to this empty house, strangles her and takes her to the funeral parlour. He collects the tickets from the girls and gets the photos from the Street-Camera. He tells Dixon that Starkey is using the Street-Camera Studio as a bait to kidnap the girls, putting Wolf and Esslinger out on a limb, as they have guaranteed to find the girls. Dixon doesn’t fall for this, so Ted comes to me and slips me the dope. Or doesn’t that make sense?”

  They stared at me blankly.

  “No, it’s too fantastic,” Audrey said at last.

  I thought about it and decided she was right. “Well, it’s nearly right,” I said doubtfully. “I’ll bet you even money that Esslinger’s funeral parlour is mixed up in these murders.”

  “You don’t know the other girls were murdered. Just because Marian was killed, it doesn’t mean “ Reg began.

  “Now don’t go spoiling my theory,” I said. “It must work out the way I see it. It clicks. I’m sure it clicks. We’ll start work right now. The only way to get to the bottom of this is to dig and keep digging. I want you to go to the Street-Camera Studio and find out if Ted’s ever been there. Checkup that first. Try and find out who collected those photos of the three girls, Luce McArthur, Vera Dengate and Joy Kunz. Find that out and we’ll be getting places. Off you go.”

  Reg said: “Okay, I’ll see what I can turn up.”

  When he had gone, I said: “Look, babe, I want you to check up on Ted Esslinger. Find out where he was on the night of each of the disappearances. See if he has an alibi. Get friendly with the guy and stick close to him. See if he’s got any crazy ideas. Unless there’s something we’ve missed, there can only be one explanation: Ted’s crazy. Try and find out if he is.”

  Audrey nodded. “I’ll do it,” she said, “and what do you intend doing?”

  “It’s time I went along and met Max Esslinger,” I said. “I want to look his funeral parlour over. Maybe I’ll get some ideas.”

  She picked up her gloves and bag. “You’ll like Max Esslinger,” she said. “I’ll swear he had nothing to do with this business, and you’ll think so, too, when you meet him.”

  I pulled her to me. “You haven’t got my nasty suspicious mind,” I said, and kissed her.

  She pushed me away. “We’ve had enough of that to go on with,” she said severely. “Hands off.”

  “Just a minute,” I said, taking her in my arms again. “Didn’t I say I was the senior partner? What I say goes.”

  “All the time?” she asked, smiling at me.

  “All the time,” I returned.

  The room was silent for a while.

  chapter seven

  I stopped my car outside of a two-storey, grey stone building with a large display window, the upper portion of which was decorated with gold lettering, reading Cranville Mortuary. There was an oak coffin on trestles in the window and nearby was a large black and white check bowl containing stiff, wax-like lilies.

  The glass-panelled door opened softly under my hand. The air of the purple-carpeted reception room smelt of embalming fluid, aromatic, sweet and sickening. I closed the door and glanced uneasily around. The imitation ebony coffin with ornate silver handles that stood against the opposite wall and the smell of death in the place gave me a spooky feeling.

  At the back of the room was a black velvet curtain hanging from a brass rail.

  It obviously hid a door. As I stood waiting, the curtain was drawn aside and a man appeared. He looked like something that had escaped from a freak show. His face was bloodless and his frame was as bony as a skeleton’s. Thin straw-coloured hair was oiled flat to his skull and his black, sunken eyes burned like hot coal.

  He eyed me suspiciously and asked in a soft, timbreless voice if he could help me.

  He looked so much like a ghoul that for a moment I could only stare at him.

  “Mr. Esslinger in?” I asked at last, pulling myself together with an effort.

  “Who shall I say wants him?” the man returned, motionless and forbidding.

  “Tell him an operative of the International Investigations would welcome a word with him,” I said, taking out a packet of Lucky Strike, but watching him closely.

  He looked away from me, but not before I saw fear in his eyes. “I’ll tell him,” he said, “but he’s busy right now.”

  “I’m in no hurry.” I flipped a match across the room. “Just tell him who wants him arid I’ll stick around.”

  He gave me a long, hard stare and then went away. I dragged down a lungful of smoke and waited. After a while I wandered over to the imitation ebony coffin and examined it. It was a nice job and I wondered vaguely if it would fit me. It seemed a little too narrow, although the length would take me all right. After I’d been over it for a few minutes and exhausted its interests I went over to a framed notice hanging on the wall giving prices of coffins and their various styles. I was surprised to find how cheaply you could be put underground.

  “You wanted to see me?” a voice asked softly behind me.

  I didn’t jump more than a foot.

  Max Esslinger was an older edition
of his son. His face was more lined and his eyes more thoughtful than Ted’s but the likeness was remarkable.

  “Maybe you’ve heard of me,” I said. “I’ve been working for Wolf up to this morning.”

  He smiled and put out his hand. “Why, of course,” he said, in a pleasing baritone voice. “You’re the detective from New York, aren’t you? I’m glad to know you. Aren’t you working for Mr. Wolf anymore?”

  I shook hands, feeling a little blank. “We had a difference of opinion,” I said, with a grin, “and I quit.”

  Esslinger shook his head. “I’m afraid Wolf’s a difficult man to get along with. I’ve known him for a long time. Come into my office. We can talk there without being disturbed.”

  I followed him through the door which was hidden by the black velvet curtain, down a passage, past a couple of doors and into a pleasant, well-furnished room.

  He waved me to an armchair and sat down behind a large flat-topped desk.

  “Now, Mr. Spewack, what can I do for you?” he asked, pulling open a drawer and taking out a box of cigars.

  I shook my head. “Not for me,” I said, setting fire to my cigarette. “As I was saying, I quit working for Wolf this morning. I’m interested in this case, Mr. Esslinger, and I wonder if you’ve any objection if I worked with Miss Sheridan. It wouldn’t cost you anything. Wolf s taken care of the financial angle and he’s not getting his money back. I’d like to clear up this business before I returned to New York.”

  I was surprised to see his face brighten. “That would be generous of you, Mr. Spewack. I must confess I am very worried that nothing so far has been done. I am more than anxious to get the matter cleared up myself.”

  There was no doubt of his sincerity, and I remembered what Audrey had said about it not being possible for him to have had anything to do with the missing girls. There was something about Esslinger that more or less convinced me that she was right.

  “That’s fine,” I said. “Frankly, I was expecting some opposition from you. I heard you wanted Miss Sheridan to have a free hand.”