The James Michael Ullman Crime Novel

by James Michael Ullman

  “Tell me about Sunday. You often go to her place weekends?”

  “No. But I’d been studying a lot. I wanted a break. I phoned. She didn’t want me to come, but I went anyway. I was only there an hour or so, then she sent me away.”

  “A neighbor heard you arguing. What about?”

  “Pot.”

  Forbes stared at him.

  “That’s right,” Eric went on. He managed a thin to-hell-with-you smile. “Pot. Marijuana. You know what that is, don’t you?”

  “I know. What about pot?”

  “I smoke it. It’s one of the things we’d talk about. She was square on the subject, tried to talk me out of it. Sunday I had some with me. I showed it to her, tried to persuade her to try some, but she took it away from me. Made me promise not to buy more unless I went to her and asked for those sticks back.”

  “You left without them? They’re still in her apartment?”

  “Yes. I—it was real cornball, wasn’t it? Me letting her take the stuff. And her all worked up over a little pot, while at the same time she and you were—”

  “What happened last night when you drove her home?”

  Eric looked down. “I phoned her at the office about four. It’d started to rain. I asked if I could give her a ride. I wanted to apologize for Sunday. She said okay. I picked her up in front of the Sherman Hotel, at about a quarter past five. She was late. Said she’d got tied up with a last-minute call.”

  A late call? Forbes and the police had stopped at the office on the way to headquarters. Curley’d been there too. He’d arrived first and let them in, in fact. They’d gone through Helen’s desk in the off chance they’d find a lead to her killer. Helen kept a log of all her calls, incoming or outgoing, so Forbes would know how much time she had spent on each client. And the last entry on the Monday log had been at 4:42 P.M., an incoming four-minute call from the president of the company that had been considering promoting the alcoholic sales manager from Winnetka. He’d reported that they’d decided to promote the lush anyway, provided he agreed to take the cure.

  “She say what the call was about?”

  “No.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, during the ride I told her I was sorry about Sunday. Then we discussed a paper I’m writing—‘The Decline of Western Man.’ She’d been interested in it before, but last night she seemed to have something else on her mind. When we got to her building, I asked if I could come up but she said no. I’d forgotten the lighter I’d left Sunday. I guess she had too. She just said she was expecting someone. Somebody who’d tell her about a missing person you were looking for. A girl, a waitress, I think.”

  “At her apartment?”

  “That’s what she said.” Eric looked up again. “I thought it was a story she invented to get rid of me. That’s what it was, wasn’t it? I know you hardly ever handle missing persons cases, except routine skiptracing jobs, people who run away because they can’t pay their bills.”

  “I’ll ask the questions. She say anything else?”

  “Yes. I said it was unusual, wasn’t it, seeing someone about a case at home? And she said well, it was an unusual case, the damnedest thing she’d ever run into.”

  From outside, traffic sounds filtered through the window. It had been the damnedest thing Helen had ever run into, all right. Whoever was to have discussed Iris Dean with her had probably murdered her.

  “You see anyone hanging around?” Forbes asked. “Loitering? Even walking down the street?”

  “No. She ran out of the car to her apartment. Then I took off.”

  “Where to? What’s your alibi for the time of Helen’s death? The coroner’s physician put it at between six, and seven. If you picked her up late, you must have reached her building at about five-forty.”

  “It was closer to six. There was an accident on the Drive, we got hung up.” Sullenly the boy drew on his cigarette. “Hell, I guess I don’t have much of an alibi. Maybe it sounds silly to you, but from Helen’s I drove out to the Aquarium. Just parked and looked at the lake. I do that when I want to think about things. How the world’s having a nervous breakdown. How people your age have fouled everything up. How—”

  “How long you there?”

  “Seven-thirty, eight. I don’t know. I drove back here, ate supper, then started studying again. That’s what I was doing when Mr. Axburn called. He said Helen’d been murdered, the police were questioning you, but there was nothing to worry about. Jesus! I saw it on television. Helen carried out of her apartment. You getting into the squad car. I got sick. I went out and walked in the rain. I remember I was on a bench at the Oak Street Beach when the sun came up. And later Rose barging up here with a lot of sentimental crud about you and Helen. She’s all right, she means well. I got it off my chest with her, but afterward she wanted me to eat something. Can you imagine? At a time like this, to eat?” Eric’s words trailed off.

  Forbes got up and walked to a window. He tried to assess the consequences of what had been, and what might happen next. It would have to be a fast decision, and once made there’d be no turning back.

  Finally he said, “Of course, you know the police want you. The man who drove her home, the last person known to have seen her alive, the man she argued with Sunday. And won’t Jaraba’s enemies have a field day when it’s learned the mystery man is my son, who’s been seeing Helen behind my back for months. Even been entertained by her in her apartment.”

  “It wasn’t entertained.”

  “It’ll seem that way. A lot of people will think it was that way. Father and son, the same woman. And then there’s your damned pot. The police’ll find it if they haven’t already. Possession’s a felony in Illinois, a first offense can get you three to ten. So many nice college kids use the stuff now that ordinarily the sentence would be suspended, but with Jaraba’s enemies baying at you, trying to dirty this up all they can, don’t count on it. And of course in view of your emotional attachment to Helen, your obvious anger at both of us for having a sexual relationship, and your lack of an alibi, there’s a much more serious charge the state’s attorney might consider.”

  “You’d tell the police about me?”

  Forbes turned and walked to the boy. “You want me to?”

  “I’m not sure.” Eric lowered his eyes. “I thought about it. I know I should tell them myself. It’s the right thing and all. But—but I don’t think I could stand it. The detectives and reporters. Questions about me and Helen. I think I’d go out of my mind. I just couldn’t yet, not this soon after…” He looked up again. “And it’d ruin me, wouldn’t it? College. Being a teacher. If I went to prison because of that pot—”

  “No, I won’t turn you in,” Forbes said. “You just go about your business. Don’t discuss Helen or her murder with anyone. Don’t even attend the wake or the funeral.”

  “You can’t order me to stay away from that!”

  “I am ordering you. The police’ll be there. I don’t know how good a description they’ll get of their mystery man, but I don’t want you parading in front of them, not in your emotional state. And if you are questioned, just say you knew Helen casually. Someone you’d seen in my office when you dropped in. If they don’t buy that, clam up. Call Barry Axburn, he’ll send someone and notify me. After that we’ll play it by ear, admitting no more than necessary.”

  Eric shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  “I know. It’s the only way. It’s what you want yourself. If you didn’t, you’d have gone to the police hours ago. The last few years you’ve been giving me a hard time, haven’t you? Sneering at how I make a living. My false values, hypocrisy, all the rest of it. And you convinced me. Made me think about myself, reassess everything, try to get out of it through Jaraba. Maybe you don’t think much of Jaraba either, but it was the only out I could find and I bucked for it because of you. But I notice that when the c
hips are down, you’re willing to live a lie. You’ve been living one since Barry told you Helen’d been murdered. I still don’t see you reaching for that phone, all eagerness to enlighten the police with the truth. All you seem to have on your mind is your future, which is what I have on mine. So you and me, we’ll live this particular lie together.”

  For a long moment the boy glared at Forbes. Then he said, “Damn you, I never want to see you again. From now on I’ll take care of myself, understand?” An odd expression crossed his face. “But tell me. The questions you asked—there really is a missing girl, isn’t there? Helen was going to see someone about her. And the person she was going to see—”

  “You take care of yourself,” Forbes said, “and I’ll take care of that missing girl.”

  * * * *

  Rose Huff waited behind the wheel of a pink late-model Cadillac. Forbes slipped into the front seat beside her.

  “How’d it go?” Rose asked.

  “Not very well. How about a ride to the office?”

  “Sure.” She started the car and they eased into traffic. “I tried, Julian,” she said. “I think he half listened. It’s so damn hard to get through to kids today. He thinks you’re ancient, that the idea of bedding down with a girl like Helen would never occur to you. I tried to explain.”

  “Thanks. I suppose Helen told you all about Eric.”

  “She had to tell someone. She’d run out to my place a lot and talk about the boy. She didn’t like it, his hanging around on the sly. He had this crush on her. It made her nervous, but she didn’t know what to do about it. He’d confide in her, tell her all sorts of things about himself. I guess he made her what they call a mother substitute.”

  “Mother?” Wryly Forbes smiled. “Yes. Sort of.”

  “She told me about that too. But she never gave him the slightest—”

  “I’m sure of it. Eric tell you what happened last night?”

  “Uh-huh. And frankly, I wasn’t sure what to do. All I knew was I’d better hold him there until you could talk to him.”

  “I’m glad you did. Rose, I’ve got to keep him out of it. You know what’d happen if the police learned he drove Helen home last night.”

  “You don’t have to draw a diagram. But the missing person. Was that on the level, or—”

  “It was on the level. A girl, Iris Dean.”

  “What’ll you do now?”

  “Find the girl, learn why she dropped out of sight. And as soon as I can prove a link between Iris Dean and Helen’s murder, I’ll take it to the police. Hopefully I’ll do that before the police find their mystery man.”

  Rose drove on silently until they crossed the Clark Street bridge over the Chicago River and edged into a line of traffic headed into the Loop.

  “Julian,” she said, “I know it’s none of my business, but I have to say this. Helen never told me about you two. She didn’t have to. And I loved Helen. Her father worked for my father, I got her her first job, with Jaraba’s publishing company, after she graduated from high school. Whoever killed her, I think when they catch the bastard they ought to hang him by—oh, never mind.”

  She paused, apparently trying to think of the right words.

  “About Helen, though,” Rose went on. “Don’t feel guilty about her. She loved you in her way, but I don’t think she’d ever have married anyone. It wasn’t in her nature. She wasn’t promiscuous, but whenever she got involved with a man it’d be someone she knew she could never marry, for one reason or another. As though she was making excuses for not settling down and raising a family. Forgive me, I…”

  “Don’t stop. I knew so damned little about her.”

  “All right. I don’t know who all of them were, and I don’t think there were many. But there was an editor at Jaraba’s. A wife and six kids. And a public relations man who’d drop around with press releases. He finally married his best client’s daughter. She’d fall in love, throw herself at the man until he responded. I guess she needed the physical side of it, and the idea that someone cared and she had someone to care for. But she always knew the affair would never be more than that, that the man was unattainable, just as you were unattainable. You weren’t her type, and there was your son. I think that’s why she encouraged him, subconsciously. She could never marry you with Eric feeling about her as he did.”

  The Cadillac braked in front of Forbes’s office building. Rose opened her purse and pulled out a handkerchief. “And that,” she added, “ends the sermon for today. Go on upstairs. I’ll park and get us some coffee. You and Bill take it black, don’t you?”

  “Us?”

  “Sure. The agency’d collapse without a girl to run things. I’ll be damned if I’d let any other sweet young thing risk her neck working for you boys until the police catch whoever killed Helen. Anyhow, it’ll be the first useful thing I’ve done since we put out the Hoodlum Directory.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me. It’ll cost you. Whatever you were paying Helen, I want twenty-five percent more.” Upstairs Curley waited in his cubicle, moodily smoking a cigarette and ignoring a telephone that jangled at his elbow.

  “Hi, Julian.” There was more the little investigator seemed to want to say, but all he could come up with was “Hell of a note, isn’t it?”

  “Sure is.”

  “Everyone’s been ringing us. Reporters, friends, enemies, cranks. So I just told the answering service to take all the calls. I haven’t even looked at the mail.”

  “Rose,” Forbes said, pulling up a chair, “will give us a hand. But before she gets here…” Briefly he told Curley about his talk with Eric.

  Curley shook his head. “Julian, you’re an idiot. You’ve tampered with evidence, withheld material facts in a homicide investigation. And sooner or later the police will learn about Eric anyhow.”

  “Perhaps. Bill, the partnership offer’s still open. And I still hope to turn the whole business over to you one day, but obviously it can’t be so soon now. I couldn’t promise when. So under the circumstances, if you want to change your mind about the agency—”

  “You’re dissolving the partnership already?” Curley looked away. “Hell, I’ll stick. You know my fondness for sinking ships, but I’ll state my position at the outset. I think you’ve lost your mind. Homicide—that’s police business. We’re skip-tracers, bill collectors, personnel checkers, commercial sleuths. Hell, the only dead bodies I’ve ever seen have been in funeral parlors.” He got to his feet. “But okay. Let’s see the file on Iris Dean.”

  Forbes shaved and changed clothes in the building’s men’s room. When he returned, Rose was on Helen’s phone getting the messages from the answering service, and Curley sat at Forbes’s desk studying Iris’s photograph. Apparently the prints had been delivered late the previous afternoon. The original and the negative weren’t in the envelope, so Helen must have mailed them back to St. Clair.

  “Frankly,” Curley drawled, “I don’t believe it. That this old man wanted to find this girl just to be sure she’s all right. I showed the girl’s picture to Rose, and Rose doesn’t believe it either.”

  Forbes picked up a few of the prints and dropped them into a jacket pocket. The blowup showed Iris full figure, standing at the edge of a wooden pier with the shoreline behind her.

  “I know. I have growing doubts about that too, so the first order of business is finding St. Clair. It’s time for another talk. For the record, I’d also like to know where he was between six and seven last night. I talked to him at eight and he said he was flying to Florida. If he hasn’t left a message with our answering service, try his apartment anyhow. And check out a number he left with the answering service. He claimed it was a phone in a bar at O’Hare. Jaraba wants to see me. I’ll call you as soon as I can.”

  “How do you think,” Curley wondered, “Jaraba intends to disassociate you from his campaign? B
y stabbing you, shooting you, or setting you adrift in a small boat?”

  “Hard to say.” Forbes rubbed his eyes. “God, I’m bushed. If we don’t find St. Clair right away, I’ll sack in for a few hours.”

  “The phone at your apartment,” Curley pointed out, “will be just as busy as the phones here. If I were you, I’d get a hotel room.”

  “Hotel? Good idea. I’ll try the Dijon first. I planned to sneak in later anyhow to question guests on Iris’s floor. If the manager’s not around, I think I can get by the day clerk. She wears thick glasses, and I won’t look anything like the detective she saw Friday.”

  “Deception?” Curley’s eyes narrowed. “What about your quaint rules? That if there’s any other way to do it, we don’t lie to people?”

  “On this case,” Forbes replied, “you can forget the rules. Anything goes.”

  CHAPTER 5

  It took Jaraba just twenty-three minutes to read Forbes out of the party, fire him as editor of the Hoodlum Directory, and notify him that his appointment to the Senator’s committee had most certainly been withdrawn. The ax fell in a conference room in a large, low-slung building that housed Jaraba’s newspaper plant.

  Barry Axburn and a dozen party functionaries were made to look on as Jaraba, red-faced and enraged, strode back and forth denouncing Forbes in gutter language. It was a side of Jaraba well known to his aides but carefully shielded from the public by the image makers charged with creating the Jaraba mystique.

  Forbes, Jaraba said in effect, was stupid, immoral, irresponsible, weak-willed, and worst of all disloyal. He, Jaraba, had picked Forbes from obscurity, made him a public figure and pulled strings to land him the appointment with the Senator, all as part of the buildup for the day when Forbes could take a post in the Jaraba administration. And this was how Forbes returned the favors. He’d risked everything, including Jaraba’s own political future, with a private indiscretion, and of course the you-know-what had hit the fan now. Hell, it had been assumed that in his private life Forbes would be a monk. And wouldn’t it have been something if people on the other side got secret pictures and tape recordings of Forbes the crime fighter and his secretary in bed and then sprung them on the eve of the election. Too bad the story had to come out this way, some nut murdering Helen, but at least between now and election day there was time for voters to forget. The Senator wouldn’t forget though. Jaraba had been made a fool in the Senator’s eyes, a senatorial aide had already read him the riot act long distance from Washington for recommending a man who slept with his secretary. The repercussions might haunt Jaraba for the rest of his political life.