“I’m quitting,” Simon said.
“One of the gutsy ones,” Reardon remarked. “I’ve quit seventeen times this year and I’ll quit again in the morning. Right now I need a smoke.” He touched a lighter to the cigarette and nudged Simon across the yard towards a black Cadillac parked in a no-parking zone. “I’m going to drive over and have a look at the inside of that apartment myself,” he said. “I thought you might like to come along.”
“What did they tell you about Mary Sutton’s condition?” Simon asked.
“Not much change. Little chance of survival. Don’t worry about it. I left the apartment telephone number with the nurse at the reception desk. They’ll call me there if there’s any change.”
It was a lot better than hanging around in a hospital corridor when there was work to be done. Simon got into the Cadillac with Reardon and they eased out of the yard quietly. Reardon drove swiftly through fog-veiled streets that seemed strangely hushed after the siren-screaming exodus to the hospital hours earlier. There was little traffic and it was only a matter of minutes before the Cadillac slid silently to the curb and parked opposite Mary Sutton’s apartment building. Three hours had obliterated tragedy. No morbidly curious, no fire trucks, no police cars crowded the street now. Except for a boarded-up window on the fourth floor there was nothing to distinguish the building from any other apartment house in the area.
“You’re just about a car length behind the place where I was parked when Mary Sutton came through the window,” Simon observed. “The passing convertible with the top down was moving in the opposite direction. It carried her almost to the end of the block before the hysterical driver jumped the curb and landed in somebody’s hedge. I followed the convertible. Never got inside the building at all.”
“Let’s have a look-see,” Reardon said.
He got out of the Cadillac and led the way across the street and inside the foyer where a sad-eyed little man wearing a baggy sweater over faded blue jeans was shoving a carpet shampoo machine over the soiled wall-to-wall. Reardon asked for the manager and showed his credentials. The man turned off the machine and glared back with smouldering hostility.
“Don’t you fellows ever quit for the day?” he said. “I’ve been combing cops and firemen out of my hair all evening. Look what they did to this carpet. Water and mud all over the place. And upstairs. I saw the firemen coming and got the pass key to four-twenty-two so they wouldn’t chop down the door. Did that stop them? Just because I was excited and couldn’t get the door unlocked fast enough they smashed it in anyway.”
“You’re lucky they did,” Reardon said. “The fire might have spread to the whole building.”
“Maybe. But I could have unlocked the door if they waited a few seconds.”
“Do you still have that key handy?”
“It won’t do any good now. The lock’s smashed. I just finished nailing some boards across the door so nobody would go in and steal Miss Sutton’s things. She has some real nice things—if the firemen left any of them unbroken.”
“Is there a service door?”
Reluctantly, the manager conceded that there was a service door and went into his apartment long enough to produce the key. He accompanied them upstairs on the service stairway inquiring en route as to the condition of Mary Sutton and regretting dolefully that such a tragedy should happen to such a nice woman. “A real lady,” he said. “No noise, no loud parties. Always paid her rent on time without being asked.”
“She gave a party last night, didn’t she?” Simon asked.
“Did she? Maybe a dinner party—something like that. All I know is that she never caused any disturbance in the building. I wish I could say as much for all the tenants.”
The service door opened easily and the manager switched on the light. They entered the apartment through the kitchen—a bright yellow and white room with bleached wood cabinets, a stainless steel sink set in yellow tile and a yellow counter gas range with a built-in oven. The firemen hadn’t reached this far. Everything was immaculate except for two glasses and a Martini pitcher containing a little melted ice that stood on the counter bar separating the kitchen from the dining area. Reardon dismissed the manager, who probably returned to his shampoo machine, and closed the door behind him. They proceeded through the dining area, where a circular teak wood table flanked by four naugahide upholstered chairs remained undisturbed, into the living room which appeared to have been struck by a tornado. The soggy carpet was muddied from the hall door to the boarded-up window; a tall ceramic lamp was in pieces on the floor; the charred remains of a melon-coloured seat cushion had landed on a sideboard smashing several porcelain vases; and the chair from which it was taken, blacked by soot and fire, still sat forlornly beside the scorched wall where blacked fragments of draperies still clung to the traverse rods. Simon found a lamp that wasn’t broken and Reardon located the wall switch. Light made the scene even more depressing.
Reardon crouched behind the burned chair and found a walnut table with one leg broken and the fragment stuck in the shattered remains of a large mosaic ashtray that had leaked butts and ashes all over the carpet. He examined the cigarette butts. They were a mentholated brand with a mouthpiece that showed smudges of lipstick.
“She must have been sitting in this chair smoking when the fire started,” he said. “It spread to the drapes and—zowie!”
“I wonder why she didn’t run for the door,” Simon said.
Reardon looked across the room. It was at least fifteen feet to the hall door. He crossed the space and examined the lock.
“The safety’s on,” he said. “Maybe she tried to get out and panicked. It has happend. If she had been drinking her reflexes were slowed down. She might even have ben asleep.”
“Where’s the telephone?” Simon asked.
“I saw one on the kitchen wall.”
“It has a short cord. When I talked to her at three I had the impression she walked into another room with the telephone while we were talking.”
“Try the bedroom.”
It was a one-bedroom apartment but the rooms were large and airy. Behind a bank of utility closets they found the bedroom door—open. Inside the room a king-size bed, hastily made with lumps still showing under a psychedelic-print spread, was flanked by lamp tables. On one of them was a white telephone with a cord long enough to reach into the living room. On each table were ashtrays partially filled with cigarette butts. One tray held the mentholated brand, the other was half-filled with a regular brand with cork tips. No lipstick. Opposite the bed was a portable television. A large dresser with a mirror and a small chest of drawers completed the furnishings. A closet-lined hall led to the bathroom—tub with shower, cabinet-type lavatory with an imitation marble top that extended over the toilet tank, and a small dressing table. The floor was carpeted with soft yellow shag that had escaped the worst of the firemen’s damage but still carried a few large, soggy footprints.
“She sounded sleepy—a little slow responding on the telephone,” Simon reflected. “It might have been because she wasn’t anxious to have me come over. I had the impression that one of the party guests had stayed the night.”
“Probably Corman,” Reardon said. “They were pretty close.”
“You’ve checked that out?”
“Naturally. I’ve had Mary Sutton watched since Barney came up missing. He might try to contact her.”
“All the way from South America?”
“If that’s where he is. We don’t know that, do we? We don’t even know that the man who called himself Barry Anderson and took a Braniff flight south was really Barney. Lots of men limp. I’ve known wilder coincidence than that in my years of police work.”
“Do you think Barney took the money?”
Reardon opened the medicine cabinet above the lavatory and began to take a silent inventory of the contents. Dentifrice, hair spray, suntan lotion—”In my position I have to think so until he proves otherwise,” Reardon admitted. “Naturall
y, I can’t tell that to Carole—but she’s no fool. Only one man is missing from Pacific Guaranty. That’s important. The two of us know Barney and we’re wondering why the hell he did it, if he did it. Lieutenant Wabash isn’t emotionally involved in the case. Last night he said: ‘Why think about motive? No man needs a motive to take a million bucks. He takes it because it’s possible.’ Wabash could be right, you know.”
“But Barney—”
“Is a human being like the rest of us. He may have been a football hero but that was a long time ago. The real world is rough on heroes. Especially Barney’s world.”
Reardon opened a bottle of aspirin and shook one out into his palm. He scrutinized it. “Bayer,” he said, and returned it to the bottle. He opened another bottle and shook out a few smaller pills. He touched one to his tongue. “No label,” he said. “Maybe birth control. I understand no modern girl is without them today.” He checked out the Listerine mouth wash, the iodine and a couple of brand-name sleeping aids. He found a thermometer and a hypodermic needle. He found a bottle of wheat germ tablets, several vitamins and several face creams and then opened a small jar labled “hormone cream” and scowled at the contents.
“Does this look like cream to you?” he asked.
Simon looked into the jar. It contained a fine white powder.
“I keep shaving cream in an empty peanut can,” Simon said. “Broke the jar and couldn’t find anything else to hold it.”
Reardon took a pinch of the powder and touched it to his lips. “This isn’t shaving cream,” he said, “it’s hard stuff.”
“Heroin? Mary Sutton?”
Reardon nodded. “Tough to swallow, isn’t it? The stuff shows up everywhere. Maybe that’s why she sounded slow on the telephone—and why she isn’t responding to treatment. I’m going to call the hospital.” Reardon re-capped the jar and stuffed it into the pocket of the coat he was still carrying over his arm. Then he pulled out a few sheets of Kleenex from the wall dispenser and wrapped up the hypodermic needle carefully before putting it into his inside coat pocket. He closed the medicine cabinet and returned to the telephone in the bedroom. He was dialling when Simon returned to the living room.
The light was still blazing. On the floor where Reardon had found the ashtray Simon spotted a familiar object. He picked it up and dusted off the soot. It was a flight schedule. The same schedule, or one like it, that he had seen in Mary Sutton’s desk. It hit him then, suddenly, as if the last three or four hours had been a bad dream and he was beginning to wake up, that he shouldn’t have given her that hour of grace when he telephoned. He shouldn’t have telephoned at all. He should have come to see her—cold. He should have hit her with a verbal attack that would force out of her everything she knew or even suspected, because Mary Sutton had to know all the angles at Pacific Guaranty. The apartment was nice—or had been before the fire. The furniture was expensive—the rent must be at least 200 a month. Mary Sutton had come a long way in her brief years and she had to be tough as nails under that charming façade. She probably had a good salary for a woman, but the main difference between a man and a woman these days was usually about $7,000 a year and anyone with normal intelligence would resent that—perhaps enough to participate in a robbery that would wipe out the inequity for life. More than anything he wanted to talk to Mary Sutton and he couldn’t—not tonight—perhaps never. He heard Reardon coming back from the bedroom. At the same time he heard a key scratching helplessly at the hall door the manager had nailed shut. Reardon heard it too. Instinctively, he turned off the overhead light and motioned Simon to keep quiet. After a few seconds the key stopped scratching. Muffled footsteps moved away from the door.
“I’ve got to see who that was,” Reardon whispered. He walked through the living room back into the kitchen area and was approaching the service door when the sound of the scratching key came again. Reardon stepped back behind the door as it opened. Paul Corman walked into the apartment.
Corman looked haggard. He hadn’t shaved for at least 24 hours. His hair was rumpled. He wore a tweed jacket over a turtle-necked sweater, slacks that looked as if they had been slept in, and rubber-soled brogans that made a hissing sound on the carpet. He stood in the middle of the kitchen floor and called out: “Mary, I’m back. I came back to apologize, honey. I didn’t mean a damned word that I said—” Then he saw Simon standing in front of the burned-out débris and his jaw fell down into the folds of the turtle neck. “You still here?” he said hoarsely. “My God, what’s happened?” There was no way to answer him until his eyes took in the whole scene. By that time Simon realized the man was drunk.
“Mary!” Corman yelled. “What have you done to Mary?”
“I haven’t done anything to her,” Simon said. “There was a fire. She’s in the hospital.”
Corman’s brain couldn’t seem to comprehend. “Don’t lie to me!” he bellowed. “Mary didn’t want you to come here but you had to come anyway. Why couldn’t you leave her alone? If you’ve hurt my girl I’ll kill you, you over-paid shyster!”
Corman lunged across the room. He was small but wiry. He was all over Simon before he could side-step the attack and his fists, flailing at Simon’s head and into his stomach, were like anvil blows. A volcano of hostility was erupting and even if Simon was the innocent bystander who got in the way there was no time for objective analysis. Simon tasted blood in his mouth and lashed out at something that felt like flesh and cracked like jawbone. A few more pieces of broken furniture wouldn’t matter now. Corman crashed against the sideboard, shattering the rest of Mary Sutton’s ceramic display. With an animal roar he lunged forward again and this time the momentum alone was enough to send Simon sprawling on the floor. Before he could get up again the huge feet of Captain Reardon stepped over him, and the huge right hand of Captain Reardon ploughed into Corman’s middle and bounced him back into the cushionless chair where he folded like a wet newspaper and didn’t move.
“Are you all right?” Reardon asked Simon.
Simon scrambled to his feet and made sure his head was still attached to his neck. “Physically, yes. Psychologically—”
“Cool it!” Reardon ordered. “Both of you!”
The admonition was wasted on Corman. He leaned forward and buried his head in his hands. For a moment it seemed that the manager might have vomit to clean from the damaged carpet but Corman just shuddered a bit and then raised his head. He looked around the room as if slowly becoming aware of the débris of disaster. The scorched smell of fire still lingered in the room. Eventually his eyes fixed on the boarded window. “Fire,” he mumbled, doing a slow re-take on Simon’s words. “Mary in the hospital.”
“She went through the window like a flaming torch,” Simon said.
Horror was replacing the fury on Corman’s face. “You were here.”
It was both a statement and a question. Simon shook his head. “On the street. On my way up. I never talked to her at all.”
“It’s still your fault,” Corman muttered. “If you hadn’t called we wouldn’t have quarrelled. She said you were coming and I told her not to talk to you. We had a few words and I left with my steam up. I wanted her to go with me—up to Mammoth. Somewhere away from this Amling mess.”
“Why didn’t you want her to talk to me?” Simon asked.
“I told you. She needed to forget Amling. He’s gone with the loot—we all know that. The great Golden God had feet of clay.” Corman’s fingers worked at his jacket pocket and pulled out a crumpled package of cigarettes. He took one out and looked about for a match. The cigarette had a cork tip. “Everybody knew it but Mary,” he added bitterly. “She was still carrying a torch.”
“I thought Mary was your girl,” Simon said.
“Sometimes—on lonely nights. I’m the boy who keeps away the things that go whoosh in the dark. It was Amling she cared about and he never gave her a tumble. Why did you have to butt in, Drake? I had just about convinced her that we should drive up to Mammoth—”
; Corman couldn’t find a match so he dropped the cigarette to the floor. He came slowly to his feet and the fury began to flood back into his eyes. “She would have been out of here—safe with me instead of here in a burning room!” he shouted.
The telephone began to ring.
“Shut up and sit down,” Reardon ordered.
“I could have made her forget about Amling. Damn you, Drake—”
“The telephone is ringing,” Reardon bellowed. “Don’t you move—either of you—until I get back.”
Simon and Paul Corman stood measuring each other like a pair of fighting cocks with an interrupted main event, while Reardon went back into the bedroom to answer the telephone. He was gone for about three minutes that seemed an hour and a half, because the decorative wall clock the firemen had missed stood at fifteen minutes past nine. The hospital had called to tell Reardon that Mary Sutton was dead.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THAT’S THE WAY it went. A man tried to do a favour for an old flame who had married a very nice guy and ended up playing heavy in a lop-sided triangle nobody could ever straighten out. Corman took the news like a man being given the death sentence. He was sobbing when Reardon turned out the lights and led the way through the service door and down the stairs where he returned the key to the manager and told him not to let anyone into the apartment. Mary Sutton was dead and her death was a police matter. Corman drove his own car to the hospital. Simon rode back with Reardon but didn’t go inside. He had a bruise on his jaw the size of a golf ball and felt a deep need for the tender remonstrations of his wife. He got into his own car and drove back to the hotel where he found Wanda, still wearing her coat, sitting up in bed staring at the late show and chewing her cuticle. It was an old John Wayne picture and she never chewed cuticle for John Wayne. It had to be worry over Mary Sutton. He mixed a couple of drinks from the bottle of Scotch and then told her everything that had transpired since he had put her into the cab. She cried a little over Mary Sutton and fussed a little over his bruise. Then she fell asleep on his shoulder without removing her coat. Simon napped intermittently until grey light at the windows indicated a new day in the wings and everybody could be thankful that Thanksgiving was over for another year.
The Brink of Murder Page 12
