After Midnight

by Nielsen, Helen

  “And?” Franzen asked.

  “He’ll live another fifty years if he can find a sharp enough lawyer.”

  Simon knew it was time to go home.

  SEVENTEEN

  It was sunrise when Simon reached The Mansion. He didn’t look in on Hannah. Rousing her at such an hour was not only dangerous, it was heresy. He went directly to bed and slept until noon when Duane Thompson telephoned and demanded an immediate appearance at City Hall. Through a fog of confused memories, Simon recalled that—among other events on the busy agenda of the previous evening—he had witnessed an attempted murder and that clarified Thompson’s point of view.

  He drove to the rear parking lot of City Hall and entered through the back doorway. Before facing Thompson or any of the reporters who might still be cluttering the halls, he wanted to see Nancy Armitage. He found her in a private cell in the woman’s section looking none the worse for her first night behind bars. She had, in fact, the strange radiance that emanates from one who has found satisfaction.

  “You’re lucky,” Simon said. “You’ll be charged with assault with a deadly weapon—not murder. If you like, I’ll recommend a good lawyer. A friend, but not too good a friend.”

  “I was thinking of you, Mr. Drake,” she said.

  “Thank you, no. I expect to be busy. Besides, I’m a witness to the act. That would prejudice me.”

  “But I didn’t mean to shoot! I only meant to frighten him into taking me with him!”

  She probably believed every word she said. That would be an asset on the witness stand.

  “You just keep on saying that and you won’t have any trouble,” Simon declared “But be sure and tell your lawyer not to ask my opinion. I saw the expression on your face when you pumped lead into Lodge’s stomach. You were having too much fun for me to ever get my heart into any defense of poor Florence Nightingale.”

  This was a personal report. The one Simon later made to Duane Thompson was more detailed and less analytical.

  Thompson was happy. With the deft touch of a miscast press agent, he was turning the fiasco of the Roger Warren murder into a masterpiece of police deduction. Olson was a federal prisoner—as Lodge would be if he escaped the death penalty—but the murder charge took precedence and the full publicity coverage would now come to a man who had an iron-clad case. Nowhere at any price was there enough protection to save Lodge now. August Mayerling’s aunt in Santa Barbara had suffered a complete relapse and it was doubtful that August would return to Marina Beach before the end of the year. Eddie Berman’s lawyer had sealed him off from any communication, and the powers that paid Frank Lodge for his extracurricular activities didn’t include legal protection in the contract.

  Simon told Thompson all he knew about the devious trail that had led from the murder on Seacliff Drive to Seaman Olson’s midnight swim in the glare of police searchlights, and explained how a faulty lock on the Warrens’ front door had brought the trail back to Frank Lodge’s front window.

  “Lodge heard the door banging in the wind because he stood at an open window in the living room with a pair of binoculars in his hand when the Warrens came home. He must have been watching that window for hours, because the quarrel at The Cove sent the battling Warrens off in one direction, and he had to get Nancy Armitage back to her night patient. He knew Roger had the package of heroin, but I don’t think he worried about it. He’d watched Roger for months. He knew his contact was local and that he always brought the package home with him. It was just a matter of time.

  “He knew he was going to kill Roger that night, and Lodge is an improviser. We can see that in the way he used an oil slick on the dock when he dropped Charley Becker’s body into the sea. The Warrens came home battling—as usual. The door kept banging after they went upstairs—which meant it was left unlocked. He heard Roger ask for a knife. Then the quarreling stopped. Lodge waited until all was quiet and went next door to do the job he had contracted to do and found everything set up for him: a murder weapon complete with fingerprints, a drunken victim in a chair in the living room and a drunken wife sleeping in the bedroom. All he had to do was take the heroin, kill Roger and leave the knife.”

  “Obviously,” Thompson said.

  “Obviously?”

  Thompson smiled blandly. “A professional killer can’t be apprehended as quickly as an ordinary ‘it-all-went-black’ family murderer. He needs to be lulled into a false sense of security.”

  “Thompson,” Simon howled, “you’re not going to palm off my investigation, my demolished brakes and my encounter with Nancy Armitage and her lover over a hot gun collection as your master plan to catch a killer!”

  “I’m not?” Thompson said. “Give me odds.”

  Simon couldn’t do that. Gambling was illegal in California.

  He left Thompson to his fantasies and drove back to Seacliff Drive. The front door was still unlocked at the Warren house. He entered and walked up the short flight of stairs to the living room. The drapes were drawn and a light burned in Wanda’s bedroom, but the house was empty. He found one closet door open. The contents seemed intact—except for one empty hanger on the floor. Retrieving it, he found the crumpled wire from Olson on the floor. Wanda was gone. Her clothes, cosmetics and her French perfume were still in the house, but she was gone. Simon listened to the surf bothering the rocks on the beach below for nearly an hour and then abandoned the vigil.

  He returned to The Mansion late in the afternoon to find Hannah in heated telephone debate with someone who probably regretted the whole thing.

  “No, you may not call me Hannah!” she announced. “My name is Miss Lee and I cherish the sound of it. I reserve the use of my first name to my closest associates and refuse to share the privilege with every upstart switchboard operator who thinks it’s smart to be familiar. Now, put through my call as you’re paid to do and we’ll remain self-respecting strangers.”

  When Hannah saw Simon in the doorway she abandoned the entire project and demanded to be brought up to date. Newspapers were so impersonal. He told her about Nancy Armitage and her face glowed with malevolent delight.

  “I told you not to trust that woman!” she exclaimed. “Conscience! Humbug! Beware of volunteers, Simon. Always beware of volunteers. Oh, that reminds me. Commander Warren called. He wants you to come out to the yacht.”

  “Why?” Simon asked.

  “Protocol. He wants to surrender his sword, I think. He says that he always admits an error.”

  “So do I,” Simon said, “and then I try not to repeat it. I’ve been out to the commander’s yacht. I didn’t enjoy it. I don’t like him or his nineteenth-century mind. Why should I accept his apologies when his contempt is so flattering?”

  “But, Simon,” Hannah begged, “what will happen to that sweet little Wanda Warren?”

  Simon knew he was in trouble. Never in her life had Hannah Lee called any woman “sweet” without having something up her sleeve.

  “She’s not my baby,” Simon said.

  “But she is a human being. Simon, you sent her a wire. What did she do?”

  “She ran. What did you expect her to do? She always runs. She ran away from her father. She ran away from the commander’s sarcasm. She ran away from my wire. That’s her pattern.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “I don’t know. I stopped by her house but she hasn’t come back. Scared, I suppose, of facing another trial. Well, let her go. She’s still attractive—physically. She can go back to wriggling in public until she finds some nice young man who likes spineless, clinging vines and makes her a better offer.”

  Hannah cocked her head like a mother hen watching the frantic scratchings of her young.

  “You sound bitter,” she observed.

  “Well, I’m not! I’m relieved to have it all over with. Now let’s forget the whole affair and get back to basics. How’s the garbage pickup these days, and when do I get my dinner?”

  “I hope that question was in two parts,” Hannah r
emarked. “As for your dinner, it’s waiting. Just open the doors to the dining room.”

  Hannah liked elegant touches. Simon assumed that she had prepared a surprise, and he was right. He opened the double doors that led into the dining room—but it wasn’t the same room at all. The large formal dining table was shoved against one wall. In its place, cosily set before the fireplace, was an intimate table for two. Twin rows of wine glasses were separated by ornate candelabra, and a silver wine bucket housed a bottle of champagne. Simon had the eerie sensation of having wandered back into Frank Lodge’s apartment—and then he realized the room was occupied. Wanda moved toward the candlelight, slight, slender and attired in something so form-fitting he had to fight down a feeling of slow strangulation. Quite deliberately, she took the bottle from the ice bucket and inserted a corkscrew. The cork came out easily with a sharp pop, and Wanda beamed.

  “There, I’ve done it,” she said.

  “What are you doing here?” Simon demanded.

  “I fooled you. I decided to stop running. Shall I pour or do you pour? I’m never sure which is right. I guess it’s tea that a woman pours.”

  “When did you come here?” Simon asked.

  “Last night.”

  “I didn’t see you.”

  “Of course not! I came after I got that wire. It didn’t make sense to me and I was tired of being locked inside that house. I came here because—well, where else could I come?”

  The strangulation feeling was giving way to something much more frightening. Simon began to feel warm all through his body. Wanda was even lovelier without a dryer on her head. Young, homeless, dependent—

  Suddenly he panicked.

  “Hannah!”

  He whirled about but Hannah, leering happily, was slowly drawing the doors together.

  “Hannah, this isn’t fair!” he cried. “I’ve been torpedoed!”

  “On the contrary,” Hannah said. “When Wanda came last night we had a woman to woman chat. We both agreed you were much too professional to work for charity.”

  “But I love charity!” Simon said. “Hannah, don’t leave me! This woman is mercenary. She married Roger Warren for his money. She as much as admitted it!”

  “Bully for her!” Hannah murmured. “I always knew there was something I liked about the child.”

  The doors closed, and from the far side of the room came the throbbing strains of Nancy Armitage’s plaintive love song. Hannah’s theatrical sense left nothing undone.

  “Mr. Drake,” Wanda inquired, “don’t lawyers do anything but talk?”

  There was only one thing Simon could do in such a situation. He faced the music.

  If you liked After Midnight check out:

  A Killer in the Street

  Chapter One

  It was a Tuesday night in November, 1962. Rain fell slow and steady in Manhattan, slanting hard on near-deserted sidewalks and streets pocked by the occasional twin circles of approaching headlamps. Taxis spawned out from Times Square like predatory bugs in search of new feeding grounds, and here and there a truck rolled heavily past sleeping skyscrapers where spotty clusters of bright windows indicated janitors were toiling late on nocturnal rounds. Nature had a conspiracy against Kyle Walker. Tuesday was the night for his extension course at the university, and it had rained every Tuesday since the course began. Kyle Walker was 30, a civil engineer on the city payroll, and a man of ambition far above his present status. Tall, angular, a bit shaggy in his waterproof and fedora, he hunched awkwardly over the steering wheel of the eight-year-old sedan that was taking him home.

  Home was the Cecil Arms apartment hotel—an unimaginative brick structure providing what was known, wryly, as low-cost housing and holding in residence a collection of the young and ambitious on their way to glory, and the old and embittered on their way to nowhere. It housed, in particular, a lovely young sociology major who had been named Diedre by doting parents and called nothing more elegant than “Dee” since the christening ceremony. Dee with her solemn brown eyes, her scholar’s mind and nymph’s body. Dee, who could leave her text and tortoise-shell glasses on the bedside table and become as primitive as Eve in his arms, or who, on a wet and miserable night such as this, would have dry slippers at the door and a pot of hot chocolate waiting on the back of the kitchen stove like any dutiful Haus-frau. With such thoughts to keep him warm, Kyle Walker felt extraordinarily good—in spite of the warped wiper that flapped ineffectually against the windshield of his old sedan—because he was young and alive and had yet to know the meaning of terror.

  The mouth of the lower level garage was deserted. Bernie, the night attendant, wasn’t in his office, but his radio was blaring a percussion beat that was Bernie’s signature, and it meant that he had gone for coffee or tumbled into the back seat of one of the parked cars to sleep off a dull evening. Kyle nosed the old sedan into his own slot and switched off the ignition and the lights. Gathering up an armload of textbooks from the seat beside him, he stepped out of the car into an unusual darkness. The overhead lights were out. The only light in the garage came from the small office at the entrance and the indicator over an automatic elevator on the opposite wall. He slammed the car door behind him. Darkness seemed to intensify sound. The thud reverberated hollowly and then faded behind a wild temple-block obbligato rising from the radio. Even his footsteps on the floor traced a sharp, staccato pattern all the way to the elevator. Kyle pushed the down button and waited. A high-pitched wail concluded the radio offering and in the subsequent silence he became aware of an annoying scratching or scuffling sound emanating from behind a stack of empty packing cases a few feet away. He made a mental note to speak to Bernie about rats in the garage and then, as the doors under the indicator opened, stepped inside the bright box of the elevator. Entering, he pushed the button for the fourth floor. When he faced front the doors were closed and the elevator was in motion. Passing the first-floor level he began to grope through his pockets for his key ring. At the second-floor level he remembered they were still in the ignition of the sedan. Halfway to the third he reversed direction and started down. At basement level the doors opened and light from the elevator spilled over a scene that held Kyle magnetized.

  Now he faced the empty packing cases. Beyond them the scuffling sound had developed into a full-fledged battle. Two men were doing something violent to Bernie. The boy was gagged and bound with rope, but had managed to pull loose from his captors long enough to hobble a few feet toward the entrance of the garage. His face was a flash of white terror—his mouth opened in a scream that never reached sound. He writhed in the light as they fell on him. The larger man held his arms while the other, in a gesture so swift it seemed trivial, dropped a wire about his throat and completed a quick, brutal strangulation. Kyle was dumb. Not until the murder was accomplished did the man with the wire become aware of the light spilling over him. As Bernie’s body slumped to the floor, the strangler turned quickly and stared at the open elevator. He was a man of ordinary appearance—conservatively dressed, clean-shaven, with intense eyes magnified by steel-rimmed glasses. His face was devoid of expression, and Kyle stared at it for a full twenty seconds before he was able to raise his free hand and depress the fourth-floor button. As the elevator doors closed, he slumped back against the steel wall and fought nausea.

  It was the beginning of the fear.

  Kyle left the elevator at the fourth floor. The corridor was empty—that was good. He went directly to his apartment and rang the bell. Dee always stayed up for him, and they hadn’t lived at the Cecil Arms long enough to make neighbors she could visit. Impatiently, he rang a second time. Dee opened the door.

  “I thought you had your key,” she said.

  “I did,” Kyle answered. “I left my key ring in the car. My feet are wet. I don’t want to go back down for them tonight.”

  He handed Dee the textbooks and crossed quickly to the street-side windows of the small living room. The apartment was equipped with steel Venetian blinds assemble
d on sagging tapes that never gave complete privacy. Tonight it seemed they must be transparent. He lifted one slat and peered out at the street. He had been too intent on outwitting the ailing windshield wiper to notice what, if anything, was parked on the street as he approached the garage. Four stories below, the rain was still pounding hard on black asphalt and silver cement, but opposite the Cecil Arms, just outside the arc of a street lamp, a dark VW van nosed slowly away from the curb. The headlights came on as a man sprinted across the shiny street. Reaching the curb, he paused and peered up at the apartment building. Kyle caught the glint of light on steel-rimmed spectacles, and then the far door of the van opened, the man leaped into the cab, and the van disappeared in the darkness.

  Kyle lowered the slat.

  “What is it?” Dee queried anxiously. “An accident?”

  He remembered that he hadn’t kissed her when he came in. He took the texts from her hands, tossed them into a lounge chair and took her in his arms. She was soft and warm and smelled of drugstore cologne and cocoa. He didn’t know how tightly he held her until she said, “Kyle—please! I can’t breathe!”

  Kyle let her go. She looked at him strangely—not certain if it was the proper time to smile.

  “Wet feet—warm heart,” she said. “What were you studying in class tonight? Or shouldn’t I ask?”

  He brushed a dark lock of hair away from her forehead. Shock created peculiar reactions. He could see the strangler’s hands fixing a wire about Bernie Chapman’s neck, and then it became Dee’s neck and Dee’s dark eyes widening in pain and horror.

  “Dee,” he said, “I’m quitting the class.”

  “Quiting?” she echoed. “Why?”

  “I must. We’re not getting anywhere, Dee, and it’s so late …”

  “Late?”

  “I mean that life passes so quickly. We’re in a rut, Dee. I want to leave New York.”