He called to another attendant to bring down my car, and while I waited for it, I asked: “I suppose the cops third degree’d the chauffeur?”
“Sure. A couple of them tackled him again a few minutes ago. But the driver’s got nothing to worry about. Neither has Mr. Janoth. They drove to a dinner somewhere and then they drove straight to some other place. Your friend Mr. Hagen’s. It checks okay with us. They never garage this car here nights or week ends, so what would we know about it? But I don’t mind cops. Only, I don’t like that driver. Nothing I could say, exactly. Just, well.”
He looked at me and I gave him an invisible signal in return and then my car was brought down.
I got into it and drove off, toward Marble Road. But 1 hadn’t gone more than three blocks before I began to think it all over again, and this time in a different mood.
Why should I destroy that picture? I liked it. It was mine. Who was the better man, Janoth or myself? I voted for myself. Why should I sacrifice my own property just because of him? Who was he? Only another medium-sized wheel in the big clock.
The big clock didn’t like pictures, much. I did. This particular picture it had tossed into the dustbin. I had saved it from oblivion, myself. Why should I throw it back?
There were lots of good pictures that were prevented from being painted at all. If they couldn’t be aborted, or lost, then somebody like me was despatched to destroy them.
Just as Billy would be sent to destroy me. And why should I play ball in a deadly set-up like that?
What would it get me to conform?
Newsways, Commerce, Crimeways, Personalities, The Sexes, Fashions, Futureways, the whole organization was full and overrunning with frustrated ex-artists, scientists, farmers, writers, explorers, poets, lawyers, doctors, musicians, all of whom spent their lives conforming, instead. And conforming to what? To a sort of overgrown, aimless, haphazard stenciling apparatus that kept them running to psychoanalysts, sent them to insane asylums, gave them high blood pressure, stomach ulcers, killed them off with cerebral hemorrhages and heart failure, sometimes suicide. Why should I pay still more tribute to this fatal machine? It would be easier and simpler to get squashed stripping its gears than to be crushed helping it along.
To hell with the big gadget. I was a dilettante by profession. A pretty good one, I had always thought. I decided to stay in that business.
I turned down a side street and drove toward 58 East. I could make a compromise. That picture could be put out of circulation, for the present. But it would really be a waste of time to destroy it. That would mean only a brief reprieve, at best. Its destruction was simply not worth the effort.
And I could beat the machine. The super-clock would go on forever, it was too massive to be stopped. But it had no brains, and I did. I could escape from it. Let Janoth, Hagen, and Billy perish in its wheels. They loved it. They liked to suffer. I didn’t.
I drove past 58 East, and began to follow the course the other car must have taken going away. Either Janoth had dismissed Billy when he arrived, and returned by taxi, or he had ordered Billy to come back later. In any case, Janoth had dined at the Waynes’, according to all accounts, and then, as I knew, he had come to 58 East, and then of course he must have gone directly to Hagen’s.
I followed the logical route to Hagen’s. I saw two nearby cabstands. Janoth must have used one of them if he had returned by taxi, unless he had found a cruising cab somewhere between the two. He certainly would not have been so stupid as to pick one up near 58 East.
The farthest cabstand was the likeliest. I could begin there, with a photograph of Janoth, then try the nearer, and if necessary I could even check the bigger operators for cruisers picking up fares in the neighborhood on that evening. But that was a tall order for one man to cover.
From Hagen’s, timing the drive, I went to the Waynes’, then turned around and drove slowly back to 58 East. The route Earl must have followed took about thirty minutes. Allowing another thirty minutes for the fight to develop, that meant Earl was covering up about one hour. This checked with the facts known to me.
Perhaps he had stopped somewhere along the way, but if so, no likely place presented itself.
That gave me only two possible leads, a cab by which Earl may have made his getaway, or possibly some attendant at Pauline’s or Hagen’s.
It was pretty slim. But something.
I drove back to the office, garaged the car again, and went up to 2619. There was no one there, and no memos. I went straight on into 2618.
Roy, Leon Temple, and Janet Clark were there.
“Any luck?” Roy asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Well, we’re starting to get some reports.” Roy nodded with interest toward the cross-reference chart laid out on a big blackboard covering half of one wall. “Ed Orlin phoned a while ago. He located Gil’s with no trouble and definitely placed the man and the woman there. Interesting stuff. I think we’re getting somewhere.”
“Fine,” I said.
I went over to the board, topped with the caption: X. In the column headed: “Names, Aliases,” I read: George Chester?
Under “Appearance” it said: Brown-haired, clean-cut, average height and build.
I thought, thank you, Ed.
“Frequents”: Antique shops, Van Barth, Gil’s. At one time frequented Gil’s almost nightly.
It was true, I had.
“Background”: Advertising? Newspapers? Formerly operated an upstate tavern-resort.
Too close.
“Habits”: Collects pictures.
“Character”: Eccentric, impractical. A pronounced drunk. This last heading was something that had been added by Roy in the Isleman and Sandler jobs. He imagined he had invented it, and valued it accordingly.
I said, standing beside the word-portrait of myself: “We seem to be getting somewhere.”
“That isn’t all,” Roy told me. “Leon and Janet have just returned from the Van Barth with more. We were discussing it, before putting it on the board.”
He looked at Leon, and Leon gave his information in neat, precise, third-person language.
“That’s right,” he said. “First of all it was established that Chester was in the lounge on Saturday night. He did not check the Judas picture he bought, but he was overheard talking about it with the woman accompanying him. And the woman with him was Pauline Delos.”
I registered surprise.
“Are you sure?”
“No doubt about it, George. She was recognized by the waiter, the bartender, and the checkroom girl, from the pictures of her published in today’s papers. Delos was in there Saturday night, with a man answering to the description on the board, and they were talking about a picture called Judas
something-or-other. There can be no doubt about it.” He looked at me for a long moment, in which I said nothing, then he finally asked: “I feel that’s significant, don’t you? Doesn’t this alter the whole character of the assignment we are on? Personally, I think it does. Somebody raised the very same question this morning, and now it looks as though he had been right.”
I said: “That’s logical. Do the police know Delos was in there Saturday night?”
“Of course. Everyone in the place promptly told them.”
“Do the police know we are looking for the man with her?”
“No. But they are certainly looking for him, now. We didn’t say anything, because we thought this was exclusive with us.
But what should we do about it? We’re looking for George Chester, and yet this Delos tie-up is terrific, seems to me.” I nodded, and lifted Roy’s phone.
“Right,” I said. When I had Steve Hagen I barked into the receiver: “Steve? Listen. The woman with our man was Pauline Delos.”
The other end of the wire went dead for five, ten, fifteen, twenty seconds.
“Hello, Steve? Are you there? This is George Stroud. We have discovered that the woman who was with the person we want was Pauli
ne Delos. Does this mean something?” I looked at Roy, Janet, and Leon. They seemed merely expectant, with no second thoughts apparent in their faces. At the other end of the wire I heard what I thought was a faint sigh from Steve Hagen.
“Nothing in particular,” he said, carefully. “I knew that she saw this go-between. Perhaps I should have told you. But the fact that she was with him that night does not concern the matter we have in hand. What we want, and what we’ve got to have, is the name and whereabouts of the man himself.
Delos is a blind alley, as far as our investigation is concerned.
The murder is one story. This is a different, unrelated one. Is that plain?”
I said I understood him perfectly, and after I broke the connection I repeated the explanation almost verbatim to the three people in the room.
Roy was complacent.
“Yes,” he said. “But 1 said all along this was an issue related to some recent crisis, and now we know damn well it is.” He rose and went over to the blackboard, picked up some chalk. I watched him as he wrote under “Associates”: Pauline Delos. Where the line crossed “Antique shops,” “Gil’s,” “Van Barth” he repeated the name. Then he began to add a new column.
“At the same time, Leon and Janet brought in something more tangible,” he went on. “Tell George about it.” Leon’s small and measured voice resumed the report.
“When they left the cocktail lounge of the Van Barth, our subject forgot something and left it behind him.” Nothing about me moved except my lips.
“Yes?”
Leon nodded toward Roy’s desk and his eyes indicated an envelope. I seemed to float toward it, wondering whether this had all been an extravagant, cold-blooded farce they had put together with Hagen, whether I had actually mislaid or forgotten something that gave me away altogether. But the envelope was blank.
“A handkerchief,” I heard Leon say, as from a great distance. “It can probably be traced, because it’s obviously expensive, and it has what I believe is an old laundry mark.” Of course. She had borrowed it. When she spilled her cocktail I had used it, then given it to her. And it had been left there.
I turned the envelope over and shook the handkerchief from the unsealed flap. Yes. I could even see, faintly, the old stain.
“I wouldn’t touch it, George,” said Leon. “We may be able to raise a few fingerprints. It’s a very fine, smooth fabric.” So I had to do that. I picked up the handkerchief and unfolded it. And laid it down and spread it out, very carefully and cautiously.
“I imagine it already has plenty,” I said. “The waitress’s, the cashier’s, yours, one more set won’t matter.” I inspected the familiar square of linen with grave attention. It was one of a lot I had bought at Blanton’s & Dent’s, about a year ago.
And there was the faint, blurred, but recoverable laundry mark on a bit of the hem, several months old, for it must have been put there when I last spent a week in the city and sent some of my things to a midtown laundry. “Yes, I imagine this can be traced.”
I refolded the handkerchief, stuffed it back into the envelope. I could now account for the presence of my own fingerprints, but I knew I could not save the handkerchief itself from the mill.
I handed the envelope to Leon.
“Do you want to take this to Sacher & Roberts?” That was the big commercial laboratory we used for such work. “Whatever they find, we’ll put another team on it. I suppose Dick and Louella relieved you at the Van Barth?”
“Oh, sure. Our man comes in there once or twice a week, they said.”
“We’ve got the fellow covered at this place called Gil’s, and at the Van Barth,” Roy pointed out. “He’ll come back, and then we’ve got him.”
I nodded, rather thoughtfully. I said: “Certainly. He’ll return to one place or the other. Then that will be that.” I don’t know how that conference broke up. I think Leon went on to Sacher & Roberts. I believe I left Roy making additional entries on the big progress-board. I told him to eat and get some rest when he’d finished, I would be leaving around seven.
If they actually brought out prints on that handkerchief, we would all have to volunteer our own, mine with the rest. That in itself I had taken care of. But for a long, long time in my own office I sat trying to remember whether my fingerprints could be found anywhere on Pauline’s overnight bag. Such a duplication could not be explained away. Hardly.
I forced myself to relive that last day with Pauline. No. I had not touched that grip anywhere except on the handle, and Pauline’s final touches had certainly smudged them all out.
Sometime in the afternoon I took a call from Don Klausmeyer.
“Oh, yes, Don,” I said. “Any luck with Patterson?” Don’s slow, malicious, pedantic voice told me: “I had a little trouble, but I found her. I’ve been talking to her for about an hour, going over old catalogues of her shows, looking at her fifth-rate pictures, and trying to keep her four kids out of my hair.”
“Okay.’ Shoot.”
“I have turned up one very significant fact. Louise Patterson was the customer who bid, unsuccessfully, for her own picture in the dealer’s shop that night. A friend saw her canvas there, told her about it, and it was Patterson’s hope that she could buy it back for herself. God knows why.”
“I see. Anything else?”
“Do you understand? It was Patterson herself, in the shop that night.”
“I get it. And?”
“And she described the man who bought the picture, at great length. Are you ready to take it?”
“Let’s have it.”
“This is Patterson speaking. Quote. He was a smug, self-satisfied, smart-alecky bastard just like ten million other rubber-stamp sub-executives. He had brown hair, brown eyes, high cheekbones, symmetrical and lean features. His face looked as though he scrubbed and shaved it five times a day.
He weighed between one sixty and one sixty-five. Gray tweed suit, dark blue hat and necktie. He knows pictures, says she, and is certainly familiar with the works of L. Patterson, which he doubtless collects, but only for their snob-appeal. Personally, I think the dame overestimates herself. She admits she’s been forgotten for the last ten years. But to go on. Our man is a good deal of an exhibitionist. He imagines he is Superman and that is what he plays at being. The woman with him was beautiful if you like Lesbians in standard, Park Avenue models.
Unquote. Got it?”
“Yes.”
“Does it help?”
“Some,” I said.
“I’ve been poking around the studio-loft she lives in—God what a paradise for rats and termites—looking at acres and acres of pictures. Artistically she’s impossible.” How would Don know? “But they reminded me of something I’m sure I’ve seen somewhere very recently. If I can only remember what it is, maybe I’ll have another lead.”
He laughed and I echoed him, but I was staring straight at Study in Fury on the wall opposite me.
“Maybe you will, but don’t worry about it. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
When he hung up I stared at that picture, without really seeing it, for a long five minutes. Then I took my scribbled notes and went into Roy’s empty office and duly entered Don’s report on the chart. By now it was crystallizing into a very unpleasant definition of myself indeed. And after that, I took three good, recent photographs of Earl Janoth out of the morgue.
A little past seven o’clock Roy returned. We arranged about relieving each other on the following day and then I went out, feeling I’d had about all I could stand for the time being.
But I still had work to do.
At the cabstand I had that afternoon selected as the likeliest. I got my first real break. A good one. A driver identified Janoth as a passenger he’d ridden a little after ten o’clock last Saturday night. The driver was positive. He knew when he’d picked him up, and where, and where he’d put him down. A block from Hagen’s.
I knew this might save my neck, as a last desperate resort.
But
it would not necessarily save my home.
It was around midnight when I reached Marble Road.
Georgia and Georgette were asleep.
I found The Temptation of St. Judas where I had left it, in a closet downstairs, and in twenty minutes I had it concealed in back of another canvas.
It could be discovered, and easily, if they ever really caught up with me. But if anyone ever got this far, I was finished anyway.
Earl Janoth III
FIVE DAYS after Steve first organized the search we had enough material concerning that damned phantom to write a long biography of him. We had dates, addresses, his background, a complete verbal description of him, X-rays of every last thought, emotion, and impulse he’d ever had. I knew that blundering weak fool better than his own mother. If I shut my eyes I could actually see him standing in front of me, an imbecilic wisp of a smile on his too good-looking face, I could hear his smooth, studied, disarming voice uttering those round, banal whimsicalities he apparently loved, I could almost reach out and touch him, this horrid wraith who had stumbled into my life from nowhere to bring about Pauline’s death and my possible ruin.
Yet we didn’t have the man himself. We had nothing. “Candidly, I think you are holding something back,” said George Stroud. He was talking to Steve. I had insisted on being present, though not directly participating, when we reexamined the paralysis that seemed to grip our plans. “And I think that thing, whatever it may be, is the one solid fact we need to wrap up the whole business.”
“Stick to the facts,” said Steve. “Your imagination is running away with you.”
“I think not.”
We were in Steve’s office, Steve behind his desk, myself a little to one side of it, Stroud facing Steve. The room was filled with sunlight, but to me it looked dim, like the bottom of a pool of water. I don’t believe I’d slept more than two hours a night in the last week.
The damned wolves were closing in on me. I’d been questioned by dozens of detectives and members of the district attorney’s staff three, four, and sometimes five times a day, every day. At first they’d been polite. Now they weren’t bothering much with that anymore.
The Big Clock Page 10
