Rook Takes Knight (The Howie Rook Mysteries)

by Stuart Palmer

  II

  THE STIFF MEDICINAL SHOT of bourbon was already being poured. Rook tossed it off like water. “But why, Hal, why?” he demanded.

  “Charteris was displeased with something that Dee had dared to say to him, and took the leather to her bare back. Next morning when he was out of the house Dee’s sister Mary came in all the way from Covina and insisted on taking the pictures with the family camera. She’d been trying to talk Dee into leaving the man, and obviously the photos would be effective evidence in any contested divorce action.”

  “I should think so! When did this happen?”

  “About three weeks ago, according to Dee. She didn’t want to show them to me, and swears she hasn’t shown them to anybody else. Don’t ask me why any woman in her right mind would stay with the man another day, another hour even! She says she loved him and was sorry for him. Charteris was more than twenty years older than she—he married her when she was only a struggling TV actress, living on the fringe …”

  “I know. Hanging around Schwab’s Drugstore, with all the other Hollywood houris. I suppose she thought Charteris was a catch!” He tried to hand back the offensive photos.

  “You keep them—and the negatives too. I want one of them blown up big, the one I showed you first. Because I might just decide to lay all our cards on the table and show it to Wilt Mays. Photographs don’t lie, and they’re worth a thousand words. He might not even want to proceed if he has a look at Exhibit A beforehand. But, Howie, it’s a two-edged sword. Right now all he’s got against our client is the marital strife, plus the fact that when first questioned by Sergeant McDowd she said she was home and in bed when her husband was killed.”

  “Can they prove she wasn’t?”

  “I’m afraid so. The first police on the scene made identification from papers in Charteris’ billfold and called in, and a desk officer tried to break the news to her at home, getting no answer.”

  “But that’s hardly positive proof—”

  “No. But later she tried to tell the D.A.’s men, when they questioned her at the morgue, that she’d taken a couple of sleeping pills and hadn’t heard the phone. Only McDowd is a thorough sort of cop, and he found a neighbor living down the street who happened to be putting his car away late that night and saw her in that distinctive red MG high-tailing it up toward home just before one A.M. Do you see the catch? The couple had quarreled and even argued about divorce—but that’s not enough to arrest anybody on. Neither is the fact that she wasn’t home as she said, but out somewhere. But with this nasty photo, Mays has got motive for murder—murder with a capital M! If you want to look at it that way, as he certainly will.”

  Rook nodded gravely. “If right after the beating Mrs. Charteris had grabbed up a gun or a knife and done away with the sadistic bastard then and there, she’d be in the clear. Justifiable homicide, in anybody’s book. But this business of waiting three weeks, and then using the undeniably premeditated method of committing murder with a stolen car—that makes it first-degree homicide, with malice aforethought, dead to rights.”

  “Exactly! So I don’t know which way to jump. If it has to come to trial, that photo will knock the jury for a loop. And if the case were in the hands of anybody but Wilt Mays, I think the whole thing would be quietly nol-prossed. But Mays is a real tough customer. His putting this house under surveillance shows that he expects Dee to panic and make a break for Mexico or somewhere, in spite of my promise to surrender her right after the funeral. But I think it’s now time for you to meet our fair client face to face.” The attorney went over to the foot of the stairs and called up, “Mary? Can Dee come down now and meet Mr. Rook?”

  The sisters must have been more than ready, for they appeared almost immediately. The older woman, acting like an officious mother hen, was trying to give both moral and physical support, but the tall, dark younger woman pushed her impatiently aside and descended the stair a step or two ahead, marching erect and proud. It was a good performance—if it was a performance. Deirdre was wearing a loose white robe and transparent sandals, her dark hair bound by a silver ribbon and flowing down her back almost to her waist. She looked, Rook thought, like a queen caught in the grip of the Terror and on her way to the tumbrels. And she was the very epitome of the physical type he had always secretly most admired in women, and seen so seldom.

  Hair so black as to be almost bluish-purple, eyes a deep azure blue, proudly curved small nose, slimly voluptuous figure … how aptly, he thought, she had been named after that first Deirdre … “Deirdre Queen of Sorrows” in the Synge play and in the ancient legends of Eire.

  If she thought for an instant that this sketchily dressed, shaggy bear of a man was miscast in the role of glamorous private eye, she gave not the slightest flicker of her long eyelashes. When Agnews introduced them, she said, “Thank you for coming to the rescue, Mr. Howard Rook.” Her voice was low and pleasant, but with echoes of Midwest origins rather than the fine Irish brogue that, Rook felt, would have better harmonized with her appearance.

  “At your service,” he said, and meant it. He very nearly pressed her fingers to his lips instead of just shaking hands.

  But Sister Mary, otherwise Mrs. Edward Patch, was something else again. She had almost the same eyes, but her hair had been ineptly dyed to an unearthly orange-red, her voice was strident, and her heavy-set body was squared off like a stage-Irish biddy’s. Her handshake was hard as a man’s, and she said immediately, “So you’re supposed to be the hot-shot investigator? Well, let me tell you something here and now. Dee didn’t kill that skunk, though the dear God in heaven knows he deserved it a thousand times over, treating her like he did! I know my little sister—didn’t I bring her up myself after our poor mother died when I was only twelve and she a baby of three? It’s ridiculous to think of her killing anybody! Her only mistake was in marrying that two-faced, cruel-hearted, soft-spoken devil of a man. She should have left him months ago, I’ve told her not once but a thousand times—”

  “Then, Mary, suppose you let her tell us, and you run along back upstairs?” interrupted Hal Agnews, who could be firm when necessary. With some reluctance the older woman obeyed, pausing only to give Deirdre a quick, sisterly hug, and then slowly mounted the stairs. Soon she was out of sight—and possibly out of earshot.

  Rook felt oddly relieved when the woman was gone—he could have seen her committing murder without even batting an eye. But appearances are all too often deceiving. Right now Deirdre looked innocent as a Botticelli Virgin, having seated herself in a high wing chair where she was poised and waiting. There was something of the witch woman about her, Rook decided. Stronger men than he would turn to mush when gazed upon by those deep azure eyes, and he must now remember to hold on to his objectivity with both hands.

  “I didn’t kill my husband,” she was saying. “What else can I tell you?”

  Rook hastily collected himself. “Mr. Agnews here has already given me most of it, so we won’t have to go through all that again. But there are a few questions that you’ll have to answer sooner or later, Mrs. Charteris. Some may seem of a rather intimate nature, so please forgive me. First, why didn’t you leave your husband after the beating?”

  “It—it wasn’t that simple. John was wonderful to me when he—when he was himself. Everything would be peaches and cream between us for weeks, or even months. Then the black mood would come upon him and he’d be a different person. Afterward he’d be crazy with remorse, and swear it would never, never happen again. I loved him, and I’m not the sort of person who can easily stop the habit of loving someone.”

  “But in a case of actual, physical cruelty—”

  “John was sick! He’d promised to get mental therapy, and he went to a psychiatrist, a Dr. Mortensen in Beverly Hills. He was supposed to be having weekly sessions, only I began to wonder if he was really keeping his word. I couldn’t find any canceled checks made out to Dr. Mortensen, though I looked all through John’s desk. So I made the mistake of calling him on it�
��and that’s what the last trouble was about. John blew his top and shouted that he didn’t need any headshrinker but that I did! And that night was the very worst of all. You saw the picture.”

  “Yes. I wish I hadn’t.”

  “I’m sorry it was necessary. I could hardly bring myself to give it to Mr. Agnews …”

  “Who else has seen it?”

  “Good heavens—why, nobody! Except Mary, who took it.”

  “Did your husband regularly mistreat you?” Rook asked quietly.

  “To be perfectly frank, yes. John used to—to punish me sometimes. He didn’t need much of an excuse, either. Once it was because I’d danced twice with a man, a guest at one of our parties. Once it was because I tried to lock him out of my bedroom after he’d been so beastly to poor little Gregorio that I’d had to intervene—something trivial about oxalis weed or Bermuda grass in the lawn. John never or almost never showed that side of himself to anybody but me. And it seemed that I had to be a goddess of perfection or else an abject slave to him, depending on his mood. It was getting worse and happening oftener. Sometimes I could sense it building up …”

  “ ‘The show of violence,’ as Dr. Wertham says in the authoritative text on the subject,” Rook suggested—to give her a moment to dab at her eyes with a handkerchief.

  “I guess so. But please let me finish, before I get too embarrassed to say it.” Deirdre tried to smile, but failed miserably in the attempt. “You see—I know this sounds crazy—it all started when John and I were first married. It was really nothing but a wild sort of love-play, at least in the beginning. John would decide that I’d been a naughty little girl and he’d pretend to be angry and then hold me down and spank me with a ping-pong paddle, you can guess where. If—if you must know—” she was flushing furiously now—“well, I sort of enjoyed it! And it always climaxed in an orgy of wild love-making, like nothing else in the world …” Her voice broke off.

  “It’s all in the Kinsey Report, and in Krafft-Ebing,” put in Hal Agnews, addressing Rook in an effort to give Deirdre a moment to pull herself together. “Not too uncommon between lovers, and not really abnormal unless it gets out of hand.” He turned back to Deirdre. “Still, we’ll just forget that part of it—I mean, your enjoying it at first—as far as any jury is concerned. If it comes to that.”

  Deirdre nodded bleakly. Rook said, “But later, Mrs. Charteris, when this game got beyond agreeable limits, didn’t you scream or call the police or anything?”

  “No,” she admitted. “I was too ashamed! I don’t think any of the neighbors would have heard me anyway, and it always happened at night when Gregorio and Maria had gone home. And if I’d have screamed or made a fuss he’d only have hit me harder! Like a fool I kept thinking a miracle would happen and he’d get well again.”

  “Did you ever see a doctor about your injuries?”

  She shook her head. “As I said, I was too ashamed. And afterward John always made a big thing of rubbing me with ointments and stuff.”

  Rook had had about enough of this, and decided to change the subject. “You were considering a divorce? And you had even gone so far as to consult an attorney?”

  “Perhaps ‘consulted’ is too formal a word. I went to see Harry Holtz, an old friend of the family, who’s supposed to be one of the best domestic-relations attorneys in Westwood. Harry’s the quiet type of divorce lawyer who usually tries to mediate quarrels and get people back together again. But when I told him my problem he advised me to start suit at once.”

  “And why didn’t you?”

  “I—I just couldn’t seem to make up my mind! I’d been brought up a strict Catholic, you see. My family were what you might call lace-curtain Irish, on the south side of Chicago. Divorce was a dirty word to me, and it seemed like an admission of failure. I didn’t want to lose John. I wanted him to come back to me, the same wonderful man I’d married for better or worse. He’d threatened to kill himself or me or both of us if I ever tried to leave him.”

  “He was really the possessive type, then?” Rook probed.

  “Yes, but the generous type too. He’s been paying all the bills for my father, who’s in a convalescent hospital back in Chicago. He’s been wonderful to Mary, too—when she lost her job in the make-up department at Warner Brothers he set her up in a beauty parlor, and then after she married Ed Patch, John lent them a whole lot of money so they could start a night club out in Covina—”

  “Money which, don’t you forget, he wanted us to start paying back as soon as the Corn Patch began to get out of the red!” came Sister Mary’s irate voice from the head of the stairs. “With six percent interest, yet!”

  “Mary, please will you stay out of this?” Deirdre called, a forgivable barb in her voice. In a moment a bedroom door slammed loudly, but Rook reminded himself that a door can be slammed from either side. “You mustn’t mind my sister,” Deirdre was saying. “She has a heart of gold, but she could never resist trying to get into the act. This is big drama for her.”

  “For all of us, maybe,” Rook told her. “Please go on.”

  “Well, if I left John, where could I run to? He would have fought any divorce, and he wasn’t above bribing witnesses to testify to all sorts of things about me. He had influence and he could afford the best legal talent in town, he kept reminding me. His money is tied up in fifty ways I don’t understand, and he’d have fixed it so I didn’t have anything to live on.”

  “You hadn’t thought of going back to your career?” asked Agnews.

  “What career? Going back to being just Dee Delaney, phoning Central Casting every day? Oh, I was the darling of the props and the grips and the photogs and lab men, but not of the agency men and the sponsors. And I couldn’t go back to that rat race anyway. What could I do to support myself, be a cocktail waitress at the Corn Patch? Or maybe a dress model and live on cottage cheese and lettuce? I loved being Mrs. John Charteris and seeing my name in the society pages instead of the cheap Hollywood gossip columns. I loved having Maria bring me breakfast in bed and—oh, I can’t explain why I stayed, even to myself.”

  “I think you have,” said Rook softly. “Another moot question. Since you were not here at home when the police phoned to tell you your husband had been killed, then where were you?”

  She hesitated. Hal Agnews said, “Tell us, Dee. It’s a privileged communication, and needn’t go any further.”

  “Well,” she said, “I was restless and afraid that night. I sensed that John was working himself up into another one of his moods, and so I got in my car and just drove. I drove toward the ocean—”

  “Stop right there,” interrupted Agnews. “Tell the truth to your attorney, girl! Refuse to answer if you must, but don’t lie. That stuff about a lonely drive to the beach won’t wash, so try again.”

  “I may be in desperate trouble,” Deirdre said slowly. “But I’m damned if I’ll drag anybody else down with me!” The blue eyes blazed. “Do you both understand that?”

  “Please!” begged Rook. “If you were with another man, go ahead and tell us. This isn’t the Victorian era, and nobody is going to blame you very much if you tried to find comfort elsewhere, not with this sick situation at home. If anybody can give you a solid alibi for the time of your husband’s death, it’ll make all the difference!”

  There was a longish pause. “It concerns a married man,” said Deirdre finally. “But only indirectly. I won’t mention his name—wild horses couldn’t drag it from me!” Rook was beginning to feel that he had been somehow caught in an episode of Peyton Place or some other TV soap opera. “But it isn’t what you think,” she went on. “That evening John had been sort of strange. He spent hours mounting photos in our big album—he was a camera fiend, you know. When he finally took Lancer and started out for his usual long walk, I felt a sudden need to cry on somebody’s shoulder. I first tried to call Max Linsky, who used to be my agent and was a sort of Dutch uncle when I was in show business, but no answer. There was no answer when I phoned—thi
s other friend, a man I used to know when I was a struggling actress. I almost married him once, but he was too kooky and undependable. I figured that he’d be coming home soon—his wife happens to be out of town on location—so I took a chance and drove out to where he lives. But he wasn’t home, and I just sat outside in the car and waited. But he didn’t come.”

  She paused, and Agnews offered to mix her a drink. But she wasn’t having any. “You see, it’s really no alibi at all,” she continued. “It got later and later and I realized that John would be getting home from his walk. And while we have—we had separate bedrooms, he might look in on me before he went to bed, or he might see my car gone. He was always so quick to be jealous—”

  “Jealous of this former boy friend?” Rook wanted to know.

  “John didn’t even know he existed—I don’t think.”

  “Then it wasn’t the man you danced twice with at the party?”

  “Heavens, no! I’d broken off with practically everybody I ever knew in show business when I married, because John wanted it that way. He was just jealous, period. And particularly of the mysterious phone calls I’d been getting until recently. If Gregorio or Maria answered, the caller would hang up. If John was home and answered, the same thing. If I answered, the caller would just hold the line for a while—I could hear him breathing hard—and then hang up.”

  “How did you know it was a man calling?” Rook wanted to know.

  “Why—well, just once when I answered he said my name, in a throaty sort of whisper, like a sick calf. And the funny thing is, he mispronounced my name! It isn’t ‘Dee-idrey’—and anybody who knows me would probably have just said Dee anyway.”

  “Enter Mr. Nemo,” said Rook. “That means ‘nobody’ in Latin.”

  “But the goofy phone calls weren’t the worst of it,” Deirdre continued. “I think that recently John had even hired private detectives to follow me when I went out, though he denied it up and down. He even went so far as to insist that I must have been stooping to the same thing, because he imagined that some car had been tailing him on his midnight walks! Nonsense, of course. And sometimes when I was here in the pool I’ve caught the glint of the sun on what could have been binoculars somewhere up the canyon …”