Rook Takes Knight (The Howie Rook Mysteries)

by Stuart Palmer

  “But wait! I can’t afford—I mean, if Jeannie ever finds out—”

  “Only Deirdre claims that you weren’t here and that she waited for maybe an hour or longer outside in her car, and then gave it up and went home.”

  “Dee said that?”

  “Not to the police as yet, just to me and her attorney. Not much of an alibi, is it? Unless of course somebody saw her here, or even noticed her car parked outside. Is there a resident manager or somebody who might have noticed?”

  “Nobody—that I can think of offhand.” Ruggles was unhappy. “I don’t know what to tell you. I only wish to God I’d been home. But you know how it is when your wife’s out of town. I’m between jobs right now, and I can’t just sit home evenings and bite my fingernails. So I was what you might call out and around.” He waved a vague hand. “You know, the bars and night spots down the coast—Venice, Ocean Park, Redondo …”

  “Alone?”

  “Pretty much, I guess.”

  “Anybody who could swear where you were abound midnight Wednesday?”

  “I don’t know—probably some of the bartenders or cocktail waitresses. I was sort of tying one on. But—but why do I need an alibi?”

  “Because maybe the reason you weren’t here when Deirdre tried to find you is that you were busy killing her husband?”

  Ruggles looked at that pitch and let it go by. Then he said, “You know, that’s a twisteroo, almost bad enough for a TV script! I’m supposed to have killed a guy I never knew or even saw?”

  “One theory is that Charteris was killed as a favor to Deirdre.”

  Ruggles laughed, a bit weakly. “But I don’t even drive a car! Jeannie took our heap up to Jackson’s Hole, Wyoming, where she’s on location with the Cheyenne Days company. And I don’t even have a license—too many 502s, if you must know.”

  “Drunk driving convictions on license needn’t apply,” Rook told him. “You could still have driven a borrowed car. Don’t take it personally, Mr. Ruggles. I’m just trying to check out everybody who might have or might ever have had romantic feelings about Deirdre. It’s a little hard to swallow, though—that a man who would kill for her sake would then sit back and let her face the rap! It’s sort of a contradiction in terms, if the original motive was what we think it was.”

  “You’re kidding! Dee would never be arrested! No cop in his right mind—” Ruggles sounded as if trying to convince himself. “Why, they’d only have to look at her to see that they couldn’t make it stick!”

  Rook shrugged. “Assistant D.A. Wilton Mays seems to think they can. We must surrender Deirdre in his office right after the funeral. Are you thinking of attending the ceremonies, by the way?”

  “Me? But I never met the guy!” The thinnish, still handsome although somewhat raddled face registered innocent astonishment—or perhaps it was consternation.

  “Just because the absence of any of Deirdre’s old friends might be noticed, that’s all. Suit yourself. And thanks for the beer.” Rook went out, closing the door softly and hoping that he’d given Danny Ruggles something to think about. About all you could do in a screwball case of this kind was to act wiser than you were, and hope that somebody could be startled into a countermove. It was a little like flushing wild game …

  Ruggles couldn’t be the lightweight he seemed. And could any man who had once held Deirdre in his arms ever be able to put her completely out of his mind and out of his heart, even after they had gone their separate ways? “Does true love ever die, or is there a spark in the ashes still? Tune in next week at this time for the next thrilling episode of The Perils of the Black Widow!” Rook was saying to himself as he drove down to the liquor store at the corner of Chatauqua and the Coast Highway and sought the phone booth.

  During the noon hour Hal Agnews usually had a sandwich lunch in his office. It was really the only time in the day one could be reasonably sure of reaching him. And Rook reached him now.

  “Anything to report, Howie?”

  “Maybe a couple of leads.” Rook began at the beginning—all the details of his phone calls to Sergeant McDowd and Evelyn and Lou Elder, his visits to Mr. Willson and to the photo lab, his recruiting of Finn and the full details of his somewhat disappointing session with the client and her sister. Some bits of it he had given the attorney before, but now he knew the tape recorder was on and there would be a permanent record. Then there was the verdict of Dr. Lloyd, the dry-run at Inside Filmdom, the surprise call from the helpful Mr. Keyes, and the bearding of Danny Ruggles in his den. Hal Agnews had to be impressed with all the dust Rook was stirring up.

  “You think he’s our man, don’t you, Howie?”

  “I can’t answer that yet. I managed to dislike him thoroughly—it wasn’t hard. But he doesn’t look like any heroic knight in shining armor to me. The very thought of that seedy character holding Deirdre in his arms—”

  “Four years and more have passed since they had their little romance, Howie. Show business is hard on its people. Maybe Danny was a real handsome stud back then. You say he has no alibi, either?”

  “He doesn’t remember. Probably he’ll try to set one up with his friends among the musicians or bartenders or cocktail waitresses, unless he’s smart enough to stick to his original story that he was just bar-hopping and doesn’t remember where he was that night at what time.”

  “A concocted alibi is worse than none at all. What’s your next step, Howie?”

  “I’m going to try to have a talk with Harry Holtz, the divorce attorney, in the hope of putting some sort of burr under his tail. I’m not sure enough of Ruggles as yet to eliminate anybody who knew Deirdre more recently. It’s still wide open. I’ll just work down the list, I guess. But I’m still wondering about what might be in that will of Charteris’…”

  “Didn’t I tell you? I talked tough with the Charteris attorneys and got the facts. Charteris made a will four years ago leaving everything to Deirdre, provided she be living with him as his wife at the time of his demise—everything except five thousand each to the San Francisco cousins, a thousand to the servants, and—in a codicil added only a few weeks ago—a half interest in the horse Carbon Copy to Charles Booth.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser.” But it wasn’t what he’d hoped for.

  “Oh, by the way, Howie. I know you’re busy, but sometime during the day you ought to throw together a press release—”

  “Saying what? Neither Lou Elder nor his millions of avid readers will be interested in the fact that we’re not getting anywhere.”

  “Oh. Well, maybe Mike Finn has had better luck. I think there was a phone call—yes. He wants you to call this number, he’s waiting.”

  “Thanks. It’s probably some friendly neighborhood saloon, so I better get back to him before he runs up too much of a tab. See you.”

  Rook called the number, which turned out to be an auto-wrecker’s on Sherman Way in the Valley. Finn was still there, and in a state of what was, for him, reasonable complacency.

  “Got it, Howie! The auto-wreckers are most of them hooked up to a teletype system, so if somebody wants a certain part for a certain make and model and one dealer hasn’t got it, another one maybe has. There aren’t too many classic-type Model-A’s any more, and very few of them are owned by teen-agers—too expensive. It cost me twenty bucks, but I went through the Paid bills at a few places and narrowed it down by areas and one thing and another, and the best bet seems to be a kid named Bob Wade, license ORC-977. You said the first letter was round.”

  “According to Mr. Willson with two l’s. Get an address?”

  “Yes, it was on the bills. A student dormitory at UCLA.”

  “That makes sense. The campus is only a few miles from where the car was parked that night.”

  “Want me to look the kid up and put the heat on him?”

  “Yes—no, I’ll do it.” Then Rook got an idea. “It would be smarter still to hand it to McDowd, and maybe make him a little more sympathetic to our cause. Sergeant McDo
wd, of West L.A. division …”

  “I know him. Sure, Georgie McDowd. We were both in the detective bureau years ago, when HQ was on Spring Street.”

  “Good. Give him the lead and let him handle. If that pair of kids can describe the driver of the death car, we’ve got it made.”

  “Do I sit in?”

  “No. McDowd knows his business. You go do some checking on the Charteris servants, a Filipino couple named Santos, living in Boyle Heights. What sort of alibi do they have for Wednesday night, and did Mrs. Charteris have any men callers when her husband was out, stuff like that. Then get out to the Corn Patch, a night spot in Covina, and see what you can find out about Ed Patch and his wife Mary, who’s Deirdre’s sister. They’ve got a certain amount of what could be considered motive.”

  “Got it.”

  “And then, since you’ll be way out in the boondocks anyway, go out to the Pomona fairgrounds and do a make on an independent trainer named Charley Booth who has his string there. Check his alibi.”

  Finn said he’d try. Rook hung up and looked at his watch to see if it was time to be hungry—it was, since the hands pointed to one. He went across the street to a convenient bar called the Grotto and ordered a beer and a corned-beef sandwich. And it was time to do some planning. What he was really looking for now was Deirdre’s secret lover, who might or might not be Danny Ruggles. Perhaps it was somebody she had never dreamed of in that light, or somebody who had hardly known it himself. Maybe his picture had been in the album that Deirdre had shown him last night. Holtz—or Booth—or even Max Linsky?

  Wheels turned, and ripples spread out from a stone dropped into the pool, and Robert Wade and Honey Wirtz were picked up around two that Friday afternoon by plainclothes detectives and willy-nilly hauled down to the West L.A. substation. There, as was par for the course, they’d been allowed to fret on a hard bench for some time before they were finally ushered into the office, a singularly bare and unattractive cubicle smelling of sweat and tobacco smoke and stale coffee. Sergeant George McDowd sat behind the battered oak desk, with a determined smile on his rocky face.

  Bob Wade, registered owner of the Model-A, was a tall, gawky youth with a pale Edgar Allan Poe mustache and over-long tresses which the sergeant would have bet were put up in rollers at night. He was not inclined to be cooperative. “You’ve got absolutely nothing on us, Mister Fuzz,” he opened with ill-concealed hostility. “Nothing at all! I want to protest this arrest—”

  “Please just be quiet and listen, will you?” asked the massive McDowd. “Nobody’s been arrested. But you two were seen leaving the scene of an accident …”

  “Who says?”

  “A Mr. Willson—he saw the car. And your roommate, who says you had a date with Miss Wirtz—Honey here—that night.”

  “But we weren’t even in any accident, if that’s what it was!” put in the girl, a round-faced and wide-eyed miss who looked to the sergeant as if she needed to wash her feet and her golliwog hair, to say nothing of her loose boy’s sweater which bore a swastika of rudely painted flowers.

  “No, your car didn’t hit the victim. Your front end doesn’t show any marks, and you were headed in the wrong direction anyway. You must have seen everything that happened, though. You saw a crime being committed and failed to report it. I can hold you both for a few hours, and I can hold that hot-rod for a week if I need to. Maybe the vacuum cleaners will show up some traces of the wrong kind of cigarettes, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Who says we use pot?” Bob came back almost too quickly.

  “I’m not saying you do. But if you want to be tough, I can be tough. Or you can talk. Take your choice.” The sergeant took out a notebook and a ballpoint pen (which were for effect only) and at the same time pressed a certain button under the desk with one knobby knee.

  Now the boy and girl held a whispered consultation, obviously debating the pros and cons. Then Bob turned back to face the music. “Okay, dad. I can’t get around anywhere without my wheels, so you got us over a barrel. Sure we got away from there fast. The guy was dead, wasn’t he? We just didn’t want to get involved, is all. So what do you want from us?”

  “Describe the car, please.”

  “It was a green ’56 Dodge wagon, coming west on Darlington, running without lights until after the hit, burning a lot of oil and has a noisy transmission. California plates, but I couldn’t make the license in the dark.”

  “Was it an accident, in your considered opinion?”

  “Hell, no! The driver made sure of his hit by aiming straight for the guy who was walking the dog, and he even swerved to do it. Never even tried to slow down, either. There, you got it. Now can we go? I got afternoon classes—”

  “All in due time.” McDowd pretended to write something down in the notebook. “But I noticed you said ‘he.’ It was a man driving the car, then?”

  “Sure. I guess so. Wearing a hat, a real square.”

  “Do you corroborate that, young lady?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Do you agree that it was a man?”

  Honey frowned, as if in unaccustomed concentration. “I don’t know. He sure didn’t drive like any little old lady from Pasadena. But maybe it could have been a woman in a man’s hat. All I saw was a white blotch—a sorta mask of a face. I think wearing sunglasses, at night yet! Then pouf!—it was all over.”

  McDowd made another careful doodle in his notebook. “Could you, either of you, identify that face from a photo or in a police line-up?”

  The teen-agers looked at one another and then shook their heads in unison. “Not in a million years,” said Bob. “Chee-rist, it was all over in just a flash!”

  “Anything else you can think of that might help us identify that driver?”

  “Nope!” they both agreed.

  “Well, if you do think of anything later, here’s my card with the phone number. You can go now, and thanks for your cooperation. That’s all.”

  The young couple broke for the door and freedom. Then Bob hesitated, turning back. His voice was slightly less truculent as he asked, “You gotta put this on report and let the newspapers have it and we’ll maybe have to testify in court and all that jazz? Because if it gets to Honey’s folks there’ll be hell to pay.”

  “It’ll go on report, but your names won’t appear unless it’s absolutely necessary. That’s up to the D.A., not us. Maybe you didn’t notice, young man, that we had you picked up very quietly, and that then the officers let you go get Honey without her parents being alerted? Believe it or not, nobody wants to be rough on you. As far as we’re concerned, what you’ve said is strictly confidential. Only next time when you see a crime being committed, it might be easier all around if you’d come forward on your own without being involved, hear?”

  “Why, we might just do that little thing, daddyo.”

  McDowd had two daughters of his own, with whom he found it increasingly difficult to have any communication at all. “You’re in this world whether you like it or not, and you can’t change it by just turning your backs on it!” he said.

  “Sure, daddyo, sure. Don’t say it hasn’t been nice seeing you …” The rest of the boy’s farewell was lost as the office door slammed behind them.

  “ ‘The youth of today is the promise of tomorrow!’ ” quoted the sergeant bitterly as he switched off the tape recorder in his desk drawer. Then he went over to pick up the torn fragments of his card and dropped them neatly in the wastebasket.

  But he did have one or two additional facts to give the D.A.’s office. The boy’s description of the death car fitted the auto theft report made by Mr. and Mrs. Dibble. And they had said that there had been a man’s hat—an old hat that Dibble wore when it rained—as well as a jacket, a box of Kleenex, and a pair of old sunglasses in the glove compartment.

  McDowd picked up the phone.

  VI

  ROOK WAS ADVISED, IN the cool and dignified reception room of the law offices in Westwood, that Mr. Holtz couldn’t p
ossibly be seen except by appointment. The bored countess behind the desk was very firm about that.

  “Then I’ll wait,” said he.

  “If it’s a domestic relations problem, Mr. Holtz doesn’t handle anyone but ladies—”

  “That figures,” said Rook with a stage leer.

  “I mean,” her highness recovered hastily, “that Mr. Holtz specializes only in suits for wives against husbands, so if that’s the purpose of your call”—she graciously consulted a notebook—“we can refer you to another very well-qualified attorney down the street.”

  “Thanks just the same.” He thought of taking a chair, but the only reading material in sight was a copy of Fortune, which intrigued him not. And his schedule was tight. On an impulse he wrote on a slip of paper: “It’s about Deirdre Charteris—urgent! H. Rook” “Will you give him this, please?”

  “I’m sure it won’t make the slightest difference—” began the haughty lady. But Rook just braced his feet and stood there, as if prepared to stand all afternoon and into the night. Meanwhile he admired the appointments, which were discreetly lavish. There was a flowering shrub in a marble urn, and he had half a notion to pick a bud. But he decided that he was not at the moment in a boutonniere mood. Finally the countess shrugged and disappeared through a door. Less than a minute passed and she was back, to beckon him down a long hall and through a massive door at the end of it. There she abandoned him, still offended.

  It was a walnut-paneled room, subtly lighted and gently air-conditioned, with a number of easy chairs in green and gold brocade, a tall dark bookcase with an awesome collection of mint-condition leather-bound law books and a stereo-television set built into it. The pale emerald carpet was almost high enough to mow, and there was a massive walnut desk with a high-backed “judge’s chair” behind it. The desk was ostentatiously bare except for a porcelain vase holding a dozen or so Talisman roses (in September?) and some photographs in gold frames. They were not of the usual wife and children, but of very regal-looking Burmese cats and beautifully groomed cocker spaniels; all were in color and one showed a small dog being awarded a big blue ribbon at some kennel club show. The successful divorce attorney, Rook remembered, is very often a bachelor. With reason.