by Henry, Kane,
Then my legs went accordion.
27
I LIFTED my head from the heat of the pillow and I said, “I’m hungry,” and I saw Philip Scoffol’s face, and then it blurred and was gone….
Another time, I raised my head and I said, “I’m awful hungry,” and I saw Scoffol’s face near me and he said, “Good boy, Petie.”
His face went away and then there were stiff white gowns around me, a whole party of them gathered around the bed, and a little cup of chicken broth materialized under my nose, and I strained upward and someone loaded chicken broth into me with a small spoon and I loved it, and then I threw it up plop into a basin that was waiting under my chin.
Somebody said, “Not bad at all,” and I wished he’d drop dead and then all the faces blurred and were gone….
Another time I woke up and I said, “What about some food around here?” and I said it so loud it scared me, but Scoffol himself fed me soup and it stayed down and I said, “Thanks,” and I went to sleep.
That’s the way it went for a while and pretty soon food was coming in on a tray and I was sitting up and feeding myself. Then they let me put my feet over the edge of the bed and dangle for a few minutes a day, and then they let me stand up with my arms around the shoulders of a couple of nurses, and then they let me shuffle around the room hanging on to Philip Scoffol, and then they pushed me around the corridors in a wheel chair, and then they stuck me into a tall sanitary white contraption, sort of cage on wheels, and I could lean my arms on the top rails and rest while I learned to walk again.
Then I began to see the flowers and the boxes of candy for the nurses.
The room was clean and smelled of roses and Scoffol was clean and smelled of hair pomade and summer came in through the open window and talked to me about grass and rolling hills and the smell of hay.
I sat among fresh linens with two pillows behind me and I never felt better in my life.
“You look wonderful,” Scoffol admired. “You almost look chubby. You did all right.”
“Quiet, pal. I need a woman, if you ask me. I was talking to the doc about that last night. Things happen. You get dreams. Doc said not to be so proud. All quite usual. Doc said, by the way, I could talk business if I wanted today. And I want. Restrictions off.”
“You sure?”
“I haven’t asked you before, have I? So fill in.”
Scoffol said, “What’s the story on Grant? There was a cop sitting in here regularly for a while. Holly was arrested for it, and there he was in the jug being questioned when your story broke.”
“Which was the idea; Holly where I wanted him and Gorin where I wanted him. All I had was a story. It needed underlining and they were the boys to underline it.”
Emphatically Scoffol said, “They underlined it all right. When Higgins checked with the office in the morning, he found out what had happened to you and he checked with me, and Gorin was picked up in your apartment. Gorin broke; that sealed it and you were right all the way through. Holly broke too. After Gorin. But Holly convinced them that he had nothing to do with the death of Grant, and he told them where he had left the gun that was later used on Grant and found in his office. Holly’s gun. You had it.”
“So what?”
Scoffol came over and fixed the pillows and patted my face. “So you were under technical arrest. Then Pat Rafferty heard about it and he went to bat for you and they pumped Holly on that phase of it and Holly spilled about Grant’s business and they took the cop out of this room, and they’re itching to talk to you to see if they can’t learn more about the operations of this guy Grant. And Louis Parker isn’t as dumb as he looks. He stood up for you. But, now, what about Grant?”
I told him all about Grant.
“You’ll go downtown with me,” Scoffol said, “after you’re out of here and we’ll take care of odds and ends. You’re whitehaired boy right now, downtown.”
“All right, all right. Now, what happened?”
“What?”
“What happened? Remember? I’m the guy, in the first place, who asked to be brought up to date.”
A nurse came in. A new nurse. A beautiful nurse with blond hair and brown eyes and you could easily guess at her figure by the hints that came through the starch.
“There’s a Mister Brewster outside.”
“Professor Brewster,” Scoffol said.
“Could be,” she said.
“All right,” I said. “Thanks. Tell him to wait. I’ll see him in a little while.”
Scoffol tapped his pockets and drew out a cigar. “Not allowed to smoke in here.” He lit the cigar. He said, “Bringing you up to date, Miss Wilde took a dive. Holly and Gorin have quietly pleaded guilty to several raps that are outside the statute of limitations, and they’ve been quietly sentenced. No publicity. Mr. Curtis is eminently satisfied. Edith Wilde was a suicide due to ill health, and your story on Grant explains the death of Mrs. Curtis.”
“How about a cigarette?” I asked.
“You’re not allowed.”
He got up and went out and came back with a single cigarette and he lit it for me off his cigar and gave it to me.
“That’s your bribe. Now I want the story. The how. I know the facts; you’ve told me and Higgins has told me and Archie has told me. But I still don’t know the how.”
“Fair enough,” I said, “and don’t interrupt. Miss Edith Wilde was a pushover.”
I stopped and watched him shake his head despairingly. I shook my head too. I said, “This time I’m on your side. The elegant Edith Wilde as a fast pushover sat as poorly with me as it does with you. Also, Miss Wilde was engaged to be married to Mr. Holstein. Which was completely ridiculous. That combination — Miss Wilde as a pushover for me, and Miss Wilde as the truly betrothed of Grandma Ed Holly, because Number One with me, right there in the beginning. It was so very wrong. I know my ladies. With a woman of that caliber, it was so ridiculous, it was exciting. I meditated on it and I came off with a two-pronged premise: (a) that she wants to stay on the inside track with the super-sleuth in order to know exactly what’s playing and when it’s playing, and (b) that Holly is stuck on her so she lets him think she’s engaged to him in order to use him for some darn good purpose of her own. I put glue on that and pasted everything I got onto it.”
Scoffol said, “Not bad. Not bad at all.”
“I poked around. Al Warmy, a little crook, had taken the rap for a job he and Joe Pineapple had pulled, way back, so I saw Warmy. Al warmed up to me and he brought Holly into the picture as third hand on stick-up business about ten years ago. I pasted that on Number One and it fit like gloom on a birthday card, but I let it hang.
“Then Matty Pineapple gave me the keys to Joe Pineapple’s hideaway in Brooklyn and Joe in Brooklyn had quite a layout. And while I’m there, Mr. Wesley Gorin comes slithering around. I pasted all of that on Number One. It brought Gorin into the picture. I let it hang.
“Then Eric Gorin got his, and things began to pop and pretty soon I had Wilde bring me fingerprints of everyone in the Gorin household and then bang — her handwriting was a bold peculiar abnormally slanted backhand, which was the handwriting on a note dated about nine years back which I found in one of Joe Pineapple’s old suits, and then everything fit.
“Edith Wilde, upper-crust genius, creator of the best in jewelry, partner in Curtis Wilde, had known one Joe Pineapple, crook, well enough to write him notes — from there on it was easy. I checked with Mitch Saffron on disposition of the stuff during that period and, as I expected, there was no disposition and Mitch had it figured the stuff had been smuggled out of the country, but I knew different. Along the way, a couple of things worked themselves out, like why Mrs. Curtis was killed.
“What about Xavier Hoy Ginsburg?”
“Shot in desperation by Eric Gorin because of those notes.”
Scoffol went to the window and bent over and looked out and turned and sat down on the cold radiator. “It’s lumpy. In one spot. If Grant’s
idea was snatch, why does Eric Gorin get killed because he looks like Wesley Gorin. No Gorin should have been killed.”
Grudgingly I said, “The senior partner is smart. I was giving you a fast resumé. I skipped that. Get that Brewster in here, if you will. He’ll be interested.”
Scoffol went out and came back with Professor Brewster.
Brewster was a very old man with a hawk-nose that hung out, thin, over pale lips. “I heard you were better, Mr. Chambers.”
“Please sit down,” I said. “My partner, Philip Scoffol; Professor Brewster.”
They shook hands. Scoffol sat on the edge of the bed. Brewster sat in the chair.
“I’m in the process of flattening a lump for my partner,” I said. “Will you listen, please?”
Scoffol got off the bed and went to the window but he said nothing.
“You see, Phil, I got to that house practically before the smoke had cleared. I got Brewster and Gorin, the only two occupants except Eric, out of the house. You know, avoiding publicity and interrogation and arrest. I had the run of the joint. It was an amateur job. I picked the gun out of the brass umbrella receiver in the hall. I collected quite a bit of stuff. Eric Gorin and Dorothy Brewster were lovers. There were letters from Eric to Dorothy in her room. Also, there were letters from Eric to Dorothy in the Professor’s room, I mean Brewster, so he knew about it.”
Professor Brewster brought forth a gun. Honestly.
“For heaven’s sake,” I said, “put up that pea-shooter. Jesus, I’ve had enough of weapons. Take that thing away from him, will you, Philip?”
Scoffol moved carefully and took it out of Brewster’s unresisting fingers.
“So,” I said, “he knew. And a check on the gun, a .38, showed only Brewster’s fingerprints. The Professor just went and did himself a job on the other Professor. He had accumulated a lot of hatred for Eric. He figured it was an ideal time. Someone had made an attack on Wesley Gorin. What with the resemblance, he’d follow through. He unlocked the front and back doors. Then he bumped Eric. He probably planned on picking up the letters that his sentimental wife had saved, and those he had, and any Eric may have had from Dorothy and destroying them and getting rid of the gun and going back to sleep and I don’t know from nothin’. And it might have worked if not for Frank and Alice. When those two burst in practically at once, the poor Professor got rid of the gun in a hurry in the umbrella stand and later, when he looked for it, it was gone. And he knew who had it. Right, Professor?”
He didn’t answer. He sat in the chair, a massive man, and he let his head hang.
I said, “Like all amateurs, he did nothing, hoping against hope that maybe I’d die or something or I’d just lose the gun or forget about it — but that everything, somehow, would straighten out in the end. And the Professor is a psychiatrist. He was over a barrel with his behind in the air. He ehose to remain that way. Possibly today he came here with the vague idea of polishing me off.”
“Then why didn’t you turn me in?” Brewster asked, suddenly.
“Because I had a job to do on Wesley Gorin,” I said more to Scoffol than to him. “Wesley had been unconvinced. The real thing had had no effect on him, that bump on the head he got. The fake floored him. I had him scared blue. I talked him into the mistaken-identity stuff and had him over at my place to protect him. I needed him around.”
Scoffol put the gun in his packet pocket. Gently he said, “Trot over to Headquarters, Professor Brewster, and get a load off your mind. Get a lawyer. And don’t worry too much about it. There’s an unwritten law that covers that type of matter. Those letters will help you.”
“I’ve got them at home,” I said. “I’ll turn them over with the gun. Mr. Scoffol said a mouthful, Professor.”
Brewster stood up and shrugged and squared his shoulders and said, “Thank you, gentlemen. I shall follow your advice. Good-by.”
He went away.
“No more lump?”
“No more lump, master mind.”
The nurse with the figure that you could guess through starch came back and said, primly, “There’s a Miss Blamey outside,” and turned and walked out.
“Good-by, boss,” I said. “Talk to her for a few minutes, then send her in.”
Sternly Scoffol said, “Now remember, fella, you’re not all healed.”
“Good-by, boss.”
Alone, I adjusted the roses and patted the pillows and straightened up and combed my hair with my fingers.
The door moved.
“Ah,” I said, “the lovely Lolita …”
If you liked Martinis and Murder check out:
Death of a Dastard
Chapter One
JASON TOURAINE was a dastard.
Dastard is an old-fashioned term but I must be old-fashioned in describing Jason Touraine: there is no new-fashioned term more properly fitting.
Dastard implies coward, sneak, sinner, scourge, miscreant, recreant, scoundrel, cockatrice — and Jason Touraine was a gorgeous combination of all that and gorgeous is precisely the word for what was Jason Touraine. Jason Touraine was a tall, lean, hard, irresistible stack of male loadstone. Jason Touraine was as attractive to females as a powerful electromagnet is attractive to loose-strewn iron shavings. Jason Touraine, who stood up to no man — what need? — stood up to, and lay down with, many women, but valiantly: it was his stock in trade. I grew to know a good deal about Jason Touraine, all, however, in retrospect, because when I grew to know a good deal about him, he was already dead, and I had been hired to find out who killed him and why.
I saw him for the first and last time that Friday evening at the party of the McCormicks on East 66th Street — the evening that Harvey Everest McCormick became a customer. Harvey’s wife, Madeline, was already a customer — had been for a number of years — but Harvey was a novitiate: on that Friday evening, for the first time, he made initial encounter as client to a private richard.
The invitation said eight o’clock, so of course I showed up at eleven: who needs the frigid wassail of the warm-up period? I took care of that at home and arrived well-oiled but not askew, to be enthusiastically bussed, right on the mouth, by Madeline Van de Velde Clemson McCormick. She then led me to meet a lot of the guests, who were higher than breakfast for a giraffe — genial men and lovely ladies — and while I made earnest effort to dally amongst the more pulchritudinous of the latter, mine hostess would have none of it. I made earnest effort to dally because at the moment I was footloose, lovelorn, and looking like all hell to be entrapped in a liaison. But mine hostess was intent upon introducing her late arrival to all and sundry, even her husband.
“Peter,” she said. “You know Harvey, don’t you?”
“I do,” I said.
“Harvey,” she said. “You know Peter, don’t you?”
“I do,” he said.
“Well, damn! Christ! Do something! Say hello, kiss each other, shake hands, go into a buck and wing. Something!”
“Hello,” said Harvey Everest McCormick.
“Hello,” I said.
Mine hostess was something.
Ebullient, dour, dashing, lugubrious, lively, charitable, acquisitive — mine hostess had a personality with more tiers than a cut-through onion. Her maiden name had been Madeline Smetana. She had been born in Altoona, Pennsylvania. She had been an only child of Ukranian-Americans. Her mother had died when she was thirteen and she had been the woman of the house for her widowed father, a coal miner who believed in education. She had been a bright student in high school and when her father had met his end in a mine-crash pile-up, the insurance settlement had been sufficient to transport her to a one-room apartment in Poughkeepsie, New York; a change of name to Madeline Smith; and a matriculation at Vassar. She had been graduated cum laude, she had been the star of the Varsity Show, she had stayed on for her Masters in Drama, and then, of course, she had hurried to New York and acquired a two-line part in a revival of The Importance of Being Earnest under the direction of the esteemed Mort
imer Van de Velde, who was then sixty-two. Mortimer — thrice-divorced — had cast a covetous eye upon unreluctant Madeline, and in a comparative trice, Mortimer was quatre-married. He had stayed alive and active until he was seventy-seven and until he had steered the dramatic Madeline through nine leading roles on Broadway. Then, in a sudden clutch of heart failure, he had passed on to his Valhalla, leaving behind a great name, no money, and a ripe widow who, at age thirty-nine, retired from the stage.
At age forty, svelte, slender, regal, and sophisticated, she had met and married Horace Delmont Clemson, a millionaire many times over and a client of mine. Horace Delmont Clemson had then been sixty-six, only four times married, and when I had remonstrated with him about his intended fifth launching, he had chuckled and said, “Baby, how many years do I have left? Isn’t it worth it to spend whatever those years in control of this marvelous woman?”
Those years had been three. He had died leaving his all to his dearest Madeline (I had been one of the witnesses to his will, as subsequently, I had been one of the witnesses to Madeline’s will). His all had been an astonishing accumulation of hard cash, a packed portfolio of blue-chip stocks and bonds, and the sole ownership of the successful enterprise called Horizon Press, the Managing Editor of which had been the tall, lean, loose, gangling, good-looking, red-haired Harvey Everest (his mother believed she had given birth to a mountain) McCormick.
Madeline Van de Velde Clemson had had many intimate conferences with Harvey Everest McCormick, both before and after the death of the venerable Horace, and one such conference, after death, wafted Harvey McCormick over the heads of anxious vice-presidents unto the office of acting president. Thereafter the acting president and the sole owner, after a short engagement, merged as husband and wife; the acting president became the actual president; and the name of the firm was changed to Harvest House (Harvest representing the first four letters of Harvey and the last three letters of Everest).
