Kill Now, Pay Later (Hard Case Crime (Mass Market Paperback))
Page 5
I passed up several outside phone booths and found one of the old-fashioned kind hidden in a drugstore. I dialed the Popes’ number. Unless a cop answered, I still should be able to get Davidson on the phone.
A man’s voice said hello.
“I’d like to talk to Irving Davidson,” I said. “The insurance company detective.”
“Who is this?”
“Mr. Shields, from the New York office.”
There was a pause. I heard somebody breathing. The same voice said, “You wouldn’t be kidding me, would you? Is your real name Gates?”
“That’s right,” I said. “I take it this is Junior?”
“I don’t like even my friends to call me that,” he said, “so don’t you. You’re a persistent son of a bitch, aren’t you?”
“Why do you say that? I haven’t got around to you yet.”
Pope let a moment go by and said, “Why should you want to get around to me?”
“I have one or two questions.”
“I’m thrilled. But maybe you’d better make it some other day. I’m busy, and you might have trouble getting in. I don’t know what you’ve done to Minturn. He had a phone call a few minutes ago, and he did a little yelling. I was in the next room with the door open, and if you make the mistake of showing up here, you are to be pounded on like a drum. We have quite a good fence around the property. Minturn told the sergeant to put a man at the foot of the drive to keep out the curiosity seekers. I believe that includes you.”
“Thanks for the warning,” I said. “I’m always interested in the reasons people have for not wanting to answer questions. What are yours?”
He made a disgusted sound and slammed down the phone.
I thought for a moment, then looked through the yellow pages of the county phone book. I dialed a number.
A hushed voice answered, “Morrison Mortuary. Mr. Morrison speaking.”
“Sergeant Shea of the State Police,” I said. “I’m making arrangements for traffic control at the Pope funeral. You’ll be handling that, won’t you?”
“Why, no,” the voice said, surprised. “I understand that Henry Turner—or so I was informed. Where did you hear—because we have every facility, and we’d be more than happy—”
“Turner,” I said abruptly. “True enough. I should have written it down. Sorry to bother you.”
I hung up, went back to the yellow pages and found the address of Henry J. Turner, Inc., Funeral Directors. I bought some cigars at the cashier’s counter and asked for directions. A few minutes later I was outside Henry J. Turner’s subdued show window, which displayed lilac drapes and a single large urn, presumably empty.
A bell tinkled as I went into a waiting room. Canned mood music was coming from somewhere. I didn’t need it; I was feeling melancholy already. A young man came through from a back room, slipping on a dark coat. His hands were very clean and slightly wrinkled; he’d probably just been embalming somebody.
“Mr. Turner?” I said.
“No, Mr. Turner is out,” he said with regret, as though he had just learned of the passing of one of my dear ones. “I am his co-worker, Leon Satterthwaite, if I can be of any assistance.”
“Miss DeLong asked me to stop in,” I said. “She’s been trying to call you all morning. All she gets is a busy signal.”
His hands clasped each other. He looked at me out of the tops of his eyes, like a springer spaniel who wants to go out.
“Miss DeLong. Mr. Pope’s secretary. A terrible thing, wasn’t it? We were all of us deeply shocked. Such a vibrant woman, Mrs. Pope, so thoroughly alive.”
“Miss DeLong was hoping Mr. Turner could come out.”
Mr. Satterthwaite opened his eyes wide and unleashed his hands. “But he’s there! He left two hours ago!”
“He never got there.”
“What on earth? He did have one other bereaved party en route, but that was only scheduled to take a minute. Do you suppose he’s been trying to get me? I’d better check my phone.”
“Could you do that later?” I said. “Miss DeLong is getting impatient. I heard her say something about giving the contract to Morrison’s, if you’re too busy to handle it.”
“But we aren’t busy at all!” he exclaimed. “And even if we were up to capacity, which we aren’t by any means, we would always make room for Mrs. Richardson Pope! You may remember the ceremony we handled for the Popes a few months ago. That unfortunate man, not much left of him to bury. Properly speaking we should have refused it, we were overloaded, but we burned the midnight oil, so to speak. I don’t make a practice of running down competitors, heaven forbid. But Morrison simply hasn’t the stature—I suppose he quoted you a lower price. There’s more than price to a dignified interment, much, much more. I think I’ll just run out myself and straighten this out.”
He told someone in the rear to report the phone out of order, and came back putting his head into a black Homburg.
“Do you mind if I ride with you?” I said. “My car’s in the garage.”
“Not at all. Delighted.”
He led me to a jet-black Cadillac, one of the seven-passenger sedans that are manufactured for undertakers and city officials. As he drove he described the elegant work his firm had done. Everything about a Henry J. Turner ceremony, in his possibly biased opinion, was in impeccable taste.
The police car at the entrance to the Popes’ driveway was parked at a right angle, blocking one lane. The red light on the roof blinked compulsively. Satterthwaite slowed but didn’t stop. I wished I had the added protection of a Homburg, but one in the front seat of a black Cadillac was enough; the troopers only gave me a glance.
“Hello!” Satterthwaite said, seeing another outsized Cadillac beside the house. “Henry made it, after all. That’s a weight off my mind. While I’m here, I think I’ll look in and see if I can make myself useful.”
He steered the big car into an open space, removed his Homburg to run a pocket comb through his hair, and put the Homburg back on. I went in with him.
“This way,” I said, guessing.
We had entered by a side door. I headed down the cross hall for the main entrance, hoping to find Davidson before anyone spotted me. After that I wanted to have a talk with Miss DeLong. There were two people I particularly didn’t want to see. One was Lieutenant Minturn. The other was Richardson Pope, Jr., who at that moment came through an open door directly in our path. He was carrying four bottles of whiskey wrapped in tissue paper, two in each hand. Another boy his same age, with another four bottles, was behind him. Seeing me, Pope stopped so short that the other boy walked into him with a clash of glass.
“Hey, watch that good Johnny Walker,” he said.
Pope had recovered some of his color, but it had come back in patches, giving him a mottled look. “Gates, my friend, you are an idiot. After all the advice I gave you, too. See what we have here, Binge.”
His friend looked me over. He was built like a stump, without a waistline. His blond hair was cropped so close that his scalp shone through.
“This would be Gates, the bloodshot private eye?”
“That’s who it would be. And it seems to me I told him nobody wanted to see him. Here,” he said to Satterthwaite, loading him with bottles. “Take these to the thirsty people in the living room.”
“Glad to,” Satterthwaite said.
“Just follow the tinkle of ice cubes. Binge, show our friend one of your holds. I’ll get Sonny.”
He walked off quickly. Satterthwaite followed with the bottles. Binge stepped in against me and clamped both hands around my right arm, pressing his thumbs against the axillary nerve in the armpit. It is one of the basic judo come-alongs. It can be broken in a number of ways, one of which is to twist suddenly and kick your man in the stomach. Considering the recent bereavement the family had suffered, that didn’t seem quite the thing to do here.
“That’s all right,” I said, rising on my toes to ease the pressure. “Where did you pick it up?”
Pope came back, accompanied by a tall, black-haired youth, considerably underweight, weaving like a sunflower in a wind.
“Talking about your military service?” Pope said. “Dishonorably discharged,” he told me admiringly. “Plenty of people buck for it, but Binge is the man who got it.”
“And it wasn’t easy,” Binge said.
“I’m going to have a little conference with Gates,” Pope said. “Not in the house. We don’t want to spoil the atmosphere. Let’s show the man our swimming pool.”
“Absolutely,” Sonny agreed. “Where the cannibals cooked the missionary. He’d better watch his P’s and Q’s or he’ll get some of the same.”
“Sonny,” Pope said sharply. “I’ve told you before. No cracks.”
“Absolutely, no cracks.”
They walked me out of the house. There was no doubt what they had in mind, and like so much else that had happened this morning, it seemed out of proportion. We went across the parking area, in a loose but definite formation. Minturn and a uniformed trooper came around the house. We were far enough apart so we didn’t need to greet each other if we didn’t want to, and neither of us wanted to. Minturn scraped his hand across his chin. I was back on Pope property against his wishes, but he decided to let Pope and his friends administer the discipline.
Skirting the garages, we went through a latticed arbor and came to a kidney-shaped swimming pool. The striped umbrellas and the usual swimming pool furniture were out, but naturally no one was in the pool. There was a low bathhouse. Beyond a putting green and a croquet lawn, I saw a blackened area where a building had recently burned down. Part of a brick chimney was all that remained.
“You had a fire?” I said.
“One of the dandiest fires you ever saw,” Sonny said behind me.
Pope looked around and there was nothing further out of Sonny.
“I want privacy,” Pope said. “The bathhouse.”
“The men’s side or the women’s?” Binge asked, and Pope said, “Shut up, creep.”
I thought we had enough privacy where we were. I whirled my right arm. Binge held on. Both his arms flew up, leaving his midsection open. I hit him with a left, a little low but not low enough to make him mad, and he let go. I completed the pivot and backed up against the bathhouse wall.
It was Sonny who surprised me. He spread out his long arms and toppled forward. I hit him sharply twice, but it was like trying to divert a falling spruce. His arms wrapped themselves around me; there seemed to be more than two. Before I could get untangled, Binge slid between me and the wall and clamped on one of the nastiest holds in the repertoire, pulling my arm behind my back and up toward the opposite shoulder. Now with only a little more lift, he could break the arm. He was too slow to be really good at this kind of argument, but to get away from him I would need more room. I couldn’t do anything while I was hampered by Sonny.
“What do you want me to do, say uncle?”
“Inside,” Pope said.
I pushed at Sonny with my left hand, and his arm slipped off my shoulder. That was apparently all that had been holding him up. He slid to the concrete.
Pope turned him over. He was peacefully asleep.
“He must have a glass jaw,” Pope said scornfully. “How about it, Binge, can you manage the tough man from the big city?”
Binge sneered. “With my toes.”
He steered me through the open door. I was glad to see that the floor inside was covered with duckboards. There were four cubicles to a side, each with a swinging door, several shower heads in a wider area beyond.
Pope stopped. “You haven’t been smart, Gates. God knows I’m in no position to preach, but there’s one thing I’ve learned—do something as dumb as you did last night, and you’ve got to take the consequences.”
He showed me what he meant by consequences by throwing a right at my head. He wasn’t aiming at anything important. Where it hurt most was in my arm socket as I went backward.
“I want to ask a question,” I said.
His eyes narrowed. “You say that so politely, go ahead.”
“Ease off on the pull, will you?” I said to Binge. “I don’t mean let go. Just ease off a little.”
He lowered my arm enough so my heels could touch the duckboards. “I’ve heard two theories about last night,” I said. “Naturally I have one of my own. I’d like to know what really happened, but I don’t want to learn any family secrets. It makes no difference to me how you spend your nights, or with how many people. Is that clear? All I want to know is who was working with Moran. Why should that bother you?”
“Nobody was working with Moran. He was working alone. That’s one thing the police are sure of.”
“They’re sure because it’s easier that way. Easier for them, easier for you and your father. They couldn’t get a conviction, they probably couldn’t even make an arrest, so why waste time thinking about it? Nobody’s interested except me, but I’m very interested. Listen for a minute. You brought in extra servants for the night. The caterer must have had a dozen people. It almost has to be somebody from the outside who didn’t know Davidson was here. So why is everybody getting so hysterical?”
Pope hadn’t been listening. “That’s crap and you know it. There’s no such person. Nobody had to tell Moran there was a wedding here yesterday—it was in the papers. Mother was wearing her big necklace. He saw it and decided to make a stab at that too. Hell, it’s so easy anybody can see it. He had a gun, didn’t he? If he’d known you were going to be asleep, why would he bring a gun? He was planning to stick you up.”
“People like that do carry guns,” I said. “They feel more confident.”
“Crap,” Pope repeated. “Sheer crap. I heard Minturn explain it. You’re in a jam. If you make enough noise, maybe you can get somebody to believe you. I talked to what’s his name, Hamilton. He says you’re going to be hurting for clients from now on, and I can’t say my ass bleeds for you, either. Get a good hold, Binge. I’m going to work on his body first.”
I had one more point to make, and I made it fast. “I said I wasn’t after your secrets. But that’s something that can change.”
“This is going to be a sample, man,” Pope said, showing me his right fist, not a terribly lethal weapon. “I’ll say it now while you’re conscious. You’ve been told to keep off our land. That didn’t work, and maybe this will. But if you ever come back and annoy us again, you’ll wish you hadn’t.”
He took his time, making a face as he drew back his fist. Binge raised my arm. But he had left me too much slack; I unbent my knees and went up and to the right, as if I had been doing a half-twist off a low board. There wasn’t much spring in the duckboards, but Binge gave me the lift I needed, so I was past the danger point before I started to come down. I landed on one shoulder, and as my legs whipped around he lost his hold.
He chopped at me with the slicing edge of his palm. I took it on my forearm. I already had a foot behind his ankle, and I slammed the other against his kneecap. He went over, falling through one of the swinging doors.
Pope stamped at me. I rolled out from underfoot and I was halfway up when Sonny, conscious again, wavered in from the doorway and fell on me.
It was like being hugged by a languid octopus. Pope was shouting, jabbing at me with both fists at the same time, without taking the time to get set. He was hitting Sonny nearly as often as he was hitting me. Whenever I threw off one of Sonny’s arms and went to work on the other, the first came back and wrapped itself around me. I was carrying the whole weight, and I didn’t want to fall where Binge could get at me.
I heard a rush of footsteps. A girl’s voice called, “Dick! Dick! What in God’s name are you doing?”
Pope was having a small fit, Sonny and I were embracing, Binge was trying to stand up. That was the complete answer to the question. I caught a
glimpse of a white blouse and a white face above it—Shelley Hardwick, and I didn’t think she was going to be much help.
She cried, “Dick, don’t you have any sense at all? Don’t you know what—”
“Keep away from me,” he yelled.
The interruption made him realize that he wasn’t hurting me. Reaching past Sonny, he grabbed my neck in both hands. His lips were contorted and his eyes seemed to be in danger of starting out of his head. He had forgotten that all he wanted to do was warn me against trespassing. Now he wanted to kill me.
I almost went down. Suddenly Sonny gave a small grunt. He let go and started another downward slide. I brought my fists up hard between Pope’s arms and knocked his fingers away from my throat. He came at me again. I sidestepped and hit him as he went by. He plunged into the shower, traveling the last few feet on his nose, and ended up against the wall. I went after him, feeling very mean. He looked up, but what he saw discouraged him. He stayed where he was.
I whirled. For the time being all was peaceful in the bathhouse. Binge had stopped trying to get up. He lay back against the door of one of the cubicles, whimpering and protecting his injured knee with both hands. Shelley was standing above Sonny, who was again unconscious. She was holding one of her high-heeled shoes by the toe. There was a small metal plate on the heel, and I assumed that this had recently made contact with Sonny’s skull. Because of the spring in the arch, a high-heeled shoe is one of the most efficient saps ever devised.
“You realize you’re on the men’s side?” I said.
Her breath came out in a half-laugh. She balanced on one foot to put on her shoe.
I ran hot water into one of the basins. Pope started to move. I said wearily, “No, Dick,” and he stopped.
I still wasn’t sure it was over, and I watched him in the mirror for a moment.
“Now what?” he said.
“Now I think I’d better see your father,” I said. “I didn’t want to bother him today, but it looks as though he’ll have to be bothered.”
Pope made a funny sideways gesture. “I suppose you’ll tell him.”
I didn’t answer. There was something slightly appealing about the boy, but I couldn’t be expected to feel kindly toward someone who had just been trying to throttle me. I looked at the damage. It wasn’t bad, although I had hardly looked my best to start with. Luckily Dick hadn’t been wearing rings. The marks on my neck were beginning to fade.