Strip for Murder

by Richard S. Prather

  She looked at me, face blank, eyes dull. “It is Mother, Shell.” No outcry, no tears. She turned and went out the door, started back down the hall. She walked slowly and stiffly, putting one foot before the other with exaggerated care, like a woman walking after weeks in bed. I stayed alongside her, my hand on her arm.

  Hansen looked at his watch as we reached the car. I said, “You don't need either of us now, do you?”

  “Not now. Later I'll want to see both of you.”

  “Sure. I'll be in touch. We'll grab a cab if it's all right with you.”

  He glanced at Laurel, chewed on his lip, and nodded. “The girl—she'll be OK, won't she?”

  “I'll stick with her as long as she wants me to.”

  He nodded and left. We walked to the corner and caught a cab. Inside, I said, “Where do you want to go, Laurel?”

  She looked at me. “Home, I guess.” I tried to talk her out of going there, but she was insistent. I leaned forward and gave the driver the address of the Redstone house, then sat back. Laurel kept looking at me. She said, “I just want to go home. But there isn't anybody there now, is there? Nobody there.”

  The frozen look melted. She said in a hardly audible whisper, “Oh-h ... oh, my God!” And then the tears came. She threw herself forward against my chest, head burrowing hard against me, her hands balled into small fists pressed on each side of her face, and great shaking sobs racked her body. I put my arms around her and held her, but I couldn't think of anything to say that would make it easier for her. There wasn't anything to say.

  She stayed like that for the rest of the ride, but slowly the sobs subsided. When the cab stopped in the graveled drive she pushed herself away from me, fumbled in her bag for a handkerchief, and wiped some of the tears and mascara streaks from her face. I paid the driver and we went inside the house.

  I guess I spent about half an hour with Laurel. She asked me to tell her the whole thing again. I'd learned that the .32 Smith and Wesson had been Mrs. Redstone's own gun, and finally I said, “Honey, do you think she could have...”

  Laurel was under control now, dry-eyed and sober. “Killed herself?” she said. “That's idiotic. She was murdered. She wouldn't have, couldn't have killed herself. My God, Shell, who would do a thing like that? And why? Why?”

  She didn't expect an answer, and I didn't have any to give her. I did try to convince her again that she should stay somewhere else, even mentioned that my apartment might be safer, but she said she wanted to be alone here for a while. In a few minutes she asked me to go.

  I hesitated and Laurel said, “Go ahead, Shell. Thanks, but I'll be all right. I just don't want to talk, or see anyone, or anything.”

  I got up to leave and she came over to me.

  “Put your arms around me, Shell. Don't kiss me, just hold me a minute. Just hold me.”

  She pressed close against me, then turned and walked away. I went out. My Cad was still in the drive. I'd left it here when I'd gone with Hansen to Fairview. I started it and headed for downtown Los Angeles. There was a man I meant to find. A murderer; maybe a guy after a lot of money. Maybe even a woman. But I had to learn quite a bit more today, had to be sure I got my hands on the right guy. Because when I found him, I might kill him.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Samson had his cigar going when I walked into Homicide in City Hall, but I made no cracks about his weeds today.

  He looked up and saw me, then growled around his cigar, “Shell, glad you came down. We got something you're interested in. Some dope on Poupelle just came in from Washington.” He reached for some papers on his desk, saying. “What's with the Redstone woman? You saw Hansen, didn't you?”

  “Yeah. Just left him a while back.” I briefed him on the high points of what had happened, then looked over the papers he'd given me. While I glanced at them he covered the salient points, punctuating his words with streams of foul cigar smoke.

  “This Poupelle's a grade-A louse. Mixed up in a kind of badger game in Cincinnati, also Philadelphia. Only instead of a shapely babe and a furious husband, Poupelle played the babe's part and arranged for a house dick to catch him with the gals. The women paid off the detective, who split with Poupelle.”

  “He did time?”

  “No, that's the sweet angle of his racket. He picked his female patsies from the real upper crust, gals from the local high society. Babes afraid their society laying would hurt their society standing, and wouldn't finger the bastard. Charges brought once in Cincy, once in Philly—and both times the complaining witnesses blew cold, dropped the complaints. So, as far as we can tell, he wasn't ever convicted of a crime.”

  I grinned at Sam. “Maybe I'll convict the bum, when I get my hands on him. You talk to him yet?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, we brought in him and the wife, Vera. In case you were wondering, they've got airtight alibis. They were with this Ed Norman you mentioned last night, and half a dozen other people. Out at that castle. Until a couple of hours after the place closed, by the way.”

  “So that means all three of them, plus half a dozen other people, have alibis. But, Sam, a guy could leave the castle, knock somebody off, then come back in. Probably with nobody the wiser. You know, everybody drinking, wandering around. Wouldn't have to be gone over an hour. Probably a lot less.”

  “Well, the story hangs together. Besides, all we could do was question them, easy like. There's no complaint or anything against them.”

  “How'd Vera take it?”

  “Went all to pieces. We let her lie down here a while before they left.”

  I ran through the rest of the report, most of which Samson had given me verbally. “This dope fits Poupelle like a boy's BVDs, Sam. Wherever there's big money and women starting downhill, you find slobs like Poupelle hanging around giving them a push. Always a friend of a friend, guys with maybe one or two talents, neither of which is polo, but they make a good living. I kind of had a hunch about Andon. I've got some more hunches about him, too. Something about those alibis smells.”

  “Sure. Could be they're all lying. Or just some of them are lying. We can't put thumbscrews on them. Anything else bring you down?”

  I reached into my pocket. On the way here I'd stopped by my apartment, changed clothes, and got the original report that Paul Yates had given Mrs. Redstone. A couple of telegrams had also arrived for me and I'd picked those up just before coming to City Hall. “You've answered some of it already, Sam. But chew on this.”

  I gave him the typed report and the two wires. “Vera told me Poupelle was some kind of broker in New York, but nobody there ever heard of him, witness wire one. The other wire's from the Kellogg agency in New York. They're doing some checking for me and, so far, got a line on Poupelle's Cincinnati activities. That was enough to bring me here—but you're way ahead of me.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Anyway, it seems Vera doesn't know her hubby's background very well. I don't say she doesn't; I say she says she doesn't. And look over the result of Yates's investigation of Poupelle. You and I both got a little on him in practically no time; but not Yates. Not a word in his report about Andon's being a loverboy, nothing damaging or derogatory. It's all phony—and it all smells worse than your cigars.”

  “These are good cigars. The stuff we got just came in, so we weren't able to ask Poupelle about all this. We will—and he can be amazed. You can't ask Yates.”

  “True. Something else I wanted to talk to you about. I imagine you've gone over Yates's stuff pretty closely. Home, office, so on.”

  “Right. Didn't tell us anything. Might look a little different now.”

  “That's what I mean. I'd like to go over his files this afternoon. And I want to check Poupelle's bank account. Can you fix it for me?”

  Sam nodded and rolled gray ash off his cigar “Stuff's still in Yates's office. We went through it there. Eighth and Hill. I've got a man there, Sergeant Billings, just to keep an eye open, but I'll tell him you're coming down. And I can get you in
to his bank, probably. California on Spring Street. What do you expect to find?”

  “I dunno, Sam. On the bank angle, I learned Poupelle dropped a big wad at Castle Norman, passed a bum check for it. Might find a record of it. Might not. And there's a screwy Norman-Poupelle relationship in this thing.” I paused a moment, then went on. “There's another idea floating around in my head. Suppose Poupelle knocked off somebody and Norman found out about it and started bleeding Poupelle. I mean, quite a while back. Might explain a couple of things.”

  “It might. Might not. Why would Norman blackmail Poupelle? I imagine Norman's got plenty of cash; Poupelle's not loaded.”

  “Not then he wouldn't have been, maybe. He sure is now.”

  Sam took the cigar from his wide mouth, deliberately ground it out. “Yeah. This'll kill you. Those hard boys that jumped you yesterday at that night club—all four of them work for Ed Norman.”

  I didn't say anything for quite a while. Then I got up and walked to the wall of his cramped office, leaned against it. “Sam, here's a short paragraph. See how it reads. Poupelle comes out to the Coast, and his character doesn't improve like the weather, he stays a bastard. He drops a wad at Castle Norman, gives Norman a rubber check. Around the same period he wiggles up to the Redstone clan. Mrs. Redstone adds him up and gets the correct answer: Zero. Puts an investigator—Yates—on his educated tail. Yates fakes a report for Mrs. Redstone, but Yates isn't so thick he doesn't know quite a bit about Poupelle's background, just as we do. Say Poupelle is working his racket, or even wants to marry into a pile of bucks. If Yates spills the real beans to Mrs. Redstone, Poupelle's party is a bust.” I stopped.

  Sam scowled. “So?”

  “Yates is dead, isn't he?”

  “That he is. Fits all right, Shell. Could be.” He scowled some more. “So is Mrs. Redstone dead. But she maybe blew her think pot herself.”

  “Maybe good little girls go to heaven. Come off it, Sam. You don't think she did it.”

  “I don't know what I think, Shell. I'm not a private dick that guesses right all the time and prowls around nudist parks. I'm a cop, and I got to have more than guesses.”

  “Nudist! Why, that fiend Hansen! He tell you that, Sam?”

  “He did.” Sam chuckled and stuck a new cigar in his chops. It occurred to me that if Sam knew the whole story about me and that nudist park, he might swallow his cigar and strangle on it.

  “So I'm uninhibited,” I said, and changed the subject. “It seems peculiar that Ed Norman's name crops up so often. He's the boy who was chinning with Garlic night before last.” I told Sam about my conversation with Norman at the castle. “As for Poupelle, maybe he needed money bad. You don't welsh on guys like Norman, much less slap them with rubber paper.”

  Sam said, “On that forty-five of Garlic's. We ran it through SID, got nothing. New gun.”

  “Makes sense. He probably throws the old guns away whenever he kills somebody.” I lit a cigarette and said casually, “A guy took a shot at me yesterday, and I think there's a fifty-fifty chance the slug was from a gun that wasn't thrown away, from the rifle that kissed Yates off.”

  Sam was doodling on his pad, but he dropped the pencil and jerked his head up. “What? This is a fine time to be telling me. For Christ's sake, Shell, you gonna keep it a secret till they tie a tag on your toe in the morgue?”

  “He missed me.”

  “Where was this? How about that bullet?”

  I was damned if I'd tell him where it was; not just yet, anyway. As long as that tag stayed off my toe, I figured to be working closely and congenially with Sam and the rest of the guys at headquarters. I had seen the gleam in Hansen's eye, read the Clarion's sly insinuations and not-so-subtle innuendoes about “sunbathers” and “naturists,” and I had sensed Sam inner glee at the thought of my merely being near a nudist camp. If the truth were ever known, Sam would ride me practically into the morgue all by himself. And I quailed at the thought of what the rest of my pals scattered over all twenty-eight stories of City Hall would do with so juicy an item.

  I said to Samson, “It was out of town. The slug's in an absolutely impossible place, up high on the side of a scooped-out cliff. Take my word for it.”

  “Why not have the boys take a look at it? If there's any chance it is from the Yates gun—which we haven't any trace of—that bullet might be damned important.”

  “Sam, it's inaccessible. I know how important it might be. But you can't get at it with a ladder or even fire-department paraphernalia. You'd have to overcome the forces of gravity to get it, and I'm not that clever. Besides, it might not even have been a thirty-thirty.”

  A crazy idea skittered in my brain. I remembered telling Laurel that the only way to get up that outward slanting cliff would be to float up. It was still a goofy idea, but I let it bubble in my head while I kept talking to Sam. “How about Bender, the con boy I mentioned yesterday.”

  “Got a little, not much. He's part of the bunch that hangs out at the club, that Afrodite. But he hasn't been seen around there lately.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since a month ago. Last time we've placed him there was on June first. Then he disappeared. And there's no connection at all with Poupelle.”

  “How about with Norman? He wasn't one of Norman's boys like Foo and Strikes and the rest, was he?”

  “No sign of it. Free-lance. Self-employed except when he tied up with another con and they both took a mark for his roll.”

  “How'd he work? Anything there?”

  “Yeah, he's got a record here and over half the country.” Sam dug into his desk, found a sheet of paper. “Last couple, three years, he's been working the wire mostly. He's a cackle-bladder expert, too. During the last Santa Anita season he was in with Good Time Wilson, had a store out on Eighty-ninth Street; they took Fowler, of Fowler, Brandt, and Parker, right there in the store, for eighty-five thousand on some rigged race horses. You'd think a lawyer would know better.”

  “Not if he got the itch, and a good con boy can give angels the itch. The marks see those thousand-dollar bills.”

  Sam's men had checked on the Clarion article, talked to the reporter who'd written it. The reporter's story was that he'd received an anonymous phone call yesterday, giving details about Laurel Redstone's nudism kick, plus a suggestion that he look in his mailbox, which he did. There he'd found an envelope containing information that satisfied him, plus a couple of pictures, probably taken with a telephoto lens, of Laurel and others in the camp. He'd got his story written barely in time to make the late edition. He wouldn't say what the other information was, pointing out that the important fact was that his article was true, and insisted the phone call had been anonymous. I didn't believe it, of course, but Sam's men had to be content with that much.

  That was about all Samson could tell me. He made phone calls to Yates's office and the California Bank, hung up, and told me it was all set. “Ed Norman has an account there, too, if that does you any good.”

  “It might.” I went to the door. “Thanks, Sam. When you get Poupelle again, I'd like to talk with him.”

  “Sure. Don't get killed.”

  “Not a chance. I'll call you before you knock off.”

  I phoned him sooner than I'd expected to, though. And I almost got that tag on my toe.

  Chapter Fourteen

  When I left City Hall, I climbed into the convertible and drove to a gas station, where I used the pay phone to call a friend of mine named Jay Carter, a dealer in government surplus from whom I'd bought a couple of thousand dollars’ worth of equipment in the past.

  I recognized his secretary's slightly nasal voice when she answered, “Carter's Surplus, anything for a price.”

  “What can I get for a martini?”

  “Shell! Where've you been? You horrid thing.” Maybe her voice was a little nasal, but the rest of her was virtually without flaw.

  “Hi, Sally. Can you put Carter on for me? I'm in a hurry this afternoon.”

&nbs
p; “Instead of putting Carter on, wouldn't you rather—”

  “Sally, I said I was in a hurry.”

  “Well, nuts to you.”

  The phone went onto a desktop with a clatter. In a moment Carter bawled into it. We yakked a minute, then I told him what I wanted.

  “What in Christ's name are you up to now?” he asked me.

  “Never mind. Just get it and don't boost the price more than a thousand percent.”

  “You know me. I can get it—and cheap—especially for you, my fran', but what in Christ's—”

  “You wouldn't believe me. How soon?”

  “Couple days OK?”

  “No. I want the stuff this afternoon.”

  “Impossible.”

  “I hear the price going up. OK, Jay, just get it.”

  “Well...” He was quiet for a minute. “Most of it I got. Give me eight hours. That's the best, Shell.”

  It was eleven A.M. now. “All right, Jay,” I said “Do the best you can, and throw in a Coleman lantern.”

  “Will do. But what in Christ's name are you—”

  I hung up on him and headed for the California Bank. The manager wasn't delighted at the prospect of letting me peek at his books and microfilms. They never are. But Sam had talked to him, and in a few minutes I was seated at the viewer of a big Recordak, looking at the projected images of Andon Poupelle's checks. A male clerk, who would help me with other records of deposits and withdrawals, operated the Recordak, flashing the enlarged images of check after check on the white screen. While I was at it I gave Ed Norman's account a going-over, too. When I got through I wasn't sure I'd learned anything new—but I had found the microfilm of a check dated May 28 of this year, signed Andon Poupelle and made out to Edward Norman. It was in the amount of $56,000 and had been sent back to the endorser, Norman, with a notation that it was being returned because of insufficient funds in Poupelle's account.

  Norman hadn't been too helpful last night, but at least Three Eyes had given me the straight dope on that item; and he was the man who'd also told me there was a rumble that Poupelle had pushed one Bender. Bender, who hadn't been seen around for a month.