by Craig Rice
“We’re just curious,” Bingo said, between lips that had suddenly grown stiff and cold. “When was this?”
“It was about five o’clock yesterday afternoon,” June said. “I went up to see Harky, and when nobody answered my ring, I used my key and went right in. It looked as if Harky had been getting ready to go on a trip. His suitcases were all packed, and the bedroom was a mess. But there didn’t seem to be anybody there, so I looked around a little.”
“Go on,” Bingo said. He saw that June Logan looked a little pale.
“And when I got to the bathroom,” she said, “there it was. Blood all over everything.” Suddenly she looked at Bingo, and her eyes were puzzled. “But when I came back, and ran into you two, the body wasn’t in the bathroom, and there wasn’t any blood. Everything had been cleaned up. What happened? Why was it like that?”
“Maybe somebody liked to see things neat and clean,” Bingo said. He remembered Harkness Penneyth’s corpse as he had seen it, fully dressed in a well-tailored brown business suit, sitting on the davenport in the living room, with a book in its lap.
“But where is the body now?” June Logan asked.
“Somebody must have moved it,” Bingo said.
She looked at him thoughtfully. “You two, for instance?”
Handsome said quickly, “When we went there, there wasn’t any body on the bathroom floor.” Handsome believed in always telling the literal truth.
“That’s right,” Bingo hastened to add.
There was a long, ponderous silence.
“You see,” she said at last, “what I meant when I said—you’re messing around with high explosives. Because this business is strictly TNT.”
Bingo lit a new cigarette and sat looking at the end of it. It seemed to him that he hadn’t learned any of the things he’d come to learn, and that he’d completely lost any opening he might have had toward asking about them.
“Can you imagine that?” Handsome said. “Somebody must have moved the body.”
“You,” June Logan said, “are a very smart boy. But you two amateurs had better keep out of this. Don’t go nosing around. Because Marty Bucholtz is doing the same thing, and he probably has good reasons, and he plays for keeps.”
“Just let me ask a question,” Bingo said. “Why should he bother, if Mr. Penneyth doesn’t have any dough, and he owes everybody?”
She regarded him thoughtfully for a moment before answering. “Because Harky is going to get money,” she said slowly. “A hell of a lot of money. And Marty knows about it, and so does Marty’s boss.”
“And Marty’s boss,” Bingo said, “is—?”
“You’re bright,” she said, shrugging her shoulders. “You can find out.”
“O.K.,” Bingo said. “So I’ll find out. And where is all this dough coming from?”
“Santa Claus,” she said.
“That’s a silly answer,” Handsome said reproachfully.
“It was a silly question,” June said. “You probably know as well as I do where it’s coming from. It’s from a bird. A pigeon.”
“A homing pigeon, I suppose,” Bingo said.
She shook her head. “This pigeon,” she said, “wasn’t going to come home.”
“Oh,” Bingo said. “I see you read the newspapers, too.”
“I don’t read the newspapers,” she told him, “but my friends confide in me. Why don’t you?”
Bingo ignored her last words. There were times to be nice to a dame, and times to be tough with her. This was obviously one of the latter. He grabbed her wrist.
“Let’s hear some more about this pigeon,” he said harshly.
She didn’t even try to pull away. “That’s all I know, bud. Harky has money coming. He was even able to borrow some on the strength of it. All of a sudden the people he owed money to began letting up on him, and making like they were friends of his again.”
Bingo said, “Go on.” Her arm was smooth and soft and faintly warm. “And tell me the truth about this homing pigeon, because I know something about that, too.”
“All right,” June Logan said. “There’s no reason why I shouldn’t. And if you want to hold my other hand, here it is.” She held it out to him.
Bingo dropped her wrist as though it had suddenly scorched him and moved a few steps away. “Tell me the rest of it,” he said coldly.
“Tough, isn’t he?” she said to Handsome. Then, “Hell, you know as much as I do. Harky had a partner, name of Pigeon. He disappeared—” she paused, tilted an eyebrow, and said, “You know all that. The insurance policy, and the rest of it.”
“Sure,” Bingo said, breathing a little hard. “We know about it.”
“Well, then,” she said, yawning, “I don’t know what you’re bothering me with questions for. If you know all the answers already.” She added, “If you and Marty are after the same thing, you’d better consider yourself in the way.”
Bingo said, “Don’t worry about us.”
“Sure,” Handsome said. “We can look out for ourselves.”
She looked at him and smiled faintly. “Babes in the woods,” she murmured.
“One thing more,” Bingo said, ignoring her remark, “when you walked in there and found him dead, why didn’t you call the cops?”
“And get mixed up in it myself?” she said scornfully. “Do you think I’m crazy?”
“O.K.,” Bingo said. “I was just asking. It’s been a pleasant little visit. Too bad it didn’t do us any good.” He picked up his hat and stood spinning it on his forefinger.
“You got some good advice,” she commented, “if you knew enough to take it.” She struck the best pose she knew, and said, “Now we have all that out of the way, why don’t you drop up and visit another time—when we don’t have to talk business?”
“That,” Bingo said, his voice hard, “is the best advice you’ve given us yet.” He crossed the distance to her in two steps, grabbed her, and kissed her angrily and violently, one hand tangled in her dark-red hair. It was a long and purposeful kiss, and it had absolutely no effect on June Logan. She simply stood there and took it. She said nothing when Bingo let her go.
“Bingo,” Handsome said in a shocked voice, “you oughtn’t to have done that.”
“Oh, Mildred doesn’t mind,” Bingo said, in his nastiest tone, “or maybe I ought to call her Miss Murray.” He watched her from the corner of his eye and saw her face whiten. “You don’t mind, do you, Miss Murray?”
“You dirty bastard,” she said in a voice halfway between a gasp and a scream. Then she lunged forward, one hand outstretched to slap his face; he caught the hand in mid-air and held it tight, his fingers bruising the wrist. She clawed at him then, and bit his hand, catlike, until he caught her back hair and pulled her away.
“Please, Bingo,” Handsome said. “Be polite.”
“Polite,” Bingo said, surprised, “to her?” He picked her up, sat her in a corner of the davenport, and said, “Kindly sit there and keep your trap shut, madam. I mean, Miss Murray.”
She muttered something about Bingo which was complimentary neither to him nor to his parents.
“Nasty temper, hasn’t she?” Bingo said to Handsome. “Suppose you try being polite to her for a change.”
She glared up at him with blue eyes that had narrowed into slits and begun to blaze like neon signs. “I never made any secret of changing my name from Mildred Murray to June Logan,” she said. “June Logan is a better name. And I’m an actress.”
“Sure,” Bingo said easily, “but you’re a terrible one. Sweetheart, I don’t care if your name is June Logan or Mildred Murray, or Mehitable McGillicuddy. That’s between you and the census bureau. But I would like to remark that”—he took a long breath—“maybe Marty Bucholtz didn’t like it that you changed your name and were keeping a spare nightie hanging up in Harkness Penneyth’s closet. Guys have even been known to kill each other, in the past, over babes like you, though God knows why.”
“Marty and I were wa
shed up a long time ago,” she said.
“O.K.,” Bingo said. “I wasn’t even curious.” He picked up his hat again and walked over to the door. “Let’s go, Handsome. I’m afraid we’re beginning to bore the lady.”
Handsome got over to the door fast. Then he said politely, turning the knob. “I’m sorry we had to bother you, ma’am.”
She didn’t hear him, and neither did Bingo. The latter opened the door and, while Handsome went out into the hall, turned to smile at her.
“I will drop in another time,” he said pleasantly, “when we don’t have to talk business. And when I do, shall I call you June or Mildred?”
“Call me,” she screamed, “I’ll call you—” and she added, with interesting details, just what she’d call him.
Bingo shut the door just as the highball glass crashed against it. “She must be Irish,” he remarked. He tipped his hat to the closed door.
“Not necessarily,” Handsome said. “My grandma had a worse temper’n that, and she was a Polack.” He waited until they’d gone down in the elevator and through the lobby, and then said, “Say, Bingo, do you think you ought to’ve said all those things to her?”
“Why not?” Bingo said.
“Well,” Handsome said thoughtfully, “she’s a lady. Shall we go home on the bus?”
“For the price of two bus fares,” Bingo said sternly, “we can buy one beer.”
Handsome sighed and started walking.
“When we get our dough,” Bingo said consolingly, “we’ll go everywhere in taxis.” He walked in silence for a little way, and then said, “Of course, she could have been lying to us about Mr. Penneyth.”
Handsome said, “But he was dead.”
“Sure,” Bingo said. “But we don’t know for sure if he was stabbed or not. We just know he was dead. Maybe,” he said thoughtfully, “we better go back there tonight and find out for sure.”
“O.K.,” Handsome said, “if you say so. But what makes you think she was lying?”
“I just said that she could have been,” Bingo said crossly. “Maybe she wasn’t. But I want to know.”
“O.K.,” Handsome said again. Half a block later he said, “Why?”
Bingo said, “Don’t forget we gotta find out who murdered him. Partly so we can prove to Mr. Pigeon that it wasn’t us, and partly so we can get our dough. So first we gotta find out how he was murdered.”
They reached Seventy-fifth Street before Handsome said, “How is this party going to get the five hundred thousand dollars and split it with us if he’s in jail for murdering Mr. Penneyth? Or do you mean we should wait till he gets the dough and splits with us, and then we should tell the cops? Because that last don’t seem exactly honest.”
“That’s a problem,” Bingo said severely, “that we’ll solve when we get to it.”
“Sorry,” Handsome said. At the corner of Seventy-ninth and Amsterdam he said, “Bingo. If the party who put Mr. Penneyth’s clothes back on him and sat him up on the sofa and cleaned up the place was the same party who murdered him, why did he come back and do it?” He paused, drew a long breath, and said, “And if it wasn’t, and it was some other party who didn’t murder him, what was his idea of doing it anyway?”
Bingo said, “This is no time to bother me with questions.”
“You don’t have to answer,” Handsome said apologetically, “but they bother me if I don’t ask ’em.” They crossed Eighty-first Street and turned east. “Was it the same party who got our letter, Bingo, and if it wasn’t who did?”
“That’s enough,” Bingo said.
There was silence for about fifteen feet. Then Handsome paused, braced himself, and looked at Bingo.
“Listen,” he said desperately. “There’s one more question I gotta ask, because it’s about her. I can’t figure it out. And if you just let me ask it, then I’ll shut up and I won’t bother you any more.”
“All right,” Bingo said wearily, coming to a full stop. “What is it?”
“That girl,” Handsome said. “She went in Mr. Penneyth’s apartment and found him murdered in the bathroom, and she went away again, didn’t she? She must’ve went away, because when we were there she came back like she’d been outside. Isn’t that right?”
“Sure,” Bingo said. “That’s right. So what’s the question?”
“This,” Handsome said. “What I want to know is—why did she come back?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
It had been a hot, sticky, depressing day. Now, at nine in the evening, the buildings and sidewalks seemed to send out waves of stored-up heat, and the air was damp and heavy and suffocating.
Bingo walked the eighteen blocks to Harkness Penneyth’s apartment, not only to save the bus fare but also because Central Park West was the only place where the air seemed to be moving even a little, and because he wanted to think.
Baby had gone to work, so Handsome had had to remain with Mr. Pigeon. Handsome had protested against Bingo going on the errand alone; in fact, Bingo had wished that he’d protest a little more, so that he could give in and postpone going to Penneyth’s apartment until the next evening. But he’d felt the necessity of displaying his nerve in front of Mr. Pigeon, and had said so vehemently that he didn’t mind going alone that Handsome had believed him.
So Handsome had settled down to developing and printing (eleven more quarters had come in in the afternoon mail), with Mr. Pigeon’s offered assistance, and Bingo had started put by himself.
One day gone, he reflected, and they hadn’t accomplished a thing. Only six days left now. They were going to have to work fast.
He wasn’t just sure what he was going to accomplish by the visit to Harkness Penneyth’s apartment. Making sure that June Logan had told them the truth was interesting, but he didn’t quite see how it could be important. Still, there might be something, some piece of evidence he and Handsome had overlooked the first time.
This was the way things happened when you tangled with important dough, Bingo told himself. What looked like a simple little business operation between a few individuals got mixed up with murder and trouble and heaven-knew-what. He not only had the job of finding out where the five hundred grand was going, and making a deal, but now he had to find out who’d murdered Mr. Penneyth, just to prove to Mr. Pigeon, and to Baby, that he and Handsome were O.K.
All in all, a very repulsive situation, he said to himself.
He turned off Central Park West, passed two apartment buildings, and paused in front of the three-story, yellow-brick building where Harkness Penneyth had lived. It was entirely dark. But just to make sure, he paused in the vestibule and rang the late Mr. Penneyth’s bell, long and loud. Nothing happened. He rang the first-floor bell, marked J. AND Q. DYMTRYK, and nothing happened. Above the third-floor bell was a tiny card marked APT. FOR RT. REAS. CALL GAFFREY, PA 5–6401.
Bingo grinned, removed the card, wrote MABEL AND GENEVIEVE on the back of it, and slipped it into the mailbox slot. Then he started upstairs, feeling in his pocket for the key he’d taken from the late Mr. Penneyth.
The apartment was warm and stuffy and half dark. He stood for a moment just inside the door, looking around. A sickly glow from the street lights came in the window, changing the furniture into mysterious and threatening monsters. There was the dusty odor of a room left untenanted, with its doors and windows closed, through a day of midsummer heat.
But there was no one save himself in the apartment—unless someone was hiding in a closet waiting to pounce on him. Bingo told himself that he wasn’t in the least frightened, and turned on the lights.
He moved cautiously through the bedroom, the guest room, the dining room, and the hall, just to make sure he was alone. Then he went into the kitchen.
He took out the key to the icebox, unlocked the padlock, and then stood for a moment, his brows knit, looking at the door.
Putting Mr. Penneyth’s body into the icebox had been a dirty trick, and he felt sorry about it. When a guy was dead, the least you could
do for him was see he was nicely laid out, in a swell-looking room, with candles. Like Uncle Herman was. Or give him a really good wake, like Aunt Kate had. It had been a very shabby way to treat Mr. Penneyth, in spite of the fact that he’d been a very, very unpleasant type of character.
“I’m sorry as hell,” Bingo whispered to the icebox, between tight, cold lips. “Only, you understand, it was the only thing we could do at the time. When we get everything else fixed up, we’ll make this right, honest.”
He felt a little better then, but not much. Maybe it would have been better, after all, if Handsome had come along. Then he opened the icebox door, set his jaw, hard, and eased the body of Harkness Penneyth out to the floor.
Ten minutes later he snapped the lock on the icebox door, put the key back into his pocket, walked over to the cupboard, and poured himself a stiff drink of Harkness Penneyth’s gin.
June Logan hadn’t been lying. Harkness Penneyth had been stabbed in the back. Then, after he’d been stabbed, someone had put his clothes on. There wasn’t even any blood on the clothes, except for one small smear on his fine-gauge, glove-silk undershirt.
Bingo went into the bathroom, where June Logan had seen the body, face down on the floor, stark naked and covered with blood. The bathroom was spotlessly clean. There wasn’t a mark on the black-tile floor. The thick, pale-green towels hanging on the racks had just come from the laundry. The deep-violet bath mat wasn’t even rumpled.
Between the time of Mr. Penneyth’s murder and the time when he was dressed and the bathroom tidied up, there had been a long enough interval for June Logan to come in, look around, and go away again. Had the murderer gone away and come back? Or had he been hiding in a closet while she was there? No, June Logan claimed she had searched the apartment.
Then why should the murderer have come back, dressed Mr. Penneyth and put him on the living room sofa, and cleaned up the bathroom?
Or had it been the murderer? Had it been someone else? But why should someone else, coming in and discovering that Harkness Penneyth had been murdered, take all that trouble and then go away, without calling the cops?
