The Sunday Pigeon Murders

by Craig Rice

  Bingo decided he needed one more drink of the late Penneyth’s gin. He went out to the kitchen for it and then went on into the living room.

  What did you look for on the scene of a crime, anyway? Footprints, Bingo told himself, fingerprints, buttons from coats, ravelings.

  He looked around the living room helplessly. Where did a person begin? If there was anything there for him to find, what would it be, and where should he look for it?

  For a long time he stood there in the middle of the room, thinking. He could leave right now, walk out the door, and take the subway downtown. He had enough cash in his pockets to take him to Atlantic City. You could always pick up a job there at this time of year. What’s more, he had on his best suit, so he wouldn’t be leaving anything valuable behind. It would be so easy, that way. Just take the subway down to the bus terminal, take a bus, and forget the whole business. Tomorrow would be another day.

  Only, there was Handsome. And Mr. Pigeon. Left alone, Handsome would be bound to get into trouble, trying to run things by himself. Handsome would have to go back to his newspaper job. Mr. Pigeon would go wandering around the streets and get himself murdered.

  And besides, there was the half of a half-million bucks, and the International Foto, Motion Picture, and Television Company of America.

  Bingo sighed, and wondered where to start searching and what to search for.

  Then he heard a sound, a faint sound, out in the hall. For a moment he stood, listening, half paralyzed. And then there was another sound, a key being inserted into the lock.

  The distance from where he stood to Harkness Penneyth’s bedroom was half the width of the living room, but Bingo covered it in two bounds. There wasn’t time to close the door, just barely time enough to duck into the shadows, before the front door opened and someone came in, quietly and cautiously.

  At first Bingo didn’t dare look. The unknown person who was moving carefully about the living room might be anybody; it might be Marty Bucholtz or his side-kick, Art, or it might be June Logan, or it might be the murderer. Or it might be (and he hoped, almost prayerfully, that it was) some perfect stranger.

  There were faint, very faint, sounds from the living room. At last Bingo braced himself, drew a long, silent breath, and peered out through the crack in the door.

  It was a perfect stranger, a female stranger. Tall and well put together. She had her back to Bingo when he first saw her, but it was a beautiful back, beautifully dressed. Bingo didn’t know the word for cocktail suit, nor for bronze lame, nor for knife-pleated chiffon, but he could appreciate the effect. The hair wasn’t bad, either, he reflected, if you cared for the brassy blonde type. He wondered if it was dyed, and what her face looked like.

  Then she turned around, and he realized immediately that the hair must be dyed. She must have been a gorgeous babe fifteen years ago. Now, her features were handsome, and her face showed the effect of expensive care, but there was a slight sagging along the chin, small puffs under the eyes, lightly drawn lines around the mouth.

  It was embarrassing, Bingo felt, watching the face of somebody who thought she was alone. Like accidentally walking into an occupied bathroom. Seen among other people, this blonde babe might have seemed pleasant and charming. But now, her face was hard, calculating, and coldly speculative.

  She was searching Harkness Penneyth’s living room with a thoroughness that surpassed even Handsome’s and Bingo’s. But, Bingo observed, watching her, she didn’t have any more luck than they’d had the night before.

  At last she gave up and stood for a moment in the center of the room, her lips pursed, her eyes narrowed. Then suddenly she began walking—no, striding—toward the bedroom.

  Bingo retreated, just in time, to the guest room. A few minutes later, the visitor finished her job in Harkness Penneyth’s bedroom and moved on into the guest room. Bingo ducked into the dining room and, from there, to the kitchen.

  But, from the kitchen, he realized, there was no way of escape. There, she had him cornered.

  Various people, including Uncle Herman, had called Bingo lazy, overambitious, untruthful, and even harsher terms. But no one had ever said that he wasn’t ingenious and resourceful.

  He pinned a towel around his waist, shucking his coat and hat onto a chair as he did so, lifted a handful of dishes into the sink, turned on the water, and began whistling loudly.

  A moment later the blonde babe came into the kitchen. Bingo turned around from the sink, affected a mild surprise, and said, “Good evening, madam.”

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

  Bingo gestured toward the sinkful of dishes, and let it go at that.

  “Where’s Wilkins?” she asked.

  “Mr. Penneyth had to fire him, ma’am,” Bingo said, affecting an air of great sadness. “For being”—he struggled for a moment to find the word—“irrelevant.”

  She stared at him for a moment, bit her lip, and then smiled. “He’ll probably fire you for being immaterial. Where’s Harkness?”

  “He’s gone out of town, ma’am,” Bingo said. That, he reflected wasn’t far from being the truth.

  “When did he go?”

  “Yesterday, ma’am.”

  “Then why,” she said, “are you washing dishes now?”

  Bingo opened his mouth and closed it again, without word.

  “Strange,” she added, “when Wilkins telephoned me Sunday to say Harkness was going out of town he didn’t say anything about having been fired.”

  “Mr. Penneyth fired him by wire, ma’am,” Bingo said respectfully.

  She sniffed, and said, “Oh, well, his affairs are his own business.” She walked to the cupboard, took out a glass, went to the liquor cupboard, and poured two fingers of Scotch into the glass. Bingo hoped she wouldn’t want ice and seltzer. She did.

  “I don’t suppose he gave you the key,” she said to Bingo, standing beside the icebox.

  “No, ma’am,” Bingo said.

  She shrugged her shoulders, and said, “All right. I know where he keeps the spare one.” She walked to the broom closet, glass in hand, opened the closet door, and began feeling along the inside wall.

  There wasn’t any way to flee. There wasn’t any fire escape leading from the kitchen. There was a twenty-foot drop to the areaway below. And she was between him and the hall leading to the living room and the front door. So Bingo waited, rattled the dishes in the sink, and wished he knew what to do next.

  “Nobody but Harkness,” the woman remarked, coming out of the broom closet, a key in her hand, “would put a padlock on his icebox.”

  Bingo turned to the sink, holding his breath, firmly resolved not to look. The funny noise in his ears, he decided, must be his heart pounding. From behind him he could hear the key being inserted into the padlock and being turned, the padlock being removed, and the icebox door being opened. There was a long silence. Then the icebox door was shut again. The padlock was slipped back into place and shut.

  By that time, Bingo dared turn around. He saw the blonde babe replacing the key in the broom closet. Her face didn’t seem to be paler than it had been before.

  “So he did kill him, after all,” she said.

  Bingo dropped the dish towel, a plate, and, with them, all pretense. “Who killed him?” he demanded. “Do you know?”

  “Of course I know,” she whispered. There was a brief half smile on her haggard face. “Imagine putting him in the icebox, so it wouldn’t be found out too soon.” The smile faded. “He thinks he’ll have to kill me next. But I’m going to be too smart for him.”

  Bingo said, “I hope so,” with instinctive politeness.

  She stared at him and said, “Who the hell are you, and what are you doing here?” Then she paused suddenly, held her breath, and said, “Listen!”

  There was a sound at the front door. The blonde babe grabbed Bingo by the arm, dragged Bingo down the hall and through the living room, shoved him in front of the door, and hissed, “If he’s a friend of
yours, he’ll have to kill you first!” and pulled the door open, fast.

  The man framed in the doorway was Art Frank. He had a gun in his hand.

  For a moment he and Bingo stood looking at each other. There was a tiny gasp from the blonde. No one spoke, no one moved. Then the gangster’s lips moved slowly into a nasty smile.

  “Just the guy we was looking for,” he said.

  “So, you do know him,” the blonde said.

  Art Frank said, “We ain’t met socially. But we’re very anxious to get acquainted with him.” He looked at Bingo and said “I t’ought Mabel and Genevieve lived on the floor above.”

  “They did,” Bingo said, “but they decided to move.”

  “You must introdooce us sometime,” the gangster said. Then his smile faded and he said, “Nice of you to have her along.” He jerked his head toward the blonde. “We’d like to get acquainted with her, too.” His eyes shone like marbles, gray marbles. “Come on out, both of you. The car’s waiting downstairs.”

  “You fool!” the woman said. “You don’t know what you’re doing!”

  “Sure I don’t,” Art Frank said. “But I know enough to carry out orders. Get a move on, now.”

  There was a movement—so swift and so unexpected that Bingo couldn’t see what had happened. A light seemed to flash in the half-darkness of the hall. The breath came in a sudden, choked gasp from Art Frank’s throat.

  A look of pained and terrible surprise spread over the gangster’s face. His knees bent, then his hands were flung out before him, then he fell, just outside the doorway, just before Bingo’s feet. The handle of a little knife was still quivering in his back.

  The blonde babe grabbed Bingo’s arm, dragged him back into the room, and slammed the door, all in one quick motion. They stood there against the wall, she on one side of the door, he on the other.

  There were soft, running footsteps down the stairs. There was the sound of the downstairs door slamming. Then there was silence.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Maybe it was five minutes, maybe it was thirty seconds, maybe it was half an hour, that they stood there by the door, motionless, listening. There wasn’t a sound. The door downstairs had slammed, and that was all.

  Finally Bingo began to realize that he wasn’t the last person left alive in the world. He glanced over at the blonde babe and saw that she was standing there tense, frozen, not frightened, not horrified. Just waiting. Waiting for something that didn’t seem to be going to happen.

  “Damn it,” Bingo said. “I’ve had enough of this.”

  He reached for the door and flung it open. The body of Art Frank moved, almost as though it were alive, and sprawled across the sill.

  The little knife that had been quivering in the dead man’s back was gone now.

  Bingo wheeled around to face the blonde babe. He grabbed her by the front of her bronze lame blouse, just below the big sapphire clasp at her throat, gripping the fabric in his angry hand.

  “You said he killed him,” Bingo said. “Who the hell is he? Why did he kill him?”

  “He’s—” the blonde said, caught her breath, and said, “he killed him because—” She stopped suddenly, was silent for a moment, and then looked coldly and determinedly at Bingo. “I don’t know who you are or how you’re mixed up in this. But if you don’t help me with that”—she waved a beautifully manicured hand at Art Frank’s corpse—“I’ll call the police and tell them I caught you breaking in here and that you stabbed him.”

  Bingo said, “Listen, lady. I don’t know who you are either, but I’ll be delighted to help, and what do you want me to do?”

  “We’ve got to get him out of here,” she said, pointing at the body. “Because if the police find a dead man here in the hall, they’re going to search the apartment, and that means they’ll search the icebox too.”

  “O.K.,” Bingo said. “I’m with you.” He’d have done anything, promised anything, at that moment, to get away from Harkness Penneyth’s apartment and back to the peace and security of the little room on which only $17 rent was still due, where Handsome and Mr. Pigeon were developing and printing pictures. “What do you want we should do with him?”

  “I’ll show you,” she said. She picked up a platinum-fox fur she’d tossed on a chair by the door when she came in, and flung it over her arm. “My car’s around the corner. I’ll go down and drive it up in front. You pick him up, and bring him down to the car.” She stooped down over the body of Art Frank for a moment.

  “And suppose I don’t want to?” Bingo said. “Suppose I want to pick up the phone and call the cops and tell them there’s been a murder?”

  “Then,” she said, “you’ll be sorry, Mr. X.”

  He saw that she had Art Frank’s gun in her hand. With one quick move, he could take it away from her. A sharp kick on her ankle, one hand jabbing her stomach, and the other hand catching her wrist. But that wasn’t what he wanted to do. He wasn’t afraid of her, he wasn’t afraid of the cops, but he was afraid of Harkness Penneyth’s body being found. So he shrugged his shoulders and smiled pleasantly.

  “Lady,” he said, “I’ll be glad to co-operate.”

  She left him and trusted him not to run away or to call the cops, while she went to get her car. It was all she could do at the time. Besides, as she pointed out to Bingo before she went away, if he changed his mind about co-operating, she could always give the cops a description of him, and with his fancy clothes and his ugly mug, he wouldn’t be hard to pick up.

  Bingo turned out the lights in Harkness Penneyth’s apartment, left it, and closed the door behind him. There was a little blood on the floor under Art Frank’s body, not much though. The door mat, moved a little to the left, covered it neatly.

  From below, he heard a car stop in front of the building. The downstairs door opened, and the blonde babe called, “Bring him down.”

  Bingo hoisted the dead gangster to his feet, put an arm around his waist, flung one limp arm over his own shoulders, and managed to get him down the stairs.

  “Nice work,” the blonde said. She held the door open for him.

  There were a couple of people coming down the sidewalk. The blonde moved up on the dead man’s other side, took his arm, and said to Bingo, “You never should have given Harold that last drink. He always passes out.”

  One of the people going down the sidewalk giggled.

  They shoved Art Frank’s body into the middle of the front seat of a dark-blue Buick sedan. Bingo got in on one side, and the blonde babe on the other. Then she started the car with a lurch, raced down the street, whipped around the corner into Columbus Avenue, and drove south.

  “Going far?” Bingo said pleasantly.

  She said, “Far enough, and shut up.”

  He didn’t say another word, all the way down Columbus Avenue to where it became Ninth Avenue, down to Fourteenth Street, where she turned off suddenly and turned several corners in such rapid succession that he completely lost track of where they were. Then she stopped in front of a small apartment building, got out, and slammed the door shut.

  “Wait,” she said, “till I make sure there’s nobody home.”

  Bingo waited. Art Frank’s body was warm and heavy against his shoulder. He felt a little sick and very frightened. This was what happened, he reminded himself, when you tried to mix in with the big dough. People got killed. People killed each other for money, just like Uncle Herman had said. Maybe it was better to be poor, after all, and worry along with the quarters that came in from photographs taken in Central Park. You might miss out on a lot of things, but at least you didn’t find yourself in some strange woman’s car, at eleven o’clock at night, on a street you didn’t even recognize, with the body of a dead gangster heavy against your shoulder.

  And Art Frank, he must have been trying to get into the big dough too, or he wouldn’t have gotten mixed up in this. Now, look what had happened to him. It might happen to him, Bingo, tomorrow, or day after tomorrow, or any day now. W
hat was worse, it might happen to Handsome.

  Only, he knew that it was too late to back out now.

  The blonde woman came back to the car and opened the door on Bingo’s side.

  “Everything’s O.K.,” she reported. “Help your drunken friend out.”

  Bingo obeyed. He didn’t know what was O.K., but it seemed best not to ask questions right now. And he resented the body being referred to as his “drunken friend.” He could recognize the wisdom of the statement, since people were going up and down the street, but he resented it just the same. It had nothing to do with the fact that Art Frank hadn’t been a friend of his. Rather, it seemed like a disrespectful way to refer to anyone who was so recently a corpse.

  The apartment building had a small lobby, decorated with imitation tapestry, imitation marble, and imitation potted plants. The lobby was deserted. Bingo and the blonde woman got Art Frank’s body across the imitation-tile floor without any trouble, and into the self-service elevator. She punched a button that stopped the elevator at the third floor.

  There were only two apartments on the third floor. She steered Bingo over to the door of one of them and helped him ease the dead man down onto the door mat, so that he sat, as though resting, against the door. Then she hurried Bingo back into the elevator, across the lobby, and back into the car.

  He could think of a hundred questions he wanted to ask, but this seemed to be a time for tact.

  She drove the car over to Seventh Avenue, up to Fourteenth Street, and stopped in front of a corner cigar stand. She hopped out of the car and into the cigar store. Bingo hesitated a moment and then followed her.

  She was in the telephone booth, and she was dialing police. Bingo turned cold, considered making a break, and then listened.

  “Police?” the blonde babe said. “There’s a dead man in the hall outside of apartment 3-B, the Bellevue Apartments on Thirteenth Street.” She paused, and said, “That’s right. 3-B.” She slammed down the receiver, came out of the booth and saw Bingo.

  “I just came in to get a package of cigarettes,” Bingo said.

  “I don’t give a damn what you came in for,” the blonde said. “If you wanted to listen, why shouldn’t you listen?” She led him out to the sidewalk. “That ought to fix Marty Bucholtz.”