by David Bishop
“What was used to strangle her?”
“It looks like a dirty robe tie. I was about to look for a matching robe when you started hollering.”
“Was it pink terrycloth?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s her robe all right. You should find it inside. If she’s like most people, it’s probably on a hook behind the bathroom door.”
“Gee thanks, Sherlock.” Suggs rolled his eyes. “You must be a topnotch PI.”
“Listen, Suggs, I don’t need your attitude. I was just trying to help.” Then Jack tried again to move around the sergeant.
Suggs moved over again, keeping Jack from reaching the porch. “Okay, Jack. I didn’t realize you knew her all that well.”
“I didn’t. I already told you. I only saw her that once. She struck me as a sweet kid. Nora felt the girl had real sculpting talent. If you haven’t found her work yet, you will. Please take in any of her sculpted pieces. I’m going to hire an attorney to pursue getting them released to Ms. Ziegler mother. Would you do that, Paul?”
“Sure.”
The story Jack had told Suggs danced around the whole truth and nothing but the truth, but he needed to stop the questions about how and why he got to know the victim.
Jack thought as Suggs continued to walk with him toward his car. The blackmailer might have killed Phoebe as part of sweeping his trail clean, if he figured I didn’t know about Randolph Harkin. Still, he had to know that killing Phoebe would lead the cops to Donny’s club where they would learn that for over a year she had a once-a-month date with a guy named Harkin. No. It made no sense for the blackmailer to kick up that dust. He’d let it lay. If, on the other hand, he knew I talked to Phoebe, he’d figure I knew about Harkin and that I’d be able to squeeze that soft little man to find out about the swapping of the portraits. Either way, killing Phoebe would only turn up the heat on him. Given this bastard’s penchant for caution, if he hasn’t already sold the real paintings, he’ll squirrel them away while things cool.
Suggs opened Jack’s car door. “Get out of here, Jack. Go home. Nothing else you can do here. I’m sorry about all this.”
“Hey, Paul, you’re finally calling me Jack.”
“Fuck you, McCall, and the horse you rode in on.”
Chapter 34
Jack met Drummy at seven in the morning. By eight the security expert had found no evidence of surveillance equipment in MI, and had left Jack’s office to sweep his home and Nora’s apartment. After he left, Jack and Nora went into their case room to discuss the death of Phoebe Ziegler, but Paul Suggs had summarized it best: “The choices had been Phoebe’s. She made ‘em. They went bad.”
Nora looked up from the papers in front of her. “I stopped at the National Portrait Gallery. Harkin’s there. He’s wrung out but holding up. Here’s his list of copyists.”
Jack slid the chair between them back toward the wall and rolled close enough to see the list. Nora’s perfume was soft and attracting. “How many are there?”
“Eleven in the U.S.,” she said. “I think we’re on solid ground assuming the copyist is in the U.S. That would avoid the problems associated with getting the phony paintings in through customs and the real ones out. Diplomatic immunity might be the weak link in that assumption but we’ve had no reason to think in that direction.”
“What’s the geographic distribution?”
“Three in the D.C./Virginia/Maryland area and three in New York City, the other five are in the Midwest and far west.”
An hour later they had identified three trails they needed to get on fast: finding the forger, baiting the blackmailer through the surveillance equipment in the office of Dr. John Karros, and getting in Art Tyson’s face. They had nothing that fit tight on Tyson, but his car matched with the car they saw outside Sarah Andujar’s house. Chris Andujar’s receptionist was his girlfriend. He had owned a silent piece of Luke Tittle’s Place and the accounting records missing from Luke’s could explain Allison Trowbridge being blackmailed. Yeah. They had a fourth trail: finding out if Allison had been blackmailed and over what.
Nora would contact each of the artists by phone. She would also finagle an appointment as a new patient with Dr. Karros. For that she’d need to develop a story ripe enough to give the listening blackmailer a reason to shake her down.
Jack spotted the name on a half-opened second floor window overlooking Eighteenth Street: A. Tyson, Private Investigator. The building was across from Joey’s, a neighborhood watering hole in the Adams Morgan district in northwest DC.
Jack stepped inside the one-room office to see Tyson sitting behind a desk butted up against the side wall, a cold, mostly-smoked cigar wedged between his fat fingers. His thin plastered down hair could have been mistaken for a grease smudge if not for the gray streaking through the smear. A waste basket sat in the corner on the dirty green vinyl floor, the area around it littered with spent wooden matches, snapped in two.
So it was Tyson parked outside Sarah Andujar’s home.
Tyson looked up, a crooked grin on his face pushing his hammered-in nose off center. He held a phone in one hand, and brought the hand surrounding the blunt cigar to his face, a keep-quiet finger touching his lips.
Jack leaned against the wall and imagined how Dashiell Hammett, the creator of Sam Spade, might have written the description of Tyson’s office: In the dark, quiet gut of the night the room was cast in pink light from the pulsing energy of the neon sign over Joey’s Bar. The cold room lacked a family portrait or even one of those free cheesecake shots that come inside when you buy a cheap frame. Tyson’s desk was home to a phone, a lamp with a green plastic shade, and the rest of the mess that wasn’t balanced on top the file cabinet or stacked on the dirty beige visitor’s chair. Spade couldn’t tell if the tarnished spittoon next to the desk was a functional accessory, or merely a period piece for ambience. On the floor—
Jack’s thoughts were interrupted when Tyson hung up the phone. “Hello, Artie,” he said. “I wasn’t sure I’d catch you in this early.”
“Early? Shit. This is the back end of yesterday. I work nights. Sleep afternoons.” He thrust his chin forward like a fighting cock. “What do you want?”
“You invited me to come see you. Promised to explain the ins and outs of being a DC snoop dick, if I recall your phrase.” Jack’s attempt to match Tyson’s smirk failed.
Tyson reached in a bottom drawer and brought out a bottle of whiskey grasped by the neck. On the return trip, his hand brought up two stubby glasses decorated with smudges; his index finger deep inside one, his wide thumb getting personal with the second. He poured a big gulp into each. Then stared at Jack like a dim bulb stares from the far end of a dark hallway.
“Quit fencing, McCall,” Tyson said. “That’s not what brung ya. You’re uptown. Me, I’m skidsville. I know it. What the hell you want?” Tyson picked up the index-finger glass, inclined it toward Jack and chugged its contents in one swallow. Jack left the wide-thumb glass sitting.
Jack had learned the word gumshoe for private investigators watching detective movies from the forties. He couldn’t recall ever having used it before, but gumshoe fit Tyson and his rumpled office. Still, Tyson had been right. They were sniffing each other like a couple of circling dogs.
“Okay, Artie. Here’s a part of it. We know you were a silent partner for Tittle and his bag man for protec—”
“An old rumor,” he bellowed. “Ancient history. Get to the point, McCall. Spit it out.” He illustrated “spit it out” by squirting a dark stringy clump of tobacco juice into the spittoon next to his desk. Thus, answering one question: the spittoon was an accessory and not noir deco.
“For curiosity’s sake, tell me one thing?”
“If I can, sure,” Tyson said, “one PI to another.” Tyson made a noise that sounded half snuff and half snort.
Jack hadn’t been invited to sit, but he did after picking up the files from the dirty beige chair and stacking them on top of some cameras and recordin
g equipment on the floor along the wall.
A cockroach scampered out of one of the folders when Jack started to pick them up off the desk. Tyson hammered the roach with the flat of his hand and swept the twitching remains off his palm and into the spittoon, then wiped his hand on his pants. Then he returned his attention to Jack. “So ask. I ain’t got all day.” Then he shrugged, picked up the thumb glass and took its contents in a single swallow.
“At my open house you went to speak with Mayor Molloy. Almost the moment you got to him, he started shaking his head. To what was he saying no?”
“Hell, who knows. I’d had a few that night to celebrate your opening. I don’t even remember speaking to Molloy. I ain’t exactly in the mayor’s inner circle.”
“You mean your poker games with the mayor aren’t on his social calendar?”
Tyson’s squint pouched his cheeks up to smear the bottom edge of his glasses. He again spat at his spittoon. “Well, aren’t you Sam Fuckin’ Spade.”
Jack considered that a compliment, but Tyson had gotten the middle name wrong.
He decided not to ask Tyson if he had been outside Sarah Andujar’s house that first morning. He wouldn’t get anything out of Tyson unless he had him by the short hairs, and he didn’t. Not yet.
Jack stood.
Tyson stood also, his belly closing the desk’s partially opened pencil drawer. He hacked up a mouth wad and fired it at the spittoon. This time he missed. The two men stood temporarily mesmerized by the green slime slithering down the side of the desk.
“You got more to say, McCall?” Tyson asked after sitting back down.
“That’s it for now, Artie. That is, unless you wanna talk about why Donny Andujar was so eager to get Jena Moves on her back with Randolph Harkin?”
Tyson’s smirk disappeared. He refilled the void with a hard, blank look. Then he laughed. “Donny runs whores. The whole town knows it. I’ve been in there enough to know that Jena Moves had what it took from her hips to her lips. He prob’ly just wanted another working mattress-back. Now, if that’s all, I got to be excusing myself.”
Jack decided to skip shaking Tyson’s roach-crusted hand. “Thanks, Artie. You were thoughtful enough to visit my office. I wanted to repay the courtesy. I’ll see you around.”
Jack had turned his back and taken the two steps necessary to reach for the knob when he heard a chair screech hard and hit the wall. He spun around.
“Interesting interrogation, McCall. Me, an ex-copper versus you, ex-king-shit spook.” The vein in Tyson’s temple twitched to its own rhythm. “I put four killers in the ground and another dozen in the can, and the city threw me out like I was garbage.”
Tyson used the back of his hand to wipe away a stringy white substance that had bunched up at the corner of his mouth.
Jack moved closer, Tyson’s desk standing as a demilitarized zone. “I guess some of us just get the breaks, Artie. I’m leaving now, unless you have something else you wanna say.”
Tyson hacked again and leaned toward his spittoon, then swung his head around and spit whatever he had brought up onto Jack’s face.
Jack wiped his face with his hand, wiped his hand on his shirt, and wiped Tyson’s grin with his fist. The fat gumshoe went down like a puppet without strings.
The surveillance equipment stacked in the corner beside the room’s one file cabinet was the same kind that had been installed in the office of Dr. Karros.
Jack left Arthur Tyson, Private Investigator, after dumping the contents of his spittoon over him from grin to groin.
Chapter 35
Jack stopped at home, tore off his shirt, threw it away, took a quick shower, and changed into a fresh pair of slacks and a shirt he had just picked up at the cleaners. He was meeting Max for lunch. While sliding his feet into a pair of black loafers, Drummy called.
“Your place was clean, but I hit the jackpot at Nora’s. There was a wireless near her living room phone and another in the bedroom. The conversations pass to a CD in a micro recorder hidden in some rocks out front so he can swap it out without having to get inside her place.”
“That doesn’t sound like the kind of stuff you found at Dr. Karros’s.”
“For sure, this equipment is up to date. The CD will hold a ton.”
“Anyway to trace it?”
“I’m still here; you want it out?”
Jack rubbed his chin. “We have to assume it was put there by the blackmailer. What’s your guess on why the equipment is more state-of-the-art than what we found in Karros’s office?”
“The easy answer is two different installers; but this kind of work isn’t usually a team sport. One thing that is certain, the guy who would use what’s here wouldn’t be caught dead using the junk in the doctors’ offices. The two may not be related. This one could be a curious lover. Is Nora dating anyone in the business?”
“Not that I know of. Let’s leave it in place. Since Benny Haviland was killed, maybe the blackmailer got a new electronics man. Then again, Haviland could have planted the bugs making a new installer necessary. Maybe his loot from the blackmailings let him upgrade. We could guess all day. Whoever it is, he’ll be eager to keep up with what’s on it. I’ll alert Nora. Maybe we can use it to flush him out. There are some trees in front of her place. Can you set up a camera so we can see whoever comes for it?”
“Piece of cake. And I’ll bring you a remote that will let Nora check from inside the house to see if any pictures have been taken.”
The restaurant where Jack was meeting Max had a counter with round stools and a dozen or so booths covered with red checkered oilcloths. The menu featured sandwiches named after Hollywood stars. The place was a throwback to the days when if it wasn’t cooked on a grill, it came out of a deep fryer, so the food tasted great. Every time Jack drove by, the place was packed with people breathing grease and treating their mouths to a good time.
Jack ordered his usual, the Humphrey Bogart. Max’s choice, a hotdog named the George Hamilton. They both backed up their sandwiches with a Killian Red Ale. He brought Max current on the investigation before saying, “You made quite an impression on Mary Lou. Thanks for handling the biker.”
“You’ve seen his type, boss, loud and nasty disguised as tough.”
“I’m just glad you came by when you did.”
“You know, if I’d have called in Metro for the assault on Mary Lou, Phoebe Ziegler might still be alive.”
“Max, you know better than to armchair quarterback these things. Hell, I could say the same. If I had given Suggs Donny’s confession that named George Rockton as one of his goons that beat me up, Rockton might’ve been arrested. In either event, the biker would have been out on bail fast and might well have still raped and murdered Phoebe Ziegler. This thinking also assumes the blackmailer had no other muscle than Rockton, and we don’t know that either.”
“That’s good rationalizing, boss, but still—”
“Still nothing,” Jack said sharply. “The bottom line is we had an investigation underway regarding Dr. Chris Andujar. We knew of no credible threat to Phoebe, hell, no threat whatsoever. Rockton chose to commit a crime. No one is at fault for that but Rockton.”
The waitress, wearing a checkerboard apron that matched the oilcloths on the tables, brought them their orders. Max raised his Killian Red. “Here’s to confusion for all the enemies of the Irish.”
Jack raised his glass and they each took a drink.
“Okay, boss. I don’t figure you’re bribing me with this here George Hamilton just to talk about Mr. Smelly?”
“You’re right,” Jack said through a big grin. “I need to know about Mayor Patrick Molloy. Family background. Real stuff, without the public polish. The mayor’s Irish and you’re Scottish and Irish. You once told me that your families came here when you two were boys. You okay with my asking?”
“When we was kids the mayor and me was real chums, but for the past twenty-five years he’s acted like he never knew me. I got no grudge, but I
got no problem telling you what I know. It’s all ancient history though.”
Max, not a guy for those fancy mustards, lathered his dog in plain yellow, sprinkled on onions, and suffocated it with pickle relish. Max looked up. “What? A man has to eat his greens.” He winked and took a first bite.
“Ancient history is exactly what I’m after,” Jack said. “I need a peak at the real guy.”
“My family and Patrick Molloy’s family left Chicago for DC on my ninth birthday. Patrick was a few months younger than me—still is fer that matter. Before we was born, Patrick’s daddy, Sean Molloy, and my pa, Alastair Logan, met in Chicago where they both worked for the Irish racketeer Dion O’Banion. In the beginning they both drove beer trucks. My pa stayed a driver, saying he had to provide for his family and that the silliness of prohibition made it okay to deliver for a bootlegger. Sean Molloy, the way my pa told me, let his ambitions reshape his sense of right and wrong, and over time Sean moved up in O’Banion’s mob from driver to enforcer to all-around hooligan.”
Max paused to take the second bite of his George Hamilton. By the length left, Jack estimated that for Max a hot dog took three bites. When the waitress came by, Max, busy chewing, hand signaled for another Hamilton dog.
Jack picked up the second half of his Bogey, a dill rye sandwich made with meat loaf cooked with cut up carrots and mixed-in cheese and layered with slices of bread-and-butter pickles. Along with the sandwich the place served pan-fried, diced new potatoes that Max explained in South Ireland were called English Queens.
“Wasn’t O’Banion the competing bootlegger Al Capone had gunned down in a flower shop?”
“That’d be O’Banion.” Max’s second dog arrived and he set to dressing it while he talked. “In the mid-twenties, three killers, probably out-of-town talent so they wouldn’t be recognized, walked into O’Banion’s flower shop like they was customers. One guy shook O’Banion’s hand to keep him from drawing his piece while the other two pumped O’Banion full of lead. After that, our papas went to work for Bugs Moran, a half Irishman who took over O’Banion’s mob.
