by Craig Rice
“Since when,” Joe the Angel said, and hung up.
Malone sighed, tucked the money in his wallet, and told Maggie, “Now, I’ve got to produce.”
“Go back to worrying,” she said, and went out.
Malone put his head back on his arms and worried about how he’d lost that much in last night’s poker game, what he was going to do about the young di Angelos, and where next month’s office rent was coming from. He was wakened from a dream of utter darkness by a discreet knock at the door.
“Malone,” Maggie whispered. “Another client, and it looks important, and for the love of heaven, comb your hair and straighten your tie.”
The little lawyer roused himself, scooted to the cupboard washbasin, and did the best he could. He was sitting behind his desk when Maggie ushered the woman in.
She was a king-sized Amazon, and beautiful. Malone stood up from behind his desk and estimated her height at a little less than the Empire State building. He took a second look and decided she was only about five feet eleven. Her hair was blonde, her face was lovely. Her clothes were definitely not from a department store basement.
“Mr. Malone,” she said, “I’m Nadine Sapphire.”
“A beautiful name,” the little lawyer said gallantly, “for a beautiful woman.”
She smiled, sat down, and became only half the size of the Empire State Building.
“I wish my husband had as beautiful a one,” she said. “His name is Jackson Kornblum. He’s an artist. I mean, he paints pictures, I suppose that makes him an artist. And he has ten thousand dollars that belong to me.”
Malone felt a quickening down his spine. What had Eddie said? “A big lady, and very pretty.”
“Go on, my dear,” he said, and hoped his voice was not as hoarse as it felt.
“We’d quarreled. We’d been quarreling a lot, but this was the finish. I’d brought the money home, in cash, that afternoon, and put it in a tin box on the bookcase, to take to the bank the next day. He wouldn’t let me touch it. He put me out of the house.”
Malone took another look at his client and decided Jackson Kornblum must be about the size and shape of Samson. He looked sympathetic, “You poor girl.”
“That was day before yesterday,” she said. “He won’t send me the money, and I don’t want to go out there alone. That’s why I came to you. I suppose I could take a policeman with me, but I think a lawyer would be better. After all, it’s my money. I earned it.”
“None of my business,” Malone said, “but how?”
She looked as though he should have known, “I’m a lady wrestler.”
Malone managed, with an almost superhuman effort, not to look surprised.
“Well, will you come with me?”
He rose and said, “What are we waiting for?”
Her car was waiting downstairs, and she drove it expertly. The little lawyer had a feeling she would do everything just as expertly.
The house was just as the young di Angelos had described it, a small house, surrounded by trees and bushes, in that section where the city was about to become suburbs. It was, Malone noted, still within the city limits. That meant the murder was in von Flanagan’s jurisdiction, which was good. Von Flanagan occasionally gave him a bad time, but suburban police were worse.
They walked up to the front door and she fumbled for her keys. Well, Malone told himself, this was as good a way as any to discover the body.
They went in. There wasn’t any body to discover.
Malone blinked.
There wasn’t even an indication that a body had even been there.
Maybe the di Angelos had been mistaken. Maybe Jackson Kornblum had just been konked on the head hard enough to knock him cold, had come to, and walked away. But Malone didn’t think so. Young as they were, the di Angelos would have been able to tell if a man were dead or not.
“He isn’t in,” Nadine Sapphire said in a tone of relief.
She looked through the house, Malone looked around the room. A big room, full of pictures. A hardly adequate description. The pictures made him shudder a little, even if he couldn’t tell what they were supposed to represent. He imagined Jackson Kornblum had painted them. Certainly, he wouldn’t have bought them. No one in his right mind would have bought them.
“No, he isn’t here,” she said, coming back in the room.
She walked over to the bookcase, picked up the tin box and opened it.
“But the money is,” she said happily. She counted it. “It’s all here. Ten one thousand dollar bills.”
Malone’s mind was whirling like a merry-go-round. The di Angelos had been telling the truth. The body had been here and the money gone. Now the body was gone and the money was here.
Were the di Angelos crazy, or was he?
His gaze caught a framed photograph on the bookcase, a thin-faced man with small eyes, set close together, and a small beard.
“Is this him?” he asked.
Nadine Sapphire nodded. “That’s him. The rat.” She stuffed the money in her purse. “Let’s be on our way.”
Halfway to the Loop she said, “You’ve been very kind. I suppose your fee should be ten percent.”
“Miss Sapphire,” Malone said, “you’ve taken up a very little of my time, on a morning when I had nothing to do anyway. I’ve had a very pleasant drive on a beautiful day. Let’s see—my fee has been paid.”
She shot a sharp glance at him.
“The pleasure,” he said, “of meeting a real lady wrestler. First time in my life.”
She laughed. “All right. Then let me send you tickets to the match tonight.”
“A deal,” Malone said.
Back in his office, he worried about the whole thing. Finally he called up Joe the Angel. The boys should be at their destination by now. He got the telephone number in Milwaukee and put a call through, and got Eddie on the wire.
Were they absolutely sure the man was dead? Were they absolutely sure the money was gone?
Eddie’s voice was hurt. “Mr. Malone, don’t you believe us? Naturally we’re sure.”
“Just wanted to double check,” the little lawyer said soothingly.
“Is anything gone wrong?” Eddie asked anxiously.
“Not as far as you’re concerned,” Malone reassured him. He hung up.
Well, that one hopeful theory was out. That Kornblum had hidden the money in a safer place. That someone had knocked him cold enough to look dead. That he’d come to, put the money back in the box, and gone out.
Everytthing would have been so easy if it had happened that way. The di Angelos could have come back from Milwaukee, Nadine Sapphire would have her money and all he, Malone, would have had to do was forget the whole thing and go to the wrestling matches.
But it hadn’t worked out that way.
The phone rang and he picked it up with an inexplicable sense of apprehension.
“Malone? Rico di Angelo. I want you to come over right away. I got a trouble.”
Another di Angelo. Where did Rico, Joe’s cousin, who owned the undertaking parlor on North Avenue, fit into this tangle?
Malone said, “I’ll be right over.”
He paused in the outer office and said “If any more di Angelos get into this rat race, I’m going to Alaska.”
He took a cab to the ornate establishment and walked in. Rico was waiting for him, his usually cheerful face pale with anxiety.
“Malone,” he said without preliminary, “I got a body. A corpse.”
“Well,” the lawyer said with false cheerfulness, “I thought that was your business.”
“You don’t understand,” Rico said. “I don’t know how I got this body.”
“You’re damned right I don’t understand,” Malone said. He took out a cigar, started to unwrap it, and put it back in his pocket.
“Somebody, they break in my place last night,” Rico said. “I see it when I get here. I think, I been robbed. I don’t worry. No money here to steal. I look around and I fin
d it. The body.”
He looked at Malone with a kind of helpless anguish. “Nothing stolen. Nothing missing. But somebody leaves me a body.”
“Whose?” Malone asked savagely.
Rico shrugged his shoulders. “No clothes. No wallet. Nothing. Just a body. On the slab, covered with one of my sheets. What are we going to do?”
“First,” Malone said, “we’ll take a look at this body.”
He had a horrible premonition that was turning his stomach into what felt like an ice-cube tray.
Rico led him into the back room, where a sheeted form lay on the slab. “There it is,” Rico said. He pulled back the sheet.
The premonition had been right. A thin face, eyes too close together, a soft little brown beard.
“Whose was it, Malone?” Rico whispered. “Where did it come from and how did it get here” He sighed noisily. “I run a nice little business here, I never get in no trouble. Malone, what do I do now?”
Malone was silent for a moment. Again he reached for the cigar, again he put it back.
“I know whose body it is, and I know where it came from. I don’t know how it got here, but I know what we’re going to do. We’re going to break out your hearse and we’re going to put it back where it came from.”
“Malone,” Rico said, “you are my friend. Any time you want flowers free, to give to one of your girls—”
“Forget it,” Malone said. He went back into the front room. He saw that there was an ashtray, unobtrusive, but nevertheless an ashtray, and decided it was not against etiquette to light the cigar. He could hear Rico talking in rapid Italian to his assistant. He could hear sounds of movement.
At last Rico came to the door and said, “All packed. Let’s go.”
Malone followed him out to the alley and slid into the front seat of the ambulance.
“I think this better than the hearse,” Rico said. “Not so much noticed.” He stepped on the gas. “George, he is in back with the patient.” He grinned.
Malone gave him the address and said, “Let’s not use the siren. Also because we’ll be not so much noticed.”
He tried to think things out. Anyway he looked at it, it added up to one of those mathematical problems that could only be solved by a wall-wide electric machine with two thousand push buttons.
Jackson Kornblum had been a smallish man. (Malone suddenly remembered Nadine Sapphire saying, “He put me out of the house.” The little lawyer wondered just how he’d done it.) But even so, it would have taken a fairly strong person to carry him out of the house, probably into a car, and then carry him into Rico di Angelo’s undertaking parlor. A reasonably husky man could have done it. Or a lady wrestler.
But she’d seemed genuinely surprised when the body was missing.
Had she killed him? She had the strength to crack a man’s skull, which was what had happened to Kornblum. Had she killed him and arranged an elaborate shenanigan with him to go out to the house, so that she would have a witness—a lawyer—present when the body was discovered?
Had it happened that way, and had someone else moved him to Rico’s? Why? And who had put the money back in the tin box, and where had it been in the meantime?
And where were Jackson Kornblum’s clothes? Had they been taken off to avoid identification? But in that case, why bother to break into an undertaking parlor, and leave the body there? Why not just dump it in a ditch somewhere?
Finally, why had Jackson Kornblum been killed?
Malone sighed loudly.
Rico said anxiously “I go too fast for you, yes?”
“You don’t go too fast for me, no,” Malone said.
Fortunately the Kornblum house was in a sparsely settled section. No one seemed to notice the ambulance as it pulled up through the trees and stopped by the front door. Malone got out and tried to remember how the young di Angelos had broken in. The bedroom window. He walked around the house, found the window with the cut screen, and crawled in. The pictures leered at him as he walked through the living room, he tried to avoid looking at them.
He opened the front door. Rico and his assistant carried in the late Mr. Kornblum.
“Here,” Malone said. “On the floor.”
Rico frowned and looked a little shocked. “Not on the bed.”
Malone shook his head. “The floor.”
Rico shrugged his shoulders and obeyed.
“We’re taking the sheet back with us,” the lawyer said.
Rico picked up the sheet, folded it. “He doesn’t have no clothes on.”
“He’s not going to get cold,” Malone said grimly. “Let’s get out of here before somebody drives by and wonders what an ambulance is doing parked in the front yard.”
As they neared downtown Rico said, “I drive you to your office.”
“Not in this you won’t,” Malone said hastily. “I too have my special standing. Just drop me where I can get a taxi. And forget all this ever happened.”
Rico sighed. “Maybe I lose a good customer.”
“Maybe we’ll get him back for you,” Malone told him.
The tickets were in an envelope on his desk when he reached the office. He looked at them thoughtfully. An idea, not much of a one, but something, was beginning to form in his mind. He picked up the phone and called the Milwaukee number.
“Eddie,” he said, “it’s okay to come back. And come back right away. I think you can give me some help.”
He hung up and called Maggie.
“Get two more of these,” he said, waving the tickets at her. “I’m treating some young friends to the matches tonight. And then—” He fished for the paper on which he’d written the address of the Kornblum house, found it, and handed it to her. “Find out what precinct this is in. Call that precinct, report a body at this address, and hang up fast. Then get hold of Charlie Stein for me and tell him to get over here fast.”
He wasn’t sure if he was accomplishing anything, but he wasn’t losing ground.
It was less than half an hour before Charlie Stein arrived. He was a dapper little man with a waxed mustache, who was a one man Dun and Bradstreet—except that he worked faster. For the most part his customers were bookies and proprietors of gambling houses who wanted to know how far their clients’ credit could be trusted. Malone never had figured how he could get his information, but he could ferret out the finest details, and when necessary, in a hurry.
“H’ya, boy,” he greeted Malone. “Got a drink in the house?”
Malone opened the filing drawer marked “Emergency” and pulled out the bottle of gin, and two glasses.
Charlie toasted him silently and said, “What can I do for you, boy?”
“Find out everything about a guy named Jackson Kornblum. Bank accounts, insurance, the works.”
“Can do,” Charlie said. “How soon?”
“I’d like it in ten minutes,” Malone said, “but, well, fast as you can make it.”
“Fast it is,” Charlie said. He tossed off the rest of the gin. “See you this afternoon.” He flicked an imaginary speck of dust from the carnation in his lapel.
Malone slipped him one of the two hundred dollar bills he’d received from Joe the Angel.
“Thank you, boy,” he said, and was off.
An idea was beginning to form slowly in Malone’s mind. So far it hadn’t taken any definite shape nor form. It was like jello that still had to be poured in the mold, but it was there.
He picked up the phone and called von Flanagan, at Homicide.
Von Flanagan wasn’t in. Malone identified himself, swore it was a matter of vital importance, and where could he reach von Flanagan. After a few minutes wait he was given an address he immediately recognized as that of the Kornblum house.
Well, there was nothing to do until Charlie Stein came back, and a little refreshment and human companionship might help the idea to jell.
He paused in the outer office. Maggie said, “The tickets arrived by messenger. And since when have you taken up wrestlin
g?”
“Not wrestling,” the little lawyer told her, “wrestlers. There’s a distinction. I’m going out on business. I’ll be back in an hour.”
She sniffed. “If anything important comes up, I’ll call you at Joe the Angel’s.”
It was not the first, nor even the hundredth time that Malone had sought Joe the Angel’s City Hall Bar as a refuge from troubles and a place to compose his thoughts. He slid onto a stool at the far end of the bar, waved at Joe, and said, “Rye.”
Joe slid it in front of him, and as Malone reached for his wallet, held up a protesting hand.
“Today, on the house.”
“Thanks,” Malone said. He downed his drink, reached for his beer chaser. “I phoned the boys that they can come back from Milwaukee.”
“They’re all okay?” Joe the Angel said happily, refilling the glass.
“All okay,” Malone told him.
For an anxious moment he thought Joe the Angel was going to kiss him, in front of a janitor from the City Hall, a Tribune reporter, and assorted patrons. He protected himself by getting the second drink down fast. His glass had hardly touched the bar before Joe the Angel filled it again.
“You know what happen, Malone?”
“Not quite,” Malone said, “but I will.” He hoped he was telling the truth. “I just know they’ll be in the clear.”
Joe the Angel turned to the City Hall janitor and said, “This Malone, he’s smart like a judge.”
“This gal who hired the boys,” Malone said casually, “you ever see her before?”
Joe nodded. “She come in now and then, have one small drink wine, say good night, go out again.”
“Any idea who she is?”
Joe shook his head. “Me, I don’t ask my customers their names. I know now who she is, I think. The boys tell me when they come in this morning, she married to that fella got killed. I don’t know his name. I don’t know her name.”
His tone indicated that he would just as soon not know, that he was through with the whole matter. He shoved the bottle of rye in front of Malone, said, “Help yourself,” and went away to wait on a new customer.
Malone sat brooding. The idea was beginning to jell a little, but not much.
He’d been thinking that sending the two young di Angelos out to the Kornblum house on what turned out to be a fool’s errand had been intended as a cover up for murder. He decided now that didn’t make sense. If the plan had been to have the di Angelos caught with the corpse, there would have been some arrangement to catch them. This way, no one could prove they had ever been near the place.
