Terry sat on the receptionist’s desk and read the notes, all neatly typed, and handed the pages to Cassidy as he finished each one.
A lot of it was mumbo jumbo. A lot of it wasn’t.
The previous October Max Bauman had gone to see Dr. Epstein complaining of dizzy spells, extremely painful headaches, fainting spells, short-term memory lapses, loss of his sense of taste, increasing loss of the sense of smell. The symptoms had been coming on for six months or so. Dr. Epstein had run a torrent of tests and diagnosed the problem. A Dr. Wagenecht had even done a little digging in Max’s cranium while his friends had thought he was on a sudden, urgent business trip to Arizona right before Halloween. The hairpiece must have been used to cover the scars. He hadn’t been thinning down for Cindy Squires. He was losing weight because he was dying. An inoperable, malignant brain tumor in an advanced stage.
According to Maurice Epstein, Max Bauman wasn’t going to see the spring of 1944.
According to Maurice Epstein, Max Bauman’s brain was in a kind of violent convulsive state. He’d prescribed a couple of drugs which might calm him down but Epstein noted that he was afraid Max wouldn’t take the medication since it might also turn him into something indistinguishable in all the ways that mattered from a Hubbard squash. The doctor’s fear, he confided, to his file, was that Mr. Bauman could possibly—given the nature of his personality and the symptoms already observed—lose himself in erratic, uncontrollable, violent rages …
Maurice Epstein sure had Max’s number.
If Max was about to go, he might just as well take as many folks with him as he could.
Chapter Fifteen
FATE IS FUNNY.
Olive Naismith woke up early and couldn’t get back to sleep. Her job interested her and she realized she could start rearranging the files if she went into work right away, before anybody else got there, so she was the first person to arrive for work in the Dalmane Building the next day. Because she was so conscientious she killed a man before she opened the office door. She did it but the crazy part of it was that she didn’t know she’d done it. It was all a bad joke.
Midmorning. Terry was already on his second cigar and the office was thick with blue smoke. They were trying to devise some plan to deal with Max. They weren’t having much luck. Cindy was still safe in the country, if not in Cassidy’s heart, which felt like the A train had run over it, and maybe Max was still hoping she was in Boston visiting her brother. But, inevitably, he would start looking for Bryce Huntoon … Soon. Very soon. Terry was blowing giant smoke rings.
“Everything’s different now, that’s the problem,” Cassidy said.
Terry nodded glumly.
“We gave Huntoon to Max because you could talk Max out of actually going after him with a tommy gun. Now we know that we’re dealing with a different, new Max, a Max with his brain in the red zone. So everything’s quite different.”
Terry nodded again, crossed his Florsheims on top of his leather-rimmed desk blotter. “But the idea is still the same. Once Huntoon gets out of town, gets back to Washington, the pot comes off the boil.”
“Suppose—just suppose—Max figures out you can get to Washington from New York, what then?”
“I say out of sight, out of mind. Maybe Bryce is gone already. I’ve had Olive ringing him all morning. No answer.” He fell silent.
“He’d be safer in England,” Cassidy said. “Do you think Ike could use him? I’ll bet Bryce would have lots of good ideas about invading Europe … or maybe combat in the South Pacific. He’d be better off taking his chances with the Japs—”
“Relax, Lew. It’s gonna be okay. Maybe Max’ll die—hey, you never thought of that. One of those half-assed out-of-his-head rages, breaks a couple of billiard cues over Bennie’s metal head and, wham, apoplexy … he drops dead. Don’t give up hope. Could happen.”
They were still sitting in morbid silence pinning their hopes on an apoplectic stroke when Otto Birdall, the building maintenance super, showed up. He was white as the driven slush and his mouth was dry. He kept licking his lips and it didn’t do any good. He said he had something he wanted them to see. He’d come to them first because they were detectives. He said it was the goldarnedest thing he’d ever seen and he’d seen plenty in his day. He said they couldn’t take the elevator down. He’d had to shut it off. So they walked down, not so easy for Cassidy with his stick.
They followed Otto down the stairway to the lobby, then through another metal door and down the utility stairs to the basement. The boilers made the concrete room an inferno. They all began sweating right away. They went through another metal door and down a final flight of steel stairs to the subbasement. “Over here,” Birdall puffed, pointing through an ancient brick keystone arch caked black with coal dust. The air contained particles of dust and the whole place shook with the rumble of subway trains. He flipped a switch. “In there. You go look. Once is enough for me.”
They stepped into a narrow kind of pit which housed the base of the elevator shaft. The steel frame bounding the shaft at ankle level was sunk into concrete. Just above their heads were the protrusions from the frame that marked the farthest point of the cage’s descent. At that level the door would open into the basement. All of which was well and good but who cared? What mattered lay at their feet, tied with heavy, greasy rope to the bottom frame of the elevator’s skeleton.
The rope was tied tightly both to the frame and a man’s ankles. It had rubbed through his socks and bitten into the flesh all the way to the bone. The crosspiece of the frame was bowed slightly as if pulled out of shape by Charles Atlas. The rest of the body was wearing an army officer’s uniform, one of about a million wandering around New York.
Then came the bad part. The smell of blood was everywhere. The uniform was soaked with all the indignities of his death, the blood and urine and feces. Cassidy couldn’t imagine what had happened to the top of the guy. There wasn’t any head. The body lay crumpled and at the shoulders just a terrible, spongy, bloody mess, like nothing he’d ever seen in his worst nightmares. It was like a battlefield casualty. There were sharp collarbones jabbed up through his coat, splintered to the width of chopsticks and ripping the woolen fabric. Something which might have been part of his spine stuck up out of the pulp which had once been a throat. He turned away but not before that one indescribable horror had impressed itself on his mind. He knew it would be there forever.
“Now, lookee here,” Otto Birdall said from behind them. He pulled a lever which reactivated the elevator. The motor clanged on and it began its slow descent from far above. When it reached the level of the first floor, Cassidy thought he saw something moving, swinging like a hanging fern, from the bottom of the cage. It kept coming closer until the cage reached the brakes and stopped with a jolt a couple of feet above their heads. There was something hanging there, all right.
Terry gagged reflexively and Cassidy heard him exercising his will, grinding his teeth. Cassidy tasted bile. His mouth was about to turn inside out. The blackthorn stick slipped from his hand and clattered on the frame. Otto Birdall retrieved it, handed it to him. Terry gave in and puked on the gritty floor, stood gagging.
A head dangled from a rope tied to the undercarriage of the elevator cage. A head which looked like a ghoul’s handiwork, distorted almost beyond recognition. A head and some stuff hanging from it, bloody, shredded stuff. The eyes had come loose, burst from their sockets, hung like wet marbles on the cheeks. The sockets were dark and clotted. The face was empurpled with exploded veins. Teeth had bitten through the lips, through the rags which had been jammed into the mouth. The skull gleamed through the rips in the pink, lacerated flesh. Still, even with the distortion of the death agony, Cassidy recognized the face.
Colonel Bryce Huntoon’s war was all over. It had indeed been hell.
It took awhile to piece it together.
Birdall called the police and they came and saw and turned the Dalmane Building into a stockade for the rest of the day. Cassid
y stayed out of it altogether and Terry acknowledged that he knew the deceased but had no idea why he’d been killed or why he’d met his end in the Dalmane Building. The cops wasted lots of time questioning everybody in the place.
The story came clear and, in the privacy of their office, Cassidy and Terry made their own additions and speculations. Pops Dunleavy, the night super, reported that Huntoon had come in late, around midnight, and said he was leaving a message for one of the tenants. He wanted to slip it under the door and Pops figured he was a bird colonel or a brigadier, somebody he sure as the devil wasn’t going to argue with.
Pops went on making some pin money cleaning up a couple of offices and about an hour later he heard several men, four he thought, leaving the building. He hadn’t been around for their arrival so he figured they’d come from one of the offices where they’d worked late. He hadn’t seen the colonel again, assuming he’d left.
Elmo Andretti had been up at Heliotrope waiting for Max and his praetorian guard to show up but they hadn’t. Elmo had debated dropping by the office but it was one o’clock in the morning and he’d had a brutal day. So he went home, thus avoiding pressing the up button which would have torn Huntoon’s head from his body.
Terry and Cassidy had stopped at Muldoon’s for a beer and a cheeseburger after reading Dr. Epstein’s file on Max Bauman. They, too, had gone home. Cassidy had lain in bed thinking about Cindy, wanting to call her, wanting to hear her voice, knowing he mustn’t … while Bryce Huntoon had struggled helplessly, hopelessly, through the watches of the night, waiting for someone to push that button, knowing what would happen … waiting, waiting, waiting for the inevitable. Waiting to die.
Waiting for sweet little Olive, who came to work so early.
Terry sat smoking one of the Havanas, savoring each puff, looking fondly at it like he might at a particularly toothsome chorus girl.
“You know, Lew,” he said, “I’d never have believed Max could do such a thing. A killing is one thing. But what he did to Bryce …” He shuddered under the neat gray pinstripe. “Why?”
“Love. And that thing eating up his brain. He’s gone over, all the way over.”
“Like Irish Billy Worley, six, seven years ago? Ate all those folks out on Staten Island?”
Cassidy nodded. “He’s just a killing machine now, that’s all. He killed Huntoon not to get rid of Cindy’s boyfriend. He killed him the worst way he could because he was punishing him.” He blinked at Terry. “Punishment is scary.”
“Punishment is crazy.” He looked up and frowned. “You know what this means, of course—”
Cassidy frowned back at him. All he could think of was the dangling head, the stuff hanging out of it, and what Max might do to Cindy. But she was safe. There was no way Max could know where she was.
“It means,” Terry went on, “that Max is not long for this world, one way or the other. And you know what that means? That means I’m gonna run out of these cigars. Lew, the man has treated me like a son. Do you realize what he’s done for me, Lew? He’s fixed it with the guys in the humidor room at Dunhill for me to go in and make withdrawals from his private stock. No greater love hath Max. But what happens when Max croaks? He’s got an inventory of four, five thousand of these babies in the humidor room … who’ll get ’em? Are they in his will? What if I’m cut off? Shit!” He stood up and began pacing.
“Frankly, Terry, I don’t give a damn.”
“You have no sense of proportion.”
“Beyond the matter of Max’s cigars, what do you think we should do? What do you do with a killing machine?”
“What a question!” He paced to the window and stood looking down on Vanderbilt Avenue and Grand Central.
“Don’t jump,” Cassidy said. “You might land on some innocent.”
“As you say, my old friend, there are no innocents—”
Olive appeared in the doorway.
“Mr. Leary, there’s a call for you—”
“Tell ’em they’re five minutes too late, he just jumped out the goddamn window—”
“It’s Mr. Bauman,” she whispered intently, pointing at the phone.
“Oh, Lord,” he said, “why me?” He turned to the window, tapped the pane of glass, spoke to it: “Don’t go away, I’ll be right back.”
Cassidy carefully lifted his own telephone, listened.
“Max,” Terry said. “Top o’ the mornin’. Or afternoon, I guess—”
“Terry, I wanted to thank you again for your help last night. I’m afraid I wasn’t myself, not feeling too well.” He sounded fine now.
“I hope you’re better today—”
“Oh, yes, I recover very quickly. I can’t pretend that I found our conversation anything but deeply upsetting. But that, as the man said, is life.” It was hard to remember that he was dying, that he’d cracked last night, that he’d done what he did to Huntoon.
“Have you heard, by the way,” Terry said, “about Bryce Huntoon’s misfortune last evening? He just went to pieces, you might say, right here in our building. Awful mess. They’re still wiping him up. Got tangled in the undercarriage of our elevator.”
“Yes. I know about that.” Cassidy heard him breathing at the other end of the line.
“Let’s not bullshit each other, Max. You shouldn’t have done that, it was a bad thing to do. You’re gonna get Bennie all worried about getting into Heaven again.”
“I wasn’t aware you were so concerned about the Colonel’s well-being. Or Bennie’s chances in the Great Hereafter—”
“I wasn’t,” Terry said. “But you had me set up for the killing. I resent that. It makes me feel like a heel.”
“You are something of a heel, Terry.” Max chuckled softly. “I’ve always liked that about you. What did you think? I was going to give the man a mention in dispatches? Nonsense, I say. It was a battlefield execution. A traitor. One thing a man learns, you have a problem, it’s always best to attend to it and move on.” His voice had begun to grow shrill. It was like hearing a banshee. “It was necessary to make an example of Colonel Huntoon. I don’t enjoy being betrayed, I’ve never minced words about that. The man paid the price for his traitorous nature. As will anyone else who betrays me … Is that clear?” He was almost screaming, then stopped abruptly. He was panting.
Terry bored in. “I hear you were there in person for the festivities. Nice touch.”
“Why would you find it wise to provoke me, son?” Max’s voice had dropped to a normal, conversational tone. “Ask yourself, is it a wise stratagem?” There was a long pause. Cassidy looked at Terry. His knuckles were white, grinding at the telephone. “I want you to understand what happened last night. Look at it from my point of view. I was there to make sure the man knew why he’d come to such grief. He needed to see that he was paying the piper. Do you see that, Terry? Of course, he was in perfectly good health when I last saw him—”
“Yeah. He had plenty of time to think things over—”
“That was the point, wasn’t it, Terry?”
“I suppose it was.”
“You see, I knew you’d understand. Now, I also wanted to tell you I’d be coming by personally to deliver the check. Little enough for a job well done. Wait for me, please. Then I’m going up to Boston to find Cindy. I’ll surprise her—”
“Why not just leave her alone?”
“Think about it, son, you’ll see it just doesn’t make any sense. What I’ve done, I’ve done for her. She must realize the painful consequences of her acts. It’s a part of growing up, isn’t it? I’m going to have a nice talk with her. Perhaps I’ll meet her brother, take a walk through the Yard. Yes, I’m looking forward to it, now that we’ve cleared up our little, problem.” He sounded avuncular now, benevolent. “Give my best to Lew. Wait for me in the office, will you? I’m looking forward to paying you off. A cashier’s check, how does that sound?” He chuckled again.
“See you,” Terry said, and hung up.
Terry wasn’t smiling or laug
hing and his cigar was dead in his mouth.
“Boston,” Cassidy said. “He’s not going to like what he finds in Boston. Nothing.”
Terry nodded.
“He’s bound to come looking for her. We’re the ones who’ve been watching her. He’s going to come ’round asking us questions … You know what he’s going to think?”
“I’ll bite,” Terry said. “Tell me.”
“He’s going to feel betrayed.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that.”
“I want to be with Cindy until this is over,” Cassidy said.
“Look, there’s no way he can find her—”
“Where there’s a will there’s a way. I’d feel bad if he did and I wasn’t there—”
“You might feel worse if you are there. Take your gun.”
“That house is full of guns.”
“Don’t argue, okay? Take the gun.”
“What about you?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, shook his head. “I’ll wait for Max and see what happens. No point in running away from good old Max and his ten grand.” He slapped Cassidy on the back. “Don’t worry, amigo. I’ll be okay. If I can’t outthink Max and the Three Stooges, I’m done, anyway. Go on, get going, Lew. Go keep the maiden safe. I’ll see you later.”
It began snowing while he walked to the parking lot. Big soft flakes, wet, heavy. The sky was dark, the way it looks in the summer when a storm is about to hit. The wind was bitter, killing.
It wasn’t easy sorting out his feelings about Cindy. Even if he wanted no part of her anymore, he still had to think of what to do with her. She was like a ticking bomb waiting to make a mess of everyone near her … but, hell, he couldn’t let Max have her …
Max hadn’t killed Huntoon, he’d butchered him. He was trying to scare everyone, give a warning, cleanse himself of the stench of betrayal. Maybe he was trying to settle accounts so he could die. He’d slipped so far into madness and evil that there was no pulling him back. He was in a killing frame of mind. He could kill and then chat on the telephone as if he’d just given a recalcitrant associate a stern dressing-down. When he learned that Cindy wasn’t in Boston, what kind of fit might overtake him?
Kiss Me Once Page 28
