by Anthony Rome
It was a woman’s voice that answered through the panel this time. There’d been other women’s voices. But this one said, “It’s me, Vic. Sally Bullock.”
I watched Rood unlock and open the door. The girl who slipped in was small and curvy in flowered toreador pants and a black sweater. Her face was pretty, but what her solid case of the jitters was doing to it wasn’t. Her jaws worked feverishly as she chewed at a wad of gum. She wasn’t enjoying the gum. She was overdue for her fix; the gum chewing was a pathetically inadequate attempt to pacify her burning nerves.
“You’re late for it,” Rood said as he shut the door.
“You’re telling me,” she snapped. “Come on, Vic. I’m in a hurry.”
“How much you want this time?”
Sally Bullock dug into a pocket of her toreador pants, fished out a wad of bills, slapped it in Rood’s waiting hand. “As much as this’ll buy me,” she said nervously.
Rood counted the bills, whistled. “This’ll buy you a couple weeks’ supply.”
“That’s what I need. I got to get out of town for a while. C’mon. Hurry.”
She watched greedily as he counted out capsules of heroin into a small brown grocery-store paper bag.
As he dropped in the last one, she said quickly, “I needa shoot-up right now. Can I use one’ve your needles?”
There’d been similar requests during my wait. Rood followed my instructions. “In the bathroom,” he said. He watched her go to it, but didn’t go with her. After she vanished into the bathroom, Rood looked at the bedroom door. He couldn’t see me through its narrow, dark opening, but he smiled nervously at me anyway like a bad boy seeking approval from his teacher after he’s been whipped into doing the right thing for a change.
When Sally Bullock came out of the bathroom she was a different girl. She moved with a lazy, feline grace. Her eyes were dreamy. Her lips smiled at a private joke.
“Bye now, Vic honey,” she murmured. “Won’t be seeing you for a couple of weeks.”
“Where’re you going?” Rood asked, and glanced again in my direction. He wanted to be sure I understood he was trying to help me.
“Away, away,” she chanted. “Vacation. My boy friend needs a vacation.” She giggled and drifted to the door. Rood opened it and she drifted out with her brown-paper bag full of the devil’s groceries.
I came out of the bedroom as Rood shut the door behind her. He turned to me eagerly. “Okay?”
“Fine,” I told him. “But look over there at that.”
Rood said “Huh?” and turned to look where I was pointing with my left hand.
I raised my right hand with my .38 in it and hit him behind the ear. He was a loose sprawl on the rug when I opened the apartment door and went out.
Sally Bullock was hip-switching her way to the end of the lighted lanai. I moved silently through the dark courtyard, keeping her in sight. She reached the sidewalk and turned left. As I eased up to one of the palms, edging the sidewalk, my hand was wrapped around the .38 in my pocket.
She was crossing the street diagonally in the middle of the block, walking quickly. I hesitated in the shadow of the tree. My Olds was parked on my side of the street. If she got into one of the cars parked on the other side, I wanted to be able to reach the Olds quickly enough to be on her tail before she drove out of sight.
But she didn’t head for any of the parked cars. She climbed the curb between two of them, hurried off along the opposite pavement, and vanished around the corner. I left the shelter of the palm and hurried across the street the way she had gone, strode up the pavement, and went around the corner after her.
Sally Bullock was jumping into a car as I came around the corner. It was a Chrysler convertible with the top down, facing my way with the motor running. In the light of the street lamp I could see the face of the man behind the wheel plainly. A thin face. A crooked nose. The limping man who’d made me lose Nimmo.
The light that showed him to me showed me to him. And he recognized me.
The Chrysler’s motor roared at the same time that I jumped toward the curb dragging the .38 from my pocket. The big car leaped forward. But not away from the curb. He was near enough for me to see the hard set of his face as he twisted the steering wheel. The front tires rammed the curb and mounted it with a bound. The car rocketed straight at me.
The gun in my hand seemed to go off by itself. I saw the spider web of cracks abruptly radiate out from the bullet hole in the windshield, saw his mouth strain wide open as I hurled myself out of the path of the hurtling car.
The side of the fender caught my hip. I was thrown high and spun like a top. I was still spinning through blackness when the rending crash of a couple tons of metal plowing into solid brick reached me. Then the pavement slammed into me and the blackness stopped spinning.
The wail of a distant siren racing nearer corkscrewed me up out of the blackness. My head hurt horribly and there were pains to match it traveling down my leg from my bruised hip. The rest of me just ached. I opened my eyes and found that I was sprawled in the gutter, with two uniformed cops standing over me and a crowd gathered around me and the Chrysler.
The car was across the pavement, with its engine accordioned into the brick wall of the comer building.
The man who’d driven the car—Catleg—was gone.
Sally Bullock hung over the hood like an abandoned rag doll. She’d gone through the windshield into the wall. What the glass and the brick had done to her made me want to close my eyes again and crawl back into the blackness.
I felt like Typhoid Mary. Wherever I went, I carried death with me. I touched people’s lives, and they died. First Turpin. Then Ruyter, Langley, and Oscar. And, almost, Kosterman. Now Sally Bullock. The worst of it was I knew she wasn’t the end of it . . .
CHAPTER
20
IT WAS FOUR in the afternoon when I left the lower Miami Beach police headquarters building. They’d been ready to let me go three hours earlier, but I’d been dead to the world on a cot in the station basement. Sleeping it off.
They’d given me a hard time for a while. Because I was all they had—outside of a dead girl, a smashed car with a bag of narcotics under the front seat, and the fact that the driver of the car had managed to vanish before the first cops arrived on the scene.
So once the police doctor said he’d seen men hurt worse than I was after they’d fallen down a flight of stairs, and pronounced me fit for questioning, the cops had crowded me. I’d had to give them part of the truth: That the driver of the car—a man I knew only as Catleg—had shot my client in Mayport. That I was working with the Mayport chief of police to catch Catleg. That when I’d caught him he’d tried to run me over.
A witness to the accident confirmed the part about the car trying to run me down. And Chief Patrick confirmed by phone that I’d been working for him.
The cops shifted their efforts to trying to find Catleg. They didn’t have any success in that direction either. My bullet had hit him. There was blood on the steering wheel, and it wasn’t Sally Bullock’s. The witness to the smashup had seen Catleg stagger away on foot and said he looked pretty badly hurt. The cops threw a dragnet around the area and combed it. They didn’t comb Catleg out of it. But an hour after the smashup, a man reported that his parked car had been stolen, three blocks from where Catleg had driven the Chrysler into the wall.
The Chrysler didn’t help either. It was registered to Sally Bullock. And the address she’d given on her driver’s license was a place she hadn’t lived in for a year.
Most of these facts came in after I had passed out on the cot in the basement of the station. Lieutenant Myers, in charge of the investigation, gave them to me after I rose from my hours of oblivion.
Myers accompanied me to the station entrance.
“You’re limping pretty bad,” he commented as I hobbled down the hall beside him. “How’s it feel?”
“Like it looks. Lousy.”
“That’s the kind of day t
his is. Lousy. A day like this I can do without.” Myers sighed theatrically. “A real nothing day. I got a wrecked car with a bag full of dope in it. I got a girl that’s dead. I got a professional killer—maybe named Catleg—that I can’t find. I got you that I’ve got to let go. I should’ve stayed home sick today. That’d look better on my record than anything I’m gonna make out of this case.”
“How’d a narcotics arrest do for your record?” I asked him.
He looked bored. “A user?”
“A pusher. Retail. But big.”
He began to look interested. “Ah, now. On a day like this, nothing that good could happen to me.”
“Vic Rood.” I told him the address. “By now he’ll have moved his stock out of the place. But maybe he forgot some of it. Look under the cushion of his living-room sofa.”
I bought a fresh shirt on my way to the Miller Building. I didn’t want to go to the Miller Building. What I wanted was to get on the Straight Pass and head for blue water—and forget the whole damned mess. But I steeled myself against it. There was a five-thousand-dollar bonus waiting for me, dimly seen through a fog of unanswered questions.
In the men’s room on the fifth floor of the Miller Building I shaved, washed, and changed to the new shirt. Then I went to my office and called Chief Patrick in Mayport. I filled him in on what had happened, and asked if there was any word from or about Rita Kosterman. There wasn’t. She’d vanished as thoroughly as Catleg.
I hung up and sat thinking about Kosterman’s missing wife for a time. Finally, I phoned Anne Archer at her hotel.
“Hi!” she said when I told her who I was. “I was wondering how you were getting along.” She sounded different, more relaxed and cheerful than at any time since I’d met her. “Keeping out of jail?”
“It’s touch and go,” I told her. “Have you by any chance heard from Rita Kosterman last night or today?”
“No. Why?”
“Just fishing for information.”
“Oh? Well, I have some for you. About me. My husband flew down from Detroit last night—repentant and eager for a reconciliation. And here’s another surprise for you. I’m not getting a divorce. He’s a louse. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned down here, it’s that so are all men, one way or another. So I’ve decided, what the hell, why not keep the louse I’ve got.”
“Sounds sensible,” I admitted.
“I’ve a hunch,” she said happily, “that Miami Beach is going to be a much nicer place for a second honeymoon than it was for waiting for a divorce.”
I wished her the best of luck.
Next, I put through a call to Nate Feldman in New York. “I ain’t had any sleep since you called me yesterday,” Feldman said when I got him on the phone. “If you tell me you’ve been fishing all this time, I’ll shoot myself.”
I said, “I’ve been having a grand time. What’ve you got for me?”
“Well, not the whole story yet on any of them. But here’s what I’ve got. Nothing on any guy named Catleg. On Jules Langley, the cops say he was working a racket with some call girls. Selling jewelry to their men friends. The men’d give the girls the jewelry; the girls’d give it back to Langley for a commission.”
“I know about that,” I told him. “What else?”
“Nimmo Fern, formerly Joe Furman, had some call girls working through him a couple years back for a while. His girls were some of the ones working the racket with Jules Langley. That’s Nimmo’s connection with Langley. All the connection I’ve turned up so far.”
“How about Rita Nielsen?”
“Her I’ve got practically nothing on. Except through what I heard about Nimmo Fern. But I’d guess she knocked around quite a bit before she married him.”
“Say that again?”
He said it again. “But that was five years ago. She walked out on him without a word about four years ago. Ain’t been heard from since, far as I know.”
“Anything else?” I asked absently, thinking about Rita and Nimmo. Suddenly, most of the questions had answers.
“One more thing,” Feldman told me. “You asked me to try to get you Nimmo Fern’s present Miami address. I got it.”
It was a lovely Mediterranean-style white cottage with a red tile roof, set like a jewel in a lush green, palm-shaded garden on one of the causeway islands in Biscayne Bay.
Night was cloaking the bay when I reached it.
There was light showing through one of the big windows.
I walked on the grass, making no sound as I reached the side of the cottage. I moved along the wall to the edge of the window that showed light and peeked inside at a large, beautifully furnished living room built on several levels around a massive stone fireplace.
There was only one person in that room. Rita Kosterman. That didn’t surprise me. She sat slumped in a deep chair, staring into the dark, empty mouth of the fireplace. I shifted away along the wall, around the corner of the cottage, looking into the other windows, listening. I saw no sign of anyone else inside.
But I kept my hand on the gun in my jacket pocket as I rang the front door chimes.
Rita Kosterman opened the door. She had a gun in her hand, pointed at me. Her eyes were wide when she opened the door, her face grimly expectant. When she saw me, her eyes went a little wider; expectancy changed to disappointment.
“Hello, Mrs. Kosterman,” I said gently. “Is Nimmo here?”
It took her a moment to recover enough to shake her head. “No,” she whispered. Her hand holding the gun sagged.
I stepped inside, brushing past her. I put my hand on the door, and when she let go of it, I closed it.
“Waiting for Nimmo?” I asked softly.
“Yes,” she said in a curious monotone.
I held out my hand toward her gun. “Better give me that, Mrs. Kosterman,” I said carefully.
She backed away quickly. But the gun was no longer pointed at me. She was just holding onto it. “No,” she said. “I’m going to kill him.”
“Are you that sure Nimmo’s the one who tried to get Kosterman killed?”
“Nobody else had any reason to.” She moved away from me cautiously to the chair in which I’d first seen her. She lowered herself into it wearily, holding the gun on her lap, watching me to make sure I didn’t take it from her.
I sat on the arm of a couch, facing her. “Tell me about it.”
She looked at me emptily, not answering.
“Then suppose I tell it,” I said. “It starts with the fact that you’re not really Kosterman’s wife. He doesn’t know you were already somebody else’s wife when you married him. Joe Furman, alias Nimmo Fern, is still your husband legally. You never got a divorce from him.”
“I couldn’t,” she said flatly. “And it didn’t matter, anyway. I was Rudy’s wife, except for some legal fine print. It didn’t hurt anybody.”
“Not until Anne Archer brought Nimmo out to your place for a party some five months back,” I said. “That was the bit of wild bad luck that tore it for you. You’d run out on Nimmo, because you were afraid if he found out about Kosterman he’d ruin it for you. That’s why you didn’t get a divorce from Nimmo; he’d have found out why you wanted it. It worked fine for you until Nimmo came out to The Island that day and found you in a bigamous marriage with Kosterman.”
I waited for her to say something. She didn’t. She just sat looking at me, holding onto the gun on her lap.
I went on: “So Nimmo started blackmailing you. He knew Jules Langley from New York, which gave him a perfect way to collect from you. If you’d started trying to slip him big hunks of money, Kosterman would have gotten curious and found out. This way he didn’t. You just began turning over all the jewels to Nimmo. And Langley had the phonies put in. Nimmo pocketed the profits from the real stones and split with Langley. It was a perfect setup for them. The gems weren’t even hot because no one knew they’d ever been stolen.
“No one ever would have known either. But then your stepdaughter went out
on a binge and lost that daisy pin. You saw it was missing when I brought Diana home and you put her to bed. You got scared and called Miami. Nimmo or Langley?”
“Nimmo,” Rita whispered.
“Uh-huh. And he contacted Langley, who got real upset. Because he and Nimmo were all set to profit double from those jewels by having you toss them in the drink and declare them stolen. Then Kosterman’d replace the jewels with the insurance money, and the switching of phony stones for the real ones could be done all over again. Right?”
She nodded, staring at me with feverish eyes.
“Langley got worried that the daisy pin with the fake stones would turn up sometime, and ruin the setup,” I went on. “So he set out to find the pin. First with Oscar. When they didn’t find the pin on me, he called you and told you what to do. You sent Diana to me to hire me to turn up the daisy pin. And when I went out to try to locate it, Nimmo was tailing me. With a killer named Catleg.”
Rita’s shoulders were sagging. All the fight seemed to be draining out of her. “I don’t know any Catleg. But the rest is true,” she said tonelessly. “What the hell’s the use . . . I knew it was all bound to come out. I’ve been waiting for everything to fall in on me ever since Anne brought Nimmo out to the house. There’s only one thing I want now.”
“To kill Nimmo?”
She nodded.
“Why’re you so sure he’s the one who hired Kosterman to be shot?”
“Who else would have a reason? Nimmo must have started thinking about all the money I’d inherit with Rudy dead.
And I’m still Nimmo’s legal wife. He must have been planning to use that to blackmail most of Rudy’s money away from me. And it’s all my fault he tried it. If I’d told Rudy the truth in the very beginning . . .”
She told it all to me then, in a torrent that had been dammed up four years too long: “I led a lousy life before I met Nimmo in New York. I’d gotten to hate being on my own, alone. Nimmo was exciting, charming . . . I thought it would be different being married to him. It was. It was worse. When he started pimping for a bunch of call girls, he even tried to get me to be one of them . . .
