Dead Aim (The Lt. Hastings Mysteries)

by Collin Wilcox

  “So the four of you, then, watched TV.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember what programs you watched?”

  He smiled with a kind of supercilious, tolerant superiority. “It was a movie. The Glass Key, I think.”

  “During that whole time, did your sister and Mr. Valenti stay in bed?”

  “Except for when she got me the stuff.”

  He was insisting. Reluctantly, I said, “The marijuana, you mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “How much marijuana did you pick up?”

  “A lid.”

  “Did you buy it?”

  “Yes.”

  “For how much?”

  “Fifteen dollars.”

  “Did you give the money to your sister?”

  “No. To Valenti.”

  “Had you bought marijuana from Valenti in the past?”

  “Sure. Two, three times a month. The rumor was that he was trying to make himself financially independent of my sister. Using her money for capital, of course.”

  Drumming my fingers on the steering wheel, I was looking absently at a small group of shrilly quarreling children. I was thinking, wryly, that I could arrange a pot bust of the Manley-Mitchell premises, and make a few cheap headlines for myself. For some reason, Bruce Manley was almost asking for a pot bust. Why? Was it a false-arrest trap? Was it a need to confess, and suffer—a love-hate relationship with his roommate? Did he want to go to jail with Billy Mitchell, sharing the same peril?

  I glanced at Manley, speculating on how he got his sexual kicks.

  “Did Valenti deal in drugs on a fairly large scale, would you say?” I asked.

  “I have no idea. I just know about the rumors, as I said.”

  “If he was dealing, it’s quite possible that he had drugs on the premises—large quantities of drugs. Cash, too.”

  “I suppose so. I really wouldn’t know.”

  I nodded, thinking about it. I decided to shift my ground. “Do you know how your sister and Valenti happened to meet?”

  “They met in Los Angeles, probably at some wild, wicked party. Which Valenti probably arranged.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because Valenti was a gigolo. No good. Everyone could see it but Karen. Unfortunately, though, Karen wasn’t in a very strong bargaining position with men—not, at least, until she came into her inheritance. By then, it was too late; she’d never learned the rules of the game. So she was stuck with people like Valenti. Leeches.”

  “Did he mistreat your sister?”

  “Physically, you mean? Or otherwise?”

  “Either way.”

  “Well, last night, for instance, an ex-girl friend of Valenti’s phoned. Everyone could hear her screeching at him. It was a wild scene—really wild. There was Valenti, sitting up in bed, naked, grinning his oily, 1930-style gigolo’s smile—smoothing down his stupid patent-leather hair, and smoking a joint while he murmured sweet Latin nothings into the phone. Honest to God, it was like a bad out-of-date movie. Karen was steaming. But at the same time, she was also trying to ignore it—the way dear old Mother presumably taught her.”

  “What was this ex-girl friend screeching about?”

  “According to Valenti, she was consumed with unrequited love. But that doesn’t mean it was true. More likely, she was bugging him for money. According to Karen—who told me about it once when she was stoned—this alleged ex-girl friend actually had Valenti’s kid. Which, naturally, Valenti won’t admit. Still—” Bruce Manley shrugged languidly.

  “Do you know this girl friend’s name?”

  “Yes. Jane Swanson. She and Valenti apparently met in Las Vegas, which would be their natural habitat. They lived together off and on for two or three years. Jane was a hostess in a casino, which is another word for a free-lance call girl. Valenti, I hear, hired himself out to women, for an hour or a month. Between their separate engagements, they lived together, probably so they could share the rent. It was a beautiful, free relationship.”

  “Did your sister first meet Valenti in Las Vegas?”

  “I don’t think so. Presumably, Valenti considered Las Vegas the minor leagues, where he polished his technique. When he felt he was ready—when his accent sounded right in the bathroom, probably—he moved up to Los Angeles. Hollywood.”

  “And Jane Swanson followed him.”

  “At a respectful distance. However, as Valenti solidified his hold on Karen, he lengthened the distance between himself and Jane, so that Jane was compelled to take on someone.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean, she’s been living with a sometimes bartender named Rawlings—Dave Rawlings, I think.”

  I’d taken out my notebook, scribbling down the names, places and approximate dates. As I wrote, I glanced at Bruce Manley. He seemed to be tiring rapidly—coasting, perhaps, from an “up” to a “down,” losing his grip.

  “Have you actually met either Jane Swanson or Dave Rawlings?” I asked.

  “I met Jane once,” he answered dreamily. “Karen was attending a family funeral, to which I wasn’t invited. I stopped by her place to replenish my supply of grass. Jane was there, with Valenti. I mentioned it to Karen. When I did, she told me the whole story. She was pretty upset.”

  “How did your sister happen to know so much about Valenti’s involvement with Jane Swanson?”

  He smirked. “She hired a private eye. Karen was like that. She wanted to know the worst.”

  “Your sister, I gather, wasn’t an especially happy person.”

  “Neither of us is very happy, Lieutenant.” His voice was soft, his manner disinterested, remote.

  “Your father says it’s because you’ve got too much money.”

  “Maybe he’s right. Or maybe that was his problem, and he just passed it on to us. Maybe the rich shouldn’t reproduce—like morons, and other social undesirables.”

  “Yet you and your sister chose to live in San Francisco, in the same city with your parents.”

  A spontaneous grimace split his mask of dreamy indifference, revealing a wild, blazing bitterness. His voice was very low, his eyes very bright as he said, “In the first place, Lieutenant, San Francisco’s the most exciting city in the world. Furthermore, our presence here was the surest way of getting back at our parents for twenty-odd years of nothing.”

  “They’d prefer that you were somewhere else, you mean.”

  “That’s it, Lieutenant. Exactly. They live in daily terror of looking up from martinis with the French consul to find Karen or me standing in the doorway. They—” He turned away from me, then blindly wrenched open the door and got out of the cruiser. Leaning in through the window, his venomous voice hardly more than a whisper, he said, “When you find the murderer, Lieutenant, I hope you call me. I want to look in his face. I want to spit on the bastard. Then I want to thank him, for choosing Karen first. Because it could have been me, Lieutenant. For different reasons, by someone else’s hand—in a different place, at a different time, it could have been me.”

  He turned away, stumbling across the sidewalk, banging the sagging wrought-iron gate behind him. I watched him enter his small shingled house, automatically noting that he hadn’t unlocked his front door.

  9

  STILL PARKED IN FRONT of the house, I sat motionless behind the wheel, mentally replaying Bruce Manley’s final outburst, fixing his strange, bitter phrases in my mind.

  Did he actually believe that Karen’s murderer could have been his own? Did he believe they’d both been marked for death? Or was he simply indulging himself in bitter, post-adolescent theatrics?

  I had no idea—no specific suspicions, no theories. The interview had promised more than it finally delivered. An hour ago I thought I had a suspect. Now I wasn’t so sure.

  I called in, got Friedman and requested an address check on Jane Swanson and Dave Rawlings. Grumbling sourly about the suddenly skyrocketing homicide rate, Friedman instructed me to come in for a two P.M. c
onference with Captain Kreiger. I agreed, then asked for a surveillance on the Bruce Manley-Billy Mitchell residence. I had just said goodbye to Friedman and was checking into the communications net when I saw a white Volkswagen, this year’s or last’s, pulling to a stop across the street. I watched a tall, lean, restless-moving young man get out of the car and cross in front of me, heading for the shingled house. Calling out quickly, I moved to intercept him at the iron gate.

  “Mr. Mitchell?” I asked. “Billy Mitchell?”

  His slightly upslanted, wolfish gray eyes were level with my own. I saw the eyes narrow as I reached into my side pocket and showed him the shield, introducing myself.

  Mitchell gave way before me, an involuntary half-step. He was instantly on guard. His eyes moved covertly toward the house, then quickly back to me. His face was lean, dominated by a tight yet mobile mouth, high cheekbones and pale, predatory oriental eyes. He wore slim leather trousers and heavy boots, a bright paisley shirt open to the waist. A blue bandanna was knotted flamboyantly at his throat. His reddish-blond hair was medium long, carefully cut. He was in his middle twenties. He looked intelligent, ill-tempered and smugly self-satisfied.

  “What can I do for you?” He was arranging his stance in a studied, loose-jointed effort to appear sardonic, nonchalant.

  I bluntly described the double murder, testing his response. His eyes flickered, but his lean, gracefully poised body remained relaxed. He seemed to be coolly studying me.

  When I’d finished my brief accounting of the crime, he allowed a moment to pass, then said, “That chick was a victim type. Like she was asking for it. Masochism is the female thing, but she wore it out. Really ran it into the ground. All the way into the ground, deep and dead.”

  “You knew her pretty well, then.”

  He shrugged. “I saw her twice. Maybe three times. But she was sick, man. You could see it. She had these calf eyes. And she hugged herself whenever someone stuck her real good. Which is what Valenti was good at: sticking her.”

  I studied him a moment, then said quietly, “You’re quite a philosopher.” Moving my head to the cruiser, I said, “Would you mind coming over to the car for a minute or two? I’d like to double-check a few things.”

  “What kind of things?” He wasn’t moving.

  I turned to face him squarely. “Your movements last night.”

  “Hmm.” He folded his arms. Then: “I don’t get it.”

  “There’s nothing to get, Mitchell. I’m asking you, as a matter of information, what you were doing last night. From, say, ten o’clock until midnight.”

  “Are you telling me that I’m a suspect, or something? Is that where you’re going with this?”

  I moved slightly away from him, instinctively giving myself room—aware that the muscles of my back and thighs were tightening.

  “If you were a suspect, Mitchell, I’d’ve already given you your constitutional rights, and we’d probably be on our way downtown.” I paused, letting it sink in before saying, “I’m asking you a simple, direct question. If you don’t want to answer, then we’ll probably have to change the script.” I gestured toward him with my right hand, palm up, invitingly. “So it’s up to you: the hard way or the easy way.”

  “Christ, it’s just like on the boob tube. Dragnet. Taaa da dum, dum.” It was the Dragnet theme.

  I didn’t answer.

  With lower lip protruding, he exhaled suddenly, ruffling his reddish hair. It was a strangely childlike, innocent mannerism.

  “I went over to Karen’s,” he said abruptly, “with Brucie boy. We got there about eleven, and split about twelve-thirty.”

  “What happened then?”

  “We came home. We went directly home. We didn’t pass Go.”

  I nodded thoughtfully, studying him. Then: “What d’you do for a living, Mitchell?”

  “Different things.”

  “What kind of things?”

  He raised his shoulders in a languid shrug. “I’ve only been out of the army for a year. I’ve just been making the scene—hanging loose.”

  “Were you a draftee?”

  He nodded.

  “Where’s your home?”

  “New York. Albany, New York.”

  “What’s your father’s name?”

  “What’s my father got to do with it?”

  I drew a long, slow breath, glanced up and down the street and then stepped closer to him. In a low, tight voice I said, “I’ve got a double murder to investigate, Mitchell—a very important murder, involving very important people. I don’t know much about the murder. We don’t know the motive yet, but it’ll probably turn out that the motive has something to do with gain. And if that’s the way it turns out, we’ll be looking for people with the most to gain. And someone like yourself—someone with nothing to lose and maybe lots to gain—you could interest us a lot. So that’s why I was asking you for your father’s name. Maybe he’s a capitalist, for instance, who sends you five hundred dollars a month, just to stay in California. If that’s the case, we’d like to know about it.”

  He snorted, amused at some private little joke. “My father was a peddler, Lieutenant. A round-shouldered, soft-talking, sick-smiling peddler, selling wholesale draperies. Unfortunately, he wasn’t a very good peddler. So he started drinking, and my mother started working. When I was seven years old, Mummy kicked Daddy out of the house. Literally. Whereupon Daddy became a bum—a wino, in fact. When I was a bad little boy—or a bad big boy—my mother would tell me that I’d grow up to be just like Daddy.”

  I sighed involuntarily, pausing a moment—secretly assessing the unwitting damage he’d done me. He’d come incredibly close. He could have caught me with a sucker punch, and done less damage. I hadn’t quite been a drunk; I hadn’t quite abandoned the children. I’d merely left them to their mother—their sleek, golden predator-of-a-mother, so breathtakingly perfect that she seemed unreal even in memory. She’d—

  “—isn’t exactly a capitalist, either,” he was saying. “Unless you figure a four-chair beauty shop is big business. Still, Mummy isn’t hurting.”

  I blinked, then automatically asked, “Do you have an allowance?”

  “No.”

  “How do you live, then?”

  “I live off Bruce.”

  I nodded, thought about it, and then decided to say, “That doesn’t make you much different from Valenti.”

  Forcing a smile, he said, “Nobody’s perfect, Lieutenant. Everyone’s out for a little more than he’s got. Take the Manleys, for instance. They’ve got it all, but they still want more. Even the old man, Mister High Society—Mister Perfection. Turn over his rock, and you’d be surprised what you’d find. In fact—” His mouth twisted in a derisive, satanic grin. “In fact, if you’re looking for suspects, you should be talking to the old man, not Bruce.”

  “I don’t think you know what you’re talking about, Mitchell.” I said it flatly, hopefully to goad him into continuing.

  “Yeah? Well, ask Walter J. Manley about a girl named Candice Weiss. She’s a beautifully stacked chick who happens to take money from Sugar Daddy Walter. Then she turns around and buys stuff from Valenti. So you can imagine the scene. There’s Walter J. Manley, accusing his daughter of loose living. And there’s Karen, accusing Daddy right back in his teeth. And there’s Valenti, smiling.”

  For a long, silent moment I studied him, watching his grin widen.

  “What’s the matter, Lieutenant?” he asked softly. “Are you a little shook, to think that you might have to pick on someone a little bigger than you are?”

  Ignoring the remark, I took down his mother’s name and address, then instructed him not to leave town.

  “It’s beginning to sound like I should get a lawyer,” he said. “I think I will get one, in fact. I’ll tell Bruce to get one, too. Or maybe we can share one with his father. We could cut expenses.”

  “Use your own judgment, Mitchell. Think it over. And while you’re thinking, you might give a little
thought to the kind of life you’re living. I see a lot of people like you—you’re my stock in trade. Nothing surprises you; nothing shocks you. Nothing much matters, really. You’ll try almost anything, once. You’re probably involved with drugs. If you are, you’ll find that drugs plus that chip on your shoulder are a bad combination.” I flipped the notebook closed, returning it to my pocket, clicking my ballpoint pen. “You might also mention my little sermon to Bruce Manley. You’ll probably both get a chuckle out of it. Unfortunately.”

  I got in the cruiser and drove off without looking back, already behind schedule for the captain’s meeting.

  10

  I KNOCKED ONCE ON Kreiger’s door, then turned the knob. As I took the armchair left empty for me, I saw Kreiger glance pointedly at his watch. The time was five minutes after two, and the captain didn’t approve. I wouldn’t have approved either if I’d called the meeting.

  Canelli, Markham and Friedman sat around Kreiger’s oversized gray-steel desk. Each man nodded at me, mumbling a greeting that matched his rank. Friedman was smoking a cigar, Markham a cigarette. Canelli was doodling, drawing an elaborate Christmas tree. I placed two manila file folders on the desk, drawing up my chair. Canelli laboriously hunched his chair aside, making room. His elbow caught the doodle of the Christmas tree, sailing it to the floor close beside the captain’s chair.

  Kreiger glanced down at the drawing, sighed once and then turned to me. “How about leading off, Frank? Let’s see what we’ve got. Start with Draper.”

  Referring to notes, I outlined the case in two minutes or less, focusing my monologue on Kreiger. His pale Prussian eyes were expressionless. He sat stolidly in his chair, big hands clasped quietly together on the desk before him. His curly blond hair, still thick at forty-four, was close-cropped. Kreiger was a squared-off, calm, precise man. I’d first met him more than twenty years ago, in the army. We’d been on a brief football-player’s gravy train, stationed at Fort Monmouth. He’d tackled me hard enough to flatten me on the hard turf of an ill-prepared practice field. He’d looked down at me for an expressionless, reflective moment, then noncommittally helped me to my feet. The incident was typical of Kreiger: tough and efficient, he’d first had his way. Then, unsmilingly generous, he’d repaired the damage—asking nothing, revealing nothing, expecting nothing.