For the first time since I’d met him, Wildman looked worried.
“I ... shouldn’t think so.”
He took a neat drink of whiskey. I sipped a taste. It was fine brew. I waited.
It gave me a chance to study the man more closely. His silver hair was thick, and on the long side, and swept back from a clean-shaven face. The lips beneath his humped eagle’s nose were thin.
“I appreciate your coming to see me on such short notice–” he began abruptly.
The telephone rang. Wildman looked up expectantly. The butler knocked and came in.
“Your call from Texas, sir,”
Wildman excused himself. I enjoyed the fire. And my whiskey. By the time he returned it was nearly an hour past the time originally set for our meeting. I hoped my stomach wouldn’t start growling.
“I must apologize,” Wildman said, freshening his glass and offering the same for mine, which I declined. “That call was supposed to come through this afternoon. I’m a shareholder in a drilling venture. They were sinking a test well.”
I guessed he meant oil. “The burdens of a tycoon.”
He looked briefly amused. “Something like that.”
He sat forward.
“I am a wealthy man, Miss Sullivan. I’ve gotten that way by being shrewd at investments. Sometimes they pay off. Occasionally they do not. When that happens, I take my loss like a man. It’s part of business. Winning and losing.”
We were getting to why he’d invited me here. I nodded.
“Perhaps they’ll get oil from that test well. Perhaps not. That winning and losing is – as you put it – part of the burden of being a tycoon.”
His features had hardened. For the first time I noticed the darkness of his brows, which, as he leaned forward further emphasized his nose, giving him more than ever the look of a bird of prey.
“I do not object to losing. Occasionally. I do object to being cheated. I object to lies. To being swindled–”
Screeching anger outside the door brought us both to our feet as it slammed open. A blonde with a gun in her hand lurched toward us. Behind her I saw the butler make a wary – and unsuccessful – attempt to grab her arm.
“You sonovabitch!” she screamed at Wildman. “You’ve ruined my life!” She let off a shot that shattered a lamp a foot from where Wildman stood. “Make a move and the next one goes into your head!”
The gun veered toward me. Her eyes were glassy and brimming with hate and I caught a glimpse of her finger hovering on the trigger.
“Who’s this?” she slurred. “Your latest floozie?”
Three
I put a hand to my throat and staggered sideways a step.
“I – I think I’m going to faint,” I gasped. As I sagged toward the carpet I caught Wildman’s startled and vaguely disappointed look.
Midway down I bunched my muscles and pushed off on one foot, pivoting. My shoulder, with all my momentum behind it, drove into the side of the woman’s knee. It didn’t catch her as far behind as I wanted, but drunk as she was it was enough to bring her down. I landed on her and scrambled for the gun. It jarred loose her grip, but she managed to hang onto the butt of the gun.
Despite her inebriation she fought like a cat. The gun went off again, its report roaring in my ear. I became aware of others joining the attempt to restrain her. Rogers had appeared from somewhere and was at her head. He managed to pin her shoulders. The butler caught gingerly at her left wrist. Her other hand still waved the gun unhealthily close to Rogers’ head. I pulled back and socked her hard in the jaw.
It didn’t knock her out. Instead she started to weep.
“Father! Father! Are you all right?”
A skinny boy of eight or nine burst in. Seeing us on the floor, he skidded to a stop. A woman ran in behind him, grabbing his shirt.
“Sorry, sir–”
“Is that a gun?” The boy’s eyes were wide.
“Shouldn’t you be doing your arithmetic, Stuart?” Wildman asked woodenly.
The woman hustled the little boy out.
Sitting back on my haunches, I finally got a good look at the woman I’d tackled. She’d been pretty once. Still was, maybe, beneath too much makeup and too much anger and the bloating that came from too much booze. She was blonde with the flawless look of weekly salon visits. I made her to be about ten years younger than Wildman, who stood watching impassively.
I picked up the gun, which had finally tumbled free when I hit her. I set it aside after checking the chamber. The chauffeur and butler lifted her deferentially to her feet. Her sobs grew louder in the otherwise silent room.
“You bastard,” she gasped. “You smug, self-important bastard. Why do you have to humiliate me?”
Rogers, I noted, was keeping a tight grip on the woman’s arm.
“Put her in her car and drive her home,” Wildman directed tersely. “Keep her keys.
The butler slipped a hand under the woman’s elbow and he and Rogers escorted her from the room. I was still on the floor, resting back on my heels. Wildman hadn’t budged an inch since it all began. Now, coming unfrozen, he helped me to my feet.
“With a tackle like that, you could be playing for Pittsburgh,” he said.
He was shaken. His effort at lightness showed it. Sports didn’t interest me much, but I knew enough he meant football. I managed a smile.
“Are you all right?” he inquired.
“Yeah. Fine. Thanks.” I was kicking myself for not having my automatic in some kind of shoulder rig, but it was a little early in the year to be shooting somebody anyway. At least I hadn’t turned sissy when I found myself staring at a gun again.
“I could do with more whiskey,” Wildman said abruptly. “You?”
He poured it himself even though the butler returned just then accompanied by the girl in the frilly apron who’d taken my coat. She carried a dustpan and brush with which she made short work of the broken pieces of lamp. Within minutes the butler had added a log to the fire and carried the frame of the lamp out ahead of her. Just like that, all traces of the recent unpleasantness were eradicated.
“I take it you know the lady who came calling,” I said as the door closed behind the two servants.
“My sister.” Wildman grimaced. “She’s been indulged all her life; can’t be bothered with reason. Married a man who’s an even bigger spendthrift than she is. Our father left her portion of his estate in a trust, which I administer. Wise on his part, as she’d otherwise have spent every penny. She resents it.”
“Enough to have set up that truck ramming into your car?”
He gave a mirthless laugh. “Dorothy never looks far enough ahead to plan anything.”
“She might have killed you just now. And damned near did.”
He knocked back the rest of his whiskey and didn’t answer. As I hefted my own glass I realized an inch or two on the underarm seam of Genevieve’s jacket had pulled apart. I touched a finger to it absently.
“I’ll replace your jacket, of course,” Wildman said, noticing. “I do apologize. Now let’s have dinner and get back to the reason I asked you here.”
* * *
The butler and maid bustled in and set up a table for two in an alcove. It happened as fast as debris from the shooting had disappeared. Starched white linen, comfy dining chairs, a silver bucket on a pedestal for wine. There was even a rose in a bud vase. The first course was prawns on ice with tiny little points of toast.
“As I was telling you earlier, I accept the fact that now and then I’ll have to take a loss on my investments,” Wildman began. “But I will not tolerate being conned. I will not tolerate being played for a fool. In my sort of business, reputation is a valuable asset. It’s money in the bank.”
I had trouble thinking of what Wildman did as business. It felt more like putting one pot of money up to make more money. I kept on listening.
“When I invest in a project, Miss Sullivan, it’s enough to bring others along. Other investors. Perhaps a
bank loan. It’s because I am known for ... shrewdness. Good judgment. An ability to spot problems or weaknesses others miss, as well as opportunities.” He paused to sip water and blot his lips. “Perhaps I sound vain. The point is, I value my standing as someone prudent, someone with a very hard head for business.”
“Yet someone’s snookered you,” I guessed.
His smile was a civilized reflex hiding something more ruthless.
“If you wish to put it that way,” he agreed.
“Let’s start there then.”
Wildman thought a minute. “About six months ago I got wind of what seemed to me a very promising investment opportunity. A manufacturing venture. Its details are unimportant. The channel through which it reached me was entirely trustworthy. The reputations of other investors involved were as sound as my own. The integrity of the man who was putting the whole thing together was unimpeachable. Or so I thought.”
We were working our way through veal birds now. They’d come with asparagus tips that had to be from a greenhouse and walnut sized buttered potatoes. There was half a tomato for garnish. I hoped it was okay to eat that too.
“Then what happened?” I prompted.
Wildman sipped some wine. It was white, which was just all about I know about wine. His eyes grew piercing, once again reminding me of a bird of prey.
“In short, the man behind the deal disappeared. Anyone who’d put up money lost it.”
“Including you.”
“Yes.”
“How much?”
He chuckled mirthlessly. “You’re direct. I wish more people were. The s.o.b. stung me for eighteen thousand dollars.”
I whistled silently. Wildman leaned forward.
“I don’t like losing that kind of money, Miss Sullivan – but I can afford it. It will not affect how I live or my business dealings, except perhaps to make me even more cautious regarding the latter than I already was. It’s the principle of the thing. The fact that someone made a monkey of me. I asked you here because I do not intend to let that go unremedied.”
The wad he’d lost might not be a lot of money to him, but I couldn’t even imagine all it would buy. Nevertheless, Wildman had a right to be sore.
“What’s the name of the man I’ll be looking for?”
“Harold Draper.”
He filled in details. Draper had worked his way up at a top-notch firm that dealt in commercial realty. Half a dozen years ago he’d stepped out on his own, putting together investment deals to not only buy property but also develop it. At a time when a quarter of the country was out of work and plenty more stuffing their shoes with cardboard and managing on potatoes and tea twice a day, if they had even that, Draper’s profits – and his reputation in the business community – had risen.
“I’m guessing you haven’t reported his con game to the police,” I said slowly. “It’s not the sort of thing you wish made public.”
He inclined his head.
Apparently Wildman had some sort of hidden bell or buzzer for summoning servants, because the butler came in then with a heavy silver coffee service and asked if I took cream or sugar. I said no. We waited a minute while the maid replaced our plates with footed dishes containing some sort of concoction of ladyfingers and pastry creme and fruit and such.
“Since you want to keep mum about Draper’s swindle, what exactly is it you want me to do?” I asked slowly.
Wildman set his dessert aside untouched and leaned toward me.
“I want you to find the man in question, Miss Sullivan. I want you to bring him to me.”
“Then what happens?”
“I will show him he chose the wrong man to gull.”
I set my spoon down. I hated to walk away from the layers of creme and pastry. I’d hate to walk away from Wildman’s sizable fee even more. But I didn’t like the way his hawk eyes had hardened.
“I don’t hunt people down so they can be killed, Mr. Wildman.”
“There are punishments far more satisfying than killing someone, Miss Sullivan.”
The answer was as chilling in its own way as the threat of violence, and better suited to the thread of ruthlessness suggested in the man across from me.
“I’ll take you at your word, then. I’ll turn over every stone I can to find Draper. I’m guessing your name carries plenty of influence in this city, but if I bring you Draper and he turns up dead, people I know will ask questions you don’t want to answer. They won’t back down and they’ll make your life a misery.”
I hoped he believed it.
I wasn’t sure I did.
Four
Food and facts both stick to you better first thing in the morning. Over my daily breakfast at McCrory’s lunch counter, I concluded I had more oatmeal in the bowl before me than useful information about my latest case.
I knew Harold Draper, who dealt in real estate and once had been on the up-and-up, had swindled my client and other smart men out of considerable dough and then disappeared. My client, Ferris Wildman, had sent word he wanted to hire me, a few hours after which his car – with me inside – had been deliberately rammed. When he’d barely begun to explain why he’d sent for me, his sister had burst in with a gun and tried to shoot him.
Either my client wasn’t too popular or someone didn’t want him talking to me.
Wildman had pooh-poohed the idea his sister might have played any part in the swindle. She seemed awfully keen to have him out of the way, but I was inclined to believe her performance last night was mere coincidence, unrelated to his sending for me. She’d been too drunk to be reliable, to herself or anyone else, if her goal had been to prevent an outsider from hearing details of the lucrative con.
“Thanks for the magazine. Give me something fun to look forward to Saturday nights,” murmured Izzy, the thin little waitress who’d brought my breakfast and sometimes my lunch for years.
I nodded, but she was gone down the counter before she could even see my acknowledgment. I’d slipped her a third-hand copy of Black Mask . She was raising a kid on her own, which couldn’t be easy.
Sipping the coffee she’d refilled, I decided Wildman’s sister could wait until I’d checked out other people. Even if she’d played no role in her brother getting bamboozled, she might tell me something else that proved useful.
The air along the counter to my left was blue with smoke. Now a woman sat down on my right and started a cigarette to go with her toast. I decided to leave, unable to take any more of the smell. It was perfume of the death that had eaten away at my dad, day by choking day.
* * *
My office was on Patterson a few doors shy of where it angled into St. Clair, near some railroad tracks and the produce market. The market didn’t have much this time of year, just roots and a few winter greens and late apples, but I liked its shouts and the clatter of carts and trucks over bricks all the same. I’d just turned the point of the triangle when a police car headed in the opposite direction pulled to the curb in front of me and its window rolled down.
“Awful fine shoes for this much slush, Maggie Liz. Did you never hear of rubbers?” asked the man with a thicket of white hair who stuck his head out the window.
“Going to give me a ticket for walking without galoshes?” I grinned, going over to meet him.
Billy Leary had been my dad’s partner and was one of my godfathers. Behind the wheel Mick Connelly, a cop in his early thirties nodded formally. He had rusty red hair and a well defined mouth, and even six feet away he stirred something in me that I didn’t want disturbed.
“You doing okay?” he asked.
“Yeah. Fine. You?”
He nodded.
On the night I’d had to shoot a man, Connelly had risked his neck to save mine. Trouble was, I’d managed to save it myself at exactly the instant he’d burst in. If he’d been a second earlier, he’d have beaten me to it. If I’d been a second slower, I’d be dead. I’d thanked him more than a few times, but he’d become standoffish since that evening.
Things felt stilted between us.
Oblivious to the tension, Billy spoke again. “Awful about the Pope.”
“Yeah.”
The morning paper had carried news of his fatal heart attack. Even though I’d parted ways with the Church, Pius XI had been Pope for most of my life. He’d shown plenty of spine speaking out against Hitler and Franco for the way they were mistreating Jews, and he’d scolded the U.S. and Britain for not doing the same.
Tough Cookie (Maggie Sullivan mysteries) Page 2
