Jade in Aries

by Donald E. Westlake

  We both waited while he got to his feet, closed his notebook, put his pencil away in his shirt pocket, and picked up his chair. He left, carrying the chair out of the room with him, and shut the door.

  The detective said, “All right, Tobin, what’s the problem?”

  “No problem,” I said. “I’ll go now.”

  “Don’t hard-nose me,” he said. “What’s Manzoni into?”

  “Nothing that would interest a fellow officer.”

  “Forget that. If Manzoni’s heading for trouble, the captain wants to know about it.”

  I looked at him. “You’re the funnel?” It happened that way, in some precincts: a captain who neither liked nor trusted his men found one of them to spy on the others for him. A funnel, with the wide end in the bullpen and the narrow end in the captain’s ear.

  He said, reasonably, “What does it matter to you, Tobin? You don’t have any reason to love Manzoni.”

  And yet I still had the bullpen mentality; I automatically sided with Manzoni against the captain’s stooge. I said, “I don’t have any reason to love anybody around here.”

  “You won’t level with me? Just the two of us, no witnesses, off the record.”

  I got to my feet. “Goodbye,” I said.

  “You may want a friend some day,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t want it to be you,” I said, and left the little office. I shut the door behind me.

  19

  MANZONI HIMSELF WAS COMING down the corridor toward me, and I was so absorbed in my own affairs, and my reactions to the smell of precinct politics I’d just been given a whiff of, that I didn’t notice at first that he looked urgent and intense and worried. I braced myself for trouble from him, and it wasn’t until he spoke that I realized the trouble was his this time, and not mine.

  He said, “Forget all that.” As though we’d already been having a conversation. His speed and intensity were the signs of the disaster that had overtaken him, whatever it was. He said, “Are you done in there?” As though it had been a physical examination at a doctor’s office; in any case, something I’d done on my own, that he’d had nothing to do with.

  I said, “What now?”

  “I want to talk to you. Is Carpenter still in there?” He headed for the room I’d just left. Looking back at me, he said, with irritation, “Come on, will you?” As though we were to stop playing now, something serious had come up.

  Just as he reached for the doorknob—and I was trying to make up my mind whether to stick around for this or not—the door opened and Carpenter came out. He looked flustered when he saw Manzoni, and more so when he saw me. He must have thought I’d told Manzoni about him, or in any case, intended to. I didn’t; what they did to each other in here made no difference to me.

  But Carpenter didn’t know that. “Hi, Aldo,” he said, and his nervousness was so intense that if Manzoni hadn’t already been caught up in this other thing, he would have understood it all right then and there, without being told by anybody. But Manzoni could see nothing right now other than his own problems, and he nodded a distracted greeting, pushed past Carpenter into the room, and gestured through the doorway irritably for me to follow.

  Carpenter tried to catch my eye, to warn me to keep my mouth shut, but I wouldn’t let it be caught. I had decided I wanted to know what had happened that had so disturbed Manzoni, so I, too, stepped past Carpenter and went back into the little office, and Manzoni shut the door in Carpenter’s face.

  I said, “What is it?”

  Neither of us contemplated sitting down. Manzoni paced halfway to the window, turned back, gave me a tightly anguished look, said, “David Poumon’s dead.”

  My immediate reaction was, Cary Lane did it, to make the prophesy come true. Only after that did I think, It came true!

  Manzoni had pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, and was nervously poking a finger into it, trying to get at one of the last remaining cigarettes. “But it’s all right,” he said. “We got him.”

  “You got who?”

  “The one who did it. Another spade faggot, named Leo Ross. You’ve met him.”

  That’s astonishing, I thought. I said, “How was he gotten?”

  “He made a stupid mistake. He locked himself on the roof.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “Tobin, what the hell does it matter how this all happened? The point is, Poumon’s dead.”

  “You’re going to fit Ross for the Dearborn killing, too?”

  “Fit him?”

  “I don’t mean frame. Do you think he’s it?”

  Manzoni shrugged. With obvious reluctance, he said, “He probably is. We’ll have to talk to him when they bring him in.”

  I said, “And Cornell, too?”

  He didn’t quite meet my eye. “We’ll look into that, too.”

  “Now that there’s been another death. Do you want Cornell to pay you what he was going to pay me, or will your city salary be enough?”

  His anger was mostly defensive. “I followed my opinion,” he said, meeting my eye now, glaring at me. “I acted about the facts the way I read them.”

  “The sad thing is,” I said, “you half-believe that. Within a week you’ll believe it all the way. What do you want with me now, Manzoni? I’m tired, I want to go home.”

  “What the other one said at the hospital,” he said, reluctant, hesitating. “You know, Lane.”

  “When he said Poumon would be killed?”

  “It was supposed to be astrology!” he burst out peevishly, as though he were the one being treated unfairly. “Who’d pay any attention to that?”

  I didn’t want to give Manzoni the benefit of any doubts, I disliked him too much for that, but I couldn’t help putting myself in his place and wondering how I would have reacted under the same circumstances. One murder, one attempted murder. Somebody deeply involved in the case says there’ll be a third, and gives the name of the victim. When asked the source of his information, he says astrology. (Or a Tarot deck. Or palmistry. Or ESP. Or the I Ching. Or a dream. Or whatever.) What would I do?

  I would talk with him. I would not place credence in his source, but I would talk with him, I would try to find out if other things in the environment of the murder had given him hints he didn’t fully understand and had unconsciously converted to a medium he did understand; in this case, astrology. I might eventually turn away, saying there was nothing in it, just as Manzoni had done, but first I would have talked with him. Which Manzoni had not done.

  But Manzoni’s question to me just now had not required an answer, and so I gave it none. He rushed on, saying, “Why obscure the issue? That doesn’t have to come up at all. You’re out of it, I’m out of it, Cornell is out of it, we’ve got the killer, so why drag in anything else?”

  I said, “You’re telling me you don’t want me to mention to anybody that you were warned Poumon would be killed.”

  “He said it was astrology!”

  “Whatever he said it was, you don’t want me to mention it.”

  His mouth moved, his hands moved, as though he would present arguments; at last he just dropped his hands to his sides, shrugged, and said, “That’s right.”

  “Manzoni,” I said, “you’re the worst judge of human nature I ever met in my life. I’m not going to mention anything about this mess to anybody. I’m going home, and I’m going to stay there. But Ronald Cornell and Cary Lane are going to crucify you; those two faggots, as you love to call them, are going to nail you to the cross, and I couldn’t be happier about it.”

  “You bastard, what right have you got to—”

  “No right at all. I’ve seen cops like you before, Manzoni, I worked with some in the old days and I could never get used to them. Self-righteousness instead of brains. You’re a threat to everybody in the world who isn’t named Manzoni, and it’s a rare treat to see one of you birds become at last a threat to himself. Goodbye,” I said, and left, and went home.

  20

  K
ATE WANTED ME TO see Cornell again, but there was no point to it, so I didn’t do it. I was still very surprised that it had turned out to be Leo Ross, but whoever it had turned out to be I wasn’t the one who’d found him, so I rated no payment. Cornell was out from under the Manzoni threat, Ross was in jail, I wasn’t going to be hassled for practicing without a license after all, and there was nothing left to be done. The whole thing was finished, as far as I was concerned. That evening, and again the next morning, I went back to work in the basement.

  Except it wasn’t finished.

  Kate came downstairs about three o’clock the next afternoon, Monday, to tell me Henry Koberberg was in the living room and wanted to talk to me.

  I should have known he’d be along. He wasn’t a stupid man, far from it; it was only inevitable that he would come to me.

  Because it wasn’t Leo Ross. I knew damn well it wasn’t Leo Ross. That amiable, clever man hadn’t killed anybody, and I knew it. And I knew why he’d been framed, and I knew why Poumon had been killed, and I absolutely knew who’d done it all: the killings, the attack on Cornell, the framing of Ross, everything. I didn’t know the exact details of motive for the original murder of Jamie Dearborn, but everything else I knew.

  I’d known it from the instant I’d heard Poumon was really dead. I’d known it, and I’d pushed the knowledge down under the surface of my thoughts, because I didn’t have one item of proof. I had nothing but personalities and relationships and some understanding of needs. Not enough. Not enough for me to say a name to Manzoni, so I’d pushed it under instead. I suppose I’d thought, down in the level under conscious thought, that the truth would out somehow anyway. It wasn’t likely Manzoni would be staying in charge of the case much longer, and the next man wouldn’t have any vested interest in obsolete theories to keep him from seeing the truth.

  Of course, back when I’d read about Cornell’s accident in the newspaper I’d made the same easy assumptions, and it hadn’t quite worked out that way.

  And here was Koberberg, calling me to come back to the surface once again. I stood leaning on the shovel, looking at Kate, and she stood on the third step from the bottom, waiting for me. I considered the arguments I might try, and knew they were no good. I shook my head, and put the shovel down, and went upstairs.

  As usual, I had to wash first. When I went into the living room, Koberberg was sitting in the chair just to the right of the door. He was wearing his topcoat; his hat was in his lap. He had the stunned look I’ve seen sometimes on the faces of survivors of bad automobile accidents, as though the mind hasn’t yet moved past the instant of the impact, is still back there, stuck in a cleft in time, while the body has come along through the minutes without it.

  He looked at me and said, “He’s innocent.”

  “I know,” I said. “Bruce Maundy did it.”

  He blinked, and on the other side of the blink his face was subtly different; his mind, jolted out of the cleft way back in yesterday, had suddenly rejoined him. He said, “Bruce? Are you sure?”

  I said, “I have no proof. I have no way of getting proof.”

  “The police could,” he said, “if they’d bother to look.”

  “I’m not well connected with that precinct,” I said. “They’d listen to you before they’d listen to me.”

  “Manzoni won’t listen to anyone,” he said.

  I said, “Manzoni? He’s still in charge?”

  “Of course. Why wouldn’t he be?”

  “Haven’t Lane and Cornell made any statements?”

  “Cary is at my place. He collapsed after he found the body. I’ve been trying to take care of him.”

  To ward off, I suppose, his own collapse. I said, “What about Cornell?”

  “I really don’t know. Ronnie’s still at the hospital, naturally. Statements about what?”

  Instead of answering him, I said, “Isn’t there any kind of on-going police investigation?”

  “Why should there be? They have their man,” he said bitterly.

  “Aren’t they interested in motive? In proofs?”

  “They have Leo, that’s all the proof they seem to need. Good heavens, man, he’s black and he’s queer! What do you expect from the police department?”

  I said, “Then I don’t know what to say. You could try talking to Manzoni, he might be a little more accessible now that his first theories have been proved wrong.”

  He shook his head. He said, “I’m not entirely sure why you’re trying to evade the responsibility of this, but you know you aren’t being honest with me. Detective Manzoni is not accessible to me, nor will he ever be.”

  I said, “But I don’t have any proof, don’t you see that? I know it was Maundy, I know why he did it, but I can’t prove any of it.”

  “Shouldn’t you be out looking for proof?” he asked me.

  “Why? You say it’s my responsibility. Why is it my responsibility?”

  “Because there’s no one else to do it,” he said. “The only man who can do the job always has the responsibility to do it.”

  Operating without a license again. I shook my head, angry at myself, at Koberberg, at Maundy, at Manzoni, at the whole world. I said, “Tell me Ross’s story.”

  Ross’s story was a simple one, though in the telling, complex. He had received a phone call from someone with a disguised voice, saying he had proof that Koberberg was the murderer of Jamie Dearborn, and offering to sell the proof for a hundred dollars. (Such an incredibly small amount!) He had arranged to meet Ross on the roof of the building housing Lane and Poumon’s apartment. Their building, it seemed, was more of an apartment house, six stories high and with twenty-four tenants. Ross recognized the address, of course, but didn’t know yet what it meant.

  In any case, he agreed to the meeting, and he went to it armed with a length of pipe wrapped with a woman’s stocking, for self-defense. He took the elevator at the apartment building to the top floor, went up the last flight of stairs to the roof, and stepped out to find the roof empty. He propped the door open and walked around the roof, looking over the edge here and there, and when he got back to the door, it was shut and locked.

  He shouted, of course, but no one heard him. This was just around four the previous afternoon, Sunday, when the windless snowfall had recently started up again. A snow like that muffles sounds.

  The law requires a fire escape from the roof, but in some parts of the city waves of burglaries have led building owners to remove the top flight of fire escapes, and police—as anxious as anyone to see the number of burglaries lowered—tend not to notice the violation. That had happened here, and there was no longer any way for Ross to get off the roof.

  He finally decided the only thing to do was wait for either Lane or Poumon to enter or leave the building, and he stayed at the front edge of the roof to watch for them. He planned to drop the length of pipe when he saw them, to attract their, attention. Then he would shout and wave his arms, they would see him, they would rescue him.

  Of course, he wasn’t looking straight down the front of the building the whole time. It was cold up there, and it was snowing, and he had to move around to keep himself a bit warm. It is also very hard, after a while, to go on staring indefinitely at one spot, no matter what the situation.

  So he missed Lane. Of course, Lane had been hurrying home, rushing from the hospital as a result of the warning he’d seen in the horoscopes, and had run directly from the cab under the canopy and into the building.

  While Ross continued to stand around on the roof, feeling more and more like a fool and wondering if he should take the chance of dropping one flight to the beginning of the fire escape—the ground, sixty feet away, deterred him—Lane took the elevator to his fifth-floor apartment, searched it for Poumon, saw a bedroom window standing open, knew it shouldn’t be open in such cold weather, and looked out, to see Poumon’s body lying in the middle of the building’s trash cans below.

  It was Lane who called the police. It was the police who
eventually went up on the roof and found Ross. And when they searched him, they found the length of pipe in his pocket. He told his story, but it wasn’t believed.

  I said, “The police believe Ross took Poumon to the roof and threw him off from there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why? With Poumon already on the fifth floor, why do they think Ross took him up two flights more?”

  “You were a policeman,” Koberberg said. “You know the phrase modus operandi. Ronnie was dragged to the roof and thrown off, and so David must have been as well.”

  “Very sloppy thinking,” I said. I was pacing the floor, trying to find the handle. “There might be something on the window sill,” I said. “Something in the apartment somewhere. But it would take professionals to find out.”

  “You’re a professional,” Koberberg said.

  I stopped and looked at him and shook my head. “There are no Renaissance men any more,” I told him. “I was a professional badge-carrier at one time, no more and no less. What we need in that apartment is professionals in the police sciences. People who put a thread under a microscope and tell you what color and make of coat it came from. That isn’t my field, and it never was.”

  “I see. I’m sorry, yes, you’re absolutely right. I think of a policeman as someone with all the police skills combined in one head.”

  “It doesn’t happen,” I said.

  “So what is needed is to give the police department some incentive to do its own investigation.” He peered at me. “What was it that convinced you Bruce was guilty?”

  “When I heard that Poumon had been killed. Maundy did it to distract Manzoni.”

  “Distract? I don’t follow.”

  I said, “All right, from the beginning. All of you people share an interest in astrology, that’s number one.”

  “Mine is more critical than the others,” he said mildly. “I consider astrology very interesting, but not yet proven.”

  “In any event, you’re involved in it. So are all the others, including Bruce Maundy. He even had something to say about it when he came here to warn me off the other day.”