My Kingdom for a Hearse

by Craig Rice

  John J. Malone didn’t like the way she’d phrased that, no, not one little bit. He wondered if executive assistants opened their employers’ mail in the morning. He went right on keeping very quiet.

  “They always turn up,” she went on, “that kind of girl. Frankly, I think Hazel is wasting her money, hiring you to look for her.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Malone asked politely. He wondered if she called Mrs. Swackhammer Hazel to her face.

  “But it’s her business.” This time her smile was a shade more definite. “Enough of all that. Do tell me all about yourself.”

  “My dear lady,” Malone said. “My dear girl—” He spread his hands in a deprecating gesture and did his best to look as though he were her abject slave. “Tell me all about you. The voices—”

  Again the dreamy smile. “I planned to be an actress. But I was best at imitations. Then I decided the business world held a more lucrative future. So—”

  Definitely lucrative, Malone reflected with another look around the apartment, at the hostess pajamas, and at the diamond bracelet that was too modest to be anything but real. He wondered why she’d sent for him and just how he was going to go about finding out.

  “I used to tease Rita Jardee no end by imitating her,” she said, and she sounded exactly like the golden voice. “Then one day she got furious, and Hazel made me stop it.” That was Hazel Swackhammer to the last clipped consonant. “Rita’s hated me ever since. Jealousy.”

  Malone said nothing and looked curious.

  Myrdell smiled. “Otis and I are nothing but friends,” she half-whispered. “And Rita’s through with him anyway.” She changed the subject and the voice abruptly. “I talk this way to strangers and creditors.” It was the unpleasant twang.

  She lit a cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke around herself. The effect was pleasing and, Malone observed, she knew it. He remembered the interested and appraising way she had run her dreamy eyes over Gus Madrid’s muscles, and almost wished he didn’t prefer blondes.

  “Tell me, Mr. Malone,” she shot at him suddenly, “do you really think you can find Eva Lou Strauss?”

  “Why does everyone assume I’m looking for her?” Malone snapped. “Why do you assume that I am?”

  Myrdell added a little more smoke to the effect and said, “Leave it at ‘everyone.’ Your bodyguard—”

  “Mr. Madrid,” Malone said stiffly, “happens to have a girl named Eva Lou Strauss. His business is none of my business.”

  “Which is?”

  He almost said, “Looking for Eva Lou Strauss.” The conversation was getting him nowhere. “My business is the honorable practice of law.”

  Something about that seemed to amuse her.

  “Look,” Malone said, “what gives you that impression?”

  “That you’re a lawyer?”

  “Damn it,” Malone said. “You know exactly what I mean.”

  “Oh,” she said. “That.” She paused. “This morning Eva Lou Strauss didn’t show up. Hazel gave me your name and told me to send for you.”

  “It was about another matter entirely,” Malone said. He wished he knew whether or not she knew about the little package in that morning’s mail, and looked intently into her eyes. It was like looking into a shadowed mist. “About some column items that had upset Mrs. Swackhammer.”

  She said, “Oh, that,” again, as though Delora Deanne got involved in scandal every day of the week. “Your gangster friend—your bodyguard—”

  “Has a girl named Eva Lou Strauss,” Malone said. “All right, the same Eva Lou Strauss. Let’s not go into all that again. Now you tell me, what do you know about Eva Lou Strauss?”

  “Nothing,” Myrdell Harris said. “Except that she’s missing.”

  They seemed to have completed a circle, Malone reflected, and he wasn’t going to go around it again.

  Suddenly she said, “I do know a lot of things. Other things, I mean.”

  “Such as—?” Malone asked hopefully.

  “Just things.” She put her half-smoked cigarette out lazily. “I’m not just Hazel’s executive assistant, I’m her confidential assistant.” She let it go at that and gave every indication that she meant to keep right on doing so.

  Malone sighed. “If it’s any of my business, why did you ask me to come over tonight?”

  Again that vague, dreamy smile. “Shall we leave it—that I wanted to get better acquainted?” She reached for another cigarette. “It’s possible as this goes along, I might be helpful to you. And you might be helpful to me.”

  Any time she was helpful to him, Malone told himself, it was going to cost him money.

  “As what goes along?”

  “Oh—” her gesture might have meant anything—“all this.”

  “Including Eva Lou Strauss?”

  She nodded. “Including Eva Lou Strauss.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  “I’ve already told you that I didn’t. But she’ll turn up sooner or later.”

  No, he very definitely didn’t like the way she said it. “What do you know that might be helpful?”

  “Oh—” Again the gesture. “Just—things.” And again the smile. “I’ll keep in touch with you as things go along.”

  The little lawyer rose, briefly considered shaking her, and decided to give up.

  At the door she said, “I need to be very careful. You see, everybody—nearly everybody—hates me.”

  He managed to say something in the way of a gallant protest and headed down the corridor. It had been a thoroughly unsatisfactory visit from every viewpoint. He tried to console himself with the fact that she hadn’t been able to find out anything from him either, but it didn’t help. He felt irritated. Frustrated. What was that beautiful word? Disconcentrated, that was it. To get undisconcentrated, he needed a drink, several drinks, and a quiet place to do some heavy thinking. What would the cuddly receptionist be doing this evening? Then he remembered Gus Madrid.

  The big gunman was almost friendly as they got in the car. “Where next?”

  Malone said, “I don’t know.”

  “And Malone, don’t you go telling babes I’m your bodyguard, understand. Me, I’m not nobody’s bodyguard. Okay you tell ’em I’m your chauffeur. But no bodyguard.”

  He slammed the car door and went on. “Okay, drive you where to next?”

  “At least,” Malone told him glumly, “you’re saving me a lot of taxi fares.”

  That brought him to an abrupt and hasty review of his finances. Something under twenty dollars, he estimated, not counting a possible extension of credit at Joe the Angel’s City Hall Bar.

  He glanced at his uninvited companion. Yes, Gus Madrid looked prosperous. And something had to be done about those finances, fast.

  “Tell you what,” he said almost happily. “I know where there’s a good all-night poker game—”

  Chapter Nine

  “Never mind what happened,” the little lawyer growled. “And never mind giving me any sympathy. Just say that last night I made the biggest mistake of my life.”

  Jake closed the office door behind him. “Who’s the big goon sitting out there?”

  “Him?” Malone winced. “A damned good poker player.”

  “You may not need sympathy,” Jake said, “but you look as though you needed a drink. And what was the mistake?”

  Malone looked at him through tired, red-rimmed eyes and said, “Jake, there are times when I begin to think it was a mistake ever being born at all.”

  “If it’s a matter of money—” Jake began.

  Malone considered borrowing back a hundred from Jake. After all, it would be an investment in Jake’s future success, in a sense. He considered borrowing from a long list of people who probably wouldn’t have it anyway. He considered a lot of things, including going to bed and sleeping all day. Then he shook his head.

  “It isn’t that bad,” he said bravely.

  True, the check from Hazel Swackhammer might come in a later
mail.

  “How’s Helene?” he asked, hoping she was still asleep.

  “Fine,” Jake said. “She was up at the crack of dawn, and she’s been gone since breakfast.”

  Malone scowled. There was nothing to do but hope for the best, but he had a feeling it wasn’t going to do any good.

  “She said she was going shopping,” Jake said. He looked worried. “Malone—whatever happens, Helene mustn’t find out about—this. It’s something she shouldn’t be mixed up in.”

  The little lawyer nodded. True, in the past, Helene had been mixed up in a lot of things, of which murder had sometimes been the mildest, but he knew how Jake felt because he felt the same way. Helene sometimes had a way of complicating things, which he didn’t like to contemplate in connection with the present tangle.

  “Anyway,” Jake said, “if she were to find out about it now—after we’ve already kept it a secret from her—” He didn’t need to say another word.

  Malone sighed. It would probably take a miracle to keep Helene in the dark, but at least he could hope for one. He said, “How’s the television business?”

  “Fine,” Jake said bitterly. “Now look, Malone. Something’s going to have to be done about all this. I called the Strauss girl’s place. She hasn’t come back.”

  “So did I,” Malone said.

  “She’s got to be found, Malone.” Dead or alive, his tone added.

  Malone made a sweeping gesture that included not only Chicago, but the North and South American continents. “Where? Where do we look? Where do we start?”

  “Don’t be a defeatist,” Jake said firmly. He added in a milder tone, “Though it’s going to be like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

  “A haystack,” Malone said in a gloomy tone, “entirely composed of last straws.” He glowered at Jake as though he were personally responsible for most of them. “If you’re going to just sit there and brood, you might as well go do it in your own office.”

  Jake said, “At this hour, the corridor outside my office is littered with actors, writers, musicians, and odds and ends of people waiting for Mr. Jake Justus, very important producer.”

  “Maybe Eva Lou Strauss will be there,” the lawyer said. “Maybe she’s just a frustrated actress.” He thought about Myrdell Harris and wondered if he ought to tell Jake about his completely fruitless visit with her. No, no point to it. Then he thought about Myrdell Harris imitating the golden Delora Deanne voice. In a pinch, she could do the same job on a Delora Deanne TV show, if there ever was one. That is, if anything happened to Rita Jardee. As far as he knew, nothing had, yet. He found himself wondering how Rita Jardee’s voice could be sent through the mail to Hazel Swackhammer, and found the thought so disquieting that he abandoned it at once.

  He decided to drive the thought out of his mind by telling Jake all about Myrdell Harris, complete with voices. Also, complete with lack of information.

  Jake scowled and said, “If you’d stayed there and tended to business last night, instead of getting mixed up in a poker game—”

  “It wasn’t for pleasure,” Malone said wearily. “Just call it an ill-timed investment.”

  Jake looked at him suspiciously. “And by the way, since when do you keep a spare poker player sitting around in your front office?”

  Malone sighed. “Oh, all right. He’s keeping an eye on me because he’s looking for Eva Lou Strauss, and he thinks I know where she is.” He explained the details.

  “Well,” Jake said at last, “with enough people looking for Eva Lou Strauss—” He paused, looked sympathetically at Malone and said, “Maybe he’ll get tired of waiting and go looking for her himself.”

  “If he doesn’t,” Malone said, “I’m staying right where I am. He’s not only an expensive person to play poker with, he’s a terrible driver.”

  “Well,” Jake said again, “well—” He rose, adjusted his topcoat and started for the door. As he reached it, a sudden inspiration seized him. He flung the door open wide, and said loudly to Malone, “Then I’ll go right over and see this Strauss girl. Maybe she’ll listen to reason and come back.”

  He closed the door quickly before the little lawyer could say a word, leaving him sitting behind his desk in popeyed protest.

  “Mr. Justus,” Maggie said hopefully, “my brother Luke—”

  “Later,” Jake said. “Definitely, but also, later.” He pushed on into the corridor.

  The elevator door opened. Jake stepped in, noting with pride that the big gunman had stepped right in behind him. Getting rid of him might prove a problem later, but at least for the moment he’d gotten him away from Malone.

  He paused a moment on the sidewalk, blinking in the sunlight reflected on the already soot-smudged snow. A place to think seemed to be called for, and fast. Luring Gus Madrid away from Malone’s office had seemed like a brilliant inspiration at the time; now he was beginning to look dubiously and uncomfortably at the immediate future. He decided that it was something like having captured an untamed water buffalo.

  He realized that he was heading in the general direction of Joe the Angel’s, and went on a little more purposefully. That was as good a place to think as any.

  A few minutes later he settled down on a bar stool and noted, with a mixture of satisfaction and discomfort that Gus Madrid had also settled, a few stools down. He ordered a rye and sat staring at it. There was a possibility that he might go out through the door leading to the storage cellar, thence to an opening into the uncharted—for him, at least—labyrinth that lay under Chicago’s Loop.

  After a second rye he discarded the cellar exit plan as both impractical and undignified. Joe the Angel wouldn’t lift a fraction of an eyebrow if he were to go exploring, but he certainly wouldn’t permit the big gunman to follow. Besides, Jake thought, he would probably get lost himself.

  With the third rye, Joe the Angel propped his elbows confidingly on the polished bar. “Jake. My niece—”

  “Sings like the birds,” Jake said. “Dances like a spring breeze. Beautiful as the stars, but friendlier.”

  “You said it.” Joe the Angel glowed.

  “But,” Jake said firmly, “later. When I have my show a little more organized.”

  Joe the Angel sighed, and changed the subject. “Malone. I worry about him.”

  “Me too,” Jake said. “I worry about him all the time.”

  “But not like I worry, Jake. My cousin Rico—” he paused, shook his head. “I don’t like this. This cutting off of hands.”

  Jake became very uncomfortably aware of Gus Madrid four feet away. He said, very confidentially, “Just between us, Malone’s been working too hard. Don’t worry about whatever Rico said. Nothing to it. But Malone gets little fancies, sometime. Nothing serious.” He hoped he sounded convincing, and felt like Judas.

  The booth telephone ringing was a welcome diversion. Again a sleepy-eyed American reporter got up to answer it. Again the dingy white parakeet said, “Ring, ring, ring,” in a nasty voice.

  And again Joe the Angel glowed. “Very smart, that bird. Very rare bird.”

  “If he’s so smart,” Jake said, “why don’t you teach him to answer the phone instead of talking about it?”

  Joe the Angel looked at him coldly and went away to wipe up a purely imaginary spot at the far end of the bar.

  Jake sighed and went back to considering his next move. He couldn’t stay here indefinitely. For one thing, Malone himself would show up sooner or later, and the luring away of Gus Madrid would have been wasted. On the other hand, there seemed no place else to go. Certainly not back to the apartment. He wasn’t going to let the big gunman find out where he lived, and possibly encounter Helene.

  Well, as Malone had pointed out, there was always his own office. Gus Madrid would be welcome to park outside in the corridor as long as he liked.

  He ambled slowly up to Wacker Drive and across the bridge to the Wrigley Building. There he moved more briskly, giving the briefest of greetings to the assorted h
opefuls in the lobby.

  Two more hopefuls were outside his office when he arrived, with Gus Madrid lingering down the corridor. He recognized them as unemployed actors and managed another brief greeting.

  “’Lo, Jake, just dropped by in case you were in—”

  “Mr. Justus, I happened to be in the building, and—”

  He waved at them, muttered something about having to make a few phone calls and seeing them later, and went on in. He felt a little more secure with the office door closed behind him, and not just from Gus Madrid, either.

  The anteroom needed dusting. For that matter, so did his own office. He located a cloth in an otherwise empty drawer and spent a few minutes housecleaning. Then he arranged and rearranged papers on the desk. Finally he opened the door and motioned to the two actors.

  “Sorry my secretary isn’t here. Home with a sprained rib or something.”

  He interviewed and soothed the two actors without promising them anything. As the day progressed, he did the same with other actors, three announcers, an ex-rodeo star, the manager of a troupe of acrobats, a belly dancer, and an assortment of writers, directors, musicians, and miscellaneous singers. All of them expressed proper concern over his secretary, and all of them went away properly soothed.

  He checked with his telephone-answering service and found that there had been no telephone calls. He called down to the restaurant for a sandwich, coffee, and the newspapers.

  At last he peered into the corridor, saw no one but the slouching figure of Gus Madrid leaning against the wall. With a feeling of relief, he locked the door, turned out the lights and settled down to spend the afternoon. He glanced at the front pages of the trade papers and laid them aside. He looked over half-a-dozen magazines in the anteroom and discarded them. Finally he located a dictionary and went to work on all the crossword puzzles in all the newspapers.

  By the time he had finished with them, the office was beginning to grow dark. He glanced at the window and saw that the sky had clouded and that it was snowing with real enthusiasm now.

  There was no reason on earth, he thought suddenly, why he couldn’t go downstairs, grab a taxi, and with a series of street directions he’d long ago learned from Helene, lose Gus Madrid completely. In fact, there was no reason why he couldn’t have done that long ago, or even in the first place.