The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK

by Fletcher Flora

  The fingers of his left hand moved up the keys. It was remarkable how lightly that chunk of rock moved. The thin sounds of the short scale lasted no longer than a few seconds. The left hand joined the right in his lap.

  “I’ll tell you something,” he said. “I don’t know why. What I ought to do is throw you out of here. Anyhow, Regis had cash. Enough for a lifetime in the right place. See that picture over there? It’s a copy of a Rembrandt. Behind it there’s a safe. Regis knew the combination. The night he went away, I had seventy-five grand in it. Regis took it.”

  “That’s a lot of cash to have in a safe behind a picture.”

  “I had it for a purpose. Never mind what.”

  “You let him get away with it? You didn’t try to recover it?”

  “No. To tell the truth, I was relieved. I always felt an obligation toward him because of the woman whose lousy kid he was. Now the obligation is wiped out. We’re quits.” He lifted both hands and replaced them gently on the keys of the piano. There was not the slightest sound from the wires inside. “Besides, I figured it was partly for her. For Constance. I liked her. I hope she’s happier than she ever was.”

  I started to refer again to corn, but I thought better of it. Then I thought that it would probably be a good time to leave, and I turned and went as far as the door. “Hand,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Forget it. Drop it. You hear me?”

  “I hear you,” I said.

  I opened the door and went out. After three steps in the hall, I heard the piano. What I heard from it was something else by Chopin.

  CHAPTER 5.

  On the way in, no one had spoken to me. On the way out, someone did. The lower hall was the place, and Robin Robbins was the person. She was standing in the entrance to the cocktail lounge, at the edge of the shallow step, and although she was standing erect, like a lady, she somehow gave the impression of leaning indolently against an immaterial lamppost. Her voice was lazy, threaded with a kind of insolent amusement. “Buy me a drink?” she said.

  “I’m too poor,” I said.

  “Tough. Let me buy you one.”

  “I’m too proud.”

  “Poor and proud. My God, it sounds like something by Horatio Alger.”

  “Junior.”

  “What?”

  “Horatio Alger, Junior. You forgot the junior.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t forget him altogether. What do you say we start trying?”

  “I’m surprised you know anything about him to start trying to forget. He was a long time ago, honey. Were kids still reading him when you were a kid?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I was never a kid. I was born old and just got older.”

  “Like me. That gives us something in common, I guess. Maybe we ought to have that drink together after all. I’ll buy.”

  “No. I’ve got a better idea for a poor, proud man. In my apartment there’s a bottle of scotch left over from another time. Someone gave it to me. We could go there and drink out of it for free.”

  “I don’t care for scotch. It tastes like medicine.”

  “There’s a bottle of bourbon there too. In case you don’t care for bourbon, there’s rye.”

  “No brandy? No champagne?”

  “Anything you want.”

  “That’s quite a selection to be left over from other times. Was it all given to you?”

  “Why not? People are always giving me something. They seem to enjoy it.”

  “Thanks for offering to share the wealth. However, I don’t think so. Some other time, maybe.”

  She opened a small purse she was holding in her hands and extracted a cigarette. I went closer and supplied a light. She inhaled and exhaled and stared into the smoke with her smoky eyes. Her breath coming out with the smoke made a soft, sighing sound.

  “Suit yourself,” she said. “It’s just that I’ve got something I thought you might be interested in.”

  “You’ve got plenty I might be interested in, honey.”

  She dragged again and sighed again. The smoke thinned and hung in a pale blue haze between us. In her eyes was a suggestion of something new. Something less than insolence, a little more than amusement. Her lush little mouth curved amiably.

  “That’s not quite what I meant, but it’s something to consider. What I meant was something I can tell you.”

  “Information? Is it free like the scotch and the bourbon and the rye? Don’t forget I’m a guy who wears ready-made suits.”

  “I remember. Poor and proud and probably honest. Right out of H. Alger, Junior. Don’t worry about it, though. It’s free like the scotch and the bourbon and the rye.”

  “Everything free. No price on anything. I hope you won’t be offended, honey, but somehow I got an idea it’s out of character.”

  “All right. Forget it. You were asking questions about a couple of people, and I thought you were, interested. My mistake, Horatio.” Her mouth curved now in the opposite direction from amiability. What had been in her eyes was gone, and what replaced it was contempt. I thought in the instant before she turned away that she was going to spit on the floor. Before she could descend the step and walk away nicely on her nice legs with the neat movement of her neat behind, I took a step and put a hand on her arm, and we stood posed that way for a second or two or longer, she arrested and I arresting, and then she turned her head and looked at me over her shoulder.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Make mine bourbon,” I said.

  We went the rest of the way down the hall together and down the two steps and outside. Beside the building was a paved parking lot reserved for patrons, and I had left my car there, although I was not properly a patron. We walked around and got into the car and drove in it to her apartment, which was in a nice building on a good street. It was on the fifth floor, which we reached by elevator, and it didn’t have any terrace that got the sun in the afternoon, or any terrace at all, or any of many features that the apartment of Faith Salem had, including several acres, but it was a nice enough apartment just the same, a far better apartment than any I had ever lived in or probably ever would. Besides, it was certainly something that someone had just wanted to give her. For a consideration, of course. An exchange, in a way, of commodities.

  “Fix a bourbon for yourself,” she said. “For me too, in water. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  She went out of the room and was gone about five times as long as the minute. In the meanwhile, I found ingredients and mixed two bourbon highballs and had them ready when she returned. She looked just the same as she’d looked when she’d gone, which was good enough to be disturbing.

  “I lose,” I said.

  “Some people always do,” she said. “Lose what, exactly?”

  “A bet. With myself. I bet you’d gone to get into something more comfortable.”

  “Why should I? What I’m wearing is comfortable enough. There’s practically nothing to it.”

  I was facing her with a full glass in each hand. She approached me casually, as if she were going to ask for a light or brush a crumb off my tie. She kept right on walking, right into me, and put her arms around my neck and her mouth on my mouth, and I stood there with my arms projecting beyond her on both sides, the damn glasses in my hands, and we remained static and breathless in this position for quite a long time. Finally she stepped back and helped herself to the glass in one of my hands. She took a drink and tilted her head and subjected me and my effect to a smoldering appraisal.

  “I’ve always wanted to kiss a man as ugly as you,” she said. “It wasn’t bad.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ve had worse myself, but under better conditions.”

  “I’m wondering if it’s good enough to develop. I think it might be.”

&n
bsp; “You go on wondering about it and let me know.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  She moved over to a chair and lowered herself onto her neat behind and crossed her nice legs. From where I found a chair and sat, across from her, I could see quite a lot of the legs. She didn’t mind, and neither did I.

  “If you decide to develop it,” I said, “won’t Silas Lawler object?”

  She swallowed some more of her highball and looked into what was left. Her soft and succulent little mouth assumed lax and ugly lines.

  “To hell with Silas Lawler,” she said.

  “Don’t kid me,” I said. “I know he pays the bills.”

  “So he pays the bills. There’s one bill he may owe that he hasn’t paid. If he owes it, I want him to pay in full.”

  “For what?”

  “For the murder of Regis Lawler.”

  She continued to look into her glass. From her expression, she must have seen something offensive on the bottom. I looked into mine and saw nothing but good whisky and pure water. I drained it.

  “Maybe you don’t know what you said,” I said.

  “I know what I said. I said he may owe it. I’d like to know.”

  “And I’d like to know what makes you think he may.”

  “Start with that fairy tale about Regis and Constance Markley running off together. Just disappearing completely so they could have a beautiful new life together. Do you believe it?”

  “I don’t believe it. I don’t disbelieve it. I’ve got an open mind.”

  “Brother, if you’d known Regis Lawler as well as I did, you’d know the whole idea is phony. He just wasn’t the type.”

  “I’ve heard that. I’ve also heard that he was in love with Constance. It’s been suggested that he might have done for her what he wouldn’t have done for anyone else.”

  “That’s another phony bit. His being in love with Constance, I mean. He wasn’t.”

  “No? This is a new angle. Convince me.”

  “Maybe I can’t. I don’t have any letters or tapes or photographs. Neither does anyone else, thank God. I could give you some interesting clinical descriptions, but I won’t. Basically I’m a modest girl. I like my privacy.”

  “I think I get you, but I’m not sure. Are you telling me more or less delicately that Regis had love enough for two?”

  “Two? Is that all the higher you can count? Anyhow, what’s love? All I know is, we went through the motions of what passes for love in my crowd, and he seemed to enjoy it. Whatever you call it, he felt more of it for me than he felt for anyone else, including Constance, and I guess you couldn’t have expected more than that from Regis.” Her little mouth had for a moment a bitter twist. The bitterness tainted the sound of her words. She did not have the look and sound of a woman who had been rejected. She had the look and sound of a woman who had been accepted with qualifications and used without them. Most of all, a woman who had understood the qualifications from the beginning and had accepted them and submitted to them.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I always have trouble understanding anything when it gets the least complicated. You were having Regis on the side of Silas, and Regis was having you on the side of Constance. Not that I want to make you sound like a chaser or a dish of buttered peas. Is that right?”

  “Damn it, that’s what I said.”

  “And Silas killed Regis in anger because he found out about it. Is that what you mean?”

  “It’s a solid thought. I like it better than the fairy tale.”

  “I’m not sure that I share your preference. I don’t want to hurt you, honey, but I doubt like hell that Silas considers you worth killing for. He just gave me permission to try my luck if the notion struck me, but maybe he didn’t really mean it. Anyhow, you’ll have to admit that it doesn’t sound like a case of homicidal jealousy.”

  “Who mentioned jealousy?” She shrugged angrily, a small gesture of dismissal. “He’s proud. He’s vain and sensitive. He’s made a hell of a lot out of nothing at all, but he can’t forget that he only went to the fourth grade and got where he is by doing things proper people don’t do. He still feels secretly inferior and insecure, and he always will. The one thing he can’t stand is the slightest suggestion of contempt. He’d kill anyone for that. Can you think of anything more contemptuous than taking another man’s wife or mistress?”

  I thought of seventy-five grand. It seemed to me that helping yourself to that much lettuce was a contemptuous act too, and I thought about discussing it as a motive for murder, but I couldn’t see that it would get me anywhere in present circumstances, and so I decided against it.

  “So he killed Regis,” I said. “That was a couple of years ago. And ever since he’s gone on with you as if nothing at all had happened. After murder, business as usual at the same old stand. Is that it?”

  “Sure. Why not? Laughing like hell all the time. Feeling all the time the same kind of contempt for Regis and me that he imagines we felt for him. Silas would get a lot of satisfaction out of something like that.” She looked down into her glass, swirling what was left of her drink around and around the inner circumference. Bitterness increased the distortion of her mouth. “He’ll throw me out after a while,” she said.

  “You’re quite a psychologist,” I said. “All that stuff about inferiority and insecurity and implied contempt. I wish I had as much brains as you.”

  “All right, you bastard. So I’m the kind who ought to stick to the little words. So I only went to the eighth grade myself. Go ahead and ridicule me.”

  “You’re wrong. I wasn’t ridiculing you. I never ridicule anyone. The trouble your theory has is the same trouble that the other theory has, and the trouble with both is that they leave loose ends all over the place. I can mention a few, if you’d care to hear them.”

  “Mention whatever you please.”

  “All right. Where’s the body?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the detective. Work on it”

  “Where’s Constance? Did he kill both of them? If so, why? He had no reason to hate her. As a matter of fact, they should have been on the same team. You, not Constance, would have been the logical second victim.”

  “I know. Don’t you think I’ve thought of that a thousand times? Maybe she knew he killed Regis. Maybe she learned about it somehow or even actually witnessed it. Damn it, I’ve told you something you didn’t know. I’ve told you about Regis and me. I’ve told you he was not really in love with Constance and would never have run away with her for any longer than a weekend. I’ve told you this, and it’s the truth, and all you do is keep wanting me to be the detective. You’re the detective, brother. I’ve told you that too.”

  “Sure you have. I’m the detective and all I’ve got to do is explain how someone killed a man and a woman and completely disposed of their bodies. That would be a tough chore, honey. Practically impossible.”

  “Silas Lawler’s been doing the practically impossible for quite a few years. He’s a very competent guy.”

  “He Is. I know it, and I’m not forgetting it. However, I can think of a third theory that excludes him. It’s simpler and it ties up an end or two. You said Regis didn’t love Constance. He just had an affair with her. Suppose he tried to end the affair and got himself killed for his trouble? She was a strange female, I’m told. Almost psychotic, someone said. Do you think she was capable?”

  Robin Robbins stood up abruptly. She carried her glass over to the ingredients and stood quietly with her back to me. Apparently she was only considering whether she should mix herself another or not. She decided not. Depositing her glass, she helped herself to a cigarette from a box and lit it with a lighter. Trailing smoke, she returned to her chair.

  “Oh, Constance was capable, all right,” she said. “She was much too good to do a lot of thin
gs I’ve done and will probably do again and again if the price is right, but there’s one thing she could have done that I couldn’t, and that’s murder. And if you think that sounds like more eighth grade psychology, you can forget it and get the hell out of here.”

  “I don’t know about the psychology,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure that you don’t really think she killed Regis. If you did, you’d be happy to say so.”

  “That’s right.” She nodded in amiable agreement. “I wouldn’t mind at all doing Constance a bad turn, but she didn’t kill Regis. That’s obvious.”

  “I’m inclined to agree. In the first place, she couldn’t have got rid of the body. In the second place, if she could and did, why run away afterward? It wouldn’t be sensible.”

  “Well, it’s your problem, brother. I guess it’s time you went somewhere else and began to think about it.”

  “Yeah. I’m the detective. You’ve told me and told me. You haven’t told me much else, though. Not anything very convincing. You got an idea that Silas killed Regis because you and Regis made a kind of illicit cuckold of him, and you lure me here with free bourbon and tell me so, and I’m supposed to be converted by this evangelical message. It’s pretty thin, if you don’t mind my saying it. Excuse me for being skeptical.”

  “That’s all right. I didn’t expect much from you anyhow. I just thought I’d try.”

  “Try harder.”

  “I’ve got nothing more to tell you.”

  “Really? That’s hard to believe. You’re not exactly inexpensive, honey, and I’ll bet you have to earn your keep. What I mean is, you and Silas surely get convivial on occasions. Even intimate. Men are likely to become indiscreet under such circumstances. They say things they wouldn’t ordinarily say. If Silas killed Regis because of you, I’d think he’d even have an urge to gloat. By innuendo, at least.”

  She moved her head against the back of her chair in a lazy negative. “I’m a girl who knows the side of her bread the butter is on, and I earn my keep. You’re right there. But you’re wrong if you think Silas Lawler is the kind who gets confidential or careless. He’s a very reserved guy, and he protects his position. He tends to his own business, and most of his business nowadays is on the three floors of the building we just left. To be honest, he’s pretty damn dull. He works. He eats and sleeps and plays that damn piano, and once in a while he makes love. Once a month, for a few days, he goes to some place called Amity.”