Casey started toward the door. He hadn’t learned much, but he was getting warm. There was that feeling in the air of getting very warm indeed. “I hope,” he added, his hand resting on the door handle, “to get this cleared up one way or the other soon. When I do, you’ll see your daughter again. I’m sure you’ll remember that if you’re tempted to cry on Gorden’s shoulder.”
Phyllis didn’t ask questions, not many, anyway. He had no way of knowing when she had awakened and missed him, because she didn’t say. She said hardly anything at all all day. In the evening they went out to dinner and took in a movie. Driving home, she asked him.
“I went out for a drive,” Casey said. “I wanted to think.”
“I’ve been thinking, too.”
She sounded very grave. Casey stopped for a signal and took a moment to scan her face, sober and serious in the light of the corner lamp.
“Casey, let’s not go back!”
“What?”
“Back to Big John’s. Back to anywhere. Let’s just keep driving.”
“Driving? Driving where?”
“I don’t care—anywhere. Let’s get clear away from this city and never come back. And never think about it again.”
It didn’t make any sense. This whole thing was her idea in the first place; besides, there was no forgetting a thing like murder. The police wouldn’t forget. Casey knew that much.
“You’re talking crazy!” he shouted. “We can’t go away. You know that. I’ve got to stick with this thing. I’ve got my teeth in it now. When I find Carter Groot—”
He’d never told her much about Groot, just a brief reference that last night at the walk-up, but she seemed to understand.
“When you find him!”
The light was green again, and the drivers behind him were leaning on their horns, but even though she finished very quietly Casey heard exactly what she said.
“Can’t you see, Casey? Carter Groot is dead. And when you know what he knew—”
Some sentences didn’t have to be finished.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
ELEVEN O’CLOCK. Casey made the call from a telephone booth at the corner drugstore, just in case Phyllis might be curious, which she obviously was. Mrs. Brunner must have been sitting beside the phone.
“I’ve been thinking things over,” she said, her voice sounding a little strained and tired over the wires. “I want to talk to you, Mr. Morrow.”
“Alone?”
“Yes, alone.”
There were different ways of being alone and, under the circumstances, Casey knew which way he preferred. A little Bohemian restaurant tucked under the El on South Wabash would be just about right. It had been a long time since he’d been there but nothing would be changed. Little restaurants tucked under Els never changed, and it was from a booth far in the rear of the room that he watched Mrs. Brunner come in, look about carefully, questioningly, and then, seeing him at last, come back to his booth. It was noon by this time, and the place was crowded, noisy, filled with delicious smells and, for their purposes, quite alone. Except, of course, for Maggie Doone sitting at a table in the center of the floor where she could watch everything while tackling a plate of goulash.
Maggie had been sweet about it, too. “I’m so happy that I haven’t another single thing to do in life but look after you,” she’d stormed over the phone. “I suppose I’ll even have to pick up my own check!” Which she would, of course, since Casey had never laid eyes on her before while Mrs. Brunner was around. But he felt a lot easier knowing there was someone present to give him the high sign in case Mrs. Brunner’s idea of intimacy included Lance Gorden or a couple of boys from homicide.
She wore black. She was the kind of woman who wore black well and knew it, in fact, wore anything well and knew it without seeming to make an issue of it. But not all the poise and breeding and studied calm in seven generations of Back Bay could have concealed the battle going on behind her deep-set eyes. Deep-set and a bit hollowed, as if she hadn’t slept well. All she wanted was coffee.
“I’ve been thinking over what you told me yesterday,” she said at last. “It strikes me that you’re quite a persistent young man.”
“Is that a compliment?”
Only a shadow of a smile relieved her tension. “That’s really not important, Mr. Morrow. What is important is that I’ve no intention of underestimating you. You seem to be quite capable of unearthing any information I could give you, so we may as well have it out right now. About Lance, I mean. You’ll keep after him, won’t you?”
“That I will,” Casey said grimly.
“Then I’ll try to save you a little trouble. You’re right about one thing. A hundred thousand dollars was too much to pay for that property. About sixty-five thousand too much.”
She didn’t seem upset about it. It was as if Gorden had been caught going through a red light or making a U turn, and then Casey realized that this was no sudden discovery; Mrs. Brunner had known about it for some time.
“I wasn’t quite honest with you yesterday,” she added. “I have seen the property and, little as I know about business, it aroused my suspicions. I made a few inquiries and learned that it had been sold for thirty-five thousand not six months before Lance made the deal.”
“And you’ve known this all along?”
“For several months.”
“And you still think Gorden would make an ideal son-in-law?”
Casey’s amazement was equaled by Mrs. Brunner’s serenity. She was wearing a vague, forgive-us-our-trespasses smile that made him want to pound on the table. This woman would buy anything; she’d turn both cheeks and bend over to take the boot Gorden, or any other smooth operator, was going to give her and then go to the trouble of rationalizing the act.
“I suppose that is difficult for you to understand,” she said quietly. “As a matter of fact, Lance and I discussed the situation immediately after I learned the truth. He’s a very young man, Mr. Morrow, and very much in love with my daughter. It’s difficult for a proud young man, virtually penniless, to marry a girl of great wealth. Or don’t you think so?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Casey muttered, uncomfortably suspicious that his ears were getting red. “But I suppose swindling her family out of a nice little nest egg makes everything cozy.”
“You make it sound very ruthless, Mr. Morrow.”
“How do you make it sound?”
“Rather tragic. I’m certain Lance is honest at heart, but I was very careless in placing so much temptation before him when he was already so disturbed over Phyllis. It’s as much my fault as his.”
“The law wouldn’t think so.”
“But the law isn’t concerned with this. Lance wanted to return the money but I told him to keep it more or less as a loan—and a lesson. That’s why I don’t intend that this shall go any further.”
“I gather that Mr. Brunner didn’t know.”
She didn’t answer. It was obvious enough what Casey was thinking—what anyone would think with so much to go on. Mrs. Brunner bit her lower lip white, as if aware that she’d said too much, but it was too late now for that. She fingered the clasp of her handbag and made a move to leave the table, but Casey held out his hand.
“The canceled check,” he said. “Remember?”
“What are you going to do?”
“That depends on what you do, Mrs. Brunner. I don’t intend to yell copper unless you do, if that’s what you mean. I just want to see a man about a hundred thousand dollars.”
This was all crazy, downright insane. He was bluffing all the way. One word from Mrs. Brunner, one move toward the phone booth, and he’d have gone crashing through the kitchen and out the back alleyway. Some of that had to be showing. She hesitated, her gray eyes leveling at him again.
“What is it?” Casey asked.
“I want to see my daughter, Mr. Morrow. I want you to bring her home.”
Now it was Casey’s turn to think things over, but the time was short for a man with so many th
ings to do. Besides, any day, any hour now Phyllis would say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing, or maybe be recognized on the street, and bring the whole damn police force down on his head. But he didn’t want to think of Phyllis. If he thought of Phyllis he’d say no; if he concentrated on that check he’d ask—
“When?”
“Tonight,” Mrs. Brunner said. “I’ll stay in at my husband’s apartment if that’s more convenient.”
But Casey was thinking of that long open highway leading west, with no stop lights or streetcars or city police to get in a man’s way if he needed to move in a hurry. “I don’t like the traffic,” he said. “She won’t want to go, anyway, but maybe I can talk her into a ride in the country.” And Mrs. Brunner, handing over the canceled check, didn’t exactly hide the fact that this was one engagement he’d better keep.
The name on the check was Victor Vanno. That didn’t tell him much, but the stamp on the reverse side indicated that the check had been cashed at a bank on La Salle Street and that did help. Vanno was in the city, then, or had been at the time the check was cashed, and if the answers beginning to stack up under Casey’s hat were anywhere near the truth Mr. Victor Vanno would still be around. There had to be somebody else; Gorden couldn’t do it alone. Somebody had to play shortstop on that double play from Mrs. Brunner to Vanno to Gorden, and somebody had to know something about Carter Groot. Had Vanno cashed that check and then walked out of the bank with the money in his jeans? That would be too risky. More than likely he’d held it just long enough to sign his name.
Outside the restaurant Casey waited at the El stairway until Maggie showed up. “Guess what?” he said. “I’ve got a job for you. Can you make like a crisp, efficient credit manager?”
Maggie glared at him.
“Try calling this bank,” he went on, holding out the check, “and see if Victor Vanno is one of their steady customers. See if he has an account, but most of all an address. You figure it out. You’re a smart girl.”
“One dollar and sixty-five cents,” Maggie said firmly.
“What?”
“Including tip. I could have stayed at home and opened a can of soup. Come on—give.”
One dollar and sixty-five cents it was.
It was a peculiar address that Maggie finally brought back from her afternoon’s occupation, peculiar for a man on the receiving end of a hundred thousand dollars. Casey could feel himself getting excited. Things were working out now, working out just the way he’d figured them. He sent Maggie home, grumbling as usual, and started walking west on Madison.
A couple of blocks beyond the river Casey stopped. It checked. The faded-paint number on the glass-paneled door was the same as the one Maggie had scrawled on the check, and it sure wasn’t the Ambassador East. There was a bar and grill on one side and a pool hall with green-painted windows on the other, and wedged in between was this cheap little hotel with a shoe-box lobby and stack of stairs fingering up toward a yellowish light. Casey cut across the lobby to a little hole-in-the-wall desk where he was already being eyed by an old man wearing a greasy brown sweater. Asking questions didn’t make the old man regard him any friendlier, either.
“Vanno?” he repeated. (He’d been hitting the bottle a long time to get a croak like that.)
“Victor Vanno,” Casey said.
“Who wants him?”
“I do. I just told you.”
“He ain’t in.”
Casey took a quick look at what there was to the lobby and decided against it, but an open doorway led into the bar and a man could get thirsty on a job like this.
“I’ll wait,” he said.
“Don’t know when he’ll be in.”
“I’ll still wait.”
The bar whisky was none too good, and bar whisky was all they had, but at least it was wet. Casey’s palms were a little wet, too. He realized that, with some surprise, after he’d been sitting at the far end of the bar for maybe twenty minutes. It must be the excitement, the tensing for something he could only guess at. He ordered another shot and nursed it along a bit, wishing that something would break. Who was Victor Vanno, anyway? What would he look like? What would he say? The bartender didn’t seem talkative, but Casey was going to have a try at it anyway when the street door opened and a buxom female with a mop of orange hair stumbled up to the bar. She wasn’t completely drunk; on the other hand, she wasn’t completely sober. Besides, she was talking to herself.
“On your way, he says, you bother me! How you like that guy talkin’ that way to me? How you like that, huh?”
She wasn’t going to get an answer, which was all right on account of she wasn’t talking to anybody. The bartender merely drew a beer and shoved it across the bar in a way that told Casey this was old stuff.
“Like he was a duke, or something! Well, I’ll tell you—” She stopped long enough to drain her beer in one long, deliberate pull that held Casey fascinated, and then wiped one hand across her rouge-smeared mouth. “Nobody’s pushin’ me aroun’! Not me, see? I’m goin’ up an’ tell that dirty—”
“Hey,” the bartender said.
She was already shoving off toward the hotel lobby. She stopped and looked back to where he was rapping the bar next to the empty beer glass. “Vanno’ll take care of that,” she roared. “He’ll take care of plenty before I’m through with him! Nobody’s pushin’ me aroun’!”
Vanno. That’s all Casey needed to hear. He slid off the bar stool and followed the woman into the hotel lobby. She didn’t even bother with the desk clerk; she knew where she was going and Casey wasn’t far behind. The stairs led up to a dark, narrow hall, and three doors down she stopped and yanked at the doorknob. The door didn’t give.
“Vanno!” she called. Then her voice softened and turned sticky. “Vanno, honey, open the door.”
Casey gave her all of thirty seconds and then stepped up to the doorknob. “All right, Vanno,” he said. “Open it up.”
Things were happening on the other side of the panel. He could hear a heavy body stirring on the bed, getting up, and then waiting, undecided, behind the door. Then it opened slowly, and Casey wanted to duck. The light in the room behind him made Vanno a giant. Casey measured his shoulders against the doorframe and felt a prickling at the back of his neck. The face, heavy and swollen with liquor and sleep, was unfamiliar; but he’d have known those shoulders anywhere. Casey Morrow wasn’t one to forget an assailant who’d caressed him with a blackjack.
“I told you to clear outa here,” Vanno growled, glaring right past Casey to where the woman stood open-mouthed and bewildered. “Who’s this you brought around? What are you tryin’ to pull, anyway?” She began to blubber something but it wasn’t important. Vanno had stepped back and let some of the light spill out into the hall, and Casey could actually feel the recognition. He could figure that, too, now. Gorden and his houseman would have compared notes on their mysterious callers and formed a pretty pat description, and Junior, here, had been briefed for that expedition to Erie Street. Now he was remembering and that could complicate matters.
“Hello, Vanno,” Casey said, edging into the room. “Mind if I come in?”
He didn’t feel that brave. As a matter of fact, he was beginning to appreciate that fortification he’d picked up at the bar. The woman scurried in behind him and Vanno closed the door. The room suddenly seemed awfully crowded.
“I’m a little disappointed in your diggings,” Casey observed. “But I guess even a hundred thousand doesn’t stretch very far these days.”
“What do you want?” Vanno demanded. “Who sent you?”
“Nobody. It was my own idea.”
“You should be more careful what ideas you get.”
Vanno didn’t seem to be the analytical type, but he’d been told that this man in the raincoat and the brown hat was trouble and that was good enough for him. His coat was unbuttoned and Casey could see the shoulder holster next to his shirt. All that muscle, and he has to carry a gun, Casey thought. Maybe
I’m not the most frightened man in the world after all.
“I don’t know how you came to wash Gorden’s dirty linen,” he said, “but he sure must not pay much.”
“Who’s Gorden?” Vanno asked.
“A nervous man. A very nervous man. Personally, I wouldn’t care to do business with anybody so jumpy. I think he’s got a guilt complex, Vanno. I wouldn’t be surprised if he talked in his sleep, especially when it gets warm.”
“Honey,” the woman with the orange hair demanded, “who is this guy?”
“Mr. Opportunity,” Casey answered. “I just got Vanno’s name in a quiz contest. For the right answers he wins the grand prize.”
“What answers do you want?” Vanno growled.
“The big one. What happened to Carter Groot?”
It was the big one, all right. Vanno had been uncertain until now; now he knew. His hand slid toward that shoulder holster (the big ones, Casey remembered, scare the easiest) but he didn’t have time. A man learns things in the South Pacific; he learns fast or he never learns at all. No sooner did he make that move than Vanno was sprawled on the floor with a foolish expression on his big meat face and an empty hand where the gun had been.
“That’s better,” Casey said. “I always like a man who knows how to relax.”
“Honey,” the woman said, “are you all right?”
“Shut up,” snapped Vanno.
“He’s the law, that’s what he is. He has to be the law!”
“I told you to shut up!”
“But you’re a two-time loser!”
So that was it. Gorden would know, of course. Gorden, Casey remembered, was a lawyer; he would know Victor Vanno like the book he could throw at him if things got rough.
“Inflation,” he mused aloud. “One day you get your name on the deed to a run-down estate about to be sold for taxes, and six months later Mrs. Brunner pays one hundred thousand dollars for it. That’s as neat a piece of free enterprise as I’ve ever come across. When did old man Brunner get wise?”
“You can’t pin that on me!” Vanno bawled.
“Famous last words,” Casey observed. “I bet you could swing a mean poker, too.”
Dead on the Level Page 13
