He was about the same build and coloring as the man we’d found in the bathtub on Lafayette Square, and the features were not dissimilar, but there was something about the set of his face that spoke volumes about the glimpses of the life Dex and I had gotten over the past few days. And maybe a whiff of something that came off him; the smell of success and corruption in his own special blend.
Dempsey stood in the doorway for a long moment, drinking in the scene. His eyes slid over me and looked coldly at Cal, but they stopped at Rita like they’d hit a wall.
“So this is how it is, huh?”
“Harry …” Rita’s voice was as small and girlish as I’d ever heard it. “It’s not what it looks like. It’s not what you think.”
“And what do I think, Rita? That you double-crossed me? That you agreed to go away with me, then fed me to Lucid’s torpedoes?”
“It’s not like that Harry… .” Her voice was plaintive now.
“It was a nice setup, Rita. You get me to buy the tickets … get me to put up the dough for the trip … for a life. Then you get rid of me so you can run off with this boob.”
“Hey!” Cal said, shifting the gun uncomfortably from one hand to the other and targeting first Dempsey, then me, then Dempsey again, as though he couldn’t quite decide whose presence represented the biggest threat. I could have told him, but he didn’t ask.
“Yeah, you heard me, you dumb palooka,” Dempsey went on. “Look at the broad you chose. Think about the game she’s playing, chum. She doesn’t care for you any more than she cared for me. First chance she gets, she’ll throw you over for something better, because that’s what her kind does.”
Now Cal seemed to have three people to watch carefully. Me, Dempsey, and Rita. Of the three, there’s no doubt I seemed the least likely to try anything funny.
“We was …” Cal cleared his throat, went on. “We was gonna go away together.”
“A lonely island in the Pacific, right?” Dempsey said. “Yeah, poor sap. We were gonna go there too, weren’t we, sweetheart?” he said, addressing Rita again. “How much you get for me? Was it enough?”
“Fifteen G’s,” Rita said quietly.
Dempsey whistled. “Not bad, not bad. With the fifteen I’d already given you to hang onto for the South Pacific, you were gonna be set up pretty good. You and pretty boy here,” he said, cocking his thumb at Cal. “Too bad those looks ain’t brains or you’d be dangerous.”
“Hey!” Cal said again.
“You figured I’d take it lying down, Harry?” Now there was a white heat on Rita’s face. She didn’t look beautiful anymore. “You think I didn’t know you were carrying on with that Jergens broad? I’ve got eyes, Harry.”
I flashed a look at Cal’s face at the mention of Brucie’s name. What I saw there was anything but brotherly. If I hadn’t been sure before, I was now: no one in this room knew the whole game. Probably not even Cal.
“People talk,” Rita added.
“They talk too much,” Dempsey sniffed.
“She wanted what I had.” Rita seemed not to have heard Dempsey at all. “And when she tried to take it, I realized I wanted more. I wasn’t gonna be that girl, Harry. I wasn’t gonna be the girl you left behind because you found someone new.”
“So you … what? You cooked up this cockamaimy plan to go off with him? And with my lettuce? I don’t think so, Rita. I don’t think so at all.”
While Dempsey spoke, I could feel something like tension rise in the small room, or maybe it was just the heat from under his collar. It can’t have felt good to come to understand how he’d been both duped and used. As he became aware of just how deep this treachery had gone, I could see the anger rise in Dempsey’s face. I watched while a deadly light dawned, and though his expression never changed, the tension around him did. After a while I felt that if I reached out, I’d be able to touch it. And I’d get burned.
When with a flinch and a shrug a weapon seemed to appear in Dempsey’s hand, I was almost not surprised. Or maybe I was surprised—that it had taken so long to happen. How much had either of this pair thought he would endure before he’d snap?
Dempsey pulled out the gun and aimed it levelly at Cal. Not to be outdone or undone, Rita reached into her handbag and brought out a tiny pearl-handled derringer. In another situation, that gun might have been laughable. In the confines of the tiny quarters, however, I figured she could make any one of us pretty good and dead.
I let my eyes slide over these characters one by one, situated now like some weird Mexican standoff. Cal with his roscoe trained on Dempsey. Dempsey with his gun aimed almost casually at Rita, while Rita stood pointing her little weapon with great care in Dempsey’s general direction. The room felt like a powder keg. I didn’t figure it would take much of a spark for it to go off.
“What I wanna know, doll,” Dempsey said to Rita, “is why? We had us a pretty good plan. If the P.I. would’ve seen what we meant for him to see …”
“Yeah,” Rita retorted, bolder now. “If. If you weren’t married. If your wife hadn’t come back from her mother’s in Pasadena sooner than expected so’s we had to get the body out of the house. If you didn’t have an eye for a pretty skirt. If the shamus hadn’t got it into his fool head to go to Frisco, seeing the corpse and then fingerprintin’ it. If, if, if. But the biggest if of all has nothing to do with fate or the universe, Harry. The biggest if of all was Lucid Wilson. It was stupid to try an’ play him. He’d have found us sooner or later; then I’d have ended up dead too.” She finished on a wretched sigh, then raised her weapon. The other two raised theirs as well.
There was a shot. Maybe two. But I didn’t hang around to see who fell. In the heat and the noise, I took the only break I figured I was going to get and headed out the cabin door, running like hell and screaming blue murder. I could have saved the screams, I guess. By the time I hit the corridor, uniformed sailors—or were they steamers? I wondered maniacally—were heading toward me. My friend Gill, from earlier in the day, was at the head of the line.
“What’s going on?” he asked naturally enough, his pleasant face not so calm now.
I let them know all hell had broken loose in one of the staterooms and led the way back, though they hardly needed me; the smell of cordite was rich in the air.
By the time we got there, Harrison Dempsey was dead— really dead this time—shot through the chest, just as the body in the tub had been, the body Dex and I had found at Lafayette Square.
All of us could see the small but deadly popgun still smoking in Rita’s hands. She looked at the tiny pearl handle with something like wonderment on her face. Perhaps she hadn’t expected that the little gun was actually capable of a mortal wound. It was.
There was no sign of Cal, which didn’t surprise me. He’d seemed like someone who would take care of himself first. Would he slink over the side and paddle the few feet back to shore? Or hide in some gangway and then sneak back off the boat when the coast was clear? Or, as I was increasingly suspecting, was Brucie holed up in a stateroom on this very ship, waiting for Cal to join her, perhaps with thirty large in hand?
Either way, I figured we’d seen the last of him. His type is catlike: they land on their feet until one day they finally hit the ground too hard. That’s the thing about cat lives; they only get the nine.
“What did you do this time, kiddo?” At the sound of his voice, my heart filled with relief.
“Dex!” I said, wheeling around, pleased but not surprised to see he had Mustard in tow. “What are you doing here?”
“Your note, for one. Plus the fact that Lila Dempsey couldn’t identify her husband’s body.”
“Because he wasn’t dead,” I said. “Elway told me when I called him this morning looking for you.”
“I take it she could identify him now?” Mustard said, indicating the fallen man through the stateroom doorway.
They didn’t let us stand around much longer. A P.I. license will get you only so far. There wasn’t room for t
he three of us in the tiny cabin, not with Dempsey’s corpse taking up space and an ever-increasing stream of people trying to get into the room to either clean things up or figure things out. Besides, there suddenly didn’t seem to be any reason to hang around.
It took us a while to find our way off the ship, but when we did we met O’Reilly and Houlahan coming up the gangplank.
“Hello, boys,” Dex said casually. “What are you two doing here?”
“A little bird downtown told us Harrison Dempsey was dead and on this tub,” O’Reilly said. “Considering the shenanigans this body has been gettin’ up to, we figured we’d better get down here quick and check it out for ourselves. How many times can one man die?”
“It’s Dempsey all right. This time it’s Dempsey for sure. And when you two are finished here, you swing by my office. There’s more of this tale I need to tell.”
I looked at Dex as we continued on our way, but he didn’t say anything. Maybe he would have, but just as we were about to move away from the ship, I spotted another passenger coming down the gangplank. It was Rita Heppelwaite, being escorted by two uniformed officers. She was handcuffed and managing the gangplank only awkwardly, hindered by high heels and a fur coat that kept wanting to slip off her shoulders.
As we watched her make her careful way, I realized I may inadvertently have saved Rita’s life. If all I now suspected was true, it was possible that Brucie and Cal would have slipped Rita into the drink along with me once the ship was motoring toward Hawaii. Just as this thought flitted through my head, I saw Rita’s eyes slide over the three of us—me, Mustard, and Dex—as though she hadn’t seen us at all. That’s when I realized another thing: I may have saved her life, but right this moment I wasn’t sure she’d thank me.
“You know, it’s a damned shame and even kind of a waste,” Dex said. “A woman like that, she seems to so love her clothes, wouldn’t you say, Kitty?”
“I guess,” I replied, unsure where this was going.
“I wonder how she’ll like the more limited wardrobe she’ll have in prison.”
“I don’t think she’ll like it much. For one thing, the prison blues will clash with her hair.”
“I expect you’re right, Kitty,” he said thoughtfully, watching as they led her past us. “I expect she won’t like it at all.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
“WHAT I DON’T UNDERSTAND”—Houlahan’s voice held a slight slur—“was why she double-crossed him.”
“Too many players,” Mustard piped up. “Which she? Which he? I’m havin’ trouble keepin’ ‘em all straight.”
Houlahan looked piercingly at Mustard, as though he didn’t quite understand. And I guess he wouldn’t have understood it all in any case. Not now. Not yet. That would have to come.
“Well, why would Rita double-cross Dempsey? It seems like she had a pretty sweet setup. They both did. They’d have gotten away with it all, and no one the wiser.”
Dex, always the perfect host, reached into his desk and pulled out a bottle of bourbon. He reached across the cluttered surface, topping glasses as necessary. He did it with the air of a man who was using this simple act as a touchstone while he thought. I could see why; it was a confusing enough tale.
Dex and I had pulled every available chair into his office. Now Dex was behind his desk, and O’Reilly, Houlahan, Mustard, and I sat around him. I was pleased to be included in the group, not relegated to my own desk and instructed to type. I’d expected the order when we’d parked in front of the office, but it hadn’t come. O’Reilly and Houlahan didn’t need impressing on this day. And Dex knew that my part in the matter had been vital and foolhardy. He’d told me about both in the car in no uncertain terms.
“Near as I can figure,” Dex said now, “in the end the double cross was because of a girl.”
“Ain’t it always?” Houlahan said with a smirk.
Dex nodded, but said, “It ain’t always, but it is often enough that it makes you think.”
“Brucie,” Mustard said. Maybe I was the only one who could hear a slight note of sadness in his voice. Disappointment. What might have been.
Dex nodded, and like a couple of German shepherds, the flatfoots were instantly alert.
“What’s that?” O’Reilly said.
“Nothin’,” Dex replied. “It doesn’t matter now.” He sighed deeply and ran his hands through his hair. It was a familiar enough gesture, and I knew exactly what it meant. The flatfoots had to be told about Brucie and about how she fit into all this. They needed all the details if justice was to be done. But they didn’t need it right this second, not with Mustard sitting right there and looking as miserable as I’d ever seen him. “OK,” he said finally, “it does matter, but there are a few pieces I’m still putting together. And there’s a client I need to talk to before I can spill the whole thing.”
“Tomorrow morning?” O’Reilly said. “At the station.”
“Sure. Sure thing, fellas.”
“Scout’s honor?” Houlahan said.
Dex nodded. “Scout’s honor,” he said, though I was fairly confident he’d never been a scout.
O’Reilly maybe had the same idea, and he narrowed his eyes at Dex, but didn’t pursue the matter. Instead he drained his glass, then held it out for more. “The girl said there was another man in the cabin at first,” he said, while Dex poured. “But we couldn’t find any trace.”
“The girl is Miss Kitty Pangborn here,” Dex instructed, pointing at me.
“Katherine,” I corrected.
“And she said the guy was a torpedo named Cal,” Dex said.
“How’d she know he was a torpedo?” Houlahan asked.
“Your mouth is moving, but your head is pointed in the wrong direction,” I said pertly. “I’m sitting right here.”
“OK, sister,” he said, addressing me for the first time. “How’d you know he was a torpedo?”
I shrugged. “It fits, is all. He talked about killing me, calm as you please. He would have done it too, I’m sure. He said they’d wait until dark, then ‘slip’ me ‘into the drink.’ “ There was more I could have said. Stuff about Brucie. Brucie and the brother I suspected wasn’t. But I held onto it for now. I needed to talk to Dex. Alone. What I had to say shouldn’t be said in front of Mustard; he shouldn’t hear it that way first. Besides, the way I figured it, there was no hurry. The City of Los Angeles would be seven days on the water. Plenty of time to work out how best to handle the matter, how to finally tell the police and have them wire down there so the authorities at Hilo could apprehend Brucie and Calvin when the ship docked.
“Slip you into the drink, huh? Nice. Wouldn’t even have had to waste a bullet.” Mustard said it jovially, but belated concern for me etched his brow.
I grinned back at him. “That’s right, Mustard. No use wasting perfectly good bullets when there’s no call.”
“Here’s another thing I don’t get,” Dex said, interrupting the exchange. “You said you locked the fingerprints we took in San Francisco into the office safe, right?”
I nodded. “That’s right. Before Cal and I headed out to …” I shot a look at Mustard, knowing his place in Venice was his secret. Or at least it had been until he took Brucie there and I inadvertently dragged along her lover.
“Out where?” Houlahan insisted now.
“Out to Venice,” Mustard finished. “We’d stashed Brucie out there.” I could almost feel the flatfoots perk up again at the name, but then they settled down. Either the booze was softening them up, or they realized Dex would deal with them straight later. Maybe both.
“Right,” I said. “I locked the fingerprints in the safe that day. Before we left. And I’ve racked my brain about it too, Dex, because who would have broken in and taken them?”
“Because who would have known they were there?” Dex added.
“Right. The only thing I can figure is this: when I opened the safe, Cal was there in your office. Sleeping.”
Dex arched a single e
yebrow. “My office.”
“Sorry but… yeah. I didn’t know what else to do with him. And don’t forget, at the time I was sure he was Brucie’s brother. The only thing I can figure is that maybe he wasn’t sleeping. Maybe he saw me open the safe and put something in there— maybe he even had some idea what the something was—and later on he checked in with Rita, who told him—or someone— to come back and glom the envelope.”
Dex kicked back a bit and looked thoughtful. “I guess that’s as good an explanation as any,” he said at length. “And the way things have turned out, it looks like it might be the only one we get.”
Mustard drained his glass, put his head in his hands, and rubbed his ginger hair. “What a business,” he said distractedly, into the table. “What a mixed-up business the whole thing has turned out to be.”
“You got that straight,” I said. “Which reminds me … we now know for sure that Dempsey wasn’t the one killed at the house on Lafayette Square. So if not Dempsey, who was killed there?”
This the flatfoots had already worked out. “We won’t know for a few days yet, but we’re figuring it was G. Eddie Powell. He’d been working for Dempsey for a few months, and his wife reported him missing three days ago.”
“What’s the G stand for?” Mustard asked distractedly.
Houlahan shrugged. “Gregory? Gorgeous? Graham? It doesn’t matter. What does matter …”
O’Reilly picked up the story as if he and Houlahan were an old married couple: “What matters is G. Eddie was probably hired because he looked a lot like Dempsey. Same build, similar coloring, good-looking gay. Dempsey and Rita probably had this cooked up for some time.”
Dex took up the story. “So they killed G. Eddie at Dempsey’s house. I was supposed to witness the whole thing. Only I was sleeping when it went down, and missed all the action.”
“Remind me not to hire you to do any P.I. work,” O’Reilly chirped.
“That’s too bad,” Dex replied dryly. “I could have made a small fortune off the two of you.”
Death Was the Other Woman Page 21
