Knocked for a Loop

by Craig Rice

  “But I wanted to know more. So I nosed around. I’m very good at that. Stepchildren get to be. In fact, I’d make a very good foreign spy. So anyway, I tumbled to this kidnaping jazz. All right, Malone, granted that it was in a good cause, and that nobody meant anybody else any harm, I was all against it. But there didn’t seem to be much I could do about it. I couldn’t very well go to Carmena and/or Hammond and say quote, the jig is up, unquote, could I?”

  “It might have been awkward,” Malone conceded.

  “Not only awkward,” Lily said, “but—while my various stepfathers left money, they left it to Carmena, with perfect unanimity. She’s the very soul of generosity, but there you are.”

  There he was, Malone thought, with a minor, but new, complication. He had a feeling that it was the first of many he was going to encounter in the Estapoole family, like the first small bubble coming to the surface of a very quiet pool.

  “An alternative,” she said, “was to tell Leonard. But somehow I didn’t think that would seem very friendly of me. So the only thing left to do was to kidnap Alberta myself.” She paused, turned her head to smile at him, and said, “You see?” Malone saw. He saw far more confusion than there had already been. And he had a discouraging premonition that there were a lot more confusing elements still to come.

  “I had to have help,” Lily Bordreau said. “I couldn’t just whisk Alberta away and hide her. There had to be somebody else involved. I couldn’t ask Jane Estapoole, naturally.”

  Malone stirred uncomfortably. Was this another small bubble coming to the top of the same pool? He thought of a few questions and then decided not to ask them. Instead he commented, “So you sent for Helene.”

  She nodded. “I sent for Helene. I knew it was the kind of mad thing that would appeal to her, and it was.”

  “It would be,” Malone said grimly.

  Lily Bordreau chuckled. “Helene was to do the whisking off. Pick her up and take her to the museum. Then, just take her someplace. Home with her, perhaps. She said she’d think of something.” She paused. “And then, things went wrong. They got Alberta after all.”

  Malone remembered that Lily and Jane had not been there when he brought Alberta home. Evidently Lily didn’t know about that. He said, “How about Helene?”

  “Well, obviously,” she said defensively, “Helene could hardly go romping around and be picked up as the babe who’d apparently put the finger on Alberta by taking her to the place where she was kidnaped from, if you know what I mean.” “I do,” Malone assured her. “That sentence made perfect sense, once I figured where you went into it and came out of it. So you hid her out.”

  “And I’m taking you to her,” she said.

  Malone sighed. “It was all a very pretty idea, and it’s a shame it didn’t work,” he said amiably. “And just what did you plan to do with that collection of information after you’d gotten it from Leonard Estapoole?”

  She rammed on her brakes on the verge of running a red light, caught her breath, and said, “What?”

  “You know perfectly well what I mean,” Malone said. “You’re fond of everybody, but nobody could have been that righteous or altruistic or whatever it was. You knew Alberta wasn’t going to be hurt or even frightened. But the idea Car-mena and Hammond Estapoole had looked like a very tidy one, and you decided to step in and use it yourself first. Only, you missed.”

  She drove quite a way in complete silence. Then she said defensively, “I haven’t broken any law.”

  “No,” Malone said. “And I don’t imagine you’re a bit sorry.”

  “I’m not. And Malone, I could have done all right with that batch of information myself.”

  “So could a lot of people,” Malone said in a grim voice. He hadn’t forgotten for a second the little arrangement he’d made personally with Max Hook. Nor the arrangement with Frank McGinnis. And time was getting short and he didn’t seem to be making any progress.

  “Malone, where are they now? They’ve got to be somewhere!”

  “My dear,” the little lawyer said wearily, “I’d give a great deal if I knew.”

  “Do you think they’ve been destroyed?”

  “No,” Malone said.

  “Do you think they’ll ever be found?”

  “I don’t know,” Malone said in the same weary tone, and then, “Yes.” They had to be found, there was no other possibility he dared to contemplate now. He realized that she’d gotten very far away from the subject of what she had intended to do with the envelope of information, and he glanced at her admiringly. Diversionary tactics were something he could appreciate, even when used on himself. But just the same, he meant to go right on asking questions.

  Right now, though, there appeared to be no time for it. Lily Bordreau stopped her car in front of an unpretentious-looking building and got out. “Wait here a minute, Malone.”

  He started to protest, then changed his mind. If she wanted to prepare Helene for his arrival, that was all right with him. It would give Helene time to think up a thousand plausible reasons for everything she’d been up to, but that didn’t matter. She could think them up just as well on the spur of the moment, too.

  The minute stretched into what seemed to be a very long time before she reappeared.

  She was breathless and unexpectedly white-faced. “She isn’t there, Malone.”

  He started to ask a question and then paused. Lily Bordreau was just a little too breathless and too pale to be accounted for by the mere fact of Helene’s being missing. “Let’s go in,” he said.

  She shook her head. “No point in that. She isn’t there. So we’d better go looking for her.”

  “No point in that either,” Malone said. “Chicago is a large and teeming city. Or she may have gone back to Wyoming.” He looked her right in the eye. “And I must say, it isn’t very neighborly of you not to ask me up for a drink.”

  She looked right back at him. Alter a moment one side of her mouth lifted in a wry smile. “Okay, Malone, you asked for this. But you’re not coming up to see my etchings. Just the handwriting on the wall.”

  He followed her through the very ordinary doorway, and found that the interior of the building was far from unpretentious. The light was dim and he blinked a little, going through a brief corridor that led to an enormous two-storied and elaborate room. Even in the half-light he could see that it had a carved wood balcony along one side, an immense window opening onto a garden, lavish and expensive painting equipment grouped near the window, and lavish and expensive furniture everywhere else.

  Lily Bordreau switched on a light and said dramatically, “There!”

  Malone looked at the body on the floor and said nothing. Nor did he move.

  The setting was just a little too much the same. The body in more-or-less the same position as Leonard Estapoole’s had been. An overturned chair and an upset wastebasket. A smallish object on the floor that could very well have been the lethal weapon, in this case, an odd-shaped brass statue. And yet, as he looked, he was aware of a subtle difference, though he wasn’t quite sure what it was. He closed his eyes for a moment.

  “Malone,” she said anxiously, “are you ill?”

  He shook his head at her. “No,” he said. “I’m thinking.” But right now it amounted to about the same thing.

  Then he knew what the difference was. The disorder in his office had been a studied, an arranged disorder. It had been carefully designed to give the impression of a struggle, and again he wondered if the unknown person who framed him had considerately intended to give him a manslaughter out, thus showing that there was no real personal animosity involved. But its very skill had defeated it as far as he himself was concerned. It had been entirely too artful.

  This, however, had the ring of genuineness about it. There really had been a struggle, though a mild and very brief one. Nature imitating art, he told himself.

  “It’s Tony,” Lily Bordreau said in a squeaky voice. “And he’s dead!”

  “I can see
perfectly well that it’s Tony,” Malone said irritably. “And I can see perfectly well that he’s dead, too.” He added very thoughtfully, “And very recently dead, too.”

  She didn’t say anything, and he didn’t ask any questions or make any further comment. That could come later. She’d had time enough to come in and murder the Estapooles’ chauffeur while he waited in the car, and it was possible that she had. But right at this moment he didn’t care. Nor did he care who’d murdered Leonard Estapoole, nor what had really been behind the kidnaping of Alberta Commanday. He was only wondering why everything seemed to be happening to him.

  “Malone, what are we going to do?”

  “Well,” Malone said, “there’s always Honduras. Or Costa Rica.” Or that remote island in the South Seas.

  “I didn’t do it,” she said, in a very matter-of-fact voice. “I came in. Helene was gone. He was there, like that. So I came out again.”

  What was the phrase he’d used to von Flanagan only this morning? “A very nice story—and very nicely told—” Only she hadn’t come right out again.

  But what he asked was, “What was he doing here? And how did he get in?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know, Malone. The door was locked. Someone could have let him in.”

  “Who?”

  She shrugged her pretty shoulders. “I don’t know. Maybe Helene.”

  “Why would she let him in and then go away and leave him here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He drew a long breath. “All right, who else had keys to your studio?”

  To his relief, she didn’t say, “I don’t know.” But she hesitated a little longer than he liked before she said, “Jane. And the janitor. And the cleaning woman. Malone, what are we going to do?”

  “I suppose,” he said, in a very tired voice, “we’re going to call the police.” He looked around for the telephone, found it, put his hand on it.

  Suddenly he realized how very long the day had been. This day, and the day and the night before. A few hours’ sleep that was more pure unconsciousness than sleep in the dreary hotel room on West Madison Street. Worse, really, than no sleep at all. His jaw still ached, and his head throbbed. He didn’t want to be here, in this strange and lavish room, with this unwelcome and unfamiliar corpse, and this worried and somehow baffling girl. He wanted a bath. He wanted a drink. He wanted his dinner. He wanted to be in some warm, soothing, and restful place, preferably Tommy Storm’s apartment. He wondered if she was waiting up for him.

  He considered asking Lily Bordreau if she knew why anyone would want to murder Tony Somebody-or-other, the Estapooles’ chauffeur, and gave that up as an unnecessary idea. The chances were that she would say, “I don’t know,” and he was getting a little tired of that.

  There was a knock at the door and she looked at him questioningly.

  Malone nodded, his hand still on the telephone. “Better see who it is.”

  He heard her open the door, heard von Flanagan’s voice rumbling something indistinct, and stood perfectly still, waiting, until the big police officer came into the room.

  “I don’t blame you if you don’t believe this,” he said then, “but I was picking up the phone to call you.”

  He could see from von Flanagan’s face just how far he was going to get with that explanation. Questions were forming in von Flanagan’s eyes. This, he decided, was a time to get his in first, and he had one to lead off with.

  “And just who the hell,” he said calmly, “tipped you off this time?”

  CHAPTER 16

  One of the more pleasant things about having known von Flanagan for a long time, Malone reflected, was that it was possible to predict his reaction to any given set of circumstances well in advance. Once caught off base, he either blustered or he improvised, not always too well. This time, he tried to combine both.

  “Who the hell said anything about anyone tipping anybody off?” he demanded angrily, and finished a little lamely, “To anything?”

  Malone said nothing, and he said it very pointedly.

  “This young lady’s stepfather was murdered,” von Flanagan said. Now he was reduced to pure improvisation. “And I’m the homicide department.”

  Malone looked von Flanagan coldly in the eye and went right on saying nothing. The look had to do with the fact that the murder of Leonard Estapoole was officially settled, and that anyway, this was an odd hour to be calling on a witness. Von Flanagan turned his eyes away.

  “We was going to go bowling if you wasn’t in,” he mumbled. “That’s why Klutchetsky and Scanlon were with me when we dropped by your office last night.”

  “Oh,” Malone said coldly. “Then you were tipped off. And by whom?”

  “I don’t know,” von Flanagan began. He stopped abruptly, glared at Malone and said, “Go to hell.”

  “And I suppose,” Malone said, this time icily, “you were planning to go bowling tonight too, in case you didn’t find me. Or even better, a corpse. A corpse that’s in your department.”

  Von Flanagan said nothing this time. He looked unhappy.

  “All right,” Malone said, in a very tired voice. “You’ve got your murders. The first one, in my office. This one, with me at the scene of the crime.”

  “Believe me,” von Flanagan said, “there’s nothing personal about this, Malone.”

  Malone ignored that. “There’s the phone. Call your experts. But we just got here ourselves.”

  He turned his back, walked over to the big window and stood gazing out at the little garden, resplendent and silvery in the spring moonlight. He was going to need to do a little improvising himself, and so far he didn’t have even the beginning of a theme.

  In the first place, what was the Estapooles’ chauffeur doing here?

  In the second place, what was the Estapooles’ chauffeur doing here murdered?

  Behind him, von Flanagan was busy on the telephone, giving orders. In a few minutes the lavish and expensive room was going to be full of people. Sooner or later, there were going to be reporters and photographers. A nice follow-up. PROMINENT CITIZEN FOUND MURDERED IN JOHN J. MALONE’S OFFICE. And now, JOHN J. MALONE FINDS MURDER IN GIRL ARTIST’S STUDIO. The headline writers would phrase it a little more succinctly, but the inference would be there. That Malone, he gets around.

  He turned and looked at Lily Bordreau, huddled in a big dark chair, very pale, very frightened, and very silent. He smiled at her reassuringly.

  “Fix your hair and powder your nose,” he told her. “You’ll have to look pretty for tomorrow’s first editions any minute now.”

  A new kind of alarm came into her enormous eyes. “You mean—newspaper pictures?”

  “Don’t let it bother you,” he said. He added comfortingly, “Happens all the time.”

  He wished he felt as reassuring and as comforting as he hoped he sounded.

  Von Flanagan had finished telephoning. Now he concentrated a scowl on Lily Bordreau.

  “Okay, who is this guy?”

  She looked, and even possibly was too scared to speak.

  “Leave her alone,” Malone said. “To save you a little time, it’s the Estapoole chauffeur. I don’t know his last name.”

  “Clancy,” Lily Bordreau said, between frozen lips. “Antonio Clancy.”

  Von Flanagan remarked that it was a nice combination. “And just what did you have against this Clancy?”

  Lily Bordreau opened her mouth and shut it again. Her eyes were perfectly round. She didn’t look frightened this time, but she looked startled.

  “And did you copy the way your stepfather was murdered,” he went on nastily, “or is this just one of those coincidences Malone is always talking about?”

  “Now wait a minute,” Malone began.

  Von Flanagan waved him aside. “Or did you maybe murder your stepfather, which would be logical, and get this Frank McGinnis to take the rap for you?”

  “She isn’t answering questions,” Malone said briskly.

 
Von Flanagan gave him the dirtiest look he had left, said, “You shut up, Malone,” and went on to Lily Bordreau, “I must say, you got your lawyer here in a hurry.”

  “Perfect nonsense,” Malone said. “We came here together, just a few minutes ago, and we don’t know any more about this murder than you do.” Well, not much more. “And I wasn’t her lawyer until—1” he smiled at Lily Bordreau—“just this minute. As a matter of fact—” He paused.

  As a matter of fact, he wasn’t entirely sure he was going to be her lawyer. So far, there really hadn’t been time to choose up sides. He not only didn’t know which side she was on, he didn’t have even the faintest idea which side he was on. But for the immediate present, there was an unspoken appeal in her eyes that somebody had to answer, and he was the only lawyer around.

  “As a matter of fact,” he finished, “I was just picking up the phone to call you, when you so providentially came pounding at the door. And that reminds me, you haven’t answered my question. Just who did tip you off?”

  Alter a long and difficult silence, the only thing von Flanagan came up with was, “I’ll ask the questions around here.”

  “Ask away,” Malone said cheerfully. He took out a cigar, started to unwrap it, remembered he was in the presence of a recently murdered man, and put it back in his pocket.

  “Well—” von Flanagan said. He stopped, looked around the room, glowered at Klutchetsky and Scanlon, snapped, “Don’t just stand there, do something!” paused again, glowered this time at Malone, and said, “You can’t get away with this!” and sat down, looking very tired and a little helpless.

  There wasn’t anything to be done until the experts arrived, and Klutchetsky and Scanlon knew it. They stood awkwardly, looking as helpless as von Flanagan, and almost as unhappy. Lily Bordreau sat curled up in the big chair. She’d obeyed Malone’s instructions as to hair and make-up, and now she sat waiting apprehensively for whatever might be going to happen next. Von Flanagan sat slumped in his chair, looking as though his huge bulk were suddenly too heavy for his bones, as though he’d lost a night’s sleep and his feet hurt.