He wagged his head, his eyes narrowing.
“The policeman. The young man. He is dead?”
“As dead as the ten-cent fare,” I said coldly. “And I’m in hot water with the Police Department. So I think you can understand my concern. You okay, Miss Tango?”
She nodded slowly, but she was staring at Mr. Arongio now. Something like disbelief refused to go out of her eyes.
“If you hadn’t come, Ed …” she oozed it out “… he might have killed me. Oh, Carl, what’s the matter with you? What’s wrong? You’ve been acting like a crazy man!”
“I am—crazy.” He stared back at her. Suddenly, he sagged into a chair and shuddered. His great shoulders surged within the confines of a dark blue suit. It was the same suit he’d had on yesterday. Somehow it meant to me that he hadn’t done much sleeping.
I kicked out a chair myself and straddled it backward, resting the nose of the .32 across the wooden back rest.
“Mr. Arongio, let’s talk. I’ll take it from the beginning.”
His voice rose in anger.
“Go away. Call your police. I am done. There is nothing more to be said.”
I laughed to show him how funny I thought he was.
“It’s not that easy. I don’t know how it is in your country but let me tell you how it is in my country. Cops ask about a million questions. You just don’t turn yourself in and let it go at that. Don’t be a kid about this. ’Fess up and maybe we can clear up a few things. The cops can get rough when they need answers to clear up some official business, you know. Like Lake’s murder, for instance.”
Arongio glared at me, his massive head wagging in the negative.
“Talk, talk. No more talk. I’m done.”
“Okay,” I snapped. “I’ll talk. You can nod here and there. Yesterday Mrs. Arongio hired me to follow you on the grounds of you being a wandering husband. You weren’t. She was a wandering wife. Her playmate was Lake, the Raven third baseman. You brought a gun to the ball park which you never got to use. Somebody beat you to it with a bloody awl. Now you really go nuts. You ransacked Lake’s hotel room and killed a cop when you got caught at it. I think you just lost your head at the moment but we’ll let that ride for the nonce.”
That got a reaction out of him. His tongue and accent got thicker.
“I did not mean to kill the policeman. I was desperate.”
“You were,” I agreed. “So I went down to Mrs. Arongio’s hideaway in the Village and find out you still were. Enough to beat hell out of her and ransack her place, too. I got enough out of her to know she and Lake were lovers and partners in a deal that involved getting something away from you. Something that meant life or death to you. Maybe both. What was it?”
“Nothing.” He stiffened visibly. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“No, I wouldn’t. Your wife has one of your bad habits. She conked me with a bottle and took off. When I put myself together and got back to my office, Miss Tango here was planted right smack in the middle of another of your house-cleaning jobs. Waiting with a phony yarn to justify her being there and to try out the charm act to find what you had sent her to find in the first place. Maybe you thought your wife and Lake had left your prize package with me. If I’m getting through to you at all, would you please nod just once?”
My voice was annoying him. “What difference does it make?” But his question was as good an answer as any other.
“Nothing at all. Except that I tumbled to our little Mimi and found out all about your touching love life and sudden strange behavior. Mimi was loyal to you. She couldn’t believe you had turned into a killer and that something like money or jewels meant more to you than life itself. Judging by the gentlemanly going-over you were giving her when I got here, I think you’ve successfully evaporated the last, lingering doubt. She doesn’t look so sure of anything any more.”
“Forgive me, Mimi.” He turned to her, his voice thick with apology. “I thought you had betrayed me with this person. When you came back empty-handed, I lost my head.”
“Miss Tango.” The whip of my voice brought her head around. “What was he expecting you to find?”
She bit her outsized lips.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“That’s great. Simply great. How the hell can you find something when you don’t know what the hell you’re looking for?”
She didn’t have an answer for me. She moved her head in a slow no and stared down at her shoes. Mr. Arongio sighed audibly and got to his feet. He lumbered to the window. Mimi Tango watched him from the edge of the bed.
“Get away from that window, big man. You’re not going to louse me up with a suicide at this late date.”
He whirled with his first show of heat since he had calmed down.
“I am a fool but I am not a ridiculous man. Why not call the police and end all these questions?”
“I will when I get some answers. Some answers that make sense.”
“Very well then. I tell you everything. It does not matter any more. Nothing matters. I am ruined.”
“So is the Coliseum in Rome but it’s still standing. Take it easy. I could be a big help.”
“I doubt your help very much. You are an American. You are interested in dollars, money. All Americans are. Is that not so?”
“Guilty, your honor. Sure, I’m interested in money to a certain extent. I’ve got principles, too. You’d be surprised how happy I want everyone to be. I’m interested in people, the good way of life. I cry when dogs get run over; babies tickle me pink. I’m always good for a handout to a bum. But I’m a detective and I’m in trouble. And you’re in trouble. Both our ways of life are ready for the ride down the kitchen sink. Unless we cooperate. Play ball with me and I can be real friendly.”
“Your talk—you are joking. Laughing at me?”
“Not necessarily. I just don’t like to cry, that’s all.”
He shook his head furiously. I had given him an awful lot of words to play around with. He was finding them hard to digest.
Mimi Tango was a big help. She got up off the bed and went over to him and put her arm gently on one of his huge shoulders. Her eyes were tender as the night for him. Nuts, I told myself. He beats hell out of her and kills people but she was still wrapped around one of his little fingers. Only his fingers weren’t so little. I made up my mind not to trust him any further than I could throw him, which wasn’t any distance to speak of.
“Go ahead, Carl. Tell him what he wants to know. Ed might be able to straighten this mess out.”
Good old Ed. “Try me, Mr. Arongio,” I suggested.
“Very well then.” His voice got businesslike. For a second I thought he was going to sell me an antique clock. “I tell you everything. I conceal nothing.” It got me the way his voice would go real foreign in idiom every once in a while. I couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling that he might be play-acting. “You have reasoned everything very accurately. Up to a point, Mr. Noon.”
“We never got to the point,” I reminded him.
“Quite so. The thing I was looking for so hard. You will laugh at it. You may even refuse to believe it.”
“Try me.”
He stared at me for a long while after that. I stared right back. He worried his soup strainer with his teeth. He seemed to fidget. It was ludicrous behavior in so big a man. I checked my impatience. A couple more minutes wouldn’t make that much difference.
“I have tried so many places to find it, Mr. Noon. The places that you say I turned upside down. Even this Lake’s locker in the ball park. I could not get in this morning. The police were all over …”
“Any time you feel like beginning, go right ahead,” I said evenly.
He braced himself.
“You are familiar with such stories as ‘The Gold Bug,’ ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ The Murders in the Rue Morgue’… ?”
That got my eyebrows up. Talk about crazy opening lines, he couldn’t have stunned me more if he had started t
o recite the alphabet. But I’m quick on the uptake.
“I’ll answer that question by matching you, Arongio. ‘MS Found in a Bottle,’ ‘The Oblong Box,’ ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ …”
His face lighted up like he was five years old and I was a nice big man who had bought him a bar of candy.
“And The Black Cat.’ Just so.” He spoke eagerly. “I am delighted, Mr. Noon. You will make my story that much easier …”
“Hold on. My head hurts. What has a bunch of stories by Edgar Allan Poe got to do with the trouble you’re in and the trouble I’m in? I’m not interested in any allegories, Arongio. So let’s get to it. Now, if you’ll start all over again …”
“But, my young friend.” He was so excited now he was beginning to babble. “Your Poe has everything to do with it! He is the cause of everything. The reason I was so desperate, the officer being killed …”
“Wait a minute. Hold the ball.” I held up my hands. “Let’s take this by the numbers. I don’t want to mix myself up any more than I have to. Are you talking about Poe—the Edgar Allan who lived and died in the last century and wrote a mess of wonderful, fantastic, beautiful stories? Same Poe?”
“The very same. The original.” He almost crowed. The change in him was fantastic. It was as if we’d been clowning around for a half an hour and finally gotten around to his favorite subject.
I looked at Mimi Tango, half convinced he was crazy and half to convince myself I wasn’t hearing things. But she was staring at him too, open-mouthed, so there was no help there.
I turned back to him. “Okay. Same Poe. So what?”
He got angry all of a sudden. Quick like a sudden storm.
“What do you think it would be worth—you with your dollars and cents—to find a diary of Poe’s that no other man has ever seen or read before? That has never been published? In his own hand, on paper brittle with age, his words still miraculously legible?”
“Masterpieces in literature I don’t know from,” I said as drily as I could, “but if you’re trying to tell me that there’s an unknown diary of Poe’s in circulation …”
“I am telling you!” he shouted.
“Go on. There must be more.”
His eyes gleamed. Suddenly, he didn’t look normal. “I bought it from Mr. Lake for twenty thousand dollars.”
I groaned. “Oh, no,” I said.
“Exactly.” He deflated again.
THIRTEEN
I laughed this time and kept right on laughing until Arongio’s beefy face was redder than his tie. He glared at me angrily but I waved him off with the .32.
“You laugh—you think it’s funny?” He was incredulous.
“You’re damn right. I laugh, I think it’s funny. It’s a scream. How good a Poe expert are you anyway? That diary couldn’t be legitimate. If it was, why would Lake sell it to you for a miserable twenty thousand dollars? A Poe diary would be worth a fortune—if it was really a Poe diary.”
That cooled him down for some strange reason. Maybe that point had been bothering him, too. He collapsed in a chair.
“I told you you would find it difficult to understand,” he said. “A man like you.”
“A man like me is from Missouri, Arongio. I’ll believe it when I see it. Not before. But it doesn’t stop me from listening.”
Mimi Tango stirred suddenly. I flung a look at her but she only had eyes for Carl. Her Carl.
“Tell him the whole story, Carl. From the beginning. I think he can still help you …”
“Thanks for the vote, Slim,” I said.
Arongio nodded. His bull head leveled at me with new determination.
“You will understand. Yes, even a man such as you.”
He took it from there, jumping right into the hoariest story this side of soap opera. But this one had the advantages of Edgar Allan Poe, which no soap opera ever boasted of. I listened because there was hardly anything else to do. I could have interrupted in quite a few places with the sort of remarks that make detectives irksome but I didn’t. Arongio rushed on like a Lexington Avenue express, dropping the craziest kinds of information without discrimination. His story was chock full of inconsistency like you find in idiots. But somehow I knew it was the plain, unvarnished truth. Nobody makes up stuff like that. Not even kids. The yarn was cute but not cute enough. Crazy but not too crazy. Fantastic but still underlarded with the plain, normal, screamingly natural faults we all have somewhere under our clothes.
I wouldn’t bore my worst enemy with a verbatim account of what could be called Arongio’s folly. I couldn’t believe even for a minute in there being a Poe diary undiscovered. Sticking to the facts, the story went something like this:
Arongio, an antique dealer of the first magnitude, is approached by a man named Larry Lake, a ball player on a Providence, Rhode Island, nine, who brings with him a worn, aged black book which he claims he found in the cellar of a house in Providence where Poe is known to have lived. Get that. Poe. Poe’s works are world-famous. He died too young. A diary by him, authentically his, of course, would astound the world of literature and probably bring a selling price high enough to purchase the state of Texas. Arongio knows this. Arongio, it just so happens, is a Poe bug from way back. Has a private den at home that is practically a shrine to the Great Man. Countless volumes of his works in English and foreign translations. A three-foot-high statuette of the Black Raven, Poe’s famous bird, adorns the mantelpiece. Arongio has it bad for Poe. Every conceivable piece of Poe-iana can be found in his den. (Lake can’t possibly know this, of course. Or can he? Is it just lucky that he brought his rare find to such a man?)
Arongio is beside himself. Now he will go down in antique and literary history as the discoverer of a new Poe work. Lake lets him study the pages and condition of the diary to his complete satisfaction as to its authenticity. Arongio is convinced. He invites Lake to his home where Lake meets the Missus and they go into the den to discuss terms.
Well, Arongio, still beside himself, draws twenty shiny new thousand-dollar bills from his account at the Second or Third National Bank and presents them forthwith to Mr. Lake, a young man whom he sincerely believes he is swindling in a hardheaded business deal. After all, what is twenty thousand dollars when the Poe diary will net him fame and much more money when shown to the proper head of the Literary World? This is the night before Lake’s game at the Polo Grounds, but Mr. Arongio knows nothing about baseball and cares less. Mr. Lake had a diary that he wanted very badly.
Arongio had his precious diary and pores over it in his den. The next morning the world falls out beneath him. The diary is missing from his forced-open desk in his den. It turns out Mrs. Arongio is missing, too. Arongio goes berserk. He rushes to his shop, The Kitty Corner, where Mimi Tango tearfully, because she is in love with him, tells him about the third baseman whom everyone knows Mrs. Arongio has been throwing herself at. She had made some indiscreet phone calls from the shop while her husband was off at antique auctions. And Arongio grabbed his gun and was off on his tear which is where you and I both came in.
The fact that the runaway lovers had taken the diary with them had only solidified his conviction that it was genuine.
Me—it was too pat for me. Lake’s team was the Ravens; Mrs. Arongio’s husband was a Poe bug. And all of a sudden Lake has a precious Poe manuscript. No, sir. According to the dates Arongio was talking about, Lake had known the Missus a long time. Long enough to shack up with her down on Minetta Street. That’s the way I read it. And Lake may have worked the gag just so he could see more of Mrs. Arongio without her running back and forth to Providence. Could be and it also could be that the diary was really something Poe had kept but …
As for their taking the diary back, there could be two reasons. One: that it was genuine. Two: that they had taken back the concrete proof of the swindle they had worked on Arongio. The law can’t do anything to you without evidence.
I lit another cigarette. Arongio had finished his tale. He had run on and on
like a madman and now he had run down. The real nutty thing, though, was that I could see he still couldn’t make himself believe that the diary that Lake had brought him was a phony. He didn’t miss the twenty thousand or the Missus half as much as he missed the diary.
“Grow up,” I poured some cold water at him. “It was a slick con job. A real cute one. Playing the sucker’s hopes and dreams for all they were worth. So you’re out twenty thousand. But grow up.”
“What are you saying now?”
“I’m saying that there is no Poe diary, no secret, new, never-before-seen thing that will astound the little book store around the corner. Concentrate on the twenty thousand-dollar bills. They’re the only thing that’s real. We can see those.”
“I can’t make myself believe—I won’t…”
“Oh, beans. Now I know why Lake got his. Somebody on that ball club saw that twenty-bill wad. And wanted it. Bad enough to kill him. They didn’t know from Poe. Or care much either.”
“But if you could have seen the diary. It looked so right. The yellow color of age, the creases. Even the signature …”
“Sure, it was good. It had to be. They were taking you for a good ride so the trimmings had to be fancy. But don’t be a chump. When money’s involved, nothing’s on the level.”
“You Americans are all alike …”
“Yeah, sure. Look, Arongio. I know what you’re looking for. And I don’t know. But now we got the motive. The dough. Somebody’s got the dough. Or maybe he didn’t.”
“What do you mean, Ed?” Mimi Tango had come back to life. “If anybody killed Lake, they’d kill him to hide the fact that they did get the money. That would be the only reason for killing him, wouldn’t it?”
“Good for you, Slim.” I winked at her. “But it’s not a hard and fast rule. Murders get done for a lot of other reasons, too. I think the money might have been extra gravy this time. That Lake wasn’t a popular guy. The Ravens hated his guts from my information on the subject.”
Arongio cleared his head as if a swarm of flies had surrounded him. “What are you going to do with me?”
Dead Game Page 7
