“You’re wishing him,” Linda said. “You’re selling yourself on Barker. How would Barker know you as Gwen’s husband?”
“My picture, of course. Barker knew me if he visited our apartment. He couldn’t fail to know me—my picture sat in the living room where he could study it every time he visited her.”
She thought about that one for a moment and found it palatable. “I begin to see what you’re getting at. Barker would tip off the police about the Wagner party on a gamble that he might catch you there. It makes some sense—a bit. And he would have Gwen’s apartment watched for the same reason?”
“Exactly. Barker is the man who would know Gwen’s uptown address, isn’t he? They’re old friends.”
Linda tempered her enthusiasm for my logic. She continued to argue against Barker, trying to break him down on the basis of credibility. I had a strong case against him. He was Consuelo’s lover, and Gwen’s friend, by his own admission. He had become friendly with Gwen a long time ago. How long? It could be that he was the man who set her up on Seventy-eighth Street. Certainly he was our major suspect.
“It’s open and shut,” I said.
“I don’t think so,” Linda argued. “You’re losing perspective, Steve. You forget that when he met you, he talked freely of Gwen. He admitted too much to be the murderer. I can’t see him talking that way about Gwen a few hours after he had killed her. After all, he didn’t really know you, did he? Yet, he accepted you as a skip-tracer, without any question. If he had just committed a murder, wouldn’t he have acted the part? He certainly would have kept quiet above Gwen.”
“The subject is too smart for that type of reasoning,” I said. “He knew that he could be traced to Gwen eventually. It paid off for him to admit knowing her.”
Linda pursued her line. “Even so—why would he murder both Gwen and Frugi?”
“Jealous rage,” I said impatiently. “Who can tell why he did it? Isn’t it enough that he tried to frame me? Listen to what he looks like, Linda. He’s average. That’s important, I tell you. He’s the man in the street, oversized only in the hands. Suppose that he had visited Gwen at our place? He would know the building. He would enter as he did by the back way. And then—”
Linda clutched my arm and I felt her nails. “We can prove him guilty—if what you say is true, Steve. We’ll take him back to Ken. If Ken remembers him, it’ll be all over, in a minute!”
“I’ll break his filthy neck,” I said, and pounded on Monkowitz’ shoulder. “The Temple Apartments, Monkowitz.”
“Uptown again,” he said. “You need any help with this guy, boss?”
“I don’t think so. I have a persuader.”
“You mustn’t use it, Steve,” Linda said seriously. “Whatever happens up there, don’t use a gun.”
“I won’t have to use it,” I said. “I’ll only show it. The subject will wilt. He’s the type.”
Monkowitz said, “Look what’s cooking up there, boss—in front of The Temple.”
He had stopped for a light. On the next corner a squad car was parked ahead of the canopy. A few late strollers peered cautiously into the lit foyer. There were no policemen on the street. I said, “Keep rolling, Monkowitz. Keep rolling.”
Dead end. I sank back against the cushion and worried my fingernails. Linda said nothing. Monkowitz circled the Temple at a snail’s pace. I worked for my next move. Nothing came to me but the sour taste of my sudden frustration. Barker must have called the police. I checked myself. I backtracked. I climbed out of my line of thought and closed my eyes and sought another route. I tried to think the way Harv thought. He had always accused me of “straight-line thinking.” He had worked in the office to cure me of this habit, the mental monotony of the plodder. Deadbeats, frauds, all those who lived beyond the borderlines of society existed by their own peculiar standards. They had trick brains. They covered themselves. You had to match wits with them by taking the roundabout way, the way that led around an idea, through the intricacies of invention. If you traveled straight, you wound up where they wanted you, against the dead end, the high wall they built to hold you from them. I stood at the wall now. I was the unimaginative researcher, the man who convinces himself before he has proven a conclusion. I fought to clear my head of the debris of my theories. But George Barker loomed large and ominous in my fevered mind.
It was Linda who helped me, finally.
“We can check Barker, Steve. Once and for all.”
“You agree with me, then?”
She shook her head, stubbornly. “I want you to convince yourself about him.”
“How can we do it?”
“Monkowitz.”
“They’d nab him in the hall.”
“I don’t think so. They don’t know him.”
“You underestimate them, Linda.”
Monkowitz idled at a light. “You got nothing to lose, boss.”
Linda said, “If you can get to the elevator boy, Monkowitz, ask him whether Barker is still up there. If he phoned the police, he’s not waiting for them, is he, Steve?”
“Why not? He’d be showing a clean nose that way.”
“I doubt it,” Linda said. “Whoever called the police only hoped that you’d return to Consuelo’s apartment.”
“Barker,” I said again. “It must be Barker. Don’t you see that he’d cover me wherever I might appear? He wants me picked up. Unless he’s had them grab me he can’t rest easy. He knows I’m after him now. He’s sure that I’ve placed him as the murderer. I’m convinced that he’s up at Consuelo’s. He’s selling the police his fairy tale right now.”
“Then we must prove you wrong.”
“You want I should go in?” Monkowitz asked.
“Get the elevator boy,” Linda said. “Bring him out here if you can.”
“Do you think you can do it, Monkowitz?”
“For money, any elevator boy will move, boss. Up and down, or even sideways. Unless there’s a flatfoot in the hall. Do I have to bring him out? What do you want me to ask him?”
“Find out about the man in Frugi’s apartment,” I said. “Ask the boy if the poor man’s Primo Camera came down.”
Monkowitz parked a block from the Temple. We watched him run off down the street. We sat there quietly for a while. The minutes hung. I began to revise my theories, deliberately. If Barker were not in the Temple, where would he be?
Linda almost read my mind. “We’re arguing against ourselves, Steve. If Barker is the killer, he’s the man who returned to Mrs. Monati’s. He’s the man who came into Mario’s looking for Ken Sisley, isn’t that so? It seems to me that his search for Ken couldn’t have ended at Mario’s. He’d be on the prowl for Ken this very minute. He’ll have to eliminate Ken.”
“He may know all about Ken,” I said. “Are you sure you weren’t followed from Mario’s?”
“Very sure. I was a pretty scared gal when I took Ken out of there. Nobody followed us. I made sure of that before I pointed the cab for home.”
“He could have tailed me, Linda. I was pretty numb when Monkowitz told me you’d left Mario’s with Ken. I rode uptown in a vacuum.”
“Monkowitz is coming back.”
He came toward us at a heavy canter. He waved a hand as he ran. He puffed into his seat and started the ab and spoke to us out of the corner of his mouth.
“It was a physic, boss. The cops were upstairs, two of them.”
“What about Barker?”
“Your boy Barker had a cut lip?”
“It could be. I hit him hard.”
“He left the place,” Monkowitz said. “The elevator jerk said he left maybe a whole hour ago. The cops just got there couple of minutes ago. Barker left in a hurry, the kid says. I couldn’t talk much to him on account of he got a flash from upstairs. He had to take the car up. He beat it fast, because the buzz came from Frugi
’s floor, the boy said.”
“Nothing else?”
“One thing. The elevator jerk said there was a robbery reported upstairs, in Frugi’s.”
“Barker,” I said. “That proves he put the call in, doesn’t it, Linda?”
“Maybe. But it might have been Consuelo,” she said. “Or the man who did the robbery.”
“Barker,” I repeated. “Barker robbed that apartment, just as he robbed Frugi’s.”
“You can’t prove it, Steve.”
I tried to prove it. I was stubborn. I had to be stubborn. The evidence against Barker built him in my mind, I saw him as a perfect fit for the evening’s activities. I reminded Linda of the facts. I retraced my steps after leaving Gwen’s art school. Why had Barker run away, leaving Consuelo to me? He might have been running back to my apartment, to check again on Ken Sisley. Hadn’t he suggested that Consuelo take me to Wagner’s party? Knowing our destination, he had plenty of time to search Frugi’s and Consuelo’s, to take whatever he wanted and leave at his leisure. He had nothing to fear from Frugi. He had killed Frugi. And he could rob Consuelo without worry, for she was with me. He must have found out, somehow, that Ken drank at Mario’s. But he missed Ken there. He arrived too late to follow Linda out of the bar and find her apartment. But he could have followed me. If he did, he would return to Linda’s flat soon, very soon. He would search for Ken. He would kill Ken.
“We’d better find the subject,” I said.
PART IV
Death Nest and a Lethal Lady
CHAPTER 12
I had borrowed Monkowitz’ flashlight. The circle of light roamed George Barker’s studio, a restless eye, jittering over the floor, exposing the gray boards, high-lighting the cap of a paint tube and skittering onward and upward to the liquor cabinet to explore the glasses. They sat where we had placed them, three hookers, one still brown with the dregs of Consuelo’s last drink.
The dirty cushions on the window ledge were bunched and wrinkled. A cigarette butt, lipsticked on the end, hung on the edge of the ledge, ash side in, and alongside it lay a small handkerchief with fancy-work edges, scarlet in the center, where Consuelo had smeared her lipstick. I lifted it and stared at it and dropped it on the seat, watching it flutter and fall so that the letters C. F., done in blue silk, shone under the sharp light. Up and around swung the beam of yellow, illuminating his easel and the crayon sketch upon it, the rakish nude, bawdy and grinning. Gwen? I wiped at my eyes and studied it. I saw nothing that I had not seen before. And seeing nothing, the light fell away and focused on his bureau, an ancient piece, of dull imitation mahogany, festooned with brassy knobs.
The opened drawer showed me his socks and shirts and the odds and ends of his toilet, a shaving brush and its tube of cream, a small cracked mirror, an opened package of cheap blades. The right-hand drawer was loaded with paper, sketchbooks and tracing paper and an assortment of menus, too many to catalogue. I pulled at these and unearthed a small black book and laughed at it, amused by the blackness of it, enthralled by the symbolism, the inventory of his addresses, his dead black record of lady friends. Up close, his hand was spidery, not at all like Frugi’s careful lettering. He had written these names hastily, perhaps at bars, perhaps on street corners.
And here was Gwen. Gwen Hibbs, the name alone, followed by no address, no phone number. Why had he failed to write alongside her name? Was it because he dared not put her address here? Was it of such importance that he would not record it? He would be crafty, this Barker. He would be thoughtful about what he wrote. I saw him taking his time with Gwen’s name, writing it more carefully, meditating over it and then passing it, to leave her address to his memory only. I saw him as a sly and studious villain. I credited him with every ruse, every subterfuge. I put the little book in a pocket. There was no time for further research here. I stood in the center of his room, alone with myself, the light out, listening to the sound of my own breathing, making up my mind to leave now.
And then the silence shrieked.
The phone rang. I dropped the flashlight in a spasm of terror. I bent for it. I crawled for it. I recovered it and stayed that way, kneeling on the floor, trying for quick and decisive thought. The police again? The phone shrilled at me, challenged me, set up a clatter in my mind, moved me to action. I snapped the light and found it, on a small stool near the liquor cabinet. I sat there, looking at it as though it were a living thing, a speaking thing. You listen to a telephone, but you hear more than the bell. There is a voice in the bell, a human voice, a shouting voice, commanding you to answer it. Your muscles move you toward the voice, the years of habit pull the muscles, the thousand gestures of the past cry out at you. This could be an important voice. This could be a vital voice.
I watched my hand reach out to grasp the phone.
“Hello?”
“Steve?”
I kneeled at the phone. This was Harvey!
“Have you made the locate?” he asked.
“Barker? Not yet.”
“Where is he? You’ve got to get him. I figured you’d tail him down to his studio, Steve. You’re late. You’re slow.” He was pushing it now. His voice was pitched low and out of key, excitedly over-quick in the syllables. “Get the hell out of there now. They’ll be down to check him any minute.”
“The police? I don’t see how—”
“They’re quick and thorough. They must have tagged Frugi, hours ago. That would give them Consuelo and after Consuelo, Barker. Get out. Now.”
“I’m getting out,” I said.
He barked at me. “Get up here, fast. Your friend Ken Sisley has flown the coop!”
My head was on the merry-go-round again. “That’s impossible.”
“Don’t theorize!” He was angry now. His voice was hard and cold. “This damned mess is piling up around you. You’ve got to move, do as you’re told. Stop thinking your way deeper into it, do you hear me?”
“But Ken must be—”
“Move!” he shouted at me. “I can’t stay here long. They’ll be up to check this dump, too. Shake your tail and start up to me. Right now.”
“I’m coming,” I said.
I let the phone slide down and away, wet from the touch of my hand.
He overpowered me with his urgency. He froze me. I sat there shaking my head at him, disturbed by him, annoyed by his mastery of me. Four years of taking his orders had made a machine of me, as far as Harvey was concerned. He pressed a certain button, he pulled a certain switch, he barked a certain order, and I responded. I should have shouted him down. I should have told him not to worry about Ken Sisley. Ken Sisley was safe. He still slept in Gloria Baran’s apartment. I was sure of it. I remembered now why Harvey had not found him. I had told him, “He’s on ice until tomorrow, Harvey.” But I had forgotten to tell him where. I fought down the urge to phone him now, to set him straight. He had built up a resistance in me. I was too tired to be ordered around. I decided to let it wait.
My body stiffened under me. I was sitting on the floor. My legs were weak and numb. I was trembling. I trembled more when I heard the hard footfall on the stairs outside.
I was on my feet when the subject walked in.
When he switched on the lights, Louie Sliger’s gun was in my hand. I had it aimed at Barker’s eyes.
His mouth dropped open. He didn’t move. He stared at the gun and closed his mouth. His big hands balled and opened, slowly. He played it safe and stood firm in open-faced surprise, in lip-licking speculation. I watched him, thinking of Wagner now. Wagner was a clever man. Yet he had underestimated this killer. Barker was simple and obvious. He moved in the normal pattern. He had a little act that he played, over and over again. He promoted the juvenile in himself. He worked through each scene with open-faced simplicity. He radiated nothing subtle. But it was this adolescent bit of histrionics that threw you off. I had tasted his murderous fists. They wou
ld wield a knife with professional ease.
“Up,” I said. “Keep your hands up.”
He raised them slowly. “What’s eating you, McGrath?” he said. “You off your nut, or something?”
“Over here,” I said. “Stand against the wall, Barker. I’m not playing potsy this time. If you move, I’m going to use this gun.”
“I don’t get it,” he said.
“Over to the wall.”
He moved. “Listen, McGrath, what’s bothering you?”
“You. Why did you kill them?”
“Kill?” he asked himself, his eyes wider now, his voice suddenly high. “For God’s sake, what are you talking about?”
“Gwen.”
“Gwen Hibbs?” he murmured, weak and unbelieving.
“Gwen McGrath was her name.”
If he was acting, he was no amateur. He registered Grade B movie shock, complete with trembling. He began to sweat. “You’ve got me wrong, McGrath. I hardly knew the dame. Why would I kill her? I don’t get you. Why me? Who told you I even knew her well?”
“You did.”
“No. Think back, McGrath. Use your head. What I told you was the truth, so help me. She came up here just once. That was all. We didn’t hit it off. I told you that, remember?”
I stepped up to him and he wilted. I hit him hard with my right hand. He folded up, covering his face with his hands. I hit him again. He began to blubber. I left it that way.
“I want the truth,” I said. “I’m going to cut you into little pieces, Barker. I’m not playing around anymore.”
He was breathing heavily. Now the mask was dropped. Something fell, away from his face, a little of the small boy routine. He kept his hands up, but the palms showed. He was flat against the wall. His arms shook.
I said, “Why did you kill her?”
“Wait,” he whispered. “Give me a chance to talk, McGrath.”
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