Corpses in the Cellar (6 page)

“You mean the waiting business?”

“No!” Claypool exploded it out, disassociating himself as quickly as he could. “That was just a way to earn money, that’s
all. I’m an actor, that’s what I am.”

“I thought that was good for actors. Not aging.”

“It is!” Claypool’s eyes were frantic. It was as if he were saying all this for the very first time, and yet Lockwood was
sure it was an everyday litany. “But Christ, you’ve got to look twenty-five first. Let me look twenty-five, and I don’t care
if I don’t change a hair from then on. But what kind of work can I get, looking like this? How many acting jobs do you think
there are for fifteen-year-olds?”

Lockwood shrugged. He really didn’t know.

“None. Zip. Okay, maybe here and there, something, but mostly tiny parts, no money. Besides, after a while, they get tired
of seeing the same goddamn fifteen-year-old, over and over. It depresses people. Here they’re falling apart, seeing pieces
of themselves die every day, and I’m there mocking them with my looks. After a while, they don’t even want to see you.”

“The audiences?”

“I wish. I wish I could get that far. No. The agents, the producers. They get tired of you, you make them uneasy. That’s why
I was working at The Palms. I’m no goddamned waiter,” Claypool finished, miserably.

“Len!” Lockwood heard a small, faint voice from the next room. Claypool’s head jerked up in reaction, but he gave no answer.

“Len!” the voice came again, and this time Claypool rose. “Excuse me,” he said, as he walked to a door at the back of the
kitchen.

The voice, feminine, was muffled as Claypool stood in the doorway. “Just a guy from an insurance company, Vera,” he explained.
“Nothing important. Nothing to worry about.” He turned and returned to the table.

He seemed very weary as he lowered himself into the chair. “My wife. She’s sick. Can’t get out of bed.” His hand fiddled with
an unwashed plate on the table. “She’s always sick,” he added, glumly.

“Perhaps I’ve come at the wrong time,” Lockwood said.

The clear, young-looking eyes stared into his. “Mister, when you come around here, you’re always coming at the wrong time.
That’s the only kind of time we’ve got.”

“Perhaps I should leave.”

“Perhaps you should. But I promise you, the next time wouldn’t be any better. Besides—” Claypool gave a half-smile—“I can
use the company. Stick around. I’d prefer taking in a movie, but at least you won’t cost two bits.”

“All right,” The Hook said. “We know now that the fire at The Palms was arson.”

Claypool gave no reaction. “Yeah?” was all he said.

“My job is to check out the claim. To see if paying out the insurance is justified.”

“The place burned down, didn’t it?”

“Right. But we don’t know yet just why it did.”

“You think Grand burnt it himself, for the insurance.”

“It’s one possibility. The one my company would like to rule out before coming through with the money.”

“I bet. My father was taken on his insurance policy. When things got tough, he tried to get back some of the money he’d paid
in. Nothing doing.”

“We don’t work that way.”

Claypool stared at him skeptically, then shrugged. “Okay, so what do you want to know?”

“Grand said he fired you for cheating on the tabs.”

Claypool flushed. “That’s not why!” He rose and strode to the begrimed window that looked out on the narrow airshaft rising
through the building. He glanced back at Lockwood. “Okay, I admit I jerked around with the bills from time to time. Christ,
everybody does that. The kind of salaries Grand pays, the kind of tips you get, you have to fool around a little. Nothing
wrong with it, nothing dishonest. It’s just the system.”

“You say he didn’t fire you for that.”

“Of course not! The old wreck never even caught me!”

“He said he did.”

“A ploy! That’s all it was, a ploy! He knew he couldn’t get me out of there any other way, so he rigged up the usual evidence
they rig up against help when they want to ditch them.”

“So then why did he want to fire you?”

“Jealous.” Claypool gave a mirthless laugh. “The old bastard was jealous.”

“You and his wife?”

The smile faded from Claypool’s face. “I wish. Don’t I wish.”

“Len!” The voice came again, faint, and weary. And imploring.

Claypool seemed to sag, and then he rose. “Yes, Vera?” he asked, when he reached the door. His voice sounded as if he were
sixty.

Again his wife’s words were muffled. Claypool nodded, then turned and went over to the sink. Running the water, he grabbed
a glass and stuck his finger in the water, once, twice, then filled the glass. “I’ll be right back,” he told The Hook.

“It’s not easy,” he said when he returned. “A married man, usually all he’s got to think about is his job. The wife takes
care of the rest. But the way things are—” he ran his eye over the room, over the crusted plates standing on the table, and
then to the sink, dishes jumbled helter-skelter with pots, pans, and glasses, all of them standing in a pool of greasy water,
then down to the unswept floor, and then over the crumbling walls and ceiling. He gave a short, sarcastic laugh. “Well, I
try to do what I can.”

“Where were you the night the club burned down?” Lockwood questioned.

Claypool stared at the detective. “Out,” he said.

“Out where?”

“Out.”

“Nothing but ‘out’ could get you twenty years to life.”

Claypool stirred uneasily, and his voice dropped to a hush. “I’m a man, right? A man has needs, and sometimes, if his wife
can’t take care of them—”

“Can you back it up?”

“If I can find her again.”

Lockwood studied him, aware it was making Claypool uncomfortable. Finally, he said, “Did you do it?”

“Me?” Claypool’s eyebrows flew up. It was a pretty good reading. “Hell no, but I wish I had.”

“You don’t like Grand.”

“Hate him.”

“Because he fired you.”

“Because he’s an old man. A rotting, decaying, old man. And he’s married to—” Claypool broke off.

“He’s married to—?”

“He’s married to the kind of girl every man dreams about.”

“The girl next door.”

Claypool sneered. “All right. The girl next door. You make it sound stupid, but there’s nothing wrong with it. A clean, wholesome,
beautiful woman.” Claypool spat the last word out. “Healthy.”

“The two of you?”

“The two of us—
nothing,”
Claypool said bitterly. “Sure, sure, she was nice to me. She’d talk with me, laugh with me. But you see this face? You think
a girl like that can take anyone with a face like this seriously? She treated me like her little brother.”

“But Grand got jealous.”

“Sure. Sure he got jealous. A man like that, all he’s got is money, just money and everything else ugliness—naturally, he’s
going to be jealous. He watches her like a goddamn cat. Doesn’t miss anything. I could see him staring at us sometimes, him
sitting in the office, door open, watching us, eyes almost glowing back there in the dark.”

“He never said anything to you?”

“Why? Why would he say anything? That would be like admitting something to himself. Instead, he just watched us. I have to
admit, I enjoyed seeing him do it, enjoyed seeing him squirm. I’d even go out of my way to talk to her, just to jam it to
him. And then one night, I guess he’d had enough, and he canned me,” Claypool concluded, eyes bleak, and despairing.

“Have you worked since?”

“One night. Saturday. Made $3.50.”

“Things are tight.”

“I’ll manage. I always do.”

Lockwood looked around him. There wasn’t much evidence of that. He rose. “Who do you think did it?” he asked.

“Who else? Grand never left the club till four
A.M.
Always in the back, counting his money. So why’d he leave that night? What other reason?”

“Anyone else you can think of doing it?”

“Yeah,” Claypool said. “Yeah, everyone who ever worked for him. Only they’d have been goddamn sure first that the bastard
was locked inside.”

Before Lockwood was halfway out the door, Claypool had turned away from him, his face up to the mirror, staring at himself,
staring with a ferocious intensity, anger and frustration written all over his face.

Bill Lockwood fixed his eye on Mr. Gray, the head of claims at Transatlantic Underwriters. He wondered how many of Gray’s
employees had thought of burning his house down—with their boss locked inside it. The concept, he decided, was an appealing
one.

“Bill—” Gray’s thin, annoyingly insinuating voice came at him—“Bill, I have to tell you, I’m doing all I can to protect your
job.”

Lockwood stared at him. “May I ask why?”

Gray snorted genteelly and handed him a press clipping. “This.”

It was a Broadway column. “Insiders wonder why Transatlantic Underwriters is stalling on forking out the insurance mazuma
for the tragic fire at Mack Grand’s Palms nitery.”

Lockwood looked at Gray. “So?”

Gray’s lids dropped. Eye contact wasn’t his thing. Unconsciously, he began to fiddle with his gold pince-nez, a habit that
invariably put a razor edge to Lockwood’s nerves.

“So, Bill, the Board isn’t happy about this kind of publicity. They are made uncomfortable by any implication that Transatlantic
isn’t prompt and just in its payments.”

“There’s no such implication there,” Lockwood snapped. “You know what gossip columns are about. They don’t give a damn about
insurance companies. They
do
give a damn about suspicious nightclub fires.”

“Bill,” Mr. Gray started, doing his best to sound gentle and fatherly, unknowingly giving a fine imitation of Lizzie Borden’s
dad, “you know that and
I
know that. But try to convince the
Board
of that.” His fingers were scurrying over the pince-nez again. “They want action, Bill. Mr. Immelman was all for pulling
you off the investigation. I really had to fight him.”

Lockwood stood there and looked at the man whom he knew had never fought a superior in his life. Again the directness of his
stare made Gray fidget, look off into the distance, then to his desk. “Anyway, you’re all right for the time being,” he finished,
lamely. “But you’ve got to get cracking on this, Bill, you really do.”

“You know I’m doing the best job possible,” Lockwood told him, pulling out a pack of Camels and offering one to Gray, who
curtly shook his head no. Lockwood smiled to himself, knowing Gray’s secret fear of germs, of anything that remotely resembled
germs. When he lit up, he made sure the smoke drifted in Gray’s direction.

“I
don’t
know that,” Gray dissented, unsuccessfully trying to avoid the smoke without tipping off his discomfort. “I haven’t seen
any reports from you.”

“I’m talking about the job I do for you every time you give me an assignment,” Lockwood said, irritation creeping into his
voice. Why did Gray’s face have to look so white and bloated, like a stiff hauled out of the Hudson after a two-week soak?

“Ah, yes, well, Bill, you know,” Gray purred, “what’s done is done. The past is the past. It’s the
here
and the
now
that counts. That’s what this business is all about.”

Lockwood watched a couple of smoke rings break against Gray’s face before he continued. “All right. I’ll tell you where I
am.”

He rose, and paced the thick rug of the room. “I’ve checked out all the victims. The customers were tourists, each of them
from out of town. There’s no reading on any of them. As far as I can tell, they were clean.”

“You do still think it’s arson?” Mr. Gray asked, hope shining out of his watery blue eyes. If it were arson, and if the arson
were owner Grand’s work, then Transatlantic wouldn’t have to pay. To Gray, that was the best of all possible worlds. Premium
upon premium coming in, and not a payment going out.

“Yes,” Lockwood said, staring through the window at the city that spread out below him. No airshaft here.

“Well, what about the other people who died in the fire? Do they mean anything?”

The Hook took another drag on the Camel. “Something funny was going on there.”

“Yes?” Gray was expectant in a way that offended The Hook. To Gray all those dead bodies were nothing but possible evidence;
evidence to make use of while building a case to deny the claim.

“By law the club should have been closed to the public by three in the morning. But it wasn’t. I figure the waiter and bartender
who died in the fire kept the place open, knowing Grand was gone, and sold booze to the tourists, pocketing the cash themselves.”

“That’s just a theory.”

“More than a theory. The books hadn’t been done, but the total on the register tape—the tape I found in the cash register—that
total had been penciled into the books to work against. The amounts were exactly the same.”

“And that means?”

“That means that after Grand left the place at three, no cash went into the register.”

“And since the customers were still there half an hour or so later, one would presume some drinking went on during that period.”

“Exactly.”

“But the bookkeeper—she was Grand’s sister. Wouldn’t she have—as you are wont to say—blown the whistle?”

“One would think so,” Lockwood admitted. “But loyalty among relations isn’t as unflagging as we might wish. It could be she
was in for a share of the pot.”

“And the two chorus girls?” Gray asked, eyes glittering. Lockwood remembered how Gray had looked when he’d told the detective
how the women were found, bodies blackened, clothes burned off. It had made him want to puke.

He turned his back on Gray, repulsed by the sickness he saw there. Naked women. That was Gray’s big thing. Naked women. No
matter how their clothing had been removed. “I figure they were girl friends of the bartender and waiter. Or maybe pick-ups
of one of the customers. In any event, I think they just got caught in something that didn’t have anything to do with them.”

“Poor dears,” Gray clucked, his pale blue eyes alight, as he thought about them. And then the light flickered and died, and
he looked up at Lockwood. “What else?”