HCC 115 - Borderline (25 page)

“I might as well start with you, Phil.”

I talked with him for ten minutes. But I had already pumped him dry the day before.
Still, he gave me a little information on some of the others I would be seeing. Before,
I had tried to ask him about his own relationship with Karen Price. Although that
tack had been fairly effective, it didn’t look like the best way to come up with something
concrete. Instead, I asked him about the other men. If I worked on all of them that
way, I just might turn up an answer or two.

Abeles more or less crossed Fred Klein off the suspect list, if nothing else. Klein,
whose wife was in Reno, had tentatively made the coulda-dunnit sheet on the chance
that Karen was threatening to give his wife information that could boost her alimony,
or something of the sort. Abeles knocked the theory to pieces with the information
that Klein’s wife had money of her own, that she wasn’t looking for alimony, and that
a pair of expensive lawyers had already worked out all the details of the divorce
agreement.

I asked Phil Abeles which of the married men he knew definitely had contact at one
time or another with Karen Price. This was the sort of information a man is supposed
to keep to himself, but the mores of Madison Avenue tend to foster subtle back-stabbing.
Abeles told me he knew for certain that Karen had been intimate with Harold Merriman,
and he was almost sure about Joe Conn as well.

After Abeles left, I knocked the dottel out of my pipe and filled it again. I lit
it, and as I shook out the match, I looked up at Harold Merriman.

A pudgy man with a bald spot and bushy eyebrows, forty or forty-five, somewhat older
than the rest of the crew. He sat down across the desk from me and narrowed his eyes.
“Phil said you wanted to see me,” he said. “What’s the trouble?”

“Just routine.” I smiled. “I need a little information. You knew Karen Price before
the shooting, didn’t you?”

“Well, I knew who she was.”

Sure, I thought. But I let it pass and played him the way I had planned. I asked him
who in the office had had anything to do with the dead girl. He hemmed and hawed a
little, then told me that Phil Abeles had taken her out for dinner once or twice and
that Jack Harris was supposed to have had her along on a business trip to Miami one
weekend. Strictly in a secretarial capacity, no doubt.

“And you?”

“Oh, no,” Merriman said. “I’d met her, of course, but that was as far as it went.”

“Really?”

The hesitation was admission enough. “Listen,” he stammered, “all right, I…saw her
a few times. It was nothing serious and it wasn’t very recent. London—”

I waited.

“Keep it a secret, will you?” He forced a grin. “Write it off as a symptom of the
foolish forties. She was available and I was ready to play around a little. I’d just
as soon it didn’t get out. Nobody around here knows, and I’d like to keep it that
way.” He hesitated again. “My wife knows. I was so damn ashamed of myself that I told
her. But I wouldn’t want the boys in the office to know.”

I didn’t tell him that they already knew, and that they had passed the information
on to me.

Ray Powell came in grinning. He was a bachelor, and this made a difference. “Hello,
London,” he said. “I made it with the girl, if that’s what you want to know.”

“I heard rumors.”

“I don’t keep secrets,” he said. He sprawled in the chair across from me and crossed
one leg over the other. It was a relief to talk to someone other than a reticent,
guilt-ridden adulterer.

He certainly looked like a Don Juan. He was twenty-eight, tall, dark and handsome,
with wavy black hair and piercing brown eyes. A little prettier and he might have
passed for a gigolo. But there was a slight hardness about his features that prevented
this.

“You’re working for Mark,” he said.

“That’s right.”

He sighed. “Well, I’d like to see him wind up innocent, but from where I sit, it’s
hard to see it that way. He’s a funny guy, London. He wants to have his cake and eat
it, too. He wanted a marriage and he wanted a playmate. With the girl he was marrying,
you wouldn’t think he’d worry about playing around. Ever meet Lynn?”

“I’ve met her.”

“Then you know what I mean.”

I nodded. “Was she one of your conquests?”

“Lynn?” He laughed easily. “Not that girl. She’s the pure type, London. The one-man
woman. Mark found himself a sweet girl there. Why he bothered with Karen is beyond
me.”

I switched the subject to the married men in the office. With Powell, I didn’t try
to find out which of them had been intimate with Karen Price, since it seemed fairly
obvious they all had. Instead I tried to ascertain which of them could be in trouble
as a result of an affair with the girl.

I learned a few things. Jack Harris was immune to blackmail—his wife knew he cheated
on her regularly and had schooled herself to ignore such indiscretions just as long
as he returned to her after each rough passage through the turbulent waters of adultery.

Harold Merriman was sufficiently well-off financially so that he could pay a blackmailer
indefinitely rather than quiet her by murder; besides, Merriman had already told me
that his wife knew, and I was more or less prepared to believe him.

Both Abeles and Joe Conn were possibilities. Conn looked best of all. He wasn’t doing
very well in advertising but he could hold his job indefinitely—he had married a girl
whose family ran one of Darcy & Bates’ major accounts. Conn had no money of his own,
and no talent to hold a job if his wife wised up and left him.

Of course, there was always the question of how valid Ray Powell’s impressions were.
Lynn? She’s the pure type. The one-man woman.

That didn’t sound much like the drunken blonde who had turned up on my doormat the
night before.

Jack Harris revealed nothing new, merely reinforced what I had managed to pick up
elsewhere along the line. I talked to him for fifteen minutes or so. He left, and
Joe Conn came into the room.

He wasn’t happy. “They said you wanted to see me,” he muttered. “We’ll have to make
it short, London. I’ve got a pile of work this afternoon and my nerves are jumping
all over the place as it is.”

The part about the nerves was something he didn’t have to tell me. He didn’t sit still,
just paced back and forth like a lion in a cage before chow time.

I could play it slow and easy or fast and hard, looking to shock and jar. If he was
the one who killed her, his nervousness now gave me an edge. I decided to press it.

I got up, walked over to Conn. A short stocky man, crew cut, no tie. “When did you
start sleeping with Karen?” I snapped.

He spun around wide-eyed. “You’re crazy!”

“Don’t play games,” I told him. “The whole office knows you were bedding her.”

I watched him. His hands curled into fists at his sides. His eyes narrowed and his
nostrils flared.

“What is this, London?”

“Your wife doesn’t know about Karen, does she?”

“Damn you.” He moved toward me. “How much, you bastard? A private detective,” he snickered.
“Sure you are. You’re a damn blackmailer, London. How much?”

“Just how much did Karen ask for?” I said. “Enough to make you kill her?”

He answered with a left hook that managed to find the point of my chin and send me
crashing back against the wall. There was a split second of blackness. Then he was
coming at me again, fists ready, and I spun aside, ducked and planted a fist of my
own in his gut. He grunted and threw a right at me. I took it on the shoulder and
tried his belly again. It was softer this time. He wheezed and folded up. I hit him
in the face and just managed to pull the punch at the last minute. It didn’t knock
him out—only spilled him on the seat of his tweed pants.

“You’ve got a good punch, London.”

“So do you,” I said. My jaw still ached.

“You ever do any boxing?”

“No.”

“I did,” he said. “In the Navy. I still try to keep in shape. If I hadn’t been so
angry I’d have taken you.”

“Maybe.”

“But I got mad,” he said. “Irish temper, I guess. Are you trying to shake me down?”

“No.”

“You don’t honestly think I killed Karen, do you?”

“Did you?”

“God, no.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You think I killed her,” he said hollowly. “You must be insane. I’m no killer, London.”

“Of course. You’re a meek little man.”

“You mean just now? I lost my temper.”

“Sure.”

“Oh, hell,” he said. “I never killed her. You got me mad. I don’t like shakedowns
and I don’t like being called a murderer. That’s all, damn you.”

I called Jerry Gunther from a pay phone in the lobby. “Two things,” I told the lieutenant.
“First I think I’ve got a hotter prospect for you than Donahue. A man named Joe Conn,
one of the boys at the stag. I tried shaking him up a little and he cracked wide open,
tried to beat my brains in. He’s got a good motive, too.”

“Ed, listen—”

“That’s the first thing,” I said. “The other is that I’ve been trying to get in touch
with my client for the past too-many hours and can’t reach him. Did you have him picked
up again?”

There was a long pause. All at once the air in the phone booth felt much too close.
Something was wrong.

“I saw Donahue half an hour ago,” Jerry said. “I’m afraid he killed that girl, Ed.”

“He confessed?” I couldn’t believe it.

“He confessed…in a way.”

“I don’t get it.”

A short sigh. “It happened yesterday,” Jerry said. “I can’t give you the time until
we get the medical examiner’s report, but the guess is that it was just after we let
him go. He sat down at his typewriter and dashed off a three-line confession. Then
he stuck a gun in his mouth and made a mess. The lab boys are still there trying to
scrape his brains off the ceiling. Ed?”

“What?”

“You didn’t say anything…I didn’t know if you were still on the line. Look, everybody
guesses wrong some of the time.”

“This was more than a guess. I was sure.”

“Well, listen, I’m on my way to Donahue’s place again. If you want to take a run over
there you can have a look for yourself. I don’t know what good it’s going to do—”

“I’ll meet you there,” I said.

The lab crew left shortly after we arrived. “Just a formality for the inquest,” Jerry
Gunther said. “That’s all.”

“You’re sure it’s a suicide, then?”

“Stop dreaming, Ed. What else?”

What else? All that was left in the world of Mark Donahue was sprawled in a chair
at a desk. There was a typewriter in front of him and a gun on the floor beside him.
The gun was just where it would have dropped after a suicide shot of that nature.
There were no little inconsistencies.

The suicide note in the typewriter was slightly incoherent. It read:
It has to end now. I can’t help what I did but there is no way out anymore. God forgive
me and God help me. I am sorry.

“You can go if you want, Ed. I’ll stick around until they send a truck for the body.
But—”

“Run over the timetable, will you?”

“From when to when?”

“From when you released him to when he died.”

Jerry shrugged. “Why? You can’t read it any way but suicide, can you?”

“I don’t know. Give me a rundown.”

“Let’s see,” he said. “You called around five, right?”

“Around then. Five or five-thirty.”

“We let him go around three. There’s your timetable, Ed. We let him out around three,
he came back here, thought about things for a while, then wrote that note and killed
himself. That checks with the rough estimate we’ve got of the time of death. You narrow
it down—you did call him after I spoke to you, didn’t you?”

“Yes. No answer.”

“He must have been dead by that time; probably killed himself within an hour after
he got here.”

“How did he seem when you released him?”

“Happy to be out, I thought at the time. But he didn’t show much emotion one way or
the other. You know how it is with a person who’s getting ready to knock himself off.
All the problems and emotions are kept bottled up inside.”

I went over to a window and looked out at Horatio Street. It was the most obvious
suicide in the world, but I couldn’t swallow it. Call it a hunch, a stubborn refusal
to accept the fact that my client had managed to fool me. Whatever it was, I didn’t
believe the suicide theory. It just didn’t sit right.

“I don’t like it,” I said. “I don’t think he killed himself.”

“You’re wrong, Ed.”

“Am I?” I went to Donahue’s liquor cabinet and filled two glasses with cognac.

“I know nothing ever looked more like suicide,” I admitted. “But the motives are still
as messy as ever. Look at what we’ve got here. We have a man who hired me to protect
him from his former mistress—and as soon as he did, he only managed to call attention
to the fact that he was involved with her. He received threatening phone calls from
her. She didn’t want him married. But her best friend swears that the Price girl didn’t
give a damn about Donahue, that he was only another man in her collection.”

“Look, Ed—”

“Let me finish. We can suppose for a minute that he was lying for reasons of his own
that don’t make much sense, that he had some crazy reason for calling me in on things
before he knocked off the girl. Maybe he thought that would alibi him—”

“That’s just what I was going to say,” Jerry interjected.

“I thought of it. It doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, but it’s possible, I guess.
Still, where in hell is his motive? Not blackmail. She wasn’t the blackmailing type
to begin with, as far as I can see. But there’s more to it than that. Lynn Farwell
wouldn’t care who Mark slept with before they were married. Or after, for that matter.
It wasn’t a love match. She wanted a respectable husband and he wanted a rich wife,
and they both figured to get what they wanted. Love wasn’t part of it.”