Silent Are the Dead (17 page)

He got up and put on his hat. “Well, I got to run, Jim— Sit still. I can let myself out.”

Bishop nodded, his chins folding and unfolding. “I told Lyda last night we could count on you. And when she told me what happened this morning—well, I won't forget. Neither will she. We've kept the secret this long, and with this ticker of mine I'm living on borrowed time. The doc can't figure why it hasn't stopped long ago. I just want to be sure she marries the man she loves. I don't want anything to spoil it for her.”

“Well, you don't need to worry about Logan,” Casey said. “He's got the picture but he'll give it back.”

Bishop told him to come again and play some chess and Casey went out and trudged down the stairs, feeling more weary and depressed than ever now that he had seen the man.

The keys in his pocket that Nancy Jamison had given him sent Casey back to the office. He found the studio deserted and was glad of that as he took the steel box from his desk. He found a key that would fit the lock and opened it. There was nothing in the box but a few papers and a bulky envelope. He opened this. It was full of films.

Afraid to look at them just then, he leaned back in his chair. He sat there quite a while, until he knew he could no longer postpone the issue. Then he began to go through them, holding them up to the light. It was difficult to tell about some of them but when he came to one that showed a man and a woman in a snug embrace he quit looking and put them all back in the envelope.

He knew he would have to print them, all of them. He would have to find out for sure, but he couldn't do it tonight. He could not force himself to the task now. He didn't want to think about it. Nancy Jamison had been right. Perry Austin was a blackmailer. That was enough for now. The pictures could wait. He put the envelope in an inside pocket. He opened the drawer of his desk and found his quart of bourbon more than half full. He put it into his topcoat pocket and reached for the telephone.

“If anybody wants me,” he told the operator, “I'll be home. And I don't want to be bothered.… That's right. I don't feel good. I'm sick.”

And as he hung up he thought,
You ain't kiddin' either, brother. You're sick.

Chapter Sixteen:
SILENCED FOR GOOD

C
ASEY HAD A SLIGHT HEADACHE
when he awoke the next morning, and as he lay there wondering why he felt so low, he remembered about Perry Austin and that made the head worse. He sat up, decided he wasn't going to the right away, and got to his feet.

By a system of sliding black curtains, Casey had made part of the kitchen into a workable darkroom and as soon as he was dressed he got the envelope of Austin's and looked over the negatives. Almost immediately he was aware that they belonged in two classes. One was made up of originals; the other, he saw, consisted of copies—negatives which were simply pictures of other pictures. This was evident because the edges of the prints and the thumbtacks holding them to the easel were visible; but when these edges were masked out, a print could be made that, while not an exact duplicate, would compare favorably with the original.

This served only to increase his bitterness because it told him that not only had Austin been engaged in blackmail, but that even when he collected he took the precaution of keeping a copy, so that if conditions warranted he could follow up his victim and collect a second time. Therefore it would seem that all copies represented pictures which Austin had collected on; all originals indicated pictures which had not been sold at all because they had not been sufficiently dangerous, or because the victim was too tough to fall for blackmail.

Casey began to make prints of those negatives which were copies and had been sold. One was a close-up of a hotel registration card. The names on it meant nothing to him but the name of the hotel did:
The Butland
—rooms a buck and a half up and no questions asked. The next two were pictures of men and women he had never seen, ordinary pictures until you saw that the background was a night-club entrance and realized how a jealous husband or wife might feel when confronted by this evidence. The fourth was another couple and this time Casey knew the man, not personally, but he'd seen him around. Clay Ackerman his name was, and he ran a large personal-loan company.

Right there Casey stopped. He was a tough man to convince, and a stubborn one. Everything he had seen said that Perry Austin was a blackmailer who used his connection with the
Express
to further his extortion efforts; yet even now Casey was not convinced. He was crazy, maybe, but he was going to find out for himself. He looked at the print again. Ackerman and some woman coming out of a doorway which bore the number 87. It meant nothing to Casey although it was obvious that the picture had been taken at night.

He slipped the print into the sink with the others and started to clean up while they washed. To hell with the rest of the negatives. He'd do them later. But .first he was going to find out about Austin, and Ackerman was going to tell him.

The Citizen's Personal Finance Company had offices on the fourth floor of the Townsend Building. A cute little brunette at the information desk was twisting her mouth to one side and working on it with lipstick, but when she saw Casey she stopped to ask him what he wanted. He said he wanted to see Mr. Ackerman.

“I'll see if he's in,” she said. “What was it you wanted to see him about? A loan?”

“No. A picture.”

The brunette put down the vanity and lipstick, started to plug in a line. “I'm not sure—” she began.

“Just tell him a man's out here with a picture he ought to see.”

She plugged in the jack, rang, and repeated what Casey had told her. She looked up at him presently. “What was the picture of?”

“Of Mr. Ackerman,” Casey said. “And a woman, and a house that had number eighty-seven on the door.”

The girl relayed the information, said, “Yes, Mr. Ackerman,” and pulled out the jack. She picked up her vanity and smiled at Casey. “Mr. Ackerman will see you in just a moment.”

Casey paced back and forth, looking through the glass partitions at the main office beyond. There were 30 or 40 people banging away at business machines, and one corner of the big room had been railed off to accommodate four desks and four smooth-looking gentlemen who sat behind them importantly, like vice-presidents of a bank. One was interviewing a customer. One was talking on the telephone. One stepped over and spoke to the fourth and the two of them got up.

Casey reached for a cigarette and. sat down. Just after he'd got a light and an inhale the brunette called to him. Mr. Ackerman would see him.

“You can go this way,” she said, and pointed to a door opening from the anteroom. “The last door on your right.”

Casey thanked her and went along a narrow corridor to the designated door. He went in, finding himself in a large and beautifully appointed office that reminded him of Stanford Endicott's. At the far wall, behind an enormous desk, sat Ackerman. He was leaning back, smiling, a compactly built man with a pointed jaw and thick, graying hair. He had a cigarette holder, in one hand, a long black one. He put it in his mouth as Casey approached. “What about the picture?” he asked pleasantly.

Casey produced it and Ackerman sat up and reached under the desk. Somewhere behind him a door opened. Ackerman glanced at the picture and nodded.

A man walked past Casey to a door in one corner of the room. When he opened it Casey saw a landing and stairs going up and down. The man came back, a nicely-built fellow, young, clean-jawed, and blond. Ackerman leaned back in his chair and smiled. “All right, boys,” he said.

Casey didn't get it. He scowled, started to speak. A hand fell on his shoulder, turning him. Not until then did he realize that when the blond man came in, three others came in with him. One of them took his arm, a black-browed fellow with big ears. Casey had never seen him before, but the other two were the vice-presidents he had seen talking outside.

“Let's go, bud,” the black-browed man said.

“Wait a minute,” Casey said. “What is this?”

“The bounce, bud.”

Someone grabbed his other arm. They had him hemmed in now and he pushed one away so he could turn to speak over his shoulder to Ackerman.

“Listen,” he argued. “This is no touch. I just want to—”

That was as far as he got. Somebody tried to yank him toward the door. He jerked back, pushing. The heel of a hand caught him under the chin, knocking his head back. He felt his legs being kicked out from under him and tried once more to call to Ackerman; then the hand was under his chin again and his hat went off and somebody clipped him in the stomach.

After that he got mad and things were vague. He remembered knocking the black-browed fellow on his haunches, of being dropped to one knee by a punch to the head; then he was knocking men down and they were getting up and slugging him and he was punching and watching them drop and backing up.

Finally something clipped him harder than usual and he felt his legs sag. When he got his eyes open he was on hands and knees and everything was quiet and nobody was hitting him any more. As though from a great distance he heard someone say, “Man, how you go!”

He shook his head and looked up. Ackerman was standing beside his desk grinning. “You had two of my boys on the floor and one in the air all the time you were in there. If Rusty hadn't tapped you with the sap I think you'd've taken the four of them.”

He glanced toward the door through which Casey had entered. Casey, still on hands and knees, followed the glance. Blondy was holding a handkerchief to his nose; Black-Brows had a bloody mouth and a rapidly closing eye; the other two didn't look like vice-presidents any more.

“All right,” Ackerman told them. “Get cleaned up. You'll be okay, Rusty, but the rest of you better call it a day. You'll give the place a black eye.” He waved them out with the cigarette holder, put his hand under Casey's arm.

“I can make it,” Casey said, and found he could. He felt his face. His teeth were all there but there was blood in his mouth and a lump on either side of his jaw. “Those were four nice gentle lads,” he said morosely. “Where do you get 'em? Off of rock piles? Do they work here all the time?”

“They're in charge of complaints.”

“And come all equipped with blackjacks, huh?”

“Only Rusty,” Ackerman said. “We don't need one often, but you'd be surprised how people squawk.” He had been getting a bottle and a glass from a cabinet as he spoke and now offered Casey a drink. “Wash your mouth out with that.”

Casey tried it. His eyes widened and he sipped again incredulously. “Brandy!” he said, his lumps forgotten. “You don't get stuff like this any more,” he said gratefully, and swallowed the rest of it.

“You know you don't. Help yourself.” Ackerman was busying himself with an office icebox. He came back with some ice cubes. “You want to hold these on your face? Wrap them in your handkerchief— That's it. Sit down. I guess I made a mistake. When the operator told me about the picture I figured I'd have to chuck you out, but nobody can scrap like you and be a blackmailer— Who the hell are you, anyway? What's the beef?”

Casey sat down. The second brandy made him feel better. He wasn't even sore any more. He sort of liked this guy. “I work for the
Express,”
he said. “And never mind how I got the picture. I'm more afraid of it than you are. All I want to know is, did you pay? And who to?”

“Sure I paid,” Ackerman said. “That was nearly a year ago. The wife and I were separating and if she got hold of that picture I'd've had to up the settlement. I gave the lad a grand and told him if lie came back I'd throw him down the stairs. He handed over the negative and print and I thought that was that. I'm divorced now. The picture isn't worth a dime. So when you come in—” He shrugged. “I'm sorry as hell, but you see how it was.”

“You don't know the fellow that collected?” Casey asked.

“There were two. The one that took the picture—I saw him when he did it—was not the fellow that collected. That one was tall, good-looking in a ratty sort of way, Mustache—”

“What kind?”

Ackerman thought it over. “Pointed. Slick. The other fellow was smaller. He had a mustache too, but little, clipped.”

“That does it,” Casey said bitterly, and began to feel bad all over again. He knew what the score was now. Austin took the pictures and Harry Nye did most of the collecting and framing.

“Does what?” Ackerman asked.

“Tells me all I want to know. Tear that thing up and throw it away. Forget it.” He got up. “Sorry I bothered you, but it was worth the beating.”

“Beating?” chuckled Ackerman. “You? Did you see my boys? Hell, you don't look bad. You might've bumped into a couple of doors. Why don't you have another slug of that brandy before you go?”

Lieutenant Logan was slouched low in his chair, his heels on the desk. He was staring morosely at his shoes when Casey came in the office, and he shifted his gaze without changing its quality or moving his head.

“Seen Harry Nye?” Casey asked.

“No. But we will.”

Something in the inflection of Logan's voice interested Casey and he sat down, drawing up his chair. “Looking for him, are you?”

“Plenty. What happened to your face?”

“A bee stung me.”

“Three times, huh?” Logan said. “Once on each side and once in the mouth.” He swung his feet down, his gaze more curious now than morose. “Well, it's about time somebody gave you a working over— Who was it?”

“You wouldn't know him,” Casey said. “It was about a picture.”

“Okay then, what're you sore about?”

“I got trouble.”

“You've
got trouble?”

Casey watched Logan, saying nothing. Logan lit a cigarette, broke the match between thumb and finger. “What'd you want to see Nye about?”