The Collection (134 page)

“The only thing that surprises me,” Score said, “is that the
old man came up with the money for him. Albee hadn't expected it, had made the
Kenosha trip as a last desperate chance. I think now that he'd have blown town
even without capital if the old man hadn't come through. With a sudden stake,
he just couldn't resist it.”

I asked if he knew what had happened at the bookstore and
Score said sure, Albee had told him. He'd been managing to drag down about ten
bucks a week besides his salary all the time he had worked there. Just tried to
drag a bit too deeply that Friday morning because he was desperate about his
bookie bill, and got caught with his hand in the till.

Score shrugged. “He'll land on his feet, wherever he went.
He's --- --- --- Ever see a picture of him?”

He got up and went to the file cabinet. “We got some stills
here.” He opened a drawer, hunted for and took out a file folder, handed me
half a dozen eight-by-ten glossies, portrait shots. “Top one's straight, others
made up for roles he played. One of 'em's as King Lear; that's the best role he
ever played.”

Albee was a good-looking young man all right, but what
struck me was his resemblance to his father. It was really strong, one case
where neither of them or anybody else could ever have denied the relationship.
The second shot showed him as a mustachioed pirate with a black eye patch, as
villainous a character as ever stormed a poop deck, whatever a poop deck is.
The third --- --- ---

The photographs shook a little in my hand. Albee as King
Lear, with lines of age in his face and wild gray hair and a wild gray beard.
He didn't look like his father in that shot; he
was
his father. Trim
that beard. Instead of that gray wig, dye his own short hair. Let him talk like
a Wisconsin farmer as, having known his father and being an actor, he certainly
could do. . . .

I made the motions of looking at the rest of the glossies
and handed them back. I thanked Jerry Score and made my get-away.

I walked south and walked blindly except when I had to cross
a street without getting run over. Of course Floyd Nielson hadn't given away
eight hundred dollars. Discount everything that Albee, as Floyd Nielson, had
told us. Albee hadn't expected to get the loan and hadn't. But he'd learned his
father had just sold the farm. Probably had all his money including the
proceeds of the sale on hand, in cash. A fortune for a killing, whether it had
been in cold blood or during a fight after a violent quarrel.

And then the fright and the planning. Establish that Albee
had taken a powder, that his father was still alive and had gone west, where
he'd gradually be lost track of. And if Albee showed up alive someday,
somewhere, even came back to Chicago someday, so what? His father had been alive
and looking for him long after Albee had gone. If his father's body were never
found, there'd never have been a murder, never be an investigation.

And Uncle Am, even without having seen the photographs I'd
just seen, had guessed it before I had. Or at least had seen it as a
possibility. Right now he was on the Nielson farm, looking to see if there was
a place where a body could have been put where it would never be found. Not a
grave; a grave gives itself away by sinking unless there's someone around to
keep it leveled off. But somewhere. . . .

If I'd had any sense I'd have gone to the office to wait for
Uncle Am. Even if he hadn't found a body---and Albee could have disposed of it
elsewhere than at the truck farm---we could prove a case, or let the cops prove
it, just by pulling off Albee's beard; it was two inches long and he couldn't
possibly have grown a real one in nine days.

But I didn't have any sense because I was walking into the
lobby of the Ideal Hotel. A medium priced hotel, the kind the real Floyd
Nielson would have chosen. Albee was staying in character and---suddenly I saw
the reason why Albee Nielson had used first Missing Persons and then us as
cats'-paws; he himself had
had
to stay away from even pretending to
hunt for Albee on his own; Honey, Score, probably even his landlady, would have
recognized him, gray beard or no. Which was why, too, he'd taken a hotel south
of the Loop instead of on the Near North Side. In person, he'd avoided the area
completely, except for his brief visit to our office.

I asked the clerk if Mr. Nielson was in. He glanced over his
shoulder and said, “I guess so; his key's not in the box. Room two-fourteen.”

There was an elevator, but I didn't wait for it; I walked up
the stairs. I found 214 door and knocked on it. He opened it and said, “Oh, Mr.
Hunter. Come in.” I went in and he closed the door and looked at me. “Well,
find out anything about Albee?”

And I realized then, too late, that I hadn't figured out
what I was going to say or do. Give a tug on his beard? But I'd look, feel, and
be too damn foolish if I was wrong, and I
could
be wrong.

I decided to toss out a feeler and see how he reacted to it.

I said, “The case isn't closed yet, Mr. Nielson. Something
new has come up. There's a suspicion of murder.”

And as suddenly as I'd been hit in the gut last night, I was
being strangled. His hands were around my throat. There are people who fight by
lashing out with their fists and there are stranglers. He was a strangler. And
his hands were
strong.
Like a steel vise.

I tried to pull them away with my own hands and couldn't.
Then, just in time, I remembered the trick for breaking a strangle hold taken
from the front. You bring up your forearms inside his arms and jerk them apart.
I tried it. It worked.

I took a step back quick while I had the chance, before he
could grab me again. He didn't know boxing. He put up his guard too high and I
swung a right in under it that got him in the gut just like the goon's swing
last night got me. Maybe not as hard, but hard enough to bring his guard down.
I feinted a left to keep them down and then put my right into his chin with all
the weight of my body behind it, and he went down, out cold.

So cold that my first thought was to kneel beside him and
make sure that his heart was still beating.

My second was the beard. It did
not
come off. And I
bent down to study his face closely and saw that the age lines in it were
etched and not drawn.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and stayed sitting there for
about nine hours. Anyway, it seemed that long. I gently massaged my neck where
those strong hands had gripped it, and then I looked down at those strong hands
and wondered how I could have been so blind as not to notice them the first
time we'd talked to him. They were, even aside from their own indications of
age, the muscled, hard, callused hands of a farmer, not the hands of a
book-store clerk. Uncle Am had always told me to look at people's hands as well
as their faces when I was sizing them up. I hadn't even noticed Floyd Nielson's
hands.

He began to stir, and his eyes opened.

And there were footsteps in the hallway outside and a heavy
knock on the door, a cop's kind of knock. I called out, “Come in!”

The first one through was a cop I knew slightly, Lieutenant
Guthrie of Homicide. The second man I didn't know; I later learned he was a
Kenosha County Sheriffs deputy. The third man in was Uncle Am.

Nielson sat up.

Guthrie said, “Floyd Nielson, you are under arrest for suspicion
of the murder of Albee Nielson. Anything-you-say-may-be-used-against-you.” He
produced a pair of handcuffs.

Uncle Am winked at me. “Come on, kid. They won't need us,
not now anyway. We may have to testify later.”

I went with him. Outside he said, “You beat me to him, Ed,
but damn it, you shouldn't have tackled him alone.”

I said, “Yeah.”

“There's a likely looking bar across the street. I think
we've earned a drink. How's about it?”

“Yeah,” I said.

We ordered drinks. Uncle Am said, “You gave me the idea,
kid, when you said, last thing last night, that what puzzled you was that he
wouldn't just accept that Albee had taken it on the lam, go on to California
and wait to hear from Albee if Albee ever chose to write. What he did was out
of character, spending a full week in Chicago heckling first Missing Persons
and then us. He just wanted it firmly established that Albee
had
taken a
powder.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“With the hypothetical money. It would have been out of
character for him to give Albee that money to begin with, and he didn't. So
they got into a fight over it and he killed Albee. That's my guess, and if it
was that, he could probably have got away with self-defense if he'd called the
sheriff right away. But he wanted to play it cute.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“So I guessed he'd have disposed of the body on the farm
rather than risk moving it, so I went there. I looked around with the idea of
where I'd put a body where it never would be found unless someone looked for
it. A grave in the open was out. But there was a brand new cement floor in the
tool shed. The new owner was surprised Nielson had gone to that trouble after
he'd already sold the farm. So I called the sheriff and he brought men with
picks.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“One thing puzzles me. How he got Albee to take Jerry's car
back to him and then return to the farm to be killed. That part doesn't make
sense.”

I said, “He brought the car back to Chicago himself Saturday
evening, left it in front of Jerry's and left the keys in Jerry's mail box. He
had the address on the car registration.”

“And then went back to Kenosha by bus or however, got his
pickup truck and came to Chicago again to use Albee's keys to raid his pad in
the middle of the night. Sure. There were two suitcases and a portable
phonograph under that cement, besides Albee. Well, kid, however
you
figured
it out, you beat me to the answer.”

I said, “Uncle Am, I cannot tell a lie.”

“What the hell do you mean?”

“I mean it's four o'clock. Let's knock off as of now and
have a night on the town. We're due for one anyway.”

“Sure, kid, we're overdue. But what's that got to do with
your not being able to tell a lie?”

I said, “I mean I need two more drinks before I can tell you
the truth.”

“Then let's have them right here and get it over with.
Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

And we ordered our second round, and then our third.

Peter Kidd should have suspected the shaggy dog of
something, right away. He got into trouble the first time he saw the animal. It
was the first hour of the first day of Peter Kidd's debut as a private
investigator. Specifically, ten minutes after nine in the morning.

 It had taken will power on the part of Peter Kidd to make
himself show up a dignified ten minutes late at his own office that morning
instead of displaying an unprofessional overenthusiasm by getting there an hour
early. By now, he knew, the decorative secretary he had engaged would have the
office open. He could make his entrance with quiet and decorum.

The meeting with the dog occurred in the downstairs hallway
of the Wheeler Building, halfway between the street door and the elevator. It
was entirely the fault of the shaggy dog, who tried to pass to Peter Kidd's
right, while the man who held the dog's leash — a chubby little man with a
bulbous red nose — tried to walk to the left. It didn't work.

“Sorry,” said the man with the leash, as Peter Kidd stood
still, then tried to step over the leash. That didn't work, either, because the
dog jumped up to try to lick Peter Kidd's ear, raising the leash too high to be
straddled, even by Peter's long legs.

Peter raised a hand to rescue his shell-rimmed glasses, in
imminent danger of being knocked off by the shaggy dog's display of affection.

“Perhaps,” he said to the man with the leash, “you had
better circumambulate me.”

“Huh?”

“Walk around me, I mean,” said Peter. “From the Latin, you
know.
Circum,
 around —
ambulare,
 to walk. Parallel to
circumnavigate,
 which means to sail around. From
ambulare
also comes the word
ambulance
—
 although an ambulance has nothing to do with walking. But that is
because it came through the French
hôpital ambulant,
 which actually
means—”

“Sorry,” said the man with the leash. He had already
circumambulated Peter Kidd, having started the procedure even before the
meaning of the word had been explained to him.

“Quite all right,” said Peter.

“Down, Rover,” said the man with the leash. Regretfully, the
shaggy dog desisted in its efforts to reach Peter's ear and permitted him to
move on to the elevator.

“Morning, Mr. Kidd,” said the elevator operator, with the deference
due a new tenant who has been introduced as a personal friend of the owner of
the building.

“Good morning,” said Peter. The elevator took him to the
fifth, and top floor. The door clanged shut behind him and he walked with firm
stride to the office door whereupon — with chaste circumspection — golden
letters spelled out:

PETER KIDD

PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS

He opened the door and went in. Everything in the office
looked shiny new, including the blonde stenographer behind the typewriter desk.
She said, “Good morning, Mr. Kidd. Did you forget the letterheads you were
going to pick up on the floor below?”

He shook his head. “Thought I'd look in first to see if
there were any — ah—”

“Clients? Yes, there were two. But they didn't wait.

They'll be back in fifteen or twenty minutes.”

Peter Kidd's eyebrows lifted above the rims of his glasses.
“Two? Already?”