The Fatal Frails (5 page)

He carried her to the bedroom and closed the door.

• • •

He reached for the switch on the lamp on the night table when he heard her returning to the bed. “No!” she said sharply, sensing his movement, but she was too late. She grabbed for the negligee at the foot of the bed to shield full-fleshed nudity as the light bathed her. Johnny intercepted her arm. Slowly he drew her up and in until she slithered across him face down. “Will you stop it?” she demanded crossly, and flung a hand behind her.

He removed the hand unhurriedly and rested his eyes upon the smooth white buttocks. He looked again, more closely. With a finger he traced one of a number of misty dark lines faintly visible beneath the satiny surface. “What happened here?” Johnny asked her.

She stirred uneasily on his knees. “I fell on the stairs.” Her voice was muffled.

“The hell you fell on the stairs. I’ve seen a whipped rump before. Who ploughed your field?”

“Let me back under the covers,” she pleaded. He released her arm, and she crawled back in beside him. The look she gave him was as defiant as her tone. “You can’t guess who did it?”

“Stitt?”

“Yes, Stitt, damn him!”

“How long ago?”

She shrugged bare shoulders. “Two months, ten weeks.”

He whistled. “An’ you still look like that? What the hell did he use?”

“A riding crop. The doctor said it would be six months before I bleached out completely. I was in bed five days. I couldn’t move.”

“I believe it. How’d it happen?”

“I misjudged him,” she said, remembered resentment in her tone. “I had information I thought he’d buy, or trade for. Instead he tied me over the end of a bed and whipped it out of me. I made it harder on myself by thinking that if I kept my nerve and didn’t talk he’d get scared and quit. I didn’t realize until too late that he was—enjoying himself.”

“Did he have a hold on Arends? He sure as hell didn’t sound like a man talkin’ to his boss over there.”

“Max always acts like the king of the mountain. You never saw anyone so arrogant.” She leaned up on an elbow to look into his face. “I’m answering a lot of questions, Johnny. I wouldn’t want you to forget it when it’s my turn.”

“What’s with all this mismarked and unmarked symbols I been hearin’ about?”

“That was a very minor matter, Johnny, except to Jack Arends.” She slid down beside him again. “Every foreign shipment coming through customs, whether by boat or air, has every individual piece in the shipment marked with the symbol of the importing merchant. For one reason or another a shipment occasionally isn’t picked up here by the importer to whom it was consigned, and then, rather than pay roundtrip freight charges and wind up with the merchandise still on his own shipping platform, the manufacturer will scramble around to find someone else to take it over. In such cases customs insists that the goods be re-marked with the symbol of the new consignee. It’s a tedious, time-consuming and expensive process. Since the manufacturer will make a cash allowance to the new consignee for the expense of the re-marking, if the actual re-marking can be avoided it’s cash in the importer’s pocket. It’s a favorite evasion of the borderline importers and freight forwarders, although not the big ones like Jack. It requires—”

Johnny interrupted. “Hold it just a minute, sugar.” He leaned up over her to reach for the phone on her side of the bed. He dialed the hotel. “Edna? Killain. Tell Vic I’m gonna be late, will you?” He looked down at the auburn hair spread on the pillow and the perfectly formed white neck with the little hollow at the base of the throat. “Make that good an’ late. Thanks, Edna.” He hung up, placed a palm flat on the soft swell of Gloria’s stomach and jiggled lightly. He grinned as her knees came up involuntarily. “You were sayin’ it requires—” he prompted her.

“Oh. Collusion is what it requires. Money changes hands, but if the wrong inspector’s assigned there can be hell to pay, like this time. It was serious for Jack, who could have lost his license. He was furious. He accused Max, but Max denied it.”

“But you think it was Max.”

“I think—” She hesitated. “I don’t know. In a way it’s petty larceny, and, much as I dislike Stitt, he thinks a little bigger than that. It’s exactly the type of thing that appealed to Claude, though. He’d rather steal a dollar than find five. I think Claude probably made a deal with someone in Jack’s warehouse.”

“Arends called Dechant a thief.” Johnny made it a question.

“Sticks and stones—” Gloria said lightly.
“De mortuis nil nisi bonum
. Let’s say Claude was a devious man.” She reached up and ran a hand over the ridged scars on Johnny’s chest. “Who ploughed
your
field, mister?”

“A guy who wished he hadn’t.”

She pulled herself up to a sitting position to look down at him. “I’ve answered a lot of questions, haven’t I, Johnny?”

“Meanin’ it’s your turn to ask a few? You’re distractin’ me up there.”

She folded her arms across her firmly nippled, full breasts. “That better?”

“Terrible.” He pulled her down beside him again. “For some reason I seem to be in a hurry, so I’ll save you the trouble of askin’ the questions. I’ll give it to you in two words: August Hegel.
Vous comprenez?”

“So you do know,” she said quietly. “Jules insisted there was no way you could.” She looked up at him as he moved over her. “You’re getting into—”

“Hush, woman,” Johnny said firmly. He settled his hands in the dimpled hollows of the plump shoulders. “First things first.”

He put out the light.

• • •

His cab was back on the west side before Johnny remembered Jules Tremaine. He looked at his watch. One fifteen. “Skip the Duarte,” he ordered the driver. “Take me on up to the Alden. It’s around 82nd.”

“I know,” the cabbie grunted, and swung north on Sixth. Across 57th he headed into the park. Johnny rocked from side to side on the back seat with the letter-S curves until they headed west on a sweeping turn, crossed Central Park West and pulled in under a marquee in the upper end of the first block.

Johnny had never seen the Alden before, but, even from the sidewalk, one look at its solid, banklike exterior and subdued lobby told him all he needed to know. An apartment hotel, known in the trade as a “family” hotel, exactly why he’d never been able to understand. Damn few families lived in them. Their one-and-a-half, two, and two-and-a-half room apartments were far more likely to be occupied by professional and theatrical people of a little more stature than their downtown counterparts.

“Jules Tremaine,” Johnny said into the house phone in the almost spartan lobby. “Killain,” he announced to the voice in his ear. “I’m downstairs.”

“Come on up. Four-oh-seven.”

The handsome Frenchman was standing in an open doorway when Johnny stepped off the elevator into the fourth-floor corridor. Silently he led the way inside. “Nice digs,” Johnny said after a look around. Nothing was new, but everything was comfortable. His glance rested longest on a large short-wave radio with a table to itself.

Tremaine nodded indifferently. “They want to get in to paint, but I can’t stand the smell. I told them to wait till I had to be out of town.” His manner appeared neither friendly nor unfriendly. He was waiting, as though for a cue to determine the course of the conversation.

“All you people seem to be doin’ pretty well,” Johnny suggested.

“All us people?”

“I went over to the blonde’s, like you said. She don’t look anywhere near close to the bread line.”

Tremaine pulled out his cigarettes and offered Johnny the pack. His dark eyes were inscrutable. “Anything of interest come up?”

“Is a dead body of interest?”

The extended arm went rigid. “Whose?”

“Jack Arends.”

For a count of five the Frenchman seemed nearly to hold his breath. “Killed?”

“Dead,” Johnny confirmed. “In the blonde’s bathroom. Bathrooms are gettin’ to be downright unlucky these days. Someone didn’t like him four times in the head with a black automatic that looked like the twin of Dechant’s.” Jules Tremaine shoved his cigarettes back in his pocket and lighted a match before be realized he hadn’t taken one from the pack. “I met a guy named Harry Palmer tonight,” Johnny added.

“He financed deals for Claude.” The big-shouldered man said it absently, his mind obviously elsewhere. “I used to work for him myself.”

“Yeah? Where?”

“Europe. Bird-dogging business prospects.” Tremaine finally got a cigarette going. “What are the police doing?”

“Givin’ your blonde acquaintance a fit about who had keys to her apartment. Arends was inside when we got there.”

“We?”

“We,” Johnny repeated, and let it go at that. “How would you assay this boy Faulkner?”

“Not too highly. He has—” Jules Tremaine bit off whatever he had been about to say. His steady regard of Johnny was emotionlessly thorough. “At the moment I’m more interested in how I assay you. Just where do you fit into the picture?”

“That didn’t seem to bother you too much on the phone when you invited me to come over an’ talk.”

“I’ve changed my mind about the talk. Jack Arends wasn’t dead then.”

“I’ve got an alibi for that,” Johnny said lightly.

Unexpectedly the Frenchman flushed. “Meaning I haven’t?”

“I don’t give a damn whether you do or not.” Johnny stared at a stubbornly protruding lower lip. “Do you want to talk or don’t you?” He threw up his hands at the sullen silence. “I don’t get it. This was your idea, remember? Who muzzled you? Why?” His eyes probed at Tremaine’s wooden expression. “Last chance,” he warned. “This is countdown. Three. Two. One. Zero.” He turned and walked to the door. There wasn’t a sound from behind him.

In the corridor he wondered fleetingly whether Gloria could have called the Frenchman and told him that Johnny actually had knowledge of August Hegel. But then wouldn’t she have told him about Arends?

He had to walk three blocks before he could flag down a cab to get him back to the Duarte.

T
HE RING OF THE PHONE
in his room caught Johnny on his way to the door. He came back and picked it up. “Yeah?”

“Two to see you down here, John.” The sound of Marty Seiden’s brisk voice reminded Johnny that it was Vic’s night off. Marty, the red-headed, bow-tied, wisecracking middle-shift front-desk man always took over for Vic Barnes. “Names are Faulkner and Palmer.”

“Send ‘em on up.” On impulse he left the room to meet them at the elevator. They got off with their backs to him, Palmer in the lead, and Johnny reached out silently and tapped Ernest Faulkner on the shoulder. The lawyer whirled, mouth agape, dead white.

“Oh—” he said weakly. “Don’t—do that—”

Harry Palmer’s alert features reflected amusement as he turned to survey the scene. “Try Miltown, Ernest,” he advised. He cocked an eyebrow at Johnny. “Which way?”

“Straight ahead. Six-fifteen.” Johnny trailed them down the hall, removed a key from a clip on the band of his watch and opened the door. “We won’t be disturbed here,” he told them.

Harry Palmer scuffed a toe in the dull-hued Oriental rug and gazed around the attractively furnished oversized bed-sitting room. He looked from the three-quarter-sized refrigerator in one corner to the television set to one of Johnny’s uniforms laid out on the bed. “This is your place?” he asked sharply. He shook his head gently at Johnny’s affirmative nod. “You sure must know where the body is buried around here, man, to rate this kind of accommodations.”

“A man died an’ left it to me,” Johnny said. He waved them to chairs as he walked to the refrigerator. “Room an’ all. You can have anything you like to drink, boys, if you don’t mind it tastin’ like bourbon.”

“I was forty years old before I knew they made anything but bourbon,” Harry Palmer grunted. The aggressive-looking little man seemed to be swallowed up in the depths of Johnny’s armchair.

“Make mine a short one,” Ernest Faulkner said hastily. “Did you say a man left this to you in his will? I never heard of such a thing.”

“Neither had the hotel lawyers, but it stuck.” Johnny handed them each a drink and poured himself a shot. “If I’d known you were comin’, I’d have iced the champagne.”

“Champagne!” Palmer snorted. “Just as soon drink vinegar.” He leaned back in the chair to look up at Johnny. “What kind of a man dies and leaves you with a place like this, Killain?”

“He owned the place. I was able to do him a couple favors one time,” Johnny said evenly. “In Italy.”

“Italy,” Palmer repeated with no change of expression, but Johnny saw that Ernest Faulkner’s hand had whitened around his glass. The lawyer opened his mouth as though to speak, and then closed it again as Palmer continued. “That’s where you met Dechant?”

“Not head-on. That came later.”

“Later,” Palmer repeated again. He drained half his drink, held the balance up to the light to study it critically, nodded, finished it off and set down his glass. He folded his hands together with his elbows resting on the arms of his chair. “You know what the password is in this game, Killain?”

“I know
a
password.” Johnny emphasized the indefinite article. “August Hegel.”

“That’s the one,” the little man admitted, and looked at Ernest Faulkner.

“There’s no way he could have known,” the lawyer said huskily. “Claude told his business to no one. You know that.”

“I know nothing,” Harry Palmer declared flatly. “Especially in the light of what you tell me of the state of his affairs.” He turned to Johnny, briskly assertive. “I don’t know where you stand on this thing, Killain, but I know where I stand. Dechant died owing me a lot of money. I thought I was protected, but, if matters continue to shape up as they have to date, I’ll wind up with the feathers from the chicken. I wouldn’t like that, Killain. It could leave me looking to do business with a smart young fellow.”

“Faulkner’s your lawyer, too?” Johnny asked.

Harry Palmer smiled. “Let’s say I pay him a retainer.”

The lawyer’s too-white face pinked up. He settled his heavy horn-rimmed glasses more firmly on the bridge of his delicate-looking nose. “There’s an interrelationship of interests which permits—” he began, and was cut off by the brash little man.

“Stow it, Ernest. Save it for your tear-wet pillow.” He addressed himself to Johnny again. “You don’t look like the type to me to split legal hairs, and you can damn well bet your second-best store teeth that I’m not, either. I’m in the process of finding out that Dechant’s been playing me for a fool right along. I don’t like it. All the importing he did—with my money, the bastard—was just a blind for whatever else he was doing. He never made a quarter on his legitimate operations. He bought and sold over and over again at cost, even at a small loss. Since he lived like a maharajah ever since I’ve known him, it leaves me wondering where the money came from.”

Palmer grinned at the obviously unhappy Faulkner. “I’m indebted to Ernest for the information as to the lack of financial righteousness in Claude’s affairs. Ernest is sweating it out, because as Dechant’s lawyer he signed a lot of little pieces of paper he now knows had no basis in fact. Ernest is afraid he’s going to wind up as the bagman. I’m afraid I’m not going to get my money.” He shook free a cigarette from the pack he removed from his breast pocket. He offered it to Johnny, who refused. “So what are you afraid of, Killain?”

“That no one’ll pay me enough for my trouble.” Johnny lifted his own empty glass. “Refill?”

“No, thanks.” Harry Palmer leaned forward in his chair. “A couple of people approached me recently—at different times, that is—about giving them a hand with the recovery of an object that had been the subject of some mismanagement.” He grinned faintly. “I wasn’t interested, until I found out what kind of a jackpot I was in trying to get my money out of Dechant’s screwed-up estate. Right now I could be interested as hell, if you’re for real. Tremaine told me you were over at his place this afternoon making noises that you knew something. Arends told me that you were over at his place raising general hell. Before he died.” He paused. “That’s something I’d like to know a little more about. Jack Arends was a good friend of mine.” He turned to accept the lawyer’s proffered light for the cigarette, which had remained unlighted in his mouth during his speech. He puffed hard twice, and with a wave of his hand dismissed Jack Arends as well as the cloud of smoke around his head. “You gave me the password, Killain.” He stared at Johnny keenly. “I want my hands on something that’ll give me a lever toward recovering my money. Do you come in that door?”

“If the door’s marked
Money.”

Harry Palmer removed a folded-over checkbook from an inside jacket pocket, spread it on his knee and wrote swiftly with a fountain pen. He ripped the check from the book and waved it in the air to dry, leaned forward and handed it to Johnny. “It’s not signed, Killain. You turn the stuff over to Tremaine. When he tells me it’s the right stuff, I’ll sign the check.”

Johnny looked down at the unsigned check in his hand for forty thousand dollars. He flicked it between thumb and forefinger so that it sailed back onto Palmer’s lap. “You talk like a man without good sense, Palmer. I don’t do business with checks, signed or unsigned. I don’t do business with Tremaine, if you’re the buyer. I do business with you. For cash.”

“Now don’t go off half cocked, boy,” the little man warned him. “I never appear in these things personally. And, as for the check, ask around a little. I think you’ll find out that when Harry Palmer says he’ll do a thing, Harry Palmer delivers the goods.”

“No cash, no deal, Palmer.” Johnny walked back to the refrigerator and refilled his glass. “It’s not enough, anyway.” He leveled a finger at the man in the chair. “I’ve already had a better offer than yours, but I haven’t seen the color of any money there yet, either. I’ll tell you right now, the first with the gelt gets the stuff.”

“You’ve been offered more?” The little man’s eyes had narrowed. “I don’t believe it. There aren’t enough people—” He looked around impatiently as Ernest Faulkner leaned over the arm of his chair to tug at his sleeve. The lawyer murmured in an undertone.

Harry Palmer first looked thoughtful, then shrugged and bounced abruptly to his feet. “You think it over, Killain. And don’t try to outsmart a man that makes his living at it. Come on, Ernest.” From the door he looked back at Johnny. “Killain. If it stays like this, I go for myself, understood? No hard feelings if your corns get trampled?” He grinned, waved and disappeared.

He’d overplayed that hand a little, Johnny decided as the door closed behind them. Still, he couldn’t afford to let himself be cornered. He’d hear from Palmer again.

He finished his drink and rinsed out the glasses in the bathroom. With all these people milling around, where could the thing be? Or, if one of them had it, could it be that he’d be afraid to come to the surface with it for fear the sharks would tear his throat out?

He left the glasses to drain, and returned to the elevator and the lobby.

• • •

He looked up from the desk as Sally called to him from the switchboard. He crossed the lobby in his soft-footed shuffle and leaned on the little gate between them as Sally’s brown eyes inspected him. “What did those men want, Johnny?”

“Well, it’s like this, ma. They want to buy somethin’ I don’t have. They don’t know I haven’t got it, so I’ll sell it to them.”

“It sounds like one of your deals,” she observed. “What are you actually—” She broke off, nodding over his shoulder. “Are you sure your customers haven’t filed a complaint already?”

Johnny turned to see Lieutenant Joseph Dameron advancing across the lobby toward them, with Detective Ted Cuneo half a pace behind. The lieutenant’s apple-cheeked ruddiness was void of expression, but Ted Cuneo’s popeyed stare glinted with anticipatory malice. Johnny felt that he could hear the storm-warning signal flags snapping in the wind. “You changed shifts, Joe?” he greeted the lieutenant blandy. “Or just quit sleepin’?”

Lieutenant Dameron nodded briefly to Sally before addressing Johnny. “Can we talk upstairs?”

“We can talk right here, Joe.”

“I’d like it better upstairs, Johnny.”

“Sorry. I’m on duty.”

“A hell of a lot that ever bothered you!” Quick anger flared in the official voice.

“Well, I guess I got to level with you,” Johnny said apologetically. “I got a blonde waitin’ upstairs for my coffee break. She’s allergic to gendarmes.”

The frost in the gray eyes hardened to ice. “I said I’d like—”

“Joe, I don’t give a damn what you’d like,” Johnny wedged in. “You want to talk? So talk.”

The lieutenant’s smile was wintry. “Strictly in character.” His eyes flickered to Sally again before returning to Johnny. “You went out to see Arends yesterday at Empire Freight Forwarding.”

“Wrong,” Johnny told him.

“Don’t tell me it’s wrong!” Ted Cuneo broke in. “I checked with—”

“The pair of you’d make stinkin’ witnesses,” Johnny inserted cuttingly. “No wonder you average about fifty per cent convictions. I went out to Empire. Arends happened to be there.”

Two pinpoints of red dotted Cuneo’s sallow complexion. “Watch your mouth, man,” he said dangerously. “I mean it.”

“You’re aware of course, Johnny, that the situation has changed since we had our little talk the other evening.” Lieutenant Dameron’s tone was level. “A man has been killed. This is a police operation now. You can’t go around rooting up indiscriminate stumps with your nose.”

“Show me,” Johnny invited.

“Show you what?” Cuneo demanded aggressively.

Johnny kept his eyes fixed on the lieutenant. “Show me the chapter an’ section of the statute that says I can’t.”

“Now look, you—” Cuneo growled from the side of his mouth.

“A pretty good jackleg lawyer told me one time people would be surprised as hell to know how limited police powers really were,” Johnny said softly. He leaned back negligently on his elbows on the wooden gate. “He said it’s the extra-legal powers they assume to themselves that get them their mileage. An’ in trouble, too, sometimes.”

“I’ve listened to about enough of this damn—”

Johnny straightened suddenly, a leveled finger cutting off the other man. “Let’s just simmer down a minute, Joe. You didn’t come over here to talk. You came over here to threaten. Go ahead. I won’t hold you up again. I want to see if you’ve got nerve enough to do it in front of a witness.”

“You think you can talk to the lieutenant like that?” Cuneo asked harshly. “I’ll show—”

“Ahh, bag it, big-mouth,” Johnny said wearily. He met Dameron’s bleak stare head-on. “This is a police operation,” he mimicked. “What the hell’s that give you, the governor’s emergency powers?”

“You cock your nose just once in the wrong direction on the street,” Cuneo snarled. “Just once—”

“Attempted police intimidation of a citizen,” Johnny re-marked over his shoulder. “Take it down, Sally.”

Lieutenant Joseph Dameron looked at his man and jerked his head slightly. The detective hesitated, then turned and stalked to the other side of the lobby, obviously fuming.

“That’s the idea, Joe,” Johnny approved. “Never back down in front of the hired help.”

“I don’t care a bit for your attitude,” the lieutenant rasped. “Not that I could have expected anything different.”

“But here you are, wastin’ your time.”

“So it would seem. Some people have to learn the hard way. Look, Johnny—”

“Ahh, here it comes,” Johnny interrupted. “Act One, Scene Two. Threats didn’t work. Here comes the soft soap.”

“Nobody threatened you!” Steel rang in the authoritative voice.

“No? What program you tuned in on, Joe? Well, the hell with it. I’m still waitin’ to hear whatever it was you came all the way over here to say.”

“I said it!”

“You did?” Johnny grinned at the anger-reddened face. “In all the snappin’ an’ snarlin’ I must’ve missed it. You care to repeat it?”

“If you think for one minute I can’t enforce—”

“Now just a minute.” Johnny could feel the irritation mounting within himself. “You try enforcin’ any unwritten laws around me an’ I’ll guarantee to sicken somebody.” Anger sharpened his tone. “Just why the hell is it nobody’s supposed to say ‘no’ to you bastards? You make a production of runnin’ everyone off the grass on a murder case. If only the police work on it, then there’s nobody to make you look bad by havin’ an intelligent idea once in a while. If you can’t do it any other way, you bull people off. Try it with me. Just try it. So long, Joe.”