Where Is Bianca? (12 page)

“You knew a woman named Anna Gavin and her daughter Nancy, fifteen at the time, in Brooklyn ten years ago?” Corrigan said.

“If I talk I get a break?”

“If you don't talk, it won't get you a break,” Corrigan said.

“I didn't do nothing to the girl. I knew the Gavin slut and her kid, sure.”

“You took the girl away.”

“Oh, no. She came of her own free will.”

“Jail bait,” Meisenheimer said.

“I was just trying to help her,” Darson protested. “Her life was hell with her old lady. I had a spare room. It was like I was adopting the kid, see? I treated her like she was my own daughter.”

Corrigan and Meisenheimer traded glances. “All right, Darson,” Corrigan said. “We're going to surprise hell out of you. We'll buy that cock-and-bull story. How long did you treat Nancy like a daughter?”

“Six, seven months,” Darson said eagerly. “I don't remember for sure. It's been a long time.”

“Then what happened?”

“She met some punk kid. I come home one night and she's lifted everything that ain't nailed down. She and this punk took off.”

“Where to?”

“I don't know.”

“You must have tried to find her, Darson, if I know your kind. And I know it. What did you come up with?”

“Okay,” Darson stuttered, “I did go looking. I hear her and the punk have moved in with a pal of the punk's on the edge of Harlem. But I couldn't locate them.”

“She change her name?”

“She was always changing her name. She hated her real name.”

“Did she, now?” Corrigan's eyes flickered. “Did she try out the name Noreen Gardner, say?”

“I dunno. She used to drive me nuts, making me call her by a new name every week. The kid was nuts.”

“When did you last see her?”

“I ain't laid eyes on her from that day to this.”

Corrigan gave Darson the once-over.

“I swear I'm telling the truth, Captain!”

Corrigan was convinced. But he said nothing.

“If she hadn't glommed my stuff, Captain, I'd have been glad to see her go. I'm telling you straight. She was mean and sneaky. Fight you like an alley cat if you got her dandruff loose.”

“Did she have any habits you remember?”

“Habits?”

“Any subject she was bugs on.”

“Oh. She was one of them movie bugs. Used to want to spend all her time in movie houses. See the same pictures over and over. Then she'd come home and make up her face different, her hair. It was like she wanted to become the star she'd seen in the movie. If you'd put in a word for me to the arresting officers, Captain.…” The swinish face looked slyly up at Corrigan.

“I'll put in a word for you,” Corrigan said. “I'll tell the officers who picked you up not to forget that the Menendez kid might have been one of their own.”

Chuck Baer was in the MOS squadroom talking shop with a couple of detectives. He followed Corrigan into his office.

“You look bushed, Chuck.”

“Need the sleep I didn't get last night.”

“Drive up to Adirondacks Hall?”

Baer nodded.

“How did it go?”

“Bianca hasn't returned to the sanitorium,” the private detective said. “No one there's seen or heard from her since she checked out on the arm of her husband-to-be. I confirmed one thing, though. Vincent Lessard was a straight-out fink of a fortune hunter.”

“I figured that out long ago, Chuck.”

Baer sucked on his cigar. “The administrator of the sanitorium is a good man, Tim. An M.D., Ph.D., and psychiatrist for good measure. And Dr. Hall's been around long enough to know every gimmick in the book. He tagged Lessard right away. It put him in a spot.

“Here he had this rich girl who was an emotional wreck. If she wanted to marry a fortune hunter after she pulled out of it, he was helpless to do anything about it. But in view of her condition Dr. Hall felt it was his ethical duty to let her know the kind of man she was dealing with.”

“So he had to talk with Bianca,” Corrigan said, “and all it did was make her defend Lessard.”

“That's right,” Baer said. “This was the big one Lessard had waited for all his lousy life, and he was covering every angle. He planted the thought in Bianca's head that Dr. Hall wasn't her friend—that he was out for all he could take from a defenseless rich patient.”

But Dr. Hall had proved no easy antagonist. He hired the security man at Nulan Inn, where Lessard was social director, paying him out of his own pocket, to look into Lessard's record. The man began with Lessard's employment application; he pumped two disgruntled widows at the inn whom Lessard had been cultivating until Bianca Fielding came into his life; he used the long distance telephone. In a few days a dossier took shape.

Vincent Lessard's employment history, Baer went on, ran the gamut from paid-escort “service” to dance instructor to social director at swank resorts. He had always sought jobs that would put him in proximity with the kind of women he could milk. His career was a succession of lonely females, chiefly widows with money, who were feeling the years slip by and were hungering for the romance they had either left behind or never had. “A professional lapdog,” Chuck Baer grunted. Lessard took these women for all he could wheedle out of them, until they got sick of him or some relative bought him off.

Dr. Hall was about to confront Bianca Fielding with his findings when Lessard, who apparently had a flair for strategy, got wind that he was being investigated.

“A hot pants on the inn switchboard who drooled every time Lessard turned his Barrymore profile her way unbagged the cat. She told him what was going on.

“Lessard lost no time. He sweet-talked Bianca into leaving the sanitarium before the roof fell in on him. There was no legal way Dr. Hall could stop her. He didn't even see her leave. Lessard sneaked her out to moonlight and roses, orange blossoms, her town house in New York, and happiness ever after. They were married enroute in a civil ceremony in Connecticut.”

“None of which gets us any closer,” Corrigan said, “to where Bianca is.”

“That goddam Mayan ring,” Chuck Baer grumbled. “It ought to tell us something, but I'm damned if I can figure out what.”

“Well, we know that Bianca and Noreen Gardner made a crossing somewhere,” Corrigan mused. “The ring tells us that, Chuck.”

He stopped suddenly.

“What's the matter?” Baer asked, sitting up.

“It just occurred to me.”

“What just occurred to you?”

“Maybe Noreen died because she might have been able to tell us where Bianca is.”

12

A stiffness invaded Travers Proehl's gross shoulders. The producer did not turn his head either to the right or the left. He simply glared at the images of Corrigan and Baer in the bar mirror as they slipped onto stools beside him.

“Hello, Proehl,” Corrigan said. “Your building super said you sometimes drink your lunch here.”

“It's a good place,” Proehl growled. “The whiskey's not cut, the tables are clean, and the old men with the beards keep it quiet for their chess games.”

“Who's distrubing them?” Baer growled back.

“You're distrubing
me
. What do you two want?”

“I've got a couple of officers starting in the past and working forward,” Corrigan said. “I thought it might be interesting to reverse the process, starting now and going back in time.”

“Whose time?” the producer said.

“Noreen Gardner's.”

“Why don't you ask Peggy Simpson? She was telling you a library full about Noreen.”

“But not how Noreen came to show up in the Village.”

“Who the hell knows how anybody comes to show up in the Village, except the finks who skyrocket the rents down here?”

“If anybody knows about Noreen, it should be you.”

“Why me?”

“She lived with you, didn't she? Before she shared the apartment with Peggy Simpson?”

“So she lived with me. You going to make a federal case out of it?”

“Living with a woman, a man gets to know her pretty well,” Corrigan said. “You might tell us how well Noreen knew Bianca Lessard.”

“Who says they knew each other at all?” Proehl flicked a finger at the bartender for a refill.

“An old Mayan sun god says it,” Corrigan said. “Its image in sterling was wrapped around Bianca's pinkie when she disappeared. When Noreen Gardner turned up dead,
she
was wearing it. By the way, where were you the night Bianca and Lessard had their big hassle and she walked out on him?”

A tremor rippled through Proehl's enormous body. He jerked his head as if to clear it. “Damn you; what in the hell is this?”

“Relax,” Corrigan said. “Are you afraid to answer my question?”

“Why should I be afraid?” Proehl shouted.

“If I knew I wouldn't be asking you. You do remember the night Lessard says he last saw his wife?”

“I remember.” The producer's voice was hoarse from his effort at self-control. “Vincent has talked about it enough. I was at Fran Weatherly's that night. We were going over costs of some scenery. We needed figures—Jean Ainsley, the woman in charge of the Fielding theaters, never gives with enough figures. She's a real bitch when it comes to stalling. She's a bitch in every way.”

Corrigan felt himself tighten all over. Chuck Baer, who knew him better than anyone else, gave him a startled look. But Corrigan worked on himself, and the moment passed.

“Let's get back to Noreen Gardner,” he said evenly. “She didn't simply knock on your door one day and move in.”

“Almost,” Proehl said. “Almost.”

“Where did she walk from in order to knock on your door?”

“She was living over on Eighth Street. Fellow runs a book and art store on the ground floor called The Treasure Trove. He rents out the flats upstairs.”

“His name?”

“How the hell should I know? Sellar, Shelton, something like that.”

Corrigan rose from the bar stool, and Baer did, too.

“Don't hurry back,” Proehl said. He sounded as if he were spitting.

Corrigan walked out, and Baer followed.

The dusty window of The Treasure Trove featured a sample of pop art on an easel—the precise likeness of a beer can opener—and a display of posters extolling a volume of erotica about love cults around the world. The shop smelled dusty inside.

At the counter a skinny young man was examining some brushes. He was being waited on by a tiny man in his fifties with a dwarf's face that came to a perfect point in a brownish-red Vandyke.

“Be with you in a moment. How about a browsing around?” The proprietor turned back to the young man studying the brushes.

The customer completed his selection, paid for the brushes, and left, with a light in his eye.

“Are you Mr. Sellar?” Corrigan asked.

“Chellarn,” the tiny man said.

“I'm a police officer.” Corrigan flipped his wallet open. “I'd like to ask you a few questions.”

The little man looked alarmed. He reached for a package of Turkish cigarettes that lay on the counter and selected one with care.

“I understand you rent the apartments upstairs.”

“I lease the whole building. Is one of my tenants in trouble? I try to screen them, Officer.” He held his cigarette between thumb and forefinger, European fashion, puffing energetically.

“No,” Corrigan said, “we simply want some information about a past tenant. A girl named Noreen Gardner.”

“Oh, yes. I remember her.” He seemed relieved; he dropped the cigarette and ground it out with his heel.

“How long did she sublet from you?”

“Three, four months. Actress of great promise. Chameleon quality, you know. Becomes wholly the character she is playing. Quite rare. I saw her in the Weatherly play that closed a couple of weeks ago.”

“You have any trouble with her?”

“Well, she had temperament. But she was never more than a week late with her rent.”

“Do you know where she lived before she came here?”

Chellarn waved Corrigan's question aside with his tiny hand. “Never pry. If a tenant keeps paid up, his apartment is his castle. Provided they're not destructive, of course.”

“Then you didn't know Noreen Gardner very well?”

“I don't believe in getting chummy with my tenants,” Chellarn said. “A good morning, and that's it. Anything more, and soon they're asking you to wait for the rent.”

“Do you know if she had close friends among your other tenants?”

“I can't say.”

“I'd like to talk to some of them.”

“The ones who were here when Miss Gardner occupied an apartment have all gone. They come and they go. However.…”

“Yes?”

“One thing I do recall about Noreen Gardner. She was a sick girl.”

“Sick?” Corrigan asked sharply. “How?”

“She came in to pay the rent one day. For the last month she was here, if memory serves. I was busy with a customer, and Miss Gardner waited. Suddenly she uttered a gasping moan, a really frightful sound.

“She was standing beside that table where the art magazines are stacked. Her mouth was open, and her eyes seemed to be pushing out of their sockets. Before I could reach her, she had fainted.”

“Do you know what was wrong with her?”

“No. The customer and I carried her to a couch I have in the rear. I called Dr. Pelligrini, whose office is across the street. Then I elevated Miss Gardner's feet and put damp cloths on her forehead. She was coming to by the time the doctor got here.”

“Did you talk to Pelligrini about her?”

“I told him what had happened and who she was,” Chellarn said. “Then it was no longer my business.”

Corrigan said thanks and they left.