Where Is Bianca? (8 page)

“Well, I'm afraid you and your playwright playmate may have to look for a new leading lady.”

“Now, see here, Corrigan! I don't have to listen to your insinuations about me and Fran!”

“Because,” Corrigan said, “the girl in the morgue may be Noreen Gardner.”

“What!” Lessard was literally staggered. He went over to a chair and sat down and put his drink aside and took out his handkerchief and wiped his hands.

“How well did you know Noreen Gardner?”

“I've had nothing to do with her, not in the way you mean. Any man could take her for the price of a promise. But not me, friend—not that one. She's a greedy, grubbing, petty thief who'd steal the label off your necktie if that was the best she could do at the moment. She's bad news—or was, if she's dead.”

“Sounds like a mighty sick girl,” Chuck Baer said.

“Are you serious about her petty thievery?” Corrigan asked Lessard.

“I think she's a kleptomaniac. She'll lift anything she can lay her hands on. She even eats as if she's afraid the food will get away from her. She acts as if she grew up having to scrounge in garbage cans.”

“Would she have stolen a ring?”

Lessard stared at him. “Bianca's ring.…”

“This morning,” Corrigan said, “a girl named Peggy Simpson showed up at Missing Persons and says she thinks the body in the morgue is Noreen Gardner's. She couldn't explain the Mayan ring. Can you?”

“I don't see.…”

“Maybe Noreen was here about the time Bianca disappeared, and had a chance to steal the ring,” suggested Baer.

“No, absolutely not. Noreen's been here only twice. Once with Travers Proehl, the producer of Fran's plays, and another time with Travers and Fran when they came here to talk business. The second time was several days before Bianca disappeared. Anyway, as I told you, Bianca wore that ring all the time. I'm sure she was wearing it the night she walked out. Noreen had no chance to sneak the ring.” Lessard squirmed in the chair. “The ring made me so sure.…”

“Let's go back to the beginning,” Corrigan said. “To the night you last saw Bianca.”

“On the eighth of this month.” Lessard turned to glare at the private detective. “I've been all over it with you, Baer.”

“Sometimes you remember a detail afterward,” Baer said. “Something pops into your head.”

“Well, nothing's popped into my head. And I ask you again—who the hell are you working for, Baer—me or the police department?”

“You hired me for an assignment. The assignment is to locate your wife. How I do it is my business. Yours,” said Baer, sucking on his dead cigar, “is to pay my fee.”

Lessard's glare faded. He got up and began to walk around. “Of course, of course. It just occurs to me. You may have to go to Europe to find her. Maybe she found New York too much for her, too foreign. She may have decided to go back to where she had friends.”

“Not because New York was too foreign to her,” Corrigan said, watching him. “But because she couldn't take you and Frances Weatherly. That seems to me a more plausible theory, Mr. Lessard.”

Lessard began to gnaw at his fingernails.

“Did Bianca mention Europe that last evening?”

“No.”

“Can you remember anything during your brawl with her that night that may have some bearing on her intentions?”

Lessard stopped walking and faced Corrigan in a curiously pleading attitude. “You know how these things go. One word leads to another, and before you know it you're saying things you don't mean. I remember telling her at one point that she ought to have married some hand-kissing sonofabitch of a European, that he'd have shown her a thing or two about having mistresses. I shouldn't have said that, but she was making such a thing about Fran and me.…”

“And that's when she walked out on you?”

“Yes.”

“Did she say anything as she left?”

“No, she just gave me one of those dirty looks women specialize in.” The man actually contrived a groan. “Those eyes of hers! I'll never forget that look. She picked up her handbag and wrap and ran down the stairs.”

“Did you follow her? Try to stop her?”

“Well, I followed her down, yes. Yelling, I'm afraid. I didn't really believe she'd walk out. She turned on me in the foyer. ‘Don't touch me,' she said, ‘don't speak to me, and don't try to stop me. You and Frances Weatherly deserve each other, and I want you both to know it. I hope you'll be very happy.' And she left. She didn't even bang the front door.”

“And you let it go at that?”

“The hell I did. I was hopping mad, I tell you. The quiet way she shut that door was worse than a kick in the teeth. I ran to the door, yanked it open, and saw her hurrying down the sidewalk. “You crazy fool,' I called after her, ‘where do you think you're going?' She said one thing back at me: ‘I don't need you for anything,
anything!'
Then she went around the corner, and I kicked the door closed. I actually wasn't too concerned at that time. I figured she'd cool off and come back bawling in a day or two, and the whole thing would be over.”

Corrigan continued to watch him. Under the act he seemed genuinely distressed. With an operator like Lessard it was hard to separate the true from the false sometimes, but this was not one of those times. He wanted Bianca back, all right. Also, he was scared to death. But all this could have a less than innocent explanation. He could have engineered her death and now regretted it.

Baer said, “First thing I did was check out the cab companies, Tim. No dice.”

“She could have walked for blocks, in the state she was in,” Corrigan said. “She might be an item in some cab company time sheet as a fare beginning at an address nowhere near this one.”

“Or an independent picked her up and made no record at all.” Baer's gaze locked briefly with Corrigan's.

The message passed between them.

Or she didn't get into a taxicab at all
.

Lessard caught the interchange. He said suddenly, “I know I'm not being much help … but I've told you everything I know, Captain. I simply can't explain the Mayan ring—unless the body is Bianca's.”

“Well, we can tackle that a different way, a way in which you can help.”

Lessard became suspicious. He was making his glance hold nobly steady, like any honest man, but it was too steady, too honest.

“I? How, Captain?”

“I'd like your permission to let one of our tech men come to the house here to examine some of Mrs. Lessard's personal things.”

“Oh?” Lessard was like a cornered animal trying to pretend that it was not conscious of the flashlight pinning it down. “What would that be for?”

“I'm referring to a fingerprint man. He'll dust items it's likely she alone handled, like a lipstick or compact from one of her purses, a perfume bottle, a cosmetic jar, other things on her dressing table. The toothbrush she was using around the time she walked out. Okay?”

“Naturally,” Lessard said. He had relaxed slightly.

“The object, of course, is to get as full a set of her prints as possible, so that we can match them with the prints of the body in the morgue, what's left of them. May I use your phone?”

Lessard waved grandly. “Be my guest, Captain.”

8

The black Ford slid into Sullivan Street. A young woman in a knit shirt and toreador pants, wearing her hair in a ponytail, emerged from a delicatessen halfway down the block. In the crook of her right arm, buttocks riding her hipbone, a fat baby happily blinked in the waning sunlight over Greenwich Village. A white-aproned boy carrying a bag of groceries opened the door of a convertible at the curb and deposited the bag behind the front seat. The young woman secured the baby in his car seat and drove off.

Car 40 parked in the space.

Corrigan got out. He checked a store front for the street number, fed the parking meter, and started along the sidewalk.

He found the house a few yards beyond an espresso café. The entrance, its concrete lintel glowering over the sidewalk, was above street level, reached by a short flight of stone steps.

Corrigan walked up to the second floor.

Apartment 2A was at the front of the building. Corrigan was raising a finger to the buzzer when he heard the sounds of a struggle. A soprano scream was cut short. Footsteps rushed toward the door. A man's voice uttered an obscenity. The footsteps reversed direction.

Corrigan quickly tried the door. It was unlocked. He stepped into Peggy Simpson's apartment.

The Simpson girl and the gross man he had seen in Jean Ainsley's outer office accompanying Frances Weatherly were not immediately aware of him. The hulking producer had dragged Peggy Simpson from the door and was forcing her toward an overstuffed chair in the tiny living room.

“You're hurting me,” she whimpered. “Don't kill me, Travers. Please.”

“You mindless little crumb,” Travers Proehl panted, “you aren't worth killing. But you've got to be taught a lesson.”

“Let her go,” Corrigan said.

Proehl swiveled the bullet head on his fat neck.

“Who the hell are you?” he asked, staring. He was still stooped over the frightened girl, gripping her arm.

“I said let her go.”

“You—”

Corrigan took two steps. His right hand came up in a blur and the gross man went over backward as if he had been struck by lightning. Corrigan straddled him and frisked him. The man was clean. He pulled back and looked down at the quivering hulk.

“Next time,” Corrigan said, “do what you're told when you're told.”

Proehl sat up, messaging his throat. “I remember you now,” he gasped. “The man with eye-patch. I saw you in Jean Ainsley's office. You're a police officer.”

“That's right. Corrigan, of the Main Office Squad. Is this the way you get your kicks, slapping women around?”

Proehl did not reply at once. He scrambeld to his feet, still feeling his throat tenderly. He must have weighed 275 pounds. He was dressed to the nines and had a pink barbershop look. All the same, Corrigan thought, there's something unscrubbed about him. Unsavory. His restless little eyes had glints of meanness in them, and worse.

When he did answer, it was sullenly. “It isn't as bad as it looks. I didn't hurt her.”

“Oh, no?” squealed Peggy Simpson. “Look at my arm!” It was bruised.

“You look at it. I'm sick of it, and you.”

“That's enough,” Corrigan said. “What's this all about?”

“He came in and started beating on me,” Peggy Simpson sniveled. “For no reason at all! He's a crazy man. Crazy, I tell you.”

“No reason?” Proehl snarled; he was still feeling his neck. “I found out she'd been to the police. I wanted to know what kind of tale she'd been carrying. She accused me to my face of killing Noreen Gardner.”

“I didn't say you
meant
to kill her,” the girl wept. “I just said you couldn't keep your hands off her, that you knew you were losing her to some big wheel in the theater she'd met, and maybe you'd lost your head. He always does, Captain Corrigan. He never ended an affair with a girl pleasantly in his life. He's overpossessive and unreasonably jealous, and he has a homicidal temper.”

Proehl started toward her. Corrigan stepped in front of him.

“Sit down.”

Proehl stood unyieldingly, breathing murder. Corrigan put his fingertips on the enormous chest and applied pressure. The man sat down on a studio couch with a crash.

“Can you account for your whereabouts the night Noreen Gardner disappeared?”

“This is no courtroom!”

“Look,” Corrigan said. “I've got too much on my mind to play patty-cake with the likes of you. If you won't answer my questions here, maybe you'll change your mind at headquarters. Which will it be?”

“I was seeing a man uptown that night,” Proehl growled, “trying to raise additional backing for the new Weatherly play.”

“You're trying to hit the big time, is that it?”

“What producer isn't? I'd give my right arm to produce a Broadway smash. But I didn't do anything to Noreen Gardner. If she's really dead, find the operator who was feeding her that line about his important connections in first-line theater. The bastard who turned Noreen against her friends.”

Proehl was pounding the arm of the couch with a big fat fist. Corrigan watched the show for a few moments. Then he said, “Any idea who this man is, Proehl?”

“By God, I wish I had! The snake-tongued sonofabitch is probably married and he'll spit on Noreen when she palls on him. But she's too stupid to size him up. Or she doesn't care.”

“Did Noreen ever mention a Nancy Gavin to you?”

“Nancy Gavin? Never heard.”

“What do you know about Noreen's background?”

“Who the hell cares about her background? I don't ask to see their A.K.C. papers.”

“How did you meet her?”

“I was working out of a theater on Bleecker Street. Converted old store building.” Proehl's little eyes shimmered violently. “Filthy rat's nest! Trying to make do with makeshift scenery … idiots and kooks to work with! The same damn old miserable story.”

“You met her in this theater?”

Proehl got up and walked heavily to the window, ignoring Peggy Simpson as he passed her. “Noreen answered a casting call. She read for me, and I knew I was in luck. A kid had shown up who could really act. I didn't ask her any questions about herself, so I can't tell you anything about her. To a producer a find like Noreen is money in the bank. The only thing I wanted to do was hold on to her.”

Proehl turned from the window. He looked drained suddenly. His jowls sagged. His color was bad. Corrigan had seen many a man who looked like that just before a suicide attempt He's manic, Corrigan thought. Way up there one minute, in hell the next.