The Essential Noir Bundle, page 127
“I’m going now,” I said. “Sit tight till you hear from me. And don’t scare up the maid.”
“Remember, I’ve told you nothing,” she reminded me as she followed me to the sitting-room door.
From the Gungen house I went direct to the Mars Hotel. Mickey Linehan was sitting behind a newspaper in a corner of the lobby.
“They in?” I asked him.
“Yep.”
“Let’s go up and see them.”
Mickey rattled his knuckles on door number 410. A metallic voice asked: “Who’s there?”
“Package,” Mickey replied in what was meant for a boy’s voice.
A slender man with a pointed chin opened the door. I gave him a card. He didn’t invite us into the room, but he didn’t try to keep us out when we walked in.
“You’re Weel?” I addressed him while Mickey closed the door behind us, and then, not waiting for him to say yes, I turned to the broad-faced man sitting on the bed. “And you’re Dahl?”
Weel spoke to Dahl, in a casual, metallic voice:
“A couple of gumshoes.”
The man on the bed looked at us and grinned.
I was in a hurry.
“I want the dough you took from Main,” I announced.
They sneered together, as if they had been practicing.
I brought out my gun.
Weel laughed harshly. “Get your hat, Bunky,” he chuckled. “We’re being taken into custody.”
“You’ve got the wrong idea,” I explained. “This isn’t a pinch. It’s a stick-up. Up go the hands!”
Dahl’s hands went up quick.
Weel hesitated until Mickey prodded him in the ribs with the nose of a .38-special.
“Frisk ’em,” I ordered Mickey.
He went through Weel’s clothes, taking a gun, some papers, some loose money, and a money-belt that was fat. Then he did the same for Dahl.
“Count it,” I told him.
Mickey emptied the belts, spit on his fingers and went to work.
“Nineteen thousand, one hundred and twenty-six dollars and sixty-two cents,” he reported when he was through.
With the hand that didn’t hold my gun, I felt in my pocket for the slip on which I had written the numbers of the hundred-dollar bills Main had got from Ogilvie. I held the slip out to Mickey.
“See if the hundreds check against this.”
He took the slip, looked, said, “They do.”
“Good—pouch the money and the guns and see if you can turn up any more in the room.”
Coughing Ben Weel had got his breath by now.
“Look here!” he protested. “You can’t pull this, fellow! Where do you think you are? You can’t get away with this!”
“I can try,” I assured him. “I suppose you’re going to yell, Police! Like hell you are! The only squawk you’ve got coming is at your own dumbness in thinking because your squeeze on the woman was tight enough to keep her from having you copped, you didn’t have to worry about anything. I’m playing the same game you played with her and Main—only mine’s better, because you can’t get tough afterward without facing stir. Now shut up!”
“No more jack,” Mickey said. “Nothing but four postage stamps.”
“Take ’em along,” I told him. “That’s practically eight cents. Now we’ll go.”
“Hey, leave us a couple of bucks,” Weel begged.
“Didn’t I tell you to shut up?” I snarled at him, backing to the door, which Mickey was opening.
The hall was empty. Mickey stood in it, holding his gun on Weel and Dahl while I backed out of the room and switched the key from the inside to the outside. Then I slammed the door, twisted the key, pocketed it, and we went downstairs and out of the hotel.
Mickey’s car was around the corner. In it, we transferred our spoils—except the guns—from his pockets to mine. Then he got out and went back to the Agency. I turned the car toward the building in which Jeffrey Main had been killed.
Mrs. Main was a tall girl of less than twenty-five, with curled brown hair, heavily-lashed gray-blue eyes, and a warm, full-featured face. Her ample body was dressed in black from throat to feet.
She read my card, nodded at my explanation that Gungen had employed me to look into her husband’s death, and took me into a gray and white living-room.
“This is the room?” I asked.
“Yes.” She had a pleasant, slightly husky voice.
I crossed to the window and looked down on the grocer’s roof, and on the half of the back street that was visible. I was still in a hurry.
“Mrs. Main,” I said as I turned, trying to soften the abruptness of my words by keeping my voice low, “after your husband was dead, you threw the gun out the window. Then you stuck the handkerchief to the corner of the wallet and threw that. Being lighter than the gun, it didn’t go all the way to the alley, but fell on the roof. Why did you put the handkerchief—?”
Without a sound she fainted.
I caught her before she reached the floor, carried her to a sofa, found cologne and smelling salts, applied them.
“Do you know whose handkerchief it was?” I asked when she was awake and sitting up.
She shook her head from left to right.
“Then why did you take that trouble?”
“It was in his pocket. I didn’t know what else to do with it. I thought the police would ask about it. I didn’t want anything to start them asking questions.”
“Why did you tell the robbery story?”
No answer.
“The insurance?” I suggested.
She jerked up her head, cried defiantly:
“Yes! He had gone through his own money and mine. And then he had to—to do a thing like that. He—”
I interrupted her complaint:
“He left a note, I hope—something that will be evidence.” Evidence that she hadn’t killed him, I meant.
“Yes.” She fumbled in the bosom of her black dress.
“Good,” I said, standing. “The first thing in the morning, take that note down to your lawyer and tell him the whole story.”
I mumbled something sympathetic and made my escape.
Night was coming down when I rang the Gungens’ bell for the second time that day. The pasty-faced maid who opened the door told me Mr. Gungen was at home. She led me upstairs.
Rose Rubury was coming down the stairs. She stopped on the landing to let us pass. I halted in front of her while my guide went on toward the library.
“You’re done, Rose,” I told the girl on the landing. “I’ll give you ten minutes to clear out. No word to anybody. If you don’t like that—you’ll get a chance to see if you like the inside of the can.”
“Well—the idea!”
“The racket’s flopped.” I put a hand into a pocket and showed her one wad of the money I had got at the Mars Hotel. “I’ve just come from visiting Coughing Ben and Bunky.”
That impressed her. She turned and scurried up the stairs.
Bruno Gungen came to the library door, searching for me. He looked curiously from the girl—now running up the steps to the third story—to me. A question was twisting the little man’s lips, but I headed it off with a statement:
“It’s done.”
“Bravo!” he exclaimed as we went into the library. “You hear that, my darling? It is done!”
His darling, sitting by the table, where she had sat the other night, smiled with no expression in her doll’s face, and murmured, “Oh, yes,” with no expression in her words.
I went to the table and emptied my pockets of money.
“Nineteen thousand, one hundred and twenty-six dollars and seventy cents, including the stamps,” I announced. “The other eight hundred and seventy-three dollars and thirty cents is gone.”
“Ah!” Bruno Gungen stroked his spade-shaped black beard with a trembling pink hand and pried into my face with hard bright eyes. “And where did you find it? By all means sit down and tell us the tale. We are famished with eagerness for it, eh, my love?”
His love yawned, “Oh, yes!”
“There isn’t much story,” I said. “To recover the money I had to make a bargain, promising silence. Main was robbed Sunday afternoon. But it happens that we couldn’t convict the robbers if we had them. The only person who could identify them—won’t.”
“But who killed Jeffrey?” The little man was pawing my chest with both pink hands. “Who killed him that night?”
“Suicide. Despair at being robbed under circumstances he couldn’t explain.”
“Preposterous!” My client didn’t like the suicide.
“Mrs. Main was awakened by the shot. Suicide would have canceled his insurance—would have left her penniless. She threw the gun and wallet out the window, hid the note he left, and framed the robber story.”
“But the handkerchief!” Gungen screamed. He was all worked up.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” I assured him solemnly, “except that Main—you said he was promiscuous—had probably been fooling with your wife’s maid, and that she—like a lot of maids—helped herself to your wife’s belongings.”
He puffed up his rouged cheeks, and stamped his feet, fairly dancing. His indignation was as funny as the statement that caused it.
“We shall see!” He spun on his heel and ran out of the room, repeating over and over, “We shall see!”
Enid Gungen held a hand out to me. Her doll face was all curves and dimples.
“I thank you,” she whispered.
“I don’t know what for,” I growled, not taking the hand. “I’ve got it jumbled so anything like proof is out of the question. But he can’t help knowing—didn’t I practically tell him?”
“Oh, that!” She put it behind her with a toss of her small head. “I’m quite able to look out for myself so long as he has no definite proof.”
I believed her.
Bruno Gungen came fluttering back into the library, frothing at the mouth, tearing his dyed goatee, raging that Rose Rubury was not to be found in the house.
The next morning Dick Foley told me the maid had joined Weel and Dahl and had left for Portland with them.
THE FAREWELL MURDER
CHAPTER 1
I was the only one who left the train at Farewell.
A man came through the rain from the passenger shed. He was a small man. His face was dark and flat. He wore a gray waterproof cap and a gray coat cut in military style.
He didn’t look at me. He looked at the valise and gladstone bag in my hands. He came forward quickly, walking with short, choppy steps.
He didn’t say anything when he took the bags from me. I asked:
“Kavalov’s?”
He had already turned his back to me and was carrying my bags towards a tan Stutz coach that stood in the roadway beside the gravel station platform. In answer to my question he bowed twice at the Stutz without looking around or checking his jerky half-trot.
I followed him to the car.
Three minutes of riding carried us through the village. We took a road that climbed westward into the hills. The road looked like a seal’s back in the rain.
The flat-faced man was in a hurry. We purred over the road at a speed that soon carried us past the last of the cottages sprinkled up the hillside.
Presently we left the shiny black road for a paler one curving south to run along a hill’s wooded crest. Now and then this road, for a hundred feet or more at a stretch, was turned into a tunnel by tall trees’ heavily leafed boughs interlocking overhead.
Rain accumulated in fat drops on the boughs and came down to thump the Stutz’s roof. The dullness of rainy early evening became almost the blackness of night inside these tunnels.
The flat-faced man switched on the lights, and increased our speed.
He sat rigidly erect at the wheel. I sat behind him. Above his military collar, among the hairs that were clipped short on the nape of his neck, globules of moisture made tiny shining points. The moisture could have been rain. It could have been sweat.
We were in the middle of one of the tunnels.
The flat-faced man’s head jerked to the left, and he screamed:
“A-a-a-a-a-a!”
It was a long, quivering, high-pitched bleat, thin with terror.
I jumped up, bending forward to see what was the matter with him.
The car swerved and plunged ahead, throwing me back on the seat again.
Through the side window I caught a one-eyed glimpse of something dark lying in the road.
I twisted around to try the back window, less rain-bleared.
I saw a black man lying on his back in the road, near the left edge. His body was arched, as if its weight rested on his heels and the back of his head. A knife handle that couldn’t have been less than six inches long stood straight up in the air from the left side of his chest.
By the time I had seen this much we had taken a curve and were out of the tunnel.
“Stop,” I called to the flat-faced man.
He pretended he didn’t hear me. The Stutz was a tan streak under us. I put a hand on the driver’s shoulder.
His shoulder squirmed under my hand, and he screamed “A-a-a-a-a!” again as if the dead black man had him.
I reached past him and shut off the engine.
He took his hands from the wheel and clawed up at me. Noises came from his mouth, but they didn’t make any words that I knew.
I got a hand on the wheel. I got my other forearm under his chin. I leaned over the back of his seat so that the weight of my upper body was on his head, mashing it down against the wheel.
Between this and that and the help of God, the Stutz hadn’t left the road when it stopped moving.
I got up off the flat-faced man’s head and asked:
“What the hell’s the matter with you?”
He looked at me with white eyes, shivered, and didn’t say anything.
“Turn it around,” I said. “We’ll go back there.”
He shook his head from side to side, desperately, and made some more of the mouth-noises that might have been words if I could have understood them.
“You know who that was?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“You do,” I growled.
He shook his head.
By then I was beginning to suspect that no matter what I said to this fellow I’d get only headshakes out of him.
I said:
“Get away from the wheel, then. I’m going to drive back there.”
He opened the door and scrambled out.
“Come back here,” I called.
He backed away, shaking his head.
I cursed him, slid in behind the wheel, said, “All right, wait here for me,” and slammed the door.
He retreated backwards slowly, watching me with scared, whitish eyes while I backed and turned the coach.
I had to drive back farther than I had expected, something like a mile.
I didn’t find the black man. The tunnel was empty.
If I had known the exact spot in which he had been lying, I might have been able to find something to show how he had been removed. But I hadn’t had time to pick out a landmark, and now any one of four or five places looked like the spot.
With the help of the coach’s lamps I went over the left side of the road from one end of the tunnel to the other.
I didn’t find any blood. I didn’t find any footprints. I didn’t find anything to show that anybody had been lying in the road. I didn’t find anything.
It was too dark by now for me to try searching the woods.
I returned to where I had left the flat-faced man.
He was gone.
It looked, I thought, as if Mr. Kavalov might be right in thinking he needed a detective.
CHAPTER 2
Half a mile beyond the place where the flat-faced man had deserted me, I stopped the Stutz in front of a grilled steel gate that blocked the road. The gate was padlocked on the inside. From either side of it tall hedging ran off into the woods. The upper part of a brown-roofed small house was visible over the hedge-top to the left.
I worked the Stutz’s horn.
The racket brought a gawky boy of fifteen or sixteen to the other side of the gate. He had on bleached whipcord pants and a wildly striped sweater. He didn’t come out to the middle of the road, but stood at one side, with one arm out of sight as if holding something that was hidden from me by the hedge.
“This Kavalov’s?” I asked.
“Yes, sir,” he said uneasily.
I waited for him to unlock the gate. He didn’t unlock it. He stood there looking uneasily at the car and at me.
“Please, mister,” I said, “can I come in?”
“What—who are you?”
“I’m the guy that Kavalov sent for. If I’m not going to be let in, tell me, so I can catch the six-fifty back to San Francisco.”
The boy chewed his lip, said, “Wait till I see if I can find the key,” and went out of sight behind the hedge.
He was gone long enough to have had a talk with somebody.
When he came back he unlocked the gate, swung it open, and said:
“It’s all right, sir. They’re expecting you.”
When I had driven through the gate I could see lights on a hilltop a mile or so ahead and to the left.
“Is that the house?” I asked.
“Yes, sir. They’re expecting you.”
Close to where the boy had stood while talking to me through the gate, a double-barrel shotgun was propped up against the hedge.
I thanked the boy and drove on. The road wound gently uphill through farmland. Tall, slim trees had been planted at regular intervals on both sides of the road.
The road brought me at last to the front of a building that looked like a cross between a fort and a factory in the dusk. It was built of concrete. Take a flock of squat cones of various sizes, round off the points bluntly, mash them together with the largest one somewhere near the center, the others grouped around it in not too strict accordance with their sizes, adjust the whole collection to agree with the slopes of a hilltop, and you would have a model of the Kavalov house. The windows were steel-sashed. There weren’t very many of them. No two were in line either vertically or horizontally. Some were lighted.
