“I accept.” It was a croak.
I released the arm. He stumbled forward, caught his balance after a few steps, and leaned against a glass case, working the abused limb. He took out a handkerchief and mopped his face. Beneath his breath: “Well, Jack, you made a horse’s ass of yourself again.”
“Not a horse’s ass. Just a poor judge.”
“You’re very kind, I think.”
“Thanks for your help, Mr. Billings.” I picked up the report from the floor where it had fallen and rolled it up, just to have something to do with my hands. “By the way, did you happen to know Lee Collins, Judge DeLancey’s pilot on that last flight?”
He shook his head, smiling helplessly. He was almost back to normal. “As I said, he never took me into his confidence. I never met most of the people he did business with.”
“How about Krim and Bingo Jefferson? Did you know them or why they may have been killed?”
He smiled the same smile. “I’m sorry.”
I thanked him again and made for the door. Then I turned back. “Does the Judge’s collection include any thirty-two caliber pistols or revolvers?”
“Several. They weren’t as common out West as the forty-four, but they were far from rare.”
“Would you know if any of them is missing?”
“Of course. But I can see them all from where I’m standing. Wait a minute.” He crossed to DeLancey’s portrait and swung it out from the wall, revealing a round metal safe recessed behind the woodwork. “He acquired an old Forehand and Wads worth thirty-two a few months before his death. A derringer. It was said to have belonged to Doc Holliday, but there was no verification. He was in the habit of storing handguns in this safe until they could be authenticated.” He gave the dial a final twist and pulled open the door. He put his hands inside, there was a pause, and then I saw his shoulders tense.
“This can’t be,” he whispered.
I
JOINED HIM
as he withdrew a gray metal strongbox from the safe’s interior. His leather key case still dangled from the open lid. The box was empty. I glanced inside the safe. The tiny light that went on when the door was opened glowed yellow over loose papers, a ledger with brass corners, a triple-deckered checkbook, nothing more.
“When was the last time you saw the gun?” I demanded.
Billings continued to stare at the box as if by sheer force of will he could make the derringer return. “I don’t know.” His voice was dreamy with mild shock. “I’ve had no reason to check as long as the box was in its place. I don’t think I’ve seen it since before Arthur—”
“Was anything else kept in it besides the gun? Cash? Jewelry?”
“Just the Forehand and Wadsworth. Now I remember. The last time I saw it was the day Arthur sold me the collection.”
“He sold it to you when?”
“Just before I left for Hawaii on that vacation I told you about. Come to think of it, that was the last time I saw Arthur.”
“Didn’t you wonder why a fanatic collector would up and sell you the lot just like that?”
“Not at all.” He lowered the lid and put the box back in the safe, returned the key case to his pocket and swung the door shut. A hidden spring whirled the dial to some innocuous digit. Then he replaced the painting. “He knew that if the Internal Revenue seized it, the collection would be sold at auction, the pieces scattered God knows where. He’d spent years building it up and he couldn’t stand the thought of it. He made the deal on the condition that no part of it could ever be resold. I signed a paper in agreement.”
“Where’d you get the money?”
He smiled ruefully. “I borrowed it. When you’re in debt as often as I am, your credit rating is A-l. It’s one of the benefits of being broke in this great land of ours.”
“Could the Judge have taken the derringer with him on that last fishing trip?”
“Possibly. I can’t think why, since it would technically be stealing. If he felt he needed protection, he owned several modern pistols, all registered and legal and infinitely more reliable than any of these relics.”
I could think of a very good reason, but didn’t mention it. “Does anyone else have the combination to that safe?”
“As far as I know, I’m the only one. Of course, I have no way of knowing if Arthur gave it to someone else. That’s highly unlikely, however. He was a cautious man. Anyway, I alone hold the key to the burglar alarm, which I had installed myself.”
“There’s nothing in that. There are a hundred and ten ways to get around the most sophisticated alarm system in the world. They’re the first things a second-story man learns. Or it might have been lifted while you were in Hawaii, before the system was installed,”
“They’d still need the keys to the door and to the strongbox.”
“DeLancey had them.”
Deep in thought, he said nothing.
“What about your mother?”
“I’d sooner suspect the mayor. The only things Mother hates worse than tobacco are guns. She’s terrified of them, to the point of refusing to enter this room.”
“That leaves the servants. And Clague.”
He laughed shortly. “Clague wouldn’t have the guts. He’s been sweet on Mother since the day she married Arthur, but hasn’t even had the nerve to tell her in the five years my stepfather’s been dead. As for the servants—” He shrugged. “Not Carmen, though. Never Carmen.” He was silent for a moment. Then his cheeks flushed. “Damn! If that does turn out to have been Doc Holliday’s weapon and the thief doesn’t know it, it might be used in some nickel-and-dime stickup and end up on the bottom of the river. Think of the loss to posterity.”
“You think of it. I don’t have time.” I went back to the door. “When the police question Mrs. DeLancey, you’d better tell them about the gun. If it turns out to be the one that killed Bingo Jefferson and they find it, they’ll be all over you. That’s friendly advice in return for your cooperation. You can do what you like with it.”
He nodded. Then he looked worried. “Do you think that’s true about Julio?”
“Julio?”
“The chauffeur. Carmen’s husband. You said I’d better watch it because of his bad temper.”
“Yeah. He’s in pretty good shape and he moves like a boxer. And Puerto Rico’s national bird is the switchblade.”
“Thanks. I’ll remember that.”
“
Por nada.
” I waved the battleworn report he had given me and went to collect my hat and coat.
The hood was up on my Cutlass and the dark chauffeur was leaning over the engine. I crept up behind him softly and thrust a stiffened forefinger against his spine. He tensed.
“Que pasa,
Julio?” I spoke through my teeth.
He straightened slowly and turned to face me. His dark Latin eyes fell to my empty hand. He smiled sneeringly, white teeth gleaming against his brown skin.
“I was admiring your engine,
señor.
Ees a beautiful machine.
Pero no está original.
Also illegal.”
“I didn’t like the one it came with,” I said. “I had the pollution equipment removed from this one because I could have eaten my lunch in the time between when I stepped on the gas and the carburetor got the message.” I put a cigarette in my mouth and offered him the pack. “You spent a lot of time with Judge DeLancey, didn’t you, Julio?”
He accepted one, smoothed it between his even brown fingers, and stashed it in his shirt pocket. His expression was guarded. “Maybe.
Cuánto dinero, señor?
”
As I replaced the pack I tapped my wallet part way out of my inside breast pocket and thumbed the corner of a sawbuck into the open. My coat shielded it from the house. He glanced at it and nodded almost imperceptibly. I said, “Let’s take a look at the spare.”
He slammed down the hood and we walked to the other end of the car. I unlocked the trunk lid and threw it up, blocking the view from the windows. I got out the ten spot. He eyed it hungrily.
“
Si
,” he said. “
El juez,
he was a busy man. I drive him everywhere.” He reached for the bill. I held it back.
“To the airport?”
“
Si,
many times.”
“You saw his pilot? A tall man, dark, large hooked nose? Called himself Lee Collins?”
His eyes narrowed. “I theenk you forget how leetle the ten dollar buys today,
señor.
”
“I theenk not.” I struck a match as if to light my cigarette, but set fire to the bill instead. Black smoke curled up from the burning edge. He made a grab for it. I pulled it back out of his reach.
“I see the pilot,” he blurted, watching the bill anxiously. “Many times. I speak to heem some of the times.
Por favor, señor!
”
I touched the flame to the cigarette, then blew it out. One corner was gone. “What did you talk about?”
“Nothing of importance. Some of the times we drink the coffee in the lounge while
el juez
talks on the telephone. We speak of the weather, our pay, the man we work for.
Es verdad!”
I had started to put another corner to the burning end of my cigarette. I stopped. He lowered his eyes.
“Hees name, eet ees not Collins. He was dark like
español,
but he was not Spanish. He had a funny accent.”
I left that opening alone. “Singsong? Like an Arab?”
“
Si,
like
arabe.
The people who are buying America.”
“Did you ever catch his real name?”
He shook his head. I moved the bill closer to the Winston’s business end. “Eet was funny name,” he said. “I cannot remember.”
“Was it Krim?”
He was ecstatic. “
Si,
Kreem. I ask heem once and he tell me. Ali Kreem. He said everyone who heard eet accuse heem of the high gasoline, so he change.”
I extended the bill. “
Gracias,
Julio.”
He snatched it from between my fingers and stuffed it into the slash pocket of his jodhpurs. “Do me a favor and go straight to hell.”
He stalked past and resumed waxing the already glittering Trans Am. I let him. You can’t get good help these days, even when you pay them for something you had to begin with.
I’d skipped breakfast that morning, so I grabbed an early lunch at a counter on my way to the office. The hamburger was still sitting in my stomach like a lump of lead when I went through the unlocked outer door. No one was waiting for me, and the air had that stale smell that told me no one had been. Which was a relief, because I was still expecting the cops. I left the door standing open to gather circulation from the hallway, unlocked and entered my private office, and threw open the window. Sunlight flashed off the windshields of automobiles exceeding the speed limit in the street below. I laid the report Jack Billings had given me on the desk and went back and got the mail and shed my hat and coat and opened and read the stuff on my way back to the desk.
There were no coded messages for me to decipher, no requests to trace the missing duchess, no urgent entreaties from the police to help solve the mystery of the tower room, the man with the limp, and the one-eyed Albanian dwarf. What there were were a final notice from Detroit Edison and a friendly warning from my alma mater that I was about to receive a telephone call soliciting a donation. I parked the bill with the others under the blotter and flipped the cheery form letter into the waste basket. They’d squeezed all the blood out of me they were going to get.
I turned on the ceiling light and sat down to read the report on Janet Whiting. It was written in detectivese, full of addresses and times and subjects entering and exiting buildings. The dick who had filed it used slashes and semicolons like a hypochondriac uses aspirin, but you don’t get much chance to refine your writing skill sitting in an automobile with one eye on a newspaper and the other on the door of the building across the street. After a few paragraphs I found myself counting the pages that remained.
The background stuff was better, though hardly illuminating. She was born thirty-eight years ago in Huron, a village thirty miles west of Detroit, to George and Elizabeth Stephens Whiting. Her father was fifty-two at the time of her birth, her mother forty-six. She spent what the bread advertisements would call her formative years doing the things small-town girls usually did twenty-odd years ago and seldom do anymore, until the company her father worked for moved its headquarters to Detroit and the family was forced to follow. At that point things went sour.
Three weeks after the move, her mother collapsed while crossing Livernois and died of heart failure before the ambulance arrived. Never prosperous, the two survivors found rates hostile on the west side and wound up in a two-room apartment on Hastings, a street that no longer exists, on the theory that when a neighborhood goes bad, building an expressway through it will eliminate the problem.
At the age of fifteen, less than a year after leaving Huron, Janet was arrested and fined for prostitution. More arrests followed, some for soliciting, others for nude or topless dancing in neighborhoods where zoning laws prohibited such goings-on. Meanwhile her father died. She was twenty-seven and dividing her time between go-go dancing in several downtown joints and selling her favors in an apartment on Erskine when she happened to meet Judge Arthur DeLancey while the latter was waiting at a taxi stand and she was getting out with her companion for the evening. The companion was sloppy drunk and she was delivering him home. She didn’t have carfare and when she and the hack went through her escort’s pockets it developed that neither did he. The hack was all set to holler cop when DeLancey slipped him enough to cover the tab and to help carry her customer up to his apartment. After that he offered to share the taxi with her. She accepted, and the two sped off in front of a sidewalk full of witnesses. End Part One.
I flipped back through it absently, wondering why someone with enough on the ball to sit on the federal bench could let himself be seen in the company of a prostitute. I wondered about other things as well, such as why page three of the background section was lighter in color than the others.
Like the others, its corners were bent and thumb-blurred, but while the rest had yellowed slightly, this one remained as white as the day it had left the cellophane. I studied it more closely, comparing the typescript. The characters on this page were a shade blacker than those on the preceding and succeeding sheets. I flipped the page back and forth, back and forth. The characters differed in style as well. Why not? They had been typed on different machines.