“You can start with why you think Arthur’s still alive,” he said.
I was in the act of lighting a cigarette. I drew the smoke as far down as it would go, shook out the match, and leaned over to drop it into a square black onyx ashtray on the edge of the desk. I squirted smoke.
“I don’t have any evidence that he is,” I began. “Just a hunch. But it’s a hell of a hunch.
“He had tax problems, big tax problems. The kind that can land a man in a cell for a long time no matter how important he is. There was only one way out of it: to disappear. But disappearing isn’t as easy as it was once. First you need money, a lot of it if you want to continue living the way the Judge did. So he set up a dummy company, Griffin Carbide. He got his friends to invest in it on the rumor that it was going to merge with a bigger company. It didn’t and it folded. His friends took the loss. Only it didn’t fold, on account of I found out today that it owns property thirty miles west of here. I figure DeLancey’s been drawing on Griffin’s funds since his vanishing act, just as if it were his personal bank account. The ready cash he needed to start came from selling his firearms collection outright to his stepson, Jack Billings.
“His scenario was just flashy enough to be believed. Everyone knew how keen he was on fishing and the outdoors, so he arranged an excursion to Canada over Lake Superior. To make it look like a working vacation he invited his aide. Then at the last minute he bowed out. Probably he claimed pressing business and told the pilot and aide to go ahead and he’d meet them later, traveling by automobile around the lake. Only they never made it across Superior. Maybe he tampered with the engine, maybe he planted some kind of bomb. It doesn’t matter. What matters is the plane went down over the most treacherous body of water on earth. As far as the public and anyone else were concerned, the Judge went down with it.”
I paused to draw on my cigarette and give Montana a chance to comment. He didn’t. He was staring at his strong square hands resting on his stomach. I continued.
“It was a peach of a setup. He didn’t confide in anyone, not even his family or mistress. It was almost perfect except that he didn’t count on his late pilot having a brother.
“The pilot went by the name of Collins, but according to DeLancey’s chauffeur his real handle was Krim, the same as the Arab who owned The Crescent. I’ve seen Collins’ picture and the family resemblance is unmistakable. Krim—the Krim of The Crescent—had a substantial bank balance and was in the habit of making regular deposits in large amounts. Somehow he found out that the Judge wasn’t on that plane when his brother went swimming, and his revenge took a lucrative turn. It’s my guess he used the blood money he squeezed out of DeLancey to buy the joint on Cass, which made a good front should the IRS start wondering where he derived his income. I bet if you look it up you’ll find that Griffin Carbide is a major investor. But what Krim was getting was scrapings compared to what DeLancey had to draw on, so everyone was happy. Then Janet Whiting showed up.
“She was bitter about the disappearance of the Judge’s last will and determined to find it. Somewhere along the way she tumbled to Krim’s relationship to DeLancey and became an employee at The Crescent under an assumed name to learn more. You found out she was working there and because you felt responsible for her—later we’ll go over just why—you sent Bingo Jefferson down to look after her.”
“I told you that,” put in Montana.
I nodded. “But you didn’t tell me that you fathered her illegitimate child back in Huron—which, the laws governing paternity suits being what they are, was a good enough motive to send Jefferson not to protect her, but to kill her.”
He stopped staring at his hands and leveled his gaze at me. For an instant I was transported back to a jungle in Southeast Asia, face to face with a guerrilla I’d stumbled across with his hands buried in the bloody face of a writhing G.I. I’d had my M-16 with me, and it had all been over in a second. But I never forgot his eyes. I made a gesture of dismissal.
“Relax, I wasn’t accusing you. If you’d wanted her on ice you would have put her there long ago. Fatherhood is just as strong a motive for feeling
protective
toward the woman involved. Unfortunately, she didn’t see it that way, and when she spotted Jefferson—a menacing enough figure at the best of times—she got nervous and called me. Remember, she couldn’t be sure that you weren’t in on the plot.”
“What makes you think I’m not?”
“An investigator survives on hunches. If you’d been that kind of a guy you would never have stood trial on that chintzy assault rap, let alone been convicted. You’d have fixed it. I’m rambling.
“Jefferson eavesdropped on my conversation with Janet Whiting—or Ann Maringer, as I knew her. He saw the ring change hands, figured out what it represented, and tried to get it back from me because he knew it would make trouble if it was traced back to you. You know what came of that. After I left and Janet got off work he followed her to her apartment. He had to find out where the ring went. He backed her into the bedroom, where she snatched a gun from somewhere and shot him. Or maybe not.
“Maybe someone else followed her home. Someone like Krim, who had grown suspicious and was afraid she was going to spoil his good thing. Maybe he shot Jefferson and grabbed the woman to use as an extra bargaining point with DeLancey. Somewhere there’s a thirty-two derringer floating around that may have been what did the job on your bodyguard. It’s the ideal murder weapon—unregistered, untraceable, and easy to hide. Don’t ask me how he got it; I’m hypothesizing. Why Krim died and who did it is still up in the air, but I’m betting the Judge was in no mood for further squeezing.”
Montana said, “You mentioned another murder.”
I blew a jet of smoke at a corner of the ceiling. Beyond the window the Detroit skyline was limned in a haze of blue smog under a layer of dying sunshine. “You may read about it in tonight’s paper,” I said. “The local media people like to play up violent crimes that happen in other places. About noon a young Reliance Investigations operative named Albert Gold was gutshot and left for dead in the house you used to rent outside Huron. He left a terrible mess on his way downstairs. Later his car was found shoved off an abandoned logging road not far away. Tread marks found at the scene indicate that another car had been parked on the road when Gold arrived. I think they were left by a car belonging to Jack Billings.
“Billings supplied me with a report on Janet Whiting that his mother had commissioned Reliance to prepare. He had substituted a page in the background section in order to throw me off the track, and went to Huron. I don’t know why. Maybe he thought Janet Whiting was stashed there. Maybe he suspected his stepfather was still alive and, like Krim, saw a profit in it. Or maybe that sappy story he tried to sell me about being infatuated with Janet was true after all. Anyway he went there, and not long afterward so did Gold.
“His motives are easier to figure. You’ll remember I asked if you knew who was tailing me earlier. It was Gold, one of the operatives who had been keeping you under surveillance for the steel mills.”
“I had the office checked out after you tipped me,” Montana said. “The telephones had been tapped and the office wired. We’re suing Reliance for invasion of privacy.”
“Good for you. Gold tried to shake me down after he saw me coming out of The Crescent, where Krim was killed. By bugging our last conversation he learned who Ann Maringer is. It’s my guess he got hold of his agency’s file on Janet Whiting and that greed brought him out to Huron. There he tangled with Billings and fell down hard.”
“Interesting,” he commented, after a short silence, during which I finished my cigarette and rubbed it out in the onyx tray. “And quite plausible, granting the original supposition that Arthur isn’t dead. But why come to me with it?”
“I thought you might be able to fill in some of the gaps. Such as what really happened out there twenty-four years ago, and what it has to do with anything.”
There was another pause, and then his lips smiled thinly, wholly independent of the rest of his face. “Detectives. Everything always has to have something to do with something else. Don’t you recognize coincidence?”
“You’re stalling.”
“Damn right I’m stalling. I don’t think as fast on my feet as I used to. It might interest you to know that Janet Whiting never bore my child, and that we never had sex before my wife died and Arthur DeLancey disappeared.”
I made myself more comfortable in my chair. “It might.”
He leaned back again and rescued the beat-up baseball from the shelf. This time he didn’t finger it. He placed it in the center of the desk and proceeded to ignore it.
“I was living there at that time, in that rented house in the woods,” he admitted. “Under an assumed name, for the sake of privacy. It was my first vacation in years. I met Janet in the local hardware store. She saw that I was buying fishing tackle, recognized a trout lure in my purchase, and mentioned a pond where the trout were biting. Apparently she was something of a tomboy, and not at all shy of strangers, though she could barely bring herself to give her order to the clerk, who she must have known for years. I was never much of a fisherman, but I was interested for the sake of my house guest, who was. She offered to show me the way. I took her up on it.
“After we had driven out there I invited her up to the house for lunch. Don’t look at me that way, Walker; it was a hot day and I was happily married. What I forgot—”
“—was that DeLancey wasn’t,” I finished. “He was your guest, wasn’t he?”
He glared. “If you knew that, why’d you insist I was mixed up with her back then?”
“I wanted to hear you say it. I wasn’t sure you would if I didn’t jolt it out of you. The Judge had to have been there. It came to me when I got back to town this afternoon. He was the fisherman in this case, not you.”
“You know what’s wrong with you, Walker? You’re too damned circumspect for your own good. One of these days you’re going to zigzag yourself into a real jam.” His eyes dropped to the baseball on his desk and his expression softened. I wondered what it was about that ball. He continued in a quieter voice.
“Arthur took one look at Janet that day and something came into his eyes I didn’t like. But he was too smart to try anything while I was around. Nothing happened that day.”
“Nothing?”
“Not a thing. She had eaten and was about to leave when the police came. Her father was with them, red-faced and mad as hell. I’ve battered men who called me worse than he did, but he was a man with a half-grown daughter and I was in the wrong.”
“Didn’t the cops ask for identification?”
“I had a phony driver’s license made out in the name of Peter Martin, an alias. You have to appreciate the occasional need for privacy in my work. Anyway, it satisfied them. Arthur was out fishing at that time; no one saw him. They took the girl away and that was the end of it. I thought.
“Arthur was good-looking in those days. Women were always ready to fall in love with him, and he was a spoiled little kid when it came to self-discipline. He couldn’t control his urges. I figured Janet was too young to have those kinds of thoughts, but kids were getting to be a lot older than I was at the same age. It was a week before I found out that instead of going fishing, Arthur had been meeting the girl in the woods. He said she came to him the first time he visited the pond, and that it had got to be a regular thing. He said it was her eyes that attracted him, which I could believe. She had—has—beautiful eyes, bluer than any I ever saw.
“I blew my top. I told him to pack up and get the hell out of my house. He did, and I cleared out right afterward. I wasn’t going to be around when her old man found out what had been going on.”
“Is that why you and the Judge split up?”
“I suppose it played a part, but not right away. Later, much later, I found out that the girl’s family had come to Detroit when they found out she was pregnant. I tried to get in touch with her, but he—I’m assuming it was her father’s decision—wanted nothing to do with me. I never saw Janet again until she took up with DeLancey years later. By that time she was a woman and old enough to make her own decisions. Her father was dead. I was no longer involved.”
He looked at me hard. “That’s it, except that I felt responsible again after Arthur disappeared and left her without a cent. The son she had raised alone was old enough to work. I gave him a job here. I think my affair with Janet grew out of that. So you can see why I care what happens to her. She bought a piece of me twenty-four years ago and I’m still paying interest on the mortgage.”
“Noble.”
“Far from it. I won’t say I didn’t get something out of the relationship. Janet had changed a great deal in the years since Huron. There she was awkward, unsure of herself. As a woman she was poised and graceful, if not exactly beautiful. Her maturity had caught up with her early dancing lessons. I was proud to have won her, if only for a little while.”
“So it was Griffin Carbide that ended your friendship with DeLancey.”
“That again,” he said impatiently. “Yes. I was never able to prove it, but I suspected from the beginning that he manipulated that stock for his own benefit. It wasn’t the money, even though it took a big bite out of funds belonging to the men I was elected to represent. It was the fact that he’d cheat the organization that made him. That I can’t forgive. If you’re right, and he’s living off what he stole from this union, I’ll use whatever influence I have left to make sure he spends what’s left of his life inside walls.”
I frowned at the ruled notepad upon which I had been recording his statement. Then I met his gaze. “I’d like to meet Janet Whiting’s son.”
“You already have.” He turned to the intercom on his desk, and I noticed for the first time that the orange light was shining on the panel, which meant that every word we’d said had been heard in the outer office. “Bill, come in here.”
B
ILL
C
LENDENAN CAME IN
like a man walking through a neighborhood he used to know well but didn’t trust anymore—high on the balls of his feet, sidling as if to present a narrower target. He had his right hand inside the flap pocket of his jacket.