Authors: Donald E Westlake
Because it wasn’t Leo Ross. I knew damn well it wasn’t Leo Ross. That amiable, clever man hadn’t killed anybody, and I knew it. And I knew why he’d been framed, and I knew why Poumon had been killed, and I absolutely knew who’d done it all: the killings, the attack on Cornell, the framing of Ross, everything. I didn’t know the exact details of motive for the original murder of Jamie Dearborn, but everything else I knew.
I’d known it from the instant I’d heard Poumon was really dead. I’d known it, and I’d pushed the knowledge down under the surface of my thoughts, because I didn’t have one item of proof. I had nothing but personalities and relationships and some understanding of needs. Not enough. Not enough for me to say a name to Manzoni, so I’d pushed it under instead. I suppose I’d thought, down in the level under conscious thought, that the truth would out somehow anyway. It wasn’t likely Manzoni would be staying in charge of the case much longer, and the next man wouldn’t have any vested interest in obsolete theories to keep him from seeing the truth.
Of course, back when I’d read about Cornell’s accident in the newspaper I’d made the same easy assumptions, and it hadn’t quite worked out that way.
And here was Koberberg, calling me to come back to the surface once again. I stood leaning on the shovel, looking at Kate, and she stood on the third step from the bottom, waiting for me. I considered the arguments I might try, and knew they were no good. I shook my head, and put the shovel down, and went upstairs.
As usual, I had to wash first. When I went into the living room, Koberberg was sitting in the chair just to the right of the door. He was wearing his topcoat; his hat was in his lap. He had the stunned look I’ve seen sometimes on the faces of survivors of bad automobile accidents, as though the mind hasn’t yet moved past the instant of the impact, is still back there, stuck in a cleft in time, while the body has come along through the minutes without it.
He looked at me and said, “He’s innocent.”
“I know,” I said. “Bruce Maundy did it.”
He blinked, and on the other side of the blink his face was subtly different; his mind, jolted out of the cleft way back in yesterday, had suddenly rejoined him. He said, “Bruce? Are you sure?”
I said, “I have no proof. I have no way of getting proof.”
“The police could,” he said, “if they’d bother to look.”
“I’m not well connected with that precinct,” I said. “They’d listen to you before they’d listen to me.”
“Manzoni won’t listen to anyone,” he said.
I said, “Manzoni? He’s still in charge?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t he be?”
“Haven’t Lane and Cornell made any statements?”
“Cary is at my place. He collapsed after he found the body. I’ve been trying to take care of him.”
To ward off, I suppose, his own collapse. I said, “What about Cornell?”
“I really don’t know. Ronnie’s still at the hospital, naturally. Statements about what?”
Instead of answering him, I said, “Isn’t there any kind of on-going police investigation?”
“Why should there be? They have their man,” he said bitterly.
“Aren’t they interested in motive? In proofs?”
“They have Leo, that’s all the proof they seem to need. Good heavens, man, he’s black
and
he’s queer! What do you expect from the police department?”
I said, “Then I don’t know what to say. You could try talking to Manzoni, he might be a little more accessible now that his first theories have been proved wrong.”
He shook his head. He said, “I’m not entirely sure why you’re trying to evade the responsibility of this, but you know you aren’t being honest with me. Detective Manzoni is not accessible to me, nor will he ever be.”
I said, “But I don’t have any
proof,
don’t you see that? I know it was Maundy, I know why he did it, but I can’t prove any of it.”
“Shouldn’t you be out looking for proof?” he asked me.
“Why? You say it’s my responsibility.
Why
is it my responsibility?”
“Because there’s no one else to do it,” he said. “The only man who can do the job always has the responsibility to do it.”
Operating without a license again. I shook my head, angry at myself, at Koberberg, at Maundy, at Manzoni, at the whole world. I said, “Tell me Ross’s story.”
Ross’s story was a simple one, though in the telling, complex. He had received a phone call from someone with a disguised voice, saying he had proof that
Koberberg
was the murderer of Jamie Dearborn, and offering to sell the proof for a hundred dollars. (Such an incredibly small amount!) He had arranged to meet Ross on the roof of the building housing Lane and Poumon’s apartment. Their building, it seemed, was more of an apartment house, six stories high and with twenty-four tenants. Ross recognized the address, of course, but didn’t know yet what it meant.
In any case, he agreed to the meeting, and he went to it armed with a length of pipe wrapped with a woman’s stocking, for self-defense. He took the elevator at the apartment building to the top floor, went up the last flight of stairs to the roof, and stepped out to find the roof empty. He propped the door open and walked around the roof, looking over the edge here and there, and when he got back to the door, it was shut and locked.
He shouted, of course, but no one heard him. This was just around four the previous afternoon, Sunday, when the windless snowfall had recently started up again. A snow like that muffles sounds.
The law requires a fire escape from the roof, but in some parts of the city waves of burglaries have led building owners to remove the top flight of fire escapes, and police—as anxious as anyone to see the number of burglaries lowered—tend not to notice the violation. That had happened here, and there was no longer any way for Ross to get off the roof.
He finally decided the only thing to do was wait for either Lane or Poumon to enter or leave the building, and he stayed at the front edge of the roof to watch for them. He planned to drop the length of pipe when he saw them, to attract their, attention. Then he would shout and wave his arms, they would see him, they would rescue him.
Of course, he wasn’t looking straight down the front of the building the whole time. It was cold up there, and it was snowing, and he had to move around to keep himself a bit warm. It is also very hard, after a while, to go on staring indefinitely at one spot, no matter what the situation.
So he missed Lane. Of course, Lane had been hurrying home, rushing from the hospital as a result of the warning he’d seen in the horoscopes, and had run directly from the cab under the canopy and into the building.
While Ross continued to stand around on the roof, feeling more and more like a fool and wondering if he should take the chance of dropping one flight to the beginning of the fire escape—the ground, sixty feet away, deterred him—Lane took the elevator to his fifth-floor apartment, searched it for Poumon, saw a bedroom window standing open, knew it shouldn’t be open in such cold weather, and looked out, to see Poumon’s body lying in the middle of the building’s trash cans below.
It was Lane who called the police. It was the police who eventually went up on the roof and found Ross. And when they searched him, they found the length of pipe in his pocket. He told his story, but it wasn’t believed.
I said, “The police believe Ross took Poumon to the roof and threw him off from there?”
“Yes.”
“Why? With Poumon already on the fifth floor, why do they think Ross took him up two flights more?”
“You were a policeman,” Koberberg said. “You know the phrase
modus operandi.
Ronnie was dragged to the roof and thrown off, and so David must have been as well.”
“Very sloppy thinking,” I said. I was pacing the floor, trying to find the handle. “There might be something on the window sill,” I said. “Something in the apartment somewhere. But it would take professionals to find out.”
“You’re a professional,” Koberberg said.
I stopped and looked at him and shook my head. “There are no Renaissance men any more,” I told him. “I was a professional badge-carrier at one time, no more and no less. What we need in that apartment is professionals in the police sciences. People who put a thread under a microscope and tell you what color and make of coat it came from. That isn’t my field, and it never was.”
“I see. I’m sorry, yes, you’re absolutely right. I think of a policeman as someone with all the police skills combined in one head.”
“It doesn’t happen,” I said.
“So what is needed is to give the police department some incentive to do its own investigation.” He peered at me. “What was it that convinced you Bruce was guilty?”
“When I heard that Poumon had been killed. Maundy did it to distract Manzoni.”
“Distract? I don’t follow.”
I said, “All right, from the beginning. All of you people share an interest in astrology, that’s number one.”
“Mine is more critical than the others,” he said mildly. “I consider astrology very interesting, but not yet proven.”
“In any event, you’re involved in it. So are all the others, including Bruce Maundy. He even had something to say about it when he came here to warn me off the other day.”
Koberberg nodded. “All right. Point number one accepted.”
I said, “The killer knew Cornell was trying to use astrology to solve the murder. You all knew that, and the killer had to see the stuff on Cornell’s desk when he tried to kill
him
.”
“Naturally.”
“So he’d check into it himself, wouldn’t he? Run his own horoscope, look in all the books, just to find out if there was something dangerous to him in there or not.”
“I suppose we all did that,” Koberberg said. “Leo and I did. We both found a danger of imprisonment and other more general warnings. It was to be a dangerous time for us both.”
“Did you look up the others?”
“No, but we didn’t know the details of time and place of birth on the others. I admit we were interested.”
“So was Maundy. And those details were on Cornell’s desk. He copied them down, and he checked everybody else’s horoscope to see what he could find. He even found an error in one of them.”
“An error?”
“When he came here the other day, he was very excited and angry and nervous, and he let some things slip. He said Cornell couldn’t even do horoscopes right. When I was at the hospital yesterday, Lane found an error that Cornell had made in one of the charts.”
Koberberg said, “The only way Bruce could know about the error would be if he was the murderer!”
“That’s right.”
“Well, couldn’t you bring
that
to the police?”
“Bring what to the police? I say Maundy said something that showed he had information that only the murderer could have had. Maundy says I’m a liar, or I misunderstood him. The fact he let slip is very small and very remote. It wouldn’t be enough, not by a long shot.”
“What if you talked to him again?” Koberberg asked me. “If he’s so excitable, he might make other slips.”
“He already did. At least, I construe it that way. I’ve been told that Cornell and Dearborn never permitted anyone upstairs to their top-floor bedroom, is that right?”
“That’s right. They both seemed to put great store in that, it was their private place.”
“From what you said at Remington’s the other night, I got the impression that even included people Dearborn would pick up while Cornell was away.”
“That’s right,” Koberberg said. “Cary told me that.” He gave a sad little smile and said, “I got the impression half of Jamie’s attraction for Cary was that private room. Cary wanted to see it, but Jamie would never let him go up there. Not for sex, not for anything.”
“When Maundy was here,” I said, “he said something about the drivers on the Brooklyn Bridge maybe seeing the murderer. That
might
have been said by somebody who’d simply had the room described to him, but it sounded like something said by a man who’d been there.”
“Of course!” Koberberg was briefly excited again, but then he looked cynical and said, “But that wouldn’t be proof either, would it?”
“No, it wouldn’t. My word against his again. And only a peripheral fact at best.”
“It’s enough, though,” Koberberg said. “Not enough to convict, possibly, but certainly enough to convince a sensible man. Bruce saw Ronnie’s papers, and he’d been up in that room.” He frowned and said, “But why do it all? I can see reasons for his getting enraged at Jamie, and after that killing I can see why he felt he had to protect himself by killing Ronnie, but why kill David? Why frame Leo?”
“He needed somebody to give Manzoni,” I said.
“This is the second time you’ve mentioned Manzoni. I don’t understand it.”
I said, “As I told you Saturday night, it was Maundy that put the bug in Manzoni’s ear about me. Maundy was in the car when I was stopped.”
“That’s right.”
I said, “I’ll tell you what I think happened after that. Manzoni wasn’t one hundred percent sure of his position, and it made him nervous that Cornell was hiring people to snoop around. Also, I didn’t give him much satisfaction, he was feeling a little frustrated when he left me. So he leaned on Maundy a little, I can guarantee you he did. It would be appropriate for his character.”
“Leaned? In what way?”
“Pushed Maundy to find out why he was so set against an investigation. Warned him that if it turned out he was only trying to cover some wrongdoing of his own, things would get very rough.”
“Yes, he would do that, wouldn’t he? And Bruce wouldn’t stand up to it very well; those superficially tough people never do.”
I said, “Maundy was afraid my hanging around would either expose him or stir things up to the point where the police would take a second look at the case and maybe
they’d
expose him. So he figured he had to make sure things quieted down.”
“By killing David and framing Leo? What a shabby reason to end a man’s life and ruin another’s.”
“I suppose he would have preferred to kill me,” I said, “but that would have opened things up, and what he wanted to do was shut them down. And when he’d checked all the horoscopes, there was Poumon’s with a warning about violent death and an aerial accident. He found out that Lane was going to be at the hospital with Cornell all day, he called Ross, he hung around the apartment building, locked Ross on the roof, rang Poumon’s doorbell, was let in, killed Poumon, and left. That open window was his only mistake, probably out of nervousness, but it wasn’t a big enough mistake to cause Manzoni to think twice.”