Murder Is My Dish (2 page)

“You would like to go on board, señor?” the watchman asked me, leering.

“He wants to come on board,” the sailor with the plaster said. He lurched against me and brushed his hand over my shoulder, laughing. He was spoiling for a fight, a good old-fashioned, last-night-in-port, what-the-hell-if-we-can't-find-any-women fight, the kind it would take two weeks on the slow freighter run to the Parana Republic to recuperate from. His hand felt the bulge of my shoulder holster and his jaw dropped open to show his surprise before he lunged for it.

I stepped back and came up hard against one of the big crates. I kept him away with the heel of my left hand, groping for the gun. He was not too drunk to stop in his tracks when he found himself gazing down the bore of a Magnum .357.

“Aw, meester,” he grumbled in disappointment.

“You wish to go on board?” the watchman asked again.

I waved the gun. They moved back reluctantly. The one with the harmonica slipped in the slush and almost fell down. The others laughed. They were spoiling for a fight so much I almost expected them to jump him.

“I don't think so,” I told the watchman. Down-river a mile or so a boat horn moaned. The sailors watched me. “You men tell your captain something for me,” I said. “Tell him to call the F.B.I. New York field office in the morning. Tell him to ask for Mr. Drum. Can you remember that?”

“He is of the F.B.I.?” the one with the harmonica asked the watchman, who shrugged.

“Viejo, viejo,”
scolded the one with the sling.

The old man merely laughed. He'd been spoiling to watch a fight as much as they'd been spoiling to get in one. I backed away, but no one tried to follow me. When I reached the pillars of the overhead ramp I turned around and headed for Sloppy Pete's.

The bar and grill smelled of greasily grilling hamburgers, beer, and unwashed floors. Sloppy Pete looked the part in a two-day beard and a grease-splattered apron. I had a beer and a hamburger and asked about last night's excitement. Sloppy Pete wasn't the only one who wanted to talk, but they couldn't tell me anything I didn't already know. The big battered guy had come in, staggered over to the phone, and collapsed. Sloppy Pete had called the cops. There had been no one outside on the street. So the big guy had died, huh? Well, he'd looked bad, mister, he'd looked real bad. Have another beer?

I called a taxi and took it over to the Airlines Terminal Building on East 42nd Street. I got my bag from a locker and walked across the street to the Commodore Hotel. The snow was finally beginning to stick. I checked into a room, and showered, and unpacked pajamas and an unopened bottle of bourbon. I poured the kind of shot into the bathroom glass that is supposed to make you forget your troubles, but when I drank it down and felt it land on top of Sloppy Pete's hamburger I could conjure up a clear picture of Andy Dineen's face for the first time in my mind.

Elementary, my dear Dr. Watson, he had said in his booming voice when I'd given him what information I had on this New York job. He'd insisted on taking me over to the Stattler Men's Bar to drink with him to his first assignment. We drank and he said, Drum and Dineen; I like the sound of it. Pinkertons, here we come.

By now he was growing cold on a slab in a drawer in the Bellevue morgue.

In the morning I called the F.B.I. New York field office and said, “This is Chester Drum. I'm a graduate of the Academy class of fifty. Any classmates of mine around the office?”

“You an agent now, Mr. Drum?”

I said I was not.

“I'll see, sir.” The voice took on respect, and lost warmth. In a few seconds another voice said: “Chestah? Well, I'll be dipped. What you doing in New York, boy? This is Pappy Piersall.”

Pappy had been the humorist of our F.B.I. Academy class, a roly-poly Virginian who hid a lot of brain power behind rosy cheeks and a tooth-paste-ad smile, and a lot of strength in a deceptively soft-looking body. I told him it was a long story and added, “I need some help.”

“I thought you were gumshoeing in D.C.”

“I am. Here's what, Pappy. If you get a call from a Parana Republic national asking for Mr. Drum, get a number where I can call him back.”

There was a silence. I could imagine the smile dropping off Pappy's round red face. “Now, wait a minute, boy,” he said finally. “You wouldn't be trying to impersonate an agent?”

I didn't say anything.

“Hell's bells, boy! You can't do that.”

“Andy Dineen was working on a case with me.” There was a taste in my mouth bitter as gall, but I didn't think Andy would mind. “Remember him?”

“Sure. Sure I do.”

“He was beat to death the night before last, Pappy.”

Pappy swore. When he finished his voice was softer and had lost most of its drawl. “How did it happen, Chet?”

“I don't know. I'm going to find out.”

“But Jesus, boy. This call is monitored. You know that. All our calls are monitored as a matter of form.”

“I never said I wanted to impersonate an agent. I'm hopping around town. I need a message center.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Andy was an agent too.”

“I know it. Don't you think I know it?”

“Will they give you much trouble?”

Pappy said softly, almost devoutly, “You find out about Andy; I'll worry about the trouble.”

I told him where I could be reached, and hung up. After a quick breakfast at the Commodore coffee shop, I took the shuttle over to Times Square and the IRT subway uptown to The Heights. A small orange snowplow was clearing the campus streets and men with shovels were attacking the sidewalks which had drifted over. I followed a group of students who wore their crew cuts and toggle-topper coats like a uniform over to the administration building, where a receptionist told me which campus street to follow and which stairs to climb to reach the Spanish Language and Literature Department. Ten minutes later I was knocking on a door which bore the legend
Rafael Caballero, Catalonian Culture,
in black letters on maple-stained wood, and a girl's voice told me to come in.

It was a small office with a battleship-gray metal desk, chair, and filing cabinets. There was a closed door behind the desk and on the wall a large blowup of a Goya sketch savagely and pessimistically showing a blind beggar with a dog and a black cape and an empty hat.

A boy in an open toggle-topper stood before the desk with his chin slumped almost to his chest. “But I think I ought to drop Spanish Sixty-seven,” he was saying. He added brightly, hopefully: “I could pick up Sixty-eight next semester.”

The girl behind the desk said, “I'm afraid it's much too late in the semester to even consider dropping a course.”

“But,” the boy challenged, “I'm going to flunk.”

“I'm sorry, Mr. McLeod. Really, I can't help you.”

“My flunking will be on your hands,” the boy said dolefully. “I want to see Mr. Caballero.”

The girl looked up from the papers on her desk for the first time. She had long, lustrously black hair which fell straight as a well-pitched tent except where it coiled under at the bottom a couple of inches below her shoulders. She had a high forehead which called for but did not have bangs and which managed to tone down the hot dark eyes and the full, moistly red lips. Perhaps that was the idea. She wore a white cashmere sweater which clung with the tentative gentleness of an uncertain lover to the kind of torso which belonged, without any uncertainty, in a sweater ad. She was not a beautiful girl in the trite mode of beauty that Hollywood has proclaimed, but she was strikingly attractive and her easy, unaffected poise told you she knew it.

“Mr. Caballero is not in,” she said to the boy.

“Well, when can I see him?”

“I don't know when he'll be in. Why don't you see Dean of Men?”

“Maybe I will,” the boy sulked.

“You do that, Mr. McLeod,” the girl said frostily. Mr. McLeod left. The girl smiled at me with friendly curiosity.

“I guess I go to the corner of the room too,” I said. “I'm looking for Mr. Caballero.”

“Well, he really isn't here.” Her lips were still smiling at me, but her eyes were troubled.

“Drum's the name. Primo Blas Lequerica, the Parana Republic's permanent delegate to the United—”

“Oh, Mr. Drum!” she cried, before I could finish. She got up and came around the desk, flashing a hopeful, optimistic grin. Long legs were covered by a nubby brown tweed skirt and nylons and supported by heels which gave her two inches to add to her own five-six or seven. “Then you must be working with Mr. Dineen. You can tell us where Rafael—where Mr. Caballero is!”

“Not me,” I said. She pulled up short, close enough for me to smell a very faint but musky perfume. The eager grin went the way of yesterday's clear and sunny weather.

“I'm so sorry,” she said. “But when you mentioned Mr. Lequerica, I thought—”

“That I was the private detective he recommended to Mr. Caballero? I was. A friend of mine took the job. I take it Caballero's missing.”

She was disappointed enough to say tartly, “Why don't you ask your friend?”

“My friend is dead.”

“Dead? Dead?” She ran the gamut from joy to despair in a few seconds. It was too much for her. She turned her back and covered her face and sobbed. I touched her shoulder and she swung around as if we'd practiced this many times before, and she shoved her face against my chest and went on sobbing.

After a while I asked, “The police know about Caballero?”

Her head bobbed. Her glossy black hair tickled my chin. “No, no. He's only been missing since the night before last … we couldn't be sure that he … but if his bodyguard … dead …”

She found my breast-pocket handkerchief and used it. She mumbled something about being a great big baby and I said something fatherly about how a good cry helped. For some reason that made her mad. She uninhibitedly blew her nose and shoved the handkerchief back in her pocket. She stamped back to the desk and lit a cigarette. She wiped a tear from the tawny skin of her cheek.

“I'm sorry about Mr. Dineen,” she said. “Truly sorry.” She puffed on the cigarette, scowled, and crushed it out in an ashtray.

“This is what I know,” I told her. “Lequerica recommended me to Mr. Caballero, who wanted a bodyguard because he was completing a book said to contain the kind of dynamite that could blow the lid off twenty years of dictatorship down in the Parana Republic. Mr. Caballero had been threatened by parties unknown, and decided a bodyguard would be a good investment. I'd done some work for Preston Baylis, a Washington attorney representing the Republic's interests in the U.S., so Baylis recommended me to Lequerica, and Lequerica to Caballero. But why Lequerica, who works for the Parana Republic government, would go out of his way to help Caballero, whose book—”

“They're friends, that's why.”

“You're Caballero's secretary?”

“Yes. I am Eulalia Mistral,” she said, and offered her hand. I shook it, and observed that she pumped my hand with almost boyish enthusiasm, and made some inane remark about the wind of the same name while I thought of a dying man's last words and a boat of the same name and whether I would ever know which one Andy had had in mind.

“The book still bothers me, Miss Mistral,” I said. “Or Lequerica's interest in seeing that it and its author were protected.”

“All right. Maybe you're right. I thought they were friends, but the only thing Lequerica did was recommend a detective. Rafael could have used the Yellow Pages.”

“Can the book really do what they say it can do?”

“Oh, yes. I've worked closely with Mr. Caballero. I've helped him organize his notes and typed the final draft of each chapter. Mr. Caballero, you see, was a Catalonian refugee of Republican Spain who made the mistake of fleeing, back in the late thirties, to the Parana Republic. He was employed for ten years as a private tutor in the family of the Republic's dictator, Indalecio Grande. Then, about eight years ago, he came to this country, went to work at the university, and began his book. He's the only man who can blow the lid off Indalecio Grande's rein of terror from the inside. I'm scared, Mr. Drum. If they've got their hands on him—”

“He's an American citizen, isn't he?”

“You think that would stop them?”

“The book's finished?”

“Not quite.”

“Where's the manuscript now?”

Eulalia Mistral lit another cigarette, and smoked it this time. “Night before last,” she said, “Mr. Caballero taught a late evening class here at the university, then left in company with Mr. Dineen. In the morning he didn't show up.”

“The manuscript?”

“He usually kept it in the safe here. It was gone. Mrs. Caballero says he never reached home that night.”

“Then why the hell didn't somebody call the cops?”

“Stop shouting at me.”

“Well, why didn't they?”

Eulalia went to the window and looked out. When she turned around, there were bright angry spots of color in her cheeks and her fists were clenched. She was furious, but I didn't have any idea why. “I don't have to answer you!” she cried. “Who do you think you are?”

I headed for the door, but I wasn't exactly trying to break any speed records getting there. “Suit yourself, sister. But if you're mad at somebody else, don't bite my head off and expect me to stick around.”

“Wait. Please.”

“I'm listening.”

“I've known Rafael Caballero for a long time. My father was in the Parana Republic underground.” She went on sotto voce: “He went to jail. He died there. Rafael took me to this country with him. He has been like a second father to me, but his personal affairs—are no concern of mine.”

“His personal affairs are why you didn't call the cops?”