The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction (76 page)

“You really should do something about your suits, Mr Pine.”

I looked back at him sitting there like one of those old Michelin tire ads. “How much,” I said, “would you charge me for one?”

“I think we could do something quite nice for you at three hundred.”

“For that price,” I said, “I would expect two pairs of pants.”

His chin began to bob and he made a sound like roosters fighting. He was laughing. I closed the door in the middle of it and went on down the hall.

The address on South Shore Drive was a long low yellow-brick apartment building of three floors and an English basement. A few cars were parked along a wide sweep of concrete running past the several entrances, and I angled the Plymouth into an open spot almost directly across from 8789.

The rain got in a few licks at me before I could reach the door. Inside was a small neat foyer, complete with bright brass mail boxes and an inner door. The card on the box for 3C showed the name Amos Spain.

I pressed the right button and after a longish moment a woman’s voice came down the tube. “Yes?”

That jarred me a little. I hadn’t actually expected an answer. I said, “Mrs Spain?”

“This is Mrs Monroe,” the voice said. “Mr Spain’s daughter. Are you from the post office?”

“Afraid not. I’m an officer, Mrs Monroe. Want to talk to you.”

“An officer? Why, I don’t believe . . . What about?”

“Not from down here, Mrs Monroe. Ring the buzzer.”

“I’ll do no such thing! How do I know you’re a policeman? For all I know you could be a – a—”

“On a day like this? Don’t be silly.”

There was some silence and then the lock began to stutter. I went through and on up carpeted steps to the third floor. Halfway along a wide cheerful hallway was a partially open door and a woman in a flowered housecoat looking out at me.

She was under thirty but not very far under. She had wicked eyes. Her hair was reddish brown and there was a lot of it. Her skin was flawless, her cheekbones high, her mouth an insolent curve. She was long and slender in the legs, small in the waist, high in the breasts. She was dynamite.

I was being stared at in a coolly impersonal way. “A policeman you said. I’m fascinated. What is it you want?”

I said, “Do I get invited in or do we entertain the neighbors?”

Her eyes wavered and she bit her lip. She started to look back over her shoulder, thought better of it, then said, “Oh, very well. If you’ll be brief.”

She stepped back and I followed her across a tiny reception hall and on into an immense living room, with a dinette at one end and the open door to a kitchen beyond that. The living room was paneled, with beautiful leather chairs, a chesterfield, lamps with drum shades, a loaded pipe rack, a Governor Winthrop secretary, a fireplace with a gas log. Not neat, not even overly clean, but the right place for a man who puts comfort ahead of everything else.

I dropped my coat on a hassock and sat down on one of the leather chairs. Her lips hardened. “Don’t get too comfortable,” she said icily. “I was about to leave when you rang.”

“It’s a little chilly out for a housecoat,” I said.

Her jaw hardened. “Just who do you think you are, busting in here and making smart remarks? You say you’re a cop. As far as manners go, I believe it. Now I think I’d like to see some real proof.”

I shrugged. “No proof, Mrs Monroe. I said officer, not policeman. A private detective can be called an officer without stretching too far.”

“Private—” Her teeth snapped shut and she swallowed almost convulsively. Her face seemed a little pale now but I could have imagined that. “What do you want?” she almost whispered.

“Where’s Amos Spain?” I said.

“My . . . father?”

“Uh-huh.”

“. . . I don’t know. He went out early this morning.”

“He say where?”

“No.” Whatever had shocked her was passing. “Tom and I were still sleeping when he went out.”

“Tom?”

“My husband.”

“Where’s he?”

“Still asleep. We got in late. Why do you want to know where my father is?”

I said, “I think it would be a good idea if you sat down, Mrs Monroe. I’m afraid I’ve brought some bad news.”

She didn’t move. Her eyes went on watching me. They were a little wild now and not at all wicked. She wet her lips and said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about. Bad news about what?”

“About your father. He’s dead, Mrs Monroe. Murdered.”

“I don’t believe it,” she said quickly. Almost too quickly.

“He’s been identified. Not much chance for a mistake.”

She turned away abruptly and walked stiffly over to a lamp table and took a cigarette from a green cloisonné box. Her hand holding the match wavered noticeably but nothing showed in her face. She blew out a long streamer of smoke and came back and perched carelessly on an arm of the couch across from me. The housecoat slipped open slightly, letting me see most of the inner curve of a freshly powdered thigh. I managed to keep from chewing a hole in the rug.

“There’s been some mistake, Mr Pine. Dad never had an enemy in the world. What do you suggest I do?”

I thought back to be sure. Then I was sure. I said, “The body’s probably at the morgue by this time and already autopsied. Might be a good idea to send your husband over. Save you from a pretty unpleasant job.”

“Of course. I’ll wake him right away and tell him about it. You’ve been very kind. I’m sorry if I was rude.”

She hit me with a smile that jarred my back teeth and stood up to let me know the interview was over and I could run along home now and dream about her thigh.

I slid off the chair and picked up my hat and coat. While putting them on I moved over to the row of windows and looked down into the courtyard. Nobody in sight. Not in this weather. Rain blurred the glass and formed widening puddles in thin brown grass that was beginning to turn green.

I turned and said, “I’ll be running along, Mrs Monroe,” and took four quick steps and reached for the bedroom door.

There was nothing wrong with her reflexes, I’ll say that for her. A silken rustle and the flash of flowered cloth and she was standing between me and the door. We stood there like that, breathing at each other, our faces inches apart. She was lovely and she smelled good and the housecoat was cut plenty low.

And her face was as hard as four anvils.

“I must have made a mistake,” I said. “I was looking for the hall door.”

“Only two doors,” she said between her teeth. “Two doors in the entire apartment. Not counting the bathroom. One that lets you out and one to the bedroom. And you picked the wrong one. Go on. Get out of here before I forget you’re not a cop.”

On my way out I left the inner door downstairs unlocked. In case.

The rain went on and on. I sat there listening to it and wondering if Noah had felt this way along about the thirty-ninth day. Smoke from my fourth cigarette eddied and swirled in the damp air through the no-draft vent.

The Plymouth was still parked across from 8789, and I was in it, knowing suddenly who had killed Amos Spain and why Spain had been wearing what he wore and why he wasn’t wearing what he hadn’t worn. It was knowledge built piece by piece on what I had seen and heard from the moment I walked in and found the body on the couch. It was the kind of knowledge you can get a conviction with – if you have that one key piece.

The key piece was what I didn’t have.

Now and then a car came into the wide driveway and stopped at one of the entrances to let somebody out or to pick somebody up. None of them was for the rat hole to which I was glued. A delivery truck dropped off a dinette set a couple of doors down and I couldn’t have cared less.

I lighted another cigarette and crossed my legs the other way and thought about hunting up a telephone and calling Lund and telling him to come out and get the knife artist and sweat that key piece out in the open. Only I didn’t want it that way. This was one I wanted to wrap up myself. It had been my office and my couch and almost my client, and I was the one the cops had tromped on. Not that the tromping had amounted to much. But even a small amount of police displeasure is not what you list under assets.

Another twenty minutes floated by. They would still be up there in that apartment wearing a path in the rug. Waiting, sweating blood, hanging on desperately, risking the chance that I had known more than I let on and was already out yelling for the cops.

I would have loved to know what they were waiting for.

When the break did come I almost missed it. An ancient Ford with a pleated front fender wheezed into the curb. A hatless young man in a rained-on gray uniform got out to look at the number over the entrance to 8789. He had a damp-looking cigarette pasted to one corner of his mouth and a white envelope in his left hand. The local post office dropping off a piece of registered mail.

And then I remembered Mrs Monroe’s first question.

I slapped open the glove compartment and got out my gun and shoved it under the band of my trousers while I was reaching for the door. I crossed the roadway at a gallop and barged into the foyer just as the messenger took a not too clean thumb off the button for 3C. I made a point of getting out my keys to keep him from thinking Willie Sutton was loose again.

He never even knew I was in town. He said, “Post office; registered letter,” into the tube and the buzzer was clattering before he had the last word out. He went through and on up the steps without a backward glance.

The door was off the latch, the way I had left it earlier. By the time the door to 3C opened, I was a few feet away staring vaguely at the closed door to 3B and trying to look like somebody’s cousin from Medicine Hat. The uniformed man said, “Amos Spain?” and a deeper voice said, “I’m Mr Spain,” and a signature was written and a long envelope changed hands.

Before the door could close I was over there. I said, “It’s me again.”

He was a narrow-chested number with a long sallow face, beady eyes, a thin nose that leaned slightly to starboard, and a chin that had given up the struggle. Hair like black moss covered a narrow head. This would be Tom Monroe, the husband.

Terror and anger and indecision were having a field day with his expression. His long neck jerked and his sagging jaw wobbled. He clutched the edge of the door, wanting to slam it but not quite daring to. The silence weighed a ton.

All this was lost on the messenger. He took back his pencil and went off down the hall, his only worry the number of hours until payday. I leaned a hand against the thin chest in front of me and pushed hard enough to get us both into the room. I shut the door with my heel, said, “I’ll take that,” and yanked the letter out of his paralyzed fingers. It had sealing wax along the flap and enough stamps pasted on the front to pay the national debt.

Across the room the girl in the flowered housecoat was reaching a hand under a couch pillow. I took several long steps and stiff-armed the small of her back and she sat down hard on the floor. I put my empty hand under the pillow and found a snub-nosed Smith & Wesson .32, all chambers filled and dark red nail polish on the sight. I held it loosely along my leg and said, “Well, here we are,” in a sprightly voice.

Monroe hadn’t moved. He stared at me sullenly, fear still flickering in his small nervous eyes. The girl climbed painfully to her feet, not looking at either of us, and dropped down on the edge of a leather chair and put her face in her hands.

The man’s restless eyes darted from me to the girl and back to me again. A pale tongue dabbed furtively at lips so narrow they hardly existed. He said hoarsely, “Just what the hell’s the bright idea busting in here and grabbing what don’t belong to you?”

I flapped the envelope loosely next to my ear. “You mean this? Not yours either, buster.”

“It belongs to my father-in-law. I simply signed for it.”

“Oh, knock it off,” I said wearily. “You went way out of your league on this caper, Tom. You should have known murder isn’t for grifters with simple minds.”

A sound that was half wail, half sob filtered through the girl’s fingers. The man said absently, “Shut up, Cora.” His eyes skittered over my face. “Murder? Who’s talking about murder? You the one who shoved in here a while ago and told Cora about Amos Spain?”

“I wasn’t telling her a thing,” I said. “She knew it long before. You told her.”

“You might like to try proving that,” he said.

“You bet,” I said. I put the gun on the couch arm and looked at the envelope. Yesterday’s postmark, mailed from New York City. Addressed in a spidery handwriting, with the return address reading:
B. Jones, General Delivery, Radio City Station, New York, NY
. I ripped open the flap and shook out the contents. A plain sheet of bond paper wrapped around three odd-looking stamps. One was circular with a pale rose background and black letters. The other two were square, one orange and one blue, with the same crude reproduction of Queen Victoria on both. All three wouldn’t have carried a postcard across the street.

Monroe was staring at the stamps and chewing his lip. He looked physically ill. The girl was watching me now, her fingers picking at the edge of the housecoat, her face white and drawn and filled with silent fury.

I said, “It would almost have to be stamps. I should have guessed as much two hours ago. How much are they worth?”

“How would I know?” Monroe said sulkily. “They weren’t sent to me. I never saw them before.”

I slid the stamps back into the envelope and put the envelope in my pocket. “You’d know, brother. If you’d kept a better eye on Amos Spain you might even have gotten away with the whole thing.”

“You’ve got nothing on us. Why don’t you just shove off?”

“I’ve got everything on you,” I said. “Not that I deserve any credit. The Army mule could have done the job. I can give you the State Attorney’s case right now.”

I picked up the gun and swung it lightly between a thumb and finger and sat on the couch arm. Rain beat against the windows in a muted murmur. From the kitchen came the lurch and whine of the refrigerator motor.

“Somebody named B. Jones,” I said, “gets hold of some rare stamps. Illegally. Jones knows there are collectors around who will buy stolen stamps. Amos Spain is such a collector. A deal is made by phone or letter and the stamps are mailed to Spain. In some way you two find out about it. After the stamps are in the mail, perhaps. No point in trying to get them away from Uncle Sam; but there’s another way. So the two of you show up here early this morning and force your way in on old Amos, who is still in bed. You tie him up a little, let’s say, and gag him, leave him on the bed and come out here in the living room to wait for the postman with the stamps.