Westlake, Donald E - SSC 02 Read online

  This time, he had contented himself with going through my personal papers and with leaving me a short but complete note, typewritten and sitting on my answering machine:

  You have until noon Monday.

  * * *

  The phone woke me at nine-thirty Sunday morning and it was Staples, sounding slightly irritated through his normal cheeriness. "Do you feel brilliant this morning, Carey?" "What? What?"

  "Oh, I'm sorry, did I wake you?" "No, but you might. What time is it?" "Nine twenty-seven. Up late last night?" Yes, as a matter of fact. I'd stayed up till nearly three, distracting myself from thoughts of Edgarson by trying to make a sensible interview out of Brant's twaddle. But I was awake now, so I sat straighter in the bed and said, "That's okay, I ought to get up anyway. What's happening?

  "Another little problem."

  "Problem? You mean a murder?"

  "Well, that's the question. I say it's a clear-cut case of suicide, but Al Bray keeps saying it feels funny. He doesn't have a bit of evidence, it just feels funny."

  So that was why Staples was annoyed. It wasn't so much that Bray disagreed with him, which surely must have happened more than once in the course of their partnership, as that Bray was disagreeing on Staples' grounds. It was Staples who was supposed to have feelings and be intuitive, while Bray was assigned the role of the methodical plodder. To have the plodder suddenly intuit all over the place could be unsettling.

  I said, "You mean you think it's suicide and he thinks it's murder?"

  "He doesn't know what he thinks," Staples said. "It just doesn't feel right. So he asked me to call you."

  "He asked? Al Bray?"

  "We made a deal. If you agree with me it was suicide, Al won't make any more fuss and we'll put in our report and that's the end of it."

  "What if I think it's murder?"

  He chuckled; a bit challengingly, I thought. "Then you'll have to prove it," he said.

  * * *

  They sent a car for me, with a uniformed policeman as chauffeur. I hadn't been happy about leaving the apartment untended, since the chainlock only works when there's someone inside to attach it, but then I remembered a stunt from several hundred spy movies. I took a paper match, bent it double, and wedged it between door and frame just below the bottom hinge. It protruded just enough to be seen, if you knew where to look, and if anyone opened my apartment door the match would fall. It wouldn't keep Edgarson out, but it would warn me in time if he'd returned. If the match was on the floor when I came back I'd know Edgarson was once again in residence, and off I'd go for Romeo.

  Outside, the policeman was standing beside his unmarked black Plymouth, his breath steaming in the cold air. The snow had stopped but the sky was still gray and heavy with low clouds, and the temperature was dropping.

  Our destination was Central Park West near 89th Street, and on the way the cop filled me in on the situation. At eight-twenty this morning, a tenant of the building in question had come out to walk his dog, and found the crushed body of a woman lying face up on the sidewalk. The tenant returned immediately to the building and informed the doorman, who called the police. The doorman also obtained a blanket and went out to cover the body, at which point he realized the victim was someone he knew, a tenant who had occupied one of the penthouse duplexes atop the building. Apparently she had fallen or jumped or been pushed from the terrace up there.

  A patrol car responded to the first call, but no one went up to the dead woman's apartment until the precinct detectives arrived, and then it took considerable banging and doorbell-ringing to rouse the woman's husband, who had been asleep and had not been aware of his wife's absence from the apartment. According to the husband, his wife had been despondent and depressed recently and had spoken of suicide.

  The couple's name was Templeton, George and Margo, and they were both in their early fifties. He was a millionaire in the real estate business in the city, with ownership of office buildings and Broadway theaters among his holdings, and she was a one-time actress who had given up her career twenty-five years ago to marry him. They had two sons, both now grown and living away from New York. They had been to a party last night where both had become very drunk and where George Templeton freely admitted they had quarreled publicly over whether or not he had ruined her life twenty-five years ago by marrying her. They had returned home, continuing the argument in their chauffeur-driven limousine and in their bedroom, until Templeton had either gone to sleep or passed out from drink. And he had known nothing more until the pounding of the police at his door had awakened him.

  The Templetons kept a staff of three servants, but only one of these—the maid—lived in the apartment, and she invariably spent her Saturday nights and Sundays with her family in New Hyde Park.

  As to the time of death, the Weather Bureau said the snow had stopped at just about eight o'clock this morning. The body had been found at eight-twenty, and both the tenant who'd found it and the doorman who'd covered it swore there was no snow on top of the body. After eight o'clock, then, and before eight-twenty.

  I was primed with all of this by the time we reached the building, and I was happy to see the body was no longer on the sidewalk. Clean and neat, that's the way I like my murders.

  My chauffeur-cop accompanied me into the building and up in the elevator. Going up I reviewed what he'd told me, and decided Al Bray was probably right. It not only sounded like murder, it sounded like my murder, plus a terrace. I mean the murder I'd committed. Argumentative women don't commit suicide, they don't want to give the opposition the satisfaction. What most likely happened was that George Templeton, tired and drunk and getting older by the second, had finally popped Margo a good one to shut her up and she'd done herself a fatal injury in hitting the floor. Not wanting the scandal or the trouble of a manslaughter trial, George had chucked her over the terrace, pretended to be asleep, and then told the police his wife had been suicidal lately.

  I felt ambivalent about exposing old George; in a way, we were members of the same fraternity.

  * * *

  It was a two-story apartment, with a spiral staircase.

  The elevator let me off directly into the living room, on the apartment's lower floor, where Staples and Bray were sitting together on green velvet sofas, having a stiff-necked discussion. It ended when they saw me, and they both got up and came over, Staples looking a bit cocky and defiant, Bray awkward but determined.

  It was Bray who did the talking, after we'd exchanged ritual hellos. "I feel a little funny about this situation, Mr. Thorpe," he said. "It goes against the grain with me. But there's something wrong here, I know there is, and I just can't put my finger on it. You've come up with a couple of off-the-wall solutions the last week, so maybe you can do something this time."

  Staples added, "Even if it's just to put those feelings of Al's to rest."

  "I don't know what to say," I admitted. "You people are trained, I'm not. I've just had beginner's luck."

  "Maybe you've still got it," Bray said. "Come along."

  We went up the spiral staircase in single file, Bray and then me and then Staples, who said, "Templeton isn't here right now. His doctor's in this building and he's down there, under sedation. If you need to talk with him, we can work something out."

  At the head of the stairs was the master bedroom, large and ornately furnished, with french doors leading to the terrace. Windows flanking the french doors featured hanging plants, with frost-blackened leaves.

  Staples now took over, saying, "No one's gone out on the terrace yet. It's exactly the way we found it. Come take a look."

  I went with him. He opened the french doors and I stood in the doorway as he pointed out the obvious, saying, "You'll notice there's footprints in the fresh snow. But there's only one set of them, and they lead straight out to the railing, and they don't come back."

  I nodded. "So I see."

  "We took the shoes off the body," he went on, "and compared them with the nearest prints, and those prints w
ere definitely made by those shoes."

  "Ah."

  I stood frowning at the terrace. The recent windless snow, the current bitter cold, had combined to create an almost perfect tableau for us, as though it were a model made out of papier mache. Two lawn chairs were folded away to one side of the terrace, which was otherwise unfurnished. The layer of snow on the floor was two to three inches thick, and in it the footprints showed clearly. There was no other disturbance of the snow of any kind out there. Beyond the snow-topped wrought iron railing was Central Park, far below, shrouded in grayish white.

  Cold air was seeping in, despite the lack of wind. I stepped back from the doorway, shivering a little and looking again at the frostbitten hanging plants. I said, "Have you been keeping this door open very much?"

  "Not much at all," Bray said. "Why? Does it matter?"

  "I don't know if anything matters," I told him. "I'm just trying to get a picture of the situation."

  Staples said, "Shall I close it now?"

  "Might as well."

  Staples closed the french doors and then he and Bray watched me as I wandered around the bedroom, studying things at random and trying to come to a decision. Finally I turned to Bray and said, 'I'm sorry, Sergeant Bray. I'm not saying you're wrong, but this time inspiration just refuses to hit."

  He frowned at me, and I could feel his confusion and his mistrust. He believed I was lying, but he didn't know why. He said, "You don't see any indication of murder, eh?"

  "Indication? I don't see any proof. There's plenty of indication, but you already know that. The argument at the party, the amount of alcohol they'd drunk, all the rest of it."

  "But no proof." Now it was Bray's turn to wander the room, glowering at this and that. "There's something here," he said. "I know it, but I just can't get hold of it."

  "I'm sorry I can't help," I told him. "I hate to spoil a perfect batting average."

  "You're not spoiling it," Staples assured me. Now that he was being vindicated his manner was bluff and hearty. "If there's nothing here, and you find nothing, then you're still batting a thousand."

  "Oh, no," I said. "I'm not saying Sergeant Bray is wrong. I do know what he means, that there's a certain something about all this that doesn't feel just right. But I don't know what it is any more than he does."

  That mollified Bray, without spoiling Staples' pleasure, and soon afterwards they sent me off again to be driven home. Staples' farewell to me was, "See you at three."

  "What? Oh, Gaslight." That had entirely slipped my mind. "You and your wife at three. Absolutely."

  Bray being present for this exchange, it became neces-

  sary to widen the invitation to include him, and he thanked me and said he'd try to make it. But his mind was still on the death of Margo Templeton, and his vague conviction that something was wrong.

  Well, he would find it or he wouldn't. I'd done what I could for my fraternity brother.

  Good luck, George.

  SIX

  The Chainlock Mystery

  I was rewriting my questions to match Big John Brant's answers when Staples called again. "It looks like I'm going to be late," he said. "We've had a new development."

  Poor George. "In the Templeton case?"

  Not poor George. "No, as a matter of fact, it's in the Laura Penney case."

  Why did my heart flutter? I was the one in the clear.

  "A new development? That's wonderful."

  "We're not sure yet," Staples told me. "It's an anonymous letter with a tip in it."

  Edgarson! That son of a bitch, that rotten filthy bastard! Clutching the phone so tightly that my fingers hurt, I said, "A tip? What kind of tip?"

  "It's all very vague and roundabout. But it isn't just some crank who read about it in the papers, because it's got details in it that only an insider would know." Then he dropped the other shoe: "Do you know any friend of Mrs. Penney's with connections in Boston?"

  "Boston? You mean, besides me?"

  Staples said, "You? I thought you were a native New Yorker."

  "No, I'm a Boston boy."

  "Well, it can't be you. Can you think of anybody else?"

  "I'll put my mind to it," I promised.

  "Fine. Anyway, the reason I called, I might be a little late for the movie. Patricia's coming direct to your place and I'll meet her there. If that's okay with you."

  "Of course. No problem."

  "Fine. See you then."

  * * *

  I was in the kitchenette, putting together a quick lunch prior to the screening, when it seemed to me I heard some scratching sounds at the front door. Stepping out to the living room, a piece of baloney in my hand, I saw the door partway open and a hand reaching through to poke at the chainlock.

  "Hah!" I cried. "Hah, you son of a bitch, you wont get in now!"

  The hand withdrew and the door closed. He'd given up, the bastard.

  Wait a minute. Was there something on the chainlock? Squinting, trying to see, I moved toward the door as the man on the other side gave it a sudden loud thump. The door shook, and the chainlock ball fell out of its slot. The chain swung free, and the door opened wide, and Edgarson came walking into my apartment.

  "Yak!" I ran back to the kitchenette, exchanged the slice of baloney for my longest and sharpest knife—which was neither particularly long nor particularly sharp—and then I crouched in the doorway, snarling and at bay. "Don't come any closer!"

  Edgarson gave me a pitying smile. "Do you want to see how I'd take that knife away from you?"

  "I'm serious about this," I said.

  So he came over and took the knife away and tossed it into the sink and released my arm. "Now we can talk," he said.

  I headed toward the door, but he didn't follow. Instead, he stood in the kitchenette doorway and called after me, "It's mighty cold out there."

  And I in my shirtsleeves. Hand on the doorknob, I looked back at him and saw he wasn't behaving in a threatening manner. He was simply standing there by the kitchenette, watching me, waiting for me to settle down. Also, he hadn't been more physical than necessary in disarming me of the knife. Hesitant, not sure what I should do next, I said, "What do you want, Edgarson?"

  "You know what I want."

  "I have friends coming here pretty soon," I told him. "Including two policemen."

  "I've noticed that about you, Mr. Thorpe," he said, and crossed the room casually to sit on my sofa. "You ve gotten real chummy with those two officers."

  "They told me about that anonymous letter you wrote."

  That produced a happy smile. "Oh, you know about that already, do you? I was going to mention it."

  Releasing the doorknob, I moved back into the living room, saying, "This isn't fair, you know. It really isn't fair."

  He spread his hands. "What isn't fair, Mr. Thorpe? You owe me ten thousand dollars. You'll pay me before twelve o'clock noon tomorrow."

  "I don't owe you! The evidence is destroyed, you don't have anything on me any more."

  "Oh, that little razzle-dazzle you pulled, about what story you'd tell." He shook his head, his smile turning down at the corners. "Well, that's in the past now, isn't it, Mr. Thorpe? You've already told your story, haven't you? And you can't change your story any more than I can change mine."

  "So it's a stalemate," I said.

  "Not quite." His smile became happier again. "There's still one difference between us," he said. "I didnt kill Mrs. Laura Penney, but you did. And I know you did."

  "But you can't do anything about it. You just admitted as much, you can't change your story."

  "That's right, Mr. Thorpe. About the only way I can be a good citizen now is anonymously."

  "You can't prove anything."

  "Well, sir, Mr. Thorpe, what proof do I have to have to write an anonymous letter? All I need do is attract their attention, wouldn't you say so? And leave the rest to them?"

  "You already did that."

  "Oh, that one." Modestly he smiled and shook his he
ad. "I could do a lot better than that, Mr. Thorpe."

  "Is that right? What could you say? How is an anonymous letter going to—"

  The phone rang. I glanced over at it, annoyed, and then finished my sentence as I crossed the room to answer it. "—be more persuasive than I am? I know them now, they're my friends. Hello?"

  Staples: "Fred again, Carey. Listen, this is taking a while, I'm definitely going to be late."

  Glowering at Edgarson, I said, "I'm sorry to hear that, Fred."

  "Patricia's on her way, though. And I'll get there just as soon as I can."

  "We won't start without you," I promised.

  "You know," he said, "it's amazing how many people don't really come from New York."

  "Is that right?"

  "Tell you all about it when I see you."-

  "Right. So long."

  I hung up, and Edgarson said, "Let's see, now, would that be Fred Staples? Detective Sergeant, Homicide South?"

  "Excuse me a minute," I said, and went into the bathroom, where I swallowed a Valium with Alka Seltzer. Then I stood for a long minute looking at my reflection in the mirror.

  I knew what I had to do. What choice was there?

  I got the hammer from the storage cabinet under the sink, and then I eased open the door just far enough to see him out there. He was on his feet, strolling comfortably around, at home and at ease. He stopped at the bookcases, he browsed, he selected an issue of Third World Cinema and leafed through it. Would he stop at the two-page spread of stills from the porno movie?

  He would. Clutching the hammer, I slipped out of the bathroom and across the carpeted living room floor. Remembering how readily he had taken that knife from me, wincingly aware of what he might do if he saw me coming at him with a hammer in my hand, I found myself torn between the needs of speed and silence, and I did a sort of frantic tip-toe plunge across the room, lifting the hammer high over my head.