1949 - You're Lonely When You Dead (3 page)

T
he telephone bell, ringing like an hysterical fire alarm brought me out of a heavy sleep with a start that nearly capsized the bed.

I groped for the light switch, turned it on, and as I grabbed at the receiver I looked at my bedside clock. It was four minutes past three.

‘Is that you, Malloy?’ a voice barked in my ear. This is Mifflin, police headquarters. Sorry to wake you, but a guy’s just brought in a handbag that belongs to Dana Lewis. She’s one of your operators, isn’t she?’

‘You didn’t wake me up to tell me that, did you?’ I yelled.

‘Take it easy. We’ve called Miss Lewis but can’t get an answer. Besides, there’s something wrong. There are bloodstains on the sand near where the bag was found. At least that’s what the guy says. I’m going out there right away. I thought maybe you’d want to go with me.’

I woke up then.

‘Where was it found?’

‘On the sand dunes about a mile from your joint. I’ll be over in ten minutes, and I’ll pick you up.’

‘Right,’ I said, slammed down the receiver back on its cradle and scrambled out of bed.

By the time I had dressed I heard a car pull up outside the cabin. I snapped off the lights and ran down to the gate.

Mifflin and two cops in uniform were waiting for mc in a big radio car.

Mifflin was a short stocky guy with a fiat, red battered face and a nose like a lump of putty. He was a good, tough cop, and we had worked together off and on for some time. I liked him and he didn’t exactly hate me, and whenever we could we helped each other. He opened the car door, and as soon as I was in, the driver sent the car jolting along the beach road.

‘It may be a false alarm,’ he said as I settled beside him, ‘but I thought you would want to be in on it. Maybe the guy’s talking through the back of his neck about bloodstains, but he seemed pretty definite about it.’

‘What was he doing out there at this hour?’

‘Snooping around. He’s quite a character in these parts. A guy named Owen Leadbetter. He’s a bit queer in the head. One of these nuts who spy on courting couples and makes out he’s bird watching. But he’s harmless enough. We know him well. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.’

I grunted. I wasn’t interested in flies.

‘Was Miss Lewis on a job?’ Mifflin asked.

‘Not to my knowledge,’ I said cautiously.

When I told Cerf I guaranteed secrecy I wasn’t fooling. I had made it a rule, no matter what happened, never to mention a client’s name without his permission.

‘We’re about there,’ the driver said suddenly. ‘He said the first line of sand dunes, didn’t lie?’

‘That’s right. Put on the searchlight, Jack, so we can see what we’re doing.’

The small but powerful beam of the auxiliary spotlight went on and lit up the stretch of sand dunes before us. It was a lonely, forlorn spot. Coarse, scrubby bushes grew out of the sand in big clumps. To our right, and in the distance, we could hear the sea beating on the reef, and there was a chilly wind that whipped up the sand every now and then into scurrying whirls.

We got out of the car.

‘You stick right here, Jack,’ Mifflin said to the driver. ‘If I shout, turn the light on me.’ He handed me a flashlight.

‘We’ll keep together. And you, Harry, you start looking to the right. We’ll go to the left.’

‘Why didn’t you bring Leadbetter with you?’ I asked as we tramped over the loose sand. ‘It would have saved time.’

‘I didn’t want to be bothered with him. You have no idea how that guy talks once he lets his clutch in. He’s marked the spot with a pile of stones. It shouldn’t be hard to find.’

It wasn’t. We found the pile of stones about a couple of hundred yards from the car.

Mifflin shouted to the driver, who focused the searchlight on the spot. We stood a little to one side and examined the ground. The sand had been trampled flat in places, but was too loose to hold footprints. Near the pile of stones was a patch of red. It looked like blood, and the flies seemed to like it and it gave me a hollow feeling. Dana was a fine kid. She and I had been pals for some time.

‘Looks as if someone’s been around,’ Mifflin said, pushing his hat to the back of his head. ‘The stuff’s no good for prints. That’s blood, Vic.’

‘Yeah,’ I said.

The other policeman, Harry, came over.

‘If she’s anywhere around she’ll be in there,’ he said, pointing with his nightstick to a large clump of shrubs.

‘There’s been a trail to that clump, but it’s been smoothed over.’

‘Let’s have a look,’ Mifflin said.

I stayed right where I was while the other two went across the sand and began to search among the shrubs. My mind was a blank as I watched their bright flashlight beams probing among the thick undergrowth.

Both of them suddenly stopped and I saw them bend down. I took out a cigarette, put it between my dry lips but forgot to light it. They remained bending for a minute or so.

It seemed like a year to me. Then Mifflin straightened.

‘Hey, Vic,’ he called. His voice was sharp. ‘We’ve found her.’

I threw away the unlighted cigarette and walked stiff-legged across the sand and joined them.

In the hard glare of their flashlights she looked like a doll.

She lay on her back, sand in her hair and eyes and mouth.

She was as naked as the back of my hand, and the front of her skull was smashed in. Her hands were like claws, stiff in death, held before her face. From the look of her scratched, sand-smeared body she had been dragged along face down by her feet and dumped there the way you would dump a sack of garbage, and with as much feeling.

The stark horror on her face turned me cold.

T
he grey dawn light was showing above the line of skyscrapers as I came out of Police Headquarters. It was five-fifty-five, and I felt low enough to walk under a duck’s tail.

While the prowl boys were bringing Dana in, I had put through a call to Paula. She had asked me to go over to her place as soon as I was through with the police, and I said I would. I could tell by the sound of her voice how shocked she was, but neither of us said much. We were both aware we were talking through the police exchange board and pretty sharp ears were certain to be listening in to what we were saying.

Mifflin had asked a lot of questions, but without telling him about Cerf I couldn’t be of any help, and I didn’t tell him about Cerf. I said I had no idea why Dana had been shot and that she wasn’t working on a job for me. He went over the ground again and again, but it didn’t get him anywhere.

Finally he said he would have to to talk to Brandon, Captain of Police, when he came in, and that I would hear from them during the morning. I said I’d be around and made tracks for the door. He seemed reluctant to let me go, but he hadn’t any reason to keep me there.

The policeman guarding the entrance scowled at me as I walked down the steps. There was nothing personal about it.

The cops of Orchid City were picked for their meanness. I scowled right back at him and went on to the end of the street, where I picked up a taxi to take me to Paula’s apartment on Park Boulevard.

I was surprised to find her dressed, and looking as neat as a new pin when she opened the front door.

‘Come on in,’ she said. ‘I have coffee for you. I bet you need it.’

Paula was a tall, dark lovely with cold, steady brown eyes and a mouth as business-like and as hard as a rattrap. She was quick on the uptake, unruffled and easy to work with, and it says a lot for her force of character that during the years we had worked together I had never made a pass at her, although once or twice I had been tempted. Maybe it was because we had worked together during the war. She had been a cypher officer attached to the O.S.S. where I worked with the cloak-and-dagger boys. It was she who had encouraged me to launch Universal Services and had lent me money to tide me over the first six months. We had taken the rough with the smooth together for about five years. We had seen each other at our best and worst. It got so I didn’t look on her as a girl any more, not that she wasn’t attractive, she was, but we knew too much about each other to encourage a romance, and she had a way of nipping that sort of thing in the bud with a sarcastic remark that I or any other guy wouldn’t risk running into a second time. But for all that, we got along fine together.

‘Never mind the coffee,’ I said. My nerves were still jangling from the shock of finding Dana. ‘I want you to go over to Dana’s apartment. She may have left duplicate of her reports there. I’m off to see Cerf.’

‘Take it easy, Vic,’ she said calmly. ‘That’s all been taken care of. I’m just back from seeing Cerf, and Benny’s over at Dana’s place now.’

‘I might have known you would have got going,’ I said, and sat down. ‘So you went to see Cerf. Was he up?’

‘No, but he soon got up,’ she said, pouring a large cup of black coffee. She went over to the sideboard and fetched a decanter of brandy and floated a spoonful of the liquor on the coffee. That was one of her fads. She maintained black coffee was a better stimulant than whisky. ‘This is a dreadful thing, Vic. That poor kid....’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘What did Cerf say?’

‘He’s acting like a crazy man. You didn’t tell the police Dana was working for him?’

‘No. I stalled Mifflin, but I don’t know how long it’ll be before he finds out. Mifflin’s nobody’s fool. Cerf’s holding us to our guarantee, of course?’

‘Is he not!’ Paula said, pouring a second cup of coffee. ‘If we tell the police Cerf hired us to watch his wife we might just as well go out of business.’ She went through the brandy ritual and came over to sit opposite me. ‘He swears he’ll deny anything we say, and if we do talk he threatens to sue us for libel.’

‘He doesn’t care a damn that we’re heading for an accessory rap, I suppose?’

‘Of course he doesn’t.’

‘Well, we’ve given him the guarantee so we can’t go back on it. I don’t like it, Paula. That rule wasn’t intended to cover murder.’

‘Any ideas why she was killed?’

‘Nothing solid. Maybe she came upon this guy who’s blackmailing Anita and he silenced her.’

‘How was she killed?’

‘Shot through the head with a .45 at about fifteen yards range by someone who could shoot. What beats me is why he took her clothes.’ I finished the coffee, stood up and began to pace up and down. ‘We’ve got to find this killer, Paula.’

‘You mean we’re handling this on our own?’

‘You bet we are. From now on we’re not taking any other job until we’ve got this guy. When we’ve found him we’ll have to work out how we’re going to fix him without involving Cerf.’

‘Couldn’t we take Mifflin into our confidence?’ Paula asked. ‘You get on well with him. He might be prepared to keep Cerf under cover.’

‘Not a hope. He would have to report to Brandon, and you know how Brandon loves us. No. We can’t tell the police anything. They’d want to interview Mrs. Cerf. That’s something Cerf wouldn’t stand for. If he says he’ll swear he didn’t call us in, that’s what he’ll do. We have no proof that he did call us in. He hasn’t paid our fee yet, and by the look of it, he won’t. His first contact with us was by phone. All we’d get from him would be a libel suit that’d break our backs.’

‘I don’t like it, Vic. If the police find the killer and he talks we’re going to be chopped.’

‘Yeah, but I don’t see how they will find him. They have nothing to work on. We hold all the clues and that’s why we’ve got to clear up the mess. And besides we have a personal interest in this killing. No one’s going to shoot one of my operators and get away with it.’

‘What’s the first move then?’

‘I’m going to talk to Mrs. Cerf right away.’

Paula shook her head.

‘It’s not going to be that easy. She’s skipped.’

I stared at her, the flame of my lighter hovering before my cigarette.

‘She has?’

‘I asked to see her, but Cerf refused. He said he was arranging for her to leave town right away. She’s gone by now.’

‘We’ll have to find her. She knows the killer.’

‘That’s what I told Cerf. He said she knew nothing, and if we interfered with her or tried to find her we’d be answerable to him.’

‘We’ll find her all right,’ I said quietly.

‘Don’t be too sure the blackmailer is the killer, Vic,’ Paula said. ‘We have only Cerf’s word for it there is a blackmailer. She may be helping a lover.’

‘I’ll have a word with the daughter. She hasn’t any time for Anita and might be glad to talk.’

‘That’s an idea. Who else is there to work on?’

‘There’s the guy who found the handbag: Owen Leadbetter. I don’t know whether to let the police milk him and get the information from Mifflin or have a go at him myself. If Mifflin finds out we’re making inquiries he might smell a rat. Leadbetter might give us away.’

‘You’ll probably stop his mouth if you pay him,’ Paula said. To her way of thinking money could do anything.

‘Yeah. Well, I’ll try him. Then there’s this guy Barclay, been around with Anita, and according to Dana’s report they were acting like lovers. I’ll dig into his background. He may be our man for all I know.’

‘If there is a blackmailer at the bottom of this,’ Paula said, ‘I’d pick Bannister. He’s touched everything crooked since he’s been here. Why did Mrs. Cerf call on him the night before last, and what was her urgent business? If we could find that out we might get places.’

‘I’ll turn Benny on to Bannister and Kerman on to Anita,’ I said, lighting another cigarette. ‘I’ll get Kerman to dig into Anita’s background. We may turn something up to help us. I’ll go along and have a talk with Natalie Cerf.’

‘You’ll have to work fast, Vic,’ Paula said. She was quiet and calm. It took a lot to rattle her. ‘If the police find the killer before we do...’ She pulled a face.

The front-door bell rang sharply, making us both jump.

‘That’s probably the cops,’ I said, getting to my feet.

‘More likely Benny,’ Paula returned. ‘I told him to come here as soon as he was through looking Dana’s apartment over.’

She went to the front door and returned a moment later with Benny, whose usual humorous face was hard and set.

‘Can you beat it, Vic?’ he said, closing the door. ‘We’ve got to find the lug who killed her. It’s knocked me. One of the nicest kids I’ve ever worked with.’

‘Did you find anything to hook Cerf up with the killing?’ I broke in sharply.

Benny controlled his feelings.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I found her report book and the duplicates of her last report. And something else. I don’t know what to make of it. It can’t be hers. I found it under her mattress,’ and he fished out Anita Cerf’s diamond necklace from his pocket and dangled it before us.