Dead on the Level (3 page)

THE DREAM’S NAME was Phyllis Brunner—that’s what the photo caption said. She was young, she was rich, and also, since last night, she was missing. But the big story was her father. Darius Brunner II was dead, his handsome, graying head considerably battered by the violent application of a fireplace poker and the study of his fashionable lakeshore apartment thereby transformed into a chamber of death. The latter fact was fully attested by on-the-spot pictures. Time of death had not been established, but it was known that he had shared an informal dinner with his comely secretary, Miss Leta Huntly, twenty-eight, shortly after eight p.m.

“We had worked later than usual at the office,” Miss Huntly explained when questioned by the police, “and Mr. Brunner insisted on taking me to dinner and then driving me home. It was about nine-thirty when he dropped me at my apartment, and I assumed that he was going straight home. I can’t imagine who could have done such a terrible thing to Mr. Brunner! He was a wonderful man!”

At this point, Miss Huntly gave way to tears, artfully preserved by an alert cameraman.

Casey was getting the story at last, the newspaper spread across the bed he had so thoroughly unmade before the bellboy brought it. He’d had a bit of luck getting back to his hotel room, and at this point luck wasn’t hard to take. Along with the five thousand dollars, he had raked up a room key out of his pocket. What must have happened, he decided, was a simple case of getting sidetracked in the cocktail lounge before turning the key in at the desk. Later, of course, he wasn’t in much of a shape to remember anything, especially a key. But the important thing now was how much the hotel staff remembered, or, to be specific, the waiter in the lounge. A recollection of the Stygian gloom of the Cloud Room (Casey noted its chrome-plated name as he slipped unobtrusively through the lobby) was of some comfort, but not much. If Casey could see the girl’s face in that dim light so could the waiter. And it wasn’t a face that any man would be likely to forget.

Casey’s room was on the sixth floor, but he hadn’t dared risk an elevator. The whole idea was to appear as if he had spent the night enjoying the hostelry’s much vaunted comforts, and it wasn’t until he had phoned for the morning paper that he realized his timetable was a little off. Next came the whirlwind transformation of the room, the unmaking of the bed, opening of his saddle-tan bag and, to give things a homey touch, the draping of his suit coat over a convenient chair. Casey was in the bathroom shaving when the knock came at his door.

He answered, opened the door wide, and then went back into the bathroom to dry his hands. Give the bellboy time to get a good look at the room, that was the idea.
Just in case you find yourself needing an alibi, Casey Morrow, give him time
.

“You’ll have to get this changed,” he said, coming back with one of the hundred-dollar notes in his hand, “it’s the smallest I’ve got. And don’t be all day about it. I’ve got a train to catch.”

The moment the door closed, Casey ripped open the paper.

Brunner’s body had been discovered by Arvid Petersen, the houseman, when he returned from an evening of bowling.

“It wasn’t my regular night out but Mr. Brunner phoned in the afternoon and said he wouldn’t be home for dinner, so I should take the evening off. I came in about eleven-thirty and found him like that. It was awful. He was a fine man, too. I worked for him twenty years now.”

Reached at the Brunner country estate near Arlington Heights, Mrs. Brunner was in a state of near collapse and unavailable to the press. Her photographs, however, were amply available….
prominent society matron, noted for her many charities …

Casey pushed the paper aside in disgust. He didn’t care about Mrs. Brunner’s charities; all he cared about was the brief reference to Phyllis Brunner’s disappearance. The paper didn’t have a thing on it really. Just an intimation that the girl and her high-powered convertible were still unaccounted for at press time. Sensing sensation, they had played it up big. Big and hollow, with nothing but a headline, a picture, and a couple of inconclusive lines. At least the thing Casey feared most wasn’t there. There was no mention of an unknown man escorting her from the Cloud Room.

He felt considerably better by the time the bellboy returned with his change. He could even make small talk. “That’s what I call service,” he said, peeling off a ten from the roll of bills.

But the bellboy hardly seemed to notice. He was staring at the photo on the front page with an intensity that made Casey regret not having turned to the sport section.

“Quite a dish,” he murmured. “I sure hate to think of a dish like that being stuffed into some garbage can.”

He was an ageless creature, maybe twenty, maybe thirty, with a twisted, contemptuous face and a voice to match. What he had just said was like a blow in the stomach, but Casey had to make some answer.

“I don’t get you. The paper just says that she’s missing.”

“The paper says! The papers don’t know everything yet, and even when they do they’ll have to clean it up. What could be said about this girl, mister, you just don’t say when it’s social register. Now do you get me?”

Casey hesitated. It could be just gossip, but the bellboy seemed awfully sure of himself. Besides, at this stage misinformation was no worse than no information at all. “You seem to know something,” he suggested, and was rewarded by what might have passed for a smile.

“I know she was here yesterday afternoon, mister. She was downstairs getting tanked up. The bartender saw her. After a while she picked up a drunk at one of the booths and walked out with him. It’s easy to figure the rest.”

Casey couldn’t very well comment with his mouth open, a sight that seemed to fill the bellboy with inner delight. “She must have taken the boy friend home to Papa and they didn’t get along so well,” he added, grinning. “They’ll find her in some garbage can. It was bound to happen sooner or later.”

Now he was interested in the ten dollars, but Casey wasn’t. “She doesn’t look like the sort of girl who would go around picking up drunks,” he said tightly. “Maybe your barkeep friend is headline-happy. Maybe he just thinks he saw Phyllis Brunner.”

“Ernie?” Behind that one word was a look reserved for idiots and very small children. “If Ernie says it was the Brunner girl, it was the Brunner girl! Look, I’ll show you.”

The room wasn’t on the lake side of the hotel; the windows faced the tall, gray spike of an office building across the street, and it was that structure toward which the bellboy waved his hand. “The Brunner Building,” he explained, “home of Brunner Enterprises. Phyllis Brunner was in and out of the place all the time, and usually she’d come over to the Cloud Room afterward and kill a few hours. I’ve seen her there myself, lots of times. I always wondered what a girl with all she had could find to be so unhappy about.”

“Unhappy?”

“Well, that’s how she seemed. Nervous, jumpy. And if she took a notion to pick up a guy, she’d pick him up, believe me! But it’s a risky business.”

For a moment Casey wanted to heave this leering know-it-all through the window, but he also wanted to know whatever else there was to his story. And it wasn’t so much what the bellboy had said that made him go hollow inside; it was the awful knowledge that he didn’t know any more about what really had occurred than this sordid-minded character or any other theorist. Of course, that wasn’t quite true. He knew about the five thousand dollars, and a man doesn’t pick up that kind of money overnight just by sitting at home with his Boy Scout Manual.

“And what about the pickup?” he suggested. “Do they ever find him?”

“That’s an interesting point,” the boy answered, his brow furrowing thoughtfully. “They claim you can’t get away with murder, but it’s done all the time. Of course, if they do get him he can always plead insanity—but it won’t do him any good. You can’t buck that kind of dough. Anything else, mister?”

Maybe Casey’s imagination was on edge, but it seemed that he was being scrutinized a little too carefully. Or it could be just the ten dollars. “Sorry,” he muttered, handing over the bill. “I’m not so sharp this morning. Met an old buddy down the hall last night and we lifted a few.” (Maybe that would cover for what must be showing on his face. It would cover, too, in the unlikely event of the desk having tried to ring him during the night.)

“I could get you something for that. Ernie has a concoction guaranteed to kill or cure.”

The barkeeper again. Casey was learning to hate him already.

“Of course, he’s kind of tied up with the homicide squad right now, but in case of an emergency—”

“Homicide?” Casey choked. “Here?”

“They were here when I got your bill changed, getting Ernie’s statement. But I’ll ask him—”

Casey almost shouted his refusal. “I’ve still got that train to catch,” he reminded, only this time he meant it. And then, when the bellboy finally cleared out, he sank back down on the bed and listened to the hammers pounding a tattoo inside his head.

So that’s the score
, they told him.
Of all the places to go, you would walk straight into a pack of bloodhounds getting the scent!
Casey doubted strongly that the bellboy’s theorizing was original. In all probability he was merely echoing some of what he had heard. But it really didn’t matter. It was nobody else’s conjecturing that had him this scared; it was his own. Mentally, he was running even before he heard that grisly tale, even before he read the papers, and the instinct that had told him to run was screaming louder by the minute. If Ernie, the devil take him, was talking to the police now, there was still a chance of getting out of the hotel before a general alarm. A cigarette he couldn’t remember lighting began to burn his fingers, and Casey stood up. This was no time for meditation; he had work to do.

The best he could do in the way of changing his appearance was a clean shirt and a different tie. Most of his luggage was still at the baggage room in Dearborn Station, and he could almost hear Ernie describing a man in a tan gabardine suit. Sand, that smooth-talking clerk had called it, desert sand—very distinctive. For once in his life, Casey didn’t want to look distinctive. Most of all, he didn’t want to look anything like the man Phyllis Brunner picked up in the Cloud Room.

Casey was reaching for his raincoat (at least it would be inconspicuous) when the sight of his image in the mirror reminded him of something. With his right arm upraised, he could see a dark shadow on the underside of his suit coat sleeve, and then Maggie’s words came back and snagged on a raw edge of his mind. “It was soiled.” The coat was soiled, so Maggie had sponged it off. That was mighty nice of her, but the reflected shadow of the stain brought to mind the unpleasant press photo of Brunner’s crumpled body and the bloody poker messing up the carpet beside him.

The underside of his coat sleeve. Casey yanked the corresponding sleeve of his raincoat inside out and found what he was looking for. Maggie hadn’t sponged that far. The blood was still there.

I’M CASEY MORROW,
young business executive (all right, then, ex-executive) just in from Los Angeles. I’ve been up in my room all night, like a good boy, and I’ve never seen Phyllis Brunner or had anything to do with making her father a corpse. There’s no blood inside my coat sleeve, and no incriminating five thousand dollars in my pocket. I don’t have to look guilty if I see a policeman, and I don’t have to run from anything
.

Casey had just about sold himself this line by the time the elevator reached the lobby. He stepped out briskly, in the manner of a man on his way to catch the train, and brushed off the bellboy who reached for his bag. “I can handle it,” he said, and headed for the desk.

If I’d been smart and remembered having paid up in advance, I could have sent the key down with young Dick Tracy. But maybe it’s better this way. I can’t see anything that looks like the law—or can I?

A middle-aged man with a solemn sort of face was leaning against one end of the desk talking to the clerk. He had blue eyes and a little gray showing under a snap-brim felt that was just about the same shade of blue. He wore a wrinkled gray waterproof that had seen better days, and looked about as ordinary as a man could look—and still be a cop. How Casey knew all this was something he couldn’t have explained on a bet, but he did know. There was a third man, too. A small, balding individual wearing a dark suit and a bow tie who would, Casey was sure, answer to the name of Ernie. At the moment, he was doing the talking.

“Personally, I don’t think you’re going to find this guy was registered here,” he insisted. “He was broke. Counted out every dollar like it was his last.”

Casey came close enough to hear, but kept his face turned aside. He did, however, yank out his wallet and let the bulge show as he tossed down the key.

“Just a minute, Lieutenant,” the clerk murmured, and stepped nearer Casey. “Good morning, sir. Checking out?”

“That’s right,” Casey said.

“Everything satisfactory?”

“Fine. Everything was fine. I slept like a baby.”

There was a little business with the registration cards, and then the desk clerk smiled. “You seem to be all paid up, Mr. Morrow.”

“I am? Oh, sure. I remember now.” Casey started to turn away, carefully avoiding the men at the other end of the desk, and then he had a bright idea. “If anybody tries to reach me here,” he added, “tell them I’ve finished my business and gone back to the Coast.”

“Of course, Mr. Morrow. Any forwarding address?”

There was no need to overdo it. Casey managed a smile. “Anybody I care to hear from will know my address,” he said.

It was working fine. Slow and easy, that was the idea. Keep the whole thing slow and easy. He took one step away from the desk and then deliberately paused to consult his watch. In that way he was able to hear a little more of what went on with the police lieutenant.

“I know it’s not much of a description to go on,” Blue Eyes was saying, “but Ernie here says he could make positive identification on sight.”