Laurel and Hardy Murders (14 page)

“Just one thing.”

She glanced at her watch. “What
is
it?”

“Does Dutchy own a typewriter?”

“No, but I do.”

“May I see it?”

“Why?”

I told her exactly what I needed to see it for. She uttered an exasperated “tch,” but walked with brisk heel-clicks down the hall, jerking her head for me to follow.

She opened the door to a dark, dusty workroom. On a table piled with ledger sheets and long technical-looking galleys there was an SCM electric. I took out the note, put it on the table and asked if I could take a sheet of paper. She nodded, looking over my shoulder.

I typed a few letters. It was not the same machine. The ribbon might have been changed, but I doubted that the author of our warning missive would think to alter the keys from pica to elite.

I threw away the comparison sheet and thanked her. She didn’t acknowledge it.

I left at the same time she did. I offered to share a cab with her if she was headed uptown, but she declined.

I caught a taxi on Eighth Avenue and told him to leave me off at 85th and West End. During the ride, I mused over the odd circumstance that Isabel Hovis had submitted, albeit impatiently, to my questions without wanting to know why I was asking them.

I tried to let myself in with my key, but it didn’t fit. Hilary apparently had the lock changed. I rang and submitted to the Manhattan ritual of peephole scrutiny. Every man’s apartment a speakeasy.

Harry let me in. Hilary was at a press luncheon. I went back to my room and stuffed a suitcase with clothes.

“I’ll come back for the rest later,” I told him, heading for the door.

“Hold it, Gene. Hilary said if you showed up, she had a present for you.” He rooted in my old desk and brought out a small manila envelope. It was slightly bulky. I thanked him for it and stuck it in my pocket without opening it in front of him.

Outside, I ripped it open. There were two things in it: my severance paycheck, and a paperback book.

It was an anthology entitled
Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings.
There were several pencil marks opposite page numbers in the table of contents.

My first impulse was to toss it in the corner trash basket. But I changed my mind and stuck it in my back pocket.

I walked over to 85th and Broadway and deposited the check in the bank before grabbing lunch at the Maravilla.

“Y
OU DID
WHAT
?”

“Tailed ’im.”

The Old Man stuck out his chest proudly.

“
Why
? What for?”

“Oh, boy, don’t you know? That’s what detectives do!”

I counted to ten, then asked him as calmly as I could what good it could possibly do shadowing Phil Faxon after the murder had already been accomplished.

He had no answer, though he tried to improvise one. I waved for silence, went over to a telephone and tried Phil’s number. He was in. I made an appointment for later that evening. I wanted to meet him right away, but Faxon insisted we drop by his apartment after ten.

I hung up and turned to the Old Man. “From now on,” I said, “we’re working together.”

“Good idea, boy. You can watch me and learn a few tricks.”

This time I counted to twenty.

I
WASN’T ABOUT TO
return to Hilary’s for my gun, so I made sure Butler’s was capable of firing, and that he knew how to use it. I don’t usually consider a weapon a necessary adjunct to an investigation, but this was different. We’d been threatened twice, and we were about to visit one of the prime suspects.

Arteseros, the desk clerk, gave us a description of the man who’d asked for our room number the night before. It sounded like Phil.

I’ve never been able to figure out the architectural inception of certain Manhattan houses. In the fifties, there is a showcase theater which does not front any street. To reach it, it’s necessary to walk through the hallway of an apartment building and emerge in the backyard where the theater sits in the middle of a brick courtyard.

Faxon’s apartment was a similar deal. He lived off a narrow slummy East Village street...actually in the Lower East Side, if one ignores the euphemisms of block associations and landlords.

Before I could ring the buzzer, the front door opened. It was Faxon, waiting for us. He was dressed in gray wool slacks, a heavy sweater, and topcoat. I wondered whether we were dealing with a man who’d totally slipped his gears. The temperature was in the eighties. Beads of sweat ran down his thin nose.

“Welcome,” he said, smiling, “welcome to the Inner Sanctum.” It was, of course, a perfect imitation of the Voice of Raymond from the old radio show.

He escorted us to a coffin-small elevator. We all squeezed uncomfortably, the Old Man’s belly taking up the greatest portion of the breathing space. Faxon pushed the sixth-floor button and the door groaned closed.

“Bet you think,” Phil said as the elevator crawled slowly upward, “that I gotta know somethin’ about that goddamn Heeb’s death. Me standin’ by the kitchen door an’ all, right?”

“Goddamn right, we—” Butler began, but I jabbed an elbow in his gut to shut him up.

“
Do
you know something?” I asked Faxon.

He scratched his straw-dry, gray hair, then wiped his palm against the side of his face, which was covered with stubble and sweat. “Maybe I do. Maybe not.”

The door opened. We tumbled out, glad to be able to expand our diaphragms to normal capacity.

“This way, gents,” our host said, starting down the hallway toward a door over which a sign glowed:
EXIT.

Faxon talked in a mutter that might have been a footnote to himself. “Might tell somethin’ you’d want to know.”

“What’s that?” I prompted.

“That knife they pulled outta Poe. Didn’t you never see nothing like it before?”

Butler started to answer, but I nudged him again. The idea is to keep the suspect talking, not supply him with possible answers.

“Why do you ask? Did you recognize the knife, Phil?”

He stopped at the door, opened it, and turning, laid his finger aside his nose and grinned cryptically.

“Trust me,” he said. “I know.”

He stepped through the door onto the roof. Butler and I followed. The building described a kind of square-cornered C at its top and we were on one of the arms of the letter. Faxon pointed across to the other, separated by a narrow empty gap across which a wooden walkway had been stretched. On the opposite side, a flimsy lean-to glowed with light.

“That’s my penthouse,” he said with pathetic hyperbole.

“About the knife, Phil?” I asked.

“The knife, yeah,” he replied, stepping onto the wood walk. “I know who it belongs to.” He gestured to Butler to stand back. “Don’t come across till I’m over. This thing wobbles, was only meant for one at a time.”

It did more than wobble. When Faxon was halfway across, there was an ominous splintering crackle.

“What the holy hell—” he started to say, then changed his mind and began to scream.

The crackle turned into a complicated cracking and the little bridge buckled under him and broke into two hanging fragments. Faxon plunged through and down, down into the darkness, screaming all the way.

There was a muffled thud and a groan, as if from a long way off. Butler rushed over to the edge of the roof and I joined him, peering into the depths below. It was pitch-black, no way of telling whether he’d fallen two stories or ten. We couldn’t see Faxon at all. I yelled down to him, but there was no answer.

“Godalmighty!” the Old Man said in a low voice. “We were warned somebody’d get hurt...”

I sent him back to the street to phone for help. There was no way to get across the gap to Faxon’s apartment. The middle section of the C in which the roof was shaped was blocked by a rise of two additional stories.

I was in the hallway when Detective Irv Katz came puffing along with Butler. A pair of stretcher-bearers brought up the rear. I wondered how they’d all fitted into the tiny elevator.

“Lou sent me along when he heard it was you,” said Katz. “Why aren’t you out there, watching in case the guy who did it is still in the vicinity?”

“That’s exactly why I’m in here,” I said. “I’m unarmed.”

The elevator opened and another detective ran along the hall and caught up with Katz.

“Okay,” the thin, sad-faced policeman told Butler, me, and the hospital attendants, “hold it just a second while Gabe and I check it out.”

They pushed open the roof door and carefully walked through, guns ready, flashlights in hand.

A moment later, Katz stuck his face back in. “What the shit are you trying to pull, Gene?”

“Huh? What are you talking about?”

“Come on out here, smartass!”

I stepped onto the roof, the Old Man behind me. The other detective was shining a powerful light into the abyss. We walked over to the ledge and peered down where the light indicated we should look.

There was no one there. The only things we saw were a couple of mattresses piled on top of one another.

It couldn’t have been more than a six-foot drop.

“Y
OU SHOULDA LET ME
play ‘Chopsticks’ on his teeth!” the Old Man howled.

I told him to shush. We walked glumly out of the old building. I’d tried to get Katz to let me into Faxon’s apartment, but the detective, relenting slightly, admitted someone might have been playing a practical joke on us but still, there was no cause to permit us to break and enter.

I was sure Faxon would be back, too. Further flashlight investigation showed a ladder farther along the shallow brick gulley. There was also a splattered watermelon which must have been responsible for the sickening squelching noise that I’d thought was Phil’s body hitting cement. An old trick from radio days, one Faxon would be intimately familiar with.

“Hey, boy, can’t we stay awhile till the cops take off? Then we can barrel-ass our way back in!”

“Old Man,” I said, “it’s my license you’re trying to play fast and loose with!”

I didn’t like to admit it to myself, but the detective license might be the last thing I had that Hilary might care about.

We tramped into a Brew ’N Burger and ordered a couple of bowls of chili and a pitcher of beer. After Butler drained off his first glass in two consecutive swallows, he grumbled at Faxon’s nerve, eluding us in such a ridiculous manner.

“But don’t you see?” I asked. “It’s positively insane. Why would he stage such a stupid scene? He had to know we’d see down there and spot the mattresses and everything.”

“It’s simple, boy. He wanted to get away from us.”

I shook my head. “There’s no point in calling us over and faking a death drop. He could have just refused to see us. Or he could have ducked out between the time I called and he told us to come over. He could have done a lot of things. He might have made us believe he’d been murdered by messing up the apartment, throwing around some red paint, anything. Weakening that bridge—”

I stopped. A new notion occurred to me. I didn’t like it one bit.

“What’s up, boy?” Butler asked, setting fire to a twist cigar.

“It just hit me. What if the killer really did loosen the bridge? He could have conked Phil on the head, faked a groan, and dropped the melon, and then spirited him away to murder somewhere else.”

The Old Man’s jaw flapped open. “Y’mean he’s maybe stuck in a coal chute, right now?”

“It’s a possibility.”

He shuddered. “Cripes, divorce cases are nothing like this mother! What do we do next?”

“Check out Faxon’s favorite haunts. See if he’s really missing or playing games.”

“O. K., boy, but I gotta call home first and see if Andy’s run the business into the ground yet.”

I didn’t comment on how far above the ground it actually was. The Old Man returned a few minutes later, looking annoyed. His brother apparently had been picked up by the police for placing illegal bets on the office phone.

I told Butler to leave a message at The Seymour whenever he got back, then said so long to him as he pulled off in the Packard.

I took a long walk. I had thoughts I needed to be alone with.

Wednesday, I tried to find Phil. He didn’t answer his phone or doorbell, so I had to assume he wasn’t home. O. J. reluctantly supplied me with a list of places he’d done voice-overs at. I made the rounds of recording studios, but didn’t even turn up a mention. He hadn’t worked in months.

At last, I tried an agent I once knew. O. J. said Maury Axel occasionally found employment for Phil Faxon. I got Axel on the phone and he informed me that Faxon was supposed to be narrating an army training film that same day.

The tip took me out to Brooklyn and a drafty old warehouse behind several industrial storage facilities. I wandered in the labyrinth for twenty minutes before tracking down the production unit Phil was hired to work with.

“He called in this morning,” the floor manager told me. “Said he was sick. Lucky we’ve got other material ready to shoot. He’s supposed to come in Monday for the stuff we didn’t do today.”

Monday. Five days away. Plenty of time to escape.

Or hide a body.

I ate alone that evening and retired early. I read in bed for a while before turning off the light. I had to admit Mary Wollstonecraft made some kind of a dent.

T
HERE WAS NOTHING ELSE
I could think to do with Phil Faxon on Thursday, so I swung back to Dutchy. I phoned his apartment and finally got him in. He was cordial enough, told me to come on over, but the joviality sounded strained. Any incursion into Dutchy’s private affairs would not get very far, I was only too aware. Knowing his style, I expected he would disarm me with “buff talk” and clam up as soon as I got too personal...

I took a walk down to West 26th. It was only half a buck, but I hadn’t yet made up my mind to register for unemployment, so I let my feet take the abuse, instead of my wallet.

Dutchy was sipping mocha java in his living room, a bare chamber except for an elaborate stereo system and a wall of recordings, most of them cinema theme music albums. His dour wife showed me in. “The Rescue of Demetrius” was blasting from the speakers.