Laurel and Hardy Murders (16 page)

“Damn it, don’t you ever
clean
that thing?”

Meanwhile, the masked menace cut his wheels hard and shot forward to make a getaway on Sixth Avenue. Unfortunately, he was too near the Packard and couldn’t avoid the door which I’d left wide open when I got out.

There was a metallic rip that was fascinating to hear and afterward, a loud clang. The Chevy kept going.

“What was that noise?” Butler asked suspiciously.

“Your front door.” I rounded the car, picked the thing up from the street and showed it to him.

Butler unlocked the trunk, tossed it in, then sourly told me to get in the back seat.

The Chevy was several blocks away by the time he got the car started again, but traffic was sparse and we could still see it. Butler jammed his foot on the accelerator as hard as possible and we roared along, breaking every speed law, crossing red lights.

“It’s not worth it!” I told him. “Let him go!” But Butler pretended not to hear me. Or maybe he wasn’t pretending. There was a hell of a wind in the car from the hole where the door had been.

The Chevy was stuck at a light. This time, Butler did the bumping, then started to get out, but the light changed, so he slammed the door and we were off once more.

It was up one avenue, across a side street, down another avenue. Our quarry could not shake Butler. I did my best to jot down the other’s license number, a New York plate, when we got close enough.

The chase took us to the base of the island where the buildings are tall and the streets incredibly narrow. There our luck ran out. The Chevy shot a red light and Butler tried to do the same. But there was a car coming the other way. The Old Man hit the brakes and I almost landed in the front seat.

Butler leaned on his horn, but the car in the cross street stayed in the middle of the intersection, blocking it. Its door opened and someone got out and approached us.

It was Inspector Lou Betterman.

He let us off fairly lightly. We were treated to fifteen seconds of colorful imprecations and a warning to Butler never to come anywhere near him again. But to me, Lou was reasonably civil, considering the circumstance which brought us together.

“Why don’t you and Hilary grow up?” he chided. “I was just talking with her. Both of you want each other, and neither of you knows what to do about it.”

“About the only thing I can do, Lou, is to work on this Wayne Poe business and impress the lady.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Since when did I ask for any help on it?”

I knew him well enough to understand the implication. He evidently had somebody in mind for the honors.

“Did you tag somebody, Lou?”

“Not yet. Soon.”

Which meant there was no chance of getting the name.

S
ANDY AND DUTCHY WERE
no longer at the Improv, so we decided to turn in. The doorman eyed the car with surprise, and Butler made me carry in all the six-packs so the garage attendant wouldn’t be too tempted by the missing door to assuage his thirst.

At the elevators, the desk clerk hailed us. When we approached, he presented us with a package which he said had just been left for us.

“How long ago?”

“Maybe ten minutes back. A man with gray hair, same one who asked about your room the other night.”

I turned and saw Butler unwrapping the box.

“
Don’t
!” I snatched it away and held it up to my ear but didn’t hear anything.

“Jeez!” said the Old Man, “I never thought of that!”

He never thought of anything.

I summoned a bellhop and told him to bring a bucket of water. Then I made the night clerk clear the lobby, and I rung up Irv Katz at the 24th Precinct. He said he’d rouse the bomb squad right on over, and instructed me what to do till then.

It didn’t take them long to get there. Katz was with them and he stood outside with me and Butler.

“This had better not be another gag,” the detective warned us.

He had a lot more to say when the squad opened the sodden parcel and found nothing inside but a toy piano with six ten-dollar bills stuffed under its lid.

“I
ONLY GOT ONE
thing to say,” Butler replied when I asked him for ideas.

“What?”

He placed his forefinger against his lower lip and flapped it in the conventional childish depiction of lunacy.

“Cut it out!” I growled. “And pass me that bottle.”

We were both lying on our beds, too keyed up to go to sleep. He stretched over and let me take a swig of his gin. It was the weirdest-tasting stuff I’d ever tried.

“What the hell’s in this, Old Man?”

“Walnut extract.”

“Omigod,” I murmured, closing my eyes. But he was still there when I opened them—an evil-tempered troll puffing his aromatic twist stogie and guzzling walnut gin.

Butler shook his head. “Too much goddamn pussyfooting,” he grumbled. “If we’d worked that crud over, we wouldn’t be lying here wondering whether we’re gonna find cherry bombs in the john and chicken gizzards in our socks!”

I was almost ready to agree with him on the question of how to interrogate a suspect. Things were getting altogether too screwy. The miniature piano clinched it. There was a rickety bridge in
Swiss Miss
, over which Laurel and Hardy attempt to carry a piano. Aficionados know that the Hal Roach studios edited out of the film a moment when a revolutionary tosses a bomb inside the instrument—a fact which would have motivated the frequent accidental pounding on various piano keys as the boys try to lug the thing across the narrow footpath. Evidently, our assailant knew his Laurel and Hardy intimately, and very possibly figured we did, too. The toy piano practically shouted to us that it
could
have been an explosive device.

But why the money?

The description of the man who delivered the package fit Phil. But I couldn’t decide whether he was the actual culprit—or if we were only
supposed
to think so.

Meanwhile, I had a call in to a friend of mine, Leon Sallis, at a state police HQ. I asked him to track down the owner of the license number of the car that battered the Packard.

“Hey, boy,” said Butler, “I been thinkin’.”

“What about?”

“Sixty bucks’d be a big help fixing my car door. Wanna play me for your half?”

“Play what? We don’t have any cards.”

He got up and went to a side table which he’d managed to litter with discarded walnut shells. He plucked three of them out of the debris, then fished in his pocket and pulled out a little plastic container. He opened its lid and took out a ball bearing.

I laughed. “You’re going to pull the old shell game with
that
?”

“Why not?” he asked, eyes wide. “Works as well as a pea, don’t it?”

“Sure, sure, Old Man!” I swung my legs out of bed and examined the metal ball to make sure it was as solid as it looked. “Okay,” I nodded, suppressing a grin, “you’re on.”

I slapped five dollars down on the bed. He did the same.

A moment later, he was holding my five.

In five minutes, he had the entire thirty dollars.

I’d accepted the bet because I knew he couldn’t work the classic dodge of slipping the pea out by rolling the shell over it. You can’t do it with an unyielding metal sphere.

He started to count his money and I snatched up the shells and examined them. There were tiny bits of metal glued to the inside top of each.

Magnets.

“Okay,” I sighed, “give me back my money.”

He frowned, as if I were an especially slow-witted child. “C’mon, boy, you know better’n that. I cheated you fair and square!”

Just then the phone rang. It was Leon, my contact in the state police.

“Gene, that was a rented car,” he said.

“Under what name?”

“Oliver Wheaty.”

I sat up. “Give me that again?”

“I
guess
that’s how you pronounce it.”

“Give me the spelling.”

“W-h-e-e-t-e.”

I thanked him and hung up.

After a minute, I turned around to tell the Old Man, but he’d sneaked out while I was on the telephone.

F
IRST THING FRIDAY MORNING
, I rang up O. J.’s number, but his wife, Della, said he was out of town and wouldn’t be back till Monday. I asked where he’d gone, but she couldn’t or wouldn’t fill me in.

I didn’t want to spend three days doing nothing, so Butler and I decided to go question Natie and find out whether Dutchy was right about him having a motive for murdering Poe.

We found him at The Lambs, dressed in a short green tunic and matching cap with a red feather in the band. He was rehearsing something on the third-floor stage with Toby Sanders, who was similarly dressed.

The stage was arranged to look like a bar, and at one end, a dartboard hung on the side of a flat. As we walked in, Toby was pointing something out in the opposite direction for Natie, who obligingly looked away from the dartboard long enough for Toby to stick a dart into the middle of the bull’s-eye. Toby then produced a thwacking sound with his mouth and Natie, turning, did an exaggerated double take. Then he took his own dart, aimed it from across the room, and threw it.

Butler and I gawked in amazement. The projectile lodged in the back-feather end of the dart Toby’d planted.

I hailed Natie and he came down the side of the steps, shielding his eyes to see who it was.

“Gene,” he called, smiling as usual, “is that you?”

“Yep. What are you two doing? It looks like—”

Natie nodded. “Robin O’Hood, the Irish pub sketch. Toby and I are going to perform it at the Philadelphia convention as a tribute to Black and White.”

“How in hell’d you
do
that, boy?” Butler exclaimed, pointing at the darts. “How long’d you have to practice?”

Natie laughed. “That’s a trick target, for God’s sake! You think I can duplicate the original? I borrowed it from Russell over at the Magic Mecca on 53rd.”

Butler tromped up the stairs so he could examine the target close up. He was probably wondering whether he should buy one, and if so, how he could use it to swindle me out of some more capital.

“What can I do for you, Gene?” Natie asked. “I’ve got to get back up there with Toby, I can only spare a minute.”

“Dutchy says you had a particular reason for wanting Wayne Poe dead.”

He stared at me for a second, then whistled low. “You don’t screw around, do you? You go right for the gut.”

“You know Frank and I are trying to find out who killed Poe.”

“Yeah, but it never occurred to me you’d be sticking it to me.” He shook his head, trying to clear it of the giddiness I suppose my question brought on. “It’s really a family thing, Gene. I hate to say it’s none of your business, but—it isn’t.”

“Would you rather talk to the police about it?”

I tried not to sound like I was threatening him, but there was no polite way to do it. Natie chewed over it for a while, then, with downturned mouth, gestured for me to join him at the back of the theater.

We sat down in the end seats of the two last rows. I turned my head halfway to catch what he was whispering.

“My sister Renee used to date Wayne. I fixed them up, for Christ’s sake! But I’d only been in the Sons about a year, and he was the first celebrity we ran into at a meeting. I was impressed, and she was even more starry-eyed. I mean, she was only twenty-two at the time.”

“What happened? He drop her?”

“The son-of-a-bitch knocked her up!” His vehemence had its effect; I had to wipe off my ear.

“Look, Gene,” he said unhappily, “is all this really necessary?”

“Maybe not. Nowadays, getting a woman pregnant is not exactly a blood-feud business.”

“Yeah,” he blurted, “but the crud said he wouldn’t support the kid, even if she went to court and stuck him in jail. Instead, Poe provided her with the name of a ‘good doctor.’ It was in the days before abortion was legal in New York.”

I drew some air between my teeth. “Did she go?”

“God, no! She’s got
some
brains. Couple of weeks later, as a matter of fact, we read in the paper that the quack Poe named was being disbarred for unsanitary reasons, malpractice, you name it.”

“So what happened to the child?”

“She had it, put it up for adoption. We didn’t have the money to make a big federal case out of it.”

I patted him on the shoulder as I rose and told him not to worry, I wouldn’t tell anyone about it.

“I couldn’t have killed him, Gene. Not that I wouldn’t have enjoyed it. But I was right in the middle of the audience. You can ask half a dozen witnesses.”

“Okay. We have to get their names, I suppose, but I’m inclined to believe you. It’s too easy to check out.”

Natie stood and I moved to the side of the aisle to let him pass, but he stood there looking at his hands, trying to make up his mind about something. Finally, he spoke.

“Gene, I...I wasn’t going to mention this to anybody. Like I say, I’m glad Poe got it. But it never occurred to me somebody innocent might be tagged for it.”

“You know something, then?”

“I saw something.”

“What?”

He shrugged. “It doesn’t make sense.”

I laughed. “What
does
in this nutty case?”

“After Poe fell, you climbed onstage with O. J., remember?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You turned and told everybody to keep back and give him air. While your back was turned, I saw O. J. do something.”

“What?”

“Take out his handkerchief.”

I looked at him like he was crazy.

“Are you being
funny
, Natie? Maybe he wanted to wipe his forehead, it was hot. Or maybe he wiped his nose.”

He nodded. “He wiped something, all right.”

“What?”

“The knife.”

N
ATIE WENT BACK ONSTAGE
and continued the rehearsal.

I thought it over for a while, then decided to run over to Grand Central and see O. J.’s wife, Della. The Wheete hat and clothing accessory store is a small fashionable shop just around the corner from the station on Vanderbilt Avenue.

Just as I’d made up my mind, the rehearsal ended. Natie changed to his usual orange T-shirt, an action which quickly ignited an argument between him and the Old Man. Toby wisely ducked out, which left me to be an unwilling moderator on the question of who was more attractive, Mary Tyler Moore or Susan Seaforth, the Old Man’s favorite on “Days of Our Lives.”