The savage salome (15 page)

"Where is it then?" I prodded.

"In a locker at Grand Central," she said. "Earl's got the key though."

"So I've got to try and convince him?" I said sourly.

"Tell him Marge said it's O.K.," she whispered.

"Fine!" I snaried. "He'll take my word for it?"

"The locker number is 625," she said. "The only way you could find out is from me—he'll know that."

"I hope you're right, Marge," I said sincerely.

The nurse's uniform rustled faintly as she came into the room. "Time's up, Mr. Boyd! Did you get Miss Harvey to sign all the necessary documents?"

"Oh, sure!" I said hastily.

"Documents?" Marge said fiercely. "What documents?" Her eyes burned holes in my face.

I turned my head away and winked deliberately at the nurse. "You're so right, Miss Harvey," I said in a soothing voice. "You can't be too careful in these matters." I winked at the nurse again. "Although I'm sure you can trust your nurse!"

"What documents!" Marge said frantically.

"Ah—er—exactly," I babbled. "You're absolutely right, Miss Harvey—^what documents?"

I backed away from the bed quickly, getting a last glimpse of her livid face straining to rise from the pillow, then I almost ran out into the corridor.

The nurse closed the door, then smiled at me apologetically. "I'm awfully sorry, Mr. Boyd, that was aU my fault. I should have remembered how touchy some people are about their private affairs!"

"Think nothing of it," I said generously. "I appreciate your help."

"Have you been in touch with Doctor Weiner since this morning?" she asked suddenly as we reached the elevator.

"Why, no," I said cautiously. "I just haven't had the time."

"I think you should contact him, although he's off duty right now." She bit her Up for a moment, then made up her mind. "I shouldn't do this, but you are her lawyer after all—I'm afraid she doesn't have very long, Mr. Boyd."

I stared at her stupidly for a moment. "You mean— she's dying?"

"I'm sorry." She touched my arm for a moment in a spontaneous gesture of sympathy.

"She got wet," I mumbled, "she caught cold—suspected pneumonia—now she's dying?"

"Now, get a grip on yourself, Mr. Boyd!" The crisp professionalism came back into her voice. "It has nothing

to do with that—it's her heart. She's been living on borrowed time these last five years—Doctor Weiner says it's a miracle she's lived as long as she has."

"There's nothing you can do?" I asked hoarsely.

She shook her head in self-reproach. "I have no right to talk this way. I'm no doctor, Mr. Boyd."

"But you heard what he said?"

"I did," she said, nodding reluctantly. "Mitral stenosis —^her heart has been crippled for a long time."

"Just how long does she have?"

"No doctor would give you an absolute estimate, Mr. Boyd—but Doctor Weiner said two weeks at most."

"Thanks, nurse," I told her. "You've been very kind."

She blushed faintly. "My father was a lawyer, Mi. Boyd, and somehow you remind me of him. I—I always have so much more confidence in an older man!" She turned and walked away from me fast and it was the one thing that saved her from getting clobbered. Older man? There wasn't one wrinkle in the profile yet. I figured her father must have died young—^real young like twenty-five maybe.

I sat in Harvey's private office and looked at him, while he glared back at me. Fifteen minutes I'd sat there already and I was getting impatient. It was four in the afternoon and I hadn't even had lunch yet. Outside thick black clouds had closed in Manhattan and it was raining steadily with the sullen promise of coming winter. It was the right time to go to Florida.

Earl looked sharply at Benny, who was leaning against the wall with a permanent sneer on his face, and cleared his throat noisily.

"How does it sound to you?" he asked cautiously.

"I wonder what kind of a sucker Boyd takes you for, Mr. Harvey." Benny grinned. "He comes in here and says like he changed his mind—^you didn't kill those two guys— he made a big mistake! So now we all get to be real friendly and you give him those files just because he asked real nice?"

"He's seen Marge and she says it's O.K.," Harvey said.

"He's seen Marge—^he says. She O.K.'s the deal—^he says. He runs off at the mouth all the time, Mr. Harvey!"

"If anybody's got a right to be sore at Boyd, it's me!" Eari said nasally. "You get paid for the bruise on your nose, it's like they call a—what is it?—occupational hazard!" He looked admost pleased with himself for a moment. "I don't get paid for being clobbered, and I got two bones broken in my nose." He scowled at Benny for a while. "He must have seen Marge and she must have O.K.'d the deal—how else would he know about the locker in Grand Central—^the number even?"

"Earl," I said tightly, "I get a thousand dollars for finding the killer—I figure your blackmail material can help. If you want to play hard to get with the stuff, that's fine by me. I can stiU make the grand by turning you in!"

He brushed the lank hair out of his eyes irritably. "Don't push it aU the time," he said. "I got to have time to think, don't I?"

"What's the matter, Mr. Harvey?" Benny pushed himself away from the wall and came toward the desk slowly. "This punk got you real worried? I figured you was too big a man to let a cheap private dick get under your skin!"

"Shut up," Harvey said automatically, but his heart wasn't in it.

Benny edged around the desk toward me and I saw the fine beads of sweat glistening on his face. He was building himself up for more fun and games—the kind that would reinstate him with his boss, and himself. When he figured he was close enough, he stopped and grinned at me.

"You jumped me this morning when I wasn't looking, punk!" he said in a low voice. "It was a mistake letting it give you big ideas like you can push Mr. Harvey around! Mr. Harvey's a real big man in this town and I guess I owe him the favor of cutting you down to size!"

I sighed wearily and looked at Harvey. "Why don't you put a phonograph in the office, Earl? That way you could get music sometimes instead of all this yack-yack-yack. Whatever you've done it wasn't bad enough to deserve Benny—nobody could do anything bad enough for that."

"That does it up real good, Boyd!" Benny said thickly.

He Ufted his right arm casually and the switchblade seemed to jump into his hand—so maybe Marge had taught him something in the tunnel of love after aU. I

twisted my body sideways the moment I saw the knife blade flash, and a second later it thudded into the padded leather back of the chair right where my kidneys had been the moment before.

It took Benny a moment to jerk the knife clear of the heavy padding and that gave me time enough to jerk the .38 clear of the harness. I slammed the barrel down across his wrist and the knife dropped out of his fiingers while he took time out to yell.

It was horse-trading, and more or less honest. We traded time—a second here, a second there. Time enough for Benny to hold his wrist and yell meant time enough for me to raise my arm and lay the gun barrel along the good side of his nose. The three seconds he took to bury his face in his hands and bust out crying gave me a bonus even. I hit him for the third and last time with the barrel against the side of his head, slamming him across the desktop so he finished up in a heap on the carpet right beside Harvey's feet.

Suddenly there was a blissful silence in the office. I looked at Harvey and swung the business end of the .38 around toward him. He winced when he saw it.

"I'll take the key now, Earl," I said.

"Sure, Boyd!" he said quickly. For an awkward moment he fumbled in his trousers pocket, then found the key and dropped it on the desktop. I picked it up and slid the .38 back into the harness.

Earl looked at Benny huddled peacefully on the carpet, then looked back at me.

"I'm kind of glad you did a real job on his nose." He fingered the white tape across the bridge of his own nose thoughtfully. "It makes me feel a little better."

"It's the Manhattan way of life softened him up. Earl," I said. "He needs a job where he can use his hands—sweat a little—work long hours."

"I know what he needs," Harvey said shortly, "And I'm going to make sure he gets it!"

"I was thinking," I said. "That Fountain Park concession of yours—why don't you put him out there for a while? Keeno could find him a real big project all for himself—like cleaning out the empty cigarette packs and pop bottles cluttering up the water in the tunnel of love."

"Yeah," he nodded. "You could have something there, Boyd, I'll keep it in mind."

I went out of his office and the miracle happened—^I found an empty cab in the rain. The locker at Grand Central yielded an attache case. I took a quick look inside and saw the stiff manila folder had a label with Salome typed neatly across it. So somebody in Harvey's organization had an orderly mind—I wondered if it was Marge.

It was a quarter after five when I got back inside my own office. Fran Jordan was about to leave, putting a final touch of lipstick to her softly pouting lower Up.

"Welcome home," she said, smiling. "How did it go at the hospital?"

"You did a great job, Fran," I said warmly. "The nurse was eating out of my hand after you explained all the legal complications—so I saw Marge Harvey and got what I wanted from her." I scowled suddenly, remembering the nurse's cracks about older men.

"Fran—" I angled the profile carefully and gave her the frank, boyish grin. "Do I remind you of somebody in your family, like maybe your father? Do I come under the heading of *older man' in your vocabulary?"

"Oh—that," Fran said casually. "I was getting nowhere with her over the phone, trying to dazzle her with legal mumbo-jumbo I didn't even understand myself. I guessed if you said it was important you got in there, I couldn't foul it up. So I got all girlish and confidential—told her how I'd only been working in my father's office the last six months and it was all my fault those papers hadn't been signed a week back."

I suddenly felt a hell of a lot better. "Did you tell her to watch out for the youngest-looking father she ever saw?" I chuckled happily.

"I told her to watch out for a man with a dyed crew cut and tiny little white scars around the hairline where he's had his face lifted four or five times," she said happily. "Shall we drop the subject?"

"Agreed," I said. "Anything exciting happen, like somebody sent us some money?"

"Miss Lynn called—four times. She sounded real upset you weren't in the whole four times. She's getting

tired of wandering around your apartment all by herself!"

"Yeah?" I said, suddenly vague. "Anything else?"

"A little bird called—^that's what it sounded like anyway —a bird named Kasplin."

"What did he want?"

"He said he promised to call you this morning and make a definite appointment for you to see him. I told him you were out and he said he'd call back later. I said to make it after five and he'd be sure to catch you."

"Fine," I said. "That aU?"

"There isn't any more," she agreed. "Can I go now?"

"The only good reason why not that I can think of wouldn't stop you," I said truthfully. "What do you do all day when I'm not here?"

"I run a floating crap game," she said easily. "It's very profitable, but then I cheat a little. Good nigjit, Danny."

"Good night," I told her.

After she'd gone I went into my office, opened up the attache case, and put the manila folder on the desk. Inside were three smaller folders—^the first one was labeled "Rex Tybolt." I opened it and there were aU the candid camera shots of Acapulco, both negatives and prints. It seemed like a lousy epitaph for anybody, so I closed it up again quickly.

The second folder was labeled "Margot Lynn." Inside was a sheaf of newspaper clips, all concerned with the activities of a certain juvenile delinquent named Janie Rigowski. I read through them aU with increasing interest —Margot had been a very naughty girl, like real active.

There was nothing in the first two folders that even hinted at the murderer's true identity. I felt more hopeful about the last folder; from what I'd seen and heard the last few days of Donna Alberta's normal life, Harvey's researchers would have needed to dig way down deep if they hoped to come up with something they could use successfully to blackmail the prima donna.

I glanced casually at the typewritten label on the outside and had the folder half open before it penetrated my brain. Maybe the typist had goofed—a second look confirmed the name wasn't Donna Alberta on the label at all. It was "Kasplin."

The folder spilled out another bunch of newspaper

clips onto the desk. They were all dated around the fall of 1950. Kasplin had a different name then—"Little Joey, the pocket-sized encyclopedia of music."

There were a couple of faded handbills among the newspaper clips, advertising a traveling carnival. Little Joey was billed as the midget marvel who could answer any question on music from the audience, and would guarantee to name any song or time, once someone had whistled the first three bars.

The clips were from a group of country papers in the Midwest. A member of the traveling carnival had been convicted of living off the immoral earnings of one of the gkls traveling with the show. Found guilty of pimping— but the cream of the joke was shown in the massive, blown-up pictures every newspaper had carried on their front pages of the two of them standing side by side. Little Joey was four feet four inches tall, the captions said, while the girl, an overdeveloped muddy blonde, was exactly six feet tall.

Kasplin had collected a suspended sentence because he was a first offender—and, I guessed, because the judge had a streak of compassion for someone who'd been born with the intelligence and instincts of a normal man, but with the body of a dwarf.

He was grotesque. Even now, looking at the ten-year-old faded newspaper clips, I still felt a sense of shock when I looked at the finely modeled head, the handsome face and strong features—^then saw the tiny manikin's body below.

Harvey's researchers had dug deep all right—and hit a jackpot. All it needed was for Donna Alberta to get one look at those clips and it would be the end of Kasplin as her manager—^the end of his career in opera or any other kind of serious music, I guessed.