Win, Place, and Die! Page 12

  “How’s the chalk doing?” I asked.

  Ferdinand shrugged expressively, a large and soul-stirring gesture. “The chalk stinks, my friend. If the chalk did good for me, would I be in this hole, cooking bad food for stupid people? If the chalk could work, you wouldn’t see Ferdinand here.”

  “You figure the flats only?”

  “What else?”

  “Ever tried the trotters?”

  “Impossible,” he sighed. “My friends tell me the trotters are easier. Eight horses in a race is always better than ten or fifteen. But how can I go to the trots?” He waved his thin arms arounds frantically, indicating the confines of his bailiwick. “This is my work, this lousy kitchen. On Sundays I am off. But the horses run nowhere on Sunday. Ah well, it is bad enough to lose my money the way I do. The bookie lives a fine life from Ferdinand, believe me. Every day, a good profit. We make jokes about it here in the kitchen. It is as George always says—I should bet with myself. I should be my own bookie and then I would be a rich man.”

  “George Bannerman said that?” I asked.

  “George is a smart one. So smart he never bets.”

  “You know him long?”

  “I know him five years. Since I came to work here.”

  “Why was George fired?”

  “That,” said Ferdinand with a long sigh, “I cannot say. Where is George tonight? When I come into this hole of a kitchen to work, always George is here. He has his cigarette and we talk for a little bit. Five years, this goes on, every night. Tonight, no George. Is he sick? I ask Gloria, the girl who checks the hats. But Gloria says no, Ruvulo fired him, last night, at closing.” Ferdinand slapped the folded paper down hard on his knee. “In this crazy business, which man can call a job his own? George Bannerman, after maybe so many years here, fired, poof!—like that.”

  A waiter interrupted the chef for a special order. Ferdinand took me with him into the corner of the busy kitchen, anxious to keep talking about his friend Bannerman.

  “You knew his background?” I asked.

  “A sad thing,” said Ferdinand, rolling his expressive eyes at the ceiling. “You mean the track business?”

  “George told you how he was kicked out of racing?”

  “Poor George, poor George. It took much time before he told me. A scandal, and all because of a woman. Always, it is a woman who does this to a man like George Bannerman. You knew that? You knew that he killed his career because of a whore?” The little chef watched me keenly, as though measuring me for the final drama of his yarn. “A woman who later died, and the devil take her black soul. After that, when George lost her and they kicked him out of racing, he went to hell. Straight to hell. Ah, to hear poor George tell it is to break your heart. A good man. A good man, I tell you.”

  “How did he wind up working here?”

  Ferdinand shoved a finger into the broth he concocted. He licked it, closing his eyes to savor it. He added salt, pepper and oregano. He sampled it again. Then he whistled for a waiter and handed over the dish.

  “How he got here is also a strange story,” he said. “The one man he considered his enemy. This man helped him get a job here.”

  “You remember the man’s name?”

  “But, of course. It was Jake West.”

  “It seems impossible,” I said. “Bannerman hated Jake West.”

  “Ah, so you know the story?” Ferdinand held up a hand, delighted to bring me to attention. He had arrived at the portion of the story he most favored. He was pausing to give it the essential flavoring now, the final touch of the master. He leaned over the counter and waggled a finger at me. “But you do not know the ending, eh? George Bannerman, he took a long time to think about his trouble in the racing business. He found out, maybe years later, that Jake West was not, after all, his enemy. He had accused West out of ignorance. He had threatened West out of ignorance. George Bannerman, I tell you, is a good man. They were friends, these two, before the scandal. When George found out the truth, he went to West. He apologized to West.”

  “And Jake West got him the job here?”

  “Exactly the truth.”

  “And since then, they saw each other?”

  “The best of friends,” said Ferdinand brightly. But his mobile face clouded suddenly, as sour as badly flavored custard. “Even after this terrible thing happened to Jake West, I am still sure of it.”

  “It does seem strange,” I said, “that George faded out of here right after the murder of his pal.”

  “It is nothing. I tell you George is a good man, my friend.”

  “I’m beginning to believe you.”

  “I can only tell you again that George is a good man.”

  “You may have to tell that to the police, Ferdinand.”

  “The police? They think George killed West, then?”

  “They may be around to thinking it.”

  “They will be wrong,” said Ferdinand stubbornly. “You can send them here and I will tell them the story and they will be wrong, I say.”

  “Forget it, Ferdinand. Where can I find George?”

  “And you, of course,” he said, “are not from the police?”

  “I, of course, am not.”

  He paused to make up his mind about me. “Well,” he said at last, “George lives over near Fifth Avenue somewhere.”

  “On which street?”

  “I am trying,” Ferdinand said. He removed his tall chef’s hat and exposed a wealth of scalp above the ears. He ran his palm over the polished surface and slapped it frantically. “A head like a rock, I have, my friend. A head like a balloon, with nothing but air inside. Once, twice, I walked him part of the way. Which corner did he turn, you ask? Let me tell you, my friend, I can’t think. Ah? Thirteenth?” He clapped his hat on and popped his eyes at me. He began to skim and skid around behind the stove, ladling a pot of soup, tasting it, peppering it, salting it and then advancing to the hot table where he went through similar gymnastics with the simmering meats and vegetables. He stopped at last. He held up a large ladle. “Aha! Now I remember something; my friend. Not much, because Ferdinand is so stupid. But this I do remember. George once told me the name of his landlady. George loved her soups, you understand? Mrs. Delongo, her name was.”

  “That’s good enough,” I said. “You’ve been a great help, Ferdinand.”

  I thumbed through the phone book in the lobby. Mrs. Delongo was listed at a Thirteenth Street address. The clock stood at 11:15 when I ran out of The Famous Cellar. I turned to the east, my heart pounding in my chest, aware of nothing but my immediate goal. This was another of the fictional moments, a scene. I had written time and again, the quick and pulsing sequence when the investigator has the scent and sets off in pursuit of his villain. The facts I had developed in the past few hours seemed to fit a special pattern. There was a man alive who had a reason for murdering my uncle. And I had found him!

  I sped through the darkened streets. George Bannerman must have nursed his hatred of Jake West over the years. He had somehow managed to kill my uncle in the appropriate spot, close to the heart of the track. George Bannerman was a madman. He had set the stage for the crime against the backdrop of his inner torment. He had lured Jake West to the stall of Arcturus on some pretext or other. Then, in the still of early morning, Bannerman had confronted his betrayer. I saw Bannerman now, preparing to leave the city. I prayed that he would still be at Mrs. Delongo’s place. I made the turn into Thirteenth Street and rolled to a stop before the big brownstone that bore the address of the rooming house. I raced up the stone steps and pressed the bottom bell.

  Then the door opened.

  I was facing a tiny old woman, a picture-book landlady who held a lace handkerchief to her nose and eyed me with a soft and tender regard. She stepped back and motioned me inside. The heat of my personal tension did not affect her. She closed the door quiet
ly and wiped her nose.

  “Mrs. Delongo?” I asked.

  “Mrs. Jennifer Delongo,” she corrected, more concerned with her handkerchief than me.

  “George Bannerman lives here?”

  “Not any more, young man.”

  “He moved?”

  “Not exactly,” she sighed. She regarded me with the soft and mossy eyes of an aged setter. “George Bannerman is dead. He committed suicide.” She turned abruptly and led me into the spotless living room. She seated herself tentatively on one of the ancient chairs. “They found him in the river, early this morning. Jumped off the Manhattan Bridge, poor soul.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Old ladies with good vision often can qualify as expert witnesses. An old lady observes the most unessential details, the peculiar, personal and petty items that snare her attention and fix the trivial firmly in her mind. She will tell you that Mrs. Soandso was seen walking on Fifth Avenue the other afternoon, attired in a linen suit, of a beige color, and wearing a hat that bore sixteen blue grapes against a branch of leaves of the genus Ulmus Americana, on which a small coleopterous insect stood in an attitude of prayer. She will respond to all questions concerning these fixations. She will magnify and qualify her minuscule vision, taking great pains to convince you of her precise and flawless observation. She will charm you with all manner of detail. But when the chips are down and the questions involve the forest, rather than the trees, the old lady will balk and bumble.

  “What sort of a man was George Bannerman?” I asked.

  “A good man,” Mrs. Delongo said without hesitation. “A man of excellent personality, indeed.”

  “A good tenant?”

  “The best. He lived here for the past five, no, six years.” She adjusted her spectacles and peered at me with a birdlike glance. “You might say that George was my oldest tenant.”

  “He always lived alone?”

  “How do you mean that?”

  “I was thinking of roommates.”

  “You are making a silly implication,” Mrs. Delongo said with a stiffening tightness, her pale cheeks warming with embarrassment. “This is a respectable house, young man.”

  “Of course it is,” I said quickly. “But you misunderstand me. I’m curious about George’s male friends.”

  “Ah? So?” She relaxed and fiddled with her nose to allow herself time to regain her doll-like composure. “Well, there was one.”

  “Who would that be?”

  “A man named Jacob.”

  “Jacob West?” The expression on her face was a mixture of exploratory thought and impending doubt. “Please, Mrs. Delongo,” I begged. “This is very important to me. Do you recall Jacob’s last name?”

  “If you want the truth,” she said with a sigh, “I never really met the gentleman. All I know is what poor George told me. George said Jacob was his best friend. George said that Jacob got him the job in the night club. They were like brothers, those two.”

  The picture was beginning to come into focus for me. Jake West had worked to help the man who should have been his only enemy. The story suited Jake’s open and sympathetic nature. It would be like him to arrange a job for Bannerman, to stay with Bannerman until he righted himself with society. And after that? These two had become close friends. These two had created a friendship born out of an honest respect for each other.

  “When did you see Jacob last?” I asked.

  “A few weeks ago. He came on Sundays, mostly. They’d talk and have a drink together.”

  “But this didn’t happen all year round?”

  “Oh, no, not at all. Jacob was out of town a lot. They would exchange letters, long, wonderful letters that gave George so much pleasure, poor soul.”

  “George talked to you about the letters?” I asked.

  “He did, indeed,” she giggled. “Jacob was quite a lady’s man.”

  “Really? Remember the lady’s name?’

  “George didn’t mention it to me.”

  “Are you quite sure, Mrs. Delongo?”

  “I am positive.” She eyed me with sharp disapproval.

  “And did George save those letters?”

  “If he did, I wouldn’t know it.”

  “Tell me about George,” I said. “Did he seem the type to commit suicide?”

  Mrs. Delongo thought her answer through carefully before mouthing it. “George Bannerman was not what I would call a happy man,” she said slowly. “Yet, I can’t honestly imagine him taking his own life.”

  “He wasn’t depressed lately?”

  “Not unusually so.”

  “Did he have an argument, perhaps? A fight with Jacob West?”

  “Nonsense, young man. They were the best of friends, I tell you.”

  “Did Jacob always come alone?”

  “Always.”

  “Do you recall how he arrived? Could you remember his car if you saw it again?”

  “I most certainly could,” Mrs. Delongo said proudly, adjusting her spectacles as if to assure herself that they would function when called upon. I led her to the window and pulled up the shade. The blue convertible stood conveniently under a lamppost, the color dulled and obscured a bit by the soupy light. Yet, the sight of it made the old lady nod vigorously. “That’s Jacob’s car, of course,” she said with conviction. “I recognized it right away because of the little gray patch in the black canvas top up there near the side, do you see it?”

  “Mrs. Delongo,” I said thankfully, “you’ve been a great help to me. Can I ask you one more favor? Will you be good enough to let me examine poor George’s room?”

  “Why, young man?”

  Mrs. Delongo’s pert face surveyed me with pixyish concern. She returned to her chair and sat there stiffly, working the handkerchief in her gnarled hands. Something had happened in the last few minutes. Something had soured her and stiffened her.

  “It could be that George Bannerman was murdered,” I said.

  “How?” She fought to set me straight in her womanly catalogue of strange and unbelievable men. “How was that?”

  “His suicide might have been arranged.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “It’s a personal theory of mine.”

  “It’s absolutely wrong,” said Mrs. Delongo, with the grim-lipped certainty that comes with old age. “Because the man who came here this morning said it was suicide.”

  “The man? What man?”

  “The man from the police.”

  “What did he look like?” The old familiar question seemed stale and stupid now. Mrs. Delongo would spout the familiar descriptive clichés. “Can you remember?”

  “Of course I can remember,” she said firmly. “He was a shortish man, but not too short. He gave me the impression of being a really efficient policeman. He was well-spoken and cultured. He had a pleasant face and wore horn-rimmed glasses. His name—”

  “Never mind his name,” I cut in. “I think I know the gentleman. But he wasn’t from the police, Mrs. Delongo.”

  “But he showed me a police badge.”

  “I can buy them for you by the gross. What did he want here?”

  “I let him examine poor George’s room. That’s why he came.” She walked a respectable distance away from me. She stared at me with open suspicion. She paused, as if any further movement toward me might be dangerous. “He warned me there’d be people like you around.” She lifted the phone and challenged me with her eyes. “And now—unless you leave at once—I’m going to phone the police.”

  “Wait,” I pleaded. I began to talk. Fast. I went through a galloping account of my background, laying on with the prose until I caught her in the intricacies of my personal saga, all the way down the line to the murder of Jake West. I appealed to her womanhood and her sense of fair play. I jerked identification symbols out of my pock
et, my driving license, my membership in the Authors Guild, an old book review, and finally, the tiny picture of my uncle. Mrs. Delongo succumbed to my display of honest pleading. Slowly, slowly, she abandoned the telephone and began to pluck at my private memorabilia, scrutinizing the scraps and items with a birdlike watchfulness, torn between budding faith and glimmering suspicion.

  “I’ll prove that I’m right,” I argued. “I’ll prove that the man you allowed into George’s room was a fake. Have you examined his room since this morning?”

  “I have not,” she said with a touch of amazement. “I’m not in the habit of searching my tenant’s rooms, young man.”

  “Let’s you and I break that habit.”

  “Very well. Follow me.”

  Mrs. Delongo gasped and squealed when we entered George Bannerman’s room. It was a large square place, an ancient brownstone masterpiece, the bedroom of some forgotten New Yorker. There were two long windows on the street side. The window on the right was halfway up and the playful breeze blew with great strength as soon as the door to the hall opened. The wind picked up a mass of scattered papers on the floor. Somebody had been through the dresser and the desk. Somebody had searched out something and left the dross wherever his marauding hands had dropped it. The drawers to the desk stood open. The dresser, too, had been completely rifled, its contents strewn on the faded rug: shirts and underwear, ties and socks, a mélange of confusion. The lone closet door stood ajar and Bannerman’s suitcases, two worn brown leather bags, lay upended on the bed. Whoever had plundered this room was an expert in the business of search and seize.