Murder for Madame Read online

  “Cooperation. Talk. The right time.”

  “And why should I give you the right time?”

  “Because I’m a buddy of Lieutenant Biberman’s,” I said. “And unless you play ball with me, I’m going to pick up that telephone and make a phone call to my friend Biberman. And I’m going to tell him a little secret that would maybe make Biberman happy.”

  A secret? What kind of a secret?”

  “A little story about a man named Noonan.”

  I dropped it and watched him react to it, the way a Tiffany clerk might react to a dead herring on his desk top. He showed me how many corrugations he could develop in his brow. He knotted his eyebrows tight and moved back from the counter.

  So I dropped the other herring.

  I said, “I’m talking about the bracelet Noonan brought down to you the other day, Krubaker.”

  “Bracelet? Noonan?” He threw out his hands in a gesture of ignorant hopelessness calculated to make me blush with shame. “You came to the wrong place, mister.”

  He was stalling, and it did not sit well with me. I reached across the counter for his neck. I missed him, but caught enough of his dirty tie to fill my fists. I clutched the tie and turned it in my hand, squeezing it tight against his fleshy throat and jerking him my way until his panting face was close enough to slap. He did not enjoy the massage. He was pulling me back with him, stretching a hand for a drawer at his side. There would be a gun in there. I produced my automatic and showed it to him, paralyzing his groping hand. I smacked him again. His tongue hung out of his blubbering mouth and he began to whimper heavily. He struggled against me, howling his terror. Joy backed away from the activity, frightened and trembling.

  I said, “We’ll be out of here in a few minutes, Joy. As soon as Mr. Krubaker decides that I’m not up here to play footie with him.”

  “You’re choking me,” said Krubaker.

  “Not yet, but soon. Pick up the phone, Joy,” I added. “Dial Headquarters and ask for Lieutenant Biberman.”

  “Wait,” Krubaker said.

  “You’re ready to sing?”

  “The bracelet. I have it.”

  “Who brought it here?”

  “A man. I never saw him before.”

  “His name?” I asked, jerking his tie tighter.

  “Noonan. His name was Noonan.”

  “Barchy’s boy?”

  “That I don’t know,” Krubaker squeaked. “Only his name.”

  “Where’s the bracelet now?”

  “In the safe back there.”

  “Open it.”

  I tugged him back there and he worked on the combination with palsied fingers. He opened the old safe and slid his hand inside and brought out a long box. Then he showed us the bracelet. It was a fantastically beautiful piece, a combination of pearls and diamonds.

  I held it up to Joy.

  “That’s Mary’s,” she said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’d know it anywhere. I couldn’t be wrong, Steve, not about this thing. I’ve seen her wear it many times.”

  “What’s it worth?” I asked the quaking diamond merchant.

  “I gave Noonan twenty grand for it.”

  “That means it’s worth fifty?”

  “Who can say?” Krubaker asked himself, his beady eyes glued on the sparkling bauble. “You satisfied now, mister? The bracelet, please.”

  “Not yet.”

  “What else do you want to know?”

  “When did he bring it down here?”

  “Yesterday. In the morning.”

  “Where did he say he got it?”

  Krubaker shrugged it off. “Do I ask questions in a deal like this? Noonan had the goods. I’m in business to buy, not ask.”

  “Next time you’ll ask,” I said, and tucked the bracelet away in my jacket pocket.

  “Wait!” he screamed, clutching at my hand. “You can’t do this to me! You made a deal—you promised me nothing would happen if I talked. What are you doing with it? Where are you taking it?”

  “A man I know wants to see it, Krubaker. A man down at Police Headquarters.”

  He leaped at me, shouting a hysterical oath. I motioned Joy back to the door and retreated with her, avoiding his clawing hands as they swept my way over the counter. An alarm went off somewhere in the building. He had pressed a button back there behind the counter. I waited for the sound of Joy’s footsteps clattering down the stairs. Then I stepped into Krubaker and hit him in the stomach with a long, sweeping left hand. I hit him hard enough to double him up and send him to his knees, squirming out his grief to the dirty floorboards. He would stay that way for a while. Long enough for me to beat it downstairs.

  I beat it.

  Joy had used her pretty head in the emergency. There was a cab waiting at the corner, and she was waving at me through the window. A few pedestrians turned in their hurly-burly routes to squint our way. But they must have thought I was running only because of the girl behind the slender arm. Nobody made a break for me, not even the lanky cop who was parked across the pavement. The cab snaked away down the street, into the lane of uptown traffic. I sat back and cooled, letting the early morning air blow the heat off my face.

  Then I tapped the cabby on the shoulder and directed him to drive us to Larry Fanchon’s place.

  Joy was reluctant to return to him.

  “I can’t go back to Larry now,” she said. “Not without the painting, Steve.”

  “I’ll have the painting for you as I promised, Joy—within a few hours.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I told you before that this deal is closed. I just closed it up in Krubaker’s office. I’m going to be on a merry-go-round for the next few hours, but after that this thing will be open and shut. In the meantime I want you up with Larry Fanchon, where you’ll be safe. I’ll be needing you to testify about Krubaker and Mary’s bracelet. I can’t afford to take any more chances on you, Joy. I want you where I can reach you. Will you promise to stay put until you hear from me?”

  She had promised by the time we reached Larry Fanchon’s place.

  CHAPTER 27

  I had things to do.

  And not much time to waste.

  The police medico was a man named Dr. Millett, a short and quiet character with a sad pair of eyes and a voice as soft as rancid butter. He knew me well, but our friendship could have been cut off by a misplaced comma. We had tangled before, three times, on various assignments that had led me into his little formaldehyde anteroom. He stood behind his desk now, rolling gently on his heels, his hands buried deep in his pants and his flushed face reflecting the perpetual irritation I always stimulated in him. He heard me out, pausing only to walk to his dirty window and mop his sticky brow. He was as cordial as a Congressional committeeman listening to a Communist.

  He said, “Your theories are all wrong, Conacher. You can’t tailor a police report to fit your own needs.”

  “I’m not tailoring,” I said “All I want to establish is a morsel of doubt.”

  “Doubt is doubt. If I tell you I doubt that it’s a hot day, you can accept the premise, but you must then consider me a poor judge of the weather. Doubt can be established about anything and everything. But finicky doubt won’t get you anywhere on this Haskell Moore thing.”

  “All I want to know is whether he might have been hung.”

  “The evidence points the other way,” Millett said with some impatience. “He stood on the chair and tied himself up securely. Then he kicked the chair away. We have dozens of cases every month in which the suicide victim goes about killing himself in exactly that way. There was nothing strange about it, nothing at all.”

  “But he was drunk.”

  “He had been drinking some.”

  “He was stinking drunk.”

&
nbsp; “Stinking?” The good doctor showed me his long-nosed disapproval of all lay experts in the field of gawk-and-guess. “Our investigations show that Moore was something of an alcoholic. His autopsy revealed only a small quantity of consumed liquor. You would have to show me moving pictures of his behavior to prove that he was stinking drunk when he decided to end it all.”

  “I have witnesses.”

  “Forget them, Conacher,” he said with finality. “No witness on earth can prove what goes on in the mind of a suicide. Haskell Moore killed himself. Period.”

  “Yet he could have been hung?”

  “You’re a stubborn fool.”

  “That goes double,” I said, and joined him at the window. He stepped away from me, bothered by the sound of my voice, a medical snob who would not budge to a layman. I put a jabbing finger against him, prodding his chest to find a short cut to his intellect. “Suppose that I can prove that Haskell Moore was knocked off?”

  “Suppositions are cheap.”

  “Maybe you can find a bargain by speculating, Millett. Maybe it would be a feather in your cap if I were right?”

  “I don’t need feathers in this job.”

  “On you they’d look good.”

  “I don’t have to listen to your guff, Conacher,” he said with some irritation. “Why don’t you peddle your ideas somewhere else?”

  “Because I need your opinion, God help me.”

  “I’ve given you my considered judgment.”

  “You’ve given me nothing. I want you to establish a small doubt about Moore. You’re giving me a stubborn diagnosis, Millett. This is no appendectomy. Let’s talk about the rope. Let’s talk about the knot tied around his neck.”

  “The knot was typical.”

  “Not a noose?”

  “A simple knot. A suicide’s knot.”

  “But somebody else could have tied it?”

  “Nonsense,” said the doctor, waving my idea away as though it were an annoying insect. “Utter rot.”

  “You’re acting the snooty medico again,” I barked. “Open up your mind to something new, Millett. I’m asking for small talk and all you’re giving me is the asinine, hard-headed, stone cold snobbery of a typical pill-and-plaster purveyor. A guy like you should be able to open up his brain and use his imagination. Why are you buttoning yours up so that I can’t reach you? I’ve got a strong hunch that Haskell Moore was set up for a patsy in this murder.”

  “A patsy?”

  “A foil. Somebody planted his knife in Mary Ray’s house, and then managed to murder Moore with a rope.”

  “Interesting, but remote.”

  “Why? Suppose somebody knew that Moore was having arguments with Mary Ray? Suppose somebody waited until Moore visited Mary on the night of the murder? It would be a simple matter to follow Moore, to wait until he returned to his studio, and then knock him off.”

  “Simple? It sounds like something out of a dime novel.”

  “Murders often stink of cheap fiction,” I said. “The business of analyzing the maniac’s mind is hard work for better men than you, Millett. Why do you take things for granted? All I want you to do is admit the premise that Haskell Moore might have been lifted to that chair and strung up. Is it possible?”

  He fingered his flabby lip and continued to stare out of the window, but I had reached him, finally. He considered the landscape outside, running his watery eyes over the skyline where something held a dull fascination for him. But he was thinking. He was hashing the idea over in his flat-topped intellect. The pressure of my theory grew stronger as he stared, and his eyes brightened with the blossoming of the reflex thinking I had inspired in him.

  He turned my way finally.

  “Does Doughty know of your ideas?”

  “The hell with Doughty,” I said. “I don’t need a cop’s brain now. I need a doctor, doctor.”

  “You have a suspect?”

  “I’ve got him on ice.”

  “He would have to be a strong man,” said the good doctor.

  “He’s strong enough to have lifted Moore. Moore was a lightweight.”

  “You have something there.”

  “You’re slipping over to my side?”

  “You’ve proved possibility. Can you set up probability?”

  “I’m halfway home,” I said.

  “I wish you good luck, Conacher,” he said, and shook my hand.

  CHAPTER 28

  Now I was on a one-way street. The hunt would end soon. The thin and gossamer threads had faded out of the scheme of my mental meanderings and the road lay open before me; at the end of the avenue of chase-and-challenge, my man would be waiting for me. He existed as a completed picture in my fevered brain. He would be crafty and cunning and wily beyond all normal behavior. He would be running from me soon, unless I collared him quickly. The thought of him moved me quickly uptown through the heat, oblivious of the pedestrian tide around me. His image burned brightly, a caricature of evil, a grinning face that taunted me, challenged me. His mouth was fixed in the cruel, hard-lipped curve of malice that had set my corpuscles burning not too long ago. I saw him making his way up the alley and through the side door into Mary Ray’s. I saw him creeping into her room. And then he stabbed her. And crawled away when he heard me on the stairs, to return later and flatten me with his brute hands.

  I hammered on the door of the Rebus. It was seven o’clock, too early for the night club trade, but they would be getting ready in there. I squinted through the small glass on the door. I hammered again, louder now and with a violence that brought the sting to my fist.

  The bartender opened up, holding me at the door.

  “My old friend,” he said, but did not move away to let me pass.

  “You and I have to make some more small talk,” I said.

  “We’re not open for business.”

  “I’m opening the dump.”

  He gave way to me, stepping backward to the hatcheck booth, a cavern of gloom in the wall. The air-conditioning was not yet on and the place stank from the lingering odors of last night’s hectic customers. From somewhere in the back came the dull clank of pots and pans and the sound of a man’s voice singing a muted and foreign melody. The bar itself was lit feebly, and the big room beyond had not yet been rearranged for the evening traffic. Chairs were piled on the small tables, and in the center of the dance floor a mop and pail sat in solitude.

  “Barchy don’t like early callers,” the bartender said.

  “We’ll keep this visit a secret,” I told him. “Has Barchy been in yet?”

  “A half hour ago.”

  “And Noonan?”

  “I didn’t see the hood.”

  “Does Noonan usually come in with Barchy?”

  “All the time.”

  “Where’s Barchy now?” I asked.

  “Upstairs, I suppose.”

  “I want to be sure.”

  “Go up and see,” the bartender said, and started away from me.

  I yanked him back. He bristled under my hands, but something worked against continuing the struggle. It could have been the look in my eyes. Or it could have been the gun I showed him, up high, close to his cheek.

  “Now we’ll start it all over again,” I suggested. “Barchy comes in every day at this hour. With Noonan. But Noonan isn’t with him today. Is that right?”

  “I told you that before.”

  “Now tell me where Barchy is.”

  “Upstairs.”

  “Call him down.”

  “Are you nuts? What’ll I tell him?”

  “Tell him Conacher is down here.”

  “He won’t like it, chum. Barchy likes to talk business in his office.”

  “He’ll come down for me. Call him.”

  He walked me back to the far end of the bar. There w
as a small, closet-like arrangement in the wall near the last bar stool, and a telephone sat on a ledge. The bartender thumbed a button under the phone and after a second somebody talked to him.

  The bartender, said, “A jerk by the name of Conacher is down here, Boss. He says he wants for you to come down.”

  There was no pause after the dialogue. The bartender hung up and shrugged at the phone and turned to me and shrugged again.

  “He’ll be right down, Conacher. Jesus, you must have something on the King. He doesn’t come down here often like this.”

  “Go back to your bottles and glasses,” I told him.

  I escorted him behind the bar. I stepped away toward the entrance and looked through the little window in the door. Outside, the long shadows were falling across the street, dim and dusty, the prelude to a sticky night. A shop window light blinked on, illuminating a galaxy of ladies’ hats arranged in a modern pattern. The flood of pedestrians seemed to flow in one direction, toward the west, where they would be taking the subway home to their steaming flats. The heat in the Rebus hung over me, sending the bubbles rolling down my forehead. My lips were dry. I had one hand in my pocket, holding the gun. It was a comfort to me.

  Until somebody came up from behind and tapped me on the shoulder.

  “Jesus, but you’re goosey,” Barchy said, smiling at me as I jerked myself into some semblance of order. “You jumped like you maybe saw a ghost when I tapped you.”

  He was a gray blob of nothing in the gloom, a vague silhouette against the weak bar lights, far behind him. But he was alone.

  I said, “I expected you to come in from the street, King.”

  “I thought you were a detective,” he smiled. “There’s a way into this dump from behind the bar.”

  “I’m a detective, not an architect.”

  “Why didn’t you come upstairs, detective?”

  “I want to see you alone.”

  “I was alone up there,” Barchy said. He ambled back toward the bar and leaned on it and motioned the bartender to come our way. “Mix my friend Conacher a long, cool one, Herman. Also one for me. Conacher and me, we’re going behind the bar because we got to talk, understand? If anybody asks for me, I’m not here.”