Murder for Madame Page 9

  “You didn’t talk that way about him last night.”

  “You didn’t ask me much.”

  “I’m asking you now.”

  “Why?” she asked the ceiling. “You didn’t seem to give much of a damn about Fanchon last night. Or did you?”

  “You weren’t on the ball,” I said. “I got a lot from him. I found Haskell Moore.”

  “So you found Haskell Moore. Now what?”

  “Moore was dead.”

  “Pardon me if I don’t weep.”

  “He killed himself.”

  “That was thoughtful of him.”

  “I thought you’d enjoy the news,” I said. “Moore wasn’t very popular with a lot of people, was he?”

  “He was an old louse. I told you what I thought of him last night. I’m not a forgetful drunk, sweetie.”

  “That’s why I came down here, Gloria.”

  She stopped moving around and settled close to me. She leaned down at me, her mood changed now, her face gay with good humor.

  “That’s better,” she said quietly. “I was very angry when I lost you last night. It isn’t nice to play games with a girl, Stevie.”

  “I was thinking about your memory, Gloria. Let’s save the sweet talk for later.”

  “My memory?”

  “Your sharp brain. You said that you remember things when you’re lit.”

  “I never forget a thing,” she said and dropped an arm on my shoulder. “I remembered you, didn’t I?”

  “Try remembering Fanchon.”

  “But I do.”

  “You were asleep when I left, weren’t you?”

  “Almost, but not quite.”

  “You remember me leaving?”

  “Vaguely. I heard the door shut.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then nothing.”

  “Fanchon,” I said. “What did he do?”

  She laughed out loud. “What kind of a routine is this? I told you he didn’t do anything. He wouldn’t dare make a pass at me. Don’t you believe me?”

  “I’m sold on that angle, Gloria. But what did he do?”

  “He ran inside and was gone for about ten minutes. I heard him on the phone.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Now you’re asking too much,” Gloria said. She sat down and rubbed her forehead and closed her eyes, trying to bring some feeble memory to life. And failing. “I can’t recall what in hell he said.”

  “Part of it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Was he talking to a man? A woman?”

  “It was too far away,” she said. “His library is at the rear of the house, and the phone is in there. I remember it from his parties. I couldn’t possibly have heard him clearly.”

  “So he made a phone call. Then what?”

  She made an impolite gesture with both hands. “He kicked me out. He called his houseboy and had him walk me home.”

  “What time was that?”

  “Jesus, you’re asking too much.”

  “You stayed here after that?”

  “I was out cold,” she laughed, “until you rang the bell a half hour ago.”

  She went to the window on the street side and opened it wider. The hiss and pour of the rain filtered in, a background of sound in a closet of sweat. The room was damp and warm and it would be much hotter before it got cool in here. I took off my jacket and unloosened my tie, a gesture that brought a sparkle to her eyes. She went to her tiny refrigerator and brought out some bottled soda and a fifth of Bourbon. She poured two glasses of it and iced them down well and handed one of them to me. I played it her way and let her feed me two doses. I wanted her friendly. She would talk when she trusted me.

  “Maybe we’re finished talking business now?” she asked.

  “Not yet. Tell me about Fanchon,” I said. “Whatever you know.”

  “To hell with Fanchon.”

  “He’s important to me.”

  “How important can a slob like that be?” she asked. She had left the table and was sitting on the bed, leaning back on her hands.

  I said, “You’re slowing me up, Gloria. Don’t forget that I’m a detective and I’m here on business.”

  “You’re no detective, Steve. You’re blind.”

  “I’ve got to dig more on Fanchon.”

  “Fanchon can wait.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of—he won’t wait. And you’re the only contact I have with him.”

  “I’m not that kind of contact.” She was up higher on the bed now. Her head was on the three colored pillows and she was spread out in a pose calculated to inspire artists, sculptors and also the run of the mill layman. “Fill my glass again, sweetie. And bring it here to me.”

  I did as I was told. She took the glass and put it down on the tiny table near the bed. But she didn’t put down my hand. She held it tight and worked her subtle strength on it. She was strong as a mill-hand, but much softer.

  “I said we’ll talk about Fanchon later,” she suggested.

  You’re making it tough for me.”

  “I’ll make it easy.”

  She made it easy. The rain hissed outside the window and there were the dull noises of traffic in the street below, the daytime surge of business moving uptown. I had planned this visit with a purpose. It would be better to approach Eric Fanchon on an inside track, after being warmed up by somebody like Gloria, who might know him well. But she was warming me up in a different way. She was upsetting my plans, working havoc with my strategy.

  Afterwards, I took her to lunch at the Barrel and she gave me the answers I was looking for.

  She had a more than intimate knowledge of Eric Fanchon’s domestic affairs, culled from immediate contact with the fat man at his parties and abetted by the many stories, rumors and legends about him in the Village. Some of the little tales were merely aspects of his erratic character. Others, however, concerned his private life.

  He had a son and the son’s name was Lawrence. But Lawrence lived in the gilded purlieus of Park Avenue and scorned his father’s chosen haunts, disdaining the Bohemian bums who gathered in the downtown Fanchon temple. Lawrence was a snob. She had met him once, by accident, at an early morning breakfast in Eric Fanchon’s huge dining room. Lawrence had walked in, observed the festive group and then turned on his heel for the door.

  She described him accurately. She labeled him and added what she considered his personality tabs. And when she was finished, he emerged as a dapper youth, in his middle twenties, of a darkly handsome visage, well-spoken and serious, the symbol of the young and respected business executive. She painted him in fine strokes, making good use of her feminine facility with detail. She dressed him up for me, in conservative clothes and solid colored ties. She went down the line on him, adding small bits of information that came through from the first moment of meeting him. He had said only a few words to his father, but the words were spoken in a half whisper. And he blushed when he mouthed them.

  “Sort of a college boy type,” Gloria said. “The kind of kid we see down here in the Village once in a while. You know—the studious artist type. Quiet. Very quiet.”

  “I gather that you liked him.”

  “I felt sorry for him. His old man is such a weirdo.”

  “You liked him after only seeing him once? Break it down for me.”

  “How can I?” she asked. “I react on impulse. Remember?”

  “How can I forget?”

  “When do we react again, Steve?”

  “Soon,” I said. “But right now, I’ve got to see a man.”

  CHAPTER 14

  My office was a two-room affair in the Dorker Building, a better than average cubicle because I was doing a better than average business in routine skip-trace work. Ever since the day I hit th
e front pages on the Masterson case, clients flocked to me, attracted by the corny press stories that built me into a minor magician. A girl by the name of Liz Abbott handled my office stuff and she was good enough to run it single-handed when I chose to rest my brain. This did not mean that she worked alone. She was aided and abetted by several outside operators like Slip Keddy, and sometimes she left the office herself to explore a lead or two.

  She was out today. It would have been good to talk to Liz because she was a girl with a good brain. The reception room was empty and there was a note on her desk saying:

  Steve: I’m out on the prowl for David Pressman’s wife. If you need me, I’ll be home tonight, after six. From what I heard this morning, you’re tied in knots on the Mary Ray murder. Why? A little man was in this morning and asked for you. I told him you were too busy. But he said he’d be back.

  Liz

  I opened the window at the far end of the reception room, to kill the ingrown smell of the place. I crossed through the small hall and entered my private cell and sat behind my desk. There were a few letters and notes to be read and I thumbed through them and marked them for Liz. I riffed through the phone book and noted several phone numbers: Lawrence Fanchon, Eric Fanchon and King Barchy. Then I pulled out a wad of yellow sheets and began to doodle the names one under the other, decorating them with scrawls and curlicues that would have meant much to a practicing psychiatrist. The names were doodled in small letters, circled and squared into confining areas. But my subconscious began to etch a new name alongside these three and the letters of this name were bigger and bolder and my pencil bit into the letters until the point pierced the paper. The new name was Joy Marsh and then JOY MARSH and around and about it a series of question marks and arrows pointing this way and that.

  I stuffed the yellow sheet away and reached into my desk and fed myself a shot of Bourbon. There was a small sink in the corner of my cave and a glass for water. I turned on the faucet and watched the water spill over the rim of the glass and splash down the drain. It made a gurgling sound, not loud, so that all other sounds could be heard beyond the gurgling.

  Like the sound of the door to the reception room, opening. And the latch clicking shut.

  And the following sly noise of footsteps in the corridor outside.

  The door was open, so I could see him clearly as he stepped inside. He was a short, bulky character in a sharp summer outfit of light gray. He had on fuzzy suede shoes of a dark brown shade, a pink shirt abounding in stripes and a tie that resembled an adaptation of a nightmare out. of the mind of an idiot designer, blotches of yellow and cerise, as pleasant as an abstraction of nausea. He was biting a dying cigar and squinting at me through his slitted eyes. He was standing in the doorway, his body not quite turned to face me, in the attitude of a man who hasn’t quite made up his mind to move, one way or the other.

  He made up his mind. He advanced to the desk and dropped a fat ash in my ashtray and then slid into the leather seat close to me and removed his Panama hat. He mopped his brow and then examined his handkerchief as though he expected to find diamonds. He had big hands.

  “Am I talking to Conacher?” he asked his handkerchief.

  I said, “In the flesh.”

  “Conacher, the private dick?”

  “My license is on the wall.”

  “I expected something else, chum.” He hoarsed his words, but his voice kept cracking in a funny way, so that you got the impression he was clearing his throat all the time. “I expected a big guy.”

  “You’ve been reading too many murder books.”

  “I never read books. But the papers, now, I read them all the time. You read them this morning? That Mary Ray killing,” he said to himself. “Terrible.”

  “Interesting reading. Better than Dick Tracy, isn’t it?”

  “Jesus, a terrible thing,” he said. He voiced his opinion to the end of his cigar, as he shook his head sadly. “The way Mary was butchered, I mean. Any guy does a job like that, he’s got to be crazy, I say. Who walks in on a dame in her bedroom and slips a skivvy into her? A guy has to be screwy in the head to do a job like that. This Haskell Moore guy, he must have been hopped up, I say.”

  “An interesting deduction,” I said. “Shall I take shorthand notes?”

  “Very funny, Conacher. But put your pratt back on that chair where it was. I like funny jokes better when the comic is sitting down.”

  I said, “Get the hell out of here.”

  He said, “Noonan!”

  And then Noonan came in.

  “Hello, sucker,” he said. He advanced with the rolling gait of the professional boxer, his broad shoulders stiff and set. He was handmade for mayhem, a tall and sturdy character who radiated a subtle air of mockery in his every gesture. He had a slick, hard face, cut along classic lines. Somewhere, a long time ago, people had told him he was handsome. But his manly beauty was lost on me. I disliked every bone in his head.

  He wore a green felt hat with a rakish feather of the type sported along Broadway. His clothes were tailored theatrically, featuring an overlong jacket that promoted his wasp waist and exaggerated the chest expansion under the striped silk shirt. A large ring glinted on his left hand and made me wonder whether he was a southpaw puncher. He would be able to cut and rip a man’s face with that ring.

  In the pause, he stood over me and treated me to a close-up of his wicked smile, as cold and mean as the side of a hyena’s jaw. He was forcing me to look up at him, and I did not enjoy the perspective. The size of him started a fresh glow of heat around my collar; another big, blustery guy playing havoc with my blood pressure.

  “Pull up a chair and drop dead,” I said.

  “A funny man,” Noonan said.

  “The big laughs come later, Noonan,” the other man said. “But first we got to make our friend here talk to us.”

  “Coax me,” I said. “I’m bashful.”

  “You want me to coax him now, King?” Noonan asked.

  “Not now.”

  “King Barchy?” I asked.

  “A real bright boy,” said the man behind the cigar. “Conacher don’t want us to muss him up, I say. Right, Conacher?”

  “I bleed too easily,” I said.

  “Conacher has something he wants we should know, Noonan. Like what he did with the book he took from Mary Ray’s.”

  “What book?” I asked.

  “Conacher knows the book I’m talking about,” King Barchy said, a picture of quiet confidence. “Give him time, Noonan.”

  “I’ll play it again,” I said. “What book?”

  “The little book with the names in it, Conacher.”

  “You’re whistling in the breeze, Barchy.”

  “You took it out of her bedroom.”

  “You don’t read your papers right,” I said. “That’s the problem the Library Association is trying to lick. They claim that most people only read the headlines, Barchy. If you had finished the report of what happened in Mary Ray’s bedroom, you would have known that I was slugged before the city dicks arrived.”

  “Hit him once, Noonan.”

  “It won’t do any good, Barchy. I’m leveling.”

  “Hit him, I say.”

  So Noonan hit me. He reached across the desk and grabbed me by the lapels and pulled me his way and slapped a big palm at me, high on the right cheek, as gentle as the kiss of death. He pulled me forward and hurled me against the chair, alongside Barchy. Barchy continued to puff his cigar.

  “Now, Conacher, about that book,” he said.

  “You can go to hell,” I said.

  “Again, King?” Noonan asked.

  “Again.”

  I was waiting for him this time, the way a sitting duck waits for a dose of buckshot, quick on the rise and going away fast, so that his deliberate thrust at my chin missed by a good six inches. He puffed
and huffed his embarrassment and I caught him as he regained his footing, off balance and teetering close to the desk. I stepped around the corner and kicked him in the gut. Hard. He doubled up, and when his face came down he was kissed off by my knee again. It doesn’t pay to diddle with fisticuffs when the odds are against dignified pugilism. So I kneed him again and when he sat on the floor his head clapped up against the side of the desk like a heavy knock on a door.

  Then King Barchy hit me with the flat side of a freight car.

  And I was out.

  CHAPTER 15

  Noonan revived me with a glass of water from my sink, flush in my face and delivered with force, a flat splat of liquid that opened my eyes and bobbled my head alive.

  And Barchy was saying, “All right, Conacher. So I believe you about the book. Noonan was only fooling.”

  I said, “He fools too rough. The next time he tries it, I’ll kill him.”

  “I believe you, Conacher. You got a well-trained knee.”

  “I do more damage with my shoes.”

  “I said I believe you. Now I’ll give you some advice. I’ll give it to you for free.”

  “Let me try him again, King,” Noonan said.

  “Shake your tail out of here, Noonan. One of these days you’ll get anxious with a clever boy like Conacher and he’s going to open your head and spill your brains on the rug. This Conacher is tough because he’s got to be tough, I say. I got all kinds of sympathy for a guy his size. Maybe it’s because I stunted my growth with butts, too, when I was a kid. A little guy with a big brain is worth six like you, Noonan. So shake your tail out of here and go down and wait for me in the car. I don’t need you for Conacher. We’ll get along real good together.”

  Noonan shuffled out and I toyed with the idea of diving at the great King Barchy. He sat where he had sat throughout the little fracas, still sucking tenderly at his cigar stub, still as composed as a turtle on a hot log in the sun. His heavily lidded eyes barely opened to watch me, but I knew he was alive to my purpose from the way he fingered the little automatic on his lap.

  “Sit down, Conacher,” he said. “You and me got business to talk about.”