Rather Cool for Mayhem, page 12
“I’ll manage.”
“One more question. How did you know that Norman slept in Room 13 night before last?”
“Alma told me at breakfast this morning,” Grace said. “I asked her.”
“The poor girl certainly knew lots of answers.”
“Jim,” Grace began, “I’d like to—”
I stopped her by putting a finger against her lips. I had heard voices coming down the path from the inn, back of the cypress hedge. Time was running out. I whispered: “Is there any way to get to your cabin without passing the inn?”
She pointed.
I hugged her. It was a brief hug, and probably a clumsy one, just as clumsy as most of the things I’d said and done—or hadn’t said or done—since we first met. But it was a hug from way down deep and it said many things I’d felt for years and never got around to saying.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I whispered.
“Goodbye. I’ll try to keep them busy.”
I ran down a little path that wound through a grove of willows. I looked back once. I saw Grace going off in the opposite direction, swinging along with a jauntiness that she certainly did not feel.
I plowed through some underbrush, kicking up the ominous mutter of dead leaves. I crossed the road on a run, and climbed to the cabin without being stopped.
Four cars stood on the flat, unattended. Apparently the keys had not yet been redistributed. I reached into Grace’s car and slipped her duplicate key into the ignition. Then I released the emergency brake, and pushed. When I had generated a little forward motion, I jumped in and coasted silently down the slope. I didn’t start the motor until the momentum had, almost died.
A minute later I was rolling down the dirt road toward the New York highway.
Chapter Fourteen
There was a big hamburger stand at the junction of the dirt road and the concrete highway. I parked Grace’s car on the north side, toward the back, where it could not be seen from the junction, and bought myself an excuse to wait. I had a right to be hungry, but I wasn’t much interested in food. However, I ordered a bottle of beer and worried the edges of a hamburger. I had drunk the beer down to the top of the label when a State Police car came by, driving very slowly. It didn’t stop, but it made me realize that I had better mix a little ingenuity with my beer if I expected to get through to New York.
If McKay wanted me badly enough to devote sufficient manpower to the job of stopping me, I’d have about one chance in fifty of reaching Manhattan—and I had to get through. My best bet was to try to make it before he got enough manpower mobilized, and to give the cops on the road a run for their money. The Sunday traffic was in my favor, and I knew a trick that would add to the confusion. I walked around to the car and poured the rest of the beer over the license plates. Then I kicked some dust against the plates so it would stick in uneven patches. The number wasn’t obliterated, but it was confusing to read. The index letter looked as much like a “Q” or a “C” as a “U,” and the digits could have been almost anything unless you looked very closely.
I went around to the front of the stand, got another beer, and bought the morning paper. Dr. Norman didn’t make Page One, but he got half a column inside the second section, with a photograph of the deceased. The picture was of Norman in uniform, but it didn’t make him look very military. I folded the second section and put it into my pocket. The rest of the paper I tossed into Grace’s car and came back to my observation post.
In about twenty minutes Eddie Westerford’s fireman’s dream of red and chromium came blazing out of the dirt road and swung south toward New York. Eddie was at the wheel, his golden hair blowing in the wind. Conchita was with him. Here was my fox.
It wasn’t hard to follow a car like Eddie’s, even in Sunday traffic. I managed to keep two or three hundred yards behind, trying to be very anonymous in the parade of Sunday drivers. I didn’t notice any cops following me, although I kept one eye on the rear-view mirror, and the other on the road ahead. After a little while my dual role of fox and hound became largely automatic and I found myself wondering if I was doing the right thing in heading for New York.
I decided I was. True, the trails at Blindman’s Lake led straight to the murderer, but it was almost impossible to find out where they started. I was sure I’d have a better chance in New York. For instance, it was apparent that Norman’s murderer had intercepted Alma Frazer’s note to me, but how would I, or anyone else, go about running down the interceptor? Had Tommy’s pocket been picked, or had he dropped the note? Tommy didn’t know, and it was certain that anybody with the blood of two murders on his hands would deny with his last lying breath that he had ever seen the note. And I didn’t believe that even McKay’s police tricks could break him down.
I wondered what the missing note actually said. I felt pretty guilty about not getting the message that proved to be Alma’s death warrant, and yet I could hardly be held responsible for Alma’s committing her message to paper. Karl, of course, would consider me responsible, since he had opposed Alma’s talking to me in the first place. After he had come out of the first shock of the bad news of Alma’s death, Karl might even put the finger on me. Even if he knew what Alma wanted to tell me, I doubted if Karl would let McKay in on the secret. Karl had gone to great pains to let me know he had definite principles against co-operating with the police. Not even vindictiveness against the murderer of Alma would overcome those principles, I was pretty sure. He probably wouldn’t even tell McKay I had noticed that Norman’s toothbrush was missing.
I did some thinking about the toothbrush. There was a possibility that it was of some special brand that might be traced to Norman. A probability, even, since it had been ostentatiously left in Alma’s room. But why? Well, that wasn’t too hard to figure out. The murderer of Norman was not only covering his own tracks, but he was dropping a few false clues to involve others—like the gun with my prints on it. So my guess was that Norman had left his toothbrush behind in Room 13 inadvertently, maybe in a glass in the bathroom, and that the murderer had found it there and taken it to Room 29 when he went up to kill Alma. Norman’s toothbrush in Alma’s room might be intended to suggest an intimate relationship, to hint to McKay that jealousy was the motive for both murders. Would McKay think Karl Vogel had discovered Alma was two-timing him with Norman and had killed them both?
I thought about the implications of the toothbrush for about five miles, still keeping Eddie Westerford’s car in sight ahead of me, still listening for the sirens I didn’t want to hear. Then I thought about Tommy for a while. I remembered my first impression of Alma Frazer’s possible relationship to Norman when I had noticed her devotion to Tommy. I also remembered Bob and Joan Stewart’s fanatic resolve to keep Tommy as their own, and I couldn’t help linking it with the fact that I had seen Bob Stewart coming down the stairs of Lakeside Inn just a few minutes before I found Alma dead. I couldn’t discard the possible deductions from this chain of impressions and facts, but it was an unpleasant line of reasoning and I gave it up after a minute or two.
I was thinking about Eddie Westerford’s strange and frantic search of Room 13, and of his enigmatic interview with Betty Hurley, when I noticed that Eddie had pulled up at a roadside bar and grill. I had to pass him. I slowed down for a road stand a little farther along, but I didn’t stop there. Two motorcycle cops were at the counter, talking to the waitress.
I picked another joint half a mile down the road and stopped for another beer. I also looked up the Westerfords’ Manhattan address in the phone book. Ten minutes later the red car came by again, and I got back on the trail.
I followed Eddie and Conchita as far as the approach to the George Washington Bridge. Then I quit. There were four State troopers leaning on their motorcycles, watching the cars crossing from Jersey to New York. I didn’t have to huddle with myself for very long to decide that this was not the best way across the Hudson.
I did a few fancy turns in the traffic cloverleaf to make sure that one of the four troopers was not following me. I lost Eddie’s car, but I was still at large, and I thought I knew where I could pick it up again.
On my third lap around the cloverleaf, I found the road leading to the Lincoln Tunnel, and headed in that direction as fast as I dared without attracting too much attention for weaving in traffic. There was a trooper at the entrance to the tunnel, but he didn’t seem to notice me.
At the New York exit, however, there were two cops who looked me over plenty. After I passed them, I could see them in my rear-vision mirror, still looking at me. I stepped on the gas, beat the next traffic light, and swung Grace’s car into a garage on West Fortieth Street. Then I took a taxi to Greenwich Village.
I had the cabbie drive past the Westerfords’ address in Perry Street, then go around the block and drive by again. On our fifth time around, I saw the red car parked at the curb. Eddie was getting out. Conchita slid under the wheel, and Eddie went directly into the house. When Conchita drove off, I told the cabbie to follow her.
Conchita drove uptown on Eighth Avenue and turned into Fifty-seventh Street. My cab trailed her for three cross-town blocks. We passed her when she parked near Fifth Avenue. Looking back, I saw her go into an office building. I paid off the cab at the corner and walked back.
I went into the building Conchita had entered and looked at the directory board in the lobby. Immediately I felt like patting myself on the back. There was a third-floor listing for a firm called “Super Fidelity Sound Studios.”
I crossed the street to wait in a doorway. In five minutes Conchita came out, got into her car, and drove away. It didn’t take me long to go up to the Super Fidelity Sound Studios.
The door with the studio sign on it was locked. I rang the night bell and an earnest young man in his shirt sleeves ultimately came to open.
“Sorry to disturb you,” I began, “but I understand you made a recording a few days ago for Dr. Norman H. Norman, and I—”
“Gee zuzz!” the young man interrupted. “Another one.”
“I have a rather unusual request, but I’m willing to pay for any favors I ask.” I produced a ten-dollar bill and folded it into quarters with one hand while I replaced my bill-fold with the other. “I’d like very much to hear a playback of your file copy of Dr. Norman’s recording.”
The young man glanced at the sawbuck and swallowed both audibly and visibly. He had a very expressive Adam’s apple.
“No soap,” said the young man, with genuine regret. “I tell you what I told the dame who just came here asking the same thing. There’s no file copy and no script. The doctor didn’t want any master and no dubbings. He was very explicit. He wanted just one audition copy, and he took that with him.”
“Don’t you usually make your own reference copy,” I said, “just in case the customer changes his mind later or trips on the rug and smashes the recording or something?”
“Not this time, we didn’t,” the young man said. “Dr. Norman was such a screwy guy and made such a fuss about everything, that we made just the one copy. We don’t have a thing of his in the house except about twenty seconds of intro that we cut by accident. It was just a level test, but the recording lathes happened to be rolling, so—
“I’ll pay a dollar a second to hear the level test,” I said. I took out another ten-dollar bill and folded it carefully with the first.
“No soap,” the young man repeated. “Dr. Norman gave orders to destroy that cut. He just phoned today.”
“Today?”
“About an hour ago. He phoned from out of town and said the original got broken and did we have a copy. I told him no, nothing but that twenty seconds of test cut. So he asked me to play it back for him on the phone and I did. Then he said it was no good to him and please destroy it right away. He—”
“Did you destroy the cut? Did you?”
“Not yet,” said the young man. “Gee zuzz, I don’t have time to turn around here on Sunday afternoons. I’m all alone here in the shop, and I’ve been making off-the-air recordings for three customers. I don’t even have time to go to the can, let alone think about that cut.”
I took a deep breath. I guess I’d been holding my breath for the last two minutes.
“Did that woman who was just here listen to the test cut?” I asked.
The young man turned his back on me.
Hold it for half a shake,” he said, as he hurried into the next room. I saw him bending over a battery of lathes, watching the metal points plow up little blue-violet clouds of fine-spun gossamer that floated on the glistening dark mirrors of the revolving discs, diaphanous tufts of color as lovely as the sounds being etched into the dead, deaf surfaces. He blew away some of the gossamer, looked at a few dials, adjusted a switch here and there. Then he came back.
“Sorry,” he said. “Were you saying something to me?”
“I asked you if that woman who came here a little while ago listened to your cut of Dr. Norman’s level test?”
“No,” said the young man. “She wanted to hear it, but I told her I’d already smashed it.”
“Why did you tell her that?” I asked, ostentatiously playing with the two ten-dollar bills. “Did somebody ask you to tell her that?”
“Nobody told me to say nothing,” said the young man. “Only I didn’t want to waste any time arguing with that dame. She used to work here, and she gives me shooting pains in both cheeks. All lady engineers give me a pain in both cheeks. And besides, Dr. Norman phoned me to scrap the test.”
“I think you ought to know,” I said, “that Dr. Norman couldn’t possibly have ordered you to scrap that test recording today. Dr. Norman is dead.”
“Dead?”
“Dr. Norman was murdered yesterday afternoon.”
“Gee zuzz! Murdered?” The young man’s sensitive Adam’s apple did a complicated series of movements in syncopated rhythm. “Maybe I ought to listen to a newscast once in a while,” he said. “All I do is take off music and long-winded talk. Or are you kidding me, mister.”
“I’m not kidding,” I said. I showed him the second section of the morning paper, with Dr. Norman’s picture in it. He looked from the newspaper to the ten-dollar bills. Then he looked at me.
“That’s him, all right,” he said at last. “Say, are you a dick?”
“Private investigator,” I said. I flashed my A.G.O. card. The Army’s identification credentials are very official-looking, complete with photograph and fingerprints. The young man glanced at the card just long enough to be impressed. His gaze came right back to the money in my other hand.
“Do I hear the test?” I asked.
The young man took the two ten-dollar bills. “Sure, as long as it couldn’t have been Dr. Norman himself who ordered the—Say, I wonder who it was phoned me an hour ago, pretending to be the doctor?”
So did I, as I watched the engineer shuffling through a stack of discs. He selected one, led me into another room, motioned me to a chair, and placed the disc on the turntable of a playback. He snapped a switch and caressed the needle of the playback with his thumb until a series of reassuring clucks told him that the amplifier was warm. As he slid the needle into the grooves, I heard a loudspeaker saying:
“Good evening, friends of Grace Boyd. Good evening, fellow crooks, charlatans, and murderers. This is the Seeing Eye of Blindman’s Lake, bringing you the facts of life. It is a tragic thing, as you all should know, to base one’s life upon the hypocrisy of others, to believe that all who glitter have hearts of gold, that only the frankly disreputable are truly evil. How much more clearly could the blind of Blindman’s Lake see, if only they knew all the reprehensible little things—and the big ones—buried in the souls of their own friends, in the files of Grossbeck’s Pharmacy, in the archives of the—”
An off-mike voice interrupted to say: “Good. That was fine. Now let’s record it.”
“And that’s that,” the young man said, as he shut off the machine. “It don’t sound to me like it’s worth twenty bucks, but that’s all there is.”
“It’s plenty,” I said. “Thanks a lot.”
“Is it okay to scrap the platter now?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll help you.”
I took the recording from the turntable and cracked it against my knee. There was no use exposing the young man to further temptation, in case somebody else came around waving frog-skins.
When I got down to the street, I made for the nearest cigar store and attacked the pile of telephone directories. I looked in the red book under “Pharmacists” to find the address of Grossbeck’s Pharmacy. It was in the heart of the Village. I hailed a cab and gave the directions.
There are many arteries leading from Midtown Manhattan to the heart of Greenwich Village, one through the Garment District, one straight down the skid row of Sixth Avenue employment agencies, one that passes the ladies’ jail erected where the old Jefferson Market Court once stood, one that follows the deceptive thermometer of Fads and Fashions that is Fifth Avenue, running from expensive chills to low-grade fever within a few blocks.
On a Sunday afternoon late, about the only difference between the heart of New York’s Bohemia and the heart of America’s most bourgeois Puritania is that Sauk Centre, Wisconsin, is probably a little more lively than Sheridan Square, New York. I wouldn’t go so far as to say you could shoot a cannon ball down the streets of Greenwich Village of a Sunday, because the streets of the Village were quite obviously laid out by some gentleman in his cups. Why, otherwise, should Fourth Street cross Twelfth Street? Or Bleecker Street writhe like a wounded snake? But the streets were shrouded with such a religious quiet that the occasional squawk of the taxi horn had no answer except the shrill cry of children playing in deserted intersections.
Fifteen minutes after leaving the Super Fidelity Sound Studios, I was paying off my cab in front of Grossbeck’s Pharmacy in Greenwich Village. It was an old-fashioned pharmacy with huge colored globes in the window, thousands of neatly labeled bottles with ground-glass stoppers and hand-painted jars on the shelves; no soda fountain, though. A rotund little man with a white mustache and no hair whatever greeted me.
