The Second Fletcher Flora Mystery MEGAPACK® Page 2

  I offered her a cigarette, thinking it might loosen her up a little. After a slight hesitation, she accepted it and a light gratefully.

  “Apparently Hal’s never mentioned me,” she said.

  I’d guessed her identity, of course, from the moment I’d walked in.

  “Until this afternoon,” I said, “I hadn’t seen Hal for a long time. He probably has a lot of friends I’ve never heard of.”

  She leaned forward stiffly, clutching the edge of the desk. “You’ve seen him?”

  “I just came from the municipal prison.”

  “How is he?”

  I shrugged and lit a cigarette of my own, taking my time, answering her through smoke. “Licked,” I said. “Ready to quit. I’m supposed to be his lawyer, but it’s just for looks.”

  “He didn’t mention me at all?”

  “Not by name. He said he spent the night of the murder with a girl. That you?”

  Delicate color flushed her cheeks. “Yes.”

  “It’s an air-tight alibi, honey. You could save his hide with a dozen words in the right place.”

  “I know. That’s why I’m here.”

  “This isn’t the right place. If you speak up, Hal won’t even need a lawyer. All you have to do is see the district attorney.”

  “I’ve seen him.”

  In his corner, Oliver Wendell Holmes, with no problems, slumbered quietly in his web. The office seemed filled, of a sudden, with a poised and breathless menace.

  “Yes? What did he tell you?”

  “He told me it was a nice try and that he admired me for the attempt, but said he had a witness of his own who contradicted my testimony. His witness was one of his own investigators. He told me to go home and forget it, otherwise I’d find myself involved in a perjury charge.”

  Her voice had sunk to a whisper of bitterness. I got up and moved over to a window that looked down into the narrow chasm of a dreary alley.

  After a while, I turned back into the room. She still sat on the edge of her chair, the ineffectual cigarette burning forgotten between her fingers. A thin line of smoke ascended past her face. Her eyes met mine, fear swimming darkly.

  I said quietly, “You know anyone out of town? Anyone you could visit for a while?”

  “No.”

  “That’s too bad. You ought to take a nice trip. You ought to take a quick trip to a far place. You got a job?”

  “Yes.”

  “Get sick. Give me time to figure something out. In the meantime, go home and lock your door. For your sake and Hal’s, take care of yourself.”

  She jerked erect. “I’ll be all right. Will you call me when you need me?”

  “I’ll call you. Leave your address with my secretary.”

  She went to the door and stood there with one hand on the knob. “Why?” she asked. “He’s just one of the little guys. He isn’t big enough to rate a top bracket frame.”

  I was suddenly wishing I had never known Hal Decker and that this girl was a thousand miles away. I wasn’t proud of the feeling, and I said softly, “There’s nothing personal about it. Any guy would have done. It’s just that someone needs a patsy…it’s just that Hal pointed at himself with his big mouth…it’s just that he made himself logical.”

  She continued to stand there for a few seconds, her eyes fixed in a blind stare of intense absorption. And then, saying nothing, she went out.

  I leaned back to study the wall beside the door. Outside in the reception office, the voices of Kitty and Wanda Henderson were engaged in a brief exchange. Then the hall door opened, closed, and silence descended.

  Suddenly, beyond my door, Kitty’s typewriter began a furious clattering. Shadow on the glass, I thought. The clattering ended abruptly, and Kitty’s voice rose brightly. Almost immediately, my door swung open, and my reflexes had me reaching for a stack of paper, while I thought unkindly of Kitty’s negligence in forgetting to cue me in. But I didn’t complete the action. I knew, somehow, that the two guys who entered would not be susceptible to the routine.

  One of them leaned against the door. The other moved in on my desk, with a cordial smile on his face. He even removed his hat, placing it carefully on a corner of the desk. His hair was light brown and clipped close to a skull. He was tall, topping-six feet, with heavyweight shoulders that moved in easy co-ordination with his legs. A pretty nice-looking guy, really, except that his light tan eyes were cold and shining with conditioned wariness. There was about him the delicate and indefinable scent of violence and death.

  “You Solomon Burr?” he asked, pleasantly.

  “Yes,” I said. “Have a chair.”

  The cordial smile spread a trifle. He reached into the inner pocket of his coat and removed a thick, green packet. He fanned the edge of it with a thumbnail and laid it on the desk among the legal papers.

  “No, thanks. We won’t stay. The girl who was just here—Wanda Henderson—this will pay you to forget her.”

  It was a lot of money, a hell of a lot of money for a lawyer with a relatively new shingle. I looked at the packet, and my palms were itching.

  “Go to hell,” I said.

  The guy with tan eyes kept smiling. He picked up the money and returned it to his pocket. Leaning across the desk, as if he were going to argue the point, he slashed the horny edge of his hand across my month. My chair teetered, crashing over backward, not so much from the blow as from my effort to get away from it. The guy came around the desk and kicked me. I tried to move away, but all my muscles were drawn in a kind of excruciating contraction. I felt myself hoisted, jammed against the desk. Stony knuckles raked my face and the pleasant voice, spaced precisely between blows, reached me faintly on a rising wave of thunderous nausea.

  “You could have made a nice bundle, just for turning down a job. Now you’ll turn it down without the bundle, just because I ask it. You hear me, counselor? You hear me real plain?”

  I heard him, but I didn’t answer. I slipped away under cover of night and descended in soft and sweeping gyrations a thousand sickening miles to the blessed sanctuary of the floor.

  CHAPTER TWO

  More Women in the Act

  My head was lying on something delightfully soft. Far off above me, a voice said, “Damn it, you’re getting me all bloody.”

  Opening my eyes, I saw through a swimming pink mist the shimmering, elusive face of Kitty Troop.

  “Pardon me,” I said, shutting my eyes again.

  The effort detonated a bomb inside my skull.

  “Shut up,” Kitty said. “If you’ve got to bleed, bleed quietly.”

  When I’d accumulated enough strength to lift my lids once more, the pink mist had thinned a little, and Kitty’s face was closer and clearer.

  “You’ve been crying,” I said.

  She sniffed. “Like hell I have. You think I’d waste any tears on a guy three months delinquent on my salary? What the hell you trying to do, sonny, make like Perry Mason?”

  “Perry Mason never gets beat up,” I said. “Perry Mason is a hero. Has anyone ever told you that you’ve got nice legs?”

  “You’d be surprised,” she said. “Anyhow, you ought to use a more direct approach. Between you and me, lover, this is a damned devious technique. Now get up. The fun’s over.”

  I tried a grin and suffered for it. “You’re profane, honey. You’re a very profane dame.”

  “To hell with you,” she said.

  Slipping an arm across my shoulders, she made enough clearance to draw her leg out from under. Then, very gently, while bells rang and sirens whined in a vivid shower of colored sparks and streamers, she deposited me into a chair.

  She went away, and I let my eyes close. Pretty soon, she returned, and I let them stay closed. She swabbed the cut on my cheek bone with liquid fire.

  “Ouch,” I said.

&nbs
p; “Merthiolate,” she said.

  “Take it easy, honey.”

  “It ought to have a stitch.”

  “Nothing doing.”

  “Okay. I’ll pull it together with tape. That way, it’ll leave a cute little scar. Make you look experienced.”

  She did things with gauze and tape, and after a while, I began to feel much better, the fire diminishing in my face. With the tips of my fingers, I explored tenderly a swelling along the line of my jaw,, the bloat of my lips. Kitty held a small mirror in front of me, and I was surprised to see that the reflected face wasn’t nearly so misshapen to the sight as it was to the touch. It had its purple patches and its distortions, to be sure, but the damage was minor to a face like mine.

  “Nothing much I can do for the lips,” Kitty said.

  “You might try kissing them.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “All right. I wouldn’t let you kiss me, anyhow, because you’re vulgar. You’d have to wash your mouth out with soap and water first, By the way, where’d you get all the first aid stuff?”

  “I keep it in the drawer with my novel. I’ve been holding it for the day you get tired of watching your lousy spider and start looking around for more basic entertainment.”

  “I’m not the rough type, honey.”

  She gave me another grin, a little firmer around the edges this time, and perched on a corner of the desk. The nylon, even with runners, was very alluring.

  “I was keeping it for you, lover, not me. Any guy who can’t handle a couple of gorillas wouldn’t get far with Kitty.”

  I eased my head back wearily against the chair, and her hand came out suddenly, her fingers trailing lightly down my bruised cheek.

  “It isn’t funny, Sol.”

  “No,” I said, “it really isn’t.”.

  “What’s it all mean? Why do you rate a treatment by professional gorillas?”

  I sat there with my head back, looking up at the ceiling. It was still the same old ceiling. Kitty sat on my desk, and she was still lovely, desirable, and unpaid. Everything was the same and in order. Yet nothing was the same, and nothing was in order.

  “It means, honey,” I said quietly, “that a very deadly character wants Hal Decker to burn for a murder he didn’t commit. It means that anyone who gets in the way will get to be considered strictly expendable.”

  “Who is he, Sol?”

  “That’s something I’ve been thinking about real hard, and I keep getting an answer that scares the hell out of me. On the evidence, it’s really a pretty simple problem. Wanda Henderson is Hal Decker’s only alibi. Hal hasn’t told anyone about her, because he’s afraid of what might happen to her. On her own, Wanda went to Austin Stark, the district attorney, and told him Hal had spent the night of Danny Devore’s murder with her.

  “What did Stark do? He laughed politely and sent her home under threat of a perjury rap. But Wanda didn’t go home. She came here instead, because Hal had mentioned to her that I’m a lawyer and that we used to be pretty good friends. She leaves here, and five minutes later a trio of gorillas make an appearance. One of them tries to buy me off the case. When I won’t buy, he gives me a sample of available consequences. Here’s the point, honey. How do they know Wanda Henderson is an alibi for Hal Decker? What’s the only way they could know?”

  Kitty was perfectly still, her eyes shining. After a while, she said, “The district attorney, Sol? Don’t be silly.”

  “It figures.”

  “The way you look at it, it figures. Look at it another way, it doesn’t figure at all. In the first place, Stark isn’t part of the old crowd at City Hall. Danny Devore’s crowd, that is. He’s a crusader, a clean-up guy. As a matter of fact, Danny was one of his principal targets. He’s the white knight of the righteous.”

  “He wouldn’t be the first saint with a brass halo. Maybe he feels appointed, and anointed. Maybe he looks upon the death of Danny Devore as a kind of holy assassination. I sort of see it that way myself.”

  “What about the frame of Hal Decker? Is that holy, too?”

  “It could be. A holy sacrifice on the altar of pure politics. Saving the great man for the great work.”

  “You’re making him a maniac, Sol. You don’t believe it, yourself.”

  “You’re right as usual. I don’t really believe it. I was just talking.”

  She scooted over on the desk and put her feet in my lap. “Look, Sol. You sure you aren’t off on the wrong scent? Austin Stark is an ambitious guy. He’s got a long way to go in politics. His first step up was going to be on the dead carcass of Danny Devore. Dead politically, I mean. Danny’s death was the worst thing that could have happened to him. Because of the old martyr angle, Danny’s gang is playing it for all it’s worth. Already people are forgetting what a louse Danny was beginning to look, and one of his boys is sitting in Danny’s chair. He’ll be there a long time now. Danny’s murder has set Stark’s career back five years. Can’t you see that?”

  “Sure. I can see it, all right. I can also see Stark’s connection with the gorillas. I can see that he has made a blunt effort to intimidate Hal Decker’s only witness. I can see that his own key witness is one of his own key men. I can see it all, and I can smell it. It stinks!”

  I sat up in my chair, removing her feet from my lap, and putting my hands flat on the desk. Slowly, with labor and sweat, I pushed myself erect and stood quietly, leaning on the desk, until the room quit revolving and everything settled in its place. Kitty put an arm around me, contributing to my equilibrium, and that part was fun.

  “Go get the city directory, honey,” I said. “Look up the address of Wash Richert.”

  “Stark’s witness?”

  “He’s the guy.”

  “You going to see him?”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Why?”

  “When something smells, you sniff around.”

  Her arm dropped away from me, and she went out into the reception office. While she was gone, I tried on my hat for size. Except for a tender spot above one ear, my skull seemed to have escaped abuse. I took a turn around the room, checking my motor reactions and finding them adequate. Kitty came back and stood watching my test run with critical eyes.

  “It’s nine twelve South Twentieth,” she said. “You want me to go along to put you together again, just in case?”

  I walked past her. “Don’t be facetious, honey. Remember, I’m your boss.”

  She snorted. “A hell of a boss, you are. Working the help without pay…brawling in your office…getting involved with politicians. How the hell can you ever expect to amount to a damn?”

  I ignored her, opening the outer door, and putting one foot into the hall.

  She said, “Sol.”

  I paused and looked back over a shoulder, my eyebrows making interrogation points.

  “Be careful, Sol.”

  I went on out and down the single flight to the street. I leaned against a lamp post. As I stood there, the yellow light came on above me, casting my abbreviated shadow to the pavement at my feet. Getting into my car, I drove away.

  Out on South Twentieth, I found nine twelve to be a three-story brick walkup, with a narrow front and a high stoop. I went up the steps and into a short hall with a weak bulb burning at the ceiling under a dirty globe. Along the wall on my right, as I entered, were six mail boxes. Examining the names on the boxes, I discovered that Wash Richert lived on the third floor. Cursing my luck and my condition, I made the long climb up the worn, dark flights.

  Outside Richert’s door, I knocked and waited, hearing within the sound of approaching footsteps. A woman, I thought, and when the door opened, it was. For a woman, she was tall, almost as tall as I, dressed in a navy blue sheer that gave her arms and shoulders, where there was nothing, under a soft, smoky look. Her platinum hair was phony, but the dye jo
b and the style were good enough to make the phoniness unimportant. Her eyes were warm and her mouth was soft, almost pouting in repose, but you got a quick impression that the eyes could freeze fast, the lips thin and harden.

  “I’m looking for Wash Richert,” I said.

  Her voice had a minor nasality, whining slightly in her nostrils. “He isn’t here.”

  “You know where he is?”

  “No.”

  “You know when he’ll be back?”

  “No. Probably not for a long time.”

  “You his wife?”

  “I could be. What is this, mister? What you after’?”

  “Just conversation. May I come in?”

  She looked at me with her platinum top cocked a little to one side, her eyes speculative. She seemed to be trying to make something interesting out of me, something that would do to pass the time.

  “Why not?”

  Following me into the room, she wondered if I’d like a drink to match one she’d been drinking when I knocked, and since I needed it, I said I would. She went off into a small kitchen to mix it, and I dropped my hat onto a chair and listened to the pleasant sounds of glass and ice. Pretty soon she came back and handed me a glass that was dark enough to look promising. Her own, I noted, was just as dark.

  “Must be lonely without your husband,” I said.

  She looked at me over the rim of her glass with an expression in her warm eyes that left everything open. “You’re only lonely if you let yourself be,” she said.

  I swallowed a piece of my drink, and it was as strong as it looked. The warmth from the pit of my stomach was potent, prompt, and welcome.

  “Where’d you say Wash went?”

  “I didn’t. I said I didn’t know.”

  “I guess you did, at that. I’m the forgetful type.”

  “I’m not. If you’d tell me your name, I’d remember that.”

  I had another drink and inspected the lowered cubes. “It’s Burr.” That didn’t seem to register, so I added, “I’m a lawyer.” She was still waiting, so I finished, “Hal Decker’s lawyer.”