Case Pending - Dell Shannon (25 page)

"I tried to— I thought if I could appeal to
her, remind her of what she said before, what we—but she just gave
a little gasp and said, 'Oh, I couldn't, Mis' Morgan,' and hung up.
Dick—"

"Yes," he said, making meaningless
scribbles on the note pad in front of him. Henry was there at
his desk across the room, Stack right alongside under the other
window; Morgan couldn't say much directly.

"Go on."

And what it came to was—right back to Graham
Court. Seven o'clock, Smith's message said, at Graham Court, the
address and apartment number carefully read out. Morgan might as well
come to him, ran the message (insolently phrased, sounding the
opposite in the woman's soft voice), and he needn't think account of
things going haywire last night he'd stopped meaning anything he'd
said. He'd be waiting alone for Morgan at seven, and this had better
be the pay-off, or else.

"All right," said Morgan steadily, "I've
got that. Seven, that's early. I'd better not try to make it home
first. Mean?—just more bluster, is all—don't worry, hon.
You'd better expect me when you see me, O.K.?"

He put down the phone and went back to his open case
book there on the desk, pretending to check notes, add a word here
and there, but not really seeing anything on the page.

Two things said themselves over in his mind. The
apartment
. And,
Alone
.
(Smith, of course, unknowing that he bad any prior knowledge of the
apartment, any other reason to be there.) It added up—for Morgan,
and also to a couple of things that were no concern of Morgan's but
interesting: that alone suggested that Smith had seen to it that
neither the woman nor the boy had any idea how much money he was
expecting, and that and the revealing of his home address suggested
that very likely he was planning to decamp with the money, maybe at
once. What it added up to for Morgan the murderer was safety—maybe.

Depending on where Mendoza's men were. He thought he
might get some information on that point when he saw Mendoza an hour
from now, with this stuff from the school.

From the time on Saturday night when the cold fact
had penetrated his mind that the only real lasting safety was Smith
dead, circumstances had been forcing on Morgan certain changes of his
original plan he didn't much like. He looked at this one from
all the angles; it was better than the street holdup in a way, and it
would, of course, have to do. You were always seeing something like
that in the paper. A man shot himself, hanged himself, slashed his
wrists in the bathtub: no known reason, no prior threat.

The tricky factor was the timing. If Mendoza's men
were inside, it couldn't be done at all: they'd be too close, and not
unlikely in a position to know at which floor Morgan stopped. But
if they were outside, then—which way, before or after the
Lindstroms?  Before, he thought. Quick and quiet up to the third
floor, and no backchat with Smith: as soon as the door was shut
behind him in Smith's place, and Smith away from it. And no
fooling around with any attempt to muffle the shot, a suicide
wouldn't bother and there wouldn't be time. Gun in his hand:
prints. Thirty seconds? There had to be a good chance he'd have
time to be outside the door again, at least, before anyone else got
there. There was a narrower chance that he could get halfway down the
stairs before that. People exclaimed, talked a little, wondered,
before they went to see. The ideal thing would be Morgan standing in
the secondfloor hall, just ready to knock on the Lindstroms' door,
when doors opened and people came out saying, "Was that a shot?"

But Morgan halfway down (which was also halfway up)
would do.
I'd just got to the Lindstroms' door
when— I knew it was a shot up here, I started up to see—

That was all he needed to say; none of his business,
nothing to link him to an unexplained suicide.

Sue, of course no question here of passing it off as
accident. It couldn't be helped. He'd got past worrying
about the side effects; he was feeling now the way she'd said, Let's
for God's sake get it done and over, any way at all.

Because, if he'd be honest with himself, he wasn't
sure he could do it—that all this would come to any action in the
end.

He had to do it, the only possible solution. He'd
seen that clear on Saturday night.

Which of course was the point. If you got yourself
wound up to a place where you were ready to do murder, you ought to
do it right then while, so to speak, the spring was tight. He
hadn't; he'd had three nights and nearly three days to think about
it, and now he didn't know if, when the chips were down, he could
really bring himself— He touched the gun under his coat; he'd been
carrying it because he was afraid Sue would find it if he left it
around the house. He thought angrily, uneasily, Ethics be
damned: what loss is that hood?  He'd decided this, he was just
being a damned coward, to think—

You got a little cowardly when you were thirty-eight,
with a wife and child and a mortgage on the house and debts and a job
that paid just forty-two hundred a year.

And once he'd thought, if he could feel he was to
blame for getting into this mess— But of course he was, they both
were, they'd known at the time it was a silly and dangerous thing to
do.

Which brought him back to the woman, because he
supposed—if you looked at it from all sides—and remarkable as it
might seem, she wouldn't want to lose her husband, whatever kind he
was.

People, thought Morgan tiredly: people.

The agencies' bright brisk assurances: we like to
find just the right child for the individual parents: patience! The
endless forms. The investigators: questions, questions. Time
going by, and both of them afraid, never, and Sue And then, that
woman. Just by chance sitting next to Sue in the lounge of a
department-store rest room. "Such a lovely baby, Dick, I
couldn't help saying—only a month old, and darling, she hasn't even
named her, wasn't that interested— Later they both thought, less
lack of interest in the baby than preoccupation with the husband. Oh,
obviously that curious mixture of obsession (that couldn't really be
called love), dependence, and fear. . . .

He was awful mad when he heard about the baby, he
didn't want another kid, they take a lot of time and all, you know. 
And I can't go out to work now, with it to look out for. 
He's—my husband, he's back east, he's—well, he's sick, see, awful
sick, in the hospital, and can't work. I'd just as soon—anyways, I
guess it'd be better off with folks like you. . . . .

Yes, silly: dangerous. All that you forgot,
confronted with the warm round armful that would be Janet Ann
Morgan. A little sense you tried to use, you got the woman to
sign a statement saying she was relinquishing the child voluntarily,
and you told Dr. Fordyce that Sue was nervous, didn't trust the
agency's medical tests, wanted his report Too. And Dr. Fordyce, very
probably, could make a pretty shrewd guess at the truth, but he was
an old friend and he figured, maybe, that it wasn't up to him to be
an officious busybody. And all the tests saying just what Janny had
been telling everybody since—
such a lovely
baby
.

And now, Smith. Robertson, the woman said: Smith,
Brown, Green, what the hell if it was O'Kelly or Bemstein or
Gonzales. . .There he was, and he was the danger: it would all
come to nothing if he were out of it, the woman was a nonentity with
no force in her. So that left it right up to Morgan, and this
was the only way he could see open to him.

When he came round to that
point again, he got up and shut the case book. On his way over
to Police Headquarters, he told himself that from another angle, it
was safer really—if you came to murder—to do it cold,
thinking. If you had to, if you could, if you could face the
issue and take the only decision. . . .

* * *

The waiter at Federico's saw Mendoza come in, and
when he presented the menu also brought the two fingers of rye that
was usually Mendoza's one drink of the day, and, five minutes later,
the black coffee. They never hurried you at Federico's, and they
knew their regular patrons.

Mendoza brooded over the coffee; he had something
else to think about now, which was probably quite irrelevant, and
that was Morgan. Morgan, so much friendlier than he had been this
morning, expanding on what information he'd got at the school, and
then asking questions.  Had Mendoza got anywhere on the
Lindstroms, anything suggestive from the men watching the apartment,
and just how did they go about that anyway, he'd think it was an
awkward job, that they'd be spotted. . .oh, from a car, and
tailing the woman when she—and only up to midnight, that was
interesting. . . . .

Morgan, being affable in order to ask questions? And
just why? Morgan—now Mendoza looked at him with more
attention—strung-up, a little tense, putting on an act of being
just as usual. So all right, he was worried about something,
he'd had a fight with his wife, he was coming down with a cold
or—quite likely—he'd felt a trifle ashamed of his barely
courteous manner this morning and was trying to make up for it.

There were more interesting things to think about
than Morgan. Over his dinner Mendoza thought about them.

The school, somewhat bewildered at being asked but
polite to an accredited civic agency, said in effect that young
Martin Lindstrom was one of its more satisfactory pupils. A good
student, not brilliant but intelligent, cooperative, well-mannered
and reliable. He had a good record of attendance and
punctuality. He was somewhat immature for his age, not
physically or academically but socially: not a particularly good
mixer with other children, shy, a little withdrawn but not to any
abnormal degree. Mrs. Lindstrom had never attended any
P.-T.A. meetings, none of the teachers had ever met her, but that was
not too unusual.

The tailers. Mendoza had debated about taking
them off: a waste of time? Not likely to come up with anything,
and there was no real reason to single these people out. . . . .In
twenty-four hours she had left the place only once, between seven and
eight last evening, the boy then being home; she had walked three
blocks to a grocery store on Main and home again with a modest bag of
supplies.

On Thursday she had an appointment at the county
clinic. He toyed with the idea of putting a policewoman in there, to
inveigle her into casual conversation, but what could he hope to get,
after all?  No lead, no line. . . .He'd like to talk with her
himself, judge for himself what kind of woman— See the boy, get
some idea— Remembering Mrs. Cotter's graphic description, he
reflected that Mrs.  Lindstrom wouldn't be an easy woman to talk
with, sound out.

The doll, his only excuse for approach, and not a
very good one. He knew now definitely that it was the same doll:
the factory had identified it by a serial number as the one sold to
Mrs. Breen, and that was something: it might be a lot. Definite
facts he liked: this was one of the few he had to contemplate in this
business.  But—as he'd said to Mrs. Breen and
Mrs. Demarest—make it an excuse to see the Lindstrom woman:
forget Elena Ramirez and go back to Brooks, say, you were
inordinately interested in this piece of merchandise—and all the
rest of it.

She would only tell him some plausible tale of a
niece or godchild, and that was that—no further excuse to pry at
her.

He got out the little strip of lace and booded over
that a while. He muttered to it, "
Eso
no vale un comino
-not worth a hang!"
Both ends of this thing had come to a dead stop: blind alleys. There
was nowhere new to go, on either Brooks or Ramirez. And yet at
the same time he felt even more certain now that the cases were
essentially the same case, that the Lindstroms were the link (or one
of them), and that just a couple of steps beyond this dead end lay
something—someone—someone more definite fact—that would lead
him to the ultimate truth, and to a murderer.

He had also, for no reason, a feeling of urgency—a
feeling that time was running out.

When he left Federico's he went back to his
office. And that was for no reason either. He stood there, hat
and coat still on, looking down at that doll on his desk.

He thought, It might mean this and it might mean
that, but the one thing it meant, sure as death, was that somebody
was trying to tell him something with it. And what he would like to
think somebody was telling him was that the Lindstroms were
definitely involved.

Suddenly he swore aloud, folded the wrapping paper
round the thing and thrust it under his arm. There were times you had
to sit down and think, and other times you had to act, even if you
weren't sure what action to take—there was a chance you'd pick up a
new lead somehow, somewhere, if you went out and about just at
random.

Take the excuse: go and see the woman, talk with
her-about anything; something might show up, he might get the smell
of a new line.

It was just before seven when he nosed the Ferrari
into the curb outside Graham Court. Already dark, but the city
truck had been around, finally, to replace the bulb in the street
lamp a little way down from the entrance to the cul-de-sac, and he
recognized the man just turning in there, walking fast.