Murder Is My Dish (10 page)

I jangled Eulalia's car keys in my pocket and went over to the parking field. This time Grundy's man came along with me. He was blushing slightly. He was getting to like his assignment too much.…

He drove back to the Commodore with me in Eulalia's car. I wondered what he would think of his sense of security and well-being if he knew I was getting ready to ditch him now. I made a point of telling him about the car. I even wrote down Eulalia's friend's address when we stopped for a light, telling him I'd better get it on paper before I forgot it. I thought he might take out his anger on Eulalia by having her car impounded, but I couldn't help that. Lequerica, Eulalia, Duarte—all were gone. Caballero was probably dead. Andy Dineen was dead. New York didn't have a thing for me now. But Grundy's little gray man couldn't possibly know anything like that.

It was less trouble than the last time. I pulled the car into a taxi space outside the Commodore and the doorman told me we couldn't stay there. “Be a minute,” I said. “My friend will wait with the car.” I left the keys in the ignition. I gave Grundy's man a cigarette and a hand wave and said, “Right back, shadow. Don't go away.” He laughed. I laughed. The address of Eulalia s friend was in the glove compartment.

I got out of the car. The rain had almost stopped. I walked into the Commodore entrance and across the lobby to the Lexington Avenue exit. Then I turned around and went to the desk to pay my bill. I was leaving a battered suitcase and a change of clothing behind, but that couldn't be helped. A couple of minutes later I was out on Lexington Avenue looking for a cab. I took it down Second Avenue and then over to First and called a funeral parlor from a pay phone in the Bellevue lobby. Yes sir, we know an undertaker in Washington, D.C. This sort of thing is not at all uncommon. Yes sir, if there's a great hurry we could have the body of the deceased in a splendid casket, ready for entrainment—that was his word, entrainment—in a couple of hours. There would be papers to sign. There would be the necessity of riding the same train as a passenger. Our affiliate will receive the casket on arrival in Washington, sir. You don't have to pay us anything. Our Washington affiliate will take care of the entire bill at his end. Terribly sorry, sir, about your friend. Bellevue, sir. Yes, sir. We're on our way.

He had an unctuous voice and I wouldn't have trusted him with a live curb setter, but it all worked out as he had promised. The man with the exposé magazine was not on duty at the morgue, which was a break. In a little while the undertaker got there. I went out for some coffee and something to eat. When I came back, what was left of Andy Dineen had been taken from the morgue drawer and put in a box. They even had a train schedule for me. The undertaker drove over to Penn Station, offering me a lift. It was late in the afternoon and almost dark when we reached the station. The undertaker shook my hand. His hand was cold and clammy.

Forty minutes later I climbed aboard a Washington-bound Pennsylvania express. A colored porter came through to say dinner was now being served in the dining car, but I didn't have any appetite. There was a man I had to see in Washington. Then I almost hoped someone would drop a brand new case in my lap.

But I knew I would turn down the case, if any. Andy Dineen was riding in the baggage car.

Chapter Nine

I
MADE
the final arrangements four and a half hours later with the representative of the Washington undertaking establishment in Union Station. He was a young fellow with a fast line of chatter. He looked more like a public relations man who had just been graduated from the mail room than an undertaker. There was a splendid little cemetery he knew of halfway between the District and College Park, Maryland. My friend would be entombed on Monday morning. Would that be satisfactory? I said it would and wrote him a check that was very fat—which explained why they had sent a public relations man with the bill.

Then I went home to my apartment in a converted old brownstone on Florida Avenue. Outside, a couple of young girls with good legs in short ice-skating skirts twinkled by with figure skates hanging over their shoulders, heading for the Uline Ice Arena. They smiled at me. It was nice to know I didn't look as bad as I felt.

Upstairs I gave a long, hard, sour look at two rooms of drably furnished efficiency. There wasn't any mail for me. The mail would be at my office, and time enough for that Monday, after the funeral. I was going to sleep all day Sunday. To hell with the rest of the world. Attaboy, Drum. I couldn't get comfortable in the club chair. The bed seemed softer than I had remembered. Too soft.

I picked up a book on the Hittites. Back in college I'd been a bug on ancient history and archaeology. We all have our vices. It seemed too long ago to be part of the same life. Attis, the book said. Attis, beloved of Cybele. The words swam and crawled and wriggled, eluding me. I shut the book and dropped it with a thud. I went into the bathroom and washed up. In the mirror I saw the blond crew cut and the hard-planed face with the scar on the left cheek and the bruised jaw. An interesting-looking face for taking pokes at or smiling at if you happen to be a pretty girl with ice skates over your shoulder.

“You well-adjusted son of a bitch,” I said out loud, and went into the kitchen for my old friend, Jack Daniels, who was waiting obediently on the shelf alongside the cold cereal. I poured the kind of drink Eulalia Mistral would have poured, and drank it. Eulalia was out over the Caribbean now, winging south for Caracas and Ciudad Grande with Primo Blas Lequerica and Pablo Duarte.

I had another drink. Attis, beloved of Cybele. Jack Daniels Sour Mash, beloved of Chester Drum. A voice said, “Don't make up your mind yet.”

I listened and didn't answer. The voice went on: “At least wait till you see Preston Baylis. All right?”

I nodded sagely and took another drink. The voice was quiet now. It had been, naturally, my own voice.

When Jack Daniels had been emptied of all but the charcoal-mellowed aroma, I went to sleep.

On Sunday morning I called Preston Baylis's home in College Park, Maryland. It was a clear, briskly cool sun-filled day, the nicest we'd had in weeks. Mr. Baylis was not available for comment, sir. He had given the press the only statement he would give them, earlier in the morning. I said I wasn't the press, wondering if I'd taken up the wrong profession, if you can call other people's troubles a profession. Then I identified myself and asked to speak with Mr. Baylis, anyway, and please. He came on the line a moment later.

“Chester?”

“In the flesh and out of a job. I loused it up for you, Mr. Baylis.”

“You're telling me,” he said with a nervous laugh.

I didn't say anything.

“Oh, I don't mean that. I mean the whole thing. The D.C. papers played it up big. They've never liked me, you know. Chester, do yourself a favor. Never have a famous father.”

“It's too late for that. I guess I'm lucky.”

“They crucified me just because I'm the Paranaian legal representative in this country. As if I'd had a hand in kidnaping or killing Rafael Caballero.” The nervous little laugh again. Over the phone it couldn't be appreciated, unless you knew what Preston Baylis looked like. He looked like a more intellectual Ernest Hemingway, when Hemingway was in his prime. The nervous little laugh went with his looks like butterscotch topping goes with a rare T-bone steak. But Preston Baylis had the misfortune of being born the son of the late, great supreme court justice of the same name. They said he was the spit and image of his father, on the outside. On the inside the best he had was the nervous little laugh. It was the only thing which hadn't belonged to his father. The rest was pale shadow and footsteps and shoes much too big for him to fill.

“I never even met Rafael Caballero.”

“I know. You told me.”

“I never even met Indalecio Grande. But that doesn't stop them from hanging him in effigy outside my house.”

“From doing which?”

“The pickets. They're all over the place. There are cops stationed on the lawn.” He laughed the nervous little laugh again. “I'm practically in a state of siege out here.”

“I come out?”

“Is it about Caballero?”

I said it was about Caballero in a roundabout way.

“I wish you wouldn't. I just want to forget it. I have nothing to do with it really.”

I said I would like to see him anyway.

“Well, all right, if you must.”

“How would noon be?”

He told me noon would be as good as any other time. He said, with his nervous little laugh, that perhaps the pickets would call it a day by then. They had assembled on the street outside his place just after sunrise. They'd been at it for hours.

I hung up, shaved, showered, dressed, and went outside for something to eat. When I finished it was still only ten-forty. Since it was only about a twenty-minute drive to the Baylis home in College Park, I had more than enough time for a Sunday morning visit to my office and decided to use it. I drove over there in my white De Soto convertible. F Street was almost deserted and the Farrell Building, across the street from the Treasury Department at the corner of 15th Street, was closed for the Sabbath.

I rang the night bell. When nothing happened, I rang it again. In a little while a sleepy-looking face over a pair of narrow shoulders in a maroon-and-tan elevator operator's uniform appeared on the other side of the door. The glass of the door had been cleaned and polished and waited, gleaming, for Monday's fingerprints and smudges. The elevator operator seemed surprised to see anyone.

His face was a new one to me, so I showed him the photostat of my detective license, signed by no less a personage than Police Commissioner Eric Mann. It seemed to satisfy him. “Important case, huh, Mr. Drum?” he said.

I gave him my most mysterious nod and he locked the door and took me up in the elevator. “I wait?” he said.

I nodded again and walked down the corridor to my office.
Chester Drum, Confidential Investigations
, the black lettering on pebbled glass said. Envelopes were stuffed into the mail slot at the bottom of the door. I knew what they would be. They rarely varied. A detective agency in Philadelphia or somewhere had heard about me and needed operatives. They would be delighted to pay me eighty-five or ninety bucks a week if I signed my life over to them. A handful of unhappily married Washingtonians wanted their divorces arranged. They would get the form letter, done up by the mimeograph and photo-offset outfit on the third floor of the Farrell Building, which explained that I didn't do divorce work. A few flyers advertised everything from fingerprint kits to toupees to authentic Chinese lunches, to go. The Bring-the-Vote-to-Washington Committee was in there pitching with a brochure. It usually ran like that. And maybe, if my luck were running, there might be a case waiting for me and fifty dollars a day and expenses while it lasted.

But I never got as far as the letters stuffed into the mail slot this time. Something too big to stuff was leaning against the base of the door. It was a rectangular box done up hastily and untidily in old brown wrapping paper with bakery string. I picked it up and saw the New York postmark and the handwriting of the address. It was Andy Dineen's handwriting, and the last, thing he had ever written.

The elevator operator hummed something and sang some words in falsetto about towering over the street where I lived. The brown wrapping paper rustled in my hands as I tore the string.
Macadam Bond
, it said on the box inside. There was a picture of a Sphinx against a blue sky. It was a ream box of typing paper. Inside, on top, a note had been scrawled in pencil on a torn off piece of the brown wrapping paper. It said:
Chet, the client is scared stiff. Maybe you better hold this for safekeeping. Regards to the Pinkertons, Andy.

I remembered what I'd told Pablo Duarte. It had seemed like a good idea at the time. I had said:
You killed Rafael Caballero because his book could rip hell out of Indalecio Grande's regime. You killed him, but you didn't get the book.
And, I had lied:
I have the book.

The sky-blue box contained several hundred sheets of paper, typed on, with much crossing out and many marginal jottings, if the first few sheets were any indication. I riffled through them. There were also a couple dozen crisp, shiny photostatic positives of letters. I didn't read them. I opened the office door with my key and went inside. I looked at the office safe and shook my head. It might do for some things, but it wouldn't do for this. I found an attaché case, two years old and never used, which a satisfied client had given me, or maybe it had been my aunt in Spokane, Washington, I didn't remember which. I put the box in the case and snapped the lid.

Rafael Caballero's book. Me and my big mouth.

I returned to the elevator with the attaché case under my arm. The elevator operator looked at the case and gave me a knowing smile. He hummed the one about the rain in Spain falling mainly in the plain. “Seen it?” he asked me. I shook my head. He'd made his point. The road show of
My Fair Lady
had come to town. He had seen it.

Outside, I tooled the De Soto up 15th to Thomas Circle and then to Logan Circle and along Rhode Island Avenue under the railroad trestle and beyond. Pretty soon I crossed the Maryland border. I wouldn't have been too surprised if the attaché case burned a hole in the leather upholstery of the De Soto on the way out to College Park.

The Baylis house wouldn't have disappointed an antiquarian who took his ante-bellum houses straight and Georgian, with red brick walls, a real live portico out front, Victorian iron deer prancing on a lawn which rolled back from the street in a big curving swoop like a matronly breast and was shaded by sycamores, elms and even a couple of force-fed Southern magnolias growing about as far north as magnolias will deign to grow. But the view was spoiled by coffins.