Murder Is My Dish (7 page)

In a hand the size of an eight-ounce boxing glove he held a revolver. It looked very small, but it was big enough. Threaded to the muzzle of the revolver was a flaring tube as long as the bore.

He shot Ramon first. The bullet took Ramon under the jaw. It made a very small hole but the big man had fired from his waist, and going out the back the bullet almost took the top of Ramon's head off. The big man shot Julio before Ramon hit the floor. The tube on his revolver was a silencer. The gun went
pfft
once and Ramon was dead. It went
pfft
again and Julio threw his arms up and spun and fell face down.

Julio's wife screamed. This tenement had heard screams before, but not screams like that. I thought it would bring help, but knew the help would come too late. I had time to take one step toward the big man, then he pulled the trigger. Julio's wife went on screaming. The gun made a clicking noise. The big man pulled the trigger again. Click. There were no holes in me anywhere. I was still alive.

Julio's wife opened the door. She rushed out into the hall, screaming. The big man hurled his revolver at me. It jarred the wall and went off, the silencer dropping away, with an explosive roar. I sprang for one of the kitchen chairs. Light on his feet, the big man came at me. I hefted the chair and slammed it down over his head. That's the part I remember. It's the part I dream about. The chair flew to pieces. All I had left in my right hand was a leg and a supporting strut.

The big man moved back half a foot and shook his head. I hit him with the chair leg. I held it in both hands and swung it like a baseball bat. I kept on swinging. Maybe I was still weak from the sapping I'd taken. But the chair had broken apart, hadn't it? I hit him again. He caught the chair leg and twisted. I drove the edge of my hand against his neck. He was panting. At least I had made him do that. I let go of the chair leg. He flung it aside. There were noises outside in the hall. Doors opening. More screaming.

He moved his right fist about six inches. He did not seem to put much effort behind it. He didn't have to.

The next thing I knew I was looking at a black rubber overshoe and the trouser leg of a police uniform.

He wasn't the only cop in the place, but it took me a while to see anything above or beyond his trouser leg. When he saw me blink my eyes he crouched and passed something in front of my nose. It made me gag and made tears spring to my eyes.

He said, “You better?' It was a rhetorical question. Before I could answer he said, “Sergeant out in the hall wants to see you if you are.”

I sat up. It took more doing than breaking the chair over the big man's head. No one rushed over with sympathy and solicitude. No one offered a hand or a kind word. No one would have cared if instead of sitting up I had expired and earned a sheet like the ones covering Ramon and Julio.

“The big guy,” I said. “You get him?”

“It jives,” the cop said.

“What?”

“In the hall they're talking about a big guy.”

The camera cops had finished their work and were packing their equipment. The positions of the bodies, mine included, had been chalked. When the basket boys came they could go right ahead and pick up the pieces.

I climbed to my feet and used the kitchen table for support. Out in the hall, Julio's wife was crying bitterly, steadily. I staggered over to the sink and splashed cold water on my face. Cupping my hands, I drank some. Then I went outside.

A uniformed patrolman wearing the stripes of a sergeant on his overcoat was squatting like a baseball catcher in front of Julio's wife. She sat with her back against the hallway wall with a semicircle of tenants hemming her there. She had drawn her knees up and her slumping chin was almost touching them. She was a chubby brunette with a round face and a flat nose. She was crying. The sergeant couldn't get a word out of her.

When he saw me he stood up, taking something carefully and with reverence from the inside pocket of his coat. It was the Manila envelope. From the way it bulged no one had emptied it.

“Lady says this belongs to you, mister. She don't want any part of it.”

“I was delivering it, yes.”

“Can you prove that?”

“No. The bills aren't marked.”

He scowled. He had done a lot of scowling in his day. His face fell right into it: the furrowed forehead, the elongated lips, the eyes like slits.

“What were you delivering it for?” he said finally.

I thought it was a stupid question. Maybe the way I felt if he asked me my name I would have thought it a stupid question. But the point was, the homicide squad would arrive pretty soon and ask the same question all over again, only better. I told him that.

He didn't like it. But just then, like the marines, the homicide boys came trooping up the stairs in the nick of time. There were three of them. When they came down the hall under the single bare electric light, I recognized the man in front. He was tall, with wide slumping shoulders and a sad long-nosed face. His sad face had looked more at home in the morgue.

“Well, hello there, Lieutenant Grundy,” the sergeant said, saluting. “I haven't seen you in a while, sir. How are things over at Homicide West, sir?”

“They're still considering your transfer, Sergeant,” Grundy said. “They'll let you know. What happened here?”

The sergeant told Grundy what he knew. It wasn't much. One of the Puerto Rican tenants had phoned for the police. There were two dead men inside, one of them the crying woman's husbands. There was talk of a big man who had got away. There were twenty-five thousand dollars. “And there's this guy out here, Lieutenant. He was in a fight, maybe with the big guy.”

Grundy looked at me for the first time. He smiled. It was the saddest smile I have ever seen. “Well, if it isn't the shamus,” he said. “You sure have got a nose for homicide, Drum. Why don't you try and tell me about it like the nice, cooperative fellow you are?”

I told him, all right. I told him everything in my most forthright, earnest attitude. I had to. This time they could run me in as a material witness.

“But you didn't call the police at any time?” he asked when I had finished.

“No, Lieutenant. We were afraid to. In case they had Caballero.”

“But they didn't?”

“I already told you I overheard them say Caballero was murdered aboard the Parana Lines S.S.
Mistral
.”

“What about the big guy? Could you give us a make on him?”

I thought of the way he had fired twice getting up out of the sofa, killing two men. I thought of how I hadn't been able to dent his skin with a chair leg. “You bet I could identify him,” I said.

Grundy grunted and leaned over the woman. He surprised me by being both persuasive and patient. After a while he got her to tell him about the big man in the turtleneck sweater. He thanked her and turned back to me and took off his hat and scratched his head. “It looks like you're telling the truth this time,” he said grudgingly.

“Listen,” I said. “The dead man—the one named Ramon, not the woman's husband—saw them kill Caballero on the
Mistral
. Doesn't it figure that the big guy is off the
Mistral
too?”

Grundy shrugged. “If he is, he's way out of my league. I couldn't touch him there.”

“The D.A.'s office could, with an indictment.”

He shrugged again. “All right. Come down to the station and make a statement. We'll take the widow too. But we don't tell the D.A.'s office how to run its business.”

There was nothing I could say to that. The sergeant and the patrolman took Grundy inside and showed him around. Grundy told them to wait for the coroner. He took Julio's wife gently by the arm and led her down-stairs. I went down flanked by the other two homicide cops. It had stopped snowing.

We drove down to Homicide Manhattan West headquarters in Grundy's squad car. I made my statement. It was typed and I signed it three times. Grundy thanked me again. Julio's woman began to talk haltingly. I hung around until she finished her story. She didn't leave anything out that I knew of. Then I walked out of there and nobody tried to stop me. I felt pretty good until I remembered the gray man who was probably waiting for me in the Commodore lobby. Grundy probably couldn't wait to see just what I was going to lead them to next.

I called Eulalia Mistral from a drugstore down the block. I told her who I was.

“I got home an hour ago,” she said. “I prayed you would call.”

“There were three of them,” I said. “A seaman off a Parana ship tied up on the North River, and two Puerto Rican friends of his.”

“Rafael—what about Rafael?”

“He's dead. I'm sorry. He was dead before I even saw you.”

There was a silence. Then she said, “You did everything you could, Chet. You didn't have to. I want to thank you.”

“The guy on the ship saw them kill Caballero. I gather he wasn't supposed to, but he did. He decided to kidnap a dead man, but he needed help. He was afraid to make the contact alone. There were two of them in the car. Only one of them came out after the money. The other two hung around to help. They helped him all right.”

“What happened?”

“They took me home with them. Then they got killed. The men did. The woman's with the police.” I told her what had happened in Julio's apartment. Then I asked, “What about the money?”

“We'll get it back. It's ours.”

“Sure, but can you prove it?”

She sounded surprised. “Do we have to prove it?”

“Maybe you won't have to, at that. If no one else can claim it and prove ownership, you ought to get it back. Mrs. Caballero can prove she withdrew twenty-five thousand dollars of the Fund's money, can't she?”

Eulalia said that she could. Then she asked me, “What will you do now?”

“The man who shot the phony kidnapers could tell us about Caballero.” And Andy Dineen, I thought. “But by the time the D.A.'s men get on it, he could be halfway back to the Parana Republic. It's a touchy thing, dealing with a foreign national. They might even want the Grand Jury to hand down an indictment first.”

“But what about you? What will you do?”

“Sleep. For about two weeks.”

“No. Really.”

“See Prino Blas Lequerica, I guess. Maybe he can fix it up so I can go aboard the
Misral
without masquerading as an F.B.I. man.”

“Without doing what?”

“I'm dead on my feet, kid. When I get like this I talk too much.”

“Wait, please! Don't hang up. Primo Blas won't help you, Chet. Maybe he's an international playboy and a diplomatic gigolo, like you read in the papers, but he's loyal to our homeland.” Her voice caught, and there was a silence.

“What's the matter?”

“Our homeland. I was just thinking. Some homeland! But if you were born there and raised there it's hard to—you can't just—oh, I can't put it into words. It's still a beautiful country, even if Indalecio Grande does run it. The people are still good people. They haven't changed. My father felt that way. He loved the country and the people. He died for them. I'm going home.”

“What?”

“Don't sound so surprised. I do every Christmas, to see my mother.”

“Don't be a fool,” I said. “They're still looking for Caballero's manuscript. You probably know more about its contents than any living person. Don't you think they know that?”

“My mother's a sick old woman. She looks forward to Christmas. They give me a visa. I'm not a fugitive. Besides, I'm an American citizen.

“So was Caballero. You said so.”

“Still.”

It was no use arguing with her. She thanked me again and told me to be careful and asked me if she would see me again. I said I didn't know and she said good by and waited. When I didn't say anything else, she hung up.…

I took a taxi back to the Commodore and dragged myself into the lobby. It was only a little after midnight but it felt like next year.

The little gray man was waiting in a leather chair near the desk. I went over to him and said, “Hi there. I'm going upstairs to sleep now. I'd like to sleep late but I won't be able to. In the morning I'm going to visit Primo Blas Lequerica, the Parana Republic's permanent delegate to the United Nations. You can come along if you want. Then I'm probably going over to West Street to the Parana Lines building. You can come along. In fact, I wish you would. No more secrets. No more ducking out on you, cross my heart. Well, good night.”

I left him sitting there with his mouth open. For all I know—and for all I care—he sat that way all night long.

Chapter Seven

I
PAID OFF
the taxi across Fifth Avenue from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A cold rain had fallen during the early morning, and was still falling. It was good weather for museums and indoor games and staying in bed all day, alone or with company.

I walked through slush looking at the other side of the street. It was much nicer over there with the winter-bare trees as a backdrop for the museum and a busload of raincoated children storming up the wide stone steps with three grown women, probably their teachers. My side of Fifth Avenue was one continuous wall of concrete set back a little way from the street and expensive cars lined up contiguously at the curb as if they had been cemented there. A doorman with a visored cap poking out under the hood of his slicker came by with two disdainful-looking permanent-waved French poodles on a double leash. He appeared to be more miserable than I felt, so I smiled at him. He did not smile back.

Primo Blas Lequerica had a terrace apartment in one of the buildings opposite the museum. I went in there and up in an elevator a little larger than an upright coffin. A city cop stopped me in the carpeted hallway near Lequerica's door.