The Body Lovers (15 page)

“And Dulcie McInnes?”

“She was on live TV from Washington this afternoon M.C.ing a fashion show for some big women’s organization. She’s a house guest of a woman who’s the wife of one of our biggest lobbyists and couldn’t give us a lead to Gates at all. She suggested that he might have gone off on an independent assignment. Our men didn’t think so because the equipment he would have carried is still at his studio.”

I leaned back in the chair with my hands folded behind my head. “Not much is being said in the papers about Mitch Temple.”

“Which is the way we wanted it and they’re cooperating.” On the wall the clock ticked the seconds away. Pat finally said, “The M.E. had replies to his queries about the poison that was used on the Poston girl. It wasn’t as exclusive as he thought it was. There are certain other derivatives from similar sources that have been used by the Orientals for centuries. It went out of fashion when the royalty class was deposed by the rabble, but available. Interpol reported its use several times during some big family vendettas in Turkey.”

“I’m missing your point,” I said.

Pat picked up a pencil and doodled on a pad on the desk. “There isn’t any. I’m just throwing it up for grabs.”

“Sorry, buddy.”

“We hit a dead end on the whip that killed the Delaney kid.”

“You still have one more to go. Find out who owns a rack.”

Pat shot me an annoyed glance. “Mike ... this could be an individual. A nut. He preys on one type. He uses gimmicks.” He threw the pencil down and slapped the desk with an open hand. “Damn it, I haven’t got the feeling that it is and neither do you.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Damn it, Mike ...”

“Something’s wrong. Too many things miss being on the line by a fraction. There are people involved who have no right being there at all. Kills like this generally touch only certain persons ... they don’t get spread out all over the map like this one.” I stopped and let the chair ease forward. “No, I don’t think it’s an individual. It’s too well coordinated. If it were an individual somebody would have seen something. If those kills were related there was nothing spontaneous about them.”

“Get to it, Mike.”

“Theodore Gates could be the key. He knew three of them. Photos of them were in his files. I saw Greta’s name in his personal index and the next time it wasn’t there at all. He had the time to destroy it. Greta could have called him after I left there to tell him I had located her. A little thought would put his finger on what happened. He took the card out and disappeared.”

“Why?”

“And therein lies the rub,” I quoted. “Why? Unless he and Greta had something going for them. Somebody obviously paid off Lorenzo Jones to use Virginia Howell’s room that night. I’ll take her word for it she didn’t know what the scoop was.”

“We’ll get him.”

“Sure, but what good will it do? He’s a pimp, a punchy pimp.

If there’s a hot one here nobody’s going to invite him in on the deal. That type is too likely to blow it to pieces. No, he was used somehow. I can see how a guy like Gates might have had contact with Jones. Gates had outside assignments that could have led to Jones or he just could have been one of the guy’s clients. When you get a file on Gates that stuff will come out. We just can’t wait around, that’s all.”

Pat got up and stalked to the window, snapping his fingers with impatience. “Mitch Temple puts it all in the same package,” he said. “He spotted the same similarity and followed it up. He recognized somebody and died for it.” He turned around and squinted at me. “Then there was that guy who tried for you. Nothing came of that either. We’re dealing with a cast of nobodies.”

“But they’re there.”

“Sure. And we’re here. Three punks are in the can on an assault and battery charge. Great record. You know what the papers will be doing to this office if there’s no action before long?”

I nodded. “Every reporter in the city is working overtime.”

“The difference is, friend, that they don’t have to be the goats.”

“Pat,” I said quietly.

“Yeah?”

“What’s out at Bradbury?”

“Now what hole in your head did that come out of?”

“It came up along the line,” I said.

Pat’s smile was a tight thing that barely crinkled his mouth. There was no humor in it at all. Before he could push it I added, “Harry Service mentioned Greta having a letter from there once. He didn’t see it.”

Some of the frost left his face. “When was this?”

“Her last visit.”

Pat went over it in his mind a moment and told me, “It’s a resort area along the coast and a residential area for the wealthy further in. I haven’t been there for five years.”

“Nothing else?”

“You pushing an angle?” he demanded.

“Curious, that’s all.”

“She could have been there. The place is public beaches, a yacht harbor and motel area now. Some of the Fire Island crowd took it over and ran it down. It’s getting a reputation of being an artists-and-models colony. The old permanent residents complained, but it didn’t help any. I guess they thought it would ruin their image, especially after a couple of the embassies bought into the area there.”

“What embassies?”

“Oh, the French have a place there... so do one of the Russian satellite countries. I think one of the Middle East outfits moved out there a couple of years ago too.”

I laughed with surprise. “And I thought if it didn’t happen in the city here you wouldn’t know about it.”

“The reason I know is because some of our best officers retired from the force to take up security jobs there at twice the pay.”

“Not at the embassies?”

“No, they have their own security. The town has a jazz festival every year that brings in a mob of town wreckers. The public finally anted up for a bigger force before somebody caused an international incident. It’s gotten worse every year. It’s too damn bad Gerald Ute wouldn’t be philanthropic in other fields.”

“Ute?”

“Yeah, the one you met the other night.”

“He’s got a place out there?”

“Not him. He simply financed the jazz festivals. He turned his place into a communal recreation center for the bigwigs of the U.N. The city runs it, but on a pretty restricted basis. It was a grand gesture and got him a lot of publicity, but it got a white elephant off his hands too ... along with a fat tax deduction.”

He sat down, swinging idly in his chair, watching my face. “Velda’s out there,” I said.

“So are a hundred agents from Washington to make sure nothing happens to the housecats from the U.N. These days nobody wants to take a chance of having some politico scratched. Hell, the way diplomatic immunity goes these days we can’t even give out parking tickets.”

I didn’t want Pat to see my face. He didn’t know it, but he had just been the catalyst that jelled one of those thoughts that had been so damn elusive.

When I got up I tossed a note on Pat’s desk. “Can you see Harry gets this? It’s a report that his sister is alive.”

“Okay. You going to press charges against those three we’re holding?”

“Right now.”

“You’re going to have a lot to talk about when you’re in court on that kill.”

Four of them were in the office when I got there. Al Casey and Hy were at the desk and two old-timers from the morgue file, passing them from one to another, identifying the subjects and making terse comments on their background.

I threw my coat and hat on a chair, took one of the containers of coffee from the sack and looked over Hy’s shoulder. “What have you got?”

Hy nudged AL “Tell him about it.”

He fanned out a dozen pictures in front of him. “Mitch Temple pulled out a lot of folders, but his prints were only on the edges, from where he thumbed through them. However, on the photos in two of the folders his prints were all over them, so he had taken a lot of time going through them.”

“These?”

“Yeah. Sixty-eight of them in the ‘General Political’ classification. We have everything from the mayor’s speech to a union parley. We tried the cross indexes and can’t see what ties in. Everybody in the foreground of the shots is identified and so far we have over three hundred names with repeats on about half, all of whom are fairly prominent citizens.”

“How many did the paper use?”

“About a third. They’re stamped on the back with the dates.”

“There’s a common denominator there though, isn’t there?” Hy nodded. “Sure. We nailed that right away. All were taken in New York within the last year. Try to make something out of that.”

I picked some of the photos from the pile on the end and scanned through them. Some I remembered having seen in the paper, others were parts of the general coverage given the occasions by one or more photographers. There were faces I knew, some I had just heard about and too many that were totally unknown.

Every so often somebody would spot a possible connection and it would be checked out with another index, but every time they’d draw a blank. There didn’t seem to be any possibility of a connection between their activities and Mitch Temple’s death. Nevertheless, the pictures made repeated rounds among all of us.

I grinned when I saw Dulcie McInnes at a charity function and another of her at a ball in a Park Avenue hotel dancing with an elderly foreign ambassador in a medal-decorated sash. Then I stopped looking at faces and concentrated on the names typed and pasted to the back of the sheets.

The only one whose name had come up before was Belar Ris. He was greeting a diplomatic representative from one of the iron curtain countries who was getting off an airplane and Belar Ris had the funny expression of a man who didn’t particularly care about being photographed. He seemed to be tall and blocky, suggestive of physical power even tailor-made clothes couldn’t conceal. His face didn’t show any trace of national origin except that he was swarthy and his eyes had a shrewd cast to them. His out-stretched arm was bared to the cuff of his coat, his wrist and forearm thick. Belar Ris was a short-sleeved-shirt man, the kind who wanted no obstacles in the way of a power move.

Al saw me concentrating on the photo and asked, “Got something?”

I tossed the picture down. “Mitch had some column items on this one.”

He looked at it carefully. “Who didn’t? Belar Ris. He’s a U.N. representative. There’s another picture of him in tonight’s paper raising hell at an Assembly meeting.”

“Anything special on him?”

“No, but he’s publicity-shy. There are a dozen like him at the U.N. now ... the grabbers. He’ll play both ends against the middle to keep things going back home. Anything to protect his interests. It’s too bad the idiots appoint people like that to represent them.”

“They have to.” Al separated some of the shots in front of him and picked one out. “Here’s another of Ris. It was right after that Middle East blow-up. The guy he’s talking to was ousted the next week and killed in a coup.”

One other person was in the picture, but the lighting didn’t make his features too distinguishable. “Who’s this?”

Al took the picture from me, scanned it and shook his head. “Beats me. Probably in the background. He’s not mentioned on the back.”

“He looks familiar,” I said.

“Could be. That’s right outside the U.N. complex and he could be part of a diplomatic corps. It doesn’t look like he’s standing with Ris.”

He was right The guy wasn’t with Ris or the other one, but it didn’t look as if he were going anywhere either. He seemed to be in an attitude of waiting, but even then, with a stop-action shot, you couldn’t tell. There was something vaguely familiar about him, a face you see once and couldn’t forget because of the circumstances. I ran it through my mind quickly, trying to focus on possible areas of contact, but couldn’t make a connection and put the picture back on the pile.

I spent another twenty minutes with them, then got up and wandered down the corridor to the morgue where old Biff was reading his paper. He waved and I said, “Mind if I take a look in your files?”

“Be my guest.”

I went down the rows until I came to the “R’s” and pulled out the drawer. There was a file on Belar Ris, with three indistinct photos that hadn’t been used. There was the shadow of his hat, a hand apparently carelessly held in front of his face and a blur of motion that didn’t quite make him recognizable. The ones he was with were identified, but I didn’t make any of them. All of them seemed to have some prominence, to judge by their clothes, the attaché cases they carried or the general background. I closed the files and walked back to the desk.

Hy was standing there looking at me.

“Okay, Mike,” he said, “you pulled something out.”

“Belar Ris,” I told him. “There’s nothing in the files.”

“Why him?”

“Nothing special. He was the only one I recognized that Mitch wrote about.”

“Can it, Mike. There is something special. What?”

“The guy doesn’t seem to like having his picture taken.”

“A lot of them are that way.”

“Attached to a diplomatic staff? They’re all publicity hounds.”

“What do you know about Ris, Mike?”

“Only what Mitch wrote.”

“Maybe I can tell you a little more. He’s got a hush-hush background. Black-market activities, arms dealing, tricky business dealings, but I know a lot of others on top of the political situation that were just as bad. Right now he’s being treated mighty carefully because guys like that can sway the balance of power in the U.N. Now look ... there’s something else about Ris, so don’t you tell me ...”

“There isn’t anything, buddy. I was swinging wild.”

Biff shoved the paper across the desk before Hy could answer me and said, “This the one you’re talking about?”

It was Belar Ris on the front page, all right. He was talking to two of our people and a French representative during a break in the session and his face was hard and one finger pointed aggressively at our man who looked pretty damn disgusted. The caption said it was a continuation of the argument over having admitted the government represented by Naku Em Abor, who had just proposed some resolution inimical to the western powers.