The Brink of Murder (6 page)

S
IMON DROVE BACK
to Marina Beach with the car radio tuned to the 24-hour news station. Reardon was right. Somebody had put a lid on the Amling story and so far it was holding tight. When he reached The Mansion Wanda was gone. She had called in from the recording studio in Hollywood to report that she had an all-night session on the agenda and would sleep it off at the Century Plaza. Chester was in his rooms cramming for the new teaching assignment, and Hannah, wearing a red-velvet dressing gown, was relaxed on the chaise longue in her sitting room reading
Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex
by that prominent literary figure, Dr Reuben. She glanced up as Simon entered the room.

“I always knew somebody would write the story of my life one day,” she quipped. Then she read the expression on Simon’s face and let the book drop to the floor. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

He gave a detailed résumé of the day’s events and concluded with Captain Reardon’s disclosure of the Pacific Guaranty audit.

“I don’t believe it!” Hannah gasped. “It’s like hearing that Jack Armstrong robbed Fort Knox. How’s Carole taking it?”

“How can she take it? If it’s true that Barney took that money and has gone away with it she may never see him again.”

“Argentina,” Hannah reflected. “Isn’t that where people go to avoid extradition? He must be mentally ill.”

“I thought of that. But he wasn’t mentally ill when he drew up the papers putting his house in his sons’ names.”

Hannah hadn’t heard about that. She listened to Simon’s story while the cosmetic surgery of excitement took years from her face. “That doesn’t sound so good for Our Hero,” she said. “He was anticipating trouble. Have you told his wife?”

“Not yet. She has enough grief for the moment. I have a bit of grief coming up myself. Carole Amling asked me to help find her husband. If I do find him—or if any of the agencies looking for him find him—he’s going to need a lawyer to defend him and you know who that will be.”

“Was she really that important to you, Simon?”

Simon grinned. “I suppose she was—at the time. But there’s more to this than sentiment. The fact is that I’m obligated to protect the interests of Carole and her sons, and right now the whereabouts of Barney Amling constitutes their greatest interest. I’m just not satisfied that Barney—if he has taken the money—pulled this thing off all by himself. There’s always a motive to anything like this. Mental aberration is a cop-out. I’m going to have to dig.” Simon took the parking-lot ticket out of his pocket and handed it to Hannah. “I managed to get this out of the glove compartment of his car before the lawmen saw me.”

She studied it curiously. “Tell me more,” she said.

“It’s time—dated. That car was driven into the lot at 7.37 p.m. Friday, 10 November. According to what I learned from the garage-attendant at Pacific Guaranty, Barney left the building almost three hours earlier. But before he left, he called his son and told him he was making an emergency flight and wouldn’t be home for several days. Barney’s home is less than a thirty-minute drive from the airport. If he was anticipating a long absence there was nothing to stop him from driving home and saying goodbye to his family.”

“He was afraid of losing his nerve,” Hannah suggested.

“I thought of that. But I’m still curious about where he spent the two hours and fifty minutes between the time he left the office and the time he reached the airport. He didn’t have to leave the office at all, you see. If he didn’t want to see anyone he could have stayed right there until it was time to go to the plane. If he wanted dinner, he could call down to any of several restaurants on the Mall, or he could have taken the elevator down and spent the time in the bar of one of those restaurants. He wouldn’t have needed his car for that. So, unless you want to buy the idea that he spent all that time just driving about on an evening when there was enough intermittent rain to make driving hazardous, he must have gone somewhere and seen someone or, at least, have been seen by someone.”

“And talked to someone,” Hannah contributed.

“Right. This parking ticket is the only thing I have that the police don’t have so what I intend to do is try reconstructing Barney’s last day at the office and see where it leads. I did see his appointment book for the day. It had one notation in his own handwriting—I take it that Mary Sutton usually makes his appointments—and that was for lunch with Vincent Pucci.”

“Pucci,” Hannah repeated. “The name sounds familiar.”

“You’ve probably seen it on a billboard or two. Pucci is building some of the more lavish housing developments hereabouts.”

“He sounds like a gangster.”

“There’s gossip to that effect. So far as I know that’s all it is—gossip. He’s never been named by any investigating committee.”

“They don’t make investigating committees the way they used to,” Hannah said sadly. “There hasn’t been a really good one since Estes Kefauver. I don’t suppose there’s any use in me asking you to take me along when you go to see Pucci.”

Simon shook his head. “Afraid not. It may not be the easiest thing to do. He’s a busy man.”

“Just the same, I’ll bet you fifty thousand of the more than three hundred thousand dollars you owe me for losing at pinochle that you make it on the first try.”

• • •

Hannah was almost right. On the next morning Simon drove to the head office of Pucci Enterprises and asked to see Vincent Pucci. The man in charge, who resembled an Olympic decathlon contestant, made it known that this was impossible until Simon produced his card and announced that he was representing Bernard Amling.

“I don’t think Mr Pucci likes to have his projects held up with legal delays,” he said. “I’m trying to be helpful.”

Mr Pucci didn’t like his projects held up with any kind of delays, legal or otherwise, and the result of this approach was a series of telephone calls that finally pinpointed the big man himself at a health spa just a few miles from the Pacific Guaranty tower. It was a very expensive spa with a neo-Las Vegas Romanesque décor and there, sweating out the afterglow of a herbal massage, Simon found Pucci reclining on the couch like Nero resting up for the next orgy. In addition to the attendant, a girl with a paperback cover figure and not much more clothing, he was accompanied by a bodyguard who might have been a twin to the man at the construction office. Simon presented his card and watched it wilt in the herbal air. The bodyguard, who was wearing a sweat-suit, read the card and presented it to Pucci who was wearing a frown.

“Okay, so you’re Drake,” he said. “What’s wrong with Barney? If there’s trouble he should call me himself.”

“He should call his wife, too, but he didn’t,” Simon said.

Anyone who thinks women have a corner on an ear for gossip hasn’t known many businessmen. Vincent Pucci’s large, flabby face, dominated by an enormous nose that was almost luminous with sweat, came to instant attention.

“What do you mean?” he demanded.

“Barney’s gone away. Didn’t he tell you about it when you had lunch together a week ago last Friday?”

“Did I have lunch a week ago with Barney?” Pucci asked.

The man in the sweat-suit emitted an affirmative grunt. “At Emilio’s,” he said.

Pucci’s face wrinkled into a nostalgic smile. “Emilio’s,” he sighed. “That Emilio makes the greatest chicken cacciatore anywhere outside my mama’s kitchen. Barney wasn’t very hungry.”

“That’s interesting,” Simon said. “Do you lunch together often?”

“No,” Pucci said. “Barney wanted to talk about the beach project. You know—progress report. I told him we would pour the first-layer foundations the following Monday and we did. I told him we would also finish the parking-lot the following Monday and we did. You can write cheques on Vincent Pucci’s word. Everybody in the construction business knows that.”

“Is the project the only thing you talked about?”

“What else? A little football, maybe. That’s what I like to talk about with Barney Amling. Football. I had a bundle riding on the Rams once. He told me why they couldn’t win and I switched my bet. Cleaned up. A banker who knows football, now that’s the kind of man I like.”

“Did he come to Emilio’s alone? I mean, did he have a woman with him?”

“A woman?” Pucci cried. “What do you mean—a woman?”

“A woman—young and attractive, probably. You see, I don’t exactly represent Barney Amling. I represent his wife.”

“She’s got ideas about Barney?”

“She’s got ideas.”

Pucci looked at his bodyguard and rolled his eyes in amazement. “How do you like that? Barney Amling? How does that grab you, Louis?”

“It grabs me,” Louis said. “You never can tell.”

“You never can tell about them egghead WASPs,” Pucci said. “Of course, he was always a friendly guy and real polite to ladies. I introduced him to my daughter, Veronica, once. She was walking around like we had eggs on the rug for days. ‘Groovy,’ she said. ‘For an older man, Papa, he is real groovy.’ Kids know about these things, I guess. Hey, Drake, you think Barney’s wife is trying to get a divorce?”

“Not if she can help it,” Simon said.

“That’s good. I don’t like to do business with a banker whose wife is getting a divorce. It don’t look good.” Then Pucci slapped his stomach with both hands and emitted a staccato laugh. “Women,” he said. “Always getting ideas. I’ll tell you what’s wrong. Barney works too hard and she feels neglected. Now here’s what I’m going to do. I’ve got a nice place down in Baja. You can’t even get to it except by private plane. When I see Barney I’m going to tell him he’s working too hard and should take a couple of weeks off to go down there with his wife. No kids. Just his wife. A woman needs some romance once in awhile. Never too old for romance. Even my wife, at her age, likes perfume and flowers and sometimes a trip to Europe. Barney should take his wife with him on those business trips instead of that secretary—” He paused, suddenly moved by his own words. “That secretary,” he repeated. “Say, you don’t think she’s been making a play for the boss, do you?”

“It happens,” Simon said.

“Yeah, it happens. You wait. I’ll talk to Barney when he gets back. But if you see him first, you tell him the beach project is right on schedule. Right on the nose.”

“Which project is that?” Simon asked.

Pucci beckoned to Louis. “Give Mr Drake one of the cards from the project,” he said. “It’s going to be the best one yet. Do you know, Drake, that, sooner or later, everybody wants to live by the ocean? The old people feel time creeping up on them and think, Jesus, we don’t have much time and we never lived by the ocean yet, so they pay three or four times the rent they usually pay just to have a few months on the beach. The young people are just as bad. The houses I sell are chicken feed compared to what I’m going to make on these apartments, if I don’t have trouble with screwballs.”

“Screwballs?” Simon echoed.

“Ecology nuts. College kids and old ladies. Zoning commissions I can handle, but these kids and old ladies!”

“They can’t be bought, is that it?”

“Bought! They don’t know the meaning of money. How can they? The kids are all living off their parents and the old ladies off annuities. I’ve got some property right below the new project—I mean, I’ve got it in mind to buy. It belongs to a crazy old lady who lives in a rest home. The house on this land is fifty years old and should be condemned. There it sits, an eyesore, on a piece of land one hundred by two hundred feet. The house she rents out to kids at one-fifty a month. Imagine! Land that valuable should be bringing one-fifty a month for every four-fifty square feet. At ten storeys high you figure out what it’s worth. But she won’t sell. The ecology nuts build a whole campaign around her and the senile old bat thinks she’s some kind of hero.”

“Every business has its hardships,” Simon said.

“That’s the truth! But these kids are the worst. They say they want to live close to nature—like Indians. Just let something go wrong with the garbage disposal and they scream for help.”

Pucci snapped his fingers and Louis brought him a huge towel. He stood up and wrapped himself like a perspiring Nero in a terry-cloth toga.

“Now I’m going to the sauna room,” he said. “Take your clothes off, Drake, and join me. It’s a pleasure to talk to you. Maybe I could use a smart lawyer like you on my staff.”

“Sorry, I free-lance,” Simon said.

“Okay, so we talk awhile.”

“Some other time. Thanks,” Simon said.

He left Louis and another shapely girl attendant to help Pucci into the sauna room and walked back to the entrance lobby. The card Louis had given him was a little damp from the steam, but he tucked it into his wallet anyway. At the public phone in the lobby he found a telephone book and looked up the address of Emilio’s restaurant.

• • •

It was tucked away on a side street where it had probably been for 30 years: a nondescript-looking building with a faded awning and a parking-lot that was always filled during business hours because any chef who can please the public doesn’t need a neon sign or press agent. Simon didn’t drive into the lot. All he really wanted was a picture of Barney Amling’s last day in circulation and an idea of the mileage he might have put on the Continental. He drove by slowly and then noticed the Chevron station on the corner with the operator’s name hung out in front: Lew Morely. He drove in and stopped beside the pumps. He gave the boy on duty the key to the tank and went into the office.

Morely was seated behind a desk: a muscular young man of about Simon’s age with pale red hair and an unlit cigar in his mouth. Did he remember servicing Barney Amling’s car a week ago Friday? Morely chewed on the cigar and remembered.

“Sure. About noon—a little after. He’s not a regular customer, I’m sorry to say, but I always remember when he comes in because I used to play football myself. Not pro’, understand. Collegiate. Junior college, in fact. Still, when you love football it really doesn’t matter.”

“Did you talk football that day?”

“I tried to. Amling was in a hurry. Business lunch with some big shot. What am I saying? Barney Amling’s a big shot himself these days. Know him?”