The Cutie (10 page)

“Yes, sir.”

He looked away from me, studied the darting fish for a minute, then put the box of fish food and the net down and said, “You aren’t interested in tropical fish. Come to my study.”

He led the way and I followed him, walking slowly, matching his old man’s pace. We went down the horror-movie hall and into his study, a high-ceilinged room, dark and windowless, the walls covered with jammed bookcases. Tesselman switched on the indirect lighting, motioned for me to sit in the brown-leather chair facing the desk, and himself sat behind the desk, hands folded in his lap, looking at me with pursed-lip attention. He looked out of place behind that desk, smaller and more fragile than ever in back of all that broad, empty mahogany. The wood of the desk was dark and rich and highly polished, and looked as though it should be warm to the touch. A telephone and an ashtray were the only items on the desktop.

“Did he tell you about the killing?” Tesselman asked me.

“Not exactly. He didn’t see it. He fell asleep in a doorway or an alley somewhere, earlier in the evening, and when he woke up he was in Miss St. Paul’s apartment. She was lying on the floor, already dead. He was terrified and ran away, leaving his hat and fingerprints behind. He came directly to me, asking for help, but the police showed up and he ran away again. I haven’t been able to locate him since.”

“He doesn’t remember murdering poor Mavis?”

“He doesn’t think he did. And neither do I.”

He frowned. “Why not?”

“Three reasons,” I told him. I counted them off on my fingers. “First, Billy-Billy himself. He’s a meek, nervous, quiet little guy whose only defense is running, and whose only offense is dope. He isn’t the type who kills. When he gets in a jam, he folds up. Second, he doesn’t carry a knife or any other weapon. He’s afraid to. He knows it’s nothing but a cheap conviction if the police pick him up and find a weapon on him, and he also knows he’d never be able to use a knife. Third, someone called the police right after the murder, and made the tip-off. That meant someone besides Billy-Billy and Miss St. Paul was present. The real killer.”

Tesselman was studying me carefully, lips pursed out in concentration. The fussy little man was almost completely gone now, replaced by a shrewd and silent man who could be relied on to be nobody’s fool.

He said, “The first two reasons you gave are meaningless. This Cantell isn’t the killing type, and he doesn’t carry a weapon. You are talking about his character and his logic. But you yourself said he was taking dope, that he had taken so much he lost consciousness. Rules of character and logic don’t apply.”

I shrugged. It was too early to start arguing over individual points. “There’s only the phone call,” I said.

“Possibly only a witness,” he said.

“Possibly, but not very probably. Where was this witness? If he was in the apartment, why didn’t he come to Miss St. Paul’s assistance? Dope or no dope, Billy-Billy Cantell is a puny little weakling who’d have a tough time taking candy away from a baby. If he’d attacked Miss St. Paul with a knife, she could have taken the knife away from him, held him down, and called the police. He’s no raging monster, believe me.”

“We were talking about the witness,” he said.

“The witness, yes. Where was he? In the apartment? If so, he was either the murderer or an accessory to the murder, because he didn’t even try to stop it.”

“He might have been in the building across the street, and saw the murder through the window.”

“I haven’t seen Miss St. Paul’s apartment,” I said. “I’ll have to leave it to you whether that’s possible or not.”

He looked startled for a second, and then he frowned down at his folded hands, thinking. Finally, he said, “You’re right. He couldn’t have been across the street. Mavis was killed in the living room, and she always kept the living-room drapes closed in the summer. Because of the air conditioning.”

“Then he had to be in the apartment.”

“Yes.” He looked at me, frowning, and said, “I’ve only just met you. I have no way of knowing how trustworthy you are, and I didn’t hear anything about a phone call before this. Would you be offended if I checked that story?”

“Not at all,” I said. “May I smoke in the meantime?”

“Of course.” He pushed the ashtray across the desk toward me, and picked up the phone. I lit a cigarette and smoked energetically while Tesselman talked rapidly to somebody he called “John.” He said he would wait, and we avoided looking at one another until John came back and answered his question.

When he hung up, Tesselman looked at me and said, “All right. Where does it go from there?”

“Cantell passed out,” I said, “earlier that evening, in a doorway or an alleyway or maybe even on the sidewalk. Our man murdered Miss St. Paul, left the apartment, picked up Cantell, brought him back to the apartment, left him there and phoned the police. If Cantell hadn’t come to, and gotten out of there just before the police showed up, the case would have been closed by now, and Cantell would be on his way to the chair, while the guy who really did kill Miss St. Paul would get off scot-free.”

“There’s another possibility,” he said. “Cantell murdered Mavis, left the apartment, spoke to someone else before he went to you, and that someone else immediately phoned the police.”

“I’m afraid not, sir,” I said. “The police arrived at the apartment before Billy-Billy had gone a block. He saw them. And I was the only person he talked to.”

“On both of those counts, you have to take his word for it.”

“Why not? At the time, there was no reason for him to be lying. If he’d been to somebody else, he would have told me. He wanted me to help him, he wouldn’t have lied to me.”

“All right, I’ll grant that. Provisionally. I’m still bothered by one point.”

“Sir?”

“This murderer of yours was taking a very grave risk when he returned to the apartment, carrying Cantell. If he had been seen, his whole plan would have fallen apart.”

“That’s a quiet block at that time of night. And I assume there’s no doorman at Miss St. Paul’s building, and that the elevator is self-service.”

“Yes, you’re right. Still, why did he go to so much trouble? Why didn’t he just leave after the murder and let it go at that?”

“He must be somebody who has a pretty good motive for wanting Miss St. Paul dead. If the police didn’t have another suspect handy, they might poke around until they found that motive.”

“All right. Then, why Cantell?”

“It could have been anybody. Any bum he ran across, sleeping one off so soundly he wouldn’t wake up when he was moved.”

“That also sounds unlikely. Cantell would certainly have remembered being moved.”

“Not necessarily. Last night, I tried to wake a friend of his, to find out if he knew where Billy-Billy might be. The friend was doped up at the time. I moved him, slapped him, walked him around, put him in a tub of cold water, and it took me almost half an hour to wake him up to the point where he recognized me. And I was
trying
to wake him up. Our killer didn’t want to wake Cantell, he just wanted to move him. That isn’t difficult at all.”

Tesselman leaned back in his chair and studied the titles of the books on the shelves nearest him. “It’s plausible,” he said at last. “It makes sense.”

“It’s the only way that does make sense,” I said.

“All right. You have me three-quarters convinced. Now you want something from me, or you wouldn’t be here. What is it?”

“I want two things,” I said. “First, you put a bug in somebody’s ear, somebody in the Police Department, about getting this case solved fast, putting the murderer behind bars right away.”

“I may have mentioned I was interested in the case,” he said. “But I certainly don’t control the Police Department.”

“I know that, sir. But the police are getting too eager. They’re trying to force Ed Ganolese to turn Cantell over to them. They’re disrupting operations right on down the line, with raids and arrests and all the rest of it. They’re fouling the organization up just when I need it running smoothly, so I can put it to work looking for the guy who framed Billy-Billy.”

“The Police Department is doing this?” He sounded honestly surprised.

“Yes, sir. And the worst part of it is that we don’t have Billy-Billy. I’m the only one who’s seen him, and he ran away from me when the cops showed up. Nobody knows where he is.”

“And you want me to take the bug out of my somebody’s ear, is that it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All right, I’ll see what I can do. Now, what was the second thing you wanted from me?”

“Mavis St. Paul,” I said. “The killer knew her, and had a reason for wanting her dead. I didn’t know her, and I don’t know anybody who knew her. I’d like you to fill me in, tell me who her friends were, who her enemies were, who might have wanted to kill her.”

There was a change in his expression then, too slight and too subtle to define. But something of the fussy old gentleman who had been puttering around with his tropical fish was back in Tesselman’s manner all at once, and he said, “I don’t believe poor Mavis had any enemies. She was a lovely girl, a beautiful girl.” He leaned forward, and his eyes, behind the spectacles, were blinking again. “A beautiful girl,” he repeated. “She had a lovely singing voice, clear and soft. Not operatic, really, not strong enough for that, just a soft and lovely voice, like a bell. She had planned to return to her acting lessons, you know. She had a great deal of natural talent. A friend of mine is a backer of Broadway musical comedies, and I had already talked to him about her. As soon as she had had more training and more experience, he would have found a place for her. She had a wonderful future ahead of her. Such a beautiful girl.”

“There was no one you knew of who disliked her?”

“Who could dislike her? Such a sweet girl. She was only a child. Everyone loved her.”

“Who were her friends, then? The people who knew her?”

“I never knew many of them,” he said. “Her old roommate could probably help you there, more than I. Her name is Betty Benson.”

“Yes, I’ve already heard of her. I have her address, but I haven’t been to see her yet.”

“She’s the one who could help you.” His hands were atop the desk now, bony and fidgeting, and he sat staring at them. “Such a lovely girl,” he said. “Everybody loved her.”

Someone knocked at the door. Tesselman looked up, called out, “Come in,” and the butler stuck his head around the door to say, “Mabel’s giving birth, Mr. Tesselman.”

“Oh!” Tesselman changed at once. Now he was completely the puttering old codger again, without the wistful overtones caused by the subject of Mavis St. Paul. He got to his feet and scurried around the huge desk. “Come along,” he said to me. “This should be worth seeing!”

He hurried down the hall, running in the strained shuffle which is the old man’s trot, and the butler and I followed him. The three of us clustered around the tank holding Mabel and her new brood. Tesselman went to work with the midget butterfly net, transferring the newborn fish from the aquarium to a large Mason jar half-full of water. Mabel darted back and forth, chasing her young, so infuriated at the net that kept getting in her way that she smacked straight into the glass side of the tank.

Tux said, “Beautiful, ain’t they, Mr. Tesselman?”

“Beautiful,” said Tesselman. His voice was the same as it had been when he was describing Mavis St. Paul.

I looked at this old man, and he just didn’t ring true. The changes were too fast, there was something calculated about them. There was no difference between his extolling the late Mavis St. Paul and his praising the beauty of his cannibal tropical fish.

There wasn’t anything else for me to do here, and Tesselman had apparently forgotten me and our conversation completely anyway, so I said, “Well, I guess we’ve covered it, Mr. Tesselman. I’ll be getting on.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, distracted. He paused to blink at me. “You see Betty Benson,” he said. “She’d be able to tell you about Mavis’s friends.” He went back to work with the net.

“I’ll do that,” I said. “Remember about the bug, will you?”

“I will, I’ll call this afternoon. Got you, you little squirmer!”

“I can find the door,” I said.

“Keep me informed,” he said, but he didn’t look away from the fish.

“Yes, sir, I will.”

I went down the horror-movie hall and the
Gone with the Wind
staircase, by the
Life
contemporary living room, and outside to my Mercedes. I sat in the car for a while, trying to figure it out. Tesselman had showed me about three different faces, and the shrewd and calculating face was the only one that rang true. The business with the fish could be considered simply a relaxation of his shrewdness, the purpose of any hobby.

But why the crocodile tears over Mavis St. Paul? For some reason, he’d wanted me to think Mavis St. Paul had meant something special to him, something more than a casual mistress. Why? The answer to that one might prove interesting.

On the way back to town, I stopped at a roadside phone booth and called Ed, to tell him the good news about Tesselman. “The dogs,” I told him, “have been called off.” He told me there was still no word from or about Billy-Billy, and I asked him which he wanted me to work on especially, finding Billy-Billy or finding the cutie. “Never mind Billy-Billy,” he said. “Wherever he’s hiding out, it’s good enough to keep the cops from finding him. Get the bastard who started all this, and we won’t have to worry about Billy-Billy at all.”

So my next stop was Betty Benson, who lived in the Village, on Grove Street near Sheridan Square.

Grove Street, naturally, was a one-way. The
other
way. I tried circling the block, which is virtually impossible in Greenwich Village, and after a while I wound up on Grove Street, parked between two Volkswagens, a block and a half from the address I wanted.

The building Betty Benson lived in was an old one, converted half a dozen times from whatever had been its original role in life. There was a buzzer-release system on the downstairs door. I rang the bell next to “Benson,” and after a minute the buzzer sounded and I pushed the door open.