The Cutie (12 page)

“Why not?”

“Well, he’s dead. He died about a year ago. Mavis thought he was going to leave her a whole lot of money in his will. He told her he would, but he didn’t. I forget who got his money. There wasn’t much of it, anyway. Not as much as Mavis thought there would be.”

I wrote “Dead a year ago” after Charles Morgan’s name on my list, and said, “Is there anybody you know of who might hate Mavis, or might have wanted to kill her?”

“Of course not.” She looked at me as though she thought I was crazy for even suggesting such a thing. “Nobody could ever hate Mavis,” she said. “Oh, she was awfully trying at times, of course. Everybody is, in one way or another. Mavis was awfully lazy and wanted to be waited on all the time. She’d never take her turn to do the dishes and things like that. But she was an awfully sweet person. She was never catty or anything, never talked about anybody behind their back or anything like that. She was a good friend. Everybody liked Mavis.”

“Had you seen much of her lately?”

“Oh, sure. She’d come over and chat all the time.”

“Was she worried about anything? Did she act as though she were afraid or upset about anything at all?”

“Not at all. She was in seventh heaven. She thought Ernest Tesselman was going to get her a big part in some musical comedy or something. She even thought he was going to marry her. She was going to go talk to a lawyer about a divorce and everything.”

“A divorce?”

“Well, certainly. She couldn’t get married again without getting a divorce first.”

“I didn’t know she’d been married.”

“Oh, it was years and years ago. She was married in her home town, before she came to New York. There’s an air base or something out there, and she married somebody from the base. She was a legal secretary or something at the base, and that’s how she met him. Then he deserted her, after they’d only been married a little while, and she came to New York. That’s why she was so mercenary about men. She’d married for love once, and all she’d gotten was heartache.”

“What was her married name, do you know?”

“I don’t think she ever told me. It wasn’t St. Paul, I know that. That was just a stage name. She named herself after Paul Devon, because he was her acting teacher. But she never told me what her husband’s name was. She didn’t like to talk about that part of her life. It was awfully painful for her.”

“I imagine so.” I looked at the list of names, and read them aloud. “ž‘Alan Petry, Paul Devon, Cy Grildquist, Johnny Ricardo, Charles Morgan, Ernest Tesselman.’ Was there anybody else particularly close to her, that you know of?”

“No, that’s all I know of,” she said. “She would have told me, if there was anybody else. We told each other everything.”

“How about women? Did she have many woman friends?”

“Only me. She didn’t like most girls. She thought they were silly.”

“I see.” I tried to think of something else to ask her, but there wasn’t anything. I got to my feet. “Thank you very much, Miss Benson,” I said. “You’ve been a great help.”

She stood up and walked to the door with me. “I think you ought to watch Ernest Tesselman,” she said, “If he told you he was in love with Mavis, or anything like that, he was lying. He was just stringing her along, like all the rest of them. He had no intention of marrying her, just as he had no intention of getting her into musical comedy.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Mavis was tone deaf. She couldn’t carry a tune.”

Back in the Mercedes, I spent a useless couple of minutes staring at my list of names and trying to figure out what to do next. I should go talk to these people, find out about them, narrow the list of suspects down to the one name that would spell cutie, but I just couldn’t concentrate on the problem. It had been relatively cool in Betty Benson’s apartment, but outside it was as hot and muggy as ever. It was four o’clock in the afternoon and I’d had about two hours sleep in the last thirty, and I was too groggy to think. The world was just going to have to wait for a few hours, while I got caught up on my rest.

That was the only decision I was capable of making right then. It was time to go to sleep. I started the Mercedes, and drove down toward Sheridan Square, and fiddled around among the one-way streets until I finally managed to head myself uptown. At one point, I thought I saw a car I kind of recognized and I waved, and then I forgot it.

I drove home, left the Mercedes with the day kid at the garage, and slogged through the humidity to my building. The air conditioning inside was nice, but no longer enough to revive me. I leaned against the wall of the elevator all the way up to my floor.

Ella was in the living room, bright and chipper, when I walked in. She was dressed in a white peasant blouse and a full white skirt with Aztec designs on it in gold, and she looked so goddam cool and alert I could have kicked her teeth in out of pure envy. I stood in the middle of the living room and peeled my suitcoat off.

“Poor Clay,” she said, taking the suitcoat from me. “You look tired.”

“I am tired,” I told her. “I want to take a vacation. I want to go away somewhere. Maybe Alaska.” I ripped off my tie, handed it to her, and went to work on the buttons of my shirt.

“You should take a shower,” she said. “And then go to bed for a while.”

“You’re absolutely right,” I said. I let her lead me through the apartment to the bedroom, and between us we got my clothes off. Then she took me into the bathroom, stood me in the shower, and turned the water on. It was cold at first, and I shivered a bit, but then it warmed up and felt fine. I stood there for a long while, not thinking at all, just enjoying the feel of the lukewarm water on my skin, and then I stepped out onto the mat and Ella toweled me dry. She brought me back to the bedroom, helped me into bed, and tucked the nice crisp sheets in around me. She kissed me on the forehead, playing the Little Mother role to the hilt, and said, “Have a good sleep.”

I murmured something, closing my eyes, and the goddam doorbell sounded off.

“Oh, no,” said Ella.

“I’m not home,” I said. “I’ve gone away.”

“All right,” she said. She left the bedroom, and I closed my eyes again.

I was just drifting off to sleep when she came back. She touched my shoulder. “Clay, it’s the police,” she said. “They want to talk to you.”

I opened my eyes, and saw Grimes standing in the doorway. “Up and at ’em, Sleeping Beauty,” he said. “We’re going for a little ride.”

“You want to sublet this goddam place?” I asked him.

“Get up and get dressed,” he said. “Snap it up.”

I stared at him, wondering what the hell had happened to Tesselman. Hadn’t he come through on his promise to calm the cops? Or was that lousy fish of his still giving out with babies? “What’s wrong now?” I asked him.

“Move,” he said. “Unless you want to be booked in the buff.”

“Booked? Booked for what?”

“You got it wrong, Clay,” he said. “
I
ask the questions. All you do is get up and get dressed.” He turned to Ella. “If you wouldn’t mind—” he started.

“It’s all right,” I said. “She’s seen me in the raw.”

“Nevertheless,” he said.

“I’ll be in the living room,” she said, and went away.

I pushed the sheet to one side and got out of bed. As I padded around the room, gathering clothes, I tried to figure it out. Tesselman should have given the all-clear signal a couple of hours ago. Unless the son of a bitch had double-crossed me. But why should he? He didn’t have any percentage in letting Mavis St. Paul’s killer get away.

Unless Ernest Tesselman was the killer himself. I sat on the edge of the bed, in the middle of putting on my socks, and let that little thought play around inside my head. Did it make sense? Tesselman kills her, drags in Billy-Billy to play stand-in, and uses his influence to see to it that the cops don’t look any further than the patsy. Did it make sense?

“Come on, Clay,” said Grimes. “Quit stalling.”

I didn’t want to go to jail, I really didn’t want to go to jail. This was a notion that hadn’t occurred to me before, and I needed time to think it out, time to poke around and see if it made sense. Tesselman tried to give me the impression he felt strongly about Mavis St. Paul, he’d been going to help her land a job in a musical comedy. He’d told her he planned to marry her. But he just hadn’t rung true with his eulogy for Mavis, and Betty Benson had supported the idea that Tesselman was faking his feelings for the girl. Maybe they’d had a fight. It could have happened, Mavis could have found out he was just stringing her along. They argued, he lost his temper, stabbed her—

“You want to go with no shoes on?” Grimes asked me.

“Listen, Grimes,” I said. “I don’t want to go at all. What is this? You guys still playing dragnet for Billy-Billy Cantell? I told you I don’t know where he is, and I still don’t know where he is, and if I knew where he was I’d deliver him to Centre Street personally.”

“Talk at the station,” he said. “You’ll get all the chance you want.”

You can’t argue with cops, you can’t reason with them. They get an idea into their heads and that’s it. If an atom bomb were to go off right outside the window at that point, they would still take me right through the fallout to the station.

I knew better than to try to talk to a cop. I’d play their game, get out as soon as I could, and get back to work. I finished dressing and walked through the apartment to the living room, Grimes right behind me.

Ella was in the living room, sitting in the chair next to the phone, and the other two cops who went everywhere with Grimes lately were both standing by the door.

Ella looked over at me and said, “They won’t let me call Clancy.”

“They have no respect for due process of the law,” I told her. “Call him as soon as we leave.”

“All right,” she said. “It isn’t anything serious, is it, Clay?”

I didn’t know whether it was or not. “No,” I said. “It isn’t serious. These guys just can’t think of anything else to do, since they lost their pinochle deck.”

“Come on,” said Grimes.

“I’ll call him right away,” Ella promised, as we left.

We went down the hall to the elevator, and Grimes said, “She doesn’t deserve you. She seems like a pleasant girl.”

“She is,” I said. “Listen, is this trip really necessary?”

“Yes.”

The elevator door opened, and the four of us stepped inside, which crowded things a bit. “I really don’t know where Billy-Billy is,” I said. “You can hold me forever, and I still won’t know.”

“This has nothing to do with Cantell,” he said.

The elevator started down then, but that wasn’t what gave me the butterfly feeling in my stomach. “It isn’t Cantell?”

“You know damn well it isn’t,” he said.

“How do I know all this?”

“Because you got to somebody,” he told me. “I don’t know who it was you got to, but we heard the word. Ease off on the Cantell search. Don’t make life so difficult for the syndicate.” He twisted his mouth in a grimace of disgust. “Sometimes,” he said, “I wish I was President. Just for one day, just for twenty-four hours.”

“So you’re going to give me a hard time for something else, is that it? Sour grapes, is that it?”

“We’ll talk at the station,” he said.

“You’re hell on wheels, Mr. Grimes,” I said, but I wasn’t really interested in the conversation any more. Tesselman had come through after all. He’d called off the cops, to give me a better chance to find out who had killed his girlfriend and framed Billy-Billy. So where did that put the Tesselman-as-killer theory? Right in the trash can.

And if Grimes wasn’t after me for Cantell, what the hell was this? There was no sense asking him, he’d decided to play cute and close-mouthed, and he wouldn’t tell me what day it was. Whatever it was, I hoped to hell it was something that Clancy could get me out of fast. I wasn’t up to this kind of thing at the moment.

It was a long silent drive to the precinct station, and it wasn’t the precinct I’d thought we were going to. Which meant they didn’t want Clancy to spring me right away. There were no formalities at the desk. We walked right by it, headed into the green-walled bowels of the building. So I wasn’t even going to be booked yet. I could wait and guess and sweat it out until they finally decided to tell me what I was here for.

We all walked into a bare little room, and I knew I’d been through this game before. There were the chairs, one of them in the middle of the room and the rest scattered around against the walls. The lighting, I noticed, was normal, with no particular bright beam aimed at the chair in the center. As a matter of fact, there was enough outside light coming through the filthy windows so they didn’t have to turn on the electric lights at all. Ashtray stands were dotted around the room, but none of them was near the center chair, which meant I wasn’t going to be able to smoke. There was a water cooler in one corner of the room, and I knew that was something else I wouldn’t be getting any of. Oh, this was going to be fun.

I didn’t wait for anybody to give me directions. I just sat down in the chair in the middle of the room, and waited. Grimes and the other two cops drifted around the room for a couple of minutes, taking off their suit-coats and loosening their ties and shoving the chairs back and forth with grating noises. Grimes got himself a cup of water from the water cooler, which was behind me, and I heard it go
gurgle-gurgle.

They finally decided to get started. Grimes led off, standing in front of me while the other two cops sat around in the background. “Where’ve you been all day?” he asked me.

“Here and there,” I said.

“Names and addresses,” he said.

“They slip my mind,” I told him. “I want to make it clear that I’m not refusing to answer. It’s just that I forget.”

“You forget where you’ve been all day?”

“Yes, sir, I do. I forget where I’ve been all day. It was awful hot outside, that probably explains it. I do remember one thing. I didn’t go anywhere with air conditioning.”

One of the other cops spoke up. “How long you been shacking with the broad in your apartment?” he asked me.