The Long Night (17 page)

The death of Judith Walker was a grown-up variation of the same kind of game. Only the prize could've been a private compartment in the ice-box on Fourteenth Street.

Carole was waiting for me to ask some more questions, her wide grey eyes watching me with a distant appeal in their depths. I wondered why I had once thought she was wrapped
in the cold of a statue. Now she looked different. It was fear that had made the difference—fear that dimmed the glow nothing could altogether hide.

Right then, I had no questions she could answer. I said, “That lets Ivor Kovak out. Do you mind if I take that bottle with me?”

Carole said, “No . . . of course not.” She didn't seem surprised. She was still thinking of the night she'd fed her boss a mickey. But I got the idea she was somehow disappointed in me.

I stuck the bottle in my pocket and I put on my hat. As I opened the door, I said, “There's a little thing I don't understand: a little thing I guess you haven't thought of.”

She shivered as if she felt a sudden draught, like you do when you're overtired and you've got to stay awake. She said, “What is that?”

“Why Judith only laced your rye with knockout drops,” I said. “When you hate someone the way she must've hated you, it's just as easy, and much more permanent, to use strychnine.”

There was no need for Carole Vau Buren to say anything—except maybe good-bye. And she skipped that, too. As I went out, she was cuddling herself tightly and staring after me with an empty face.

One thing I knew and that was she had told me the truth about Ivor Kovak—the truth so far as the doped rye was concerned. For a reason I didn't want to analyse, I hoped the rest of her story was equally true.

In my racket, patience isn't a virtue: it's a necessity. You go around gathering a load of information most of which will ultimately be worthless. But you've got to have it all because you can't start separating the wheat from the chaff until you know which is wheat and which is chaff.

That was why I made a trip out to McKinnon's Distillery to show them the label on the bottle of their rye that someone had spiked with chloral hydrate. Not that I told them about the spiking. I just asked them if the perforations in the label would indicate the bar that sold this particular bottle and, if so, would they mind very much telling whose bar it was?

They said they didn't mind at all and the bottle in question had been shipped along with a lot more to a joint on Mortimor Street and had I found any fault with McKinnon's Mountain Dew?

I said I usually stuck to bourbon but, when I did take rye, I preferred it straight and the only fault I'd found was that people had got into the habit of dishing up McKinnon's with an extra kick which spoiled its flavour and sometimes left too much of a hangover and I was grateful for the service.

These things take time no matter how you cut the trimmings. The day following my chat with Carole Van Buren was half gone before I took myself into the bar on Mortimor and presented my travelling bottle for the bartender's inspection.

He was a long-faced guy with a domed head and a shapeless nose and a turned-down mouth. He said, “If the distillery says it's one of ours, then it's one of ours . . . what's the play?”

“I'm trying to locate the party who bought it,” I said. “Maybe you could remember if I gave you a little help?”

His mouth drooped lower and his eyes alerted like somebody'd sounded a trumpet at the back of his mind. He said,
“You'll have to give me more than a little help, brother. Know how many quarts of Mountain Dew we sell?”

“I've got a fin that says you've got a good memory,” I said.

He reached out and took hold of the bottle like he was afraid I'd take it away. With a melancholy grin, he said, “My memory's started working . . . now give me a lead.”

“From what I'm told,” I said, “you sold two of these to the same customer . . . about two weeks ago. You don't sell all that many in pairs, do you?”

“No-o-o. . . . I guess we don't at that.” He removed the cork and squinted into the neck of the bottle like it helped him to think. Then he wrinkled the tip of his nose and took a deep sniff. Very slowly, his eyes lifted to mine. In a hushed voice, he said, “Say! Somebody's doctored this stuff. But doctored! Judging by the smell, one drink and you'd be out for a month. Now I'm beginning to get the drift. . . .”

I said, “Telling me what I already know doesn't rate a five-spot. Who bought this bottle and its twin a couple of weeks ago?”

He sucked at his lips and fiddled with the cork before he put it back. Then he used a long thumbnail to scratch the cleft in his chin. “A coupla weeks ago. . . . Any idea what time of day the guy came in?”

“You're not doing so good,” I said. “It wasn't a guy.”

“Oh, so it's a dame we're after . . . whadaya know?” He went on scratching his chin and making little grumbling sounds in his throat while he stared through me. And after a long minute, a grin split his face like his mouth was being stretched by retractors. He hawked and said, “Who says I'm not doing so good? . . . A dame . . . eh? Two quarts of Mountain Dew . . . well, well! I'd never have thought she'd need to work a stunt like that. Never can tell, can you?”

“When you come up for air,” I said, “do you mind telling me who she was?”

His grin shrank and he hawked again. “Was is right,” he said. “The dame I sold a coupla quarts to was that swell tomato who got herself knocked off last week: the dark frill who walked all oolala . . . somebody told me she was a model.”

“Are you quite sure?”

“Sure enough to earn that five bucks twice over. She came in around seven o'clock that night and paid for two bottles and asked me to deliver them to her apartment. The address was some place on Gifford . . . next street to this before you get to Third Avenue. Got a note of it somewhere. Her name was Walker . . . Janie or Julie or . . .” His eyes followed my hand into my pocket and out again while he searched his mind carefully. When he had taken a fresh breath, he said, “Yeh . . . I got it now. Judith—Judith Walker. Want I should look up my little book and check the address for you?”

I laid a V-note on the bar and watched it vanish. I said, “Thanks . . . you don't need to bother. So long as there was no chance of someone monkeying with the bottles before she got them . . . m-m-m?”

He shook his head slowly from side to side and pulled down the corners of his mouth. He said, “Not a chance, brother. I delivered them myself at eight o'clock the same night when I was going home. It was my early turn. And the seals were unbroken when she took them from me . . . wonder why she wanted to dope her own rye? Whole thing's a darn funny business . . . isn't it?”

“You can say that again,” I said.

The afternoon editions ran a story that wasn't in any way funny. I read it over lunch and it spoiled a good meal.

Washington.                                          Tuesday.

An elevator attendant working in the Winchester Hotel on Capitol Avenue this morning found the body of a man lying outside the elevator doors on the seventh floor with a knife wound in his back. The dead man had registered at the hotel as Glenn Bowman of New York City. He had occupied a seventh floor room for the past week.

Capt. Mervyn Lee of the Washington Homicide Bureau states that it is believed the dead man operated a private detective agency in New York. No motive for the murder has as yet been discovered. Washington and New York police are pursuing inquiries.

Lieutenant Cooke had come back from lunch but he wasn't in his office right then and would I hold the line while someone went to find him? I said they could give him a message instead and would they tell the lieutenant that King Gilmore might be able to explain how Bowman came to be lying on the floor of the Winchester Hotel in Washington. To persuade Mister Gilmore to talk, the lieutenant should ask him how a bug called Tad got his arm busted and what Tad was doing when he lost his army issue.45.

The guy on the phone made himself sound stupid so he could ask questions while the operator on the Headquarters' switchboard tried to trace the call. He said was I talking about Washington D.C. and how did I spell Tad and what about coming down to Headquarters and having a confidential chat with Lieutenant Cooke so he could get the whole story straight?

I told him brother if I knew the whole story I'd know more than anybody else and I'd have to go now because I had to see a Chinaman about my laundry. Furthermore, they could save themselves a lot of trouble for nothing as I was speaking from a pay station near the Walt Whitman Memorial and weren't public telephone booths a great convenience?

Then I hung up and got the hell out of it. I still felt bad about Cartwright but in a more academic way. After all, a guy's got to be philosophical about such things. And it could've been worse. It could've been me.

Until the Washington authorities found someone to take a trip to identify the deceased as one Glenn Bowman when the balloon would go up, everybody was entitled to consider me dead: everybody but a lovely lady called Carole Van Buren.

I thought it was a pity I hadn't used a phoney name when I'd first tried to talk with Ivor Kovak. That way Carole wouldn't have got the idea when she saw her evening paper, that she'd had a visit from a ghost who'd retained his earthly admiration for a pair of pretty legs. I was dead and I wanted to stop dead. Carole might consider it her duty to tell the police that I couldn't have died in Washington and visited her apartment both the same night.

After thinking about it from several angles, I called her at Kovak's place on Fifth Avenue.

She listened to me without saying anything and then she said she hadn't seen a paper yet but she'd already told Mr. Kovak what we'd discussed the night before.

And I said why did you have to tell him anything?

In a strangely meek voice, she said, “Because I thought it was only fair to let him know you knew the truth about that night. He's been worrying himself sick in case you found out and told his wife. Both of us thought you'd been hired by Mrs. Kovak . . . that's why he was scared to see you the day you called here. Do you mind very much that I told him you're not what we thought you were?”

“Why should I mind?” I said. “So long as he doesn't mention me to anyone.”

“Oh, he'll do whatever you want, you can be quite sure of that. He's very grateful to you for promising not to tell Mrs. Kovak about—what happened the other night . . . very grateful.” She made it sound like I'd earned royal favour.

I said, “Mister Ivor Kovak's gratitude is just the thing I need to see me through the matzos season . . . for my
money, he's a louse. Just make sure that, if he talks, I talk. Will you do that?”

“Of course . . . but you're wrong about him. He isn't really vicious. At times I feel sorry for him.”

“When a dame starts feeling sorry,” I said, “she's a pushover for a smooth operator. Better watch your step or you might have reason to feel sorry for yourself.”

As though I had given her a serious warning, she said, “I'm in no danger . . . and I wish you'd tell me what I've done to offend you.”

“Why should you have offended me?”

“I don't know; I haven't meant to. But you're different somehow since yesterday.”

“A guy's always different,” I said, “after he's been stabbed to death.”

She made two false starts before she murmured, “I've been trying not to think about that but . . . I'm beginning to get scared. First there was Judith . . . then Pauline . . . and now this man has been murdered in your place. You must've found out something you weren't supposed to know. Why don't you tell the police what it is and put a stop to all this terrible business?”

“The only thing I know,” I said, “is that Judith Walker was acquainted with a character called Richard Gilmore—if acquainted isn't maybe the wrong word. And Gilmore is behind the eight ball on account of a guy by the name of Lloyd Warner investigated his mode of living and' come up with some hot material. Which hot material Mister Gilmore will have to admit or deny before a Grand Jury sometime in the next couple of weeks. Did Judith ever talk about this boy-friend of hers?”

“Not to me. But——” Carole retired behind the phone like she needed a breathing space to sort things out “—isn't he the man I read about recently? The man somebody tried to shoot outside a night club on Forty-Second Street?”

“Yes,” I said. “He is. Are you quite sure you don't know him at all?”

“Quite sure. I've never been inside the Silver Peacock.”

“What about this Lloyd Warner? Did Judith ever mention him?”

“No. As I told you once already, she didn't discuss her
men friends with me. And I've certainly never heard the name Warner before.”

A guy in my line of business learns to recognise the truth when he hears it. Experience is the best lie-detector. And Carole Van Buren was telling the truth: she didn't know either Warner or King Gilmore.

I said, “Nice to get things clean-cut and definite for a change. Sorry to have to ask so many questions.”

“You don't need to apologise. I only wish . . .” She didn't finish it. Maybe she was too doubtful. Or too modest. I hoped it was too modest.

But I couldn't get Ivor Kovak out of my mind. If she had been playing mothers and fathers with him, it was entirely her own business. She'd never confess it to me. If I pushed her too far, she'd tell me go jump in the lake. . . . On one of those crazy impulses I can never resist, I said, “How'd you like to have dinner with me sometime?”

She took a long time to answer. Then she said cautiously, “You're wasting your money. I don't know anything I haven't told you.”