The Twenty-Year Death (65 page)

Then somebody banged on the front door and my thoughts froze. They banged again, with more violence.

It had to be Browne. He’d given Vee his key and I had the other. If I had to let him in, it would ruin my plan. I could still frame him for Vee’s murder; he’d be the number one suspect.
But he had the police in his pocket, and he probably knew how to dispose of a body without it ever getting to the police. If I wanted to protect Clotilde’s money, it had to be both of them.

I stumbled to my feet, as he pounded again, shouting this time, “Vee, you better open up.”

I approached the door, the gun lowered in my right hand.

“I’m going to beat your ass black and blue if you don’t open this door this second!”

This was good, I thought. People would be able to say they’d heard him threatening her. I stepped up to the door and put my eye to the spy hole.

Browne was very close, his face distorted by the fisheye lens into a bulbous cheek with retreating features. Another man stood behind him, squat and overweight, bald except for a bushy hedge along the sides of his skull. Two people was no good. What was I going to do with two people?

They talked, and then Browne yelled one last time, “You better be ready for the beating of a lifetime, woman!” and the two of them stalked off.

I stood there, my eye still to the spy hole, calculating, trying to decide if I should go after them, or wait, or disappear altogether. My chest felt tight and I gripped the gun in my fist so tightly that my fingernails dug into my palm.

Before I’d reached any decision, the two men were back. Browne had a key in his hand, and was reaching for the doorknob.

I jumped back, and hurried into the bedroom, resuming my position crouched to the far side of Vee’s body. All I could do was stick to the plan and improvise along the way.

The door banged open, rattling the mirrored closet doors, and Browne called from the living room. “Vee! You better have
been taking a shower—” He cut off. “Where’s the champagne?”

I could hear him moving around, but the sound was muffled. Perhaps he was in the kitchen.

“Vee! Get your ass out here. You better not have taken my champagne.”

I waited. My heart was pounding again, the pulse rising from my stomach right through my neck, and with each beat the pain in my head swelled. I had the safety off, and the gun cocked.

“I’m going to kill you...” He trailed off as he flipped the light switch and came in. I’d been sitting in the path of the light from the bathroom, so fortunately the overhead light didn’t blind me. “What the—?” Browne said, and took a fast step towards me, his hand going for the holster under his arm.

I knew I wouldn’t have two chances, so I shot him, right in the gut, because that’s where Vee would have shot him. The blood spread on his shirt immediately, and I shot him again in the same place, and then a third time.

He still staggered towards me but his hand never found his gun. I hurried to my feet, standing stock straight, still awaiting an attack, waiting for the other man to come in from the living room.

Browne tripped past me, and leaned over Vee. “What in the hell?” He looked down at himself. Some of his blood was spilling onto the carpet, some even onto Vee’s legs. “Bastard.” His voice was strained, not at all the strong man he had been at lunch, or even a minute ago. The room smelled. It could have been feces, or it could have been rotting meat, and of course there was the gunsmoke.

The other man still hadn’t come in. There was no sound in the suite.

I watched Browne with no words. I needed to be certain he
was dead, and I needed to get out of there. Even if his bodyguard hadn’t responded, I didn’t want to push my luck that the shots hadn’t alerted somebody else.

He sank to a knee. There was still no response. I’d have to take my chance. I wiped the gun on Vee’s blouse, stooped, and set it against her hand.

Browne watched me do it. He was completely white. I stood up, and as I did, he fell onto his side next to Vee. His eyes looked at the ceiling, but focused on nothing. The wounds in his stomach were still oozing, and there was a sucking sound there as the blood spread on the carpet, pooling under Vee’s hand closest to him. His breathing was shallow, and I was satisfied.

I walked away without looking back, and into the living room, my hands empty, unprotected. There was no one there.

I crossed to the door, and stepped into the hall. I looked back in the direction of the elevators, and there, halfway down the hall, was the squat bald man. His face crumpled into a question and he paused mid-stride, before he started to run towards me.

I turned, and crashed through the fire door, as he yelled behind me, “Wait!”

I took the stairs so fast that I tripped halfway down to the next landing, skidding down several steps without falling. I hurried on, already at the eleventh floor landing before I heard the fire door open above me.

“Hey! You!”

I kept going, my steps echoing in the enclosed space.

At the next landing I looked up, but there was no one above me. I pushed on, not even wondering where the bald man had gone.

I burst into the heat of the night, which felt, if anything,
hotter than the stairwell. My chest burned, my throat was dry, and my knee kept shooting spikes of pain up and down my leg with every step. I needed to get away fast, which meant a cab, and the only guarantee for a cab was the cabstand at the front of the hotel. I didn’t think about an alibi or witnesses or anything at all other than the need to get away, to run for my life.

I rounded the corner, and ran towards the doorman, waving at him as I approached, and then I recognized the car idling in front of the hotel as Browne’s, the one Vee and I had used to go back to Joe’s house and set it on fire.

“Good,” I said, between breaths, going right for the driver’s side door. “Mr. Browne said the car would be ready.”

I got in before the doorman could respond, and as I turned the key, the bald man pushed his way out of the revolving door. He’d decided he couldn’t handle the stairs and taken the elevator.

“Hey! Hey!”

The engine turned over, and I pulled away with a jerk before getting into gear, rounding the corner just as the light changed, taking George Street uptown.

Most of the downtown traffic was gone. I raced up to Washington Hill, but I knew I couldn’t go to Great Aunt Alice’s—they would know how to find me then—so I continued on past the monument, all the way up past the university, past even Underwood where Quinn and Joe had lived, and was almost at the city line when my mind slowed down enough to realize I couldn’t leave the city just yet. I still hadn’t met with Palmer, and I needed to be certain that the money was going in the right direction.

I’d have to wait until morning.

I spent the night in the car, parked in the lot of a combination garage and gas station, where an unfamiliar vehicle wouldn’t look out of place. I didn’t sleep much. I knew that Browne’s entire criminal organization would be after me, and that had a way of making it hard to sleep.

When the sun came up, I closed myself into the phone booth at the side of the station and got Palmer Sr.’s number out of the book. His voice was strong when he answered. I hadn’t woken him.

“Mr. Palmer, it’s Shem Rosenkrantz.”

“Shem. Is everything all right?”

“Can you meet me at your office this morning?”

“It’s Saturday, son.”

“I need to get out of town.”

“It can’t wait until Monday?”

“No, sir.” I didn’t offer any more explanation and he didn’t ask.

There was a pensive silence, and for a moment I thought he wasn’t even there, that he’d hung up. “I’ll be down there right away,” he said at last.

“Thank you.”

He hung up.

I got to the Key Building before he did. Downtown seemed surprisingly empty even for a Saturday, and I felt terribly exposed waiting in front of the locked building. A dejection, a sinking
feeling that it wasn’t going to work, none of it was going to work, settled over me. Browne’s men would find me and kill me, and the money would get tied up in probate for years, and Clotilde would end up in a state hospital, and the whole thing made me tired, so tired...

I don’t know what I would have done if Palmer hadn’t appeared just then. “Good morning,” he said, his key already out.

“Good morning,” I said. He let us into the building, and we went up to his office without another word.

The elevator opened onto the dark offices of Palmer, Palmer, and Crick. Palmer stepped out ahead of me and flipped a switch, and the overhead fluorescent lights started to flicker to life, revealing the waiting room I had last been in what felt like a lifetime ago. He led me back past the dark conference room, into his office, where the outside light lit the space but he turned on the overhead lights anyway. The office was dominated by an enormous desk with neat stacks of papers along its edges, and more bookcases filled with uniform leather volumes, a continuation of the law library I’d seen in the conference room at the reading of Quinn’s will.

He sat in the leather chair behind the desk, and pulled one of the piles of papers closer to him, extracting a folder without any trouble finding it. He gestured with it to one of the armchairs in front of the desk, and said, “Please, have a seat.”

I sat and waited.

“As we talked about the other day, this doesn’t really have anything to do with Quinn’s will anymore,” he started. “You’re next in line as Joe’s father, since Quinn’s estate passed to him, and it would then pass to any of his children, and after that his parents, so there’s no problem about that. Alice could try to make a fuss, but I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.”

“How long will it take?”

“It will need to go through probate since you weren’t the named holder on any of the accounts or the named beneficiary on Joe’s or Quinn’s life insurance policies. Probate could take four to six months and it’ll cost you a chunk of the estate, but you’ll still walk away with a little more than one and a half million.”

And there it was. One and a half million dollars. That justified everything I had done. I’d be free. Except I was now a hunted man. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I want to make out a will,” I said.

“That’s exactly why I wanted you to come in.” He pulled out a drawer beside him, and brought out a typed document that looked several pages long. “Since you’re in a hurry...”

“I’m sorry about that.”

He waved this away. “I’ve got a template here. I only need to fill in the names, and I’ll write in any other provisions, and have the whole thing typed up on Monday.”

“Do we need a notary? I can’t wait until Monday.”

“Is everything all right?” he said, his eyebrows raised in fatherly concern.

I pressed my lips together and took another deep breath.

“It’s this thing with this woman you knew and the gangster, isn’t it? I saw it in the paper this morning. They said she was suspected of murdering Joe. Sometimes God metes out justice after all, although to be beaten to death like that...” He shook his head.

I nodded my head, unable to say anything. I didn’t trust myself to speak.

“I’m sorry, son,” he said. “Money’s never a consolation in these matters, but think of that at least.”

I nodded again.

“Well, don’t worry about the notary. We aren’t supposed to, but how many years have I known you? I know you’re you, I know it’s your signature. We can take care of notarizing it without you, given the circumstances. We like to accommodate our clients. Now...”

He started in on the details. All my assets—including the new money from Joe—would go to Clotilde in the event of my death. He’d add her name to all of the appropriate accounts. She was already the beneficiary on my life insurance. I had him add a clause to the effect that the money would be put in trust for her if she were determined to be incapable of managing it herself, and we filled in a template for the trust too. I made provisions for my loans to Auger and Pearson to be paid back, and then I signed and initialed a whole bunch of papers, and Palmer did the same, and he said he’d get his son to make it official first thing Monday morning. The whole process took a little less than an hour.

He stood with me when we’d finished, and shook my hand. “This business has been a damn mess,” he said.

“Yes, well...”

“Yes, well...” he echoed with deeper resignation, staring off for a moment. Then he broke into a false grin, and extended his hand, and said, “May it all work out for the best.”

I took his hand in mine, and gave a pained smile. “Mr. Palmer.”

“Frank,” he said, still holding my hand.

“Frank,” I agreed. Then: “Listen...I’m embarrassed even to ask this, but is there any way you could advance me a little money to help me get back to S.A.? I haven’t got it, and I really do need to get back, Clotilde needs me there.”

He blinked, and there was a little flicker in his smile, but he released my hand, nodding, and said, “Of course, of course.”
He looked down at his desk, and slid open the center desk drawer from which he took a business checkbook. “Is a check all right?”

I thought about the challenge of getting a check cashed out in the country, and that it would be even harder out of state. I couldn’t risk being in town any longer. “If you could make it cash...”

He blinked again, and I could tell he was concerned. The whole exchange felt too familiar, too like Friday nights when I was a kid, begging the old man for fifty cents so I could take a girl for a soda and a picture show. And just like my father, Palmer at last reached into his pocket and brought out some money. Only this was a wad of bills in a money clip, instead of a handful of coins. He pulled off the clip and unfolded about half of the roll. He counted the bills twice and wrote a note in the file, under the word
Advance.
Then, with only a moment of hesitation, he handed it over to me. “Take care of yourself, Shem.”

“Thank you. Frank. You’ve saved my life.” I put the money in my pocket, feeling like a heel, but feeling even more strongly relief. “I’ll pay you back—”