Kill box, p.2
Kill-Box, page 2
“What’ll it get me?”
I squeezed her arm. “My undying affection, sugar. You know the dame?”
“It could be.”
“Who is she?”
“Dolly French,” Sybil said. “She danced next to me for three years down at The Brass Tack. She was the hottest thing in the world on bumps and grinds and look at her now.”
I said, “She still looks hot.”
“Dolly’s come up in the world. She’s fancied up. If I didn’t know her so well I’d never have recognized Dolly in that get up. She’s heavy with sugar—probably won’t even give me the right time.”
I got up and leaned over Sybil. “How about a try?”
She sighed and eyed me archly. “What a salesman,” she said.
She shrugged and got up and I followed her. A few professorial heads followed her, too, probably assessing her hips for atomic energy.
Dolly French blinked twice and then threw her arms around her old friend Sybil.
She said, “Sybil! It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? This is my husband, Michael DePereyra.”
Michael DePereyra didn’t enjoy meeting Sybil, and relished me less. Dolly had never seen me before. There was a confused and awkward round of introductions. The little blonde sat out the byplay. She was finally included in the fiesta of formality and reached up to shake my hand and give me her smile. Her smile and her hand were warm and solid and impersonal. She was Mary Wyndham.
Dolly and Sybil moved off together.
I leaned over Mary Wyndham and DePereyra didn’t enjoy the vista of my back. He fiddled with his tie, coughed politely once or twice, bowed and left.
I said, “Funny about people on trains. You sit in a corner and play games with them. You get tired of reading soupy magazine fiction and put it down and study your fellow passengers. There isn’t a parlor game in the world with more laughs. Ever play it?”
She looked down at the magazine in her lap and smiled. “I suppose I do, once in a while. It isn’t an easy game for a woman to play. Some people are liable to misunderstand. Then it becomes an embarrassing pastime.”
She had a soft voice, low and sweet and made to order for easy conversation.
I said, “A Mary Wyndham could be related to the famous Professor Wyndham—the atomic Wyndham.”
“I’m his niece,” she said. “That’s Uncle Oscar, over there.”
I followed her finger. She was pointing at a man halfway down the car, a dark and handsome man who looked old enough to be her husband.
I said, “Did you say ‘Uncle’?”
“Uncle Oscar is what I said.”
I whistled. “How does he do it? Or is he as young as I think he is?”
“The Wyndhams are famous for the size of their family and the good looks of their men.”
“And women,” I added. “How do they do it?”
“He’s the youngest uncle I have—and the nicest and the cleverest. He’s kept his youth by working hard, he says. He’s still going strong, and getting more famous by the minute.”
“He’s part of the shindig going into New York for the conference?”
She nodded. “You’ll be reading a lot about him from now on.”
“The big boy you were talking to. Is he part of the shindig, too?”
She shrugged it away.
I said, “Funny, about him. I never would have pegged him as a Michael DePereyra. He didn’t hit me that way at all.”
She laughed again. When she laughed her eyes closed tight and made pretty little wrinkles that added to her girlishness.
“How did you peg him?”
“I figured him for an overgrown college boy.”
“You talk like a detective.”
“Maybe I am a detective.”
“If you are, you’re a bad one,” she smiled. “You’ve made your deductions on the basis of remote observation. You’ve given him a character reading from forty-paces and out of the dialogue of a simple introduction.”
“When I say college boy I don’t really mean college boy. Sometimes I don’t even mean college. A man can break his neck trying to make people believe he’s a type of perennial college boy, do you follow me?”
She followed me. She followed me so well that I found myself running to keep alongside her. She said, “You’re prejudiced. A good detective shouldn’t be prejudiced. You don’t like college boys?”
“I never said I didn’t like him.”
“You don’t have to say it. You’ve been sitting over there gawking at him over your liquor glass.”
“I plead not guilty. I was staring at you.”
“At me?” she said, just as though she didn’t believe it. “Now why would a detective be staring at me?”
She was easier than I thought she would be. I sat down and leaned toward her. “I can give you a few dozen reasons. Do you want them all now or should I spread them out over a period of months?”
“Why should you spread them out?”
“I’d enjoy it,” I said.
“What’s the next move?”
“Dinner?”
“I’m sorry,” she said, as though she meant it. “I’ve already had my dinner and now I’ve got to do a bit of paper work for Professor Wyndham. Try me again in a few hours. I might allow myself a nightcap.”
“I’ll be here,” I said.
“Of course you will.”
I went into the diner and found Sybil waiting for me. She had the look of a cat who has swallowed a canary, cage and all. She said, “You got here sooner than I figured. She must have given you a very quick brush.”
The car filled up with assorted atomic talent while we ate. The hum of their double-talk filled my ears.
Sybil toyed with her dessert. “Where do you hang out in New York?”
“I have a small office under my hat.”
Sybil wiped her lips daintily. She lit a cigarette and struck an advertising billboard pose. She watched the smoke for a while and then killed the butt, suddenly. She looked at her wristwatch, sighed and stood up.
“It’s getting late, detective. We pull into Grand Central early and I’ve got a heavy day tomorrow. Look me up some rainy Thursday night.”
I watched her hips until they were lost beyond the line of heads in the diner. She turned at the end of the car, stood there for a moment and telegraphed a slow smile and a slower wink to me. It would have been nice to get up and follow her. My legs were all for it, but my brain held them under the table and I just sat there struggling with my better man.
I ordered a drink and sat fondling it until it disappeared. I ordered a small pot of coffee and spent another half hour finishing it and contemplating the black nothingness of the landscape.
I lent half an ear to the hum of conversation around me. The buzz began to annoy me and I moved back into the club car. The few magazines scattered around the place didn’t keep me awake long. My consciousness soon gave up the idea of waiting, like a keyed-up college boy, for the theoretical entrance of Mary Wyndham.
The last time I looked at my watch it was after ten o’clock and a few strays were entering the car for a short conversational bout before bedtime. I closed my eyes and let the drone of their voices lull me to sleep.
I woke suddenly. Somebody was patting my face.
The patting was not slapping, but it was deliberate and insistent.
The hands belonged to Sybil Drake.
She was dressed in an elegant yellow robe, cut to display the niceties of her midsection.
I said, “I’m sorry I kept you waiting, honey. I’ll be with you as soon as I rub the sand out of my eyes.”
She patted my face a little harder, almost slap heavy. She kept slapping it until I sat up straight and grabbed her hands. She wasn’t smiling. Her face was pale and unpainted. Her eyes had lost their mascara depths and were wide open with fright.
Her voice matched her eyes. “Wake up, detective! It’s Dolly DePereyra! She’s going nuts!”
I said, “Give it to me again, slow and easy.”
“Dolly’s in my room, Steve, screaming something about her husband. I thought maybe you could quiet her down and find out where the pin is sticking. She scared the pants off me. She scared me so bad I ran out of the room. I can’t stand a hysterical woman.”
She ran through the empty club car with much more speed than I thought she could muster. We raced through two more cars and Sybil stopped at a door.
“I’ll wait here,” she said. “When I look at her my stomach does funny things and I feel faint.”
I found Dolly on Sybil’s berth, face down, sobbing her heart out into the pillow. Her fists were clenched and she punctuated her stifled screams by systematically banging the flesh off her knuckles on the wall.
I grabbed her hands and managed to turn her a bit. She squirmed away from me and dove for the pillow. I reached under her heaving torso and gently pulled her around. When she tried to get away from me I used force. She chewed her lip and moaned into the shreds of what was once a lace handkerchief. She bent forward and held her head and sobbed.
I knelt beside her and tried to break through the barrier of sheer hysteria. The sobbing was low pitched and hoarse now. She didn’t open her eyes at all.
Sybil came in and said: “She’s been that way for almost a half hour.”
“That’s not good.”
I slapped her across the face once, not hard, but not too gently.
“Michael!” she wailed. “Oh, Michael, Michael, Michael!”
“What about Michael?”
She burbled a few unintelligible sentences, heavy with sobs and emotional syllables. She gasped this double talk until my knees hurt.
Sybil plucked at my sleeve, motioned me out of the room.
“That type of dame won’t calm down until she’s good and ready. You’re wasting your time.”
I said: “Where’s her room?”
We ran along the corridor. The first gray fingers of dawn were pointing up the hills and bathing the landscape in a dirty light. We paused two cars down and Sybil put her hand to her throat. There was a compartment door ahead, half ajar.
“Wait here,” I told her. “I’ll be right out.”
I ran past her into the compartment and almost tripped over the body on the floor.
It was Michael DePereyra. He was smeared in an incongruous pose, head staring at the ceiling. I leaned over him and put my ear to his vest. There was no beat. My ear hit a hard object in his vest pocket. It was a small package of film, a small yellow box. I lifted it out of his pocket and tucked it away. I knelt there for a moment, wondering whether I should return it. In the split second of decision, I decided against putting it back.
Sybil was waiting for me, tremblingly.
“You’re as green as a dollar bill,” she said. “What’s up?”
“Plenty, sugar, plenty. I found our chum Michael loused up on the floor in there.”
“Drunk?”
“Stiff. Dead. No wonder friend Dolly is chewing the edges off her lip. She’s in trouble—plenty of trouble.”
CHAPTER 4
I tapped Max Popper on the shoulder and he sat up. When Max awoke there were never any preliminaries. His brain opened for business just as soon as his eyes did. There were no yawns, no stretches, no eye-rubs; no fogbound sentences.
Max said, “It’s not even light yet and you’re standing there all dressed up. Where the hell have you been all night, on your ear in that club chair?”
I watched him lace his shoes and marveled at his early morning dexterity. I said, “I just tripped over a dead man.”
Max looked up for only a second. “You’re always tripping over things. Who killed him?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he wasn’t killed. Maybe he died of heart trouble.”
“So he died of heart trouble. Is that why you come in here waking me up at this hour? Or did you get in a jam on account of that big broad you were ear-bending last night?”
“Sybil is all right,” I said, and explained what had happened.
Max said, “You figure DePereyra’s wife killed him?”
“I’m not interested. I figured I’d get you up so that you could nose around. There may be something in this thing for us, I don’t know. We’ll pull into New York in a little while and we’ll hit Mrs. Brunick for her payoff on the L. A. job and from there on out we’ve got nothing worth much except that old lady in Brooklyn with the missing uncle. Or don’t you follow me?”
Max slid into his jacket and straightened his tie. He parted his thinning hair before the mirror, put the comb away, adjusted the handkerchief in his breast pocket and then just stood there staring at me.
I handed him the package of film and told him to hold it. Max scowled at it and stuffed it away in a pocket. “French pictures?” he asked.
“Maybe. We won’t know until we print them. They may be worth some dough to us.”
“What do you want me to do now?” Max said.
“Sybil broke down after I told her about DePereyra,” I said “I had to take her to the club car—she wouldn’t go back to Dolly because she couldn’t stand her routine.”
Max sucked an imaginary lemon. “You’re not telling me to keep the big babe company, are you?”
“You’re too wide-awake, Max. I’ve got a tougher job for you. Go down to Sybil’s room and start unbuttoning Mrs. DePereyra’s brain. Tell her as much as you have to tell her. See if you can draw her out a little. You may be able to get something we can use sometime.”
Max hesitated in the corridor. He stared out of the window. “You sure you know what you’re doing, Steve? It doesn’t smell too pretty for a couple of hungry eyes to be lousing around with stuff like this.”
“Let me do the worrying.”
“Sure. Sure, I’ll let you worry. Like the last time. We’re pulling into New York, remember. New York is a big town and they have big cops and big cops are tough cops. We don’t want to get jerked around like what happened to us a couple months ago. The side of my head still hurts from that last session.”
“Stay there until I arrive. Everybody on the train is asleep. Nobody will bother you.”
“I get it—nobody bothers Maxie. And you? Where will you be?”
“I’m on my way to find a doctor.”
Two cars away a drowsy porter informed me that he had a doctor in a lower berth. I watched him rouse the sleeping medico and stood back until a little man in a purple robe stepped out into the aisle.
He was gray-eyed, as high as my elbow and up to his ears in dream dust. His name was Doctor Emanuel and he was anxious to please. He followed me through the train as though I had him on a leash.
I motioned him inside DePereyra’s room and he stepped around the corpse gingerly, uttering low bird calls. He prodded the body. He got down on his knees and whistled once or twice.
When he stood up he was shaking his head and clucking sympathetically.
I said, “What’s the matter with the man?”
“Everything. Friend of yours?”
“I never saw him before I noticed his door open on my way to my room. What’s with him?”
He made up his professional face, eyes wide open and dead pan. “This man is dead.”
I sucked in some air in a mock try at horror. “Dead? How terrible! How long has he been dead, doctor?”
“Not too long, I’d judge.” He took out a little red book and began to scribble a few notes. He paused and eyed me speculatively. “I’d suggest that you remain here until I get the porter.”
He stood in the corridor. He took off his glasses and polished them on the sash of his robe. He fished into his pocket and came up with the notebook again.
“Your name?” he asked. “I’d better put your name down—just for the officials.”
I gave him my name and he moved off down the corridor.
When he had passed out of sight, I stepped back into DePereyra’s room nimbly. I kneeled over the corpse and commenced a rapid frisk. My hand avoided the familiar objects, groped for the unusual. He carried nothing appealing in his outer pockets. I pulled out his wallet, a slick pigskin affair of the oversized variety. There were many bills. In one compartment, there was a small wad of note-paper. I pocketed the scraps and replaced his wallet.
I skirted the corpse and began to take inventory. The lower berth was disarranged. Somebody had used it last night, although the disarray was casual and suggested a short stay on the bedding and not beneath it.
The upper berth was untouched, sheets and blankets smooth, pillow unruffled. There was a small leather suitcase on the floor.
I opened the suitcase and ruffled through the odds and ends of feminine apparel. I dug deeper and found the expected layer of cosmetics and decorative folderol all women carry with them on journeys. I dropped my hand among these things.
My hand felt the expected shapes. There were many bottles of cold cream, nail polish and several cardboard containers of powder. There was a lipstick case and a small jewel case. These slid through my fingers quickly, as quickly as my brain could catalogue them.
But my hand tightened, finally, over a familiar shape. I lifted it and stared at it in the gloom. I tucked it away into a pocket. This bottle was different. It was of the ordinary drugstore variety, longish and heavy and just the size for iodine or some other pharmaceutical concoction. Like poison.
My back was to the door so that I could not see who hit me. My last live memory was the sound of a foot-fall and then the stinging pain behind my ear. I floated off into a miasma of bright and shining shapes, some in technicolor. I dropped into this void and stayed there.
I had been sapped. But good.
I awoke slowly, climbing through the buzz in my brain to face the buzz above and about me. Several dozen people danced before my eyes, most of whom were Doctor Emanuel and the colored porter and two other strange gentlemen who stared at me with great interest.
