Extra Kill - Dell Shannon (10 page)

But plenty of parking space. He parked and walked up
the path indicated by sunken steppingstones to the low brick porch.
The woman who opened the door to him was obviously a domestic; her
only association with this house would be strictly the
dollar-and-a-half-an-hour kind. She was middle-aged, plain, neat, and
dowdy, with a mouth like a steel trap.

"Miss—or is it Mrs?—Ferne," said
Hackett. "I'd like to-"

"Miss Ferne, and she's not here, but she don't
buy at the door."

"I'm not selling anything." He produced his
credentials. A detective sergeant of police made no more favorable
impression on her than a salesman; she looked down her nose at him.

"Miss Ferne ain't got nothing to do with the
police. If it's a traffic ticket—"

"Detectives," said Hackett, "don't
have anything to do with that part of the business. I happen to be
from Homicide, and it's important that I see Miss Ferne. When will
she be home?"

The maid retreated a step. "Murder, you mean—"

"Well, that's not the legal definition but it'll
do in this case."

"Miss Ferne couldn't have nothing to do with a
murder—"

"We all have opinions. When will she be home?"

"I couldn't say," snapped the maid. “I
guess you better see Miss Carstairs." She retreated farther in
tacit invitation and shouted, "Oh, Miss Angel!"

Hacket went into the entry hall. He was right: the
tree made all these rooms so dark that you'd want the lights on even
at noon, to avoid the furniture. The several open doors off the hall
looked like entrances to caves. Only the open front door shed any
light here, on a polished parquet floor, a couple of fussy little
pedestal side tables bearing knick-knacks, a grandfather's clock, a
carpeted stairway.

"Well, what is it now?”

"The police," said the maid succinctly.

Hackett couldn't place the girl coming down the
stair. No housekeeper or secretary or—were there still such things
as governesses?—would hold her job a day looking like that. She
looked about twenty-five, and she didn't have bad features but she
hadn't done anything about herself at all, for a long time. Lank
brown hair was pinned back carelessly to straggle, overlong, past her
shoulders; she wore no makeup, even lipstick was missing: she had on
a drooping black skirt too long for her and an ancient darned gray
sweater too large, no stockings, and flat-heeled brown shoes.

"Oh," she said. She stopped at the foot of
the stair and looked at him, neither surprised nor much interested,
apparently, by her flat tone.

“
Homicide,” said the maid. "He wants to see
your—Miss Ferne.”

"Has she killed somebody?" asked the girl.
"That'd be a little change, and very nice too, if they put her
in jail."

"You oughta be ashamed? said the maid viciously.
"A nicer, kinder, sweeter woman I never—and you—"

The girl said detachedly, "You're hired as a
maid, Winter, not a nursemaid. I'll talk to the policeman." She
jerked her head at him. "You can come in here."

It was, when she switched on the lights, a big,
stiffly formal, cold sitting room. She threw herself into a chair and
told him ungraciously to sit down. "What do you want to see Mona
about?"

"A murder, Miss Carstairs. Someone she knew has
been murdered, and we'd just like to hear a few little things, like
when Miss Ferne last saw him and so on."

"She's just left, what a pity—she'll enjoy
that like anything." Evidently she wasn't interested in who had
been murdered. "A man hanging on her every word—even a
policeman. Heaven knows when she'll be home, she's gone to see her
agent. I suppose you could find her there if it's all that
urgent—Stanley Horwitz, two doors from the Cha-Cha Club on the
Strip. She'd be delighted to be chased down."

Hackett watched her curiously. "Thanks very
much, I may do that."

She was thin enough, even a little too thin: she
might have a nice figure under that sloppy outht. It wasn't the
deliberate sloppiness some girls affected, thinking they achieved the
casual air: it was just carelessness. Uncaringness. "You haven't
asked who's been murdered."

"Wel1, I know it wasn't Mona, more's the pity,
and if it was one of her friends, it's not likely to make any
difference to me."

"It was a gentleman by the name of Brooke
Twelvetrees."

She sat up from her ungraceful slouch and stared.
"Brooke? Who on earth would want to murder him? He's not—not
important enough."

"Somebody evidently thought he was."

"Funny," she said. "And you have to go
round asking questions to find out who and why. What a dull job. But
I suppose you're used to it. Do they pay you much for sorting through
other people's dirty laundry?"

Hackett didn't often get mad, and he was used to
overlooking insults from people he questioned, but unaccountably he
felt his temper beginning to slide with this girl. "It's a
living," he said shortly.

"And gives you that nice feeling of power, I
suppose, you can b-bully witnesses and beat up gangsters whenever you
pl—"

"Oh, for God's sake!" said Hackett angrily,
and then stopped. Belatedly it came to him that she hardly knew what
she was saying: she was caught up in some violent emotional
maelstrom, and he'd just walked into the middle of it. She was
trembling convulsively; now she sprang up, crushing both fists
against her mouth, turning her back on him.

"Here," he said, anger dropping away from
him, "what's the matter?"

She just stood there shaking. He went up and laid a
hand on her shoulder. She was taller than he'd thought; unlike most
women, she'd reach above his shoulder if she straightened up. But too
thin.

"Look, don't do that," he said helplessly.
"You'll go working yourself up into hysterics in a minute, and
that pune-faced maid'll think I'm murdering you."

She gave an involuntary, half-tearful giggle. "I'm
s-sorry. Just a minute. I'll be—all right-in a minute." She
groped blindly for a handkerchief, blew her nose; after a minute she
turned around and sat down again. "I'm sorry," she said
more steadily. "I've been saying horrible things, I didn't mean—
Not your fault .... You'd better try Mr. Horwitz's office if you want
Mona, and if she's not there I think she was going to the Fox and
Hounds for lunch."

She sat stiff and upright on the edge of the chair
and said it like a child reciting a lesson. A child with nobody to
see her hair was combed and her face washed and her nails scrubbed.
Hackett was curious and oddly irritated: what was wrong with her? She
wouldn't be bad-looking at all if she'd fix herself up a little. She
had a small straight nose, nice teeth, a clear pale complexion; her
eyes were good hazel-brown with black lashes, and if she was tall for
a woman she wasn't all that outsize. And she sat there looking like
hell, like some female in one of those funny sects where they thought
colored clothes and short hair and lipstick were engines of
Satan—worse, because those people did comb their hair and wash
their hands. Her nails were like a child's, short and unpainted, and
her hands weren't very clean, and that straight limp hair falling
stringily down her back . . . And the maid had called her Miss Angel.
Angel, my God, what a name, and for this one.

He got up and said, "Thanks very much, I'll see
if I can find her there."

She went to the door with him. "I'll give you a
little tip," she said, and her flat voice was metallic. "You
just start out by telling her you remember all her pictures and think
she's the greatest actress since Bernhardt, and she'll fall over
herself to oblige you."

"I thought I remembered the name—Mona
Ferne—she's the same one who used to be in pictures, then?"

"Oh, goodness, don't say that to her. Used to
be. She's just taking a little rest between jobs, according to her. A
little twenty-year rest." In the merciless light, from the open
door, of pewter-gray cold daylight, she looked awful: she looked gray
and cold as the sky, and her eyes I were too bright, too
expressionless on him. "She'll like you, she likes big men.
What's your name? . . . Oh, yes, that'll be all right too, a nice
American-sounding name. Now I look at you, you look quite nice,
because I like big men too. I've got to, haven't I, being so big and
clumsy myself, but it's rather an academic question, of course,
because it  doesn't work the opposite way—nobody ever looks
twice at me, no reason. Will you do me a favor, Sergeant Hackett?"

The little fixed smile on her colorless mouth was
somehow terrible. He said carefully, "Well, now, that depends on
what it is, Miss Carstairs." Something very wrong here.

"Oh, it's nothing difficult. Just, when you do
locate Mona, and talk to her, or should I say listen to her, I'd like
you to remember that she's my mother, and I'm twenty-six years old,
and she was thirty-four when I was born—it was fashionable to have
a baby that year, you see. Will you do that?"

"Yes, I'll do that."

"Thank you very much," she said. "I'm
sorry I said nasty things to you, before. Goodbye." She still
wore the fixed smile when she shut the door after him.

Hackett got out a
cigarette and lit it, and was surprised to find that his hand was
shaking. That one, he said to himself, is just about ready for the
men in white coats. But it didn't pass through his mind academically
or cynically. And as a cop he'd seen a lot of trouble and grief and
evil and lunacy, and he'd learned to shut off much feeling about it
because that got you nowhere—you'd just tear yourself to pieces
over it and accomplish nothing. But right now he felt something, he
couldn't help it, about that girl—he felt so damned sorry for her
he could have wept—and that surprised him all over again.

* * *

"I just had the feeling," said Mendoza,
"that Mr. Martin Kingman is a little too smooth and slippery to
be entirely unacquainted with the law. Of course there's a very thin
line there, I admit it—that kind is always very smooth. The same
essential type, it goes in for politics and the church and show
business, as well as legally dishonest jobs, and you've got to
separate the sheep from the goats .... But it was all very pat,
rather like a pair of professional gamblers sitting with a pigeon,
you know—I had the distinct feeling there was a cold deck rung in."

"Not surprising," said Lieutenant Arnhelm,
and sighed. He looked like someone's jolly and indulgent grandfather,
bald, round, and amiable, but in reality was a bachelor and a
complete cynic. “They get that way. After all, it's six of one,
half dozen of another whether they keep inside the letter of the law
or not—it's still a racket. It's still a front they're putting up,
and it gets to be like a seasoned vaudeville act, the automatic
routine."

"I wish you could give me something else on
them."

"I've got just so many men and there are still
only twenty-four hours in a day," said Arnhelm. "We can't
go looking every place there's a possibility of fraud. Keeps us busy
enough investigating complaints. Sure, we keep a little list, just on
the chance we'll be looking into this or that some day—another
fortune teller takes out a county permit, another funny cult gets set
up, we file what information shows up on the applications and so
on—but that's as far as it goes, unless somebody comes in with a
complaint."

"Yes, and what are the odds on the information
being false? It's like income tax returns, you can't check them all.
I know those applications for permits, those affidavits—Have you
ever served a prison-term, Have you ever been known by another name,
and so on. Like asking when you stopped beating your wife. Nobody in
his right mind is going to put down Yes, and give chapter and verse,
but so long as he scratches in No with a post office pen and signs
any name that occurs to him, it gets duly approved."

"I tell you," said Arnhelm, "you go
out and recruit the force about five thousand more men, nice bright
boys with superior I.Q.'s, and we might begin to do things the really
efficient way. Check up on every single application for every kind of
permit, among other things."

"All right, all right, I know the problem. And
at that, those recruits would do more good walking beats the
old-fashioned way—and five thousand just a drop in the bucket for
that job, in this town."

Arnhelm agreed gloomily. "And the point is here,
what's the difference? It's a way to milk the public, sure. So is any
business, in the long view, except that some businesses sell things
the public needs. Mostly it's things they just think they need, which
is what's called human nature. You're got to gull the public in some
way to sell anything, but the law draws a line as to how bad you can
gull them. As long as people like the Kingmans keep inside the line,
we can't go poking our noses into their private racket, any more than
we can into the cosmetic business, or the automobile factories, for
instance. And if we did it wouldn't do any good, they'd just find
more pigeons. People are such damn fools. Why d'you think women go on
buying some new brand of face powder? Because the ads say it'll make
them look younger. Why do men go on buying hair restorer? Because
they're damn fools. We can't cure that situation."