Masters of Noir: Volume Two (8 page)
While I was waiting, I walked to the next room and searched the cards in the Eighteenth's Known Resident Criminal File. These are the cards kept on file in the precinct where the criminal lives, no matter where he was arrested. It has his picture, his record, and the date his parole is up. In the event he was arrested with other individuals, these individuals’ names are listed on the back of the card. But there was no card for Teddy Connors.
I'd put off the paper work as long as I could, but now I sat down at a typewriter and filled out a Complaint Report form as thoroughly as I could, at this stage of the investigation, and then did the same with the other routine forms.
When I finished with the forms, I had gone as far as I could go. I had almost dozed off staring at the typewriter, so I went down to the corner and brought back a quart carton of black coffee.
I was sipping at it when Ben Muller came in.
"Any luck?” I asked.
"Maybe she took a walk, maybe she didn't,” he said. “She checked out of the hotel when she said she did, but that's as far as I got.” He reached for the coffee and drank steadily until he had finished a good half of it. “You want me to talk to her, Pete?"
"Nope. Let her think a while longer."
He shrugged. “Suits me.” He sat down at his desk and put his head down on his arms. “Don't wake me up unless I inherit a million bucks, Pete."
The phone on my desk rang. It was Tom Volz, of the Tenth.
"We got something for you, Pete,” he said. “Eddie Willard."
"Where'd you grab him?"
"We didn't. He walked in."
"The hell!"
"Sure did, Pete. About two minutes ago. He says he won't talk to anybody but you. That's fine with us. We got our own troubles."
"We'll be there before you can hang up,” I said.
"What's the deal?” Ben asked.
"They've got Eddie Willard, over at the Tenth."
He stood up, yawning widely. “Fine. Maybe we'll get to bed some time this year after all."
7.
The boys at the Tenth gave Eddie Willard and me the rear interrogation room to talk in. Willard had said he wouldn't say a word if anyone else was in the room with us, and I'd left Ben shooting the breeze with Tom Volz. Neither Willard nor I sat down. He was about my height, but a lot thicker-bodied. He had a lot of dark hair and restless dark eyes that never seemed to blink.
"I'm going to give you this fast and hard and all in one piece,” he said. “I've heard of you a lot. I think I'll get a clean shake."
I nodded. “What's on your mind, Mr. Willard?"
"I heard a rumble you were looking for Leda and me. I would have turned in up at your precinct, but I didn't want to take a chance on getting tagged by some other cop before I got there."
"Where's your wife, Mr. Willard?"
"I'll get to that. First I want to tell you that I'm doing this to save my own hide. No other reason. I've done a lot for Leda in my time, and now I'm through.” He paused a moment, biting at his lip. “Here it is, the whole thing. I just found out about Leda this morning, see? I've been married to her eight years, but I never knew until this morning just what a rotten woman she really was. The only reason I found out then is because she was scared crazy. She didn't kill Teddy Connors, you understand. But she'd been fooling around with him, over at Janice Pedrick's dump and all."
"Did she have any part in the killing?” I asked.
"Not exactly. Bucky Sullivan killed him. Here's the way it went. Leda was working for a guy down in the Village, a jeweler. This guy was trying to make time with her, and she kind of led him on because he slipped her a few extra bucks now and then. Anyhow, this guy—Dannion, his name is—had been knocking down on his income tax. Every time someone paid cash for something, he'd stash the money in his safe. God knows how long he'd been putting it away, but one night he got half crocked and told Leda about it. He said there was twenty thousand in the safe—and when she didn't believe him, he showed her."
I lit a cigarette and leaned up against the edge of the table. I didn't say anything.
"Well, Leda had been fooling around a lot with this goddamned Teddy Connors,” Willard went on. “Connors had dropped a word now and then that made her think he might be able to do something about that twenty grand. She put it up to him, and sure enough Connors gets Bucky Sullivan, a guy he used to spar with in the old days, and the two of them went over to the jewelry shop and hit it. They got the dough all right, but Connors—he saw a chamois bag in a corner of the safe, and he took that along too, without saying anything to Bucky about it."
"What was in the bag?"
"Sapphires. About a dozen of them. Worth a lot more than diamonds. Anyhow, this jeweler reported the stones missing, and called the insurance company. But he didn't say anything about the money, because he was afraid to. He got into the country illegally, about fifteen years ago, and he knew that if the feds heard about that twenty grand and started smelling around, he might be deported.” He took a deep breath. “Well, the insurance company wasn't getting anywhere. Finally they let it out in the right places that they'd pay a flat four grand for return of the stones, and no questions asked. When Bucky Sullivan got the rumble, he knew what Connors had pulled. It made him sore as hell, to think his old buddy had held out on him, and he went on the prowl."
"And caught up with him at Janice Pedrick's place?” I said.
"That's right. Leda and Connors had been shacked up there all night. This morning, Connors went out for some cigarettes. That's when Bucky saw him. He trailed him back to the apartment. He had a gun, and he forced Connors to let him in with him. He told Connors he'd let him go if Connors gave him the rocks, but Connors couldn't do that."
"Why not?"
"Because Leda had conned him out of them. She'd sold them for peanuts. He was real gone on her, I guess. He was an ugly guy, and no woman had ever given him a tumble before. Anyhow, Bucky went nuts. He hit Connors across the throat with the side of his hand and knocked him out. Then he clipped Leda over the temple with the butt of his gun. She fell down and made out she was unconscious, but she wasn't. Then Bucky grabbed a rag or something and started choking Connors. He turned his back on Leda a moment, and she saw her chance and jumped up and beat it."
I rubbed my cigarette out in a tray, studying him. “Why'd you and your wife check out of your hotel, Mr. Willard?"
"I must have been a little crazy myself, I guess. Leda—she was almost nuts. She thought sure her part in the jewelry heist would come out, once they really got to checking. She'd done a bit out on the West Coast once, for fingering another guy to a burglar—and that's something else I didn't know till this morning. And she said it'd be her word against Bucky's, and that she might end up in the death house with him. Anyhow, I couldn't think straight, right at first. All I could think about was trying to help her get away. And then all at once it hit me, what a goddamned fool I'd been all these years. And all of a sudden I knew I wasn't going to be a nanny for her any more. I'd had a gut full of her. It was like I was seeing her for the first time since I'd known her."
"If she's earned a fall, then she's going to take it alone—is that what you mean?"
"You're damned right. I've been a chump long enough. From now on, she's on her own."
"Where is she now?"
"She's in room fourteen-oh-nine, at the Milsener Hotel."
8.
We picked up Leda Willard. She was in such a state of panic that it took us almost two hours to get a coherent story from her. But when we did, it was a complete admission. She was too frightened to fight us, even too frightened to be capable of lying. She completely absolved Janice Pedrick and Eddie Willard of any implication.
Four nights later we cornered Bucky Sullivan in the men's room of a bar in Harlem. He shot it out with us, and took two slugs through the chest. While he was waiting to be operated on, he became convinced he was dying and called for a priest. Afterward, he made a full admission. Declarations by persons who think they are dying are powerful instruments. It was powerful enough to close the case for us, though Bucky Sullivan lived through the operation.
He was very bitter toward the doctor who saved him. He couldn't understand why the State should save his life—only to send him up the river and take it away from him again in the electric chair.
I DON'T FOOL AROUND by CHARLES JACKSON
Tonight Lynette McCaffrey was wearing a short red skirt that seemed all torn and jagged around the edge, like fringe; and when George Burton, watching through the open window, looked more carefully, he saw that it was fringe. Above the skirt was a thin blouse that you could see through, and above that, a small close-fitting hat of silver straw, with her brown curls bunched out below the curling brim. On her feet were flat sandals, the kind that children used to wear. He had never seen a fringed skirt before, or sandals on a girl her age, or a hat at the Yacht Club dance. As if her beauty alone was not enough to set her apart, it was like Lynette McCaffrey to wear something different, to create a new style, to get herself looked at and talked about. George Burton followed her around the floor with his eyes, and hoped that it was love.
The small orchestra from the city was playing
Hindustan
and she was dancing with Arthur Wallace again. Art had on white flannels and a blue double-breasted jacket with shining brass buttons. The flannels were certainly his own, because he had been wearing them all summer long at the Saturday night dances. George Burton said aloud, “Damn Dad anyway,” feeling a momentary burst of anger that frightened him.
He looked around quickly to see if anybody had heard. There was no one. He was alone on the raised edge of weather-beaten planks that ran alongside the Clubhouse to the broad pier fronting the bay. But if his father had only let him borrow his white flannels, which fitted perfectly all right if he tightened the belt enough, he might have had a chance with a girl like Lynette McCaffrey.
The music ended with a matched crescendo of piano and banjo, and Lynette and Art strolled from the floor toward the open doors at the bay end. She did not applaud, as the other girls did, and when Art Wallace saw how indifferent she was, he arrested his palms in midair and didn't applaud either. She reached into a side pocket of Art's jacket and drew out a pack of cigarettes. Right in front of everybody she put one in her mouth and tilted her face up for a light. Then, with the cigarette hanging from her lip in the most wonderful way, she passed through the doors and out to the pier.
George Burton had never felt so lonely, but he was not, except for one brief moment, really unhappy. He loved from afar, and merely to look on was enough. In fact he was almost happy. He waited for, and appreciated, each new feeling of exaltation; and when these came, he felt a strong new sense of being older, aware that he was experiencing himself in a way that he never had before. But Lynette was out of sight now, so after another minute he moved along the raised beam toward the open pier.
It was a marvelous August night, cool and clear, and there was a yellow moon hanging over the bluff at the far end of the bay, right over that part of the Bluff where his parents’ cottage was. He heard the wash and slap of the small waves against the pilings beneath the wharf, and he saw the gently swaying night lights, and their bobbing reflections, on the sailboats anchored offshore. Several couples stood around in the light that streamed from the Clubhouse, waiting for the band to start up again. Then he found Lynette McCaffrey.
She was seated on the flat top of one of the low iron posts at the edge of the pier. Four or five fellows hovered about her admiringly, but George knew they were thinking far more of themselves and the figures they cut than they were of her; not one of them could begin to appreciate how marvelous she was. He edged closer to listen, but not near enough, he thought, to be seen. He heard her say, “Just look at that moon.” Then, in the most matter-of-fact tone, as if she had been merely commenting on the weather, she added: “It's as yellow as piss"—and George Burton fell in love for good and all.
Lynette McCaffrey was the new girl that summer. Her family was from Cleveland, and she not only thought, but said openly, that Parsons Point was dead. What on earth was there to do in a dump like this, why didn't somebody put some life in the old place, where were all the mean men?—things like that. It had never occurred to George Burton before that the Point was dead, but he accepted the idea at once. Well, not really. It was dead for her—how could it help being?—but with a girl like Lynette McCaffrey around, it was far from dead for him.
For almost a month, now, every single day had been different, and better, than last year, because of the certainty and promise that sometime or other before nightfall, he would run into Lynette McCaffrey not once or twice but several times: sailing on the bay, having a soda at Mike's, climbing the steep path to her cottage on the Bluff (and not leaning forward in the effort, as nearly everybody else did), sunning herself in a yellow or red or green bathing suit on the pier where the
Wrinkle
came in (actually swimming was for kids), or, dressed in a fresh new frock in the late afternoon, sauntering down to the post office below the Bluff to get the evening mail. When they met, he always waited for her to speak first, and she always did. “Hi, Georgie,” she said, in the most democratic fashion. He hated being called Georgie by anybody, but when she said it, somehow it became her own special name for him, private and intimate as if it were something between them, a kind of secret that was his and hers together.
George Burton was going on seventeen, and he had heard that Lynette was almost two years older. But because he was as tall and nearly as grown-up looking as she was, he hoped nobody had told her how young he was. The fellows she hung around with were all her own age and pretty sophisticated, which was why he didn't like to talk with her in their presence—their snappy line always showed him up—and this was also why he avoided joining the little group around her now. But suddenly, to his astonishment, thrill, and a funny feeling in his stomach something like stage fright, Lynette called out to him in the dark: “Why Georgie Burton, what are you doing skulking around in the shadows like a—like I don't know what?” And while the fellows laughed, she added: “Come on over here where you belong!"
It was wonderful. Lynette McCaffrey had said it herself; and as he went over and stood beside her, he felt that maybe he did belong. Then the music started up, Lynette reached out a hand toward Hank Van Duser, and let herself be pulled to her feet. “I promised Van this one, but Georgie, will you dance the next one with me? I haven't danced with you once all summer. Not once! Here, take my cigarette ... “ George Burton took her cigarette between thumb and forefinger and Lynette moved off toward the lighted dance floor arm in arm with Van.
The small orchestra was playing
Oh Gee, Say Gee,
and George stood there on the dark wharf holding the cigarette. Everybody else had gone in. He looked at the cigarette. It was a gold-tipped Violet Milo rapidly getting shorter and shorter, now, as it burned down to the end. In a few seconds he would have to throw it away, and he didn't want to do that. Of course he didn't expect it to last all through the dance, till Lynette and Hank came back out again, but he wanted to keep it as long as he could. Finally he held it up to his lips, took a small short puff, then dropped it over the side of the pier into the water. Because of the music, he did not hear the tiny hiss it must have made as it hit the water.
The moon, rising higher over the Bluff at the far end of the bay, was getting smaller now, and it was also paler, whiter, no longer the color that Lynette had said it was—said in a way that nobody else on earth, certainly no other girl, would have described it. Her word had almost taken his breath away, but it had been exactly right, and he was filled with admiration for her originality and daring. The thought of dancing with her, actually holding her in his arms at last, right in front of all the other fellows, was a thought almost too much to bear; and he hoped he could bring it off in a casual fashion, or at least that it would look that way.
He stood there listening, waiting, and now the piano was going it alone, accompanied for the moment only by the drummer, who slapped the big drum softly with a pair of wire flyswatters which gave off a whispering, swishing sound, just right for the piano solo. He looked through the open door into the brightly-lighted Clubhouse and saw Lynette, her head in its silver straw bonnet resting on Hank Van Duser's shoulder, gazing up into Van's face as they moved slowly around the floor. He could have watched her forever. It was almost as good as the dream that was to be realized any minute now.
The tune came to an end and Van and Lynette and a bunch of others sauntered out onto the dark pier again.
She looked for and found him sitting on the iron post where she had sat. She came up to him at once and placed her two hands on his shoulders in the friendliest, the most affectionate gesture in the world. His heart swelled with pride as he saw how the other fellows noticed. She said, her voice a breathless thrilling stage-whisper, so personal, so intimate, almost like a kind of lovemaking: “Georgie honey, I've made a ghastly mistake. I could simply kill myself. Van reminded me that I promised the next dance to that fool of a Freddie Vincent, and then after that it's Art Wallace again, and then Van, and—that's the way it goes, kid. So listen, honey, why don't we do this? Next Saturday night I promise to save you two dances for just you and me alone. I'm just as sorry as I can be, I'm simply crushed and heartbroken. But I'll make it up to you next time, Georgie, honest and true."
The word
honey
struck him to the heart, but he said, “Why sure, that's okay, I understand, don't give it another thought.” He avoided looking at the other fellows standing around, and concentrated on Lynette's face alone, giving her a smile that he hoped looked all right and that she could see, and the others could see too, in the half-dark of the wharf. Immediately, then, Lynette fell into an animated conversation with the fellows standing around, and he heard her make fun of that silly little orchestra from the so-called city—("Do they actually have the gall to call themselves a
dance
orchestra, and my word, why don't they play something that isn't about a thousand years old!")—and he heard the fellows laugh. It was so like Lynette; it was all part of that wonderful outside world she came from, the great world of the future, far away from Arcadia and Parsons Point.
There was more than two hours to wait before the dance would be over at twelve and the
Wrinkle
would take them back home across the bay to the Bluff. When Freddie Vincent came and took her off to the dance floor, George Burton got up and went back along the weather-beaten planks beside the Clubhouse to the dirt road in back. He walked slowly down the dark lane to the brightly-lighted street where the bowling alley was, and the hot dog stand and the cheap dance hall that the nicer people didn't go to. He bought himself a hot dog and stood outside the dance hall looking in. It was one of those ten-cents-a-dance places, where you could go, girls as well as men, without escorts or a proper date. He watched the couples toddling around the floor. Some of the girls were pretty enough, but they were working girls for the most part, and there wasn't one of them in the whole place who had what Lynette McCaffrey had. What that was, he couldn't have said. It was a mysterious something that he had never before found in anyone else, and he knew it was love, all the more so because of his hurt.
Keenly he felt his unhappiness, and he knew that all these strangers in the street, all these callous people who never felt anything, could not possibly know what he was feeling, or, if they did know, understand. It was something he himself had not felt before, ever, and he believed that there could not be many others in this world who had ever felt it, either. It was special and delicious and painful all at once, he knew that it set him apart, and he felt both lonelier and bigger, more capable of feelings, than anybody else had ever felt.
It was life, in short. Oh, there was no fun in being so vulnerable, so much more sensitive than other fellows, but wasn't that part of love, didn't it go with falling in love, could a man have one without the other—didn't it come from being more aware and susceptible to life than the common herd? He turned away from the dancing gay throng so ignorant of the deeper finer things, and wandered off alone toward the upper end of the Point, hugging his misery to himself ...
Finally he heard the three deep notes of the
Wrinkle
whistle, which meant that the boat was leaving for the Bluff in five minutes. He hurried back.
The lights on the pier had been turned on, and a dozen or more couples who had been at the Yacht Club dance were crowding around for the trip home. The
Wrinkle
was a small narrow steamer, hardly bigger than a big launch, with a brightly-lighted cabin lined on both sides with a continuous leather-cushioned bench and an open deck above with a single bench athwart the steamer just in front of the small glassed-in place where the pilot stood at the wheel. By the time the final whistle blew, everybody was on board, the engines started up with a deep whine, the propeller churned the water at the stern into a noisy swirling foam, and they were off.
Lynette McCaffrey, her legs crossed and one sandalled foot swinging, sat between Art Wallace and Hank Van Duser. She was smoking a cigarette against all the rules of the
Wrinkle;
while the engines were in motion, smoking was not even permitted on the upper deck, much less inside in the cabin. Blowing directly onto their backs and necks, a chill wind streamed into the open windows as the boat gathered speed, colder in a way, because nobody was dressed for it, than a winter wind—the kind of chill wind that blows across the water on a summer midnight. Some of the girls huddled against their partners’ shoulders, and the fellows put their arms around them. There was a great deal of laughter and lively talk, tossed back and forth among the passengers, but it all rang hollow and false in George Burton's ear. Feeling out of it, wanting to be alone, he got up and turned toward the ladder-like steps that went up to the open deck above. Just as he began the climb, Lynette called out: