Spider’s Cage (14 page)

Jodie Ryan's shrugs were distracting. She shrugged a couple of times extra. “I don't know,” she'd said after a while. “I offered an alternative, told her to skim a gram or two when the pile was big and it wouldn't be missed, and trade it for armaments. I even suggested we could stash the carbines in the attic until we could figure out how to ship them to El Salvador.” She shrugged again. “I was feeling seditious.”

“Well?”

“She said she wasn't too sure about becoming a gunrunner and a coke dealer all in one day; she'd have to think it over. That was the last I heard about it… .”

Windrow hooked a drawer open with his foot and propped the other foot on it. His body creaked like an old oven door. On his desk in front of him lay the paperwork for two divorce cases and a breach of internal security in a burglar alarm company, and the two halves of the C-note. The edges of the former were beginning to curl and sunlight had yellowed the top sheets.

“Hey Gleason,” he said, looking over the rim of his glass. “What's the quality of the Neil woman's stuff?”

Gleason coughed on his cigarette smoke, emitting a cloud between them. “How the hell would I know,” he blustered.

Windrow put his glass on his desk and picked up a pencil. He tapped a rhythm on the glass with its tip. Gleason scratched his stubble.

Windrow raised his eyebrows and looked past Gleason at the door. “El Bad Ass'll be here any minute, Steve,” he said. He shifted his eyes to his pencil, as he rolled it between his fingertips. Windrow was the only man Gleason knew who called him Steve. Even Gleason's wife had called him Petrel, right up until the day she left him.

Gleason looked halfway over his shoulder, at the lab
boys, then back at Windrow. “Been cut heavily,” Gleason said. “Some kind of speed, dex probably. Not sure.” He waved his cigarette hand. “Lab report's kind of vague.”

There was a lot of noise in the hallway. The two or three reporters gathered there shouted questions; the police technicians looked busy. The uniformed officer outside Windrow's office let Max Bdeniowitz in, and restrained a couple of other people. A camera appeared over the heads of the knot of people at the door, its flash went off, the door closed against the moil. Bdeniowitz looked exactly like a man who thought he'd gotten away with going home and turning in early, then found out he hadn't.

“Hi chief,” Gleason said cheerfully.

Bdeniowitz ignored him and addressed a coroner's assistant. “What happened?” he growled.

The coroner's assistant was a neat, young scientist with thin hair and gold rimmed spectacles, and his name was Michael. He frowned and picked a corner of his trim moustache. “Hard to tell exactly…” he began.

Bdeniowitz scowled. “You want
me
to tell
you
?

“…but it looks like atlanto-occiputal subluxation, subsequent to hemorrhage and swelling within the spinal cord, resulting loss of primitive functions leading to death.” Michael spoke primly and continued to curry his moustache, while looking at the corpse.

“Broken neck,” Bdeniowitz muttered. “She fall?”

“Nope.”

“Pushed?”

“Nope.”

“Well?”

“Some kind of hold, executed by a strong, inexpert person. I'm guessing. They struggled.”

“Man or woman?”

The coroner's assistant shook his head.

“Anything else?”

The man showed a tentative expression and waggled the fingers of one hand, palm down. “Could have been right-handed,” he said.

“Great. A strong right-handed inexperienced person. Gleason.”

Gleason consulted his small spiral-bound notebook. “Got the call 9:10, arrived 9:20. She was there, Windrow was there.” He pointed at Windrow behind the desk. “Says he came in at 9:05 or so and found her where she lies. No weapons on the premises, except for Marty's .38,” he pointed at the pistol on top of the file cabinet. “unfired. Says he wasn't carrying it. He pulled it out of a file drawer when I asked after it.” He replaced the notebook in his pocket. “No signs of forced entry, no signs of a struggle. Windrow says the place wasn't searched.”

Bdeniowitz looked at Windrow, his face sour. “Nothing missing?”

Windrow shook his head.

“Why you?”

Windrow shook his head.

Bdeniowitz' eyes flared and the knots at his jaw hinges puffed up. “Look, apple, I know you know who this is, at least.”

Windrow nodded. Gleason spoke up.

“Say it's,” he consulted his notebook, “Concepción Alvarez. Pamela Neil's maid.”

Bdeniowitz inhaled slowly and exhaled a long, loud sigh. “Pamela Neil,” he said, nodding to himself. “Apple…”

“Nice little farm in a warm climate with goats and a woman don't speak English?” Windrow suggested helpfully.

“If you don't give us any help on this apple, I'll see if I can arrange it. Was she dead when you got here?”

Windrow nodded.

“What she want?”

“She didn't say.”

“She leave anything? A message, a phone number? Ever talk to her before?”

Windrow shook his head.

“C'mon, dammit. Why you?”

“I'm as in the dark as you are, Max. All I can figure is she must have known something about Pamela Neil's death and she figured to tell me about it. But there's another angle.”

Bdeniowitz tried to look interested.

“She might have known something about Jodie Ryan's whereabouts.”

“So?”

“She knew we were friends.”

“So what about Jodie Ryan's whereabouts?”

“I'm working on it.”

“What you got.”

“Nothing. A sore back.” Windrow poured himself two fingers of scotch. Bdeniowitz raised his eyebrows, then narrowed his eyes. “Scrape your knuckles getting that jug off the shelf?”

Windrow didn't look at the knuckles of his right hand. He'd split the skin over two of them on Harry Lobe's face. The abrasions reopened when he'd rolled through the office door. He stood the bottle in the open desk drawer.

“I had to tap a guy out earlier today,” he said indifferently.

Gleason showed Bdeniowitz his notes. Bdeniowitz skimmed them and scowled.

“Big day for you, apple. You get out the hospital from being almost killed, pick up a hooker, go a couple rounds with somebody on the way to the bar, where you get toasted, drop off the hooker, then trip over a stiff in your front door.
Did I get it all?” He indicated the form under the sheet, without waiting for an answer. “Suppose you get a little more specific.”

“It doesn't matter,” Windrow said gloomily.

“Let me be the one gets depressed about it doesn't matter.”

Windrow shrugged. “Guy named Lobe tried to shoot his way out of talking to me. I had to sit him down.”

Before the words were out of his mouth, Windrow realized he'd spilled beans he hadn't even known he was holding, because Gleason and Bdeniowitz exchanged meaningful glances, a rare occurrence.

Bdeniowitz cocked his head and eyes to one side, licked his lips, then looked at Windrow again.

“You did what?” he said carefully.

“I, uh, had to hit him,” Windrow held up the knuckles, then raised a forefinger. “Once.”

Bdeniowitz examined a fingernail. “This guy Lobe, apple. That wouldn't be Harry “Greased” Lobe? Pimp, loan shark, snowman, 15 percenter? Billed himself a theatrical agent? Same guy you sat down, this afternoon?”

A small, pointed light bulb, the 1.5 volt kind you see a lot of around Christmas time in the windows of discrete antique stores, with the curly tip, unfrosted, lit up above Windrow's head. “Lobe is a cocaine dealer?”

Bdeniowitz put his hands on his hips, pushing back his coattails as he did so, revealing the snub-nose revolver clipped to his belt. “I asked you first, apple. Answer the question.”

“Yeah,” said Windrow impatiently, “Yeah. Same guy. Harry Lobe, Lobe Theatricals. Has a cell down on lower Turk, third floor in the back, over the love-toy dealer. He's a coke dealer?”

“What an act,” Gleason grumbled.

“About what time of day were you employing your sitdown technique on the Greased Lobe, apple?”

Windrow thought about it. “Maybe three o'clock this afternoon?” He looked at his wristwatch. “Matter of fact, it was three oh five.” He tapped the crystal with a fingernail. “My watch must have stopped when I hit him.”

Bdeniowitz waited. Gleason licked his fingertips and went through the pages of his notebook.

“Well?” Bdeniowitz said impatiently.

Gleason stopped on a page and ran a finger down the lines. “Two fifty-five,” he read. He looked at Windrow. “Your watch was fast, you hope.”

“Could be, but…”

“Or he's lying,” Bdeniowitz observed.

“Maybe it didn't stop right away. Maybe—.” Windrow looked back and forth at the two of them. After what must have seemed a long time to them—it did to him—, he made the connection.

“So Lobe's dead too,” Windrow said.

The two detectives stared at him.

“S
OMEBODY PUT A BOMB IN THE MAN'S WASTEBASKET,”
Bdeniowitz explained. “Consisted of a bundle of dynamite, a windup alarm clock with nails stuck in the face, a lantern battery and a detonator. Maybe some other stuff. It's hard to tell. We found the battery nearly intact on the roof of the building behind Lobe's, but not much else.” He sighed. “In fact, it was a hell of a job figuring out whether or not the victim was actually Lobe. But the lab boys, they found Lobe's dentist and enough teeth to do the match.”

Michael, the coroner's assistant, leaning against the wall near the door, pushed his spectacles onto his forehead and scrubbed his eyes with his hands.

“We kicked it over,” Windrow said thoughtfully.

“Kicked what over?”

“The wastebasket. In the fight. We kicked it over, some trash spilled out, crumpled up bills and papers, brown paper bags, and a 1/2-gallon milk carton…” Windrow quickly sketched his encounter with Lobe that afternoon, describing how he and Sister Opium Jade had tricked Lobe into letting them into his office, how Lobe pulled a gun on them, how they wrecked the office in the ensuing struggle. “When it was over, one of the first things he did was stand up the wastebasket. Half the stuff in it was on the floor.”

Bdeniowitz shook his head in disgust. “Leave it to the apple to have a whore as his alibi.”

“Hey,” said Windrow, “she's a nice girl.”

“What is it with you and the chippies, apple? Every time you…”

“Look, I told you what she was doing there, and I told you what I was doing there. You don't believe me, go ask the girl. You don't believe her, you can ask me again. Anybody with brains to think with can see we damn near got blown up with Lobe.”

Gleason sucked on a cigarette. “You think somebody was out to get the two of you?”

Windrow shook his head. “Nobody knew I was heading for him. I left headquarters and drove straight here, collected the girl. We cooked up the story on the way to Turk Street, parked, went calling on Lobe.”

“They were after Lobe,” said Bdeniowitz. But he was frowning. “There's only one hole in your story, apple.”

“The one in my shoe?” Windrow tried to look hopeful.

Bdeniowitz shook his head. “The last page of Lobe's appointment calendar, apple. One of those jobs with the big rings, has two pages for every day of the year and time slots?” He waved at Gleason. “We found it in the office upstairs, next to the hole in the floor.”

Gleason had his notebook ready. “Only notation for today,” he said, “was for capital M period capital W period,” he lowered the notebook and looked at Windrow, “at 2:00 this afternoon.”

Windrow looked from Gleason to Bdeniowitz and back and held up his hands: “So he had a masseuse called the Merry Widow.”

Gleason stifled a laugh.

“Yeah,” said Bdeniowitz sourly. “The Merry Widow.”

Windrow shook his head. “If the guy was clairvoyant he was a half hour off,” he said. “The girl didn't even know where we were going until we got there, and I didn't feel any intelligent vibrations probing my subconscious on the way over.

“What about the initials?”

“How should
I
know?” Windrow shouted. “I got my rocks off hitting the guy in the face. You guys know damn well I don't sport bombs in wastebaskets. Get off it. Go through his records and see what M.W.'s he had a piece of. From what I hear they would have plenty of reason to want to blow him up… .”

The coroner's assistant interrupted, wanting to know if he could move the corpse.

“Keep your goddam shirt on,” Bdeniowitz snapped. “Johnson!” he shouted. The uniformed officer standing guard outside Windrow's door came in, holding the door shut behind him.

“Go across the street and bring them three hoses over here.”

Johnson looked at Bdeniowitz and did nothing.

“What the fuck you looking at?” Bdeniowitz shouted. “Go get those three chicks standing in the door across the goddam street and bring em here! Now!” His face turned purple.

“Y-yessir,” the officer said, and left.

“Watch the door, Gleason,” Bdeniowitz turned on Windrow. “If this fluff don't corroborate every syllable of your line, I'm taking every goddam one of us downtown and we're gonna stay there til we get it straight. I'm sick if this shit. You been a walkin'Peckinpah script for a week and if something don't break in this case, there won't be nobody but you and me left to hang for it.”

Windrow opened his mouth.

“Shutup,” Bdeniowitz snarled.

Bdeniowitz extracted one half of a large cigar from his inside coat pocket and Gleason torched it for him. Silence and smoke filled the room while Bdeniowitz smoked and paced. Windrow got up and added some ice to his scotch. Both he and Bdeniowitz had to step around the body lying in the middle of the room. Gleason leaned against the door and glumly chewed a cigarette.