Unhappy Hooligan (27 page)

“People who leave keys in their cars!” put in Rook. “I could show you clippings of what can happen …”

“Okay, Howie! It did happen, and this looks like one for the book. Charteris was a wealthy and prominent man, member of the Jonathan Club and Riviera Country Club, and all that. He played the stock market and dabbled in real estate and in horse racing and had a lot of irons in a lot of fires. There had even been talk of running him for Congress one of these days. There’s going to be one hell of a stink about this.”

“Murder by auto happens today a lot oftener than most people realize. It’s easy to cover up as an accident, or at least a lot of hopefuls think it’s going to be. Why, I’ve got a whole shoebox full of clippings—”

“Howie, never
mind
your damn collection of clippings at a time like this! How soon can you throw on a pair of pants and get over here?”

“All the way downtown, at this ungodly hour? Can’t it wait until morning?” Rook had worked all day on a true-crime article and was dog-tired.

“It can’t wait at all! I’ve been with the client, Mrs. Deirdre Charteris, all evening. Didn’t get a lot out of her except a few free drinks and a very damp shoulder. I just came out to a pay phone to call you, because I wouldn’t put it past Wilt Mays to have had her phone bugged. But believe you me, there’s one angle to this case that’ll make your blood boil!”

“When you get to the ripe old age of fifty, the boiling point isn’t as low as it once was. Of course our fair client is innocent as a newborn babe?” Agnews was so defense-minded, Rook sometimes complained, that he could convince himself of the innocence of any client who didn’t actually walk into the office with a smoking gun in one hand and the loot in the other.

But this time the little attorney hesitated. “We’ll go into the question of guilt or innocence later. Anyway, the late Mr. Charteris deserved all he got, and more. According to my information, they haven’t got a whole lot against our client. But you know Wilt Mays, likes to see his name and his picture in the papers. The police weren’t bearing down hard enough, he felt, so he’s more or less taken over. He also had his operatives question the widow when she had to come down to the morgue this morning and make identification. So she got caught in a lie or two, but then she had sense enough to clam up and refuse to talk any more without an attorney present. She got my name from somebody and called me and I leaped into the fracas. First off I got Mays to agree, very reluctantly, to hold off taking any further action until after the funeral, which is at four on Saturday. Then, unless we can come up with something, I’ve got to surrender our client for interrogation and presumably formal arrest on suspicion of murdering her husband. Only, Howie, when you see her you’ll understand why she shouldn’t have to be behind bars for even one day!”

“Barbara Graham was quite a looker, too,” Rook reminded him. “But she still had the dubious honor of being the fourteenth woman to be legally executed in the entire history of the U.S.A.”

“Never mind the ancient history! Snap out of it and meet me at the Charteris house as soon as you can. The address is 998 Tigertail Road, Brentwood—up the canyon off Kenter Drive. You come out Sunset past the freeway and turn right—”

“I know, I know!” Having been a working newspaperman, everything from copy boy to city editor, most of his life, he knew greater Los Angeles better than he sometimes wanted to. “Give me forty-five minutes,” he said, and hung up.

Then, with a deftness surprising in a man of his bulk, he showered himself awake, shaved himself smooth, clad himself in a pair of almost clean if baggy slacks and his one decent tweed jacket. Knotting his tie before the mirror he wished that he had remembered to get a haircut this month—but that couldn’t be helped.

As he drove swiftly but not too swiftly westward he was thinking that this must be a highly unusual case, for it was rare for Hal Agnews ever to condescend to see a client except by appointment in his Gothic sanctum sanctorum of an office down on First Street, or—if they’d been arrested—in the visitors’ rooms on the prison floors of the grim Hall of Justice nearby. Hal must be taking this one very seriously—which meant that there was drama, publicity or money in it, maybe all three.

Rook found the big house on Tigertail Road without difficulty, for it would be hard to miss Hal Agnews’ long black Cadillac, traditional status symbol of the successful trial lawyer, in the driveway. He left his own car in the street and strode toward the front door, the keen eyes under the bushy red eyebrows missing very little. Up the street a gray sedan was parked by a vacant lot, headed in this direction, with somebody sitting as inconspicuously as possible behind the wheel. “Stakeout,” said Rook to himself. The authorities weren’t just fooling, then. He noticed the dichondra lawn, smooth as a billiard table and bearing a wrought-iron sign that read “Beware the Dog” (pitiful now). To the left of the house was a garage, open and with a sleek Lincoln Continental and a small red MG in evidence. Partly blocking them was a brown Volkswagen, of indeterminate age. The house itself, not quite a mansion but certainly in well over the $75,000 bracket, was a two-story neo-Georgian edifice set apart from its neighbors on either side, and well surrounded by trees and shrubs.

Rook hesitated before striking the bronze Cupid which was the door knocker, taking a moment to straighten his tie and smooth back his shaggy ginger-colored hair. Just in case the client was half as lovely as Hal had described her over the phone.

But when he knocked, it wasn’t the lady herself who answered. It was Hal Agnews, and the usually dapper little attorney looked as if he had been through the wringer. His collar was open, his tie was loose, and there were pouches of fatigue under his eyes. “About time, Howie!”

Rook caught the other’s arm, pointing up the street. But the attorney only shrugged. “So the place is under surveillance! Wilt Mays isn’t taking any chances, I guess. Come on inside, Howie. Our client is upstairs and her sister is trying to calm her down a little. It will give me a chance to give you a fast fill-in.”

They came into a living room not quite as large as a tennis court, furnished—no, the word should be
decorated—
in what Rook thought of as Beverly Hills Byzantine. Over the mantelpiece was the portrait in oils of a strikingly beautiful brunette in a low-cut gown of aquamarine velvet; the painting, the gown, and the lady herself all looked beautiful and expensive.

“That’s her,” said Agnews as he caught Rook’s admiring glance. “Mrs. Deirdre Charteris, usually called ‘Dee.’ Howie, can you honestly imagine that gorgeous body in jail calico?” He gestured toward a nearby portable bar. “Drink?”

Rook shook his head. “You know I never touch anything but lager, and little enough of that these days.” He dropped into the most comfortable chair in sight. “Let’s have it,” he said. “What is the case, essentially? Just another matter of when anybody gets murdered, grab the spouse?”

The attorney frowned. “That’s part of it, of course. But it’s the theory of Assistant D.A. Mays, to some extent at least concurred in by Sergeant McDowd, that Deirdre is really good for it. She’s supposed to have taken her little sports car, shortly after her husband set out with the dog for his usual long walk before bedtime, and driven down to the supermarket parking lot. There she’s supposed to have looked around until she found a car—any car—with the keys in it. Charteris was a methodical man and usually took the same route—down Tigertail to Kenter and across Sunset and all the way down to Wilshire or farther and then coming back by way of Gretna Green. She is supposed to have located him from a distance, circled around and lain in wait for him on Darlington until he was dead center in the crosswalk, and then run him down.”

“There’s a lot of supposing in that,” Rook observed.

“There may have been some eyewitnesses, the teen-age couple in the parked jalopy, but they haven’t come forward. Anyway, Deirdre is then supposed to have returned the borrowed car to the lot, picked up her own car from wherever she’d stashed it, and come on home. There seems to be a time lapse of about thirty minutes or so, and Mays thinks she went somewhere with the idea of trying to establish an alibi, but that’s just wild guessing. Anyway, that’s the picture.”

“Not in such sharp focus. What’s supposed to be the motive?”

“It’s no secret that all was not well between husband and wife, though they both usually managed to put up a good front. But the Filipino servants who come in by the day admitted to the police that they’d heard Charteris roaring that before he’d consent to a divorce somebody would die first, or something equally melodramatic. He’d sounded off before others, including Dee’s sister Mary, who’s upstairs with her now, about how he’d never consent to a divorce or a legal separation. Probably because it would hurt his image as a potential political candidate and also because what was his was
his,
period. He seems to have been a man with feudal ideas about the status of a wife.”

Rook looked up at the portrait and said, “ ‘There’s my last duchess hanging on the wall, looking as if she were alive …’ as Mr. Browning said. Something like that?”

“Yes. Charteris was a de’ Medici at heart, and he might even have killed her sooner or later in one of his rages. A real Jekyll-Hyde character. Dee had even talked to a divorce lawyer, but no action had been instituted. That’s enough of the general background and the gist of the People’s case from what I can pry out of McDowd and from my sources in the D.A.’s office. Now I want to show you what may be Exhibit A for the Defense, if this thing ever actually comes up for trial.” He took a small manila envelope out of his pocket, bearing the stamp of the neighborhood pharmacy. He chose one out of several four-by-five color prints and handed it over. “There’s a whole roll of the things,” he said. “But this is the best—or the worst.”

Rook took one look, did a quick double-take, and then studied the photo critically, almost incredulously. His very insides turned over with revulsion. The photo showed a half-naked woman—the same beautiful woman in the portrait above the fireplace—with her face in profile, her back to the camera. The smooth white flesh of that lovely back and those shoulders was criss-crossed with savage black and blue and purple welts, obviously from a savage and atrocious beating.

The big man said softly, “Hal, this is unspeakable! The husband did this to her?”

“He did,” said Hal Agnews flatly. “With a leather dog leash. You might as well take a look at the others, but they’re pretty much alike.”

So they were, except some were wider angles, showing more of the pool and patio background, a couple of them with Lancer the cocker spaniel in the shot, standing close to his mistress and looking up at her with the characteristic, sentimental sadness of his breed.
Life
magazine might have gone for that one. There was a long moment of silence, and then Howie Rook said, “I think I’ll change my mind about that drink.”

T
HE STIFF MEDICINAL SHOT
of bourbon was already being poured. Rook tossed it off like water. “But why, Hal,
why
?” he demanded.

“Charteris was displeased with something that Dee had dared to say to him, and took the leather to her bare back. Next morning when he was out of the house Dee’s sister Mary came in all the way from Covina and insisted on taking the pictures with the family camera. She’d been trying to talk Dee into leaving the man, and obviously the photos would be effective evidence in any contested divorce action.”

“I should think so! When did this happen?”

“About three weeks ago, according to Dee. She didn’t want to show them to me, and swears she hasn’t shown them to anybody else. Don’t ask me why any woman in her right mind would stay with the man another day, another hour even! She says she loved him and was sorry for him. Charteris was more than twenty years older than she—he married her when she was only a struggling TV actress, living on the fringe …”

“I know. Hanging around Schwab’s Drugstore, with all the other Hollywood houris. I suppose she thought Charteris was a catch!” He tried to hand back the offensive photos.

“You keep them—and the negatives too. I want one of them blown up big, the one I showed you first. Because I might just decide to lay all our cards on the table and show it to Wilt Mays. Photographs don’t lie, and they’re worth a thousand words. He might not even want to proceed if he has a look at Exhibit A beforehand. But, Howie, it’s a two-edged sword. Right now all he’s got against our client is the marital strife, plus the fact that when first questioned by Sergeant McDowd she said she was home and in bed when her husband was killed.”

“Can they prove she wasn’t?”

“I’m afraid so. The first police on the scene made identification from papers in Charteris’ billfold and called in, and a desk officer tried to break the news to her at home, getting no answer.”

“But that’s hardly positive proof—”

“No. But later she tried to tell the D.A.’s men, when they questioned her at the morgue, that she’d taken a couple of sleeping pills and hadn’t heard the phone. Only McDowd is a thorough sort of cop, and he found a neighbor living down the street who happened to be putting his car away late that night and saw her in that distinctive red MG high-tailing it up toward home just before one
A.M.
Do you see the catch? The couple had quarreled and even argued about divorce—but that’s not enough to arrest anybody on. Neither is the fact that she wasn’t home as she said, but out somewhere. But with this nasty photo, Mays has got motive for murder—murder with a capital
M!
If you want to look at it that way, as he certainly will.”

Rook nodded gravely. “If right after the beating Mrs. Charteris had grabbed up a gun or a knife and done away with the sadistic bastard then and there, she’d be in the clear. Justifiable homicide, in anybody’s book. But this business of waiting three weeks, and then using the undeniably premeditated method of committing murder with a stolen car—that makes it first-degree homicide, with malice aforethought, dead to rights.”