Obit Delayed Page 8

  “I thought you said the light was on,” he reminded.

  “It was. I must have turned it off before I left.”

  But The Duchess was talking to herself now, because Mitch moved swiftly to the bedroom playing the light before him. There he stopped and stared straight ahead.

  “What have you been drinking?” he demanded, and in just a moment The Duchess saw what he meant.

  There was no bottle of rum on the bedside table, no glass, no box of sleeping-pills. And the only thing on Rita’s bed was a pile of twisted blankets.

  10

  SOMEWHERE ALONG THE LINE this whole business would have to start adding up; but just when Mitch thought he was beginning to close in on an answer, some joker had to step in and turn it into a great big zero. This was the biggest puzzle of all. Why would anybody take such pains to make Rita’s death appear accidental and then remove the body? He played the light across the bed again; then under and around the bed. But there was nothing to see but a carpet that could have used a sweeper. Maybe the janitor liked things tidy and always put out the bodies along with the cans and rubbish. That made as much sense as any explanation Mitch could muster at the moment.

  “Let’s get out of here,” The Duchess croaked. “I keep feeling eyes on the back of my head.”

  That was nonsense, of course. To prove it Mitch swung the light around the room. He even looked in the closet—just in case Rita had been filed away with her wardrobe; but all the garments were limp and empty, and nothing seemed to be displaced except one shapely corpse.

  “Are you sure there was a body in that bed?” he asked.

  “No,” retorted The Duchess. “I made it all up. Let’s go home.”

  “But I’m serious! Maybe she wasn’t really dead.”

  The blinds were closed and there didn’t seem such a need for secrecy any more. Mitch switched on the bedside lamp and while The Duchess was insisting that she recognized a corpse when she found one, he discovered something that bore out her story. Rita hadn’t been much of a housekeeper. Her rugs needed sweeping and her furniture needed dusting, particularly this little table. The light showed two distinct circles in the dust, one for the bottle, one for the glass, and there was a smudge about the size of a pillbox.

  “There, you see!” cried The Duchess.

  Mitch saw, and yet he didn’t see. Putting Rita away by means of sleeping-pills made sense. Disposing of the remains and the evidence made sense. But doing both things was utterly ridiculous!

  The discovery of the rings in the dust was the beginning of a search covering the bathroom, living-room, and kitchen in turn. “What are we looking for?” The Duchess asked, but since Mitch didn’t know, he didn’t answer. It was in the kitchen that they found the rum bottle put away on a cupboard shelf. Not a fingerprint on it, no doubt. And along with a few dirty dishes in the sink was one glass that had been carefully washed and dried. So much for the means and the method.

  In the kitchen they also found the back door. Mitch opened it and looked out. A set of wooden steps with a rough pine railing reached down to the driveway, a narrow, unlighted entrance to the garages in the rear that nobody used any more. Mitch could tell that when he played the flashlight over the drive and picked up the grass growing in the cracked cement and the unclipped hedge bowing in from the opposite edge.

  “Look,” whispered The Duchess at his shoulder, “there’s something caught on the railing.” It wasn’t much. Just a scrap of chiffon, a reddish chiffon that reminded Mitch of the negligee Rita had been wearing the last time he visited her apartment. But it was enough to show that she’d been taken out the back way by someone who knew the layout and was too careful to leave fingerprints, monogrammed trinkets, or a calling-card. All he’d left was a flattened cardboard box on the driveway.

  But playing a light around that drive wasn’t such a good idea under the circumstances. Back in the kitchen again, with a scrap of chiffon in his hand, Mitch could think things over. It still didn’t make sense, unless somebody had mixed up the signals and Rita wasn’t supposed to die. An attack of nerves, a case of fright, or even an overzealous errand boy could account for that; but without knowing which it was hard to guess where Rita might be by this time.

  “Let’s get out of here,” The Duchess proposed for perhaps the tenth time. But Mitch had other plans. “Now where was it that she had that phone?” he murmured.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “What you should have done hours ago—call the police.”

  “And tell them what?”

  The Duchess had an irritating way of driving home points in a tender area. Calling the police now would mean answering a lot of embarrassing questions. What The Duchess had been doing in Rita’s apartment when she found the body, for instance; and why, in view of her discovery, she hadn’t called them sooner. But the tough one would be trying to make anyone believe there actually had been a body. Rita was a notorious lush, and sleeping-pills left no blood. She could have passed out, revived, and gone off in search of another bottle in the almost three hours since The Duchess left her. That was the kind of logic he could expect from Ernie Talbot, and Mitch would have been inclined to believe it himself if he didn’t have such a good idea of why Rita’s death might be a necessity.

  That door at the opposite end of the living-room looked awfully tempting. The easiest way out of this ticklish situation was to turn off the lights, duck down that dark corridor again, and forget all about Rita’s big sleep. Mitch was still arguing with himself when the alarm went off.

  It wasn’t really art alarm, except to Mitch and The Duchess. It was the telephone speaking out with an uncanny sense of timing, and three rings later they located it at the end of the divan.

  “Answer it,” Mitch whispered.

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Go ahead, answer it. Sound sleepy and whoever’s on the other end will take you for Rita. We may learn something.”

  The Duchess was reluctant but curious, and curiosity won out. Behind a beautifully faked yawn she drew out a languid “—yes?” and Mitch, standing close enough to hear anything that might break up that waiting silence, helped her listen for an answer. But the silence didn’t break. Instead, there was only a click, sudden and decisive, and then the phone went dead.

  This time Mitch said it first. “Come on, let’s get out of here!”

  There was but one reason for hanging up that phone if a woman answered. Mitch thought about it for some time after he left The Duchess, shaken and subdued, at her doorstep. One reason. Rita wasn’t supposed to answer because Rita was dead. But why telephone a dead woman? There were a couple of possible answers to that, one of which had to do with somebody spotting the lights in her apartment and getting curious. Such a party might be interesting to meet under different circumstances, but Mitch wasn’t strong for heroics. He wasn’t strong for taking this unlikely story to the police either, but with The Duchess safely out of the picture there was no one to talk him out of it.

  Rita, wherever she might be, was strictly a police job; the sooner they started looking for her, the better would be the chances of finding her. There was a big expanse of empty desert out beyond the city limits, and the desert made a wonderful accomplice in the body-disposal business—dead or alive. The army of searchers for Frank Wales could vouch for that. In this manner Mitch argued himself across town again and around to the rear of City Hall where the lights were still burning and Ernie Talbot’s big sedan was nosed against the curb. The oddity of Ernie being on the job at such an hour would have bothered him if a lot of other problems hadn’t held priority. All it meant at the moment was that the man he wanted most to see was just inside.

  There were livelier places than the Valley City police headquarters at a little past three in the morning. With nobody around to restrain him, Mitch went directly to Ernie’s office and walked in without knocking. Ernie was at his desk hanging up the phone. He looked tired—for Ernie that was normal—but not too tired to give M
itch a rousing welcome. “What’s this supposed to be—the press club?” he growled. “Don’t you ever go home?”

  Mitch could have replied in kind, but he wanted to get this job over and done with. “I saw your car outside,” he said. “I thought it was about time we had a talk.”

  It wasn’t going to be easy to sell this yarn. For a moment Ernie seemed on the verge of throwing him out, and then he sighed, slumped back in his chair, and accepted the inevitable. Somebody was always trying to tell Ernie Talbot how to do his job; one more wouldn’t make much difference.

  “It’s about the Wales case,” Mitch said. “I may as well start off by telling you that you’re after the wrong man.”

  “Sure,” Ernie said. “I always am. But do you have a better suspect?”

  “Several. You know Dave Singer, of course.”

  The cynical smile that had been playing around Ernie’s mouth came into full bloom, and Mitch knew he was in for an argument. The best way to tell his story was from the beginning. It would take quite a build-up to make the little matter of Rita’s missing corpse sound convincing. So he started where it all began—back at Pinky’s lunch counter.

  “Dave was the one who put me onto the lead I’ve been following,” he began. “That was yesterday—Monday, I mean, right after I’d been in here talking to you and Mrs. Wales. I stopped in at Pinky’s afterward, and who should breeze in but Singer acting like a regular around that counter. That alone was enough to arouse my curiosity. Pinky’s place just isn’t Dave Singer’s style.”

  “Wait a minute,” Ernie protested. “Pinky’s may not be stylish, but it’s handy. I eat there now and then myself.”

  “Let me finish. The thing that really caught my interest was the way Dave reacted when he asked for Virginia and Pinky told him that she’d been murdered. He took it hard, Ernie, Too hard. And then he started cussing out the so-and-so who killed her.”

  Ernie was listening. He didn’t want to, but he couldn’t help himself. “Anybody I know?” he asked.

  “He mentioned no names. He just shut up and ducked out fast when he saw me at the counter. And since then he’s been scarcer than a tax reduction until a few hours ago.”

  But Mitch was going to have to talk faster than that if he intended to convince the natural born skeptic across the desk from him. He would have to paint the picture in bright colors, scene by scene. The day at Pinky’s, the same night at the Club Serape— Ernie was yawning by that time so he took a quick swing down to Mexicali and that interrupted chat with Rita Royale.

  “Look, Mitch,” Ernie broke in, “maybe they just don’t like you around. Have you heard anything from your best friend lately?”

  “Oh, they like me fine!” Mitch said. “Vince Costro even wants to buy a lot of advertising-space just to let me know how much he likes me. What do you think that’s for if not an effort to pull me off the scent?”

  “Maybe his business is bad.”

  Ernie was grinning when he said that, and it was the grin that tipped Mitch off balance. Maybe some day he’d grow up and get over feeling a twinge of revulsion every time the law winked at lawlessness, but this was the wrong time and the wrong place. The Club Serape wasn’t Ernie’s responsibility, it was far outside the city limits; but Vince Costro had no limits and his operations were common knowledge. It was one thing for the public to shrug off Costro, but Ernie had a badge in his pocket.

  “You don’t believe a word I’ve said, do you?” Mitch challenged.

  “Every word,” Ernie said.

  “But it isn’t important, I suppose! Is that all it takes to be a cop? Just a head like a block of cement and two blind eyes? A tie-in between Virginia Wales’s death and men like Costro and Singer should suggest a few interesting possibilities if nothing else. What if Virginia had been close enough to Dave to pick up something she wasn’t supposed to know? What if somebody got scared she might talk too much?”

  Mitch was too steamed up to notice a little thing like a door opening behind him, and the first he knew they had company in the office was when Ernie’s sleepy eyes brightened and focused on the doorway. He swung around to see what Ernie was looking at and almost rubbed noses with Kendall Hoyt.

  If Hoyt possessed anything but a grim expression, he never wore it while in uniform. “What kind of information?” he demanded.

  “You name it,” Mitch shot back. “Costro has plenty of interests to be sensitive about including a fast trade in marijuana, heroin—”

  “—wine, women, and song,” Ernie finished. “Listen, Mitch, we all know Vince and we all know that Dave Singer is a bad boy, but you can’t get convictions on public opinion. I could name half a dozen capital crimes that probably belong on Costro’s doorstep, but not this one. Now if you have any real evidence to the contrary, I’ll be tickled bright pink to hear it. If not, we’ll just have to postpone this little adventure story until sometime when I’m not quite so busy. Fair enough?”

  Ernie was all through now. It was up to Mitch, who didn’t have a thing at the moment but the tag end of a short temper.

  “And in the meantime you’ll go on chasing after a dead man!” he shouted.

  He hadn’t meant to say that. This was to be a discussion of facts, nothing but facts, with an absolute minimum of conjecture to keep them in line. But it was too late to take anything back. Now Ernie really was interested. Now he was demanding an explanation.

  “All right, figure it out for yourself,” Mitch said. “Frank Wales received a special-delivery letter from his ex-wife that sent him off to Valley City to see her. Something pretty big must have been bothering her to write a letter like that to a man she’d seen only once in three years. Something big—like fear for her life.

  “Now you’re taking Wales’s disappearance as proof of guilt, and I’d go along with that if I thought he was still alive. But suppose he isn’t. Suppose he reached Virginia’s house just in time to walk in on her murder? Doesn’t it strike you as odd that no trace of the man or his automobile has been reported when the whole country’s on the alert? Maybe he flew away! Maybe he’s living on some plentiful mirage!”

  Everything Mitch had went into his conclusion. “Stop kidding yourselves,” he said. “If you ever do find Frank Wales, he’ll be dead in a pile of twisted metal at the bottom of some canyon!”

  He was glad now that it was said. It was a relief to have it off his mind. Let somebody else wrestle with the problem for a while. Let Talbot and Hoyt do the job they were paid to do, so Mitch Gorman could go back to running a newspaper. Or maybe trying to boost the morale of an unofficial widow over in the El Rey Hotel.

  But something was wrong. He didn’t expect anybody to fall on his neck for passing out this information, but it was a grim story. Nobody was supposed to laugh.

  “Now why didn’t we think of that?” Ernie mocked.

  “It must be the college education,” Hoyt said. “There’s nothing like a college education to make a man real smart.”

  The hollow sensation in Mitch’s stomach wasn’t from hunger. Nothing he’d said had been that funny unless there was a special reason for Ernie being so far from his mattress at such an hour. Why hadn’t he realized that before? Why hadn’t he asked a few questions instead of sounding off like the chairman of an investigating committee? There was only one question he could ask now, and it sounded a little silly after that big sales talk.

  “All right, what is it?” he said. “What is it that you two know and I don’t?”

  For an answer, Ernie got up and started toward the door. “I hope you made our guest feel at home,” he remarked to Hoyt over his shoulder.

  “I sure did,” the policeman said. “He was a little bashful at first, but he got over that. That’s why I came in just now. I was wondering if you’d like to take a little ride in the country.”

  Nobody stopped him, so Mitch joined the parade down the narrow corridor to another office. It was a small room with dirty-yellow walls, practically no furniture, and a bright overhead
light. A couple of Hoyt’s fellow officers were waiting inside, and seated on a straight-backed chair in the center of the floor was a forlorn little man frantically puffing a cigarette. He wore a pair of faded-blue jeans and a tattered shirt with a few drops of blood on the collar, and a purple welt was forming under one eye where he’d probably bumped into the doorknob coming in. A small, dark, shabby little man.

  “He didn’t savvy anything but Mexican at first,” Hoyt was explaining, “but he learned English in a hurry.”

  “Did he say where Wales was hiding out?” Ernie asked, and Hoyt grinned his answer.

  Mitch heard all the words and saw all the faces. Now he understood. No wonder Ernie’s eyes had sparkled when he told him Wales was dead in the bottom of some canyon! Frank Wales was dead only in Mitch Gorman’s mind, and dead there only because he wanted it that way. But why? There was a lot more than his battered pride troubling Mitch as he stood there before Ernie’s little secret.

  “Just in case you haven’t caught on,” Ernie said, “I’ll bring you up to date. We picked up this tight-lipped character trying to sneak into the El Rey half an hour ago. I’ve been expecting something like this all along. That’s why we’ve been watching the hotel and tailing Mrs. Wales.”

  “Even to Mexicali?” Mitch muttered.

  Ernie winked at Hoyt. “The city should bill the Independent for mileage,” he said.

  “Who is this man?”

  “Well, you might call him Cupid, or you might call him a paid messenger. It all depends on the way your imagination runs.”

  Ernie pulled a wrinkled scrap of paper from his shirt pocket and held it in front of Mitch’s face. It was a torn bit from a brown paper bag, but the message scrawled in pencil told the whole story. Norma, honey, he read. Don’t worry. Am OK but need money. Give this man—

  The paper was torn at this point. “Our little helper here tried to destroy the note when we grabbed him,” Ernie explained, “but this was all we needed anyway. Wales writes a pretty good hand for a dead man, doesn’t he?”