Armchair in Hell (Prologue Books) Page 18

“And now I’m going to tell my paper. Who objects?”

  Nobody objected.

  She called her paper and she recited, tiredly, what she knew. She hung up. She said, “I’m going now. I’m not going back there. I’ll check in somewhere. Good-by, all you wonderful people.”

  Scoffol said, “I’ll take you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I’ll be seeing you,” I said.

  2

  Breakfast was whisky sours and scrambled eggs and whisky sours and pots of coffee and more coffee. And whisky sours.

  In the living room, I piled the tapestries in tiers in a corner. I smoked and I inspected my company.

  Pierre Vyseuseau was a scraggly beard on an unkempt face, stiffly unhappy, in the chair nearest the tapestries. Ralph March was returning from limbo, greenly, in a remote corner of the couch. Viggy roamed the living room, restless and twitchy.

  “All right, all right,” Viggy said. “How do we wash it up?”

  “Like this,” I said. “Ralph gets the bulk, you get your agent’s commission, and I get ten percent from Ralph.”

  “And I?” Vyseuseau said.

  “You get glory.”

  “But no,” he said.

  “But yes,” I said. “But positively yes.”

  Viggy said, “Let’s see that contract.”

  I showed it to him.

  He looked at it. He looked at me. I looked at him.

  “How do we know?” he said.

  “Look at the guy.”

  “I’ve seen dumber-looking guys with larceny. Cute larceny.”

  Ralph stood up on unaccommodating legs. He marched up to Viggy in the slow, spread strut of an ancient German general unlimbering toward the toilet in the morning. He leaned a finger on Viggy. “Son of a bitch,” he said. “Oh, dirty, dirty son of a bitch.”

  “There,” I said, triumphantly.

  “What?”

  “Now he’s gone and said it too.”

  “Sit down,” Viggy said. “Before you fall down.”

  Ralph withdrew the finger and wriggled for a sneer and he made it; a meek sneer, but a sneer. Then he lost it in a pout, and he did the German-general strut back to the couch.

  “It’s easy enough,” I said. “We’d have done it anyway.”

  “What?”

  “Look at the back of the contract.”

  The back of the contract was thick blue paper folded on top and stapled to the legal cap. It said “Ralph March and Algernon Hale,” near the top, and near the middle, it said “Agreement” in spaced letters, and on bottom was engraved “Rathbone, Rathbone and Bassett, Los Angeles, California.”

  “That’s one of the biggest firms in the country,” I said.

  “So?”

  “Would they have larceny?”

  Dubiously he said, “Well….”

  “No. They would not have larceny. Not that kind of larceny. Rathbone, Rathbone and Bassett wouldn’t climb out on a swaying limb with Ralph March. They can earn it easier. And much safer. Don’t be crazy.”

  “You convinced me,” Viggy said.

  “But we check to find out if it is legitimate.”

  “Sure. How?”

  “They should have a copy, if it’s on the level, word for word and comma for comma. So we call, later, and if they have a copy, word for word and comma for comma — that’s it.”

  “You don’t blame me?”

  “Of course not.”

  “It’s business.”

  “Sure.”

  He sat by the desk and he leaned his head on his hand and he put his fingers in his hair. He twisted at his hair and he stared at the desk. The lines on his face were jet and deep and his mouth was tight and small and morose. He stopped twisting his hair and he tapped his forehead slowly with the knuckle of his thumb. He looked at me with a nothing-glance. I moved my eyes away. I knew what he was thinking about. He was thinking about Denny being carried away in a lumpy canvas bag with leather handles.

  I switched off the lights. The sun was up and the room was bright and the dust showed on the furniture. I said, “We ought to doze, sort of, unless someone wants more coffee.” Nobody answered me. I cleaned up the cigarette butts and then I sat on the couch and I stretched my legs and I crossed my ankles and nobody dozed and nobody talked and all of us made our various trips to the bathroom and years later it got to be half past twelve o’clock and I put through a long-distance call to Rathbone, Rathbone and Bassett in Los Angeles.

  “Who handled it?” I asked Ralph.

  “Rathbone,” he said.

  When the call came through, I asked for Rathbone. Rathbone wasn’t in. I asked for the other Rathbone. The other Rathbone wasn’t in. I asked for Bassett. Bassett was in. “Do you know him?” I asked Ralph.

  “Yes,” Ralph said.

  “Mr. Bassett,” I said to the thick, pre-cocktail voice on the wire. “This is New York. We are attempting to verify a contract. Algernon Hale and Ralph March. Could you arrange that a copy be read to us?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Peter Chambers.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Just a minute.”

  I motioned to Ralph and Ralph talked with him. Then he put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Someone is going to read it.”

  Viggy took the telephone and he spread the contract on his knees and he moved his lips while he listened. He hung up in the middle.

  “Let us go, little folk,” he said.

  So we all attended class at the Chase National Bank on Madison Avenue near Forty-fifth Street and it was like it should have been way back in the beginning. The bank people took over the stuff for delivery and a transfer of the wherewithal was effected in favor of a pallid, prancing Ralph March who opened an account for that purpose, and Viggy was paid, and Pierre Vyseuseau clicked enviously, and I walked the splendid stone floor; supervising.

  Like an entrepreneur.

  Which rhymes with manure.

  Because I forgot one little detail. Little detail.

  I forgot to get a check for two hundred thousand dollars from Ralph March, which is what happens when you get stuck on a word and start acting like it.

  Entrepreneur.

  It isn’t too good a rhyme, at that.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  VIGGY O’SHEA said, “How?”

  I worried about the mailman.

  “How?” he said. “And what are you doing here anyway, ten thirty in the morning? In your own office?”

  “How do you mean that ‘how'?”

  “That, I don’t get.”

  “I mean is it how, a greeting, like an Indian? Or is it how, a question, laconic?”

  Dimly he said, “What should I expect from Petie Chambers at half past ten in the morning? In his own office?”

  “Look….” I said, ruffled.

  “It is how, a question.”

  Viggy O’Shea was in very fine shape: he was shaved down to gun-metal luster and he was budweiser brown and healthy from Hanovia out of the barbershop. The creases had been slept out of his face and his dark hair glistened and he was redolent of masculine talc and he glowed like grouped Martinis before breakfast. He wore a soft gray suit with expensive shoulders and a pale green shirt and a mean green tie and a froth of surf-green handkerchief. He had his legs crossed in the best and easiest chair in the office.

  “I will answer,” I said, “the second question first. I am in my office at half past ten in the morning because I am expecting mail. A check. From Ralph March.”

  “Oh.”

  “We proceed now to your how.”

  “Thank you.”

  “How what?”

  He brought out a cigar, bit, spat, and smoked. “How everything. It’s two days now since we wound it up. Mostly, I’ve been sleeping. Then I call up out of bed because I want to know, and you’re not home. So I call here, which is funny. And you’re here.”

  “Talent,” I said.

  “Of course,” he said.

  I we
dged my legs up on my desk and I settled back in the swivel chair to get comfortable. I took my legs off. You cannot get comfortable when you expect a check in the mail. Ralph March had planed out of town and at first I had thought it was powder. Silly powder. I had a good and binding contract and I’d have banged lawsuits at him like beebees out of a shotgun. But it hadn’t been powder. It had been business. He had called, yesterday, from the purlieus of the always-sunny coast with the gladsome bodings of a check in the mail. So today the first mail had been mostly for Scoffol. For me there had been advices from sundry touts pertaining to the systematic demolition of the bangtails, at varied prices per system, and a letter from a young lady recommended by a friend (she said) inquiring about a position in the office. She enclosed a photo. In a bathing suit.

  “Talent,” I said, “doesn’t mean you’re smart.”

  “Please. It’s too early in the morning. All I want to know is how.”

  “Things,” I said, “register in your mind. Maybe if you’re a genius plus you’re smart, they mean something right away. But at least if it’s talent, they don’t go out of your mind. They stick around and then if something happens that shifts a gear, bang, they mesh, and you’re rolling.”

  “Jesus, all I want to know….”

  “All right. It was close around you.”

  “What was close around me?”

  “Whoever pulled it. That much you didn’t have to be a genius to know. That’s talent. But that kind of talent stinks. Because it doesn’t mean anything. There are lots of people close around you.”

  Sourly he said, “Slow. Maybe you got talent. I’m only listening.”

  “There were three stiffs in the house and Marmaduke in knots on Lexington Avenue. So, it had to be someone close enough to you to know when you were expected back and that there was a Marmaduke and where he lived.”

  “Right.”

  “The Little Guy would have been perfect. If one of the three stiffs in the house had been a different stiff.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning you.”

  “Too fast,” Viggy said, disconsolately.

  I made a face at him, a discouraged genius of a detective’s face. “He was close enough to the proposition to know when you were expected. He could know you have a butler. He could find out where he lived. So he could have taken care of Marmaduke in the morning, and, if it was laid out well enough in advance, he could be waiting for you in your house, with boys. Then there are three stiffs: Hale, Batesem, and you. See?”

  “Yes, I see,” he saw.

  “But it wasn’t that way at all.”

  Viggy came up and deposited the cigar in an ash tray and let it smolder. I put it out.

  “Furthermore, it would have been a shooting, not a knifing. Knives are sly. He wouldn’t have had to be sly. They’d be waiting to greet you. As it happens, that wasn’t the Little Guy’s plan at all, probably because he didn’t know how many of your hoods you had staked out about the house. He probably had one figured cleaner and much less messy. After all, Vyseuseau was his boy, not yours. He probably had it figured somewhere for a clean heist, without your even knowing he was involved. Then Denny tripped lightly in, and made it easy for him.”

  “How?”

  “We’ll come to it. Then there was that other thing.”

  “What other thing?”

  “The woman in the bedroom with her throat cut and no blood. That’s what I mean about sticking in your mind till a gear shifts.”

  “Slow,” Viggy said. “Please.”

  I came around and sat on the desk in front of him.

  “Batesem was a mess. Hale was still warm. But the naked lady had been dead before her throat was cut. Otherwise, they bleed, if you know what I mean. It’s not just an open cavity of neck.”

  He smiled. Weakly. “I know what you mean.”

  “Did you know it then?”

  “No, I didn’t know it then.”

  “You were probably too excited. All right, your genius of a detective did know it, and it knocked the Little Guy right out of the running. The Little Guy wouldn’t go for embroidery in the bedroom. I didn’t understand it. It was crazy. But your genius of a detective did miss, right away, something that would have drawn it much closer around you.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Charlie Batesem was nobody’s fool. In order to get up near enough to him to cut his throat, hell, you don’t figure to be a stranger. I missed that clean. All right …”

  I told him the whole story. Then I summed up for him.

  “So Madeline Howell hires me for a thousand bucks to find the valise. That puts a new wrinkle on it. That spreads it wide open, and I can’t figure it at all. And there’s that picture of Denny on her liquor cabinet. And I’m convinced they hardly know each other, yet, there it is, bigger than a pimple on your nose: ‘To Mad, with love.’ So I stumbled around chasing up all the alleys like a detective is supposed to do, and then Mona gets killed, and I find that she’s the one that hired me through Madeline, and again it doesn’t figure, for a minute, and then — bango — it shapes. The gear shifts. It rolls.”

  “Slow,” Viggy said. “Slow. Do it right side up.”

  “Mona had told me she had a sweetheart and a boy friend. All right. The Little Guy is the sweetheart. Who’s the boy friend? Who the hell cares? But when Madeline tells me that Mona got her to hire me, strictly me, I get to thinking about the boy friend — just jabbing, and it comes to me, idiotlike, that maybe Denny could be the boy friend because, after all, she works for Denny and Denny is all wolf and no sheep and this is a real smart, beautiful trick and then I think of the duplex and I think of the picture on the liquor cabinet, and I start to think about Denny Denny Denny, and he fits — oh, how he fits.”

  Viggy kicked at the chair with his heels and started walking. I went back to my seat behind the desk.

  I finished it up for him. “He finds out about the deal from Mona. He knows Marmaduke. He finds out when you’re due back from Marmaduke, easy and casual, without Marmaduke even knowing he’s telling anybody anything. Charlie Batesem knows him well enough to let him get close up. Then he does it on Hale, and so he gets the bag, but the Little Guy shows up as he’s coming out and takes it away from him. So he gets Mona to get Madeline to hire me — he doesn’t want Mona to do it direct; she’s his girl friend; it’s too close. So I’m hired, and he’s right on top of me. He even pays me a thousand dollars out of the money that’s mine. He holds out a thousand from what he’s supposed to give me, your money, transfers that to Mona to Madeline to me, and I’m working for him for my own dough. And it explains the dead woman upstairs in the bed.”

  “How?”

  “For the first time in his life, Denny is on something big. But it isn’t just that. It is also psychological. It’s the little brother putting one over on the big brother. It’s the despised misfit outsmarting the big boy. All right. But if possible, he doesn’t want to hurt you. He worries about that. So this woman dies on him of a heart attack. So he figures one. If he gets her up there, it’s trouble. And if it’s trouble, you’ll go looking for me. So he waits outside till you get going — and he pulls it. And if you didn’t get going — well, he did what he could to get you out of the way, and you’d have had that knife just like Charlie and Hale. Lucky for you I was too drunk to hear the phone. So don’t you ever join up with my critics who insist I drink too much. For you — it was good.”

  I was finished. I had done it as fast as I could. If there were any loose spots he’d have to pull them together himself. I was through talking about it. My case was closed. Dead people aren’t as pleasant to fiddle with as they are to read about. I wished I had a drink. I don’t keep a bottle in the office. Surprise?

  “Something else,” he said.

  I knew it was coming.

  “Mr. Scoffol is very capable. You should have seen how clever he was about making sure none of the Little Guy’s boys tagged along up to your apartment. First he pick
s me up. We do zigzag in his car all the way up to the Square Deal. I suppose that’s in case some of my boys are maybe tagging along. Then he sends me up, personally, for the Little Guy. He waits outside. I’m to walk the Little Guy to the subway. Walk. Your Scoffol leaves the car up there. I convince the Little Guy about no bodyguards, and he and I walk to the subway, and Scoffol walks behind us a way, making sure. He catches up with us on the platform and we take the train. Two stops. Then we get out and wait till all the passengers clear off, but we stay there, and then we take the next train for one stop. Then we get out, take a cab to the Waldorf, pick up the Frog, and come over to your place.”

  “Elaborate,” I said.

  “Efficient,” he said.

  “Careful,” I said.

  He stopped walking. He pushed a finger out at me. “He could have been just as careful and just as efficient and just as elaborate about seeing to it that the feller didn’t carry a gun. If anyone had asked him to.”

  “I didn’t ask him to,” I said.

  “I know,” he said.

  “I know you know,” I said.

  “That’s what I mean.”

  I didn’t say anything. I picked up a pencil and I did a doodle on the desk blotter. I kept my eyes on the doodle.

  “People,” Viggy said, “don’t like it when people scrape up with their special girl friends.”

  I did another doodle.

  “People like it even less when people kill their girl friends. I bet you know that.”

  I did the same doodle over.

  “But you made very sure that you told the Little Guy all about that. And you knew he had a gun because you didn’t tell anybody he shouldn’t have a gun. I know you — that five-man compromise split was strictly turkey trot. The real music came later.”

  I put the pencil down. I stood up and went to the window. I turned my back to him and I clasped my hands behind my back tight as parting lovers. I said, “The guy killed three people and you were messed up in the first batch right up to the eyeballs and I don’t think you could have gotten out of it. Not after that car business, not with Ralph March swearing they came in with you on the train, not with Vyseuseau swearing he left them in your house. And upstairs, in bed, and naked, a woman you couldn’t explain, and on a witness stand when you can’t explain, the D.A.'s boys eat it up. All right, so I tell my story about getting them into the car because dead people in the house are poison for you. That brings them back to the house, and they’re yours again. Mister, maybe they wouldn’t have gotten you for murder, but they’d have gotten you for something — unless Denny opened up. And if he opens up, it’s a hard, wired chair up in Ossining. So I did it the way I thought it should be done. The Little Guy could have saved it up for him, and gotten away with it. I tried to push it around so that the Little Guy would work in reflex, almost. I knew the way he felt.”