Pardon My Body (5 page)

“Was it long-distance?”

“I wouldn't know. I didn't check with the phone girl, I never do—it ain't good business.”

I thought of something else. “Know where 2469 South Franklyn Avenue is?”

He stared uncomprehendingly. I gave up.

“All right, Bule. But if I were you I'd be getting a statement ready for the police.”

He gave me a steady look for the first time. “Mister—I don't know who you are or what your racket is and I ain't asking. But if what you've told me is on the level I guess I can use it…”

“It gives you a little time to frame something that'll hold,” I conceded.

“You can get the hell outa here,” he tossed back.

“Because,” I said, as I picked up my hat, “at this very minute Mr. George Clark is lying on one of Mr. Mike Hannigan's beds with a dagger sticking out of his chest, and I never saw a man looking so dead.”

It was the second time in an hour that I'd had the last word. Mr. Bule didn't take it silently. I could just hear the muttered terror of his monosyllabic profanity as I stepped out.

The elevator was at the top floor so I walked down, trying to think of something that would fit the jigsaw together. As I reached street level I remembered the girl at the reception desk.

“See your buddy?” she said brightly.

“Yeah. We had quite a chat. Look, baby, I can't
make that date after all. Unexpected business.” I pulled out my billfold and passed over a ten. “Go buy yourself a nice new hat or anything you fancy.” I started thinking: a ten—Bogard, you're crazy, you can't afford that kind of money.

Then I quit nagging myself because the kid had picked up the note, turned it slowly over and was passing it back with just about the clearest level look I ever stopped.

“Mister,” she said simply, “I don't want your bucks. I don't pick up guys to get money. I just figured you might be a good guy to play around with and maybe we'd have some fun together, but if you got new ideas I guess that's all right, too.”

I started to say something. Then found I hadn't got anything to say. I didn't even look at her. I just couldn't take another of those searing, worldly-wise stares. I moved out on to the crummy sidewalk with hot blood in my face and a cold sagging in my stomach. Then I saw I still had the ten clutched in my fingers.

I didn't think I had ever bought an experience so cheaply…until I realized that if self-respect is the clothing of the soul, I was as near naked as makes no difference.

Just then I was feeling the biggest kind of heel….

T
HE NEWSPAPER'S MORGUE FILES
on Banningham were straightforward—and unrevealing. Prim Boston family, private tutor, Yale, a short spell practising at the New York Bar, then an executive post with Textiles Inc.—which he later bought out and reformed as United Textile Distributors Inc. That was when Grierson appeared. Apparently from nowhere. The file began with his partnership with Banningham and there wasn't a line of background that counted. He must have been born and raised somewhere, but it had missed the recording angels of the newspaper's library.

Of Grierson's more contemporary activities there was plenty. It was strictly more or less what you'd expect to find. He didn't run with the Long Island sporting set. He lived in the Sands Point neighbourhood, pretty well slap in the middle of that sober cluster of wealth represented by the financial tycoons
who have built their humble mansions along the North Shore. The only mild eyebrow-raiser was that Grierson had a summer home at Seal Harbour, Maine—though that didn't prove he ever got even a passing nod from the Rockefeller dynasty.

I was about to close the folder when I heard Wes Delaney speak over my shoulder.

He was looking down at a fairly recent cut of Grierson—the only one they had. He said, “Funny thing about that guy—I'm nearly sure I knew him once in Chicago.”

Twenty-two years back Delaney was a Hearst reporter in the Windy City. He blew into New York in time to see paper millionaires jumping from thirty-sixth storey windows in the Great Depression and had stuck ever since. He knew Manhattan inside-out and if you didn't see it coming and duck he'd spend the next twenty minutes telling you it had nothing on Chicago, which he hadn't been back to in a decade.

But for once I wanted to hear about Chicago.

“How d'you mean—nearly sure?”

Delaney rubbed his crisp gray hair. He stared down at the filed picture. “I never even heard of the guy all the time I've been in New York. I guess he must have lived pretty quietly with his moneybags. The first time I saw his picture was when someone
got it out of the morgue as soon as we got a message about the murder. I could swear it's the same…”

I said, “Who did you think it was?”

Delaney lit a cigarette. “He looked to me the spit of a shyster lawyer I knew in Chicago when Capone was calling up judges and instructing them in the dereliction of their duties. Character by the name of Arthur Schultz. He was about thirty at the time and had dark hair—but the features are identical. That cut looks like one of Schultz grown older and softened-up with good living.”

He paused and shrugged. “But twenty-odd years is a long time. Could be I'm wrong. Only…”

“Only you don't think so?”

“I can't get rid of the feeling it's the same guy—but, supposing I'm right, it doesn't add up to anything. Schultz never got on the wrong side of the fence, and maybe he got to be a reformed character and figured a new name would go well with respectability.”

“It's funny,” I said, “because the file has nothing on his life before he turned up as a partner with Banningham.”

Delaney let his bushy eyebrows rise a little. About a yard.

“Uh-huh!”

“What year did he leave Chicago?”

“I think around the same time I did.” Delaney looked at me curiously. “What's your interest, Dale?”

“I was there when whoever it was stuck a dagger into Grierson and I'm trying to fit one or two ends together.”

Delaney grinned sardonically. “Yeah? O'Cassidy will love it. You're trying something, aren't you?”

“I'm not so sure what I'm trying,” I said carefully. “Let's say that just at the moment we're trying to figure out the social background of an old Chicagoan and let it go at that.”

“Okay, if that's the way you want it.” Delaney thought for a second. “Curious you should say that—because, really, Schultz wasn't a Chicagoan.”

“No?”

“No—he practised first in an up-State place. Falls City….”

He stopped, staring. Something had clicked into place in my memory. I could see the fragment of an address on a charred piece of notepaper in a shabby little room of death.

Urgently, I said, “Is there a place in Falls City called South Franklyn Avenue?”

Delaney shrugged. “I wouldn't know. I've never been there. But I can tell you this much, if it helps—Falls City was just about the toughest town anywhere east or west of Chicago back in the Roaring Twenties.
By all odds, it hasn't changed so damn much either. The Prohibition gangsters are gone and the madams have to be a little less ostentatious—but they've still got the most corrupt civic administration in the Middle West. The place is run by a crooked police department hand-in-glove with every racket in the city. Falls City is one of the places that got passed by in the march of progress, I guess.”

I shut the folder and buttoned my light autumn topcoat.

Delaney called as I moved through the swing doors, “If I've given you something I'd like to be in on it—for the paper.”

“I'll buzz you if anything comes,” I promised.

I walked on out of the building, my mind leaping about from one speculation to another and not a solid pointer in sight. Suppose Grierson was a shyster lawyer named Schultz twenty-five years ago. Suppose he beat it hotfoot out of Chicago. Suppose he became Arnold Grierson, a big-shot business executive with a feudal castle on Long Island and played kiss-in-the-ring with John D. Rockefeller's heirs and successors. It didn't mean a thing. Hey! Wait a minute. You're losing your grip, Bogard. Suppose he never
had
quite shaken the past off him? Suppose there was some reason for him to be meeting a hood
out in Connecticut. Because there
was
a reason. There had to be a reason.

All right, suppose anything you like. Where does it get you?

I decided to go home, take a shower and eat an early dinner. Maybe a rest-up first. I'm not used to walking around all day. It was 4:45 p.m. and prematurely dark when I stepped into my apartment. It looked good to me. The log fire had been lit, the place dusted off. I switched on the light and it looked better. I switched on the radio and got a load of Guy Lombardo. I was in the mood to take that, too. Hell—if Louis Armstrong can take it, I can.

I sent my hat sailing on to the big, cushioned davenport and whistled my way into the little bathroom. The phone rang. I walked back and picked up the receiver.

“Mr. Bogard?”

“How did you guess?” I said sweetly.

Bella, the switch girl laughed.

“No cracks. This is just to pass you a message. Wait a minute—I've got it written on a slip. It says for you to ring Skyline 7070 anytime after five and it's from Mr. Lucius Canting. With his compliments.”

“But not with his address, eh?”

“Why—I supposed you knew it.”

“I don't, sweetheart. Mr. Lucius Canting has never entered my life at any point yet.”

“Well, maybe he thought his phone number was an address.”

“Possibly.”

“In fact,” said Bella hesitantly. “I…er…looked it up.”

“You did?”

“I hope you're not cross, Mr. Bogard.”

“I'm delighted. What is it?”

“It's a penthouse near Riverside Towers. Name of High Corners.”

“Thanks a lot.” I replaced the receiver and dialled the Skyline number.

A feminine voice said, “Mr. Lucius Canting's suite. Your name, please?”

I gave it.

“Your business?”

“Mr. Canting is just dying to speak to me,” I said. “Suppose you put me through before he passes right out.”

“There is no necessity to be impertinent,” said the voice. “I am Mr. Canting's secretary and I am following the normal procedure in dealing with telephone inquiries.”

“I'm an abnormal caller,” I told her.

There was a pause. I could hear her speaking on a hookup line but I couldn't catch the words. Presumably she was having speech with the boss.

Then she came back. “You're through, Mr. Bogard.”

I waited.

A man's voice spoke. A middle-register voice with an overlay of warm molasses.

“Good evening, Mr. Bogard. I would like to see you on a matter of business.”

“My services aren't available just now,” I replied.

“Not even in the pursuit of truth?”

“Truth has a many-sided face. Which side are we looking at?”

Mr. Canting sighed. “You must not misquote classical definitions. It offends my aesthetic sensibilities. But, shall we say, the truth about the recent lamented decease of two eminently respectable gentlemen?”

“We could say that if we're in the mood for platitudinous hedging. Then what?”

Mr. Canting was chiding. “I scarcely think it would be fitting to discuss what I have to say over the public telephone. After all, we haven't met.”

“Some people might think there isn't any reason why we should.”

“There is, of course.”

“It's a possibility…”

“I place it higher than that. You will come for cocktails at six-thirty.” It didn't sound like a question. Yet it didn't sound like a command, either.

“I'll come,” I heard myself saying.

“Admirable.” He was almost purring now.

I hung up and peeled off my tie and shirt. I studied my face for a moment in the little bathroom mirror and decided not to give myself a second shave. Not for Mr. Lucius Canting. I stripped, showered and put on my clothes again and warmed my backside against the fire while I filled my pipe. I was doing a lot of overtime thinking and getting nowhere. Too many things seemed to be happening and nothing seemed to make sense. I put on my overcoat and hat and a navy blue silk scarf and walked downstairs.

Bella was still at the little switchboard at the back of the reception desk. I leaned against the counter.

“Yes, Mr. Bogard?”

“Bella,” I said, “I am visiting Mr. Lucius Canting and if I don't buzz you by eight o'clock I want you to put in a call to Detective-lieutenant O'Cassidy at police headquarters and tell him where I am and that I need his help. Got that?”

Bella's grey eyes opened wide. She nodded.

“You…you aren't running into trouble, are you Mr. Bogard?”

“I think the chances are about even,” I said. “Don't forget that message. The health of your favourite paying guest may hang on it.”

I could feel her stare boring into the back of my neck as I went out to get the car.