Murder Can't Wait Read online

“She’s a pretty thing. Stu liked pretty things. Most men do. You do yourself. Married one.”

  Not as a pretty thing, Heimrich thought—the thought a flicker across his mind. I didn’t even, at first, think she was—

  “You’ll have to ask her,” Fleming said.

  “She’s being asked. Steele seems to think there was something.”

  “So Steele killed him?”

  “Perhaps. You knew nothing about an—attachment?”

  “Nothing. I was Stu’s brother, not his confessor. He’s—he was a young, healthy man. She’s a pretty young woman and didn’t, when she was living here at the club with Steele, look particularly contented. I’m not the one to ask, captain. To ask—anything.”

  He was looking fully at Heimrich now, out of sunken dark eyes.

  “I’m a man who’s brought out to sit in the fresh air,” he said. “Because the housekeeper quit a few days ago and there’s nobody to—” He stopped. Then, very bitterly, he said, “To baby-sit me.

  There did not seem to be anything to say to that, and the dying man kept looking at him. Then, quite suddenly, the man’s expression changed, and he shook his head slowly and said, “I’m sorry, captain.”

  There wasn’t anything to say to that, either. Angus Fleming looked away again, toward the first tee again. There were two men there now. One of them was teeing up while the other watched him. The young man and the young woman were no longer in sight. Enid Fleming and a young man who wasn’t dying; wasn’t brought along to a place where there were people to keep an eye on him, because sometimes victims of leukemia die suddenly.

  “Have you any idea why somebody would want to kill your brother, Mr. Fleming? Aside from—”

  Fleming turned, interrupted. It was amazing how strong his voice was. He said, “How many reasons do you want, captain?” and then, without waiting for an answer, held one frail, shaking hand above the table. He brought the thumb of the hand down on the table, using it as the marker in a count.

  “He knew something about an attempted fix and gamblers had him killed,” Fleming said. He brought the index finger down beside the thumb. “He was playing around with Steele’s wife and Steele killed him. He—what else? What more do you need? He was only killed once.”

  And when he said that his strong voice was, momentarily, uncertain—shook as his hands shook and his body shook with weakness. Before Heimrich said anything, Fleming said, “I was fond of my brother. He was much younger. When we were both younger I was—I suppose you’d call it protective. Do we have to go on with this?”

  “It has to be gone on with,” Heimrich said. “You know that. If you’re too tired…”

  “I won’t be rested,” Fleming said. “Not ever, captain. Didn’t anybody tell you that?” He waited a moment. “I see somebody did,” he said. “Well—you’ve got two motives. You want more?”

  “I want,” Heimrich said, “to find out everything I can. That’s my job. Did your brother have money?”

  “Ten thousand a year,” Fleming said. “What he may have earned as a lawyer, which wasn’t much. The ten thousand is from a trust fund and the trust reverts to me. I didn’t kill my brother for his money, captain.”

  “The trust fund?”

  Anybody could tell him, Fleming said, and as he went on the vigor died out of his voice again. The trust fund had been set up under their father’s will. The principal would have gone to Stuart Fleming when he reached thirty. “If,” Angus Fleming said, “he’d been a good boy.” He said that with some bitterness and paused and looked again toward the golf course. The two men were walking away from the tee; a foursome was clustering around it.

  “You asked about Stu and women,” Angus said. “By implication, anyway. I said he liked pretty girls. He—well, he made what he himself would have called a ‘thing’ of it. Not very wisely—several times not wisely at all. My father was—call it a very moral man. Especially for others; especially for his family. He used old-fashioned words. One of them was ‘libertine.’ He decided that that was what Stu was.” He paused. He said that he supposed the word was as good as any other; he said that Stu had been, to use another word, a chaser.

  “While Stu was at law school,” Angus Fleming said, “he got himself in a considerable jam. It involved the wife of a professor and—well, it was messy. The husband wasn’t a man to hush things up. My father was—took a very moral attitude. He’d had to bail Stu out once or twice before. He—”

  Again the man stopped and looked toward the golf course. When he spoke again, he did not look at Heimrich.

  “Stu was a good-looking man,” he said. “A kind of strength seemed to emanate from him. Women were—call it responsive. Call it co-operative. I doubt if many of his chases were very long chases. I know there was nothing—nothing vicious in Stu. No desire to harm. But Father—”

  Lance Fleming, the father, had changed his will. Before that his estate had been divided equally between his two sons, who were his only living relatives. In the new will, Stuart’s half was put into a trust fund from which Stuart was to receive only ten thousand a year until he was thirty. The trust was revocable by the decision of any two of the three executors, at their discretion in-

  Angus Fleming turned back to Heimrich.

  “—in the event,” he said, “of further misbehavior. A word to use, wasn’t it? About a grown man. The executors are—were—fully at liberty to decide what constituted misbehavior. One of them was—still is—a man who looks at things much as Father did. Another is the lawyer who drew up the will. He handles the legal affairs of old Higby. Which are considerable. Higby—the one who thinks like my father, talks like him—is a dominating man. I’m the third executor. I would have been outvoted.”

  Since his father died, Stuart had been, so far as Angus knew, a “good boy.” “Or a careful boy.” The previous summer, while Stuart was still living in New York, he had come up several times for Saturday night dances at the club, and each time brought a different girl. Stuart and his girl of that week had been house guests of his brother and sister-in-law. “All,” Angus said, “very properly according to Hoyle.”

  “If your brother had been playing around with Mrs. Steele?”

  “If they got caught at it,” Angus said. “Misbehavior as stipulated. Oh, I’d have squared it in the end. The trust reversion to me is absolute. I could make a will. Have made a will, as a matter of fact. It makes things up to Stu. Was to have done that. Now I’ll have to…”

  His voice had grown progressively less vigorous. Now it trailed off.

  “Doesn’t get you anywhere, does it?” Angus Fleming said, in a faint voice. “To shut him up. Because of somebody’s jealousy. But not for money.” He did not look at Heimrich. He lifted the glass he had not touched while Heimrich had sat with him and watched it shake in his shaking hand. “Tired,” Angus Fleming said, apparently to the shaking hand.

  Heimrich stood up. He said he was sorry to have had to bother Angus Fleming.

  “Waste of time, wasn’t it?” Fleming said dimly, to the glass.

  There was one other thing, Heimrich told him. There was a club member named Isabel. A woman with reddish hair.

  “Bryce,” Fleming said. “Isabel Bryce. Friend of Enid’s.”

  “Close friend?”

  Fleming put the glass down and looked at Heimrich and the strength which ebbed and flowed in his voice flowed into it.

  “Could be,” he said. “As women have them. She’s probably taking a lesson now.” He paused. “She takes a good many lessons, I’ve heard,” he said. Then he put his glass down on the table, and his elbows on the table, and rested his head in his hands.

  Probably Fleming was right, Heimrich thought, walking across the terrace in the direction of the parking lot. Probably a waste of time. Stuart Fleming had been a chaser. The habit had got him in trouble. Conceivably, it might have got him killed. But there was nothing new in that. He had had no money. There was not really anything new in that.

  He was at the
edge of the terrace and, for no special reason, looked toward the golf house. Robert Steele was going into it, carrying a putter. A woman in shorts and golf shirt—a solidly built woman, but smoothly built—was walking from the golf house toward the terrace. She had reddish hair, which was bright in the sun. She looked to be about thirty.

  Heimrich walked back along the terrace to a point where he would intercept the woman with reddish hair. He waited there and when she was close enough he said, “Mrs. Bryce?”

  She looked up at him.

  “Yes,” she said. She continued to look at him. “You’re certainly a big one, aren’t you?” Isabel Bryce said.

  VII

  One of the troubles with me, Nathan Shapiro thought, is that I’m inclined to believe people, and too often be sorry for people. That’s the trouble with me as a cop. This black-haired girl who cries so easily. Because her lover is dead? Or because her husband is in trouble? Or because she has perception and has guile; knows that if she is a stricken child this inadequate policeman will be gentle with her?

  “You’re quite sure he said nothing to you about it?” Shapiro asked the girl at the typewriter—the girl who had been with Stuart Fleming perhaps two hours before he was killed; the girl who didn’t have to be innocent of anything at all. Including, if it came to that, the killing. A pretty young woman can press the trigger of an automatic as well as anyone else; pretty young women have. And husbands and wives, for their mutual benefit, have rigged stories, seen that they dovetailed.

  Catherine Steele was quite sure that her employer had said nothing about any evidence he had of an attempt to bribe a football player. She looked at Shapiro steadily from deep blue eyes, and was quite sure—quite, quite sure.

  The simplest thing, Shapiro thought, is that she’s lying. The simplest thing is that Fleming did tell her, probably confided in her entirely; let her see the evidence. Because he must have had evidence; would not have gone to the district attorney with hearsay. The simplest, the most probable thing, is that she has all along known the kind of people her husband mixes with and that, thinking he might have use for it, she passed along to Bernard Stahlman what Stuart Fleming told her. Together with the evidence?

  No, that didn’t work out. If they had the evidence—whatever it was; a tape recording seemed most probable—they wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of killing Fleming. They didn’t kill for the fun of it. At least those who ordered killings didn’t. (Shapiro had met some hired hands who obviously enjoyed their work.)

  Probably she had told her husband that there was evidence, and that she couldn’t lay hands on it and that Fleming planned to turn it over to the district attorney. Or, as it turned out, to, as proxy, one Nathan Shapiro. Or, to tell the proxy where to find it.

  “How long have you and Mr. Steele been married?” Shapiro asked the girl, and was chagrined to detect sympathy, almost tenderness, in his tone.

  She looked surprised, which was understandable, and said, “About three years.”

  No, she did not mind telling how they happened to meet. Why should she? (And, in her eyes, continued surprise, continued question. Why does he ask that?)

  She had met her husband at a party in New York; she had gone as an extra girl with a girl who worked at the same office she worked in—a girl who was another typist in a typist pool. The party had been a large one, in an apartment on the West Side. The people who owned the apartment—she never actually found out who they were—apparently had a lot of money. The apartment had looked like a lot of money. There had been a three-piece combo and room to dance. There had been an abundance of liquor, including champagne. She broke off then and said, “Why do you ask me about that, lieutenant? Not that I mind—”

  “Since you don’t mind,” Shapiro said, which was easier than giving the answer to her question. “Did you enjoy the party?”

  Again there was surprise in the deeply blue eyes, and she seemed to think, to remember. Then she shook her head.

  “Not much,” she said. “Almost all of the men were—well, much older. And—I don’t know precisely how to put it—harder. And the women—” She paused. “Well,” she said, “they weren’t like the women I knew.”

  It sounded like quite a party, Shapiro thought. Not like a party he’d want his eighteen-year-old daughter to go to. If he had an eighteen-year-old daughter. Or any daughter or any son.

  “Stahlman was one of the men at the party,” Shapiro said. “Or was he calling himself Steele?”

  “Steele,” she said. “It wasn’t until later—”

  She stopped. Then she started again, but not to finish that, which needed no finishing. The party got a little—“Well, some of the men were drinking a lot.” One of the men tried to “paw” her and a tall man with close-cropped black hair put a hand on the pawer’s shoulder, she thought rather firmly, and said, “Let’s not rock the cradle, huh?”

  “I didn’t like that,” Catherine Steele said. “I said something silly about not being a baby. And he took hold of me and we danced. And afterward, not long afterward, because the party was getting rough, he took me home. And—well, we began seeing each other.”

  “You happen to remember the names of any of the men at this party?”

  “It was three years ago. Anyway, it wasn’t the kind of party where people get introduced. The men seemed to know each other and the girls—most of the girls—seemed to be named ‘Babe.’”

  “A man named Pagoni? He’d be—oh, in his middle forties. Heavy-set. Perhaps even fat by now. Black hair. He used to let it grow rather long.”

  “You asked me before about a man named Pagoni. I don’t remember anybody at the party named that. Several of the men looked—well, the way you say this man looked.”

  “You didn’t go to any more parties like that? Stahlman—or Steele, if you’d rather—didn’t take you to them?”

  “No.”

  “You happen to remember where this party was held? Specifically?”

  She did not. Her friend had picked her up in a cab, had given a street and a number; she had not paid any special attention. “She was wearing a perfectly beautiful formal and I—I felt dowdy. I was thinking about that.”

  All innocence, Shapiro thought, and sighed, this time not audibly. Probably lying in her pretty teeth. Probably knew well enough the kind of crowd she’d stumbled into, and how a girl got a perfectly beautiful formal. And Steele-Stahlman turning protective, keeping her out of places where most of the girls seemed to be named “Babe”?

  Don’t be a credulous softy, Shapiro told himself. From this pretty little thing to her big tough husband; from husband to Pagoni and company. To Stuart Fleming, five bullets with love from a devoted secretary. The direct way. That probably was it. Not this brother to brother and sister-in-law; sister-in-law to somebody at a country club; somebody at the country club, innocently gossiping, to a golf pro. Not around Robin Hood’s barn. (What on earth had Robin Hood wanted with a barn?)

  Tangible evidence, assuming there had been any, probably destroyed. Certainly not, now, here in the small office—the small and shining office, still smelling faintly of paint.

  “Better look through his desk,” Shapiro said. “Filing cabinets. Sort of thing I’m expected to do. All right?”

  “I guess so. Actually, there’s only one client’s file and it’s only about a title clearance.”

  Shapiro went into the inner, somewhat larger office and began to rummage. The longer he stayed a cop, Shapiro thought, the more papers he had to push around. He pushed for some time, and found nothing worth pushing. The single steel filing cabinet was almost empty—a folder marked “Armitage” and correspondence in re a title clearance. A folder marked “Sorney,” with a letter saying that the will was being drawn up “in accordance with the instructions in your letter of March sixteenth.” Catherine Steele was an excellent typist.

  In desk drawers, the odds and ends which are tossed into desk drawers. Rather fewer than Shapiro would have expected. No, anything of importa
nce would have been moved from an office. Fleming would have to climb stairs to reach to a desk at his house. (Not that there had been anything of importance there.) Nothing—Shapiro took one of the odds and ends out of the top drawer of the desk. It was a white envelope addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. Stuart Fleming,” and postmarked the last December 18. The date was clear enough; the post office identification was indecipherable.

  Shapiro opened the envelope. It contained a Christmas cardits face a sketch of a long brown building with “Merry Christmas” festooning its facade. Inside was the inscription: “Season’s Greetings, The Cavalier Motor Lodge. Mr. and Mrs. John Spiros, Props. Hangerford, New York.”

  And over this, in pencil, was a large question mark.

  The question mark, Shapiro thought, was well placed. A Christmas card from a motel? Well, it might be good business. But—“Mr. and Mrs. Stuart Fleming”? That might, of course, be bad record keeping. But something, obviously, had caused somebody to raise questioning eyebrows. Fleming himself?

  He sat for a moment and thought about it. Probably nothing of importance—a card from a place Fleming had once stayed in, probably with a temporary Mrs. Fleming. The girl in the outer office, who was typing now, whose typewriter he could hear? Not improbably. Odd, however, that Fleming had used his own name; apparently his own address. If his address was “Rt. 1, North Wellwood, N. Y.”

  He went into the outer office and the girl whose hair was a smooth black cap swung around in her chair and looked up at him. He said, “Can you tell me anything about this, Mrs. Steele?” and showed her the envelope. She looked at it and shook her head. Shapiro said, “Open it,” and she opened it, and looked at the card.

  Then she said, “No. I never saw it before. It must have gone to his house. He must have brought it here. What does the question mark mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Shapiro said.

  “Hangerford is about fifteen miles north of here,” Catherine Steele said. “A pretty place, in the hills. There’s a lake, and boats, and people fish. A good many people from the city go there for weekends.”