Deadly Joke (15 page)

Chambrun looked dissatisfied. “Would you feel squeamish about checking out?” he asked. “If she’s at home, I’d like to know why she doesn’t answer. If she isn’t, we can assume friends.”

“I don’t mind,” I said.

“Call me when you’ve checked,” he said.

He cared.

I took the address from him and went out into the Avenue. The cabs had returned to their usual hack stands.

Melody’s address was on Irving Place, just around the corner from the Players Club, an old stamping ground of mine. There was little or no traffic at that time of night and it took less than ten minutes for us to get there. I paid off the driver and walked into the vestibule of the building, an old brownstone that had been converted into apartments.

It was so dark in the vestibule I had to use my lighter to read the names in the brass card holder. I saw “Sewall—21.” I pressed the button alongside the name. Nothing happened.

I assumed “21” would be on the second floor. After a moment or two I pressed another button at random. After a moment or two there was a clicking sound in the front door and I pushed the door open and went in. The hallway and staircase were dimly lit. I climbed the stairs, and just as I reached the second floor landing, I heard a door open on the third floor and an angry woman’s voice called down the stairwell.

“Who is it?”

“Melody?” I asked.

“No, it’s not Melody! You looking for Sewall?”

“Yes.”

“What the hell did you ring my bell for?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s terribly dark in the vestibule.”

“They’re Twenty-one—rear apartment,” the woman said. I couldn’t see her. “You tell ’em if there’s any more noise, so help me God I’ll call the cops.”

“Noise?”

“Oh, they’ve been tearing the joint apart as usual. You tell Charlie Sewall I’ve had a bellyfull.”

A door slammed.

I went to the door of 21 and rang the bell. I could hear it ringing inside quite plainly. Nobody came to the door, and then I noticed it was standing open an inch or two. I went inside. Past the dark entryway I could see there was a light burning.

“Melody!” I called out.

She didn’t answer, so I went into what was a living room. It was a shambles—chairs overturned, some broken glass on the floor, the strong smell of whiskey. The light came from a lamp that had been knocked onto the floor. A painted glass shade had been smashed and two light bulbs burned nakedly bright. On the table a cigarette was still smoking in a tray. The ash was long. I took a quick look in the two bedrooms, the bath, and the kitchenette.

There was no one in the apartment, dead or alive.

I
HAD NOTICED A
telephone in one of the bedrooms. I went back there, dialed the Beaumont, and asked the switchboard to locate Chambrun. It was urgent, I told her.

As I waited, I looked around the room. It was obviously Melody’s. The scent of gardenias was strong. The walls, the curtains, the spread on the king-sized double bed, were pale pastel pinks and yellows. The dressing table had a frilly lace cover and was loaded down with cosmetic equipment, jars and bottles, and cologne sprays, and mascara tins. From where I stood, I could see a box of false eyelashes. It was, however, the pictures on the walls that had my jaw sagging slightly. They were all photographs of Melody in varying degrees of undress down to complete nudity. Most of them had been taken long ago when she had been queen of the strippers. She had been a very lush, very damn beautiful hunk of flesh. There was, curiously, nothing lewd or pornographic about the pictures. Nothing suggestive. They were just pictures of a woman glorying in her extra-special equipment.

“Chambrun here.” The boss’s voice jolted me back to the present.

“Things look bad,” I said. I told him what I’d found, “They couldn’t have been gone long. There was a cigarette still burning in an ash tray.”

Chambrun’s voice was crisp. “Hardy will have someone there in a hurry,” he said. “Stay there till they come, Mark. You might talk to the woman upstairs. She may have seen or heard something unusual. Hyland told you he was in the phone book?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll take care of that department,” Chambrun said.

I went out through the torn-apart living room, being careful not to touch anything, and climbed the stairs to the third floor. I had the impression that the door my angry friend had slammed had been for the rear apartment, directly over Sewall’s.

I knocked. The door opened and I saw that she was really angry. She was, I guessed, in her early thirties, not bad-looking. Red hair that had come out of a bottle was tightly done up in rollers. She had on a floor-length linen robe, dark blue, and she was smoking a cigarette.

“Now what the hell?” she said, blocking the way.

I suspected a good part of her anger came from being caught looking as she did by a man.

“I’m afraid there’s bad trouble downstairs,” I said. I told her my name and who I was. The mention of the Beaumont didn’t register anything with her. “You haven’t been listening to the news on radio or television?”

“What news?” she asked. “Agnew invented some new name for somebody?”

“Charles Sewall was shot to death in the lobby of the Beaumont early last evening,” I told her.

“You’ve got to be kidding!” she said. “I heard him raising hell downstairs not half an hour ago. I told you I was about to call the cops. My name is Shelly Davis, by the way. You want to come in?”

“I’d better keep an eye on the hallway,” I said. “But I would like to ask you what you heard or saw downstairs.”

“I didn’t see anything,” Miss Davis said. “But I heard plenty. The Sewall apartment is right under mine. He and Melody were always raising hell late at night. I guess it was after they both got pretty well boozed up. Has something happened to her, too?”

“I don’t know. There’s nobody in the apartment, but the place is wrecked. You know Melody?”

“Sure I know her. She’s a nice old girl when she isn’t involved with Charlie. He’s a prick, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

“Well, he’s dead of it,” I said. “When did the row start tonight?”

“Maybe a half—three quarters of an hour ago. It couldn’t have been Charlie, could it? I mean if he was dead—”

“It couldn’t have been Charlie,” I said.

“Well, I thought it was, of course.” Shelly took a drag on her cigarette. “Some women like to be manhandled—beat up—by their guys. I guess Melody is one of them. Masochistic. If she didn’t like it, she wouldn’t have put up with it all these years. From what she told me, she’s been with Charlie fifteen, sixteen years. So when she started to yell a little while ago, and I could hear thuds, like he’d knocked her down, and stuff breaking, I supposed it was the same old tune. But three o’clock in the morning is pretty damn late to wake up the neighbors. I beat on the radiator pipe with an iron frying pan a couple of times and then it stopped. I couldn’t go to sleep, so I made myself a drink and had a cigarette. That was when you rang my buzzer.”

“You didn’t hear anyone leave the apartment?”

“No. Melody left with whoever it was?”

“She’s not there now,” I said. “I’ve sent for the police. We think somebody may be out to hurt her. That’s how I happen to be here. When she didn’t answer her phone, I came down to find out if she was safe. I wasn’t much too late. There was a cigarette still burning in an ash tray.”

“Melody didn’t smoke,” Shelly said.

“You ever know any of their friends?” I asked. “For instance, a fellow named Hyland?”

Shelly made a snorting noise. “That jerk!” she said. “Melody asked me to go out with them one night. There was an extra man. It turned out to be this clown, Hyland. I’ve still got the bruises to show for it.”

“That was recently?”

“The bruises are figurative,” Shelly said.

“Would you recognize his voice if you heard it?” I asked her. “Could it have been Hyland you heard down there tonight with Melody?”

“You can’t hear voices that clearly through the floor,” she said. “It was a man, all right. But I wouldn’t have been able to tell who. I just took it for granted it was Charlie. Who killed him?”

“That honor is still up for grabs,” I said. “He was pulling one of his jokes on his cousin, Douglas Maxwell, who’s running for the Senate.”

“It’s crazy how much they look alike,” Shelly said. “I’ve never seen Maxwell, but his pictures! You’d swear it was Charlie.”

“So right now it may have been someone who meant to kill Maxwell,” I said. “You can read about it in your morning paper.”

“He didn’t really do it, did he?” Shelly asked, her eyes widening.

“Do what?”

“Appear without his pants.”

“So you knew about it.”

“Melody told me—about a week ago. It was a funny idea, but I didn’t really think he’d do it,” Shelly said.

“Well, he did it. It turned out not to be very funny.”

Shelly dropped her cigarette on the hall floor and stepped on it. “Look, Mr. Haskell, I’m not going to be able to sleep after this. Let me get dressed, and then if there’s anything I can do to help—”

“You wouldn’t know where Hyland lives, would you?”

She laughed. “I refused the marvelous opportunity to find out,” she said. “He’s probably in the phone book.”

I left Shelly Davis to get rid of her hair curlers and went back downstairs to the Sewall apartment. I managed to keep my eyes off the pictures of the young Melody long enough to look in the phone book for Richard Hyland. His office was listed, but no home phone. There was only a Manhattan directory. He could live in Brooklyn, or Queens, or one of the other boroughs.

The door buzzer sounded and I went out into the entry-way and clicked the release. A plainclothes cop who introduced himself as Sergeant Nelson and two uniformed cops came up the stairs.

“You touch anything in here, Mr. Haskell?” Nelson asked, when I took him into the living room.

“Nothing,” I said. “I did handle the phone and the phone book in the bedroom. Nothing was upset back there. The only thing that’s different from when I found it is that there was a cigarette burning in that ash tray. It’s burned out now.”

“You just missed the fun,” Nelson said. He looked at the long gray ash. “No filter.”

“Miss Marsh didn’t smoke, for what it’s worth,” I said. I told him about my conversation with Shelly Davis.

“So maybe nothing serious has happened,” Nelson said. “She took the beating she apparently enjoyed and then went off somewhere to make love with the guy.”

“Look, Sergeant, the man she loved and had lived with for fifteen years was murdered tonight. She isn’t likely to have taken off with some other guy just for fun and games. If you knew her, you’d know she wouldn’t.”

One of the cops who had wandered into the back of the apartment appeared in the doorway. His eyes were popping. “You oughta have a look, Sergeant!” he said.

He’d found the picture gallery.

“Tell your man to stop drooling, Sergeant,” I said. “Those pictures were taken twenty-five years ago.”

There wasn’t anything I could do to help Nelson. He’d responded to a call from Hardy at the nearest precinct house. He’d come at once, not knowing what to expect. He phoned for a fingerprint man.

“I’ll talk to your Miss Davis while I’m waiting,” he said.

“Any reason for me to hang around?” I asked.

“Nope. You can make a statement later if it turns out there’s real trouble.”

I walked down the steps and out into the street. It had been deserted when I came in. Now there was a small crowd gathered around the parked patrol car. There was a faint grayish light in the west. Daylight was coming up.

I had a helpless feeling as I walked slowly away from the Irving Place house. I didn’t think anything serious had happened. Whatever Melody’s sex deviations might be, I could swear they hadn’t been a part of the brawl that had wrecked her living room. She had been afraid of something, and it had come. It was easy enough to guess that it might be Richard Hyland who was responsible. It was the only guess I could make. The simple fact of the matter was that it could be somebody I’d never heard of—one or both of Charlie’s friends who’d gone to the Beaumont with him and disappeared. It could be someone who hadn’t crossed our horizon at all. Where to look? What to do? I guessed Chambrun was trying to put his hands on Hyland. At his end he could probably find the man’s address. I decided the best thing for me to do was to go back to the hotel.

And then I realized that I was only a few blocks away from the apartment that Diana and Barry Tennant shared. They might not appreciate a visit, but I’d feel better if I knew Diana wasn’t in some kind of jam. Also, having been friends of Charlie Sewall’s, they might also know Hyland and where he lived.

There were no cabs in sight, and so I walked east to Second Avenue and then downtown. A few trucks were on the move, but not much else. The street corner groups that had been there earlier had broken up and gone home. About the only signs of life were a couple of rats working over a paper bag of garbage outside a closed Bar & Grill. But there were people alive, unless they slept to music. I felt almost as if I was in a movie with a musical score. Rock singers and guitar music were a part of the atmosphere.

I came to the building. I looked up and down the street. At that moment there wasn’t a soul in sight, not a single vehicle moving on the Avenue. I went into the dark vestibule and started up the trash-strewn stairway. As the street door closed behind me, the musical score came to an end. From up above I heard a muffled outbreak of laughter. I got to the second floor and knocked hard on the door of Diana’s apartment. I was sure I could hear voices inside, probably coming from the far end of the apartment’s long hallway.

Then the door opened and I found myself facing a very tall black man with a wide bright smile. He was wearing the uniform: striped bell bottoms, a scarlet shirt covered by a leather vest, a string of beads hung around his neck, and a leather headband worn around his forehead, and his Afro hair-do. He seemed amiable enough.

“Help you, Dad?” he asked.

I told him I was looking for Diana or Barry.