Pardon My Body (7 page)

I
T WAS ELEVEN O'CLOCK
in the morning when I got out of bed, feeling as though I hadn't been there more than a half hour. The homicide boys, the fingerprint experts, the photoflash men and a couple of criminal lawyers from the D.A.'s office had been camping out in my apartment until 3:00 a.m. They had asked all the questions in the book, taken all my suits out and put them back, looked under the carpet and covered all the show surfaces with graphite powder. They didn't tell me whether they had found anything. They didn't have to tell me. I knew damn well they hadn't. The only thing you could say was that somebody had bumped Bule, carried him up the fire escape and dumped him in my closet. If the idea was to throw a scare into me, it had. When I got into bed I had carefully locked all the doors and windows, oiled and cleaned an old Luger and borrowed some shells from O'Cassidy, who didn't even ask if I had
a licence—though I had. I woke up three times in what was left of the night and every time I found my hand under the pillow hanging on to the Luger.

I awoke with a headache which appeared to have started in my feet, getting steadily worse on the way up. My mouth seemed to be using a tongue from a hobo's cast-off boot. I put eight helpings of coffee into the percolator and took a hot bath and a cold shower while it was brewing. I began to feel part human by the time I had shaved. The coffee and three aspirins settled it. I could bear conversation now, if nobody spoke higher than a whisper.

I skipped breakfast and walked all the way to Central Park. It was early fall but the day seemed to have strayed in from summer. I sat in the sun watching the young matrons with their baby carriages and the old men who had nothing to do and wished they were young again and the shop clerks who strolled to and fro around lunchtime.

Next thing I knew I was waking up again. My watch said it was three-fifteen. I had slept two and a half hours. I was hungry now but it was the wrong time to eat. I went swimming instead. I hiked up to an under-glass plunge bath where I go to keep myself fit and kid myself I'm still young—until the twenty-year-olds start doing double flips off the fifteen-foot
springboard. But, hell, I can kid myself every once in a while, can't I?

The only other swimmer was a tall, olive-skinned girl with long black wet hair which she didn't bother to tuck under her cap. She swam with an effortless crawl and gave me a friendly eye twice but I wasn't in the mood for swimming-pool small talk. I'd have passed up Esther Williams right then. Besides, I had a date. I'd forgotten it, but the presence of the longhaired girl in the two-piece swimsuit brought it back.

I climbed out, towelled and dressed, and bought myself coffee and frankfurters at a drugstore counter on the way back to my apartment. By the time I had changed my clothes it was time to get the convertible and keep that date.

I got stalled in a traffic pile-up but I finally made the Wall Street country with five minutes to spare. I pulled into the side and killed the motor. I didn't go into the office block. I stayed in the car smoking a pipe and leafing through the afternoon editions. The evening editions had Bule on page one in a thirty-six point headline with over half a column of text from which it appeared that Detective-lieutenant O'Cassidy had everything under control and would be arresting somebody any minute now. Like hell he would. O'Cassidy is one smart operator but even O'Cassidy
has to have a clue, and at this moment there wasn't one that pointed any place in particular.

Then Miss Julia Casson stepped through the swing doors and moved over the sidewalk. I stuck my head through the window and said, “Hello.” She was wearing a Russian ermine coat which swung open to announce a soft woolen two-piece in pastel blue. After that came mile-long legs in nylons and ending in black court shoes. She had a large blue saucer poised on top of her magnificent mane. She looked cool, composed, competent and bedworthy but I decided not to tell her. She knew it already.

“Where to, big man?”

“You'll like this,” I said. “We're going to the Village.”

She smoothed her two-piece in order to draw attention to her legs, but she was a little late for that.

Then she said, “Not the Oval room at the Ritz Carlton, then?”

“No.”

“Or the Persian Room at the Plaza?”

“No.”

“Or even the El Morocco?”

“No.”

“Okay,” she said, “what do we do—dig some Dixieland at Eddie Condon's?”

“We're not going to Eddie's tonight,” I said. “There is a new place that's opened nearby. We're going to try that.”

She got out a cigarette and eyed me sideways. “You don't look the kind of man who would go for that hot jazz music.”

“You never can tell,” I said. “Maybe it reminds me of my youth.”

“Your misspent youth?”

“I fear not.”

“What a shame. It's time you had some fun, big man.”

“Yeah,” I said, “maybe. But not just this minute.”

The drive was as trying as it always is in this city. I went out of the way to buy tobacco and again to see if a detour would speed things up. It didn't. Fifty-second Street was dead except for Jimmy Ryan's, bravely reminding you that this was once the hottest street in jazz. We drove south on West Third Street, made a couple of right-hand turns and we were there.

It was a little club dispensing better-than-most food and jazz of the kind that would stack up to Mr. Condon's standards, even though the seven-piece didn't have the benefit of Wild Bill Davidson's resounding brass. The place had been opened by Marty Alton on part of the fortune he had inherited from his recently
lamented father and Marty had ideas about cooking and music. I thought it would be all right and it was.

The horseshoe bar had the most glittering array of hard liquor I had seen. It also had beer on draught, which was all right by me. The floor was the usual stamp-sized affair but nobody bothered to dance. The seven-piece was located on a platform which rose only a foot from the floor and the boys were giving out that kind of noise. That was all right by me, too.

The place was already more than three-parts full but we wedged ourselves into a table for two and ordered porterhouse steaks with all the trimmings.

I said, “I found a dead man in my clothes closet last night.”

Her cigarette stopped half-way to her mouth, and her pupils widened out as if somebody had shot them full of atrophine.

“A sharp little guy named Harry Bule,” I went on. “It's in the afternoon papers.”

“I haven't read them.” She paused a moment, then: “Is…it something connected with…the…”

I said it was. I told her. She didn't speak, but when I finished she shivered a little.

“Somebody,” she said at last, “wants you out of all this. Canting, the sybaritic gentleman with the glass furniture?”

“It could be.”

Suddenly she reached out a hand and let her fingers touch mine. Her eyes looked at me unwinkingly.

“Why don't you?”

“You mean quit?”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “Why should you go on with it? You don't want to put your life in danger for the sake of writing a book. It's too absurd.”

“Well,” I said, “when I gave up newspaper work to write, the idea was merely to look around for some current color and marry it to my own knowledge and background. I guess I didn't expect to fly straight into a series of killings. The trouble is, I'm an inquiring guy. Maybe I shouldn't—but I'd like to see what comes next and the only way I can see it is to stay on the case until it cracks.”

“Or until some hood cracks your basal structure with a bludgeon.”

“Maybe.”

“Dale, don't go on with it—please.”

She said it so violently I stared at her. “Why should you worry?” I asked.

Her gaze fell, then peeked up. “It could be that I like you,” she said simply. “I wouldn't like to see you hurt.”

“Look,” I told her, “too much has happened for me to turn it up now. When they start leaving dead guys
in your closet to scare you off you just naturally get damn curious. I'm so damn curious I mean to find out what makes Sammy run if it takes me all winter.”

Then the food came. I looked across a half-pound steak and said, “Have you seen Cornel Banningham?”

“Yes, he landed this afternoon, came straight to the office and went into conference.”

“What's he like?”

“Tall, dark, slim. Brown eyes. Good-looking if you don't mind men who have slack mouths and the kind of morals that go with them.”

“Smart guesser, huh?”

“I can tell.”

“What else?”

“Oh, I guess he's pleasant enough. Dresses well, too. English clothes. Immaculate cut. Quiet, no tie-clasps or silver bracelets.” She broke off. “What are you looking at?”

“I am looking,” I said, “at a tall, slim guy wearing English clothes of immaculate cut. He's just walked in. I can't see whether he wears a bracelet…”

She was following my gaze.

“That,” she said, “is Mr. Banningham Jr.”

He was alone and standing at the entrance to the bar with an air of insolent grace, letting his eyes run casually over the crowded floor. Suddenly, they
stopped running around. They had focused on Miss Julia Casson, and the heir to the Banningham dough and the Banningham troubles was on his way to us with that kind of easy assurance which makes for a straight passage through the most crowded restaurant.

“Waiter,” he called, “an extra chair, I think.”

A chair appeared apparently from nowhere and Mr. Banningham became the uninvited guest.

He held Miss Casson's hand fractionally longer than was strictly necessary and said, “Suppose you introduce me?”

“I like to introduce myself,” I said. “Dale Bogard is the name. I'm trying to make a living writing books and getting mixed up in murder instead. I also drink too much, smoke too much and do not believe this is necessarily the century of the common man.”

Banningham let his eyelids flicker. He took the English cigarette out of his long lips with studied slow motion.

“Thanks for telling me,” he said. He had the kind of hybrid accent you acquire through long years of living away from your native country. It was both American and English at the same time. It would be worth plenty to him in the Social Register.

He seemed to be thinking for a moment. Then he
said, “I drink too much, smoke too much and don't give a damn whose century it is just so long as Cornel Banningham has a plush seat in the stalls. I should add that I also take some pride in possessing most of the other orthodox vices.”

“That's fine,” I said. “Don't let us keep you from them.”

He looked at me hard. I seemed to be catching long hard looks all the way up in this case. But I knew he wasn't bothered.

“I like your sort,” he said. “What's your interest in these killings?”

“Killings is right. Which ones are you thinking of in particular?”

He didn't answer at once because the seven-piece had cut loose on those
Farewell Blues,
with a thirty-six-bar finish which reminded me of the fabulous Eddie Lang and Joe Venuti jazz disc the collectors still rave about. When it was over you felt as if you had sailed into a lagoon of silence, though pretty nearly everybody in the joint was talking simultaneously.

Finally, he said, “Grierson's, of course—but, more particularly, my father's.”

“You don't believe he committed suicide?”

“My father was a tough old warhorse. There
wasn't a single reason why he should do that. But you haven't answered my question.”

“What was that?”

He leaned forward a little. “Just that you seem to be mixed up in this some way and I'd like to know why.”

“I got mixed up in it by accident. Now my curiosity is aroused.”

“Some people seem to take a poor view about that.”

“Meaning?”

He shrugged. “I read the papers. Somebody left a dead man in your apartment. They must have a powerful reason.”

“Maybe they're playing the wrong hunch,” I said. “The way things are I don't have a clue.”

“But you think you will have?”

“If I stick around long enough.”

“Mr. Bogard,” said Julia, “is a very persistent man. In some ways.” She didn't have any expression on her face as she said it, but I thought she was having a tough time trying not to giggle.

Suddenly, Cornel Banningham seemed to have made up his mind about something. He said, “A preliminary check on the firm's affairs shows some pretty serious deficiencies in Grierson's end of the business. Seventy-five thousand dollars, in fact. If my father had found out about that he would want to know plenty.”

It was my turn to hand out one of those looks. “You mean your old man was bumped by Grierson, which would explain how Grierson came to be out in Connecticut the other night?”