Requiem for a Realtor (17 page)

“I'm not surprised. I took my wife there one night.”

“Not many men are there with their wives.”

“Oh?”

“The better to sin in their hearts with Wanda Janski when she sings.”

“Is it the songs, the singer, the place, the booze?”

“Why choose? It's all of them, I guess.”

“I understand Stanley Collins liked the place.”

“He was an habitue. When he wasn't a son of an habitue. But speak well of the dead.”

“Wanda certainly does.”

“You talked with her?”

“I'm talking with everyone who could cast light on Stanley's death.”

“And so you're talking to me.”

“Who could have known him better than a partner?”

“Or less. A business partner is like a wife in many ways. I suppose any partnership becomes a marriage of convenience. Two people tied together, and you don't know which is keeping the other afloat and which is trying to drown them both.”

“Will you sink or swim without him?”

“I'll miss the rascal.”

“Who do you think did it?”

“I've been thinking of little else. Could it have been his ladywife? That was my first thought.
Cui bono?
”

“Is that Cher's husband?”

Sawyer thought about it. “Don't go on the stage, Horvath. As a comedian, you'd make a good cop.”

“You mean she would profit from his death.”

Sawyer nodded and what was left of his thin hair rose and fell on his freckled scalp. “She is going to be one merry widow with what Stanley left her.”

“He was that successful?”

“As a businessman? Ha. I'll answer my own question. I kept him afloat. If I had an ounce of brains I would have cut loose from him long ago.”

“Why didn't you?”

“Inertia. It would be bad publicity, largely because you can't tell the truth about such a breakup. Another way a business partnership is like a marriage. Divorces can be messy.”

“How long had you known him?”

“A lot longer than his wife had. We were in school together.”

“Where?”

“Marquette. Before that at a military school that no longer exists. We called it West Pointless. That was in Wisconsin, too. A boarding school.”

“Why real estate?”

“Someone said property is theft. The fact is it changes hands almost as much as money, and someone has to handle the transaction.”

“And take a cut?”

“Sometimes it's less than a laceration.” Sawyer winced. “I better not go on the stage, either. The agent is a middleman, trying not to get excluded. Did you ever take logic? Either a proposition is true or its opposite is, one or the other, no in-between. The law of excluded middle. You operate on the principle as a cop, whether you know it or not. You're talking to the people who knew Stanley, more specifically, those who were at the Rendezvous that night. Why? Of any of them it can be said, either he—or she—killed Stanley or he—or she—didn't.”

“That's not much help.”

“It doesn't tell you which is true, of course.”

“That's my job.”

“Logic only takes you so far.”

“You were there at the Rendezvous that night?”

“I was.”

“Anything you can tell me that would help?”

“I wouldn't want to point the finger at anyone.”

“Either they did it, or they didn't.”

Sawyer smiled. “You're a logician. Who would gain by it? His wife. I would, too, in a way. A burden I'd no longer have to carry. And there was an insurance policy on him. Who would lose? Again, I suppose his wife. He talked about divorcing her, but would he have? If he would have, she loses; if he wouldn't, Wanda.”

“Wanda.”

“He was nuts about her. So was I, for that matter.”

“You both have wives.”

“Don't rub it in.” But he smiled when he said it. “When you step into the Rendezvous, you step out of the real world. Time is unreal, the present is the past, it's neither day nor night. I think Stanley tried to convince himself that it was the real world, and that he loved Wanda and would spend the rest of his life being sung to.”

“How does the widow gain?”

“The famous inheritance. Come on, Lieutenant, surely you've learned of Stanley's great ace in the hole. If he was a drag on the company, if he involved me in his debts, there was always the golden promise. Some day he would be swimming in money and everything would be fine.”

“That's why the partnership never broke up.”

“I guess. You had to see the expression when he talked of turning fifty and coming into that money. Nothing seemed really serious by comparison. A few crushing debts, a bottom line you could touch with your feet, no matter. When Stanley hits the half-century mark, we're all in clover.”

“And now the widow will get it.”

“The widow will get it now.”

“Everyone's a lawyer.”

“Or a comedian. Or both.”

Cy had liked George Sawyer better as a logician. Either what he said was helpful or it wasn't. You could sink your teeth into a truth like that.

24

When Agnes Lamb knocked on a door in the line of duty whoever answered wore a look that said,
There goes the neighborhood.
Not because she was a cop, but because she was black. Agnes didn't mind. People who weren't really comfortable with her race went out of their way to be helpful. If it didn't harm them, that is. Phyllis Collins had the look of someone who would be helpful or die trying.

“I hate to bother you at a time like this.”

Phyllis sighed. “Everyone says that. The truth is, being bothered is a distraction.”

“You realize we are looking into the way your husband died.”

“I hope so. It's awful that someone can get run down like that.”

“I wonder who did it?”

“So do I! We're supposed to be forgiving, and maybe I could forgive something done to me, but running over Stanley is another thing.”

“And with his own car.”

“Isn't that strange?”

“More than strange. It can't very well be a hit-and-run if someone stole his car, ran him down, and returned his car to the parking lot of the Rendezvous.”

“Please don't ask me who I think did it.”

“And make you do my job? No, my questions are little ones. How many sets of keys were there to your husband's car?”

“How many?”

“Would there have been an extra set somewhere? Here, for example?”

“If there is, I don't know about it.”

“Where might they be if there was another set here?”

Mrs. Collins had little choice but to look around. Agnes went with her as she ransacked drawers in the kitchen, looked in the desk in the front hall.

“This is pointless,” she said to Agnes. “In the first place, I don't think there is another set of keys.”

“I spoke to the dealer from whom he bought the car.”

“You are thorough.”

“Thank you. He got two sets with the car. That's usually the case. You lose one key, you have a backup.”

“Maybe it's at his office.”

“We thought of that. She searched pretty thoroughly.”

“She?”

“Shirley Escalante, the office manager.”

“And found nothing?”

“Nothing.”

“Maybe Stanley lost the first set and was using the backup.”

“I never thought of that.”

Phyllis shrugged.

“How about his clothes?”

Phyllis looked abject. “People tell me I should get rid of his clothes, not become morbid and leave everything just the way it was, you know.”

“Did you get rid of the clothes?”

Phyllis looked at her. “I have the feeling you already know I haven't.”

“I did check Goodwill and St. Vincent de Paul's.”

“They're upstairs.”

“I'll be along in a minute. Is that a bathroom?”

It was. Phyllis went upstairs and Agnes opened and closed the bathroom door and then went back to the living room. There had been a small black purse on the shelf of the hall closet. She opened it wide and held it to the light, juggling the contents. Bingo. She closed the purse, went to the bathroom and flushed the toilet, then went upstairs.

Phyllis was seated on a bed, surrounded by men's clothes, weeping her heart out.

“Never mind. You should have a friend or relative with you when you do that. Let's go down. I've had a better idea.”

“What is it?”

“I'll tell you downstairs.”

“Well?” Phyllis said when they were in the living room again.

“When you went upstairs I looked in your purse.”

“You had no right to do that.”

“Mrs. Collins, the keys we've been looking for are in your purse.”

The woman's reaction surprised Agnes. Her laughter did not seem at all forced.

“Is that so? Well, let's take a look.”

She dumped the contents of her purse on the couch, shaking it to show it was empty. “These are my keys,” she said triumphantly, holding them up.

“And the other set?”

Her eyes dropped to the couch and another set of car keys. Her mouth opened in shock.

“You put them there!”

Agnes just looked at her.

“This is the purse I carried at the funeral. I almost never use it.”

“Maybe that's why you forgot about those keys.”

25

Hazel was a creature of moods, and at the moment her mood was triumphant. Several times she had caught Tuttle in a mammalian embrace, and once he had narrowly escaped being kissed by his Amazon secretary. In her eyes, he was no longer the inept and comical excuse for a lawyer, but a shrewd practitioner on to a good thing.

“Let me read your palm, Tuttle. It could tell us things.”

“No.”

He retreated into the inner office, bracing his shoulder against the closed door lest she follow. But there was only the sound of humming from the outer office. Tuttle glanced at his palm, wondering what it might reveal to the discerning eye. He didn't want to know. He had no curiosity about his destiny, not if it were readable in the creases of his palm. The recent turn of events was due to his own efforts, and he would not allow that some fated sequence had been unraveling.

The phone rang, and Hazel answered it in the outer office. A moment later there was a rap on his door. She looked in and whispered, “Your client.”

Tuttle picked up the phone, and almost immediately his ear was filled with the excited voice of Phyllis Collins. She seemed to want him to come immediately.

“Take it easy, take it easy. I'll be right there.”

Tuttle could hear Hazel breathing into the phone.

Phyllis said, “I'm being framed.”

“I'll be there in minutes.”

Hazel's expression was not what it had been when he hurried through the outer office. “What is she talking about?”

“You know as much as I do.”

“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

The old Hazel was back. Frailty, thy name is woman. Tuttle thundered down the stairs and drove to the home of Phyllis Collins.

She was a lot calmer face-to-face, showing him the purse from which the keys of Stanley's car had mysteriously emerged, the purse she had carried at Stanley's funeral.

“You were right to call me. I'll get on it right away.”

“You have to tell them I already gave you the keys.”

“But there was another set in that purse.”

“She must have put them there. Someone did.”

To divert Phyllis from the demand that he tell the police he had taken Stanley's keys from her, Tuttle encouraged her to think the worst of Agnes Lamb. Not that he believed she would have planted the keys.

“Who else could have put there there?”

She looked at him with narrowed eyes, their mascara ravaged by her angry tears. “Do you still have the keys I gave you?”

Tuttle nodded. He could feel them in his pocket and they seemed to grow, becoming the massive key to the dungeon in which he would be shut up if Phyllis decided to tell the police about the keys.

“Did she ask where you were the night your husband was killed?”

“I told her nothing. I remembered what you said.”

“Good. Anyway, what's wrong with a wife having keys to her husband's car?”

Phyllis obviously hadn't yet seen the significance of her having them.

“What did Officer Lamb say when the keys were found?”

“When I accused her of putting the keys in my purse, she said I could go with her downtown and lodge a formal complaint.”

“They're playing games.”

“I don't want to play games. I want to be left alone.”

“I guarantee it.”

And off he went to police headquarters downtown. As if to prove the urgency of his task he went through two red lights, horn blaring, without incident, and pulled into a handicapped spot in front of the courthouse. He was ten feet from his car when he realized he had left it running. He went back, turned it off, and headed for the courthouse steps, his car keys in his hand. Somehow they seemed an omen.

They were. He stood before Agnes Lamb's desk while she told him the story. She had found the keys to Stanley's car in Phyllis's purse.

He told Agnes Lamb he wanted to talk with Phil Keegan.

“What for? It's my case.”

“I'm surprised you didn't arrest her.”

Agnes made a face. “For having a set of keys to her husband's car?”

She seemed sincere. The point of this visit was to find out what significance was attached to the fact that Phyllis had a set of keys to Stanley's car. Agnes's disinterest reassured him.

“Where do you get your clients?”

“From central casting.”

Outside, a police tow truck had pulled up in front of Tuttle's car and was proceeding to rig it for towing. Tuttle ran to stop them.