The Player on the Other Side (12 page)

‘
Poochie!
'

‘Just a figure of speech, like, baby. Now about my cousin. I got real sick of that Robert sitting on his big fat money — yeah, and on a lot of mine as well! — looking down his nose at me
whatever
I did. Am I a poor relative? Am I old enough to do what I want?'

‘You're not
old
, Poochie.'

‘But all the same, it's like he ain't dead yet. It's worse. Cops hanging around. Old Emily shoving her nose in where Robert's used to be. I can't even bring a chick to my own house, I got to come to a fleabag like this! You don't think I'll even get to sign the bill downstairs without an argument, do you? And besides, that bastid Archer.'

‘Who?'

‘Some bastid college wise kid Robert hired,
he's
still there and, mind you, watching the estate — watching
my
money. It ain't like I didn't talk nice to him, y'understand. Why, I could lower the boom on him so fast! — but I never, and I got more gold coming to me than he ever saw or ever will. “See it my way, old pal,” I says to him, “and you'll never regret it.” When I didn't have to ask him a-tall, I could of told him! But you think he could see it my way? Hell, no. “I'm just as sorry as I can be, Mister York,”' Percival minced and mimicked, ‘“there isn't a thing in the world I can do. It's up to the Board of Trustees.”'

‘But, Poochie, it
is
up to the Board of —'

‘He could of been on my side at least, f'evven's sake,' Percival whined. ‘It's bad enough I got to go to some college jerk to try and spring a few grand to pay some bills without I got to walk off with my tail between my legs. He'll be sorry he ever saw the day. What's left in the bottle?'

The blonde handed him the bottle and he looked not at it but into it, as one does into a television screen. ‘One thing he'll never get the chance to do again is stop my credit. Stop my credit in a store, the bastid. How do you like the nerve?'

‘Archer did that?'

‘Naaah, not Archer, my squash-head cousin Robert, and it serves him right. Even my bookie.' In mounting rage, Percival gripped and shook the bottle like a hated throat. ‘So much as a pair of socks I got no credit. Right down to the damn liquor store!' he shouted, raising the bottle to hurl it across the room while the girl squeezed her eyes shut and put her hands over her ears. But when after a moment she opened her eyes, he was still sprawled on the bed, the bottle was still raised, and his own eyes were screwed down tight. His high forehead shone with the sweat of rage. Slowly he lowered the bottle and drank hard and set it cautiously on the night table.

‘You don't want to get so worked up, Poochie,' the blonde said with anxiety.

He opened his eyes and gradually brought her overlapping curves into focus. ‘Six months to wait for that money and sometimes I don't know if I can make it. Tell you something, long as them two are still breathing, that spooked creep Myra and that Emily' — he spat on the threadbare rug — ‘I got to wait the whole six months. The hell, I wish they'd get their heads squooshed, too. Like to sqoosh 'em myself. Fact, maybe I will.'

‘
Poochie!
'

‘You think I wouldn't? Old Robert gets his head squished and he can't run down no more of my credit accounts, can he?'

Surprisingly, she said, ‘Poochie, he never.'

‘Who never? What are you talking?'

‘It wasn't him. Lenny told me.'

‘Lenny who? Told you what?'

‘Lenny Mauchheimer, he's the manager at that cut-rate bottle store of yours. He said it was your sister Emily.'

‘I know it was my sis —
cousin
, damn it! I woo'n't have the likes of her for a sister, I'd of beat her brains out in her crib. Sure it was Emily. But Robert put her up to it.'

‘Lenny says no. Lenny says the way she tells him off he gives odds it's her own idea.'

‘Oh, God, it figures, it figures. That Robert, now, he was a blocker, know what I mean? Try something he stops you. But he never
started
nothing. Emily, she's a starter, got more goddamn guts than a brass bucket of chitlins. She's all the time scared I might get sued and somebody grabs a lien on the whole estate. Sure, it was Emily from the start. Robert, I apologize.'

‘You said there's enough to handle
anything.
'

‘I told you she's crazy. How do you like that? Stops my accounts. Bluenose ol' frigate wouldn't know how to spend it anyways. Lemme check,' he said suddenly.

He reached for the phone, dialed for an outside line, then dialed again. While he waited for the ring his whole being seemed to change. He still sprawled in the bed; he still presented an ungracious view of pigeon shoulders, red eyes, hairy chest and scrawny lower ribs resembling spread hands pressed into risen dough. Yet when he spoke his voice was resonant, his diction perfect, his accent Harvard — somewhere between beginning-senior and postgraduate consistency; such a voice must have behind it entire walls of morocco-bound volumes.

As she watched, the blonde slowly raised her enameled hands to her mouth and covered it with one, with both, and permitted the escape of a single tiny nicker from her Swedish nostrils. Percival York, in the midst of his performance, gave her a broad wink which detracted not, by the shadow of a subjunctive, from it.

Into the phone he said, ‘Mr. Pierce? Ah. This is Mr. Tomlinson of Swath, Tomlinson, Sweggar and Peach. In a routine survey of the Nathaniel York, Senior, accounts, we find here a notation that Mr, ah, Percival York has canceled his credit arrangement with you. He has? Pending, ah, settlement? Very sound — yes, indeed. He sent you an advisory, of course? I beg your —? Oh, a messenger.
Not
a messenger? My goodness. Eh, eh, eh.' (It was at this lofty and controlled expression of mirth that the blonde forcibly corked her wide mouth and halved her hilarity down to a nasal susurrus.) ‘Miss Emily, of course. Eh, Eh! Still very sound. Good day to you, sir, you stoopid bastid.'

Percival hung up, and the blonde's squawk of merriment fused with his enraged shout: ‘How you like that, the stinkin' ol'
bitch
? You know what I'm gonna do to her? Oh, God, I can't think of anything bad enough; I'd like to cut her up some way she could watch herself bleed to death. Wait a minute.'

He snatched the phone again, dialed outside, then another number. This time, when he spoke, there descended on him a mien so furtive, so seedy, that even on him it showed. His voice was harsh and quiet and issued from far back in his throat, and his almost nonexistent lips moved for lavial sounds only — nothing else.

‘Freddy Merck here. Yeah, Detroit. Hey, I got a placement, second and third races Goshen. Long distance, that there Percy York. Yeah, Percy York. Why he calls long distance is his business but I hear a word around, don't play him, he's got a cousin Robert York sends a cousin Emily York around telling lay off or else. So I stalls him, he's calling back. Whadda ya know?'

Quite easily audible throughout the dingy room, the receiver answered back with a quiet harshness to match Percival York's mimicking, though its sibilants were cigar-squelched and its intonations archetypical Brooklynese. ‘Whaddaya mean you hear a word around? I myself phoned you the first one practically about this hatchet-puss Emily York barged in here and lays it on the line. And where'd you get this b.s. about this cousin Robert York sending her? Listen, Merck,
nobody
sends that broad; she makes trouble around here all the time. So what the hell's with you? Hey? Is this Merck? Hey! Who the hell is this?'

‘This,' said Percival in the episcopal tones of some giant cathedral bell, ‘is God, and it were well you mended your ways.' He hung up with a new roar of indignation at Emily York's duplicity, which clashed in the air with the blonde's screek of laughter.

‘The dirty old two-face bluenose
bitch!
'

‘Oh, Poochie, you shouldn't talk like that. You never hurt a fly.'

‘A fly,' raged Percival York sententiously, ‘never hurt me.'

14

Strategy

Ellery rang, and waited, and rang again; but he could only bring himself to wait four seconds or so. He had his thumb on the bell for the third time when the door opened and a small straight lady in her early fifties, wearing an impossibly white apron, put out her hand and said, ‘All
right
already. Don't the bell geschplit,' in tones of the hex and the schnitzelbank, of Appelbachsville and Perkasie, land of the noodle and strudel.

‘Miss York?' said Ellery. ‘Miss Myra York?'

‘She's not in,' said the small lady, ‘and she is out, besides,' and she began to close the door. Ellery deftly blocked her.

‘You'll be Mrs. Schriver.'

‘Ach,' she said, ‘I will, will I?'

‘I've got to see her,' said Ellery. ‘It's urgent.'

‘She nobody never sees and your name I don't care what is.'

‘My name is Queen.'

‘No, it ent,' Mrs. Schriver said flatly.

There had been times when Ellery had desired to conceal his identity; he had seldom had to assert it. It was a strange experience. ‘I am so!'

‘No, you
ent
,' the housekeeper said, and shoved at the door. Ellery shoved back. ‘Mr. Queen was already here whoever-you-are.'

‘That was my father!' Ellery cried through the narrowing doorway — she could push very hard. ‘I'm Ellery —
Ellery
Queen.'

She opened the door and leaned close enough to him to scan his hairline and eyes. ‘By gummitch, it could be. A very nice man your father is. Why he calls you Ellery, Ellery?'

Ellery let it go. ‘Mrs. Schriver, is Miss Myra all right? I think she might be in danger.'

Mrs. Schriver bridled. Though her hair was pulled back so hard from her brow that her forehead gleamed with tension, she conveyed the impression of hackles rising. Her blue eyes leveled, and above them appeared two angry eaves. ‘From
who
, danger?' And this, thought Ellery, is the bodyguard's bodyguard — if she cares about the body in question, and she does.

‘I'm not sure,' he said candidly. ‘But I'd rather be careful and not need to, than need to and be careless.'

Approvingly she swung the door wide. ‘Come in.'

He entered and in one swoop took in the neat wild miscellaneous character of the place. ‘Where is she?'

‘In her room —' The intonation of the housekeeper's Pennsylvania Dutch voice was such that the three words were incomplete; yet what more there might have been was snipped off and silenced by a firm quick clamping of the lips. ‘You have her to see, mister, or to see her you want? Which?'

Ellery smiled. ‘What I must do is make sure that she's all right, and that she stays all right. But I want to see her, too.'

‘But she is all right.' Mrs. Schriver was still weighing the issues carefully.

‘You know what happened to Robert York, Mrs. Schriver.'

‘
Gott.
' She flashed a look upward, either at Myra York's bedroom or higher. Suddenly she said, ‘I will see if you can come up.'

‘Is Miss Drew with her?'

From the stairs Mrs. Schriver said, ‘No, Miss Drew is out the dog walking,' and went up at an energetic pace.

Ellery grinned and glanced about. To his left he caught a glimpse of the marble head of a laughing girl, and he stepped into the parlor to admire it, which he did wholeheartedly. He was reflecting that there ought to be a law, or at least an artistic convention, demanding that all things as beautiful as this be mounted against such a horrendous background of gimcrackery as was in this room, when he became aware of upstairs voices — one quietly, steadily pleading, the other trembling on the limits of control and, somehow shockingly, even quieter than the other.

‘He can't come up. I won't go down. I'll never see him again. I knew he'd come. I won't see him. I said I'd never speak to him again and I won't. Send him away. I won't —' On and on and on, in a smooth terrible cooing, while the Dutch voice soothed and assured: ‘Shoosh,
Liebchen
, him it is not. You believe me, honest. Shoosh. He is going, he is gone already. And besides, it is not him at all.' That the Dutch voice gradually won, Ellery detected by the waning of both voices, until at last they were only troubled breathing and solicitous breath.

He stood in the foyer for a long time listening to what he could hear and then for what he could not hear — so respectful of the silence that he was afraid to creak a floorboard or a toe-joint lest he cause that dreadful whispering hysteria to come to life again.

At last Mrs. Schriver came downstairs, making not a sound. Very close to Ellery she said, ‘She is all right now, but she is not all right.'

Ellery got the message. ‘As long as she's all right,' he nodded. ‘I obviously came at the wrong time, Mrs. Schriver. Stay with her as much as you can. Take care of her.'

‘Ach, I will,' she muttered, and showed him to the door. At the door, the housekeeper said suddenly, ‘Miss Myra thinks I say Mallory. You come again back, hear?'

‘Mallory?' Ellery said swiftly, but she had shut him out. He shook his head and stepped into York Square.

The last of the day was merging with the first glow of the city's night. Ellery glanced with curiosity at the old-fashioned street lamps, little and low and gleaming yellow, one to each facet of the park's diamond shape, and each precisely opposite the entrance to one of the absurd Disneyland castles. The lamps had been electrified, but whimsically, so that they duplicated their gaseous past, making themselves merely visible without importantly illuminating anything. If Robert's killer were the sniper-from-the-shadow's type, Ellery mused, the little park wouldn't be bad for his future operations.