A Handy Death

Chapter 5

Hank Ross pushed past the old-fashioned, large PX telephone switchboard that took up a good part of the space in the outer office of “Michael Gunnerson, Private Investigations,” one flight down from his own more commodious space, receiving an admiring glance from the shapely brunette seated there with much leg showing, and opened the door to Mike’s private office. The large detective was just finishing a cup of coffee; he crumbled the cardboard cup and tossed it in the general direction of the wastebasket. The collar around his thick, corded neck was open, his necktie askew. He looked up at his visitor and nodded somberly.

“Hello, Hank.”

“Hello, Mike. You’re losing your aim.” Ross bent down, retrieved the crumpled cup, and put it in the wastebasket. He straightened up. “You also look busy. And tired.”

“I am. Both,” Gunnerson said, and stared morosely at the man facing him. “And it’s all your fault, you know.”

“My fault?” Ross raised his eyebrows and pulled a chair from its place against the wall. He dragged it beside the desk, seated himself on it by straddling it, and studied the man across from him. “How my fault?”

“You’re hooked into this Dupaul case, aren’t you?”

“You know I am.”

“And you certainly don’t expect to get the man off without a good deal of help, do you?”

“You mean, without your help?”

“That’s what I mean.”

“And you’re so right,” Ross said with a smile. “But what’s that got to do with your being so tired even before the case has started? So far, all you’ve done is put a man up in Queensbury checking on background.”

“Maybe it hasn’t started for you,” Gunnerson said, and gestured wearily toward the stacks of papers that covered both his desk and the reference table behind him. “It certainly has for me. These are copies of the transcripts of the two Dupaul trials. Homework.”

Ross’s smile broadened.

“I seem to be about the only one who hasn’t read those transcripts.”

“Then you’re either smart or just plain lucky,” Gunnerson said gloomily. “They certainly won’t prove encouraging.”

“Why?” Ross asked, honestly wondering. “Steve Sadler gave me a rough breakdown of their contents, and it seemed to me there were plenty of holes in the prosecution case. I’m speaking of the first case, the Neeley affair, which is the only one we’re interested in.”

“You think so? But then, you didn’t read the transcript,” Gunnerson said. He frowned across his desk and tented his thick, hairy fingers. “Hank, if on top of everything I read in those transcripts, this boy was also involved in any way with that attempted prison break up at Attica the other day, and it looks like he was, then he ought to be put away for life in my estimation. For sheer stupidity, if nothing else.”

Ross smiled at him, a cool, gentle smile.

“Let me ask you a question, Mike. And if he wasn’t involved in that prison riot? And if the story he told in court at the time of his first trial was the truth?”

“The truth? That weak yarn? Come on, Hank!” Gunnerson shook his head. “When, after he tells this heartrending story about how the pretty lady wanted him so bad but, before he could figure out if he’d had too much fruit juice to hack it, along comes the big bad husband, and then the gun the lady fobs off on him just happens to be his own? Man! He ought to be writing for television serials!”

Ross studied his friend’s disgusted expression a moment and then leaned over the back of the chair. His voice was calm but deadly earnest.

“Mike, listen to me. If we’re going to work together on this, then we have to have a basis of understanding. If we’re not going to be at each other’s throats arguing all the time. And, of course, if we hope to win the case.”

He paused. Gunnerson was watching him closely. Ross nodded.

“And that basis of understanding must be to assume — completely, blindly, if you will — that the boy is innocent. Not of shooting Neeley, but of any intent to do more than save his life and that of the woman with him. In other words, that the story he told in court that day was the truth. Now,” Ross said, leaning back again, “starting from that assumption, where are we?”

“Out in left field without a glove,” Gunnerson said sadly. Suddenly he grinned, a wide-mouthed, big-toothed grin. He sat up in his chair. “All right, Hank, I’ll go along with you. We’ll assume that Dupaul’s story was the true one, and that all the others — mainly Neeley’s — are lies. It might be worthwhile at that. At least investigating it from that angle should clear some of the air, because, right or wrong, at least you’ll know where you stand on the case. If you know what you also stand to lose.”

“I’ll take the chance,” Ross said. “Do I have much choice?”

“Not a great deal,” Mike said, and rubbed his crew-cut, grizzled head. “And you have one expert on your side, too. Good old Sherlock. He said, ‘When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’” He grinned. “What he failed to say, of course, is that whatever remains may also be garbage.”

“Bite your tongue!”

“Consider it bitten. Now,” Gunnerson said, “let’s start all over. If Dupaul was telling the truth—”

Ross raised an admonishing finger.

“You’re forgetting our basic precept, Mike. Dupaul was telling the truth.”

“Pardon me. I meant since Dupaul was telling the truth, Neeley really walked into that apartment carrying a suitcase. He put it down and went to a dresser where he fumbled around and finally came up with a gun. Now, where did the gun and the suitcase disappear to?”

“Obviously they left the apartment with the woman.”

“And why would she take them?”

“Equally obviously, to discount the story she knew Dupaul would tell — the true story of what happened.”

“But, continuing to play Devil’s Advocate—” It was clear Gunnerson was enjoying himself “—why would she want to discount Dupaul’s story? Remember,” Gunnerson said, raising a finger for emphasis, “Dupaul was telling the truth. Neeley was there with a gun and he was going to kill the two of them. Dupaul was honestly convinced of that. Dupaul, therefore, saved the woman’s life. Now, why would she be so ungrateful as to remove the only evidence that would — or could — get her benefactor off the hook?”

Ross shook his head stubbornly.

“Let’s make a small modification in our basic premise that we believe Dupaul was telling the truth. We now believe Dupaul was telling the truth as he saw it! It will probably make a difference.”

“Fair enough,” Gunnerson agreed equably. “Still, why would the woman walk out with anything except herself? I can certainly understand her taking a powder from a murder scene to save herself a bucketful of grief, but why bother to load herself down with a lot of useless garbage like a suitcase and a gun? For ballast—?”

“Mike—”

“Let me go on. All right, maybe she’d take the gun. They come in handy sometimes. But even then, as the prosecutor said, why not the gun she gave the kid? At least she knew that one was loaded. And why the suitcase? She could have been seen with it. After all, a dame traipsing around lugging a suitcase in the middle of the night makes for easy identification. Not to mention guys offering lifts in cars, among other offers. Why didn’t she leave the thing where it was? Plus giving Dupaul a chance to save his neck?”

Ross stared at him a moment. He wrinkled his forehead in thought.

“When you put it that way, Mike, there can only be one reason, can’t there? Think about it.”

Gunnerson stared back. “A reason to walk out with somebody else’s suitcase? I don’t get it.”

“Think it over carefully, Mike.”

Gunnerson’s frown deepened. “I’ve thought it over carefully, and I still don’t get it.”

“Look at the whole picture from the beginning,” Hank said slowly. “A drunken kid in his teens, who — incidentally — had just come into a couple of hundred thousand dollars; a so-called chance meeting in a bar, a sexy woman, a bedroom scene; enter outraged husband back unexpectedly from a business trip; add a gun forced on the drunken kid; a shot; lots of blood around...” He stared at Mike coolly. “What does it sound like?”

“I know. It sounds like the old chicken-bladder swindle,” Gunnerson said grumpily. “Except for a few things.”

He started to tick them off on his fingers as Ross listened.

“One. In the swindle, the gun the drunk receives from the woman only holds blanks. This one held real bullets. Two. In the swindle the gun used is the one the woman takes away from the mark. This one was left and the other gun was taken away. Three. In the swindle, the woman in the case hustles the mark out of the room and gets in touch with him later — to blackmail him. In this case the mark remained and it was the woman who disappeared. And never got in touch with anyone since. Four. In the swindle the pseudo-husband usually has a plastic bag full of chicken blood in his mouth to bite on when the blank hits him. Here the only blood was his own. Five. In the swindle they always know who the sucker is and work a long time to set him up. In this case, to believe our truthful Billy Dupaul, he happened to meet the lady in a bar by accident.”

“You know better than that,” Ross said. “He happened to meet the lady the way the victim of a card trick happens to pick any card in the deck. The card is forced on him, and I’d bet the idea of that particular bar at that particular time was forced on Billy Dupaul in the same way. Suggested subtly, maybe, but definitely suggested.”

“By whom?”

“I’d like to know! Possibly the man Dupaul was talking to in that bar after he left the hotel and before he went to the Mountain Top Bar.”

“You’re reaching, Hank! How would the steerer know he’d go there?”

“As I said before, I’d enjoy knowing.”

“And how about the other points I raised?”

“Well,” Ross said, considering, “as far as the chicken blood is concerned, the woman could have cleaned that up as well.”

Gunnerson eyed him sardonically.

“She doesn’t know when the cops will get there; she’s in the room of a man she thinks is dead, killed violently; she has to get dressed — and now, in addition to carrying off a useless gun and a suitcase — so she won’t float, I imagine — she now stops to do a bit of housecleaning? And you wouldn’t call that reaching, Hank?”

“We don’t even know the swindlers bothered with chicken blood,” Ross said stubbornly. “Dupaul was so drunk he could have been convinced he really shot the man even without the evidence of blood.”

“A rather long chance for swindlers to take, don’t you think?” Gunnerson said. “Supposing Dupaul stuck to orange juice when he got mad?”

“We don’t even know whether there was chicken blood around or not,” Ross said, still unwilling to give up his argument. “After all, nobody looked for it. The police come in on a guy covered with blood. Are they going to stop to take samples to be analyzed of the blood, or are they going to forget it and rush him to the hospital? And in the hospital are they going to wipe his chin and send the scrapings to the lab to see if a chicken bled on him while he was damned near bleeding to death himself?”

He raised a hand abruptly, preventing Gunnerson from answering.

“I doubt it. Let’s look at it like this. There’s only one condition that seems to fit the facts. Let’s assume it started out as a simple swindle, and then something went wrong. Unaccountably, the gun wasn’t loaded with blanks, but with shells—” He grinned and shook his head. “No, I don’t like that. That would really be reaching...”

“That wouldn’t be reaching,” Mike said. “That would be plain falling down!”

“Let’s start over. Let’s assume it was a swindle as far as Raymond Neeley was concerned, but that as far as the woman known as Grace was concerned, it was a simple assassination attempt. How about that?”

“You promised not to reach,” Mike said reproachfully.

“That’s not reaching,” Ross said, insulted. “You admit the picture has all the earmarks of an old tried-and-true swindle. The poor sucker thinks he shot the husband and is open for blackmail from then on, or to go to prison for knocking off the husband of a woman he made sexual advances to. Not a very good spot to be in.”

“Wait a second—”

“You wait,” Ross said, his arguments firming themselves in his mind. “You raised certain legitimate objections; well, I’m answering them. If it was a swindle scheme and the gun the woman handed Dupaul had live ammunition in it, we can scarcely believe the ammunition got there by accident. So, who put it there? Neeley, even assuming he provided the gun? I’m inclined to doubt he would arrange to be shot. Dupaul? He says he knows nothing about the gun, and our scenario has him cast as Honest Harry, whose word is good as gold. Or platinum. So it has to be the woman—”

“If there was a woman,” Mike said sourly.

“Are we back to that?” Ross looked at his companion reproachfully. “There was a woman. Our client, Honest Harry, said so, and arguing is counterproductive. Now, if this woman put the ammunition in the gun, or even knew the gun was loaded when she handed it over, then she was suckering Billy Dupaul into killing Neeley for her.”

He paused a moment for Gunnerson to object, but when the big grizzle-headed man merely rubbed his head, Ross went on.

“As far as that goes, if her object was to kill Neeley, she wouldn’t care if the sucker had money or not. Anyone she could pick up in the bar, looking young and stupid and preferably drunk as a skunk, would do. Especially someone young enough to panic in a rough situation, like being caught in bed by an irate husband. In fact, considering it, on that basis it could be a pure accident that Dupaul was the sucker. It could have been anyone she picked up in the bar who fit the general description.”

“And this stranger would accidentally shoot Neeley with Dupaul’s own twenty-two-caliber pistol?” Gunnerson said sarcastically.

“I forgot about that,” Ross said and smiled, abashed. “Anyway, that argument wouldn’t have held much water in any event. Neeley would have picked the mark — the sucker — and it would have been a man with money. And he would have been in for a shock if he opened the door to the bedroom and saw a complete stranger in bed. No. The only conclusion we can come to—”

“If Dupaul wasn’t giving us drunken dreams. If Dupaul was telling the truth.”

“—since Dupaul is telling the truth, is that Neeley thought they were working the old chicken-bladder swindle on the boy, but that the woman had other ideas. She intended to use Dupaul to kill Neeley and arranged to set him up as target for tonight all the way. Gun included.” He smiled at Gunnerson brightly. “How does that sound?”

“Like the ravings of a tortured mind. How did she get her hands on Dupaul’s gun?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Ross said cheerfully. “Next?”

“Why didn’t Neeley blow the whistle on her during the trial? After all, the lady tried to have his head blown off, which is scarcely a nice thing for strangers to do, let alone partners. Why not put the so-and-so where she belongs? Behind bars for attempted murder?”

“And end up behind bars himself for attempted blackmail? Because that’s what the swindle amounts to, and that’s what would have happened. No,” Ross said and shook his head. “Neeley was in the bind. He couldn’t pull the rug out from under the woman without accusing himself. Which explains the story he came up with.”

There were several moments of silence as the two men contemplated the straw man they had constructed.

“Well,” Gunnerson said thoughtfully at last, “it makes a logical story, I suppose, although I’m sure that given enough time and a little mental effort I could probably come up with six different theories that would fit the facts as well as the one you’ve just dreamed up—”

Ross said, “Give me just one.”

“You haven’t given me the time. And I keep coming back to that old refrain — why did our friend Grace take that suitcase?”

“As I explained before,” Ross said patiently, “to further implicate Dupaul by making any story he told look like a fabrication. He was bound to tell how the husband came in with a suitcase and dropped it. By making it appear there was no suitcase, she puts young Dupaul more in the soup. Which is what she wants. What she does not want is for the jury to believe Dupaul and start looking for her.”

“And I still say, why take the suitcase?” Gunnerson said stubbornly. “Why take the chance of being seen on the street with it? All she had to do was stuff it into a closet, shove it way back on a rear shelf. What would be so unusual about the police finding a suitcase in an apartment? What would it have proved? Certainly not Dupaul’s story; it certainly wouldn’t have helped his case a hell of a lot. Unless—”

Gunnerson suddenly paused.

Ross said, “Unless what?”

“The suitcase must have contained something she wanted,” Gunnerson said slowly. “She didn’t take it to hurt Dupaul; she took it because she wanted it. Maybe it had her things in it. For a getaway.”

“No,” Ross said. “I’ll buy her taking the suitcase for itself, but not for a getaway. The swindle, in Neeley’s mind, was just beginning. They were a long way from getting their hands on the money. Neeley would have been suspicious if he were carrying a suitcase filled with her things, and there was certainly no reason for him to fill it with things of his own. No, the suitcase almost certainly had to be empty.”

“So, even more, why would she run out carrying an empty suitcase?” Gunnerson demanded. “Hell, that makes even less sense!”

“No, it doesn’t,” Ross said slowly. He smiled. “You know, Mike, you and I complicate things entirely too much. She took the suitcase for the very simple reason that it belonged to her. Neeley said in court he never owned a suitcase, which would have been an exceptionally stupid statement if it weren’t true. Therefore the suitcase belonged to the elusive Grace, and the reason she had to take it away was because it would have led to her identification. It probably had her initials on it, or something of that nature.”

Gunnerson looked at him with mock admiration.

“Mr. Ross, as they say in Arkansas, you are purely a genius! It’s wonderful the way you manage to find explanations for everything you want to fit into one of your theories.”

“You have a better explanation?”

“Well, no,” Gunnerson said, “but that’s not the problem. The problem is to prove your explanation.”

Ross grinned at him.

“That’s your problem, not mine.” His smile faded. “Which won’t be too easy after eight years. And after nothing was dug up on the woman even at that time to help Billy Dupaul prove his story.”

“Well,” Gunnerson said, serious now, “facts are the one thing that don’t age and don’t erode. They didn’t find the woman when the trail was fresh for the simple reason that they didn’t look for her. They didn’t believe she existed. Now us, we believe she exists, don’t we? Sure we do. You just told us she did. Therefore we look.”

“Where?”

“An excellent question,” Gunnerson said. “Actually, I have a few ideas just based on our discussion here today. And that transcript you haven’t bothered to read, of course.”

“There’s one more thing for us to remember,” Ross said slowly. “It may be true that Neeley couldn’t denounce the woman in court, but I seriously doubt that he ever forgot or forgave what she did to him. Maybe the police didn’t look for her very hard, but I’ll bet he did.”

“If she existed, I’m sure he did, too,” Gunnerson said in bland agreement. “In fact, that already occurred to me. Nor do we know he didn’t find her. Which only means that if he could, we should be able to.”

“And if he looked and didn’t find her?”

“Then just hope we’re luckier.”

“I hope,” Ross said, and came to his feet. “Well, you have your target for tonight. Prove there is — or was — a woman who called herself Grace Neeley, at least for one night, and then find her.”

“That’s all?”

Ross grinned. “Then all you have to do is prove she was involved in the swindle and tried to kill Raymond Neeley. Which will get our client off the hook.”

Gunnerson’s tone was sarcastic.

“After which why don’t we prove the twenty-two pistol really wasn’t the one Dupaul brought down from Queensbury, but belonged to a long-lost grand-uncle, also named John Emerich, who lost it in a poker game one night out West to a dancehall hostess whose granddaughter happened to be named Grace?”

Ross laughed. “It would certainly help if you could!”

“Thanks,” Gunnerson said sourly. His eyes came up to study Ross’s face. “How far can we go on this one?”

“Well,” Ross said, “you know who’s paying our client’s bill. I’d say you can go as far as you need to on this one.”

“Right,” Gunnerson said. “Mr. Quirt of the Mets. The only thing I don’t know is why he’s paying.”

“I don’t either,” Ross admitted, and walked to the door. His hand found the knob and twisted it. “Does it make much difference?”

“It might,” Gunnerson said slowly, and frowned at the man in the doorway. “Hank, my people were the ones who dug up that glossy of Billy Dupaul signing the Met contract that Steve Sadler showed you. With Charley Quirt grinning like a hyena behind the boy.”

Ross frowned back. “So?”

“So they dug up a lot of things while they were digging,” Gunnerson said slowly. “Like Mr. Charles Quirt didn’t make the slightest effort to help young Dupaul eight years ago.”

“I know,” Ross said. “He couldn’t. He was out of the country.”

“I hear they’d invented the telephone by that time,” Gunnerson said sarcastically. “Don Ameche stayed up one whole night to do it.”

Ross stared at him.

“What are you driving at?”

“I’m driving at this,” Gunnerson said flatly. “Mr. Quirt wasn’t out of the country when the scout’s report on Billy Dupaul was put in. He wasn’t out of the country when the bonus contract was discussed. What I’m trying to say, Hank, is this — Mr. Charley Quirt’s sudden interest in Billy Dupaul’s welfare is very interesting. When the contract came up, Charley Quirt fought like the devil against it. He didn’t want Billy Dupaul on the Mets or near the Mets, good player or not!”