Catch the Brass Ring

CHAPTER TWELVE

I THREADED my way through the thinning crowds on Surf Avenue and almost found myself saluting a bright-looking young second lieutenant who was wearing a hundred-buck pair of pinks. Habit, mostly. But he also reminded me of Bert Archer and I wallowed in a funk again, ignoring the hawkers and garish lights and beer, taffy and popcorn and salt water smells.

And the other smells, less wholesome, at my hotel. The desk clerk wasn’t on duty, so I peered at the mail slots behind his desk and saw a slip of paper wedged into mine. Leaning over the counter, I plucked it out, unfolded it and held it under the single bulb hanging from the ceiling.

More meaningless intrigue? I shrugged and decided I’d wait up with a cigarette or two to see if Ben came back. I dropped the note on my dresser and groped for the light cord. I thought I’d left the room locked but wasn’t sure. Anyway, if the desk clerk had opened it for Becky, he could have opened it for Ben, too. On went the light, swinging back and forth because I’d given the chain a hearty yank, and shoving shadows back and forth across the room.

Ben had returned, all right. Ben was lying on my bed, but not waiting for me or anyone. Ben was stretched out on his back in a sopping mess of blood. The bedspread was full of blood and the cheap patterned rug on the floor. If that much blood had been taken from three men and not just one, all much bigger than Ben, they would have been dead. But I reached for his pulse automatically and verified what I already knew before reaction could set in and leave me feeling a little sick. Then I gagged and realized what I hadn’t realized before. The place smelled like a slaughterhouse. Still gagging but getting a cigarette lit I went down to the desk and picked up the phone and dialed the operator and asked for police. The sleepy-eyed desk clerk appeared from somewhere in back and said, “I’ll have to bill you for that call.”

“I want to talk to you,” I mumbled, “so don’t go away.” Then I heard three buzzes before a voice answered:

“Desk. Sergeant Iole.”

“This is Gideon Frey calling.” I gave him the Surf Avenue address. “There’s a murdered man in my room.”

I could almost see Sergeant Iole’s ears prick up. “Don’t touch anything. Just wait right there for us, Mr. Frey. A dead man?”

“Murdered,” I said, “unless he stuck a knife in his own back.”

There was a click. Sergeant Iole and his boys, or maybe just his boys, were on the way.

“Did you say… a dead man?” the desk clerk demanded.

“Yeah. Listen, someone gave you a note for me earlier tonight.”

The clerk examined the mail slot and then shrugged.

“I’ve got it,” I said. “Did he come here alone?”

“All alone. Is he… the dead man?”

“Did he go out and then come back?”

“He went out, all right. I didn’t see him come back.”

“I didn’t see you when I came in,” I pointed out.

“Well, I might have gone in back for a while, but I didn’t hear anyone.”

“Listen, friend, a man’s been murdered tonight. Understand what that means?”

“I didn’t see him come back. I didn’t see anyone else come in. Murdered, right here in this hotel?”

I looked around at the paint peeling on the walls, at the stained, frayed rug, at the dirty counter top and the desk clerk with a thick stubble of beard on his face and bloodshot eyes and liquor on his breath. “Yeah,” I said. “Murder at the Waldorf-Astoria.” Then I went back to my room to wait for the cops.

The slaughterhouse smell was still there. Through the thin yellow shade, red neon glared on and off, on and off. I’d pulled the light switch mechanically when I went down to the desk, so the room was alternately bathed in lurid crimson and darkness. In the crimson light the blood on the bed was a pool of gleaming ebony black and Ben Lutz’s gaunt features stared straight up at the ceiling, the eyes wide but showing only a crescent of pupil where they had rolled up, the lips slack and pulled away from the teeth as if Ben had been on the point of screaming.

I sat there in the beat-up chair and stared at the body, thinking maybe it would convince me to leave cop business to cops. But Bert had been killed first and now Ben. Next time it could be Sheila or Karen or me and I still wasn’t sure why. I knew this much: it had something to do with the manufacture of home brew at Tolliver’s Funland, probably on a large scale since a lot of people seemed to be involved. But I thought that stuff was strictly of historical interest.

Then I got to thinking. Damn Allison Tolliver and Gregory Tolliver and the Long Island Railroad and points in between. If I hadn’t gone out to Port Washington today Ben Lutz would have found me at Funland. He’d be alive right now. Hell. If they were gunning for him they were gunning for him. If not tonight, tomorrow. Hell again, and damnation. Ben had left a note for me. Something important, he’d written, and signed his death warrant. Score another point for Gideon Frey. If I hadn’t acted like a big wheel for Ben, rolling along on the highway of no-shift cock-and-bull, he might still be alive.

The cops stalked in civilly enough, and each man went about his job as if he’d been trained precisely for it in a carbon copy of my third-rate hotel room. Shorty examined the corpse and vicinity. Freckles probed about the room for anything untoward. I could have told him he’d chalk up a big fat zero for the side of the law but decided to let him find out for himself.

An older man with the three stripes of sergeant on his sleeve questioned me routinely. The fourth cop was Billy Drake. Good old pretty boy had been notified since Homicide was horning in on his territory.

His job was a little different from all the others. He stood guard over nothing in particular and stared in the mirror. He frowned at himself, then let a smile curl his lips. He straightened his tie and tried the smile again, but saw my reflection watching him and flushed an angry, not an embarrassed, scarlet.

“Drake,” the sergeant said. “You go find a phone and call for a man from the M.E.’s office. It looks like murder, all right.” He turned a lined face on me and let me see how too much murder and too much crime and too much depravity had hooded his eyes and made the lips thin and cynical. “Did you know the dead man, Mr. Frey?”

“Casually. His name is Ben Lutz. Owns a bar a couple of blocks down on Surf Avenue.”

The sergeant merely grunted, but I was wrong about Freckles. He chalked up more than a big fat zero. He found Ben Lutz’s note to me on the dresser, read it, scratched sandy-colored hair and gave the note to his sergeant.

“You know the deceased casually, eh, Frey? See this?” The sergeant offered me the note, but I waved it away.

“Of course I saw it. How do you think it got here? It was waiting for me at the desk when I came in.”

“Then how come the dead man was here in the room?”

“He must have come back a second tune.”

“We’ll check with the desk clerk.”

“He didn’t see him come back, sergeant.”

“That’s interesting.”

“Hell,” I said. “It’s just a note.”

“In which Lutz said he wanted to see you about something important. Now he’s dead. What did you mean when you said you knew the deceased casually?”

“I had a beer in his bar every now and then. We…”

“Hey, wait a minute! Aren’t you the guy who said Bert Archer didn’t like steam baths? You turned up the day he was murdered. It must be pretty dangerous for people to talk to you, Frey. They get killed.”

I was about to invoke the famous Fifth Amendment because the sour sergeant had his own ideas on everything, when Billy Drake came back, peeked into the mirror and straightened his tie again. “A man’s on his way from the M.E., sarge. I also took the liberty to call the dead man’s wife.”

“Christ, I hope the doc gets here first. We’re liable to have a sick woman on our hands. You beat guys ought to wait for instructions. Suppose you run down now and bring the desk clerk up here.”

Drake departed. Shorty lit a cigarette and said, “Rigor mortis hasn’t set in yet. Couldn’t be dead more than a couple of hours, four at the most.”

The sergeant scowled. “The M.E. will let us know. Ah, here’s our clerk.”

The clerk had small, darting eyes and deep scars on his face from a long-ago bout with acne. Lobeless ears, too. I began to hope the sergeant was an ardent believer in criminal types because then the desk clerk would divert some of his attention from me.

The clerk whined, “I can’t… look. Can’t we talk… someplace else?”

Shorty snickered and said, “He won’t bitecha,” but found an extra blanket in the closet and draped it over the corpse.

“Now then,” the sergeant began, “what happened tonight?”

“I can’t… well… at about seven o’clock — I know it was seven because I was setting my watch with Fulton Lewis, Jr. — this man comes in and asks for Mr. Prey’s room. I say Frey is out but he gets all excited and says he’ll wait. He leaves a note for Mr. Frey, then goes upstairs to Mr. Frey’s room.”

“Then what happened?”

“Well, about an hour ago Mr. Frey comes down from his room and says there’s a murdered man in there.”

“Down

from his room? Then he was home all along?”

“That’s right, down.”

“I thought you said Frey was out earlier.”

“That’s right, too. The day clerk gives me a list of who’s in, who’s out.”

“Could Frey have come back without you seeing him?”

“I did,” I said. “He wasn’t at the desk.”

“Jeez,” said the clerk. “I go to take a leak or something, but I wasn’t gone long.”

“I want to point out one thing,” I told the sergeant, “Lutz left a note for me at the desk. You found the note in my room, right? I’d like to ask the clerk if he gave me the note.”

“I didn’t give you nothing,” the man admitted.

“Right. So I took the note. You see, sergeant. He wasn’t at the desk.”

“Yeah, Frey. Very bright. Real sharp.” The way he spoke, it wasn’t grudging approval. It was: we’ll bust that little alibi wide open later, not that it’s worth a hill of beans even if it stands.

So we bantered it about. We got no place in particular, but I liked the sour sergeant less and less with every word. I wasn’t sure who I’d rather slug, him or the preening Billy Drake. I was hoping I’d keep my temper in check until someone with a high school education or the equivalent took over, but I had my doubts.

And then Becky Lutz stormed in, panting and wheezing and undulating unprettily and without benefit of a brassiere under her print housedress. “They said my Ben’s been hurt.”

The sergeant cleared his throat and recited rapidly and with about as much emotion as a tobacco auctioneer in Greensboro, North Carolina, “I have something tragic to tell you, Mrs. Lutz, Please brace yourself. Your husband has been killed.”

Becky wailed and I ran to catch her as she fell and eased her down on the understuffed chair. She was trembling all over and her lips wouldn’t keep still as her lower jaw bobbed up and down on loose hinges.

“There now, Mrs. Lutz,” the sergeant said, still without compassion.

Drake filled a glass at my sink and set it against Becky’s lips, but she couldn’t drink. She was a needle trapped in one groove on a broken record and I turned away and wished I could plug my ears. “Ben Ben Ben Benbenbenben….”

“I wish the M. E. would get here,” the sergeant said uncomfortably.

“A funny thing,” the room clerk mused, groping for a way to take himself off the hook. “That woman’s been here before. I didn’t know her name then, but she visited Mr. Frey a couple of nights ago, stayed quite a while, but I ain’t gonna swear nothing went on that shouldn’t of.”

“God damn you!” I said. “Becky wanted to see me about her husband.”

The sergeant smiled for the first time. He had a fine set of small, even white teeth, like the enamel caps the leading men use in Hollywood. With teeth like that I’d have smiled more often. Billy Drake would have walked around with a perpetual leer. “I thought you said you only knew Lutz casually, Frey. Are you married?”

“No.”

“I am. I don’t like home-wreckers. I had you figured as a lady’s man from the start. It isn’t hard to see how maybe you spin a fast line or two for Mrs. Lutz and she falls for it, then maybe does something she regrets later and tells her husband about it. So he comes to see you, mad as hell and leaves a note because the clerk thinks you’re out. He goes upstairs to make sure. You have a fight and there it is.”

I should have kept my yap shut, but I said, “Then where’s the murder weapon?”

Freckles held a knife up for all of us to see. Pocket variety,’ but long, with a mother of pearl finish and a small button at one end to activate the switch blade. “Taped under the sink,” Freckles said. “Someone figured he could hide it there. Pretty good.”

“You didn’t have a chance to get rid of the weapon yet, Frey. So you hid it.” The sergeant clicked his teeth together hard and ground them and now I knew why they were so even.

I didn’t say a thing. I wished I could get out of there and go away and make believe I’d never served with Bert Archer in Korea. The late, lamented war, but it was following me all the way to Coney Island. Whoever had killed Bert and tried to kill me the day of the inquest and killed Ben Lutz, had now decided he didn’t have to kill me after all. Let the taxpayers do it.

“You’ll have a chance to make a call down by the station, Frey. You’re being booked on suspicion of murder.”

I laughed in his face and kept laughing until the look on his face said he wanted to pull my vocal cords out and stretch them till they snapped. Then I said, “You’ll never make it stick, not if your medical examiner can establish the time of death. You see, I was out at the Tolliver Estate in Port Washington until midnight, then caught a train. If you figure it out, you’ll find…”

“That’s not my worry, Frey. That’s for the Grand Jury. It slicks, brother.”

Maybe Becky had been able to listen, after all. The police wore uniforms. The police sergeant wore stripes. The police sergeant indicated I was guilty. Becky Lutz oozed up from the chair slowly, as if she wanted to leap at me but had neither the strength nor the coordination. She managed to circle my legs with her beefy arms before she fell, shapeless and sobbing at my feet. It made me look great. Casanova Frey, home wrecker. Of course, Becky would tell them later there was nothing between us, but she might spill what she knew about the doings at Tolliver’s Funland, and I wasn’t sure which was worse. What a grand old time to think about Karen. It smelled like love, all right, but I was in no mood to relish the fragrance.

They gave me a free ride down to headquarters in a green and white Plymouth coupe. Freckles did the driving up front and the sergeant sat in the back With me, prodding my ribs with a .38 Special. At headquarters a uniformed clerk took down data in a book and fingerprinted me and asked if I wanted to make a phone call, which I did not, not yet. They emptied my pockets and confiscated my belt and made me take off my shoelaces. All this went into a manila envelope and was filed in a drawer, appropriately with the F’s. Very efficient. Someone else gave me a rusty pail, a bar of soap and a surplus Army blanket with U. S. Medical Corps stamped on it in large, faded letters. My private room wasn’t much worse than my accommodations at the hotel, except it had a metal door, locked on the outside, and bars on the window. And now I was Gideon Frey, jailbird.