Free Live Free

Murder Mystery

The room over the witch’s was not a room at all; it was a suite. Stubb glanced appreciatively at the white-and-gold mirrors and the Louis XIV carpet before seating himself on a spindly chair of velvet and gilded wood. He liked small chairs, and this one smelled of money.

“Drink?” Cliff asked.

“I’ve had too much beer already,” Stubb told him. “On an empty stomach, too. Think you could order your star operative a sandwich from room service? I haven’t eaten since lunch.”

“Whatever you want.” Cliff picked up the telephone.

“Then make it a hot roast beef, medium rare. Coffee. How come I’ve got an in on this one?”

“You don’t happen to know … ?” Cliff squinted at the label pasted on the cradle.

“Two eleven.”

“Thanks.” He dialed. “A hot roast beef sandwich au jus. Put plenty of meat on it. Two coffees, and they’d better be hot when they get here. Room eight seventy-seven in five minutes, understand?”

As he hung up, Stubb said, “I asked you how come I’ve got an in, Cliff.”

“Who said you’ve got an in?”

“You did.”

“Like hell!”

“You said three hundred a day.”

“And I meant it, Jim. That’s solid.”

“Enough to buy me off the case I was on. This afternoon you wouldn’t have me for fifty.”

“For God’s sake, Jim, you know the business! When you called, I didn’t have this job.”

Stubb stood up. “If I meet the boy in the hall, I’ll tell him to take the sandwich back.”

“Okay,” Cliff threw up his hands. “You always were a smart monkey. It ever get through to you that you’d be better off if you weren’t quite so God-damned smart?”

“And a foot taller.” Stubb sat down again.

“Yeah, I know what you mean. All right. There’s a murder, and you knew him. That’s all, Jim. That’s everything—I swear to God.”

“Uh huh. No rough stuff. That’s what you said. Ben Free?”

“You knew somebody snuffed him?”

“It’s him, then.”

“That’s the name we got, yeah.” Cliff took a snapshot from the breast pocket of his coat and handed it over.

The old man lay on a filthy floor that might have been concrete. The back of his shirt was soaked with his blood, and a pool had formed beneath his chest. Only the side of his face was visible, but it was Free.

“Twice in the back,” Cliff said. “Big slugs. We’ve got a line to the ballistics lab, but they haven’t made them yet. Probably forty-fives or three-fifty-sevens. He went right down. Probably never knew what hit him.”

“He stayed up long enough for the guy to shoot twice.”

“There’s that, yeah.”

“Where?”

“Hold on. Jim, I’ll brief you, but I want to ask you a couple of questions first. I don’t want you to go into your act again, but God damn it, you’re working for me. How’d you know who it was?”

“Just a guess.”

“All right, how’d you guess?”

“You said I knew him. I know a lot of characters around town, but you know most of them yourself, and you’ve got guys on the payroll who know them too, so it wasn’t one of those. That left people I knew way back and people I know now in my private life. Somebody who knew the guy way back isn’t worth three hundred a day—the odds against his having anything worthwhile are terrific. That left my private life. Most of the people I know like that are women, but you indicated this was a man, you said him. And you’ve been here in the hotel for a while, you said, trying to get hold of me, but I haven’t seen anything in the paper. So it was probably today, and I asked myself about men I know, privately, that I haven’t seen in the last eight or ten hours.”

Cliff snorted. “And he was the only one? Horseshit.”

“No, he wasn’t the only one, just the one that seemed like the best bet. I didn’t think anybody with big money would be interested in any of the others, so—”

The door to a bedroom opened, and a delicate-looking blond stepped out. As well as Stubb could judge, she was five-two or five-three in her heels. She carried a purse nearly as big as a hatbox, and she had been outfitted by somebody who got a thousand dollars for a cute little blouse to wear shopping.

“I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Rebic,” she said. “But I really think it’s time you introduced me.”

“You’re the boss, Ms. Whitten. Jim, this is—”

She did not give him time to finish. “My name is Standbridge Whitten, Mr. Stubb. Since my friends obviously can’t call me Standbridge, they call me Kip. I can’t imagine why, but I rather like it.”

She extended her hand, and Stubb rose and took it.

“I’m Mr. Rebic’s client. Isn’t that what you call it? Client?”

“Sure,” Stubb said. “Lucky Mr. Rebic.”

“Earlier, you asked to be … briefed? I was eavesdropping quite shamelessly; Mr. Rebic put me up to it. He refused to brief you because I had told him I wished to speak personally with each of the men who would help me find my uncle’s—”

“Ben was your uncle?”

“Yes. I’ll explain in a moment. You see, I feel that even if a man—or a woman—is a professional, he can feel, he is capable of feeling, a real loyalty. If not to his employer then to the cause of justice. To the right, if I may put it so. Don’t you agree, Mr. Stubb?”

“Call me Jim, Ms. Whitten.”

“Only if you’ll promise to call me Kip. My father, the late General Samuel Whitten, always said the most loyal soldiers were the career soldiers, those who were practically mercenaries. His men called him ‘Buck’ Whitten, though not to his face to be sure. He liked to believe it was because he had never lost his rapport with the rank and file. Do you consider yourself a mercenary, Mr. Stubb?”

“I consider myself a day laborer, Kip. Did Ben have money?”

Cliff raised a hand. “Wait a minute, Jim. A briefing’s okay, but you ought to answer a few questions yourself. Was it your impression he did?”

Stubb shook his head. “Not a cent.”

The blond girl’s fingers touched his. “Are you quite sure, Jim?”

“His house was falling apart, and he loved that house. A couple of times I tried to raid his refrigerator, but there wasn’t a damn thing to eat. Every once in a while one of us would feel sorry for him and buy him something.”

“You lived with my uncle?”

“For a few days,” Stubb said. “Yeah.”

“Did he ever speak to you of having—I don’t know, it could be anything. Something valuable. Something hidden.” She pressed his hand.

“He was your uncle, and you don’t know what he had?”

Cliff said, “Watch your mouth, Jim.”

“That’s all right, Mr. Rebic—perfectly all right. He has a right to ask these questions, a right to understand. No, Mr. Stubb—Jim—I don’t know. Only Daddy knew, and he’s no longer with us.”

“I think you’d better explain,” Stubb told her.

“I’ll try to. Many years ago, when they were quite young men, my uncle chose to leave our family. To go off on his own, as it were. He was under something of a cloud, if you understand me.”

“They didn’t like him.”

“He had been wild, I suppose. He and my father were twins, Mr. Stubb. As happens so often, one twin sought attention through accomplishment, the other through rebellion. My great-grandfather was a Rockefeller partner, and our family is still very well off.”

Stubb nodded. “Yeah, I kind of thought it might be.”

“My uncle Benjamin—that was his real name, Benjamin Whitten—apparently announced that he meant to make his own fortune and tell the rest of them to go to Hades.”

“Good for him.”

“But when he had gone, they discovered that a certain extremely valuable article had disappeared. Please don’t ask what it was, because I don’t know. I wasn’t even born when all this happened; and by the time I was old enough to care, no one was left but Daddy, and he wouldn’t tell me.”

“Whatever it was,” Stubb said, “it’s probably long gone.”

The girl pursed her lips. “I don’t think so. You see, before he died, Daddy was conducting certain investigations of his own. He said that if Uncle Ben sold what he had, he would know. And that he hadn’t sold it yet, not in all those years.”

Cliff leaned forward, rubbing his hand. “That means it just about has to be a piece of art or a rock, Jim.”

“If he was sharp enough, maybe willing to go to Amsterdam and take in a partner, he could get a rock cut up without anybody knowing.”

“He might, okay, but it would be tough. Anyhow, my first guess is art. If it had been a rock, it would probably have been in a safe or a safety deposit box someplace, and they wouldn’t have let a wild kid get at it. Art you’ve got hanging on the wall, even if there’s a lot of insurance. He could just take it down and stick it under his coat. A nice little Rembrandt, maybe.”

Stubb cocked an eyebrow at the girl. “What about insurance, Kip? Your folks collect any back then?”

She shook her head. “We—I, now that Daddy’s gone—do own certain valuable paintings, Mr.—Jim. The same company has insured them ever since I can remember, and at Mr. Rebic’s urging I called them. We’ve never had a large claim. Ever.”

Cliff said, “It’s obvious, isn’t it? To collect, they’d have had to say Ben stole it, and they didn’t want to. Hell, he was old General Buck’s brother. They kept their traps shut, hoping he’d come home. Then the rest died, and Buck started looking for him, only he didn’t find him.”

“Then the General died himself,” Stubb finished for him. “And Kip learned—someway—that Uncle Ben had been murdered. I’d like to hear about that, Kip.”

The blond girl suddenly looked a little tired, though her back was as straight as ever. “I didn’t learn that Uncle Benjamin was murdered, Mr. Stubb. I saw him on TV and went to look for him.”

“Sure. You spotted him right off, even though he had left the family before you were born.”

“But I did. Don’t you understand, Mr. Stubb? He and Daddy were identical twins. Daddy passed away only last September. This man had a beard, but otherwise he looked precisely the way Daddy had.”

Stubb nodded, half to himself. “Last night two women came to talk to a woman named Mrs. Baker, looking for Ben Free. Were you one of them?”

“I had a right to search for my uncle!”

“Sure. Did you? Was one of them you?”

Kip nodded.

“Who was the other one? Some girl working for Cliff?”

“No. I—I hadn’t engaged him then. A friend.”

“Not an investigator?”

“No.”

Cliff said, “Then she hired us, and we got on it right away.”

“Not quick enough to save him,” Stubb said softly.

“Hell, Jim, we couldn’t have. He was already dead by then. But we found him and took the picture you saw.”

“Yeah. You call the cops too?”

“We had to. Anyway, Ms. Whitten didn’t want to leave him lying there. He was her uncle, for Christ’s sake.”

“For Christ’s sake, I hope he was. What time?”

There was a discreet tap at the door.

Stubb opened it, and the Agatha Christie fan pushed in a cart redolent of beef.

“Hell,” Cliff said. “Your sandwich—I’d forgotten about it.”

“I hadn’t.”

“Ms. Whitten, will you take the other coffee, please?”

“Certainly not. Anyway, I much prefer tea.”

Cliff extended a ten. “Bud, you think you could get the lady a pot of hot tea, fast?”

“Quite so,” the Christie fan said, taking the ten. “I should be delighted.”

Stubb was already chewing a bite of beef and bread. He swallowed as the door closed. “What time, Cliff? When’d you find him?”

“This afternoon, around two.”

“Where?”

“The basement of his house, by the stairs. You know where the house was—you were staying there with him until last night.”

“I also went back this morning and checked over the house. He wasn’t there.”

“Including the basement?”

“Including the basement.”

“That’s worth knowing. Was this for the other client, Jim?”

“Let’s say it was for me. I was worried about him. He was an old man, we had liked him, and we thought nobody knew where he was.”

“You thought?”

“Somebody knew. Somebody took him back there and wasted him after I left. You want my guess about it?”

“Hell yes, if you’ve got one.”

“Somebody was looking for whatever it was Free had. Call it the McGuffin. They got hold of him sometime yesterday, slapped him around. He said, okay, take me back to my house, I’ll show you where it is. That basement was dark as hell—I had to light matches, and they probably hadn’t known to bring a flashlight. Free made a break for it. When he got close to the steps there would have been a little light, and somebody panicked and shot him.”

Cliff looked dubious. “An old guy like that?”

“Yeah, an old guy like him.”

“Jim, I can’t buy it.” Cliff looked at Kip, but Kip did not return the look; she was watching Stubb, her piquant face expressionless.

Cliff said, “Sure, amateurs get panicky, but just the same.”

“I didn’t say it was an amateur. I don’t think it was. You said maybe a forty-five, and that’s not an amateur’s heat. Your mistake is that you think it must have been somebody like you.”

“Get on with it.”

“Free must have been nearly eighty.” Stubb was no longer talking to Cliff, but to Kip. “That would make your daddy close to sixty when you were born, Ms. Whitten—not really impossible, but not likely either. Anyway, he was about eighty, but big, and I’d guess that for an old man he was still pretty strong. Cliff here could have tied him up and put him on a shelf. I could have handled him myself if I had to, and I’m no giant. But I don’t think you could have.”

Kip’s hand was inching toward her purse.

Stubb rose, knocking over his chair, and suddenly held Sergeant Proudy’s gun. “Don’t touch that,” he said.

The hand relaxed.

“That’s better. Now take it by the strap and toss it very gently right at my shoes. I’ve never shot a woman, and I don’t want to start now.”

The purse hit the floor with a thump.

“That’s better. I hate to tell you this, but that was the first thing that gave you away. That big bag didn’t go with the rest of your outfit, so I started wondering what you had in it. Then too, last night I talked to Mrs. Baker, after you and your girlfriend did. She’d been questioned by a couple of proms, not by two society girls.”

Kip said, “Jim, I can explain this.”

Stubb crouched by the purse, opened it one-handed, and whistled. “You must have raided Grandpa’s bureau. A Colt New Service. Looks like it’s been jerked off the deck of a battleship. Cliff, you packing?”

Cliff shook his head and held out his arms so that his jacket hung open.

“Fine. Kip, I won’t ask you what happened down in that basement. Maybe he knocked you down before he tried to run. Maybe he tried to take you, and lost you in the dark. But who are you really?”

There was a tap at the door, and for an instant Stubb turned to look. The carpet flew at his face. When it hit, he did not even feel it.