Killer with a Key

CHAPTER 10

Johnny dropped the empty buckets at the foot of the standpipe at the shore end of the elongated pier and fumbled in his hip pocket for his wrench. He glanced out over the Sound's blue-green chop, already turned brassy in the early morning sunlight, and knelt on the scarred, splintered planking, warm to the touch, as he opened the cut-off valve at the base of the pipe.

As he filled the buckets he could see Mike in the cockpit of the thirty-foot cruiser dancing heavily at the end of her lines a hundred feet out on the pier. Amidst the small forest of stubby masts and tired rigging in the dingy hulls around it Johnny could make out the semicircled brass lettering on the bobbing stern: Ye Olde Beaste, NYC, NY. Mike had the cowling off the brutish-looking engine and was probing its interior with a long-necked oilcan.

Ye Olde Beaste was a marine monstrosity. Its beam was out of all proportion to its water line, so that even in a flat calm it floundered like a dish in a bathtub. It made a good fishing platform, but there its virtues ceased. In addition to its disproportionate beam-to-water line difficulties, Ye Olde Beaste's seagoing life was further complicated by its engine. The perverted sense of humor of a former owner blessed with more money than brains had caused him to install in the boat's plumply pedestrian interior a power plant barely short of Gold Cup standards. Its weight guaranteed a stern-heavy sag and a steady shipment of spray aft. The engine was Mike's pride and joy, despite the fact that it was a tricky assignment to keep the monster throttled back to the point necessary to prevent hull and engine from going their separate ways.

“Catch, Mike.” Mike straightened from his loving inspection of the engine; he accepted the filled buckets as Johnny backed down the top rungs of the wooden ladder spiked to the pier piling and swung them off the planking over his head. Mike passed up two empties and sleeved his brow with the forearm of his gray sweat shirt.

“It's a hot one, boy.”

“Gonna be,” Johnny agreed. “We'll catch exercise today, period. This sun's gonna drive 'em too deep for our surface stuff.”

“Ahh, it's a change from the asphalt, anyway. You ready?”

“Soon's I fill these and get the ice out of the car.” Johnny climbed back up on the pier, returned to the standpipe, filled his buckets and re-closed the cut-off valve. He left the buckets and walked off the shore end of the pier to the MG parked in the weeds at the end of the graveled road. He could feel the heat of the planking through the crepe soles of his sneakers, even this early in the morning; at the car he removed from the floor a fifty-pound piece of ice wrapped in a sodden newspaper and swung it up to his left shoulder. He could feel the wet trickle of the melting ice run down his back as he retrieved the buckets, passing one up to the extended left hand which balanced the ice.

At the boat he set down his liquid burden and passed the ice down to Mike; he heard it thump down into the box as he reached back up over his head and handed down the water pails. He dropped down to the deck himself from the ladder after casting off the lines and fended off from the pilings with the boat hook as Mike started the engine with a deep-throated roar that sent the nearby gulls zooming aloft.

They crept away from the dock and out into the deserted Sound, and Mike nodded at a sleekly expensive cabin cruiser which contrasted sharply with their own weather-beaten down-at-heels appearance. “I'll own one like that in a year, Johnny.”

Johnny looked at the cruiser and back at Mike. “You plannin' on hitting the sweeps? Besides, you couldn't desert the old lady.”

Mike smiled. “I'll retire the old lady and keep her for a pet.”

Johnny crouched before a compartment door in the cockpit and removed a tangle of gear. Swiftly he assembled two spinning rods and sorted out a double handful of mismatched reels, swivels, lures, leader wire, a battered knife and a rusty hatchet. Beyond the point the breeze freshened; Ye Olde Beaste lumbered through lengthening swells, and the air had a crisper tang. Johnny removed half a dozen bottles of beer from the case in the bottom of the boat and put them in the box with the ice.

“Any place in particular you want to try?” Mike asked from the wheel.

“Anywhere-I don't care. When you get tired of burnin' gas, throw over the float.” He bent double to peel his T-shirt off over his head, and Mike grimaced at the Indian-bronzed torso.

“Wish I tanned like that. Last time we came out here I nearly burned right up; some deficiency in the skin pigmentation, Doc Phillips says. On the water I've got to keep covered up. How about breaking out a sandwich? I could eat a rubber boot.”

“A beer, too?”

“Later, maybe.”

They gnawed on thick slabs of ham and cheese inartistically thrust between jagged slices of rye bread. Mike tossed his torn-off crusts to the trailing cloud of gulls, stood up and brushed off his hands, and reached down to cut off the engine. In the sudden silence they began to lose headway, and he catwalked up to the bow and tossed over the float anchor which would keep them headed steadily into the wind.

Johnny drew a deep, satisfied breath. The sun was hot on his back and chest, but the breeze was cool. He handed Mike a rod as he returned from the bow, and they settled down in silence on opposite edges of the cockpit rim. The loudest sound in the boat was the slap of the choppy little waves under the bow. With the teamwork born of long practice they alternately cast and reeled, cast and reeled, and for forty-five minutes an occasional grunt and the low whine of the gear was the only medium of exchange.

Mike stacked his rod finally, butt down in a homemade holder, and reached for his cigarettes. “Not a minnow in the North Atlantic.” It was an uncomplaining statement of fact; he shielded his lighter against the breeze, puffed on his cigarette, pulled his cap farther down over his eyes and propped his back against a stanchion. Johnny tried one more cast, reeled in and stacked his rod beside Mike's. He stepped over to the icebox and removed and uncapped two bottles of beer.

“Sure wish old Vic was out here with us,” Mike said as he accepted a chilled bottle.

“Yeah,” Johnny agreed. “Mike?” Mike widened half-closed eyes. “This Tim Connor-”

“Yes?”

“How come he can keep on cuttin' the mustard on a spread like you were tellin' about last night?”

“I'd say it was a combination of things. Some people never even wise up they're being targeted. The ones that do can't prove anything. And even if you got him or some of his people dead to rights on a job, it would probably still be borderline if it was criminal. Tim keeps a couple of two-bit ward heelers on his pay roll, and they help to tone down the occasional beef.”

Mike stared out over the blue-green-gold Sound, his shoulders swaying slightly with the movement of the boat. “I first ran across Connor three years ago. Friend of mine asked me if I could get Connor off his back. My friend was an insurance man, and a couple of years before that he'd been from hunger. Then it was laid in his lap that for a price he could get a listing each month of all the claims paid by one of the largest health and accident insurance companies headquartered in New York.”

Johnny frowned. “Claims? What good-”

“I guess you never had a health and accident policy.” Mike grinned. “Or never had to collect on one, if you did. It's a little tricky; you never get what you think you have coming. No outright misrepresentation: it's just that the fine print really pares away what the blurbs advertise. So if you're up for a settlement and you find that such-and-such is disallowed in Clause thirty-two, and that so-and-so is unfortunately excluded in Clause forty-four, why you're a little unhappy about it. Usually it would end right there, but now here comes a subscriber to the Connor service ready, willing and able to sell you his policy. With the head start he has on knowing your settlement, after listening to your squawk very sympathetically, how much trouble do you think he has getting you to cancel the policy that let you down and take out a new one with him?”

“A little sharp.” Johnny's tone was thoughtful. “It doesn't sound illegal, though. Why'd your friend want out?”

“Because as far as Connor was concerned what he was doing wasn't illegal, but the same couldn't be said for my friend. The insurance companies have a word for that little bit of business. They call it 'twisting,' and if you're reported, and it's proven, you blow your ticket. You're not allowed to approach a potential customer and suggest or recommend that he cancel an outstanding policy and rewrite the same thing with you. If the customer told his own agent you'd wind up in the commissioner's office.”

“So you tell the customer to keep it under his hat.”

“Sure you do, and when you're hungry enough you'll gamble that he will. You'll risk it. But then the day comes when you're not hungry any more, or not that hungry. Do you always know to whom you're talking? You've got something to lose now, and finally you say to yourself the hell with this noise. I can use a little sleep nights. And the next time the man comes around you say, thank you very, very much, sir; it's been a real pleasure knowing you. And that's the day you make a painful discovery.”

“You can't turn loose of the wildcat?”

“Exactly. The man carefully points out to you that while his service might be viewed as a bit unethical, the hook is set a little deeper in your mouth. You have a license to lose, and a backlog of people on your books any of whose reminiscences in the wrong place could have you up before the mast.”

“What happened to your friend that wanted out?”

“He's still taking the service. I went around to see Connor, and he read me a nice little lecture on minding my own business. My friend bought another Cadillac the other day. I figure he's earned it. He's my age, but I flatter myself he looks ten years older.”

Johnny rubbed his chin. “So now we have Ed Russo tied in somehow to a character like this Connor. Did you know Russo was dating this Perry girl who was killed?”

“He was? You mean Ed ties into that public relations office, too?”

“Spent a fair amount of time over there, according to Lorraine. Not under the name of Russo, either. The point is this, though. This Perry kid would have blackmailed the Pope if she had a thirty-seventy chance. I figure whoever killed her did it to keep her mouth shut because of something she knew. The day I was there she said-”

“There?” Mike interrupted. “Where?”

“I was with her in her place when she was killed.”

“You were what?” Mike's inflection was strangled. “The papers didn't-”

“That's right. Dameron must've muzzled 'em. The girl's landlady knew I was there; Joe must've put her on ice. The killer shot from the fire escape over a high-backed chair with its back to him. I was in the chair. 'Course I never got a look at him because by the time I got to the girl on the floor and back to the window and the fire escape he was gone.”

“Brother!” Awe reverberated in Mike's reverent tone. “What did Dameron have to say to that?”

“I was still gettin' the echoes last night. I fouled off a couple of Joe's questions, and he got up on his hind legs and told me one more move from me like that one and he'd personally have me starched an' ironed.”

“You'd better watch your step, then. Lieutenant Dameron draws a little water in his section of town. Let me catch up with this. Is Russo your candidate for the Perry girl?”

“Russo's my candidate, period, except that Jimmy Rogers told me he's ironclad on Sanders, and everything stems from Sanders. I'm hoping that Roberta Perry was Russo's alibi for the time Sanders was killed. I'd like to find out. If she was, and the alibi was a phony, he'd have to knock her over to make sure no talkee, or no blackmail.”

“Boy!” Mike wagged his head from side to side. “Quiet now while I go back and unscramble this omelet you just dropped on my chin. There's a couple-”

His voice died away meditatively, and Johnny stood up and stepped up from the cockpit and walked up to the bow. He knelt, removed sneakers and socks and rose again to slip out of slacks and shorts. He went over the side in a long, shallow dive and thrashed a headlong hundred yards in a clumsily effective six-beat racing crawl, then rolled over on his back and floated effortlessly, eyes half closed against the sun.

He floated high in the water; an oddity in his chemical metabolism and the concentration of weight in his upper body gave him an unusual natural bouyancy. He could, and often did, swim for hours, and while his inelegantly powerful crawl stroke developed no real speed, he could maintain it almost indefinitely.

He rolled over again and swam back to the boat, shoulders surging up out of the boiling water. Alongside, he surface-dived and swam down under the keel, his eyes open in the cool green underwater shadows. That far down there was a definite chill in depths unwarmed by surface sun. He could see the trailing kelp and the greener marine growth barnacling the squat underside of Ye Olde Beaste, and he kicked strongly and surfaced on the far side, blowing a fine spray. He looked up at Mike carrying pails and towels from the cockpit to the bow. “Her whiskers are trippin' her, Mike. The old lady needs a shave.”

Mike nodded. “She hasn't been out of the water in eighteen months. I ought to have it done.”

Johnny swam lazily along the water line, and Mike tossed him the bow painter. Johnny went up it hand over hand until he reached the brass guardrail; his hands gripping it until they whitened, he doubled up his body and muscled himself aloft in a handstand upon its polished surface. Upside-down-erect, in sheer exuberance he raised and lowered himself three times in elbow bends, corded muscle standing out in forearms and shoulders.

“Monkey boy,” Mike's voice drifted out to him. “Too bad I haven't any peanuts.”

Johnny hand-walked the rail further in from the bow, and lowered himself to the deck. He sluiced the salt from his body with two upturned buckets of fresh water and dried himself off roughly. He slid into shorts and slacks, spread the towel on the deck, and lay down on his back.

Mike's head poked up out of the cockpit. “You want to try it someplace else?”

“What time is it?”

“Few minutes to ten.”

“Maybe we better get back.”

He lay and soaked up the sun and considered his present inability to savor this carefree life. Ellen was dead; he had promised himself he would find her murderer, and his lack of progress gnawed at his nerves. He had accomplished little or nothing, and now there was Joe Dameron to contend with also Beneath him the deck planking sprang into an independent vibrating life of its own as Mike started up the engine. He throttled it back to a rumbling mutter and stepped up and over Johnny, straddling him as he pulled in the float. Johnny braced his elbows as Ye Olde Beaste swung broadside to the swell and began to roll. He opened his eyes at the abrupt sound of Mike's voice. “I want to talk to you.”

Johnny scrambled to hands and knees and followed Mike down into the cockpit. Mike advanced the throttle arm slightly, and the motor's mutter changed to a muted thunder; Ye Olde Beaste circled clumsily and started on her return trip. Mike's face wore a scowl; his tone was flat and heavy as he raised it above the sound of the engine. “I don't like the sound of what I'm going to say, but I'm going to say it anyway. After what you told me a few minutes ago I think you need this for your frame of reference. Lorraine Barnes-” He hesitated, and Johnny waited. Mike's voice pitched higher. “Did you know Lorraine killed her first husband? Shot him?”

Johnny stared. “The hell she did!”

“She did, all right. Fifteen, sixteen years ago. It was a tight fit for her; she bought the gun she used, and the smell of premeditation was all over it. There must have been extenuating circumstances, because it wound up as manslaughter, and she got seven years. Did about four and a half. Moved away; remarried after a couple of years. Divorced. Moved again, to New York. Married Vic.” Mike's eyes swept the Sound as if he were searching for something. “I doubt the police know it; all those years, and a couple of name changes. And she wouldn't tell them.”

“But she told you?”

“Me?” Mike looked embarrassed. “No. Vic told me. I guess he had to tell someone to convince himself it wasn't her fault.”

“You'd have to say he's convinced, the way he's goin' down the line for her.” He blew out his breath; if the police ever took Lorraine's prints It wasn't likely that they would, though; she wasn't charged with anything. No wonder Vic had clammed up completely; one or two wrong words from him and the whole apple cart would have been upside down. He probably hadn't trusted himself to cope with police questioning. The conversation died. Ye Okie Beaste plowed steadily shoreward, throbbing in every pore. After a time Johnny stirred himself; he disjointed the rods, rinsed the salt water off them and the rest of the gear and stowed it away. At the dock he helped Mike slide the metal cowling over the engine, and they lashed the canvas cover down over the cockpit. They washed up at the standpipe and walked through the weeds to the car.

It was a quiet ride back to town. Mike dropped Johnny off at the hotel entrance and went on to garage the car. On his way through the foyer Johnny decided on impulse to go up against Russo again. Russo was in some manner tied in to this whole mess. If he could just get Russo mad enough to spill something He nodded to Gus behind the bell captain's desk as he crossed the lobby, then ran up the marbled steps to the mezzanine. He opened the door to the public stenographer's office, and Mavis Delaroche lifted her blonde head from the magazine she was reading. Upon recognizing her caller she closed the magazine with a snap and stood up at her desk.

“Well!” she said icily. “Look whom we have with us, unfortunately. Outside, muscles.”

“I like you, too, kid,” Johnny told her, closing the door behind himself. He looked at her. There was a lot of Mavis to look at; in her high heels she very nearly matched Johnny's six feet, and she was not undernourished. She was tastefully attired in a clinging little number which depreciated her considerable assets not at all. Her skin and eye coloration were those of a brunette, which her platinum crown gave the lie to, but not unattractively. The face was well if largely boned; only the mouth spoiled the larger-than-life cameo. The mouth was tiny and pouted.

“Didn't you hear me?” she demanded. “You're not wanted around here, mister.”

“You're breakin' my heart, kid. The weasel around?”

The brightly lipsticked mouth tightened. “I wish he were. He'd fix your wagon for you. You used up all your luck the other day.”

“That what he told you? Guess maybe he can sleep better nights if he's convinced himself that's the way it was. You his manager? Do him a favor, kid. Retire him. In that league he's a raggedy canoe in white water.”

The red lips curled derisively. “I just hope I'm there to see him take you.”

“Yeah? You like a little blood? You musta been in the front row when they were throwin' the Christians to the lions,”

“Beat it,” she said tersely. “You're excused. You can see Ed's not here.”

“Who needs Ed?” he asked her. If he could stall a few minutes Russo might be back. This Mavis was in too much of a hurry to get rid of him. “You're the stenographer around here, aren't you? Or are your duties more highly specialized these days?”

The brunette eyes glittered. “I ought to belt you one myself.”

Johnny sighed with exaggerated patience. “Loosen up the spring on that hair trigger, kid. I walk in here like a citizen to dictate a letter, and all I get is a lot of abuse. You're the stenographer?”

“Certainly I'm the stenographer!”

“So take a letter.”

She looked at him, hands on hips. “This ought to be good for a laugh, anyway,” She sat down and uncovered her machine. “From a speedball like you I'll take it right in the typewriter. Go ahead. Shoot your head off, and I do mean off.” She paused and looked up at him suspiciously. “Unless this is a gag?”

“No gag, big stuff. Very serious business. Crank it up.” He watched her slip a battered carbon between a sheet of bond and onionskin and wind it into the machine. She looked up at him impatiently.

“Well? Who's it to?”

“To? Oh. Yeah.” He looked up at the ceiling for inspiration. “Ready? Today's date, no address, to the New York City Police Department, 24 °Centre Street, New York, New York. Gentlemen: I am making this confession voluntarily-”

“Wait,” the blonde girl interrupted, whipping the paper out of the machine. “You didn't say how many copies.”

“Copies? Two's enough.”

She paused in her task of aligning fresh carbon and onionskin, her tone patient, as to a backward child, as she discarded the worn carbon in the wastebasket beside her and brushed off her fingertips lightly. “An original and one copy? Or an original and two copies?”

“I can see this is a complicated business, requirin' steel nerves and lightning-like decisions. One copy.”

She discarded a carbon and an onionskin from the sheaf in her hand, reinserted the balance in the machine, typed in the date and salutation and looked up at him. “Go on.”

“Gentlemen-” Johnny ran a hand thoughtfully over his chin stubble. “I am making this confession voluntarily and of my own free will.”

Mavis half turned to look at him, then ducked her head down and clack-clacked away at the keys.

“I am and have been under no coercion whatsoever to-”

Mavis backed her chair away, her hands in her lap. “What is this? You going to sign it yourself? And where did a mug like you learn to dictate a letter?”

“We don't all have visible talents, kid. Like you.” Johnny leered at her companionably. “And don't worry about the signer. I got him on ice. Let's see… under no coercion whatsoever to make this statement. I killed Robert Sanders, Ellen Saxon, and Roberta-”

“You're crazy!” Mavis burst out as her chair again rolled away from the typewriter. “Will you-”

“Will you stop bothering the motorman?” Johnny cut across her eruption. “-and Roberta Perry. I recognize my legal responsibility in the dictation and signature of this confession. Space for a signature; space for two witnesses' signatures. Got it?”

The typewriter tac-tac-tac'd and came to a stop. Mavis reeled the letter out of the machine, removed the carbon and handed Johnny the letter and copy. She tossed the carbon into a folder on her desk and weighted the folder with a fifteen-inch ruler. She picked up a business envelope and typed the address on it; her voice was disdainful as she gave it to him. “You're out of your mind if you think you're going to get anyone to sign that thing.”

Johnny looked at her; he felt that somehow she sounded very well pleased with herself. The corners of the small mouth turned downward as though she had difficulty in repressing a smile. She turned her face sharply away when she noticed Johnny's inspection of her; the smugness on her features as she toed her wastebasket under the desk puzzled him. And then suddenly he had a feeling. All his life he had acted on impulse; he reached for the folder beside the typewriter, and sensing his movement Mavis grabbed for his arm.

“Here! What do you think-”

He was too quick for her; her voice was still echoing angrily as the ruler slid into her lap and he picked the folder up and opened it.

“You give me that!” The blonde girl snatched the heavy ruler from her lap, rose with a jerk and pointed it at Johnny. He stared down at the top carbon in the stack in the folder whose glossy, hard-backed surface retained a perfect copy of his dictated letter.

“I can see a man lacks a little something in privacy around here, Mavis. This your own idea?” He began to flip through the carbons in the folder, each a one-time-used perfect impression of a typed letter.

“You get your big nose out of there!” Mavis dropped the ruler on the desk as she came around it on the run. She came like a man, hands doubled into fists, swinging for the body. Johnny caught a flailing arm and spun her in against himself, pinioning her as she struggled within the circle of his arm.

“A nice racket,” he said in her ear. “An out-of-town businessman drops in and dictates his bid on a contract, and with a fresh carbon you've got a copy. Whaddya do then? Look up his competition and peddle it to them?”

Her position proved to be a tactical mistake. She lifted a foot and viciously raked the length of his shin with a high heel. She lifted the foot again, but she had his attention now. He dropped the distracting folder and transferred the freed hand to the nape of Mavis' attractive neck. In two long strides he frog-marched her back to her desk, bent her over it, picked up the ruler and solidly swatted the tight skirt's most prominent characteristics. Mavis yelped shrilly and nearly bucked the desk over. Johnny tossed the ruler back on the desk as he let her go, and she straightened up, holding onto herself.

“I hope you weren't wearin' a girdle, kid,” Johnny told her. He stooped to retrieve the folder of carbons from the floor. “Shall we call it a draw? I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours.” He pulled up the leg of his slacks and looked down at the long scrape on his shin, oozing blood two-thirds of its length. He looked back at Mavis. “Your turn, kid.” She stood motionless, hands behind her, two bright, angry tears in the brunette eyes. “Chicken, huh?”

Her voice was hoarse. “You give me back that folder!”

“Later. If Russo gets shook about it, send him around to see me.” He looked at her thoughtfully. “Or is this a strictly Mavis Delaroche production?” He smiled at her silence. “I don't know why you rate Ed Russo so high, kid; pound for pound you got better action. Let's see you sit down. You know what the song says-it only hurts for a little while.” He turned to the door, then glanced back and waved to the tall girl's still-standing figure. “Think of me when you look in the mirror tonight, kid.”

He closed the office door quietly from the outside.