Send Along a Wreath

Chapter V

There was a uniformed copper standing at the door of Estelle Moran’s room. He was leaning against the wall half-asleep. Except for him the corridor was deserted. The night lights were on and the place looked dismal.

“Go get yourself a cup of coffee if you want,” O’Neill said to the copper. “I’ll be up here until you get back.”

The copper opened the door for O’Neill and said, “Thanks, a lot, Mr. O’Neill. I always get these graveyard details. It’s enough to drive a man batty.”

“Get two cups of coffee,” O’Neill said. “Hell, make a night of it.”

“I’ll do that,” the copper grinned.

O’Neill snapped on the lights and shut the door. He walked into the living room, looked around. The glasses he and the girl had used were still on the coffee table before the fireplace. He went into the bathroom and had a long drink of cold water. It tasted wonderful. His image in the mirror was pretty awful. He looked pale and the turban-effect of the bandage made him look like a hungry fortune teller.

The bathroom was clean and warm. The nylons were gone from behind the door, but everything else was just the same. He wandered into the bedroom trying to decide what he was looking for.

The drapes still billowing gently and he could feel a breeze on his cheek from the broken window. He pushed them aside and looked out on the fire escape. He could see fragments of broken glass glinting on the metal floor of the fire escape like blinking cats’ eyes.

He glanced down at the carpeting of the room and noticed that it was clean. No glass there. He got down on his knees and made a closer inspection, even ran his hand gently over the soft nap of the carpet. But there wasn’t any glass. All of it had fallen on the fire escape.

He took off his hat and started to scratch his head, until he remembered the bandage. He tossed his hat on the bed, threw the brief case beside it and sat down.

The frown on his face put deep lines alongside his nose.

He knew the whole story now. There were just a few little touches he wasn’t sure of. But they weren’t important. He knew who had killed Sam Spencer, who had sapped him in this same room a few hours before, and who had killed Eddie Shapiro.

He didn’t know why yet, but he wasn’t worried about that. He’d find that out, too.

The knowledge didn’t make him feel any better. He still felt sick and tired.

He got up and started for the phone in the living room, but before he had taken two steps, a sound stopped him. A sound that raised the hairs at the back of his neck.

The sound was that of a key sliding into the lock of the door to the suite!

There didn’t seem to be another sound in the world. O’Neill couldn’t hear his own heart or his own breathing. Nothing existed except the grating metallic click that sounded when the lock turned and the door began to open.

There was a soft footstep, a long pause, and then the lock clicked again as the door was closed softly.

O’Neill knew who was in the next room. He knew that the person who was moving slowly toward him was the murderer of Sam Spencer and Eddie Shapiro. And he knew that person had returned here to finish the job.

But he didn’t move. He didn’t have a gun. He didn’t have a chance. So he stood, a few feet from the bed, in the center of the room, waiting. His head was lowered, a little like a fighter who’d taken too much of a beating to know when to quit. His legs were spread, like a man expecting another blow.

She appeared in the doorway. There was a gun in her right hand. She said, “Smart copper,” in a voice that was just above a whisper.

“Not so smart,” he said.

She wasn’t wearing a hat. Her phoney blonde hair was disordered. But it still looked good. It still looked like the kind of phoniness that took eight hours of somebody’s time to create. The shadows under her eyes were deep and purple, but her eyes didn’t look clear now. They looked muddy and glazed at the same time. Her body and legs were the same, but they didn’t look seductive any more. They looked tense and tight, like the muscles were straining against an invisible pressure. The hand that held the gun looked the same way.

“Where is it?” she said. “Where is it, smart copper?” Her voice sounded the way her body looked.

“You’re the smart one,” O’Neill said. “The story you gave me was good enough to sell to Hollywood. All the business about having to get on the Chief. All that scared-to-death of Eddie Shapiro. All the big love act. That was really smart. Have you got the rest of it figured out, too? How you’ll get out of here if you plug me?”

“Where is it?” she said again. And O’Neill knew she wasn’t going to ask again.

“On the bed,” he said. “In the briefcase. But is it going to do you any good? Are you going to get away with it?”

“I’ll get away with it,” she said. “Back up.”

O’Neill backed up and she crossed quickly to the bed, picked up the briefcase and put it under her arm. “You big virile men,” she said, “you’re so damn dumb it’s pathetic. You think because you can paw women like they were just so many pounds of flesh that they don’t have anything to think with.”

“How did you kill Spencer?” O’Neill asked.

“How do you think? I opened the door and shot him. The big slob didn’t even have time to look surprised.”

“Then you made up the story about seeing Shapiro?”

She nodded and started to back to the door. “Smart copper,” she said. “A lot of good all this will do you. I pinned it on Shapiro so the cops would start after him. Shapiro had Bernie’s money. But he was honest. He was keeping it for Bernie. I knew if he got hot the first thing he’d do would be to go for the money. He did just that. I knew where his hide-out was. It was an old place of Bernie’s. So I went there and waited. He showed about thirty minutes later, but he didn’t have the money. He told me what he’d done with it so I shot him.”

“He gave it to the girl out at the Fairmont, so you went out there,” O’Neill said. “And you found out from her that I’d been there so you came back here.”

She nodded again and backed up a few more steps.

“I had the pleasure of breaking your head open tonight,” she said. “Too bad I didn’t kill you then and save myself this trouble.”

“I just figured everything out before you got here,” O’Neill said. “I felt pretty dumb. When I saw the nylons were gone from the bathroom and all the glass had fallen out on the fire escape, I knew what had happened. You shot Spencer to put the heat on Shapiro and make him run for the money. Then when I took over the guard duty outside you got up, dressed very carefully, and broke the window from the inside. That’s why the glass fell out. Then you let out a little ladylike scream just loud enough for me to hear, but not loud enough to wake up anyone in the adjoining rooms. And when I barged in here you conked me one. Is that about right?”

“Smart copper,” she said.

O’Neill didn’t know whether it was worth the extra effort to make a try for the gun. He knew he wouldn’t make it, but he didn’t like the idea of just standing and being plugged.

He didn’t have a chance to make up his mind.

The lock of the front door clicked, the hinges creaked.

Estelle Moran wheeled toward the living room. Two shots sounded, sharp and loud, O’Neill leaped forward, grabbed her by the shoulders and reached for the gun. But it slipped from her fingers.

She sagged back against him and began to moan softly. The small sound came through a light froth of blood that was deepening the carmine stain of her lipstick.

He put his hands under her elbows and lowered her to the floor. She sighed once and opened her eyes. They were clouding fast. She said, “Smart copper,” and turned her face away from him. She coughed once or twice and then her body stiffened in his arms. She said, “No, no,” and tried to sit up, but she didn’t make it. When she slumped back again it was all over.

O’Neill looked up and Betty Nelson was standing in the doorway. Her hands hung at her sides. In one of them was a smoking gun. Her face was empty.

“She killed Eddie,” she said. “She didn’t give him a chance. She told me he killed himself, but I knew she was lying.”

“She was lying,” O’Neill said. He was still crouched beside the dead body Estelle Moran. He felt too tired to ever get up.

“I came here after her. I told the desk clerk you’d sent for me and he gave me a key.”

O’Neill heard footsteps in the corridor, excited voices.

He got up quickly, took the gun from the girl’s hand.

“Don’t talk,” he said fiercely. He took her by the shoulders, shook her hard. “I did send for you! You came here, and she was dead already. I shot her. She pulled a gun on me and I had to shoot her. Don’t forget that!”

The copper came into the room then.

“Gosh! Mr. O’Neill—”

He stopped and looked at the body on the floor. “What happened?”

“This is the girl Logan was looking for,” O’Neill said. “She’s wanted for two murder raps. Keep the corridors clear. Send the tenants back into their rooms.”

Logan got there ten minutes later. When O’Neill finished his story he was nodding contentedly. “This is the best way all around. No trouble about a trial now.” He looked down at the dead girl and shook his head gloomily. “With those legs she’d beat any rap.”

Estelle Moran didn’t make the eight o’clock Chief that morning. But she was on it the following day. There was an aunt in California who claimed the body, and was willing to pay the expenses of burial, so she was shipped out West, not in a drawing room, but in the refrigerator car up close to the engine.

O’Neill went down to the station with Logan to see that she made connections for her final trip.

They waited until the train pulled out, then started back down the ramp.

“Well,” O’Neill said, “that’s what she hired me for. To put her on the Chief. So everybody should be happy.”

He reached into his vest pocket and pulled out the crisp fifty dollar bill she’d given him. He looked at it for a minute and then began tearing it into pieces.

“Are you nuts?” Logan asked.

O’Neill didn’t answer. Tearing up the bill made him feel better. But not much.