A Gambling Man

Chapter 38

“Hey, shamus, how’s it going?” said Earl as Archer stepped into the elevator car.

“It’s going faster than I thought.”

“Got you a juicy murder to work on?” said the little man as he closed the gate and hit the button for the fourth floor. He had on his uniform with the shirt untucked, and Archer spied a half-empty bottle of Southern Comfort tucked behind his fold-up seat.

“Why do you say that?”

Earl cackled. “Afternoon edition of the Gazette. Gal killed at Midnight Moods. You working on that?”

“It’s confidential.”

“Yeah, I thought so, all right. Now, don’t you go get sliced and diced, Archer. Lotta that going around, it seems.”

“I’ll do my best.”

The car clanked to a stop and he got off. He looked back to see Earl leaning out of the car and watching him like Archer was about to combust and the man didn’t want to miss the spectacle.

Connie Morrison looked up from her desk as Archer walked into the office of Willie Dash, Very Private Investigations.

“Hey, sorry I’m late, Connie, I—”

She interrupted. “Willie is in his office. He wants to see you. Right now.”

Her tone was a bit severe and her tight hair bun pulled her eyes back to such a degree that Archer wasn’t sure if she was glaring at him or merely reacting to the pressure on her hair.

“Everything okay?” said Archer.

“Just go see him, Archer.”

Archer hooked his hat on the wall peg, buttoned his suit jacket, and rapped on Dash’s door.

“Come,” said the voice.

He opened the door and walked in.

Dash was behind his desk, his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His black toupee lay next to him, its wisps of hair sticking up like the man’s finger had met a light socket while he was wearing it.

He took off his steel-rimmed spectacles and eyed Archer.

“Grab a seat, Archer, and let me finish this letter for Connie to get out.”

Archer sat and waited patiently while Dash’s ballpoint skated in cursive across the paper. Done, Dash rose, left the room with the paper, and came back a minute later without it. He was in his socks. Archer looked around the room for the bottle of Beam but didn’t see it. The wall bed was nestled all snug up in the wall. He looked at Dash’s eyes and saw not a trace of drunken red.

Dash sat down and eyed Archer right back.

“No, I did not sleep here, and no, I have not been hitting the bottle. And, yes, I know my toupee looks like a Sherman tank ran over it. Fact is, it blew off and landed in a ditch where a squirrel decided it was his new best friend.”

“Keen eye, Willie. Sherlock Holmes has nothing on you.”

Dash adjusted his plastic suspenders, smoothed down his shirt, and glanced at his watch. “You have a funny idea of a workday.”

“I know, I’m sorry. But I was out really late doing some sleuthing.” He paused and then let loose with his changeup pitch. “Ruby Fraser is dead.”

“Yeah, I heard.”

Archer looked deflated. “Okay.”

“And you and your friend were at Midnight Moods last night?”

“How’d you hear about that?”

“I hear lots of things, Archer. What were you doing there?”

“My friend was auditioning for a job, which she got. And I went there to talk to Ruby again. I planned to have a second go at her. And when I got back here yesterday, Connie had my ticket ready and said I was to basically have at it, that you trusted me. Was she selling me a line or what?”

“Connie doesn’t sell lines. So just drop the hurt-feelings crap, compose yourself, and tell me what you did after we parted ways yesterday.”

Archer went through the whole gambit, from A to Z. Going to see Sheen and getting the list of names from him. Driving to Midnight Moods with Callahan. And then Archer got around to telling Dash about finding Fraser.

“So you walked in and there she was, dead?”

“And then I phoned the cops from the lobby, without identifying myself.”

“You might have put you, me, and this agency in jeopardy, Archer.”

“So you would have volunteered your name to the cops?”

“No, I’m not saying that. But did anyone see you and the lady go in or out? Because if they did, you two might be looking down the barrel of a murder charge, or at the very least intent to obstruct a police investigation.”

“I don’t see how I obstructed anything. But for me, they would’ve found Fraser a lot later than they did.”

Dash stroked his chin. “What you say makes perfect sense, only some coppers have never quite grasped that concept. So you found Fraser dead, but no sign of anyone having been in her place.”

“Right.”

“Okay, you called the cops. Then what?”

“I went back to the boardinghouse where I’m staying.”

“And then?”

“I went to sleep.”

“I thought you said you had a late night. Hell, when I was your age, late to me was the next morning. But you got up and came here in the afternoon? So that was what, about thirteen hours’ worth of shut-eye?”

Dash stopped talking and eyeballed him in a way that was making Archer wish he’d driven through Bay Town and kept going right into the ocean.

“Before you say anything, Archer, keep in mind that if you lie to me, and I’ll know if you are, you’re fired.”

“I couldn’t sleep. I went for a walk and ended up at a diner, where I saw Mrs. Kemper.”

“What time was this?”

“Around three in the morning.”

“What was Beth Kemper doing at a diner at three a.m.?”

“Having a cup of coffee and a cigarette. She said she has a place to stay in town, had it before she was married. So I don’t think she went back up the mountain last night.”

“How did you get home? Walk?”

“She gave me a lift. Let me check my notes.” He pulled out his pad and consulted the pages, while Dash watched him with grudging approval.

“She said her old man told her about Ruby. I told her she might be a suspect, since Fraser might have been sleeping with her husband and they might assume she knew about it. But she said she had an alibi.”

“What was it?” asked Dash sharply.

“She was at dinner with friends from five to midnight. She wouldn’t tell me who with. She doesn’t know where her husband was during that time. When I went over to his office to get the list, I don’t think he was there.”

“You found Ruby’s body when exactly?”

“Ten minutes to twelve. I looked at my watch. One more thing — Ruby died from someone almost cutting her head off. But there was no blood around the body.”

“Meaning she was killed elsewhere. Did you check out her rooms?”

“There was nothing anywhere. So she was killed somewhere else and her body carried to her room. Tell me how the hell does somebody not see that.”

Dash took this all in and then focused on Archer’s facial injuries. “Who beat you up?”

“Right. Forgot about that. Armstrong’s boys did the pummeling. He was at Midnight Moods. He wanted to hire us to find out the truth behind the blackmail. I told him I’d have to take that up with you and that we already had a client paying us for pretty much the same thing. He didn’t like it that we went to talk to his daughter. He made me show him the list of suspects I got from Wilson Sheen. And maybe I said some things they didn’t like, and fists started flying and we got into it.”

“For starters, Archer, Douglas Kemper did not hire us to find the truth. I’m not sure what he did hire us to do, but I’m certain it wasn’t that.”

“Okay, but I also told Beth that her husband would be a suspect. She didn’t know if he had an alibi or not.”

“Oh, so it’s Beth now?”

“We had a cup of coffee last night. I saved her from a trio of punks. She was grateful.”

“I bet she was. Only you don’t want that kind of gratitude. And how does anyone know they have an alibi if no one knows when the woman was killed?”

“Beth said the police do. Her old man told her so.”

“Sawyer Armstrong told her when? You found the body at 11:50. You called the cops. They came while you hightailed it. You said Beth was at a dinner until midnight. Then she left, went somewhere, and then ended up in the diner at three a.m. So when did Armstrong tell her? And when and how did he find out?”

Despite the risk, Archer could not bring himself to tell Dash about seeing Kemper and her father together down near the wharf, when Sawyer Armstrong might very well have told his daughter about Ruby Fraser. “I don’t know. Maybe he phoned her. And she said he’s friends with Carl Pickett, the chief of police.”

Dash sat back and mulled over this. “That could be. Carl Pickett is as big a brown-noser as they come. But why would he give Armstrong the heads-up about Ruby?”

“He might if he knew there was a connection between Ruby and Douglas Kemper.”

Dash put out a hand. “Let me see the list Wilson Sheen gave you.”

Archer handed it across, and Dash ran his eye down the page.

“I don’t see much here, Archer. Looks to me more like a keep-us-busy list.”

“So they want to keep us busy so we won’t look where we’re really supposed to look? This is a funny town.”

“And getting funnier by the minute. Let’s take a walk.”