A Handy Death

Chapter 14

Hank Ross entered his office the following morning to find a strange girl in charge of the telephone switchboard. She was extremely young, slight, and very blue-eyed. He frowned and started to walk past the small barrier into the central offices, when she held up her hand. It was tiny with long red nails that looked as if they had been honed, but the gesture was authoritative.

“I’m sorry,” she said haughtily. “It isn’t permitted that people who are strangers should just barge in unannounced, like. Might I ask to whom you desire to speak?”

Hank shook his head in disbelief at the language, biting back his first comment.

“I’m sorry,” he said finally, trying to sound contrite. “You’re quite right, of course. Is Miss McCloud here?”

“Half a sec.” A cord was inserted into the board and a switch depressed. “Honey? Are you in? Who? I don’t know. Should I ask him? Sure, honey.” The baby-blue eyes came up. “What’s your name, mister?”

“Ross,” Hank said politely. “Hank Ross.”

A pad was obtained and a pencil picked up. Blue eyes came up, anxious to do the job properly.

“How do you spell it?”

“The same as on the top of the pad you’re using,” Hank said, trying to be helpful.

“Oh? Gee, thanks.” The girl spoke into the mouthpiece of her headset. “He says his name is Hank Ross, honey. R-O-S-S. What’s that? What!” She dragged the cord from the switchboard, looking at Hank with justified resentment. “You should have told me you were the boss. I was told to keep people out unless they were announced—”

“And you did very well,” Ross said hastily, and escaped past the barrier.

Sharon was grinning widely as he came into his office, shedding his coat.

“Sic transit gloria mundi,” she said. “Imagine! A telephone operator who doesn’t recognize the great Hank Ross on sight!”

“Merely the generation gap,” Hank said with a smile. “I’ll bet her mother wouldn’t have made that mistake. By the way, where is Molly?”

“She doesn’t have the iron constitution I gave her credit for,” Sharon said. “Dancing, yes. She can dance all night and still come into the office bright and fresh. But she’ll never make it on skid row. One drink is about her limit.”

“And how many did she have?”

“When I had an unlimited expense account at my beck and call? And instructions to ply them both with liquor and worm out their secrets? She had six,” Sharon said. “Doubles.”

“My God! I hope she gets back to work in a week!” Ross sat down at his desk. “I told you to entertain them, not to poison them!”

“Oh, she liked them at the time,” Sharon said airily. “And her boyfriend Jimmy didn’t turn a hair.”

“What about her boyfriend Jimmy?”

“You mean, Target-for-Tonight? Well, Jimmy is a very nice man who honestly dances as well as Molly says. I also do not believe he is married, because he has that same unworried look you have, H. R. And my guess is that he came here looking for a dentist the other week about as much as he flew to the moon last Sunday.”

Ross frowned. “You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

“What makes you so sure?”

Sharon grinned. She said, “We spies usually don’t give away our secret methods, but considering the amount of money we spent last night, I expect you have a right to know. While we were dancing, I asked him how he finally came out with Dr. Gross, his dentist. And he said fine, all he needed was one small filling.”

“So?”

“So, to begin with, the last time he was here the dentist’s name was Ross, not Gross. And in the second place Jimmy suffers from never having been married; he’s had too little practice in lying. He stumbled over words and things like that.”

Ross frowned. “So what was he doing here?”

“That I never discovered,” Sharon admitted. “But at least we know he came here under completely false pretenses.”

“Did he ask about any of our current cases?”

“Well, he claimed to be a baseball fan. He said he remembered Billy Dupaul when he first came up to the Mets. Said he read you were handling the case, and said he hoped you’d get the boy off.”

“That’s all?”

“Well, he asked if you had any plans for the trial; said since he’d been going around with Molly he’d gotten interested in law. It was a natural enough question, I suppose. In any event, I told him you had no special plans, and that was that.”

Ross drummed his fingers restlessly on the desk top.

“It all sounds natural enough, but I don’t like it. I’d still like to know what brought him to the office, and with such a flimsy story. And making up to our telephone girl like that. What’s he after?”

“Maybe another night on the expense account would help, H. R.,” Sharon said, grinning. “Maybe we didn’t ply him with enough liquor.”

“I doubt we could justify it to the income tax people as a deduction,” Ross said, smiling, “let alone Charley Quirt. And speaking of Charles Quirt, would you get him on the line?”

Sharon drew over a telephone and managed to get the new girl to understand. A few minutes later she turned, the receiver cupped in her hand.

“He’s away for a few days.”

Ross’s eyes narrowed. Charley always seemed to be away when Billy Dupaul went to trial. Allergic to trials, possibly?

“Any message?” Sharon said.

“No,” Ross said shortly. “Get Steve in here. We have a trial coming up tomorrow!”

“So where do we stand?” Steve asked. His usual voluminous file of papers was beneath his hand, ready for instant reference. Both men were in their shirt sleeves; empty coffee cups were scattered about the long conference table. Hank Ross ran a hand through his thick hair.

“Out in mid-air,” he admitted. “Damn! We know the boy was the intended victim of a swindle scheme; both Bukvic and that private detective, Jennings, admitted it openly. But they won’t testify.”

“Can’t you subpoena them and make them testify?”

Ross shook his head definitively.

“No. If we have to put Coughlin on the stand, we’ll have one hostile witness. If all our witnesses were hostile we wouldn’t have a prayer with a jury no matter what we dragged out of them.”

“Mike Gunnerson was with you when you talked to Bukvic and Jennings,” Steve said. “Couldn’t you put Mike on the stand?”

“All that would do would be to ruin Mike as a private investigator without helping us a bit. With the relationship between my firm and his for the past years, Gorman would tear him apart. Not to mention that Bukvic would never talk to him again.”

“So what do we do?”

“I don’t know.” Ross bit his lip. “And Grace Melisi dead... Although she wouldn’t have testified if she weren’t.”

“Why not?” Sharon asked. “After all, even if she admitted taking part in a swindle eight years ago, the statute of limitations would have handled that. She couldn’t be charged.”

“Not on the swindle charge,” Ross said, “but the indictment here is murder, and she would have to admit handing the murder weapon to Billy. I doubt she’d do it. Anyway, she is dead, and we’re just wasting time.”

Steve said, “Maybe the sister — Anne Melisi — might know something when you locate her.”

“If Grace Melisi didn’t put it in writing — and I’m sure she wouldn’t have — then we wouldn’t be able to use it as evidence, anyway.” Ross shook his head. “Besides, we always come back to that damned pistol. Even if Marshall took it and gave it to somebody, who did he give it to?”

There were several moments of silence; then Steve spoke thoughtfully.

“I have an idea. What difference does it make about the gun? Suppose Billy admits he had the gun with him. Suppose he admits he was caught playing around with Neeley’s woman—”

“Neeley’s wife was in court,” Sharon pointed out. “Ex-wife, rather, and Dupaul denied it was her.”

“I said woman, not wife. Suppose we work on the basis that Neeley caught Billy with Neeley’s girlfriend, and in the argument Billy shot Neeley — no, in the struggle, Neeley got shot.” Steve began to warm to his defense. “That’s it. Neeley wouldn’t want to admit he couldn’t even go to the movies without his girlfriend putting out for a complete stranger; that’s why he made up that weird story about meeting Billy outside the bar. How’s that? On that basis couldn’t we still make a strong case for self-defense?”

“On that basis,” Ross said, “the first thing we would face is the fact that our client lied to the jury in his first trial. And the basis of our defense has been that he told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Once we tore the fabric of his veracity, we’d undermine ourselves completely. That’s out!”

There were several minutes of silence. Ross sighed and reached for the phone.

“Molly—”

“She isn’t in today,” a bright voice said. “Would you care to leave a message?”

“No, thank you,” Hank said hurriedly, and hung up. He reached for the outside phone on his desk, looking at Sharon sheepishly. “I forgot. Where did you get her, by the way? Woolworth’s?”

“You won’t think so when you get the bill,” Sharon said, grinning. “She just happens to be a blithe spirit.”

“So let Noel Coward keep her,” Ross said, and dialed a familiar number. It rang once and was picked up. “Mike?”

“Hi, Hank.”

“Hello, Mike. What’s new? Wait a minute — I’ll put you on conference. I’m here with Sharon and Steve. We’re up here with all the papers on the Dupaul case, trying to discover how to walk on water.”

Mike’s deep voice filled the room as Ross pressed the conference button on the telephone, switching it through the small conference box.

“With what I’ve got for you, Hank, my suggestion would be real tall stilts. Oh, yes, for whatever help it is, I may have been a bit hasty up there in Albany yesterday—”

Steve leaned forward. “You mean, Grace Melisi isn’t dead?”

“If she isn’t, she should sue,” Mike said, “because they buried her. No, I mean I talked to some of her friends at the sanitorium, who said she’d never married. Quigley’s man up there had a little more imagination — not to mention time — and he checked out her pastor. It seems Grace was married and then divorced.”

Ross sat erect, his eyes sharp. “Who to? And when? That could be our missing boyfriend! That could be damned important!”

“The pastor didn’t know. I’ve got people working on the records here as well as in Albany, but they could have gotten married anywhere. And without the man’s name, it’s one hell of a lot of work to find it. Even if it was here or in Albany, it would take days and days. Maybe weeks.”

“Mike, that could be the answer! And we don’t have weeks, damn it! You should know that!”

“I know it, Hank. We don’t know when she married, or where, or to whom. We’re doing the best we can.”

Ross brought himself under control. “I know you are, Mike. I’m sorry I blew. Anything else?”

“No, that’s it, so far.”

“Then I’ll let you get back to it. Thanks.”

Ross hung up and shook his head. Steve looked at him.

“So now what?”

“Well,” Hank said, “we’ve gone over your abstract of the transcript in as much detail as we can. Once more and I’ll throw the damn thing out the window. Let’s hear that tape of Billy in the Tombs again, just for luck.”

“Right,” Sharon said. She slipped the casette into the recorder and pressed the start button. Ross leaned back in his swivel chair, weariness gripping him, idly letting the chair swing from side to side, his hand on his brow, his head bent, his eyes closed, listening. The tape wound through. Ross heard his own voice.

“...Jim Marshall had access to that gun? He also probably had access to the mate to it in Queensbury—”

“Hold it!” Ross was sitting erect, his weariness put aside. Sharon punched the stop button on the recorder, looking at Ross in surprise. “Go back a bit,” Ross said tersely. “Go back and take it over.”

Sharon obediently reversed the tape for several seconds, and then replayed it. Ross was leaning forward, his eyes gleaming excitedly.

“I’m stupid!” he said to himself. “Dumb, dumb, dumb! I wonder...” He frowned in silent thought for several minutes, while the tape droned on. Sharon turned it off; Hank Ross made no objection. It was doubtful if he even realized the sound had stopped. Sharon and Steve, both mystified but recognizing the mood, remained silent. “Well, at least it’s a chance,” Ross said, more to himself than to the others. His voice strengthened. “Steve, do you still have that picture of Billy Dupaul signing that contract?”

“Sure,” Steve said, puzzled, and dug it from his papers. He shoved it across the desk, and put his glasses back in place. “But what—?”

“Later,” Ross said tersely, and studied the glossy photograph closely. Suddenly he grinned, a happy grin, and reached for the phone, dialing. “Bingo,” he said under his voice, and added, “maybe...”

Mike Gunnerson answered.

“Mike,” Ross said without preliminaries, “would it help you in your search for Grace Melisi’s long-lost husband if I gave you a name as a possible candidate?”

“You’re damn right!” Mike said. “Who?”

Ross looked up. Both Sharon and Steve were hanging on every word. He grinned.

“I’ll put it in a sealed envelope and send it right down to you,” he said. “If I’m wrong, I wouldn’t want to lose the respect of my staff...”