Ah, Treachery!

Chapter 20

They stood in front of Jack Thomson, the dead doorman, until the first black-and-white arrived. They stood side by side, Partain in a mildly threatening “at ease” military stance, Jessica Carver with arms folded across her chest.

A small crowd had gathered and wanted to know if the guy was dead and if they had killed him and if anybody had called the cops. Partain answered only the last question.

After the black-and-white arrived, Partain and Carver abandoned their guard duty, answered a uniformed sergeant’s questions and agreed to wait upstairs until homicide talked to them which, the Sergeant warned, it sure as shit would.

They took the elevator to the fifteenth floor without speaking and entered the apartment. Carver went silently to her room and locked the door. Partain retired to the kitchen and began cutting up two plump fryers that were in a bag of groceries General Winfield had insisted on buying during the drive from the airport.

An hour later Partain knocked on Carver’s door and said, “Dinner’s ready.”

“I don’t want any,” she said, her voice muffled by the door.

“Fried chicken. Mashed potatoes. Cream gravy. A three-lettuce salad. Corn bread.”

After a moment she asked, “Real corn bread?”

“From scratch.”

Five seconds later the bedroom door opened and Jessica Carver, her eyes swollen and bloodshot, gave him a sad tired smile and said, “Well, I reckon we have to eat.”

“It’s on the table,” Partain said as the corridor door chimes rang.

“I’ll get it,” he told her. “You go ahead and start.”

Partain opened the door and wasn’t surprised to find that the caller was the fashion-plate homicide Detective Sergeant, Ovid Knox. Before Knox could say anything, Partain said, “You eat yet?”

Knox didn’t try to hide his surprise. “Why?”

“Because dinner’s on the table. Fried chicken. Salad. Mashed potatoes. Cream gravy. Corn bread. You’re invited. We eat in the kitchen.”

“Who’s we?”

“Jessica Carver, me and now you. But if you don’t want to eat, you can watch.”

“I’m not much of a voyeur,” Knox said.

They ate everything but the bones and the beak. And because Jessica Carver and Ovid Knox still seemed hungry, Partain found some Sara Lee brownies in the freezer and served them with the coffee. Carver had two brownies, Knox, three, and Partain, none.

After his third brownie and final cup of coffee, Knox pushed the cup and saucer aside, rested his elbows on the table, leaned forward slightly and said, “Who shot him?”

“At least two guys in a black stretch Lincoln limo,” Partain said. “One drove. The other was the backseat shooter.”

“Any description?”

“It was night. The windows were tinted. They were at least fifty yards away.”

“Tell me about the dead guy — Jack Thomson with no ‘p.’ ”

“He was the night doorman and a sometime actor.”

Knox turned to Jessica Carver. “How long’ve you known him?”

“Three years. Maybe three and a half. He came with the building.”

“Then he was here when your mother moved in.”

She nodded.

“Nice guy?”

“Yeah, he was nice. He’d get you a taxi, carry your groceries up, get your car washed, tell creeps you weren’t in when you were. He was just a nice accommodating guy. Ma always tipped him for doing stuff and gave him two hundred dollars at Christmas.”

“He ever offer to sell you any dope?”

“No. But then I never asked him, did I?”

“He ever ask you to go out with him?”

“No. But if he had, I might’ve.”

Knox turned back to Partain. “How’d he strike you?”

“He could do voices, or maybe I should say accents. He was very good at it. He also told me he was too second-leadish for films but got work in commercials — radio and TV, I suppose. I never saw him on TV but that might be because he said he did mostly voice-overs and also because I seldom watch television.”

Turning to Carver again, Knox said, “He was the night doorman?”

She nodded.

“Then he wasn’t on duty when Dave Laney paid you that early morning call.”

“Tom was on duty. The day doorman.”

“Did poor dead Jack know poor dead Dave?”

“Sure,” she said. “I stayed here a while before I went to Mexico with Dave, who was one of the creeps I sometimes told Jack to get rid of. They knew each other all right, but not socially.”

Knox rose, went to the sink, found a glass, ran the cold water, filled the glass and sipped it. All this gave Partain the opportunity to assess Knox’s outfit. That night he was wearing a double-breasted brown jacket with worsted slacks so dark green they might have been black. His shirt was the palest of yellows with a long-pointed collar. There was no tie and the collar was buttoned. Partain remembered when only hicks and rubes wore their shirts buttoned to the top like that. But if there was no tie, there was a dark green handkerchief that peeped out of the jacket’s breast pocket. Partain leaned back so he could see the shoes and was almost disappointed to discover they were the same gleaming black walnut loafers Knox had worn before.

Knox turned from the sink, had another sip of tap water, peered into the glass instead of at Partain and Carver and asked, “What happened tonight — from the beginning?”

Jessica Carver made the reply. “We were going to dinner. We were going to walk to Westwood.”

“Walk?”

She indicated Partain with a nod. “His idea. Walk there, cab back. We came out of the lobby. He asked Jack how long the limo had been parked across the street. Jack said about an hour or forty—”

Knox interrupted. “Let him take it from there, Ms. Carver.”

Jessica shrugged and Partain said, “He said forty-five minutes or an hour. I asked him why the cops hadn’t tagged it. Jack said the cops were too busy — and what if the limo was waiting for the girlfriend of some indy prod at Paramount who’d halfway promised to read the cop’s treatment for a TV show. What’s an indy prod?”

“Independent producer,” Knox said. “What happened next?”

“I asked Jack to call us a cab, took Jessica by the arm and suggested we wait inside.”

“Why’d you change your mind about walking to Westwood?”

“Because I don’t like it when cars park out in front of where I live for an hour or forty-five minutes with their engines running.”

“It was parked across the street — not out front.”

“That bothered me even more.”

Knox sighed. “Okay. Then what?”

“We were heading for the building’s front door. I glanced back, saw the limo’s rear window’d been lowered and thought I saw something metallic inside the limo. Something that, well, glinted.”

“Glinted?”

“Glinted. I shoved Jessica to the right and I dropped and rolled left. Then I heard the shot.”

“And then?”

“I waited for the second shot.”

“Thought they were shooting at you, did you?”

“I knew they were shooting at somebody. So I lay there, hoping that what I heard next would be the limo’s getaway. But I didn’t hear anything. Then I looked at Jessica. She was on her hands and knees like a sprinter at the starting blocks. But she was also staring at something. I looked where she was looking and saw Jack, the dead doorman.”

Knox nodded thoughtfully and turned to Jessica Carver. “You were on your hands and knees?”

She said yes.

“Facing the street?” he said.

“Facing the street.”

“What’d you see?”

“I saw that the limo’s back window was about three-quarters of the way down. Something was poking out of the window — something dark. The light caught it once. Bounced off it. Then I saw a red flash and heard the bang. I looked at Partain, who was trying to imitate a pancake. When I looked back at the limo, it was already pulling away — not fast, not slow, just normally.”

Knox sat back down at the old kitchen table. “It’s one-hundred-forty-nine feet from the driver’s side of the limo to Jack the doorman. It’s night but there’s still lots of artificial light. The single round hit Jack in the center of the back of his head and blew away a lot of his brains. You were Army, Mr. Partain. What kind of shooting would you call that?”

“Expert — providing the shooter hit what he was supposed to hit.”

“From what we could figure out,” Knox said, “poor Jack was moving toward the outside phone when he got it. You shoved Ms. Carver, then dropped and rolled to a point about eight feet away from Jack. Ms. Carver was sort of kneeling five or six feet away from you, looking at a limo, a driver, a shooter in the backseat and a nice slow getaway. What does all that tell you?”

“That it was a professional job.”

“Back up,” Jessica Carver said. “That limo’d been parked there with its engine running for forty-five minutes or an hour. They could’ve shot Jack anytime. But they waited till they had an audience.” She looked at Partain. “You and me.”

Knox leaned an inch or two toward Partain. “That makes a weird kind of sense to me, Partain. It make any sense to you?”

“None at all,” Partain said.