Dead of Night

Chapter twenty-six: Blubbering woman

My aching skull was a booming reminder that the person who’d tried to eliminate me only a few hours before would probably try again.

The sunlight was bright on the Broadway corner where I waited for a bus. The Sunday afternoon strollers were out in force. It seemed an unlikely spot for an attack. Still, I watched every solitary male who passed.

If it was Gowriss who’d trailed me from Manhasset, shot up my car in Brooklyn, and left me in a West Side apartment en route to the mortuary, probably I couldn’t do much more to put him out of circulation than the badges were supposed to be doing. Still, what possible motive could the narcotic addict have had for wanting me dead? It couldn’t be because of fear Tildy’d told me about him; presumably he already knew she’d told the DAides.

I couldn’t rub Gowriss off the slate completely. He was a known killer. He had shot Johnny the Grocer. But those paid droppers seldom use knives, and when they do it’s a six-inch spring blade, not a steak knife. And no cold-blooded ambusher would have left me lying there in Ruth Moore’s hallway without making sure I was finished.

Maxie claimed to have seen a man who looked like Gowriss, in the hotel. No one else had. Tim didn’t believe him. The guy Tildy’d described wasn’t remotely like the thin, sallow-skinned dope-user described in the circular. Tildy might be in danger from Gowriss; I didn’t think I was.

The only tangible signs pointed in Yaker’s direction. Tildy’s description. The wax on the spread. His oddly timed appearance at Lanerd’s suite, while I was there.

Before I left, I’d asked Ruth about Roy Y. She didn’t know much. Lanerd was acquainted with him but not too well. Yaker was a transparent bore. Made passes at everything in skirts. Had attempted to seduce Ruth in Lanerd’s office once. But what I’d heard outside his door while those con girls were with him, that scarcely matched up with murderous intent. Granting that a lustful heart, by whatever name you call it, has no conscience.

And Lanerd? He could have followed me in a cab from his home, if he’d been alive then. But flatly impossible for him to have made that gun play on Atlantic Avenue; his body’d been discovered before that. No, the party who’d cracked that statuette on my cranium was still up and about.

Hacklin and Schneider would be ready to accept the adman’s death as suicide. I couldn’t buy any part of it.

His departure from this vale certainly would hit a lot of people hard. I was really sorry for Marge, Tildy, Ruth. More for Marge than Tildy; she’d still have her career. And Ruth — She seemed to me to be the self-reliant sort who could take it in her stride.

Possibly there were others I didn’t know about who’d miss him, in the same way. As Emile would say: Quel homme!

Until I reached the Continental Television Building, it hadn’t been impressed on me what a blow Mr. Giveaway’s passing might be to some of the men who’d been close to him. Jeff MacGregory, for one.

When I asked where I might find him, they directed me to studio seven, a cute little salle the size of our Blue Ballroom.

A child’s building-block, big as a trunk, was fixed to a sign: Build Health with Munchies. On a raised platform, a couple dozen shirt-sleeved musicians were rustling scores on their racks, tuning violins, blowing dixieland on trumpets. At the other end of the studio a line of swim-suited show gals were prancing with beach parasols before a theater-size movie screen with a slide of Jones Beach on it. A pint-size taptress did cartwheels. A quintette of Cubans in white frilled camisoles twanged and sang Siboney. Nice quiet atmosphere for a head which already had tom-tom accompaniment!

An announcer directed me to the glass-paneled privacy of the control room. Three owlish young men were disagreeable about MacGregory. He wasn’t there. He was “upstairs somewhere.” This was a rehearsal, couldn’t I see that? One of them finally escorted me to a door marked: No Admittance, Clients Only.

Up a flight of stairs, behind a soundproofed door, looking down through a picture window on the pleasant pandemonium of the studio, was a grim MacGregory. He was more gaudily gotten up than the first time I saw him, but his expression wasn’t gaudy. He slumped in a preview chair, chin on chest, hand over eyes.

“Oh! My God!” He glowered at me. “Do I have to take you, too?”

“Not if I can locate Miss Millett.”

“She’s not here.” He leaned over, held his head in both hands. “She’s gone over to Iceville. To see Keith. She said you told her Dow’s dead!”

“Yair.” It didn’t seem reasonable for him to be so utterly despondent, now Marge was a widow. “What’d Miss Millett want here?”

“Two thousand fish. I don’t carry that kind of money around in my pants,” he said dourly. “By this time next week I’ll be lucky if I’ve got two bits! She’s ruined me!”

“Think she shot Lanerd?”

He stood up slowly. “I wasn’t thinking about it one way or the other. I was thinking how she’s mucked up the program. First place, she comes breezing in here with about as much chance of being unnoticed as a tuba player carrying two tubas. She asks for me; right off everybody begins the buzz-buzz about her being Miss Hands on Stack O’ Jack! Mystery — gone to hell in a handbasket! Boss — ditto, I guess!” He cursed with deep feeling. “And then she wants me to dig up dough enough for her to get to Brazil.”

“Messes things up, yair. Show must go on. All that—”

“How, for crysake, can it go on when there’s no Mystery Girl? Even if there was a mystery any longer, which there wouldn’t be!” He smoldered.

“She have anything to say about Lanerd?”

“I couldn’t understand half what she was blubbering about, she was so overwrought.” He made an angry gesture of dismissal, as if to shove the whole tangle out of his mind for the time being. “You can ask her yourself, if you hustle; she only left for Iceville ten minutes ago. Keith won’t have that kind of cash on him, either. Take him a while to get it.”

“Going to South America, is she?”

“She babbled about Montreal, Havana, London. But her company’s going to Brazil, so I s’pose she’ll head there. She did say it made absolutely no damn difference where she went; she’d be hunted just the same.”

“Hunted? Yair.” She’d been warned about keeping away from cops; now she couldn’t go to them for protection.

“I told her she better hike straight to a hospital, get some rest. She thought I meant maybe she was cracking up. ‘No, Jeff, I’m not going mad.’” He did a good job of imitating her. “‘I wish I could go mad. It would be better than having to think of the terrible thing I’ve done.’ What you going to do with a star who hands you a line like that?”

“You have other problems, too.” I waved at the Munchie rehearsals.

“Hell, yes.” He added in the surliest tone, “Don’t go quoting me as saying she confessed.”

“I won’t.”

“She didn’t.”

He was afraid he’d said too much.

“All right, so she didn’t. How’d Mrs. Lanerd stand up to the news about her husband?”

A punch in the jaw wouldn’t have hit him as hard. “Marge might have grown to dislike the bastard, in time, if he’d lived,” he said dejectedly, “but now she’ll never forget him.”

I didn’t contradict him.