Death Pulls a Doublecross [= Cowards Kiss]

Eleven

I went to the shelf and poured a little cognac in one of the glasses. I drank it off and turned around.

The briefcase was still there.

One of the slick mags had a feature running a few years back under the title “What’s Wrong With This Picture?” The pitch was quietly mindless — a Mona Lisa frowning on a wall, a man with two left hands, a face without eyebrows. The reader was supposed to puzzle it out, figure out what was wrong.

Hell, it was easy. The briefcase was wrong. It wasn’t supposed to be there at all, and there it was.

It should have been funny as hell. By the time I finally managed to sell Armin on the idea that I never had the case to begin with, wham — there it was. For a crazy second or two I wondered if it had been there all along, if Cora had unearthed it for me while she straightened up. That little piece of insanity didn’t last long. Somebody had brought the briefcase there while I was out. Somebody had given me a present.

Why?

I wasn’t going to worry about whys just then. I went to the door, locked it and slid the bolt home. I took the briefcase from the coffee table and sat down in a chair to examine it. I turned it over and over in my hands like a little kid with a Christmas present trying to guess what was inside. I shook it to see if it would rattle. It didn’t.

It was well-made and it was expensive. The leather was top-grain quality, the stitching neat and precise. It looked like an English job, which fit Armin’s little story about Canadian jewel thieves. But since most of the better briefcases sold in the States are English ones, it really didn’t mean too much one way or the other. So there was nothing to do but open the thing. So I opened it.

The inside had more things going for it. There was a long and detailed letter typed flawlessly on plain white bond. It bore no date, no return address, no signature. It led off with a simple “Dear Sir” and went on from there.

The instructions were complicated. Two keys were supposed to be in the briefcase. One, according to the letter, would fit a small locker in Central Terminal in Buffalo, New York. There was a strongbox in that locker, and the second key would open the strongbox. The box itself contained still another key, this one fitting a locker located in a station of the Toronto subway system. That locker, finally, held the Wallstein jewels.

The nameless person who wrote the letter apologized very carefully for the complexity of the directions. He was sure, he said, that the reader would appreciate them. By use of two lockers plus a strongbox, a man with keys but without instructions would be lost. So would any outsider who happened to break into the Buffalo locker — he’d find a meaningless key. If somebody was lucky enough to break into the Toronto locker he’d get the jewels, but nobody would know which Toronto locker to open unless he had the instructions in the first place and the key in the second — the key from the Buffalo locker.

I had to read the damned thing three times through before I could figure out which key was which and what the hell it was all about. By the time it made sense I had to admire whoever figured it all out. Nothing was left to chance. And there was another advantage — in the time it took to follow all the directions, the thieves would be out of town. And safe.

It was cute. But for all the good it had done the thieves they could have filled the briefcase with jewels and let it go at that. Bannister had managed to put them all in the river — except for Armin, possibly — and to get his dough back at the same time. Proving, maybe, that the best laid plans of jewel thieves gang aft agley. They’re in the same boat with the mice and the men. And it leaked like a sieve.

So now I had the briefcase. The next step, according to the book, was to turn it over to Peter Armin and collect a quick five thousand dollars for my troubles. Somehow I couldn’t quite see myself doing this. Not just yet. I had told Maddy the truth — my main interest was catching a killer and I didn’t care who Armin was or what he did with the jewels. But the briefcase might be useful to me. Maybe I could catch a murderer with it. Armin could wait a day or two for his briefcase and I could wait a day or two for my money. The killer came first.

I looked at the briefcase with respect. It was a bomb that could go off any minute, a nitro bomb that would behave unpredictably. I decided to dismantle it.

I staggered through the directions again. It was the fourth time around for me and this time I memorized them. There wasn’t all that much to remember. Just a pair of locker numbers. When they were tucked away in my mind I found a sheet of typing paper and hauled out my old portable. I copied the letter word for word, substituting new and meaningless numbers for the original ones. Then I tore the original letter into little strips of paper and flushed them down the toilet. I felt like a character in a bad Mitchum movie.

I found the pair of keys in a pocket in the briefcase. There numbers had been filed off and they looked innocent as vestal virgins. I replaced them with two keys of my own. One of them would open the door to a place in Greenwich Village where I’d lived years ago. Another would open the door to an apartment where a girl I once knew once lived. She was married now, and she didn’t live there any more. So I didn’t need the key.

I filed the sides of both keys, put them in the pocket of the briefcase, zipped it shut. I added the new set of phony instructions and closed the briefcase.

My bomb was a dud now.

I remembered telling Maddy something about bombs, saying they were going to start going off, that I wanted to set off a few of my own. I wondered if you could set off a dead bomb, a dud.

It was worth a try.

The kid with all the pimples was scratching himself. He looked up at me and gave me something that was almost a smile. Then he found my car and turned it over to me.

“I thought you just worked nights.”

“Usually,” he said. “Like today I’m working days. Win a few; lose a few. Today’s a good day for a convertible. You can roll down the top and look at the sunshine.”

“Uh-huh. Want to fill the tank?”

He studied the gauge. “Not worth the sweat,” he said. “She’s almost full now, see? You got to do a lot of driving to empty her, a whole lot. I can fill her when you bring her in.”

“I’ll be doing a lot of driving.”

“Well—”

“Fill the tank,” I said.

He filled the tank but he didn’t have his heart in it. I told him to put it on the tab, pulled out of the garage and left him scratching and mumbling. I felt better with a full tank of gas. It’s one of two prerequisites for a trip to the end of Long Island. The second is courage.

I took Second Avenue south, found the Queens-Midtown Tunnel and left the relative sanity of Manhattan for the hinterlands of Queens. I followed a variety of confusing expressways — which is where the courage came into the picture — until I managed to pass through Queens, rush through Nassau County and wind up in Suffolk County.

If you’ve got enough money, and if you don’t like New York, and if Westchester and Connecticut are either too arty or too Madison Avenue for you, you stand a good chance of winding up in Suffolk County. The towns were smaller there, the buildings lower and further apart. I had the top down and the fresh air was choking me. My lungs weren’t used to it.

I drove through the countryside and tried to pretend that it wasn’t really there. I remembered a line out of Sydney Smith to the effect that the country is sort of a healthy grave. Sydney Smith was right.

Bannister, according to Armin, lived in something called Avalon. I had copied down his address on the back of the snapshot Armin gave me, and when I hit Avalon I pulled over to the curb and fumbled through my wallet until I found it. I looked at it, remembered what Bannister was supposed to look like, then turned the photo over and checked the address. He lived on Emory Hill Road.

There was gas still left in the tank but there was room for more. A gas-pump jockey loaded me up without an argument, polished my windshield, checked my oil and water, and tried to sell me a new fuel pump. He also told me how to get to Emory Hill Road. It ran along the outskirts of Avalon. Living on the outskirts of Avalon is like living in a suburb of New Jersey, or a satellite of the moon. It’s ridiculous.

I followed his directions, found Emory Hill Road. I nosed the Chevy past a batch of estates that would have embarrassed Veblen. They were all the last word on the subject of conspicuous consumption. I passed them all by until I found one which made the rest look like Tobacco Road set to music. It had to belong to Clayton Bannister. Nobody else would want it.

First there was the house itself. The manor house, that is — I’m sure that’s what he called it. It was a cockeyed cross between Christopher Wren and Le Corbusier, a mixed marriage of the seventeenth and twentieth centuries with the assets of neither and the liabilities of both. I had never seen anything like it before; twentieth-century baroque was a brand-new concept. Flying buttresses do not go with picture windows.

The architect must have shot himself.

There were two other small houses. One must have been the guest house. The other was the garage but it looked more like a stable. A futuristic stable, of course, but still a stable. I saw a Rolls Silver Ghost and a Mercedes 300 and tried to imagine Bannister at the wheel riding to hounds, with Ralph and Billy bellowing “Tallyho!” at the tops of their impure lungs. An arresting picture.

I parked the Chevy in front of the estate and looked around for a chrome-and-steel hitching post. There should have been one, but there wasn’t. I yanked the emergency brake, killed the ignition and got out of the car. I looked at carefully landscaped grounds covered with too many different kinds of shrubs and flowers. He’d have done better cultivating one small garden.

I filled a pipe and got it going. I dropped the match onto the lawn and hoped it would start a fire. Then, briefcase tucked under arm, I started up the road to hell. It was paved with flagstones instead of good intentions.

When I was about thirty yards from the manor house its carved oak door burst open and a gorilla exploded out of it, gun in hand. It was Billy. He ran quickly and awkwardly and stopped a yard away from me.

“Whatcha want?”

I said: “Take me to your leader.”

“Huh?”

“The boss,” I said patiently. “I want to see the boss.”

When he looked as though he understood, I held up the briefcase. “For the boss,” I said. “A present.” He reached out a paw to snatch it away but I pulled it back and smiled sadly. “Not for you, Billy Boy. For the boss. Mr. Bannister. The king.”

He was still mulling that one over when the other half of the goon squad appeared. Ralph. He walked up quickly, his face a mask, took the gun away from Billy and listened to my speech.

“Go tell the boss who’s here and what he wants,” he told Billy. “I’ll stay here and watch him.”

He stayed there and watched me while Billy hurried home with the message to Garcia. We had nothing to say to each other so we stood and glared away. He kept the gun on me and looked as though he wanted me to move so he could put a hole in my stomach. I didn’t and it made him unhappy.

He broke the silence.

“What I figure,” he said, “is the boss’ll tell Billy to tell me to take the briefcase away from you and send you home.”

I didn’t answer him.

“What I figure,” he went on, “is you want him to pay you for it. It’s stupid, you ask me. He woulda paid you before, when he asked you. You weren’t selling. You were so smart and you had to get beat up, now you come to sell to him? He can kick you out on your ear. You could of saved yourself a drive, you could of put it in the mail or called up and said come and get it. You don’t make sense.”

I didn’t answer him. A bird sang songs in a nearby tree. The wind rustled leaves in other trees. The big carved oak door opened and Billy’s big head appeared.

He called: “The boss says bring him in.”

Ralph managed to register surprise without changing expression. A neat trick. He nodded slowly, then stepped aside and motioned with the gun. I looked at the gun. It was bigger than the Beretta in my pocket.

“You go inside,” he said. “I walk behind you; I keep this pointed at you. Don’t get fancy.”

I didn’t get fancy. There were three marble steps at the head of the flagstone path. I climbed them and walked through the open door into the room. Billy pointed through another doorway and led me through to the living room. I followed with Ralph right behind and felt like meat in a sandwich.

The living room had thick wall-to-wall carpeting and a beamed ceiling. The beams were huge. They almost gave the room the air of a cathedral, but misfired slightly. The furniture was large and heavy and ugly. There were books in a bookcase, all expensively bound, mostly in sets, all, undoubtedly, unread.

I looked at the room. I looked at Ralph and Billy, both standing in front of me now. I looked at Ralph’s gun.

And I looked at Clayton Bannister.

He didn’t look like his picture now. His baldness didn’t show because he was the world’s first country squire to wear his hat in his house. He also wore light gray flannel slacks, a red plaid hunting shirt open at the throat and expensive shoes. He had a large cigar in his mouth and he talked around it.

“You’re tough to figure,” he said. “You’re supposed to be tough and you’re supposed to be smart and I don’t think you’re either one. What’s the bit, London?”

“I brought you a present.”

“And you think you’ll get paid for it? You had your chance, dumbhead. You know what I woulda paid for that briefcase. Twenty grand. Maybe thirty. Now I get it for nothing, dumbhead.”

I fingered the briefcase. “You’d pay me twenty grand,” I said. “Then you’d send some boys around to take the money back and blow my brains out. That’s smart?”

His face darkened. “A cutie,” he said. “Don’t get cute. I don’t like it. You gonna give me that thing?”

I tossed it to him. He caught it with surprising grace for a man of his bulk. He opened it with his eyes on me, then lowered his gaze to study the contents. He read the letter quickly, nodding from time to time to prove he could read. Then he looked up.

“Where’s the keys?”

“In the pouch with the zipper.”

“They better be,” he said darkly. He opened the zippered compartment and took out the keys. He studied them, smiled with obvious pleasure, put them back in the pouch, zipped it shut, put the letter back, zipped the briefcase and tossed the whole thing onto an overstuffed sofa.

“You know what it’s all about, London?”

“Jewels,” I said.

“Smart boy. Just jewels?”

“The Wallstein jewels.”

“Very smart boy.” He took the cigar from his mouth and pointed at me with it, looking at Ralph and Billy as he did so. They stood on either side of him, Ralph with his gun drawn, Billy with his apey arms at his sides.

“This is a smart boy,” he told them. “You look at this boy; you listen to him; he’s smart. You hear how he talks? He talks better than you two put together. He talks better than me and I’m not so damn stupid. He’s what you call cultured.”

He sighed. “But he’s still a dumbhead. You see?”

They both nodded dutifully.

“You,” he said. “London. You take a good look at this place? The house and the grounds? You check out the trees and furniture and all?”

“I saw them.”

“Whattaya think?”

“Impressive,” I said.

“Impressive,” he echoed. He thought it was a compliment. “You think I know a goddam thing about architecture? I know what I like, anybody knows that, but that’s all. You see that picture on the wall? It’s by Matisse. What I know about art you can put in your ear. What I know about Matisse you can put in the same ear and have room left. I bet you know a hell of a lot about architecture. And about art. I bet you know about Matisse. Right?”

“Some.”

“I also bet you don’t have a house like this one,” he said. “I also bet you don’t have a Matisse hanging on the wall. I don’t mean a goddam copy. I mean what they call an original. Right?”

I told him he was right. I didn’t bother telling him I wouldn’t live in his house on a bet or that I didn’t like Matisse. This would have annoyed him.

“I got and you don’t, London. You know why?”

“Money, probably.”

“Part right. Money and power. I want a house, I go hire an architect and tell him what I want. I want a good picture, I call a dealer and tell him I want the best. That’s why I got this briefcase.”

He walked over to a heavy mahogany drum table with ugly claw feet. He ground his cigar to a pulp in an ashtray. He came back and pointed at me, this time with his finger.

“You got to get the point of this, London. You had the briefcase and I wanted it. I offered to pay you off. You, you had to be smart. Too smart. You didn’t want to play. Money wasn’t enough, so power came in. I sent a little muscle to show you I wasn’t playing games. The muscle knocked the crap out of you. The muscle told you you could get your head knocked-in playing cute. So now I got the briefcase and you got nothing.”

I looked at him.

“Muscle,” he said reverently. “How long you think you’d have a President without an army? Or a business. You take when they started labor unions. The workers, the slobs, went out on strike. They wouldn’t work. So the boss, he got some muscle going for him. He hired some slobs and told them to break a few heads. All of a sudden there wasn’t a strike any more. Everybody was working.”

I told him the unions were still around. He looked at me scornfully. “You know why? They got smart. They got muscle of their own and they broke heads on their own. You see?”

I nodded. I looked at Billy, the muscle we were batting back and forth. He looked muscle-bound and stupid. I looked at Ralph. He was more of a right arm than a muscle. He looked useful and his gun looked dangerous. More dangerous than my Beretta. I wondered if it was the same gun he killed the blonde with.

“And you’re the smart one,” he was saying. “So I got the briefcase and you got crap. I don’t have to pay you a penny, London. You know what I can do now? I can tell Ralph to shoot a hole in your head. Not in here — why mess up the place, get the rug bloody?”

“You got the girl’s rug bloody.”

He gave me an odd look. “We take you outside,” he went on. “Billy tells you to go outside and you go because he tells you and you don’t want another beating. Then Ralph shoots a hole in you and Billy digs a deep hole and buries you. The gardener plants flowers.”

He laughed, his heavy body shaking. “Better,” he said. “We take you outside and we hand you a shovel and tell you to dig. We tell you you’re digging your own grave and you dig it, anyhow. You think you wouldn’t dig it? You think you can’t make a man do any damn thing in the world?”

He was probably right.

“We tell you to dig and you dig. We tell you to lie down and you lie down. And then we shoot you and cover you up and plant the flowers and you disappear. Nobody ever knows what happened to you; you’re gone. You never were in the first place.”

I nodded slowly. “All because of power.”

“You got it, London.”

“Muscle,” I said. “There’s only one thing wrong with having muscle working for you.”

“What’s that?”

“The kind of person you have to have around.”

“You mean Billy?”

“I mean Billy.” I took a deep breath and wondered if they would really make me dig my own grave, and if I was really weak enough to do it.

“I mean Billy,” I repeated, looking at the gorilla. “You know about him?”

He looked puzzled.

I looked at Billy and remembered the kind of punch he threw. I thought about what Ralph had said before, remembered how Billy had reacted. And wondered if it still worked that way.

“About him and his mother,” I said, loud. “He sleeps with his mother, Bannister. He does things with her. Bad things.”

And that was Billy’s cue.

He came in high and he came in hard and he came in fast. I saw him coming, saw Ralph raise his gun behind him and take aim. Ralph wasn’t going to shoot. He didn’t figure it would be necessary. He was waiting.

So was I.

It happened quickly. Billy was hunting for my head and he threw a big fist at it. I ducked and let the punch go over my shoulder, then came up underneath him and pivoted. That lifted him up and spun him around. His own tremendous forward motion did all the rest of it.

And I threw him at Ralph.

He had come in high and hard and fast and he went out the same way, flying straight for Ralph. The little man — the right arm — went over backwards with the big man on top of him. Maybe Ralph was trying to shoot me. Maybe the gun went off by accident, a pure reflex action.

It didn’t matter. Either way it went off, a loud noise only slightly muffled by Billy’s bulk. Either way Billy’s T-shirt turned red with his blood. Then the two of them hit the floor with an impact as loud as the gun shot. They did not move.

I looked from them to Bannister. He had a gun in his hand. It was a big gun and it was pointed at me.