Epitaph For A Dead Beat

CHAPTER 17

It was more than just a gun. It was Italian-made, a Beretta Olympic. It had a barrel almost nine inches long, adjustable sights, a compensator at the muzzle. Two hundred dollars would buy it, but you would have to live close to the store if you expected to take a taxi home on your change.

It was a.22, which made it even more interesting. Not that I was in a position to do much about that at the moment. I gave my attention to the woman in back of it instead.

She demanded the attention anyway. She was a young thirty, and she had a head of incredibly wild orange hair which she had apparently not cut since pubescence. Her lipstick, her belt and her shoes matched the hair precisely, and everything else she had on was purple. Including the paint around her eyes, although the eyes themselves might have been green. It was not a cold night, but she was wearing one of those knitted coat sweaters. Its lowest buttons were closed at her knees. With the rest of it open and falling away from her she looked like some exotic hothouse hybrid, just about to blossom. She was as chic as next year’s best buy for the man who has everything.

Her voice curled out from behind the Beretta as idly as a wisp of smoke. “I think “I’ll ask you to step all the way inside, darling. You’ll find that agreeable, won’t you?”

“Surely,” I said.

I went past her into the middle of a living room. The gun nosed firmly into the small of my back. I heard the door close. “I’m sorry, but this does seem necessary. I’m sure you’ll be sensible enough not to move.”

I watched the bobbing of that rampant hair out of the corner of my eye while she frisked me. When she was satisfied that she was the only one who had thought to bring any artillery she backed off. She took my wallet with her.

“It can’t be robbery,” I said. “You forgot your mask.”

“And my bathing cap.” She laughed. “I’ll be happier if you’ll sit now, darling. On the couch, if you please—”

I went across. The place was just another furnished apartment, melancholy as a hand-me-down bathrobe. Overstuffed furniture, a threadbare maroon rug, listing floorlamps. A paperback book lay on the couch near me. By Lucien Vaulking, the dead writer Henshaw had connected with both girls who were now also dead.

My gift-wrapped redhead had perched herself on the arm of a chair near the door. Good calves, even though the stockings were tinted purple also.

She’d opened the wallet and was considering it, resting the Beretta along her thigh. After some seconds she considered me instead. Then she closed the wallet and tossed it across.

“Fannin,” she said casually. “That would make you the chap who found Josie the other evening. We read the first name as Henry.”

“The press is so dreadfully irresponsible these days.”

No smile. “How curious. And now you appear at Audrey’s. You will tell me why?”

“Nope.”

“I could make it difficult. There happens to be a considerable amount of money involved in this operation. I’m not down here for social purposes — surely you realize that?”

“I do now. Does Connie step out from behind the arras, or do we toddle off somewhere to meet him?”

She had small bright teeth. “Perhaps we’ll have to see him at that. Unless you wish to change your mind and tell me what you wanted with Audrey?”

I leered at her.

She lifted an eyebrow. “I rather doubt that. Meaning no offense, darling, but I don’t quite believe you could meet the going rate.” She stood, almost wearily. “You’ll pardon me if I’m so quickly bored — but then it’s not really being scintillating, is it? You don’t intend to answer my questions?”

I looked at her pleasantly. After a minute she reached below the chair and lifted a bulky black pocketbook, moving with all the graceful indifference of a lynx in a forest full of chipmunks. The pocketbook rested against her hip when she adjusted the strap across her right shoulder.

“The gun will be inside,” she said easily, “not obstructed in the least. I have an Austin Healy three doors up. You will drive, of course. I’m certain we understand each other.”

Cool, cool, like a Christmas window in Tiffany’s. So I shrugged, getting to my feet as if I really thought she might shoot holes in my head if I didn’t. Then I nodded in the general direction of her knees. “If we’re joining the maharajah, love, you really ought to hitch up that slip—”

It was so corny I was going to blush when I wrote it in my diary come bedtime. The edge of my left hand caught her at the inside of the wrist when she glanced down, and the gun went skidding noisily toward the base of a chair. She choked off an unfeminine sound, then broke after it.

I grabbed her around the waist. It was a nice waist, trim and girlish. I liked it, so I didn’t let go even when she jabbed a spiked heel into my shin. I hopped on one foot, lost my balance, went down on my seat. It hurt me more when the redhead went down on hers. My lap was under it.

“Tell me honestly — do you feel as silly as I do?”

“If you will kindly release me—”

I kept one hand near her while I stretched for the Beretta, but it wasn’t necessary. Madame was really far too civilized for bodily contact sports. She was already busy with her seams when I checked the gun.

There were five long-rifle cartridges in the magazine, one in the chamber. The bore was clean. I ejected the sixth shell, pressed it into the clip, then dropped that part of the mechanism into my pocket. She’d lost her satchel and I poked my nose into that next.

The usual female junk, nothing anymore lethal than a charge-plate. I stuck the eviscerated gun inside. A card in a calfekin wallet told me I’d been boorish with a Mrs. Margaret Constantine, Sutton Place. Mrs. Constantine carried over seven hundred dollars in subway money.

I handed the purse to her. She’d slipped off her coat. Within a minute she was sitting with those violet legs crossed, doing something remarkably studied with a Parliament and a gold-plated Ronson.

“My turn now,” I said. “We’ll talk about Constantine, huh?”

She fanned away some smoke. “Will we?”

“Okay,” I said. “I know. No cash to toss around on fun and games, my suit’s last year’s also, and on top of everything else you find it uncouth to roll on the rug. So I’ll figure it out myself with my plebeian wit. Constantine would be a man called Connie. He does some kind of fancy pandering uptown — a thriving business because he even runs to part-time help. Josie Welch and Audrey Grant have been supernumeraries of a sort.”

That got me nowhere, so I said, “You hear your husband called a pimp so often you don’t even yawn.”

This time she looked at me as if I were something extraneous she’d unearthed in the vinaigrette sauce. “May I ask how many young girls you’ve hired to undress in cheap hotel bedrooms in divorce cases, Mr. Fannin? That would be your line of work, wouldn’t it?”

I let that go past. 1 was hefting the loaded magazine.

“The newspapers said that Josie was killed with a twenty-two,” she said in a minute. “If you are by chance thinking that it might have been my gun, you can forget about it. I’m here for some information, nothing more. If you are also, it strikes me that we might make some manner of mutually satisfactory arrangement.”

I didn’t say anything to that either. Until I’d discovered who she was I’d thought the character named Connie would know something. But she would not have been waiting around if either of them had any idea what had happened to Audrey Grant.

There was a door off to the right of the couch. “Two bedrooms?” I asked her.

She nodded, curious.

“Which one’s Audrey’s?”

“Her clothes are in the one further back.”

“Stick around,” I said. I went over there and flicked on a light in a short hallway. Doors on the right side led to a kitchen and a bath. I opened the second bedroom and snapped another switch.

It was a place to sleep. A double bed, some maple stuff” with drawers and legs. A clipped-out book-jacket photo of someone who was either D. H. Lawrence or a dissipated young Abe Lincoln tacked into a wall. I started on the dresser.

Margaret Constantine came into the doorway and leaned there, trailing smoke. “Aren’t you being a bit brazen, darling?”

I was riffling a stack of blouses. “The/re both at a party.”

“Oh, yes, this absurd other life of Audrey’s.” She sat down on the bed. “I’m not sure I understand this, you know. But the simple fact is that Josie’s murder could affect us quite adversely. You’re not here because you think Audrey might be involved, by any chance?”

I grunted.

“I don’t imagine you’ll tell me what you’re searching for?”

“Bank book,” I said. “Try that bed table.”

She shrugged, then leaned across. After a second she held out the blue cardboard envelope. “Isn’t this quite against the law? Or no, you had a key, didn’t you?”

I didn’t answer her, scowling at the pass book. Audrey Grant was leaving an estate of $4,100, but that was not what I had wanted to know. What I cared about was that she had made a deposit of $1,852 on July tenth, the same day on which Josie Welch had put the identical sum into her own account at another bank.

Ulysses Grant had told me that Audrey would have gotten whatever cash was left by Elizabeth Muller Grant. She’d only gotten half. Unless I was way off base, the matching deposits meant that she’d split the inheritance with her half-sister, the child Elizabeth Muller had sent out for adoption at birth.

It tied in with what Grant had said about his estranged wife being visited by two girls, and it also tied in with what Don McGruder had told me about Josie Welch and her hard Kansas childhood. I’d remembered the date of Josie’s deposit when Grant had mentioned that Elizabeth Muller died in early July, but it had taken a second killing to make me put two and two together. Except I still did not have the foggiest notion what any of it meant.

I put back the bank book, checking my watch. Margaret Constantine did not know it, but we would be having company any minute. I decided I’d rather talk to her husband before the police at that.

Mrs. Constantine did not know that either. She had been watching me, leaning backward with her weight against her arms. Now she lowered herself to her elbows, lifting one of her crossed legs slightly. That shoe slipped off and dangled from her toes.

There was an amused twinkle in her eyes. In another second she swung around and hoisted both legs, letting both shoes tumble to the floor. It was an obvious play, but she could even be obvious with style. She blew aside some of that fantastic hair when I leaned over her.

“Anything a girl can do to protect the family business, is that it?”

I was wrong. One of her hands shot upward and clamped itself around my neck, and she jerked herself toward me. “You said they were both at a party. If they won’t be back, we — there’s time—”

I was so wrong it startled me. Before I knew it her legs were actually thrashing. The dame was compulsive as a hare.

It didn’t have to mean much, since a sweaty plumber could get the same offer from half of the authentic heiresses in town. But I’d been wondering for twenty minutes how deep that sophistication really ran. “Call me darling again,” I told her.

“Oh, yes. Darling, darling—”

I pursed my lips, braced above her. “One more thing.’’

“What? Yes, anything—”

“Did Constantine marry you right out of the racket, or did you get the retread job before you ran into him?”

“Did I get—? It took a second or two. Then she sprang back onto her haunches like an animal. “Why, you lousy two-bit son of a—”

I laughed, straightening. “That’s pretty much what I wanted to hear,” I told her.

She spat something else in substantiation, snatching up her shoes. She didn’t stop to put them on. No more composure, no more composure at all.

“If you’ll fetch your fancy coat, ma’am,” I called after her, “we can go see Connie now.”

I glanced into the kitchen and the other bedroom on the way out, having a tardy thought about something. Probably it just indicated that she was a neurotic housekeeper, even drunk. But there was no trace of that bottle Dana O’Dea had been home alone with all afternoon.

Mrs. Constantine had fetched the coat. We were climbing into the Austin Healy, as amicably as two hounds after a one-bone meal, when a patrol wagon pulled up sharply and double-parked three or four car lengths behind us.