Murder Straight Up

18

According to the ID I’d lifted from the dead man last night, his name had been Thomas Ross and he’d been a private detective with a firm named Allied Investigations. Allied was the first place I went.

I found it in one of those old bank buildings that house a myriad of tiny operations ranging from chiropractors to phone solicitation services. Allied was on the third floor behind a frosted glass door that was straight out of a Dick Powell mystery movie from the forties. It was locked and when I put my ear to it, the only sound I heard was that of the elevator whining downward behind me.

I tried the doorknob again to see if it would give at all. Nothing. I walked down the wide wooden hallway that smelled of dust and floor wax to another pebbled glass door that announced WORTHINGTON CLAIMS ADJUSTMENTS.

Behind a Royal manual typewriter at least forty years old sat a fat woman who appeared to be at least seventy years old. In an ashtray burned a cigarillo, and by her hand stood a long glass whose contents were suspiciously amber. She was either drinking a urine sample or tippling. I guessed the latter. She had grandma-white hair with an irritated red scalp and a lot of white facial hair. She wore a faded housedress that hid maybe two hundred and fifty pounds of weight. She typed with two fingers, and didn’t see me at first, and when she did, she didn’t look happy. “Help you?” she said. Obviously I’d interrupted her typing.

“Wonder if you could tell me a few things about the man down the hall?”

“Which man? The business-consultant fella or the detective-agency fella.”

“The detective-agency fella.”

“Why?”

“He was killed last night.”

“No shit, kemo sabe.”

“He was working on a case for a lady friend of mine, a very discreet case, and she’d like to get her file back.”

“She would, eh?”

“Yes, she would. So I just wondered if Mr. Ross had any associates he worked with.”

“None that I know of.”

“I see.”

“So I guess your lady friend’s out of luck.”

I kind of doffed an invisible hat to her. “Yes, I guess she is. Well, thank you.”

“You bet.”

Before I had stepped foot over her threshold, she had picked up the amber glass and tasted deeply of it. I had the sense that she’d been trapped up here since 1947. If you’d asked her, she’d have probably told you that Harry Truman was president.

I didn’t have much choice. I put my years of police training to good use by waiting until I saw that the hall was perfectly empty and then breaking into Allied Investigations. I used a pick and it took five minutes.

The furniture inside surprised me. Very expensive leather stuff. A matched set with the XKE. Maybe Ross stayed in this old building because the rent was right. Spring sunlight gave the air a golden dusty laziness. I went over to the dry bar and looked at the contents. A lot of Wild Turkey. Ross had been a high roller.

The filing cabinets were inside a walk-in closet. There were three of them and they promised to hold the secrets of the ages. The dirty secrets. It took me ten minutes to find the first name that held any interest. The name was Robert Fitzgerald, the owner of Channel 3.

During the next five minutes I found several manila folders marked with names, including David Curtis, Kelly Ford, Marcie Grant, Bill Hanratty, Dev Robards, Mike Perry and the dead boy, Stephen Chandler. I gathered them up and was coming out of the closet when I heard the step on the wood floor outside.

She said, “Come out and be careful.”

When I got out there she was holding a large and very old .45 on me. In the lazy sunlight she looked fifty pounds fatter and aged in a sick sort of way.

“This belonged to the mister,” she said. Which seemed to amuse her in some way. “He said I’d be able to use it someday.”

I really like inexperienced people pointing guns at me. “You don’t need it,” I said.

“Maybe you’re dangerous.”

“I told you. I needed a file for a friend.”

She nodded to my arms, where several files were stacked haphazardly. “Looks like you’ve got more friends than one.”

“Really,” I said, “you don’t need the gun.”

“Maybe what I need is money.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means I could always call the cops and get you arrested on a B and E.”

I sighed. In movies PIs walk around with enough cash in their pockets to pay off half the U.S. Congress. At any given time in my pockets I had ten dollars. At least this morning I had my checkbook.

“If you put the gun down, I’ll write you a check for five dollars.”

She laughed hoarsely. “Jesus Christ, bud, you’re really the last of the big-time spenders.”

“Ma’am, I’m not wealthy.”

“I want more than five.”

“How about seven?”

“Seven goddamn dollars?”

I knew she was going to get me up to ten. I just thought I’d haggle and try to contain the damage.

“A girl like me needs money,” she said. She was being coy. With her white facial hair and her whiskey-red face, coy didn’t quite work.

“Eight-fifty,” I said.

“Ten.”

“Ten bucks?”

“Ten goddamn bucks or I keep the gun up and I call the cops.”

Two minutes later I sat behind Ross’s desk writing out a check. “How do you spell your last name?” I asked.

“Pournelle. P-o-u-r-n-e-l-l-e.”

I tore off the check, blew on it to dry the ink and handed it over. She looked at it as if she was studying a dollar bill for evidence of counterfeit.

“Just who the hell are you?”

“Does it matter?” I said. “You’ve got your money.”

“Ten crummy bucks, bud.”

“Ten bucks is what I budget myself for lunch and dinner. It means I eat whatever the change in my pocket will buy me.”

“Go to McDonald’s.”

“You don’t go to McDonald’s with change these days. You need several dollar bills.”

“So why would you break into Ross’s? Really.”

“I told you. For a friend.”

From a large pocket in her housedress she took a half-pint bottle of cough syrup and tipped it up to her mouth.

“For my ten dollars do I get to ask you any questions?”

“Depends on what they are.”

“What kind of work did Ross do?”

“Like it says on the door, he was a private investigator.”

“Yeah, but I mean what kind? Did he do mostly security work, divorce work, corporate work — what?”

She smiled unpleasantly. “Him and the twins liked to have fun when they worked.”

Her mention of the twins made me dizzy with all the possibilities. “The twins?”

She nodded. “John and Rick. You ever see them?”

“No.”

“They could be movie stars. Identical twins and just as handsome as Tyrone Power used to be.”

“They worked with Ross?”

“All the time. And like I said, they liked to have fun on their jobs.”

“What does that mean?”

The smirk stayed. “Let’s just say they took a lot of pleasure in their work. You can ask a downtown businessman about that.”

Her dramatic pauses irritated me. “I’m not going to write you another check.”

“You’re a cheap bastard.”

“There are worse things to be.”

“They cut up his buttocks.”

“Whose buttocks?”

“The businessman.”

“They cut up his buttocks?”

“Yeah. There’s this fat lawyer whose wife fucks half the people in the bars downtown. He’s used to it by now. But with this one businessman she got serious. So the lawyer got mad and hired the twins. They took a butcher knife and cut the guy’s buttocks in long strips. He wasn’t able to sit down for months. He never bothered the lawyer’s wife again. Of course, by now she’s back to fucking everybody who walks through the door.”

“They sound like fun guys.”

“The twins?”

“Yeah.”

“They’re very pretty and you might think they’re queers, but if you ever saw them in action you’d think otherwise, believe me.” The note of admiration in her voice was as chilling as the lawyer anecdote she’d just related.

I sat there in the sunlight and wished to hell I did something else for a living. You hang around too many people like this old babe here and you begin to think everybody’s like her.

I picked up the files and walked around the desk. She started to reach for the .45 in her pocket again, but I just frowned and said, “I’m going is all.”

“You taking those with you?” She meant the files.

“Yeah.”

“I should charge you more.”

I gave her my best glare. “You’ve pushed your luck about as far as it’s going to go.”

She looked me over and decided I was serious and then just gave me a great cynical shrug and let me walk past her and out into the gloom of the hallway.