No Pockets in a Shroud [Short Story]

Chapter Eight Dice-table Ghost

The day was brisk, but a lazy sun was beginning to take the edge from the air. Eleanor drove desultorily, drifting down one street and up another in aimless fashion. Neither of us felt much like talking, particularly me, because I was fitting together some unpleasant ideas which were beginning to form in my mind. Superimposed on these ideas I unexpectedly got the impression that there was plan behind the seemingly purposeless driving. And as Eleanor’s aimless turnings brought us closer and closer to the highway leading past El Patio, I grew sure of it.

Eventually a side street spewed us out on the main road. Eleanor turned in the direction away from town and increased the car’s speed.

Although I knew, as we neared El Patio I asked: “Where we going!”

El Patio’s stone pillared gates came in sight and Eleanor slowed the car. “Let’s stop for a drink.”

“It’s closed.”

“Your blonde friend will let us in.”

I shrugged. “Suit yourself. But lots of places that are open serve drinks.”

She swung the car between the stone gateposts and brought it to a stop next to the building’s front steps. We left it parked there instead of driving back to the lot.

Vance Caramand let us in when I pounded on; the big bronze doors.

“Fausta around?” I asked.

“Shopping in town.” He closed the door behind us and walked off, leaving us to our own devices.

Mouldy Greene and Romulus sat at a table near the bar playing gin rummy.

I said: “How about a couple of drinks?”

“Help yourself,” Mouldy said.

Going behind the counter, I found a bottle of rye and plunked it in front of Eleanor.

“There a tray back there?” she asked.

I looked. “Yeah. Why?”

“Put some glasses and things on it and we’ll take it back to Louis’ office.”

The suggestion didn’t startle me. I almost expected it. I began to feel as though we were acting out a play that had been rehearsed, and were responding to each other’s cues, knowing in advance what was to happen next.

I asked: “Why?”

“We can talk privately there.”

“With the ghost of your ex-lover looking on?”

She pouted. “Don’t be common.”

“O.K.,” I shrugged. “If the association doesn’t bother you, it won’t me.”

I slapped the tray on the bar, set the rye, a jug of water, a siphon, two glasses, a spoon and an empty bowl on it. Emptying a shelf of ice cubes in the bowl, I picked up the complete equipment and followed Eleanor back to Bagnell’s office. I sat behind Bagnell’s desk and mixed two drinks while Eleanor perched on the desk edge and swung her feet.

“Satisfy your morbid curiosity?” I asked.

“The drink?”

“The atmosphere.”

She said: “I don’t see why you’re acting so silly about coming back here. Louis Bagnell was nothing to me.”

“I’m not acting silly. I’m just trying to figure out why.”

“Why what?”

“Why you wanted to come here.”

Setting down her drink, she looked down at me puzzledly from her elevated position. “I didn’t insist, you know. It was just a spur of the moment idea. If you don’t like it, we’ll leave.”

“I don’t like it.”

She frowned in annoyance. “What’s the matter with you?”

“It wasn’t a spur of the moment idea. You meant to come here from the moment we left my place. Why?”

“You’re being silly.” She took a long drink and left her nose up in the air after she lowered the glass.

The desk telephone caught my eye and I lifted the receiver and dialed Homicide. Eleanor watched me from her eye corners, but she wasn’t giving me the satisfaction of indicating interest. I got Hannegan on the phone.

“Moon,” I said. “How’s Horne doing?”

“Just started to work on him,” Hannegan told me. “We closed shop, once he was safe in jail, and the inspector and I both slept till noon. The inspector’s talking to Horne now.”

“Good. I’m at El Patio. Will you ring me back after Day goes over him?” I read him the number from the phone’s dial plate.

“Sure,” said Hannegan.

When I hung up the phone, Eleanor said: “Mix me another drink.”

“I thought you weren’t speaking to me.”

“I’m not, except as a bartender.”

I put together two more drinks and leaned back in the desk chair to enjoy mine. Just as I started to raise the glass, the office door crashed back against the wall and Fausta, her eyes sputtering like a shorted neon sign, stood in the doorway.

“So?” she hissed.

“So what?” Eleanor snapped right back at her.

Fausta prowled dramatically into the room. “To my own house you bring him, you — you she wolf!” She stopped in front of Eleanor and bared her teeth.

Eleanor said: “Get away from me, blondie, or I’ll bat your brains oat.”

Easing out of my chair, I circled toward the door around the side of the desk opposite the two women.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I’ll be at the bar. Let me know how things turn out.”

Fausta spun on me. “You, Manny Moon! Why you bring this woman here where I am?”

“I’ll be at the bar.”

“Wait, Manny.” All at once her voice was contrite. “I be good.”

I paused in the doorway. “Yeah?” I said cautiously.

“You think I act bad to make scene?”

“Yes. Very bad.”

“You desire I go leave you alone?”

“Yes.”

Her expression turned forlorn. Slowly she moved to the door and stopped next to me. Turning her head over her shoulder, she looked sorrowfully at Eleanor. Then her face screwed up, her tongue shot out at Eleanor and at the same time she gouged a sharp heel into my one good shin.

“Ow!” I yelled, but before I could grab her, she was flitting down the hall toward the dining room.

Limping back into the room, I got my foot on a chair and began to rub my shin cautiously.

“Little brat,” I growled.

Eleanor came over and kissed me behind the ear. “Don’t mind, Manny. I’m all the woman you need.”

Continuing on around me, she went toward the bathroom. I noted that the eternal oversized bag was clutched tightly beneath her arm. When I heard the bolt slide to, I quickly but softly moved to the bathroom door and pressed one ear against the panel. I heard her fumbling at the washbowl, and the clash of metal on porcelain. Then the phone rang. I cut it off in the middle of its second ring.

“Yeah?” I said.

“El Patio?”

“Yeah.”

“Manville Moon there?”

“Speaking.”

“Hannegan. We’ve been going over Horne and he admits everything you told us, but still won’t break on the actual killing. Insists he never got out of the car.”

“I never said he did.”

Hannegan was silent for a long time. “Jeepers creepers!” he said finally. “No wonder the old man hates you!”

“How long was he parked?”

“He says about an hour. Seven-thirty to eight-thirty.”

I thought a moment. “That covers the time from before the murder until after the cops arrived. Did you ask him if anyone else entered the grounds while he was there?”

“Yeah. He said no one could without his seeing it, and he didn’t see anyone.”

I said: “I’ll phone you back in a few minutes,” and hung up just as Eleanor came from the bathroom.

“Who was that?” she asked.

“Hannegan, reporting nothing new. Horne denies the killing.”

I walked over to her, put a hand on either shoulder and looked down into her face. She raised her lips to be kissed.

I said: “Close your eyes.”

Obediently her eyes closed, and I dropped my left hand over the edge of the purse held beneath her arm. My right palm transferred to her right shoulder, pushed, spinning her sidewise so that I was literally left holding the bag. Taking two backward steps, I sat on the desk top, holding the purse in my lap with both hands.

She came at me quickly and I raised one foot, letting her run against the sole and at the same time drawing back my knee to cushion the contact. She came to a gentle, but firm stop with my foot pressed into her stomach.

Her eyes stared into mine stonily. “Give me my purse!”

I said: “If I straighten my leg fast, you’ll end up across the room.”

I straightened it slowly and steadily. She gave ground until my leg was out straight, then impatiently stepped back another step and brushed a palm across her stomach. I kept my eyes on her as I unzipped the purse. She watched un-winkingly as I removed the Army .45 and laid it beside me on the desk.

“I thought this was only for roulette nights,” I said.

She didn’t say anything.

I laid a cigarette case, a lighter, a small flask, a pen and checkbook, a lipstick and a handkerchief beside the gun, keeping my eyes on her face all the time and locating each item by touch. In the bottom of the bag I felt what I was looking for.

I brought out the squat metal tube and dropped my eyes to it. It was a spare barrel for a .45 automatic, with a thin wire looped around one end.

Eleanor asked: “How long have you known?” She made it a simple question with no particular emotion.

“I got a glimmer last night when you showed too much knowledge of your husband’s business. But I couldn’t see any possible way you could have done it, and when everything began to point to Horne so neatly, I stopped thinking about you. Then your desire to get back here today convinced me there was something here you had to get. You rang me in because you needed an excuse to come here and didn’t know Fausta well enough to just barge in. But I still wasn’t sure until a minute ago when Hannegan told me Horne saw no one enter the grounds. Even then I hadn’t the faintest idea how you did it.”

“Do you know now?”

I nodded. “The extra barrel. Your interesting soldier friend with the gun collection probably gave it to you. I should have thought of that. I found dozens of broken guns in combat, in wrecked planes and burned out tanks. And sometimes I’d build a good one out of the salvageable parts of several. Your friend probably did the same thing, only he kept the leftover parts. How many extra barrels did he give you?”

“Two.”

“So you still have enough for one more murder.”

Her face flushed, but she made no reply.

“When you came to see Bagnell,” I continued, “your gun was equipped with a full clip and an extra shell in the chamber. In your purse you also had the extra barrel and this little piece of wire with a hook on one end and a loop on the other. After drinking and necking a while, you decided to go to the bathroom. You left the door open and filled the washbowl with cold water. That served a double purpose, didn’t it? No man, even a wolf like Bagnell, is going to look toward an open bathroom door while a woman inside is running water.

“You must have dropped to one knee to get the correct gun level before you shot him. Then you field stripped the gun. I can field strip an Army automatic in fifteen seconds. You probably practiced until you were at least that good. You dropped the hot barrel in the washbowl and reassembled the gun with the other barrel. By the time the automatic was back in your purse, apparently un-fired and with a full clip, the other barrel was cool enough to handle without the black leather gloves you so conveniently wore.

“You let out the water, lifted the removable strainer, hung the barrel from it by means of your little wire and reinserted it so the barrel was out of sight down the drain. With previous practice you could do all that in less than two minutes. And the only visible evidence was a few drops of oil in the bowl, which I never figured out.

“Then you went back into the office and spread yourself on the floor in apparent faint until Greene and Caramand broke in. You made a mistake there, though. Your spotless dress puzzled me because the floor was spattered with blood. You carefully didn’t lie in any, but later realized you should have and told me you’d been splashed. How’d you get rid of the spent shell?”

“Flushed it down the drain.”

I sat swinging my feet and turning the gun barrel over and over in my hands. She continued to watch me, her face just as expressionless as it had been from the beginning.

Finally she said: “You had to know, of course.”

I raised my eyes inquiringly.

“I’d have told you eventually if you hadn’t found out. I’ve thought about it a lot and tried to figure out some way not to tell you, but I couldn’t. I had to, in order to carry out the rest of the plan, and if I didn’t, killing Louis was wasted.”

I frowned and continued to look puzzled.

“You realize now, I suppose,” she went on, “that I’m the organizing brains behind Byron. He’s nothing but front, but he’s been necessary because the organization wouldn’t take orders from a woman. He didn’t even know Louis was going to die. I just told him to have all the boys get perfect alibis and to drop in on you for his own. I wanted to be sure you’d be dragged into the case because, you see, I’d picked you to succeed Byron.”

I stared at her blankly while her calm voice pursued the explanation.

“The O’Conner girl’s body showing up was pure coincidence. Neither Byron nor I ever heard of her. Louis had to die because no one in his organization was strong enough to wear his shoes, and his death left the town wide open for us. But when things settle down, outside gangs are going to realize the pickings here and start moving in to take over. Anyone of them could take the town from Byron,”

I twisted the barrel some more and waited for her to go on. She moved a step nearer me.

“You’ve got a reputation,” she said softly. “No out-of-town mob is going to buck you any more than they bucked Bagnell.”

“What happens to Byron?”

“He dies of dyspepsia.”

I thought about this for a minute. “So it’s induced dyspepsia,” I said slowly, and suddenly remembered Byron’s retaining me to solve his murder “in case it happened.”

I said: “I wouldn’t make a good substitute for Byron. I don’t take orders from women.”

“I’ll take orders from you. Don’t you know I’m in love with you?”

“Sure,” I said, “That’s why you pumped bullets at me through the bathroom window.”

She stopped moving toward me and flushed slightly. “I was only scaring you away from the bowl. I’d have hit you if I really meant it.”

I threw a twisted grin at her. “Didn’t you say Byron had your first husband killed? That must have been before you started having his ideas for him. Do I get murdered by another successor in a couple of years?”

She stood very straight and her face lifted haughtily. Without turning, I reached sidewise and picked up the phone. I drew it into my lap and dialed a number.

“Who you phoning?”

I smiled at her. “Hello,” I said. “Put on Lieutenant Hannegan.”

She started toward me, her fingers spread for clawing and lips pulled tautly back from her teeth. I let her get close, stuck my metal foot in her stomach and pushed.

She was sitting on the floor, her pupils dilated like an animal’s, when Hannegan came to the phone.