Silent Scream

CHAPTER 7

I caught Lawrence Dunlap on his way out to lunch. Diana Wood’s desk was still untouched. Dunlap was with a tall, slender woman in her late twenties. She wore little make-up, had short and very neat brown hair, and her shoes were “sensible.” Her gray suit and coat were beautiful material, but a shade frumpy. A refined girl. With my slept-in shirt, duffel coat, and missing arm, I must have looked like something from Mars. She stared at me.

“I lost it in Montego Bay,” I said. “Sharks, you know.”

She flushed, but took it. I’d caught her staring, being vulgar, and she accepted her own standards. Not bad. What we used to call “breeding,” the real thing. Mainline and bankers.

Dunlap held her arm. “What do you want, Mr.-?”

“Fortune, Dan, detective,” I said. “Remember? I need some more information on that employee of yours.”

Dunlap’s Yale Club face was confused behind his glasses. He looked at the woman, and then he laughed.

“You mean Diana Wood? You can say her name in front of my wife, Mr. Fortune. All right, come inside for a moment.”

In his private office he sat in his desk chair, trim and casual, and grinned at me. His wife sat on a couch. I stood.

“You flatter me,” he said, smiled at his wife. “He thinks Diana and I are an item, Harriet. Jealous?”

“He is flattering you, dear,” Harriet Dunlap said.

She laughed, too. A bantering laugh, playful. They were a couple, passion under her polished surface. It was there in the way she looked at him, in her voice, and he returned the feeling. Trouble can be hidden, especially by well-brought-up patricians, but not real happiness. A happy couple. The only incongruous touch was his eyes. They didn’t quite fit the rest of his face, lines of strain around them. Maybe he worked too hard.

“You and Diana Wood were in Philadelphia the last three days?”

“So?” he said, nodded. “Yes, we were, a business conference.”

“You’re sure?” I said.

He studied me. “You’re no reference-checker, are you? Who is it? Harold Wood? He hired you?”

“Yes,” I said. It was true now. “But not just him. The police, too, Mr. Dunlap. You better tell me the truth.”

He hesitated, glanced at his wife. She smiled, shrugged. It was his decision. He thought for a time.

“If Wood tries to use it against Diana, I’ll deny I said it, but, no, Diana wasn’t with me. I don’t know where she was. I do know she would do nothing to concern the police.”

“You cover for her? Give her time off to play?”

“She had days coming. Look, Mr. Fortune, I like Diana, I don’t really know the husband. Diana’s a nice girl. What she does is her affair. I help as a friend. She’s helped me.”

“Hostess at parties? Nice to visiting clients?”

“It’s the way we have to do business sometimes.”

Harriet Dunlap said, “Rules of the game, Mr. Fortune.”

“Really?” I said to her. “Not nice for the mainline.”

“My family has been in the country three hundred years,” she said. “We didn’t survive without getting in the dirt to compete.”

“Look,” Dunlap said again, “it’s none of my business, but Wood almost asked for it. He seems to be a narrow man, surly, with no ambition to get ahead. At parties he stands in the corner, glowers at Diana when she’s just trying to have fun, and leaves her alone. So she met a man.” A shrug.

“What man?”

“I don’t know, I don’t want to know. I think Diana outgrew Wood, found out that she could have more, do better. I’m afraid she’s too much for Wood. He acts as if he never heard that a man could make money, from art or anything else. The things money can buy are beneath him, mundane. A pure young man.”

I said, “What do you think he should do?”

“I think he should let her go.”

There was a tone in his voice. Heavy, like… what? A kind of knowledge? He knew more than Harold Wood? About Diana?

“You know an Irving Kezar?” I asked.

“Kezar? Vaguely. A lawyer, I believe. Represents a client of ours sometimes. It’s getting late, Mr. Fortune. We must-”

“Sid Meyer?”

He got up. “No, sorry. Harriet?”

The wife stood. She smoothed her skirt, busy. To avoid looking at Dunlap and me? Sid Meyer meant something to her?

I said, “How about a dapper type, wears a black overcoat, gray hat, yellow gloves?”

“Good God!” Harriet Dunlap said. “Yellow gloves?”

“I don’t know him,” Dunlap said. “We’re hungry, Mr. Fortune. Remember, short of the police, I’ll say Diana was with me.”

“I’ll remember,” I said. “Just when do you think she might be coming back from Philadelphia?”

“Perhaps today,” Dunlap said, and ushered me out.

The winter afternoon sun didn’t penetrate into Captain Gazzo’s dim Centre Street office. He says it’s always 3 A.M. in his work, and he works behind drawn shades.

“The gun on Kezar’s stairs traced to a warehouse robbery ten years ago, unregistered since. End of that,” Gazzo said. “Sid Meyer hadn’t been picked up even for questioning in three years-here or in Jersey. The Newark cops-that’s where his trucking company is-watched him, but he was clean as far as they know. Their informers say Meyer had been dickering for some new trucks lately, but the pigeons don’t have a whisper of why. All they can offer is that Meyer had been running around a lot, was nervous, seemed to have something going.”

“He had reason to be nervous,” I said.

“I wish we had the reason,” Gazzo said. “Irving Kezar’s a funny bird. I found he’s been picked up a lot of times, mostly on business ethics cases, frauds, stock manipulations, yet no one remembers him. The little man who wasn’t there, part of the scenery like the mailman. For all the pick-ups, he’s never even been booked, not once-no evidence, the innocent middleman.”

“Some power somewhere, Captain? Protection?”

“It doesn’t show, but when you put it all together, it looks like the pattern. Only if there’s power, it’s not Kezar himself. He’s had that cheapo apartment for twenty years, the records in his office are about as interesting as a bird-watcher’s diary, and just as clean. Almost never has a direct client, works for other lawyers, bigger firms. A plodding attorney, with a plodding income. Only he’s got a second apartment midtown, and I smell a second set of records somewhere. I smell money somewhere, too.”

“You can’t dig deeper?”

“Not without a clue, a lot of work, and a court order. For that I need some reasonable suspicion to show a judge,” Gazzo said. “Dan, I’ve got to have some names. Leave out the bios for now, but give me the names. Okay?”

It was more of a break than I deserved, or than he would have given anyone else. He liked my mother, and he’s human.

“Okay,” I said. “Try Mrs. Mia Morgan.”

He ran the name through his mental data-bank of thirty years of crime and criminals. He scowled. “Morgan? It doesn’t connect to Sid Meyer, but I’d swear I know it. Morgan… but, something else, too.” He shook his head, amazed. A blank, yet…?

“Levi Stern?”

A shrug. Stern in New York was as useful as Jones in Wales. The shrug also said Sid Meyer had no Levi Stern in his history.

“Lawrence Dunlap.”

The data-bank clicked out a card. “Blue-chip broker, from out west, but Harvard Business School. Financial whiz-kid once. Married into Pennsylvania blue blood-bankers, public service. Local Jersey politics, community boards, trustee, all that. How does he fit with Sid Meyer and your wife-tail?”

“I’m not sure he does. I told you.”

“I haven’t turned him up,” Gazzo admitted. “Who else?”

“John Albano.”

“Albano?” Gazzo sat alert. “You’re sure it’s John? I know a lot of Albanos, best and worst. Youngish? Say, thirty-five?”

“No, say seventy but looks younger. White hair, short with shoulders, worked abroad a lot he says. Lives East Side.”

Gazzo sighed, shook his head wearily. I named the Woods last, uneasy. I watched him, and felt better. He showed no reaction. Diana and Harold Wood didn’t tie in with Sid Meyer, not yet anyway. I gave him a description of yellow-gloves, and of my adventure in the St. Marks Place alley. His eyes snapped.

“Hoods, Dan? Pros, like Sid Meyer’s killers?”

“Sure,” I said, “but what hoods, and why?”

In the dim office I sensed that all at once he had some kind of answer to that question. Or, at least, he had a more direct question to ask. He got up like a man with work to do. Work that didn’t include me.

“Keep in touch, Dan,” he said.

By midafternoon I was back in the lobby of Diana Wood’s building. I waited, and wondered what Gazzo had heard in what I’d told him? I wondered if Sid Meyer’s murder had anything to do with Diana Wood? I wondered about Diana Wood.

I felt sad for Hal Wood. I felt very bad for Wood-and I felt excited. She had two men, why not three? Hal Wood had lost her, and maybe she and I…? I wonder if we’ll ever change, most men? Or maybe it was only me? I waited, feeling dirty but still excited, and a little after 4 P.M. I saw her.

She got out of the big, black car in front of the building, still carrying the flat box. A man came into the lobby with her. They stood in front of the elevators for a moment. She had a look in her eyes few men ever see-big, soft, happy. Then she went up. The man glanced around the lobby once before he went out to his car, got in the back, and the car drove off.

I knew what was familiar about the back of the man in Mia Morgan’s snapshot. I knew the answers to a lot of my questions. I’d seen the man.

I only hoped he hadn’t seen me!