The Paw of the Cat

Chapter Three Money Makes Murder

It took Stenn until eleven o’clock to locate the Theater of the Dance. He had thought that he could locate any organization in the city in half that time. It was at the end of a narrow alley that turned off Proctor Street in the oldest part of the city. Stenn vaguely remembered that the building, set squarely across the end of the alley, had at one time figured as a warehouse for a certain bootlegging combine. Proctor Street near the alley mouth was a place of horse rooms, dusty candy stores and several dance studies and Turkish bath outfits.

The place was dark. There was a heavy wire grill across the top half of the sturdy door. Stenn turned his pencil flash through the dusty glass, saw a table littered with papers, the end of a cot. He tried the door. It was locked. He took the folded newspaper out of his pocket, spread it on the ground, sat on it and began to wait with all the stubborn, endless, frightening patience at his command.

It was close to one o’clock when two couples came down the alley past the trash cans. They were talking loudly, laughing, silhouetted against the lights of Proctor Street.

Stenn silenced them by rising to his feet as they approached.

“Sleep it off some place else,” a man said. They stood, wary, staring at him.

Stenn flicked on his light, swept it across their faces, holding it for a fraction of a second on each one. Two girls, both blonde, both very young but with the threat of future hardness in their faces. One vast blonde young man with bovine good looks and a pink buttonhole mouth. One dark man, a bit older, his face alert and vital.

“What do you want?” the dark one said as the light touched his face.

“I’m looking for Della Clove.”

“Why?”

He held the badge briefly in the white glare of the light. “That’s why.”

“You won’t find her here. She lives outside the city,” one of the girls said. “Which might be considered a very good thing.” She laughed, too loudly.

“Shut your face,” the dark man said. Stenn detected a faint accent.

“Are you Raoul?” Stenn asked.

“Yes. I have no business with you.”

“I can decide that, one way or another. Open up. We’ll go inside.”

“You have a warrant, Officer?”

“No. It’s your choice. Talk here or talk in my office.”

“What’s the charge?”

Stenn turned the light again on the younger of the two girls. “How old are you, honey?”

“Twenty-one,” she said, with a knowing curl to her lip.

“And I think I could prove sixteen. That would make it a morals charge, Raoul. Now will you play?”

The laughter had gone out of them. Raoul pushed by Stenn and opened the door with a key. He reached inside and clicked on the light. It was an unshaded bulb that hung between cot and table. There were two dirty paper plates on the floor, a container that had evidently held coffee.

Raoul said, his tone determinedly gay, “Sorry the place is in such a mess, Officer. We weren’t expecting distinguished company. This is the old watchman’s room. Now it’s my bedroom. When we open up it will become the ticket office. Here, I’ll show you the rest of the layout.” He walked through the far door and clicked a switch. A dim light disclosed a large room with a stage at the far end. Wooden chairs had been lined up to give it the look of a theater.

“My name,” he said, “is Raoul Palma. This is a school of the drama. I am licensed to teach here. I have been in this city for a year. My three friends are members of the cast in a play that is now in rehearsal. We have worked this evening. We went out to eat. We have returned to work again. Are there any more questions?”

Stenn turned and looked at the other three. The big man’s face wore a permanent simper. The two girls gave him stony looks. “Go on in and work then, while I talk with Palma.”

They filed by him. Palma sat on the cot. Stenn pulled the connecting door shut. He looked long and hard at Palma. The man’s face was intelligent, sensitive. His fingers were long and delicate, but he appeared to be well muscled.

“Something about this layout smells,” Stenn said.

“Is art criticism your strong point, old man?”

The tone was as cool and insolent as any Stenn had ever heard. He tightened his right fist a bit. “How many people will be in your play? What will it be called?”

“The three in there, Della Clove and myself. A cast of five. It will be called ‘Etude in Three Acts.’ It depicts decadence. We will be ready to put it on two months from now. I call the medium we are using interpretive ballet. I have a one-year lease on this building. The Theater of the Dance is organized as a charitable and educational institution.”

“Do you have a job?”

“This,” said Palma, with an inclusive sweep of his hand, “is my career.”

“What do you live on?”

Palma’s eyes were touched with arrogance. “Miss Clove, out of the goodness of her heart, feels that this venture is worth supporting. With the help of that portion of her small income which she donates, we manage to get along. Not luxuriously, as you can see, but adequately.”

“Put it another way, Palma. Call it a form of extortion.”

“Hardly that. Miss Clove and I are to be married once the play starts. We plan on a long, successful run.”

“Does she know that?”

“Of course. Now is there anything else?”

“I’ll be back to see her. She’ll be here tomorrow afternoon?”

Raoul Palma held the door open. He bowed with irony. “So nice you called, sir. I’ll tell Della she had a visitor.”

Stenn frowned his way down the alley and out onto the Proctor Street sidewalk. Raoul Palma had handled him neatly, competently. Almost too well. It spoke of past contact with law. Raoul was a man practising a form of dishonesty that was neatly within the letter of the law and he knew it. Stenn guessed his age at about forty, a very compact, capable forty.

He found Al Morganson getting ready to leave the news room. They went together to Al’s favorite bar, the Rip Tide, which belied its bold name by being small, dim, dusty. There were only forty-five minutes left until closing. Morganson was one of those rare men so colorless that he seemed to have no specific contour of face or body. To a very few people in the world Al Morganson betrayed his capacity for affection. Paul Stenn was one of these. To all the rest of humanity Morganson was as coldly emotionless, as calculatingly exact, as a key-punch machine.

But each man had found within the other a streak of vulnerable warmth as carefully and successfully concealed as a picture of Trotsky in Moscow.

They stood at the comer of the bar. “This,” said Stenn, “is still the Jane Doe and now I am going around in more circles than I ever see before.”

“It’s a dance that cops do. A mating rite, I’m told.”

“When we’re stuck we come running to the fourth estate.”

“You touch me.”

“Because anybody sifting dirt long enough has a criminal-type mind.”

“I take it back.”

“What does the name Clove mean to you? With a dollar sign in front of it.”

“Clove, Clove. Not hard, that question. Once upon a time that was a big name in this town. I guess right after the Civil War they owned most of the town. The last of the line was somewhat of a bum and by then the family fortunes had sagged more than somewhat. Roger Clove. At the age of forty or thereabouts he married a tramp of some kind. That was maybe twenty years ago or a little more. They had some public battles and separated. Roger drove his Pierce Arrow into a bridge abutment. There was a kid and it was a big story for a time because the wife got nothing and the kid got the works. Not right then, but when it got to be twenty-one. There was some sort of a maintenance income for the years in between. Say, you might have a yarn there, Paul! The kid ought to be taking that dough out of the deep freeze pretty soon. It’s just about time, I’d guess.”

“Very much dough?”

“Unless I’m very wrong it was a half-million bucks in the beginning, and it maybe has earned a little increment. Now tell me how this works into the severed blonde.”

“Because one of the two witnesses turns out to be one Della Clove. Maybe it is just coincidence. I worry about coincidences. All but one person out of a thousand is a plain ordinary joker like you can read his life history across the front of his vest. Then when you find some kind of an angle fastened loose like onto another case, more often than somewhat there is a connection. Nine times in my mind I am about to put my nose to the ground in another direction but there is one little fact I can’t swallow.”

“Like what?”

“Like two coincidences in a row. It seems that Miss Clove is playing a sucker-type pattycake with a very smooth citizen who could very possibly be from Mexico.”

“Can you turn loose on him?”

“Not without maybe looking very silly. I think you ought to whip up a feature on an enterprise called the Theater of the Dance. You could interview the female lead, who is the same Miss Clove. The establishment can be located at the end of Kimball Alley off Proctor.”

“What will you be doing?”

“I shall be bending the ear of the law firm which is supposed to be looking out for Miss Clove’s interests.”

Stenn spent an hour over reports and picked up two routine assignments off the board. They filled the rest of the morning, resulting in one arrest, one positive identification from the gallery. He had fried fish for lunch and went back to Kimball Alley with the meal a solid lump in his middle, adding to his irritability.

The day cleared off as he reached the converted warehouse. The door was unlocked. He pushed it open, walked between the cot and the table to the second doorway. Shafts of dusty sunlight came through the high barred windows and patterned the floor. Raoul, in black tights and a sweat shirt, sat on his heels at the edge of the stage directing Della.

“Try it again,” he said. “Right toward me. And express, darling. Express! Every line of your body must mean something.”

Stenn stuck an unlit cigarette in the corner of his mouth and looked moodily on as Della Clove, her hands over her head, fingertips touching, head back, chest arched, came slinking diagonally across to Palma in a bent-kneed stride. Stenn decided that it could be good or bad. To him it merely looked inexpressibly comic.

As she struck her pose close to Palma, Stenn lit a kitchen match on his thumbnail. The cracking sound in the silence swiveled their heads toward him. Palma dropped lightly down to the floor and came across toward him.

“Ah, the persistent policeman! We’ll take a break, Della, darling.”

Della remained on the stage, her arms folded, her face scowling. “You broke the mood, you crummy cop,” she said loudly. The voice had a harsh urchin quality.

Stenn ignored Palma and strolled over and stopped ten feet from the stage looking up at Della. “So it was a mood,” he said. “I’m glad to know that. To me it looked like a lot of no-talent being taught how to look funny by a guy who doesn’t know anything about it either.”

She turned red and then white. “What would you know about anything?”

“I know you’re the corniest looking female ham I’ve seen since they closed the Lido Burlesque. They had a dame there did pratt-falls. At least you were supposed to laugh.”

“That’s quite enough,” Palma said sharply.

Stenn turned and looked at him with a mild stare. “What’s the matter? Scared I’ll wise her up? Scared she’ll find out you’re a phony?”

“He’s not a phony!” Della yelled. “You lunk cop, Mr. Palma was a director of the Mexican Ballet.”

“Shut up!” Raoul said, too late.

The girl ignored him. “Raoul’s got more talent in his little finger than you’ve ever had in your whole family.”

Stenn shoved his hands into his hip pockets, bunching up his coat. “Sure he’s got talent. I’ll admit that. That teen-age blonde he was leading in here last night at one o’clock proves that.”

Della’s mouth sagged open. She snapped it shut and turned on Raoul. “Is that true?”

“I wasn’t happy about the way Tommy, Berta and Lorraine handled their parts yesterday, darling. I found them and brought them back to run through it again. Don’t let this man distress you.”

“I’m sorry, darling.”

“He’s got a handy way of lying about women,” Stenn said casually. “Look at that fat line he fed you about the blonde.”

Della’s folded arms tightened across her breasts. Stenn felt the tension in her. Palma said smoothly, “My dear fellow, I’ve just explained that it was a late rehearsal.”

Stenn stared at him with hooded eyes. “You’re smooth, fella. You’re a treat to a tired cop. I’ll give you that. But she’s already showed you she’s a weak link. I would think you might worry about that. I would think it might interfere with your sleep.” He gave Palma no chance to answer. He walked stolidly across to the doorway and left.

The firm was Kalder, Harness and Slade. Stenn worked his way through the phalanx of secretaries until he reached Mr. Marion Harness. Harness sat behind a green-steel desk with an inlaid-linoleum top. The backs of his hands and the skin under his eyes and chin were over fifty. But Mr. Harness wore an expensive wavy brown wig, a dentist’s carefully uneven work of art, the sheen of contact lenses, padded shoulders and, Stenn was certain, an adequate girdle. He was fifty-five trying desperately to look forty, succeeding in looking like a sixty-three trying to look fifty. The tip of his tongue ran slowly back and forth along the thin red underlip.

“I do not feel that we can give out that information.”

Stenn shifted his bulk in the chair. “I do not care how you feel or how you don’t feel. I do not care who your friends are or how high up they may be.”

“There’s no need to be insolent.”

“I am not going to move out of this chair, friend, until I get the answers to my questions. Six days ago I got my teeth in a case. Maybe it’s a murder case. I don’t know yet. While unraveling I come across a deal where a client of yours is heading for a lot of trouble. You help me and maybe I can stop it. You sit there and sneer at me and I’ll sure as hell let it be known that I was blocked out of the play right here in your office. It will be my pleasure to nail you to your own wall.”

Harness looked over Stenn’s head at the far wall for ten seconds. He flicked the switch on the desk box and said, “Miss Trent, please bring in the Clove file.”

Within twenty seconds a tall girl loped in with the file and placed it on the desk. She shut the door soundlessly as she left.

“In eight weeks and two days we shall turn over to Miss Clove securities which, based on average market values for the past quarter, have a value of two hundred and twenty-one thousand, four hundred and three dollars. In addition there are government bonds in the amount of one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, cash in the account totaling eighty-one thousand, seven hundred and fourteen dollars and seventy cents, and rental property estimated at a flat two hundred thousand dollars. In accordance with the terms of the will we paid out two hundred dollars a month to Mrs. Clove, now Mrs. Ferris, until the child was fifteen and since that time we have been paying three hundred dollars a month directly to Miss Clove. At the end of eight weeks and two days we shall turn over the entire estate of six hundred and twenty-eight thousand, one hundred and seventeen dollars and seventy cents, plus any accrued interest and income, to Miss Clove. There are no ‘strings attached’ as you put it. We hope that Miss Clove will continue to permit us to protect her interests, but that is a decision which she must make. We could keep the principal amount intact and pay her an income, before taxes, of roughly twenty-five thousand a year.”

“Suppose something happens to her before she inherits?”

“Then we are directed to turn the entire estate over to the Salvation Army. As a legal point, should she die the day after inheriting, the money would, of course, go to her heirs.”

“Does Miss Clove know the size of the estate?”

“At her request, for the past six years we have sent a quarterly statement.”

“Has she made any attempt to borrow against her expectations?”

“If she has, we have not learned of it.”

“Thanks.”

“Please don’t mention it.”