Very Cold for May

Chapter Fourteen

The policeman who met them at the door of the Riordan suite made a warning gesture with his hands. Jake looked past him and saw Denise Riordan sitting in an overstuffed chair. She was crying, and Brian Riordan was beside her, patting her arm.

“What’s all this?” Martin said.

“She learned that her husband took a powder, I think,” the patrolman said.

Martin removed his hat and smoothed down his thin hair. Prior and Sheila sat down inconspicuously on a sofa while Jake lit a cigarette and walked to the fireplace where a small wood fire was burning. He turned his back to the heat gratefully.

Martin looked down at Denise.

“We’ve got a few things to clear up, Mrs. Riordan. I’ll try to be as quick as possible.”

Denise continued to cry and despite the solemnity of the scene the thought occurred to Jake that she would get a great deal of sympathy during Riordan’s trial. She was wearing a black dress with sequins and the firelight played interestingly over her smooth tanned legs and gracefully molded ankles. Denise, Jake guessed, would do all right.

Brian Riordan said to Martin, “This is a helluva time to be barging in. Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”

“No, it can’t wait until tomorrow,” Martin said.

“Okay, let’s get it over with then,” Brian said coldly.

A loud peremptory knock sounded and every head turned sharply. Martin stepped over and opened the door.

Gary Noble and Toni stood in the corridor.

“Come in,” Martin said.

Martin closed the door behind them, and Noble glanced around the room uncertainly. “What the devil is going on?” he said. “Toni called me and said Niccolo was in some kind of trouble. What the hell is going on? Where’s Riordan?”

“Dean Niccolo was murdered this evening,” Martin said. “Dan Riordan has blown out of town. Is all this news to you, Mr. Noble?”

“Good God,” Noble said.

Toni Ryerson turned frantically to Jake, and when he looked away from her, she took a backward step. “I knew he was in trouble, but I didn’t know he was dead,” she said. “It didn’t matter that he was in trouble. I thought...”

She stopped speaking and sat down carefully in a straight-backed chair.

Noble patted her shoulder and said to Martin, “This is terrible.”

“Yes, it is,” Martin said.

Everyone was watching him expectantly now. He stood in the middle of the room, his eyes touching everyone present in turn and the silence became a heavy, palpable thing.

“All right,” Brian said savagely. “What are we waiting for?”

Martin glanced at him calmly and then walked over and sat down beside Prior.

“Jake has something to tell us,” he said, in a conversational voice. “I think you’ll find it interesting.”

Brian made an impatient gesture with his hand. “What the hell has he got to do with this matter?”

“Go ahead, Jake,” Martin said.

Jake faced the semi-circle of puzzled faces with what he hoped was a confident expression, and tried to escape the feeling that he was as out of place as a thumb screw in a psychiatrist’s office.

“I’m going to talk about three murders,” he said. “The heart of this matter is, or was, May Laval, a gay and exciting woman whom we all knew. May made the mistake of deciding to publish her memoirs, the details of which were embarrassing and distressing to a number of important people. This is not the time to examine her motives for doing this, because the real reasons will probably never be known. Anyway, she started her project, and was immediately marked to die.”

He lit a cigarette and wished he hadn’t ended the sentence so inanely. He was getting warmed up to his topic, but he would have preferred to write it down instead of delivering it like an earnest valedictorian. That was the trouble with murder, he decided irrelevantly. It was so damn obvious and blunt. You couldn’t be casual about it. The minute you tried you sounded fatuous. All you could do was treat it seriously; and that made you appear pompous and slightly ridiculous. He sighed and blew a streamer of smoke into the air.

“One gentleman who didn’t want his wartime activities put on the best-seller lists was Dan Riordan. He therefore sent his dog robber, Avery Meed, to cajole May out of writing a book. Riordan’s offer consisted of straight, beautiful cash. But, and this is important, when Meed arrived at May Laval’s home, May was already dead. She had been strangled before he got there.

“Meed may have been shocked by this fact, but he was well-trained enough to go on with his orders. He found the diary and took it to his hotel room.

“Now,” Jake continued, “we come to an unlikely development. I mean Dean Niccolo. The pitch was consistent with Dean’s behavior pattern, I suppose. And, parenthetically, everyone in this mess behaved with deplorable unoriginality. Everybody followed his characteristic bent religiously. Had anyone crossed us up by seeking peace of mind, or knowledge, or the love of a pure woman, we’d have been lost. But everybody behaved predictably, everybody wanted something for nothing.

“So, to get back to Dean Niccolo. He had been gambling. He got seriously into debt, and needed funds in a hurry. He knew that May Laval had some dirt on Riordan, so he decided to try to get hold of it, the object of course being blackmail. Therefore he went to May’s home, arriving there just as Avery Meed was making his entrance. He watched Meed go inside and come out half a minute later with a book under his arm.

“Niccolo lost his nerve. He left. But the same morning he met Meed in my office, and learned that he worked for Riordan. Niccolo knew then from the papers that May had been killed and her diary stolen, so he guessed that Meed had done both jobs. He trailed Meed from our office to his apartment and made a proposition. But Meed was constitutionally unable to rebel against his orders and so he refused Niccolo’s offer. That is why he died. Niccolo killed him and got hold of the diary.

“Now,” Jake said, “we come to the end of act one. Is everyone following me so far?”

“How much more of this do we have to listen to?” Brian asked Martin.

“Just until he’s through,” Martin said.

“I’m going to get more interesting from now on,” Jake said, with a glance at Brian. “But let’s not leave Niccolo quite so abruptly. One thing ruined his plan. Prior here had already discovered Riordan’s wartime frauds — the frauds revealed in the diary. Thus, Prior knocked Niccolo out of a sale. Riordan wasn’t interested in suppressing information at a fat figure, when the same dope was already in the Government’s hands. Thus when Niccolo called Riordan to make a sale he was told to go to hell. Riordan knew Prior had the dope on him because Prior had told me and I, in turn, had told Riordan.

“That’s enough background, I think. It’s time to be vulgar and start pointing.”

Jake put out his cigarette and lit another. He glanced around the room, and said, “Here’s the way it could have happened, of course, with names and everything.”

He turned to Brian and Denise.

“How long has your affair been going on?”

Denise said, “That’s a fine thing to say.”

“I know,” Jake said. “But it’s important to my theory.” He glanced at Brian. “Do you have something melodramatic to say, or would you prefer to answer the question?”

Brian said coolly, “You’re getting in nice and deep, my friend. Go ahead.”

“Why, thanks. Your father knew about the affair you’d been having with Denise, of course. Denise, who is majestically indiscreet when tight, let your father in on your secret.”

“That’s a lie,” Denise said.

Jake smiled. “Hardly. Remember the afternoon you and I had a few drinks? We came back here and Riordan entered a few moments later. You were lying on the couch and, to be a heel about it, you were stinking drunk. He told you to get to your room, whereupon you began to entreat him to take you up to the lodge again — a place you’d never been with Riordan. You said as much the first night I met you in Noble’s office. Riordan then learned that you had been up to the lodge, and that you were well aware of its aphrodisiac qualities — or the aphrodisiac qualities of its usual tenant. Riordan reasoned thus: you’d been to the lodge, ergo, it must have been with Brian.”

“I won’t listen to any more of this,” Brian shouted.

“When your father realized that you were two-timing him with his wife, he kicked you out,” Jake said calmly. “He’d taken quite a beating from you, Brian. He listened to your cynical moralizing about the war, and watched you posturing absurdly as the bitter, maladjusted war hero. Why he did is something a psychiatrist might tell us. But he drew the line at allowing you to play around with Denise.”

Brian shrugged and lit a cigarette. “You’re being awfully wordy about it. We had a disagreement and he blew his top, that’s all.”

“There’s a little more to it than that. What did you do when you realized that the golden eggs weren’t going to be laid any more?”

“Oh, that’s your story,” Brian said with a smile.

“Okay. When you were tossed out of your mink-lined nest you started thinking how you could clip him for some money.” Jake stopped and turned casually to Denise. “Remember, Denise, when you told me about your habit of listening in on the extension phone in your bedroom?”

Denise glanced uncertainly at Brian, and then said, “I may have mentioned it. It’s hardly a crime.”

“Well, that depends. Dean Niccolo made a call from here this afternoon. He called a girl named Toni Ryerson who is sitting with us now. Did that conversation surprise you?”

“Don’t say anything!” Brian said. “That’s none of his damned business.”

“Yes, you’d better be extremely careful now,” Jake said. “Dean called Toni to ask her to help him out of an embarrassing spot. Dean talked too much to me — he mentioned knowing that I’d received May’s diary — and he had to have an alibi. You see he had sent me the diary, after killing Meed. The police could have used that information, Denise. Why didn’t you go to them?”

“I didn’t know what the devil he was talking about,” Denise said, standing and facing him excitedly. “It didn’t make any sense to me.”

“Shut up,” Brian said.

“Damn it,” Denise said, wheeling on him. “I’m tired of being shouted at. I couldn’t make any sense out of it, and neither could you.”

Jake said, “So you told Brian about the call, eh? And Brian was confused and bewildered?”

“She told me about a conversation she’d overheard between Niccolo and some girl,” Brian said tensely. “Do what you can with that.”

“I’m going to try. You knew from that conversation that Niccolo had sent me the diary. That meant that Niccolo had clipped the stuff pertaining to your father from the diary and still had it in his possession — since I told your father, in your presence remember, that the diary received had no reference to him in it. You knew that Niccolo had the dirt on your father. And you wanted a way to make your father start laying those golden eggs again, didn’t you? So you thought of blackmail.”

Brian pushed a lock of hair from his forehead and attempted a smile. It was not a success.

He said, “Supposing you say what you mean in simple blunt language.”

“Fine,” Jake said. “I’m suggesting that you might have gone to Niccolo’s tonight, after learning he had the dirt on your father, and that you blew his brains out when he wouldn’t come across with the clipping. Didn’t you?”

Brian shook his head. “No,” he said.

Lieutenant Martin got up slowly and rubbed the back of his head with his left hand. “You took a drive out toward Niccolo’s apartment tonight, didn’t you?” he said, in a mild voice.

Brian turned to him with a startled expression. “You’re not taking this pipe dream seriously, are you?”

“Oh, very seriously,” Lieutenant Martin said.

“You can’t be,” Brian cried. “You’re trying to pin this on me to frame me, that’s all.”

Denise had been watching him tensely since Martin had spoken; and now she suddenly took a step back and put a hand to her mouth. “You killed him,” she whispered. “You simple fool. I told you...”

Brian turned and slapped her across the mouth with his open hand.

“You simply won’t keep quiet, will you?” he said coolly.

“That’s enough of the dramatics,” Martin said. He looked at Jake thoughtfully for a second, a worried line above his eyes; then he shrugged. “Okay,” he said to Brian. “Let’s go.”

The words seemed to act as a spur to Brian. He lunged forward suddenly and hurled Martin aside, and then broke for the door.

But he didn’t get far. Prior came out of his chair with astonishing speed, caught him by the shoulder and spun him round; and before Brian regained his balance, Prior straightened him with a savage right to the jaw. Brian’s eyes glazed over as he started to fall; and Prior’s next punch, a professionally expert left hook, dropped him to the floor unconscious.

A uniformed policeman stepped quickly over his prostrate body and caught Denise by the arms as she started for the door.

“That was neat work,” Martin said to Prior. He brushed his hair down. “He caught me by surprise.”

“Well, you were busy talking, and I had a better chance to watch,” Prior said. “I saw it coming.” Sheila slipped over to Jake. “You were wonderful,” she said. “Now can we get out of here?”

“Oh, sure,” Jake said, and looked at Martin who was scratching his ear and frowning somberly. “We’ll clear out right away. But first we’ve got to settle something.”

He paused and glanced around the room.

“You see, Brian didn’t murder Niccolo. The emotional difficulties in the Riordan family had nothing to do with that murder — or May’s.

“The fact that Denise overheard a conversation, that Dan Riordan absconded, and that Brian and Denise enjoyed an affair had nothing to do with Niccolo’s murder — or May’s. But they all formed so neat and logical a pattern that I was seduced. The person who murdered May and Niccolo was quite obvious for some time. I outlined a case against Brian and Denise just to show you all how misleading those developments were. And of course I had to show off a little too.”

“Well,” Martin demanded.

“Oh, yes,” Jake said. He turned and glanced at another person in the room. “How about it, Prior? Shall I tell the story, or will you?”

Prior started. He stared at Jake for several seconds and then smoothed his closely cropped hair with an absent gesture and smiled slightly. “Now what the hell do you mean by that, Jake?”

“I mean that you murdered May Laval and Dean Niccolo,” Jake said, easily. “Would you like to hear the details?”

Prior lit a cigarette and smiled again, and then he said, “Well, I guess you’d better explain yourself,” in a puzzled but unworried voice.