Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 39, No. 6, June, 1994
- Автор: Bashover Albert, Crawford Dan
- Год: 1994
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: ISSN: 0002-5224
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 39, No. 6, June, 1994». Краткое содержание книги:
“It figures,” I said, then told Jack about my brief encounter with Dan Ruscinski. Jerry Lynch qualified as one of the men in town whose business wasn’t up for scrutiny by those who enjoyed good health and preferred keeping it that way. If Stefan Damokura had placed some bad bets with one of Lynch’s boys, he wouldn’t have wanted to welsh.
“Better steer clear of that bunch,” I warned. Jack hadn’t laughed at my attempt to be funny, but he did then. He hung up without comment. Still laughing.
With Christmas putting the skids under real news, the following day dragged on interminably. Jack Eddy called to say the personnel at the jewelry store had been checked out and seemed above reproach. If one of them had passed a schematic of the alarm system to Anderson Spangler, the act had been masterfully concealed. The records of the company that had installed the system were guarded like Fort Knox. The investigation was as dead as my old Chevy.
The report of a murder on the far side of town near Firestone Park came too late for anything more than a page one brief in the final edition. “The body of a man shot at close range was discovered this afternoon in a Brown Street apartment...” I called in the report from the police station, then rode to the scene with detectives.
My stomach did a flip-flop when we pulled up in front of a familiar building, the grocery with Kenneth DeRidder’s apartment above. The youthful lawyer was seated facedown at the big table with the law books and legal pads, encrusted now with dried blood. The bullet that killed him had been fired much earlier, probably the night before.
I turned away, nauseated. After telling the detectives what little I knew about the victim, I went outside and gulped fresh air, then from a booth on the corner phoned the Wellington Agency. Jack Eddy wasn’t there. I boarded a Brown Street bus headed downtown.
Rather than returning to the Times-Press building, I transferred to another malodorous orange bus that took me to City Chevrolet. An hour later I drove home in my new car, the ebony black 1932 Chevy sedan that was much like my old one. They had allowed me twenty dollars on a trade-in, and I had wangled nineteen more off the price, so it set me back a hundred and forty. I put twenty down and would owe ten a month for a year.
As I was parking in front of the boardinghouse, Jack Eddy pulled his big Auburn into the space behind. He was out ahead of me, frowning a little as he looked over my purchase. “What did you do, buddy, have the old heap painted?”
“This is a different car, Jack,” I said indignantly. “My old one was a standard model, this is a deluxe coach.”
“Well, excuse me, friend. Mind pointing out the difference, aside from the paint job?”
I stalked off without replying.
Jack Eddy followed me into the house, grinning as he settled in the parlor with the home edition of the Times-Press. Mr. Reimer came in and carefully eased down on the opposite end of the couch on which I was sitting. “Have an interesting day at work, Abraham?” he asked.
“Not until a couple of hours ago.”
“Oh? What happened then?”
“A murder out on the south end of town. A lawyer named Kenneth DeRidder.”
Jack Eddy lowered his paper. “What was that? Is this one of your jokes?”
“No joke. I tried calling you but you were out.”
Jack startled Mr. Reimer by bringing his fist down hard on the arm of his chair. “This is a fine kettle of fish!”
One thing about Jack Eddy, he had an unlimited supply of timeworn phrases at his command. As he jumped up and went to the phone, I wondered if his way of speaking fit in with his burning ambition. He was determined to rise to the top at all costs, but would his glib tongue and flippant manner favorably impress the big brass at Wellington’s New York headquarters? Perhaps. As Jack might put it, to men in their line of work, actions would speak louder than words.
After a supper of Mrs. Bauer’s superb corned beef hash I drove Jack Eddy downtown. Not before everyone went outside and pretended to admire my new car. Everyone aside from Bus Bauer, who grunted contemptuously and said, “Another Chevy!” before going back in the house. You didn’t have to have much upstairs to see the others were unimpressed. Only Mr. Reimer seemed sincere in saying I had made a wise choice.
“Well, buddy,” said Jack as we neared the police station, “I’ll say this much, it runs better than your old clunker. Sounds better, too.”
I was hoping it would be a quick trip so I could pick up Sue Baney and take a spin around town. That didn’t seem promising when we were told that Plato Largis, the detective in charge of the murder investigation, had returned to the scene of the crime. Then it began snowing again as we drove south on Brown Street.
We fast-talked our way past a young cop at the door of the apartment. Plato Largis grimaced when he saw us coming. “Not you two again.” He took a cigar from his shirt pocket, an El Verso so dark it looked like a fat stick of licorice, but thought better of the idea and put it back again. “Be a sport, Eddy,” he said, “and tell me you’re not tied in some way with this case. Just once I’d like to wrap up a job without laying eyes on you.”
Jack gave him a smart-guy grin. “Wouldn’t want you getting complacent, Plato. This DeRidder kid was supposed to testify for a client of mine, so I’m curious when somebody slaps a seal on his lips.”
“Beverly Keeler’s your client?”
“You called it, pal.”
“That young lady may need all the help she can get.”
“I want to be there when you talk to her.”
“You know something funny, Eddy? I had you down in my book as a shamus, not a lawyer. When did you pass the bar?”
“Come off it, Plato. She’s been set up from the word go, so I want to be dealt in on the game.”
A cat-that-swallowed-the-ca-nary smile came over Largis’s face. “Even if I operated that way, you’re about an hour too late. The coroner’s preliminary report says DeRidder died sometime between midnight and three in the morning. Beverly Keeler claims she went to bed a little after eleven. Alone.”
“So did I,” said Jack. “Does that make me a suspect?”
“Probably not, unless I find out DeRidder was scheduled to testify for you, too.”
Aside from background information on the victim there was nothing new on the murder in the morning. Kenneth DeRidder had grown up in Cadiz, a small town among the coal fields that had been Clark Gable’s home before he came to Akron for a job in the rubber shops. DeRidder would have been a kid in knee pants at the time Gable set out to see what lay beyond the hills and hollows of east central Ohio. The young lawyer had followed a different route to Akron and met a different fate when he arrived. After four years at Muskingum College came a couple in law school at The Ohio State University. All a waste as it turned out.
Jack Eddy phoned while I was in the middle of a different story with first-edition deadline approaching. “Guess where Damokura was when DeRidder got it?” he said.
“I’m on deadline, Jack.”
“Can you believe another of those all-night poker games? He and Spangler have more in common than I realized. This one was at the Anthony Wayne Hotel with a judge, a deputy prosecutor, and some big jamoke from your own newspaper. Started about eight and didn’t break up until dawn.”
Ben Goldsmith’s eyes were on me so I kept typing. Even so he left the city desk and came over to stand with one hand on the sheet of paper in my Remington. “I’m about to wrap it up, Ben,” I said.
Jack took the hint. “Lunch at Tommie’s?”