CHAPTER THIRTEEN

C ONSIDERING THE FACT that it had been nearly four o’clock before Larry Palmer had been able to get to bed, it rather surprised him to find that he felt reasonably refreshed when he woke shortly after nine on Friday morning. The day was overcast at that hour, with a cool breeze sweeping in from the east, and he shivered slightly as he closed the window and then went across to the door to get his copy of the Bulletin from the outer hall.

Because he lived close in town, his paper came from the last half of the press run, and when he saw the story on Leo Flynn’s murder together with two of the photographs Reece had taken, he knew the Bulletin had been sufficiently impressed with the story to replate. This pleased him until he remembered that it had been luck and circumstance that had given him a part in that story rather than any special ability or ingenuity on his part. He was still on a special assignment that might now be concerned with two murders instead of one, but the solution, in spite of his own activities, seemed as remote as ever.

He did not, however, dwell on this for long. By the time he had finished his usual breakfast, he was ready to start out again, and though he had it in mind to report to the office first, he did so by way of a long detour that took him past the Destler house in Jamaica Plain. When he saw a police car was still parked in the block, he understood why and drove back into town and left his car in the lot next to the loading platforms.

At that hour there was no one in that part of the city room devoted to the morning editions, but there was a note on his desk that told him to see Kelly, the managing editor, as soon as he came in. Now, walking towards the corner office, he was filled with a mild sense of trepidation lest his assignment be abruptly terminated for some reason as yet unknown.

Kelly apparently had no such idea in mind. As a matter of fact, his good-morning was genial and he seemed well pleased as he tapped a copy of the Standard and announced that on the Flynn story the Bulletin had scored a clean beat on the city edition.

‘Luck’, Palmer said. ‘If I hadn’t lived a block and a half away when Gladys Flynn ran out on the street last night, we wouldn’t have had it.’

‘So what do we care how we got it?’ Kelly said. ‘What I like about it is that Mr. Austin’s getting something for his money. He’s got you on this pet assignment of his and you’re the lad that cracks the story.’

He paused, his gaze good-humoured and reflective. ‘Who knows, maybe that luck’ll keep working for you. Have you got anything else? Do you figure the two killings hook up?’

Palmer said he thought so, but did not go into detail. He said he had made a lot of notes and wanted to collate them and look for discrepancies and possibly for leads he might have overlooked or forgotten.

‘I think it all ties back into the birth-certificate racket’, he said. ‘Ethel Kovalik is murdered. She has two names written down in her pocket book. One was Flynn and now he’s dead. The other’s John Destler.’

‘Maybe you’d better keep an eye on him then. If you need help, Mr. Austin might go for a private detective to give you a hand.’

‘There’s a police car already watching the house.’

‘Well—’ Kelly said and then reached out as the telephone rang. ‘Yes’, he said. ‘What? Oh, just a minute … For you’, he added with obvious surprise.

‘Larry,’ Gladys Flynn said without preliminaries, ‘I’ve got to see you. Right away, you understand. Can you come?’

‘Sure. Where are you?’

‘Home.’

‘I’m on my way.’

The living-room of the Flynn apartment was untidy and stale-smelling when Larry Palmer walked in fifteen minutes later. A scatter rug had been thrown over the chalk marks the police had made, but the room seemed to have been otherwise untouched. Cigarette butts filled the ashtrays, the grey rug was scuffed and dirty, and here and there traces of dusting-powder could be seen.

Gladys wore a trailing green housecoat and held a halfconsumed highball in her hand as she waved him towards the divan. Her hair had been pinned up without regard to style. She’d touched up her face a bit, but there was a hardness to it now and her green eyes seemed restless and unnaturally bright. When she had taken another sip of her highball she asked if he would have a drink and he said it was a little early for him. She did not urge him, but sat down and took a cigarette from a crumpled package.

‘I have to talk to someone,’ she said, when he had given her a light, ‘and you’re elected. You’re working on that Ethel Kovalik thing, aren’t you?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well, I don’t know if there’s any connection between what happened to her and Leo, but there are some things I can tell you, and maybe you’ll know if they’re important.’

‘Maybe’, Palmer said.

‘At first I felt so numb and beat-up I couldn’t even understand what happened. I still can’t believe Leo’s dead and I didn’t want to think about it, and then I did think. All I want now is to make somebody pay for what he did to Leo.’

Palmer said he understood how she felt, and she denied this. ‘No, you don’t’, she said bitterly. ‘You think you know the kind of guy he was, and part of what you think is right. But you didn’t know how it was with us. I knew what he was. He had a streak of larceny in him and he was lazy and weak, I guess, but he was good to me and I loved him. I’ve been around ever since I was fifteen and I guess I know what men are like. There was never anything vicious about Leo. He’d get loud and he’d bluff, but that’s all it ever was—bluff.’

She had more to say along the same line and Palmer let her go, the picture developing until he thought he understood how it was with these two people who were realists in their relationship with each other, who thought very little about the future but were content to enjoy for the present the best that each had to offer. Out of all this came the knowledge that it was Gladys who was the stronger of the two, and now that she was alone, the desire to fight back was both instinctive and determined.

‘But that’s not what I asked you to come here for’, she said. ‘There are some things I want to tell you, and one of them is that I think Waldo knocked on the door last night. I was married to him, you know. Years ago out on the West Coast. I got to know his voice pretty well.’

Remembering what she had told the police, Palmer said: ‘But you won’t swear that he’s the one who called.’

‘Did you actually see his car like the lieutenant said?’

Palmer said no and explained where and when he had seen the grey convertible.

‘He followed Leo’, she said with conviction.

‘Why?’

‘Why?’ she said with some scorn. ‘You don’t need a diagram, do you? The police say Leo was shot in his car and drove here. So whoever shot him must have seen him drive off. He’d want to stop Leo, wouldn’t he? He’d have to follow him if he could, wouldn’t he? To be sure he finished the job before Leo could talk?’

‘But why should Banton want to kill him?’

‘I can’t tell you that for sure’, she said. ‘But I know Leo’s been afraid of something the past couple of days. He wouldn’t admit it. He wouldn’t talk, but he was jumpy and edgy, and he usually wasn’t that way at all. At least not with me.’

‘But that doesn’t mean—’

‘I haven’t finished.’ She swallowed the drink and put the glass down hard, the back of her hand ribbed with tendons. ‘Leo had something on Waldo.’

Palmer said: ‘Oh’ softly and took pains not to let his quickening interest show. ‘Do you know how Leo got that something?’ he asked quietly.

‘I told him.’

‘Then it was something that happened when you knew Banton on the West Coast … What was it?’ he asked when she made no reply.

‘He was in with a gambling syndicate. He wasn’t important, but he was tough and he wasn’t afraid to tackle anything. I didn’t know it when I married him. All I knew was that he was a good dresser and had plenty of cash in his pocket. I was only a waitress and trying to do better. I’d left home because I couldn’t take it any more, and there were too many kids anyway, so nobody gave a damn. I wasn’t old enough to know the score, but I knew if I married Waldo I’d never have to go back. It wasn’t so bad for a while’, she said.

‘His name was Bantonowycz then, with the accent on the second syllable. I think he came from Poland around 1936, when he was twenty, but he didn’t have hardly any accent when I knew him, even though he wasn’t a citizen yet. I thought it was pretty swell, staying in bed mornings and not having to worry about where the next dollar was coming from—until the cops came one day and took him away.’

‘For what?’

‘Assault. With a dangerous weapon. Something like that. He finally did nine months, and I’d get a cheque once in a while from this mob he was working for. I didn’t like any part of it. They scared me, the way they looked at me most of the time with guns under their coats. I told Waldo so when he got out, and he said he’d find another job, and then a few months later they grabbed him again for the same kind of rap. He said it was a frame, but that didn’t help him any. He was convicted and given six months, and by that time I’d had enough. I got a divorce while he was in jail and went up north and got a job in a night club. I didn’t see Waldo again until I came east. I’d heard he was doing well and I hit him for a job—I had the experience then—and he gave it to me. I’ve been there at the hotel ever since.’

Palmer digested what she said and found it consistent with the things he had heard about Waldo Banton. But he still did not see how all this added up to a motive for murder, and he said so.

‘So you knew Banton had a record. You told Leo, and you admit he was a bit of a chiseller—’

‘Let’s admit it’, she said. ‘He was a chiseller.’

‘And you think that’s motive enough for Banton to want to kill him?’

‘If he thought he could get away with it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because Waldo’s in love and wants to get married again—or hadn’t you heard?’

Then Palmer remembered what Wilson, the photographer, had told him the other night about a Mrs. Hardy who had gone to Reno to get her divorce so she could marry Banton.

‘You mean Mrs. Hardy?’ he said.

‘That’s the one. Maybe not as society as some, but plenty respectable, with a lot of money and a good name. Suppose she finds out Waldo has a prison record. Maybe she’s not going to be so crazy to marry him. Leo might have been fool enough to try to put the bite on Waldo, and if I know Waldo he wouldn’t stand still for anything like that. He might pay a little something for nuisance value, but anything big he’d handle in his own way.’

Silently admitting that the theory presented possibilities, Palmer was still reluctant to accept it as convincing. Men had killed before to hide their past, but somehow he felt that a man like Banton, who fought his way up to a position of some respectability, would have handled the matter in another way. Interested in the woman’s story but disappointed in its potential, he sought some other answer to Flynn’s death, and once again his mind came back to the man Ethel Kovalik had been afraid of: Kurt Henkel.

‘You didn’t know Leo until you came here to work, did you?’

‘Not until I was working for Waldo. Leo used to hang around the hotel, and that’s how I met him.’

‘He must have known about everyone who ever worked there.’

‘Sure, he did. Leo knew everybody. He ate there nearly every night.’

Palmer hesitated, hopeful at what she had said, but mentally crossing his fingers.

‘The other night when I was talking to you and Leo’, he said, ‘Leo admitted he knew a waiter named Henkel, but he said he didn’t know anything about Muller. That wasn’t true, was it?’

‘No.’

‘Why should he lie?’

‘Because he was cagey. Some people just naturally tell the truth; Leo didn’t unless he was sure the truth wouldn’t hurt him. Sure, he knew Henkel and Muller’, she said. ‘He got them their jobs. They were here to see him later that same night.’

Palmer stared at her and let his breath out while halfformed premises began to unfold in his mind. Because he wanted to be sure of his ground before he jumped to a conclusion, he took one thing at a time.

‘Leo got them their jobs’, he said. ‘When was that?’

‘Oh, a couple of years ago. Just after I came here, I guess.’

All right, Palmer thought. Leo got them the jobs, but it was Banton who insisted that they were not fired. Therefore there was indeed some definite connection between Banton, Flynn, and the two waiters.

‘What about the other night?’ he asked.

‘I went to bed as soon as we got in—that was the same night you’re talking about—and sometime later I woke up and Leo wasn’t in bed. I looked at the clock and it was ten minutes to three, so I peeked into the living-room. He was talking with the two of them. I don’t think they even saw me.’

‘You didn’t hear what they were saying?’

‘I didn’t wait long enough.’

‘Did it sound as if they were arguing?’

‘No.’

‘Or threatening Leo?’

‘Nothing like that.’

Palmer leaned back to consider the information and then he thought of something else that might, in the light of the story Janet Evans had told him the day before, be the lead he was seeking.

‘Leo had a list, didn’t he?’ he asked, deciding to take a chance.

‘A list?’ She looked at him then and for the first time the green eyes seemed evasive.

‘I’m not guessing’, he said. ‘I know there was a list of names … You know about the birth-certificate racket Leo was mixed up in, don’t you?’

He watched her nod and said: ‘I think Leo had a list of names that he was tapping in a small way. Do you know about it? Or where it is?’

Again he saw the indecision in her glance and he pressed on quickly. ‘If you do, if you’re interested in trying to find out who killed him, I think you ought to say so. It’s important, and if you don’t want to tell me, then tell the police.’

‘Police?’ she said with quick revulsion. ‘I wouldn’t give them the time of day after the pushing around they gave me. I never did like cops, and—’

She broke off abruptly and came to her feet to hurry from the room. When she came back she had in her hands some folded sheets that had been stapled together. She sat down again and tossed them into Palmer’s lap.

He was aware at once that there were four sheets of thin all-rag paper on which had been typed a list of names, addresses, and dates. He was also aware of the perfumed odour that came from them, as though they had been hidden among a woman’s things. After that he saw that of the two hundred or so names, about two-thirds had been carefully blocked out in black ink so that they were completely unreadable. With no more than a glance at the first sheet, he flipped it over until he found the name he sought: Kurt Henkel. Farther on he saw the name of Albert Muller.

‘Okay’, he said, feeling little surprise at his discovery. ‘What did Leo tell you about this?’

‘Not much’, she said. ‘He said it was a sort of meal ticket and that I was to keep it for him.’

‘Did it occur to you that he might be doing some collecting from these names?’

‘It may have.’

‘But you didn’t ask?’

‘No.’

‘Or care.’

‘Of course I cared. I was afraid he might get in trouble. But what you don’t seem to understand is that I loved him.’

She hesitated then, and when Palmer glanced up from the list, he saw that she had leaned back on the cushions, her hands limp in her lap and her eyes closed.

‘I didn’t want to reform him’, she said in a choked and barely audible voice. ‘If I reformed him and he changed, he might change towards me too … He might have got tired of me’, she said, and as he watched her, he saw two tears squeeze out from beneath the closed lids.

He put his hand on her arm, an impulsive gesture that came from a sudden understanding of this woman and the philosophy of living she had accepted. It left him strangely moved and he realized that there was nothing more to be gained here, that the decent thing was to leave her alone with her grief.

He thanked her for her help and she said she hoped he could use it. He said he would certainly try. When he turned at the door before letting himself out, she was still on the divan, her eyes closed against the room.