Gascoyne Page 3

  “What’s the story?” I ask.

  “Bad pedigrees.”

  “How much?”

  “Half price.”

  “Offer Marty a third and put them into AIRPORT RENT-A-MOBILE and see Rolf about papers and plates,” I say.

  “Okay boss. Last thing, there are some state and fed tax people sniffing around your bank accounts.”

  “All of them?”

  “Mainly the big one in the WESTBINDER BRANCH BANK. The state man is up for sale but I don’t know about the fed.”

  “What’s his name?” I ask.

  “Robinson.”

  “Don’t touch him, he bites. Well think of something,” I say.

  “Right boss.”

  I hang up and slip onto Mirindaranda Road and take it easy for a change. Then I dial Marge.

  “Well,” she asks first thing, “is he dead?”

  “Completely.”

  “Let’s throw a party dear.”

  “You know I never throw parties Marge.”

  “Pooper.”

  “No I just don’t have the time, especially now.”

  “Why now?” she asks. “Dear you just never seem to have the time for anything. You know I haven’t seen you for two whole weeks now and then it was just for a few minutes when you came in to get the keys for something, look I’m not trying to be possessive or anything like that, but—”

  “Well Marge I’m sorry but this is going to be a long week too, but it’s not my fault that Roughah went and got himself bumped off.”

  “It is too.”

  “Stop it,” I say.

  “Didn’t he pay you for that sort of thing?”

  “Technically. Say Marge I wonder if you could run up to the mountains for me?”

  “Love to,” she says. “Something I do all the time without thinking, like brushing my teeth. What’s two hundred and fifty miles?”

  “Hundred and twenty-five.”

  “One way dear.”

  “All I want you to do is take a quick look at Roughah’s hunting lodge up there, Condor’s Crag, just to see what condition the thing’s in.”

  “What for?”

  “Because my bet is that Nadine Roughah’s going to unload everything and cut out of here fast and consequently there’ll be a lot of bargains floating around, and that’ll be one of the best ones.”

  “Why don’t you send Chester or one of your other characters?” she asks.

  “Chester’s already on an eighteen-hour day as it is and I need everybody else in town at the moment.”

  “Well maybe. When do you want me to go?”

  “As soon as you can.”

  “Now?” she asks.

  “Can you?”

  “If you’re not coming to dinner here tonight.”

  “The hunting lodge is more important.”

  As usual she hangs up in a fit of anger, and I can see her walking straight out to the car, shouting to the rafters, good old Marge.

  As soon as I hang up the phone rings right back at me.

  “Yeah?”

  “Hello GASCOYNE, this is Nadine Corell.”

  “Nadine who?”

  “The late Mr. Roughah’s widow.”

  “Of course.” I knew it all the time but I just wanted to see how hard she is, which is plenty hard. “Tell me Miss Corell, how did you get my phone number?”

  “Your man Chester gave it to me.”

  “I see. What can I do for you?” I ask.

  “I want to see you. Now.”

  “Where?”

  “At the house.”

  “Five minutes,” I say.

  “Thank you GASCOYNE.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  I turn left at the first signal, luckily catching the left-turn arrow green, and go around a block which is mostly taken up by used cars and swing back onto Mirindaranda Road, heading back toward the Roughah layout. I’m getting a little hungry so I reach over and open the glove compartment and pull out a big Hershey bar with almonds, but the thing’s a bit limp from sitting in the heat and it’s really hell getting the goo off the paper into my mouth, sticky like flypaper. I get most of it in and wipe the rest off my face with my handkerchief, and then I toss the gooey wrapping paper out the window and it sails along flat a ways behind the car, I can see it through the rear-view, and then lands sticky-side-down right square on the windshield of a Volkswagen right in front of the driver, who immediately piles into his nearest rolling neighbor left, poor bastard.

  I go straight where Mirindaranda splits and in a second am back at the Roughah gate driving up the white gravel driveway. I pull up finally under the wisteria arbor and park in front of my nameplate. I slide out of the car and walk right in the front door without knocking and notice that already they’ve taken Grant the butler’s body away. The Widow Roughah is standing about in the middle of the purple carpet that covers about half of the black marble floor.

  “You are two minutes late, GASCOYNE.”

  “Mrs. Corell, I—”

  “Corell is my maiden name. Miss Corell will do.”

  “Miss Corell—”

  “GASCOYNE let us get to the point. I want you to find the murderer of my late husband Rufus.”

  “Why?”

  “I have a passion for facts and I don’t think our Police Commissioner does.”

  “The fact is that Rufus’s dead, Miss Corell.”

  “I want to know how, why, et cetera.”

  I look her square in the eye and say, “I have the impression you’re holding something back.”

  “A woman always holds something back,” she says and lets her arm drop and it brushes against her slinky black gown with a nice little hissing sound.

  “You’re being vague, Miss Corell. What would I get out of it?”

  “Seventy-five thousand,” she says.

  “But he owes me at least that in severance pay.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll never get that, GASCOYNE.”

  “Oh?”

  “The estate is nearly bankrupt.”

  I look at her emotionless face for a long moment while she pulls a cigarette out of somewhere near the top of her very low-cut gown and lights it with a long kitchen match ignited by a deft flick of a fingernail.

  “How,” I ask, “can you afford to pay me seventy-five thou when the estate’s nearly bankrupt?”

  “The identity of the murderer is worth exactly one million dollars to Rufus’s heir, GASCOYNE.”

  I whistle. “I’ll do it for a hundred and twenty-five.”

  “A hundred,” she says slowly in a nasty tone.

  “Sold.”

  “But you don’t get a damn cent unless you find him.”

  “Of course. But tell me, how does it work out that you will get a million bucks if I find the murderer?”

  “I can’t tell you at the moment.”

  “When can you?”

  “In three days.”

  I give her the GASCOYNE-eye a minute or two and then say, “Perhaps I should leave then.”

  “Why?” she asks, blinking.

  “And come back in three days.”

  She smiles and exposes her very attractive gums. “Please don’t.” She looks at me down her cigarette which she’s holding in front of her face. “Stay awhile,” she says.

  “Thanks.”

  “Well?”

  “Well what?” I ask.

  “Start staying awhile right now.”

  “I really can’t,” I say.

  “Why not?”

  “Too many things to do.”

  “Like what?”

  “Something different every time.”

  “Well,” she says shifting her weight from one leg to the other and picking at her teeth with her thumbnail, “what exactly is it you do, or how do you spend your time?”

  “In a lot of ways. It just sort of passes, the days slip by,” I say.

  “You’re not being very specific, GASCOYNE.”

  “How?”

>   “I mean what exactly do you do?”

  “Well,” I say, “the next thing I have to do Miss Corell—”

  “You can call me Nadine.”

  “Nadine is to ask you a few questions.”

  “Oh?” she says.

  “Would you mind if I did ask you a few questions now?”

  “Shoot,” she says.

  “Ah yes. Tell me, did you love your husband?”

  “Passionately,” she says longingly.

  “The thirty years’ difference in your ages didn’t seem to matter then?”

  “Only at night. There are some nights I will never forget. One for example—”

  “That’s not necessary Miss Corell, I understand, but I do want to know how much money you had when you married Rufus.”

  She casts her eyes up at the frescoed ceiling and taps an index finger on her finely pointed well-formed chin.

  “Three dollars and eighteen cents,” she says.

  “Well now Miss Corell, tell me where—and if my questions seem to jump around some, please don’t worry because in the end we’ll reorganize everything—tell me where you went with your chauffeur boyfriend Dmitri and diamonds early this afternoon.”

  “To the beach.” She holds out an arm and turns it around slowly. “See my tan?”

  I look at her tan and arm for a long time as she keeps turning it around, and when I’ve seen that one she holds up the other for a long time before letting it drop. They aren’t very tanned.

  “And what happened to the diamonds?” I ask.

  “I put them in a safe-deposit box.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t you think that was a good idea?” she asks with a surprised look.

  “Yes, but I want to know why.”

  “Well the diamonds belong to me,” she says.

  “Oh. That’s all right then. But I’d like to know now what Nancy, Rufus’s mistress, was doing around the place earlier this afternoon.”

  She smiles and waves a hand at me and looks away and says, “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  “What’s your guess?”

  “What’s yours?”

  “I’m asking the questions around here Miss Corell,” I say.

  “Of course.”

  “What is your guess.”

  She puffs on her cigarette and says, “My guess is that they were screwing.”

  “It’s these little things that are important,” I say, “so please excuse me if I seem to push a little hard.”

  “Of course. I understand.”

  “Now, do you know anybody that likes to dress up as a giant tree sloth?”

  She taps a thumbnail on her teeth again and lets fall an ash onto the purple carpet. “No, I’d say everybody I know would like to do that at some time or other.”

  “Nobody in particular?”

  “No.”

  “I see. Well now Miss Corell will you be so kind as to tell me what Police Commissioner O’Mallollolly was doing here early this afternoon.”

  Her face flushes and her eyes go immobile and she pulls the cigarette from her mouth with a little putt noise. “I … I have never met Police Commissioner Q’Mallollolly.…”

  I stride over to the huge grand piano and fling back the keyboard cover and pound on the keys randomly for dramatic effect. At the death of the last discordant note I say, “Miss Corell you have been lying.”

  “I know,” she says quietly, going a little limp here and there.

  “What is the truth then?”

  “Please have patience GASCOYNE!”

  “Am I or am I not being hired by you?”

  “You are—the first part was true. Here!”

  She pulls out a stack of hundreds and shoves them into my hands, about three grand, I reckon.

  “All right,” I say.

  “I should prefer to be alone now GASCOYNE.”

  I head for the door shoving the wad into my pants pocket and I turn to nod goodbye to her and I notice suddenly she has moved away from the place where she was standing, and I can see now that all that time we talked she was standing on the small bat-shaped bloodstain left on the purple carpet by the late Rufus Roughah.

  As soon as I hop back in the car and get rolling down the driveway I give Chester a call.

  “Chester did you give Nadine Roughah my phone number?”

  “No boss.”

  “How the hell did she get it then?”

  “Maybe Roughah wrote it down somewhere and she found it.”

  “Could be,” I say. “Not very important at the moment, but it’s a little irritating.”

  “I understand boss.”

  “Good. Now the Widow Roughah says the estate’s almost bankrupt and if I find the murderer she gets a million bucks minus my ten percent. Figure that one out.”

  “It makes sense that the estate’s almost bankrupt. We hit him pretty hard though I haven’t seen the last quarterly financial statement yet.”

  “What’s the last thing we got him on?”

  “The Wyoming oil deal. He lost three hundred grand on that one without knowing it,” he says.

  “Still there must be something else Chester.”

  “I’ll have the files checked boss.”

  “What about this million bucks?”

  “If I had three guesses I’d say insurance three times,” he says.

  “Good thinking.”

  “If O’Mallollolly makes it suicide, there’s no money in that for Mrs. Roughah so it’s worth a lot to her to prove O’Mallollolly wrong.”

  “I remember vaguely something about an insurance policy but damned if I know what. You remember anything?” I ask.

  “Not a thing.”

  “You’ve got photostats of every paper in Roughah’s study safe?”

  “As far as I know boss.”

  “Nothing there?”

  “Not a thing,” he says.

  “For a million bucks he’d pay quite a premium.”

  “Yeah and we’d have a record of it. Must be a couple of policies with different companies.”

  “Well do your homework Chester and take a close look at this bankruptcy thing just to make sure nobody else’s stealing the watermelons. Another thing, put a tail on O’Mallollolly—”

  “He won’t like that.”

  “I know but he’s an elected official and there’s no law against following a man, doesn’t matter who he is. Also I want the Widow Roughah tailed, Dmitri the chauffeur, Roughah’s mistress Nancy, and check all the costume shops in town to see if anybody’s returned a giant tree sloth costume with a big hole burned in the chest. If you find out who, tail him too.”

  “Roger boss.”

  I hang up just as the signal on Mirindaranda Road turns green and I make a quick left across the intersection before anybody else really gets going but have to stop for a damn pedestrian and so I block up a couple of lanes until the old lady moves it out of the way, then I get the hell out of there. What they ought to do is dig dark little tunnels underground everywhere, just for pedestrians, and let us motorists get back the roads which belong to us. I floor it and run up Mirindaranda Road North which winds through some low hills that are just getting their first apartment buildings and will be completely covered with them in two years, and if the Widow Roughah sells out her forest preserve that’ll make the whole area solid from downtown east to Pastiche Mountain National Forest.

  I’m heading downtown now and the top of Police Tower slips into view, which has been the tallest building in town since ’56, but only by twelve feet. It’s time to have a little chat with O’Mallollolly now because I want to see what he’s up to which I have the feeling is quite a lot. He was always the type who liked to play games with nasty little surprises in them but simple enough that any idiot could figure out the score before it was too late. But now I feel like he might be trying to go big time and if he is he’s sure starting out on the wrong foot. He ought to know where to start by now.

  I slip onto Beachshore A
venue and run through an old residential section of downtown dodging unused streetcar tracks which are left over from a couple of years ago when URBANIAN IMPROVEMENT ADVISORY CONSULTANTS advised the city to convert from streetcars to buses. The city did just that and so URBANIAN really cleaned up on the fat commissions for the buses they sold to the city and right now they’re managing a pilot slum project for this area since the city’s agreed not to enforce the building codes, and already I can see they’ve stopped repairing broken streetlamps and signs or towing away abandoned cars or cleaning the gutters. All this is red-hot real estate now and URBANIAN’S cutting the apartments up into little bitty holes in the wall and the city’s doubled the bus service through here because these people can’t afford cars with the rents they’re paying. But I do wish somebody would get rid of the old streetcar tracks and fill in the potholes because all this brings out a nasty front-end shimmy in the Nash, though maybe it’s just age because the thing’s over ten years old now and the front-end joints are probably all sloppy.

  Beachshore Avenue drops me right behind Police Tower and as I pull in the back alley I think that this Roughah insurance thing rings a bell somewhere in my head but just can’t get through at all loud or clear. No insurance company in its right mind would have insured Roughah’s life for more than about ten bucks the way he was generally disliked by the people who carry guns in this town, but this is the logical way to look at it and my little ringing bell is telling me there is insurance but not telling me a damn thing else. Bad memory I’m getting in my old age, I think as I swing into the Police Tower parking lot and slip the Nash into the parking slot with my nameplate on it. Also, Rufus was way down deep the sort of ordinary guy who feels very bad if he doesn’t have exactly what everybody else does and he knew damn well that anybody who’s anybody’s got life insurance in this world. With exceptions of course, which he wouldn’t have understood.

  I ease myself out of the car and walk through the little Japanese garden to the side entrance and slip my key into the executive elevator that stinks to high heaven of O’Mallollolly’s phony Havanas. I push fifteen and up I go and I turn on the fan to clean out the stink, filthy habit, and in a moment the door slides open at floor fifteen and the small circular waiting room that’s never used. I walk across and into O’Mallollolly’s plate-glass office and find him peering through the 75X Ziess refracting telescope that’s mounted on the end of his very long desk. He’s looking somewhere into the city.