Hard Case Crime: House Dick (19 page)

“Motive,” Morely said irritably. “A guy like Barada don’t kill just because some john’s shacked up with his wife. Blackmail, yes, because it’s profitable. How could he get a nickel out of murdering Boyd?”

“Maybe he got the jewels.”

“You fixed that one, pal,” Morely said bitterly. “I might believe it like I believe in the True Cross, but Mrs. Boyd has the jewels now.”

“He got a grand out of them,” Novak said evenly.

“Canary feed. Hell, he coulda realized half their insured value from the insurance company. If he killed Boyd for the jewels why didn’t he make them pay off?”

“There’s an answer to that,” Novak murmured. “You figure it out.” Then he cut the connection, massaged his closed eyes and crossed the lobby to an open elevator.

Riding to the fifth, Novak slumped wearily in the corner, opening and closing his hands. His belly ached where the muscles had bunched from Barada’s low punch. If he let himself concentrate on it he could probably get sick again. If he tried.

The doors slid apart, and Novak stepped into the fifth floor hall. Walking to Bikel’s room he keyed the door and went inside. He turned on the lights and stared around. Bikel’s bag was still there, packed and waiting for the absent owner. Might as well check him out and free the room. Novak hooked onto the bag, carried it out to the corridor and locked the door. Then he walked further down the hall. As far as Suite 515. Thirty-five skins a day, plus District Tax. Now single occupancy. The widow of the late Chalmers Boyd. Novak pressed the door button and waited.

Far down the corridor a door opened and shut. Low voices threaded through the heavy air. From inside 515 no sound.

Novak pressed the button again. Longer this time. It made a thin muffled sound. Like a dog whining in a cellar.

Pressing his ear to the door panel he listened, got out the master key and opened the door.

In the sitting room a single lamp cast a subdued glow against the naked wall. Enough to show a woman sitting on the sofa, face turned toward the dark window. As he closed the door the click of the lock seemed to rouse her. The eyes turned toward him, and he saw the pudgy doll-face, the heavy arms, the mountainous bosom. One hand covered something on the cushion beside her thigh. The light was too indistinct to show him what it was.

As Novak walked toward her, dull eyes regarded him unblinkingly.

He lowered the bag, chose a chair not far from the sofa and settled into it heavily. Pulling off his hat he tossed it onto the table. Moistening his cracked lips he said, “Full circle, Julia.”

Her mouth opened and closed. The lips formed no words.

“Back where it all started,” he said in a thick voice. “Barada’s dead—along with the hood who called about your jewelry. I thought you’d be interested to know.”

“You killed them?’

“Barada was shot by Pike Hammond—a gambler Barada owed sixty-five thousand dollars to. Hammond’s from St. Louis. Possibly you’ve heard of him.”

Her head moved. Yes.

“I killed the other. He took one gun from me, forgot to look for another. The mistake was fatal.”

She said, “You are an evil man. A wicked man. You disrupt peoples’ lives. You kill without compassion.”

Novak laughed dryly. “They would have killed me, Mrs. Boyd. Entirely without pity. And the girl as well.”

Her body moved forward slightly. “The slut—where is she?”

“Safe, Mrs. Boyd. And far from here.”

“She wronged me,” the voice said vacantly. “She wronged me grievously.”

“Your husband wronged you. And long before he met Paula Norton.”

Her head nodded pensively. The fingers of her left hand twitched. The lips said, “I was a young girl once. I had a normal body. There were many who thought of me as beautiful. Then I became unhappy. My body grew until it became this bloated thing.” Her tone filled with disgust. “Chalmers was to blame. It was his fault that I became the ugliness I am.”

“He’s paid for it,” Novak observed. “The account’s settled. And you have your jewelry. You must have wanted it badly.”

Her head moved negatively, her body shifted slightly. From the city beyond the window drifted the low purr of night traffic in the streets, the whistle of the night steamer to Old Point Comfort.

Julia Boyd said, “He gave it to me on our twenty-fifth anniversary. I wore it once and put it away. It made me look even more grotesque. I hated it. Then he gave it to the woman he admired. He thought I didn’t know, but I did. I found out, and I challenged him, insisted he get it back.”

“What else did you find out?”

Her shoulders moved disdainfully. “Chalmers was a coward. He was afraid to ask her for it. So he had copies made. He gave them to me. It was supposed to deceive me. But the detectives told me.”

Novak nodded. “By then Paula had broken with him, making the return of the real jewelry even more difficult. Because her husband was out of prison and in need of money. He had lost sixty-five thousand dollars to Pike Hammond, probably as much to others. His luck had gone bad. To Barada your jewelry meant a stake, last chance to pull himself out of a narrow hole. I think Paula would have returned the jewelry when she found out it was yours—only Barada wouldn’t let her. Maybe you learned that too.”

“He was a desperate man,” she said heavily. “His kind will do anything for money.”

“Even murder,” Novak said. “I learned that tonight.” He sucked in a deep breath. The bedroom doorway was dark. From somewhere outside came the whine of a vacuum cleaner. A late check-out. Readying the room for anonymous guests. A transient place. A hotel never sleeps.

Novak said, “You thought by reporting the jewelry as stolen you could put more pressure on Paula for its return. But out of some sense of loyalty to Paula, Chalmers refused to make the report. Or he could have felt that paying for it was the easier way. When he came back here after talking to me you must have been furious with him. He was ready to pay Paula the sum Barada was asking. I was with her when he telephoned to arrange a meeting.”

Her eyes narrowed. In the dim light they were without color, without depth. Holes in a white mask. She said, “It was
my
money. Everything that Chalmers owned belonged to me.”

“Not an ideal arrangement,” Novak said dryly. “No man would like that kind of arrangement for long.”

“He had no choice,” she said scornfully. “Without me he was nothing. A shirt-sleeved bookkeeper in my father’s bank. That was how Chalmers started. It was what he would have had to go back to if I threw him out.”

“Lovely people,” Novak muttered. “Pillars of suburban society.”

Julia Boyd touched one finger to the corner of her mouth, lowered her hand absently. Novak said, “I heard Paula refuse to meet Chalmers the night he was killed. Her ex-husband had given her a beating and shown her what he really was—a vicious hoodlum. She was shocked, confused; she wanted time to think. So she told your husband she would talk to him the next morning, then went out for a long walk. But by next morning your husband was dead, and Paula was under suspicion. Only she didn’t kill him.” He stared at the white face. “The body was found here, Mrs. Boyd, not in Paula’s room where it was supposed to be found. That was the second thing that went wrong.”

A frayed sigh came from her lips. Novak’s throat grated like emery paper. He swallowed, said, “We haven’t discussed Dr. Bikel yet. The ubiquitous medicine man and herb specialist. The guy who brews mescaline and vends it in his little shop. The guy who gave you the sympathy and understanding you never got from your husband.”

Her eyes moved. She looked slowly at her hands, then stared at a point on the wall over Novak’s shoulder.

“The police have Eddie. They wanted to talk to him, Mrs. Boyd. About the way his wife died. Did she kill herself, or did he recommend an overdose of something to calm her nerves? Bikel was a small-timer, Mrs. Boyd. An old chiseler settled down in an ostensibly respectable business. Married and leading a shabby life where pennies counted. Then somehow he hooked onto you. I see him studying your case and seeing in it a chance to be big-time and legitimate. His last chance. It wouldn’t take much intuition to guess the relationship between you and Chalmers. Or you may have told him about Paula and your husband. That could have encouraged his idea of marrying you eventually. But of course he was already married.

“His wife must have known his plans. I can see him talking over the future with her matter-of-factly, pleading for a quiet divorce and promising to provide for her afterward. Even handsomely. But when he planned this trip with you I can see her getting desperate, threatening to destroy his scheme by revealing to you that Bikel had a wife. In any case, the day he checked in here he sent a telegram. It told her not to come to Washington and promised he’d arrange things to her satisfaction. But she came anyway. Yesterday after noon in Bikel’s room they had a nasty scene, and she ran out crying. From there she scurried to the chapel. To pray, Mrs. Boyd. In your set prayer isn’t overly fashionable, I imagine. Prayer from the heart, anyway. And this morning she was dead. A shabby, wizened little creature. Bikel’s wife and helpmate. No one to trot around in moneyed circles. Just an embarrassment to the doctor.” His hands curved stiffly over his knees. “But she’s dead now, and Bikel’s free. Do I get an invitation to the wedding?”

Julia Boyd said nothing. Her mouth grimaced, her tongue licked her lips slowly.

Novak said, “I brought his bag here. The doctor won’t need it for a while. He’s spending the night at Police Headquarters, Mrs. Boyd. No need to wait for him any longer.”

Her head lowered. The heavy shoulders came forward, and her body shivered. “He deceived me,” she whimpered. “Pretending to love me when he was married. Men have always tricked me. Like Chalmers.” Her throat sucked breath stridently, and her eyes lifted. “When Chalmers married me I was an innocent girl. I believed he loved me, but he was false. He only wanted my money—like Bikel.” Her eyes dropped away, and her voice hollowed. “All I ever wanted was love and happiness. And this is what I became.”

For a brief moment he felt a surge of pity for her; then he remembered the house on Melrose Street and his voice steeled. “It must have been a brutal shock to find out your husband had tried to palm fake jewelry on you—another in a series of bitter disillusionments with your husband. But you kept them and the time came when they were useful.”

Her eyes had brightened. Her head slanted to one side as she listened. Novak said, “Somehow you managed to get Chalmers into Paula’s room while she was out. You shot him in the bedroom, recovered the payoff money from his pocket and the real jewels from her makeup bag and planted the fakes under her pillow. Only minutes later Barada found them there and took them away. Bad luck for you. But by then you were back here and in bed.”

“Someone moved Chalmers’ body,” she whined. “Was it you?”

He nodded. “How did you get into her room? Bribe the hall maid?”

A smile moved her lips. “I stood at the door and called the maid. She assumed it was my room and let me in. Then I called Chalmers by telephone, pretending I was the girl, and told him to come over. I left the door ajar and waited in the bedroom. You know the rest.” A tremor racked her body. As though she were sitting in an icy draft. But the window was closed, the warm air still and heavy.

Novak said, “You couldn’t tell the police that Paula had been given your jewels by Chalmers because your knowledge would have suggested to them that you might have taken violent means to get them back. So the fakes had to be found where you planted them. You didn’t know Barada had taken them; so you hired me to discover them. Only my heart wasn’t in the job. Yes, I sold out to her, if you want to put it that way, but not for financial considerations—because I didn’t think she killed your husband. More bad luck for you. But things picked up when Barada’s thug called and offered the jewels for sale. You knew they were phonies, but you couldn’t admit it. So I became useful again—the perfect witness to the manner of their recovery. Only before I brought them to you I stopped at a jeweler’s and had them examined. So knowing they were fakes I got you to sign a receipt acknowledging that I had returned legitimate jewelry to you. At the time I was surprised you let me get away with it, but later you must have seen the spot it put you in, and so you tried to buy back the receipt. I needed it to prove I had acted in good faith and at your request—in case you or anyone else got the idea I might have lifted the jewels myself and maneuvered their return.”

He felt his shoulders sag. Fatigue was chilling him. He swallowed, blinked and went on. “Barada was pretty mad when he found he had only a set of muzzlers for all his trouble. He figured Paula still had the real ones and tried to beat them out of her. She didn’t have them, of course, so Barada decided I might. He invited me to a deserted house and threatened me with death. A desperate man, Mrs. Boyd, to use your words, but not over-intelligent. He wasn’t smart enough to reason that if neither Paula or I had the real jewels you must have them, and that you were willing to pay a grand to get the fakes in order to protect yourself. To you it was a small price in terms of your security. In time Barada might have realized that whoever had the real jewels probably had shot Chalmers Boyd, and then you would have been in for blackmail. But that doesn’t matter now. How much did Bikel know?”

Listlessly she said, “He acted as though he knew I killed Chalmers, but he said nothing.”

“Why should he? It suited him that your husband was dead. And of course his pose was an eligible suitor attracted by what you were, not by your money. Quite a blow to your pride when you learned he had a wife, though I doubt the way she died troubled you. So Bikel became another man who lied and deceived you. And you were waiting for him to return.”

He got up slowly and went over to her. Emptily she said, “He should have told me in the beginning. I would have understood and helped.”

“But he neglected to. And he destroyed what was left of your illusions.” His arm reached down, but her hand lifted suddenly. It held a small blue steel automatic.