Murder in the Wings (16 page)

I shook my head. "You said you didn't want any games, Mrs. Bridges. I'm not playing any. I found that envelope in Michael Reeves's apartment. You must have sent it to him."

Her cute little face was fiercer than ever now. "And I'm saying to you that you're a liar."

"There's only one other way that it could have gotten there."

"And how would that be?"

"Sylvia took it there the night of the murder."

I'd gotten the impression that Mrs. Bridges was very good at keeping her face from revealing secrets, but a big, cumbersome secret struggled across her features then. She looked guilty as a little girl with her fingers in Mommy's jewelry box.

"So you know," I said.

"Know what? You're playing games again."

"No games, and you know damn well what I'm talking about."

"Don't speak to me in that tone," she said.

"Then don't try to waste my time."

"Exactly what is it, Mr. Dwyer, that you're accusing me of?"

"I'm not sure yet."

"Well, that's a very impressive piece of detective work."

"All I know for sure is that your daughter went to Michael Reeves's apartment the night he was murdered. Now I'm beginning to believe that she brought him an envelope from you that contained money. That
would lead me to suspect that you, directly or indirectly, were paying blackmail to Michael Reeves. And that's exactly what I'm going to tell the police when I leave here, Mrs. Bridges. They'll want to talk to Sylvia."

She reached over and pressed a button. David Ashton's voice came on the intercom. "Yes?"

"David, I want you to give Sylvia that new prescription from Dr. Kern. I want you to give it to her immediately."

"Is something wrong?"

"Don't ask me any of your damn foolish questions. Just give it to her."

"All right, if that's what you want."

She looked triumphant. "Sylvia won't be interviewed by anybody for quite some time, Mr. Dwyer. As a matter of fact, before the night's out I strongly suspect that she'll be in Dr. Kern's clinic. And Dr. Kern can be very persuasive."

"Is that how he kept her from going to prison when she stabbed one of his workers?"

"How did you know about that?"

"You wanted me to look into the case, remember? When you start looking into things, you learn secrets sometimes."

"I want you to leave."

"What was Reeves blackmailing you with?"

"Did you hear what I said? I want you to leave."

"There's an innocent man in jail tonight."

"I'm beginning to wonder if he is innocent. He sounds more and more guilty to me."

"You'd ruin the theater's reputation to save Sylvia, wouldn't you?"

The anger faded. She looked old. "Do you have children?"

"One. A boy."

"Wouldn't you do nearly anything to save him?"

"Of course."

"Then don't be foolish. Of course I'd save Sylvia before I would the theater."

I was suffocating in the flowers. "He was blackmailing you, wasn't he?"

The hand she flung at me scarcely had any strength. "Just leave, Mr. Dwyer, leave now."

On our way back to Donna, the servant said, "I've never seen her so exhausted like this. You must have disturbed her a great deal." He was smiling as he said it. When we reached the other half of the penthouse, Donna explained that David Ashton had had to excuse himself. I knew what that meant. He was busy putting his wife into a form of brain death so that nobody, especially the police, could ask her any questions.

In the car, Donna said, "Dwyer, we've got to get some rest. Think of all we've been through in the last twenty-four hours."

"I'll drop you off."

"Dwyer, you too, all right?"

"I feel fine."

"You look like shit."

"Thanks."

"We're not that young anymore."

"I'm thinking of Stephen," I said.

She was silent. Then she said, "I'm being selfish."

"So I'm not dropping you off?"

"Right," she said, sounding weary. "You're not dropping me off."

T
rueblood Medical Supplies was housed in a small brick building a few hundred yards from a railroad siding. In the rain and fog, the green and red rail yard lights were bright as beacons. A lone switch engine lurched by. As we walked toward the building, the engineer tugged twice on the air horn.

A light shone through a grimy window. I peered in past the metal mesh. A naked overhead bulb lit long, tall rows of supplies on deep wooden shelves. The place appeared clean and orderly and prosperous. I rattled the door knob. I hadn't really expected it to be open. "Let's try the front," I said.

We walked around the corner to where a big glass window read TRUEBLOOD MEDICAL SUPPLIES. From there I could see a small, tidy front office with three gray metal desks from the sixties, a fake red flower in a slender glass vase on each. I tried the front door. Zip. Zero. Nada.

"You still haven't told me—" she started to say.

"—what we're doing here exactly," I finished for her.

"Exactly, smart-ass."

"Well, in prison Lockhart worked in the infirmary. Out of prison he lived at a halfway house, where he had nothing whatsoever to do with medicine. But he had a card from a medical supply house in his wallet."

"Boy, that is weird."

"Now all we have to do is raise somebody and ask
him a few questions."

"There isn't anybody in there."

"There should be."

"At this time of night?"

I nodded toward the back. We stood under an overhang. In the moonlight the rain drops looked fat and silver. "You didn't notice the little decal on the door
back there?" I said.

"What little decal?"

"It's from the Thornton Security Agency. A bull's
eye."

"Uh-huh. I didn't notice it."

"Well, that supposedly means that Thornton keeps a man on the premises every night."

"So there's somebody in there?"

"Yeah, and apparently he's asleep because I sure rattled the hell out of the back door."

Without missing a beat, she said, "Are you hungry?"

"God, I wish you hadn't said that."

"Meaning you are."

"Yeah. Sort of."

"You know what I'm thinking about?"

"Before you tell me what you're thinking about, I'll tell you what I'm thinking about. I'm thinking about my waistline and about how my agent gets on my ass
every time he sees me these days. Donna, I've really got
to cool it with the food."

"Yeah, I guess that's sensible."

We stood under the overhang some more and watched the fat silver raindrops and our chilled silver
breath.

"So why don't you tell me what you were thinking about?" I said.

"It'd probably be better if I didn't."

"Hell, there ain't any calories in mental pictures."

"I was thinking about Denny's." Junk food is her specialty.

"Yeah, what about Denny's?"

"Well, you know that breakfast they serve, with a cheese omelet and hash browns on the side with one of those little containers of Kraft's grape jelly?"

"Yeah."

"That's what I was thinking about. My relatives down South always serve food like that. You're going down there in June with me, right?"

"Right." I liked the South, and I'd heard so much about her relatives that I wanted to meet them. But right now I wanted to go to Denny's and have the food she'd just described.

I was just about to take her hand and lead her around back, whether to the door again or to Denny's I wasn't sure, when the door behind us opened and a chunky woman with a butch haircut and a big Magnum said, "This ain't no place for hanky-panky. This is private property."

"Bertha," I said.

She squinted at us with steely blue eyes. In her blue Thornton Security uniform she could easily have been a guy, and when I'd worked with her there had been occasional speculation that she actually was, or had been before the miracle of surgery. She was wide and squat and a good woman in a gruff way.

"Dwyer?"

"Yeah."

"Dwyer, you dipshit, what're you doing out here?"

"Trying to get inside."

"You'd think a former cop would know that B and E is against the law." With a quick practiced glance, she assessed the tall and casually beautiful Donna Harris. "How did you ever talk her into spending time with you?"

"I'm still wondering myself."

She tilted her head toward the inside. "You up for some coffee?"

"Sounds great," Donna said.

Apparently I now had an official spokesperson.

Bertha Lamb led us down a corridor to a tiny lunchroom with a Formica table and a microwave that didn't look big enough to hold a donut. On top of the cabin-style refrigerator sat a Mr. Coffee with a full pot. Bertha poured coffee into "personalized" mugs and handed us each one. I drank from Mona's cup, hoping Mona didn't have gum disease or something. Bertha raised her cup with a heavy competent hand, almost in a toast, and said, "Were you the asshole who was rattling the back door?"

"Yeah, why?"

"Well, I've had a spell of stomach trouble, so I was incapacitated for a while." She nodded to a door that showed the brush strokes of a bad green paint job. The sign read LADIES. "Puts you in a hell of a bind, let me tell you. You can't move but some fool is rattling anyway." She smiled at Donna. "What do you see in this hot dog, anyway?"

"Not much, now that you mention it," Donna said sweetly.

"Now I want you to tell me about this place," I said.

"Trueblood?"

I nodded.

"Started working here last week. The plumbing's bad, their subscription to
Time
ran out a couple months back so they've just got old issues, they've got a Scanray security system that isn't worth diddly-squat, and one
of the secretaries keeps a jumbo package of Switzer's licorice on her desk. Unfortunately, Thornton makes
us take a polygraph test every month, so if I so much as
took a bite of the stuff, I'd be out of a job."

"You think the place is strictly legal?"

"Huh?"

"I mean, have you noticed anything funny going on? Late-night deliveries, anything like that?"

"You on a case?"

"Sort of."

"I wish Thornton would let me moonlight like that. Hell, I get tired of being a baby-sitter for alarm systems. I wish I could work on an actual case."

"So have you noticed anything?"

"Uh-huh."

"Damn."

"Sorry, Dwyer."

Donna said, "Do you know anything about the
owners?"

I looked over at her, impressed. I should have thought of that myself.

"You a detective, too?"

"No, I'm an editor."

"An editor?"

"Yes, of an advertising magazine."

"Oh, I see." But obviously she didn't. She put a fat finger to her sulky lower lip. "The owners. Hmmm. Nope. I don't remember anything except for a plaque in one of the offices. Shows a bunch of guys a long time ago cutting the ribbon to open this place up. That mayor—Dandridge—was in the picture, the one who went to prison? He was the one cutting the ribbon."

"Mind if we go see the photo?"

She shrugged. "Hell, no. Come on."

We followed her. As we walked, I asked her about Lockhart: she didn't know anything about him. She moved like a rowboat in rough water. Her thighs were so short her Magnum almost touched her knees. We went back to the front office. All of us looked at the desk with the big black slab of Switzer's licorice on it. "You'd think the bitch would at least have decency enough to keep it in her desk," Bertha said.

We went through a dark door. Bertha flipped on the lights. A mahogany desk the size of a ping-pong table lay before us. It was covered with photos of a blond middle-American family. All the kids would grow up to be George Bush. There were two miniature flags on the desk, one U.S.A., one state. The rest of the desk was so bare it looked like a prop. Bertha pointed to a faded photograph behind the desk, reverently framed in silver. "There."

We went over and looked at the six men. Each wore a suit of the sort that Edmund O'Brien wore in
D.O.A.
(one of my favorite actors in one of my favorite movies). At the right edge of the photo you could see a black 1948 Buick, fat and formidable. I scanned the men, their faces. At the fourth one I stopped.

"God," Donna said. "Look." She was ahead of me.

"Somebody you know or something?" Bertha asked.