The Collection (122 page)

I said, “Damn,” softly to myself.

“But now all is quiet again,” Darius Hill continued reading.
“Bailey is asleep under a mild drug. After coffee, I shall go to complete my
search of his room. I am almost convinced, by now, that he does not have the
letter any longer and that his tacit threat was a bluff.

“And then, whether or not I find it, a third and final
murder.

“You see, Darius, I have taken your lessons to heart. No one
will suspect that I would kill Lecky merely because---whether you or I receive
the directorship---I shall be freer to concentrate on lunar and planetary
observations and no longer will take orders from a doddering fool.

“No, I would
not
kill him if I had a stronger motive
than that. I shall not kill Bailey, for that very reason. If I succeed to the
directorship, however, he would be taken care of. Of course, I would not kill
Lecky for so slight a motive, as motives go, save that the doing of two murders
has made a third a matter of slight moment.

“Adieu, then, Darius. Coffee, then Bailey's room, then I
shall steal Charlie Lightfoot's leather leggings from the closet, lace them on,
and visit friend Lecky. Then---but if you ever read this, you'll know the
rest.”

Darius looked up. He said, in a curiously flat voice,
“That's all.”

* * * *

A month later, Annabel and I were married at the
observatory. Darius Hill, the director, had insisted on giving the bride away.
Charlie Lightfoot was my best man.

Darius spoke, copiously, at the dinner afterwards. He'd been
at it for what seemed like hours.

“. . . and it is most fitting that Einar should be
the setting for this sacred ceremony,” said Darius, “wherein are joined the
most beautiful woman who ever graced a problem in differential calculus, and a
young man who, although he came to us in an hour of tribulation, has
proved. . . .”

“Ugh,” said Charlie Lightfoot. “Paleface talk too much.”

He reached for his glass---and I reached, under the table,
for Annabel's hand.

The door was that of an office in an old building on State
Street near Chicago Avenue, on the near north side, and the lettering on it
read
HUNTER & HUNTER DETECTIVE AGENCY
.
I opened it and went in. Why not? I'm one of the Hunters; my name is Ed. The
other Hunter is my uncle, Ambrose Hunter.

The door to the inner office was open and I could see Uncle
Am playing solitaire at his desk in there. He's shortish, fattish and smartish,
with a straggly brown mustache. I waved at him and headed for my desk in the
outer office. I'd had my lunch---we take turns---and he'd be leaving now.

Except that he wasn't. He swept the cards together and
stacked them but he said, “Come on in, Ed. Something to talk over with you.”

I went in and pulled up a chair. It was a hot day and two
big flies were droning in circles around the room. I reached for the fly
swatter and held it, waiting for one or both of them to light somewhere. “We
ought to get a bomb,” I said.

“Huh? Who do we want to blow up?”

“A bug bomb,” I said. “One of these aerosol deals, so we can
get flies on the wing.”

“Not sporting, kid. Like shooting a sitting duck, only the
opposite. Got to give the flies a chance.”

“All right,” I said, swatting one of them as it landed on a
corner of the desk. “What did you want to talk about?”

“A case, maybe. A client, or a potential one, came in while
you were feeding your face. Offered us a job, but I'm not sure about taking it.
Anyway, it's one you'd have to handle, and I wanted to talk it over with you
first.”

The other fly landed and died, and the wind of the swat that
killed it blew a small rectangular paper off the desk onto the floor. I picked
it up and saw that it was a check made out to Hunter & Hunter and signed
Oliver R. Bookman---a name I didn't recognize. It was for five hundred dollars.

We could use it. Business had been slow for a month or so. I
said, “Looks like you took the job already. Not that I blame you.” I put the
check back on the desk. “That's a pretty strong argument.”

“No, I didn't take it. Ollie Bookman had the check already
made out when he came, and put it down while we were talking. But I told him we
weren't taking the case till I'd talked to you.”

“Ollie? Do you know him, Uncle Am?”

“No, but he told me to call him that, and it comes natural.
He's that kind of guy. Nice, I mean.”

I took his word for it. My uncle is a nice guy himself, but
he's a sharp judge of character and can spot a phony a mile off.

He said, “He thinks his wife is trying to kill him or maybe
planning to.”

“Interesting,” I said. “But what could we do about
it---unless she does? And then it's cop business.”

“He knows that, but he's not sure enough to do anything
drastic about it unless someone backs up his opinion and tells him he's not
imagining things. Then he'll decide what to do. He wants you to study things
from the inside.”

“Like how? And why me?”

“He's got a young half brother living in Seattle whom his
wife has never met and whom he hasn't seen for twenty years. Brother's
twenty-five years old---and you can pass for that age. He wants you to come to
Chicago from Seattle on business and stay with them for a few days. You
wouldn't even have to change your first name; you'd be Ed Cartwright and Ollie
would brief you on everything you'll be supposed to know.”

I thought a moment and then said, “Sounds a little far out
to me, but---” I glanced pointedly at the five-hundred-dollar check. “Did you
ask how he happened to come to us?”

“Yes. Koslovsky sent him; he's a friend of Kossy's, belongs
to a couple of the same clubs.” Koslovsky is chief investigator for an
insurance company; we've worked for him or with him on several things.

I asked, “Does that mean there's an insurance angle?”

“No, Ollie Bookman carries only a small policy---small
relative to what his estate would be---that he took out a long time ago.
Currently he's not insurable. Heart trouble.”

“Oh. And does Kossy approve this scheme of his for investigating
his wife?”

“I was going to suggest we ask Kossy that. Look, Ed, Ollie's
coming back for our answer at two o'clock. I'll have time to eat and get back.
But I wanted to brief you before I left so you could think it over. You might
also call Koslovsky and get a rundown on Ollie, whatever he knows about him.”

Uncle Am got up and got the old black slouch hat he insists
on wearing despite the season. Kidding him about it does no good.

I said, “One more question before you go. Suppose Bookman's
wife meets his half brother, his real one, someday. Isn't it going to be
embarrassing?”

“I asked him that. He says it's damned unlikely; he and his
brother aren't at all close. Hell never go to Seattle and the chances that his
brother will ever come to Chicago are one in a thousand. Well, so long, kid.”

I called Koslovsky. Yes, he'd recommended us to Bookman when
Bookman had told him what he wanted done and asked---knowing that he,
Koslovsky, sometimes hired outside investigators when he and his small staff
had a temporary overload of cases---to have an agency recommended to him.

“I don't think too much of his idea,” Koslovsky said, “but,
hell, it's his money and he can afford it. If he wants to spend some of it that
way, you might as well have the job as anyone else.”

“Do you think there's any real chance that he's right? About
his wife, I mean.”

“I wouldn't know, Ed. I've met her a time or two and---well,
she struck me as a cold potato, probably, but hardly as a murderess. Still, I
don't know her well enough to say.”

“How well do you know Bookman? Well enough to know whether
he's pretty sane or gets wild ideas?”

“Always struck me as pretty sane. We're not close friends
but I've known him fairly well for three or four years.”

“Just how well off is he?”

“Not rich, but solvent. If I had to guess, I'd say he could
cash out at over one hundred thousand, less than two. Enough to kill him for, I
guess.”

“What's his racket?”

“Construction business, but he's mostly retired. Not on
account of age; he's only in his forties. But he's got angina pectoris, and a
year or two ago the medicos told him to take it easy or else.”

Uncle Am got back a few minutes before two o'clock and I
just had time to tell him about my conversation with Kossy before Ollie Bookman
showed up. Bookman was a big man with a round, cheerful face that made you like
him at sight. He had a good handshake.

“Hi, Ed,” he said. “Glad that's your name because it's what
I'll be calling you even if it wasn't. That is, if you'll take on the job for
me. Your Uncle Am here wouldn't make it definite. What do you say?”

I told him we could at least talk about it and when we were
comfortably seated in the inner office, I said, “Mr. Bookman---” “Call me
Ollie,” he interrupted, so I said, “All right, Ollie. The only reason I can
think of, thus far, for not taking on the job, if we don't, is that even if
you're right---if your wife does have any thoughts about murder---the chances
seem awfully slight that I could find out about it, and how she intended to do
it, in time to stop it.”

He nodded. “I understand that, but I want you to try,
anyway. You see, Ed, I'll be honest and say that I
may
be imagining
things. I want somebody else's opinion---after that somebody has lived with us
at least a few days. But if you come to agree with me, or find any positive
indications that I'm maybe right, then---well, I'll do something about it.
Eve---that's my wife's name---won't give me a divorce or even agree to a
separation with maintenance, but damn it, I can always simply leave home and
live at the club---better that than get myself killed.”

“You have asked her to give you a divorce, then?”

“Yes, I--- Let me begin at the beginning. Some of this is
going to be embarrassing to tell, but you should know the whole score. I met
Eve . . .”

He'd met Eve eight years ago when he was thirty-five and she
was twenty-five, or so she claimed. She was a strip-tease dancer who worked in
night clubs under the professional name of Eve Eden---her real name had been
Eve Packer. She was a statuesque blonde, beautiful. Ollie had fallen for her
and started a campaign immediately, a campaign that intensified when he learned
that offstage she was quiet, modest, the exact opposite of what strippers are
supposed to be and which some of them really are. By the time he was finally
having an affair with her, lust had ripened into respect and he'd been thinking
in any case that it was about time he married and settled down.

So he married her, and that was his big mistake. She turned
out to be completely, psychopathically frigid. She'd been acting, and doing a
good job of acting, during the weeks before marriage, but after marriage, or at
least after the honeymoon, she simply saw no reason to keep on acting. She had
what she wanted---security and respectability. She hated sex, and that was
that. She turned Ollie down flat when he tried to get her to go to a
psychoanalyst or even to a marriage consultant, who, he thought, might be able
to talk her into going to an analyst. In every other way she was a perfect
wife. Beautiful enough to be a showpiece that made all his friends envy him, a
charming hostess, even good at handling servants and running the house. For all
outsiders could know, it was a perfect marriage. But for a while it drove Ollie
Bookman nuts. He offered to let her divorce him and make a generous settlement,
either lump sum or alimony. But she had what she wanted, marriage and
respectability, and she wasn't going to give them up and become a divorcee,
even if doing so wasn't going to affect her scale of living in the slightest.
He threatened to divorce her, and she laughed at him. He had, she pointed out,
no grounds for divorce that he could prove in court, and she'd never give him
any. She'd simply deny the only thing he could say about her, and make a monkey
out of him.

It was an impossible situation, especially as Ollie had
badly wanted to have children or at least a child, as well as a normal married
life. He'd made the best of it by accepting the situation at home as
irreparable and settling for staying sane by making at least occasional passes
in other directions. Nothing serious, just a normal man wanting to live a
normal life and succeeding to a degree.

But eventually the inevitable happened. Three years ago, he
had found himself in an affair that turned out to be much more than an affair,
the real love of his life---and a reciprocated love. She was a widow, Dorothy
Stark, in her early thirties. Her husband had died five years before in Korea;
they'd had only a honeymoon together before he'd gone overseas. Ollie wanted
so badly to marry her that he offered Eve a financial settlement that would
have left him relatively a pauper---this was before the onset of his heart
trouble and necessary semiretirement; he looked forward to another twenty years
or so of earning capacity---but she refused; never would she consent to become
a divorcee, at any price. About this time, he spent a great deal of money on
private detectives in the slim hope that her frigidity was toward him only, but
the money was wasted. She went out quite a bit but always to bridge parties,
teas or, alone or with respectable woman companions, to movies or plays.

Uncle Am interrupted. “You said you used private detectives
before, Ollie. Out of curiosity, can I ask why you're not using the same outfit
again?”

“Turned out to be crooks, Am. When they and I were finally
convinced we couldn't get anything on her legitimately, they offered for a
price to frame her for me.” He mentioned the name of an agency we'd heard of,
and Uncle Am nodded.