“So you took the trouble to come up here to tell me how hopeless my position is. How nice of you.” Lorna Kyler swung around. “If that’s all—”
“Who said it was hopeless?” The man in the chair reached up, scratched at his pate where the hairline had receded. “I thought maybe you and me, we’d have a talk. I’ve got some ideas.”
A frown ridged the blonde’s forehead. “You just said—”
“I just said there’s no use trying to buy up all the evidence you left behind.” He pursed his lips, dropped his eyes to his half-filled glass. “As long as he’s alive, you’ve got troubles.” He rolled his eyes up from the glass to the woman’s face. “Big troubles.”
The blonde’s shoulders drooped slightly. “You have a suggestion?”
“Accidents have been known to happen.”
Lorna Kyler stared at the man in the chair for a moment, walked over, sat on the couch facing him. “You’re presuming an awful lot to come here and make statements like that. Suppose I should go to the police? Or even to my husband?”
The man in the chair grinned, shook his head. “You’d be crazy to. In the first place, they wouldn’t believe you. I’m a licensed private investigator doing a job for your husband. Naturally you’d try to discredit me. And when they saw what I’d managed to dig on you” — he grinned again, shook his head — “you wouldn’t stand a chance.”
Lorna caught her full lower lip between her teeth, worried it. The slanted green eyes studied the face of the man in the chair opposite her. She realized she was taking a big chance if the man had been sent by her husband; on the other hand, her husband had no need for such traps. The detective was right — she had left a wide-open trail, overly confident that she could always twist Abner Kyler around her finger.
“Why should you do this?” she asked finally.
Tim Davis took a deep swallow from his glass. “Money.” He leaned back, rubbed the heel of his hand along his chin. “Either way, I can’t lose. You don’t buy the idea, I take what I’ve got to the old man. You buy it, I make triple my fee.”
“I see.” The blonde got up out of her chair, made another trip to the window. “How much is that fee?”
The detective considered. “You get the whole package for a hundred thousand.”
The woman at the window whirled. “You must be crazy. A hundred thousand! Why—”
“There’ll still be plenty left. A lot more than if I turn over what I’ve found.” He managed to look sad. “That way we’re both out.”
Lorna started to argue, then shrugged. “I’d be the first one they’d suspect.” She shook her head. “It wouldn’t work.”
“Why don’t you leave that to me?” Davis told her. “You’d be out of town when it happened. There’d be no way they could tie you to it.” He tilted the glass to his lips, drained it. “I’m not exactly an amateur.”
The blonde couldn’t repress a slight shudder, rubbed the backs of her arms with the palms of her hands. “How would it happen?”
Tim Davis leaned over, deposited the empty glass on the edge of the coffee table. “Leave that up to me, too. The less you know about it, the less you’re likely to spill if they do start questioning you.” He consulted his watch. “Is there someplace you can go for let’s say a week?”
The blonde bobbed her head. “I have friends up on the Cape.” She licked at her lips. “Would it take that long? I mean...”
The man in the chair pulled himself to his feet. “Don’t worry about when it’s going to happen. That way you’ll be all the more surprised when they send for you.” He made an ineffectual attempt to smooth some of the creases out of his pants. “I’ll be in touch in about ten days.” He walked to the door, stopped with his hand on the knob, turned back. “If you have any idea of reneging on the price, forget it. The money wouldn’t do you any good in a shroud.” He pasted a grin on his lips that failed to make his eyes, pulled the door open and closed it after him.
Lorna Kyler stood looking at the door for a moment, then ran to it. She reached for the knob, hesitated, then dropped her hand. She turned, walked back to the portable bar, poured herself a stiff drink.
In the hallway, Tim Davis waited for two minutes, then grinned his self-satisfaction. He knew he had her figured right from the minute he started digging into her background. But even some of these case-hardened babes backed away from murder. He was glad she didn’t.
Johnny Liddell walked down the corridor to the double glass door at the far end of the hall bearing the inscription SEAWAY INSURANCE CORP. He pushed through into the anteroom, walked up to the girl at the desk in the enclosed area.
“Lee Devon.”
The girl behind the desk stopped pecking at the typewriter keys and turned a pair of incurious eyes on him. “May I have your name?”
“Johnny Liddell.”
“Mr. Devon’s expecting you.” She got up from her chair, waited until Liddell had pushed through the gate, turned and headed for an office diagonally across from her desk. “Will you walk this way, please?”
Liddell watched for a moment, shook his head sadly. “Sorry, honey. I just don’t have the equipment.”
The girl gave no sign that she’d heard, held the door open for him. He had an impression of full breasts and firm thighs as he squeezed past her into the room.
Lee Devon looked as if he had been jammed into the armchair behind the desk. He was fat and soft-looking, and was swabbing his forehead with a balled handkerchief as Liddell walked in. His eyes were two bright-blue marbles that were almost lost behind the puffy pouches that buttressed them. He nodded to the girl, his jowls swinging. “I don’t want any calls, Janie.” When the girl had closed the door behind her, he turned to Liddell. “Sit down, Johnny. I think we’ve got some business for you.”
Liddell pulled a chair up to the desk, dropped into it.
Devon picked up a folder from the corner of his desk, flipped it open. “You read about Abner Kyler?” He rolled his eyes upward, studied Liddell from under heavily veined lids. “Millionaire, got himself boxed out of his mind, got himself killed when his car went through a railing over the viaduct leading to the Hamptons.”
Liddell reached over to the humidor on the desk, helped himself to a cigarette. He stuck it in the corner of his mouth. “I read something about it,” he said. He scratched a match, touched it to the cigarette. “You don’t think that’s how it happened. That it?”
The fat man picked up a cigar, tested it between thumb and forefinger. He pursed his lips, made and broke bubbles between them. “Let’s just say that I want you to find out if that is the way it happened.”
“Any reason for thinking it wasn’t?”
Devon bit the end off the cigar, spat it at the wastebasket. He stuck it between his teeth, chewed on it “Nothing I can put my finger on. Just a feeling.” He held the unlit cigar in the center of his mouth, seemed to be selecting his words. “You fly a desk like this for twenty years, you get a feeling every so often.” He squirmed uncomfortably in his chair. “I’m not as active as I used to be, so I figured maybe you’d like to check this one out for me.”
Liddell nodded. “What’ve you got?”
The man behind the desk shoved the folder toward him. Liddell dumped the contents on the desk, skimmed through a flimsy on the police report, glanced at the findings of the coroner.
“Alcohol concentration point three in his blood?” Liddell whistled. “This boy didn’t do things halfway.”
The fat man bobbed his head, starting the jowls swinging. “According to the A.M.A., a concentration of point one five would mean he’d had twelve ounces of hundred-proof stuff. A point three concentration would mean twenty-four ounces.”
Liddell dropped his eyes back to the coroner’s report, then picked up a glossy showing a smashed car lying on its top, the tangled legs of a body visible inside it. A second picture showed the dead man after he had been removed from the car, his head lopsided, his eyes staring blankly upward.