I reached 209 and knocked on the door. It swung open slightly, raising a little red flag in the back of my head and setting off a warning siren in my ears.
You never lead with your head. That rule makes perfect sense in boxing, and even more in whatever it is I think I’m doing. Sticking your head through an open door invites the type of unpleasantness that befell Anne Boleyn. Instead, I stood on the hinge side and slowly swung it open. No sound came from the dimmed room beyond the jamb.
I stole a quick glance through the doorway, but saw nothing save for the decrepit rent-included furniture. He had the shades drawn. The spill of light from the fringe left the room with a dusky illumination. I quickly slid inside and flattened myself against one wall. Suddenly I felt very insecure. I could see two options. In the first, Flatt had stepped out for a quick bite at the neighborhood Takee-Outee. In the second, he was behind the next door with a nasty present for the cornet player.
There was a third possibility I hadn’t considered. I glanced through the crack between the hinge and jamb of the bedroom doorway. Flatt was there, sitting in a wing chair. The first thing that struck me was the double grin. I rubbed my eyes, but it was still there — the grin formed by his open mouth, and the second one, just below it. It took me a few seconds to figure it out, and the realization made me queasy.
Someone had garroted Flatt savagely, splitting the skin from ear to ear, forming the second malevolent crimson grimace. There would be no need for Claire Sturges’s warrant. I pulled myself together enough to make a rapid search.
I was looking for anything with a name on it, or photographs. I got lucky. There was a small spiral notebook in his jacket pocket, with a number of times and schedules in it, like a record Flatt might have kept if he had been tailing someone. And there were four names — Clyde Gilstrup, Ted Forde, Jackson Rogers, and Robin McLean. I stashed the notebook back into his pocket and decided it was time to call Farley Nuckolls.
I was reaching for the phone when something hard and heavy slammed into the side of my head, right behind the left ear. It was a professional blow, calculated to stun me without doing any appreciable harm, and it worked. I fell to my knees, clasping my star-filled cranium between my arms to fend off any more approaching line drives. None came. I slowly rolled over onto my back. Four hands grabbed for my jacket lapels and boosted me into a hard desk chair. Someone turned on the reading lamp and pointed it right into my eyes. It hurt almost as much as my head.
“Okay,” someone said, the voice of a cultured and refined man. “Who are you?”
“Gallegher. Pat Gallegher. A lady asked me to find the guy in the bedroom. She said his name was Baxter Flatt. The name on the mailbox downstairs said B. Flagg. You’re going to tell me it’s something else?”
“We’re not going to tell you anything. Why did this woman want you to find him?”
“She was worried. The police told her that he was a psychotic. She wanted him to get help. So, I found him.”
There was a long silence, broken only by an occasional whisper, during which I hoped fervently that I had made all the right guesses. Finally, the light snapped off. I rubbed my eyes, trying to massage away the burned spots on my retinae.
The first voice said, “We don’t know the guy in the bedroom. We don’t know who killed him. We don’t care. We’re just a couple of concerned citizens who dropped in to check out what was happening. What you do about him is your business. We’re going to leave now, and go about ours. Don’t count on seeing us again. In fact, it might be a good idea to forget about seeing us at all. Understood?”
“Clearly,” I replied. They left a moment later. I never heard them hit the stairs. They were professionals, in every way, and they made me feel like the amateur interloper I was.
I had been right, though. Flatt was exactly what he had claimed to be. If the guys who clobbered me had sliced his neck, then I’d be dead too. They were covered, though. The police already had Flatt pegged as a mental case. He’d have no relatives, no claimants. He’d languish in the city morgue until the city decided to bury him in as businesslike a manner as possible. Whomever he had worked for would have no further problems with him.
I’m not a policeman or a private investigator. I don’t carry any license, and I have no badge to flash to get information. I’m just a big galoot who was forced by a smarmy little shylock to learn some distasteful methods for extracting what I want from people. This particular job had entailed a minimum of unpleasantness, and that suited me straight up and down the line. Claire Sturges had paid me to find Flatt. I had done so. Signed, sealed, delivered, thank you, ma’am, it’s been a pleasure doing business with you, call again soon.
Ms. Sturges had other ideas. After calling the police with an anonymous tip about a disturbance at the Duvalier, I made my lumbering way to Poydras Street and called her from a Stand ’n’ Snack on the ground floor of her office building. I asked her to share a bite with me.
“The poor, poor man,” she sniffled, after I’d related the story, sans the grisliest details. “He died all alone in the world. No one will claim his body. How... dismal. It isn’t much to show for a lifetime, is it?”
“No,” I said, mostly to comfort her. Flatt had likely lived four or five times the life of any three people Claire Sturges knew.
“Find out who did it, Mr. Gallegher,” she implored.
I should have seen it coming from downtown, “No, I don’t think... I mean, the police have the case now, and I’m sure—”
“But you said they probably wouldn’t do anything, that they’d just write it off. Does that mean whoever killed him will go without punishment? Is that right?”
Damn her. Whether intuitively or by chance she had pulled just the right string, the one that invariably propels Pat Gallegher, unlikely knight errant, into abrupt, energetic, frequently effective action. She had appealed to my most conventional feature: my outmoded, Hammurabian, antiquated need to feel that — if only in an ironic sense — justice has been served. Justice was probably going to receive the short end of the stick in the case of Baxter Flatt. Somehow Claire Sturges had intuited that this little loose end would prompt me to accept her kind offer to put my butt on the line. It was not a nice thing to do to a peace-loving man.
“Will you require more money, Mr. Gallegher?” she asked, heaping guilt upon subtle emotional coercion.
“No!” I replied, perhaps a little too quickly and enthusiastically. “I’ve done damned little for your money as it is. I’ll speak with Detective Nuckolls this evening. If, as I expect, he plans no major investigation, then I’ll look into it. Unofficially, of course. Remember, I’m an amateur in the eyes of the law.”
Farley was not happy to see my face. He didn’t care for what I said either.
“I suppose that was you who called in the murder at the Duvalier,” he said, as I walked into his office.
“I can neither confirm nor deny...” I started.
“Bite me. I’m off in fifteen minutes. Make it quick.”
“I was wondering about the disposition in the Baxter Flatt case.”
He got up and left the office. He returned several moments later with a file folder, already open, which he was reading so vigorously that I was surprised his lips weren’t moving. Finally, he put the folder down and leaned forward. “When you report back to Miss Sturges, please tell her the case has been closed. It has been ruled a suicide. We do not anticipate any further investigation. Thank you for dropping by.”