“Some other time, hussy. What about the platinum? She coming to the office?”
“No. She’s waiting in a little bar called The Peanut. They serve them in bowls with beer. It’s on Fifteenth, just off Wamego Street.”
“I know the place. See you later.”
“I wonder,” she said sadly, and I hung up.
On Fifteenth, just off Wamego, The Peanut was a dismal, little bar which, like all bars in the morning, somehow gave the impression of having a hangover. In the shadowy interior, behind the peanut bowls, a bartender looked at me as if he wished he didn’t have to. Opposite the bar, lining the wall, there was a string of booths, each with its own peanut bowl, and private remote-control box for the juke box in the rear. In the last booth, where the shadows were deepest, I caught a glimmer of platinum, the white movement of a lifted hand.
I told the bartender to bring me a shot of rye and went back to the booth and sat down. While I was waiting for the rye, I saw that Kitty had been right. Mrs. Richert was scared to death. Her face was drawn, no more than a shade darker than her hair, and her eyes were still and wary. She held a glass in her fingers, twisting it slowly, with odd little jerks.
“You wanted to talk with Wash,” she said. “It’ll never happen now.”
“I know. A cop named Wiley Shivers came to see me this morning.”
“Yeah.” Her eyes stared into her slowly rotating glass. “Nasty little toad. I wasn’t thinking straight, or I- wouldn’t have put him on you. You got an idea Wash didn’t really see Hal Decker leaving Danny Devore’s place the night of Danny’s murder?”
“Yes. Hal spent that night with his girl. She was willing to swear to it. You get the tense? Was, I said. That was yesterday. Today she’s dead. Murdered. I just left her on the floor of her apartment.”
Fear moved like a shadow across her face. “The devil,” she said softly. “The merciless, arrogant devil.”
“Stark?”
The flesh quivered on her bones, and I could see her fingers tighten convulsively on the glass. “So you’ve figured it out. He killed Danny Devore, and I guess he killed Hal Decker’s girl. For that, I don’t give a damn. But he killed Wash, too, and Wash was mine. I’ve played him for a sucker whenever the notion struck; but he was mine, and I never wanted him dead. And I want the guy who killed him.”
“And if Hal Decker, an innocent guy, goes clear in the process, that’s purely coincidental, I suppose.”
Her eyes flicked up and down, and the hardness was in there with the fear. “That’s right. Wash and I had this fixed up for a big bundle, but now hope for the bundle’s dead with Wash, and all I want is to get even. I want the guy who killed Wash. Anything that comes with it is frosting on the cake, as far as I’m concerned.”
I looked at her with the first, faint light of dawn breaking inside my skull. “A bundle? So Wash was more than a phony witness. He was also a blackmailer. That explains a lot. I saw Stark in all this from the beginning, but I couldn’t see why he’d bump his own witness. And there’s still something I can’t see. I can’t see why Stark killed Devore. I know he was after Danny’s public hide, but murder’s something else. It’s too fantastic for belief.”
Her lips curled. “Politics,” she said, and the word as she said it was incredibly profane. “There was a better reason than politics for Danny’s murder. It’s really sort of funny, the way it happened. Listen. Wash was Stark’s investigator, and Wash was a handy sort of guy. He had a way with gadgets. Things like tape recorders, for instance. Stark wanted something on Devore that he could use, something concrete. Devore used to make a lot of his crooked deals in his study at home, and Stark figured that if he could set up a hidden mike in the study with a recorder hidden outside, sooner or later he’d get something hot.
“He put Wash on the job, and Wash set the thing up. How he did it doesn’t matter now. Just take it from me, Wash was a pretty clever guy. He took three spools of tape on three consecutive nights and turned them over to Stark. What Stark didn’t know was that Wash played it all back before he turned it over. He not only played it all back, he made copies. Some of it was pretty good. Enough to nail Devore down. But Stark was greedy. He wanted more, and he got more.”
She stopped talking and began to laugh. It was deep, soundless laughter that shook her body like a violent spasm. After a minute, she broke it off with a shrill gasp and said hoarsely, “He got something real hot. He got something so hot it blistered the tape and shiveled his own lousy soul. He got Mrs. Austin Stark and handsome Danny Devore in a scene that was strictly unofficial. I guess it was the one thing the arrogant devil never dreamed of.”
She began to laugh again, and inside my skull the dawn broke like thunder. The irony of it all was enough to make anyone hysterical. I reached across the table in the booth. I put my thumb on one side of her face and my four fingers on the other. Then I make like a pair of pincers, cutting off her laughter and forcing it back into her throat.
“I get it,” I said. “That was something a guy like Stark couldn’t take. He went blind. He killed Danny Devore, not for any political reason, but for the old three-cornered reason that’s always been valid.”
“That’s it.” She lifted her glass suddenly, draining away the last of its amber contents. “He told Wash to knock off the recordings. But he didn’t know that Wash had copies. He didn’t realize that Wash knew about Mrs. Stark and Danny Devore. Most of all, he didn’t realize that Wash was spinning another spool the night of the murder. He found it out about an hour later. He found it out when Wash showed up at his place all ready to do business.”
“What about Hal Decker’s gun?”
“Devore wasn’t killed with Decker’s gun. That was fixed later. Wash remembered Decker’s threats. He knew Decker could be made to look like a logical suspect. Wash swiped the gun the same night and planted it by Devore’s body. He agreed to swear he’d seen Decker leave the scene of the murder. Wash didn’t mind helping with the alibi.
“The way he looked at it, the alibi was a kind of insurance on the tape. Stark had to be free in order to pay. He was a guy going up, and he could pay and keep paying.” Her fingers tightened around the glass until I thought it would crack. “There was something else he could do, too,” she said softly. “He could kill. Wash should’ve remembered that.”
The front door swung open, and a girl came into the bar. She was, as she would have been the first to tell you, intelligent, beautiful and loaded with charm. Her eyes drifting over me casually; she sat down in a booth up the line and ordered a beer.
“Has Stark got the tape?” I asked.
The platinum head nodded. “Not the two big ones — not the love scene, not the murder.”
“Where are they?”
Her eyes sharpened, calculating possibilities of salvage, and I laughed. “No dice, sister. I couldn’t take up more than a fin. It’ll have to be for the satisfaction you get out of it.”
She shrugged and dug into her purse. On the table between us, she laid a key. The key had the number six hundred and eight stamped on it.
“Public locker,” she said. “Union Station. The player is there, too.”
I covered the key with a hand, and it was just in time. The bar door swung open again, and three guys came in. Two of them I remembered. They came straight back to our booth.
The guy who’d worked me over said pleasantly, “We thought she’d contact you. She told you where the tape is?”
“Tape?”
The guy’s laugh wasn’t quite as pleasant as his voice. “I’ll play along for a minute, counselor. Recordings, I mean.”
The key was red hot in the palm of my hand, under my thumb. “I don’t know anything about any recordings. Recordings of what?”