“A little palaver with you and the boy friend.”
On the bandstand, Archie spotted me. His dark, sleek form stiffened. As soon as the dance number was over, he signaled to his pianist for a chaser. He left the stand, nodding at this person, smiling at that one, without his cold, dark eyes ever leaving me.
He came up to the table and I said, “Sit down, Archie.”
“He… He’s got a gun on me, Archie,” Jean said. Archie sat down. “This is going hard with you, Rick.”
“Not half as hard as it’s going with you, chum. Which of you snitched that packet of notes from my house tonight?”
They looked at each other blankly. “Notes?” they said.
“I didn’t stutter, and both of you hear quite well. You know they’re hunting me for murder?”
“We know it,” they said.
“So you think I’d hesitate to spill Jean’s liver all over the next table?”
She grimaced and Archie’s knuckles went white against the table cloth. “You wouldn’t dare,” he said.
“Just try me. Brother, just try me. Now which of you got those notes? Just tell me that, give me the notes, and we’ll forget the whole incident and I’ll apologize for talking to Jean the way I have.”
“That’s a promise?” they breathed.
“As sure as my name’s Rick Hershey! Where are the notes?”
Jean looked at him and said, “Archie, do you know what he’s talking about?”
He said, “No. Do you?”
They looked at me and said: “We don’t know what you’re talking about, Rick.”
“Okay,” I growled. “If that’s the way…” I caught Archie’s gesture. Just a slow falling of one of his lids over his dark eye and a lifting of a forefinger to the tip of his nose. Orchestra leaders have a set of signals all their own. I glanced over my shoulder. Two hulking lads were moving out from the farther wall, shoulders humped, glassy eyes dead on me. Rather than have the bouncers throw me out and maybe attract police attention, I got to my feet. I promised Jean and Archie that I’d be seeing them and got out of Club Mananita maybe a yard-and-a-half ahead of the pair of bouncers.
That left me with Perry Lance. In a drugstore down the block from Club Mananita I called his parents’ mansion. He wasn’t there. I called his club. He wasn’t there, either. So he was either out gadding or in his apartment uptown. I decided not to tip him off by calling the apartment. I left the drugstore and whistled for a cab.
I nodded a thanks to the elevator starter, walked down the hallway to the door of Perry Lance’s bachelor apartment. I opened the door, peeped in the snug sitting room. It was empty. I could hear Perry whistling softly back in the bedroom. When he came out of the bedroom, I was standing in the middle of the sitting room, waiting for him.
He took three steps into the sitting room, saw me, and took two back. “Well, I must say, Rick, you’ve got your own share of gall, coming in here this way!”
He seemed suddenly to need to do something with his hands. He walked over to the antique Dutch cabinet, got a bottle and poured himself a jigger of rum. He didn’t offer me one, drinking his own while watching me down his nose.
“Where are the notes, Perry?”
From the way he jolted I knew I had it. Tingles raced over me. Actually getting the notes was the next thing.
He stammered, “Notes? Notes…?”
“That’s right. The notes you took from my desk earlier this evening.”
“Rick, I was just going out. I haven’t time for jokes or…”
“The notes, chum.” I selected a nice book end of beaten brass and walked toward him. He dropped his rum glass, backed against the wall. “I don’t…” he began. Until he looked at my eyes; then he said, “The notes are there in the secretary.”
“Get ’em!”
He divided his attention between me and the secretary. Then it was all on the secretary and he was scratching like a dog digging for a bone. He turned, pressed back against the secretary. “They’re gone, Rick! I took them from your house, yes, when I heard the newscast. I went by your place, and happened to see Godiva Hoffman’s signature on the notes on the desk.”
“You were planning to see that I got the electric chair. You were planning to remove me and do a little courting with Ellicia, huh, chum?”
“I… I think a lot of Ellicia…”
“That was a hell of a nasty way to show it. All right, you snitched the notes. Then what?”
“I brought them here. I was out only half an hour or so after nine-thirty to get a sandwich. I came back, got dressed, you came, and now…” He spread his hands.
I mulled that over. All the time Perry had been edging toward the door. He yanked the knob, shot out in the hall. He yelled bloody murder as I made a dive for him and missed. A few doors began popping open. Perry kept right on yelling. The joint was unhealthy.
I lammed for a window at the end of the hallway. The whole place was coming alive, malignantly, what with Perry’s yelling. A fat man between me and the window tried to get his hands on me. I buried my fist in three hundred pounds of lard. The fat man sat down, minus his breath. The way I went out that window and down the fire escape was a panic.
I walked the streets for maybe an hour. I came to the numbing conclusion that as a detective I was a lousy bust. But I had this thing. I knew I had it. It was as simple as the formula for hydrochloric acid. From a pool room I phoned the house. Ellicia sounded panicky, and I told her to calm down. “You’re going to have a party,” I said.
“A party, Rick? At this hour? Rather late to start, isn’t it?”
“Just tell them you’ve got some extra special champagne. That’ll bring them out.”
“Who’ll I invite?”
“Anybody you can round up. The usual crowd of magpies. You’ll find them in this joint and that one, where at the moment they’re having to pay for their drinks. Just be sure that Perry Lance, Jean Darlan, and Archie Satler are there.”
“Oh… You mean that one of them…”
“One of them made a corpse of the woman who wasn’t there. If one of them doesn’t show up, he’ll be the party with murder on his conscience!”
But they all showed up. I walked in and the room got as quiet as if a snake had entered. I looked around the room at the deadbeats and parasites and bluenoses. The last chords of the piano hung in the air. Archie Satler was turned toward me on the piano bench. Jean was standing near him, a slug of Scotch and soda halfway to her lips. Perry and Ellicia were near the bookcase; old J. P. sat before the fireplace and waited. The rest of the parasites and bluenoses didn’t matter.
I said a pleasant hello; nobody answered. Ellicia came over and gave my arm a squeeze. I said, “Well, we might as well get to the brass in the tacks, huh?” I walked forward in the room. “Somebody here is a lad with bright ideas. A lad who suspected that I was up to something when my wife happened to mention casually that I’d had dinner out four or five times and had come in late afterward. A lad who nosed around and found out that I’d rented an apartment for one Codiva Hoffman in the Wardmore Arms.
“That much is simple enough, isn’t it? This nosy person then watched the apartment, seeing a nice blackmail angle, and discovered there evidently was no such person as Godiva Hoffman. This person tumbled then to my real motive in renting the apartment, knowing me and my wife well. Knowing that I’ve never made any bones about crowds of chattering magpies and wanting to be one-hundred per cent essential with my wife.”
I shrugged their gazes off. “It’s still simple enough, isn’t it? Our nosy lad sees the sweet set-up, makes a little trip down to a cheap bar, finds a woebegone female barfly, installs her in the apartment as Godiva Hoffman. That leaves me with a real Godiva on my hands — I am to be confronted with this flesh and blood Godiva and told that I’ll either pay off heavy sugar or have my wife find out. That’s simple too, isn’t it? Nasty and simple.