Merchants of Menace Read online

  “Got their registration?” Mitch asked. Hiller nodded and handed Mitch the sheet, which had a record of the New York license plates.

  That was about all there was to it. Nobody picked up Bella Tansey and her Buick, Prudence Gilford was socked away in a rooming house in town, and Mitch never expected to see her again.

  When he got home that night, Amy kissed him and asked him about things, and then after he’d horsed around with the kids a little, she showed him a letter from her sister. Her sister’s husband was on strike, and what the union paid them took care of food and rent and that was about all; but they had to keep up their payments on the car and the new dishwasher, and the TV had broken down again, and could Mitch and Amy help out for a little while—they’d get it back soon.

  So after the kids were in bed, Mitch and Amy sat down on the sofa to figure things out, which took about two seconds and came to fifty bucks out of his next paycheck. It was always like that with the two of them: they saw things the same way and never had any arguments. Not many guys were as lucky as Mitch.

  The next morning, Decker had his usual conference with the Homicide Squad and went over all the cases they had in the shop. The only thing he said about the Gilford business was, the next time Pulasky tried to sucker them, figure it out so he had to come down here personally, and then make him sweat.

  Mitch drew a couple of minor assault cases to investigate, and he’d finished up with one and was on his way to the other when the call came in on his radio. Go out to French Woods, on East Road. They had a homicide and it looked like the missing Tansey woman.

  He found a couple of police cars and an oil truck and the usual bunch of snoopers who had stopped out of curiosity. There was a kind of rough trail going into the woods.

  A couple of hundred yards in, the Lieutenant and a few of the boys and Jub Freeman, the lab technician, were grouped around a dark blue car. It didn’t take any heavy brainwork to decide it was the Tansey Buick.

  When Mitch got to the car, he saw Bella Tansey slumped in the front seat with her head resting against the window. The right hand door was open and so was the glove compartment, and Decker was looking at the stuff he’d found there.

  He gave Mitch the main facts. “Truck driver spotted the car, went in to look, and then got in touch with us. We’ve been here about fifteen minutes, and the Medical Examiner ought to show up pretty soon. She was strangled—you can see the marks on her neck—and I’ll bet a green hat that it happened the night before last, not long after she left the motel.”

  Mitch surveyed the position of the body with a practiced eye. “She wasn’t driving, either. She was pushed in there, after she was dead.”

  “Check,” Decker said. Very carefully, so that he wouldn’t spoil any possible fingerprints, he slid the junk he’d been examining onto the front seat. He turned to Jub Freeman, who was delicately holding a handbag by the two ends and scrutinizing it for prints.

  “Find anything?” the Lieutenant asked.

  “Nothing,” Jub said. “But the initials on it are B.T.W.”

  “Bella Tansey What?” the Lieutenant said. He didn’t laugh, and neither did anybody else. He stooped to put his hands on the door sill, leaned forward, and stared at the body. Mitch, standing behind him, peered over his head.

  Bella had been around thirty and she’d been made for men. She was wearing a blue dress with a thing that Amy called a bolero top, and, except where the skirt had pulled up maybe from moving the body, her clothes were not disturbed. The door of the glove compartment and parts of the dashboard were splotched with fingerprint powder.

  Mitch pulled back and waited. After about a minute the Lieutenant stood up.

  “Doesn’t look as if there was a sex angle,” Decker said. “And this stuff—” he kicked at the dry leaves that covered the earth, “—doesn’t take footprints, If we’re lucky, we’ll find some­ body who saw the killer somewhere around here.” He made a sound with his thin, elastic lips and watched Jub.

  Jub had taken off his coat and dumped the contents of the pocketbook onto it. Mitch spotted nothing unusual—just the junk women usually carried; but he didn’t see any money. Jub was holding the purse and rummaging inside it.

  “Empty?” the Lieutenant asked sharply.

  Jub nodded. “Except for one nickel. She must have had money, so whoever went through this missed out on five cents.”

  “Couldn’t be Ed Hiller, then,” Mitch said, and the gang laughed.

  “Let’s say the motive was robbery,” Decker said. “We got something of a head start on this, but brother, it’s a bad one. Why does a woman on her way to California make a phone call and then sneak off in the middle of the night? Leaving her girl friend in the lurch, too. Doesn’t sound like robbery now, does it?”

  “Sounds like a guy,” Mitch said. “She had a late date, and the guy robbed her, instead of—”

  “We’ll talk to Ed Hiller about that later,” the Lieutenant said. “Taylor, you better get going on this. Call New York and get a line on her. Her friends, her background. If she was married. How much money she might have had with her. Her bank might help on that.”

  “Right,” Mitch said.

  “And then get hold of the Gilford dame and pump her,” Decker said.

  Mitch nodded. He glanced into the back of the car and saw the small overnight bag. “That,” he said, pointing. “She packed, so she didn’t expect to go back to the motel. But she didn’t put her bag in the trunk compartment, so she must have expected to check in somewhere else, and pretty soon.”

  “She’d want to sleep somewhere, wouldn’t she?” Decker asked.

  “That packing and unpacking doesn’t make sense,” Mitch said.

  Decker grunted. “Homicides never do,” he said grimly.

  Mitch drove back to headquarters thinking about that over­night bag, and it kept bothering him. He didn’t know exactly why, but it was the sort of thing you kept in the back of your mind until something happened or you found something else, and then everything clicked and you got a pattern.

  But, what with organizing the questions to ask New York, he couldn’t do much doping out right now. Besides, there was a lot more information to come in.

  He got New York on the phone and they said they’d move on it right away; so he hung up and went to see Prudence. He was lucky to find her in.

  She was shocked at the news, but had nothing much to contribute. “We didn’t know each other very long,” she said, “and I was asleep when she left. I was so tired. We’d been driving all day, and I’d done most of it.”

  “Did she mention knowing anybody around—anybody in town?”

  Mitch asked. Prudence shook her head, but he put her through the wringer anyhow—it was easy for people to hear things and then forget them. You had to jog their memories a little. And besides, how could he be sure she was telling all she knew? He felt sorry for her, though—she looked kind of thin and played out, as if she hadn’t been eating much. So he said, “That five bucks of yours isn’t going to last too long, and if you need some dough—”

  “Oh, thanks!” she said, sort of glowing and making him feel that Mitch Taylor, he was okay. “Oh, thanks! It’s perfectly wonderful of you, but I have enough for a while, and I’m sure my sister will send me the money I wired her for.”

  By that afternoon most of the basic information was in. Locally, the Medical Examiner said that Bella Tansey had been stran­gled with a towel or a handkerchief; he placed the time as not long after she’d left the motel. The Lieutenant had questioned Ed Hiller without being able to get anything. Hiller insisted he hadn’t left the motel, but his statement depended only on his own word.

  Jub had used a vacuum cleaner on the car and examined the findings with a microscope, and he’d shot enough pictures to fill a couple of albums.

  “They stopped at a United Motel the first night,” he recapitulated, “and they had dinner at a Howard Johnson place. They ate sandwiches in the car, probably for lunch, and they bo
ught gas in Pennsylvania and Indiana, and the car ate up oil. There was a gray kitten on the rear seat sometime or other. They both drove. Bella Tansey had ear trouble, and she bought her clothes at Saks Fifth Avenue. I can tell you a lot more about her, but I’m damned if I’ve uncovered anything that will help on the homicide. No trace in that car of anybody except the two women.”

  The New York police, however, came up with a bombshell. Bella Tansey had drawn $1,8oo.00 from her bank, in cash, and she’d been married to Clyde Warhouse, and they’d been divorced two years ago. She’d used her maiden name—Tansey.

  “Warhouse!” the Lieutenant said.

  Everybody knew that name. He ran a column in the local paper—he called it “Culture Corner’’—and he covered art galleries, visiting orchestras, and egghead lecturers. Whenever he had nothing else to write about, he complained how archaic the civic architecture was.

  “That’s why she had the W on her bag,” Mitch said. “Bella Tansey Warhouse. And Ed Hiller didn’t lie about the phone call. She made it all right—to her ex-husband.”

  Decker nodded. “Let’s say she hotfooted it out to see him. Let’s say she still had a yen for him and they scrapped, that he got mad and lost his head and strangled her. But why would he take her dough? She must’ve had around seventeen hundred with her. Why would he rob her?”

  “Why not?” Mitch said. “It was there, wasn’t it?”

  “Let’s think about this,” Decker said. “Prudence says Bella unpacked. Did Bella start to go to bed, or what?”

  “Prudence doesn’t know,” Mitch said. “I went into that for all it was worth, and Prudence assumes Bella unpacked—she can’t actually remember. Says she was bushed and went right to sleep. Didn’t even wash her face.”

  “Well,” Decker said, “I guess Warhouse is wondering when we’ll get around to him. I’ll check on him while you go up there.” The Lieutenant’s jaw set firmly. “Bring him in.”

  Mitch rolled his shoulders, tugged on the lapels of his jacket, and went out The first time you hit your suspect, it could make or break the case.

  Clyde Warhouse lived in a red brick house with tall white columns on the front. Mitch found him at home, in his study. He was a little guy with big teeth, and he didn’t really smile; he just pulled his lips back, and you could take it any way you pleased.

  Warhouse came right to the point. “You’re here about my former wife,” he said. “I just heard about it on the radio, and I wish I could give you some information, but I can’t. It’s certainly not the end I wished for her.”

  ’What kind of end were you hoping for?” Mitch asked.

  “None.” The Warhouse lips curled back, telling you how smart he was. “And certainly not one in this town.”

  “Let’s not kid around,” Mitch said. “You’re coming back with me. You know that, don’t you?”

  The guy almost went down with the first punch. “You mean—you mean I’m being arrested?”

  “What do you think?” Mitch said. “We know she phoned you and you met her. We know you saw her.”

  “But I didn’t see her,” Warhouse said, “She never showed up.”

  Mitch didn’t even blink. “How long did you wait?”

  “Almost an hour. Maybe more.”

  “Where?”

  “On the corner of Whitman and Cooper.” Warhouse gasped, then put his head in his hands and said, “Oh, God!” And that was all Mitch could get out of him until they had him in the Squad Room, with Decker leading off on the interrogation.

  The guy didn’t back down from that first admission. He knew he’d been tricked, but he stuck to his guns and wouldn’t give another inch. He said Bella had called him around midnight and said she must see him. He hadn’t known she was in town, didn’t want to see her, had no interest in her, but he couldn’t turn her down. So he went, and be waited. And waited and waited. And then went home.

  They kept hammering away at him. First, Mitch and Decker, then Bankhart and Balenky, then Mitch and Decker again.

  In between, they consulted Jub. He’d been examining Warhouse’s car for soil that might match samples from French Woods; for evidence of a struggle, of Bella’s presence—of any­ thing at all. The examination drew a blank.

  Warhouse just grinned his toothy grin and kept saying no. And late that evening they gave up on him, brought him across the courtyard to the city jail, and left him there for the night. He needed sleep—and so did the Homicide Squad.

  At the conference the next morning, Decker was grim. “We have an ex-wife calling her ex-husband at midnight and making an appointment; we have his statement that he went and she never showed up; and we have a homicide and that’s all.”

  “The dough,” Bankhart said.

  Decker nodded “When we find that seventeen hundred, then we might have a case, We’ll get warrants and we’ll look for it, but let’s assume we draw another blank. Then what?’’

  “Let’s have another session with Ed Hiller,” Mitch said.

  They had it, and they had a longer one with Warhouse, and they were still nowhere. They’d gone into his back­ground thoroughly. He earned good money, paid his bills promptly, and got along well with his second wife. He liked women, they went for him, and he was a humdinger with them, although he was not involved in any scandal. But in Mitch’s book, he’d humdinged once too often. Still, you had to prove it.

  For a while they concentrated on The Happy Inn. But the motel guests either couldn’t be found—because they’d registered under fake names with fake license numbers—or else they said they’d been asleep and had no idea what was going on outside.

  The usual tips came in—crank stuff that had to be followed up. The killer bad been seen, somebody had heard Bella scream for help, somebody else had had a vision. Warhouse had been spotted waiting on the corner, which proved nothing except he’d arrived there first. Every tip checked out either as useless or a phony.

  The missing $1,700.00 didn’t show up. Decker ran out of jokes, and Mitch came home tired and irritable. The case was at a full stop.

  Then Decker had this wild idea, and he told it to Jub and Mitch the next day. “My wife says I woke up last night and asked for a drink of water, and I don’t even remember it.”

  “So you were thirsty,” Mitch remarked.

  “Don’t you get it?” Decker exclaimed. “People wake up, then go back to sleep, and in the morning they don’t even know they were awake. Well, we know Bella packed her bag, and she was in that motel room with Prudence and must have made some noise and possibly even talked. I’ll bet a pair of pink panties that Prudence woke up, and then forgot all about it. She has a clue buried deep in her mind.”

  “Granted,” Jub said, “but how are you going to dig it up?”

  “I’ll hypnotize her,” Decker said with fire in his eyes. “I’ll ask a psychiatrist to get her to free-associate. Taylor, ask her to come in tomorrow morning, when my mind is fresh. And hers, too.”

  Mitch dropped in on Prudence and gave her the message, but the way he saw things, the Lieutenant was sure reaching for it—far out. Mitch told Amy about this screwy idea of Decker’s, but all she said was that tomorrow was payday and not to forget to send the fifty dollars to her sister.

  That was why Mitch wasn’t around when Prudence showed up. He took his money over to the Post Office and there, on account he liked to jaw a little, make friends, set up contacts­ you never knew when you might need them—he got to gabbing with the postal clerk.

  His name was Cornell and he was tired. Mitch figured the guy was born that way. Besides, there was something about a Post Office that dragged at you. No fun in it, nothing ever happened. All the stamps were the same (or looked the same) and all the clerks were the same (or looked the same) and if anything unusual came up, you checked it in the regulations and did what the rules said, exactly. And if the rules didn’t tell you, then the thing couldn’t be done, so you sent the customer away and went back to selling stamps. Which people either wanted, or th
ey didn’t, There were no sales, no bargains. A damaged stamp was never marked down—it was worth what it said on its face, or nothing. There was nothing in between.

  Still, the Post Office was a hell of a lot better than what Decker was doing over at the Homicide Squad, so Mitch handed in his fifty bucks for the money order and said, “It’s not much dough, I guess. What’s the most you ever handled?”

  The clerk came alive. “Ten thousand dollars. Six years ago.”

  “The hell with six years ago. Say this week.”

  “Oh. That dame with seventeen hundred dollars. Seventeen money orders. That was the biggest.”

  Click.

  Mitch said cautiously, “You mean Prudence Gilford?”

  “No. Patsy Grant.”

  “P.G.—same thing,” Mitch said with certainty. “Same girl. And I’ll bet she sent the dough to herself care of General Delivery, somewhere in California.”

  Cornell looked as if he thought Mitch were some kind of magician. “That’s right,” he said. “How did you know?”

  “Me?” Mitch said, seeing that it all fitted like a glove. Prudence—or whatever her name was—had strangled Bella for the dough, then packed Bella’s bag, dragged her out to the car, driven it to the woods, and left it there. And probably walked all the way back. That’s why Prudence had been so tired.

  “Me?” Mitch said again, riding on a cloud. “I know those things. That’s what makes me a cop. Ideas—I got bushels of ’em.” He thought of how the Lieutenant would go bug-eyed. Mitch Taylor, Homicide Expert.

  He walked over to the phone booth, gave his shield number to the operator so he could make the call free and save himself a dime, and got through to the Homicide Squad.

  Decker answered. “Taylor?” he said. “Come on back. The Gilford dame just confessed.”

  “She—what?”

  “Yeah, yeah, confessed. While she was in here, the strap on her bag broke and she dropped it. Everything fell out—including seventeen money orders for a hundred bucks each. We had her cold, and she confessed. She knew all about Warhouse, and planned it so we’d nail him.”