Nets to Catch the Wind Page 5

  She went over to the refrigerator and took out breakfast stuff, eggs and bacon and a dish of canned grapefruit. When breakfast was finished, she straightened the kitchen. A paper boy went past on the street outside, his bike squeaking a little; the paper plopped on the front porch. Amy brought it in.

  If there was anything new in the case, she couldn’t discover it. A lot of the train passengers had been questioned. Tickets, reservations, were being checked. The porter, who had been knocked out by the murderer (or murderers), hadn’t regained consciousness. He was under police protection in the hospital. Fogarty had another interview, on page two—a little old woman who seemed to have been doing some sort of heat-induced strip tease with a lot of petticoats, who claimed to have found a single brand-new nylon stocking, minus its mate, stuffed into her belongings when she had returned from one of her trips to the rest room. Fogarty played up the stocking, trying to make a small mystery of it.

  Amy laid aside the paper, went into the bath, removed her gown and robe and slippers, and showered briskly. Then she began to dress for town. Only some half hour later did she realize that a fugitive scrap from her reading had stuck in her mind—Fogarty’s painstaking word picture of a fluttery little old lady confused by crime. He has a gift, she thought irritably. Mimicry with words. Only now I haven’t time to think about the gifts of Mr. Fogarty.

  There was a lot to be done today; not seeing people, like yesterday, but errands which concerned the final affairs of Robert Luttrell. A funeral. The word had a strange flavor, a foreignness; it was not anything she had supposed would be her business. She was struck all at once with a sort of dread for the eventual ceremony, the body displayed in a casket, flower odors like a pall, the mannered grief, the consoling music.

  She sat down and rubbed her temples. It had to be gone through. No doubt the slightest appeal would bring offers of help from the officers who had known Robert, and things would be taken out of her hands so that she might go on as a mere spectator. For a moment she was tempted.

  The thought died in the nagging return of something Fogarty had written. Why should the idea of a little old woman, shedding petticoats, have any significance? Amy rose and forced herself to go on dressing. She was pulling on her hose when she remembered. There had been a stocking among the little old lady’s belongings, stuffed in where it had no business to be.

  Amy nibbled her lip. I’ll get it sometime, she told herself. It’s skittering around inside my head like a ghost.

  A ghost . . . She frowned, her hands resting on her knees. For a moment something—an image, not words—seemed to float almost within reach of recognition. Something she knew, half glimpsed, like a reflection in a pool.

  The tantalizing feeling went away. Her thoughts returned to the job that must be done. She hurried, finishing her dressing, then left the house. There were things to check. She stopped at the police station to make sure just when her husband’s body would be released by the coroner’s office. Then she drove on, downtown, to the funeral home. By ten-thirty she was finished, all details attended to, and as she left the mortuary the director complimented her on her levelheaded control. Perhaps he meant the words as he spoke them, a genuine liking for a woman who wasn’t broken and crying, but the remark struck Amy wrong. She felt her face stiffen, and he must have seen it too. “Of course I know what inner grief you must feel,” he stammered.

  “I’m sure you don’t,” she flung at him, knowing at the same moment that her anger was unreasonable and silly, that it was compounded out of frustration, out of hatred of her own limitations and the fact that the papers had given no hint of clearing Robert Luttrell of the suspicion of having sold his prisoner. She went down the steps to the sidewalk and looked at the street, seeing the town suddenly in a new light, hating it. There was someone here—perhaps more than one—who knew the truth. The clean-swept streets, the neat prosperity, the orderly handling of traffic—this wasn’t Lomena. Lomena was a town where a gambling czar had been murdered, where an innocent man had been railroaded for a crime he didn’t commit, where a cop was killed to shut his mouth. Of course the death had taken place on a train just pulling out of L.A.; but its roots were here. Its stinking, rotten roots. . . . Amy walked toward her car. Her knees were shaking, her hands clenched.

  A sign swung on a bracket over a door. The sign squeaked a little. The wind was dying on the near-noon heat, but there was enough left to swing the sign, to make its cricket’s noise, thin and irritating. Amy glanced up. The lawyer’s name, Cunninghan, was lettered there in antique gold. She slowed, put her hand on the car door, then turned back.

  The door under the sign opened upon a flight of steps.

  Cunninghan’s waiting room looked soft and rich, painted and furnished in deep gold and smoky grays. The windows gave a gauzy light; the smoky rug was deep as moss. A gold-headed girl was sitting at the desk. She looked up at Amy, letting her hands drop from the typewriter. “Yes, madam?” The smile was professional, perfunctory.

  “I wondered if I might see Mr. Cunninghan. I’m Mrs. Luttrell.”

  The eyes remained cool, polite. She straightened a paper on the desk. “Did you have an appointment, Mrs. Luttrell?”

  “Mrs. Schneider suggested that I call on Mr. Cunninghan.”

  A flash of interest crossed the girl’s face. She rose from the chair. Amy saw that she was dressed in a thin black loose-fitting blouse, dull and smoky in tone, and a yellow skirt. She was part of Mr. Cunninghan’s decorating scheme, and the effect gave her an odd anonymity. She blended, all but disappeared, in the pattern of the furnishings. “Just a moment, please. I’ll see if he’s busy.”

  Amy watched her cross the room, aware of a dry amusement. Truly this was getting the ultimate use out of a secretary. The door in the opposite wall opened and Amy heard voices in the other room. Then quiet, while the secretary spoke. The door drifted shut; Amy couldn’t tell if anyone had pushed it.

  The gold-headed girl came back. “Mr. Cunninghan would like you to go in now, please.” She stood aside and Amy passed.

  There were two men in the office. For a moment Amy thought that Cunninghan must be the man by the window, and that he had a child sitting behind the desk. Then she saw with a shock that the creature peering at her was a man—was probably Cunninghan—and she remembered the remark Mrs. Schneider had made about him, about his appearance. Cunninghan was deformed. He was a bent and twisted dwarf.

  His voice was quiet without being in any way hesitant or weak. A lot of calm power, of innate sureness of himself, was exuded with his words, and Amy wondered how much effort, how much cultivation, this had taken from a man whose body was startling in its deformity. “Sit down, Mrs. Luttrell. I’m very glad you came this morning. Mrs. Schneider thought you might be in to see me. By the way, may I present my assistant, David Neece?” He nodded toward the other man. Neece came over and, as if acting as Cunninghan’s official host, shook hands with Amy. He was a big lean man with black curling hair and dark eyes, and a flashing smile. Amy got the full effect of the smile, and the distaste she had experienced in the first shock at Cunninghan’s appearance began to fade away; she wondered if this result was the intent of Neece’s presence.

  Neece brought a chair closer to the desk and Amy sat down.

  Cunninghan’s face was deeply tanned. His gray hair was cut crew style. Amy saw that his hands, spread out on his desk, were thick-knuckled, roughened, as though he performed some sort of exercise with them. She wondered what it was. “I’m trying to find out something which may solve my husband’s murder. The truth can help. If I could get it.”

  Cunninghan smiled a little. “You don’t expect truth from a lawyer?”

  She looked at him frankly. “No, I don’t.”

  “I may surprise you.” The big, confident voice seemed to conceal a chuckle. Cunninghan picked up a silver knife from the desk and turned it between his fingers. “First, permit me to say that I don’t think anyone with a grain of sense believes that your husband was selling h
is prisoner.”

  “It’s the official verdict.”

  “We can’t be sure of that, Mrs. Luttrell. The police methods are devious. They don’t always think what they pretend to.”

  “There is evidence somewhere. I mean to have it.”

  He sighed, examining the design on the handle of the knife. “Yes, I can judge your determination. David——” He looked at the big pleasant man who lounged on the arm of a chair, giving Amy a friendly once-over. “Bring that file on the Tzegeti affair, will you? We might as well let Mrs. Luttrell have the facts at once.” He turned back to Amy. “Mrs. Schneider wants you to see the material we gathered on Tzegeti before Schneider’s murder. You may be surprised. You may think it doesn’t amount to much. We think it had a direct bearing on Schneider’s death.”

  The voice had so much control, so much power, it was hard to think of Cunninghan’s position as Mrs. Schneider’s official echo.

  “I want you to understand that the investigation on this matter wasn’t Schneider’s idea. Vernon Wyse suggested it, and it was carried out under his supervision. The opening situation didn’t seem too serious. Someone was breaking into the cars in the parking lot at the Picardy Club. At first it appeared to be merely petty thievery. Kid stuff, perhaps. And yet we knew the thing had to be handled carefully.”

  Amy recalled a remark made by Mrs. Schneider: it wasn’t anything we could give the papers. No, they wouldn’t want any publicity that might discourage attendance at the poker tables. A man who’s worried about what might be happening to his car isn’t going to stay long at cards.

  “Tzegeti was supposed to be a general caretaker, gardener, and watchman. When a few complaints came in—Vernon handled that sort of thing—he had a talk with Tzegeti. On the surface, Tzegeti seemed eager to co-operate. He suggested better lighting on the parking lot. We still didn’t think it needed a special attendant. Well, we learned. But by then it was a matter of blackmail, and a near suicide.”

  David Neece came over with a large manila folder, handed it to Cunninghan, who began to remove papers from it.

  The first was a mounted newspaper clipping dated almost a year before. Amy read it rapidly, aware of Cunninghan’s and Neece’s eyes upon her. The clipping told the story of a wealthy woman found nearly dead from an overdose of sleeping pills, a note beside her blaming the act on gambling losses. Her life had been saved because her husband had returned earlier than expected from a hunting trip.

  Cunninghan went on in his smooth, strong voice: “This Mrs. Drake had been a fairly regular patron at the club. She lost some money—not a lot, when you consider what she was worth. She quit coming suddenly. The next we heard was this. I sent David to see her”—his gaze flickered over to the younger man—“and he gained her confidence enough to get her to admit that the thing which had driven her to try suicide was not the money losses but blackmail. Someone was threatening to tell her husband about the nights she’d spent at the Picardy, and she figured it would be the end of their marriage.”

  Neece put in, “Drake was quite a bit younger than his wife, and from her attitude I judged she didn’t think she had too good a hold on him. Besides that, she was an extremely nervous type, almost hysterical—the wrong kind of woman for a blackmailer to tackle. Tzegeti wouldn’t know what sort she was, of course—he didn’t work inside the club. He blundered there.”

  Amy looked at the big tough hands turning the silver knife over and over. “Did you accuse Tzegeti?”

  Cunninghan gave her another paper. Tzegeti’s name was a small black scrawl at the bottom of the page. It was a confession of blackmail.

  Cunninghan turned in his chair, restlessly; there was something in his manner that betrayed an impatient dislike—for the job, perhaps, or more likely for Amy, who was being hard to convince. “This is the angle which ties it up to Schneider’s murder. Vernon Wyse was handling the affair. It was dynamite, of course. One breath of scandal linking the Picardy with the Drake business would mean a tremendous loss of revenue.”

  “Just as if,” Neece added, “a real live leper had been discovered at a center table, playing poker.” He smiled, letting her see his sympathy and his desire to clear up any difficult points.

  Cunninghan went on. “Wyse was keeping the papers in his room, trying to decide whether to take it up with Schneider or not. While he was away, Schneider entered the room on some excuse or other, and we’re pretty sure he found this folder and read the contents. That was the morning before his murder.”

  “You think he tackled Tzegeti with the Drake affair that night, and Tzegeti killed him.” Amy put the papers together neatly and waited for Cunninghan’s answer.

  He rubbed a hand over the gray crew cut and frowned. “Schneider was a curiously trusting man. You wouldn’t think a gambling man would be, and being the owner of the Picardy brought him into contact with every kind of trickery and fraud. But he did have that streak in him—toward certain people. If he brought up the matter to Tzegeti, it might have been done in the way of simple questioning. But Tzegeti’s reactions could have been explosive. Guilt makes a man uneasy, quick to defend himself. And Tzegeti was guilty of blackmailing Mrs. Drake.”

  Amy picked up the confession. “It doesn’t specify whom he blackmailed.”

  “Of course it doesn’t. If the papers at any time should have become public for some reason, we couldn’t have her name brought in.”

  “I see.” Amy studied the folder into which he was putting the collection of papers. It was new, crisp, unmarked by handling. “Perhaps you gathered this material for my benefit,” she said.

  Cunninghan’s fingers paused at their task. His eyes settled on her, a still and watchful look.

  “The folder isn’t old, as the clipping is, nor does it show the wear and tear of the confession.”

  Neece laughed. Cunninghan allowed a dry smile to curl his lip. “You’re quite sharp. As a matter of fact, all material relating to the Tzegeti and Drake business is being filed under finished business—hence the change to a new folder.” He became serious. “It is finished, you know.”

  “There are papers there you haven’t let me see.”

  He flipped them toward her. “Merely Mrs. Drake’s statement, typed out by David after he’d talked to her. Unsigned—we didn’t want to pin her down. And a list of patrons who had their cars rifled, with mention of things lost.”

  “Did Tzegeti confess to rifling the cars?”

  “According to Vernon Wyse, yes. Verbally.”

  She stood up from the chair. “I guess that’s what I came to hear, Mr. Cunninghan. I want to thank you for your time.”

  He rose, too, and she was surprised at his height. In the chair he had seemed a dwarf, small, shrunken. But long legs put him up, above the level of her shoulder. It was his upper body, the spine and chest, she saw, which had grown crooked and deformed. The big head on top of the skinny shoulders was turned, regarding her gravely. She flushed, wondering if she’d betrayed any shrinking, any revulsion.

  Neece was opening the door for her. “I’m going to see Mrs. Luttrell down to her car.”

  “Do that, David.” Amy found her hand gripped by one of Cunninghan’s. The flesh was hard, the skin rough. She wondered again what he did that gave him the hands of a laborer. “Have I convinced you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I’ll think it over.”

  “If there’s anything you want to know—come back. Any time.”

  Curiously, she got the impression that he meant it. Whether honestly or for purposes relating to Mrs. Schneider’s instructions, he really did wish to convince her of Tzegeti’s crookedness. It was something queerly and personally important to him. He believed; he wanted Amy to follow suit.

  “Good-by, Mr. Cunninghan.”

  “Good-by, my dear.” For an instant she caught sight of what might be his courtroom manner, a strong magnetism, a forceful friendliness. He seemed to turn it on as he might turn on a light. It obliterated the deformed back,
the shrunken chest. He was full of power, charm, convincingness.

  With Neece she went out into the reception room, passing the secretary at the desk. The girl didn’t look up, and because she fitted so well into the decorating color scheme, she was all but invisible. Amy wondered briefly whether the girl’s strange anonymity was Cunninghan’s idea or her own. There might be secretaries so bent on being office fixtures that this course would be normal to them.

  Then Amy remembered the principle of protective coloring. If the girl were hiding, as it were—what or who was she hiding from? Neece? Was he a wolf?

  They were on the sidewalk now. Amy looked at him sidewise. His black hair was thick and glossy. He was good-looking, all right, enough to have a touch of vanity about it, and enough to have plenty of women chasing him. For no reason just then she remembered Fogarty’s freckles, his homely red hair, his offensive manners. If Fogarty were here, the secretary would no doubt be crouched under the desk.

  Neece touched her elbow. “It’s time for lunch. What do you say to having a bite with me?”

  He made it seem casual, impersonal. If this was technique, it was decently respectful. She smiled back at him. “Yes, I think I might.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  THEY HAD been seated in the café booth about ten minutes, and Neece’s sixteen-cylinder charm hadn’t missed a spark, when Mrs. Schneider walked in at the door, looked around, and came toward their table. She had on a big white gauzy hat and a white crepe dress embroidered all over with silver threads in a small pattern like raindrops, a sheen that found an echo in her hair. There was a subtle air of strain and hurry—she paused at the table, didn’t stop Neece’s jumping up, and said to Amy, “I’m so sorry to interrupt. Will you excuse me, please?” She didn’t wait for Amy’s pardon, but spoke to Neese. “We’re going to have to have a conference, David dear. It’s about the account book.” Her eyes dwelt on Neece with a touch of secret meaning, a look like a small kick under the table, and he laid down the napkin he’d been holding. She made a very cool and commanding duchess, this Mrs. Schneider, and all at once in a flash of insight Amy got the idea that Mrs. Schneider wouldn’t care anything about a place like the Picardy Club except the money that came out of it. She wouldn’t like crowds, and cigarette smoke, and the camaraderie of a card table. It was odd to think of her raking in all that money from a place she must despise.