Dead, She Was Beautiful Page 9

  “I grow on people,” the burly man admitted and stood aside for Hagen to unlock his front door. He stepped inside then and looked around the living room with a condescending air as if ready to say, H’m, not bad.

  Hagen didn’t wait to hear Jack’s opinion. He followed the other man into the house and hit him with all his strength, a judo cut with the stiffened palm across the back of the thick neck. He put a lot into the blow. He was paying back several people. Jack fell like a tree and lay face down. Hagen shut the door.

  “Nice of you to drop in, Jack,” he murmured and knelt down beside the outstretched figure and began to go through the man’s pockets. He didn’t find much besides tobacco crumbs. Jack carried a key ring that indicated he owned an automobile. There was also a handkerchief, overdue for the laundry; a package of cigarettes and a local book of matches; a box of tablets and a switchblade knife. The most interesting item was a train ticket, the return half of a round-trip fare from Los Angeles. The ticket had been sold the day before Hilda’s murder.

  The blue stub had fallen from Jack’s wallet and Hagen had laid aside the wallet momentarily to examine the ticket. He might have learned more had he gone on to open the wallet but he didn’t have time. He made a bad mistake. It was a sin of omission and it consisted of not paying any attention to Jack. From the blow he had dealt out, Hagen confidently expected his victim to remain “hors de combat” for at least an hour. He underestimated the toughness of the thick neck. Without even a warning twitch, Jack suddenly reared up from the floor, like a horse bucking. Hagen didn’t have time to be surprised. The top of Jack’s bullet head struck him flush on the jaw.

  He kept falling for a long time, down an endless slope toward an unseeable bottom, and something kept hitting him as he fell. He couldn’t imagine what this was and then he decided that someone was shooting arrows at him. That didn’t seem fair, he already had enough to think about, and he wished that whoever was laughing would shut up. All at once he struck bottom and Hagen rolled his head from side to side and then had to spit out a mouthful of lint.

  His eyes took a little time in focusing and his mind a little bit longer than that to comprehend that he lay on his own carpet in his own living room. Remembrance flooded back. He raised his head and moaned aloud at what the effort cost him. His jaw throbbed like an impacted wisdom tooth.

  Nevertheless, he eventually came up on his hands and knees and found other pains to catalogue. His right hand was aching and swollen as if it had been stomped on, and his side hurt him every time he breathed.

  “Nice guy,” he muttered hoarsely. “I only hit him once.”

  Hagen looked around for Jack but the burly man had gone, taking his wallet and other belongings with him. Visible evidence of his presence still remained, however, and the sight of the living room made Hagen forget his own bruises momentarily. The room had been vandalized, deliberately desecrated. Hagen’s books lay on the carpet, some of their pages ripped out. The reading lamp was a shattered cripple. And the upholstery of the furniture had been slashed viciously and some of the stuffing pulled out, like eviscerated bodies.

  Jack had taken ample revenge for Hagen’s treatment of him.

  “He’ll pay,” Hagen mumbled to himself. “There’s got to be an end to this some day and then it’ll be my turn. It’s coming. Everybody just look out.”

  With this to salve his feelings he stumbled out to the bathroom to mend himself physically. He was relieved to find that nothing appeared to be broken, though it was hard to tell about his ribs. But he still had all his teeth and he could manipulate his fingers gingerly. He didn’t even look too bad, once he washed the dust off his face.

  “Rugged, that’s me,” he told his reflection. “Not brainy, but rugged.”

  That was what came of letting your frustrations get the upper hand, he thought. Just because he had been edgy, he hadn’t even heard what Jack had to say. He wondered what the other man’s mission had been in seeking him out. He might never know now.

  “We grow so soon old and so late smart,” he said aloud. It had been one of his father’s favourite aphorisms. Hagen had never appreciated it so much before. If he had played his cards right, Jack might have been some help to him. At the very least, Hagen wouldn’t be standing here now, aching in all parts of his body, with his living room a shambles.

  When he felt up to it, he tried straightening the mess but it hardly looked the same, and wouldn’t without professional assistance. Discouraged, he sat down at the kitchen table and waited for his coffee pot to percolate. That was really the worst thing about not being married, he decided; you had no one to gripe to in moments like these. Hagen considered the telephone thoughtfully. The sight of it squatting there by his elbow started his mind to pull itself out of the slough of self-pity.

  He poured himself a cup of coffee and tried to recall the exact sound of Jack’s voice He practised it aloud, striving to capture the inflections, or lack of them, in the guttural speech. Gradually he evolved a combination of sentences in his mind and he went over the phrases time after time until he had achieved a passable impersonation, at least in his own opinion.

  “Well, we’ll see,” he murmured. “Maybe Jack’s going to be some help, after all. Or maybe I’m wrong about that ticket to L.A. in his pocket.”

  He dialled Wayne Wishart’s number and sat listening to the faraway ring. It was still early and he counted on Wishart being home. A man usually doesn’t go out on the town the night following his wife’s murder. And because he had no other lead to follow, Hagen was curious to learn Wishart’s response to his impersonation. He couldn’t forget that Wishart had spent the day before in Los Angeles, and Jack had come from that city too.

  It was Avis Gill who answered the telephone in her best secretarial manner. “This is the Wishart residence. Whom do you wish?”

  “Hello,” Hagen growled. “This is Jack …” He had his lips parted to add that he wished to talk with Wishart.

  She didn’t give him a chance. Her professional manner cracked and her voice trembled. “What do you want now? You know you’re not supposed to call here. We’ll call you.” And she hung up.

  Hagen slowly replaced the receiver, a feeling of elation beginning to sprout inside him. The call hadn’t turned out exactly as he had expected but it had borne fruit of a sort. There was some connection between Jack and Wishart—or, at least, the Wishart household, he amended. And Avis Gill had sounded definitely scared. Of what?

  He knew that he wouldn’t learn the answer sitting in his kitchen. Hagen had a final pull of coffee, stuffed a banana and two doughnuts in his coat pocket, and left the house. He drove across town to take up his position near the Wishart house again just as he had the night before, but with one big difference. This time nobody was paying him.

  12

  ON the way to the Wishart home, Hagen stopped at a drugstore to buy the evening papers on the off-chance that the police had solved Hilda’s murder and hadn’t bothered to tell him about it. They hadn’t but the papers were full of information about Doc, whose name, it turned out, was actually Ira Gruber. He had been vaguely dubbed a “mystery man” by the reporters and Hagen discovered sourly that the police had taken the entire credit for tracking down and identifying the old bum. “Routine police methods,” Troge was quoted as saying.

  Hagen turned on his car radio and got more of the same from a local newscast. He understood. The cops, lacking a definite answer in Hilda’s death, weren’t above feathering their own nest with Hagen’s straw.

  “Better that than my hide,” he muttered and turned off the radio. His vanity was injured but that was all, and his neck was what counted. The stories tonight had dropped him clear on to page two and that suited Hagen fine. Of course, this did not preclude his eventual reappearance as big news but he could hope for the best.

  Right now, his hopes were concentrated on the Wishart house down the street from where he parked. His impersonation of Jack had kicked up some dust, though exactly what the si
gnificance was, Hagen couldn’t tell yet. He had found that in the private detective business as in war, at least ninety per cent of the battle consisted of waiting.

  Tonight, however, he was not content to wait in his car as he had done on the previous evening. Something Avis Gill had said—” We’ll call you “—led him to believe that this course of action might prove futile. So Hagen, after a few moments’ scrutiny of the rambling house from the front, quitted his automobile and once again circled the outside of the glass brick wall. He used his flashlight boldly, planning to tell anyone who questioned him that he was on police business. However, no one challenged him and he soon found what he was seeking: the telephone wires leading to the house.

  Hagen had the odd sensation of reliving a past experience as he again hauled himself up the slick wall and dropped into the flower bed on the other side. For a moment he stood quite still in the bushes, listening and looking, as if he expected to see Hilda’s mink-draped form and hear her argumentative voice calling to him. Don’t tell me you’ve come back, Morton. Don’t tell me you can’t forget. Directly ahead loomed the diving tower, unlighted now, where she had drawn in her last breath and posed for him and he hadn’t even bothered to look. Was there someone up there—or was it only a cloud in the night sky beyond? Hagen gritted his teeth and got a grip on his nerves. He saw no one and he heard nothing and the weird feeling passed.

  He moved across the yard. The simplest place to attach his wire-tap set was where the wires came down the side of the house. But he also wanted to watch the house as much as he could, rather than huddle blindly against the foundation. So he tracked the telephone wires to the house and then back a little way, choosing his lookout and listening post carefully. Where he picked his spot, the overhead wires were beyond the reach of his fingers so he scouted around in the shrubbery for something to stand on. He stumbled into a wheelbarrow. With this as a platform, he was able to snap his lead-in cables to the Wishart wires quite easily. He had done it many times before and his equipment was expensive. Hagen had no scruples about it, though wire-tapping was generally held in bad repute. But Hagen could see little difference between following a man to a clandestine rendezvous and listening to him make the appointment. The only real difference was that in the latter case Hagen would know where he was going ahead of time. A wire-tap for him was merely a labour-saving device, since the evidence wasn’t admissible in court anyway.

  It was for this reason that he had brought the phone trap with him to the Wishart house. If someone in the house had an appointment with Jack, or intended to have, Hagen would follow him, come hell or high water. But if that someone should entrust the secret to the telephone wires, well, Hagen would be saved that much unnecessary worry.

  The key word in this theory, as in all of his theories, Hagen reflected, was “if”. He couldn’t be sure Wishart or his mother or his secretary would try to contact Jack tonight, in which case his vigil in the bushes would result in nothing more than a cold. But that was a chance he had to take—and he had nothing better to do, anyway.

  There was another possibility which occurred to him as soon as he had adjusted his headset. Because, at that moment, someone within the house was just hanging up the receiver. Hagen was in time only to hear the final click of the cut-off bar and then the buzz of the dial tone. Who had been on the line—on either end, for that matter? There was no way of telling.

  Nevertheless, there was nothing to do but gamble that he hadn’t already missed the important call. Hagen made himself comfortable in the wheelbarrow and ate his dinner and wondered what Dagne would say if she could see his fare. He thought he must make it a point to have a diet consultation with her one of these days. By now he was thinking very pleasantly of the girl again. After the beating he had absorbed from Jack, her slap seemed the merest love tap. He hardly recalled it now anyway, preferring to remember instead the kiss that had preceded it. It had been worth it, he decided.

  Even with these pleasant memories, the vigil eventually began to pall on him. The simple truth was that nothing was happening. There were no incoming calls to the Wishart house. Once someone in the house dialled a number and Hagen tensed expectantly. But whoever it was only was checking the correct time and merely listened to the recorded voice before hanging up again.

  Hagen might have thought the place deserted if he had only his ears to guide him. But his eyes told him otherwise. The draperies had not been drawn across the windows that overlooked the grounds and most of the rooms were lighted. At intervals Hagen could see the people within as they passed to and fro. They looked strange to him, like actors in an old silent movie, since he could hear nothing of what went on inside. Avis Gill, for example, sat near the record-player, apparently listening to the music and keeping time with it by rocking her head. To Hagen she resembled a person with palsy.

  And Wayne Wishart, pacing back and forth through the various levels of his sprawling house, might have been a marionette by his jerky erratic movements that reflected, Hagen surmised, a nervousness that was virtually tearing him apart. Once he paused to have a violent—and soundless—argument with his mother, and Hagen was reminded of a Punch and Judy show. He wouldn’t have been surprised if Wishart had suddenly begun to belabour the old woman with a stick in the classic manner. And, recalling Mrs. Wishart’s personality, he wouldn’t have interfered.

  The fog had begun to settle down, a light grey mist that did not restrict the visibility much but caused the temperature to plunge. Hagen began to feel his bruises more intensely and his mind began to sort out reasons why he should go somewhere more comfortable, with his own bed heading the list.

  Hagen got up and moved around, as far as the trailing wire of the headset would allow, trying to recapture his earlier enthusiasm for the game. He finally compromised by agreeing with himself that he would wait another half-hour. That would be ten o’clock and it was unlikely that any business would be done after that hour. Wayne Wishart might even go to bed….

  His next glimpse of the red-headed sub-divider didn’t tend to bear out Hagen’s hopes, however. Instead of donning pyjamas, Wishart appeared in his bedroom and selected a tan topcoat from the closet. In one hand he carried a book which made it appear as if he had interrupted his reading to come for the garment. This didn’t make any sense but when Hagen saw Wishart put on the coat, he quit wasting his time with theories. A man didn’t put on a topcoat to read a book, or to argue with his mother, either. Wayne Wishart was going out.

  Hagen moved quickly, congratulating himself on his patience and sure that it was going to pay off for him. He detached the wire-tap, folded the equipment into the leather carrying case and headed for the wall. The light in Wishart’s bedroom was out now and an instant later Hagen heard the slam of the door that gave access to the garage. Hagen scrambled up to the top of the wall.

  At that moment, as he was poised ready to leap down to the sidewalk, the telephone inside the house began to ring, clearly audible to him through the extension in the cabana. Hagen sat atop the glass barrier, gripped with indecision, not knowing which way to jump. Should he go back and hook up his wire-tap again on the chance the call might be important? Or should he forget the phone and follow Wishart? It was obvious that he couldn’t do both and time was short. In the garage he heard an automobile engine cough to life.

  He decided to stick to his original decision. Wishart, more than anyone else, held forth promise of being the key he was looking for. His decision made, Hagen jumped heavily to the sidewalk.

  “But if he’s just going down to the drugstore for a soda, I’ll shoot myself,” he muttered aloud and began to run for his car.

  The wire-tapping equipment banging against his sore side, didn’t add any speed but Hagen covered the distance in quite a respectable time. When he slid, panting, behind the wheel, Wayne Wishart’s automobile had not yet appeared in the driveway. Hagen could hear the engine racing as the other man let it warm up. He started his own car’s engine and waited.

 
Hagen continued to wait. The seconds stretched into minutes and still there was no sign of Wishart. Did he forget something and go back? Hagen wondered. Or, worse yet, was that phone call for him and he’s in there now talking to Jack while I sit here listening to his engine purr? He fidgeted, straining his eyes for the red glow of tail-light that would show Wishart backing out of his garage. It didn’t come.

  Finally Hagen couldn’t stand it any longer. Fearing that he was making a sucker play but unable to resist, he got out of his car and went to look. Then he frowned. In the darkness of the driveway he couldn’t see Wishart’s car. After a moment he realized that it wasn’t the darkness at fault, after all. Wishart’s car wasn’t in the driveway.

  Risking discovery Hagen pointed his flashlight down the dark path of concrete. To his surprise he saw that the garage doors were still down.

  “But I can hear the engine running,” he muttered, seeking an explanation. “So where in the world …”

  The answer struck him so suddenly that he gasped, as if the blow had been a physical one. He threw caution and concealment to the winds. The beam of his flashlight stabbing the darkness ahead of him, Hagen sprinted for the building at the end of the driveway. He reached it, grappled with the pull handle of the nearest door and flung it upright. It crashed resoundingly against the top of the frame.

  Smoke, acrid and strong, billowed out at him. Coughing, Hagen groped for his handkerchief. Holding it over his nose and mouth, he stumbled into the murky garage and along the side of the Buick station wagon till he reached the driver’s side. The fumes tore at his throat and corroded his lungs and burned his eyes. By touch he found the ignition switch and turned it off.

  Then, choking and gasping, he grabbed Wayne Wishart by the belt of the tan topcoat and, tugging at him like a sack of laundry, pulled the unconscious man out into the cool, damp and—blessedly—fresh air.