Give the Girl a Gun Page 6

  “He got himself taken into this Huntsafe Company on out-and-out lies,” she said. “He talked Barney Amhurst into believing he had all sorts of influence among state legislators all over the country and wrangled a ten-per-cent interest in the Huntsafe on the promise that he could get legislative action to make it compulsory. Walt was plenty smooth too. He took the only two state legislators he knows, a New York State senator and a guy from Texas, to see Barney and have him explain the Huntsafe to them. Walt, of course, gave Barney the impression they were just two of dozens of contacts he had, and poor Barney fell for it.”

  As evidence of his crookedness Mrs. Ford repeated what I had already learned from Maxim’s personnel director about Ford’s shenanigans as a purchasing agent. But what she told me about his blackmailing activities was brand-new material.

  He kept a file, the woman told me, containing compromising pictures of numerous women. Where he got them, she did not know, but she had once seen the file while they were still living together. As a matter of fact her discovery of the indecent pictures had been the final factor in her decision to leave him. Mrs. Ford said she assumed at first they were merely bits of pornography he kept to gloat over privately, but when she confronted him with the file, he laughed cynically and told her she would have a lot less money to spend if he didn’t possess the pictures. Then she realized he was using them for blackmail.

  She had one other minor bit of information I made a note of. The case of a dozen ivory-handled pistols had been obtained by Walter Ford while his wife still lived with him, and she was able to tell me it came from a salesman named Edward Yancy, who worked for a local wire-manufacturing company.

  Before leaving the ungrieving widow, I used her phone to make two calls. One was to private detective Harold Quentin and the other to salesman Edward Yancy. Luckily both happened to be in their offices.

  From the former, I learned Walter Ford had surreptitiously visited Evelyn Karnes’s flat on several occasions ; and from the latter, I learned nothing except that the case of pistols had contained exactly twelve guns and they had come from another customer of his, the Tulsa Arms Company.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE HALL DOOR of my flat was open and through it I could hear the drone of my vacuum cleaner. Cautiously I entered just as the sound died away to a final wheeze.

  Fausta, winding up the cord, stopped to look at me accusingly. She blew a strand of blonde hair out of her eyes and I noted there was a smudge of dust on her straight little nose.

  “You did it on purpose,” she impeached. “You knew I could not stand to wait here in all this dirt.”

  “You’re even prettier when you’re being domestic than you are in a green formal,” I said, walking over and bending to brush the spot of dust off her nose with a light kiss. “You’d make some lucky man a fine housewife.”

  “Hah!” she said, grabbing my ears and kissing me full on the mouth. Then she backed off in simulated outrage, as though I had attempted to attack her, gave me a light slap and said, “That is what you call blarney. No girl in her right mind would be a housewife for you. Who wants to stay home and slave while you gad about with other women?”

  “The only woman I’ve spoken to since I last saw you was in line of business,” I assured her. “Where’s Madeline?”

  “If you are not interested in other women, why do you want Madeline?”

  “I didn’t say I wasn’t interested in other women. I love each and every one of them. I just didn’t happen to run into any who appealed to me while I was gone. Where’s Madeline?”

  “Where you keep all your women,” Fausta said sulkily. “In the bedroom.”

  At that moment Madeline came through the bedroom doorway. She had a dustcloth in her hand and one of my dish towels tied around her head. “That room is done,” she told Fausta. “Are we all finished?” Then she looked at me. “Hello, Mr. Moon. I hope you don’t mind our cleaning things up. Fausta said …"

  “I know,” I interrupted. “Fausta said the place was a pigpen. Believe me, I don’t mind at all. Matter of fact, if you girls happen to be in the neighborhood about this time next week …"

  “We will go by without even slowing down,” Fausta said. “What did you find out about Madeline’s Thomas?”

  “He’s in a jam,” I told them. “Day’s got enough circumstantial evidence to convict him right now. Almost too much evidence. If Henry is the killer, he’s a lot stupider than he looks.”

  I outlined everything I had learned, including my visit to Walter Ford’s widow.

  “I thought so,” Fausta said. “Out carousing with a drunken widow while we work our fingers to the bone.”

  Madeline said, “That’s the first I knew Walter Ford was married. Why he even asked me for a date once.”

  “I’m going to have to do some fast moving if I expect to pick up any defense evidence before Henry comes up before the grand jury,” I said. “They sit next Tuesday. Madeline, I suggest you get hold of a lawyer for Tom in the meantime. You might also run over to his flat and pick up a couple of pipes and some tobacco to take him. Can you get in?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I think I’ll run you over,” I decided. “I want to take a look at that neighborhood in daylight anyway.”

  Fausta, whose workday did not really start until late afternoon, decided to come along too.

  While Madeline and Fausta were hunting down Thomas Henry’s landlord, I made a short study of the geography of the neighborhood. The Remley Apartments, where Barney Amhurst lived, was at 14 McKnight Avenue. Henry had a basement flat at 18 McKnight, just two buildings away. The three buildings, the Remley, the apartment next to it and the one in which Henry lived, were surrounded by close-cropped lawn on all sides. As there were no hedges or fences between them, it obviously would have been possible for the killer to cross behind the center building as soon as he shot Ford and arrive at Henry’s door in a matter of seconds.

  A check of the basement rear entrance showed the lock was the simple old-fashioned kind which could be opened by a dime-store skeleton key. And when I peered through the window, I saw that this entrance led directly into Henry’s workshop.

  It didn’t prove anything except that it would have been possible for the killer to plant the murder weapon as Henry insisted it had been planted.

  After completing my geographic study, I decided to drop in on Barney Amhurst while waiting for the girls to finish whatever they were doing in Henry’s apartment, but the visit was a waste of time insofar as finding out anything I didn’t already know about Walter Ford and Thomas Henry. For no particular reason except that I ran out of other questions, I asked him about the accidental shooting of Lloyd Strong.

  Amhurst’s statement was substantially the same as Henry’s, except that he admitted to me his belief that Madeline’s bullet rather than his had killed her brother.

  “The buck broke cover about two hundred yards from us,” Amhurst said. “Lloyd was about a hundred yards beyond it in a clump of underbrush. There was a slight upgrade from the buck’s position to Lloyd’s, and I’m sure I didn’t shoot high. Just as I squeezed off the shot, I was conscious that I didn’t have enough lead and knew that I had missed. But I’m equally sure I wasn’t high. My slug should have hit the ground about halfway between the buck and Lloyd.”

  “Why did you take the blame then?” I asked.

  “Well, Madeline was so upset over Lloyd’s death I was afraid learning she herself had killed him might throw her into a complete nervous breakdown. So I lied and told her I’d seen her slug kick up dirt in front of the buck just before I fired. She fired first, you see, but the truth is I didn’t see her bullet strike anything.”

  “Would it have been possible that neither of you shot him?” I asked. “That the bullet came from another direction?”

  He looked at me strangely. “It’s a funny thing you asked that. I had a feeling that when Madeline fired I heard another rifle crack at the same time, but I wrote it off as an echo. Wh
en nobody else mentioned hearing it, I decided it must have been an echo, but it still stuck in my mind. I suppose it’s possible that some other hunter we didn’t know was around accidentally shot Lloyd, but since from the law’s point of view it didn’t make much difference whose bullet killed him, I didn’t see much point in confusing things by bringing it up at the inquest.”

  I said, “There wasn’t any if Lloyd’s death was really an accident.”

  Amhurst’s eyes grew wide. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Nothing in particular. But Walter Ford’s death was definitely murder. And since four of the same people were in the vicinity when both men died, there is at least a possibility that the first death was murder too. I’m not saying Lloyd Strong was murdered, or even that I strongly suspect he was. But since we now know there is a murderer in some way connected with your little group, the possibility has to be at least considered. After all this time I doubt that anything could be proved one way or the other though.”

  In an odd voice Amhurst said, “Since Tom Henry was the only person around when Lloyd was shot, aside from Madeline and me, when you start considering the possibility of Lloyd being murdered, you’re actually considering the possibility of Tom having murdered him.”

  “Not necessarily. Wasn’t Bubbles Duval in your party too?”

  “Not that day. She stayed back at camp.”

  “You’re sure? Ever bother to check if she spent all morning there?”

  “Now you’re being ridiculous,” Amhurst said. “Why in the devil would Bubbles want to kill Lloyd?”

  “Probably she didn’t. Probably she never left camp. But there is still the possibility. There are a lot of possibilities. Maybe Tom Henry shot him by accident and was afraid to admit it.”

  Amhurst shook his head. “If Tom did the shooting, it wasn’t an accident. He and Lloyd were on the drive team, and when you’re driving game you don’t shoot. We had a standard rule about that. When the party was separated, only those on a predesignated stand were allowed to shoot, no matter what kind of target showed.”

  “There’s another possibility too,” I said. “Maybe either you or Madeline spotted Lloyd through the underbrush, took advantage of the situation and deliberately shot him.”

  For a moment the man looked at me. Then he laughed. “Now you’re really reaching out in left field.”

  “Probably,” I admitted. “The most likely possibility is that Lloyd’s death was just what the inquest said it was. An accident.”

  But in my own mind I didn’t really believe that. Now that we knew there was a murderer around somewhere, it seemed a bit too coincidental for an earlier victim to have died accidentally. If Lloyd Strong’s death had been murder, it bore all the earmarks of as careful planning as the murder of Walter Ford. When I left Amhurst, I still was not absolutely convinced of Thomas Henry’s innocence, but more and more I was inclined to regard it as probable that he had been framed. If he had, my task was to find the framer.

  Though I knew of no motive anyone who had been present at Amhurst’s the evening before might have to kill Ford, both Max Furtell and Bubbles Duval had opportunity. Since everyone else had been in the front room when the shots sounded, I could eliminate them as suspects. However, we had only the bodyguard’s unsupported statement that he had not stirred from his car until I went after him, and only Bubbles’s word that she had remained all that time in the bedroom.

  The latter I tended to rule out because, while she would have had plenty of time to shoot Ford, step back into the bedroom through the French doors and then unobtrusively join the rest of us, she would not have had time to run across the intervening yards and plant the gun in Henry’s workshop. Nor could she have planted it after she left, since Fausta and I took her home and she wasn’t out of our sight between the time of the murder and the time Hannegan must have started his search of Henry’s workshop.

  Ed Friday’s bodyguard easily had time to plant the pistol though, since a good quarter hour elapsed between the time the gun went off and I went outside for him. And for motive all he needed was an order from Ed Friday.

  The more I thought about it, the more possible it seemed that Friday had issued such an order. I was certain the ex-racketeer was capable of ordering murder if he thought it necessary to his plans, and equally certain Max Furtell would obey such an order. What Friday’s motive could be, I had no idea, but I kept remembering his nocturnal visit to my flat and his attempt to get me out of town before Madeline could engage me to look into the murder.

  I decided my next move would be to check into a possible relationship between Ed Friday and Walter Ford.

  Madeline and Fausta had completed their mission of mercy while I was engaged with Amhurst and were seated in the car when I came out. Madeline had in her lap a round, one-pound can of tobacco and a collection of three pipes.

  “You know some woman who lives in the Remley?” Fausta inquired.

  “Several,” I said. “And they’re all mad about me. But I was visiting Barney Amhurst. You want to take that stuff over to Tom now, Madeline?”

  When the girl said she did, I drove her over to headquarters and left her, and then drove Fausta back to El Patio.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  MY NEXT LOGICAL move should have been a visit to Evelyn Karnes in an attempt to discover just how far she thought Ed Friday’s jealousy of Walter Ford might have taken him. While it was a little difficult to visualize the cynical Friday in an Othello role, he had exhibited jealousy of Walter Ford, and it was at least conceivable he had ordered him killed because Ford was making a play for Evelyn.

  But Evelyn Karnes lived halfway across town. And since Bubbles Duval’s apartment was only a mile or two from El Patio, I tried the blonde first.

  It was pushing five when I left Fausta, and I stopped at the first drugstore I saw in order to use the phone. I found a Miss Beatrice Duval with a Dove Street address listed in the book, but there was no answer. Recalling that Mrs. Jennifer Ford had referred to Bubbles as a dress model, it occurred to me she might know where the girl worked. Mrs. Ford was at home, but apparently she had been pursuing the gin bottle steadily ever since I had left her. In a thick, nearly incoherent voice she told me she didn’t know where any of her deceased husband’s tramp girl friends worked, and cared less.

  As a last resort I again phoned Howard Quentin, the private cop Mrs. Ford had employed to check on Walter’s love life. I caught him, he informed me, just as he was walking out the door for the day.

  He also informed me Bubbles Duval modeled dresses at Saxon and Harder’s.

  There was a little delay in getting Bubbles to the phone at Saxon and Harder’s, the store apparently being unaccustomed to having its models receive calls while working. When she finally answered, she sounded out of breath.

  “Manny Moon,” I said. “Remember me?”

  “Of course,” she said with what sounded like a mixture of pleasure and misgiving. Then quickly, “You better make it fast. We aren’t supposed to get personal calls.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I tried your home first. I want to see you. When do you get off work?”

  “Tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not till seven, Manny. And I have to get home to dress after that. Informal?”

  “No,” I said, suddenly realizing she was misinterpreting my request to see her and thought I was calling for a date. “You’ve got the wrong idea. I just …"

  “My supervisor’s heading this way,” she interrupted in a quick tone. “Formal then. But don’t call for me. A couple of reporters have been hanging around trying to get my statement about last night, and they’d only bother you with a lot of questions too. I’ll meet you somewhere. Where?”

  “May I get a word in edgewise?” I asked.

  “Oh, gee! She’s looking right at me and tapping her foot. I have to hang up, Manny. Make it El Patio at eight.”

  The last words came in a rush and were followed by a sharp click. Exasperatedly I g
lared at the dead phone for a moment before slamming the receiver back on its hook. El Patio the girl had said. It wasn’t bad enough to be roped into a date I had no desire for, it had to take place right under the interested eye of Fausta.

  Then I got sore at Bubbles. After Fausta’s reaction the evening before, she should have known better than to pick Fausta’s own club for a rendezvous, even though she was rattled by her supervisor’s observation. If the girl was that empty-headed, she deserved whatever Fausta did to her.

  And since I did want to talk to Bubbles, I phoned El Patio, got hold of the headwaiter and reserved a table for two at eight.

  Evelyn Karnes was listed in the phone book at 1114 Grand. Dropping another dime in the slot, I dialed the phone number listed.

  After a few rings, the enameled brunette’s clear but lifeless voice said, “Hello.”

  “Evelyn?” I asked. “Manny Moon.” Then before she could get the same misapprehension Bubbles had suffered as to the reason for my call, I added distinctly, “I’d like to talk to you for a few moments about last night. You going to be home for a while?”

  “Until seven. I have a rehearsal scheduled at seven-thirty.”

  “I’ll be right over,” I said, and hung up.

  Evelyn Karnes lived in the lower right flat of a four-family building. The neighborhood was moderately quiet and the building fairly new and modern. From the outside, it was nothing you might not expect a chorus girl to be able to afford, however.

  But inside, the apartment was at a fantastically different economic level than the neighborhood. Evelyn’s wages had never paid for the thick Oriental rugs, the deep-cushioned modern furniture or the luxurious drapes at the windows. The furnishings were fabulously expansive. The place was not a home, it was the love abode of an Oriental satrap. Everything in it was either soft or sensual, from the white bear rug in front of the fireplace to the excellent nude originals on the walls.