Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries

Slightly dazed by my sudden elevation to amateur sleuth, I threaded my way through the cardboard-box jungle and went back to work. I make a comfortable living painting dust jacket illustrations for mystery and suspense books. I did all kinds of commercial art up until a few years ago when the cover I painted for Death Is My Interior Decorator won all the big awards in the field. Now I specialize in the crime stuff, which is fine with me because I like to read mysteries, too.

I’d barely gotten back into the painting when the doorbell rang. If this was the late admiral calling in person, I wasn’t even going to bother unpacking. The apartment was nice but not that nice. As it turned out, it was only Tom Banks, the doorman.

“Getting settled in?” he asked with a friendly smile. A tall, broad-shouldered man in his early sixties, he has one of those open, expressive faces, the kind that seem readymade for smiles and laughter. I figured him for one of those rare people, a man who actually enjoys his work.

“Settled in,” I answered. “I’ll be lucky if I get everything unpacked before the two year lease is up.”

Banks laughed and handed me a stack of mail. More catalogues, from the look of it, and perched on top of them, you guessed it… a neat little pile of postcards. “I’ve been holding them downstairs,” he explained. “Drayton, the postman, asked me to. He didn’t want the moving or cleaning people tampering with the mail.”

Better them than me, I thought.

“Very conscientious,” I said aloud. “I’ve never been in an apartment building before where they deliver the mail right to your door.”

“That’s Drayton,” Banks nodded. “Very dedicated to the job, he is. Never taken a sick day in twenty years. The perfect postman, I call him. He told me just the other day that he was being considered for mail carrier of the year.”

“How about that.” Just my luck. If he’d been a little less zealous, I might not have ever seen the damned postcard.

“Do the rugs look okay?” Banks asked. “They spent all afternoon on them. I guess they got all the blood out of that one,” he added, peering down at the faded two by three Oriental I was standing on. It was the very same rug on which the admiral’s sea legs had a fatal loss of footing.

“They look fine to me. When’s the relative due?”

“Well now,” Banks was suddenly evasive. “A couple of weeks, I guess. Shouldn’t be more than a month or so.” He spread his hands in a gesture of futility. “There’s nothing I can do, Mr Winsor.”

“I’m not blaming you,” I reassured him. Part of the deal for my getting the apartment was that I kept the admiral’s stuff there until his only living relative arrived from some distant port of call. Apparently there was no more storage space in the basement of the building. I’d managed to cram most of his furniture and personal stuff into the spare bedroom. But there was no way I could get all the rugs in there, too. As a compromise the management had agreed to have the rugs cleaned before I moved in.

After wishing me well with the unpacking, Banks returned to his post in the lobby. I should have gone back to work myself, but I looked at the postcards instead. There were four of them in the pile of mail Banks had brought up, each with the same view of the rundown hotel. They were all from his friend Charles, with a chess move at the end of each message. Two of them seemed normal enough, but the other two carried obvious replies and comments to events that had taken place after Admiral Penny’s death.

What the hell was going on here? Was there chess after death? Was the US Postal Service a whole lot more far reaching than I’d ever given it credit for? I hadn’t taken the one card all that seriously, but this was something else again. Charles had signed all of the cards “fraternally yours”. I wondered how Admiral Penny was signing the cards he sent to Charles? Eternally yours?

I was too keyed up by then to go back to the painting. I grabbed my jacket instead and went downstairs. I needed a walk in the park, something to get my mind out of neutral. Maybe I could come up with a couple of notions that would clear the whole thing up. The worst part of it was that I was actually starting to believe what Karen had said. That Admiral Penny had been murdered and that it was up to me, if I wanted the “haunting” to stop, to bring his killer to justice.

One of the advantages of living on Gramercy Park is the park itself. It’s a small, fenced-in square of immaculately maintained greenery, to the best of my knowledge the only private park in New York City. A neighborhood association handles the upkeep, and the park is strictly reserved for area residents only. Some people might find it a little on the snobbish side, but I wasn’t complaining. Since I now lived there, I intended to make the most of it.

My new key fitted perfectly in the park’s wrought iron gate. I closed it firmly behind me and began to stroll the graveled paths, enjoying the autumn sunshine while I tried to think detective-like thoughts.

I almost knocked the girl over before I saw her. She spun around and glared at me, a tall, willowy blonde with the face of a Botticelli angel. “I didn’t hear you coming,” she sputtered angrily. “You really ought to learn to walk louder.” Her wide blue eyes narrowed as she focused in on me. “You’re Winsor, aren’t you? The fellow who just moved into 3C.”

“That’s right,” I smiled. “And you’re Tana Devin, the star of Maneuvers. ”

The recognition and the way I’d phrased it brought on a full-wattage smile. She’d obviously mistaken me for a fan of the show. Maneuvers was a new and very popular daytime soap, and Tana Devin played the vixen, the one you love to hate. She couldn’t act worth a damn, but it didn’t matter. Nobody else on the show could, either.

“We’re neighbors, you know,” she informed me. “I live right next door to you in 3B.”

“You must have known Admiral Penny then?” If I was going to do some detecting, now was the time to start.

Her smile did a fast fade, and I could almost see the smoke from the smoldering anger that backlit those bright blue eyes. “Penny,” she seethed. “Dropping dead was the only thing that man ever did that made me happy. He was the nosiest old crock in creation. Always looking through the peephole in his door to see who was coming in and going out of the other apartments on the floor. I could hear his raspy breathing every time I walked by. It was getting so I hated to invite anyone over. No privacy at all in my own damned building.” Her blue eyes narrowed a little more as she studied my face. “I hope you’re not going to be manning the peephole like Penny? I won’t stand for any more of that crap.” Her soft voice was suddenly as cold and merciless as an Arctic winter.

“Not me,” I assured her. “I’m far too busy for that kind of nonsense.”

“Glad to hear it,” she said. “Just keep it that way and we’ll get along fine.” On that cheerful note, she turned away and strode down the path without a word of goodbye.

Well, I’d certainly learned one thing about the late admiral. Tana Devin hated him. Now, no one likes being spied on, but it’s basically a harmless pastime. What I couldn’t figure out was why Tana Devin loathed Penny with such intensity. There had to be more to it than that.

After a couple more turns around the park, the answer came to me. The lovely Miss Devin’s name had been in the papers quite a lot these past few weeks. Not the real papers but those supermarket tabloids they sell at the checkout counters. I vaguely remembered the headlines on one of them, some kind of sex scandal that linked Tana Devin with a prominent but very married politician. I remembered somebody’s mentioning that the liaison had very nearly cost Tana her part in Maneuvers. While the show portrayed this kind of bedhopping all the time, the chairman of the company that sponsored it was an uncle of the politician’s wife. I guess rating points won out over family ties because Tana did manage to keep her job. But the way I heard it, it had been a very close thing.