Блейк Крауч - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 133, No. 5. Whole No. 813, May 2009

The woman with my pocket linen to her lip said, “Mrs. Lantrip met Alexiou when she was catting around out here last year. They’ve been trading love notes ever since. She knew her husband had hired Transcontinental to chaperone this year’s fling, but she also knew you only had her description to work with. I happen to fit that description, too. So she and Guy worked out a switch.”

That explained the secret smile she and Beeler had exchanged after my warning. I’d let them know the plan was working.

“While you’ve been traipsing around behind us,” Hale concluded, “Lantrip and Guy have been over in Malibu, going at it like rabbits.”

“Shut up,” Beeler said again.

He made up for being late with the line by shaking her arm roughly. That was all the opening I needed, glasses or no glasses. Only Truax beat me to the punch, literally. He hit Beeler in the breadbasket with a movement I admired both for its efficiency and effect.

“Why did the brother here go along?” he then asked as though nothing had happened.

Hale said, “He thinks Alexiou is going to get him in at Metro. He’s been out here for years, trying to worm his way in somewhere. Guy’s playing him the way Lantrip’s playing her husband.”

Riggs trotted out of the darkness. “No sign of him, Sam. He must have had a car waiting.”

“He’s halfway to Mexico by now,” Hale said. We all looked at her, even the stooping Beeler, so she explained. “He had an accent.”

That rang a bell. And Hale’s earlier reference to a zoot-suiter finally registered. But Truax still had the floor.

“How did he lure you away from the lights?”

Beeler wasn’t up to speaking, so Hale answered. “He met us on the club’s front steps. Gave us a song and dance about how there’d been a big fight and a newspaper photographer was inside snapping away. I couldn’t afford to have my picture taken as Evelyn Lantrip. The guy told us this path was a shortcut to a taxi stand. He followed us and pulled a gun.”

The Transcontinental man worked through it aloud. “He can’t have known the next party coming up that path would have a small fortune around her neck, any more than he knew that Elliott would come along to cover his back. He must be having the luckiest night of his life.”

I was good and sick by then of playing the fall guy. “His luck’s run out,” I said. “If we move fast, we’ve got him.”

“We?” Truax said.

“Sure. It’ll make a great ending for your report to Kansas City.”

I took off for the bougainvillea tunnel, ignoring the group’s questions until we were passing the Arbor’s front door. Then I said to Hale, “You can wait inside. Or they’ll call you a cab.”

“What about Beeler?” Truax asked.

“He goes with us,” I said.

“The hell I will,” Beeler said.

Riggs, who was supporting Beeler at the elbow, stole his boss’s line: “Relax.”

Hale said, “I’m going, too. I want to see how this ends.”

I liked her for that and said okay. Truax wasn’t liking much about the setup, but he didn’t voice his objections until we were all squeezed into their coupe, Beeler and his nurse in the backseat and Hale between Truax and me in the front.

“Why Beeler?” he demanded then.

“Who picked the Arbor as your next port of call?” I asked Hale.

“David did. He said it was part of the circuit his sister liked to make.”

“It is,” Beeler said.

“And how did the gunman know you couldn’t afford to be photographed as Lantrip? That fairy story was especially designed to scare a woman in disguise. Nothing happened tonight by chance; everything’s been planned out. That’s why Beeler.”

“You’re forgetting your part,” Truax said. “They couldn’t know you’d blunder in. But if you’re right about Beeler being involved, then the robber had to have known his mark was being tailed. No gunman would waylay the lady if he knew she had a private cop in tow.”

It was a great objection. Either Beeler was an innocent party and the robbery was a lucky fluke or Beeler was a mastermind who’d set up a robbery that couldn’t work unless I happened along. Luckily, I’d seen a third way.

“Remember the guy with the unlit cigarette we scared when we charged out of the jungle? He was part of the scheme. All he had to do was ask you for a light and you’d be off camera long enough for the thing to work. Only I slowed you up instead. By the time you finally showed, Miss Hale had screamed and the jig was up. So the accomplice took off.”

I’d been giving Truax driving directions in small chunks, the same way I’d been passing on my brilliant solution. I knew that once I told all, it would be back to the chorus for me. Eventually, though, we arrived at Nick’s Hideaway.

“Why here?” Truax asked.

I told them then about seeing the watchful youngster in the dated suit and got the demotion I’d expected. Truax told Hale to stay in the car, she told him to tell it to the Marines, and we all five went in. Though the music was still playing, no one greeted us. I showed them the door marked Private. Truax tried its knob very quietly, then drew his gun and kicked the door in with the same economy of motion he’d earlier used on Beeler.

If Guy Alexiou had been directing the scene, the little tableau that greeted us couldn’t have been any more perfect. The gunman with the accent and the dated wardrobe was standing next to the room’s center of light: a big desk trimmed out in brass studs. Seated behind the desk was Nick Sebastian. Between his fat hands stretched a long strand of green beads.

We trooped in, Riggs shutting the damaged door behind us. A movie script would have provided some snappy dialogue at that point, but we did without. Truax patted down the Mexican and took his gun. Only then did Sebastian ask what we wanted.

“That,” Truax said, aiming his snub-nose at the necklace. “And you two.”

“The gentleman told me he found this outside,” Sebastian said. “If that isn’t what happened, it’s news to me.”

I said, “Your silent partner here says different. He says that jade was going to remodel this dump.”

Sebastian picked Beeler out of the crowd. “You four-eyed sponge. I should have known better than to trust you.”

It was a great spot for one of Beeler’s retroactive shut-ups. Instead, he took us all by surprise. Riggs still held him by the arm, but only loosely. Beeler pulled the kid into a headlock and, reaching around him, drew the gun from Riggs’s holster.

“Drop yours,” he told Truax. “Both of them.”

The detective couldn’t hope to shoot without hitting his partner, so he dropped his revolver and the Mexican’s glittering automatic. When its previous owner stepped to retrieve it, Beeler waved his gun at him.

“No you don’t, Pedro. I’m flying solo from here on.”

He pushed Riggs aside, crossed to the desk, and took the jade from Sebastian. “Enjoy prison food, Nick.”

As he backed toward the door, he noticed Hale. The look he gave her made me step between them.

Then the door behind Beeler flew open, hitting him a whack that sent his glasses flying and shoved him my way.

I grabbed his gun arm and raised it to the ceiling just as the revolver went off. Then I landed a right cross, a solid one this time.

Beeler sank to the floor, revealing the figure in the doorway. It was a little guy with a beak of a nose and a nonstop blink. Claude Dabney. He was huffing and puffing like the Big Bad Wolf.

“I want my hat, you chaps,” he announced. “And I want it now.”

Just shy of last call, Marion Hale and I found ourselves in the tiny, book-lined bar of the Arbor Supper Club. We’d gone back there — after a preliminary interview with the cops — to collect my LaSalle. The club had let us in despite the early hour and even though I no longer had a tie. I’d used mine to bind the hands of Claude Dabney, king of the jungle. He was now asleep in the backseat of my car, wearing his beloved hat, which I’d been carrying around for him since the Troc. But not wearing his shoes. I’d locked those in the trunk as an added precaution. Marion had tossed in her phony wedding ring for good measure.