Эд Макбейн - The April Robin Murders

“Was,” Bingo said. The warm feeling of pride began to come back. “Only we just bought it.”

“So this is what it looks like inside!” the cop said. He looked around with a kind of awe. “Could stand a little more furniture, though.”

“It’s in storage,” Bingo said. “Be moved in tomorrow or next day.” He added, with a studied air of carelessness, “This house used to belong to April Robin, the movie star. Why, it was built for her! You remember April Robin?”

The tall cop said, “April Robin! I was just a kid then, but—” And the shorter cop said, “Remember her! Oh boy, do I!”

A pair of swell guys, Bingo reflected after they had gone. For a brief moment his almost rapturous mood returned. He glanced again around the huge room, picturing the way it was going to look once the furniture had arrived. Then, with a jolt, his mind came back to Pearl Durzy.

“Handsome,” he said, “I didn’t see anything of that note when the cops were here. In her room, I mean. Or anywhere in her purse.”

“I didn’t either,” Handsome said. There was a faintly worried note in his voice. “Maybe we’d better take another look.”

They not only took another look, they searched the room. They looked in drawers, in boxes, in the pockets of the few dresses that hung in the wardrobe. At Handsome’s suggestion, they looked in all the wastebaskets.

“It simply isn’t here,” Bingo said at last. He had a feeling that he was hearing his own voice from somewhere very far away. “It isn’t here anywhere.”

They went back in the living room and sat down. Bingo lit a cigarette nervously.

“And if it isn’t here,” Bingo went on, inwardly shrinking from the implications of his own words, “somebody must have taken it away.”

They looked at each other for a moment. Then Handsome said miserably, “I said it was an accident, Bingo. I mean, I said she hadn’t been murdered, which amounts to the same thing. Because it looked like it was an accident.”

“It did to me, too,” Bingo said. “And to the cops.”

There was another unhappy silence. Then Handsome said, “She could’ve been knocked out first.”

After a while Bingo said, “It still could’ve been an accident. Why, any number of things could’ve happened to that note.”

“Sure, Bingo,” Handsome said reassuringly. Neither of them believed that for a minute. “Only, Bingo. Are you going to call up the cops and tell them about it?”

“I don’t know,” Bingo said. He thought it over. He foresaw that if he did, there would be a lot of troubles and complications, all of them wasting valuable time. On the other hand, murder — especially when it happened in his own house! Their own house.

He suddenly realized that it wasn’t murder yet, and began to feel much better. “We’ll wait,” he told Handsome. “She’s still alive, and by tomorrow she’ll most likely be better. In which case, she herself can tell what happened. If she isn’t, well—” He paused. “Tomorrow will be time enough. And it’s late and we’re tired.” He pounded the cushions of the davenport experimentally. A little bumpy, but he’d slept on much worse. “And I have a hunch we’d better get these lights off pretty soon. Because our next-door neighbor struck me as the type of dame who’d come right over to see what the ambulance and the police car were all about.”

Handsome began bringing over the blankets they’d picked up at an Army-Navy store, and unpacking pajamas. Before he’d gotten very far, there was a buzz at the door.

“What did I tell you?” Bingo said. He sighed. “Better answer it, though.” No point in insulting a new neighbor, especially a rich society widow.

The visitor who came into the room wasn’t Mrs. Waldo Hibbing, however. She was a tallish young woman with a bathing beauty type figure not at all concealed by dark green sharkskin slacks and a bright green, flame and white print blouse. She had long, smooth dark hair, not black, but close to it, coiled loosely on the back of her head, bright blue eyes which seemed to be shooting off sparks at the moment, and a slightly sulky bright red mouth. Bingo, having become a shade more skeptical during the course of the day, took a close look at her long, sooty eyelashes and decided that this set was real.

She stood in the center of the room, her fists on her hips, looking first at Handsome and then at Bingo, and then back again.

“I was driving by and saw the lights,” she said, “and I thought I’d better investigate. Who are you two guys, anyway, and what the hell are you doing here?”

“I’m Bingo Riggs,” Bingo said politely, “and this is my partner, Mr. Kusak.” He handed her a card of the International Foto, Motion Picture and Television Corporation of America. “And who are you, and won’t you have a chair?”

She had an arm of the davenport instead. “I’m Mrs. Julien Lattimer. And is this some kind of gag?”

Handsome said, “You’re not the Mrs. Lattimer that murdered her husband. She was littler, and blond.”

“No, I’m not,” she said, and smiled at him, the instinctive way that women smiled at Handsome. It was a slightly grim smile, though. “I’m the Mrs. Lattimer who divorced her husband. Adelle Lattimer. In fact, I’m the Mrs. Lattimer who’s going to inherit a quarter of everything he had in the world — as soon as I find his body.”

“You’re much better-looking than your picture,” Handsome said judiciously. “The one I saw, I mean. It was in the News. January 25, 1953. You had short hair.”

Adelle Lattimer looked at Bingo and said, “I don’t know what all this is about, but your partner fascinates me.”

“He fascinates a lot of people,” Bingo said. “It’s just that he remembers everything. He could probably tell you what horse won in the seventh on that day.”

“Not that day,” Handsome said. “January 25, 1953, was a Sunday and they weren’t running.”

“It would be more helpful,” she said, “if he could tell what horse was going to win in the seventh tomorrow. But I guess that’s asking too much. And all this is a lot of fun, but just what are you boys doing here?”

“We live here,” Bingo said stiffly.

She glanced around the room, observing its lack of furniture, and not overlooking the half-unpacked luggage and blankets. “You don’t look particularly settled and cozy,” she commented, “but I admit you do look moved in. And granted it’s none of my business — yet — just who told you that you could live here?”

“Nobody,” Bingo said, even more stiffly. “Nobody had to. Because we bought the house.” His hand started for his pocket, and the papers given him by Courtney Budlong. Then he changed his mind. He agreed heartily, but silently, with Adelle Lattimer that it was none of her business, and he intended to leave it that way.

She stared at him. “Is this another gag?”

“It’s no gag,” Bingo said. “We bought it from Mr. Julien Lattimer. Through Budlong and Dollinger in Beverly Hills.” There, that ought to hold her.

“But you can’t have bought it from Julien Lattimer,” she said, still staring at him. “He’s dead. He was murdered.”

“So you say,” Bingo said. “But a firm like Budlong and Dollinger knows what it’s doing.”

She nodded at that. “But damn it,” she said, “if the son of — if he isn’t dead, where the hell is he?” She looked accusingly at Bingo and Handsome as though they’d deliberately hidden him.

“Why should we know?” Bingo asked. “We just bought a house from him, that’s all.”

“You mean you didn’t see him?” she demanded.

“No, we didn’t see him,” Bingo said. “We saw Mr. Budlong, the real estate man.”