Carolyn Banks - The New Black Mask (№6)

“You saw a big man? Could you identify him?”

The boy shook his head. “It was dark. The car was only there a minute. The woman got out to hold the door open for the guy to get in fast. Then they drove off real quick.”

Damn! “That was all you saw? You’re sure?”

He nodded. “Except the big guy had a gray suit, and the woman had a green dress and real dark hair kind of long, and the car was a blue Mercedes four-door.”

I stared. “You saw all that in the dark?”

“Sure,” the boy said. “When the woman got out of the car I looked close ’cause it might have been Mr. Castro, see? She walked around in front of the headlights and I saw she was a woman. I mean, I saw the guy’s suit and the woman and the color of the car because I was looking hard for Mr. Castro.”

Stood in the dark of that empty street, near that deserted building site, and looked closely at two people for only a few seconds. Because he wanted to give a package to a man who had forgotten it in his store. A man who had been nice to him. A man he had gotten to like. So he looked hard, hoping one of the people was Mr. Castro, but the man was too big and had on a gray suit, and the other was a woman in a green dress, and the car was a dark-blue Mercedes, and...

In the office Pearce looked at his drawn shades as if he were seeing the city invisible on the other side. Schatz looked at the door as if he wished he were on the other side going away.

“Castro didn’t need a razor,” I said. “So when he was delayed that night, he hurried a little and forgot the package.”

“It’s not much, Dan,” Pearce said.

“The boy can’t really identify either of them,” Schatz said. “He didn’t get the license number of the car, and you got any idea how many dark-blue Mercedes there are in the city?”

“It’s enough,” I said. “The woman walked in her own headlight beams. A slim, dark-haired woman in a green dress, and that fits Susan Roth and what she was wearing according to ten witnesses at the Junior League. The man fits Roth and what he was wearing. Susan Roth’s car is a dark-blue Mercedes.”

Pearce shook his head. “I don’t know, Dan.”

“With what I dug up on all their actions, their motives, my reconstruction of what happened, it’ll probably convince a jury.”

“Probably?” Pearce said.

“You want to tell the DA about probably, Fortune?” Schatz said.

I said, “Probably is all we’ll need.”

And the interoffice telephone rang. Pearce answered.

“She’s here,” the captain said.

The door opened and Susan Roth, formerly Susan Castro, stepped into the room. She stood tall and poised, a fine-looking woman. Still young and close to beautiful. Her cool eyes took in each of us in turn.

“Sit down, Mrs. Roth,” Captain Pearce said.

“Am I under arrest, Captain?”

“No,” Pearce said, “not yet. But Mr. Fortune there has a story we think you should hear.”

Her eyes turned to look at me. She looked at my empty sleeve and my old tweed sport jacket and cords. Her lips curled faintly. She did not think much of me, but she sat down, waited, her foot swinging lightly in its two-hundred-dollar pump.

I told my story. From my first hunch about Castro and his murder plan, through what I had pieced together about Roth and her plan, to Castro’s mistake and the soda fountain boy, and her walking through the beams of the headlights. She showed no reaction until the soda fountain boy. At her careless walk through the headlights she blinked. At Roth coming out of the building site in his gray suit, her foot stopped swinging.

“Castro’s company hired me to investigate his murder, Mrs. Roth. They’ll do everything they can to convict you and your husband. They’ve seen my report, they’ve already hired the best lawyers to work with the DA. Since you didn’t kill Castro yourself, the captain there can offer you a deal to turn state witness. Accessory, five-to-ten years. With good behavior, parole in as little as three years. Maybe less. If you stand up in court with Roth, you could get life without parole.”

Her face showed nothing. I was going on my judgment, on everything I had learned, sensed, in the killer’s mind of Susan Roth. With both Castro and Roth out of the way, her sons would be rich boys. She would know how to get her share. In prison for life, what good would the money do her? What I had guessed, uncovered, pieced together might not convince a jury. She might get off. On the other hand, she might not. Say a fifty-fifty chance, maybe a little worse. I figured those odds would be enough for Susan Roth.

“Charge me first” — her voice had no emotion — “then I’ll tell you how Norman killed poor Maxwell.”

It wasn’t what should have happened, but it was something. The murder had been mostly her idea, she should have taken the big fall. It’s an imperfect world; you get what you can.

The case had been all a matter of getting inside their killer minds. Norman Roth would never make the deal, turn her in. Susan Roth, once Susan Castro, would and did. She was a practical woman.

Harold Walls is a pseudonym. He describes himself as a “dyspeptic misanthrope with no real desire to reveal my identity or my motive in writing fiction to the world at large. That’s why I write under a pseudonym.”

It was called the Celebrity Club, but the closest thing to a celebrity that had ever sipped stale, warm beer from a chipped bar glass at Johnny-O’s joint was Marblehead Dexter Simpkins, especially the night before his picture was on the front page of the Jamestown Journal as the prime-and-just-apprehended suspect in the rape and murder and then mutilation of the fourteen-year-old daughter of a very prominent man-about-town who just happened to be a white accountant, public and certified.

Marblehead’s rise to fame in the city at large was meteoric, but he has faded from memory fast. He is scheduled to make the front page one more time about four years from now, when his appeals run out and he gets to choose three witnesses to his untimely and unnatural demise. One way or the other, Elgin Balfour means to be there.

Marblehead was the main man to the Celebrity Club regulars, who still talk, three years later, about how he got framed. And the man had such promise, such talent, such style, they say. They remembered when Marblehead played football, and oh, how he dived into that line — head first and feet driving, never stopping till he was down, and even then always grinning like he had the world by the balls and knew just when to squeeze. He was just biding his time, they all said then.

Marblehead Simpkins used to walk like a king through Roosevelt Village, and the boys stood back and the girls came forth and Marblehead showed the girls that he was the man, their man. He was six-feet-four of prime fullbacking scholarship meat, wrapped in proud and shining ebony the year he left high school. That was the summer a going-on-drunk rent-a-cop caught Marblehead behind the concession stand by the football field one moonlit night, his shiny black ass pumping and glistening between the unshaven legs and turned-down toes of Marissa Balfour, who didn’t practice discrimination and never stopped screaming that she wanted it all, till it was all gone.

Marblehead wanted her to have it, too, but the DA felt their desires were improper and that the man had to learn some humility, or at least discretion, even if he was just eighteen and Big-Ten-bound, so he put the boy’s ass in the can for two to ten on a charge of rape statutorily. There he could ponder what might have been if Marissa’s daddy, Elgin, had his way.

“You’re gonna have to get used to white boys from now on, son.” The bailiff laughed, and Marissa cried, because Elgin was sending her north to get her head straight and her ass in line in a place where the moon might as well never rise and the sun might as well never shine.