Джон Макдональд: Flight of the Tiger

The drinks came. Ben said, “Those officers said you could tell me what this is all about.”

“Nobody knows the whole story, Lieutenant. When they called Dick back in, he wanted Helen to go to Ohio and stay with her folks. She didn’t want to do that. Didn’t want to give up the apartment. She said she could make some money modeling. She decided she could take in another girl and split expenses, and with Dick’s allotment she could get along. He told her to get hold of me if she got in any sort of jam. And he told me to keep a fatherly eye on her.

“She took in a girl named Denny Young. Denise. Dark girl. Very lovely. I never met her, but the pictures of her in the papers were striking. A bad actor, that Denny Young, as it turned out. But you couldn’t blame Helen. She didn’t know anything about her when she moved in. Both modeled for the same agency. Denny was running around with a bad crowd, dating a man called Eric Gorman, going to all the flash spots with him and his bodyguard. He’s one of those people who are always being arrested and released for lack of evidence. Big, ugly joker. Supposed to be a real-estate dealer, but the rumor is that he’s mixed up in every filthy way a man can make money in this town.

“Anyhow, some nights Denny would come back to the apartment. Most nights she wouldn’t. She broke so many modeling dates the agency finally dropped her, but she still came up with her share of the apartment expenses. Then something must have happened. You don’t cross a man like Gorman, but Denny must have; nobody knows how. From the way he wrecked the apartment, the police think Denny must have taken something from him, and they don’t know if Gorman got it back or not.

“Well, it happened a little over three weeks ago. Helen had phoned me to come over the day before, said she felt discouraged, rootless. Up to then she’d kept busy, but now she didn’t care. She said she had talked to her family long-distance and told them she was going to give up the apartment and go back there. I told her I thought that was a good idea. Denny was in her bedroom while I was there. Helen said Denny hadn’t been out of the apartment in two days. She didn’t feel good, or something. As I said, it all happened the very next day. Helen was already packing for Ohio when I got there, and she said she had told the agency to drop her.

“And then it happened, the very next day. It was about five o’clock when Gorman and his bodyguard came to the apartment. Helen didn’t know how they got upstairs. It turned out they had come up the back way, through the service entrance. They knocked, and when she opened the door they pushed right in. Gorman’s man clapped his hand over Helen’s mouth. She thought it was some kind of a robbery — she’d never seen Gorman. The two men wrestled her over to a chair and tied her up with nylon stockings and gagged her with a dish towel from the kitchenette. They did all this very quietly. Then they went into the bedroom.

“Helen heard Denny give one yelp. Through the open door she saw the bodyguard pin Denny’s arms behind her. She was limp and Helen guessed they had hit her. Gorman put on a pair of pigskin gloves to protect his hands and went to work on Denny’s face. Helen told me she wanted to keep her eyes shut or her head turned away, but there was something so horrible about it she couldn’t help watching. I remember what she said: ‘The absolute destruction of beauty.’

“Helen fainted then. When she came to, Denny was on the floor. Helen could see her legs. The men were ransacking the apartment. They even went through the stuff Helen had packed. They dumped out the contents of her purse but didn’t take the money. They ignored her, as though she weren’t there. Helen couldn’t tell if they found what they were looking for.

“They left about seven. Helen upset the chair and pulled herself across the room and knocked the telephone table over. She managed to dial the operator and make some muffled noises. The operator traced the call quickly and the police radioed the nearest car. The cops cut Helen loose and got an ambulance for Denny Young. Her face was a ruin — broken nose, jaw, cheekbones. But, unfortunately for Gorman, he’d done more damage than he realized. There was a brain injury. She died three days later without ever coming out of the coma. Gorman must have been informed, somehow, that he had seriously injured the girl, because, after Helen identified him from his picture on file and the police went to pick him up, he was gone. So was his plane, a small job he kept at a field in Westchester.

“The police had been trying to nail Eric Gorman for so long that it made Helen MacLane, as an eyewitness to murder, very important — so important they didn’t want her to go back to Ohio. They could have locked her up as a material witness and for her own protection, and now I guess they wish they had. But instead they put a. guard on her and let her stay at the apartment. A few days later somebody took a shot at her with a rifle with a silencer. They shot from a roof on the other side of Sixty-fourth. The man apparently didn’t hold his aim low, as you’re supposed to when shooting from a height, and the bullet went two inches over her head. If it had been three inches lower, Gorman could have come back to town with a manufactured alibi and defied anybody to bring him to trial, in spite of the statement Helen signed.

“After that happened, the police moved Helen to a hotel where they could watch her better. A week ago Wednesday she disappeared. They’ve been showing pictures of her on television, and pictures of Gorman and Brath — that’s the bodyguard. They don’t know whether Gorman or any of his people got her, but they don’t think so. They think the strain of waiting got on her nerves and she cracked. One of the men who was supposed to be guarding her saw her walking out the door of the hotel carrying a small bag, and she was alone. He ran out and got the number of the cab before it disappeared in traffic. The driver said he let her off in Times Square and thought maybe she headed for a subway entrance, but he wasn’t sure. They told me that if anybody came around looking for her or asking about her, I should get in touch with the police right away. The only way they’ll know if Gorman got her is if he shows up back in town.

“The newspapers gave it a big play at first, but it’s dying down now. Backpage stuff. The way the tabloids have covered it, you’d think Helen was as much of a tramp as Denny Young, that she was horsing around with Gorman and his crowd too. Having her a Korean-war widow has given it that touch of bathos they like.

“Well, that’s the way it is now. Helen didn’t go back to Ohio. Nobody knows why Gorman beat Denny Young to death, but they’re pretty certain he’s too intelligent to have killed her on purpose. Not with a witness there. If he’d meant to kill her, he’d have killed both of them. But killing seems to be out of his line. No rough stuff at all. He just happened to be mad enough to want to handle it personally. Gorman’s plane hasn’t been seen anywhere.”

Willsie rubbed his eyes and said, “All this would have driven Dick out of his mind. He was crazy about her. I go around feeling responsible. I should have checked on that Young girl when she moved in with Helen. If Gorman comes back to town, it will be a pretty good indication that Helen is dead and her body is in deep water somewhere.”

“You mean he could come back and nothing would happen to him?”

“I wouldn’t say ‘nothing.’ He might fall down a flight of stairs, but without Helen on the stand, they can’t make the case hold water. Nobody saw him enter or leave the apartment house. They know he must have come in the back. He didn’t leave any fingerprints. And there’s no such thing as legal positive identification by sworn statement.”