Ричард Деминг - The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK®

“Benny spoke of you a lot,” she said. “He had a good deal of admiration for you.”

“I liked Benny too. Which is one of the reasons I’m here.”

She looked a question and the gambler explained, “This isn’t entirely a sympathy call. I’m playing cop. Trying to run down Benny’s killer.”

“Oh? Well, I’m afraid I told the police everything I knew.”

“I know. But maybe if we kicked it around a while, you’d remember something you didn’t tell them. A clue to the identity of this mistress you think he had, for instance.”

She hushed slightly. “I see you’ve been talking to the police.”

“Some. Had dinner yet?”

She shook her head. “We… I usually eat about seven.”

“Then suppose you have it with me. We can talk while we’re eating.”

“In public?” she asked. “With my husband dead less than twenty-four hours? Oh, I couldn’t.”

The objection struck Ross as more a sop to convention than a symptom of grief. As a matter of fact, he couldn’t detect any grief in the woman.

“We’ll pick a quiet place where you won’t be known,” he said.

She considered. “You think it would be all right? Maybe your being Benny’s employer and all…”

“It will be all right,” he assured her.

He took her to Romaine’s, where the only illumination was candlelight and the clientele was small but select. He learned her first name was Helene, and before dinner was over he was calling her Helene and she was calling him Clancy.

After dinner Ross ordered drinks, and it developed that Helene Stoneman had an affinity for double bourbons and soda. As Ross drank only his usual weak scotch and water, by ten p.m., when they finally left Romaine’s, Ross was still dead sober, but Helene Stoneman was hilariously drunk.

By now she had completely forgotten her widowhood. As soon as they were seated in the Lincoln, she leaned against him, gave him a moist kiss on the cheek and then nestled her head on his shoulder.

When they reached her home, he had to help her from the car. Though he steadied her with one hand gripped to her bicep, she staggered all over the walk on the way to the front porch. Leaning her against the door, he took her purse and searched it for her key. He gripped her bicep again when he opened the door, to prevent her falling inward with it.

The gambler was a little irked with himself for letting her get so drunk. When he had discovered her liking for bourbon, he had deliberately shelved talking about her husband’s murder in the hope that he could first loosen her tongue with alcohol. But in her present state it was unlikely he could get any sense out of her at all.

Leading her into the front room, he switched on a lamp and steered her toward the sofa. But instead of sitting, she suddenly spun against him, threw her arms about his neck and dragged his mouth down to hers.

He found it wide open.

For the next few moments Ross merely hung on while the woman’s body undulated against his and her mouth greedily worked at his lips. Finally he forcibly broke the kiss and held her away by the shoulders. She fought his grip, attempting to struggle back into his arms.

“Hold it, Helene,” he said. “I’ll play with you when you’re sober, but I don’t take advantage of drunken women.”

“I am sober,” she said in a strained voice. “That sobered me like a jolt of electricity.”

Looking down at her, he realized with astonishment that she was telling the truth. Only moments before she had hardly been able to stand, but she had sobered as abruptly as she had managed to get drunk.

“Don’t just stand there looking at me!” she said. “For God’s sake, kiss me!”

And hanging his detaining grip from her shoulders with an outward movement of her hands, she was back at him like a wildcat, twining her arms about his neck and moving her body passionately against his. Ross made another halfhearted attempt to disengage himself, but her almost animal abandon was too much for him.

Giving up the fight, he grabbed her as roughly as she was grabbing at him and threw her onto the couch.

Later, as they sat side-by-side on the sofa quietly smoking cigarettes, Helene seemed impelled to offer some explanation for her startling performance.

“I’m not a nympho, Clancy,” she said in a subdued and entirely sober tone. “But you don’t know how long I’ve been pent up. Benny and I… Well, there just wasn’t anything there any more. I knew he had another woman, so I wouldn’t…” She let it trail off. “Did you expect the evening to end like this?”

“It got a little off the track,” Ross admitted. “All I planned was a bit of discussion about Benny.”

“Do we have to talk about him?”

He looked down at the top of her head. “Don’t you want your husband’s killer caught?”

She shifted a little uncomfortably. “Well, yes, I suppose. But you must know I wasn’t in love with him.”

Ross asked casually, “What were you doing with Big John Quinnel this afternoon?”

Straightening up, she looked at him. “What?”

He repeated the question, then added, “I happened to see you together at the Park Plaza. At the time I didn’t know who you were.”

Helene frowned. “Why did you wait so long to ask me?”

Ross shrugged. “Maybe I didn’t think it was important. Is it?”

The question made her pause. “Of course not,” she said finally. “Big John was Benny’s employer in Chicago, you know, so I got to know him quite well. When he saw about Benny’s death in the paper, he phoned to offer sympathy. Then he asked me to drop by the hotel because he wanted to talk to me. I met him in the bar for one drink. All he wanted was to know if I needed help. Money help, he meant. I said no and he brought me home.”

Ross said nothing for a few moments. Then he asked, “Have you gone through Benny’s things yet? Papers and so on?”

She shook her head. “I’m supposed to tomorrow morning. With a Lieutenant Redfern. He thinks maybe he can find a clue to the identity of Benny’s mistress. Though what good that will do him, I don’t know.”

“It might solve the case,” Ross told her. “A witness who saw the shooting claims a woman did it.”

“Oh? Do the police have a description?”

“The police don’t even have the witness. I dug him up. Anyway, about the only description he could give was that she was female. Incidentally, what kind of car do you drive?”

“A blue Ford sedan. Why?”

“Nothing. Just checking.”

She frowned at him. “What kind of car did this witness see?” she demanded.

“A black coupe,” he lied in an easy voice.

Her lower lip stuck out petulantly. “I don’t think that was a very nice question to ask.”

“I’m not a very nice guy,” Ross conceded cheerfully. “Do me a favor tomorrow, will you?”

“What?”

“If you and the lieutenant turn up the name of Benny’s mistress when you go through his papers, phone it to me.”

“All right,” she said. “If you’re looking for a woman suspect, I’d just as soon you’d look away from me.”

It was nearly midnight when Ross pulled into his reserved place in the parking lot behind Club Rotunda.

The lot was on the opposite side of the alley from the club and in the center of the block. Club patrons had to walk approximately a hundred feet to the alley mouth, turn right and walk half the length of the building to the side entrance. Clancy Ross, having a key to the alley door leading from the club kitchen, had to walk only half that distance.

Even before he caught the glint of light on metal, Ross sensed a shadowy figure crouched in the alley. Instantly he dropped flat, his right hand darting beneath his left arm as he fell. A streak of fire probed out above his prone body, the sharp crack of the pistol echoing from the building walls a micro-second later.