Тэлмидж Пауэлл - The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™ - 25 Classic Mysteries

Montague’s face went livid. His eyes blazed; he pounced to his feet, ripping out an oath. “I wouldn’t have touched a hair on her head!” he shouted. “Listen, you two-bit private dick, if you think I’m going to stand here in my own office and let you talk to me...”

“Sit down, Montague,” Archer said placidly. “It’s either me or the police. It’d be a lot better to have me on your team — even at two-bits. Which is practically all I’m getting out of this case.”

Montague opened his mouth to curse some more, but the chief waggled a finger and said, “Your team, remember? You’re going to tell me what I want to know, or I’ll have Brogardus breathing so hard down your neck it’ll scorch your shoulder blades!”

Montague got that glittering look in his eyes again. He sensed this was a moment for caution. “If you told Tim Brogardus a pack of lies about me, Archer,” he warned, “dark alleys might get mighty unsafe for you.”

“I don’t doubt that,” Archer conceded, “but I’m a truthful man. And the fact remains that about a year ago you blossomed into the big time with this club. It takes backing — capital — to do that; you didn’t have it on your own.”

“Meaning?”

“Let’s dig up a little past history,” the chief suggested mildly. “Buddy VanDyke, for example. Marilyn Foster was not to have been Buddy’s first venture into marriage, as I remember. Over a year ago, Buddy married Sue-Carol Loefler, the heiress to the Loefler Distilleries fortune. At that time Buddy was practically flat, the old, respected VanDyke fortune having gone the way of so many old, respected fortunes. Buddy was living mostly on his name, good looks, and credit. Then he marries Sue-Carol — and just a short time after their marriage, she leaves here one night after an argument with Buddy. He was drunk, stayed here at the club, refusing to go with her. A few hours later, Sue-Carol was found in the wreckage of her car in a ravine on Highway Sixty Six.

“It was raining that night, and cold, with a film of ice on the roads. The police marked off Sue-Carol Loefler VanDyke’s death as an accident. Angered and hurt because of her argument with Buddy, she’d been driving too fast. She’d been unable to make the curve — possibly hadn’t seen it in the darkness and rain until too late — and had plunged to her death in the ravine.

“But the fact remains that Buddy inherited her millions; that Buddy was here at the club, and you alibied him; and that a short time after that you began expanding.”

“Meaning?” Montague said again, the word like the crackle of ice in the room.

“Meaning that there is the remote chance that Sue-Carol’s death could have been murder.”

“That’s a lie! You’d never get to first base trying to stump up a thing as insane as that!”

“But what if it isn’t a lie?” Archer persisted. “If Sue-Carol were murdered, you’d have been in a prime position to make Buddy VanDyke pay off, up to his eyeteeth!”

That controlled glitter in Montague’s eyes shattered. He mouthed a curse this time, threw a looping punch at the chief. Archer sidestepped. I moved in on Montague, and he jabbed at me. I jabbed back, and Montague staggered into the desk. He damned my ancestors, and before I could get close enough to stop him, yanked a desk drawer open. I knew he was going for a gun.

I plunged into him, trying to pin him over the desk. He writhed out of my grip, and we tripped and fell with a jar that shook the floor. Sometime in his long, spotty past, Montague had learned a lot about dirty fighting. He gave me a knee in the groin, went for my eyes with his thumbs and the soft pressure point behind my ears, where the jaw hinges, with his index fingers. He’d called it. If that was the way he wanted to play, it was all right with me. I worked on his kidneys with my elbows, thrashing to get out from under him. I rolled on top, butted him in the chin. That stunned him, and I grabbed a handful of hair and slammed his head against the floor. The carpet was thick, but not that thick. Montague relaxed, groaning.

“I guess,” Archer remarked, as we went out the door, “that we insulted Lon! Let’s go someplace and get a bite of dinner.”

We did, and with the grub under our belts, Archer decided we’d drive out to the VanDyke house.

The huge old pile of stone and steel that was the VanDyke mansion looked grim and forbidding in the darkness. Lights were on here and there in the place, making the windows like eyes watching us as we rolled up the long, curving driveway.

I planted the sedan at just about the same spot I had when we’d been here earlier today. We’d just got out of the car and started up the veranda steps when headlights splashed in the driveway behind us. We turned, saw a car coming up the drive. It was moving fast for that narrow, twisting drive; it almost lost a bumper against a tree, and I stood frozen, thinking my old sedan was finally going to-be reduced to complete junk.

But the driver of the other car, a convertible with the top down, saw the sedan, slapped on the brakes. The convertible stopped with a little side skid in the drive, nudged against the sedan’s bumper.

The convertible’s horn let out a long, protracted blast. A male voice shouted thickly, “Wha’sh idea leaving that heap parked like that?”

“Sounds like Buddy VanDyke,” the chief said.

“Like Buddy VanDyke with a few too many under his belt,” I added, as we bolted down the veranda steps.

Buddy was lolling over the convertible steering wheel. He still had his palm on the horn, and it was setting up such a racket I couldn’t hear myself think. “Sho,” he mouthed looking at us, his face flushed in the light of the dash lamp, “it’sh the great detectiffs! Going to find out who killed little Marilyn, Mishter Archer?”

“Move the car, Luke,” the chief told me softly. “I’ll see if I can do anything with this guy besides pouring him back in the bottle.”

I moved up the drive, got in the sedan, started it, and pulled it over to the extreme edge of the driveway. While I was occupied with that, the big, oaken front door of the VanDyke house had opened and old Ludwig and the leathery servant, Josiah, had come out, attracted by the convertible’s horn.

“What’s the meaning of this?” old Ludwig roared.

“Don’t shout, grandpa,” Buddy held his finger up to his lips. “Lishen, she might be out there in the night shomeplace. Poor Marilyn. Dead in the night shomeplace.”

“You’re drunk!” old Ludwig thundered. “Well, Josiah, don’t stand there gawking! Get him up to his room!”

Josiah said a hurried “Yes, sir,” and bumbled around the car. He got the door open on Buddy’s side.

“Joshiah, you’re a good egg,” Buddy patted the servant’s shoulder, “but I can make it up under my own power, shee? Poor Marilyn. Dead in the night shomeplace!” He staggered across the veranda, into the house.

“That young pup should be thrashed within an inch of his life,” Ludwig decided glaring toward the house.

“I’m sorry he’s in that state, myself,” Archer agreed. “There was a question or two I wanted to ask him. About his investment in Lon Montague’s Starlight Club.”

“Eh? Oh, I can tell you anything you want to know about that, Mr. Archer.”

The chief looked a little stunned, his face drawn in the light spilling over the drive from the house. He’d expected, I guess, secret blanks in Buddy’s past, and for the first time in his career, I saw complete puzzlement rising in David Archer’s eyes.

The chief drew old Ludwig out with questions, and from the way the grandfather spoke of Buddy’s relations with Lon Montague you had the feeling that it was truth.