Dan Marlowe - Doom Service

“Sally Fontaine's apartment at six in the morning is your business?”

“I've already explained that that was a mistake. A misunderstanding.” The voice deepened. “You've acquired a little dangerous knowledge, Killain. Don't abuse it. Keep your nose out of my affairs.”

“You keep your goddam affairs outta my nose, then,” Johnny told him. He picked up the power of attorney and the check.

Lonnie Turner's eyes narrowed. “You strike me as a pusher, Killain. You don't know when to leave well enough alone. You get in my way and I'll be right in the front row when you get it.”

“Don't get too close to the action, pretty boy. You might get your nose caught in the flywheel.” Johnny turned leisurely to the door, his eyes on Monk, whose eyes were on the man behind the desk. Disappointed, Monk stepped aside.

On the way through the green-walled inspection station Johnny waved to the unseen tweed suit he knew would be behind the one-way window in the wall.

Paul held out the phone to him as Johnny swung off the elevator. “The detective-”

“Rogers?” Johnny picked up the phone. “Yeah, Jimmy?”

“Come on upstairs.”

“Upstairs where, for God's sake?”

“Gidlow's suite. In going through his papers we found a couple of bankbooks, joint accounts in the names of Gidlow and Roketenetz. One of them shows a balance of six hundred and seventy-five dollars.”

“Well, it'll bury him, that and the check I brought back from Turner's,” Johnny said philosophically. “I don't know if he had any insurance or not. I should ask Sally, but I don't like-”

“The second bankbook,” Detective Rogers interrupted, “shows a balance of one hundred and eighty-nine thousand dollars.”

There was a silence. “Take another look at the decimal point, Jimmy,” Johnny said finally.

“I've looked, four times. One hundred and eighty-nine thousand dollars.”

“Well, what do you know?” Johnny murmured softly. “What in the hell do you know? Shove over, investigator — I'm on the way.”

Johnny sat alongside Detective Rogers on the luxurious divan in Jake Gidlow's suite, with Lieutenant Dameron's beet-red, silver-stubbled features studying them impassively from across the room.

“You need a new make-up man, Joe,” Johnny informed the big man solicitously. “You're showin' your age lately.”

“I'm off today,” the lieutenant replied. “Officially. The taxpayers be damned.” He leaned forward in his chair. “What about these bankbooks?”

“They're on the level?” Johnny queried, still not quite believing, and at the lieutenant's confirming nod he shook his head slowly. “Who gets the gelt?”

Lieutenant Dameron glanced at the silent Detective Rogers. “I've made a couple of telephone calls,” the latter admitted. “The lawyers are going to make a fortune on this one. It comes down to the time of death of the two deceased, Gidlow and Roketenetz. The police timetable at the moment is that Gidlow died first, by roughly twelve hours. If that held up in civil court, the joint account rights revert to Roketenetz and, upon his subsequent death, to Roketenetz's heirs.”

“Roketenetz's heirs-” Johnny echoed. So far as he knew Sally and the kid had been alone in the world, the principal reason it had hit her so hard. She'd mothered him for years. “So Sally's an heiress.” The idea took a little getting used to, he decided.

“She could be,” Detective Rogers said cautiously. “The man I talked to, though, wouldn't say positively. He said that it primarily depends upon the established time of death, but that there are other complicating factors.”

“Sounds like a lawyer himself,” Johnny commented. “If there weren't any, they'd contrive a few.” He shoved his hands deep in his pockets and looked down at his shoes thoughtfully before looking up at Lieutenant Dameron again. “Where in the hell did that kind of money come from, Joe? It wasn't the kid's. He never had but one fight grossed him twenty-five hundred, an' I doubt he netted half of that.”

“So it was Gidlow's money, then?” Lieutenant Dameron sounded only mildly interested.

Johnny frowned. “I never figured Jake for any kind of real money. Jake was an operator-in an' out of a dozen shady deals a week. He'd rather beat you out of a hundred than pick it up on the sidewalk. This sounds like way too much for him.” He waved a hand at the rooms about them. “An' don't let the suite fool you-I've heard Jake brag many a time that it was a tax-deductible business expense. Say, doesn't Gidlow have a wife, or some heirs of his own?”

“No wife.” The lieutenant's tone was firm. “We've checked. He left a will, though.”

“He did?” Johnny straightened on the divan. “Who benefits?”

“Gentleman named Alonzo Turner. Solely.”

Johnny whistled softly through his teeth. “Lonnie Turner! Maybe this thing begins to make a little sense, now.” He jumped up restlessly and paced the length of the room before wheeling upon the silent lieutenant. “Suppose Jake was holdin' a bunch of cash Lonnie was hidin' from the tax people?”

“We've considered that.” Detective Rogers' voice was brisk. “It seems valid only up to a point. It could have happened that way if Turner thought that, through the will and other strings, he had Gidlow so completely sewed up that he was taking no risk in letting him hold the money; but it breaks down when you come up against the fact of the joint account. It doesn't explain Roketenetz's name on the bankbook.”

“Maybe it does, too,” Johnny argued. “If Lonnie had enough on Jake to be sure Jake couldn't double-cross him, he could've had Jake holdin' for him. But if anything went wrong it was Jake that stood to take the fall, and that wouldn't suit a weasel like Jake at all. Jake could have figured that if he had the kid's name on it, too, he could always claim it's the kid's dough and let him explain where it came from when the day for explanations came. I'd like to bet you Gidlow slapped bank signature cards down in front of the kid an' said sign here, an' here, an' here, an' here.

The little account was the kid's. He never even knew about this other thing.”

“It's a theory,” the sandy-haired man admitted after a moment. He looked at his superior. “The kicker in the deal is that if the money is Turner's, he-or whoever the money belongs to-has no legal claim to it now. A joint account balance goes to the survivor, period, except in a very few cases of a consideration of trust, which I doubt would apply here. I can't see Turner invoking it, for one thing-if this is hidden tax money, whoever stakes a claim to it is in the grease with Internal Revenue. No, sir-the owner of this money will never dare try to claim it.” He looked at Johnny. “There's another factor. If Roketenetz had anything to do with Gidlow's death, he couldn't benefit, and neither could his heirs.”

“If you're earnin' your money, you ought to have the answer to that already,” Johnny told him. “Who did grease the chute for Jake?”

“If I could tell you, I could go home and go to bed.” The slender man yawned and stretched prodigiously. He lowered his arms slowly. “It had aspects of a frame. Gidlow was manually strangled, and the body placed on the divan. The camera was rigged with the thread so that whoever opened the door took a picture of himself without realizing it, since there was no flash and the thread snapped after contact. Very crude.”

“What the hell was so crude about it?” Johnny demanded. “Suppose it had been me whizzed in there. I'd have taken a picture of myself in the doorway of the room of a murdered man, an' never even known it. You think I'd ever have noticed that little bit of thread left on the camera trigger? Like hell I would.”