Лоуренс Блок - One Night Stands and Lost Weekends

At 3:30 I was up in Westchester County. The sky was bluer, the air fresher, and the houses more costly. I pulled up in front of a $35,000 split-level, walked up a flagstone path, and leaned on a doorbell.

The little boy who answered it had red hair, freckles, and a chipped tooth. He was too cute to be snotty, but this didn’t stop him.

He asked me who I was. I told him to get his father. He asked me why. I told him that if he didn’t get his father I would twist his arm off. He wasn’t sure whether or not to believe me, but I was obviously the first person who had ever talked to him this way. He took off in a hurry and a few seconds later Phil Abeles came to the door.

“Oh, London,” he said. “Hello. Say, what did you tell the kid?”

“Nothing.”

“Your face must have scared him.” Abeles’s eyes darted around. “You want to talk about what happened last night, I suppose.”

“That’s right.”

“I’d just as soon talk somewhere else,” he said. “Wait a minute, will you?”

I waited while he went to tell his wife that somebody from the office had driven up, that it was important, and that he’d be back in an hour. He came out and we went to my car.

“There’s a quiet bar two blocks down and three over,” he said, then added: “Let me check something. The way I’ve got it, you’re a private detective working for Mark. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’d like to help the guy out. I don’t know very much, but there are things I can talk about to you that I’d just as soon not tell the police. Nothing illegal. Just... Well, you can figure it out.”

I could figure it out. That was the main reason why I had agreed to stay on the case for Donahue. People do not like to talk to the police if they can avoid it.

If Phil Abeles was going to talk at all about Karen Price, he would prefer me as a listening post to Lieutenant Jerry Gunther.

“Here’s the place,” he said. I pulled up next to the chosen bar, a log-cabin arrangement.

Abeles had J&B with water and I ordered a pony of Courvoisier.

“I told that homicide lieutenant I didn’t know anything about the Price girl,” he said. “That wasn’t true.”

“Go on.”

He hesitated, but just a moment. “I didn’t know she had anything going with Donahue,” he said. “Nobody ever thought of Karen in one-man terms. She slept around.”

“I gathered that.”

“It’s a funny thing,” he said. “A girl, not exactly a whore but not convent-bred either, can tend to pass around in a certain group of men. Karen was like that. She went for ad men. I think at one time or another she was intimate with half of Madison Avenue.”

Speaks well of the dead, I thought. “For anyone in particular?” I asked.

“It’s hard to say. Probably for most of the fellows who were at the dinner last night. For Ray Powell — but that’s nothing new; he’s one of those bachelors who gets to everything in a skirt sooner or later. But for the married ones, too.”

“For you?”

“That’s a hell of a question.”

“Forget it. You already answered it.”

He grinned sourly. “Yes” — he lapsed into flippant Madison Avenue talk — “the Price was right.” He sipped his drink, then continued. “Not recently, and not often. Two or three times over two months ago. You won’t blackmail me now, will you?”

“I don’t play that way.” I thought a minute. “Would Karen Price have tried a little subtle blackmail?”

“I don’t think so. She played pretty fair.”

“Was she the type to fall in love with somebody like Donahue?”

Abeles scratched his head. “The story I heard,” he said. “Something to the effect that she was calling him, threatening him, trying to head off his marriage.”

I nodded. “That’s why he hired me.”

“It doesn’t make much sense.”

“No?”

“No. It doesn’t fit in with what I know about Karen. She wasn’t the torch-bearer type. And she was hardly making a steady thing with Mark, either. I may not have known he was sleeping with her, but I knew damn well that a lot of other guys had been making with her lately.”

“Could she have been shaking him down?”

He shrugged. “I told you,” he said. “It doesn’t sound like her. But who knows? She might have gotten into financial trouble. It happens. Perhaps she’d try to milk somebody for a little money.” He pursed his lips. “But why should she blackmail Mark, for heaven’s sake? If she blackmailed a bachelor he could always tell her to go to hell. You’d think she would work that on a married man, not a bachelor.”

“I know.”

He started to laugh then. “But not me,” he said. “Believe me, London. She didn’t blackmail me and I didn’t kill her.”

I got a list from him of all the men at the dinner. In addition to Donahue and myself, there had been eight men present, all of them from Darcy & Bates. Four — Abeles, Jack Harris, Harold Merriman, and Joe Conn — were married. One — Ray Powell — was the bachelor and stud-about-town of the group, almost a compulsive Don Juan, according to Abeles. Another, Fred Klein, had a wife waiting out a residency requirement in Reno.

The remaining two wouldn’t have much to do with girls like Karen Price. Lloyd Travers and Kenneth Bream were as queer as rectangular eggs.

I drove Abeles back to his house. Before I let him off he told me again not to waste time suspecting him.

“One thing you might remember,” I said. “ Somebody in that room shot Karen Price. Either Mark or one of the eight of you... I don’t think it was Mark.” I paused. “That means there’s a murderer in your office, Abeles!”

It was late enough in the day to call Lieutenant Gunther. I tried him at home first. His wife answered, told me he was at the station. I tried him there and caught him.

“Nice hours you work, Jerry.”

“Well, I didn’t have anything else on today. So I came on down. You know how it is... Say, I got news for you, Ed.”

“About Donahue?”

“Yes. We let him go.”

“He’s clear?”

“No, not clear.” Jerry grunted. “We could have held him but there was no point, Ed. He’s not clear, not by a mile. But we ran a check on the Price kid and learned she’s been sleeping with two parties — Democrats and Republicans. Practically everyone at the stag. So there’s nothing that makes your boy look too much more suspicious than the others.”

“I found out the same thing this afternoon.”

“Ed, I wasn’t too crazy about letting him get away. Donahue still looks like the killer from where I sit. He hired you because the girl was giving him trouble. She wasn’t giving anybody else trouble. He looks like the closest thing to a suspect around.”

“Then why release him?”

I could picture Jerry’s shrug. “Well, there was pressure,” he said. “The guy got himself an expensive lawyer and the lawyer was getting ready to pull a couple of strings. That’s not all, of course. Donahue isn’t a criminal type, Ed. He’s not going to run far. We let him go, figuring we won’t have much trouble picking him up again.”

“Maybe you won’t have to.”

“You get anything yet, Ed?”

“Not much,” I said. “Just enough to figure out that everything’s mixed up.”

“I already knew that.”

“Uh-huh. But the more I hunt around, the more loose ends I find. I’m glad you boys let my client loose. I’m going to see if I can get hold of him.”

“Bye,” Jerry said, clicking off.

I took time to get a pipe going, then dialed Mark Donahue’s number. The phone rang eight times before I gave up. I decided he must be out on Long Island with Lynn Farwell. I was halfway through the complicated process of prying a number out of the information operator when I decided not to bother. Donahue had my number. He could reach me when he got the chance.