Джо Горес: Cases

Dunc picked up the ankle gun, pocketed it. Wrapped Drinker’s right hand around the Colt .38, then let hand and revolver fall naturally. What else? Bullet hole!

He found Drinker’s slug lodged in the wall six inches from a framed picture. Dig it out, or leave it there? But on the far wall was a larger picture, a Maxfield Parrish print, blue ladies in diaphanous gowns with blue mountains behind them. He switched the prints. Maxfield Parrish covered the bullet hole.

He was halfway out the door when he remembered the ankle holster. Empty ankle holster. He went back and got it.

At 7:58 Monday morning Dunc trudged up the inner stairs at EDWARD COPE — INVESTIGATIONS. The newspapers had carried the explosion at the Whams’ flat, two dead. April — identified from the teeth in the half of her lower jaw they’d found — and an unidentified male too lightly built to be her husband.

In an allied story a private investigator who had been a marine demolitions expert in the war had been found dead in his apartment, an apparent suicide, with a large amount of unexplained cash and the remnants of a bomb-making kit...

Sherry was at her desk, her eyes red with weeping.

“I don’t believe it,” she said to Dunc.

“That Drinker would set a—”

“He’d kill anybody for money. But kill himself? Never!”

“He kept bad company,” Dunc said in a soft voice.

Her gaze faltered. “Dunc, I’m so sorry about Penny...”

“Yeah. Me too.”

There were volumes in the exchange. She ducked her head, ran for the stairs, ran down them, went out. He stood as if listening for something, then walked over to Drinker’s private office. He stood in the open doorway, looking in, overwhelmed with rage, anguish, love, regret, nostalgia, hatred.

All gone. Everything. His beloved Penny. His child. Drinker. Even Sherry. His dreams of being a writer. His joy at being a private eye. He’d clean out his desk, get his stuff from Ma Booger’s, say goodbye to Mickey, and hit the road again.

To go where? To do what?

There were tentative female steps on the stairs. He felt an upsurging in his chest. Sherry, coming back. They would sit down, talk it through, hash it out, get everything out in the open.

But it was a middle-aged woman, well dressed, her face crumpled with loss and indecision. She paused at the top of the stairs. “Mr. Cope?”

“Mr. Cope... died suddenly over the weekend. The office is no longer—”

“Oh. I’m so sorry.” She made a vague gesture of regret, but she might not have heard him. “I had hoped to hire him... My daughter... she’s only sixteen, and I’m afraid she’s run away with a man... much older than herself...” She wrung her hands with the over theatricality of true emotion. “What am I to do?”

Dunc felt an inner stirring. He was surprised to realize he was standing aside as if to usher her into Drinker’s private office, and she obediently went past him. But Drinker was dead.

“Please sit down,” he heard himself saying. He sat down himself in the swivel chair, drew over a memo pad, and picked up a ballpoint pen from the blotter. He began, “Maybe you’d better give me the particulars...”