“Sarge,” he said happily, “I figured you and Fausta would be down to spring me.” The “Sarge” was a holdover from army days, and I had given up trying to break him of the habit.
“Spring you?” I repeated.
“Yeah.” He looked at the turnkey. “Well, what you waiting for? Open the door!”
I said, “You’re a little ahead of yourself, Mouldy. This is just a five-minute visit. Talk fast, and give me the whole story.”
But talking fast was not one of Mouldy’s talents. He was willing enough to tell his story, but somewhere between Mouldy’s brain and his vocal chords was a maze in which ideas frequently got lost before he could express them. By virtue of dogged questioning and the kind-heartedness of the turnkey, who risked the inspector’s wrath by letting us stay ten minutes instead of five, I finally managed to piece together Mouldy’s version of what had happened. But the ordeal left me almost exasperated enough to let him take the rap.
The “Talcott dame,” as Mouldy referred to her, had dined at El Patio three nights in a row, and each night stopped a few minutes to chat with Mouldy.
“She acted kind of lonesome,” he said. “Though why a dandy-looking babe like her should be lonesome, I couldn’t figure. She said she liked me because I reminded, her of a polio athletic man.”
“A what?” I asked.
“Polio athletic. She said that was some kind of cave man.”
“Paleolithic,” I said. “Go on.”
“Well, one thing led to another, and first thing I know she invites me to drop over some time. I tell her I work till one a.m., and she says make it one thirty some morning. I ask, what morning? The one coming up, she says. This was about nine last night, see. So when we close at one, I shed my tux, put on another suit, and drive over to her apartment.”
Mouldy said the apartment was in the Grand Towers, probably the most expensive apartment house in town. After feeding him several drinks, his hostess left him alone and entered the bedroom, with the routine remark about getting into something more comfortable. They had been drinking in a small card room between the front room and the bedroom, and while Mouldy waited for his lady love to return, he heard a key open the front door and someone enter the front room.
Since Minerva Talcott had neglected to inform him she had a husband, Mouldy was mildly interested in the new arrival, but not in the least alarmed. He simply sat and continued to sip his drink, until a shot boomed in the front room. Then he sat a moment longer, thoughtfully considering the meaning of the explosion, finally set down his drink and ambled into the front room to investigate.
He found a thin, middle-aged man with gray hair lying on his stomach in a pool of blood.
I interrupted to remark, “Warren Day says your gun killed him.”
“Yeah, Sarge. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather.”
“Where was your gun when you found the body?”
“In my holster.”
I looked at him for a moment, finally had a bright idea, and asked, “Where was the holster?”
“Attached to the harness.”
“You silly moron!” I yelled. “Stop playing games!” Then, I brought myself under control and pursued him further in a subdued tone, “Where was the harness?”
It developed the harness was hanging from a chair in the front room, where Mouldy had left it along with his coat when things started to get cozy. Apparently, the first drink had been served in the front room, and the move to the card room was a later development.
The gun was still in its holster when Mouldy discovered the body, but he managed to get it into his hand before Mrs. Talcott entered the room attired in a fetching negligee, took one look at the body, another at Mouldy’s gun, and fainted.
“I figured with shooting going on, maybe I better have a rod in my hand,” he explained brightly.
He was still wandering around the apartment carrying it when the police arrived.
When we got outside, Fausta said, “What do you think, Manny?”
“He was suckered,” I said. “A frame, pure and simple. Go on home. I got a date with another woman!”
“Minerva Talcott?” she asked. “Can’t I go too?”
“She probably wouldn’t offer to change into something more comfortable if you were there,” I said.
Fausta screwed up her nose at me. “She won’t anyway. Even a woman who would chase Mouldy must draw the line somewhere. No woman but me would want a man of such ugliness.”
Apparently, my expression of belief in Mouldy’s innocence had begun to restore Fausta’s spirit.
A card beneath a mail slot at the Grand Towers informed me that Mr. and Mrs. Henry Talcott occupied apartment one hundred and eleven, which proved to be a rear apartment on the first floor. The woman who answered my ring fitted Mouldy’s description perfectly. She was a dandy-looking babe.
She was not more than five feet three, and her legs, arms and waist were slim, yet she must have weighed at least a hundred and twenty-five pounds. The excess weight was in the right places, and the negligible sun dress she wore indicated that she was proud of every pound of it.
Sultry eyes beneath square cut, coal black bangs appraised me silently.
“I’m Manville Moon,” I said, and showed her my license as a private investigator.
When she had examined it and returned it without comment, I said, “Mr. Marmaduke Greene has retained- me to dig up evidence in his defense. May I come in?”
“I’ve already talked to the police,” she said distantly. “And losing my husband has been an awful shock, of course.”
Since, according to her own story, her husband had died because he discovered her with another man, I withheld any expression of sympathy, merely waiting for her either to invite me in or slam the door. She waited too, and when the silence finally became absurd, petulantly stepped aside and asked me in.
Cleaning service at the Grand Towers must have been excellent, for there was no mark whatever on the rich, gray rug of the apartment’s front room, not even a light spot to indicate where blood had been scrubbed away.
Mrs. Talcott had two other visitors; a chunkily-built man with smooth, blond hair and a lean, gray-faced character with rubbery eyes and absolutely no expression. The moment I glanced at the latter, I felt the short hair along the back of my neck rise like a dog’s hackles. It’s a sensation I almost always experience when I encounter a hood, a sort of sixth sense which fingers a professional killer for me the moment I see one.
The chunky, blond man she introduced as Gerald Brand, and identified him as her deceased husband’s partner. Gerald gave me a hearty handshake and the bluff sort of greeting you usually get only from fellow lodge members. The gray-faced man was identified simply as Mr. Fen, but was addressed by Gerald Brand as Deuce. He gave me a distant nod, and kept his hands by his sides.
It did not require any particular brilliance to deduce that Mr. Fen was Gerald Brand’s bodyguard, which set me to wondering what sort of business he and his deceased partner had been in together.
Not being a subtle person, I bluntly asked for an explanation.
“My husband and Gerald operated a news publishing and distribution business,” Minerva Talcott said.
I hiked an eyebrow. “What paper?”
“No paper,” Brand said easily. “Turf news.”
I understood the bodyguard then. Horse-racing dope sheet distribution was big business, and while legitimate in itself, its customers were largely illegal bookshops. It was more or less common knowledge that the national gambling syndicate was trying to monopolize the field by crowding out independent publishers and distributors. The mortality rate among independents across the nation had grown to the point where only a distributor with either a syndicate tie-in or a suicide complex would appear in public without a bodyguard.