“The only thing that surprises me,” Score said, “is that the old man came up with the money for him. Albee hadn’t expected it, had made the Kenosha trip as a last desperate chance. I think now that he’d have blown town even without capital if the old man hadn’t come through. With a sudden stake, he just couldn’t resist it.”
I asked if he knew what had happened at the bookstore and Score said sure, Albee had told him. He’d been managing to drag down about ten bucks a week besides his salary all the time he had worked there. Just tried to drag a bit too deeply that Friday morning because he was desperate about his bookie bill, and got caught with his hand in the till.
Score shrugged. “He’ll land on his feet, wherever he went. He’s — — — Ever see a picture of him?”
He got up and went to the file cabinet. “We got some stills here.” He opened a drawer, hunted for and took out a file folder, handed me half a dozen eight-by-ten glossies, portrait shots. “Top one’s straight, others made up for roles he played. One of ‘em’s as King Lear; that’s the best role he ever played.”
Albee was a good-looking young man all right, but what struck me was his resemblance to his father. It was really strong, one case where neither of them or anybody else could ever have denied the relationship. The second shot showed him as a mustachioed pirate with a black eye patch, as villainous a character as ever stormed a poop deck, whatever a poop deck is. The third — — —
The photographs shook a little in my hand. Albee as King Lear, with lines of age in his face and wild gray hair and a wild gray beard. He didn’t look like his father in that shot; he was his father. Trim that beard. Instead of that gray wig, dye his own short hair. Let him talk like a Wisconsin farmer as, having known his father and being an actor, he certainly could do…
I made the motions of looking at the rest of the glossies and handed them back. I thanked Jerry Score and made my get-away.
I walked south and walked blindly except when I had to cross a street without getting run over. Of course Floyd Nielson hadn’t given away eight hundred dollars. Discount everything that Albee, as Floyd Nielson, had told us. Albee hadn’t expected to get the loan and hadn’t. But he’d learned his father had just sold the farm. Probably had all his money including the proceeds of the sale on hand, in cash. A fortune for a killing, whether it had been in cold blood or during a fight after a violent quarrel.
And then the fright and the planning. Establish that Albee had taken a powder, that his father was still alive and had gone west, where he’d gradually be lost track of. And if Albee showed up alive someday, somewhere, even came back to Chicago someday, so what? His father had been alive and looking for him long after Albee had gone. If his father’s body were never found, there’d never have been a murder, never be an investigation.
And Uncle Am, even without having seen the photographs I’d just seen, had guessed it before I had. Or at least had seen it as a possibility. Right now he was on the Nielson farm, looking to see if there was a place where a body could have been put where it would never be found. Not a grave; a grave gives itself away by sinking unless there’s someone around to keep it leveled off. But somewhere…
If I’d had any sense I’d have gone to the office to wait for Uncle Am. Even if he hadn’t found a body—and Albee could have disposed of it elsewhere than at the truck farm—we could prove a case, or let the cops prove it, just by pulling off Albee’s beard; it was two inches long and he couldn’t possibly have grown a real one in nine days.
But I didn’t have any sense because I was walking into the lobby of the Ideal Hotel. A medium priced hotel, the kind the real Floyd Nielson would have chosen. Albee was staying in character and—suddenly I saw the reason why Albee Nielson had used first Missing Persons and then us as cats’-paws; he himself had had to stay away from even pretending to hunt for Albee on his own; Honey, Score, probably even his landlady, would have recognized him, gray beard or no. Which was why, too, he’d taken a hotel south of the Loop instead of on the Near North Side. In person, he’d avoided the area completely, except for his brief visit to our office.
I asked the clerk if Mr. Nielson was in. He glanced over his shoulder and said, “I guess so; his key’s not in the box. Room two-fourteen.”
There was an elevator, but I didn’t wait for it; I walked up the stairs. I found 214 door and knocked on it. He opened it and said, “Oh, Mr. Hunter. Come in.” I went in and he closed the door and looked at me. “Well, find out anything about Albee?”
And I realized then, too late, that I hadn’t figured out what I was going to say or do. Give a tug on his beard? But I’d look, feel, and be too damn foolish if I was wrong, and I could be wrong.
I decided to toss out a feeler and see how he reacted to it.
I said, “The case isn’t closed yet, Mr. Nielson. Something new has come up. There’s a suspicion of murder.”
And as suddenly as I’d been hit in the gut last night, I was being strangled. His hands were around my throat. There are people who fight by lashing out with their fists and there are stranglers. He was a strangler. And his hands were strong. Like a steel vise.
I tried to pull them away with my own hands and couldn’t. Then, just in time, I remembered the trick for breaking a strangle hold taken from the front. You bring up your forearms inside his arms and jerk them apart. I tried it. It worked.
I took a step back quick while I had the chance, before he could grab me again. He didn’t know boxing. He put up his guard too high and I swung a right in under it that got him in the gut just like the goon’s swing last night got me. Maybe not as hard, but hard enough to bring his guard down. I feinted a left to keep them down and then put my right into his chin with all the weight of my body behind it, and he went down, out cold.
So cold that my first thought was to kneel beside him and make sure that his heart was still beating.
My second was the beard. It did not come off. And I bent down to study his face closely and saw that the age lines in it were etched and not drawn.
I sat down on the edge of the bed and stayed sitting there for about nine hours. Anyway, it seemed that long. I gently massaged my neck where those strong hands had gripped it, and then I looked down at those strong hands and wondered how I could have been so blind as not to notice them the first time we’d talked to him. They were, even aside from their own indications of age, the muscled, hard, callused hands of a farmer, not the hands of a bookstore clerk. Uncle Am had always told me to look at people’s hands as well as their faces when I was sizing them up. I hadn’t even noticed Floyd Nielson’s hands.
He began to stir, and his eyes opened.
And there were footsteps in the hallway outside and a heavy knock on the door, a cop’s kind of knock. I called out, “Come in!”
The first one through was a cop I knew slightly, Lieutenant Guthrie of Homicide. The second man I didn’t know; I later learned he was a Kenosha County Sheriff’s deputy. The third man in was Uncle Am.
Nielson sat up.
Guthrie said, “Floyd Nielson, you are under arrest for suspicion of the murder of Albee Nielson. Anything-you-say-may-be-used-against-you.” He produced a pair of handcuffs.
Uncle Am winked at me. “Come on, kid. They won’t need us, not now anyway. We may have to testify later.”
I went with him. Outside he said, “You beat me to him, Ed, but damn it, you shouldn’t have tackled him alone.”
I said, “Yeah.”
“There’s a likely looking bar across the street. I think we’ve earned a drink. How’s about it?”