“Sure. I knew you would too, and that you’d go down there and look around. No point in both of us working,” he said drily.
“You want to hear about it?”
“Not particularly,” Martin said, and he was smiling again. “Let’s go in and wind this up, Jake.”
“Hey, wait a minute,” Jake said. “I just have a wonderful theory.”
Martin laughed and got out of the car. Jake climbed out and caught his arm. “I’m not going to make accusations that won’t stick.”
“Look at it this way,” Martin said. “I don’t have a case either. And I can’t open up until I’m dead sure of myself. If these were punks I wouldn’t care. But this is a different class of people. You can get things rolling in an unofficial capacity, and when the fireworks start I’ll be right there.”
“With a pair of handcuffs for me?”
“We have to force this thing,” Martin said. “I’m asking a lot, Jake. I know how you’ve been thinking, and where it’s led you. Our theories may support one another. If you’ll start things rolling we can wind this up tonight”
“All right,” Jake said. “Anything to get out of this damned rain.”
Chapter Fourteen
The policeman who met them at the door of the Riordan suite made a warning gesture with his hands. Jake looked past him and saw Denise Riordan sitting in an overstuffed chair. She was crying, and Brian Riordan was beside her, patting her arm.
“What’s all this?” Martin said.
“She learned that her husband took a powder, I think,” the patrolman said.
Martin removed his hat and smoothed down his thin hair. Prior and Sheila sat down inconspicuously on a sofa while Jake lit a cigarette and walked to the fireplace where a small wood fire was burning. He turned his back to the heat gratefully.
Martin looked down at Denise.
“We’ve got a few things to clear up, Mrs. Riordan. I’ll try to be as quick as possible.”
Denise continued to cry and despite the solemnity of the scene the thought occurred to Jake that she would get a great deal of sympathy during Riordan’s trial. She was wearing a black dress with sequins and the firelight played interestingly over her smooth tanned legs and gracefully molded ankles. Denise, Jake guessed, would do all right.
Brian Riordan said to Martin, “This is a helluva time to be barging in. Can’t it wait until tomorrow?”
“No, it can’t wait until tomorrow,” Martin said.
“Okay, let’s get it over with then,” Brian said coldly.
A loud peremptory knock sounded and every head turned sharply. Martin stepped over and opened the door.
Gary Noble and Toni stood in the corridor.
“Come in,” Martin said.
Martin closed the door behind them, and Noble glanced around the room uncertainly. “What the devil is going on?” he said. “Toni called me and said Niccolo was in some kind of trouble. What the hell is going on? Where’s Riordan?”
“Dean Niccolo was murdered this evening,” Martin said. “Dan Riordan has blown out of town. Is all this news to you, Mr. Noble?”
“Good God,” Noble said.
Toni Ryerson turned frantically to Jake, and when he looked away from her, she took a backward step. “I knew he was in trouble, but I didn’t know he was dead,” she said. “It didn’t matter that he was in trouble. I thought...”
She stopped speaking and sat down carefully in a straight-backed chair.
Noble patted her shoulder and said to Martin, “This is terrible.”
“Yes, it is,” Martin said.
Everyone was watching him expectantly now. He stood in the middle of the room, his eyes touching everyone present in turn and the silence became a heavy, palpable thing.
“All right,” Brian said savagely. “What are we waiting for?”
Martin glanced at him calmly and then walked over and sat down beside Prior.
“Jake has something to tell us,” he said, in a conversational voice. “I think you’ll find it interesting.”
Brian made an impatient gesture with his hand. “What the hell has he got to do with this matter?”
“Go ahead, Jake,” Martin said.
Jake faced the semi-circle of puzzled faces with what he hoped was a confident expression, and tried to escape the feeling that he was as out of place as a thumb screw in a psychiatrist’s office.
“I’m going to talk about three murders,” he said. “The heart of this matter is, or was, May Laval, a gay and exciting woman whom we all knew. May made the mistake of deciding to publish her memoirs, the details of which were embarrassing and distressing to a number of important people. This is not the time to examine her motives for doing this, because the real reasons will probably never be known. Anyway, she started her project, and was immediately marked to die.”
He lit a cigarette and wished he hadn’t ended the sentence so inanely. He was getting warmed up to his topic, but he would have preferred to write it down instead of delivering it like an earnest valedictorian. That was the trouble with murder, he decided irrelevantly. It was so damn obvious and blunt. You couldn’t be casual about it. The minute you tried you sounded fatuous. All you could do was treat it seriously; and that made you appear pompous and slightly ridiculous. He sighed and blew a streamer of smoke into the air.
“One gentleman who didn’t want his wartime activities put on the best-seller lists was Dan Riordan. He therefore sent his dog robber, Avery Meed, to cajole May out of writing a book. Riordan’s offer consisted of straight, beautiful cash. But, and this is important, when Meed arrived at May Laval’s home, May was already dead. She had been strangled before he got there.
“Meed may have been shocked by this fact, but he was well-trained enough to go on with his orders. He found the diary and took it to his hotel room.
“Now,” Jake continued, “we come to an unlikely development. I mean Dean Niccolo. The pitch was consistent with Dean’s behavior pattern, I suppose. And, parenthetically, everyone in this mess behaved with deplorable unoriginality. Everybody followed his characteristic bent religiously. Had anyone crossed us up by seeking peace of mind, or knowledge, or the love of a pure woman, we’d have been lost. But everybody behaved predictably, everybody wanted something for nothing.
“So, to get back to Dean Niccolo. He had been gambling. He got seriously into debt, and needed funds in a hurry. He knew that May Laval had some dirt on Riordan, so he decided to try to get hold of it, the object of course being blackmail. Therefore he went to May’s home, arriving there just as Avery Meed was making his entrance. He watched Meed go inside and come out half a minute later with a book under his arm.
“Niccolo lost his nerve. He left. But the same morning he met Meed in my office, and learned that he worked for Riordan. Niccolo knew then from the papers that May had been killed and her diary stolen, so he guessed that Meed had done both jobs. He trailed Meed from our office to his apartment and made a proposition. But Meed was constitutionally unable to rebel against his orders and so he refused Niccolo’s offer. That is why he died. Niccolo killed him and got hold of the diary.
“Now,” Jake said, “we come to the end of act one. Is everyone following me so far?”
“How much more of this do we have to listen to?” Brian asked Martin.
“Just until he’s through,” Martin said.
“I’m going to get more interesting from now on,” Jake said, with a glance at Brian. “But let’s not leave Niccolo quite so abruptly. One thing ruined his plan. Prior here had already discovered Riordan’s wartime frauds — the frauds revealed in the diary. Thus, Prior knocked Niccolo out of a sale. Riordan wasn’t interested in suppressing information at a fat figure, when the same dope was already in the Government’s hands. Thus when Niccolo called Riordan to make a sale he was told to go to hell. Riordan knew Prior had the dope on him because Prior had told me and I, in turn, had told Riordan.