Act of Fear (11 page)

‘So,’ he said when he hung up, ‘what can I do for you, Mr …?’

‘Dan Fortune. You can tell me where I can find Miss Driscoll.’

‘Nancy—?’

His voice gave him away when he tried to stop. The ‘Nan’ part of Nancy came out fast and surprised. The end of the name was modulated and trailed off. His jaw muscles clamped hard to prevent any more involuntary sounds. I could see the knots of muscle along his jaw. I had also seen the surprise. The name had hit him unprepared. Exactly why it was a shock I didn’t know, but I could guess. Judging from the way he ran his office, Mr Walsh liked young ladies. But I was not interested in the manager’s love life unless it related to Jo-Jo Olsen.

‘Miss Nancy Driscoll, right,’ I said as if remembering some official report that had sent me here to the travel bureau. ‘I’d like to talk to her.’

‘I’m afraid she’s not here,’ Walsh said.

There was a tone in his voice that started a small alarm in my brain. Walsh was being cautious. And something else. The manager had a faint question in his voice. The caution could be caused by his interest in the girl, if he had an interest. But what was the question I heard?

‘When do you expect her?’ I said. I decided to be cautious too.

‘I, ah, couldn’t say, Mr Fortune,’ Walsh said. ‘May I ask what your interest is?’

‘I can’t say,’ I said as brusquely as I could, trying to sound like a policeman. ‘But I have to talk to her. Maybe you can tell me where she is.’

Walsh squeezed at the bicep muscle of his left arm with his right hand. ‘Well, I’m not sure …’

I had a thought. ‘How long since she’s been to work, Mr Walsh?’

‘What?’ the manager said. ‘Oh, well, about a week. Yes, this is Friday, and she hasn’t been in since last Friday. I mean, she was here all day last Friday, but not since.’

‘In other words, she didn’t show last Monday and hasn’t been in all week.’

‘Yes,’ Walsh said. ‘That’s it.’

‘Has she called in?’

‘Er, well, no,’ Walsh said.

There it was again. The caution and question in the voice of the manager. Did he think I was a snooper hired by his wife? That was more than possible. He was nervous about something. I began to think that the manager had more than a passing interest in Nancy Driscoll. He was acting very much like a man with a lot on his mind and a hot potato in his pocket. But just at that moment I had more on my mind than an office scandal.

The Driscoll girl had not been to work all week. She had not called in sick, if Walsh were telling the truth. And Jo-Jo had done his fadeout last Friday. I felt a lot like swearing. After all I had done so far it could turn out that Jo-Jo Olsen was just off with the Driscoll girl. There could be a hundred reasons why he would not tell about it. No, there had to be more. My two shadows were looking for Jo-Jo for some reason. Still, it was possible that Jo-Jo had planned to run far and stay long and had taken the Driscoll girl along.

‘All right,’ I said, ‘suppose you give me her address.’

‘Well, I …’ Walsh began.

‘I think you’d better,’ I said.

Walsh considered me. ‘She lives at 145 West Seventy-Fourth Street, apartment 2B.’

‘Thanks,’ I said.

All the females watched me go. The grey-haired harpie gave me a smug look as if she was sure that her Mr Walsh had handled my type. I grinned all around, and they became busy. I glanced back. Walsh had forgotten to close his door behind me. I saw him through the open door. He was talking fast on the telephone. I had not heard it ring. Walsh was calling someone. I had a good hunch that it was about me.

All at once another possibility occurred to me. I did not like the thought. Maybe my two shadows and the mayhem so far on Pete had no connection to Stettin or Tani Jones but to Nancy Driscoll. It was possible. Maybe Jo-Jo had run off with the Driscoll girl and someone did not like that. My two hard types could be looking for Jo-Jo about Nancy Driscoll. It was as good a theory as any other I had come up with. With the little I knew, it was a fine theory.

It was also a dangerous theory. If it had any germ of truth in it, Walsh was probably calling down the wolves on me.

I got out of that office and out of the building. Once I reached the crowded midtown street I felt better. Somehow daylight and sun and crowds make a man feel safer. What can happen in broad daylight on a street full of innocent people? Plenty, that’s what can happen. I can name six unsolved killings that took place in broad daylight on a city street. Caution was indicated.

So I took the short subway ride up to Seventy-second Street, with a careful and watchful change at Columbus Circle, and went warily up out of the station into the heat.

I walked north on Central Park West in the shadow of the Dakota Apartments. The park was across the street to the right. It was still early and the park was green and bright in the sun. New York, in summer, is always at its best before eleven o’clock in the morning. The air is clearer then, the heat not yet an oven.

I turned left down Seventy-Fourth Street. It was a street of nursing homes and renovated brownstones. As I reached Columbus Avenue I began to watch all round. I was wary. Crowds can be a help when you want to hide or fade away, but they can also hide men looking for you. Columbus Avenue was crowded. The one-way traffic thundered down with the staggered lights like a massive herd of roaring animals. I crossed on the green, and approached 145 on the far side of the street.

This block between Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues was far different. It was a polyglot mess of rooming-house brownstones, old and shabby brown-stones, renovated brownstones, refaced brownstones, and a few tall modern apartment houses. There was also a school and a cheap hotel at the Amsterdam Avenue corner. I passed 145 across the street and walked casually on to the corner. But I had had a good look at 145.

It was a renovated pair of brownstones combined into one apartment house but still with two entrances. I knew that 2B would be the parlour floor rear – about the best apartment in the building. With two apartments on the floor, it would be a small apartment. I waited for a time at the corner. I saw no one who seemed interested in me and no one suspicious. I had come to talk to Miss Nancy Driscoll. I walked back to 145 on its side of the street, and went down into the vestibule.

It was a small vestibule. The kind with an outer and inner glass door, coloured tiles on the floor, and the row of mailboxes between the two doors. There was no mail in Nancy Driscoll’s mailbox, which could mean that she had not gone away, or had come back. It could also indicate that she did not get much mail. I pressed the bell of 2B and waited. In the tiny vestibule I was feeling as exposed and nervous as a fish in a fishbowl. There was no one on the street outside who looked suspicious or dangerous, but I had that tingling in the arm that wasn’t there that comes when I sense that all is not right. The door buzzed and I pushed it open and went in. It was a good sign. Nancy Driscoll was at home. I needed some good signs about now.

The cellar door was directly in front of me at the end of a short hall. There was no elevator. I checked the cellar door and found it open. That was a good thing to know, just in case. Inside, it was a typical West Side apartment house, the hall and stairwell empty and silent with everyone out at work in the morning. I went up the stairs slowly. There was one short flight, a landing, another short flight, and the first floor. The first floor turned out to be no more than a small landing with two doors at right angles and the stairs going on up. The door to 2B was directly in front of me. I listened but heard no sound inside. I pressed the doorbell.

The door opened instantly.

A man stood there.

There was a pistol in his right hand.

I tried for the stairs down.

‘Don’t try!’

I stopped.

‘Inside.’

I turned and walked into the apartment. The man followed me down the narrow kitchen, the pistol steady in his hand, and into the living-room, which had a fine old fire-place and high ceiling. One look told me that Nancy Driscoll, wherever she was, had been a girl who wanted things – Things, you understand? The living room was filled with all the proper pieces of furniture: a small bar stocked with all the proper glasses, the whiskey in decanters with little metal name tags; there were the proper candle-sticks, bric-á-brac, prints on the walls; the bookcases were filled with elegant sets that looked as if they had never been cut and rows of best-sellers jacketed in plastic. Nancy Driscoll was a girl who wanted what everyone else in the middle had or wanted.

‘Against the wall! Hands flat on the wall. Lean.’

I leaned against the wall with my lone hand flat on it. I felt his hand give me a quick but complete frisk for weapons. I came up clean, and he stepped back.

‘Okay, sit down.’

I sat on a cheap modern couch facing him. Up close, the couch and everything else in the apartment was cheap, shoddy, built to look elegant but made of boxwood, pegboard and tacks. And I guessed that Nancy Driscoll had spent most of her salary for a lot of years to get together this pitiful show of what she yearned to have but could have only in shoddy imitation. I was getting a picture of Nancy Driscoll. A sad picture.

My captor put his pistol away in a small belt holster.

‘Who are you? What do you want with the Driscoll dame?’

He was a man of medium height and weight. His suit was old and had not cost more than fifty dollars new. His shoes were worn and half-soled. His hat had not been blocked for years. His socks drooped. His face was pale and tired. I looked at him and knew who Walsh had called. A man who looked and acted like this man and who had the right to carry a gun could only be a policeman. The cheapest hood would not have been so poorly dressed or so tired. He had detective written all over him, and he had been waiting for me.

‘Fortune,’ I said. ‘Walsh tipped you, right? I’m a private operator.’

‘Good for you,’ the man said. ‘Now tell me about the Driscoll woman.’

‘A case,’ I said. ‘The trail led here. Call Captain Gazzo at Homicide if you want to check, Lieutenant …?’

‘Sergeant Doucette,’ he said. ‘The girl wasn’t very important, Fortune.’

I heard the word. ‘Wasn’t?’

‘Yeh, she’s dead. I figured you could …’

The sergeant stopped and shrugged. I knew how he felt. He needed a break. I felt worse. I seemed to be moving fast backwards. Every lead turned into a new crime, and I was no closer to Jo-Jo Olsen. Except that this time I knew that Jo-Jo was connected to the Driscoll woman, and I now had a real reason for a man to run. It was not a happy thought.

‘When?’ I said.

‘I thought you could tell me,’ Sergeant Doucette said. ‘I guess we better go talk to the lieutenant.’

‘I’d rather talk to Captain Gazzo.’

Doucette shrugged again. ‘From here you go to the lieutenant. After that he’ll tell you.’

He walked behind me out of the apartment and down the stairs. I decided that Doucette had been a detective long enough. He believed nothing and no one. He took no chances. In his work that was a good rule.

Gazzo clasped his hands behind his head and looked up at the ceiling of his office. I sat and smoked. The captain again did not look as if he had slept. But then, he always looked like that. Why would a man bother to sleep when the clock in his brain never moved from midnight and it was hard to tell if the faces that passed before him were real or in a dream?

‘This is getting to be a habit,’ the captain said. ‘A bad penny. Nobody likes bad pennies. You sure there is a Jo-Jo Olsen?’

There was a faint edge to Gazzo’s voice. I knew that it did not mean anything. It was a reflex. I was not a visitor this time. I was a man picked up looking for a murder victim, at the scene of the crime, and the captain’s voice automatically took on the hard edge, the hint of suspicion. Gazzo could not help it, the way an old fighter cannot resist a bell.

‘How did the Driscoll girl die?’ I asked. ‘The lieutenant forgot to tell me.’

I was beginning to feel like a puppet on a string. No matter what I did I ended up asking questions like a straight man in a nightclub routine. All my efforts so far had only uncovered more possible mayhem to lay at Jo-Jo Olsen’s door.

‘Multiple bruises and contusions that led to fatal brain damage,’ Gazzo said. ‘In other words she was knocked around by someone with heavy hands.’

‘There seems a lot of knocking around in this,’ I said.

Gazzo was thoughtful. ‘No robbery, no forcible entry.’

‘When?’

‘Sometime last Saturday, the M.E. says. We found her on Monday. That manager, Walsh, found her. When she didn’t show for work he called her. He got no answer so went around. At least, that’s his story. He had a key.’

Now I knew what had been strange about Walsh. I also heard the first solid motive for murder and runout in this whole mess. One woman, two men. Classic. Only it had been the Driscoll girl after Jo-Jo, according to my reports, which made the motive fit Walsh a lot better than Jo-Jo.

‘Is Walsh clear?’

The captain stared at his ceiling. ‘Who’s ever clear? He was at home with his family in Port Washington on Friday night. Early Saturday he took his boat out alone. He was out all day. Says he was cruising eastward on the sound. No one saw him he can be sure of. Stayed overnight on the boat somewhere near Port Jefferson and got home about noon on Sunday.’