Lucky Stiff - Craig Rice (good book club books .TXT) 📗
- Author: Craig Rice
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Malone shook his head again and said, “It’s still no.”
Anna Marie shrugged her shoulders and said, “It’s your question, you answer it.”
“It was a damned convenient way to keep out of the public eye,” Malone said. “If Jesse Conway, and Warden Garrity, and, eventually, Bill McKeown had been murdered shortly after your release, the police might have asked some embarrassing questions. Only by playing ghost could you get away with it.”
“Get away with what?” A harsh note had come into her voice.
“Why,” Malone said amiably, “getting rid of the people you hated, grabbing off all the money you could, and quietly disappearing.” This time he intended the smile. “You were luckier than you thought you’d be. You discovered you didn’t have to disappear quietly—you could reappear publicly with your face all over the front pages and a chance at a Hollywood career.”
“Go on,” she said coldly.
“Anna Marie,” Malone complained, “don’t use that tone of voice with me. I’m only telling you what happened. You got in touch with Bill McKeown as soon as you got back to Chicago. You told him you were alive, and you told him how and why. You pretended you didn’t know anything about his part in the frame-up. But you warned him that Jesse Conway was about to crack. You put Jesse on the spot for Bill McKeown by calling him and telling him to come to your apartment. You told McKeown that Garrity was ready to spill the whole story, and you put him on the spot by calling him, telling him to drive to Chicago and to get in touch with me right away.” He paused and relit his cigar.
“You told me you were guessing,” Anna Marie reminded him.
“But I’m guessing right, now,” Malone said, not looking at her. “Jesse Conway wouldn’t have come to your apartment unless you asked him to. I can do a little more guessing, and correct me if I guess wrong. Milly Dale knew about you and Bill McKeown. She may have suspected the real truth. You went out the day of her death and talked to McKeown. You told him to follow her and make sure she wasn’t going to talk. When he was afraid that she was going to talk, he killed her. In a way, you put her on the spot for him, too. Killing Louis Perez and Earl Wilks was probably his own idea, but it wouldn’t have been necessary if it hadn’t been for you.”
She walked out into the middle of the room and said, “There’s a telephone in the apartment downstairs in case you want to call the police.”
“Why should I,” Malone said, “when you’re a wonderful Little Girl with a great future ahead of you? It would break Lou Berg’s heart, and I like Lou Berg. What good would it do him, for instance, if I told the police and the world the reason Eva Childers set not one, but two men, on the trail of what had actually happened to Big Joe—that she hated you, suspected the truth, and wanted the world to know it.”
Anna Marie said very calmly, “Then you know who hired Ike Malloy to murder Big Joe and frame me.”
“It’s all in the diary,” Malone said, slapping the little book with the palm of his hand. “There’s only one person in the world it could have been. Big Joe Childers himself!”
He turned and faced her. “That’s why he started to write a letter beginning ‘Forgive me.’ He wanted you to read it— afterward. Because he loved you, even on the day when he’d arranged his own murder—but arranged for you to suffer and die for it. And you knew all the time, didn’t you? And Jesse Conway knew. And Garrity knew because he was Big Joe’s brother-in-law, and Big Joe had confided in him. And Bill McKeown knew.”
Anna Marie murmured, “What are you going to do about it Malone? Tell the story to the whole world?”
“Why should I,” Malone said again, “when such a number of otherwise useless people died to keep it from being told? It would be a shame for their deaths to be wasted as much as their lives were. What good would it do for me to tell Daniel von Flanagan that Big Joe Childers was heartbroken and desperately ill, that he knew he could live only a few more months, that he’d discovered that the girl he adored was cheating on him, and even worse than that, that she was the brains behind a particularly nasty racket.”
“I was completely innocent as far as Big Joe’s murder was concerned—and Jesse Conway—and Garrity—” She looked at him stony-faced. “You can’t prove that I put them on the spot for Bill McKeown. You can’t prove that I so much as talked to Bill McKeown after I came back to Chicago.”
“I’m not trying to prove anything,” Malone said, still pacing the floor, “but Bill McKeown was an Irishman and he wasn’t frightened when he saw what might have been your ghost back at The Happy Days. He was startled, that’s all.” He paused, smiled at her, and said, “Well, that’s it. I’ll burn the diary. You’d better hop in the cab, go back to the hotel and pack, if you’re leaving for Hollywood on the six o’clock plane.”
She looked at him with wide uncomprehending eyes. “Why, Malone?” she said. “I mean—why don’t you—?”
“You haven’t murdered anybody,” Malone said.
She said, “There’s something about—being an accessory before the fact.”
Malone said, “Don’t keep that cab driver waiting too long. He might start cruising around for another fare.”
She shrugged her shoulders, walked to the door, paused there, and said, “You still haven’t answered, why?”
“For the same reason Big Joe Childers started to write you a letter beginning ‘Forgive me,’” Malone said. “I love you, too. Now you’d better go.” He closed his eyes.
For a moment he felt her arms around him, her lips against his. Before he could reach for her she was gone. He opened his eyes and saw briefly a shadowy gray form fleeting down the stairs. He heard the downstairs door open and close, he heard the cab start. He knew he would never see her again.
He paused and looked back at the unfurnished and desolate room, then he returned and started slowly down the stairs. He had reached the bottom step when the front door opened and Al Harmon came in.
“I thought you’d come here, pal,” Al Harmon said, lighting a cigarette. “Look, that blonde isn’t sore at me after all, and she’s got a friend for you.”
It was three in the afternoon when the door of Malone’s office opened and Maggie looked up from her magazine.
The little lawyer came in, a trifle wearily, but his eyes, including the blackened one, were bright. He greeted Maggie with a cheerful nod and said, “Any calls?”
“Nothing important,” she said, “just a couple of prospective clients with a lot of money.”
He ignored her and glanced at the newspapers on her desks. They told of the brilliant job Daniel von Flanagan of the homicide squad had done in smashing the protection racket and finding the murderers of Big Joe Childers, Jesse Conway, Warden Garrity, Milly Dale, and Louis Perez. The story explored the fact that the murderer had not lived to stand trial, but commended Captain von Flanagan just the same.
There was also a story of what an inspired reporter called, “The Greatest Hoax in History”—ex-ghost at the airport on her way to Hollywood. There might also have been a story about a well-known Chicago lawyer being arrested after a fist fight in a South Chicago saloon, if Malone hadn’t done a quick job of contacting a friend of his on the Herald-American, and bribed his way out of the South Chicago jail.
“Take a letter to Mrs. Eva Childers,” Malone said. “Tell her that Anna Marie St. Clair’s only relative is a Mrs. Bessie O’Leary in Grove Junction, Wisconsin. Tell her the murderer of Big Joe Childers has been discovered and that the case is closed. Send her a bill and leave the amount blank, and let her use her own judgment.”
He started toward the office door. “Anything else?” Maggie said.
“Yes,” Malone said. He went into the office, opened his closet, took out the long, flat, white box, and carried it back to Maggie’s desk.
“Send this back to the Toujours Gai Lingerie Shoppe,” he said. “Call Miss Fontaine and ask her if she has the same model in rose in—”
He paused and closed his eyes for a moment,—“size sixteen.”
Maggie made a note, sniffed scornfully, and said, “By the way, did I hear anybody make any remarks about getting to any office by nine o’clock in the mornings, or was I dreaming?”
“That,” Malone said happily, “was yesterday. Believe me, Maggie, I’m a changed man.”
He went into the office, closed the door, and in five minutes was sound asleep.
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