Chapter 9 #2
Miss Cabot had brought her knitting, one of a pair of mittens, and while they awaited events she explained to Daisy how she created the snowflake pattern.
Daisy hoped she looked as if she were listening.
Actually, she was recalling the reasons Lambert had given why the police might suspect her of shooting Carmody.
Now that her second meeting with Sergeant Gilligan was surely imminent, her nerves were twitching.
She was quite glad to have the redoubtable Miss Genevieve at her side.
They did not have long to wait. Gilligan arrived, followed through the swinging doors by his retinue, Detective O’Rourke and the large plainclothesman, whose name Daisy thought was Larssen.
Gilligan marched straight towards the reception desk, but O’Rourke scanned the lobby, saw Daisy, and tapped the sergeant on the shoulder. “There’s the dame we want, Sergeant,” Daisy heard him say.
“The lady, O’Rourke, the lady!” Gilligan snapped. “Let’s remember the lady’s husband is one of the higher-ups ‘over there.’” He advanced on Daisy with a would-be ingratiating smile. Someone must have given him an exaggerated idea of Alec’s importance. “Good morning, ma’am.”
Before Daisy could respond, Miss Genevieve put her oar in: “So you made sergeant at last, Gilligan!”
Gilligan swung towards her, his expression changing to one of dismay amounting almost to alarm. “Miss Cabot? Rats!” he muttered.
“Miss Genevieve, if you please. My sister is Miss Cabot.” She waved regally.
“Delighted, I’m sure,” twittered Miss Cabot.
“Don’t tell me they’ve put you in charge of the investigation into Otis Carmody’s death?”
The sergeant bridled but sounded resigned. “Yes, ma’am. At least, the D.A.’s Office is on the case, too.”
“And the Justice Department, I hear.”
“That isn’t in the papers!” Gilligan scowled at Daisy.
“Not yet,” said Miss Genevieve pointedly, “but I’m still in the business, you know. I keep my ear to the ground. I hear things.”
“Rats!”
Miss Genevieve’s smile made Daisy think of a Cheshire cat with stolen cream on its whiskers. “I’m not on the crime beat any longer, to be sure. I have no obligation to turn over what I find out to an editor.”
“I guess not, ma’am.”
“At present I’m inclined to keep my knowledge to myself, for the sake of my young friend, Mrs. Fletcher. Of course, I may change my mind.”
Daisy did not rate Gilligan high on the evolutionary ladder, but a hint so broad was not beyond his comprehension.
“There’s sure no need to change your mind, Miss Genevieve, no reason at all. I just wanna go over what Mrs. Fletcher saw again, case maybe she’s remembered sumpin else, and then we’ll go downtown so she can check out the mug book.”
“Oh no!” said Miss Genevieve sharply. “Police headquarters is no place for a gently bred young lady.”
“Sure ain’t!” Larssen agreed.
The sergeant glared at him. “O.K., Larssen, you can go get the book, pronto. And make it snappy.”
As the blond giant hurried off, looking martyred, Gilligan glanced around the lobby. It wasn’t exactly busy, but a few people were coming and going, and Kevin was leaning against the wall at the corner near his elevator, keeping a watchful eye on proceedings.
“This is too public,” Gilligan grunted. “We’ll go up to your room, Mrs. Fletcher.”
“Oh no!” Miss Genevieve objected again. A glint in her eye, she went on with a primness quite foreign to her, “Most improper, Sergeant. Mrs. Fletcher may be a married woman, but she is young and pretty.”
“Spare my blushes!” Daisy uttered, trying not to laugh.
She wasn’t at all surprised when Miss Genevieve next suggested, in a tone as martyred as Larssen’s face had been, “You’d better all come up to our suite, I guess, so that Ernestine and I can play chaperon.”
“Geez, save me from nosy old maids!” Gilligan muttered,
obviously no more deceived than Daisy. Thoroughly disgruntled, he gave in. “O.K., your place, then, if that’s the way you wannit. Course, I’ll hafta bring my other witness along. Hey, you, Lambert! I wanna word with you.”
“Oh dear,” said Miss Cabot, at last breaking her appalled silence.
Miss Genevieve was momentarily disconcerted. However, by the time Gilligan gave her a sly glance to see how she reacted to his adding Lambert to her invitation to her suite, she looked intrigued.
Disappointed, he turned back to Lambert, who stammered, “Who, me?”—apparently his standard response when addressed unexpectedly.
“You gotta twin brother?” Gilligan asked nastily.
As Lambert jumped up and came over, Miss Genevieve said to Daisy, “That young nonentity was a witness, too? What a coincidence! I suppose he was also visiting an editor, though he failed to mention to me any ambition in the writing line.” She bent a severe frown upon him.
“Excuse me, ma’am,” he apologized. “I don’t want to intrude …”
“Come on, come on,” Gilligan interrupted. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
At Miss Genevieve’s halting pace, which slowed deliberately when Gilligan started to chivvy, they went across to the elevators. Kevin jumped to attention.
“Going up?” he asked eagerly, no doubt hoping to glean a few grains of information.
O’Rourke opened his mouth for the first time. “This here’s the young shaver that his sister was chambermaid to Carmody, Sergeant.”
“That right? Gave you some trouble, din’t he?”
“He didn’t have to put the screws on, Sarge! Bridey tole him everything right off.”
“Doncha get fresh with me,” Gilligan snarled, reaching out to cuff the boy.
Daisy put her hand on his arm. “I’m sure he’s only telling the truth, Sergeant. Bridget was eager to put her knowledge at the service of the police.”
“Oh yeah?” He stared at her. “Whadda you know about it?”
“She’s my chambermaid, too.”
“That don’t mean …”
“Come on, come on, Sergeant!” said Miss Genevieve, who with her sister had entered the lift by now. “Let’s get this show on the road.”
“Aw, the heck with it!” Gilligan surrendered, to Daisy’s relief. She didn’t want him delving into just how much Bridget had told her.
“Third floor, please, Kevin,” she said, joining the Misses Cabot.
“Going up!” he said in his usual jaunty manner and winked at her. The men crowded in after her and Kevin shut the gates with a double clang.
“Geez, I’m glad Larssen ain’t in here, too,” said O’Rourke as the laden lift creaked upward.
“The other detective?” ventured Lambert, squeezed into a corner. “Where did he go?”
“To get the mug book,” Daisy informed him, “so that you and I can try to identify the fugitive.”
“I never saw him! I swear, Sergeant, I never saw his face!”
“Then you won’t reckernize any of the shots, will you?” Gilligan grunted.
“Third floor,” Kevin announced.
The Misses Cabot’s sitting room was large enough to accommodate everyone easily, but by no means large enough to afford Gilligan any privacy he might have hoped for.
Miss Genevieve, installed by the fireplace, listened avidly to every word as he took Daisy through her evidence again.
This time he started with the overheard argument.
“Word for word, near as you can remember, including the rude word the dame used.”
“Cover your ears, sister,” advised Miss Genevieve, making no move to cover her own.
“‘You bastard,’” said Daisy, “‘I wouldn’t come back to you if you made a million dollars.’ Then Carmody said, ‘If I made a million dollars, you still wouldn’t squeeze one red cent out of me.’ More or less.”
“He said, ‘More or less’?”
“No, Sergeant, I say that’s more or less what they said.”
“More or less!” said Gilligan in disgust. “It can’ta been Carmody, though, it was this guy Bender he was blackmailing said that.”
“I still think it was Carmody,” Daisy persisted.
“Sure, more or less!” the sergeant jeered.
Daisy wanted to point out that, considering what Bridget had overheard, it made perfect sense for Carmody to have been the speaker.
But she didn’t want to get the chambermaid into hot water.
Besides, Gilligan had probably bullied the poor girl into changing her story to fit his preconceived notions.
Miss Genevieve put her oar in. “You believe Carmody was blackmailing Mr. Bender?” she asked.
“Sure thing!” said Gilligan. “There’s enough stuff in
Carmody’s papers up in his room to worry Barton Bender plenty.”
“Such as?”
In the face of Miss Genevieve’s scepticism, the sergeant was too eager to prove his point to remember discretion. “He owns a whole lotta tenements, slum property, that he’s been paying off the city inspectors not to see they’re falling down. Not that that’s any big deal,” he added hastily.
The inspectors must be Tammany appointees, like Gilligan, Daisy guessed.
“His tenants don’t like it, they can go somewhere else.” Miss Genevieve’s sarcasm was obvious.
“Yeah, and he ain’t above encouraging ’em.
Gotta gang of hoodlums he sends round to evict troublemakers, and he don’t care who gets hurt.
Well, troublemakers, I got no beef with that, but them that’s a bit behind with the rent …
The public don’t like reading about widders and orphans getting roughed up.
That gets in the papers, the Police Department’s gonna sit up and take notice. ”
“I should hope so!” Daisy exclaimed.
Gilligan shrugged. “It’s a free country.”
“Sister, may I remove my hands from my ears now?” Miss Cabot asked plaintively.
With an impatient nod to her sister, Miss Genevieve said, “Unpleasant, but I can’t see Bender killing to save his reputation.
Isn’t he wealthy enough to hire the best lawyers, and to pay his toughs to take the rap without splitting on him?
Murder is a whole different ball-game. It would raise the stakes too high for his liking. ”
“You been talking to the guy?” Gilligan demanded.
“No, but that sort of person generally runs true to type. You’ve talked to him, what did you think of him?” She
paused. “You have talked to him, haven’t you, Sergeant?”
“No,” Gilligan admitted sourly. “I didn’t get to Carmody’s room till last night.
Bender was out—some nightclub his housekeeper said, she didn’t know where.
I left a man to watch, but he didn’t come home.
I guess he musta gone on to Mrs. Carmody’s hotel room, and we ain’t got a line on that yet.
I got men out going round the hotels. But messing with his tenants ain’t all Carmody had on him. ”
“No?”
“There’s some funny business with mortgage loans on his properties. I turned it over to our fraud people. If it’s what it looks like to me, he’ll go down for a stretch anyways, even we can’t pin the murder on him—though I ain’t giving up on that, not by a long shot!”
“You’d do better to stick to what Carmody was digging out about Tammany’s business,” Miss Genevieve declared. “What did you find in his papers on that subject?”
Gilligan turned sullen. “You know I can’t discuss evidence. Give a dame an inch and she wants all hell. I didn’t oughta’ve told you nuttin and I ain’t gonna tell no more.”
Miss Genevieve had already induced the detective to reveal far more than Daisy would have dared hope for.
“Eugene Cannon” must have been a first-rate crime reporter.
Daisy hadn’t had to lift a finger to obtain masses of information about Carmody’s wife and her lover.
She wished she could meet them. One learnt so much by actually talking to a person, but at least she had plenty of food for thought.
Leisure for thought she had not.
“O.K., let’s get on with your story, Mrs. Fletcher,” Gilligan growled. “Maybe you’ll remember sumpin useful this time around.”