Die, Little Goose: A Bret Hardin Mystery. David Alexander
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a knife. When it came my turn, I couldn’t go through with it. I couldn’t stand the thought of the pain, even though I wanted to die. I went out and got drunk. I’ve been drunk for hours now. I want to give myself up, but I can’t bear to have policemen beat me. I just want to die, to pay for what I’ve done as quickly as I can. Old Jim told me you know a police lieutenant named Romano. He says he’s a decent man. I want you to take me to him.”
“Does Jim know you killed Daphne?”
“No one knows. I killed her about this time last night. She’s been there in her wheelchair dead for twenty-four hours, Hardin, and nobody knows about it yet. I ran out of the house and got drunk, and I’m still drunk. I just walked and walked and walked when the bars were closed. I had a bottle. I’ve been trying to work myself up to going to a police station, but I was afraid they’d beat me. Then I thought about you and how you knew the lieutenant. For God’s sake, take me to him, Hardin.”
“Are you sure you killed your wife?” Hardin asked. “This isn’t just some drunken idea you’ve got?”
“Good God, man! Of course I’m sure!”
“But why?” asked Hardin. “Old Jim Lennox told me she was doing as well as could be expected. He sees a lot of her. He says she doesn’t have much pain. And he told me you and this new partner, Elsa, have just been booked for a spot in a night club starting next week.”
“She wouldn’t tell him how much she suffered, Hardin. She suffered terribly. She has, ever since that night I drove a car while I was drunk and smashed it up. I was thrown clear and was hardly hurt at all. But Daphne could never dance again. She couldn’t even walk again. And it was my fault. We were a top act, Hardin. Adriane and Daphne, The Temple Dancers. This new girl and I, all we get is cheap hotel bookings and spots in strip joints.”
“Romano’s working the four to midnight,” Hardin said. “He’s at Homicide West on Twentieth. We can get a cab and drive downtown if you’re sure that’s what you want.”
“I’m sure,” Adrian declared.
As they walked down the alley, Hardin wondered why he was going out of his way to help a comparative stranger who was not only drunk but was probably a screwball. He hadn’t wanted to leave the game. One of the gambler’s ironclad axioms is “Stay in action when you’re winning.” He was doing this mainly because of old Jim Lennox, he supposed. Old Jim had seemed to like this boy and his crippled young wife, and to pity them. Hardin had always felt ironically paternal toward Lennox, who was some forty years his senior.
They walked toward Ninth Avenue. Two blocks back of them the brightest lights in all the world blazed on Broadway, but this neighborhood was cellar-dark. Men and women in underclothes and night dress leaned far out of the windows of brick and brownstone tenements, gasping for a breath of the stale air. In their despairing fight against the heat, they no longer lit their low-watt light bulbs, dreading to add even this small warmth to the choking pall inside their box-like flats. New York, Hardin thought, has the brightest lights and darkest byways of any city on earth.
At the corner of Ninth Avenue a red neon sign sputtered, flickering on and off, as if it, too, were melting in the heat.
The twisted tubes of the sign spelled out “Mike’s Bar.” Adrian paused at the corner. He looked at his wrist watch and said, “I’ve got to have a drink before I go through with this, Hardin. It’s only ten to eleven. We’ve got time. Your friend will be on duty for another hour.”
Hardin shrugged. “It’s your party,” he said.
Mike’s place did not boast air conditioning. The door stood open and an electric fan on a tall standard blew swirling patterns of smoke and the stench of sweating bodies through the trapped air of the gloomy interior. Soiled men with dead faces stood at the bar, drinking silently. Adrian ordered a double shot of bar whisky and disregarded the water chaser the bartender placed beside it. Hardin refused a drink. While Adrian was drinking two doubles, Hardin said, “If the body has been there since last night, someone must have found it. I know your rooming house. It’s a clean and decent place—one of the last of the old-fashioned Broadway theatrical residences—and Mrs. Mattingly wouldn’t let a day go by without having your room cleaned. The maid must have been in there this morning. Jim drops by to chat with your wife all the time. He must have knocked on the door when he got home tonight after the paper was out. And your partner—Elsa Travers, is that her name?—lives in the room right next to you. She must have looked in, too, when you didn’t show up today.”
Adrian Temple said, “I can’t understand why they haven’t found the body, but I can’t believe they have. I’ve read all the papers and there’s nothing in any of them. They would have played it up. We were a famous dance team once. It was Daphne, though, who was the star. I was just her dancing partner. We had top billings everywhere. We were guest artists on all the big TV shows. We could name our own price then. We had an apartment on Park Avenue and a little hideaway in Connecticut and I drove an MG. I wrecked the MG when I was drunk and crippled Daphne for life. I was nothing without Daphne. She was the act. Since then, for two years now, I’ve tried a lot of partners and this last one, Elsa, is no better than any of the others. They book us to fill in between the strip women at cheap clubs. All our money’s gone. The hospitals and doctors and operations took that.”
He drank the last of his whisky and said, “They haven’t found her yet. That’s why I want to confess. I can’t stand the thought of Daphne being there all alone, even though she’s dead.”
Hardin remained silent. Temple replaced his glass on the bar. His hand was shaking and his face had gone pale. He turned to Bart and said, “Hardin, it’s not true what they say about electrocutions, is it? I mean, they don’t give you the current slowly, torture you to death? I can’t stand pain. I can’t help it. It’s a phobia. I’ve always been like that. I get sick all over at the thought of pain. They give you dope before they take you to the chair, don’t they, Hardin?”
Hardin said, “I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been electrocuted.”
Adrian glanced at the big clock on the wall. “It’s eleven,” he said. “We’d better go while I still have the courage, before the whisky wears off. I’ve got to go through with it now.”
They left the bar and found a cab. Ninth Avenue is a one-way downtown street with staggered lights and they made good time. They reached Manhattan West in slightly under a quarter of an hour. The old precinct station was the clearing house for all the murders west of Fifth Avenue on Manhattan Island. Appropriately enough, it was located in the edge of the area that used to be known as Hell’s Kitchen.
The desk sergeant on duty was a pleasant, rather scholarly-looking man with horn-rimmed glasses and he might have resembled a high school Latin teacher if he had not worn a policeman’s uniform. He knew Hardin. “If you want the lieutenant,” he said, “you’ll find him upstairs in his little sweatbox.”
Hardin thanked the sergeant and led his companion up a flight of worn stairs.
Romano’s office was an airless cubicle that contained a desk, two chairs and an old leather couch where the lieutenant, who seldom went off duty when a big kill was breaking, often slept. Romano sat in a creaking swivel chair behind the battered desk. He was in his shirt sleeves and his shirt was soaked. A small electric fan blew hot air at him. He was a dark, heavy-set man with a mane of black hair that was sprinkled with gray and shining with beads of perspiration. He perspired freely the year around and tonight he was drenched. His rough-hewn profile gleamed in the light of a green-shaded desk lamp. A tall young detective named Grierson reclined on the lumpy leather couch. His attire was less formal than Romano’s. His crumpled shirt hung from the back of a chair and his undershirt gleamed white against his wide, sun-tanned shoulders. Grierson raised himself to a sitting position as Bart and Adrian entered the office.
Romano said, “Hello, editor. How are you enjoying our heat wave? And who’s your friend?”
“This is Adrian Temple,” Bart replied. “He wants to talk to you.”
Romano looked