Spider’s Cage Page 5

  YOU’RE ONLY AS GOOD AS YOUR LAST PERFORMANCE, BUT you might do better—or worse—tonight.

  He could hear Jodie Ryan telling it to him, he could see her saying it, so he was probably unconscious. He put his hand out to touch her.

  “Now, now, Mr. Windrow. Try to save it for Saturday night.”

  He forced his swollen eyes to become slits and admit light. Beyond the plastic bracelet on his extended wrist, a nurse bustled about his bed, tucking in the sheets with one hand and catching his hand with her other. He could see gray hair, broad shoulders and thick arms. Jodie had gotten old.

  “ … just about the luckiest man in this hospital,” she was saying, “don’t make me break your arm. It would spoil your streak.” She folded his arm across his chest, then gently took a pillow from beneath his head and removed its casing. “Of course,” she mused, “there’s Seamus Moriarty, in Supply…”

  “Sup …” Windrow muttered. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. His voice sounded like a prison dishwasher. He cleared his throat, tried again, and got no sound at all.

  “Supply,” the nurse confirmed, unperturbed. “Seamus won two thousand dollars last week on the goddam Pittsburgh Steelers.”

  “Two… sand… lars,” Windrow croaked. “guess… lot of… dough… in Sup…”

  “Not for the Irish it isn’t.”

  “Cath’lic… Protes…?

  “Both.”

  “The generalist swine.”

  “Junky. Cleaned out the dispensary morphine, flew to Nevada and moved into a whorehouse. Shot the wad and the bindle in three glorious days and nights.” She thumped up the pillow and gently replaced it under his head.

  “I thought you said he was lucky.”

  “He was and still is,” she said, removing an empty pill cup from the table next to the bed. “He didn’t die and didn’t get caught.” She gave him a look. “You, on the other hand, didn’t die either.” She sighed. “But you got caught.”

  A man in a white coat with the tubes of a stethoscope spilling out of a side pocket entered the room. He carried a sheath of x-rays on a metal clip, wore a tie and a worried face.

  “So what makes me so lucky?” Windrow asked.

  “First man to touch me in three days and get away with it,” said the nurse, folding her big arms across her chest, and looking over the doctor’s shoulder. He held three x-rays up to the light, one by one, and shook his head over each. He looked at the last x-ray the longest, turning it in the light until it was upside down.

  “Mmmmmm,” he said.

  “Hmph,” said the nurse.

  “Am I draftable?” Windrow asked, hopefully.

  “Contraindicated,” muttered the doctor.

  “Tsk,” said the nurse. She shook her head.

  “Miraculous,” said the doctor, lowering the last film. He handed the x-rays to the nurse. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

  Windrow looked at him through his slits. Every muscle in his body was sore. He’d been run over by a Cadillac limousine and a house.

  “As far as the police could tell, your car rolled over at least three times, and they’re going to have to melt down a beach to replace all the windows you broke. Your car was completely destroyed, there’s nothing left of it. A wrecker had to park on the sidewalk and winch it out of the dining room through the hole in the wall. Surviving the impact, you should have been incinerated, you had a full tank of gasoline. Yet, all the gasoline did was run out on the orchids and a 17th century Persian rug. When you were thrown clear of the wreckage you should have been killed outright when the marble-topped dining room table cut you in half. Yet, the table was destroyed when the banana tree fell over it, a millisecond before you got there. Nice table, too; sat twelve with elbow room. Instead you landed in the arms of six dryads on a sixteenth century tapestry that hung a foot off the wall, destroying it too. But, it saved your life. A few feet to the left, you’d have hit a suit of armor holding a broad sword and battle axe. On the other side, an eight foot glass cabinet full of Dresden China.” He gestured emptily. “After you tore the tapestry off the wall, you and it fell onto a sofa that wasn’t supposed to have been there. The workmen who found you had moved it there while they were sanding down the floors in the living room.”

  He shook his head in disbelief. “It’s incredible,” he said. “In all my years as a sawbones, I’ve never seen anyone go through so much and come out so fit. The worst injury you sustained is that bruise on the left side of your face.”

  Windrow raised the eyebrow over the uninjured eye. Sal would laugh to hear that. He’d have to tell her about it when he caught up with her.

  The doctor nudged Windrow’s shoulder with a friendly fist. “You’ll be in good enough shape to start paying off the stuff you destroyed by Monday. It comes to about $775,000.” He shook his head. “Incredible. Just like on TV.” He looked Windrow straight in his slits with the wide eyes of the true believer. This had the effect of making the worried look a tired one. “You’re a very lucky man, Mr. Windrow. Luckiest guy I heard of since Seamus Moriarty won two thousand dollars on the goddam Pittsburgh—”

  “Don’t count your apples, apple.”

  Windrow closed his slits and groaned. “Morphine,” he said. “Taxi.”

  “You tell him, chief.”

  “Shut up, stupid.”

  Windrow didn’t want to recognize the voices of Max Bdeniowitz and Petrel Gleason. He pulled the bedclothes over his head. He could hear a siren, far away.

  “Good day inspector. He’s awake this morning, but he should rest,” the doctor suggested, helpfully.

  “We all should rest,” Bdeniowitz growled, “but I want to wrap this case before lunch.”

  “And the only way to have a tough bird like this for lunch,” Gleason added, “is to grill him slow. Real slow.”

  Windrow moved the covers and opened one eye. Gleason, standing behind Bdeniowitz, winked at him. Bdeniowitz shot a glance at the doctor and nurse. They excused themselves. “Give us a call if you feel sick or anything,” the nurse said. She glared at Bdeniowitz and followed the doctor out the door.

  Bdeniowitz stood over Windrow with his hands buried in the pockets of his pants. Gleason, dressed like his own idea of a detective, buried his hands in the pockets of his belted trench coat. He also wore a slouch hat, and, as always, a cigarette dangled off his lower lip. He liked to hold his head to one side and squint the lower eye against the smoke from the cigarette. Posed thus, he could pass himself off as a thinking man, until someone asked him a question.

  “Funny coincidence yesterday,” Bdeniowitz said, looking down at Windrow, “out to the Sea Cliff neighborhood.”

  “I could use a laugh,” Windrow said.

  “You won’t see the humor,” Bdeniowitz said, scratching his chin. “First day I’m back from my vacation, I read in the Herb Caen about this ‘forcible entry’ out to the Sea Cliff. And who’s booked on it? Our old pal, the famous Marty Windrow.”

  Windrow knew Bdeniowitz would never forgive him for bringing the heat of publicity down on his office, years before, but it was the first he’d heard of the forcible entry. He smiled with the corner of his mouth less sore than the other one.

  “Look at it this way, Max,” he said. “If you can make me laugh, it’ll hurt. But as for the forcible entry, forget it. Go book a black Cadillac for voluntary attempted man slaughter.”

  Bdeniowitz scowled. “Don’t interrupt. It’s after I’m reading the front page I’m reading about you. The front page is interesting of its own accord. I’m just back from vacation, you understand.” He jerked a thumb toward Gleason. “Things around the office are quiet—too quiet. So I read the papers to find out what the criminal element is up to.” Bdeniowitz slid the room’s single chair close to the head of Windrow’s bed, straddled it and sat, folding his arms on its back. “Seems like the department is investigating a crime of passion, out to the Sea Cliff…” he paused. Windrow felt his heart sink. Had he killed someone in that house
with his car? He tried his memory. He could remember holding on, and yellow and green aluminum lawn furniture, and the hedge. He couldn’t remember how he came to be thrown out of the car, or what happened after.

  Bdeniowitz watched him, gauging his reaction. Windrow said nothing. After a well-timed silence, Max continued. “So, according to the papers, about two blocks over and a hundred yards down from your story, there’s another story, a sadder one.” He shrugged. “It’s a sad world. Some people count more than others, even when they’re dead.”

  Another pause.

  Bdeniowitz sighed. “So this society broad, she turns up at the bottom of the cliff, right below her own house. Suicide, looks like.” Bdeniowitz spread his hands. “Name of Pamela Neil bounce with you, apple?”

  Windrow blinked. When his slits reopened, they were wider than before.

  Bdeniowitz was deadpan.

  “What happened?”

  “Why don’t you tell us?”

  “It’s your story. Finish it.”

  Bdeniowitz shrugged. “Quite a bit happening, by the look of things. First, the boys from homicide,” he pointed over his shoulder at Gleason, who cleared his throat, “they think it’s a suicide. There’s plenty of explanations for that. She had everything in the world she needed. Monthly divorce settlement, a new inheritance, big home, art, boyfriend, a yacht, and another home, maybe a little smaller, to rest from the big one in. So, it’s obvious, she probably couldn’t stand being alive. Like that. She even had plenty of cocaine. Now the cocaine, that’s something. Killing yourself because you’re rich is one thing, but getting crazy and stupid behind a lot of nose candy…” Bdenoiwitz wagged a forefinger at Windrow, as if he were lecturing a child. “A theorist down at headquarters, a specialist in reconstructing homicides,” he tilted his head toward Gleason, who shifted uneasily, “came up with a really plausible explanation for this poor woman’s untimely demise.” Bdeniowitz sighed again, heavily.

  “It seems,” he began, “it seems… Oh Christ.” He scrubbed his forehead, shielding his eyes from Windrow. “You tell him, Gleason.”

  Gleason cleared his throat again and used his hands while he talked. “Well, she’s rich, sure. So she don’t have to work and she’s sitting around this big joint all day, snorting the blow, free-basing too. That’s hard on a person. Doing nothing but dope gets your brain working on itself. You get nervous, paranoid. You think the world’s out to get you. Everybody wants your ass, if it’s nice, or your coke. Like that.” Gleason looked from Windrow to Bdeniowitz and back again. Bdeniowitz kept his face hidden from Gleason, scratched an eyebrow. “So she’s there in the house, all by herself. She’s holding nearly an ounce of cocaine, and she knows that’s big trouble, even in San Francisco. Maybe the ounce has just been delivered, by a certain out-of-work detective and ex-cop, a known pot offender, who came on to her, shook her up, made her more nervous than usual. There’s the sex angle: she’d just had some of that…” Gleason avoided Windrow’s slitted eyes. Windrow’s disdain hurt his own face. “Anyhow, there’s this huge commotion down the street. Sirens, firetrucks, cops; a traffic jam, ambulance, a crowd and a TV news truck. She thinks the sirens are for her, the dragnet is on and the bust is coming down. She’s wrong of course; they’re down there untangling a private dick and his car from all that nice furniture. But she doesn’t know that. She runs around the house with the ounce of coke. What to do, what to do. It’s too big to flush down the john whole, and there won’t be time to empty it slowly. Increasingly hysterical, she zigzags all over the house and then: Aha! The cliff. She’ll just throw it at the ocean. She runs outside, leans over the low balcony railing, heaves the bag, slips…” Gleason inverted the palms of both hands. “Good night Miss Anne.” He stood, waiting for a reaction.

  He got silence.

  Gleason squinted. “Irene, I mean,” he said, almost as if to himself. “Good night, Irene.”

  Bdeniowitz sighed and talked to the floor. “A kid on the beach calls it in. They get the corpse downtown and find all these wood fragments, splinters, embedded in the body, especially about the head and shoulders. The homicide theorist opines as how there are a lot of junipers and scrub cypress on the way down to the beach. The full report, with theory, is released to the newspapers, who just happened already to be right down the street photographing what’s left of the Maclellan place, and insist they know what happened for the morning edition before the autopsy.” He looked up at Windrow. Windrow returned the gaze.

  “Well, we found the ounce,” Gleason protested meekly. Bdeniowitz ignored him.

  “The theorist—unrelenting, brilliant, self-taught—got one thing right: You.” Bdeniowitz pointed at Windrow’s nose, “You had something to do with it.” His voice was suddenly forthright and loud. “I don’t buy no funny coincidences. We got you, we got mayhem, and only a block separates the two. No coincidences, not even a little one, even if it is in the Herb Caen. As for the rest,” he threw up his hands. “Shit,” he said, “The boss catches a fish this big.” He let about six inches separate his two index fingers. “When he gets back from his vacation and his taxidermist, the boss is in shock to discover the city is still where he’d left it, with people walking around in it. In spite of his condition he goes to work. Upon reading the papers concerning the preceding events, and after auditioning theories, the boss fires everybody and orders a routine analysis of the cause of death.” Bdeniowitz read the palm of one hand with the forefinger of the other, squinting as if farsighted. “Hmm. Multiple contusions and abrasions about the head and shoulders of the deceased, many of them thought to have been caused by a blunt instrument. The wood splinters embedded in the deceased turn out to be spruce and mahogany. Well, well!” Bdeniowitz shot Gleason a look of contempt. His voice transuded sarcasm. “Further investigation, conducted both in our modern forensic laboratories and at the scene of the crime by our highly trained and skilled personnel, revealed some interesting facts. No investigation is complete without a couple of facts .” He enumerated his fingers. “The smashed remains of a stringed instrument, possibly a guitar, strewn on the rocks below the house, and its neck—with the strings still on it, not far away, trapped in the junipers about halfway down the cliff. There’s blood on both. Analysis revealed the blood was of exactly the same type as the victim’s. Well, well, whaddya know. Now it’s a homicide, with dope, sex, and music thrown in.”

  Windrow started to speak. Bdeniowitz held up a hand and shook his head.

  “Then what do we find? Various drink glasses around the house, each containing residues of various expensive boozes. All of the beautifully defined fingerprints on these glasses can be accounted for by comparing them with those of the residents or servants pertaining to the premises. All, that is, except for one lovely thumbprint, which, lo and behold, turns out to belong to an ex-cop, one Martin Windrow, last seen, more dead than alive, on page twenty-one, next to the Macy’s ad, left hand gossip column, ‘breaking and entering’.” Bdeniowitz paused.

  “But not as dead as the deceased,” he added quietly.

  Another silence.

  “You had scotch, Marty,” Gleason said.

  Chapter Eight

  WINDROW LOOKED AT THE SUNLIGHT STREAMING through the hospital window and wished he were part of it. If so, he would swim upstream a few miles. High above the city he could bounce a sunbeam off a cup of coffee into a sad man’s face, sure, and he could follow black limousines through the streets, watch a body plunge down a cliff, follow an elusive singer to her telephone, spot the red roll of quarters through that tiny window in that huge array of windows, there, the two cops badgering the sick man in his bed, and warm their backs for them, make them less assiduous. Of course, light changes everything; light is information. And information is light; but whereas the sun provides warmth, the fact of the death of Pamela Neil chilled decidedly the atmosphere in the room.

  The siren got real loud as it approached the base of the hospital building, and stopped.

  Bdeniowitz was
oddly patient. Windrow looked at him. “Did you check her for residual cocaine?”

  Bdeniowitz made a wagging motion with the fingers of his upturned palm. “The story the story,” he said. “Let’s have it.”

  “I was there. I was just leaving her house when this Cadillac limousine…”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute. What were you doing at this dame’s house? Delivering laundry?”

  “I was looking for her step-daughter.”

  Bdeniowitz looked at Gleason and whistled. “Her stepdaughter. this Neil was maybe thirty. She…”

  “Twenty-nine,” Windrow said.

  Bdeniowitz looked back at him. “Gleason,” he said. Petrel Gleason thumbed through a pocket-sized spiral notebook. Bdeniowitz didn’t wait. “Twenty-nine, thirty. So how old’s the daughter, Windrow? Fourteen? Twelve?”

  “The Mann Act,” Gleason chuckled, still thumbing through the narrow pages. “Breaking and entering, willful destruction of private property, the Mann Act …”

  “About the same,” Windrow sighed.

  The two cops looked at him.

  “She’s twenty-seven, for chrissake.”

  “Old enough to bite,” Gleason observed.

  “She’s a friend of mine,” said Windrow. “She travels when she works, which is all the time, so she doesn’t maintain an apartment anywhere. When she’s in town, she stays with her stepmother.”

  “So you went over there to see her.”

  “Yeah. Only there was some kind of foul up. She wasn’t home. She got hung up working. So I sat down and had a drink with Mrs. Neil and the aesthete she lives with.”

  “Twenty-nine,” Gleason announced, reading from his notebook.

  “Ass-theet?” said Bdeniowitz.

  “Right,” said Windrow. “Name of Woodruff. Collects art.” Gleason raised an eyebrow and begun thumbing through his notebook again. “I had a scotch,” Windrow recalled. Gleason paused, then reversed his way through the pages and stopped. “Scotch,” he said. “Woodruff,” Windrow said. Gleason began to go the other way through his notebook. “Talked about the weather for a while. Mrs. Neil’s nose was running, seems she’s had sinus since they left Palm Springs. It’s the fog. Like that. While we were talking Jodie called and said she’d be delayed. You might check on that call, as a matter of fact, if you can. I’d be interested in that.”