Archer - The Chill Part 22

"At least she had some respect for her old man, eh?"

"A good deal."

He breathed with enormous relief. It would pa.s.s, as everything pa.s.ses when a man is drinking seriously to kill awareness. But for the moment he was feeling good. He believed his daughter had conceded a point in their bitter life-long struggle.

"Luke was born in nineteen-oh-three on Spring Street," he said with great care, "in the twenty-one-hundred block, way out on the south side--two blocks over from where I lived when I was a kid. I knew him in grade school. He was the kind of a kid who saved up his paper-route money to buy a Valentine for everybody in his cla.s.s. He actually did that. The princ.i.p.al used to take him around to the various rooms to show off his mental arithmetic. He did have a good head on his shoulders, I'll give him that. He skipped two grades. He was a corner.

"Old man Deloney was a cement finisher, and cement started to come in strong for construction after the World War. Luke bought himself a mixer with money he'd saved and went into business for himself. He did real well in the twenties. At his peak he had over five hundred men working for him all over the state. Even the depression didn't cramp his style. He was a wheeler and a dealer as well as a builder. The only things going up in those days were public works, so he went out in a big way for the federal and state contracts. He married Senator Osborne's daughter, and that didn't do him any harm, either."

"I hear Mrs. Deloney's still alive."

"Sure she is. She lives in the house the Senator built in nineteen-oh-one on Glenview Avenue on the north side. Number one-oh-three, I think." He was straining to live up to his encyclopedic reputation.

I made a mental note of the address. Preceded by clinking, Bert Haggerty came into the room with ice and water and gla.s.ses on a tin tray. I cleared a s.p.a.ce on the desk and he set the tray down. It had originally belonged to the Bridgeton Inn.

"You took long enough," Hoffman said offhandedly.

Haggerty stiffened. His eyes seemed to regroup themselves more closely at the sides of his nose.

"Don't talk to me like that, Earl. I'm not a servant."

"If you don't like it you know what you can do."

"I realize you're tight, but there's a limit--"

"Who's tight? I'm not tight."

"You've been drinking for twenty-four hours."

"So what? A man has a right to drown his sorrows. But my brain is as clear as a bell. Ask Mr. Arthur here. Mr. Archer."

Haggerty laughed, mirthlessly, falsetto. It was a very queer sound, and I tried to cover it over with a broad flourish: "The Lieutenant's been filling me in on some ancient history. He has a memory like an elephant."

But Hoffman wasn't feeling good any more. He rose c.u.mbrously and advanced on Haggerty and me. One of his eyes looked at each of us. I felt like a man in a cage with a sick bear and his keeper.

"What's funny, Bert? You think my sorrow is funny, is that it? She wouldn't be dead if you were man enough to keep her at home. Why didn't you bring her home from Reno with you?"

"You can't blame me for everything," Haggerty said a little wildly. "I got along with her better than you did. If she hadn't had a father-fixation--"

"Don't give me that, you lousy intellectual. Ineffectual. Ineffectual intellectual. You're not the only one that can use fourbit words. And stop calling me Earl. We're not related. We never would have been if I had any say in the matter. We're not even related and you come into my house spying on my personal habits. What are you, an old woman?"

Haggerty was speechless. He looked at me helplessly.

"I'll break your neck," his father-in-law said.

I stepped between them. "Let's have no violence, Lieutenant. It wouldn't look good on the blotter."

"The little pipsqueak accused me. He said I'm drunk. You tell him he's mistaken. Make him apologize."

I turned to Haggerty, closing one eye. "Lieutenant Hoffman is sober, Bert. He can carry his liquor. Now you better get out of here before something happens."

He was glad to. I followed him out into the hall.

"This is the third or fourth time," he said in a low voice. "I didn't mean to set him off again."

"Let him cool for a bit. I'll sit with him. I'd like to talk to you afterward."

"I'll wait outside in my car."

I went back into the bear cage. Hoffman was sitting on the edge of the couch with his head supported by his hands.

"Everything's gone to h.e.l.l in a hand-car," he said. "That p.u.s.s.y willow of a Bert Haggerty gets under my skin. I dunno what he thinks he's sucking around for." His mood changed. "You haven't deserted me, anyway. Go ahead, make yourself a drink."

I manufactured a light highball and brought it back to the couch. I didn't offer Hoffman any. In wine was truth, perhaps, but in whisky, the way Hoffman sluiced it down, was an army of imaginary rats climbing your legs.

"You were telling me about Luke Deloney and how he grew."

He squinted at me. "I don't know why you're so interested in Deloney. He's been dead for twenty-two years. Twenty-two years and three months. He shot himself, but I guess you know that, eh?" A hard intelligence glinted momentarily in his eyes and drew them into focus on my face.

I spoke to the hard intelligence: "Was there anything between Helen and Deloney?"

"No, she wasn't interested in him. She had a crush on the elevator boy. George. I ought to know, she made me get him the job. I was sort of managing the Deloney Apartments at the time. Luke Deloney and me, we were like that."

He tried to cross his second finger over his forefinger. It kept slipping. He finally completed the maneuver with the help of his other hand. His fingers were thick and mottled like uncooked breakfast sausages.

"Luke Deloney was a bit of a womanizer," he said indulgently, "but he didn't mess around with the daughters of his friends. He never cared for the young stuff, anyway. His wife must of been ten years older than he was. Anyway, he wouldn't touch my daughter. He knew I'd kill him."

"Did you?"

"That's a lousy question, mister. If I didn't happen to like you I'd knock your block off."

"No offense."

"I had nothing against Luke Deloney. He treated me fair and square. Anyway, I told you he shot himself."

"Suicide?"

"Naw. Why would he commit suicide? He had everything, money and women and a hunting lodge in Wisconsin. He took me up there personally more than once. The shooting was an accident. That's the way it went into the books and that's the way it stays."

"How did it happen, Lieutenant?"

"He was cleaning his .32 automatic. He had a permit to tote it on his person--I helped him get it myself--because he used to carry large sums of money. He took the clip out all right but he must of forgot the sh.e.l.l that was in the chamber. It went off and shot him in the face."

"Where?"

"Through the right eye."

"I mean where did the accident occur?"

"In one of the bedrooms in his apartment. He kept the roof apartment in the Deloney building for his private use. More than once I drank with him up there. Prewar Green River, boy." He slapped my knee, and noticed the full gla.s.s in my hand. "Drink up your drink."

I knocked back about half of it. It wasn't prewar Green River. "Was Deloney drinking at the time of the shooting?"

"Yeah, I think so. He knew guns. He wouldn't of made that mistake if he was sober."

"Was anybody with him in the apartment?"

"No."

"Can you be sure?"

"I can be sure. I was in charge of the investigation."

"Did anybody share the apartment with him?"

"Not on a permanent basis, you might say. Luke Deloney had various women on the string. I checked them out, but none of them was within a mile of the place at the time it happened."

"What kind of women?"

"All the way from floozies to one respectable married woman here in town. Their names didn't go into the record then and they're not going to now."

There was a growl in his voice. I didn't pursue the subject. Not that I was afraid of Hoffman exactly. I had at least fifteen years on him, and a low alcohol content. But if he went for me I might have to hurt him badly.

"What about Mrs. Deloney?" I said.

"What about her?"

"Where was she when all this was going on?"

"At home, out on Glenview. They were sort of separated. She didn't believe in divorce."

"People who don't believe in divorce sometimes believe in murder."

Hoffman moved his shoulders belligerently. "You trying to say that I hushed up a murder?"

"I'm not accusing you of anything, Lieutenant."

"You better not. I'm a cop, remember, first last and always." He raised his fist and rotated it before his eyes like a hypnotic device. "I been a good cop all my life. In my prime I was the best d.a.m.n cop this burg ever saw. I'll have a drink on that." He picked up his tumbler. "Join me?"

I said I would. We were moving obscurely on a collision course. Alcohol might soften the collision, or sink him. I finished my drink and handed him my gla.s.s. He filled it to the brim with neat whisky. Then he filled his own. He sat down and stared into the brown liquid as if it was a well where his life had drowned.

"Bottoms up," he said.

"Take it easy, Lieutenant. You don't want to kill yourself." It occurred to me as I said it that maybe he did.

"What are you, another p.u.s.s.y willow? Bottoms up."

He drained his gla.s.s and shuddered. I held mine in my hand. After a while he noticed this.

"You didn't drink your drink. What you trying to do, pull a fast one on me? Insult my hosh--my hoshpit--?" His lips were too numb to frame the word.

"No insult intended. I didn't come here for a drinking party, Lieutenant. I'm seriously interested in who killed your daughter. a.s.suming Deloney was murdered--"

"He wasn't."

"a.s.suming he was, the same person may have killed Helen. In view of everything I've heard, from her and other people, I think it's likely. Don't you?"

I was trying to get his mind under my control: the sloppy drunken sentimental part, and the drunken violent part, and the hard intelligent part hidden at the core.

"Deloney was an accident," he said clearly and stubbornly.

"Helen didn't think so. She claimed it was murder, and that she knew a witness to the murder."

"She was lying, trying to make me look bad. All she ever wanted to do was make her old man look bad."

His voice had risen. We sat and listened to its echoes. He dropped his empty gla.s.s, which bounced on the rug, and clenched the fist which seemed to be his main instrument of expression. I got ready to block it, but he didn't throw it at me.

Heavily and repeatedly, he struck himself in the face, on the eyes and cheeks, on the mouth, under the jaw. The blows left dull red welts in his clay-colored flesh. His lower lip split.

Hoffman said through the blood: "I clobbered my poor little daughter. I chased her out of the house. She never came back."

Large tears the color of pure distilled alchohol or grief rolled from his puffing eyes and down his damaged face. He fell sideways on the couch. He wasn't dead. His heart was beating strongly. I straightened him out--his legs were as heavy as sandbags--and put a bolster under his head. With blind eyes staring straight up into the light, he began to snore.

I closed the roll-top desk. The key was in it, and I turned it on the liquor and switched off the light and took the key outside with me.

chapter 20.

Bert Haggerty was sitting in the Chevrolet coup, wearing a stalled expression. I got in beside him and handed him the key.

"What's this?"

"The key to the liquor. You better keep it. Hoffman's had as much as he can take."

"Did he throw you out?"

"No. He pa.s.sed out, while hitting himself in the face. Hard."

Haggerty thrust his long sensitive nose toward me. "Why would Earl do a thing like that?"

"He seemed to be punis.h.i.+ng himself for hitting his daughter a long time ago."

"Helen told me about that. Earl treated her brutally before she left home. It's one thing I can't forgive him for."