Even the Butler Was Poor Read online

  Giving Ben and Gardener a quick, rueful smile, he crossed over to Kathkart and started talking to him in a low murmuring voice.

  "Have you worked with Kathkart before?" Gardener asked quietly.

  "Never have, nope."

  "I have—once before." He sighed, rolled up his script and rubbed it across his small chin. "I'm not coming across too swish, am I?"

  "I've never heard an English muffin with more balls," Ben assured him.

  "I would've liked to turn down this particular job, but I couldn't risk ticking Les off. They use me on a lot of other stuff."

  ". . . don't want to annoy him, remember?" drifted over from Les's murmured lecture to the big actor.

  "Okay, okay," muttered Kathkart. "I forgot, Les, I lost my temper."

  "This isn't Shakespeare, old buddy," reminded Beaujack in a louder voice. "Don't take it too seriously."

  "All right, Les, but keep in mind that if I didn't take this goddamn job seriously the agency would have lost the Chumley account a long time ago." Kathkart came stomping back to his mike, squatted, grunted, and scooped up his discarded script with such force that he turned it into a ball of crumpled paper.

  Beaujack tapped Ben's upper arm with his fist. "All your jobs for us won't be this rough," he promised. "Don't hold this against us."

  "Right you are, guy," said Ben in his muffin voice, tugging at his forelock.

  It was a few minutes shy of six-thirty in the evening when they finished recording the three My Man Chumley commercials.

  Chapter 13

  They'd entered Ben's house at about five minutes shy of two that afternoon. Two of them, big men in dark windbreakers and ski masks. They had come down through a wooded area, pines and maples mostly, to the left of his house and slipped in by prying open the sliding glass doors of the living room.

  They were very slick about breaking in, quiet, professional. But, even so, up in the guest bedroom H.J. heard them.

  Her heartbeat accelerated, but she didn't panic. Nor did she for a moment assume that they might just be friends or neighbors of Ben's dropping in for an afternoon cup of coffee.

  I'd better get my butt out of here, she told herself, rising slowly and quietly off the bed where she'd been lying and reading through one of the business ledgers she'd dug up in Ben's study. He really was making over $200,000 a year now.

  She dropped the black-bound book on the unmade bed, and took a deep breath. From the back of a wicker chair she grabbed her maroon sweater. She couldn't hear them downstairs anymore, but she sensed them.

  She flatfooted over to the window and, after breaking a thumbnail on the latch, urged it open, patiently and without noise. H.J. knew, from her earlier thorough casing of the house, that there was a slanting roof just outside this particular window. Poking her head cautiously out, she surveyed things. Nobody was stationed in front of the place, there was no sign of a car parked out on the road.

  Taking another deep breath, she climbed out of the bedroom and made her way on hands and knees down across the shingled roof. She had the impression she heard someone coming up the stairs in the house she was abandoning. Not waiting to confirm that, she rolled over the edge of the roof and held onto it with both hands, dangling about ten feet above the side lawn.

  Okay, Geronimo or whatever, she said to herself, letting go.

  She hit hard, jangling her teeth. As she fell over, her right knee slammed into the ground. Making a sighing, unhappy sound, she scrambled to her feet and started running.

  "I seem to be doing a hell of a lot of limping lately," she observed as she hobbled rapidly into the surrounding woodlands.

  After a few minutes of running and stumbling, H.J. found a dark, shadowy spot rich in high, concealing brush. She hunkered down amidst the bushes with her back pressed against a tree trunk. Not once during the long uncomfortable hour that the men ransacked Ben's house did she consider calling the police.

  H.J. was alone in the house, her auburn hair tied back with one of Ben's paisley ties, when Joe Sankowitz arrived a few minutes after eight that night. She opened the door holding a broom in her left hand. "You got them?"

  Narrowing his left eye, Sankowitz inquired, "Am I interrupting your spring cleaning, Helen?"

  "Come on in," she invited. "We had sort of an incident here this afternoon."

  He followed her into the living room, tapping a large manila envelope against his leg. "Jesus, what went on?"

  "Housebreakers."

  She had all the furniture put back pretty much where it had been, but several hundred books, hardcover and paperback, were scattered around the carpet in disorderly heaps. "What did the police say about—"

  "I didn't call them."

  Sankowitz studied her face for a few silent seconds. "Meaning this is all part of the same general calamity that you've dragged Ben into?"

  H. J. smiled. "He volunteered to help me out a little, Joe."

  "Any idea who did this?"

  "I got a distant glimpse of them when they took off," she replied, leaning her broom against the wall. "It was two big lunks with ski masks or maybe stocking masks over their thick heads."

  "Where were you while they—"

  "Hiding in the woods out there most of the time," she said. "I was here—upstairs—when they first broke in. But I jumped out a window and they didn't spot me."

  "Me, I'd have run further than just these woods."

  "You're into jogging."

  "But they might have come hunting for you. You should have, Helen, put a few miles between you and them."

  "No, I wanted to stay in the vicinity."

  "Why?"

  "Well, for one thing I wanted to be here when you showed up."

  Sankowitz shook his head. "Ben isn't back from New York yet, huh?"

  "Any minute, though. He phoned from Grand Central to tell me he was catching the 7:07."

  "How'd he take the news of the break-in?"

  "I didn't tell him. No use his worrying and fretting all the way home," she said. "Anyway, I've managed to get most of the damage cleaned up—except for all these damn books."

  "I'll help you with those while were waiting for Ben," offered the cartoonist.

  "Before we do that, what about the film?"

  Sankowitz walked away from her to sit on the sofa. "It turned out to be. . . very upsetting stuff." He placed the envelope on the cushion next to him and kept hold of it.

  "But there were pictures, something came out?"

  "Yes, there are nineteen shots."

  She crossed over to him, undoing the necktie that was holding her hair. "Showing what?"

  "I'm afraid it must be the aftermath of a killing."

  She shook her head, causing her hair to fall to her shoulders. "Okay, let me see."

  "I think we better wait until Ben gets here, because there are some very serious—"

  "The pictures were, more or less, willed to me." Leaning closer, she snatched the envelope free of his grasp. She walked over to a thick black floor lamp.

  "Helen, this all could be very—"

  "Relax, Joe." She unfastened the clasp and slid out the cut up sheets of proofs and a glassine envelope of negatives. After scanning a few of the shots, she laughed. "Bingo."

  Chapter 14

  Ben was kissed by H.J. soundly, on the mouth, seconds after he came through the doorway from the garage into the kitchen. "Yes?" he asked when it was over.

  "Welcome home—wait till you see the pictures." She caught hold of his arm, tugging him into the hall leading to the living room. "Oh, and don't have a fit."

  "What might I have a fit about? Is Joe here yet?"

  "He's in the living room. But I meant because of the burglars."

  He halted on the threshold. "We were visited by burglars?"

  "I'm afraid so."

  Sankowitz bounced up off the sofa. "Ben, I think you've got to call the cops in. What you're into is not a simple, fun-filled treasure hunt. These guys—"

  "Were you here, H.
J., when it happened?"

  "Only for a brief while, Ben." She took his attaché case away from him, guided him to an armchair. "I cleaned up just about all the traces of—"

  "Christ, they dumped every book I own—"

  "I haven't gotten around to the books yet."

  "This is very scary stuff," said Sankowitz. "These guys broke in, they trashed your house and. . . If they'd caught Helen they might have done her serious damage."

  "I didn't get caught, though. And once they left, I—"

  "What did you do?" Ben put his hand on her shoulder. "How'd you avoid them?"

  "I was upstairs taking a nap. I heard them breaking in down here, lucky for me, and went right out a window. I slid down the roof and headed into the piney woods."

  "Damn it, Helen Joanne, you could have been murdered. Or broken your neck."

  "But I escaped, I survived," she pointed out, hugging herself and smiling.

  "So far you've survived, but that's sure no guarantee that—"

  "Ben, please. I really am not in the mood for one of your avuncular lectures just now." Walking over to the coffee table, she bent and gathered up the contact prints. "Hush up for a minute and take a look at these, will you."

  "Make it a quick look," advised Sankowitz, sitting uneasily back down. "Then rush all these pictures over to the law."

  Ben took the cut up proof sheet. "You really think. . . Holy shit!"

  H.J. laughed and said, "Impressive, huh?"

  The first shot showed two men carrying the body of a portly gray-haired man out the rear door of a colonial mansion. The man at the head end of the probable corpse was Barry Kathkart, looking nowhere near as amiable as he did when playing My Man Chumley. At the foot end, obviously struggling with the heavy body, was Lea Beaujack.

  "Beaujack and Kathkart," murmured Ben as he slowly scanned the rest of the sequence.

  The pictures, taken at night and probably with some kind of zoom lens, showed the actor and the advertising executive lugging the body of the gray-haired man out of the mansion, down along a stretch of white graveled drive and then depositing it in the trunk of a Mercedes. In the final three shots you could make out a very unhappy Trinity Winters and a lean, sour-faced older man standing by and watching as the corpse was being stuffed into the trunk.

  Perching on the arm of Ben's chair and crossing her legs, H.J. said, "I can identify everybody but the dead man and that old coot next to Trinity."

  Ben said, "Actually we're not sure the guy they're lugging around is dead."

  "Oh, so? You usually don't rush somebody to the emergency room in the trunk of your car."

  "You're right," he agreed. "The fellow next to Trinity is Arthur Moon."

  She pressed her hands together, smiling. "The CEO of Lenzer, Moon & Lombard?"

  "That Arthur Moon, yes."

  Sankowitz said, "You know, there's something familiar about the old gent they're carting off." He came over to take some of the photos away from Ben.

  "Do you know him?"

  The cartoonist's forehead acquired a few new wrinkles. "He's not a friend of mine, if that's what you man," he answered. "More like somebody I maybe met once—or saw on television years ago."

  "He seems to be at least seventy." H.J. glanced hopefully at Sankowitz.

  He gave a negative shake of his head. "I can't dredge up a name as yet. Could be it's only that he somewhat resembles my Uncle Herschell."

  H.J. rubbed her fingers across the back of Ben's neck. "Do you realize what we've got pictures of?"

  "A safe guess would be that this is the windup of a murder."

  "That's not necessarily so," said Sankowitz from the sofa.

  "What else," asked H.J. scornfully, "would it possibly be?"

  "The man might simply have had a heart attack."

  "If your Uncle Herschell dropped dead in your parlor," said H.J. impatiently, "would you haul him off to dump in a culvert? What I mean is, if you didn't have anything to do with his kicking off, you'd phone the police or the paramedics. And you'd sure as heck leave him lying where he fell."

  "I would, sure," agreed Sankowitz. "Thing is, Helen, I'm not the spokesman for a multimedia, multimillion dollar food account. Nor, last time I checked, am I an important exec with a prestigious advertising agency. These people don't want any scandal."

  "That part is right, they sure don't." She recrossed her legs, rubbing at her bare knee. "It's dead certain one of them killed this poor old duffer. To avoid any legal trouble or any scandal that would hurt the Chumley account, they decided to get rid of the body. Then they could pretend that none of them had a thing to do with sending him on to glory."

  Ben tapped one of the small photos. "This, by the way, is Kathkart's place," he said. "We went to a party there one time years ago."

  "You and me?" asked H.J.

  "I don't remember," he said. "But if this is Kathkart's house, he's likely the one who committed the murder."

  "That doesn't necessarily follow."

  "Sure, it does. Beaujack didn't drop over to Kathkart's to kill off one of his guests. It has to be Chumley who killed. . . Damn, I wish we knew the victim's name."

  "I may come up with the name eventually." Sankowitz studied his share of the photos again. "There are other ways to find it out, though."

  "Obituaries," suggested Ben.

  "If he was well-known, yeah. We can assume that Helen's late chum took these pictures within the past couple of weeks, so we—"

  "They are recent, because Trinity has her current hair style," said Ben.

  "Okay, then you can definitely check recent obits."

  "Suppose they dumped the body in the Sound in a gunnysack full of scrap metal?" H.J. left the chair arm to start pacing in a wide, lopsided circle. "There won't be any obituary in that case."

  "But there still might be a missing persons notice of some sort."

  "Be more likely that they'd dump the body a safe distance from Kathkart's place in Westport," suggested Ben. "And try to make it look as though the guy had met with an accident or been mugged."

  H.J. halted and eyed her former husband. "Hey, how do you know about the present state of Trinity Winters's hair?"

  He leaned back in his chair, letting the photos rest on his knee. "I hate to mention all this," he said. "But it occurred to me a few minutes ago that I didn't get my latest My Man Chumley role solely because of my impressive talent."

  Snapping her fingers, H.J. said, "Beaujack wanted to get you out of the house, so he could have somebody come here and search it."

  He nodded, tapping another photo. "This is probably the same Mercedes that tried to flatten us the other night," he said. "And it's probably Les Beaujack's car."

  "So he saw you with me, figured you must be involved in all this mess."

  "Or at least that I might know something about what Rick Dell was up to," said Ben. "Beaujack was very cordial to me today, but he did make a few remarks that seemed odd even at the time. Yep, I have to admit that he had ulterior motives for casting me as an English muffin."

  "Was Trinity at the recording session, too?"

  "Nope, she was hurrying out of the agency as I was arriving. We bumped into each other. She didn't seem to recognize me—but I'm near certain she's the masked woman who shot at me and tried to swipe Buggsy."

  "Golly," remarked Sankowitz, "this is getting better than I dared hope. Gun toting models, hairbreadth escapes, all the—"

  "Hush," H.J. interrupted.

  Ben said, "Here's probably what happened—some night within the past week or so. Kathkart, who is known far and wide for not being the calmest and most even-tempered of men, got into a situation that produced this elderly corpse. We don't know why yet, since we don't know who the dead man is. Let's see, Trinity was probably at Kathkart's for some—"

  "Definitely was," cut in H.J. "She's been dating My Man Chumley, remember?"

  "Alright, so probably Trinity was with him. The victim shows up for some reason, there's a fracas, Kathkar
t kills him—"

  "Allegedly kills him," amended Sankowitz.

  "Allegedly my ass," said H.J.

  "Kathkart realizes he's in big trouble. But—and this has to be the key to what happened—he also realizes that he's damn important to the ad agency. If he's arrested for murder—or even manslaughter—it screws up the whole and entire My Man Chumley account. He and the agency stand to lose millions of dollars, The Chumley image goes flooey and the client is—"

  "They're very conservative, too," said H.J.

  "Who?"

  "The Walden Food Corporation, the folks who own My Man Chumley. Mom and the flag sort of people," she said. "If word got out that Chumley was slaughtering kindly old codgers, it would annoy them no end."

  "Exactly. So Kathkart says to Beaujack, and possibly Moon as well—'Gee, I seem to have this corpse on my hands, fellas. Suppose you come over and help me get rid of it. Otherwise we all lose millions.'"

  "A loyal ad man like Les Beaujack," said H.J., "would hop into his Mercedes and whiz over there with a shovel and a sack of quicklime."

  "Could be you're a mite too cynical," suggested Sankowitz. "Not all advertising folks are crass and mercenary."

  "Kathkart sure is, though," said Ben. "Les Beaujack, too. I don't think he'd have much of an ethical struggle over something like this. Not with all the money involved."

  Sankowitz asked, "How'd Rick Dell fit into all this?"

  H.J. answered, "He'd been dating Trinity off and on and he. . . Well, he had a habit of tailing his ladyfriends sometimes and snapping photos. Unbeknownst to them."

  "That might indicate he tried blackmail before this," said Ben. "Did he ever try photographing you?"

  "Not to my knowledge, no. But he did confide in me that he'd done it with other ladies," she said. "There was jealousy involved, whether or not he also had blackmail in mind. I'd guess that he was out on one of his patrols, tailing Trinity and snapping pictures from a safe distance. Then all of a sudden a murder took place and he was close enough to get photographs of the mopping up operation. He may also have seen the victim going in to Kathkart's home and recognized him."

  "Another thing I've been wondering," said Sankowitz. "How come Dell didn't develop these shots himself instead of hiding the undeveloped roll in the dummy?"