The Complete Cases of Stuart Bailey by Roy Huggins

Author:Roy Huggins [Huggins, Roy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-05-14T04:00:00+00:00

IT was nine o’clock when I looked in on Hazel. She was bright and cheerful as usual, and so was the morning. I had the world in one pocket and the ash tray in the other. There were no messages, so I stepped across the hall and opened my office door. It wasn’t much of an office, long and narrow, with a single window, mustard-colored linoleum, a desk, a filing cabinet, and two Mexican posters on the walls. I had never had any trouble keeping it neat.

But it wasn’t neat now. It was untidy. Drawers pulled out and left that way, a few papers scattered on the floor. It wasn’t havoc, just the casual disorder of someone looking for something nervously and in a hurry. Nothing had been overlooked. The hand had been into every spot where something could be put away or hidden. That seemed to call for a deduction: The party hadn’t found what he was looking for.

I didn’t waste any time. But I had had breakfast downtown and had been gone for more than an hour and a half. The nervous Nimrod would have been to my apartment and gone by now. But ten minutes later I was at my door. I tried the knob. The door was unlocked. I opened it slowly. Here was the havoc, an aspect of sheer meaningless rage. That suggested a deduction: The party hadn’t found what he was looking for here, either.

I heard a sound from the kitchen, remote, unhurried. I had him trapped! Then another sound with more urgency in it, the hiss of a siphon sending its carbonated joy into a glass of ice cubes and whisky, I turned toward the open kitchen door.

Freddie was trying out my last bottle of Canadian whisky. He saw me, looked only faintly surprised, and said, “Not the kind of liquor you expect to find consorting with folding beds and gas beaters.

I said, “Did you find what you were looking for?”

“I certainly did,” he chirped, and raised the glass and peered at it.

“How long have you been here,” I asked, “and what do you know about the treasure hunt that’s being run through here?”

Ho brought his eyes back to mine. They weren’t bleary, but they didn’t focus readily.

He took a polite sip at the drink and said, “I’ve changed my mind about you, Bailey. I’ve been talking to your gravel-pussed friend, Quint. He tells me you think you’re obligated to act like a hard guy, and that you almost never kill anyone.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Then there was another reason,” he went on amiably. “One that you might be interested in.”

“Why should I be interested?”

He walked past me into the living room, looked the place over, and said, “My ex-stepmother told me you were working on the case.” He pushed a pair of pants down to the other end of the davenport and sat down.

“All right.”

He smiled suavely and took another drink. He was having the time of his life. “I had dinner at Chasen’s late last night.

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