What Price Murder

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

THE LOBBY of the Insurance Exchange Building was practically deserted when at something after six o’clock McCloud pushed through the doors. The single elevator left running was bringing down only an occasional passenger, and the man at the cigar stand was already putting his counter stock away and beginning to lock up for the night. Leaning on the cigar case and apparently very interested in its contents was Detective-lieutenant Floyd Brannigan. McCloud pretended that he didn’t see Brannigan, which in effect was pretending that he was stone blind, and headed for the elevator. Brannigan yelled at him.

“Hey, you!” McCloud turned. “Oh, hello, Lieutenant.” He looked at his strap watch with exaggerated impatience. “I’m in kind of a hurry.”

Brannigan was not impressed. He was a large man, almost as tall as McCloud and much thicker through the middle. “So you’re in a hurry. Why?”

“Now you’re getting personal,” McCloud said. “Polite people don’t ask things like that.” He tried to give the impression that he had just taken a dose of Sal Hepatica. “When you’ve got to go—”

Brannigan’s pale eyes narrowed. “Save it,” he advised. Casually, almost as though it were an accident, he blocked the elevator doors.

“What’s new on the Kahn & Company job?”

McCloud was indignant. “A fine thing to ask me! It’s your case, isn’t it?”

“Unh-hunh. That’s why I’m hanging around. Emil Kahn is upstairs, closeted with your boss.”

“No!”

“Fact,” Brannigan said. His eyes watched everything in the lobby but McCloud. “What do you think of Kahn?”

McCloud appeared to think. Presently he said, “You mean do I think it was an inside job? It could be. I guess that’s why Jessup is holding up payment on the policy.”

Brannigan spat out the toothpick. “You’re only guessing?”

“Yes.”

“I think you’re a liar,” Brannigan said. He poked a thick forefinger at McCloud’s chest. '“You’ve been busier than a cat on a tin roof the last three days. You mean you haven’t found out anything?”

“Have you?” McCloud countered.

Brannigan flushed angrily. “There’s a difference. I’m a cop. Crooks don’t come to me with off-color deals.”

McCloud was offended. “Are you insinuating that West Coast Indemnity would traffic with thieves?”

“You’re damned right I am!”

McCloud made disparaging noises. “You ought to be ashamed.”

“And you ought to be in jail!” Brannigan yelled. "For years you and Jessup have been giving us the runaround, buying back stolen goods and God knows what else.” He took a slow breath. "This is one time you’re not going to get away with it, baby.”

McCloud was beginning to think the same thing himself. Brannigan’s presence at another time would not have worried him, but now that he actually had a lead, or what seemed to him a possible lead, police interference was apt to be embarrassing. It was not that he or his employers condoned thievery; it was just that many times, through bungling or worse, the constituted authorities managed to apprehend the criminals without recovering the loot; or to so scare the criminals that recovery was impossible. It was McCloud’s job to get the stuff first, provided that it was his company who had insured it, and the criminals later, though sometimes this last didn’t work out exactly as planned. That’s what Brannigan was sore about.

McCloud affected a great earnestness. "Look, Lieutenant, if you can pin this job on Emil Kahn I’ll be the first to congratulate you. I don’t like him.”

Brannigan was partially mollified. “What’s he doing up there?”

“I wouldn’t know,” McCloud said. "Probably trying to collect the insurance, but that’s only a guess.” He grinned suddenly. “If you’d get the hell out of my way I could go up and find out for you.”

Brannigan said a very bad word indeed. “I’ll bet!”

"Well, I would,” McCloud insisted. He exuded righteousness. “I’m all through pulling chestnuts out of the fire for soulless corporations.” He sighed. “It doesn’t get you anywhere.”

Brannigan was unsympathetic. “You seem to be doing all right for yourself.”

McCloud shrugged. “Money! Do you think that money is all that matters to me?”

“Yes,” Brannigan said quite frankly, “I do.” He stood aside, though, and permitted McCloud to get into the elevator.

His entrance interrupted what had apparently been a very heated discussion between the two men already there. Jessup, seated behind his desk with the effect of an entrenched but beleaguered general, had one fist still poised in midair preparatory to banging it down for emphasis to something he was saying. Seeing McCloud, he reconsidered banging it and lowered it with admirable repression to the arm of his chair.

“Oh, so it’s you!”

McCloud admitted that it was indeed he. He said, “You’d better watch your blood pressure, Counsellor.” His dark eyes examined Emil Kahn without warmth.

“Hello.”

Kahn snorted. Obviously he was not in a pleasant mood, nor was he unaware that McCloud’s advent was going to be something of a liability. He was still wearing a bandage on his head, badge of his rather unheroic encounter with the man or men who had made away with his quarter million dollars in unset stones. McCloud looked at the bandage with pointed disparagement.

“You’d think they hit you with your own safe instead of a measly little slap.”

Jessup decided to bang his fist after all. He was head of West Coast’s legal department.

“Stephen, I want you to remember that Mr. Kahn is one of our policyholders. One of our most valued policyholders.”

McCloud accepted the reproof at something less than its face value.

“All right.” He sneered at the bandage. And then, addressing Jessup but really watching Emil Kahn: “Brannigan is downstairs in the lobby.”

Jessup stood up violently. “In God’s name, why?”

“He still thinks it was an inside job,” McCloud said. “He thinks Kahn had a hand in it.”

“The hell with what he thinks!” Jessup yelled.

Emil Kahn blew out his fat lips. “Well!” Two ponderous steps brought him to the desk and he leaned on it and thrust a heavy jaw at Jessup. “Look, my friend, I am not taking any more of this kind of thing from you or anybody else. I have a policy with your company that is supposed to cover the loss of those stones. I either want the stones or the money.”

Jessup appealed to God in Heaven to give him strength. “Am I arguing?”

“Stalling is a better word,” Kahn said nastily. “You’ve been stalling me for three days.” Angry breath whistled through his overlarge nose.

“Do you pay off or do I have to sue?”

McCloud decided that he had helped to precipitate the clash; he would now cast a little oil on the troubled waters. “I think I’ve finally got a lead,” he said.

Both men glared at him. “Well, why didn’t you say so?”

He became indignant. “I ask you, have I had a chance? Have you guys done anything but yell ever since I came in? The description you gave us, and the police, doesn’t seem to fit anybody in Los Angeles. Suppose I give you one that does?”

Kahn shrugged. “I don’t like your implication, but go ahead.”

Meticulously, from memory, because he knew Duke D’Arcy very well indeed, McCloud described the gambler and night-club proprietor who Van Felix had thought might be implicated in the diamond heist. Kahn’s broad face remained unchanged.

“No, that is not the man I saw.”

Jessup looked at McCloud. “Well?”

“It was just an idea,” McCloud said. He was still not satisfied about Emil Kahn’s possible complicity, but he had absolutely nothing to hang an accusation on. And in the matter of Duke D’Arcy he had only Van Felix’ word that Margie Garland was D’Arcy’s girl. Still, meagre as the tip was he had to play it. There was nothing else that even remotely resembled a lead.

He pointed the cigar at Jessup. “Can you get me fifteen or twenty grand at this time of night?”

“What for?”

McCloud moved his shoulders impatiently. “Maybe you’d better not know that. Let’s just say that I know a certain lady who might be willing to talk if her palm was crossed with something beside silver.”

Emil Kahn sucked in his breath. “You mean you’d actually compound a felony?”

Jessup barked at him. “He means we’re just like you. We don’t want to lose a quarter-million dollars if we can help it. And as for stalling you on the insurance, we’re perfectly within our rights. There’s a clause in your policy that gives us five days.”

Kahn yelped. “So you’re going to be like that!”

“Not if you leave us alone,” Jessup said. He spread his hands. “McCloud says he’s got a lead. If we can get the diamonds back, we’re going to do it, and it’s none of your business how we do it. We’ll see about avenging your poor head afterward.” He stared appraisingly at McCloud. “What’s this lady’s name and address?”

McCloud shook his head, then changed his mind because he saw that he wasn’t going to get the money otherwise. He gave Margie Garland’s name and address, then went over and stood by the tall windows while Jessup opened the safe. Presently he was counting a neat sheaf of currency and signing the customary receipt for it.

Emil Kahn watched the proceedings with patent disapproval. “Suppose I informed Lieutenant Brannigan of what you intend doing?”

“Go ahead,” McCloud said. “You interfere in our business and we’ll sew your policy payment up in court for so long you’ll have a beard down to here before you collect.”