Laurel and Hardy Murders (10 page)

“Hey, kid, I’m sorry, I was just kidding,” Poe continued, unrelenting, “I know you’re sensitive about your upbringing. It’s not often they throw out the child and raise the afterbirth.”

This time the hiss of indrawn breath sounded like an overstressed steam radiator. Someone booed.

Poe glared. “All right, anybody else want to tackle the master?”

“
I do
.” The voice, cutting through the growing sounds of discontent, rang out clearly, unmistakably. It was Hilary. She stood up, hands on hips, waiting for Poe to make the initial assay.

He shaded his eyes and scanned the audience until he spotted her. Sawing his hand in a gesture of dismissal, he said, condescendingly, “Sit down, babe, it won’t be a fair fight.”

“True, but I’m willing to wait while you run out and buy some brains from a butcher.”

A few people tittered.

“Hey, now, look, chick,” Poe protested, “I’m tryin’ to spare you—”

“Spare us all. Drop dead.”

“HAW!” It sounded like Frank Butler. I still didn’t know where he was, but the noise came from the direction of the head table.

Poe pointed to Hilary and spoke to the rest of the audience. “You ever see it to fail? Broad can’t make it with anybody, she comes on like Godzilla.” He smiled at her venomously. “I’ll give ya a break, see me in my dressing room.”

“Why not?” Hilary replied. “You’re probably funnier in bed than onstage.”

That fetched a good guffaw and some applause. Poe’s lips pursed tight, but instead of continuing the battle, he turned to Del James and with great emphasis, said “
Now
!” Del struck up the lead-in to “Comedy Tonight” from
A Funny Thing Happened
...

Hilary sat down and Poe started singing. But the audience had tasted blood. First a few catcalls, then a whole chorus of jeers drowned out the music.

Poe ignored the audience, singing as loud as he could, but slowly edged toward the exit to the kitchen, anxious to finish the number and make a fast getaway. Del stepped up the tempo, doing his bit to get Poe the hell out of there. By the final verse—the one with the lyric guaranteeing “a happy ending, of course”—the singer was almost tiptoe-poised to zoom offstage. He bellowed the final elongated “Comedy...tonight!” with his arms spread wide in the customary sell-the-end-of-the-song attitude.

At that instant, a great bellow welled from behind the head table. Rising from its concealing drapery, Frank Butler stood erect, hefting with both hands a four-tier, spun-sugar milky-white wedding cake, the tallest, sloppiest such confection I’d ever seen. He leaped onto the platform, his weight shaking the stage; he resembled an angry white pachyderm.

“
Teach you to screw around with the Old Man
!” Butler roared, mushing the monstrous bonbon into Wayne Poe’s face. It happened so quickly that the comic didn’t have time to do anything but stand there, astonished, and take the cake.

A tidal wave of rejoicing: snickers, chortles, Woody Woodpecker-type cackling, brouhaha, belly laughs. The tubby avenging angel bowed low to the audience and strutted off.

Poe, inundated with icing, wobbled about with the gigantic cake stuck to his head. Struggling to breathe, he frantically clawed away enough to reveal a snowy suspicion of his features, making everyone howl all the louder.

The comic, apparently determined to make the best of the absurd figure he cut, yammered and flapped his arms like a chicken, sinking to his knees in a limp-legged crumple that would have made Marcel Marceau proud. But he didn’t let the gag die there. Allowing the weight of the cake to tilt him, Poe flopped to the floor, his only points of contact his legs and head. With his body angled upwards, he resembled a gigantic half-open jackknife.

The laughter accelerated. The controlled topple was funny enough in itself, but the protracted milking of the ridiculous angle at which his cake-piled head rested was pure inspiration.

“Will you look at that cat?” Al Kilgore exclaimed gleefully.

“That,” said Dick Baldwin, standing near the alcove doorway, “is
economy
!” He giggled.

I looked at my watch, clocking the laugh for Poe, figuring he’d never get a reaction like it again. It was exactly ten minutes of eleven. The second hand swept past the numbers. Five seconds.

The comedian was still in the middle of the stage, immobile, a grotesque tangle of floppy limbs and lopsided layer cake.

Ten seconds. Twelve.

Poe didn’t move.

O. J. ambled over to the platform, got up on it, walked a few steps, and stared down at the motionless lump. He frowned.

The laughter gradually tapered off.

“
Gene
!” It was Hilary. Her voice was sharp, urgent.

I was already on my way. Hopping onto the stage, I whirled and held out a hand to stop the curiosity seekers from following.

“He might be sick,” I said. “Give him air, don’t crowd.”

O. J., kneeling upstage of Poe, raised his eyes and spoke low. “He’s going to need more than air, Gene. Help me carry him out of sight.”

I took one look at Poe and shook my head. I knew better than to move a man with a knife stuck in his back.

“Hilary,” I yelled, “call Lou Betterman.” I didn’t want to panic the crowd by directly naming the police.

I felt Poe’s pulse. Nothing. I tried his chest. No heartbeat. I rose and asked a question of the audience.

Fortunately, there were three doctors in the house.

I
ENLISTED SERGEANTS-AT-ARMS
immediately, appointing each a different door to guard. O. J. hurried downstairs to explain things to any Lambs staff on the premises.

I wanted to avoid a general announcement, but I knew we were going to be there all damned night, so everyone had to be told. I tried to make it as gentle and diplomatic as possible, but predictably, one person went all hysterical and had to be handed over to one of the physicians. The rest of the group buzzed among themselves.

Frank Butler stomped up to the edge of the platform, an anxious look on his broad face.

“Hey, boy!” he bellowed.

“What?”

“This mean we
ain’t
gonna see the Laurel and Hardy pitcher?”

“Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into!”

P
UFFING OUT HIS FLABBY
cheeks, Inspector Lou Betterman, NYPD, glowered at the roomful of nervous, fidgety onlookers and grumbled, half to himself, “A hundred witnesses, for Chrissake, and nobody sees a goddamn thing!” He pulled at the scraggly tuft he thought was a mustache and shook his head as he regarded the technicians on the platform dusting and measuring and photographing. “That,” he said, a bit wistfully, “was a lousy thing to do to a beautiful cake.”

Betterman was ticked off at being called out at all, let alone in the middle of the night. A Manhattan-based inspector generally concentrates on desk-side administration, but the murder at The Lambs was too ticklish to be left solely to rank and file. For the first half-hour, he was busy just processing celebrities, soothing them and getting them the hell out of there before the news-ghouls descended to scratch up tidbits.

“C’mon,” the inspector said, jerking his head for me to follow, “the others are waiting for us in the library.” He lumbered across the room, flipping an offhand nod at the officer posted by the rear archway to pass me through.

Inside, the inspector waddled over to a red leather chair and plopped heavily on it. I sat down between Hilary and O. J. while Betterman glared at the fourth person in the room.

Frank Butler, oblivious to the policeman’s scrutiny, sat at a small card table engrossed in a hand of Klondike. Every so often, he sneaked peeks at the face-down cards.

“How come,” said Betterman to Hilary in a reproachful tone, “you never gimme a call unless it’s on business? It’d hurt you to pick up a phone now and then, say hello?”

His acquaintanceship with my employer went back to a time when, according to him, he bounced her on his knee. I found it hard to visualize, not so much because of the difficulty of picturing a tiny Hilary submitting to the familiarity as because of the seeming impossibility of anyone getting past Lou’s lap to attain a perch on his patella.

“I don’t think,” Hilary said quietly, “that you asked us in here for small talk.”

“Might as well have,” he grumped, “for all I’ve got. No witnesses. Nobody recognizes the—
will you cut that out
?”

Butler looked up, offended. “All I’m doing’s shuffling! What’s eatin’ you, your truss too tight?”

Betterman waved a warning finger. “You better watch your ass, Butler, or I’ll have your license.”

The other laughed. “How? I don’t operate in this crummy state.”

“We can talk to people in Philly.”

“Yeah?” Butler snorted, wiping his huge forehead with a disreputable old rag. “They better be pretty hotsy-totsy. My uncle’s the chief of police, and the mayor’s my second cousin.”

Betterman eyed me dubiously. “He on the level?”

“I doubt it.”

O. J. cleared his throat, not wanting to interrupt, but having no choice. “Inspector, I—I’ve got to get back out there. This banquet is my responsibility.”

“Yeah. This won’t take too long.” The policeman withdrew a small notebook and pencil from a pocket, flipped open the pad and made a few notes, then pointed to O. J. with the writing stub. “The way I understand it, you were up by the head table when the incident occurred, right?”

O. J. nodded but did not look directly at Betterman.

“That means you were the only other person in line to see what happened. Did you, in fact, see anybody behind the platform?”

O. J. hesitated before replying. He took out a white handkerchief as if to dab the perspiration from his brow, but forgot what the original intention was, stared at the cloth for a few seconds, then put it back in his pocket. “I...I’m afraid I saw no one,” he told the policeman at last. “I doubt if anyone noticed anything but the tower of glop Frank here shoved into Poe’s face.”

“All right,” Betterman sighed. “Pass on that for now. Gene has fixed the time of death—assuming the knife was thrown at the instant the cake—ah—”

Butler wouldn’t permit him to find a delicate phrasing. “Y’mean when I smooshed it in that turkey’s fat puss.”

“I’m talking to Mr. Wheete, no one else!” Betterman said sharply.

“Suits me,” the Old Man shrugged, repeatedly cutting the deck with one hand.

Betterman closed his eyes for a three-count before continuing.

“All right. Say the stabbing was at—impact, or a second or two later. That was ten of eleven, right?”

O. J.’s normally unclouded brow wrinkled in concentration. “It sounds correct, sir. I looked at my watch, as a matter of fact, more than once. I was worried Poe might go on too long. Everybody had warned me about that. So you see, I was really more concerned with the passage of time than the exact hour.”

Hilary raised an index finger. Betterman nodded for her to speak.

“Lou, you said the knife was
thrown
?”

“Looks it. We figure the killer hadda be back by the kitchen door, eight or nine feet behind Poe to hit at the angle we found the knife. Couldn’t’ve been too close behind. Poe was on a platform and the angle woulda been too low.”

“Any chance,” Hilary asked, “the blow could have been delivered by a person standing in the wings behind him,
on
the platform?”

The inspector jerked a thumb at Butler and O. J. “These two’d have t’be practically blind to miss seeing anybody standing there. The kitchen door, all right, that I can buy. It’s on a lower level and in the shadows.”

He looked at O. J. and the Old Man, hoping one of them would remember something, but O. J. just studied his manicure and Butler began building a card castle.

I understood Butler’s callousness. He, like most of the Sons, hated Wayne Poe. But he was really nettling Lou Betterman.

“It’s a good thing for you,” the policeman told him, “that you were on the other side of the victim when you delivered that cake. Otherwise, you’d be my prime suspect.”

“Crap, boy! That creep wasn’t worth the trouble to kill, I just wanted to make him look like a horse’s ass.” Butler’s house of cards tumbled to the table and he scowled at them. “Need a shot of gin. Hands ain’t steady enough.”

“Lou,” I said, “have you questioned Phil Faxon yet? I recall he was standing at the back of the room near the alcove where you go into the kitchen. Maybe he saw the killer leaving through the kitchen door near the stairs.”

The inspector hailed the nearby patrolman and asked him to pass the word along to Katz, Betterman’s assistant, to find Phil Faxon.

While we were waiting, Hilary asked about the murder weapon.

“Smudged beyond recognition. No prints,” said the inspector.

“You mean somebody wiped it off?”

“Nobody got near the body,” I interrupted.

“Chrissake, it hadda be cleaned beforehand,” said Betterman, waving a paw at me impatiently. “Killer probably wore gloves, though so far that’s conjecture.”

“Where did the knife come from?” asked Hilary. “The kitchen?”

“Nope. You never saw a dagger like this in a chef’s mitt. It’s honed razor-sharp, perfectly balanced, single ruby in the side of the hilt—”

“There are a number of trophies all over the club, hanging up, in display cases,” said O. J. “It’s probably one of them.”

Betterman frowned. “If it is, nobody recognizes it. Your vice-president, what’s-his-name?”

“Hal Fawkes.”

“He says he never saw a knife like that in the club. I checked with one of the Lambs officials downstairs, and he confirms.”

Hilary had a puzzled look on her face. “Lou,” she said, “can I get a look at it before you tag it and pack it away?”

“Ask Katz when he gets back with Faxon. Why, you know something?”

She shook her head. “Not anything I can brag about. Just a niggling feeling, that’s all, I can’t define it.”

Katz, a sad-eyed policeman, cleared his throat and passed Hal Fawkes into the room. Betterman barked at Katz before he could back out.

“I said Faxon, not Fawkes.”

Katz nodded long-sufferingly. He was used to his superior’s irascibility. “Faxon’s upstairs with the old guy, waitin’ for the ambulance to—”