Read Online The Brink of Murder by Helen Nielsen - Free Book Online Page B

he wanted dinner, he could call down to any of several restaurants on the Mall, or he could have taken the elevator down and spent the time in the bar of one of those restaurants. He wouldn’t have needed his car for that. So, unless you want to buy the idea that he spent all that time just driving about on an evening when there was enough intermittent rain to make driving hazardous, he must have gone somewhere and seen someone or, at least, have been seen by someone.”
    “And talked to someone,” Hannah contributed.
    “Right. This parking ticket is the only thing I have that the police don’t have so what I intend to do is try reconstructing Barney’s last day at the office and see where it leads. I did see his appointment book for the day. It had one notation in his own handwriting—I take it that Mary Sutton usually makes his appointments—and that was for lunch with Vincent Pucci.”
    “Pucci,” Hannah repeated. “The name sounds familiar.”
    “You’ve probably seen it on a billboard or two. Pucci is building some of the more lavish housing developments hereabouts.”
    “He sounds like a gangster.”
    “There’s gossip to that effect. So far as I know that’s all it is—gossip. He’s never been named by any investigating committee.”
    “They don’t make investigating committees the way they used to,” Hannah said sadly. “There hasn’t been a really good one since Estes Kefauver. I don’t suppose there’s any use in me asking you to take me along when you go to see Pucci.”
    Simon shook his head. “Afraid not. It may not be the easiest thing to do. He’s a busy man.”
    “Just the same, I’ll bet you fifty thousand of the more than three hundred thousand dollars you owe me for losing at pinochle that you make it on the first try.”
    • • •
    Hannah was almost right. On the next morning Simon drove to the head office of Pucci Enterprises and asked to see Vincent Pucci. The man in charge, who resembled an Olympic decathlon contestant, made it known that this was impossible until Simon produced his card and announced that he was representing Bernard Amling.
    “I don’t think Mr Pucci likes to have his projects held up with legal delays,” he said. “I’m trying to be helpful.”
    Mr Pucci didn’t like his projects held up with any kind of delays, legal or otherwise, and the result of this approach was a series of telephone calls that finally pinpointed the big man himself at a health spa just a few miles from the Pacific Guaranty tower. It was a very expensive spa with a neo-Las Vegas Romanesque décor and there, sweating out the afterglow of a herbal massage, Simon found Pucci reclining on the couch like Nero resting up for the next orgy. In addition to the attendant, a girl with a paperback cover figure and not much more clothing, he was accompanied by a bodyguard who might have been a twin to the man at the construction office. Simon presented his card and watched it wilt in the herbal air. The bodyguard, who was wearing a sweat-suit, read the card and presented it to Pucci who was wearing a frown.
    “Okay, so you’re Drake,” he said. “What’s wrong with Barney? If there’s trouble he should call me himself.”
    “He should call his wife, too, but he didn’t,” Simon said.
    Anyone who thinks women have a corner on an ear for gossip hasn’t known many businessmen. Vincent Pucci’s large, flabby face, dominated by an enormous nose that was almost luminous with sweat, came to instant attention.
    “What do you mean?” he demanded.
    “Barney’s gone away. Didn’t he tell you about it when you had lunch together a week ago last Friday?”
    “Did I have lunch a week ago with Barney?” Pucci asked.
    The man in the sweat-suit emitted an affirmative grunt. “At Emilio’s,” he said.
    Pucci’s face wrinkled into a nostalgic smile. “Emilio’s,” he sighed. “That Emilio makes the greatest chicken cacciatore anywhere outside my mama’s kitchen. Barney wasn’t