Milo March #7: The Gallows Garden

The Gallows Garden

by

Kendell Foster Crossen

Writing as M.E. Chaber

With a Afterword by Kendra Crossen Burroughs

Steeger Books / 2020

Copyright Information

Published by Steeger Books

Visit steegerbooks.com for more books like this.

©1986, 2020 by Kendra Crossen Burroughs

The unabridged novel has been lightly edited by Kendra Crossen Burroughs.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law.

Publishing History

Hardcover

New York: Rinehart & Company, January 1958.

Toronto: Clarke, Irwin & Company, 1958.

London: T. V. Boardman (American Bloodhound Mystery #225), August 1958. Dust jacket by Denis McLoughlin.

Paperback

New York: Pocket Books #1240, as The Lady Came to Kill, May 1959. Cover by Len Goldberg.

New York: Paperback Library (63-549), A Milo March Mystery, #18, March 1971. Cover by Robert McGinnis.

Dedication

To Lisa Palmieri, with love, and in memory of the season when grape leaves curl up like the hands of little dying grandmothers.

One

My name is Milo March. I’m an insurance investigator. It’s not quite the same as being a private eye, even though I wear a trench coat, sometimes play a case by ear, and have been known to chase a blonde—when there wasn’t a brunette around.

I have my own office on Madison Avenue—the martini capital of the United States. March’s Insurance Service Corporation. I work for any of the insurance companies that wants to hire me. It means that I get most of the cases—life, fire, jewelry, or other valuables—which are too big or too hard for their regular claims departments. It’s a living.

It had been three or four weeks since I’d been on a case and my bank roll was beginning to look as if it had taken a course at Slenderella. My fees were pretty high but the money didn’t last long after I got through paying for my apartment and my office and supporting five or six of the leading bartenders in New York. I was trying to think of a way of drumming up a little business when the phone rang.

I picked up the receiver. March’s Insurance Service Corporation, I said in a voice which I hoped would convey the idea that I was so busy I could barely squeeze in one more case.

Milo, a sexy contralto voice said, have you really become as stuffy as you sound?

I recognized the voice. It belonged to Merry Mellany. She was beautiful and blond and either the third or the fourth richest woman in the world. I could never remember which. I had worked on a case involving her jewels a couple of years earlier and we’d been friends ever since. And I mean just friends. It had just missed developing into something else several times. Sometimes I suspected the only reason it hadn’t was that the thought of all that money scared me.

I am not stuffy, I said indignantly. But once in a while I have to sound as if this were an office and not an after-hours club. How are you, Merry?

Wonderful, but bored, she said. Take me to lunch?

It’s the best offer I’ve had all morning, I said. Twelve-thirty at Cherio’s?

Love you, she said. I’ll be there. She hung up.

I replaced the receiver, wondering why it always seemed so much easier to spend money than to make it. That seemed to be the only result of a hard money policy.

I had no sooner put the receiver down than the phone rang again. I picked it up and said, Yeah? I was back to normalcy.

Milo? It was a man’s voice. It sounded like someone I knew.

Yeah, I said again. It was a good line and I might as well stick with it until I got close enough to read the score.

This is Martin Raymond, he said. I knew him, all right. He was a vice-president of Intercontinental Insurance, a company I’d done a lot of work for. Got a minute?

I did a while ago, I said, so it must be around here somewhere.

He rewarded me with a conference-room laugh. That’s my boy, he said. Always making with the old boffola. Want to run over here? We have a problem maybe you and I can kick into shape.

Let’s just run it up a flagpole and see who salutes it, I said. I’ll be right over.

I hung up and looked at my watch. It was eleven o’clock. I called my answering service and told them I wouldn’t be back until after two. Then I went out and walked up Madison Avenue.

Intercontinental had been one of the first insurance companies to move uptown. They had their own building on upper Madison. It was an imposing edifice of glass and steel, giving mute testimony to the profits in premiums. Up on Raymond’s floor there was a redheaded receptionist who gave ample proof that they didn’t think only of money. She checked on her phone and told me I could go in.

Raymond’s office, on the other hand, was a triumph of cash over taste. Only slightly smaller than Grand Central Station, it was furnished in Early American, including a refurbished and glorified cobbler’s bench that now held only a couple of ashtrays. The walls were covered with photographs of the early executives of Intercontinental, all of them looking like bandits who had come down out of the hills in their Sunday finery to have their pictures taken. Raymond was sitting behind a low table-desk, the top of which was bare except for a gold pencil and pad. The clean-desk bit was fashionable on Madison Avenue and was supposed to hint that here was a man so busy that he kept up with his work.

Milo, boy, it’s good to see you, he said as I came in. He waved a hand toward something that had once been an Early American cupboard and was now a bar. I guess it’s too early to offer you a drink.

It’s never too early, I said, but I’ll bear up without one. Somebody has to show those A.A.’s they’re not the only ones who can keep a grip on themselves.

He laughed politely. Want to go to work?

I never want to, I said, but I like the money. It comes in handy when I want to add to my stamp collection. What’s the job?

Just a small problem, he said. Which meant it was a tough one. The name Dr. Jaime Moreno do anything to you?

Not especially, I admitted. It’s vaguely familiar, but that’s all.

He was a professor here at New York University. Vanished not long ago.

Then I remembered. Dr. Jaime Moreno had been a political refugee from one of the Latin American countries in the Caribbean. He’d been teaching Latin American literature at the university. He had left the university one evening and that was the last ever seen of him.

I remember, I said. He came from one of those banana republics in Central America.

Sugar, not bananas, Raymond said. He was an exile from the Monican Republic, or Republic of Santa Monica. He was pretty well known as a critic of the regime down there.

I was remembering more and that was putting it mildly. The Monican Republic was the personal property of a guy who called himself Generalissimo Francisco Torcido, or sometimes simply The Benefactor. He’d been the dictator of the country for the past thirty years, and according to all reports it had been one of the bloodiest rules in the world. The Monican Republic was a little country about the size of Illinois, bounded by the Dominican Republic, the Republic of Haiti, and the Caribbean.

I remember reading about it in the papers, I said. They never found him, huh?

Raymond shook his head. Not a trace.

The theory, I said, was that Torcido had him killed, wasn’t it?

There are two theories, Raymond said carefully. Moreno was the treasurer of some refugee fund amounting to about one hundred and thirty thousand dollars. The day after he ‘vanished,’ he showed up at the bank and drew all of the money out. That was the last time he was seen. So one theory is that he took the money and went to greener pastures. The other theory is that Generalissimo Torcido had him kidnapped and brought back down there, where he was killed. There is also the death of an American which some people are trying to tie in with it.

I remembered reading something about that. It had to do with an American pilot who had supposedly flown Moreno to the Monican Republic and then he, too, had vanished there. But I didn’t ask any questions. I could always check it with someone who wasn’t so careful as Raymond.

After all, Raymond added irrelevantly, the Monican Republic, while small, is an important member of the anti-Communist bloc, and Generalissimo Torcido is, I believe, well liked in Washington.

Sure, I said, and I remember hearing somewhere that Lucky Luciano helped us to win the war. Bedfellows make strange politics.

Well, he said vaguely. He wasn’t going to pursue that line. In the meantime, everyone has been searching for Dr. Moreno. The New York police, the FBI, and a private group mostly composed of other refugees. There has been some prodding on the matter from Congress. Most recently, the Monican Republic has hired a couple of well-known lawyers and an investigator here in America to try to solve the mystery. I understand that the tourist business has fallen off since the incident and Torcido himself is anxious to have the matter cleared up.

I’ll bet, I said. I looked at him. Do I get the impression that after all these people have failed to find the professor, you want me to step in and dig him up?

Not exactly, he said. We carried no insurance on the man. I doubt if he had any. Under the circumstances, I suppose premiums would have been pretty high. No, we’d like you to find his manuscript.