Two things happened so quickly neither Conroy nor myself could have stopped them from coming about.
Bella Baldwin ripped out a fierce and ugly curse. What I mean ugly.
A flying cocktail glass sailed past my ear, missed Conroy's sleek skull by no more than an inch and then shattered on the wall behind him in a tinkling, musical shower of disintegrating fragments. Bella Baldwin followed the flight of the glass. Fleshy hands poised like Dracula claws, face mottled with fury, Amazon body rocketing by me for Frankie Conroy. He went absolutely white and shrank back in his chair. The torrent of foul language pouring out of Bella Baldwin's lush red mouth would have shocked a truck driver caught in a stream of Sunday drivers. No woman in the world should ever talk like that. Not ever.
"—— I knew it! You're still panting after that uppity Dago bitch! After all your talk and promises. Why, you goddamned bastard——"
It would have been funny except that it was so ugly all around.
Frankie Conroy, one of the grand old men of Crime, Incorporated, trying to shrivel down into his chair as if he wanted to go right through the bottom, or disappear, or make himself too small to hit. Bella Baldwin descending on his worried frame with all the classic outrage of the woman betrayed. Conroy's reaction seemed proof positive of the accuracy of the blistering accusations still steaming from his lady fair's mouth. I couldn't stand by and watch the old routine, though, as much as I might have enjoyed watching Conroy get his lumps. I leaped across the desk corner, found the attacking Bella's waist, hooked both palms into her hips and hauled her back the way she had come. She was warm and pulsing even through the stiff gold lamé gown and she didn't lose easily. She squirmed and twisted until I pinned her fleshy arms behind her and vised down hard. She was an armful and a tougher bargain than any man might have been. I dragged her back with me, pulling her from the desk altogether, so that her high heels were scuffing vicious grooves in the wood of the uncarpeted floor.
"——you sonofabitch—let me go——!"
Frankie Conroy stared up at us both from the depth of his chair. Shouted denials and meaningless words roared back at Bella Baldwin. But none of it was making any sense or having any calming effect on the wriggling hellcat in my arms. She had come to the same single conclusion I already had. Frankie Conroy and Terry Ricco had crossed paths, all right. Just how often and just how well only remained to be seen. Or found out. And maybe there was still hand-holding in the offing, as impossible as that seemed. It's a screwy world. (Remember Peaches and Daddy Browning?)
"——I'll kill her, Frankie! You can't two-time me——"
The door sprung inward and the goon squad came on the double, drawn by the gutter-and-boiler-factory explosions of cursing and fighting. And none too soon for my dough, either. Bella Baldwin was giving me a hard time, having spiked one of her shoes down into my instep and managing to twist one arm free and rake a mean welt down the back of my right hand. I was maybe a punch away from laying her out for the count, right on the tip of her tanned jaw but Fargo saved the day. Big Fargo, the outsized guide-bouncer-whatever. He hustled Bella Baldwin out of the office as swiftly as if she had been a child and exactly as if he had done it once or twice before. Conroy's blurted instructions, more for the rest of the goon squad than anybody, restored some kind of order. But even before Bella Baldwin was lifted screaming and struggling from the office, she got out one last loaded lulu. "It's her, ain't it? You want her and the dough . . . oh, you lousy crummy lying——"
The door slammed, cutting the rest of it off in the middle.
And stranger even than that, the goon squad had left with her, as unobtrusive as ever—and I was alone in the office with Frankie Conroy. The same bare, unfurnished room shone starkly in the pale yellow light from a set of overhead fluorescent tubes. Quiet as a tomb at midnight. You could have heard the next lie drop. Or the next truth.
"Noon," Frankie Conroy murmured, still ashen-faced, still staring in the direction of the closed door, "when Fargo comes back, get your iron from him and get out of here. You can't do yourself any good here. I'm telling you for your own neck so you can stop wasting time. You're barking up the wrong boy. I got nothing to do with the Junkyard kill."
"Sure, Frankie. Anything you say." I stared meaningfully in the direction of the door. Conroy reached down behind the desk again, shuddered and brought up another glass which he filled to the brim with Scotch from the bottle which Bella had tried to get her hands on to crown him with. He straightened out his crumpled striped suit, played with his twisted tie and tried a smile on for size. It didn't come off.
"What a dame," he said. "Plenty of guts. Plenty of everything else too."
"She could kill you someday. She doesn't seem to be afraid of your reputation. Shows you how dumb she is," I offered in consolation.
"She'll cool off. She always does. Then we get cozier than ever. Know what I mean?" His Flynn moustache curled like a villain's come to collect the mortgage payment. "I owe you one for saving me from having my eyes scratched out, Noon. You moved real good that time."
"Save the hearts and flowers. And the posies. You want to square things, you just level with me. About the Ricco business."
He frowned up at me. His face lost all friendliness.
"Don't try me, Noon. For the last time, I had nothing to do with that. Not a thing. Take it or leave it."
Fargo came back at that point, despite his huge proportions moving back into the room with all his by now familiar ease and deftness. His smile was taut. Conroy flung him an anxious glance and then relaxed. The big man had given him a high-sign of some kind, signaling an all-clear.
"You should see her," Fargo chuckled. "Out there singing her head off and moving it all around like nothing happened. That Bella. She's some woman, Frankie." Fargo ambled to my side, waiting for more orders.
"I'll take it for now," I said, avoiding Fargo and turning toward the door. "But one last thing—are you seeing Terry Ricco or is Bella just an old-fashioned girl who gets jealous of every other woman who says hello to you?"
Frankie Conroy set his drink down, pyramided his hands once more and his hawk face was no longer interested in anything else I had to say.
"Give him his rod back, Fargo, when you get him to the front door. And get him out of here. He's beginning to rub me the wrong way."
Fargo gave me my rod back and got me out of there.
Conroy's ridiculous office was one place I had no regrets about leaving: the atmosphere and the company were stifling.
On the sidewalk under the purple canopy, mammoth Fargo had one last forget-me-not before he went back into the club. The night air sung.
"Noon, Frankie doesn't want to see you anymore."
"That figures."
"I don't want to see you anymore either. If I do, one of us isn't going to walk away in one piece. Any ideas who that would be?"
"I got the message, Fargo."
"You see you remember it. Now buzz off."
When he was gone and the muscle-bound doorman was sizing me up with a sour expression on his brutish face, I hailed a cab. Again I knotted a loose shoelace, wanting to give Monks' tail a little more time to keep tabs on me. I hadn't spotted him in the club at all but he'd been there all right. Monks' boys aren't exactly amateurs, either.
A lone cruising cab sluiced up to the canopy and I stepped in. Down the block an automobile's headlights suddenly blinked on. It only meant something because I was watching out for it. And it meant that at least two detectives had been assigned to the care and keeping of Ed Noon.
The cabbie batted his meter and said in a tired voice, "Where to, mister?" He sounded about as enthusiastic as an overworked housewife.
"Tenth Avenue and Fifty-Sixth," I told him. "There's a junkyard there." The Manhattan evening had gotten later and darker but the glow of neon and stars and that peculiar brilliance that lights up the city cast a diffuse, almost surrealistic, aura over all things. Hello, Dali.
The stone buildings, the towering
skyline to the east and west and the moving illumination of traffic and trade—Manhattan's pulse and heartbeat throbbed on remorselessly. Unfeelingly. Like forever.
And the one other thing I couldn't escape, apart from the Headquarters' tailing detail, was the plain, unvarnished possibility that young Terry Ricco and old Frankie Conroy might be lovers. The mating of May and December, the Angel and the Devil, a Romany Mod Cleopatra and a sidewalk Caesar whose guns and goons just might be responsible for the death of the man known as John Junkyard. Sex can be as blind as Love.
We all go to heaven or hell by different routes.
I had to wonder just what road Terry Ricco was on.
It was close to ten o'clock as the cab crossed town, heading for the junkyard—and whatever answers I might find there.
The scene of the crime is always a good place to visit if you're a detective for a living, even if you wouldn't want to live there.
I had to see Giovanni Ricco's office before I did another thing. Proper investigation dictated such a move. It was in the cards.
And in the coins, too.
Those half-coins which had to be the key to John Junkyard's murder.
GANG
Tenth Avenue lay dirty, quiet and waiting in the moonlight.
An enormous circle of moon, hanging low over the city, made dark silhouettes and titanic shadows of everything in sight. A heavy truck motor roared off in the stillness. The shabby, desolate neighborhood—an artery for trucks, trailers and commercial traffic in the daytime—was like a long, lonely stretch of unused railroad track. I watched as the taillight of the taxicab disappeared around the next corner. Rising high on all sides were tall, gloomy, barely-lit buildings which could have been apartment houses but more likely were loft warehouses. The distant arch of the West Side Highway, flickering with north- and southbound vehicles with motors inaudible, flowed on into the far horizon. Toward Upper Manhattan and The Bronx. There wasn't a human being in sight on the deserted sidewalks. The paradox always amazed me. Within five minutes' walking distance lay bustling, humming Times Square with all the crowded neon and the throngs of people. This was Wasteland and no fit place for anyone to live. Not anybody.
The Headquarters car, that Plymouth again, eased gently around the uptown corner and came to a stop, lights going off. Satisfied, I got down to cases. I pulled my hat down and walked rapidly toward the junkyard.
As close as this was to my midtown office, I hadn't seen the junkyard in years. John Ricco's first place of business was a museum piece out of memory. Here had begun the fabulous career of the immigrant junk dealer who had parlayed savvy and individual hustle into a fortune. I wondered if Ricco's two kids really appreciated what he accomplished with all the odds against him. No special education, bucking all the prejudice of homemade bigotry, he maintained his own right to live and do his own thing in the face of the Mob——or the Mafia or the Organization or whatever the hell they were calling themselves these days. J. Edgar Hoover had had the FBI to back up his arguments; Giovanni Ricco had only his chutzpah and native intelligence. And they almost don't make them that way anymore.
Word must have come down from somewhere higher up. Leave John Junkyard alone. Let him have his own way. He's a credit to us all.
There was no other explanation for Ricco's uninterrupted rise to fame and fortune. And reputation. For he had never compromised. Or copped out.
There was a thirty-foot-high wooden gate that was more of a stockade entrance than anything else. I half-expected to see an F Troop-sort of sentry box standing behind it. I checked the darkened thoroughfare for any sign of approaching cars. There was none so I was over the fence and into the dark, massive yard in just as little time as it took an old West Farms kid and ex-cavalryman to manage it. I could always climb, and the stout, heavy poles, lashed together with cross-bars of matching timber, made it a breeze. It was like climbing trees in Bronx Park, monkey-fashion.
The junkyard, eerie and abandoned, with the low full moon almost overhead, like a prize in a shooting gallery, was like a sudden jab in the solar plexus. My own childhood came rushing back in a floodtide of recall. Once you've been in one junkyard, you've been in every junkyard in the universe. They probably look the same in Paris, in Rome and in Timbuktu. They must, because they deal always in the same old things . . . junk, thrown-away utilities, discarded refuse that nobody needs or wants anymore . . . the collected-and-discarded refuse of lifetimes.
Heaps of rubber tires were piled high like so many dirty doughnuts. Stacks of rubble and debris. A badly-damaged refrigerator here, a brokendown castiron stove there. A half-demolished derrick, its crane bent in half like a broken matchstick, stood in the center of the big yard. Outlined in the full wash of the moon, the huge derrick was like a busted toy, something King Kong might have played with. Or maybe Godzilla. Every revealed patch of earth was a depository for something. Barrels and kegs and old oildrums so laden with grease as to be pitch-black. A mountain of rolled, tied-up carpets and linoleum surrounded by sagging, wormeaten stuffed chairs, and beds, with the springs coiling out of each, like so many snakes poised in the moonlight to hiss and strike. The smell in John Junkyard's old boneyard was the thick, heavy, undeniable stench of the march of Time. I wondered only briefly why he had ever hung on to such an eyesore when the going got so much better for him. Tradition was one thing; but this was ludicrous. And also unhealthy. The place should have been condemned decades ago.
I pulled up short to avoid a high heap of moldering, smelly, mysterious garbage of some kind, when suddenly a large gray rat scurried past my advancing footsteps. I was moving as quietly as possible but I was no match for a rodent who lives by stealth. For a moment the hair stood up on the back of my neck, but I shook the feeling off. The rat had no business with me nor did he want any. I moved on, circling the heap and it was then I saw the tiny light burning steadily before me, about ten yards away. A light softly blazing like a will o' the wisp over a marsh. I peered deeper into the gloom. The moonlight didn't penetrate this far back because of a sloping overhang of metal roofing from the nearest building standing high and tall above the junkyard. As my eyes searched around, I made out the dim outlines of a low, tarpaper shack sprawling from behind another indeterminate mound of refuse and scrap. Now I knew. It was John Junkyard's old office, which he had kept for no other reason than his nostalgia Italian-style. Or as a reminder of how far he had traveled from all this. Anyhow, someone was using the old office in the shack right now, for equally unknown reasons. That too, was obvious. Lights and candles and lamps just don't go on by themselves. Someone has to put them on. Not even IBM could manage illumination in a deserted junkyard.
I drew closer to the office where Giovanni Ricco's life had wound up on the junkheap in spite of everything, guided by the burning light. It enlarged like a flaming star, then seemed to fan out into a much bigger flare of light. I made out a window with a crossbar of panes. Beyond the distant fence behind me, another heavy truck roared along Tenth Avenue. The rumbling echoes filled the junkyard and when the sound faded, going north, I could suddenly hear a low murmur of voices. Voices vague and blurred but voices all the same, and coming from the tarpaper shack. Young voices.
I edged in closer, crouching low, keeping my silhouette small. Somewhere out on the Hudson River, a barge horn mooed like a mighty cow. The moan drowned out the talking voices. I took advantage of the din to ease over to the rising piece of ground that held the shack, stepped quickly around a stack of rusting I-beams and shafts of girder debris and circled to the rear of the squatting shack, Indian style.
The Tonto maneuver cost me plenty. I was so preoccupied with stalking, I lost all the cards in the night game. I had exposed my rear to the enemy.
Something no one should ever do on a reconnaissance mission. Especially an ex-cavalryman who learned the art of sneaking-and-peeking when Patton was tanking his wave all over Hitler's Europe. Learned it the hard way.
I heard the mistake before I saw it. Before I could re
ctify it.
There was a concerted gasp of breaths, a sudden rush of figures, a mass movement exploding behind me. I whirled, hands flying upward in pure reflex, one of them snaking for the shoulder-holster .45. I was already cursing myself for not having it out in the first place but the second place was already on top of me. It was too late for tears. Or excuses.
They rushed me. An organized, collective, single-purpose They.
I went down beneath a heaping, striking, heavy pile of bodies. Corduroy, leather and suede pressed into my face, my senses—a sea of threshing arms and legs. There had to be at least four of them. I couldn't get a punch or a kick in edgewise, and suddenly I stopped moving or I would have had to stop breathing. I was down beneath a ton of dead weight pinning me down, nearly pressing me into the damp, smelly earth.
"Pick the bastard up and bring him inside," Johnny Ricco's familiar one-note voice suddenly whispered fiercely, cutting the grunting silence with all the subtlety of a sledge-hammer. "I wanta carve my initials out on his dirty face! JR—compliments of Johnny Ricco!"
No Junior ever had an uglier and more righteous sound in his voice.
Johnny Ricco sounded exactly the way he obviously felt.
Mad enough to kill.
They carried me into the tarpaper shack as if I were one of the rolled-up rugs lying in the moonlit junkyard. As if I was no more than a bit of collected scrap or junk that might fetch a price on the market. I was just as helpless as that, and just as useless.
Only no rolled-up rug had ever felt as scared as I was.
I was in the hands of a boy who was certain I was his father's murderer. A boy with a gang. A boy with a knife, who knew what vendetta meant.
A boy who just might have all the time and privacy in the world to settle his accounts with me. Johnny Ricco, Terry Ricco's brother.
But, mostly, John Ricco's son.
A wild kid with wilder ideas. Like knowing how to use a knife.
A "now" generation youngster with "then" generation solutions.
The Girl in the Cockpit Page 5