You Can't Catch Me

by Lawrence Lariar

  He broke out a bottle and insisted that we drink and talk nonsense for a while. He had the manners of a gentleman. You drank his liquor and listened to his oiled repartee and forgot that this was the man who had come up through the ranks of thugs and gunmen of the bootleg era to establish himself as the czar of all the racketeers in the Middle West. Rico Bruck moved among the city great, the officials and celebrities and the society bigwigs, but his source of income still came from the backwash areas of the world of almost legalized crime: the numbers game and the bookie business and his famous Card Club.

  John Gilligan rested his bony frame in an easy chair and conducted the conversation with his expected courtroom flair for managing dialogue. At ease near the window, he looked for all the world like a British peer on the loose for a fast cup of tea and a few scones. He sipped his drink in delicate pauses. He fingered his thread of a mustache with finesse. His saturnine face remained deadpan as he mouthed his well-constructed sentences. But he handled his job with aplomb, subtly guiding the tête-à-tête into channels in which I was involved, so that soon we were engaged in a talk about my business alone. And after that, it was a short jump to the problem at hand.

  “Rico’s insisted that you’re the man for this job, Wells,” Gilligan said. “And after talking to you, I’m inclined to agree with him. Your chore involves discretion and sound, independent judgment. I think you’re well equipped to handle it.”

  “I haven’t said I’d take it yet,” I reminded him.

  Rico burst into unfeigned merriment. “See what I mean, John?” he roared. “This is not a man you can con into a deal. He’s cagey, as smart as you are.”

  “I don’t doubt it for a minute,” smiled Gilligan. He put down his glass and produced a pipe, lit it slowly and deliberately and then leaned on his bony knees and grinned at me. “But I know Wells can’t turn down this deal, because it’s so damnably simple and yet pays so well. I’m sure Wells is interested in an easy buck, as the saying goes?”

  “Start with the dough,” I suggested. “The job can come later.”

  “You’ll be paid a grand for the deal,” said Rico. “Is that sugar?”

  “Not sugar, Rico, A grand for a private investigator can be too much for too little. Maybe you want somebody else, because I only play the legal jobs.”

  Rico opened his mouth to talk, but John Gilligan waved him into silence. Rico caught the signal and relaxed behind his desk, rolling a yellow pencil in his little hand and watching his legal advisor for the next part of the byplay.

  “This job is strictly legal, of course,” said Gilligan, as calm as a dead herring and just as emotional. “Rico is interested in a character who leaves tomorrow night on the Century, for New York. This man is a sitting duck for you, Wells. He will probably become one of the simplest assignments you’ve ever had. In the first place, he is ponderously fat. He is so fat that it would be impossible for him to hide from you, to lose himself in a crowd.”

  “You want him tailed?”

  “Exactly. Rico merely wants to know where this fat man goes when he arrives in New York.”

  “You spot him, that’s all,” Rico said.

  “One day’s work for a thousand dollars,” said Gilligan.

  “That’s a lot of loot for a small job.”

  “It’s worth it to me,” said Rico. He rolled his eyes in a quick exchange with Gilligan. “I’ll get it back, Wells.”

  “I wasn’t worried about that angle,” I said. “But why me for the job?”

  “I like you.”

  “And I love you dearly, Rico. But still, why me?”

  “Questions,” said Rico to Gilligan. “You see what I meant, John? This boy’s got something upstairs. He’s brainy.”

  “Flattery will get you nowhere,” I insisted. “You’ve got a whole squad of gunsels who could track a rat through the sewers of Times Square and come back with a mink pelt. You’ve got plenty of willing little workers, Rico, busy bees who can knock off a thing like this with no effort at all.”

  “I have?” Rico asked his ashtray. “Maybe you can name me one, Wells?”

  “I don’t pal around with your lads.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Gilligan said quietly. “Rico is right, my friend. His staff of assistants are a notch above the grade of moron, actually.”

  “Not only that,” Rico added. “It isn’t because they’re all so damned dumb, Wells. Point is, this fat character is smart, you understand. Do you send a boy out on a man’s job? And suppose the fat boy knows a couple of my men, what then? A man running, he feels a hell of a lot better if he knows who’s chasing him, right? And if he knows they’re after him, why he really makes tracks. He really fades.”

  “The fat man is tricky,” Gilligan said. “He’s smart enough to smell out any of Rico’s boys. That’s why we need a man like you, Wells. You can’t pass up a jaunt like this. Rico will pay all your expenses, deluxe style, including a drawing room on the Century, plus the best suite in my hotel, the Brentworth. Compliments of the management, of course.”

  It was a caviar and canapé assignment. It was steak and onions, money in the bank, a gold brick on a plate for any private investigator in his right mind. But I checked my growing enthusiasm, despite the fact that the journey might include Toni Kaye as roommate on the Century. Their uninhibited zeal and the ardor of their pitch goosed my natural caution.

  John Gilligan was bending every effort to sell me the trip. His presence in this room was calculated to lend dignity and decorum to the pitch. He was oily and smooth, an expensive huckster for so simple a deal. Why was he knocking himself out? They were hard at work promoting something that looked ripe for an intelligent high school lad with a mail order detective’s badge. My record and my background rose up to challenge their honeyed words. Any detective worthy of his fodder looks twice at an offer coming from such a man as Rico Bruck. He could be using me for a tool, a stooge, an outside handyman on a mission involving illegal high jinks. I let the silence build, watching them carefully in the pause. They gave me nothing but deadpan quiet, patiently awaiting my decision.

  I said, “Tell me more, Rico.”

  “More of what?”

  “The pitch.”

  “You know the pitch,” Rico said, turning to Gilligan for moral support. “We leave out anything, John?”

  Gilligan rested his regal neck against the back of the chair. He puffed slowly on his Dunhill. He opened his eyes and stared at the burst of smoke. “Not a thing, Wells. You know all there is to know, my friend.”

  “Everything,” said Rico.

  I plucked my hat off my knee. I put it on my head and stood up and started for the door, watching them freeze as I moved away.

  “Good day, gents,” I said. “It’s been a lovely little party.”

  “I say now,” said Gilligan, back on his feet again. “What’s eating you, Wells?”

  “Maybe I don’t go for legal double talk, Gilligan.”

  “Legal? I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”

  “You lawyers have one-way tracks of understanding,” I said quietly. “What do you need, a fancy writ before you start laying the facts on the line? You’ve talked me around the old garden gate, Gilligan, but you haven’t said much of any interest to a detective. Maybe you’d better start all over again.”

  “Relax, Wells,” Rico said, taking my arm as gently as a Boy Scout leading an old lady across a busy street. “You got a bad temper. What’s bothering you?”

  “The fat boy,” I said. “Who is he?”

  “You’ll see him tomorrow,” said Gilligan. “I’ll point him out to you in the station.”

  “Double talk again. Who is he?”

  Silence. And then the quick exchange of wide-open amazement at my question. Gilligan put down his pipe and struck a pose calculated to convince me of his intrinsic honesty, the type of st
ance he might use on a fickle jury, complete with boyish innocence ripe on his bony face.

  “Will you believe me if I tell you we don’t know his name?”

  “Frankly, no.”

  “It’s true,” said Rico anxiously. “So help me, Wells, it’s true.”

  “Let me put it this way,” Gilligan said, putting it the way he chose with a well-oiled gesture of his outstretched hand, palm down and designed to quiet me. He kept his hand that way as he talked, half closing his eyes and making heavy and ponderous furrows in his brow as he expounded his case. “There are certain situations in which a man like Rico can become involved that lie outside the province of the usual. What I mean is, this assignment may sound rather queer to you Wells. But in the final judgment, you must rely on the character of your client when making a decision. What Rico is asking you to do is only a normal procedure in your line of business. He wants a man followed to New York. You’ve done the same chore on many occasions before this. You must consider this job just as routine as any of the others you’ve handled.”

  He was good. He was great. But he didn’t reckon with my natural apathy toward all members of the bar. There wasn’t a lawyer on earth I could ever learn to love. In my book they were mental maggots, the leeches who suck blood and live off misery and corruption. Unless you need one….

  I said, “A great speech, Gilligan. Wonderful. But here’s another small question for you to chew on. Why do you want this fat slug tailed?”

  Gilligan exchanged a sly smile with Rico, slow and easy, the way two parents might react to a foolish question from a growing boy. “There are certain things we can’t tell you about the fat man, of course,” Gilligan said easily. “You must have had jobs like this before, Wells—cases where the client only gives the orders without revealing the background for the chase?”

  “I’ve had them,” I said. “But this is my first for Rico Bruck.”

  They caught the impact of my line. I saw Rico’s eyes flick to Gilligan, a second’s slide, but enough to quiet the tall man. Then Rico came my way and stood over me, small and weak-looking even up close. His face, however, was set and grim, as tight as the hard line of his jutting jaw. He reached into his jacket, pulled out his wallet and began to drop bills in my lap—fifties—slowly enough for me to count them as they fell, twenty of them. He paused when the last one fluttered to rest. He continued to count, ten more bills; five hundred extra.

  “Fifteen hundred bucks,” said Rico, barely raising his voice. “And you get an extra five hundred when I come to New York and you tell me where I can lay my hands on the fat slob.”

  “He must be worth his weight in gold,” I observed.

  “The fat man is loaded,” Rico said.

  “With what?”

  “You get your dough for what we explained, and no questions.”

  I stacked the green stuff into a neat bundle. I placed the bundle on Rico’s desk.

  “Stuff it,” I said.

  The little man reacted with a fine display of temper. His pale cheeks flooded with crimson and he opened his mouth and spluttered an obscenity at me. But Gilligan stepped between us in time to save me from boiling over.

  “Take it easy, boys,” he said, still the calm and legal arbiter. “No need to get your dander up, Wells. You can’t blame Rico for wanting to keep the lid on this deal. Look at it this way; it’s perfectly legal, but it involves a man who is not considered pure in police circles. I’m talking about Monk Stang, of course.”

  He dropped the name quietly, but Rico spat violently into a convenient cuspidor at the mention of Monk Stang. He had spat before and he would spit again, because Monk and he were arch enemies in the world of criminal endeavor. For the past five years Monk Stang had been slowly insinuating himself into the Chicago rackets, a procedure that had resulted in inter-mob friction on several occasions. In the dim and distant years, during Prohibition and later, Monk and Rico had been partners, henchmen, conspirators in assorted larceny and mayhem. But Rico graduated to the more refined rackets in the forties, deserting his partner in New York. After that the breach widened. And when Monk arrived in Chicago all hell broke loose, especially in the neighborhoods dominated by Rico’s gambling establishments. There had been a truce between them last year. Something must have happened to open the rift and renew the ancient feud. I took a stab at guessing.

  “The Folsom pendant?” I asked. “Is that what the fat boy has?”

  “You see how smart he is?” Rico said. “He guesses good.”

  “How could I miss?”

  Gilligan smiled feebly at Rico. “Let’s lay it on the line for Wells, Rico. He’s not stupid, after all. Everybody in Chicago knows that you were down at police headquarters after them. Folsom pendant was stolen last week. It requires no great deductive powers to add two and two. Since Monk Stang appeared down there at the same time you did, the assumption is that either of you might have been involved in the theft of that pendant.”

  He continued his monologue, breaking down the Folsom case with a fine regard for detail. Everybody who reads the Sunday supplements is aware of the fabulous history of the Folsom pendant, a bauble that has long fascinated the public because of its historical background. It is reputed to be the creation of Cargini, who had designed it for the Czar of all the Russias before the Revolution. It is a magnificent cluster of priceless gems surrounding a giant stone almost as large as the Hope diamond and valued at over half a million. The treasure had been lifted from the Chicago home of Everett Folsom, despite the usual precautions. The heist was a masterpiece of burglary.

  The police grabbed Monk Stang first because of his reputation for this type of thievery; Monk was the master strategist in chores of this sort. But Monk escaped with an airtight alibi, and so did Rico Bruck. Their session in the D.A.’s office was strictly routine, but there had been hard and violent exchanges between them, enough to make the headlines for a day or two. For my dough, only Monk Stang could have engineered the job. The Folsom pendant was a challenge for his talents.

  I waited for Gilligan to unwind himself, another five minutes of legal double talk calculated to put my mind at rest permanently.

  “Let’s say that Rico suspects the fat man of carrying the Folsom pendant to New York for Monk Stang,” said Gilligan. “All we want you to do is follow him discreetly.”

  “Why should fatso be heading for New York?” I asked. “There are plenty of cooperative fences here in Chicago.”

  “A good question,” said Rico. “Tell him, Johnny.”

  “Monk Stang is in New York,” Gilligan said.

  “And you want the fat boy before he reaches Monk?”

  “That’s a pretty sound theory.”

  “You two will be in New York?”

  “We’re taking a plane tonight,” Rico said. “We’ll be there a long time ahead of you, at the Waldorf. You got a snap job, Wells. You just follow the fat man until he settles down. When that happens, you let me know. What have you got to lose? You doing anything wrong, tailing a man for a customer?” He picked up the stack of bills and held them out to me. “Don’t be a dope, Wells. Take the bundle.”

  I took it. “When do I leave?”

  “I’ve reserved a drawing room for you,” Gilligan smiled. “I’ll meet you at Union Station this afternoon at five-thirty, to point out your quarry.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The Card Club

  2:49 P.M.—July 17th

  Toni Kaye was waiting for me in the driveway when I came out, chatting idly with the ape in the monkey suit. I tugged her away and strolled toward my car.

  “You’d better pack your duds,” I told her. “We’re leaving for New York tonight.”

  “We?” she laughed. “You throw a fast pitch, Mike.”

  “Why waste time?”

  “Sometimes it’s better slow and easy.”

  “That’s for the
birds, Toni.” I piloted her into my car, sat her down and gave her a cigarette. She closed her eyes and blew smoke and meditated. She threw her head back and stretched with animal movements. Her blonde hair was as natural as the green leaves above us. She sucked casually at the cigarette. She crossed her legs and I saw that her well-molded knees were unstockinged. I said, “I haven’t got time for games because the train pulls out in a couple of hours.”

  “Give a gal a minute to make up her mind, Mike.”

  “What’s your problem?”

  “The job at Rico’s earns me good money.”

  “You’ll do all right,” I said. “You can always do as well as Rico’s in New York.”

  “And suppose I miss?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “You’ll stay there?”

  “I can be sold the idea,” I said, and dropped my hand over her shoulder. “I have a branch office in New York.”

  She opened her eyes and turned her body so that she could appraise me. There was a budding curiosity moving her eyebrows, an expression that told me she was capable of deep and penetrating thought. “A branch office?” she asked. “What’s your line?”

  “I’m a private investigator.”

  “And you’re working for Rico?”

  Was it fear that clouded her eyes? She stared out over the lake, moving her body away from me. A plane hummed high in the western sky but she was looking somewhere beyond it, deeper into the blue and through the blue and out of this world, into her own personal landscape. What she saw there didn’t charm her.

  “What’s wrong with working for Rico?” I asked.

  “I didn’t say it was wrong. What are you doing for him?”

  I patted her hand. “A private eye doesn’t divulge his client’s little secrets, baby.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said absently. “I didn’t know. But maybe I better stay where I am for the time being, Mike.”

  “You worried about what I’m doing?”

  “Maybe I’m just worried about myself.”

  “That’s crazy, baby. What I’m doing for Rico shouldn’t bother you.”