You Can't Catch Me

by Lawrence Lariar

  “A broad?” I asked, putting on a show of surprise. “Sid’s been holding out on me. Built?”

  “But stacked. What I’d give for a dame like that.”

  “Good old Sid,” I commented. “He never told me.”

  “I don’t blame him a bit. Listen, if I had a babe like that one, I’d build a wall around her. She’s just about the hottest-looking doll you ever laid your eyes on—”

  “Listen, you wouldn’t know her name? I could pull a big gag on old Sid if I knew who she was.”

  “Her name?” he asked himself. “Let me think a minute, mister.”

  He thought it over. He closed his eyes and bit his lip again and ran his dirty fingernails through his dirty hair. He stared at a bird on a hydrant across the street. He sucked and puffed at his cigarette. He scratched his head and made faces at the floor and when it was all over his face lit up with a small but significant spark of animation.

  “Spain,” he said. “Linda Spain, a burlesque broad. You ever heard of her? She’s terrific, mister. Go down to the old Braddock Theatre some night, behind the alley, because the place is closed up in front. For three bucks they’ll let you in to watch the girls shake it. “Listen, this babe is the hottest—”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow, if Lady Lombar breezes in.”

  CHAPTER 8

  The Brentworth Hotel—New York

  11:07 A.M.—July 18th

  The Brentworth was an ancient trap, a relic of the early days of the century, located in the middle Forties. Its rococo façade had been sandblasted recently, so that the front stood out among the dismal rows of office buildings flanking it. The lobby blossomed with the latest in modern décor, a decorator’s dream of delight, complete with striated woods and startling niches. But the customers looked as old as the foundation of the building. A few wrinkled faces paused in the perusal of their morning newspapers to look up and examine me as I breezed to the desk. It struck me that I had seen brighter faces at the morgue.

  The desk man informed me that the “young lady” was waiting for me upstairs in my suite, 904, and he hoped that my stay in New York would be pleasant. He was a dapper, efficient character, probably the manager. He gave me the best wishes of John Gilligan and hoped my suite was comfortable, and if anything bothered me would I kindly pick up the phone and tell him so that he could make it right for me?

  I took the elevator and found number 904. It was a two-room deal, quietly done in pastel shades, with windows facing Broadway so that the Paramount Tower became the center of interest in the ridge of buildings outside.

  Toni was waiting for me in a bright yellow lounging outfit that made her-look like something out of a fashion ad. She had taken a shower and freshened her make-up, a softer shade now, for daytime wear.

  I said, “Hungry, Toni?”

  She led me into the living room and pointed to a tray full of dishes. “I was starved, Mike. You don’t mind?”

  “Not a bit. I like my women well fed.”

  “How about you?”

  “I can do anything better on an empty stomach.”

  “I believe you,” Toni said. “What about the fat man? Did you track him down?”

  “I know where I can put my finger on him.”

  “A finger wouldn’t bother him. He certainly was the fattest man I ever saw in my life. What was with him? You think he was crazy? He sure acted crazy.”

  “Like a fox,” I said. “He’s no fool, Toni.”

  I picked up the phone and called the Waldorf and asked for Rico Bruck. Toni was standing at the window when I mouthed his name. She swiveled around and came at me, her face working to show me her sudden surprise. She stood there, watching me in fascination, tonguing her upper lip and breathing hard. Rico was out. I left a message for him and hung up.

  “Why didn’t you tell me Rico was coming to New York?” Toni asked. She clutched my arm and squeezed it. She was trembling. She was shaking like a Mixmaster, so violently that I grabbed her and patted her where it would do the most good.

  “Why didn’t you ask me?”

  “I don’t want him to know I’m here, Mike.”

  “He won’t know. It’ll be our little secret.”

  “I ran away from Rico’s place to stay clear of things like this,” she said. “I don’t want any part of it.”

  “You’re on the outside,” I told her. “All I did for Rico was follow that fat character. You told Rico you were quitting?”

  “I just walked out, Mike. He’s going to be sore as hell if he finds out I’m with you.”

  “He’ll never know.”

  “You’re so damned sure of yourself,” Toni said with a weak sob, and walked away from me and into the bedroom. I followed her inside and found her sitting on the bed, her pretty head buried in her hands. “But you don’t know Rico.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  “He’s bad, Mike. He could make it tough for me in New York.”

  “Why should he?”

  “Just because he’s mean, because he expects everybody who works for him to be loyal.” She shivered and showed me her troubled eyes. And when I put my arm around her, there was no warmth to her body. “He could circulate lousy stories about me here,” Toni said. “He has all kinds of contacts in show business.”

  “You’re dramatizing him,” I said. I turned her face my way and looked into her damp eyes. “Unless you and he were playing rabbit together. Was that it?”

  “What do I look like?” she asked angrily, shrugging my hand away. “I wouldn’t be found dead in a bed with him.”

  “And he knows it?”

  “I’ve told him often, Mike.”

  “I can’t blame him for not giving up,” I said with another try at her waist. This time she allowed me to keep my hand where I put it, around her waist with a gentle pressure. “But you’re all wrong about Rico, Toni—because he’ll never know from me that you’re in town. Does that help? Or shall I sing it to you?”

  “It helps,” Toni said quietly. “You’re a good egg, Mike. I can’t help feeling that I can trust you.”

  “Is that all you feel?” I pulled her to me and she did not fight.

  “Maybe what I feel scares me a little.”

  “We’re talking too much, Toni,” I said.

  She answered with her lips, giving herself to me with a rush of enthusiasm that set the hidden fires burning in me. “I’m all through talking now,” she said. “Don’t let me talk anymore, Mike.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Marty’s Bar and Grill—New York

  4:23 P.M.—July 18th

  I took her to Marty’s later. Marty’s place was a hangout for the newspaper boys, writers and theatrical folk of the neighborhood, an intimate steak and chowder house that featured sawdust floors and food that was geared to make you drool. My New York office was around the corner. We sat at the bar and waited for my partner, Izzy Rosen. It was almost five, and Izzy would be in soon.

  When the hour arrived Izzy came with it, pushing through the door with his usual burst of energy. He spotted me at the bar and slapped me affectionately while I introduced him to Toni Kaye.

  “Glad to meet you,” Toni said, eyeing him with the sly and frigid regard of a judge at a dog show. “Any friend of Mike’s is a friend of mine.”

  “That goes double,” Izzy beamed. He had a quick and intelligent face, and added her up with no effort at all. And when he had finished his mental gymnastics, he ordered a drink and disregarded her. “Break down the deal for me, Mike,” he said. “Maybe you’ll be needing me?”

  I cut it up into small pieces for him, including the dramatic session on the train and the hurly-burly that had followed. Izzy listened with his accustomed concentration. Up close, he looked for all the world like a prosperous theatrical man, an agent, a producer, or a Broadway entrepreneur. He dr
essed in the height of style, featuring the latest in masculine apparel, clothes that built his dumpy frame into a picture of middleclass prosperity. He could have been somebody’s tailor; a well-to-do cloak-and-suiter. He could have been the poor man’s Billy Rose, doing the town with a pocketful of loot. But Izzy Rosen was none of these things.

  We joined forces five years ago, when I opened the Chicago office. Izzy had proved himself the best private investigator in New York, a specialist in the finger department, a masterful brain at skip-tracing, tracking down the quarry when it runs for the dim and distant corners. Izzy could make a locate with a minimum of information. He had been the inspiration in the chase for Garrison Carruthers three years ago, when the millionaire playboy chose to run for cover from his nagging wife. Izzy had tracked him down in less than three months, breaking the case wide open on a few leads that wouldn’t have inspired anyone but himself.

  “Fifteen hundred clams for that kind of a chase?” Izzy chuckled and shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense, Mike.”

  “Do we ask questions when the bundle is so big?” I asked.

  “We do not. You phoned in Sidney Wragge’s address to Rico?”

  “Rico isn’t in his room at the Waldorf.”

  “You want me to phone it in?” Izzy asked, rolling his eyes toward Toni in a suggestive grin. “You’re going to be busy this afternoon, I gather?”

  “All tied up.” I said. “Toni and I are going to have some food now, Izzy. You want to keep trying Rico?”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “Let me know when you reach him. I’ll be at the Brentworth late this afternoon.”

  “Of course you will,” Izzy smiled.

  And he tipped his hat with a fine show of gallantry, downed his drink and marched out of there.

  Toni and I sipped black coffee and had a few brandies and smoked a few cigarettes. The place was empty now, save for a few late afternoon strays who drank at the street end of Marty’s bar. We were alone in the back of the bistro, isolated in a small and cozy booth, so that it was possible to mug it up a bit. She leaned against the wall and pulled me to her along the cushioned seat. Her sultry eyes were bright with purpose now. It was no hardship to kiss her.

  I said, “We’re wasting time here, Toni.”

  “That’s what I was thinking, Mike.”

  “Pull yourself together, we’re going back to the Brentworth.”

  We walked the few blocks back to the hotel, and her arm was tight in mine. Even the old cruds in the lobby gazed at her with obvious ardor, following us as we crossed to the elevator and started upstairs. She stopped in the hallway near our door and turned to me.

  “Easy, Toni,” I said. “We’re almost home.”

  And then I opened the door and the mood left me.

  And passion died for Toni at the same moment.

  Because we stepped across the threshold into a scene of horror. Everything in the place was upended and loused into disorder: chairs on their sides, tables upset, and the two lamps cracked and smashed on the rug, one of them incongruously lit and glowing with a brilliance that made the tableau a mad thing, something out of a stage set in a melodrama of blood and vengeance. Near the table, his gory head partly covered by the decorative throw, lay the body of a man. He was brutally mangled, his face smashed as though a hundred horses had stomped on it.

  “The fat man,” Toni gasped, clutching me. “The fat man.”

  She fainted after that.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Brentworth Hotel

  7:17 P.M.—July 18th

  Toni was out, as cold as a box. I slapped her wrists and tried the water cure until her eyelids quivered and she came alive, shivering her unrest, still caught up by the shock and shudder of her last wakeful moment at the door. The room was bathed in gloom.

  “Is he dead?” she whispered.

  “I haven’t checked,” I said. “Sit still and grab hold of yourself while I look.”

  Sidney Wragge lay on his back, his arms outstretched in a last violent gesture, as though his larded hands had been groping for his assailant’s throat. I bent over him, knowing that he was dead before I felt for his pulse. No man could have survived the terrible mauling that had floored Sidney Wragge. The sight of the mess that was once his face pushed me away from him, tortured by gut jumps that almost sent me out of control. I pulled the table cover over his gory head and stood there gawking down at him. The emeralds in his ancient stickpin glimmered at me like malevolent eyes. On my knees, I lifted his trench coat gently. It was not buttoned. Wragge must have visited at his ease, loosening his coat as he strolled my room. I reached inside his jacket and found his wallet, empty. Somebody had cleaned him thoroughly.

  “What are we going to do?” Toni asked from the door, sobbing now, blubbering like a schoolgirl caught in a fraternity house. “This’ll be the end of me, Mike. You’ve got to take me out of here. Nobody will want me in show business if this gets out. Please—”

  I went to her and jerked her around a bit, cutting her prelude to hysteria before it ripened into the real thing.

  I said, “This thing stinks to high heaven, Toni. We’re in it up to our ears.”

  “Why can’t we run?”

  “Run? How far? You remember the porter on the train last night? He’s going to remember us, baby. He’s also going to recall the fact that we had a visitor in the drawing room. The city dicks will add this one up as fast as a belch after a beer.”

  She was sobbing quietly, her head buried in her hands, not listening to me at all. My mind sloughed her off, busy with the mechanics of the moment, the inevitable headache that was blooming inside of me, goosed along by the rush of anger that beat at me whenever I added it all up. My jittery brain worked over the events of last night, backtracking through the drama in the drawing room, reliving the scene with Sidney Wragge, bleeding it for clues to his strange behavior. What lunatic urge had brought Wragge to my rooms? My mind brought him back into focus, all of him, including his forthright dialogue, his prickling fear of death, his powerful stubbornness.

  I ran back to the bedroom. Toni’s bag lay opened in the corner of the room, beyond the bed, its contents strewn over the rug as though a strong wind had blown her undergarments there. The lock was cracked, prodded into a twisted mess by a powerful hand probably wielding a penknife. She went over her intimate belongings with me. There was nothing missing.

  “Wragge probably hid the pendant in your bag last night,” I said. “It would have been easy for him, while we were asleep. He came back here to pick up the cluster while we were out. But somebody knew he was coming. He must have been tailed from his flat.”

  I was talking to myself again, trying for some order out of the debris. I picked up the phone and called Izzy. He was out. Then I called the Waldorf again. Rico was still away. Outside, the city was slipping into darkness and the Paramount Building was no longer a slender silhouette against the sky. The big clock told me that it was after eight. I had been standing around for a long time. Too long.

  “Clean the mascara off your face, Toni,” I said. “We’re getting out of here.”

  “Where?” she asked. “Where are we headed?”

  “Out. I’ve got to make contact with Izzy Rosen. It’ll be some time before they find the flat slob up here. And before they do, we’ve got some calls to make.”

  She jumped into action, glad of the chance to leave the bloody room. We slipped into the hall and made the fire stairs without being seen. We went down slowly, pausing on each landing for footsteps. Nobody bothered us. We made the basement and strolled through it, threading our way between the gray pillars and toward the light on the far right. There was a blue bulb glowing at the exit, a door that led into an alley. We entered a canyon of quiet and advanced toward the street. It occurred to me that this would be an easy pitch for a purposeful prowler. Whoever had killed Sidney
Wragge might have entered the Brentworth this way, creeping along the alley unobserved and climbing to the ninth floor to do his dirty deed.

  My reflections were jolted when we stepped out into the quiet street.

  A few yards away a man stood at the curbing, leaning against the sleek chassis of a black sedan. I tugged Toni to one side, planning a detour to the left to avoid him. Standing in the shadows, he was somehow a familiar figure. He turned a toothpick nervously in his hard mouth. He had a lean and a bony jaw to match his angular body. He eased himself away from the car and slipped our way before I could step aside.

  “In the car,” he said.

  “Were walking, chum,” I said.

  “In,” he said again. “And no tricks.”

  I brought my fist up but he was as agile as a tomcat on the prowl for a mouse. He slapped down at me and there was a gun in his hand, it caught me on the wrist and paralyzed me, a vicious swipe that almost brought me to my knees. He kicked out at me and his foot found my stomach and doubled me up. There was no sound from Toni. He had already grabbed her and pushed her away, into the car, where somebody else held her.

  “Now we’ll play it all over again,” he said. “Get up and move. Into the car.”

  He had a low voice, guttural and flat. In the darkness I couldn’t see much of his face, but once again the feel of him, the timbre of his graveled snarl, stabbed at some recent memory. I had met this gunsel before. He dug the muzzle of his automatic into my navel.

  “Next time I’ll hurt you,” he said. “So get in.”

  I got in.

  CHAPTER 11

  Lexington Avenue—New York

  9:00 P.M.—July 18th

  The car roared off, turning sharply into Lexington Avenue and heading uptown. The driver rolled it at a dignified speed. He had stepped into the driver’s seat as soon as he saw me enter the rear of the car. He had the traditional beefy neck of the overweight mobster. I couldn’t see the edge of his face. But the man next to Toni and me appeared clearly in the intermittent light from the street. He was close enough for me to smell the weight of his tobaccoed breath, foul and acrid, as he relaxed against the cushions. I caught his profile, lean-nosed and cruel, the face of the professional hard guy, complete with a nasty scar that crawled from his right temple to the sharp line of his upper jaw. Where had I seen him before?