You Can't Catch Me

by Lawrence Lariar

  “I know you from somewhere,” I said.

  “Peachy,” he said, not bothering to turn my way. “That’s just peachy.”

  “Chicago?”

  He didn’t say. He stared ahead of him, pouting and puffing and playing it dumb. He was coming into focus for me now. I saw him as a newspaper photo, a headlined character in the Folsom mess last week, back in Chicago. I remembered a man of his size and shape, pictured alongside Monk Stang, on the way into the courthouse, shielding his head with his hat, a blurred gesture because the camera beat him to the snapshot.

  I said, “Frenchy Armetto. You’re making a mistake, Frenchy. You don’t want us.”

  “Maybe.”

  Frenchy Armetto’s career carried him into activities in the rod and gun department Frenchy was a smalltime heist man who had been sent up, back in 1931, for perpetrating a foolish robbery in Brooklyn. He came out of jail, a surly youth with ambitions to go higher in the world of mayhem and malice. It was at this point in his nefarious life that he joined forces with Monk Stang. Nobody ever did find out whether Frenchy was the lad who shot the two policemen outside the Dugout Club, during the mad larceny of that bistro’s coffers one night in 1941. Frenchy was held, but he was never touched. Rumor had it that his alibis were engineered by the great Monk Stang. The press dove into the yarn and tried to spill Monk’s guts for the public. But the wily Stang managed to brush away all charges. And since that day, Monk retired his assistant to the more gentle chores.

  And as for Monk himself? No police record held the full display of this man’s credits in crime. He was the top man in larceny, certainly, despite the fact that he had abandoned such obvious high jinks more than five years ago. Today Monk Stang devoted himself exclusively to the borderline businesses of crime: the pinball machines, the one-armed bandits, the numbers game and a few minor dabblings in café-fronted gambling dens patterned after the models set up by his enemy, Rico Bruck. He had no record of mayhem. But what was the reason for the sudden strangling of Archie Fissell, the maggoty czar of all the pin ball machines in Brooklyn? Archie was found one night with his tie knotted too tight. It was a small knot, neatly tied, but pulled so snugly around Fissell’s neck that the coroner assumed only a giant ape could have applied the pressure. Yet Monk Stang had ripped telephone books in half for the entertainment of his friends. And Monk Stang, by a peculiar coincidence, took over the Fissell territory after that. Without a murmur of protest from the surviving Fissell henchmen.

  The same Monk Stang rose to heroic heights during a brawl in his card room behind the Excelsior Garage. On this occasion two newspaper men were witnesses to his ability at grab and grunt. In a short but memorable session of fisticuffs, the little flabby-looking mobster had broken the arm of his adversary and then transported him through the door and into the street, where he was left for the birds.

  “Whoever put you on me gave you a bum deal, Frenchy,” I told him, trying for sincerity. “We just got in from Chicago. This is our honeymoon.”

  He faced me slowly, running his eyes over me in dull appraisal. He followed through to Toni, huddled in the corner, her hand trembling in mine. His mean face broke into a thin-lipped smile, after which he shook his head slightly. He said nothing.

  The driver said, “Save it, Mister. You’re knocking yourself out.”

  “Where are you taking us?”

  “Questions,” Frenchy said wearily. “You ever hear a guy ask so many questions, Max?”

  They laughed it up. Frenchy Armetto continued his glum silence after that, chewing his perpetual toothpick as we rolled up Lexington Avenue. The sound of Toni’s sobbing filled the car and I gave her a handkerchief and told her to blow her nose and relax. We made a right turn into a residential street in the middles Eighties, quiet and dignified and already half asleep. The car coasted halfway up the block and braked before an ancient residence. Frenchy slid out, and at the same moment the driver had the other door open and was piloting Toni up the stone steps, Frenchy pushed the gun in my ribs and jerked his head toward the entrance. For a quick moment I meditated making a stab at him. But reason won out over my Boy Scout impulse.

  Frenchy prodded us forward and we minced through a narrow hall, gray and dirty and smelling of dampness and the musty backwash of old age and seasoned neglect. Max stood at the stairway, motioning us onward and upward. We climbed the antique stairway, listening to the sound of our footsteps on the rotten boards, Toni’s heels setting up a staccato clatter that echoed down the stairwell, while behind us came the shuffling tread of our two captors.

  The upstairs hall was narrower and dimmer than the entrance. There was a light perched high on our left, a glassed-in globe, painted a dull red and shimmering with a faded glow. The place stank of decay and corrosion, a zombie residence, like something out of a Charles Addams cartoon, complete with peeling wallpaper and the odor of dry rot.

  Our escorts pushed us through the last door on the landing, into a room that seemed incongruous in the house, it was neat and clean. Somebody had swept it regularly. And there was a nice desk sitting in the corner, as businesslike as a bank president’s. The man who sat behind the desk leaned on his elbow and bit the juice out of a mangled cigar. He squinted up at us curiously, casing Toni quickly and then reserving the full weight of his scrutiny for me.

  “Hello, Monk,” I said.

  “Do I know you?” he asked.

  “You know me.”

  “From where?”

  “Chicago,” I said. “You want a hint? You want a crack at the sixty-four dollar question?”

  “A big joke man,” Monk said casually.

  What is it that labels the experienced gangster? What special cut of jaw and mouth? What extra fillip of plug-ugly design? Monk Stang violated all the Hollywood rules for criminal casting. He was a middle-aged man of average height and average build. He had an average head, with the average amount of baldness high on the dome, a round spot of scalp, soon to become more barren. Monk had the bearing and gestures of a doctor, a lawyer, a plumber, an accountant. He could have passed as a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker. You put the pieces together and he added up as a harmless sort of crud, the man in the street, the newsvendor, the haberdasher, the peddler of chestnuts on a busy corner.

  You felt the pressure of his personality only when he talked. His voice had a metallic ring, a crisp, brusque finality, an authority that no average man can ever summon up under normal circumstances. And with his voice, the confidence came through in the way he moved. He was moving now, close enough to count the fillings in my upper jaw.

  “The courthouse,” I suggested, “We’ve met there once or twice, especially on the Lippy Maggee case, two years ago.”

  “Sure,” said Monk. “A private dick?”

  “Mike Wells.”

  “Sure,” he said again, and stepped back to face Frenchy. “You positive you got the right guy, Frenchy?”

  “He was in the book at the Brentworth,” Frenchy said. “He was the jerk I saw talking to Gilligan in Chicago, at the station.”

  “I don’t get it,” Monk said. “You working for Rico Wells?”

  “I could be,” I said. “Since when have you been hijacking private investigators, Monk?”

  “Frenchy made a mistake,” said Monk, waving away my comment and bending to the task of spitting a pound of loose tobacco shreds from his fat mouth. He advanced to Frenchy and whispered a few subtle comments. Frenchy’s voice rose with conviction. The dialogue became heated, so warm that the big chauffeur stepped up behind Monk. Monk pushed him away and yammered at Frenchy.

  “Ask the crud,” Frenchy said. “This private eye was on the train with the fat slob. When he left the train, he tailed the fat boy. Then he came back to the Brentworth. Then he took his girl out to a place called Marty’s, over on Lexington. After that, he went back to the Brentworth. Right, Max?”

  Max nodded. �
�Check, Frenchy. I watched the Brentworth while Frenchy followed this guy to Marty’s. I saw the fat man go into the Brentworth. Then, about a half hour later, this private eye and the broad came back. Me and Frenchy waited for them to come out. They came out.”

  “So he must have the stuff,” said Frenchy.

  Monk shook his head at me sadly. “You got the stuff, Wells?”

  “What stuff?”

  “The gems.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Monk.”

  Monk continued to shake his head with sorrow. “You want the boys to give you a once over?”

  “You’re wasting your time, and mine.”

  Frenchy stepped forward and reached for my jacket. It was too much for me. I caught him by the shoulder and slipped him a fast right hook, low enough to take the wind out of his sails. He clutched at his stomach. He said something nasty about my mother, so I hit him again. Toni screamed, but I stepped back and away before Max could reach me. I held my hands over my head and grinned at Max.

  “I’m all finished,” I told him. “That was something I’ve been wanting to do for the last half hour. You can frisk me now.”

  “Let me at the bastard,” Frenchy said.

  Monk reached for him before he could step toward me. “Save it, Frenchy,” he said. “You, too, Max. This guy is clean. No private dick worth his salt would play gunsel for Rico Bruck. Maybe I owe you an apology, Wells.”

  “Stuff it.”

  “I don’t like my boys playing rough,” Monk said. “Especially with guys like you, Wells. Listen, stop me if I’m wrong. Rico put you on the fat man’s tail. He don’t trust his messenger, right? He don’t trust the fat boy?”

  He was leveling with me or he was the best actor in New York City. He was telling me his personal theory about Sidney Wragge, simply and with a face as straight as a school kid reciting the Gettysburg Address. He spouted his last line of dialogue with genuine sincerity and when I didn’t respond, he sat down and waited patiently for my next speech, making a production out of rekindling his dead cigar. He was playing the scene for me alone. He was building it with an instinctive flair for the dramatically apt pauses. But he didn’t sell me. How could he? I knew too much of his background.

  I said, “Maybe he didn’t. But why would Rico kill the fat boy?”

  Monk released a hidden reserve of histrionic ability. He let the cigar fall out of his fingers. He stood up. He leaned on his hands and let his neck jut out my way. He licked his lower lip, twice.

  And then he said, “Did you say the fat boy was knocked off?”

  “You heard me, Monk.”

  “When? Where?”

  So I told him. “He was murdered in my room at the Brentworth. Maybe an hour or so ago.”

  He jumped at the news. He put on a great display of honest surprise, slapping a fist in a palm and pacing the floor and muttering guttural gibberish to promote his befuddlement. He worked hard to show me he was as mystified as I. “I don’t get it,” he said, over and over again. Frenchy Armetto watched his boss with a lynx’s eyes, sliding his animal hate my way and accelerating the toothpick in his mouth. The big chauffeur just stood his ground.

  “It don’t add up,” Monk said finally.

  “Maybe it figures,” I said, “if Frenchy got restless.”

  “I’ll kill you,” Frenchy said, dropping his hand into his pocket. “I’ll drill you for that, you cheap dick.”

  Monk lashed out at him, a quick slap that moved his gunman back on his heels and against the wall, rubbing his jaw with a shaking hand. Monk grabbed his lapels and shook him hard. Once or twice Frenchy’s head hit the wall. But he said nothing. Max watched the procedure with his hands folded across his big chest. He stood close to Monk Stang, and when it was all over, Max dragged Frenchy over to the desk and set him down on it. He held Frenchy there.

  “Frenchy wouldn’t cross me,” Monk said. “Would you, Frenchy?”

  “Listen, how could I?” Frenchy wailed. “Max was with me all the time.”

  “Not all the time,” I suggested. “Frenchy could have doubled back from Marty’s, entered the Brentworth, and knocked off the fat boy. He had plenty of time. That Folsom cluster is worth a half a million bucks, Monk. Even your best friend would cross you for a bundle that big.”

  They frisked Frenchy. They went over him quickly, emptying his pockets on the floor, unmindful of his squeals of protests. When it was all over, they had found nothing.

  “I didn’t think he’d do it,” Monk said. “Frenchy and me, we’ve been together since we were kids.” He eyed me with a sly and cunning look, as a stirring thought, a theory of his own making, took shape in his mind. “Who do you think did it, Wells?”

  I shook my head. “That’s what the city dicks will be asking, Monk.”

  “They’ll be asking you, Wells.”

  “If they can find me.”

  “You’re running?” Monk’s incredulity knew no bounds.

  “I’m running after the killer. I’ve got a name and a reputation to keep clean.”

  “And when you find the killer?”

  “I’ll deliver him to the city boys.”

  “What for?” Monk smiled slowly. “The man who knocked off the fat slob has the Folsom cluster, Wells. It could be worth a lot of dough to me.”

  “Are you making me an offer?” I asked. “Save your energy, Monk. If I were you I’d be setting my alibis in order. Because you may have to answer a couple of questions yourself.”

  “I know all the answers, Wells.” Monk thumbed his assistants out of the room. He stared at Toni for a long moment and then politely opened the door for her and bowed her into the hall. He closed the door slowly and sat once more behind his desk. He puffed a few drags on a fresh cigar and studied the fresh ash as though he could find the missing gems somewhere in the small spark of light. He addressed the cigar. “I’ll pay you ten grand in cash, Wells. No strings. All I want is the inside track when you nab the killer.”

  “When and if,” I said.

  “You’ll do it. I know your reputation.”

  “Thanks, for nothing,” I said. “When and if I make the locate on the killer, I do my duty as a citizen, Monk. No deals.”

  He shrugged and got up. “It might be easier for you to do it my way.”

  “I’ve done it the hard way before,” I said.

  And then I walked out of there.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Rivington Hotel

  11:06 P.M.—July 18th

  Izzy Rosen had thousands of friends in an assortment of businesses, each of them willing to favor him with a variety of gestures of good will, including less-than-wholesale-prices, cut-rate tickets to hit shows, and free entry to every type of sporting event known to man. One of Izzy’s intimates owned a small and exclusive hotel on the west side of Central Park: the Rivington, an establishment that catered to the middle-class tourist trade from all over the land.

  I took Toni to the Rivington and got her a room.

  “Sit tight until you hear from me,” I told her. “You’ve got nothing to worry about. There’s nothing of yours at the Brentworth, not even a grain of your powder. I cleaned the room thoroughly before we left. When this blows over, you’ll get what I promised you.”

  “You mean the knock down to Lawrence Keddy?”

  “I mean everything.”

  “When will I hear from you?” Toni asked.

  We were in her room and it was late at night and she had calmed enough to regain some of her usual aplomb. There was fear in her yet, and it would have been nice to quiet it. But I had things to do. “I’ll be visiting you sooner than you expect,” I said.

  “I can’t wait, Mike.”

  “You’d better. It won’t be smart to be seen around town yet. Not until this thing is wrapped up.”

  I took a cab
to my office, a simple layout in the Cranmer Building, not too far from Grand Central. It was a small place, as exclusive as the men’s room in a Turkish bath. A variety of strange businesses occupied the building, including stamp merchants, electrolysis experts and a spattering of minor legal talent too poor to afford the finer suites on Fifth Avenue. But it was home to me. There was an entrance through a short alley, a route I knew well and had used before. It avoided the lobby and led me to the elevator by way of the basement. Here I could move upstairs without checking in on the street level, an arrangement Izzy and I had made a long time ago with Sam, our cordial janitor. He brought the car down at my signal, and greeted me with his accustomed affection.

  “You in from Chicago for a while, Mike?” he asked.

  “I may be here permanently, and in a city cell, if things don’t work out right for me. Anybody looking for me tonight?”

  “Nobody but Izzy.”

  “He’s upstairs?”

  “He came in a half hour ago.”

  Izzy was bouncing around in our reception room when I arrived. He leaped my way when my feet crossed the threshold. He grabbed my arm and pushed me back toward the door and flipped off the light switch with his free hand.

  “Out,” he said. “We’re taking a quick powder. No questions, yet.”

  He told me why on the way down the fire stairs. He had tried to reach Rico Bruck all afternoon—and failed. This confused and irritated him. He next attempted to phone me at the Brentworth, and again he was foiled. No answer from my room. He assumed that I was engaged in intimate pastimes with Toni and did not want to be disturbed. He waited a reasonable gap of time and phoned again. After that, he became worried. He went at once to the Brentworth.