You Can't Catch Me

by Lawrence Lariar

  “The place was lousy with cops,” Izzy said. “You know why?”

  “They discovered the fat boy.”

  “You knew all about it?” Izzy halted me on the way out through the alley. “You didn’t butcher him, Mike?”

  “Why should I?”

  “I’m only asking. I saw Lieutenant Leach down in the lobby of the Brentworth. He said the fat slob’s head was kicked in and smashed beyond recognition. I thought maybe you and he got into a squabble. I figured maybe you were cockeyed when you left Marty’s and you went back to your room with that fancy broad and found the fat boy waiting for you.”

  “And then I kicked his face in? Is that what Leach thinks, Izzy?”

  “Leach doesn’t exchange theories with me, Mike. You know that. I don’t like the smell of it.”

  “It stinks,” I said. Then I brought him up to date on the episode with Monk Stang and his hairy henchmen. I retold the whole yarn from the beginning, and Izzy listened without interrupting. We got into a cab and he sat in the corner, gnawing his lip. He would be exploring the details now, running them over in his mental machine, so that we could move quickly—and in the right direction.

  I said, “You worried about Leach, Izzy?”

  “He wants you to come in, Mike.”

  “Tell him to go to hell,” I said. “Tell him I’ll see him when we’ve got something.”

  “He might get technical—and come after you.”

  “Did he say that?”

  “Leach will do anything to keep his department looking healthy. The Commissioner has been riding the Midtown boys plenty the last half year. Leach wants arrests—to make his office look busy. He wants you, Mike.”

  “What do you think?” I asked. “If I give myself up now, a couple of the angles I have will die. And I don’t want them to die, Izzy. I’ve got things to do—right away.”

  “Then we do them.” Izzy laughed. He snapped out of his trance in a hurry, his mind made up now and anxious to move into action. “What’s our first move, Mike?”

  “You’ve got to make contact with Rico Bruck,” I told him. “You’ve got to check him on this deal, Izzy. For my money, he’s as ripe a prospect as Monk Stang. I don’t trust either of them. Get going, Izzy. We need every minute we can get. When you finish with Rico, go back to the office. I’ll phone you there.”

  “Where are you headed, Mike?”

  “I’m doubling back,” I said. “I want to see what I can pick up on Sidney Wragge. Who the hell knows his friends and his connections? Maybe he was murdered by an intimate acquaintance. Somebody we never met or knew about might have knocked him off for the Folsom jewels.”

  I let him out and told the cabby to take me downtown. The Kimberly Building was as old as my grandfather, but still retained a gloomy magnificence in the lobby, a broad and well-kept hall and a nest of caged elevators. Sidney Wragge’s office was on the twelfth floor, a narrow-halled layout that housed a half dozen offices. Number 1217 stood at the end of the hall and featured the simple legend:

  SIDNEY WRAGGE

  Importing—Exporting

  The door was open. And the room was a nightmare of upheaval. Every filing cabinet in the tiny place had been emptied on the floor, along with a profusion of books from the small bookshelf behind the desk. The desktop was littered with a variety of papers. Somebody had been through this office with an eye geared for search and grab. Every small hiding place had been explored, including the metal petty-cash box, pried open and abandoned on the floor. The rug was white with papers of all sorts—bills and letterheads and correspondence. Even the leather chairs had been overturned and slashed in a frantic quest of the Folsom stones.

  I stood flat-footed in the center of the debris, measuring it, frowning at it, snarling at it. I began to examine the desktop, handling everything with the light touch, bending to study every item of importance. I lifted letterheads and billheads, scanning the bits of correspondence quickly. The stuff carried the imprint of a few foreign firms: The Unique Export, dated in July of last year and bearing the signature of M. Lecleru of Paris, France. The correspondence had to do with the importation of a huge order of trimmings for ladies’ hats. The language was forced and stilted.

  I ferreted on the floor, comparing the datelines. There were none later than a year ago. The place was probably being used as a front by Wragge, a screen for his book-making operation. I stuffed a few sheets of correspondence in my pockets for future perusal. On my knees, I cased the floor, groping beneath the mounds for anything and everything. I found nothing.

  The desk teased me. I swept the top clean and started through the drawers, searching for the usual small phone list, or the little black reference volume, usually found loaded with addresses. I worked my way up to the desktop again, bare now save for the big green blotter and the pen and pencil set. The blotter fascinated me. In the lower right hand corner, somebody had been doodling, somebody had etched a queer design: L S—L S—L S, over and over again, in round letters and in square letters, in fancy curves and curleycues.

  Linda Spain?

  My mind lit with remembered conversation, the small talk I had made with the druggist’s clerk on the corner of Wragge’s block. This was a crumb, the first lead, a small and feeble t light in the darkness, but enough to move me to action. Linda Spain might be the key to Wragge’s intimate life, the link to his background habits, friends, relatives, and personality. Her name sang in my brain, a hopeful lyric, because sometimes the smallest lead can carry an investigator along the high road to success.

  So I stood there, as stiff and thoughtful as a two-bit mystic at a county fair. And standing in the quiet, the little noises of the night came through to me. From somewhere down below the sound of the elevator hummed in the building, a muted buzz but enough to prick my sensibilities. I put out the lights in Sidney Wragge’s office. I shook my pants out of there, running along the hall to the fire stairs door. I slid in behind it and listened, allowing myself a thin crack of vision into the hall.

  The elevator stopped and somebody got out. Through the slit, the long corridor was in focus for me, wide enough to observe the two men who advanced toward Wragge’s door.

  They were Frenchy Armetto and Max.

  I started down the stairs. It was time to get out of there.

  CHAPTER 13

  Sidney Wragge’s Apartment

  12:28 A.M.—July 19th

  The way into Sidney Wragge’s flat was simple. The buzzers in the hall indicated that he had rooms on the first floor. So I pressed number 6E, the front door clicked open and I was walking through the broad entrance hall to number 1B, a door on the left side of the building and up front.

  And once again, his door was open.

  But this time I arrived in time to meet his company. I slipped inside and found myself in a square hall, beyond which lay the small living room. There was a girl standing in the living room. She almost fell on her face when I walked in.

  “Looking for something?” I asked.

  She was tall, red-haired and buxom. Her face was round and pretty and cut in classic lines. She had large black eyes. She opened them wide and her broad lipsticked mouth telegraphed her shock. She stepped away from me, back toward the widow.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “I asked the first question, lady.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’ll play it again,” I said, and approached her slowly. She flattened herself against the wall near the window. She was dramatic and expressive, without saying a word. She had a figure made to satisfy the customers in any burlesque house, exaggerated in the hips and torso, but the curves were firm and young. She would get high rates in her profession. She kept pushing her hair back from her face in a nervous gesture.

  “Are you Linda Spain?”

  She nodded dumbly.

  “And did
you do this job, Linda?”

  She stared around her. The place was a cesspool of disorder. It was a two-room apartment, featuring a living room-sleeping room combination. The wall bed had been pulled down and the two pillows lay uncovered, the pillow slips on the floor along with the sheets and blankets. The mattress leaned against the bed at a crazy angle. Around and about it were scattered all the worldly goods of Sidney Wragge, as though some potent wind had blown them there. But no wind short of a hurricane could have worked such disorder. Through the arch, the kitchen showed the same treatment. Somebody had emptied the contents of the cupboards on the floor; each small container was opened, a sugar bowl, a few cereal boxes, pots and pans, and a percolator with its innards missing. The lone closet door stood ajar, and Wragge’s clothing lay in an untidy heap inside, atop an empty suitcase. There was no need to ferret amid this debris.

  “I just got here,” Linda said.

  “Just? When?”

  “About five minutes before you came.”

  She had a voice that shivered its alarm, a girlish soprano that seemed out of place because of her theatrical figure. In the pause, some measure of her personality began to return—the burning brightness of her eyes, the keen and searching quality of her temperament. She was young in the frame but wise in the head, this girl. I came in closer, to hold her away from any show of confidence. She would require handling, toying, playing in a round-about routine, with no holds barred.

  “Where’s Sidney?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, mister. Honest I don’t.”

  “You had a date with him here?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “Maybe I’m a good friend of his, lady.”

  She seemed to shrink further into the wall and her hand went to her pouted mouth. We were close enough for me to count the pores in her face, and it came to me that the dim light in Wragge’s room had been hiding her brilliance from me. She was heavily made up, her skin aglow with the light tan make-up used on stage. There were lines of heavy pencil around the edges of her eyes, and her eyebrows were hand-drawn and arched too smoothly. She was wearing a low-cut dress, geared for summer comfort but designed for theatrical effect. She was big. She was an Amazon bump and grind queen, a fitting mate for the giant Sidney Wragge, except for her age.

  “I didn’t do this, mister,” she pleaded. “We’re old friends, that’s all. Look, I have a key to this dump.”

  She stepped aside and picked up her bag from the litter on the small desk. Her trembling fingers found the key and she held it up for me and watched my face as I examined it.

  “You’ve been in touch with Sidney today?” I asked.

  “I haven’t seen him, not yet.”

  “And you don’t know where he is?”

  “Would I be here if I knew?” She was rallying now, slowing down her show of nerves, trying for ease and nonchalance. She added me up slowly, her crimson mouth curving in a gentle smile. She was prettier that way. But her smile couldn’t wipe away the trouble in her eyes, the edge of worry that no display of humor could kill.

  “You’re not a cop,” she said. “Are you, big boy?”

  “Suppose I’m not?”

  “I’d feel a lot better.”

  “Where would that get me?”

  “It all depends where you want to go.”

  There was the sound of a door opening, from somewhere through a few walls. She froze as she listened to it. She began to tremble again and moved close to me and put a cold hand on mine.

  “Listen, will you help me?”

  “Try me. I’m a Boy Scout at heart, especially with big girls like you.”

  “I’m afraid,” Linda said. “I’ve been scared silly for the past hour or so.”

  “Afraid of what?”

  “A man. Ever since I did my closing number at the show. There’s a jerk been following me. After the show, two of my pals and me went out for coffee. That was when I had the feeling this mug was watching me. It was in a dogcart and he looked in through the window once. Then he came back again.”

  “How do you know he was looking at you?”

  She shivered violently. “I started for home in a cab. He got into a cab behind me and started to follow me. I begged my cabby to try to lose him. Lucky for me, he was a nice cabby. He drove fast and managed to shake the guy. Then I came here. I wanted Sidney to help me, to take me home and stay with me.”

  She was talking fast and talking smoothly, out of her obvious driving fear. She paused only once, to jerk her head toward the window when a passing car hissed by.

  “Why didn’t you go to the cops?” I asked.

  She eyed me with discouragement. “You ever been to the Braddock, big boy?”

  “What’s the Braddock got to do with it?”

  “Come down some night. The show we put on in that dump is only for the private trade. The Braddock’s been closed since the Minsky wheel died in New York. We run a strictly stag deal, with tickets on sale only under hats. What we give the boys in that place is so hot that the cops would put the lid on it and send some of us away where we couldn’t shake our cans for a while. So how could I go to the cops?”

  “Who was the jerk who followed you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “I never saw him before in my life. It’s hard to remember.” She rubbed her brow and scowled at her inefficient memory. “Oh, it’s happened before, a couple of times, nuts in the audience who get ideas about the girls in the line. They’re different, though. They come up to you at the stage door and proposition you, and after you turn them down, maybe they’ll try again. But those characters are open. You tell them you’ll call a cop—and they fade. This guy was something different. He was a sneak. He didn’t give me a chance to get a good gander at his face. He scared me silly. If you’re a real friend of Sidney’s, please take me home?”

  It was after one in the morning and she was begging me to take her home. If I played along with her, I might learn something useful. So I let her continue her urgent plea. I listened to her and played hard to get. She talked on and on in an unbridled tempo. She was nervous and upset, but all of it was genuine. She sold me a bill of goods, and when I softened her eyes told me that she would pay off later, in dividends that I could understand.

  We left Sidney Wragge’s and walked to the corner. Her arm was tight in mine and she hugged me eagerly, as though I might sprint away from her if she released me. The streets were dead and the city slept and snored with only the dull hum of its breathing coming through to us, the rumbles and roars of the muted traffic. Our cab entered the theatrical district and turned to the East Side. Nobody followed us.

  CHAPTER 14

  Second Avenue

  1:47 A.M.—July 19th

  She had me stop the cab on Second Avenue, so that she could try a neighborhood bar for a bottle of bourbon. I let the cabby go and we walked a block to a dimly lit joint where Linda was sure we could get what she wanted. She came out with a bottle of good stuff.

  She patted it fondly and said, “We can use this tonight, hah?”

  And she led me into a side street, as quiet and dead as the inside of a library. It was a short walk from the corner to her apartment house, but almost as soon as we made the turn, my short hairs went up. Were we being followed? Somebody moved behind us on clever legs, spryly and with an experienced step, soft and effortless. I didn’t turn. I pressed her arm and she came closer.

  “Pull up short when we get inside the lobby,” I whispered, holding my head in its normal position for intimate talk. “There’s somebody behind us.”

  I felt her stiffen as we finished the last few steps to the door. It was a small apartment house, of the same type as Sidney Wragge’s, but on a slightly higher level in the social stratum. It was newer and more dignified, with an entrance that featured
a marble fish spewing water into a green and brackish pond. A few tired goldfish swam around under some floating lettuce.

  I pulled Linda behind the abutment of the hall wall. I held her there. Time ticked by. A minute? And then the figure of a man appeared against the frosted window of the entrance door. He was little and he seemed stooped as he leaned into the door and pushed it slowly open. I let him come four steps our way. And then I made a grab for him.

  He pulled to one side with an animal’s reaction to a sudden tormentor, spry and with electric speed. But I had a hand on his shoulder and jerked so hard that I almost wrenched the jacket off him, complete with shoulder pads. The hall was lit only by the reflected glow of an interior fixture, but I could see enough to catch the terror in his face. I started my right hand up toward his chin when Linda ran toward me and clung to me. Her voice carried a shaking urgency.

  “Jesus no!” she begged. “That’s only Champ.”

  “Who the hell is this gorilla?” the little man whined.

  I released him, almost overcome by internal merriment at the picture he made. “Champ of what?” I asked.

  “He’s Champ Crowley,” Linda said. “He lives upstairs—a neighbor of mine, big boy.”

  Champ Crowley adjusted his haberdashery with a wriggling and squirming display of petulance. He was an overgrown midget, wrinkled in the neck and face, an ex-jockey I remembered out of the Racing Form days of my youth. We shook hands and he accepted my apology with good grace. He led us up to the second-floor landing, where he invited us into his nest for a nightcap. He had apartment 2B, directly across the hall from Linda. He broke out some glasses and did his best to make us comfortable. Champ spoke with a nasal twang, a hillbilly diction that made his citified slang seem incongruous.

  “Friend of Sidney’s,” Linda explained, smiling my way.

  “Any friend of Sid’s is a friend of mine,” said Champ.

  “When’s he getting back, you know?”

  “He’s back,” I said. “He’s in town.”

  “A good boy, Sid.”