by Jerry eBooks
“I’ll believe it,” Tony said.
“They don’t kill often. But they can be awful tough.”
“Mugs,” Tony said with a sudden bitter contempt. “Guys with guns. Just mugs.”
Johnny Ralls reached for his glass and drained it empty. The ice cubes tinkled softly as he put it down. He picked his gun up, danced it on his palm, then tucked it, nose down, into an inner breast pocket. He stared at the carpet.
“How come you’re telling me this, copper?”
“I thought maybe you’d give her a break.”
“And if I wouldn’t?”
“I kind of think you will,” Tony said.
Johnny Ralls nodded quietly. “Can I get out of here?”
“You could take the service elevator to the garage. You could rent a car. I can give you a card to the garage man.”
“You’re a funny little guy,” Johnny Ralls said.
Tony took out a worn ostrich-skin billfold and scribbled on a printed card. Johnny Ralls read it, and stood holding it, tapping it against a thumbnail.
“I could take her with me,” he said, his eyes narrow.
“You could take a ride in a basket too,” Tony said. “She’s been here five days, I told you. She’s been spotted. A guy I know called me up and told me to get her out of here. Told me what it was all about. So I’m getting you out instead.”
“They’ll love that,” Johnny Ralls said. “They’ll send you violets.”
“I’ll weep about it on my day off.”
Johnny Ralls turned his hand over and stared at the palm. “I could see her, anyway. Before I blow. Next door to here, you said?”
Tony turned on his heel and started for the door. He said over his shoulder, “Don’t waste a lot of time, handsome. I might change my mind.”
The man said, almost gently: “You might be spotting me right now, for all I know.”
Tony didn’t turn his head. “That’s a chance you have to take.”
He went on to the door and passed out of the room. He shut it carefully, silently, looked once at the door of 14A and got into his dark elevator. He rode it down to the linen-room floor and got out to remove the basket that held the service elevator open at that floor. The door slid quietly shut. He held it so that it made no noise. Down the corridor, light came from the open door of the housekeeper’s office. Tony got back into his elevator and went on down to the lobby.
The little clerk was out of sight behind his pebbled-glass screen, auditing accounts. Tony went through the main lobby and turned into the radio room. The radio was on again, soft. She was there, curled on the davenport again. The speaker hummed to her, a vague sound so low that what it said was as wordless as the murmur of trees. She turned her head slowly and smiled at him.
“Finished palming doorknobs? I couldn’t sleep worth a nickel. So I came down again. Okey?”
He smiled and nodded. He sat down in a green chair and patted the plump brocade arms of it. “Sure, Miss Cressy.”
“Waiting is the hardest kind of work, isn’t it? I wish you’d talk to that radio. It sounds like a pretzel being bent.”
Tony fiddled with it, got nothing he liked, set it back where it had been.
“Beer-parlor drunks are all the customers now.”
She smiled at him again.
“I don’t bother you being here, Miss Cressy?”
“I like it. You’re a sweet little guy, Tony.”
He looked stiffly at the floor and a ripple touched his spine. He waited for it to go away. It went slowly. Then he sat back, relaxed again, his neat fingers clasped on his elk’s tooth. He listened. Not to the radio—to far-off, uncertain things, menacing things. And perhaps to just the safe whir of wheels going away into a strange night.
“Nobody’s all bad,” he said out loud.
The girl looked at him lazily. “I’ve met two or three I was wrong on, then.”
He nodded. “Yeah,” he admitted judiciously. “I guess there’s some that are.”
The girl yawned and her deep violet eyes half closed. She nestled back into the cushions. “Sit there for a while, Tony. Maybe I could nap.”
“Sure. Not a thing for me to do. Don’t know why they pay me.”
She slept quickly and with complete stillness, like a child. Tony hardly breathed for ten minutes. He just watched her, his mouth a little open. There was a quiet fascination in his limpid eyes, as if he was looking at an altar.
Then he stood up with infinite care and padded away under the arch to the entrance lobby and the desk. He stood at the desk listening for a little while. He heard a pen rustling out of sight. He went around the corner to the row of house phones in little glass cubbyholes. He lifted one and asked the night operator for the garage.
It rang three or four times and then a boyish voice answered:
“Windermere Hotel. Garage speaking.”
“This is Tony Reseck. That guy Watterson I gave a card to. He leave?”
“Sure, Tony. Half an hour almost. Is it your charge?”
“Yeah,” Tony said. “My party. Thanks. Be seein’ you.”
He hung up and scratched his neck. He went back to the desk and slapped a hand on it. The clerk wafted himself around the screen with his greeter’s smile in place. It dropped when he saw Tony.
“Can’t a guy catch up on his work?” he grumbled.
“What’s the professional rate on Fourteen-B?”
The clerk stared morosely. “There’s no professional rate in the tower.”
“Make one. The fellow left already. Was there only an hour.”
“Well, well,” the clerk said airily. “So the personality didn’t click tonight. We get a skip-out.”
“Will five bucks satisfy you?
“Friend of yours?”
“No. Just a drunk with delusions of grandeur and no dough.”
“Guess we’ll have to let it ride, Tony. How did he get out?”
“I took him down the service elevator. You was asleep. Will five bucks satisfy you?”
“Why?”
The worn ostrich-skin wallet came out and a weedy five slipped across the marble. “All I could shake him for,” Tony said loosely.
The clerk took the five and looked puzzled. “You’re the boss,” he said, and shrugged. The phone shrilled on the desk and he reached for it. He listened and then pushed it toward Tony. “For you.”
Tony took the phone and cuddled it close to his chest. He put his mouth close to the transmitter. The voice was strange to him. It had a metallic sound. Its syllables were meticulously anonymous.
“Tony? Tony Reseck?”
“Talking.”
“A message from Al. Shoot?”
Tony looked at the clerk. “Be a pal,” he said over the mouthpiece. The clerk flicked a narrow smile at him and went away. “Shoot,” Tony said into the phone.
“We had a little business with a guy in your place. Picked him up scramming. Al had a hunch you’d run him out. Tailed him and took him to the curb. Not so good. Backfire.”
Tony held the phone very tight and his temples chilled with the evaporation of moisture. “Go on,” he said. “I guess there’s more.”
“A little. The guy stopped the big one. Cold. Al—Al said to tell you goodbye.”
Tony leaned hard against the desk. His mouth made a sound that was not speech.
“Get it?” The metallic voice sounded impatient, a little bored. “This guy had him a rod. He used it. Al won’t be phoning anybody any more.”
Tony lurched at the phone, and the base of it shook on the rose marble. His mouth was a hard dry knot.
The voice said: “That’s as far as we go, bub. G’night.” The phone clicked dryly, like a pebble hitting a wall.
Tony put the phone down in its cradle very carefully, so as not to make any sound. He looked at the clenched palm of his left hand. He took a handkerchief out and rubbed the palm softly and straightened the fingers out with his other hand. Then he wiped his forehead. The clerk came ar
ound the screen again and looked at him with glinting eyes.
“I’m off Friday. How about lending me that phone number?”
Tony nodded at the clerk and smiled a minute frail smile. He put his handkerchief away and patted the pocket he had put it in. He turned and walked away from the desk, across the entrance lobby, down the three shallow steps, along the shadowy reaches of the main lobby, and so in through the arch to the radio room once more. He walked softly, like man moving in a room where somebody is very sick. He reached the chair he had sat in before and lowered himself into it inch by inch. The girl slept on, motionless, in that curled-up looseness achieved by some women and all cats. Her breath made no slightest sound against the vague murmur of the radio.
Tony Reseck leaned back in the chair and clasped his hands on his elk’s tooth and quietly closed his eyes.
DEVIL’S BILLET DOUX
Cliff Howe
When his past threatened to wreck his future, John Liegh decided to write a . . .
JOHN LIEGH drew the fifteenth circle on the morning of February twenty-first.
Little circles on his desk calendar marked the nights he had slept little or not at all.
Besides the calendar was a check book, and it had been there fifteen days. Next to the check book was a packet of paper smaller than John Liegh’s palm. The packet consisted, first, of a letter which John had penned:
Dear Jim:
Sorry I have taken so long getting these notes to you. I was mighty glad to help you out by acting as secretary in your place at the last lodge meeting. Hope the cold is better.
Best wishes,
JOHN.
Though Jim Spears, for whom the note and the attached lodge meeting minutes were intended, was president of the bank three blocks down Front Street from John Liegh’s office, that tightly folded packet had been on John’s desk fifteen days.
John Liegh had scarcely finished drawing the fifteenth circle when the phone rang. It was Jim Spears calling to ask for the sixth time why he hadn’t received the notes John took at the last lodge meeting.
“Why, haven’t you got those minutes yet, Jim?” John asked. “Swear I must be getting absent-minded. I’ll see if I can find them kicking around here somewhere.” John hung up as the opening of his office door brought on a cold nausea as though there was a snowball rolling around inside his belly. When he saw that it was Town Marshal Gilling who entered, he relaxed a little. There was once a time when the glimpse of a uniform would have made John quail, but not any more. He smiled in his mild manner at Gilling and said:
“Come in and set a while, Dan.”
Dan Gilling shook flabby chops. “Consarn you anyway, John! Think a man smart enough to make the kind of money you do would have more horse sense. Never can tell when some city crooks are going to hit this town, yet for the past two weeks every time I try your door at night I find it unlocked. Either you got to get less absentminded or let me have a key to lock up with.”
John Liegh laughed quietly. “I’ve nothing here to steal.”
“All the same, a cop’s job is to prevent crime. And you’re practically invitin’ somebody to bust in here. So,” he warned as he backed from the door, “after this you lock up.”
For fifteen nights, John Liegh’s office had been unlocked. Surely, John’s past would soon roar down upon him from the city on the night train. A man cannot lock his door against his past. John Liegh had tried it before.
ON THE seventh of every February, every year for twenty years, Arthur Kent and John Liegh’s past had dropped in on the little office. Yet today was the twenty-second. If Arthur Kent was dead, if the past died with him—
“Well, if it ain’t good old Spike!” John’s thread of hope was a cobweb, ripped ruthlessly by the roaring voice from the doorway. The cold nausea returned to John.
Arthur Kent was a big man, black-browed, loud-mouthed, bullying. He barged into the room and. he and John Liegh’s past called out in unison: “Long time no see yah, Spike, old boy. Remember the time you spit out the window and hit the warden in the face?” John Liegh’s face screwed into knots of agony. “For Pete’s sake, not so loud, Art! The people in this town respect me for what I am now, not what I was.”
Then he stood up, brushed his hand quickly across the desk, stepped around the desk to Arthur Kent. “Let me take your coat, Art,” he said quietly.
Kent’s laughter sneered. “Thanks, Spike. You always were a damned dirty little worm, like some rich punk’s valet.” Wordless, thin cheeks flushed, Liegh took Kent’s coat to the rack and hung it up. Then he returned to the desk to sit opposite Kent.
“Just blew in last night,” Kent said. “I held off a couple of weeks so you could hope I wasn’t coming.”
John shook his head. “I’ve been expecting you. I have made a sufficient deposit in my checking account to take care of your yearly allowance.”
Kent nodded. “But I’m boosting the price a little bit. I figure you’d be willing to pay a little more now, with your daughter marrying that rich guy in Chicago. Three thousand bucks is the price.”
John reached for his check book. He said very quietly: “This money I’m giving you now will have to do you. I’ll pay you the three thousand, but it’s the last penny you’ll get from me. If you come here again, I’m going to kill you.”
“Sure, I know. The number of times you’ve been going to kill me has excited all the undertakers from here to the coast. You always were a gutless worm. Never will forget the time you pulled a gun on me, then couldn’t go through with it.”
“This is the last time, Kent,” John spoke through clenched teeth. “I’ve been to my doctor. He tells me my blood pressure is rising dangerously. I’ve got to stop worrying and get more sleep. So one of us has got to go.”
Kent shrugged. “Go ahead and kick off. I’ll put the screws on your daughter’s rich husband. I think he’d keep me going, rather than have it get out his wife is the daughter of an ex-con. Now you pay up and you won’t see me until next February—unless I should get a little short in the middle of the year.”
JOHN picked up a pen and made out the check in the amount of three thousand dollars, payable to Arthur Kent. At the bottom he signed: “John Leigh.” He tore out the check savagely, handed it to Kent. “Now, get out,” he said.
Twenty minutes after Arthur Kent had left, the telephone rang. It was Jim Spears calling.
“Say, John, about those lodge meeting minutes—I found them. Or rather Dan Gilling did.”
“Where?”
“Ever hear of a man who calls himself Arthur Kent?”
“No,” John said thoughtfully. “Don’t think I did.”
“Well, I found the ledge meeting notes in his coat pocket. Dan Gilling says you been leaving your door unlocked at nights. He figures this Arthur Kent walked into your office, stole the report together with that note to me which was attached.
“And when Dan Gilling pinched this Kent man, Kent said he was a friend of yours and then started calling you a lot of names. He said you were an ex-convict, and that was more than Dan Gilling could stand. He hit Kent over the head with his gun. If you’ll come down here, you and I can swear out a warrant—”
“Wait a minute,” John cut in. “I don’t get this. Why steal that note to you, and the lodge report? That’s hardly a big enough crime to send a man to jail.”
“Why—why didn’t I tell you about the check, John? This Kent wanted that note you wrote to me as a specimen of your handwriting. The man’s a forger and a damned good one. We caught him trying to cash a check for three thousand dollars. And he had forged your signature so pretty, he’d have sure taken us in except for one thing. If that note you wrote to me had been signed with your full name, he’d have trimmed us all right, see?”
“No,” John said bewilderedly.
“Well, when Kent forged your name, he tripped up on the spelling of the last part of it. He signed the check ‘John Leigh’ instead of ‘John Liegh’.”
John Lie
gh looked at his calendar and smiled at the chain of penciled circles. The fifteenth was the last.
THE BLACK NARCISSUS
Neil Miller
Doc Walters always had to have his little joke; and nobody’d ever object if it wasn’t that he always had to have the same joke. That sort of thing begins to get in a fellow’s hair after a while.
“This woman looks kinda dead,” he pronounced solemnly.
And Grady rubbed his nose with the palm of his hand and took his eyes away from the spot where somebody’d bashed the victim’s skull with the well-known blunt instrument.
“You’re too conservative,” he said to Doc. “I’d say she was definitely dead.”
The medical examiner sighed regretfully and nodded. “I guess I will, too. Basal fracture. Somebody hit her an awful wallop. Somebody didn’t like her.”
Then the guy that’d found the body and notified the police inserted himself suavely into the proceedings. He claimed his name was Nickey Nolan and that he operated a night club called the Casino Habana.
“I think you’re getting the wrong angle on this?” he said. “Everybody liked Lola. She didn’t have an enemy in the world. Why, that dame was tops in popularity! Since she’s been dancing at the Casino Habana, we’ve been able to double our cover charge—and they fight to get in!” Grady rotated ponderously, and looked Nickey over. Nickey was something to look at, if a fellow wasn’t too particular about what happened to his eyes.
“I don’t usually like guys that wear loud clothes,” Grady said thoughtfully, “but maybe you’ll be an exception. A lot depends on how much you talk, and what you say.” Nickey went through a lot of elegant motions lighting his cigarette. “One of those hard-boiled detectives, eh? Well, if that’s the way you want it—”
He shrugged his tailored shoulders and went across the room to drop into one of those silly little chairs like you never see anywhere but in a woman’s apartment. He consulted his fingernails.
Grady didn’t even bother to look at him, but said: “Do you happen to be around here often at this hour of the morning? Or was this some special occasion?”