by Jerry eBooks
And there was the still unexplained matter of the pawn ticket. Conceivably, if he could get to understand that, that might hold his chance. . . .
THE clog in the feedline was located—a squashed section of copper tubing under the rear end. Eddie rolled himself out from under the convertible and stood up, wiping his hands on a piece of waste.
He opened the door of the convertible, pulled down the flap of the glove compartment, to see if the pawn ticket was still there. It was—exactly where he had left it—stowed under road maps and grimy typewritten papers. It was a Bowery pawnshop’s check, with $1800 scribbled in the margin.
The check, together with a receipted bill for full cash payment for the convertible, had been in the car when Brickner first brought it in six weeks or so back. And Eddie’s cautious inquiries had satisfied him that Brickner was again about his spending habits along Broadway—to the tune of several hundred dollars a month. Why, if he could toss money around at night spots, and pay cash for expensive cars, did he let this pledge, whatever it was, go unredemeed? A matter of front? Did putting every cent into the show window help Brickner peddle his imported stones? Or what?
Still unable to puzzle it out, Eddie stood up, closed the door scowling. He walked over to the elevator, rode down to the office for a new piece of tubing.
Rusty and MacKay, the jumpered attendants in the front office, were immersed in a game of gin-rummy. As Eddie bent over the desk, scribbling out his requisition, Rusty said: “Why tell him? I’d like to see that fat pup get it in the neck. He irritates me.”
“So what? He’s a customer, isn’t he?” MacKay said.
“Are we supposed to play watchdog to the customers? Rush over and tell them when we think somebody’s tailing them? Hell, we may be imagining it—McVeigh might be after somebody else entirely.”
“Not twice in a row, chum. The first time, yes, we could have been mistaken. But not the second time. He’s taking their dust and you know it.”
Eddie impaled the carbon of his slip on the spindle, and stood up casually. “Who’s this?”
“McVeigh—a little hustling shyster, a divorce specialist, a love-nest smeller-outer.”
“And who’s he following?”
“Your pal Brickner. It looks like his wife has caught up with him again.”
Startled, Eddie hastily opened his mind, waiting for this new nugget to fuse into something.
It didn’t fuse. He strained, riding back upstairs, to force something out of it, to line it up into a situation he could use.
Then he found out how strongly the girl actually had impressed him. The main thing that jumped into his mind was a sudden sinking worry about where she would wind up on a deal like that. If she were about to get tangled in a divorce mess with a heel like Brickner—the kind of mess that a slippery Broadway shyster would cook up. . . .
He caught himself in consternation, wondering what in the name of God he was doing worrying about her. A babe. A Broadway babe. One of Billy Brickner’s babes.
He couldn’t quite swallow it. Whatever she was, she was a little hayseed, as green as grass. Or was she? Was he himself as Broadway-wise as he thought? What was the percentage in actual figures—the chances of a cute little face and a pair of hungry eyes on Broadway being genuine? A thousand to one that she was strictly from hunger. And yet—she wasn’t. He knew damned well that she wasn’t. She was all right. A sweet kid.
It dawned on him finally, just how deeply she had laid the finger on him, and he went queasy all over. Hell, it made no sense! He, of all people, was in no position to go for a girl. And if he did have to go for one, why in heaven’s name pick one in her position? And why pick her?
She jumped back into his mind’s eyes. She was no dazzling beauty. On two continents and in a score of cities, he had seen plenty who were. Her skin was like cream, but there was the ghost of freckles across the bridge of her neat, short nose. Moreover, her features were too—too straightforward: nose, short upper lip, soft cherry mouth and round little chin. Without the electricity of her shining eyes and her long bob of midnight hair, she would be colorless.
He stared at himself in the dim washbasin’s mirror. His taut, almost raw-boned dark face under its snarl of burl-mahogany hair reassured him. Whatever fool he might make of himself, no girl was going to fall for that homely dial and those sludge-colored eyes. Especially not with a black smear of grease across his lean jaw.
He set his jaw, swept the whole disturbing argument from his mind. He could—and would—drop her a word of warning about this McVeigh, and to hell with the rest of it. He had grimmer business to worry about. Once he tipped her off, she would be off his mind, where she ought to be.
He did not tip her off that night. He made it a point to be down on the main floor when Brickner came in for his car. He came in, sullen-eyed, tight-lipped, and silent, growled for his car and, when it was brought, climbed in without a word and drove off, alone.
Eddie watched him with vaguely questioning eyes as he snarled the convertible down the street.
At his shoulder, Rusty said in an undertone: “There he is—there’s McVeigh now—the shyster I told y’about.”
Eddie looked sharply across the street. He was just in time to see an inconspicuous little man in a gray suit and dark fedora slip into a light sedan opposite and drive quickly off in the wake of the big car. He had a mournful, down-in-the-mouth expression, sad granite eyes, a little round face and an unmistakable toupee.
LUCK made him miss the girl until the next Tuesday night—or rather, Wednesday morning. She came in at three o’clock A.M. and she had Brickner’s stub in her hand. He had neglected to inform Rusty and McKay of Brickner’s authorization and he spotted her as she argued with them up front.
She had on a black moire evening dress with minute pink rosebuds down one side of her waist, but still the same white fur bolero. Her shining eyes thanked him when he walked over and told the others that the matter was arranged.
“You going to take it out yourself?” he asked.
“Oh, no. I’m meeting Mr. Brickner here.”
He brought the car down and climbed out. Her eyes were on him—almost, it seemed, eagerly. She said quickly: “You’re not from Iowa, are you? There were some Barringtons near where I lived.”
Since Barrington was strictly a “nom de garage”—one breath of his own name being as good as a warning signal, should Brickner overhear it—Eddie shook his head and mumbled something about Michigan. Then, as something seemed to inhibit his telling her what was on his mind, he said inanely: “You’re from Iowa, eh?”
“But definitely. A farmer’s daughter—meaning housekeeper, cook, slavey, and bottle-washer. In the dullest, deadest end of nowhere. And not even one traveling salesman.” She said it lightly, hastily—and it made him irrationally furious, in its desperate straining for sophistication.
He had not had the slightest intention of being gruff, but his voice came out that way. He said: “I don’t know if you know it, but your boy friend’s wife is checking up on you.”
The girl’s shining eyes went wide, then darkened with fury. She drew herself up. “My boy friend! Well, really! Suppose you mind your own—”
“O.K. Skip it!” he raged.
He went back and hammered mercilessly at a crushed fender. All right, to hell with it! Let her smarten up the hard way, like better girls had done before her. There must be something wrong with his brain anyway, to go falling all over himself to help a dumb little wren like her, anyway.
Brickner came in drunk the following Monday night—with the girl—around eight o’clock. Eddie was hanging up the air hose, was close enough to smell the excess alcohol ten feet away. Brickner didn’t see him. His flushed face was even darker than usual, his eyes bloodstreaked and sullen and there was a twist to his red mouth.
Eddie looked him over viciously. His widow’s-peak of gray-white hair was plastered down to his round head and his unpleasant mouth always looked moist. What a Romeo!
/> He was suddenly furious. There were two doors to the garage—IN and OUT. Eddie went out the far one and leaned his back against the wall to let the rage cool out of his head.
Presently, while he was still standing there, the convertible nosed out, tipped down across the sidewalk and stopped, for traffic. Eddie could have stretched out and touched Brickner’s neck.
He almost did. The fat playboy was looking down at the girl and his voice was slaty. “. . . too damn bad about my language! All right sister. I’ve let you get away with the Goldilocks stuff too long and you’re getting dizzy with it. You’ll come out with me tonight to Long Island.”
The girl gasped. “I’ll do no such thing! If—if that’s what you think of me—
“Stow it! Stow it! Good lord, what kind of sucker do you take me for! I run you around night after night, anywhere you want. I get you a job in the Sinners. I even let you steer me to Joe Plaktis’ crap joint—”
“Steer! Billy—I just happened to know—”
“Oh, yeah—you just happened to know! Do you really think I don’t know you’ve been getting a cut of my losses there? I’m dry back of the ears, sister—but dry! And it’s all O.K., see—only don’t get flossy with me. I might drop a little word to the Broadway cops. . . .”
Traffic opened. The convertible bumped forward, swept away.
Eddie stood there for five minutes with the blood pounding in his head before he went in and told Rusty: “I’m off.”
THE Sinners was a cocktail-bar and nightclub in the ill-named Puritan Hotel, on Fifty-second Street. It was primarily a bar, with mirrors, chromium and red-and-black enamel making the room gaudy. The entertainment took place on the minute dance floor. He got there as the nine o’clock show opened.
He breathed again as she was announced, and then he watched her routine and his heart sank. There was nothing modest about the strapless, backless—and almost frontless—white sequin evening gown she worked in. Presumably the exposure of her upper body was her selling point. Certainly it couldn’t be the patter songs she sang, leaning against the piano, an inept aping of a Ramona or a Hildegarde, as closely as he could figure.
Tonight even the body exhibition didn’t win out. The frightened look around her eyes was too noticeable. She went off to only a smattering of applause. Eddie saw her eyes scurry over the room as she bowed off via the bandstand curtam. She beckoned a waiter.
He watched somberly when the waiter reappeared and went over to speak to a customer at a table. Presently the customer—a wooden-faced man with pencilline mustache and ironed-sleek blond curls—got up, buttoned a double-breasted dinner jacket. He picked his way casually around the bar, strolled out through a narrow door which opened on the corridor to the hotel proper.
A minute later, through the door, Eddie saw the girl hurry along the curving corridor, in the same direction. She wore a little black silk jacket now and carried a black purse.
By the time he had determined to follow her out into the corridor, and had made his way out into the marble-and-gilt of the domed rotunda, he could spot neither her nor the man. He stood irresolute, in the shadow of a line of tall, drooping potted plants.
Just as he set his jaw and started for the desk, the girl’s frightened choked voice reached him from the niche behind the plants. “. . . know I didn’t do anything of the sort, Joe. I—Mr. Brickner wanted to gamble. The girls told me you ran an—an honest game. I just—” The man’s voice was cold. “And who says different?”
“Nobody—no, that isn’t it. He said—well, he thinks you’re paying me. He threatened to tell the cops you were. You—you’ve got to tell him you’re riot.” The man swore. “A fat lot my telling him would do. He’d believe me, wouldn’t he? What . . . Wait a minute! Gentle hell—have you got him sore at you and now he’s going to take it out on me?”
“No, no—that is,” her voice was desperate with fright, “he wants me to go—go home with him tonight and if I don’t, he says he’ll get a cop he knows and—” The blond man’s voice was fretful. “I don’t get it. Why won’t you go home with him?”
She sailed out from behind the plants so suddenly that Eddie was left flat-footed. He caught just a glimpse of the handkerchief pressed to her mouth, as her heels click-clicked her rapidly around the bend of the corridor. The woodenfaced man came out, too, stared bleakly, then went on back into the bar.
The corridor, Eddie found, had a half a dozen doors opening from it, some of them blank and unmarked. He traversed it to the stationery shop at the end, without being able to determine which door had swallowed her.
He returned to the bar just in time to spot the wooden-faced blond man near the street door. He was receiving his hat and stick from the checkroom girl, settling the black fedora carefully on his blond curls. Eddie watched him out, vaguely worried.
He breathed a little easier when he learned from the bartender that the performers remained strictly in their balcony dressing-rooms when not actually working, until after the final show at two thirty.
He had no inclination to spend the four hours drinking, so he presently went out to get the cool night air on his face. He was grimly furious with the girl’s dizzy-headed behavior, but the last two years had ground a deep forbearance into him. And the last few months had educated him as to the incredible daze that seems to spread over female brains on Broadway—a daze that seemingly only experience can cure.
He sat through a movie to kill time, wandered up to Central Park, dropped into a Broadway billiard-room. He watched two expert players till the hands of the clock crept close to two, then washed up and set out slowly back to the Puritan on foot.
Something unexplained made him stop as he passed the doorman—Soldier Magowan—under the hotel canopy, and ask casually: “None of the floor show girls have gone out yet, have they?”
“Nope. Only that singer of Billy Brickner’s. She was sick or something.
He took her home, cryin’, half an hour ago.
HE STOOD on the curb, cold, for nearly three minutes, before he turned and hurried to a pay phone and, called Rusty at the garage. “How do I get to Brickner’s place on Long Island?”
“Over the Fifty-ninth Street bridge, to the Grand Central Parkway. That leads into the Northern State Parkway. Drop off at the Turnpike and drive ten miles and there’s Maquasset. What the hell? You want a car?”
He sped blindly over the route. The coupe that Rusty’d brought had a fresh ring job and he was ruining it. It wasn’t worth a thought. Even the war-time forty-mile-an-hour speed limit was scarcely worth a thought. Nothing was, except overtaking the fat playboy before he spoiled—well, something that was pretty nice.
He was almost to the drop-off of the Northern State Parkway when he saw a car’s lights at rest on the side of the road. A sailor ran out, semaphoring urgently. Eddie braked down and the sailor, bug-eyed, stammered hoarsely: “Hey! Over there—on the golf course—dead guy! What’ll I do?”
Eddie jerked the handbrake, piled out. The golf course that flanked the parkway here sloped down to a hollow. In the hollow was the green of the twelfth hole. On the velvety oval green were angry tire burns and Brickner’s glittering convertible.
Billy Brickner sat inside, and anything that Eddie might have wished to happen to him was no worse than what had happened. His left hand was caught in the spokes of the steering wheel. His head was thrown back. There were parallel scratches down his dough-white face, a bruise on his temple, and a blue-agate tipped hatpin nearly buried in his right eye.
Eddie stood without breathing, and stared. The sailor’s flashlight beam wavered, reflected light from the dead man’s glassy eye and from a ring on Brickner’s trapped left hand. The ring was a thick gold band with a grayish, uninteresting stone. Eddie had never seen it before.
He put a handkerchief over his fingers and snapped on the car’s own lights. His thinking was thick. He opened the glove compartment. It was bare and empty.
The sailor said in a hushed voice: “Hey—you shoul
dn’t touch nothing. That guy’s been knocked off.”
“That’s right.” Eddie’s voice was dry. He shut the convertible’s door. “How’d you find him?”
“I was just driving along and I saw the car over there and I thought it was kind of funny.”
“Wait here. I’ll get a cop.”
He wondered giddily whether he should, or not, as he turned the coupe hastily around and sent it back toward the city. He finally pulled into a police booth four miles back. “There’s a sailor back there by the golf course asked me to send a cop—something serious,” he told the beefy thick-looking cop on duty, and drove on, leaving the other scowling uncertainly.
When he was out of sight, he let the coupe out to the last notch he dared. But it was a long drive back. By the time he rumbled back over the bridge, dawn was turning the sky a vague oyster-gray.
In a drugstore, be found a phone listed for Vivian Donald and drove rapidly downtown and across to the Chelsea district, parked, walked a half block to Twenty-fourth Street. He forced himself to saunter casually around the corner into her narrow, slanting little street.
He picked out with his eye the uninspiring little white, high-stooped house just around the corner. Cards under brass mailboxes in the vestibule assigned her to Apartment 2R. He had pressed the bell, long and urgently, before he made out, through the ground-glass panel, a man’s shadow.
The door clicked and he went in to the dimly-lighted hall. A blocky-shouldered man with flaming red hair and a brown tweed suit had his back turned to him, cupping a match to a cigarette. Eddie went on up to the second floor, wiped sweat from his palms and raised a hand to knock on the panel that bore the girl’s card.
The door was pulled inward, by an immaculately-dressed, slight little man with a spiked gray moustache and a round, pleasant face. Sunny blue eyes looked up at Eddie pleasantly. “Come in, friend. Come right in.”