by Jerry eBooks
It took only about three drinks to get Stokes in a heckling mood. By the time of Eddy’s third song Stokes’ bright remarks were being passed from table to table.
I didn’t feel too kindly toward Stokes myself, because it was a pleasant thing to hear this Eddy Delgado sing. Eddy had about enough vocal power to fill a box at the Metropolitan, but the amplifying system took care of that. The loudspeakers carried his voice from the back alley to Sunset Boulevard.
Eddy was not yet drawing the ice-cream and bobby-sock mob but he was great guns with the double chin and the corset. He was medium tall, pale, and thin as a pull of taffy. You could distinguish him from the microphone by the brown, curly hair which had a tendency to crawl down his neck. At the end of his third song Eddy asked for a little fanfare and then he made a speech.
LADIES and gentlemen, there is one so-called man among you who likes nothing better than a fight as long as he is barricaded behind his typewriter. They tell me he has two good punches in his repertoire, both of them below the belt. His most recent pleasure is to refer to me as The Lung. At this time I would like to offer him the opportunity to find that lung with either one of his fists. If he doesn’t, I shall proceed to poke him square on the nose—”
Well, friend Stokes was already up, brushing back his handsome blond hair, the big shoulders under his dinner jacket tight and set. He swaggered over to Eddy without a word and swung.
We were prepared for that. I knew the punch that Stokes would throw. I had seen him use it. Amateurs seldom change their style. I had taught Eddy how to snake out of the way of that first one and he did a good job of it. Then the lights went out.
I had the whole scene measured with my eyes. In two steps I was spinning Stokes by the shoulder. I let him have a solid right across the jaw. I couldn’t hear him land because of the uproar, but I knew by the feel that he was down and out?
In fifteen seconds the lights came on again and I was back at my table sipping a highball. Stokes was flat on his back in the middle of the dance floor and Eddy was standing over him with his fists doubled. The crowd whooped.
I looked as surprised as I could, then I trotted out and raised Eddy’s arm. “Ladies and gentlemen, the new champion . . .”
Well, that really broke things up. The manager came down and began pumping his elbows at Eddy but the crowd was cheering and applauding so loud that the boss had to shrug it off, with a sick little grin. Eddy and I carried Stokes backstage into a little cubbyhole and dumped him in a chair. Nobody seemed interested in reviving him. It was as if all Hollywood had thrown that punch at him.
Under normal conditions, such an unexpected scene would have kept everybody jabbering for the rest of the evening, but the act that followed was not a normal condition. It was Vivian Ryan.
This Vivian was something that should happen only in a dream, and if your husband failed to come home some night you could just about figure he was down on the Sunset Strip elbowing into the Shadyside at twenty smackers per elbow.
Vivian had platinum hair that did not grow—it floated around her head. She had slate-gray eyes, a smile with the right number of teeth, and a figure that would stop an army in its tracks. Take all that, put it in a wisp of lace, and set it to Dustin Mills’ music and you had a combine that was out of this universe.
Dustin Mills himself did not know one end of a musical scale from another, but his shoulders filled out a tux properly and his dark South-of-the-Border face looked good to the customers. Also Mills knew a gold mine when he saw one, namely Vivian Ryan dancing soft shoe to the rhythm of Mark Cavanaugh’s drums, Paul Miranda’s piano, Joe Hufty’s bass fiddle, Terry Biddle’s slip horn, and Eddy Delgado’s voice.
At the end of Vivian’s number, I just sat there, all six-feet-five of me, slumped in my chair, dreaming about it. I did not wake up until the club was closing and I heard Eddy Delgado hissing at me across the table: “Harrigan! Harrigan, listen! You broke Leland Stokes’ neck with that punch! They’ve got a doctor backstage and he says Stokes’ neck is broken!”
I WILL never forget the beet face of Detective Lieutenant O’Malley when he saw what had happened to Leland Stokes and then saw Eddy Delgado. He looked around desperately at the members of the band as if he hoped that some mistake had been made about the source of that punch. It takes quite a man to wrestle the bull fiddle, or the trap drums, or the slip trombone all evening, but all Eddy Delgado needed for his work—in the words of the late Leland Stokes—was a lung. That was about all Eddy had. You would not buy Eddy for a slab of bacon.
O’Malley pinned Eddy up against the piano and fired questions at him. “It is your opinion that being called The Lung in public print is reason to break a man’s neck?”
Eddy was grinning it off like the world’s champ. “I did not intend to break his neck.”
“Could there be anything else involved in your little feud with Stokes?” O’Malley snapped.
Eddy squinted his brown eyes. “Such as?”
“Such as Stokes trying to groom this Vivian Ryan girl for the movies and you not wanting to be left behind?”
“Who told you that?” Eddy barked, looking around angrily at the band, particularly at the Latin profile of Dustin Mills.
O’Malley shrugged. “I read the papers. I even read Stokes’ column. I recall he gave Miss Ryan that fancy monicker, The Heartbeat.”
“Vivian is a heartbeat, all right,” Eddy said. “She’s the heartbeat of this band, but I don’t think anyone around here would want to stand in the way of her career.”
O’Malley looked at the girl. She was still in costume, sitting at my table. “Well, if I was The Lung I wouldn’t want The Heartbeat to get very far away,” O’Malley said.
The only laugh at that gag came from O’Malley himself. He scowled up at the band, waved a big hand at Mark Cavanaugh, the drummer. Mark was high man on the slope of the pit, surrounded by his family of traps.
“Hey you!” O’Malley said. “Did you notice anybody go backstage after Stokes was carried off?”
Cavanaugh was a good-looking, solid hunk of man, but his dark face constantly twitched with an overflow of energy. He shook his head, grinned. “I’m a busy man when Vivian dances. The body is hers, but the rhythm is mine!”
O’Malley switched to the fat man on the fat fiddle, Joe Hufty, working down by the left exit. “How about you, big boy?”
Hufty twanged the bass and displayed a pair of hands. “I, too, work for a living!” O’Malley swung to finger-happy Paul Miranda at the piano on the far right. “What did you see, boogie-boy?”
Paul’s grin was oily. “You expect me to be seeing other things when our Vivian is dancing?”
O’Malley was not too happy about it all. He came over to my table. “You’re the monster they call The Arm?” he asked.
I nodded. “Harrigan is the name.”
“Harrigan, did you notice how dead Stokes was when you helped this kid carry him away?”
“A stiff is a stiff, dead or alive,” I said. “At the time I thought he was alive.”
“People should watch things,” O’Malley grumbled. “Which way did you carry him?”
“Around the piano, through that curtain at the right.”
O’Malley consulted my shoulders. “Harrigan, I wish you were a crooner.”
“How come?”
“We could use a turkey like you on this job”—O’Malley waggled a finger at Eddy—“but I don’t know what a jury is gonna do with this animated wishbone!”
EDDY himself was not frightened. He reveled in his ill-gotten glory. The next day he popped into my gym with: “Harrigan, they’ve got me in every headline in the country! ‘Crooner Packs Death Wallop’ and stuff like that.”
“It won’t sound so musical through the solid walls of San Quentin,” I reminded.
“Oh, hell!” Eddy said. “There are plenty of lawyers who can get me out of this mess. They’ll have the state apologizing to me even for bringing up the matter.”
“Edd
y, it strikes me, when you get right down to it, that you aren’t in this mess at all. I’m the one who is.”
Eddy looked alarmed. “Now, Harrigan, you keep your mouth shut. I want it to stand as it is. After all, you were punching as my proxy and I’ll be an accessory before the feet anyway . . . All I want from you is why you hit the guy so hard!”
“Eddy, I didn’t hit him so hard.”
“Huh? What d’you mean by that?”
“I mean, I was holding back. If a neck broke under my fist, I would have felt it breaking.”
“Maybe it was the way he hit the floor—”
“I plant ’em easy,” I said. “I know about fractured skulls. Anyway, Stokes’ neck was twisted halfway around to the left. The way he was hit, it should have been twisted to the right—”
“But it must have been your punch, Bert! Nobody was backstage at all after that until they found him dead.”
“It does look bad,” I admitted, “but I still can’t figure about that punch.”
Eddy was off on his brag again. “You know, Bert, this has been a very great thing for the crooning business. Pretty soon it may be regarded as one of the manly professions.”
“You’re in no spot to be crowing, kid,” I advised. “Murderers get a lot of publicity, but they don’t last.”
“I wouldn’t call it murder,” Eddy protested.
“You might if you got to thinking about it.”
I wasn’t the only one who had an idea like that. Vivian Ryan looked me up privately in my office with the floating miseries in her gray eyes. Vivian was not exactly one of my following, but I was one of hers. “Bert, I’m so worried about Eddy!” she said.
With Vivian it’s every man for himself. “Eddy seems able to take care of himself,” I said coldly.
“That’s the trouble, Bert. I wish Eddy wouldn’t act so much like—like a crusader. That Lieutenant O’Malley is very angry. He says even newspaper columnists have a right to live.”
“There are arguments on both sides,” I said.
“Bert, they’re trying to make a murder case against Eddy!”
“Who told you?”
“Bill Fisher, the electrician, said they made him tell about the lights going out that night and he had to admit that Eddy had paid him to turn them out. That makes it look as though Eddy knew what he was doing. They say Eddy knocked Leland down and then broke his neck in the dark! And that isn’t all, Bert. They’re saying Leland Stokes was in love with me and Eddy was also in love with me, that Eddy was jealous—”
“Is that true?”
“I don’t know,” she whimpered. “Nobody ever said so.”
I put a protective arm around her shoulders. “Honey, it strikes me the guys you associate with are all undernourished.”
She found my chest very absorbent. “Oh, Bert, what’ll we do about Eddy?” she wailed. “I just couldn’t get along without Eddy!”
“There are lots of crooners as good as Eddy—”
“There’s no voice for me like Eddy’s! I just float away on it!”
“Huh!” I said. “Well, honey, I think it’ll be very hard to convince a jury that Eddy was a murderer. Take it from me, Eddy just doesn’t have the muscles. It would take somebody with a mighty twist in his hands to break Stokes’ neck!”
I found Vivian blinking down at my own big hand on her shoulder and I quickly got the thing out of sight. She looked up at my face and I could feel the hot blush creeping up my neck like an army of red ants.
ALTOGETHER my position was very delicate. I didn’t know whether Eddy might talk if he got in too tight a spot and there were also a few other people, who might remember how close I’d been to Stokes while the lights were out.
It was very hard on my character to know what to do. Especially because of the little guy with the shrill voice who rides around on my shoulder giving me advice in tight places. This voice, I find is always on my side. In the case of Eddy Delgado, the voice kept saying: “You will note, Harrigan, that Eddy would not be very big competition for Vivian Ryan if he was enrolled for the full course at San Quentin. It would be advisable, Harrigan, to let the law take care of Eddy—”
Sometimes I am inclined to argue with the voice. That’s how I came to be at the Shadyside Club a few nights later, alone, watching Vivian’s number from a table way back among the poor tippers.
My pulse was thumping that night as if Vivian were dancing in the palm of my hand. The sensational part of her tap routine was the fact that she didn’t make the tap sounds herself. She wore soft shoes, and Mark Cavanaugh, the drummer, did the tapping with a wooden block arrangement set up before a microphone. Cavanaugh worked in the dark and Vivian held the spotlight. The audience did not catch on until Vivian made a sudden stop and the taps kept right on going. Then Vivian leaped and whirled, tapping with her toes all the while, and her feet seemed to thud against invisible drums.
As a finale an extra spotlight picked up the hands of Paul Miranda at the piano, jumped over to Terry Biddle’s trombone, then drifted down to Eddy Delgado at the mike, Vivian adapting her style to each mood. Her long toe leaps and Eddy’s mellow voice went together like soft winds and summer rain. The band was muted down to a whisper and the spotlight framed just the two of them, Eddy and Vivian. If they had ended the number right there, the audience would have fallen on its face, but the band jammed the thing into a storm, pitched it up to Joe Hufty at the big bass, and finally back to the hurricane beat of Mark Cavanaugh’s drums.
At the end I was sweating as if I had just gone ten rounds with Cavanaugh. I was excited. Very excited.
When the club closed I went down to the pit. A few wolves were circulating around Vivian, but she was brushing them off expertly. She said she had to stay on and smooth out her routine with the drummer.
Eddy Delgado and Dustin Mills came out from backstage, gloved and hatted for the street. I dragged Eddy into a corner. “Eddy, I got an angle on this thing. I want to get hold of the dope sheet on that last number, I mean the sheet that shows what instruments are playing at what time.”
Eddy’s brown eyes crinkled. “The orchestration?”
“Yeah. That’s it. The whole works.”
“Well, Mills would have—”
“Get it, Eddy, get it. This is murder we’re talking about!”
My voice was harsh with excitement. Eddy felt it and ran after Dustin Mills. He caught the leader at the side door, got the proper sheets, and the two of us sat down to them in the front office.
“It stacks up like this, Eddy,” I said. “I know I didn’t break Stokes’ neck with that punch. I just put the guy under the anesthetic for the big operation, the big twist. Somebody else got to Stokes while he was unconscious. Now, there was nobody backstage during Vivian’s dance number, so I figure that maybe Stokes was slipped the old twist by someone in the band who had time to slip through the back curtain. The way the spotlights were focused, there were times when you couldn’t see the band at all, and anyway when that girl is dancing you can be sure that nobody is looking anywhere else!”
Eddy’s pale face was turning a greasy yellow. “God, Harrigan, do you think so?”
“Kid, I know so. I got a brain as well as an arm. Now, you find me what instruments had some time off. Find me somebody with a nice pair of hands. To break a man’s neck you gotta have hands!”
Eddy buried his nose in the music, reading it as I would read a book. Finally he jumped up, yelped: “I’ve got it, Harrigan! I should have remembered. At least three minutes without a solitary note.”
“Which one?” I demanded hoarsely. Eddy threw off his hat and gloves, beat out a little rhythm patter on the desk with his hands. “Don’t you get it, Harrigan? That guy would be sure to have strong hands, terrific hands. His stuff is all by hand!”
“I get it!” My slap on Eddy’s back almost flattened him. “That’s our man. Come on, kid!”
THE LIGHTS were out all over the club, except for a double spot on Vivian and Mark Cavanaugh
rehearsing down there in the pit. Nobody else was around. The night watchman was very likely keeping his eye on the liquor supply in the bar.
Eddy and I stood in the foyer peering through swinging glass doors. Vivian was still in her scant costume, a streak of mist, and the drums were going like machine guns.
Cavanaugh was a show in himself. He had his coat off, sleeves rolled up. Bare arms snaked around him, streaked from drum to drum. Black curls danced across his eyes. His face strained and chanted, as if the rhythm began at the roots of his hair and worked down through his body. The sweat worked with it, streaking his face with writhing ribbons of silver.
“He beats it with his gums,” I muttered. “I’d like to hear that chant, like to hear what he says.”
“We might be able to, at that,” Eddy whispered. “See that microphone hanging over his head? I think it can be lowered. Try to slip inside without being noticed, Harrigan.”
Eddy disappeared in the direction of the electrician’s booth. I dipped through the glass doors and found a chair in the outer border of darkness.
Cavanaugh and Vivian were too absorbed to notice any outside sounds. All the mikes were still on and the rhythm came flooding out of the loudspeakers, a twisting, tugging jungle beat, enough to rip a man right out of his chair. I saw the overhead microphone creep down toward Cavanaugh’s bobbing head. Every so often Cavanaugh’s face would twist upward, eyes blinking, mouth working, teeth gleaming, and fragments of his chant would hit the mike—“Comin’ at ya, comin’ at ya, comin’ at ya . . .”
The drums would go up in a wild crescendo, then fade, and again the mike would catch the chatter of his lips.
“. . . Take it baby, take that beat! Take it baby, take that beat! . . . Whirl it baby, tie it up! Shape it baby, tie it up! . . . Dance it baby, dance it baby, dance it baby . . .”
I didn’t hear Eddy come in but I felt his clawed hand biting my arm. “Listen, Harrigan!” he hissed into my ear.