The Case of the Singing Sword (The Billibub Baddings Mysteries)

by Tee Morris

  As I was dragging a sharpening stone across a hunting dagger at my desk, I found real comfort in this thought: Regardless of whether I was dealing with Capone’s or Moran’s boys, all of them were cream puffs compared to what I’d dealt with before in Acryonis. I don’t care how big Sammy “The Hammer” Garibaldi is, he ain’t got nothin’ on the scrappiest of orcs. This knowledge—partnered with the self-confidence one gains with a freshly sharpened battle-axe and a loaded automatic—was giving me just enough peace of mind to get a little sleep while working this case. That is, if you define “a good night’s sleep” as sleeping with one eye open and a battle-axe under the pillow.

  Yeah, yeah, I know. You probably think it would be smarter sleeping with a gun under the pillow. Well, I’ve heard talk about this fairy showing up when you leave a tooth there. Even though I knew the odds of coming across a bona fide fairy in this world were about as likely as the Boston Braves winning the World Series, the last thing I wanted to give a fairy an opportunity to get its mitts on was a loaded.45 automatic.

  After another fitful night’s sleep, it took a couple of chunks of ice in the sink and a few dozen splashes to the face to wake me up Monday morning. I called the office to let Miranda know I would be in later around lunchtime; the morning was going to be spent out on the town, hitting the sidewalks and streets for a little shakedown of my connection in the Al Capone machine.

  Benny Riletto was your typical numbers runner, a high noble in a little corner of Al Capone’s empire who loved to throw his weight around. Talking to Benny for too long would have you believing that when the major decisions were made, he was there to whisper the final word to Capone, who would then give Benny the nod and repeat verbatim what had been whispered into his ear.

  In my world, Benny was no better than a tone-deaf bard whose stories continued to grow in height as he hopped from grove to grove. Thanks to some of those tall tales of his, Chicago’s simple folk were terrified of his shadow and played Benny’s lottery games without question. They had no clue that this dink consistently messed his trousers on the days Capone’s boys collected from him. If his books were off even by the slightest, it would be a short-lived night on the town for Benny Riletto.

  Ol’ Benny was hardly a general, but he made enough to live well. Still, as I’ve said before, money doesn’t grant a goblin manners, etiquette, or class. Although Benny loved to play the part of the big man on Mulberry Street, his reputation of being a cheap bastard preceded him wherever he went. But Benny’s arrogance and his miserly habits weren’t nearly as insulting as his smarmy “Don’t say Benny don’t take care of his own…” when leaving some sorry excuse for a tip. If there were any way he could have shined his own shoes without breaking a sweat, he would have.

  What a prick.

  Monday was Benny’s primping day, when he begrudgingly surrendered some of his hard-earned gold to look the part of a big-time mobster. This usually meant he was hitting up dry cleaners, haggling for the cheapest rates to cover his even-cheaper suits. Then it was off to get a shoeshine…but not just any shoeshine. No, he was going to find the most desperate nipper with the widest eyes and most eager “Shine your shoes, sir?” offer, and then completely ruin that kid’s morning by monopolizing it for a few coppers. And sure enough, that’s exactly where I found this skinflint in nobleman’s clothing, leaning hard on a kid who was buffing his leather shoes.

  Benny saw me coming, but pretended not to as he turned his attention back to the shiner. “Aw, now c’mon, kid. Dese are da real t’ing! Dat’s fine eye-talian leather y’got deah!”

  I smiled, catching the boy’s doubtful look. If anyone knew the real thing, it was this kid. And this kid knew there was nothing real about this mook’s “t’ing.”

  “Yessir,” the boy huffed, his brow starting to bead up as he worked.

  “Benny!” I called out.

  For a reply, he pulled out the newspaper from underneath his arm and opened it to the center. I wasn’t fooled. Benny wasn’t smart enough to read the funnies.

  “Benny, a moment of your time.”

  “Dat’s a mighty tall order, Short Stuff,” Benny sighed with a shake of his head and a shift of the toothpick between his lips. He was already turning the page, but his face was still as dim and blank as ever. “Time is money. I dunno. I got places ta go an’ t’ings ta do.”

  Looking down at his polished dogs, Benny nodded with approval (Yeah, like this kid who had sweated over these cheap shoes really lived for that!) and flipped the boy a dime. “Deah ya go, kid, an’ hey, keep da change,” he smiled with a wink. “An’ don’t say Benny don’t take care of his own.”

  The shoeshine was nine cents.

  “I need to talk to you about DeMayo…”

  And that was as much as I managed to get out before he tucked the newspaper under his arm and started walking away… and by the sudden vigor in his step, he needed to be somewhere. “DeMayo…DeMayo…DeMayo?” he uttered over and over, as if he’d never heard it before.

  “I’m proud of you, Benny. You can speak and walk at the same time. Now tell me what you’ve heard about Pretty Boy.”

  This dink knew that long strides were the best way to make me work for information. I was doing just that because I was now downwind of him, catching whiffs of his sorry excuse for a cologne: a scent best described as two-week-old dragon piss. By the Fates, did he bathe in the stuff this morning?

  “Hey, look!” I puffed, my short legs moving as wide as my girth would let me. “I don’t think I’ll be keeping you from any important date you got, and I’d hate to have you sweat your scent off. So how about we stop and talk a bit about Tony DeMayo?”

  On every mention of his cohort’s name, Benny’s long, lanky legs widened their stride. “Sorry, Short Stuff, can’t help ya deah.”

  “Really?” I was now close to running in order to keep up with him. “Any reason why you’re feeling tight-lipped today?”

  Benny glanced over his shoulder, his eyes angled downward at me struggling to keep up. I could see the creases in the corners of his eyes and the slight rise in his cheeks. The son of a bitch was smiling. He was enjoying this, and he knew I probably couldn’t keep this pace up for much longer. Sad thing is, he was probably right. If I had my familiar deerskin boots around my feet, he wouldn’t have stood a prayer. But if I tried hoofing after Benny in these street loafers, I’d be looking at blisters larger than griffin eggs.

  When you want to grab Benny’s attention, you compliment his taste in clothes, dames, and the “finer things” in life. (Too bad he didn’t know any of the “finer things” outside of an Ace comb.)

  “Hey, Benny! Lemme see those shoes of yours.”

  That brought him to a halt. As I caught up to him, the idea of knocking that smug look off his face with a war hammer briefly took my mind off my aching feet. Another time, I thought to myself, another time.

  Flashing me that salesman smile of his, Benny stuck out one of his loafers, proud as a peacock. I tell you, that shoeshine boy had a talent. He had given those imitations a gleam and polish that would have made the Chalice of Tyrian look tarnished.

  I nodded approvingly. “Nice.”

  He still was still sporting that wide, self-aggrandizing grin when I gave him a sudden push back into the alleyway. The garbage detail hadn’t made it to this corner yet, so Benny wound up accessorizing his pinstripes with banana peels, rotten lettuce, and other garbage when he landed hard on his scrawny ass.

  While indulging in the more colorful vocab of this realm, Benny fumbled for something in his coat pocket. Maybe a switchblade, maybe a snub-nose. I didn’t know, and I didn’t plan to wait and find out. I pushed hard against his chest, pinning him back against the alley’s brick wall, and gave him a hard slap across the face for a chaser.

  “Pipe down, Benny, or the shoes get it next!”

  Yeah, I made sure that he’d fall without junking up the shoes. It was my bargaining chip in this little chat we were having. His swearing now dulled
to a pathetic whimper as I pressed my fist harder against his chest, just itching for a reason to give him a quick punch to his ribs.

  “Now, I’m gonna ask you one more time—”

  “Ya pissant! Goddamn runt! My suit!” Ah, Benny had found some new bolts for his verbal crossbow. At this rate, I figured it was only a few more minutes before he started crying like a baby. “I’m gonna—”

  “What? Tell Capone? Now why you wanna do that, Benny?” I stepped back, giving my thick red beard a few long, thoughtful strokes. “If you did that, I guess I’d have to tell Big Al about your sticky fingers, wouldn’t I? You think he’d be really concerned about a dwarf with a short temper when his numbers runner is skimming off the top?”

  Now this was something a lot of people suspected of Benny Riletto, but no one could really prove. I, however, was the one exception. It was on a divorce case a few months back in which a local business mogul was suspecting his young, nubile wife of enjoying the nightlife a little too much. Naturally, he called on me and my talents of discretion to ferret out the truth.

  So I began following the wench to some of the livelier nightspots of Chicago, where I discovered that one of her more frequent companions was Benny Riletto. He must’ve been quite the Don Juan (or Samirill Rubbiar for the Acryonis crowd), able to fix a permanent smile on a woman’s face and keep her breaths in quick, raspy moans. Either that, or he was one hell of a conversationalist. (If the former was true, someone bury a short sword in my gut, please!) At any rate, Riletto never hesitated to pick up the tab on their nights together, which always ended in the finest hotel suites of Chicago.

  Although my attention was still focused intensely on the princess and her casual trysts, I couldn’t help but notice this numbers runner who was doing well for himself. Too well, the more I watched him. When I had collected enough dirty linen on the princess, I started watching Benny on my own dime, even sneaking a peek his numbers book when he was schmoozing what I could only assume was his potential ticket to easy money.

  My “personal quest” revealed two sets of numbers in Benny’s book. One set of numbers, payoffs, and profits was given to Capone’s boys, and these numbers always added up. Never a dime or a dollar missed. All the cash was presented in neat little piles with a smiling (and slightly sweaty) Benny Riletto behind the transfer.

  Then there was the second set of numbers, the actual numbers pulled in by Benny. Now sure, he wasn’t all that impressive when you met him (and especially when you got to know him). He sure could sell the numbers game, though. When I first came across Benny pitching the numbers racket, I had to wonder if he was in possession of some charm or subliminal influencing spell. I was soon convinced it was his own kind of magic—the con-artist’s kind. If anyone could sell brimstone to a rock dragon, Benny could. I was in no doubt that he was pulling in the cash, probably a lot more than the other numbers runners in his neck of Chicago. The detail, length, and ingenuity to which this weasel went to hide this mismanagement of funds would have impressed Gryfennosian tax collectors.

  Because his fudging of the numbers remained consistently subtle enough for Capone and his seconds to not notice, Benny had a nice little windfall from his creative bookkeeping that allowed him to attract and entertain the upper crust of Chicago society. Win a prize such as the dowry of a Chicago princess, and he could retire from the business and remain set for several lifetimes.

  Yeah, Benny was still a dim-witted prick, but he was hardly stupid when it came to crunching the numbers and playing the con.

  After collecting a goodly amount of evidence so clear you would think it was Illesria crystal, I joined Benny one night over a cozy Italian dinner, just the two of us. I knew I was going to catch him in a private moment because when I had dropped off some incriminating photos of the Missus to my client about an hour beforehand, I could see it in my client’s face that he and his sweet little wife were going to have an immediate sit-down about their future relationship.

  So instead of Benny’s usual “party with the princess,” it was “dinner with a dwarf” where we talked about our future relationship. He flipped the bill for this dwarf’s lasagna and tiramisu (and even took care of the tip) while sweating up a storm at the evidence before him. Someone knew his dirty little secret, and it was going to cost him in detailed inside information about the Organization for a good, long while.

  Lately, Benny had been getting cocky: calling me “Short Stuff,” ignoring me from behind his newspaper, and otherwise not taking seriously the one dwarf who could guarantee him a permanent room at the “Six Feet Under” flophouse. Today was as good as any day to remind him why it was in his best interest to be good to me.

  “You look mighty good in this brown pinstripe number of yours,” I said with a grin while straightening his lapels. “Might wanna make a note of that to your undertaker.”

  “Screw you, Baddings!”

  Oh yeah, Benny had definitely creamed his java with troll’s piss this morning.

  “Ya know,” he continued, “someday, dat ain’t gonna stop me from takin’ ya head off. Ya just watch. Real soon, Big Al won’t be da only boss people’s gotta deal wit!”

  “Really? You thinking about taking over, Benny? Making Chicago your own?”

  Now this I wanted to hear. Sure, he loved talking like a big shot, but Benny was usually smart enough to keep a bridle on that stag. Idle threats toward Big Al really didn’t do much to lengthen one’s lifeline; the streets not only had ears, but a mouth bigger than a Sacred Oracle. Looked like Benny was feeling his oats, and there had to be a good reason.

  “Ya nevah know, Short Stuff. Maybe one day, I’ll be callin’ da shots from downtown.”

  “You think you can take down Big Al?”

  “Why not? He ain’t so tough. Hides behind a lotta hired guns, but hey, he’s not as tough as he t’inks. Maybe one day he was, when he was in da streets, but dat was den. We’re talkin’ ’bout da heah an’ now, ain’t we? And you’re gonna see a lotta changes in da heah an’ now, Baddings.”

  The smell of rotting vegetables and overripe banana peels was beginning to overpower his cologne, which was an improvement if you ask me. Standing again on his polished shoes, Benny kicked a freckled lettuce leaf in my direction. It landed just shy of me, but you would have thought it had slapped me in the face by his smirk. “You might just have ta find anudda sap ta get ya inside scoop.”

  “You sure talk like a man with a plan, Benny.”

  I reached into my inner pocket and pulled out my pipe, which was stuffed with a nice tobacco. (Well, nice tobacco for Chicago. Never could find anything close to the “good stuff” from home, but hey, you make do, y’know?) I scratched a match against the rough brick of the building behind him.

  “I bet DeMayo had a plan, too,” I continued. “I wonder if you’ve got better taste in dives than he does.”

  Benny gave a slight huff, his mouth tight in disapproval. “Too bad fa him he couldn’t keep ’is yap shut. DeMayo was too busy impressin’ th’ dames. All he hadta do was keep quiet, an’ den—”

  That was when he caught himself.

  “What?” I asked politely, taking a few drags from my pipe while eyeballing him.

  Benny straightened his tie and scoffed. “What, are ya deaf, Small Fry? Maybe ya didn’t heah me earlier, Baddings, so I’ll put it in terms ya might undastan’. Fu—”

  Before Benny could drop that four-letter bomb, I gave him a swift punch in the balls. (Who says there ain’t advantages in being a dwarf in a human’s world?) He was back on his knees, hands clutching his family jewels, face turning anger-red with just a hint of painful-pale as the wind I knocked out of him emerged in a surprised, raspy groan.

  My mother would have been so proud of her Baby Billibub.

  The safety was off and the hammer was back as I stuck the tip of Beatrice’s barrel against Benny’s forehead, pushing him back up to face me. He was still dazed as I reached into his coat and tossed his Saturday-night pistol back into the alley.
The sound of the gun clanging against trash cans brought him back to the Land of the Living. Taking another deep drag from my pipe, I gave Benny the same winning smile that I used to flash to a goblin before taking his head.

  “Now listen up, ya spineless twerp. You’ve been testing my waters today. I want to know why. This ain’t like you, Benny. You’ve got the backbone of a Maktashian slug, and about as much motivation. So you tell me what you and Anthony were cooking up, and I won’t let Beatrice get in the last word.”

  “Okay, okay, okay!!!” With each “okay” his voice rose in pitch, reaching a point that could crack glass. After he took a deep breath, still fighting back tears from my unexpected punch below his belt, his voice was back to his annoying nasality. “C’mon, Baddings, what’s ya beef?”

  “My beef”—I snapped, poking him in the chest with my finger—“is that you’re wasting my time! I’m on the clock here, and I don’t like settling my arguments with Beatrice. Blood is a real bitch to clean out of the barrel. I can always get a new suit if your brains splatter on it, but I can’t find another Beatrice. So you’re not winning me over, and you’re definitely not improving my mood!”

  “Look, look, look, Baddings!” His hands were up in the air and shaking like a couple of leaves while I resumed my pipe-puffing. Enjoying the weed kept me from laughing at the fact he was in no real danger. This cretin wasn’t worth the price of a bullet.

  “I wasn’t suppos’ta know about da package. I was droppin’ off some numbahs fa Capone, an’ happened ta catch a coupla words between da Boss an’ his generals.”

  I shook my head. “Benny, you dumb mook! You really do have a talent for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Go on.”

  Benny stared at me for a moment, his jaw tightening. He really didn’t liked being talked down by a dwarf (and that’s saying something considering our height differences), but he liked it even less when I was right.

  “So,” he began again, “I heah dem talkin’ ’bout dis package…”