Tweak the Devil's Nose

by Deming, Richard

  Before Flat-face could align his sights for a second shot I had two more bottles started, and after that I kept them going as rapidly as a juggler throws Indian clubs. It is amazing how accurately you can toss a full quart bottle clear across a room. In spite of hardly taking time to aim, not one of the eighteen quarts I threw missed Barney or Flat-face more than two feet. After the second volley Flat-face gave up trying to get in a shot, and he and Barney devoted themselves to scampering about on all fours in a frantic attempt to dodge the rain of hard drinks.

  Had they kept out of each other’s way, perhaps all the bottles would have missed, but they were both paying more attention to me than to where they were going, and they met head on just in time for the seventeenth bottle to catch them right where their heads were touching. The eighteenth I had already started by then, and it sailed harmlessly over their prone figures to burst against the windows of one of the one-armed bandits. Had this final bottle connected with either of the men, I would have had a corpse on my hands, for it seemed to possess more steam than my earlier throws. It was hard enough to disrupt the mechanism of the slot machine, for the machine emitted a dull clanking noise, slowly turned its left-hand drum until a lemon showed, and spit dimes all over the floor.

  The floor was a mess. Counting the two bottles I had thrown at Slim, I had fired twenty quarts and all but four had broken. Four gallons of mixed liquor trickled over broken glass and filled the air with an overpoweringly rich aroma.

  Rolling both Flat-face and Barney on their backs to prevent them from drowning in a puddle of whisky, I examined them and decided neither probably suffered anything more dangerous than mild concussion. Slim was going to require some plastic work on his nose and possibly had a fractured skull, but he also was alive.

  For a few moments I contemplated the recumbent figure of Barney Seldon, wondering what I had better do about him. I realized he would regard this incident only as further reason for having his goons teach me a lesson, and the prospect of permanently keeping one eye over my shoulder did not appeal to me. After some thought I picked Flat-face’s pistol off the floor, wiped it clean of liquor and thrust it in my coat pocket. Relieving Slim of the keys to the blue sedan, I pocketed them also. Then I found an ice bucket behind the bar, filled it with water and dumped it in Barney’s face.

  After the second bucket he woke up.

  Spluttering, the gang leader sat erect, groaned and pressed both hands to the side of his head where the seventeenth bottle had caught him. A noticeable bump was beginning to form. When I judged the bells in his head had reduced their jangle sufficiently for him to understand words, I said, “Barney!”

  He looked up slowly, still holding his head, and blinked at me.

  I said, “Barney, can you understand me?”

  He started to nod his head, but the movement brought a moan from his lips. Thickly he said, “Yes.”

  “Then listen carefully. I don’t care how hard you chase Fausta, because when she gets tired of your chasing, she’s perfectly capable of tying a can to your tail without my help. And if I feel like it, I’ll chase her too. Without your permission. But keep your goons away from me.”

  He said something under his breath.

  “Understand this clearly, Barney. I’ve no intention of spending the rest of my life jumping at shadows. One more pass at me and I’m coming at you with a gun. Not after your hoods, but straight at you. And if you think that won’t get you dead, check the morgue records over my way.”

  Still clasping both hands to his head, Barney said indistinctly, “I know you’ve knocked off a bad boy or two, Moon.”

  “Mr. Moon.”

  After a pause he sulkily amended, “Mr. Moon.”

  “Want to call it quits, Barney, or want to make this a real feud?”

  His glazed eyes peered up at me with hate, but after an imperceptible hesitation, he said, “I guess a dame’s not important enough to kill a guy over, and I’d have to kill you if you came gunning.”

  “Think you could?” I asked.

  “I don’t want to,” he said with a mixture of pain and irritation. “All I ever intended was to give you a few bumps, but you got to take things serious. Just go away and leave me alone.”

  I left him alone amid the ruins of his playroom and his two hoods.

  20

  I left Flat-face’s pistol in the glove compartment of the blue sedan, and the sedan I abandoned with the keys in it across the street from my apartment in the same spot my visitors had previously parked it. On my own car I found a parking ticket, of course, over an hour and a half having elapsed since I left it in the “no parking” zone. I filed the ticket in my breast pocket for later presentation to Warren Day.

  My front door had been left unlocked, but apparently I had received no other visitors, for things were exactly as they had been left. I recovered my P-38 from the mantel, rolled my pajamas into a tight package with my toothbrush inside, and was out of the flat again within two minutes.

  Fausta, attired in a thin but opaque white dressing gown which hid all but the bottom six inches of a startlingly transparent nightgown, was amusing Mouldy by letting him watch her paint her toenails when I finally got back. This I gathered not from observation, but from deduction, for by the time I had convinced Mouldy through the locked door that it was really I and I was alone, Fausta had completed the job. When Mouldy finally let me in, she had her tiny feet on a footstool and was wriggling them in an apparent attempt to make them dry faster.

  The moment I entered, Fausta wrinkled her nose and said, “Are you drunk, Manny?”

  I said, “You’re acting more and more like a wife. Keep it up and I’ll start insisting on the pleasures of marriage as well as the inconveniences.”

  “You will?” she asked in an interested voice. Then she screwed up her nose again. “You smell like a distillery. Have you been swimming in the stuff?”

  “Just wading,” I told her, for the first time becoming conscious of the aroma I was carrying about with me.

  Examining my shoes, I discovered they were soaked above the insole with liquor. Kicking them off, I carried them over to the open window and set them on the sill to dry.

  “You can get back to your back-slapping,” I told Mouldy.

  “Sure, Sarge. Where’d you find liquor deep enough to wade in?”

  “Barney Seldon’s over in Maddon.”

  Fausta said, “Barney Seldon? You were over at his place tonight, Manny?”

  “Yeah. And your handsome boy friend is out as a murder suspect. The two hoods who dumped me in Midland Park were Barney’s boys, incidentally, and their original intention was the same as Percy Sweet’s. To beat me up. But it develops Barney was just jealous about my chasing you, and knows nothing of the Lancaster killing. Apparently the reason the hoods changed their minds about beating me up was that they knew Barney would regard your welfare as more important, and they dumped me out in order to run to your rescue. I assume that when they found cops already on the scene, they quietly faded out of sight.”

  Fausta said indignantly, “Wait until that Barney Seldon comes here again!”

  “I don’t think he’ll try any more passes at me,” I said. “We talked the matter over and he agreed he was being childish.”

  Fausta looked at me suspiciously. “You beat him up,” she accused.

  “I didn’t lay a hand on him,” I said truthfully.

  Mouldy asked, “How come you were wading in liquor?”

  “Barney has a stream of it running right through his house.”

  Mouldy looked surprised. “That jerk? A real whisky stream?”

  “A real whisky stream.”

  “What do you know?” Mouldy said. “A jerk like Romeo Seldon striking whisky. Luck never happens to guys who deserve it.”

  “Try drilling under your bed,” I suggested. “Maybe you’ll strike a Martini spring.”

  “Now you’re kidding,” Mouldy said. “Everybody knows Martinis aren’t raw products like whisky.
You mix gin and vamoose.”

  “Yeah, do that. Vamoose, I mean. I’ll take over Fausta’s protection.”

  When the door closed behind Mouldy, Fausta asked, “Who is supposed to protect me against you?”

  “Your virtue, my honor and the lock on your bedroom door. Not to mention my state of near collapse after a hard day.”

  Fausta watched broodingly as I stripped back the day bed and plumped my pillow into shape. Giving her toes a final wriggle, she stretched like a kitten and came erect.

  “Good night, Manny,” she said politely. I said, “Good night, Fausta,” in an equally polite voice, but as she padded by on bare feet, I suddenly grabbed her by the shoulders and swung her against my chest.

  Far from being surprised, she met me as though expecting the maneuver. Using my ears as handles, she pulled my mouth down to hers and kept it there until smoke began to curl from between us. Then with a side twist as efficient as a shifty halfback’s, she slipped from my arms and scooted into her bedroom. The door closed, but I heard no sound of a key turning.

  Slowly I undressed, donned my pajamas and took my time getting two drinks mixed. I was starting toward the door with the drinks in my hands when it suddenly opened.

  There was no light behind Fausta, but the front room was brightly lighted, and the nearly transparent nightgown she wore only softened her lines without concealing a thing. The vision stopped me in my tracks, and I was still standing there foolishly with my hands full of highball glasses when she grinned like a gamin, gently closed the door in my face and locked it.

  Setting both glasses on an end table, I tried the knob without success.

  Bitterly I said through the door, “A woman who does things like that deserves to be hanged by the thumbs.”

  “What happened to your honor and your state of near collapse?” she asked from the other side.

  “I’ll collapse you when I get my hands on you.”

  “Do you want me to open the door, Manny?”

  “Of course I want you to open the door.”

  There was a pause, then, “Want to marry me?”

  “Oh, the hell with it,” I said, and retreating to the end table, drank both drinks one after the other.

  As Fausta had warned, the day bed was not very comfortable.

  The smell of frying bacon aroused me at the ungodly hour of eight A.M. Strapping on my leg, I shrugged on a robe, visited the bathroom long enough to brush my teeth, then went to investigate the smell.

  I found Fausta before the stove fully dressed, if you could call the fraction of a yard of blue cotton comprising her sun suit fully dressed. Greeting me cheerily, just as though nothing out of the way had occurred between us the previous night, she set a steaming cup of coffee before me.

  “Eggs and bacon in five minutes,” she said, and returned to the stove.

  I said, “Back when I was a young wolf, we had a name for gals like you. We called them teasers.”

  Without turning around she wiggled her hips at me like a puppy wagging its tail. “A woman has a right to protect her vanity.”

  “Vanity? You mean her virtue.”

  “I mean her vanity. A woman does not necessarily want a man to make love to her just because she wants him to want to make love to her.”

  It required a bit of mental juggling, assisted by a sip of scalding coffee, to sort this out in my mind. I am not adept at following feminine logic at any time, but before coffee in the morning it escapes me completely.

  When no comment was forthcoming from me, Fausta said, “If you did not always act so smug and bored, last night would not have happened.”

  Her words started me on an attempted analysis of our relationship. If I acted smug and bored around Fausta, it was strictly an act, I thought. Smug possibly, I admitted to myself, though cautious was probably a better word choice. But bored? Offhand I could think of a dozen emotions she had at one time or another aroused in me. Everything from deep tenderness to my present impulse to upend her and apply the palm of my hand where it would do the most good. But I honestly couldn’t remember a single instant of boredom.

  Again I said, “The hell with it,” but this time only to myself.

  With Fausta in tow, I arrived at Warren Day’s office about nine A.M. The inspector looked up in simulated astonishment when we walked in.

  “Still up from last night?” he asked. “You wouldn’t get up this early without a summons, so you must not have been to bed.”

  I told him I had been asleep by midnight, and tossed my parking ticket on his desk.

  Before he had a chance to refuse it, I said, “I got it on police business, and the business paid off. You may scratch Barney Seldon off your list of suspects.”

  The abrupt way in which I made this announcement made Day blink. “What?”

  “Barney Seldon.” I gave him a brief run-down of my previous evening’s activities. “So you may as well tear up that assault complaint against Percy Sweet and Seldon at the same time you tear up my ticket,” I concluded. “You only wanted it as an excuse to hold Seldon when you got your hands on him anyway. And since both Barney and Percy Sweet are clear on the Lancaster and Knight killings, I’m not interested in pressing charges.”

  The inspector scratched his long nose. “Suppose Barney was selling you a bill of goods?”

  “He wasn’t,” I assured him. “Aside from the fact that our killer tried to poison Fausta, which Barney would certainly never do, his hoods dumping me and scurrying to Fausta’s rescue the minute they learned she was in danger cinches it that Seldon was merely behaving like a jealous juvenile delinquent. And don’t tell me his actions were too childish to be plausible. You have to possess subnormal intelligence to be a hood in the first place.”

  Reluctantly the inspector agreed with me. Apparently his reluctance stemmed from this leaving him only Laurie Davis as a suspect, whereas he would have preferred someone with less influence. Not that political influence could deter Warren Day an inch from what he regarded as his duty, even though it did tend to awe him, but from a practical point of view it made his task harder. Seldon he could have dragged in, placed under a white light and hammered with questions until he was groggy. With Laurie Davis he would have to have an airtight case before even approaching the man.

  Hannegan stuck his head in the door, cocked an eyebrow at Day, and the inspector shook his head at him.

  “Cancel it,” Day said. “I decided to go myself.”

  Hannegan looked a mute inquiry.

  “Why the hell can’t you talk?” Day blared at him. “I’m tired of your sign language.”

  “Yes, sir,” Hannegan said. His head disappeared and the door closed.

  Rising from behind his desk, Day reached for his flat straw hat.

  “Where you bound?” I asked.

  “Over to Jones and Knight Company,” he said without enthusiasm. “Come along if you want.”

  The very fact that he issued an invitation convinced me he considered the visit unimportant. I asked, “What’s up?”

  The inspector grimaced. “Jones phoned he’s completed examination of his books. He has all the data concerning Knight’s borrowings listed.”

  His indifferent tone told me he had decided everything connecting Knight’s death to Lancaster’s had been uncovered when we ran into Ilco Utilities, but he could not pass up the remote chance of finding something which might point toward a less troublesome suspect than the political boss of Illinois. His treatment of Lieutenant Hannegan verified this reasoning also. Apparently he had instructed the lieutenant to make the trip to Jones and Knight Company, but changed his mind when he lost Barney Seldon as a suspect. The chief of Homicide per personally going on such a routine errand indicated the inspector had reached the point of desperately grasping at straws.

  Having reached the same point myself, I told him we would go along.

  This time when we arrived at the Jones and Knight Investment Company, Matilda Graves was not crying. She was filing letters, an
d she was being very brisk and businesslike for the benefit of the remaining partner’s wife. Isobel Jones sat in one of the three visitors’ chairs, watching her with amused disinterest.

  The secretary-bookkeeper greeted Fausta and me, then looked inquiringly at Warren Day.

  “Day of Homicide,” the inspector growled at her.

  “Oh, yes, officer. Mr. Jones was expecting someone from the police, but he is in conference at the moment. I’m sure he’ll be through in a matter of minutes now. Do you mind waiting?”

  It was obvious from the inspector’s expression that he not only minded, but considered the suggestion preposterous. As chief of Homicide he was used to others waiting on his convenience, and reversal of the usual procedure caught him off center. But it was equally obvious Matilda Graves had no idea she was speaking to the chief of Homicide, and assumed he was merely a plain-clothes policeman. Since he could hardly correct her impression without sounding pompous, he grunted something unintelligible, seated himself in the visitor’s chair farthest from Isobel Jones and glanced at Isobel obliquely. As usual he covered his unease at the presence of an attractive woman with a fierce scowl.

  Isobel said, “Hello, Manny,” nodded at Fausta and favored the inspector with a dazzling smile.

  With his eyes on Matilda Graves, who was too plain to upset him, Day muttered, “Morning, Mrs. Jones.”

  I said, “Can’t even the wives of businessmen get in to see them when they’re in conference?”

  “Not when they’re in conference with lawyers, apparently. This seems to have been a bad day to call for shopping money.”

  Fausta had seated herself between Isobel and Day, which left me standing, as there were no more chairs.

  “Why don’t you bring a chair from Mr. Knight’s office,” Isobel suggested. “I’ve had experience with Harlan’s ‘few minutes’ before, and sometimes they stretch.”

  “I’ll stand,” I said, but when nearly ten minutes passed with no sign of life from Jones’s office, I changed my mind and crossed to the door of Knight’s office.