by Howard Fast
“I didn’t see a thing,” I said firmly.
“Harvey, you simply have no idea how thoroughly we plan a thing. Every loophole plugged, every contingency considered. We even maneuvered the fat man into buying the Ritzhampton; we made the loans available to him; we hooked E.C. Brandon into the deal, and some of us wanted to let it unfold and then finger Brandon with the picture hidden away in his cellar. That had virtues, but better to have Brandon outside where we can use him. We got some darling tapes on him and the fat man and the Rembrandt, and then we got his daughter.”
“You got his daughter? The hell you have! The fat man’s got her, and while we stand here yakking and waiting for the guards to turn up, he can be putting her away and Lucille Dempsey with her.”
“Don’t worry about the guards, Harvey. Don’t worry about the fat man. We got the fat man, Harvey. We got the girls. We got the two morons he uses for trigger men. You got real things to worry about.”
“Like what?”
“Like being present when I had to kill these two cowboys.”
“My God, Mr. Corsica, you saved my life.”
“Is that what you’re going to say on the witness stand, Harvey?”
“This won’t ever get there. My lips are sealed.”
“Don’t be a horse’s ass,” Corsica said.
“No?” I shrugged. “What the hell’s the difference—horse’s ass or not. I’m on the short end. The cowboys were leading me to the last roundup. Now you.”
“Don’t bracket us, Harvey.”
“After all, it was self-defense.”
“Harvey,” he said patiently, “do you know who I am or don’t you?”
“I know.”
“All right,” he said. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped the butt of the Luger carefully. Then he took it by the muzzle and handed it to me. I took it and covered him.
“Don’t move,” I said.
“Harvey!”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Well, Goddamn it, you give me a gun—”
“Would I give you a loaded gun, Harvey?”
I pointed it at the door and fired. It clicked.
“By golly,” I said respectfully, “you went up against them with two bullets—”
“No, Harvey.” He took a small Smith & Wesson out of his jacket pocket and covered me. “I got another gun. That makes sense, doesn’t it?”
I took out my own handerchief, wiped the butt and dropped the Luger to the floor. It fell with a crash that would have awakened the dead, but our own seclusion was not disturbed.
“There will not be another patrol of guards for thirty minutes or so, Harvey. As for the alarm system, we have disconnected it. So it will do you no good to be petulant.”
“Well, I pulled three enormous fuses,” I said foolishly. “It’s got to do something.”
“It did something,” he replied patiently. “It cut the current to the converter which changes AC to DC for the old freight elevator. I know the plans and the wring of this place better than the head curator, Harvey. Don’t worry. We don’t steal art. Shmucks steal art. Texans steal art. We don’t. So now pick up the gun, Harvey.”
I picked it up. “It’s not my gun. Where does it get you?” I asked.
“Let me do it my way, Harvey—yes?”
“Yes,” I said.
“The gun is registered in your name, Harvey. The girls will swear that you were taken here under duress and forced to participate in this attempted heist. You will be a hero, Harvey.”
“Not in Texas,” I said glumly. “Not in the Nineteenth Precinct either,” I said, even more glumly.
“Even in Texas, Harvey. The fact of the matter is that Coventry comes from Brooklyn first. They’re all wanted in Texas. The fact that you got them both with a gun that had only two cartridges in its magazine—a gun you forgot to load—”
“I’m against violence,” I said desperately. I felt sorry for Coventry now. A fat cowboy who comes from Brooklyn is maybe the most pathetic thing on earth.
“You took a life to save a life.”
“You’re putting me on,” I said miserably.
“No, sir, Harvey. I am not.”
“Why should you let go of Cynthia?”
“Because a bird in the hand, Harvey, tax-free, is worth a whole flock of birds in the bush.”
“What bird in the hand?” I was almost shouting now, and he politely asked me to lower my voice. “What bird in the hand?” I repeated more softly.
“The bird in your pocket, Harvey—the eighty-five grand in traveler’s checks that you tried to buy the cowboys with.”
“Me have eighty-five thousand? That’s a pipe dream. I was conning them. I made that eighty-five out of thin air.”
“Harvey,” he said coldly, “we tapped your room in Toronto—we got taps all over the hotel—we even got connections in banks. Now, do you give me that eighty-five grand, or do I have to push you around a little and maybe shoot you a little to get it?”
“You give me both girls?”
“Both.”
“When?”
“When you sign the traveler’s checks and hand them over.”
I reached into my pocket, took out the fat folder of checks, and held it up.
“Sign them, Harvey.”
“Where?”
“Sit down on the floor and sign them.”
He tossed me a ballpoint pen, and I sat down on the floor, alongside of the two dead Texans, and signed five ten thousand-dollar checks, five five thousand-dollar checks and ten one thousand-dollar checks. Then I pushed the lot over to him.
He picked up the checks, stuffed them into his pocket, and said, “OK, Harvey—stay where you are. Don’t move. Count to one hundred, but don’t move, because it’s been nice and it would be a pity to louse it up at this point. So don’t move.”
He backed away, and then suddenly he turned around and took off out of the room. I might have gone after him, but it is a lot more likely that I might not have gone after him. In any case, the decision was taken away from me, because before my counting reached twenty, Cynthia and Lucille burst into the room, and Lucille threw her arms around me and kissed me and wept copiously, which was exactly what my battered ego required. Cynthia, on the other hand, stood there forlornly. I expected her to have hysterics, but at that moment Cynthia reached a sort of adulthood.
“I do feel sorry for them,” she said, “but they weren’t very nice people, were they?”
Chapter 16
“All right, we’ll take it from the top again,” said Lieutenant Rothschild. “It’s only ten minutes past midnight, and Harvey’s a strong young feller. It don’t matter that I got ulcers and Kelly here’s got a wife that’s going to divorce him if he don’t show up one of these nights. No, sir. None of that matters. We got all the time in the world.”
“I told you my story, Lieutenant,” I said. I had not only told my story, I had memorized every detail of that office, the yellow walls with their ancient peeling paint, the three old wooden chairs and the two battered tin files, the hundred-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling and the Underwood typewriter circa 1935—and I had even made a feeble and unappreciated crack or two about how the city treats its faithful servants.
“Tell it once more, Harvey.”
“Am I under arrest? That’s all I want to know. I want to know once and for all whether you intend to arrest me, because if you are going to arrest me, I am damn well going to get a lawyer and see that my rights are protected—”
“Nuts,” said the Lieutenant. “That’s a load of crap, Harvey and you know it. There are any number of things I can do without arresting you, so don’t force my hand.”
“Such as?”
“Such as killing your license to practice as a private dick. Such as having a chat with the people up there at the company you work for. Such as—”
“All right, Lieutenant. Let’s be friends again.”
“Just tell it again.”
I told it again
—interrupted only by one or two unrestrainable guffaws from Kelly. When I finished, I said, “Why don’t you explain to that big ape that I’m not doing a comedy routine.”
“Because you are, Harvey. Trouble is, you don’t listen to yourself. You tell me that you went into the Metropolitan Museum of Art with two of Coventry’s cowboys, after you had conned them into believing that you knew how to cut out the alarm system, that the three of you hid under a bed in the American Wing, that you pulled the freight elevator fuses, and then, when you were about to heist the painting, that Valento Corsica appeared, killed the two cowboys with a Luger registered to your name, and then bowed out, leaving the gun with you. How does it sound, Harvey?”
Kelly guffawed again.
“It sounds a little unreasonable,” I admitted.
“You know what I say, Lieutenant,” Kelly put in. “I say we book him for homicide. He shot two men. That’s it. Everything else just clouds the issue. What is clear as day is the fact that he knocked over these two cowboys.”
“Sure—that’s the one thing as clear as day. The only trouble is that Harvey didn’t shoot those two cowboys.”
“Why? Because he says so?”
“No.” Rothschild shook his head. “You ought to know me better, Kelly. I don’t believe what a suspect says even if I can confirm his story with my own eyes. But Harvey here couldn’t shoot a rabbit, even if he knew how to shoot, which he doesn’t. He never carried a gun and never had a permit for a gun.”
“He’s got a permit for the Luger.”
“So he has. Why don’t you give us a straight story on that, Harvey. Just that. Put yourself in my place. I got a murder weapon and I got your fingerprints on it and it’s your gun—my God, Harvey, give me a break.”
“They registered it in my name. They got the permit,” I explained.
“Who?”
“The Mafia.”
“Mafia—Mafia—”
“Corsica told me,” I began—
“Corsica told you nothing. Corsica is dead. This afternoon they fished his body out of the river. We found the bloodstains on the laundry in the Ritzhampton and we got bloodstains in the laundry chute.”
“That’s Count Gambion de Fonti. He was not Valento Corsica. He was only a setup, a patsy, a foil for Fats Coventry—”
“Who was shaping up to steal the Rembrandt. I know. You told me. He comes to New York with four cowboy torpedos to steal maybe the most famous picture in the world. For whom? Why? Goddamn it, make some sense!”
He took a deep breath, and then said more softly, “I’m shouting. That could be interpreted as intimidating you. I don’t want to intimidate you, Harvey. Why didn’t you tell me I was shouting?”
“I don’t like to make you angry, Lieutenant,” I replied reasonably.
“You don’t like to make me angry. You really got a better nature or something, Harvey.” He turned to Kelly. “Bring up the girl?”
“Which one?”
“The Dempsey girl. With the other one—you tell them kid gloves. She is nobody, only E.G. Brandon’s daughter. Here’s a couple of bucks. Send out for some more food if she’s hungry. What is she doing?”
“She’s filling in a form for computer dating.”
“What?”
“You know—they run it through a machine and come up with a date.”
“Oh? All right—tell the matron to let me know if she gets nervous. If worse comes to worse, we send her home.”
“She don’t want to go home,” Kelly said uncomprehendingly. “They got a sixteen-room flat or something on Park Avenue, but she don’t want to go home.”
“All right. Send up the other one.” He thought about it for a moment. “The kid—well, the hell with what she wants. Give me that two bucks.” Kelly handed back the money, and Rothschild said, “Take her home. Send up the Dempsey woman but take the kid home.”
“She says no.”
“The hell with what she says! Take her home. I want her off my hands.”
“It’s past midnight—”
“Kelly, take her home!”
Kelly left the room, and Rothschild turned to me and said petulantly, “Look at the kind of hole you put me into, Harvey. Just look at my position. I got enough on you to get an indictment, but you didn’t kill those two cowboys. I know that, and yet I can’t prove it and neither can you—not with the best Goddamn lawyer in the world. I know you’re lying a mile a minute, and so help me God, I would like to hang a real big one on you. But this is too big. So you know what I got to do?”
“What?”
“Real wise guy.”
“All I said was ‘what.’”
“Don’t say anything. Because I got to set this up as self-defense. I got to make a hero out of you. Pure self-defense—Harvey Krim, acting in defense of law and order, guns down two deadly Texas killers. You’ll be the biggest man in the city tomorrow—and I got to do it. Me.”
“Thank you,” I said meekly, “but I don’t want to take credit for any killings. You know how I feel about violence—”
“You are taking credit, Harvey. One or the other—credit or the rap. Which is it?”
“Credit,” I said shortly.
“That’s what I like about you, Harvey. Above all, you are a reasonable man.”
Lucille was brought into the room at that point by a Detective Banniker. Rothschild told the detective to go and Lucille to sit down. Then he circled his desk and sat down behind it, studying Lucille thoughtfully. Finally, he said, “You’re a librarian.”
“That’s right.”
His voice became soft and philosophical, filled with the subtle sadness of lost years never to be regained. He is most dangerous, least to be trusted when his voice does that, but this was something I could hardly convey to Lucille; Rothschild said nostalgically, “Libraries—the whole meaning of my life. You know, radio was just beginning then. We had no television. All our dreams, all our education was in that building—the New York Public Library. It was our Mecca, our oasis, our breath of meaning and hope. Do you know what a librarian meant to me then, Miss Dempsey? To all of us kids?”
Lucille shook her head.
“Civilization!” Rothschild pronounced. ‘We lived in a jungle.”
“Oh? I feel sorry for you.”
“I’m not asking for sympathy. I am trying to evoke a picture—a picture of what the image of a librarian means in my life. A librarian, Miss Dempsey, was something sacred to me.”
“I wish Harvey felt that way,” Lucille said sadly.
“Him? It would be a miracle if he ever thought of any human being, Miss Dempsey. In those terms, I mean, but don’t get me started on Harvey Krim. I have already had a bellyfull of Harvey Krim. The point is, I can’t think of a librarian as a liar.”
“That’s very kind of you, Lieutenant. Only, I imagine librarians will lie when they have to, just as any other group would—”
“Don’t disillusion me—please, Miss Dempsey. Just tell me exactly what happened to you tonight.”
“But I told it to you already, Lieutenant. I also told it to Sergeant Kelly. I also told it to that nice policeman who took it all down in shorthand—you know, the one who asked me whether I was married. He was very polite. He asked me whether I would ever think about going out with a cop, and I said that I would.”
“He’s a nice cop,” Rothschild agreed. “I’m a nice cop too. I’m a good listener. So tell it again—please, Miss Dempsey.”
“Very well,” Lucille sighed. “From the airport, we went straight to the Ritzhampton. I talked Harvey into it.”
“What! That was my idea!”
“Shut up, Harvey,” Rothschild said. “Look, Miss Dempsey, skip that part of it. I want to know what happened after the fat man took Harvey away—Coventry and the two cowboys.”
“Well, as I told you, Cynthia cried a good deal. But finally I calmed her enough to play a few hands of rummy. Not that either of us could keep our minds on what we were doing. You just don’t quiet
ly play cards when you think you are going to die during the next few hours—”
“Front door and back door locked?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Phone dead?”
“Why didn’t you smash the windows and throw stuff into the street?”
“Lieutenant, I am not entirely brainless. There’s a terrace around that suite. The doors to the terrace were locked. So were the windows. Anyway, there was always a guard outside the doors. So we played cards limply for a while and then I heard that sound I told you about. Outside the front door. A sort of pop. It made me think of a gun being fired but it was not loud.”
“Silencer,” I said.
“Thanks, Harvey. I never could have figured out that it was a silencer. I needed you for that.”
“I also heard the elevator,” Lucille said.
“Before?”
“I think so.”
“You said you heard it after.”
“I think both times. Then I told Cynthia that I was going to try the door again and then maybe start smashing in the windows, just as you said, and maybe get out on the terrace.”
“But the door was open.”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t think it peculiar?”
“I didn’t think anything, Lieutenant. I just called out to Cynthia and we both bolted out onto the elevator landing, and I pressed the button as hard as I could—which I don’t imagine made one iota of difference, and the elevator came, and the operator didn’t appear at all surprised, and he took us down to the lobby, and there was this nice man from Centre Street—that is what you call police headquarters, isn’t it?—well he was waiting for us.”
“He was not a cop and he was not from downtown,” Rothschild said with growing irritation.
“Well, it seems I cannot tell the story to please you, Lieutenant. I do try though. I simply identify this man as he described himself. He said his name was Detective Comaday—John Comaday.”