The Hardboiled Mystery Megapack

by John Roeburt

  “Find The Tiger Man.”

  “Yes.”

  “Brett Carter, he’s a newspaperman.”

  “A sportswriter, Johnny. He has a column on the Times-Herald.” She touched Devereaux’s hand; a long tapering nail like a pointing spear. It gave the detective an uncanny feeling. He could imagine a ritualistic bloodletting, and then his own oath in blood. To serve her, and shield her, unto death.

  He heard her say, “Brett Carter did not involve me, Johnny. He was sensitive to my situation. He was clever! He reopened the question of The Tiger Man, in his column, but not in reference to me. I was never mentioned!”

  Devereaux nodded in automatic understanding. Notoriety; the union of The Tiger Man and Nina Troy in the public press—It could only scandalize the mother and the boy. He thought for a long moment. “How badly beaten was he? You didn’t elaborate before.”

  “Savagely. There was a concussion, and…a damaged ear.” She looked green and sick and hollow. “After recovery, Brett will need plastic surgery. His face…” The detective regarded her intently. “Other than the merely intuitive, what makes you suppose your sports-writer friend was beaten as a warning to you?”

  There was no immediate answer. She was busy pulling a sleeve up above the elbow.

  She made a sign, and Devereaux looked. There were discolorations on the arm, brown and black blotches with a mottled purplish overlay.

  “And my other arm too,” she said. “And on my back and chest.” Her mouth twisted to form a smile, but her eyes brimmed. “I have an unfortunate skin. The smallest bruise, I’m discolored for weeks.”

  “Who beat you?” Devereaux asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  The detective raised his brows, and she said, “There was a blow from behind. On the ground, I was kicked over and over. I recovered consciousness in a neighborhood drug store.”

  “Where did the assault take place?”

  “On East Forty-ninth Street, at the turn into Beekman Place. One door from where I live. I’d walked home from CBS. It was ten in the evening.”

  “The police?”

  “I let them interpret it, when they came to question me.” A look flickered. “Assailant Unknown. A psychopathic sadist, a mugger. The police had a ready answer.”

  Now her eyes were a shade odd as they held Devereaux. Her voice had a strange quality, like a shrill child’s at the very limits of imagination. “I’m not to find Rocky Star, or even look for him. That is the meaning of the beatings. Old ghosts, Johnny; I’m not to stir them. Nor is Brett Carter to stir them. There is something deep in Rocky Star’s disappearance. Deep, and dark, and horrible! More than is known, or suspected; more than has ever been known. Rocky Star concerns me, as a missing husband, but I’m just a small figure, the smallest thread. This is my feeling…”

  The detective said, “Pull the thread, and the cloth unravels.”

  “Yes! I’ve come to understand that, Johnny. The irony of my situation, and the unimaginable peril. I married a man named Peter Black. But to find Peter Black, I must also find Rocky Star. The two names are the same man.” Her mouth quivered. “This simple thing I must establish, isn’t so simple. It’s complex, and tortured. It’s not only alias Peter Black, a missing husband and father. It’s The Tiger Man, a celebrated disappearance, with its whisperings of foul play and foul crimes. With its sordid secret and Shadow Men who beat you on darkened streets. It’s…” Her voice broke, and the tears Devereaux watched scalded him too.

  After a while, Devereaux said, “It does have its irony. Your situation, a small figure you represent in a Case that stands high with the great puzzles of the last decade.”

  She said, “I must know. It’s my life!”

  “When did you become aware that Rocky Star was the man you married as alias Peter Black?”

  She said surprisingly, “I knew it at once. He made no secret of it.” She anticipated Devereaux’s next question. “I accepted his explanation for the assumed name. I was in love; I imagined myself to be in love! A secret marriage, secret from the press, and the world. But for a little while only, I was told. There were problems, of a delicate, personal nature. But not my concern. I must not burden myself with them. I must place blind faith.”

  Devereaux said, “You entered the marriage contract, knowing the irregularity.”

  She said, “I was dazzled, I was delirious, I was young. A great champion and me: a car-hop in a uniform apron. I was flattered by the flirtation. I built a fantasy for myself. Clothes, and furs, and the moon. Rocky Star would furnish a penthouse on the moon.”

  Devereaux laughed, eager for this new vein. “Prince Charming with cauliflower ears.”

  She said, “I thought him beautiful. I was so grateful to him! I didn’t think to examine, or dissect, my beau. I didn’t pry into his mind, to look for ideas.” Her eyes on Devereaux were wise and candid. “At twenty, you’re something formless, Johnny. You have no idea of what the woman will be, will some day be.”

  Devereaux thought he understood it. “Rocky Star alias Peter Black was over your head then. You never dreamed you’d someday be over his head.”

  She nodded. “I never dreamed it for a minute. I was frantic, and seeking. I had no skills, or fine schooling, or opportunity. I found menial jobs, and lost them. I had inferiority feelings. I thought myself ugly. I had nightmares about my skin, my impossible nose. In my daydreams, I wanted to act, I was always the actress. I was nothing, less than nothing, and never too far from suicide. When Rocky came along, to single me out, to want me, he was God. I let him pick me up. I let him marry me, in his own way, on his own terms.”

  It was light-veined, purposely, as if by frivolity she could disown the young girl she described. But there were currents underneath, and Devereaux was swept up in them.

  “And so it went,” the detective said. “And then, the intervening years. But tell me, I’m curious…” Devereaux hesitated.

  “Yes?” she prompted.

  “Your looks, as I see you. That ugly duckling you described. Where did she go?”

  Nina laughed and said, “Wisdom obliterated her. I grew up, and my face was suddenly something I knew I could live with, manage with.” She touched the tip of her nose. “Here where it tilts. The ski jump, as my adolescent dates used to call it. I came to understand its difference from other noses. I came to be proud of it, proud of the difference, and show it off boldly.”

  Devereaux nodded to this, and Nina touched a hollow in her cheek. “These hollows, and the symmetry it gives the face.” She flashed a satirical look. “The mystery it suggests, and the intrigue. But the cheeks were grubby once; I was the fat-cheeked barmaid. I remodeled the face. I sculpted it into what you see. By diet, by starvation, by determination.” She smiled across to Devereaux. “Shall I go on and tell you how I redesigned my brow and hairline?”

  Devereaux smiled. “I can guess. But tell me how you took on all the maturity. And in five or so short years. Your style of talk, the language and polish. The high intelligence; I’ve been impressed with it all evening.”

  Her eyes thanked him. “You grow, or you wither. Five short years can be a lifetime, for the results you can get. Books, and classes, and museums. Lessons in diction, in phonetics, your own daily practice. If you’re desperate enough, Johnny. And a discriminating use of your time. Only people who can further you. Sharpen your ear, sharpen your wits. People with ideas, and good talk.”

  A silence fell, then Devereaux said, “Rocky Star alias Peter Black. If he turns up, alive and well, what will you do?”

  The answer was quick. “Divorce him.”

  “Just the legality of the marriage. That’s your one objective.”

  “Just the legitimacy of my son. So it can never be disputed. So my son can assume his father’s name. His father’s real name.”

  “How about the boy’s rights generally? The boy’s equity in property, money?”

  She knew the answer to that at once. “My son’s rights of course. His fath
er, and property—I don’t want my son deprived of anything.”

  Devereaux looked at her. It was a look of liking. She had qualities he admired; a sophistication and candor that beguiled him. His skepticism of before, as much as it was, had fallen. Devereaux the cop; she wanted only Devereaux the cop. But that was all right too. The problem was a fascinating challenge. The mysterious disappearance of Rocky Star, The Tiger Man. In a way, he had a stake in it too. Every cop had. Even an ex-cop.

  Devereaux asked, “The sportswriter, Brett Carter. Where is he hospitalized?”

  “The Le Grand,” she said, and her great heaving sigh was a live thing. Relief; she had won over Devereaux the cop.

  Devereaux smiled. “I’m your man. I didn’t think I would be, but I’m your man.”

  Now there was a glow radiating from her. Pride in Devereaux the cop, faith in his method, in his invincibility.

  The other Devereaux sat in his lonely corner, looking on.

  Part 2.

  The face was mummified, and the body lay rigid. The white hospital sheet lay limp as a shroud. There was no rise or flutter, as if the heart it covered had stopped. Standing beside, in an upside-down jar and ready for emergency use, was a plasma jug. At the head of the bed, but behind it, was an oxygen tank and its cone-shaped applicator. Overhead, like a futuristic mobile, was a container of glucose, for intravenous feeding of the patient.

  The name line on the hospital card clipped to the bed read: Brett Carter, 38.

  The man in the white doctor’s coat looked gravely at Devereaux. It was a Mourner’s look, as if the sorrows of the world lay heavily inside him.

  Devereaux turned and quit the room.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Part 1.

  The night was sparkling clear, and the moon low. His eyes were on the stars, and Devereaux had the sensation of telescopic vision. His stride quitting the hospital was first brisk, and then slow as he neared the corner. He was alone on the street, lost in vast spaces.

  This street in the East Sixties between Lexington and Park had none of the tumult of the City around. It held the Le Grand Hospital, a Consulate, the Ecole Française, and residences pressed narrowly into plots that were eighteen feet wide. The residences were mainly Stevens Red, thickly painted over the natural brick like a pastiche, and sedate brownstone. Some few were pretentious in their masonry, with scrollwork and sculpted figures across the facade, and vaulted cathedral windows. There were stone lions on some stoop-fronts, aged and hoary and amiable in mien, as if glad for the doldrums of this concrete jungle. These latter buildings were sandstoned to the glinting gray and washed look of mausoleums. Its ghosts were an era; the time of Rectors, the plumed hat and high button shoes, and a nouveau-riche with diamond-set teeth.

  The street and the detective were in attunement. The quiet was good, and soothing, like quick sedation in the first premonitory throb of a giant headache. He could meander, unhurried, and think. Think cautiously, in the first whining labors of a long unoiled machine. It had been two years of retirement now, a span of time away from the scheme of crime, and its schemers. His mind had lost its charge; that sharp, sharp-edged, instinctive and special set of responses that distinguished a veteran detective, first grade, from the run of people.

  He had reached the corner, to stare distractedly across the sidewalk to his parked Buick. The Buick, vintage 1949, was pointed south, to the midtown hub of Manhattan, to the noise and the rowdy blare of a City that had filled the pages of his young manhood and prime, a City that had keyed him to its reflexes, that had made him wise without wisdom.

  The blow when it came sent him crashing as if from a height. It came from behind, to strike the base of his skull. His eyes went blind, and his feet and hands were immediately dead. On the sidewalk, he was one with the cement. Impaled on it, and fusing into it too. There was no dream. He had no mind to dream.

  Part 2.

  The bare light-bulb hung from a long cord suspended from the ceiling. Vibrations from the street, the cross-town busses on Forty-second Street and on Sixth Avenue that bisected each other’s paths, shook the cord. The sway of the bulb made patterns that did an eerie dance on the walls and ceiling.

  The walls were gray-drab; the old paint was a harsh crust on the plaster. The room was a box; it was sparsely furnished. It had a steel cabinet with a convex look from the dents in it, a great desk with a missing drawer, an old leather heart-chair whose springs seemed to rise from the flooring. The walls sported an old show poster advertising Guy Gillette, and a chromo of a man in sideburns whose bony smile and general contentment suggested high governmental position in some earlier time.

  The insinuation of the room was one-dimensional. Stare hard at it, and it was a flat canvas with odd surface pinnings; a collage or dadaism, but of a somber and disquieting sort.

  There was a legend on the plate glass of the door, inverted from the inside of the room and to be read backwards. It read: Sam Solowey, Detective Agency.

  The shoeless man sat uncomfortably on the straight chair. But his eyes were fond, and they were given to the man who lay mathematically and exact on the leather heart-chair. This man was expressionless, his breathing tentative, like a convalescent still unsure of his pulse, loins, brain, and life-force. His head on the upper rest of the heart-chair was arched to form an “L” with his shoulders, keeping the base of his skull from settling against the chair. There were bandages and tape around the skull, white and immaculate and antiseptic. There was a seepage around the edges of the bandages and tape, bubbling like tiny beads of oil on water. More than an hour had passed since the assault on Devereaux, but the blood had not yet coagulated.

  Devereaux spoke in snatches of talk. Snatches, then long silences in which he appeared to drowse. It was a slow monologue; the facts and figments in the story of Nina Troy and The Tiger Man. Solowey made no comment on what he was hearing. He just listened, engrossed, his eyes on Johnny Devereaux in a nice radiation of warmth.

  A clock somewhere in the City chimed the midnight hour, and it was another vibration in the cardboard room. The building itself was a thing of cardboard, a fabrication of paper and glue and bits of wire that sat whimsically in the bosom of a towering futurism of iron, mortar, and steel. But three storeys high, an anachronism in a crossroads of fantastic realty and land costs, the building housed a check-cashing service, a gypsy tea room, a marriage broker, an unanointed distributor of ecclesiastical pamphlets, a tailor, a provider of wigs and chignons, and Sam Solowey’s solely owned and operated Investigating Service. The great unifying thread that wove this odd and amorphous galaxy into a group that could decently share the small elevator, the single washroom and the littered hallways, was the miraculously low rent.

  Long, long after, there was coffee. A portable burner that plugged into a wall socket, and a blackened kettle. Instant coffee with a cereal taste, a spoonful to the individual cup.

  Devereaux made a face. He was a connoisseur of coffee, jealous of this one taste if no other, and inclined to disgusted outbursts in restaurants.

  “The coffee tastes like rotgut, Solowey,” Devereaux said.

  Solowey shrugged amiably. Obese though he was, it was a glandular phenomenon and not a gourmand result. He had little zest for food, or taste. The filet mignon or the frankfurter found him equally disposed. Eat, cram fodder, and get it over with. Food was a mechanical need, the squirt of an oil can. And coffee was universally brackish, all brands and preparations, by virtue of its essence. Fetishists of the coffee bean, tasters and samplers and connoisseurs, were anathema to Solowey. He had his own stubborn notions about culture and the civilized human. And in this account, there was no acceptance of the lowly stomach as index or gauge. Mind, and heart—These were Solowey’s concern and yardstick.

  He watched Devereaux sip coffee and fill with torment. He broke into a chuckle when a nauseated and violent Devereaux spilled his coffee into a spittoon.

  “You’re back in the land of the living,” Solowey said. “The positive Dev
ereaux, who will never do as the Romans, or compromise his own dogma.”

  “The coffee stinks,” Devereaux said. “I’ve tasted better in hobo jungles.” He smiled slightly in a sudden thought. “But I get it. It’s a spoof. You’ve fed me that same poison before, for a laugh.”

  Solowey laughed outright. “It’s a brand I keep specially for Devereaux. For these rare and enchanted moments.”

  “The gag’s a tired one. Time you gave it up.”

  Solowey’s eyes twinkled. “A man who has a conviction about coffee. Coffee, when there is Spinoza! I am eternally incredulous. I must have the proposition demonstrated over and over again.”

  “The things that amuse some people,” Devereaux said. “Let’s get down to it now. I’ve given you the story, all there is.”

  Solowey nodded, and his brow creased seriously. “The assault on you. You are sure it connects with the case of this Nina Troy?”

  “What else could it be?”

  “Assault on the streets,” Solowey motioned a palm. “An everyday commonplace.”

  “I wasn’t robbed. A hundred dollars in cash and a gold watch; I woke up with it. Except for the beating, my person wasn’t molested.”

  “The blow then, for its own sake? In a great City there are barbarians…”

  Devereaux’s look rejected it. “Let’s not get psychiatric. We’ll theorize a whole textbook, but only jackass ourselves. I was struck down, then kicked in the head. Someone knew Nina Troy had been talking to me, soliciting my help. It was a warning to me. To butt out, not to interfere, tell Nina Troy to take her troubles elsewhere.”

  Devereaux got on his feet restlessly and then sat down to touch fingers tenderly to the base of his skull. “It will hurt for a month!” His look hardened, and an uneven row of upper teeth flashed in a characteristic expression. “Beatings are the style of this Case, from what I know so far. Sneak assaults by a specialist in mayhem. Brett Carter in Le Grand Hospital. And Nina Troy herself. She can’t show her neck or arms.”

  There was a silent moment. Devereaux’s stare waited on Solowey. The latter was deep in a meditative calm, his eyes half closed, the moon face curiously Oriental in this cast. He had this way of thinking, akin to trance, and it exasperated Devereaux. Devereaux’s nerves were close to his skin, his speech rapid and fretful and telegraphic, his thinking quick, perhaps too quick. The deliberateness and depth that was Solowey pushed him to the edge of temper.