The Hardboiled Mystery Megapack

by John Roeburt

  It was this line of men Devereaux was mainly watching. And soon, when Max Toller finished at the Dispatcher’s Window, and had climbed into the driver’s booth of an orange and black taxi-cab, the detective hurried over to the car.

  Devereaux got into the back of the cab, and the taxi-driver looked inquiringly over his shoulder. There was little reaction to Devereaux’s show of police credentials. Toller’s homely and not unpleasant face held the merest shadow of a smile, as if nothing lay so heavily inside that he must start or fume before the unexpected. He was lean, of medium size, perhaps thirty, long in the face with a small, square chin. His skin was pale, even yellow, and very pockmarked.

  Devereaux said, “Drive around, while I talk. All about Rocky Star, and you. When I’m through, you’ll have your turn to talk.” Now there was a boding note. “You can be free of me early, Toller. You can also be stuck with me, really stuck with me.”

  The men exchanged looks, each estimating the other, and Devereaux was struck by Toller’s eyes. The iris was brown, and the pupil was yellow. A cat-yellow that shone like night-eyes.

  Part 2.

  The rain had stopped and the air felt washed, and street lamps threw a triangular beam on the satin walks.

  The taxi-cab crept past rows of buildings and shuttered stores in the slow, tortured roll of a mourner’s car in the long processional behind a hearse.

  There was a sharp crackle of splintering wood as the taxi-cab ran over a peddler’s empty crate in its path. And soon again, before another block, the small explosion of a glass bottle under the wheels. Toller was guiding the taxi-cab as if blind to the road, with eyes only for the buildings and the stores, and his own conjurations.

  At house number 222, the taxi-cab crept even more slowly, and Devereaux looked at the tenement in a reminiscence of his own. The Starzianis, Onofrio and Aldo. The old man in the chromium wheelchair, recreating Notre Dame de Louvre with matchsticks…the young man on his throne of a gold-painted chair…

  The first story fire-escape was festooned with patriotic bunting centered around a blown-up photograph of a youth in military dress. A legend over the face read: Welcome Home, Peter.

  Toller stopped the taxi-cab abreast of a city pier that was just the turn of one corner from house number 222.

  The driver pointed to an inky void. “We used to dive off that dock every July and August, me and Rocco. Rocco was twelve when he made it across to Brooklyn doing the crawl. He didn’t go in for boxing, he could have been a champ swimmer.” There seemed to be pride in Toller’s tone. And even more than pride, love, for Rocco Starziani.

  Toller said, “All the garbage in the river, and the dead rats, and the floating condoms full of clap and the syph. Rocco never got sick once. But me, I got dysentery twice, and boils on my behind every summer.”

  Devereaux said nothing. It was two hours since they had left the midtown garage. The sentimental tour, and the sentiment, was Toller’s own design. The detective had gone along with it, sensitive to the idiosyncrasies of the man, letting Toller employ his own mode of reply and revelation. Kids on the old block; the memory of fun, and malice; the first long trousers, and the commemorative beer in Crowley’s Tavern; the Saturday dance in the Palermo Club, under a painted moon and twinkling electric stars set into the ceiling, and after that a visit to the yardhouse flat of Olga the Nympho who was married to a Chinee. Toller had rambled through a lifebook, in scrambled chronology. But with vivid re-creation.

  Toller said, “And that stuff you heard from the kid brother Aldo. Swallow it, you’re a dope. Aldo had whams in his head, even way back as a kid. He ran around in his old lady’s brassiere, until Rocco beat it off him. He’d make up stories about Rocco, to make Rocco look like a bum… Rocco wasn’t an angel, mind you. He was tough, and he swaggered. But if he didn’t, he’d be dead. It was that kind of a neighborhood. And sure he never gave his own people a dime. Or a hand-out when he made the grade. But it wasn’t because Rocco was tight with a buck. He passed it around like he was Santa Claus and every day was Christmas. Ask me! Or check back on his big fights, mister. Every other fight was Benefit Night. Cerebral Palsy, Milk for Underprivileged Kids, Polio… The Tiger Man never turned down a Cause. He only drew the line where his folks were concerned…and I can’t shed any light there as to why. I ever brought it up, Rocco slapped me down quick.”

  Devereaux repressed a mounting impatience. So far, no consequence, nothing that remarked on the overriding question: the end of The Tiger Man. How, who, and why? So far, only nostalgia…the loquacious and misty Toller resurrecting yesterday, and refining it, to build a myth for Rocco Starziani. For Rocky Star, The Tiger Man. This, and the detective’s growing belief that for all his patent clarity, and the nice organization of memory and emotion, yet Toller was not a rational man. Not a rational man, and more than a little unbalanced in his own unique way. Even a lunatic perhaps, simulating sanity, the manners and tone of the sane. And that this night revisitation, to the corners and haunts of a youthful time, was neither tonic nor the food of soul and spirit, but the deeper substance of Toller’s disorder, the mark of his obsessional personality. The night had so far been an interlude with the macabre and the eerie, a journey into Shadowland with a supreme necromancer. Toller was a ghoul searching for carrion in a World of the Dead.

  Toller lighted a cigarette, to puff it and expel smoke in snorting blasts. As if he was now hardening himself for graver areas of talk, where cunning must do for candor. A while later, he flipped the butt of his cigarette into the void that bulked beyond the taxi-cab. He said unexpectedly, in the tired sigh of a man who had ground himself into utter exhaustion. “I’ve just about told you all I know to tell, mister.”

  Devereaux fought down his own weariness. The two-hour junket and jabber had tired him too. He had hoped for more than the barren result to now. In this hope, Devereaux’s complaisance; his motive in permitting Toller to run unreined with the bit in his teeth. Let him unravel himself…and perhaps end caught in his own snarl.

  Devereaux rallied himself to the skirmish. He had only delayed his role of inquisitor. The detective said, “My ears are bent, but I haven’t learned a thing. Except that you and Rocco were once the East Side versions of Penrod and Sam…and that the kid brother Aldo might have told me a few whoppers about his brother. All colorful stuff, but I’m not doing research for a novel. I’m investigating the disappearance of Rocky Star. I’m building a case in proof of his murder. So that I can finally nab the murderer and recover the corpus delicti. Whichever comes first, the murderer and then the body, or vice versa, but the end accomplishment of both.”

  Toller said, “Rocco was already a contender for the title, when he set me up as his trainer. I was pushing a hack when he whistled me off the street. A C-note a week, and all I could eat and drink. For old time’s sake, because we buddied as kids.”

  Devereaux said, “You’re still picking at the edges, Toller!”

  Toller said, “I wasn’t inside Rocco any more, like I was in times on the old block. And I didn’t figure to be, or want to be. Rocco was big time, and I was a mug on his payroll. The closest I got to him was six weeks before a fight. Rubdowns, and roadwork, and a game of checkers. I got him into shape, I relaxed him. Outside of that, Rocco had his own life, and I respected my limits. A fight was over, I didn’t see him for a half year at a time.”

  The taxi-driver looked scowlingly at the detective. “What else do you want me to tell you!”

  Devereaux said, “About Hobie Grimes.”

  “Hobie managed Rocco. Hobie bossed me around. I was green, a hackie learning how to be a fight trainer, and Hobie never took his thumb off me. I never chummed with Hobie, any more than I did with Rocco. Hobie was a big wheel, I wasn’t in his class.” A smile, faintly perceptible in the gloom, touched Toller’s mouth. “Hobie liked them bright, up there with Professor Einstein, and he had me tabbed as a stupe. Hobie had a degree from a mail order college, and he went around slapping people with the diploma. A skull se
ssion’d come up, and Hobie would hand me the comic strips and tell me to go find myself a corner somewhere.”

  Devereaux said, “About Damon Marco.”

  Toller’s answer was slow in coming. He said, “Other than the rumors that went around…that Marco was into Rocco for a piece, I never knew anything about it. I don’t now know anything about it.” Toller paused, then elaborated a little, as if a yarn must have substance for the embroidery alone. “Marco was around the training camp now and then, watching Rocco work out. He’d come for the day, with turkey sandwiches and a thermos jug of coffee, because he wouldn’t trust food his wife hadn’t personally prepared. But I never thought Marco’s coming ever meant anything…not the way the mobs follow the fights.”

  Devereaux said acidly, “I told you Marco did have a big piece of Rocky Star.”

  Toller said indifferently, “Yeah, you told me. But it’s brand new to me, mister. It’s something I know only as of tonight. And the rest of it—what you said before about The Flipper—his telling you the heat was on for Rocco, for trying to dump his contract with Marco…”

  Devereaux interjected sternly, “When Rocky welshed on the hundred thousand dollars he’d agreed to pay Marco!”

  “Yeah, that. All over my head, mister. I repeat, it’s something I know only as of tonight, on your say-so. I had a job with Rocky Star, and I had my own crowd to socialize with. I didn’t know Rocky’s troubles, and Rocky never told me anything.”

  Devereaux said, “You do fancy footwork for only an ex-trainer.”

  “I can’t give you answers I simply do not have.”

  Devereaux said, “What happened to Rocky?”

  Toller said, “I’ve been asking the same question, for longer than you, mister. What happened to Rocky, where did he go?”

  Devereaux said, “Who murdered him?”

  Toller said, “I worry about that too. Was Rocky knocked off? I’m gray from worrying about it.” Devereaux said, “Where is Hobie Grimes now?”

  “Around, no?”

  “No. He’s vanished.”

  “Now there’s a note!” The mystification in Toller seemed almost genuine.

  Devereaux said, “That Shrine up on the Drive. Talk about that.”

  “You mean Rocky’s old apartment? I keep it up, so what? I began doing it figuring Rocky’d come back to it. That he’d thank me for keeping it up.”

  “You’ve been paying the rent for it for five years. Twenty-four hundred a year times five. Twelve thousand dollars!”

  “Yeah, it has come to a lot of dough.”

  “Out of a taxi-driver’s wages!”

  “I had savings. The years training Rocky, I kept socking it away. Any time you want to see my bankbooks…” Toller paused, then repeated the figure as if awed by it. “Twelve thousand…imagine that! You do something month by month, you have no idea how it adds up. But I did it for a friend…who I figured took off to work something out for himself. I’m a guy like that, mister. I’m for somebody, I’m for him.”

  Devereaux said coldly and critically, “A friend you figured who took off… And what did you figure when a month became a year, and a year two, and five?”

  Toller seemed to be formulating a reply. “I said I figured Rocky was off working something out for himself. The true fact is, I was sure of it at first. Rocky was a kid like that, back on the block. He’d be high, up on a cloud, real happy and getting his kicks. Then he’d be low, down in the dumps, hating himself and nasty to his friends. When he was like that for a while, he’d cop a fly. Go away without saying where or good-by. Sometimes he’d come back home on his own, and other times the authorities found him. His old man’d have to go across the country to fetch him back. And when he was back, he was okay again. Back up on that cloud, like he’d settled something for himself. Until the next time, anyhow.”

  Toller chuckled with a reminiscence. “He once made it clear to Mexico. He was fourteen, but built like eighteen. He changed his name to Spanish and got lost with a couple of hundred peons working in a fruit orchard. That time Rocky was gone a year. And he could have made it longer, if he hadn’t got himself arrested for slugging somebody.”

  Devereaux said, “The Shrine up on the Drive. I insist on the word Shrine, because it fits. It’s a tabernacle, where you come to worship. Your Devotions once a week. You were clocked in and out for years by the police. You’re there like you’re down here tonight. To commune with the dead. Now talk about that!”

  Toller said resentfully, “Go take a flying jump, mister.”

  Devereaux said, “Those spells you described… Rocky high, and Rocky low. When acute, it’s sometimes called paranoia. An old Bellevue report on you strongly suggests the same.”

  Toller said, “Have yourself a ball, mister. I don’t care.”

  Devereaux said, “All night you’ve talked about Rocky Star in the past tense. Rocky was, and so forth, as if he were dead and you knew it. You’ve been mourning his passing all night.”

  Toller said nothing. But his breathing now was sharp, open-mouthed and labored, as if he were having some involuntary physiological spasms.

  The detective continued, “Rocky is dead, and you know it. You’ll have to convince me otherwise! Now I’m asking you how did Rocky die, in what manner, and whom are you protecting by keeping your mouth shut?”

  There was no reply to this. Now Devereaux said experimentally, “Was it Marco?—A reprisal murder of Rocky Star? And by silence, you’re protecting yourself first and fundamentally. Run afoul of Marco and his crowd, and you might not survive it. Is that your fear, Toller?”

  Toller said, “The way you cops love to make with theories.” He was suddenly, at once, at the edge of temper. His eyes, the cat-yellow pupils, were glaring at Devereaux across the shadowed cab. “You grab a guy like you owned his time. You don’t worry, it’s not your livelihood. The right answers bore you, so you try putting words in his mouth. You’re there with the insults, because you’ve got a badge and you’ve got a gun…”

  The cat-yellow pupils grew rounder in the shadows, and then suddenly they were lost. Toller was out of the cab in a whirling motion.

  “The hack’s all yours, mister. Break your balls and see how tough a livelihood can be!” The shout re-echoed along the docks, as if repeated over and over by Toller in his flight.

  When Devereaux got out of the taxi, Toller was lost in the inky void, impossible to find.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The music started up with a clang, clang of bells. The horses began to move, slowly and then faster, until their ice-cream colors were threads on a huge, gyrating bobbin. There were blowing mists without rain, and a wetness glistened on the green-painted benches.

  The little man in neat dress who had come up to the bench placed a handkerchief across the slats before seating himself. His soft tone seemed efforted; the rage it repressed was in his eyes.

  “Why do I have to meet you in a public park?”

  “Turnabout,” Devereaux said humorlessly. “On my estate this time.” He motioned across the walk. “This carousel ride’s on me. Be my guest.”

  Marco said, “I thought you had sense. But you’re a wild man. Where have you got The Flipper?”

  Devereaux said, “He’s in prison hospital. Booked for possession of drugs.”

  Marco said, “Kidnap, across state lines. You violated federal law. You’re not a cop in Jersey; you’re not a government man. The Flipper has civil rights like everybody. I’ve been talking to a lawyer.”

  The detective said, “Nice concern for The Flipper. But in jail, he’s safe from you.” He saw the swift, passing apprehension in Marco. “He tried to die for you, Marco. But I didn’t let him. Now you’ve got to kill him.”

  Marco said, “I don’t like the way you talk to me.”

  Devereaux said, “I know. The shocking disrespect. A tin-badge like me. You who sit at banquet tables with gold badges.”

  Devereaux’s eyes held Marco. “The Flipper talked about you. Very private stu
ff. Like he lived with an ear to the keyhole.”

  Marco said, “He made it all up. You were on top of him; The Flipper could always tell a good story.”

  The detective said satirically, “You’re getting away from your Blackstone. You could have said duress, the ravings of a drug-eater being tortured by a cop.”

  Marco said, “Thanks for the advice.”

  Devereaux said, “You lied to me about Rocky Star.”

  Marco said, “Don’t give me the slow needle. You’ve got something to say, say it. Be a man. Hit me with all you’ve got.”

  The detective said, “That one hundred thousand dollars, payable to you so The Tiger Man could be free of your contract. Rocky never agreed to the sum. You imposed the sum on him. One hundred thousand dollars or else.”

  “That’s what The Flipper told you.”

  “You deny it?”

  Marco thought briefly. “All right, I admit it. Except for the ‘or else.’ Those are your words, Devereaux.” There was venom in the tone now. “You like to cut me down. Make me out only a goon, make me small.”

  Devereaux said, “A dirty little dealer in narcotics and murder. Thirty-seven corpses fertilizing your flowerbeds. But pardon the moral tone.”

  Marco said, “I’ll remember that.”

  Devereaux said, “Rocky defied you. No further tribute…you’d bled him enough. So you set your dogs on him.”

  A small pause fell, then Devereaux said, “I ordered you here. On the theory that if you endured the humiliation, it was a case of wisdom before pride. That you’d guessed what I’d accomplished with The Flipper. That you came to convince me further that you did not murder, or cause the murder of Rocky Star. To convince me, and ward off the headlines you dread.”

  Devereaux studied the gangster in a long, close scrutiny, and then said very quietly, “Big headlines, Marco. I’ll see to it with all my resource. Marco and murder. Like this was 1930 again, and you’d never taken a diction lesson or built that high stone wall. Headlines dripping blood, in your country club, in Camden for your rhumba teacher to read, and on the college campuses.”