Dead Sure

by Herbert Brean

  “Congratulations.” He appreciated her excitement. But he hadn’t liked seeing her dance like that, or the artificial sweetness she seemed to be showing everyone. And she’d been talking to Sandalwood.

  “There are girls here who’ve been in the business over three years,” Gee Gee went on. “And I’m just getting started. But Max—well, Max!”

  A man stood over their table, short and purple-suited and dominant. Ryan recognized him from the day in court.

  “You were sensational, doll,” he said. “Sensational.” Pudgy fingers with big rings squeezed her shoulder. “Some people been saying when Lili leaves Saturday night you oughtta replace her.” Gee Gee looked up hopefully. He saw the look. “I’m thinking about it.”

  “Thanks, Max.”

  “Have your friend stay for the party.” Max walked away.

  “Thanks, Max,” she called after him.

  “You forgot to tell him he is sweet.”

  “Now, lover, don’t act that way. This might be my chance. Max isn’t so bad.”

  “What was it you wanted to tell me?”

  But waiters began moving the tables around, including theirs, to make one long table.

  Apparently everyone had read about Ryan. When Gee Gee introduced him they were very nice, with that combination of friendliness and respect for even a minor public figure that characterizes the stage. They sat at the long table and drank toasts to Max and ate turkey slices and listened to the music. It wasn’t the raucous thumping of before; the pianist’s fingers had acquired a melancholy delicacy and the trumpet a beautifully timed sadness. Gee Gee raised her face to the horn’s golden bell, listening, chin and neck white in the smoky light, and the trumpet player saw her and played straight to her while her red nails tapped rhythm on the tablecloth. The band rambled slowly through “Confessin’,” yearned into’ “After I Say I’m Sorry,” and mourned with “When Your Lover Has Gone.” Ryan found his arm around Gee Gee’s shoulders.

  After a time she sighed and nestled. “What’s with you, baby?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Sure? Not mad?” She was anxious about it.

  “Sure,” said Ryan. “Not mad.” It was almost true. Then Sandalwood’s taunting face, the Harwyn’s canopy, the white dress held before her at the end of the dance, swam through his mind, and it was a lie.

  Her glass was empty and she sipped contentedly from his, which he had not touched. She had to tell him about what Sandalwood had said, but she didn’t want to right now; this night was too perfect to spoil. He had come to the party, after all. Everyone had told her how well her act had gone. And she knew it had; she had felt the crowd’s electric reaction.

  “Baby.” She had never called him that before. “You don’t like Harry Derby’s sister better’n me, do you?” It was a rhetorical question, asked in drowsy confidence that the answer would be the right one.

  Behind them the unmuted trumpet took up “Dream,” huskily, sweetly.

  But raw gasoline had been poured on smoldering coals.

  “What else,” Ryan demanded, taking his arm away, “did Sandalwood mention today?”

  He had never seen her eyes so round. “Why, Neill. Don’t get the idea—”

  “I’ve got the idea. Incidentally, Rosemary Derby is a very decent sort of girl. But what did Sandalwood say about her—or me? Today. At the Harwyn Club.”

  That hit. “How—how did you know that?”

  “I’m a cop, you know,” said Ryan bitterly. “Just a cop.”

  She was silent a second. Then, quietly, “Neill? That night you and Ed Jablonski arrested Derby—what really went on?”

  “What do you mean?” Ryan demanded truculently. But it alarmed him.

  “Because whatever it was, Jack Sandalwood knows about it. And he’s going to publish it in his series. He said so. What happened, Neill? Is Derby’s sister in it?”

  Ryan made a snorting sound. “What’d he tell you?” he asked thickly.

  “He didn’t tell me anything—and I didn’t tell him anything. Except that I knew, whatever it was, that you were not to blame, and that the night we met that damned Jablonski had boasted of fixing Derby and all that.”

  Oh, God! He could hear it all, just as though he had been there. He knew how Sandalwood had got it out of her, and what he was figuring on, and why he had gone up the river. It was very, very late and the night had grown old and the fatigue was back. And he was beaten.

  After many highballs the man sitting across from them had arranged matches in a geometrical pattern on the tablecloth. Now he lit the first match and waited for the next one to ignite. So did Ryan. And there was Sandalwood, all the time. Always ahead of him.

  “What does it mean, Neill?”

  “Mean? To whom?”

  “To you—and me. To us.”

  “Us,” Ryan repeated. “You’re not mixed up in it.”

  She did not answer. The man across the way got his chain of matches burning. They made successive brown spots on the tablecloth.

  Ryan reached some obscure conclusion. She had fixed him up, too. The cute kid in the big fur coat. “The hell with it,” he said.

  It was hardly lucid but she knew what she meant. And even before he could enlarge on it, she answered understanding.

  “Sure. The hell with it. You know what, Neill? The night that we met—well, I’ve been thinking. That night, I got to looking at Inez when she was crying about that slob of a partner of yours. And I remember later, when you tried to kiss me, I thought, ‘What’s with hanging in clubs?’ I thought to myself, ‘You fool around joints like this’”—she waved—“‘where do you wind up?’ And I believed it. But suppose I go along with you, pal?”

  The s’s were coming out slurred and the “pal” was too loud. Ryan, who had been studiously refusing drinks, realized that Gee Gee had had several. He had never seen her like that.

  “Then where do I wind up?” she asked. “With some guy who’s never around when you want him, and gets jammed up in some jerky way and won’t talk about it, even when you try to help him and everyone else will be reading about it in the paper in a few days. And two-times you with some gangster’s sister, and…”

  “Sure,” said Ryan. It would still take Sandalwood a few days to get the story together and print it. So if he had any chance left at all, he’d better get going. That meant getting some sleep, not the kind that was a luxury or comfort, but the raw commodity that kept you going and thinking straight, and alive. Fit for duty was the departmental expression.

  Why had he ever thought she was for him?

  “Okay,” he said. “I never could have taken you to fancy joints like the Harwyn Club. If we’d hooked up, you’d have wound up in Queens, buying groceries at Bohacks and having a baby. Two or three, after a while. No strips. No daiquiris on the ice, or frozen or whatever you call them. No Max.” He looked at her. “No Max. And I’ll say this. I don’t go for dames that let every slob who hires them get cozy—”

  The chain of matches had burned out on the tablecloth. The man who had lit it, finding their conversation more interesting, was listening attentively. The pianist drifted into “Avalon.”

  “Go to hell,” said Gee Gee a little hoarsely. “You heard me, buster. You go to hell. No one talks to me like that. I’ll work for Max. I’ll go to the Harwyn Club if I please. And I’ll tell any spying, sneaky son of a bitch cop who thinks he’s going to tell me—” She flung her glass’s contents, backhand, in his direction.

  Ryan jumped up to avoid its ice cubes.

  But being up, there was no reason to sit down. “I was going to take you home,” he said. “I guess I needn’t have bothered. Max’ll be glad to.” There was another full glass near Gee Gee.

  The man across was listening so intently that when she picked it up and threw it wildly he did not react quickly enough to dodge this second sh
ower of ice cubes.

  Ryan got his hat and stalked out. There was a cab stopped at the Sixth Avenue corner and he got in it.

  That ended that.

  CHAPTER 25

  You Get to Waiting for It

  There were gaudy placards on the newsstand where he bought his morning paper a few hours later. They announced the beginning of “Prosecution of the Innocents,” a new series by Jack Sandalwood. Ryan apprehensively read the first article over toast and coffee in Grand Central waiting for the Ossining train. In it Sandalwood referred to half a dozen historic miscarriages of justice and to several familiar recent ones, and explained his purpose: to reveal how the courts and the law are less than completely omniscient and just. The name of Harry Derby did not appear. But, Sandalwood concluded, the series would also include some new, unsuspected cases of gross injustice that would stun the reader.

  Having hardly touched the toast, Ryan left a tip, paid his check and walked toward the train gate. As he did he felt his burden sag his shoulders and bend his head. If he felt that way now, how would it be this afternoon? And tonight? And tomorrow? Tonight and the possibility it offered seemed remote and hopeless. But Sandalwood was near and overpowering and inescapable. Sandalwood knew all, or certainly most of what he needed to know.

  Presently the sun glittered like strewn diamonds on the Hudson, and the landscape that rolled past the train window looked newly raked and tidied. But to Ryan the day was at midnight.

  Since Ryan was an official visitor ostensibly on police business, he was to see Derby in one of the second floor attorney’s rooms in the death house. In the center of the room was a table with a pad of white paper and some chairs. On the sterile walls were framed etchings. Ryan heard a voice say, “In here!” and Derby came in. The guard remained just outside the door.

  Derby looked even leaner, and his face and hands were pale. Yet he also looked healthy and well-knit, and the gray denim shirt and pants were almost dapper. He stared at Ryan a moment, then slouched in one of the chairs. He clasped his hands before him. He did not say anything.

  Ryan waited. When there was no sound in the room or outside, he spoke very softly. “I’m not here on police business. This is personal. We framed you a while back. Now I’m going to spring you. I thought you ought to know.”

  Derby watched his own hands twist.

  “You heard me?”

  The breath went out of Derby’s lungs, but Derby did not look up or speak up.

  “Ask your sister. Rosemary.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she knows all about it.”

  “I mean, why are you doing it?”

  “Because you’re innocent, for God’s sake. I won’t let an innocent man go to the chair.”

  Derby looked up, wary but interested. “How do you know I’m innocent?”

  “I know where you were at the time of the crime.”

  “Like hell you do.”

  “Think I don’t?”

  “I know you don’t.”

  “All right. I’ll tell you. And if I’m right, you’ll tell me.”

  “I’ll tell you nothing.”

  “Your eyes will.” He lit a cigarette. “On the day and at the time Mrs. Connors was murdered you were cracking a drugstore down in the Thirties near First Avenue. You needed dough. You had hoped to buy into a gum-machine business; maybe you thought you’d get part of it that way. You went into this joint, sent the old guy who runs it into the back, then you grabbed what was in the cash register. You ran out, and you made it—easy.”

  Derby’s lynx eyes were still trained on his hands. “Where’d you get all this?”

  “What’s it matter, if it’s wrong?”

  Derby said nothing.

  “But it’s not wrong. Because you left a thumb print on the drawer. And of all the people in the department I’m the only one who could recognize that print if he saw it. I saw it.”

  Derby was silent.

  Ryan said, “Look, Derby. I didn’t come up here for a joyride. I came to tell you I realize now what happened.”

  Derby’s glance ranged nervously over the floor’s waxed linoleum. Ryan knew what he was thinking: this was a trick. Derby could not readily interpret something like this in any other way. He said, “And the other reason I came was to find out if you could give me any leads on someone who might look like you, or wear a checked jacket, or might have been operating in that neighborhood.” Ryan took the last drag on his cigarette and snuffed it out against his shoe sole. “I don’t have all day. Let’s go.”

  “What the hell is this?” said Derby. “First the reporter. And now you.”

  “What reporter?”

  “Some mutt named Sandalwood,” said Derby, and Ryan’s empty stomach spasmed. “He was up here late yesterday. What goes on?”

  How much did he know now? “What did you tell him?”

  Derby’s lips twisted their habitual contempt. “I didn’t tell him nothing. I told him to come back later, I’d think over his proposition.”

  “What was that?”

  Derby looked at Ryan with cold insolence. “I’ll tell you one thing, copper,” he said. “That guy knows something. How much, I don’t know. But he’s not shooting in the dark. Somebody filled him in. He talked about getting me out. Everybody’s going to get me out. You—him—even the damn union.”

  “What does the union say?”

  “They had some jerk up here last week. And I got a letter. Everyone says, ‘Don’t worry, Derby—you’ll never burn. We’re workin’ on new evidence.’ Not that I believe the slobs.” Derby’s laugh was unnatural.

  Ryan said, “Why do you think I’m here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll tell you. I want to get any lead I can as to who killed the old lady. And one of the suspects is a guy named Big Mackie. You know him—the guy who runs the boxing joint.”

  Again Derby looked at his hands. Then he looked up. “Let me tell you something. I been living with this a long time. Ever since that verdict come in, sure. But longer than that. You know me, cop, and I know you. Maybe every now and then I’ve did something could get me in real trouble. Maybe once or twice it did. Maybe sometimes I was lucky.” For a second he glanced at the wall’s etchings.

  “But after a while you get to waiting for it. And when it happens, you’re almost—well, relieved or something. You know what I mean? So don’t get too friggin’ gay. I ain’t too unhappy.” Derby’s voice had raised momentarily to normal volume.

  The guard at the door looked in. “Everything okay?”

  “Everything’s okay,” Ryan said. Then, “Tell me something, Harry. Why’d you take the rap? Even though you didn’t know about the fingerprint, you knew there was a chance that the old guy who runs the drugstore could identify you.”

  Derby laughed. “Gimme a cigarette. And next time bring a carton. You crazy or something? Look at my record. I’m three times gone. If I got tagged for that drugstore thing, I go for life. What difference does it make when you die, if you’re gonna die in prison? You think I want thirty years in this can? Besides, that Farragut is pretty good, you know. They’re still workin’ on it for me.”

  They’ve sold you down the river and you don’t know it. You’ll still be expecting a miracle when they shave your head. “Yeah. Sure,” said Ryan.

  “Anyway, I ain’t as dumb as I look. You think I believe this hero play you’re making?”

  “What are you driving at?”

  “You think I didn’t read the papers? Think I don’t know where framing me got you? Why would you kick all that in the face?”

  “Look, Derby, before I’ll let you go to the chair I’ll tell everything that happened the night we pinched you.”

  The Adam’s apple in Derby’s throat rolled as he laughed.

  “You think they’d believe you? You t
hink they’d let you talk about that? When they got Derby all buttoned up and another murder written off? You meathead!”

  Hunger and weariness and most of all defeat began again. Why had he bothered? Why had he started it?

  The guard put his head in the door. “About finished?” he asked.

  “Big Mackie, for the love of God!” said Derby contemptuously. “How’s that screwball mixed up in it? He couldn’t hurt anyone but dames.”

  “Dames?”

  “He used to collect pictures of broads being whipped.”

  “Okay,” said the guard, coming in.

  “Gimme your cigarettes, if you want to really do something,” said Derby.

  CHAPTER 26

  Steam

  That night Ryan and Lambert, among others, were loaned to a Bronx precinct that was anticipating a triangular war between three teen-age gangs. Nothing happened and so after driving and walking unfamiliar streets until one a.m. they were able to return to Fifty-first Street and check in. There was a message for Ryan in Sergeant Weiner’s legible scrawl: “Ken called and said your boy is back. Ken is at home.”

  In the cab that he took simply to save energy Ryan tried to relax. He could not. He kept thinking that luck never lasted forever. They’d been lucky taking Derby. He’d had luck with the Puerto Rican.

  And now?

  When Rosemary let him in she smiled cheerfully, then her face grew anxious again. Ken sat at the dining-room table, a gin rummy game before him. At sight of Ryan, he swept the cards away. “Let’s go.”

  “Not so fast. What do you know for sure?”

  “He got back around seven. I saw him drive up in a cab. I was in the beanery across the street, drinking my fourth coffee.” He grinned. “I’d been there since I got through work.”

  “And then?”

  “He went out around eight for an hour or so. Then he came back. That’s when I called the precinct.”