He went close to Ragtime with his own gun making a bulge in his pocket. Ragtime drew a gun from beneath his left armpit and Donahue, placing it on the desk, told him: “There’s a Sullivan law in this state. Or,” he mocked, “have you got a license?”
“Cripes, what are you pickin’ on me for?”
Donahue said nothing for a long moment. He sat on the edge of the desk, folded his arms and studied Ragtime’s face with keen disapproval.
Presently he said: “Well, what do you want?”
Ragtime moved forward to the edge of the chair, rubbed his hands on his knees, stared mournfully at the mouse-colored carpet. “I been in stir for fifteen—”
“I don’t want your history. What did you come here for?”
Ragtime made a hopeless gesture. “I been readin’ the papers. About Cherry—my wife—bein’ bumped off by some heels and about you bein’ her friend. See?—I been readin’ the papers.”
“So what?”
“So—so—well, hell, I been thinkin’ about my kid. About Helen. I been wonderin’ how she is and if I can do anything for her. I been thinkin’ maybe—”
Donahue’s voice was wooden, like his face: “You couldn’t do a thing for her.”
“Where—where is she?”
“I don’t know.”
Ragtime looked up. “Huhn?”
“I said I don’t know. And if I did know, you’re the last guy in the world I’d tell!”
Ragtime jumped up, made a supplicating gesture, his knees bent. “You wouldn’t tell me—her father?”
Donahue straightened from the desk, put his hands in his pockets and took three slow, inimical paces until he stood over Ragtime. “Listen, punk. I know all about you. I took the trouble to look up Cherry’s history and in doing that I naturally came across yours. You bailed out on her when she was having her kid and the next time she heard of you was when you landed in stir for a manslaughter rap two years later. She’d washed her hands of you before that. She had to make her way. You started her on the downgrade. Now get out.”
The self-pity left Ragtime’s face like a cinema black-out. He shrank back several steps, screwing up his hands. He croaked: “I guess I got a right to see my kid!”
“You mean,” Donahue said, “that you think you’ve got a right to the dough Cherry left her.”
Ragtime’s eyes popped. “I never even thought o’ that! It’s my own flesh and blood I’m thinkin’ of. She’s got a right to a father’s protection—”
“The flesh and blood you ditched before she was born.” Donahue took a stride and his voice hardened, his long teeth gleamed. “I told you I don’t know where she is. I wish I knew. And I’m telling you this, grifter: if you find her first I’ll frame you, I don’t care how—I’ll frame you so that you’ll go back to stir for the rest of your life. She doesn’t know you exist. She doesn’t know anything about you. Get that. And get this!” His hand shot up and gripped Ragtime by the throat. “It’s going to stay that way. You hear, punk!”
Ragtime babbled. “I get you! I get you! You’d like that dough for yourself, huhn? You’ve got your own eye on her—”
“I’ve got plenty of women without taking ’em in their teens—and when I go in for that kind of stuff, sweetheart, my intentions are never honorable. But I like the kid. I’d like to see her get a break. Scram!”
His arm straightened violently and Ragtime, with a shocked grimace, traveled the length of the room and stopped hard against the wall. He pawed at his throat, made a few gasping sounds, then lurched toward the door.
“Wait,” Donahue said.
He scooped up the gun on the desk, walked across the room and held it out, barrel first. Ragtime clutched it and stuffed it beneath his armpit.
Donahue said: “Try using it on me in a dark place some night and see where it gets you.”
Chapter II
Asa Hinkle, the Agency head, was nibbling at potato chips and washing them down with an Old Fashion when Donahue, lean and a paler brown than he used to be, came into the small, discreet bar at Milio’s. Hinkle was the direct antithesis of Donahue—being older, fat in a solid way, and smoothly pontifical behind delicately rimmed pince nez. Paul, behind the bar, was a dark cameo aptly set in the black marble, mahogany and chromium of the bar.
“Oh,” said Hinkle, quietly, and dabbed at his lips with fresh linen. “I’m caught, eh?” He grinned, winked. Donahue said: “Getting better taste in your liquor, huhn?”
“I—er—heard the food was good here.”
“I remember—I told you…. Whiskey-sour, Paul—not too sweet.”
He leaned with his elbows on the bar, massaged his palms slowly together and stared at nothing, absorbed with himself.
Hinkle said, offhand: “Penny for your thoughts.”
“Piker.”
On the floor above, where the restaurant was, a string quartet was worrying through “Barcarolle.” It was dinnertime and afterwards. Later, the strings would be put away and there would be brass and reeds and drums getting hot. The place had a surface elegance, in the best Upper East Side, New York, taste. Park Avenue was only a stone’s throw away and once this house had been tenanted by an ambassador.
“That girl?” Hinkle tried, carefully—and then looked innocently at a potato chip.
Donahue said: “Ragtime Bliss showed up—sure enough.”
“I knew he would.” Donahue stared hard at his hands. “If I know my heels, he’s way down—way down.”
“What did he want?”
“What do you suppose?”
Hinkle said: “H-m-m,” reflectively and then looked sidewise at Donahue. “The girl, eh?”
“His daughter.”
“You treated him nicely, I suppose.”
“Can you imagine,” Donahue said, “that fat-head spinning me a hearts-and-flowers yarn about his flesh and blood?… Oh, yes, I treated him nice! Like an old friend! Yeah….” His voice trailed off into a harsh rasp.
Hinkle turned and got close to him. “Donny, listen. For the love of——listen: don’t be a sentimental Mick all your life. Granting the girl is good, which I don’t doubt she is, why tangle yourself up in this web? Her mother was a notorious vice queen that made a last try to clean out. She was going to turn information over to you that would incriminate several vice squad men, several police magistrates and a surrogate. She got bumped off doing it. The information landed in other hands. You went through a lot of heartache and headache to get it. You got it. You turned it over to our client—the District Attorney. In the meantime this daughter of Cherry Bliss, the vice queen, turns up—broke, desolate, down from an upstate girl’s school where she was known as Helen Thompson. She comes to you. Seventeen or eighteen, isn’t she? She comes to you and suddenly I find you being godfather—”
“And now you’re trying to be godfather to me. Pardon me, Asa, but—”
“I know, but on the other hand—”
“On the other hand,” Donahue cut in, turned, raising his palm, “that little girl saved my life. Downtown that night, when those guys were ready to kill me—she’d followed me there. She got in the house. They heard her. They let up on me and that gave me a chance to fight my way out—and get her clear. But it’s not mainly that. It’s”—his face became warped with brown disgust—“it’s that I want to see her get a break.
“Libbey, that foul-minded newshawk, has a hunch that Cherry left a daughter. Don’t ask me how he found it out. But he’s got his nose to the ground because his boss is on his neck and they’re aching to spread it high and handsome. Kelly McPard, a good guy but a cop, wants to know who the woman was somebody or other saw coming out of the house downtown after the shots. And here’s a girl who was kept ignorant of her mother’s profession for years, learns about it suddenly and has her whole viewpoint knocked cockeyed.
“I liked Cherry, Asa, no matter what she was. This punk of a husband of hers started her on the downgrade when he pleaded with her to go to a rotten state’s attorney out West t
o use her charms to get him out of Dutch. And she went, the fool, and later he bailed out on her. The kid came to me—what could I do? She wasn’t on the make. She was on the deep end—and it was partly my fault that her mother got bumped off. I talked her into giving me that information—and, damn it, I really think she thought I was falling in love with her. I was out after information and determined to get it at any cost. And that’s why I’m for the kid.”
Hinkle sighed. “I see. I see your mind’s set.” He sighed again, looked at his empty glass. “This business of ours is a pretty lousy one at times, Donny…. Any word of her?”
“No. She sent me flowers once at the hospital. I tried to get in touch with her at her old address. No go. I don’t know where she went—or why. But I’ve got some feelers out. I’ve got to find her before her father does—or Libbey, or Kelly McPard. Kelly read a book once on how to be a cop and it went to his head. And Libbey’s drunk himself to the point where he has to bring in big news all the time or he’ll lose his job. That puts me right in a nice bed of roses—with plenty thorns.”
Hinkle said: “Her old man may prove troublesome.”
“You’re telling me?”
Donahue tossed a bill on the bar and got a quarter change.
“Where are you going, Donny?”
“I was on my way when I stopped here…. There’s a little blonde trying to catch your eye. What would Mrs. Hinkle say?”
Hinkle reddened.
Donahue poked him in the ribs, chuckled, said nothing and strode from the bar. He got his brown hat and tan camel’s hair in the foyer and went out into the windy autumn street. He had the rangy walk of a long-legged man. A block farther on he caught a taxi and it took him eastward to an opulent apartment house that rose alongside the East River.
The doorman looked like a character out of a comic opera. The lobby was austere, modernistic with many angles of bronze and recessed mirrors. The elevator was large, silent on its upward flight, and the corridor down which Donahue later walked was bathed in silence.
A maid in a black-and-white dress opened the apartment door. She looked like an octoroon and had very white teeth. He gave his name and in a moment the maid returned and let him in. She vanished down a small inner corridor and Donahue went on into a deftly lighted living-room and grinned at the large woman on the sofa. Three Poms crawled over her. She grinned back.
“Hello, handsome.”
“Hello, Bertha.”
She was Big Bertha, fifty if a day, fluffed and powdered and dressed expensively but in bad taste. She had a finger in many peculiar rackets in the city, and once had been faithful to a Milwaukee brewer until he got kittenish and ran off with a girl young enough to be his grandchild. She had known Cherry Bliss. Once she had knocked out a Filipino student who tried caveman stuff on Cherry, long ago and far away.
“You could make some woman happy, Donny,” she said.
“I make a lot.”
“Gee, you hate yourself—but I like you, fella!” She held out her hand, slapped it like a man into Donahue’s and yanked him down to the sofa beside her.
He picked up one of the Poms and bounced it into an armchair.
“Easy!” she cried.
“If I loved you, I might love your dog. Have a cigar?”
“Don’t mind if I do.”
He snipped the end off a panetela with his knife. She took the cigar, clamped it between strong teeth. He struck a match, lit her cigar, then his own.
“What about it?”
He picked up another Pom that had crawled on his lap and bounced it after the first. Big Bertha bristled.
“It’s the breed,” he said. “Why don’t you get Scotties?”
“They smell.”
She heaved out of the sofa with the third Pom under her arm. She crossed to a Queen Anne secretary, got an envelope and lumbered back to the sofa. She landed heavily, and with relief. She snapped open a lorgnette, held it to her eyes and fumbled one-handed with the envelope until she had extracted a fold of paper.
“One of my girls,” she said, “is indebted to me. Heavy. If I moved a finger, she’d go up. She’s valuable, as it is. I use her to keep a check on the places where I run my dances. By the way, I’m opening a new place. In Harlem. Dinge. What the hell, it’s business. Black hostesses and only”—she leaned towards him—“black sheiks. Here.”
She passed him the slip of paper. “That girl of mine went all over town. Women’s rooming houses, women’s hotels. She’s slick—good as a detective, only more reliable. No reflections, Donny.”
Donahue looked up from the paper, his face a little weary. “Here, huhn?”
She nodded. “Ten cents a dance for sixty seconds.”
He leaned back, chewed on a corner of his mouth. “That’s not so good. This the name she used?”
“Mary Stone.” She handed him the envelope. “The picture you lent me’s in the envelope. She give you that?”
“Sent it—when I was in the hospital.”
“How old you getting?”
“Thirty-four.”
Big Bertha puffed on her cigar. “She’s only eighteen, Donny.”
He scowled at her. “I’m not out for her!”
“Just Irish, huhn?”
He stood up. “Thanks, Bertha. What kind of place is this?”
“Not the best. Lot of Filipino trade. Pretty rough—but I keep the precinct skipper smeared well.”
He dragged at his cigar, dropped his voice, saying: “How well did you know Cherry’s husband?”
“Who—Ragtime?”
He nodded.
“I knew him long before she did. Out in Milwaukee. He used to pound the ivories in a beer garden. I used to sing. I was a lousy singer. You see, Donny, I was always a hellion—I was in trouble for the first time at thirteen. It was through Ragtime I met Cherry—a wide-eyed kid from the sticks. She didn’t know what it was all about.”
Donahue nodded slowly, reflecting. Then he said: “Ragtime’s out of stir.”
“That’s too bad.”
“He’s looking for Helen.”
Big Bertha blinked, chewed on her cigar, spurted smoke through her nostrils. “The kid, I suppose, would be a soft-hearted slob like her mother—and fall for his song and dance.”
Donahue snapped: “Like hell! He’ll never get her!” He picked up his hat. “I’ll be seeing you, Bertha. Thanks for every little thing, honeybunch.”
She sighed. “Boy, I wish I was twenty years younger!” Then she heaved up, said: “Oh, wait; I almost forgot.” She thumped into her bedroom, came out with a folded newspaper. “Pipe this, Donny.”
He went over beside her and peered at a short item in Personals.
Helen T.—Write me or call me. What has happened?—Bob.
“Of course,” said Big Bertha, “it might be Helen anybody. I know a Helen Tumulty and a Helen Torgaard. But it just caught my eye. I always read the Personals, hoping I’ve got rich relatives with diamond mines or something in Africa.”
He said: “Mind if I keep this paper?”
She said: “Go ahead,” and he shook her hand and went out.
Chapter III
It said: Dancing Academy in red, flickering neon letters one story above an all-night cafeteria. The entrance was at the side, with a lighted façade, a wide door. Shiny, slick, too-white or too-dark youths hung around the door. Smart-alecks. Cake-eaters. Nine out of ten on the make.
Donahue was a tall man thrusting through the group. He went up the wide staircase and into the railed-off area in front of the dance-floor. Here dozens of youths and older men hung around, watched. Pale, pimpled boys from the side alleys and small, glossy Orientals from God knows where. Rotten dancers and excellent dancers. But all the girls were hoofers.
There was a large man who leaned in the little gateway, his arms folded. He watched the dancers. Donahue tapped his shoulder and the man turned, hard and blonde and remote.
“Mary Stone on the floor tonight?”
“No.�
��
“Where is she?”
“Ask information, guy.”
“Don’t get funny. I just had a cigar with Big Bertha.”
“Oh.” The man grinned sheepishly, then said: “She quit. She called up this afternoon and said she was quittin’. I guess she can’t take it. These dames have to know how to take it.”
“Thanks.”
Donahue turned and went out and a small, young Filipino turned and cruised dark, brilliant eyes after him. Down in the street, on the curb, Donahue took out the envelope Bertha had given him and got a second address. He stopped a cab, got in and gave the address, settled back with the last of his cigar. He tossed the stub away when he climbed out, five minutes later. It was a dark, windy tunnel of a street with narrow, three-story brick houses fronted by high stone stoops with iron rails and gloomy vestibules. Donahue climbed one of these stoops and rang a bell marked Janitor.
In a little while a man in a bathrobe opened the door and Donahue said: “Where does Miss Stone live?”
The man’s arm went straight up. “Top. Forty-three. In the back. Way in the back.”
Donahue nodded briefly, pushed past him and went up the first staircase. It had a brown, worn runner with brass strips at the edge of each step, and the banisters were huge, old. The halls were vast, cold, neat but worn to the bone with age and repeated cleanings. The top hall was the smallest and tan doors shone with cheap, glossy paint.
He knocked on a door that had 43 in tin numbers on the center panel. He waited, hands in overcoat pockets. In a minute a small voice said:
“Who is there?”
“It’s Donahue, Helen.”
He could hear the small, muffled “Oh!”
She wore a blue skirt and a Russian blouse of white, heavy silk and she looked clean and trim and a little white-faced, frightened. She made a halting gesture.
“Won’t—won’t you come in?”
He entered the bed-sitting-room that was square, high, with dark mahogany trim and old sand-colored wallpaper. He stopped by the foot of the brass bed and heard the door close quietly behind him. Then he turned and looked at her.
Tough as Nails: The Complete Cases of Donahue From the Pages of Black Mask Page 36