The Brass Cupcake

by John D. MacDonald

  Boom town, fun town, money town, rough town. Lay it on the line. You can’t take it with you. Next year comes the H bomb. Put it on the entertainment account.

  I stood near the office and watched them. The haltered girls, the bald lobster-pink heads, the big convertibles. You could look into a pair of eyes and tell at once if the owner was a local or a tourist. Local eyes held a wearied acceptance. Tourist eyes had a bright glaze, a hectic promise, a threat of excitement.

  As I walked toward the parking lot to get my car, I saw my reflection in a store window, saw it before I had prepared myself to see it, and thus achieved for one small moment a bitter objectivity.

  I saw the heavy slabs of the shoulders, the hooded and secretive eyes, the black hair thinning back at the temples, the somber, almost petulant cast of the mouth. A big man. A big stranger with rocks in his fists and broken dreams swinging from the angles of his heart and a gray nausea in his brain.

  Mom, it’s raining out and I hate my toys and I hate myself too.

  “Run along and play.”

  Aw…

  “Run along and play like a nice little boy. Go find the pretty stones, darling. Then we’ll give you fifty thousand dollars and you can buy ten thousand fifths of bourbon, or ten pretty automobiles, or just dozens and dozens of playmates, or maybe a little of all three.”

  Gee!

  “But son! Be careful you don’t get your head stomped in.”

  The inside of the car was an oven. The sweat rolled into my eyes, stinging, before I could get the crate rolling.

  2

  SERGEANT BANSON lives with his two kids and his sister in a white clapboard four-room house on a fifty-by-eighty lot east of town where the mosquitoes come big and come hungry, like knives in the night.

  It could be a house in Portland or Columbus or Stevens Point, Wisconsin—except for the sandy yard, the jacaranda tree, the acacia tree, the small, dusty, discouraged palm.

  Washing hung on the back-yard line. Big red ants were carrying on extensive engineering operations near the garbage can.

  I rattled the screen door of the kitchen and the Sergeant’s sister waddled to the door and stared at me with frank animosity. “You shouldn’t come here,” she said. I could tell from the way she pitched her voice that Harry was home and asleep.

  “I want to talk to him.”

  “He needs his sleep bad. Why do you keep bothering him?”

  “Let’s let Harry decide whether he wants to talk to me, shall we?”

  “I’m not going to wake him up for you.”

  “Then I’m coming in and wake him up myself.” I pushed the door open. She didn’t object. She waddled back over to the sink, sniffing audibly.

  Harry was in the front bedroom. The shades were drawn. Coming out of the sunlight like that, it took quite a time for my eyes to get used to the dimness. Harry’s rattling snore seemed to catch in his throat each time, then burst forth with a gluey sound. He was naked except for underwear shorts. His long, yellowish body was stringy and lean except for the hard mound of the belly. He was plagued with bad teeth and the smell of his breath was in the room. The holstered .38 was hung over the back of the chair.

  I lit a cigarette and sat on the edge of the bed. I grabbed his knee and shook him. His flesh was warm and sticky. “Wake up, Harry. Wake up.”

  He mumbled, then sat bolt upright with a great gasp, his hand reaching over for the revolver. His eyes were wide and staring.

  “Wha’… Oh, you,” he said. He yawned. I lit another cigarette off mine and handed it to him. He took it and his eyes had turned snake-hard. “What the hell are you doing here, Cliff?”

  “Don’t hemorrhage, Harry. I left the car over on the highway and came in the back.”

  A complaining tone crept into his voice. “I don’t know what you got to bother me about, Cliff. You know if people talk about you coming here it eight-balls me with the Chief and the Commissioner.”

  “If you don’t tell ’em, they won’t know. You’re off duty. I’m just a friend.”

  “Great friend!”

  “I’m on this Stegman deal.”

  His eyes widened. “Lord Mabel!”

  “Just give me a review, Harry.”

  “You musta gone nuts, Bartells. They’re itching for you to step into this kind of mess. The Commissioner’ll bust you wide open right down the middle.” He coughed. “You got no more chance of buying that ice back than you have of flying like a big bird. If they ever find out you’re interested, they’ll dream up something to charge you with.”

  “Just what happened, Harry?”

  “It’ll be in the afternoon paper, Cliff.”

  “I want you to tell me.”

  “And you can go to hell,” he said gruffly.

  I snapped my cigarette at the far wall. It hit under a framed photograph of Angela and the two kids. We both watched the sparks shower down and glimmer out against the rug and the wooden floor.

  “And just how is Angela?” I asked gently.

  Just before the war Harry Banson, then a bachelor of forty, went down into the swamps to pick up a suspect. The suspect had a cousin named Angela—a doughy, smiling little girl of sixteen. Harry brought them both back. He jailed the suspect and married Angela, the little swamp rabbit. She had three kids in three years. One died. Her lungs went bad. They got so bad that the force stopped kidding Harry about his swamp rabbit. I, as lieutenant, rearranged the roster so as to put Harry in the way of two fat rewards. With those rewards he managed to send Angela out to Denver to give her lungs a chance to heal.

  “Angela’s a lot better, damn you.”

  I stood up. “Did I ever lever you with that before? Did I? Banson, you can keep that mouth of yours shut and you can go to hell too.”

  He leaned over the edge of the bed and butted his cigarette against the floor.

  “Sit down, then,” he said with a weary tone. “But you’re plain crazy to stick your nose into this. The way they’re acting down there, if they don’t find the somebody who did it pretty soon, they’ll pick up somebody and yank out a confession.”

  I sat back on the bed. “We got the call at five after seven this morning,” he said. “Her name was Elizabeth Stegman and she was fifty-nine years old. She came from Boston in a big new Buick with her personal maid and her chauffeur. They got here January third. The maid and the chauffeur are man and wife. She got them a place in town where they could keep the car under cover. She took over a nine-hundred-a-month apartment out at the new place, the Tide Winds. The apartment has a big bedroom, sun deck, living room with the wall facing the ocean all glass front, kitchen, and all done real nice.

  “The chauffeur has a license to carry a gun on account of this Elizabeth Stegman—a spinster, by the way—trucks all her jewelry down here with her. She puts it in the Florence City Bank until the landlord can have one of those little barrel safes put in the apartment at her expense. Every day is the same, the chauffeur and maid say. Their names are Franklin, Horace and Letty Franklin, and they live in the Belle-Anne Courts out on Bay Drive. A Nigra girl named Frances Audrey sneaks in about seven and cleans up all the apartment except the bedroom. She’s hired to do that sort of work by this Lew Roma who owns the Tide Winds. Then about nine Horace and Letty come over. They’ve already had breakfast. Horace wakes her up, then cooks her breakfast while Letty gets the old lady dressed. While Horace serves her on the sun deck, Letty cleans up the bedroom. Every morning the same routine.

  “But this morning Frances sees the bedroom door is open. The outside door was latched as usual, so Frances had to use her key. Frances looks in and there is the old doll in her pajamas on her face on the floor ten feet from the bed. She is under the safe, the safe door open, the picture that covered it thrown aside. The way it looks, somebody told her to use the combination to open the safe or else. And the moment the door swung open they bashed her behind the ear with a sap, using a full arm swing so that it busted the bone back of the ear like a clam shell and drove the
splinters way into her brain.

  “We are there ten minutes later. Nobody heard anything. Each upstairs apartment has a private stairway, so anybody could have gone up and knocked without being seen. The doc arrives and sets the time of death between midnight and two in the morning. Lew Roma tells us that some of the other residents were having noisy parties at about that time. The prints on the round safe door belong to the old lady. The door wasn’t forced. No other prints that mean anything. All in all, a very professional job, Cliff, except for knocking the old lady off.”

  “What line are they taking downtown?”

  “They gave the Franklins a very bad time, but it turns out Horace and Letty are in the clear. The Belle-Anne Courts is maybe three blocks from that little beer joint on Bay Drive called the Bomb Run. Horace and Letty have taken up table shuffleboard in a big way. There was a tournament there last night. The Franklins left at about quarter after two and they were there every minute. Fact is, they took second in the final play-offs. The last I know, Letty Franklin tells the Chief that a niece of Miss Stegman’s, her only close relative and the girl who inherits, has been in town for two weeks, living at the Coral Strand instead of with the old lady. I was dead for sleep and I went off duty as the Chief was sending Buzz out to pick her up.”

  “You know her name?”

  He gave me a broken-toothed grin. “Hold on tight, Cliff. The name is Melody Chance.”

  “Nobody has a name like that, unless they changed it from Heimenpfeffer,” I said.

  “Now you know everything I know, Cliff,” Harry said. “I’m dead for sleep.”

  He lay back as I stood up and moved to the doorway. He had his hands locked behind his graying head. “Watch yourself. Cliff. Watch yourself.”

  His sister snorted as I went back through the kitchen. I banged the screen door and cut across the sandy yard. The littlest kid was standing by the sagging garage, tow-headed, streaky-faced, three fingers in his mouth. He had that wary swamp look around his eyes. It hadn’t been there when Angela had been around.

  I drove slowly back into the traffic snarl. My “efficiency apartment” is over a Western Auto store two blocks from the railroad station. I have a private parking space out behind the store. An outside open staircase, spiked to the cinder blocks, leads up to my door. There is another inside staircase that I seldom use.

  I draped myself across the studio couch, set the phone base on my chest, and dialed the Kit-Kat. When I went to the wars there was no Kit-Kat. In fact, there was no land where it stood. They made a fill for it, sucking up the bay bottom and making a point of land into the bay with the Kit-Kat at the end of it. By day it’s a huge, low L-shaped building in pastel pink, the L enclosing two sides of a huge pool. A guard, stationed at the mainland end, opens an impressive gate to let you into the parking area. The short base of the L contains Tony Lavery’s offices and living quarters, as well as the biggest high-limit gambling layout for a hundred miles around. The long stem of the L contains bars, dining rooms, dance floors, dressing rooms, and so on.

  “Kit-Kat,” a warm girl-voice said. “May we take your reservation?”

  “Is Tony in his office yet?”

  “Just a moment, sir. I’ll see if he’s in. Who’s calling?”

  “Tell him it’s the Clown Prince and see what he says.”

  The phrase was full of hoarse laughter. Languid Tony, surprisingly blond, had sent for me once, about a month after I exchanged my olive drab for police-force blue. Chief Powy told me I had to go. I’ll never forget Tony’s amused smile at my red, angry face. He slouched in his big office chair and said, “Baby, this is the new deal. Things have changed since you’ve been away, my buddee. In this pocket I got the Chief. Over here in this pocket I got the Commissioner. That’s my job. I’m just the local errand boy for the syndicate. Between the three of us we keep the town nice and clean for the rabble. Right now you’re a big hero. A prince of a fellow. But, baby, we’ll make you a clown prince if you go Christer on us. We want you to be a good cop, but there are certain little local ordinances that you’d better ignore, the way we’re ignoring them.”

  The girl was back on the line. “He’ll take the call, sir. Just a moment.”

  “So it’s you, baby,” he said softly. “Don’t tell me. Let me guess. Only you could be this dumb. Better take a run out here, if it’s what I think it is.”

  “It is,” I said. He told me to make it fast and hung up.

  Palms were black paper cutouts against red fire in the western sky as I drove through the gates. The cocktail hour was well under way and there were about sixty cars in the big lot. I could hear people laughing out by the pool. When dusk approaches there is a new note in the laughter of women, as though the coming of night awakens something primitive, something that is buried deep when the sun is high.

  The Kreshak twins met me outside Tony’s office. They are beach boys. Tight silver trunks all day, nut-brown muscles like a Charles Atlas ad, at night they don beautifully tailored white jackets and take over the bouncing job. They’re smooth at it. The noisy drunk suddenly sobers when the Kreshaks move in from either side and take hold of his arms in what looks, from ten feet away, like affection. Only the drunk knows that both hands have suddenly gone numb and the pain is curling his toes. They smile and make small talk and walk him quickly out.

  I can’t tell them apart. One said, “Do you smell cop?”

  “The odor is faint. Maybe it’s an ex-cop, Larry.”

  “Don’t get me laughing,” I said. “I become helpless.”

  “You ticklish, too?” Larry asked. He patted me quickly and lightly on all the possible places and said, “Oh, fudge! Nothing for my collection.”

  I looked at them closely. “Boys, I never noticed it before, but aren’t you both getting a little bald?” Their color faded. “And a little thicker around the waist? You know what happens to aging beach boys. They end up looking like Dutch bartenders.”

  “Wise,” Larry spat. “Wise.”

  “Tut, tut,” I said. “Remember that all is vanity. It just seems a shame to see you boys going downhill so fast.”

  I went on into Tony’s office. He was bending over a mirror laid flat on his desk, carefully clipping his small blond mustache. He glanced up. “Go make yourself a drink over in the corner, baby. With an Irish and water for me, no ice.”

  He slid the mirror and the scissors into the top desk drawer as I brought him his drink. I took my bourbon and soda over to the chair by the windows that looked out over the bay. A fishing launch was coming in late, running lights haloed by the evening mist rising off the water.

  “I always gave you a mark for bright, baby,” he said. “Now I wonder.”

  “I can try to buy, can’t I?”

  “Let me give it to you straight. Suppose I found out it was one of my boys. Just suppose. Or even three of my boys. My best boys, I’d have their bare feet heated up until I got the ice and a confession. And then I would turn them and the ice and the confession over to the law so fast it would make your head spin. That’s how much I like this. Sure, I steered you into a contact on a couple of other deals. This is different. This is everybody’s bread and butter, baby.”

  “How about rumors?”

  “This big jewel stuff is different. The top boys have no crowd. They go it alone. Sometimes just a guy, singleton, or a couple. They dress the best, have the right cover stories, and lead clean and simple lives. With the mob that floods in here during the season, there could be a few strangers among us. I wouldn’t know.”

  “Suppose you got a chance to make a contact?”

  “I’d cross them, baby. I’d throw them to the law.” He took out a nail file and began to work on his left thumbnail, tapering it to a smooth oval.

  “I’m still buying,” I said. “Three hundred packages of C notes, if anybody should mention it.”

  He whistled soundlessly. “It makes my mouth water. But not enough. A fix is a delicate thing. You know, if the law should get a line
that it was one of my boys, my fix here wouldn’t be worth a rusty fishhook. They’d stomp in and cream this whole operation. It’s that big. And the syndicate would turn away and leave me for lost. I’m not fool enough to have any of this deal. And that’s where I look at you—as the books say—askance. If my fix is no good, where would you stand if they found out down at the station that you happen to be in contact with the person who clobbered the old girl? I wouldn’t want your bill for dental work. And if you never peeped, I bet they could stick you away for five without half trying. Withholding evidence of a murder. Something like that.”

  “There’s another side to it, Tony.”

  He raised one delicately arched blond eyebrow. “Already I can see that. If you make it your business to cross them in order to make a big score for your company, what are you going to do for a job? Pick oranges?”

  “It’s clean healthy work.”

  “Now just suppose I was the guy who did it to the old girl. I put myself in his place. I’m so hot that probably the best thing I can do is stay right here. I want to unload the ice. What do I do? I handle it just like a snatch payoff. The ransom for Junior. Put dirty old bills in a shoe-box and run like hell, I’d tell you. Then you’ve nothing to feed the cops.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  He sighed and threw the nail file into the drawer. “A thing like this makes me nervous, baby. We are all munching on a nice big peaceful healthy pie and some creep has to throw a dead fish into the middle of it. We play for the big-money boys and girls. There are towns in the country where they feel safe because they know everything is under control. Up until today this was that kind of town. Word gets around. This has been a place for the happy Big Rich to kick up their heels. If all this hits them wrong, if the lid is slapped back on quick and tight, we’ll be getting nothing but the Little Big Rich. The Big Rich tip a dime, wear a tweed suit for seven years, have their shoes resoled until there’s no more uppers left. The Little Big Rich tip with the big bills, and wear a fortune on their backs. But in the pinch, when the little ball goes round and round and the bets are down, it’s the little guy in the wrinkled tweed suit who is betting the house limit every time and who arrived in a hundred and sixty feet of boat worth five thousand a foot.”