Stop This Man!

by Peter Rabe

  Catell pulled around the corner fast, skimming the parked truck by inches. The unconscious man in the back rolled heavily against a television set. Glass broke and picture tubes without their housings crashed around the floor. Catell came to a sharp stop in front of Schumacher’s house and, still whistling, jumped out of the truck and opened the door in the back. With one hand he pulled the television set toward him; with the other he reached for a wrench. A few sharp blows and the tube in the set was broken, leaving a large, empty space. Carrying the set in both arms, Catell slammed the rear door with his foot and went up the stairs of the apartment house. Catell kept on whistling loudly, even when he saw faces looking at him through the glass of the door.

  Cops.

  Again he didn’t have to think, to decide.

  “Is one of you jerks going to open that door?”

  For a moment they didn’t move, just stared at the man with the television set. Through the glass Catell saw the lips of one of them move, and he seemed to be saying, “Of all the rotten luck—”

  The one with the cigarette opened the door and Catell went through. He gave the man with the cigarette a push with the back of the television set.

  “Pardon me, buster. Step aside.” He went to the stairs and up, whistling as before.

  He didn’t see an agent on every floor, but he knew they were there. They didn’t worry him. The one on the fourth floor—he’d have to get rid of him.

  When Catell came to Schumacher’s door, he looked down the corridor and saw a man busying himself with the hallway window. The guy was concentrating very hard on the window.

  “Hey, buddy,” Catell said.

  “You calling me?”

  “Yeah. Gimme a hand, willya?”

  That’s the guy he had to get rid of. When the agent came closer, Catell pushed the television set at him.

  “Hold this for a second, buddy?”

  The man put his arms around the bulky cabinet and looked at Catell with a question, but just as he was going to say something, Catell’s arm whipped out and the ridge of his hand slashed across the man’s Adam’s apple. That was all there was to it. Catell caught the set and let the man drop. Then he kicked his foot against Schumacher’s door.

  “Open up. It’s Tony.”

  Schumacher pulled the door open a crack.

  “Open up quick. Drag that cop in here.” Catell pushed past Schumacher into the apartment. “Don’t stand there, goddamn it, get that guy on the floor there!”

  Schumacher dragged the unconscious man from the hall and kicked the door shut.

  “Tony, what goes here? Did you say ‘cop’?”

  “Quick, where’s the stuff? Same place?”

  “Of course. You didn’t think I was going to go near—”

  “Shut up and listen. The place is lousy with cops. Feds, I think. The whole street is staked out. Now I’m going to take this stuff and walk right out of here. You stay put. They got nothing on you, they don’t find nothing, and you don’t say nothing. Understand? I’ll contact you.”

  Catell went to his knees before the bookcase and pulled up the rug. Then he lifted three boards, stuck his hand inside the hole, and dragged out the battered yellow cartridge case he had hidden there. When he lifted it, something thumped inside the locked case.

  “Wanna take a quick look, Otto?” Catell started to undo the latch.

  “For God’s sake, Tony, leave it closed. That gold is poison, Tony. It’s poison of the worst kind.”

  Catell had shoved the box inside the television set and started toward the door.

  “Tony, I beg you, I beg you to listen—”

  “Out of my way!”

  Catell had his hands full with the cabinet. He kicked at Schumacher with his foot and caught him on the shin. Schumacher doubled up with pain.

  “Out of my way, damn you. Now open this door.”

  Schumacher moved awkwardly, limping. He opened the door.

  “Tony, please—”

  “You heard what I said. I’ll get in touch with you. When I’m downstairs, throw this guy back out in the hall.” Catell was at the stairs already.

  “Tony! Tony, I’m sick!”

  Catell was running down the stairs. He was whistling again. For a moment Schumacher staggered with a new rush of nausea that choked his throat and blurred his vision. Then, sweating with the effort, he dragged the limp agent back out into the hall. Panting and weak, Schumacher closed his eyes. When he looked at the man on the floor again, their eyes met. With a horrible effort the hurt agent strained his injured throat and let out a weird, loud scream.

  As Schumacher staggered back into the room he could hear them clambering up the stairs. He was fumbling for his gun in the desk drawer. When they clattered up to the door, guns drawn, a rushing nausea curled Schumacher’s insides. He lost sight of them, and with a head-splitting effort he retched helplessly. He heard noise, he heard the crash of the guns, and when he retched the second time, there was blood in the vomit.

  They stepped up to him, dead in a mess on the floor, and they saw that he wasn’t even holding the gun right.

  At the corner of the street two men sat inside the closed truck among equipment and instruments. One sat at the short-wave radio; the other was fingering a Geiger counter. Suddenly the instrument crackled and ticked with a wild rush of discharges. Another ticker, standing nearby, did the same thing. The two men jumped.

  “Christ Almighty, what in hell was that?”

  Outside, a television repair truck turned the corner fast and lost itself in the traffic.

  Chapter Four

  The taxi wound slowly through the late-evening traffic. A thin spring rain had been drizzling all afternoon, almost like a fog, and the lights of downtown Detroit looked hazy. Catell and Selma sat in the cab, far apart on the back seat, not smiling.

  “Hear the latest?” asked the cabby.

  He didn’t get an answer. Catell looked at Selma, who had wrapped a fox stole high around her neck, as if to protect herself from the thick dampness in the air.

  “Did you hear the latest about the killing?” said the cabby, a little louder this time. He was a determined man.

  “Answer the guy,” Catell hissed. “Act natural.”

  “Uh, no, I haven’t. What is the latest?” asked Selma.

  “Remember reading about that killing in Highland Park a few days ago, where the cops shot a guy called Shoemaker? Well, they found out who the other guy was. The other guy who was in with old Shoemaker.”

  Catell tensed and leaned forward a little, his hands curled on the back of the driver’s seat.

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, it turns out the other guy was a dame—beg pardon, a woman.” The cabby let that sink in, waiting for some sound from the back.

  “Oh, really?” Selma said at last.

  “That’s right. She was in the building all the time, disguised as a cleaning woman.” The cabby paused significantly and then said in a triumphant voice, “And here is the pay-off: After the cops had went out, what does she do?”

  “What?”

  “She goes up to that Shoemaker’s apartment, and she goes ahead and cleans up the mess there.”

  “She did? What mess?” Selma asked.

  “The mess, you know. A guy gets shot up, there’s a mess on the floor. Blood and so forth.”

  “That’s terrible,” Selma said.

  “I’ll say. Them molls are cold as ice when it comes to that kind of thing. Of course, she only did this to cover.”

  “Cover what?”

  “To cover up her real purpose, that being the hidden goods.”

  “Oh, I see,” Selma said. “What were those goods?”

  “Well, they didn’t say in the papers, but my wife knows the super’s wife in that building. In other words, I have what might be called inside dope.”

  “And?”

  “This friend of my wife’s, the super’s old lady, she figured Shoemaker for a suspicious character from way back. No v
isitors, no visible means of support, hardly ever went out—you know what I mean. Well, she’d go up to his place now and then, just to check. She’d look at the plumbing or the wallpaper, anything like that to check up on what was going on there. And what do you think she found?”

  The cabby paused, but nobody said anything.

  “She found stacks and stacks of road maps!”

  “I don’t understand,” Selma said.

  “Don’t you get it? Road maps! Where do you get road maps, I ask you, except you walk in a filling station and ask for one? That’s how he’d been collecting those road maps!”

  The traffic got lighter on upper Woodward and the taxi speeded up. Selma didn’t say any more. She sat huddled in her corner of the seat, weary and withdrawn.

  “So what was this moll picking up?” Catell asked.

  “I’ll tell you what she was picking up! Remember I was telling you about all them road maps? Do you also remember that slew of gas stations that got stuck up around Detroit and vicinity the last coupla months? Well, the guy what done it, he’d walk in the gas station, ask for a road map, and then stick the place up. Now, do you still want me to tell you what was stashed away in that apartment there?”

  “Never mind,” Catell said. “I can figure it. Schumach—I mean, Shoemaker had all the money from those gasstation holdups stashed up there, and his girl friend came to collect after he’d been shot, right?”

  “You certainly are right,” said the cabby with a sense of achievement.

  Catell sat back in his seat. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes, lit one for himself, and then offered one to Selma. She shook her head and turned away.

  How she remembered those road maps! Otto and she would sit on the couch nights and study the maps, talking about trips they’d take someday. Schumacher never took her on any of those trips, but he’d talk about them often, and Selma was sure he meant to take her away someday, to drive along the highways through different states, and to see all the points of interest that were marked on the maps. And Selma had liked the planning ahead; she had felt comfortable sitting on the couch there with old Otto.

  “What’s eating you?” Catell said.

  “Nothing.”

  Selma bent her head so Catell couldn’t see her eyes. She felt terribly alone and wished she could cry out, weep.

  “Do something with your hair, kid. Those curls are coming down,” Catell said.

  “It’s the damp, honey. I’m sorry.”

  “Well, fix it. We’re almost there.”

  The taxi had swung off Woodward, out toward the country. A garish neon sign came closer, off to the right of the highway. It said, “Paar Excellence,” first in red, then in pink, then in blue, and finally all together—red, pink, blue.

  “Get happy, kid. Here we are.” Catell straightened his tie.

  The Paar Excellence had two sections. One was a roadhouse with name band, fried chicken, dancing, and drinks. The other was a private club. Freddie Paar ran both of them, and he probably even owned the place, though nobody knew for sure. In the roadhouse section he had a friendly nod for the patrons; in the club he knew everybody by name. He had to.

  When Selma and Catell walked into the club entrance, a bruiser in a tuxedo asked for their cards.

  “No cards,” Catell said. “Just blew into town and haven’t joined yet.”

  “No card, no enter,” said the tuxedo.

  “I been here before,” Catell said.

  “No card, no enter.”

  “Call Paar. Tell him Catell is here.”

  The tuxedo picked up a phone in the wall and talked into it. Then he hung up and said, “Wait here. He’ll be right out.”

  They waited while the bruiser looked Catell up and down. He didn’t give Selma a second look.

  Then Paar came through the door that led to the club proper. He was short and his tuxedo was built around him like a piece of architecture. Above the upholstery in the shoulders his head looked small, even though his thinning black hair left him with a monstrous forehead.

  “My dear Selma,” he said, and kissed her hand. “And Tony, of course. Come in, come in.”

  They followed Paar through the door and into a dim, low room with a fireplace, a long bar, and scattered couches. A girl in black stockings and very little else took Selma’s fur and Catell’s overcoat. Then they took one of the couches while Paar sat opposite on a low coffee table.

  “Well, Tony, what have you decided?”

  “No business, Paar. We came on a social visit.”

  “Of course, Tony, and forgive me, Selma, but answer me just this, Tony. Am I your man, or do you do it directly?”

  “Directly.”

  “Fine, Tony, fine. No hard feelings, you understand, but do call on me for any help, eh? And now I want you to have a drink on the house. I may join you later.”

  He smiled at both of them, patted Selma on the knee, and was gone. He did it all so smoothly that Catell felt like a clod. He saw that Selma was smiling at Paar’s back, but he was in no mood for an argument.

  A blonde waitress brought them their drinks. She was wearing a little apron that was attached to her body in some mysterious way. “On the house,” she said. Catell didn’t know whether he should smile back at her or not.

  “What did he mean by that remark, is he your man or not?” Selma caught Catell in the middle of a thought.

  “Huh?”

  “Paar. What was he talking about?”

  “Oh, nothing. About the heist. I talked with him about unloading something.”

  “So?”

  “He was interested but I wasn’t. He’s too high.”

  “He knows what we got?”

  “What we got?”

  “Yeah, what we got! You weren’t thinking of leaving me out of this, were you? You weren’t thinking you could pay me off with rent money and an occasional date in a nightclub, were ya?”

  Selma leaned her large face close to Catell and he could see the make-up and the pores of her skin. One of her curls was still hanging down and bobbed up and down like a spring when she talked.

  “Calm down, damnit. We came here for a good time.”

  “So I’m asking again. Does he know what we got?”

  “No, he doesn’t know what we got. All he knows is there’s a lot of it.”

  “So you said no to Paar. And how, big shot, are you gonna move the stuff we got, seeing you ain’t too pleased with Paar?”

  “Selma, for chrissakes, let’s have a good time, huh?”

  “How ya gonna move it?”

  “All right. Stop yelling. I’m going to take it where Paar would take it. He let slip with something. Out on the West Coast.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know yet. I gotta make connections there first. L.A., probably.”

  Selma let herself sink back on the cushions of the couch. Catell could see where her corset pinched her and looked away.

  “I love the sunshine. Gee, Tony, won’t it be fun on the beach there and everything?”

  “You want another drink?”

  Selma didn’t answer. She was looking up in the air, smiling and saying “Gee” every so often. When the fresh drinks came, Catell took her hand.

  “Honey, listen. Let’s get one thing straight. This deal isn’t through yet, and until it is, we gotta go easy. When Schumacher was around he staked me to some dough, but now there isn’t any. Not till the deal comes through. So till then, we gotta go easy, not to speak of the risks. The way I figure it, you stay here and I do the scouting alone. Then I send for you. And then we can go anywhere you want. Whaddaya say?”

  “But Tony!” Selma sounded hurt. “You mean that?”

  “Just till I finish this business, honey. You know I can’t be seen with you now They know you been a friend of Schumacher’s, and I don’t want to get connected to him in any way. It’s too risky. Besides, I haven’t got any dough right now.”

  “Tony, I got some. I got two thousand at home. I been savi
ng it the longest time. And honest, Tony, I don’t mind.”

  “It’s no good, Selma. It’s too risky for both of us. As long as I’m not connected with Schumacher in any way, everything is jake.”

  “Now you listen to me, Tony Catell. You better take care of me or else. Otto never would have acted that way. I’m going with you or else.”

  “Or else what?” Catell said it slowly and quietly, but Selma caught the tone.

  “You don’t scare me one bit, Tony Catell. If you think you can trample all over me and then walk out you got another guess coming. First you make me leave Otto, then you go get him shot to death so he’s out of the way, and then you think you can just give me the boot and light out. Not on your life!”

  “Selma, you’re talking crazy. You got everything wrong. I never intended for Otto to end up that way.”

  “Oh, yes, you did, lovin’ cup. I know your kind, but it ain’t gonna happen to me.” Selma gave Catell an ugly look and drained her glass. “I want another drink, right now. And don’t tell me you’re broke, lovin’ cup.”

  Catell controlled his temper and waved for another drink.

  “And from now on, any plans you got you discuss with me, lovin’ cup, understand? I been around long enough to know how to handle your kind.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  “What’s that? And another thing. I want you to know I despise you from the bottom of my heart, lovin’ cup, for what you did to my Otto. That was the lowest, swiniest—”

  “Stop calling me loving cup.”

  Selma stopped in the middle of her sentence and looked vacantly at Catell. Then suddenly she buried her face in the palms of her hands and started to cry. She bawled with a wet and cowlike sound, crying, “Lovin’ cup!” between hiccups.