The Triple Shot Box (Goodey's Last Stand, Not Sleeping Just Dead & Fighting Back): Three Gritty Crime Novels

by Charles Alverson

  “You looking for someone?” she quavered.

  “Just Irma Springler,” I said. “Have you seen her today?” “No.”

  “Have you seen her this week?”

  “No.”

  I was going to try for this month, but I knew the answer I’d get and I wasn’t ready to go to a year.

  “Thanks very much,” I said. “If you do see Miss Springler, would you…” The door shut with an emphatic crunch.

  It was easier going down, and by the time I got downstairs it was dark. It was a nice night for walking home. Broadway was kicking into life as I passed through. Club-door barkers were trying out their lines of lapel-grabbing innuendo, and dudes from Cotati, Burlingame, and El Cerrito sidled down the street, avoiding the doormen’s blandishments and looking for that mythical club where the drinks weren’t watered and they were taking it all off right there in front of your face.

  Back on my block, all was peaceful. The door to Lum Kee’s shop was shut, locked, barred, and probably booby-trapped.

  A glance up at my apartment’s lighted windows told me that somebody was home to welcome me. It had been quite a while since there’d been a light on for me, and the idea was cheering. I flipped on the stairway lamp and started climbing.

  I usually climb stairs looking at my feet, but something up ahead on the second landing caught my eye. It was Chub, my old buddy, sitting on the top step, fat hands piled in his lap, like an Occidental Buddha. His round eyes were peacefully closed, and I thought Chub had dozed off waiting for me until I saw the thin line of blood running from the left side of his mouth down over those well-fed chops onto the front of his mohair suit.

  That is, it had been a stream of blood, but as I got closer I could see that it had dried to a ribbon of rusty red. “Chub,” I said, the way people will talk to a dead man, and I touched his unbloodied shoulder. His plump little body rocked, and I had to stop him from tumbling forward. He’d been precariously balanced in death, and I’d upset that balance. Moving a hand to his back, I started to lay him down on the landing. My hand found a sticky patch of blood between his shoulder blades and came away gory, but I got him laid down. His knees were still slightly bent, and in the harsh light of the landing I half expected Chub to throw a hand up to shield his eyes.

  When I opened the door of my apartment, Fong was sitting on the long, green couch going over some printed forms. The door to my bedroom—my former bedroom—was closed, so I assumed that Mickey was in there playing Florence Nightingale to the girl junkie.

  “Hello, Joe,” Fong said. “Fsui-tang woke up a while ago and is resting comfortably. I really do think she was just worn out.”

  “I hope she’s well enough for company,” I said, washing my hands at the kitchen sink, “because we’re going to have some soon. There’s a dead man lying on the next landing down, and I’ve got to call the police.”

  “A dead man?” Fong said right on cue. “But who? Are you sure he’s dead?” He was up off the couch, prepared to do something Christian.

  “I’m sure,” I said. “I’ve seen one before. Do you remember that little man who was here yesterday when you came up to see the apartment?”

  “Yes. You called him—”

  “Chub, but his name was Seymour Kroll. Somebody stuck something very much like a knife in Mr. Kroll’s back not too long ago. And from the blood on the stairs, I’d say it happened right outside the door of this apartment. I don’t suppose you heard anything?”

  “No. And I’ve been here since you left. I—”

  “Save it for homicide,” I said, reaching over to pick up the telephone. “You’d better warn your delinquents in the next room that the police are coming. They may not want to stay.”

  I was right. No sooner had I told a very alert and cheerful sergeant about Chub’s accident than the door to the bedroom opened and Mickey came out carrying the girl. He was only a little devil, but she looked as though she weighed about as much as a box of Wheaties. Fong followed them, still trying to talk Mickey into staying. He wasn’t having much luck.

  “Thanks, Gabe,” said Mickey, “but we’re not going to be here when the cops come. I’ll get in touch in a few days. We’ll be all right.” The girl wasn’t saying anything. She was conscious, and eyes the color of a moonless night took in the small room. She lay back in Mickey’s arms like a failed channel swimmer.

  It occurred to me that I still had the file on Tina D’Oro and that it wouldn’t be a great idea for the police to find me with it. I got an idea.

  “Can your boy here be trusted?” I asked Fong.

  “Sure,” said Fong. “I think so.”

  “Okay.” I pulled out a pen and wrote my name and an address on the envelope the records came in and sealed it. I put a couple of postage stamps in the corner and put the envelope and a five-dollar bill on top of Fsui-tang.

  “Do me a favor,” I said. “Drop this in the first postbox you come to.”

  “Okay,” said Mickey. “We’re off.”

  Then they were gone, and I could hear Mickey’s heavy shoes clunk down the thin-carpeted stairs. He slowed right about where Chub’s body would have been, but then picked up speed again. From my front window I saw them leave the building and disappear between two fences across the narrow street.

  Their short shadow had hardly disappeared when a prowl car swung in off Jackson and climbed the curb in front of the building. Two uniformed cops sprang out of the car and clanked across the sidewalk into the building. We’d be seeing more of those boys. “What shall we do?” asked Fong.

  “Wait. It won’t take them long to get up here.”

  “No, I mean about Mickey and Fsui-tang,” he said. “Shall we tell the police they were here but left? Won’t they be angry?”

  “Very likely,” I said. “But it’s usually the best policy to tell the police the truth. Unless you have a good reason not to. Do you know where those two kids have gone?”

  “No.”

  “Then you can’t very well tell the police, can you?” I asked. “So I think we’d better tell it the way it happened. Okay?”

  Before he could answer, somebody hit the door with what sounded like a baked ham, and I gestured for Fong to answer the door. When he did, the doorway was full of blue serge, and a cop started to ask if Fong was the guy who reported a dead body. Then he looked over Fong’s shoulder and saw me.

  “Goodey!” he said. “What the hell are you doing here?” It was Gerry Anderson, a thick-skulled Swede I’d soldiered with a long time ago in the Parks Division. He hadn’t been too happy when I got into plainclothes.

  “I live here,” I said. “And I reported finding the body. This is the Reverend Gabriel Fong. He shares this place with me.”

  Anderson looked Fong’s urban guerrilla outfit up and down and wondered whether to call me a liar. But after a lot of soul-searching—he did everything but take off his hat and give himself a Dutch rub—he decided not to chance it. That’s why Anderson was still in uniform and always would be.

  “Who’s the dude down on the landing?” Anderson wanted to know.

  “His name is Seymour Kroll,” I said. “He’s a lawyer’s investigator from New York. I found him about twelve minutes ago sitting on the landing, leaking a bit of blood. When I touched him, he fell over, and I let him lie.”

  “You didn’t disturb—” Anderson began, but then he thought better of it.

  “I didn’t anything,” I told him. “So why don’t we just stand around and talk about old times until the experts get here?”

  Anderson didn’t like that remark, but, lacking a better one, he stood glowering at me and Fong. Mostly me.

  “Say,” he said, “is there anyone else here?”

  Fong eyed me as I said no.

  There was a half knock on the door as it was shoved open, and Anderson’s partner came into the apartment. He couldn’t have been over twenty-one, and he looked as if he’d taken the oath that afternoon just in time to go on shift. He was a fresh-faced kid who
had success written all over him. From the way Anderson looked at him, I knew he could see it too.

  “Hey, Andy,” he said, “that guy…”

  “I know,” said Anderson. “Go down to the front door and wait for homicide. Tell them I’m up here. And check out anybody who comes in or leaves the building.” He said this last bit to nobody, because the kid had already gone.

  Anderson amused himself by opening doors and peering into the other rooms of the apartment while Fong and I exchanged assorted glances.

  “Too bad about the old watchman,” Anderson said by way of time-passing conversation. What he meant as a cop was “too bad you pulled a bad one.” As a cop I understood him exactly. “Hope it doesn’t come down too hard on you.” Apparently news of my departure from the force hadn’t sunk to the lowest levels.

  “Me too,” I said honestly, not giving away a thing.

  This brilliant exchange was interrupted by a thumping of feet up the stairs, and the young cop burst in through the door followed by Johnny Maher. Detective Sergeant Johnny Maher.

  Johnny wasn’t that much older than the rookie—maybe five years—but in true age he could have been the boy’s grandfather. There were ages behind those pale-green eyes, ages of deprivation and downgrading that he was in a hurry to make up for. Johnny was a sharp-dressing cop. Not rich, but sharp. You’d never have mistaken him for a bank president.

  Or a pimp. If you guessed a pro football quarterback or a local-TV chat-show host, you’d be close to his style. Right then, his style was direct. “What’s going on here, Goodey?” he asked. He used to call me Joe, but that was earlier in the week before he’d made sergeant.

  “A little murder, Johnny,” I said, “or so it seems. I was just telling Andy here that the victim was a friend of mine, a lawyer’s investigator out from New York.”

  Up until that moment Maher hadn’t given any indication that he’d been aware of Anderson’s existence. He was like that with the troops and was famous as Maher the Patrolman’s Friend. “Anyone else here?” He threw the question at Andy as you’d throw a dog a poisoned bone.

  “Not since I been here,” Anderson said through his big, pale-gray teeth.

  “Well, take your young friend here out and find out what the neighbors know,” said Johnny. “You won’t get much done holding up the walls here.”

  The two men in uniform went out, Anderson seething and the youngster half-admiring Maher but making a mental note to be nicer to patrolmen when he was a detective sergeant. Maher and I stood silently looking at each other.

  “Nice going, Johnny,” I said. “You’ve made another good buddy among the peons. Andy will be your pallbearer when some other cop zaps you.”

  “I’m not paid to be chummy with the troops, Goodey,” Maher said. “I do my job and I see that they do theirs. And, speaking of jobs, I understand you’ve had a recent change of employment.” The word was trickling out. “Sort of, Johnny,” I said. “I decided to go to work for a living.”

  All this time Gabriel Fong had been sitting in my old easy chair, watching us as if we were characters in a lousy play. I hate to say it, but the expression on his face was inscrutable. I liked to think that he didn’t care for Maher because I disliked him. But they might have turned out to be the best of pals. Might have.

  But the next thing Johnny did was arch a nearly double-jointed thumb in Fong’s direction and ask, “Who’s that?”

  I started to open my mouth, but Fong beat me to it. “That,” he said, “is the cotenant of this apartment you’ve just barged into without invitation.” The voice was tougher than I’d have thought possible. “Who are you? I assume that you’re a police officer, but I’ve seen no proof.”

  Maher gave me an eyebrow-lifting look, as if he expected me to intervene just short of throwing Fong out of the window, but I sat still and did nothing.

  Like a quick-draw artist, Maher went into his inside coat pocket and came out with his leather badge holder, which he right-jabbed under Fong’s snub nose. To read it, Fong would have had to go cross-eyed.

  “That satisfy you?” Maher snarled.

  Fong reached up, effortlessly pushed the badge-holding hand out to reading distance, and read it slowly, not missing any of the small print. That’s my boy.

  “Thank you, sergeant,” he said mildly. “My name is Gabriel Fong. I’m a theological student at the San Francisco Bible College, and I live here. Is there anything else you want to know?”

  “Yeah,” said Maher. But just then heavy feet thumped up the stairs, and Andy came in through the half-open door, trying not to look too excited.

  “Sergeant,” he said, puffing a little, “an old lady across the street says just before we got here somebody suspicious left in a hurry. A Chinese kid, and it looked like he was carrying a little girl. She doesn’t know where they went.”

  Maher wheeled on me and Fong. “You know anything about this?” he demanded.

  “Yes,” I said. “They were here until I found Kroll’s body, but then they remembered they had a date somewhere. So they left.”

  Maher wasn’t the exploding type. His face turned to stone. “Goodey,” he said quietly, “are you telling me that you let two potential suspects leave here after you knew a murder had been committed?”

  “That’s right,” I said easily. “I had no right to stop them. I’m not a cop anymore.” I didn’t bother going into the unlikelihood of a sick girl and her volunteer nurse sneaking out into the hall and knifing Chub. Anderson was having enough problems with the first bit of information I’d dropped. He kept boggling and looked as though he was wondering who to slug.

  Maher took it quite well. Too well, in fact. “Right,” he said smoothly, “you’re not a cop anymore. But you are a suspect, and so are you, Charlie Chan.” He whipped a pair of cuffs out of his back pocket and flipped them to Anderson.

  “Tie these monkeys together, Andy,” he said. “Frisk them and take them downtown. Have them put in detention until I get there, and then come right back.”

  “You haven’t read us Miranda,” I said, anxious that Maher shouldn’t do anything to imperil his new stripes.

  “Fuck Miranda,” he said. “You know it, and you can explain it to your friend in the lockup.”

  “You see,” I told Fong, “there’s nothing to worry about. Cops like Maher only skip the finer legal points when they don’t expect an arrest to stick. He’s pissed because we let Mickey and Fsui-tang leave.”

  “Cuffs!” snapped Maher.

  Relieved to have something to do, Andy did an expert job of cuffing me to Gabriel and then himself to me. He had to be good at something.

  “It’s the city’s gasoline,” I told Maher as Anderson started tugging us out the door, “but you’re wasting it. Do you know who Mr. Fong is?”

  Maher signaled for Andy to stop. “I’ll bite,” he said. “Who is Mr. Fong?”

  “The mayor’s cousin. His other cousin.”

  Maher didn’t even bother to respond to that. He just thumbed Andy and us out the door.

  Andy didn’t have a lot to say on the way down to headquarters. Neither did Fong and I, but there in the caged-in back seat we got in a few whispers.

  “What will happen now, Joe?” Fong asked.

  “They’ll lock us up for a little while,” I said. “But don’t worry. I’ll have us out within a couple of hours.”

  “I hope you’re right,” he said. So did I.

  9

  If you think the average law-abiding citizen feels strange finding himself in a cell, imagine how a cop feels. It’s not natural. It’s like a dog being peed on by a lamppost. I’d known Archie Meltzer, the chief turnkey on duty, for over ten years, but you wouldn’t have known it from the way he processed me for the cells.

  “Hello, Archie,” I said in a friendly way.

  “Empty out all your pockets,” said Archie. “Put your money, car keys, other valuables on the table.”

  “Sure, Archie,” I said, turning out my pockets. “How�
�s your kid brother? He still racing those pigeons?”

  “Remove your belt, tie, if any, and shoelaces,” Archie said, “and place them on the table next to the long, brown envelope.” Another turnkey I didn’t know was busy counting the money we’d put on the table and making an itemized list of the other things.

  “Right,” I said. “You know best. But, Archie, there is one thing. I’d kind of like to make that telephone call. You know, the one everybody talks about. It’s important.”

  “Plenty of time for that later,” said Archie, “Read the itemized list, initial each entry and sign your accustomed signature and the date at the bottom.” We’d done all this like good boys, and Archie was telling his helper where to stash us. “Okay,” he said, deadpan, “this way.”

  “Archie,” I said, “I don’t want to be a nag, but I’d really like to make that phone call. And my friend, Mr. Fong, would probably like to make one, too. It is the law, you know.”

  “I know the law, Joe,” Archie said, using my name for the first time, “and you’ll get your phone call. Now, do as the man says.” I did as the man said, leading Fong through the green, metal door and down the corridor that leads to the dozen or so cells where drunks and other master criminals were kept. There were also a couple of high-security cells, and I wondered if I had enough status to get one of those.

  The turnkey stopped us in front of a cell with a guy already in it and opened the door. “Not you,” he said as I started to go in. “You.” He motioned to Fong.

  “Don’t despair, Gabe,” I said. “I’ll have us out of here in no time.”

  “Sure, Joe,” he said, but he didn’t sound too sure. I didn’t feel too sure. As the turnkey was locking Fong in, his new roommate, a little whey-faced guy with a dirty-blond pompadour and the eyes of a child molester, came to the front bars and stared at me.