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

by Charles Alverson

  “Olga’s baby,” I said with that dumb feeling you get from telling somebody something he already knows. “Maggie said she came back from San Francisco a couple of years after she left home to have a baby and then went back to the city, leaving it with her mother. Hell, you ought to know that.”

  Scarezza didn’t even hear that last bit. He was still standing, so I got to my feet. I can’t bear people standing over me, not even sawed-off retired gangsters.

  “Tell me about the baby,” he demanded. “That was my baby. Olga never told me, the dirty bitch. Tell me, you punk!”

  “There’s not much to tell. The next winter after Tina left the baby with Maggie it died—probably of gastroenteritis. Maggie said she buried it in West Pittsburg.”

  I think maybe he was going to jump me, or at least that’s what the remnants of his reflexes told him he ought to do. But this last one stopped him like a bullet in the chest.

  “Died?” he said, but I knew he wasn’t really asking me a question, so I stayed mum. It was his scenery; let him chew it up. His dry lips played silently with the word. I looked away. “Died,” he said again to himself. But then he shot me an accusing look. “Was it a boy?”

  “I don’t know. Maggie didn’t say.” He made me feel stupid.

  “Didn’t say,” he shouted. “Didn’t say. She didn’t say. You dumb, crummy bastard. My son is dead, and you don’t know anything about it. You probably don’t even know if he was baptized, you son of a bitch.”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t.” This wasn’t fair; Scarezza was getting all the best lines. Scarezza was still standing in front of his chair, twitching in all directions as if warming up to do something rash. He’d jettisoned his glass somewhere.

  Then he was moving toward a tall wardrobe against the wall at the foot of his bed. I’m glad nobody gave me the job of stopping him. Flinging the door open, he threw a suit of clothes on the unmade bed and began ripping off his robe and pajamas. He was mumbling to himself, probably cursing me and Maggie and Tina and anybody else handy. I stood and watched. Scarezza didn’t even know I was there. Half dressed, he looked like a poorly fed turkey with a thin chest and saggy, blotchy skin. But as he tore off his pajama bottoms and donned a suit—a midnight-blue pinstripe number with a sixties cut—a new Scarezza appeared.

  He didn’t quite fill the suit anymore—his thin neck bobbled around in the starched collar of a white-on-white shirt—but I could see that he had once filled it well. There was nothing comical about him even now. He exchanged soft carpet slippers for a hard-looking pair of black wing tips and fumbled a bit with the laces before he got them knotted. The final touch was a snappy, narrow-brimmed Stetson with a chicken feather in the band. He looked ready for anything.

  But he wasn’t quite. Pausing to give a button on the wall next to his bed three sharp jabs, he plunged toward the desk behind me. I nimbly got out of his way and turned to watch him unlock and then open the long middle drawer of the desk. A thick sheaf of currency disappeared into an inside pocket of his suit coat, and his hand went back into the drawer. It came out full of black automatic, a matte-finished .45 with a muzzle that looked big enough to take a potted plant. He rammed a clip full of fat, ugly bullets into the butt of the automatic and clicked the safety back and forth a couple of times.

  “Do you think you’re going to need that?” I asked him.

  Scarezza started and swiveled toward me with a surprised expression, pointing the pistol in my general direction. He’d forgotten that I was there.

  “I might,” he said levelly, looking me in the eye as if to head off objections. “You wouldn’t be planning to try to stop me, would you?”

  I started to explain that I wouldn’t stand in his way even if he was off to rob a train, but the door came open in a hurry, and Thompson, textbook still in his hand, lurched in and stood with his mouth open, staring at the new Tony Scarezza.

  “Mr. Scarezza!” he said.

  “Thompson,” said the old man, totally in command of the situation, “how much is that old heap of yours worth?”

  “Heap?” asked Thompson. He wasn’t getting many good lines either.

  “Your car,” said Scarezza snappily, “that thing that belches and farts every morning when you leave here. How much, boy?”

  “My car? I don’t know. Maybe a hundred dollars. Why—”

  “Here’s two hundred,” said Scarezza, riffling through his wad of notes and shoving a few into the student’s hand. “Give me your keys. Now!”

  The confused Thompson, money still in one hand, dropped his book and dug for the car keys with the other. Scarezza snatched them, favored me with a crisp look and went through the doorway into the long hall. Thompson and I looked at each other for a moment and then followed him.

  Scarezza was making good time down the polished hall and was nearly to the big double doors at the end of the ward when we caught sight of him. The sleep talker was again giving Madeline good, sound parental advice when we passed his door. On the marble apron at the top of the stairs a couple of nurses and a sleepy porter stood dopily watching Scarezza as he started down the spiral staircase. He’d had the good sense to put the automatic away. We followed him down like two store dicks after a fleeing shoplifter, and on about the second turn we all met Dr. Chapel coming up with an alert expression on his pleasant face. He looked as though he were either going to shake hands with the old man or tackle him.

  He did neither. Instead, he looked past Scarezza at me and said disapprovingly, and I thought a bit disappointedly, “Mr. Goodey, I really cannot allow you to take a patient from this establishment without the proper procedure.”

  By this time he and Scarezza had passed each other without so much as a how-dee-do, and Chapel joined our merry little group in pursuit—although not very hot—of the old man.

  “I’m not, Doctor,” I told him as he fell into step between me and Thompson, who had given way eagerly. “Mr. Scarezza seems to be going someplace, and we’re just following along. Would you care to join the posse?”

  We were now in the foyer, and Scarezza was just going through the outer door. He went down the steps, but we stopped at the top and watched his dark figure leave the circle of light created by the tall street lamp.

  “He seems determined to leave,” I observed to Chapel. “Do you want me to stop him?” It was the least I could offer, considering that I’d set Scarezza in motion.

  Chapel thought for a moment, but his forehead didn’t show it. “No,” he said in a long-drawn-out syllable, “we have no right to stop him. Mr. Scarezza is free to go where he likes.”

  From somewhere out in the dark we heard the wheezing roar of an old car coming reluctantly to life. Gears clashed, followed by a short screech of tires. Well, so long, Tony, I said to myself. Nice knowing you. But then, still with no lights on, a dusty 1957 Ford hardtop came barreling into the building’s half-moon drive. Welcome back, Tony.

  Scarezza brought the car to a sliding stop, leaned over, rolled down the passenger side window and shouted, “Hey, Goodey.” Ever helpful, I trotted down the steps and leaned toward the window of the car.

  “Yes, Mr. Scarezza?”

  “Where exactly did you say Maggie was living on the Contra Costa Canal?”

  “I didn’t,” I said, smiling in an effort to keep from seeming rude.

  Mr. Scarezza said something in Italian and popped the clutch, nearly taking my head off as I stepped smartly out of the way. The car veered away into the second half of the horseshoe, and the headlights came on as it disappeared on a sharp turn to the right

  By this time, Chapel had joined me on the narrow sidewalk. Thompson was on his way back to his anatomy textbook. The doctor seemed subdued and didn’t say anything for a minute. Then he did.

  “Mr. Goodey,” he said with quiet wonder, “whatever did you say to Mr. Scarezza to get him to take off like that?”

  “This is going to sound a bit strange, Doctor,” I said, “but all I did was tell him that he’s a fa
ther.”

  I know an exit line when I deliver one, so I walked over to my car, leaving Dr. Chapel to deal with his gaping jaw and fevered imagination.

  17

  As I drove back toward North Beach, I gave some passing thought to Scarezza and his .45 coming up against Jim Barton’s old hawg-leg, but I didn’t worry about it too much. They were both old enough to take care of themselves.

  Broadway was alive. Bumper-to-bumper carloads of yokels stared at heel-to-toe pedestrians, who stared right back when they weren’t trying to catch a free glimpse of flesh throughout the curtained entrances of topless clubs. They were all having a hell of a good time. The only person I could see having a better one was a heavy from the Klondike Klub who was carefully beating up a citizen who’d had the temerity to get drunk before ten p.m. And not at the Klondike. No sense of protocol.

  The Broadway clubs were just getting into top gear. The quality trade was lined up across the sidewalk to get into a famous drag cabaret, and doorway barkers were frantically trying to skim off whatever cream was left. “Come on, come on,” chanted a slick young thug in the doorway of Skin Alley, “come right in. Show’s just starting this minute, folks. Step right in for a full hour of solid sensation, sizzling syncopation, and sex, sex, sex!” What the barker meant was a twenty-minute wait, thirty-five minutes of tantalization, five minutes of sock-it-to-’em, and out the suckers came, at least eight bucks poorer and very little wiser.

  At a momentary break in the traffic, I cut off Broadway into a dimly lit network of small streets and alleyways, the part of North Beach few of the Saturday night crowd ever saw. When you live in North Beach you know all about these narrow, wandering streets and cul-de-sacs that offer parking places unblemished by tourists. I found these all full of tourists’ cars, so I left the Morris half on the sidewalk and half in somebody’s prize bed of daffodils. It was a short walk through a couple of alleys to The Jungle, where Irma was supposed to meet me.

  I like alleys. You can never tell what you’ll find in them. This one was full of surprises. At a point where one alley jogged slightly into another, I heard a sound somewhere in the darkness to the left of me. It was high-pitched, could have been a moan or a cry for help. It could have been a cocker spaniel in heat. Whatever it was, it stopped me and turned me two or three steps toward the sound. Where I stood was slightly lit by the dirty glow of a street light, but straight ahead of me was as flat and black as a strip of new blacktop road.

  Out of that blackness a pair of strong hands grabbed the lapels of my jacket and jerked me forward. A foot in my stomach provided a nice amount of leverage, and I found myself flying through the darkness like an oversized bullet. Someone had been practicing his judo.

  Fortunately, someone—small and hard, mind you, but better than nothing—got between me and the ground, so I slid off him to a fairly safe landing except for a dull pain in my knee, a scraped cheek, and a mouthful of something gritty and nasty. Not that I had a lot of time to feel thankful, because what felt like several dozen pairs of invisible hands began trying to grasp each other—through my body. I lashed out with a foot hopefully, but hit nothing. And to make it worse, a pair of hands latched onto my ankle and began dragging me on my back away from the dimly lit alley into ultimate darkness. At the same time, several pairs of well-shod feet began trying to make field goals with my head. One glanced off a bit too sharply, taking, I felt sure, one of my ears with it.

  I thought about my police special tucked neatly among my underwear in the trunk of my car two blocks away. More to the point, I thought about the palm sap nestling next to the handkerchief in my left rear pocket. The palm sap is not necessarily a very sporting weapon—six ounces of birdshot nicely wrapped in a leather cover just made to fit in the palm with a couple of loops for fingers—but it is comforting. To the sapper, that is. It turns what looks like a lazy slap of the open hand into a real knee trembler. The civil liberties people call it dirty pool, but where were they now?

  I lay there bumping feet first down the alley, protecting my head with my arms as best I could and thinking that no trip lasts forever. He had to drop my feet sometime. But I wasn’t sure that I was looking forward to that event. The outsides of my arms and elbows were catching hell, not to mention my ribs. After this, I could no longer claim a perfect body. My coat and shirt were now knotted up under my arms, and bits of broken glass and dog bones joined in the fun by scarifying my back from waist to armpits. This was getting past a joke.

  Then it happened. The fiend hauling on my ankles tripped and fell backward. When my heels hit the ground, I gave up self-defense for a moment, got my feet under me at the cost of a nasty kick to the jaw, and sprang forward as far as I could, hoping to come down on the dragger. At the same time I reached back for the palm sap and slipped it on my right hand. I came down with a satisfying crunch on a limb belonging to the man on the ground and was rewarded with his howl of pain. Things were looking up, but I was still surrounded by slugging midgets.

  An old vice-squadder once told me that in a fight a wall to your back was worth more than a ten-lesson course in jujitsu. His face had looked like a pound and a half of chopped liver, but I took his advice. Figuring that there had to be a wall to one side or the other, I flailed out with the sap and bulled my way to the left, knocking shadowy figures and trash cans out of my way as I went. My outstretched hand touched a brick wall, and I flung myself toward it. A bit too enthusiastically. My head hit the bricks with a jarring crunch and a pain which obscured everything but a solid thump to the kidney that one of my friends dealt me.

  Shaking my head to clear it, I felt better and continued to hit anything I could see that would stand still. I was beginning to make out my attackers pretty well. There were five or six of them, none taller than my shoulder and all wearing some sort of wool skiing mask that seemed to take some of the sting out of my sap. They went down, all right, but they came bouncing right back up with hard knuckles and knees. None of them said a word; the only sounds were grunts and exploded breath and punches landing.

  Don’t let movie fights fool you. Throwing punches may be satisfying—if they land—but it’s hard work. Every punch I gave took a little more out of me, and every one I took hurt a little more.

  You’d think that at a time like that I’d be too busy to do much gazing around, but I began to notice something tall and bulky out in the alleyway at the entrance to our little arena. It had two legs and stood with hands on its hips. My first emotion was relief. Good deal. The Seventh Fleet was about to arrive and rescue me. But the figure didn’t move. For what seemed like five minutes but may have been thirty seconds, it just stood there looking on. Well, I rationalized, as I discouraged a knee to the balls, it’s no good rushing in if you can’t see. He’s acclimatizing his eyes to the darkness. Relief is only seconds away. But still he didn’t move. One hand moved up to his mouth with a red point of light in it.

  Of course, he was finishing off the last few drags on a cigarette. No use in being wasteful. But even when the cigarette had been shot pinwheeling against a wall, my rescuer didn’t move. Maybe he was working out a game plan. It occurred to me with a sick feeling that maybe he was one of them. But just then I had to devote my attention to one little monkey who was trying to chew off my thumb while another of them jumped on my back and a third party took my legs out from under me, dropping me into a heap of rotting vegetables. One arm was pinned under me, and somebody was trying to rip the other one off.

  I was just about to swallow my manly pride and start crying for help when my arm was suddenly freed, and the lad who had been wrenching it flew backward over a row of vegetable boxes. Someone was among the enemy, dealing out vicious and efficient punches, and quite quickly my attackers began to lose heart. Somehow, as he threw them away, they didn’t come back, but melted into the darkness. And without even saying goodbye. Soon I felt a pair of large hands grab the tattered front of my jacket and pull me to my feet.

  “Things were beginning to look a bi
t dark for you, pal,” my rescuer said. Then he recognized me—or pretended to. “Goodey!” said Bruno Kolchik.

  I didn’t say anything. I was too busy taking a rough inventory of my parts and accessories. I seemed to be in one piece, if you don’t include extraneous bits of skin I couldn’t account for. My clothing—never much to start with—had suffered. I was not a well-dressed private detective. However, my palm sap was virtually unblemished, and I put it away tenderly. A boy’s best friend is not his mother.

  All this time Bruno was watching me with an expression halfway between smug self-satisfaction and idle curiosity. I didn’t like either much and thought about getting the palm sap out again. Then I thought about the way he’d handled my attackers. Instead, I did a good neat job of tucking in my shirt and smoothing down what was left of my jacket.

  “It took you quite a while to pitch in,” I said accusingly. “What were you waiting for—the first body count?” I was neither friendly nor grateful, which is perhaps a personal failing of mine.

  “Hell, Goodey,” he said good-naturedly, “how quick would you be to jump into a back-alley brawl in North Beach? I didn’t have any idea it was you until I pulled you from the bottom of the heap.” He had me there. If our positions had been reversed, I’d be two blocks away whistling, and he’d be getting his spleen ventilated. That is, if I could believe that he didn’t know it was me. I had only his word for that.

  “Anyway,” he said, “you don’t seem to have suffered any permanent damage. It’s a good thing you were wearing your old clothes. Do you have any idea who your little friends were?”

  “It could have been my fan club, but somehow I doubt it. None of them left a visiting card. But if you run into half a dozen bruised midgets, you might ask them a few questions.”

  “I’ll do that,” he said. “In the meantime, where were you going?”

  “Why do you want to know?” I asked cautiously.