by Jack Iams
Burlick stood still, looking disgusted and baffled. Tim remembered much the same expression on his face when Sam Magruder had rebuked him in the Breeze Club.
“What’s the big idea?” he asked sullenly.
“A small sample,” said Mrs. Barrelforth, “of the trouble I’m prepared to make if you don’t give.”
Burlick looked at Tim as if he expected masculine sympathy. “Is this dame crazy?” he demanded.
“Maybe,” said Tim, “but she generally means business. You might as well make up your mind to talk.”
Burlick stared at Tim and then at Mrs. Barrelforth, breathing hard. His face grew sulky and he shrugged. “What’s it to me?” he said. “Okay. So this Ludlow babe was here.”
“What did she want?”
Burlick hesitated. He looked at the shattered mirror and said, “She wanted me to put her in touch with Frankie Heinkel.”
“Did you?”
“Hell, I don’t even know Heinkel. I don’t mess with guys like Heinkel.”
“You don’t, eh? Who tipped Heinkel off that Sam Magruder was in the Breeze Club that night?”
“How would I know?”
“Well, that’s another story,” said Mrs. Barrelforth. “What did you do with Mrs. Ludlow?”
“I’m a nice guy when I’m treated right,” said Burlick. “I sent her to some guys who do know Frankie.”
“Good-hearted Jake,” said Mrs. Barrelforth. “Mrs. Ludlow didn’t happen to mention Sam Magruder, did she?”
Again Burlick hesitated. Then he said, “Yeah. As a matter of fact, she did.”
“What did she say about him?”
“Said she knew something about him that Frankie Heinkel would like to hear.”
“That’s more like it,” said Mrs. Barrelforth. “So where did you send her?”
Burlick stared at her for a moment, then suddenly he turned on Tim. He sounded oddly petulant. “You’re the babe’s husband, aren’t you?”
“I’m the lady’s husband,” said Tim.
“All right,” said Burlick. “She comes along here and she asks me to do her a favor. So I do it. And what happens? You come along and start bustin’ up my place. That’s what you get doin’ a favor. People bustin’ up your place.”
“Where is she?” asked Mrs. Barrelforth.
“You want to know? Okay, I’m washin’ my hands of the whole damned business. You can talk to the babe herself.”
He crossed the room and picked up an ivory telephone from a low bookcase littered with comic books. He dialed a number and said, “Jake speaking. Is that limey dame still around? Put her on the wire, will you?” He waited a moment. “Hello, kid. This is Jake. Look, your husband and some female wrestler are here, bustin’ up my place. Will you for Christ’s sake call ’em off? Okay.”
He handed the phone to Tim. “See for yourself, wise guy,” he said.
Tim took the phone wonderingly. “Hello,” he said.
“Tim!” It was Sybil’s voice, unmistakably. It was sharp, too. “What in heaven’s name are you up to?”
“Looking for you.”
“Well, don’t. I’m quite all right. Who’s the female wrestler? Mrs. Barrelforth?”
“Who else?”
“Then you and Mrs. Barrelforth go to some nice, quiet pub and drink some whisky. Don’t worry about me. I’ll explain things tomorrow. I hope.”
The last two words were set apart from the hard brightness of the rest.
“Let me speak to her,” said Mrs. Barrelforth.
She reached for the phone, but the line was dead.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The Harbor Snuggery
“Satisfied?” Jake Burlick said to Tim.
Tim didn’t answer. He stared at Burlick with a dislike so strong that he almost felt sick at his stomach. It filled him with a queer ache to think that this foreheadless plug-ugly should know more about his wife’s goings-on than he did. All he wanted to do was hit him.
“I’m not satisfied,” said Mrs. Barrelforth. “Not by a long shot. How do we know Mrs. Ludlow wasn’t talking at pistol point? Where is this place, anyway?”
“What place?”
“The place you just phoned, naturally.”
“Look, lady,” said Burlick, “when you come in here, you said you wanted to be nice. I’ve tried to be nice, too. You got what you come for. Supposing you scram.”
“I propose to,” said Mrs. Barrelforth. “I propose to scram straight to wherever it was you just phoned.”
“Are you crazy?”
Mrs. Barrelforth smiled and picked up another glass. She gazed at it musingly.
“Listen, lady,” said Burlick, and there was an incongruous note of pleading in his harsh voice, “those are bad guys. They’d kill me like that if I told you.”
“A very small loss to society,” said Mrs. Barrelforth equably. “Where’s the place?”
“You mean you don’t care if I get knocked off?” He sounded shocked and hurt.
“Not especially,” said Mrs. Barrelforth. “Answer the question, Burlick, or I’ll start screaming and charge you with rape.”
Burlick snorted. “That’s one thing nobody’d believe.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Mrs. Barrelforth, blowing airily on her square fingernails. “Shall we give it a try?”
“No! For God’s sake, no!”
“Then talk.”
Burlick looked out of the window at the tiers of lights against the dark sky. He sighed despairingly and said, “Okay, sister, It’s a hotel. On West Street. The Harbor Snuggery.”
“Water-front joint, I take it.”
“Yeah. Fourth floor. Sign on the door says Employees Only, but I don’t guess that’ll bother you.”
“I don’t guess it will,” said Mrs. Barrelforth. “Especially as you’re coming with us.”
Burlick’s face looked as if he’d found ground glass in a highball. “I might as well walk into a firing-squad,” he said.
“That’s better than waiting for the firing-squad to come to you, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Barrelforth. “You’ll be safer with us than you will be here. All I want to do is make sure you’re not giving us a wrong steer and that you don’t warn anybody we’re coming. Once we get to this place, you can stay in the car. Get the rest of that monkey suit on and let’s go.”
Burlick stared the way people do when a magician borrows and smashes a watch. Like a man in a dream, he got his coat.
* * * *
The Harbor Snuggery had failed to live up to its name for at least one customer who was being ejected from its ground floor barroom as Tim’s car, with Mrs. Barrelforth at the wheel, drew up. It was a four-story building of weather-beaten frame with dim, unhappy windows between sagging fire escapes. Thick, yellow light seeped out of the barroom’s doors and windows, but it was a sinister, rather than a cheerful, glow. It was the sort of bar they show lantern slides of at W.C.T.U. lectures.
A Salvation Army trio, looking pinched and blue in the raw wind that swept West Street, was just moving off and glad of it. The man who had been thrown out staggered away in the opposite direction, cursing thickly “Nice place, Burlick,” said Mrs. Barrelforth. “And God help you if it isn’t the right one.” She turned toward the back seat where he had been sitting, but he wasn’t there. He was huddled on the floor.
“God help me, anyhow,” he gritted. “You do some dame a favor and this has to happen.”
“Chin up,” said Mrs. Barrelforth cheerfully. She and Tim climbed out of the car, into the biting wind.
Next to the barroom was a separate door over which a sign, illumined by a bulb visible through cracked blue paint, said: Hotel Entrance. Tim followed Mrs. Barrel forth through it and up a flight of dingy imitation marble stairs. At the top, in a small and evil-smelling space that only the most chari
table could have called a lobby, a swarthy, fattish man drowsed behind a desk of sorts. He sat up at their footsteps and when he opened his eyes they were Latin and liquid and dangerous.
“Wrong place, ain’t you?” he said softly.
“Don’t know yet,” boomed Mrs. Barrelforth. “We’re going up to the fourth floor.”
“Oh, no,” said the man. He sounded sad. “No, you’re, not gonna do that. You’re in the wrong place.”
“We’ll soon see,” said Mrs. Barrelforth.
She swept toward the next flight of steps, which rose from a doorway, half hidden by a rag of a curtain. Simultaneously the man slid around the desk, moving lithely in spite of his squat bulk. He caught Mrs. Barrelforth’s arm. Tim couldn’t quite see what happened next, but there was an easy, almost ritualistic, movement of Mrs. Barrelforth’s large hands and the man leaped into the air with a squeal of pain, described an arc with his legs and went crashing to the floor, his head thudding against a spittoon. He lay there, his eyes open, whimpering.
“Ju jitsu,” said Mrs. Barrelforth to Tim. “Learned it as a girl. Comes in handy sometimes.”
“Do you teach it to the brides?” asked Tim.
“In extreme cases. Shall we ascend?”
The next floor was illumined by a naked yellow bulb at the head of the steps and a red one farther along, presumably the bathroom. Wallpaper was peeling from the walls and the whole place was acrid with a damp, unwashed smell.
“Must remind Lady Sybil of the old family castle,” said Mrs. Barrelforth. “One more floor.” She was panting slightly.
Another naked bulb lit the next floor, if you could call it lighting. In the oppressive dimness they could barely make out the sign, Employees Only, on a door at the end of the corridor.
Mrs. Barrelforth knocked. She knocked again. There was no sound. She knocked once more, the beat of her knuckles loud in the silent gloom.
“Looks flimsy enough,” she remarked. “Let’s give it the old heave-ho.”
“Maybe it isn’t locked,” suggested Tim.
“Nonsense. Of course it’s locked.” She turned the knob, as if to show him his folly, and the door opened. From the darkness came an aroma of good liquor and good cigars, mingled with a fainter odor of good perfume. Mrs. Barrelforth ran her hand along the wall, found a light switch, and turned it on.
It wasn’t the luxurious hideaway of a Fu-Manchu, but it was a great deal more comfortable than the rest of the hotel would have suggested was possible. Evidently two of the regular bedrooms had been knocked into one and the walls repapered. There was a sofa that looked new and a couple of fuzzy easy chairs and a shiny liquor cabinet. In the middle of the room, between two standing lamps, was a bridge table on which a deck of cards lay scattered while a second deck sat primly beside a score pad in one corner.
“Suffering cats,” said Mrs. Barrelforth. “Don’t tell me your wife’s gone to all this trouble just to find a bridge game.”
“Could be,” said Tim. He picked up the score pad. At the top, individual scores, marked by initials, had been kept. “Look,” he said. Only one of the scores was plus and it was plus fourteen hundred points. The initials were S.L.
“Let’s hope the stakes were high,” said Mrs. Barrelforth.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Speaking Of Shots—
Mrs. Barrelforth sat down in one of the easy chairs near the liquor cabinet, on which stood a half-full bottle of Scotch. “Might as well try some of this bloke’s whisky,” she said. “Any clean glasses around?”
Tim found two reasonably clean ones and she poured a couple of hookers. “Here’s luck,” she said. “Although right now we seem to have run out of it.”
Tim’s glass paused halfway to his lips. He felt suddenly cold. “What do you mean by that, Mrs. Barrelforth?” he asked. “You don’t think that Sybil is—is already—”
“No, no,” said Mrs. Barrelforth comfortably. “I think she’s holding her own, so far. She’s a cool one.”
Tim looked at the bridge table. “And maybe a wrong un?” he asked in a low, strained voice, as if it hurt him.
“Let’s not jump at conclusions,” said Mrs. Barrelforth. “Let us, rather, consider for a moment. Your Lady Sybil wants to see this Heinkel creature the worst way. Why?”
Tim was silent for a moment. He took a drink of Scotch. Then he said, “Mrs. Barrelforth, there’s something you’d better know. Sybil thinks that Heinkel—”
“Killed her father. Don’t look so surprised. I told you the Association checks up on its brides. But what I don’t know is what she has in mind now. Does she want to kill Heinkel with her own hands?”
“Don’t,” said Tim. His lean face was white, not looking at her.
“It must have occurred to you,” said Mrs. Barrelforth.
“Of course.”
She glanced at him sympathetically. “That’s pretty good Scotch,” she said. “Take a big swallow, h helps like nobody’s business.”
Tim took a big swallow but it didn’t help much.
“Anyway,” went on Mrs. Barrelforth, “she persuaded good old Jake to get her this far. I think Jake’s telling the truth when he says he doesn’t know Heinkel. He’s just a cheap thug who was used as a combination front man and bouncer for the Breeze Club. If he knew where Heinkel’s hiding out, the cops would have hammered it out of him.”
“Mrs. Barrelforth,” said Tim, “may I ask why the president of the New Jersey Chapter of the British American et cetera is so well up on these matters?”
“You certainly may,” said Mrs. Barrelforth. “When a little war bride arrives in New York after five thin years, what does she want to do? Make whoopee. And it’s when an innocent lassie’s making whoopee at places like the Breeze Club that she needs looking after most. So it’s up to the Association to be au courant. See?”
“I see.”
“To get back,” Mrs. Barrelforth went on, sipping, “Lady Sybil got this far. Presumably it took quite a while to fix the meeting with Heinkel and so they played a little bridge. Why not? What I’m wondering is, did the bridge game break up because they were warned or simply because it was time to call on Mr. Heinkel? That could be important. Damned important. Because if Heinkel gets the idea that Lady Sybil arranged to be followed—well, not so good.”
Tim put his hands to his forehead. It was wet. Mrs. Barrelforth got up and patted his shoulder.
“Easy, son,” she said gently. “The Association hasn’t given up yet. Not by a long shot.”
Even as she spoke, a sharp crack came from the street below, loud in the dull rush of wind.
Mrs. Barrelforth stiffened like a bird dog. “Speaking of shots,” she said, “what did that sound like to you?” Tim had jumped to his feet. “My God,” he exclaimed, “do you suppose—”
“I sure do,” said Mrs. Barrelforth. “Let’s go.”
She paused to empty her glass and Tim was out of the door first. He could hear the clatter of Mrs. Barrelforth’s sensible shoes on the stairs behind him as he crossed the dim patch of the first landing and descended fast toward the brighter light of the grimy little lobby.
Rising slowly from the street stairs was the swarthy, squat man. He had a gun in his hand and a look on his face that Tim had seen on G.I.s’ faces sometimes when they got used to killing, a cold, nauseating relish.
“Okay, hold it,” the squat man said and leveled the gun at Tim.
Tim didn’t exactly hold it. He probably couldn’t have if he’d wanted to. His feet paused at about the fourth step but the rest of him didn’t. His eyes saw a round wooden curtain ring and his hands grabbed it, his rangy body swinging into space. His feet sailed into the squat man’s face, in which for a second lay dumb surprise, then the face tilted and went backward down the imitation marble stairs. Only the bottom one was struck, and that with a squashy thud.
Tim dr
opped to the floor on shaky legs and saw Mrs. Barrelforth calmly picking up the squat man’s gun.
“Nice work,” she said. “I remember Douglas Fairbanks doing something of the sort. We won’t see his like again.”
The squat man lay in a heap at the foot of the steps. Mrs. Barrelforth picked her way over him, lifting her skirt a little as if feeling a need to be feminine for a change. “He’ll keep for a while,” she said over her shoulder to Tim. “But I’m not so sure about poor Jake.”
Poor Jake was still huddled on the floor of the car, but there was a difference. Several differences, in fact, but only one that counted: a round hole where hair met eyebrows.
Mrs. Barrelforth bent over him for a moment, then straightened up. There was a strange expression on her rawboned face. “You know,” she said, “he had it coming to him, all right. But I wish I hadn’t said a while back I wouldn’t care. It’s worse when a bloke’s scared.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
In Line Of Duty
Tim lit a cigarette. He lit it because he thought it would quiet his nerves, then he realized that his hands were steady and that his nerves were already quiet. His brain, which had been a blur upstairs in the hotel, felt cool and clear. It was a funny thing about death; it did that sometimes. It had been that way in the war, when he’d had to go into a town where there were snipers. Scared green till he got there, then it was all right. Not good, but all right.
“What do we do now?” he asked.
“Cops,” said Mrs. Barrelforth. “We don’t call ’em, though, we go to ’em. Mahomet to the mountain.” She jerked her head toward the hotel entrance. “And we take that little bundle of trigger-happiness with us.”
They picked little bundle up between them and carried him to the car. He was heavy. “Seems sort of indecent to dump him in back with Jake,” said Mrs. Barrelforth. “Let’s shove him in front.”
They heaved him onto the front scat and closed the door, letting him slump back, against it.
“Apparently I get dumped in back,” said Tim.
Mrs. Barrelforth chuckled. “I’ve got other plans for you,” she said. “First place, there’s no sense you getting mixed up with the cops. I can handle ’em, but they’ll want to know who you are and ask you a lot of questions and maybe even hold you overnight. So I’ll wheel our cargo along to Spring Street by myself. Now, don’t start a lot of chivalry. It’s better that way.”