“You get it?”
“Yes. A man is waiting for him at Kearny and Broadway. Told him to hurry.”
“How long ago?”
“None. They’re just through talking.”
“Any names?”
“No.”
“Thanks.”
I went on to where Duran was stalling with an eye on the elevators.
“Shown yet?” I asked.
“No.”
“Good. The red-head on the switchboard just told me he had a phone call to meet a man at Kearny and Broadway. I think I’ll beat him to it.”
Around the corner from the hotel, I climbed into my coupe and drove down to the Frenchman’s corner.
The Cadillac he had used that afternoon was already there, with a new license plate. I passed it and took a look at its one occupant—a thick-set man of fortysomething with a cap pulled low over his eyes. All I could see of his features was a wide mouth slanting over a heavy chin.
I put the coupe in a vacant space down the street a way. I didn’t have to wait long for the Frenchman. He came around the comer afoot and got into the Cadillac. The man with the big chin drove. They went slowly up Broadway. I followed.
We didn’t go far, and when we came to rest again, the Cadillac was placed conveniently for its occupants to watch the Venetian Cafe, one of the gaudiest of the Italian restaurants that fill this part of town.
Two hours went by.
I had an idea that the Whosis Kid was eating at the Venetian. When he left, the fireworks would break out, continuing the celebration from where it had broken off that afternoon on McAllister Street. I hoped the Kid’s gun wouldn’t get caught in his coat this time. But don’t think I meant to give him a helping hand in his two-against-one fight.
This party had the shape of a war between gunmen. It would be a private one as far as I was concerned. My hope was that by hovering on the fringes until somebody won, I could pick up a little profit for the Continental, in the form of a wanted crook or two among the survivors.
My guess at the Frenchman’s quarry was wrong. It wasn’t the Whosis Kid. It was a man and a woman. I didn’t see their faces. The light was behind them. They didn’t waste any time between the Venetian’s door and their taxicab.
The man was big—tall, wide, and thick. The woman looked small at his side. I couldn’t go by that. Anything weighing less than a ton would have seemed tiny beside him.
As the taxicab pulled away from the cafe, the Cadillac went after it. I ran in the Cadillac’s wake.
It was a short chase.
The taxicab turned into a dark block on the edge of Chinatown. The Cadillac jumped to its side, bearing it over to the curb.
A noise of brakes, shouting voices, broken glass. A woman’s scream. Figures moving in the scant space between touring car and taxicab. Both cars rocking. Grunts. Thuds. Oaths.
A man’s voice: “Hey! You can’t do that! Nix! Nix!”
It was a stupid voice.
I had slowed down until the coupe was barely moving toward this tussle ahead. Peering through the rain and darkness, I tried to pick out a detail or so as I approached, but I could see little.
I was within twenty feet when the curbward door of the taxicab banged open. A woman bounced out. She landed on her knees on the sidewalk, jumped to her feet, and darted up the street.
Putting the coupe closer to the curb, I let the door swing open. My side windows were spattered with rain. I wanted to get a look at the woman when she passed. If she should take the open door for an invitation, I didn’t mind talking to her.
She accepted the invitation, hurrying as directly to the car as if she had expected me to be waiting for her. Her face was a small oval above a fur collar.
“Help me!” she gasped. “Take me from here—quickly.”
There was a suggestion of foreignness too slight to be called an accent.
“How about—?”
I shut my mouth. The thing she was jabbing me in the body with was a snub-nosed automatic.
“Sure! Get in,” I urged her.
She bent her head to enter. I looped an arm over her neck, throwing her down across my lap. She squirmed and twisted—a small-boned, hard-fleshed body with strength in it.
I wrenched the gun out of her hand and pushed her back on the seat beside me.
Her fingers dug into my arms.
“Quick! Quick! Ah, please, quickly! Take me—”
“What about your friend?” I asked.
“Not him! He is of the others! Please, quickly!”
A man filled the open coupe door—the big-chinned man who had driven the Cadillac.
His hand seized the fur at the woman’s throat.
She tried to scream—made the gurgling sound of a man with a slit throat. I smacked his chin with the gun I had taken from her.
He tried to fall into the coupe. I pushed him out.
Before his head had hit the sidewalk, I had the door closed, and was twisting the coupe around in the street.
We rode away. Two shots sounded just as we turned the first corner. I don’t know whether they were fired at us or not. I turned other comers. The Cadillac did not appear again.
So far, so good. I had started with the Whosis Kid, dropped him to take Maurois, and now let him go to see who this woman was. I didn’t know what this confusion was all about, but I seemed to be learning who it was all about.
“Where to?” I asked presently.
“To home,” she said, and gave me an address.
I pointed the coupe at it with no reluctance at all. It was the McAllister Street apartments the Whosis Kid had visited earlier in the evening.
We didn’t waste any time getting there. My companion might know it or might not, but I knew that all the other players in this game knew that address. I wanted to get there before the Frenchman and Big Chin.
Neither of us said anything during the ride. She crouched close to me, shivering. I was looking ahead, planning how I was to land an invitation into her apartment. I was sorry I hadn’t held on to her gun. I had let it fall when I pushed Big Chin out of the car. It would have been an excuse for a later call if she didn’t invite me in.
I needn’t have worried. She didn’t invite me. She insisted that I go in with her. She was scared stiff.
“You will not leave me?” she pleaded as we drove up McAllister Street. “I am in complete terror. You cannot go from me! If you will not come in, I will stay with you.”
I was willing enough to go in, but I didn’t want to leave the coupe where it would advertise me.
“We’ll ride around the comer and park the car,” I told her, “and then I’ll go in with you.”
I drove around the block, with an eye in each direction for the Cadillac. Neither eye found it. I left the coupe on Franklin Street and we returned to the McAllister Street building.
She had me almost running through the rain that had lightened now to a drizzle.
The hand with which she tried to fit a key to the front door was a shaky, inaccurate hand. I took the key and opened the door. We rode to the third floor in an automatic elevator, seeing no one. I unlocked the door to which she led me, near the rear of the building.
Holding my arm with one hand, she reached inside and snapped on the lights in the passageway.
I didn’t know what she was waiting for, until she cried:
“Frana! Frana! Ah, Frana!”
The muffled yapping of a small dog replied. The dog did not appear.
She grabbed me with both arms, trying to crawl up my damp coat-front.
“They are here!” she cried in the thin dry voice of utter terror. “They are here!”
“Is anybody supposed to be here?” I asked, putting her around to one side, where she wouldn’t be between me and the two doors across the passageway.
“No! Just my little dog Frana, but—”
I slid my gun half out of my pocket and back again, to make sure it wouldn’t catch if I needed it, and used my other ha
nd to get rid of the woman’s arms.
“You stay here. I’ll see if you’ve got company.”
Moving to the nearest door, I heard a seven-year-old voice—Lew Maher’s—saying: “He can shoot and he’s plain crazy. He ain’t hampered by nothing like imagination or fear of consequences
With my left hand I turned the first door’s knob. With my left foot I kicked it open.
Nothing happened.
I put a hand around the frame, found the button, switched on the lights.
A sitting-room, all orderly.
Through an open door on the far side of the room came the muffled yapping of Frana. It was louder now and more excited. I moved to the doorway. What I could see of the next room, in the light from this, seemed peaceful and unoccupied enough. I went into it and switched on the lights.
The dog’s voice came through a closed door. I crossed to it, pulled it open. A dark fluffy dog jumped snapping at my leg. I grabbed it where its fur was thickest and lifted it squirming and snarling. The light hit it. It was purple—purple as a grape! Dyed purple!
Carrying this yapping, yelping artificial hound a little away from my body with my left hand, I moved on to the next room—a bedroom. It was vacant. Its closet hid nobody. I found the kitchen and bathroom. Empty. No one was in the apartment. The purple pup had been imprisoned by the Whosis Kid earlier in the day.
Passing through the second room on my way back to the woman with her dog and my report, I saw a slitted envelope lying face-down on a table. I turned it over. The stationery of a fashionable store, it was addressed to Mrs. Inés Almad, here.
The party seemed to be getting international. Maurois was French; the Whosis Kid was Boston American; the dog had a Bohemian name (at least I remember nabbing a Czech forger a few months before whose first name was Frana); and Ines, I imagine, was either Spanish or Portuguese. I didn’t know what Almad was, but she was undoubtedly foreign, and not, I thought, French.
I returned to her. She hadn’t moved an inch.
“Everything seems to be all right,” I told her. “The dog got himself caught in a closet.”
“There is no one here?”
“No one.”
She took the dog in both hands, kissing its fluffy stained head, crooning affectionate words to it in a language that made no sense to me.
“Do your friends—the people you had your row with tonight—know where you live?” I asked.
I knew they did. I wanted to see what she knew.
She dropped the dog as if she had forgotten it, and her brows puckered.
“I do not know that,” she said slowly. “Yet it may be. If they do—”
She shuddered, spun on her heel, and pushed the hall door violently shut.
“They may have been here this afternoon,” she went on. “Frana has made himself prisoner in closets before, but I fear everything. I am coward-like. But there is none here now?”
“No one,” I assured her again.
We went into the sitting-room. I got my first good look at her when she shed her hat and dark cape.
She was a trifle under medium height, a dark-skinned woman of thirty in a vivid orange gown. She was dark as an Indian, with bare brown shoulders round and sloping, tiny feet and hands, her fingers heavy with rings. Her nose was thin and curved, her mouth full-lipped and red, her eyes—long and thickly lashed—were of an extraordinary narrowness. They were dark eyes, but nothing of their color could be seen through the thin slits that separated the lids. Two dark gleams through veiling lashes. Her black hair was disarranged just now in fluffy silk puffs. A rope of pearls hung down on her dark chest. Earrings of black iron—in a peculiar club-like design—swung beside her cheeks.
Altogether, she was an odd trick. But I wouldn’t want to be quoted as saying that she wasn’t beautiful—in a wild way.
She was shaking and shivering as she got rid of her hat and cloak. White teeth held her lower lip as she crossed the room to turn on an electric heater. I took advantage of this opportunity to shift my gun from my overcoat pocket to my pants. Then I took off the coat.
Leaving the room for a second, she returned with a brown-filled quart bottle and two tumblers on a bronze tray, which she put on a little table near the heater.
The first tumbler she filled to within half an inch of its rim. I stopped her when she had the other nearly half full.
“That’ll do fine for me,” I said.
It was brandy, and not at all hard to get down. She shot her tumblerful into her throat as if she needed it, shook her bare shoulders, and sighed in a satisfied way.
“You will think, certainly, I am lunatic,” she smiled at me. “Flinging myself on you, a stranger in the street, demanding of you time and troubles.”
“No,” I lied seriously. “I think you’re pretty levelheaded for a woman who, no doubt, isn’t used to this sort of stuff.”
She was pulling a little upholstered bench closer to the electric heater, within reach of the table that held the brandy. She sat down now, with an inviting nod at the bench’s empty half.
The purple dog jumped into her lap. She pushed it out. It started to return. She kicked it sharply in the side with the pointed toe of her slipper. It yelped and crawled under a chair across the room.
I avoided the window by going the long way around the room. The window was curtained, but not thickly enough to hide all of the room from the Whosis Kid—if he happened to be sitting at his window just now with a pair of field glasses to his eyes.
“But I am not level-headed, really,” the woman was saying as I dropped beside her. “I am coward-like, terribly. And even becoming accustomed—It is my husband, or he who was my husband. I should tell you. Your gallantry deserves the explanation, and I do not wish you should think a thing that is not so.”
I tried to look trusting and credulous. I expected to disbelieve everything she said.
“He is most crazily jealous,” she went on in her low-pitched, soft voice, with a peculiar way of saying words that just missed being marked enough to be called a foreign accent. “He is an old man, and incredibly wicked. These men he has sent to me! A woman there was once—tonight’s men are not first. I don’t know what—what they mean. To kill me, perhaps—to maim, to disfigure—I do not know.”
“And the man in the taxi with you was one of them?” I asked. “I was driving down the street behind you when you were attacked, and I could see there was a man with you. He was one of them?”
“Yes! I did not know it, but it must have been that he was. He does not defend me. A pretense, that is all.”
“Ever try sicking the cops on this hubby of yours?”
“It is what?”
“Ever notify the police?”
“Yes, but”—she shrugged her brown shoulders—“I would as well have kept quiet, or better. In Buffalo it was, and they—they bound my husband to keep the peace, I think you call it. A thousand dollars! Poof! What is that to him in his jealousy? And I—I cannot stand the things the newspapers say—the jesting of them. I must leave Buffalo. Yes, once I do try sicking the cops on him. But not more.”
“Buffalo?” I explored a little. “I lived there for a while—on Crescent Avenue.”
“Oh, yes. That is out by the Delaware Park.”
That was right enough. But her knowing something about Buffalo didn’t prove anything about the rest of her story.
She poured more brandy. By speaking quick I held my drink down to a size suitable for a man who has work to do. Hers was as large as before. We drank, and she offered me cigarettes in a lacquered box—slender cigarettes, hand-rolled in black paper.
I didn’t stay with mine long. It tasted, smelled and scorched like gunpowder.
“You don’t like my cigarettes?”
“I’m an old-fashioned man,” I apologized, rubbing its fire out in a bronze dish, fishing in my pocket for my own deck. “Tobacco’s as far as I’ve got. What’s in these fireworks?”
She laughed. She had a pleasant laugh
, with a sort of coo in it.
“I am so very sorry. So many people do not like them. I have a Hindu incense mixed with the tobacco.”
I didn’t say anything to that. It was what you would expect of a woman who would dye her dog purple.
The dog moved under its chair just then, scratching the floor with its nails.
The brown woman was in my arms, in my lap, her arms wrapped around my neck. Close-up, opened by terror, her eyes weren’t dark at all. They were gray-green. The blackness was in the shadow from her heavy lashes.
“It’s only the dog,” I assured her, sliding her back on her own part of the bench. “It’s only the dog wriggling around under the chair.”
“Ah!” she blew her breath out with enormous relief.
Then we had to have another shot of brandy.
“You see, I am most awfully the coward,” she said when the third dose of liquor was in her. “But, ah, I have had so much trouble. It is a wonder that I am not insane.”
I could have told her she wasn’t far enough from it to do much bragging, but I nodded with what was meant for sympathy.
She lit another cigarette to replace the one she had dropped in her excitement. Her eyes became normal black slits again.
“I do not think it is nice”—there was a suggestion of a dimple in her brown cheek when she smiled like that—“that I throw myself into the arms of a man even whose name I do not know, or anything of him.”
“That’s easy to fix. My name is Young,” I lied; “and I can let you have a case of Scotch at a price that will astonish you. I think maybe I could stand it if you call me Jerry. Most of the ladies I let sit in my lap do.”
“Jerry Young,” she repeated, as if to herself. “That’s is a nice name. And you are the bootlegger?”
“Not the,” I corrected her; “just a. This is San Francisco.”
The going got tough after that.
Everything else about this brown woman was all wrong, but her fright was real. She was scared stiff. And she didn’t intend being left alone this night. She meant to keep me there—to massage any more chins that stuck themselves at her. Her idea—she being that sort—was that I would be most surely held with affection. So she must turn herself loose on me. She wasn’t hampered by any pruderies or puritanisms at all.
Crime Stories Page 59