When Harlem Avenue was fifty yards up ahead, I figured it was time to start being clever. The traffic signal at the intersection was green for me; but instead of taking advantage of it, I cut my speed and inched toward the right-hand curb to give the cars behind me a chance to get through.
There were two: one very close, the other pretty well back. The guy on my tail seemed confused; instead of swerving past me to beat the light, he slowed too, and kept his position. The second car came up fast but had been too far back to cross before the signal changed, so it drew up alongside me at the crosswalk.
It was a big dark-blue LaSalle, with a lot of chrome and a minor gouge in the right front fender. There were two men in the front seat, but not enough light to make out the faces under the snap-brim felt hats. I kept my left hand on the wheel and put the other down slowly and felt around for the gun and put it to rest on the seat between my legs. . . .
The amber showed and the sedan leaped ahead with a drumming roar and became a dwindling taillight. I sat there and watched it fade until the horn blasts from the other car sounded impatient instead of polite.
I let out my breath and gave the car just enough gas to turn the wheels. By the time I was halfway across the intersection, the guy behind me was fit to be tied. He slammed his horn button a time or two more, then swung out and went by on my left. A fat man with his coat off was driving a Ford Tudor that couldn’t have been as old as it looked; and next to him, holding a baby. was a skinny woman in a house dress. The woman stuck her head out and yelled something as they went by, but all I got of it was a couple of words I don’t ordinarily use myself.
I grinned to show that Paul Pine had nerves of steel and put the gun back on the seat and got up to about fifteen miles an hour. The Glenhaven Cemetery was on my left now, behind an ornamental iron fence, and my headlights picked out an occasional white stone among the trees. It occurred to me that there seemed to be a lot of cemeteries in my life lately.
I lighted a cigarette with the dashboard lighter, meanwhile keeping my eyes open for the entrance to the dirt road mentioned in the letter to Baird.
It appeared finally, a good two city blocks past Harlem Avenue. An eight-foot red-brick wall flanked it on the left; that would be the western end of the cemetery. On the right side of the road were trees and bushes and grass, and enough weeds to hide the Taj Mahal.
I waited until there were no headlights in either direction, then cut my own lights, turned off Addison and rolled along the dirt road until I figured I was a hundred feet into it.
I let the motor die with a lonesome cough, and sat there with my hands resting lightly on the wheel and turned my head in little jerks from side to side. I could see a little but not enough. Not nearly enough. There were two very large cottonwoods just ahead, their upper branches tangled with those of a giant elm on the other side of the cemetery wall. Together they formed a tunnel that was like being inside a length of old stovepipe. It would have been. a good spot to bring a blanket and a blonde.
I sat there and dragged on my cigarette and listened to the little ticking noises the engine made as it cooled. After a minute or two a pair of crickets started up, trying to make things cheerful for me. They could have saved their strength. Even Spike Jones and his boys wouldn’t have done me much good right then.
A tree frog right over my head went ee-ee suddenly and I jumped and cracked my knee on the steering post. I said, “The hell with it,” out loud, and reached around and took my coat off the back of the seat and got into it. I put the .38 under my arm and released the door catch and got out into the road, leaving the brown-paper parcel where it was.
The road was packed pretty hard considering the previous night’s rain. I stretched my arms and took off my hat and scratched my head where it didn’t itch, just to be doing something, and put the hat back on my head. I walked ten feet up the road and turned around and walked back again to prove I wasn’t nervous. I proved it to everybody except me.
My wrist watch showed ten minutes short of one o’clock. I walked some more; fifteen feet this time. At that rate I’d be able to spit in a tiger’s eye by the time the ten minutes were up.
I went back to the car and leaned on the fender and practiced getting used to seeing in the dark. Bit by bit I was able to make out the shapes of bushes and assorted undergrowth, none of it worth the trouble. It was a little cooler now, not enough to help much, and there was a sort of tired breeze to make rustling noises among the weeds, like feet sneaking around. I would have made a hell of a pioneer.
Something made a noise behind me. It wasn’t much of a noise. About as loud as a cigarette ash falling on a snowdrift. I started to turn around.
I should have turned faster. Something came down on the back of my head. It couldn’t have been the Queen Mary’s anchor; there wasn’t enough water around.
I dived into a shoreless sea of black ink, pulled folds of black velvet over my head and burrowed into a coal pile.
I was out.
CHAPTER 9
Dim sounds . . . a sort of uneven chant, coming across a black universe of dull pain. Little specks of fire appeared, light-years away, danced crazily and disappeared. Then nothing. . . .
The chant came back. It became loud, very loud. The void was still there but this time it was filled with a greenish-yellow light impossible to look at. . . .
“ . . . other guy says, ‘Naw, I don’t care if she has one.’ So the first guy says, ‘Then let’s take them damn things off!’ Haw, haw, haw!”
“Ha, ha! That’s a good one, all right. That’s a good one.”
“Yeah, I kind of like that one myself. ‘Let’s take the damn things off!’ he says. Haw, haw, haw!”
I opened my eyes. I was in a room. It was a very nice room, too, although it took a while before I could see well enough to know that. It had oak paneling and a beamed ceiling and magenta carpeting. A heavy walnut desk with an inlaid top of blue leather stood in front of a square casement window of leaded glass squares. There were a few square-backed leather chairs scattered around, and a blue leather couch against one wall. I didn’t know about the couch right away because I was stretched out on it.
There were two men up near the desk, just standing there. The chant I had heard while getting past that sock on the head had been their voices.
From what I could make out, they were just a couple of guys. The one in the shapeless gray suit was fairly tall, with thick bowed shoulders, a lumpy face the color of fish bait, and coarse black hair that needed combing. The other man was slightly below medium height and his plump body was covered with a neatly pressed brown suit that should have been an inch larger all around. He had hips like a woman and a round, pink, patient face with features a shade too delicate for a man.
The big guy started another smoking-car story. It wasn’t as old as the one I’d heard the tag line on, but it wasn’t as funny either.
I moved a couple of fingers; not much, just enough to make sure orders from the head office could get through to them all right. I let my feet down to the floor and sat up. Immediately the room hit an air pocket and the light from the overhead fixture began to get fuzzy. I put both hands around one arm of the couch and closed my eyes. But the groan got out before I could do anything about it.
The bathroom ballad pulled up short, which kept my groan from being a total loss, and feet came across the carpet and stopped in front of me. I didn’t look up. I didn’t even open my eyes.
“You look a little rocky, pal.” A voice like that would have vocal cords made of sandpaper.
I didn’t say anything. I hardly even thought anything.
“You don’t feel like talking, hunh?”
I got my eyelids apart again. It wasn’t easy either. There were two muddy spots on the knees of my dark trousers. For some blurred reason those two spots made me almost as angry as the belt I had taken on the head. I said, “Which one of you bastards sapped me?” My voice sounded as if it was coming out of a well.
�
�You hadn’t ought to talk that way, pal. We your friends. We don’t hit you around none.”
Thin legs in gray pants. That would make it the pasty-faced one. I got my eyes up past his knees, his crotch, his belt, his green necktie. . . . It was the pasty-faced guy all right. The one with the hips was there too, off to one side a little.
I said, “Okay. You didn’t sap me. Somebody did. I think I’ll kind of go home.”
“Sure, pal.” I was being humored. “Only not right now. You ain’t no shape to get around.”
“Don’t tell me what kind of shape I’m in,” I said. I stood up. It took some doing, but I stood up. The guy with the fish-food face put a spatulate forefinger against my chest and gave it a little-bitty push and I sat down again, hard. The room moved around like a fat woman on a hard mattress and the light dimmed.
“You believe me now, hunh?” Pasty Face said, showing me his big chalk-white teeth. “You ain’t in good shape, honest. Maybe we talk a little while, you feel better, hunh?”
I don’t think he liked the way I looked at him. He pushed out the tip of his tongue and dislodged his cigarette butt. It fell on the rug but he ignored it. He tightened the slack line of his lips and grinned with cold menace. His hands opened and closed slowly at his sides. He said:
“It don’t look like you got nice manners, pal. Seems as if you should talk when I ask you something, hunh?”
I said two words. They were words that hardly anybody likes having said to them.
He brought around a hand that seemed mostly bones and laid it alongside my jaw so hard I fell off the couch. There had been nothing in his face to warn me so I could set myself for the blow. I tried to get up but there was too much rubber in my arms and legs. Then a couple of fingers hooked under the back of my collar, lifted me up and dumped me into a sitting position on the couch.
The fog lifted an inch at a time. That pasty face was looking down at me. It was the kind of face that peeps into bedroom windows. I gave my leg a jerk and slammed the toe of my oxford into his shin.
It hurt him. There was only one place I could have hurt him worse but I couldn’t get my foot quite that high. He let out a yell and staggered back and clawed a black leather sap from his hip pocket and swung it at my head like a tennis player making a flat drive.
But this time I had a chance to see it coming. I ducked under the blow and came off the couch, low, and put my shoulder into his gut. His breath whistled between his teeth and he fell on the floor, taking with him one of the leather chairs that happened to be in the vicinity.
He didn’t get up right away. For that matter, I didn’t either. My head felt like a discarded polo ball and somebody had been fooling with the lights again. . . .
“Pick him up, Cleve,” a voice said. I had heard that voice before—a hundred years before. It was a deep voice, a flat voice, a voice as dry as talcum powder.
A pair of not very strong hands slid under my armpits and hoisted me onto the leather couch once more. By this time I was willing to stay there.
There were three of them lined up in front of me: the little guy with the hips; Pasty Face (he was holding onto the back of a chair and bent over a little, his face even pastier than before and his eyes as mean as a slapped Sicilian); and the man I had met the night before behind a desk upstairs at the Peacock Club. Two hundred fifty pounds, six feet four. D’Allemand.
He said, “We meet again, Mr. Pine.”
I waggled my jaw experimentally and was pleasantly surprised when it didn’t fall in my lap. My head still ached, but dully now, like a last summer’s love affair.
D’Allemand tried again. “How are you feeling, sir?”
“What the hell do you care?” I said. It wasn’t very original. I was too used up to be original.
He reached out and swung a chair into position in front of me and lowered himself slowly onto it. With that bulk he would always lower himself slowly onto chairs. He took a loose cigarette from a pocket and gave it to me and struck a match. I filled my lungs with smoke and let it trickle slowly out and looked down into the caves where he kept his eyes.
He said, “There seem to be people who do not like you, Mr. Pine.”
I said, “I’ve got an ache in my head to tell me that. From the way your pasty-faced punk handles a blackjack I figure he put the ache there. Given the chance I’ll make him eat his sap without opening his mouth.”
Pasty Face growled something and took a step toward me. Without turning his head D’Allemand said, “Ownie,” softly and it froze my playmate where he stood.
To me, D’Allemand said, “I had you brought here, Mr. Pine, to get answers to a few questions that have been bothering me.”
“I don’t know any answers,” I said. “A man named Baird hired me to hand twenty-five grand to you for the release of a guy named Taggart. Right now I’d say the entire deal was rigged so you could get your hands on me. All that keeps me from being sure is that Baird actually gave me the twenty-five, and there are a lot of simpler ways for you to nab me if you wanted to.”
D’Allemand stared at me levelly. “Take my word for it: I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
It might have been the truth. I shrugged. “All right. What do you want to talk about?”
“I want to talk about a man. A man named Jerry Marlin.”
It got very quiet in the room. Nobody seemed to be breathing. D’Allemand’s deep-set eyes had sparks in them—small hot sparks that were probably reflections from the overhead light fixture. His two muscle boys stood there and stared at me too.
“You seem surprised, Mr. Pine,” D’Allemand said softly.
“Why not?” I said. “I can be surprised. What about Marlin?”
“You were looking for him last night.”
“We’ve been over that.”
“Do you know where he is now?”
“No.”
“Don’t lie to me, you son of a bitch.”
There was no heat in his words. That way it sounded worse.
“Flattery won’t get you anywhere,” I said.
He crossed his knees and looked at the nails of his left hand. His lips moved a little as if he was counting up to ten. Smoke spiraled gracefully up from the cigarette lost between the first and second fingers of his right hand.
“Perhaps the boys should work you over a little, Mr. Pine.”
I felt that one in my belly but I didn’t say anything.
Ownie, the lad with the toadstool complexion, folded the fingers of one hand and rubbed the knuckles lightly along a leg of his gray pants. He said: “It wouldn’t hurt none to try, boss.”
D’Allemand appeared to have made up his mind. He said, “Keep your hands off him,” and got off the chair and went over to a door in the opposite wall and went out.
Ownie and Cleve, the one with the hips, stood there and watched me. I watched them and twirled my thumbs and wondered what had happened to Baird’s bundle of C notes. Ownie made pawing motions at his shirt pocket and brought out a crumpled pack of cigarettes, lighted one and put back the pack without offering it to Cleve. I gathered that Cleve didn’t have any vices that would look good in public. Ownie threw the used match in my lap and said, “I don’t forget that kick in the shins, peeper.”
“Then don’t earn yourself another one.”
He thought about that and nodded his head. “I can wait. I’m good at waiting. You better get used to going without teeth, pal.”
I dropped my cigarette stub on the carpet and stepped on it. Five minutes went by, then the door opened again and D’Allemand came in carrying a folded newspaper.
He tossed it to me and said, “You will find it under the cartoon on page one, Mr. Pine.”
I knew what it was going to be while I unfolded the paper. The item carried a one-column head.
GIRL’S ESCORT VICTIM OF
MYSTERY SLAYING
Shortly before dawn yesterday, Gerald Marlin, 34, 1291 Dearborn Parkway, was shot and instantly killed in
front of an apartment building at 1317 North Austin Boulevard.
Marlin was accompanied by a Miss Leona Sandmark, who lives at the Austin Boulevard address, and had just driven the woman home from a round of night clubs. The couple was hurrying across the sidewalk to avoid an early morning shower when three bullets struck Marlin in the back, felling him instantly.
Terror-stricken, Miss Sandmark fled to her apartment and summoned the police, who found Marlin’s lifeless body where it lay in the rain.
Miss Sandmark, almost completely unnerved by the shock of her experience, told police she did not see the killer. Captain Locke of the Homicide Detail reports little is known about Marlin, but that an investigation is under way.
There was more, but that was all I needed just then. I folded the sheet back into its original creases and put it down on the couch and said:
“All right. I read it. Marlin was one of your boys and somebody shot him and you don’t like it. Where do I fit?”
He sat down on the chair across from me and took a small penknife with a platinum handle and six diamonds set in a circle on one side, and set about cleaning his nails. If I had had a knife like that, I would have pawned it and bought myself a Cadillac.
He finished his left thumb before he looked up and met my eyes. Very quietly he said, “Did you kill Marlin, Mr. Pine?”
I blinked. “Certainly not.”
“Who did?”
“I don’t know. How could I know?”
“You were there, Mr. Pine.”
“Who says I was there?”
He seemed a bit disappointed in me. He took his eyes off me, looked back at his left hand, and started work on the nail of his forefinger. Behind him, Ownie and Cleve shifted their feet a little, as if they wanted to sit down but didn’t dare without an okay from the boss.
“I am going to be frank with you, Mr. Pine,” D’Allemand said, talking to his nails. “I own several gaming locations in and around Chicago. Not many people know that I own them.
“Jerry Marlin was employed by me. His was a highly specialized vocation. He mingled with unattached women who came to my places, became friendly with them, acted as their escorts. When they wanted to gamble, he would bring them where it would be profitable to me. Will you have a highball?”
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