The Complete Casebook of Cardigan, Volume 4: 1935-37

by Frederick Nebel

Shade took a pull at his cigarette. “What’s that got to do with me?”

  “I thought you’d be interested, in case Flush owed you some money.”

  Shade kept his cigarette between his flat bloodless lips and raised his pale blank eyes. “You been drinking?”

  “I always drink. What’s the connection?”

  Shade got up and walked peacefully around the room, taking meditative sucks at his cigarette. He stopped and stared blankly at Cardigan, and then said in his dry, unhurried voice, “Well, I’m not interested.”

  He sat down at his desk, picked up a pencil, and began adding a column of figures.

  Cardigan said, “You don’t have to show off, Steve. I know you can add.”

  Shade tossed aside his pencil and stared blankly into space with a kind of patient resignation.

  “It’s this,” Cardigan went on. “Flush is in debt at the hotel. That means he’s in debt other places. Is he in debt to you?”

  “No.”

  Cardigan watched the rusty, expressionless face for a moment, then said, “You keep books, Steve.”

  Shade looked up at him. “Well?”

  “Suppose you show me McMann’s account.”

  Shade replied matter-of-factly, “My books are private business and suppose you cut out the clowning and take the air. I don’t know what you’re driving at, but I never got beyond the sixth grade, so I guess it’s over my head.”

  Cardigan leaned straight-armed on the desk, his eyes narrowed. “Just Flush McMann’s account, Steve.”

  “No.” Shade waved his bony hand. “It’s a rule I keep, and I’m not going to break it now. McMann don’t owe me anything. Take it or leave it. But don’t expect me to prove it. I don’t have to.” He stood up, smoothed down the points of his white waistcoat, said in his level dry voice, “You can find your way out. Find it.”

  “Okay,” Cardigan said, and turned and strode to the door. But he did not go out. He locked the door, pivoted, and headed back darkly toward the desk. Shade reached for an electric button and Cardigan threw his cigar and Shade ducked to avoid being hit in the face. The cigar bounced off his shoulder. Sparks showered and Cardigan came around and stepped on the cigar, on the sparks. Shade’s eyes did not change expression, but in some undefinable way his rusty face looked strangely sinister.

  Cardigan’s voice was low, blunt. “I knew Madge McMann when she was so high, sweetheart, and there’s a bad smell in the air somewhere. I don’t know just where it is and if I have to step on a few sharpshooters like you to find it, I’ll step on ’em. I ask you a simple question and you sit there like a lousy wooden Indian. Where’s your book?”

  Stony-faced, Shade said, “Do you know what you can do?”

  “Your safe’s over there,” Cardigan said, pointing. “Open it and get out the book.”

  Shade’s voice was almost laconic. “You can go to hell.”

  “I can but I like it here better. Listen, you—” He slapped his hand down hard on Shade’s bladelike shoulder and took hold of a handful of material there.

  “Take your hand off,” Shade said evenly.

  “Don’t worry about my hand—I’ll wash it afterward.”

  “You’re trying like hell to insult me.”

  Cardigan said, “If a guy said to me the things I’ve been saying to you, baby, I’d kick his teeth down his throat. You’re just acting cool, calm, and collected because you haven’t the insides to get stinking mad enough to take a poke at me. What’s holding you back? I’m on your territory and there’s probably two dozen guys in the building’d pile on me soon as you raised a squawk. So what’ve you got to lose?”

  Shade’s face remained expressionless, but he said, “Boil all that down and what does it spell? Crap.”

  “You’ve got the lines, Steve, but I don’t think you’ve got what it takes to back them up. You might roll the yokels in the aisle, but—Listen, I want that book,” Cardigan cut in suddenly, savagely, his thick brows snapping together above his nose. He straight-armed Shade against the wall with such force that a picture hanging there was jarred lopsided.

  Shade’s eyes jigged for an instant, but then returned to their normal blank expression. Cardigan blocked him, saying somberly, “I’ve got to remind you, buddy, that a gal I knew as a kid died tonight and not by her own hand. If I have to break your lousy neck to get that book, I’ll break it. I’m not just on a case for the Cosmos Agency. I’m not just checking up for the Triple State Insurance. My heart’s in this case, Shade, and your wooden-Indian act pains the pants off me.”

  The eye is not the only medium of revealing a man’s fright. Shade’s eyes remained level, blank; nothing could be read into them. But round his mouth there was a twist of fear, and a pulse was beating in his throat. Cardigan’s hand shot outward, clamped on Shade’s throat; he lifted Shade an inch off the floor and plastered him against the wall.

  “The book,” he said grimly.

  Shade nodded, his face flushed with blood that welled suddenly beneath his dry rusty skin. Cardigan let him go and Shade stumbled to the safe. He coughed, hacked. He worked the combination with dry, nervous fingers. Then he turned the handle. Instantly bells began ringing near and far and Shade spun away from the safe, ran to the far side of the room, got behind a table. The bells kept on ringing.

  Cardigan’s lips curled. “You started those bells!”

  “When I turned that handle,” Shade said.

  Fists pounded on the outside of the door and Cardigan wheeled toward it. His hand slid for his gun, but he checked his draw; he knew it would be suicide to show a gun in this place. Besides, the club was filled with people in no way connected with it—women, men, who had come here to eat, dance, gamble. The door burst in and whanged back against the wall and men streamed into the room, some with drawn guns.

  Cardigan threw the light switch, plunging the room into darkness. He could hear the startled, angry outcries of the men. He strode toward the doorway, which was bathed in light from the corridor. All but two of the men had swept into the room. These hovered uncertainly in the doorway. Cardigan hit them with the speed of a trip-hammer, stepped between them as they fell, and vaulted over the banister. He landed halfway down the staircase, stumbled, and carried a man with him to the bottom.

  Three men waited at the bottom. One of them swung a club as Cardigan rose and Cardigan shot his head to one side, dodged the blow, and heard the club bark against the newel post. Another man lashed out with his foot toward Cardigan’s stomach, and Cardigan shifted, took the blow along his thigh, hit the man twice in the face with blows so close together that they seemed like one. Another man heaved a chair and Cardigan caught it in midcareer, kept it swinging, and then let it fly up the stairs at three men who were pounding down from above. It stopped all three of them. He slapped a smallish man contemptuously in the face and strode toward the foyer. A gang of five had reorganized and started after him and he had to break into a run. As he reached the doorway leading to the foyer he ripped off the heavy portières, turned and flung them into the faces of the running men. The men’s arms flailed, one of them tripped, and the others sprawled on top of him.

  Women were running about in the foyer, jabbering and making small terrified outcries. One of them, her jaw shaking, held out her jewels to Cardigan. He never noticed this, so intent was he on reaching the door. He rolled the women out of his way. One of them, a hefty redhead, had a slipper in her hand, and was saying, “One of those guys you socked was my husband!” She brought the pointed heel of it smack down on Cardigan’s head. It was like being hit with a wedge of wood. Cardigan’s eyes seemed to pinwheel in their sockets. He waded through the women toward the door, heard the rush of men in the corridor. His hand slapped on the door and he pulled it open, saw two uniformed cops standing on the sidewalk below in listening, curious attitudes.

  Cardigan shouted, “Police! Help!” He ran down the steps to meet them, pointed back toward the door. “A fight in there! A lot of guys fighting!”

 
; The cops gripped their nightsticks and charged through the doorway. The redheaded woman was wildly flailing the air with her slipper and it connected accidentally with the ear of one of the cops. He swung and chopped with his nightstick and the redhead went down.

  “Oh!” cried another woman. “You hit a woman!”

  “Geez,” said the cop, “I thought it was a guy with a red beard pointed toward the ceilin’.”

  Cardigan reached Central Park West and walked south, his tie far over to one side and his hat crushed down over his forehead. As he passed beneath a streetlight he looked thoroughly disgusted. He had not wanted to pull a gun in the Orion, and he knew that if he had remained they would have beaten him to a pulp. His only out had been to get out, fast. Now he began to wonder if he had done right in going there in the first place. A wild hunch—a blind stab in the dark—that had come to nothing. Yet he could not get certain suspicions out of his head.

  A panhandler shuffled up and said, “Say, chief, how about—”

  “Beat it!” Cardigan snapped. But a few steps farther on he stopped, turned about, and said, “Here.” He tossed a quarter that rang on the sidewalk, glimmered beneath a streetlight. The bum slapped it down with his foot.

  Cardigan hooked a taxi and rode as far as the Burley. He looked in the office for Meyer, didn’t find him, and went down to the bar. Meyer was having a beer.

  “Hey,” said Meyer, “that guy McMann is taking it pretty hard. He was in the bar here about an hour, drank five Scotches in a row, and I had to lug him up to his apartment. I couldn’t make him understand about locking the door, so I left him on the bed and locked the door from the outside.”

  “Got the key?”

  “Yeah. I was intending to take another look at him in a few hours.”

  “Let’s have the key.”

  Cardigan went up to the fourteenth floor, keyed his way into 1404. One light was burning in the living room and a low nightlight was burning in the bedroom. McMann, fully dressed, lay sprawled on the bed in sodden slumber. Cardigan stood looking thoughtfully at him for a couple of minutes, then moved slowly to the bed. He reached over and cautiously drew a wallet from McMann’s inside pocket, backed slowly into the living room, and stopped beneath the single burning light.

  He found in the wallet two ten-dollar bills, a lot of club cards, a sweepstakes ticket, some of McMann’s personal cards. But there was nothing that aroused his interest, except one card, an Orion Club card, with Shade’s home address on back. Replacing the contents of the wallet he inadvertently dropped one of the cards into a wastepaper basket. He bent down, picked out the card and a rumpled ball of paper—leaving the basket empty. He remembered that on his last visit to the apartment the basket had been completely empty. He opened the rumpled ball and found that it was a piece of hotel stationery containing figures written in a scrawled, unsteady hand.

  Hotel $610.00

  Liquor 115.00

  Tailor 205.50

  Doctor 315.00

  Shade 48,000.00

  Dresses 425.00

  $49,670.50

  Cardigan thrust the paper into his pocket. His eyes fell on an automatic pistol that lay on the desk and he picked it up, weighed it in his palm, peered toward the bedroom door. He shook his head ruefully and laid it down again, then returning to the bedroom, he slipped the wallet back into McMann’s pocket.

  When he walked into the bar ten minutes later Meyer was paying up. Cardigan gave him the key.

  “How’s he?” Meyer asked.

  “Dead to the world. I closed and locked the window and jammed the lock. Flush might take it in his head to follow suit if he feels low enough. I was going to take his gun away, too, but I changed my mind and left it. He might—well, it might come in handy.”

  He went up to the lobby and as he was heading for the door the clerk on duty called, “Mr. Cardigan.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I didn’t think you were in the building. Sergeant Green phoned about a minute ago and said I should tell you to come over right away to Thirty-ninth Street, between First and Second Avenues. I said you weren’t around and—”

  Cardigan cut him short with, “Thanks,” and slapped his way through the swing door.

  Chapter Four

  The Leopard’s Spots

  IT was in front of a row of darkened garages, a dismal fag end of the East Side. Cardigan, coming around from First Avenue after having left his taxi at the corner, saw the cluster of automobile lights, the bulky shapes of men. There was an ambulance on the scene. Abe Green had his hard straw hat in his left hand and was scratching the top of his head with his right. The ambulance men were lifting a body on a stretcher. Green pointed.

  “Plavy,” he said.

  Cardigan could see the light gray suit with the pinstripe, the quiet face of the dead man.

  Green pointed up the block to where a light burned in front of an all-night garage. “Guy up there said he heard running feet and caught a glimpse of two guys streaking past on the other side of the street, one of them—this guy, Plavy, I guess—about twenty yards in the lead. The other guy yelled, ‘Stop!’ but Plavy kept on. The garage guy stood in his door and watched them fade away, but before they reached First Avenue he heard three shots.” Green nodded to the ambulance. “Plavy was shot three times in the back. I was wondering if it was Flush did it.”

  Cardigan shook his head. “I just left him ten minutes ago, drunk and sound asleep. Did the garage guy get a look at the guy who was chasing Plavy?”

  “Uh-uh. Too dark.” Green put his hat back on. “Well,” he said, “we wanted Plavy and we got him, but we ain’t got him the way we wanted him, and the way we got him”—he shook his head—“don’t make sense. I sure expected it was Flush that nailed him, but you say Flush is drunk and asleep, so that’s out and now I got to go to the trouble of thinking hard again.”

  The ambulance doctor called him and Green walked over to the ambulance. Cardigan lit a cigarette and tossed the match to the sidewalk, and when he looked down, casually, an instant later, he saw that a piece of paper lying there had caught on fire, and in the small glow he saw some marks on the paper. He slapped the flame out with his foot, picked up the paper, and moved over in front of the headlights of one of the parked cars. Only a corner of the paper had burned and he saw that it was a piece of Hotel Burley stationery. On it was printed in ink the words, “Tips, June 9th,” and beneath these words were seven entries in amounts ranging from ten cents to a quarter. Cardigan shrugged, turned the sheet over, and saw several pen-and-ink sketches.

  Green called across the sidewalk, “Hey, I’m going over the precinct, Jack.”

  “Okay.” Puzzled, Cardigan crammed the sheet of paper into his pocket.

  Fifteen minutes later he walked into a bar on Forty-fifth Street, ordered a double rye, and drew the paper from his pocket. The sketches were all of the same face, drawn from various angles—a man’s face, the hair inked in black. Somewhere, sometime, he had seen that face. He had another drink and continued to brood over the sketches, racking his memory. He shook his head, sighed, downed a third drink. And then his eyes started in their sockets. He remembered. Bert—the fellow who had first accosted him at the Orion and who had led him up to see Shade.

  Cardigan went out of the bar like a blustering wind. He walked to Fifth Avenue, hopped into a taxi at the corner, and gave the address of the Orion. When the taxi braked sharply in front of it Cardigan stepped out, saw the place was completely dark—there was no glimmer of light anywhere in the building. He remembered the address he had seen in McMann’s wallet—the Orion Club card with Shade’s home address written on the back. He got back into the cab and said, “Shoot through the Park at the Sixty-sixth Street transverse and let me off at Park Avenue and Seventieth.”

  THE cab entered Central Park at Sixty-sixth Street, but the east end of the transverse emptied into Sixty-fifth. The cab went north on Fifth Avenue and then over east to Seventieth and Park. Cardigan got out and stood on the cor
ner taking quick, hard puffs at a cigarette. The avenue was almost deserted, only a scattering of autos moved. The lights of the tall buildings looked cool in the mellow summer sky. Cardigan crossed to the northeast corner of Seventieth, walked north several blocks, and then turned right.

  He entered the large apartment building and walked down three steps into a low gray-and-chrome lobby that had square pillars of mirrored glass. At one end was a small black marble desk and on it stood a couple of phones. A clerk behind the desk was sorting mail.

  “These house phones?” Cardigan asked.

  “Yes.”

  Cardigan picked up one of them, turned his back on the clerk, took off the receiver but held the hook down with his left index finger. He said in a loud voice, “Mr. Shade’s apartment.” He waited a moment and then said into the mouthpiece, “Steve. This is Jack. I’m down in the lobby. I’d like to see you…. Okay. I’ll be right up.” With the hook still held down, he slipped in the receiver, put back the instrument, and started off. But a few yards farther on he turned and called out, “By the way, what’s Mr. Shade’s apartment?”

  “Ten-twelve,” the clerk said.

  An elevator car full of chromium and mirrors hoisted Cardigan to the tenth floor. It was not much of a walk to 1012 and in a minute he was plugging his thumb against a shiny pearl button imbedded beside the door.

  Shade, in trousers and stiff shirt, but collarless, opened the door and though his mouth sprang open in surprise no sound emerged—for Cardigan was already denting Shade’s stiff shirtfront with the muzzle of his gun. He stepped in, closed the door, and motioned for Shade to move down the inner corridor. The corridor was rather long, with a closed door at the end, but on the right, near the closed door, an open archway led into a vast living room with large casement windows framing the city and the sky. The room was empty.

  Cardigan’s voice was low, threatening. “You the only one in the apartment?”

  “Yes.”

  “You want to be damned sure of your answers, Shade, because I’m feeling my oats.”

  He tapped Shade’s pockets and pushed him on into the living room. Shade’s rusty face was expressionless, wooden, and his eyes, pale, blank, moved across Cardigan’s face in a curious manner that seemed to lack completely any hint of curiosity.