by Basil Copper
There was a rash of gaudy signs; Funeral Parlour, Eat at Joe’s, Hi-Lite Laundry. Civilization spitting out the last remnants of respectability. It wasn’t Skid Row but it was trying. Tucker stopped the car in a dirt yard outside a freight depot. A hooter sounded mournfully across the sunlit acres and there came the clitter-clatter of freight cars being shunted. A couple of negroes in brilliant red shirts went by at the end of an alley.
There was a whole mess of frame buildings; old women were sitting on the stoops of sagging porches. Paint was peeling from everything and the air smelled of stale cabbage and yesterday’s gravy.
“You sure this is the right place?” asked Tucker reflectively.
“Perhaps he likes to be private,” I said.
“You can say that again,” he said gloomily. “He ain’t likely to be disturbed here.”
He flicked an apple core over a board fence in disgust. It bounced on a pile of trash cans and a crowd of flies rose buzzing in the close air. The house we wanted, 7438 Folsom, was a big rambling frame building set back on a weed-grown pavement and sandwiched in between two crumbling brown-stone apartment blocks. I had seen such places in Dodge and some of the old Western cowtowns where you expect such picturesque survivals, but I hadn’t known they still existed in L.A. Still, I had been learning a lot of things in the past week.
We picked our way through screaming children, along a boardwalk and up some old wooden steps. 7438 had a big entrance hall, dark and dirty; the doors were painted in varying shades of chocolate brown, all of it peeling. A big negro passed us in the gloom as we went in through the wedged-open door. A frosted glass lobby had once contained clean windows. There was another door with a card pinned to it. It said: JANITOR. Tucker knocked. It sounded like drum-fire in the hall and I hoped no one upstairs had heard it.
There was a shuffling noise and an enormous woman peered out from behind the door suspiciously. As far as I could make out she was the same size all the way down. She had iron-grey hair, a face like Joe Stalin and a cigarette burned in a corner of her mouth. She kept the door on the chain.
‘‘Yeah,” she said. Her voice sounded like a cold chisel going through metal tubing. She didn’t take the cigarette out of her mouth. It was probably fixed, anyway.
“Apartment 22?” I asked. She jerked her thumb towards the ceiling. “Sixth floor back,” she said. She slammed the door and we heard her feet going away. She didn’t believe in shooting her mouth off.
“Nice old lady,” I said.
“You asking me or telling me?” said Tucker. We went on up. The smells seemed to get worse the higher we went. On the first floor there was more chocolate brown paint, doors with children crying behind them, an uncarpeted hallway. Dim bulbs burned on every landing; they only seemed to make the place darker. Footsteps echoed hollow on the bare boards, once or twice dim figures passed us in the gloom.
I felt the sweet bulge of my holster under my arm pit. We seemed to have been walking for about three hours and I could hear Tucker breathing heavily in this airless vault. We stopped for a moment about four flights up. A radio was blaring through paper-thin walls; I leaned against the door for a second and a fat cockroach scuttered away from my hand.
“No one in his senses would live here for choice,” whispered Tucker, his head against my ear. Pretty much my impression. Could be an accommodation address. There were a number of fascinating suppositions.
A board creaked as Dan Tucker moved his agile bulk and I followed him up the next flight of stairs. When we got to the sixth floor, I could see that the stairs still led upwards into the darkness. Down below, the stairwell was fretted by the bright sunlight which came through the open door of the hall; above us, sun spilled through a dusty skylight about a hundred feet higher up. In between the two extremes there was only shadow and the shapes of the stair railings printed in little stipples of light.
I saw Tucker had got his gun out so I eased mine out of the shoulder holster; I had a short-barrel fitting and it had the silencer already on. Tucker was still in front and I couldn’t get past him without making a heck of a noise. We went down the end of the corridor. Nothing stirred. There was a piece of paper pinned alongside the last door. It had a number typed on it; 22.
Tucker knocked. The raps went echoing down the stairwell. There was the faintest scuttering behind the door, then silence. I could feel the sweat trickling down me. I looked at Tucker and he looked at me. He tried the door-handle. I noticed he stood well away from the edge of the door, in the shelter of the wall. The door was locked. I held up my gun and he nodded. We changed places. I put four shots in around the lock.
The gun gave the faintest of sighs, the wood splintered and Tucker coughed loudly to cover the noise. We didn’t want the whole house in on us. Nevertheless I could hear the bullets going into the floor with loud smacks on the other side. Pieces of wood flew all over the corridor and the air was suddenly full of choking dust. Down below there came an angry rapping on the ceiling. There was still no reaction from inside the room. Tucker came over to my side.
He sort of leaned against the door. It held and then gave with a loud crack. He heeled it open quickly and flattened himself against the wall. From where I was standing I could see the corner of a table with crockery and the remains of a meal on it. My bullets had ploughed across the floor before embedding; the lino was scored and scorched and the holes the bullets made had converged, ending with a floorboard, splintered and pocked, reared on end. The Smith-Wesson did a lot of damage at close range.
We went through the door in a rush, fanning out each side in the gloom. Nothing moved except the blind in the faint breeze. Then there was a crash and a tinkle — I felt a needle scratch along my spinal cord. We turned round. The door-lock had fallen out of the wood and spilled over the floor. It still didn’t quiet my nerves. There was something damn funny about that room. There came an angry rapping from down below. Then a voice like the siren of the Queen Mary floated up the stairwell. I drifted out on to the landing. The janitress was standing in the hall, glaring upwards. I resisted a temptation to spit.
“Sorry, ma’am,” I said. “Hire purchase agents.”
She grunted. For a minute I thought she was coming up, but the stairs were too much. She went back in and slammed the door. I went back into the apartment, shut the door behind me and wedged it with a chair. Tucker had disappeared. I went through an open door and found a small kitchen. Tucker was looking thoughtfully out the window down into a back area. A fly couldn’t have got out that way. There were two doors leading off the kitchen. I opened the nearest one, slid my gun barrel round the corner and eased myself through. The room was used as a bedroom.
There was a mess of soiled sheets in one corner, stripped off an old frame bed; old fashioned wall paper, a frosted glass panel let into the window near the bed to blot out the brick wall of the area opposite. It only succeeded in being depressing. There was something else about the room too, but it took me a minute or so to locate it. Then I saw an ashtray on top of the dresser. There was a cigarette stub in the tray. It was still smoking.
A muscle fretted in my cheek. I could suddenly smell death in the room. There was no sound but the noise of a truck starting up, a long way across the block; that, and the faint slurring of a train, about a couple of miles off. It carried in the warm air. There was only one place in the room where anything could be concealed and that was the other side of the bed. I took a step around and then stopped.
No matter how many times it happens, you never get used to it. There was a black shoe sticking out from underneath the heap of bed linen. I didn’t have to see the built-up heel to know who it belonged to, but I had to make sure. I didn’t like touching the bedding with my bare hands, so I used the silencer on the gun barrel. The sheets parted smoothly, then fell away crimson and I was looking into the face of Captain Jacoby.
He looked surprised and very dead. Blood was still pumping from a big hole in his chest and the bullet had done a lot more damage com
ing out the other side. Jacoby’s face looked almost as astonished as Tucker’s. Neither of us said anything for a minute. A fly buzzed loudly in the silence and then settled on Jacoby’s head. I didn’t like that and flicked it off.
*
He still wore the brown suit and maroon socks. I fished in my pocket and presently came up with my piece of broken tooth. I went over to Jacoby and tucked it down into his breast pocket. I felt better after that.
Tucker grunted. “Damn silly thing to do,” he said. He reached down for the piece of tooth, walked over to the window and flung it into the area. He stood glaring moodily through the glass.
“This’ll stir up the Press. And the Commissioner,” he said savagely.
“Don’t tell me you mind,” I said mildly.
“About him?” he said. “No, it’s not that, it’s just that people like Jacoby get honest cops a bad name.”
I remembered what Margaret Standish had said about things being lost in pigeon holes and what Horse Jarvis, the drunk in the tank downtown had been telling me about Jacoby. We were slow, of course, wasting time, but we had some excuse. It had been quite a moment finding Jacoby; then we had the good cards in the pack — no one could get out of the building, because there wasn’t a fire escape, we commanded the only door.
The cigarette might have belonged to Jacoby; whoever killed him probably used a silencer because no one seemed to have been disturbed and we heard nothing on the way up; the blood still flowing meant that the killer either had to be still in the apartment or else he had been an Olympic sprinter to get away in the time. We both had the same idea at the identical moment. We went at the kitchen door at a fast lick. The second door leading off the kitchen was locked.
I went gum-shoeing silently back into the main room. The chair wedged against the door hadn’t been disturbed so no one had gone out. Anyway, I did what I should have done at first and tried all the doors and lockers in the apartment. There was nothing else in the place, only a few clothes and odds and ends. There was no other entrance and the doors led only into closets and storage space. There wasn’t even a phone anywhere and the toilet wasn’t big enough to house Toulouse-Lautrec. We went back into the kitchen and stared at the other door.
I knelt down and peered through the keyhole. Corny, I know and if anyone had been the other side he could have blown my head off. I could just see a dimly lit room beyond when I heard a scrabbling noise inside. I rolled aside as Tucker went at the door like an Aberdeen Angus in a lounge suit. No lock could have taken that sort of punishment and this was a flimsy affair. The door gave a shriek of protest and Tucker went through in a thunder of arms and legs.
I followed in a rush and blinked in the half-light. Nothing moved. I snapped on a switch. A bulb balefully competed with the light straggling in from behind long, thick curtains. Then there came a scrabbling again; I felt that slight tickling along the back of my neck. There was only one place it could be. Tucker padded silently over to a thick hessian curtain which blocked one window. He ripped it back and levelled his gun.
There was a sort of alcove. A man was half-seated in it. He had a sweat-soaked face and he had been trying to force up an old, distorted window frame with a kitchen knife.
He had raised it perhaps three inches before it had become hopelessly jammed. Not two feet beyond was the rusted balustrade of the only fire escape on this side of the building.
“You’d better come on out — you’re only wasting your time,” said Tucker, almost gently.
Paul Mellow shrugged with a defeated gesture, dropped the knife and followed us into the room. He looked a beaten man.
*
“I told you to stay away from amateurs,” I said. He sat in a cheap kitchen chair and looked at us with a yellow face. Tucker’s was set like concrete.
“You know this is a gas chamber job,” he said, jerking his thumb through the bedroom door. Mellow licked his lips and his pupils showed white all round.
“It was nothing to do with me,” he almost whispered. “I told them they’d never get away with it.”
“We know about Sirocco,” I told him. “He’ll be picked up in time. It’s the others who interest us. Who’s in back of this?”
“You’ve got to believe me,” said Mellow. “I know nothing about it. I just drive the car, get my money regularly.”
“If you’re in the clear how come you hang out in a crumby joint like this?” said Tucker.
“It was Johnny’s idea,” said Mellow. “This was just a contact place. I had to meet them here twice a week or collect mail and get my instructions.”
He gave Tucker his address; a fairly high-priced hotel over on Alameda Avenue. Tucker wrote it down. Then he went to phone. Mellow looked at me appealingly.
“They will believe me, won’t they … ?” His voice tailed off. I tried to look sympathetic. I don’t do it very well and it wasn’t successful.
“You could help by levelling with the Captain,” I said. “If it helps any I’ve been retained by your brother to try and keep you out of trouble. But now …” I shook my head. The act was going over great. His face lit up.
“Mandy?” He gripped my arm. “I might have guessed. He won’t let me down. He always was a good guy.”
“Too good for a cheap punk like you,” I told him. “Only chance you’ve got is to turn State’s. Then we may be able to do something.”
The hopeless look came back into his face. “I can’t do that. I ain’t got much choice. Go to the gas chamber legally, or get rubbed out unofficially. It all adds up to the same thing. Either way, it don’t help me none.”
I sighed. “Let’s skip the rest for a minute. Whoever killed Jacoby can’t have been gone long. Let’s assume that Jacoby was working in with Sirocco, tipping them off about police information, that sort of thing. He got a cut, same as you. The boys got tired and finished him off and left you to pay the bill.”
Mellow’s eyes flickered. I felt pretty sure this was the truth and kept on at him.
“Whoever put the big chill on him left only a few minutes ago.”
Mellow looked up from the chair. “I don’t see how you could have missed him. He must have passed you in the hall.”
That made me think but it would have to wait for a bit. Tucker came back in the room. We sat down and watched Mellow. He sat and watched us.
*
The howl of prowl-car sirens was still splitting the air. Boots were thundering on the stairs, big cops cursed at the heat and the height, flash-bulbs were popping.
Said Tucker, “For Chrissake keep those reporters out.” A voice echoed down the stair well. “All right, boys, you’ll get all the news at the four-thirty conference.”
In the kitchen Mrs. Five-by-Five was going over Paul Mellow’s history, molecule by molecule, between crocodile tears. She peered over my shoulder into the bedroom. Jacoby’s feet were visible and the fingerprint boys were dusting all round.
“The poor captain … he’s dead?” she asked me.
“He’ll get used to it,” I said.
“He’ll have to,” said Tucker. The door opened and MacNamara came in. He looked at me with a tired expression.
“You again,” he said.
“I got the TV rights,” I said. He looked at me sharply and went on in. He took a white coat out of his bag and went to work. I went out in the hall and used the pay phone. I got Mandy Mellow.
“Faraday. You’d better come on over,” I told him. I filled him in on the details. He thanked me and rang off. I went on back to the kitchen. The din was worse, if anything; Mellow sat in the chair. Tucker had been joined by two other detectives and they were taking it in turns to question him. McGiver was there, too, standing in the background. He nodded at me.
“Looks like you got yourself a new boss,” I said.
“Looks like it,” he said. He didn’t sound too tragic about it.
I went into the hall. Just one more flight up the stairs ended in a landing. There were some wooden steps up and t
hen a wood and frosted glass door with a rusted lock. The key was in the lock. The door led to a small floored area surrounded by green painted iron railings.
There was washing waving languidly in the heavy atmosphere and evidence of other things too, but what the hell, it was fresh air. I stood over in the corner, in the lee of a chimney stack and stared away through the heat haze to the freight yards and the shimmer of L.A. beyond. Presently I saw a glimmer of light about a quarter of a mile away and then a brilliant scarlet roadster hove into view; it threaded the blocks like some enormous beetle shining in the sun and stopped almost directly underneath me. Mandy Mellow had arrived.
*
I sat in the passenger seat of the scarlet Caddy and waited for Mandy to come out; there was a battery of controls that wouldn’t have disgraced the flight deck of a DC8 and the only thing missing was a TV screen. I wondered idly why Paul Mellow hadn’t just followed along in his brother’s shadow. All he had to do was shovel up the greenbacks as fast as they came over the tables; it was like printing your own money. Then I saw Mandy Mellow coming.
“How did you make out?” I asked him. He gave me a thin smile as he climbed into the driving seat. He held out his hand. “Many thanks,” he said. “I owe you a lot, Faraday.”
He smoked silently, flipping his used match stick in a moody arc over the windshield.
“I think we might do a deal,” he said finally. He wrote me a cheque on a sort of folding desk which came down out of the dashboard. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a typewriter pop out of a cubbyhold too. The cheque was about five times what the job was worth, but I took it. There wasn’t anything to say.
He turned towards me. He had put on a pair of dark glasses and it was impossible to make out the expression of his eyes.