by Henry, Kane,
“Phone?” I said.
He pointed at a slender table with a phone on it in a dark corner of the room and he said, “Remember what we talked about before, Mr. Chambers.”
I called the number and I said, “Mr. Ginsburg, please,” to a man’s voice that answered.
“Not in.”
“When do you expect him?”
“Can’t say, bud.”
“Look here. I’m a customer.”
“Sorry, bud. He’s out of town. It’s a few months now.”
“Well, all right. Where can I reach him? It’s important.”
“Listen, bud. You’re a customer, you know that Xavier. He don’t ask nobody nothing and he don’t tell nobody. He just ups and goes and nobody knows where or why. If you want action, come down to the office and introduce yourself. If he owes you any money, bring your slips in and we’ll check and the office’ll pay it. Good-by, bud.”
“Thanks.”
Curtis said, “Well?”
“He’s been out of town for the past several months. They don’t know where.” I sat down again. “Well, what about him?”
Curtis folded his hands. “Eric Gorin introduced them about a year ago. How Gorin got to know him, I don’t know. He’s a dark, slender man with expressive hands and shining black hair. Rochelle was fascinated with him, and a very good pair they were. They carried on for about six months and then she tired of him and dropped him. But that one wasn’t easy.”
“You mean for once, not looks, not charm, not money, not influence, none of it worked.”
“He threatened blackmail. He threatened to come here and expose her before her husband.”
Conrad came in with the bag, set it down wordlessly and went out.
Curtis said, “I want you to take that valise. It may be of some help.”
“Yes. Please go on.”
“One evening, he came here. We were having dinner. I could see by her face that she had not expected that he would come. But she got hold of herself quickly. She asked him if he had anything to say to me and he replied that he had. She said, very coolly, ‘Please proceed and get it over with. I don’t want you dirtying up my house.’ He might have been bluffing up to then, but after that, well, he just started talking and waving his hands and making all sorts of faces. He blurted many despicable things. I was transfixed. Two reprehensible depraved beings, here, in my home, at my table. It was nauseating.
“When he stopped, she asked bitterly, ‘Are you through?’ He said, ‘Yes, I’m through here, but I’m not through with you.’ ‘Then get out of my house, you black filthy bastard, and take this with you’ (those were her words), and she flung a long bread knife with all her force and as luck would have it, it caught him in the shoulder and penetrated at least four inches.”
He was pale again with thin sweat on his face. He brought his hand to his left shoulder in a gesture: “Xavier tore it out, the blood spreading right through to his jacket, and he flung it back at her violently and he said, ‘I’ll kill you. I swear it,’ turned and quit the house.”
“Folksy people,” I said, unnecessarily.
“On top of that, Dick, who has the freedom of the grounds, got wind of what was going on, as dogs do, and attacked him savagely as he came tearing out of the house. Lee, Conrad and myself had all we could do to drag him off. And all the time we heard the sound of her laughter as she watched from the window. Dick finished what she had begun. He laid that shoulder bare to the bone. Gaspard, or Ginsburg, refused first aid and refused a doctor. He got into his car, and roared off. That was the last I saw of him.”
“Nice,” I said. “Nice.”
“That was about six months ago.”
I said, “Weren’t you afraid he’d come back here some night?”
“I didn’t care, one way or the other. I know that he called on the telephone once or twice. He asked to speak with me and of course I wouldn’t talk with him. But I didn’t expect him here. Not with Dick around.”
“It didn’t have to be here,” I said. “Do you know where this fellow lives?”
He took out a flat brown wallet from his bosom pocket and he withdrew a card and he handed it to me. “Yes, I do. Right here on Long Island. Not very far from here, as a matter of fact.”
I looked at the card. It was one of his own, smudged, a little bent, and on the reverse side, scrawled in ink, was “Six, Boughage Road.”
“May I keep this?”
“Certainly.”
“Then I’ll be going now. It is getting late for a fellow who has a date with Miss Wilde.”
“I’ll get a cab for you.” He went to the telephone. “And don’t forget the bag.”
Conrad brought my hat.
7
AT THE railroad station I checked the suitcase and bought a directory and found that Boughage Road ran only two blocks and was bisected by a Bryant Boulevard. I chose a number on Bryant Boulevard about five streets from Boughage Road and I called a taxicab and said: “Four hundred Bryant Boulevard.”
I paid the driver and he rolled off and I looked around.
There were shabby bungalows and wooden shacks and tiny brick houses, all set apart, isolated, most of them boarded up.
I stamped along a pebble-strewn uneven roadway, kicking up dry red dust and it got more desolate as I poked along. There was no person in sight.
Finally it ended. Beyond were marshes.
I walked back very slowly and stopped at the first intersecting byroad which was a narrow rutted path and I noticed, then, that there were two crossed wooden slats, lettered in faded white and nailed to a tree. I was barely able to discern that I had been walking on “BRYANT BD” and that the intersecting path was “BOUGHAGE.”
The path ended, to my left, in a still pool of oily water, blotched with large patches of green scum. An ancient, ramshackle, gabled, slatted house rose from the water on mildewed poles. It looked deserted.
To my right, at the edge of the swamp, on the opposite side of the roadway, stood a narrow rust brick house, alone.
I went to my right.
The house had four sandstone steps and the numeral 6 was stenciled on the third one from the bottom. I ran up the four steps and looked at a red paneled door and pushed a bell. I heard a faint rasping ring inside.
There was no answer.
I went down the steps slowly and turned and faced the house with my hands in my pockets and looked it over. It was two stories high, not wide nor deep, and it had six or seven rooms all told, no more. There was no fence.
I walked all around the house. It was surrounded, rotunda-like, by very high, unkempt, untrimmed hedges, about a foot from its walls. All the windows were closed and all the shades were drawn. South was the back of the house with three wooden steps and a door which was locked.
On the marsh side, suddenly, a sharp thin glint of light broke from a bush and I went over and parted the thick hedge and drew out an oblong metal box and I turned it over in my hands. It was heavy, an expensive, compactly constructed strongbox of excellent workmanship; locked. I carried it by the handle, like a lunch box, and went back to the rear of the house.
I used the box and broke a hole in a window near the catch.
I walked quietly through a kitchen and through a foyer and into a large living room. The house stank. I went to a window quickly and undid the clasp and opened it top and bottom, keeping the blind down. The blind rustled hollowly as air blew in.
Someone had given the living room a going-over but thoroughly. There were two small library tables and the drawers of both of them were on the floor amongst a wild litter of papers. A tall secretary was open, papers strewn over it, drawers gaping, emptied. All the books of a low modern bookcase had been withdrawn and were piled on the floor in scrambled heaps. The pillows of the couch and of all the easy chairs had been torn and removed and were scattered about and both the couch and the easy chairs were overturned, underbellies ripped and exposed.
There was a large round table in the ce
nter of the room on which was a thick embroidered doily and on that was an empty whiskey bottle and two glasses. I smelled at the bottle and the glasses, like a detective, and it meant nothing, and I put the strongbox on the table and I walked back through the living room and into the little foyer and through a doorway on the right and into a hall and up a steep narrow stairway. The smell was more pronounced.
The first door was a bathroom and the second and third were bedrooms, in shapeless confusion, dresser drawers and closet doors open, clothes snarled and strewn, mattresses torn and turned up, pillows open on the floor.
I opened a fourth door and I almost fell in. A suffocating putresscent stench hauled off and hit me, and my Adam’s apple rammed to the top of my throat and stuck like a fishbone. I slammed the door shut and went to a hall window and unlocked and opened it and hung half out and waited for the knots in my stomach to come unloosened. Then I went to the bathroom.
I took the utility handkerchief from my back pocket and the fancy handkerchief from my breast pocket and put them in the sink and let them soak up cold water. I tied them over my nose up to my eyes, train-robber fashion, and went back to that bedroom.
I saw the body on the floor, but I went straight for the window. It was unlocked. I raised it and leaned out and breathed a few breaths and without actually thinking about it I saw that I was directly over the shrubbery in which I had found the metal box. I could see the break in the bush.
I put the handkerchief back over my face.
Despite the state of decomposition and the greenish-yellow spots on the waxlike skin, I was pretty sure that the unconcerned face that grinned up at me had been that of Xavier Hoy Ginsburg. He lay on the floor, near a telephone table, parallel to and alongside the bed, a small man with black hair. The fingers of one brown hand were touching the foot of the table. He was completely dressed in a blue serge suit with no vest, and near his belt, the small dark brown stain about the one very tiny hole in his white shirt, was blood, not much blood.
I bent and flipped back his jacket and withdrew stuff from the inside pocket and skipped back to the window and rolled the handkerchief onto the bridge of my nose and, leaning out, I examined a picture post card and two envelopes postmarked about two months back. One envelope contained a telephone bill and the other was a bit of advertising literature from a loan company begging you to please come and take their money. The post card was from Atlantic City and said: “Feeling fine. Hope you too. Nick.” Both letters were addressed to Xavier Hoy Ginsburg, 6 Boughage Road, Long Island, New York. The card was addressed to Xavier Hoy Ginsburg at the New York City address.
I used the handkerchief again and dropped the envelopes and post card near the body. Then I got out of there.
I picked up the strongbox, downstairs, and went out of the house the way I came in, through the broken kitchen window.
I lost my way and wandered around for a while until I found paved streets and sidewalks and a taxi. I went to the railroad station and picked up Curtis’ bag.
It was dark when I got back to the City.
I went to a phone booth and called Police Headquarters and said, “There’s a dead man at Six Boughage Road, Long Island; Boughage, B-O-U-G-H-A-G-E,” and hung up.
8
I UNLOCKED the door of my apartment and switched on the lights and put Curtis’ bag and the strongbox in a closet. I went to the bedroom and changed my shoes and socks. I wiped my face with the bottom of a clean white terry cloth robe and ran my fingers through my hair and switched off all the lights and went out.
I took a cab to Broadway and Forty-ninth Street.
I was looking for Barney Green and I knew I would find him.
Every evening at Broadway and Forty-ninth Street, a block from Madison Square Garden, handsomely dressed men gather and linger. Their suits are beautifully tailored and their ties are long and lovely. Talking, their faces relax but the lips stay hard and the eyes are always vague and opaque like shuttered windows in empty houses. These are the gambling gentry (with many fingers in other pies), the professional takers of bets, the big-money guys with the pink jowls and cigars and the slick articles that are the middlemen and the little runners with squint eyes and wise faces and pimples on their cheeks.
Barney was in Lindy’s, I was told, and I met him coming out. “That cheesecake,” he said. “Heaven.”
I said, “Can we talk a minute?”
He took my hand, like Mama holding Junior when they cross the street, and he led me to the darkened-windowed doorway of a closed haberdashery shop. He took out a cigar and wrapped his lips around it and lit it and the large round diamond on his pudgy pinky glittered.
“Shoot, boy.”
“Know a guy called Xavier Hoy Ginsburg?”
“I know him. Strictly a phony. What else?”
“Nothing else about him. But in case you miss it in the papers or the papers don’t use it — he’s dead. Jobbed. A few months ago, I think. And I tell you because I like you, and maybe you can use it yourself.”
“Thanks, friend. What else?”
“I’m trying to locate Al Warmy.”
Barney rubbed his nose. “You know Al is on the up-and-up, friend? You know that?”
“I’ve heard,” I said.
“You put the pinch on him once, didn’t you? A time ago?”
“That isn’t true, Barney.”
“He thinks you did.”
“He’s not thinking right.”
He squinted at me through cigar smoke. “Level, Pete? You know me.”
I put a finger on a button of the white on white shirt and I poked it gently. “I had nothing to do with the pinch. Fact is, I got pinched myself at the time only it didn’t stick. I was working on a case and I was working all around Al Warmy but he himself didn’t mean one damn thing to me and I had nothing to do with the pinch. Clear?”
“Clear enough for me,” Barney said.
I knocked on the door.
A thick voice said, “Mac?”
I said, “Yeah.”
He opened the door. I put both feet in and shoved it with my shoulder and shut it behind me and I waited there with my hands in back of me on the doorknob.
He stood still a moment with his mouth open and then he said simply and flatly:
“I don’t want you here, Mister. Screw.”
He had a voice that grated like he had a throat full of moth balls, a whiskey whisper. He was squat and powerful. He was short-legged and bowlegged and hairy, with long arms like an animal. He had a face like a folded hat.
He said, “Out.”
“Look, Al.”
He flicked a long arm at me, fast, before I could duck, and my nose began to bleed.
He said, “Out.”
“We’ve got business, Al.”
A thin trickle of blood slid down to my mouth and I licked at it. I didn’t move from the door. His face took on an intense furrowed look like a man with his last match monkeying with a cigarette on a windy street. He walked to a table and threw me a dirty napkin.
“Wipe your nose.”
“Thanks, Al. All right if I sit down?”
“That ain’t all right. I want you out. I don’t want no trouble with no law.”
“I’m not law, Al.”
“I just don’t want no trouble with no law,” he said. “See?”
The room was square and bare and dirty with a wisp of carpet of no color on the floor. There was a washtub and a sink and a utensil closet and a gas range and a refrigerator and a radio and an ancient, mouse-gray chaise longue. There were little feathers about a cage with a little bell on top and a sad canary on one leg was drowsing through an early moult.
He said, “Hell, stinker, you might as well squat.”
I went and sat in a chair and put my hat on a table.
Knuckles made sharp short noise on the door.
“Mac?” Al said.
“Yeah.”
He opened the door for a little man, skinny as a pencil, with one lumpy c
heekbone and a fig ear and a large brown paper bag with the tops of capped bottles protruding. Mac handed him the bag and Al took it to the washtub.
“Who’s the company?” Mac inquired.
“Law,” Al rasped.
“Law?” Mac wheezed. “You jammed, Al? Trouble?”
I said, “No trouble. Al’s an old friend of mine.”
“Then what you got the snotrag to your nose for?” Mac asked, reasonably.
I took the napkin away. No more blood. I said, “Kidding around,” and I pulled my lips back and gave him teeth and a squint with wrinkles.
“Cops laugh like that,” Al said. “Good-by, Mac. Thanks for the beer.”
“Take it easy, pal. You can’t use no trouble.”
“You telling me?”
Mac left. Al brought two glasses and opened a quart bottle and tossed my hat onto the chaise longue and sat down. He filled his glass and drank it and refilled it and drank half.
“All right,” he said. “Have beer. What’s scratching?”
I had some beer. “What are you doing these days?” I said, over the glass.
“What’s it to you?”
“Nothing. Only a friend of yours got knocked off yesterday. You’re liable to wind up with a belly full of the trouble you’re so keen on avoiding.”
“What friend?”
“Joe Pineapple.”
I watched him. His face showed nothing except bristles but his deep-set black pig-eyes closed to wet shining slits.
“You did it to me once, stinker,” he said. “You ain’t doing it twice.”
He got up and went to the closet and came back with a rough-handled press-button jackknife that clicked and spouted a murderous six-inch blade.
“You’re wrong, Al. You’re wrong twice. I didn’t do it to you then, and I don’t want to do anything to you now. It’s time you and I got straightened out.”
He said, “Stinker,” and his thick lips writhed over pink gums and he spat at me through his upper teeth.
“What are you doing these days. Al?” I said quietly.
Rigidly he said, “I’m a horse’s front.”