by Henry, Kane,
“Spread it out a little. Al.”
He picked a piece of enamel off the table with the point of the knife and then he looked up at me and I didn’t like his eyes. “Two years,” he said, “you bastard. When I got out, Mac, the guy was just here, give me a lecture. He made sense. Mac, he used to be a lightweight pug. When I got out, Mac was doing a horse act in tank vaudeville and little night spots. Two men in a horse doing funny things. Mac split up with his partner and when I gets out Mac gives me the lecture and gives me the job. Horse’s front, and that’s what I’m doing, and what’s it to you?”
“Work last night?”
“You bet.”
“Where?”
“Jersey City.”
“Good. Because Joe got it last night around midnight. That ought to put you in the clear. It doesn’t figure for you anyway. It figures for a taller guy. You have a yellow coat?”
“No.”
I lit a cigarette and put the pack on the table. “You got a two year rap, Al, about eight years ago, and you think I pinned it on you.”
“Goddamn right you did.”
“You’re wrong. I never bothered explaining it. It didn’t mean anything to me. It means something to me now. I need a couple of answers and you may have them. I didn’t pin that rap on you, brother, all I did was save you about six years in the jug.”
“Yes you did,” he jeered.
“Listen close and maybe that pinhead brain of yours will get it. I had a job. Mitch Saffron hired me. Mitch is a legal kind of fence.”
Al Warmy said, “I know all about that Mitch racket.” He drank more beer and the bottle was empty. He got up and got another bottle and filled both our glasses and scraped back his chair and tilted it and put his bare feet on the table.
He said, “Somebody cops some stuff and the insurance company is stuck. So there’s a reward. So the stuff turns up and the reward is paid and nobody’s hurt. This Mitch Saffron is the contact boy.”
I drank warm beer unenthusiastically. “Something like that. So when that Belton dame got stuck up for that necklace, there was a reward of five G’s and they put Mitch on it. Mitch didn’t get a nibble, so he put me on it. I know a few guys and I got a few leads and I found that you and Joe pulled it.
“You were a strong-arm no-brain. So I contacted Joe. You remember there was a scuffle with the dame’s escort and he pulled the handkerchief from one of your faces. I threatened Joe with that. Identification. It was no soap all around and period. So I knew that the thing had been pulled off your delightful puss. But you just got paid for a job, and didn’t know anything else. Then it caved in.”
Simply through beer foam, he said, “Yeah. All over me.”
“The point is that I didn’t know a thing about it. Mitch was sore because you guys didn’t want to play ball, and he was out to teach somebody a lesson. Mitch put me on it, but he put the cops on me. You and me and Joe got slapped down. I could explain my part and Joe was unidentified and you didn’t talk. So you got the rap.”
“That makes you a sap, so far,” Al said.
I lit a cigarette and blew a smoke ring at him. “Now, big-brain, listen very carefully. Listen and fold up that jackknife.” I spoke very slowly. “Sonny Evans copped a plea for you and you got two years. I had worked on that case and I work pretty good. If I would have spilled that that job was not an isolated fast stick-up like they thought — If I would have spilled what I knew, that that was the only one of a series that you had helped Joe on — they’d have never let you cop a plea, shyster or no shyster. Sonny Evans is a shrewd mouthpiece, but if I would have poured my stuff, you’d still be canned up sweet. I just didn’t have the heart. I knew you for the underpaid exploited lamebrain you are. Who’s a stinker?”
His eyes stayed on mine. He folded the knife slowly and tossed it onto the chaise longue and he spread his fingers wide and then curled them up into two fists and banged them together. He said, but he didn’t sound like he meant it, “How do I know this is straight goods?”
“Sonny Evans knows. Ask him.”
“It figures straight,” Al Warmy said. “You’re looking at one big ugly dope.”
I must have held a lot of breath in my chest for a long time. A sigh that was ordinary came out prodigious.
Al got off the chair. “One big dope. Is it all right?” He stuck out his paw. It was like shaking hands with a bag of nails.
“It’s all right,” I said.
He brought out a bottle of rye whiskey and small glasses and we banged a few. We didn’t talk. We banged a few more.
“I had you pegged wrong, Mister,” Al said. “I might have had to cut you. It’s been on my mind.”
“I’m in a lousy business,” I mourned.
“How’s about it?” he reminded me.
“What?”
“I’m talking.”
I put the butt of my cigarette under my shoe. “Think hard, Al. Who was finger on those jobs? They were pulled on expensive night club drunks. Who fingered them? Here’s a few names: Rochelle Pratt Curtis, Wesley Gorin, Xavier Hoy Ginsburg or Gaspard. Anything ring a bell?”
“No bells, Mr. Chambers. Nothing. I wouldn’t know the finger, anyway. You had it right. I’m a big dope that’s only the pratt boy. Joe gives me a buzz and fixes me with a rod and I go along for the job and I don’t know nothing.”
“Think hard, Al.”
The hair on his head moved forward. “It was a three-man job, sometimes. What’s it to you now? It’s a long time.”
“I got a case,” I said. “Did you know the other guy?”
“Knew him some. Fancy mug. Holly.”
A thick pulse behind my ribs bumped around like a herring fresh out of water. I stretched my toes inside my shoes and my calves were taut.
Unexcitedly I said, “Come again, Al.”
“Fancy mug. Holly. A duke called Grandma Ed Holly.”
9
I WAS laid out all over the sofa and I had one aching leg slung over the back rest and another aching leg stretched across the pillows. I had a little food in me and I had had a hot tub and I wore nothing except a purple towel knotted at my left hip. My bathrobe was piled under my head.
Scoffol sat at my desk and poisoned the air with his cigar. He sat squarely and sturdily, massive and impassive and impressive, like granite. Sitting there, he was good for me. He was like a three week rest cure in a monastery.
I sighed deep from the belly and I said, “Tails tonight.”
“I came,” Scoffol said, “for information. Not sartorial meditation. Give.”
I gave him a fast but full report on recent events.
He said, “It’s a hell of a note.”
I said, “Yeah.”
“You sure go around in circles.”
“Oh, advice.”
“It’s your baby. You’re the Sherlock.”
“You don’t like the way I work?”
“Look, Pete. I’ve got my own headaches. Only this guy that got lumped, this Wesley Gorin, it seems to me that that one is the crux.”
“Crux your eye,” I said. “We’re supposed to find out why Joe Pineapple put the bite on Curtis. That’s what we really got hired for. That’s basic. The rest is incidental.”
“As I said, you’re the Sherlock.”
I stuck my hands under my head. “Boss, I’ve had a pretty rough day. It’s not over yet, and when you sit still and shut up you’re restful, but right now you’re under my skin like a splinter.”
“Well, it seems to me — ”
“I know. Frontal attack. Talk to Wesley Gorin.”
“It might make it a lot easier. You’d be less tired.”
“It might and it might not, and I might and I might not. That monkey, you’ll agree, has probably been pumped exhausted by the cops. You can’t say he’s exactly propitious for more talk, and especially not with a guy who doesn’t have a police badge to help with the questions. I’ll get to him in my own way. He’ll keep.”
“Will he?” S
coffol said through his nose.
“Look, boss. That tap on the skull Gorin got was not mayhem. It was expediency. Someone wanted him dented, comatose and quiet. Nobody wanted to hurt him.”
“They might the next time.”
“It happens I’m going to see him tonight, but I don’t think I’ll get a chance to talk with him. I’m invited to a party.”
“By whom?”
“By Miss Edith Wilde.”
“What kind of party?”
“A hoity-toity exclusive midnight supper by candlelight de luxe at the home of Mr. Wesley Gorin.”
Scoffol got up and went to the kitchen and came back with an apple. I freshened up my pillow of bathrobe.
I said, “These are the details. I got them from La Belle Wilde. Wesley Gorin has a house on East Sixty-seventh Street. Six people live there. The Gorins, the Gorins and the Brewsters. There are two sets of Gorins. A family affair. There’s Wesley Gorin and wife, Tamara. There’s brother Eric Gorin and wife, Paula. There’s Henry Brewster, a close friend, and wife, Dorothy. No children.”
“What about Miss Wilde? Where does she live?”
“Edith? She has an apartment at the Broadmoor.”
Aridly he asked, “Edith, is it?”
“Edith,” I said, “it is.”
“Look, Peter. The lady is Wilde of Curtis Wilde, a big leaguer in this town. She’s not Lolita Blamey.”
“That’s enough of that, Priggy. She’s a pushover for my money, which Lolita Blamey is not.”
“You say you got this stuff from Miss Wilde?”
“Yes,” I said frostily, “we talked, too. Everybody up on Sixty-seventh Street seems well fixed. Wesley’s retired and piddles around the stock market. Both Henry Brewster and Eric Gorin are college professors in one of our local halls of learning. Brewster is a practicing psychiatrist. Teaching school is a side thing. Eric is a full time professor. A bigwig authority on botany.”
“And what is this Wesley Gorin retired from?”
“Edith didn’t rightfully know. Inherited a little piece as a young man. Wise investments. A flair and a little know-how and know-who in the stock market. Had a little brokerage joint or something for a while. Made his load and quit. That’s her story on our Wesley.”
Scoffol put the core of the apple on top of a leather cigarette box on the desk. “Where is it?”
“What?”
“The box.”
“Box?”
“Remember Curtis’ morbid memoirs and dead gamblers with peculiar names and mysterious metal boxes in tangled shrubbery?”
“You mean you can actually lay off being critical long enough to get human and curious. What happened to Frontal Attack.”
Glumly he said, “Where is the box?”
“In the foyer closet.”
I looked at my wrist watch. I said, “Hell, it’s late. I want to drop in at the Nevada first. I’d like to get a little oiled in nice company before I take on that candlelight repast. This has been one day.”
Scoffol got up. “That Chambers. The alleged conquest of Wilde doesn’t seem to have tempered the inexorable quest of Blamey.”
“But how you have just said yourself a mouthful.”
“Nuts,” Scoffol said. “The box.”
In the kitchen I held it and he hit it and then he held it and I hit it and then I put the little hammer down and I said, “It’s silly.”
Scoffol said, “Wait,” and went out.
In five minutes I had three portions of rye, neat, and the room got much brighter. Then he came back with a thick ugly instrument that looked like a cross between a tomahawk and a pile driver.
I lay half in the bathroom and half out of it, on my stomach, and I held the box tight against the tiles and Scoffol crouched in the bathtub and swung the hammer and whacked at the box. The idea, sort of, was to hit the lock, and occasionally he hit it. It took fifteen minutes and a messed-up notched bathroom floor and some furious sliding around the bathtub with language to match before the damn box opened.
Scoffol grunted and spread out in the bathtub and checked the contents of the strong strongbox and I sat on the sink and watched.
Then Scoffol said, “All right, I’m through,” and handed up a thin sheaf of rectangular green paper. “Only these mean anything to us.”
I frowned over thirty-two thousand dollars’ worth of promissory notes from Eric Gorin, maker, to Xavier Hoy Ginsburg, payee.
10
THE TALL man, urbane and immaculate (he hoped) in tails, striding in the van of the man with the menus, was yours truly, and Lolita torching at the mike, looked directly at me and I wondered if she could see me through the glare of the spotlight.
“Good evening,” the waiter said. “The usual?”
I said, “Good evening, Isaac. Yes. Rye and soda, my brand, and will you tell Miss Blamey, when she’s through, I’d like to see her, please?”
“Soon as she’s done, sir.”
He brought the whiskey and a small bottle of soda and a tall glass and ice and I sipped at the highball and looked and listened and waited for her to dance.
There was applause. She came back and blew a kiss and went away.
“No dance?” I said when she sat across from me. “What’ll you have?”
She was older in a skin-fitting black dress with sequins, with a high collar about her throat, and her face was white and smooth as a Chiclet.
“Sherry, please.”
“Sherry, Isaac.”
“Peter, I’m so glad you’re here.”
“What’s this?”
She was crying quietly.
I said, “Honey, you’re not that glad to see me.”
“I’m frightened, Peter. I’m ‘terribly, awfully frightened.”
“What is this?”
“He … he beat me.”
I turned the ice in the whiskey and soda.
“I wouldn’t dance tonight because I have black and blues on my body. I can’t get away from him. I’m mixed up. He’s bad. I’m going crazy. I’m that scared.”
I said, “Take it easy, kid.”
“I’m sorry.”
Being moronic helps. I said, “Come on, now. With those beautiful eyes and those beautiful these and those beautiful those. You’ve got everything. You can’t be afraid. Not you.”
“He said he’ll kill me and he’ll do it. Peter, you don’t know that man.”
Amiably I said, “I’d like to, though. What’s all this beating and threatening? What’s going on?”
“He’s one of those men. He’s got to be boss. He’s got to own you. You’ve got to knuckle under. Always. To everything.”
“Drink your sherry, sweetheart. Forget it.”
Very quietly she said, “Peter, please. Can you stay? Please. He’ll be here soon. I can’t stand it.”
“I can’t stay long, beautiful. I’m late for an appointment now. Business. Have another sherry. What’s wrong with the guy?”
“There’s nothing wrong with him. He’s just got to be boss. Always. I wish — ” She sat up, tense. “He’s here.”
The tall man had checked his hat and was standing half-silhouetted in the doorway. A very tall man with a well-shaped head, and hair that was thick and ash blond and wavy; with wide, heavy, brutal shoulders. He looked around, and then he came toward our table. He walked on muscular buoyant legs, catlike, almost.
“Good looking,” I said and I stood up.
Lolita half choked: “Andrew Grant. Peter Chambers.”
I swung from way back and he swirled onto the polished floor and he slid on his back and he stopped at the feet of a little colored man in the middle of “Old Man River.” He got to his feet, amidst applause, and he moved swiftly out of the spotlight.
He came back and he spoke softly in my ear. He said, “Nice work. Don’t forget it.”
I hit him again, high, full on the cheekbone. He stood like wood and then he swept up the soda bottle and flung it and I ducked and I was caught, coming up, by the
butt end of a strong left in my right eye and then I was all over him. I gave him the knee in the groin and he doubled and then he got a stomach full of knuckles and he grunted and covered and a good sharp right to the point of the chin sat him down hard and uncomfortable in the chair next to Lolita.
They held me from behind and they held him down by the shoulders and they said, “Gentlemen, gentlemen, please.”
The band blared loud hot music.
Dancing began again.
The manager said and asked: “No more, gentlemen?”
“Nice knowing you,” I said and I sat down. “Isaac, bring more sherry for Miss Blamey. And bring anything the gentleman would like.”
Grant looked directly at the waiter. “Scotch on ice. Double.”
He unwrapped a flat black cigar and lit it.
He looked me over with cool, narrow, contemptuous eyes. A good looking boy, this Grant; a blond with black eyes and a clear fresh skin and dimples and fine teeth.
Isaac showed up with sherry and Scotch.
Grant gulped his fast and said, “Another double, please.”
I said, “Ice, Isaac, for the eye.” I looked at Blamey. “Discolored yet?”
She shook her head yes.
“The fastest black eye in my life,” I said.
“Not really black,” she said. “A little bruised.”
Isaac brought more Scotch and ice and a napkin. I made a compress and applied it. It hurt. I looked at my watch. I put the compress down.
“I’ll have to be going, children. Take care of yourself, Mr. Grant. The drinks are on me.”
Abstractedly he said, “if I were you, I’d follow that advice to the letter. I’d take very good care of myself.”
“Nice Mr. Grant.”
“I’d take very good care of myself,” he said again.
I stood up. “Save the grandstanding, brother. You’re through here. If you want, papa spank again. Or if you insist, papa would just as lief part your hair with a bottle.”
He flushed and drank Scotch.
Lolita looked up at me.
“Don’t worry, honey,” I said. “No more trouble. And don’t worry about handsome over here either. If he ever lays a finger on you again, I’ll kill him, so help me, and it’ll be a pleasure. You leave this table with me now, and remember — if this oaf ever goes near you again, ever, call a cop.”