by Henry, Kane,
“Anything you want to add?”
“There’s nothing else, I tell you.”
“You’re probably a liar. But the hell with it. Subject three — you’re one goddamn little fool and I ought to shove this cocktail glass right up your nose. Why did you call up Ed Holly and scare him into paying me a social call?”
His face dropped and hunched up and got smaller and he looked as crestfallen as a well-chewed cigar butt.
“Because,” I said, “you’re one dope. Because you got panicky after our meeting in Brooklyn. And weren’t you surprised when I called you this morning, all nice and healthy and everything. Weren’t you?”
I grabbed flaccid skin from under his chin and I pulled his face half across the table. “Weren’t you?”
“Yes.”
I let go.
“You’re one dope, Wesley. You’re one hell of a dope. Somebody’s after you. Somebody sicked Pineapple on to you. Maybe Holly himself, maybe Warmy, maybe some friend of Pineapple’s who thinks the finger grew to a strongarm; somebody, definitely, is after you — and me, I want to crimp it just to spoil it, and you sick that bastard on to me. Are you or aren’t you?”
“What?” he squeaked.
“A dope.”
“Perhaps.”
“What about getting slugged?”
“If it was Pineapple, then it might have been some fancied grievance, but that is over because he’s dead. If it wasn’t Pineapple, then it was just hoodlum stuff. Holdup.”
“You really believe that?”
“It is just as plausible as what you’re insisting upon.”
“All right, Gorin. Look around.” He turned and he saw Alice Hilliad and Frank Higgins in a booth. “Those two,” I said, “drinking highballs on the expense account are not wasting time. Look, if Pineapple wanted to get you, he’d have shot you. Period. If it was a holdup, then you wouldn’t have been smacked on the back of the head with a padded billy. You’d have been stuck up. Period. Don’t you see? Something is goddamn fishy. I’ve a hunch you were being primed for a snatch, which means you were the subject of an attempted kidnap. Does that mean anything?”
“Kidnap? Oh, stop it, Chambers.”
“Anyway, those two back there ought to keep you out of trouble. I’m hoping something will turn up that will help. You’re covering up somewhere, little fellow, so they don’t only protect you, they watch you. And when somebody covers up like you’re covering up, that’s bread and butter, and when it’s bread and butter, I don’t know if I can blame you. But get this matted down in that obstinate little brain — I’m convinced that you’re fey, remember fey? And I’m on your side only because I want to spoil the play. Spoiling the play might be pushing people around, and when you push people around, they don’t like it and they push back and that’s what I want. I want to crash the party and the only way in is wrong way in. Through the skylight.”
I stood up.
“Fey,” Gorin said to his cigar. “And this young man says that I’m the one that’s fey.”
16
I TOOK the Lexington Avenue local downtown to Spring Street and walked to Centre Street, number Two hundred and forty, which is Police Headquarters in New York City and I asked to see Rafferty of the Confidential Squad and when I saw him I asked him if he had had lunch.
“No,” Rafferty said. “You’re looking fine. Nice eye.”
“You’re the first one to say that in practically a week. That I’m looking fine. It must be champagne what does it, after all.”
Rafferty wrinkled his nose. “Make mine bourbon. Or vanilla.”
Patrick Rafferty looked like they had named him Patrick Rafferty after they had seen him all grown up. It fit exactly: big and brawny and beetlebrowed Pat, with his fine gray hair and smiling honest gray eyes; every inch magnificent cop.
“How’s about late lunch, Pat?”
“Why are you poking around?”
“Guy named Andrew Grant.”
“I can talk about that one without even thinking. What’s the bribe, customer?”
“Chow mein in Chinatown.”
Rafferty loved chow mein like people go for special cheesecake.
We went and we ate and the little Chinamen grinned familiarly and happily at the big uniformed Rafferty.
We talked politics until Rafferty said: “Delicious. What do you want to know about the guy? And why?”
“I’ve got a case. I don’t like the guy and I’d like to like him less. So give with dirt, Patty boy. Dirty dirt.”
Rafferty shoved dishes away from him on the slippery table top. “A funny duck. Been in practice more than a dozen years, never tried a case. Got two good men, Floyd and Black, law man and trial man, respectively. Seems they handle the law business.”
I produced cigarettes. “What’s Grant?”
“He’s not a lawyer for my money, laddie, even though he has a sheepskin. He’s just the boss. He’s away often. He gets around. He must have a pile of dough. He’s a terrific high liver. You don’t get that kind of dough practicing criminal law unless you’re one of about ten lawyers in this city. Maybe stock market.”
“What’s the background?”
“Background? No background. Just a guy. The usual father and mother, and he was an only child. Parents dead. He’s never been married. That’s all. That’s the background.”
The waiter came and took the dishes off and mopped the table with a wet slop-rag and wiped it dry with a clean towel.
Rafferty poured again and sipped tea. “He’s been on the carpet several times. Nothing to do with his law practice. He keeps those skirts clean. Just circumstances. You understand that this is confidential, Peter.”
“Of course. What does it mean, ‘just circumstances’?”
“He’s been on the scene of five death matters,” Rafferty said. “That’s funny. One happens. Two happen. Three happen. Five is unheard of. We checked him good — but good — the last couple of times. Velvet stuff, but thorough. Had him talking to us the last time, cutelike, for maybe twelve hours.”
He grunted and he shook his head. “Nothing to it. Coincidence. No motive or anything like it. Nothing close to it. Didn’t even know the respective parties deceased. Never even heard of three of them, he convinced the Department. We checked him good, but good. Just damn coincidence. I don’t know. I suppose those things happen. If not for cross-files and cross-indexing, I don’t suppose we’d even have asked for more than his name and address — among those present.”
“I see,” I said, vacantly.
“I got to know him pretty well. Checked deep. Hunch. On my own. Nothing to it. Clean. But, myself, I still can’t help wondering. I bet that’s the strangest cross-index in the country. But no possibility of motive, no actual acquaintance with even one corpus delicti. It had me licked.”
I thumped a cigarette on the smooth table. “It’s curious, all right.”
“Spreads over about ten years.”
“Who were they?”
Rafferty leaned back, half closed his eyes, spoke slowly: “Morse. Remember? The Washington biggie. Committed suicide in the midst of a party, alone, in an anteroom. Gun. A woman in Delaware. Suicide. Gun too. A simple case of pure murder at a Long Island gathering, unsolved. Gun too, but no weapon ever showed up. A suicide or something when a guy fell or was pushed at a penthouse party uptown. And a shooting on a night-club dance floor, last year, hushed up and unsolved. Five times. And our friend Grant was an invited guest in the high esteem of the hostesses at all of the gatherings, and in the night club, he was just in a night club and the dance floor was crowded.”
Rafferty unhooked the napkin from around his throat and wiped his mouth and his face.
“Of course,” he said, “out of thousands and thousands of cases of sudden death, the fact that one individual happens to have been among those present five times, that doesn’t really mean a thing. If he was really mixed up in any or all of them — he wouldn’t be that dumb to be among those present and be
found present each time, and pick himself up a reputation as a cross-index museum piece. Unless it was expediency, bravado, a thorough knowledge of the laws of evidence, a sublime contempt for cross-files, and the conviction that we couldn’t pin a damn thing on him, cross-files or no.”
I sighed a big unhappy sigh and I said, “Funny. And with what I’ve got, ghoulish. I got two more cases of violent death, that is, one death and one disappearance, where a guy tells me he thinks it’s funny, and what he thinks it’s funny about — is Andrew Grant.”
“Ghoulish is a foolish word,” Rafferty said. “Give out, laddie.”
“Two bad boys. Little Squirt Cole and the recent Joe Pineapple.”
“Squirt and Pineapple,” he said softly.
“It gets crazy. Cross-indexing on them, puts him out of line. The others were all big. Society. This damn Grant gets more interesting every time I talk about him. Maybe we ought to put a couple of men on him permanent. We did have a couple on him for a while. But the boss got them chased off. And now you turn up with what a guy thinks about Squirt and Pineapple. The commissioner would think I’m about ready to retire if I went to work on him about that baby again without something definite. Must not waste the taxpayers’ money.”
“I’ve got a man on him, Pat, and permanent. Your good friend, Mike Maine. And I don’t have to worry about taxpayers’ money.”
“Good boy.”
“And I’m going to follow through where your cross-indexes can’t reach. I’m going to see Augie Piazza.”
Affectionately Rafferty said, “Piazza. That little crook. Give him my love. Between that guy and myself, we could make a million in blackmail in a week.”
“Pete, would you carry a tale?”
“No.”
He smiled the Rafferty smile, but he didn’t look happy. “I’d love to know if he’s got any dope on him. If he has, look out for the guy. But what’ll it get you? You’re using my system. Cross-index. Only you’re using human cross-index. The Department and Piazza. Suppose it clicks. That’s not evidence.”
“I don’t need evidence. I’m a private operator. If he clicks, I’ll fix it some way that we catch up with him.” I squeezed out of the booth. “Let’s go.”
“Yeah. You couldn’t carry a little tale back to the old man? Just a little mite of a peach? Unofficial?”
“Maybe. Depends on what I get. I might even turn him over to you all wrapped up. It happens.”
“Good hunting, boy.”
17
WHAT Patrick Rafferty was to law and order, Augie Piazza was to a very select clientele.
I walked along the streets of the lower east side and I loved the sights and the smells; north to Kenmare and east to the Bowery and across the Bowery to Delancey Street and east along Delancey Street with its babel of tongues and its dry-goods stores and its egg creams and its pants shops.
I turned left at Clinton and went into a store bearing the gilt-lettered legend: A. PIAZZA, BAIL BONDS, NOTARY PUBLIC.
The store was large and dim and almost bare of furniture and cool and damp. It had oak benches along its walls and, in the rear, three oak desks alongside one another in a parallel haphazard line.
Seated behind one desk was a pale young man with black eyes and a pearl-gray felt hat. Seated on top of the same desk with his legs crossed and his small feet encased in very shiny yellow shoes was another pale young man with black eyes and a pearl-gray felt hat.
“Yeah?” questioned the man on the desk, discouragingly.
“Augie in?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Just tell him Peter Chambers, if you please. He’ll know.”
The pale young man hesitated for a moment, then he leaped lightly off the desk and clicked his shiny shoes up a flight of wooden stairs which was part of the gloom in the extreme rear. I sat on a bench and smoked. The man behind the desk inserted a toothpick between his teeth and tipped his hat forward over his eyes and slid down in his chair.
Presently footsteps tapped down the stairs.
“He says to go up to the office. Watch your step on them steps, bud.”
“Thanks, bud.”
The office was a room with a creaking wooden floor and a dozen large green filing cabinets and a big green safe and a window with bars and a kneehole desk.
Augie Piazza met me with stuck-out hand.
“How’s it, Petie?”
“Hello, Augie. How’s biz?”
“No squawk.”
Piazza was a tiny man and very thin. His black hair, well greased, was combed across his head from an extreme side in the manner of a man attempting to befuddle his mirror in the matter of his growing baldness. He was swarthy, with small regular features and shrewd, expressive, constantly moving, bright black eyes.
“Sit down, Pete. Have a seat.”
I put my hat on one of the green filing cabinets and I sat down and I said, “I need a little information, Augie. About two hundred fifty dollars’ worth.”
“Always trying,” Augie said. “No, sir. You ain’t coming all the way down here without even a telephone call for no two hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of information. Not you.” “No?”
“Not you. Maybe to spend a grand. That’s possible.”
“A grand for what?”
“For whatever you come for.”
“Same old Augie,” I said. “I don’t have time to bargain. Maybe you don’t have information that’s worth a thousand dollars.”
“If I ain’t, I don’t charge.”
I said, “The guy’s name is Andrew Grant. And how are you fixed?”
“Look out, Mister Pete.”
“Do I get information?”
Augie took his feet off the desk. “I don’t know if what I got is worth a G. And I don’t know nothing about this guy if it ain’t worth a G.”
I got up and went around and stood over the little guy. “Look, Augie. We’ve been friends for a long time. I’ve done you favors and you’ve paid me, and you’ve done me favors and I’ve paid you. We even up. But we’ve never cheated have we?”
“No.”
“All right. Give. If it’s worth anything, I suppose it’s worth the G. If not, it just isn’t worth anything.”
He waved the cigar. “All right, all right. Sit down where I can look at you. You make me nervous standing away up there. You got yourself a deal.”
I sat down in the chair facing Augie and he put his feet back on the desk and crossed his ankles.
“That guy,” he said, “is way out of my class. He’s a lawyer. But the shyster stuff ain’t his racket.”
“I’ve heard that before. How do you know?”
“I know. This guy is big-time. Big-time, if you know what I mean. I got it figured, maybe, but that ain’t info. That’s what I mean about the G.”
“Stop it, will you? Every time I talk about that chump, people talk to me in riddles.”
“All right. You know Scalzi?”
“Yes.”
“Well, if one of my boys downstairs starts crossing me, I don’t even talk to the boy. I go see Scalzi. Scalzi has his organization. That’s his business. So I go see Scalzi and we make a deal and I go home. Then my boy gets took care of. See?”
“Yes.”
He shoved the cigar back in a corner of his mouth. “But if I don’t like Petie Chambers and I go see Scalzi, maybe Scalzi don’t do business. Chambers is too big. So Scalzi don’t play. So I go see Benny Kay in Brooklyn. Maybe you’re too big for Benny Kay too. So I go see Fat Jack the Book uptown and if Fat Jack don’t want the business, I’m done. I hit my top. I got to do it myself, or import a cokey torpedo. Then I’m away out of line and it’s trouble. Get it?”
“So?”
“So this Grant is the top of the mountain.”
I got on my feet and I kicked back the chair and I ran around the desk and I pulled poor Augie up by his lapels. Augie spluttered and dangled, his toes touching the floor. I shoved my face down to his.
“What t
he hell are you trying to sell me?” I whispered.
Aggrievedly Augie said, “You nuts? What the hell’s the matter with you?”
“I’m sorry, Augie. I blew. It fits, all right, but it’s fantastic.”
“What fits?”
“Why should a man like Andrew Grant …?”
“Why should Scalzi? Why should Benny Kay? Why should Fat Jack the Book? Why? Because it’s dough, big plenty dough.”
“You sure? How do you know this, Augie?”
Augie arranged himself in the chair. He put his feet back on the desk. He looked at his jostled cigar, looked at me, shook his head.
He said, “I know because that’s my business. No one else knows, because I don’t really know myself. Listen. What I meant before is that I ain’t got no real information. Only a sucker pays me for what I’m giving you.” A smile wreathed his face behind cigar smoke. “And you’re just sucker enough. I don’t know nothing about the organization. I don’t know who works for him or who ever worked for him or who he works with. I don’t know no contracts he knocked off. All I know is what sieves through to me, and if he ain’t the top of the mountain, I ain’t Augie Piazza. But I got my figure.”
I tipped back the chair and rocked on the hind legs. “What’s that?”
“I get paid for information. I don’t get paid for figuring. And I think you’re ripe for a bonus.”
“Right now, frankly, little Augie, I’m ripe for anything you’ve got to sell.”
He took his legs off the desk. “So here’s my figure. Grant does work, mouthpiece for the boys. When there’s trouble, they come to him and he figures the angles and his law boys do the work. Little by little, he grows. Becomes front man for most of the racket boys. Knows how to pull wires, when to cop a plea, how to make the fix. Gets plenty biz. Gets to know more goons and torpedoes and hoods and con men and heisters and big shots than I do.”
“So what?”
“So pretty soon, one day, in walks a politician or some other kind of legit biggie. Starts talking roundabout. Says he knows that Grant knows the underworld. Says, roundabout, he’s desperate. Says there’s a big shot what’s got the icepick in him. Says, roundabout, it’s worth heavy sugar if this big shot gets heart failure, or gets hit with a truck or something. Maybe Andy can send him to the right place to talk with the right people, or maybe Andy can do the talking for him. Andy knows it’s big; too big. So Andy says, ‘Come back tomorrow and bring it all in cash.’ So he sits and figures, and he knows no organization will touch that. So he says to himself, ‘I got my own organization. I know all the boys and I got the brains. I can pick one here and one there and maybe boss this trick myself.’ So this politician comes back and Andy knows he’s anxious, just like you are right now, and he heists the figure a way, and he tells him, ‘Kick in and I’ll front for you. I’ll turn the dough over to the right parties and you can go home and take it easy.”