by Henry, Kane,
“That’s right.”
“And while you held Gorin, and if you found out what was cooking, maybe you’d make some more dough before you started polishing them.”
“That’s right.”
“Then Rochelle Curtis messed it up.”
‘That’s right.”
“So you did half anyway. You got Pineapple. And it was probably still your intention to take Gorin. You were probably priming Cherry Nose as the new first assistant.”
“That’s right.” He stopped slumping and sat up straight. “You’re a smart apple. What about us? Do we do business?”
“No.”
“Possibly — ”
“No possibility. I’m no angel. I’ve done business in my day. But you and I don’t do business, so skip it. Put your hands on the desk.”
I stood up and kicked back the chair. He put his hands on the desk.
“You’ll use that dial on your desk. You’ll call Police Headquarters.”
He didn’t move.
“Andy boy, you’ve got a pretty good mind. You tell me if I make sense. The cops will give you all the degrees, first, second, third and whatever else they can put on for you. But you’re a smart cookie. You know, according to what you’ve told me, that they can’t pin murder on you no matter what I tell them. No proof, No legal evidence. So you don’t finish done to a crisp turn in the broiler up in Sing Sing. So what have you got to lose? And if you don’t use the dial, then there’s trouble, and I’ve got the guns and then you’ve got a lot to lose. It’s safer my way. Am I making sense?”
No answer.
“Well?”
“Just a minute.” He shook his head. Groggily. “I’m dizzy.”
“Lousy, chum,” I said.
He licked at his lips. “I have a bottle here. In the drawer. May I?”
He moved his hand.
I waved a gun.
“Don’t be a chump, sweet-eyes.”
25
I KNEW why I was going to let him.
I wanted to kill him.
He was probably right; he’d never get the chair, not without evidence, not without proof, and what he told me didn’t mean a thing. That wasn’t the kind of evidence that convicts. That would be my word against his, and he knew more tricks that way than I knew; that was his trade. For Mike, maybe even for Rochelle and Pineapple and Feisal and for God knows how many others — for the first time in my life I really wanted to kill a man. But I didn’t have it in me. I just didn’t have it in me.
So it was going to be a tossup.
Cavalier Chambers.
Chump Chambers.
I was going to let him!
“I could stand a drink myself,” I squeaked. My voice was an echo coming back to me after a long time. My mouth was dry. My head was a balloon filled with chloroform.
I ducked as he came up with a gun.
Things happened.
Pain ripped my shoulder.
I jolted over to the floor, and I was still.
Time, for seconds, telescoped: I saw him stand up behind his desk and carefully point the gun again to make sure this time, and I saw his vicious mouth smile and I lay on my side and waited and then I pulled at the triggers of both pistols and pumped and I saw blood burst from his head and I watched part of his face dissolve into squirming crimson and I saw him go slowly down behind the desk, like a marionette Santa Claus down a chimney, and I kept pulling at triggers long after there was no sound in the room except the futile foolish click-click of hammers on empty shells …
I got up and went around the desk and looked at him.
Then I passed out.
Blood was on my lips.
I came to; numb, dull, motionless.
My face was on his.
Then my hand was crawling slowly, like a thing apart, brainlessly, exploring the corpse beneath me. It felt it, rested on it, held it — and consciousness boiled up and exploded in me and I snatched my hand to my mouth and wiped away the dead man’s thickened blood.
I shut my mouth and gulped. I got up on my feet. My shadow, in the dim light, was gaunt on the wall. I shivered and rubbed at my stomach with both hands.
I swallowed air and I went to one of the doors at the side of the room and pulled it. It was a clothes closet. I tried the other. It was a bathroom, complete with shower.
I staggered in. I was boisterously sick.
I came out and snapped bright lights on and looked at my wrist watch. It was ten after nine. I sat in a chair and put my head down between my knees. Then I went back and I was sick again.
I looked in the mirror and I shuddered. I took my clothes off and got under the shower and felt pain in my shoulder. I got out, dripping, and stood before the glass. Nothing. Graze. Slight flesh wound. Scratch. Outside, there, I had just plain fainted. Lionhearted detective. I wasn’t hurt a damn. I got back under the shower and soaped the shoulder and turned down the hot and increased the cold and jumped around a little and got out. I dried myself and washed my mouth and put some iodine on my shoulder and combed my hair and dressed.
I looked in his desk, like a dope, for a bottle. Of course, no bottle. You can look.
I went out into the library and put the lights on. I went through leather swinging doors with round glass windows like portholes and put more lights on. I opened doors. I opened a door with a brass name plate: “Mr. Floyd.” I opened “Mr. Black.” I opened “Private.”
And in “Conference,” I found a great big beautiful bar.
I took three deep swigs from the bottle. I choked. I coughed. I poured some into a glass for a chaser. I sat down with the bottle and played Lost Weekend for five minutes.
I put the bottle back and the lights out.
I went back to Grant’s room. I put Holly’s gun on the desk.
I called Police Headquarters. I said, “There’s been a murder. A guy named Edward Holstein who lives on Madison Avenue and works for Curtis Wilde knocked off a lawyer named Andrew Grant in Grant’s office.”
“Just a minute — ”
I hung up.
I put the lights out and felt my way to the hall. I rang for the elevator. I held a handkerchief over my nose and blew and blew while the night man glared at me stupidly all the way down.
26
I WALKED across New York town to Fifth Avenue of a sultry spring night that was hot and heavy and clamped down by thick low rust clouds. There was no thunder.
I caught a bus.
By the time I got off it was raining.
Alice Hilliad said, “My God, you look like a wet turkey that saw a million ghosts.”
Gorin was asleep in my bed. Higgins was out for the newspapers.
The phone tinkled once. Alice said, “It’s Mr. Scoffol.”
“Hi, fella,” Scoffol said.
“Hello, boss. When did you get in?”
“About an hour ago. What’s the program?”
“I’ve got news. Suppose I meet you at Edith Wilde’s place. I’m expected there. The Broadmoor. Apartment 1815.”
“When, fella?”
“Any time. Soon as you can make it, I guess.”
“Right. I’ll be seeing you.”
I hung up. I began to pull off wet clothes.
Higgins came in. “A hell of a night. It’s teeming.”
Wearily I said, “Alice, you go on home. Pop around here in the morning about eleven. There’s an old raincoat in the closet. Try it on for size.”
“Thanks.”
She said good night and she left. She carried the raincoat over her arm.
“Stay with that Gorin guy,” I said to Higgins. “You’re going to have cops for breakfast.”
Scoffol, ruddy as a traffic cop on New Year’s day, shifted the glass to his left hand and stuck his hand out.
“Well,” he said. “The detective. You look like the booby traps have got you. You look like hell.”
“So they tell me.”
“Nonsense,” Edith said. “I’ll take the raincoat, and y
ou take your choice — Scotch à la Scoffol or brandy à la Wilde.”
I gave her my coat. I sat down and pulled at my nose and scrunched at a fingernail.
She wore black. Black something cut down deep with a wide red leather belt with nailheads. She wore her hair differently, parted in the middle and behind her ears and down along her neck. She looked younger. Brandy had put a glow on her cheekbones.
Scoffol said, “It’s a drink the lad is needing. To take the rain off him.”
“You takes your choice,” Edith said.
“No. Thanks.”
“What?” Edith said. “First time. Since I know him.”
Scoffol put his drink down. Evenly he said, “What goes?”
“Nothing. Except our case is busted wide open.”
“Take it easy,” Scoffol said.
He took up his glass and sat on the arm of an easy chair and bit on his lip. Edith settled in a corner of the sofa.
I looked down at her. I said, “Who tells him?”
“First off,” I said to her, “I’d like to explain a little of it. Nobody talked. Not Gorin, no one. It’s a business, like yours. Our business, we poke around and dig and pick up items and see where they fit and poke around some more and sometimes things add up and sometimes they don’t.”
“Inarticulate,” Edith said, “and incoherent.”
“The guy’s worked up,” Scoffol said.
I twisted around to him. “All right, here it is. Some of it is guesswork. Most of it isn’t. The structure is all there.”
“Take it easy,” Scoffol said.
“A dozen years ago, about, a cute little tomato comes up to the big town from the sticks. She’s beautiful, she’s educated, she’s smart, she’s talented. She’s got something on the ball. She makes doodads and things from metal and she’s good. She’s up here to develop that.
“We know her. Miss Edith Wilde.”
He looked at her sidewise and slid into the easy chair and sipped the drink.
She crossed her legs and she smiled faintly and the brandy spots flamed in her face.
I said, “The young lady caught on with one or two costume jewelry outfits, she designed gorgeous things that ladies loved. She did all right for a kid from the sticks, but this was no ordinary kid and she wasn’t satisfied. She bought swell clothes, she patronized the right beauty salons and she took on New York sleekness. She mixed with the best.”
“That’s enough background,” Scoffol said.
I rubbed the back of my neck. “She met people in the right brackets and she shuffled them up and one day she drew Wesley Gorin out of the pack and she propositioned him. She wanted her own shop. She needed an angel. Gorin liked her looks, liked her style, and liked her work. They set up shop and started going places.”
Scoffol said, “Spell Gorin for me.”
“Wesley Gorin. A little guy. Legitimate. A weak sister. If you get your hooks in you can pull him around. Not much dough, really. But he knew the best people and he could recommend the best people and he was a shrewdie and he’d been turning a buck always because he knew the best people. How’m I doing, Edith Wilde?”
“Too well,” she said and she uncrossed her legs and hugged her knees.
Scoffol poured straight Scotch and handed it to me and I drank Scotch. I stopped walking. “Things went along swell for a couple of years. Gorin was pleased, his venture was making money. Miss Wilde was also making money but she would have liked to have made more money.
“Then,” I said, “poison filtered in.”
“Very fancy,” Scoffol said. “‘Poison filtered in.’”
“Grandma Ed Holly, ex-bootlegger, ex-racket boy, holing up under a phony name for a breather. Edward Holstein. Ex-big shot taking a job in a costume jewelry shop as a clerk for a layover and going head over heels for the slick chick from the sticks. And she learned fast that this was no ordinary salesclerk. She learned; too, that the guy was stuck on her, and she never misses on that kind of stuff. She put a string through him and tied a knot and let him hang, for what it was worth. And it was worth plenty.”
Edith Wilde said, “You’re doing very well.” She didn’t move in her corner of the sofa. “Coherence, and all.”
I said, “You can take it from there, sister, if you like. I’d prefer that.”
“You finish,” she said.
“Well, mix ambition with poison and garnish with weakling and you’ve got the ingredients for a powerful explosive, if it’s the right kind of poison, and Holly was the right kind of poison. He started shining up to the boss-lady, and then he comes up with an idea and the idea is a cuckoo. Holly knew that the toughest part of a jewelry heist is getting rid of the ice, that the reason the real boys lay off that stuff is that it’s peanuts in the end. What with passing it along to the receiving boys, and breaking it up, and getting rid of it through the usual fences, it winds up as coffee and cake dough.”
“You telling me?” Scoffol said.
“I’m telling her,” I said, and I looked at her and she looked back at me.
“So,” I went on, “friend Holly comes up with the best idea in his life. Wilde and Gorin for finger. Wilde had larceny, so she was easy, and Wilde could handle Gorin, so he was easy. Holly, with just a little help, could handle the actual heist superbly. You work the hot spots and the Duke and Duchess pick the suckers and pick them carefully and you do your end of the job skillfully (you know how) and then the pay-off is tremendous, with no risk and no fences. You’ve got your Edith Wilde, a real fourteen-carat genius at exactly that sort of work, to take the stones off your hands and work them into brilliant creations and sell them, legitimately. What a fabulous setup! Diamonds have no earmarks. Everything is clean, the minute after the heist. There, laid out in front of Grandma Ed Holly, was the sweetest dream of his life; the perfect racket.”
Scoffol said, “You’re clicking, son. No halos. For nobody. I hope you know what you’re doing.”
I didn’t even look at him. I looked at Edith Wilde. “And so, the lady goes up the line. Hick from the sticks to prosperous owner of the smartest little shop in town catering to the exclusive best and. Sales bring capital, capital buys stock, you’ve got the talent, and you’re zooming. And now and then, you pull another job and pick up raw material free for nothing at all.”
My mouth was dry. I talked faster. “The organization is small: Holly, Wilde, Gorin, Joe Pineapple, and, when necessary, Al Warmy, who doesn’t know the right time. They clean up. They’ve got the cops crazy. The heist jobs are clever, not too frequent, perfectly executed. Decoys never work. Confidential squad is off its nut, fences are tapped: no stones show up in the usual places. No stones show up at all.”
I scooped in my pocket for a cigarette. “And then, once, luck goes bad, and Warmy gets pinched, and even that isn’t so bad, because nothing breaks. Al Warmy, a small-timer, gets pinched. Once, a sucker didn’t act according to specifications. But Warmy doesn’t know his behind from a hole in the ground and he takes the rap and that is that. But it was enough. We’re not dealing with a bunch of cokey cheap hoods. This bunch knows when they’ve pushed far enough. Gorin has his belly full. Wilde sees the light. Holly and Pineapple are easily convinced. They have a tremendous going business and a swell reputation. The woman’s talent is on their side. They all sit back, legit, and the dough pours in. There’s no need for further risk.”
Scoffol was all through drinking for the evening. Gruffly he said, “Bring it home. Funnel it down.”
“All right. The lady was established. The offer from Curtis was the peak. Curtis Wilde, Inc. came into being. Wesley Gorin got pensioned off, which wasn’t even blackmail since he was silent partner from the start and entitled to his take. Holly got a job at ten grand a year plus bonus, plus, I suppose, sweetening on the top from the lady. Pineapple was put out to pasture with a tidy income. He put the bite on Wesley Gorin for a little added.”
“Now,” Scoffol said, “the lady was on top, but now the lady was the sucker.”<
br />
She stood up and poured brandy and drank it thirstily and went back to her corner of the couch. Grimly she said, “And how the lady was a sucker.”
I said, “Two people were unhappy. Miss Wilde, because the game had run its full circle and she was paying through her pretty nose, and Joe Pineapple, with the usual cupidity and stupidity of the run-of-the-mill crook who never knows when he’s well off. Wilde didn’t do anything about it. She held back, afraid of trouble. But little Joe Pineapple thought he could do something about it. Mistakenly, he had the idea that Blair Curtis had been one of the boys in on the play since he and Wilde hooked up, and he got in touch with Curtis directly for one big tap; and that was the kick in the pants that set Miss Wilde in action. She devised a method to pull out of it, once and for all, and stay on top. Alone.
“So she takes the string she had tied around Holly off the hook and yanks it. Holly is nuts about her. So, reluctantly, she gives in. She promises to marry him. But — money. She’s paying out too much, she confides, and of course the lovesick Holly agrees. So Holly gets commissioned to take care of Pineapple and Gorin. Holly wouldn’t do any of that personally, that’s out of his line and therefore dangerous. But he knows a guy, the best. Pay the guy, she says, pay him tops, this is a very important job. She shells out, but it’s worth it. And in back of her mind, I’ll bet anything, after that’s over, she plans to do a job on Holly herself, and then, at long last she’s out. Out!”
Don’t ask me why.
I don’t know, and I never will know why human beings keep doing that sort of thing.
They’re all washed up, panties and all, and it can’t do any good, but they always do it and, always, it surprises me because it doesn’t make sense, only up to now it never hurt me, it just surprised me.
Anyway, Edith Wilde stuck her hand down under the pillow and came up with a laughable little .22, a small black instrument with a tiny muzzle, and I didn’t laugh because the trigger was being squeezed with determination and five cute little pellets entered into me, in the region of the stomach, like five baby fingers into porridge.
I stood where I was, and watched her run into the bedroom with Scoffol pounding after her and I heard the crash of glass and I heard her scream.