In the side street below, the siren of a prowl-car wailed to a stop. Cops’ voices rose on the night.
Downy stood with a white face, looking on. Grier, one of the fat cops, was trying to question Arky, who sat staring off across the bedroom in a daze.
“But why did you do it, Ark?” Grier insisted. “I thought you and Anna was…”
“I told her not to come in,” said Arky. “I yelled at her. Look, Tubby. I got clipped. I ain’t thinking straight…”
Grier looked about him helplessly. In a moment there were heavy footsteps on the stairs and a couple of boys from the prowl-car came into the hallway, glanced down at Anna’s body, then entered the bedroom. One of them was carrying an odd-looking carbine-like gun with a hooded silencer on it.
“Somebody try to blast you, Ark?” asked the one carrying the gun.
“Yeah,” said Arky. Then he lifted a shaking hand toward the hallway. “They got ... they hit. . . Anna. I got clipped, too.”
“Where the hell’s that doctor?” cried Grier, more bewildered than ever now and trying to hide it.
Wild with excitement, Downy turned, ran down the stairs, stumbling and almost falling, and hurried to an all-night drugstore to call Reisman, then the Journal.
In the bedroom, the phone began to ring again. Coming to himself, Arky answered it; then his face turned from white to greenish as he listened to the usually calm Paymaster’s excited voice.
“They tried to kill the Mover tonight, Arky. He was sitting reading in his study with the windows wide open. He’s got a bad arm and shoulder wound. But somebody shot at the killer—nobody seems to know who, and a prowl-car from the Pier 7 Station was wrecked chasing the getaway car. There is going to be a terrible mess. He should have listened to you.”
“Yeah,” said Arky, keeping his voice calm. “I had an inquiry here, too.”
“Are you all right?” the Paymaster asked anxiously.
Arky glanced about him at the policemen, who were all trying to appear as if they weren’t listening.
“Oh, sure,” he said. “Business as usual. You know. Track odds.” He hung up.
“I can’t figure why that doctor don’t get here,” said Grier, peevishly.
After a moment, Arky got shakily to his feet and went out into the hallway to take a look at Anna. Somebody had covered her face with a handkerchief. There was dust on the bottom of her bare feet—dust she’d picked up hurrying to Arky’s bedroom to see why he didn’t answer the phone.
Lola, who had been revived, stood with her arms around Zand and her head on his shoulder, crying quietly.
“Poor Anna,” she sobbed. “Oh, God! Poor Anna. She was such a wonderful woman.”
In the back bedroom the baby began to cry, wailing persistently in the silence that followed Lola’s remarks.
“Go look after him, will you?” cried Arky, harshly, turning to Lola.
Lola started violently. “Oh, God! The poor kid! What’ll become of him now?”
“Go look after him,” shouted Arky. “Never mind the Goddamn carrying-on.”
“She’ll look after him, Ark,” said Zand. “Take it easy. This has been rough.”
Lola moved back from Zand and went down the hallway as if in a daze; the spare bedroom door closed quietly. In a moment, the crying ceased.
Arky stood staring down blankly at Anna. “I told her not to come in. I yelled at her,” he said at last. “But that’s the way she always was—wouldn’t listen.” After a moment, he went on in a low voice: “I guess she figured something must be wrong with me—that’s why she wouldn’t listen. She didn’t know what fear was, that woman!”
A few moments later the doctor arrived. After a brief examination, he said to Arky: “I can’t do anything for her. But I can patch you up good as new. What a lucky man you are! Half an inch more and you’d be lying there with her. This is the kind of crease you read about, but seldom see.”
Grier came over and looked on, then he asked Arky: “Got any leads for us, Ark? Got any idea who might be gunning for you?”
“No,” said Arky; then he shouted: “Take it easy, Doc—for God's sake!” Returning to his normal voice he spoke again to Grier. “Lots of guys lose a little money and they get sore. You know how it is, Tubby.”
“Yeah,” said Grier. “But you don’t expect some 17th Ward slob to come shooting with a gun like that—silencer and all.”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Arky.
Downy was frantic. He couldn’t locate Reisman. He couldn’t even raise anybody at Reisman’s house, which was very strange, considering the hour: after one o’clock.
Not certain just what to do, Downy finally called Pee Wee at the Journal and gave him the story about the attempt on Arky’s life and the accidental death of his girlfriend, Anna.
“What do you expect me to do with this?” cried Pee Wee irritably. “I’ll bet the girl friend wasn’t even a blonde beauty. Or even a blonde.”
“Yes,” said Downy. “She was a blonde. Kinda fat though and maybe thirty-five.”
“You said twenty-five, didn’t you? That’s what I thought. And a blonde beauty? Good. Love Nest Murder. But no matter what I do with it, brother... it will be mild stuff tomorrow. Hear about Judge Greet?”
“No,” said Downy indifferently. Judge Greet was a dull figure to him. A civic leader, for God’s sake! “What about him?”
“Somebody tried to kill him, that’s all! So get off the wire, will you?—with this 17th Ward stuff. I’m standing by. Get off, Downy.” Pee Wee banged up the receiver at the other end and Downy winced.
Who would want to kill Judge Greet? Downy shook his head in bewilderment, recalling the several times he’d met the Judge, a big, genial, rather pompous man, who made surprisingly brief and witty speeches on the banquet circuit. Some lunatic, no doubt. Who else?
Downy had worked his way downtown from the 17th Ward now and went into an all-night sandwich-shop for a snack. There was a cute red-headed kid with a glib tongue behind the counter and Downy sat eating a Denver sandwich and chinning with her.
“Aren’t you even going to ask me when I get off?” she inquired.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” said Downy.
“I can see you’re the shy type. Well, I get off at six in the a.m. Does that discourage you?”
“It certainly does. What an hour for a date!”
“You said it, curly. Romance at six a.m. My husband’s just getting up to go to work. Six feet tall, weighs two hundred.”
“The same size as my wife,” said Downy and the girl giggled appreciatively, looking at Downy with even more interest than before.
Suddenly Downy came to himself and almost fell off his stool. Turning, he took the thirty feet to the phone booth at a run. The red-headed girl stared after him in amazement.
“I hope he’s not going in the wrong direction,” she said as he shut the door of the booth.
Reisman answered at once. He sounded violently irritated.
“I been trying to call you for—” Downy began, but Reisman cut him off.
“I’ve still got my hat on. All this is what comes of living in the sticks where they haven’t got a first-run house. We drove into the Bijou. Double bill, both features; newsreel; comedy; Community Chest short; two intermissions so the yokels can buy peanuts, popcorn, and candy, which is the real purpose of showing movies now. All around me people were crackling paper and chomping. I missed a lot of the dialogue so Selma began to explain the plots to me. Very interesting. On the way home, I blew a tire. Nobody is speaking to me after what I said.”
“Listen, Ben. They tried to kill Arky tonight. He—”
“What! What!” cried Reisman. “Give it to me, and give it to me slow.”
Downy explained at some length, and then as Reisman said nothing, he added: “I phoned it in to Pee Wee, but he says it will get nothing, nothing at all on account of—”
“Good,” Reisman interrupted, “the less the better.”
Downy per
sisted: “... on account of the Judge Greet business.”
“The what?”
“Judge Greet. Somebody tried to kill him tonight.”
“You sure?” Reisman’s voice sounded almost hysterical. “Yeah. Call Pee Wee.”
“Okay. Hang up.”
“Wait, Ben. What do I do now?”
“Go back to the 17th if you want to. Go home to bed. I don’t care.” Reisman broke the connection abruptly.
Downy returned to the counter. A tough-looking taxi-driver was kidding the red-head now but she wasn’t paying much attention to him, and in a moment she walked back to Downy.
“Was she home?” she asked, jerking a thumb toward the phone.
“A man answered so I hung up.”
“Another cup of coffee, wise guy?”
“Yes,” said Downy.
When the girl returned with the coffee, she said: “Are you really married?”
“No,” said Downy. “Are you?”
“No.”
They looked at each other in silence for a long time, then the taxi-driver began to tap irritably on his water-glass with a knife.
“You want something else?” she called.
“Yeah,” said the taxi-driver, glaring at Downy. “A little service, sister, if you don’t mind. Another glass of water. Another cup of coffee. And a piece of apple pie.”
The girl served the taxi-driver in silence, then she came back to Downy.
“I must’ve done something to annoy him,” she said, giggling.
“I got to go clear across town on business,” said Downy. “I might be driving back around six.”
“Yeah? Funny hours. What business you in?”
“Police reporter.”
The girl’s face lit up. “Yeah? Murders and stuff? Some fun.”
“What’s your name?” asked Downy.
“Eunice Kubelik.”
“Mine’s Downy. Will I be seeing you?”
“Maybe,” said Eunice.
Downy went out whistling. All memory of the dead Anna lying on the floor of that dingy hallway had temporarily left his mind. The world was actually a delightful place, when, by the merest accident, a guy could make a connection with a red-headed doll like Eunice Kubelik. A wonderful place!
12
AT DOWNTOWN and the Pier 7 Station House, the two main police department clearing-houses of the big town, things were in an uproar. Yammering reporters were chased from room to room by the police, who kept falling over them. The attempted assassination of Judge Greet was the biggest crime story in a decade. Phones rang, and kept ringing. Girls on the switchboards looked haggard and spent, and cops kept bringing them coffee.
Legmen, hanging around the Judge’s house, and getting shooed away from time to time, kept calling one station or the other, trying to get some news.
At about three in the morning, Captain Dysen, looking grimmer and more formidable than usual, showed up at the station house, refused to talk to anyone, pushed reporters out of his way, and shut himself up in his office. Snooping, some of the boys heard him talking on the phone at intervals in a low voice; but they could not make out a word he was saying.
As time passed, Downy kept looking at his watch, the hands of which seemed to be stuck. Wouldn’t it ever get to be six o’clock? The hell with Judge Greet. He himself had more pressing business.
It was very quiet in Arky’s apartment. Lola was sleeping in the spare bedroom so she could look after the baby. Arky was lying full-length on his bed, staring up at the ceiling, his bandaged head propped up on three pillows. Zand was sitting nearby, smoking nervously, and from time to time glancing at the open window. He looked pale and shrunken in his loose, violently striped pajama top. He had a .45 revolver jammed down into his waistband, but the cold barrel against his bare skin began to bother him, so he took it out and put it on the table, beside him. Arky winced at the sound and turned to look at him.
“Don’t bang things around, will you, Zand? I got a head like a drunken bear.”
“Like a what?”
Arky grimaced and didn’t speak for a moment. “I got a headache, for Christ’s sake. Feels like the top’s coming off.” There was a long silence, then Zand spoke. “What do we do now, Arky?”
“We don’t do nothing. We wait to hear from the Mover. Why don’t you go lay down some place—get some sleep?”
“Not tonight,” said Zand. “I’m going to sit and wait for that friendly sun to come up. Them guys might come back.” Arky laughed mockingly. “They won’t be back. Not them guys. Never. They bungled it and they’re going to hear about it at their end. This was a big try. Bigger than you think. Anyway, I got the guy that was on the roof. I think I hit him twice. Once in the hand, and once in the shoulder. At that range, a .45 slug ain’t going to help him any. I give it to him worse than he give it to me.” He paused, then spoke in a low voice: “Except for Anna.”
“Son of a bitch ought to be cut up in small pieces,” said Zand.
“I did my best,” said Arky. There was a long silence. In spite of himself, Zand began to nod and jerked his head up with a start when Arky spoke again. “I should’ve married her, Zand. I’ll never find another one like her—I ain’t even going to look. That’s my last woman. Permanent woman, I mean. No more.”
“Why didn’t you marry her, Ark?” asked Zand. “I used to wonder. You two were always just like married people. I used to keep reminding myself you wasn’t.”
Arky sighed and rubbed his hand gingerly across his forehead. “Some crazy idea I had, I guess. You got to be pretty well satisfied to stay with a woman nearly ten years. I mean satisfied every way. It’s not just sex. That ain’t so important as most people seem to think it is. If that’s all a guy wants, he can get it and forget it, once a day, once a week, once a month—whatever his system calls for. Easiest thing in the world to get if you ain’t too particular. Never went over a week myself since I’m sixteen. No ... it was just that Anna was a gentleman…”
At another time, Zand would have laughed. Now he nodded solemnly. Arky had a funny way of expressing himself : you had to get the hang of him: but Zand knew what he meant, all right.
“She was a hundred percent,” said Arky. “Square. She put up with a lot from me at first. I was always seeing some cutie, and taking a stab. But that wore off, swear to God. I been like an honest married man for quite a while now, though I did see one lately was beginning to interest me. Right now she interests me about as much as you do, Zand.”
Zand repressed a quip and stared at the floor.
“Yeah,” Arky went on, “I should have married her. She always wanted to; then she could have had some kids. I didn’t want kids. After all ... the business I’m in, well … But if I’d’ve been back home where kids could grow up right it’d been different. Not in this place. Besides, I always disliked kids ... till Orv showed up. Now I don’t dislike ’em any more. The reason Anna took such a shine to Orv was she wanted kids of her own…”
“What are you going to do about the kid, Arky?” asked Zand.
“We got to get him back to his parents. Remember where you took that girl?”
“Yeah,” said Zand. “I can find it.”
“All right,” said Arky. “Tomorrow early you and Lola take the kid and all that stuff Anna bought—cost me two hundred…” Arky laughed sadly. “You take it—find them Polish kids and give ’em back their baby. If they want to put Orv in an orphanage that’s their business. He’s their kid. Besides, a kid’s better off in an orphanage than in a dirty, filthy, stinking place like this. You see ’em on the street every day, Zand, poor snotty-nosed little bastards…”
“Yeah,” said Zand thoughtfully. “I think you got something there. Only thing is, Lola’s going to raise a howl. She wants him.”
“That’s stupid,” said Arky.
“Yeah,” said Zand. “It sure is.”
There was a long silence. Arky closed his eyes and lay thinking about Anna. Half dozing, he saw her coming toward hi
m, laughing, her plump cheeks dimpled, her pale blonde hair shining—big, healthy-looking, strong—a whole lot of woman, Anna: a whole lot of woman!
… The coroner’s man had removed Anna’s body in a basket. There was to be an autopsy. The ballistic experts would check with the bore of the carbine the bullets removed from her body. It was merely routine. Nobody suspected Arky.
At Downtown there was an argument going on. Red Seaver cried: “I’d like to talk this over with Ben Reisman. He used to be the best. But I can’t locate the son of a bitch. He took a powder. I called Downy at Pier 7 but he don’t know where he is. Now where do you suppose Ben’s got to this time of the night?”
“Could it be women?”
“No. I think he’s past that. At least he hinted to me he was.”
“Liquor?”
“With that famous ulcer?”
“I’ve seen him tight—and not so long ago.”
“Not late at night.”
“You got me there. Gambling?”
“Gambling! Reisman! With all he knows? Oh, please now.”
“Well, there’s only one other answer. He’s on to something.”
“He’s a columnist. Jesus, you’re no help at all.” Red turned to a young blond fellow standing nearby. “Rooster—go try Reisman’s house again.”
“Okay, Red,” said Rooster, pleased that the great Mr. Seaver was even aware of his presence, then he dashed off.
“Now you were saying…” somebody called to Red.
“I was saying,” said Red, “that my hair’s not carrot color if there isn’t a cover-up going on in the police department. Now mind you, I don’t know what kind or why—I can’t get the ends together—but ain’t it a little funny, a prowl-car from Pier 7 getting smashed up in Riverview? You all got the same information. Do something with it.”
“What? Our man at Pier 7 said the boys had an open fugitive-warrant, looking for a suspect. They chased a car that wouldn’t stop. They went boom, or even powie. It can happen. It’s happened to me. I just smashed my heap up last week and I wasn’t even chasing anybody.”
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