Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  “You got to make an exception this evening,” said Ronicky, more fiercely than ever. “I ought to make you drink all three drinks for being so slow about drinking one!”

  “Three drinks!” exclaimed the fat man, trembling violently. “It — it would kill me!”

  “I think it would,” said Ronicky. “I swear I think it would. And maybe even one will be a sort of a shock, eh?”

  He commanded suddenly: “Drink! Drink that glass and clean out the last drop of it, or we’ll tie you and pry your mouth open and pour the whole bottle down your throat. You understand?”

  A feeble moan came from the throat of the hotel keeper. He cast one frantic glance toward the door and a still more frantic appeal centered on Ronicky Doone, but the face of the latter was as cold as stone.

  “Then take your own glasses, boys,” he said, striving to smile, as he picked up his own drink.

  “You drink first, and you drink alone,” declared Ronicky. “Now!”

  The movement of his hand was as ominous as if he had whipped out a revolver. The fat man tossed off the glass of whisky and then stood with a pudgy hand pressed against his breast and the upward glance of one who awaits a calamity. Under the astonished eyes of Bill Gregg he turned pale, a sickly greenish pallor. His eyes rolled, and his hand on the table shook, and the arm that supported him sagged.

  “Open the window,” he said. “The air — there ain’t no air. I’m choking — and—”

  “Get him some water,” cried Bill Gregg, “while I open the window.”

  “Stay where you are, Bill.”

  “But he looks like he’s dying!”

  “Then he’s killed himself.”

  “Gents,” began the fat man feebly and made a short step toward them. The step was uncompleted. In the middle of it he wavered, put out his arms and slumped upon his side on the floor.

  Bill Gregg cried out softly in astonishment and horror, but Ronicky Doone knelt calmly beside the fallen bulk and felt the beating of his heart.

  “He ain’t dead,” he said quietly, “but he’ll be tolerably sick for a while. Now come along with me.”

  “But what’s all this mean?” asked Bill Gregg in a whisper, as he picked up his suit case and hurried after Ronicky.

  “Doped booze,” said Ronicky curtly.

  They hurried down the stairs and came out onto the dark street. There Ronicky Doone dropped his suit case and dived into a dark nook beside the entrance. There was a brief struggle. He came out again, pushing a skulking figure before him, with the man’s arm twisted behind his back.

  “Take off this gent’s hat, will you?” asked Ronicky.

  Bill Gregg obeyed, too dumb with astonishment to think. “It’s the taxi driver!” he exclaimed.

  “I thought so!” muttered Ronicky. “The skunk came back here to wait till we were fixed right now. What’ll we do with him?”

  “I begin to see what’s come off” said Bill Gregg, frowning into the white, scowling face of the taxi driver. The man was like a rat, but, in spite of his fear, he did not make a sound.

  “Over there!” said Bill Gregg, nodding toward a flight of cellar steps.

  They caught the man between them, rushed him to the steps and flung him headlong down. There was a crashing fall, groans and then silence.

  “He’ll have a broken bone or two, maybe,” said Ronicky, peering calmly into the darkness, “but he’ll live to trap somebody else, curse him!” And, picking up their suit cases again, they started to retrace their steps.

  7. THE FIRST CLUE

  THEY DID NOT refer to the incidents of that odd reception in New York until they had located a small hotel for themselves, not three blocks away. It was no cheaper, but they found a pleasant room, clean and with electric lights. It was not until they had bathed and were propped up in their beds for a good- night smoke, which cow-punchers love, that Bill Gregg asked: “And what gave you the tip, Ronicky?”

  “I dunno. In my business you got to learn to watch faces, Bill. Suppose you sit in at a five-handed game of poker. One gent says everything with his face, while he’s picking up his cards. Another gent don’t say a thing, but he shows what he’s got by the way he moves in his chair, or the way he opens and shuts his hands. When you said something about our wad I seen the taxi driver blink. Right after that he got terrible friendly and said he could steer us to a friend of his that could put us up for the night pretty comfortable. Well, it wasn’t hard to put two and two together. Not that I figured anything out. Just was walking on my toes, ready to jump in any direction.”

  As for Bill Gregg, he brooded for a time on what he had heard, then he shook his head and sighed. “I’d be a mighty helpless kid in this here town if I didn’t have you along, Ronicky,” he said.

  “Nope,” insisted Ronicky. “Long as you use another gent for a sort of guide you feel kind of helpless. But, when you step off for yourself, everything is pretty easy. You just were waiting for me to take the lead, or you’d have done just as much by yourself.”

  Again Bill Gregg sighed, as he shook his head. “If this is what New York is like,” he said, “we’re in for a pretty bad time. And this is what they call a civilized town? Great guns, they need martial law and a thousand policemen to the block to keep a gent’s life and pocketbook safe in this town! First gent we meet tries to bump us off or get our wad. Don’t look like we’re going to have much luck, Ronicky.”

  “We saved our hides, I guess.”

  “That’s about all.”

  “And we learned something.”

  “Sure.”

  “Then I figure it was a pretty good night.

  “Another thing, Bill. I got an idea from that taxi gent. I figure that whole gang of taxi men are pretty sharp in the eye. What I mean is that we can tramp up and down along this here East River, and now and then we’ll talk to some taxi men that do most of their work from stands in them parts of the town. Maybe we can get on her trail that way. Anyways, it’s an opening.”

  “Maybe,” said Bill Gregg dubiously. He reached under his pillow. “But I’m sure going to sleep with a gun under my head in this town!” With this remark he settled himself for repose and presently was snoring loudly.

  Ronicky presented a brave face to the morning and at once started with Bill Gregg to tour along the East River. That first day Ronicky insisted that they simply walk over the whole ground, so as to become fairly familiar with the scale of their task. They managed to make the trip before night and returned to the hotel, footsore from the hard, hot pavements. There was something unkindly and ungenerous in those pavements, it seemed to Ronicky. He was discovering to his great amazement that the loneliness of the mountain desert is nothing at all compared to the loneliness of the Manhattan crowd.

  Two very gloomy and silent cow-punchers ate their dinner that night and went to bed early. But in the morning they began the actual work of their campaign. It was an arduous labor. It meant interviewing in every district one or two storekeepers, and asking the mail carriers for “Caroline Smith,” and showing the picture to taxi drivers. These latter were the men, insisted Ronicky, who would eventually bring them to Caroline Smith. “Because, if they’ve ever drove a girl as pretty as that, they’ll remember for quite a while.”

  “But half of these gents ain’t going to talk to us, even if they know,” Bill Gregg protested, after he had been gruffly refused an answer a dozen times in the first morning.

  “Some of ’em won’t talk,” admitted Ronicky, “but that’s probably because they don’t know. Take ’em by and large, most gents like to tell everything they know, and then some!”

  As a matter of fact they met with rather more help than they wanted. In spite of all their efforts to appear casual there was something too romantic in this search for a girl to remain entirely unnoticed. People whom they asked became excited and offered them a thousand suggestions. Everybody, it seemed, had, somewhere, somehow, heard of a Caroline Smith living in his own block, and every one remembered dimly ha
ving passed a girl on the street who looked exactly like Caroline Smith. But they went resolutely on, running down a thousand false clues and finding at the end of each something more ludicrous than what had gone before. Maiden ladies with many teeth and big glasses they found; and they discovered, at the ends of the trails on which they were advised to go, young women and old, ugly girls and pretty ones, but never any one who in the slightest degree resembled Caroline Smith.

  In the meantime they were working back and forth, in their progress along the East River, from the slums to the better residence districts. They bought newspapers at little stationery stores and worked up chance conversations with the clerks, particularly girl clerks, whenever they could find them.

  “Because women have the eye for faces,” Ronicky would say, “and, if a girl like Caroline Smith came into the shop, she’d be remembered for a while.”

  But for ten days they labored without a ghost of a success. Then they noticed the taxi stands along the East Side and worked them as carefully as they could, and it was on the evening of the eleventh day of the search that they reached the first clue.

  They had found a taxi drawn up before a saloon, converted into an eating place, and when they went inside they found the driver alone in the restaurant. They worked up the conversation, as they had done a hundred times before. Gregg produced the picture and began showing it to Ronicky.

  “Maybe the lady’s around here,” said Ronicky, “but I’m new in this part of town.” He took the picture and turned to the taxi driver. “Maybe you’ve been around this part of town and know the folks here. Ever see this girl around?” And he passed the picture to the other.

  The taxi driver bowed his head over it in a close scrutiny. When he looked up his face was a blank.

  “I don’t know. Lemme see. I think I seen a girl like her the other day, waiting for the traffic to pass at Seventy-second and Broadway. Yep, she sure was a ringer for this picture.” He passed the picture back, and a moment later he finished his meal, paid his check and went sauntering through the door.

  “Quick!” said Ronicky, the moment the chauffeur had disappeared. “Pay the check and come along. That fellow knows something.”

  Bill Gregg, greatly excited, obeyed, and they hurried to the door of the place. They were in time to see the taxicab lurch away from the curb and go humming down the street, while the driver leaned out to the side and looked back.

  “He didn’t see us,” said Ronicky confidently.

  “But what did he leave for?”

  “He’s gone to tell somebody, somewhere, that we’re looking for Caroline Smith. Come on!” He stepped out to the curb and stopped a passing taxi. “Follow that machine and keep a block away from it,” he ordered.

  “Bootlegger?” asked the taxi driver cheerily.

  “I don’t know, but just drift along behind him till he stops. Can you do that?”

  “Watch me!”

  And, with Ronicky and Bill Gregg installed in his machine, he started smoothly on the trail.

  Straight down the cross street, under the roaring elevated tracks of Second and Third Avenues, they passed, and on First Avenue they turned and darted sharply south for a round dozen blocks, then went due east and came, to a halt after a brief run.

  “He’s stopped in Beekman Place,” said the driver, jerking open the door. “If I run in there he’ll see me.”

  Ronicky stepped from the machine, paid him and dismissed him with a word of praise for his fine trailing. Then he stepped around the corner.

  What he saw was a little street closed at both ends and only two or three blocks long. It had the serene, detached air of a village a thousand miles from any great city, with its grave rows of homely houses standing solemnly face to face. Well to the left, the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge swung its great arch across the river, and it led, Ronicky knew, to Long Island City beyond, but here everything was cupped in the village quiet.

  The machine which they had been pursuing was drawn up on the right-hand side of the street, looking south, and, even as Ronicky glanced around the corner, he saw the driver leave his seat, dart up a flight of steps and ring the bell.

  Ronicky could not see who opened the door, but, after a moment of talk, the chauffeur from the car they had pursued was allowed to enter. And, as he stepped across the threshold, he drew off his cap with a touch of reverence which seemed totally out of keeping with his character as Ronicky had seen it.

  “Bill,” he said to Gregg, “we’ve got something. You seen him go up those steps to that house?”

  “Sure.”

  Bill Gregg’s eyes were flashing with the excitement. “That house has somebody in it who knows Caroline Smith, and that somebody is excited because we’re hunting for her,” said Bill. “Maybe it holds Caroline herself. Who can tell that? Let’s go see.”

  “Wait till that taxi driver goes. If he’d wanted us to know about Caroline he’d of told us. He doesn’t want us to know and he’d maybe take it pretty much to heart if he knew we’d followed him.”

  “What he thinks don’t worry me none. I can tend to three like him.”

  “Maybe, but you couldn’t handle thirty, and coyotes like him hunt in packs, always. The best fighting pair of coyotes that ever stepped wouldn’t have no chance against a lofer wolf, but no lofer wolf could stand off a dozen or so of the little devils. So keep clear of these little rat-faced gents, Bill. They hunt in crowds.”

  Presently they saw the chauffeur coming down the steps. Even at that distance it could be seen that he was smiling broadly, and that he was intensely pleased with himself and the rest of the world.

  Starting up his machine, he swung it around dexterously, as only New York taxi drivers can, and sped down the street by the way he had come, passing Gregg and Ronicky, who had flattened themselves against the fence to keep from being seen. They observed that, while he controlled the car with one hand, with the other he was examining the contents of his wallet.

  “Money for him!” exclaimed Ronicky, as soon as the car was out of sight around the corner. “This begins to look pretty thick, Bill. Because he goes and tells them that he’s taken us off the trail they not only thank him, but they pay him for it. And, by the face of him, as he went by, they pay him pretty high. Bill, it’s easy to figure that they don’t want any friend near Caroline Smith, and most like they don’t even want us near that house.”

  “I only want to go near once,” said Bill Gregg. “I just want to find out if the girl is there.”

  “Go break in on ’em?”

  “Break in! Ronicky, that’s burglary!”

  “Sure it is.”

  “Ill just ask for Caroline Smith at the door.”

  “Try it.”

  The irony made Bill Gregg stop in the very act of leaving and glance back. But he went on again resolutely and stamped up the steps to the front door of the house.

  It was opened to him almost at once by a woman, for Bill’s hat come off. For a moment he was explaining. Then there was a pause in his gestures, as she made the reply. Finally he spoke again, but was cut short by the loud banging of the door.

  Bill Gregg drew himself up rigidly and slowly replaced the hat on his head. If a man had turned that trick on him, a .45-caliber slug would have gone crashing through the door in search of him to teach him a Westerner’s opinion of such manners.

  Ronicky Doone could not help smiling to himself, as he saw Bill Gregg stump stiffly down the stairs, limping a little on his wounded leg, and come back with a grave dignity to the starting point. He was still crimson to the roots of his hair.

  “Let’s start,” he said. “If that happens again I’ll be doing a couple of murders in this here little town and getting myself hung.”

  “What happened?”

  “An old hag jerked open the door after I rang the bell. I asked her nice and polite if a lady named Caroline Smith was in the house? ‘No,’ says she, ‘and if she was, what’s that to you?’ I told her I’d come a long ways to see Caroli
ne. ‘Then go a long ways back without seeing Caroline,’ says this withered old witch, and she banged the door right in my face. Man, I’m still seeing red. Them words of the old woman were whips, and every one of them sure took off the hide. I used to think that old lady Moore in Martindale was a pretty nasty talker, but this one laid over her a mile. But we’re beat, Ronicky. You couldn’t get by that old woman with a thousand men.”

  “Maybe not,” said Ronicky Doone, “but we’re going to try. Did you look across the street and see a sign a while ago?”

  “Which side?”

  “Side right opposite Caroline’s house.”

  “Sure. ‘Room To Rent.’”

  “I thought so. Then that’s our room.”

  “Eh?”

  “That’s our room, partner, and right at the front window over the street one of us is going to keep watch day and night, till we make sure that Caroline Smith don’t live in that house. Is that right?”

  “That’s a great idea!” He started away from the fence.

  “Wait!” Ronicky caught him by the shoulder and held him back. “We’ll wait till night and then go and get that room. If Caroline is in the house yonder, and they know we’re looking for her, it’s easy that she won’t be allowed to come out the front of the house so long as we’re perched up at the window, waiting to see her. We’ll come back tonight and start waiting.”

  8. TWO APPARITIONS

  THEY FOUND THAT the room in the house on Beekman Place, opposite that which they felt covered their quarry, could be secured, and they were shown to it by a quiet old gentlewoman, found a big double room that ran across the whole length of the house. From the back it looked down on the lights glimmering on the black East River and across to the flare of Brooklyn; to the left the whole arc of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge was exposed. In front the windows overlooked Beekman Place and were directly opposite, the front of the house to which the taxi driver had gone that afternoon.