Black Shadows

by Simon Swift

  Hell what a mess.

  I got to my feet and hurried to the nearest bar that I could find. This time I did pay attention to my surroundings and was fairly sure that I had not been followed. This was another thing puzzling me, where was Weeny Jung Ping? I passed on that question and ordered a cognac but received a brandy. I shrugged and took a booth in a corner keeping a close eye on anyone who passed through the door.

  The more that I thought about the meeting with Coward the more the mess got dirtier and dirtier. This was not just about the death of Dyke Spanner anymore and that was what scared me. This was now about a large chunk of my life that I had left behind ten years ago. It wasn't just the Shadow Man Detective Agency that I had turned my back on in 1935 it was one of the most famous gangland hits of the era. Me, Dyke and Terry had not supposed to be in the Palace Chop House when Dutch Schultz, Lulu Rosencrantz, Abe Landau and Otto Berman were hit and with skillful maneuvering and a lot of string pulling, we managed to not be there. Terry was dealt with in a way in which we had become accustomed and Dyke Spanner and I erased our presence. As far as I was aware there was not another person except Hermeez Wentz that knew we had been there.

  Apart from one. The one that Coward failed to mention and therefore either didn't know about or was pulling a hell of a bluff. That one was the Irishman that I wanted to forget. The Irishman was called Liam Tighe.

  The first time that I met Liam Tighe, I was left convinced that he was insane. Crazy as it sounds he was a remarkably likeable man considering he was an unabashed racist, sexist, violent thug. He appeared to live in a fantasy world where he was a cross between Nietzsche’s Superman and Hitler's dream of the ultimate Aryan. No taboo was too risqué and no subject was not fair game for his narrow opinionated ramblings that although alone were disgusting, were delivered in such a comic way in that they regularly brought a smile to your face where there should only have been a scowl.

  He was a small, squat man with a shaved head, his round face covered in light, brown stubble and his big, happy eyes dark brown. He usually wore a smart, black suit with a bright orange waistcoat underneath. This was kept out of sight and was his own tribute to his heroes of Ulster. He also carried a pistol in his pocket and was not afraid to brandish it at the most inappropriate of times.

  I was manning the office of the Shadow Man Detective Agency alone. It was lunchtime and the others had gone out for a slap up meal, leaving me to man the telephone and read the newspapers unbothered. There was a knock at the door and in walked Liam Tighe. He was carrying a parcel and placed it on the desk, before looking suspiciously around him. He put his bottom lip over his top one and sunk his head into his shoulders before asking where Terry was.

  "He's out for lunch," I said. "Can I leave him a message?"

  Tighe lit up a roll-up cigarette and held it between his forefinger and thumb pointing inwards, sucking the smoke deep into his lungs with his eyes closed before putting his head back and exhaling.

  He then looked at me and shook with laughter.

  "Get your money on Eastern Purple today in the two-thirty. It's got Marcus on him and he's carrying six pounds less than last month when he fuckin' stormed home. He won by twenty lengths that day. Really, twenty lengths!"

  He pulled a Racing Post out of his inside pocket and placed it on the desk. There was a red ring around the two-thirty race and he jabbed at it with his stumpy finger.

  "That is the easiest money you'll earn all week. It's home and hosed believe me. It's going down in class to gain a bit more experience and then it will be going for the big ones later in the year."

  "Have you backed it?" I asked.

  He shook his head. "Nah, I'm not betting today," and he pulled a slip of paper from his pocket, unfolded it and held it towards me. "Look, I've got fifty billies here. Number five, five to one, ten bucks to win," He again laughed out loud, raising a fist in the air and shouted, "Fuck 'em eh? Fuck 'em all!"

  I did put a few dollars on Eastern Purple but it would be the last time I backed one of Liam's hot tips. Every day he came into the office he was singing the praises of one horse or another, convinced the race was over before it had begun and every time without fail it trailed home well out of the places. But he did win money. Almost as frequently as his tips failed, he triumphantly held aloft a winning ticket from some other race in which he had backed on the spur of the moment or at random.

  Another regular part of Liam's routine was his fantasy forays into the world of buying and selling. One day he would bring in a box of bulbs, the next day it would be drinking glasses and the next day bootleg liquor. He would then allow himself to be bartered down below cost on the precept that he was starting a new venture. Sometimes the demand would be there and there was real money to be made only his supply always dried up before he could make any. He would proudly regale you with his vision of a bright new future, of the Tighe empire that he was building, only to slope in the next day with the disappointing news that he couldn't fulfill your very first order. Unperturbed the next day would herald the bright new dawn of some other doomed venture.

  The box that he laid on the desk that very first day was full of cigars, fine Cuban cigars and I bought the lot for a very reasonable price.

  "Fuckin' Cubans, eh. Bastards!" he said and pulled a face as if he had sucked a particularly bitter fruit. "Not as bad as the fuckin wops though are they? Eh? Eh?"

  He leaned a bit closer towards me, tucking his shirt back in his trousers as he spoke, "If it was up to me I'd take a few boys and go knock on all the doors of those fuckin' shit holes in the Lower East Side," he motioned as he was talking, "I'd say right you've got one hour to get all your shit together and be on a plane or a boat back to wherever it is you come from. Same goes for the niggers, the spicks, the Jews, the gooks and the fuckin Pope lovers. Send 'em all back to the fuckin' jungle or wherever it is they're from and if they don't go we should burn their fuckin' houses to the ground. That'll teach 'em, eh, for coming here and fuckin' our women."

  I said nothing, shaking my head and sighing inwardly when Terry and boys returned. Forgetting about his tirade Tighe raised his arms and gave Terry Shadow a great big bear hug.

  I then listened in amazement as he and Liam had a long conversation about how the Irishman was helping an old African lady that lived in the ground floor flat of his tenement block. Incidentally, the flat was in the Lower East Side. He had been going round for the last two weeks, every day and cooking for her, buying her groceries and cleaning the flat. In the same sentence he denigrated blacks for being ‘filthy, disgusting motherfuckers’ and smiled fondly as he recalled the over proof dark rum that she had sent back from relatives that she had given him as a gift.

  He went on and on and on and we were all convinced he was as close to a mad man as you can safely be but then we learnt to look forward to his visits. We disagreed with pretty much all of his politics, his views on the world and his attitude to women but yet he always brought a smile to our faces and never appeared to once threaten the real world.

  Until one morning when the Tribune hit the mat and he was there for all to see on the front page.

  Right until the last time I ever saw him, Liam Tighe denied that he did that terrible thing to that young girl and I guess I believed him. I shouldn't have, none of us should have done, he fantasized crazily about doing something similarly nasty every time we met, but when it had actually happened he broke up.

  I think we would have offered our support whatever the financial situation. After all, Terry and Liam were real tight, and Terry was a kind hearted kind of guy in a strange sort of way. But when the family organization came knocking on the door and peeled off ten big ones and put them in Terry's greasy hand with a promise of much more to come. Well it kind of sealed the friendship and Liam was assigned twenty four hour protection.

  That was what we were doing there that night at the Pork Chop House when Dutch Schultz got whacked. It now seems a hell of an irony getting caught up in a gangland hit w
hilst on the payroll to protect a body from exactly that kind of operation. But the contract out on Liam was not from anywhere near as high up and we had holed up in the Garden State for the last few weeks, so the location was purely coincidental.

  And now I was forced to confront that day again. I thought that I could forget it, the day Liam Tighe fled to Argentina, but now it was on my mind that he might just have fled with a little bit more than his family's stock of white powder.

  When the bar closed up at two thirty I was about to get back in my rental car and drive all the way back to Manhattan, but I had had far too much to drink and I felt exhausted so I walked back to the hotel. I hoped that after a good night's sleep everything would be clearer in my head.

  I stumbled into the hotel and made my way slowly up the stairs to my room on the third floor. Feeling well lubricated with too much alcohol and frazzled with the night's revelations, I took a blazing hot shower to clear my mind for sleep. It warmed me up and made my body feel a little better but I was still so tired, so very tired and was sure I would be asleep the moment my head hit the pillow.

  Unfortunately, it did not get that far.

  When I finished toweling myself dry and ambled through to the bedchamber, I felt a large arm around my neck and a heavily smelling handkerchief pushed over my mouth and nose. I tried to fight it off but one or two inhalations of the handkerchief and my strength drained quickly away and unconsciousness came a little quicker than I had even imagined.

  Chapter Fifteen – Night Visitor

  It felt like I had been sleeping for days.

  I knew I was sleeping in a nice, warm, comfortable bed, but I had no idea where and no conception of for how long. Dreams can sometimes be guidance but not with me, I can quite often have three or four epic dreams in the space of a couple of hours. Whole lifetimes are lived on the grandest scale and minutest detail yet if I wake and take a look at the clock barely enough time to boil an egg has elapsed.

  This time was no different. Ever since Claudia had walked through my office door, she had featured strongly in my vivid dreams, and then Marlow, and sometimes the both of them. They were the weirdest yet the most exciting dreams. The kind that make you really disappointed when you wake up, leaving you feeling that you have lost a chunk of your life forever.

  I heard the chinking of keys. I awoke to see the door open and in walked the frame of a tall, beautiful woman. The lights were switched on and stood before me was Marlow.

  I sat up in bed and rubbed my eyes. I couldn't believe what I saw; she was there as large as life, wearing that same dressing-gown from a few nights earlier. She had a huge smile on her face and came running towards me. Before I knew it she had her arms around me and was showering me in kisses.

  I pushed her gently away and looked into her sparkling green eyes. "Marlow," I said. "Are you all right? How did you get in here?"

  She smiled nervously and held the keys in her hand. "Oh Errol, I'm so glad you're here," she replied. "I thought that you'd never come."

  I rubbed my eyes and sat up in bed, unable to take all of this in. I had so many questions I had to ask her, so many things that I needed ironing out in my mind and yet all that I could think about was how beautiful she looked and how much I would like to show her how I had missed her.

  Marlow smiled, tears in her eyes, but she looked cold. "Are you all right Errol, did they hurt you?"

  "I'm fine baby, don't worry, I'm fine," I said, and then took a few moments to clear my mind of hurdles before saying, "Marlow there's a hell of a lot of questions you need to answer and you need to answer them well."

  She slowly caressed my hand and sniffled. Then she took a deep breath and nodded her perfect head so that her red, curly locks bobbed across her painfully sweet face. And then she began to answer the questions. I fired them thick and fast, one after the other and sat back digesting exactly what she had to say, how she said it and how she reacted to suggestions that I made.

  I listened to everything Marlow said. I listened intently and I wanted desperately to believe her, but I was still extremely sceptical.

  She insisted the original case was not a set up. At least not by her, she felt genuine worry for Claudia and wanted the situation clearing up. The fact that the trail led right to the murder of my former partner was a huge and unforeseen coincidence. She confessed candidly to being the lover of Dyke Spanner, although this was a separate issue to Claudia and to George Ferriby that she had felt no reason to tell me. Staying with that theme she strongly denied being the cut out for The Coward, as Woo Wang and later Weeny Jung Ping had insisted and also denied ever working with or for The Coward or Audrey Daniels or anybody regarding Dyke. As far as she was concerned he was her lover and nothing more. They met by chance at a show on Broadway.

  But of course all these paths would eventually cross each other and that was when she began to tell lies. She was devastated when she found out Dyke had been killed and that she had been so close to the incident and went into instant shock, although that was not to diminish in any way on our night together she added hastily. Of course one burning question that I had to ask again was why Daniels had called at her apartment and why did she instantly get scared if she didn't know him?

  "Dyke never fully confided in me. If you knew him as well as you say you do you would know that he wouldn't do that however good you were in bed. But he did tell me that people were after him, real bad people that wanted to kill him and if they saw me with him would want to kill me too. That must have been why that killer called me up and now it freaks me out even more.

  "Dyke tried so hard to contact you, Errol. He told me you were business acquaintances and that he didn't want to see any harm come to you. Unfortunately, whenever he got in touch you were out, and wherever he went nobody knew where to find you. He tried, Errol, he tried desperately to warn you and that's certainly why he's no longer here. I'm sure it was his constant talking of you that led me to think about Claudia hiring a detective. You sounded like just the kind of guy she needed."

  Marlow started to weep, resting her head on my chest. The more emotional she got, the more she began to convince me she was telling the truth.

  "Take your time sweetheart, take your time. There's no rush."

  I got her a drink of water and she gulped it down hurriedly.

  "Was Dyke killed by The Coward because he was trying to warn me off?" I asked nonchalantly.

  "Yes, I think so. They must have known that he was trying to approach you and they wanted to get him out of the way. He refused to do a deal with them. You know, a deal to hand you over for a king's ransom. And so...and so they sent a contract killer to send him into the big sleep."

  Again Marlow could not control her floods of tears.

  I lit up a Lucky with my small, metal-plated lighter and inhaled deeply. A thick cloud of smoke filled the room as I exhaled. Jeez I could do with a drink right now. Meanwhile Marlow was gradually composing herself again.

  "Why didn't you tell me all this, the other night? Hell, you were so evasive, keeping everything close to your bosom. Then I could of thought things over a little better. Instead of being in this damned mess."

  "I'm sorry, Errol, I didn't know what to do, I was frightened of what these people would do to me. If they could kill a man like Dyke, then they could surely get to me but as far as I could work out they were unaware of my link to either Dyke or you. I don't know, I guess I thought that if you met me in Manhattan you could take me away from all this but first I needed to think. And that was when they struck and brought me here.

  "You still could, Errol. The other night I was not in full possession of the facts but now after a couple of days here I think maybe I am. How could I get it for them? Me, being a mere innocent girl, but you, Errol. You could do a deal I am sure, you could sell this blue diamond and we could go and live miles away from here."

  Marlow pushed herself close to me, rubbing her hand up and down my leg. She looked absolutely ravenous and I was so tempted t
o just forget everything and take her there and then. I looked at her beautiful face and our mouths met. We kissed passionately, but before it got any further she pulled away.

  "You do have the diamond don't you, Errol. The Coward is right isn't he?"

  I ignored the question and again moved closer to Marlow, kissing her luscious, red lips. She kissed me back, but then again pulled away.

  "It's very important, Errol. He will not just give up on this. He has told me all about it. He has spent most of his life and he has covered the four corners of the world for this stone. He won't just give up on it and right it off you know that don't you? You must have it, you must have."

  She looked at me, her eyes deep and hopeful. She reminded me of that little kitten she had back in the apartment in Brooklyn, all innocent and dependent. I knew, of course, she was nothing of the sort. She was highly independent and a very cunning lady.

  "What happened when Coward's boys pinched you? Why didn't they kill you, like they killed Dyke?"

  Marlow looked away and stood up. She made sure to avoid eye contact and dabbed her forehead. "Clearly they thought that I'd make good bait. It makes perfect sense doesn't it? They agree a meeting where you can rescue me in exchange for the diamond. That's why you came isn't it, Errol, to rescue me from their evil clutches?"

  Or maybe you were bait for some other reason, lady. Maybe you were a foil for me to come and complete the second half of their big sting. I would travel all the way to Woodstock to murder the only living witness to my earlier killing of Dyke Spanner. Apart from wanted felon, Audrey Daniels of course, making his confession all the more believable.

  I finished my cigarette and stubbed it out in the ashtray provided. Fumbling around in my trouser pockets, I realized it had been my last one. Marlow duly obliged, pulling a fresh packet from her gown pocket and offered one to me. I took the packet, and she lit one up for me.