Brass Rainbow

by Michael Collins

  The Brass Rainbow

  Dennis Lynds writing as Michael Collins

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media Ebook

  To Ken Millar,

  with thanks

  1

  SAMMY WEISS once made seventeen passes in a row in a crap game where “two bits” meant twenty-five dollars, not a quarter. It was the event of his life, and they still tell the story around the Village and Lower East Side. It does not impress me. I was there.

  But Sammy never forgot that once, briefly, he had been a big man. He was being the big man now where he sat in the only other chair in my one-room office.

  “You swear I was with you twelve noon to two P.M.,” Weiss said, “and it’s a C-note for you.”

  He was expansive, come to buy the services of a poor detective, but his shadowed Levantine eyes did not look at me. Weiss is short, fat and soft, and his eyes never look at anyone. He wears a clean shirt, but his suits never fit. His floral ties sport a diamond stickpin that went out of style long ago. His overcoat is too long and has a fur collar. The fur shows bare hide where it has rubbed so long against his fat neck.

  “Make it two hundred,” he said. “I was with you, right?”

  “You haven’t had two hundred at one time in ten years,” I said. “And I don’t buy.”

  “Danny the Pirate, he’s so honest?”

  The old nickname showed how long Weiss has known me. A relic of the ancient career in juvenile thievery that had cost me my arm. Unrecorded history, I’ve got no police record. All I have is a missing arm and old acquaintances like Weiss.

  “I lost my arm, not my brains. My mother didn’t raise me to sell an alibi for two bills, and not in the dark.”

  “Your mother I could of bought for a dollar!”

  I closed my eyes. A cold wind was blowing down the air-shaft and through my single window. A Siberian blast that made my stump ache. I opened my eyes. You can’t really feel better by hitting a man weaker than you. At least, I never could. Maybe that’s why I never made my mark in the world.

  “Hell, Danny, I’m sorry,” Weiss said.

  He had begun to sweat. It was ten degrees outside, and not much higher in the office, but his face shined with sweat like a pale wet moon. Just as it had done years ago on his big night.

  Weiss had begun with ten dollars, let the pot ride, and after his fifteenth straight pass there was $163,840 in that pot. Two more passes, maybe one, would have broken the game. That is the crapshooter’s dream: to be the last man at a long table in an empty room, stacking his money.

  I remember the stink of his sweat-soaked clothes as the gamblers waited. I can see his hands shaking as he reached to drag $160,000 from that pot, and hear him croaking, “Craps coming, I got the hunch. Crap this time for sure.”

  Crap had not come. He made two more passes before he crapped out, and when he walked out on stiff legs he left the game badly bent but not broken. The hard-faces smiled. They knew. Weiss walked out rich, but not a winner. He had won a battle; other men were going to win the war.

  Now I said, gently for a born loser, “What trouble is it?”

  “I don’t know, Danny,” he said, his hat held in both hands like a suppliant before a priest. “Freedman’s after me.”

  He shuddered as if in pain. For Weiss, Detective Second Grade Bert Freedman was pain.

  “You know,” I said. “Tell it.”

  He looked at the ceiling as if trying to find some way of not knowing. “I went up to this guy in the Sixties: Jonathan Radford III. He got a nephew: Walter Radford IV. Like kings they got numbers.” He tried to grin to make it all okay. “Anyway, Walter owes me $25,000 from a big poker game. I go to collect from the uncle, see? A girl opens the door and sends me to a kind of office. This Radford don’t even turn around. He’s by the open window, breathing! Silk robe! The big man. He lets me cool my heels a while. I say where’s my money? He turns around, fast-like. He says no payoff! He says I can go whistle. He curses me out. So I throws a bluff at him, see? I say there’ll be trouble, heads maybe get broken. He comes on me like he’s nuts! He grabs me. He musses me up. I swing on him, maybe once. He goes over and just lies there. I mean, he don’t get up. So I go to turn him over, when he starts groaning. I got scared. I beat it.”

  He stopped. I waited.

  “That’s all of it?” I said.

  “What else? I mean, he went over, he was groaning, and I beat it,” Weiss said. “Look, the doorman saw me go in, maybe one look. He wasn’t there when I went out. One old lady in the lobby saw me going out fast, and that girl saw me when I went in. She didn’t hardly look at me. How can they be sure? You tell Freedman I was with you, and it’s us against Radford. A lot of guys look like me. He made a mistake.”

  It was so stupid, so full of holes, it was pitiful. An animal running blindly from a forest fire.

  “Sammy,” I said, “Radford knows your name.”

  “He don’t!” Sammy said triumphantly. “I never told him.”

  “Then how do the police know?”

  “I figure he give a description. Freedman hears that and comes after me first off.”

  “How do you know Freedman wants you?”

  “I got friends. I made my window a jump ahead of the Cossack golem two hours ago. I shook him.”

  “Maybe it’s something else.”

  “I ain’t done nothing else. Gimme an alibi, Danny?”

  “No. Go in. See what Freedman’s got. Don’t mention Radford until they do. If it is Radford, he started the fight.”

  “He’s a blueblood, Danny, rich. Who listens to Sammy Weiss? They’ll drop a year on me at least. I can’t take it inside. All you got to do is alibi me. I know how it works. Our word against his. Only it’s got to be two of us.”

  “No,” I said. “It wouldn’t help, and it’d hang me.”

  His moon face looked straight at me for almost the first time. “Okay, Dan, sure. Only go talk to the guy. Make him tell he started it. Talk to Freedman, you know? Tell him I got friends. Look, I ain’t got two C-notes. I can get maybe fifty bucks.”

  “Freedman would laugh at me, and how do I prove this Radford hit first? What can I do, Sammy? Go in to the Lieutenant, skip Freedman. Tell your side of it straight.”

  He blinked at me. He got up. His lower lip quivered. He put on his hat and walked out. A small, fat man with a ragged fur collar and a diamond stickpin. A small man who walked small and who knew it.

  For a year after the night that had been his triumph and his tragedy, Weiss had walked tall. He spent, or lost, that $160,000 in the year to prove how tall he was. All he proved was that he was not tall at all. His moment had come and he had failed it. Most men fail their big moment, but most can evade the knowledge of their failure. Weiss could not evade.

  He had not crapped out on the sixteenth roll. He had rolled two more passes, and those two useless passes would haunt Weiss forever. They proved he did not have what it took. So he bluffs. His cow eyes tell the world that the next time he will let the pot ride all the way. He doesn’t even fool himself. He knows he will always quit two passes too soon. Freedman probably wanted him for something about as important as rolling dice in public.

  I hauled on my duffle coat and went out to eat.

  On the dark street the wind blew a spray of old snow. I hunched inside my collar and headed for Eighth Avenue. As I neared the corner, I saw Weiss talking to a tallish, redheaded woman. She wore thick stage make-up, and black-net stage tights showed from under her fur coat. Her hair was almost orange and piled high. Weiss got into a taxi with her.

  I went down to the Sevilla and had a paella. I thought about Marty, my woman. Marty was down in Philadelphia with a new show, so I thought about Sammy Weiss. I thought a
bout his story, and a small point stuck out after a time and bothered me. If this Radford, or his nephew, owed Weiss $25,000, how could Sammy say that no one at Radford’s apartment knew his name? It made no sense.

  I finished my dinner and went over to Boyle’s Tavern, where Joe Harris was working.

  “You hear about Sammy Weiss winning $25,000?” I asked Joe.

  “I ain’t heard of him winning twenty-five cents,” Joe said, and poured. Joe always slips me my first Irish free. “Where would Weiss get the stake to win that much, or the nerve to play for it anymore?”

  “Yeh,” I said.

  I wondered what Weiss had really pulled, or tried to. I didn’t wonder too hard. Not then.

  2

  I WOKE UP to pounding on my outside door. My watch read six-thirty. The dawn light was gray, and the temperature in my bedroom was like the arctic tundra.

  I shivered out of bed and grabbed my robe. I turned on the oven and two of my gas heaters. With my income I can choose between one warm room or five cold ones. I like space, but it’s a discouraging choice. While I lighted the heaters and wished I could afford five warm rooms without rearranging my psyche to fit the needs of the corporations, the pounding on my door did not let up.

  I opened the door on Detective Bert Freedman. He was a short, stocky man with shoulders like a bear. He walked in without being invited, producing a warrant, or saying hello. It was a technical point I let pass. Freedman started a tour of my rooms.

  I plugged in my coffeepot. Men who live alone too long, or live in too many places where no one knows them, develop habits instead of friends. A ready pot of coffee was my welcome to a new day. It was perking when Freedman faced me.

  “You can tell me where Sammy Weiss is, or you can come down to the squad room.”

  “You can close the door behind you going out, or you can have some coffee.”

  “Don’t get wise with me, Fortune!”

  Freedman makes big fists for a short man. He’s a hitter, a Johnny Broderick detective. But the famous Broderick was a good cop, hard and smart, while Freedman is a bad cop who is hard in place of being smart. The police have a normal quota of stupid men; no more and no less than any other big organization. I was no match for Freedman. I wouldn’t have been with two hands, but I keep a hammer handy in my kitchen. In my work I need the police, but I draw the line at Freedman. I touched the hammer.

  “I didn’t ask you in,” I said. “You’ve got no warrant, and I’m not a reasonable suspect in a felony. You’re out of your precinct. Lay off, or I’ll fight back and apologize later.”

  Freedman has no sense of humor. Vicious men seldom do. He watched me as if deciding whether I would really fight or not. His fists clenched and unclenched.

  “Weiss told people he was going to hire you.”

  “He didn’t,” I said. “What’s he wanted for?”

  Freedman laughed. “He’s one Jew-boy’s gonna hang slow.”

  Freedman has a mission—to destroy any of his fellow Jews who break the law. A self-appointed scourge of the tribe.

  “Why?” I said.

  “He’s dirt,” Freedman said. “A bug, a grease spot. You see him, or hear from him, you tell me fast. Just me, no one else.”

  “If he’d shot Moses,” I said, “I’d tell you last. I’d want him to get to the Tombs on his feet and breathing.”

  Freedman couldn’t really hurt me as long as I was clean with Centre Street and my own precinct squad. He opened and closed his fists a few more times, and then he left. He slammed the door.

  Outraged voices along the hall complained bitterly. I hardly heard them. My mind was on Sammy Weiss. Freedman had not acted as if he wanted Weiss for punching a man—not even a rich man.

  The Medical Examiner’s Building in New York is on the East Side near the river. It stands between the old buildings of Bellevue Hospital and the new buildings of New York University’s Medical School. Snow had started falling again, and it hung over the river like a swirling mist as I went down into the main autopsy room.

  I was looking for the night man, Mitch O’Dwyer. There was a covered body on one of the eight tables. A murdered man on a living room floor does not make me shiver the way a body on an autopsy table does. It’s the impersonality of death that scares.

  Mitch O’Dwyer looked up. “Trouble, Dan?”

  “Do you have a Jonathan Radford III, Mitch?”

  No matter how rich a man is, if he dies a violent death in New York he will end up on the autopsy table. In midtown that means in the M.E.’s morgue, and Mitch O’Dwyer makes the tags that go on the wrists of the dead.

  “Yeh,” Mitch said. “I remember that part about ‘the third.’”

  I wasn’t really surprised, or I wouldn’t have been there in the morgue.

  “Can I see him, Mitch?”

  “Make it fast. The docs’ll be down soon.”

  There are 128 storage crypts in the morgue. New York is a big and violent city. The crypt Mitch opened contained a muscular man of medium size in his late fifties or so. He had been a handsome man with regular features, thick gray hair and an imperial beard, small eyes, and a thin, hard mouth. Weiss had been right. Radford looked rich and tough, like old Kaiser Wilhelm.

  “Can I see the report, Mitch?”

  “Is it important?”

  “It could be.”

  “Okay, I’ll look at it for you. Wait over in Phil’s.”

  I went across the wide avenue to Phil’s luncheonette. The snow was thick and blowing. I ordered two eggs and coffee. Mitch arrived before my second coffee. He sat down and read from a pad:

  “Jonathan Ames Radford III; age 59; 146 East Sixty-third Street. Dead on arrival at his home of 17th Squad detectives called by George Foster Ames of the same address. Death was from a single knife wound in the left ventricle.”

  I sat up. “A knife, Mitch?”

  “That was it. The wound was funny, some kind of knife with a wavy edge. It wasn’t found.”

  “What about the time?”

  “Cops got there at six-ten P.M. That was last night. The Doc estimated time of death between around noon to two-thirty P.M.”

  “Any other wounds or bruises?”

  “No, and that’s funny. In knifings they usually get bruises.”

  I paid Mitch his ten dollars and went back out into the wind on the avenue. (What Mitch does isn’t legal, but he has six kids and the taxpayers hate to pay people they can’t see working directly for their own benefit.)

  In the driving snow I walked downtown toward the Lower East Side. I wanted to find Sammy Weiss. It could be that the police only wanted Weiss as a witness. That was not the way Freedman had acted, but you could never tell with a man like Freedman. Any chance to make Weiss sweat would be a pleasure for Freedman.

  Sammy was not a violent man. He was, if anything, a soft man. On the other hand he hadn’t seen anything like $25,000 in a long time, and if Radford had tried to welsh …?

  One way or the other it was murder, and, witness or suspect, Weiss’s only play was to turn himself in. There’s nowhere to run from murder.

  He had come to me, and while I owed him nothing, everyone needs someone on their side. There are always gray areas, even in murder. It was possible that Weiss didn’t even know that Radford was dead. Someone had to tell him, and better me than Freedman.

  I plodded through the snow of the Village and the Lower East Side for the better part of the morning. I tried all Weiss’s haunts I could remember: taverns, poolrooms, Turkish baths, horse rooms, and the dingy cafeterias where lone men like Sammy eat. Freedman had been most places before me. No one had seen Weiss since 3:00 A.M. last night. That made me wonder.

  No one sticks to the old places like a solitary gambler down on his luck, except a sailor. To a sailor the ship is home, mother and family. To a piece of flotsam like Weiss, home is his haunts.

  As a last resort I checked his room on St. Marks Place. I did not expect him to be there. He wasn’t. I stopped for a beer
.

  Sammy was on the run or hiding. Without money he could not run far, and he could not get money because the police would know everywhere he could hope to get it. Without money he could not hide long, either. So he had more money than I had suspected, or someone was hiding him. It let me out. If he had stabbed Radford, only a lawyer could really help him. If he hadn’t stabbed anyone, he didn’t seem to need my volunteer aid.

  I went home and cooked a can of soup to warm me. I watched the snow outside the window. The tall buildings uptown were vague ghosts through the swirling flakes. I thought about Marty. I thought about going down to Philly to see her. But I would only be in her way. A girl trying to make it in her first real show doesn’t want a steady lover hanging around to scare off people.

  I got my coat. I couldn’t spend the day thinking about what Marty was doing in Philadelphia. At least I could find out how bad it was for Weiss. Not from the police. They would only figure I was in touch with Weiss and sweat me. I would investigate. At least keep busy.

  Maybe I was just curious. Being a detective gets to be a habit, and a murder is like a mountain—it’s there.

  3

  THE APARTMENT HOUSE on East Sixty-third Street where Jonathan Radford had lived was a massive, gingerbread gray building built in the twenties for the true rich. Its upper stories were lost in the heavy snow.

  “Radford apartment,” I said to the doorman.

  He was obviously under orders to keep the murder quiet. A foursome looking for a taxi appeared in the lobby. He didn’t even ask who I was.

  “Apartment 17, left elevator, rear.”

  It was a small, self-service elevator that served only two apartments on each floor. It delivered me to a tiny foyer for apartment 17. I rang.

  The man who answered the door was tall, gray-haired, and looked something like the body in the morgue without the beard. He had a large nose, the pink face a man gets when he is habitually shaved by barbers, and a wrinkled neck he tried to hide by holding his head too high. I had a mental flash—I knew his face. How?