The Long Night

by Hartley Howard

  I said, “I’m not assisting anyone. That’s one thing you and I have in common.”

  “You’re impertinent, Mr. Bowman.” She walked round me carefully like I had smallpox and she backed against the green drapes and felt for the join with one hand behind her. Anger improved her looks. Now she was less like a beautiful statue and more like a woman. I’ve never had a yen to get friendly with a statue.

  “O.K.” I said. “So I’m impertinent. Does that excuse you of all responsibility?”

  “Responsibility for what?”

  “Don’t you want Judith’s killer to be found out?”

  “Of course I do!” Almost in the same breath, she added, “But that doesn’t mean I’ll allow myself to be talked to this way by someone who has no authority. Just what is your interest in this affair, Mr. Bowman?”

  “I represent Judith Walker,” I said.

  “That doesn’t make sense. Judith didn’t have the chance to hire you. She——”

  “—died too soon,” I said. “Which brings us back to the motive you were quite sure it wasn’t. Why were you so sure?”

  Carole didn’t mind my lob shots but she wasn’t happy when I sent over a full volley. She let that one go by. In a stiff voice, she said, “The truth is you’re in this because you think there may be pickings. I’ve heard things about men in your kind of business.”

  “And I’ve heard things about girls in your kind of business.” I knew I’d made a mistake in not leaving her to cool off a couple of pages earlier. Playing Tom to her Tabby wasn’t going to pay off any dividends. “Some day,” I told her, “we must get together and collaborate on a book—one of those revealing books. Meantime, would you tell Mister Ivor Kovak I wish to see him?”

  When she’d had time to realise I was retiring from the field to regroup, she said, “Mr. Kovak can’t see you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He isn’t available right now. I—I believe he’s gone out.”

  “I don’t,” I said. “But, if I’m wrong, I’ll apologise. And I’ll wait patiently for his return.”

  Any anger she might’ve felt didn’t show any longer. Very calmly, she said, “You may have to wait a long time. Mr. Kovak was interviewed by the police this morning and he has no intention of discussing the subject further. His whole desire is to avoid getting himself involved in notoriety.”

  “Do I blame him? And who’s asking him to get himself involved in anything? Just you tell him I’d like a quiet chat and then you can go back to your modelling.” I let my eyes loose on a slow tour from her high, firm breasts past her slim waist and her tapering hips down to a pair of ankles that looked like they had no bones. When I’d climbed leisurely back up again checking points of outstanding interest on the way, I said, “It suits you better than acting the watch-dog. I guess Kovak is old enough to take care of himself.”

  There isn’t a dame alive or dead who has ever had any real objection to a guy looking at her that way. She might’ve said she didn’t like it but it’s given her a nice warm, satisfying feeling inside, nevertheless.

  Carole Van Buren hated me because she liked to think I thought she had what it takes, even though she didn’t want me to get the idea she’d ever give me the chance to take it. After her ice-cold grey eyes had told me just what kind of a louse I was, she said, “You may wait if you wish . . . but I can assure you that you’re wasting your time.”

  Then she tucked in her pouting lips and backed through the swaying green drapes quickly. Her high heels went thump-thump-thump-thump across a deep carpet and a door slapped shut and everything was quiet again. I lit a cigarette and waited.

  Two or three minutes passed. And another two or three. The sewing machine was a distant rumble and the tiny voices gabbled on unintelligibly. They sounded like overlapping stations on a badly-tuned radio. I listened to them and smoked and wondered why it took Ivor Kovak so long to make up his mind.

  Sooner or later, he knew he’d have to see me. He could refuse outright or he could stall, but he couldn’t go on stalling . . . unless he hoped I’d get tired of waiting and give up . . . If I made myself awkward, he could have thrown me in the can . . . if he didn’t mind creating a fuss . . . but he was trying to avoid notoriety . . . so he wouldn’t make a fuss . . . he’d just go on stalling. . . .

  Putting yourself in the other guy’s place is all right when you’ve got some idea of the kind of character he is. I hadn’t any ideas about Kovak. But I soon got some.

  At the end of ten minutes the street door down in the tiled lobby hissed open and a patrolman came in. He looked up at me and hunched his shoulders and pulled down the corners of his mouth. Then he came heavily up the stairs with his arms swinging.

  All the way up he was watching me. When he reached the top he stopped and slid his thumbs into his belt and straightened so’s to let his chest stick out. He said, “You waiting for someone, bud?” He had a lean face with deep-set eyes. His cheekbones were hard and shiny and he had a tough chin. He looked like he didn’t expect trouble but he hoped he was wrong.

  I said, “Why?”

  He said, “Look, bud. . . .” He took his hands away from his belt and came nearer. Not too near: just near enough to crowd me in case I got the idea I could duck out through the green satin drapes. “I’ll ask the questions,” he went on. “You don’t belong here and you ain’t wanted here. Do you go out nice and quiet or do I run you out?”

  “What am I supposed to have done and who’s laid the complaint?”

  “I’ll write you a letter.” He was watching my eyes.

  “Somebody around this place must be nuts,” I said. “All I’ve done is tell a dame I’d like to see Mr. Kovak. She said I should wait. So I’ve been waiting. Is that a crime?”

  “No. But that ain’t the way I heard it.”

  “Maybe not. But that’s all there is to it.”

  “You didn’t insult a young lady and do a lot of wild talking?”

  “Do I look that kind of crazy guy?”

  His thin mouth twitched and he sniffed. “You’re leading with your chin, brother,” he said. “I never judge a sausage by its skin. Mr. Kovak says that’s what you done and, any time, I take Mr. Kovak’s words against yours. You got your reasons or you ain’t got your reasons, it makes no nevermind to me. All I know is you don’t pay the rent here.” He drew a deep breath and lifted himself on the balls of his feet. “Gonna make left-right-left-right, bud, or would you like to start something?”

  “What gives after we leave?” I said.

  “Nothing. Mr. Kovak just says I should get you outa here and see you don’t come back. He don’t wanna talk to you but you won’t take no for an answer. So——” he grinned at me like he didn’t think I’d be amused “—I says maybe he used the wrong approach . . . yes?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And you’re gonna walk out like a nice boy and not come back?”

  “Yes,” I said. I pushed past him and began to go down the stairs.

  He followed me at a slower pace. Half-way down, he called after me, “And you ain’t gonna trouble Mr. Kovak or the young lady no more?”

  Without stopping, I glanced back at him. “I’ll send you a letter,” I said.

  Chapter VII

  The Dead Can Laugh

  At a quarter off six it was dark. Along the glittering length of Fifth Avenue the big stores were closing down for the night. One by one the lights of the upper floors went out and the sky came down and rested on the bright river of window displays flowing into the downtown darkness.

  Except for a lamp burning outside the big, all-glass entrance, Ivor Kovak’s premises had come to the end of another day, too. No light showed from the salon behind the green satin drapes; no light showed from anywhere. But no one had come out since the lights went off.

  I stood in a discreet doorway on the other side of the street and I waited. I’d been waiting for one hour and three-quarters minus ten minutes I’d taken off to grab a cup of java an
d a double-decker. That had been at five o’clock. And Mister Kovak and Miss Carole Van Buren had to go home sometime.

  In my racket you don’t have to be clever. All you need is a good pair of arches and the ability to creep inside your own mind while your body practices suspended animation. Time doesn’t drag so much that way. You can think about other things instead of telling yourself that you might be getting varicose veins for nothing.

  Came six o’clock. By now it was dark and it was cold and it was trying to rain properly. I did my best to keep warm by thinking about Carole Van Buren but it didn’t work. Thoughts of her made me think of Judith. And Judith wasn’t warm any more. Judith was frozen meat. Judith was a carcase with a tab on it in the city mortuary.

  So I thought about other things for a while. Such as why I was acting Joe Shmoe over a dame I’d seen only twice in my life and once in hers—a dame who’d been sucker-bait. Someone had wanted damn’ badly to railroad me into the death-house and Judith had been meant to be the whistle blow at the start of the journey. What I should’ve been doing was keeping my nose clean and my door double-locked nights.

  Only. . . . Something smelled about the whole set-up. I didn’t know of any dame who wanted to see me dead. And this would’ve been the complicated way of doing it that only a woman could’ve cooked up. Lots of guys hate my guts but they wouldn’t go all round the houses to have me rubbed out. The thing was too involved for any of the characters I’d annoyed in the past. They’d all been simple souls—the type who use a hit-and-run car or a knife in the back or a pair of heavy boots. This was a woman’s subtle way of taking her revenge.

  And that let me out. But I was already in. A honeyed, velvet voice on the phone had invited me in. Whose voice? And why? And how had the party who’d slugged me known I’d go into the bathroom? I might’ve called the law . . . or taken it on the lam soon’s I found Judith flipped on the bed . . . or searched the apartment with a cannon in my hand. . . . So the whole thing smelled.

  I let it lay at that. Because the big, one-piece glass door across the street had opened and several people were coming out. Five to be exact. All women. Carole Van Buren wasn’t among them.

  They didn’t loiter. Under the light above the entrance they told each other good night and someone laughed at something that’d been said and they broke up and went off: three one way and two the other. I hadn’t seen anyone lock up.

  The cold seemed to have frozen my watch. From ten minutes after six until a quarter after six was a very long hour. I wondered if Mister Kovak and Miss Van Buren were alone together in Mister Kovak’s office and if she were interested in art or did he keep his etchings in his apartment? After all, when she’s bringing home the bucks to the extent of four hundred a month, a girl’s got to be nice to her boss.

  At six-twenty, a floozie with ankle-strap shoes and no brassiere walked slowly past the doorway where I stood and gave me the double-O. She had a little kiss-curl stuck in the middle of her forehead and she was all crimson mouth and eyelashes.

  When she had gone on another couple of yards, she stopped and looked back and her teeth shone in a big, lazy smile. She said, “Hallo . . . cold, ain’t it?” Her voice could’ve been the voice that’d spoken to me on the phone. Could’ve been—but it wasn’t. This one wasn’t thickened with liquor.

  I said, “Whether it’s hot or it’s cold, sister, for my part you can keep it. Go peddle it some place else.”

  Without letting go of her smile, she gave me a cute name. If I’d been what she called me, I’d have been the biggest box-office draw on Coney Island. Then she said, “I hope you get run over by a truck. . . .” Her adjectival idea of a truck was something Ford never thought of.

  She was still finding descriptions for me as she walked on. They stayed in my mind long after the sharp tap-tap-tap-tap of her spike heels had dwindled resentfully into the sound of other footsteps and the bumbling of passing traffic.

  Six-thirty . . . a drizzle of rain misted the store windows and etched tyre marks on the pavement . . . passers-by began to hurry . . . windscreen wipers gave every car a pair of sleepy eyes . . . the tyre marks melted and the pavement became a glistening black ribbon reflecting a mile of lighted windows in the locked-up stores. . . .

  Then the glass door opened again. The dame with the platinum streak came out. She looked both ways and fiddled with her handbag and glanced back at the door like she’d forgotten something. After a few seconds of that, she walked to the kerb and stared across at me.

  I stayed where I was. If she knew I was there, then she knew and I could do nothing about it. If she didn’t. . . .

  She did. She walked a hundred yards along the Avenue in the direction of Broadway, crossed over to my side, and walked back. When she was level with my doorway, she said, “You’re acting the chump, pokerface. Kovak doesn’t know who killed Judith Walker. But I do.”

  I caught hold of her arm and pulled her in from the light of the overhead street lamp. She looked scared but not too scared. I said, “That’s just dandy. Now, all you’ve got to do is tell me and that’ll be two of us who know.”

  “Why should I?” She took off one glove and tucked in a wisp of her mousy hair. Then she looked down at my hand and prised my fingers off her arm. Her skin felt cold and dry and bloodless.

  “Because you’ll live longer that way,” I said.

  “Uh-uh. You’ll have to do better’n that.” In the reflected light, her eyes were hard and predatory.

  “There’s a saying,” I told her, “that it could happen to you. The character who put the bee on Judith Walker isn’t playing for peanuts.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” she said. “There are no stakes at all in his game. He wanted to kill her and now he’s done it. What more should he want?”

  “To save his own skin, for one thing. How’s he going to feel when he finds out you know . . . if you know.”

  “He won’t find out. And I can take care of myself, anyway.”

  “Not his way, you can’t. Why not be your age and save yourself a lot of grief?”

  She gave me a thin smile. With derision in her eyes, she said, “You can quit the high-pressure salesmanship, brother. I only know one thing: information like I got is worth something. How much is there in it for me?”

  “The price of your neck,” I said. “What if I turn you over to the law?”

  “I’ll call you a liar. Or a screwball. Which d’you fancy?”

  “You mean you’ll let him go free unless you get cash on the line?”

  “Sure. D’you see me crying my eyes out over a tomato who had big ideas of her own importance?”

  The lamp above the glass door had gone out. A blustering rain swept the opposite sidewalk like a tattered curtain as I said, “How can you be sure this guy did it? Were you there at the time? Or did he tell you himself?”

  She opened her mouth and shut it again and shook her head. She was trying to watch the door across the street as well. She said, “You must take me for a dope. That’d make me an accessory . . . wouldn’t it? No, mister, I wasn’t there and he didn’t tell me. But I happen to know he was her boy-friend. And I also happen to know the kind of dame she was . . . and not only with him. So she asked for it and she got it. And I don’t blame him, neither.”

  “Maybe you don’t. But that isn’t enough for an arrest, never mind a conviction. Anyway the police will find out who all her boy-friends were before they’re through.”

  “O.K. So they don’t need me at all, do they?” She grinned like a cat. “Or d’you think they could use one little piece of info they’ll never find out?”

  “How do I know? What is this info you think is so valuable?”

  “I don’t just think, brother. I know.”

  “Yeah? Well, here’s one thing you don’t know.” I took a handful of her coat and jerked her tight against me. As she struggled to pull away, I said, “There’s a copper right across the street. How would you feel if I called him over and told him you tried
to work the sidewalk Susie act on me?”

  She stopped struggling. Her face went pasty under the lavish make-up and she got a lump in her throat that kept coming back up every time she swallowed it. When she got rid of it at last, she said huskily, “You couldn’t make it stick . . . I’m a respectable girl . . . everybody knows I work for my living . . . Mr. Kovak would clear me in five minutes. I’d tell them how I came—to be—talking——” The lump came back and stuck. This time it seemed to have a nasty taste.

  “You could pass for one of the Burlap sisters,” I said. “To wriggle out of this pinch, you’d have to spill the little piece of info. And——” I put my other hand under her chin and tilted up her face so she had to look up at me “—that might get you in bad with the law. You’ve been concealing evidence material to the commission of a homicide. I once knew a dame who got one to three in the pen for just that . . . well?”

  She tried to twist free to look over her shoulder but it didn’t get her anywhere. I merely drew farther back into the doorway and took her with me. I said, “You got five seconds to make up your mind.”

  In her eyes, I could see a procession of double X’s passing under review while she made a pathetic face like she was about to burst into tears. Then she asked, “Am I not entitled to anything for telling you?”

  “Not a dime,” I said.

  “You’re gonna be sorry for that. A certain guy had a date with Judith Walker last night and I can put the bee on him. Isn’t that worth something? Save you running around in circles . . . wouldn’t it?”

  “Time’s up,” I said. “Give.”

  Her head went back and she laughed up at me. Before I could stop her, she had tossed her handbag away and pulled off her hat. With her untidy hair ruffling in the draught, she said, “Go on, mugsie, holler copper. If you don’t, I will. And when he gets here, I’ll be looking nice and pretty with the front of my dress all torn and——” her hands went round my neck and she pulled my head down and planted a lush kiss smack on my mouth “—you’ll be carrying plenty of evidence, too. Know what a guy gets for criminal assault in this town?”