Sledgehammer

by Walter Wager

  “She’s good,” Carstairs judged as he listened to the blond singer on the bandstand celebrate a Harold Arlen blues.

  “As a performer, of course,” he added as if to reassure Kathy Pikelis.

  “Of course,” she agreed wryly while she studied the pretty, vital woman who sang so well.

  “A large talent,” Carstairs teased.

  “All over,” Kathy Pikelis concurred.

  The blonde was big, big-boned and big-voiced and big in the chest, as the bare shouldered dress revealed. She wasn’t fat—not even plump—but she had a size and solidity that came through in her strong, sure voice. Judy Ellis was twenty-seven or maybe twenty-eight, the knowledgeable bachelor calculated instantly, and the way she moved her body—subtly and sensually without the slightest trace of vulgarity—told that she was a woman and she enjoyed it. As Dennison seated Pikelis and his guests, the blues ended and the band leader smiled, paused about four beats, and sent sextet and vocalist swiftly into the Beatles’ bouncy “We Can Work It Out.” Like the best of the professional football players, she had an effective change of pace and all the moves. She seemed almost too good for a gambling club in Paradise City.

  “Has she been here long, Mr. Dennison?” Kathy Pikelis asked.

  “About five months. She came with the band. They’re very popular.”

  “I can see why,” John Pikelis judged.

  They ordered drinks, and then Carstairs danced with Kathy Pikelis again and he stopped thinking about Judy Ellis or any other women. The ganglord was still talking with Dennison ten minutes later when they returned to the table, but the casino manager excused himself immediately and Pikelis suggested that they now adjourn to the gambling room.

  “You’ve probably heard about the sin in our city,” he announced with an amused smile as they strolled past the two sturdy young men—plainly security—who flanked the swinging doors to the casino area, “and here’s your chance to see how wicked Paradise City really is.”

  “Sin has always been one of my most favorite things,” Carstairs answered. “Sin and pretty girls.”

  “I’ll bet,” commented the pretty girl beside him.

  “Do you mind, Kathy?”

  “I haven’t minded that since I was sixteen,” she whispered mischievously as her father led the way.

  “You’re the most attractive girl here, you know.”

  “And you’re the most clean-cut dirty old man I know,” she replied pleasantly.

  “You’re mad about me, right?”

  “Hopelessly. It’s your shyness that gets me,” she jested.

  “Don’t forget my sincerity.”

  “No, I’ll never forget your incredible sincerity. That’s what’s so sneaky about you—you don’t lie,” she explained. “Girls aren’t used to that sort of thing. It isn’t really fair, Petie.”

  He squeezed her left hand, raised it to his lips for brief connection.

  “I never said I was fair—just honest,” he answered. “I’m the most honest, clean-cut, dirty old man in the world. And the youngest.”

  Now they were in the gambling room, and it was much like a dozen others that the millionaire sportsman had seen around the world. It was more attractive than the ones in the Hilton in San Juan but not nearly so elegant as the one he’d visited in Biarritz. The red velvet drapes lent a certain European plushness to the decor, but the miniskirted waitresses circulating with drinks were much more Vegas than Versailles. It was a large room with two roulette wheels, three dice tables and three others where men were playing cards. Carstairs’ eyes wandered thoughtfully around the scene, up the walls to the ceiling for a long moment and then back to the tables.

  There were no gun ports in the ceiling, so far as he could tell.

  Gilman would know for sure, of course.

  There he was, Samuel Stanley Gordon Gilman—coolest man in this air-conditioned chamber. He was working the number-two roulette table, calm and efficient and pleasant and doing everything right. He would know about the entire security system and how the gambling casino operated, what the “house” brand of Scotch was, where the air-conditioning ducts were and which of the $50-an-hour women was considered the best value. By now, his orderly mind would have recorded all these details and many others—analyzed, cross-indexed and filed them for instant retrieval. He was as good with facts and numbers as Carstairs was with guns and women, the celebrated sportsman reflected.

  Kathy Pikelis saw her escort looking at the croupier, wondered.

  “You know him, Petie?”

  “No, but I think he’s the sly fellow who asked the bartender at the hotel whether I dye my hair.”

  “Do you?”

  “I don’t even shave under my arms,” Carstairs replied truthfully as he started toward one of the card tables.

  “No roulette?” Pikelis inquired.

  “A mug’s game, sir. Too purely mathematical for a fun-loving and thrill-seeking lad such as myself,” the bachelor explained. “A recreation for scientists and stock brokers.”

  “Not adventurous enough?”

  “That’s it, John. No adventure and no romance.”

  “Are you a romantic, Mr. Carstairs?” fenced the racketeer’s smiling daughter.

  “What? Oh, I thought you knew that. Don’t tell me that you really believed I was just another fortune hunter after the fabulous Pikelis pearls?”

  For a moment the racketeer was puzzled by the reference to the nonexistent jewels, but then he nodded.

  “No, no, Kathy,” Carstairs continued, “it is you and your pure girlish beauty that fascinate me, that send my senses reeling.”

  “I’d say that you were probably intoxicated by your own charm, cher ami.”

  “Cruel, cruel woman,” he grumbled as they reached the dice tables.

  “This your game?” tested Pikelis.

  His daughter instantly shook her head.

  “No, Dad, that wouldn’t be for Petie. Too vulgar, right?”

  The spy grinned.

  “Definitely lower-class.”

  “And lacking any solid challenge for a man dedicated to skill and control in his adventure? Too chancy, right?”

  Carstairs raised her hand again, kissed it reverently.

  “Yes, my dear. You understand me so well,” he confessed.

  “You aren’t really a gambler at all, Petie?” she accused.

  He sighed.

  “I have no silly compulsion to lose my money, if that’s what you mean, Kathy. I’d rather make money. Your father understands that, I think.”

  Pikelis nodded.

  “So it’s cards?”

  “Yes, John. I’ll try a few hands. Will you join me?”

  They sat down at the nearby “21” table, and the dealer hesitated uneasily for a moment before he pointed out that they had no chips. Carstairs extracted ten $50 bills from his wallet, glanced at the ganglord. Pikelis coolly added five $100 bills to the heap, and some ninety seconds later they had chips and the game began. Pikelis watched guardedly, and Carstairs played boldly. Boldly but intelligently, the racketeer observed. In forty minutes, the wealthy bachelor was $370 richer.

  “So twenty-one is your game?” Pikelis speculated as a pretty waitress—she was about fifteen pounds overweight but in the right places—set down the drinks they’d ordered.

  “Not really. I prefer poker.”

  “He would,” the girl standing behind him said. She was near and warm and smelled subtly of promise. “Of course, he would. Poker is a more combative game, isn’t it, Petie?”

  “I have no secrets from you, honey,” the second most eligible bachelor in the United States replied.

  Her perfume was marvelous, and her body heat seemed to magnify its effect.

  “I like poker myself,” announced the graying racketeer in carefully measured tones.

  He finished the Scotch, looked his question.

  “Why not?” Carstairs replied affably.

  The two men rose, collected their chips and sta
rted to the next table where the poker contest was in full swing. By the end of the third hand, Pikelis realized how correct his daughter’s judgment had been. Carstairs played poker the way he stalked tigers in the Burmese jungles—totally, craftily and ruthlessly. It was a kind of war all right, and the handsome millionaire obviously enjoyed it immensely. It was a very special sort of war, very personal—a duel. It wasn’t that Carstairs was out to get Pikelis in particular; he meant to defeat them all—every player at the table. He meant to win. Pleasantly but totally, he was committed to conquest. He joked, he smiled, he bluffed, he tested, he calculated—and he won. He won three out of every four hands, sometimes with daring and sometimes with cunning but always with a cool grace.

  Pikelis studied him, trying to figure out the man and his game.

  Both were effective, tough, admirable and difficult to define.

  “You play like a professional, Petie,” the racketeer announced in a voice of guarded compliment.

  “I like to think of myself as the most professional of the amateurs, John,” Carstairs answered.

  “In everything,” judged Kathy Pikelis.

  “Is that a proposition or a put-down?”

  She hesitated a moment before replying.

  “That’s just a woman’s intuition. I’m really saying the same thing as Daddy, you know. You play to win.”

  The second most eligible bachelor in the U.S.A managed to nod, shrug and smile simultaneously.

  “I need the money,” he fenced, “and I enjoy the action.”

  John Pikelis shook his head.

  “Everybody in this room likes the action and the risks and the feeling of importance that a man can get when he lets people know that he can afford to gamble,” the practical old ganglord disagreed. “And I saw a doctor on a TV show once—couple of years ago—who said that many guys who gamble are so mixed up they want to lose. But you’re like me, Petie. You want to win, and that’s normal for a man.”

  The ganglord liked him.

  That was promising.

  “See, I told you I’m a normal man,” Carstairs chided the girl. “You’re right, John,” he continued as he turned to her father. “I only play the games I like—the games I’m good at—and I play to win. You play pretty damn good poker yourself.”

  It was true. Carstairs was ahead some $3,100, but Pikelis also had more chips—perhaps $500 or $600 more—than he’d bought at the start of the game. In addition, the racketeer had some further ideas about this yellow-haired stranger who was—ever so gracefully—wooing his daughter. Petie wasn’t spoiled, soft, smug or simple or any of those other things that the magazine writers and gossip columnists had indicated. Polished and smooth and strong—like stainless steel, that was P.T. Carstairs.

  Some people, some men, some fathers might have found that combination disturbing.

  John Pikelis didn’t.

  He found it interesting, perhaps admirable.

  He wasn’t sure yet.

  There was something—not exactly criminal but very clearly outside the normal rules of society—in P.T. Carstairs. It wasn’t just the arrogance of wealth and influence; it was something more—and more difficult to define.

  “One more hand?” the racketeer suggested.

  The other players nodded. The handsome celebrity shrugged again, played smiling again and won again. He was now $4,300 ahead and bored. He glanced at his watch, realized that Arbolino and Williston might not be finished yet back at the hotel.

  “I suppose that it would be lousy manners to walk out on the game when I’ve got so much of your money, gentlemen,” the tough, smiling bachelor announced casually, “so I’d better give you demon gamblers a chance to get even.”

  The losers beamed.

  Carstairs had style and manners as well as money, Pikelis approved as he signaled the dealer to resume the play. Kathy Pikelis arched her eyebrows, wandered away to the roulette table to watch the action there. She couldn’t help but notice the stickman’s cool expertise and subtly superior patter. Gilman smiled at her pleasantly, approvingly and the least bit distantly. He was a professional all right, keeping her at arm’s length as a sensible stickman should do with a patron, especially a pretty woman. She guessed that he was somebody new from some other place, but she knew nothing more than his speech and poise communicated. He knew a lot about her from the dossier that Williston’s R and A team had provided, but he focussed on the role of playing the perfect croupier and he played it perfectly. Only infrequently did he permit his mind to wander to Arbolino and Williston, and when he thought about it he wasn’t really worried. After all, the “recon” and the gear and the plan were all carefully integrated, selected, right for the operation.

  It wasn’t that complex or dangerous an operation, nothing comparable to the assault on the 5th Panzer Army’s main fuel dump or the assassination of Colonel Detzler by rigging his desk lamp with a bomb that looked exactly like a light bulb. It was cool—almost too cool—in the gambling room, Gilman noticed as he raked in some chips, but he was too busy to ask anyone to adjust the air-conditioning.

  It was much warmer in the alley behind the Paradise House. As a matter of fact, both Williston and Arbolino were sweating in the white cotton coveralls. Each man carried a tool box marked ACE ELEVATOR in his right hand and a silenced .32 pistol in a sling under his left arm. As they entered the rear of the hotel, a black man in a waiter’s uniform—obviously sneaking a quick smoke between duties in the cocktail lounge—looked up and smiled from the doorway.

  “Freight elevator?” the professor asked in an accent as Southern as he could counterfeit.

  “That way. Left at the end of the corridor.”

  The black man didn’t ask whether anything was wrong with the elevator. African Americans weren’t encouraged to ask questions in this town, and it wasn’t any of his business anyway. The spies followed his directions, found the freight elevator and ran it to the top floor. Then they found the steps leading to the roof, not the area that was occupied by the Pikelis penthouse but the rear corner where the bulk of the building’s massive air-conditioning plant thrust its functional tower into the sky. The man who ruled Jefferson County would have preferred to have his suite at the highest point—the top—but Pikelis had grudgingly accepted the economic realities with the proviso that his quarters be screened from and isolated from the big cooling machine. Dozens of potted plants and shrubs had been aligned to comprise a solid green wall some seven feet high to separate the penthouse and its terrace from the air-conditioning gear.

  Williston and Arbolino knew this, having studied the photostats of the building plans and the newspaper clipping about the opening of the hotel and the aerial photographs that P.T. Carstairs’ money had persuaded a certain Jacksonville charter pilot to take for a certain nonexistent advertising agency’s imaginary brochure. The Columbia professor and the stunt man had also listened to Gilman’s own scouting reports on the building, so they had no hesitation in heading directly for the door marked “AIR CONDITIONER—ROOF.”

  “Alarm,” Williston reminded.

  Arbolino nodded, found the alarm device exactly where Gilman had described it and then carefully disconnected it. The door opened easily. As they stepped out onto the roof, Williston re-checked the luminous dial of his wrist watch again. The man from Las Vegas had calculated that the operation should require between four and a half and six minutes, seven at the outside. If they stayed more than eight, they were probably in trouble and if it took ten minutes or more the odds were that they’d have to fight or shoot their way out of the penthouse. The penthouse surely had guards outside in the foyer—at the door of the private elevator—and there could be other armed men or perhaps servants inside as well.

  The stunt man pointed to the metal steps running up the side of the tower, opened his tool kit and took out a nylon ladder with hooks at either end. He climbed a dozen rungs up the side of the tower, attached the hooks securely to the metal step and then swung himself out and over the w
all of shrubbery. He dropped lightly and—quite mechanically, like some veteran trapeze artist—swung the nylon ladder back up to where Professor Andrew F. Williston of Columbia University was waiting on the side of the tower to catch it.

  Williston repeated the process, studied the green walls warily until he found the barbed wire concealed so neatly and hooked the end of the nylon ladder to a branch that was free of electrical alarms or other hazards.

  They were on the terrace.

  So far, so good.

  Elapsed time from leaving the freight elevator: one minute and fifty seconds.

  The two invaders slipped on the special goggles, flicked on the infrared “penlights” and moved warily toward the French doors that led into the penthouse itself. A brief examination revealed no alarms, so Williston turned the knob and the two men entered. It was the living room, as big and grand as Carstairs had described. The furniture was all where he’d said it would be, the three couches, the grand piano and the enormous marble coffee table. Williston would have expected John Pikelis to have one of those chic glass-and-chrome tables, and for a second he wondered.

  Then he heard the sound.

  Both of the spies dived for cover, one behind a couch and the other in a gracious fall of drapery near the window. The door opened. One of the liveried African American servants entered, looked around for a moment before strolling to the bar and pouring himself three fingers of John Pikelis’ best cognac.

  In a paper cup.

  He had brought his own paper cup; he’d leave no traces.

  He sipped the Remy Martin V.S.O.P. appreciatively, crushed the cup and put it in his pocket. He smiled. It wasn’t the smile of a thief or the smile of a bitter servant or even the smile of a sly Uncle Tom. It was the open look of a man who recognized and enjoyed fine brandy, whose conscience was as pure as his taste. At the door, he hesitated and stopped by an end table to move an ashtray—it might have been an inch out of place—before departing.