by Keene, Day
“Remember me?” I asked him through the crack.
He ignored me to ask Corson, “What’s the big idea, copper?
Corson pushed at the door. “Open up. We’re coming in, LaFanti.”
LaFanti shook his head. “Uh uh. Not in here. Not you or any other cop. Not without that paper.”
“We have it,” Olson said. “In fact, we have quite a few papers.” He read LaFanti the warrants he had insisted on having sworn out.
When he’d finished LaFanti said, “Well, in that case, I guess I’m stuck.” He closed the door and opened it free of the chain, but he still blocked the way with his body. “Okay. Let’s talk right here.”
Corson pushed him aside. “To hell with that pigeon stuff. We’ve got you this time, Joe. We’ve got you tight.”
The guy was a good actor. He looked sincerely puzzled. “I don’t get it, copper. Believe me.” He asked one of the reporters, “What am I supposed to have done? What are they charging me with?”
A half-dozen flash bulbs flared as the reporter said, “Kidnapping and attempted murder.”
LaFanti grinned. “Now I know it’s a gag.”
I walked over in front of him. “You never saw me before, I suppose?”
“No,” LaFanti said it flatly. He stared at my feet and raised his eyes until they were looking into mine. “No. I never saw you before. Who are you and what’s your gripe, soldier?”
Chapter Seven
I SAID, “I’ll gripe you!” and swung a hard right to his jaw.
LaFanti let the blow slide off his forearm and asked Olson, “What’s eating on the guy? What’s the matter? Is he crazy?”
As he blocked the blow the belt of his, robe came untied. All he had on under it was skin. LaFanti retied the belt. I said, “You never saw me before?”
“No!”
“You and Tommy and Hymie didn’t force me into your car on the corner of State and Van Buren?”
“No!”
“You didn’t bring me up here? You didn’t offer to set me up in whatever kind of business I was in before I went into the army if I’d keep my mouth shut about what Mona told me this morning?”
“No!”
“You didn’t insist that she’d told me where she stashed the diamonds she clipped off Stein?”
LaFanti shook his head. “You’re not making sense, soldier. I never saw you before in my life and I don’t give a damn what happens to Mona.”
I tried a last time. “You and Norm and Hymie and Tommy and Gordon didn’t beat me unconscious? You weren’t planning to dump me in the lake and make it look like accidental drowning?”
LaFanti fished in the pocket of his robe and came up with a loose cigarette and a lighter. “No,” he said, through the flame of the lighter. “In fact, I haven’t been out of the apartment all afternoon, and I can prove it.”
It was quiet in the apartment when he stopped speaking. I realized everyone was looking at me. There was a worried frown on Olson’s face. I stood looking around me, feeling like a damn fool. There wasn’t a sign of any damage or any blood on the floor. The floor didn’t even look damp. There certainly was no body. The framed picture of Mona was back on the end table.
“Where is Tommy?” Captain Corson asked LaFanti.
LaFanti sucked on his cigarette. “Down at the place in the Dunes.” He showed his white teeth in a smile. “I had a little private business to take care of this afternoon, so I gave the boys the day off.”
“He isn’t dead?”
LaFanti’s grin widened. “Probably dead drunk. That swish can drink more liquor.” He looked back at me. “But now let me get this straight. Just who is this soldier?”
Olson’s worried frown deepened. He said, “Sergeant Mike Duval, Johnny Duval’s brother.”
“Oh, yes,” LaFanti said. “That young soldier that Mona married. She should have stuck to the guy and stayed home taking care of her kid instead of hanging around bars and picking up guys like Stein. Then she wouldn’t be in the mess she’s in.”
I knocked him off his feet. “You son-of-a-bitch, stop stalling. What did you do with Tommy’s body? What did you do with Gordon?”
He shook his head while still on the floor. “Believe me, I don’t know what you’re talking about. So Mona went sour on your brother. Why take it out on me?”
I tried to kick him and Nagle stopped me. “Easy makes it, Sergeant,” he said.
Captain Corson was prowling the room, paying special attention to the floor. He asked, “What part of the room were you in when you shot Tommy Lewis?”
I pointed to the chair he had been sitting in. “Right there. I dropped him on that throw rug.”
Corson got to his knees and looked at the rug, then under it. “Not on this rug!”
I insisted, “But I did. Then I broke a whiskey bottle on Gordon’s head and ground the jagged butt into his face. He was screaming like mad when I left him.”
Corson ran the tips of his fingers across the parquet flooring. “It beats me,” he said finally. “You’re sure this is the apartment they brought you to?”
“I’m positive.”
Corson’s eyes were disappointed. Still squatting on his haunches, he looked at LaFanti. “You said before that you could prove you hadn’t left the apartment all afternoon. How?”
LaFanti smirked, “By two witnesses. One of them the elevator boy.”
Corson got to his feet and ordered Nagle to get the elevator boy. The kid was even younger than I had judged him to be and scared. When Captain Corson asked him his name he had to wet his lips with his tongue before he could answer.
“Manny,” he said finally. “Manny Kelly.”
“What time did you come on duty?”
“Noon.”
“And you’re still working?”
“This is my long day. Tomorrow I work a short one.”
“I see,” Captain Corson said. He showed the kid his buzzer. “Know what this is, Manny?”
The kid swallowed the lump in his throat. “Yes, sir. It’s a captain’s badge.”
Corson dropped it back in his pocket. “And I’m a captain, a captain of homicide. Keep that in mind.”
“Yes, sir.”
“How many times did Mr. LaFanti go out today?”
The elevator boy shook his head. “He didn’t go out at all. Anyway, I didn’t see him.”
“You’re positive of that?”
“I’m positive.”
“He stayed in his apartment all day?”
“Unless he went out before noon.” The kid gained a little more self-confidence. “All I know is what happened since I came on duty.”
Corson pointed at me. “How about this sergeant?”
“What about him?” the kid asked.
“You brought him up this evening, say between seven and seven-thirty?”
“No, sir,” the kid lied.
“But you have seen him before?”
Kelly shook his head. “No, sir. Not until all of you barged into the cage just now and he asked me if anyone had gone in or out since he’d left. I thought at the time it was funny.”
I looked at LaFanti. He looked back, amused. “The kid is lying,” I said. “LaFanti has paid him to lie.”
“How about that, son?” Olson asked.
Kelly raised one palm shoulder high. “So help me. I wouldn’t lie for no one.” He made it sound good. “Usually there are a lot of guys coming and going to this floor. But today since I came on duty at noon I had only one passenger for fourteen.”
“Who was he?” Olson asked.
Kelly grinned. “It wasn’t a him. It was a her.”
LaFanti’s smirk grew even wider. “I told you.”
With Corson at my heels I crossed the big living room to the hall and tried the knob of the door. I was sure it led to the room in which a girl had been crying. The door was unlocked and swung in.
The little blonde who had gotten out of the cab I’d taken down to Central Bureau was sitting on the bed. A
ll she had on was lipstick and that was smeared, but not from crying.
She eeked and did a poor job of covering herself with the top sheet. Tart or not, she was cute.
“What are you doing here?” Captain Corson asked her.
Her grin was gamin. “Do you really want me to tell you?”
Corson got red back of the ears. “Let’s put it this way, then. How long have you been here?”
“Three or four hours,” she lied. “Since around four o’clock.”
“I told you,” LaFanti repeated.
Unless I’d blown my top, both the blonde and the elevator boy were lying. They had to be.
“What’s the matter?” the blonde asked LaFanti. “Are we raided?”
“So it would seem,” he said.
One of the camera men tried to get a picture of the blonde. Still red behind the ears, Captain Corson closed the door and led the way back to the living room. “I will be damned,” he said, “if I know what to think.”
LaFanti’s voice was patronizing. “You sure now, soldier, that you haven’t gotten your apartments mixed?”
I tried to think of something to say and couldn’t. I couldn’t prove a damn thing, at least not immediately. It was the time element that had thrown me. I’d figured to be back in ten minutes. Instead, it had been over an hour, giving him plenty of time to clean up the apartment, buy off the elevator boy and substitute the naked little blonde for the girl I’d heard crying.
One of the reporters laughed. “It sort of looks like this has turned out to be a wild goose chase.” He looked back at the door of the room. “Or should I say wild tomato? Isn’t that the little stripper who takes off her clothes to music at The Furnace, Joe?”
“That’s right,” LaFanti admitted. “So help me, the guy must be crazy.” He glanced at the door of the bedroom. “Why would I want to pound on him when —” He left it there.
Several reporters laughed. I said, “You’re lying and you know you are. You had some other dame in here while you were pounding on me. The little babe in the bedroom was downstairs when I left. With all her clothes on, I know. She got out of the cab I took to Central Bureau.”
“So you say,” LaFanti said. He looked at my campaign ribbons and medal bars and asked, “I wonder if I could speak to you privately, Mr. State’s Attorney.”
Olson said, “You can say whatever you want to say right here.”
LaFanti said it. “I think the soldier is nuts. Look at the fruit salad on the guy.”
“What about it?” I asked.
LaFanti’s smile was smooth. “They’re a credit to you, soldier. I wish I could wear them.” He sounded like a con man selling a bill of goods to a bunch of rubes on a carnival midway. “All I’m thinking is maybe you’ve been through too much. Making all these wild accusations that you have doesn’t make good sense. In my book you got —” he couldn’t think of the word he wanted. “Not battle fatigue. What’s that other thing?”
“War neurosis?” one of the reporters suggested.
LaFanti showed his white teeth in a smile. “Yeah. That’s it. Like hallucinations.” He ignored me to talk directly to the reporters. “The sergeant’s a good Joe, see? He comes back here to look up his brother’s wife and what does he find? He finds Mona just about to take the big step for scragging a guy she’d been cheating on his brother with. The sergeant is hurt. He’s sore. He wants to beat on someone to get even for what Mona done to his brother. So he dreams up this stuff about me, subconsciously, see? Just because at one time Mona was my girl.”
I said, “That’s a lot of crap.”
“Could be,” LaFanti admitted. “But you’ve made a lot of charges, fellow. You’ve caused me embarrassment. Now I’m going to make one request, for your own good, because I think when you’re normal, you’re probably a pretty good guy.”
“What sort of a request?” Olson asked.
LaFanti said, “I want the guy run through the psycho ward.”
Coming from him it was funny but Olson didn’t seem to think so. I could feel my throat contract, as I looked from him to Captain Corson. He was still prowling the living room, touching this, handling that, listening with one ear. As I watched, he picked something small and white from one of the twists of a loop throw rug. He looked at it thoughtfully a moment, then dropped it in his vest pocket.
For a moment no one spoke. Olson broke the silence. His voice was thin and hurt like he’d been put upon. “Well, there certainly are no bodies and no disorder here. And after the wild and unsubstantial charges that the sergeant has made, he can’t be completely normal.”
I said, “Heifer dust to that,” and started for the hall door. The framed picture of Mona stopped me. There was something wrong about it. Then I thought I knew what it was.
Olson asked, “You’re willing to swear that the sergeant has never been in this apartment before?”
“I swear,” LaFanti swore. “You heard the elevator boy. You heard what Gloria said.”
“And Tommy and Gordon —?”
“Are down at my place in the Dunes.” LaFanti nodded at the bedroom door. “After all, when a man has company —”
Captain Corson figured my move just as I reached for the knob of the hall door. “Hold it, fellow,” he said.
I slipped the gun I’d taken away from Tommy out from under my coat. “In an old-fashioned campaign hat,” I told him. “I’m not nuts and no one is going to make me play with blocks and try to put square pegs in round holes. All I want from you is the answer to one question.”
Corson asked flatly, “What?”
“If a lad is committed to the psycho ward in this man’s town, how long does it take to put him through the mill?”
“Four or five days.”
“And there you have it,” I told him. “By the time the sicky-ackys give me a clean bill of health, the little doll in the death house will be dead.”
None of the men in the room moved, with the exception of one of the camera men. He took a flash of me holding the gun on Corson.
I opened the door and slammed it behind me. I’d reached the elevator by the time LaFanti tugged it open. He shouted, “Stop him. The man is crazy.”
I shot off the lobe of his left ear and he closed the door a lot faster than he’d opened it.
The elevator punk was afraid I was going to kill him. “So help me, Sergeant —” he whimpered.
I pushed the gun in his ribs. “All the way down — fast.” Passing the fourth floor I asked him, “How much did LaFanti pay you to cover for him?”
He was afraid of me, but more afraid of LaFanti. Sweat beaded on his cheeks and dripped from the bulb of his nose. “I — I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I didn’t have time to argue with him. I walked past the cordon of detectives and uniformed cops that Captain Corson had posted and whistled down a Loop-bound cab.
“Where to?” the driver asked.
“Just drive,” I told him. “I don’t know just where I want to go.”
I didn’t. I had a lot to do and not much time in which to do it. From now on, both LaFanti and his boys would be looking for me. After pulling a gun the way I had and shooting off part of Joe LaFanti’s ear, even Captain Corson would think I was crazy.
Chapter Eight
WITH THE exception of the night clubs and bars and hotels, and here and there a hock shop, most of the store fronts along North Clark Street were dark.
I got out of the cab at Chicago Avenue and walked south slowly, through a blare of slip-horns and saxophones and the tinkle of pianos. Sin, it would seem, was popular in Chicago. North Clark Street was lined with bars and night clubs, most of them featuring strippers, all of them doing business.
I stopped and looked in the window of a lighted hock shop with the name North Star Loan on the window. Up near the door there was a showcase filled with shirts and three revolving racks of ties. Back of the show case I could see a display of straw hats. I wanted to contact Mona’s lawyer, but the fir
st thing I had to do was get out of uniform. Within the next ten minutes evey prowl and radio car cop in Chicago would be looking for a big red-haired tech sergeant with a chestful of assorted fruit salad.
I walked in the open door. It smelled like all hock shops, of moth balls and old leather. A good-looking lad, swart-faced, laid down the Racing Form he was reading and asked what he could do for me.
I said, “I’d like to buy a suit of civvies, that is, if you handle clothes.”
“Sure thing, Sergeant,” he grinned. He led me to a rack of suits in a built-in glass showcase, then looked at the width of my shoulders. “Let’s see. I’d say a forty, long.”
“Right on the nose,” I told him.
He slid open the rack and took out a fashionable double-breasted silk gabardine I couldn’t tell from new. “How does this one hit you, Sergeant?” He looked at the code mark on the tag. “A one hundred and fifty buck hand-tailored suit I took in from a lad on the street who thought a gray horse could win the Derby. If it fits, you can have it for fifty.”
I tried on the coat and held the pants to my waist. The coat fit fine. The pants were about the right length. “Okay,” I told him. “I’ll take it. Now how about some shirts and a hat?”
He showed me his teeth. “Those I got new.”
I picked out three size sixteen white broadcloth shirts, a plain blue tie and a natural colored Leghorn straw hat with a loud band.
The lad was pleased by the late sale. “You just get that paper, Sergeant?”
“No, I’m still in,” I told him. I added a little white lie. “It’s just that I’ve got a date with a girl who wants to see me in civvies.”
“Dames,” he admitted, “are funny.”
The only shoes he handled were various colored sneakers with thick crepe rubber soles. I picked a blue pair to go with the tie I’d bought. They made me feel like I was walking on a mattress but they were better than the tight shoes that were blistering my heels.
I bought a small suitcase to carry my uniform and changed my clothes in a little curtained-off room. It was surprising the difference the duds made. The suit made me look like a small hot-shot, like I belonged on North Clark Street.