by Day Keene
He ordered a glass of beer to take the taste of the rye out of his mouth. At least the beer was cold. He sipped it, painfully conscious that whatever decision he came to this morning might be the most important one of his life. The girl in the red raincoat and the Italian cab driver were the only two people in the world who could possibly connect him with the parcel. The girl, the Italian cab driver and one inanimate object. The lost plastic tag from the handle of his brief case.
Brady studied the brief case he’d bought the night before. Despite his efforts to age it, it looked like a new case. He’d expected May to say something about it. She hadn’t. She’d been too interested in helping her brat of a son wheedle a bicycle out of him. When he’d taken on May and Alice and Jimmy he’d really done himself proud. He’d built a nest for a brood of vultures, all three of them determined to feast on him, one way or another.
There was a phone booth in the rear of the bar. On impulse he called the office and Miss Karney answered the phone.
“Good morning. Harper, Nelson and Ferrel.”
Brady simulated a husk in his voice. “This is Jim Brady, Miss Karney. Will you please inform Mr. Harper that I won’t be in this morning as I seem to have picked up a terrific cold.”
Miss Karney was sympathetic. “Of course. You sound terrible, Mr. Brady. You’d better stay in bed all day.”
“I intend to,” Brady lied and broke the connection.
It was too warm in the phone booth. Or, possibly, he just imagined it. The mild exertion of telling the lie had bathed his body in a cold sweat.
He walked back to the bar and finished his beer. It all had seemed so simple at first. He’d found a parcel in a taxi. Curious, he’d examined it. The parcel contained money. He’d decided to keep it. And now his normally flat and routine world was filled with odd angles.
Mr. Harper might or might not believe his phoned message. Remembering the scene of the morning before, Mr. Harper might think he was just throwing his weight around and decide that one James A. Brady was expendable.
If so, there went his job. Because of one simple phone call. And in a strictly legal sense the money wasn’t his. The law was firm on found objects. He should have turned the parcel over to the cab driver. Right now, while he stood in a bar, a thorough police investigation could be under way.
The same was true if the money came from some illegitimate source. Only then he was more involved. The smart money men, the fast buck boys, the hoods from the wrong side of the track made their point with brass knuckles and barrels partly filled with concrete.
Brady used his handkerchief to pat at the perspiration beading his face. And he still didn’t know how much money was in the parcel. He still didn’t know if the risk he was running was worth while.
The barman picked up his empty beer glass. “Tough night, fellow?”
“Tough,” Brady admitted.
For some reason the simple question irritated him. The barman didn’t really care how he felt. He was merely making conversation, muttering one of the small amenities with which modern man masks his true emotions. If the barman knew he had a parcel of money in one of the dime lockers outside he would undoubtedly slip him a Mickey and steal the key.
Brady walked out of the bar fingering the key with his change. Fear is a complex emotion. He couldn’t force himself to act normally as he walked back to Grand Central. His eyes persisted in looking back over his shoulder like the girl in the red raincoat had looked over her shoulder when she’d run across the street through the rain.
The crowd in the station had thinned. The big rush of commuters was gone. Brady wished he hadn’t chosen quite so prominent a block of lockers. He walked past the locker in which he’d left the brief case, then lit a cigarette and tried to look casual as he studied the people around him. None of them looked like detectives. None of them looked like mobsters.
He inserted his key in the slot and exchanged the empty case he was carrying for the bulging one in the locker. Then he closed the locker door and inserted another dime and removed the key and returned it to his pocket.
No hand was laid on his shoulder. No one came up and grabbed him. No one poked a gun in his back. The two men in the slowly moving car that had cruised the street the night before could not have been looking for 1134 East Elm Street.
It felt good to have the case under his arm again. His eyes no longer felt hot. The raw feeling was gone from his throat. Now all he needed was a few hours alone to count the money and ascertain if it contained a clue to the identity of whoever had lost it. The amount of money and possible rightful ownership would determine his next move.
He debated taking the East Side subway and rode the shuttle to Times Square instead. The lower East Side was composed of neighborhood communities. Everyone noticed a stranger. But in Times Square everybody was a stranger.
As he emerged from the kiosk in front of the moving sign around the Times Building, Brady experienced a mild glow and a feeling of importance. It was incredible what having money did to a man. He wasn’t out of the woods. He might have a long way to go. Still there had been some subtle change in his physical chemistry. He felt he was an entirely different person from the everyday, sixty-five hundred dollar a year James A. Brady, the translator who rode the New York, New Haven and Hartford five mornings and five evenings a week, every week of the year, legal holidays excepted.
Finding a hotel room was no problem. He could see half a dozen from where he was standing. There was the Sheraton-Astor, the Taft, the Lincoln, the Piccadilly. There was only one trouble with them. They were all too big and important. Important people stayed at them. By chance, he might encounter one of the out-of-the-country clients of Harper, Nelson and Ferrel. While he was supposed to be home in bed with a cold.
He crossed to the east side of Broadway and walked up it, glancing down the side streets as he passed. There were hotels on almost all of them but he decided that one of the theatrical hotels on Forty-seventh Street would be the most practical.
After passing the foyer of the Palace Theatre he turned east again and continued on down Forty-seventh toward the Avenue of the Americas, better known as Sixth Avenue.
The hotel he finally chose was fairly small with a compact lobby and a ferret-faced, sharply dressed room clerk.
As Brady signed the registration card John A. Smith, the clerk smiled thinly. “Okay, Captain,” he said. “You’re a little early but Pocahontas will be with you in a few minutes. You pay me. That will be twenty dollars.” Brady started to protest. Twenty dollars was an outrageous price for a room. He could rent a room at the Plaza for that. On the other hand, if he walked out he would call attention to himself and that was the last thing he wanted to do. Besides, what difference did it make? He had lots of money.
He laid a bill on the desk. “Whatever you say.”
The exterior of the hotel had obviously been renovated but the modernization hadn’t extended to the interior. The elevator was so old the cables creaked. The room was on the fourth floor, shabbily furnished but fairly clean, with a private bath and a good view of a rusted fire escape.
A bellhop with a whiskey breath and wearing a food-stained uniform attempted to take the brief case from him and lay it on the dresser. Brady stopped him.
“If you don’t mind, I can manage.” He thought a moment and added, “But I tell you what you can do.”
The bellhop moved the toothpick he was chewing from one side of his mouth to the other. “What’s that, chum?”
Brady peeled a ten dollar bill from his rapidly diminishing roll and gave it to the man. “Get me a bottle of whiskey. Rye.”
The bellhop creased the bill lengthwise. “Sure thing, pal. Pitching a little one, eh?”
“You could call it that,” Brady said.
Little or no air was coming in the open window. Brady threw his trench coat over a chair and took off his jacket. Then, as an afterthought, he unknotted his tie and took it and his shirt off. God only knew how long it would take him t
o count the money. He’d paid twenty dollars for the room. He might as well be comfortable.
While he waited for the bellhop to bring the whiskey he washed his hands and face in the bathroom. The small window to the air shaft was painted shut and the small room was stuffy and smelled of cheap perfume and disinfectant. When I pick a hotel I pick a beauty, Brady thought. Still he had the comfort of knowing he was alone. At least Alice couldn’t get at him here.
Back in the room, unable to control his impatience, he unzipped the brief case and looked in. The parcel looked just the same as it had the last time he’d seen it. He started to take out one of the sheaves of bills but rezippered the case hastily as the bellhop knocked on the door.
As the man set the bottle on the dresser and transferred the cracked ice in the silver pitcher he was carrying to a glass one, he glanced at the shirt Brady had hung over the only chair in the room and grinned. “Making yourself comfortable, I see.”
“That’s right,” Brady said.
The bellhop nodded sagely. “It does a man good to cut loose once in a while. Only you’re a little early, see? So there may be a slight delay.”
Brady didn’t have the slightest idea what the man was talking about. He didn’t care. Having another glimpse of the money had put him in a generous mood and he told the boy to keep the change from the ten.
The bell man was properly grateful. “Thanks. Thanks a lot, Mister. The desk clerk was a little edgy but I gave him the okay as soon as I seen you. There’s a real sport, I says to myself.”
As the man closed the door behind him, Brady shook his head to clear it. He’d been away too long. They talked an entirely different language in Manhattan from the one they talked in Stamford.
The bellhop had opened the bottle, probably to help himself to a drink enroute up from the bar. Brady found a glass on the medicine shelf in the bathroom and poured it half full of whiskey. He was too excited to drink it. Instead, after making certain the spring latch on the door had caught, he unzippered the brief case again and dumped the parcel on the bed spread. Then he tore away the silver paper gift wrapping and the newsprint under it.
The sheaves were tightly packed and there were more of them than he’d realized. Nor would it be necessary for him to count each individual bill. He’d counted one sheaf in the stall at Grand Central Station and had come up with either four thousand five hundred or five thousand four hundred dollars. There were forty sheaves of banded bills in the parcel, each manila band initialed L.D. Allowing for the occasional one thousand dollar bill he could see, suppose he roughed in each sheaf at five thousand dollars. Forty times five thousand was—
Brady stared at the money on the bed, incredulous. Unless he was completely crazy, there were two hundred thousand dollars on the bed.
When he could move, he slipped a small piece of white paper out from under one of the bands and read it. Written in Italian, in the same childish scrawl that had pencilled the initials, was the cryptic message:
Settlement 1957 account in full.
L.D.
One thing was certain. The money hadn’t come from, nor was it intended for deposit in, the Chase National Bank. He had a tiger by the tail and no mistake. The sweat on Brady’s body turned cold. Who was L.D.?
He forced himself to think. There had been, he believed, a gangster named Legs Diamond. But that had been years ago, long before his time, back in the prohibition era when New York’s Roaring Forties had flown knee deep with bootleg whiskey and needle beer.
He looked at the sheets of newsprint he’d torn from the parcel. The wrapping had come from a three day old Chicago Morning Tribune. Whom did he know who could brief him on the Chicago underworld? Johnny Cass! He hadn’t seen Johnny for two years, not since he and May and the children had moved from West 15th Street. But, as far as he knew, Cass was still covering a police beat for the same New York evening newspaper that he’d joined when he’d finished with high school.
There was a phone on the dresser and a phone book under it. Brady found the number he wanted and gave it to the clerk downstairs. He had no trouble getting through to Cass. Johnny was glad to hear from him. They exchanged information about their wives and mutual friends, then Brady inquired, as casually as he could, if Cass happened to know any big shot in either the New York or Chicago underworld whose initials were L.D.
“That would be Lew Dix,” the reporter said.
“Is he a big shot?”
“The biggest. He’s one of the few big ones left from the old Al Capone mob. The Feds also think he’s a spoke in the old international Mafia but no one has ever been able to prove it. Why? What’s your interest in Dix?”
“His name came up in connection with a new account we’ve been offered in Rome,” Brady lied. “But from what you’ve just said about him, I don’t know whether we want to do business with him or not.”
He ended the conversation as soon as he could without being abrupt. He wasn’t at all happy about the information Cass had given him. Seemingly his call had established one thing. If L.D. was Lew Dix, his lucky find was underworld money. But just how hot it was, he had no way of knowing.
On impulse, he pushed the sheaves of bills back in his brief case and stuffed the silver gift wrapper and the newspaper in the basket under the window. Cass had called Dix a big wheel, a spoke in the international Mafia. A hard lump formed in the pit of Brady’s stomach. No longer thirsty, he added the bottle of whiskey to the paper in the basket. This was far from being as simple as it had seemed at first. He would need a clear head to think this thing through.
He walked into the bathroom again and ran cold water in the bowl and splashed it on his face and chest and the back of his neck. It helped some but not much. He was still perspiring when he walked out of the bathroom and stopped short, staring incredulously at the girl turning down the spread and top sheet of his bed.
“Hi, honey,” she yawned. “Sorry I took so long but I was sound asleep when Joe called me. We didn’t expect any customers this time of morning.” She took off her dress and lay down.
A lot of things were suddenly clear. Why the room rent had been so high. Why the clerk had called him Captain and said he was a little early but Pocahontas would be with him in a few minutes. Why the bellhop had said he’d known he was a right guy. The racket sprang up periodically among the cheaper hotels. There was no organized vice, as such, in the city. But working together, a room clerk and a bellhop frequently circumvented the law by having the clerk rent a room to a live one for a sum sufficient to cover the amatory services of a girl living in the hotel.
The girl was young and blonde and fairly pretty. She had all of a woman’s attributes. After the abortive episode with Alice the night before, Brady was still unnaturally excited. But of all the things he wanted least at the moment, a woman headed the list.
The girl patted the bed beside her and smiled at him vacuously. “Well, now mama’s here, let’s get on with it, sweetheart.” Her smile faded. “Or ain’t I good enough for you or something?”
“No,” Brady assured her. “It’s not that. You’re a very pretty girl.”
He walked over to the bed to try to explain and then looked up as the room door opened and the ferret-faced, clerk and the bellhop came in.
“Did he?” the clerk asked the girl.
The girl was furious with him as she covered herself with the sheet she’d turned back. “You’ve got a nerve walking in while I’m working. How many times have I told you?”
“Did he?” the clerk repeated.
“No,” the girl admitted. “We were just about.”
The bell man took Brady’s shirt from the chair and handed it to him. “That’s what he thought. Get dressed and get out of here, Mister.” He explained to the girl. “He’s a newspaper man. One of them damn nosy reporters.”
Brady paused in the act of putting on his shirt. He didn’t want the girl but he didn’t want any misunderstanding either. “Now just a minute, fellows. You have this thing all wr
ong. I—”
While his arms were still caught in the sleeves of his shirt, the bellhop hit him. Then he hit him again, this time so hard the blow knocked him against the dresser, rocking it and causing the fat brief case to slide off and fall on the floor.
“Sure. All wrong,” the bellhop sneered. “After Charlie heard you call your paper and ask to talk to the city desk. We’ll learn you bastards to nose around.”
His arms free, Brady doubled his hands into fists and started for the bellhop but stopped as the other man took a sap from his hip pocket.
The girl on the bed was shocked. “A lousy reporter. And he looks like such a good guy.”
The clerk jerked his thumb at the door. “Out. And don’t print nothing about this or you’ll wish you hadn’t. We have a good thing going. And we intend to milk it before the vice squad blows the whistle.”
Brady put on his tie without bothering to knot it, slipped on his suit coat, then picked up his brief case and trench coat. He thought he could hold his own with either of the two or even with both of them. But his fists were no match for a blackjack. Besides he couldn’t afford any trouble.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll leave.”
He rode down in the creaking elevator between the two men and as he started across the lobby the bell man pushed him unexpectedly and he tripped and fell, the brief case slipping from under his arm and skittering across the tile floor.
“Big shot,” the bell man jeered. “Tryin’ to con me into thinking you were a right guy by telling me to keep the change from a lousy ten.”
Tight-lipped with anger, Brady stooped to pick up his case and the clerk kneed him viciously in the mouth, then picked up the brief case and threw it in his face. “Out. Get going, Mister.”
The brief case under one arm, Brady pushed through the swinging door and out onto Forty-seventh Street There was the normal amount of pedestrian traffic and his mouth was bleeding so badly that a few of the passersby stared at him but none of them stopped.