Too Hot to Hold

by Day Keene

  Scaffidi hesitated, then got into the seat beside the girl without touching her. “Look, Miss. I don’t want to be fresh or anything but nothing can be that bad. What was in this parcel you say you left in my cab?”

  There was no handkerchief in her purse. Linda Lou leaned forward and dried her eyes on the hem of her slip. “Money. A lot of money.”

  Scaffidi whistled softly. Here we go again, he thought. If this was a con game of some kind, he’d never heard of it. He didn’t see how the girl could hope to collect from his insurance company by claiming she’d lost a lot of money in his cab without substantial confirmation she’d had a bundle in the first place.

  “How much money?” he asked her.

  “I can’t tell you.” Linda Lou recovered some of her composure. She knew it was almost futile to ask. She asked, “I don’t suppose you know the name of the man who got into your cab when I got out.”

  Scaffidi sighed. “I’m sorry, Miss. He was just a fare to me. I don’t even remember what he looked like.”

  Linda Lou promptly told him. “A big man. Dark haired. Wearing a trench coat. Like he’d been walking in the rain. And I think he was carrying a brief case.”

  Scaffidi remembered the man as vaguely as he’d remembered her. “That’s right. Yeah, we talked about you and the accident. I asked him if he’d seen what happened to you and did he want to talk to the cops and he said no.”

  Linda Lou thought rapidly. If she could identify the man and find out where he’d gone after robbing her of the parcel, Mr. Dix might believe her story. “Do you remember where you took him?”

  Scaffidi shook his head. “I’m sorry, Miss. He was just another fare on a rainy day. A short haul, as I recall. But I can’t remember where.”

  “Try. Please.”

  “This guy is important to you?”

  “Very.”

  Scaffidi tried to remember and couldn’t. He wished he could. The girl wasn’t his type. He liked his women with more padding. Still, if the matter was as important to the doll as it seemed to be, he wished he could help her. After all, she said she’d left the parcel in his cab and if that was true, he was, in a way responsible for her getting it back if possible. On the other hand, he couldn’t stop and frisk his cab after every fare. He took it for granted that most people were honest, and most people were. If they found anything in a cab they usually turned it over to the driver.

  “Think. Please,” the girl beside him pleaded.

  Scaffidi brightened. Of course. His trip book. It would be down in black and white in his trip book. And his trip book was back in his room.

  He leaned forward to tell the girl he could help her after all when a man’s voice said, “How cozy.”

  Linda Lou tried to scream and couldn’t. Her mouth was dry. Her throat was closed. She knew who Morgan and Daly were and what part they played in Mr. Dix’s organization. The other girls had pointed them out to her. So the moment Dix had learned she’d failed to deliver the parcel, he had sent Morgan and Daly to find her.

  For his part, Scaffidi was more amused than frightened. He thought he had the picture now. And if this was some form of a badger game shakedown, the little chick with the corn-pone accent and her rah rah boys had gone to a lot of trouble for nothing. Where women were concerned he had no reputation to protect. They couldn’t get a dime out of him. On the other hand if it was a heist, he’d been stuck up so many times he’d learned to carry no more than twenty dollars in his wallet. And a double saw buck wouldn’t make or break him.

  “Okay. Let’s get it over with,” he said. “What’s the caper?”

  He started to get out of the cab and one of the men slipped a gun from a shoulder holster and slapped the barrel of it across his face so hard that blood spurted from his nose. “Stay right where you are, grease ball.”

  Daly slammed the rear door of the cab shut and opened the front door and got in while Morgan opened the door on the other side and sat sideways in the bucket seat, looking at Linda.

  His voice completely devoid of expression, he said, “Let’s have it, Linda. Where is it?”

  Linda Lou cried silently. “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t give us that.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  Morgan reached through the open section of the glass partition and slapped her. “Keep talking. What do you mean you don’t know?”

  “Just that,” Linda Lou told him. She tried to explain. “When my train got into New York yesterday morning, I got in Mr. Scaffidi’s cab. And he had to stop a few hundred feet from the station to fix his windshield wipers. While I was waiting a big man in a wet trench coat jerked the door open on the curb side and pointed a gun at me. Anyway I think it was a gun. And when he said he was sorry I thought he meant he was sorry he had to kill me. After all the awful things Mr. Dix warned me might happen, I’d been afraid all the way from Chicago. And I panicked. I opened the door and ran and left the parcel in the cab.”

  The two men on the front seat looked at each other. “You ever see this man before?”

  “No.”

  “He just materialized out of the rain and pointed a gun at you?”

  “I thought it was a gun.”

  “You expect us to believe that?”

  Linda Lou repeated, “It’s the truth.”

  Daly turned his flat eyes on Scaffidi. “Where do you come into this, grease ball?”

  Scaffidi took his hand away from his bleeding face. His morning meal was resting uneasily in his stomach. He wished he hadn’t eaten the pizza. He’d been wrong about these men. They were men, not college boys. He’d seen their type before. And back of whatever names they were using, they were just as much grease balls as he was. They were the type of American born Italians who gave all hard-working, God-fearing, law-abiding American Italians a bad name. The paesanos called their kind of men enforcers, men who could get up from a meal and machine gun a fellow being to death, then come back and finish the meal, as if nothing had happened, without even washing their hands.

  He spoke slowly, choosing his words with care. “Look, fellows. I don’t know what this is all about. Believe me, I don’t come in. I’m just here washing my hack when the girl comes in and claims she left a parcel in my cab. Wrapped in silver paper, she tells me. And I never even saw her before, except the one time yesterday morning when she climbed out of my heap on Forty-second Street leaving me with a tripped meter.”

  “I’ll bet. I’ll just bet. That’s why you were sitting so close. You sold out cheap, Guiseppe. If Miss Larson was going to pay you of for keeping the parcel for her, you should at least have taken her to your room. You’d have been more comfortable that way.” Daly got out and opened the back door of the cab. “Get out slowly, Giuseppe. Then turn around and put your hands on the roof of the car.”

  “He’s telling the truth,” Linda Lou said shrilly. “You have to believe him, believe me.”

  Scaffidi got out slowly and put his palms on the roof of his cab and Morgan walked around the rear and covered him with his gun while Daly went through his pockets.

  “Find anything?” Morgan asked.

  Daly itemized the driver’s effects. “Some change. Two ten dollar bills in a wallet. The usual I.D. cards. A set of keys. A rag with polish on it.” He held up the plastic tag. “And this.”

  “What is it?”

  “It looks like a tag off a suitcase.”

  Linda Lou offered, “The man who tried to get into the cab was carrying a brief case under his other arm. Maybe the tag came from that.”

  Morgan took the plastic tag from his partner and read the name aloud. “James A. Brady.” He tossed the tag back on top of the small pile of personal possessions on the polished hood of the cab. “Not bad, Linda. You think fast. You got so scared you panicked and left the money on the seat of the taxi and this guy Brady found it and put it in the brief case he just happened to be carrying. Is that the story? Now what are we supposed to do? Go chasing off to this place Stamford, wherever it
is, and scare hell out of some innocent Joe while you and your grease ball stud catch a freighter to South America with the money?”

  “No,” Linda Lou protested. “Believe me. I don’t even know Mr. Scaffidi. He doesn’t know me.”

  Morgan was mildly reproachful. “Shame on you, Linda Lou. The way I heard the story in Chicago you were hard to make. I even heard the boss almost busted his fat guts trying. But of course two hundred thousand dollars is a lot of pry.” He took Scaffidi by the shoulder and turned him around. “Now let’s have the real story, Giuseppe. Where is the parcel Miss Larson left with you while she spent the night in Bellevue dreaming up this phony cover that she’s trying to sell us?”

  Scaffidi protested. “I don’t know. I never even saw the parcel.”

  Daly lashed out with his gun again, hitting the cab driver even harder this time, digging the front sight of the barrel so deeply into the flesh of his face that blood followed the path of the metal.

  Scaffidi screamed with pain and Morgan stuffed the polish cloth into his mouth. “You don’t seem to have understood the question. My partner asked what you did with the parcel.”

  “No,” Linda Lou pleaded. “You mustn’t hurt him. He didn’t have anything to do with me losing the money.”

  She scrambled out of the cab and attempted to stand in front of Scaffidi and Morgan swept her off her feet with a backhand sweep of his free arm. “We’ll come to you later,” he said. “Right now we’re concerned with your boy friend.” He nodded at Daly. “Ask him again.”

  Daly wiped the blood off his gun barrel on the front of Scaffidi’s clean shirt. “In a minute. But I’d better lock the door first. This may take a little time.”

  ELEVEN

  THREE LITTLE GIRLS were playing hop scotch on the pavement of the short street dead-ending on the East River. As Brady walked past them and stopped at the parapet, leaning his elbows on the stone, he realized that the afternoon shadows were lengthening. He was tired. He had reason to be. Ever since he’d left the hotel he’d walked, not paying any attention to where he was, moving along with the other people on the sidewalks, automatically stopping for red lights and moving on when the lights turned green.

  With two hundred thousand dollars under his arm. He looked at his watch. It was four minutes of five. And he still didn’t know what he intended to do. For all he knew it might be too late to do anything. If a couple of punks in the lowest echelon of the underworld were willing to play as rough as the desk clerk and the bell man had been to protect a minor racket, just what would Mr. Dix do, to recover his money?

  For the hundredth time, Brady considered walking into the nearest police station, laying the brief case on the booking counter and telling the desk sergeant about it. “Here. I don’t want the stuff. I’m frightened.”

  Two things stopped him. First, the truth was too fantastic. The police would never believe he’d found the money. Such things just didn’t happen. He’d be held for investigation and the newspapers would pick up the story. He’d become a one-day sensation.

  Sixty-five hundred dollar a year translator claims he found two hundred thousand dollars on back seat of taxi cab.

  After that the reporters would really go to town. They would examine and print every facet of his life, the bad along with the good. He’d never done anything particularly bad but there were some episodes he would prefer to keep private. Then there was May. Angry because he’d failed to tell her about finding the money, thinking that he’d intended to hold out on her, there was no telling what May might say to the reporters. Then there was May’s daughter, Alice. If Alice was old enough at fifteen to want to be treated as a woman, she was old enough to feel scorned. And there’s an old and very true adage concerning that one.

  All in all, the thing would be a mess. When the newspapers had finished with him he might not have a wife. He might not even have a job. The firm of Harper, Nelson and Ferrel would consider the whole affair undignified.

  Brady pushed himself away from the parapet and walked back the way he had come. If the money really belonged to a big time Chicago mobster, the no longer mysterious Mr. Dix would be equally unappreciative. He would want his money, not a series of newspaper clippings and a police receipt. And if Brady turned the money over to the police there was a very good chance that they would impound it.

  For whatever purpose the money was to have been used, whoever was to have received it as settlement in full for 1957, there was only one logical reason for transferring such a large sum in cash. Mr. Dix hadn’t wanted it to show on his books. He had been willing to chance its being stolen as long as it couldn’t be traced to him. And if he, Jim Brady, were to call attention to the fact that Mr. Dix had so much money in cash, he might bring the Internal Revenue boys into the affair and Brady doubted very much if Mr. Dix would want to go to jail on a charge of income tax evasion.

  Brady’s mind continued to race along. If the girl in the red plastic raincoat had been acting as an agent in the matter, if she’d been carrying the money, she’d had reason to be frightened.

  He mentally reconstructed the scene. After falling in front of the station, to keep his barked knuckles from bleeding all over his coat, he’d thrust his hand into his pocket. His hand had still been in his pocket when he’d yanked open the door of the cab. And thinking he was from some rival mob and had come to hi-jack the money, the frightened girl had naturally assumed his hidden hand had been holding a gun.

  And just how to explain that to Mr. Dix?

  Brady walked on wearily. He couldn’t go to the police. Even if he knew how, it seemed unwise to contact Dix. All he had to offer was his unsubstantiated word against whatever story the girl might choose to tell. Even if he returned the money, the odds were ten to one the matter would finally be settled by the harbor police pulling another floater out of the river.

  Brady was honest with himself. There was a third reason for keeping the money. It was his one big chance to get out of the mess he was in. The money was his. He’d found it. If he could sit tight for six months or a year, go right on as if nothing had happened, he could leave May five or ten thousand dollars to tide her over until she sold her bill of goods to some other home-hungry male.

  Brady walked down the steps of the next subway entrance he came to. For the present, however, if he wanted to avoid a family quarrel, it would be better for all concerned if he was on the 5:35 when it arrived in Stamford.

  When he reached Grand Central Station Brady opened the locker to exchange the case he was carrying for the empty one inside. Then it occurred to him that for some reason or another he might not be able to get to the locker each day and if he remembered correctly, they were checked and cleaned out every twenty four hours. You had to identify your property to recover it, plus paying an additional charge. But a baggage check was good for thirty days.

  He stood in line at the check room counter wondering what the bored attendant would do if he knew what was in the fat brief case.

  After checking the brief case containing the money he barely had time to buy a paper and still catch the 5:35. He was already settled in his seat when he realized he’d forgotten to take the new brief case out of the locker. He hoped May wouldn’t notice he was arriving home empty-handed. If she did, all he could do was say he’d left the case at the office.

  May didn’t say anything when she picked him up at the station. For some reason she was unnaturally silent and tight-lipped.

  Supper was never a pleasant meal. Tonight it was really dreary. Over-excited by the purchase of his new bicycle, Jimmy monopolized the conversation. The only time May spoke was to ask for something to be passed. Alice’s eyes were puffed and red as if she’d been crying all day. Tonight there was no footsy and no kneesy. The fifteen-year-old ate silently, glowering at Brady between bites.

  When supper was over, instead of helping her mother with the dishes, Alice asked to leave the house on the pretext of doing her homework with the girl across the street. Brady expected May to prot
est. She didn’t. Instead, she asked Brady to give Jimmy a dollar so he could go to the movies.

  Brady gave his stepson the money and walked into the living room and re-read his paper to make certain he hadn’t missed a follow-up on the girl in the red raincoat. Also, there was no advertisement in the lost and found column that could even remotely be constructed to concern the money he’d found.

  He lit a cigarette from the one he was smoking and saw that instead of washing the dishes, May had come into the living room and was sitting on the same straight-backed chair on which he’d gone through the nightmare with Alice. Her hands were folded tightly in her lap. The corners of her thin lips were turned down in the ‘you-sonofabitch’ expression that always preceded a scene.

  “What did I do now?” he asked.

  “You don’t know?”

  Brady forced himself to speak casually. “No. I haven’t the least idea.”

  “Hah.”

  “Just what does that mean?”

  May told him. “Mr. Harper phoned this afternoon.”

  His cigarette no longer tasted good. Brady put it out. “Oh?”

  “You didn’t go to the office today, did you?”

  “No,” Brady admitted. “I didn’t. What did you tell him?”

  “What could I tell him? I told him your cold was much better and you would be in in the morning.”

  “Thanks.”

  May felt sorry for herself. “All right. I lied for you. I may even have saved your job. I think I have a right to know. Why didn’t you go to the office?”

  Brady couldn’t think of any reason, at least any that he could tell May. He told her the partial truth. “I just did not feel like it.”

  “When you know what losing your job could mean to all of us?”

  “I’m not going to lose my job.”