by Brad Latham
“My life can become rather exciting, can’t it, Mr.—uh—I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your name.” There was a hint of mischief in her look and a slight invitation in her voice. Evidently he had finally been admitted, however tentatively, into the elite world that was Muffy Dearborn’s.
“Lockwood. Look. Isn’t there anything else you know? Do you have any idea at all of where the jewels might be?”
Just as on the preceding night something seemed to register in Muffy’s face as he said that. But she shrugged. “How could I know? Wouldn’t it make more sense to interrogate Mr. Toomey?”
“In time I will. But I think you’re not telling me all that you know, Miss Dearborn.”
Her eyes blazed. “How dare you! One lousy item in that idiot Winchell’s column, and—”
“I don’t know about that. It’s what I’m reading in you that worries me.”
“Get out of here! Get out!” She had picked up the hairbrush and was waving it wildly at him.
“All right, Miss Dearborn, I will for now. But you’ll see me again, I’d imagine.”
“Get out!”
He walked past Stephanie, who was holding the door open for him. He turned his head toward her, and once again she was staring intensely at him. This time, however, he wondered if there were something new in her eyes, a kind of smouldering. He would have to see her again, too. Not likely that she knew anything directly about the case, but even if she didn’t, she might unconsciously have picked up something, or at least be able to inform him on any revealing quirks of Muffy’s personality. And unless he was misreading that new look of hers, getting help from Stephanie should be no problem. It seemed obvious now that she would be willing to give him anything he wanted.
He left the hotel, and strode down Broadway to the battered newsstand.on the corner of Broadway and 50th Street. Jimmy the Newsie was there, a stubby little man, skin long ago chafed and hardened by the buffeting winds of winter and the burning sun of summer. As always, he was in constant motion, the never-ending stream of people pausing for a moment, lifting up a paper, then handing him a couple of pennies, or waiting for their change of a larger coin. His hands and face were streaked with the oily black of the newsprint he handled fourteen hours a day.
In the middle of change-making, he glanced up. “Hook!” he cried, his small eyes lighting up. He was another of those who’d won a bundle all those years ago, betting against the marine.
“Hello, Jimmy.”
“Tribune? Telegram? Sun?” Jimmy asked, ready to seize a paper for him.
“Not just now, Jimmy. I need a favor.”
Jimmy was selling his sixth newspaper since their conversation had begun. “You got it,” he said immediately, counting out change, folding a newspaper and handing it to a waiting regular. “Hey, I heard about Jabber-Jabber Jacoby!”
“Already?”
“What do you mean, already? I’m in the news business, don’t forget. O’Hearn told me. You know, the cop with the crooked teeth? Jesus Christ, the poor guy, a bullet through the head!”
“Actually, that’s what this is about. I want you to set up a meet with Two-Scar Toomey.”
Jimmy stopped dead in his tracks, ignoring the three hands stretched out to him. “Toomey? But—but I heard that Richie Calidone and Angelo Ischetta—that you’re the one who stopped ‘em. They were Toomey’s boys, you know.”
“I know. That’s why I want to see Toomey.”
Jimmy shuddered, jerked his neck back once, twice, and returned to his customers. “Sorry to hold you up. Here. Three cents out of a quarter, thank you, Miss. Thank you, sir.”
“I’d like you to do it now.”
Despairingly, Jimmy turned to a small brownish man who was standing tentatively nearby. “Take over for me for a minute, will ya, Willie?”
He drew Lockwood off to the side a few feet away, and his voice went low and urgent. “You’re crazy, you know that? You’re setting yourself up if you see Toomey. He’s got to want your hide.”
The Hook smiled at him. “It’s my hide, Jimmy. I’d really appreciate it.”
Jimmy threw out his arms in exasperated surrender, his little brown eyes shooting skyward. “Okay, okay! You got a nickel?”
The coin in his hand, he trotted to a nearby phone booth, dropped it in the slot, dialed, and after two minutes returned to The Hook. “It’s all set up,” he said. “He’ll see you right now. His place in Brooklyn. You know the address, right?”
“Right. Thanks, Jimmy.”
“Don’t thank me. Not for that. But don’t curse me, neither. Remember, you wanted me to do it.” He was back at the stand, edging Willie aside, making change, handing out papers. He shouted out a final word to Lockwood. “I just hope tonight, tryin’ to sleep, I can remember that!”
Lockwood walked over to the Radio City Garage and picked up his car, a gunmetal-gray 1937 Cord convertible. Once in the car, before starting up the motor, he checked his .38. He had little regard for Toomey, no fear of him when it came right down to it, but it paid to be careful.
He pulled out of the garage and headed downtown, traffic thick, horns ceaselessly blaring, jaywalking pedestrians darting in and out of the tangle every time they saw an opening or thought they did.
Slowly he made his way downtown and then turned off to the left, heading toward the Brooklyn Bridge. His eyes routinely swung toward the rearview mirror and fixed there. There was a big black Packard behind him, and its occupants all seemed to have their gaze fixed on his car.
He dropped down a block, and the car followed. He went up two, and the Packard remained behind him, implacable and unswerving.
He hit the gas, roared up the next block, goosed it through a traffic light that had just turned red, swung through the corner driveway of a Shell station, went into a screeching U-turn, and, the next time he looked, found himself alone.
He drove aimlessly for a few minutes, putting the Cord through a random traffic pattern, then, satisfied he’d shaken them, made his way to the Brooklyn Bridge.
He was halfway over it when the Packard showed again. It was four cars away, hanging back a little more discreetly this time. For the moment, he could do nothing. The bridge was packed solid with scores of other cars.
He continued on, searching the rearview mirror, seeing if he could make out who it was, but they were too far away, and the light was wrong. The bridge ended, and he sliced over to the left, hurtling onto Tillary. The Packard wheeled the same way, moving after him, brakes squealing as drivers whose path it crossed hit their pedals, cursed, and hoped.
He went a few blocks up Tillary, and, at the last minute, turned up Duffield. The Packard, caught off guard, barreled past the intersection. But a moment later, Lockwood saw it back up and then tear up the street after him.
He moved onto Willoughby and then Gold, hampered by the traffic, by the narrow streets, a wary eye out for the kids who dotted the area and who at any moment might rush out in front of him.
Suddenly he shot onto the broad reaches of Flushing Avenue, down by the Navy Yard. He hit the accelerator all the way, the Packard Twin Six engine throbbing into full power under the Cord’s coffin hood.
He was in his element now, leaving the Packard in the dust, when an approaching Mack truck in the opposite lane and an iceman with a horse-drawn cart that trotted dispiritedly ahead in his own lane, cars double-parked on either side of the street, forced him to slow down, unable to break through the temporary bottleneck.
It was all the Packard needed. It roared forward, barely missing the suddenly swerving Mack, and forced him off the street, the two cars zooming diagonally up onto the sidewalk, almost crashing into the red brick warehouse that faced it.
He was already shoving the gear into reverse when the occupants of the Packard flung the Cord’s door open, and the four of them, all very big and very bulky, pulled him out, flinging him to the sidewalk.
Then the kicking and punching began.
Still down, Lockwood grabbed at a le
g and pulled, and one thug tumbled over him, screening him for the moment from the blows of the others. He scrambled halfway up and wrapped his arms around the waist of the second man, feet digging into the ground as if in a football scrimmage, this one being a scrimmage played for keeps.
“Get ’im, you stupid mugs! Finish ‘im off!” came a voice, and The Hook wheeled and thundered a punch into the jaw that flashed before him. The resulting crunch was satisfying, but now they were all over him again, punishing him on the back, about his head, his shoulders, his kidneys, feet again slamming against his sides and gut. “This’ll teach ya—stay away from Toomey and forget about the jewels!” the voice came again, and The Hook managed one last, desperate right before he went down. He saw an eye, a big brown and white eye, striking the ground near him, rattling around, vibrating noiselessly as a great black curtain suddenly descended over his conscious mind.
CHAPTER
3
And then, instead of the black, there was white. A huge blur of white that slowly separated itself, breaking into patterns that in turn became white walls, white sheets, the white uniform of a nurse standing near him. “He’s coming to,” he heard a voice say.
There was brown now, too; the rumpled wool suit of Jimbo Brannigan. “I told ya ya weren’t ready for Joe Louis,” Brannigan joked through the concern that showed in his broad Irish face. “What happened, kid?”
“I don’t know, Jimbo.” Every part of him was aching. “I had a meet all set up with Toomey, but before I got there a bunch of lugs in a big black Packard forced me over and beat the living daylights out of me. How am I, anyway?”
“You’ll live. Were they Toomey’s boys?”
“No, I’m sure they weren’t. They were mugs I’ve never seen before, not that I got much of a look at them. They were all over me from the word go, and I never got a really good fix.”
“You couldn’t identify them?”
“Not really. Wait a minute. I could at that.” Suddenly Lockwood noticed a woman off to one side. It was Stephanie.
“What’s she doing here?” he asked Brannigan.
“I was questioning Muffy Dearborn at her hotel when they called me about you. This one here heard you were hurt and insisted on coming along. I told her no, but two minutes after I arrived, here she was.”
Lockwood fell silent, regarding Stephanie, who simply looked back at him, saying nothing, impassive. Simply—there.
“Now what’s this about your saying you could identify one of ’em?” Jimbo asked, and the warmth was mostly out of his voice. He was a cop now, doing his job.
“I knocked the eye out of one of them.”
“What?”
“It was a false eye. Glass. There can’t be too many boyos on the work-’em-over circuit with a brown glass eye.”
Jimbo scratched his head. “Jesus. I’ll say there can’t. That’s a new one on me.” Jimbo turned to a policeman whom Lockwood now noticed for the first time. “You ever hear of a sassyboy with a glass eye?” The patrolman shook his head.
Jimbo lifted his heavy bulk off the chair by the side of the bed. “Well, I’ll see if I can find out anything. They tell me you’re gonna survive. Should be a doctor along here any minute to check you out. If you need anything, let me know, hear?”
The Hook nodded, and Jimbo left, along with the cop. The nurse had already gone, and now there was just the two of them in the room, he and Stephanie.
“Why are you here?” he asked.
“Don’t talk now, you’re hurt,” she answered.
“No, I’m all right,” he responded, pulling himself up slightly in the bed, feeling the dull pain in various areas of his body as he did so. His hands gingerly explored a few of the aches. He did seem to be all right. “Please tell me. Why are you here?”
“I am here to protect you.”
“Protect me?”
“You must understand,” she said, with a slight French accent. “I once knew a man like you.”
Lockwood looked for his cigarettes, located them, and nodded in their direction. “Could you—” he began.
She pushed a Camel halfway out of its package and offered it to him, then flicked the black and silver Dunhill lighter, and he drew in on the cigarette. It tasted good. “Go on,” he said.
“He was in trouble. Serious trouble. He didn’t know it, but I did. I told him this, but it didn’t seem to matter. He thought that anything that came along, he could, how you say, handle it himself. I knew better, but he… dissuaded me.”
She drew near him now and sank onto the chair by his bed. Her gaze was unwavering, and as he watched, he found himself not believing her.
“And I left him alone. And he was unprotected. And—” This time she lowered her head, and was quiet for a moment. “And I cannot let that happen again,” she said, looking at him once more, the words rushing out.
The Hook took another puff. The cigarette now tasted sour, and he crushed it out. “He died?”
Her lids dropped, and again her head dipped downward, in silent assent.
The scent of her reached him now. He drank it in, filling his lungs with it. He was goddamned if he knew what she wanted from him, but he knew now what he wanted from her. Her dark brown hair was soft and waved, her lashes long and midnight-black, her nose slightly fleshy in the bridge, in that strangely sexy way such noses have. She had raised her head, and he saw the inviting hollow of her cheeks and the fullness of her lips, the perfection of her shoulders and the glory of her breasts.
“Does Muffy know you’re here?” he asked.
“It makes no difference now. I have quit her.”
“You’ve given up your job?” There was amazement in his voice but no disbelief. This time she seemed to be telling the truth.
“Yes.”
“But why?”
“I must care for you. I must redeem myself for the sake of André—the man of whom I was speaking,” she said, entreaty in her voice, but a kind of blind assurance as well. She would be difficult to dissuade.
“You gave up your job for that?”
“Ah. Well, it was other things as well. She is not, how you say, a gentle woman. She is rich, yes, but she has no nobility. Everything is for her, nothing else counts.” She reached out to straighten his blanket, and her perfume drifted his way again. It was a very womanly smell.
“You had a disagreement?”
“Disagreement? No. But when I saw her reaction to Mr. Jacoby, after everything else I had known her to do, it was almost too much. And then, when the call came, and she heard about you, and it was as if you were an insect—then that, plus what I feel I owe to André, and thus to you—I left.” She ended.
Lockwood considered her. “Do you think Muffy took the jewels?”
Her head rocked. He had startled her, in some frightening way, by hitting her with this, out of the blue. “No—uh, I don’t know. It could be—I don’t think so—why should she—but perhaps—I cannot say,” she finished, limply.
“What’s your game, Stephanie?”
“Game?”
“I—ah, never mind. Find me a nurse, and let’s get out of here.”
It would be good to be back in his apartment, Lockwood thought, as the elevator in the Summerfield Hotel on West 47th Street ascended. It might be awkward with Stephanie here, but she could be a key to this case, and she offered certain other… benefits.
The elevator reached the twelfth floor, and the two of them stepped out, and walked a few paces to his door. He inserted the key, turned it, opened the door and followed Stephanie in. Two-Scar Toomey and his ugly-looking buddies were sitting there, awaiting his arrival.
“Whattya say, pal,” Toomey greeted him.
“Pretty juicy-lookin’ company you’re keepin’, Hook,” his right-hand man, Petey Ahearn smiled, showing all the fine good humor of an attacking Doberman.
“Button it, Ahearn,” Hook commanded, the ice of his eyes making Petey shift uneasily, his smile of bravado looking forced.
; “You don’t speak to my boys like that, Lockwood,” Two-Scar snarled, the dead-white tissues over his left eye and across his right cheek standing out in the light of the lamp by the chair in which he sat, relaxed and insolent.
“Stow it, Toomey. We’ve got things to talk about.”
Toomey’s right hand twitched near the bulge in his jacket. “You’re living dangerously, Hook.”
“That’s what they pay me for, Toomey. I’m sorry I missed our little meeting.”
“No one stands up Toomey,” the racketeer mumbled. “And no one gets away with messing with any of my boys. I know what you did to Angelo and Richie.”
“If you want to keep your boys safe, Two-Scar, you’d better put a leash on them.” Toomey’s mouth went ugly when Lockwood hit him with the nickname, but he ignored him. “Richie Calidone got what was coming to him. His partner, too.”
“You’re gonna pay for it, Hook.”
“Stop talking like some grease-painted mobster off the Monogram lot, Two-Scar. Look, the two of us have business to do, and we might as well get down to it.” Lockwood kept the talk going, trying to figure out what the hell to do with Stephanie if the fireworks went off. He had to protect her and at the same time shoot it out with the five of them. At the moment, he didn’t much like his chances.
“What business? What kind of business would I do with a nothing like you?” Two-Scar sat back in his chair for a moment and grabbed a cigar from his breast pocket. He bit off the tip of it, then struck a wooden match by flicking it with his fingernail, and drew in slowly on Cuba’s second-best product, after its women.
“The Dearborn jewels.” The Hook looked them all over; Two-Scar in the easy chair, Petey Ahearn and Stuff Maggiatore on the couch, Slops Weinstein sitting on the windowsill, a thug whose name Lockwood didn’t know lounging against the wall behind Toomey. General Pershing couldn’t have devised much better offensive positions.
“The what?” Two-Scar grinned now, enjoying his cigar and the sense of power this situation gave him.
“You know what I’m talking about. You, or at least one of your boys, hiked the jewels, and somehow Jabber-Jabber Jacoby found out about it, so you wiped him.”