A Century of Noir

by Max Allan Collins

  He never changed his position as I reached the table—just smiled and said very low: “You’re Race Williams, of course. I have seen your picture. I have come to this country for the purpose of looking at you—just once.”

  “That’s fine,” I said, and since his voice was not unpleasant, I tried to keep mine the same, though I daresay I didn’t make much of a go of it. “You’re Mr. Raftner. Well, I’ve got some bad news for you. Your very charming companion is coming along with me.”

  “That is not the truth,” he said very solemnly. “She will not go. She will remain here with me. It is her preference—her privilege—and her comfort.” And very slowly, “She is used to every luxury of life. Prison cells are cold and damp.”

  “Hell!” I didn’t like this backing and filling. “I thought you were dynamite. Armin gave me the idea that this was the table of death.”

  “You could, of course, make Armin’s words come true.” Those great shoulders hunched. His left hand still hung over the chair; his right still held the almost full glass of champagne.

  “Come on, Mary,” I said. “Your fat friend has proved a bust. You and I are going places.”

  Mary started to her feet. Raftner spoke, “The dear child has a cold on her chest Mr. Williams. She will be escorted home carefully so that the night air will not hurt her. Then she will place her feet in a hot bath.” He paused a long moment, turned his head and looked directly at the girl. “Sit down, child,” he said, and his voice was like fingernails drawn along a wall. “I knew a young girl once who found the hot bath so severe that she never walked again.” He made a queer noise in his throat. “Both her feet were amputated.”

  So that was it. Here was a guy who was supposed to be good with a gun making cracks with certainly more than a hint of torture. Mary Morse put one hand to her throat; the other stretched limply toward me as she fell rather than slipped back in the chair.

  “Go, Race,” she said. “Go—I’ll—I’ll stay with him. I’ve got to. I’ve got to.”

  “Nonsense,” I told her and as my voice rose a little I took a quick look-see around. Tables on either side of us were vacant; people beyond were looking from the semi-darkness beneath the balcony into the light, and watching the singer. I went on: “Don’t mind this big bust, Mary. You heard what was going to happen to me if I came here. Now what? A lot of wind. Why, this big stiff couldn’t—”

  The big stiff did. He just moved his right hand back and tossed it up again. The “insult direct” or something like that in the book of etiquette, I guess. For his cigar puffed, smoke blew straight into my face the moment the champagne splashed all over my map.

  Mad? Of course I was mad. So would you be. I just can’t shoot lads to death unless there is some reason for it. Though you and I may think a face full of champagne is sufficient reason—twelve beer-drinking men on a jury might not.

  Anyway, I didn’t like it. His eyes were watching my right hand. Hard eyes and cold; no fish now, but steel through his glasses. And his right hand was ready to cross as soon as mine. Oh, I won’t believe any man is quicker than I am, and—

  I don’t go in for light humor often, but I did now. I stretched out my right hand, pulled the cigar out of his wide, surprised mouth, then shoved it back into his face again. That I turned it around and shoved in the wrong end of the cigar—that is, the wrong end from his point of view—is what caused the trouble. But if he wanted to play—why, so did I.

  If you have ever pushed the lighted end of a cigar in your own mouth during a fast evening, you’ll know the sensation of surprise. But you’ll probably have to guess how it feels when someone else does it—then screws it in like a cork in a bottle.

  No, I don’t know how dangerous Mr. Raftner was, but I do know what he did. He spit bits of cigar, ashes, and fire, and jumped up and down like a maniac. Sure, he stopped the show. He had half a dozen waiters around, poured glasses and glasses of water into his mouth, and just made a mess of himself as the waiters tried to stop him. He tried to talk, but didn’t make much of a go of it.

  To the first waiter I said: “He’s drunk.”

  The head-waiter was disturbed—greatly disturbed. He said sort of awed: “He’s the Baron from Antwerp, is he not? It is most regrettable, Miss Morse—this head of a great jewelry firm.” And when I put a bug in his ear, “But certainly, monsieur. Miss Morse need not be further embarrassed. The door there—through the kitchen. No, no—no one knows him by name, and few saw—and none, I believe, recognized Miss Morse.”

  I wasn’t mad any more when a captain led the girl and me to the little door and into the kitchen. Of course, Mary was well known in the best places. For some time now she had been the actual head of Morse and Lee. Poor kid—trying to stimulate the jewelry trade by appearing in fashionable places.

  I was careful as we left that dining-room. No fear that Mr. Raftner, alias, the Baron, would stick a bullet in my back. Like Mount Vesuvius, he was having another eruption. It was Armin I was watching. I saw him come to his feet and start across the dining-room toward the vanishing figure of Raftner who was being pushed more than just escorted between red curtains in one corner of the room. Then Armin hesitated, hurried back to the Flame who was quickly leaving the room.

  Yes, I was chuckling. But we can’t have our little joke without paying for it. That’s life, I suppose. The captain who saw us to the side entrance and sent for a taxi was very polite. He said quite close to my ear: “ Monsieur le Baron was rather too clever with the champagne. But you, monsieur, with the revolving cigar were superb.”

  So just as I was about to help Mary Morse into the taxi I parted with a tenspot. Another donation to a cause that had paid no dividends. But I shook my head. After all, where could I have gone and had so much fun for ten bucks. Mr. Raftner had taken it, and wasn’t likely to go around and tell people what had happened. I frowned. Nothing to worry me, maybe. But what of Mary Morse?

  That had been my mental question. Now as I turned and started to climb into the taxi it became a physical one. Mary Morse was not in the taxi. Mary Morse was gone. She was nowhere on that side street. By the time I reached the corner Mary Morse was not on the main thoroughfare either.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  On the Kill

  I climbed into the taxi and gave the address of my apartment. Then I did a little thinking. My main thought was that Raftner was flooding the city with narcotics and the place he would use to distribute the drugs from would be Mary Morse’s jewelry shop—one of the most respected establishments in the city. The last place to suspect, it had never even come under observation when her dear Uncle Frank Morse had hidden drugs in the basement. He’d kept the stuff in vases that sold for prices that would amaze you—did me, not having an eye for Ming’s Dynasty or any other guy’s dynasty for that matter. Now Raftner was threatening Mary Morse with exposure of her dead uncle’s activities, the fact that she’d kept her knowledge of them from the police. Also threatening to expose the bit of killing I’d pulled off in her interest.

  One thing they did wish to make sure of—and that was that I was out of the picture, and out of it quickly. If I were willing to fade myself they’d let it go at that. If I weren’t, they wanted to find it out right away and knock me over.

  Anyway, I couldn’t get the truth out of Mary Morse—at least at once—since I didn’t know where she was. Then who could talk? And I had it. Her stepfather, Conklyn Lee. He had managed that firm since Mary’s grandfather’s death.

  I’m not a sentimental fool. Anyone who knows me knows that. Oh, if it comes to a show-down, I’ll die for a cause, but I’d much rather kill the cause and live for another one. And I’m not a guy who got his knowledge of drugs and the vicious part they play in the life and death of a great city by reading articles in the magazines. I have seen the real thing. Criminals turned into mad dogs by dope, murders and tortures, decent women leaving their husbands and children and walking the streets because of it. Young lives ruined, old lives taken by a jump from a window
.

  Of course I couldn’t let lugs like Armin or Raftner tell me where to get off but when I reached Conklyn Lee’s old brown-stone front, I like to think there was something else beside that urging me—something of the crusader if you want to go DeMille on me. Lee let me in himself and I followed him down the hall to the library. He may have been hot stuff in the jewelry business and made quite a front, but then I guess he didn’t go walking about the great floor of the shop with his nightshirt flapping out from under his bathrobe.

  He had more things to do before he could get settled than a bride getting ready for her wedding. He had to get his glasses, mix himself a whisky and soda without hardly enough whisky to kill the taste of the soda. He kept walking around offering me cigarettes and lighting one himself every time I shook my head, until he had two in the ashtray and one in his hand—all lit. And all the time he kept saying: “Mary—where is Mary? No cigarette, Mr. Williams, no whisky? Some tea then?”

  “I never eat or drink or smoke in a place I’m not sure of,” I told him flat. “I lost some good friends that way.” And when his face grew blank, I explained simply, “Poison.”

  “Good gracious,” he said, and if the words themselves seemed trite, old-fashioned and childish, he put enough expression into them to make them sound almost profane.

  I didn’t waste time; I gave him straight talk. I said bluntly, and as if I knew every word of it to be gospel: “The shop is being used again to store and ship narcotics.”

  “The idea”—he puffed and blew a bit—“is impossible.”

  “Have you met the Baron from Antwerp?” I chucked at him.

  “Baron Von Stutz? Yes.”

  “And Armin Loring?”

  “Armin Loring? No.”

  “Maybe not under that name.” I shook my head. “Now, Mr. Lee, we’re getting too deep into this thing to go on with it. I may have trouble explaining my knowledge of the former use of your store for narcotics, and those men I shot up in Mount Vernon. And it may ruin the Morse firm, may give you and Mary a jolt up the River. I’ve got to hear talk from you—real words—or I’m going to blow the works. You’re opening up a passage that will make the almost uncontrollable crime situation in the country get out of hand entirely.”

  He got up, paced the room, said: “I don’t know. I hope not. I—God, Williams! I’ve thought of it day and night and have been tempted to go right to the government officials. It’s Mary—just Mary. But there are times when I thought it would be best for her if I should talk to you. After all you have done it would seem so unfair—such ingratitude—to let you pay the penalty for your loyalty and help. Yes, I think I will go straight to the police with the whole truth.”

  So we reversed positions. It was he who threatened to go to the cops, and now I who talked him out of it. I told him all that had happened tonight. Of Mary’s fear, of my attempt to help her, of the threats against my life. I watched his face while I talked. Then I watched his face while he talked, and I’m used to reading faces. His was an honest one; so honest it stood out. I’d have bet my last dollar on that—but what the hell! I’ve bet my last dollar on a lot of things and lost. But he gave me the story.

  “Mary has taken an active part in the business lately. Even built it up considerably. After Gentle Jim Corrigan’s death we felt that we had nothing more to fear. Mary tried to see you then—thank you. The past seemed so definitely the past. Then it became the present—a deadly horrible present.”

  He paused and I helped by saying: “Let’s have it.”

  “Mary began to be worried. Began to spend much of her time in the basement below the store. Then she introduced me to Baron Von Stutz who was interested in vases. Then out of a clear sky she told me that the Baron would take charge for a while of the buying and selling of vases to private collectors. He would come and go by the rear entrance to the basement itself. No one but men he selected would handle the shipments of vases. There was such a fear in her eyes, such a plea, such a—I—” His hands spread far apart. “So she asked for the key to the heavy steel door that led to the basement, and the next morning”—with great emphasis on the single word, next—“I gave it to her, and for the first time in the history of the shop the basement on that side was shut off from the shop itself.”

  “Why do you say—next morning?” I asked him.

  He coughed, looked me straight in the eyes and finally said: “We had but the one key which I kept in a drawer in the safe. I had a duplicate made.”

  “You were suspicious, then?” The old boy had his good points.

  “Suspicious!” His voice raised slightly. “I was alarmed, frightened, distraught.”

  I liked that last word so I threw it back at him. “When you visited the basement later with that key were you still distraught?”

  He didn’t smile, simply nodded. “This Baron knew nothing of vases. Even in the semi-darkness and without handling them I knew that a great many pieces he’d brought in were made here in America by the thousands to be sold at cheap auction-rooms. I spoke to Mary, and she told me the truth. It was blackmail. This dark man who was often with the Baron and called himself Mr. Armitage had discovered the secret of her uncle’s—Frank Morse’s—death. They were using our basement for the cutting and resetting of smuggled or stolen gems. It was the price we must pay for their silence.”

  “Did you believe her?”

  “Of course.” Conklyn Lee seemed surprised, and if he were an actor he was a damned good one. “You think it’s drugs. No, Mr. Williams. I thought of that, too, but after what you told Mary the first time—she’d—yes, she’d sacrifice everything—name, business before she’d agree to that.”

  I shrugged my shoulders as I came to my feet. “Go on believing what you like, Mr. Lee. But it’s drugs just the same.”

  We talked after that. And I believed in Conklyn Lee, just as Mary Morse believed in him. I believed in Mary Morse, too. Believed even now that she did not suspect the real truth. Illegal diamonds, unlike dope, could not corrupt the youth of a country. Sure, she would believe what they told her. Who wouldn’t believe it? And I gulped. I didn’t like the answer to that thought. The Flame wouldn’t believe it. Not be fooled a minute. And the Flame was in it. Criminal mind, eh? She must have developed a criminal stomach, too.

  Before I left I made arrangements to meet Conklyn Lee at the shop the following night.

  The Flame was nervous; Armin Loring was nervous; Raftner was nervous, for he had sent Spats Willis to kill me. Willis, of course, was both nervous and dead. But I recognized the signs. It affects all big crooks the same. They get fidgety, suspicious, ready to act quickly; kill quickly just before the big pay-off.

  The pay-off was soon, then. The drugs must be in that basement ready to be shipped. The cheap vases gave that away. That’s how the dope came there and that would be how the dope left.

  What would the government, the police, give for a bit of information like that? They’d give us freedom. They’d have to. It would be a great story that Mary Morse suspected something wrong, hired me and I uncovered the greatest drug-ring that ever got ready to encircle a city—a country even. The other story about Uncle Frank Morse—my killing him—why, we’d just forget that and begin with the coming of Baron Von Stutz, alias Raftner, and Armin Loring. So I was humming as I left the house.

  I wasn’t humming when the taxi drew up before my apartment door. My pleasant thoughts busted like a child’s balloon. We could forget it all right. But what good would that do us while Raftner and Armin Loring still remembered it and could talk about it?

  As I stepped from the taxi my thought was to make them forget it. Which was impossible unless—unless—And my right hand mechanically slid under my left armpit as I swung around. Yep, I thought, imagination is a great thing, as I actually caressed my gun—and I was right. For that little bit of imagination saved my life, saved it right then and there in the fraction of a split second.

  Sure, for I swung my face almost against the barrel of a Tommy
gun. I saw the steel drum which hid steady fingers, saw a face behind that tommy gun. I don’t know if the man spoke, if the man threatened. I don’t think so. Just narrowing eyes, a droop to the lower lip, the sudden assurance of death, and I flipped back my hand and shot that face straight out of my life—and his too, for that matter.

  The City of New York may seem insufficiently policed. You can walk the streets at night and not see a cop; you’d think you didn’t have any protection. But try shooting a man to death and see how quickly the boys turn up and want to know why. Yep, they were on their way before I skipped over the corpse and stepped into my apartment house.

  I bumped into Frosty, the night-man. His eyes popped; he dropped the paper he had been reading on the floor, mouthed the words: “Lord, Mr. Williams, sah! I just read it in the paper and—and you ain’t gone an’ done it again?”

  “That’s right, Frosty. I gone an’ done it again.” I handed him a five-spot. “Tell the cops I’m upstairs and pay the taxi-man if he squawks.” Without losing my stride I entered the automatic lift and started up. One thing was certain. The boys in the dope racket meant business.

  I reached my apartment in time to get O’Rourke out of bed and tell him to hop over—there might be trouble with the police. O’Rourke was half asleep, but he came to quick enough when he realized a dead guy was lying out front.

  “What the hell!” I cut in on his sermon. “I’m a citizen and I want some police protection. I want it pretty damn quick, too, or these cops will drag me downtown and keep me from shooting a guy who—”

  “Another one?”

  “Yeah—another one.” I stopped. The bell of my apartment was ringing, and someone was trying to kick the door in at the same time. “Wait, O’Rourke. Don’t go back to sleep.” I put the phone down on the table leaving the connection open and went to the door, flung it wide. A sergeant was there and a couple of harness cops behind him.