“For someone it was,” I reminded him.
“You’re crazy,” he said.
“That’s what the D.A.’s lad tried as a last resort when the trial was on.”
“Shit.”
“What else is new?”
To keep calm, Jerry grabbed at his butts, lit up a smoke and deliberately sat back looking at the ceiling. “Give me one idea,” he finally mused.
“Did Van Reeves contact you about the Swiss broad?”
“Uh-huh.”
“She was the redhead, buddy.”
His eyes came down from the ceiling and searched my face. “Now you tell me.”
“Last contact was Ray Hilquist. She lived with him.”
“You son of a bitch. Where do you pick it up?”
“I’m fighting for my life,” I said. “Remember?”
Jerry took another pull on the cigarette, his features thoughtful now. “Hilquist and Leo Marcus used to be tied in together. Just little things. Nothing worth pulling them for, but they were close.” He wasn’t looking at me now. He was reviewing the records mentally, pulling out the files in his mind the way cops do, remembering the little things that count. “They had a split once,” he told me. “A broad was involved. Word got out that the wheels in the Syndicate called a meeting and pulled them back together, otherwise it was an ‘or else’ deal. They didn’t like some twist interfering with business. No sweat after that. Too much action was involved. You have posed an interesting thought, Regan.”
“Keep on it.”
“I will.” He leveled his eyes at me. “But you stay cool,” he said as he got up. “When you’re thinking you scare me.”
“I’ll scare a lot of people before it’s through,” I told him.
CHAPTER FOUR
STAN THE PENCIL wasn’t hard to find. Like all the rest, he had his money rounds; the habituals with the two bucks, the fivers, the ten spots who waited for him in the right places to pick up their cash and slap it on the nose of some nag running the circuit. To him it was a living, two fifty a week with a few weeks in the workhouse when the administration needed a patsy to pad the news reports.
All expenses paid and his wife and kids supported while he was staring at the bars wondering when the legislature would legalize off-track betting like the people wanted despite the pious claims of the backwards-collar gooks and the political slobs who went their way.
I found him at The Shamrock making his book in a cheap pad, his eyes too suddenly round at what he saw in my face. I said, “Talk, Stan. Let’s take a table somewhere.”
“Look…”
“I’m off the force, Stan, but I can still break you in little pieces. Here and now. Your choice.”
“So all right. Talk. It’s cheap.”
I grabbed his arm, pushed him to a table and called for a couple of beers. When the waiter brought the steins I sipped the top off mine and put it down and watched the wet circles it made on the table top. “You were there that night, Stan.”
“Was I called as a witness?”
“Nope.”
I let my eyes drift up to his, feeling the air go through my teeth again. “You’ve been around, boy. You know the ropes and the angles. Nothing gets past your kind. I thought nothing did through me, but something did. What was it?”
“Look, Mr. Regan…”
“Think, buddy. It’s your arm. Left or right first?”
Stan The Pencil was scared. His throat bobbed convulsively and a vein in his temple throbbed too damn hard. “Mr. Regan… it was like they said. You got looped. Hell, I’d do what I could if…”
“There was something. I came in that bar sober.”
“You had a headache. You was eating aspirins.”
“I’d just bought them, Stan. An unopened box at the drugstore on the corner. I had six. It’s an occupational hazard.”
“So I didn’t see nothing. No kidding, Mr. Regan…”
“Who slipped me a dose?”
He could hardly keep his hands folded in front of him. “Honest, Mr. Regan, it was like you had too much. So who was there? Them crazy artists, Popeye Lewis and Edna Rells, they ain’t done nothing. Who could louse you up? You know old Popeye. He got nothing going for him except his paintings and fifty million bucks he hates. That nutty Edna he lives with is just as bad. All that loot and they shack up in a garret even if he does own the whole joint. He won’t live off nothing his old man left him, just what they make with that crazy smear they sell. Me, so what did I do? Make a few contacts? I thought it was a good party.”
“Where did the redhead come in?”
“Who knows?” he said. “Dames were all over the place.”
“You saw her?”
“I saw plenty of broads. She latched on when you started the big pitch. Come on, Mr. Regan.”
“How long have I known you, Stan?”
“Like maybe five years.”
“Ever get yanked?”
“Hell, you weren’t on that detail.”
“Phones were all over the place,” I reminded him. “I could have assigned it anytime.”
“All right, all right. You were square. What you want from me, anyway?”
“The redhead.”
Stan The Pencil’s hands were in tight knots, the fingers twisted together. “Like she drifted over. You pitched, she caught. I cut out about then. I don’t know from nothing. I told them all that.”
“You know her?” I watched him closely.
He caught the funny look in my eyes and said, “I know her now. Not before. I seen it in the papers.”
“Let’s think back.”
“What for?”
“Leo Marcus and Hilquist.”
“Mr. Regan…”
“Stop bullshitting me.”
His face got sullen and his eyes dropped to his hands.
I said, “What’s the racket talk?”
“Some broad,” Stan said softly. “This gonna hurt me?”
“No.”
“Marcus fixed it. What difference does it make now?”
“Because I got fixed too,” I said.
Very simply he looked up and said, “I’m more scared of them than you, Mr. Regan. What now?”
“Nothing, buddy,” I said. “You can blow now.” He hadn’t told me anything, but he’d think he had and he’d be different later.
I got out and walked. My apartment was fifteen blocks away but I had to think about it. A month gone sitting on a bail bond because they wanted to get it over with in a hurry, the eyes of a guy who had been close friends looking at you speculatively, the hatred of the press and the animosity of the public because they thought a hard-working career cop took five grand instead of his life’s work. Nuts.
The rain started in a gentle mist at first, working up to a great gout that caught me on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-ninth and when I walked through it, ignoring all its malicious fury, developed a rumble with heat lightning in the west that growled its displeasure at me.
I said, “Drop dead,” toward the sky and kept walking while people watched curiously. Screw them too, I thought. If they knew who I was, they’d spit. The killer cop. He had gotten away with murder.
Well, thank somebody for twelve good men and true who had bought the story.
I hoped they were right.
There was still a chance they weren’t.
I went over it again, knowing the odds I was up against. I reached the apartment and studied the old brownstone from the outside, realizing that anybody could get inside there. Hell, for a pro, you could get anywhere. A key was easy to get. I inserted my own in the lock, turned it and pushed the door open. It was only a three room flat you could expect a bachelor cop to occupy, nothing special no matter how hard you looked. The only extravagance was the wall safe with nothing in it outside a will, a birth certificate and two diplomas, compliments of the butcher downstairs who thought I needed more security. The Marcus file had been stowed in the false bottom of the rectangular bottom of
the waste basket by the old desk I used, a nothing place an ordinary housebreaker would have missed and a pro looking for the right thing in the right place found. The five grand was in a new place, too damn obvious, an area above the unpainted pine that formed a ceiling in the bedroom closet.
It was newly cut and that was what had made it all the more damning.
Out of curiosity I checked the apartment. The signs of white dust from the print teams the department sent in were still showing on the furniture, wisps here and there like an untidy woman would make from powdering after a bath, the stigmata of the professionals taking care of their own. Or frying him if they had to.
I lay down on the bed, listening to the air going out of the mattress with a soft hiss and closed my eyes, thinking of how nice it was to sleep and be away from it all. There was a sweet smell of pleasure there, a sensual odor of the far-off things that could never be attained for someone like me and sleep was the utmost pinnacle of desire. It was a gentle, wafting breeze that talked to me from way down deep and out of the downy fluffiness of it all I could hear a strange voice that had turned us into the wild assed bastards they couldn’t beat with all of the Nazi deviousness and the man kept saying, “They’ll try anything. If it’s foreign to you, cut out and run. Shoot. No matter who. Blow out your breath and get away. They have chemical warfare to offset our superiority in noxious gases. They want you. Remember… YOU. You have information. They’ll do anything. They’ll do…”
My eyes opened on his words as if I were years back in a different place and I remembered the rules. I cut and ran, hit the door, opened it and lay face down in the empty doorway gasping for breath while my senses came back to me.
I was lucky. It had all seemed so nice. Like freezing to death in the snow when you thought you were nice and warm all the time. I found the unlabeled can under the mattress that had been activated by my weight. A simple thing that could have been a shaving cream container or a deodorant spray if it hadn’t been a deadly sleep inducer from which I never would have awakened.
After the windows were opened and the odor gone, I stuck the can in the refrigerator, locked up and dropped into the sleep I should have had in the beginning.
Somebody really wanted me dead in the worst way.
Even when you’re a cop with a cloud over you, certain avenues are open. I took the canister up to the lab, where Sergeant Ted Marker looked at it before turning it over to the other specialists, letting me sit in the big chair by his desk while we waited for the analysis report.
For me, they did it fast. Ted’s assistant came back in an hour with the can and an elaborate report. Ted studied it a moment before laying it on his desk, then read it over again to be sure. “German compound,” he finally said. “We called it FS-7, Roderick Formula.”
“What’s that mean?”
He peeled off his glasses and looked at me. “Nerve gas. Unassuming and deadly. The trap was cute. You’re supposed to be dead. What’s inside you, Regan?”
“I’m motivated.”
“Stop the crap.”
Ted let a smile flicker across his usually glum face. “It was set up very easily. Like all aerosol bombs, small pressure sets it off. It was put under the springs of your bed. You pushed the button yourself.”
“I’m glad I didn’t have company.”
“The value of being a lonely bachelor,” he smiled.
“Knock it off.” I leaned forward in the chair. “It isn’t a domestic compound?”
“I haven’t seen it since ’45. One of the end products of the Nuremberg trials. It was exposed there.”
“Like Sentol?”
“You think a lot, Regan.”
“I’m supposed to,” I threw at him. “What about the container?”
“German surplus. Somebody has access to unauthorized supplies. Outside of what was released to our own agencies, this stuff was all supposed to be destroyed.”
“Somebody had a sense of the future,” I grimaced.
His answer was quick. “Why?”
“To take care of people like me.”
He nodded, looked at the report a moment, then came back to me. “Some have a great sense of timing. They think ahead. They can wait.”
“How could they get this stuff?”
Ted made a gesture with his shoulders. “How do the punks get guns?”
“That easy?”
“That easy. Money can buy almost anything.”
I got up and put my hat on, thinking of the five grand somebody had left in my room. “Almost,” I said.
Al Argenio came in as I said it, a small box in his hand. He hadn’t shaved that morning and his face had a hard, swarthy look, a guy who had been up all night. He was all badge, gun and efficiency, and he gave me a hard leer and said, “What are you doing here, bum?”
He thought I was going to walk past him and ignore the remark. It was the second mistake he made with me. I laid one on those black chops of his that slammed him into the wall with a glassy stare in his eyes, awake enough to hear what I said but not awake enough to do anything about it. “Watch your tongue, slob,” I said.
The others looked at me, hid their grins and didn’t stop me from going out. None of them liked him either.
Downstairs, I used the pay phone to call the Murray Hill number. The one in the book got me to the PBX board, but the old badge number and the tone of voice got me Miss Mad on a private phone, that cool voice with the throaty timbre saying hello with that little tinge of anticipation I had hoped to hear and I said, “Regan, sugar. We alone?”
“I hope so.”
“Lunch?”
“I hope so.”
“You won’t get shook? A cop isn’t exactly a company president.”
“In your circles I wouldn’t be considered great company for a date unless it was in the line of duty, would I?”
“My circles aren’t the old ones right now, honey… so it’s a date. The Blue Ribbon on Forty-fourth?”
“You never change, do you?”
“Why should I, baby?” I asked her. “About two-thirty… the crowd will be gone.”
The crowd was gone, but the regulars were there, saw her come in and join me and grinned in appreciation. She went through the bar, crossed into the booth behind Angie and sat down in the chair he held out for her.
“How many years has it been, Patrick?”
“Maybe twenty-five.”
“The first time you ever asked me out to lunch before.”
“Would you have accepted before?”
Something had happened to her eyes. The bottomless well wasn’t there any more. “You’ll never know,” she said. “Shall we wait to eat or talk now? I know it isn’t a cruise for you.”
“Let’s keep it like between old friends. You’re easy on the eyes and it makes talking a pleasure.”
“Okay, old friend. Just don’t ask me one question.”
I anticipated what she had in her mind and said, “Like what made you get into the racket in the first place?”
Madaline nodded sagely. “I might decide to tell the truth for a change. I never have before. The others all expected nice scandalous statements tinged with sensuality they could savor with all the gusto of a gourmet and I fed them what they wanted to hear. The truth is very simple and quite sordid.”
“Then save it until you’re ready.”
She watched me, her fingers toying with the napkin, “You’re probably the only one who would understand it.”
The waiter took our orders then, brought a pair of drinks to sip at while we waited for the duckling he had suggested and I lifted the glass in a silent toast. “To now, Mad.”
She winked, sampled the drink and put it down slowly. “I have news for you, Regan.”
I waited.
“Let’s call it hearsay. No confirmation. For your information I put the question to some of the kids and it didn’t take them long to come up with some oddball facts.”
“Like what?”
�
�Ray Hilquist may have set up Mildred Swiss, but she wasn’t completely cooperative. She had been seen around with Leo Marcus in out-of-the-way places while she was supposed to be keeping Hilquist’s bed warm.”
“What the hell did Leo have to pull in a broad like her?”
Madaline pursed her mouth and shrugged. “Who can tell about women, Regan? Maybe they like most what they can’t have.”
“You know the Syndicate stepped in and cleaned up the deal?”
She nodded gently and picked up her drink. “That’s the strange part.”
“What is?”
“Leo was much bigger than Hilquist. It should have gone in his favor if there was a squabble.” She drank, put the glass down and asked me, “Ever consider that?”
“I gave it a thought. Maybe they didn’t figure little Millie Swiss was right for their top man. Okay for Hilquist, but something Marcus wouldn’t miss after a while.”
“Possibly. They use computers in the rackets these days.” Then she shook her head again, her face thoughtful. “I don’t buy it. I’ve seen too damn much. I know those people…”
“Oh?”
She said, “It was in the last couple of weeks before you shot… before Marcus was killed he was seen with Mildred Swiss. The kids told me it looked like love… all quiet and cozy, stars in her eyes, hand holding under the table and that sort of garbage. She was still in the apartment Hilquist had… the lease was paid in advance and he had left her enough spending money to keep her going for a year anyway after he died.” Madaline grinned at me. “She was a lucky little twist. Most of them don’t make out that well.”
“A cozy situation,” I said. “If Marcus did go for the broad he could have arranged Hilquist’s accident, then took his time about moving in so no finger gets pointed at him.”
“You’re forgetting one thing,” she said.
“What?”
“The wheels in the Syndicate don’t like intramural rivalries. They’d go after anybody acting independently of their instructions, especially if it would jeopardize their operations.”
“That only leaves two conclusions then,” I said. “Either it was an accident or they arranged for it to happen.”
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