Halo in Brass

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Halo in Brass Page 12

by Howard Browne


  Her red-coated lips came slowly unstuck, like a bandage peeling away from an open wound. “And you’d do it too,” she said contemptuously. “You’d throw me right in their laps simply because you think I’m holding out on you. How good do you sleep nights, mister ex-cop?”

  This was fun. Hit her again, Pine; she’s only five feet of dumb broad and one more will do it. I was enjoying this. Every stinking minute of it.

  I walked two yards away from her and back again. The wind still shouted in the streets and between gusts I could hear faraway dance music and the thin high note of a woman’s laugh strained through walls.

  “You’re forgetting something,” she said suddenly. “You’re forgetting I’m married and queer women don’t marry men. The police know that, even if you don’t. That’s why all this fast talk of yours about them suspecting me is just a cheap trick to make me stool on a friend.”

  “I’m forgetting nothing,” I said. “Queers marry for money or for safety or for any one of fifty reasons. Being married to O’Flynn won’t get you out of this that easy. Take my word for it.”

  The contempt was still strong in her voice. “You don’t care how you get results, do you? Blackmail, threats—the works. Just so you can earn your stinking whatever-it amounts-to a day.”

  “I do my job,” I said, my voice dull in my ears. “Make up your mind, Mrs. O’Flynn. Do I get what I want from you the easy way or do I have to use the cops as a club? You’ve done a lot of slick yammering about ratting on friends. I say at least one of your friends is a killer and needs to be ratted on. Which is it going to be, you or her?”

  She opened her hand and deliberately let her cigarette drop to the floor. It hit the linoleum and rolled toward me. The lipstick at one end was like blood on a sheet.

  “You win, copper,” she said calmly. “I’ll see that you get what you’re asking for. But it won’t be now because I don’t know the answer. But I’ll get it and when I do you’ll hear from me. You’ll have it by tomorrow. Early tomorrow.”

  Our eyes locked for a long moment before she looked down at her hands. “How will I get in touch with you?” she said, making it sound unimportant.

  I told her. She heard me through, then gave a short cool nod and walked around me and on out the door, not slamming it this time.

  I stayed where I was, leaning against the chair, watching smoke from my cigarette curl upward in a twisting spiral. “You won’t last much longer,” I said aloud. The words were gall to my tongue.

  The cigarette didn’t say anything. Nobody had spoken to it.

  CHAPTER 16

  THE game room was something to see. O’Flynn might skimp on office furnishings but when it came to slicking up for the trade the best was something you hauled in by the truckload.

  Not that it was big enough for fleet maneuvers. But still enough room for three roulette layouts down the center under a mammoth crystal chandelier. Along the side walls and in the corners were such things as dice tables and blackjack stations. Powdered shoulders and white ties were thick around the roulette tables, although the one in the center was getting the heavy play. The motionless air carried the crisp rattle of chips, the dry even murmur of croupiers, the shrill voices of women. Put almost any woman in an evening gown and stick a glass in her hand and her voice automatically goes up three octaves. Change the glass for a stack of chips and the walls ring.

  I sat on a chrome-and-red-plastic bar stool and sipped at a double cognac and admired the room, if not the people in it. The bar itself filled a long shallow alcove in one of the lemon-colored walls, and here and there along the others, under hooded display lamps, were somber oil paintings which no one bothered to look at. Carpeting the color of a Hanoverian nosebleed .ran to the baseboard, deep enough to ambush tigers in.

  I finished my drink, wiped my hands with the handkerchief from my breast pocket and lighted a cigarette. My thoughts were beginning to catch up with me, adding to the gloom brought on by my talk with Bonnie O’Flynn. I thought of Laura Fremont and Grace Rehak, reluctantly, without pleasure and without hope. One of them had probably killed two women. Almost certainly, in fact. I looked at my wrist watch and didn’t see what time it was. I remembered the girl on the bed, with her eyes sticking out and four broad shallow scratches across the pale skin of the belly. I remembered Captain Blauvelt’s remarks about the twilight zone of sex Mary Conrad and her friends were a part of.

  Be a private detective. Easy enjoyable work. See the world through a garbage can. Nuts!

  “Another, sir?” asked the barman, holding my empty glass in one clean white hand. He seemed a little worried by my expression. You never know about these solitary drinkers.

  “Yeah,” I growled. “I got a bad taste in my ears.”

  It made no sense to him but it did to me. He filled the glass from the same bottle of Delamain and went away for my change. The smoke from my cigarette hung in the tired air like fog in a valley.

  I leaned my back against the bar and watched the clump of fancy people around the center roulette table. I had nothing better to do. Two women—young and dressed to gamble— . seemed the center of attraction there. A redhead and a blonde. Not much of them was visible, just bare shoulders and wearing their hair the way hair was being worn that season. They would be beautiful, probably, with the enameled, assembly-line kind of beauty that went with hormone creams and Dior gowns.

  I decided I was getting too much out of too little.

  There was a man with them—a man of medium height, with capable-looking shoulders under the coat of a midnight blue tuxedo cut by an archangel with three centuries to do the job. He seemed to be splitting his time between placing bets and conferring with the redhead. Whenever he spoke to her it brought on a shifting of bodies and a craning of necks as the spectators eavesdropped. His black hair was cropped fairly close and at the moment could have used a comb. Patches of silver at the temples indicated he was old enough to go out with girls.

  A man and a woman came out of the crowd at the tables and stood at the bar next to me. He ordered drinks in a loud, almost feverish voice. “I’ve heard of systems,” he said to the woman. “But not like that one I didn’t. He doubles at the right time and he drags down at the right time and it all comes out of that book. You’re seeing roulette, baby.”

  “Lot it means," the woman said, her voice like a damp finger across glass. “Not the way that blonde keeps shoving it back. You know who they are, Herb. Lawrence Griswold and that fourth wife of his. She’s certainly common enough.”

  “My God! You dames!”

  They finished their drinks in a hurry and scurried back to the center table. And that was when I got my second look of the day at Mr. Smith.

  He was pushing through the crowd, a highball in each hand, his handsome dark head gleaming under the light. I couldn’t mistake him. He was wearing dinner clothes that made him look as slender as a steel blade. He put one of the glasses in front of the blonde and said something to her.

  I drank the rest of my drink and went over there, my pulses starting to stir. It took some polite shoving before I could get where I wanted to be. Mr. Smith could see me now by turning his head a few inches to the right. That would be fine. I would enjoy having him see me.

  The redhead wasn’t betting. She was a tall unfrail number in her twenties, wearing her hair drawn back in a smooth cap, with the ends bunched low at the nape of her neck. Her eyes were large and blue under almost straight brows and her features were good. It was a face that could attract a lot of favorable attention except that it had all the warmth and mobility of an iceberg off Greenland. Her dress was billowing black net and it fitted her right, but it was no importation. She held a pencil and a small notebook and was telling Griswold where to put his chips in a quiet voice that belonged with her face.

  As far as roulette was concerned they were doing fine. There were stacks of chips and layers of banknotes in front of him—a small mountain of them and growing all the time.

  Bets were
being placed for the next spin of the wheel. The blonde put sizable stacks on two numbers. Her back was to me and I couldn’t see much of her face. But what I could see of the rest of her made it a nice evening. Griswold, on orders from the redhead, shoved three tall piles of green chips on the black diamond, his hands shaking slightly. There were other chips on the board but they didn’t matter to the crowd. The attention was all on the Griswolds.

  The croupier was a small round man in white tie and tails. His expression was sad and a little worried, as if all house losses came out of his weekly pay check. This not being Monte Carlo or an Oppenheim novel, he used his hands to handle the chips instead of one of those wooden rakes you see in pictures. He gave the layout a jaundiced once-over, spun the wheel and with a practiced flip of the wrist sent the ivory ball around the groove in the opposite direction.

  I slid a hand in my pocket and got out my slender supply of money and eased up to the board, between the blonde Mrs. Griswold and the lean slice of manhood known to me as Mr. Smith. The blonde was too busy watching the skittering ivory marble even to turn her head. Smith gave me an annoyed glance, looked away, then jerked his eyes back to me. The color ran out of his cheeks like water down the drain. His face turned to stone and fury darkened his blue eyes.

  “Greetings,” I said smugly. “You haven’t got that two hundred bucks handy, have you?”

  He made a rough, whispering sound deep in his throat. He couldn’t stop looking at me. The hand holding the highball jerked just enough to slop some of the contents over the rim.

  A murmur from the crowd caught my attention. The marble was out of the groove and bouncing musically along the metal slots. It settled suddenly in one of them with a sharp click and stuck there, riding it until the wheel stopped.

  “Black Thirteen,” the croupier announced evenly. No one was on the number. He matched Griswold’s chips on the black diamond and swept the rest of the board clean.

  The redhead consulted her notebook with an aloof calmness. “Sixteen and nineteen, à cheval,” she murmured.

  The blonde said, “Oh, for God’s sake!” in a cool throaty way and pushed half the balance of her chips violently onto the square containing the red diamond. “You sure you didn’t rig this wheel, Jules? Or do I have to ride with my husband just to win a few stinking dollars?”

  Griswold was stacking his winnings. He said, “Why not try it once, Eve?” He sounded pleasant in an absent-minded way. “Without a system you’re just throwing money away.”

  Eve Griswold snatched up her highball and took a long pull at the liquor with a kind of insolent grace. She put the glass down on the table with a thump and drawled, “I hadn’t realized we were so hard pressed, darling. I could always take in washing.”

  The words were said loud enough to be heard clear back to the fringe of the crowd. Lawrence Griswold flushed solidly and his hands were suddenly still on the chips in front of him. The sharp hiss of an indrawn breath was Smith's reaction to Eve Griswold’s lack of manners.

  “Place your bets, please,” the croupier said indifferently. Bad manners and short tempers were an old story to him.

  I worked a couple of dollar bills from my wallet and leaned past Eve Griswold to drop them next to her chips on the red diamond. My shoulder brushed against her, letting her know I was there. She turned her head without haste and looked me full in the face.

  “I might end up giving you a hand with that washing,” I said.

  She stared at me out of dark-blue eyes with their own brand of casual arrogance. She was as lovely as they come and she had known it long enough to stop thinking about it. Under the harsh light her soft gold hair had a hot look but the face below it seemed cool enough. The small firm chin would take a lot of licks without screaming for help; and while the thin high line of her nose suggested a quick temper, the mouth would smile without much effort.

  Hardly any smile this time, though. Not much more than a stirring at the corners of lips that were neither full nor thin but wholly desirable. Dark brows that were more than penciled lines lifted with faint interest—the kind of faint interest that, under the proper circumstances, might get some meat on its bones.

  “Aren’t you overdoing it a little?” she asked negligently.

  “It’s only money, Mrs. Griswold.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I was afraid it wasn’t.”

  We were being stared at. Griswold’s lips were stiff in a chilly half-smile; and while Smith was out of my range at the moment, his eyes would be poison-tipped dirks. The redhead was deep in her notebook; as far as she was concerned I was out to lunch.

  The ivory ball whirred like a sleepy rattler . . . and conditions were back to normal. I watched it slip out of the groove and rattle along the tines. It fell into the green double zero and was still there while the layout was being swept clean.

  “Pardon me,” I said ruefully, “while I step out in the rose garden and shoot myself.”

  Her smile was all I had hoped it would be. “Well, don’t bleed on the rhododendrons. The management would never forgive you.”

  “Come to think of it,” I said, “I’d better not. I’ve got a date at one o’clock.”

  Lawrence Griswold had lost even his half-smile. “You might introduce your friend, Eve,” he said with a casualness that wasn’t casual at all.

  A voice next to me said, “My fault, Larry. This is Paul Pine; Mr. and Mrs. Griswold.”

  I said, “Thanks, Stu,” without looking at him. “Not that I meant to push in,” I said, looking into Eve Griswold’s eyes. They were eyes deep enough for the high-dive board and as blue as distant mountains under a summer haze. “But there are times when Stu’s a little slow with introductions.”

  “Place your bets, please,” the croupier said patiently.

  Griswold clicked a pile of chips as a polite hint that I was holding up his fun. I said, “Go right ahead. I’ve already passed my limit. Nice meeting you. Maybe I’ll stop in for a drink the next time I’m out your way.”

  “Do that,” Lawrence Griswold said. He might even have meant it.

  Eve Griswold said nothing. She was watching me, a spark of laughter far back in her deep eyes, and fumbling with the jeweled clasp of a sequined bag I hadn’t noticed before. Likely it was crammed with thousand-dollar bills. I grinned at her and said, “Don’t feel bad about my losing. A man in my line makes millions.”

  I turned away, meeting the white strained face of the man who called himself Smith. I flapped the back of a hand lightly against one of his forearms in a comradely gesture as I went by, said, “See you around, Stu,” and pushed through the crowd and headed toward the stairs leading to the ground floor.

  CHAPTER 17

  IT WAS a clear cool night, almost cold in fact, with the smell of autumn prematurely in the air and a full white moon riding the distant sky. I passed the Loop at a few minutes past eleven and drove north through Lincoln Park, its trees and bushes cold and lonely under the wind and the moon, and beyond them the dull pound of lake surf as ominous as distant artillery.

  At Pratt Boulevard I drove west to Wayne Avenue and along it until I found parking space a quarter of a block south of the Dinsmore Arms. I resisted the wind long enough to wrestle my bags out of the boot and lugged them over to the building entrance, fought the door open and went in.

  The lobby lights were out at this hour. At the far end Sam Wilson, the nightman, sat at the switchboard, his head hanging over the pages of a pulp magazine. It was the last touch needed to put me where I had left off five days before.

  He got out of the chair to welcome me. “Hi there, Mr. Pine! I thought you was away on a vacation.”

  I put down the bags and leaned against the counter and looked at him. He was as fat and as sloppy and as nosey as ever. His cloudy eyes squinted at me through thick lenses bridging a shapeless nose. Dandruff sprinkled the shoulders of his dark coat, like salt on' licorice. His last shave had been as careless as all those before it and his tee
th still cried for the brush. But he was part of being home and I almost reached out to pat him on the head.

  “I broke one of my skis,” I said. I pointed at the magazine he was holding. “How’s it going?”

  He let me see the cover. It showed, in colors that screamed, a man on the floor with a knife in his chest. A blonde with a topheavy bosom and hardly any nightgown was crouched over him staring at her hand. There was blood on her fingers and it bothered her. It bothered me, too. Maybe next time she’d be more careful.

  “One of them society capers,” Sam said, tasting the words. “This here private eye is trying to get the girl off the spot, y’see, because he’s pretty sure she ain’t killed nobody. But the cops think different and he’s hiding her out in his apartment. And all along she’s got the—”

  “I’ll read it,” I said. “The minute you finish, I’ll read it. A guy in my line can’t know too much. Any mail or messages?”

  He came reluctantly back from a world where murder was fun and went over to the rack to see. He gave me three phone messages that were from the social side of my life. I shoved them in a pocket and gathered up the two pieces of battered luggage and a morning paper off the pile on the counter and got into the self-service elevator. Sam was back in his magazine before I pushed the button.

  I unlocked the door to 307 and dropped the bags inside and flipped up the wall switch, lighting the end-table lamps flanking the blue-and-beige-striped davenport across the room. Home never looked better. The hotel maids had taken advantage of my absence to put in some extra licks. The air was a little close but opening a window would fix that.

  I threw my hat on the blue lounge chair and went into the kitchen to put water and the right amount of coffee in the percolator and lighted the gas under it. There was half a bottle of Scotch in the cupboard. I got it down and drank a hooker, neat, to hold me together while I unpacked my bags and stored them back in the bedroom closet to gather dust.

 

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