The two with him were in pajamas, the usual halfway-good-looking band boys, both drunk, but not staggering drunk. One jittered madly on a clarinet and the other on a tenor saxophone.
Back and forth in front of them, strutting, trucking, preening herself like a magpie, arching her arms and her eyebrows, bending her fingers back until the carmine nails almost touched her arms, a metallic blonde swayed and went to town on the music. Her voice was a throaty screech, without melody, as false as her eyebrows and as sharp as her nails. She wore high-heeled slippers and black pajamas with a long purple sash.
Steve Grayce stopped dead and made a sharp downward motion with his hand. “Wrap it up!” he snapped. “Can it… Put it on ice. Take it away and bury it. The show’s out. Scram, now—scram!”
King Leopardi took the trombone from his lips and bellowed: “Fanfare to a house dick!”
The three drunks blew a stuttering note that shook the walls. The girl laughed foolishly and kicked out. Her slipper caught Steve Grayce in the chest. He picked it out of the air, jumped towards the girl and took hold of her wrist.
“Tough, eh?” he grinned. “I’ll take you first.”
“Get him!” Leopardi yelled. “Sock him low! Dance the gumheel on his neck!”
Steve swept the girl off her feet, tucked her under his arm and ran. He carried her as easily as a parcel. She tried to kick his legs. He laughed and shot a glance through a lighted doorway. A man’s brown brogues lay under a bureau. He went on past that to a second lighted doorway, slammed through and kicked the door shut, turned far enough to twist the tabbed key in the lock. Almost at once a fist hit the door. He paid no attention to it.
He pushed the girl along the short passage past the bathroom, and let her go. She reeled away from him and put her back to the bureau, panting, her eyes furious. A lock of damp gold-dipped hair swung down over one eye. She shook her head violently and bared her teeth.
“How would you like to get vagged, sister?”
“Go to hell!” she spit out. “The King’s a friend of mine, see? You better keep your paws off me, copper.”
“You run the circuit with the boys?”
She spat at him again.
“How’d you know they’d be here?”
Another girl was sprawled across the bed, her head to the wall, tousled black hair over a white face. There was a tear in the leg of her pajamas. She lay limp and groaned.
Steve said harshly: “Oh, oh, the torn-pajama act. It flops here, sister, it flops hard. Now listen, you kids. You can go to bed and stay till morning or you can take the bounce. Make up your minds.”
The black-haired girl groaned. The blonde said: “You get out of my room, you damned gum-heel!”
She reached behind her and threw a hand mirror. Steve ducked. The mirror slammed against the wall and fell without breaking. The black-haired girl rolled over on the bed and said wearily: “Oh lay off. I’m sick.”
She lay with her eyes closed, the lids fluttering.
The blonde swiveled her hips across the room to a desk by the window, poured herself a full half-glass of Scotch in a water glass and gurgled it down before Steve could get to her. She choked violently, dropped the glass and went down on her hands and knees.
Steve said grimly: “That’s the one that kicks you in the face, sister.”
The girl crouched, shaking her head. She gagged once, lifted the carmine nails to paw at her mouth. She tried to get up, and her foot skidded out from under her and she fell down on her side and went fast asleep.
Steve sighed, went over and shut the window and fastened it. He rolled the black-haired girl over and straightened her on the bed and got the bedclothes from under her, tucked a pillow under her head. He picked the blonde bodily off the floor and dumped her on the bed and covered both girls to the chin. He opened the transom, switched off the ceiling light and unlocked the door. He relocked it from the outside, with a master key on a chain.
“Hotel business,” he said under his breath. “Phooey.”
The corridor was empty now. One lighted door still stood open. Its number was 815, two doors from the room the girls were in. Trombone music came from it softly—but not softly enough for 1:25 AM.
Steve Grayce turned into the room, crowded the door shut with his shoulder and went along past the bathroom. King Leopardi was alone in the room.
The bandleader was sprawled out in an easy chair, with a tall misted glass at his elbow. He swung the trombone in a tight circle as he played it and the lights danced in the horn.
Steve lit a cigarette, blew a plume of smoke and stared through it at Leopardi with a queer, half-admiring, half-contemptuous expression.
He said softly: “Lights out, yellow-pants. You play a sweet trumpet and your trombone don’t hurt either. But we can’t use it here. I already told you that once. Lay off. Put that thing away.”
Leopardi smiled nastily and blew a stuttering raspberry that sounded like a devil laughing.
“Says you,” he sneered. “Leopardi does what he likes, where he likes, when he likes. Nobody’s stopped him yet, gum-shoe. Take the air.”
Steve hunched his shoulders and went close to the tall dark man. He said patiently: “Put that bazooka down, big-stuff. People are trying to sleep. They’re funny that way. You’re a great guy on a band shell. Everywhere else you’re just a guy with a lot of jack and a personal reputation that stinks from here to Miami and back. I’ve got a job to do and I’m doing it. Blow that thing again and I’ll wrap it around your neck.”
Leopardi lowered the trombone and took a long drink from the glass at his elbow. His eyes glinted nastily. He lifted the trombone to his lips again, filled his lungs with air and blew a blast that rocked the walls. Then he stood up very suddenly and smoothly and smashed the instrument down on Steve’s head.
“I never did like house peepers,” he sneered. “They smell like public toilets.”
Steve took a short step back and shook his head. He leered, slid forward on one foot and smacked Leopardi open-handed. The blow looked light, but Leopardi reeled all the way across the room and sprawled at the foot of the bed, sitting on the floor, his right arm draped in an open suitcase.
For a moment neither man moved. Then Steve kicked the trombone away from him and squashed his cigarette in a glass tray. His black eyes were empty but his mouth grinned whitely.
“If you want trouble,” he said, “I come from where they make it.”
Leopardi smiled, thinly, tautly, and his right hand came up out of the suitcase with a gun in it. His thumb snicked the safety catch. He held the gun steady, pointing.
“Make some with this,” he said, and fired.
The bitter roar of the gun seemed a tremendous sound in the closed room. The bureau mirror splintered and glass flew. A sliver cut Steve’s cheek like a razor blade. Blood oozed in a small narrow line on his skin.
He left his feet in a dive. His right shoulder crushed against Leopardi’s bare chest and his left hand brushed the gun away from him, under the bed. He rolled swiftly to his right and came up on his knees spinning.
He said thickly, harshly: “You picked the wrong gee, brother.”
He swarmed on Leopardi and dragged him to his feet by his hair, by main strength. Leopardi yelled and hit him twice on the jaw and Steve grinned and kept his left hand twisted in the bandleader’s long sleek black hair. He turned his hand and the head twisted with it and Leopardi’s third punch landed on Steve’s shoulder. Steve took hold of the wrist behind the punch and twisted that and the bandleader went down on his knees yowling. Steve lifted him by the hair again, let go of his wrist and punched him three times in the stomach, short terrific jabs. He let go of the hair then as he sank the fourth punch almost to his wrist.
Leopardi sagged blindly to his knees and vomited.
Steve stepped away from him and went into the bathroom and got a towel off the rack. He threw it at Leopardi, jerked the open suitcase onto the bed and started throwing things into it.
L
eopardi wiped his face and got to his feet still gagging. He swayed, braced himself on the end of the bureau. He was white as a sheet.
Steve Grayce said: “Get dressed, Leopardi. Or go out the way you are. It’s all one to me.”
Leopardi stumbled into the bathroom, pawing the wall like a blind man
2
Millar stood very still behind the desk as the elevator opened. His face was white and scared and his cropped black mustache was a smudge across his upper lip. Leopardi came out of the elevator first, a muffler around his neck, a lightweight coat tossed over his arm, a hat tilted on his head. He walked stiffly, bent forward a little, his eyes vacant. His face had a greenish pallor.
Steve Grayce stepped out behind him carrying a suitcase, and Carl, the night porter, came last with two more suitcases and two instrument cases in black leather. Steve marched over to the desk and said harshly: “Mr. Leopardi’s bill—if any. He’s checking out.”
Millar goggled at him across the marble desk. “I—I don’t think, Steve—”
“O.K. I thought not.”
Leopardi smiled very thinly and unpleasantly and walked out through the brass-edged swing doors the porter held open for him. There were two nighthawk cabs in the line. One of them came to life and pulled up to the canopy and the porter loaded Leopardi’s stuff into it. Leopardi got into the cab and leaned forward to put his head to the open window. He said slowly and thickly: “I’m sorry for you, gum-heel. I mean sorry.”
Steve Grayce stepped back and looked at him woodenly. The cab moved off down the street, rounded a corner and was gone. Steve turned on his heel, took a quarter from his pocket and tossed it up in the air. He slapped it into the night porter’s hand.
“From the King,” he said. “Keep it to show your grandchildren.”
He went back into the hotel, got into the elevator without looking at Millar, shot it up to Eight again and went along the corridor, master-keyed his way into Leopardi’s room. He relocked it from the inside, pulled the bed out from the wall and went in behind it. He got a .32 automatic off the carpet, put it in his pocket and prowled the floor with his eyes looking for the ejected shell. He found it against the wastebasket, reached to pick it up, and stayed bent over, staring into the basket. His mouth tightened. He picked up the shell and dropped it absently into his pocket, then reached a questing finger into the basket and lifted out a torn scrap of paper on which a piece of newsprint had been pasted. Then he picked up the basket, pushed the bed back against the wall and dumped the contents of the basket out on it.
From the trash of torn papers and matches he separated a number of pieces with newsprint pasted to them. He went over to the desk with them and sat down. A few minutes later he had the torn scraps put together like a jigsaw puzzle and could read the message that had been made by cutting words and letters from magazines and pasting them on a sheet.
TEN GRAND BY TH U RS DAY NI GHT, LEO PAR DI. DAY AFTER YOU OPEN AT T HE CL U B SHAL OTTE. OR EL SE—CURTAINS. FROM HER BROTHER.
Steve Grayce said: “Huh.” He scooped the torn pieces into a hotel envelope, put that in his inside breast pocket and lit a cigarette. “The guy had guts,” he said. “I’ll grant him that—and his trumpet.”
He locked the room, listened a moment in the now silent corridor, then went along to the room occupied by the two girls. He knocked softly and put his ear to the panel. A chair squeaked and feet came towards the door.
“What is it?” The girl’s voice was cool, wide awake. It was not the blonde’s voice.
“The house man. Can I speak to you a minute?”
“You’re speaking to me.”
“Without the door between, lady.”
“You’ve got the passkey. Help yourself.” The steps went away. He unlocked the door with his master key, stepped quietly inside, and shut it. There was a dim light in a lamp with a shirred shade on the desk. On the bed the blonde snored heavily, one hand clutched in her brilliant metallic hair. The black-haired girl sat in the chair by the window, her legs crossed at right angles like a man’s and stared at Steve emptily.
He went close to her and pointed to the long tear in her pajama leg. He said softly: “You’re not sick. You were not drunk. That tear was done a long time ago. What’s the racket? A shakedown on the King?”
The girl stared at him coolly, puffed at a cigarette and said nothing.
“He checked out,” Steve said. “Nothing doing in that direction now, sister.” He watched her like a hawk, his black eyes hard and steady on her face.
“Aw, you house dicks make me sick!” the girl said with sudden anger. She surged to her feet and went past him into the bathroom, shut and locked the door.
Steve shrugged and felt the pulse of the girl asleep in the bed—a thumpy, draggy pulse, a liquor pulse.
“Poor damn hustlers,” he said under his breath.
He looked at a large purple bag that lay on the bureau, lifted it idly and let it fall. His face stiffened again. The bag made a heavy sound on the glass top, as if there were a lump of lead inside it. He snapped it open quickly and plunged a hand in. His fingers touched the cold metal of a gun. He opened the bag wide and stared down into it at a small .25 automatic. A scrap of white paper caught his eye. He fished it out and held it to the light—a rent receipt with a name and address. He stuffed it into his pocket, closed the bag and was standing by the window when the girl came out of the bathroom.
“Hell, are you still haunting me?” she snapped. “You know what happens to hotel dicks that master-key their way into ladies’ bedrooms at night?”
Steve said loosely: “Yeah. They get in trouble. They might even get shot at.”
The girl’s face became set, but her eyes crawled sideways and looked at the purple bag. Steve looked at her. “Know Leopardi in Frisco?” he asked. “He hasn’t played here in two years. Then he was just a trumpet player in Vane Utigore’s band—a cheap outfit.”
The girl curled her lip, went past him and sat down by the window again. Her face was white, stiff. She said dully: “Blossom did. That’s Blossom on the bed.”
“Know he was coming to this hotel tonight?”
“What makes it your business?”
“I can’t figure him coming here at all,” Steve said. “This is a quiet place. So I can’t figure anybody coming here to put the bite on him.”
“Go somewhere else and figure. I need sleep.”
Steve said: “Good night, sweetheart—and keep your door locked.”
A thin man with thin blond hair and thin face was standing by the desk, tapping on the marble with thin fingers. Millar was still behind the desk and he still looked white and scared. The thin man wore a dark gray suit with a scarf inside the collar of the coat. He had a look of having just got up. He turned seagreen eyes slowly on Steve as he got out of the elevator, waited for him to come up to the desk and throw a tabbed key on it.
Steve said: “Leopardi’s key, George. There’s a busted mirror in his room and the carpet has his dinner on it—mostly Scotch.” He turned to the thin man.
“You want to see me, Mr. Peters?”
“What happened, Grayce?” The thin man had a tight voice that expected to be lied to.
“Leopardi and two of his boys were on Eight, the rest of the gang on Five. The bunch on Five went to bed. A couple of obvious hustlers managed to get themselves registered just two rooms from Leopardi. They managed to contact him and everybody was having a lot of nice noisy fun out in the hall. I could only stop it by getting a little tough.”
“There’s blood on your cheek,” Peters said coldly. “Wipe it off.”
Steve scratched at his cheek with a handkerchief. The thin thread of blood had dried. “I got the girls tucked away in their room,” he said. “The two stooges took the hint and holed up, but Leopardi still thought the guests wanted to hear trombone music. I threatened to wrap it around his neck and he beaned me with it. I slapped him open-handed and he pulled a gun and took a shot at me. Here’s the gun.”
He took the .32 automatic out of his pocket and laid it on the desk. He put the used shell beside it. “So I beat some sense into him and threw him out,” he added.
Peters tapped on the marble. “Your usual tact seems to have been well in evidence.”
Steve stared at him. “He shot at me,” he repeated quietly. “With a gun. This gun. I’m tender to bullets. He missed, but suppose he hadn’t? I like my stomach the way it is, with just one way in and one way out.”
Peters narrowed his tawny eyebrows. He said very politely: “We have you down on the payroll here as a night clerk, because we don’t like the name house detective. But neither night clerks nor house detectives put guests out of the hotel without consulting me. Not ever, Mr. Grayce.”
Steve said: “The guy shot at me, pal. With a gun. Catch on? I don’t have to take that without a kickback, do I?” His face was a little white.
Peters said: “Another point for your consideration. The controlling interest in this hotel is owned by Mr. Halsey G. Walters. Mr. Walters also owns the Club Shalotte, where King Leopardi is opening on Wednesday night. And that, Mr. Grayce, is why Leopardi was good enough to give us his business. Can you think of anything else I should like to say to you?”
“Yeah. I’m canned,” Steve said mirthlessly.
“Very correct, Mr. Grayce. Good-night, Mr. Grayce.”
The thin blond man moved to the elevator and the night porter took him up.
Steve looked at Millar.
“Jumbo Walters, huh?” he said softly. “A tough, smart guy. Much too smart to think this dump and the Club Shalotte belong to the same sort of customers. Did Peters write Leopardi to come here?”
“I guess he did, Steve.” Millar’s voice was low and gloomy.
“Then why wasn’t he put in a tower suite with a private balcony to dance on, at twenty-eight bucks a day? Why was he put on a medium-priced transient floor? And why did Quillan let those girls get so close to him?”
Millar pulled at his black mustache. “Tight with money—as well as with Scotch, I suppose. As to the girls, I don’t know.”
Collected Stories (Everyman's Library) Page 72