I knew him then, of course. I got hold of his active hand and began a lesson in judo, bending the fingers up so that they would crack off unless he lay on his stomach and played dead. He chose to relax under the pressure. His flashlight lay up against my knee. I lit it up and focused it.
Into the face of Fred Pate.
“Fawncy meeting you here.” I chuckled. “Come in for the crumpets and scones, Englishman?”
“You broke my blasted hand,” he wailed.
“Your neck is next.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“Have yourself a bloody look,” I invited. I aimed the light under my chin. He recoiled when he recognized me. “It’s a real London night, isn’t it, Pate? You decided to come out in the fog? Why here, Englishman?”
“Knock it off,” he muttered. He sat up now, massaging his dangling wrist. His fingers were a welter of blood. My shoe had almost mangled them. Permanently. He aimed his rat eyes up at me. He clenched his bony jaw. “I’m here for what I can pick up, naturally. What else?”
“You’re a liar,” I told him. “A bloody British prevaricator.”
I found his gun in a jacket pocket. He was sporting a neat tweed suit, something out of Finchley’s and done in the upper-class style of tailoring. A well-dressed heist man. Veddy, veddy Briddish. “You’re a smart lad, Pate. Too smart for casual larceny of this type. What brought you to this particular place?”
“The owner was moving.”
“How did you know?”
“I have my own methods.”
“Let’s hear them, Pate. How would you find out the owner of this brownstone was moving out?” I said it loud and I said it close to his lean nose. I let him see that this was no moment for games. “Better tell me the truth, Englishman. Or I’ll kick your snotty nose in.”
“I told you the truth.”
“How did you know this place was empty?”
His eyes played tag with an invisible object above his head. When they returned to mine, a thin line of sweat bubbled on his upper lip. “Real estate research,” he said. “Notices of sale.”
“You can do better than that, Pate.”
“I’m leveling with you.”
“You’re on the wrong level. Try again.”
“I tell you—”
But he didn’t tell me. He had long black hair, greased up with a slick pomade that made my fingers slip when I grabbed him. I clutched a handful of his hair and slammed back. His head came loose from the hinges on his shoulder. His head cracked back against the stout leg of the dining room table.
Craggghk! His eyes popped, but he wasn’t budging for me. The sweat began to drip now, from under his oily hair and down his corrugated brow and into his eyes. There were small flecks of red, veined and insolent, in the corners of his eyes.
Craggghk! I slapped his head back again. His eyes closed and his jaws hardened under the impact of the blow. But he was still stubborn and arrogant, letting me see his disgust by the way he clamped his surly mouth shut.
I showed him the nose of his own little gun. I shoved the gun under his right eye. Then I pulled back and waited for him to react to the reality of it. It was a foreign automatic, built in Britain by specialists. It was strangely heavy for a gun of its size, and I wondered what would happen if he tasted the full strength of it. Just once. Across the jaw.
“Come off it,” he whispered weakly. “I told you the truth.”
So I smacked him. Not too hard, but where it would soften him permanently. The butt of the gun connected with his cheek and the sound of the hit was a sickening clop against the frame of his jaw. He began to cough and splutter.
“You’re lying, Pate.”
“My head,” he groaned.
“I’ll break your bloody head the next time.”
“Don’t hit me.”
“Talk,” I told him.
“Don’t hit me again.”
“Talk, Englishman! Who sent you here?”
“Malman.”
“That’s better.” I jerked him up, lifting his scrawny neck and letting him see the gun, up close to his head. He was beginning to fade out for me. His eyes were two marble agates in a pool of dirty milk. I ran into the kitchen and filled a glass of water and threw it in his face. He bobbled his head and blinked. The water dripped over his cut lips and he licked at it blearily. I slapped his jaw until he could focus on me again.
“What did Malman want you to get here?” I asked.
“The stones.”
“Which stones?”
“Sigmund Hess,” he groaned.
The laughter spilled out of me. Something snapped out of the jigsaw puzzle and slipped into place. The mention of Sigmund Hess pricked my intellect.
“Hess has stones hidden in this dump?” I asked.
“That’s what Malman told me.”
“Where’s Malman?”
“Right now?”
“You want another massage?” He bunged his sleepy eyes at me when I put my fist against his chin. He tried to crawl into a crack in the wall. “You’re too banged up to be clever anymore, Englishman. Better tell me where I can find your boss.”
“Warburton Arms.”
“You’re lying.”
“Please.” He held up his hands feebly. “I’m telling you the truth.”
“If you’re lying, I’ll put you in a hospital.”
“The truth,” he muttered. “Malman’s at the Warburton.”
“His room number?”
“Nine seventy-three.”
“On your feet. We’re going to see him.”
“Can’t move.”
“I’ll arrange it.”
I pulled him up. His cute little alpine hat had been knocked off and lay near the parquet, between the dining room and the living room. I adjusted the feather and slapped it on his head. He was all bones and air in my hands. But he would pass for a drunken friend on the way to the Warburton. He would sway and shiver with all the genuine symptoms of alcoholic abandon.
I hauled him down the steps and into the street.
“Ooggghhzz—” he mumbled as I slid him into a cab.
“Watch your language,” I said.
CHAPTER 22
The Warburton Arms was an ancient and crumbling dump that housed the lesser fry in show business, the grifters and cheap vaudevillians, the down-at-the-heels hangers-on and a scattering of leeches who fed off these low-class louts; the bookies and pimps and touts that inhabit the side streets of Broadway. The lobby held nothing but three decaying palms in filthy pots. The automatic elevator wheezed and hummed on the way up to the ninth floor.
I had my gun in Pate’s back at the door to Malman’s room. Pate knocked and announced himself and the door opened and my foot held it open and I shoved Pate inside and stepped after him across the threshold.
Arthur Malman stood a yard away from me.
I slapped out at him when his hand snaked for his pocket.
“No tricks,” I said.
I pushed Pate in ahead of me, waving him up against the wall. Malman had an automatic in his jacket. I dropped it into a vase on the small table where the phone sat. Malman watched me nervously. But he smiled when I picked it out again and emptied it.
“You get around, shamus,” he said.
“And in,” said Pate wryly. “This lad gets in, Arthur.”
“All over,” I added.
“Mind if I sit?” asked Pate. “I’m done in, old man.”
“Sit, but don’t move.”
He slumped into the nearest chair, as tired as a pug after a fifteen-round go. He mopped at his sweating brow. Malman just stood there doping me out in his tricky mind.
“Why the rod, Malman? You’re ruining your reputation.”
“I don’t usually carry armament. Recently, h
owever, I needed—ah—more self-assurance, shall we say?”
“We shall say,” I said. “We shall also say that you’re supposed to be a respectable business man these days.”
“I am, my friend.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Why, I have a restaurant, down near Baltimore. Place called the Roadside Rendezvous. Quite successful.”
He would be telling me the truth. His voice was a shock to me, cool and easy and carrying the overtones of gentility. Arthur Malman could have been a successful business man, a prosperous doctor or a lawyer or a schoolteacher. Without knowing his peculiar background, Malman could have been anything he chose to be. He had a simple face, as common as your grocer’s or your plumber’s. It didn’t surprise me to discover a book on his easy chair—the latest by Steinbeck and opened to a spot well past the middle. Malman had a good brain. But Malman had a few kinks in his mental machinery. He would never cease planning the strategy for larceny. He had earned a great reputation for himself as the master brain in all matters of scientific burglary on the grand scale. The boys at Safe and Loft had caught him only once, however, during his youthful days as an apprentice heist artist. Malman had served only one small hitch in Sing Sing. But when he emerged from that institution, he came out armed with a caution that kept him out of police line-ups from that day forward. Since then, Malman operated as a specialist. He took pains to set himself up in respectable businesses. He owned laundries and shops and restaurants. And on the side, whenever an outstanding larceny called for his talents, he sold his schemes to the underworld goniffs who needed him for the timetable planning of their heists.
His rooms at the Warburton seemed much too neat for the hotel. The decor was trim and personal, containing articles of furniture that Malman himself must have brought into the hostelry. There was a deep and comfortable rug on the floor. There were chairs in good leather, and tables and incidental pieces that spelled class. I wondered whether Malman owned a small piece of this hotel. Through the door on the left, I could see a section of a neat and tidy kitchen. And beyond the small hall abutting the kitchen, another door showed me the edge of his bedroom, lit by gentle lights and smacking of the taste and refinement of a hired decorator.
On the blond-wood coffee table, Malman had a collection of the daily papers. I counted five different news journals, including the two great morning tabloids in New York. One of the tabloids lay open to a spread. The right-hand page featured a long picture of the Cumber Santa Claus over a bold headline: CUMBER SANTA WHO LIVES AT THE STORE.
As I stared down at the layout, Malman said: “Your store put on a fine promotion for Christmas this year, Conacher.”
“You,” I said, “seem interested in Christmas.”
“It’s a nice holiday.”
“You have kids?”
“I never married.” He laughed. “But I give out a few gifts during the season.”
“Is that what took you to Cumber’s so early in the morning?”
“Exactly,” he said with a grin.
“You lie like hell, Malman.”
Malman removed his glasses and put them away in a leather case. He carried the gesture off with no effort, in the manner of a college professor who has tired of study. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. He exercised his eyebrows. He had delicate fingers, the hands of an artist or a musician, well-manicured and almost feminine in their movements.
“You ran like a rabbit when you spotted me,” I reminded him. “Where were you running?”
“I don’t recall running.”
“You’ve got a weak memory.” I sat on the edge of the coffee table, close enough to him that he could feel my gun on his knee. Pate took the inevitable cigarette out of his mouth and blew his nose noisily. They exchanged worried glances.
“You were running from me,” I said. “But you were also skipping down the corridors on a special assignment of your own.”
“And where was I skipping?”
“I’ve got news for you, Malman. They found some of your prints on the door to the locker room, behind the Toy House.”
Malman licked his lips nervously. I had stunned him with this slice of information. Pate began to laugh, but blew it away into his handkerchief. He was enjoying a special joke, an intimate bit of humor only the two of them could appreciate.
“Sloppy, boss,” laughed Pate.
“I’m telling the truth,” I said. I picked up the tabloid and folded it to the picture of the Cumber Santa. I slapped the paper down on Malman’s lap. He stared at it as though it might be a squirming adder. “Do you want to talk, Malman? Or do I bring you in on a murder rap?”
Malman couldn’t take his eyes off the newspaper. He was having trouble with his cheek muscles. A flicking tic ran along his jaw. He couldn’t control the twitch in his mouth, either.
“They think I killed the Santa Claus?” he mumbled.
“I know one city dick who’s sure of it.”
“But it isn’t true.”
“That’s what I told him, Malman.”
His eyes cleared for a moment, some of the fright dying under the greater glow of his curiosity as he regarded me.
“You don’t think I killed the man, is that it, Conacher?”
“I don’t think you’re the type. That’s why I’m here.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I’ll spell it out for you. The way I see it, you walked into Cumber’s on other business. You made an early morning visit to the store so that you could talk to the original Santa. Am I right?”
Malman nodded. Pate coughed and grunted. “Devilishly clever of the lad,” he began. “Bloody—”
“Shut up, Pate!” snapped Malman. He slapped the chair with the newspaper. “How did you figure it, Conacher?”
“It adds up,” I said. “When I saw you after the cocktail party, I knew you wouldn’t stand on a plant outside Cumber’s unless you were waiting to meet somebody. Your presence in the street that night puzzled me, but I wasn’t exactly dying of curiosity. The next morning, however, you really made me bounce. It was too early in the morning for a department store heist, and besides, you aren’t the type who appears at the scene of the crime. I asked myself several questions about you. I got only one answer. You must have come to Cumber’s to see somebody. Somebody important to you.” I reached out and took the tabloid out of his hands. I held the picture of Santa Claus up for him to see. “You must have been visiting Sigmund Hess.”
“How do you fit Hess into the deal?”
“Because he was the store Santa. You recognized Hess by this black ring he sported. You bought a tabloid and studied the picture of the Santa. You knew that Hess was a big fat character. Two and two makes four.”
“You see?” laughed Pate. “This lad’s a veritable Sherlock Holmes, boss.”
Malman scowled his henchman into fresh silence. A small part of his worry had faded now. “Suppose I admit you’re right, Conacher?” he asked. “What’s your pitch?”
“One thing at a time, Malman. Am I right, so far?”
He nodded, unsmiling. “What’s your deal, Conacher?”
“Information. About Sigmund Hess.”
“In exchange for what?”
“My lip,” I said. “Zippered.”
Malman nodded. “Good enough.”
Pate said: “You’re making a mistake, boss, trusting this bloody bas—”
But Malman reached over and slapped him across the mouth. Malman’s arm was strong and his aim perfect. Pate subsided with a sniveling grunt, wiping the fresh blood off his lip. Malman sat back, waiting for my first question.
“You arranged a store heist at Cumber’s,” I began. “And one of the principals in the robbery was Sigmund Hess. Who was the higher-up in the deal?”
“I don’t know,” Malman said.
“You worked only
through Hess?”
Malman nodded. “My only contact with the store was Sigmund. He came to me to arrange the details. I arranged them. Sigmund Hess cleared the way for the men. He showed one of the boys where to flatten the night-watchman. He fixed everything on the inside.”
“Hess actually supervised the robbery?”
“To the last detail. Including the removal of the gems.”
“And after that, he quit his job at the store?”
“Not for months.” Malman smiled. “Sigmund quit his job when I began to threaten him. You see, Sigmund became reluctant to pay me my full share of the deal. When that happened, I sent Pate up to threaten him. Only last week, Sigmund promised he’d hand over my final cut in the bundle—about thirty thousand dollars. But when the day came for the pay off, Sigmund Hess disappeared.”
“And you went looking for him at Cumber’s?”
“I looked all over for him,” Malman said. “I checked on his brownstone and found out he’d signed a contract to sell it. This worried me because it meant he might be planning to leave the country. That was why I watched Cumber’s the night of the Christmas promotion party. I figured maybe he’d come to the party to see his partner in the heist. I was right. Sigmund appeared at the employees’ entrance. But he didn’t leave the party, and that bothered me. I thought he might have escaped again, by another exit in the store. Until I saw his picture in the papers this morning and recognized him from his ring, as you said.”
“So you went to Cumber’s to threaten him again?”
“Exactly. I thought I could get to him through that locker room, behind the Toy House. I was right. When I opened the door found a Santa Claus in there all right. But he wasn’t my man.”
“You spoke to him?”
“I addressed him as Sigmund,” said Malman. “But just as soon as he answered me, I knew he wasn’t Sigmund, of course.”
“And then what?”
“I got out of there, but fast.”
“On the way out,” I said, “did you see anybody in the corridor?”
“Not a soul.”
“You’re quite sure you saw nobody?”
“Positive,” said Malman. “I left the store right away. I spent the rest of the day wondering about what happened to Sigmund Hess. But when the report came over the radio about the death of the other Santa Claus, I knew Hess must have been killed, too. That was why I sent Pate down to Hess’s brownstone. I thought maybe Sigmund had hidden some of the gems in his place. It was a longshot chance, but I figured it was worth Pate’s effort.”
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