“I don’t want to get mixed up in anything with Rico.”
“You won’t come near it.”
“I don’t want it.” She seemed to shiver a bit, pulling her arms close to her sides as though a cold wind had swept over her. “That’s another reason why I want to get away from here.”
“Rico bothers you?”
“Not yet, he doesn’t.”
“You’re expecting it?”
She closed her eyes and flipped her cigarette away. Her lips were brilliant scarlet, the make-up of the seasoned theatrical gal, skillfully blended to complement her darkish skin color. She frowned thoughtfully at some secret problem. She was wearing a powerful and penetrating fragrance, a perfume that bit deep into my libido.
“Rico can’t touch me,” she said.
“Especially if you’re in New York,” I said.
She broke down a bit then. Something was happening inside her that I couldn’t reach, some internal struggle that she alone could put to rights. “It isn’t easy to make a break, Mike. I’ve got nobody to go to for advice.”
“You’ve got me.”
“But I hardly know you.”
“Try me.”
“You make it sound awfully easy,” she said.
“And you’re working too hard to make it tough. A gal like you can knock them dead in a town the size of New York. Chicago is a backyard compared to what goes on back home. You’ll be in the capital of show business, Toni, the hot spot of the world for all performers. I’ve seen girls with half of what you got making the bigtime there. You can’t miss.”
I could feel her come alive under my talk, melting into me and softening as she let me know she was close to me. I was throwing her everything in my book. She was something I wanted, right away, tonight, and on the train to New York.
“You sound as though you really mean it,” Toni said softly.
I showed her that I meant it. I leaned over and kissed her. She sank against me, bringing her right arm up to my neck and letting me feel her fingertips. She gave me her lips and they were mantraps, ripe and yielding.
We were low on the cushion, but I could see over the edge of the wheel, enough to bring the festooned doorman into focus. He was staring our way and scratching his head. He scowled and gawked and took a tentative few steps our way, his beefy frame moving in the stride of the professional pug, a rolling gait that made him seem more apelike than ever. He walked down the pavement and reached the bluestone drive, but something held him there. He came to a sudden halt and his face was so close that I could see the struggle for decision going on in his elemental brain.
“Elmo won’t come,” Toni said with conviction.
And she was right. He was standing stiff and dumb. He had his hat off and was working away at his head, scratching for an extra moment. Then he turned abruptly and strode back to his former position at the door, as idiotic as a caged chimpanzee in the zoo. I leaned over her. “What do you say, Toni?”
You’re a hard man to brush off.”
“You’ll be there?”
“I’m sold, Mike.”
She stepped out of the car and started up the driveway and she didn’t look back to wave good-bye. I caught a last squint of her as I turned my car around. The big doorman stepped aside to let her enter the house. She didn’t say a word to him.
CHAPTER 4
Union Station, Chicago
5:03 P.M.—July 17th
I put Toni aboard the train and saw that she was comfortable and went out again to the appointed meeting place with John Gilligan. He appeared at the exact moment of our appointment, as punctual as an anxious lover. He was dressed meticulously, the picture of an English country gentleman in casual tweeds and a fuzzed Tyrolian sport hat. He looked as young as I, the lucky stiff, despite the fact that he was on the edge of the fattening forties. But Gilligan was the type of aristocratic gent who would never thicken around the gizzard or add too many furrows and wrinkles to his smooth and sharp-etched face. Crossing the station on the way to me, he bounced with a spry and confident step, smooth and athletic. He held the same collegiate pipe clamped firmly in his lips. He greeted me with a steel grip and a professional smile, complete with a full display of his dentures.
“No luggage, Wells?” he asked.
“I always travel light,” I said. “I’ve got plenty of stuff in New York.”
“This trip will be a lark for you. Sometimes I envy you private investigators. Years ago, when I was in college, I had active dreams of becoming a member of your brotherhood. What easier way to earn money than simply pursuing a fat man?”
“The law,” I said. “For my dough, you legal beagles have the racket.”
“You’re not serious?” He was profoundly shocked at my deadpan comeback. “The law is an intricate business, Wells.”
“Not when you have retainers like Rico Bruck. I’ll bet he’s paying you a big bundle of cabbage every year just for holding his hand, as the feller says.”
Gilligan didn’t respond to my ribbing. He had his eyes aimed at the gate. His expression reminded me of the beady squint of a thoughtful animal, but not a beast of the active kind. He was a sloth, a skinny sloth, on the lookout for a vagrant morsel of game. We were in the shadows. We were hidden from the view of all passing pedestrians bound for the Century. But Gilligan cased the crowd with an alert eye, and nobody he wanted to observe could ever escape his fixed focus.
He nudged my arm. There was a ponderous figure moving across the open area before us.
“The fat man,” said Gilligan.
“Fat?” I asked. “He’s a moving mountain.”
“An accurate description, Wells.”
“He’ll be easy,” I said. “You were right about him, Gilligan. It’ll be like following an elephant through the lobby of the Ritz.”
The fat man wasn’t really fat. He was big and broad and beefy and stout. He was a giant. He had great square shoulders and a head to match, straight-lined above the collar so that he gave you the feeling he had no neck at all. There are degrees of avoirdupois. The flabby fat man waddles, overburdened with too much weight in the wrong places, around the navel and in the stomach so that basic movement becomes a serious problem and the simple chore of walking resembles a hippopotamus on the prowl through the jungle. My man was different. I couldn’t see his face, but he moved with surprising agility for a man of his girth. He wore a massive trench coat of the lighter-shaded variety, a creation that gave him the appearance of a military mogul. At the gate he paused for a quick turn to look behind him, but his features were lost to me because of the intervening crowds. Then he was gone down the ramp.
“Think you can miss him?” Gilligan asked with a wry smile.
“That would be impossible. There isn’t another one like him alive.”
“You’re quite right. You noticed, of course, that he, too, carries no luggage. Does that mean anything to you?”
“It could mean that he’s got a nest in New York somewhere.”
“Exactly my theory.” He grinned and looked at his watch. “I must be off now, Wells. Good luck to you. I’ll see you in New York.”
I watched him stride away, an aristocratic figure, as jaunty and self-contained as a State Department official on a welcoming committee. Then I wandered to the news-stand, bought a paper and studied the inside pages for more news of the Folsom case. The mess had simmered down. There was a small notice on the fourth page, an item from the D.A.’s, office, a few planted words explaining that the Chicago beagles were still at work on the deal and were making progress. The words brought a chuckle to my throat.
I skipped down the ramp and into the train.
Toni was waiting for me, dressed in a provocative ensemble designed to feature the elegance of her figure.
“Where were you?” she pouted.
“I had to see a man about
a man,” I said.
“For a minute I thought the train would be leaving without you.”
“Do I look that crazy?”
“Not crazy,” Toni said, “but maybe busy in the head. You look that way right this minute. What’s bothering you?”
“You.”
“Character,” she said and let me kiss her. She had already ordered a pair of drinks, remembering my taste for Scotch. “Sit down and relax and tell me all about it.”
The train rolled out of the station and we had two more of the same before we got up and went into the diner for dinner. We were planted at an end table, so that I could case the place as we ate, alert and anxious for another squint at the fat man. But he didn’t show. We completed our meal and sat there nursing more liquid nourishment and running through a breakdown of Toni’s dreams for success in New York. I was operating out of my yen for a close-up of fat boy, holding her there in the hope that I might get to know his face.
A table on a train promotes intimacy. The wheels sang beneath us and the black square of the window was a frame for the skittering rush of lights outside. We drank black coffee and made passes at each other with our eyes.
“Another drink?” I asked.
“I fall asleep when I drink too much, Mike.”
“Have some more coffee.”
“Maybe I won’t need any more if we leave now.”
We strolled back through a section of coaches, and I found myself working my eyes over the passengers again. I saw nothing of the fat man. Curiosity gnawed at me. Once, on another assignment, I had followed a little man named Pradow, a wealthy merchant who had suddenly decided to escape from the stifling company of his wife and four small children. Pradow had boarded a train, too, but the sneaky crumb had pulled a switch with me. He had walked into the train, all right. But he had also walked out, a simple strategy that slowed up my chase for a full week before I could pick up his scent again.
A seasoned eye takes no chances. I paused at the door to our drawing room, making up my mind about the fat man. He had entered the train a full ten minutes before I walked in behind him. He could have slipped out during that time. He might be laughing at me right now, in some convenient bar in Chicago. A seasoned eye doesn’t welcome that type of laughter.
Toni came to the door and put a hand on me.
“Still thinking?” she asked.
“I’ll turn it off in a few minutes,” I promised.
“Now,” said Toni, and pulled me around so that I could look at her through the door. “Or never.”
She was standing there and playing games with her eyes. And yawning. I made my decision. I followed her inside.
“Getting sleepy?” I asked.
“It’s only ten o’clock. I just didn’t want you standing out there.”
“Trains always knock me out. I think too much on trains.”
“Why all the thought?”
“Maybe it’s the sound of the wheels,” I explained, watching her at work with her hand mirror, powdering her nose. “They have a soporific effect on me.”
“Watch your language,” Toni commented.
“What’s with the powder?”
“My nose is too shiny.”
“Too shiny for what?” I took the mirror from her. “Save it for later, Toni.”
“Later?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“You’re rushing me again,” she pouted.
“You said you liked it slow and easy, remember?”
“What a salesman you are.”
“Are you buying?” I had her hand and she didn’t resist me. Her palm was slightly damp.
“Coax me.”
“Sit down,” I said, and tugged her my way. She rolled into my arms and let me kiss her. The compact dropped on the carpet with a flat slap.
“Slow and easy,” Toni said. “And let’s get comfortable, please.”
Far up ahead the whistle of the train screamed twice. The silence grew around us and I reached backward, groping along the wall until I found the light switch and clicked it off. Her yielding body told me that this was what she wanted.
Suddenly I felt Toni tighten in my arms. Her body strained against mine and her hands came down to my chest and she was clawing me, pushing me back and staring past me toward the door. In the semi-gloom, her eyes were wide with alarm as she watched the door. Whatever she was looking at had scared her into a frozen, heart-pounding horror. She was whispering something to me. I turned around to follow her eyes.
And then I saw the silhouette in the door.
It was the fat man.
“Good evening,” he said.
CHAPTER 5
Twentieth Century Limited
10:06 P.M.—July 17th
I switched on the light.
Up close he was bigger than big in the electric moment of his entrance, I found myself torn between shock and laughter. Not that I would have laughed at him. He didn’t encourage hilarity. His heavy brows were lowered in a queasy scowl and his eyes were deep slits beneath them, in which a bright spark burned with a steady, intense flame. The expression on his face was rigged to raise the hackles of any ardent lover caught, as I was, between the immediate present and the delectable future with Toni.
I said, “You’re in the wrong room, Chubby.”
“Am I?”
He was staring hard at Toni, enjoying her frantic effort to button her blouse. He uttered an indecent laugh.
“You fat slob!” Toni said.
“Temper,” said the fat man. He had a soft voice for a man of his bulk, an oily voice, a voice that bit because it did not bark, loaded with the undertones of habitual authority, the quality of officiousness, the sharpness of accustomed poise. “The little lady has a bad temper.”
“So has this little man,” I said.
“Kick the fat bum out, Mike.”
“My apologies,” said the fat man. He looked again at Toni and his mean lips curled disdainfully at the edges, adding no humor to the sly and evil sparkle of his eyes. “My deepest apologies, young lady. But I’m staying.”
“Why here?” I asked angrily.
“Why not?”
“Because we don’t want a third for pinochle, Chubby.”
Was he off his rocker? Sometimes a man with a fixed idea can be loosened and lightened by a touch of comedy. But this character, did not respond to my gag file. He chuckled briefly, a small surge of amusement that collapsed before it got underway, a stock laugh that could indicate thin contempt as well as merriment. He continued to stare at Toni until she was forced to squirm in her seat and avoid his eyes, overcome by their probing contempt.
“I do not play pinochle,” he said.
“I’ll scout around in the lounge and get you a poker game,” I said.
He shook his head at me, unsmiling. “No cards, my friend.”
“A kick, Mike,” said Toni. “What he wants is a good kick in his fat—”
“Temper,” said the fat man again.
There was an element of unreality in his pose. He stood there appraising us and what came through his eyes resembled the calculated coolness of a madman. Was he really nuts? What psychiatric upheaval gnawed at his brain? His brittle smile was doing things to my blood pressure. I began to sweat. Anger and impatience tightened me.
“You heard the lady,” I shouted. “So you made a mistake and wandered into the wrong room. Now beat it.”
He didn’t beat it. He stood there, grinning down at me, and from where I sat his tremendous body gained power and stature out of the forced perspective.
“Suppose I tell you that I am not in the wrong room?” he asked quietly.
“You want to see my tickets?”
“Not at all.”
“You want me to call the porter?”
“I only want
you to stay where you are.”
He had a face to frighten babies, built king size, with fleshy jowls and ruddy cheeks. His great trench coat was big enough to clothe a dozen midgets. His fat neck almost buried the neat and conservative tie, a simple design in blue, selected to set off the gray suiting that showed a bit higher up near the lapels. His face was cut in classic lines, with a short sharp nose and a small cruel mouth. But it was his eyes that held you. They were black and burning and buried behind the deep shadows of his brows. They were highlighted by a pinpoint glow of some reflected radiance—the eyes of a huge bird, a rapacious vulture. His baleful stare annoyed me.
I got up.
“I would suggest that you remain seated,” he said gently.
“And I suggest you wiggle your fat pratt out of here,” I told him. “Fun is fun, but I’m not in the mood for games.”
“I assure you,” the fat man said, eyeing Toni with something resembling humor, “that I am not jesting. Not in the least. I intend to remain in this room.”
“Out!” I shouted, moving in close to his beefy frame. “Beat it.”
He didn’t move. He stood there, only two feet away from me, but his massive body made the distance seem insignificant. I hesitated for a small tick of time, pondering a way to level the big crud. In the pause I saw Toni press the button for the porter. I aimed a fist at his jaw.
He caught my hand and I found myself squirming in his grasp. He had iron bands in his arm, a viselike grip that challenged my muscles. I swung up at him with my free arm, but he caught it with the skill of a seasoned pug, turned me around and put the pressure on my wrist so that a bolt of pain skittered along the edge of my shoulder, as sharp as a knife stab. He had me in the position used for mayhem, a judo hold that limited my movements so that he could break my arm at any time the mood inspired him. I kicked out at him and felt my shoe connect with his shin. He uttered a growled obscenity and squeezed me hard again. I yelped with pain. Then there was a knock on the door.
The fat man glared at me. He slapped me forward so that I fell alongside Toni. There was a gun in his hand suddenly, a small and evil-looking automatic, aimed at my nose.
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