“Part of my business. I’ve been through it before.”
“You know what you’re going to do next?”
“I know what I’m going to try.”
“You’re wonderful, Mike.”
“Not wonderful—desperate. I’ve got to go out and get me some more research.” I strolled back to the window and flipped the shade and looked down into the street. He was there. “The little man bothers me.”
“Why should he be following you?”
“I’m going to find out.”
“But how?”
“By simply asking him a question or two.”
“Please,” she pleaded, holding me at the door. “You sure you know what you’re doing, Mike? He could be dangerous. You might get hit again.”
“There’s only one way to finger a tail,” I said, working myself loose from her demanding hands. “What I said before about you still goes. Stay right where you are.”
“But how long?”
“Until I come back I’ve got to meet Izzy down at the fat boy’s flat. Izzy sounds as though he’s got something. But it shouldn’t take me long. Stay put.”
“I’m going nuts up here alone.”
“Do as you’re told, Toni.”
I went down into the lobby and crossed before the desk so that I could get an angle shot of the street from one side of the hall. He was still out there, busying himself with a cigarette and shifting his weight from one leg to the other. He would be good and tired now. I walked back through the hall to the door with the red light over it. I stepped downstairs into the basement, a catacomb of shadows, loaded with the debris usually found in hotel cellars. Beyond the crates and boxed sections for storage, on the other side of the square stone room, a pale blue light burned above a door. It was the way out. I doubled back through the alley and climbed a fence to get through to the next building, on the side that faced Central Park West. Here another narrow alley led me to the pavement facing the park.
Across the street, I scuttled quickly along the stone wall and made my way back a half block, so that I could re-cross again beyond his focus, shielded from him by the building against which he leaned. It was another small hotel, and here the service entrance was easy to enter. It led me back into a small, square yard. On the other side the street was separated from this area by a heavy metal fence. The ramp leading up to his fence brought me within a few feet of the man in the green hat. I cat-walked up to him. The street was empty when I came up behind him, fast enough to make my approach dramatic and surprising. He was an easy grab.
I jerked him hard, a back hold that caught him and riveted him because he was unprepared for my assault, stumbling against me and almost throwing me off balance on the incline. He struggled desperately when he knew the score, which was a split second after I had him. He was equipped for breaking judo grips, more wiry than I expected. It did my heart good to level him with a strong right to his navel as soon as he turned my way. He groaned and gurgled his pain. He doubled up and rolled quietly down the incline to the basement steps.
I dragged him into the shadows and sat all over him, slapping him until his face was redder than the Communist banner. His hat fell off and he was a middle-aged and balding character. He had a flabby face and eyes that were as strong as noodle soup. If I continued to massage him, he might collapse completely. He had used the dying remnants of a once athletic frame in the one desperate flurry up on the ramp. He was as limp and lifeless as Monday’s wash now. I clutched his suit, high on the lapels. I jerked his head up.
“Who sent you out?” I asked.
“Drop dead,” he answered.
“You want to play some more?” I slapped his head back against the concrete wall behind him, a flat crack that brought his tongue out of his mouth. “Who sent you?”
“You heard me before.”
“I’m losing my patience.”
“Go lose it somewhere else,” he said. “You bother me.”
So I bothered him some more. He asked for it. He asked for the full flood of my pent-up impatience, the frustration and anger that had been building in me for moments like this. He was shorter and weaker than I, but no qualm of sympathy rose up to alter my purpose. Anger bit deep inside me and I struck out at him again, this time with my fist, straight for his jaw.
He was out and I dragged him down the steps and into the basement. I frisked him quickly and found an automatic under his jacket. There was a sink down there and I heaved a bucket of water at him, stunning him to wakefulness again. I stood there over him and waited for his eyes to stop rolling. And then I showed him the gun.
A gun can be magic. A gun can be open sesame for the stubborn mouth of a character like the man on the floor beneath me. He popped his eyes at the gun. He squirmed away from it, holding up his hands and going whole hog on the terror routine. He pushed his body against the wall as though he might find a hole there and disappear forever from the muzzle before him.
“Who sent you out?” I asked again.
“Rico Bruck,” he said.
“Why?”
“Rico didn’t tell me.”
“You’re one of his boys?”
He bobbled his head at me, out of breath and weak with fear. “Masters,” he gasped. “George Masters is my name. Private investigator.”
“Prove it.”
He proved it. His hand snaked into his jacket pocket and came out with a wallet through which he fumbled for a card of identification. What I saw on the card almost made me laugh out loud. The poor slob was a downtown dick, a private op. He watched me nervously, mopping the blood from his cracked lip.
“As one private eye to another, Masters, you stink.”
“You?” he asked wearily. “Rico didn’t tell me you were in the business.”
“What did Rico tell you?”
“Only to tail you.”
“When did you begin?”
“Yesterday,” he said.
“You didn’t get much, did you?” I asked. “I could have told Rico just where I was headed. All he had to do was ask me. But this pitch sort of changes things now.”
“Rico’s all right. Don’t blame Rico, pal.”
“Go back and tell him I love him dearly.”
“My rod, chum,” he said as I started away.
“I may need this gun.”
I stashed it away and went out through the alley, up the incline to the street. I ran to the corner and grabbed a cab there.
CHAPTER 23
Sidney Wragge’s Apartment
9:01 P.M.—July 19th
Sweat! The incident with the man named Masters had tightened me and heated me and forced my mind into the narrow groove that always comes at the end of a chase. I sat back in the cab and listened to the noises of the night as we sped through the downtown lanes of traffic that would carry me to Sidney Wragge’s apartment. The hiss and hum of the tires should have wooed me into a relaxed mood, but my brain was singing with the thousand and one words I would soon exchange with Izzy. I added up my stockpile of odds and ends and found the total interesting. There were areas of emptiness and speculation, but I knew that Izzy and I would fill the gaps, just as soon as we sat in a quiet corner and laid out the strange pattern of evidence that began with the murder of the fat man. I burned with the yen to tell Izzy about Masters. If Rico hired him to tail me, it really meant that we could cross Rico Bruck off our list of suspects. Obviously the little Chicago gambler couldn’t have killed Wragge if he suspected me of having the Folsom pendant. Whoever murdered Wragge had that pendant!
I was running when I left the cab, through the dingy hall of Wragge’s apartment, and down the corridor to his rooms.
“I’ve got something, Izzy!” I said, bursting in.
A dull lamp lit only one corner of the fat man’s room. I stepped back in a reflex of horror as I saw what lay
under the small table near the window. Izzy Rosen was on the floor. He was seated in a grotesque pose against the wall, his head down in the attitude of a tired drinker at an all-night brawl. But what had leveled Izzy was much stronger than a party cocktail. Somebody had hit him. Somebody had opened his head with a vicious blow behind the right ear, a bloody welt that made my stomach toss.
I ran into the john, got a glass of water and held it to his lips. He was too far gone for helping himself. And the sight of him on the floor tore at my heart and made me mutter profanities at the unknown bastard who had slugged him.
“Mike—”
He barely said the word, letting it bubble from his tired bumbling lips, and tried to open his eyes for me.
“Who slugged you, Izzy?”
His head rolled weakly to one side and went limp and lifeless. He was out now, cold, and it would do no good to try for talk with him. I grabbed the phone and called for an ambulance, caught up in the hopelessness of watching my best friend fall away from me. I hung up and beat my fists and listened to the sound of my anger, the desperate pounding in my head. The words I had for Izzy rose up in me, so that I began to whisper them to the four walls. Whoever mauled him must have thought that we were coming down to the wire on the Sidney Wragge case. Why? What drove the zany sneak to Wragge’s apartment? And who was he?
The wail of the ambulance tore me out of my reverie. I rode it back to the hospital and watched them cart Izzy away and sat in the waiting room for a long time. The events of the past two days skittered through my mind and I closed my eyes against them and tried for some order, some plan. But the worry about my partner rose up to cancel out all intelligent thought. Anger boiled in me, enough to bring me to my feet and set me to pacing the quiet room.
And then a nurse came out and said, “No use waiting any longer. He’s in a coma. We don’t know when he’ll come out of it.”
“How bad is it?”
“Concussion.”
“I want to see the doctor.”
“I’m sorry, but you can’t.” She was using her quiet and professional softness, trying to calm me.
“It’s important.”
“It’s impossible.”
“The hell it is,” I said. “It’s important for me to know when he comes out of it. He’ll be saying things I want to hear. I figure he’ll be telling me who slugged him, and that means a lot to me, sister.”
“I know how you feel, but there isn’t any way to get you inside to see the doctor now.” She eyed me with a show of friendliness. “But maybe I can help you. I’ll stay with him.”
She began to come into focus for me. Sometimes the heat of anxiety can dull the visual machinery. A few minutes ago she was only a blob of white femininity, the symbol of a nurse, out of perspective for me because my brain wasn’t interested in any of the details of her intimate figure. She had existed as a formless thing, in the same way that the pictures on the wall were only dull squares of nothing against a colorless background. But now her voice came through to me and the undertones were husky and exciting. And after her voice, I was beginning to notice her face, the smooth round oval of a beautiful peasant, blue-eyed and challenging and provocative.
“Well, that’s nice of you, Miss—?”
“Prionee.”
“Is that what your friends call you?”
“You can call me Magda.” She blushed prettily and smoothed her uniform. “And don’t worry about your friend. I’ll take care of him.”
“I’m not worried anymore, Magda.”
But I was worried sick and the worry built in me until it became a tight knot of blossoming disquiet, until I found myself in a convenient bar, downing my third hooker of Scotch and making sour faces at the glass. There was a newspaper under my eyes, but the print seemed blurred and fogged as I thumbed, skimming the pages willy-nilly. Was my brain seeking some mention of the Sidney Wragge case? Were my eyes flitting purposely over the headlines? I found myself reading the Broadway gossip column of an elf named Arch Minton, a news maggot who had a variety of scouts in every hot spot in town. And Arch was reporting a strange piece of news. Arch said: “A little bird tells me that Monk Stang and two of his boys are spending the weekend in a cool room downtown. Rent free, yet!”
So the police had jailed Stang and his henchmen! I had been toying with the idea of paying Monk Stang a visit, to talk again of his reasons for visiting New York, to ask him cute questions about Frenchy Armetto and Max. Now I could cross these three off my mental inventory. Now I could begin to fight my way back through the recent past, working to organize the card index file of memory, to prime myself for the next move in the zany hunt for Sidney Wragge’s killer. The next move? Where was it?
My impatience worked against any intelligent thought. I was too upset about Izzy to concentrate with any planned purpose. I sat there sucking hard at my cigarette, watching the elbow-benders at the bar and listening to the juke box grind out the monotonous rhythm of a current polka. On my right, a grizzled bartender leaned confidentially toward a man with a pink bald head. A fan buzzed from somewhere deep in the dirty shadows. Beyond the misted window, the lights of the street were fogged and dim, the noises out there blurred and muted. A taxi horn brayed at a traffic light. Someone laughed from far away.
Then the door opened and a couple walked in, the girl giddy and high, the boy alive with quiet purpose, his eyes nibbling at her as they approached the bar and sat down. She pulled coyly at the loose strands of blonde hair that fell over her shoulder. She was a chorine, well made-up and round and soft in the figure. She primped in the mirror behind the bar. The gesture caught and held me. It was a familiar movement, a quick flick of the fingers that stimulated me because it reminded me of someone out of the recent past. She was squirming on the stool now, moving her hips in a delectable motion. Her head turned my way and I saw then that it couldn’t be her face that challenged me. She was not pretty. But something about the color of her hair was setting off a chain reaction in my mind. A blonde! The silken sheen forced me off on a one way tour in my mental hayride. She was backing me into a recent corner, forcing my brain into the hectic moments with Toni Kaye.
Toni! The thought of her was enough to move me. Off my chair and out through the bar and into the street.
Because suddenly a fresh wave of anger had made my spine crawl with purpose. I knew where I was going now.
I skipped off the curbing and began to yell for a cab.
CHAPTER 24
The Rivington Hotel
9:53 P.M.—July 19th
The Rivington was a gray and ghostly shape in the rain, as dim and misted as an Impressionist painting, but twice as inspirational for me. I paid off the cabby and stood across the street from the ancient canopy, letting my eyes play games with the stone façade while my brain groped and fiddled for the right approach to Toni Kaye. She was awake. Her window was an oblong of yellow light up there. In moments like this, a private eye plays games with his ego. The heat of the chase boiled up in me. There were a few dozen ways for handling Toni, but I wanted the one perfect approach. I wanted the way that would make her talk, and the memory of her sharp mind slowed me down and forced me into plans of strategy, like a corn-fed hero in a television mystery.
Toni was clever. Toni was intelligent. I had figured her all wrong, from the moment I met her on the pebbled drive of Rico Bruck’s Chicago den. How long ago? I almost laughed out loud when I backed into the past and realized that so much had happened in less than a week.
And then I thought of Izzy Rosen.
And I flipped my cigarette away and ran across to the Rivington.
Toni let me in with a tired yawn. She had a two-bit romance in her hand and rubbed her eyes to prove that she had been reading it. It might have been true, because the couch was arranged for the chore. She had dragged the small end table up to the edge of the couch, and the little lamp still burned, an
d the pillows still showed the imprint of her body. No other light was alive in the room and the pat stage set irritated me. I reached for the wall switch.
Toni blinked and said, “Must you?”
I took off my jacket and threw it on a chair. “I don’t like being in the dark, Toni.”
“And what does that mean?”
“Just that I like you in the clear, so that I can eat you with my eyes.”
“Flatterer.” She smiled and started toward me from the window, more graceful in slippers than she was in high heels. She had on a lounging outfit that seemed fresh and new, a silken ensemble that did little to hide her provocative figure. She stretched as she came, and her gesture was slow, and contrived, like a young actress working at being the femme fatale. Or was my imagination playing tag with me? Were her eyes a bit too bright after a session with a book? And her make-up? Was it fresh and brilliant, suddenly? I watched her move my way, her hips swaying gently. And then she was sitting alongside me on the couch, and the air around me was alive with her personal perfume.
And she was saying, “You look all in, Mike. Tired?”
“Sick and tired.”
“Nothing new?”
“You mean with Izzy?” I shook my head wearily. “Sometimes even Izzy goes off on a false lead. He was all wrong about the last one.”
“That’s a shame,” she said quietly She got up and showed me that my news upset her. “I suppose that means I’ll be holed up in this rat nest forever?”
I didn’t answer. My eyes had begun their tour of the room. There were three ashtrays, all of them glass, of the common variety found in cheap hotels. The one at my elbows had two butts, each of them tipped with crimson.
“Is it such a bad place?” I asked.
“Bad? It’s horrible. The monotony is killing me.”
“I’ll rent you a television set.”
“No, thanks. That would really give me headaches.”
The second ashtray, on the coffee table near the easy chair, was empty. The third one was near the wall, on another table. I got up and went to Toni and turned her around and let her feel my arms. She was tight and stiff, promoting her restlessness by going metallic for me.
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