The clerk had stopped gabbling about Roosevelt Raceway. He stared at my finished sketches with the curious eye of a critic, awed by my quick skill with the pencil, yet troubled by the pictures I had drawn.
“You draw real good,” he said.
“Do I? You recognize this character?”
“I dunno.”
He lifted the paper and adjusted it under his nose. He stared and squinted at it. He rubbed his chin and scratched at an annoying itch somewhere deep under his mat of hair. He jerked his head backward and forward, assumed a critical air, registered recognition and befuddlement, satisfaction and disappointment, as fussy as a connoisseur over a faked masterpiece.
“I dunno,” he said again.
“What don’t you know?”
“Is it supposed to be Sidney?”
“Doesn’t it look like him?”
“A little bit, here, where you got him front view.” He paused and shook his head again. “But the side view, now. That’s not Sidney at all.”
I handed the sketches to Toni. She said, “He’s wrong, Mike. You caught him the way I remember him.” She shivered a little. “Especially the profile shot.”
“Are you kidding?” asked the clerk. “That ain’t Sidney at all.”
“Why isn’t it Sidney?” I asked.
“The nose, mostly.”
“What’s wrong with the nose?”
“Sidney didn’t have such a sharp nose.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m not only sure now,” he said, “but I am also positive. You know why? Because it just so happens Sidney comes in here for nose drops all the time. A post-nasal drip, he has, I guess. So naturally, when a man talks about his schnozzle so much, why you sort of get to know it. You sort of pay extra attention, if you get what I mean.” He made a sour face at the head-on view of Wragge, my first sketch of him. “What threw me off was this here picture, see? Because, from the front, Sidney could be any other type fat man; Hoover, maybe, when he was younger. Or Fatty Arbuckle. Fat guys are hard to draw from the front, is that it?”
“Tough as hell,” I admitted. “But you still think my profile shot of him is way off?”
“It just ain’t Sidney, is all. Not that nose. Sidney also don’t look so mean.”
“I guess you’re right. Sidney’s the jolly fat boy type, right?”
“Exactly. A regular guy.”
“Sure. The best in the world.”
“Right. I never met a guy in the bookie business exactly like Sid. Always a happy smile, even on a big payoff. Like the time I had that longshot at Aqueduct …”
His voice faded off, lost to me now, as meaningless as the sighing of a distant wind, or the noise of the city outside. My mind was on fire. I had planted the seeds by myself, and now the fruit was ripe, the enigma solved for me. The recent past rose up to dig at my racing corpuscles; the beginning of it, all the way back to Chicago and Rico Bruck and Gilligan and the assignment; all the way through the trip to New York, complete with the fat and ominous hulk of Sidney Wragge, his larded face crushed to a bloody pulp in my room at the Brentworth. The route was polished with the crimson stain of murder, a mad and frantic chase through the city, in search of everything and nothing. And now I had the answer. I stared beyond the clerk’s shoulder, through the wall and beyond the wall to the next stop on the trolley line to death. Something of my purpose must have come through to Toni, because she grabbed my arm and held tight and wouldn’t let go when I tried to shake her off.
I turned to face her. “Let’s get out of here,” I said, pulling her off the stool and into the street. “We’ve got a little chore to do.”
I hesitated in the shadow of a sleeping building, jerking her close to me, so close that I could see the softness in her eyes. She did not try to leave me. She did not complain about the pressure on her arms.
I said, “I need your help, Toni.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“You’ve got to go down to the police.”
“The police?” She trembled, on fire with worry. “I don’t get you, Mike.”
“I’ll need them at the Brentworth Hotel—in about thirty minutes.”
“And you’re willing to trust me?” she asked. “I could run out on you.”
“You could, but you won’t,” I said.
We were in the doorway to an apartment house, back in the shadows, deep in the quiet. The light from across the street filtered in and lit her face with a strange and subtle glow. Her eyes were steady on mine. She was adding me up again. She was staring at me with an intensity that would have rocked me and ruined me at any other time but this. Right now I needed her, and she knew it, and she was working to prove that she merited my trust. She put a cold hand on my wrist. She came closer to me and began to talk.
“I’m glad you feel that way about me, Mike. Because I wouldn’t want you to think of me any other way. I wouldn’t want you to think that I knew what Elmo was going to do to your partner.”
“Skip it,” I said, and tugged at her to quiet her emotional throbbing. “If you don’t do as I tell you, I’ll spend the rest of my life finding you. And when I find you, I’ll beat that pretty face of yours to a pulp. Is that clear?”
“I don’t blame you for saying that,” she whispered. Her body told me of her fear and upset, tightening and hardening against me, alive with tension. She was close enough so that I could feel the intimate shape of her against my chest, and hear the sound of her breathing, and smell the sweetness of her breath. And then something happened to her and she went soft again and melted against me and wiped her eyes.
And she was whispering when she said, “Tell me exactly what you want done, Mike. I promise to do it.”
So I told her.
CHAPTER 28
The Brentworth Hotel
1:34 A.M.—July 20th
The street was a black canyon, a gloomy alley, a corridor of quiet. The scene was no tonic for my frayed sensibilities. I was counting on Toni to skip back to the police. I was depending on her to give them my message, to have the squad cars around the Brentworth in about twenty-five minutes.
Would she do it? The memory of my last moment with her revived my confidence. But after that, other memories rose up to dim my hopes. Anger prickled my scalp and heated the back of my neck. I thought vaguely of what I would do to her if she didn’t come through for me. But the upsurge of emotion died quickly in me. The Brentworth challenged me from across the street. I stepped out of the shadows and headed for the entrance.
The canopy shed a weak light on the pavement, yellowish and soupy. In the lobby, the light seemed paler and dusty; as old as the hotel itself. Two small lamps glowed among the empty chairs and there were no guests lounging under the potted palms. From somewhere behind me a radio blared the muted strains of a late-hour disc jockey show. Ahead of me a clerk dozed behind the desk, leaning on an elbow and snoring with abandon. I approached him and coughed politely.
He didn’t respond. So I knocked his elbow off the register.
“Yes?” He eyed me with the approval of a Tiffany clerk who finds a dead herring on his counter.
“Mr. Gilligan,” I said.
“Not in.”
“Really? I had an appointment with him.”
“Not in,” he said again, brushing an imaginary fleck of dandruff off his lapel.
“Do you mind phoning him?” I asked.
“I do, indeed.”
“Do you mind telling me his room number?”
“Ask Mr. Gilligan.”
But I didn’t have time for asking Mr. Gilligan. So I reached over and grabbed him, high and tight on his blue serge. I pulled him my way so that he hung over the desk. Then I said, “I’m asking you pretty please—Gilligan’s room number?”
“Go to hell.”
There would be not
hing in it for him, nothing but a short and pleasant coma, because the elevators were around the abutment in the lobby, and nobody could hear me as I went to work on him. He had a wide and pimpled head, and a manner that irritated me, because every second was important to me. So I caught him by his tie and turned it like a crank, twisting it until he clawed out at me, the breath coming hard and rasping from his mouth. I put a fist in his navel and his tongue dropped a bit and the sweat came and he began to cough and splutter.
“Nine-oh-five,” he gasped.
“Good boy.”
I didn’t want him around to bother me anymore. I yanked him again and his head jerked forward, within hitting distance. And then I hit him, not hard, but in the right spot, a stiff crack that caught him on the point of his receding jaw. He sagged and fell at me and I caught him and dropped him behind the counter and on the floor, where he belonged.
He would be dreaming for a long time.
The ninth floor was a kick in the mental pants for me. How many hours ago had I been there? I walked slowly down the crimson carpet and stood near the door to 904, where it had all begun. A few feet beyond that door, on the same wall, was the number 905, and the sight of it brought a strange surge of laughter to my lips; quiet laughter, the feeble edge of my frustration. The little gears in my mental machine clicked disturbingly, taking me back to the first few heated hours with Toni Kaye, reminding me that all this had happened very close to Room 905. And was Gilligan sitting behind the wall in his suite, enjoying my antics, smiling with satisfaction at the role he had created for me? And what was Gilligan doing now? I advanced to his door and put my ear against it. There was the sound of speech in there, dull and muffled. The voices were low pitched and muted. A glass tinkled vaguely. A drinking party? And then somebody laughed, and the laughter beat against the inner wall of my brain and tightened me where I stood, because the laughter was not Gilligan’s. It was a weird laugh, a zany laugh, a chuckle compounded of depth and personality, an impossible burst of amusement that seemed to come from out of the recent past. And the laughter moved me to action.
I opened the door and walked in.
And then I froze.
John Gilligan stood at the window, his head turned my way, an expression of complete and uncontrolled bewilderment popping his eyes. But Gilligan didn’t hold me for more than a tick of time. I was looking to his right, at the man who sat in the big red leather chair, facing me. The sight of him made me swallow hard and my throat seemed suddenly sanded and dry and all my muscles went quickly tight. Because of his monstrous bulk. Because he sat there staring at me, his heavy brows lowered over the deep and saturnine pits of his eyes. In the split second of my entry, his larded visage hardened in a mask of officious anger, a pose that I remembered well. Because the man in the red leather chair was Sidney Wragge!
And since he was Sidney Wragge, he opened his slit of a mouth and spoke.
“Mr. Wells,” he said with his usual show of dignity. “This is a surprise.”
There was not time for hauling out my automatic. Gilligan came alive at the window, his face empty of its accustomed collegiate ease, his lean frame alert and almost athletic in its movement. He had a gun in his hands, out of nowhere, and he was stepping forward and waving it at me, in the way that a small boy converts himself into a Western hero. He was Hopalong Cassidy, without his nag. He was the big bad menace, complete with all the sliding gestures that make up the act. But there was nothing amateurish in the way he dug the nose of his armament into my gut and pushed me back and against the wall. His hands were on me and all over me in a quick flash of energy, and he was yanking out my automatic and shoving it away before I could call him a dirty name.
“Who let you in, Wells?” he asked.
“You don’t train your front office well,” I said. “The guy at the desk was easy.”
“Mr. Wells is the muscular type,” said Wragge, chuckling at me with a brief surge of humor. He did not hold the pose. His great and shaggy brows came down in a frown that was meant to wilt any starch left in my sweating collar. “Mr. Wells is also the clever type,” he added. “How did you guess that I’d be here, Mr. Wells?”
I said, “You can blame your friend Gilligan.”
“Gilligan?” Wragge asked his fingertips. “How?”
“Tell your partner, Gilligan,” I said.
“Partner?” Wragge asked. He was as cool as a Tom Collins spiked with arsenic. He continued to hold a little monologue with his pudgy fingers. “Mr. Wells is a clever man, John. You see, he knows everything. It’s unfortunate, however, that this is the wrong moment for knowing so much, Wells. Sometimes a man can dig his own grave with his loose tongue.”
He was telling me! I stood there looking at both of them and feeling the beat of my heart, up high, somewhere near my throat: Minutes were passing and it was important that I keep the clock ticking away. Gilligan snaked his eyes at Wragge and there was a hint of blossoming fright in the exchange. He was the bottom boy in the deal. He was the junior assistant, the fall guy, the henchman in this scene. Wragge surveyed him with the same tolerant air he used when talking to me. And Gilligan didn’t care for the role. Gilligan was in no mood for any more idle conversation. Something had happened to his courtroom manner. He had left it somewhere back in Chicago, where he had left his reputation to gamble with Sidney Wragge. Instead of his usual slick and calm deportment, Gilligan seemed wired for sound, a loud speaker who would talk only when Wragge pressed the button. Gilligan was twitchy. He held his gun with a nervousness that scared me more than the look on the fat man’s face. Gilligan might tremble too much and pull the trigger and make the place noisy. Wragge saw his mental upheaval and didn’t like it.
“Put your gun away, John,” said Wragge. “I’ll take care of Mr. Wells.”
“My pleasure,” said Gilligan. He tried to laugh, but produced only a high and off-key cackle. “Let’s hear it, Wells, all the way”
“This is no courtroom,” I said. It pleased me to see him go red and flustered. He wanted to be the big bad man. He wanted to justify his manhood for Wragge, to prove himself, to show that he was hard and mean. But all he could raise was an angry flood of blood pressure, as weak and meaningless as a blushing virgin. “What the hell do you think you are, Gilligan—Mr. District Attorney?”
So he hit me. The right cross he delivered was better than I thought he could manage. He clipped me across the jaw and I went down, upsetting a small table behind me. Gilligan pulled me up and made me sit and goosed me with the automatic. It was all very jolly. I was gaining time, but it would cost me all my teeth for the long delay I needed.
“Now, then,” said Gilligan, borrowing a bit from Wragge’s book of poise, “let’s have it, Wells.”
“What?”
“How did you manage to guess what was going on?”
“Toni Kaye,” I said.
“You’re lying!”
Beyond Gilligan’s right arm, my eyes caught the figure of Sidney Wragge, bending forward in the easy chair now, caught up in the first shock of my little narrative. I had pricked him where it meant something.
“Toni Kaye knew nothing,” said Wragge.
“Of course she knew nothing,” I said. “But you made your biggest mistake when you hired her. You thought she’d soften me up, and you were right, Gilligan. She could soften up anything on legs except chairs and tables. She’s good. She’s terrific, but you didn’t trust her, did you? You should have let her be, once she arrived in New York. Instead, you decided to visit her. Toni’s a bad housekeeper, Gilligan. The only furniture that bothers her is in the bedroom. She’s fond of mattresses and little else. But all of a sudden, Toni began to go cute on me. I caught her cleaning ashtrays. That was a funny little bit, believe me. It put me in the role of a television detective, all of a sudden. It made me look around for crumbs. And I found them, Gilligan. You forgot to leave your stinking little pipe home w
hen you went to call on her. She couldn’t get those crumbs out of the place quick enough. Is that a laugh?”
Gilligan didn’t find it amusing. Something was happening to Wragge in the pause. The fat man was shaking his massive head at his junior partner. The fat man was bubbling with anger.
“Where is she?” Wragge asked.
“At a place called the Rivington,” Gilligan said.
“Send Elmo over for her.”
“You can’t do that, can you?” I asked Gilligan. “Tell Mr. Wragge why, Junior.”
“Why can’t you do it?” Wragge snapped.
Gilligan squirmed and said nothing.
I said, “Because Gilligan sent Elmo out to put me away. Didn’t you, Junior?”
Gilligan sucked more air, avoiding the eyes of his partner.
“Elmo did his best,” I said. “But it wasn’t good enough. You’ll find him out on Long Island, but you won’t find him in one piece. Sending the gorilla out to butcher me was a dandy idea—but you thought of it too late. He hit me when I was just finishing with the other fat man’s apartment, when I was searching for the crumb of information Izzy Rosen found—in the refrigerator.”
“And what was that, Wells?” Wragge asked.
“You queered yourself there, Wragge. You’re much too well-bred to be gnawing stale veal cutlets and drinking cheap soda pop. And why should you save bacon drippings? When you set up the double you intended to kill, you should have sent him to finishing school for a while, until he learned your personal habits. You should have schooled him in the gentle art of mattress bouncing, too.”
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