by Robert Colby
“What threats?” His face never changed, his feet went back on the corner of the desk. “I never made any threats.”
“Naturally. One of your hoods took care of it.”
“I don’t hire hoods. You see if you can find a man in my employ who has a record. Go ahead. I’ll give you a list of the names.”
I got up and walked to the desk. I gave his feet a shove and he damn near fell off his chair. He was sputtering something but I talked him down with a finger in his face.
“Listen,” I hissed. “You’re not snowing some goddamn social worker sent over by the PTA. Don’t give me crap. I know the score from way back. What does it take to hire a couple of mugs no one ever heard of in Miami? Or a dozen? All it takes is dough. And a phone call!”
“All right,” he said. His face was crimson. “But don’t you lay a hand on me again. You’re in my house. Don’t try it. I’m no ex-con and I can make a case out of it. I mean it!”
He did. And he was right. I shouldn’t have touched him, though I wasn’t going to admit it. The smug invincibility with the feet on the desk was a little too much for me. I went back and sat down.
“How long do you think you’re going to get away with it, Tarino?” I asked mildly.
“You’re just one man, Striker,” he said. “The police have been all over this threat business with me and I got a. clean bill. Do you expect to make any more of it than they have?”
“The police department,” I said, “has many cases. Much more important ones. And a plainclothes cop has about as much routine interest in you and your threats as around a hundred bucks a week salary will buy. That’s not very much. Unless someone like me lays the evidence in his lap. See what I mean?”
“What have you got against me, Striker?” he said. “Did I ever get in your way when you were on the force? Did I ever bother you or any friend of yours? Why, for Crissake, I’ve never been arrested in my life — not even for speeding.”
“Look,” I said. “I don’t give a damn if you run all the gin dives and whore houses in town and beat your old mother on Sunday for kicks. Nothing personal. But if you don’t stay away from this Kim Rumshaw babe, I’m going to lose a big fee. Five thousand clams.” I smiled. “Be reasonable, Tarino. Lay off, will ya?”
Tarino nodded. He took a file from his pocket and began sawing at a nail. “That’s a lotta dough,” he said. “It makes sense to go after it. I’d do the same in your shoes, Rod. No kidding.” His grin was friendly. “But I’ll tell you the truth. This threat business is a mystery to me. Some nut is having a ball at my expense and I’ve got a couple of guys checking around for answers. But meanwhile, I’m gone for Kim. Way out to hell and gone. And I’m gonna keep ringing her phone and I’m gonna keep traveling around with her just as long as she’s willing. The. girl says she wants to see me and I believe her. Threats or no threats, that’s the way it stands.”
He sounded sincere. About the threats. I almost fell for it. Almost.
“That’s too bad, Tarino,” I said. “I’m sorry we can’t get together on this.” I stood up. “Just remember, I told you to leave the girl alone. I won’t say it again.”
“And if I don’t leave her alone, what will you do, Striker? I suppose you’ll get hard with me. I suppose you’ll lay for me some dark night, eh? And then you’ll beat me up.”
“Not at all,” I said. “That wouldn’t be legal and I need my license. No, what I’m going to do is to close down your rat traps and send you to jail, Tarino. I could have pulled the rug out a long time ago when I was on the force. But then you were just a nuisance and you weren’t really in my department. I still have plenty on you for a start and there are all kinds of ways to get the rest. After which, I know at least two or three guys among the top brass who would be glad to climb higher on your neck. Care to change your mind?” “No.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Nothing personal, Tarino. No hard feelings. It’s the way I make my living …” I went to the door.
“Okay,” said Tarino, smiling, still sawing at the nail. “Just don’t get in over your head, Striker. Just don’t drown yourself for a lousy five G’s. Understand?”
I grinned back at him. “I can swim,” I said. “Even under water. And my hide is too tough for sharks. But thanks, I’ll be careful.” I left the room.
“No hard feelings,” he called.
I leaned back in. “Nothing personal,” I said. “Because I like you, Tarino. I really do.”
Four
Kim Rumshaw lived in an apartment building on one of the isles off the MacArthur Causeway. Her aunt had a house on the next isle over — just close enough for Kim to keep in touch with the gold, and far enough for her to nest in privacy.
I guided my Olds over the narrow bridge from the causeway and wheeled right until I found the Flamingo Court Apartments. Of course it was on the water. Almost everyone in Miami who has the loot overlooks the water. Anyway, water is to Miami what sand is to Vegas. The goddamn stuff is everywhere.
It was a little after nine and I knew that Kim would be home. I had just called her for the umteenth time and finally got an answer. She had not been out with aunty, but with the boy friend, Howie. Conditions being as they were with Tarino, this had been done on the sneak — her arrival timed so that she would be on hand in case Tarino rang up for company. Imagine the nerve of that son-of-a-bitch! Apparently his highness seldom called until after nine and the lovers had stolen dinner together. Although from the sound of Kim, the first seven courses had been liquid and a hundred proof. I could hardly blame her.
The Flamingo was the newest and tallest building on the isle. It was all glass and class. The lobby was black and gold, the doorman was at least a general and the elevator boy wore tails. No kidding! He deposited me on the eighth floor and told me that Miss Rumshaw was in apartment E. I found it at the end of a corridor and rang the bell. The door opened. Just as far as a heavy chain would permit.
“Who is it, please?”
“Rod Striker.”
“Oh.” The chain rattled, the door swung wide.
There are maybe two or three times in your whole life when you will meet a dame who makes your hormones vibrate until your teeth chatter. And when this happens you are at a loss to explain why to your friend Joe Glutz who goes feeble-minded for skinny blondes seven feet tall with short chubby legs and manly chests and wouldn’t look at a pint-sized brunette if she stepped on his bare foot with a spike heel. Because a dame is a personal kick and every man to his own sex trap.
But within certain limitations between midget and monster, I have always felt a gal either had it in the gland department or she didn’t, regardless of any preconceived package. And this Kim Rumshaw had it! In red neon caps. And I don’t mean for love but for lovin’!
Kim Rumshaw was not the sort to make you think of electric blankets. She lived and breathed in an electric field of her own.
She was a quiet-looking little brunette about five-three or four. Quiet as in smoky. The lazy smoke which drifts from the eyes and hints of the blast furnace which produced it. She had straight bangs across her forehead and her long dark hair fell to her shoulders. Simple. No hair acrobatics to take your mind from the face. A small heart of a face, full-fleshed without smudging its gentle contours. The eyes had that gray smoke color with a touch of green, the cheekbones high and smooth, nose tilted, lips flared and curled moistly back at center in a permanent pout.
She was dressed in a low-necked, okra-green sheath which had pink icing here and there and a split skirt so that when she moved you got a large view of thigh and leg encased in charcoal-colored stocking. For the ladies present, she had adorable mammary glands. But just among us male-type men, she had terrific cans, the sweetest goddamn pair of streamlined rockets ever thrust skyward from a female launching pad.
“Come in,” she said. “You don’t know how glad I am to see you, Mr. Striker.”
“My friends call me Rod and my enemies are usually men,” I said. “I’m astonished to me
et you.”
“You’re what?” She closed the door.
“Well, your aunt was vague in her description and I never gave Tarino credit for much taste. I’m already beginning to forgive him a little for his determination. We just don’t agree on method.”
“That man,” she said. “That man!”
She moved into the living room and sank onto one of the twin sofas which faced each other across an enormous cocktail table of polished driftwood. The living room must have been something like thirty by twenty, half of it glass. Beyond a wall-to-wall fluff of white rug, sliding doors opened upon a balcony. And before I took a seat on the opposite sofa, I looked down to the splash of headlights along the palm-fingered causeway, the bland dark pool of the bay, the night-face of the city, winking pale neon eyes across the water.
Half a highball sat on the table and she picked it up, crossing her legs with languorous grace, the split skirt flashing thigh and stocking.
“Would you like a drink?” she said. “I’ve had several and I may have several more. I’m trying to preserve my nerves in alcohol.” She smiled easily, but I noticed that her hand trembled as she lifted her glass.
“Sure. I’ll have a blast. And thanks.”
“I’m drinking bourbon.”
“Fine. With water.”
She went gliding across the room and returned in a minute with a dark highball. She handed it to me.
“There you are … Rod? Is that what you like to be called?”
“Well, I never had much choice in the matter. It beats the hell out of Rodney. But I owe a lot to that name. It taught me how to fight. I used to clobber the sneer off the face of every little punk who used it.”
She chuckled. “You look like a Rod, but not a Rodney. A rod is a gun, isn’t it?”
“Yes, and I’m pointed right at you, honey.”
Her lips drew back slowly and as she stood looking down at me, she swayed slightly in an alcoholic breeze. Her speech was sometimes halting, but not fuzzy.
“People often seem to be like their names,” she said. “Would you take me for a Kim?”
“I would,” I said. “Oh, I would!” She was so close I could have pulled her into my lap. And it was a temptation. But suddenly her face closed like a door in a gale. Then her lower lip trembled and her eyes grew moist. She turned abruptly and sat down.
“I don’t make a habit of getting stoned,” she said. “I think it’s disgusting. But I’ve been under a terrible strain. Honest to God, I’ve been pulled in so many directions I’m coming apart. I just can’t go on like this. Howie, my fiancé, is a little weak sometimes. And you look so un-frightened and … and capable. Do you think you can help us, Rod?”
“That’s why I’m here, Kim. I have at least five thousand reasons to give you my best effort. Your aunt is very generous.”
“She’s a dear. I adore her. Has she paid you the advance?” “Yes.”
“Good. Then we can talk business. How are you going to stop Eddie Tarino? Will you go and see him?” “I just came from his house.” “You did!” She moistened her lips. “Yes. We had a lovely chat.”
“What did he say?”
“About what I expected. He hasn’t made any threats, hasn’t ordered anyone else to, knows nothing of any beating your boy friend got. He’s innocent as cambric tea. He’ll stand on his legal right to see you whenever and wherever he pleases just as long as you make yourself available. Which, according to him, is just about any hour of the night or day, seven days a week.”
“Liar!” she said. “Liar, liar, liar!” She banged her glass down on the table and her eyes could have scorched the walls. “I wouldn’t go to a taffy pull with that man if he wore a straitjacket — except that he’s practically holding a gun to my head.”
“All right. But the fact is he’s not holding a gun to your head. He calls up and asks you to trot with him and you go. You’re of legal age, no law against it.”
She tried to get the cigarette out of her mouth and it caught on her lips. She set it free with a flick of pink tongue.
“What did you expect?” she snapped. “That I would turn him down? So he could send his apes over to beat Howie to death and murder my aunt?”
“No. But you might defy him just enough to make him show his hand.”
“We tried that. And the same night Howie was beaten. Next day Aunt Martha was threatened. No thanks. I’m scared to death of him. Did you ever, did you ever in your whole life hear of anything so insane as a situation like this? I’m engaged but I can’t go out with my fiancé. I’m free and over twenty-one. I’ve got all the money I need, and still, I’m a slave to a man I despise! Even Russia was never like this.”
“Okay, okay. We’ll fix Mr. Tarino, one way or another. We’ll pull the wheels off his little red wagon. Give me some background to work with. Now, you met him at a party and he asked you to sail away with him on his yacht for the week end. You were engaged but your guy was in Detroit and you said, Sure, Mr. Tarino, why not? Just like that.”
“You make it sound rather sordid,” she said. “And it wasn’t really.” She got up and walked to the open doors of the balcony. For a moment she stood looking down, blowing smoke into the night. Then she turned.
“He was so very polite, even formal when he asked me. He said there were going to be at least a dozen other people along, some of them older. And he made it sound as if I would be just another guest, not his date or anything like that. He was extremely casual. A group of his friends going on a little cruise, would I care to come along?
“Well, Howie was gone and to tell the truth I was a little bored anyway. More than that, I had begun to feel just a bit trapped. I was in love with Howie, of course. Madly. But I had met him while I was still in college and since my aunt liked him too and we were going to be married, that was the end of dating. And in a sense, the end of fun. I had always been much too sheltered in the years before, though I was far from a prisoner. But suddenly it seemed to me that all of the excitement of my life was going to die in April when I got married. And I was exactly in that restless frame of mind which made that cruise, and even Eddie Tarino, seem fascinating. So I went.”
“And,” I said, “once you got aboard, everything was pink lemonade on the fantail. And bridge until beddie-bye.”
Her lips curled and she made a kind of sardonic chuckle. “Sure,” she said. “Pink lemonade. Hah! Pink panties and strip poker would be more like it. A Roman orgy on the high seas. Oh, the girls were beautiful and perfect ladies. The retiring sort. They retired with the gentlemen in their cabins. I was the only female aboard who wasn’t on call around the clock. There was even a rumor you could get your jollies with marijuana, though I never saw any of the stuff. And in between there was gambling. My God, was there ever gambling! I saw enough money lost to pay for that yacht twice over. Then, a couple of hours from home port, you couldn’t find a game of jacks. The roulette wheel, the dice tables, the decks of cards, all of them disappeared. They just vanished.”
“I’ve got the picture, Kim. What about you? And Tarino?”
“Nothing. Just nothing. He never hung around the games or the women. He was almost aloof from it all. He said people would enjoy their little vices one way or another and he frankly made his living providing the opportunity. He seemed so detached from the rest of them. He just talked to me for hours and didn’t even make a pass. I found him fascinating. So different from Howie, who is sweet and bright and much better-looking, but more comfortable than he is exciting. Eddie Tarino was just packed inside with violent emotions, all of them showing in his eyes, in a single look. And I was like a little girl at the zoo, sucking a lollipop outside the leopard’s cage, deciding to find out what it would be like to squeeze through the bars and pet him for just a second — before she ran.”
“But when you tried to run it was too late?”
She hung her head a little. “Yes.”
“Because by that time you had slept with him and he didn’t want to let you
go.”
Her head dropped still farther but her eyes looked up and there was the shadow of a smile on her face that I could feel all the way down to the soles of me feet.
“Yes,” she said. “By that time I had slept with him.”
Five
Watching me from the corner of her eye, Kim drifted back to her place on the sofa and tucked her legs beneath her. She sat for several moments in the attitude of that subdued little girl who had found that leopards play for keeps.
“Well,” I said “I’m sorry you had to get involved with a guy like Tarino. He runs with a bunch of borderline tramps and you’re a taste of champagne after too much beer. The bastard is an egomaniac and he probably thinks you’re nuts about him, or would be, if you had the guts to tear loose from aunty and the boy friend. So he’s fixing everything in typical gangster style. Later you’ll get down on your knees and thank him. That’s about the way his crazy mind works.”
“Is he really a gangster?” she said in a small voice loaded with awe.
“No,” I said. “Not in the old-fashioned tradition. Not with a mob under his command, shooting down members of rival mobs in the streets. In fact, he considers himself as just a shrewd businessman and he wouldn’t have anyone around with a record. A diploma from one of the better monkey cages in the country will get you nowhere in today’s racket system. This is the era of law-abiding vice with the big wink and the big pay-off. Because there isn’t a racket in town that could operate without that payoff. Your modern racketeer plays the gentleman and lives in a swanky house in the suburbs right next to Mr. Morgan Q. Shekels who is president of the bank. He doesn’t like violence because it might soil his lovely reputation.
“But there are certain people who can’t be bought and we can’t allow them to stand in our way, can we? So what do we do? We call in the specialists in murder and mayhem. Maybe they’re local, more likely they fly in from Chicago or Detroit or Vegas or some other hood swamp. For a price they’ll beat up, knife up or shoot up the opposition, then vanish. Meanwhile, your businessman-racketeer was at his club, surrounded by half a dozen upstanding citizens who will swear he played pinochle until 2 A.M. when they all went over to Judge Take-a-bribe’s house for doughnuts and coffee. That’s the way characters like Tarino operate. They’re slimier than the old style gangsters who never pretended to be anything else.”
