“I could maybe give nine guesses. And twelve of them would be right.”
“The trouble boys,” Tony said, and smiled a brittle smile.
“Where is she?” Johnny Ralls asked harshly.
“Right next door to you.”
The man walked to the wall and left his gun lying on the table. He stood in front of the wall, studying it. He reached up and gripped the grillwork of the balcony railing. When he dropped his hand and turned, his face had lost some of its lines. His eyes had a quieter glint. He moved back to Tony and stood over him.
“I’ve got a stake,” he said. “Eve sent me some dough and I built it up with a touch I made up north. Case dough, what I mean. The trouble boys talk about twenty-five grand.” He smiled crookedly. “Five C’s I can count. I’d have a lot of fun making them believe that, I would.”
“What did you do with it?” Tony asked indifferently.
“I never had it, copper. Leave that lay. I’m the only guy in the world that believes it. It was a little deal that I got suckered on.”
“I’ll believe it,” Tony said.
“They don’t kill often. But they can be awful tough.”
“Mugs,” Tony said with a sudden bitter contempt. “Guys with guns. Just mugs.”
Johnny Ralls reached for his glass and drained it empty. The ice cubes tinkled softly as he put it down. He picked his gun up, danced it on his palm, then tucked it, nose down, into an inner breast pocket. He stared at the carpet.
“How come you’re telling me this, copper?”
“I thought maybe you’d give her a break.”
“And if I wouldn’t?”
“I kind of think you will,” Tony said.
Johnny Ralls nodded quietly. “Can I get out of here?”
“You could take the service elevator to the garage. You could rent a car. I can give you a card to the garage man.”
“You’re a funny little guy,” Johnny Ralls said.
Tony took out a worn ostrich-skin billfold and scribbled on a printed card. Johnny Ralls read it, and stood holding it, tapping it against a thumbnail.
“I could take her with me,” he said, his eyes narrow.
“You could take a ride in a basket too,” Tony said. “She’s been here five days, I told you. She’s been spotted. A guy I know called me up and told me to get her out of here. Told me what it was all about. So I’m getting you out instead.”
“They’ll love that,” Johnny Ralls said. “They’ll send you violets.”
“I’ll weep about it on my day off.”
Johnny Ralls turned his hand over and stared at the palm. “I could see her, anyway. Before I blow. Next door to here, you said?”
Tony turned on his heel and started for the door. He said over his shoulder, “Don’t waste a lot of time, handsome. I might change my mind.”
The man said, almost gently: “You might be spotting me right now, for all I know.”
Tony didn’t turn his head. “That’s a chance you have to take.”
He went on to the door and passed out of the room. He shut it carefully, silently, looked once at the door of 14A and got into his dark elevator. He rode it down to the linen-room floor and got out to remove the basket that held the service elevator open at that floor. The door slid quietly shut. He held it so that it made no noise. Down the corridor, light came from the open door of the housekeeper’s office. Tony got back into his elevator and went on down to the lobby.
The little clerk was out of sight behind his pebbled-glass screen, auditing accounts. Tony went through the main lobby and turned into the radio room. The radio was on again, soft. She was there, curled on the davenport again. The speaker hummed to her, a vague sound so low that what it said was as wordless as the murmur of trees. She turned her head slowly and smiled at him.
“Finished palming doorknobs? I couldn’t sleep worth a nickel. So I came down again. Okey?”
He smiled and nodded. He sat down in a green chair and patted the plump brocade arms of it. “Sure, Miss Cressy.”
“Waiting is the hardest kind of work, isn’t it? I wish you’d talk to that radio. It sounds like a pretzel being bent.”
Tony fiddled with it, got nothing he liked, set it back where it had been.
“Beer-parlor drunks are all the customers now.”
She smiled at him again.
“I don’t bother you being here, Miss Cressy?”
“I like it. You’re a sweet little guy, Tony.”
He looked stiffly at the floor and a ripple touched his spine. He waited for it to go away. It went slowly. Then he sat back, relaxed again, his neat fingers clasped on his elk’s tooth. He listened. Not to the radio—to far-off, uncertain things, menacing things. And perhaps to just the safe whir of wheels going away into a strange night.
“Nobody’s all bad,” he said out loud.
The girl looked at him lazily. “I’ve met two or three I was wrong on, then.”
He nodded. “Yeah,” he admitted judiciously. “I guess there’s some that are.”
The girl yawned and her deep violet eyes half closed. She nestled back into the cushions. “Sit there for a while, Tony. Maybe I could nap.”
“Sure. Not a thing for me to do. Don’t know why they pay me.”
She slept quickly and with complete stillness, like a child. Tony hardly breathed for ten minutes. He just watched her, his mouth a little open. There was a quiet fascination in his limpid eyes, as if he was looking at an altar.
Then he stood up with infinite care and padded away under the arch to the entrance lobby and the desk. He stood at the desk listening for a little while. He heard a pen rustling out of sight. He went around the corner to the row of house phones in little glass cubbyholes. He lifted one and asked the night operator for the garage.
It rang three or four times and then a boyish voice answered:
“Windermere Hotel. Garage speaking.”
“This is Tony Reseck. That guy Watterson I gave a card to. He leave?”
“Sure, Tony. Half an hour almost. Is it your charge?”
“Yeah,” Tony said. “My party. Thanks. Be seein’ you.”
He hung up and scratched his neck. He went back to the desk and slapped a hand on it. The clerk wafted himself around the screen with his greeter’s smile in place. It dropped when he saw Tony.
“Can’t a guy catch up on his work?” he grumbled.
“What’s the professional rate on Fourteen-B?”
The clerk stared morosely. “There’s no professional rate in the tower.”
“Make one. The fellow left already. Was there only an hour.”
“Well, well,” the clerk said airily. “So the personality didn’t click tonight. We get a skip-out.”
“Will five bucks satisfy you?
“Friend of yours?”
“No. Just a drunk with delusions of grandeur and no dough.”
“Guess we’ll have to let it ride, Tony. How did he get out?”
“I took him down the service elevator. You was asleep. Will five bucks satisfy you?”
“Why?”
The worn ostrich-skin wallet came out and a weedy five slipped across the marble. “All I could shake him for,” Tony said loosely.
The clerk took the five and looked puzzled. “You’re the boss,” he said, and shrugged. The phone shrilled on the desk and he reached for it. He listened and then pushed it toward Tony. “For you.”
Tony took the phone and cuddled it close to his chest. He put his mouth close to the transmitter. The voice was strange to him. It had a metallic sound. Its syllables were meticulously anonymous.
“Tony? Tony Reseck?”
“Talking.”
“A message from Al. Shoot?”
Tony looked at the clerk. “Be a pal,” he said over the mouthpiece. The clerk flicked a narrow smile at him and went away. “Shoot,” Tony said into the phone.
“We had a little business with a guy in your place. Picked him up scramming. Al had a hunch you’d run him out. T
ailed him and took him to the curb. Not so good. Backfire.”
Tony held the phone very tight and his temples chilled with the evaporation of moisture. “Go on,” he said. “I guess there’s more.”
“A little. The guy stopped the big one. Cold. Al—Al said to tell you goodbye.”
Tony leaned hard against the desk. His mouth made a sound that was not speech.
“Get it?” The metallic voice sounded impatient, a little bored. “This guy had him a rod. He used it. Al won’t be phoning anybody any more.”
Tony lurched at the phone, and the base of it shook on the rose marble. His mouth was a hard dry knot.
The voice said: “That’s as far as we go, bub. G’night.” The phone clicked dryly, like a pebble hitting a wall.
Tony put the phone down in its cradle very carefully, so as not to make any sound. He looked at the clenched palm of his left hand. He took a handkerchief out and rubbed the palm softly and straightened the fingers out with his other hand. Then he wiped his forehead. The clerk came around the screen again and looked at him with glinting eyes.
“I’m off Friday. How about lending me that phone number?”
Tony nodded at the clerk and smiled a minute frail smile. He put his handkerchief away and patted the pocket he had put it in. He turned and walked away from the desk, across the entrance lobby, down the three shallow steps, along the shadowy reaches of the main lobby, and so in through the arch to the radio room once more. He walked softly, like man moving in a room where somebody is very sick. He reached the chair he had sat in before and lowered himself into it inch by inch. The girl slept on, motionless, in that curled-up looseness achieved by some women and all cats. Her breath made no slightest sound against the vague murmur of the radio.
Tony Reseck leaned back in the chair and clasped his hands on his elk’s tooth and quietly closed his eyes.
* * *
THE KING IN YELLOW
* * *
ONE
George Millar, night auditor at the Carlton Hotel, was a dapper wiry little man, with a soft deep voice like a torch singer’s. He kept it low, but his eyes were sharp and angry, as he said into the PBX mouthpiece: “I’m very sorry. It won’t happen again. I’ll send up at once.”
He tore off the headpiece, dropped it on the keys of the switchboard and marched swiftly from behind the pebbled screen and out into the entrance lobby. It was past one and the Carlton was two thirds residential. In the main lobby, down three shallow steps, lamps were dimmed and the night porter had finished tidying up. The place was deserted—a wide space of dim furniture, rich carpet. Faintly in the distance a radio sounded. Millar went down the steps and walked quickly towards the sound, turned through an archway and looked at a man stretched out on a pale green davenport and what looked like all the loose cushions in the hotel. He lay on his side dreamy-eyed and listened to the radio two yards away from him.
Millar barked: “Hey, you! Are you the house dick here or the house cat?”
Steve Grayce turned his head slowly and looked at Millar. He was a long black-haired man, about twenty-eight, with deepset silent eyes and a rather gentle mouth. He jerked a thumb at the radio and smiled. “King Leopardi, George. Hear that trumpet tone. Smooth as an angel’s wing, boy.”
“Swell! Go on back upstairs and get him out of the corridor!”
Steve Grayce looked shocked. “What—again? I thought I had those binds put to bed long ago.” He swung his feet to the floor and stood up. He was at least a foot taller than Millar.
“Well, Eight-sixteen says no. Eight-sixteen says he’s out in the hall with two of his stooges. He’s dressed in yellow satin shorts and a trombone and he and his pals are putting on a jam session. And one of those hustlers Quillan registered in Eight-eleven is out there truckin’ for them. Now get on to it, Steve—and this time make it stick.”
Steve Grayce smiled wryly. He said: “Leopardi doesn’t belong here anyway. Can I use chloroform or just my blackjack?”
He stepped long legs oven the pale-green carpet, through the arch and across the main lobby to the single elevator that was open and lighted. He slid the doors shut and ran it up to Eight, stopped it roughly and stepped out into the corridor.
The noise hit him like a sudden wind. The walls echoed with it. Half a dozen doors were open and angry guests in night robes stood in them peering.
“It’s O.K. folks,” Steve Grayce said rapidly. “This is absolutely the last act. Just relax.”
He rounded a corner and the hot music almost took him off his feet. Three men were lined up against the wall, near an open door from which light streamed. The middle one, the one with the trombone, was six feet tall, powerful and graceful, with a hairline mustache. His face was flushed and his eyes had an alcoholic glitter. He wore yellow satin shorts with large initials embroidered in black on the left leg—nothing more. His torso was tanned and naked.
The two with him were in pajamas, the usual halfway-good-looking band boys, both drunk, but not staggering drunk. One jittered madly on a clarinet and the other on a tenor saxophone.
Back and forth in front of them, strutting, trucking, preening herself like a magpie, arching her arms and her eyebrows, bending her fingers back until the carmine nails almost touched her arms, a metallic blonde swayed and went to town on the music. Her voice was a throaty screech, without melody, as false as her eyebrows and as sharp as her nails. She wore high-heeled slippers and black pajamas with a long purple sash.
Steve Grayce stopped dead and made a sharp downward motion with his hand. “Wrap it up!” he snapped. “Can it. Put it on ice. Take it away and bury it. The show’s out. Scram, now—scram!”
King Leopardi took the trombone from his lips and bellowed: “Fanfare to a house dick!”
The three drunks blew a stuttering note that shook the walls. The girl laughed foolishly and kicked out. Her slipper caught Steve Grayce in the chest. He picked it out of the air, jumped towards the girl and took hold of her wrist.
“Tough, eh?” he grinned. “I’ll take you first.”
“Get him!” Leopardi yelled. “Sock him low! Dance the gum-heel on his neck!”
Steve swept the girl off her feet, tucked her under his arm and ran. He carried her as easily as a parcel. She tried to kick his legs. He laughed and shot a glance through a lighted doorway. A man’s brown brogues lay under a bureau. He went on past that to a second lighted doorway, slammed through and kicked the door shut, turned fan enough to twist the tabbed key in the lock. Almost at once a fist hit the door. He paid no attention to it.
He pushed the girl along the short passage past the bathroom, and let her go. She reeled away from him and put her back to the bureau, panting, her eyes furious. A lock of damp gold-dipped hair swung down over one eye. She shook her head violently and bared her teeth.
“How would you like to get vagged, sister?”
“Go to hell!” she spit out. “The King’s a friend of mine, see? You better keep your paws off me, copper.”
“You run the circuit with the boys?”
She spat at him again.
“How’d you know they’d be here?”
Another girl was sprawled across the bed, her head to the wall, tousled black hair over a white face. There was a tear in the leg of her pajamas. She lay limp and groaned.
Steve said harshly: “Oh, oh, the torn-pajama act. It flops here, sister, it flops hard. Now listen, you kids. You can go to bed and stay till morning or you can take the bounce. Make up your minds.”
The black-haired girl groaned. The blonde said: “You get out of my room, you damned gum-heel!”
She reached behind her and threw a hand mirror. Steve ducked. The mirror slammed against the wall and fell without breaking. The black-haired girl rolled over on the bed and said wearily: “Oh lay off. I’m sick.”
She lay with her eyes closed, the lids fluttering.
The blonde swiveled her hips across the room to a desk by the window, poured herself a full half-glass of Scotch in a w
ater glass and gurgled it down before Steve could get to her. She choked violently, dropped the glass and went down on her hands and knees.
Steve said grimly: “That’s the one that kicks you in the face, sister.”
The girl crouched, shaking her head. She gagged once, lifted the carmine nails to paw at her mouth. She tried to get up, and her foot skidded out from under her and she fell down on her side and went fast asleep.
Steve sighed, went over and shut the window and fastened it. He rolled the black-haired girl over and straightened her on the bed and got the bedclothes from under her, tucked a pillow under her head. He picked the blonde bodily off the floor and dumped her on the bed and covered both girls to the chin. He opened the transom, switched off the ceiling light and unlocked the door. He relocked it from the outside, with a master key on a chain.
“Hotel business,” he said under his breath. “Phooey.”
The corridor was empty now. One lighted door still stood open. Its number was 815, two doors from the room the girls were in. Trombone music came from it softly—but not softly enough for 1:25 AM.
Steve Grayce turned into the room, crowded the door shut with his shoulder and went along past the bathroom. King Leopardi was alone in the room.
The bandleader was sprawled out in an easy chair, with a tall misted glass at his elbow. He swung the trombone in a tight circle as he played it and the lights danced in the horn.
Steve lit a cigarette, blew a plume of smoke and stared through it at Leopardi with a queer, half-admiring, half-contemptuous expression.
He said softly: “Lights out, yellow-pants. You play a sweet trumpet and your trombone don’t hunt either. But we can’t use it here. I already told you that once. Lay off. Put that thing away.”
Leopardi smiled nastily and blew a stuttering raspberry that sounded like a devil laughing.
“Says you,” he sneered. “Leopardi does what he likes, where he likes, when he likes. Nobody’s stopped him yet, gum-shoe. Take the air.”
Steve hunched his shoulders and went close to the tall dark man. He said patiently: “Put that bazooka down, big-stuff. People are trying to sleep. They’re funny that way. You’re a great guy on a band shell. Everywhere else you’re just a guy with a lot of jack and a personal reputation that stinks from here to Miami and back. I’ve got a job to do and I’m doing it. Blow that thing again and I’ll wrap it around your neck.”
The Simple Art of Murder Page 9
