by Dan Marlowe
Lieutenant Dameron studied Johnny for several seconds, settled back more solidly into the depths of the armchair and folded his arms across his chest. He stared at a point on the wall above and behind Johnny, and when he spoke again his voice was almost neutral. “Ed Keith committed suicide this afternoon,” he said.
Johnny whistled. “On the level? With him I'd have bet it would take someone pushin' the hand that held the razor. So you never know.”
“You never know. He left a couple of notes. He confessed to killing Gidlow.”
“He confessed to killing Gidlow?” Johnny could hear his own voice soaring ridiculously.
“You sound surprised,” Dameron said softly. “You had a candidate?”
“My candidate sure as hell wasn't Ed Keith,” Johnny said emphatically. “Just Gidlow? Not the kid, or Hendricks?”
“Just Gidlow. Keith did it, too.” The lieutenant stopped as though waiting for Johnny to challenge the statement, and when no challenge came he continued. “He wrote it all down very neatly. He lost money he didn't have on that fight, and he went to Gidlow to try to borrow. Gidlow laughed at him. The crusher for Keith was when Gidlow received a call that Keith interpreted as meaning Gidlow had been in on a double cross. He accused Gidlow, who denied it so unconvincingly that Keith lost his head and throttled him. Keith was a big man; when he came out of the fog Gidlow was dead. Keith then did a couple of things rather clever for an amateur. He rigged up the camera, to throw sand in the air, and he called Lonnie Turner and said he'd just walked in on Gidlow's body and that he was getting the hell out of there, and that if Turner had anything of his over there he'd better get it out. He reasoned quite correctly that no one would ever suspect the murderer of making such a call.”
“Who'd he make the other call to?” Johnny asked quickly.
“Other call? What other call?”
“You took the telephone chits outta the hotel,” Johnny reminded him impatiently. “Didn't you even bother to check them?”
“There was no other call of interest,” Lieutenant Dameron said levelly.
Johnny threw up his hands in disgust. “He must anyway have called the police commissioner to establish an alibi, the way you guys are coverin' up.” He thought it over a moment. “I don't get it. He was in the clear on Gidlow, so far anyway, an' he'd finally borrowed the money he needed. Why chuck it now when he'd bridged the gap?”
“He had other troubles, he felt. I told you he left two notes. In the second one he mentioned that he and Dave Hendricks had both bet money on that fight. It was incidental that they didn't have the money they bet; the point was that it was against the rules of what appears to be a little syndicate to which they belonged. It was supposed to be handled centrally, but he and Dave got hungry. When they lost, their scramble to produce the money they needed resulted in their position becoming rather generally known and open to certain interpretation. If not the pattern, certainly the knowledge of the fix was being disclosed by them. Keith felt that Hendricks was killed by the fixer because of this, and that he was next. His nerves were so bad he jumped rather than waiting for the push.”
“Jumped literally?”
“No. Sleeping pills.”
“The easiest suicide to fake,” Johnny remarked cynically.
“There's no question but what it was suicide,” the lieutenant said patiently. He paused for emphasis. “We're back to Turner now.”
“Did Keith name Turner in the note?” Johnny asked instantly. The big man examined him woodenly, and Johnny snorted. “You'll never change, Joe. You think it's Turner, an' you're afraid to go up against him because he's got a couple of dollars.”
“I can do without those wise remarks,” Dameron said coldly. “There were no names mentioned in the note, but I think you'll agree Turner's not the least likely prospect.” He paused again, as though searching for the right words. “We have a little chore for you.”
“I knew damn well you didn't come over here just to sit and gas,” Johnny said with satisfaction. “We gettin' down to the dirt now?”
The lieutenant was leaning forward in his chair again. “Ted's been over talking to the Ybarra girl.” Johnny's glance darted off to Ted Cuneo, who stared back at him impassively. “She claims an insufficient knowledge of English to be able to understand or respond properly. She asked for you as an interpreter.”
“You must have told her you had a dozen at the station,” Johnny said cautiously.
“She made it dear she's not coming to the station, voluntarily. For the time being, at least, we'd prefer to handle it on a co-operative basis.”
“You're barkin' up the wrong tree, Joe. She doesn't know her brother's business.”
“It's always possible she knows more than her brother realizes. The doctors won't let us talk to him just yet, so we'll have to settle for next best. I think this interpreter thing is a stall. You might tell her it's the last stall we're prepared to go along with. She'll talk at our convenience, if she misses this boat.”
Johnny sat irresolutely a moment. The only way he could figure it was that Consuelo at least thought she knew what she was doing. He shrugged, rose and walked to the closet for his coat. “On this you're gonna draw a big, fat zero, Joe,” he predicted.
The big man's smile was wry. “In that case we'll be right in step with the whole operation. Are we ready? Fine.” He pushed himself up on the arms of the chair and glanced from Johnny to Cuneo. “You can reach me at home if you should happen to need me, Ted.”
Detective Ted Cuneo turned to Johnny in the back seat of the cab, after the first fifteen blocks of the ride to Spanish Harlem had been covered in silence. His tone was puzzled. “You're quite a ladies' man, Killain. This Spanish girl-”
“I know her brother,” Johnny cut in.
“-and Turner's receptionist,” the detective continued, unheeding. “You know her brother, too?” His teeth showed whitely against his sallow face. “I might have to ask you for the formula. I haven't seen two back to back like that in years.”
The balance of the ride was made in silence. They pulled in behind another cab in front of the dingy tenement, and Johnny looked out at Rick Manfredi, who was turning from halfway across the sidewalk to study them. The gambler had a long box under his arm, and his eyes flicked from Cuneo to Johnny. His expression darkened angrily, and he strode toward the cab as Johnny got out on the street side and walked around it. “I don't want you around here, Killain!” he said sharply.
“He's here because I brought him here!” Cuneo bristled immediately.
Manfredi shifted his attention to the detective. “I already told you I don't mind your scratching over my back yard, Cuneo, but I don't want you bugging the girl.”
“What the hell are you, a protective association or something?” the detective demanded.
The gambler shifted his box from one arm to the other, ignoring Cuneo's remark. “I'll go with you,” he said flatly.
“You're not going anywhere!” Cuneo's temper was growing short. “Take a walk till you're sent for, sonny!”
Manfredi's voice was steady. “I'm her fiance, Cuneo. There are times you can push me around, but this isn't one of them. Make an issue of it and I'll promise you a wasted trip.”
Cuneo glared at him, undecided, glanced at Johnny standing silently to one side and abruptly started for the iron steps. “Be my guest,” he threw over his shoulder. “All I want right now is to get home to dinner.”
Johnny followed him, and the gambler fell in behind. They mounted the five flights in silence and waited while Cuneo knocked on the door of 5-B. He knocked again more sharply when there was no response and whirled on Manfredi. “So she took a runout!” he grated. The gambler looked surprised, but Johnny pointed silently to the stairs. Cuneo's mottled color faded a little as he listened to the ascending footsteps, and in seconds Consuelo Ybarra's shawled head and shoulders appeared around the final turn as she climbed to the fifth-floor landing.
She looked windblown and breathles
s. “I 'ad a call to go out,” she managed to get out, and fumbled in her bag. “The key-”
Johnny was startled at the difference in her looks when she got the door open. The first time he had seen her she had been twenty-five and looked eighteen. She looked thirty-five now; the old-womanish shawl blotted out the youthful sheen of her hair, and there were deep lines about her mouth and eyes.
He pushed inside with the rest, and the girl waved them to the room beyond as she pulled off the shawl. “I will take off my coat-”
Rick Manfredi snapped on the light in the semidark inner room and opened the long box he was carrying. He removed two dozen red roses from the swaddling tissue and arranged them in the crook of his arm, a complacent little smile on his round, smooth face. He moved forward to catch Consuelo's attention as she entered. “For you, querida,” he said quickly, and presented his arm with a flourish.
The girl appeared not to have seen the roses as she stood before him with hands knitted in a fold of her skirt. “My Uncle Terry is dead,” she said quietly with an expressionless face. The gambler looked shocked. Ted Cuneo looked puzzled and glanced at Johnny, who kept his attention fastened upon Consuelo Ybarra. “I am jus' from the hospital,” she continued in the same quiet tone. “He spoke to me before he- died.” Rick Manfredi paled, and stood in sudden awkwardness with arm still extended. “He tol' me how you changed the round with Gidlow.” The dark eyes burned upward at the gambler. “An' how you had him beaten when you found out that he knew. You meant to kill him then, and you finally succeeded!”
“No!” Manfredi cried out hoarsely as the girl's hand flashed upward like lightning from its hiding place in her skirt. The glinting metal in her hand slashed him from eyebrow to jaw-line, and he screamed as his arms jerked upward with a reflexive movement that sent the roses to the ceiling. He staggered back a pace as the knife whipped across his face again, and the roses fell on them both. With a guttural sound the gambler brought his hands down in clenched fists upon the girl's head, and she wobbled and fell back against the wall on her knees. The wall held her cruelly upright as the crazed man slammed maniacal punches into the beautiful face, which disappeared in a crimson smear before she pitched forward.
Johnny's hard hands on Rick Manfredi's shoulders jerked the gambler over backward so violently the back of his head hit the floor first. He rolled and rolled like a stricken animal, blood spurting between the hands that were holding the gaping face. A pale-faced Detective Cuneo put himself belatedly in motion and tried to ignore the sounds from the floor as he grabbed up the telephone.
The overpowering scent of crushed roses filled the room.
Johnny swung up into the seat beside the driver as the second ambulance pulled away, and the man behind the wheel glanced sidewise at him curiously. “You there, Jack? Lovers' quarrel?” He shrugged at Johnny's silence. “How's it look, Pauline?” he called over his shoulder.
“Plastic surgery for both,” the woman intern's voice replied matter-of-factly. “This one's not quite as bad as the man.”
Ahead of them the traffic thickened in front of their blinking red light, and the siren steadied down to a prolonged wail.
CHAPTER XV
Johnny bounded up on an elbow from shattered sleep at the piercing ring of the phone. His closed-eyes grab for the lamp switch knocked the telephone to the floor, and, muttering impatiently, he hauled in on the dangling cord until the receiver was in his hand. “Yeah? Whatisit?” His voice was a sleep-thickened rumble.
“Killain?”
“Yeah.”
“Get over to my place.”
Tiny hairs stiffened on the back of Johnny's neck; he came awake all over. The voice at the other end of the line had the hollow, deadened tone of a man past the last milepost of terror. “Who is this?” he temporized. He knew who it was.
“Munson. Get over to my place.”
“You mean right now?” Johnny squinted at the alarm's luminous dial. 9:00 p.m. “Why?”
“Get over to my place,” the voice said for the third time. Johnny could hear the ragged breathing.
“Where are you?” he asked finally.
“My place-Fifty-two East Sixty-eighth. Get over here.”
“Okay, okay.” Johnny tried to hang up the phone twice before he remembered that the base was on the floor. He dredged it up, cradled the receiver and restored the phone gingerly to the night table. He fumbled the bedside lamp on, listening again in his mind to the stark voice on the telephone. It didn't sound any better in the light than it had in the dark.
He dressed quickly, then paused, sitting on the edge of the bed, a shoe in his hand. Al Munson. What circumstance could reduce Al Munson to the function of a wrung-out automaton? Johnny stared at the wall reflectively before he put on the shoe.
On the street he started for the cab stand at the corner, and changed his mind. He hailed the first cruising cab that came by, instead. “Fifth and Sixty-eighth,” he told the driver. No sense riding right up to the door on a white horse; a look at the ground first cost nothing.
From Fifth he walked up Sixty-eighth on the wrong side of the street and, when he spotted Fifty-two, ran a wary eye on the cars parked out front. All empty-unless someone were crouched down on a back seat or the floor. He skimmed the street with a practiced eye; pedestrian traffic was light.
He studied the building from across the street. It didn't look quite as prosperous as its neighbors, or as the address would indicate. No canopy. No doorman. A self-service building, from the look, Johnny decided. Self-service elevator, direct-line phones. He stood in a doorway for five minutes, getting steadily more chilled, and no one entered or exited from Fifty-two East Sixty-eighth. Johnny stamped his feet impatiently. He wasn't finding out anything here, and he wasn't dressed for outside work.
He hitched himself together under his overcoat and crossed the street below the entrance of Fifty-two, and stopped between two parked cars to scrutinize as much of the lighted interior lobby as he could see. When he had satisfied himself that it was not a service building, he took his first step from between the parked cars, then stopped as a cab pulled up to the entrance and double-parked. He watched as Dr. McDevitt alighted from the cab and hurried inside. Johnny speeded up and entered on his heels, catching up to the doctor at the mail-boxes, where he was adjusting his glasses preparatory to reading the names.
“Munson?” Johnny said from behind him, and put his thumb on the name. “Right there. Two-C.”
“Why-ah-yes,” Dr. McDevitt said in surprise, and turned. “Well, now, Killain. Are you a part of the mystery?” He waved his glasses gently to free them of the moisture created by the sudden change in temperature.
“There's a mystery, Doc?”
“Why, this telephone call. Peculiar sort of thing.” The doctor frowned slightly. “Munson's not an intimate of mine, yet he acted as though it were life and death that I get here. He sounded-sounded-”
“Hysterical?”
“Not hysterical.” The pink-cheeked man tapped his lips thoughtfully with the frame of his glasses. “Under pressure, rather. Almost-well, extreme-”
“I know what you mean,” Johnny agreed. “I had the same call.”
“Now isn't that remarkable?” Dr. McDevitt marveled. He looked toward the tiny self-service elevator. “What do you suppose can be taking place?”
“Let's find out,” Johnny said. He led the way onto the elevator and punched the “three” button. “Keep your voice down, Doc, and your heels off the floor.”
The doctor looked at him in surprise, then pointed at the button Johnny had pushed. “Isn't it the second floor we want?” he asked.
“Let's do this my way, Doc. Someone could be waitin' for us to get off this tin can at the second floor.” Johnny slithered out of his overcoat and dropped it on the floor of the cab. He cleaned out the contents of his pockets and dropped them on the coat-wallet, key ring, loose silver, money clip, tie clasp, nail clippers. “We'll go up a flight an' come down the stairs behind him a
n' kibitz the hand he's holdin'.”
“I don't understand,” Dr. McDevitt said crossly, looking at the little pile of things on the coat. “Do you expect me to believe that you know-”
“I don't know a thing, Doc,” Johnny interrupted him. “I feel.” He retrieved a handkerchief from the coat, wrapped it twice around his belt buckle and knotted it firmly. He removed his shoes as the elevator stopped and the doors opened silently. He listened carefully, but he couldn't hear a fragment of sound from below.
There was light in the hallway-not good light, but enough to study the position of the stairs in relation to the elevator. If there was a stake-out below, the logical place for it to be was under the stairs, with the elevator doors under scrutiny.
Johnny stooped and picked up his key ring with his left hand. He looked at the mingled emotions visible upon Dr. McDevitt's mild features and indicated with a thumb that the doctor was to remain on the elevator. In stockinged feet Johnny crept across to the head of the stairs leading down to the second floor, dropped to all fours and, on his stomach, wormed his way soundlessly down the inner side of the stairwell, tight to the wall. He eased around the corner at the midway landing and paused at a point eight feet above the second-floor hallway.
He listened again, and the silence was so complete that it was with some doubt that he tossed his key ring over the bannister in front of the elevator and heard it land with a loud clank. Johnny waited for seconds until he heard the faint scrape of shoe leather below; he lifted his head in time to see a shadow move out from beneath the staircase. When the shadow bent down to investigate the key ring, Johnny looked down into the face of a man he had last seen wielding a length of pipe upon Manuel Ybarra's prostrate body. Johnny rose silently to his feet, dived over the bannister and landed on the shadow's back.
The man grunted loudly and went limply floorward. Johnny pinwheeled over him and came up on hands and knees, his elbow numb from contact with the floor. He chopped a bladed palm fiercely to the neck juncture for insurance, and looked up at the patter of feet on the stairs as Dr. McDevitt trotted down.
