It would not have done him much good, because Pete Cancelli ate lunch in the Greystone every day, accompanied by his good friends, Bobo Simon and Katz Manning. They occupied a corner booth, from which they could watch the door and they were the best customers of the house. Not that they paid.
Cancelli watched Hull mince toward them and said, not for the first time, “If I didn’t know better, I’d be expectin’ a proposition.”
“He may be inclined,” said Katz judicially. “I ain’t saying either way.”
“He’s regular,” Simon maintained. “I seen him with many a broad. He’s regular.”
“Inclined, he could be. But, you know, a guy can fight it. He can refuse to go the tour,” said Katz, who was in a serious mood.
Hull came to the booth and pulled up a chair between Cancelli and Simon. His mouth was pursed in a cupid bow of dolor. He said, “The vodka is dreadful. It makes horrible martinis.”
“Sell ’em Bloody Marys.”
“You can’t sell a martini man,” said Hull petulantly. “You know that, Pete. Martinis are a career.”
Simon said sympathetically, “A lousy martini is worse’n poison to a martini man.”
“Well, maybe you better use the Smirnoff for martinis and the regular stuff for Bloody Marys,” said Cancelli. “I’ll have to see about it. Where’d the run come from?”
“The West Side,” said Porter Hull.
“I’ll look into it. They got to be more careful.”
“The next thing you know they’ll be using methyl alcohol, like that fellow in Atlanta,” said Hull. “Forty-two people died because of that batch. I don’t know how many were hospitalized.”
“All right, all right,” said Cancelli. “I said I’d handle it.”
“But my customers. I must buy several cases of Smirnoff at once.”
“So buy. What’s the matter with you today, Porter? You miss out with that broad last night?”
“She was terrible! She was too drunk to know what I was doing!”
His voice was so high in register that Katz looked meaningfully at Simon and said, “You see what I mean?”
“What’s that?” demanded Hull. His face was flushed, his fists balled and ready. “You cheap, two-bit hoods, if you put your dirty mouths on me, I’ll kill you.”
“You gonna love us to death?” asked Katz innocently. Hull upset his chair, coming to his feet. Katz slid a hand inside his coat and waited, grinning.
Cancelli said mildly, “Lay off the beef, both of you. Porter, boy, Katz knows you’re not one of them. He’s just taking you for a ride.”
“I’ll kill him with my bare hands!”
“He’s got a gun and a knife,” said Cancelli reasonably. “Now behave, the customers are looking at you.”
Porter Hull straightened, his fists unclenching. He looked guiltily at the bar trade, managed a broad smile, the corners of which were steely. “I’ll see you boys later. Must order that Smirnoff.”
He walked away, his hips swaying, trying to control them but unable to do so.
Katz said, “I still got my doubts.”
“You got doubts you was born,” said Simon. “Lay off the guy.”
“Bobo is right,” said Cancelli. “Maybe his genes got a little outa balance, what of it?”
“Jeans? What’s with tight pants? Porter don’t wear jeans, he is strictly continental. Brooks Brothers ain’t good enough for him.”
Cancelli said gently, “Him and me go to the same tailor.”
“I been meaning to speak to you about that,” said Katz. “Like some of the boys, they wonder. Are we going too high class? Like they talk, I hear ’em, I bat them down. But maybe they got a right.”
“Everybody’s got a right,” said Cancelli expansively. “Like down south, I believe those Negroes got a perfect right to sit down. We got ’em, ain’t we? Pay ’em as good as the white boys. Congress, the President, everybody says there is free speech.” He thought a moment, then added, “Gimme the names of some of those boys. They need talkin’ to.”
“You said they got a right.”
“Yeah, but look—I got rights, too.”
The logic of this impressed Katz. He nodded, wonderingly, and said, “Pete, I gotta hand it to you. I worked for Frankie Yarbo, I worked for the best. You got more of a way of makin’ sense than any of ’em. Tell the truth, a couple of those boys is jigaboos. And they work on the West Side. When we go over there, we can roust ’em a little.”
This decided, they turned to graver things, ordering lunch, calling the bookies to make their bets for the day, discussing the women of yesternight and pondering the prospects for tonight. Nola came in, although it was hours before her time to report. Cancelli watched her go into the darkened hatcheck room.
He said to Simon, “Move in there and gander on her.”
“That nothing broad?”
“Do like I say and keep quiet about it. Don’t let her suspect anything.”
Simon slid, slim, silent, grumbling that his lunch would be cold. Katz squinted at Cancelli, asking silent questions.
“The Erie,” said Cancelli. “She’s on it.”
“Why don’t we take care of her?”
“We’re too high class,” Cancelli said. “Also, we’re too smart.”
“Oh. I see.” Katz attacked lox and scrambled eggs, gnawed at a bagel. “The food in here is pretty good. It’s a kick havin’ a joint like this. I heard plenty about Larry Fay and Owney Madden and them, with their fancy speaks during Prohibition. What did they have that we haven’t got?”
“They had Helen Morgan, we got Lila,” said Cancelli.
“They didn’t put out any more stuff than we do.” Katz was feeling expansive. “They fought among themselves. We don’t. We’re at least as good, maybe better.”
Simon came back, scowling. “That dame is kookie. All she’s doing is free loadin’ lunch.”
“She didn’t make a phone call?”
“She tried to. No answer. She’s eating, I tell you.”
Cancelli did not reply. He leaned back and closed his eyes. Nola was here for more than lunch, he thought. She was checking for Damon. It had to be that way. She tried to reach him to let him know the score but couldn’t make the connection. Therefore Damon was some place he had not expected to be.
He hoped the agency men were keeping track of things. Of Ware and Damon and Lila and the others.
Damon was too smart, sometimes. Ware was an amateur, nobody to fear. But Damon… He worried about the police sergeant all during the lunch.
Damon was eating a hot dog, because the girl wanted a hot dog. He wasn’t hungry, but he was chewing and swallowing. He threw orange juice down his throat in an effort to clear a passage.
He said, “I’ve got to call in.”
“Sure, honey,” said the big girl. She was well aware that she had him thoroughly trapped. “Then can we see another producer?”
“Sure, baby.” She was so clean and rounded and maybe even she was ready, if he could swing a deal for her. She had class. She made Nola Shenovitz look like a two-cent piece left out in the rain.
He made his call and asked for a car. They argued with him at Headquarters, but he asked for his shamus and stubbornly went out on a limb. “I got a real lead that can take me to Cancelli. It might take a day or two. If they want to detach me, at least let me take a car. I can’t pay for taxis, you know that, not on my dough. I can take a lay-off without favor, but I need wheels.”
“You need a car in midtown?”
“It’s not midtown. It’s a cruisin’ job.”
“If you’ve got some dame on a string, Damon, this will be your finish.”
“Look, damn it, I got a dame for a decoy. This is strictly off the record, you understand? Christ, it’s a break. Cancelli has to be responsible for the Colyers. There’s never been any doubt in my mind.” He was lying, but this was his story and he was stuck with it and he might as well go all the way. “If I can roust him, I can hand him his
head.”
“There’s people don’t want him nailed.”
“Not you,” begged Damon. “You’re not one of them. Jeez, if you are, I better hand in my badge.”
The politician on the other end of the wire debated with himself. He had a dozen irons in the fire. He had to choose between the people wired in with Cancelli and the Syndicate and those who were opposed for reasons not necessarily having to do with virtue or justice. He asked tentatively, “Can you give me a hint?”
Damon took a deep breath and breathed into the phone the one word, “Alky.”
Again there was an agonizing wait before the voice said, “You get the car. It’s your tail, though, if you miss.” Damon went back to the girl, wiping away the sweat from the telephone booth ordeal. She was drinking another glass of orange juice. Nedick’s best customer, he thought, but on the other hand she would look just as good in Jack’s Place on his night off, when he could show that he did rate some class.
The car would be a while appearing. He talked, asking clever questions about Alvin, trying to learn if the little man had ever mentioned alky, its ramifications.
She understood, and was duly thoughtful. “It seems to me he was awful excited lately. I thought it was the thing about the track. The Gold Bug thing, you know? He was awful high on Gold Bug, but he didn’t have any real money to bet, did he? Ted made the big bet.”
“That’s right. Now, if Alvin walked into Cancelli’s liquor racket and Ted came into it later…”
She said brightly, “I can see what would happen. Alvin was making a lot of mysterious trips into town. And… gee, wait!”
Damon waited, watching the emotions walk across the handsome features of the tall girl, adoring every shading of the thought processes.
She said, “The booze! Alvin had a gallon of vodka. Only it had a taste. You know? Vodka isn’t supposed to have any flavor, on account of the charcoal. Alvin read that, in Esquire magazine, I think it was. About putting it through the charcoal four times. This stuff had an oily taste and instead of being sore about it, he just laughed. That wasn’t like Alvin.”
“Then he’d been around the still,” said Damon. “It’s probably the West Side.”
She had lost interest. She was smiling at him. “You worry a lot. Look, what about that job? I’m broke. I’ve got to have work.”
They were at 42nd Street and Broadway. He had to wait for the car. He said, “I’ve ordered transportation. When it comes, I’ll park it and take you to see George Barbicon. He’s putting on a show at the Corsican Club.”
She said, “I can’t sing or dance or anything.”
“You can take off your clothes,” said Damon. “You walk real good, I can see that.”
“All country girls can walk.”
He said, “Barbicon will hire you.” It meant using up a favor he might need some day, but Barbicon would put her in the line. He had saved the producer from a lewd vagrancy rap not too long ago.
“You know what? You’re nice.” She beamed upon him without reserve.
“Thanks,” he said humbly, sincerely.
“You are. I guess I’m just soft for you skinny guys with big eyes. Like you need somebody or something.”
“Maybe I do,” he said huskily.
“I don’t mean just the hay department.”
“I hope you don’t, Rose Marie.” He heard himself say that, fervently, his eyes wet. Hal Damon, the midtown cop, stood there on the corner of 42nd and Broadway and bared his soul to a big broad from upstate whom he scarcely knew. “I sure hope you don’t.”
She patted him as one would a bouncing puppy. “You need taking care of. Maybe I’m just the one to do it.” He shivered with pleasure. He knew he was being naïve. He knew all the dangers inherent in believing this Amazon of a girl from upstate. The very fact that she had been Alvin’s woman was dismal enough. Yet he could no more help himself than a starving man can resist food.
The car arrived. He took over, dismissed the driver, called Rose Marie from the shelter of the Nedick’s stand. He pulled around the corner and parked in a prohibited zone. For a moment he sat and looked out the windshield.
Then he said, “If you get this job, will you ride with me this afternoon? I can use you for a front.”
She glanced fondly down at her blouse and said, “Why, baby, I do qualify, don’t I?”
They went up the street and into the office building which housed Barbicon.
Damon was already thinking that he would start downtown and work his way up through all the Camp properties. They were all on the river, where barges could, in the prosperous days, be unloaded with ease of their burden of anthracite and bituminous coal.
If he could get Cancelli over a barrel, there were several angles to work. If he could pop something that would break the Colyer case everything might work out for him. Maybe he could get a better pad, some place to do honor to this long-legged, luscious dame now going into the building ahead of him.
He might be Damon the ugly cop, but he could dream as good as the next one, he told himself in a moment of clarity. Dreams are dreamed to be dashed to bits.
thirteen
Izzy Blatsky dwelt in an apartment on the edge of the Puerto Rican belt. The halls smelled of bad cooking but the place seemed clean and orderly. Lila and Jack rang a bell and the door opened and a woman stared at them.
She was a short woman with a broad back. Her legs and arms were stumpy. She wore her hair in bangs and a page bob which was hugely unbecoming. Her skin was oily and dark and her eyes black and deep-set.
“I’m Sophie,” she said. “Izzy is just getting off the phone, you should come in already.”
Izzy appeared in the background, shrugging into a jacket. “They don’t wanna come in, we got business.”
“Awright, already, you got business,” she said. Her smile displayed uneven teeth. “I’m pleased to meetcha anyway.”
“Thank you,” said Lila. “It’s nice of you.”
“Don’t think a thing of it.”
The door closed with emphasis. Izzy winced and said, “Everything she does is heavy-handed.”
“She looks as if she recovered very well from the flu,” said Jack.
“She recovered. But her cousin is still inna kitchen, eatin’ me out of house and home.”
“Your wife was lucky she got over it so quickly,” said Lila. “It generally leaves you weak, exhausted.”
“You should be so strong as Sophie, like a horse,” said Izzy absently. “Here is the crate.”
The sun was shining, kids ran in the streets. The block was solid with apartments, rising to the sky. The rental auto was headed east. Izzy fussed with the keys. “Got to lock up everything double tight. They would loot it for laughs, even my car.”
Jack was looking at his list of properties. Most were on the West Side, low in Manhattan. There were two on the East River, coal silos, according to the description. He checked the lessee, the same in both instances, “Acme Corp. of America.”
He asked, “You know anything about this Acme Corporation on the East Side?”
“Yeah. A company sells supplies. Nothing,” said Izzy. “You wouldn’t be interested. The one I got in mind is on the West Side.”
“It’s not listed here.”
“From the old coal company?” Izzy peered at the list. “They missed it, already. It’s a big yard. Could be stills all over it. Right on the river.”
He opened the door of the car. Jack motioned Lila into the rear seat and shut the door behind her. He looked at Izzy’s round face, newly shaved. He waited until the driver had climbed behind the wheel. He got in beside him.
He leaned over and sniffed. He made himself laugh and say, “Whew! Some cologne you use, Izzy.”
“Cologne, smologne! After shave. From Sophie, a birthday. In a stone crock, it stinks good, huh?”
“It stinks,” said Jack. He had to be very careful of his voice. “Let’s try the East Side, just for grabs.”
“Nothin
g, I tell you.” Izzy cranked down the window and the odor lessened.
It was still the scent which Jack remembered from the alley on the night Alvin’s body had been stuffed into his trash can.
Izzy was turning the corner. He looked straight ahead and Jack saw that the round jaw was hard, the teeth set. The harmless, garrulous, semicomical hackie looked entirely different in this moment.
He cursed himself for allowing Lila to come along. He had expected to do no more than smell out a still, from a distance if need be. Once one knew what he was looking for it should not be difficult to detect the odor of mash when it was cooking.
He had detected an odor, all right. He was riding in the car with a man who had, at the least, been in on the killing of Alvin Colyer, who had belted him in the head in order to make a getaway.
He said, “The East Side, Izzy.”
Izzy took a deep suck of air, looked quickly in the rear-vision mirror, straightened out the car and headed for the East River. Jack looked back.
A small coupé was lurking behind them, a Ford or a Chevy, he thought. It could easily be the car he had seen that night, going into Third Avenue.
It could the more easily be the same car, Izzy’s car, with Sophie driving. Sophie’s recovery from the Asiatic flu would then not seem so miraculous, as Sophie indubitably never had the disease. Izzy Blatsky was a liar, an actor, and in all probability, a murderer.
It dawned upon him then that a hack driver, working midtown, was a perfect connection for a headman of a mob. If the mob was shoving bootleg liquor, it became even clearer, because the taxi driver would know all the spots, would hear the conversation of people going to and coming from them.
He would also be able to keep tabs on such as Hal Damon, to a certain extent, and on Jack Ware for a certainty, since it was easy enough, as proven, to become his personal driver and confidant. He was able, even now, to take Jack Ware into a trap. He had been on the telephone before leaving the apartment. The odds were a hundred to one that his principal was at the other end of the wire.
They drove eastward along the crowded street and the sun still shone. It was an ordinary day in New York, thought Jack Ware, like any other day… only different
Death Comes Early Page 11
