“Only a few minutes.” There was a singing sort of calmness in her voice. “He expected to find you in bed with me and went into a rage because I had let you get away. Are you really another gangster, Morgan, trying to move in on Hake's racket? Whoever you are and whatever you want, stay away from Hake, for God's sake. I'm telling you...”
“There's only one thing I want you to tell me, Priscilla. Where is Hake Derr?”
“I don't know,” she replied promptly. Too promptly? Wayne wondered. “He went out of here swearing to carve you up in little pieces and I don't know where he is.”
“But you can tell me where I might find him.”
“No. He doesn't really trust me yet.” Her voice was low and troubled. “I've never seen him any place except here. I don't know anything else about him.”
“You know what his real business is.” Wayne threw the words at her as though they were rocks.
She lifted her head defiantly and spat out, “Of course I know. Why in hell else do you think I'd let a lunk like that in my bed?”
“To get stuff from him?” Wayne's voice was disbelieving. “I don't believe it,” he said flatly.
“No,” she told him contemptuously. “Not to get stuff from him. My God, I can pick up anything I want in this town without sleeping with the head guy. Aside from that, I don't go for it personally.”
“Thenwhy, Priscilla?”
“Because Hake Derr's in the money. Real money.” Her lips thinned against her teeth and she loosened the edges of the green robe to hold both hands out in front of her with the fingers tightly balled into fists. “That's what I'm out for,” she told him fiercely. “Mazuma. Wads of it. And Hake's on his way up. He's got a deal on now that'll put him up along with the goddamned Rockefellers and Morgans. And that's where I want to be.”
“You've got a pretty good little racket of your own right here,” Wayne told her soberly.
“Chicken feed.”
“Even a cellar joint like this is cleaner than peddling dope to school kids,” Wayne said wearily.
“Hake don't peddle it. There's plenty of others to do that work, and if he didn't furnish them someone else would. What are you horning in on Hake for if dope money is too dirty for you to handle?”
Morgan Wayne hesitated a long moment before replying. He was vaguely conscious that Priscilla's robe had fallen open in front, but he was more concerned with studying her face and intonations and trying to figure the angles than in the white flesh she was showing him. A lot might depend on how he answered her. If it were true that she was only interested in money and not in Derr himself—and if he could convince her that with a little help from her he might soon be in a position to take over Derr's business with its huge profits—the chances were that she would be eager to play along.
But somehow, something rang false in her statements. There was that first intuitive feeling he had about her that afternoon. He couldn't drive himself to believe she was all bad. A wanton, yes. Tough-minded and with an eye to the main chance. She'd never have got where she was now without those attributes. But for her to have cold-bloodedly tied up with a drug racketeer like Hake Derr simply to feather her own nest and for no other personal reason was more than Wayne could accept. She was lying to him now, he thought grimly. Following orders from Hake Derr and trying to draw him out into the open.
He said finally, “Maybe I'm changing my mind about horning in on Derr. From what I hear around, this thing he's got on is big enough so he might be able to use a partner to handle some of the angles. Tell me where he is and I'll talk it over with him.”
“I told you I didn't know.” Suddenly Priscilla's voice was listless and disinterested. She glanced down at the spreading edges of her robe and drew them together mechanically. Not as though it mattered much, but as an indication that the interview was ended.
“So you've told me,” Morgan Wayne agreed. “So you'll phone him as soon as I walk out of here. That's O.K. I want you to. Tell him I'll be around. Tonight.”
He turned about and strode out of the bedroom. He didn't look back as he crossed the living room of Priscilla's apartment and there was only silence behind him.
He went out unhurriedly and down the stairs. He moved surely and silently on the balls of his feet toward the front exit, where Willie Sutra still stood facing away from him.
The noise of the piano and of loud laughter beyond Willie drowned the sound of his coming. He lifted a heavy gun from his pocket as he neared the man, and he paused behind him to swing the loaded cylinder and short barrel against the right side of Willie's head just above the ear.
Willie went to the floor without making a sound.
Wayne pocketed his gun and calmly stepped over the limp figure. If anyone in the long dim room noted the incident, there was something about Morgan Wayne as he crossed to the front, looking neither to the right nor to the left, something about the set of his wide shoulders, the implacable grimness of his face and the icy coldness of his eyes, that prevented any interference.
Wayne went out past the hat-check girl without seeing her and turned toward the parking lot where he had left the Hudson.
Chapter Twelve
MORGAN WAYNE drove north to 110th Street and parked at the curb. It was a cool night and he shivered a little in his linen suit as he got out of the Hudson. He turned the jacket collar up about his neck and let his heavy shoulders hunch forward in a sort of slouch, assuming a shambling and slightly furtive air as he walked half a block to “Flying Horse” Avenue. It was a mean little street with a few small shops lighted at this hour, and those who passed on the sidewalk moved purposefully and looked neither right nor left.
There was a dim street lamp halfway down the block, and Wayne stationed himself close to it so the bleared beams lighted his white suit plainly but kept his face shadowed.
He yawned openly at intervals, hunching his shoulders and shuddering as he did so, stretching out his arms and darting quick side glances in either direction.
Nothing happened for at least five minutes. Two men passed behind him on the sidewalk as though unconscious of his presence, and then a woman approached from his right. She slowed as she neared him, and Wayne went through his yawning routine again, noting with a side glance that she was drably dressed and staggering a trifle.
She stopped close behind him and asked in a furred voice that tried hard to sound coy and desirable, “Lookin' for somethin', mister?”
He turned slowly, rubbing the back of his hand across his mouth. “Not what you're peddling, sister.”
She tossed her head archly and put one hand on her hip. “How d'yuh know if you don't take a try? Three ways for a fin ain't a bad deal, huh?”
“Beat it,” snarled Wayne. “Ten ways for a buck wouldn't interest me right now.”
“I getcha,” she told him wisely. “Soon's you're fixed up you'll maybe want some. I'll, be waitin' down to the gin mill yonder.” She moved on, swaying her fat hips so flagrantly that she almost fell flat on her face.
Wayne faced around again and gave another yawn. He saw a thin, boyish figure step from a darkened doorway two hundred feet down the street and accost the prostitute. She spoke to him, then laughed and went on toward the lighted barroom a short distance beyond.
The other figure strolled toward Wayne. A thin-faced lad who didn't look older than fifteen, trying to put a swagger in his walk and with an unlighted cigarette drooping at a wise-guy angle from the corner of his mouth.
He passed Wayne without speaking, looking him over carefully and letting his footsteps get slower and slower as he went on, until he stopped thirty feet away, turned, and sauntered back while his hands went searchingly into his pockets. He stopped and asked past the cigarette, “Got a match, mister?”
Wayne nodded. He got a lighter from his pocket and held it so the boy could not fail to note the gold case, thumbed it to a flame, and held it out with shaking hands.
The lad bent to suck flame into his cigarette, twisting his head to lo
ok up at Wayne with narrowed, ferrety eyes. “You got the shakes, mister. What the hell? It ain't that cold.”
“The monkey's on my back, kid,” Wayne said huskily. “He's scratchin' like hell, but a punk like you wouldn't know about that.”
“Think so, huh?” The boy grinned slyly and sucked smoke deep into his lungs. “I figured you was a customer when I seen yuh standin' here yawnin'. An' I knowed it fer sure when you give Three-Way Annie the turnwn.” He became abruptly businesslike. “Which yuh want, mister? I got horse an' weed.”
“Horse. How much you got?” Wayne put whining eagerness in his voice.
“I got five decks on me.”
“That's O.K. for a starter, but look. I gotta have more. Lots more. I'm in a spot, see? tammin' out of town where I maybe can't get it easy, and my own peddler, damn his lousy soul, is shacked up somewheres I can't reach him. I need twenty decks fast.”
“Twenty decks of H? Jeez, mister, I ain't never pushed a wad like that before. A deck here an' a deck there... you know how it is. Just enough to pay for my own shots.”
“But you can get it,” Wayne pressed eagerly. He rubbed knuckles into both eyes and sniffled loudly. “I'll pay extra because I got to have it fast.”
“Sure, I can get it O.K. But how do I know...”
“Here.” Wayne fumbled in his pocket with trembling fingers and drew out a crumpled fifty-dollar bill. “Gimme your five decks now and keep that bill for an advance against the other fifteen. How soon can you get it?”
The boy looked at the bill and whistled with surprise. He dug into his pocket and pulled out five small paper packets and handed them over with a sly grin. “I guess you ain't no narcotics guy, all right. No cop'd jar loose with half a C when he could do it for ten. Take me about forty minutes, mister. Where'll you be?”
Morgan Wayne slid four of the packets in his pocket and was fumbling eagerly with the fifth as though in a hurry to get some good from it. He nodded down the street and said, “How about meeting me in that bar?”
“Sure.” The boy's wizened grin became a leer. “Where Annie hangs out, huh? After a shot she'll mebby look better to you. See you there in forty minutes.”
Chapter Thirteen
Case history of Johnny Harlon, aged fifteen, 1348—Street, New York City, as wire-recorded by Sergeant Nickerson of the New York City Police Department's Narcotic Squad.
“You start with reefers, see? They're a sort of cigarette, only different. You smoke them different. You suck the smoke in with lots of air, all the way in till your guts are floating—and pretty soon you're floating too. You're high, mister, and you never had it so nice. Everybody's your pal and the girls all love you. Anything you want is yours for the asking—or taking. You can do anything, see? Rip an automobile tire in two with your bare hands if you want to, beat hell out of a cop twice as big. That's how it seems. You ain't afraid of nothing and there ain't nothing to be afraid of. Things taste better'n they ever did before, and smell better. And if you're with a girl, it lasts a million years and it's so good you can't stand it. You die on her and then come back to life and you ain't dead at all but alive like you never was alive before. That's the way reefers do you at first.
“But next morning you're crawling in hell, mister. You're down at the bottom and there ain't no way out. You itch all over and your nose and eyes burn and run water, and your throat's dry and rasping like a charred crust of bread. You lay there wherever you are and vomit all over yourself and it's like you're a pig in a pen, but it don't matter none. Nothing matters except getting some more and getting back alive again.
“So that goes on and you need more'n more for your lift, and pretty soon there just ain't enough kick to it and you got to have something stronger, and then you start sniffing the powder and that's O.K. for a while, but then it gets just the same as the other and pretty soon you end up like anybody else and start main-lining. That's punching a hole in the vein and taking the heroin hot into the blood straight from a medicine dropper. You get the jolt, mister, before you can count five, and it's real good. Better'n ever before, because now you're fixed so you can't do without it, and that's O.K. as long as it lasts, but it keeps lasting shorter and shorter and you got to get a fix oftener and oftener till pretty soon you got to have it three-four times a day and it takes fifteen or twenty bucks a day to keep you right.
“Where'm I gonna get that kind of money? Not by working. I can't get no job to pay me like that, and besides, I got to stay in school, and even if I run away I ain't in no good shape to hold down a job.
“So all I can do is start stealing because I got to have the dough. Or maybe hang around the queer joints and be some brownie's boy.
“Sure, I tried 'em both, but neither one worked good. I started grabbing stuff from stores, but the bastards you got to sell to only give you maybe a tenth of what it's worth and you never do have enough jack, and then I tried the other, but the queers you run into mostly expect you to give it to 'em instead of selling it.
“Then the pusher where I get my horse says why don't I turn peddler myself, and he sets me up in business for free. I know all the kids in school, see? So he gives me reefers to pass out free and get them started just like I did. And I don't mind none by this time because I think why shouldn't them other punks be like I am, so I hand the reefers around, and then pretty soon start showing 'em how to main-line with heroin for a real kick. That's free, too, at first, but not very long, you bet. Soon's them others get to where they got to have it, I'm the only one around where they know to get it. So I'm right in there peddling it to them and it's easy money and it's their tough luck where they get the jack to pay me.
“So I did real good at first. I was what they call a mule. That's a delivery boy for this pusher, and he pays me just enough for my own shots, but that's all right because I don't need nothing else.
“But I go on the nod so steady I get so I can't remember nothing, and I'm going nuts from wanting it between jolts and stealing it from my own customers, and even that ain't enough, so finally I get arrested when I kill that old man in the candy store.
“You said I killed him, anyhow. I don't know for sure. I didn't go to kill him. I just wanted money for a deck of H. Honest to God, I don't remember hitting him with the rock you say I had in my hand. I just needed the H real bad, that's all, and I had to get it some way.”
The boy who contracted to “take the monkey off” Morgan Wayne's back could have been Johnny Harlon a short time before Johnny made his kill. Any one of New York City's six thousand adolescent dope addicts could have been Johnny Harlon; that is, their personal case histories parallel Johnny's step by step except that the girls usually wind up selling themselves on the streets to get money for their daily dope rations, and except that most are discovered and arrested before taking the final step of committing murder to obtain the money they cannot do without.
Fifteen minutes after the boy had left Morgan Wayne under the street lamp, he turned up in a dirty gin mill in the San Juan Hill district only a block off the Hudson River. He stood just inside the door nervously looking around the smoke-filled room until he got the nod from a thin, greasy-faced man sitting alone at a table in the back.
For props, Poppy McMooney had a beer glass and a racing form in front of him. The form sheet was a week old. The glass had suds caked inside in dry rings. Poppy was a pusher who attended strictly to business.
The boy slid into the seat across from him and leaned forward intently, talking in a low voice. “Twenty decks, Poppy,” he ended excitedly. “Twenty decks all at once, he wants.”
“Yeah? How you know he's on the level?”
“Hell, heneeds it, Poppy. You shoulda seen 'im.”
“A guy like that,” said Poppy distrustfully, “with money to pay for twenty decks, he don't have to stand out under no street light hopin' some mule will come along to fix him up. If he's on the stuff, he's got his own supply where he gets it steady.”
“Sure, but like I told you, he's takin
' it on the lam outta town an' his regular peddler ain't around. I swear he's O.K., Poppy.”
“You'd say that about anybody, Alvin. You're so red-eyed crazy for H you'd sell twenty decks to the Mayor. I been thinkin' about dropping you, Alvin. You're gettin' so damned jittery...”
“You wouldn't do that, Poppy! I got to have it. You know I got to have it.”
“I know,” grumbled Poppy McMooney. “That's why I don't trust you. How you know he didn't say twenty decks so you'd get excited and make a home run for me, with him follerin' on your heels?”
“Aw, no, Poppy. It ain't nothin' like that. I cased him good before I fused him. Hell, he had the shakes so bad he even turned down a dame. You know how it is when a guy needs some horse.”
“Where'd you say this customer is?” grunted Poppy. “I'll take a look at him.”
“You can do that right now.” Morgan Wayne's incisive voice cut into the conversation. He stood beside the back table with the bulk of his body cutting off the pusher and his adolescent “mule” from the view of the others in the barroom.
Poppy McMooney jerked back and swiveled his long neck to look up at the stranger, and the boy shrank away in fright, his jaw sagging open as he stuttered, “You— you follered me?”
Wayne nodded without looking at him. In a not unkindly voice, he advised, “Blow, son. Get out of here fast and don't come back.” Wayne took a side step to let the frightened youth slither past and out of the room, then he smiled slightly and explained to Poppy, “No use letting a punk like that in on a real business deal.” He brought a hand carelessly from his pocket showing a wad of bills. “I can use plenty where I'm going. I said twenty decks to the kid because I knew any more would scare the pants off him. How much you got stashed that I can get in a hurry?”
Poppy stared at the wadded bills and saw they were a mixture of twenties and fifties and hundreds. He gulped and his eyes glistened and avarice overcame his caution. There was class written all over this customer. Not at all the sort of addict Poppy generally dealt with. If he was really desperate for a lot of stuff to move out of town fast, the chances were he wouldn't haggle about price. “I got a good supply,” he mumbled. “Don't know exactly how much, but...”
The Avenger Page 10
