by Michael Mayo
The voices got louder. The only words I could make out were, “This way.”
I heard the sounds of something bumping into furniture and a bleating animal cry. I thought it was a sheep, but what the hell did I know from sheep? There were curses and more banging and bumping until two men and an animal staggered into the light. I still couldn’t make out what it was, but it was about knee height to the men and it didn’t want to be there. They had a rope around its neck, and it took both of them to drag it to the door. It balked and they struggled until one guy got behind and pushed while the other yanked on the rope and they got it through the doorway and into the office. When they got into the light, I could tell that it was the two idiots, the kid with the pistol and bad hair and the older guy, the vice cop that knew Fat Joe. What was his name? Trodache? His face was still red from the coffee I threw at him.
They were followed by a man in a suit. I only got a look at his profile and saw that he was a young fellow with round glasses, a downy mustache. Not tall, not short, smoking a cigarette. He had the overcoat tucked under his arm, and he was carrying the suitcase. Once the two guys had the animal in the office, he followed them in and shut the door. After that, they had a lot to say to each other but I couldn’t understand any of it and the animal quieted down. All I could see was the line of light under the door.
I got up and walked back down the long table to the door. Along the way, I cocked the .38. The office door opened outward. I figured I could get close enough to hear and they might not see me behind it when they left. And if they did see me and object, I could shoot them. Or, if I had time, I could duck back in the conference room.
When I got to the door, I heard two of them arguing. It was Trodache, with the whispery voice, and the young guy who, I guessed, was the boss, the one I saw with the big Olds the night before. I couldn’t make out what Trodache was saying, but I could tell he was asking for something. The other man had a crisp, educated accent, easy to understand. “Don’t worry,” he said, “They’re going to pay. Six thousand means nothing. And if they don’t, it doesn’t matter. We’ll go back to the original arrangement, but this will be better. And remember, we’ve got to take a look at the other place before you call them tonight.”
Trodache and the kid said things I couldn’t get and the boss answered, “No, he won’t be back until Sunday at the earliest and this is for me to worry about, it’s not your concern. Go on. You know what you’ve got to do. I’ll meet you at six.”
I stepped back into the conference room. Moments later, the two idiots came out, and the door slammed fast behind them, like the other man had pushed them out. As they walked away, the kid said, “This is so fucking screwy I don’t believe it.”
The older guy croaked, “Think about the money,” and they left. I heard the frosted glass door close.
For several seconds after that, I couldn’t tell what the hell was happening on the other side of Wilcox’s office door. It was completely quiet for a long time, then I heard bleats and moans and squeals and groans and grunts and a lot more banging around, much more violent than it had sounded coming in. The pace and intensity got quicker and more excited, and the bleating rose to sound like a terrified scream. It was almost human in its fear, but I knew it was the animal. The frightened sound seemed to go on for hours, but it couldn’t have been more than minutes, long painful minutes, with more loud thumps of things being knocked over.
It ended with a long screech and a tearing sound and a satisfied moan that was human. Definitely human. Then the smell hit me. I knew it right away from the slaughterhouses down on Gansevoort Street.
I also knew that whatever happened next was going to be bloody, and I tried to clamp down on my shallow breathing and racing heartbeat. Be cool, I told myself. Don’t hurry, don’t hesitate. I made sure my finger was outside the trigger guard. Again, silent seconds stretched out until the door swung open and the third man stood there, his back to me, looking into the office. He wore a brown tweed suit. I could only see the collar of the suit until he took off the overcoat, and folded it carefully, keeping the blood-smeared front away from his hands and clothes. He put the coat in the suitcase, then took off the gloves I hadn’t noticed, and put them in the suitcase, too, and snapped it shut.
The smell of blood and shit and offal was rank.
I couldn’t see past the man into the office. His breathing still sounded as ragged as mine had been. He took time to straighten his tie, adjust his cuffs, and smooth his hair back with his hands. He picked up the suitcase, reached in to turn off the lights, closed the door, and left.
A few seconds later, I heard the frosted glass door shut again. I eased the hammer down on the pistol and forced myself to open the office door and turn on the lights.
It was a goat, not a sheep, with curled horns. It was hanging upside down on the leather chair. The guy had tied the rope around the animal’s back legs and pinned the rope with a knife driven into the top of the chair. He’d killed it by cutting the throat and slashing it open from stomach to sternum. Another blood-streaked knife was buried in the middle of the desk. The guts and other messy stuff were smeared around the second knife.
Scrawled large in blood on the wall were the words BROTHER BEAST.
The smell alone was enough to make me dizzy. I wanted to scram out of there fast but settled down and strolled out like a guy who wasn’t in a hurry.
Back when we killed Maranzano, it took four guys with knives and guns to finish him off, and even then, it wasn’t easy, the old man put up a hell of a fight. I didn’t see the body, but I saw the photographs. It was pretty bad. The goat got it worse.
After the business with Miss Wray saying her husband knew me, and Daphne saying that this Apollinaire knew me, the slaughter of the goat meant I was in the middle of something I’d never seen before, and it scared me worse than anything ever had.
Chapter Twelve
So what do I tell Miss Wray and the RKO guys? That’s what I was thinking as I settled behind my desk in the office. It was getting close to five o’clock by then, and the Democrats were making an early start of it. The bar was jumping. If it got much busier, as it tended to on Friday, we’d need extra help. I was reaching for the phone to call the kitchen when the thing rang. It was Grossner, the RKO lawyer. He sounded honked off.
“I’ve just learned that you’ve been in contact with the extortionists. Why didn’t you tell us?”
“I had other things to do. Have they called? You decide to pay ’em?”
“No, and I can’t say that I care for your attitude. We’re not paying you to—”
“You haven’t paid me anything yet. After you do, you can give me orders and I might listen to you, but don’t count on it. For the moment, I’m working for Miss Wray. Take it up with her.”
He backed off right away and said perhaps he’d been too hasty. “We all want Miss Wray to be happy. I understand that, and even though we haven’t agreed to their demands, we do have the money ready. Since they sent the book and the demand to the Pierre, we assume they’ll call here. You should be here, too.”
I said I’d be there in half an hour and told him to have them send up a corned beef sandwich.
That got him honked off again and he sputtered, “I’m not going to order a sandwich for you.”
“Okay,” I said, “then make it an hour” and hung up.
Vittorio’s guys didn’t have any corned beef, but there was some steak left over from lunch. They put some horseradish on the bread, too.
When I finished, I went downstairs. They were two deep at the bar, all the booths were filled and most of the tables. I went to the back corner of the bar and motioned Connie over. We had to lean close to hear each other.
I said, “It was an interesting afternoon. Daphne had a lot to say. I’ll tell you all about it when we can talk, but the important thing is that it looks like the picture book is advertising for a stag movie based on King Kong.”
That surprised her. “I never heard
of such a thing. How could they do that?”
“Search me. But I might have a line on the guy who made the picture. Could be that he lives at the Chelsea, one floor above you.”
That really surprised her. “You’re kidding.”
“If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’. Now they want me to go back to Miss Wray’s hotel. If those guys who were in here last night call, they’ll want their money tonight. Sounds like the studio is willing to pay up, so I might be busy. But I’ll try to get back early, and maybe we can pay a visit to this guy. Daphne said his name is Oscar Apollinaire. And she said he knows me. That I can’t figure at all. The name mean anything to you?”
“No,” she said, “but I can ask Nelson.”
“Nelson?”
“The elevator operator. He knows everybody in the building. Want me to call him?”
“No, ask him when we wake him up.”
There was no sign of the Olds on the taxi ride up to the Pierre.
Miss Wray’s suite was still lousy with flowers. It looked like more had arrived since I was there last night. One table had been cleared, and right in the middle of it, she’d put one white rose. The card leaning on the pot read congratulations! see you soon, cary.
Miss Wray looked terrific. She was dolled up in a long dress made of heavy blue silk with some kind of pattern woven into it, and a necklace with a diamond that would fill a shot glass. She was still pacing the room, and she’d switched from champagne to tea.
Detective Ellis was getting chummy with Grossner and Sleave in a far corner of the room. The lawyers were decked out in white ties and tails. Grossner got up as soon as he saw me. A fourth guy in a regular suit sat at a desk beside them. He was scribbling serial numbers from a stack of bills. He wasn’t paying much attention to that, because all the time we were talking, he was turning to listen to us.
Grossner strode over and said, tugging at his coat, “All right, Quinn, what have you learned?”
I took off my topcoat and hat and went to the bar to pour myself a brandy. Then I said, “Miss Wray, do you want everybody to know this, or do you want to talk it over in private, just you and me?”
Grossner and Sleave started to say something until she held up a hand. “Go ahead,” she said and gave me a wink they couldn’t see. “I trust your discretion.”
“It looks like the guys behind this are an ex-vice cop named Trodache and a kid. I don’t know his name. Ellis, do you know Trodache?”
He shook his head, and his quick scowl told you everything you needed to know about his opinion of vice cops. I asked the lawyers if the name meant anything to them and they said no.
“Trodache and the kid must have followed Miss Wray to my place last night. I went out after we talked and they braced me on the street.”
Grossner interrupted me, “You’re sure they’re behind it?”
“They knew about the six thousand dollars, and they said they had more books. But they’re not in this by themselves. There’s a third guy, a younger guy. He was in the backseat of their car, and he’s got to be the brains of the outfit.”
Sleave, the lawyer with the pince-nez, said, “Is this the way these matters are normally handled? I mean, I thought these blackmailers or extortionists would want to keep their identity secret. How did you learn this man’s name? Did he tell you?”
“No. After they left me, they went back to my place. Fat Joe knows Trodache and let ’em in.”
I saw they didn’t understand. “Fat Joe, the doorman. He probably told you to fuck off last night. Sorry, Miss Wray. He wouldn’t say it to you.”
Hazel came in and sat next to Miss Wray on the sofa. “He certainly did not.”
“By giving me the business and then showing up at my place, they’re letting us know that they’re a step ahead of us. And why do they care if we know who they are? They didn’t kidnap anybody, they’ve got dirty pictures. The monsignor gets steamed up about it but nobody else. What have they done?”
Nobody could answer that.
“The girl in the pictures used to work for Polly Adler under the name Nola Revere. She left Polly’s without telling anybody why. Maybe she posed for the pictures before then. Maybe it’s why she left. That I can’t tell you.”
I decided not to mention the Wilcox Foundation or the stag movie for the moment. But Sleave still had questions.
“Still, how did they steal our copyrighted material? Those costumes and sets were kept under wraps.”
“Maybe they saw the lobby cards and posters like I did,” I said. “Maybe somebody working on the picture told them what it looked like, I don’t know. But there’s something else. Trodache and the kid think that the girl in the pictures really is Miss Wray. What do you make of that?”
Nobody said anything. Then Miss Wray said, “Oh, come now. How could anyone believe that?”
I shrugged and said, “Seems to me it’s possible they didn’t have anything to do with taking the pictures. Maybe they bought ’em or stole ’em from whoever did.”
“That doesn’t matter to me,” she said, her voice hard and serious. “I want them destroyed. Does everyone understand that?”
She stood up and stared at the lawyers and said again, louder, “Does everyone understand that?”
They nodded and I went on. “And then there’s Saxon Dunbar.”
At the mention of the name, the guy copying the serial numbers stopped what he was doing and stared at me. The lawyers didn’t know who I was talking about. I said he was like Winchell and they understood.
“He came in my place last night, a few hours after you were there, and said somebody called him and said there were naughty pictures of Miss Wray floating around, and she was trying to get ’em back and I was the go-between.” Again, I decided not to go into the rest of it about Miss Wray’s other “artistic” photographs or her problems with her husband. But what about the rest of it?
“Now, here’s what’s strange,” I said. “The guy who told Dunbar about the pictures also said that they were taken on the set where they made the movie.”
Miss Wray’s big eyes got bigger. “You mean he suggested that I . . .”
“Yeah, with one of the black guys.”
Hazel jumped right up and said, “That’s just . . . just . . . impossible. There were too many of the crew members on the set every night, and the only time the colored people were there was when we shot the altar scene and the rampage. You weren’t even there that day.”
Miss Wray couldn’t say anything and just stood there with her mouth open until she laughed.
Grossner paid no attention to either of the women. He said to me, “What did you tell him?”
“That Miss Wray had been in my place and I met her and anything that went on between us was private. If he knows about you and Sleave, he didn’t say so.”
Sleave stepped in front of Grossner and declared, “All right, that’s enough. This situation is becoming increasingly unpredictable. No more discussion. We’re going to pay them, and Quinn and Detective Ellis are going to make sure that every bit of this horribly offensive and repulsive material is destroyed. The very idea of one of those savages and Miss Wray, it’s unthinkable. When they call, we agree to pay and we end this. Detective, are you agreed?”
Ellis got up from the sofa where he’d been listening and said, “I’ll talk to Captain Boatwright to make sure I’m covered this weekend, but I don’t see why I couldn’t be with Quinn when he makes the payoff.”
Sleave said, “Do you believe what he told us about this ex-cop and Dunbar and the salacious story? Can we trust him?” He turned to me and said, “No offense, Quinn. Your reputation and your associates precede you.”
Ellis gave me a thin little smile. He knew I wasn’t telling everything I knew. “Yeah,” he said, “you can trust Quinn. For now.”
I asked how we’d get the books and Sleave said that could be worked out when they called.
Grossner clapped his hands together and said, “Excellent. We are agreed. Now, w
e have another engagement at the RKO offices and we’re late already. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours. You and Quinn can stay here and wait for the call. Miss Wray, are you ready?”
She held up a finger and said, “One moment. Mr. Quinn and I need to talk.”
The lawyers stewed in their boiled shirts and tails. She guided me into a sitting room and closed the door. “What else did you learn today? I know there’s more.” She put a hand on my arm and nailed me with another wide-eyed look. It got warmer.
“First, like I told them, this afternoon I found out that the woman whose name I told you, Nola Revere, that’s her in the pictures, for sure. And it wasn’t the first time. It was some other photographs like that that got her into the business.”
“Have you located her?”
“No, she quit Polly’s and nobody’s seen her since. But I may have a line on the guy who took the pictures. Oscar Apollinaire. The name mean anything to you?”
She shook her head.
“It looks like he’s not the third guy who was with Trodache and the kid. Maybe he told them the pictures were really of you and sold them, or maybe they stole them. There’s a chance I can find this bird later tonight, but it’s too soon to say anything, and that’s not what’s really eating you right now, is it? You’re more worried about what Dunbar might write in his column than the pictures?”
She thought before she answered. “Yes, I suppose so, but we can’t deal with one and not the other.”
“Suppose I could get Dunbar to lose interest.”
“But how?”
“Leave that to me.”
She said, “That would be wonderful,” and smiled like an actress.
I said, “And when this is over, we’ll sit down and you’ll tell me about your husband and how he knows me.” She stopped smiling.
Back in the flower room, as Grossner helped the women with their coats, Sleave came over and said, “Quinn, I hope you understand that I didn’t mean to be insulting when I questioned your trustworthiness. We simply don’t know you. We’re really not used to dealing with situations like this, and your methods are, well, unorthodox. We do appreciate your help.”
