“I'll debate it with you, wise guy.” The small eyes in the pallid face glittered as Johnny turned carefully to face them; he inched his feet fractionally apart, as equidistant from all three as he could manage without being obvious.
“Listen, Max,” Johnny said abruptly. “Let's look at the blueprints. You think you can put a collar on me. Well, I'm tellin' you that you can't. You want to move a few women in here nights, I imagine, and you want me to do business. The answer is no.”
“I don't think you can make that stick, Killain.” Max Armistead's voice was soft, but his face was not. Slender, foppishly dressed, thin featured, effeminate looking except for the arrogant light eyes ... a man used to the driver's seat.
“I don't run your kind of ship, Max.”
“You could change your mind. Or have it changed.”
“Not by you, mister. I don't like you. You're a dirty little pimp, besides I don't know what else. You're—”
He broke off as the man on his left drew back suddenly. The pent up violence in Johnny exploded; he charged them, the weight of the big body bouncing them into each other as they tried to find working room in the elevator's narrow confines. Almost happily he slipped under a punch and swung the rigid edge of his palm viciously against the nearest fat neck overflowing its crumpled collar, and the man's eyes turned inward as he sagged floorward like a rag doll, face down.
Johnny grunted as a jolting blow took him in the short ribs, and he reached for the second man. “Come on, pretty boy,” the man wheezed, and light glinted from his knuckles. Johnny absorbed another body punch, but snapped a hook to the straining face and felt flesh and bone crunch under his knuckles. The man staggered back, blood spurting from his nose, his bulk pinning the smaller Max in the farthest corner.
“Now, you sonofabitch—” Johnny stepped inside the big man's aimlessly flailing hands and circled the blocky body with his arms. He locked his grip rigidly, and for the first time in longer than he could remember he called on all the strength in his power-packed body, channeling it into the constriction. The man in his grip writhed, screamed hoarsely until his voice soared to a shriek, then fell to his knees, his dead weight breaking the terrible pressure. Johnny straightened reluctantly, set himself, and swung down in short, brutal arcs into the popeyed face, left, right, left, right, left.
He drove the face right down onto the floor of the cab, and on the way down it disintegrated into a crimson blob. He stepped back and pivoted to confront the six-inch blade on Max's knife as the little man moved whitefaced from his corner. Feinting with his left hand, Johnny stamped hard with his heel on the nearer instep in its low-cut cordovan, and Max yelped in anguish. A sledgehammer blow to the elbow of the knife arm caused the blade to fly across the elevator and clatter noisily on walls and floor.
Brushing aside the ineffectual opposition, Johnny grabbed the white silk shirt front and hound's tooth checked jacket in a twisting grip that pinned the wearer to the wall. “I got a lot of people rootin' for me now, Max. You've had this done to a lot of people... now try it on for size—”
The slender man thrashed frantically at the end of the pinioning arm, toes straining to reach the floor. “I'll kill you, Killain—” It came from deep in his throat.
“Don't miss your first shot, then, because if I ever get my hands on you I'll break you up three quarters of an inch at a time. Now, damn you—”
The elevator rang with the deliberate full-armed slaps he dealt the crimsoning face. A thin trickle of red ran down from the nose and dripped onto the wreckage of the fancy clothes; when the straining figure went limp, Johnny felt only surprise. He stepped back and let the sodden mass slip slowly to the floor where it sprawled leadenly over the bodies of the other two, and in the sudden silence Johnny became conscious of his own harsh breathing. He stared down at his hands and relaxed them with a shudder. It was over, finished....
Almost tentatively he placed a hand on the elevator's controls, as if wondering whether it would once again perform the familiar duty. He shook himself roughly and dropped the car like a stone to the sub-basement. He flung open the door in a crash of metal, grabbed a pair of heels and dragged a heavy body fifteen feet along the cement floor and out a side door to the alley, damp with night mist. On the second trip he felt his saturated uniform split through the shoulders; he was wringing wet and shaking from the reaction, but his resentment still smouldered.
He threw the whimpering Max out onto the pile of flesh, straightened, and released a great explosion of breath from pent-up lungs. From the alley bed drifted a mewling cry. “Don't hit me again— Don't—”
Johnny growled in disgust and jerked shut the heavy outside door with a clang. He slid the bolt, wiped the perspiration from his streaming features, returned to the elevator and rose swiftly to the sixth floor. Standing in the middle of the room he ripped and tore the sticky shreds of the uniform from his body and on the way to the shower picked up the phone, the dark hair matted on his still heaving chest and his skin gleaming with the sweat running down his flanks.
“Sally? Everything quiet?”
“Johnny! I think I rang every phone in the house trying to find you! Max is around here looking for you with two big—”
“I met the gentlemen, ma.”
“You did?” Her voice soared. “What happened?”
“I signed a release. You're in his stable now.”
“Quit kidding. What did happen? You sound funny. Or have you been chasing some blonde through the corridors?”
Johnny flexed a bruised knuckle and tenderly explored a lumpy welt below his ribs. “I disremember, ma. Tell Paul I'll be down in fifteen minutes.” He hung up and walked into the shower, where he stood in a torrent of hot and then cold water. He grimaced at the muscled nudity in the mirror on the back of the bathroom door as he toweled himself vigorously. “Still lucky, aren't you, Ugly? There must be a corker lined up for you when they turn the right page.”
He drew on a robe, sat down in an armchair, and listened as the hammering pulse and heartbeat gradually lessened. He rose finally, took down a fresh uniform from the closet, dressed leisurely, and headed back to the service elevator.
Chapter II
The phone woke him; he looked at his watch as he came completely into focus in the first instant. Four thirty; the daylight four thirty. He cleared his throat. “Yeah?”
“Mr. Frederick would like to see you in his office right away, Johnny,” Myrna's nasal accents informed him.
“I'm on my time now, sis. He knows where to find me.”
He grinned as he hung up; he kept his hand on the receiver and picked it up again almost before it began its second querulous ring. “Who is it?”
“Johnny?”
He blinked; this was not Fussy Freddie's apologetic tenor. “Yeah?”
“You know who this is?”
“I not only don't know, I don't give—” He broke off as his mental card file fitted a face to the voice, and his eyes narrowed. “Can you whistle 'Edelweiss'?”
“I could when I had to. Sharp as ever, aren't you, boy?”
“I'll be right down.” He dressed quickly, in slacks and sport shirt, ran a wet comb through snarled hair, splashed water on his face and rubbed briskly, and left the room, pausing only to remove a chair whose upper back rest was wedged under the doorknob.
The elevator operator arched his brows at sight of him. “Up early, John.”
“Gettin' an idea how the other half lives, Roy.”
Frederick's office was on the mezzanine, but Johnny rode down to the lobby, took a quick but careful look around, and walked back up the stairs. At the office door he knocked once and entered.
“Ah, there you are, Johnny—” Ronald Frederick was not seated at his desk. The little manager sat primly on the edge of an imitation red-leather easy chair beside it, slim fingers twiddling the precisely arranged tips of the handkerchief in his breast pocket. The crease in the gray trousers looked sharp enough to serve as a cutting tool, and t
he narrow shoes glistened. “I understand you and Lieutenant Dameron are already acquainted, Johnny.”
The man behind the limed oak desk stood up, smiling. His hair was the same steel gray as his eyes, and the ruddy face had been much exposed to weather. Authority rode in the impressive bulk of the shoulders in the neat business suit. “Hadn't had time to tell the boss here the details,” he said easily. “Nice to see you again.”
Johnny nodded and looked from the apple-cheeked man to the neat little manager in his chair. “He means nice to see me outside the cell block, Freddie.”
Lieutenant Dameron smiled. “He's got to have his little joke, Mr. Frederick. Didn't Willie Martin tell you about Johnny?”
“Why, you mean our Mr. Martin, the—ah—owner? Why, no, but I think I may have—ah—sensed there was something—”
“It's a good yarn when it's told right, Mr. Frederick. Now you take a few years back—”
“Joe—!” Johnny interrupted warningly, and Lieutenant Dameron's conspiratorial smile included Ronald Frederick.
“Didn't know he was bashful, did you, Mr. Frederick? I don't want to spoil a good story, so you just ask Willie the next time you see him about the night Johnny swam the harbor in Marseilles with Willie on his back. Willie can really tell that story.”
“I'm tellin' you, Joe—”
“That was after they'd outscrambled a bistro full of very unfriendly people, and Willie broke an arm in the shuffle. Get him to tell you about it; Willie's a good talker.”
“And not only Willie, you thick harp. You lost your damn mind?”
The big man nodded to Ronald Frederick, who had un-clasped the primly laced hands in his lap to put on his steel rimmed glasses over whose top edge he was looking at Johnny. “See what I mean, Mr. Frederick? Bashful. Now the night he and I were lined up against the back wall of a cold, wet cellar in Taranto with a good man dead on the floor and a man standing across from us with a gun in his hand—you get the picture, Mr. Frederick?”
“S-surely—”
“Our boy here took off from the cellar wall, picked up three slugs on the way over, but he reached the man with the gun. Broke him all up with his hands. And that reminds me, Johnny—”
“"That reminds me, Johnny—'“ Johnny mimicked savagely. “You in the pulpit nowadays? I'm tellin' you: shut up!”
The ruddy-faced man shrugged. “You can see how it is, Mr. Frederick. And who's responsible for my gray hair. But here we sit visiting, forgetting that you're a busy man—”
The little man rose, reluctantly. “I should have a word with the—ah—chef,” he acknowledged. In his speech patterns he seemed to search carefully for the definitive word. His fascinated glance returned fleetingly to the furious bronzed features of his night bell captain before passing on to the big man behind the desk. “No reason why you shouldn't—ah—visit right along here, though. I'll leave word you're not to be—ah—interrupted.”
“Very kind of you, sir,” the lieutenant said genially. “If you must run along—”
“Why yes. It's been nice meeting you, Lieutenant. Johnny, I'll—ah—look you up later.” The door closed behind the slender figure, and the lieutenant held up his hands in mock defense as Johnny glowered at him.
“It'd better be a good reason, Joe.”
“Reason? Who needs a reason? Why should I let you be a shrinking violet? Relax, boy; get yourself appreciated.”
“Appreciation I can't use.”
“Now there's gratitude for you. I put you in solid with the boss, and you blow your stack. With him you've got it made; you're in like Flynn. You're—”
“I haven't heard a reason yet, Joe.”
The lieutenant delicately extracted a single cigarette between thumb and forefinger from the pack in his breast pocket and leaned back in his chair with it rakishly in his mouth, still unlit. “Let's come back to that in a minute. First things first, Johnny. They put a little piece of paper on my desk today that said that Max Armistead was D.O.A. at City General this morning.”
Johnny kept his face impassive as he flipped on his cigarette lighter and approached the desk. “Somebody else didn't like him? I'll contribute a dollar or two to the defense of whoever shot him.”
“Did I say he was shot?”
“With the muscle he hired, wouldn't they have to shoot him?”
The gray eyes studied him over the lighted cigarette. “Up to nine o'clock this morning I'd have thought so, too, but somebody roughed up the muscle.”
“I'd have paid admission to that if it'd been advertised.”
“Sorry we couldn't arrange it. Max was shot, Johnny'.”
“That's what I said.”
“You did, right out loud. Only thing, it wasn't until we got the medical report we knew there was a bullet in him. He didn't look as though he needed one. Now we come to the odd part.” The gray eyes were veiled momentarily as the lieutenant blinked at the drifting cigarette smoke, but the voice continued evenly. “The muscle got just as good a going over. They're not talking about where they got it— yet, anyway—but there's the usual bicuspid disarray, multiple contusions, and abrasions. And something else.”
“Something else?”
“Yes. One of the muscle is down flat on his back with a few little things disarranged in his chest and ribs.” Lieutenant Dameron leaned forward over the desk and pointed a forceful finger. “Kind of took me back, Johnny, listening to the doc reel off the medical lingo for what was busted, bent, and twisted. Took me back I hate to think how many years to a cellar in Taranto with another sawbones reeling off a list of what was busted, bent, and twisted on a guy had just put three slugs in you. You'd be surprised how alike it sounded.”
“You don't have to play cop with me, Joe. Head-to-head, you get answers.”
“I get answers anyway, Johnny.”
“I got one word for that statement. Probably not much used in your august presence lately.”
The apple cheeks darkened, but Lieutenant Dameron smiled. “How'd we wind up like this? I came over here to sign you up.”
Johnny couldn't keep the surprise from his voice. “Sign me up? For what?”
The lieutenant stubbed out his cigarette. “Max was a tough little hood, Johnny, but recently he'd been taken over by someone who evidently shaves with carborundum. The ground swell I get is that Max was fronting for something that was to be based here, and they felt they had to have you in, or out. Max muffed the assignment. Exit Max. Now how about a little of that head-to-head talk.”
“Say please.”
“Please, you complete bastard—!”
“Okay. Max had been trying to move in on me for a month. I kept standin' him off; I figured he wanted to tuck a couple of girls upstairs like he's done in a couple of other places on 45th Street. Last night him and his crowd laid for me in a parked elevator, which didn't give them much racing room. After we talked it over I threw them out in the alley.”
Lieutenant Dameron placed his hands together at his chin in the shape of a church steeple and peered at Johnny over them. “You haven't gone back much, evidently. Think you had an audience in the alley?”
“That kind of audience should have made a little noise.”
“It should, at that. Although this seems to be a very careful crowd. With that introduction, though, I'd say you're a cinch to hear from them again. I'm glad I played my hunch and came over here. You can keep me posted.”
The silence built up in the office; Johnny rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Did you really think I'd pigeon for you, Joe?”
The red-faced man spread his hands wide, palms down, his face bland. “Who said anything about pigeoning? Couldn't you use a little excitement? You so damn proud of the way you're living?”
“You're almost making a case, Joe.” Johnny leveled a concentrated stare at the man behind the desk, who sat silent. “If I thought you were asking me, an' not tellin' me—”
Still silent, Lieutenant Dameron fished out another cigarette and lit it. He inhaled
deeply, leaned far back in his chair, crossed his legs, and said nothing.
Johnny shook his head negatively, almost regretfully. “You're on the make for something, Joe. I know you. You'd give me an apple for an orchard any day. I don't trust you. We may have been on the same team once, but that was an accident. Besides, you were always a great one to let a few piddlin' little rules and regulations get in the way of gettin' something done. Anyway, how do you know their offer might not be better than yours? If you ever get around to making one?”
The ruddy-faced man laughed and slapped his open palms down on the desk top. “Offer? After what you did to the Greeks bearing gifts? You're odds on to see the lightning before you hear the thunder, boy.”
“I think they'll want to talk it over.”
“It might pay you to be careful in case they don't.” The cigarette in his hand described a brief, encompassing circle. “You get a feeling sometimes, Johnny. This is a big one. It's not women. It's supposed to be something coming in on boats—dope, diamonds, take your pick. So how about it?”
“How about it? What's in it for me, Joe, even if I said yes? You don't really want me, anyway. Would you turn me loose to get the job done?”
“Sure.” The big man said it easily, but he watched Johnny narrowly. “This is civilization, though.”
“You'd be gettin' a man, not a method, Joe.”
“Now wait a minute. You couldn't go off half-cocked—”
“I sent for you, Lieutenant?”
“All right, all right, damn you. Look... think it over, will you? We can work it out. You can't expect me to put my pension on the line just because you happen to feel like outmuscling somebody—”
“I don't expect anything, Joe. I'm not on the team.”
“Think it over. I'll call you tomorrow.” Lieutenant Dameron rose to his feet and walked to the door. He hesitated with it open as though about to say something else, changed his mind, nodded briefly and went out, and the door closed softly behind him.
Doorway to Death Page 2
