“Why don’t you go to the police, Mr. Nugent?”
“No, that’s no good.” I didn’t tell him why. I had as much, possibly even more, to lose by police interference than they did. “I’m going to blow town for a while,” I decided suddenly. Yes, that was it. I had the money now, one place was as good as another to enjoy it in.
I looked down at my sock-feet, wiggled my toes ruefully. “Look, there’s something I have to have, though, and I can’t go back to there myself and get it. You’ve been up to my place several times, you know the layout.” I didn’t know why, but I had a strong hunch I could trust him. “I’m going to take a chance on you, Limpy. Here’s my key. Go up there and get me a pair of shoes out of the clothes-closet. That’s one thing. And the second thing—now listen carefully. You know that little knee-high frigidaire in the serving-pantry? Open it up. Put your hand in where the ice-cube tray goes. Instead you’ll find a flat tin box, locked. Pull it out, wrap it up in a towel or something, and bring it out with you.”
I didn’t tell him what was in it. There was roughly eleven thousand dollars in cash in it. I’d spent about a thousand in the past week. I hadn’t trusted it to any bank or even the hotel safe. I was glad now.
“The elevator boys all know you, and I’ll phone in to the desk from outside and tell them I’m sending you over to get something from my rooms, so you won’t be stopped on the way out. You bring it over to the station and meet me there. I’ll be in the last row of benches in the waiting-room, against the wall, so my bare feet won’t be noticed. I’ll have a newspaper spread out full-width in front of my face. Look for me behind a spread-out newspaper.”
“I can get in and out through the service entrance. That way, if they do happen to spot me, they won’t think nothing of it. I know the hotel fireman, I’ve often gone down there to get warmed up in the cold weather.”
“Make it as fast as you can, Limpy. There’s a Midnight Flier I’d like to make.”
As I watched him get out of the cab and disappear around the corner, I wondered if I’d ever see him again. Even though I hadn’t told him, he was no fool, he must have a good hunch what was in such a box as I’d asked him to bring. Locked or otherwise, a chisel and hammer would open it in five minutes.
I put in my identifying call to the hotel and then I cabbed over to the station. I had enough money on my person to buy my Flier ticket ahead of time, without waiting for him. My socks were black, fortunately, and I forced myself to walk as naturally as possible, in order to avoid attracting attention to my feet. No one seemed to notice that my extremities ended in silk instead of shoe-leather. I picked up a newspaper, sidled into the last row of benches in the waiting-room, and opened it out full-spread before my face.
* * *
—
I had sixteen minutes to go before train-time.
The first five minutes, he was coming and it was going to be all right. The second five, he’d let me down, he’d taken the cash-box and goodbye. I’d have to powder out of here as broke as I’d been a week ago, and when I got where I was going, the whole thing would start over—park-benches and papers out of bins. Then the next four minutes or so after that with the gates already open and that minute-hand on the wall creeping closer and closer to twelve, were a mixture of the two, hope and despair, with a third fear added for good measure. Maybe it wasn’t his fault, maybe those guys waiting outside had caught on, had jumped on him and hauled him off with them as he came out, service-entrance or no service-entrance.
Somebody coughed in front of my newspaper, and I tucked my head a little lower. The cough came again, like a double-take-em of the throat if there is such a thing. This was on the fourteenth minute.
I lowered the paper and Limpy was sitting there, in the seat right in front of me. He was turned sidewise toward me, holding up a paper of his own to screen him from the front. His arm hung down over the back of the seat toward me. An oddly-shaped newspaper-wrapped bundle, obviously a pair of shoes, already lay on the floor beside me. The flat oblong of the strong-box, also newspaper-wrapped, came down beside them a moment later, from somewhere underneath his outer clothing.
“Boy,” I exhaled softly. I’d never been so glad to see anyone in my life. I got on the shoes, and sheathed the long flat box in the waist-band of my trousers, upright against my side. It stayed there pretty securely, and without making a very noticeable bulge.
There was a minute-and-a-half yet before the train left. I couldn’t resist asking him, as I stood up: “Limpy, did you have any idea what was in this box?”
“Sure,” he said unhesitatingly. “Several thousand dollars in cash.”
I stared at him, startled. “How did you know?”
“I couldn’t help seeing it, the lid came open while I was wrapping it. You maybe thought you locked it the last time you took it out, but in your excitement or hurry you must have forgot to. It was open.”
I just stared at him unbelievingly. “You’re what I call an honest man, Limpy. There aren’t many like you.”
“But you’re my friend, Mr. Nugent,” he protested. “A guy don’t do that to his friends.”
He came out to the train with me to see me off. There was less than a minute left now. A day-coach had been all I’d been able to get, at the last minute like that. I got aboard, found a seat by the window, and spoke to him on the platform outside, where he’d remained standing, through a two-inch opening left at the bottom of the pane, bending over so I could see him. The shade had been drawn down to match.
“Look,” I said. “There’s a lot of swell clothes, and some of them I never had time to wear yet, and gadgets I’m leaving behind at the hotel. I want you to have them. The rooms have been paid for until tomorrow night. You still have the key. You go up there and take them with you.”
“I couldn’t do that, Mr. Nugent,” he said disclaimingly. “F’rinstance, if I wore clothes that looked too good, it would kill my way of earning a livelihood. But I’ll take your belongings over to my place and look after them for you there, until you come back to town. I’ll give you my address, so you’ll know where to find me. Or in case you want them forwarded, drop me a line. Just Limpy Jones. I got a room on the third floor, over at 410 Pokanoke Street. You can remember that name, can’t you?”
“Look, Limpy, I want to do something for you—” I protested.
“Four ten Pokanoke Street,” he insisted.
* * *
—
Somebody had dropped heavily into the seat beside me. I lowered my voice so I wouldn’t be overheard. “I’ll never forget what you did for me tonight. I’m O.K. now, the train’ll be pulling out in a few more seconds. Take care of yourself, Limpy.”
“Lots of luck, Mr. Nugent,” he said. He turned and drifted away through the groups on the platform.
I sank back in my seat, tilted my hat well down on the bridge of my nose to shade my eyes, and prepared to doze. I could hear the conductors relaying “ ’Board” outside, from one car to the next, until it had died out all the way up front somewhere.
I pushed my hat up off my eyes again and turned to the man beside me. “Pardon me, would you mind taking your elbow out of my ribs, I’m trying to take a little nap here.”
“That ain’t my elbow,” was the casual answer.
I looked and it was a gun. He had his right arm tucked under his left, and the gun came out just about where his left elbow would have been.
The wheels had given their first jerky little turn under us. “Time we were getting off, isn’t it?” he was as matter-of-fact about it as though we were a couple of fellow-commuters riding out to the same station together of an evening.
“You can’t hijack me off the middle of a crowded train like this, gun or no gun.”
“The gun ain’t the important part,” he agreed languidly. “The tin is.” His hand came out of vest
and showed it to me, put it back again. “The gun is just to hold you still so you’ll take time to look at it.” The wheels were starting to pick up tempo. He raised his voice authoritatively, so that it would reach the vestibule. “Hold that door, conductor, two rainchecks!” And to me: “Get going.”
I walked down the aisle ahead of him, made the transfer to the platform beginning to sidle past, and he hopped off at my heels, without breaking the twist he had on my arm.
He stopped there a moment and frisked me, in full sight of everyone, while the train hurtled by. “What’s this?” he said, when he came to the tin box.
“Money.”
He transferred it to his own outside coat-pocket. “All right,” he said, “now if you don’t want the bracelets in front of everyone, just walk quietly out through the station with me.”
I began walking. A dick. And all along I’d thought it was a matter of personal vengeance on the part of the real Lee Nugent. “What’s it for?” I asked him as we made our way back across the main rotunda.
He gave me a halfway smile. “What’re you trying to do, kid me? You don’t know, do you? You haven’t the slightest idea. Are you Lee Nugent or aren’t you?”
Sure, it had to do with that. They must have changed their minds, turned it over to the police, when they found I’d slipped through their own fingers. What could I do but brazen it out? “I’m Lee Nugent,” I answered crisply. “And that money is rightfully mine.”
“Glad to hear it,” he said drily. “Nobody’s talking about the money. You’re wanted for murder. Long time no catch. But all that publicity you got a couple days ago sure dropped you in our laps pretty. Pictures ’n everything. Brother, you must think we don’t keep records and haven’t got good memories.”
I’d taken sudden root on the mosaic flooring. Even the gun couldn’t get me to stir for a second. So that explained why the account hadn’t been claimed! The original Nugent had known better than to show up, twelve thousand or no twelve thousand.
“No, wait—listen to me a minute—I’ll make a clean breast of it, I’m not Lee Nugent. I crashed that account. My right name is—”
He smiled humorlessly. “So now you’re not. A minute ago you were. You sure change fast. Keep moving.”
I stumbled on out to the street beside him. They must have finger-prints and things like that on record; I could clear myself, I could prove I wasn’t the same individual.
We’d stopped beside a car standing waiting a short distance down from the main entrance to the station. There was one other man in it, in civilian clothes, at the wheel. He swung the door open as we neared it. The dick collared me into the back ahead of him and then got in after me. Neither he nor the driver said anything to one another, and the car started off without any instructions being given.
“Look,” I began again in another minute or two, “I tell you I’m not Lee Nugent. There must be a difference in our descriptions, there must be something that’ll—”
“Don’t tell it to me,” he said with stony unconcern, “tell it where we’re going when we get there—if it’ll do you any good. Personally, I don’t give a hoot who you are. To me you’re just a guy I was sent out to bring in.”
I didn’t speak again for a while—what was the use?—until a wrong street had ticked by, and then a second and a third. I looked out sharply, and then sharply back to them. “This isn’t the way to headquarters.”
The one beside me relayed it to the driver with satiric emphasis. “This isn’t the way to headquarters.”
Something darker than the overtones of the official arrest began to descend on me; an oppressive sense of doom, a complete extinction of hope. The police, though they may err at times, at least are not vindictive just for the sake of being so. Private vengeance is.
When the car stopped finally, I was vaguely aware of the dim outline of some large house directly before us. I was hustled inside before I could further identify it. The driver of the car as well as the man who had seized me on the train both came inside with me.
I was shoved into a room in which there was a cobblestone fireplace and wood panelling on the walls. Whatever this place was, it was fitted up as though it was used for dwelling purposes, was someone’s residence. There were two men in it, waiting for us. One standing, the other negligently balanced across the corner of a heavy table, one leg dangling short and repeatedly flipping an open jackknife in air and catching it almost miraculously each time by the flat of the open blade between two fingers before it could bite into the polished table-surface. The one standing was the man I had given the slip to at the night-club.
He came forward and he said: “Here. You forgot something.” And he let me have one of my own patent-dress-shoes full in the face. It stunned me for a minute. I went back against the table, and the ones who had come in with me held me up between them. I heard one of them say: “Don’t do that till Ed sees him.”
One of them left the room, and there was a short wait. Then he reappeared followed by a short, heavy-set man. The latter was fully dressed, but he was in the act of shrugging on his jacket as he came through the doorway. He buttoned it, then he raised both hands and smoothed back his stringy black hair, as though he’d been taking a nap fully dressed when they summoned him. He appeared to be in his early forties, and he was probably younger than he looked.
He walked all around me two or three times, looking me up and down, almost like a fitter in a clothing-store inspecting someone trying on a new suit. “Uh-huh,” he grunted affirmatively a couple of times, “uh-huh.” Then he stopped finally, directly before me. “So this is what you’re like.”
I said, a lot more defiantly than I felt: “You’re not the police. What’s this for, what’s it about?”
He withdrew to the other side of the table, ensconced himself in a swivel chair, cocked one leg up over the other, stripped a cigar. One of his henchmen supplied the match.
Finally, when I thought he was never going to speak again, “I’m Eddie Donnelly,” he said. “Mean anything to you?”
“No, because I’m not—”
“It should,” he overrode me. “Well it would to your father, if he hadn’t been smart enough to die before I could get my hands on him.”
“I haven’t any fa—”
Again he bore me down. “Maybe I should refresh your memory. Joe Nugent, your father, and mine were partners. A crooked partner and a partner that was honest. The crooked one swindled the honest one, and hundreds of other people that trusted the honest one besides. Then he disappeared, and let the innocent one take the rap for him. It’s an old story, old as the hills. But I never yet grew tired of repeating it. Because it happened to me and mine!”
5
His face darkened. “My father went to jail, for something he didn’t do. Yours hid his family out of sight for a while, and went off by himself, out of reach, to another country, where he lived off the fat of the land on stolen money, waiting for things to blow over. But it didn’t end there. My father died in jail. He never came out alive again. It killed him just as surely as a gun or a knife. He was murdered. They took me up to see him near the end. Yes, I was just a kid, but they took me up to see him, that was his last request. And his dying words to me were: ‘Get even for us, Eddie. Get even on that man that’s done this to us, on him and his, if it takes all your life.’ I swore I would, and I keep my oath to a dying man.”
He flung down his cigar, as though the memory of all this made it taste bad. “I saw my mother scrub floors on her hands and knees, until she died too, years before her time, a worn-out drudge. I saw my sister—well, something even worse happened to her, because there was no one to give us a home any more. I grew up on the streets myself, and then in reform school. All because my birthright was taken away from me.
“But I had one thing through it all to keep me going. My oath to get even. An
d it still hasn’t been fulfilled. I caught up with him years later. I tracked him down until I’d caught up with him. And I was just too late. Just a few weeks too late. He’d died safe in bed, in the beautiful mansion that blood-money had bought him. He’d died a respected, honored, adopted citizen in that second home of his in a foreign land. I couldn’t take that away from him. My oath went unfulfilled. But I knew he had a son somewhere. A son he was too cowardly to come back and acknowledge.” His fist came down with a sound like thunder. “And now I’ve got his son. That’s something even better!”
“Only you haven’t,” I said. “I was born George Palmer. I never heard of any Lee Nugent until a few short days ago. I picked the name at random out of a newspaper because I saw there was some money waiting to be claimed, and I went down there and impersonated him. You’ve got the wrong guy. You’ve got a fake, a phony. What good is it to your vengeance to get even on somebody entirely different? I haven’t got the blood of your father’s enemy in my veins—”
To my surprise he’d shut up completely. I hadn’t thought it would be this easy to convince him. Suddenly, for some reason or other, he seemed uncertain. They were all looking at him curiously. I saw. He made a steeple of his fingertips and poised them before his mouth. “It’s always possible, of course,” he said quietly, “that me and my fellows here have made such a mistake. Isn’t it, boys?”
He turned and looked hard at them, one by one. I saw the corners of his eyebrows quirk upward. Then he turned back to me again. “I don’t want to be too hasty. I’ve waited a long time. I can afford to wait just a little longer, for the sake of being sure. Suppose I send down to your old neighborhood, bring someone up here and see if they recognize you. There’s no one has such long memories nor such keen eyesight for familiar faces as old-time neighbors—” He was soft as silk now; he was good. “Naturally, I don’t mean where you were first raised, you were too small then,” he interposed smoothly. “I mean from where you moved to after that, from where he hid you out later—” He snapped his fingers helplessly a couple of times, like you do when you’re trying to remember a name.
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 46
