“Yeah!” said Gino. “Big blooper. He blew the windows out of the Pentecostal church next door by mistake.”
“And they were having a prayer meeting at the time,” Willis added.
I stood up to stretch my legs. Strolled around the auditorium a bit while the rest of them chattered. It was taking up time which was just what I wanted.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Mary-Lyn called after me.
“Just taking a breather,” I said. “You’re all miles from the truth.”
“Spit out what you know, smarty pants.”
“The vault we want isn’t in a bank. It isn’t even in a Pentecostal church.” I had everyone’s attention now. “The sixth line of the poem tells us where.”
“My whole is my hiding place within the store,” Mary-Lyn read. “What the holy crap does that mean?”
“It means the vault is in a store – a department store.”
“Hannington’s,” Shirley helpfully added.
“You mean a joint like Macy’s has got a vault?” Willis said.
“Why not?” I said. “Hannington’s has a lot of wealthy customers. Some of them want to rent a deposit box to keep items they’ve bought in the store – jewellery, for instance. Others might just rent a box for their private use. I guess Brandenburg J Bekker was one of them.”
“Okay, we’ll do the rest at Hannington’s,” Mary-Lyn said.
“You mean we’re gonna bust into the store now?” Gino asked.
“You think I’m gonna stand in line tomorrow morning with a load of broads looking for a new shade of lipstick?”
She pointed at Winkle and Cilla. “Tie them up and lock them in that shithole of a dressing room. The cleaner can find them in the morning.”
“We don’t have a cleaner,” Winkle wailed.
“Then you better get to know each other real well,” Mary-Lyn said.
“Ugh!” Cilla said.
I winked at her. “I’ll send a rescue squad,” I whispered.
Mary-Lyn stood up and stomped around like a general giving orders.
“Move your asses,” she said. “I’ve got a deposit box to bust into.”
Gino and Willis motioned their guns at Shirley and me and we headed towards the door.
“What are we going to do now?” Shirley whispered.
“I guess that depends on Julius Caesar,” I said.
Shirley rolled her eyes and shook her head.
Shirley and I were driven across town in the back of an old Bedford van.
It had once been painted white, but had turned grey. Its engine sounded like an old bear with a bad cough. And the inside smelt like it was used to transport dead badgers.
But it was everything Mary-Lyn needed – anonymous, private and easy to steal.
Gino drove while Mary-Lyn navigated from the passenger seat. Willis crouched in the back with his gun trained on us. He had his finger on the trigger. I hoped he had the safety catch on or he could loose off a shot when Gino swerved round a corner.
The clock on the Chapel Royal sounded two as we parked in East Street, fifty yards from Hannington’s. As the engine died, Mary-Lyn and her hoodlums began an argument about how to break into the store.
The hoodlums wanted to bust through a door. Mary-Lyn preferred a subtle approach.
She said: “These places always have a night watchman. We’ll need to put him out of action. He’ll have an office near the back door.”
“How do you know that, boss?” Willis asked.
“’Coz I’ve ripped off more stores than you can count on your fingers and toes. Don’t do it now. Jeez! Why have I hired morons?”
“What’s the plan?” Gino asked.
“I’ll sidle up to the door, like I’m a street girl looking for some action. When I’ve got his attention on my outstanding assets, Willis will wing in from the side and sock him so he has a nice long sleep.”
“What do I do?” Gino asked.
“You stay in the van and make sure these two don’t lam out of there.”
Mary-Lyn and Willis climbed out of the van and disappeared round the back of Hannington’s.
The plan must have worked, because Willis was back in five minutes. Gino and Willis harried Shirley and me out of the van. They hustled us up a dark alley and through a back door into a large storeroom. It was lit by low-watt bulbs hanging from loose flex. The place was lined with metal shelves stacked with brown cardboard boxes.
To the right of the back door, there was a glass-walled office. It was furnished with a desk and a chair. There was a cup of coffee and a half-eaten sandwich on the desk. The door was open and I stuck my head in. The room was warm from an oil heater burning in the corner. This would be where the night watchman would hang out during the witching hours.
For the moment, he was in the storeroom with his hands and feet tied and a handkerchief gag around his mouth. He was propped up against a pile of boxes. He looked at us with dagger eyes. I’d put him straight later. I hoped.
In the meantime, I said: “Where’s Mary-Lyn?”
Willis said: “She’s looking for the safety deposit boxes. She’s a real smart lady.”
“If she’s that smart, she can decode the rest of the riddle herself,” I said. “We’ll be on our way.”
“Stay where you are.” Mary-Lyn appeared from behind a stack of boxes. She had a shit-eating grin on her face, like she’d just been handed an Oscar and was lapping up the applause.
I said: “Don’t tell me – you’ve found the safety deposit boxes.”
She said: “I can sniff out anything.”
Shirley said: “With a nose like that, I’m not surprised.”
Mary-Lyn snapped: “Do you want a bullet in the fanny?”
Shirley said: “They don’t all make as big a target as yours.”
Mary-Lyn’s eyes flared. She raised her Luger.
I said: “Fire that and you’ll have the cops here within minutes.”
Mary-Lyn shot Shirley a dirty look: “You’ll end as pussy food,” she said.
“Seems you already are,” Shirl said.
Mary-Lyn knew she’d lost the verbal battle. She stomped off through the store room. The hoodlums hustled Shirl and me after her.
We clumped down some stairs and pushed through a strong steel door. We entered a dark windowless room.
Mary-Lyn threw a switch and long fluorescent tubes hanging from the ceiling flooded the place with light.
A bank of more than a hundred safety deposit boxes, stacked five deep, lined one side of the room. The other side had a set of cubicles where box owners could pore over the contents in privacy.
Willis gawped at the row of boxes and said: “Gee, boss, how long is it gonna take us to open this lot. I said we’d need Jelly Jonah.”
“Shut up, dope,” Mary-Lyn snapped. “We ain’t opening them all. We’re opening only one. The one with the bearer bond.”
“Which one is it?” Gino asked.
Mary-Lyn waved her Luger carelessly at me. “This guy’s gonna tell us. Unless he wants his mouthy girlfriend perforated like a five-cent stamp.”
I said: “If I decode this, you let us go unharmed. Agreed?”
Mary-Lyn grinned. Like one of those spiders that eats its partner after mating. “Now he wants to do a deal,” she said.
She walked over to me. Looked me in the face. I looked back. Her face was twice as tough as mine. But then in my job I didn’t spend as much time lying on my back and looking at the ceiling.
“You put that bearer bond into my hand and you and miss slut-face walk out of here on both feet,” she said.
“Spoken like a true con-woman,” I said. “But we accept.”
I shared a glance with Shirley. She raised an eyebrow and shrugged. It didn’t seem like we had much choice. Shirl had had her fun with Mary-Lyn. But it looked like we were the losers.
Right now, we had to focus on walking out of this alive.
“So which of these boxes have we gotta bust int
o?” Mary-Lyn asked.
“Clever old Bekker gives us that clue in the seventh line of the poem,” I said. “When there think of Caesar, the Rubicon’s hero.”
Willis piped up: “I got that one, boss. It’s Caesar’s Palace in Vegas. Won three hundred bucks there once.”
I ignored him. “We’re talking about Julius Caesar, the Roman bloke who shouldn’t have gone out on the Ides of March. But years earlier, when he was a guy on the make – he faced a big choice. He could march on Rome with his legion and seize power. Or he could do what the senators back home had ordered. They wanted him to disband his victorious troops so he didn’t pose a threat to them. Instead, he marched the legion to the very boundary of Italy – the river Rubicon. If he crossed that river with his legion, there was no turning back.”
Mary-Lyn tapped her foot impatiently. “Jeez, what is this? A sophomores’ history seminar? I want the frigging box number.”
“The story tells us. Because Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49BC. You want box 49.”
Gino slid across the floor to the box like a lizard swimming in its own slime.
“This is the box, boss,” he said. “But it’s got one of those four-number locks on the front. We gotta get the combination.”
Mary-Lyn rounded on me. “Well, what is it, big brain?”
“You’ve got to remember that this poem was written for an audience of one – Max Miller.”
“You telling me that only this Miller guy could understand the whole poem?”
“That’s what Bekker intended. It’s like a private code. If only the sender and the receiver understand it, no-one else can crack the secret.”
“Looks like you’re walking outta here horizontal after all.”
“If I were horizontal, I wouldn’t be walking. But I think there might be a way to get the answer. Max had a song that he sang at almost all his shows. It was called Mary from the Dairy. The seventh line of the poem tells us the first digit in the code is in the word Mary.”
I quoted from the Blue Book: “The first of four numbers you’ll find there in Mary. And the final line provides the other three digits in the words from the dairy.”
“That Bekker guy don’t know ‘rithmatic,” Willis said. “There ain’t no numbers in words.”
“Aren’t there?” I said. “Remember we’ve been asked already to think of Caesar. The Romans used letters to denote numbers – V stands for 5, X stands for 10, L stands for 50, for example.”
“None of those get us anywhere in Mary,” Gino said.
Mary-Lyn was quiet. But she was interested. She’d stopped tapping her foot on the floor.
I said: “The M in Mary stands for 1,000. Then in the words from the dairy, another M adds another 1,000, the D stands for 500 and the I stands for 1.”
“So where does that get us?” Mary-Lyn asked.
“Suppose we add them all together,” I said.
Willis put his gun on the floor and started counting on his fingers.
“Pick your piece up, clown.” Mary-Lyn commanded. “Leave brain work to those of us with brains.”
“So what’s the answer?” I asked her.
“Er…”
“It’s 2501,” I said.
Gino moved to the deposit box. He twiddled the rotors on the number lock 2, 5, 0, 1. He heaved on the handle. The box rattled in its casing. Wouldn’t shift.
I moved over and tried it. The thing was locked solid.
“Looks like you and your little tart will be leaving horizontal, after all,” Mary-Lyn said.
She checked the bullets in the magazine. “Two each and three to spare,” she said. “You’re just about to go from hero to zero.”
Hero to zero.
I clapped a hand against my forehead. “Of course! The sixth line of the poem. But remember in Rome there is never a zero. The Romans may have been great road builders and invented underfloor central heating, but they never came up with a character for zero. We need to exclude the zeros in the four numbers we’ve got.”
I flipped the page on the Blue Book and scribbled the four numbers down – 1,000, 1,000, 500, 1. Then I crossed out all the zeros and looked at what was left – 1151.
I handed the Blue Book to Mary-Lyn. “That will open the box,” I said.
Mary-Lyn spun the rotors, then pulled on the handle. The box opened with a gentle hiss.
She reached in and pulled out a single sheet of paper. Her brow wrinkled as she studied it. Her lips moved as she silently mouthed the words.
She looked up and grinned. “One million smackeroos. And all mine,” she said.
She turned to Willis, but pointed at me and Shirley.
“Now shoot them,” she said.
Chapter 21
“If there’s any shooting to do, my brother will oblige,” a familiar voice said.
We all spun round and gawped.
Terry and Tommy Hardmann loomed in the doorway. Terry Hardmann held a vicious looking pistol. It had a long barrel, like an anteater’s nose.
Tommy Hardmann toted a machine gun. It was one of those old-fashioned ones with a circular magazine underneath the barrel. Edward G Robinson had one in that nineteen-thirties film Little Caesar I’d once seen on TV. It looked like a serious piece.
Or perhaps Terry had the machine gun and Tommy the pistol. After all, they were identical twins.
Either way, they outgunned Mary-Lyn’s raggle-taggle army.
Mary-Lyn’s eyes blazed with fury. She looked like she wanted to say something. But her hand holding the bearer bond whipped behind her back. She wouldn’t be able to hide it from this pair for long.
The Hardmanns advanced further into the room.
I said: “Let me guess. You turned up at the Last Laugh after our party was over. You discovered Ernie Winkle and Cilla tied up in the dressing room. You persuaded them to tell you what had happened and where we’d gone. What I can’t work out is how you found out about the bearer bond.”
Tommy looked at Terry and giggled.
Terry said: “Shall we tell him?”
Tommy snickered: “I think we could answer, er… a gentleman?”
Terry chuckled: “Yes, a gentleman.”
“And does this gentleman have a name?” I asked.
“Several,” Terry giggled.
“But we’re not telling,” Tommy cackled.
The pair couldn’t contain their merriment. At least, someone was having a good time.
“Oh, I get it,” I said. And I did. “You both know Bruce the Boxer, the man who saw Bernstein visiting Winkle at the Last Laugh. No doubt you’re regular visitors to Bruce’s back room with the special magazines. He would’ve been keen to ingratiate himself with a couple of gangsters like you. After Bernstein was killed, Bruce told you about the visits. I expect the mystery has been nagging at your nasty minds for days. No doubt last night’s ruckus at the Golden Kiss spurred you to put the squeeze on Winkle this evening. Pity Mary-Lyn got there first.”
While I’d been delivering this speech, Mary-Lyn had edged closer to the deposit boxes. Gino slid forward, but Terry saw the movement and waved him back with the barrel of his gun.
Willis said: “Hey, boss, are these guys on our side?”
Mary-Lyn ignored that and said to Tommy: “What do you want?”
Terry said: “I want that bearer bond you’re holding behind your back.”
“We can negotiate,” Mary-Lyn said.
“Okay,” Terry said. “Here’s my final offer. Give me the bond within ten seconds or I’ll shoot you.”
Mary-Lyn pouted her lips. Lowered her eyelids like she was a regular Mata Hari. She hitched up the hem of her skirt and thrust out her breasts.
She said: “Shoot me, honey, and you’ll lose out on the fringe benefits.”
Terry glanced at Tommy: “We could shoot her later.”
Tommy said: “Don’t fall for her tricks.”
“Try mine, instead,” Shirley said.
Tommy hadn’t noticed Shirl had crept up
beside him.
Shirl puckered up her lips and tossed back her blonde hair. She moved so close to Tommy he had to move his machine gun.
She said in a low husky voice: “I like a guy who fires more than blanks.”
Tommy coloured up. He said: “Ain’t you the bint we met at the club?” He glanced at Terry who was staring at Mary-Lyn. “Hey, perhaps we could have one each if we shoot these other guys. We could take the bond later.”
Shirl ran her hand softly up the back of Tommy’s head.
“I like a man who plans ahead,” she said. She was right in front of Tommy now.
And then her right leg moved in a blur. There was a wet squelch as her knee connected with Tommy’s crotch. And he buckled over.
His finger squeezed the machine gun’s trigger and a volley of shots bounced off the floor and ricocheted around the room. And then something jammed and the magazine fell off. It clunked on the floor and rolled away.
We’d all dived for the floor as the gun’s blast echoed. It sounded like a thousand pneumatic drills had hammered through the walls. The bullets singed off the boxes and dinged around the cubicles. And then one hit a fluorescent light. It shattered and glass rained down on the room.
I stuck my head up to see where Shirley was. She’d taken cover behind Tommy.
The other lights flickered. And then they died. The room was plunged into a blackness so dark it could’ve been the end of the universe. The place where all light ends.
And then the roar of the echoes faded as though they’d been drawn away to another world. A heavy silence descended on the room.
But the silence lasted only for seconds. Because Tommy moaned. Then there was a guttural choke in his throat - like slugs sliding down a slimy drainpipe. There was a plop and a squelch as Tommy’s vomit hit the floor.
“Yuk!” Shirley said.
On the other side of the room, Willis said: “My leg hurts, Gino, I think one of those bullets hit me. Gino, are you there…?”
Gino didn’t reply.
To my left, there was a rustling sound. Mary-Lyn was moving.
I couldn’t see anything, but I sensed she’d stood up and was moving across the room.
Terry still had his anteater pistol. I hoped she didn’t bump into him. If that pistol went off in the dark, there was no knowing who it would hit.
The Comedy Club Mystery Page 19
