The Lucky Stiff

by Craig Rice

  The little lawyer shuddered, called room service, and demanded a rush double order of pancakes with sausage, scrambled eggs, hot biscuits with marmalade, coffee, half an apple pie, and a quart of cold beer.

  “There’s a lot more to discuss,” he said as he hung up the phone, “but I dislike doing my discussing on an empty stomach.” He managed a delicate operation of wrapping the sheet around him, squaw fashion, and getting out of bed, all at the same time. “I’m going to take a shave and a shower. There’s all kinds of make-up and stuff in the top left-hand dresser drawer in case you want any. And if you want a drink, there’s a bottle of gin under the clean socks in the middle drawer.”

  He stood under the shower for a long time, and lingered over his shave. He should have had a hangover, but he felt like a million—hell, two million—dollars.

  He knew what Anna Marie was doing. He knew why she was doing it. Frankly, he didn’t blame her. But maybe he could talk her out of it. Because if she went ahead with what was undoubtedly in her mind, she was going to blow the lid off a political pot that was already beginning to steam a little.

  It would destroy a number of his best connections, if such a thing took place, but that wasn’t his reason. He could always make new connections. It would ruin a number of his friends. Or were they his friends? Malone paused, razor in hand, and the lathered face that looked back at him from the mirror answered, “No.”

  It might bring about a reform administration in the next election, and he’d have to find a new place to play poker. That had happened before, and he’d always managed.

  There would be danger to Anna Marie herself. Malone’s razor paused again, halfway down one cheek, and he said, “Not with me around, there wouldn’t.”

  But there would be trouble, big trouble, before the thing was through. Some of it he could anticipate, some of it he could sense. Murder, and suicide, and ruin, and political upheaval. Anna Marie was holding dynamite in her frail, lovely hands. Malone didn’t like explosions.

  He finished shaving and began rubbing lotion on his face. Maybe he could talk her into giving up the whole thing. If she wanted to have a little fun with Bugs Brodie, or Butts O’Hare, or some of the boys at the City Hall first—well, he, Malone, was always willing to lend his hand to a practical joke. Then the whole thing could be explained as a joke. He grinned at the recollection of how Joe the Angel’s face had looked, and sobered quickly when he thought of how his own face must have looked. All right, a joke was a joke.

  Sure, that was the thing to do. Talk her out of it.

  Malone patted talcum powder on his face and brushed his hair. He’d carried his clothes into the bathroom, and he dressed slowly, rehearsing what he was going to say to her.

  And then, when he had talked her out of it—

  He could make a lot more money than he did and manage his affairs a lot better. He might even be able to collect some of the money his clients owed him. He could reorganize his office arrangements and go after some really important cases. Why, with his brains, and his connections, he could be a rich man in no time at all!

  There were some beautiful little apartments overlooking the lake, up on the drive.

  Or maybe a pretty little house in Wilmette. Anna Marie might like a house. Just a tiny but perfect house, like a jewel box.

  He’d reopen his charge accounts at Saks’ and Blum’s-Vogue. He’d make a lunch date for tomorrow or next day with that wholesale jeweler. And didn’t that pawnbroker he’d successfully defended on an arson charge have a brother-in-law in the fur business?

  Malone whistled happily as he tied his tie. From now on, everything was going to be wonderful.

  He was glad that his brown suit had just come back from the cleaners, and that he had a new tie. He whistled a few more bars as he polished his shoes with the end of the towel and stuffed the towel behind the bathtub. Finally he gave his hair one last lick with the brush. Then he opened the door.

  There was Anna Marie, standing before the dresser, smiling at him in the mirror. She’d dressed and made up her face. He stared at her.

  The tawny hair rippled on her shoulders when she moved her head. She was the most gorgeous girl Malone had ever seen, and he’d seen a lot of gorgeous girls in his time. The whole picture of what had happened to her ran through his brain, like the life history that’s supposed to run through the brain of a drowning man. It took about ten seconds, but he saw all of it—the trial, the appeals, the long weeks in the deathhouse, the final walk to what she’d thought would be the electric chair. Someone had planned, deliberately, that it would happen to her, that way.

  It wasn’t going to be a practical joke. It was going to be something serious, and deadly. It was going to be dynamite. And, Malone told himself, he was going to love it.

  “All right, baby,” he said quietly. “We’ll do it your way.”

  Chapter Six

  Ordinarily, John J. Malone preferred delicate-looking girls, with dainty, birdlike appetites. Possibly a hangover from the days when he was putting himself through night law school by driving a taxi. In those days a girl who said, “I’m not hungry, thank you, I’ll just take a cup of coffee,” was a rare jewel to be treasured. Or possibly it was because, in his later, and more affluent days, he liked his girls to pay attention to him, and not what he was feeding them.

  This morning, though, he enjoyed watching Anna Marie at her breakfast. She’d been eating prison breakfasts for weeks now, and the little lawyer knew exactly how much graft was being collected from the food allowances. And even without the graft, oatmeal was a hell of a thing to face when you first woke up in the morning.

  He managed, surreptitiously, to slide five of the pancakes onto her plate, and three onto his own. Most of the little sausages landed beside the five pancakes, and the sirup jug was pushed over to her side of the table. He watched, happily, while she wiped up the last drop of sirup with the last square inch of pancake. He gave her most of the scrambled eggs, and felt a warm, purring sensation when she piled gobs of marmalade on the biscuit. Finally, when she accepted most of the apple pie, and sighed over her coffee, his happiness was complete.

  A fly would have starved to death on what was left on the table when breakfast was over.

  Malone had been keeping the rest of the beer—he’d served some of it with the scrambled eggs—cool under the cold-water tap in the bathtub. Now he poured out two glasses, gave Anna Marie a cigarette, and said, “Well? Who framed you? Or is that what you want to find out?”

  Anna Marie took a long, slow drag on her cigarette and said, “If I’d known, I wouldn’t have started out by haunting you.” She gazed through the smoke and said, “I’m sorry I said that, this isn’t any time to be funny.” She paused. “What’s more, I’m sorry I played that trick on you last night. I just couldn’t resist—” She paused again. “And I’m sorry—oh, well, the hell with it.”

  She put down the cigarette and picked it up again. “I had to have someone to help. I couldn’t manage a thing like this by myself. You were—the only person—Well, if I’d had you at the trial, none of this would have happened. I was worried once, and I wanted—but they all kept saying, ‘Don’t worry, Anna Marie, we’ll get you a good lawyer,’ ‘don’t worry Anna Marie, we’ll fix everything.’” She shook her head. “And then all of a sudden it was over, and—”

  “Never mind,” Malone said hastily. “That was yesterday.”

  “And there’ll always be a tomorrow,” she said automatically. She paused, stared at him, and suddenly laughed. “Every now and then I go on talking as if I were dictating something to sell to a confession magazine.”

  “And every now and then,” Malone said, “I start answering as if I were reading one.” He bit the end off a cigar. “There are certain things you want to do.”

  She nodded, and the “Yes” was a whisper.

  Malone blew a shred of tobacco off his lip and reached for a match. “Why?”

  “Well, because—” She looked up at him. “A
re you my lawyer, or aren’t you?”

  “At least that,” Malone said. “Unless I have been dreaming.”

  To his amazement, she blushed. Becomingly, too. He finally managed to get his cigar lit, and sent up a smoke screen between them.

  “Revenge can be a lot of fun,” the little lawyer said slowly, “but it can be a lot of trouble, too. Sometimes it’s better to forget all the hell you’ve been through and pick up life at the beginning of the next chapter, and follow it through to the to-be-continued.”

  “A lovely sentiment,” she said. “I wish I agreed with it.” Her lips were pale under the make-up. “It isn’t revenge. Not for me, I mean. Sure, it was a bad few months, but I’m alive. And Big Joe—”

  Malone looked tactfully away, in spite of the smoke screen. A moment later he said, “Look out for that cigarette. Do you want to set the hotel on fire when it’s the only home I have?”

  She picked it up from the corner of the rug, brushed at the ashes with her fingertips, and said, “Sorry. Listen, Malone. Big Joe Childers had his failings, but he was a good guy. You know, a good guy. He was a crook, all right, sure, but he was one of the most honest crooks I’ve ever met, and I’ve met a lot of them. He wanted to live a long time, just like everybody wants to live a long time. Just like you want to, and I do.”

  “Ike Malloy killed him,” Malone said, trying to sound disinterested.

  Anna Marie jumped up from her chair. “Look, when some guy kills another guy, you don’t arrest the gun he used, do you? Ike Malloy was a weapon, that’s all.”

  “A very nice piece of reasoning,” Malone said approvingly. “You have the makings of a lawyer.” He glanced at her and added, “Though it would be a great pity for you to waste yourself on a legal career.”

  He picked up the newspaper and looked at it for a long time. “There are a few interesting facts about Ike Malloy’s confession.”

  Anna Marie lifted a questioning eyebrow.

  “It seems,” Malone said, “an inquisitive cub reporter named Griggs got to the hospital about two jumps behind the ambulance bringing in Ike Malloy. It took him a little time to get to Malloy’s room, because the press was definitely not invited. He got to the door just in time to hear Malloy demanding that the police take down his confession that he’d killed Big Joe Childers. But Ike Malloy’s lawyer was informing the doctor and the policeman in charge that his client was obviously delirious and in no condition to talk.” He paused. “Odd, isn’t it, that his lawyer would be there, handling things.”

  “Go on,” Anna Marie said through tight lips.

  “Another item in the paper,” Malone said, “states that one Albert Griggs, reporter, is in St. Luke’s Hospital recovering from head wounds received in an attempted holdup in an alley leading from his newspaper’s parking lot.” He laid down the paper for a moment. “They certainly were anxious to make sure that Ike Malloy’s confession never saw daylight.”

  Her lovely mouth twisted into a wry smile. “I damned near was a real ghost.”

  “You can say that again,” Malone said with feeling. “And the only reason you aren’t is that this Griggs guy had sense enough to phone his paper from the public telephone in the hospital lobby before Ike Malloy’s boss’s hired hands kicked him out. Because the city editor got right on the job, and Captain von Flanagan, of the Homicide Bureau, was at Ike Malloy’s bedside in fifteen minutes.”

  She sighed. “That was close.”

  “Ike Malloy told the whole works,” Malone said. “Names and details. Von Flanagan checked fast. The two guys who drove Malloy to the saloon and waited outside, with the engine running in their car, broke down and talked. So did the waiter who let Malloy in the back way. In fact, Malloy only omitted one important detail.”

  “I know,” she said. “He didn’t tell who hired him.”

  “But,” Malone told her, “the newspaper story does name the lawyer who said Malloy was in no condition to talk. He gave a statement later, by the way, to the effect that he had sincerely believed his client was out of his head, and that he was only anxious to protect his client from, quote, injudicious questioning, unquote. You can’t disbar a man for that, nor even publicly state that he’s one of the damnedest liars since the snake in Eden.”

  “His name?” Anna Marie asked.

  “Jesse Conway,” Malone said.

  There was a silence. Malone lit a cigar and looked thoughtfully at Anna Marie.

  “I know a lot of people,” Malone murmured. He might have been talking to himself. “You’d be surprised at some of the people I know. I’m surprised myself, now and then. I knew Ike Malloy, for instance. In fact. I was best man at his sister’s wedding. Ike was a good, honest guy who obeyed orders and never killed anybody he wasn’t told to kill. I know a lot of other people, including a couple of guys who could kidnap anybody you cared to name, and who could—using methods I wouldn’t care to discuss—get information out of a mummy.”

  He paused, gazing at the end of his cigar. “I even know Jesse Conway. He used to be a pretty good lawyer. He used to be a pretty good guy, too. But something happened to him. I don’t know what it was. He has plenty of money, but damned few clients. And he’s gone soft. Soft, and worried.”

  Anna Marie said nothing. She was remembering Jesse Conway helping her into the taxi last night.

  “Unless I’m very much mistaken,” Malone said quietly, “it would take those guys I mentioned about five minutes to pry all the information you need loose from Jesse Conway. If you want it that way.”

  This time the silence seemed to stretch on and on. Then Anna Marie put out her cigarette and said, “I don’t.”

  “Even if Jesse Conway told you the name you want to know, and all the details?”

  She shook her head. “The one name isn’t enough. Because I—” Her voice broke off. “I can’t explain it.”

  “I know,” Malone said. “You want to haunt houses. And I want to help you. And between us, we’ll probably get into a lot of trouble, and I’m going to love it. Now, tell me what made you trust Jesse Conway in the first place?”

  She looked at the floor. “Malone, I had to trust somebody. It was—” She paused for a moment. “It happened so fast. I was angry at the time. Not because I was in love with Big Joe, I wasn’t. Not because he provided for me—well, let’s call it lavishly. Not because he was running around with another girl, even if she was one of my best friends. But because he would run around with another girl and not tell me. We’d always been square with each other, understand?”

  “I do,” Malone said. He aimed an inch of cigar ash at the ash tray and missed. “Who was the girl, or is it any of my business?”

  “Milly Dale,” Anna Marie said. “She’s a singer. A swell kid.”

  Malone nodded and said in a very noncommittal voice, “I’ve heard of her.”

  “Big Joe swore he’d never been out with her in his life,” Anna Marie said. Suddenly she lifted her head, and her smoky eyes grew brightly wet. “He was telling the truth. But I didn’t know it then. And we got into a row. And then someone pushed open the door and shot Big Joe, and before I knew what was going on, he’d shoved the gun in my hand and was gone, and then the room was full of people, and the police came and—”

  “Never mind,” Malone said hastily. “I read all that in the papers.” He wanted to put his arms around her, to comfort and soothe her, the way one would comfort and soothe a scared little child who’d not only been snatched from in front of a speeding truck but had dropped and lost an ice-cream cone in the excitement. Instead, he poured a little more gin in her glass and lit a cigarette for her. “We were talking about Jesse Conway, remember?” He glanced at her and added, “You can skip the next chapter because I can guess it. You were scared, and dazed, and sick, and you hardly knew what was going on. You were arrested and booked on suspicion of homicide, and then someone came to see you and said everything would be fixed up. Who was it?”

  “Mike Brodie. Know him?”

  �
��I do,” Malone said. His mouth was grim. “Cousin of Bugs Brodie, the slot machine boss.”

  “He said everything would be O.K., and he’d been a good friend of Big Joe’s, so I believed him. And he’d gotten me a lawyer, Jesse Conway, and I was to trust Jesse Conway and—and—” her voice broke again.

  “And not worry,” Malone finished for her. “And while you were two jumps from the chair, Jesse Conway was trying to hush up the confession that saved your life.”

  Anna Marie closed her eyes for just a moment. She was hearing Jesse Conway’s voice—“Believe me, Anna Marie—I couldn’t help it—” Don’t get soft, she told herself. She looked at Malone and managed to smile brightly, almost too brightly.

  “Let’s get practical, Malone. I’ve got to find a hideout. I’ve got to get in touch with Jesse Conway so he can get me whatever clothes and stuff I need from my apartment. Money, too.”

  “I can manage the hide-out,” Malone said. He reached for the phone, called the manager of the hotel and explained that he had an important witness who had to be kept concealed for a few days, and how about that room around the corner from the freight elevator? Available? Fine. The usual procedure—all telephone calls to be switched to his, Malone’s room, and no maid service without fifteen minutes’ notice from the switchboard. Thanks, pal.

  “Sometimes,” Malone told her, hanging up the phone, “I do have to hide out important witnesses. A couple of times I’ve had to hide out an important murderer. But this is the first time I’ve had to hide out an important ghost.” He paused, scowled. “Suppose Jesse Conway or Garrity decide to confide in whoever was back of this business?”

  “Right now,” she said, “neither of them would dare. They’re too scared.”

  Malone nodded. “That’s true. You’ve got both of them nicely cornered. I’ll get Jesse Conway for you.” He picked up the phone again, called a number, and handed the phone to her.

  She said, “May I speak to Mr. Conway, please. When do you expect him? Do you know where I can reach him? Thank you.” She hung up.