The knife flipped in a small arc and landed back in the man’s palm. His eyes remained on Harry. “Yeah,” he said. “Cigarettes on the soles, if you’re interested. Tape on the mouth, to keep her from yelling. Make you mad?”
Harry’s muscles bunched for a blind rush, then he froze as a voice from the table cracked like a pistol shot. “Hold it, Nolan!”
Harry twisted toward the voice. It was the big, red-faced man who had spoken.
In a reasonable tone the man said, “Ripper can slice the edge of a playing card with that thing at thirty feet. On top of that my two boys at the door have cocked pistols aimed at your guts. Nobody wants to harm either you or your wife. Let’s talk things over like reasonable human beings.”
He waved a hand at one of the vacant chairs around the table. Harry glanced back at the knife, then at the two guns centered at him from the doorway. Finally he looked down at Helen, who gave him a smile full of pain and shook her head hopelessly.
Harry’s shoulders slumped and he walked over to seat himself at the table.
“Let me introduce myself,” the big man said. “I’m John Gault, and this is my assistant, Gerald Crane.”
Without preamble, Big John Gault announced what he wanted the black ledger mentioned in Dale Thompson’s column. He was convinced Helen knew where it was, but had been unable to persuade her to tell. Harry had been brought in to aid the persuasion. If he could talk his wife into disclosing where the ledger was, Big John was willing to pay them five thousand dollars and put them on a train for Des Moines, with the stipulation that neither ever return to Wright City.
The alternative Big John did not mention, but the implication was obvious.
Harry suppressed his rage enough to remark, “This ledger must be important.” He turned toward Helen. “What’s in it, honey?”
Lifelessly Helen said, “A complete record of payoffs in Wright City for the past ten years. Publication would have put John Gault and his whole crooked gang behind bars.”
“And you know where it is?”
The distinguished looking Gerald Crane answered for her. “We talked to the elevator operator at the Newbold Arms. Your wife arrived for work Friday at eight-thirty, and left the building again ten minutes later with a package the size of the ledger under her arm. She was gone twenty minutes and returned without it. In the interim my friend Ripper and I…ah…called on Mr. Thompson, so when your wife returned, she walked right into our arms. Obviously Thompson suspected we might try to recover the ledger and had your wife secrete it somewhere. She’s wasting her time and ours by insisting she doesn’t know where it is.”
A package under her arm, Harry repeated to himself. His thoughts touched the package slip in his inside pocket, and he knew where the ledger was. Helen had mailed it to their box.
“Why have you held out, honey?” he asked gently. “Was it worth torture?”
Her pain-racked eyes swung to him. “Dale Thompson worked ten years to break this gang’s power,” she said quietly.
Harry said thoughtfully, “Five thousand dollars is a lot of money. Suppose we made a deal so they couldn’t kill us? Suppose we insisted on getting to Des Moines first, and phoning back long distance the information about the ledger? They’d have to trust us to phone, and we’d have to trust them to send the five thousand dollars.”
John Gault said quickly, “We should have picked you up sooner. I’ll buy that one with a slight change. We’ll put your wife on a train for Des Moines, hold you as a hostage so she doesn’t get any ideas about double-crossing us, and release you with five thousand bucks the minute we get the ledger back.”
Helen had looked at Harry with disappointed shock. Looking back at her without expression, Harry slowly let one eyelid droop. Momentarily she looked startled, but she covered her understanding that Harry’s motive was other than appeared on the surface by making her eyes harden.
She said to John Gault, “And let you keep on running your gambling houses and dope shops? That’s what Mr. Thompson was fighting, and what he died for.”
“You’d rather we both die?” Harry asked reasonably.
Helen looked at him silently for a moment, then her lips trembled and she burst into tears.
It took but a few minutes to work out the details of the agreement. The two men who had brought in Harry would get Helen to the noon train, which was scheduled to arrive in Des Moines at eight that evening. Helen would phone John Gault’s unlisted number before midnight, and as soon as the ledger was recovered, Harry would be escorted by the same pair to a train for Des Moines.
She clung to Harry for a moment before she was carried out, but her face was set and emotionless as the trio disappeared through the door. Only a fleeting, final glance of worry from her at the last moment told Harry she knew he was planning something desperate.
Big John Gault rose to his feet. “Just make yourself comfortable and we’ll hope to have you out of here by midnight,” he advised Harry. “You seem like a sensible young man, but I’m sure you’ll understand I can’t taken any chances.” To the pockmarked Ripper he said, “You can handle him all right alone, can’t you?”
Ripper gave the knife in his hand an expert flip and looked at Harry with contempt. He did not bother to reply.
“Then expect us back about midnight,” Gault said. “The boys will bring you in lunch and supper.”
He motioned to Gerald Crane and the two of them left together.
Harry studied the pock-marked man reflectively. “It’s only about ten o’clock,” he said. “You going to sit with that thing in your hand for fourteen hours?”
Smoothly the pock-marked man flipped it once more, then slid it out of sight beneath his coat. In a bored tone he said, “I can get it out and sink it anywhere I want faster I than you could spit. Your limit is fifteen feet away from me. Get an inch closer and you swallow six inches of steel.”
Harry walked over and sat on the cot Helen had occupied. “Got any objection to my taking a nap?” he asked.
Ripper shrugged with indifference. Elevating his left shoe to the cot, Harry unlaced it, pulled it off and left it sitting on the cot next to him. He repeated with the right, also leaving it on the cot then put his feet flat on the floor and wriggled his toes.
“Them’s kind of beat up high shoes you got,” the pock-marked man remarked. “What are you, a farmer?”
“Shop worker. These are safety shoes.” He picked one of the heavy, high-topped shoes up by the toe. “They’ve got steel toes.”
And he sent the heavy shoe spinning end-over-end at the man.
Steel glittered in Ripper’s hand just as the shoe’s steel toe caught him in the chest. He fell backward, righted and flung the knife just as the second shoe caught him full in the face.
A streak of light slithered past Harry’s ear as he hurled himself forward. When he reached the other cot, Ripper was leaning on one elbow, groggily fumbling for the gun under his arm.
Winding his fingers into the man’s hair, Harry pulled him to a seated position and smashed his fist against the pock-marked jaw.
* * * *
Sergeant Don Murphy said, “Stop jittering. They’ll be here. The train isn’t due to leave for another hour and a quarter.”
The plainclothes man Murphy had dispatched to check the waiting rooms returned and reported a woman with crutches and two men answering the descriptions of the gunmen were in one of the side waiting rooms on the mezzanine. Quickly, the sergeant issued instructions to the messenger and the two other men with him, then moved toward the stairs leading to the mezzanine without hurry. Harry fell into step beside him, and the others followed.
Harry had expected Murphy to surprise the men from behind, but the sergeant calmly walked around in front of them, stopped and flipped back his coat to disclose his badge. He did not draw a gun, but hi
s right hand rested against his belt.
They looked back at him blankly, both started furtive movements toward their armpits, but stopped them almost immediately. Some cold assurance in the homicide man’s eyes, a waiting look which edged almost on cruelty, caused them simultaneously to reject the invitation. Slowly they raised their hands level with their shoulders.
As the two men were led away in handcuffs, Harry scooped Helen into his arms, holding her around the shoulders and under the knees as you would a baby.
“We’d have been here sooner, darling,” he said. “But Sergeant Murphy wanted to bag Big John Gault, Gerald Crane and a cop named Joe Murphree first. And since he’s a night shift cop and this is on his own time, I had to humor him.”
Helen wound her arms about his neck. “Take me back to our own apartment,” she said simply.
THE BLONDE IN THE BAR
Originally published in Manhunt, May 1954.
After ten years as a vice-squad cop, I not only know every place in St. Louis where professional hustlers hang out, I also know all the bars where amateurs go looking for men. The Jefferson is neither sort of place.
It was a little surprising in that sedate atmosphere to have a lovely blonde slide onto the bar stool next to me and throw an inviting smile in my direction before turning her attention to the bartender. It was even more surprising when after that unmistakably inviting smile, she concentrated on ordering a drink and ignored my curious examination of her.
After a moment I decided she must have momentarily mistaken me for someone else. Wishful thinking, I told myself. Now I was beginning to imagine beautiful blondes were passing at me. Ruefully I turned from the girl to examine my reflection in the bar mirror.
Look at you, I told myself. Thirty-two, and you look forty. Why would any woman pass at you?
Dispassionately I studied the lines of disillusionment deeply etched into my face, physical evidence of the spiritual scars I had accumulated during ten years of constant association with the seamy side of life. Why did the muck a cop encountered leave scars on some and roll off the backs of others without leaving a trace, I wondered? Why was I a misanthrope at thirty-two while my partner, Jud Harrison, remained as cheerfully full of high spirits after ten years on the vice squad as he had been as a rookie?
My gaze flicked from my own reflection to that of the girl next to me, meeting her eyes in the mirror. To my surprise her lips curled in a slight smile.
“Admiring yourself?” she asked softly.
I turned from her reflection to the girl herself. She was about twenty-five, I guessed, and as sleek and beautiful as a new Cadillac. From her dress and the diamond brooch at her throat I judged she was equally expensive too.
If she was on the make, why had she picked me, I wondered? On the other side of her sat a smoothly handsome man whose perfectly tailored Palm Beach made my shapeless seersucker suit look like a sack. And dotted along the bar were a half dozen other men who were not only better looking than I, but obviously had more money.
Deciding not to look a gift horse in the mouth, I said, “Criticizing myself. I was trying to make up my mind whether to drink myself to death, or just go home and cut my throat.”
The girl moved her eyes sidewise at me. “Come on now. It can’t be that bad.”
Producing a package of cigarettes, I offered her one, but she shook her head.
“Buy you a drink?”
With the same slight smile she had thrown to me in the mirror she indicated the still nearly full highball before her. Running out of conversational subjects, I lapsed into silence.
“We can talk, though,” the girl said. “I’m not a bad listener. Why so down in the mouth? Fight with your wife?”
I shook my head. “I don’t own one. It’s nothing specific. I guess I’m usually down in the mouth.”
“Business troubles?”
I considered. “Maybe you could call it that. Not financial troubles. I’m a cop. Every once in a while I get disgusted with humanity and more disgusted with myself.”
She looked up at me interestedly. “A policeman? I might have guessed that.”
When I raised an eyebrow inquiringly, she said, “You look so strong. And you seem to have that quiet air of authority policemen are supposed to have.”
The girl actually sounded like she admired me, I thought with mild surprise. For a moment I felt a tug of suspicion, but when I studied her guileless face it died away and was replaced by an unaccustomed feeling of expansiveness. I have never been much of a ladies’ man, and it gave me a strangely pleasant feeling to find I could impress a woman as beautiful as this one.
She was no casual barfly, throwing out a line to the first man she encountered in an attempt to make a pickup, I decided. With her looks and her obviously expensive dress, she could get all the men she wanted without cruising the bars. I decided she must be a guest at the hotel, and was merely being friendly.
Noticing her glass was now nearly empty, I asked, “Can I buy you a drink now?”
“All right,” she said agreeably.
Her name was Jacqueline Crosby, she told me over the drink, and she was a dress designer from Chicago. She was in town for two weeks as her company’s representative at the national fashion show. In return I informed her my name was Sam Card and I was a sergeant on the St. Louis morality squad.
By two highballs later we were old friends. Usually alcohol only succeeds in making me more morose, but to my surprise I found that drinking with Jacqueline was making me increasingly cheerful. By eleven o’clock, when she suggested that she had better get to bed because she had to rise early, I was behaving as light-heartedly as though I were my moon-faced partner, Jud Harrison, instead of the morality squad’s eternal sourpuss.
“I live right here at the hotel,” she added. “If you want to take me up to my room, I’ll mix you a nightcap in return for the drinks you bought me.”
Her tone conveyed the barest suggestion of promise that the invitation could mean more than a nightcap. Momentarily it brought my feet back to earth as I again wondered what motive so beautiful a woman could have in scraping acquaintance with a mere cop. Then I decided that questioning motives was probably one of the reasons I had missed many of the pleasures in life, and rose to follow her without a care in the world.
Jacqueline had a suite, not just a room, I discovered when she keyed open her door and I followed her into a large sitting room. She left me there while she went on into the bedroom, and I could hear her phoning down for ice.
Then she called, “Get the door when the boy brings ice, will you, Sam? I want to change into something more comfortable.”
That did it. Up till then my opinion of Jacqueline had been swaying back and forth between regarding her merely as an impersonally friendly female and a woman on the make. But the corny line about getting into something more comfortable crystallized it. I was now suddenly sure that from the moment she sat down on the bar stool next to me, she had intended me to bring her to her suite and make love to her.
With a mixture of mounting anticipation and puzzlement I wondered if after a lifetime of being ignored by women, I had suddenly become irresistible. Walking over to a wall mirror, I studied my lace again, but it didn’t look any more like the answer to a maiden’s prayers than it had in the bar mirror downstairs.
A knock came at the door, I opened it and traded the white-coated boy in the hall a quarter for a bowl of ice. I had barely closed the door behind him when Jacqueline came from the bedroom.
More comfortable, she had said, and she had changed into about as comfortable a garment as you can imagine short of bare skin. She wore a lace negligee so filmy it was all but transparent. And beneath it there was nothing but the pink and white of her flesh. She wore nothing else.
She was even barefoot.
I watched
in astonishment as she removed a bottle, siphon and two glasses from a small liquor cabinet and mixed two highballs. If there had been any lingering doubts in my mind as to what she wanted of me, that negligee would have halted them.
But why so lovely a woman would have picked me out of all the men in the Jefferson bar, I could not imagine.
The thought occurred to me that perhaps I was intended to be the victim of a badger game, but I instantly discarded it as inconceivable the girl would be stupid enough to attempt that stunt on a man she knew to be a cop.
When she neared to within two feet of me in order to hand me my drink, and the bright light of the lamp next to me penetrated her thin garment to expose her firm pink-tipped breasts as clearly as though she were naked, I stopped worrying about her motives. Setting down my glass on the mantel without tasting it, I removed hers from her hand, set it next to mine, and took hold of her.
Chapter 2
Approximately an hour later I discovered the reason for Jacqueline’s concentrated play for me. We were back in the sitting room by then, and I had dumped the tepid contents of our highball glasses and mixed two fresh drinks. Jacqueline sat on the sofa watching me mix them, her bare feet tucked up under her and the flimsy negligee wrapped around her so tightly it outlined her figure like a coating of cellophane.
When I passed over her drink, she patted the place next to her on the sofa in indication for me to sit down. I shook my head and looked at her without smiling.
“Why?” I asked.
“Why what, Sam?”
“Why everything? Why did you bring me up here? What do you want?”
Her smooth forehead puckered in a frown. “You mean you think there’s an angle?”
“I don’t think I’m irresistible,” I told her. “For thirty-two years women hardly give me a second glance. Then the most beautiful woman I ever saw takes one look at me and goes completely overboard. Forgive my cynicism, but I’m not exactly a dunce. There has to be an angle.”
The Second Richard Deming Mystery MEGAPACK® Page 11
