Through the chintz-hung door to the dining room came the young waiter who had served them on Monday. His dark eyes were incredulous and angry. He shouted, “Where do you guys think you’re at?” His face was somber from dirt and a two-day beard.
Little Joe moved toward him. “Hello, Dago,” he said.
“Wait a minute.” Williams stepped in front of the squat gangster. “Choir-boy is mine.”
He hit the waiter tentatively with his left hand, then let him have the right in a wide swing just below the jawbone on the neck. Knees buckling, the waiter backed against the table with the metal legs, slid down it like an actor in a slow motion picture. The slot machine, slipping off the tilted pine top, landed on his shoulder; then glanced to the floor, spewing coins over the cracked boards. Presently the waiter toppled onto a pile of nickels and lay there, glaring balefully at Williams.
Crane watched, fascinated, until Butch said, “Here’s another.”
It was Joe Petro. He was wearing slippers, trousers without a belt, and a purple shirt, and his fat body filled the doorway. His shirt was open at the collar like an author waiting to be photographed after he has sold his first novel, only the Italian had on stained flannel underwear over his chest. His face was expressionless. He held the chintz curtain back with his left hand.
“Stick ’em up,” said Little Joe; “we wanna speak to you.” He had a short-barreled .38 in his hand.
Crane stepped to the side so that the pistol would not shoot him if it went off. “You remember me?” he asked Petro.
The Italian shook his head.
“Choir-boy remembers me,” Williams said, looking at the waiter; “don’t you, choir-boy?”
Gleaming black eyes defied them from the pile of nickels.
Butch pulled the bartender nearer to him. “You better lie down too,” he said. He twisted his wrist, sent the old man in a spinning fall to the floor.
“We won’t hurt you if you tell us the truth, Petro,” Crane said. “We want to know why you and your men tried to kill us last night by the Bureau.”
“Yeah, tell us,” said Little Joe.
Petro’s fat face was the color of tallow. “You crazy,” he said. “I don’ know you.”
“Should I sock him, boss?” asked Butch.
Crane said, “Not yet.” He scowled at the big Italian. “I know you shot at us, but I want to know why.”
Petro’s mouth moved convulsively. “You sonabitch, get out o’ here.” The voice emerging from the thick neck was ludicrously shrill. “You don’ pull thisa stuff on Joe Petro.”
“Hit him,” Crane said.
Butch hit him.
Little Joe said, “Don’t lower them hands, Dago, or I’ll plug you.”
“Now, do you want to tell us?” Crane asked.
Hate simmered in the pouchy eyes.
Crane said, “Hit him again.”
Butch put his shoulders into this one. There was a dull impact, as when an automobile hits a horse, and the Italian overbalanced, tottered back to the wall. He leaned there, blinking at them stupidly. Butch watched him incredulously. “Christ I” he said. “I must be losin’ my punch.” He stepped closer and drove Petro to the floor with a downward hammerlike blow of his fist.
There was a slithering sound on the nickels, and Crane turned just in time to see Williams’ foot lash out at the waiter’s right arm. A stiletto described a graceful arc in the air, hit the wall by the front door, and clattered to the floor. The waiter yelped with pain and clutched his wrist.
“Choir-boy wants to get shot,” said Little Joe.
While they were waiting for Petro to regain consciousness, Williams drew four steins of beer and handed one to each of the others. The beer was cold, and it tasted fine. Butch drained his stein in a breath, filled it again at the tap, and then went over to Petro, saying, “I hate like hell to waste this stuff.” He poured the beer over the Italian’s head.
It was already dusk, and Crane turned on the electric lights. The big Italian groaned, tried to get up. Williams, lighting a cigarette, watched him interestedly. “Think he’ll talk now?” he asked. He inhaled luxuriously, blew the smoke out his nose and mouth at the same time.
The old bartender was still lying where Butch had thrown him, his head buried in his arms. He was pretending that he was dead.
After the rumble of a streetcar passing outside had faded away, Crane tried again. “You might as well tell us now, Petro, because we’re going to stay here until you get ready to talk.”
Breathing as laboriously as a man with pneumonia, the Italian leaned one elbow on the floor and tried to ward off Crane with the other arm. Blood trickled from his mouth, and his eyes were wild. He wouldn’t speak, though.
Crane, bending over him, asked the others, “What the hell are we going to do?”
“I can make choir-boy talk.” Williams had retrieved the stiletto, was balancing it on his index finger. “Can’t I, choir-boy?”
The waiter hissed at him through his teeth.
“No,” William Crane said. “I want to get the story from Petro.”
Little Joe had moved to the dining-room doorway and was looking in toward the kitchen. “Maybe the Dago’s got a daughter back there,” he said. “If I gave her a little…”
Butch interrupted him. “These spaghetti broads is poison.” He reached down over the bar and pulled out a quart bottle of bourbon and a chromium-plated lemon squeezer. “I got a better idea, even if it ain’t so much fun.” He pulled the cork from the bottle with his teeth, spat it on the floor, and drank noisily.
Crane asked, “What’s the idea?”
Butch wiped his mouth with his coat sleeve, handed the quarter empty bottle to Little Joe. “You grab the Dago’s left arm,” he ordered Crane.
Petro’s flesh, under the purple silk shirt, was astonishingly firm, and Crane took hold of the arm with both hands. Butch, kneeling on the other side, produced a mass of brown cord from a coat pocket and unwrapped part of it around the Italian’s right wrist and tied it securely to a radiator pipe. “That’ll hold the bastard,” he announced.
Another streetcar rolled by on Halstead Street, shook the room.
Little Joe grinned down at them, holding the .38 in one hand, the bottle, now half empty, in the other. “Goin’ to show him the goldfish?”
Butch picked up the chromium squeezer. It had two long handles which gave leverage to crush the lemons. “I’ll show him some goldfish he never seen before.” He fitted the squeezer over the hand Crane was holding.
Petro’s small eyes asked a terrified question of each one of them, and his breath made a rattling noise in his throat.
The center of the squeezer fitted nicely in the soft palm of the Italian’s hand. “That’s tender, ain’t it, Dago?” Butch inquired. He pressed the ends of the squeezer toward each other.
Petro’s hoarse screaming was loud in their ears.
As Butch eased the pressure, Crane asked, “It was you and your men who shot at us, wasn’t it?”
A fever sweat had broken out on the Italian’s face. He ran his tongue around his blubbery lips, looked appealingly at Crane. Butch tightened the lemon squeezer, and he said quickly, “Yeah, we shot at you.”
“That’s better.” Crane nodded his head. “Now, why did you try to plug us?”
Petro’s quivering lips mumbled the name, “Grant.”
“You thought we had him put on the spot, didn’t you?”
Petro nodded.
With eyes as dark as ripe olives in the dim electric light, the waiter and the bartender watched them silently from the floor. Little Joe, bored, was polishing off the rest of the whiskey.
“We didn’t,” Crane said. “Somebody got to him before we could find out what he knew about the Westland case. You don’t think we would kill somebody we wanted to get some information from, do you?”
The Italian, still sweating, didn’t answer.
Crane continued, “We want to find out what he knew about Westland.”
Little Joe waggled the bottle admonishingly at his companion. “You hadn’t ought to have done that,” he said; “just when he was going to spill his guts.” He poured the remains of the whiskey on Petro’s face.
Butch indignantly demanded, “How’d I know the Dago was delicate?”
A clock, striking somewhere in the back, sent five silver bullets of sound into the room. Petro struggled to a sitting position again, the blood pumping back into his face, his eyes, no longer urgently afraid, were calm with an acceptance of fate. “You will let me pray before you kill me?” he asked.
Crane said, “First tell us what Grant knew about the Westland case.”
Petro’s voice was barely audible. “He never tell me.”
“Can that stuff,” said Butch. “He musta told you. Come clean or I’ll really squeeze ya with this thing.”
Petro shook his head.
“Wait a minute I” The waiter sat up on the floor. “I tell. Don’t hurt him again. Mannie Grant seen Mister Westland say good-night on the night of the murder—his wife, she was still alive then.”
“Atta kid, choir-boy,” said Doc Williams.
“Fine,” Crane said. “Now tell us who the slick fellow was you had shadowing us in the hotel.”
The waiter’s eyes avoided Joe Petro. “That was the Chevalier.”
“That torpedo!” Little Joe whistled. “What’s he doing with a bunch of amacheurs like you, choir-boy?”
The waiter said defensively, “He eats here a lot.”
“And he was just doin’ you a good turn.” Little Joe’s face was villainous. “Listen! You tell the Chevalier the next time he wants to play Boy Scout to lay off white people. He better stick to spiggoties because if he don’t, he’ll find himself with a one-way ticket in his pocket some day soon.”
Butch, kneeling on the floor by Petro, asked Crane: “Anything more, boss?”
Looking at Petro’s pain-racked face made Crane feel ill. “No, let him go.”
Butch attempted to twist the squeezer from the Italian’s hand, then looked at it with surprise. “Christ!” he said, “the damn thing’s stuck to a bone.”
Crane got up quickly, made for the door. “Let them send for a doctor,” he called over his shoulder, stepping out into the street.
Firm-fleshed rays from an arc light ribboned the darkness. Williams and Butch joined him. The wind was like a damp towel on their faces.
Behind them, Little Joe paused in the lighted doorway, addressed the silent saloon.
“You wops better behave,” he said, “or next time we come back we’ll get a little unpleasant.”
CHAPTER XII
Wednesday Night
“No ma’am,” said William Crane, “there’s nothing wrong in this room.”
He was lying on the hotel room bed, the telephone resting on his chest. It was dinner time, and it was quite dark outside and not noisy. Puffs of sharp cold air came through the quarter-open window. It was good to lie on a bed.
Crane spoke plaintively into the telephone. “I just want to speak to police headquarters. Do you mind very much if I speak to police headquarters?”
Shoulders hunched in amusement, Williams watched him from the embrace of an overstuffed chair. Poised in his hand was a glass of bourbon whiskey liberally laced with New Orleans absinthe.
“I don’t want to speak to the manager,” Crane said. “I don’t want to speak to the house detective. There is nothing wrong in this room. I just want to speak to police headquarters.”
The hotel operator, defeated, made angry clicking noises in the ear piece. At last another woman said, “Police Headquarters,” and Crane said, “Deputy Strom.”
After a series of men with sullen voices had answered on various extensions, the deputy was located. Crane asked him if he had any news.
“I got the pistol for you and left it with Major Lee.” The deputy’s voice came in a bull-like roar, as though he was talking on the transatlantic phone. “He’ll have a report for you after supper. I’m counting on you two to let me know what you find out from him.”
“We’ll call you,” Crane said. “How about Sprague?”
“Nothing much out of the way about him. He came to the office at the usual time yesterday, worked until six and then left.”
“How’d he happen to work so late?”
“They said at the office he worked that late, or later, a couple of times a week.”
“Where did he go after he left the office?” Crane asked.
“We aren’t sure, but we think he called on Simmons, the butler for Westland.”
“The hell you say!”
“Yeah. One of the stenographers in the office heard him call Simmons and ask him if he was going to be in about six-thirty.”
“Did you ask Simmons if the old man had called on him?”
“I sent a couple of men around to talk to him, but he said he didn’t see Sprague at all. He admitted he had received a telephone call from him, just as the girl told us, but he said Sprague didn’t show up.”
A woman and a man, talking loudly, passed by the door. Their voices came in through the transom. The woman’s tone was shrill. “I don’t see why I have to put up with him treating me like I was a common floosie … or his wife,” she said querulously.
Crane grinned at Doc Williams, spoke into the mouthpiece: “Did you see if Simmons had a record?”
The deputy’s voice was aggrieved. “Do you think I’m a correspondence-school dick? I did, and he ain’t got any.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Nothing. You can’t arrest a guy because he was supposed to have talked with a fellow who was later killed by a hit-and-run driver, can you?”
“No, I guess not.”
“You talk to Simmons. Maybe you can get something out of him.” The deputy’s voice was losing some of its power. “You can call me about him and the gun later. I’ll be here at the Bureau until midnight.”
“O. K.” Crane hung up the receiver softly, then, after a few seconds, raised it to his ear. There was a sound such as you hear in a sea shell against your ear and then a click. “That goddam operator,” he said.
“Forget her,” Williams said. “They always listen in when they think you don’t want them to. What’s this about Simmons?”
Crane told him, then took a mouthful of the bourbon and absinthe. It tasted sweet at first, but after he had swished it against his gums, the flavor changed to anis. He swallowed slowly and exhaled through his nose at the same time, sending the sharp fumes through his sinus into his forehead.
Williams watched him. “You better be careful or that stuff will set you on your ear.”
“I want to be set on my ear.”
“What are you going to do about Simmons?”
Crane filled his water tumbler one quarter full of absinthe. Then he put in an equal amount of whiskey. The resulting mixture was decadently green. He sipped it experimentally, added a piece of ice. “Which do you think is better,” he asked, “bourbon laced with absinthe, or absinthe laced with bourbon?”
“Listen, are you going to give up on this case?”
Crane drank again, letting the ice tickle his nose. “Green is more artistic, but brown is maculine.” He found he had trouble focusing his eyes on Williams. “Give up? Give up?” He stood up, put one hand between the buttons of his shirt in a Napoleonic attitude. “The sun never sets on William Crane.”
Doc Williams regretfully poured the rest of the bourbon and the absinthe into the bathtub. “You’ll feel better when you get something to eat,” he shouted over the noise of running water.
Crane pushed back the cab door, said to the driver, “You can wait. We’re going on north in a minute.”
He and Williams got in the green automatic elevator, and he pushed the button for the eighth floor.
Crane said, “You’ll find out.” He shoved open the eighth-floor door and rang the bell to Westland’s apartment. He was still pretty drunk, but he had everything under control.
Simmons opened the door until the safety chain was taut. “Oh, it’s you,” he said. He did not undo the chain.
“Yeah, it’s us,” Williams agreed.
Simmons was wearing a white silk shirt, a pair of black trousers pulled snug at the waist by a broad belt, and patent leather slippers. The bright bulb in the hall made angular his brittle jaw and protruding cheek bones, but his eyes were shadowed. “What do you want?” he demanded. He looked, with the queer shadow and light on his thin face and the silk shirt and the broad belt snug at the waist, like a good Spanish painting of a bull fighter.
“We’d like to ask you a few more questions,” Crane said.
Simmons’ voice was harsh. “What about?”
From the void behind him came the sound of a big jazz band playing the Limehouse Blues, sweet and slow and heavily accented, as the piece should be played. Simmons turned, called over his shoulder, “Wait until I fix the radio,” and disappeared.
Williams said, “What the hell’s the matter with that guy? Why don’t he ask us in?”
“I don’t know,” Crane said. “Maybe he thinks we’re after the silver.”
Simmons came back and peered out at them through the crack in the door. “Well?”
Leaning one hand against the door jamb, Crane asked, “What did Sprague ask you when he visited you here last night?”
“I didn’t say he visited me last night.” Simmons blinked his eyes. “We talked over the——”
“I know you talked over the phone, but I also know he came out here and saw you.”
“Oh!” The momentary slackness of indecision on Simmons’ face betrayed him. He felt it himself. “Out here…?”
“Yes, out here.” Crane was angry. “I want to know what you didn’t tell the police.”
Headed for a Hearse Page 14
