Shakedown

by William Campbell Gault

  When he’d finished reading it, he looked up to find me watching him from the other side of the coffee table.

  His face was pale and his voice shaky. “You knew this letter was coming. You had something to do with it. You—” He started to get up, to run, I think.

  I shoved him back and the davenport acted as the fulcrum from behind. I swarmed him there, shoving a knee into his groin. Then I pulled his head back, my hand over his mouth. He was a big man but soft, and that knee to the groin had taken all the fight out of him. I slid the Mexican knife into that soft throat, saw the blood spurt from the jugular, and waited until he’d gone limp.

  There was blood all over the handkerchief. I removed it from the handle of the knife and shoved it into my jacket pocket. The knife I dropped to the coffee table. Then for seconds I stood there, listening to my heart beat. It was the first time for me. It was the first time the stakes had been worth it.

  I was calm. I was calm as hell, and that wasn’t the way I’d read it would be. My heart was going a little faster than usual, but my mind was clear, and I didn’t feel a second’s regret. Peter hadn’t owed me a dime.

  Then as I turned slowly I saw the package still on the table in the kitchen, and I unwrapped it and took out the cotton dress. There was a pool of blood on the coffee table, and I soaked the dress in that and stuffed it into the fireplace along with the paper. I lighted it, and watched the dry part of the dress burn and the fire go out as it came to the blood. It would look like an amateur who’d been in too much of a hurry to get rid of the dress right.

  The letter I picked up with my fingernails and put with some other mail on the sideboard in the dinette. Then I closed the Venetian blinds in the living room and went out to the kitchen again. Through the glass top of the kitchen door, I could see an alley and high fences enclosing all the back yards. This would be the way to go out.

  I checked the front door to see that it was locked and went out the back way. That door locked on closing, too. There was a good possibility Peter might not be found for a long time. Until he started to smell.

  The small yard here was bordered with daisies and geraniums. I went through it to a deserted alley, and turned left to the nearest street.

  There was no hurry. I walked back to the office.

  I sat there for minutes, listening to the Gardaluck typewriters, the hum of traffic outside. Great town for cults and undertakers and genteel rackets. Great town to get out of. The old man had left it feet first; I’d be leaving it with a suitcase full of moolah. What had started as a four-way split was now down to no more than three and would culminate into a Joe Puma benefit. Because I’d left the minors, I’d taken Deutscher’s advice, and thought big.

  I had the gun and the guts. The others in this weren’t exactly gutless, but they didn’t work with guns. They weren’t prepared to go as far as I was because they weren’t as hungry as I was.

  My phone rang and it was Jean. “I’ve been trying to get you all morning. Where were you?”

  “Don’t make noises like a wife. What’s new?”

  “Dad’s taking Willi to the modern art show at Pellini’s this afternoon. Isn’t that sweet?”

  “He’s moving right in, isn’t he?”

  “Yes. I’m beginning to wonder about that girl.”

  “I wonder more about your dad. There isn’t a chance, is there, that he could get into her purse without our knowing it?”

  “A very small chance. What did you learn last night?”

  “That he’s got a place in Playa del Rey.”

  “Great.”

  “Sure. That’s why I’m worried about Willi. You have her confidence, have you?”

  “I have. Don’t worry about this end. And Joe, you keep an eye on that Deutscher, too.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “And this evening, I think Dad wants you to put on your act. I’ll phone you about that. Will you be at the office, or home?”‘

  “Here for a couple hours. I’ve some work to do.”

  “I’ll phone.”

  I got up and stretched and decided I was hungry. I ate at Mike Hartoun’s, shish-kebab and pilaff and madzoon: Armenian food and good.

  Then I came back to the office and went through the accounts receivable. Everything there was dead but it wouldn’t hurt to make one more try. I sent out some strong letters. Then I went through the records I didn’t want to leave behind, including some pay-offs that might prove embarrassing to explain. I made a big stack of these and put them in a cardboard box to carry to the incinerator.

  There was a chance I’d get rooked all around in this deal coming up, but it was a small chance and I wanted to be ready to leave as soon as I had the money. Charles Adam Roland had cut his expectations to a hundred and fifty thousand and that was still a lot of money—for one man.

  I went through my bills and I made out some checks. It would be silly to jeopardize the kind of life I intended to have in the future for some penny ante bill I didn’t pay. Lots of these collection agencies were national and it’s amazing the amount of routine investigation they’ll put into a small account.

  I took the letters out to the mail drop and then came back for the records. The incinerator chute is at the far end of the hall, and I was there unloading the papers in bundles the opening could handle when I saw the big boy coming up the hall toward my office. It was Manny Rodriguez and he had the look of a cop who’s about to make a pick-up. It wasn’t until that second that I remembered the bloody handkerchief in my jacket pocket.

  I had it out and concealed by a handful of papers as Manny saw me and started my way. I dropped it in the chute and slammed the door and reached for another handful of papers as Manny came to a stop a few feet away.

  “Moving?” Manny asked.

  I shook my head. “Just burning old bills. What’s on your mind, Manny?”

  “McGill wants to see you. I’m to bring you in.”

  “What does he want to see me about?”

  “He didn’t say. Let’s go, Puma.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “EASY, MANNY,” I SAID. “This isn’t a police state, yet.”

  He looked at me coolly. “Are you resisting arrest? I’m armed, you know.”

  “Am I being arrested?”

  “You’re being picked up for questioning. Are you going to resist that?”

  “No. Have I time to get rid of the rest of this?”

  He nodded, leaned back against the wall and lighted a cigarette. I took my time with the papers, trying to figure what McGill would want. They couldn’t have found Deutscher; it didn’t seem likely. Manny wouldn’t have come here alone.

  McGill’s face was stone when Manny and I came into his office. I was on the other side of the fence again, and McGill was letting me know it.

  “Sit down,” he said to me. And to Manny, “I won’t need you further.”

  Manny’s face was as cold as McGill’s when he went out. The captain waited until Manny had closed the door before turning back to me.

  “What’s going on, Puma?”

  “I don’t follow you, Captain. You’ll have to make the question more specific.”

  “What I should do is throw you in the can and let you sweat for a while. You know, Puma, the only reason I’ve been easy on you so far is because I had so much regard for your father.”

  “Cops killed my father,” I said.

  “During a—a riot. And the officer who fired the shot is no longer with the Department. I wasn’t speaking for the others, anyway. I said I admired your father.”

  I made no comment.

  “You must have been a great disappointment to him.”

  I said nothing.

  He paused. “And now Rickett thinks he’s being framed.”

  I gave the captain my steady, honest glance. “By me?”

  “By you or Deutscher. We haven’t been able to get hold of Deutscher this morning. Know where he is?”

  I shook my head. “Why should I, Captain?
He’s no friend of mine.”

  “You’ve been seeing enough of him, lately. You worked with him on that Condor case, I hear.”

  “You’re not running your section on rumours, are you, Captain?”

  “Well, did you work with Deutscher on the Condor case?”

  I shook my head. “Not for a minute. It was a messy, dirty deal, and I wouldn’t have had a part in it if Deutscher had asked me to. But he never even approached me on it.”

  “That isn’t what Deutscher said.”

  “If he said anything else, he’s a liar. And I’ll tell him to his face, in front of you, Captain.” I shook my head sadly. “I used to think the old man was punchy when he talked about police persecution. I see his point now.”

  The captain’s smile was right out of the deep freeze. “Do you think we’ve been persecuting you?”

  “Haven’t you? How about Manny? Just because he’s soft on some Mexican whore, he comes gunning for me because he thinks I knew where she was. Deutscher told me she was dead; I passed the information along to Manny, like a legitimate operative. He comes back to me swinging. How was I to know that Deutscher got his information from some quack and the quack was lying?”

  “All right. We’ll say you’re clean, there. Now do you want to talk about Moose Jelko?”

  I stared at him. I wondered how closely I’d been watched. How did they know about that fight unless they’d followed me? And if they were watching me, had they watched me walk into Deutscher’s this morning?

  I said calmly, “How did you hear about him? Got a man on me, Captain?”

  He didn’t answer.

  I said, “Moose is a punch drunk bum, and he was annoyed because I was checking a friend of his. Moose was also very drunk that night.”

  “I see. Who were you checking?”

  “Manny knows,” I said. “I met him there—Little Phil.”

  “Checking him for whom?”

  “For Jennings, for Rickett’s attorney.”

  Silence, and then, “What did you learn?”

  “Just as much as Manny did, nothing. I learned something else though, but not from Little Phil.”

  McGill nodded, waiting.

  I took a breath. “This last Rickett episode looked like a frame to me, just like it does to you, Captain. I think Rickett is the killer, all right, but he was probably drugged or influenced under alcohol to go up there and get Target. But that doesn’t bring me into it, does it?”

  “Not unless you were involved in the Condor case and you claim you weren’t. Have you any better suspects, Puma?”

  “One,” I said. “A name given to me by Deutscher, though the bastard probably won’t admit it, with all the lying he’s already done about me. And it’s a name I should be protecting.”

  McGill stared at me. “Do you mean Jennings, by any chance?”

  I nodded.

  “But why?”

  “Ask Deutscher. Why didn’t Deutscher get the job investigating Little Phil? He’d worked for Jennings on the Condor case. My guess is that Deutscher was leery of this one and suggested my name to Jennings, hoping to stay clear of it. Jennings, I heard, has been playing the ponies. And Jennings handles all of Rickett’s money. And Jennings probably knows the inside of the Condor case. What a sweet set-up for a guy tapping the till. Then he puts me on it to see if I can find a leak. If I can’t, he might assume the police can’t. So Rickett goes to the gas chamber, leaving no relatives.”

  McGill took a deep breath. “You think there’s a tie-up between Jennings and this Little Phil?”

  “There must be a tie-up between the person who framed Rickett and Little Phil. If it’s Jennings—” I shrugged.

  McGill was thoughtful. “And you don’t know where Deutscher is?”

  I shook my head. “A couple days ago, he told me he was going up to ’Frisco for a week. But how can you tell with a liar like him?”

  “’Frisco, eh? He didn’t say why?”

  “He said something about Josie Gonzales being up there. He had a yen, you know, for Josie. He lived with her for quite a while after that Condor case.”

  “This is all new to me,” McGill said. “These are things the Department likes to know about, Joe.”

  “I’m not working for the department,” I reminded him.

  “Nor with us, the way it looks.”

  “I can’t be with you when you’re against me,” I explained. “I’ve got just as much pride as my old man had. And I’m not an informer.”

  “What makes you think we’re working against you?”

  “You put a man on me, didn’t you? How else would you know about Moose Jelko?”

  “We didn’t have a man on you. If you read the gossip columns, you’d know where we got the Jelko story. It made all of them.”

  “All right, sir,” I said. “I apologize.”

  They hadn’t had a man on me. That was the important thing.

  “There’s a possibility,” McGill said, “that I owe you an apology too, Joe. If this tip on Jennings proves to be sound, I may owe you more than that.”

  “You don’t owe me anything, Captain,” I told him. “But Jennings does. One day’s pay with expenses. So don’t tell him I’m giving you any leads.”

  McGill smiled for the first time. “Oh, you bastard. All right, Joe. Take off. We’re going to get along, aren’t we?”

  I smiled at him. “I hope so. It’s more important to me than it is to you, sir.”

  I stood up and he threw the last question. “You’re not sure, are you, that Josie Gonzales is in ’Frisco?”

  I shook my head. “It’s another of Deutscher’s stories.”

  “I see. All right, Joe. Luck.”

  I’d walked in as “Puma” and out as “Joe” but his attitude didn’t fool me. He was still incorruptible McGill, all cop.

  But it hadn’t exactly been a wasted trip. They’d be looking for Deutscher in ’Frisco and spending their time on Jennings in town. And the captain might begin to wonder about Manny’s regard for Josie.

  Rodriguez was standing in the hallway when I went through. He didn’t even look at me. He’d been my one friend in the Department, but I wouldn’t need friends in the Department much longer. Not in this town.

  I went back to the office and cleaned up the rest of the records. The incinerator wouldn’t be lighted until tomorrow morning, but even though some of the records might incriminate me, I doubted if anyone could make a jury-proof case out of them. And there was no reason for the law to be checking my records now.

  And then I thought of the handkerchief, but it wasn’t incriminating until they found some more blood to match up with it. And that too would burn with the records in the morning.

  Even if they should suspect me of killing Deutscher, I wouldn’t be here for questioning. Unless they should find him soon. And there wasn’t any reason why they should now if they assumed he was still in ’Frisco.

  The furniture in the office wasn’t worth worrying about and it would look bad if I tried to sell it, once I knew the Clifford pitch was going through. That was a loss I could absorb.

  I went home after cleaning out all the files and started to get ready for a shower when I saw the Cad pull up in front. I went to the door to wait. Charles Adam Roland was in navy blue today, a soft flannel suit, beautifully draped and cut. The shirt was white oxford, the tie a silver and blue striped bow.

  My shirt was off and he noticed that. “Didn’t interrupt anything, I hope?”

  “Just a shower. How are things breaking?”

  “You’re coming up for dinner tonight. You’re the investigator Jean hired, remember. We’re pretending Jean is thinking of putting some money into this scheme.”

  “And she hired me to check her own father?”

  He nodded, smiling. “That’s the big angle in all con games, as you know. Suspicion between the inside man and the roper. With the inside man finally winning out in the mark’s confidence.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I said.
“The idea is, as I see it, that though I could find nothing wrong with your firm, I’m still suspicious.”

  He nodded. “Unreasonably so.” He tried to make the next remark sound casual. It would have if I hadn’t been expecting it. “You haven’t seen Deutscher, have you?”

  I shook my head. “Not today.”

  Roland looked faintly worried. “We had an appointment. I hope nothing—” He didn’t finish.

  I said easily, “Almost anything could happen to Deutscher. He’s double-crossed so many people, I’m surprised he’s stayed out of the hospital this long.”

  Roland chewed at one corner of his mouth. “Deutscher—? Really? Well, at any rate he’s solid with the law.”

  “They’re looking for him right now,” I said, “and I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they put him away for a spell.”

  Roland really looked worried, now. “You’re serious?”

  “I’ve never been more serious. How an operator of your calibre ever trusted that slob is beyond me.”

  Roland smiled. “I get it. You two had a fight about something.”

  I shook my head and sat down on the davenport and started to take my shoes off.

  Roland said, “Dinner’s at seven. Remember, I’ve options on this stuff so even if Miss Clifford should check that, we’d be clean. The uranium angle is purely speculative but so is the whole business world. All we have to do is play it straight.” He paused. “And steer clear from any violence. You’ve had two fights so far, one with a police officer. We can’t afford that kind of temper, Puma.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m a cringing violet from here in.”

  “Fine. And tonight you’re an opinionated, right wing, smug private eye suspicious of all cultured people.”

  I nodded and made a circle of my thumb and forefinger. “I’ll make you proud of me.”

  “I’m sure you will. Well, see you at seven.”

  He waved in his jaunty way and left me. I wondered how jaunty he’d be when he learned Deutscher was dead. Or that I knew he and Deutscher had planned their steal at Playa del Rey last night. Even that probably would only stop him for a second. Words were his business, and poise and the big front.