“Ah, yes, Mr. Peters, this is Prosephone Fabrikant, a not very old and not yet a dear friend.”
The woman winced at both the phoney name and the comment, but said nothing.
“I’m sorry to—”
“Don’t apologize,” Fleming said quickly. “Our last meeting was the most exhilarating event of recent years. Perhaps our second can evoke the memory.”
“Are you going to be tied up long?” sighed Prosephone Fabrikant in an accent distinctly cultured and distinctly American, probably Boston.
Fleming looked at me with an eyebrow raised.
“I was hoping you could put me up for the night,” I said.
Prosephone Fabrikant’s irritation reverberated from the walls and shot right through me.
“Of course,” said Fleming. “Prosephone and I can continue our discussion tomorrow.” He looked at her with confidence coming dangerously close to indifference. She tried to stare him down icily, but she was no match for a man who had practiced that look for long hours before a mirror, or else was just born to it. If I tried it, I’d look like a punch-drunk middleweight who heard bells when there were no bells.
“Of course,” she said, finally putting down her drink and stalking to the door. Fleming rose to follow her, but he didn’t hurry and he was right. She hesitated with her hand on the knob, and I retreated as discreetly as I could to the window to look out at the lights of downtown Chicago.
I couldn’t make out the words, but her voice sounded hurt and weak—a voice that seemed out of place in that cool body. His voice was firm but soft. He kissed her for a long time, but without frenzy or fire. Then he opened the door, guided her out, and closed it behind her.
“Met her in the bar downstairs,” Fleming said, returning to the room. “Don’t really remember her name, but have the distinct impression from her ring that she is married. Toby, women are not to be trusted—but American women, for all their deceit, are a distinctly superior lot to Englishwomen. Englishwomen simply do not wash and scrub enough.”
I shrugged and told my tale. When I was about to tell him about Servi’s body in the park waiting for sunrise, he rose and put his finger to his lips. He nodded to the door, and I could see a distinct shadow blocking out a chunk of light in the hall. Fleming made an opening and closing motion with his hand to indicate that I should continue talking. I did while he made his way slowly to the door. He was within a foot of the door when an ancient floorboard under the carpeting gave him away with a distinct creak. The shadow snapped away from the door and footsteps clopped down the hall. Fleming jerked the door open and disappeared. I was a few feet behind him.
Fleming had ten years on me and I remembered him telling me something about having been an athlete. He made a strange looking sprinter in his velvet smoking jacket and slippers, but he was a fast son-of-a-bitch. I couldn’t keep up with him. He went through an exit door and I followed about fifteen feet behind. When I went through the door I stopped to listen for footsteps. My heavy breathing got in the way, but I managed to control it long enough to determine that people were running up the stairs, not down. I went up. Down would have been more fun.
About four flights up I heard a metal door open and close with a clang. Then it opened and closed again. A second or two later I thought I heard a shot. By the time I reached the metal door at the top of the stairway, I hoped there was no one beyond it waiting for me. I needed a week or two to get my legs back and inhale enough air to stay alive. It was either age or the flu or both, or maybe just good sense, but I was tired. I was also responsible for a partly mad Englishman who might be getting shot at by a guy who knew how to shoot.
I pushed the door open and got hit in the face by a blast of wind from the lake. I waited for the wind to pass, but it didn’t. The roof of the Ambassador in the winter was not the ideal place for shelter.
The moon was partially out and I could make out the shapes of chimneys and air ducts, but I couldn’t see any people. I did hear the shot that tore up a spray of snow at my feet. I jumped into the darkness behind a chimney and tripped over a body.
“Fleming?”
“Fleming the fool, at your service,” he said tightly. “I have a very neat little Barretta in my suitcase —oiled, clean, dying to be used.”
“Sorry,” I said, waiting for the man we had trapped to figure out we were unarmed and come looking for us. My eyes adjusted to the near light and I looked at Fleming who, in spite of the thin jacket, didn’t look in the least cold. The only effect of the last ten minutes had been to mess up his hair. As if sensing this, he reached up and patted it neatly in place.
“I wonder,” he said, “if there is another way down from here.”
“I don’t want to try it,” I said.
“No, no old chum, I wasn’t worried about our escape. I don’t want our elusive friend to scamper.”
Something crunched in the snow about twenty feet away. The howl of the wind mixed with the sound, but both Fleming and I heard it. We looked at each other. I’m sure the fear was clear in my eyes. He looked positively happy.
“Good, now we know where he is,” he whispered, and pointed to the right while he slipped away into the darkness on the left. I crawled where he had indicated as quietly as I could, but it wasn’t good enough. Another shot hit too close to me to be luck. I crawled fast, rolling for cover behind a ridge of brick. Both my heart and the footsteps were about equal in volume and both were getting louder. He couldn’t have been more than a dozen feet from me when whoever it was let out a pained grunt. Less then a second later the footsteps retreated. I peered over the ridge of bricks cautiously and saw the faint outline of a man about thirty feet away. He took two more shots into the darkness, and I screwed up my courage and stood up.
“This is the police,” I shouted, making my voice as deep and as loud as I could. “Step out here with your hands over your head. Murphy,” I said in a stage whisper, “if anyone comes in view with a gun in his hand, start shooting and ask questions later.”
Not having thought out the consequences of this move, I wondered what I would do if someone did step forward with a gun in hand and saw me unarmed. I hurried in a crouch to a metal air duct and was rewarded by the sound of hurrying feet and the slam of the metal door. Just in case it might be a trick, I sat for another shivering minute or two and then made a circle to the door. I pulled it open and found nothing.
Then I began to search for Fleming’s velvet-clad body. By leaning forward, I managed to follow a maze of foot prints in the snow in a variety of circles. One set of prints, however, led to a nauseating end at the edge of the building. I didn’t want to look over and down. A few months earlier, in Los Angeles, I had seen a midget take an enforced dive out of a high window—and one sight like that in a man’s life is one more than he needs. I rubbed a ball of snow in my face and leaned over into the blast of wind.
The fingers of a pair of hands stood out distinctly no more than two feet below, clinging to a concrete design in the hotel.
“Fleming?” I called into the wind though it didn’t take much to realize it couldn’t be anyone else.
“Peters,” he said somewhat faintly, but without fear—at least without fear I could detect. “Glad you found me. It’s rather difficult to hold on and I really don’t see how I can scramble up.”
I leaned over with one hand on the brick ridge of the roof and watched while one of Fleming’s slippers dropped from his foot and went sailing down into the night, flickering past lighted windows to disappear far below. Fleming’s face was hidden by the jutting of concrete, but I could see his body literally swaying in the stiff wind. I eased my way out, trying not to lose my frosty grip with my left hand while my not-long-enough right arm inched down to Fleming’s fingers.
“Don’t let go till I have a grip on your wrist,” I shouted.
He responded, but I couldn’t make out the words. I did manage to get a reasonably good grip on his left wrist, but the whole operation was full of potential fai
lure. My hands were cold and so were his, and I didn’t know if I had the strength to pull him up even if I could hold my grip.
“Don’t try to pull,” he shouted. “Just get a firm grip and let me try to get up on your arm.”
He let go with both hands and my left arm pulled painfully in the socket, but I held my grip. His right hand reached up to get a grasp on my sleeve and he threw his legs up agilely over the same concrete outcropping to which he had been clinging. Just as my right hand lost its hold on the moist wrist, Fleming’s left hand grabbed the brick along the roof and he pulled himself up and over.
We lay there panting and enjoying the firmness beneath us for a minute or two without speaking.
“Do things like this happen to you often?” he finally gasped.
“Sometimes,” I said.
“Fascinating,” he came back with a grin. He pulled himself up and helped me to my feet. “I hope you don’t resent my saying this Toby, but aren’t you getting a bit long of tooth for this sort of thing?”
I shrugged and he nodded in understanding.
As we made our way down the stairs back to his room, Fleming explained that he had heard the man with the gun take a shot at me and had, in turn, thrown a snowball with a rock in it at the carrier of certain doom. The man, whom he did not get a decent look at, had turned and taken a few shots at him, and Fleming had scrambled over the side of the roof to avoid the bullets.
“I don’t think anyone heard the shots with the wind blowing like this,” I said, as we went into the room and Fleming closed the door behind us.
He kicked off his remaining slipper, finished off his bourbon and branch water while humming a tune I didn’t recognize, and went into the bedroom to get his gun.
“We must stay in touch,” he said, turning an armchair to face the door. “Now I suggest you lie down on the sofa and get a few hours sleep while I tell you my life’s story.”
I was too tired to argue so I kicked my shoes off and stretched out. The last thing I remembered him saying was that he had either studied under a psychiatrist in Austria or been studied by one. Either possibility seemed reasonable to me at that point.
In my dream, Cincinnati was undergoing a massive reconstruction and I kept having to move from house to house to stay out of the way. I’d had the dream before and I didn’t like it. When I woke up in the morning, Fleming was sipping a cup of coffee. He wore a fresh suit and was clean shaven.
“Sleep well?” he said.
“O.K.,” I said.
Fleming looked at his watch. “I have an appointment or two,” he said, “and I think you have a crime to get on with.”
We shook hands.
“If you ever get to L.A., look me up,” I said. “I’m in the phone book.”
“And if you ever get to England after this damned war of ours, look me up.”
I went out the door without looking back, made it to the lobby without being shot, let the doorman get me a cab, and told the cabbie Merle’s address.
12
In the very late morning, I shaved, made a couple of scrambled eggs and some toast for Merle and threw two more eggs on for Narducy, who stopped in. Merle coughed her way through breakfast and put up a half-hearted resistance to the orange juice I forced on her. Narducy just looked at his coffee and pulled out a copy of the Chicago Times, a tabloid with a little line drawing of a camera looking at the reader at the top of the page.
Merle had a half box of Rice Krispies on a high shelf, which wasn’t so appetizing, but she also had two brown bananas, which compensated. I had three bowls of Krispies with bananas and read about Servi being found on the Lincoln Park bench frozen solid. The story was on page four with no picture. My tale of murder and machine-gunning, under O’Brien’s by-line, made page three with one-column shots of Bistolfi, Canetta, Morris Kelakowsky, and me. The photo of me was the worst, which seemed unfair since I was the only one of the quartet still alive. They had dug up an employment photo from my Glendale police days and had it sent by wire. It was a good ten years old. As awful as I felt, I knew I looked a lot better than that right now.
O’Brien played up the fugitive bit and added a little more blood to my already bloody tale. Aside from that, and the strong indication that I was responsible for the murders, the story seemed fair enough.
“I fixed the lock and cleaned out the trunk,” Narducy muttered.
Merle wandered dizzily back to the bedroom in her floppy robe and groaned.
“Toby,” she croaked in a voice two octaves lower than I recognized, “take care of yourself.”
“Well, Raymond,” I said, rinsing out dishes, “I’ve got two hours to turn myself in to the cops.”
“Hell,” he said, “you can just get on a bus or train and get out of here. The paper says they just want you for questioning. They wouldn’t drag you back from California, would they?”
“I don’t think so, but I promised a guy I’d turn myself in. I haven’t got much to sell but a body that’s ready for scrap, a brain that doesn’t work half the time, and my word. I can’t count on the body and brain, but my word has held up pretty well.”
Narducy shrugged and threw down the last two scrambled eggs and a slice of toast.
“How about finishing up and getting me over to the Drake so I can give the bad news to the Marx Brothers?”
Narducy nodded, finished eating everything on the table that could be eaten, put on his jacket and cap, inched his glasses up, and said he was ready. I looked in on Merle, who was asleep and giving off rasping sounds.
The sun was high, but nothing was melting as we went through the streets. I tried to think, but I was out of tricks and ideas. Narducy said he’d wait for me while I talked to the Marxes. Costello and Chaney were in the Drake lobby not even pretending to hide behind a newspaper. I walked over to them.
“Marx don’t leave,” said Costello. “Not till Frank finds out what happened to Gino. You don’t leave either till Frank says.”
“Someone’s been reading the papers,” I said.
“That a crack about my being able to read?” said Costello through his teeth.
“No,” I reassured him, “I’m not in the crack-making business today. I’ve got more important things to do.”
“Like?”
“Like keeping somebody alive,” I said, and walked to the elevator.
The Marxes were dressed and arguing, at least Groucho and Chico were arguing. Harpo was doodling on a pad.
“Well, Peters,” said Groucho, “you got more publicity in Chicago today than we had all last year.”
“In my business, publicity is not a sign of success,” I said.
I hadn’t sat down, and Chico invited me to pull up a chair. I did and the three brothers looked at me.
“You’ve got something to say, Peters,” said Chico.
“Yeah, Nitti’s boys are downstairs, and Nitti’s not a patient man. I’ve got to turn myself in to the Chicago cops in an hour about those killings, and I don’t think they’ll let me go for a while. I don’t know who killed those guys, and I don’t know who set Chico up as the fall guy. I’m no closer than I was five days ago. The only changes are that I’ve managed to get four guys killed and to give pneumonia to a lovely lady. My advice to you,” I said, looking at Chico, “is to borrow the $120,000 from your brothers, give it to Nitti, and go back to California.”
“O.K.,” said Chico. “Then what do you do?”
“Cops hold me a few days, and I keep trying to find out who killed those guys. Maybe I get lucky and it ties in to who set you up. I think it will.”
“And what does Nitti say about your staying around?” asked Groucho.
“I don’t think he’ll like it, but I’ve never been very good at keeping friends.”
“One more bit of feeling sorry for yourself and we’ll call Nitti and have him cart you out of here right now,” said Groucho.
“Whoever’s pulling all this is always a step ahead and inside my mind. It might take me forev
er to catch him, or them,” I said.
“Who knew?” said a voice.
I didn’t recognize the speaker. At first I thought someone had come through the door or the radio was on, but the door was closed, and the Arvin on the table was dark and cold.
“Who knew where you were going? Who did you tell?”
The voice came from Harpo. It was the first time I had heard him speak since I met him. I looked at Groucho and Chico, but they didn’t find speech from their brother worthy of comment.
“What?” I said, looking at him. His voice had been soft, almost as if he were speaking to himself.
“Did you tell anyone where you were? Anyone who knew each place you went?”
“Somebody may have been following me,” I said, “but the killer was ahead of me on the West Side, and—” Then I got the idea. It seemed good, and then it seemed stupid, and then it seemed good again. There was only one thing wrong with it, one thing that didn’t make sense.
“Can I use your phone for a long distance call?”
“Be our guest,” said Chico.
I got the operator and placed the call to Miami. It took me and the operator about ten minutes to reach the person I wanted, but when I got him I asked him one question. The answer told me who my killer was.
“Well?” said Groucho. “You look like the cat who swallowed Kitty Carlisle.”
“I’ve got less than an hour to turn myself in to the cops,” I said. “I think you can start packing and stop worrying about that $120,000. I’ll give you a call or be back later.”
In the lobby I stopped to have a talk with Costello. He said he’d have to check with Nitti about what I wanted, but he’d call right away.
Narducy was reading a detective magazine when I got in the cab.
“Know where the Maxwell Street Police Station is?” I said.
He did, and we shot into traffic going south.
If it weren’t so close to two, I probably would have gone back to Merle’s for my .38. I’ve thought about it a couple of times. It would have changed things, probably a lot, but I’m not sure it would have been better.
You Bet Your Life: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Three) Page 14
