Between the Dark and the Daylight

by Ed Gorman

  And I could be mistaken about Doc Dunaway. I don’t think I am, not after the conversation we had, but I could be. There wouldn’t be any justice in smearing his good name without evidence, would there? I sure wouldn’t want that on my conscience.

  Besides I’ve always liked Doc; he minds his own business, never bothers anybody, just wants to be left alone to live out the rest of his days in peace.

  And there’s no denying he was right about Tully. Tully might not be guilty of murder, but he’s guilty of plenty of other crimes and he belongs in prison. You wouldn’t get an argument about that from anybody in Ridgedale.

  I don’t know. I just don’t know.

  What would you do?

  A full-time professional writer since 1969, BILL PRONZINI has published close to 70 novels, including three in collaboration with his wife, novelist Marcia Muller, and 32 in his popular “Nameless Detective” series. He is also the author of four nonfiction books, 20 collections of short stories, and scores of un-collected stories, articles, essays, and book reviews; and he has edited or coedited numerous anthologies. His work has been translated into eighteen languages and published in nearly thirty countries. He has received three Shamus Awards, two for Best Novel, and the Lifetime Achievement Award (presented in 1987) from the Private Eye Writers of America; and six nominations for the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe award. His suspense novel, Snowbound, was the recipient of the Grand Prix de la Litterature Policiere as the best crime novel published in France in 1988. A Wasteland of Strangers was nominated for best crime novel of 1997 by both the Mystery Writers of America and the International Crime Writers Association. Another mainstream suspense novel, The Crimes of Jordan Wise, was nominated by the International Crime Writers Association for the Hammett Award for best crime novel of 2006.

  Jonas and the Frail

  BY CHARLES ARDAI

  Jonas took the punch, as he had to — what else could he do?

  They were holding his arms, one man on either side of him, each of them taller than Jonas, and wider, too, though Jonas was certainly no shrimp. He’d played fullback on his high school football team, had won many a game for the Tigers by barreling through the opposition, sheer mass carrying him into and over the beefy lads from Haverfield and Oakdale. But the men holding his arms were bigger than him, and stronger, too, so he stood there and took the punch.

  It was not the sort that would level a fighter in the ring, but it had force behind it and Jonas’ head snapped to the side before smacking against the wall behind him with a painful clonk. The dapper little fireplug in front of him tugged his gloves down tighter, made practice fists a few times in the air, and then socked him a second time, this time smack on the kisser. Jonas felt his lips mash flat against his teeth, tasted blood.

  “Now tell me again what my sister is to you,” the man said, glowering. He wore a grey felt homburg and a black topcoat over a charcoal double-breasted suit. His cheeks were bare, his sideburns neatly trimmed. He looked like a newspaper advertisement: Fine Menswear, Shaving Supplies. Come To Siegel’s.

  “Nothing,” Jonas said. The words came out mushy. “She’s nothing to me, Mr. Siegel, honest.”

  “My sister’s nothing?” he shouted. “She’s nothing?” He sank a left into Jonas’ gut, followed by a right, then a left again, like he was hitting the heavy bag at the gym. Spit flew from Jonas’ mouth as each punch landed and he sagged forward at the waist as much as the men holding him would allow.

  “I didn’t mean that, Mr. Siegel,” Jonas whispered, the words hardly audible. “I didn’t — ”

  “If you touched her,” Siegel said, “I will cut off your hand. If you kissed her, I will cut out your tongue. If you, god forbid, came close to her with your filthy, greasy, goyische schvantz, you know what I’m going to cut off?”

  He waited for an answer. Finally Jonas nodded.

  “So I’ll ask you one last time,” Siegel said, softly, politely, tugging the lapels of his suit jacket back into place. “What is my sister to you?”

  “She’s my job, Mr. Siegel,” Jonas whispered. “She’s who you told me to watch, and protect, and make sure nothing happened to. That’s all. I never touched her.”

  “Then where,” Siegel said, leaning in till his nose was less than an inch from Jonas’ bruised and purpling face, “is she?”

  Melissa Siegel — known to all as Missy — hung first one stocking then the other over the radiator grill, spreading the silk out with a dainty fingertip. Silk would ruin if you dried it too quickly, but a low, slow heat like this would do fine.

  She pulled the negligee tighter around her, clasping it together between her breasts. Mike Donovan lay on his side in the Murphy bed, covered to the waist by the top sheet, his hat and holster on the table by his side, his shirt and pants and socks and garters strewn across the floor. Missy’s dress was draped over the back of the room’s one chair. Her brassiere was nowhere in sight.

  Mike’s eyes followed her as she strode back toward him, hips swinging lazily, the expression on her face sly and replete. She sat on the corner of the mattress and pulled her legs up under her, Indian style. “Three times, Mike,” she said. “In one night. That’s got to be some kind of a record, even for you.”

  His roguish grin widened. “Lady, you were made for breaking records.”

  She reached out a palm, laid it flat over the sheet where his manhood lay, quiescent at last. She patted the flesh through the fabric, felt not the slightest stir. “Ah, Mike, isn’t that cute, he’s sleeping.”

  “Knocked out is more like it,” Mike said. “Like Sugar Ray Robinson took down Gene Fullmer.”

  “If that’s how Sugar Ray took down Fullmer,” Missy said, “I’m sorry I wasn’t in the stadium to see it.”

  “You’re a dirty broad, you know that?”

  “Yeah?” Missy pulled her negligee apart, uncovering a pair of breasts that were heavy enough you could tell they’d start to sag by the time she turned twenty. But that was still three years away. “You didn’t seem to mind earlier.”

  Mike reached over to the table, slipped a cigarette out of a pack. “Who would?”

  Missy’s face clouded over. “My brother would. If he knew-”

  Mike flicked open his Zippo, touched the flame to the cigarette, flipped it closed again. “Forget about him, doll. Your brother’s a little man with a little bit of business on a couple little blocks on the Lower East Side. He’s nothing.” Mike drew on the cigarette, handed it over to Missy, who took a drag in turn. She coughed, passed it back. “He keeps pushing the wrong people too hard and someday soon the big man’s gonna give someone the nod to put some extra ventilation in him. Maybe it’ll be me.”

  “Ah, you talk big, all you micks, but he’s still alive and a dozen of you are in the river where he put you.”

  “That’s cause he’s a sneaky little yid, with a sneaky little crew, and he don’t fight fair.”

  Missy threw her head back and laughed, a sharp sound that left her breasts quivering. “Fair. Fair’s when the other guy’s lying in the gutter with holes in him. Unfair’s when it’s your guy.”

  Mike reared up, the sheet falling off to one side. He rolled Missy onto her back and she wrapped her long legs around him.

  “Yeah?” he said, dipping his head to kiss her hard on her throat. “I’ll show you holes, baby, and I’ll fill ‘em for you, too.”

  Missy’s eyes slid shut and a smile split her face. “Big talker,” she said.

  Jonas pressed a steak onto the mouse puffing up his right eye. The left wasn’t nearly as bad. And the split lip, well — it was a split lip. Not a whole hell of a lot to do about it, he’d just have to eat carefully the next day or two.

  Assuming he was still around in a day or two.

  Siegel had made himself clear: He wanted his sister home and he wanted her home now. And if the reason she wasn’t home now had two legs and wore trousers, he wanted those legs horizontal and in a box.

  Jonas laid the steak d
own on a chipped plate by the sink, rinsed his hands off, and pulled on the clean shirt Hazel had left out for him.

  He felt like a prize dope for letting Missy out of his sight in the first place. She’d spent the evening as she spent so many, caroming from one of Times Square’s rooftop gardens to the next, swing music and champagne making a heady atmosphere in the steamy summer air. She was younger than the other women in those places and they wouldn’t have let her in unescorted, but that was just as well since her brother wouldn’t have let her out unescorted either. Jonas had followed her dutifully from one joint to the next, checking her wrap at the door, collecting it for her when Missy was ready to leave, and, in between, sitting beside her at a succession of little round tables and horseshoe banquettes, glaring at any man unwise enough to chance a peek down the lady’s décolletage.

  She’d left him for the powder room more than once as the evening wore on, the inevitable consequence of all the flutes of Dom she was downing, but she’d always returned promptly, straightening her dress beneath her as she sat and casting a resentful glance his way. Okay, she wished he wasn’t there. Join the club, sister. You think it’s a laugh and a half drinking club soda all night while your boss’ kid sister gets tight? You think every man dreams of spending hours listening to clarinets and trombones while he ought to be at home with his wife, getting a good night’s sleep?

  But he knew his role and she sure as hell knew hers, and they played them out like Lunt and Fontanne.

  Then came the Green Lion, where the trombones were louder and the comics nastier and the dancers less well behaved. The waiter stationed outside the swinging door to the kitchen looked to Jonas like he was packing heat. The cigarette girls fingered the packs meaningfully before handing them over and judging from the smell in the air occasionally sold one-offs that weren’t filled with Virginia’s finest.

  And when Missy went to the powder room, she didn’t come out again.

  He watched — he didn’t take his eye off the door, he’d swear to that later when taking his licks. But each time the door opened, it was some other woman going in or coming out. After five minutes passed, then ten, Jonas started to get anxious. Finally he burst in, ignoring the feminine squeals that erupted around him and throwing off the hand on his shoulder from the bouncer attracted by the commotion.

  “Where is she?” Jonas roared at the bouncer.

  “Who?”

  “Missy Siegel — Harry Siegel’s sister.”

  The man shrugged, glanced carelessly from face to face at the women in the room. “You got me, bub. She ain’t in here. And you can’t be in here either, understand?”

  Oh, he wanted to take a swing at the smug bastard, he wanted to lay him out flat on the tile floor. But Jonas had bigger worries now than this man. Looking around, he spotted a pink-lacquered door down at the far end of the room, past the row of sinks.

  Who’d ever heard of a powder room with a rear exit?

  He’d raced out and down the stairs, taking them two at a time, reaching the sidewalk in nothing flat, but there was no sign of her, and none of the cabbies he buttonholed had seen anyone answering to her description. How had they managed not to notice a seventeen-year-old in a satin gown with a pair on her that made Mansfield look positively undernourished? Or were these fine gentlemen lying to him? Bracing them, one by one, with his .45 held tightly in one fist and their shirt collars in the other, Jonas concluded they were telling the truth. Which meant she was either still in the building or had stolen away through the service alley in back. Hours of hunting, first floor by floor and then street by street, produced nothing, except for the growing realization that he’d have to go back to Siegel empty-handed.

  Jonas slapped the steak back on his eye for another second or two. It was cold and slimy and didn’t make him feel any better. But people said it was what you were supposed to do. Steak on a black eye, slice of potato on a wart. You could make up your own rules or you could do what people told you. Jonas was the kind of guy who did what people told him.

  He grabbed his keys and hat and, quietly so as not to wake his wife, pulled the door shut behind him.

  Missy yawned as she drew her stockings on, clipped them to her garters, let the skirt of her dress fall to her knees. There was nothing like a lazy Sunday morning after a long night’s entertainment, but while Donovan was out like a light, snoring softly into his pillow, Missy was wakeful and restless. She patted down her dress, re-pinned her hair, settled her hat on top at an angle she’d seen in a movie magazine, and stepped to the door. She had her hand on the knob when the knock came.

  “Who is it?” she said.

  “Missy?”

  She knew the voice — oh, did she ever.

  She paused only to flick one of her straps off her shoulder, letting it settle loosely on her upper arm, then opened the door.

  Jonas went back to the scene of the crime, as it were: the last place he’d seen his charge before she’d pulled her disappearing act. The Green Lion closed each night at 4 a.m., but a skeleton crew remained behind to mop the place down, sweep up broken glass and cigarette butts, and evict the occasional dozing hophead from one of the toilets. Jonas pulled up in a taxi just after dawn and saw two men stumble out of the place, tuxedos unkempt and faces worse, holding onto each other for balance. He could smell their breath as they passed.

  The elevator man, a one-armed veteran in a banded cap and pinned-up sleeve, resented being asked to ply his trade at such an ungodly hour. He muttered under his breath till Jonas pulled his jacket to one side to show his holster and the well-worn pistol butt it held. The muttering stopped, and a few floors later the elevator did, too.

  Jonas pushed his way through the leather-upholstered swinging doors, presently unattended, where just a few hours earlier a hostess and a maitre d’ had been tending to arrivals, the latter spreading a thick layer of soft soap in every direction, the former smiling dazzlingly and not noticing that the buttons on her blouse had come undone. Melissa had noticed, of course; the look the girls had given each other could have chilled a gimlet at twenty paces.

  The hostess would be at home now — hers or some lucky man’s. But the maitre d’ would still be around, Jonas knew, supervising cleanup and bolting down a quick dinner of leftovers and bottle ends. It was one of the perks of the job, the chance at the choice leavings of chateaubriand and Veuve Clicquot.

  Jonas picked his way between the tables, stepping out of the path of a kid pushing a mop, and shoved open the door to the kitchen. Sure enough, the maitre d’ was bent over a serving platter filled smorgasbord-style with bits of this and that. His black bow tie was undone and dangling and a stained napkin was tucked into the collar of his shirt.

  Jonas pulled his gun and thumbed back the hammer, approached calmly. The maitre d’ let his knife and fork clatter to the countertop and put his hands up. “What is this?”

  “What does it look like?”

  “Night’s receipts are gone, mister,” the man said. “Long gone. Jimmy and Paul carried ‘em to the bank hours ago.”

  “I don’t want money,” Jonas said.

  “Then you’re the first man I ever met that didn’t.” He untucked the napkin, balled it up, tossed it on the platter. “What is it then?” His eyes narrowed. “Got it in for Donovan? No skin off my nose. Chintzy bastard’s no joy to work for, let me tell you.”

  “I’m looking for a girl. Seventeen years old, built like Lana Turner, you saw her here with me last night. Name’s Missy Siegel. She’s Harry Siegel’s sister.”

  “That who she is?” He let out a low whistle. “Doesn’t take after her old man. And you wouldn’t know she was only seventeen to look at her.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” Jonas said. “But she is. And Mr. Siegel’s not happy that she didn’t come home with me last night.”

  “Gave you what for, did he?” the maitre d’ said, aiming a thumb in the direction of Jonas’ swollen face.

  Jonas shrugged. “It’s my job. I didn’t do
it.”

  “Jeez,” the maitre d’ said, “the people we work for.”

  “Enough palaver, Skeezix. I’m not your friend. I’m a man with one question, and you’ve either got an answer to it or you’ve got a bullet coming to you. Understand?”

  The maitre d’ nodded nervously.

  “I searched the building,” Jonas said, “and I searched the neighborhood, and I didn’t find her anywhere. I don’t see how she could’ve gotten away from me so fast. What I want to know is who she left with and where she is.”

  “That’s two questions,” the maitre d’ said.

  “You can have two bullets,” Jonas said.

  “No need,” the maitre d’ said. “No need. She left with Donovan. Not the first time, neither. And as for where… did you think to check the roof?”

  When Jonas stepped through the door, Missy put one long forefinger to her lips and inclined her head toward where Mike Donovan lay sleeping. This wasn’t a room so much as a maintenance shed, and with the Murphy bed open there was barely room to stand, never mind for two people to talk without waking a third.

  She bent forward slightly, let the top of her dress slip forward a touch, waited for his eyes to be drawn involuntarily toward her bosom, which would be all the sign she needed that she’d be getting her way.

  But he wasn’t having any. Jonas hooked her strap with one meaty thumb and shoved it back onto her shoulder. “Put ‘em away, doll. I’ve already got a pair at home.”

  She took a step toward the door but Jonas grabbed her forearm in one fist. He wasn’t letting her get away again.

  “Not so rough,” she hissed. “You big ape.”

  Donovan turned over in his sleep, the sheet slipping from his flank as he did. If Jonas had wanted any further proof of what had gone on in this room he had it now. The man was naked as the day he was born, and if there was any blush creeping up the cheek of the young woman in the room, Jonas couldn’t see it.

  He switched her arm from his right hand to his left and un-holstered his gun.