by Otto Penzler
I took a deep breath. I said, “Gimme a swallow of that gin. Thanks.” I put the tumbler down again. I looked him right in the eye. “All right, I did it! Now how d’ye like that? I begged him not to throw his life away on her. When he walked out anyway, I beat him up to her place in a taxi, got there first, gave her one last chance to lay off him. She wouldn’t take it. She was all soft and squashy and I just took a grip and pushed hard.”
“And the doorman?” he said with a smile.
“His back was turned. He was out at the curb seeing some people into a cab. When I left, I took the stairs down. When Chick signaled from her apartment and the doorman left his post, I just walked out. It was a pushover.”
His smile was a grin. “Well, if you killed her, you killed her.” He called in to the other room, “Hey, Coley, she says she killed her!” Coley came back, flapped his hand at me disgustedly, said, “Come on, let’s get out of here. There’s nothing doing around here.”
He opened the door, went out into the hall. I said, “Well, aren’t you going to take me with you? Aren’t you going to let him go and hold me instead?”
“Who the hell wants you?” came back through the open door.
Burns, as he got up to follow him, said offhandedly, “And what was she wearing when you killed her?” But he kept walking to the door, without waiting for the answer.
They’d had a train to make. I swallowed hard. “Well, I—I was too steamed-up to notice colors or anything, but she had on her coat and hat, ready to leave.”
He turned around at the door and looked at me. His grin was sort of sympathetic, understanding. “Sure,” he said softly. “I guess she took ‘em off, though, after she found out she was dead and wasn’t going anywhere after all. We found her in pajamas. Write us a nice long letter about it tomorrow, Angel Face. We’ll see you at the trial, no doubt.”
There was a glass cigarette-box at my elbow. I grabbed it and heaved, beserk. “You rotten, lowdown—detective, you! Going around snooping, framing innocent people to death! Get out of here! I hope I never see your face again!”
It missed his head, crashed and tinkled against the door-frame to one side of him. He didn’t cringe, I liked that about him, sore as I was. He just gave a long drawn-out whistle. “Maybe you did do it at that,” he said. “Maybe I’m underestimating you,” and he touched his hatbrim and closed the door after him.
The courtroom was so unnaturally still that the ticking of my heart sounded like a cheap alarm-clock in the silence. I kept wondering how it was they didn’t put me out for letting it make so much noise. A big blue fly was buzzing on the inside of the windowpane nearest me, trying to find its way out. The jurists came filing in like ghosts, and slowly filled the double row of chairs in the box. All you could hear was a slight rustle of clothing as they seated themselves. I kept thinking of the Inquisition, and wondered why they didn’t have black hoods over their heads.
“Will the foreman of the jury please stand?”
I spaded both my hands down past my hips and grabbed the edges of my seat. My handkerchief fell on the floor and the man next to me picked it up and handed it back to me. I tried to say “Thanks” but my jaws wouldn’t unlock.
“Gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict?”
I told myself, “He won’t be able to hear it, if my heart doesn’t shut up.” It was going bangetty-bangetty-bang!
“We have, your honor.”
“Gentlemen of the jury, what is your verdict?”
The banging stopped; my heart wasn’t going at all now. Even the fly stopped buzzing. The whole works stood still.
“We find the defendant guilty of murder in the first degree.”
Some woman screamed out “No!” at the top of her lungs. It must have been me, they were all turning their heads to look around at me. The next thing I knew, I was outside in the corridor and a whole lot of people were standing around me. Everything looked blurred. A voice said, “Give her air, stand back.” Another voice said, “His sister. She was on the stand earlier in the week.” Ammonia fumes kept tickling the membranes of my nostrils. The first voice said, “Take her home. Where does she live? Anybody know where she lives?”
“I know where she lives. I’ll take care of her.”
Somebody put an arm around my waist and walked me to the creaky courthouse elevator, led me out to the street, got in a taxi after me. I looked, and it was that dick, Burns. I climbed up into the corner of the cab, put my feet on the seat, shuffled them at him. I said, “Get away from me, you devil! You railroaded him, you butcher!”
“Attagirl,” he said gently. “Feeling better already, aren’t you?” He gave the old address, where Chick and I had lived. The cab started and I couldn’t get him out of it. I felt too low even to fight any more.
“Not there,” I said sullenly. “I’m holed up in a cheap furnished room now, off Second Avenue. I’ve hocked everything I own, down to my vaccination mark! How d’you suppose I got that lawyer Schlesinger for him? And a lot of good it did him! What a wash-out he turned out to be!”
“Don’t blame him,” he said. “He couldn’t buck that case we turned over to the State; Dar-row himself couldn’t have. What he should have done was let him plead guilty to second-degree, then he wouldn’t be in line for short-circuiting. That was his big mistake.”
“No!” I shrilled at him. “He wanted us to do that, but neither Chick nor I would hear of it! Why should he plead guilty to anything, even if it was only housebreaking, when he’s innocent? That’s a guilty man’s dodge, not an innocent man’s. He hasn’t got half-an-hour’s detention rightfully coming to him! Why should he lie down and accept twenty years? He didn’t lay a hand on Ruby Reading.”
“Eleven million people, the mighty State of New York, say that he did.”
I got out, went in the grubby entrance, between a delicatessen and a Chinese laundry. “Don’t come in with me, I don’t want to see any more of you!” I spat over my shoulder at him. “If I was a man I’d knock you down and beat the living hell out of you!”
He came on, though, and upstairs he closed the door behind him, pushing me out of the way to get in. He said, “You need help, Angel Face, and I’m crying to give it to you.”
“Oh, biting the hand that feeds you, turning into a doublecrosser, a turncoat!”
“No,” he said, “no,” and sort of held out his hands as if asking me for something. “Sell me, won’t you?” he almost pleaded. “Sell me that he’s innocent, and I’ll work my fingers raw to back you up! I didn’t frame your brother. I only did my job. I was sent there by my superiors in answer to the patrolman’s call that night, questioned Chick, put him under arrest. You heard me answering their questions on the stand. Did I distort the facts any? All I told them was what I saw with my own eyes, what I found when I got to Reading’s apartment. Don’t hold that against me, Angel Face. Sell me, convince me that he didn’t do it, and I’m with you up to the hilt.”
“Why?” I said cynically. “Why this sudden yearning to undo the damage you’ve already done?”
He opened the door to go. “Look in the mirror sometime and find out,” was all he said. “You can reach me at Centre Street, Nick Burns.” He held out his hand uncertainly, probably expecting me to slap it aside.
I took it instead. “O.K., flatfoot,” I sighed wearily. “No use holding it against you that you’re a detective. You probably don’t know any better. Before you go, gimme the address of that maid of hers, Mandy Leroy. I’ve got an idea she didn’t tell all she knew.”
“She went home at five that day. How can she help you?”
“I bet she was greased plenty to softpedal the one right name that belongs in this case. She mayn’t have been there, but she knew who to expect around. She may have even tipped him off that Ruby Rose was throwing him over. It takes a woman to see through a woman.”
“Better watch yourself going up there alone,” he warned me. He took out a notebook. “Here it is, One Hundred Eighteenth, just off
Lenox.” I jotted it down. “If she was paid off like you think, how you going to restore her memory? It’ll take heavy sugar….” He fumbled in his pocket, looked at me like he was a little scared of me, finally took out something and shoved it out of sight on the bureau. “Try your luck with that,” he said. “Use it where it’ll do the most good. Try a little intimidation with it, it may work.”
I grabbed it up and he ducked out in a hurry, the big coward. A hundred and fifty bucks. I ran out to the stairs after him. “Hey!” I yelled, “aren’t you married or anything?”
“Naw,” he called back, “I can always get it back, anyway, if it does the trick.” And then he added, “I always did want to have something on you, Angel Face.”
I went back into my cubbyhole again. “Why, the big rummy!” I said hotly. I hadn’t cried in court when Chick got the ax, just yelled out. But now my eyes got all wet.
“Mandy doan live her no mo’e,” the colored janitor of the 118th Street tenement told me.
“Where’d she go? And don’t tell me you don’t know, because it won’t work.”
“She done move to a mighty presumptuous neighborhood, doan know how come all of a sudden. She gone to Edgecomb Avenue.”
Edgecomb Avenue is the Park Avenue of New York’s darktown. Mandy had mentioned on the stand, without being asked, that Reading had died owing her two months’ wages. Yet she moves to the colored Gold Coast right on top of it. She hadn’t been paid off—not much!
Edgecomb Avenue is nothing to be ashamed of in any man’s town. Every one of the trim modern apartment buildings had a glossy private car or two parked in front of the door. I tackled the address he’d given me, and thought they were having a housewarming at first. They were singing inside and it sounded like a revival meeting.
A fat old lady came to the door, in a black silk dress, tears streaming down her cheeks. “I’se her mother, honey,” she said softly in answer to what I told her, “and you done come at an evil hour. My lamb was run over on the street, right outside this building, only yesterday, first day we moved here! She’s in there daid now, honey. The Lawd give and the Lawd has took away again.”
I did a little thinking.
Why just her, and nobody else, when she held the key to the Reading murder? “How did it happen to her? Did they tell you?”
“Two white men in a car,” she mourned. “ ‘Peared almost like they run her down purposely. She was walking along the sidewalk, folks tell me, wasn’t even in the gutter at all. And it swung right up on the sidewalk aftah her, go ovah her, then loop out in the middle again and light away, without nevah stopping!”
I went away saying to myself, “That girl was murdered as sure as I’m born, to shut her mouth. First she was bribed, then when the trial was safely over she was put out of the way for good!”
Somebody big was behind all this. And what did I have to fight that somebody with? A borrowed hundred and fifty bucks, an offer of cooperation from a susceptible detective, and a face.
I went around to the building Ruby Rose had lived in, and struck the wrong shift. “Charlie Baker doesn’t come on until six, eh?” I told the doorman. “Where does he live? I want to talk to him.”
“He don’t come on at all any more. He quit his job, as soon as that—” he tilted his head to the ceiling, “—mess we had upstairs was over with, and he didn’t have to appear in court no more.”
“Well, where’s he working now?”
“He ain’t working at all, lady. He don’t have to any more. I understand a relative of his died in the old country, left him quite a bit, and him and his wife and his three kids have gone back to England to live.”
So he’d been paid off heavily too. It looked like I was up against Wall Street itself. No wonder everything had gone so smoothly.
No wonder even a man like Schlesinger hadn’t been able to make a dent in the case.
“But I’m not licked yet,” I said to myself, back in my room. “I’ve still got this face. It ought to be good for something. If I only knew where to push it, who to flash it on!”
Burns showed up that night, to find out how I was making out.
“Here’s your hundred and fifty back,” I told him bitterly. “I’m up against a stone wall every way I turn. But is it a coincidence that the minute the case is in the bag, their two chief witnesses are permanently disposed of, one by exportation, the other by hit-and-run? They’re not taking any chances on anything backfiring later.”
He said, “You’re beginning to sell me. It smells like rain.”
I sat down on the floor (there was only one chair in the dump) and took a dejected half-Nelson around my own ankles. “Look, it goes like this. Some guy did it. Some guy that was sold on her. Plenty of names were spilled by Mandy and Baker, but not the right one. The ones that were brought out didn’t lead anywhere, you saw that yourself. The mechanics of the thing don’t trouble me a bit, the how and why could be cleared up easy enough—even by you.”
“Thanks,” he said.
“It’s the who that has me baffaloed. There’s a gap there. I can’t jump across to the other side. From there on, I could handle it beautifully. But I’ve got to close that gap, that who, or I might as well put in the order for Chick’s headstone right now.”
He took out a folded newspaper and whacked himself disgustedly across the shins with it. “Tough going, kid,” he agreed.
“I’ll make it,” I said. “You can’t keep a good girl down. The right guy is in this town. And so am I in this town. I’ll connect with him yet, if I’ve got to use a ouija board!”
He said, “You haven’t got all winter. He comes up for sentence Wednesday.” He opened the door. “I’m on your side,” he let me know in that quiet way of his.
He left the paper behind him on the chair. I sat down and opened it. I wasn’t going to do any reading, but I wanted to think behind it. And then I saw her name. The papers had been full of her name for weeks, but this was different; this was just a little boxed ad off at the side.
AUCTION SALE
Jewelry, personal effects and furniture belonging to the late Ruby Rose Reading Monarch Galleries Saturday A.M.
I dove at the window, rammed it up, leaned halfway out. I caught him just coming out of the door.
“Burns!” I screeched at the top of my voice. “Hey, Burns! Bring that hundred and fifty back up here! I’ve changed my mind!”
The place was jammed to the gills with curiosity-mongers and bargain-hunters, and probably professional dealers too, although they were supposed to be excluded. There were about two dozen of those 100-watt blue-white bulbs in the ceiling that auction rooms go in for and the bleach of light was intolerable, worse than on a sunny beach at high noon.
I was down front, in the second row on the aisle; I’d got there early. I wasn’t interested in her diamonds or her furs or her thissas or her thattas. I was hoping something would come up that would give me some kind of a clue, but what I expected it to be, I didn’t know myself. An inscription on a cigarette case maybe. I knew how little chance there was of anything like that. The D.A.’s office had sifted through her things pretty thoroughly before Chick’s trial, and what they’d turned up hadn’t amounted to a row of pins. She’d been pretty cagy that way, hadn’t left much around. All bills had been addressed to her personally, just like she’d paid her rent with her own personal checks, and fed the account herself. Where the funds originated in the first place was never explained. I suppose she took in washing.
They started off with minor articles first, to warm the customers up. A cocktail shaker that played a tune, a make-up mirror with a light behind it, a ship’s model, things like that. They got around to her clothes next, and the women customers started “ohing” and “ahing” and foaming at the mouth. By the looks of most of them that was probably the closest they’d ever get to real sin, bidding for its hand-me-downs.
The furniture came next, and they started to talk real money now. This out of the way, her ice came on. Broth
er, she’d made them say it with diamonds, and they’d all spoken above a whisper too! When the last of it went, that washed up the sale; there was nothing else left to dispose of but the little rosewood jewel case she’d kept them in. About ten by twelve by ten inches deep, with a little gilt key and lock; not worth a damn but there it was. However, if you think an auctioneer passes up anything, you don’t know your auctioneers.
“What am I offered for this?” he said almost apologetically. “Lovely little trinket box, give it to your best girl or your wife or your mother, to keep her ornaments in or old love letters.” He knocked the veneer with his knuckles, held it outward to show us the satin lining. Nothing in it, like in a vaudeville magician’s act. “Do I hear fifty cents, just to clear the stand?”
Most of them were getting up and going already. An over-dressed guy in my same row, across the aisle, spoke up. “You hear a buck.”
I took a look at him, and I took a look at the box. “If you want it, I want it, too,” I decided suddenly. “A guy splurged up like you don’t hand a plain wooden box like that to any woman that he knows.” I opened my mouth for the first time since I’d come in the place. “You hear a dollar and a quarter.”
“Dollar-fifty.”
“Two dollars.”
“Five.” The way he snapped it out, he meant business.
I’d never had such a strong hunch in my life before but now I wanted that box, had to have it, I felt it would do me some good. Maybe this overdressed monkey had given it to her, maybe Burns could trace where it had been bought….
“Seven-fifty.”
“Ten.”
“Twelve.”
The auctioneer was in seventh heaven. “You’re giving yourself away, brother, you’re giving yourself away!” I warned my competitor silently.
We leaned forward out of our seats and sized each other up. If he was giving himself away, I suppose I was too. I could see a sort of shrewd speculation in his snaky eyes, they screwed up into slits, seeming to say, “What’s your racket?” Something cold went down my back, hot as it was under all those mazdas.
