361

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Do it yourself,” I said.

  He did, and sat down again, and looked miserable. He hunched over his knees and sipped coffee. Bill had made all three cups just black. We both drank it that way all the time. Smitty didn’t like it, but he drank it.

  “It’s time to tell us the story, Smitty,” I said.

  “I can’t,” he said. He looked earnestly over the cup at us. “I come to do you a favor, pay back your old man. You rough me up. I should of stayed away in the first place.”

  I turned my head. “Bill, can you hit him any softer than the last time? I hate waking him up all the time.”

  Bill got up, eager, grinning. He wanted to even the slate. “I’ve got some beauties in here,” he said, and showed us his right fist. It had red hair and orange freckles all over it. The knuckles were big.

  Smitty said, “Come on. Lay off me, come on.” His voice was higher. He was pushing back down in the chair.

  “Tell us an easy part first,” I said. “What was the favor my father did you?”

  His eyes were on Bill’s fist. “It was before you were born,” he said. “Before repeal. I was driving a truckload in from New Hampshire when the state boys got me.”

  “A truckload of what?” Bill asked him.

  “Whiskey.” He would have said it with contempt for Bill’s ignorance, but he still had respect for Bill’s fist. “The people I worked for threw me away, but your old man was my mouthpiece. For no dough.”

  “How did he know you?” I asked.

  “We worked for the same people.”

  Bill took a step toward him. “That’s a lie.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Okay, Smitty, now the current events.”

  “I told you the whole thing. There’s gonna be trouble in New York. You don’t want any part of it.”

  “I want every part of it,” I told him. “Names and addresses. They killed my father.” I pointed at Bill. “They killed his wife.”

  He looked surprised, for just a second. Then his face closed up again, and he said, “Okay, right there that tells you.”

  “Tells me what?”

  “Why you ought to clear out.”

  “Because Bill’s wife was killed?”

  “You don’t want to be involved.”

  “I am involved, whether I like it or not. Tell me about this trouble that’s going to happen in New York.”

  He hesitated, considering, looking from me to Bill and back. Then he said, “It’s got to do with the Organization. That’s all I’ll say, that’s too much already.”

  “What organization?”

  “The mob. The outfit. The syndicate, you might call it.”

  “What do I have to do with the syndicate?”

  “On account of your father.”

  “What does he have to do with it?”

  “He used to work for it.”

  Bill went over and hit him twice before I could move. Then I got to him and pulled him away. I said, “Control yourself, goddamn you to hell, or I take him away and you can screw yourself. You want to cry in your beer, or do you want to help?”

  “All right, all right.” He pulled away from me and went over and sat on the sofa again.

  Smitty had protected himself with his arms. He lowered them now like they ached. His eyes were round. He said, “I didn’t do it. What’s the matter with him? I come to do you a favor. What’s the matter with him?”

  “He lost a wife.”

  “It wasn’t me. I come to warn you. I should of stayed away in the first place.”

  I said, “Who did it, Smitty? Who killed my father? Who killed Bill’s wife?”

  He shook his head. “No. You two are crazy. You’ll go after them, and they’ll trace it back to me. I just come to do you a friendly gesture. Because of your old man. I don’t want to get killed.”

  “What are their names, Smitty?”

  “They’ll trace it back to me. I don’t talk any more.”

  I said, “Bill.”

  It was a long night. We kept the drapes shut. Bill knocked him out and I woke him up. But there was somebody in the world who could scare Smitty more from a distance than we could close up. The last time, I didn’t wake him. We dumped him in a closet and locked the door and went to sleep.

  Four

  In the morning, before we left, Bill wanted to do something nutty like bury him in the cellar or leave him on a side road in his own car and with a bullet in his head from his own gun. “If we let him live,” he argued, “he’ll go right back and let them know we’re coming.”

  “No, he won’t,” I said. I looked at Smitty and talked to Bill. “He’ll have to tell them he talked to us. They won’t believe he didn’t give names. So he won’t go back to New York at all.”

  “No,” he said. “I won’t.” His words were slurred, because of his puffed lips.

  “He’ll go west some place,” I said, “and change his name.”

  He caught the quote. He said, “You won’t ever hear from me again.”

  After a while, Bill took my word for it, and moved his Mercury out of the driveway. Smitty backed his Plymouth out and drove away. He didn’t pause to ask directions.

  Bill had to go into town and say goodbye to his boss and his kid, and get his money out of the bank. I stayed behind and packed suitcases and locked the windows. When he came back, we loaded the trunk and headed for New York.

  I was still shaky in the right-hand seat. I tried driving for a while, but it was too hard. Not only the distance judgment, also the right ankle. They hadn’t been able to fix it completely. It wouldn’t bend any more, and made me gimp a little. I had to push the accelerator down with my heel, and it was awkward. So we switched again, and Bill drove the rest of the way. We went down through Pennsylvania, 11 and Carbondale and 106 and the Delaware Water Gap. It was the same distance, and 17 made us leery.

  We went down Jersey and over the bridge to Staten Island and across Staten Island and over the new bridge to Brooklyn. Then we went up the Belt Parkway and through the tunnel into Manhattan.

  We’d kept Smitty’s revolver. Bill had a Luger that maybe still worked, but no ammunition for it. He’d tried in Binghamton, but neither he nor the clerk was sure what size cartridge it wanted. He was going to try again in New York. Also in the trunk we had two deer rifles.

  We got a hotel way up Broadway, 72nd Street, fairly cheap with a garage. Bill had almost four thousand dollars. I had not quite a hundred. The Air Force had sent the second hundred of my mustering-out pay to the hospital. God knew where the third hundred would go. That should be coming soon. Next Monday I’d be out two months. That seemed hard to believe.

  It was only a little after two when we checked in. Bill found a bank a couple blocks down from the hotel. He put three grand in a joint checking account. We both signed cards and got a checkbook. They were unhappy. They wanted to give us one with our names on the checks.

  After lunch, we went back to the room and sat on the beds. Bill said, “Now what?”

  I said, “We go in two directions. The license plate of Smitty’s car is one. But I think that was probably stolen. The other is Dad. He was a lawyer in New York, way back when. He had something to do with the underworld.”

  “That’s a lie. That punk was lying.”

  “No. It’s something from that time that killed him. They were looking for him, maybe. He figured it was safe to come to New York, after all these years. But he was nervous about going out of the hotel.”

  “But why Ann?”

  “Tell me about that.”

  “She was in the Civic Theater. You know, amateur. She spent two, three evenings a week at rehearsals. She’d take the bus in and get somebody to drive her back. I couldn’t go get her on account of Betsy. And the bus doesn’t run that late. That night, she took the bus in like always. It was three blocks to walk to where they rehearsed. She was cross-c-crossing the street. It wasn’t even dark, it was only seven-thirty. Early evening. The car came ou-came out of the side street,
clipped her. She got kno-knocked—”

  “Okay,” I said. “Take it easy. You don’t have to tell me now.”

  “I’ll get it over with,” he said. He lit a cigarette. “Back onto the sidewalk,” he said. “The car knocked her back-back—”

  “Okay.”

  “Jesus.” He breathed loudly, inhale and exhale, staring at the bedspread pattern. He laid his hand on the bedspread, fingers splayed out. He pressed down and said, “Three people saw it. Nobody saw it clear. The car didn’t even slow down.”

  I said, “I wonder if it was the same car.”

  He looked at me. “As went after you?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “I don’t know. I suppose so. Nobody saw it clear.”

  He finished his cigarette. I went over to the phone, and looked at the directories. They had the Manhattan and the Brooklyn and the Bronx. I found Chester P. Smith in the Brooklyn book, at 653 East 99th Street. Nightingale 9-9970.

  A woman answered. I asked for Smitty, and she said, “Who?”

  “Chet. Chester.”

  “He’s at work. Who is this?”

  “I think we were in the service together,” I said. “If this is the right Chester Smith. Medium height, thin-faced.”

  She laughed, as though she were mad. “There’s nothing thin about this Chester,” she said.

  “Can’t be the same guy,” I said.

  I hung up and looked for the public library in the Manhattan directory. It said there was a Newspaper Division at 521 West 43. I said, “I’m going out for a while.”

  Bill said, “Where?”

  “Library. You could figure out how we check that license plate.”

  “What the hell you doing at the library?”

  “I want to see if Dad ever made the paper.”

  “You mean with the underworld? Bootleggers?” He got to his feet, frowning and mad. “That punk was lying, Ray. What kind of a son are you?”

  “A son with his last eye open,” I said.

  He hung fire, and then turned away. “Hell,” he said. “I haven’t been getting any sleep.”

  “I’ll be back after a while.”

  He flung himself face down on his bed and I left the room.

  Five

  It was between Tenth and Eleventh Avenue. That whole block was sewing machine wholesalers. The newspaper library was the second floor of a building that looked like a post office. Some papers they had on microfilm, some they had bound in big books.

  I looked through the New York Times Index. I found it in 1931. Dad was only twenty-seven then. He was married, but he didn’t have any kids yet. He’d been a lawyer two years.

  There was a guy, he owned a lot of buildings. Most of them were tenements, slum buildings. Almost all of them had speak-easies in them. He was up for allowing liquor to be stored and sold on his property with his knowledge. He got off on a brilliant piece of legal footwork on the part of his lawyer, a member of the firm of McArdle, Lamarck & Krishman. It was so brilliant the Times did a profile on the lawyer, whose name was Willard Kelly, and on the firm he worked for.

  McArdle, Lamarck & Krishman, “it was alleged,” got virtually all of their business, directly or indirectly, from the liquor syndicate. Willard Kelly had been with the firm less than a year. This was the first time he’d handled a case in court for them. The profile writer was sad that Kelly was selling his brilliance to the underworld.

  Your father. You think you know him. You forget he lived a lot of years before he started you. All of a sudden you find out you never knew who the hell he was.

  I wrote down all the names. Morris Silber, the landlord. Andrew McArdle and Philip Lamarck and Samuel Krishman, partners in the law firm. George Ellinbridge, the prosecuting attorney. Andrew Shuffleman, the judge.

  Willard Kelly didn’t show up again. I went back through the Index, twenties and thirties, checking the other names. Morris Silber got a year in jail in 1937 for housing violations in his tenements, mainly rats. His lawyer wasn’t named. Philip Lamarck died in bed in 1935, at the age of sixty-seven. Andrew Shuffleman died just as peaceably the same year, at the age of seventy-one. George Ellinbridge was elected State Assemblyman in 1938, but wasn’t re-elected.

  Andrew McArdle personally defended crime kingpin Anthony Edward “Eddie” Kapp in his income-tax evasion trial in 1940. The crime kingpin went to jail, with two sentences of ten years and one of five years, to run consecutively and not concurrently. Twenty-five years. It wasn’t up yet, but there were such things as paroles.

  Eddie Kapp. I didn’t find any references to him later than 1940. I found a lot of them in the early thirties and late twenties. A friend of Dutch Schultz and Bill Bailey. An important man around that crazy time when Schultz was killed over in Jersey and Bailey became top man for two weeks. Then Bailey walked into a New York City hospital one afternoon and said he didn’t feel well. They put him to bed, and two o’clock the following morning he was dead. The death certificate said pneumonia.

  Eddie Kapp. Willard Kelly. Connected by a man named Andrew McArdle.

  I wasted some time, then, looking in the current year’s Index. They had monthly indices in a filler book, and July was the most recent. My name was there, for July 14th. I filled out a slip, got the microfilm, and put it in the viewer. I read about the shooting. The Times called it “bizarre.” It only rated a small paragraph on page eight. DRIVER SHOT AT WHEEL.

  The woman came over and told me it was five o’clock, closing time. I put the microfilm back in the box, put my pencil and pad in my pocket, and left.

  Six

  Back at the room, there was a guy with Bill. He had on a brown suit with the coat open. His white shirt was bunched at the waist. He was thin and his tie was brown and orange and green and he wore a brown hat back on his head indoors.

  Bill said, “This is Ed Johnson. He’s a private detective.”

  Johnson grinned at me. “That’s right,” he said.

  I frowned at Bill. “What the hell for?”

  “We’re not going to get anywhere on our own. You got some jerky idea about Dad mixed up with the underworld. We need somebody who knows the ropes.”

  I looked at Johnson. “Get out,” I said.

  His grin faded. “Well, I don’t know,” he said. He looked from me to Bill to me. “I’ve been given a retainer, to check out a license plate.”

  “We want to do that,” Bill told me.

  I sat down and lit a cigarette. “We don’t want to spread our business around,” I told the match. “We don’t want to finger ourselves.”

  “I’m trustworthy,” Johnson told me. “One hundred per cent.”

  “Just the license, Ray,” said Bill. He sounded embarrassed.

  Johnson said, “You couldn’t do it, I can.”

  I shrugged. “The hell with it,” I said. “Go play with the license plate. It was on a Plymouth.”

  He looked from face to face again, and then he said he’d be seeing us, and left.

  Bill said, “That was a hell of a way to talk. He’s a nice guy.”

  I said, “He’s a stranger.”

  “We need somebody dispassionate. You’ve got this nutty idea—”

  I took out the pad and read aloud from it. Then I tossed it on the dresser and said, “Smarten up.”

  Bill pushed words into the silence like a man pushing logs into mud. “It wasn’t Dad. Willard Kelly, that isn’t an uncommon name. Hell, it’s my name, too.”

  “Just a coincidence.”

  “Sure.”

  “Two Willard Kellys. Both the same age. Both in New York. Both lawyers. Both graduates of the same school.”

  “Maybe. Why not?”

  “You ought to go back to Binghamton, Bill. You’re blind in both eyes. You’ll get us in a lot of trouble.”

  He looked at me, and then he went and sat on the bed. He sat in the middle of the bed, knees folded like a yogi. He looked big and pathetic. His blunt fingers, hairy and freckled, traced the pattern of the spread.r />
  After a while, he said, “My father.”

  A while longer and he said, “He wasn’t like that.”

  “He changed. Reformed. Quit the syndicate and moved away.”

  His eyes had sad, shredded edges. “That’s true?”

  “Something like that.”

  “That was really him, in the paper?”

  “You know it.”

  He made a fist and pounded the pattern. “How the hell can I have any respect for him?”

  I popped the eye out and got to my feet. I put it on the dresser and said, “Get up, Bill.”

  He was puzzled. “Why?”

  “You lose respect too easy.”

  “I don’t want to fight you, Ray.”

  He came off the bed with his hands spread, and I hit him on the side of the jaw.

  The third time I hit him, he swung back. I was at a disadvantage, I didn’t always judge the distance right. I walked into a few. I kept getting up. He started to cry, and his face was as red as his hair, and he kept knocking me down again. Then he put his hands at his sides and shook his head and whispered, “No more.” I got up and hit him with my left hand. He didn’t dodge or raise his arms or defend himself or fight back. I hit him with the right hand. And the left hand again. He blubbered, “No more.” I hit him right hand and then left hand. He dropped to his knees, and the vibration knocked the Gideon Bible off the nightstand. I hit him right hand, from the knees coming up, and he went over on his back. He wouldn’t get up.

  I got the eye from the dresser and went into the head. I washed my face and watched myself put the eye in. It didn’t make me want to throw up any more. My knuckles were scraped and there was a ragged cut on the left side of my jaw.

  I went back and sat down in the chair again. After a while, Bill sat up. He said, “All right.”

  I said, “You going back to Binghamton?”

  “No. You’re right.”

  I wasn’t sure he knew. I said, “Why did you think I came here? To play Summer Festival?”

  “No,” he said. “I know that.”

  “Do you know what we’re doing here?”