by McBain, Ed
There was something about the way Ollie said, “Yes,” and paused significantly, and then added, “She knows,” that immediately told Pike all he had to know.
“Something’s happened to Augusta,” Pike said.
“I am not saying anything happened to Augusta,” Ollie said. “I am not saying anything happened to anybody. All I am saying is that a serious crime has been committed, and you can help us a lot by letting us have the contact sheets, and by coming along with me to the hotel, where we can go over them together with Kling and a man you may know named Arthur Cutler, who is probably being telephoned right this minute and being asked to go on down there. What do you say, Mr. Pike?”
“If Augusta’s in trouble…”
“Yes or no, Mr. Pike?”
“Yes. Of course,” Pike said.
There were, as Pike had promised, exactly 1,080 prints on the black-and-white contact sheets. Moreover, the guest list for the wedding and reception totaled not 200 people, as Kling had estimated, but exactly 212 people. Carella had phoned Cutler and asked him to meet him at the hotel, and then he had called Kling to tell him what he could expect. Kling, who had never met Fat Ollie Weeks, but who had heard a lot about him from Cotton Hawes, immediately asked why he was sticking his two cents into the case. Carella told him that Ollie had come up with a good idea; he added weakly that Ollie was a very good cop, and that they could use all the help they could get. Kling said that according to Hawes, Ollie was a bigoted asshole. Carella told him that was true.
“Then why do we need him?” Kling asked.
“I think he can help us,” Carella said. “He’s got a good head, Bert. He’s apt to run things by the book, but occasionally he’ll come up with an idea that nobody else thought of. As, for example, the pictures Pike took.”
“Well, okay,” Kling said reluctantly.
“Give him a chance,” Carella said.
“Yeah,” Kling said.
Carella had forgotten to prepare Kling for Ollie’s famous W. C. Fields imitation. There were six men in the hotel room now, including Bob O’Brien, who had relieved Meyer and who was monitoring a telephone that defiantly refused to ring. The one time it had rung all afternoon, in fact, had been when Carella phoned not a half-hour ago, to tell Kling they’d be coming over with the photographs and the guest list. It had been silent up to that time, and it had been silent since. O’Brien, sitting on the bed with a pair of pillows propped up behind him, his long legs stretched out, had both earphones on his ears and was reading a paperback book.
The other five men sat on folding chairs the hotel manager had generously provided, around a card table he had also provided. The containers of coffee and the doughnuts on the table had been paid for by the cops. The photographs had been taken, developed, and printed by Alexander Pike. The guest list had been typed four weeks ago by Alf Miscolo in the Clerical Office of the 87th Precinct, as a favor to Kling. The magnifying glass was the property of the 87th Squad, and had been brought to the hotel room by Detective Steve Carella. Art Cutler’s clothes were by Cardin, and his hair styling was by Monsieur Henri. That took care of the credits.
As for the photographs, Cutler praised Pike extravagantly for his artistry and sensitivity, and Pike thanked him profusely, and then one or another of the men called off the names of anyone whose picture Carella or Kling did not recognize. Ollie Weeks kept the tally, crossing a name off the guest list whenever someone was identified. By the time they’d looked at all the pictures, they had also crossed off all the names on the list—but they still had pictures of sixteen people who could not be identified by any of them. Ollie insisted that they look at those photographs again. Again, they could not identify them. Ten of the people were men, six were women. It was assumed that some of the unidentified women were wives or girlfriends of art directors or photographers who’d been invited by Augusta, and it was similarly assumed that some of the unidentified men were escorts brought along by some of the girls. “Ah, yes,” Ollie said, using his W. C. Fields voice for the first time and surprising everyone in the room, with the exception of Bob O’Brien, who couldn’t hear because of the earphones on his head, and Carella, who’d heard the priceless imitation before.
“What we must do then, m’friends,” he said, continuing with the imitation, “is go over the list, matching couples this time, man and wife, sweethearts and lovers, and so on. Then, whoever’s left without a mate, I’ll go see them personally and ask them if they know any of these unidentified people. Ah, yes.”
“Ollie, that’ll take forever,” Carella said.
“Have we got anything better to do with our time?” Ollie asked in his natural voice, and Kling looked at the silent phone, and then they began going over the list and the photographs yet another time.
The call from Fats Donner was clocked in at the precinct switchboard at precisely ten minutes past 4:00. Hal Willis took the call in the squadroom upstairs.
“Yeah,” he said, “what’ve you got?”
“On this Al Brice.”
“Yeah.”
“I know where he is.”
“Where?” Willis asked, and picked up a pencil.
“How much is this worth?”
“How much do you want?” Willis asked.
“I could use a C-note.”
“You’ve got it,” Willis said.
“I should’ve asked for more, I got the century so easy,” Donner said.
“Don’t press your luck, Fats,” Willis said. “Where is he?”
“In a fleabag on Fifty-sixth and Hopkins. You want to die laughing? The name of the place is the Royal Arms, how about that?”
“The Royal Arms on Fifty-sixth and Hopkins,” Willis said. “Is he registered under his own name?”
“Arthur Bradley.”
“You sure it’s him?”
“The night clerk knows him. It’s Brice, all right. Incidentally, about the night clerk…”
“Yeah?”
“He don’t want trouble later, dig? He done me a favor passing this on.”
“Nobody’ll know about it, don’t worry.”
“What I’m saying, I don’t want Brice to know it was the night clerk fingered him, dig?”
“I’ve got it. When did he check in?”
“Late last night.”
“What time?”
“Close to midnight, must’ve been.”
“Was he alone?”
“No. He was with a broad.”
“Did she walk in under her own steam?”
“What do you mean?”
“Was she ambulatory?”
“I still don’t get you,” Donner said.
“Did she walk in, or was he carrying her?”
“Carrying her? Why would he be carrying her?”
“Forget it. What’s the night clerk’s name?”
“Harry Dennis.”
“What time does he go on?”
“He works from eight at night till eight in the morning.”
“Then he wouldn’t be there now,” Willis said, looking up at the clock.
“No. You plan to go there now?”
“I think I’ll pay the man a visit, yes,” Willis said.
“He’s heeled,” Donner said. “He’s heeled very heavy.”
“How heavy?”
“My man saw a .38 in a shoulder holster, and he thinks he spotted a Magnum tucked in Brice’s belt.”
“That’s heavy, all right,” Willis said appreciatively.
“So that’s it,” Donner said. “About the money…”
“You’ll get it.”
“I’m a little short this week. You think you can send somebody by with it? Like you done before?”
Willis looked up at the clock again. “It’ll have to be when the shift changes,” he said.
“When’s that?”
“Midnight.”
“That’ll be fine, if you can do it.”
“Sure. I’ll have a patrolman drop it in your mailbox.”
&
nbsp; “Thanks,” Donner said. “Listen, this is none of my business, but I wouldn’t go calling on Brice all by myself, I was you. From what I hear about him, he’s got a very short fuse, and also he’d as soon shoot you as spit on you. Dig?”
“I won’t go there alone,” Willis said.
“Not that it’s any of my business,” Donner said, and hung up.
Willis went into the lieutenant’s office to get the hundred for Donner, and then he typed up an envelope with Donner’s name and address on it, and put the money in it, and sealed the envelope. Carella walked in just then, and told him they’d checked and double-checked all the pictures taken at the wedding and reception, and Ollie Weeks was now out trying to run down any strangers in the batch. Willis filled him in on the call from Donner and asked if he wanted to come along when he questioned Brice. Both men went downstairs to the muster room.
At the desk, Willis handed Sergeant Murchison the sealed envelope and asked that a patrolman drop it in Donner’s mailbox when the graveyard shift went out. Murchison took the envelope, looked up at the clock, and then asked them where they were going. They told him, and he jotted down the address on a pad alongside the switchboard.
The Royal Arms had never warranted its majestic name, but at one time it had at least been a reasonably habitable hotel. Situated as far uptown as it was, before World War II it had attracted a clientele consisting largely of traveling salesmen seeking clean lodgings at reasonable prices. In 1942, though, much to everyone’s surprise, a hotel went up across the street from the Royal Arms. The new hotel was called the Grand, another example of rampant hyperbole. There was speculation at the time—well, it was actually a great deal more than speculation, since five detectives working out of the Eight-Nine were busted for taking bribes, and obstructing justice, and the like. But that was in 1945, long after the Grand had established a reputation for itself and amassed a small fortune for its owners.
The mob owned the Grand Hotel.
Or so it was rumored.
This was way back then, Gertie. The mob owned the Grand, and they had opened it in the asshole end of the city only because the Hamilton Bridge was on Fifty-sixth and the River Road, some six blocks north of Hopkins Avenue—and across that bridge, in the next state, some fifteen miles from the bridge, to be exact, was an Army base full of red-blooded young American soldiers anxious to get into the city whenever they got a pass. Not to mention a harbor full of Navy ships a bit farther downtown, full to bursting with crew-cutted sailors similarly inclined, though in the Navy they called it liberty. Liberty was what could very definitely be enjoyed at the Grand Hotel in those dim dear days of World War II. Passes, too. Both liberty and passes could be enjoyed at the Grand. Furloughs and leaves could be enjoyed there, too. The mob sure knew how to run one hell of a swinging hotel, especially when half the detectives of the 89th Squad were being paid to look the other way. The mob didn’t even bother to put any muscle on the people who owned the Royal Arms across the street. All the mob did was set up a little nightclub in the hotel, to attract the servicemen from hither and yon.
There is nothing illegal about running a nightclub, not if you have a cabaret license, which the mob was able to get very easily, since the man fronting the operation was as clean as the day is long. The nightclub was strictly legitimate. And where you’ve got a nightclub, you’ve got to expect girls kicking up their legs on the floor, and girls showing their legs at the bar, which back in those splendid days of garter belts and nylon stockings was a sight indeed to behold. You had to expect such goings-on in a nightclub; this was, after all, the big city. So the cops weren’t being paid off merely because a few dozen girls were kicking up their legs at the nightclub bar. No, Virginia, the cops were being paid off because a few hundred girls were spreading their legs upstairs in the Grand’s grandly appointed boudoirs.
The Grand, in short, was what you might call a whorehouse.
And a very successful one indeed, until somebody blew the whistle on all those hardworking detectives who were looking the other way. Meanwhile, the Royal Arms kept sliding downhill because it just couldn’t compete with the acres of flesh being offered at the Grand across the street. Eventually, and long before those cops on the pad were caught, even the steady clientele of tired traveling salesmen moved over to the Grand, where rejuvenation could be had for a reasonable price. Ironically, the Grand was now one of those hotels rented by the city for use as a temporary welfare shelter; the people who lived in it were poor, but entirely respectable. It was the Royal Arms that was now a haven for prostitutes and junkies.
Albert Brice was in room 1406 at the Royal Arms.
They asked for him at the desk, and the clerk immediately recognized them as cops and asked in turn how he might possibly assist the police department of this fair city. They told him how.
At seven minutes to 5:00, Detective Hal Willis knocked on the door to room 1406. Carella stood just to his right, his gun drawn. They had talked this one over on the way to the Grand, and had decided to use extreme caution in approaching Al Brice. Normally, knowing the man was armed, they’d have kicked the door in without announcing themselves, and they’d have fanned out into the room hoping to get the drop on Brice before he could use the Magnum. The .38 didn’t frighten them much (like hell it didn’t), but the Magnum was a weapon to respect. The Magnum could literally tear off a leg or an arm or a goodly portion of the head. They did not want a trigger-happy ex-con cutting loose with a Magnum. They would not have wanted that even if Brice had been alone in the room.
But Brice was not alone. Brice had checked in with a woman at or around midnight last night, a half-hour after Augusta Blair Kling had been abducted from her hotel room. The woman accompanying Brice could have been anyone in the universe, of course; there was no real reason to believe she was Augusta. But Carella and Willis had to operate on the theory that she was in fact Augusta, or at least might possibly be Augusta. And if the woman in room 1406 was Augusta, the last thing they wanted was a hail of exchanged bullets. So they had asked the desk clerk to call the room and tell Brice the plumber was there to check that faucet, and Brice had said, “What faucet? What the hell are you talking about?” and the desk clerk had simply told him he’d send the plumber right up. Had the Royal Arms been a fancier hotel, Willis might have pretended he was a bellhop. The truth of the matter, though—sad to relate—was that the Royal Arms didn’t have a bellhop, and so Willis knocked on the door, and when Brice called, “Who is it?” Willis said, “The plumber.”
“I didn’t ask for no plumber,” Brice said. He was just behind the door now.
“Yeah, but we got to fix the faucet, mister,” Willis said. “That’s a city regulation, we’ll get a fine we don’t fix it.”
“Well, come back later,” Brice said.
“I can’t come back later. I go off at five.”
“Shit,” Brice said, and he unlocked the door and opened it wide.
“Police officer,” Willis said. “Don’t move.”
Brice seemed about to move, in fact, but he changed his mind the moment he saw the gun in Willis’s fist.
“What is this?” he asked, which was a reasonable question.
The two detectives were inside the room now. Carella closed and locked the door behind him. There was a rumpled bed opposite the door, but no one was in it.
“Where’s the woman?” Willis asked.
“In the john,” Brice said. “What the hell is this, would you mind telling me?”
“Get her out here,” Carella said.
“Come on out!” Brice yelled.
“Who is it?” a woman asked from behind the closed bathroom door.
“It’s the fuzz. Come on out here, okay?”
“Well, okay,” she said. The door opened. The woman was naked. Well, almost naked. She was wearing blue stockings rolled to the knees, and she was wearing red high-heeled shoes. She was perhaps twenty-seven or twenty-eight, a woman who may have been considered pretty once upon a time, when
knights roamed the earth and chivalry was the order of the day. But chivalry was dead, and so was the girl’s spirit, slain in a thousand shoddy hotel rooms by a succession of faceless men, slain too by the tread marks running up and down the inside of both arms. The girl looked exactly like both of the things she was—a junkie and a hooker. There was nothing exciting about her nakedness. The detectives had seen naked corpses with as much life.
“Anybody else here?” Carella asked.
“There’s nobody else here,” Brice said. “Just the two of us.”
“Hal?” Carella said, and Willis went to check out the bathroom.
“What’s the beef?” Brice asked.
“Where were you all day yesterday?” Carella asked.
“Why?”
“Here it is straight,” Carella said. “Something happened to a policeman’s wife. The policeman is somebody you know. So where were you yesterday?”
“Who’s the policeman? Never mind, don’t tell me. The son of a bitch who killed my brother, am I right?”
“That’s right.”
“What happened to his wife? I hope somebody—”
“Where were you yesterday, Al?”
“Mister Brice, if you don’t mind. I done my time, I’m a private citizen now, you can call me Mister Brice.”
“Where were you yesterday, and cut the bullshit. We know you’ve got a pair of weapons in this room, and unless you’ve got a permit for them…”
“You find a gun in this room, I’ll eat the fucking thing. Who told you I’ve got a gun in here?”
Willis came out of the bathroom, nodded to Carella, and then crossed the room to open the closet door.
“Let’s start with three o’clock yesterday, okay?” Carella said.
“Let’s start with shit,” Brice said. “I was with Jenny all day yesterday. Whatever happened to Kling’s wife—”
“You know his name, huh, Al?” Willis asked from the closet.
“I’ll never forget that prick’s name as long as I live,” Brice said.
“How about it, Jenny?”
“He was with me,” Jenny said.
“All day long?”
