Kiss Me Once

by Thomas Gifford

  They moved like ghosts in the fog.

  The big square man was bringing up the rear. He could hear the crackling burning of something in the parking lot. One of the others turned, called back through the fog, “You coming? You all right?”

  “No, you dumb shithead, I’m gonna stay for breakfast! ’Course I’m coming …”

  The sound of a motor launch firing its engine sliced through the fog.

  “Where the fuck’s the dock?” the big square man yelled, stopping, turning, trying to get his bearings.

  “Over here, follow the sound of my voice …”

  Then they were gone, faint sounds of the tommy-gun men clambering from the dock onto the launch.

  He was right about the square man but it didn’t make things any better knowing that he’d been mowing down gangsters in the parking lot.

  Harry Madrid.

  Cassidy limped back across the stretch of beach, following his own tracks, climbed the dune, and there they were, Bennie standing guard, Terry and Cindy huddled halfway down the dune. Cassidy sat down beside them, keeping his leg straight before him.

  Terry had recovered somewhat, though the pallor beneath his tan gave him away. He leaned on an elbow, fumbling in his coat, brought out a leather case, slid off the top to reveal three of Max’s Havanas. “I take it the danger has passed. Calls for a cigar. Bennie,” he called over his shoulder, “you want a cigar?” Bennie ambled down the dune and squatted beside them. “Don’t mind if I do,” he said. Terry cupped his hands around his lighter and waited until all three had their cigars going. Cindy leaned against Cassidy, making herself small.

  “They’re gone,” Cassidy said. “Motor launch.”

  “So what happened?” Terry asked. “Could you see anything?”

  “Oh, yeah, I saw them …”

  “So? Who was it?”

  “It was Harry Madrid.”

  Terry scowled. Bennie, who’d stood up and taken a few steps away, turned from his contemplation of the sea, slowly being revealed by the breaking up of the fog.

  Cassidy said, “Harry Madrid just came out of nowhere to wipe out one of Johnny Rocco’s divisions, rat-tat-tat. I wonder if Max will be happy … Maybe, maybe not.

  “The question is,” Cassidy persisted, “how did Harry know they’d be here? And did he know Max wasn’t coming?”

  The fog had drifted away and the sun began to glow timidly behind the low-slung rain clouds. It gave a watery light, a weak yellow wash over the gray ocean.

  Bennie was pointing toward the shoreline. “What’s that? Coming in with the surf?” He polished his glasses on his handkerchief and hooked them back over his ears.

  Cassidy stood up, gave Terry a hand. “How’s the back?”

  “It’s eased off. It’s that slug, it moves around.”

  Cindy got up, holding her high heels in one hand.

  Bennie had struck off down the shingle of sand, making for the water. They set out after him, stragglers from a battlefield, wandering through the wind and mist. Cindy walked in stockinged feet, leaving tiny prints.

  The smell of oil was thick, the slicks from the merchant ships washing ashore, staining the cementlike sand. A couple of dogs had come from nowhere, barked angrily at the wheeling gulls above them, at the dead, blackened fish fetching up at their feet. Bits of junk began to bob up in the foaming surf and stick in the sand with the froth curling around them, sucking at them as if the sea had thought better of it and wanted to reclaim them. Footlockers, wooden slabs from lifeboats, a lifesaver riddled with bullet holes. The U-boat had surfaced to machine-gun the survivors in the water. Oil cans floated in like gravestones marking the ends of things. The stuff kept coming in waves.

  It looked as if logs were coming next. Bumping one another, riding the waves among the oil drums and the blankets and shredded planking.

  When they floated closer, you could see the truth.

  The logs had arms and legs and faces. They were soaked in oil and blood and saltwater. Had they felt any better in the last moments, unarmed, knowing they were dying for their country?

  Cindy Squires gasped and turned away. “That’s it,” she said. She set her jaw firmly, turned her back on the sea, and set off back up the beach toward the dunes.

  Bennie and Terry were standing at the edge of the water, staring at the bodies washing up at their feet.

  Cassidy looked down into one of the faces. The flesh was bluish white and rubbery. The eyes were still open. Water dribbled at the corner of the man’s mouth. One side of the face was burned and raw and white, all the blood drained away from the wound. Cassidy turned away to keep from vomiting.

  He’d counted six corpses already. It was a hell of a show, all right, but probably nothing more than just another day for the guys overseas, island-hopping in the Pacific. The rain had coarsened again and was dripping slowly off the brim of his hat.

  Bennie and Terry had moved on. He watched them, wondering when they’d have had enough. He was just about to turn back and go find Cindy Squires when it happened.

  A disproportionately large lump of body, like a prehistoric sea creature, crested a wave and came flopping onto the sand. It was blackened with oil, like the others. Terry walked toward it. The gulls were gathering, screeching, at the dogs, trying to get at the dead fish. The dogs howled, dashed at them.

  Terry stopped abruptly, looked back for Bennie, then moved closer to the monstrous body.

  He bent down, hands on knees, staring into the face. Then he stood up, looked out at the ocean and the diving gulls.

  Then he went. He just toppled over. Crumpling.

  Bennie plucked him out of the air as if he were a tumbling leaf. He never hit the wet sand. Bennie held him in his arms like a child.

  Cassidy got to them as quickly as he could.

  Bennie pursed his lips, said from a great height, “He swooned, Cassidy. You saw him.” He might have been speaking of a maiden lady in Barchester Towers.

  Cassidy looked down at the oversize mound sprawled indelicately on the sand.

  It wasn’t a man.

  It was two men. They were roped together. A good part of each head was gone. And they weren’t sailors. It didn’t make any sense. But, of course, it had made some kind of sense to someone.

  They’d been shot in the head, tied into one large bundle, and dumped somewhere offshore. As he watched the bodies rocking in the foaming eddies a tiny, nervous-looking sand crab crawled timidly from the larger corpse’s slack mouth.

  Cassidy felt his stomach dropping down an elevator shaft.

  He knew both of them.

  Markie Cookson and his little blond lad.

  With the sailors at last.

  Chapter Seven

  WHEN CASSIDY AWOKE AT FOUR o’clock that afternoon, the inside of his mouth needed a shave and his bad leg was as stiff as W. C. Fields on Saturday night. He lay in bed for several minutes trying to sort out the dreams from the reality of what had happened at the shore. The dreams couldn’t compare. Then he hobbled into the bathroom, turned on the shower, brushed his teeth eight or nine times with the last of the Ipana, chugged a bottle of Listerine, and stood under the hottest water he could deal with. Pretty soon he sat down on the little three-legged wooden stool in the glass shower stall and coaxed himself back to life. Sen-Sen. He needed a mouthful of Sen-Sen more than anything in the world.

  Marquardt Cookson’s half-exploded head loomed at him when he shut his eyes. He smelled the stench of the blackened, oil-soaked mound of blubber on the beach. Then Terry was toppling through space, his hat drifting away into the water, then Bennie was catching him …

  Bennie hadn’t recognized the corpse. The two corpses. It was easy to forget the prettyboy, a kind of lady-in-waiting. Bennie had been far too busy grabbing Terry to register the identity of the fat man. But Terry had gotten a good look at poor sweaty old Markie and had fainted dead away. He’d come to while Bennie was carrying him away from the bodies. He’d insisted he could walk, so Bennie had put
him down gently as if he might shatter. Terry wobbled a bit, then pulled himself together and grinned at Cassidy, running a finger along his moustache as if it might have fallen off while he was out. “One look at a stiff,” he said, “and old Leary passes out.” He shook his head. “I can’t afford that kind of talk.” He frowned. “Keep it to yourselves, gents.”

  Cindy Squires was sitting on the Chrysler’s running board staring at her nails. It was better than looking at the parking lot which was splattered with dead gangsters. The Lincoln Continental was burning, a grace note Harry Madrid hadn’t been able to resist. A column of black smoke twisted away in the mist. Flames crackled, tongues of orange fire poking up through the frame of the rag top, like pictures coming back from the desert war in North Africa.

  Nobody had much to say on the ride back to the city. They were all sealed in their own little compartments of shock and weariness, but Cassidy was thinking too hard to grab a nap. There were too many angles to pull together but what struck him as important was the certainty that recognizing Markie’s face was what had caused Terry to faint. Had it been just the surprise coupled with his general physical weakness? Looking at dead merchant seamen, you didn’t expect to see your everyday dead aesthete. Maybe it was because you didn’t expect to see a friend.

  Or maybe it was something else. Maybe it was the envelope on the bar, all that money … Markie wouldn’t be paying the piper anymore.

  The connection between the two men had always puzzled Cassidy but the envelope on the bar looked like a lot of explanation. Markie, however, still remained an enigma. What had he and his boyfriend done to get washed up with the sailors?

  And what had Harry Madrid been doing out there, anyway?

  And if Max Bauman wasn’t really sick, then he and Rocco must have gotten together somewhere else … and the trip to the shore had been an elaborate piece of misdirection. Which made him wonder if anybody had known what the hell was going on last night … Maybe everybody had been bitten in the ass by the unexpected. Hell, maybe Max had staged the rub-out. But no. Harry Madrid didn’t do Max’s killing for him …

  Finally he figured he was as clean as he was going to get. He dried off, primped for a while, gave that up as too little too late, got dressed, and ventured out of his room, wondering what was coming next and knowing it would grab him by surprise.

  Terry had already gone out. Cassidy made fresh coffee and sat in the breakfast nook staring at the attaché case he’d kept in his room while he’d slept. A battered leather case, scuffed and scraped, with brass fittings. A single lock. He sighed, gave in to curiosity, and got a screwdriver from the catchall drawer in the kitchen. He stuck the business end in under the hinged brass flaps and pried until it popped open.

  He looked at the contents, paced around the kitchen, and turned on the portable radio next to the breadbox on the counter. He went back to the case and stared.

  There was no point in counting it. Stacks of twenties, crisp and new, looking like the ink was still wet. Twenty, twenty-five stacks in paper wrappers, forty or fifty of them to a bundle. Maybe $25,000. Snappy as Dick’s hatband, as the old codgers used to say.

  Somebody down in Florida had a printing press.

  From the looks of it, Rocco was doing a nice business in twenties. And Cassidy had walked away with the sample case. Was Max Bauman in the market for twenties?

  He closed the case and took it back to his room. One more loose end.

  When Terry got back, his dark blond hair was freshly trimmed, slicked straight back, and his thin moustache had survived another trip to the Terminal Barber Shop. His pallor had also had a sun treatment. Cassidy came into the kitchen and saw him sitting in the breakfast nook smoking a cigarette, looking out the window into the air shaft. Cassidy poured himself coffee and slid in across the table from him.

  “Got any answers, sport?”

  Terry looked up. “How the hell should I know? It’s all Greek to me.”

  “Has it occurred to you that neither Markie nor his chum was a member of our Merchant Marine?”

  “It’s a dumping ground out there, Lew,” he said impatiently. “People who kill people take the stiffs out there and drop ’em off. Sometimes they get a cement necktie, sometimes they just let ’em wash up on the shore. That’s if they want to send a message to somebody.”

  “But why take the bodies out there?”

  “Lew, Lew, what is this, a test? Maybe they saw it in the movies. Maybe it’s a grand old tradition. A union rule. I never asked. They just do it. Thing is, if this is a message, it’s going to take awhile to get it delivered. It’s all pretty confusing out there, all those bodies.” He unplugged the percolator and filled his cup again. He started ladling sugar into the cup.

  “What kind of message?”

  Terry shook his head. “That’s what I’m thinking about. Who’s supposed to get scared when word gets out? Or when Markie doesn’t show up for his regular whipping?”

  “What kind of enemies would he have?”

  “Guys like Markie could have dozens. Fairies fight all the time. Jealous little pricks.” He was thinking aloud.

  “You going to report it?”

  He looked at Cassidy from the corner of his eye. “Oh, I don’t think so. They got their hands full without worrying about the Jersey shore. Let’s just wait and see what happens.” He inspected his nails, bit at one. He never did things like that. He was strictly a weekly manicure man. “Listen, Lew. Let me be frank. I’m getting one helluva message. Me. Personally. Maybe the message was for old Terry …”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t ask me to explain. Just listen. If it was meant for me, I sure wasn’t supposed to get it so soon. Just dumb luck I was there. But it means I’ve got an edge. And that’s all I need.” His eyes were shining, almost bubbling with excitement. It was his element and he was in it up to his ears. It seemed as if he knew the message was for him and now the abyss of danger beckoned irresistibly and he was feeling alive again.

  “Why kill Markie to send you a message? I don’t get it.”

  “You don’t have to get it, Lew. Just take my word for it.” He looked across the steaming coffee. “I can handle this, I can beat this game, any game in town. All I need to lock it up is a little edge. No contest. They’re coming after me now, Lew, I know it … you ever have a feeling? You know something? Somebody’s out there breathin’ hard, watching me … Well, now it’s starting … I’d like your help, sport.”

  Cassidy shifted, poured coffee so he wouldn’t have to look at Terry and show the confusion he felt. Dewey, Luciano, Madrid, they wanted his help. Cindy Squires wanted his help. Now Terry. And Terry had the oldest claim, the strongest. It was like the old days. But helping Terry wasn’t as simple as it once had been. There were too damn many angles.

  Terry kept talking. “There’s something I gotta do. Tonight.” He batted his eyes at Cassidy. “I’d like a backup man. Somebody to ride shotgun.”

  “So what’s the deal?”

  “Come on, Lew. Friends don’t ask. They just start bailing.”

  “Sure, Terry. Don’t worry. I’m your man.”

  “Tonight we ride, amigo.”

  It was raining again by nightfall. The Yankees had managed to squeeze their game in during the afternoon. They’d beaten Connie Mack’s Athletics, 11–2, and Cassidy had been looking forward to going out to the stadium the next day but the radio had said New York was in for several days of rain and cold. Well, it was a long season and he was reading War and Peace, which couldn’t get rained out. He was enjoying General Kutuzov immensely, making all the connections between Hitler and Napoleon that were on everybody’s minds in those days. He felt as if he’d once played for Kutuzov himself and the old bastard had never heard of the forward pass. Coach Kutuzov had believed you let the enemy keep coming at you in little chunks of yardage because it was a very long field and sooner or later they’d fumble the damn ball. Reading the novel, then reading the daily papers, you
got the feeling it was all happening again in Russia.

  Twenty-four hours before, they’d all been on the way to the Jersey shore and the impending fireworks and Cindy Squires had told him about the rainbows of the Normandie and now everything had changed. Cassidy felt as if someone had been tinkering with all the dials and he was hearing a bunch of stations he hadn’t known were there. He kept hearing Cindy Squires’s self-hatred, going on about how she was a whore and wanted to make a business deal with him and had to get away from Max … and he heard himself telling her he’d fallen in love with her … and now he wondered what the hell had been going on out there. And Harry Madrid with a Thompson sub wasting a battalion of Rocco’s foot soldiers … and the fat body sprawled on the sand … Too much had happened. He was having trouble getting it all straight. And there was a bag full of counterfeit twenties and where were the gasoline rationing stamps Dewey’d been so hot about? And what had Cindy Squires done to warrant so much of her own hatred? And what had she really offered him? Was she serious, would she remember? Did he love her, for God’s sake?

  Then Terry said it was time to go.

  At the first drop of rain all the cabbies had remembered pressing engagements elsewhere so it took forever to flag one down. He was headed home to Brooklyn and consented to drop them on First Avenue at 51st rather than turning up into Sutton Place. Cassidy swung his bad leg out, stood in the rain, and tipped him a dime.

  It was raining hard. Rivers gurgled in the gutters. The traffic lights reflected in the wet streets. Very pretty. They crossed the street, collars of their macs turned up, hat brims low, and headed into Sutton Place where the door knockers were polished lion’s heads and the old money lived happily ever after.

  The late Marquardt Cookson had lived on the east side of the street. The building exemplified the High Moroccan period which hadn’t lasted long but had left its mark all over the East Side. There were three arched entryways with thick oak doors crisscrossed with black iron straps, carved confessional windows like the old speakeasies, and wrought-iron hinges not much larger than Aunt Fanny’s picnic hams. Terry picked the lock.