Dead of Night

by Stewart Sterling

  No. She’d waited for Lanerd to call. Waited and hoped and waited some more. She hadn’t phoned his suite because she supposed the police would be there, as I’d warped her. She’d come straight to her apartment from the hotel so she hadn’t eaten.

  Around three she decided to go down to the delicatessen on the corner of Broadway to get a sandwich and some of the mushrooms Lanerd liked so much. She’d left her door open because she thought, though he had a key to her place, that he might not have it with him.

  She’d only been away ten minutes at most. When she came in and saw me on the floor, she thought surely I was dead. She called Lanerd’s doctor, he’d attended her several times, he came right over.

  There’d been no envelope on the floor when she found me, she was positive about that.

  I asked if I could dry the dishes. She shook her head; it was time for me to lie down.

  “Just for the record,” I told her, “let this be the first time a Vine has refused that kind of an offer in a girl’s apartment. But I’ll take a check for a rainy day.”

  She untensed enough to laugh. “All right.”

  The phone rang. It was Pat Ashmore.

  “I’m wearin’ those new brogans already, Gil.”

  “Find him?”

  “Lemme read ya, right off his trip-record card: ‘Trip number eight. Eleven twenty-five ayem. One passenger. No bags. From Hotel Brulard. To Gotham Athletic.’”

  “Yair?”

  “Wait. This is what the jockey says. She asks him to wait. She goes inside. Comes right out again. Says to the jock, ‘They don’t know where he is! Dear Lord, isn’t there anybody who can help me?’”

  “Give that man five silver dollars. He’s earned it, Pat.”

  “There’s more. Lissen. The hackie gets worried about her. Asks what can he do to help her. She answers nobody can help her, really. Finely she decides he should drop her at the Continental Television Building. So that’s what he does. At eleven forty-five. Fare, seventy cents.”

  “Neat and complete.” In jest I added, “How big a tip?”

  “A cuter,” he said. “That what you wanted?”

  “Come around to the P-R on your day off,” I told him. “Bring your girl. Bring your family. You can have anything you want except the dinner check.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six: BLUBBERING WOMAN

  MY ACHING SKULL was a booming reminder that the person who’d tried to eliminate me only a few hours before would probably try again.

  The sunlight was bright on the Broadway corner where I waited for a bus. The Sunday afternoon strollers were out in force. It seemed an unlikely spot for an attack. Still, I watched every solitary male who passed.

  If it was Gowriss who’d trailed me from Manhasset, shot up my car in Brooklyn, and left me in a West Side apartment en route to the mortuary, probably I couldn’t do much more to put him out of circulation than the badges were supposed to be doing. Still, what possible motive could the narcotic addict have had for wanting me dead? It couldn’t be because of fear Tildy’d told me about him; presumably he already knew she’d told the DAides.

  I couldn’t rub Gowriss off the slate completely. He was a known killer. He had shot Johnny the Grocer. But those paid droppers seldom use knives, and when they do it’s a six-inch spring blade, not a steak knife. And no cold-blooded ambusher would have left me lying there in Ruth Moore’s hallway without making sure I was finished.

  Maxie claimed to have seen a man who looked like Gowriss, in the hotel. No one else had. Tim didn’t believe him. The guy Tildy’d described wasn’t remotely like the thin, sallow-skinned dope-user described in the circular. Tildy might be in danger from Gowriss; I didn’t think I was.

  The only tangible signs pointed in Yaker’s direction. Tildy’s description. The wax on the spread. His oddly timed appearance at Lanerd’s suite, while I was there.

  Before I left, I’d asked Ruth about Roy Y. She didn’t know much. Lanerd was acquainted with him but not too well. Yaker was a transparent bore. Made passes at everything in skirts. Had attempted to seduce Ruth in Lanerd’s office once. But what I’d heard outside his door while those con girls were with him, that scarcely matched up with murderous intent. Granting that a lustful heart, by whatever name you call it, has no conscience.

  And Lanerd? He could have followed me in a cab from his home, if he’d been alive then. But flatly impossible for him to have made that gun play on Atlantic Avenue; his body’d been discovered before that. No, the party who’d cracked that statuette on my cranium was still up and about.

  Hacklin and Schneider would be ready to accept the adman’s death as suicide. I couldn’t buy any part of it.

  His departure from this vale certainly would hit a lot of people hard. I was really sorry for Marge, Tildy, Ruth. More for Marge than Tildy; she’d still have her career. And Ruth—She seemed to me to be the self-reliant sort who could take it in her stride.

  Possibly there were others I didn’t know about who’d miss him, in the same way. As Emile would say: Quel homme!

  Until I reached the Continental Television Building, it hadn’t been impressed on me what a blow Mr. Giveaway’s passing might be to some of the men who’d been close to him. Jeff MacGregory, for one.

  When I asked where I might find him, they directed me to studio seven, a cute little salle the size of our Blue Ballroom.

  A child’s building-block, big as a trunk, was fixed to a sign: Build Health with Munchies. On a raised platform, a couple dozen shirtsleeved musicians were rustling scores on their racks, tuning violins, blowing dixieland on trumpets. At the other end of the studio a line of swim-suited show gals were prancing with beach parasols before a theater-size movie screen with a slide of Jones Beach on it. A pint-size taptress did cartwheels. A quintette of Cubans in white frilled camisoles twanged and sang Siboney. Nice quiet atmosphere for a head which already had tom-tom accompaniment!

  An announcer directed me to the glass-paneled privacy of the control room. Three owlish young men were disagreeable about MacGregory. He wasn’t there. He was “upstairs somewhere.” This was a rehearsal, couldn’t I see that? One of them finally escorted me to a door marked: No Admittance, Clients Only.

  Up a flight of stairs, behind a soundproofed door, looking down through a picture window on the pleasant pandemonium of the studio, was a grim MacGregory. He was more gaudily gotten up than the first time I saw him, but his expression wasn’t gaudy. He slumped in a preview chair, chin on chest, hand over eyes.

  “Oh! My God!” He glowered at me. “Do I have to take you, too?”

  “Not if I can locate Miss Millett.”

  “She’s not here.” He leaned over, held his head in both hands. “She’s gone over to Iceville. To see Keith. She said you told her Dow’s dead!”

  “Yair.” It didn’t seem reasonable for him to be so utterly despondent, now Marge was a widow. “What’d Miss Millett want here?”

  “Two thousand fish. I don’t carry that kind of money around in my pants,” he said dourly. “By this time next week I’ll be lucky if I’ve got two bits! She’s ruined me!”

  “Think she shot Lanerd?”

  He stood up slowly. “I wasn’t thinking about it one way or the other. I was thinking how she’s mucked up the program. First place, she comes breezing in here with about as much chance of being unnoticed as a tuba player carrying two tubas. She asks for me; right off everybody begins the buzz-buzz about her being Miss Hands on Stack O’ Jack! Mystery—gone to hell in a handbasket! Boss—ditto, I guess!” He cursed with deep feeling. “And then she wants me to dig up dough enough for her to get to Brazil.”

  “Messes things up, yair. Show must go on. All that—”

  “How, for crysake, can it go on when there’s no Mystery Girl? Even if there was a mystery any longer, which there wouldn’t be!” He smoldered.

  “She have anything to say about Lanerd?”

  “I couldn’t understand half what she was blubbering about, she was so overwrought.” He m
ade an angry gesture of dismissal, as if to shove the whole tangle out of his mind for the time being. “You can ask her yourself, if you hustle; she only left for Iceville ten minutes ago. Keith won’t have that kind of cash on him, either. Take him a while to get it.”

  “Going to South America, is she?”

  “She babbled about Montreal, Havana, London. But her company’s going to Brazil, so I s’pose she’ll head there. She did say it made absolutely no damn difference where she went; she’d be hunted just the same.”

  “Hunted? Yair.” She’d been warned about keeping away from cops; now she couldn’t go to them for protection.

  “I told her she better hike straight to a hospital, get some rest. She thought I meant maybe she was cracking up. ‘No, Jeff, I’m not going mad.’” He did a good job of imitating her. “‘I wish I could go mad. It would be better than having to think of the terrible thing I’ve done.’ What you going to do with a star who hands you a line like that?”

  “You have other problems, too.” I waved at the Munchie rehearsals.

  “Hell, yes.” He added in the surliest tone, “Don’t go quoting me as saying she confessed.”

  “I won’t.”

  “She didn’t.”

  He was afraid he’d said too much.

  “All right, so she didn’t. How’d Mrs. Lanerd stand up to the news about her husband?”

  A punch in the jaw wouldn’t have hit him as hard. “Marge might have grown to dislike the bastard, in time, if he’d lived,” he said dejectedly, “but now she’ll never forget him.”

  I didn’t contradict him.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: CLUES FROM A WALLET

  A PATROL CAR with two stony-eyed sergeants idled before the Continental Building as I left. The sight of a uniform wasn’t as reassuring as it might have been, considering the danger I was in.

  There was enough ringing in my ears without having to listen to a bawling-out from Hacklin or Reidy Duman or Harry Weissman for having stayed the hand of authority in its descent on Ruth or Auguste or Edie. It wouldn’t have helped my headache to explain how my Buick happened to stand on a Brooklyn corner with its windshield riddled.

  It struck me forcibly, at the sight of those minions of the law, that maybe I’d been betting my cards too strong. When the showdown came I might look pretty silly, backing my judgment against all the badges. But I couldn’t afford to drop; I had so much at stake I’d have to play it out, regardless.

  Keith Walch wasn’t at Iceville when I got to the big rink on West Fifty-Second. About a dozen girls in short white skirts and high white shoes, swinging long colored capes from their shoulders, swooped around the ice; Over the Waves came out of a wire recorder like a wheezy carousel. It was cool in there after the Death Valley temperature of the street; the butterfly capes and the easy, rhythmic movements were soothing to watch.

  One of the cuties swooped over, stopped in a silvery spray of ice. Mister Walch? She didn’t know; she thought he might be in the Iceville office with Miss Millett. She bobbed her head in the direction of the office.

  It was behind a flimsy gypsum-board partition with a thin, jerry-built door. Red paint notified the unauthorized to Keep Out—Millett Enterprises, Inc. The door wasn’t open but it didn’t have to be for the voice inside to penetrate. I couldn’t hear what the speaker was saying until I nursed the knob around noiselessly, pushed gently.

  It was Walch. On the phone. In no genial frame of mind. “… they pick him up around half past ’leven last night, gallopin’ up Park Avenuh with nothin’ on ’cept his shorts, screamin’ bloody murder… sure, he was schwocked to th’ scuppers… cop took him back up to the apartment where those cream puffs ’f yours put the snatch on his suitcases, his clothes, his cush… huh?”

  The door was at one end of a storeroom cluttered with theatrical trunks, spotlights, piles of three-sheet posters showing the Incomparable Tildy doing a split, five feet above the ice.

  The agent howled like a wounded weasel. “… it means a hell of a lot to me… th’ cream puff who held him while th’ other one made off with his stuff was still there, gettin’ her clothes on… cop hadda run her in, too, an’ of course she counters by swearin’ out a complaint Yaker tried to rape her… he couldn’t get Lanerd at the hotel so he called me at th’ club. I spent all night with th’ dumb creep, diggin’ up bail, gettin’ a legal eagle to work on th’ cream puff, hirin’ a doc to examine her, make sure she hadn’t been hurt… now lissen, I got enough snafus to straighten out, without… huh?”

  I didn’t make any undue commotion crossing to the opposite end of the storeroom.

  “… yes, goddam it, all night… they wouldn’t let him go until she made a statement denying her assault charge… deal we finally made at five this morning was, if he gets his clothes back—I hadda get one of my suits from the club for him—an’ the suitcases, he’ll forget about the money in his wallet, eighteen hundred smackers, a nice price for a cream puff, godsake… but she claims she don’t know how to contact her chum-bum, except through you… so they’re both to meet y’ there at six o’clock… now lissen!”

  He did the listening, for the length of time it took me to get where I could see in the office. He was alone, sitting on the small of his spine in a swivel chair with one foot cocked up on top of a desk drawer. He wore a mauve jacket over a lime-tinted sport shirt. He heard me or saw me, the second I saw him.

  “… hold everything,” he snarled at the phone, “somebody jus’ opened a manhole, a big stink blew in… I’ll call y’ back.” He slammed the receiver down viciously. “Why, damn you! Don’t you get enough keyholing in your own dump? You gotta come over here?”

  “Where’s Tildy?” There were a dozen glossy-print photographs of her tacked up on the partition; on the desk beside a pair of rocker-blade skates, a bronze paperweight with the familiar twirled-out skirt and shapely legs!

  “Where you won’t find her, bud.” He came up out of the chair, his face mottling. “Half a mind to mark you up good; takin’ her to the Brulard last night, you—”

  “You haven’t even half a mind if you think there was any monkey business.”

  He grabbed one of the skates, swung it high. I had no choice. I gave the desk a shove. It pinned him against the chair. He threw the skate. I had a forearm up. It numbed my wrist so for a few seconds I thought it was broken.

  I went across the desk at him. He was backed up against the partition. When I bounced knuckles off his chops, his head banged one of those photos of Tildy. I nailed him again on the rebound. A good solid bone-to-bone sock. He went down. The chair went over. The oak arm clipped him as it toppled. His head bobbled around as if his neck was broken.

  After I made sure my wrist wasn’t, I shut the door, turned the key on the inside. In case any of his employees barged in and couldn’t see my side of it.

  Then I looked around for a lead to Tildy. I frisked him. Went through his pockets, his wallet. What a collection!

  Bills, letter from a skate manufacturer with a check in it, letter from a girl who’d been in the Icequadrille line asking for a loan, snapshots of girls, one of a boy wearing a polar-bear-cub costume, press clippings on Skate Mates, a deposition taken by some law firm in a damage suit, a typed report of a metabolism test he’d taken at a hospital recently, business cards from artists, costumers, musicians, advertising men, electricians—nothing about Tildy or where she might have gone.

  I put the stuff back in the wallet, in his pockets, rummaged the desk. The only item which might have been of interest was the Manhattan Telephone Directory. Evidently he had the habit of scribbling numbers on the front cover of the phone book. There was one number that had been scribbled within a matter of minutes; it was in ink from a ball-point pen; it smudged a little when I rubbed my thumb across it.

  A Lafayette number. I dialed it just on that outside chance. A gravel-voice gent at the other end said, “Blazer—Bill Every speaking.”

  Blazer. The Blue Blazer, where Johnny the Grocer had re
sted his head in a puddle of blood! “Edie Eberlein there?”

  “No,” stated Mister Every. “She was. But she stepped out for a short Coke or somethin’. She might be back. Want me to say who called?”

  “Walch,” I said. “Keith Walch.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: BLOODY BRAWL

  RENOWNED NAMES smirked from paint-peeling signs over narrow doorways: Belmont, Grand, Gotham, Plaza. The coy humor of those Bowery flophouse proprietors in naming their stenchy hospices after uptown hotels had slight appeal for me at the moment. My own sense of humor was buckling at the knees. I paid off the taxi on a sidewalk dappled with sunlight and decorated with refuse moderne, walked past hock shops and open-air beef stewdios to the Blue Blazer.

  I hadn’t waited for Walch to come out of his coma. Nothing would have been gained unless he’d undergone a change of heart and told me where to find Tildy; after our donnybrook, that didn’t seem likely.

  There wasn’t much chance he’d swear out any complaint against me. Only result in bad publicity for his star; be enough of that anyhow, especially if Hacklin hadn’t impounded that farewell note to keep it out of the papers.

  But the agent would be no bonus when it came to getting a statement out of Tildy to clear Auguste; wouldn’t be co-operative in uncovering Edie Eberlein’s part in last night’s fatalities. I’d have to do the digging on that, myself. Never had I felt less like it. What I craved was to stretch out on a soft sofa under low lights and sip a tall rum bomba. With Ruth Moore on the side.

  The Blue Blazer was one of those drums where the tables are covered with red-checkered cloths, the waiters wear ankle-length aprons, and the straight drinks wouldn’t fill a thimble. It might have been decorated by a drunken painter. A long, black-walnut bar ran along one side; even at that early hour elbow parkage was at a premium.

  I couldn’t see either La Eberlein or Roy Yaker, so I wedged myself in between a chief petty officer and a tubby little butterball reciting ribald limericks in a loud voice to anyone who’d listen. Talk about a melting pot! But simmering!