Cash My Chips, Croupier

by Piers Marlowe

  ‘Anyway,’ Hazard grumbled, ‘there are too many damned cars chasing about in circles.’

  ‘So,’ said Drury, ‘we go where they specialise in transport. It would seem the best place to call.’

  ‘They’ll be shut,’ Perran pointed out.

  ‘That’s what I’m hoping,’ Drury told him. ‘I imagine they have a nightwatchman. You want to come for the ride?’

  ‘Thanks, but — ’

  Perran hesitated, staring at his closed coffee percolator.

  ‘It’s because of what’s inside the coffee-pot I’m making the offer,’ Drury enlarged in the same quiet tone.

  ‘You mean — you think my car will be there?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Drury said bluntly. ‘But either someone still wants to build up the evidence against you or they’ve changed tactics. It’s high time we knew where this Aussie named Harris, Bandelli’s enforcer, stands.’

  ‘There’s one character who can tell you that,’ Perran said.

  ‘Bandelli,’ came from Bill Hazard, as though he didn’t think highly of the obvious.

  ‘No, his current woman,’ said the journalist. ‘La Manning herself. She can also tell you what’s between her and Sandra Beltby, because I’m damned sure something is, and don’t forget Harris runs a gym off Greek Street in Soho. La Manning could be a mine of information if you knew where to start blasting.’

  Drury stared back at the other.

  ‘I think I just might,’ he said very softly and reached for the phone.

  Chapter 8

  Alf Bradley was a nightwatchman who was paid a high wage to obey instructions he had been given implicitly, without question and without independent thought. When he had been taken from the Sackville Gymnasium and Sporting Club, where he had been a punch-drunk has-been glad to earn a few shillings from any client to whom he could be useful, especially as a punching bag on two legs, he had thought he would miss the Soho bright lights. However, he had been pleasantly mistaken. His job in the East End had proved a holiday for the past seven months. Good pay, easy hours, practically nothing to do except read his instructions every night, just to make sure he knew the drill.

  Not that anything had happened before unless Harvey himself had been along, which made it all right anyway. But tonight was different. He saw the uniformed police getting out of the car, and because he had read the drill in the locked drawer with the private-line phone he knew what to do.

  First, at any rate.

  He went back to his small office with the screened window and unlocked the drawer for the second time since his arrival. He pulled out the phone and dialled the number written in ink under the base. He heard the number ringing and waited impatiently for someone to pick up the receiver at the other end.

  The phone stopped ringing and a nasal Australian voice said slowly, ‘Alf?’

  ‘It’s me,’ he said. ‘Listen, there’s a car load of cops outside.’ Alf Bradley stopped talking and listened to a bell ringing and a pounding sound. He spoke into the phone hurriedly. ‘They’re hammering away now. I can’t stay. Do I let them in?’

  The man at the other end of the line said clearly so that Alf wouldn’t have to mesh too many mental gears to understand, ‘You let them in and ask what’s wrong. You stick with them, and you keep asking what’s wrong. If they tell you say you’d better ring the manager, but don’t tell them my name. Got that?’

  ‘Got it,’ said Alf. ‘And, Harve, suppose they start searching the place?’

  ‘You ask if they’ve a warrant.’

  ‘A warrant.’

  ‘A search warrant. But don’t panic. I’m on my way. Just keep acting natural.’

  ‘Natural,’ said Alf with soft wonderment in his voice.

  ‘You’ve got it,’ said Harvey Harris and rang off.

  As he hung up the receiver Harris turned to his visitor. He couldn’t see the expression in the man’s eyes behind the pair of large Continental sunglasses he wore in an office illuminated with electric light. The two men almost filled the small office with the large old-fashioned roll-top desk against the wall opposite the window with the drawn blind.

  Harvey Harris stood up.

  ‘I’ve got to go. Something’s come up. You stay here, Gene.’

  ‘How long will you be? I could get claustrophia in this cubicle.’

  ‘Maybe an hour, maybe two. I shouldn’t think any longer.’

  ‘Hell, two hours alone here — ’

  ‘Stop beefing,’ said the Australian, whose stocky figure made it difficult for a stranger to appreciate that he was all of six feet tall. ‘This is something I can’t put off. When I get back we’ll do some phoning, see if she’s turned up. The club’s shut till the police says it can be opened, and we don’t want to draw attention to the flat do we?’

  ‘How about Ebor?’

  ‘You don’t have to worry about him.’

  ‘That leaves Bandelli. He scares me.’

  ‘Forget him.’

  ‘How about if he comes here?’

  ‘He won’t. He never has yet and he’s not likely to start now. He’s in a panic about what Toni was up to. That’s plenty to hold him. So relax. Smoke. Think of the money you’ll soon have and life in South America. If you feel like dreaming, turn the light out. Now I’m off.’

  Harvey Harris grabbed his coat and hat and eased out of the office before he had donned either, and before the man in the dark glasses could ask more questions that required ingenious answers.

  Ingenious, that is, in allaying the doubts of an anxious mind. And Gene Craig’s mind was very anxious, especially about the woman for whose sake he had pulled this crazy caper.

  The door clicked shut and he heard the Australian’s feet on the stairs, going down to the gym.

  Crazy was a good description, he decided. Not that he had done his part yet, but he was committed all the way. There was no getting out. Especially not now Toni Cuzak was dead.

  He lit a cigarette with a hand that shook.

  He stared at the safe holding the black leather bag containing the money he had been shown, and forced himself to remove his gaze.

  ‘Just like a bloody rat with a hunk of ripe Stilton,’ he muttered, mocking himself.

  He sat in his chair and surprised himself by the discovery that he was straining his ears for sounds. He was halfway through his second cigarette before he heard feet mounting the stairs. He would have heard them sooner if Harris hadn’t dropped his car key when trying to unlock his dark green Jaguar in a hurry. As it was he had to grope in the gutter by the light of his Ronson before he found it. The Jag’s rear lights hadn’t vanished round the corner before Drury, accompanied by Bill Hazard and a frowning Micky Perran, was crossing the narrow street to the gym’s entrance.

  Joe Apps, who ran the sports club associated with the gym, met them.

  ‘You’ve just missed him, Mr. Drury,’ he said as he sized up Perran, whom he obviously considered the odd man.

  Micky Perran even felt like the odd man. He had thought Drury was whisking him off to a raid on an East End warehouse belonging to the Cross Counties Transport Company. Instead, Drury had arranged for a car of uniformed police to cover the warehouse and he had come to the Soho gym — after a phone call to Joe Apps, whom he knew, apparently, from a long way back.

  Frank Drury could be a very unpredictable cop, which probably accounted for the enviable collection of commendations in his record at Scotland Yard.

  His move to draw off Harris was made a split second after Joe Apps had told him Alf Bradley was working as the transport company’s nightwatchman. He knew very well why Alf Bradley had been given the job. Alf was no good except for obeying instructions, and he had come from the Soho gym. Alf had been washed up as both light-heavy with a slow but hard right hook, and as a small-time hanger-on of several gangs, when he had hired on at the Sackville as a human punch-bag.

  Joe Apps looked uneasy as he waited for Drury to say something. The Yard superintendent was running his ey
e over the characters, black, white, and tan, who were indulging in work-outs either in the two rings or with the array of muscle-building equipment spread around.

  ‘His visitor didn’t leave with him, Joe.’

  ‘No, Mr. Drury.’ Joe Apps’ uneasy look did not lift.

  ‘He’s in the office?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’ll go and talk to him.’

  ‘Look, Mr. Drury — ’

  But Drury gave the protesting Joe Apps his friendliest smile, and accompanied it with words intending to be friendly if one knew how to accept them. And he was sure the worried-looking man in front of him did.

  ‘Stop worrying, Joe. There’s no trouble for you. My word on it. You want it to stay that way, don’t you?’

  A pink edge of tongue flicked across the other’s stretched mouth, but he wasn’t grinning.

  ‘Of course, Mr. Drury.’

  ‘Fine, so we’ll go up to the office, unless, Joe, you want me to produce my search warrant?’

  The merest suggestion that the words were a question hung in the close atmosphere. Joe Apps’ rubbery mouth seemed to collapse as the corners moved closer together and his tongue suddenly seemed stuck to the roof of his mouth.

  He nine-tenths guessed the mention of a search warrant was bluff, but couldn’t risk being ten-tenths sure and acting on it. Possibly because he was thinking there would be other times when he would confront Drury, and Drury was the kind of cop one liked to be sure remembered only the things one wanted remembered.

  It wasn’t quite a clash of opposed wills, but almost. Not that Drury was worried. The visitor might elect to leave of his own account. But the fact that he hadn’t already left seemed significant, and Drury was a man who preferred both positive acts and negative ones to be significant — at least by his reckoning.

  ‘You know me, Mr. Drury. I’m not an obstructionist.’

  Drury’s smile, which had been slowly evaporating, suddenly came back with added warmth.

  ‘A very good word, Joe,’ he said, wondering where the hell Joe Apps had collected it. Probably hearing some counsel use it in court. ‘And you’re right, I know you, Joe. That’s why we’re doing it this way. See?’

  Joe Apps nodded. He saw about as clearly as a blind man in a fog at midnight. He stretched the flesh of his jaw, bringing into sharp relief the two figure-eight pits that were a perpetual reminder of when he had once been on the receiving end of a motor-cycle chain.

  ‘Sure, Super.’

  He stood back, waving Drury towards a drawn curtain at the far end of the gym. The three visitors were watched on their way to that curtain by every man in the gym except Joe Apps. Behind it rose a flight of uncarpeted stairs. Drury led the way up them to a landing which led to two doors. One had the initials W.C. in the middle of the top panel and a bright new Yale lock. The other had the word ‘Private’ and no lock above the handle.

  Drury turned the handle and went in.

  The others crowded after him as the Yard superintendent found his smile again and looked pleased.

  ‘Look who’s here to greet us.’ He sounded more amused than surprised. ‘The man who sold Bandelli his string of gambling casinos, only you, Micky, said in your Banner articles that it was a fiddle, and Bandelli threatened a libel suit and so you were out. Well, Gene, you can take off the dark peepers,’ Drury finished, no longer amused, ‘and tell us the truth. Was it? And while you’re at it just enlighten us as to why you’re here.’

  But before Craig could collect his wits and even begin to think how to answer Micky Perran suddenly exclaimed loudly.

  ‘That’s her!’

  He pointed to a framed photograph on the desk that was presumably Harris’s.

  ‘Who?’ Drury asked.

  ‘The woman in my boot. The woman I saw at the Red Ace.’

  Gene Craig was on his feet, crowding the room more than when he was seated, with the others confronting him.

  ‘What the hell are you talking about — in your boot?’ he demanded in a voice in which gravel rolled and bounced and churned unpleasantly. ‘That’s my sister. She’s also Harvey’s fiancée.’

  Phil Strapp was a disgruntled man. As a features editor, he liked things to progress smoothly, but now he wasn’t even making progress, smoothly or otherwise. That damned Perran had always been reliable until the Bandelli business. At least, when he said he was on his way in he meant it. He had sounded as though he had meant it when he used the same words on the phone earlier, speaking from his flat.

  But the damned man hadn’t shown up. Probably his grubby idea of paying the paper back for the editor getting in a panic about Bandelli. But he had a story. Hell, he must have, he was involved in the action, and Toni Cuzak was dead. He was practically an eye witness if the Yard Press Bureau handout was anything to go on, and he couldn’t remember the time when it wasn’t.

  Strapp smoked and littered his desk with ash and dead matches and grew hourly more irritable, but he wouldn’t quit. He had that strange sixth sense some newspapermen acquire of awareness that something will happen. Moreover, he was reluctant to concede that Perran would stop acting like a professional journalist and not do something he had told an editor he would do.

  He looked up when the glass-pannelled door of his office opened and Sheila Devlin came in, Irish and pert and always hiding the product of her Celtic thinking behind a dazzling smile. It was on display as she stood in the doorway wrinkling her nose.

  ‘How can you live in this atmosphere after you’ve used up all the oxygen?’

  It wasn’t a question to be answered save rudely, and that smile invariably saved her from the more outrageous forms of journalistic wit of an excessively masculine kind.

  ‘I can’t unless the door’s kept shut.’

  ‘I’m the bearer of news, but if I come and shut the door you’ll risk making some of your own. Manslaughter is my guess. After all, suicide isn’t news any more.’

  Strapp put down his pipe.

  ‘All right. But it had better be worth another match,’ he glowered.

  She closed the door and perched on the end of his desk, holding up supremely well under his persistent glower. She knew he had said some pretty harsh things about a woman being taken on in the sports section.

  She said sweetly, ‘Are you still looking for an assistant on the features side?’

  ‘I’m not looking for one,’ he said carefully, reaching for his pipe and then withdrawing his hand as she shook her head. ‘I need one, but I can get along until I find the right person.’

  ‘You’re looking at the person now.’

  He didn’t look impressed.

  ‘That would require proving.’

  ‘I think I can do that,’ she said, nodding and dangling a leg that revealed a fair portion of very shapely thigh below her rucked-up mini-skirt.

  ‘Doing that will be about as easy,’ he told her, ‘as coaxing a mule into a burning barn.’

  ‘Well, this office smells like a burning barn, I agree,’ she retorted sweetly. ‘So let me get to work on the mule. I’ve been standing in for Ben, who had to go north. Apparently Ben has a contact named Apps. Joe Apps. Mean anything?’

  He scowled. ‘Not a thing.’

  ‘He looks after a gym in Soho. The Sackville. A tony name. Well, he rang Ben and got me, and he thought what he had to tell was worth buying. I said let me hear it first and then I’d be able to say. He didn’t like the idea much, but when I said Ben might not be back for another couple of days he was ready to talk. Afterwards I said we’d buy it. But it isn’t sports news. It’s crime.’

  The features editor rose from his chair. He was a thickset man, rumpled, and some of the flesh under his clothes was moist. Even getting out of a chair and picking up his pipe again, sticking it between his teeth and planting a nine and a half tan suède brogue on his chair was completed with an economy of effort and motion that the woman’s dark eyes appreciated.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said round the stem of his cold pi
pe.

  So she told him, knowing she had his undivided attention as long as the phone didn’t interrupt.

  It didn’t, which she considered a lucky break.

  She told him that Joe Apps had explained how a phone call had taken Harvey Harris, who owned the Sackville Gym, away in a hurry. How Superintendent Frank Drury had arrived with two companions, one of whom was Micky Perran, whose face Apps remembered from the Banner’s series on Bandelli. How they had gone up to Harris’s office and some time later came down with a fourth man, who had been Harris’s visitor.

  ‘Apps doesn’t know if he was under arrest. But he could have been. The police have been looking for him for some time. His name is Craig. I think he said Gene Craig.’

  Suddenly there was a smile round the pipe stem.

  ‘Darling,’ said Strapp extravagantly, taking the cold pipe away from his happy face, ‘I could kiss you.’

  ‘I’d be happier if you okayed that payment while Ben Partridge is away. I stuck my neck out. You either chop it off or leave it where it belongs.’

  ‘I’ll do better, darling.’

  Her own bright smile faded somewhat. She wasn’t sure she felt encouraged by the fresh familiarities. Not wishing to say the wrong thing at what could be the right time, she wisely remained silent. Seemingly this caution of a member of the opposite sex won the features editor’s approval.

  ‘I’ll take you over as assistant if you follow this up. Leave Apps to me. I’ll see he’s satisfied, and I’ll probably ring some more background facts out of him while his palm is itching. But you I’m handing the sticky one, darling. You want it?’

  ‘If it’s possible, legal, and won’t get me carved with a chiv.’

  His eyes were full of warm approval as he nodded again, felt for a match, and relit his pipe. He blew smoke at her. She blinked, but refused to cough even though her throat itched. She sensed this was the crucial test for some kinky reason of his own.

  ‘It’s possible and it’s certainly legal, but I can’t promise about your third condition — after what happened to Toni Cuzak.’

  Her mouth pinched at the corners a mite, but her chin kept up, and she didn’t wince visibly. He liked that display enough to say through released mouthfuls of harsh-smelling smoke, ‘What I can promise is, if you agree and go through with it, you start with a fifty per cent rise in salary, I shan’t get petty about reasonable expenses, and there will be perks. Useful ones from time to time if you show what words mean and can leave out the ones that don’t have meaning.’