Cash My Chips, Croupier

by Piers Marlowe

  She sensed this was where she would be smart to slide off the end of his desk and walk out in a hurry, not pausing to close the door. But there was something in his face that belonged to the man who had said the harsh things about a female sports writer behind her back. Something that was a cross between a leer and a challenge. At least, that’s what she thought she could see, but she allowed she didn’t know him at all personally, and she could be a fool to jump to a false conclusion just on hearsay and looks.

  ‘What’s this legal possibility that might cost me blood?’

  Only when she saw the leer separate from the challenge did she realise how the salacious bastard might have taken the words. She couldn’t stop her face from growing hot, but she forced her chin to remain high.

  His grin spread and he put down his pipe voluntarily.

  ‘Keep looking as lovely as you do this minute and you can’t miss,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a car, I know. You get over to Micky Perran’s flat in Putney. I’ll give you the address. You get inside and you get his story — on paper. I’ll hold space for it. Twenty-five hundred to three thousand words. To be continued if you assure me the follow-up’s worth it. Do that, tie up Perran so he doesn’t play footsie with any other paper, and I don’t care how you do that bit, and you’re working for me. Make a bloody hash of it, let me drop on my face in the sewer, and you’re out, and I’ll see you don’t get another job in the Street, and I don’t give a mired damn what the N.U.J. say.’

  Phil Strapp’s facial expression had changed. Despite the threatening wattles around his neck, he looked lean and urgent and the change made her feel excited. She stared back at him, holding her breath that felt as hot as an imprisoned khamseen. She saw this meaty man of ungainly shape suddenly as a newspaperman who not only knew his job, but someone who knew people and what made them react and behave as they did. She had the feeling that under the bulk he was hard and dynamic and didn’t make a fetish of winding his watch each night because it was a piece of personal furniture he carried more for show than for use.

  ‘Well?’ he snapped, suddenly wanting her answer. ‘Have I scared you off, Miss Devlin, or am I going to make a newspaperman out of you?’

  She slid off his desk but didn’t open the door.

  She said, ‘I hope you’re going to save time by writing out the address in Putney now.’

  She picked up a ballpoint from his desk and offered it to him.

  ‘You’d better give me the phone number as well as your home number. Just in case.’

  Swiftly she felt her shoulders seized. She was dragged forward and a kiss planted on her left cheek.

  Holding her then at arm’s length, Phil Strapp said, ‘Darling, I said newspaperman, not reporter. Remember that. Because I to God surely will.’

  He released her, sat down and started writing on a piece of paper. She looked at the top of his greying head.

  He finished writing and looked up quickly, catching the look on her face before she could remove it.

  ‘Tell me what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘The truth, so don’t flatter me.’

  They exchanged grins and she said, ‘I was thinking you could be the type who’d come out on top in a chopsticks deal with a crooked Chinaman.’

  ‘Well, you don’t look Chinese to me, darling.’ He handed over the paper and she folded it without looking at it and turned to the door. As she opened it he said, ‘One word to the wise. Micky Perran may turn out to be a first-class bastard when he’s within hand reach of a mini skirt. I don’t know. But I do know his marriage went sour on him, though I don’t know how it’s left him about other women. He’s a good freelance, knows his trade, and what’s more he knows what he’s worth. So if you have to compromise don’t be scared. I’ll back any promise you make, if you let me know as soon as you can. Just get the bloody story out of him and don’t bother about libel. That’s my headache, and I’ll clear things with the editor himself. He knows this is going to justify Perran’s other series. I went over that with him after lunch. Good luck, darling.’

  He released her with his eyes, stretched a hand to his phone, and said to the operator, ‘Give me a line.’

  Chapter 9

  Sheila Devlin stood outside the front door of Micky Perran’s third-floor flat and felt the excitement she had raised for her bird-dogging role ooze away from her. A Kerryman father who had seemed to be a short-distance champion in all he did had died in a Killarney jaunting car that had tried to beat a motorcoach to a right-angle turn in the road. He had bequeathed her little save dark-eyed good looks and an overdose of Celtic truculence once her mind was made up.

  She wondered whether Micky Perran could be Irish. She hoped not. She was tired of short-distance champions with syrup on their tongues and improvident habits that fitted like gloves.

  She pressed his front door bell and mentally crossed her fingers. She didn’t mind if he was about as meaty as a dish of colcannon, though she had been warned by an uncle who looked like a leprechaun of all skinny men, so long as he didn’t give her the sweet-talk treatment. It not only wasted time, of which she had little enough to spare, but more often than not it produced a response in her that could only be described by the misleading and outmoded word unladylike.

  The door opened and she was confronted by a virile-looking male in his mid-thirties. Rather more startling was the fact that he was also in his Y-front briefs, socks, and singlet.

  ‘Come in, darling,’ he said in a passable imitation of Phil Strapp’s tone of bonhomie.

  ‘Oh, God!’ she said, hesitating between disgust and outright anger. ‘You men. It’s a conspiracy.’

  Whether she would have walked away if he hadn’t reached out and caught her wrist she was never able to be sure later. He pulled her inside the flat and pushed the door shut with a socked foot.

  ‘Fix me a drink,’ he said, using a voice that she accepted as his normal speaking tone. ‘But think about it before you pour your own tipple. You’ll be driving.’

  With that he pushed her into a room that was combination lounge and dining room and went on his way back to the bedroom, leaving the door open, so that he could hear her chinking bottles against glasses while she could hear him whistling as he dressed.

  Ten minutes later he joined her. He had donned a dark grey suit, white shirt with a pastel blue cross-weave, and a dark blue tie. He looked like what she had several times read a Madison Avenue adman tried to look like. She felt herself quietly approving what she saw and at the same time disapproving of her approval, which was more than a little confusing as well as unsettling at a time when she wished to appear most settled — at least in the matter of how she intended this confrontation to be conducted.

  ‘Whisky,’ he said, looking at her glass.

  ‘Mostly ginger ale as I’m driving.’

  Despite her calculated sangfroid he knew she was bubbling with curiosity. But she was determined to keep her cool, as he was alerted when she said, ‘I’ve fixed yours, as you asked, with ice and lemon. I couldn’t find a lime.’

  He picked up the glass waiting for him, and the scent was as it should be.

  ‘How did you know enough to pour me a daiquiri?’

  ‘I use my eyes and remember what I see. It isn’t really difficult, Mr. Perran. Or should I get down to essentials and call you Micky? I’m Sheila.’

  His brows lifted, doing nothing to spoil his good looks, as she was careful to observe.

  ‘Oh, let’s get right down to essentials, Sheila. I’d like the eye and memory bit filled in.’

  ‘I read the lunch editions, which reported what you told the police last night — or was it this morning? That last daiquiri seems to be responsible for quite a lot in your life, Micky.’

  ‘You don’t know the half. But that’s the half I’m going to tell you before you drive me down to Shoreham.’

  She sipped her very diluted whisky slowly as though she had something to contemplate.

  ‘You’ll find me very attentive, Micky. B
ut please tell me why I had to be greeted in the near-altogether.’

  ‘Oh, come,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t as near as all that. Besides, it was your poor sense of timing. I’d only had chance for a quick bath after Strapp phoned, and when dear Philip got around to making his call I hadn’t long returned from Scotland Yard. The bath and a complete change of clothes were very necessary, as well as a shave, after spending some hours trussed up under a pile of hay in a cowshed.’

  Seeing her look of impelled surprise he smiled encouragingly.

  ‘But that’s all part of the other half I’m about to tell you. And don’t worry, you won’t have to hound me. Strapp’s put me in the picture. If I’m difficult you continue to write up sports features when the rest of the sports team aren’t sober enough. Well, I won’t promise too much except that I won’t get you drunk — not deliberately. How’s that, Sheila?’

  ‘Good enough for a start, and I feel revived. Oh, by the way, I listen better when I’m smoking. You don’t mind?’

  ‘I’ll join you,’ he said, ‘and I’ll take it as an insult if you don’t shut that handbag and stop reaching for a Sweet Afton or whatever it was you acquired a taste for in the bog.’

  She felt resentment flaring until she saw he was grinning at her. She was surprised again. This time when she found she was smiling back at him.

  She appreciated Micky Perran as a journalist from the way he gave her what he knew. She made only four interruptions for minor enlargements, and halfway through she poured him another daiquiri and added the remainder of the ginger ale to her own glass. He finished his second drink and said, ‘You can ask questions while we wash up. I hate leaving dirty crocks of any kind when I go out. They’re always so damned unwelcoming when I return.’

  ‘I know the feeling,’ she told him, sucking in her mouth until her face momentarily belonged to an insouciant skeleton. ‘I’m the same way about dead flowers and littered ash-trays, and I can’t live with anything that looks faded. It always seems somehow obscene, as though it’s mouldering while I stare at it.’

  He said, ‘What were you before you mistakenly decided you could be happy in a newspaper office?’ He watched her dry the glass he had just rinsed at the sink. ‘Nothing personal, you understand. No one can be happy in such a place. They can be dedicated, intensely occupied, even devoted, but never happy, which may be why I’m a freelance in my fashion. But you, Sheila, what were you previously?’

  She set down the glass she had rubbed until it sparkled like crystal in the ceiling light.

  ‘A psephologist.’

  ‘I can’t even spell the word, and it sounds vaguely filthy.’

  ‘I was an opinion pollster.’

  ‘Now the confident way you handled me when you arrived is fully explained,’ he grinned. ‘But I forgive you, and I’ll prove it by answering your first question. By the way, what is it?’

  ‘What are we visiting at Shoreham?’ she inquired without hesitation.

  ‘A cabin cruiser with the enchanting name of Sea Elf, which I hope it doesn’t live up to,’ he told her as he hung up the tea towel. ‘More precisely she’s about twenty thousand quids’ worth of Bertram Flybridge Sports Cruiser with a pair of four hundred h.p. marine engines giving her thirty odd feet of fibreglass sheathing a turn of forty knots while she’s burning a gallon of fuel a minute.’

  ‘The owner wouldn’t be a certain Gene Craig, would it?’

  He looked at her with respect and made no effort to conceal the fact, for which she felt more grateful than she could have imagined possible for a stranger.

  ‘As a matter of fact, it would. Oh, yes, I remember. Of course, you’re the sports writer who spoke to Apps when he tried to get someone else. Strapp told me, but it didn’t register. So it all depends on me whether you cross the floor to join the features side.’ Perran laughed at the look of chagrin which crossed her face. ‘Don’t feel upset. Phil was on the phone to me before you’d left the Banner building. At that, he was lucky to get me. About six times today he’s rung and found no one at home.’

  She stood looking at him. ‘What does all this, added up, mean? Have you already made a deal with Strapp?’

  ‘Not on your life. I couldn’t. I told Superintendent Frank Drury, who’s heading this case, I wouldn’t write a word until he gave me the high sign.’

  ‘Then this trip to Shoreham — you were having me on? That it?’

  He shook his head. ‘When I told Phil Strapp how it was he retorted that you would be here to earn your place in features. If I didn’t come across you’d probably be joining the unemployed. That gave me an idea, which I was careful not to share with him, Sheila. I asked if I could borrow you to go out of town, but I couldn’t say where. He didn’t like it, but he said yes. So it’s Shoreham and the Sea Elf, but not Gene Craig. Frank Drury’s got him tied up where Harvey Harris and Mario Bandelli and no one can reach him.’

  She let a small frown crease the pale space between her quick and intelligent eyes. He decided she was one woman whom a frown didn’t spoil for looking at.

  ‘And what was the idea Strapp doesn’t know about?’ she asked. ‘Or don’t I get to know?’

  ‘Oh, you get to know all right, Sheila. Because it’s no idea at all without you. You, in fact, make it possible. You see, you can do the writing instead of me. But there’s a condition.’

  ‘How could I guess?’

  ‘Now don’t sound that way, Sheila. I’m thinking for both of us.’

  She waited for the rest, her look now distinctly cagey, as though she had suddenly remembered most of the things she had ever been told about what makes this a man’s world.

  ‘You write it the way I tell you. That way, when I come to my personal story, it’ll be something the Banner readers will be waiting in line for.’

  ‘You want me to report what you tell me. That it?’

  He eyed her askance. ‘You mistrust my intentions, darling,’ he said in his mock-Strapp voice. ‘Hell, no! Write it as a feature and get yourself a by-line. You’ll earn it. But you’ll learn the business of making the readers want more, and you’ll be doing me a good turn. Now, does that sound like a deal?’

  ‘It sounds like one.’

  ‘And you sound hesitant.’

  ‘You could be conning me.’

  ‘How I’d like to know. Genuinely.’

  ‘I write the come-on feature to satisfy Strapp and you then sell the big personal story to someone else.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Smart girl. I could do that, if I was a louse. How do you feel about lice?’

  ‘Like a dedicated exterminator.’

  He shuddered theatrically. ‘The very thought scares me.’ He held out his hand. ‘You do a job for me and I do a job for the Banner.’

  She took his hand but before she released it she said, ‘No get-out clause?’

  ‘One. But it isn’t concealed in the small print. Strapp meets my price. After all, we haven’t talked terms. There hasn’t been time. But the better the job you do, the better the terms I can ask. Fair?’

  ‘Let’s say fair enough.’

  They shook hands and then he pulled her close, looked into her eyes and was startled by what he found there, and kissed her mouth. As he released her he said, ‘And that had nothing to do with Phil Strapp or the Banner, but a hell of a lot to do with me.’

  He had expected to see her looking furious. Instead, she was looking bright-eyed and her breath was coming fast. That was when he realised his own was joining in a kind of whispering duet.

  ‘Now let me get this straight,’ said Drury, staring at the man on the other side of his desk. ‘Your sister was staying in the flat over the Red Ace. She was to be the contact between you and Cuzak, but no one was to know. That was the deal. She was to bring you a hundred and forty thousand in cash. That would be the signal for you to take the Sea Elf to the agreed rendezvous out in the Channel. There a helicopter would drop you a cargo you would take aboard. You would make for a South American
port named by whoever came aboard with the cargo. Is that right?’

  ‘That’s it. Details were to be filled in later. Joanne was to collect them. After I reached the South American port with the cash and the cargo I would be paid fifty thousand in cash. That was the deal. But I only had a hope of pushing it through if I stayed out of London. On Sea Elf I was safe. It was hired under another name. I didn’t run any risk of being picked up on that old warrant so long as I was careful. After all, I was only the front man in that Marmaduke sale of the casinos to Bandelli. I didn’t really touch the money, and it was crazy for the Inland Revenue to hunt me to pay capital gains on capital I’d never received. I couldn’t even explain. That would have meant Bandelli’s part in the deal coming out, and what do you think my life would have been worth? Or Joanne’s?’ the man again wearing Continental sunglasses finished.

  ‘I’d say Harvey Harris could best answer that one.’

  Drury pulled his gaze away from the man opposite and sat back in his chair. He flipped a loose waving hand at the empty coffee cups on the desk and the attendant Bill Hazard removed them to the flat top of a metal filing cabinet near the window. Drury’s thoughts were running along dual channels. Besides tackling a man who was not too anxious to be communicative the superintendent was wondering why there had been no report as yet from the uniformed crew that had been waiting with Alf Bradley for the Australian enforcer of Bandelli’s outfit to arrive from the Soho gym in his Jag. The delay was becoming increasingly perplexing.

  In order to avoid giving Craig time to think too much about the implications of his changed situation, Drury went on, ‘How long had your sister been engaged to Harris?’