by Keene, Day
I transferred my papers and the gun, folded my uniform into the suit case and walked out to the counter where the dark lad was totalling my bill. With everything, it came to eighty-nine dollars minus ten percent. “Why the ten percent off?” I asked him.
“That’s for your Medal of Honor bar,” he said, soberly. “No dog-face ever found one in a box of rations. I know. I was one of the poor bastards at Bastogne.”
I hadn’t even noticed he’d seen it. It was a little thing that gave me a big glow. It was the first nice thing that had happened to me since I’d hit Chicago.
I smoothed the lapel of the gray suit. “Thanks. Thanks a lot, fellow.”
He said, “Wear it in health.” Then he added, grinning, as I went out the door, “Ten years ago, if anyone had told me I’d ever give a sergeant a break —” he left it there.
I gave him a wave of the hand and walked on down the street. There was a cigar store on the next corner. I used the books in the booth to look up Mona’s lawyer. There was a Quentin E. Emerson listed under lawyers in the classified directory, but I couldn’t find any home address for him. The chances were he lived in one of the dozens of small towns within commuting distance of the Loop.
Mona’s lawyer would have to wait until morning —if I lasted that long.
Back on Clark Street again, I stood undecided, wondering just what to do, what I could do. According to what Olson had read to me from her case file, Mona had picked up Stein at a clip-joint called The Furnace. I could see its flashing red neon sign across and down the street a block away. It was as good a starting point as any. I doubted if even Joe LaFanti would give me credit for guts enough to show in one of the places he owned.
I crossed the street, my palms sweating a little, and turned in at The Furnace. It was a big barn of a place on a corner. There were dimly lighted booths against three walls and a raised runway bisecting a horse-shoe shaped bar in the center of the floor. The joint was packed with free spenders. A B-girl or a hustler was sitting on her living in every second booth and bar stool. The joint smelled like what it was.
I tried to find a stool at the bar but had to settle for one of the few unoccupied booths. A hatchet-faced waiter took my order. Beer was a dollar a bottle. An ounce of cut bar rye brought the tab to two dollars and a quarter.
I sat sipping my drink. A hot four-piece combo was playing It Must Be Love on a small raised platform at the wide end of the runway but no one was paying any attention to them.
The turn-over of girls on the stools was terrific. They came and went like busy little ants. It was the closest thing I’d seen to a wide-open parlor house since I’d been stationed in El Paso and spent most of my pay in Ciudad Juarez. I tried to visualize the little kid in the death house working in such a joint and couldn’t. She might stay with a guy she liked. She probably would and had. But I couldn’t see her putting it out for money, no matter how many confessions she’d signed, no matter what the State of Illinois had proved.
The framed picture of Mona in LaFanti’s apartment haunted me. I wished I knew more about women’s jewelry than I did. If I was right, something was awful screwball. Perhaps Mona’s attorney could tell me. Anyway, he could find out.
Someone blocked off the light in the booth and a not bad-looking little brunette in a tight black skirt and a crisp white shirtwaist sat down across from me.
“How are the chances of you buying a little girl a big drink, mister?” she asked.
I said the chances were good and told the waiter to bring her whatever she wanted. She ordered a double rye high. “Stranger in town, mister?” she asked.
I pointed to my suitcase. “Just got into town.”
“And out for a big time, huh?”
I lied, “That’s right.”
She raised her glass when our drinks came. “What’s your name?”
“Cole. Jim Cole,” I lied.
She wrinkled her nose at me and leaned forward a little, just enough so I could see she wasn’t wearing a bra. “I’m Maggie. My right name is Marguerite but everyone calls me Maggie.”
Her smile was as nice as her body. I touched my glass to hers. “Maggie sounds good to me.”
She felt her way. “First time you’ve ever been in here?”
I nodded. “Yeah. That’s right.” I lit cigarettes for both of us. “You work here long?”
Her smile turned wry. “Two years. I did a strip act up to a month ago. Then the guy who owns the joint went overboard for a little bleached blonde and I got the boot.”
“You like the work?”
She shrugged. “Anyway, it’s a living. What do you do?”
I said I was a construction man.
The waiter brought us fresh drinks without waiting for me to order and the size of the roll I was carrying seemed to impress the little brunette. She moved around and sat on the same side of the booth.
“You look like you’re flush, honey.”
“Yeah. It so happens,” I said.
I had an idea what her next move would be. I waited, wanting it to come from her. She wet her lips with the tip of her tongue. “You just out to drink or are you looking for a good time, honey?”
I played dumb. “What kind of a good time?”
She pressed her thigh against mine. “You know what I mean.”
It was an idea. If she had worked at The Furnace for two years, the chances were she had known Mona. In a hotel room, just the two of us, it might be she could give me a new slant on the case.
Maggie persisted, “I’ll show you a good time, honey. Honest. I’ve always been crazy about big red-haired guys.”
“How crazy?”
She picked up my hand and slid it under the table. Her thighs were soft and cool. There was nothing under her skirt but her. “You’ll see.” She sucked in her breath in simulated passion. “Come on. Be a sport. Let’s both have a good time, big boy.”
It was a funny sensation. Instead of exciting me, the feel of her disgusted me. Possibly it was because, at least so the State of Illinois claimed, the little doll in the death house had made the same pitch to a jewelry salesman named Stein.
She slumped lower in the booth. “Come on. Be a sport,” she repeated.
The smoke, the cheap whiskey and the blare of the four-piece combo were making my head ache. I started to ask how much she figured her company was worth. I froze with my left hand trapped and my right hand on the butt of the gun in my coat pocket. Hymie and Norm had walked in the door of The Furnace. They began to talk to a lad in a white dinner jacket who looked like he might be the manager.
The lad in the white dinner jacket looked around the club, then came directly to the booth in which we were sitting.
Maggie released my left hand and sat up. “Now what?”
“Gloria’s drunk,” he told her, “too drunk to work the ten o’clock show. Norm and Hymie just came from Mr. LaFanti’s apartment.”
“So?”
The lad paid no attention to me. To him I was just another free-spending chump. “So you’ll have to take over her spot,” he told her.
Maggie patted my cheek, then stood up and smoothed her rumpled skirt. “You wait, honey,” she insisted. “Mamma will be right back. Just as soon as she takes off her clothes for the cheap Johns at the bar.”
She and the manager left. I sat watching Hymie and Norm. What had happened was obvious. To celebrate making a fool out of me, LaFanti and the little blonde who had replaced the girl I’d heard crying had taken a few too many drinks. Hymie and Norm seemed amused. They had a drink at the bar, laughing with one of the barmen. Then they turned and walked out again.
To look for me?
I leaned against the back of the booth. It was an effort for me to breathe. My whole body was slimy with sweat. “What time does the show go on?” I asked the waiter, as he replaced my empty glass and set down a fresh bottle of beer.
He said, “Right away, mister. There’s the emcee out now.”
I sipped my drink as I watched the s
how. The acts and the emcee’s gags were as raw as the whiskey. A dame sang some dirty songs. Two tired strippers who were beginning to sag where they shouldn’t and bulge in the wrong places peeled down to their ten o’clock shadow.
Then Maggie came out on the runway, carrying a flowered parasol and wearing a big picture hat and a full-skirted dress with a bustle. At a distance she looked almost virginal. The thought disturbed me. For my own sake. For Johnny’s. How does a whore look? I thought.
The little doll in the death house looked like she wouldn’t say spit, but then so did Maggie. I sat breathing hard, watching her discard first her parasol and next her hat and gloves. Now she was shrugging out of her dress and the crowd in the club whooped as she paraded the runway wearing a pair of long white stiffly starched pantaloons with an old-fashioned camisole to match.
The camisole fluttered to the runway. Still keeping time to the music, she stepped out of the pants. Now all she had on was a net brassiere and a rhinestone bauble that bobbled enticingly, as she did a series of bumps.
The net brassiere followed the camisole to the runway. She had a pretty little body. She’d told me to wait. She was mine if I wanted her. It could be she could tell me something. What was more, if I took off with her, I would be safe from both LaFanti and the police for at least one night.
It was a funny sensation. I wasn’t a male virgin. I had played house with dames of all sizes and shapes and color, from Rabat to Yokohama. Now, all of a sudden, the idea was repugnant to me.
I laid a bill on the table and picked up my suit case. The waiter was concerned. “What’s the idea?” he asked. “I thought you were going to wait for Maggie?”
What could I tell him? The truth? That I didn’t want any woman? That with a world full of women to choose from, I had fallen in love with a big-eyed little doll — one who had been convicted of first staying with, then robbing and killing a wholesale jeweler by the name of Stein?
“Tell her I’ll be back,” I lied.
After the foul air in the club, the street smelled sweet and clean. There was a lighted hotel sign in the next block. I walked back the way I had come. The” light on the corner was against me. I stood waiting for it to change, then felt the short hairs on the back of my neck tingle, as a radio patrol car drove up beside me for the red light.
The squawking two-way on the dash of the car was describing me.
“… Six-feet-two inches tall. Approximately two hundred pounds … Red hair … Blue eyes … Deeply tanned … When last seen Duval was in uniform … He is a technical sergeant in the infantry and is wearing four banks of campaign ribbons and bars … This man is armed and mentally sick … Code 34 …”
I wished I knew what Code 34 meant. The cop sitting nearest me yawned almost in my face. All he saw was the Leghorn hat and the gray gabardine suit. “Poor devil,” he said to his partner. “One of them cases of war neuroses, I betcha. It stands to reason. A guy can only take so much and then he blows his top.”
The cop driving the car was noncommittal. “Could be. On the other hand, I caught more hell at St. Lo than you could jam into Soldier Field. What I mean is they did it to us. And there still ain’t anything so wrong with me that a dame and a bottle can’t cure it.”
The police car drove on as the light changed. I walked on up the street and checked into the hotel, registering as Jim Cole. It wasn’t much of a hotel. The room and bath to which the clerk assigned me was on the second floor in front.
The bell boy raised the window as high as it would go. “Anything I can get you, sir?” he asked. He leaned on the word anything.
“No. Not a thing,” I said.
When he had gone I stripped off my clothes and soaked my feet in the tub. I showered and washed out my shorts and socks and hung them on towel racks to dry. Then without bothering to fold down the spread, I turned out the light and lay down on the bed to wait for morning.
The darkness covered me like a blanket. Through the open window I could hear music, faintly, and now and then the rumble of a streetcar. A couple checked into the room next door, the girl giggling and saying, “Don’t, John,” from time to time.
The night grew older and darker. The girl in the room next door stopped saying don’t and put an oh in front of John.
I wished the wall was thicker.
I wished I had waited for Maggie.
“Think of me,” Mona had said.
I wished I could stop thinking of her.
Sometime toward morning I slept.
Chapter Nine
MORNING DAWNED gray and naked. With the neon signs turned off and the hustlers and B-girls and barmen and suckers still in their sacks, North Clark Street was just another street.
I stood at the window a long time, watching the early morning rush of Loop-bound traffic. It tapered off shortly before nine. I wanted to see Mona’s lawyer as soon as I could but I doubted that he would be in his office much before ten o’clock. To keep from showing my face on the street before I had to, I phoned the desk to send up a bell boy. Then I sent him out for a morning paper, a pint of rye, a quart of coffee and a half-dozen western sandwiches.
The boy was a middle-aged man, a different bell boy from the one who had shown me to my room. As he set the greasy brown paper sacks on the scarred dresser, he grinned knowingly. “Kind of weaning a small drunk, eh, fellow?”
“Yeah, just a small one,” I lied.
I wished he’d get out. He didn’t. He opened the pint of rye and rolled the ten-dollar bill I’d given him around one of his fingers. “Well, if you lose the toss,” he winked, “that is, if you get started again and want some pretty company, let me know.” North Clark Street was still North Clark Street. All that was turned off was the neon. He confided, “We’ve got a couple of hot little numbers living right here in the hotel.”
I said I would keep it in mind and locked the door after him. All I wanted to do was talk to Mona’s lawyer, have him find out one thing for me. It could be I was wrong. If I was, I’d shove on and LaFanti and his boys and the police could find a new yard bird.
Still, if the girl in the death house had killed Stein, why didn’t Captain Corson think she was guilty? Why was he still working on the case? Why had LaFanti been so certain she’d talked to me? About what? And why had LaFanti told Hymie:
“Don’t he a chump. You’re thinking like a square. Of course she talked. And unless we get rid of Duval we won’t he safe until they pull that switch.”
I took a big drink of rye, wishing I was smarter than I was. The rye tasted good. Alternating sips of rye and coffee, I read the morning paper while I ate the sandwiches.
My picture was on the front page. It was the one the camera man had taken in LaFanti’s apartment just before I’d shot off the lobe of LaFanti’s ear. There was a picture of Mona in the next column, a picture I hadn’t seen before. I studied it carefully but it didn’t tell me a thing.
Opinion seemed to be divided as to whether I was actually crazy or just out to raise as much hell as I could with Joe LaFanti. In a statement to the press, State’s Attorney Olson had said:
“Frankly I feel that Sergeant Duval has made a fool of me and the state’s attorney’s office and should be subjected to an exhaustive psychiatric examination. However, when I talked to Duval in my office earlier in the evening and explained the State’s case against Miss Ambler, he seemed perfectly rational and resigned to the guilt of his dead brother’s widow. And I might add that there is no doubt as to Mona Ambler’s guilt.”
LaFanti was even more big hearted. According to the reporter who’d interviewed him, he’d written off the lobe of his ear to profit and loss. His statement read:
“I haven’t got a thing against the guy, see? In my book, guys who have been through the hell that Duval has can be excused for blowing their tops. I don’t see how they stay as sane as they do. It must have been a great shock to Sergeant Duval to find his kid brother’s widow where she is. As I see it, he was hurt and disappointed. He hit back inst
inctively — and I was handy. Mona had been my girl. She’d done his brother wrong with me. I paid the lawyer who defended her. Duval felt like he wanted to pound on someone, so he picked me.”
I read the statement again. It may have made sense to the reporter. It didn’t make sense to me. When I’d first gotten into the thing, I hadn’t wanted to pound anyone. All I’d wanted to do was to make a few arrangements to take care of Johnny’s kid.
It said: continued on page two. I turned to the second page. The interview with LaFanti continued:
“But as for me kidnapping Sergeant Duval, subjecting him to a beating or holding him a prisoner in my apartment, that’s a lot of nonsense. The sergeant had never been in my apartment until he walked in with State’s Attorney Olson and Captain Corson and I can prove it by Manny Kelly, the elevator boy and Miss Gloria May, the young lady to whom I’m engaged and with whom I spent all of yesterday afternoon.”
I noticed that nowhere in his statement did LaFanti mention either the hood I’d killed or the one whose face I’d massaged with the jagged heel of the shattered rye bottle. He concluded the interview by saying:
“However, I still feel as I did after a thorough search of my apartment disproved Sergeant Duval’s wild sensations. I feel that he ought to be run through the psycho ward — for his own good.”
For my good, or his? It took five days to put a guy through the mill and in five days the kid in the death house would be dead and the murder of a lad named Stein would be transferred from the alive to the closed file.
There was a lot more of this and that, including a picture of Miss Gloria May. There was no doubt about it. She was the same blonde whose taxi fare I’d paid. She couldn’t have been in the apartment. It had been another girl whom I’d heard crying.
I read on down the page. There was even a couple of columns by local prominent sicky-ackys attempting to rationalize the wild “accusations” I’d made against Joe LaFanti by explaining the devious ramifications of war neuroses and battle fatigue. Their explanations didn’t make any more sense than LaFanti’s statement. Like the cop in the prowl car had said, even if I was suffering from battle fatigue, which I wasn’t, there wasn’t anything wrong with me that a bottle and the right dame wouldn’t cure.
