Death House Doll

by Keene, Day

  As I spoke, the room door swung in and LaFanti switched on the overhead light. He wasn’t alone. He was wearing a white silk suit and looked cool and comfortable and amused. He had a drink in one hand and a gun in the other.

  “Pardon me,” he said, “did someone mention my name?”

  The girl in my arms stiffened and began to scream. I considered dropping her and trying for my gun.

  Hymie read my mind. “Uh uh. I wouldn’t, Duval. You look fine just like that. But if you think you can make it, go ahead.” He thumbed the safety off the automatic he was holding. “Believe me, I owe you plenty for that fall you made me take. You damn near broke my neck.”

  Norm’s swollen jaw made his smile crooked. “And if Hymie can’t take you, I can. In fact, it would seem this is the end of the line, soldier.”

  The girl in my arms weighed a thousand pounds. It was like reliving a nightmare. I’d gone through this same thing before in Gloria May’s apartment.

  LaFanti was proud of himself. “Who said a mountain wouldn’t come to Mohammed? It’s simple if the mountain happens to be red-haired and none too bright. All you have to do is grease the way with a dame.” He pretended to be concerned. “What took you so long, Duval? After we missed you in Evanston, then we got that flash that you’d asked a gas station attendant the way to Miller and were driving a white Jaguar, we expected you at least half an hour ago.”

  My mouth was dry. My throat was constricted. I felt like a fool. The party, the conversation they’d let me overhear, Hymie raising his eyes to the balcony — all had been parts of the trap. I had been expected. They’d known I was outside the window.

  The girl in my arms stopped screaming and stared at LaFanti, terrified.

  I whistled in the dark. “Know something?”

  “What?” LaFanti asked.

  I said, “I’m glad the legislative branch of the United States government gives out awards for courage instead of brains. If it was the other way round, I’d have to give my medal back to Congress.”

  Posthumously.

  Chapter Seventeen

  LAFANTI wasn’t amused. “Let’s go downstairs,” he said, coldly.

  He stepped aside to let me pass him. The girl in my arms began to cry again, quietly, without hope, as I had heard her cry in LaFanti’s apartment. I carried her down the stairs into the big living room. All the girls, except Gloria and one or two of the men, were gone. LaFanti didn’t want any witnesses to what was going to happen to me.

  Gloria was almost as drunk as she had been when I’d walked in on her in her bedroom. “Hi, Romeo,” she grinned. “Tell me, how was I? Did you have a good time?”

  LaFanti nodded to a sofa. “You can put the dame down now. She won’t run away. She knows what will happen if she does. That tying her up business was strictly sucker bait.”

  I started to lower her to the sofa and Norm dug his gun barrel into my spine. “Just a minute.” He tried to tug my gun from my coat pocket. The front sight caught on the lining. He ripped it out, tearing the pocket.

  I put the girl on the sofa and stood looking down at the torn pocket of the gray gabardine suit. “Wear it in health,” the pawn broker had told me. It had been a good omen. It had worked fine for a time. But now it would seem that my health had run out.

  LaFanti sat on the arm of a chair. “You’ve given us a lot of trouble, fellow.” He looked at the girl on the sofa. “Are you still playing dumb?”

  I shook my head. “No. I know.”

  “The little doll in the death house told you?”

  “No.”

  “You just figured it out by yourself?”

  “That’s right.”

  “She didn’t tell you anything?”

  “No.”

  “See. Like I said,” Hymie muttered. “We could have let the guy go back there that first day in the apartment and Tommy would still be alive and Captain Corson wouldn’t be raising hell and smelling around the way he is.”

  “Water on Corson,” LaFanti said. Only he didn’t say water.

  There was a package of cigarettes on the table. I put a cigarette in my mouth and lit it.

  Hymie’s admiration was begrudged. “You’re a nervy bastard. I’ll say that for you.”

  I sucked smoke into my lungs, thinking of what the girl had said up in the room, of how Johnny had described me to her.

  “He said you were swell. The grandest guy in the world.”

  And I was letting Johnny down because I was dumb, because I’d let a hot-shot racketeer outsmart me. Because I was dumb, the little doll in the death house would have to walk the last mile.

  The windows were gray with dawn. It would be morning in a few minutes. I didn’t want to die. I wanted to live. I wanted to tell the girl in the death house how I felt about her. I wanted to tell her that, funny face or not, I loved her. I wanted Johnny’s boy to have a mother. I wanted a lot of things. And all I was going to get was a hole in the sand.

  I sucked so hard at the cigarette the heat burned my fingers. “Supposing I were to tell you where the Stein diamonds are?”

  LaFanti looked at the girl on the sofa, then back at me. His voice was oily. “You work fast, Duval. I’ve been trying to find out for six months.”

  “No,” the girl on the sofa said. “Don’t tell him. They’re the only chance Clara has left.”

  “Mona,” LaFanti corrected her. He continued to look at me, trying to figure out if it was a stall, if I was trying to save my hide. “You know?”

  “I do.”

  “Where are they?”

  I shook my head. “Not so fast.” Still stalling, I looked at the brightening window — then looked away fast and back at LaFanti. He hadn’t seen what I had. None of them had. They were too interested in what I said I knew. One hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars worth of diamonds were a lot of diamonds.

  “What do you mean, not so fast?” LaFanti asked.

  I said, “We’d have to make a deal.”

  “What sort of a deal?”

  “My life for the diamonds.”

  The crying girl on the sofa sat up and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Men,” she said. She made the word sound dirty. “You’re all sons-of-bitches, all of you. All of you but Johnny.” She slumped back on the sofa and began to cry again.

  LaFanti was practical. “Frankly, you interest me, Duval. This whole affair has put me to considerable trouble and expense. How’s this for a deal? You tell us where the diamonds are. If you aren’t lying to save your neck, if the diamonds are where you say they are, we’ll hold you for three more days — then turn you loose.”

  “How do I know I can trust you?”

  He shook his head. “You don’t. But you aren’t in a position to be picky. It wouldn’t take the boys very long to dig a nice hole in the sand right next to where we planted Tommy.”

  “No,” I admitted, “it wouldn’t.”

  “Well?” he asked.

  “They’re in the diaper bag,” I told them. “Before his mother packed it with his little shirts and dresses and diapers, she ripped up the rubberized bottom of the bag, put the diamonds and the belt they were in in the bottom of the bag, then glued the bottom back.”

  The girl on the sofa cried harder.

  LaFanti exhaled as if he had been holding his breath a long time. “I’ll be a son-of-a-bitch,” he said, finally. “Of course. It’s the one place in Chicago I didn’t think to look. I didn’t even know there was a bag.”

  He got up from the arm of the chair on which he was sitting.

  “Now what?” Hymie asked.

  LaFanti said, “You and Norm stay here with Duval and the girl. I’ll drive back to Chicago and pick up the ice.”

  “And then —?”

  “And then,” he said, “I’ll come back and we’ll have some fun with Duval.”

  I wiped the sweat from my face. “You promised.”

  “Sucker,” Gloria said, shrilly.

  “Yeah. So it would seem,” I said
. “I should have grabbed the diamonds and blown.”

  Gloria was amused. “You always think of the right things too late, don’t you, Sergeant? Just like it was with me. We could have had a good time. Then, at least, you could have had a memory.”

  Hymie shook his head. “Dead guys don’t remember.”

  LaFanti picked an expensive panama from a table and shaped it to his head. As he started for the door, he said, “I’ll be back as soon as I can. But one of you guys better relieve Louie. He’s been outside all night.”

  “I will,” Norm said.

  LaFanti started for the door again and stopped, no doubt feeling like I had when he’d opened the bedroom door. Captain Corson was filling the doorway and behind him there was a full strength platoon of plainclothes men and Indiana state troopers.

  “Going somewhere, Joe?” Corson said.

  LaFanti looked over his shoulder at me. “You knew they were outside.”

  I admitted, “I saw a face at the window. And hoods don’t wear campaign hats.”

  Captain Corson came into the room. “Let’s have your gun, Joe. This time I have you. Killing that lawyer Emerson was a mistake. That one, at least, we can pin on you.”

  I’d never seen a man sweat harder. The back of LaFanti’s white suit was black with sweat. He glanced at Hymie and Norm. “Well, do something, you bastards.”

  “Not me,” Hymie said. “Not with twenty guns on me.” He laid the gun he was holding on the floor, gently, with care, like it was an egg and might break.

  Norm was already reaching for the ceiling.

  I saw LaFanti’s muscles tense. He was in the same spot I’d been in. He had nothing to lose. He turned and started to run for the door to the kitchen. As he passed me, I thrust out my leg and he tripped over it and sprawled his full length on the floor. I asked him the same thing that Captain Corson had. “Going somewhere, fellow?”

  Corson pulled him to his feet and holding the lapels of LaFanti’s white suit in his left hand, he used his right fist to mash LaFanti’s nose flat with his face.

  “Unnecessary brutality,” Corson said. It was like he was talking to himself, remembering what State’s Attorney Olson had said in the squad room. “Have I wanted to do that for a long time!”

  “Do it again,” one of the state troopers said. “The trouble the bastard has made for us. The bastards he’s made, for that matter.”

  Captain Corson did it again.

  LaFanti screamed and sat on the floor, holding his ruined face in both hands.

  Corson turned his attention to me. “Well, if it isn’t Sergeant Duval. You’ve had quite some fun, eh, Sergeant? Ever since you shot your way out of LaFanti’s apartment.”

  I couldn’t tell by his face where I stood with him. I asked, “What does Code 34 mean?”

  One of the plainclothes men who held me while Corson had worked on me in the squad room grinned. “It means: ‘Wrap him in cotton. Bring him in gently, boys. We like the guy.’”

  I looked back at Corson. “You knew I wasn’t crazy?”

  Still poker-faced, he said, “Since that first night in LaFanti’s apartment. We could have picked you up on any of several occasions. But you were making such a good cat’s paw we thought we’d give you your head. Then when you headed down here, the Indiana boys co-operated with us. You may have noticed you didn’t even see a police car.”

  “It worried me.”

  “They were busy sweeping the highway, picking that punk of an elevator boy out of your car and posting a guard around the lodge.”

  I sucked in a deep breath and held it. When I exhaled, I said, “Thanks.”

  One of the Indiana troopers grinned. “Think nothing of it, soldier. We were happy to oblige.”

  Corson nodded at his squad. “All right. We still have plenty to do. Let’s gather them up and head back for Chicago.”

  Hymie bleated, “I won’t go. I know my legal rights. You got to extradite me.”

  Corson used the back of his hand to knock him across the room. “Okay. You’re extradited.” He motioned Gloria to her feet, then pushed his battered straw hat to the back of his head and looked at the girl on the sofa with a puzzled expression in his eyes. “And who is this?” he asked me.

  I said, “Suppose you ask her?”

  “Who are you?” Corson asked her.

  The girl on the sofa stood up. Her mouth opened as she started to tell him.

  “Why, I —” she began. Her mouth continued to work but no words came out. The full realization that she was talking to an honest cop, that she was safe, really safe for the first time in six months, swept over her like a wave.

  “Why, I —” she repeated, then fainted.

  Chapter Eighteen

  IT HAD been a long day. A lot of things had happened. I’d talked to a lot of people. Night was a long time in coming. But it was worth it when it came. If the brass in the big office had been generals, instead of attorneys general and big-shot police and high state officials, there would have been almost as many stars in the room as there were in the sky.

  Captain Corson hadn’t been kidding. He’d been right behind me all the time. He’d even picked up the suit case containing my uniform that I’d left in my room in the North Clark Street flea bag. It felt good to be back in uniform. I sat with one hip on a desk looking around the room. Everyone concerned with the case was there, except Johnny’s boy and the little doll I had seen in the death house.

  Corson read my mind. “Keep your pants on, Sergeant,” he said. “You know how it is. There is almost as much red tape in our business as there is in yours.”

  “Yeah. Sure,” I said, “I know how it is.”

  We hadn’t let First Assistant State’s Attorney Olson in on all the details. He tried to butter up to me. “You seem to have made quite a forty-eight hours of it, Duval.”

  I brushed him off. “I’ve had better times doing other things.”

  Warden Kane came in a few minutes later. The little doll still looked good to me. She was still wearing the old-fashioned gold loop earrings and Kane had allowed her to change into the dress she had been wearing when she’d been committed to Joliet. It wasn’t much of a dress but she had what it takes to fill it out and make it look like a Paris creation. She’d braided her hair and wound braids around her head. Her big eyes were bright and shining. She walked with her head held high. She looked around the room, then came directly to me and touched my cheek with the finger tips of one hand. She breathed the two words. “Funny face.”

  I put my hand on her fingers. “You told me to think of you.

  She said, “And you did.”

  Then she and the girl I’d rescued from LaFanti’s place in the Dunes were kissing each other and hugging and crying in each other’s arms.

  Seen together, there was a strong resemblance. You could tell they were sisters. Both were five feet tall. Both of them had black hair. Both had blue eyes and fair skins. Both had beautiful bodies. But the resemblance stopped there. The eyes of the girl that my brother had married looked tired and too old for her body.

  Olson’s lips looked dry. He tried to wet them with his tongue. “I — I don’t get this,” he said.

  Captain Corson rubbed the knuckles of his left hand with the fingers of his right. The tail of the canary was still sticking out of his smile. “You will,” he said, genially, “you will.”

  It was all very informal. A dignified, white-haired man, the state’s attorney general looked at Olson thoughtfully, then across the room at me. “Suppose, Sergeant Duval,” he suggested, “inasmuch as you have been the chief instrument in preventing a flagrant miscarriage of justice, you explain the situation to Mr. Olson.” He leaned on the word mister.

  I said, “You convicted the wrong girl, Olson. It seems there are two Jones girls, just as there were two Duval boys.”

  He repeated, “I still don’t get it.”

  I looked over to where LaFanti was sitting in a straight-backed chair handcuffed to a detective. “Ma
ybe you’d like to tell him, Joe.”

  “Go to hell,” LaFanti said. His broken nose made him sound as if he had adenoids.

  The two girls stopped hugging and kissing each other and watched me. I singled out the one I’d picked out of the bedroom in LaFanti’s lodge. “What’s your name, honey?”

  She said, “I’m known in Chicago as Mona Ambler.”

  “Is that your right name?”

  “No. My right name is Mary Jones.”

  “And you?” I asked the other girl.

  She said, “I’m Clara, Mary’s sister.”

  “And where have you been the last six months?”

  “In prison.”

  “Why? I mean what was the charge against you?”

  “I was accused and convicted of murdering a man named Stein.”

  I looked back at Mary. “Did Clara kill Stein?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “Did you?”

  She shook her head even harder. “No, but I can’t prove it. That’s why all this happened.” She made a hopeless little gesture. “Oh, I’m no angel. I don’t claim to be one. If I’d had any strength of character I wouldn’t have let Joe LaFanti force me back into the rackets. I’d have done what I wanted to do, stay true to Johnny. I’d have made a good home for my baby even if I had to work as a salesgirl days and wait table nights.”

  “Instead, you allowed LaFanti to force you back into working at The Furnace?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you do there?”

  She began to cry again. “Why shame me by making me say it? You know what I did.”

  I said, “All right. Let’s put it this way. Six months ago, while you were working at The Furnace, you made the acquaintance of a wholesale jewelry salesman by the name of Stein?”

  “I did.”

  “And took him to your hotel room?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were you intimate with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened then?”

  She made the hopeless gesture again. “Both of us were drunk. I was so drunk I passed out. When I came to Joe and Norm were in the room arguing with Stein. Somehow they’d learned he was carrying a fortune in diamonds. They wanted them. Stein put up a drunken argument and Joe lost his temper and shot him with the gun he’d given me.”