Too Hot to Hold

by Day Keene

  Seen close up, he didn’t look like a killer. He was merely a tired man in his early thirties with an attractive swatch of gray in his black hair.

  Busy with his thoughts and a cup of steaming coffee, he didn’t notice her at first. The counterman did and was shocked.

  “Holy smoke, Miss,” he gasped as he studied her swollen face. “Who hung one like that on a pretty doll like you?”

  Brady turned on his stool to glance at the girl and almost spilled his coffee. Even with one of her eyes swollen almost shut he recognized her immediately. There was no doubt about it. She was the girl in the red plastic raincoat, the girl who had been in Mike Scaffidi’s cab.

  “I’ll have a cup of coffee, please,” Linda Lou told the counterman.

  “Yes, Miss. Right away,” he smiled.

  Brady lowered his own cup to his saucer. He felt as if someone had opened an artery and all of his newly regained self-confidence had drained out. He’d been followed from Stamford after all and he was back in flight again, even sitting on the stool. Not knowing what else to do, he waited for the girl to speak. She was silent until the counterman moved away to serve another couple. Then she spoke in a very low voice.

  “There are three of them in a car outside. Mr. Dix and Morgan and Daly.”

  Brady thought if she was trying to impress him she’d succeeded. After what Johnny Cass had told him even the name Dix terrified him.

  Linda Lou added, “Morgan and Daly are the ones who killed the cab driver. They beat him to death with their guns because he couldn’t tell them where the money was.” She spooned sugar into her coffee. “And I had to stand there and watch it. After they finished with him they did this to me.”

  Brady wondered what the girl expected him to say. He said, “I’m sorry. Believe me, Miss Larson. I’m sorry.”

  Linda Lou sipped her coffee and returned the cup to its saucer. “And they’re waiting outside to kill you,” she went on, “just as soon as they make you tell them what you did with the parcel. I’m supposed to get you out there by telling you how smart I think you were and that I want to throw in with you and you can take me to a hotel if you want to. But we wouldn’t get twenty feet before they jumped you. So if you want to get out of this alive, you’d better call you own gang, fast.”

  Brady protested, “But believe me, I haven’t got a gang”

  Linda Lou studied his face. “Don’t try to lie to me, Mr. Brady. Please. This is too important. I know you’re the man who opened the cab door and frightened me.”

  “Yes,” Brady admitted. “I am.” He thought a moment. If the situation was as serious as it seemed to be, there was no use mincing words. All he could do was tell the truth. “But all I did was open the door. I didn’t even know there was anybody in the cab.”

  Linda Lou was skeptical. “You didn’t point a gun at me and start to say you were sorry you had to kill me?”

  Brady held up his right hand. “I swear.”

  “Then why did you have your hand in your pocket?”

  Brady showed her the scabs on his recently barked knuckles. “Because I fell down in front of the station and I was trying to keep from getting blood all over everything.”

  Linda Lou looked into his face for a long moment and believed him. She’d never been too certain there’d been a gun. She asked, “But you did find the money?”

  Brady considered his answer. It had been all right for him to have taken chances but now it looked like certain death. And a dead man couldn’t spend money. As he saw it now the only thing he could do was get off the hook with a whole skin if he could. The girl seemed to believe him. Perhaps she would intercede with Mr. Dix for him. He didn’t like to let go of the money. But if he had to, he had to. He would have to find some other solution to his marital problems.

  “Yes,” he admitted. “I found the money. And I stuffed it into my brief case. That’s when I must have lost the damn tag.”

  “But someone in Mr. Dix’s organization in Chicago did tip you I was carrying the money and what time I would get into New York?”

  “No. I just happened to get into your cab.”

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  “It’s true.”

  “You haven’t got a gang?”

  “No.”

  “And you don’t belong to a New York mob that’s trying to move in on Mr. Dix?”

  “No.”

  If the situation wasn’t so dangerous, if he wasn’t so stinking with fear, Brady could have laughed. This could not be real. He couldn’t be sitting here at two o’clock in the morning listening to a nineteen-year-old girl talking in a magnolia blossom and honey-suckle accent about gangs and mobs moving in on one another. Only the girl’s badly punched face and his knowledge that Scaffidi was dead gave any credence to the scene.

  Linda Lou persisted. “But you are a member of the Rafia?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Linda Lou was impatient. “The Rafia. As I get it from listening to Mr. Dix and Morgan and Daly talk, it’s a sort of high-class club for bad Italians.”

  Brady perspired even harder. “You mean the Mafia.”

  “That’s it.”

  Brady shook his head. “I’m sorry.” He tried to make his position clear so the girl could make it clear to Mr. Dix. “Look. I don’t have a gang. I’m not a member of one. I don’t belong to the Mafia. As far as I’m concerned it’s just a name I read once in a while in the newspapers.”

  “Then what do you do for a living?”

  “I’m a translator. I work for an import-export firm on Fifth Avenue.”

  “But you do have a gun?”

  “No,” Brady said. “I’m sorry.”

  Linda Lou put her small hands on the counter and her mouth worked as she silently cried. It seemed that for the fourth and most important time in her life she’d bet on the wrong horse again. She’d picked another loser.

  “Why?” Brady asked.

  She told him. “Because if what you say is so, we’re dead.” She glanced at the door of the grill. “In just a few more minutes Mr. Dix and Morgan and Daly are going to come in that door and take us away from here and beat where the money is out of you. Then they’re going to kill you and me along with you because I didn’t do like they said. They’ll kill us just like they killed Mr. Scaffidi.”

  Brady felt a drop of sweat tickle all the way down his side. The game was up. He’d lost. But he couldn’t let anything more happen to this girl because of him. He’d caused her enough suffering.

  It was futile to try to make a deal with Dix. Dix would take the money and kill them anyway, if only to protect himself in the Scaffidi matter. But there was one thing he could do. If he could get the girl out of the restaurant he could go to the nearest precinct station and tell the police the whole story. He could give them the claim check for the money and take whatever lumps he had to take. But meanwhile the girl would be safe.

  He took a ten dollar bill from his pocket and laid it on the counter. “For the steak and the coffee,” he told the counterman. “Is there a back way out of here?”

  “Yes,” the counterman said, “there is. The kitchen backs on an areaway that comes out between two buildings on Forty-ninth Street.”

  Brady helped Linda Lou to her feet.

  “Where are we going?” she asked him.

  He told her, “Out the back way and run for it. There’s a police station not far from here and it may just be we can make it.”

  The areaway outside the kitchen door was narrow and not lighted and smelled of the garbage containers that lined it. Gripping the girl’s elbow, Brady hurried her toward the not distant street lamp he could see. Just as they reached the mouth of the areaway a man stepped out of the night and blocked their way.

  “I warned the old man,” Daly said. “I told him something like this might happen.” He jammed the barrel of his gun into Brady’s side. “All right, now, you smart bastard, you’ve had it. Walk out of here and down to the corner and across Eig
hth Avenue slowly. Then turn right on Eighth and keep going until you come to a big, black car.”

  Gambling that the other man wouldn’t want a shot to be heard, Brady ignored the command and hit Daly as hard as he could. Daly’s head hit the wall and the gun clattered to the cement walk.

  “Run,” Brady shouted to Linda Lou.

  She tried to run and slipped on the wet sidewalk and fell just as Daly regained both his feet and his gun. In the clear, all Brady had to do was run. The man didn’t dare to shoot him until he learned where the money was hidden. But he couldn’t leave the girl. Retracing his steps, he gripped Daly in a bear hug and tried to wrestle him off his feet and the gun exploded between them.

  Even muffled as it was by their bodies, the gun shot sounded unnaturally loud. Daly stood a moment, then went limp in Brady’s arms and slumped to the walk.

  His breathing labored from the struggle, sweat almost blinding him, Brady took a step toward the girl, then stopped and looked from the gun in his hand to the motionless figure of the man lying face down on the pavement.

  In killing him he’d plugged up his last avenue of escape. Now he couldn’t go to the police. Now no sane jury of men and women would believe his fantastic story that he’d just opened the door of a cab and found two hundred thousand dollars on the seat. They would assume that this was an internecine affair between gangs and he’d killed the man on the pavement for possession of the money.

  The shot had been heard. A police whistle was blowing. The implacable wheels of the law were beginning to turn. As Brady stuffed the gun in the pocket of his trench coat, the sharp nails of Linda Lou’s fingers bit into his arm.

  “What are we going to do now?” she asked him.

  “I don’t know,” Brady admitted. “But we can’t wait for the police. If we do they’ll charge me with murder and probably book you as my accomplice.” He added, bitterly, “For all I know, seeing that I still have the money, they may charge us with Scaffidi’s murder and make it stick. We have to get out of here.”

  “Whatever you say,” she said.

  In falling she’d twisted her ankle and limped badly. Brady half carried her toward Times Square. He was completely exhausted but he forced himself to move. This, then, was the end of the tragic comedy of errors that had begun one rainy morning in Manhattan.

  FIFTEEN

  THE RAIN WAS no longer just a shower. It was falling in great drops that bounced noisily on the pavement. The dimly lighted side street was beginning to fill up with people, morbidly curious about the police sirens and whistles. A black rain-coated figure was running up the middle of the street.

  On the theory that a couple was less likely to be suspect if they were hurrying toward the scene of a crime rather than away from it, Brady reversed his direction and helped the girl beside him limp back to the mouth of the areaway seconds before the running policeman went past them. A squad car followed the policeman and by the time he and the limping girl had walked half way back, a second police car turned east off Eighth Avenue and disgorged two uniformed officers intent on keeping the onlookers away from the motionless figure on the walk.

  “Keep back. Stand away from him,” one of the officers ordered. He spoke crisply to the recently arrived patrolman. “Help Jim keep them moving, Murphy. The homicide boys raised hob the last time there was one of these little affairs. The damn ghouls; not only tracked up all the evidence, they picked up everything but the body.”

  “Yes, sir,” the patrolman said. He turned and faced the crowd. “You heard the lieutenant. Keep moving.”

  As Brady and Linda Lou approached the scene, he pointed the end of his night stick in their general direction. “That includes you, Mister. Don’t just stand there gaping. Walk your girl out in the street and around him.”

  Brady was pleased to. He walked Linda Lou out onto the pavement and up to the corner and across Eighth Avenue. On the far corner he hesitated, briefly. “Where were Mr. Dix and this other hood you spoke of waiting?”

  Linda Lou shielded her eyes against the rain as she looked up the street. “In a big, black car. But it isn’t there now. They probably drove away as soon as they heard the rumpus.”

  “Probably,” Brady agreed.

  He helped her north on Eighth Avenue. A third police car was parked in front of the bar and grill. As he looked across the street, the counterman who had served them came out on the walk accompanied by a plainclothes-man. The detective went over to Brady’s car and tried a door and then said something to the counterman. Trying to shield his head from the rain with his apron, the counterman shrugged and returned to the lunchroom while the detective continued to try the car doors, then cupped his hands to the wet glass of the front window as if hopeful of reading the name on the registration slip on the steering wheel.

  “That takes care of my car,” Brady thought.

  He felt trapped. Even now a police cordon was being thrown around the district. He and the girl couldn’t stay where they were. Nor, if her twisted ankle hurt her as much as it seemed to, could he expect her to walk much farther.

  “Now what?” Linda Lou asked.

  “I don’t know,” Brady admitted. “But we’ve got to get away from here.”

  “Why don’t we take a cab?”

  Brady considered the suggestion. Taking a cab would merely prolong the inevitable. By law all cab drivers kept trip books. And no matter how many times they changed cabs, it would be simple police procedure to trail them from where they were now to wherever they asked to be taken. More, a cab driver would be another witness against them. If and when they were charged with the murder of the dead hoodlum, the cab driver would testify he’d picked them up across the street from the restaurant a few minutes after the shot had been fired.

  “We can’t,” he said crisply and explained why.

  Linda Lou rested her hand on the door of the convertible beside which they were standing. “Then why don’t we use Daly’s car?”

  “Daly’s car?”

  “Yes. This one. He rented it to drive me up to where you live so I could identify you.”

  Brady looked at the convertible. It would take the police hours, even days to trace the rented car. Then they might not connect it with him.

  He opened the door of the convertible and looked in. The key was in the ignition. He helped Linda Lou in, then walked around the car and slipped behind the wheel.

  “What hotel are you staying at?” he asked her.

  Linda Lou told him. “None. I had that accident right after I got into town and they took me to the hospital. Then a couple of hours after they released me, there was the business with Scaffidi.”

  Brady started the car and drove south on Eighth Avenue. “Of course.”

  If there was a cordon around the district it wasn’t complete as yet. No whistles blew. No sirens screamed. No one tried to stop them. Even if the girl had checked into a hotel, going there wouldn’t have been a very good idea. It was the first place that Dix and his remaining killer would look for them.

  Brady drove aimlessly for a few minutes, trying to think. Any hotel in Manhattan was out. Once the police dragnet had been put into effect plainclothes detectives and uniformed officers would comb every hotel on the island. Nor could he take the girl home for several reasons. One, once the police had broken open the locked doors of his car and gotten at the registration slip on the steering post they would know his name and address. Two, he could imagine May’s face if he was to walk in with a pretty nineteen-year-old girl and say, “I’ve just killed a man and the police are looking for us. Well have to hole up here for a few days until I figure out the best thing to do. Miss So and So, this is my wife, May. May, I want you to meet Miss—“What is your name?” he asked the girl beside him. “Your real name?”

  “Larson. Linda Lou Larson,” Linda Lou told him. “Most of the girls I worked with called me Linda. But my full name is Linda Lou.”

  “Of course,” Brady admitted; “I read it in that squib in the paper.” />
  He’d not only read the name, he’d liked it. It just went to show how disorderly his thinking was. He wasn’t in any mental condition to make a serious decision, not one as serious as this, one on which his life might depend. So much had happened so fast he had to have time to allow his head to clear.

  He asked, “Do you know anyone in New York who might agree to hide you?”

  Linda Lou shook her head. “No.”

  “How about back there where you came from? And I don’t mean Chicago.”

  Linda Lou shook her head more emphatically. No matter what happened to her she wouldn’t go back to Della’s. “No. I don’t have any place to go back to.”

  “That makes two of us,” Brady said.

  It was incredible how fast his life had changed. Two mornings before he’d been a complete nonentity, a pliant if dissatisfied commuter, enroute to a job he despised. Now, in the morning, the newspapers would be filled with his name. His picture would be on the front page. He’d killed a man. Other men wanted to kill him. He was being hunted by the police. He had two hundred thousand dollars he didn’t even dare to claim, let alone try to spend. All because he’d opened a cab door.

  The thought grimly amused him. He laughed.

  Linda Lou’s twisted ankle was sore and she could feel it beginning to swell. As far as she was concerned there wasn’t anything amusing about the situation. “What’s so funny?” she asked.

  “The whole damn thing,” Brady said. “I don’t know if you quite realize it yet, Miss Larson. But you and I are in a mess.”

  “I realize it,” Linda Lou said. She touched her swollen eye. “Remember they pounded me for two hours. They thought I was lying about the money.”

  All Brady could do was to say he was sorry.

  Trying to keep away from the brightly lighted section he turned right at the next corner and several blocks later he found they were at the approach to one of the northbound ramps of the Skyway. He drove up the ramp for lack of any reason not to. It didn’t matter much where they went. It was only a matter of time before either the police or Lew Dix caught up with them.