by Angel Eyes
“Handy. Or do you always carry it?”
He nodded a third time. He gave good hostage, I’ll say that for him.
“Man, scratch anyone over twelve this side of Woodward, you’ll find a piece.” The words tumbled out shallow and breathless, forced out by the pressure of my forearm against his throat. “Ain’t you heard? This here’s Dodge City.”
“Shame on you,” I said. “Renaissance and all.” In the advertising mirror behind the bar I glimpsed a face I would cross the street to avoid, strained, tight, and leering. I released him, stepped back, and took the Luger from my pocket. “The iron. Slide it along the bar.”
It was nothing, an Italian automatic of no particular make stamped out of sheet metal and exported in a hurry before it blew up in someone’s face. I picked it up off the polished counter top and sniffed the muzzle. It hadn’t been fired recently. The butt was clear of blood and hair. I dropped it into my coat pocket. Between it and the Luger and the diamond ring I was hauling enough metal to sink an ore carrier.
Turning, the janitor recognized me. I read his thoughts: He was calculating the life expectancy of a man who had seen his boss’s murderer. Others followed it, thoughts I liked even less.
“I didn’t kill him.”
He wasn’t convinced. I couldn’t imagine why not. I broke the magazine out of the Luger and showed it to him.
“See? Loaded. Why skull him when a bullet is so much neater and more certain?” I shoved the clip back in, just in case he forgot about the one in the chamber. His gaze roamed toward the corpse and back to my eyes, or rather to the bridge of my nose. The whites were dazzling.
“It’s noisier, though.”
I pointed the muzzle at the floor six feet away and fired. He jumped halfway up the bar. Concrete dust erupted around the fresh hole in the linoleum. I batted away the metallic gray smoke. “I don’t hear any sirens, do you?” My voice sounded strange coming on the heels of the nine-millimeter’s deafening roar. “You and I both know that one shot isn’t going to bring anyone running in this neighborhood. The exact opposite, in fact. So why bash in his head?”
That stopped him for a moment. Then his face lit up. “Maybe you’re one of them maniacs.”
I sighed. “I could be, but I’m not. Here.” I went for my wallet and he almost got down on the floor beside the dead man. I extended one of my cards. He accepted it like Socrates accepted the goblet, gingerly, between thumb and forefinger. “That’s my card. Would a murderer give you his card?”
He read it, moving his lips. “You couldn’t tell by me,” he said then. “I never met one before. That I know of.”
“You think I handed him his ticket because of what he was going to do to me today and because you heard him say I killed Bingo Jefferson. You know there’s nothing to the last part, because a cop was here and when we left I wasn’t wearing handcuffs. And don’t hand me any of that crap about white men looking out for each other. No one thinks that anymore, not this far north, not today. As for the other part, what happened here ended in stalemate; I’d have no reason to look for revenge. The fact is I’m here for the same reason you are, to do a job.”
He watched me the way a child watches the parent who’s told him he’s being punished for his own good and that someday he’ll be grateful. I stashed the Luger.
“All right, you don’t have to believe me. We’ll let the cops sort it out later. Here’s how it stands. Someone iced your boss not long after I left and tried to make it look like robbery by emptying the till. Any other time it could have been robbery, but not now, while I’m investigating another murder and he keeps figuring in. Besides, it was someone he knew or he wouldn’t have got this close. It’s barely possible that you knocked him down. I don’t think so or you wouldn’t be here now. The one guy who almost never returns to the scene of the crime is the guy responsible. But it could be you know who is, or at least why it was done.”
I left an opening wide enough for him to leap through. He didn’t. But he was interested in what I was saying. I approached it from another angle. “How long have you been working here?”
“Couple of months.”
“How well did you know him? Was Krim his real name?”
“All I know is his mother was a bitch. Had to be, to have a son like him. Cheapest bastard I ever worked for, and some of the bastards I worked for would make Jack Benny look like Albert Schweitzer.”
“How did he sign your paycheck?”
“He didn’t. I always got cash.”
“Didn’t you question that?”
“Why should I? I figure it’s my duty as a citizen to help cut down on paperwork at the IRS.”
“Patriotic.”
“What you expect?” He was scowling. “Last March I get the census. The questions they ask. How many kids did I have before I got married? What color toilet paper I use? Who bangs my wife when I’m at work? The information is confidential. It said. Couple of months later I start getting mail from places I never heard of, trying to sell me stuff I didn’t even know what it was. I wonder where they got my name.”
I couldn’t use any of that. “Did he have a brother or some other close relative that looked a lot like him?”
“Christ, I hope not. One like him is enough.”
There was a door at the other end of the bar, marked PRIVATE. I cocked my head in that direction. “That the office? Got a key?”
He shook his head. He was still thinking about the census.
“Does anyone have a key to the front door?”
“Only Mr. Krim.”
“Good. Lock it.” I got out the ring I’d taken from the Arab’s pocket and went around the bar the long way while he crossed to the steps leading up and out. I whistled at him. At the landing he turned.
I clanked the Luger down on top of the bar. “Don’t let me hear that door opening.”
He nodded slowly.
I tried the office door, found it locked, and commenced my game of Russian roulette with the keys, meanwhile keeping an eye on the janitor. For a moment he hesitated, his gaze wandering from the gun to me and figuring the distance in between. But he was curious too. The lock snapped home decisively.
The fourth key did the trick. Retrieving the automatic, I motioned the janitor to stay back, nudged open the door with my foot, and spread-eagled against the orange-sherbet wall. No bullets followed. I craned my neck around the jamb. The office was deserted. The janitor’s sneer tingled between my shoulder blades as I holstered the Luger and stepped inside.
They’d remodeled right past the place, leaving intact the Roaring Twenties decor, down to a desk Brigham Young had tossed out to lighten his wagon on the trek west and a punch-drunk brass cuspidor that for half a century had been used to catch the water from a leak in the waterstained ceiling. Mosquitoes could have bred in the stagnancy. An antique wooden filing cabinet stood in a cobweb-strung corner against the dank stone walls. I tugged at the top handle. It was unlocked, and for good reason. All three drawers were empty, and from the mold inside had been that way for some time. I lifted the inkstained blotter from the desk and found the initials of someone’s grandparent in the bland old oak, nothing else. There was nothing under the telephone either, or submerged in a white china mug three-quarters full of cold coffee. The top drawer contained order blanks scrawled over indecipherably in pencil, a lot of rubber bands, and loose paper clips. A pint of rye whiskey, half full, lay in one of the side drawers beside an upended shot glass and a bottle of aspirins. The next drawer down was empty. The bottom drawer wouldn’t budge.
I selected a key shorter than the others on the ring and inserted it. The janitor was watching from the other side of the desk. When the lock clicked he caught his breath. He shifted weight impatiently from one foot to the other as I withdrew a flat booklet in a yellowed plastic sleeve and opened it.
It was an account book, drawn on the National Bank of Detroit in the name of The Crescent. It went back to last year, with a balance forward of $16,996.87 from
the previous book. There were no withdrawals, but every other month a deposit had been made in the amount of five thousand dollars. The most recent was dated two weeks ago. The Crescent didn’t clear that much in six months, much less sixty days.
I had been careful to handle the book with my handkerchief. Now I slid it back into its sleeve, smeared that between my palms, put it back in the drawer and closed and locked it. Then I went around the office using the handkerchief to wipe off everything I’d been near and a few things I hadn’t.
“So what’d you find?” asked the janitor as I hustled him out ahead of me and smeared the doorknob on both sides before locking up.
“It’s what I didn’t find,” I lied. “How come there’s no safe in the office? I never saw a bar that didn’t have one. And what happened to Krim’s thirty-two, the one Lieutenant Fitzroy was so interested in?”
“At police headquarters, I guess. Cops come back a half hour after you left, with a warrant for it. He wouldn’t have a safe, claimed it was like advertising to a thief. I heard him say it I bet a hundred times. You think he creamed that guy Jefferson?”
“Not with that gun. He wouldn’t have been stupid enough to hang onto it. How long has he owned this place?”
He shrugged. “I heard a year.”
“You hear a lot for a janitor.”
“Just ’cause I’m poor don’t mean I’m deaf.”
Only a year. That explained why the IRS hadn’t gotten around to asking why Krim never paid anyone out of the account. I said, “There’s a C-note in it for you if you forget you found me here. Call the cops, report finding the body, but leave me out of it.”
His eyes narrowed. “Let’s see something upfront.”
“Right now I’m strapped. I’ll catch you later. You’ve got the hammer. You can always turn me over if I don’t come through.”
“Yeah, and tell the cops what when they ask how come I didn’t do it sooner? I just got off parole, man. If I risk going back inside, it’s got to be for something better than some hoojie’s cross my heart and hope to die.”
“I’ll see what I’ve got.” I reached inside my coat pocket. He watched me, licking his lips. In his greed he forgot that I had my wallet in my breast pocket, not on my hip. He was still watching as I drew out a fistful of his Saturday Night Special and clanked it against the side of his head. He said something that didn’t sound like any language I was familiar with and his bones dissolved.
I got my arms around his chest under his arms and dragged him into the office. I started to leave, paused, then went back and got out the biggest bill I had, a five, and thrust it into his jacket pocket.
“Something up front,” I said. I locked him in and ditched the keys on my way out. His gun went into the sewer.
10
I WAS DRIVING EAST on Adelaide when the first fat drops struck the Cutlass’s vinyl top with a noise like grasshoppers bounding off a bass drum. Immediately it swelled to a roar, and the cityscape beyond the windshield dissolved as if the artist had lost patience with it and swiped a turpentine-soaked sponge across the canvas. I could sympathize with that.
Lightning blanched the street, then withdrew, thunder pounding its heels. I switched on the wipers, but I might as well have tried to dig a hole in Lake Michigan for all the good it did. A couple of blocks of that and I pulled into a diner to let it blow over while I wrestled a steak.
The place was too well lit for a fugitive from his second murder in less than twenty-four hours. The only other customer was an elderly black man in a dirty raincoat slurping chili at the counter. He could have been a plainclothes cop. I chose a booth and when the waitress showed up ordered a sirloin I knew would bear little resemblance to the juicy red number pictured on the spotted menu, and a glass of beer.
“We don’t serve beer.” She was a fat girl with a faint moustache, her middle cruelly bisected by an apron string like a strand of piano wire and her brown hair gathered up under a ducky white cap. She looked like the Pillsbury Doughboy in drag.
“Do you serve water?” I asked.
“When they ask for it. These days it costs us.”
“Let’s be extravagant.”
“That mean you want water?”
I said it meant I wanted water. It was the longest conversation I could recall ever having had on the subject. She wrote it down as if she might forget it between here and the counter twelve feet away and waddled off in that direction. I watched the tall thin guy behind the counter slap a hunk of meat the size of a shoe heel onto the griddle, just to make sure he didn’t drop it on the way, then killed time while it was cooking by reading the selections on the juke box controls on the wall of the booth. “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?” was as funky as it got.
Rain belted the plate glass window in gusts, beyond which the street was as black and inscrutable as Krim’s dead eyes. Then lightning hurled everything into blinding unreality, catching pedestrians in mid-lope holding folded newspapers over their heads, the women clutching the hems of their skirts as they ran. Thunder set the building shuddering. They had closed down bars that pandered, slapped injunctions on all-night grindhouses and strip joints, thrown up hotels that stood empty, fiddled with the crime statistics, and coerced the local media into ignoring “two-bit” murders for more upbeat news, but they couldn’t stop the lightning or the thunder. I wondered what the mayor thought about that, or if he even heard it through the soundproof walls of his brand-new million-dollar office. I wondered what the motorists stranded in the flooded ditches Detroit calls underpasses thought about it. I wondered what had happened to my steak.
When it came, it was underdone and trying to hide under a sprig of parsley that had come over on the Mayflower. I considered sending it back, but was reluctant to make a scene in my soon-to-be-wanted state, and in any case I was too tired and too hungry to argue. Red juice trickled onto the plate as I made my first cut, but I forked the chunk into my mouth without hesitation and chewed it and swallowed and managed to keep it down without thinking too much about the stained linoleum behind the bar at The Crescent. I was getting hardboiled as hell.
I had scooped up the last of the starchy mashed potatoes and was washing the glue out of my mouth with water that had come from the inside of a rusty boiler when a cop came in through the glass door.
Looking showroom new in a shining poncho and cellophane-wrapped cap, he lamped the interior of the diner with the kind of eyes that could spot a paper clip in a bushel of straight pins. Despite his drooping moustache he couldn’t have been more than twenty-two, but he looked as hard as a chunk of fresh-split maple. His gaze lingered on me for an instant and then he strode up to the counter, leaving a trail of wet boot prints on the waxed floor. I got my heart going again in time to hear him order six hamburgers and four coffees to go from the fat waitress.
“Some kind of party, Dave?” asked the thin man at the griddle. Six fresh patties struck the hot metal, hissing furiously.
“More like a wake.” The cop swung a leg over a stool and sat down, his poncho rustling like a sheet of tin. His voice was a pleasant tenor in spite of his surface hardness. “We got a murder down on Cass, a Class D joint. Looks like robbery. The owner caught the guy rifling the till and got himself sapped but good. The guy sapped another one in the office, but that one’s still kicking. One of the dancers found them and called us.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how those dudes in plainclothes do it. The guy’s laying there with his brains showing and they send me out for supper.”
“All you cops got cast-iron stomachs. This guy in the office doing any talking?” The thin man turned over the patties with a spatula. Grease spattered his white apron.
“They were trying to bring him around when I left. He had a lump on his head like Tibet has a hill called Everest. Lots of cream in one of those, Sue. The lieutenant says he don’t like it black.”
The waitress finished filling four Styrofoam cups with steaming yellow-brown liquid from a glass pot and upended the crea
m dispenser into the last. She handled it as if it had grown out of her hand.
“Punks,” said the thin man. “Well, it ain’t as if he didn’t ask for it, running one of them porno joints. It’s getting so I can’t take the old lady out for a drink anymore without some broad pushing her tits in my face.”
“I’m sure that’s why they killed him, Charlie,” deadpanned the cop. “They’ll probably donate the dough to the Women’s Decency League.”
“Yeah, well, maybe that wouldn’t be such a wild idea.” Charlie got the hamburgers between buns and laid them on a tray for the waitress to wrap and bag. “This town started going to hell when Henry Ford started paying five bucks a day and brought all them niggers and hillbillies up from down South. No offense, there.”
The old black man gave no indication that he’d heard the crack or the disclaimer. He continued slurping.
“Hey, I’m from Ohio,” Sue complained.
“That ain’t the South.”
“It’s south of here.”
“So’s Dearborn, but I wasn’t talking about that neither.”
“Before my time.” The uniform paid the girl for his order and placed the bulging paper sack under one arm. “Thanks, Charlie. You’ve made a bunch of fat old detectives very gassy.”
“Shove it, Dave. Hey, maybe I’ll see all this on the eleven o’clock news.”
“The day I marry Dolly Parton.”
I watched the cop leave. Lightning limned him briefly as he folded his lanky frame into his scout car out front, then it was dark again until his lights came on and he swung back onto Adelaide. He had no partner. The mayor was cutting back again; I’d heard he was stocking domestic in the wine cellar of his limousine.
“It is too the South,” grumbled the waitress. “Ain’t you ever noticed my accent?”
“Get your accent over there and give that guy his bill.”
She did as directed, tearing it savagely from her pad and flinging it down onto my table. I paid at the register, got a quarter in change, and dropped it into the pay telephone near the door. The instrument had been there a while and no one had gotten around to telling Ma Bell that this one was still enclosed in a booth so she could send someone to rip it out. I pulled the door shut and dialed the number Phil Montana had given me. When a Spanish accent answered I asked for Mrs. DeLancey. The maid or whoever it was asked who was calling. I told her, adding where I had obtained the number. I was instructed to hold on.
