by Horace McCoy
“What did you do?”
“Odd jobs.”
“Cracking skulls? Killing people? Odd jobs like that?”
Ackerman looked at Mike. “He’s cute, that kid of yours,” he said.
“The fact is that you were shaking down a lot of little cigar store and shoe-shine stand bookmakers. You were on the hook to a couple of the bigger boys and you had to get off. Crespi got you off. He did you a favor and you did him a favor. You killed Manizates.”
“I never heard so much crap in all my life,” Ackerman said.
“You were useful in other ways, too,” Cicero said. “You knew the cops who could be bought and the cops who couldn’t. You were his pay-off man.”
“Nuts,” Ackerman said, standing up.
Mike Conroy shoved him down hard.
“Keep your hands off me, Mike,” Ackerman said, and wanted to kill him.
“You can go,” John said to Ackerman. “You can get back to your job of being chief of Nemo’s private police force. And you can tell him this. I’m after him—but I’m after you more. You were a cop and you sold out. If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to nail you.” He turned to Mike. “I want a tail on him twenty-four hours a day. I want to know every move he makes.”
Ackerman went out. Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Mike said, “Why tail him? Why tell him about it?”
“Just conversation,” John said. “Something to worry him. But that part about nailing him wasn’t conversation. I’d rather nail one crooked cop than a dozen Crespis.”
Mike Conroy faced the group, the shoulders of his blue serge coat bulging under tense muscles. Nemo, Ackerman, Igo Grodzka, Pia and Paul Sublette and Eamon Harrigan. Mike was looking directly at Ackerman. He knew the only way out of it was to talk tough. “I’m telling you there’s no tail on you,” he said. “That was just a gag. It was psychology. It’s just a gag.”
“He might have a tail on me and you not know anything about it,” Ackerman said.
“I’d know.”
“Yeah? Whose the hell side are you on, anyway?”
“You’re the only one in here that don’t seem to know,” Mike said narrowly.
“Maybe that’s because I’m the only one in here who’s been subpoenaed.”
Ackerman’s tone was nasty and Mike’s face turned red. “You better be careful I don’t take you in again,” Mike said. He reached into his inside pocket and took out a subpoena. “This kind of subpoena’s a hell of a thing, Roy,” he said. “I don’t even have to hand it to you. I put it right there—” He reached to stick it between Roy’s coat collar and shirt and Ackerman slapped his hand away.
“That’s what I mean,” Mike said. “Resisting arrest. So I file a report and you go off to the morgue. Don’t forget that, you son-of-a-bitch.”
Roy Ackerman’s lips twitched faintly. Igo Grodzka looked up from his manicuring and licked his lips.
“Take it easy, Mike,” Harrigan said.
“He’s got to go along with the play. I told him that,” Mike said.
Ackerman growled unintelligibly and Mike slapped him across the face with the back of his hand. Ackerman teetered in the chair and when he had gotten his balance his hand snaked to his hip pocket. Nemo picked up a wine bottle on the table and smacked Ackerman across the wrist with it. “Cut it out,” Nemo said. “You bore me.”
“You son-of-a-bitch, you stay out of my hair,” Mike said to Ackerman.
Ackerman rubbed his wrist.
Mike looked at all of them. “Get one thing through your heads,” he said. “We need each other in this thing. Maybe you need me more than I need you. But I won’t have any more of this sneaking through alleys and parking lots and back-trailing eight or nine times every time somebody in this outfit blows a cork. From now on let me alone. You hear that, Eamon? Anything I got to report, I’ll report. Just like I been doing.”
He turned and went out.
They listened until his footsteps faded away in the hall.
Then Harrigan said quietly to Ackerman, “You got to watch your step. You got a hair-trigger temper that could pull the switch on all of us. Mike Conroy’s caught in the same wringer we are. Stop pushing him around.”
“Hell with that,” Ackerman said.
“We’ve got to go along with the play,” Harrigan said.
Irately Ackerman got to his feet and picked up the Star-Journal from the table. The headline read: ACKERMAN QUIZZED BY JOHN CONROY. He shook the paper up and down in short jerks. “Am I gonna have to tell every one of our guys who reads this to go along with the play?” he said angrily. “We got a thousand books going in this town. They’re ours, lock, stock and barrel—the wires from the track, the fixtures, the spittoons. We got three thousand slot machines operating. Six or seven thousand guys on the payroll, one way or another, looking to us for protection. We guaranteed these guys protection. We got it. The fix is in. Nice tight outfit. And then they read this. They say what happened to the fix? They get jittery—”
“He’s got an argument there,” Paul Sublette said. “Same thing with the out-of-town guys.”
“You’re damned right I got an argument,” Ackerman said. “These guys get jittery fast. Right now they’re wondering when a lot of boy scouts are gonna crash in with sledge hammers and wreck their joints.”
“That’s election stuff,” Harrigan said. “John Conroy’s after bigger things than a few bookmakers and slot machines.”
“The guys that own the joints don’t know that and they don’t care. There’s nothing bigger to a guy who owns a joint than his own joint. Don’t tell me. That’s my business. I’m in and out of fifty, seventy-five a day—”
“We can trust Mike Conroy,” Harrigan said. “Take my word for it.”
“What kind of logic is that?” Ackerman said, spreading his hands impotently. “A business like this depending on somebody you think you can trust?”
“Just because you don’t like him—”
“I hate his guts. But then I hate a lot of people’s guts that I do business with. So do all of us. But we do business with ’em because they’re on one side. Mike Conroy’s on two sides. Nemo’s right. Blood’s thicker than water. When it comes to a showdown, he’ll pull a switch so fast we’ll never know what hit us.”
“He’s told us everything so far.”
“Small stuff,” Ackerman said. “Stuff you put in the window to get the suckers inside.”
“You’re like Igo,” Harrigan said. “If you can’t make the rules you don’t wanna play—”
“Let him finish,” Nemo said quietly.
“Yakking. All the time yakking,” Harrigan said. “We agreed on this once.”
“I never agreed,” Ackerman said. “I thought your idea stunk then and I think it stinks now.”
“I had the answer,” Igo said.
“Sure you did,” Ackerman said. “But it’s too late for that now. Pop the guy off, they’ll throw the whole National Guard in here.”
“So what’s the answer, then?” Pia asked.
“I don’t know what the answer is. All I know is I been up there and it don’t smell right. All day I sat there. I watched ’em. It don’t smell right.”
Nemo had been sitting there quietly, listening. “Eamon, you think this guy’s going to cross us or not?”
“I’d bet on it,” Harrigan said. “I know he won’t cross us.”
Nemo grinned. “There’s one sure way to find out.”
“How’s that?”
“Give him something,” Nemo said. “Give him something real important. Like some evidence about something, this—that. Know what I mean? Then see what he does with it. See if he contacts us, brings it here like he should, or see if he goes to his kid with it.”
“You mean something faked,” Ackerman said. “You mean set him up with something faked.”
“Sure, faked,” Nemo said. “Nobody’s stupid enough to really give him something.”
They were all staring at Harrigan.
<
br /> “Well, how about it, Eamon?” Nemo said. “What do you say?”
“I told you, the guy’s my friend,” Harrigan said patiently. “That don’t mean he’s my old mother.” He swallowed. “Anyway, this is business. Sure, I’ll go along with you. Let’s find out about him once and for all and get this thing settled.”
Wearing a mink coat over a black taffeta evening gown, Judge Helen Waycross was standing inside the door of Amanda’s room watching her pack a suitcase. “But why are you doing this?” she was saying.
Frenelle, the neat colored maid, came in. “May I help you now, Judge?” she asked.
Helen Waycross slipped the mink off one shoulder and the maid took it off the other shoulder, folding the coat across her arm. Helen’s evening gown was bouffant at the bottom but very tight and strapless at the top. You could see a lot of her skin and all of it was white and firm. “That’ll be all tonight, Frenelle,” she said.
The maid went out, closing the door.
“Because I have to be there,” Amanda said, a little peevishly. “We work all hours of the day and night. I have to be close to the job.”
“That close?”
“Yes.”
“Whose idea was this?”
“Mine. He doesn’t even know about it. He needs me.”
Helen Waycross stared hard at her daughter.
“It’s perfectly respectable,” Amanda said. “John and Cicero’ll be on one floor and I’ll be on another. That’s where the office is. It’s a suite, really. The living room has been turned into the reception room and the bedroom is the office. The other bedroom is where I’ll be—”
“This is not a matter of morals, at all,” Helen Way-cross said. “It’s a matter of emotions. I think you’re overdoing this. Coming home at all hours, no sleep, irregular meals ...”
“But don’t you see—with me staying there that won’t happen.”
“I think you’re letting your enthusiasm carry you away.”
“Oh, you’ll never understand how I feel about this!” Amanda exclaimed impatiently. Then she was swiftly contrite. She said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.” She grimaced. “All of a sudden, I’m talking like a daughter. I don’t ever remember that happening before. We always talked—” She moved her hand vaguely, as if groping for the words with her fingers.
“Man to man?” Helen Waycross said, with a touch of bitterness.
“Well, yes. It sounds funny, but that’s how it was. Man to man.”
Helen half turned away, her lips parted and unhappiness in her face.
Amanda moved to her. “Please, let’s not quarrel. We’ve always had such a wonderful friendship.”
“I thought so, too—but now I realize that your father and I made a mistake. I more than he, because you’ve been mine alone for sixteen years. Treating you as if you were an adult when you were only a baby, discouraging your childish enthusiasms because I believed they were signs of weakness ...”
Amanda smiled in mild disagreement. “I never had childish enthusiasms. I didn’t even like dolls. I was a blasé old lady at ten.”
“That’s the horror of it. You should have had enthusiasms. They should have been permitted to run their course and expend themselves naturally instead of being dammed up to break loose now. The guilt is mine. I wanted you to be everything I was not.”
“Don’t say that. You’re the most wonderful mother who ever lived. I admire you more than I’ll ever be able to say.”
Helen kissed her on the forehead. “And you admire John Conroy, too.”
“Yes. Very much.”
Helen peered at her closely. “The great adventure,” she said. “How far has this thing—” She checked herself almost proudly. “No, I won’t ask you that.”
“Thank you,” Amanda said. “Thank you.” Her lips trembled and her eyes filled with tears. She moved into her mother’s arms—it was the first time she ever remembered doing that—for refuge. “I can’t help it,” she said. “All my life I’ve been waiting for this to happen ...”
When the buzzer sounded John and Cicero looked at each other, wondering who it could be at that hour of the night. It was almost two o’clock. John put down the four mug pictures he was holding and went to the door of the office.
Amanda was standing there with a suitcase and a make-up kit.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“I’m not going,” she said. “I’m already there. I’m moving in.” She said to Cicero, “I’ll put these in the other room.”
John frowned.
She said, “Didn’t Cicero tell you?”
“Tell me? Tell me what?”
“Tell him,” Amanda said to Cicero, and started down the hall toward the bedroom.
“What is this?” John asked.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Cicero said blankly.
Amanda stuck her head inside the door. “Cicero, you said this morning that you’d be perfectly happy to move to another room and let me stay here. You know you did.” She walked on down the hall.
John stared at Cicero.
“But—but,” Cicero said, smiling weakly, “it was just an idle remark.”
John said grimly, “Apparently not as idle as you thought.”
“Well, we were talking—one thing and another. She said it was inconvenient, going way uptown every night, that there were a lot of things to do at night and that she liked to stay in touch with the situation twenty-four hours a day and did I think you’d mind if she slept on the davenport over there. I said she could have my room any time she wanted. That was all.”
“All? She pulled you on like an old boot. You may know a lot about law, my friend, but you don’t know very much about women.”
“Well, what else could I say?”
“Right now I’m thinking of what her mother’ll say.”
He walked down the hall to the bedroom.
Amanda was standing in front of the dressing table, her suitcase open on the chair.
“Wait a minute,” John said.
She turned and looked at him.
“This is going to be the first time in my life that I ever took the same girl home twice in the same night,” he said.
“Didn’t Cicero explain?”
“Now, look,” John said impatiently. “He was just being polite.”
She smiled.
“I thought so,” he said. “You conned him into this.”
“Conned?” she said archly. “I don’t remember that word in the law lexicons.”
“Stop it,” he growled. “When all’s said and done Cicero hasn’t the authority to let you move in here.”
“Why not? It’s his bedroom. If he wants to give it up to me and move to another one, does he have to get a special dispensation from the governor?”
John looked at her. There was a half smile on her face. He didn’t know what else to say and he was afraid that what he had said had lacked conviction. The memory of her body in his arms and her lips on his was much too fresh for him to try to make himself believe that he didn’t tingle a little at the prospect of her living this close to him.
“You know very well that your mother’ll go right through the roof when she finds out about this,” he said.
“You don’t know her,” she said. “My mother is very understanding. As a matter of fact, I’ve already told her.”
“You had a fight with her and you moved out? Is that it?”
“Quite the contrary. I told her I wanted to be close to the job. Which is true.”
“What else did you tell her?”
She faced him. “Nothing. I didn’t have to. That’s the most wonderful thing about my mother—she understands.”
John threw up his hands.
Amanda said quietly, “I love you, John. I love you so much I’ll take you on your own terms.”
John wanted to take her in his arms and tell her that he loved her, too. But he didn’t—right then. He said, “Cicero and I are cooking up something. Com
e on in.”
Eamon Harrigan drove past Mike Conroy’s house and saw Mike’s car parked in the driveway, and he knew that he had got there in plenty of time. It was only a little before 7:20 in the morning. He drove down the street and parked so he could keep an eye on the Conroy driveway. What he had to say to Mike he didn’t want to say over the phone.
Harrigan waited almost half an hour and then he saw Mike back the car slowly out of the driveway up the street. Harrigan followed him. Four blocks up, Mike turned right into a one-way street, a feeder lane for the freeway ahead. Then Harrigan pulled alongside and motioned for Mike to stop.
Frowning, Mike did. Harrigan parked behind him and got out quickly.
“You’re a little off your beat, ain’t you?” Mike asked.
“I been waiting for you,” Harrigan said. “Let’s ride around. Less conspicuous that way.” He got into the squad car.
“What’s the matter now?” Mike said, putting the car in gear, driving away.
Harrigan explained that Nemo and the boys were still ill at ease. John’s attack on their past—their far past—had them alarmed. If the syndicate had a weakness, it was in the far past. Those were the days before the evolution of the organization, Harrigan said, before their protection by the higher-ups had been completely arranged and perfected, when nobody had imagined how big they would eventually be. And since there was not as much at stake then as there was now—well, naturally the boys had made mistakes. John evidently knew that and it would be where he would center the attack. As a matter of fact he had already started. The Manizates case proved that. This was where their weakness was—twenty, twenty-five years ago.
“Ever hear of Nick Carson?” Harrigan asked.
“No,” Mike said.
“Been out west for some years now. Nevada. There’s a D.A. file on him—and this one’s more than a weakness. It’s a lead to stuff that could blow us sky high. We want you to get it for us.”
“You mean to keep?”
“To burn. Right now John doesn’t connect Nick Carson with us. He may never connect us. But we can’t take that chance.”
“Why’s Carson so important?”
“Carson got drunk one night and killed a guy with his car. The cops picked him up and he shot his mouth off about how high he stood with Nemo. He did, too. But he was an undercover man and the cops had never heard of him and he was drunk and they didn’t believe him. They thought he was bragging. But in view of what’s happening now—well, if there are any names in the file and John runs onto them—”
