Lady Crymsy

by P. N. Elrod

  Wise of him.

  “What’s your angle in this?” he asked.

  “Your boy did some unnecessary pushing around of me last night, which I did not appreciate. Thinks I’ve got eyes for Rita—which I don’t. I’d like the chance to straighten him out on a few facts.”

  Nevis snorted again, amusement this time. “Hard to tell where he is with her. Some guys who chase her he doesn’t care about, like Upshaw; others he gets his nose out of joint. You must be one of the lucky ones.”

  “So I gathered. Where would he be hiding himself?”

  “He’s got a hotel room someplace.”

  “A friend of mine checked on that today. Came up empty.” The phone had been ringing just as I’d wakened. Gordy had sounded disappointed about his lack of progress. I was just glad to learn Rita was still safe. Two of the men sitting by her at the service were on the Nightcrawler payroll. “You know any other place Shivvey might run to if he didn’t want to be found?”

  “If I did, he wouldn’t be there.”

  “Come on, you gotta know some bolt-hole he’d creep into.”

  Nevis grimaced, rubbing his good eye, which was very bloodshot. “Listen, I’ve been getting shit like this from goddamned cops for longer than I can remember. I’ve had no sleep since the night before last and no food except for about fifty cups of coffee they gave me to keep me jumping. Why the hell should I start answering your questions?”

  I decided to risk giving him another migraine. “Nevis…” I focused on him carefully, taking things slow. In the next minute I got to know the lines and planes of his face in rare detail and watched them gradually ease and soften as all thought, all worry seeped from his conscious mind. That was reassuring. I didn’t care to have another incident with him collapsing on me.

  “Tell me everything you know about Lena Ashley,” I said.

  “She’s dead,” he murmured in a lost, hollow voice.

  “Yes. I want to know why you walled her up.”

  “Wha… no.”

  “Talk to me, Nevis. Why did you kill her?”

  Tension crept back into his body, starting with his shoulders bunching up, then his head bowing. “No.”

  “You have to tell me. You’ll feel better once you do. Why did you kill her?”

  Violent shake of his head. “No!”

  Jeez, he was jolting himself out of it. I was either losing my touch or his headache was going to reappear to screw things up again. “All right, take it easy, Nevis.”

  But he didn’t take it easy and surged awkwardly up from his chair, lurching a few uneven steps across the office. His eyes were unfocused; if he wanted to hit something, he couldn’t see it. I waited, then sniffed the paint-laden air for any whiff of illness coming from him. Just ordinary sweat this time, but tinged with the acid bite of anger.

  I said his name a few times. His breathing slowed as I gave him soothing, calming words, but his expression remained tense even after he resumed his seat. I frowned and thought glum thoughts, the kind that come to me when I have to admit I’d tripped up somewhere.

  “Okay, Nevis, you’re not going to get upset anymore. Just answer me straight. Did you know about Lena skimming money from the bets she placed for you?”

  The answer took its own sweet time coming, but he finally shrugged. “Yes, but I could afford it.”

  “Weren’t you angry with her for stealing from you?”

  “At first. But it didn’t mean anything. I could afford it.”

  I felt a keen sympathy with the cops. This wasn’t what I wanted to hear. “Did you kill Lena?”

  “No! I want… want…” He was fighting me again, his anger giving him strength. If I pressed too hard, he’d be useless. Even if it wasn’t what I wanted, I had what I needed and told him to relax, then waited until he woke from his hypnotic haze. He gradually wilted like a balloon losing air, until he leaned forward, putting his head in his hands. From the sounds he was making—long shuddering sighs—it was from raw grief, not physical pain. It hurt to watch him, so I stared out the window. The green Ford was still there. The driver had gotten out. He had his back against the curbside face of the car, and sent a plume of cigarette smoke into the still night air. Just filling the time until Nevis emerged.

  “I didn’t want this,” he stated. That hollow note was back in his voice. He looked hollow, gouged from the inside out with a dull chisel. “I was hoping she’d just taken the cash and run away, that when it got spent, she’d come back. I didn’t want her dead. My God, dead like that.”

  “What happened the last time you saw her?”

  “Nothing. It was just another night at the club. She’d done her usual run to the bookies and brought in the cash winnings, same as always. We had a drink, and she went to sit out front while I did the counting. She kept back a twenty, and I pretended not to notice. Same as always.”

  “You sure you didn’t mind her stealing?”

  “In a five-grand bet who cares if I’m short a couple bucks? I sure as hell didn’t. I spend more than that in tips.”

  “Who else knew she was stealing?”

  “No one.”

  Which isolated him as a man with a motive. But unless he was hiding a spectacular force of will or cockeyed insanity, he’d given me the truth about his innocence.

  “Who’d she see that last night? Who spoke to her?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Same people as always, Rita was there.”

  “What about Tony Upshaw?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And Shivvey?”

  “Him, too. I’d just hired him on a week earlier.”

  “You knew he was after Lena for himself?”

  “Didn’t matter. She was with me, and he never went near her. He started going sweet on Rita about then.”

  A practical man, Mr. Coker. Never mooch on the boss’s territory. If he’d had an inkling of Lena’s skimming game, that would give him a reason to get rough with her. I found it easier to believe in Coker’s greed as a motive than her rejecting his advances. Except that he couldn’t have known about the money cache until after her disappearance, when Rita showed him the record book. I didn’t see how any of them could have lied to me, so I’d very obviously tripped up. Or maybe missed a step.

  The only other man even remotely involved was Tony Upshaw, and if five years ago as a wet-eared kid he’d had the balls to wall a young woman up alive, I was a monkey’s uncle and then some. He’d be the type to boast about it. I’d talk to him, just to be thorough. There was a slim chance he’d known about the skimming, in which case things would almost make sense again. I wanted sense, even if it meant adding bananas to my limited diet.

  And if Tony was also innocent, then me and the cops were clean out of luck. Lena could have been the victim of some sadist none of us knew about. Unthinkable, but not impossible. If so, then we’d never find him.

  “I want the man who killed her,” said Nevis. He’d fully woken out of his trance, was thinking again for himself. “I’m going to take him apart.”

  The way he spoke gave me to understand that he would be literal with his intent and do it with his bare hands. I hitched a hip on my desk corner.

  “You’ve got no idea who it might have been?”

  “I’ve got no ideas left. I need sleep.”

  “Go get some, then, but watch your back.”

  “From Shivvey? Of course.”

  “I mean it, Nevis. You see the papers today?”

  “What about them?”

  An afternoon edition was on my table under a stack of the day’s mail. I fished it out. The story about the barbershop shoot-out had made it above the fold. The names of the victims were being withheld by the cops pending further investigation.

  Nevis had a green cast to his already-present pallor. “What is this?”

  “You can expect more heat from the law. Since you were in custody, they can’t pin this on you, but those four were all bouncers at the Ace.”

  “You saying Shivv
ey did this?”

  “I’m pretty certain of it. He wanted to cover his tracks.”

  “Y-you fill me in. What the hell is going on?”

  He got a highly edited version of events. “… so Shivvey and his boys left me for dead. He didn’t want witnesses blabbing, that’s why I figure he scragged them. Gris is gone, too, probably.”

  He shook his head. “No, this is going too far and too fast. I can see Shivvey trying to take over the Ace, but this?”

  “Well, you know him better than me. What’s he capable of?”

  Nevis closed his sagging jaw. Something new in his weary eyes: fear. He wasn’t used to it. “No, none of this happened like you’re saying. You don’t look like he got anywhere near rough. What kind of bull are you trying to feed me?”

  I fixed on his gaze again. “It’s no bull, Nevis, you can believe me. Think things over. But watch your back while you do. Don’t go anywhere he might know about.”

  Release.

  He pinched the bridge of his nose. “God, I gotta get out of here.”

  On that we were in agreement. If he was sickening for another headache, I didn’t want him around. Gordy would be along soon, and I’d prefer not to risk more hypnosis on Nevis. “Okay, come on.”

  He levered up, walking stiff and slow as I herded him out. We were in the hall when I heard something, a couple of somethings, making loud, sharp clunks behind me in the office. I started to turn, but hesitated, then a leftover instinct from my Army days made me give Nevis a violent push forward and throw myself down next to him. He squawked a ripe protest at the treatment, but the two near-simultaneous bangs close behind us utterly drowned him out.

  14

  The heavy burst of air pressure shock rather than the cracking noise of the explosions made my ears buzz like a bad radio. I shook my head against the static. It didn’t help.

  “What the hell was that?” Nevis wanted to know. He started to rise, but I shoved him down again.

  “Crawl,” I ordered, pointing at the stairs.

  He seemed inclined to argue, but one look at my face changed his mind. He scrambled along, all knees and elbows, with me holding in place listening for further clunks. The hall was littered with glass exploded out from the transom. Slivers cascaded from my clothes when I stood, slamming home an ugly déjà vu feeling from last night.

  I cautiously angled an eye around the door frame, alert to duck at the least sign of movement.

  Smoke and the sharp stink of cordite. There was less damage than I’d expected, but it was bad enough: two blackened pits surrounded by uneven star-shaped scorch patterns smoldering in the floor. The walls and ceiling were pierced in a hundred places by shrapnel. As with the transom, the window glass was gone, blown out to the street below. My table was oddly untouched except for some holes and being knocked a foot out of place, only the papers were scattered. Nevis’s chair, however, had been converted in an instant to kindling. Splinters were everywhere, one of the legs freakishly embedded next to the doorjamb. I cringed at the thought of those flying shards spearing through my body, the wood as deadly to me as the grenades would have been to Nevis. We’d escaped by scant seconds.

  “My God,” said Nevis. From the hall he stared past me.

  Deciding to risk it, I crossed the room to look out the windows. He followed. The street was still empty—it would have to be clear of witnesses—except for a lone man walking swiftly toward the green Ford.

  “That son of a bitch!” Nevis snapped, recognizing him. He shot out the door for the stairs. Too angry to think about the height, I went transparent and shot out the window, dropping swiftly to hit the sidewalk running.

  The man glanced back at the sound, froze only a moment, then ran full tilt toward his one hope of escape. I snagged him just as he reached for the door handle. He yelped and struggled, getting in a couple of solid slugs, which didn’t affect me. He tried to pull the gun I knew he carried. I slapped him once on the side of his head, which took all the vinegar out of him.

  Nevis suddenly charged in, knocking me out of the way. Too angry to wonder how I’d gotten there ahead of him, he breathlessly cursed, hitting hard and connecting each time he said “shit,” which was a lot. Our mutual quarry was on the pavement in short order. I dragged Nevis away before he could start kicking. He was red-faced pissed, and I felt the same, but was still sensible to practicalities. We couldn’t question Tony Upshaw if Nevis beat him to death.

  Nevis was a handful for a few minutes until the momentum of his rage slowed, combining with his weariness to leave him wheezing and sweating and hardly able to stand. Only then did I let him go so I could see about Upshaw.

  His gun had fallen clear; I scooped up the little .22 and tucked it into a pocket. As much as he wanted to be thought tough I wondered why he carried such a small caliber, then concluded he didn’t care to ruin the lines of his suit. No need to worry about that now—Nevis had done a thorough job of demolishment. Upshaw was curled into a protective posture, his arms blocking my view of his face, though I could smell the blood. I got a good grip and dragged him toward the club, not bothering to look back for Nevis.

  I didn’t stop until reaching the lobby stairs, when Upshaw’s usually nimble feet went clumsy. He stumbled and collapsed on the steps.

  “It wasn’t me, it wasn’t me,” he said with the panicked conviction of a kid caught playing with matches rather than a mob killer who’d missed his target. The whine in his voice was almost funny. Almost.

  “You little shit—” began Nevis. He’d recovered enough for a second round, and I got between them again.

  “You can have him later,” I had to shout to make him hear. Maybe his ears were buzzing, too, but more likely it was sheer emotion making him deaf. “Go bolt the doors so we don’t get more booms.” I repeated variations of this twice over before he got it, then he moved quick enough, his good eye blazing with fury for Upshaw.

  I held still, glaring at Upshaw myself while silently counting to twenty, needing the calm. I counted slowly. Nevis scowled, but kept his distance; Upshaw peered out from between his arms, clearly concluding that I was building up to something. When I moved—merely to lean forward—he covered up again, bracing for another beating.

  “Not the face,” he pleaded.

  Nevis snarled, fists ready. “I’ll give you face, you little son of a bitch.”

  I waved him away. “Upshaw, you answer me straight or I let him go to work on you. Once he’s done, the only movie part you’ll get is playing stand-in for Boris Karloff.”

  Upshaw moaned agony and tried to all-four it up the stairs. My guess about his greatest fear had been a bull’s-eye. I grabbed his feet and hauled him back, the steps bumping the breath out of him. “I didn’t do it,” he insisted, the whine more pronounced. His nose streamed red, the stain all over his mug and his once perfect clothing. The slicked-down hair was now sticking comically up in all directions. The supreme self-command he showed on the dance floor was quite shattered. Real life, real death can do that to a person.

  Now that his arms were down, I fixed him with a look. It was hard getting through all that fear, but soon his mouth sagged, and his struggles ceased. “Who sent you?”

  “Sh-shivvey.”

  What a surprise. “Okay. You tell us the whole thing, top to bottom.”

  I had to prompt him, and Nevis’s frequent belligerent interruptions didn’t help, but the story finally came out.

  Shivvey Coker had phoned Upshaw this afternoon to have a private meeting just outside the dance studio. Upshaw was used to such casual calls, it usually meant he was to run a minor errand. Not this time. Coker was quite the artist at persuasion and knew how to play his fish. A bald instruction to kill Nevis would have been refused, but sitting together in his car and sharing a friendly bottle for a couple of hours took the horror out of the task for Upshaw. Coker had worked gradually up to it, making it seem part-game, part-initiation, part-duty. If Upshaw really wanted to play with the big boys, he had to prove
his loyalty and willingness to follow orders.

  The offer was a cliché straight out of a dime magazine and shouldn’t have swayed anyone with real sense, but Upshaw’s ambitions made him vulnerable. He wanted the prestige and respect of the tough guys and obviously hadn’t put too much thought into questioning Coker’s motive for suddenly making use of him for so important a job. The deal had also been sweetened with the promise of enough cash for Upshaw to make a splashy entrance in Hollywood.

  By the time they’d finished the bottle, Upshaw wanted to prove himself so badly he’d not even asked for half the money in advance, as was usual in such deals. He hadn’t been reeled in so much as thrown himself bodily into the boat, ready for gutting.

  All Upshaw had to do was find Nevis, wait for the right moment, and pull a couple of pins on the grenades Coker happened to have along to give him. Upshaw had put Rita in a cab and followed Nevis from the services. He had no astonishment for my still being alive; Coker must not have informed him.

  Upshaw had parked, strolled right up to the club, and waited under the open, well-lighted windows until the street was clear for him to make his lethal pitches. He’d heard nothing of our talk.

  “I guess we both know who killed Welsh Lennet way back when,” I said to Nevis. “Not many people keep grenades on hand.”

  “Who cares?” Nevis rumbled. Through it all he paced up and down, slowly, too worked up to notice anything amiss about Upshaw’s extraordinary cooperation. He kept looking at Upshaw, murderous revenge pouring off him like smoke from a fire.

  This I understood perfectly. Upshaw had been willing to smear me, a bystander, all over the room right along with Nevis. I was hard-pressed to keep Nevis from going to work on him. It could not be me. In my own anger I’d have killed Upshaw. Too quickly.