by Cain, Paul
Maccunn raised his head once and looked down at the right side of his chest and it seemed curiously flat, curiously distant; he lowered his head and was still. Angelo moaned.
The wind was like an icy wall.
In the reporters’ room of the Ninth Precinct Police Station, Nick Green was playing cooncan with Blondie Kessler, when the Desk Sergeant yelled from the next room:
“Blondie! Pineapple at Tony Maschio’s Barber Shop on Seventh—nothin’ left but a grease spot!”
Kessler put his cards face down on the table and stood up slowly.
He said very simply: “Dear, sweet Jesus!”
Green looked up at him with elaborately skeptical disdain. “Every time I get a swell hand,” he muttered plaintively, “something happens so you have an excuse to run out on me.”
Kessler, moving towards the door, yipped: “Come on.”
Nicholas, sometimes “St Nick,” Green was thirty-six—with the smooth tanned skin, bright China-blue eyes of twenty, the snowy white hair of sixty. He was tall and slim and angular, and his more or less severe taste in clothes was violently relieved by a predilection for flaming red neckties.
His nickname derived from his rather odd ideas about philanthropy. He had been at one time or another a tent-show actor, a newspaperman, gambler, gun runner, private detective, and a few more ill-assorted what-nots, and that wide experience had given him decidedly revolutionary convictions as to who was deserving and who was not.
A stroke of luck combined with one of his occasional flashes of precise intuition had enabled him to snatch a fortune from a falling stock market and for three years he had used his money and the power it carried to do most of the things young millionaires don’t do. He numbered legmen, Park Avenue debutantes, pickpockets, touts, bank robbers and bank presidents, wardheelers, and international confidence men among his wide and varied circle of friends, and he had played Santa Claus to more than a few of them at one time or another. He found the devious twistings and turnings of politics, the complicated intrigues of the New York underworld exciting, spent more of his time in night courts than in nightclubs and was a great deal prouder of his accuracy with a Colt .45 than he was of his polo.
He got up and followed Blondie Kessler out of the reporters’ room and down the corridor. In his car—a black and shiny and powerful coupé—they careened around the corner and roared north. Green swerved to miss a sleepily meandering cab by inches, asked:
“Now, about this Maschio?”
Blondie was a police reporter on the Star-Telegram. His hair was as black as St Nick’s was white. He was a squat stocky Dutchman almost as broad as he was long and he had a habit of staccato, almost breathless expression, particularly when he was a little excited.
“Tony Maschio is—or was—Gino’s brother. He’s run a barbershop where a lot of the town’s big shots go to have their fringes trimmed for eleven or twelve years, an’ he’s been partners with Gino an’ Lew Costain in a high-powered gambling syndicate on the side. His shop was a little bit of a two-by-four joint, but Tony an’ his hand-picked barbers were artists and it was usually full of names from Wall Street or Park Row.”
Kessler was silent a moment; and Green invited: “And …”
“And—Bruce Maccunn, my Managing Editor, has been dropping in at Tony’s for a mustache trim an’ a mudpack every Friday night for as long as I can remember. I’ve located him there a half dozen times in the last two or three years—late Friday nights.”
Green whistled softly. “And …”
Kessler had no time to answer; the car slid to the curb across the street from the pile of smoking ruins that had been Maschio’s barbershop. In spite of the hour, the glacial wind, the usual gallery of morbidly curious had gathered. Several firemen, policemen, and an ambulance squad from the Emergency Hospital were industriously combing the debris of bricks and steel and charred wood.
Kessler was the first reporter on the scene; he scurried about from one to another after information. Green strolled over to join two men who were standing a little way down the street in earnest conversation. One of them was Doyle, a plainclothesman whom he knew slightly, and the other was a wild-eyed Italian who was explaining with extravagant gestures that if he hadn’t lingered in the corner lunchroom for a second cup of coffee he, too, would have been blown to bits. He, it appeared, was Giuseppe Picelli, Tony’s Number Three Barber, and he’d been on his way back to the shop when the explosion occurred.
Green jerked his head towards the heap of wreckage. “How many have they found?”
“Don’t know.” Doyle chewed his unlighted cigar noisily. “Most of ’em are in pieces—little pieces. We’ve identified Tony an’ one of his barbers, but there’s a lot of pieces left over. This guy”—he nodded at Picelli—“says Bruce Maccunn was there—came in jus’ before he left.”
Picelli bobbed his head up and down, jabbered excitedly: “Sure, Mister Maccunn came in as I went out—an’ there was another fellow—I don’t know him… . An’ Tony an’ Angelo an’ Giorgio… .”
“That all?” Green was blowing hard in his bare hands to warm them.
“That’s all were there when I left—but Gino an’ Mister Costain were coming over. Tony was expecting them… .”
Green and Doyle looked at each other.
Doyle grunted: “If Lew Costain got there for the blow-off it makes my job about eight hundred percent harder. I don’t guess there are more than eight hundred people in New York that’d like to see him in little pieces.”
Kessler galloped over. He was a little green around the mouth and eyes.
“Mac g-got it!” he stuttered. “They just dug him out—or wh-what’s left of him… .”
Doyle tried to light his cigar in the screaming wind. “Why did Gino Maschio an’ Costain get it,” he growled. “Maybe there’s not enough left of them to find out, but if Picelli here knows his potatoes they were in the shop or on their way to the shop—an’ if they were on their way they would’ve showed up by now.”
Kessler gurgled: “Where’s a telephone?”
“There’s one in the lunchroom around the corner on Second Avenue.” Picelli waved his arm dramatically.
A police car, its siren moaning shrilly, pulled up and a half dozen assorted detectives piled out.
Kessler grabbed Green’s arm, shouted, “Come on, Nick—I gotta telephone an’ I wanna talk to you.” They hurried towards Second Avenue.
Green grinned down at the tugging, puffing reporter.
“You look like a crazed bloodhound,” he said. “Don’t tell me you’ve got another one of those red-hot Kessler theories.”
“Theory my eye! I’ve got the whole business—the whole bloody shebang!”
“Uh-huh.” Green’s grunt was elaborately incredulous.
Kessler snorted. “Listen, John Sallust was released from Atlanta three days ago!”
“So what?”
Kessler’s mouth made an amazed O. “So what! So Bruce Maccunn was the man who rode Sallust—in the paper—an’ finally stuck him for the Arbor Day Parade bombing nearly five years ago. So Sallust swore by the beards of Marx and Lenin he’d get Maccunn. So, after a half dozen appeals and new trials and whatnot he finally got a commutation and what does he do but make good and plant a pineapple under the man who put him behind the bars!”
They turned the corner.
Green murmured softly: “Blondie, my child—you’re just as dippy as a bedbug—an especially dippy bedbug.”
Kessler stopped suddenly, stood with his arms expressively outstretched and said:
“For the love of God—do you mean to tell me you don’t get it? Maccunn, more than anyone else, or all the rest of ’em put together, hung that rap on Sallust. The Government wanted to drop the case on insufficient evidence, but Maccunn hated radicals like poison an’ wouldn’t let ’em. His editorials yelled about co
rruption and anarchy and it finally worked. What’s more natural than Sallust wanting to wipe Maccunn as soon as he got out?”
Green shook his head slowly. “Nothing’s more natural,” he admitted. “Only I happen to know Sallust a little and he’s much too bright a guy to do anything like this three days after he’s sprung—or any other time.”
Kessler’s mouth flattened to a thin, sarcastic line.
“I followed his case very closely,” Green went on, “and he was railroaded if anybody ever was. He’s really a swell guy who has his own ideas about the way the country should be run. I’ll bet he never saw a bomb in his life.”
“Nuts.” Kessler half turned. “It all fits like a glove. He’s an anarchist an’ those boys say it with dynamite. He couldn’t blow up the whole paper—that was too big an order—and Maccunn never lit long enough at his home for that to be practical, but he went to Tony Maschio’s every Friday night between twelve-thirty and one-thirty. It’s open and shut.”
Green smiled sadly, shook his head, murmured: “Mostly shut.”
“That’s my story an’ I’ll stick to it.” Kessler turned and went into the lunchroom.
Green walked slowly back towards his car, whispered into the wind:
“An especially dippy bedbug.”
The hands of the big clock over the information desk pointed to one forty-one. The great concourse of Grand Central Station was speckled with the usual scattered crowd.
On the wide balcony above the west side of the concourse, the man in the dark-brown camel’s hair coat who had forgotten his suitcase in front of Tony Maschio’s walked slowly back and forth. The collar of his coat was turned up and his hands were thrust deep in his pockets; his large dark eyes were fixed on Gate Twenty-Seven, which led to the one-forty-five Boston train, and his head turned slowly as he walked back and forth.
He was a powerfully built man of uncertain age and as much of his face as could be seen above the heavy coat collar was unnaturally flushed.
Suddenly he stopped pacing and leaned forward against the marble balustrade. He had caught sight of a man of about his own build and coloring—moving swiftly across the concourse. The man’s most striking features were the grace with which he moved and his bright yellowish-green velour hat. He flashed a ticket in front of the conductor and disappeared through Gate Twenty-Seven.
The man in the dark-brown coat hurried down the great stairway, across to one of the ticket windows. When he turned away he held a little piece of pasteboard and he strode with it through Gate Twenty-Seven. He walked the length of the train to the first coach back of the baggage car and swung aboard.
He found the man he was looking for in the smoking car of the third Pullman back. There was no one else in the smoking room; the porter was making up a berth at the other end of the car.
The man in the dark-brown coat held the curtain aside with one arm and leaned against the side of the narrow doorway.
He said: “Hello.”
The other swarthy man was sitting next to the window, reading a paper. He put the paper down and looked up and his color changed slowly, curiously, until his face was almost as yellow and as green as his jauntily cocked hat. He did not speak.
From outside, the conductor’s voice came in to them: “All aboard… .”
The man in the dark-brown coat smiled a little; he whispered:
“Let’s walk back and look at the lights.”
The train began to move, slowly.
The other man’s empty eyes were on one of the big pockets of the dark-brown coat where something besides the big man’s hand bulged the material. He did not move, seemed incapable of moving.
The man in the dark-brown coat repeated: “Let’s walk back… .” Then he crossed swiftly and grabbed the other’s coat collar with his free hand and jerked him to his feet, shoved him to the door and out into the narrow corridor; they went towards the rear of the train.
They went through four cars, most of them with the berths made up and curtains drawn, encountered only a heavily breathing drunk in pajamas who had mislaid something, and two sleepy porters. The last car was partly compartments, partly observation car. As they entered it, a red-haired brakeman passed them without looking at them and went forward. They went to the observation rear end and the man in the green hat said: “This is far enough, Lew, if you want to talk.”
The man in the brown coat smiled. His right hand moved the coat pocket suggestively. He nodded his head sidewise, erupted, “Out on the platform, Gino. Then no one will hear us.”
Gino took one glance at the bulged coat pocket, and opened the door to the observation platform.
The train was just coming out of the tunnel to the elevated tracks and the rosy glow of midtown Manhattan was reflected by the gray wind-driven clouds. The wind slashed like an icy knife and green-hat mechanically turned up his collar, shivered violently.
Following him, the man in the dark-brown coat pulled the door shade down—both window shades were drawn—and closed the door tightly. He jerked his hand from his pocket. There was a momentary flash of something bright and glittering as he swung his hand up and down in a short arc against the other’s skull. The hat went whirling away into the wind and darkness and the man sank to his knees, toppled forward to crush his face against the floor.
The man in the dark-brown coat knelt beside him and went through his pockets swiftly, carefully. In the inside pocket of his suitcoat he found a thick packet of currency, slipped it into his own inside pocket.
A new sound, the faint stutter of an incoming train on the adjoining track, grew above the roar of the wind. The man glanced ahead, around the corner of the car, seemed for a moment to be calculating the distance away of the approaching headlight, then stooped again, swiftly.
Hurriedly he stripped off the man’s overcoat, then his own. He struggled into the former—a rather tight-fitting tweed Chesterfield—and somehow forced the other man’s arms and shoulders into his own big dark-brown camel’s hair; then he finished transferring the contents of his own inside pockets—several letters, a monogrammed cigarette case and other odds and ends—to the inside pockets of the unconscious man.
The stutter of the approaching train grew to a hoarse scream. He boosted the limp body onto his shoulder, stood up, and when the blinding headlight of the train on the adjoining track was about twenty-five or thirty feet away, he dumped his burden over the side-rail of the observation platform down onto the track in front of the onrushing locomotive.
Then he turned swiftly and went back through the observation car. As he reached the third car forward the train slowed and he heard a far-off voice shout:
“Hundred an’ Twenty-fifth Street.”
When the train stopped and a porter opened the doors of the vestibule between the third and fourth car, the man, now in a tightfitting tweed Chesterfield, swung off and sauntered down the stairs that led from the station to the street.
As he crossed the street towards a cab he heard the conductor’s thin far-off wail above the wind: “All aboard… .”
He climbed into the cab, snapped: “Three thirty-two West Ninetieth—and make it fast.”
Green lit a match and examined the mailboxes carefully. The second one on the left rewarded him with a dingy label upon which:
john darrell sallust
paula sallust
had been typewritten in bright-blue ink.
He rang the bell under the label and after a minute the lock of the outside door buzzed; he went in and climbed two flights of narrow stairs to Apartment B5. The door was ajar; he knocked and a man’s high-pitched voice called:
“Come in.”
Green went into a very large and bare studio, dimly lighted by two floor lamps in opposite corners and a small but very bright desk lamp on a wide central table.
The high-pitched voice: “Well, Mister Green—this is
an unexpected pleasure.”
Green took off his hat and went to the wide table. He bowed slightly.
“Might you, by any chance,” he inquired blandly, “have been out this evening—since, say eleven o’clock?”
John Sallust was a thin, consumptive-looking Englishman with a high bulging forehead, stringy mouse-colored hair, and cold gray eyes, so light in color that they appeared almost white. He sat straddling a chair, his chin resting on his clasped hands on the back of the chair.
“I not only might have,” he said evenly—“I was. I only got home about a quarter of an hour ago.”
Green glanced at the square heavy watch on the inside of his left wrist; it was fifty-two minutes after one.
Sallust turned his head. “This is Paula, my sister. This is Nick Green. You’ve probably heard me speak of him.”
She was half sitting, half lying on a low couch against one of the long walls of the room, a very dark, very diminutive girl with porcelain-white skin, a deep-red mouth and large oddly opaque eyes.
She nodded and Green bowed again slightly.
“We went to a theater.” She sat up slowly. “We went to a theater and John brought me home afterwards—it must have been about ten-thirty—and then he went for a walk.”
Green smiled. “That’s simply dandy. Now, if you two can jump into your hats and coats and the three of us can get out of here in about one minute flat”—he raised one snowy eyebrow and grinned at Sallust—“you won’t have to take another of those very unpleasant trips to jail.”
Paula leapt to her feet, almost screamed: “Jail!”
Sallust’s thin face twisted to a wry smile. “You choose a rather bizarre time to joke, Mister Green,” he said softly.
Green was looking at his watch. “Maybe in two minutes,” he whispered as if to himself.
Paula crossed to him swiftly.
“What are you talking about?” she gulped. “What is it?”
