Doom Service

CHAPTER XV

Johnny bounded up on an elbow from shattered sleep at the piercing ring of the phone. His closed-eyes grab for the lamp switch knocked the telephone to the floor, and, muttering impatiently, he hauled in on the dangling cord until the receiver was in his hand. “Yeah? Whatisit?” His voice was a sleep-thickened rumble.

“Killain?”

“Yeah.”

“Get over to my place.”

Tiny hairs stiffened on the back of Johnny's neck; he came awake all over. The voice at the other end of the line had the hollow, deadened tone of a man past the last milepost of terror. “Who is this?” he temporized. He knew who it was.

“Munson. Get over to my place.”

“You mean right now?” Johnny squinted at the alarm's luminous dial. 9:00 p.m. “Why?”

“Get over to my place,” the voice said for the third time. Johnny could hear the ragged breathing.

“Where are you?” he asked finally.

“My place-Fifty-two East Sixty-eighth. Get over here.”

“Okay, okay.” Johnny tried to hang up the phone twice before he remembered that the base was on the floor. He dredged it up, cradled the receiver and restored the phone gingerly to the night table. He fumbled the bedside lamp on, listening again in his mind to the stark voice on the telephone. It didn't sound any better in the light than it had in the dark.

He dressed quickly, then paused, sitting on the edge of the bed, a shoe in his hand. Al Munson. What circumstance could reduce Al Munson to the function of a wrung-out automaton? Johnny stared at the wall reflectively before he put on the shoe.

On the street he started for the cab stand at the corner, and changed his mind. He hailed the first cruising cab that came by, instead. “Fifth and Sixty-eighth,” he told the driver. No sense riding right up to the door on a white horse; a look at the ground first cost nothing.

From Fifth he walked up Sixty-eighth on the wrong side of the street and, when he spotted Fifty-two, ran a wary eye on the cars parked out front. All empty-unless someone were crouched down on a back seat or the floor. He skimmed the street with a practiced eye; pedestrian traffic was light.

He studied the building from across the street. It didn't look quite as prosperous as its neighbors, or as the address would indicate. No canopy. No doorman. A self-service building, from the look, Johnny decided. Self-service elevator, direct-line phones. He stood in a doorway for five minutes, getting steadily more chilled, and no one entered or exited from Fifty-two East Sixty-eighth. Johnny stamped his feet impatiently. He wasn't finding out anything here, and he wasn't dressed for outside work.

He hitched himself together under his overcoat and crossed the street below the entrance of Fifty-two, and stopped between two parked cars to scrutinize as much of the lighted interior lobby as he could see. When he had satisfied himself that it was not a service building, he took his first step from between the parked cars, then stopped as a cab pulled up to the entrance and double-parked. He watched as Dr. McDevitt alighted from the cab and hurried inside. Johnny speeded up and entered on his heels, catching up to the doctor at the mail-boxes, where he was adjusting his glasses preparatory to reading the names.

“Munson?” Johnny said from behind him, and put his thumb on the name. “Right there. Two-C.”

“Why-ah-yes,” Dr. McDevitt said in surprise, and turned. “Well, now, Killain. Are you a part of the mystery?” He waved his glasses gently to free them of the moisture created by the sudden change in temperature.

“There's a mystery, Doc?”

“Why, this telephone call. Peculiar sort of thing.” The doctor frowned slightly. “Munson's not an intimate of mine, yet he acted as though it were life and death that I get here. He sounded-sounded-”

“Hysterical?”

“Not hysterical.” The pink-cheeked man tapped his lips thoughtfully with the frame of his glasses. “Under pressure, rather. Almost-well, extreme-”

“I know what you mean,” Johnny agreed. “I had the same call.”

“Now isn't that remarkable?” Dr. McDevitt marveled. He looked toward the tiny self-service elevator. “What do you suppose can be taking place?”

“Let's find out,” Johnny said. He led the way onto the elevator and punched the “three” button. “Keep your voice down, Doc, and your heels off the floor.”

The doctor looked at him in surprise, then pointed at the button Johnny had pushed. “Isn't it the second floor we want?” he asked.

“Let's do this my way, Doc. Someone could be waitin' for us to get off this tin can at the second floor.” Johnny slithered out of his overcoat and dropped it on the floor of the cab. He cleaned out the contents of his pockets and dropped them on the coat-wallet, key ring, loose silver, money clip, tie clasp, nail clippers. “We'll go up a flight an' come down the stairs behind him an' kibitz the hand he's holdin'.”

“I don't understand,” Dr. McDevitt said crossly, looking at the little pile of things on the coat. “Do you expect me to believe that you know-”

“I don't know a thing, Doc,” Johnny interrupted him. “I feel.” He retrieved a handkerchief from the coat, wrapped it twice around his belt buckle and knotted it firmly. He removed his shoes as the elevator stopped and the doors opened silently. He listened carefully, but he couldn't hear a fragment of sound from below.

There was light in the hallway-not good light, but enough to study the position of the stairs in relation to the elevator. If there was a stake-out below, the logical place for it to be was under the stairs, with the elevator doors under scrutiny.

Johnny stooped and picked up his key ring with his left hand. He looked at the mingled emotions visible upon Dr. McDevitt's mild features and indicated with a thumb that the doctor was to remain on the elevator. In stockinged feet Johnny crept across to the head of the stairs leading down to the second floor, dropped to all fours and, on his stomach, wormed his way soundlessly down the inner side of the stairwell, tight to the wall. He eased around the corner at the midway landing and paused at a point eight feet above the second-floor hallway.

He listened again, and the silence was so complete that it was with some doubt that he tossed his key ring over the bannister in front of the elevator and heard it land with a loud clank. Johnny waited for seconds until he heard the faint scrape of shoe leather below; he lifted his head in time to see a shadow move out from beneath the staircase. When the shadow bent down to investigate the key ring, Johnny looked down into the face of a man he had last seen wielding a length of pipe upon Manuel Ybarra's prostrate body. Johnny rose silently to his feet, dived over the bannister and landed on the shadow's back.

The man grunted loudly and went limply floorward. Johnny pinwheeled over him and came up on hands and knees, his elbow numb from contact with the floor. He chopped a bladed palm fiercely to the neck juncture for insurance, and looked up at the patter of feet on the stairs as Dr. McDevitt trotted down.

On his feet again, Johnny tried the door of 2-C. It was locked, and he backed off to the opposite wall. “Here!” Dr. McDevitt protested as he sensed Johnny's purpose; with a running start Johnny burst the door open at the lock. It splintered inward in slow motion, disclosing a big, high-ceilinged room furnished with the elaborately heavy, ornate pieces of an earlier day. From the doorway Johnny could see Al Munson's gross body sprawled across a desk, the upturned face ghastly white. There was very little blood visible from the small black hole in the center of Al Munson's forehead.

Johnny unknotted the handkerchief, which he had used to keep his belt buckle from clicking on his wormlike progress down the stairs, padded his hand and reached for the phone on a circular marble table.

“Just a moment, Killain.”

Impatiently, Johnny looked over his shoulder. Dr. McDevitt stood four feet inside the shattered door, the small automatic in his hand trained directly upon Johnny.

“Where'd you find-” Johnny began, and swallowed. Dr. McDevitt's eyes and expression made a number of things belatedly clear. Without moving his hands at all Johnny surreptitiously began to change the position of his feet.

“I didn't find it, Killain. I had it,” the doctor said softly. “And now I must use it again.” He sounded properly regretful. “I never really believed that you could get past Armand, but your animal instinct served you well. It's well I took the precaution to be present.”

Johnny glanced at Al Munson's body. “Your signature, Doc?”

The pink-cheeked man nodded. “A mewling kitten,” he said disdainfully. “I posted Armand and went out to the street to await your arrival.”

“You're the gizmo behind the whole thing?” Johnny still found it a little hard to believe.

“These people abused my patience terribly,” Dr. McDevitt assured him earnestly. “Their greed destroyed my foolproof plan. I naturally had to take steps.”

Rocky, Johnny thought, and I got to find it out upwind from the barrel of that small-caliber belly gun. “Armand got Roketenetz at the Rollin' Stone,” he said tentatively, turning his body a fraction of an inch at a time to lessen the area in front of the gun barrel.

“Roketenetz,” the doctor agreed, “and Ybarra. I felt that Hendricks and Munson should be dealt with personally by me, inasmuch as they had so grossly abused my confidence.” His voice rose sharply. “In five years the group had earned a steady profit, with no one the wiser, all due to my initiative and planning. Wouldn't you have thought they'd be satisfied?” The tone was high-pitched and querulous.

“It's a shame Keith got away from you,” Johnny said solemnly.

“It is, indeed. I had not anticipated his-ah-withdrawal. I fear I shall never understand people.”

You and me both, Johnny thought. How in the hell am I gonna reach that little flipped-lid? His eyes ranged the room for something to throw, but there was nothing within reach. He didn't even have his shoes on. And then he heard the elevator. The self-service elevator was moving. The discovery of his overcoat and other items on it should produce some kind of an investigation.

But the doctor heard it, too. Without saying a word his arm tensed and lengthened itself, and Johnny launched himself backward, rolling hard to gain the shelter of Al Munson's desk. The little gun spat nastily, and a large splinter flew past Johnny's head, but he came up behind the desk, grabbed up Al Munson's lumpy weight, pushed it out in front of himself, balanced himself carefully and charged Dr. Philip McDevitt. Six feet away he propelled the heavy body forward in a straight line, he himself diving low. The doctor was still methodically snapping bullets into Al Munson when Johnny hit him at the ankles. The doctor cried out shrilly like a petulant child as he went over backward, and his head struck a chair with a dull sound.

When he had breath in his lungs again, Johnny climbed wearily to his feet and plodded to the telephone.

In the cab on the way back crosstown Johnny sat on the jump seat and faced Lieutenant Dameron, Detective Rogers and a D.A.'s investigator named Douglas. Behind them the high-ceilinged room still seethed with precinct men uniformed and plain-clothed, lab men and a medical examiner, and the specialists from Homicide East, but Johnny had been released to Dameron and Rogers upon their belated arrival. The beefy Douglas had wandered in like a sleepy bear getting out of the cold and had attached himself to the expedition setting out for the West Side precinct to receive Johnny's statement.

“I'd like to have seen your face when McDevitt pulled the gun on you,” Detective Rogers said from the back seat, and grinned at Johnny's grunt. “Of course, you knew it was him all along.”

“The hell I did, and neither did you,” Johnny said flatly. “Say, was it him Keith made that second call to from Gidlow's suite? If it was you boys are due for a few demerits.”

“Keith made that call to Keith,” said Dameron. “He called the Chronicle office, and asked for himself,” he explained.

“Smart,” Johnny mused. “Not smart enough to keep strugglin', though. When the doc scared him bad enough he pitched it in. I don't see how I missed seein' that little bastard. His footprints were all over the place.”

“He had perfect cover. He'd formed the ring of people who had a finger on the pulse of the business, and they must have made a comfortable fortune. In a way you can see his sense of outrage when they defected from beneath him.” Detective Rogers' voice was somber.

“I thought it was Turner,” Johnny admitted, and the D.A.'s man, Douglas, spoke up for the first time on the ride.

“What gave you the hunch about the goon under the stairs, Killain?”

“I wasn't sure he was under the stairs,” Johnny explained patiently. “I just felt someone was there. If I took that phone call at face value, I was due for a fall.”

“Yes, but why? Something Munson said?”

“The way he said it,” Johnny said briefly.

Douglas plainly was an unhurried man befitting his bulk. “I'd like to know why it was the way he said it,” he persisted.

“You could lose your next couple of meals if I told you.”

“Try me,” Douglas said solidly.

“Just remember you asked.” Johnny's glance drifted off to the silent Lieutenant Dameron before it returned to the beefy investigator. “This goes back a ways. I happened to be in a place one time where two guys were brought in to a drumhead court. They were murderers and torturers, long overdue to get their tickets punched. They had information, but there wasn't time to get it. Somebody got the idea that, if they could be made to make one quick telephone call, they'd bring the roof down on some more of their own kind. The first guy was planted in a chair beside a phone, with a man behind him with both hands in his hair, and a man in front of him with a knife across his throat. He was told who to call, an' what to say. He knew he was for the knife whether he made the call or not. He said the equivalent of 'To hell with you, Jack,' and the knife went z-z-zick. They tossed him aside, an' sat the second guy down. He bought another hundred an' eighty seconds. He made the call.” Johnny drew a short breath. “His voice sounded like Al Munson's. You kind of don't forget it.”

The cab drew into the curb in the short silence that followed. “Anyone for Aesop's Fables?” Douglas asked finally. He buttoned his coat, opened the door and stepped out on the sidewalk, and the others followed. Johnny looked up at the stars in the cold-looking night sky, shoved his hands deeply in his coat pockets and trailed up the steps of the weather-beaten red brick building. Inside he would dictate and sign his statement, and then it would be time to go to work.