Lady, go die

CHAPTER SIX

“All right,” Pat Chambers said, “go over it again.”

He leaned back in his swivel chair and listened while I told the story for the third time. This captain of Homicide was careful and crafty, with an adding machine for a brain and the smooth manner of a man-about-town.

But all cop.

We were in his office off the station-house bullpen of the red-brick building where he worked, sometimes even on Sunday, like this afternoon. The place maybe was bustling a little less than on other days, but otherwise, it was business as usual.

My third recitation took longer than the last as I fitted in little details and opinions that had escaped the previous tellings. I ended with my leaving Sidon that morning, after breakfast at Big Steve’s. A man has got to eat.

“You come up with a murder motive yet?” Pat asked.

“For Sharron Wesley or for me? I damn near bought it, you know.”

He shrugged. “Take your pick.”

I gave him a shrug back. “No definite motive. But plenty of reasons for one.”

“What reasons?”

“Start with, that town is as crooked as a corkscrew. Isn’t that reason enough?”

He rocked in the chair, hands locked behind his neck, elbows winged out. “I just love the way you think, Mike. So simple and direct.”

“That doesn’t sound like a compliment.”

Now he sat forward, resting his hands on his desk and folding them, as if about to say grace. “Naturally, there’s a motive and it won’t be an obscure one, but based on what you’ve gathered so far, I’d say getting down to it will be tough. What can I do for you?”

That was the line I’d been waiting for.

“First of all,” I said, and I sat forward too, “I want to see if you can get me any info on Rudy Holden. Find out if he is as innocuous as he looks and sounds. When I talked to him last night, he played dumb, but he’s living in the biggest, swellest house in town filled with the kind of furniture you don’t get at the Salvation Army.”

Pat scribbled Holden’s name down on a note pad.

I went on: “Rumor around Sidon is that he’s a little guy in the bigger scheme of things… but in a small town, a little guy can be pretty goddamn big.”

Pat raised a hand for me to hold it a minute, got on the phone, spoke a few words, and before he had even lowered his hand, he passed the note to a uniformed cop who scrambled in, took it, and scrambled back out.

“You realize, Mike, that I can’t get too deep in this thing. If it had started here in the city, I could pull strings to work with you out there in Sidon. But unless some developments carry it back to Manhattan, you’re going to have to do most of the work yourself.”

“I know,” I said through a yawn. “That’s what I’m hoping for.”

“Oh, you’re a one-man cleaning crew now, I suppose?”

I patted the holstered rod under my arm. “Just me and my broom.”

Pat gave me a disgusted smirk. “Then you certainly don’t need my help.”

“But I do. Anyway, there is a tie-up with the city. Most of the clientele at Sharron Wesley’s gambling house are almost certainly New York City residents. Those kind of big spenders don’t limit themselves to one or two shindigs on the weekend. They’ll do plenty during the week, too.”

“Granted.”

“So if you hear of the vice boys pulling any raids on joints around town, try to find out if any of their high-roller arrests had at any time been patrons of Sharron’s shed. How’s that?”

He was rocking again. “Fair enough. I’ll do what I can.” An eyebrow went up. “Now, how about the potshot taken at you? You’re sure it was Dekkert?”

I laughed long and loud. “Natch, chum. Who else but? That punk is laying for me.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

I shrugged. “Make him sweat. Then when I get ready, I’m going to take him down. All the way. As much for what he’s put poor Poochie through as for the shot he sent in my direction.”

Pat looked at me very seriously and spread his hands on the desk. “How can you be so sure it was Dekkert?”

“Why shouldn’t I be?”

He shook his head slowly. “You could be treading on some mighty sensitive toes here, Mike. After all, you have got yourself a reputation and not a nice one at that. You stand up in front of the wrong judge with one of your self-defense ploys…”

“That’s pleas, Pat.”

“…and you’re going to take a long, hard fall. Say what you will about Dekkert-and I’ll say the same and worse-but he is a cop.”

I blew a half-hearted Bronx cheer.

“Suppose,” Pat went on, “the murderer knew of your antagonism for Dekkert, and used that to remove you both? If Dekkert is not the murderer… and there’s no reason to think he is anything but a bent small-town cop with a grudge against you… then the real murderer could kill you, and suspicion would be thrown on Dekkert. The real killer could take a shot at you and miss, safely knowing you’d go after Dekkert without looking around for anyone else.”

I gave that one some thought. That adding-machine mind of Pat’s again had come up with an analysis that certainly sounded logical enough. But hell, who else but Dekkert would make a sucker play like that? So far I hadn’t garnered anything around Sidon that was worthwhile shooting me over, just some nosing around.

Pat knew enough to let me sit there and mull it over for a while.

Then he said, “After the body was discovered, did the police get over to Sharron Wesley’s place very fast?”

“No. I drove up there immediately. Took fifteen minutes or so getting there, and I fooled around for at least half an hour. After that I was at Poochie’s maybe fifteen minutes before the shot was fired at me, then I carried him back to my car. In all that time there was no sign of the gendarmes.”

“Unless the guy that shot at you was one-like Dekkert, for example.”

“Roger, pal. Now you’re seeing things from my point of view. To me it looks like the local boys didn’t bother going out to Sharron’s, because they knew just what to expect there. According to the leads I got, the entire political regime of Sidon had their fingers in that pie.”

Pat was nodding. “And they couldn’t go out to that casino to investigate without risking exposure of a racket they were into up to their own necks. I get the picture.”

“Yeah, well, you’re a little slow, Pat, but I knew you’d catch up.”

That made him laugh, and he was still grinning as he said, “Okay, Mike, I’ll get some men to work on this end. Suppose I call you tomorrow and let you know what I find out.”

“Fine,” I said, getting up to go. “You can reach me at the Sidon Arms. If I’m not there give the message to Velda. But don’t leave anything pertinent-just say I should call you back.”

“Got it. The walls have ears and eyes.”

“Yeah, and one of these days I’ll give those walls a nice new paint job. Guess what color.”

“You do know I’m a cop, right?”

We grinned at each other, shook hands, and I walked out.

I left the heap in the usual garage and walked the half block to the Hackard Building. Getting in the building required a key that only long-time tenants possessed. There was nobody manning the visitor’s book on Sunday and the lobby was so dead, I was almost surprised tumbleweed wasn’t blowing through.

I took the elevator up to the eighth floor where we kept a two-room suite of offices, and I was fishing out my keys when I noticed the lights on and shadows moving behind the pebbled glass that said HAMMER INVESTIGATING AGENCY.

My keys wouldn’t be needed-the door was a little ajar already. I put them back in my pocket and got the. 45 in my mitt and thumbed the safety off and went in fast and low.

But there were two of them, one going through the filing cabinets to the right, and that gave him the chance to hammer me on the back with clenched hands, sending me face down, hitting the wood floor hard with the rod spilling from my fingers and skittering under Velda’s desk, spinning like a deadly top. Somebody clicked off the overhead lights, and with no windows in the reception area, shadows draped everything and all I could make out as I rolled onto my back were two shapes in baggy suits and hats, one at my right, coming at me with clawed fingers, and the other at the left, going through Velda’s personal filing cabinet, pausing to reach under his arm and that meant a gun would soon be belching flame, and in the wrong direction. I spun to my right and with an underhanded swing jammed four stiff fingers into the belly of the guy who’d slugged me, and he folded up like a card table, only card tables don’t vomit all over the floor when they go down.

The other visitor’s rod was halfway out now, a revolver, and I threw myself at him, in a wild tackle that took him down, bone-jostling hard. The fingers of both my hands found his throat and his face was just a shadowy, reddening, tongue-bulging blur as I strangled him and battered his skull into the floor in fury-fueled overkill and before I could kill the bastard, I got clouted on the back of the head, maybe with a gun butt, and fell with limp, lazy, painless ease, floating down headlong into the temporary death that was unconsciousness.

When I came around, my first thought was to keep my head down, because the Japs were out there, maybe twenty yards away, just waiting for the right target to pop up like at an arcade. I would wait till somebody laid down some covering fire and then and only then I would make a break for it, fleeing from the fox hole into the jungle with a grenade ready to toss back in their goddamn laps and let those evil assholes laugh that off.

But I wasn’t in the jungle. I was on the floor of my office, the reception area. The place had been given a thorough, professional shakedown-only the two drawers they’d been rifling when I’d come in were still sticking out.

Velda would make an inventory that would say whether anything had been taken, but I felt I knew what this was about.

I sat on the couch. It stunk in there. A modern art masterpiece on the floor was where the one guy had puked. My hand found the knot on the back of my skull, but my fingers carried back no blood. They could have killed me, easy, but hadn’t. Absent-mindedly, I got up, knelt down like a kid looking under his bed for his missing dog and retrieved my. 45.

Gun holstered, I sat back down. My head hurt but it wasn’t pounding. I was lucky. And I was almost glad it had happened.

Because now I knew this led back to the city. Now I knew somebody had been called, and that somebody had sent that pair around to check up on my office and see if I left anything of interest lying around.

After I mopped up the vomit, I went into the inner office, opened some windows, and did what I’d come for originally. I called four stoolies around town and asked them what they knew about the gambling operation out on Long Island, outside little Sidon.

Nobody knew anything, but they’d poke around for me.

The headache was getting worse and I washed down half a dozen aspirin with some bourbon. Then I did what any brave, two-fisted detective would do in this situation.

I took a nap on the couch.

I woke around nine and fifteen minutes later I was down on the street, heading for the garage. But a cab cruised by and I impulsively hailed it.

I gave the driver an uptown address and settled back in the cushions. The neon-draped city certainly looked good to me. Why the hell anyone wanted to go to the sticks for a vacation was more than I could figure. Right here in Manhattan was the works-shows, bars, dancing. In Sidon, you hibernated.

Or maybe ran down a murderer.

My cab pulled up in front of a cellar bar that was stuck in the front of a boarded-up three-story building that looked ready to fall apart. The ramshackle appearance was merely a front. Behind that deteriorated stone-and-brick veneer lurked one of the city’s top gambling dumps.

Louie Marone ran it. In that shady racket, he was as on the up-and-up as they came. The house took its percentage and nothing more. When you sat in a game at Louie’s, you could be sure the cards weren’t fixed and no wires were attached to the wheels.

Instead of steps, a ridged gangplank led to the bar and I mostly slid down it and plodded through the sawdust to the counter and parked on a stool at the end. The place wasn’t hopping. Well, it was Sunday.

The bartender, a whiskered Greek right out of the Gay Nineties, quit polishing glasses long enough to set a beer up in front of me, then went back to his wiping. Besides myself, the only other occupants of the joint were a pair of rough-looking gents knocking off boiler-makers as fast as the bartender could pour. Then I noticed a pair of luscious-looking legs extending from a booth.

The legs made me curious. And I was ready to bet that the package they were part of would be just as nice as they were. This seemed to me a bet worth making, and after all, Louie was the most honest gambling joint in the city, so my odds were good.

I didn’t have to reflect on my potential bet very long. A tousled head of blonde hair poked around the backrest and a very lovely body uncoiled itself from the seat and walked itself toward me. There was a lot of animal in her stride. Under the close-fitting jersey of her dress, each little muscle in her stomach and legs rippled coaxingly. If she had anything on under that thing, you could stuff it in a thimble.

She parked a glorious fanny on the stool next to me and flashed a smile in my direction.

“Why, hello, Mike,” she said. She poured it out like melted butter.

Now what? I couldn’t place her at all. Maybe I had taken one to the head harder than I thought…

“What do you say, kid?” I said, faking it.

“Remember me?”

I don’t usually forget pretty faces, even after getting clobbered. This one belonged to a fabulous piece of fluff of about twenty-one, though she looked as though she had been around some.

“Nope,” I said, deciding to keep it honest, like Louie. “Can’t say I do. Not proud of it, either.”

She smiled and this time it was not a come-on, but the smile of a real person, not some dame on the make.

“Marion Ruston,” she said, red-nailed fingers brushing her full bosom. Lucky fingers. “Billy’s little sister? I was just a kid when you got him out of that scrape that time.”

Then I got it.

Billy Ruston was a kid who had started life pointed in the wrong direction. I had used him for a messenger sometimes, trying to make less of a dead-end kid out of him; but he had become involved with the law when the gang he ran with robbed a warehouse. Both Pat and I had intervened and arranged for him to join the army. Doing that, the judge had suspended sentence on him while his former pals did their stretch upstate.

Marion had been just a kid then, as she said. I remembered her crying at the trial, a pretty little flat-chested teenager. I was wondering if-like her brother-her rough background had sent her tumbling off the straight-and-narrow.

The bartender brought her a Manhattan without being asked, and I ordered up a highball.

There was a disapproving tone in my voice when I said, “What are you doing in this place?”

“A place like this? Nice girl like me?”

“Something like that, yeah.”

Her mouth made a sort of smug kiss when she smiled that certain way. “Don’t get me wrong, Mike. I work here.”

I frowned.

“Not a B-girl! I’m Louie’s bookkeeper.”

I eyed the curves assembled on the stool next to me, pretending I didn’t approve of them. “Then why don’t you dress for the job? In that outfit…”

I let it go at that.

She laughed and it had a mocking edge. “I just like to have a little fun, that’s all. I’ve taken such a beating all my life, it’s nice to do some pushing back myself for a change. Besides, I bring a lot a business in here.”

“Doing what?”

“Being eye candy.” She gave me that laugh again. “Men seem to like to look at me. I saw the way you looked at me, Mike, till you found out who I was.”

She had me there.

“But if Louie caught me being serious with any of the goons that come in here? Why, he’d spank me but good.”

If I were Louie, I’d have been looking for an excuse.

I asked, “No steady boyfriend on the outside?”

“No dice. I don’t like men… not that much. I just like to tease ’em.”

My highball arrived and I sipped it. “Dangerous game, honey. You’re going to get caught short someday.”

She shook her head and blonde curls bounced. “Not a chance. I make ’em sweat, then chase ’em home, like the scared little boys they are.”

“Maybe you just haven’t met the right guy.”

“Get out! They’re all after the same thing. Hardly a variation in technique. They put up a big show, spin a line a yard long, and then offer to show you their stamp collections.”

“It used to be etchings.”

“Sometimes it still is.”

I was torn between my attraction to this knowing beauty and the memory of the sweet innocent kid she’d been.

“Just look out, Marion,” I said softly. “Some guy is going to bust up that little game of yours, and you’re going to be left holding the bag.”

“Pooh.”

“Some guys take a tease too serious. A girl can get manhandled.”

“A guy can get kneed in the nads.”

She had a point.

“Where’s Louie?” I asked her.

“Upstairs,” she said with a nod in that direction. “Want me to get him?”

“Do that.”

Marion slid from the stool and swayed down the bar, trying a little too hard to impress me now, and disappeared into a tiny alcove. A few minutes later she was back with her boss in tow.

Louie was a big Italian with a smile for everyone, a tuxedo that dated to Prohibition, and an ardent hatred for crooks. There was nothing to say about Louie except that he was square and a swell guy, always good for a touch.

He spied me and beamed all over. “Mike! How do you do!” I never knew whether this was in imitation of the radio catch-phrase or just a greeting. “Glad to see a you. Whatcha know?”

We shook hands, and he ushered me over to a table in one corner.

A smile blossomed under a Clark Gable mustache in a J. Carrol Naish face. “What are you drinking, my friend?”

“Highball. There’s plenty of this one left.”

“That glass has no bottom, Mike. And your money, she’s no good here.”

“Thanks, Louie. How’s business?”

“Good, Mike, verra good. Everybody, they spend plenty of dough. Sunday, a little slow. We have to close early, Sunday.”

Right. Three a.m., instead of four a.m.

I lifted a thumb. “I mean upstairs.”

“Yeah, good up there too. I spin a straight wheel. Plenty of people come to Louie’s. Plenty of people, but not you, Mike. Where you been forever?”

“You know me, Louie. I’m not much of a gambler.”

A grave expression took over the jovial face. “You are the great gambler, Mike. You gamble your life.”

“Ah nuts,” I grinned at him. “Got a few questions for you, Louie. Think you can help out?”

“Maybe so. Let’s a go to my back room. Leave the glass. We can do better.”

Marion, seated on a stool at the bar, saw us heading to the rear and hopped off and tagged after. She fell in just behind me.

Louie noticed, halted the procession, and gave her a long look. Then he said, “You wait out here, Marion.”

“I’m with Mike.”

He shook a finger at her, Daddy scolding. “This Hammer guy, he’s not like them other bums. No games with him now. He’ll poke you one.”

She gave that ambiguous remark a short snort and threw a lush, taunting lipstick smile my direction.

“I don’t think he’s man enough,” she said, then laughed as she walked away.

I could see where she might need a spanking at that. Later maybe.

“Little devil,” Louie said, trying not to smile as he nodded toward the lithe figure. “Some a day she go too far.”

“That’s what I told her. You know, Louie, not all men are as gallant as I am.”

He had no response to that.

The back room was a comfortable little den used exclusively to entertain Louie’s prime guests between rounds of losing money. The chairs were like those in an exclusive old-time men’s club-leather, studded with buttons, but very comfortable. Framed paintings adorned the walls, all winter scenes, except for a huge hand-tinted photo of the Coliseum in Rome. One corner held a cabinet lined with books, not leather-bound, but well-read volumes, from classics to bestsellers, with half a dozen books on government in the collection. You couldn’t say that Louie didn’t take his citizenship seriously.

Louie went to a small bar in the opposite corner, got behind it and drew out a bottle of good Scotch. He laid out two glasses and poured a stiff one in each. We held them in a mutual toast, took a long pull, and sat down facing each other, him on his side of the bar, me on mine.

“Now, wotta questions you got, Mike?”

“I got a murder on my hands, Louie. Out on the Island. A cookie named Sharron Wesley got herself knocked off. She ran a gambling joint out of a mansion she inherited.”

“Yeah, I know this cookie. Didn’t know she gotta bumped. I pay no attention to the papers much. When did she catch it?”

“A little over a week ago. The body was just discovered yesterday, though. I’m sure it’s been in the papers here, because the reporters were thick as flies last night, and her body turned up in an unusual way.”

“Oh?”

I told him about the Lady Godiva routine.

“So you think… are you saying…?” His voice was querulous. Louie was trying to see where her death had any connection with him.

I hurried to reassure him. “Wipe off the long face, pal. You’re not in on this. I know that. But it so happens that you may have some customers that patronized the Wesley dame’s joint, and I want to find out who they are. They could stand talking to.”

He raised his palms, like the victim of a hold-up. “Mike, please. You my friend, I like a to tell you these things, but I don’t want to be no pigeon. This is a my business, Mike. It is not strictly legal, I know, but it’s all I got to make a dollar. Now, maybe I lose a the business if I rat.”

I understood where he was coming from. But I still wanted the inside dope, and I wasn’t asking him to finger any gambling bosses-just customers. Pat was sure to dig up some names for me, but it might take too long. And with bullets flying and goons shaking down my office, not to mention knocking me on my can, well… time wasn’t something to be spent so leisurely.

Louie interrupted my thoughts with, “Didn’t this Wesley woman leave a some books?”

“I thought of that, Louie, but the operation seems to be backed by a syndicate of a sort. If she did, you can bet your boots those ledgers are damn well hidden. I’m going to let you in on something, kiddo. This isn’t to go farther than this room.”

“Hokay, Mike. I keep a my mouth shut. Shoot.”

Nice choice of words.

“Louie, if I’m not mistaken, there was one hell of a take from Sharron’s dump. She was the one who ran the place and presumably she took care of the income. The books I’m not too worried about. It’s the dough that somebody will be after. The equipment in there cost in the six-digit range-possibly seven, so you can approximate the entire take, especially if the place was crooked.”

“But each week, they must a bank the take in the city.”

“That casino was strictly open on weekends. She got murdered the last night of the last party, so at least that much dough may be stashed somewhere on those grounds. She may have been keeping her own share of the proceeds there, as well. If not all of it.”

Louie nodded. “I catch. She stash a the cash, then a she die, now nobody knows where to look. Everybody searching for it and more people, they get bumped off. And you in the middle, making life miserable. Yeah.”

I nodded. “That’s how I see it. Now, here’s what I can do. Either you can put me wise to a few people who make the rounds of the gambling joints, with my word it goes no farther… or I can play upstairs here a while myself on the Q.T., and snoop around. What’ll it be?”

He pondered that a moment. “I a tell you, Mike. Do both.”

He dragged a pad out from somewhere and unscrewed the top of a fountain pen. For a minute he wrote, then tore the sheet from the pad and handed it to me. “These are some names. I don’t know where they live. You find a that out. Come here and play, watch a these people, and speak to them. Like one gambler speaks to another gambler. Just friendly. Maybe you learn something.”

I thanked him and stood up.

But a voice nagged at me that this approach still would take too long, and I couldn’t afford being away from Sidon any length of time. And anyway, I was well-known enough to get made.

“I’ll do what I can, Louie,” I said. “Maybe I’ll see you tonight, upstairs.”

“I’ll be looking for you, Mike.”

He escorted me to the mouth of the alcove and stayed behind as I headed back into the outer bar. That’s when I had a swell idea, one that might prove a good shortcut.

I slid into the booth where the lovely legs had taken up residence again. On the same side as those legs, bumping their owner over.

“Just can’t resist me, can you?” Marion said. Her tongue flicked out, the little snake.

I grinned at her. “Nope. You are irresistible, dolly. Like me.”

She laughed once, high up. “I’m just dying to hear your approach. Is it any different than the rest of the he-men?”

“Some girls find it that way, baby. Do you have an apartment around here?”

“Sure, fifteen minutes on foot, less by cab. Why?”

“Let’s go, then. We can discuss this better there.”

She blinked. “What? Don’t you even wanna buy me a drink first?”

“Hell no. That’s such a tired come-on, right? Well? Do you want to take me home or not?”

“I should say not! What do I look like, anyway?”

“I think you know what you look like. I just thought you wouldn’t mind skipping over the dull preliminaries, since you said you can take care of yourself. But if you’re scared, let’s forget it.”

She frowned and it made her nose even cuter. “What have I got to be scared of… you? Don’t tell me you think I took Louie’s warning about you seriously. Hell, that’s a laugh. There isn’t a man alive I can’t handle!”

I laughed in her face.

And that laugh hurt her. It told her that I thought she was a kid who was just kidding, and couldn’t make it in the big leagues.

Marion reached up and dragged down a flimsy hat and grabbed a light coat from the back of the booth.

“Let’s go, sucker,” she said.