The Fatal Frails

CHAPTER X

“This was the bastard's sample case,” Johnny said to Detective James Rogers two hours later. Paul Sassella looked on silently as the sandy-haired detective shuffled glossy photographs. “He couldn't very well lug anything as valuable as the monstrance around with him all the time to show it, so he did the next best thing. He took pictures of it an' the other stuff he stole from Hegel, had 'em blown up an' he was in business.”

“He didn't need a case this size for four pictures and one handgun,” Rogers objected. He balanced the automatic on his palm.

“He needed a case this size if he contacted a live one who wanted to see the actual merchandise,” Johnny said. “It's our tough luck there's nothing in it now, that's all.”

The slender man held the automatic up to the light and squinted up the barrel. “Crime to leave a gun in this condition,” he said absently. “Hasn't been fired in months. Or cleaned, either.” He looked at Paul. “You got a little dab of machine oil around?”

“Sure,” Paul said readily. “I'll get it.”

Detective Rogers removed the clip from the base of the automatic and laid it aside. “Empty,” he said tersely. He took a key chain with a tiny screwdriver on it from his pocket and laid it beside the clip. In movement too quick for Johnny to follow, Rogers balanced the automatic between his palms and twisted, and with two loud clacks it came apart in his hands. Swiftly he spread out barrel, slide, grip and recoil action, picked up the barrel, sniffed at it and put it down again.

“You do that like you'd done it before,” Johnny said.

“I fool around with them.” The detective nodded as Paul came back in and handed him a small bottle and clean rag. “Thanks. Exactly what I need.” He looked at Johnny. “If a thing's worth doing, it's worth doing right.”

Paul looked down at the dismantled gun in surprise. “Don't you test them first for fingerprints?” he blurted, and almost blushed to find himself the center of attention.

“Metal gives a poor transfer,” Rogers said smiling, “despite what you read. We're not looking for any guns, anyway. We've got the one Dechant killed himself with, and we've got the one that killed Arends.” The slim hands flew over the piecemeal bits of metal, wiping, oiling, wiping again.

A buzzer sounded overhead. “Front desk,” Paul said conversationally, and went out to answer it.

“There was no question about the gun that got Arends?” Johnny asked. “It was the one layin' beside him?”

“No doubt at all, according to Ballistics, and they haven't made a mistake since 1908, if you listen to them.” In what looked like three deft movements, the sandy-haired man slapped the automatic back together in seconds. He wiped his greasy hands on a clean corner of the rag, his eyes appraisingly on Johnny. “Why the question?”

“I don't know,” Johnny said slowly. “It leaves you with a choice of an amateur tryin' to make it look like suicide by leavin' the gun, or an amateur gettin' the lump an' droppin' the gun in a panic when he flew.”

Rogers dropped the reassembled automatic back into the sample case. “One more for the police property officer.” He replaced the top on Paul's bottle of oil. “What's the matter with either of those pictures?”

“Nothin', probably. I just wish-”

The cloakroom door opened for a second, and Paul's head loomed in it. “Emergency, Johnny.” The door started to close as his head disappeared. Moving with a speed his bulk appeared to make impossible, Johnny caught it before it shut and was out into the lobby with Detective Rogers at his heels.

Johnny took one look at the woman being supported between two men just inside the foyer doors, her face a bloody mask in which the only recognizable feature was one eye fixed in staring shock. “Take her up on the mezzanine, Paul!” he said over his shoulder, and continued on to the switchboard without breaking stride. “Ring Doc Randall, ma,” he said to Sally, and picked up a house phone. He heard the click of the connection in the middle of the second ring. “Killain, Doc. Bring your bag down to the mezzanine. Don't wait for your pants.” The connection was gone with an explosive grunt.

“What is it?” Sally wanted to know as he hung up.

“Car accident, looks like. Call the hospital and get an ambulance over here.” His eyes were on the little group of men moving carefully up the mezzanine steps with their burden. “Doc'll probably give me hell for movin' her, but the lounge up there's a damn sight better'n a marble floor.”

He went up the mezzanine stairs three at a time and reached the top as Dr. Randall emerged from the elevator with Paul beside him. In pajamas and dressing gown with trailing cord, and his white hair standing up all over his head, the doctor hurried into the oval, curtained lounge, carrying his little black bag. Johnny could hear his brisk voice. “All right. Let's get half of these people out of here.”

Johnny was halfway to the lounge entrance when Detective Rogers burst through it, heading for the stairs. He pulled up at sight of Johnny. “Recognize her?” he asked grimly.

“You mean I'm supposed-” Johnny looked at the blood-streaked piece of fur in the detective's left hand. He had seen that mink stole before. “Madeleine Winters?” he asked incredulously.

Rogers nodded. “Viciously assaulted twenty feet from the hotel marquee by a man who got out of a car.”

“Christ! I thought it was some woman went through a windshield. What was she doing-”

Detective Rogers was no longer listening. He ran quickly down the stairs. After one indecisive glance at the curtained lounge, Johnny followed him. At the switchboard Rogers passed telephone numbers in to Sally as fast he could copy them down from his notebook. “Call all these people,” he said crisply. “If they come on when I'm on another line, hold them on. Don't let them get off.”

Sally's hands flashed over the board as she set up lines and dialed. “The first one doesn't answer, Mr. Rogers,” she said in seconds. His mouth a thin line, the detective marked an “x” beside the first number of a duplicate list he jotted down. From where he stood slightly to one side, Johnny could see that there were five of the numbers. He strained to get a look at least at the exchanges, but Rogers' body half blocked his view. “Pick up the phone beside you, Mr. Rogers,” Sally said suddenly.

“Hello!” the detective barked. “Who is this?” He cut right back into the sounds emerging from the receiver. “I know perfectly well whom I'm calling at this hour of the morning. This is Detective Rogers.” He must be talking to Stitt, Johnny thought. Only Stitt would give him a growl like that. “Are you alone?” the detective continued. “Is there anyone who can verify how long you've been there?” He listened briefly. “All right. I'll talk to you again in the morning.”

“The third one doesn't answer yet, Mr. Rogers,” Sally said quietly. “The first one still doesn't answer. The- Pick up your phone again, please. Here's the fourth one.”

“Who is this?” Detective Rogers began again. “This is Detective Rogers. Are you alone?” Something indefinable in Rogers' tone made Johnny feel the detective was talking to a woman. Gloria Philips. Had to be. “Is there anyone who can verify-”

Johnny tried to listen and at the same time catch the attention of the intern and the ambulance driver who appeared from the foyer with a folded stretcher. They finally caught his silent hand-signals and went up to the mezzanine.

“I've been holding the fifth one for a minute and a half,” Sally was saying when Johnny could again pay attention. “The first and third numbers still do not answer.”

“Hello,” Rogers said into his phone. “Who is this? This is Detective-”

A sound from the stairs brought Johnny's head around. The stretcher was descending the stairs, Paul and the ambulance driver at its head and two strangers at the rear. Alongside walked the hatless intern and Dr. Randall.

Attracted by the voices, Detective Rogers turned at the phone, into which he was still speaking, until he could see the little procession. ”-in the morning,” he said. “No. No. Damn it, no! I'm busy!” He hung up abruptly. “Oh, Doctor!” he called. Both the intern and the hotel physician stopped and looked. Rogers waited long enough to glance in at Sally and receive a negative headshake before walking over to the two men. “Can I talk to her?” he asked.

“Not a chance,” Dr. Randall said emphatically. “Speaking for myself, of course. She's under heavy sedation, and will remain so for some time.” The interne nodded agreement. “A vindictive assault,” the older man continued. “A superficial examination indicates that every blow was facial. As brutal an attack as I've ever been called in upon.”

“When can I talk to her?” the detective persisted.

Dr. Randall looked at the intern, who shrugged. Looking frustrated, Roger jerked his panama down over his sandy hair and started for the door. Halfway there he turned and came back. In front of Sally's switchboard he swept off the hat and bowed. “That was a damn fine job,” he said sincerely. “Thanks.” Sally flushed with pleasure as the slender man crammed the hat back on and half trotted from the lobby.

There goes a real sharp cutting tool, Johnny thought to himself as Rogers disappeared through the foyer doors. You keep fooling around with that boy, Killain, and some one of these days he's going to nail your ears to the wall. How'd you like that question he slipped in on each of them asking if anyone was present who could verify how long they'd been there? Let one of those jokers come back in the morning now and try to supply an alibi for someone who needs it. Rogers had them already on record. It took something more than a head like a billygoat to come up with that on the spur of the moment.

He roused himself and went to look for Amy to have her clean up the mezzanine lounge.

In his room an hour later Johnny poured himself his third double shot of bourbon. He slipped down his tie, unfastened his collar and, as an afterthought, kicked off his shoes before he returned to his armchair and settled down with the bourbon. He took a small swallow, chasing it around his mouth with his tongue.

Five telephone numbers, now. Roger was hot on Tremaine. Say Tremaine's was the first number the detective had had Sally call. So Tremaine had no alibi. At least he wasn't home. And for this Tremaine could need an alibi.

Stitt had been home, assuming the second number to be his. From the growl Rogers had got for an answer, it about had to be Stitt. Stitt wanted no trouble, he claimed. The savagery of the attack was right up Stitt's alley, though. And Gloria said that Madeleine Winters had turned Stitt in on a deal that could have cost him a prison sentence. Could Stitt have hired the job done?

Then there was Gloria Philips herself. She didn't like Madeleine, either. But on the face of things at least it was unlikely she disliked her enough for this sort of thing.

Harry Palmer must have gotten the last call. It must have been gabby Harry hanging on asking questions with Rogers trying to shake him off. Which would leave the lawyer Faulkner not answering the third call. Still, Faulkner was a talker, too. Maybe the last call had gone to him, and Palmer hadn't answered the third call. Not that it made much difference as between those two. There was no apparent motive for either.

Johnny had his glass halfway to his lips again when a solution occurred to him. He tossed off the balance of his drink hurriedly, rose and in his stockinged feet walked to the phone. “Say, ma-”

“I've got a call for you,” she interrupted him.

“Wait. Those phone numbers Rogers handed in to you to call. Read 'em off to me, will you?”

“You're too late, man. That sour-looking Detective Cuneo came in a few minutes ago and asked me for them. He had to go all through my wastepaper basket, but he found them.”

“That Rogers is gettin' too damn smart,” Johnny grunted. “Cuneo still downstairs?”

“Not in sight, anyway.”

“Okay. Put on the call.” There was a second's dead air before he got the connection. “Yeah?”

“Killain?” Johnny thought the voice was guarded. “Don't use my name. This is the man who sent you the check. I'm over at Toffenetti's. Take a walk around.”

Toffenetti's was on Broadway, a block west and two blocks south of the Duarte. “What's the matter with right here?” Johnny asked, more to be contrary than because he had any real objection to Toffenetti's.

“I don't know who's watching your place. I don't think you do, either. I had two phone calls tonight I don't like. I want-”

“Two phone calls?” Johnny interrupted.

“Yes.” The voice paused. “You sound as if you might have known about one of them.”

A shrewd Prussian, Johnny thought. “Maybe I do. I'll be right over. Tell Danny at the soda fountain Killain wants the usual.” He hung up and dressed hurriedly, took the service elevator down to the lobby and told Paul he was going out for a little while. He swung down Forty-fifth Street in the mild night air, waving to Joe taking care of his last minute customers in the bar across from the theater. Joe waved back, and beckoned with the bottle in his uplifted hand. Johnny pointed to his wrist with a circular motion to indicate fleeting time as he passed by. On the corner, Shorty, the newsstand man, reached out to punch Johnny on the arm. Johnny scooped him up with an arm around his middle and carried him kicking and hollering half a block up Broadway before he let him go. Shorty stood in the middle of the sidewalk, and of the first fifteen words of his cheerful diatribe the only two printable were “big walrus.” A hundred yards up the street, Jackie Dolan, the owlhoot night patrolman, jabbed Johnny in the ribs with his billy and ducked a left to the body. This was the world of Killain.

At Toffenetti's Johnny found Max Stitt in a back booth. The cold-eyed man was distastefully regarding the enormous four-scoop sundae with berries, nuts and whipped cream across the table from him. “You're actually going to eat that sickening-looking thing?” he demanded as Johnny sat down and pulled it toward him.

“Goes just right on top of three double bourbons,” Johnny told him, spooning busily.

“Bourbons! And then that?” Words appeared to fail the other man.

“I always claimed that anything a boa constrictor can eat, I can eat,” Johnny said. He looked at Max Stitt across the booth table. “What's on your mind?”

“What's on my mind is that I received a phone call tonight from that detective who's been making a nuisance of himself out at the warehouse recently.”

“That's one call,” Johnny said as Stitt paused. “Oh, I got your check. What was the hurry?”

The cold-eyed man waved a deprecating hand. “I want no trouble. That phone call, now. If I hadn't been home what would I have been accused of tonight?”

“Hospitalizin' Madeleine Winters.”

Max Stitt pinched his chin thoughtfully between a thumb and forefinger. His eyes never left Johnny's face. “Another shooting?”

Johnny shook his head. “Knuckle job. Broke her face all up.”

Max Stitt's hands opened and closed. One thin streak of color flared in the pale features. “Someone is trying to involve me!” he said gutturally.

“It looked like it could've been your work, all right,” Johnny said in a detached tone. “Not but a couple pieces of bone left together anywhere in her face.”

“I tell you someone iss trying to inwolve me!” Max Stitt's consonants had tripled on his tongue in his icy rage. “I want no trouble, but if it iss brought to me, someone will wish he had never been born!”

“That second call you got,” Johnny said casually. “That from anyone we both know?” He dredged up a full-sized strawberry from one corner of the sundae and considered Max Stitt's obsessed silence. Johnny doubted that Stitt had even heard him. His hands clenched on the table-top before him to white-knuckled rigidity, the cold-eyed man seethed with an inner fire. Behind Johnny's back he sent searching glances darting up to the front of the restaurant, and once turned his head to look suspiciously at the roped-off, darkened section behind them.

“You know damn well-” Johnny began again, still trying, and turned curiously as Stitt's eyes again raked the front of the restaurant. “Oh-oh,” Johnny said softly. Detective Ted Cuneo sat upon a counter stool halfway to the door.

Stitt's eyes were upon Johnny immediately. “You know him? I thought he was paying too much attention to this booth.”

“A detective. He doesn't like-”

“I'll teach you to bag me, Killain!” Max Stitt's furious right hand swept upward in a blurred arc and crashed against Johnny's cheekbone. Still going backward from the force of the blow, Johnny hit Stitt in the chest with the sundae. Dripping fruit, nuts, syrup and ice cream, Max Stitt roared out of the booth. Johnny boiled out of his side, and they met in the aisle, head-on. Max Stitt's lightning fast hands nailed Johnny twice on his way in before Johnny could grab him, and then they went to the floor in a thrashing tangle.

Stitt fought with hands, feet, elbows, knees, head and teeth. Hooked fingers clawed at Johnny's face as they banged under a booth. A table leg smashed with a crackling of wood, and a capsized booth table pursued them as they rolled back out into the aisle, hammering at each other. Grimly, Johnny sought for a handhold on the eel-like Stitt, trading roundhouse clubbing lefts as he groped for a throat-hold with his right hand.

Surging up from beneath, Johnny tried to use his weight to pin the dervish spitting at him. Ignoring the lefts to his face, he grunted with satisfaction as his right hand slipped solidly home. Hitching his shoulders together for additional leverage, from the very corner of his eye he caught sight of a shadow standing behind him with uplifted hand. Instinctively Johnny dived and rolled, carrying Stitt up on top of him as a shield. Ted Cuneo's descending night stick caught the plunging Stitt squarely behind the ear, and he went limp on Johnny's body.

Johnny slung him aside like a sack of sugar and scrambled to his knees. “Take a sucker shot at me, will you, you sonofabitch!” he growled at Ted Cuneo, and started up.

“No, no, Johnny!” His high-pitched voice like a steam calliope in Johnny's ear, Danny Giardino, the tough little night manager, jumped from the thin circle of wide-eyed late-hour onlookers. Clamping a headlock on Johnny, he tried with his weight to prevent him from rising. “You can't swing at a cop, Johnny!”

“The hell I can't!” Johnny came up anyway, plucking at Danny hanging from his head. Peeling Giardino off himself like wet paper from a wall, Johnny threw him at Cuneo. The pair of them crashed backward into a booth, which splintered and collapsed beneath them. Johnny charged the shambles of the booth.

“No, no, no, Johnny!” Danny begged from the floor. He spread his arms wide over Cuneo beneath him, the tough face pleading. “Don't take a fall over this, Johnny!”

Some part of the rugged little Italian's sincere plea reached Johnny's bubbling ferment. He knew Danny was his friend. Reluctantly his hands came down, then up again as he reached down and picked Giardino up and set him on his feet. “Sorry, Danny,” he said, and turned to look for a place to sit.

The crowd parted instinctively to let him through. Johnny sat down in the nearest upright booth and looked around, trying to control his heavy breathing. That end of the restaurant was a mess. Johnny's uniform was in shreds, both forearms gone completely, as well as the entire right leg from mid-thigh. Rough, red streaks, from floor burns, abraded his forearms and his visible leg.

Ted Cuneo raised himself slowly from the wreckage of the booth, his face like ashes. No one had lifted a hand to help him. He glared around wildly until he saw Johnny, then started for him, his hand slapping at a side pocket. He stopped, slapped again automatically, turned and started pawing through booth fragments.

“Your bat slid up under the rope,” Giardino growled at him from the side. “What'cha need it for now?”

Cuneo straightened and turned to look at him, then glanced fleetingly at the rim of spectators. He scowled and shoved his hands into his pockets, his sallow features darkening with angry blood.

On the floor Max Stitt sat up slowly, a hand gingerly at the back of his head. A wet gob of fruit and syrup stains was still visible on what remained of his suit. One knee was split out completely through a trouser leg. Danny Giardino gave him a hand to his feet. Stitt flexed a wrist and fingers, and touched his throat experimentally. Looking at Danny, he reached in his back pocket and took out his wallet. “Owner?” he asked. His voice was a croak.

“Owner, hell,” Danny snorted. “Manager.”

“No trouble,” Stitt said, and swallowed visibly. He started to remove bills from the wallet, looked around at the debris and handed the wallet to Giardino. “Want no trouble,” he said, and swallowed again, hard. “Take out for-”

“What is this?” Ted Cuneo demanded in a hard tone, coming to life. He walked over and planted himself in front of Stitt aggressively. “You're making charges against this man.” A jerk of his head indicated Johnny in the booth.

“No charges.” Stitt's Adam's apple worked painfully. “No charges,” he repeated. He looked at Danny. “Enough? Write you a check if-”

“Plenty, man,” Danny said cheerfully. He separated and removed a thin sheaf of bills, showed Stitt what was left and handed him back his wallet with a flourish. “I like a guy what don't hold no grudge after a little difference of opinion.” He looked at Cuneo. “Well?”

“I'll make my own charges.” Cuneo stabbed a finger at an onlooker. “You saw him-” another jerk of the head in Johnny's direction-“try to assault me.” The onlooker stared back woodenly. Cuneo flushed and whirled to another.

“I'll swear he didn't lay a finger on you,” Danny Giardino said mildly before the detective could speak. He chuckled. “An' by God, he didn't.” He looked pleased with himself.

Detective Ted Cuneo stared at the array of faces ranging from impassive to hostile, cursed under his breath and stamped from the restaurant, the tips of his ears scarlet “Good riddance,” Danny Giardino pronounced when the door swung to behind him. The squat man beamed at the group. “Coffee's on the house, boys. Come an' get it.”