Whistle Past the Graveyard [= Give the Girl a Gun]

Chapter Twenty-One

“Thomas Henry?” I repeated incredulously. “But he’s in jail!”

“Yeah,” the inspector said. “And his place is locked up tight. No evidence even that anyone had been there. But that’s where the ealls must have come from. Somebody walked in, made all those calls, then left and locked the door behind him. Maybe we better ask young Henry who might have a key to his flat.”

I shook my head hopelessly. “I checked the back entrance to his place. It has one of those old-fashioned locks any dime-store skeleton key will open.”

We had to wait nearly another full half hour after that before the call finally came from Alberto. I spent it walking up and down, clenching and unclenching my hands. Day spent it slouched in a chair, chewing on an unlighted and increasingly tattered cigar butt and following my pacing with his eyes.

Belatedly it occurred to me Day knew nothing of the murder of Daniel Cumberland, as the report wouldn’t reach his desk until morning. Grasping the chance to wrench my mind from Fausta’s plight, I brought him up to date on my visit with Bubbles and my later discovery of Cumberland’s body.

“This killer really is panicky,” he remarked. “Two murders and two kidnapings. You think maybe this Bubbles dame may be behind all this?”

Wearily I ran my hands through my hair. “I don’t know. Conceivably she could have hired Alberto to kill both Ford and Cumberland. There’s the motive of the blackmail picture, except that if the story Bubbles told me is true, it isn’t much of a motive. I like Ed Friday as a suspect better. Only the panic this killer is in doesn’t seem to fit Friday.”

“It occur to you Alberto may be working on his own?” Day asked. “Maybe the Ford-Cumberland team was blackmailing him for something.”

I shook my head. “He isn’t smart enough to have engineered the frame against Henry. His whole record shows he’s nothing but a two-bit punk. He’s just a hired hand.”

The inspector said musingly, “As soon as we get Fausta out of this jam, I think I’ll go over Ed Friday a little.”

It was ten minutes beyond the single hour Alberto had said I would have to wait when the phone finally rang. Though I had been awaiting it with growing impatience, the sudden peal of the bell nearly made me jump out of my skin.

Picking up the phone, I said harshly, “Moon speaking.”

“Hi, friend,” Alberto’s low voice said. “I see you’ve been a good boy and stuck right by the phone. I just talked to my boss, who tells me you behaved nice about not tying the phone up by making any outside calls too. You all alone?”

“I followed your instructions exactly,” I said in the same harsh tone. “Is Fausta all right?”

“Except for a little headache. Now here’s the shake, pal. Your girl stays right where she is, snug and cozy, for a full two weeks. You tell the people who work for her there that you and her are going on a little vacation. Then go up to her apartment, pack some of her stuff in a grip and take the grip to your own flat. Just leave it there.” He emitted a small chuckle. “You can lock the door. I got a key that opens any lock. Then...”

“Just a minute,” I interrupted. “Suppose Fausta’s staff suspects something? She isn’t in the habit of running off on trips without advance notice.”

“That’s your problem, friend. Just make sure it’s a good story. Because at the first sign of cop curiosity, you can kiss your girl good-bye.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll make the story good.”

“Now after you get Miss Moreni’s bag to your apartment, pack what you need for yourself and catch a plane for anywhere you want to go, so long as it’s at least a thousand miles away. When you get there, send yourself a telegram to your own apartment giving your location and a phone number where you can be reached. I’ll take care of collecting the telegram. After that you just sit tight. At the end of two weeks I’ll turn the dame loose, give her your out-of-town phone number, and she can call you and tell you to come home. By the time you get here, I’ll be a thousand miles away, so don’t bother to hunt for me. Got all that?”

I said, “I think so, but it’s pretty elaborate. Let me repeat it back to you.”

“No, thanks pal. You got it all right, and I don’t like to talk too long. Good-bye now.”

“Wait a minute!” I said. “I’m willing to co-operate a hundred per cent because I don’t want anything to happen to Fausta. But how do I know I can trust you? I want some kind of evidence she’s all right.”

“Like me to send you one of her ears?” he asked savagely.

With an effort I controlled my voice. “I want an air-mail special-delivery letter in her own handwriting as soon as I wire my address. There’s no risk in that for you. I’ll wait forty-eight hours after I send my wire. If a letter doesn’t arrive by then, I’ll be back in town on the next plane looking for your scalp. Tell that to your boss.”

“Sure, pal. I’ll pass the word along. Meantime, you follow instructions. And remember, one peep to the cops and the next time you see your blonde, she’ll be on a marble slab.”

He hung up before I could get in another word.

I looked at Warren Day with desperation in my eyes. It was barely three minutes since the phone had rung.

“Why couldn’t you hold him longer?” the inspector growled. Picking up the other phone, he said sharply, “Did they get a trace on that call?”

After listening a moment, he said, “Okay. We’ll take the rest of it on my car’s two-way. Tell Blake I want constant reports as they come in.”

He hung up the phone instead of laying it down again.

“They had Alberto pinpointed and got his location on the air within forty-five seconds of the time he called. He phoned from a tavern over on the East Side. There was a squad car cruising only six blocks from there, and possibly they. made it in time. We should know before we get there ourselves.”

We passed through the dining room and cocktail lounge so rapidly, customers turned to stare in our wake.

At the front door Mouldy Greene said in a surprised voice, “You still here, Sarge? Thought you’d gone after Fausta long ago.”

We both brushed by without answering, which was a mistake. For when we reached Day’s car at the bottom of El Patio’s front steps, we found Mouldy right behind us. As Day and I crowded into the rear seat, Mouldy opened the front door and plumped himself next to the driver.

Turning sidewise, he scowled at me. “It just registered on me that something’s up,” he said. “What’s happened to Fausta?”

“Corner of Fifth and Martin,” Day snapped at the driver. “Open it up, and keep the two-way on.”

The chauffeur seemed to realize that Day’s mild “Open it up” meant jet speed. He took off like a rocket ship, his siren wide before we even reached the stone pillars at the entrance to the club’s driveway. It was something like eight miles across the heaviest trafficked part of town to Fifth and Martin, but I believe we made it in less than ten minutes.

Halfway across town the radio reported that the police had arrived at the tavern just as Alberto came out and that there had been some shooting. One of the two-man police team had been knocked out of action with a shoulder wound, Sergeant Blake’s voice said from the radio, and the other cap had Alberto cornered in a flat above the tavern. Other police were on the way to the scene, he went on, but since the radio of the original car was now unmanned, there wouldn’t be any additional reports until another squad car got there.

We arrived at Fifth and Martin before any further reports were forthcoming.

The tavern was a corner building, separated from the one next to it by only a four-foot areaway. As we arrived, the police were in the act of shoving back the gathering crowd and roping off the street. Searchlights bathed three sides of the building in bright glare, and a fourth light was directed into the areaway so that any attempt by the cornered man to cross to the next building could be spotted immediately.

A uniformed cop with the gold badge of a lieutenant seemed to be directing the operation. Stepping to his side, Warren Day asked him to report the situation.

“Oh, hello, sir,” the lieutenant said respectfully. “I’m not sure myself what the situation is, except we’ve got somebody trapped in that upstairs flat. All I know is I got a radio report of a shooting, and when I got here I found Officer Healey had been wounded and his partner, Thompkins, had the gunman cornered. I haven’t had a chance to find out what it’s all about.”

“The gunman’s a young punk named Alberto Thomaso,” the inspector growled. “He’s kidnaped a woman and was making the ransom call when we traced it to this tavern. You think maybe he’s got his kidnap victim up there too?”

“I couldn’t say, sir.” Turning to a nearby policeman who stood with a drawn revolver in his hand, the lieutenant said, “Come over here, Thompkins.”

Obediently the cop came over. He was a round-faced, middle-aged cop with the beginnings of a paunch.

“Was anybody with this guy when you jumped him?” the lieutenant asked.

“No, sir. He was all alone and just coming out of the tavern. We pulled up to the curb, jumped out of the car and were just closing in on him when he pulled a gun and plugged Healey through the shoulder. By the time I got my gun out, he’d run back into the tavern. I guess he intended to go out the place’s back door, but there’s three doors back there and he got the wrong one. One leads out to the alley, one downstairs to the rest rooms and one to the flat upstairs. He picked the last door, and by then I was in the tavern and he didn’t have time to change his mind. When I threw a shot at him, he ran up the stairs.”

“You sure he’s still up there?” Day asked.

“There’s nowhere else he could go. The tavern keeper told me he lives in the flat, and that stairway is the only entrance. The tavern keeper had a gun under the bar, so I set him to watching the stair door, shooed all the customers out and made a quick call for help over the car radio. Then, until help arrived, I covered the areaway between the two buildings to make sure he didn’t try to slip across.”

I asked, “Anybody but Alberto up there?”

Thompkins shook his head. “The tavern keeper says no. He lives alone.”

Mouldy Greene said in a calm voice, “Well, what we waiting for, Sarge? Let’s go in and get this punk.”