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

Chapter Twenty-Two

Warren Day gave Mouldy an irritated look. “Listen, Greene, you’re just an innocent bystander here. What makes you think you’re going anywhere?”

Mouldy looked astonished. “Isn’t this the guy who snatched Fausta?”

“Let’s let the cops run things, Mouldy,” I suggested kindly. “This sort of thing is their business.”

Mouldy’s expression turned dubious, but since he had never quite gotten over the army habit of regarding me as his sergeant, he subsided temporarily in order to await developments.

Day turned to Patrolman Thompkins. “You’re certain he didn’t slip across to the next building while you were making your last radio report?”

“He couldn’t have,” the patrolman said positively. “The guy who. owns the tavern says there’s no trap onto the roof. And the only two windows on the areaway side aren’t anywhere near the windows in the next building. He might have reached the roof if he was athletic enough by climbing out a rear window and pulling himself up over the edge of the parapet, but he couldn’t have done it in the time it took me to get the areaway covered. Besides, it would take a Tarzan to make the roof that way, and from what I saw of this guy, he was no Tarzan.”

“Maybe he went down instead of up,” the inspector suggested.

This time the lieutenant answered. “No, sir. I checked both the back of the building and the side Thompkins couldn’t see. It’s a thirty-foot drop from the windows on both sides, and there’s nothing to climb down. The back is a brick courtyard and the side a concrete sidewalk. If he’d jumped, he’d be lying on the ground with a couple of broken legs.”

The inspector scowled across at the windows again. “The same things that make it tough for him to get out make it tough for us to get in. And I want this lad taken alive. He’s an important witness in a homicide case, and also we don’t know where he’s concealed the woman he kidnaped. How do you plan getting him out of there, Lieutenant?”

“I’ve sent for a scaling ladder. I thought I’d get some men on the roof next door and have them put a few tear-gas shells through the windows. That should bring him back down the stairway. Meantime I thought I’d take a crack at talking him down as soon as things out here were organized.”

Things had pretty well organized themselves while we talked to the lieutenant. Ropes were now tautly stretched across the street and across two sides of the corner intersection, and police had managed to get all the curious onlookers beyond the ropes. Men with riot guns kept a steady watch on. the dark windows of the flat.

After glancing around, the lieutenant said, “I guess everything’s under control. I’m going inside.”

And casually he stepped out into the glare of the spotlights and started across the street. Clamping down on his unlighted cigar, Day immediately followed.

I hesitated for a moment. Then, hoping that Alberto was occupied at the moment in peering out either the side or back windows instead of the front, I started across briskly.

I kept my eyes fixed on the upper windows, noting both were raised a few inches from the bottom and expecting to see a gun barrel protrude from one or the other at any instant. It could hardly have taken more than thirty seconds to cross the street, but the time seemed to drag interminably.

I was halfway across before I realized Mouldy Greene was right by my side. I realized it when he suddenly asked, “What’s there to whistle about?”

As a kid I had lived for a time in a neighborhood near a cemetery, and I recall that whenever I had to traverse that particular block at night, I always whistled “Yankee Doodle.” Now, with something of a shock, I realized I was whistling “Yankee Doodle” through my teeth.

Cutting it off in the middle of a bar, I snarled at Mouldy with unnecessary savagery, “I’m whistling past the graveyard.”

Either Alberto wasn’t at the front windows when we crossed, or I had overestimated his probable resentment at my fingering him, because no shot came from above. I breathed a sigh of relief as we passed through the tavern’s front door.

Inside I discovered the tavern consisted of a single long room with a bar running lengthwise from one end to the other. An electric grill at the far end seemed to be all the kitchen the place possessed. Near the front door was the phone booth from which Alberto had presumably called, and the rear wall contained three doors. Over one a sign read “Rest Rooms.” The second I assumed was the rear exit, for the third door was open and I could see a stairway going upward as far as the first landing. That was as far as the stairs could be seen, because at the landing they made a ninety-degree left turn.

With both elbows on the bar to steady himself, a uniformed cop covered the stairway with a riot gun. Another cop, a pistol in his hand, waited to one side of the stairway door. In the far corner, well out of the probable line of fire, a middle-aged man who was apparently the tavern owner sat at a table nervously sipping at a beer.

“Any sound from up there?” the lieutenant asked the cop with the riot gun.

Without removing his eyes from the stairway, the policeman said, “Not a peep, sir. You sure he’s up there?”

“He has to be. There isn’t anywhere he could have gone.”

He started toward the stairs, but I stopped him by calling, “Lieutenant.”

When he turned to look at me, I said, “I’ve had a couple of dealings with this boy, Lieutenant. I also know more about the background of this situation than you do. I think if I talked to him, I might be able to advance some arguments for giving himself up that you wouldn’t know about.”

He eyed me for a moment, then glanced questioningly at Warren Day. The inspector looked me over moodily.

Finally Day said, “If you just want to talk, Moon. From the foot of the stairs. I don’t want you going up there and getting shot.”

“I’m not anxious to get shot,” I told him.

Since my experience of walking into my flat and being confronted by Alberto’s gun, I had been carrying my P-38. Now I drew it, clicked off the safety and approached the foot of the stairs.

“Listen, Al,” I called. “The place is surrounded and you haven’t got a chance. But we’re more interested in the guy who hired you than we are in you, Al. Give yourself up and turn state’s evidence, and the cops will give you every break possible. We want Walter Ford’s killer more than we want you.”

When there was still no sound, I called in a louder tone, “If you’re willing to put the finger on Ford’s killer, I’ll even talk Fausta into dropping the kidnap charge, providing you haven’t harmed her. So far all you’ve done is winged a cop. Shoot it out and you’re either going to get killed, or kill somebody and end up in the gas chamber. Give up and I’ll guarantee to do everything possible to get you a light sentence.”

All the answer I got was more silence.

A little impatiently I yelled, “How about it, Al?”

The answer came suddenly and unexpectedly. Apparently he leaped like a cat from the top step to the landing, for one instant the landing was vacant, and the next instant he was crouched there as though he had materialized out of thin air, the twin of the Colt Woodsman I had taken from him gripped in his hand and centering on my head.

My own gun was drooping downward at a forty-five-degree angle, and there was no time to bring it up. There was no time to do anything but drop flat on my face.

His small-caliber gun popped just as I started to drop, and the shot was so close I could feel the heat of the slug on the top of my head as it whispered by. As I rolled to one side of the doorway, it popped twice more, gouging splinters from the wooden floor where I had sprawled a micro-second before.

Then the riot gun roared.

It was all over when I climbed shakily to my feet. The young gunman had taken the full blast of the riot gun square in the chest. He was dead before he started to tumble down the stairs.

“I wanted that man alive!” Warren Day screeched at the man who had fired.

The cop looked abashed. “He was shooting, sir,” he said timidly. “He had legs!” Day yelled at him, his long nose nearly dead white. “Couldn’t you shoot his legs?”

“Oh, stop your yelling,” I said, irked at him. “The only way you could have taken him alive was to have me dead. He didn’t want to be alive. He wanted to go down shooting, like a two-bit hero. The officer here just did what he had to.”

Day swung his thin nose at me. “When I want your advice on what to say to my subordinates, I’ll ask for it, Moon!”

“If you don’t want it, don’t practice your Simon Legree personnel policy in front of me then,” I snarled back at him. “Pull it in private.”

We stood glaring at each other, both of us juvenilely taking out our rage at the loss of our star witness on the other, until Mouldy Greene brought us back to earth.

Mouldy asked of no one in particular, “Now how the hell we going to ask him where he hid Fausta?”