Anything But Saintly

Chapter 18

His gaze still fixed on Stark, Artie raised his coffee cup and took a slow sip. When he set it down again, he said quietly, “We’ll start at the beginning, Jake. Matt says he and you had some conversation earlier tonight. What was it about?”

Jake nervously ran a hand over the back of his bull-neck. “He’s got a witness who saw me going into Kitty’s apartment house. He had me cold, so I hadda explain what happened. I convinced him I was telling the truth about finding her already dead when I got there, but he was gonna pull me in as a material witness. I talked him into giving me twenty-four hours to turn up the killer myself. I said I’d get you to gather all the girls together and find out everything we could about Kitty’s private life. I figured we could get more out of them than the cops ever could.”

Artie glanced at me.

“That was about the substance of our conversation,” I said.

Artie turned his attention back to his aide. In a silky voice he said, “But instead of relaying this conversation to me, you decided to handle things yourself, huh?”

“I didn’t want to bother you,” Jake muttered lamely.

Artie gave him a smile that made Jake turn even paler. “That was considerate of you, Jake. Now we’ll move on to the important question. A couple of minutes ago you started to say that when you set Matt up, you were just following orders. I was under the impression you took orders from me, and I sure as hell didn’t instruct you to do anything about Matt. Whose orders were you following?”

Jake rubbed the back of his neck again. “Nobody’s. I didn’t say nothing about orders. What I meant was I was just following these guys’ suggestions.”

“What guys?”

Sweat beaded Jake’s upperlip. His face was strained with the effort of heavy concentration as he attempted to come up with a story both of us would swallow. Unfortunately, for him, he didn’t possess enough imagination to swing it.

He said, “I was worried about admitting to a cop that I’d been to Kitty’s place. So I called this friend of mine and told him about it. He said I should phone the sarge and make a date to meet him somewhere. Then he and his buddy would waylay him and scare him into forgetting what I’d told him.”

This was so patently an invention of the moment, it would have amused me if I hadn’t just come from an attempt on my life.

“Who was this friend you called?” I growled.

He licked his lips. “You wouldn’t know him.”

“I know the two goons who tried to take me, because they’re both in the morgue. Come up with your friend’s name and we’ll see if it matches either of theirs.”

Stark looked from me to Artie and back again with a trapped expression on his face. It was apparent he didn’t have the slightest idea who had waylaid me, which meant he had only been a tool in the plot, and not the instigator of it.

I decided it was time to blast the truth from him by bringing up my reserve guns. I said, “You know, Artie, when you alibied Jake to the homicide cops, I suppose you felt you had a certain obligation to protect him because you had sent him to Kitty’s place. Naturally you believed his story about finding her dead when he arrived because, so far as you knew, he didn’t have a reason in the world to kill her. But actually he had an even better motive to kill her than you did.”

Artie frowned at me. “What motive?”

“To shut her up. He could have been afraid she’d tell you he was the guy who’d been encouraging your girls to roll customers. He gets a percentage of the take for guaranteeing to protect them from you in case they ever got caught.”

Little Artie slowly ran his gaze up and down the burly frame of his right-hand man.

Jake said loudly, “That’s a lie, Artie!”

“You sure of what you’re saying, Matt?” Artie asked in a quiet tone.

“Absolutely certain. I can take you to a girl right now who will verify it.”

“You won’t have to,” Artie said in the same quiet tone. “I believe you. I guess it’s time to stop fooling around and get the answers to everything.”

He started to move toward the larger man. The swagger was gone from his walk and he moved as gracefully as a cat. His face was absolutely blank of emotion and, despite a sixty-pound-weight disadvantage, there was such a lethal air about him, I began to feel sorry for Stark.

Jake Stark must have weighed a hundred and ninety pounds, but he also must have seen the little man in action before because not only his upper lip but his whole face was suddenly drenched with sweat.

“Hold it a minute, Artie,” he said, raising his palm. “You don’t think I’d pull a stunt like that on my own, do you?”

Artie stopped a pace from him. “I’ll listen,” he said carefully.

“Nick told me to do it.”

Little Artie stood perfectly still. “Nick Bartkowiak?” he asked incredulously.

“A long time ago,” Stark said in a rapid voice, eager to get the words in before Artie decided to close the distance between them. “You think I’d cross you on my own? I got better sense than that. But what could I do when Nick gave me the order and told me not to dare mention it to you? Nobody says no to Nick. Would you, if he told you to cross me?”

Artie stood there with an absolutely stupefied expression on his face.

Stark went on in the same rapid voice, “It was Nick I phoned after talking to Rudd tonight. He said not to discuss it with you, that he’d take care of Rudd. Then he said to call him back in a half-hour. When I called back, he told me to start phoning Rudd’s apartment every five minutes until I got an answer. When I did, I was to get him to meet me somewhere. That’s all I had to do with it. I never asked Nick what he planned and he never told me. But I never even thought he meant to have a cop burned.”

This time the man was telling the truth, I knew. My old friend Nick Bartkowiak, who only that afternoon had so solicitously inquired after all the members of my family, had ordered my death. He had calmly picked up the telephone and issued orders so that Ray Zek was staked out somewhere near my apartment house parking lot when I arrived home. The man probably had climbed into the back seat as soon as I was out of sight, then simply waited for Jake’s phone call to send me running back to the car. It all must have been planned as quickly and as casually as the ordinary businessman would plan some legal maneuver to outwit a competitor.

Why would Nick Bartkowiak go to such lengths to protect Jake Stark from arrest, I wondered? Then immediately I realized there could be only one answer. It was vitally important to him that no one discover Jake was secretly operating under his orders. And almost certainly Jake would have told everything he knew under prolonged police interrogation.

All at once I understood the whole pattern of Bartkowiak’s thinking. The knowledge didn’t put me any closer to a solution of Kitty Desmond’s murder, but at least it cleared up what had happened tonight. Despite my outrage at the racketeer politician ordering to have me killed, I suddenly began to laugh. I couldn’t help it. Nick Bartkowiak’s Machiavellian ways struck me as so hilarious, I almost rolled on the floor.

Artie and Stark both stared at me without understanding. I finally got myself under control enough to choke out, “He’s tying a can to your tail, Artie. He’s through with you. He...” I dissolved into laughter again.

Artie waited patiently for me to laugh myself out, his face expressionless but a trifle pale. When I finally recovered and had wiped my eyes, he said with an effort to keep his voice steady, “Want to let us in on the joke, Matt? What do you mean, Nick’s through with me?”

“Don’t you see it?” I said with a grin. “You’re too strongly intrenched just to shove aside without cause. But for some reason he wants to replace you. Maybe you’re getting too big for your boots. I don’t know. It’s hard to figure anybody as devious as Nick.”

“Go on,” he said in his quietest tone.

“You’ve got too many friends in the district for him just to boot you out. He had to have a reason. So he arranged for some of your girls to start rolling customers, then came to you with the story that he’d heard rumors of the rollings and wanted them stopped. They didn’t stop. That made it look as though you were deliberately violating his instructions because everybody in the know is aware of the iron control you have over the girls. Probably he’s been complaining about it all over the district to all the little ward heelers you think you have in your pocket and who would raise hell if he tried to unload you without good cause. At the same time he’s probably been planting the idea that he can’t put up with such insubordination forever.”

I paused to emit a chuckle and Artie said. “How would you know he’s doing all that?”

“I don’t. It’s just an educated guess based on some information you don’t know about.”

“What information?”

“This afternoon he finished lowering the boom on you. He came into headquarters and confided in me all the trouble he was having with you. He gave me the green light to go after your girls, but not to touch you. This was supposed to be a disciplinary action to jerk you back into line, but of course it was nothing of the sort. If we touched you, a lot of people were going to want to know why, but nobody was going to get upset about some of your whores being arrested, except you. And since you’d take your complaint to Nick, he could stall you off. We started pulling in your girls tonight. See what Nick will have accomplished when the arrests are listed in the morning paper?”

“I’m beginning to,” Artie said coldly. “But you tell me.”

“He’ll have the final piece of string to tie a can to your tail. He can spread the story that you’ve gotten so far out of line, even his political influence can’t protect your racket any more, because the police commissioner will only sit still for so much. His story will make sense, because everybody knows old Baldy Mason won’t put up with rackets that start to raise a public protest. He’ll say you’re endangering the whole setup by practically asking for a full-scale police investigation of every racket in the district. And all your little ward-heeling friends, concerned about their own petty rackets, will desert you in droves. They’ll stand aside and cheer when Nick sends you tearing down obscurity alley with a can clanking behind you. Who do you figure your replacement is?”

Little Artie smiled without humor. The color had returned to his face and his eyes were glinting with the sparkle of battle. “Nobody. My tail is allergic to tin cans.”

Jake Stark said in a tentative voice, “Nick’s been grooming Whitey Sysol for something, Artie. Maybe...”

“Shut up, you miserable moron,” Artie said in a cold voice.

Jake gulped and lapsed into silence.