Black Mask (Vol. 21, No. 8 — November, 1938)

Curtain Call by Hugh B. Cave

Suicide or murder? This cop plays out his strange hunch mercilessly.

“The trouble with you,” I said, glaring at Jojo Evans, “you think everything connected with the detecting business is funny. You’re like a lot of guys that write these dumb detective stories. Murder is just something to crack wise about.”

I felt that way. It could have been the rain, and most likely part of it was but, whatever the reason or the excuse, I was in a mood that morning to bite the head off a rattlesnake. And it didn’t help to have Percy Joseph Evans sitting there with his feet on my desk, kidding me about my attentions to a corpse.

I’m dumb. I admit it. Any other dick on the force would have taken one look at that corpse and scribbled “suicide” down in his hip-pocket notebook; but yours truly, Thompson the Trouble Seeker, had to stand right up in public and call it murder.

Why? Because it should have been murder. This guy Vanetti had been begging for it.

Only it wasn’t. Or was it?

I walked into the private sanctum of

W. J. Reynolds, my boss, and said morbidly: “You sent for me, Chief?” He scowled at me.

“Close the door, Thompson.”

“Sure.” I closed it.

“Sit down.”

“Sure.” I sat. Two other men were sitting, too, and both gave me a good looking-at. One was Detective Inspector Bill Donahue; the other was Mr. Nick Lomac. Putting those two together in the same room was like parking St. Peter alongside the devil’s number one furnace stoker. Bill Donahue was big, gray at the temples, middle-aged and honest. Nick Lomac was small, slim, black-haired and vicious. A politician.

The Chief narrowed his gray eyes at me and pulled a scowl across his mouth. He was a good man, Reynolds. He’d been around a long time and without him Kolb City would have been a heap crookeder than it was.

He said, “The papers have printed a statement by you, Thompson, about the death of Leon Vanetti. An unauthorized statement and a most embarrassing one. Perhaps you can explain?”

“You know these newspaper reporters as well as I do,” I muttered.

“Meaning?”

“I spoke out of turn and some squirt scribbled it down.”

“Then you don’t actually believe Vanetti was murdered?”

“Listen,” I said, hauling in a breath because it was going to take a bit of time. “I’ll tell you exactly what happened. I was around here last night with Joe Evans, waiting for curfew, when this call came in from the joint where Vanetti had a room. I took the call myself. It was Vanetti’s landlady.

“She was in a lather about something, but she talks with a spaghetti accent and it took me at least five minutes to unravel the spaghetti. What she was trying to tell me was this: Some woman telephoned and wanted to speak with Vanetti. So Mrs. Fretas, the landlady, hoofed upstairs to Vanetti’s room and knocked, and got no answer. She figured he must be asleep, because she herself’d been sitting out on the front steps when he came in an hour ago, and he hadn’t gone out again since. So she knocked again.”

I was deliberately dragging it out, not to hear myself talk but to see what the story would do to Nick Lomac. Apparently it did nothing. Lomac sat there with indifference warped all over his swarthy face and listened to me. The way you’d listen to a Sunday morning sermon after being out on a binge the night before.

“So Mrs. Fretas,” I said, “put an eye to the keyhole, to see if Vanetti was in, and she saw him hanging there.”

“You and Evans went over there?” the Chief said.

He knew we’d gone over there. He was just pulling it out of me for the benefit of Nick Lomac. It didn’t take a swami to size this thing up. Nick Lomac was sore because of my murder talk, and he wanted a complete, detailed explanation, and he was influential enough to get it.

“When we got there,” I said, “we had to bust in the door. Mrs. Fretas didn’t have an extra key because, so she says, she gave her spare to Vanetti, a couple of days ago. He lost his and asked for another. So we broke in and found him hanging there.”

Nick Lomac opened his mouth for the first time. “What was he hung with, Thompson?”

“Fishline.”

“Fishline?”

“Yeh. The kind you catch cod on. Heavy stuff, tarred. It seems Vanetti did a lot of fishing in his spare time and had a couple of tackle boxes under his bed.”

Nick Lomac had an imagination. He put his fingers up to his throat and rubbed them around the edge of his starched collar, and winced. I didn’t blame him. That line had almost sawed Vanetti’s head off.

“So you and Evans walked in,” the Chief said, “and found him hanging there. The door was locked. The windows were locked. On the floor you found the chair on which Vanetti stood while adjusting the noose. That’s right, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

“You cut him down?”

“We cut him down.”

“Then what?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Just police routine.”

“But when the reporters arrived, you told them it was murder.”

“That’s not so,” I insisted. “I just warned them to leave things alone because it might be murder.”

“But, damn it, Thompson they quoted you as saying it was murder!”

“That was their mistake.”

The Chief glared at me, then let me have it. He possessed a nice vocabulary, most of which he picked up while handling mules in the War. Ordinarily I’d have grinned at him, but with Nick Lomac there I didn’t. Because the lacing I was getting was solely for Lomac’s benefit, and I knew it.

When it was over I muttered, under my breath and got up and walked out, pretending to be sore.

Jojo Evans still had his dogs on my desk. He grinned at me. “Way out here,” he said, “I heard the biggest part of it. There’s one word he uses that really gets me. That ‘scurrilousness.’ Some day I’m gonna look that up. What’s it mean?”

Pippo’s lunch cart has the best coffee you ever tasted, and he deals it to you by way of his black-eyed daughter Anna, who stands five-three and has a smile that wide.

I slupped the coffee and thought things over. This wasn’t an ordinary case of detecting. There are standard jobs and there are crazy quilts. In the former you smell along a given trail, knowing more or less what ought to be at the end of it. You just keep on smelling until you uncover the source of the stench. But in this particular job there were too many possible angles. Smells emanated from it the way tentacles curl out from an octopus.

First-off, the world was never going to miss Vanetti. The air would be cleaner with him underground. And I could name at least ten persons to whom his demise would bring a great big belly laugh. So, without any deep thinking at all, you could practically fill a phone book with the names of suspects.

And then again, maybe Vanetti’d really hung himself.

I drank a second mug of coffee, just to see Anna Pippo smile at me. Jojo Evans slid onto the stool beside me.

“There’s going to be hell to pay,” he said.

I glared. “Why?”

“Nick Lomac didn’t ask to have you fired. I eavesdropped.”

“Why should he ask to have me fired?”

“He’s sore.”

I said, “That guy is always sore. He just hops from one sore spell to another. Last week he burned up because a right guy got elected to fill that vacancy on the school committee. The week before that he had pups because Mitchell Brothers got the contract for that high school.”

“Only this time,” Evans said, “he didn’t blow up. He didn’t shoot off his mouth.” He gave me a fishy stare. “I’m only the police photog man but I know this time, Thompson, that it goes a lot deeper. The Lomac guy actually told the Chief to lay off you. Said you only did what you thought was your duty.”

“Real nice of him,” I snapped.

Evans reached across me for the sugar. “You keep out of dark alleys, cop. You watch your step.”

I didn’t think much about it. There was too much else on my mind. “You get those pictures finished yet?” I asked.

He shook his head. I dropped my check into his coffee and walked out and drove up to Ancell Street, to the rooming house where Mr. Leon Vanetti had committed suicide — perhaps.

It was a crummy dive, as you’d expect in a neighborhood like that. The name of Ancell Street got to be so bad at one time that respectable residents at the cleaner end of it petitioned the city fathers to change its label. Mrs. Fretas’ rooming house offered its high class tenants a nice respectable view of a dump on the side and an abandoned brewery on the other.

The downstairs door was open and I walked in The door of the landlady’s apartment was open, too. Mr. Fretas was parked in a rocking chair in his shirt-sleeves, reading a paper, and the missus was jammed into another chair, the whole two hundred and fifty pounds of her, peeling spuds.

I told her I was going upstairs to have another look around.

“Sure,” she said. Her old man didn’t even look up.

Vanetti’s room was second floor front, and when I got into it I just stood there looking around, wondering why I’d come. It wasn’t anything I could put a finger on, but that room fascinated me, just the way certain scenes in a movie do things to you. As a room it was worth just about what Vanetti’d paid for it — four bucks a week. The bed was up against one wall, a seedy green carpet covered the floor, and the furniture was heavy old-fashioned stuff salvaged from a junk store somewhere.

I felt dumb, gaping there. Something in that room was getting me down. I walked around it slowly, poking bed, the bureau. I hefted the chair which Jojo and I’d found overturned on the floor. I decided what the hell, maybe I was crazy. But still I couldn’t shake that feeling.

I hiked downstairs again, and Mrs. Fretas was still peeling potatoes. I sat down, envying her old man because he looked so all-fired comfortable. A spud dropped with a noisy plop into Mrs. Fretas’ bucket of water and I asked:

“Did Vanetti have many phone calls?”

She blinked her eyes at me. She had a face like an inflated basketball and her eyes were like imperfections in the leather. “Phone calls?” she echoed. “Why, no, I don’t think so, officer.”

“Who was the girl called him last night? Know?”

She shook her head, very solemn. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Did she ever call before?”

“No. No girl ever call him before, which I know of.”

“And she didn’t give her name, hey?”

“She just say, ‘Please, I wish to speak with Mr. Vanetti. You call him to the phone, please.’ ”

I was wasting time. Still, that phone call could have been important. I wondered if by any streak of long-shot luck I’d be able to trace it.

There was another angle, though, which might prove to be more valuable at the moment. I lit a cigarette, watched the skin curl off a potato for a moment, then said: “You have keys to most of your rooms, don’t you, Mrs. Fretas?”

She said, “Yes,” and labored around to point to a row of hooks on the wall. Each hook held a couple of keys and the keys were tagged.

“Did Vanetti lose his keys very often?”

“Oh, no. Just once.”

“You remember exactly when that was?”

I didn’t think she would, but after scowling at a potato for a couple of minutes, she surprised me. “Today,” she said, “is Thursday. Now let me see. Mr. Vanetti, he kill himself yesterday, which is Wednesday. The day before that I go to the movies with Mrs. Molinoff. That is Tuesday. So it is Monday Mr. Vanetti lose his key.”

“Monday, hey?”

“Monday. I am sitting here reading the noosepaper. My husband, he is go out for some beer. It is maybe ten o’clock when Mr. Vanetti comes in. He goes straight up the stairs. Then he comes down again and he says, ‘Mrs. Fretas, I lose my key I am afraid. You give me another, please, and tomorrow I get a new one made for myself and give your key back to you.’ So I give him my key and he goes upstairs again.”

“Ten o’clock Monday night, eh?” I said. “I don’t suppose you’d have any idea where he went that night.”

She shook her head. “No-o. He go to the doctor that afternoon, I remember, because his leg trouble him But where he go at night...” She shrugged her shoulders.

I almost had it then. The reason for my queer ideas about that upstairs room, I mean. The doctor. Vanetti’d been to a doctor because his leg troubled him. A couple of years ago Vanetti’d been banged up in an automobile accident which had left him with a limp.

I almost had it. It came up to me like a wave on a beach, whispering closer, closer, and then suddenly receding without having washed out the cobwebs in my brain. Like a name you almost but can’t quite remember. Like a strain of music, or a voice on the telephone. Close, but not quite.

I closed my eyes and conjured up a remembered him: Small, thin, ratty in face and figure, dipping along like a two-wheeled cart with one wheel off center. I made fists of my hands and tried to force my brain to think through that last thin layer of mist. But it was no go.

I sat there, struggling, then gave it up. You can put yourself in a chuckle college that way. I stood up and said good night to Mrs. Fretas and her old man, and walked out of there, my face so full of scowl that it ached.

It was all over town, of course, that Vanetti’d committed suicide, and that didn’t help me a bit. When I asked my questions, I got a flock of negative head-shakes for replies, and I put those questions to citizens who couldn’t possibly have been so void of information. I asked bartenders in joints where Vanetti had hung out. I asked men who had palled around with him. They just didn’t want to remember. Had any of those muggs seen Vanetti Monday night? Hell, no!

I made a nuisance of myself for two days. I covered the town like an epidemic, visiting every possible place the guy could have been to. But he hadn’t been anywhere. So far as Monday night was concerned, Vanetti could have hung himself Monday morning.

I had a talk with Bill Donahue, who d sat in on my little conference with Nick Lomac and my Chief. Bill didn’t get around much lately. A seige of the flu had taken plenty out of him, and the doctors had warned him to ease up. But he still had the best brain in the department. Put that guy flat on his back, lop off his arms and legs, and with his brain alone he could solve more cases than most of the healthy lads who do their thinking on the hoof. Including me.

He heard me out and then spent a long time looking at me, with a solemn frown on his rugged face. Finally he said, “Why don’t you drop this business, Thompson? After all, Vanetti was just a heel. No one misses him.”

“And besides,” I said, “I have no proof he was murdered. I can’t even convince myself.”

“Huh?”

“You’re telling me,” I said, “what Joe Evans told me. Keep out of dark alleys. Pull in my horns before someone breaks them off and rams them down my throat. Oke, Bill. You want me to go on living, and I like you for it. On the other hand I’m single — no wife, no kids — and I’m an insatiable glutton for punishment. And this thing has me goofy.”

He did his best to dissuade me, and he failed. I’m a sap. I’m a dope. I’m always going into barrooms and gulping down some screwy concoction the barkeep claims will knock your hat off.

So Bill said, “Well, if you must find out where Vanetti was Monday night, try number 1 °Casavant Street. And be careful.”

I thanked him. On my way out I bumped into Jojo Evans. “Listen, you,” I snorted. “When do we get a look at those pictures of the room and body?”

“I’m gonna do them up tonight,” he informed me.

I told him he’d better. Then I drove out to Casavant Street.

You wouldn’t expect to run into a like Vanetti at Number Ten Casavant. We have a Social Register in our town and a lot of those lads with too much money and nothing to do like to play around; and Number Ten Casavant is where they do it.

What I mean, you have to be properly dressed, properly named and quite properly heeled; otherwise your ambitions are deflated at the front door and you are reminded that for ordinary bums like you there are beer joints, bowling alleys and backroom crap games.

The police shut both eyes when looking in that direction. It would have been voluntary suicide for any mere cop to get tough with that glittering collection of money-changers.

I spoke to Paul, the gate-keeper. I said, “How’s everything tonight, Paul?” and he said, “Oh, so-so. Quiet.” I’d been there before. Venny Hamlin was always very nice to cops, provided the cops were nice to Venny.

“Mr. Hamlin around, Paul?” I asked.

Paul nodded.

I strolled in, and at that hour the place was a morgue. A couple of blue book laddies were sipping cocktails at the fancy bar, and off in a corner four well dressed men were silently playing with a deck of cards, and that was all. I hiked along a soft red carpet, went down the hall to Venny Hamlin’s office and knocked.

Venny was a bit surprised when I entered. He arched his eyebrows and said, “Well! My friend, Detective Thompson!” He pushed a box of cigars toward me, leaned back in his chair and frowned. “Sight-seeing or what?”

“Sleuthing,” I said.

“Here?”

“I’m as surprised as you are. The tip almost floored me.”

He hung onto his scowl. It didn’t mean anything. Venny Hamlin was really a good egg when you got to know him. No gangster background, no gutter upbringing. Out of college four years ago, he’d chauffeured for some old gal with a heap of bank books. This Number Ten Casavant Street was a natural outgrowth of a dawning realization that the money-money people didn’t mind losing a few dollars if they could be entertained while parting with them.

I said, “Strictly off the record, Venny, I’m checking the activities of one Leon Vanetti. He was here Monday night.”

“Leon Vanetti? That the Vanetti who hung himself?”

I nodded.

“I don’t think I know him.”

“You might not, by name,” I told him. “But he was here Monday night. Bill Donahue says he was here, and Bill’s never wrong.”

Venny shrugged.

“Listen,” I said, and described Vanetti. Described the face, the form, the limp. The limp did it.

“Right,” Venny admitted. “He was here.”

“Who brought him?”

“Why?”

“Just curious.”

He hesitated, looking very thoughtful. “Thompson,” he said finally, “you don’t want to know the answer to that.”

“Why don’t I?” I snapped.

“Look. This Vanetti is gone, forgotten. From what I’ve read in the papers, he won’t be missed any more than a case of smallpox. You, Thompson, you’re a good guy, a smart dick. You’ve got a future. You take my advice and drop this. There’s nothing in it for you except trouble some night in a dark alley.”

It was funny, and I don’t mean humorous. Joe Evans had handed me that same line; now I was getting it from the sachem of a gambling casino. Lay off.

I didn’t press him for more. I knew one thing, anyway, and it was big enough to chew on for a while. I said, “Well, thanks, pal,” and walked out.

Business, I noticed, was picking up. There were three more cars outside now than when I’d entered.

I piled into my own jalopy and drove back to town, slowly, thinking about Leon Vanetti and his limp, and that room at Mrs. Fretas’ place. I had a lot to think about, and I must have driven three miles before I waked up to the fact that someone in a machine behind was more than a little interested in me.

I slowed to a nice smooth twenty on a four-lane highway. By rights the fellow should have whizzed past. He didn’t. I reached up, tipped the rear-view mirror to a better angle and hoofed the jalopy up to forty. He came right along.

One of Venny Hamlin’s men? I didn’t think so. True, Venny had gently tried to nudge me off this job, and perhaps he had other reasons than an interest in the future state of my health, but this particular bit of play was crude. Venny Hamlin was never crude.

I did my level best for a mile to make that lad go by me, so I could get a look at his face, but it didn’t work. When I slowed, he slowed. When I stopped — just once, as an experiment — the louse pulled off into one of those shady glens built by WPA to accommodate neckers and picnic hounds.

Disgusted, I said to hell with him and gave my jalopy the gun. He wasn’t behind me when I turned into Mitchell Street, where I live.

And yet, I wasn’t alone.

I’m a quiet guy with few bad habits, and I selected that Mitchell Street apartment house three years ago because in more ways than one it’s soothing to jaded nerves. You don’t hear street cars. You don’t have kids yawping on the sidewalks before breakfast. I’m harmless, I like to be left alone; and now, damn it, I was being watched. Not only followed, but waited for.

Because when I parked my crate at the curb and got out of it, a lad across the street ducked quickly for the shelter of a doorway. And on Mitchell Street people don’t move that fast unless they have guilty consciences.

I stood there and stared holes in the doorway, my mind half made up to go over there and yank him out and demand of him how-come. Nothing makes me sorer than to be spied on. But I let it go, knowing the guy would most likely have vanished by the time I crossed over. And besides, from the window of my front room upstairs, I’d probably get a better look at him.

I walked up and let myself in, and my phone was ringing. I scooped it up. “Thompson speaking.”

It was Jojo Evans. He was excited. “Listen,” he said. “You remember those pictures I took?” And before I could reply, to tell him I not only remembered them but was wornout with waiting for them, he rushed on: “I developed ’em tonight, Tommy, and they’re hot. They’re dynamite! You get over here quick!”

“Right over,” I said, and hung up.

I went right out. The guy across the street could wait, I told myself, until I saw those pictures. If he wanted a look at me hard enough, he’d be there again, some other time. I breezed downstairs and pushed my jalopy across town with my heart pounding and fire in my nostrils.

Those pictures taken of Vanetti’s body and the room in which he died were going to tell me something. They were going to explain the queer feeling I had. Otherwise I was going to be the sorest Homicide dick this side of the place where detectives go when they decompose.

Evans lived in a swank little apartment house overlooking the park lake. I scraped a fender getting the car parked, and near pulverized a lady with a poodle when I barged into the place. My thumb went to the bell and stayed there. I’d been twenty minutes getting over from Mitchell Street, I figured, and that was nineteen minutes too long when you smelled the end of a trail.

No answer.

“Damn it,” I stormed, “that’s like him, to go out for a beer at a time like this!”

I stepped out, looked for his car. It was down the line a short way, snugly parked. He couldn’t have gone far on foot, I told myself, so I sat on the white steps in the lobby and waited for him.

Five minutes, ten, fifteen. Twice I rang the bell again. And he didn’t come.

I buzzed the janitor. I snapped, “Detective Thompson, Police Department!” at him, and in a couple of minutes he came wobbling up from his basement suite, fat and anxious and out of breath.

He let me into Jojo’s apartment, and the place was empty.

I looked around. I barged from bedroom to living-room and back again; into the kitchenette, the bathroom. There was a faint smell of chemicals around the joint, and in the bathroom on a shelf were some wet white enamel trays. But no Jojo, no pictures.

I glared at the janitor. “I suppose you’ve been down cellar. You wouldn’t know if Mr. Evans had any visitors in the past half-hour.”

He wagged his head. “I wouldn’t know.”

It looked bad. After calling me, he wouldn’t have gone out alone on the trail of any clue furnished by those pictures. He’d have waited. Unless, may-me, he’d rushed over to Headquarters.

I phoned headquarters. They hadn’t seen him. I was worried as hell.

I was a lot more worried when I got through shuffling around and began to think the thing out. You look. Jojo’d phoned me to hustle over and see those pictures. Hot pictures. He’d been expecting me. Those pictures were going to prove that I was right about Vanetti’s suicide being no suicide.

Vanetti’d been murdered. His murderers were wise to the fact that I was smelling along and getting warmer. They’d had me watched. More than likely they’d had Joe Evans watched, too, because the photographer was with me when we first laid eyes on the corpse.

Suppose that telephone conversation was overheard? Suppose the wire was tapped?

I was at Headquarters before I got things straightened out to my own satisfaction, and by that time I had the jitters. It wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d found the pictures; but their absence meant that whoever walked Jojo out of that apartment had confiscated the pictures also. That was bad. Those pictures were hot. They’d burn ’em. And unless we worked fast, lightning fast, they’d take steps to put Jojo out of the way, too.

I boiled into Headquarters and spilled it, the whole of it, because this was no time to play lone wolf. I threw it at the Chief in one big chunk and he turned pale. Then I demanded Bill Donahue, because if ever we needed a man with brains, with uncanny ability to see through fog, this was it. But the Detective Inspector wasn’t there. He wouldn’t be, the Chief informed me.

“They took him to the hospital this afternoon, on a stretcher. His heart again.”

I could have cried. It wasn’t fair to put a mastermind like Donahue in hospital when the life of a swell guy might depend on him. “You send someone over there!” I croaked. “Send someone to tell him what’s happened!”

Then I barged out.

I didn’t use my own jalopy. It was too slow. I used a police car that would do eighty, and I was out at Number Ten Casavant before the engine warmed. There were two ways, I figured, to get Jojo Evans back. One was to comb the city, dig into every possible hide-out in search of him. It wouldn’t work in time. He’d be dead before we found him.

The other way was to smash the Vanetti business wide open and put a finger on the man or men responsible. They were the ones who had Joe Evans.

It began to rain when I drove into the driveway of Number Ten. I didn’t park the car. The yard was crowded and there was no room. I bailed out, ducked up the steps, and when Paul tried to block me off, not recognizing me, I shouldered him aside and barked, “Hamlin.”

Venny Hamlin was talking to a nice genteel group of blue-bloods near one of the gaming tables. I just shoved in and grabbed his arm.

“See you alone!” I snapped. “Important.”

He was smart. He took one look at the sweat on my face, the fire in my eyes, and knew better than to cross me. He didn’t even excuse himself, just nodded, jerked around and strode down the hall to his private office. I yanked the door shut behind me.

“All right,” I rapped out. “Who was he with?”

“What the hell’s eating you, Thompson?”

“Time’s precious! Who was Vanetti with when he came here Monday night?”

He took a deep breath, then shook his head. “I can’t tell you.”

I damn near lost my temper. My arms went up in the air, waving, and I yodelled: “Get me, Hamlin, this isn’t a game any more! It’s life or death! Who was he with?”

Hamlin’s right hand was in his pocket and he said softly: “I think you’d better go away and cool off, feller.” That iced me.

I was cooler at that moment than I’d been since leaving Joe Evan’s apartment. I looked at Hamlin’s pocket and said, “Listen. Get this straight. I came here to find out who Vanetti was with and I’m not leaving till I know. The guy was a big shot; otherwise you wouldn’t be so reluctant to spill his name. Big shot or not, you talk or I’ll tear the joint apart. And you with it!”

I walked straight toward him. It sounds dumb, maybe, but it wasn’t. He had nothing to gain by blasting me, except maybe a kind word from the big shot whose name, as a mere matter of ethics, he was holding back. Nothing to gain and the world to lose, because if he shot down a cop it would be the end of him.

He didn’t shoot. He showed me both his hands, heaved a sigh and said, “You win, Thompson. It was Dane Moeller.”

“Thanks,” I said. Dane Moeller was the right-hand man of Mr. Nick Lomac, and his name on Venny’s lips bore out what I had known from the beginning: that Venny would not be protecting small fry, but someone high up in the political or financial parade.

I said, “Why’d you hold back?”

He shrugged. “Moeller is one of my best customers.”

“And Nick Lomac, too?”

He nodded. “Lomac, too.”

I said gently: “O.K., Venny, I’ll play ball. My mouth stays shut provided you keep away from telephones for a while. Whatever happens, no one knows you opened your trap.”

I hiked out. The Thompson brain was beginning to click on all cylinders by then, and I had a pretty fair idea of what lay ahead. If I made mistakes, it would be lights out. Even if I didn’t make mistakes it would probably be fatal to my career as a detective, but anyhow, I knew what had to be done.

I drove back to town and headed for the palatial residence of Mr. Nick Lomac, without wasting any time at all.

Lomac had a big joint on the boulevard, something like a transplanted Spanish castle. You and I, if we pooled every cent we could get our hands on, wouldn’t be able to buy a foot of land in that district, because our names aren’t in the Blue Book. Mine isn’t, anyway. But little things like that never bothered Nick Lomac. He bought himself an acre and built himself a house. The citizens paid for most of it, thinking they were buying bricks for a new airport. And the citizens paid for most of the upkeep. Nick Lomac knew all the angles.

I rang, and a servant opened the door to me. I asked if Mr. Lomac was in, and told who I was.

When I paced into the parlor, Nick Lomac stared at me without smiling, put down the highball he was sipping, and said: “Sit down, Thompson.” The servant vanished.

I didn’t sit. I hadn’t come to do any sitting.

“Where is he, Lomac?” I said.

He blew smoke from his nostrils. Despite his lack of size, you’d never make the mistake of underestimating Nick Lomac. You’d never made it twice, anyway. He was little, but so was Napoleon, so’s your wife, probably.

“What’s the trouble, Thompson?” he said softly.

I would have enjoyed fooling around with him, but there was no time for it. A glance told me we were alone in the room, and that was enough. I said, “Where’s Joe Evans?”

“Who?”

I snapped, “You want to hear me talk?”

“Well,” he said, shrugging, “I certainly would like to have an explanation of some sort, Thompson.”

“All right, you’ll get it. But, first, let me tell you something. If Joe Evans dies, Lomac, you burn for it. So it might be a good idea if you went to a phone right now and told your gorillas to lay off. If I were you I wouldn’t take any chances.”

I watched him when I said that, but might as well have been watching the outside of an egg. His face didn’t change. His eyes didn’t blink. “I don’t know what you’re getting at,” he said.

I threw my guesses at him. “Vanetti was murdered. Moeller, your right-hand worm, stole the key to his room Monday night; then later you sent some boys up to get rid of Vanetti and fake the suicide. Joe Evans and I were wise when we saw the set-up. You had us watched. When Evans phoned me about those photographs he’d taken, those hot pictures, you snatched him. Where is he?”

It didn’t even jar him. He smiled that oily smile of his and said, “You’ve been seeing too many movies, Thompson.”

I said, “I hope you’ve seen a few. Then you’ll know what this is.”

I showed him my gun. Muzzle first. He took a quick backward step. A lot of tough lads get the jitters when you aim guns at them.

“Where is he, Lomac?” I said.

“Thompson, you’re crazy.”

“Where is he?”

He dragged in a deep breath. The kind you need when you get a hollow feeling in your mid-section. “Well,” he said, “it so happens I do know where Evans is. But I didn’t have a thing to do with him being there.”

“Where is he?”

“Over on Dexter Street. The Dexter Social Club. You go over there and you’ll find him.”

“And you’re not responsible,” I said sarcastically, “for his being there.”

“No.”

“Of course not,” I agreed. “Oke, Lomac, you’re coming with me.”

“Me?”

“If you think I’d let you out of my sight, you’re crazy.”

He threw out a sigh and shrugged his shoulders. “I’ll order the car,” he said.

I let him pick up the phone. What the hell, I had a gun on his back, and wouldn’t he be the world’s biggest fool if he tried any stunts? Besides, I couldn’t use my own car unless I forced him to drive it. You can’t drive and hold a gun on a man at the same time.

He said into the phone: “Tell Andy to bring the car around front right away.” Then he forked the phone and looked at me and said nothing.

I should have been tipped off right then. If he’d been really scared, he would have done a lot of talking. About how he wasn’t responsible for what had happened, and so forth. But he just stood there, looking at me. Looking at the gun in my fist.

In a couple of minutes a horn tooted outside. I put the gun in my pocket and kept my hand on it. “You first,” I said.

We walked out and down the hall and out the front door into the darkness, Lomac first, me a couple of steps behind. Everything was in order, I told myself. The guy was scared and he was going to take me to the joint where Joe Evans was imprisoned. When he got me there, his gorillas might make a play to keep me there, but that was a bridge we hadn’t yet reached. The point was, we were on our way.

Yeah...

So he walked down the steps toward the waiting car, and I started after him. And suddenly I was a slice of cheese between two thick slices of bread. Because while I centered my attention on Lomac’s chauffeur, reasoning that a certain amount of trouble might emanate from that direction, two lusty lads folded in on me from the flanks and laid hold of me.

They took me under the arms, where it hurts, and both of them shoved guns into my ribs. When Lomac heard my grunt, he turned. The oily smile was back on his face. I couldn’t see it because of the darkness, but I could see the gleam of his white teeth and knew he was smiling, and knew the smile was oily.

“Nice work, boys,” he said. “Nice timing.”

I felt mean, but there was nothing I could do about it. Nothing at all. One of Lomac’s lads relieved me of my gun, thumbed out the clip and put the empty weapon back in my pocket.

Lomac said, “Take him over to the club.”

They shoved me down the steps, and Lomac stepped aside as we went by. He was grinning. He said something about the average mentality of detectives and I had no come-back. He was right. If I was any example, the average mentality of detectives was low as hell.

The car door was open and they marched me up to it. Lomac tagged along so as not to miss any of the fun. He said, “Maybe you hadn’t better take him to the club after all, boys. Just chauffeur him out into the sticks some place and — lose him. You know.”

They nodded. One of them climbed into the car. The other pushed me in beside him. Then something happened.

He’d been waiting, I suppose, for me to get into the machine, where I wouldn’t be in the way if fireworks developed. At any rate, I was no sooner ensconced in the back seat when the guy stepped out from behind a clump of Lomac’s elegant shrubbery and snapped in a voice you could hear for ten miles: “That’ll be all of that! You’re pinched!”

It was like a thunderclap at a funeral. Lomac jerked around, scared stiff. The gorilla standing beside him acted the way most of those guys do — by instinct. He went for his gun,which, like a damn fool, he’d dropped back into his pocket.

Bill Donahue — it was Bill Donahue — blasted him from a distance of ten yards, and didn’t miss. The mugg folded.

Lomac was too scared to move. But the two dogs in the car, the one beside me and the one at the wheel, had no intention of being taken that easily. The one at the wheel said, “Get him, Frankie,” and jabbed a foot at the starter button. Frankie shifted sideways and whipped his gun up to the rear window.

Bill Donahue was doing a foolish thing. He was striding toward the car and making a target of himself.

It was up to me. I still had my gun. It was empty but still useful. I grabbed it, and before my pal Frankie knew that I was up to any mischief, he had a face full of gunbutt. I didn’t aim. I didn’t have time for any aiming. All I did was swing.

Frankie’s gun exploded and the bullet went into the upholstery. Frankie sagged. I swung clear of him, in time to toss up my left arm and slap a gun out of the hand of the driver, who whirled to blast me.

We mixed it, hands and elbows doing the work. The car shot across the street, bounced up on the curb and kissed a lamp post. Bill Donahue came running.

But I didn’t need Donahue. I may have been born without brains, but the Lord granted me a fair pair of dukes, and at in-fighting I’m remarkable. In a phone booth I could probably lick Joe Louis.

When Bill Donahue got the door open I was still throwing punches, but the guy wasn’t aware of it. He was out, cold. I untangled him and shoved him away from me, and got out.

“Lomac!” I muttered. “He’ll get away, Bill!”

Bill shook his head, and I looked across the street and understood. Lomac was sprawled out on his elegant lawn. I hadn’t seen Bill bop him, but he certainly wouldn’t do any running for a while. I blinked at Bill and said warmly: “You got here just in time.” Then I added: “What’s the matter?”

He didn’t look so good. His face was sort of yellow, as if he were seasick, and he swayed a little on his feet. I remembered that he’d been in a hospital. His heart again.

I grabbed him, but he shook his head, told me he was all right. “It’ll pass,” he mumbled. “Can’t be sick now, Thompson. Too much to do.”

I shot a glance at the two guys in the car, to see if they’d be apt to give us any trouble. They wouldn’t. Not for quite a time yet. I steered Bill across the street and sat him on the steps of Lomac’s mansion. “What brought you here?” I asked.

“The Chief came over to the hospital. Told me what’d happened. I skipped and came over here quick as I could.”

“Why? Why here?” I said. “You seem to know a lot about this mess.”

He gave me a queer look. “You better find Evans,” was all he said.

He was right. I went into the house and used Lomac’s phone, called Headquarters. The Chief answered and I told him what was up, where we were at. “You send some men over here to pick up Lomac’s gorillas,” I begged, “and send a raid gang over to the Dexter Social Club on Dexter Street. I’ll be there with Lomac.”

He said he would. I went outside and Bill Donahue was bending over the mugg he’d blasted. I got Lomac into my car, but Bill wouldn’t come. “I’ll stay here and wait for the boys,” he said. He still had that queer look on his face, like he was going to be sick, awful sick, and was fighting to stay on his feet until the bell rang.

So with Lomac slumped on the seat beside me, I drove over to Dexter Street, parked at the corner and waited. In a little while the boys arrived.

The Dexter Social Club is a basement joint on the south side of the street, under a hotel. The Dexter Hotel. One is a hangout for thugs, big and small, and the other is a flop-house of the lowest order. I had half a hunch, even when we paraded down the steps and into the club, that we’d wind up in one of the frowsy rooms in the hotel.

As it turned out, I was right. The club was practically deserted. A couple of guys were shooting pool. A couple more were drinking beer out of bottles and watching them. They were all plenty scared when they saw so many uniforms.

We rounded them up and went through the place in search of others, but it was wasted effort. So then we hiked up into the hotel.

A thin little guy at a desk turned white as a sheet when he saw us. He shriveled up and his teeth chattered. I grabbed his necktie. “You know what we want,” I said.

“I... I don’t!” he wailed.

“No? Well, maybe you don’t. Maybe you don’t. Who’s living here right now?”

He didn’t shove the register at me. He had one, but it was a laugh; a guy would be a sap to scribble his name in a dump like that. No. He just let his teeth chatter for a while and then said, “We... we got a guy on the top floor, a sailor, I think he is. And a couple of girls that... that—”

“Work here?” I snapped.

He nodded. “Yes. Work here, sort of. And then there’s two men in 419. That’s all.”

We hiked up the stairs to 419, and went the last few yards along the corridor on the soles of our shoes, making no noise to warn the occupants of that room of our arrival. I had a gun in my right hand and knocked with my left.

A voice said: “Who is it?”

“Lomac,” I said.

The door opened. Before the guy even had time to widen his eyes, my foot crunched against his shin. He bent double and ran his chin straight into my fist. The fist knocked him back into the room and he fell with a crash. Even if I do say so myself, that was nice timing.

I barged in, and a flock of uniforms barged in behind me. “Move,” I snapped, “and you get it!” They didn’t move. It would have been suicide.

There were three of them, and I knew them all. Knew them by name. Shorty Macrae was a greasy, sawed-off monkey with a face as grimy as his record. Tony Partucci was tall, built like a wrestler, and reputed to be dangerous as hell with a gun. The third one, Buddy Carver, was just a tough kid doing his best to graduate into major crime. Three bad babies.

They were reaching for the ceiling, and I motioned a cop forward to frisk them. He did. Then I stood in front of Tony Partucci and snarled, “O.K., where is he?”

He must have known it wouldn’t help him any to stall. Or maybe he didn’t like the looks of the fist I held ready to tag him with. He jerked his head toward a door on the other side of the room and said, “In there.”

I crossed over and jerked the door open. Jojo Evans was inside, bound to the end of an iron bed.

He didn’t say anything. Couldn’t. His mouth was smothered under layers of tape. He stared, though, and don’t ever let anyone tell you a man can’t talk with his eyes. I was as welcome as sunshine after three weeks of rain.

I got him untied and he pulled the tape off his mouth. I would have done that for him, too, but my hands were twitching so hard I probably would have torn away his teeth.

I said, “Lomac’s responsible for this. Just wait until I get my hands on that rat!”

Jojo slumped down on the bed and sat there, sucking his lips. He was a sight. His clothes were covered with floor dirt and torn half off him, and his face was a mass of bruises. They’d tossed him around, slugged him, doused him with water to bring him to again. He’d been through hell.

“How’d they get you out of your apartment?” I demanded.

“I thought it was you,” Jojo said. “Like a sap I just opened the door.”

“They took the pictures?”

He shook his head. “Couldn’t find them. That’s why I’m not dead yet. They been beating hell out of me, trying to make me tell where to look.”

I said, “Where are those pictures?”

“There aren’t any.”

“What?”

“I mean there aren’t any prints. All I did was develop the roll. It’s hanging up to dry in the apartment house airshaft.”

I gave him the fishy stare he deserved, and walked into the other room. The boys had cuffs on Lomac’s three rats and were ready to herd them out.

“Take ’em to Headquarters,” I said. “I’ll be over later with Evans and Lomac.”

I almost had to carry Jojo down the stairs. He needed a doctor, but I had something else in mind that would do him a lot more good. Mentally, anyway. We piled into my car and I dismissed the cop who was waiting there, guarding Lomac. Lomac was coming to.

I took a roundabout way to Headquarters, a route that led through a couple of nice dark alleys. We spent some time in one of those alleys. When we did reach Headquarters, Jojo felt better. So did I. I slung Lomac over my shoulder and lugged him up the steps, took him into the Chief’s private sanctum and dumped him down on a chair. He slid off it and lay in a heap on the floor.

“What the devil happened?” the Chief demanded, looking at him.

“He resisted arrest,” I explained.

The Chief said, “Oh.”

Later, Jojo and I went over to Jojo’s apartment and picked up the roll of film. I held it to a light and looked at it, while Evans stared at me. They were pictures he’d taken in Leon Vanetti’s room, with his camera. They showed the corpse hanging there, the fishline, the overturned chair.

It was the chair, of course. I’d been in that room enough times to know it, but sometimes when you’re that close to a thing you don’t see it. The pictures gave me the proper perspective.

The chair was a mighty long way from the dangling feet of Mr. Leon Vanetti. And it was a heavy hunk of furniture; I knew because I’d hefted it. And no guy with a game leg could ever have kicked it so far out from under him.

I said, “Lomac hangs for this, Jojo. At least he rots in jail for a time. They planned this thing beautifully. Moeller swiped Vanetti’s door-key out at Venny Hamlin’s place, Monday night. The rest was easy. They just laid for Vanetti and strung him up. Maybe Lomac wasn’t on the scene, but he engineered it, and when we put the pressure on those rats who kept you company at the Dexter Hotel, something’ll break wide open.”

“It would be easier,” Jojo declared, “if we knew why they hung Vanetti.”

“I think maybe we’ll find that out.”

“How?”

“From Bill Donahue. He seems to know plenty about all this.”

Bill Donahue wasn’t at Headquarters when we got back with the film. He’d stayed on his feet long enough to superintend the cleaning up at Lomac’s house; then he’d collapsed.

Jojo and I drove over to the hospital to see him.

He was in bed and he didn’t look too good. We parked beside the bed, and when the nurse went out I said, “Mister, we want to know why Lomac saw fit to rub out Vanetti.”

Bill scowled. “Any reason will be good enough for a jury,” he said.

“I know that, but just between us we’d like to know the truth. And where you fit into this thing.”

Bill handed me a long, quiet stare. “I suppose you know I’m through,” he said.

“Hooey! You’ll be up and around—”

“Not a chance,” Bill declared calmly. “As long as a month ago I knew I was through. I went to a flock of doctors, Thompson, and they all told me the same thing. Bum ticker. Lights out any time. A month at the most.”

“You mean it?” I said, feeling queer.

He nodded. “So I decided to raise a little private hell before I turned in my checks. I’ve been a dick a long time, and I’ve taken more than my share from looked politicians and plain rats like Lomac. So I snooped around, Thompson. I snooped and came across a pretty chunk of crime in which Lomac was sunk up to his greasy neck. You remember that Mason Street underpass?”

I said I remembered it. Why wouldn’t I? When the Mason street underpass caved in — by accident — three workmen died.

“Lomac was the lad who arranged that cave-in,” Bill Donahue said quietly, “because he was sore about not getting the contract in the first place. He arranged it, and Vanetti did the dirty work. I dug up positive proof. Not the kind of proof that would convince a jury, but more than enough to convince me. So... I planned a curtain call for him. Me, too, I guess.”

He hooked his mouth into a smile. To this day, when I go past the cemetery where Bill is buried, I can still see that smile. “So... I decided to scare the wits out of Lomac, just for the hell of it, Thompson. I made a few cagey phone calls. I tipped him off that the cops were wise about that underpass cave-in. I figured it would do me a lot of good to see that rat shake in his shoes for a while.”

I stared at him. After a while I said, “So he figured he’d be safer with Vanetti out of the way.”

“And that,” Bill declared, “was the mistake he made.”