Catch the Brass Ring

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

IT WAS AFTER TEN BY the time we reached the Sound. The night was moonless and shroud black, punctuated behind us by a pair of dim headlights which we lost as Kellum gunned his Buick up the hill toward Gregory Tolliver’s estate. As we reached the driveway I slipped the cylinder of Billy Drake’s .38 Special and made sure the one empty chamber hadn’t kicked back under the firing pin.

My brain was tied in little knots, tumbling back across the gulf of years which had done some healing but still left a deep scar of bitterness which had made me fight Karen every step of the way. I remembered a day, the first day I’d discovered Allison was like a bitch in heat. We were at the beach and swimming and having one of those grand old times which don’t mean much while you’re at them but which you remember with a desperate poignancy when you’re in Korea or someplace else where life is cheap and you can’t do the things you want. Well, we’d started talking about bathing suits. It was one of those years all the gals with appendix scars and a couple of spare tires of fat were worried about the Bikini. Funny part was, though, Allison steered the conversation to men’s suits. She didn’t like shorts, she liked trunks. She laughed and didn’t think it was fair gals should go around skin tight but not men. Gals liked to look, too, she said. Sure. Why not? Only the way Allison looked, the way she stared, the way her tongue darted out and licked vivid red lips as she watched the men parade by, sitting with her eyes almost on a level with those trunks she preferred to shorts was embarrassing. I told her, but she laughed and a little later a friend of mine sat down on the blanket with us and pretty soon Allison was pawing him and he was as hemoglobined as the next guy, but hell, I’d introduced her as my gal and he couldn’t figure it and started to squirm. So then I knew.

And now, after all those years, just like in the movies, our paths crossed again. Sure she could still stir me, but it was tempered with the knowledge of her affliction and how a man couldn’t live with her and it and keep his pride.

Great old Allison. The girl behind the man behind the gun. The girl behind the man behind the knife. The girl behind the man who drags people into steam rooms and suffocates them. It was a long way from Staten Island to Gregory Tolliver’s North Shore estate, but Allison wasn’t satisfied. Maybe, I thought as Kellum’s Buick triggered the electric eye which shut the gate and went up the winding driveway, maybe she was the same way about social climbing or money or power and all those things people want as she was about sex.

All that was grist for the T-man mill. Karen was something else again. I thought Karen was here and I’d fight to get her. But I almost got a kind of sadistic satisfaction thinking about how I was going to tell Allison off. She’d make promises and plead with me. She’s get down on those knees of hers and maybe grab hold of my legs and pant for me to please forgive her and at least let her go away and she wouldn’t cause any trouble again and I could do what I wanted with the still and all the other junk. And I’d laugh till she cried.

Gideon Frey, ex-G.I. Current occupation: sadist.

Somewhere, distantly, a dog howled. It was far enough away so you knew Fido wouldn’t be licking salt off your hand in a matter of seconds, but close enough so Fido could get there in a hurry if he had to. Well, the name was Shamus, not Fido, and if Shamus could understand those things, I had a hunch he’d get satisfaction from what was going to happen to his mistress. Definitely, I’d seen better friends than Shamus and Allison.

The howling made Kellum uneasy. He cleared his throat and pulled the car up toward Tolliver’s cut-stone mansion, guided by faint squares of yellow light which, as I recalled, were two living-room windows. He stopped the car, cleared his throat again, then lit a cigarette as Shamus howled at the moonless sky.

“Where the hell are we, Mr. Frey?”

“Gregory Tolliver lives here,” I grunted. “Mean anything to you?”

“Tolliver? The guy who owns, you mean the one who…?”

“Yeah, that’s who.” I was thinking, Gregory will take this hard. I don’t know what he saw in Allison, which may sound hypocritical, but there it is. He played games about everything, though, and maybe this was the biggest, toughest game of all. He’d married a nympho and now would discover her each and every breach of the moral code and confront her with the damning evidence. But Gregory had been blind in more ways than one. He plied Allison with jewels and furs and prestige, but she was running a thriving business of her own.

I stood up and stretched and checked the gun for the fifth time although I knew it was in fine shape. Shamus bayed again while I was squinting into the gloom for another car. I couldn’t see any, but that didn’t mean anything because Tolliver’s estate sported a three-car garage. It didn’t mean anything but it made me uneasy. I wanted to shout Karen’s name and hear her scream an answer. Brilliant. I shut up and headed for the house.

I turned around and barely could make out Kellum’s bulk in the night. “You stay-there,” I whispered. “If you just hear talking, stay put. If you hear a racket, come running.”

Shamus howled. Kellum’s bulk stirred uneasily. I knew I was taking a chance. Once I was out of sight he might decide to get back in the Buick and say goodbye to the North Shore. So I hissed, “I brought you along because I need help. Remember this, Kellum: you’re all through bootlegging. It’s just a question of time. The more you cooperate, the easier it will go on you.” Sure, Big Shot Frey talking. I had as much drag with the T-men as a counterfeiter passing a phony buck in Washington in payment for the guided tour of the Treasury Building. Only Kellum, I hoped, was scared.

“What kind of dog is it anyway, Mr. Frey?”

Kellum had an all-consuming interest. Well, I didn’t like the way Shamus was baying either, but it was nothing but nerves since I knew he wouldn’t sink his fangs into a slab of T-bone steak to help Allison.

“A toy poodle,” I said, “with a loud voice. Just shut up

and do what I told you.” I thumbed the revolver to full-cock and tried the door. Out here, they were expecting no one. The door opened in on well-oiled hinges, but I almost hit the ceiling when I saw my own image stalking grimly toward me in the hall mirror. Get a grip on yourself, Gideon Frey.

Up ahead, an oblong of yellow light flooded the hall from the living-room. I edged my way along the wall, back pressed against it, and peered around the door jamb. Three lamps were lighting the room partially, but unless someone were crouching in the shadows, it was empty.

I did some more exploring. The two guest bedrooms were dark. Someone had gathered wood for the dining-room fireplace, stacking it against the fieldstone wall on the hearth under a bank of recessed fluorescents which cast gaunt shadows of the heavy oak furniture. One small lamp atop a huge earthenware jug fought against darkness in the library. On the table next to it a braille book lay face up and opened.

The entire downstairs of Tolliver’s house was empty.

The wide stairs spiraled up and out of sight between the living-room and dining-room. They dissolved in darkness where they looped back toward their starting point but beyond that a vague yellow glow told of a lamp lit somewhere up ahead. Any minute I expected to hear Kellum’s car roaring away and I began to curse myself for not calling the police or the T-men or somebody before coming to Port Washington to make myself a hero.

The stairs creaked. It wasn’t me.

I was going to flatten myself against the wall and wait, then use my .38 as a club. Nerves. I chuckled. What’s the matter with you, Gideon Frey? The downstairs is empty and that noise came from below. Probably Kellum got a case of size fourteen cold feet outside, is all.

“Get back downstairs and wait,” I whispered. “What’s the matter with you?”

He didn’t whisper. He spoke in a normal conversational tone. He wasn’t Kellum.

“You’re silhouetted against the light, Frey. I can see you. You can’t see me. Drop it.”

I licked my lips and peered behind me. I squinted furiously and gazed upon a well of blackness. He sold pizza and he toted whiskey bottles. He was Vito Lucca.

“Drop it, Frey.”

I heard a click and wondered what the odds were of hitting him if I fired in that direction. The stairs creaked faintly again. He had changed his position.

“Be reasonable, Frey. How do you know I don’t have Karen with me?”

“Let her say something.”

He responded with a four-letter word and a second person pronoun. Then: “I’m dealing this hand, not you. I see you so good I can count the knuckles on your hand.”

Try locating a sound in pitch blackness sometime. All you wind up with is frustration.

“Go ahead, Frey. Drop it now.”

I had to. But I also wanted Kellum to know something was wrong. I was betting my life on the fact Vito could see me as clearly as he claimed and praying he wasn’t the nervous type. I squeezed the trigger, dropped the pistol, got deafened by the roar as it went off and hit the stairs on all fours myself. I waited for an answering explosion from Vito’s direction. When it finally came it was between my ears and not outside them. It shoved my teeth against the carpeted stairs and covered my brain, my eyes and everything with a thick black blanket. Good night, Gideon Frey.

When my own personal morning came around I was flat on my back. I was in a bedroom, small and square with the usual furniture and sailboats sailing up and down the walls. My watch told me I’d been out no more than half an hour, but someone was beating time to martial music inside my head.

Then I heard footsteps. John Philip Sousa switched from quick to double time. I got up fast and the band used my ear as a trumpet mute. My body called halt and I sat down again on the bed. When I looked up Karen was about to apply a dripping cloth to my head.

“Gid, I was so afraid. He dropped you in here all bloody, and didn’t say a word. I managed to drag you up on the bed and… how do you feel?”

“Lousy,” I said. “When I get that little slab of pizza I’m going to wring his neck.”

Karen did the wringing. She wrung the cloth out over my face and shoved me down on my back and placed the cloth against my temple.

“I think you need stitches.”

“It can wait.”

“It will have to. We’re locked in.”

“Listen,” I said. “Vito took you. Then what?”

“It was later on, after they let you see the cellar at Funland. I don’t know where we are. He just made me get in a car and drove off with me. He didn’t say anything.”

“How did he make you get in the car?”

“He said he was taking me to you. I believed him. After that he said nothing but kept on driving. It was dark by the time we reached here.”

“God, I was worried about you,” I said. “I still am. I don’t know. I wish I knew.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What’s going on at Tolliver’s. Where do you fit in?”

“I don’t fit in at all, stupid,” Karen protested. “I think I told you once I’d cooled off about Bert. But that had nothing to do with it, I still liked the guy. He was in trouble. I thought he was up to his ears in that mess at Tolliver’s. They were real sharp. I thought Bert was public enemy number one. Bert thought I was public enemy number one. Neither of us went to the police or anything. Vito had us over a barrel.”

“Vito isn’t the boss,” I said.

“Well, someone had us over a barrel. And darn you, Gideon, I still couldn’t go to the cops.”

“Why in hell not?”

“Because you’re in on this thing. Sometimes I wish men were never born, not men I could like and get weak all over, anyway.”

I laughed. It wasn’t a pretty laugh, but it served the purpose. I went on laughing until Karen squeezed the wet rag over my mouth and made me gag.

“What’s so funny?”

“You were doing the same thing all over again, that’s all. I was trying to protect you after I found out.”

Karen should have known I was still weak, but it didn’t bother her. She leaped on me and I wasn’t sure if she was applying hold number five in a wrestling primer or demonstrating her affection, but she started kissing me and sobbing and when she began to blubber I did the holding and the kissing and then got up and lit a cigarette.

“We’re not exactly a couple of geniuses,” Karen snuffled.

I went to the door and turned the handle. Locked. I said, “Was there any rumpus downstairs after they brought me in here?”

Karen shook her head, knuckled her wet eyes like a little girl, kissed the tip of my nose and started crying again. “What are they going to do, Gideon?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I—”

There was a scratching outside the door as someone sought the lock with a key. Karen tensed against me and our hearts did a quick, uneven dance together.

King Kellum’s battered puss was the best thing I ever saw in my life.

“Kellum,” I said, grinning. “You old son-of-a-gun. I knew we could count on you. How’d you manage it, old boy? Damn, you’re a sight for sore eyes.”

Kellum grunted and waved a pistol. Mine. Or Billy Drake’s that is. “Shut up and get back on the bed. Lay down. You too, Miss Tanner.”

“What the hell,” I said. Me and Sherlock Holmes. I was beginning to realize I couldn’t even hold his violin.

“You’re a dope, Frey. It wasn’t hard to see you hadn’t called the cops. Not the way you were sweating. But neither Vito nor me nor anyone else wants to spend some time in jail courtesy of you or Miss Tanner here.”

“Both of you,” I said. “You were both go-betweens. I should have realized Vito was right away. I should have tied him with Allison Tolliver sooner. He’d told me himself. He said Allison had hot-pants. Excuse me, Karen. I knew it was like that with Allison and it didn’t click when Vito told me. It meant Vito knew Allison.”

“Forget it,” Kellum told me. He could act, all right. He knew this place and he was only too glad to drive me here and wind things up. It was all planned. Maybe they figured I’d come back to Funland for one last look before I lit out.

“Goddam,” I said. “Vito took Karen here and you both knew I would follow.”

“If you put two and two together you’d follow,” said Kellum. “If not, what the hell. We could get you when we wanted.”

“You knew I wasn’t from the boss because the boss told you. That must have hurt.”

There was a knock on the door. “Hey, Kellum.” Vito’s voice, muffled. “The boat’s ready.”

I wished I’d never met Allison. I didn’t care if she was a nympho or cold as the outside of an igloo. She was going to have us killed, me and Karen. I wondered how she’d managed to get Gregory out of the way for the evening. Gregory hardly went anyplace.

I was down deep in a funk. I wasn’t wishing for much, not now, not when it didn’t look like anything I’d wish for would ever be granted. I wished I had a chance to tell off Allison, that’s all. She had plenty. She had everything a gal could want, at least a gal like her — except for eyes. She liked eyes to look at her. Aside from that, Gregory had placed the world at her feet. But it all added up to goodbye, Karen, and goodbye, Gideon.