Catch the Brass Ring

CHAPTER FIVE

I CAME BACK FROM the Lutz’s toting a stomach full of bacon, eggs, toast, coffee and cake. Ben had minded his own business, but Becky, after nagging him, deposited her considerable girth at our table with a third cup of strong coffee for me and said I mustn’t forget that Ben was a good worker. I said I wouldn’t, I certainly wouldn’t. Apparently Becky thought I was taking Bert’s place at Tolliver’s in more than Karen’s penny arcade. While I didn’t come out and admit it, I didn’t bother to contradict her, either. Then we got to talking about Bert’s death and I insisted it was murder but wouldn’t say why.

All the proprietors were on hand at Tolliver’s when we returned, dusting off their stalls and such for the day’s trade. It was Vito Lucca who pointed me out to a tall, unsmiling man wearing a herringbone jacket and a rope-thin tie.

“Mr. Frey?” he demanded. “Mr. Gideon Frey?”

“That’s right.”

He slammed a folded sheaf of papers in my palm with the expression you’d expect if someone had just informed him he’d won the Irish Sweepstakes. “First try,” he chuckled. “Yes, sir, this is my good day.”

I started reading and learned why taxes are so high. It took four pages of fine print to tell me I’d been subpoenaed by the Kings County coroner concerning the demise of Mr. Bertrand Newton Archer. Young Billy must have fingered me for the County after the way I’d run off at the mouth, but I wasn’t complaining.

I told Sheila I’d see her dance number tonight for sure and headed for the penny arcade. Karen arched an eyebrow at the sunburn and the grease and offered me a cool hello. She gave me an apron with pockets deep enough to hold all the pennies minted last year and an ample supply of nickels, too. She gave me a set of keys and told me how to empty the coin boxes and where to stash the take. Then she said, “I suppose you received a subpoena, too?”

“Sure did. Day after tomorrow.”

“I know, Gideon. I’ll be there. You ought to watch the sun.”

“That’s the trouble. I was watching it too long.”

“If you have any questions about your job, I’ll be roving around the place.”

“There are five pennies in a nickel, ten in a dime, twenty-five in a quarter,” I said. “If I run out of fingers I can always count on my toes. I’ll refer the half a buck capitalists to you.”

“Well, you needn’t get so snotty. I meant if one of the machines jammed.” Karen wore her blonde hair in an upsweep, looking about as penny ante as a mink coat. “I’ll forget that crack, Gideon. If you’re going to work here, why don’t we stop jumping down each other’s throats?”

“Yes, Miss Tanner,” I said.

“Did you receive the subpoena because of what you went around telling everybody? That you thought Bert was murdered. That you knew Bert was murdered.”

“I think so. I can think of no other reason. I hope to do my duty as a public-spirited citizen.”

“Oh, shut up. If you don’t want to bury the hatchet, say so now. I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.”

“You didn’t lose any sleep over Bert, either.”

“That was nasty. And here we go again.” Karen hardly ever smiled, but when she did it was worth waiting for. It plucked at the corners of her mouth and gathered momentum. It tugged her pink lips apart and showed their moist insides and an edge of white teeth. Then it started working on her eyes. I got giddy, just looking. “Shake?” Karen said, offering her hand.

“It was nasty,” I admitted. Karen pumped my hand vigorously. She had a man-like grip but long, graceful fingers. “I’m sorry Ka — Miss Tanner.”

“That was nasty on my part. It’s Karen.”

“O.K., Karen. O.K.” I tried a smile too, but it threatened to peel off the sunburned skin, so I gave it up. Unpredictable wench, I thought. If you tried to butter her up she’d snap your head off. But cuss her out and she might give you that house-in-the-country smile. It was something to remember. The round almost went to Gideon Frey, but not quite. A moment later my two clam fishermen swaggered in like they owned the joint.

“Hullo, Mr. Frey,” one of them said, sticking out a grubby hand.

I reached into the till and filled his hand with pennies. He divided them with his buddy on the top of a Bat ’Em game and after a series of consultations which carried them around the arcade they began to plunge plungers and light lights.

“What was that for?” Karen said.

“They did me a favor,” I pulled a dollar bill from my government roll and stuffed it into the cash box, slamming the lid down. “There,” I said. “A neat profit for your side.”

Karen opened the box with a louder noise. She slapped the dollar back against my palm. “Just don’t do things like that without asking. You only work here, remember?”

I nodded. “Yes, ma’am. How could I ever forget?”

A good try, but we were right back where we started.

Forty-eight hours later, someone tried to kill me. It was my fault, because I’d spent the two days setting myself up as a clay pigeon. I told everyone Bert was murdered. Never mind how I knew, he was murdered. Don’t argue with me, I’ve got the inside poop. It stays inside until I tell the people at the coroner’s inquest.

I wasn’t cut out to be a Sherlock Holmes. I wasn’t even cut out to dig around for information like that Spade guy. Knocking heads in to ferret out the facts seemed more my speed, but Mr. Hammer and his compatriots knew which heads to knock. Since I didn’t, I put my own on the block.

It brought results, after a fashion. Karen left the arcade early on Thursday because she had some shopping to do before answering the coroner’s subpoena. I closed up half an hour later and walked east on Surf Avenue toward the subway. Dark, heavy clouds brooded sullenly overhead, barely clearing the tops of the buildings and threatening to up-end the harried weatherman’s applecart by splashing rain on his no-relief-from-the-heat-till-next-week prediction.

Slugs peppered the moving targets in a shooting gallery as I walked by its front. Something thudded into the wooden wall beside me. Splinters stung my face. It could have been Korea all over again the way I instinctively plunged to all fours and flattened myself on the sidewalk.

A crowd gathered. A fat man helped me to my feet and said, “It’s the heat. I always take a salt tablet. Are you all right?”

“I only tripped.”

Not without regret, the crowd dispersed. Maybe that’s the kind of sideshow the people at Coney Island really like. It would make the topic of conversation at a dozen noontime lunch counters. Such a strong-looking young man, too.

The bullet had gouged a hole in the wall, head-high. If it had come in on an angle I never would have found the slug. Actually, I found only pieces. Someone had cut an X in the nose of the slug to fashion a makeshift dum-dum. Some of the pieces had stuck in the wall like grape shot, but most of them had fallen to the sidewalk. Had the bullet even creased my forehead I’d have contracted a bad case of lead poisoning right through my thick clay pigeon skull.

Horns tooted and squawked as I darted across the wide street, giving a bus driver and a few hacks apoplexy. Directly across from the shooting gallery stood a comfort station. Everything cost money at Coney Island. There was a turnstile and a big, fancy sign which said: SANITARY TOILET — 5 cents.

An old lady in a starched blue uniform sat on a folding chair near the turnstile. The expression on her face indicated she was aware she ran the one sure-fire concession at Coney Island.

“Any customers?” I demanded.

“What do you think, dearie? It’s a hot day, so people do a lot of drinking. Some dope even set off a firecracker in here.” That was my man. “Any windows looking out the front on the first floor?”

“You don’t see any, do you?”

“What’s up on the second floor?”

“Only some storerooms. You looking to rent some space?”

“No. Listen, did someone come in here with a rifle?” It had to be a rifle, from that distance.

“A rifle — in here? You mean it wasn’t a firecracker?”

“Well, then a package.”

“A lot of people come with packages. We’ve got lockers and they cost another five cents. Everything is cheap, you see, and…”

“Forget it,” I said. I slid a nickel into the slot, pushed through the turnstile and went inside. It was sanitary, all right. The smell of disinfectant almost made me gag.

I entered a dark waiting-room which contained folding chairs, a trash can and a soda dispenser. On my left was where the men went, on my right the women. Straight ahead was a flight of stairs which I ascended three at a time. Upstairs, cartons of toilet paper, soap and paper towels were strewn about a large, musty room. My footprints joined others in the dust on the floor but there were far too many to tell me anything. Big, wind-driven drops of rain had started to fall outside, splattering in through an open window up front. This was my sniper’s perch, for his elbows had cleared dust from part of the window-sill. I sniffed and sniffed and thought I smelled the sharp odor of gunpowder.

I plunged downstairs and to the back of the place. The rear exit opened out on a parking lot which extended all the way back to the elevated line. Reading the first of a stack of comic books, a skinny kid with a crew haircut and cup-handle ears sat near an old shack with a 75 cent sign faded and peeling on the gray wood.

“Hey!” I said. “Did someone just leave the John through here?”

“Huh?”

“The John. Did someone just leave?”

“I heardja.” The kid didn’t bother to look up. “Umm-hmm.”

“Who was it?”

“How should I know? They already drove away. I was reading.”

“Do any of the people over at Tolliver’s park their cars here?”

“You kidding? If they didn’t we’d be outa business tomorrow.”

“Who?” I asked desperately.

“Lemme see. There’s Mr. Soolpovar, Mr. Kellum, Miss Tanner, Mr. Lucca. Oh, yeah. And Miss O’Keefe.”

“What kind of cars do they drive?”

“Well, Mr. Soolpovar, he drives a Studebaker Commander ’49. Mr. Kellum, now he—”

“Never mind. Whose car is missing?”

The kid stood up and folded the comic book back in the pocket of his dungarees. He squinted around the lot myopic-ally and scratched his scalp through the bristle of his hair. “All of ’em,” he said finally. “There ain’t a Tolliver car in the whole lot. You looking for someone, mister?”

“The person who came out of the John. Didn’t you get a look at him at all?”

“Naa. For all I knew it could have been a dame. I just heard somebody come out, that’s all. I should look every time? Hey, mister, are you a cop?”

“I’m J. Edgar Hoover,” I said, and walked across the parking lot toward the street. The wind had stopped but the rain came down harder, spilling out of a dreary gray sky. I caught the elevated train at West 8th and let it rock me to sleep until my stop downtown. I didn’t have much to tell the coroner. I hoped he had more because I knew it was murder but couldn’t prove it.

When I reached the address indicated on the subpoena it was raining so hard I couldn’t even light a cigarette. I paused at the revolving door when someone honked a horn and called my name. Turning back into the rain I saw a car which definitely did not belong to the Tolliver set. It was a long Caddy limousine which you’d have difficulty parking at a bus stop. A black leather top had been fitted over the metal and the whole thing was spanking new and six or seven thousand dollars worth at least. The wipers were going slipslop across the one-piece windshield. A man sat beside the woman who piloted the two and a half-ton monster.

My legs got rubbery. My mind fled back through the rain and through more rain like it but worse in Korea and through three years of a second Army hitch although I’d realized I was too old to play tin soldiers or anything else. Her name was Allison and she wore copper hair piled high on her head and had eyes you could tell were green even through the rain. Her father had owned an eight-pump Amoco station at the other end of Staten Island near Outerbridge and for all I know he still owns it. I’d foremanned the repair shop that went with it and got to know his daughter and forgot about my bank account and started spending all my money on her and liking it because she liked it and responded by giving me what virile men dream about. (“Allison’s got wild blood in her, Gid, but you can tame her, boy,” old man Hiller had said.) Everything got rosy red until people started pointing at me and snickering and talk-big in whispers and I really believe old man Hiller never knew.

Allison was the reason I’d joined the Army although I’d served my time with George Patton in World War II. Allison had wild blood, let me tell you. She collected bedfellows like other girls collected jewelry. I had been laboring under the kind of misapprehension that grows horns on men.

So now Allison waved at me from the driver’s seat of the big black Caddy and the rain soaked me while I stared and thought myself back three years.

“It is you! Gideon. Gideon Frey. Come on in out of the rain, Gid.”

I debated it. Looking at my watch I saw I was still fifteen minutes early for the coroner’s inquest. If I accepted her invitation I’d feel like a fool. If I didn’t accept I’d feel like a bigger fool. I opened the back door of the Caddy and stepped inside.

Allison was full of tricks. There was no seat in the back of the limousine and none of those pull-down chairs that accommodate two additional people. Rubber matting covered the floor and a couple of hard rubber toys were strewn about. Something in the far corner under the fly window growled sullenly, then subsided as I closed the door and squatted on my heels.

A boxer glared at me with its black, pugnacious, flattened face. Sixty pounds of brindle-colored dogflesh with sturdy forelegs and a deep chest and one of those stout harnesses that seeing-eye dogs usually wear.

“Who is your friend, my dear?” The man next to Allison spoke for the first time. He had a calm, cultured voice and the kind of accent which said he might have gone to the same schools as Roosevelt and Dean Acheson. He didn’t turn around to look at me. He merely asked. And the dog wore one of those harnesses. Allison was chauffeuring around a blind man.

“We knew each other a long time ago, Gregory. His name is Gideon Frey.”

Gregory twisted around on the front seat and shoved his hand back in my general direction. His wide eyes stared without seeing at a point midway between me and the boxer. He had a lean face with a shaggy mane of white hair that accentuated the gaunt cheeks, the long, high-bridged nose, the thin lips and small, pointed chin. Bushy black eyebrows jutted out over the sightless eyes. His face conveyed exactly the right blend of sophistication and dissipation for a Man of Distinction ad.

“Allison certainly has interesting friends,” Gregory told me.

Allison smiled at me in the mirror. “Gideon was an officer in the Navy or something.”

“A sergeant in the Army,” I said.

“Indeed?” Gregory seemed genuinely surprised. “Would you believe it, I’ve never spoken to an enlisted man before. I was beginning to think the Army commissioned everyone these days. Did you serve in Korea, Mr. Frey?”

“Yes, I did.” I shifted my weight around uncomfortably on my haunches and decided to sit down on the floor. The boxer growled but stayed put.

“Don’t mind Shamus,” Gregory said. “He won’t hurt you.”

Allison laughed, down deep in her throat, as deep as the boxer’s growl. “Don’t you believe it, Gid. That dog would bite your arm off if Gregory said so.”

“But I won’t, Mr. Frey. Allison and Shamus just cannot seem to hit it off.”

“Shamus,” I said. “That’s kind of a strange name….”

“Shamus is my private eye, you see.”

Allison found it very amusing. This time the laughter bubbled out of her lips, tinkling with music I hadn’t forgotten. It was the kind of sound that makes you perk up your ears and that must have gone double for Gregory, who had to depend on sound for a lot of things we use our eyes to see.

When Allison offered me a cigarette from a gold case with a single blue jewel at its center I noticed the simple wedding band on the customary finger. She saw me staring at it so she said easily, “I’m sorry, Gid. I forgot to complete the introductions. This is Gregory Tolliver, my husband.”

I declined the cigarette but Shamus snapped at Allison’s hand and she withdrew it quickly. “Tolliver?” I said. “Say, wait a minute. Are you here for the inquest?”

“That is correct,” Gregory Tolliver told inc. “I take it you are somehow concerned?”

“You must be the Tolliver who owns Tolliver’s Funland,” I said unnecessarily. “I’ll be darned.”

“It is merely a hobby with me, Mr. Frey. I have diversified interests scattered over the metropolitan area which take up all of my time, but when we first visited Funland, Allison was so taken with the place that she insisted—well, you know women. Allison handles many of the affairs at Funland for me, drawing her own personal income from it.

“To get back to the inquest, though, I hardly think Mr. Archer’s death was an accident, Mr. Frey. I have utterly nothing to base the contention on, of course, but of the three possibilities — barring death from natural causes which is of course precluded — I favor murder.”

“Gregory bothers himself over trifles all the time,” Allison explained.

“My dear, murder is no trifle.”

“I mean, you don’t know it was murder, darling. You’re only guessing. I didn’t mind driving you here, but I do think we ought to have a chauffeur.”

Tolliver clucked his tongue. “The back of the car is for Shamus. It is either a Chauffeur or you, my dear. Since I wouldn’t have married you if I did not find your company far more pleasant, we have no chauffeur.”

He couldn’t see his lovely wife, not with his eyes. He used his fingertips. He ran them slowly over her hair, down her brow and the fine Grecian line it formed with her nose, across her lips while she made a small kissing sound, then her chin and her throat. The fingers lingered on the firm, curving breasts, sculpting them anew for the thousandth time, dropped to the flat stomach, to the lap and thighs. A blind man could take certain liberties. Hell, Allison was his wife. Still it made me boil and then it made me angry with myself. Jealous of Allison after three years? A fat lot of good the mud of Korea did me.

I saw Allison’s face in the mirror. Beautiful. Carved in marble it would sit on a pedestal in all the best museums. But not the faintest flicker of expression touched the marble. Chalk up a change of character for Allison Tolliver, I began to think. Then I changed my mind. Allison had donned the pokerface for me, but couldn’t maintain it. She was sitting sideways in the front seat, facing Tolliver. His fingers passed from view after a time. Then Allison’s lower lip trembled. She sucked it in and nibbled on it. A low sound stirred within her, faint and faraway. She leaned toward Tolliver who withdrew his seeing hand, patted her shoulder with it and smiled. I saw that smile in the rear-view mirror. It said maybe he knew how it was with Allison but he didn’t care because he had no chauffeur and probably no butler and had a rigid monopoly on Allison’s time, so it was fine men could stir her so easily since he did all the stirring.

Tolliver said, “You must come out and visit us soon, Mr. Frey. I’m sure you and Allison will want to talk over old times.” That didn’t jibe with the way I’d figured things, not at all.

“That’s a wonderful idea,” Allison said. “Our house is out at Port Washington, Gid. You can take the Long Island Railroad or drive.”

“Well, I’m pretty busy.”

“You’re not that busy.”

Damn her, she could do plenty of stirring herself. And brother, I was really going to hate myself if I found three wasted years hadn’t helped me at all. “I’ll think about it,” I said. “We’d better go on up to the inquest.”

Tolliver climbed out of his side of the car without help as Allison slid across the seat and joined him in the rain, opening a plaid umbrella. I got out the back and stood aside barely in time. Shamus lunged out after me and nuzzled against Tolliver’s surrah silk trousers while he sought and found the harness. Shamus growled and Allison scampered to the other side of Tolliver. They made a fine looking family, the man, the woman and the dog. But Allison must have been thinking three’s a crowd.

I followed them through the rain, seeing images on the wet sidewalk and again on the glass panels of the revolving door. There was Sheila, grinning coltishly and gently massaging me with Unguentine. There was Karen saying let’s not be nasty and showing me her rare vintage smile. And there was Allison, twisting her crazy barbs in my heart after three years.