Man-Trap

I

There are two reasons I like El Patio Club as an occasional dining spot. It serves the finest food within a fifty mile radius, and its proprietress is Fausta Moreni.

It is also the last place in the world you would expect to witness a murder, though this was not a factor in my preference when I passed up three alternate dining places I like in favor of El Patio on the July evening Walter Lancaster was assassinated.

Actually it had been the scene of a murder once before, but that was back in its days as a gambling casino, when its atmosphere was more conducive to homicide. Since Fausta had taken it over, eliminated the gaming tables and built it a reputation based on food, it had become the quietest supper club in town.

It was just nine thirty when I drove between the two stone pillars marking the entrance to El Patio’s drive. The drive, which runs past the club’s front entrance, then angles left alongside the building to a parking lot at the rear, separates El Patio from a heavily treed park-like area some hundred yards square. This area offered excellent cover to the assassin.

Had the taxi driver who pulled into the drive immediately ahead of me behaved as drivers familiar with the place do, possibly I would not have been involved in the murder at all, but apparently he was a new driver and did not know procedure. Instead of continuing back to the lot, turning around and returning to the entrance with his nose pointed toward the highway, he slammed on his brakes in front of the steps leading up to the bronze doors, jumped out and left his cab in the center of the drive blocking traffic both ways.

Behind him I slammed on my own brakes just in time to avoid collision, then accidentally let my toe slip off the clutch, which caused the car to jolt forward and gently clang bumpers. This happened because I operate both foot pedals with my left foot, my right being an intricate contrivance of cork and aluminum below the knee.

Shortly after the war the Veterans Administration gave me a specially built Olds in return for the leg I left overseas, a sedan with the foot brake on the left and with an attachment which caused the clutch to disengage when the brake pedal was pushed halfway down. But when I finally traded it in on a 1951 Plymouth I could not afford the special attachment. Consequently when I brake, I turn my left foot sidewise, hitting the brake with my heel and the clutch with my toe.

I have gotten pretty good at it, but this time I slipped.

The cabbie, a cocky bantamweight with a strut like a Prussian sergeant major’s, stopped halfway up the steps, ran down again and anxiously stared at his undamaged bumper.

Then he inquired belligerently, “Whyn’t you learn how to drive?”

“Whyn’t you learn how to park?” I countered, mimicking his tone. “Pick either side of the drive you want and I’ll take the other.”

“Yeah?” he asked. “I gotta customer, Bud. I’ll move when I finish loading.”

As he started up the steps again, I got out of my car, swung open the driver’s door of the taxi and climbed in. The motor was running, and I had pulled the cab forward and to the right so that it was flush against the shrubbery edging the driveway before the cabbie realized what was happening.

“Hey!” he yelled, starting down again.

By the time he reached me I was out of the cab and had slammed the door.

I was saved from a brawl by the big bronze doors opening and a man in white Palm Beach stepping out. Immediately the doorman clapped his hands and called, “Taxi for Mr. Lancaster!”

As the man descended the steps the little cabbie said darkly, “I’ll see you again, Buster,” and moved to open the rear door of the taxi.

I grinned at him again, took a step toward my own car just as the white suited man passed between me and the cabbie, then half turned to glance back at the man as something familiar about his appearance struck me.

At that moment a gun roared so close to my ear, it started bells ringing in my head.

All three of us... the doorman, the taxi driver and I... stood transfixed as the man in white slowly spun around and collapsed on his face. The cabbie recovered first. He gave me a horrified look and dived in front of his cab out of the line of fire.

It did not occur to me at the moment that he thought I had fired the shot at him, missed and hit his customer.

As the little cabbie tried to dig a hole in the gravel drive, I swung toward the bush from which the shot had come. It was a dark night, I was unarmed and I had no intention of trying to grapple with the gunman, so I made no attempt to rush after him. But I did listen, and I could hear the rustle of fallen leaves as someone moved hastily toward the highway.

Swiftly I ran toward my car, leaped in and threw it in reverse. My intention was to back the approximately fifty yards to the drive entrance, swing my lights along the edge of the park-like area where it touched the highway, and attempt to get a glimpse of the gunman when he reached the road. But I was foiled by another car swinging into the drive just before I reached the stone pillars.

Braking, I attempted to honk it out of the way, but the driver failed to get the point and simply sat there. Finally I jumped out, shouted, “Emergency! Back out and let me pass!”

So what did the guy do? He got flustered and killed his engine. At the same moment I heard a car spin its wheels as it roared away from about where I figured the assassin would have come out on the road.

Giving up, I told the driver behind me to forget it, drove back and parked behind the taxi.

In the interval a number of people had come out of the club. At the top of the steps I spotted the vivid blonde hair of Fausta Moreni flaming like a pink beacon in the light of the neon sign over the door. Surrounded by customers, she calmly listened to the doorman’s excited story.

Standing over the crumpled white figure next to the cab, a forty-five automatic in his hand, stood Marmaduke Greene, affectionately known to his friends as “Mouldy” due to a mild but persistent case of acne. Seeing me return, the cabbie had crowded behind Mouldy’s wide back.

“That’s him!” the cabbie hissed in Mouldy’s misshapen ear. “Look out! He’s got a gun!”

Mouldy Greene’s flat face registered amazement. “Manny Moon?” he asked over his shoulder. “The sarge tried to use a rod on a little punk like you? And missed on top of it?”

He shook his gun at me friendly. “Hi, Sarge. What’s new?”

“Put it away,” I told him, eyeing the automatic warily. Mouldy is not the safest person in the world to let handle a gun, sometimes forgetting what he has in his hand and preoccupiedly squeezing the trigger.

“Sure, Sarge.” Obediently he tucked it under the arm of his dinner jacket.

During World War II Mouldy Greene had been the sad sack of my outfit overseas. Every outfit had at least one: a well-meaning bungler with a talent for fouling up every detail he was assigned, but for whom you developed the same sort of exasperated fondness a mother feels for an idiot child.

Immediately after the war, while El Patio was still a gambling casino, the underworld character who owned the place hired Mouldy as a bodyguard. He must have been hard up for strong-arm men, for while Mouldy looks tough, having a build like a rhinoceros and a face nearly as flat as the top of his head, he has a mind like a rhinoceros too. He proved just as efficient a bodyguard as he had a soldier, managing to be leaning against El Patio’s bar when a business rival put a bullet through his boss’s head.

Fausta inherited Mouldy when she took over El Patio, and while she had no compunction about instantly firing the other gunmen and bouncers inhabiting the place as members of the club’s staff, it would have taken a harder heart than Fausta possessed to cast Mouldy out into a competitive world.

Now he casually collared the miniature cabbie, held him with his feet dangling six inches off the ground and asked, “What about this guy, Sarge?” The Sarge was a holdover from army days, and I had given up trying to break him of the habit.

“Put him down,” I said. “He hasn’t done anything.”

Stooping, I felt for pulse in the prone man’s wrist, but found none. He was lying on his chest, both arms flung forward, and there were bloodstains immediately beneath each armpit, indicating the bullet had passed entirely through him from right to left.

The man lay on one cheek, a thin, austere looking face turned in the direction of the club entrance. In the dim light cast by the neon sign “El Patio” immediately over the bronze doors, I again thought I detected something familiar about his appearance, but it eluded me.

Then I walked over to the steps, which by now were packed by at least twenty people. Others, still half inside, held wide the big double doors, and behind them crowded a solid pack of customers straining to see what was going on. I had never thought my experience as a first sergeant during the war would be of any value in civilian life, but after all the intervening years I finally found a use for one thing I had learned. Summoning up my old parade ground voice, I boomed, “Everybody back to their tables! ON THE DOUBLE!”

The whole crowd jumped like people do after a thunder crash. Then they meekly turned and filed back inside, leaving only Fausta and the doorman on the steps. The doorman eyed me nervously and seemed inclined to follow the customers inside where there were no homicidal maniacs running loose.

Fausta turned her big brown eyes on me. “What happened, Manny?”

“In a minute, Fausta,” I said. I looked at the doorman, an imposing figure in the maroon uniform of a Central American general. “Seems to me you called yonder corpse by name. Who is he?”

He swallowed, finally got out, “Mr. Walter Lancaster, sir.”

My hair nearly turned white. Being innocently involved in a murder is bad enough. Having one witness, and possibly two, convinced you are the killer is even worse. But when the victim is the kind whole assassination will cause deepseated political repercussions and make headlines all over the country, you are, to put it mildly, in an unpleasant spot.

Walter Lancaster was lieutenant-governor of our neighboring state, Illinois.

At twenty-seven Fausta Moreni is one of the richest women in town, but when I first met her during the war she was a nineteen-year-old penniless refugee from Fascist Italy, frightened and alone in a strange country. Most of America’s Italian immigrants have come from Sicily and southern Italy, but Fausta was from Rome. While she is as dark as her southern countrywomen, her skin is a creamy tan instead of the sultry olive possessed by most southern Italian beauties, and her hair is a gleaming natural blonde.

Fascinated partly by her Latin explosiveness and comic opera accent, and partly by what I took to be her defenselessness in an alien land, I went overboard for her like a moonstruck teen-ager in spite of having attained the sophisticated age of twenty-four. All during the war I carried her picture in my pocket and a vague plan for a vine covered cottage in my heart.

But when I finally returned from overseas plus a long period in a V. A. hospital, nearly five years had passed and Fausta had outgrown my mental image. Only traces of her accent lingered, and in place of a naive and dependent teen-ager I found an assured young career woman well on her way to parlaying her culinary genius into a fortune. When I recovered from the shock I found I was just as much attracted to her as ever, but I no longer felt like much of a catch.

Fausta insisted it made no difference who had the money, the husband or wife, but it did to me.

Though long ago we tacitly dropped the subject of marriage, it pleases her to pretend she pursues me hotly, and to go along with the game I make a pretense of trying to struggle off the hook.

When I hung up after having called Inspector Warren Day, Fausta said in a small voice, “Tom says you shot that man, Manny.”

“Tom?”

“The doorman. He said he saw it.”

“He saw an optical illusion,” I told her. “I never commit my murders in front of witnesses.”

Her brow puckered in concentration. “I could tell him not to say anything in front of the police, but he told it in front of all those customers on the steps.” Then she brightened. “I was outside when the shooting happened. I had just left the side door from the ballroom and was walking around to the front entrance for a breath of air. I will say I stepped out to meet you and we were making love in the bushes when the shot sounded. Then the police will think it must have been another person he saw.”

“I didn’t shoot the guy,” I said irritably. “Someone fired from behind a bush right next to me. Incidentally, I came out here for dinner, but once the cops get here it may be hours before I get a chance to eat. How about rustling up a fast sandwich?”

“Food!” Fausta said. “You shoot a man and it makes you hungry! I should think instead you would want to kiss me good-bye before they take you off to jail.”

She looked at me expectantly and I said, “Roast beef, if you’ve got it. And a cup of coffee.”

“You are a corpse yourself,” she said without heat, and lifted her desk phone to order.