Whistle Past the Graveyard [= Give the Girl a Gun]

Chapter Twenty-Four

On the assumption that since the killer had become panicky enough to have Fausta kidnaped once, he might try it again, I laid down some rules before I left El Patio.

“I don’t want you to leave the club alone for anything,” I instructed Fausta. “If you have to go out, take Mouldy with you.”

“All right, Manny,” Fausta said agreeably.

The next morning I got up at the unearthly hour of nine for the second day in a row. By ten I was calling at Ed Friday’s office.

The office was in the Russo Building, and while it was furnished expensively enough in a quiet sort of way, there was nothing about it to indicate it was supreme headquarters for several legitimate corporations plus a number of extralegal activities. The gold lettering on the frosted-glass door merely read, “Friday Enterprises, Inc.” and inside there were only two rooms.

The outer room was quite large, probably sixty by thirty feet, and was divided into two sections by a polished brass railing which had a swinging gate in its center. The larger section contained a bank of filing cabinets “and a dozen desks behind which clerks and stenographers were working. The smaller section, just inside the door, contained a number of comfortable easy chairs, a sofa, several smoking stands, a table of magazines and a red-haired receptionist behind a small desk.

It also contained Ed Friday’s oversized bodyguard, Max Furtell, who lounged at ease reading a magazine.

The redhead started to ask me what she could do for me, but Max broke in, “I’ll take it, Ann.”

Ignoring him, I said to the girl, “Mr. Friday in?”

Max came erect lazily, grinned at me without humor and moved through the swinging gate toward a frosted-glass door marked “Private.”

Three or four minutes passed before Max again appeared in the doorway of the room marked “Private.” He was still grinning in a humorless sort of way when he crooked his finger at me. He managed to make the gesture deliberately condescending.

From behind the desk Ed Friday’s rubbery voice said, “Good Morning, Mr. Moon. I’m a little busy today, but I can give you ten minutes.”

Pulling one of the guest chairs away from the wall, I put it alongside his desk, facing the edge of the desk, so that when I sat down I could see both Friday and Max. For some reason I didn’t feel like having the bodyguard behind me.

Friday said, “I suppose you’re here about Walter Ford again.”

“Partly,” I said. “Also about Daniel Cumberland and Fausta Moreni.”

Friday looked blank.

“Cumberland was Ford’s partner in a blackmail racket,” I explained. “Seems he was murdered within a matter of hours of when Ford got it. And Miss Moreni was kidnaped last night in a rather stupid attempt to get me to drop the investigation.”

“Kidnaped? Is she still missing?”

I shook my head. “The kidnaper didn’t know calls could be traced to pay phones, and the cops met him as he walked out of a booth. Young punk named Alberto Thomaso. “Says he works for you.”

For a moment Friday looked at me without expression. Then he lifted a newspaper from his desk, thumbed through it until he found the item he wanted and began to read in a toneless voice:

Friday looked up at me calmly. “It doesn’t mention Miss Moreni. Further on the item says the reason the cops were looking for

Thomaso was to question him about an attempted kidnaping. But it goes on to say he died before he could be questioned. I always read the paper first thing in the morning, Mr. Moon.”

I conceded the first round. “Let me put it this way then. Thomaso didn’t live long enough to say he worked for anyone, but all indications point to you as his boss.”

I used my fingers to tick off points. “First, it keeps recurring to me that you tried to get me to leave town the minute you suspected I might begin looking into the Ford case. Second, the motive behind Fausta’s kidnaping was exactly the same thing: to force me to leave town. Third, of all the people involved in this case, you’re the only one likely to have underworld connections with a hood like Thomaso. Any comments?”

“Yes,” Friday said in his rubbery voice. “I’ve been pretty patient with you up to now, Moon. But now that you’re actually accusing me of engineering two murders and a kidnaping, my patience is exhausted.” He looked at his bodyguard. “Max, throw him out. And this time I mean physically.”

For an instant the big man looked puzzled, but then he apparently decided if I wanted to make it easy for him, he wouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Moving forward, he snaked both enormous hands toward my shoulders.

I smashed the sole of my left foot against his right knee.

The blow should have cracked his kneecap, but apparently the man was strung together with piano wire instead of ordinary muscle. Instead of his knee buckling backward, his foot just flew out from under him.

As he started to fall forward, I let him have an elbow across the forehead. His head jolted back and his hands plunked down on the wooden arms of my chair to support himself. Bringing up my aluminum foot, I planted it in his stomach and pushed.

This was a mistake, because Max had a weight advantage of approximately sixty pounds. Instead of hurling him across the room as I intended the kick to, it merely straightened him up so that he could regain his balance. But it tipped my chair over backward.

I did a complete back somersault and bounced to my feet with my back in the corner of the room farthest from the door. Seeing that he had me treed, Max took his time about renewing the attack. First he shook his right leg tentatively to determine if it still worked. Apparently it did, though it must have been sprained from the terrific kick I had landed on his kneecap.

Deciding it would support him, he limped toward me with a snarl on his face.

I ducked a whistling right, slipped under his arm and planted a solid left hook on his jaw as he swung around to face me again. He didn’t even change expression.

The next thirty seconds were a nightmare. I hit him six times with blows that would have put most pro fighters down for the count, but the only damage I could detect was to my knuckles. During the same time I managed to avoid four of his swings, any one of which would have knocked me through a wall if they had connected. Three times I ducked under his swinging arm and changed sides, catching him with solid hooks as he spun to face me again.

I had the advantage of speed and a professional knowledge of boxing, but it was only a question of time before one of his powerhouses connected and ended the fight. Fortunately Max picked a time when my back was to the corner to change his tactics.

Tiring of swinging at a moving target, he suddenly lowered his head and charged. I skipped aside, added impetus to his charge by grabbing his shoulder and heaving as he went by, and he crashed head on into the wall.

He knocked himself out.

As violent as the action had been for a few moments, it had been a relatively silent fight. Our feet shuffling on the carpet had made little sound, and the only noise aside from our panting had been the splat of my knuckles against his jaw and the crack of Max’s head against the wall. Apparently no one in the outer office heard anything, for no one came to investigate and the continued clatter of typewriters from the outer room indicated work was going on as usual.

Ed Friday had sat quietly behind his desk watching while the fracas went on. Now he looked from his recumbent bodyguard to me, glanced thoughtfully at the door, then looked back at me again as though he realized he couldn’t expect much help from an office full of women. From his expression you couldn’t have told that he was in the last disturbed.

I rolled Max over on his back, felt his pulse and thumbed back an eyelid.

“That should have fractured his skull, but he’s only knocked out,” I decided. “He must have a steel plate in his head.”

Friday asked in a calm voice, “You plan a little violence on me now, Mr. Moon?”

“It’s your choice,” I told him. “We’re going to have a talk. If you like, I’ll slap you around until you feel conversational, but I’d prefer to skip further exercise.”

He let a slight smile form on his lips. “Sit down, Mr. Moon.”

Righting my chair, I resumed my seat and lit a cigar. “Let’s start with why you wanted me to go to Mexico.”

Thoughtfully he contemplated his bodyguard’s horizontal figure. Finally he said, “I’m going to be frank with you, Mr. Moon. Not because I’m afraid of getting slapped around, as you put it, but because my concern in this matter isn’t worth getting involved in a possible murder rap. I want you to understand I had nothing to do with Ford’s death and don’t know who killed him. But I do have a reason for not wanting anyone to delve too closely into Ford’s background. I was afraid you might turn up something that would louse up a business deal I have cooking. I’m not going to tell you what that deal is, because it’s still cooking. But if it comes to the point where the police actually accuse me of having Ford killed, I’ll sacrifice the deal in order to clear myself. That will lose me some money, and it still won’t solve your murder. I think you can understand why I don’t want to talk about it unless it becomes necessary to clear myself.”

I thought this over for a few moments. “I’m not a blabbermouth,” I said eventually. “Suppose you get me off your neck by explaining the deal, with the understanding that I keep it confidential?”

He shook his head. “You couldn’t keep it confidential. After our conversation at your place the other night, I had you thoroughly investigated, and my report is that you have an almost unreasonably rigid code of ethics. If I’d known it at the time, I never would have attempted to bribe you. However, I know it now, and I’m certain if I told you about my business deal, you’d feel morally obligated to report it to the police.”

“You mean the deal is illegal?”

“Not on my part. I suspect one of the other parties to the arrangement has done something illegal though, and if it ever came to light, my part of it would blow up too. I haven’t any actual knowledge of my associate’s illegal act. It’s only a suspicion, and you can’t be held liable as an accessory for concealing a mere suspicion. I myself haven’t done a thing I could be charged with, and I don’t have your moral compulsion to report suspected illegal acts of others to the police. Particularly when it would cost me money.”

When I merely sat looking at him for a time without speaking, he went on, “Your theory that no one but me would be able to contact a professional criminal like Thomaso is hogwash anyway. Anybody can contact any type of criminal he wants to hire simply by making the rounds of the slum taverns, keeping his ears open and dropping a few discreet hints when he runs into a likely prospect. If this Thomaso kid was a free lance and in the habit of hanging around the rattier bars, anybody might have hired him.”

Max, seemingly intent on disproving my estimate of how long he would be out, groaned again and sat up at that moment. He was still groggy, however, and he kept his eyes closed while he pressed both hands to the top of his head.

With his powers of recuperation he probably would be on his feet and raring to resume activities within another minute or so, I thought. And since it looked as though I had obtained as much information from Ed Friday as I was likely to get unless I planned to tie him up and hold burning cigarettes against his feet, I decided to take my departure while Max was still in a daze.

Rising, I said to Friday, “Thanks for nothing. You’ve been damn little help,” and walked out just as Max began to open his eyes.