Martinis and Murder (Prologue Books) Read online

  Martinis

  and

  Murder

  HENRY KANE

  a division of F+W Media, Inc.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  Death of a Dastard

  Also Available

  Copyright

  For

  PAT and TAMI

  1

  I SAW the thing happen and in a cockeyed roundabout way I was mixed up in it, so the policeman had every right in the world to ask questions.

  The policeman had a stenographer (male) and instead of asking questions like a policeman, he was snapping them like a smart lawyer, cross-examination style, and when a policeman goes about his business like a smart lawyer, cross-examination style, it just becomes irritating.

  It becomes increasingly irritating, like an old corn in new shoes.

  So I quit talking.

  So he hit me, which made him more like a policeman and less like a lawyer. I moved with his fist and most of it went rapidly past me, but not all of it.

  I said, “Cut it out, Louis. I’m not one of your ironheaded, ex-convict exercise boys. Slow down.”

  The policeman was Louis Parker, detective lieutenant, homicide, New York City, a nice guy generally, of average height and built like a piano.

  He looked faintly remorseful and he sighed and tapped a cigarette out of a pack and lit it.

  “All right, Pete, I’m sorry. But you’re beginning to get my goat.”

  I kept right on sitting in a very hard chair. The back of my thighs had gone to sleep.

  “Talk,” he insisted.

  The stenographer, a pale face with a purple nose, squinted at me sidewise and smiled unpleasantly.

  “Get this monkey out of here,” I said, “and stop asking me well-rounded, idiotic, for-the-record questions and let me beat it out my own way and maybe we’ll get this business over with. I am not enjoying myself. Not in the least.”

  Parker said, “All right, Aldridge,” and the stenographer closed his pad and got up wearily and went out.

  “Since when,” I inquired, “do you tote stenographers? That turnip of yours gives me the willies.”

  “Talk,” he said, simply.

  I told him about how it must have been around ten-thirty, I wasn’t sure, and I was at the Club Nevada and I had a ringside table and I was drinking rum and Coca-Cola and I was paying no attention at all to my partner, Philip Scoffol. I was paying attention to Lolita Blamey singing songs, some clean, some dirty, only when she sang them dirty they didn’t sound dirty, but cute, like when your four-year-old daughter comes up with one of those words she learned while playing house in her girl friend’s back yard.

  Isaac, the waiter, touched my shoulder.

  “A man wants to see you.”

  “The hell with him.”

  “He says it’s important.”

  “The hell with him.”

  “Shall I tell him, Mr. Chambers, you’ll see him later? When the show is over.”

  “Yes, tell him, please.”

  I swung back to Lolita Blamey.

  When she finished, and ran off, I said to Scoffol, “I’m simply nuts about that kid.”

  Unenthusiastic, he said, “Um.”

  Isaac came back and hovered.

  Scoffol said, “It could be business, you know.”

  I followed Isaac all the way around to the other side of the dance floor where a large party was having fun around four tables shoved together. I recognized Larry White, who owns twenty-three first-class hotels, and I reached over a fat lady’s bare white shoulder and we shook hands. He turned to a man with silver hair and a wonderfully smooth face who said, “Excuse me,” and he and Larry got up and we all went down to the men’s room. Not Isaac.

  In the men’s toilet, Larry said, “This is Mr. Blair Curtis. Mr. Peter Chambers.”

  Curtis bowed slightly. I bowed slightly. Larry almost bowed slightly.

  I said, “I’ve heard of Mr. Curtis.”

  Larry said, “I saw you come in, Pete. I mentioned it to Mr. Curtis, who has been inquiring around about private detectives. You’ve been recommended.”

  “Thanks.”

  Curtis offered, “Larry has been telling me about you. When he mentioned that you were here tonight, well …”

  “If you gentlemen will excuse me.” Larry raised his hand and wiggled his fingers and went.

  I gave him a card: “Scoffol and Chambers, Investigation, 50 Rockefeller Plaza, New York.” He took it and gave me one of his (as if I needed that): “Curtis Wilde, Inc., Jewelry, Fifth Avenue at Fifty-seventh Street, New York City.”

  “Well,” he said, indecisively.

  I said, “Uh.”

  He looked around and smiled again and shrugged his shoulders. “Can you come to my apartment? In about an hour? I trust it is not an imposition. If you will kindly return my card, I’ll jot down the address and apartment number.”

  I gave him the card and my pen. The address was Park Avenue in the eighties. I liked that.

  “All right?” he asked.

  “Fine.”

  We went back upstairs.

  Scoffol said, “Well?”

  I said, “Business,” and I showed him the card.

  Parker stopped picking his nose and squirmed out of the easy chair. “Christ. Pitch. Stop winding up and pitch.”

  I loosened my tie and I opened my collar.

  “Go on, talk,” he said.

  “I left the Nevada about half past eleven. I took the subway and I got out at Eighty-sixth and walked. I figured this address for the corner of Eighty-third, which it is. I’m walking down Park and I’d just crossed Eighty-fourth, when I see this tussle here on Eighty-third. A guy jumps a guy. One of them goes down with a smack. A woman runs out of the building and screams.”

  “Checks,” Parker said. “The guy got tapped cold with a padded billy. Flat lump, no blood. But the sidewalk got him good. Two stitches on the forehead over the right eye. So?” I said, “It happened very fast. There’s a cab at the curb, door hanging open, automatic light on inside. The man is on his face on the sidewalk. The woman screams. Then she rushes at the guy that’s still standing, a little guy, and she shoves at him. Hard. This guy loses his footing and goes down. That’s two down. The woman dives for the cab. Sticks half her body in, then pulls it out quick. Yells, ‘You!’”

  Parker wrestled out of the easy chair and stood over me.

  “Yells, ‘You?’”

  “Right. Yells it out loud. I hear it all the way up the block. Seems there’s a party in the cab and she recognizes him. Anyway, she pulls out and tries to run back into the apartment house but the little guy, who is getting up, grabs an ankle and tips her over. A tall guy steps out of the cab and stands over her and shoots twice and lets fly a couple my way. Then he jumps back into the cab and the little guy follows him, and they roll, leaving the woman face up to the sky and the other guy face down on the sidewalk.”

  “Checks,” Parker said. “Some of it. We got a couple of witnesses after the yelling and shooting started. And there’s a doorman which finally shows up. What else?”

 
; I leaned back and hooked my arm over the back of the stiff chair. “I got four bullets into that cab. I’d bet on that. And if they went through, and you’re lucky, you’d better check some hospitals.”

  Reluctantly, he turned and went to the door and tiredly called, “Aldridge,” and talked to him briefly and came back.

  “Check details,” he said. “Check every miserable crackpot possibility. You wouldn’t venture a little bet, would you, about those hospitals?” He looked at me again. “I’ll want your popgun.”

  “For how long?”

  “How do I know? For a week, or so. You’ll call up.”

  I gave it to him.

  “Cab license?” he asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Of course not. Descriptions?”

  “Little guy,” I said, “practically nondescript. Maybe five-six, no hat, about one hundred forty pounds. Big guy, well over six feet, tan camel’s-hair type coat, big white buttons, snap-brim hat. Taxicab, old and yellow.”

  “Anything else?”

  “That about winds it.” I took out cigarettes. I lit up. Smoke kicked pleasantly at the back of my throat.

  “May I ask one, Lieutenant?”

  He walked up and down in front of me. He didn’t answer.

  I said, “Who was the guy that got lumped?”

  He stopped in front of me and looked down at me. “A Mr. Wesley Gorin,” he said. “And the dame, just to be sure you’re entirely up to date, was Mrs. Rochelle Pratt Curtis, in whose duplex apartment you are now throwing ashes on the parlor floor rug. Two bullets in the chest and lots of blood.”

  I got up and rubbed numbness out of my rear.

  “I’d like to go home now. You haven’t said thanks yet, Louis, for getting her upstairs while she was still breathing and working on her and calling up and standing over and helping with the guy that got lumped.”

  “Thanks. What did Curtis want with you?”

  “I never had a chance to find out.”

  “We ought to ask, huh?”

  He opened the door. I looked over his shoulder into a busy room of smoke and noise and movement, except for a long-ridged motionless bulge on a sofa near the far wall, covered with a sheet. Parker talked to a cop and closed the door and then there was a knock and Blair Curtis came in.

  Parker said, “Chambers was just going. What was it you wanted him for?”

  Curtis put a hand up to his forehead and squeezed at his temples. “No bearing on this at all. An entirely personal matter. I’d rather not discuss it.”

  Parker said, “It might have some connection.”

  “Please. No. I’m sure.”

  Parker jerked his thumb. “Good-by, Chambers. Keep handy. What’s your home address?”

  I closed my collar and pulled up my tie. “Central Park South. Or, Fifty-ninth Street near Sixth Avenue. It’s in the phone book.”

  I looked at Curtis. His face was just as wonderfully smooth but his mouth was tight and the whites of his eyes were watery gray.

  “Still want me, Mr. Curtis?” I asked.

  Quietly he said, “If you please. Will you give me a ring tomorrow?”

  I got out of there.

  Downstairs, I caught a cab and went over to Scoffol’s hotel on Forty-seventh Street. Room service brought coffee. I outlined the evening. “Will you go down to headquarters tomorrow and get some dope on it?” I asked.

  “Certainly.”

  Scoffol could do it. Scoffol was ex-copper, retired, with plenty of influence. Scoffol was the solid man of Scoffol and Chambers. Scoffol was the guy that was in the office every morning at nine o’clock, the guy with the contacts, the guy that the insurance companies had a lot of respect for (and paid nice fees for that respect). He was the guy that wrote the pay check for Archie Alexander every Friday afternoon, and for Frank Higgins and Alice Hilliad and Mike Maine. He was the guy Miss Foxworth, our mutual secretary, called “sir.” Not me. I was flash. I was ready money. When I had it. I was the guy with plenty of padding in the shoulders of the special made-to-order suits, with stripes, with a suggestion of peg in the trousers, with jackets that had to be long enough for a guy that measured six feet two. I was the guy that shot crap with the boys and took out the office help, when they were cute. I was the guy for the dames. I was distinctly (ask Miss Foxworth) the tail end of Scoffol and Chambers.

  2

  I ROLLED out of bed at nine forty-five. I went to the living room and called Lolita Blamey and made a date for lunch. I called Curtis Wilde, Inc. and Curtis wasn’t there. There was a message, though, for me to see him at one o’clock. I called the office.

  “Foxy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Scoffol in?”

  “No. He’s downtown.”

  “Tell him if he wants me I’ll be at the Woodycrest at noon. At one, I’ll be at Mr. Clair Curtis’ place of business. After that, I’ll call in.”

  “Oke.”

  She clicked off.

  “Nice polite help,” I said to myself and went and showered and shaved and had my breakfast.

  I walked out of my apartment into a beautiful spring day. The air was warm and the sky was smooth and the breeze wafting over from Central Park was fresh and clean and smelled like cake.

  At twelve o’clock, I was at a window table at the Woodycrest, like an advertisement, and I picked at a light lunch and gave with the charm for Lolita Blamey, who was something. Tall and very shapely with red red lips and black black hair and large even white teeth that glistened like candy stripes on a peppermint stick.

  I stopped nibbling and sat back and enjoyed myself.

  She ate.

  Occasionally, she looked at me, upward, slant-like, and batted ridiculously enormous lashes over wide bold eyes; coyly. Mostly, she ate.

  Suddenly she waved at the plate glass window, Scoffol half waved back, shyly, from the hip; then passed out of sight and reappeared at our table, and stood there silently, legs apart and hands behind his back; short, blunt, corpulent, ruddy-faced, round, white of hair, cheerful.

  “Well,” I said. “Good morning. Pull your feet together and sit down.”

  He grunted.

  Blamey said, “Hello, Mr. Scoffol. Do sit down.”

  He sat. “Beautiful day. Not like yesterday. Yesterday was cold. I really didn’t expect to see you, Miss Blamey.”

  She ate.

  I said, “How about some coffee?”

  “Thanks.”

  I flagged the waitress.

  He looked at his watch. I looked at mine.

  “You have an appointment,” he suggested, “at one o’clock.”

  “He’ll keep,” I said. “This is important. This Blamey here. The young lady with the appetite has become an obsession. Unrequited.”

  The waitress reached in and pushed coffee in front of us.

  “Just,” I said drearily, “a must.”

  “Just, must, lust,” Scoffol said and raised one eyebrow high and dropped it and stirred his coffee. “What in hell’s the matter with you? You have an appointment. Excuse me, Miss Blamey, this overgrown oaf inspires profanity.”

  “He’ll keep,” I said.

  “Silly man,” Lolita purred. “Sweet.”

  “Silly like a fox,” Scoffol said, “or wolf.” He pointed the back of a spoon at me. “You really ought to get out of here.”

  I tasted the coffee. “How about downtown?”

  “I picked up a few facts.”

  “Then spill, my Puritan.”

  “They found a taxicab on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. With four bullet holes.”

  “In the rear?”

  “Where else?”

  “And how many dead men?”

  “Two dead men.”

  I let it ride.

  “I’m not kidding,” Scoffol said.

  Something cold happened to my spine and I felt sweat itch out on my scalp.

  “Gentlemen,” Lolita murmured. “This is hardly light luncheon conversation.”

  “Bo
ss,” I said, “don’t be crazy. Don’t tell me we killed a couple of guys with four nonsense shots that probably didn’t go through the padding of the rear seat.”

  Scoffol was agreeable. “Correct. We didn’t. The four bullet holes in the rear of the cab and the demise of the two stiff occupants are entirely divorced of relationship. The said four bullet holes were window dressing, or ventilation, or target practice. Whatever, not entirely a waste of lead and effort, since, because of them, the said cab was quickly identified as the one around which so much commotion boiled last night.”

  I took the napkin off my lap. I called the waitress and paid the check. I said, “Good-by, beautiful. Business. I’ll see you at the Club tonight, I hope.”

  “Don’t, please, Peter.”

  We left her working with lipstick.

  “Sweet kid,” I said, outside, walking up Fifth Avenue.

  “Sensible too. Which is probably why the great Chambers, for once, is missing on all cylinders.”

  The great Chambers stopped kidding. “No. Boy friend trouble. A lawyer guy named Andrew Grant. For some reason or other, she’s frightened to death of him. She drops a remark here and there, but I can’t get her to really open up.”

  He threw his cigar away. “At half past midnight, they found the cab.”

  “That I know. On the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. Little nondescript and big yellow-coat wrapped up for delivery.”

  “Wrong again, detective. Your little nondescript was one package, all right, with a slug in the neighborhood of the heart. But the other rigorous gentleman was the taxi driver, blasted in back of the head. They got it around midnight, and they got it from the same gun that disposed of Mrs. Curtis.”

  “Keep talking, chum. Who, what, when.”

  He said, “The gun was in the cab. Clean; no identifying marks, no prints. The cab driver was Armand Feisal, a nasty little guy that the department knew and used. They had a few little raps on him, and when they needed certain information, they’d squeeze this little crook and he’d squeak. One of those. The other guy, your little nondescript, was Joe Pineapple.”

  “What do you know?” I said. “Little Joe Pineapple. A gun punk who developed into a racket boy of stature and then tapered off. But if this is a gang knock-off, where does Mrs. Rochelle Pratt Curtis fit in?”