Armchair in Hell (Prologue Books) Read online

  “Hell. You know I was kidding.”

  I took my hat and coat. “Okay?” I asked of the Butcher.

  “Sure. Okay. I’m sorry I lost my head.”

  “Me too,” Denny said. “How’s about some sherry, Fat? Without mickey.”

  “No mickey.” The Butcher grinned.

  “So,” I said, “on this happy note of harmony — I leave.”

  “Just a minute,” the Butcher said. “I’ll call down to Mushky. You’ll go down through the stairs and he’ll meet you on the ground floor and he’ll work you out through the disaster exit. That’ll leave you around the corner, a block away from here.”

  “No, thanks. No disaster exit.”

  Aggrieved, the Butcher said, “Why?”

  “It’s undignified.”

  Wrinkles curled over his eyebrows. “Oh. Undignified.”

  I took the sherry he had poured for Denny and I drank some, “Look, pally. If you’ve got a disaster exit, dear Parker knows about it. Cops are cops and cops are smart and anybody who doesn’t think so, they just aren’t smart themselves. I don’t think that Parker thinks that I’m still here, but even if he did, he’d let it go at that. I’m sure he doesn’t think I murdered anybody, he knows me too well. But he does think I know something about it and he’d damn well love it if we had a chat. So he puts a couple of boys outside my office, mostly for appearances, and he waits for me to call him up, which, one of these days, I shall probably do. But in case I’m all wrong, then Parker would have his strong young men congregate at all your exits, and I wouldn’t like someone smirking a ‘Hello, Petie’ at me sneaking out through an alley. It just wouldn’t be dignified. Follow?”

  “Follow,” said the Butcher.

  “So I’ll be seeing you.”

  I opened the door and I shut it.

  Tight and neat and close and quick — but not behind me.

  In front of me.

  Chapter Sixteen

  CRYING-TOWEL REED in undisputed possession of a corridor in Viggy’s was as alarmingly improbable as an amiable atheist in sole control of a bishopric — but if it wasn’t Crying-Towel Reed, vague but startling, lounging against the wall outside the office, then I wasn’t an excited detective, pawing a door, uttering stuttering sounds like young romance in the bathroom with his finger in his throat.

  “Get calm,” the Butcher said.

  “What’s the matter?” Denny said.

  “You look like you seen an illusion,” the Butcher said.

  “Illusion?” I said, amazedly.

  The Butcher grinned. “It’s because I don’t believe in ghosts.”

  “Outside there, brother, it is either an illusion leaning up against the side of the corridor. Or it is a guy whose name is Crying-Towel Reed.”

  Fat the Butcher kissed the grin good-by.

  “You are crazy. In the head.”

  “Try me, sweetheart.”

  The Butcher opened a drawer with assorted guns.

  He gave one to Denny and he gave one to me and he took one for himself. In a close phalanx of fire power we moved up on the door.

  “Open it, Denny,” the Butcher said.

  Denny opened it.

  Crying-Towel Reed was holding up the wall with his right shoulder and with his right hand he was menacing his mouth with a broken toothpick.

  Emphatically the Butcher said, “I’m a son of a bitch.”

  “Who says no?” asked Crying-Towel Reed.

  “Inside, catastrophe.” The Butcher called him with the gun.

  Three men with revolvers like siege guns, and Crying-Towel Reed, shapeless as a played-with paper clip, casually slouching in the middle of the green carpet. I put mine back in the drawer.

  “Touch me,” Cry said.

  I touched him. All over. He was smooth.

  “I am here on a mission of peace,” he announced.

  “What the hell kind of a mission,” the Butcher said, “of peace are you here on? And why are you on it here?”

  Crying-Towel pointed with his thumb.

  “Him.”

  “Me?” I said.

  “You.”

  “Me?”

  “The boss wants to see you.”

  “Boss, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought you didn’t have a boss.”

  “Right now I got a boss. Piecework.”

  “Just one little minute,” the Butcher said. “How the hell did you get in here in the first place?”

  Cry shifted the toothpick. “I will tell you; so you will worry. I am out looking for your shamus friend and I got some lines out. So there’s a guy I know works in this clip-coop. So there’s fifty in it for him if he tips me when the tin badge shows. So he shows. So he tips me. Downstairs you got kitchens with garbage-outs and you got chefs that don’t mind a quick buck and I know how to shmear. So I am here, strictly on a visit.”

  “Son of a bitch,” the Butcher said admiringly and wonderingly, drawing it out long like taffy.

  “That’s what you told me before.”

  The Butcher made eyes at me. “You don’t have to go, bo. We can work this guy over a little bit and send him back to his boss with a veal cutlet for a face. Because he don’t belong here. And his boss knows it. Piecework or straight salary.”

  Cry spat the wood out of his mouth. “I come on a mission of peace,” he insisted, “but outside in a nice, shiny car I got five boys. If I don’t show in an hour, they got pineapples. What you peel with your teeth and you throw.”

  “You could get killed like that,” the Butcher said.

  “I know, I am making like a comic. Good, huh? You ready?”

  “Look, tuberculosis,” the Butcher said. “You are dumb. You talk too much. We can hold you here and we can go out and take care of the boys in the shiny car. Then what?”

  Dryly Cry said, “Not dumb. Because I got more boys staked out with more instructions.” He came up to Fat the Butcher and he pushed the unpoised gun aside and he laid a finger on the Butcher’s flat white shirt. “Don’t fiddle with Cry. I’m a high-paid man, and when they give me time, I do a job perfect.” Then he came to me, winked, patted my arm. “You, professor. If the boss wanted you feet first, you would be feet first, or at least you’d have damn well known we made a stab at it. I certainly would not be here batting the breeze with this dressed-up monkey. Now, you coming, or do we take you? Later on.”

  Denny said, “Look, pal. If this joint gets blown up, guess

  what happens to the Little Guy’s flophouse. And that’s all he’s got. One single sucker trap.”

  “Bet your boots,” Cry said sadly. “Correct and you are right, longie. It ain’t good business, and nobody would like me. Which is what I say in the beginning. Peace, like that Father Divine with the Angels.”

  The Butcher made his deposit of gun in the open drawer and he went wearily into his swivel chair. He poured and he drank Harvey’s neat and then he put his feet up on his favorite corner of the desk. “Well?”

  “I’m going,” I said. “I’m very happy to go.”

  Cry said, “Smart. You’re a guy I like.”

  “You could get hurt,” the Butcher said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “It’s like this. The Little Guy thinks I stole something from him, and he’d like it if I told him where it is. I couldn’t talk much with a broken jaw, or worse. Now, could I?”

  “Well….”

  “Could I?”

  “You could write.”

  “Don’t get literal.”

  “Not me. I don’t read books.” He sighed, dissidently. “I hope you know what you’re doing. You want a few boys?”

  “Suits me,” Cry said. “I don’t care. That’s the Little Guy’s business. As long as I deliver the professor. Nobody told me nothing about no company.”

  “Me,” Denny said. “I’m just the guy.”

  He laid the gun on its side on the desk.

  “How
’s that?” the Butcher inquired.

  “You’re going to like this reason.”

  “That, I am sure of.”

  “It’s because I’m the big shot’s brother. So I’ll be my brother’s keeper. That is, I’ll keep my eye on the guy he keeps. So I’ll be doing Viggy a favor, and I don’t figure to get hurt because the Little Guy don’t figure to damage Viggy’s brother. Likee?”

  Crying-Towel Reed lit a cigarette. Denny O’Shea lit a cigarette. I looked at the Butcher and he threw the pack at me and I caught it and he said, “Keep it, for Chrissake,” and I brought him a cigarette and he lit mine and he lit his own. Everybody smoked and nobody said anything.

  Then the Butcher said, “All right?”

  “Good by me,” I said.

  “Good by me too,” Cry said.

  The Butcher fluttered his hands. “Then why the hell shouldn’t it be good by me too? Okay. Get out of here. All of you.”

  I took my hat in my hand and I put my coat over my arm and Cry opened the door and he said, “Pray view, Professor Alphonse,” and Denny and I went through and he came after us. In the corridor I inquired, “How’s Max Crumb?”

  Cry squeezed and brought up a thin smile that hung on his face like a harelip. “Crumb? I never heard of the guy.”

  2

  We went by way of the stairs and we stopped at each floor while I looked over the gaming rooms. I was guest of honor and that’s the way I wanted it. I was looking for Dolores Castle which is like looking for little Willie in a white shirt in the bleachers at the Yankee Stadium on a double-header Sunday.

  Sometimes, you find him.

  I found her, thighs against a dice table on the second floor; and she saw me and she squealed, partly at me, mostly at the portly man with the montywoolley beard who bounced a ten off the board the hard way. She gathered in her money and made herself narrow, backing out of the crowd.

  “Whew,” she said. “Two fives. And me with fifty that he makes his point. And ten extra for the hard way.”

  “Very lucky. And very beautiful. I came through to say good-by and glad to know you.”

  She looked at Crying-Towel Reed and Denny. “Hello, Denny.”

  “Hello, Dolores.”

  Her eyes scraped over Crying-Towel’s bleak face and she touched my elbow and she said, “Excuse me,” and we moved away a few inches.

  “Trouble?”

  “No.”

  “I’ve been looking for you too.”

  “Swell.”

  “I like you.”

  “I like you too, sister.”

  “Don’t call me sister.”

  “Sure thing.”

  “I saw that commotion down there. With the cop. Parker.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He asked me about you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I told him you’d beat it. I told him I saw you taking the elevator down.”

  “Thanks, precious.”

  “But I didn’t. I saw you taking the stairs. Up.”

  “Of course. You’re a sweetheart.”

  “Now what about this guy?”

  “Which guy?”

  “This little guy that looks like he’s looped. The guy with the nothing-face.”

  “Just a guy.”

  “Don’t go away,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

  Rescue, I did not want.

  I hoped, fervently, that Dolores Castle wasn’t going noble on me. I was looking forward to Dolores Castle, but not noble. I said, “In a minute,” to the boys, lightly and deprecatingly; and then she was back and she shook hands with me and she said good-bye and she left a stiff little card with me, in my hand.

  On the way out, in the men’s room, I looked at it.

  It was a bright yellow card with her name and address and phone number on one side. On the other side it said, “You’re a cutie-pie. Call me when you have the time.”

  I put it in my wallet.

  Chapter Seventeen

  UP AROUND One Hundred and Eightieth Street the George Washington Bridge is majestic over the Hudson at fifty cents a crack toll charge. On the Jersey side, there’s the Riviera, with a roll-top ceiling, where you can dance and drink and study astronomy and listen to the music and clap hands for the talent. Over on the New York end, in Washington Heights, there’s the Square Deal Club, a three-story brownstone, where you can dance and drink and study bird-cage and listen to the dice rap against the rubber backboards on the pool tables. That’s the Little Guy’s joint: with the kind of entertainment where high-hipped Negresses, smoothly naked, clip five-dollar

  bills off the table edges, rippling and smiling to the tinkled applause against the highball glasses.

  We did not go up the brownstone steps; we went around and to the right and under the steps and Cry put a key into a sheet-metal door, and he locked it behind us. He opened a second door into a long, narrow hallway and we went all the way and then Cry pushed for one of those self-service elevators with the buttons. It came and it bobbed to a stop in front of us, gratingly, like a tired locomotive harried down by a bull-red flag.

  Cry put his finger on the bottom button.

  We went down one stop into a lobby with one door and Cry knocked and said “Me” to the “Who?” — then he opened the door and he straightened his arms along the seams of his pants and he said, “Pray view, gents.”

  “Pray view what?” Denny said.

  “Pray view. It’s polite. It’s French.”

  It was a large, rectangular room with a thick blue carpet. There was no window.

  The Little Guy squirmed in the high-backed swivel chair and he glared at his gin hand. Front-Room Strader ate his cigar and discarded the nine of hearts.

  “Knock. Four points.”

  “Lucky, lucky, lucky,” the Little Guy said.

  A tired young man, slim and dapper in two hundred dollars’ worth of olive-green basket weave with a white high-collared shirt and no tie, crossed his legs in one of the blue settees, picking at his fingernails with the point of a toothpick.

  Crying-Towel Reed said, “Hi.”

  Nobody answered him.

  Nobody looked at us.

  I went across to the couch that faced the Little Guy and I lit one of the Butcher’s Luckies. Denny sat in the other corner of the couch. Cry kibitzed over Front-Room’s shoulder.

  “What you call the silent treatment,” I said, loud enough, to Denny. “You’re supposed to get nervous.”

  “Knock,” Front-Room said. “The book. Ten.”

  “No lay,” the Little Guy said. “How do you like that?”

  Front-Room poked numbers across the tally sheet, then he shuffled and the Little Guy cut and Front-Room dealt.

  The Little Guy, under lights, wasn’t as young or as handsome as he had been in the dimness of the doorway at Mona’s on Gracie Square. He was about fifty, with mauve patches

  under his eyes and a thin network of light pockmarks on his face like the shadow of chicken wire around a children’s playground. But the guy had style.

  Not Front-Room.

  Front-Room was gauche as a left-handed spitballer.

  He was a figure around the town: long and thin and gaunt and hollow-bellied in dark, baggy clothes and a striped silk shirt. He wore the heavy-framed glasses that bank presidents wear, wide and tight over the ears, with thumb-width lenses that put his eyes, swimmingly, inches in front of his face. He was the Little Guy’s outside man; he wasn’t strictly a hood like Cry. You saw him around, in his striped silk shirt — talking fix along Jacobs Beach, making signs with his fingers behind third base at the Polo Grounds, over by the frankfurter stand between halves at the pro football games, a half flight up at the Garden basketball nights talking fast to the characters with the off-the-face hats and their hands up to their elbows in the pockets of the tan-white polo coats.

  “Gin,” he said. “In the middle.”

  The Little Guy spread his hand. “That’s what I was playing for. Stuck with two jacks and a q
ueen. Thirty plus twenty is fifty.”

  “Blitz,” Front-Room said. “All the way across.” He added the figures on the score card. “That’s six hundred twelve bucks.”

  The Little Guy paid him; then he slid the cards aside with his left hand and the diamonds on his fingers sparkled like the ladies in Esquire.

  Querulously he said, “And now: what have we got here?”

  “Here we got him.” Cry gave me the thumb. “The professor.”

  “Yes. Mr. Chambers. People have been talking to me about you. Delighted.”

  Then he looked at Denny.

  “Hello,” Denny said.

  “Hello, Denny boy. How’s Viggy?”

  “Fine.”

  The Little Guy leaned back in his swivel chair and he bit at the nail of his right index finger.

  “Out,” he said, smilingly.

  “What?” Denny said.

  “Out.”

  Denny stood up. “Yes, but — ”

  The slim young man abandoned the blue settee. He moved with grace and unconcern and he put a knuckle on Denny’s chin. His eyes were black and wet like mud puddles on a dim road and his voice was like a kid’s kazoo.

  “You heard the man, bub. Out.”

  Denny dissipated the knuckle off his chin with an open right and he short-jumped a closed left to the middle button of the olive-green drape, but the slim young man was agile moving away from the punch. He placed his hand inside his jacket and he showed Denny an elegant .22, white-handled and dainty.

  He checked with the Little Guy. “What do you want with him?”

  “You’ll take him upstairs and you’ll get a cab and you’ll ride him downtown to his dance hall. The Utopia. And no trouble.”

  “Not unless he begs for it.”

  Denny about-faced, leisurely, looking down to me. “Well?”

  “No sense you hanging around,” I said, “in the circumstances.”

  “Yeah, but — ”

  “You know where you left me. Thanks for the company.”

  Denny shrugged. “Okay.” He turned back to the Little Guy. “Okay. Tell your cokey-boy to sit down. I don’t need an escort.”

  The Little Guy smiled. “You get one regardless.”

  The slim young man took a narrow Homburg off a hat tree.