Armchair in Hell (Prologue Books) Page 13

  Crying-Towel Reed opened the door for them.

  “Thanks for the job on Max,” the Little Guy said.

  I didn’t answer.

  Front-Room Strader pushed back his chair, stretched up to his full round-shouldered, skinny height, and came to my couch. He grinned chummily with brown pointed teeth and he sat down. He closed his mouth and he stared at me. His eyes filled the glass of his spectacles, faded-jeans blue and unblinking.

  Crying-Towel Reed sat on one of the square desks and leaned his elbows on his knees.

  The Little Guy lit a cigarette. His left cuff moved up. He wore four diamond rings, one for each finger, and higher up there were diamonds in his wrist watch. All that blistering

  junk under the strong top light fascinated me. The Little Guy noticed.

  “Barbaric,” he said. “Only the left side.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Diamonds,” he said. “I cannot resist them. But I limit myself to my left hand only. Why, there’s guys that use them for buttons on their underpants, and for cuff links and for the top of the zipper on the fly. Take that Lucius guy. He carries them in his lapel. You know?”

  “Yup.”

  “Where’s my valise?”

  “It’s not your valise.”

  He smiled and he clambered out of his swivel chair and his little feet took many steps coming to me, unhurriedly. Cry slid off the desk. Front-Room exaggerated the movements of unhooking the weight of a Colt from a holster and holding it in his lap.

  The Little Guy pointed to the rings on his fingers. “If I slap you with these, backhand, you bleed. If I really go, while someone holds you, you could get a very mashed-up face. We will skip that. For now. Would you like to know why thanks for the job on Max?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s like this. Max takes the valise down there with two other guys, Jasper and a guy Abe Green. Max bossed the trick. Maybe it wasn’t all his fault. I never told him what was in the bag or how valuable. But I damn well told him it was important. It was a stopover, till I contacted a guy. Well, they start throwing themselves a beer party and then Jasper and Abe go out on a date with a couple of striperoos from Jersey. According to Max, they are just going to pick them up, catch a few drinks at a bar, and bring them back to the apartment. Then I called Max and told him I was coming down. The flop-head figures I’ll be sore because he let the boys go out, so he looks for a stall. He tells me he was just on his way out; that his wife called up because he had both sets of keys and she and the kids were locked out; and he’ll meet me at Mona’s and we’ll both go down together. He hoped, by then, the boys would be back. And that is the kind of mishmash that gives you your break. That’s why thanks for the job on Max. He had it coming. Only not from you.”

  I dumped my cigarette in a water-bottom ash tray alongside the couch. “How’s he doing?”

  “Max is mending a broken back in Flower Hospital. What do you hit with? Baseball bats?”

  “Yup,” I said. “I carry them in my jacket pockets. Instead of toothpicks.”

  Very funny.

  “All right,” he said. “What about it?”

  “What about what?”

  “What about the bag?”

  “What about it?”

  “This about it. Either I get the bag or you get cooled. That’s a very simple formula.”

  “It won’t work in reverse.”

  “What would that mean?”

  Pointedly I said, “If it should happen that I got killed, first, you just don’t ever get the bag.”

  “Could be.”

  “Also if you turn your boys loose on me with the idea that they bang it out of me, that won’t work either.”

  “Why?”

  “It’ll be a waste.”

  “Of what?”

  “Energy.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m going to tell you. Now.”

  “That’s different.” He puffed his cigarette and his diamonds glittered.

  I sighed for him, heavily, and I crossed my legs. “The bag, and contents, are deposited with my partner, Philip Scoffol.”

  He shook his hands at me. “Wait a minute. Before you give with the funny stuff. Is there any way you can suggest that I handle this business?”

  “By doing business.”

  “What? I thought you work for Viggy?”

  “I work,” I said. “For me.”

  He went back to his round desk and his high chair. His face puckered. He worked on his index finger. He spat out a chewed-off fingernail. “How do you make it?”

  I drew in a long breath, noisily, and I held it, and I let it out slowly, with words: “I make it like this. I’m told that stuff is worth two million dollars. I am also told there’s a half million in it for the guy that delivers it. I deliver it. That’s my cut. Half a million.”

  Back went the index finger. Nobody said a word. Front-Room was restless on the couch. Crying-Towel leaned on the desk. The Little Guy said, “How do you know I don’t cross you?”

  “I’ll fix that. You’ll get the cash. You can get it. You run a gambling house here. That’s good for a hundred thousand in the safe. All your kind of guys have cash stashed away. Send around for it. That’s your business. You’ll have five hundred thousand G’s for the professor when I deliver it.”

  “I could still cross you.”

  “That’s what you think. I’m not finished. I come here with cops. I deliver the bag and you deliver the cash and then the reason I got cops is that I needed protection for all that green. But if you make with the cross, then I put the finger on you for the Algernon Hale knock-off, and Charlie Batesem.”

  “I had nothing to do with that,” he said.

  That was the one reason I was visiting on a red couch in the basement of the Square Deal Club inhaling unfragrance from Front-Room Strader. To get the Little Guy’s statement. Impromptu; like I’d gotten it. Explosive; like Epsom salts. Offhand; while his mind was on something important, like two and a half million dollars.

  I pressed it, anyway. “I’d tell them that all I knew was that the bag was yours. That you’d hired me as a private detective to pick it up out of a check box in the subway. That would plant it square on you, because there’s a guy Ralph March who knows that Algernon Hale brought that bag into New York the night he was killed.”

  It didn’t bother him. He wasn’t interested.

  Neither was I, any more.

  He lit a cigarette off his cigarette and shrewd wrinkles jumped around his eyes. He was punching around for an out, and he had probably found one; there must have been a lot of outs in the story I had cooked up over a fast fire. But the hell with that. Be shrewd in a hurry, Mr. Little Guy; I’d like to get the hell out of here.

  “Call up,” he said.

  “Whom?”

  “Your partner. Tell him to deliver it. You’ve cut yourself in on a deal. But no cops. I don’t like cops.”

  Crying-Towel came away from the desk.

  “No good,” he said. “This guy is slimy.”

  “Shut up,” the Little Guy told him.

  Of course. The Little Guy had a big idea.

  He looked at Front-Room and Front-Room looked at me. Front-Room took the gun out of his lap. “Get up, shtoonk.”

  He got up too.

  Mildly the Little Guy said, “You are going to call him up. If you don’t call him up then you’re going to get shot, and then we work it out with the Scoffol guy without you.”

  I leaned over his desk, near him. “Mr. Little Guy, you stink. I want to play it straight and you want to play leapfrog. If I call him, it’s no good. He’s Scoffol, who used to be an inspector with the police. He knows all about this deal. If I call him, no matter what I tell him, he knows he’s being futzed around. Because I wouldn’t call him on a two-and-a-half-million-dollar proposition, not with all the characters wanting in, not unless I was being prodded I would see him. Personal. I couldn’t be too busy for two and a half million. So i
t’s no good. You see what I mean?”

  He rubbed his hands across his mouth, not liking it.

  I said, “I’m playing it straight, and I’m going to convince you. And I’m going to trust you, because if you can make the chunky end of a big deal, you’d be an awful dope to put skids under it trying to cheat me out of the little end.”

  “How?” he said. “How you going to convince me?”

  “By going downtown and getting it. Like I outlined. And don’t jump. You send your friends with me.”

  The Little Guy walked the floor with that. “You’re a smart cooky, professor. But please remember, I wasn’t made with a finger either. Depend on that. If this thing backfires, I’ll catch up with you.” Then he said, “Use the Buick. Front-Room drives. Cry sits in the back with Viggy’s private. I’ll be right here. And I’m waiting.”

  “I need a pip-squeak,” Cry said.

  The Little Guy gave him a black automatic out of the desk.

  Then he settled in the throne chair with his finger in his mouth.

  Chapter Eighteen

  THE Buick was a commodious job and Front-Room was a careful driver; it was cellophane-smooth and silent rolling down the West Side Highway, fog up over the river, at a cautious thirty-five on the far right side of the road.

  It gave me time to worry.

  There was Front-Room and there was Cry, a couple of the boys working out a hitch: there was no Little Guy to trouble himself about my temporary well-being on account of two and a half million dollars. My custodians were tense gentlemen of small imagination and large dependence upon the pull finger; they reached, when the call was for duty, casually but quickly, like mamma with the toidy-seat for junior. If I got coy, lungingly, I could damn well collect a lot of little holes in my person.

  I got coy, unlungingly.

  “You get out at the next opening.”

  “No we don’t,” Front-Room said. “The next what you call the opening is One Twenty-fifth Street. You told us the guy lives in a hotel on Forty-seventh Street.”

  “The ex-inspector from the cops,” Cry murmured.

  I said, “May I smoke?”

  Cry said, “Sure.”

  I smoked. I said, “Don’t turn off. But if we lose a hell of a lot of time, don’t blame me.”

  “We got plenty time,” Cry said.

  “Oodles,” said Front-Room.

  “Oodles?” I queried.

  “Oodles,” he said.

  “Okay. Oodles. Let the Little Guy sit in his cellar. Let him sit all night.” I put my neck on the back of the seat and I closed my eyes.

  Silence, all around, for about ten seconds.

  Then Front-Room unlatched. “What do you mean in the cellar all night, pally?”

  “Like this. Maybe my ex-inspector from the cops isn’t home and maybe he left a number at the desk where I can reach him. So I ought to call up before he isn’t at that number either. Or, maybe he’s fixing to go out right now — the guy’s a bachelor — so a phone call would stop him and he’d wait for us. That kind of thing. A little phone call could possibly save us sitting around in the lobby half the night parceling remarks about the beautiful legs going in and out of the elevators. And all the time the Little Guy is in the cellar with the itch on his thighs. See?”

  Front-Room grunted.

  I said, “That’s all, brother. But it’s sensible. And I’ve got as many oodles as you’ve got oodles.”

  Did you ever cross your fingers around a cigarette?

  Cellophane-smooth and silent; fog up over the river; cautious thirty-five; right side of the road — it was very quiet in the commodious Buick, and your detective with the bent cigarette was producing rapidly and profusely from all his pores with sweat, telepathy, black magic, and prayer.

  The car moved to the left of the roadway.

  I lifted a cramped, wet neck off the comfortable upholstery. I brought up the cigarette with clothespin fingers. I dragged hard and I pulled deep. Then I flung it out of the open window and I said many thanks, soundlessly. And indiscriminately.

  He slid the car down the exit lane and we turned left on One Twenty-fifth. We rolled up in front of drugstore lights and he braked and sighed and twisted around and he leaned his chin on spatulate fingers.

  “You don’t get funny,” he said. “You go make your phone call. We go with you. Cry is by the door. I go in the booth with you. That’s the way we do it.”

  We went and Cry was by the door and Front-Room was in the booth with me, and taking the nickel out of my pocket was like the fellow with the bull fiddle arranging for a seat in a crowded subway.

  I got the hotel in two rings and I got Scoffol on one buzz.

  “Hello,” I said. “It’s Pete.”

  “I’m going to bed.”

  “I’m coming up to see you.”

  “Some other time. I’m going to bed.”

  “I’m bringing a couple of characters with me. To pick up the bag. The Little Guy sent me.”

  “What?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “What?” he said. “You sound like trouble.”

  “Right.”

  “Can’t talk?”

  “Right.” I had the receiver flat-pat on my ear. “Blast that other case. I’m busy now. This is important.”

  “Blast what?”

  “Correct.”

  “Blast — ”

  “Exactly.”

  “You mean that?”

  “Yes.”

  “That bad?”

  “Yes.”

  “Real trouble?”

  “You heard me.”

  “You actually want me to blast?”

  “Yes, quick, and no questions.”

  “When?”

  “The minute we come.”

  Scoffol hung up.

  “The minute we come,” I said to nothing. “I want it packed and ready. Front-Room Strader and Crying-Towel Reed. We’re going to pick it up and bring it uptown. Swell. Thanks.”

  2

  We all had our hands in our pockets as we went through the lobby and into the elevator, but upstairs in the quiet, carpeted hallway only I had my hands in my pockets, with my fingernails in my palms. (They weren’t worried about my hands; they had patted me for bumps.) Their hands were out, the naked guns flat at their legs, and they made little excited breathing sounds.

  “You knock,” Front-Room said. “We’re in back of you.”

  I knocked.

  Scoffol said, “Come in.”

  We marched in like that.

  Cry closed the door.

  Scoffol looked sleepy in a red bathrobe with his hands behind his back.

  “I’ll get it,” I said, and I took one step forward and then I swept down and over and quick-rolled at Front-Room’s feet and I grabbed and he came down on me clumsily. I heard Scoffol’s gun.

  I hoped it was Scoffol’s gun.

  If it was, no more piecework for Crying-Towel Reed; Scoffol in his cop days was constantly enmeshed with medals for marksmanship. But I didn’t look. I didn’t have the time. I was busier than a fiddler at a square dance. I beat my head on Front-Room’s stomach and my knees held his feet down and my left hand was up and tight around his right wrist where, approximately, his gun was clamped, and we squirmed in a tiresome horizontal dance on the floor. Then I heard the sobbing echoless crunch of metal on bone, twice, and Front-Room Strader retired. Wearily, Scoffol unbent and he sighed in his awkward red bathrobe and he pointed at Crying-Towel

  Reed who was strangling himself, gurglingly, bright blood rolling between his fingers, sitting on the floor, swaying.

  “An unlucky guy,” Scoffol said. “It severed the big vein in his neck. He has a tear right through him.”

  Then Cry went over on his side, curled up like it was cold and he didn’t have a blanket. I went over and took one hand off; flesh curled away and the hole pumped unhurriedly like a fountain in the park. I put his hand back and I swallowed the blob of thick nothing that grew in my thr
oat.

  “Call an ambulance,” I said, “anyway. And take care of the other guy. Call cops. Breaking and entering. Leave me out of it. I’ve had a little trouble with Parker. You haven’t seen me. And don’t worry about Front-Room Strader, the comatose guy with the glasses. He won’t talk no matter what you say. He’s one of the Little Guy’s boys. So long and I’ll be in touch, and I’m sorry about disturbing you at bedtime.”

  3

  I stood under the neon-fringed marque of Scoffol’s hotel and I waved at the feed line of taxis.

  “Yes, sir,” the man in the cap in the front seat said.

  “Thirteen Gracie Square.”

  “Yes, sir. You see that rodeo in the Garden? Them goddamn cowboys….”

  I got rodeo all the way from Forty-seventh Street to Eighty-fourth Street and East End Avenue which is Gracie Square and there I said, “All right. This corner will do,” and then I saw Ralph March come out of Thirteen Gracie Square and look around and I slid down to the bottom of the cab faster than my cabby’s cowboys off unbusted broncos.

  “Shift,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Shift. Move up to the next block.”

  I crawled up on the seat and I watched through the rear glass. Ralph walked down the stairs and he whistled at the cab and he waved at it.

  “Roll,” I said. “Around the corner.”

  We rolled.

  “What’s the matter with you?” the cabby said.

  “Nothing. I’m trying to catch my wife with her pants down. You know how it is. Only I’m too late. The guy’s just leaving.”

  Sagely the cabby said, “That’s not the way to do it. You get

  a lawyer. They do it. They get one of them private eyes, what all they got to do in life is peep across the transoms — ”

  “All right,” I said. “Thanks.”

  I paid him and I walked back.

  Ralph was gone.

  4

  I went up to Three-B. I didn’t knock. The door was part open. I pushed through. I started to say, “Mad.” I didn’t finish.

  Madeline Howell wasn’t there.

  Viggy’s valise wasn’t there.

  Mona Crawford was there.

  Face down: the still shape of her young body was softly outlined in a tight-bodiced winter-cream dress against the thick nap of the red carpet, her dark hair rippling out from her head as though she were floating in water. The white scalp line of the part of her hair on the back of her head was neat and straight like the thin dull-sheen seams of her nylons: straight and rigid and motionless.