Armchair in Hell (Prologue Books) Read online

  Mr. Vyseuseau was enjoying himself.

  He was also riding along with me. Like the old gentleman in the hat in the top seat of the hansom.

  Why?

  I decided to get out of there. I went for my hat and coat. I said, “What were you doing up there tonight? Near Gracie Square? Up around Eighty-sixth Street?”

  “But no, truly …”

  There was a knock on the door. He didn’t hear it.

  “But no, truly …” The knock was louder.

  “Ah.” He put his glass down and he stood up. “One moment,” he called. He came close and he patted my cheek. “Mr. Chambers, I am thinking you shall adore this.”

  Chapter Twenty

  I DID not adore it.

  It was the Little Guy and three of his gentlemen. There was the slim young man off the blue settee and a thick little perspiring man with jowls for a neck and a hulk-shouldered man, punchy as the fruit bowl at Christmas time, with a square face and small scars and flanged ears and restless eyes.

  I wriggled in the soft brocaded chair and I crossed my legs and I opened my mouth and I let it hang; just then the Little

  Guy and entourage were quite as inappropriate as webfoot snowshoes on the Ballet Russe.

  I closed my mouth.

  “Where …?” the Little Guy began. Then he saw me. “How …?”

  “Who?” Vyseuseau said.

  “Him. How’d you get him here?”

  I closed my mouth tighter. It was beginning to come to me.

  Vyseuseau said, “Gentlemen, sit you, if you please.” Nobody sat. Except me.

  The Little Guy moved out of his gray snap-brim and his English import with leather buttons. The rest of them stayed dressed: they spread out and leaned against the furniture.

  “I get it,” I said.

  “You are going to get it,” the Little Guy said, “I’m afraid.”

  “Any time,” said the square face with the flyaway ears. “That’s for me, and a pleasure. I will fix him for Maxie. But good.”

  “Quiet,” the Little Guy said. He came up to me and he poked an impatient finger at my forehead. “Where are they?”

  “Who?”

  “You know who.”

  Then he wheeled and ponied over to Vyseuseau. “Give it again. Straight, clear, fast, and short.”

  “At once,” Vyseuseau said. “But certainly. First they ceased at a drugstore and they all entered. Thereafter they proceeded to a hotel at Forty-seventh Street. After a time, our friend emerges, only. I mean alone. He engages a taxicab. To Eighty-fourth Street. I am a street behind, always. The taxicab ceased, then commenced again, around a corner. I went after, slowly, but when I reached where it had been, it was going away, but I saw him walking back. I proceeded, slowly, seeing him enter Thirteen Gracie Square. I returned and I parked. He emerged, later, and walked, and entered an ice-cream emporium. I parked. Then our eyes met in a mirror. I decided to leave. I left. I called you. I awaited your presence here; and suddenly, he knocked and he was here.”

  I listened as intently as the Little Guy and while I listened I learned that I wouldn’t be thrown to Blossom-Ears as exercise boy: because nobody knew about the fireworks on Forty-seventh Street like Mardi Gras over Coney Island. The volatile Vyseuseau and the nervous Little Guy completed their

  conversational rigadoon and the Little Guy came back to me, approaching with extended forefinger.

  I extended mine and I fenced it off. “Is that what you’re doing here?”

  “That’s what I’m doing here.”

  “You had better go back.”

  “Why?”

  “They’re probably on their way uptown now.”

  “What?” The finger bent and turned and he chewed on his nail. “I don’t get it. At all.”

  “This,” I said. “Scoffol had the bag checked out with a friend in Brooklyn. He wants to go for it but your boys insist upon going with him. Me, I’m busy, I’m going to arrange for coppers to accompany me uptown to your place according to the plan I laid out for you, if you remember. Also, I’ve got a couple of things to attend to before that. Business. So Scoffol takes over and I leave while he’s calling up to make the arrangements.”

  The Little Guy sat down in the hard chair near the writing desk. “What things to do? At Thirteen Gracie Square?”

  “Just a minute. Let’s get this thing in order first. Then I’ve got news for you.”

  “News for me?”

  “You and the Frog have a deal on the bag. Yes or no?”

  “None of your business.”

  You call that immaterial and irrelevant and not responsive, only I was in no position to call it anything.

  “So,” I said, “you knew I’d show up at Viggy’s joint sooner or later. You had Cry working from under and your partner, the Frog, from on top. He’s around there every night in his midnight-blue tuxedo and his twilight-gray choppers. I show up, and he calls you. But you’ve already been informed that Cry knows I’m here too, and that Cry is working on it. So you tell Vyseuseau to stay with it, and when I ride up to your joint with Cry and the boys, friend Frog is behind us in his gray coupé. And while I’m up at your place, so is he. And when I go back, he’s behind us — sort of rear-guard technique.”

  Slowly the Little Guy said, “I don’t like the business you give me about your Scoffol and my boys. It don’t smell too good from where I am. Maybe we ought to sort of inspect it.”

  “Inspect. If you ever caught up with Scoffol, he’d talk

  smoke rings at you till you’re dizzy. Don’t be a dope. Leave it alone. Listen to me.”

  “You know just how much I trust you.”

  “Look. Please and for Chrissake. You weren’t born yesterday, and neither was I, and if you think I’m pitching forward passes, the hell with it — think. You’ll find out fast enough, and if I am, you can always move in on me. I am not a tank-town shamus with a shiny badge operating from behind my sweatband. I run a big business here and I live here and I don’t mix with the likes of you, only on business, and I wouldn’t powder for any of you. Logical?”

  Music with schmalz and big, brave lyrics.

  Chambers: heaving with the words, fast and haughty, like the lady with the feathers in the mile-long roadster talking down a traffic cop.

  Eagle-Ears grunted. “We’ll move in on you all right. Shake your head, boss. I will move in on him now. A little bit. For a sample.”

  I smiled for him. I said, “Fatso, I look forward, and avidly, to kicking teeth down your noisy throat.” And I meant it.

  He started to move and I stood up. I hoped that they’d depend on him to do a little job on me. I hoped that they wouldn’t interfere while he shut my big mouth. The guy got in my hair like peanuts get in your teeth. It would be a pleasure. A good deal of annoyance steam-kettled inside of me, sealed in and no spout. I could use him.

  “All right, all right,” the Little Guy said.

  “No.” He kept coming. “I do not like the way the monkey talks to me.”

  “That’s right, Fatso,” I said. “You tell him.”

  Then the slim young man quietly said, “You heard the boss, Ernie,” and Ernie stopped, grumblingly.

  “What news?” the Little Guy said.

  I squared off in front of him and I locked my hands behind my back and I spread my legs like a sawhorse. “Mona,” I said. “Someone pushed a slug through her right eye, from very close up.”

  “What?” he said.

  “Dead,” I said.

  His face was half past twelve on a stopped clock with a limp hand. I turned away, and I turned back.

  The slim young man had jumped for his boss.

  The Little Guy was ill. His face was gargle-medicine red

  and his eyes were popped and rigid; and then his face wasn’t red any more but sick and yellow and twisted and his eyes moved up in his head and ugly groups of purple little veins crawled underneath his skin.

  “What …?” His mouth was loose. “What, what …?”


  It wasn’t pretty.

  Vyseuseau brought him brandy. The slim young man unbuttoned his jacket and opened his tie and pulled at his shirt collar. He was scattered all over the chair, quivering, his little feet riding off the floor, limp as the Cavanaugh special you ransom from the hat-check at the opera; and for one little moment the frantic pity that roars up in front of point-blank agony unembellished, like furious water for flushing the drain (and we’re holy and humane and blood brother to all men), swirled inside me and I was shaken and sorry for this wretched little man.

  I turned it off.

  The slim young man accused me. “Look what the hell you’ve gone and done to him.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Vyseuseau said, “You are positive?”

  The Little Guy fought away from the slim young man and he put his feet down to the floor. He washed at his face with both hands. “How do you know this?”

  “I saw her. I touched her.”

  “Why?”

  “I was checking on something. Something that has nothing to do with you.”

  He stood up. Weavingly. “We’ve got to get over there,” he said. “We’ve got to get over there.”

  “No good,” I told him. “I’ve called the cops. You’d mess it up.”

  “Who?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Yet. But I’m going to know. It ties in with my stuff. I need time. I’ve got to move around.”

  He wobbled over and he reached up and hung on my lapels. “You!” he said. “Don’t be crazy, pal.”

  “You!” he said.

  “Pull yourself together. I’m no murderer. I’m a private dick earning a living. You loved the girl. All right, I’m sorry for you. I know how it is. Leave me alone, and I’ll take care of it, the best I can, because it’s got to do with what I’m

  working on. Button up, and go on back uptown. I’ll let you know.”

  I brushed him off my jacket. The slim young man brought him more brandy and he drank a lot of it. He sighed, like a shiver. “Okay. I broke up. I’m better. We got two things, now. We got this, and we got business. Look out for yourself.”

  He didn’t look any better to me.

  I put on my hat and coat. “That’s where I’ll be in touch with you. Uptown. Good-by, everybody.”

  Square-Face danced over on light feet and he shoved on my shoulder. “That’s what you think, soldier.”

  “Leave him alone,” the Little Guy said. “Okay. Uptown.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  I FOUND Jackson Tomashefski in the all-night pharmacy of the Lexington Chemists, across from the Waldorf, stanchly parrying comment from three cabbies and a chauffeur in livery, over coffee, about America ain’t America any more and the goddamn Administration is all split up and it don’t give two loud hoots in hell for the goddamn people any more and all you got to do is be rich and you’re awright, otherwise it’s just too goddamn bad unless you got a union, and a good goddamn strong union, or else. I nudged through the vociferous elbows and I delivered the embattled defender.

  “Bolsheviks,” he said, slamming down the flag on the meter. “Where we going?”

  “Moe’s Grotto. Fifty-sixth and First.”

  “Sure. You got to knock the flag down on account the hack inspectors. How do you like them guys? Miscontents. We got the best goddamn country in the world …”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I saw her immediately, in a booth in the back, behind a large bowl of vegetable salad. I checked my hat and coat and skirted the square bar with green lights and I went through to the Grotto proper. She held a stalk of celery in her hand and she glared at it, soberly. Then she looked up and she saw me and she put the celery down.

  “Darling,” she said morosely. “Hello.”

  I moved in beside her.

  “What about the bag?” I said.

  “Bag?”

  “Bag. Suitcase. Satchel. Gladstone.”

  Her mind wasn’t on it. “You took long enough digging up your guy. Don’t worry about the bag. It’s in very good hands. And I wish you wouldn’t harry me, Peter. I’m not in the mood. You are gazing upon a keenly disappointed reporter. That is, if you call the pitter-patter of chi-chi chitchat reporting. How do you like that chitchat? Say it ten times, fast, and it will sound like what it really means.”

  “But — ”

  “See that woman?”

  She lifted her eyes and pointed with her face. A woman sat opposite us, four booths down, a fat, handsome, wattled woman in a dapple-gray dress with a prominent bosom, outboard and aquiline. She had her elbows on the edge of the table, and her bosom, and she stared straight ahead of her.

  “That person,” Madeline Howell said, “is the wife of a UN big shot. Another UN big shot, not her husband, was supposed to come in for a rendezvous. If I could just jab a hint of that into my column, I’d rock the city. I’d rock the country. I’d rock nations. So what happens? So the guy doesn’t show up. Now isn’t that a son of a bitch?”

  The fat lady got up and went away.

  “Mad,” I said. “What about the bag?”

  “Jesus breezes, stop it with the bag. Mona’s sitting on it. At the apartment. And if you’ve got your guy, let’s go. I’m ready to go. Damn ready.”

  She was half out of the booth. I took her arm and I drew her back. “I’ve got something to tell you. Something lousy.”

  She looked at me, then she sat down. She pulled her arm out of my hand and she put her own hand over it. Her nostrils flared and stayed that way, pinched out. “What’s the matter with you?”

  I looked at the vegetables. I said, “Mona.”

  “What about Mona?”

  “She’s been … hurt.”

  “Pete.”

  “I found her on the floor in your apartment.”

  “Pete …”

  “She was shot, from very near, through the right eye.”

  For a moment there was nothing; then the blood fell out of her face and the circles of rouge were like fever spots of

  hilarity on a painted clown. She stared at me, her eyes big and shabby with horror. “Pete,” she whispered.

  I waved at the waiter. “Brandy. Doubles.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  She finished her brandy.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  Quietly she said, “Pete, look … that kid …”

  “Slow down.”

  “Look, Pete. I practically raised that kid. I’m about thirteen years older than she is. I taught school once, back there, in a hick town in Montana. She was a pet of mine, my favorite. Since she was nine. An orphan. Lived out at my house …” Her voice went away.

  “What about her?” I said.

  “When I went East, we corresponded. Then she came on to New York. Grown and beautiful. And wild. Wonderfully wild. I couldn’t hold her. She was born for this town. Somewhere she met that Little Guy, and she stacked against the easy money, but small-town respectability was a part of her. No matter you’re a kept woman with a duplex so large it scares you; you’re not a whore if you work for a living. So she worked in that dance hall. Regularly and consistently. We went our separate ways for a while. Then she got in touch with me and offered me the lower half of that apartment. Lonesome. I wanted an apartment, and you know what it’s like trying to get an apartment. She wouldn’t take a dime from me. She couldn’t, she said, she wasn’t paying for it. I knew all about that kid. Everything.”

  I gave her a cigarette. I gave myself a cigarette.

  Suddenly she said, “You sure? Pete …”

  “Take it easy, Madeline, I’m sure. Something else. The bag wasn’t there.”

  She wasn’t interested.

  She smoked nervously.

  Brandy gave new background to her rouge.

  “You’ve got to tell me about that bag,” I said. “I think she was killed because of the bag.”

  “All right. I’m not violating any confidence now. Mona asked me to retain you to find th
e bag. She gave me the money. And she wanted you, specifically. She had heard about you, she said. She didn’t want her name mentioned, under any circumstances.”

  For a moment it made sense. Then it was crazy. Mona

  Crawford was the Little Guy’s girl friend. So he gets her to get Madeline to hire me to look for it. That would make sense. But it was crazy: because at that time the Little Guy didn’t have to hire anybody to look for it. He had it. Then I remembered. There was a middle guy. Somebody else had had that bag. For a very short time. In between possession by Viggy and possession by the Little Guy, there had been possession by another, principal or emissary — transient as a floating crap game, but possession — until a soft conk on the head had helped him relinquish it.

  Then something clicked inside of me.

  Stingily and tinily.

  But suffocatingly.

  I let it wait. I said, “What happened after I brought you the bag?”

  “I called Mona and I told her. She came home. I repeated your grisly story and I told her we were to wait for your friend. I was frightened. For her. I asked her about it. She wouldn’t tell me. She was upset. Then Olafson called me with this thing. I left it with Mona. She promised to wait for you. She was very much interested. I didn’t worry. Wild, yes. But ruggedly honorable, when it was important.”

  She closed her eyes. She drooped like a drunk’s cigarette.

  It clicked again. Urgently.

  I’ve got a sweetheart and a boy friend. Now, I’ve got you. Too.

  Very slowly I said, “Look, that thing. ‘To Mad, with love’ on your cabinet. You didn’t know the guy after all?”

  She didn’t open her eyes. She didn’t answer.

  “You did that for your protégé. Probably one of the reasons she wanted you to live there. Sort of decoy in case of trouble. If the Little Guy ever walked in on them, upstairs; well, he’s Madeline’s boy friend, not mine. Just kind of keeping him company up here, and if you don’t believe it come on downstairs, and ask Madeline. If she’s there. Look at the photo down there — 'To Mad, with love.’ Be yourself. Right girl, wrong guy.”

  I said, “Well?” and I slithered my toes around in my sweating socks.