Armchair in Hell (Prologue Books) Page 16

  She opened her eyes. Tiredly she said, “Something like that. Why shouldn’t I play along with the kid …?”

  Then, of course, it broke.

  It hit me in the head. Hard. All of it. It broke and it hit

  me in the head and it splintered all over me like a red rocket at carnival. It clattered inside me like I’d swallowed a roller coaster. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get. You’re going to scoop this old town. Exclusive and sensational. If you want to go. It could, be dangerous.”

  2

  In the cab, she said, “Did you call the police?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want to mess it up. Yet.”

  “It’s horrible.”

  I let her cry, quietly.

  I tapped on the glass panel and I slid it away and I said, “Jackson, you will go up Sixth and make a right turn at Fifty-ninth. You’ll go slow across to Fifth. I’m looking for somebody.”

  Sure enough: parked out against the curb at right angles to the long canopy in front of my fancy apartment house, to the consternation of the doorman with more gold braid than an admiral and to the utter detriment of the sweep and flourish for gratuity — a broken-down Plymouth with a couple of the boys. The roof light was on: McArthur was looped behind the wheel working on his ulcer with a fat black stogie, with McMahon beside him, working on his bank account with the Morning Telegraph.

  We rolled, and I told Jackson to stop at the Plaza. I went in and I used the phone. I called downtown and I got Homicide and then I got Parker.

  “Parker,” he said.

  “Chambers,” I said.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said.

  “That’s not nice,” I said.

  Silence.

  “Louis,” I said. “I want you to get on that two-way dingus of yours and call off the boys.”

  “What boys?”

  “McArthur and McMahon.”

  “Because why?”

  “Because I’ve got that thing wrapped up for you. The three stiffs in the automobile.”

  “What?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Silence.

  Then he said, “How do I know?”

  “Christ. Please. Don’t be a cop. You and I have had business before. I’ll have this packaged for you before tomorrow this time. Way before, I hope. Just give me room. Room, partner, to move around in. Take those guys away from my house.”

  Silence again.

  Then, “Hokey dokey.”

  “Hokey dokey?”

  “Hokey dokey, sucker.”

  “Thanks, I’ll be seeing you.”

  “You better.”

  Outside, I took Madeline out of the cab.

  “That’s all,” I said to Jackson.

  “Sure,” he said. “Because it’s stopped raining.”

  It was cold; brisk wind rubbed at our ears. Madeline put her arm through mine and the intermittent kiss of hips was pleasant and reminiscent as we walked back toward sixth. I left her under the canopy. I pushed my head through the open window of the Plymouth and said, “How’s it, fellers?”

  “Look who’s here, Mac.”

  “Son of a bitch,” said Mac. “And where do you think you’re going?”

  “Home. But first, out of courtesy, I stick my head in and say how-do.”

  Mac said, “That’s what you think, chum.”

  The other Mac said, “Boss wants to see you urgent.”

  “That’s canceled.”

  “Says what?”

  “Listen to your radio.”

  “Calling car sixty-nine …” the voice said, scratchy like burning bacon.

  “Sixty-nine,” I said. “Shame on you.”

  The radio told them to check in. Assignment off.

  “See what I mean?” I said.

  “Wise guy,” said Mac.

  “Wise guy,” said the other Mac.

  3

  I was a gray face with bristles in the mirror of the silent push-button elevator and I wore a patch that I hardly remembered

  and I had bagals around my eyes. Madeline Howell was an enigmatic white profile with teeth over a lower lip.

  Upstairs, I moved.

  I hustled like a housewife with a Flit gun.

  I took her things, and mine, and I put them away. I fixed a chair behind the door and I told her to sit in it. I sneaked a rapid, vapid drink in the kitchen, and another. I brought a gun out of the bedroom and I unclicked the safety latch and I gave it to her. She held it like you hold a fork when you’re toasting marshmallows over the gas range for the picnic in the parlor.

  “You know how?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “How to use it?”

  “Yes. I suppose. You pull the trigger.”

  I was reassured. “You don’t pull unless you have to pull. Then you pull like hell. Check?”

  “Check.”

  I snapped the lock on the door to leave it open and I went all the way across to my desk. I wanted him to see me directly, when he came: his back would be to her. My fingers produced restless drum taps on the desk. Then they stopped, frozen in a ouija spread. Silence. Nothing. And Madeline Howell behind a door, a deep crease between her eyes and her mouth like a kiss and her legs tight together and a nervous gun pointing at me. Where the hell was he?

  Street sounds drifted in, tense as nighttime noise in an empty house. I drummed on the desk again. I shifted my seat in the chair. Where the hell was he? According to me, he should have been here most of the night running up disappointed against a blank door. Now I had it all arranged for him like the madam for the millionaire.

  So where the hell was he?

  The downstairs buzzer rasped like rhonchi out of a dying man. I jumped. Madeline’s knees parted, then compressed again. I waved at her with the palm of my hand and I went for the clicker and I pushed it and I came back to my chair. We waited, and I didn’t like it. It didn’t figure. It didn’t figure for him to be polite and push all the buzzers. It figured for him to get to me fast and quick and unexpected.

  We waited.

  Knuckles whisked at the door.

  Ants ran on my spine. “Come in,” I said.

  The door opened, obliterating Madeline Howell.

  Ralph March!

  Chapter Twenty-two

  WRONG guy and anticlimax.

  “What the devil,” I said, “are you doing here?”

  “I came….”

  “I know.”

  He closed the door. He saw Madeline. “What …?” he said. “I beg your pardon.” He saw the gun. “Please,” he said.

  “Well?” I yapped.

  He flapped his hands. “A social call, really….”

  “Look,” I said. “Not now. Some other time. I’m busy.”

  He looked from Madeline clutching a gun in the far corner of the room to me balancing myself on the balls of my fingers over the desk, back to Madeline, back to me. “Busy,” he squeaked. “Busy?”

  Suddenly he was hysterical as football spiel over the Saturday radio. “I couldn’t stay cooped up any longer. I couldn’t sit tight. I had seen that girl. I had seen Hale naked and dead in the morgue. Honest to God, I’d never seen a dead body before in my life. I’m all scratchy inside. Every creak in the room lifted screaming hackles all over me. I’m shot, I tell you. I’m crawling with nerves. I went out for a walk. Then I thought I’d come talk to you. Even if I had to wake you. Checked with the phone book. Please, may I have a drink?”

  I got up and I went to the kitchen. I poured him the biggest drink of his life. Then I rattled a pheno out of a bottle. I rattled out two. One for me. I had mine with a gulp of his whisky and I went back to the living room. I said, “Ralph, I know just how it is. But right now we’re expecting company. Here’s a pill and here’s medicine. We’ll talk later.”

  He listened to the doctor. He ate his pill and he drank his whisky.

  “You’re a good boy,” I said. “Now get the hell out of here.”


  Firmly he said, “No, sir.”

  “Ralph,” I said.

  “I just won’t go back to that hotel room. I’m shot, man. I tell you …”

  “Ralph.”

  “No, sir.”

  That was that.

  So I clipped him.

  I removed Ralph March from the middle of my stratagem.

  I carried him into the bedroom and I put him on my bed and I took off his shoes. I didn’t have time for the niceties. I rolled up some toilet paper and pushed it past his lips and bound it down with a handkerchief. I tied his hands and feet with tasseled rope off two bathrobes and I attached him to the bed. I had done him a service. What with pheno and a hooker of rye to end all hookers and a rap on the jaw, he figured to slide from unconsciousness into restful slumber. It would be good for his nerves. I patted his feet, and I went back to drumbeats on the desk top and Madeline Howell.

  Where was he?

  He had opened the bag and he had found sand.

  So he knew I had them, because I had brought the bag to Mona via Madeline. He knew I hadn’t delivered them: not with Viggy visiting on Lexington Avenue because the law had three dead bodies to paste on him like cockamamies — so I had them, or I knew where they were; and then I knew why he wasn’t here yet. He was packing. He was arranging. He was setting it up. Because this was the kiss-off. He had played it all the way, the hard way. It had got messed up in the middle, and then he thought it had straightened out; then Mona had moved up in his way and it had gotten harder and tougher than ever, but going back could no longer be, because going back was despair and death, so he had shoved a bullet through her eye in the one last, necessary, miserable, unforeseen necessity — and he was out from under. Then sand.

  So this was to be the kiss-off; and he had known it while the sand had stung at his eyes and he had kicked at a futile suitcase and the grit of bastard words had scratched at his throat.

  Me. He could take his time. He could make all of his preparations. It had finally funneled down. Me. Drumbeats on the desk top. A hell of a situation. A guy with nothing to lose — and me. And I like to keep on living (do you blame me?): I like the lights and the music and the melody of the whispers. Melody of whispers. Apple-pie cute, but that’s it. We eat, drink, sleep, and make babies. That’s the heavy music and the blare of lights. That’s what we cling to, clawingly. But that’s not why we steal tapestries and stick knives into

  people and blast out their eyes, and are as wary as a bustard about our own skins. It’s a cut beneath that: the melody of the whispers: what we don’t talk about and hardly even know we feel — like what we dream about in the cool of the early evening by the sea; like the music of the waltz that reminds you of nothing but brings the prickle of tears about your eyes; like the agitation, after the fifth highball, about the brunette you will never see again, with the hurt, sorrowful eyes; like the can’t-happen knight on a white charger you dream about as a girl; like the sweet thoughts about the old man, your husband, still as death beside you in sleep, a stranger you observe and love, leaning on your elbow; like the feel of the little boy in pajamas bleary-eyed in the parlor, the feel of soft rain in the woods in the summer, the feel of the wet, puckered kiss of a child … the melody of the whispers …

  How the hell do you like that?

  A shamus with nut philosophy. And look when.

  A guy beating the hell out of a desk top, staring at a wretched Madeline Howell, waiting for a murderer …

  Then the doorbell ringing. Thinly. Upstairs.

  Denny O’Shea, a-calling. From on top; no buzzer downstairs. He’s going to wake the guy out of a dream. Like it’s supposed to be. Fast and quick and unexpected.

  I crossed him. I said, “Come on in, Denny.”

  2

  He wore a gray double-breasted topcoat and a gray Homburg and his eyes were blue craters with wrinkles, laugh wrinkles; his eyes were always laughing — at himself, at me, at God, at something. They were laughing now, but they weren’t having fun. His face was white as a fresh base line at the ball yard and his right hand in his coat pocket was the traditional lumped-up bunch with a point. He pushed the door closed with his elbow and he moved in a foot and he stood there. He said, “Gimme.”

  “I know,” I said, “what you want, and I have them.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Tapestries.”

  “Correct and right now.”

  “You want to know how I know?”

  “No.”

  “I’m going to tell you. Anyway.”

  The point in the coat got pointier. “I’m not interested.”

  “Look what Madeline’s got.”

  “What?”

  “Right behind you, a little to your left.”

  He didn’t move. He didn’t say anything. He stood there.

  “Look what I got, the man says,” Madeline said.

  He smiled tight around the mouth, lax and weary around the eyes. He moved like a cripple; small, shuffling backward steps until his back was flush with the door. Then he looked at her quickly, and back to me. Now he moved toward her sidewise and he stood above her and looked down at her and he saw what I saw: that she held a gun like a fistful of cup custard, squashily. He slapped it out of her hand and it bounced once on the carpet and he dug the thick .45 out of his pocket.

  “Over there,” he said, tiredly.

  Fustily Madeline said, “I beg your pardon.”

  “Over there. On the couch. Please.“

  Madeline was distraught and indignant, but smart aleck by the desk was stiffer than an M.C. at the two-o’clock show. With fear. Smart aleck by the desk was more than passingly acquainted with the jangle of that “Please.” Please wasn’t please, please wasn’t gallantry; please was a wrench out of nerves, a parched plea, and a slap of threat; please was movement out of a pushed-in corner, physical, a thrust of action: please could just as well have been unhappy pressure on a trigger.

  Denny O’Shea was tired and wired: Denny had crawled a long way through the sewer pipe and there was daylight up ahead, and when you’re clawing for daylight like Denny was clawing, you have to scrape anything out of your way or you have to take it along with you.

  “Sit on the couch,” I said to Madeline.

  “You too,” Denny said.

  We sat on the couch.

  He pulled my gun over with his foot, stooped and got it and put it in his coat pocket. He opened the buttons of his coat and he sat down in Madeline’s chair. He pushed the Homburg back on his head and the hair jumped up from the top of his forehead, red-blond and shiny.

  “Gimme,” he said.

  “It’s no good, Denny.”

  “Gimme anyway.”

  “It’s no good. It needs a deal.”

  “Deal?” he said.

  “Suppose I give. What happens? Nothing happens. You have your brother after you, and his organization. You have the Little Guy after you, and his organization. You have the cops after you, and that organization. You can’t trade with Vyseuseau: it tips off everybody. Plus he wouldn’t trade with you anyway because it happens he’s tied in with the Little Guy. So you’d be a lamster with tapestries and for all the good they’d do you, you could hang them in your toilet to make it look pretty. If somehow, somewhere, you could make a deal for them, it would be peanuts in a peepot. After all that play. Relax, Denny.”

  Breath in my chest was tighter than a honeymoon couple with minutes to spare; tight breath in my chest hurt against my ribs. I looked at Madeline. Madeline looked at Denny. Denny looked at me. A chary expression got mixed up with the permanent tired laughter in his eyes.

  “Deal?” he said.

  “Deal,” I said.

  “Who pulls it?”

  “Me.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m entrepreneur.”

  “What’s entrepreneur?”

  “The guy in the middle.”

  “What middle?”

  “The fix guy.”

  “For what?”


  “For ten percent. From everybody.”

  The .45 wavered. I was getting through.

  “Look,” I said. “It could have been cops behind the door instead of Madeline.”

  That helped.

  Cops. Lawyers call it a scintilla of evidence — what I did not have. Only Mona could have tied him to the three stiffs in Viggy’s house; at least Mona could have shown he was interested. But now there was no Mona to tie him. So there would have been Peter Chambers with a tall and fulgent tale, but without what the lawyers call a scintilla of evidence, and they’d have mauled him down under the lights in the hard room and they’d have squeezed him all the way from no cigarettes to maybe a rubber garden hose, but even the species

  of barrister known as shyster to the trade would have bargained him out of there on a writ faster than you could entice a two-bit baby with a hundred-dollar bill. And meantime to the sum total of no avail, look at all the characters I’d have to drag into it and how much they would hate me, which wouldn’t be at all good for the business and the roaring prosperity that has been declared to be fast upon us.

  Cops.

  But it helped.

  The bulging side of the .45 lay against his knee.

  I kept flinging the words: “I know the whole setup. Right from the start. I know too that you got Mona to get Madeline to retain me, and I know how you figured it. You figured I’d turn it down, which would mean, naturally, that Viggy retained me for that purpose. So you would hire yourself a couple of cops to play close-tail on me, so you could stay on the ball. And if I didn’t turn it down, swell; I’d be working for you. I didn’t turn it down. Which meant that Viggy, at least temporarily, was handling the bag proposition himself. So you had me working for you, and you’ve got confidence in me; your big brother’s been using me a long time. You knew I’d ring Viggy in on it somehow; but through me you’d be staying as near to the valise as possible, and when you thought it was right — you’d hit. That’s why you went up to the Square Deal Club with me: you heard me tell the Butcher that the Little Guy thought I had it. So, maybe by sticking around close, maybe I’d ask you to do me a favor; to pick up the bag somewhere, to deliver it to Viggy later. Something like that.”

  He didn’t say anything.