Armchair in Hell (Prologue Books) Page 17

  I said, “How’m I doing?”

  He picked up the gun. It wasn’t the same. It was a gesture without tension. The lines around his mouth had slacked off. The frozen laughter around his eyes wasn’t terrifying. He said, “What’s that got to do with a deal?”

  “We’ve got a set of tapestries, and we’ve got a set of thieves. That’s easy for a deal.”

  “How?”

  “There’s been pickup and hijack all the way.”

  “So?”

  “Everybody’ll play.”

  “How?”

  “The guy will pay two and a half million buckeroos.”

  “I know all about that.”

  “Genuine dough.”

  “For Chrissake.”

  “Like this. There’s the Little Guy, there’s Vyseuseau, there’s Viggy, there’s you, and there’s a guy Ralph March.”

  “There’s a guy — who?”

  “Ralph March.”

  “Who the hell is he? Ralph March.”

  “Nobody, except the guy that’s the true owner of the whole works. He was Hale’s partner, all legal with papers, survivor-take-all if one of them passes. And Hale passed, as you know.”

  He didn’t smile. It wasn’t funny.

  “So how does it work?” he said.

  “Everybody wants a piece. A peaceable piece. Right now, nobody’s got them, except you. I’ve got them and you’ve got a gun on me, so, in substance, you’ve got them. We call in the boys for conclave. Split five ways, there’s a half million each. Nobody can kick. Viggy gets what he would have gotten anyway — and the rest of them pick up a half million out of nowhere like a Christmas present. Except for the ten percent off the top. For me. Because I’m entrepreneur.”

  He liked it.

  He stamped it with the oldest seal of approval. “How do I know you don’t cross me?”

  “That’s easy. I’m not law. I’m a businessman. I’ve been retained by Ralph March to try and recover the stuff for him at ten percent. That would be ten percent of two million, because Viggy would have to get paid — that is, if it worked out clean. This way we’ve got a compromise arrangement. But the dear old entrepreneur winds up with more. There’s the additional ten percent of the extra half million which gets thrown into the pot. So why should I cross you? How do you like it, Denny? How do you like conversation about millions?”

  He smiled. Right up to the eyes. He said, “Where’s your clothes closet?”

  I pointed to the foyer.

  He stood up. He brushed his cannon into a holster under his jacket. He took off his hat and coat and he went to the foyer closet. He turned his back on us.

  Denny had come to decision. It is like the girl you have prodded with proposition for years, and she suddenly gives. You’ve got your hands full of girl. I had my hands full of Denny.

  He came back. I said, “Let’s have a drink.”

  I went to the kitchen and I brought the bottle and three glasses, water glasses. I brought a siphon of seltzer under my arm. I handed out the glasses and I poured, large ones for them, a small one for me.

  “Splash?”

  Nobody wanted a splash.

  “Chaser?”

  Nobody wanted chaser either.

  I put the bottle of seltzer on the desk.

  I said, “Boom.”

  Denny said, “Cheers.”

  Madeline said nothing.

  I passed around again with the bottle. Madeline sat back and closed her eyes. Denny and I had a refill.

  I said, “How did it happen?”

  He pinched the point of his nose. “Were you ever a younger brother? The stupid one? The one that couldn’t get five nickels change for a quarter?”

  “I get it.”

  “Plus it was dough. The first time in my life I could give it a shake. A real shake. And real dough.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Mona wisens you up to what she heard from the Little Guy. About the big coup he’s got planned. Together — you cook it up, and it was fun. For Mona. It was stealing from the stealers, it was pulling a Robin Hood, and then you two would scram for Sherwood Forest and the happily-ever-after. But the kid didn’t know you’d have to poke knives into people — ”

  “That’s enough.” He poured more rye.

  I said, “You like the guy.”

  “Who?”

  “Vig.”

  “Sure. I had it all figured. Squared down. Except for him. I worried about it.”

  “But you would have let him have it.”

  “Yes. If I had to. I didn’t want to.”

  “Where’d you get the dame?”

  “That was a break. A real break. She came up to my place two days before they got in from L.A. She was the mother of a filly who used to work in the Utopia. She needed a stake, a little stake, and she came up to my place to see me about it. We were talking and then bang, she chocked up and went

  blue and then she was gone. That’s when I figured it. Strictly a break.”

  “How’d you pull that?” I said. “It’s the only piece I don’t have.”

  He poured a little drink and he nibbled at it. He set the glass down and then he rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his palms and then he brushed fingers through his hair. “I got the idea right away. It figured to work and if it didn’t work then he’d have to take his chances just like I was taking mine. I took all the stuff out of the refrigerator, all the grates and stuff. I stripped her and I folded her in. She was there till I found out when they were coming. Two days. That morning I bought a sea bag and I put her in. I carried her down to the back of the car, drove down and took care of Marmaduke, and then I brought her up to Viggy’s house.”

  He finished his rye. “I pulled the knife across her throat. To make it look good.”

  “That’s all,” I said, “brother. I’ve got to make a call now.”

  He came very close to me, and stayed there.

  I called Scoffol. Scoffol was a patient voice dreary with sleep. I said, “Hiya, pal.” Brightly.

  “The guy was dead.”

  “What guy?”

  “The guy with the name. Reed.”

  “I don’t suppose you live with a hole like that in your neck.”

  “Very good,” he said. “Good-bye.”

  “We got work, pal.”

  “Work. Save it for tomorrow. People sleep.”

  “You save it. Sleep. For tomorrow. For now, we’re winding up that Viggy thing.”

  “Oh” — but not enthusiastically.

  “You pick up Viggy O’Shea at Eighty-three Lexington Avenue, second floor front. You pick up the Little Guy at the Square Deal Club uptown. You pick up Pierre Vyseuseau at the Waldorf. You bring them all here to my place. You bring them alone. Nobody brings assistants. You tell them I’ve got their junk and that we’re going to talk it over. Check?”

  “What about hardware?”

  “I don’t care about hardware. Just no assistants.”

  “Check. I’d rather sleep. Much.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  THEY sat around like ladies of the Rotary backed up in front of the big-game jungle hunter, without helmet, lecturing on the love life of the Zulus (with slides). I wanted attention and they gave me attention, all of them, with their heads upslanted and interested.

  There was the Little Guy, heinie-bouncing and pale in the desk chair, and there was Scoffol directly behind him, one hip on the window ledge, round and florid like a radish on a salad plate. There was Viggy O’Shea on the big blue sofa, gray-faced and black-browed, scraping at the bristles on his chin; and next to him, Madeline Howell, prim and taut; and next to her, Ralph March, doleful as a potted palm in a fleabite hostelry. There was Denny O’Shea at the other end of the room, neat and tight-skinned and crinkle-eyed in Madeline’s hard chair behind the door, and, in a thick-stuffed maroon barrel chair, Pierre Vyseuseau, rigid as an offended virgin, except that he worked with his teeth like a Chinaman with an abacus, clickingly. And annoyingly.

 
; I walked around for them, in the middle of the room, buzzing like a busy signal with the features of the deal. Calm. Like a great big unfrenzied entrepreneur.

  “That’s it,” I said. “Five ways. Nobody loses.”

  Viggy O’Shea pulled his eyebrows up over the plaid shadow-work around his eyes and he stopped scraping and he opened his mouth. Then he closed it.

  The Little Guy pointed a finger at Denny. “Why him?”

  “Two reasons. He’s the guy that took it out of Viggy’s house in the first place. The guy that your guys took it away from. Didn’t you know that?”

  “That reason stinks.”

  “Didn’t you know that?”

  “No. And I was with the boys.”

  “So?”

  “A schmo moseys out of there with a bag just as we pull up. We clip him and take it. It’s a wet, dark night. We don’t stop to turn him over.”

  “Reason two,” I said, “is better. I took it away from you, but he took it away from me. He’s got it now. I talked him

  into this deal because I think that’s the best way all around, and no hard feelings.”

  Stiffly the Little Guy said, “Maybe. What about him?”

  He pointed at Ralph March.

  “Him? That’s Ralph March. He only owns the stuff. He was partners with Algernon Hale, survivor-take-all, and he’s got good and legal papers full of whereases to prove it.”

  “Deal,” said the Little Guy.

  I looked at the rest of them. Nobody said anything.

  “Where the hell are they?” Viggy said. “Produce.”

  “That all right with everybody?” Nobody said anything.

  I said, “Madeline,” and I beckoned prettily and she got up and we went to the bedroom. “Downstairs,” I told her, “on the street floor there’s a nice guy whose name is Dr. Ben Silver. I’ve got four suitcases parked out in his apartment. Go down there and wake him and bring them up, one at a time, they’re heavy. He probably won’t let you have them till he checks with me. Tell him to call me on the phone.”

  Nobody wanted a drink. We sat around, very formal, like front men for a funeral parlor, and we diddled. It took her a long time. Maybe Doc was a heavy sleeper. It was ten minutes before the phone produced the tinkle. “Yes, Doctor,” I said. “It is okay.” The doctor sounded worried.

  Then Madeline Howell started coming through with valises. We opened the bags and we spread the stuff on the carpet. They looked very good on the carpet. Two and a half million dollars is a hell of a lot of money. They didn’t look that good on the carpet. But I’m a private eye (horrible term), I am not an expert on archaic prizes. The expert on archaic prizes was down on his hands and knees peering closely and stroking lovingly.

  “Yes, yes,” he said. “It is.”

  Then he went back to the barrel chair and clicked with the teeth. And Madeline Howell, now, of all of us, was biting at her beautiful fingernails and spitting audibly.

  “Okay,” the Little Guy said. “Only he’s out.”

  He meant Denny.

  I liked that. I had a couple of punch lines that needed fitting in.

  “Why?” I said.

  “He’s a cheap little crook. That is why. Plain crook.”

  It wasn’t that. Always on a party like this or even more

  legitimate parties (like directors’ meetings), when the boys get together to slice it up, number one on the agenda is who gets cut out so that the wedges of the pie are bigger. Viggy was a big shot and Vyseuseau was a partner. And Ralph March was clothed in legal cap with red lines along the margins and whereases in the middle, and every racket guy respects the august aura of the legal cap: that and F.B.I. So the Little Guy slapped at the weakling. Hopefully.

  I sprang a favorite line. “Who are you? God?”

  The Little Guy grumbled, munchingly.

  “Look,” I said, “the guy made a play, a big play. He knifed two guys to get it and when he got it, you took it away from him. He put a lot of work into this deal. When I picked up the bag downtown, I delivered it to Madeline Howell’s apartment and Madeline got Mona to keep an eye on it. Then this guy gets back from your place to the Utopia and there’s a message, urgent, that Mona wants to see him right away; but Mona won’t let him have it when he gets there, because Mona has learned that it’s trouble, murder trouble, so he had to put a bullet into her to take it away again. Now that’s a hell of a lot of work for a guy you want to cut out of a deal.” It was a little nickel-plated item.

  It was a cute, shining job, pearl-handled and feminine — and the Little Guy was working with it, quick and insolent, one anguished corner of his mouth hooked out of line and trembling. It was rapid-fire and sudden, not even noisy, and it was good-by Denny before Scoffol could knock it out of his hand with the seltzer bottle, and Denny stopped sitting in Madeline’s hard chair and he went over face forward with a grunt. Viggy sprawled across and bent in front of him, hiding him from us.

  A screen of green passed over Ralph’s face (poor Ralph) and he made the usual gasping noises and he toppled, sort of into Madeline’s lap. Pierre Vyseuseau stopped clicking. And the Little Guy writhed over what looked like a broken arm. Then Viggy turned around with the pot-bellied .45 out of Denny’s holster.

  “No good,” he said. Unconvincingly.

  He would have pulled it, though.

  It was largely a matter of protocol.

  Scoffol said, “Now don’t you be a son of a bitch of a dope,” and Viggy said, wearily, “Get out of the way, Mr. Scoffol,” and I knew that Scoffol wouldn’t, so I edged around to kick it out of his hand, when the rap came. Nobody said, “Come in,” but the door was still unlatched and it swung in on us and there we had Detective Lieutenant Parker, large as life and squat as an omnibus, bounded on the right by First-Grade Detective Oshinsky and on the left by First-Grade Detective Lenihan.

  We jelled that way. Telescoped down, it was a picture for the front cover of the Idiot’s Crime Gazette with ads in the back for water pistols. “What the hell?” I said. “What are you doing here? Who’s writing this story?”

  “Very nice,” Parker said.

  “What the hell?” I said, indignantly.

  “Just in case,” Parker said, “anybody gets any hot flashes — the place is lousy with cops.”

  They moved in on us then, streams of them: they all walked around the tapestries except Parker, who walked on the tapestries to the clicking consternation of Pierre Vyseuseau.

  “All right,” Parker said. “Who?”

  Madeline Howell pointed unwaveringly. “He.”

  “Good, good,” Parker said, “and dandy. Pants down, this trip, Mr. Little Guy. With delicious reputable witnesses, if you know what I mean. This one is not a gang busteroo.”

  Then he scuffed at the tapestries and he growled, “What the hell is this? My God, who’s your interior decorator?”

  “I want to talk to you,” I said.

  “I want to talk to you too.”

  “Come in here.”

  “Where?”

  “The bedroom.”

  “Bedroom?” he said, uplifted in the eyebrows. “Okay. Bedroom. It had better be good.”

  He sat down on the edge of the bed with a thin squeak-sigh like a cork coming out of domestic sherry. “Make it good,” he said.

  “You’re Homicide,” I told him.

  “Remarkable,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I’m Homicide.”

  “Very funny.”

  “All right. So I’m Homicide.”

  “So you’re interested in dead people and how they get that way. So I can clean up the stiffs in the automobile and you can close the file on them. And that Denny O’Shea mess out there.”

  “And Mona Crawford?”

  “How do you know?“

  “Um,” he said.

  “And Mona Crawford. But I want a favor.”

  “Um,” he said.

  “The tapestries on the floor.”

  “They evidec
e?”

  “In a sense. They’re motivation, as I’ll explain. But you don’t actually need them for evidence. And I don’t want them impounded.”

  “Why?”

  “I need them.”

  “Why?”

  “To turn a buck.”

  “We’ll see,” he said. “Let’s hear.”

  I gave him the story. The whole story. He asked questions. I answered them. He made notes. He stood up. He said, “Okay, louse. I could be spiteful, but I won’t be. Turn your buck.”

  Back in the living room, the canvas came and went with Denny and they removed the Little Guy and they took down yards of statements from everybody, duly sworn, from Ralph March making investments in tapestries to the Little Guy restlessly plummeting pellets at Denny. “Okay,” Parker said. “We’ll be in touch. If anybody wants to leave town, he gets permission from Headquarters, otherwise he’s got an assful of trouble. Excuse me, Miss Howell. Good-by, everybody.”

  We were alone now in the quiet living room, six of us: but the smoke of the cigarettes hung and there was the smell of the many people. I pulled up the Venetian blinds and I brought up a window and a blast of cold, clean air came through, and a slant of sick morning sunshine. I looked at my watch. It was twenty minutes after seven o’clock.

  “My God,” I said. “Look at the time.”

  Scoffol said, “Close the window.”

  Viggy said, “How’d he get here?”

  Scoffol said, “Who?”

  Viggy said, “Parker.”

  Madeline said, “Me.”

  Vyseuseau clicked.

  Ralph quivered.

  I closed the window.

  “What do you mean, you?” Viggy said.

  “I mean,” Madeline said, “me. I mean a filthy murderer killed a girl who was my friend. I mean I was sick and tired of private detectives and fancy gamblers and snotty smart talk bandied about in the living room. I mean that when I went down to Dr. Silver’s apartment for the suitcases, I called the police and I told them what had happened in my apartment, and I told them that I wasn’t a genius, but from what I’d seen and heard, Dennis O’Shea was a murderer, and that he was at Peter Chambers’ apartment on Fifty-ninth Street and Sixth Avenue. I told them who else was here. That is what I mean.”

  “Oh,” Viggy said.