Armchair in Hell (Prologue Books) Read online

  Viggy didn’t answer.

  “You’re Viggy O’Shea,” I said. “You’re big stuff. You’ve got brains and talent and imagination and daring. You couldn’t have reached to where you’ve gotten without all of that. So I’m not worried about you. But keep the bottle handy. It’s a nasty job.”

  He looked at the bottle, lifted it, and snatched one.

  “Why me?”

  “Which means what, exactly?”

  “Which means, exactly, what the hell do I have you for if I’ve got to steal automobiles and garnish them up like wagons out of the morgue?”

  I pulled breath into my chest, indignant. “Listen very carefully. Remember me? Pete Chambers. I make a living by virtue of a fragile license issuing from a sensitive Secretary of State. But fragile. And sensitive. Here we’ve got a clambake that’s strictly your party, your trouble. If I get caught transporting around with dead ones — I’m out of the box, out of the running, out of work. For life. If you get caught, it’s the same trouble, and how much worse can it get? But then you’d still have me around, license and all, doing a job for you.” I heaved for more breath and let it out, whistlingly. “What’s the sense in sticking my neck out, when yours is already out, all the way?”

  Viggy considered that.

  “Plus,” I said, “we’ve got a missing butler. That’s my department. Believe me, it says it in all the instruction books.”

  “I buy it.” He shook his head, tight-mouthed. “I don’t like it. At all. But I buy it.”

  “Smart. A few extra details. You’re going to have to strip them down. Clean. You’ll see if that woman’s clothes are around. My hunch is they aren’t. You’ll peel the boys in the car. How’m I doin'?”

  “I don’t know. Why the stripless strip tease?”

  “Because I don’t want them tied in with you. I want them unidentified as long as possible.”

  “But they know Charlie.”

  “So what?”

  “They know Charlie’s my gun-boy.”

  “So what? They’ll have Charlie dead and naked with a strange couple, also dead and naked. They can’t bring that home to you. Not quick. So they ask you about Charlie. So you still know nothing from nothing. Charlie has his private affairs. This was one of them.”

  Viggy leaned back and half closed his dark eyes.

  “Very very risky,” he understated dreamily.

  “I am aware of that. You and I know how to volley with light words about dead bodies that we don’t give a spit in all hell about. You and I can be precious about cadavers. We can be pleasant and flippant. Like interns. You’re a hard-used young man and I’m in a bastard business — we’ve seen them come and we’ve seen them go, enough of them, in our time. So we talk about them like people talk about soft-shelled crabs.”

  “All I said was that it’s risky, professor.”

  “I’m coming to that. There are two sets of risks, so to speak, and we’ve got to balance them. Your visitors can’t stay here. If the law got something like that on you — three of them — they’d pin one of them on you. You’d fry, sure as crêpes suzettes. One of them they’d pin on you. They’d play ticktacktoe till one of them fit, but pin they would; they’ve been waiting for a long time to catch you with your fly open. This would be it. So the risk of dumping them is less than the risk of leaving them hang around and visit until somebody sees one of them and starts screaming. See what I mean?”

  Viggy got up and put the bottle and the glass on an end table. “Okay, philosopher. Get going.”

  “One more thing. Two, that is. You burn the clothes and the gloves in your furnace downstairs. Then you clean out the ashes and stuff and get rid of them.”

  “Bye-bye, boy friend.”

  “Bye-bye, chum. I’ll meet you in Lindy’s. Later. We both ought to be through in a couple of hours. You can tell me stories there.”

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” Viggy said, and he sighed — but smorzando.

  Chapter Three

  RAIN slammed at the brim of my hat and I looked around for a cab and, of course, there was no cab. I buttoned my topcoat high and pulled my hat down low, but it made no difference. I was wet to the shirttails by the time I sloshed up to the Lexington Avenue I.R.T. at Seventy-seventh Street, and being wet to the shirttails is not the most agreeable sort of wetness when you sit on a slow, dank, jolting local all the way to Twenty-third Street.

  Eighty-three was an old house, dirt-colored, five stories high with beige shirred curtains on double doors, and a protruding lock. You didn’t have to be a sopping-wet, tonic-inspired detective to know enough to put the edge of a dime into the keyhole and open the door.

  The lobby smelled of German-cooked cabbage soup and it hissed of steam and it was close as newsprint on a scratch sheet, which was fine by me. It was small and square; in back, a stairway with stone steps and a brass banister cut through. In front, an oblong alloy plaque was part of the wall, with slit-topped, bell-bottomed letter boxes and names.

  I looked at names. It came to me that Marmaduke was a first name. I didn’t care. I looked for Marmaduke anyway. I was warming up in this unventilated hothouse of a lobby and my vibrating kneecaps were slowing down. There was no Marmaduke. None of the ten names were familiar to me.

  I went up two flights of dim stairs and I knocked at the door of the front apartment. Nothing. I turned the knob, softly, and the door swung in, and I helped with my foot, lightly, and it swung all the way and the inside knob tapped against a wall. The small light bulb in the hall behind me provided a faint yellow sifting shaft of illumination.

  I waited.

  Silence.

  I moved into the room, slowly, and I reached out with my right hand for the knob and I closed the door and I leaned an ominously itching shoulder blade against it and I stood there in the darkness and waited, listening to the sound of my breathing; and then I knew why I was waiting.

  The sound of the breathing I was listening to — wasn’t mine.

  2

  My right hand slid inside my topcoat and inside my jacket and under my left armpit and stopped like a suddenly frustrated lover.

  No gun, no holster. Just shirt, and wet shirt.

  I left it there for effect, just in case, and I scraped the other hand along the wall exploring for a light switch.

  I found it and I clicked it.

  A room sprang at me: a clean, spare, fastidious room. A man’s room with a black and red linoleum and a leather couch and a drop-leaf table and chairs and a radio and a midget refrigerator and closets and a dark-wood kneehole desk with knees.

  The knees wore tan flannel pants ending at bare ankles embroidered with clothesline, firmly attached to the legs of the desk chair. Going up, there was a brown belt and a neat white open-collared shirt, and going down again, there were hands, separately tied to the back of the chair. On top was a narrow white-haired head and a high forehead and stuck-out bunches of veins like knots in an old telephone cord.

  The rest of the face was buried in the open shirt collar, chin down.

  I got to the guy and I pried his chin out.

  His face was gray like the ash off a good cigar and I slapped it quietly and I rubbed it and he complained, bubblingly, from somewhere inside his chest. I let the chin go and it got tucked in again inside the open shirt collar.

  I shed my hat and topcoat and I went to work on the clothesline. Someone had done a tightly competent job. It took me five minutes to get the guy unhooked.

  I rubbed his wrists and I rubbed his ankles. Then I set him up on reluctant legs and he leaned on me and he began to shake like he was a daiquiri and I was the bartender. I held him, carefully, and he danced in my arms for a couple of minutes; then he sagged. I carried him over to the leather couch.

  I sat him up, but he keeled.

  I tried again, but he keeled again.

  I let him lie.

  There was another door which was a bedroom when I put the light on, and another door which was a toilet, so I
went back and started with the refrigerator and gave the room a

  double-quick canvass. In a closet over the radio I found a bottle with a scratched-off label. It smelled like gin. I tasted it. It was gin. I tasted it again. It was still gin. I tasted it some more while I made the trip over to Marmaduke on the sofa.

  I pulled his jaw down and now he tasted it, but he didn’t know it was gin. Yet. It ran out of the side of his mouth and he made sounds like a baby burping formula. I shifted and poured some into the other side of his mouth.

  He began to know it was gin.

  He groaned and he rumbled and he opened his eyes and he batted them like the girl in the varsity show resisting rape with repartee. Then he closed his eyes and he closed his mouth and he blew gin bubbles from a little whistle hole he’d left in his lips; stiffly.

  I slapped his face, unquietly and impatiently, each side, forehand and backhand, and fast. He drew up his lids and he showed me reproachful eyes.

  “Marmaduke,” I said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How are you, Marmaduke?”

  “I am all right, sir. Thank you.”

  “Feel better?”

  “Oh, yes, sir.”

  Then his eyes rolled up.

  I did some more face tennis on him and then I took hold of thin bones in his shoulders and I rattled and his eyes rolled down.

  “Have a slug of gin.” I showed him how.

  “No, sir,” he said with admirable firmness. “I do not partake of intoxicants. I keep it for my maiden sister. She visits sometimes in the mornings….”

  His eyes began to go. I shook them down. “Marmaduke,” I said. “You don’t look so good. I insist.”

  “If you insist, sir….”

  He grabbed one from the bottle, sitting up halfway, leaning on his elbow. He grabbed a good, gurgling shot.

  He ramrodded.

  He sat up, spine-straight, on the backless leather sofa, teeteringly. He belched — deeply, apologetically, pathetically, palpitatingly.

  One expressive belch.

  Then he gave me hurt and startled eyes.

  “Good boy,” I said. “It’ll help.”

  One eye began a slow ascent.

  I slapped him on the back. “Sit up against the wall. Like this.” I propped him up. “Can you sit like that while I make some coffee?”

  “Coffee?” he piped. “Oh, yes, sir. I would like that.”

  Marmaduke, I hoped, was coming around the bend.

  I patted his face. I looked around. “Where?”

  He pointed to what appeared to be a cupboard but which opened up into a kitchen, a built-in kitchen, a good and built-in kitchen — if you spread your elbows, you were lapped over back again in the living room. I hurriedly compounded coffee which was more poison than coffee and I administered it to Marmaduke hot and floating with grounds.

  It smartened him up. Fast. “Who are you? What are you doing here, sir?”

  “I’m a friend of Mr. O’Shea’s. He was worried.”

  “I haven’t eaten since yesterday,” he said.

  I went back to the kitchen-on-a-shelf and I found an egg beater and I whipped up a couple of eggs and a glass of milk and I covered up while I seasoned it, liberally, with gin instead of nutmeg. I took his empty cup away from him and gave him the stepped-up nog. “It’s good. Drink it and we’ll talk. I’ve really got to get the hell out of here.”

  “Oh, thank you, sir.”

  I sat down alongside of him. He smiled at me. The knots in his forehead had flattened out and his face had brightened from ash gray to apple green and his eyes had stopped lingering at the top fringe of the sockets; now they stayed in the middle with all the verve and sparkle of a couple of dry blue blots of ink.

  “What goes here, Marmaduke?” I said in the best tone of insouciance I could muster. “How come I find you fastened to a chair?”

  “Oh, that, sir.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He sipped nog. “Well, sir. This morning, I was taking my usual morning shower. At about seven thirty, sir, I had been expecting my sister. She usually visits the first part of the week. To clean up a bit for me. She is a cook, sir. Not due at her place of employment until ten o’clock….”

  He gave me the rest of it. He had rattled back the curtain on his early-morning ablutions, and he was dried and almost dressed when the tap came on the door. He had called, “Come

  in” — he had snapped the catch because he was expecting his sister. He had poked his head out of the bathroom door, and he had been smitten behind the ear, and he had closed his eyes as happens when you are smitten behind the ear, and when he had opened them again, he was a fixed appurtenance by the desk in the apartment.

  “See anybody?” I said.

  “No, sir.”

  “Hear anybody?”

  “No, sir. Only the tap on the door.”

  I got up. “Where are your keys?”

  “In my jacket, sir.”

  “Where is your jacket, God damn it?”

  “In the closet, sir.”

  “Closet? You’re going to have to be more specific.”

  “Over there.” He pointed.

  I opened a closet door. “What jacket?”

  “The blue one.”

  I brought the one blue jacket to him. He put his hand in one pocket, then he put his hand in the other pocket, then he put his hand back in the first pocket. Then he shook the jacket. No chimes. No jingle. No tinkle. No nothing. He looked at me and he smiled and he gave me the jacket and he put both hands back around the glass and he finished his comforter. “An excellent eggnog, sir. Tangy.”

  “Keys,” I said.

  “In my blue jacket.”

  “I am holding your blue jacket.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Keys, God damn it!”

  “Please, sir.”

  “Keys.”

  Marmaduke handed up the empty glass and he sighed, flutteringly. “There are no keys, it appears.”

  “Where else could they be?”

  “Nowhere, sir. Whatever intruder smote me, probably that person — it is possible that person made away with them.”

  “Astute,” I said. “A really astute bastard I’ve got me here. Do you have a phone?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Your sister have a phone?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “Ninety-one First Avenue. Near Sixth Street. One-A.”

  I tossed his jacket on a chair. I put the glass on the desk. I got my hat and topcoat. “I’ll drop in on her. I’ll have her come over and take care of you tonight. A little oatmeal and a little sleep and tomorrow you report to work as usual.”

  “Without keys, sir?”

  “That’s your problem. And Viggy O’Shea’s.”

  3

  It was pouring out. A miraculous broken-down cab floated by and I folded my tongue and I whistled and it stopped and shifted gears like an earthquake and it floated back and I floated in. I said, “Ninety-one First Avenue,” and I sat on my tippety-tip and opened my arms and took hold of the abrasive catches of both unclosed rattling doors, protectively, and I sat there like a man who is losing his oars in a bouncing rowboat, all the way to Sixth Street.

  “Wait here,” I said to the cabby. “And your doors don’t close.”

  “You said it, friend. They stink.”

  “A guy could fall out.”

  “You said it, friend. You want me to wait?”

  “Wait right here. Friend.”

  The downstairs door wasn’t locked. One-? was a ground-floor apartment. I pushed the bell. I lit up and took a few drags and stepped on it. I pushed again. Someone said, “Who’s that?”

  “Marmaduke sent me.”

  The door opened. A long woolen blue-striped nightgown topped by a blur of face was dim in the doorway. “What? What’s that?”

  I closed my eyes. Marmaduke’s gin was unfriendly in my stomach. “Your brother wants you.” />
  “How would you know?”

  I opened my eyes. The blur of a face hadn’t improved. My stomach and Marmaduke’s gin continued at odds. I closed my eyes. “He wants you right away. He doesn’t feel well. He wants to know why you weren’t there this morning.”

  “I slept. I’ve got a right to sleep. That Marmaduke. He should have been a woman. What business is it of yours?”

  “No business. I’m only delivering a message for Marmaduke. Checking, sort of. Good night, ma’am.”

  She slammed the door. I opened my eyes.

  My relic of a taxicab received me.

  “Fifty-ninth and Sixth Avenue,” I said.

  I took hold of the door catches. We spurted home, joltingly.

  Outside my apartment house, I said, “Now you wait again, Jackson.” His name on the orange card was Jackson Tomashefski and his picture didn’t agree with Marmaduke’s finicky gin either.

  “How do I know you’re coming out,” he said, “this time?”

  “A just question, Jackson, but if I pay you, how do I know you’ll wait?”

  “That’s a just question, too, friend.”

  “Come on up with me, Jackson. That’ll settle it. You need a drink with all this rain.”

  “You talked me into it, friend.”

  He held the door for me, and he bowed.

  Upstairs, I poured him a half tumbler of rye and he said, “Thanks. It’s a beautiful joint you got here,” and I said, “Yeah,” and I poured myself a full tumbler of water with a heaping teaspoonful of Alka-Zane. I get rid of my wet things and I got into woolen slacks and a heavy sport shirt and dry socks and shoes and a thick jacket and my raincoat and rain hat.

  “We’re on our way, Jackson. Lindy’s next stop. Forgive me, won’t you, but this time I really can’t invite you. I’ve got a date with a guy.”

  “Thanks just the same. You ain’t a bad egg.” He squinted at me. “Even though you got dates with guys for four o’clock in the morning.”

  Chapter Four