Armchair in Hell (Prologue Books) Read online

  I sat in a booth in Lindy’s and I polished off a plump marinated herring, filleted and swimming in sour-cream sauce. Then, of course, I ordered cheesecake.

  Cheesecake melted in my mouth and I washed it down with coffee and more cheesecake melted and more coffee washed it down, but I couldn’t get my mind off three dead bodies in a stolen car.

  Viggy was an honest gambler. A rich, influential, powerful, honest gambler; which made him as popular as ear muffs in Bermuda. Nobody loves an honest gambler. Except the customers.

  The mayor and the police commissioner called Viggy everything from tinhorn to national menace, depending upon the state of their ulcers, and, oh, how they’d have loved to pin a rap on him, which is why the great O’Shea came scampering to me, like a pregnant woman to the doctor, at the first hint of trouble, ever. An honest gambler makes gambling respectable, which doesn’t sit well with the keepers of the peace, because what are you going to use for speeches over the radio come election time?

  Viggy had a joint in New York and a joint in Chicago and a joint in Reno and a joint in Miami (seasonal) and a joint in Los Angeles. Nobody touched his joints. Nobody even went near them, except for pastime. There are bigger people than mayors and police commissioners. There are governors and senators and congressmen and there are guys with slim cigars and sun-tanned faces and frosted hairdos that gather in caucuses once every four years, and Viggy sugared and salted and buttered-down and ponied-up, and he spread it in all of the right places; and for icing, the accumulated bounced checks he had from biggies (uncollected and unpublicized) would make an autograph hound’s tongue hang and tail twitter.

  So nobody touched his joints.

  He had a partner once, a guy I’d never met but a guy I’d heard a lot about, the Little Guy, by name — but that’s for another time. Right now I was thinking about Viggy O’Shea, exclusively, in order not to think about three cold bodies in a kidnaped car….

  More cheesecake melted in my mouth and I was beginning to get sick, cloyingly, when I saw Viggy mixed up with Lindy’s revolving door. I waved at him and an actor waved back at me and I made a face and another actor waved at me — and Viggy saw me.

  He bent his knees and he slid in opposite me.

  “Glad to see you,” I said.

  Jake Teitel, the waiter, came between us. “Yes, gents?”

  “Rye,” Viggy ordered. “Two ryes. Soda.”

  “No liquor,” the waiter said. “It’s after hours, Mr. O’Shea.”

  It was ten minutes after four.

  “Coffee and cheesecake,” Viggy said. “Cheesecake for him too.”

  “No cheesecake,” I said. “Coffee.”

  The waiter said, “Fine, gents,” and he went away, and I said, “Well?”

  “Okay.”

  “Smooth?”

  “Perfect.”

  “Everything?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where’d you park it?”

  “Over by the pier. On Fifty-seventh Street.”

  The waiter brought cheesecake and coffee in a pot and clean, fresh cups. Viggy poured and drank it black, no sugar, and poured again.

  “I hope you earn your fee,” he said.

  “What fee?”

  “The fee I’m paying you.”

  “How much fee you paying me?”

  “I’m paying you seventy-five hundred dollars’ worth of fee.”

  I looked the gift horse in the mouth (not a good habit): “Why seventy-five hundred dollars? Why not forty-five hundred dollars? Why not ninety-five hundred dollars?”

  Through cheesecake, he said, “My brother Denny has seventy-five hundred of mine. I’m supposed to pick it up in the morning at his office. I’ll give you a note. You pick it up, and it’s a fee. That’s why seventy-five hundred.”

  “I’ll have to remember that. It’s a very logical way of arriving at a fee for services rendered.”

  “To be rendered.”

  He scribbled on the back of an envelope and he gave it to me. It said, “Denny, give Pete the seventy-five hundred. Vig.”

  I put the envelope away. “What services to be rendered?”

  “I want to know what the hell is going on. I want to know fast. I want to know before I get rung in on it. Those services to be rendered.”

  “If you’re still in the mood,” I said, “for telling stories — this is when.”

  The twitch under his eye had worsened. He looked tight and scratchy like the wire string on a fiddle. “I’m in the mood. It’s a story about a Frenchman. Pierre Vy — Pierre something. Vyseuseau. He’s at the Waldorf. Suite 1212.”

  “Yes?”

  “That’s the other guy that was in the house today.”

  “A real Frenchman, or a home-grown Frenchman?”

  “A French Frenchman. Fresh over. Well, fresh over, roundabout.”

  “So?”

  “This guy contacts me a couple of months ago. No. He contacts the Little Guy. Then he contacts me.”

  “The Little Guy?” I said. Appreciatively.

  A glimmer woke up in his eyes; a dull shine like the flat glint of nailheads in a saddle-leather chair. “My partner, years back, till we split on policy. I don’t believe in loan-sharking around the tables. He runs a juicy bistro uptown with a back room and an upstairs. Everything phony, from the roulette wheel to the stick-men.”

  “I know all about him,” I said. “I’m barred from up there. I suppose it’s because I’m a friend of yours. I’ve never seen the guy. I’ve tried a few times. On business. The hell with that. Is it kosher? I mean, is it kosher that first he sees him and then he contacts you?”

  “He got a lead on the Little Guy in Argentina. He also got a lead on me. He talked to the Little Guy. Then he talked to me.”

  “All right. What about?”

  “A deal. A big deal. A deal for two million smackeroos, with an extra half million thrown in for me. That’s cabbage. So I don’t care much about the kosher. I like a deal like that.”

  “Now wait a minute. If you please.”

  I took out cigarettes. I offered him one. He shook his head. I lit up. I pushed the dishes away and I put my elbows on the table. I said, “Give it to me now, once and for all, slow and clear. And coherent. Start from scratch.”

  “Shut up and I will.”

  I shut up.

  He said, “I’m in the office at the Club an evening a few months ago and Fat the Butcher comes in and he tells me there’s a well-dressed Frog with an accent wants to talk to me. I said why not, and Fat shows him in.”

  “The Frenchman Pierre.”

  “He talks around for a couple of minutes, sizing me, and I let him, and then right away he’s in the middle of it. He tells me he’s talking for a syndicate backed up by the French government, and he’s working to recover some stuff that was promoted out of his country, and that he thinks I could help. He shows me credentials. For what they’re worth.”

  “What kind of stuff?” I said.

  “Tapestry.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Tapestry.”

  “What kind of tapestry?”

  “Tapestry, shmapestry, what the hell do I care? The guy tells me it’s worth two million to him, on the line, no questions, and that I can earn a half million if I pull it off, and there’s nothing really I got to do. He lays down fifty G’s, so help me, like it’s toilet paper, and he says I’m a big operator and that’s a retaining fee for my trouble, win, lose, or draw. I put his money in a drawer and I tell him I’m retained and I give him a drink.”

  “What for? I don’t mean the drink. I mean retained what for?”

  “For turning up this tapestry stuff. He tells me the rest of it. He tells me that official channels have been exhausted. This tapestry promotion was big junk. French coppers and American coppers and F.B.I. had played around with it, but it was cold squab right now, the thing was four, five years old. So this syndicate and the French government had commissioned him to go after it. From underneath rather
than on top, with plenty shmeario. He had traced the stuff to Argentina. Then he found out that the stuff had been brought up here by private plane, and sold to one guy and then to another guy, and that was all he knew.”

  I reached for my cup and I sipped cold, scum-topped coffee. I put it down. I made it hiss with the throwaway stub of my cigarette.

  “Then what?” I said.

  “Then nothing. He hits this town with two names that maybe can help him. Me and the Little Guy. He inquires around. He gets bad reports on the Little Guy and I stack up AAA. He says. He goes up and he sizes him. Then he sizes me. I’m his boy.”

  “That’s his story.”

  “That’s right.”

  “To me,” I said, “it sounds like cheeseburger.”

  “To you,” he said, “I don’t care what it sound like.”

  “So what did you have to do?”

  “Nothing. Just drop the word around. All kinds of people hit my joints. Just drop the word around. And mention the figures. The Frenchman told me that no figure near that could be realized in private sale. The stuff was priceless stuff. If you

  know what I mean. Museum stuff. It was worth all of that to be restored to his government, but privately nothing near that could be had. Which was why the fee to the agent, me, was so big. To keep me honest. It wouldn’t pay for me to jerk it around. I’d earn more turning it over to him than trying to fiddle with it.”

  “More and more it shapes up cheeseburger.”

  “Look. Get that out of your head. It shaped up all right.”

  “What happened?”

  “I spread the word. Here and there, around the tables. Discreetly. Sure enough, after a while, I get a buzz on it.”

  “A buzz,” I said.

  “From my manager in L.A. Ralph March wanted to see me.”

  “I know Ralph March. Ralph March is an art critic.”

  He hushed at me with quick-waving, impatient hands. “Charlie Batesem and I went out there. Ralph March talked with me. Ralph is a friend of mine. On the side, he designs night clubs and things. He did my joint in Los Angeles. Ralph tells me a guy is very much interested in me. He tells me a guy wants to know all about me. Ralph gives me a send-off and the guy says will Ralph get in touch with me because the guy wants to see me and it’s important.”

  “Who’s the guy?”

  “Algernon Hale.”

  “Algernon Hale,” I said. “The Algernon Hale Galleries. Big enough. Maybe the biggest. It’s like with your Little Guy, I never saw the gentleman, but I heard about him.”

  “You saw this guy. You saw him down at the end of the table in my drawing room.”

  “Algernon Hale,” I said. “We have got trouble.”

  He leaned back and rubbed his forehead and he pinched his nose. He patted himself for a cigar and found one and peeled off the point and stuck it into his mouth and rolled it around. I lit it for him but he chewed it and it went out and he let it hang.

  “It’s been a rough night,” he said. “One goddamn hell of a rough night.”

  He shifted into a wedged-in corner of the booth and he sat there in a tired heap like a dropped raincoat.

  I lit the cigar for him again. “What happened in Los Angeles?”

  “Yeah. It took a little time till Ralph got the meeting arranged.

  Then Ralph went away and this guy got to the point.”

  “Tapestries, I take it. The point.”

  “He said that he’d heard that I was interested in certain tapestries which had come to this country via Argentina. You know me. I gave him the story bang, bang, period. I even told him what was in it for me and why. He asked me whether I’d know them if I saw them. I told him that I knew how to make money running gambling casinos and that I wouldn’t know a good tapestry from a lousy crayon drawing. I asked him would he like to meet Pierre the Frenchman, and if he could produce the goods I would see to it that he was paid.”

  “Did he have them himself?”

  “I’m sure of that. But I didn’t ask him and I didn’t care.”

  “Algernon Hale,” I said. “Was Algernon Hale willing to do business with John J. O’Shea, commonly known as Viggy?”

  He took the cigar out of his mouth and, absently, he watched the shadow of smoke crawl on Lindy’s wall. Then he hammered the lighted end hard against an ash tray, bangingly, till it came apart like a spitchcock. Then he threw it away.

  “He asked me how he knew he’d be protected, that nothing would be pulled on him. If he produced.”

  “Naturally.”

  “I told him to check on me, anywhere anybody knew me. I told him I had my quirks, but that I did business straightaway and that I had a fine lot of gun-boys on my payroll for just that purpose, and that if anyone tried to pull anything they’d wind up with a fast hole in the head, and wouldn’t that be silly because everybody could be perfectly happy if everybody played straight poker.”

  “Did you also impress that on your Frenchman?”

  Viggy came out of his corner and he leaned across the table and he bobbed a finger at me. “But good. I told him what a dope he’d be if he ever yelled copper at what he thought would be the right moment. I told him he’d never get out of the country except in a wooden box. I wasn’t too worried about the Frenchman. I’m an old hand. He wouldn’t yell copper. If he pulled anything, he’d pull something slick that couldn’t be pinned on him. Also, I checked his credentials. That way, he was one hundred percent.”

  The waiter brought another pot of coffee, unasked. He also brought a check. Viggy paid him, tip and all.

  “All right. Finish it off,” I said.

  “He contacted me ten days later.”

  “The deal was on.”

  “On. He talked to people about me. He also talked to his lawyers. He also talked to the Pinkertons.”

  “All right. All right. Jesus.”

  “So now he trusted me. He trusted me so much, he offered me a cut from his side after the pay-off. I turned it down.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You turned it down”

  He smiled, strictly dental. “I didn’t want to turn it down. I like a buck. But I turned this buck down — and with a speech. Now the guy loved me. I didn’t want to turn it down, but this was Algernon Hale, sprinkled with larceny, but a straight guy, and this wasn’t the private deal he’d been waiting for with maybe an adventurous lover of the arts with a monocle.”

  “Fine, fine,” I said. “So?”

  “So this was a big dough deal and he was crapping in his drawers and he was heated up and nervous about Underworld with purple pants and a capital U and how he could get his head handed to him instead of two million simoleons. I know those kind of guys. He itched for the dough and he’d go through with the deal, but he could be scared off, and I’m a smart businessman when I smell a buck, especially when I smell a half a million bucks. He needed reassurance, and more reassurance. I gave him reassurance. And more reassurance. That way. Honest Vig, the kid.”

  “For Chrissake — so?”

  “Nothing. I wired the Frenchman. I got my big Gladstone bag and we packed the tapestries, there were twelve of them, and we came along to New York by train.”

  “When did you get in?”

  “Ten thirty.”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “Directly home.”

  “Then?”

  “I called up the Frog and he came over and he gave the stuff the old goose and gander, and the stuff was the goods.”

  “Then what?”

  “We made a date for ten o’clock in the morning at the Chase National on Madison Avenue and Forty-fifth Street. We were going to close the deal there at the bank.”

  “What about the tapestries?”

  “Tapestries and all. That Frenchman is no dope. He was

  going to put the stuff in the hands of the bank people and ship from there.”

  “And the pay-off?”

  “Right there too. Arrangements were to be made for the transfer of two mil
lion dollars to Hale’s bank.”

  “Whoa,” I said. “Hold it a minute. What about records and income tax and that sort of thing?”

  Viggy jumped his shoulders around. “It was going through as a legitimate deal. Hale buys them from a guy, pays plenty, Pierre Vyseuseau discovers that Hale has them and he buys them, gladly. It’s either a sale or a reward. Hale’s lawyer fixed up some papers for Vyseuseau to sign.”

  “How about you?”

  “I get mine in cash. I have Charlie and a couple of the boys with me.”

  I tapped a finger on the table. “All right. That finishes the conference. Then what?”

  “We shook hands all around. Vyseuseau blew. Charlie and Hale were staying over at my place. I was going to put through a call for a few more of my grunt-boys to sit around with Charlie and the bag all night. I took the bag upstairs. You know the rest of it.”

  I leaned back and I looked at him. Wiselike.

  “I’m a son af a bitch,” I said, which I didn’t have to say, but you’re not supposed to disappoint a client.

  “Why?” Viggy said.

  “It’s fantastic.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s just fantastic.”

  “Why? Because it’s a big deal? I’ve been in bigger deals. That’s the way it is with under-the-table deals. They’re always big deals.”

  I slapped around for cigarettes. “Bill of particulars. Let’s get arranged. What’s first? You want me to find that valise for you?”

  He moved his eyebrows up to the top of his forehead, one higher than the other, and he hooked them together with a raveled wrinkle.

  “No. It’s my hunch the Little Guy has got a thumb in that. Temporarily, I’ll handle that.”

  I poured coffee from the pot. The coffee was cold again. I pushed it away. I lit a cigarette. I bounced around on the bench on my side of the booth, and I went back to work. “All

  right,” I said. “I’m hired strictly to investigate murder and not robbery. And I am to try to break it before it breaks all over you.”

  “That’s what you’re hired for.”

  “I’ve got to hit the Little Guy and I’ve got to hit Vyseuseau. I can’t get to the Little Guy by the front door. So I’ll push his back door in. Who’s his girl?”

  “I don’t know.”