The croupier said: “I think it’s a stick-up. But I couldn’t help myself. They sapped Big George.”
The blond man smiled gaily and took his .45 out of his pocket. He pointed it at the floor.
“He thinks it’s a stick-up,” he said. “Wouldn’t that positively slay you?”
De Ruse shut the heavy door. Francine Ley moved away from him, towards the side of the room away from the fire. He didn’t look at her. The man on the davenport looked at her, looked at everybody.
De Ruse said quietly: “The tall one is Zapparty. The little one is Mops Parisi.”
The blond man stepped to one side, leaving the croupier alone in the middle of the room. The .45 covered the man on the davenport.
“Sure, I’m Zapparty,” the tall man said. He looked at De Ruse curiously for a moment.
Then he turned his back and picked the cocktail shaker up again, took out the plug and filled a shallow glass. He drained the glass, wiped his lips with a sheer lawn handkerchief and tucked the handkerchief back into his breast pocket very carefully, so that three points showed.
De Ruse smiled his thin metallic smile and touched one end of his left eyebrow with his forefinger. His right hand was in his jacket pocket.
“Nicky and I put on a little act,” he said. “That was so the boys outside would have something to talk about if the going got too noisy when we came in to sec you.”
“It sounds interesting,” Zapparty agreed. “What did you want to see me about?”
“About that gas car you take people for rides in,” De Ruse said.
The man on the davenport made a very sudden movement and his hand jumped off his leg as if something had stung it. The blond man said: “No…or yes, if you’d rather, Mister Parisi. It’s all a matter of taste.”
Parisi became motionless again. His hand dropped back to his short thick thigh.
Zapparty widened his deep eyes a little. “Gas car?” His tone was of mild puzzlement.
De Ruse went forward into the middle of the room near the croupier. He stood balanced on the balls of his feet. His gray eyes had a sleepy glitter but his face was drawn and tired, not young.
He said: ‘Maybe somebody just tossed it in your lap, Zapparty, but I don’t think so. I’m talking about the blue Lincoln, License 5A6, with the tank of Nevada gas in front. You know, Zapparty, the stuff they use on killers in our state.”
Zapparty swallowed and his large Adam’s apple moved in and out. He puffed his lips, then drew them back against his teeth, then puffed them again.
The man on the davenport laughed out loud, seemed to be enjoying himself.
A voice that came from no one in the room said sharply: “Just drop that gat, Blondie. The rest of you grab air.”
De Ruse looked up towards an opened panel in the wall beyond the desk. A gun showed in the opening, and a hand, but no body or face. Light from the room lit up the hand and the gun.’
The gun seemed to point directly at Francine Ley. De Ruse said: “Okey,” quickly, and lifted his hands, empty.
The blond man said: “That’ll be Big George—all rested and ready to go.” He opened his hand and let the .45 thud to the floor in front of him.
Parisi stood up very swiftly from the davenport and took a gun from under his arm. Zapparty took a revolver out of the desk drawer, leveled it. He spoke towards the panel: “Get out, and stay out.”
The panel clicked shut. Zapparty jerked his head at the baldheaded croupier, who had not seemed to move a muscle since he came into the room.
“Back on the job, Louis. Keep the chin up.”
The croupier nodded and turned and went out of the room, closing the door carefully behind him.
Francine Ley laughed foolishly. Her hand went up and pulled the collar of her wrap close around her throat, as if it was cold in the room. But there were no windows and it was very warm, from the fire.
Parisi made a whistling sound with his lips and teeth and went quickly to De Ruse and stuck the gun he was holding in De Ruse’s face, pushing his head back, He felt in De Ruse’s pockets with his left hand, took the Colt, felt under his arms, circled around him, touched his hips, came to the front again.
He stepped back a little and hit De Ruse on the cheek with the flat of one gun. De Ruse stood perfectly still except that his head jerked a little when the hard metal hit his face.
Parisi hit him again the same place. Blood began to run down De Ruse’s cheek from the cheekbone, lazily. His head sagged a little and his knees gave way. He went down slowly, leaned with his left hand on the floor, shaking his head. His body was crouched, his legs doubled under him. His right hand dangled loosely beside his left foot.
Zapparty said: “All right, Mops. Don’t get blood-hungry. We want words out of these people.”
Francine Ley laughed again, rather foolishly. She swayed along the wall, holding one hand up against it.
Parisi breathed hard and backed away from De Ruse with a happy smile on his round swart face.
“I been waitin’ a long time for this,” he said.
When he was about six feet from De Ruse something small and darkly glistening seemed to slide out of the left leg of De Ruse’s trousers into his hand. There was a sharp, snapping explosion, a tiny orange-green flame down on the floor.
Parisi’s head jerked back. A round hole appeared under his chin. It got large and red almost instantly. His hands opened laxly and the two guns fell out of them. His body began to sway. He fell heavily.
Zapparty said: “Holy Christ!” and jerked up his revolver.
Francine Ley screamed flatly and hurled herself at him—clawing, kicking, shrilling.
The revolver went off twice with a heavy crash. Two slugs plunked into a wall. Plaster rattled.
Francine Ley slid down to the floor, on her hands and knees. A long slim leg sprawled out from under her dress.
The blond man, down on one knee with his .45 in his hand again, rasped: “She got the bastard’s gun!”
Zapparty stood with his hands empty, a terrible expression on his face. There was a long red scratch on the back of his right hand. His revolver lay on the floor beside Francine Ley. His horrified eyes looked down at it unbelievingly.
Parisi coughed once on the floor and after that was still.
De Ruse got up on his feet. The little Mauser looked like a toy in his hand. His voice seemed to come from far away saying: “Watch that panel, Nicky…”
There was no sound outside the room, no sound anywhere. Zapparty stood at the end of the desk, frozen, ghastly.
De Ruse bent down and touched Francine Ley’s shoulder. “All right, baby?”
She drew her legs under her and got up, stood looking down at Parisi. Her body shook with a nervous chill.
“I’m sorry, baby,” De Ruse said softly beside her. “I guess I had a wrong idea about you.”
He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and moistened it with his lips, then rubbed his left cheek lightly and looked at blood on the handkerchief.
Nicky said: “I guess Big George went to sleep again. I was a sap not to blast at him.”
De Ruse nodded a little, and said:
“Yeah. The whole play was lousy. Where’s your hat and coat, Mister Zapparty? We’d like to have you go riding with us.”
9
In the shadows under the pepper trees De Ruse said: “There it is, Nicky. Over there. Nobody’s bothered it. Better take a look around.”
The blond man got out from under the wheel of the Packard and went off under the trees, He stood a little while on the same side of the street as the Packard, then he slipped across to where the big Lincoln was parked in front of the brick apartment house on North Kenmore.
De Ruse leaned forward across the back of the front seat and pinched Francine Ley’s cheek. “You’re going home now, baby—with this bus. I’ll see you later.”
“Johnny—she clutched at his arm—’ ‘what arc you going to do? For Pete’s sake, can’t you stop having fun for tonight??
??
“Not yet, baby. Mister Zapparty wants to tell us things. I figure a little ride in that gas car will pep him up. Anyway I need it for evidence.”
He looked sidewise at Zapparty in the corner of the back scat. Zapparty made a harsh sound in his throat and stared in front of him with a shadowed face.
Nicky came back across the road, stood with one foot on the running board.
“No keys,” he said. “Got’em?”
De Ruse said: “Sure.” He took keys out of his pocket and handed them to Nicky. Nicky went around to Zapparty’s side of the car and opened the door.
“Out, mister.”
Zapparty got out stiffly, stood in the soft, slanting rain, his mouth working. De Ruse got out after him.
“Take it away, baby.”
Francine Ley slid along the scat under the steering wheel of the Packard and pushed the starter. The motor caught with a soft whirr.
“So long, baby,” De Ruse said gently. “Get my slippers warmed for me. And do me a big favor, honey. Don’t phone anyone.”
The Packard went off along the dark street, under the big pepper trees. De Ruse watched it turn a corner. He prodded Zapparty with his elbow.
“Let’s go. You’re going to ride in the back of your gas car. We can’t feed you much gas on account of the hole in the glass, but you’ll like the smell of it. We’ll go off in the country somewhere. We’ve got all night to play with you.”
“I guess you know this is a snatch,” Zapparty said harshly.
“Don’t I love to think it,” De Ruse purred.
They went across the street, three men walking together without haste. Nicky opened the good rear door of the Lincoln. Zapparty got into it. Nicky banged the door shut, got under the wheel and fitted the ignition key in the lock. De Ruse got in beside him and sat with his legs straddling the tank of gas.
The whole car still smelled of the gas.
Nicky started the car, turned it in the middle of the block and drove north to Franklin, back over Los Feliz towards Glendale. After a little while Zapparty leaned forward and banged on the glass. De Ruse put his ear to the hole in the glass behind Nicky’s head.
Zapparty’s harsh voice said: “Stone house—Castle Road—in the La Crescenta flood area.”
“Jeeze, but he’s a softy,” Nicky grunted, his eyes on the road ahead.
De Ruse nodded, said thoughtfully: “There’s more to it than that. With Parisi dead he’d clam up unless he figured he had an out.”
Nicky said: “Me, I’d rather take a beating and keep my chin buttoned. Light me a pill, Johnny.”
De Ruse lit two cigarettes and passed one to the blond man. He glanced back at Zapparty’s long body in the corner of the car. Passing light touched up his taut face, made the shadows on it look very deep.
The big car slid noiselessly through Glendale and up the grade towards Montrose. From Montrose over to the Sunland highway and across that into the almost deserted flood area of La Crescenta.
They found Castle Road and followed it towards the mountains. In a few minutes they came to the stone house.
It stood back from the road, across a wide space which might once have been lawn but which was now packed sand, small Stones and a few large boulders. The road made a square turn just before they came to it. Beyond it the road ended in a clean edge of concrete chewed off by the flood of New Year’s Day, 1934.
Beyond this edge was the main wash of the flood. Bushes grew in it and there were many huge stones. On the very edge a tree grew with half its roots in the air eight feet above the bed of the wash.
Nicky stopped the car and turned off the lights and took a big nickeled flash out of the car pocket. He handed it to De Ruse.
De Ruse got out of the car and stood for a moment with his hand on the open door, holding the flash. He took a gun out of his overcoat pocket and held it down at his side.
“Looks like a stall,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything stirring here.”
He glanced in at Zapparty, smiled sharply and walked off across the ridges of sand, towards the house. The front door stood half open, wedged that way by sand. De Ruse went towards the corner of the house, keeping out of line with the door as well as he could. He went along the side wall, looking at boarded-up windows behind which there was no trace of light.
At the back of the house was what had been a chicken house. A piece of rusted junk in a squashed garage was all that remained of the family sedan. The back door was nailed up like the windows. De Ruse stood silent in the rain, wondering why the front door was open. Then he remembered that there had been another flood a few months before, not such a bad one. There might have been enough water to break open the door on the side towards the mountains.
Two stucco houses, both abandoned, loomed on the adjoining lots. Farther away from the wash, on a bit of higher ground, there was a lighted window. It was the only light anywhere in the range of De Ruse’s vision.
He went back to the front of the house and slipped through the open door, stood inside it and listened. After quite a long time he snapped the flash on.
The house didn’t smell like a house. It smelled like out of doors. There was nothing in the front room but sand, a few pieces of smashed furniture, some marks on the walls, above the dark line of the flood water, where pictures had hung.
De Ruse went through a short hall into a kitchen that had a hole in the floor where the sink had been and a rusty gas stove stuck in the hole. From the kitchen he went into a bedroom. He had not heard any whisper of sound in the house so far.
The bedroom was square and dark. A carpet stiff with old mud was plastered to the floor. There was a metal bed with a rusted spring, and a waterstained mattress over part of the spring.
Feet stuck out from under the bed.
They were large feet in walnut brown brogues, with purple socks above them. The socks had gray clocks down the sides. Above the socks were trousers of black and white check.
De Ruse stood very still and played the flash down on the feet. He made a soft sucking sound with his lips. He stood like that for a couple of minutes, without moving at all. Then he stood the flash on the floor, on its end, so that the light it shot against the ceiling was reflected down to make dim light all over the room.
He took hold of the mattress and pulled it off the bed. He reached down and touched one of the hands of the man who was under the bed. The hand was ice cold. He took hold of the ankles and pulled, but the man was large and heavy.
It was easier to move the bed from over him.
10
Zapparty leaned his head back against the upholstery and shut his eyes and turned his head away a little. His eyes were shut very tight and he tried to turn his head far enough so that the light from the big flash wouldn’t shine through his eyelids.
Nicky held the flash close to his face and snapped it on, off again, on, off again, monotonously, in a kind of rhythm.
De Ruse stood with one foot on the running board by the open door and looked off through the rain. On the edge of the murky horizon an airplane beacon flashed weakly.
Nicky said carelessly: “You never know what’ll get a guy. I saw one break once because a cop held his fingernail against the dimple in his chin.”
De Ruse laughed under his breath. “This one is tough,” he said. “You’ll have to think of something better than a flashlight.”
Nicky snapped the flash on, off, on, off. “I could,” he said, “But I don’t want to get my hands dirty.”
After a little while Zapparty raised his hands in front of him and let them fall slowly and began to talk. He talked in a low monotonous voice, keeping his eyes shut against the flash.
“Parisi worked the snatch. I didn’t know anything about it until it was done. Parisi muscled in on me about a month ago, with a couple of tough boys to back him up. He had found out somehow that Candless beat me out of twenty-five grand to defend my half-brother on a murder rap, then sold the kid out. I didn’t tell Parisi
that. I didn’t know he knew until tonight.
“He came into the club about seven or a little after and said: “We’ve got a friend of yours, Hugo Candless. It’s a hundred grand job, a quick turnover. All you have to do is help spread the pay-off across the tables here, get it mixed up with a bunch of other money. You have to do that because we give you a cut—and because the caper is right up your alley, if anything goes sour.’ That’s about all. Parisi sat around then and chewed his fingers and waited for his boys. He got pretty jumpy when they didn’t show. He went out once to make a phone call from a beer parlor.”
De Ruse drew on a cigarette he held cupped inside a hand. He said: “Who fingered the job, and how did you know Candless was up here?”
Zapparty said: “Mops told me. But I didn’t know he was dead.”
Nicky laughed and snapped the flash several times quickly.
De Ruse said: “Hold it steady for a minute.” Nicky held the beam steady on Zapparty’s white face. Zapparty moved his lips in and out. He opened his eyes once. They were blind eyes, like the eyes of a dead fish.
Nicky said: “It’s damn cold up here. What do we do with his nibs?”
De Ruse said: “We’ll take him into the house and tie him to Candless. They can keep each other warm. We’ll come up again in the morning and see if he’s got any fresh ideas.”
Zapparty shuddered. The gleam of something like a tear showed in the corner of his nearest eye. After a moment of silence he said: “Okey. I planned the whole thing. The gas car was my idea. I didn’t want the money. I wanted Candless, and I wanted him dead. My kid brother was hanged in Quentin a week ago Friday.”
There was a little silence. Nicky said something under his breath. De Ruse didn’t move or make a sound.
Zapparty went on: “Mattick, the Candless driver, was in on it. He hated Candless. He was supposed to drive the ringer car to make everything look good and then take a powder. But he lapped up too much corn getting set for the job and Parisi got leery of him, had him knocked off. Another boy drove the car. It was raining and that helped.”