“Take it easy,” I said. “You’ll have a heart attack.”
“You son of a—”
I picked him up and hit him a few times. It wasn’t a particularly nice thing to do. At the moment, I wasn’t an especially nice guy. Try to kill someone often enough and he’s bound to get riled.
I hit him in the nose, and some of the cartilage melted down and readjusted itself. I hit him in the mouth and heard a tooth or two snap. He spat them out and stared at them. I hauled him to his feet again and gave him another heave and watched him fall all over the floor.
The secretary never got in the way. Good Old Miss Girdled-Hips—she only came running when someone pressed the little buzzer. She was the soul of discretion. You could murder her boss in his office and she’d never leave her desk.
I picked him up again. He was breathing raggedly and bleeding profusely. I held him by the lapels and gave him my nastiest glare.
“Had enough?”
“Yes,” he panted, fear in his eyes.
I felt a little foolish. Then I remembered the dynamite blast in Rhona’s apartment, the tommy-gun in Canarsie, the three punks in East New York. I started to get mad again. That was dangerous—I didn’t want to kill the bastard. I dumped him in an armchair and let him catch his breath.
“This time I’ll talk about rewards and punishments,” I told him. “You’ve got a client and I’ve got a client. Your client is trying to kill mine.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Your client is a man named Abe Zucker,” I said. “He runs a rigged card game and fleeces heavy-money marks. He was doing fine. Then a man named Jack Blake came along and tried a few tricks of his own.”
And, like a proud little schoolboy reciting the preamble to the Constitution, I read the whole bit to him. First he just sat there. Then he looked amused, and then he started to laugh.
I asked him what was so funny.
“London,” he smirked. “You’re a panic. A detective? You couldn’t find sand in a desert.”
“What are you getting at?”
“What am I getting at?” He laughed some more. “Abe Zucker running a card game,” he said. “That’s a wild one, London. Don’t you know who Zucker is? Abe Zucker is so damned big he wouldn’t waste his time on all the poker games in the country. That’s not his line, London. It never was.”
“What is?”
“Nothing just now. He got out of the heavy stuff a long time ago. He put his dough in legit stuff and kept it there. Abe Zucker is cleaner than you are, London. Card games!” He laughed again.
I kept my eyes on his face, trying to see what I could read there. If he was putting on an act he was good enough for Broadway…I believed him.
“Card games,” he repeated. “Card games.”
“Then straighten me out, Carr.”
He looked at me, the smile gone now. “I wouldn’t tell you the right time, London. Now get out of here—”
I started to leave when he added, “…you punk.”
I picked him up, shook him like a rat. “Talk,” I said.
“Let go of me.”
“Carr—”
“You’ll wind up in the river,” he whined. “One word from me and every gun in the city will have you in his sights.”
“I’m terrified.”
“London—”
We weren’t getting anywhere. He wasn’t scaring me and I wasn’t going to get anything more out of him. I didn’t need him anymore, not now.
But he could get in the way.
I put him out with a good, clean shot to the jaw. It landed right and I got vibrations all the way up my arm to the shoulder. He sagged and went limp. I lowered him back into the chair, folded his hands in his lap for laughs. Then I opened the door and slipped through it.
The secretary was sitting in her swivel chair. I winked at her and she smiled her metallic smile at me. I wanted to reach over and pinch the place where her sweater bulged. I suppressed the impulse. I had enough problems.
THERE WAS A DRUGSTORE on the corner of Madison and 36th with a raft of phone booths. I ducked into an empty one, switched on the overhead fan, and dialed Centre Street. I asked the cop who answered to give me Jerry Gunther.
“I’m in a rush,” I told him. “Just want some fast information. Know anything about a man named Abe Zucker?”
“I know the name.”
“And?”
“Just a second. Lemme think…Yeah.”
“Go on.”
“He’s an old-timer,” Jerry said. “Was mixed up in everything big. Junk, numbers, women. He was one of the boys who managed to stay out of the papers, not just out of jail. But he was big.”
“What’s he doing now?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing he talks about?”
“Nothing at all,” Jerry said. “He doesn’t have to, Ed. He did what they’ve all been doing, made the money illegally and then sank it into legitimate business. He owns a piece of three hotels in Miami Beach and a couple of points in one of the big Vegas casinos. Plus God knows what else. I remember him now, Ed. I saw him once years ago—we had him up on the carpet for something. But that’s ancient history now.”
“Is he in New York?”
“Who knows, Ed. He’s clean and nobody cares about him anymore. I think he’s got a big place somewhere in Jersey. I wouldn’t swear to it.”
“Thanks.”
“That all you wanted?”
“For the time being,” I said. “I may have something for you later on.”
I got off the phone, went to the counter, and picked up a couple of dollars worth of small change and a fresh pouch of tobacco. I had to wait for a booth—some fat old lady ducked into mine and she had enough dimes in front of her to talk all day and all night. Another booth emptied and I grabbed it. I dropped a fortune in silver into the phone and called the Continental agency in Cleveland.
It took a few minutes before I was connected with the op I’d talked to before. I didn’t remember his name, and that had slowed things down. But I managed to get him on the line.
“London,” I said. “You did a job for me yesterday. Remember?”
“I remember, Mr. London.”
“Good. I want the same thing but in depth. I want you to check out Jack Blake and his magic shop. Find out what kind of business the shop was doing, what scale Blake was living on, if he was spending more than he was earning, everything. Run a line on his daughter. Find out what you can about her. Not just a surface job. The works.”
“When do you want it, sir?”
“Yesterday,” I said.
He laughed politely.
“I mean—”
“I know what you mean.” I checked my watch—it was a shade past noon. “When can you have it?”
“Hard to say. Two hours, three hours, four hours—”
“Give me an outside time. I don’t know where I’ll be. I want to be able to call you and find out what you’ve got.”
He thought a moment. “Call between five and six,” he said. “We’ll have the works by then.”
That left me with five or six hours to kill. I didn’t want to go back to my apartment. A man’s home is his castle, but mine might very well be under siege by now. Carr was undoubtedly conscious and undoubtedly sending up a hue and cry, shrieking mightily for the bloody scalp of some private eye named London. For the next five or six hours I wanted to get away from the world. My own place seemed like a ridiculous place to hide.
I settled on a movie. I sat in the balcony of a 42nd Street movie house, puffed on my pipe, munched popcorn, and watched Ma Barker’s Killer Brood and Baby Face Nelson. I saw both pictures twice, and if you think that’s a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, it’s only because you’ve never tried it.
It was five when I left the show. I had a quick dinner at a cafeteria and used their phone to make another call to Cleveland. My op was on hand and he told me everything I wanted to know. I listened quietly, thoughtfully. At th
e end he said he would send me a bill and I told him that was fine.
Nothing was fine, though.
I stayed in the phone booth, sitting, thinking. I made two more calls, local ones. I talked a little, listened a little, hung up. I went on sitting in that booth until a stern-faced man came over and rapped on the door. I apologized to him and left.
The sun was dying outside, dropping behind the Jersey mud flats. The air was still too warm. I walked for a block or two, checking now and then to see if anybody was following me. Nobody was.
I thought about the way things can sneak up behind you from out of nowhere and slip you a rabbit punch. I thought about the way you can walk around wearing blinders, and then you can take the blinders off and still not believe what you see. But you see it, and sooner or later it sinks in and your world falls apart.
I hailed a cab and took a ride to a certain posh apartment house. I walked past a doorman, into an elevator. I rode up in silence. I got out and went to a door. I stood in front of it for a long time. Finally, I rang…I waited…I rang again.
TEN
She had never looked better. Even nude, with a white sheet under that flawless full-blown body and a pillow beneath that ash blond head, she had never looked better wearing a skirt and sweater. She flowed toward me like a hot river and she came into my arms and stayed there.
I let her kiss me. I ran my hands over her back, felt the firmness of her body, and I waited for something to happen inside me, something I was afraid of: a shadow of response, a flicker of desire.
It never came.
“Oh, Ed,” she was saying. “I was so worried. You didn’t call me all day. I was afraid. I thought something had happened to you; I didn’t know what to think.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I tried calling you. You weren’t at your apartment. I must have called you a dozen times but you weren’t there.”
“No. I wasn’t.”
She turned coy, twisting in my arms and looking up at me. “You weren’t with another girl, were you? I’ll scratch her eyes out, Ed.”
And then she turned kittenish again, burrowing her head in my chest and making little sounds.
I put my hands on her shoulders. I pushed, gently, easing her away. She looked at me, a question in her eyes.
They must have heard the slap in Canarsie. I hit her that hard, open-palmed, my hand against the side of her face. She stumbled and went down, started to get up, tripped, fell, then finally scrambled to her feet again. Her eyes said she didn’t believe it.
“You dirty little liar,” I snapped.
“Ed—”
“Shut up. I know the whole bit now, Rhona. All of it, from top to bottom. I got some of it here and some of it there and figured out the rest myself. It didn’t take too much thinking on my part. It was all there. All I had to do was look for it.”
“Ed, for heaven’s sake—”
“Sit down.” She looked at me, thought it over, plopped down on the orange couch.
“Jack Blake,” I said, pacing like a caged tiger. “He was a card sharp, all right. And he stopped being a card sharp. Not to go straight, though. Just to change his line of work. He stopped cheating at cards but he found other ways to cheat.
“He opened a magic shop. It was a front, nothing more. I had a detective agency in Cleveland check the place out. Oh, the store was completely open and aboveboard, all right. Only the place ran at one hell of a loss. Blake never made a nickel out of it.”
I wanted a drink. Courvoisier, a lot of it, straight and in a hurry.
“So the shop lost money,” I continued, “and Blake lived high off the hog. A big house out in Shaker Heights. Trips to Vegas and Hawaii. You don’t pull that kind of money out of a successful magic shop, let alone a losing proposition like the one on Euclid Avenue.
“So Blake had another source of income. It’s not hard to figure out what it was, Rhona. The record of deposits to Jack Blake’s checking account makes it obvious. The two of you were working a string of blackmail dodges. You were on a dozen different payrolls for anywhere from a hundred to five hundred bucks a month. It was a sweet little setup. And you weren’t his daughter, either. That was another little lie, wasn’t it?”
“You can’t be serious—”
“The hell I can’t. Jack Blake was never married. He never had a wife and he never had a kid. You were his mistress and his partner. His private whore.”
She started to get up. She saw my eyes, and she must have guessed what I would do to her the minute she got to her feet. So she stayed where she was.
“His private whore.” I liked the sound of it. “And his partner. The two of you were doing fine. Then you got hold of something that made all the little swindles look like small potatoes in comparison. You latched on to the prize pigeon of them all. You hooked a man named Abe Zucker.”
I took a breath. “Five months ago Miltie Klugsman got in touch with Blake and told him he had the goods on Zucker. Zucker’s been straight for years so he must have had something big on him, a rap the statute of limitations wouldn’t cover. Something like murder.
“It doesn’t much matter what it was. It was too big for Klugsman and he was scared to work it on his own. He knew Blake was doing a land-office business in blackmail. They worked out a split. Klugsman couldn’t have done too well with it—his widow isn’t exactly living in style. But that’s how it went. Klugsman held on to the evidence and Blake set up the blackmail gambit and Zucker paid. There was a healthy deposit to your father’s—pardon me, your keeper’s account five months ago. The first payment from Zucker was something like ten thousand dollars.
“Zucker must have thought it was a one-shot deal. When it happened a second time he figured out that it would be cheaper to arrange an accident for Blake than to pay him that kind of money for any length of time. And that was the end of Jack Blake, at least as far as this world is concerned.
“You told that part of it straight enough, Rhona. A few thugs went to Cleveland and beat Jack Blake to death.”
I took another deep breath and looked at her, all prim and proper on the bright orange couch, all schoolgirl-lovely in green sweater and black skirt, and I tried to make myself believe it. It was true, all of it. But it still seemed impossible.
“JACK BLAKE WAS DEAD,” I went on. “But this didn’t faze you much. You could live without him, but you weren’t going to let a big fat fish like Zucker wiggle off the hook. He was too profitable a source of income.
“Klugsman was anxious to give up. When Blake was rubbed out, Klugsman got nervous. He didn’t want to play blackmail games anymore. He wanted out. So you got in touch with him and offered him a fast five grand for the evidence on Zucker. That would put Klugsman out of the picture and give him a healthy piece of change for his trouble. He went for it. It looked like easy money.
“But it wasn’t,” I said. “Zucker’s hirelings were already onto Klugsman. They picked us up when I met him in Canarsie and they shot a million holes in Miltie Klugsman. They didn’t kill me. Maybe they didn’t care much at that point. They just wanted Klugsman.
“That left you in a bind. Zucker wanted to see you dead, too, because as long as you were alive he had a murder rap hanging over his head like a Sword of Damocles. You had to stay away from him and you had to get me to dig up Miltie’s package of evidence. You were too damned greedy to take your life and run with it. You couldn’t let go of that pile of dough.”
“It wasn’t like that—” she started.
“The hell it wasn’t. It was like that all across the board. And you never came close to leveling with me. You started out as the woman-of-mystery and when that fell in you shifted gears as smooth as silk and turned yourself into the damsel-in-distress.
“You let me go to Brooklyn last night and almost get killed. You let me go up against Phillip Carr this morning. You never put your cards on the table and you never gave up the idea of bleeding that money out of Zucker.” I paused. “You look great in a sweate
r. You look great out of one. And you put on one hell of an act in bed. But you’re just another deceitful crook, Rhona. Nothing more.”
Then it was quiet. Neither of us said a word. Finally, she blurted: “Ed—what now?”
“Now I call the police,” I said. “I don’t care what happens after that.”
She uncoiled from the couch like a serpent. She flowed toward me again, and her eyes were radiating sex once more. She turned the stuff on and off like a faucet.
“Ed,” she cooed. “Ed, I’m sorry.”
“Stow it,” I said.
“Ed, listen to me. I didn’t trust you. I should have, I know it. And I’m sorry. But you don’t have to call the police.”
I stared at her.
“Listen to me, Ed. I didn’t…didn’t hurt anybody. I never murdered anyone. It’s not my fault Klugsman was shot and I wasn’t the murderer. It was Zucker and the men he hired. I just thought I could find a way to make a quick dollar.
“Don’t you understand? Ed, I never killed anyone. I never hurt you—I lied to you but I never hurt you. And, Ed, when we were in bed together I wasn’t acting. I don’t care what you think of me. Maybe I deserve it—”
“Maybe?”
“I know I deserve it. But I wasn’t acting. Not in bed, not when we were making love—”
I wish someone had filmed all this. She would have won the Oscar in a walk.
“You could let me go,” she pleaded. “You could call the police and give them everything you want on Zucker and Carr and the rest of them. I’ll even help you. I’ll tell you what I know. With that much, the police won’t need Klugsman’s evidence. You can even tell them about me, Ed, if it will make you feel better. Just give me a few hours’ head start. In a few hours I can be out of town and they won’t ever find me. Just a few hours, Ed,” she pleaded.
“Ed, you owe me that much. We meant that much to each other, Ed.”
She was as persuasive as a loaded gun. “I’d have given you that much,” I told her. “Except for one thing.”