The man’s mouth worked a little. His smile had a knowing tilt to it. “I got delayed a little up north,” he said smoothly. “You know how it is. Visiting old friends. You seem to know a lot about my business, copper.”
“That’s right, Mr. Rails.”
The man lunged to his feet and his hand snapped at the gun. He stood leaning over, holding it on the table, staring. “Dames talk too much,” he said with a muffled sound in his voice as though he held something soft between his teeth and talked through it.
“Not dames, Mr. Rails.”
“Huh?” The gun slithered on the hard wood of the table. “Talk it up, copper. My mind reader just quit.”
“Not dames, guys. Guys with guns.”
The glacier silence fell between them again. The man straightened his body out slowly. His face was washed clean of expression, but his eyes were haunted. Tony leaned in front of him, a shortish plump man with a quiet, pale, friendly face and eyes as simple as forest water.
“They never run out of gas—those boys,” Johnny Rails said, and licked at his lip. “Early and late, they work. The old firm never sleeps.”
“You know who they are?” Tony said softly.
“I could maybe give nine guesses. And twelve of them would be right.”
“The trouble boys,” Tony said, and smiled a brittle smile.
“Where is she?” Johnny Rails asked harshly.
“Right next door to you.”
The man walked to the wall and left his gun lying on the table. He stood in front of the wall, studying it. He reached up and gripped the grillwork of the balcony railing. When he dropped his hand and turned, his face had lost some of its lines. His eyes had a quieter glint. He moved back to Tony and stood over him.
“I’ve got a stake,” he said. “Eve sent me some dough and I built it up with a touch I made up north. Case dough, what I mean. The trouble boys talk about twenty-five grand.” He smiled crookedly. “Five C’s I can count. I’d have a lot of fun making them believe that, I would.”
“What did you do with it?” Tony asked indifferently.
“I never had it, copper. Leave that lay. I’m the only guy in the world that believes it. It was a little deal that I got suckered on.”
“I’ll believe it,” Tony said.
“They don’t kill often. But they can be awful tough.”
“Mugs,” Tony said with a sudden bitter contempt. “Guys with guns. Just mugs.”
Johnny Rails reached for his glass and drained it empty. The ice cubes tinkled softly as he put it down. He picked his gun up, danced it on his palm, then tucked it, nose down, into an inner breast pocket. He stared at the carpet.
“How come you’re telling me this, copper?”
“I thought maybe you’d give her a break.”
“And if I wouldn’t?”
“I kind of think you will,” Tony said.
Johnny Rails nodded quietly. “Can I get out of here?”
“You could take the service elevator to the garage. You could rent a car. I can give you a card to the garage man.”
“You’re a funny little guy,” Johnny Rails said.
Tony took out a worn ostrich-skin billfold and scribbled on a printed card. Johnny Rails read it, and stood holding it, tapping it against a thumbnail.
“I could take her with me,” he said, his eyes narrow.
“You could take a ride in a basket too,” Tony said. “She’s been here five days, I told you. She’s been spotted. A guy I know called me up and told me to get her out of here. Told me what it was all about. So I’m getting you out instead.”
“They’ll love that,” Johnny Rails said. “They’ll send you violets.”
“I’ll weep about it on my day off.”
Johnny Rails turned his hand over and stared at the palm. “I could see her, anyway. Before I blow. Next door to here, you said?”
Tony turned on his heel and started for the door. He said over his shoulder, “Don’t waste a lot of time, handsome. I might change my mind.”
The man said, almost gently: “You might be spotting me right now, for all I know.”
Tony didn’t turn his head. “That’s a chance you have to take.”
He went on to the door and passed out of the room. He shut it carefully, silently, looked once at the door of 14A and got into his dark elevator. He rode it down to the linen-room floor and got out to remove the basket that held the service elevator open at that floor. The door slid quietly shut. He held it so that it made no noise. Down the corridor, light came from the open door of the housekeeper’s office. Tony got back into his elevator and went on down to the lobby.
The little clerk was out of sight behind his pebbled-glass screen, auditing accounts. Tony went through the main lobby and turned into the radio room. The radio was on again, soft. She was there, curled on the davenport again. The speaker hummed to her, a vague sound so low that what it said was as wordless as the murmur of trees. She turned her head slowly and smiled at him.
“Finished palming doorknobs? I couldn’t sleep worth a nickel. So I came down again. Okey?”
He smiled and nodded. He sat down in a green chair and patted the plump brocade arms of it. “Sure, Miss Cressy.”
“Waiting is the hardest kind of work, isn’t it? I wish you’d talk to that radio. It sounds like a pretzel being bent.”
Tony fiddled with it, got nothing he liked, set it back where it had been.
“Beer-parlor drunks are all the customers now.”
She smiled at him again.
“I don’t bother you being here, Miss Cressy?”
“I like it. You’re a sweet little guy, Tony.”
He looked stiffly at the floor and a ripple touched his spine. He waited for it to go away. It went slowly. Then he sat back, relaxed again, his neat fingers clasped on his elk’s tooth. He listened. Not to the radio—to far-off, uncertain things, menacing things. And perhaps to just the safe whir of wheels going away into a strange night.
“Nobody’s all bad,” he said out loud.
The girl looked at him lazily. “I’ve met two or three I was wrong on, then.”
He nodded. “Yeah,” he admitted judiciously. “I guess there’s some that are.”
The girl yawned and her deep violet eyes half closed. She nestled back into the cushions. “Sit there for a while, Tony. Maybe I could nap.”
“Sure. Not a thing for me to do. Don’t know why they pay me.”
She slept quickly and with complete stillness, like a child. Tony hardly breathed for ten minutes. He just watched her, his mouth a little open. There was a quiet fascination in his limpid eyes, as if he was looking at an altar. Then he stood up with infinite care and padded away under the arch to the entrance lobby and the desk. He stood at the desk listening for a little while. He heard a pen rustling out of sight. He went around the corner to the row of house phones in little glass cubbyholes. He lifted one and asked the night operator for the garage.
It rang three or four times and then a boyish voice answered: “Windermere Hotel. Garage speaking.”
“This is Tony Reseck. That guy Watterson I gave a card to. He leave?”
“Sure, Tony. Half an hour almost. Is it your charge?”
“Yeah,” Tony said. “My party. Thanks. Be seein’ you.” He hung up and scratched his neck. He went back to the desk and slapped a hand on it. The clerk wafted himself around the screen with his greeter’s smile in place. It dropped when he saw Tony.
“Can’t a guy catch up on his work?” he grumbled.
“What’s the professional rate on Fourteen-B?”
The clerk stared morosely. “There’s no professional rate in the tower.”
“Make one. The fellow left already. Was there only an hour.”
“Well, well,” the clerk said airily. “So the personality didn’t click tonight. We get a skip-out.”
“Will five bucks satisfy you?”
“Friend of yours?”
“No. Just a drunk wit
h delusions of grandeur and no dough.”
“Guess we’ll have to let it ride, Tony. How did he get out?”
“I took him down the service elevator. You was asleep. Will five bucks satisfy you?”
“Why?”
The worn ostrich-skin wallet came out and a weedy five slipped across the marble. “All I could shake him for,” Tony said loosely.
The clerk took the five and looked puzzled. “You’re the boss,” he said, and shrugged. The phone shrilled on the desk and he reached for it. He listened and then pushed it toward Tony. “For you.”
Tony took the phone and cuddled it close to his chest. He put his mouth close to the transmitter. The voice was strange to him. It had a metallic sound. Its syllables were meticulously anonymous.
“Tony? Tony Reseck?”
“Talking.”
“A message from Al. Shoot?”
Tony looked at the clerk. “Be a pal,” he said over the mouthpiece. The clerk flicked a narrow smile at him and went away. “Shoot,” Tony said into the phone.
“We had a little business with a guy in your place. Picked him up scramming. Al had a hunch you’d run him out. Tailed him and took him to the curb. Not so good. Backfire.”
Tony held the phone very tight and his temples chilled with the evaporation of moisture. “Go on,” he said. “I guess there’s more.”
“A little. The guy stopped the big one. Cold. Al—Al said to tell you goodbye.”
Tony leaned hard against the desk. His mouth made a sound that was not speech.
“Get it?” The metallic voice sounded impatient, a little bored. “This guy had him a rod. He used it. Al won’t be phoning anybody any more.”
Tony lurched at the phone, and the base of it shook on the rose marble. His mouth was a hard dry knot.
The voice said: “That’s as far as we go, bub. G’night.” The phone clicked dryly, like a pebble hitting a wall.
Tony put the phone down in its cradle very carefully, so as not to make any sound. He looked at the clenched palm of his left hand. He took a handkerchief out and rubbed the palm softly and straightened the fingers out with his other hand. Then he wiped his forehead. The clerk came around the screen again and looked at him with glinting eyes. “I’m off Friday. How about lending me that phone number?” Tony nodded at the clerk and smiled a minute frail smile. He put his handkerchief away and patted the pocket he had put it in. He turned and walked away from the desk, across the entrance lobby, down the three shallow steps, along the shadowy reaches of the main lobby, and so in through the arch to the radio room once more. He walked softly, like man moving in a room where somebody is very sick. He reached the chair he had sat in before and lowered himself into it inch by inch. The girl slept on, motionless, in that curled-up looseness achieved by some women and all cats. Her breath made no slightest sound against the vague murmur of the radio.
Tony Reseck leaned back in the chair and clasped his hands on his elk’s tooth and quietly closed his eyes.
GOLDFISH
I
I WASN’T doing any work that day, just catching up on my foot-dangling. A warm gusty breeze was blowing in at the office window and the soot from the Mansion House Hotel oilburners across the alley was rolling across the glass top of my desk in tiny particles, like pollen drifting over a vacant lot.
I was just thinking about going to lunch when Kathy Home came in.
She was a tall, seedy, sad-eyed blonde who had once been a policewoman and had lost her job when she married a cheap little check-bouncer named Johnny Home, to reform him. She hadn’t reformed him, but she was waiting for him to come out so she could try again. In the meantime she ran the cigar counter at the Mansion House, and watched the grifters go by in a haze of nickel cigar smoke. And once in a while lent one of them ten dollars to get out of town. She was just that soft. She sat down and opened her big shiny bag and got out a package of cigarettes and lit one with my desk lighter. She blew a plume of smoke, wrinkled her nose at it.
“Did you ever hear of the Leander pearls?” she asked. “Gosh, that blue serge shines. You must have money in the bank, the clothes you wear.”
“No,” I said, “to both your ideas. I never heard of the Leander pearls and don’t have any money in the bank.”
“Then you’d like to make yourself a cut of twenty-five grand maybe.”
I lit one of her cigarettes. She got up and shut the window, saying: “I get enough of that hotel smell on the job.”
She sat down again, went on:
“It’s nineteen years ago. They had the guy in Leavenworth fifteen and it’s four since they let him out. A big lumberman from up north named Sol Leander bought them for his wife—the pearls, I mean—just two of them. They cost two hundred grand.”
“It must have taken a hand truck to move them,” I said.
“I see you don’t know a lot about pearls,” Kathy Home said. “It’s not just size. Anyhow they’re worth more today and the twenty-five grand reward the Reliance people put out is still good.”
“I get it,” I said. “Somebody copped them off.”
“Now you’re getting yourself some oxygen.” She dropped her cigarette into a tray and let it smoke, as ladies will. I put it out for her. “That’s what the guy was in Leavenworth for, only they never proved he got the pearls. It was a mail-car job. He got himself hidden in the car somehow and up in Wyoming he shot the clerk, cleaned out the registered mail and dropped off. He got to B.C. before he was nailed. But they didn’t get any of the stuff—not then. All they got was him. He got life.”
“If it’s going to be a long story, let’s have a drink.”
“I never drink until sundown. That way you don’t get to be a heel.”
“Tough on the Eskimos,” I said. “In the summertime anyway.”
She watched me get my little flat bottle out. Then she went on:
“His name was Sype—Wally Sype. He did it alone. And he wouldn’t squawk about the stuff, not a peep. Then after fifteen long years they offered him a pardon, if he would loosen up with the loot. He gave up everything but the pearls.”
“Where did he have it?” I asked. “In his hat?”
“Listen, this isn’t just a bunch of gag lines. I’ve got a lead to those marbles.”
I shut my mouth with my hand and looked solemn.
“He said he never had the pearls and they must have halfway believed him because they gave him the pardon. Yet the pearls were in the load, registered mail, and they were never seen again.”
My throat began to feel a little thick. I didn’t say anything.
Kathy Home went on:
“One time in Leavenworth, just one time in all those years, Wally Sype wrapped himself around a can of white shellac and got as tight as a fat lady’s girdle. His cell mate was a little man they called Peeler Mardo. He was doing twenty-seven months for splitting twenty dollar bills. Sype told him he had the pearls buried somewhere in Idaho.”
I leaned forward a little.
“Beginning to get to you, eh?” she said. “Well get this. Peeler Mardo is rooming at my house and he’s a coke-hound and he talks in his sleep.”
I leaned back again. “Good grief,” I said. “And I was practically spending the reward money.”
She stared at me coldly. Then her face softened. “All right,” she said a little hopelessly. “I know it sounds screwy. All those years gone by and all the smart heads that must have worked on the case, postal men and private agencies and all. And then a coke-head to turn it up. But he’s a nice little runt and somehow I believe him. He knows where Sype is.”
I said: “Did he talk all this in his sleep?”
“Of course not. But you know me. An old policewoman’s got ears. Maybe I was nosy, but I guessed he was an ex-con and I worried about him using the stuff so much. He’s the only roomer I’ve got now and I’d kind of go in by his door and listen to him talking to himself. That way I got enough to brace him. He told me the rest. He wants help to collect.”
>
I leaned forward again. “Where’s Sype?”
Kathy Home smiled, and shook her head. “That’s the one thing he wouldn’t tell, that and the name Sype is using now. But it’s somewhere up North, in or near Olympia, Washington. Peeler saw him up there and found out about him and he says Sype didn’t see him.”
“What’s Peeler doing down here?” I asked.
“Here’s where they put the Leavenworth rap on him. You know an old con always goes back to look at the piece of sidewalk he slipped on. But he doesn’t have any friends here now.”
I lit another cigarette and had another little drink.
“Sype has been out four years, you say. Peeler did twenty-seven months. What’s he been doing with all the time since?”
Kathy Home widened her china blue eyes pityingly. “Maybe you think there’s only one jailhouse he could get into.”
“Okey,” I said. “Will he talk to me? I guess he wants help to deal with the insurance people, in case there are any pearls and Sype will put them right in Peeler’s hand and so on. Is that it?”
Kathy Home sighed. “Yes, he’ll talk to you. He’s aching to. He’s scared about something. Will you go out now, before he gets junked up for the evening?”
“Sure—if that’s what you want.”
She took a flat key out of her bag and wrote an address on my pad. She stood up slowly.
“It’s a double house. My side’s separate. There’s a door in between, with the key on my side. That’s just in case he won’t come to the door.”
“Okey,” I said. I blew smoke at the ceiling and stared at her.
She went towards the door, stopped, came back. She looked down at the floor.
“I don’t rate much in it,” she said. “Maybe not anything. But if I could have a grand or two waiting for Johnny when he came out, maybe—”
“Maybe you could hold him straight,” I said. “It’s a dream, Kathy. It’s all a dream. But if it isn’t, you cut an even third.”
She caught her breath and glared at me to keep from crying. She went towards the door, stopped and came back again.
“That isn’t all,” she said. “It’s the old guy—Sype. He did fifteen years. He paid. Paid hard. Doesn’t it make you feel kind of mean?”