“Neat,” I said. “You have them all the time, or is this your birthday?”
“Beat it,” he said. “Drift.” He started to close the door. He opened it again to say: “Take the air. Scram. Push off.” Having made his meaning clear he started to close the door again.
I leaned against the door. He leaned against it on his side. That brought our faces close together. “Five bucks,” I said.
It rocked him. He opened the door very suddenly and I had to take a quick step forward in order not to butt his chin with my head.
“Come in,” he said.
A living room with a wallbed, everything strictly to specifications, even to the shirred paper lampshade and the glass ashtray. This room was painted egg-yolk yellow. All it needed was a few fat black spiders painted on the yellow to be anybody’s bilious attack.
“Sit down,” he said, shutting the door.
I sat down. We looked at each other with the clear innocent eyes of a couple of used car salesmen.
“Beer?” he said.
“Thanks.”
He opened two cans, filled the smeared glass he had been holding, and reached for another like it. I said I would drink out of the can. He handed me the can.
“A dime,” he said.
I gave him a dime.
He dropped it into his vest and went on looking at me. He pulled a chair over and sat in it and spread his bony upjutting knees and let his empty hand droop between them.
“I ain’t interested in your five bucks,” he said.
“That’s fine,” I said. “I wasn’t really thinking of giving it to you.”
“A wisey,” he said. “What gives? We run a nice respectable place here. No funny stuff gets pulled.”
“Quiet too,” I said. “Upstairs you could almost hear an eagle scream.”
His smile was wide, about three quarters of an inch. “I don’t amuse easy,” he said.
“Just like Queen Victoria,” I said.
“I don’t get it.”
“I don’t expect miracles,” I said. The meaningless talk had a sort of cold bracing effect on me, making a mood with a hard gritty edge.
I got my wallet out and selected a card from it. It wasn’t my card. It read: James B. Pollock, Reliance lndemnity Company, Field Agent. I tried to remember what James B. Pollock looked like and where I had met him. I couldn’t. I handed the carroty man the card.
He read it and scratched the end of his nose with one of the corners. “Wrong john?” he asked, keeping his green eyes plastered to my face.
“Jewelry,” I said and waved a hand.
He thought this over. While he thought it over I tried to make up my mind whether it worried him at all. It didn’t seem to.
“We get one once in a while,” he conceded. “You can’t help it. He didn’t look like it to me, though. Soft looking.”
“Maybe I got a bum steer.” I said. I described George Anson Phillips to him, George Anson Phillips alive, in his brown suit and his dark glasses and his cocoa straw hat with the brown and yellow print band. I wondered what had happened to the hat. It hadn’t been up there. He must have got rid of it, thinking it was too conspicuous. His blond head was almost, but not quite, as bad.
“That sound like him?”
The carroty man took his time making up his mind. Finally he nodded yes, green eyes watching me carefully, lean hard hand holding the card up to his mouth and running the card along his teeth like a stick along the palings of a picket fence.
“I didn’t figure him for no crook,” he said. “But hell, they come all sizes and shapes. Only been here a month. If he looked like a wrong gee, wouldn’t have been here at all.”
I did a good job of not laughing in his face. “What say we frisk the apartment while he’s out?”
He shook his head. “Mr. Palermo wouldn’t like it.”
“Mr. Palermo?”
“He’s the owner. Across the street. Owns the funeral parlors. Owns this building and a lot of other buildings. Practically owns the district, if you know what I mean.” He gave me a twitch of the lip and a flutter of the right eyelid. “Gets the vote out. Not a guy to crowd.”
“Well, while he’s getting the vote out or playing with a stiff or whatever he’s doing at the moment, let’s go up and frisk the apartment.”
“Don’t get me sore at you,” the carroty man said briefly.
“That would bother me like two per cent of nothing at all,” I said. “Let’s go up and frisk the apartment.” I threw my empty beer can at the waste basket and watched it bounce back and roll half way across the room.
The carroty man stood up suddenly and spread his feet apart and dusted his hands together and took hold of his lower lip with his teeth.
“You said something about five,” he shrugged.
“That was hours ago,” I said. “I thought better of it. Let’s go up and frisk the apartment.”
“Say that just once more—” his right hand slid towards his hip.
“If you’re thinking of pulling a gun, Mr. Palermo wouldn’t like it,” I said.
“To hell with Mr. Palermo,” he snarled, in a voice suddenly furious, out of a face suddenly charged with dark blood.
“Mr. Palermo will be glad to know that’s how you feel about him,” I said.
“Look,” the carroty man said very slowly, dropping his hand to his side and leaning forward from the hips and pushing his face at me as hard as he could. “Look. I was sitting here having myself a beer or two. Maybe three. Maybe nine. What the hell? I wasn’t bothering anybody. It was a nice day. It looked like it might be a nice evening—Then you come in.” He waved a hand violently.
“Let’s go up and frisk the apartment,” I said.
He threw both fists forward in tight lumps. At the end of the motion he threw his hands wide open, straining the fingers as far as they would go. His nose twitched sharply.
“If it wasn’t for the job,” he said.
I opened my mouth. “Don’t say it!” he yelled.
He put a hat on, but no coat, opened a drawer and took out a bunch of keys, walked past me to open the door and stood in it, jerking his chin at me. His face still looked a little wild.
We went out into the hall and along it and up the stairs. The ball game was over and dance music had taken its place. Very loud dance music. The carroty man selected one of his keys and put it in the lock of Apartment 204. Against the booming of the dance band behind us in the apartment across the way a woman’s voice suddenly screamed hysterically.
The carroty man withdrew the key and bared his teeth at me. He walked across the narrow hallway and banged on the opposite door. He had to knock hard and long before any attention was paid. Then the door was jerked open and a sharp-faced blond in scarlet slacks and a green pullover stared out with sultry eyes, one of which was puffed and the other had been socked several days ago. She also had a bruise on her throat and her hand held a tall cool glass of amber fluid.
“Pipe down, but soon,” the carroty man said. “Too much racket. I don’t aim to ask you again. Next time I call some law.”
The girl looked back over her shoulder and screamed against the noise of the radio: “Hey, Del! The guy says to pipe down! You wanna sock him?”
A chair squeaked, the radio noise died abruptly and a thick bitter-eyed dark man appeared behind the blond, yanked her out of the way with one hand and pushed his face at us. He needed a shave. He was wearing pants, street shoes and an undershirt.
He settled his feet in the doorway, whistled a little breath in through his nose and said:
“Buzz off. I just come in from lunch. I had a lousy lunch. I wouldn’t want nobody to push muscle at me.” He was very drunk, but in a hard practised sort of way.
The carroty man said: “You heard me, Mr. Hench. Dim that radio and stop the roughhouse in here. And make it sudden.”
The man addressed as Hench said: “Listen, picklepuss—” and heaved forward with his right foot in a hard stamp.
The carroty man’s left foot didn’t wait to be stamped on. The lean body moved back quickly and the thrown bunch of keys hit the floor behind, and clanked against the door of Apartment 204. The carroty man’s right hand made a sweeping movement and came up with a woven leather blackjack.
Hench said: “Yah!” and took two big handfuls of air in his two hairy hands, closed the hands into fists and swung hard at nothing.
The carroty man hit him on the top of his head and the girl screamed again and threw a glass of liquor in her boy friend’s face. Whether because it was safe to do it now or because she made an honest mistake, I couldn’t tell.
Hench turned blindly with his face dripping, stumbled and ran across the floor in a lurch that threatened to land him on his nose at every step. The bed was down and tumbled. Hench made the bed on one knee and plunged a hand under the pillow.
I said: “Look out—gun.”
“I can fade that too,” the carroty man said between his teeth and slid his right hand, empty now, under his open vest.
Hench was down on both knees. He came up on one and turned and there was a short black gun in his right hand and he was staring down at it, not holding it by the grip at all, holding it flat on his palm.
“Drop it!” the carroty man’s voice said tightly and he went on into the room.
The blond promptly jumped on his back and wound her long green arms around his neck, yelling lustily. The carroty man staggered and swore and waved his gun around.
“Get him, Del!” the blond screamed. “Get him good!”
Hench, one hand on the bed and one foot on the floor, both knees doubled, right hand holding the black gun flat on his palm, eyes staring down at it, pushed himself slowly to his feet and growled deep in his throat:
“This ain’t my gun.”
I relieved the carroty man of the gun that was not doing him any good and stepped around him, leaving him to shake the blond off his back as best he could. A door banged down the hallway and steps came along toward us.
I said: “Drop it, Hench.”
He looked up at me, puzzled dark eyes suddenly sober.
“It ain’t my gun,” he said and held it out flat. “Mine’s a Colt .32—belly gun.”
I took the gun off his hand. He made no effort to stop me. He sat down on the bed, rubbed the top of his head slowly, and screwed his face up in difficult thought. “Where the hell—” his voice trailed off and he shook his head and winced.
I sniffed the gun. It had been fired. I sprang the magazine out and counted the bullets through the small holes in the side. There were six. With one in the magazine, that made seven. The gun was a Colt .32, automatic, eight shot. It had been fired. If it had not been reloaded, one shot had been fired from it.
The carroty man had the blond off his back now. He had thrown her into a chair and was wiping a scratch on his cheek. His green eyes were baleful.
“Better get some law,” I said. “A shot has been fired from this gun and it’s about time you found out there’s a dead man in the apartment across the hall.”
Hench looked up at me stupidly and said in a quiet, reasonable voice: “Brother, that simply ain’t my gun.”
The blond sobbed in a rather theatrical manner and showed me an open mouth twisted with misery and ham acting. The carroty man went softly out of the door.
TEN
“Shot in the throat with a medium caliber gun and a soft-nosed bullet,” Detective-Lieutenant Jesse Breeze said. “A gun like this and bullets like is in here.” He danced the gun on his hand, the gun Hence had said was not his gun. “Bullet ranged upwards and probably hit the back of the skull. Still inside his head. The man’s dead about two hours. Hands and face cold, but body still warm. No rigor. Was sapped with something hard before being shot. Likely with a gun butt. All that mean anything to you boys and girls?”
The newspaper he was sitting on rustled. He took his hat off and mopped his face and the top of his almost bald head. A fringe of light colored hair around the crown was damp and dark with sweat. He put his hat back on, a flat-crowned panama, burned dark by the sun. Not this year’s hat, and probably not last year’s.
He was a big man, rather paunchy, wearing brown and white shoes and sloppy socks and white trousers with thin black stripes, an open neck shirt showing some ginger-colored hair at the top of his chest, and a rough sky-blue sports coat not wider at the shoulders than a two-car garage. He would be about fifty years old and the only thing about him that very much suggested cop was the calm, unwinking unwavering stare of his prominent pale blue eyes, a stare that had no thought of being rude, but that anybody but a cop would feel to be rude. Below his eyes across the top of his cheeks and the bridge of his nose there was a wide path of freckles, like a mine field on a war map.
We were sitting in Hench’s apartment and the door was shut. Hench had his shirt on and he was absently tying a tie with thick blunt fingers that trembled. The girl was lying on the bed. She had a green wraparound thing twisted about her head, a purse by her side and a short squirrel coat across her feet. Her mouth was a little open and her face was drained and shocked.
Hench said thickly: “If the idea is the guy was shot with the gun under the pillow, okay. Seems like he might have been. It ain’t my gun and nothing you boys can think up is going to make me say it’s my gun.”
“Assuming that to be so,” Breeze said, “how come? Somebody swiped your gun and left this one. When, how, what kind of gun was yours?”
“We went out about three-thirty or so to get something to eat at the hashhouse around the corner,” Hench said. “You can check that. We must have left the door unlocked. We were kind of hitting the bottle a little. I guess we were pretty noisy. We had the ball game going on the radio. I guess we shut it off when we went out. I’m not sure. You remember?” He looked at the girl lying whitefaced and silent on the bed. “You remember, sweet?”
The girl didn’t look at him or answer him.
“She’s pooped,” Hench said. “I had a gun, a Colt .32, same caliber as that, but a belly gun. A revolver, not an automatic. There’s a piece broken off the rubber grip. A Jew named Morris gave it to me three four years ago. We worked together in a bar. I don’t have no permit, but I don’t carry the gun neither.”
Breeze said: “Hitting the hooch like you birds been and having a gun under the pillow sooner or later somebody was going to get shot. You ought to know that.”
“Hell, we didn’t even know the guy,” Hench said. His tie was tied now, very badly. He was cold sober and very shaky. He stood up and picked a coat off the end of the bed and put it on and sat down again. I watched his fingers tremble lighting a cigarette. “We don’t know his name. We don’t know anything about him. I see him maybe two three times in the hall, but he don’t even speak to me. It’s the same guy, I guess. I ain’t even sure of that.”
“It’s the fellow that lived there,” Breeze said. “Let me see now, this ball game is a studio re-broadcast, huh?”
“Goes on at three,” Hench said. “Three to say four-thirty, or sometimes later. We went out about the last half the third. We was gone about an inning and a half, maybe two. Twenty minutes to half an hour. Not more.”
“I guess he was shot just before you went out,” Breeze said. “The radio would kill the noise of the gun near enough. You must of left your door unlocked. Or even open.”
“Could be,” Hench said wearily. “You remember, honey?”
Again the girl on the bed refused to answer him or even look at him.
Breeze said: “You left your door open or unlocked. The killer heard you go out. He got into your apartment, wanting to ditch his gun, saw the bed down, walked across and slipped his gun under the pillow, and then imagine his surprise. He found another gun there waiting for him. So he took it along. Now if he meant to ditch his gun, why not do it where he did his killing? Why take the risk of going into another apartment to do it? Why the fancy pants?”
I was sitting in the corner of the davenport
by the window. I put in my nickel’s worth, saying: “Suppose he had locked himself out of Phillips’ apartment before he thought of ditching the gun? Suppose, coming out of the shock of his murder, he found himself in the hall still holding the murder gun. He would want to ditch it fast. Then if Hench’s door was open and he had heard them go out along the hall—”
Breeze looked at me briefly and grunted: “I’m not saying it isn’t so. I’m just considering.” He turned his attention back to Hench. “So now, if this turns out to be the gun that killed Anson, we got to try and trace your gun. While we do that we got to have you and the young lady handy. You understand that, of course?”
Hench said: “You don’t have any boys that can bounce me hard enough to make me tell it different.”
“We can always try,” Breeze said mildly. “And we might just as well get started.”
He stood up, turned and swept the crumpled newspapers off the chair on to the floor. He went over to the door, then turned and stood looking at the girl on the bed. “You all right, sister, or should I call for a matron?”
The girl on the bed didn’t answer him.
Hench said: “I need a drink. I need a drink bad.”
“Not while I’m watching you,” Breeze said and went out of the door.
Hench moved across the room and put the neck of a bottle into his mouth and gurgled liquor. He lowered the bottle, looked at what was left in it and went over to the girl. He pushed her shoulder.
“Wake up and have a drink,” he growled at her.
The girl stared at the ceiling. She didn’t answer him or show that she had heard him.
“Let her alone,” I said. “Shock.”
Hench finished what was in the bottle, put the empty bottle down carefully and looked at the girl again, then turned his back on her and stood frowning at the floor. “Jeeze, I wish I could remember better,” he said under his breath.
Breeze came back into the room with a young fresh-faced plain-clothes detective. “This is Lieutenant Spangler,” he said. “He’ll take you down. Get going, huh?”
Hench went back to the bed and shook the girl’s shoulder. “Get on up, babe. We gotta take a ride.”