One Night Stands and Lost Weekends

Page 35

 

  He pointed the cigar at me. “You’re a damn fool,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because ten thousand dollars is a healthy reward any way you look at it. ”

  “So?”

  He made a pilgrimage to the window. I felt like walking behind him and kicking him through it. He was a smooth little bastard who wanted me to sell out a client to him, and he didn’t even have the guts to lay it on the line. He had to be cute about it.

  “The girl is in over her head,” he said levelly. He still had his back to me. “You’re working for her. You don’t have to. You can be cooperative and pick up a nice package in the process. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Get out of here,” I said.

  He turned to face me. “You damn fool. ”

  “Get out, Carr. Or I’ll throw you out. ”

  He sighed. “My client’s a great believer in rewards,” he said. “Rewards and punishments. ”

  “I’d hit you, Carr, but you’d bleed all over my carpet. ”

  “Rewards and punishments,” he said again. “I don’t have to draw you pictures, London. You’re supposed to be a fairly bright boy. You think it over. You’ve got my card. If you change your mind, you might try giving me a ring. ”

  He left. I didn’t show him the door.

  I looked at his card for a few minutes, then went to the phone. I dialed Police Headquarters and asked for Jerry Gunther at Homicide. It took a few minutes before he got to the phone.

  “Oh,” he groaned. “It’s you again. ”

  Jerry and I had bumped heads a few times in one squabble or another. We wound up liking each other. He thought I was a bookish bum who liked to live well without working too hard and I thought he was a thorough anachronism, an honest cop in the middle of the twentieth century when honest cops were out of style. We had less in common than Miller and Monroe, but we got along fine.

  “What’s up, Ed?”

  “Phillip Carr,” I said. “Some kind of a lawyer. You know anything about him?”

  “It rings a bell,” he said. “I could find out if this was a vital part of police routine. Is this a vital part of police routine, Ed?”

  “No. ”

  “What is it?”

  “An imposition on your friendship. ”

  “What I figured,” he said. “Next time we have a vital conference, you buy. ”

  “That could be expensive. You’ve got a hollow leg. ”

  “Better than a hollow head, crumb. Hang on. ”

  Finally, Jerry Gunther came back. “Yeah,” he said. “Phillip Carr. Sort of a mob lawyer, Ed. A mouthpiece type. He takes cases for the kind of garbage that always stays out of jail. He’s been on the inside of some shady stuff himself, according to the dope we’ve got. Nothing that anybody could ever make stick. Bankrolling some smuggling operations, stuff like that. Using his connections to make an illegal buck. ”

  I grunted.

  “That your man, Ed?”

  “Like a glove,” I said. “He wears sunglasses and he’s oily. He’s the type who goes to the barbershop and gets the works. ”

  “Like Anastasia,” Jerry said. “It should happen to all of them. What’s it all about, Ed?”

  “I don’t know yet. ”

  “Nothing for Homicide, is it?”

  “Nothing, Jerry. ”

  “Then the hell with it. I only get into the act when somebody dies, fella. ”

  I thought about the corpse in Canarsie. But he never got into the files. The boys in our little poker game were too professional for that. By now he was sleeping in a lime pit in Jersey or swimming in Jamaica Bay all wrapped in cement.

  “Remember,” Jerry Gunther was saying, “you buy the liquor. And don’t play rough with this Carr. He’s got some ugly friends. ”

  “Sure,” I said. “And thanks. ”

  I put down the phone, got out of the building, and grabbed a pair of burgers at the lunch counter around the corner. As I ate, I thought about a corpse in Canarsie and a man named Phillip Carr and a blond vision named Rhona Blake. Life does get complicated, doesn’t it?

  FOUR

  I picked up my car from the garage on Third Avenue where I put it out to pasture. The car’s a Chevy convertible, an antique from the pre-fin era. I drove it down to the Village, stuck it in a handy parking spot, and looked around for a bar called Mandrake’s.

  Rhona was right. Mandrake’s was open at two in the afternoon, even if I couldn’t figure out why. It was a sleek and polished little club with a circular bar, and at night the Madison Avenue hippies came there to listen to a piano player sing dirty songs. They paid a buck and a quarter for their drinks, patted the waitresses on their pretty little bottoms, and thought they were way ahead of the squares at P. J. Clark’s.

  But in the afternoon it was just another ginmill, empty, and its only resemblance to Mandrake’s-by-nightfall was the price schedule. The drinks were still a buck and a quarter. I picked up Courvoisier at the bar and carried it to a little table in the back. The barmaid was the afternoon model, hollow-eyed and sad. I was her only customer.

  I nursed my drink, tossed a quarter into the chrome-plated jukebox, and played some Billie Holliday records. They were some of her last sides, cut after the voice was gone and only the perfect phrasing remained, and Lady Day was sadder than Mandrake’s in the daylight. I waited for Rhona and wondered if she would show.

  She did. She was a good three drinks late, waltzing in at three o’clock and glancing over her shoulder to find out who was following her. Probably the whole Lithuanian Army-in-Exile, I thought. She was that kind of a girl.

  “I’m late,” she said. “I’m sorry. ”

  We were still the bartender’s only customers. I asked her what she was drinking. She said a Rob Roy would be nice. She sipped at it, and I sipped at the cognac, and we looked at each other. She asked me for the story again and I gave it to her, filling in more of the details. She hung on every word and gave me a nod now and then.

  “You’re positive he was killed?”

  “Unless he found a way to live without a head. They shot it off for him. ”

  “I don’t know what to do next, Ed. ”

  “You could tell me what’s happening. ”

  “I’m paying you a hundred a day. Isn’t that enough?”

  This burned me. “I could make ten grand in five minutes,” I said. “That’s even better. ”

  She looked at me. “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing at all,” I said. I finished my drink, put the empty glass on the table in front of me. “I had a visitor today, Rhona. A lawyer named Phillip Carr. He told me a client of his was missing a daughter. This client was willing to shell out ten grand if I dug her up and brought her around. ”

  “So?”

  “He showed me your picture, Rhona. ”

  For a moment she just stared. Then her face cracked like ice in the springtime. She shuddered violently, and she spilled most of her Rob Roy on the polished tabletop, and her stiff upper lip turned to jello.

  She said: “Oh, hell. ”

  “Want to talk now, Rhona?”

  She stared at the top of the table, where her hands were shaking uncontrollably in a Rob Roy ocean. I walked to the jukebox, threw away another quarter, and sat down again. She was still shaking and biting her lip.

  “You’d better tell me, Rhona. People are playing with tommy-guns and talking in ten-grand terms. You’d better tell me. ”

  She nodded. On the jukebox, Billie was singing about strange fruit. Husky, smoky sounds shrieked out of a junked-up dying throat. The barmaid came over with a towel and wiped up the Rob Roy.

  Rhona looked up at me. The veneer of poise was all gone. She wasn’t ageless anymore. She looked very young, very scared. A scared kid in over her head.

  “Ed,” she said. “They want to kill me. ”

  “Who does?”

  “The man who came to see you. The same men who k
illed my blackmailer in Canarsie last night. ”

  “Who are they?”

  “Gamblers. But not real gamblers. Crooked ones. They run a batch of rigged games. They have some steerers who send over suckers, and the suckers go home broke. The lawyer who saw you works for a man named Abe Zucker. He’s the head of it. And they’re all looking for me. They want to kill me. ”

  “Why?”

  “Because of my father. ”

  “Who’s your father?”

  I don’t think she even heard the question. “They killed him,” she said quietly. “Slowly. They beat him to death. ”

  I waited while she took the bits and pieces of herself and tugged them back together again. Then I tried again. I asked her who her father was.

  “Jack Blake,” she said. “He was a mechanic. ”

  “He fixed cars?”

  She laughed humorlessly. “Cards,” she corrected. “He was a card mechanic. He could make a deck turn inside out and salute you, Ed. He could deal seconds all night long and nobody ever tipped. He was the best in the world. He had gentle hands with long thin fingers—the most perfect hands in the world. He could crimp-cut and false-shuffle and palm and…He was great, Ed. ”

  “Go on. ”

  “You ought to be able to figure the rest of it,” she said. “He quit the crooked-gambling circuit years ago when my mother died. He went into business for himself in Cleveland, ran a store downtown on Euclid Avenue and went straight. I worked for him, keeping the books and clerking behind the counter. The store was a magic shop. We sold supplies to the professional magicians and simple tricks to the average Joes. Dad loved the business. When the pros came in he would show off a little, fool around with a deck of cards and let them see how good he was. It was the perfect business for him. ”

  “Where did Zucker come in?”

  She sighed. “It happened less than a year ago. We came to New York. Part business and part pleasure. Dad bought his supplies in New York and liked to get into town once or twice a year to check out new items. It was better than waiting for the salesman to come to him. We were at a nightclub, a cheap joint on West Third Street, and the busboy asked Dad if he was looking for action. Poker, craps, that kind of thing. He said he wouldn’t mind a poker game and the busboy gave him a room number of a Broadway hotel. I went back to the place where we were staying and Dad went to the game. ”

  Billie’s last record ended and the juke went silent. I was tired of wasting quarters—and we didn’t need music.

  “He told me about it later,” Rhona said, “when he got back to our room. He said he sat down and played two hands, and by that time he knew the game was rigged. He was going to get up and leave, he said, but they were so sloppy it made him mad. So he beat them at their own game, Ed. He played tight on the hands unless he was dealing, and on his deal he made sure things went his way.

  “He was careful about it. He threw every trick in the book at them and they never caught on. It was a big game, Ed. Table stakes with a heavy takeout. Dad walked out of the game with twenty thousand dollars of their money. ”