The sweatered man snatched the gun up and stood rigid, watching Carmady.
Carmady got out a handkerchief and wiped the front of his coat, while Targo shut his large well-shaped mouth slowly and began to move the towel back and forth across his chest. After a moment he said: “Just who the hell may you be?”
Carmady said: “I used to be a private dick. Carmady’s the name. I think you need help.”
Targo’s face got a little redder than the shower had left it. “Why?”
“I heard you were supposed to throw it, and I think you tried to. But Werra was too lousy. You couldn’t help yourself. That means you’re in a jam.”
Targo said very slowly: “People get their teeth kicked in for saying things like that.”
The room was very still for a moment. The drunk sat up on the floor and blinked, tried to get his feet under him, and gave it up.
Carmady added quietly: “Benny Cyrano is a friend of mine. He’s your backer, isn’t he?”
The sweatered man laughed harshly. Then he broke the gun and slid the shells out of it, dropped the gun on the floor. He went to the door, went out, slammed the door shut.
Targo looked at the shut door, looked back at Carmady. He said very slowly: “What did you hear?”
“Your friend Jean Adrian lives in my hotel, on my floor. She got sapped by a hood this afternoon. I happened by and saw the hood running away, picked her up. She told me a little of what it was all about.”
Targo had put on his underwear and socks and shoes. He reached into a locker for a black satin shirt, put that on. He said: “She didn’t tell me.”
“She wouldn’t—before the fight.”
Targo nodded slightly. Then he said: “If you know Benny, you may be all right. I’ve been getting threats. Maybe it’s a lot of birdseed and maybe it’s some Spring Street punter’s idea of how to make himself a little easy dough. I fought my fight the way I wanted to. Now you can take the air, mister.”
He put on high-waisted black trousers and knotted a white tie on his black shirt. He got a white serge coat trimmed with black braid out of the locker, put that on. A black and white handkerchief flared from the pocket in three points.
Carmady stared at the clothes, moved a little towards the door and looked down at the drunk.
“Okey,” he said. “I see you’ve got a bodyguard. It was just an idea I had. Excuse it, please.”
He went out, closed the door gently, and went back up the ramp to the lobby, out to the street. He walked through the rain around the corner of the building to a big graveled parking lot.
The lights of a car blinked at him and his coupe slid along the wet gravel and pulled up. Tony Acosta was at the wheel.
Carmady got in at the right side and said: “Let’s go out to Cyrano’s and have a drink, Tony.”
“Jeeze, that’s swell. Miss Adrian’s in the floor show there. You know, the blonde I told you about.”
Carmady said: “I saw Targo. I kind of liked him—but I didn’t like his clothes.”
4
Gus Neishacker was a two-hundred-pound fashion plate with very red cheeks and thin, exquisitely penciled eyebrows—eyebrows from a Chinese vase. There was a red carnation in the lapel of his wide-shouldered dinner jacket and he kept sniffing at it while he watched the headwaiter seat a party of guests. When Carmady and Tony Acosta came through the foyer arch he flashed a sudden smile and went to them with his hand out.
“How’s a boy, Ted? Party?”
Carmady said: “Just the two of us. Meet Mister Acosta. Gus Neishacker, Cyrano’s floor manager.”
Gus Neishacker shook hands with Tony without looking at him. He said: “Let’s see, the last time you dropped in—”
“She left town,” Carmady said. “We’ll sit near the ring but not too near. We don’t dance together.”
Gus Neishacker jerked a menu from under the headwaiter’s arm and led the way down five crimson steps, along the tables that skirted the oval dance floor.
They sat down. Carmady ordered rye highballs and Denver sandwiches. Neishacker gave the order to a waiter, pulled a chair out and sat down at the table. He took a pencil out and made triangles on the inside of a match cover.
“See the fights?” he asked carelessly.
“Was that what they were?”
Gus Neishacker smiled indulgently. “Benny talked to the Duke. He says you’re wise.” He looked suddenly at Tony Acosta.
“Tony’s all right,” Carmady said.
“Yeah. Well do us a favor, will you? See it stops right here. Benny likes this boy. He wouldn’t let him get hurt. He’d put protection all around him—real protection—if he thought that threat stuff was anything but some pool-hall bum’s idea of a very funny joke. Benny never backs but one box-fighter at a time, and he picks them damn careful.”
Carmady lit a cigarette, blew smoke from a corner of his mouth, said quietly: “It’s none of my business, but I’m telling you it’s screwy. I have a nose for that sort of thing.”
Gus Neishacker stared at him a minute, then shrugged. He said: “I hope you’re wrong,” stood up quickly and walked away among the tables. He bent to smile here and there, and speak to a customer.
Tony Acosta’s velvet eyes shone. He said: “Jeeze, Mister Carmady, you think it’s rough stuff?”
Carmady nodded, didn’t say anything. The waiter put their drinks and sandwiches on the table, went away. The band on the stage at the end of the oval floor blared out a long chord and a slick, grinning m.c. Slid out on the stage and put his lips to a small open mike.
The floor show began. A line of half-naked girls ran out under a rain of colored lights. They coiled and uncoiled in a long sinuous line, their bare legs flashing, their navels little dimples of darkness in soft white, very nude flesh.
A hard-boiled redhead sang a hard-boiled song in a voice that could have been used to split firewood. The girls came back in black tights and silk hats, did the same dance with a slightly different exposure.
The music softened and a tall high-yaller torch singer drooped under an amber light and sang of something very far away and unhappy, in a voice like old ivory.
Carmady sipped his drink, poked at his sandwich in the dim light. Tony Acosta’s hard young face was a small tense blur beside him.
The torch singer went away and there was a little pause and then suddenly all the lights in the place went out except the lights over the music racks of the band and little pale amber lights at the entrances to the radiating aisles of booths beyond the tables.
There were squeals in the thick darkness. A single white spot winked on, high up under the roof, settled on a runway beside the stage. Faces were chalk-white in the reflected glare. There was the red glow of a cigarette tip here and there. Four tall black men moved in the light, carrying a white mummy case on their shoulders. They came slowly, in rhythm, down the runway. They wore white Egyptian headdresses and loincloths of white leather and white sandals laced to the knee. The black smoothness of their limbs was like black marble in the moonlight.
They reached the middle of the dance floor and slowly upended the mummy case until the cover tipped forward and fell and was caught. Then slowly, very slowly, a swathed white figure tipped forward and fell—slowly, like the last leaf from a dead tree. It tipped in the air, seemed to hover, then plunged towards the floor under a shattering roll of drums.
The light went off, went on. The swathed figure was upright on the floor, spinning, and one of the blacks was spinning the opposite way, winding the white shroud around his body. Then the shroud fell away and a girl was all tinsel and smooth white limbs under the hard light and her body shot through the air glittering and was caught and passed around swiftly among the four black men, like a baseball handled by a fast infield.
Then the music changed to a waltz and she danced among the black men slowly and gracefully, as though among four ebony pillars, very close to them but never touching them.
The act ended. The applause rose and fel
l in thick waves. The light went out and it was dark again, and then all the lights went up and the girl and the four black men were gone.
“Keeno,” Tony Acosta breathed. “Oh, keeno. That was Miss Adrian, wasn’t it?”
Carmady said slowly: “A little daring.” He lit another cigarette, looked around. “There’s another black and white number, Tony. The Duke himself, in person.”
Duke Targo stood applauding violently at the entrance to one of the radiating booth aisles. There was a loose grin on his face. He looked as if he might have had a few drinks.
An arm came down over Carmady’s shoulder. A hand planted itself in the ash tray at his elbow. He smelled Scotch in heavy gusts. He turned his head slowly, looked up at the liquor-shiny face of Shenvair, Duke Targo’s drunken bodyguard.
“Smokes and a white gal,” Shenvair said thickly. “Lousy. Crummy. Godawful crummy.”
Carmady smiled slowly, moved his chair a little. Tony Acosta stared at Shenvair round-eyed, his little mouth a thin line.
“Blackface, Mister Shenvair. Not real smokes. I liked it.”
“And who the hell cares what you like?” Shenvair wanted to know.
Carmady smiled delicately, laid his cigarette down on the edge of a plate. He turned his chair a little more.
“Still think I want your job, Shenvair?”
“Yeah. I owe you a smack in the puss too.” He took his hand out of the ash tray, wiped it off on the tablecloth. He doubled it into a fist. “Like it now?”
A waiter caught him by the arm, spun him around.
“You lost your table, sir? This way.”
Shenvair patted the waiter on the shoulder, tried to put an arm around his neck. “Swell, let’s go nibble a drink. I don’t like these people.”
They went away, disappeared among the tables.
Carmady said: “To hell with this place, Tony,” and stared moodily towards the band stage. Then his eyes became intent.
A girl with corn-blond hair, in a white wrap with a white fur collar, appeared at the edge of the shell, went behind it, reappeared nearer. She came along the edge of the booths to the place where Targo had been standing. She slipped in between the booths there, disappeared.
Carmady said: “To hell with this place. Let’s go Tony,” in a low angry voice. Then very softly, in a tensed tone: “No—wait a minute. I see another guy I don’t like.”
The man was on the far side of the dance floor, which was empty at the moment. He was following its curve around, past the tables that fringed it. He looked a little different without his hat. But he had the same flat white expressionless face, the same close-set eyes. He was youngish, not more than thirty, but already having trouble with his bald spot. The slight bulge of a gun under his left arm was barely noticeable. He was the man who had run away from Jean Adrian’s apartment in the Carondelet.
He reached the aisle into which Targo had gone, into which a moment before Jean Adrian had gone. He went into it.
Carmady said sharply: “Wait here, Tony.” He kicked his chair back and stood up.
Somebody rabbit-punched him from behind. He swiveled, close to Shenvair’s grinning sweaty face.
“Back again, pal,” the curly-haired man chortled, and hit him on the jaw.
It was a short jab, well placed for a drunk. It caught Carmady off balance, staggered him. Tony Acosta came to his feet snarling, catlike. Carmady was still rocking when Shenvair let go with the other fist. That was too slow, too wide. Carmady slid inside it, uppercut the curly-haired man’s nose savagely, got a handful of blood before he could get his hand away. He put most of it back on Shenvair’s face.
Shenvair wobbled, staggered back a step and sat down on the floor, hard. He clapped a hand to his nose.
“Keep an eye on this bird, Tony,” Carmady said swiftly.
Shenvair took hold of the nearest tablecloth and yanked it. It came off the table. Silver and glasses and china followed it to the floor. A man swore and a woman squealed. A waiter ran towards them with a livid, furious face.
Carmady almost didn’t hear the two shots.
They were small and flat, close together, a small-caliber gun. The rushing waiter stopped dead, and a deeply etched white line appeared around his mouth as instantly as though the lash of a whip had cut it there.
A dark woman with a sharp nose opened her mouth to yell and no sound came from her. There was the instant when nobody makes a sound, when it almost seems as if there will never again be any sound—after the sound of a gun. Then Carmady was running.
He bumped into people who stood up and craned their necks. He reached the entrance to the aisle into which the white-faced man had gone. The booths had high walls and swing doors not so high. Heads stuck out over the doors, but no one was in the aisle yet. Carmady charged up a shallow carpeted slope, at the far end of which booth doors stood wide open.
Legs in dark cloth showed past the doors, slack on the floor, the knees sagged. The toes of black shoes were pointed into the booth.
Carmady shook an arm off, reached the place.
The man lay across the end of a table, his stomach and one side of his face on the white cloth, his left hand dropped between the table and the padded seat. His right hand on top of the table didn’t quite hold a big black gun, a .45 with a cut barrel. The bald spot on his head glistened under the light, and the oily metal of the gun glistened beside it.
Blood leaked from under his chest, vivid scarlet on the white cloth, seeping into it as into blotting paper.
Duke Targo was standing up, deep in the booth. His left arm in the white serge coat was braced on the end of the table. Jean Adrian was sitting down at his side. Targo looked at Carmady blankly, as if he had never seen him before. He pushed his big right hand forward.
A small white-handled automatic lay on his palm.
“I shot him,” Targo said, He pulled a gun on us and I shot him.”
Jean Adrian was scrubbing her hands together on a scrap of handkerchief. Her face was strained, cold, not scared. Her eyes were dark.
“I shot him,” Targo said. He threw the small gun down on the cloth. It bounced, almost hit the fallen man’s head. “Let’s—let’s get out of here.”
Carmady put a hand against the side of the sprawled man’s neck, held it there a second or two, took it away.
“He’s dead,” he said. “When a citizen drops a redhot—that’s news.”
Jean Adrian was staring at him stiff-eyed. He flashed a smile at her, put a hand against Targo’s chest, pushed him back.
“Sit down, Targo. You’re not going any place.”
Targo said: “Well—okey. I shot him, see.”
“That’s all right,” Carmady said. “Just relax.”
People were close behind him now, crowding him. He leaned back against the press of bodies and kept on smiling at the girl’s white face.
5
Benny Cyrano was shaped like two eggs, a little one that was his head on top of a big one that was his body. His small dapper legs and feet in patent-leather shoes were pushed into the kneehole of a dark sheenless desk. He held a corner of a handkerchief tightly between his teeth and pulled against it with his left hand and held his right hand out pudgily in front of him, pushing against the air. He was saying in a voice muffled by the handkerchief: “Now wait a minute, boys. Now wait a minute.”
There was a striped built-in sofa in one corner of the office, and Duke Targo sat in the middle of it, between two Headquarters dicks. He had a dark bruise over one cheekbone, his thick blond hair was tousled and his black satin shirt looked as if somebody had tried to swing him by it.
One of the dicks, the gray-haired one, had a split lip. The young one with hair as blond as Targo’s had a black eye. They both looked mad, but the blond one looked madder.
Carmady straddled a chair against the wall and looked sleepily at Jean Adrian, near him in a leather rocker. She was twisting a handkerchief in her hands, rubbing her palms with it. She had been doing this for a long time
, as if she had forgotten she was doing it. Her small firm mouth was angry.
Gus Neishacker leaned against the closed door smoking. “Now wait a minute, boys,” Cyrano said. “If you didn’t get tough with him, he wouldn’t fight back. He’s a good boy—the best I ever had. Give him a break.”
Blood dribbled from one corner of Targo’s mouth, in a fine thread down to his jutting chin. It gathered there and glistened. His face was empty, expressionless.
Carmady said coldly: “You wouldn’t want the boys to stop playing blackjack pinochle, would you, Benny?”
The blond dick snarled: “You still got that private-dick license, Carmady?”
“It’s lying around somewhere, I guess,” Carmady said. “Maybe we could take it away from you,” the blond dick snarled.
“Maybe you could do a fan dance, copper. You might be all kinds of a smart guy for all I’d know.”
The blond dick started to get up. The older one said: “Leave him be. Give him six feet. If he steps over that, we’ll take the screws out of him.”
Carmady and Gus Neishacker grinned at each other. Cyrano made helpless gestures in the air. The girl looked at Carmady under her lashes. Targo opened his mouth and spat blood straight before him on the blue carpet.
Something pushed against the door and Neishacker stepped to one side, opened it a crack, then opened it wide. McChesney came in.
McChesney was a lieutenant of detectives, tall, sandy-haired, fortyish, with pale eyes and a narrow suspicious face. He shut the door and turned the key in it, went slowly over and stood in front of Targo.
“Plenty dead,” he said. “One under the heart, one in it. Nice snap shooting. In any league.”
“When you’ve got to deliver you’ve got to deliver,” Targo said dully.
“Make him?” the gray-haired dick asked his partner, moving away along the sofa.
McChesney nodded. “Torchy Plant. A gun for hire. I haven’t seen him round for all of two years. Tough as an in-growing toenail with his right load. A bindle punk.”