THE NAKED AND THE DEADLY

ONE

The wind was right and I could smell the polluted waters of Brooklyn’s Jamaica Bay a few blocks to the east. It was a warm night in August, and I was in the Canarsie section getting ready to meet a blackmailer. I puffed on my pipe, turned around, looked at the bar again. A neon sign—Johnny’s. A picture of six would-be Miss Rheingolds, chastely flat-chested and smiling buoyantly. I opened the door and went inside.

The bar had a small-town feel, like the neighborhood. It was a place for men who wanted to get away from their wives and kids and installment-plan television sets long enough for a couple of beers. There were two booths in the back, both empty. Seven or eight men sat at the bar and drank beer. They all wore gabardine slacks and open-necked sports shirts. Two others were playing a shuffle-bowler near the booths. I walked to the furthest booth and sat down.

A Budweiser clock rotated hypnotically over the bar. Nine-thirty. My blackmailer was late.

The bartender came over. It looked like the wrong bar for cognac but that’s all I drink. I asked for Courvoisier.

“You want the Three-Star or the VSOP?”

Life is filled with surprises. I asked for the good stuff and he went away. When he came back, he brought the cognac in a little snifter. I paid for the drink and sipped it.

At 9:55 my glass was emptier than the Rheingold girls’ bras and my man was still missing. I was ready to take the subway home and tell Rhona Blake to save her money. The bartender came over, his eyes hopeful, and I started to shake my head when the door opened and a little man entered.

“Give me a refill,” I said.

The little man had cagy eyes and he used them on the whole room before he got around to me.

He came up the aisle, stopped at my booth, sat down across from me. “You gotta be Ed London,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“You got the dough, London?”

I patted the left side of my jacket and felt my .38 snug in a shoulder rig. I patted the right side and touched the roll of bills Rhona Blake had given me. I nodded.

“Then we’re in business, London. This is a place to meet and not a place to do business. Too many distractions.”

He waved one hand at the bowling machine. I told him I had a drink on the way and he was willing to humor me. The bartender brought the drink. I paid for it. The little man didn’t want anything and the bartender went back to tend the bar.

I studied the little man over the brim of my glass. He was a few years too old for the Ivy League shirt and tie. He had a low forehead to fit Lombrosi’s theories of criminal physiognomy and a pair of baby-blue eyes that didn’t fit at all. His nose was strong and his chin was weak and a five o’clock shadow obscured part of his sallow complexion.

“The broad could of come herself,” he said.

“She didn’t want to.”

“But she could of. She didn’t need a private cop. Unless she’s figuring on holding out the dough.”

I didn’t answer him. I’d have liked to play it that way, but Rhona Blake wouldn’t go for it. You can pay a blackmailer or you can push him around, and if you pay him once you pay him forever. And the little man looked easy to push around. But I was just a hired hand.

“You almost done, London?”

I finished my drink and got up. I walked to the door and the little man followed me like a faithful dog.

“Your car here, London?”

“I took the subway.”

“So we use mine. C’mon.”

His car was parked at the curb, a dark blue Mercury two or three years old. We got in, and he drove up Remsen Avenue through the Canarsie flatlands. A few years back the area had been all swamps and marshes until the developers got busy. They put up row on row of semi-detached brick-front houses.

There was still plenty of marshland left. Canarsie by any other name was still Canarsie. And it didn’t smell like a rose.

“This is private enough,” I said. “Let’s make the trade.”

“The stuff ain’t with me. It’s stashed.”

“Is that where we’re going?”

“That’s the general idea.”

He took a corner, drove a few blocks, made another turn. I looked over my shoulder. There was a Plymouth behind us…It had been there before.

“Your friends are here,” I said. “In case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Huh?”

“Your protection. Your insurance.”

He was looking in the rear-view mirror now and he didn’t like what he saw. He swore under his breath and his hands tightened on the steering wheel. He leaned on the accelerator and the big car growled.

He said: “How long?”

“Since we left Remsen.”

He grunted something obscene and took a corner on less wheels than came with the car. The Plym picked up speed and cornered like a wolverine. A good driver might have beaten them—the Merc had enough under the hood to leave the Plymouth at the post. But the little man was a lousy driver.

We took two more corners for no reason at all and they stayed right with us. We ran a red light at Flatlands Avenue and so did they. The little man was sweating now. His forehead was damp and his hands were slippery on the wheel. They chased us for two more blocks and I dug the .38 out and let my finger curl around the trigger. I wasn’t sure what kind of party we were going to, but I wanted the right costume.

The Plymouth came alongside and I pointed the gun at it. There were three of them, two in front and one in back. I had a clear shot but I held it back—for all I knew they were police. They’ve got a strict law for private detectives in New York State: shoot a cop and you lose your license.

But he wasn’t a cop. Cops don’t tote submachine guns, and that’s what the boy by the window was holding. The Plym cut us off and the little man hit the brakes, and then the submachine gun cut loose and started spraying lead at us.

The first burst took care of the little man. A row of bullets plowed into his chest and he slumped over the wheel like the corpse he was.

And that saved my life.

Because when he died his foot slid off the brakes and came down on the accelerator, and we went into the Plymouth like Grant into Vicksburg. The tommy-gun stopped chattering and I hit the door hard and landed on my feet. I didn’t make like a hero. I ran like a rabbit.

The field had tall swamp-grass and broken beer bottles. I zigged and zagged, and I was maybe twenty yards in before the tommy-gun took up where it had left off. I heard slugs whine over my shoulder and took a dive any tank fighter would have been proud of, landing on my face in a clump of tall grass. I turned around so that I could see what was happening and crawled backwards so that it wouldn’t be happening to me.

The tommy-gun threw another spasmodic burst at me, way off this time. I got the .38 steadied and poked a shot at one of the three silhouettes by the roadside. It went wide. They answered with another brace of shots that didn’t come any closer.

Some more of the same. Then the tommy-gun was silent, and I raised my head enough to see what was happening. The hoods were off the road and in their car, and their car was leaving.

So was the blackmailer’s Mercury. Evidently the collision hadn’t damaged it enough to ground it, because it was following the Plymouth down the road and leaving me alone.

I waited until I was sure they were gone. Then I waited until I was sure they wouldn’t be back. I got up slowly and dragged myself back toward the road. The .38 stayed in my hand. It gave me a feeling of security.

A car came down the road toward me and I hit the dirt again, gun in hand. But it wasn’t the Mercury or the Plymouth, just a black beetle of a Volkswagen that didn’t even slow down. I got up feeling foolish.

There were skid marks on the pavement, a little broken glass as an added attraction. There was no dead little man, not on the street and not in the field. There was no blood. Nothing but glass and skid marks, and Brooklyn is full of both. Nothing but a very tired private cop with a very useless gun in his hand, standing in the road and wishing he had something to do. Wishing he was home on East 83rd Street in Manhattan with a glass of Courvoisier in one hand and something by Mozart on the record player.

I stuck the gun back where it belonged. I found a pipe in one pocket and a pouch of tobacco in the other. I filled the pipe, got it going, headed over toward Flatlands Avenue.

The third cab I stopped felt like making a run to Manhattan. I got into the backseat and pulled the door shut. The cabby threw the flag down and the meter began ticking up expenses to be charged to the account of a girl named Rhona Blake.

I sat back and thought about her.

TWO

I saw her for the first time that afternoon. It was too hot to do much but sit in an air-conditioned apartment. I’d spent the morning waking up and writing checks to creditors, and in another hour it would be four o’clock and I could add brandy to my coffee without feeling guilty about it. For the time being I was feeling guilty.

The door must have been open downstairs because she rang my bell without hitting the downstairs buzzer first. I opened the door and she came inside.

“You’re Edward London,” she said. “Aren’t you?”

I admitted it. I would have admitted to being Judge Crater or Ambrose Bierce or Martin Bormann. She had that kind of effect.

“May I sit down, Mr. London?”

I pointed at the couch. She went over and sat on it, crossing one leg very neatly over the other. I sat down across from her in my leather chair and finished my coffee.

She was beautiful. Her hair was ash blond, wrapped up tight in a French roll, and if there were any dark roots they were well hidden. She was tall, close to my own height, and built along Hollywood lines. Her mouth was a dark ruby wound and her eyes were a jealous green. She was wearing a charcoal business suit but the thrust of her breasts made you wonder what business it was.

Thirty, maybe. Or twenty-five. The really beautiful ones are ageless. I watched her open a black calf purse, find a cigarette, light it with a silver lighter. She smiled at me through smoke.

“I hate to barge in on you like this,” she said. “But this was the only listing I could find for you. I thought it was your office.”

“I work here,” I said. “It’s a good-sized apartment. And I live alone, so there are no distractions.”

“You’re not married?”

“No.”

She nodded thoughtfully, filing the information away somewhere in that beautiful head. “I don’t know where to start,” she said suddenly. “My name is Rhona Blake. And I want to hire you.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m being blackmailed.”

“When did it start?”

“Yesterday. With a letter and a telephone call. The letter came in the morning mail and told me I would have to pay five thousand dollars for…certain things.”

“Do you have the letter?”

“I threw it away.”

I frowned. “You shouldn’t have.”

“I thought it was a joke. Or maybe I was just mad, and I tore up the note. A few hours later I got a phone call. It was the same thing again. A man told me to meet him in a bar in Brooklyn with the money.”

I asked her what she wanted me to do.

“Meet him and pay him. Then bring the goods to me. That’s all.”

I told her she was crazy. “Blackmailers operate on the installment plan,” I said. “If you pay him once you’ll have to pay him again. He’ll bleed you white.”

“I can’t help it.”

“You can’t go to the cops?”

“No,” she said quietly. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I can’t. Let’s leave it at that, Mr. London.”

So we left it at that. “Then call his bluff,” I said. “Tell him to go to hell for himself. Chances are he’ll throw the stuff away if he can’t get anything out of it.”

“No. He’ll…sell it elsewhere.”

“What’s it all about, Miss Blake?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Look—”

Her eyes were hard now. “You look,” she said. “You don’t have to know. To be perfectly frank, it’s none of your business. I want you to do an errand for me. That’s all. I want you to meet this man and pay him five thousand dollars and bring the goods to me. That’s simple enough isn’t it?”

“It’s too simple.”

“He won’t go on blackmailing me. He’ll give the material to you. I’m sure of it.”

“Then maybe I’ll do the blackmailing. Ever think of that?”

“I’ve heard about you.” She laughed. “I don’t think I have to worry.”

I knocked the dottle out of my pipe and set it down in the ashtray. I started to tell her I was a private cop, not a messenger service. But the words didn’t come out. She was getting on my nerves, being cool and competent and stepping all over my masculine pride, and that was a pretty silly reason to turn down a fee.

And a pretty silly reason to send Rhona Blake out of my life.

I said, “All right.”

“You’ll take the case?”

“Uh-huh. But I have to know more.”

“Like what?”

“You could start with the identity of the blackmailer. From there you could tell me what he’s got on you, and what he’s going to do with it if you can’t pay, and why you’re over a barrel. Then you can tell me a few things about yourself. Like who you are, for a starter.”

“I’m sorry. I want to keep this matter a secret, Mr. London.”

“Even from me?”

“From everyone.”

I went over to my desk, picked up a pencil and pad. I wrote Rhona Blake on the pad and looked up.

“Address,” I said.

“I can’t tell you.”

“Phone number, then.”

She shook her pretty head. “I can’t tell you that either, Mr. London.”

“Mr. London. Look,” I said, “if we’re going to be such close friends you really ought to call me Ed.”

I didn’t get a smile. I said: “How in hell am I going to get in touch with you?”

“You aren’t, Ed. I’ll call you.”

She opened her purse again and took out an envelope filled with new money.

“Five thousand dollars,” she said.

“To waste on a blackmailer?”

“To invest in my peace of mind. And how much do you want, Ed?”

“I get a hundred a day plus expenses. And if all I know is your name, I’m afraid your credit rating isn’t too good. I’ll take two hundred for a retainer.”

She gave it to me in two bills. Brand new ones. I started to write out a receipt for $5,200 but her hand touched mine and stopped me. Her fingers were cool and soft. I looked up into the crisp green of her eyes.

“I don’t need a receipt.”

“Why not?”

“Because I trust you, Ed.”

There were at least a dozen answers to that one. They all chased their tails in my brain, and I looked at Rhona and didn’t say a word. Her hair looked as though Rumpelstiltskin had spun it out of gold. She stepped closer to me and her perfume came on like gangbusters.

“Ed—”

It was like this raw wet wind that comes just before the rain. Her hand held mine, and her eyes turned soft, and her body flowed up against mine. She came into my arms and our mouths met and that fine body of hers was taut against me and the world did a somersault.

My bed wasn’t made. She didn’t seem to mind. We went into the bedroom and I kicked the door shut. She kissed me, lips warm with the promise of hurried lust. She stepped back neatly and her hands made the charcoal suit melt from her body. I helped her with her bra and her breasts leaped into my hands. She gave a little shiver of animal joy and small sounds of passion tore from her throat.

It was a moment torn from Time. And we were on the bed, and her head was tossed back and her eyes were tightly shut, and her big beautiful body was a Stradivarius and I was Fritz Kreisler and Menuhin and Oistrakh and everybody else, stroking the world’s sweetest music out of her.

“Oh, Ed. Oh, yes!”

She was a life-size doll who cried real tears. The room rocked. Someone took the earth out from under us and we took a Cook’s tour through a brand-new world. At the end there was a monumental crescendo, and the finale came with a shake and a shudder and a sob.

 

HER VOICE CAME THROUGH A FILTER. “I’ll call you later, Ed. I’ve got to go now. The blackmailer said he would call me late this afternoon and make the arrangements for the meeting. I’ll tell him you’ll be coming as my agent, then call you and give you the details. You can meet him tonight, can’t you?”

I grunted something. She leaned over the bed and her lips brushed my face. I didn’t move. She left, and I could hear her feet on the stairs. A door closed. I still didn’t move.

Later, I got up and showered. I washed the sweet taste of her body from my skin and told myself it didn’t mean a damned thing. She was playing Lady of Mystery, and in that department she could give the Mona Lisa cards and spades and chuck in Little Casino. The interlude in bed was no love affair, no meeting of soul mates. It was a way to seal a bargain, a quick little roll in the hay to ensure my cooperation, an added bonus tacked onto the 200-buck retainer.

I could tell myself this. It was hard to believe it.

So I showered and got dressed and went into the living room to build myself a drink. Later she would call me. Then I would run out to Brooklyn to do the job for her.

I poured more cognac. There was a girl I was supposed to meet that night, a dark-eyed brunette named Sharon Ross. A publisher’s Gal Friday, a warm and clever thing. I picked up the phone and tried to find the right way to explain why I couldn’t take her to the theater that night.

“You’ve got a nerve,” she told me. “We made that date two weeks ago. What’s the matter, Ed?”

“Business,” I said. “How’s tomorrow night?”

“It’s out.” She clicked the receiver in my ear.

So I drank the drink and crossed another Sweet Young Thing off my mental list of Things to Be Physical With. I was already giving up a lot for Rhona Blake.

She called around six. “This is Rhona,” she said. “I talked to…to the man. He wanted me to come personally but agreed to meet with you.”

“Sweet of him.”

“Don’t growl. You’re supposed to meet him at nine-thirty at a place called Johnny’s. It’s out in Canarsie on Remsen Avenue near Avenue M. Give him the money and get the goods, Ed.”

“Maybe I could get the goods without giving him the money.”

“No. The money doesn’t matter. Don’t do anything silly, like getting rough with him. Just…just follow orders.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Ed—”

“What?”

A long pause. “Nothing,” she said, finally. “I’ll…I’ll call you tonight, Ed.”

THREE

My cabby came off the Manhattan Bridge at Canal Street, then found the East Side Drive and headed uptown. It was close to eleven and the traffic was thin. We made good time. The meter was a few ticks past $5 when he pulled up in front of my brownstone. I gave him a five and two singles and waved him away.

It was still too damned hot out. I went inside, took the stairs two at a time, unlocked my door, and pulled it shut after me. I poured a stiff drink and drank it.

It was getting cute now. My client had given me five grand, and I still had that. But the little blackmailer was dead and gone, and the stuff he had on her was nowhere to be found. It was time for me to call my client, of course. Time to fill her in on all the novel developments. But I couldn’t get in touch with her. She was willing to sleep with me but she wouldn’t let me know where she lived.

A few minutes after twelve, the phone rang.

“Rhona, Ed. Everything go all right?”

“No,” I said.

“What happened?”

I gave it to her in capsule form, telling her how I met the little man, how they waylaid us, how they killed him and tried to kill me. She let me talk without an interruption, and when I stopped she was silent for almost a minute.

Then: “What now, Ed?”

“I don’t know, Rhona. I’ve got five thousand bucks you can have back. I guess that’s about all.”

“But I’m in trouble, Ed.”

“What kind of trouble?”

A pause. “I can’t tell you over the phone.”

“Then come over here.”

“I can’t, Ed. I have to stay where I am.”

“Then I’ll come over there.”

“No.”

I was getting sick of the whole routine. “Then give me a post office box and I’ll mail you five grand, Rhona. And we can forget the whole thing. Okay?”

It wasn’t okay. She got nervous and stuttered awhile, then told me she would call me in the morning. I told her I was sick of phone calls.

“Then meet me,” she said.

“Where?”

She thought it over. “Do you know a place called Mandrake’s?”

“In the Village? I know it.”

“I’ll meet you there at two in the afternoon.”

“Are they open then?”

“They’re open. Will you meet me?”

I thought about that red mouth, those green eyes. I remembered the poetry of her body. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll meet you.”

Hanging up, I hauled the .38 out of its resting place and broke it open. I wanted a full gun handy. It looked as though it was going to be that kind of a deal.

It was too early for sleep. I thought about the girl I’d broken my date with: dark hair, soft curves, a sulky mouth. Right now we’d have been out of the theater. We’d be sitting in a cozy club somewhere on the East Side, listening to atonal jazz and drinking a little too much. And then homeward, for a nightcap and maybe a cup of kindness. But a date with a blackmailer had made me break my date with Sharon Ross. And now she was mad at me.

For the hell of it, I called her. The phone rang and rang and rang and nobody answered it.

I went into the kitchen and made instant coffee and thought about Canarsie. A tommy-gun—that was something to mull over. Only prison guards have them. They’ve been illegal in the States since the Dillinger era, and a hood who wants one has to shell out two or three grand for the thing. And needs good connections.

It sounded pretty complex for an ordinary blackmail dodge, and made me wonder what kind of league Rhona Blake was playing in. Triple-A, anyway. They don’t use choppers in the bush leagues.

It was late by the time I got into bed. I wedged a stack of records on the hi-fi and crawled under the covers. They played and I thought about things, and I fell asleep before the stack was finished.

 

THE MORNING WAS RAW AND RAGGED. I’d gone to sleep without flipping on the air-conditioner, and when I woke up the blankets were sticking to my skin. I pried them loose and took a long shower.

I was through with breakfast by 10:30. I wasn’t supposed to meet Rhona until two, but my apartment was beginning to feel like a jail cell. I looked through the bookcases for something to read and didn’t come up with anything. I plucked the Times off my doormat, glanced through it, and tossed it into the wastebasket.

I left the apartment wearing slacks, a sport jacket, and a gun. I locked my door and headed down the stairs, and was on my way through the vestibule just as a man was leaning on my bell. I saw his index finger pressing a button next to a strip of plexiglas with E. London inscribed thereon. He didn’t look like anyone I wanted to meet, but it was a hot day and I had a few hours to kill. I tapped him on the shoulder.

“You won’t get an answer,” I said.

“No?”

“No. I’m E. London, and there was nobody home when I left.”

He didn’t smile. “Carr,” he said. “Phillip Carr, attorney at law.” He handed me a card. “I want to talk to you, London.”

I didn’t really want to talk to him. We went upstairs anyway, and I unlocked my door again and led him inside. We sat down in the living room. He offered me a cigar and I shook my head. He made a hole in the end with an elaborate cigar cutter, wedged it in his mouth, lit it, blew foul smoke all over my apartment. I hoped it wouldn’t clog the air-conditioner.

“I’ll come to the point,” he said.

“Fine.”

“I’m here representing a client,” Carr said, “who wants to remain nameless. He’s a wealthy man, a prominent man.”

“Go on.”

“His daughter’s missing. He wants her located.”

“That’s interesting,” I told him. “The Missing Persons Bureau is at Headquarters, on Centre Street. They have a lot of personnel and they don’t charge anything. You go down there, make out a report, and they’ll find your man’s daughter a damn sight faster than I will.”

He chewed his cigar thoughtfully. “This isn’t a police matter,” he said.

“No?”

“No. We…my client needs special talents. He’s prepared to pay ten thousand dollars as a reward for his daughter’s return.”

“Ten grand?”

“That’s right.”

“I don’t work that way,” I said. “I’m not a bounty hunter, Carr. I don’t chase rewards any more than a decent lawyer chases ambulances to nail negligence cases. I get a hundred a day plus expenses. The price is the same whether I find your missing person or not.”

“That’s not how my client wants it.”

“Then your client can find himself another boy.”

“You’re not a patient man,” Phillip Carr said.

“Maybe not.”

“You should be. Can’t you use ten grand, London?”

“Anybody can.”

“Then be patient. Let me show you a picture of my client’s errant daughter; then you can decide whether or not you want to work for a reward. For ten grand, I’d be willing to chase an ambulance, London.”

It was early in the day and it was hot as hell and my head wasn’t working too well. I let him dig a thin wallet from his hip pocket. He pulled a picture from it and passed it to me.

Well, you guessed it. And I should have, but it was that kind of a day. The daughter-reward bit was as nutty as a male Hershey bar and the picture told me everything I had to know. Just a head-and-shoulder shot, the kind that made you want to see what the body looked like. A beautiful girl. A familiar face.

Rhona Blake, of course.

Carr was looking at me, a supercilious smile on his lips. I wanted to turn it inside out. But I could be as cute as he. I handed the picture back to him and waited.

“A familiar face?”

“No.”

“Really?”

I stepped closer to him. “I’ve never seen the girl,” I lied. “And the reward couldn’t interest me less. I think you ought to go home, Carr.”

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 killed 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.”

I whistled. The rigged games are usually pretty small—when you get in the high brackets, nobody trusts anybody and the games are generally honest. It’s easier to rake cheap suckers over the coals than to pick the big-money boys.

“Who played in the game?”

“Two or three of the sharps. And Dad. And some oil and cattlemen.”

It figured. Texans with too much money and too much faith.

“Even the oilmen didn’t do badly,” she said. “Dad took the money straight from the crooks. He had the time of his life. And then…then they must have figured out what happened. For a few weeks everything was fine. Then we got a note in the mail. It wasn’t signed. It said Jack Blake better give back the twenty grand he won or he would get what was coming to him. He just laughed it off, Ed. He said he was surprised they had figured it out but he wasn’t going to let it worry him.”

“And then they killed him?”

“Yes.” She finished her drink. “I was over at a friend’s house. I got home and found him lying on the living-room floor. There was blood all over. I went to him and touched him and…and he was still warm—”

I picked up her hand and held on to it. Her skin was white. She took a quick breath and squeezed my hand. “I’m all right, Ed.”

“Sure.”

We sat there. It was pushing 4:30 and the bar was starting to draw lushes. A tough little dyke in tight slacks strode over to the jukebox and played something noisy. I looked at Rhona again.

“How do you fit in?” I asked.

“They want to kill me.”

“Why?”

“They want their money back.”

I shook my head. “I won’t buy it. You’re in New York, not Cleveland. You were busy paying off a blackmailer who caught a load of lead in Canarsie. I don’t buy it at all, Rhona. They wouldn’t chase you that hard just because your father took them with a few fancy cuts and shuffles. They might run him down and kill him, but they wouldn’t bother you.”

“It’s true, Ed.”

“It is like hell. Where does the blackmailer fit?”

“He was blackmailing me. I told you.”

“How? Why? With what?”

She thought about it. The juke was still too noisy and the bar was filling up. I was beginning to dislike the place.

She said: “All right.”

I waited.

“I’m Jack Blake’s daughter,” she said. “I’m not a weeper and I don’t throw in the towel when somebody hits me. I’m pretty tough, Ed.”

I could believe it. She looked the part. Her green eyes were warm enough to throw sparks now.

“I came to New York to get them,” she said. “They killed my father, Ed. Those rotten bastards killed him. They beat him and he died, and I’m not the kind of girl who can sit on her behind in Cleveland and write it off to profit and loss. I flew to New York to get something good on Abe Zucker, something good enough to put him on death row at Sing Sing. That’s why they want me out of the way, Ed. Because they know I won’t give up unless they kill me.”

“And the blackmailer?” I asked. “How did he fit in?”

“Klugsman,” she corrected. “Milton Klugsman. He got in touch with me, told me he could prove that Zucker had my dad killed. I…I guess I let you think he was blackmailing me just to make things simpler. He called me and told me he had evidence to sell. The price was five grand.”

“He might have been conning you, Rhona.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Don’t you think I thought of that? He could have been looking for some easy money or he could have been setting me up for Zucker. That’s why I wouldn’t meet him myself, why I hired you. I decided it was worth risking five grand, Ed. Five grand was just an ante in a game this size—”

She stopped, shrugged. “I guess Klugsman was telling the truth. Whatever he had, I won’t get it now. He’s dead. They killed him, and now they want to kill me. If I had any sense I’d get out of town until they forgot all about me.”

“Why don’t you?”

“Because I’m Jack Blake’s daughter. Because I’m a stubborn girl. I always have been. Well, where do we go from here, Ed?”

I put a dollar on the table for the barmaid. “For a starter,” I said, “we get the hell out of here.”

FIVE

We took my Chevy. I drove uptown on Eighth Avenue as far as Twentieth, then cut east. There was a parking spot in front of a swanky five-story brick building on Gramercy Park. I coaxed the Chevy into it, with a Caddy in front of us and a Lincoln behind. The Chevy felt outclassed. We got out of the car, walked past a stiff doorman and into a self-service elevator.

“I didn’t want a hotel room,” she said as we entered her place. “I thought it would be too easy for them to find me. This apartment was listed in the Times. It’s a sublet, all furnished and ready. It costs a lot of money but it’s worth it.”

“What name did you rent it under?”

“I don’t remember,” she said. “Not mine.”

She said there was scotch if I wanted a drink. I didn’t. I wandered around the living room, a brazenly modern room. Rhona sat down on an orange couch and crossed her legs.

“What do we do next, Ed?”

“Go back to Cleveland.”

“And forget about it?”

“Uh-huh.”

She looked away. I studied her legs, then let my eyes move slowly up her body. I remembered last afternoon, in my apartment, in my bedroom. I took a quick breath, then crammed some tobacco into a pipe and scratched a match on a box.

“He was my father, Ed.”

“I know.”

“I can’t quit.”

“Hell,” I said, “you absolutely can’t do anything else. You know how Zucker took care of your father? Zucker didn’t go there himself, Rhona. He picked up a telephone—or he hired somebody to pick up a phone. And then a bunch of hired muscle from Detroit or Chicago or Vegas got on a plane to Cleveland and beat your father to death and flew back on the next plane. You couldn’t pin something like that to Zucker in a hundred years. All you can do is take a gun and shoot a hole in his head.”

“That’s not such a bad idea, is it?”

I didn’t answer her.

“No,” she said finally. “You’re wrong, Ed. Why is he scared of me? Why can’t he just ignore me? He had this lawyer offer you ten thousand dollars? If he’s in the clear, why am I worth that kind of money to him?”

“You must have him scared.”

She swung a small fist into the palm of her other hand. A startling gesture from a girl, especially a feminine one like her. “You are goddamned right. I’ve got him scared,” she said. “I’ve got the son of a bitch turning green. And there has to be evidence, Ed. Klugsman had evidence.”

“Unless he was conning you.”

“Then why did they kill him?”

She was right. Abe Zucker was in enough trouble to work up a sweat, enough to make him spray Canarsie with machine-gun slugs and paper Manhattan with ten-grand rewards. It didn’t quite mesh yet. Something was wrong somewhere, something didn’t ring true. But for the time being she was right and I had to ride with her.

I drew on my pipe. “What do you know about Klugsman?”

“Nothing but his name. And that he’s dead.”

“You never met him?”

“No.”

“You know where he lives?”

She shook her head. “He called me on the phone, Ed. He said his name was Milton Klugsman and he told me he had the information I needed. He said he could prove who killed my father. He didn’t give his address or his phone number or anything.”

“The phone. Is it in your name?”

“No, it’s in the name of the people I’m subletting from.”

“Then how did he reach you?”

“I have no idea.”

We kept running into walls and up blind alleys. I wondered if she was lying to me. So far she’d fed me enough nonsense to earn her a Pathological Liar Merit Badge, but the latest version had a plausible ring to it.

“Somebody knew you were in town. Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“Phillip Carr showed me a picture of you. Any idea where he got it?”

“None.”

“It was a head-and-shoulder shot, Rhona. You had your hair swept back and you were smiling, but not too broadly.”

Her face clouded. “That…sounds like a picture Dad carried in his wallet. They could have stolen it when they killed him.” She bit her lip. “But that doesn’t make sense, does it?”

It didn’t. I poked at my memory, brushed the snapshot away, and brought a different picture into focus. A face I’d seen a day ago in Canarsie. I described Klugsman as well as I could, told her how tall he was and what kind of a face he had and what clothes he was wearing. The description rang no bells for her.

I stood up, leaned over to knock the dottle from my pipe, and walked over to her. “We have to start with Klugsman,” I said. “Klugsman may have had some evidence. Without it we’re nowhere. I can try getting a line on him. Maybe I can find out who he was, where he lived, and who his friends were. If he had anything around the house, it’s probably gone by now. But maybe he’s got a friend or a relative who knows something. It’s worth a try.”

“You’re going now?”

She seemed sad about it. She was standing just a few feet from me, her hands at her sides, her shoulders back, her breasts in sharp relief against the front of her dress. Her mouth was pouting a little and her eyes were unhappy. I looked at her and didn’t want to go anywhere. I wanted to stay awhile.

“I’d better get going,” I said.

“Wait a few minutes, Ed.”

The voice was soft as a pillow. Her eyes were moist. She took a short step toward me, stopped. I put out my hands and caught her shoulders and she pressed against me, hard.

“Ed—”

I kissed her. Her mouth tasted of Rob Roys and cigarettes and she put her arms around me and clung to me like a morning glory on a wire fence. Her body was on fire. I kissed her eyes, her cheeks, her throat.

“I’m all alone,” she said. “All alone and afraid. Stay with me, Ed.”

“Sure,” I said, leading her into the bedroom, decorated in various shades of green. She stood there like a statue, but who likes statues dressed? I took off her clothes and ran my hands over her body. She vibrated like a tuning fork, purred like a kitten.

The mattress was firm. I put a pillow under her head and spread that ash blond hair over it. I touched her, kissed her. She breathed jaggedly and her eyes were wild.

“Ed—”

To hell with Klugsman. He was dead. He could wait awhile…

 

I LEFT HER IN BED, face pressed to pillow, eyes closed, body curled like a fetus. I told her not to leave the apartment, not to answer the door, not to pick up the telephone unless it rang once, stopped, then rang again. That would be my signal.

“One if by land,” she mumbled. “Two if by sea.”

I kissed her cheek. She smiled like a Cheshire cat, happy and contented. I dressed and left her apartment.

The first stop was my own apartment. I got on the phone, cursed myself once, quietly, and called the Continental Detective Agency in Cleveland. The voice that answered sounded two years out of an expensive college. I told him to run a brief check on a man named Jack Blake, supposed to be a homicide victim within the past couple of months, and to ring me back on it.

It was simple stuff and it only took him half an hour. Jack Blake, he revealed, was a card sharp who ran a magic shop on Euclid Avenue, got beaten to death in his own home, and had a daughter named Rhona. It was she who reported all this to the police. So far it was unsolved. Did I want to know more?

I didn’t. I told him to bill me and got off the phone. I’m sorry, Rhona, I said softly. This time I should have believed you. I’m sorry.

Then I got out of there and headed for the Senator, a cafeteria on Broadway at 96th, downstairs from Manny Hess’s pool hall and across the street from a Ping-Pong emporium. They serve good food and run a clean place, and every small-time operator on Upper Broadway drops in for coffee-and. I went inside and got a cup of coffee and carried it to the table where Herbie Wills was sitting.

Wills, a small, gray man of forty-five, was eating yogurt and buttered whole wheat toast. There was a glass of milk standing on the table.

“Ulcers,” he said. “I went to this doctor because of my stomach, he said I have ulcers. I have this very sensitive stomach, Mr. London. There are certain foods I can’t eat. They disagree with me, you know.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Now,” he said, spooning in a teaspoon of yogurt. “Can I help you, Mr. London?”

“I need some information.”

“Sure, Mr. London.”

Information was Herbie’s livelihood. He wasn’t exactly a stool pigeon, just a little man who kept his ears open and filed away everything into separate compartments of his mind. When the information market was weak he ran errands for bookies. He was a hanger-on, living in a clean but shabby room in a 98th Street hotel.

“Milton Klugsman,” I said.

Herbie pursed his bloodless lips, tapped three times on the table with his index finger. “So far,” he said, “nothing. More?”

I gave him a quick description. “I make him in Canarsie, Herbie. At least he’s familiar with the area out there. A Brooklyn or Queens boy, then. Any help?”

“Miltie,” he said. I looked at him. “Miltie Klugsman, Mr. London. This is what throws me for a moment; you said Milton Klugsman, I start thinking in terms of Milton or Milt. But I knew a Miltie Klugsman. This is all he gets called. Miltie.”

“Go on.”

Another spoon of yogurt, bite of toast, deliberate sip of milk. I watched him and hoped I would never get ulcers. He wiped his mouth again and shrugged.

“I do not know much,” he said carefully. “Miltie Klugsman. I think he works for himself, Mr. London. I think maybe selling things, like a fence. But this is just a guess because I hardly know him at all.”

“Who are his friends?”

Herbie shrugged. “This I don’t know. As a matter of fact, I hardly know Miltie Klugsman at all. You were right about Brooklyn. He lives somewhere in East New York near the Queens line.”

“Married?”

“He could be. I see him once with a dark-haired girl. She was wearing a mink stole. But this doesn’t mean she is his wife, Mr. London.”

That sounded logical enough. “I have to find Miltie,” I said. “Where does he hang out?”

He thought about it, through another spoon of yogurt, bites of toast, two sips of milk. “Now wait a minute,” he said. “Sure.”

“What?”

“A diner in Brooklyn!” he said. “On Livonia Avenue near Avenue K. I don’t know Brooklyn too well. The diner is one of those old trolley cars but like remodeled. I don’t know the name.”

“Probably something like ‘Diner’.”

“That might be it,” he said seriously. “Try there, ask around. You might even find Miltie himself.”

I doubted it. Miltie Klugsman wouldn’t be there unless they had plastered him under the basement floor. But I didn’t tell this to Herbie.

He was a stool pigeon with a conscience. He wouldn’t take the ten I gave him, insisting it was too much for the sort of information he had given me. I gave him a five finally and got out of there.

I went back to the Chevy. Some juvenile delinquent had relieved me of my radio aerial—in the morning he would go to shop class and make a zip gun out of it. Deprived of music, I headed dolefully for Brooklyn.

SIX

Livonia Avenue was filled with people. I parked two blocks from the diner—which was named Diner after all—and stopped in a drugstore to see if Miltie Klugsman had had a phone. He did, plus an address on Ashford Street. The pharmacist told me how to get to Ashford Street. I started in that direction, then decided to try the diner first.

It wasn’t much. A ferret-faced counterman was pressing a hamburger down on a greasy grill. He turned to look at me when I walked in. An antique whore sat at the counter near the door drinking coffee with cream.

I took a stool halfway between the old girl and a trio of young punks in snap-brim hats, all of them trying to look like latter-day Kid Twists. I was in Reles country, Murder Inc.’s old stamping grounds not far from the heart of Brownsville.

The counterman decided that the hamburger was cooked enough to kill the taste. He surrounded it with a stale roll, slapped it onto a chipped saucer, slid it down the counter to the snap-brim set. He came over to me and leaned on the counter. His face didn’t change expression when he saw the bulge the .38 made in my jacket. He looked at me, deadpan, and waited.

“Black coffee,” I said.

“No trouble. Not in here.”

He talked without moving his lips. It’s a trick they teach you in Dannemora and other institutions of higher learning. I asked him if I looked like a troublemaker. He shrugged.

“I just want coffee,” I said.

The counterman nodded. He gave me the coffee and I handed him a dime for it. He walked away to trade a story or two with the old hooker. I waited for the coffee to cool. The snap-brim triplets were looking me over.

The coffee tasted like lukewarm dishwater that some fool had rinsed a coffee cup in. I left it alone. The counterman came back, leaned over me like the Tower of Pisa.

“You want anything else besides coffee?”

“A plain doughnut.”

He gave me one. “That all?”

“Maybe not.”

“What else?”

I sat for a moment or two trying to look like a hood trying to think. My eyes were as wary as I could make them.

“I’m looking for a guy,” I said. “I was told I could find him here.”

“Who is he?”

“A guy named Klugsman,” I said. “Miltie Klugsman. You know him?”

Not a flicker of expression. Just a nod.

“You know where I can find him?”

“He ain’t around much. What do you want with him?”

“It’s private.”

“Yeah?”

I pretended to do some more thinking. “I hear he buys things. I got a thing or two for sale.”

“Like what?”

I shook my head. “No,” I said.

“You might get a better price from somebody else,” the counterman said. “Depending on what you got to sell. Miltie, now he can be cheap. You got something for sale, you want all you can get.”

“I was given orders to see Miltie,” I said. The hell with it—let him think I was only a hired hand. I didn’t care that much about the prestige value of the bit.

“Miltie,” he said. “Miltie Klugsman.”

“Yeah.”

“You hang on a minute,” he said. “I think that guy there wants more coffee. You just hang on.”

He filled a cup with coffee and took it over to the young punks. The one he gave it to had his hat halfway over his eyes. The counterman said something unintelligible without moving his lips. The kid answered.

The counterman came back. He asked me my name. I told him it didn’t matter. He asked me who I worked for and I said that didn’t matter either.

“I’ll tell it to Klugsman,” I said.

“He could be hard to find.”

“So maybe I came to the wrong place.” I started to slide off the stool, got one foot on the floor before his hand settled on my shoulder. I stood up and turned to face him again.

“Don’t be in a hurry,” he said.

“I got things to do.”

“Miltie used to come in a lot. He ain’t been around much. I was talking to a guy”—he nodded toward the triplets—“over there.”

“I figured.”

“One of ’em hangs with Miltie now and then. He says maybe he can help. If you want.”

“Sure.”

“Danny,” he said, “c’mere.”

Danny c’mered. He was almost my height but his posture concealed the fact neatly. His fingers were yellow from too many cigarettes and not enough soap. His suit must have been fairly expensive and his shoes had a high shine on them, but nothing he wore could take the slob look away from him. It came shining through.

“You want Miltie,” he said.

“That’s the idea.”

“He’s a little hot right now,” Danny said. “He’s holed up a few blocks from here. I could show you.”

We left the diner. Danny lit a cigarette in the doorway. He didn’t offer me one. We turned right and walked to the corner, turned right again and left Livonia for a side street. The block was darker, more residential than commercial. We walked the length of the block in silence and took another right turn.

“You ever meet Miltie?”

“No,” I said.

“You from New York?”

“The Bronx. Throg’s Neck.”

“Long way from home,” he said.

I didn’t answer him. We kept walking. At the corner we made another right turn.

“This is a hell of a way to go,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“We just go around the block,” I said. “There must be a shorter way to do it.”

“This is easier.”

“Yeah?”

“It gives ’em time,” he said.

It took a minute. Time? Time to make a phone call, time to take the short route and come around the block to meet us. I went for my gun. I was too slow. Danny was on my left, a foot or so behind me. His gun dug into my rib cage and the muzzle felt colder than death.

“Easy,” he said.

My hand was three or four inches from the .38. It stopped in midair and stayed there.

“Take out the piece,” he said. “Do it slow. Very slow. Don’t point it at me. I’d just as soon shoot you now and find out later who the hell you are.”

I took out the gun and I did it slowly. There was a warehouse across the street, dark and silent. On our side was a row of brownstones filled with people who didn’t report gunshots to the police. I let the gun point at the ground.

“Drop it.”

I dropped it. It bounced once on the pavement and lay still.

“Kick it.”

“Where?”

“Just kick it.”

I kicked it. The .38 skidded twenty feet, bounced into the gutter. His gun was still on my ribs and he kept poking me as a reminder.

“Now we wait,” he said. “It shouldn’t be long.”

 

IT WASN’T LONG AT ALL. They came down the block from Livonia, walking fast but not quite running. They had their hands in their pockets and their hats down over their foreheads. They were in uniform. I stood there with Danny’s gun in my ribs and waited for them.

“He’s a cop,” one of them said.

Danny dug at me. “A cop?”

“A private cop. His name is London and he’s sticking his nose into things he shouldn’t. They tried to buy him off but he wouldn’t be bought.”

“It’s good we checked.”

“Well,” the punk said. “They said anybody comes nosing for Miltie, we should call. So I called.”

I looked at my gun. It was three miles away from me in the gutter. I wanted it in my hand.

“What’s the word, man?”

“The word is we got a contract.”

“At what price?”

“Three yards apiece,” the punk said. He was thinner than Danny, maybe a year or two older. His face was pockmarked and his eyes bulged when he stared, as though he needed glasses but he was afraid they wouldn’t fit the hard-guy image.

“Cheap,” Danny said.

“Hell, it’s an easy hit. We just take him and dump him. Nothing to it, Danny.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s three quick bills. And it sets us up, man. It makes us look good and it gives us an in.”

They would need all the ins they could get. Danny was sloppy, strictly an amateur. You don’t stand next to a person when you’re holding a gun on him. You get as far away as you can. The gun’s advantage increases with distance. The closer you are, the less of an edge you’ve got.

“We take him for a ride,” Danny was saying. “Take him the same place they gave it to Miltie. Ride him around Canarsie, hit him in the head, then drive back.”

“Sure, Danny.”

“We use his car,” he went on. “Which is your car, buster?”

“The Chevy.”

“The red convertible?”

“That’s the one.”

“Gimme the keys.”

He was much too close. He should have backed off four or five steps, more if he was a good enough shot. He was making my play too easy for me.

“The keys.”

The other two were in front of us. They both had their hands in their pockets. They were heeled, but one had his jacket buttoned and the other looked slow and stupid.

“The keys!”

I let him nudge me with the gun. I felt the muzzle poke into me, then relax.

I dropped. I fell down and I fell toward him, and I snapped his arm behind his back and took the gun right out of his hand. One punk was trying to reach through his jacket button to his own gun. I gave the trigger a squeeze and the bullet hit him in the throat. He took two steps, clapped both hands to his neck, fell over, and died.

The other one—the slow-looking one—wasn’t so slow after all. He drew in a hurry and he shot in a hurry, but he didn’t stop to remember that I was using Danny as a shield. He had time to get off two shots. One went wide. The other caught Danny in the chest. The punk was getting ready for a third shot when I snapped off a pair that caught him in the center of the chest. Danny’s gun was a .45. The holes it made were big enough to step in.

I dropped Danny just as he was starting to bleed on me. He was still alive but didn’t figure to last more than a few seconds. He blacked out immediately.

I wiped my prints off his .45 and tossed it next to him on the pavement. I ran over to the curb, scooped my .38 out of the gutter, and wedged it into my shoulder rig. That made it easy for the cops. Three punks had a fight and killed each other, and to hell with all of them. Nobody would shed tears for them. They weren’t worth it.

The gunshots were still echoing in the empty streets. I looked at three corpses for a second or two, then ran like hell. I kept going for two blocks, turned a corner, slowed down. I was digging a pipe out of a pocket when the sirens started up.

I filled the pipe, lit it. I walked down the street smoking and taking long breaths and telling my nerves they could unwind now.

But my nerves didn’t believe it…I couldn’t blame them.

Brooklyn was cool, quiet, and dark, with only the police siren cutting through the night. I got back on Livonia, skirted the diner, got into the Chevy.

Behind the wheel, I dumped out my pipe, put it away. Then I drove along, trying to remember the directions to Ashford Street. I got lost once, but I found the place—Klugsman’s address.

The building was like all the others. He must have been small-time, I thought. Otherwise he would have found a better place to live. I walked into the front hallway. A kid, twelve or thirteen, was sprawled on the stairs with a Pepsi in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He watched me lean on Klugsman’s bell.

“The bell don’t work,” he said. “You looking for Mrs. Klugsman?”

I hadn’t known there was one, but I was looking for her now. I told the kid so.

“Upstairs,” he said. “Just walk right up. Third floor, apartment three-C.”

I thanked the kid, he shrugged, and I went up two flights of rickety stairs. The building smelled of age and stale beer. I stood in front of the door marked 3-C. The apartment was not empty. Gut-bucket jazz boomed through the door, records playing too loudly on a lo-fi player. I knocked on the door. Nothing happened. I knocked again.

“C’mon in, whoever in hell it is!”

The voice was loud. I turned the knob and went into the apartment where Miltie Klugsman had once lived. It was a railroad flat, three or four rooms tied together by grim little hallways. The furniture was old and the walls needed paint. The place had the general feel of a cheap apartment which someone had tried to hold together until, recently, that someone had stopped caring.

The someone was sitting on a worn-out couch. She could have been beautiful once. She may have been attractive, still; it was hard to tell. There was a pint of blended rye in her hand. The pint was about three-quarters gone and she was about three-quarters drunk. She was a thirty-five-year-old brunette with lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth.

She was wearing a faded yellow housedress that was missing a button or two in front and had floppy slippers on her feet. She waved a hand at me and took another long drink that killed most of the pint of rye.

“Hiya,” she called. “Who in hell are you?”

I closed the door, walked over, sat on the couch.

“My name’s Shirley. Who’re you?”

“Ed,” I said.

“You lookin’ for Miltie? He doesn’t live here anymore. You know the song? ‘Annie Doesn’t Live Here Anymore’?” Her eyes rolled. “Miltie doesn’t live here anymore,” she said sadly. “Miltie’s dead, Ed. That rhymes. Dead, Ed.”

I walked over to the record player and turned off something raucous. I went back to the couch. She offered me a drink of the blend. I didn’t want any.

“Poor Miltie,” she said. “I loved him, you believe it? Oh, Miltie wasn’t much. Me and Miltie, just a couple of nothings.”

“Shirley—”

“That’s me,” she said. Her face clouded, and for a moment I thought she was going to start crying. She surprised me by laughing instead. She tossed her head back and her body shook with laughter. She couldn’t stop. I reached over and slapped her, not too hard, and she sat up and rubbed the side of her face and nodded her head vigorously.

“Shirley, Miltie was murdered,” I said. “You know that, don’t you?”

She looked at me and nodded. The tears were starting now. I wanted to go away and leave her alone. I couldn’t.

“Murdered, Shirley. He had some…evidence that some man wanted. Do you know where it is?”

She shook her head.

“He must have talked about it, Shirley. He must have told you something. Think.”

She looked away, then back at me, cupped her chin with one hand, closed her eyes, opened them. “Nope,” she said. “He never told me a thing. Not Miltie.”

“Are you sure?”

“Uh-huh.” She reached for the bottle again. I took it away from her. She came at me, sprawled across me, fingers scrabbling for the bottle. I gave it to her and she killed it. She held it at arm’s length, reading the label slowly and deliberately. Then she heaved it across the room. It bounced off the record player, took another wild bounce, and shattered.

“Poor Miltie,” she said.

“Shirley—”

“Jussa minute,” she said. “What’s your name again? Ed? I’m gonna tell you something. Ed, I’ll tell you about Miltie Klugsman. Okay?”

“Sure.”

“Miltie was just a little guy,” she said. “Like me, see? Before I met him I used to work the clubs, you know, do a little stripping, get the customers to buy me drinks. I was never a hooker, Ed. You believe me?”

“I believe you.”

She nodded elaborately. “Well,” she said. “Lots of guys, you say you were a stripper, they figure you were a whore. Not me. Some girls, maybe. Not me.”

She was standing now, swaying a little but staying on her feet. She picked a pack of cigarettes from a table, shook one loose, and put it in her mouth. I scratched a match for her and she leaned forward to take the light. Her dress fell away from her body. She wasn’t wearing a bra. I looked away and she laughed hysterically.

“See something you shouldn’t, Ed?” I didn’t say anything. “Oh,” she said, continuing her story. “So I met Miltie at the club. He was a good guy, you know? Decent. Oh, he did some time. You live like this, this kind of life, you don’t care if a man did time. What’s the past, Ed? Huh? It’s the present, and what kind of guy a guy is, and all. Right?”

“Sure.”

“He wanted to marry me. Nobody else, they always wanted, oh, you know what they wanted. He wanted to marry me. So what the hell. Right, Ed?”

“Sure.”

“He was just a little guy. Nobody important. But we stuck with each other and we made it. We stuck together, we ate steady, we lived okay. This place is a mess now. When it’s fixed up it looks better.”

She pranced around the room like a hostess showing off her antiques. Something struck her funny and she started laughing again, reeling around the room and laughing hysterically. Her voice caught on a snag and the laughter changed abruptly to tears. She cried as she laughed, putting all of herself into it. I got up to catch her and she sagged against me, limp as a dishrag. I held on to her for a few seconds. Then she got hold of herself and pulled away from me.

“Poor, poor poor Miltie,” she said. “I was afraid, I knew he was getting in over his head. Listen, I was just a lousy dime-store stripper, you know? I knew enough not to try to play the big-time circuit. I stuck to my own league. You know what I mean?”

“Sure, Shirley.”

“But Miltie didn’t know this. He wanted to do something big. I was afraid, I knew he was getting mixed up, getting in over his head. He was all tangled up in something too big for him. He was a good guy but he wasn’t a big guy. I knew something like this was going to happen. I knew it.”

The cigarette burned her fingers. She dropped it and squashed it beneath one of the floppy slippers. She kicked off the slippers, first one and then the other. Her toenails were painted scarlet and the paint was chipped here and there.

“He was going to get out. He was going to stick to his own league. And then—”

She didn’t break. She came close, but she didn’t. The last of the liquor was taking hold of her now and she was staggering. She stepped into the center of the room, walked to the record player, put on something slow and jazzy. I stayed where I was. “I’m still good-looking,” she said. “Aren’t I?”

I told her she was.

“Not a kid anymore,” she said. “But I’ll get by.”

The music was strip-club jazz. She took a few preliminary steps to it, tossing her hips at me in an almost comical bump-and-grind, and grinned.

Then, slowly, she went into her act. We weren’t in a strip joint and she wasn’t wearing a ball gown. She was wearing a faded yellow housedress that buttoned down the front, and she undid it a button at a time. Her fingers were clumsy with blended rye but she got the dress open and shrugged it away. It fell to the floor bunched around her long legs. She took a step and kicked the dress away.

No bra. Just thin black panties. She had a fine body, slender waist, trim hips, full breasts with just the slightest trace of age to them. She kept dancing, moving with the music, flinging her breasts at me, grinding her loins at me.

“Not bad, huh? Not bad for an old broad, huh, Ed? Still lively, huh?”

I didn’t answer her. I wanted to get up and go away but I couldn’t do that either. I watched while she peeled off the panties and tossed them away. She had trouble with them but she got them off and danced her wicked dance in blissful nudity.

“Ed,” she said.

She came at me, threw herself at me. Her flesh, warm with drink, was soft as butter in my arms. She looked into my eyes, her face a study in alcoholic passion mixed in equal parts with torment. She looked at me, and she squirmed against me, and then her eyes closed and she passed out cold.

There was a double bed in the bedroom. She had to sleep alone in it now. Some men with machine guns had killed the man who used to share it with her. I drew back the top sheet, put her down on the bed. I covered her with the sheet, tucked a pillow under her head.

Then I got out of there.

SEVEN

The ride back to Manhattan was a long one. Every traffic light was red when I got to it.

I told myself that the picture was refusing to take shape, and then I changed my mind—it was taking shape, all right. It was taking a great many shapes, each conflicting with the other. Nothing made much sense.

Shirley Klugsman was a widow because her husband had tried to sell evidence to Rhona Blake. A man named Zucker wanted Rhona dead. He also wanted me dead, and three punks in East New York had tried to carry it off for him. And they were dead now.

 

I GOT THE CHEVY BACK TO MY GARAGE and walked halfway home before I changed my mind. Then I jumped in a cab.

Rewards and punishments—Phillip Carr’s phrase. They were at the punishment stage now. They wanted me dead, and they had tried once already that night, and maybe my apartment wasn’t the safest place in the world.

Besides, Rhona was alone…

The doorman barely looked at me. I let the elevator whisk me up to her floor, went to her door, and jabbed at the bell. Nothing happened. I remembered our signal, rang once, waited a minute, then started ringing. Nothing happened. I called out to her, told her who it was. And nothing happened.

She was out, of course. At a show, having a drink, catching a bite to eat. I got halfway to the elevator and my mind filled with another picture, a less pleasant one in which she was lying facedown on the wall-to-wall carpet and bleeding. I went back to her door.

On television I would have given the door a good hard shoulder, wood would have splintered, and that would have been that. This is fine on television, where they have balsa doors. But every time I hit a door with my shoulder I wind up with a sore shoulder and an unimpaired door. In Manhattan, apartment doors are usually reinforced with steel plates. You just can’t trust television.

I took out the little gimcrack I use to clean my pipe. It had a penknife blade. I opened it and played with the lock. It opened. I went inside.

She wasn’t there. So I sat down in the living room to wait for her, first checking the bar to see if there was any cognac. There wasn’t. There was scotch, but cognac is all I drink.

Hell. This was a special sort of situation. I poured a lot of scotch into a glass and sat down to work on it.

After half an hour, I was worried. She was in too deep, playing way over her head, and she wasn’t around. The room was beginning to get to me. I kept smelling her perfume and the furniture kept glaring at me.

Where the hell was she?

I remembered the afternoon, and the green eyes warming very suddenly, and her body close to mine. Bed, and whispers, and passion, and the happy drowsiness afterwards. And now she was gone. It was the sort of magic trick Jack Blake would have gone wild over. You just make love to this girl, see, and she disappears.

After ten more minutes of this I was morbid. I started combing the apartment in a cockeyed search for help notes or struggle signs or bullet holes. I got down on hands and knees and peered owlishly under the bed. There was a single slipper there, and a pair of stockings that had run for their lives, and a respectable quantity of dust. I checked out the closet in the bedroom. Her clothes, and not many of them. A suitcase, streamlined and airplane-gray. She had been traveling light. She was Jack Blake’s daughter, coming from Cleveland with a single suitcase and a bellyful of determination, and that wasn’t going to be enough.

I went back to the living room. The bedroom closet had been a disappointment from an aesthetic standpoint. You’re supposed to open a closet door and watch a body fall out. That was how they did it on television. And all I got was a suitcase and some clothing.

There was still a closet in the front hall. I gave the knob a twist, yanked open the door, and stepped ceremoniously aside so that the body wouldn’t hit me when it fell.

No body fell.

Instead there was a noise like a shotgun blast at close quarters, and there was a wind like Hurricane Zelda, and I flew up in the air and bounced off one wall into another. Then the lights went out.

EIGHT

It was timeless. There was the lifting sensation, the spinning, the impact, the blackness. Then I was on my back on that orange couch and my eyes were open. I saw ash blond hair, a red mouth.

Rhona.

She was saying: “Lie still, Ed. Relax, lie still, don’t try to move. My God, I came in and found you. I thought you were dead. The whole hallway was a mess. It looked as though someone fired a cannon in here. Are you all right, Ed?”

She was leaning over me, stroking my forehead with one soft hand. Her eyes were wide, concerned. Sensation was starting to come back now, with pain leading the procession. My whole body ached. I ran hands over myself to find out what was broken. Surprisingly, everything seemed to be intact. I started to sit up. There was dizziness, and I fell back on the couch and closed my eyes for a minute.

I must have blacked out again. Then I came back to life and she was lighting a cigarette for me, putting it between my lips. I smoked. I started to sit up, saw the worry in her eyes. I told her I was all right now.

“What happened, Ed?”

“A bomb.”

“Where?”

“In your closet,” I said. “I opened the door and it went off.”

“What were you doing in the closet?”

“Looking for bodies.”

“Huh?”

“Forget it.” I closed my eyes, remembering the cute little sidestep I’d executed, a nutty bit of business designed to permit the mythical corpse to fall out of the closet without hitting me. Corny, but damn fortunate. The sidestep had taken me out of the way of the blast. If the full force had gotten me, I’d have found a body, all right.

My own.

“Ed—”

I took a breath. “Rhona, somebody had it set up for you. You were supposed to walk into the apartment and hang your coat in the front closet. They must have rigged it with a wire running to the door handle, something like that. Open the door and you yank the wire and the thing blows.”

“God.”

“Uh-huh. When did you leave, Rhona? Why the hell didn’t you stay put?”

She was chewing on her lower lip and her eyes were focused on the floor. She said: “I got a phone call.”

“You weren’t supposed to answer the phone.”

“I know. But it rang and rang and rang…I picked it up.”

“Who was it?”

“A man. He didn’t give me his name. He just said he was calling for you.”

“For me?”

She nodded. “I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. But he said you were in trouble and couldn’t call yourself, and I thought you were the only person who knew the telephone number here—”

“Klugsman knew it, didn’t he?”

“Oh,” she said. “I forgot that, Ed—”

“When did he call?”

“Around midnight.”

“And you left right away?”

“That’s right.”

I put out the cigarette. “Then I missed you by less than half an hour,” I said. “They must have had a man stationed right out front, ready to drop up and install the bomb the minute you left the building. It’s easy enough to get into this place. The doorman is so busy being proper and distant that he doesn’t pay any attention to what’s going on. So the guy came in, set up shop, and left. Then I got here and waited for you.” I looked at her. “Where the hell were you, anyway?”

“Times Square.”

“Huh?”

“I took a taxi to Times Square, Ed. That’s what the man on the phone said I was supposed to do. I went to a place called Hector’s, a big cafeteria. I took a table and waited for you.”

“For how long?”

“A little over an hour, I guess. It was a bore and I was scared stiff and I didn’t know what was going to happen next. Then finally a man came over to me and handed me a note. He was gone almost before I knew what was going on. The note said you wouldn’t be able to meet me but everything was all right and I was supposed to go back to my apartment. I got here just in time to find you.”

I got up, dragged myself over to the front hall, what was left of it. There was a gaping hole in the wall directly opposite the closet door. If I hadn’t stepped aside, the blast would have made a similar hole in me.

It was something to think about.

I dropped to my hands and knees and poked around in the closet. There wasn’t much to look at, just enough to confirm my diagnosis of the blast. It was a simple sort of booby-trap, the kind even a child could put together. A few sticks of dynamite, evidently touched off with a blasting cap. A piece of thin copper wire was attached to the cap and to the doorknob. There was still a trace of the wire around the knob.

“God, Ed.”

I got up, put an arm around her. We walked to the kitchen. She put water on for coffee. While it cooked, I gave her a quick run-down on my part of the evening. I left out the call to the Continental agency in Cleveland. She didn’t have to know that I hadn’t trusted her.

 

SHE WAS SMOKING TOO MANY CIGARETTES too quickly. She was nervous and it showed. Why not? She had a lot to be nervous about. Half the world was trying to kill her. That sort of thing tends to get on your nerves.

“It doesn’t add,” I said.

“What doesn’t?”

“The whole thing. This morning they didn’t know where to find you, Rhona. Zucker’s lawyer was ready to pay ten thousand bucks just to get hold of you. A few hours later they know where you are and all they want to do is kill us both. They hand out contracts on the two of us. I’m supposed to get shot in East New York and you’re supposed to get blown up in your own apartment.”

“Maybe they had us followed. Or maybe somebody tipped them off.”

“Who?” I shrugged. “But there’s more. Why should they play around with a bomb? They could decoy you with a phone call, then drop you with a bullet on the street. Why get so fancy? Why send you on a wild goose chase to Hector’s? That’s the kind of play an amateur might use. A pro would be more direct. And we’re up against professionals.”

The coffee finished dripping. She poured out a pair of cups. I sweetened mine with a shot of scotch and let it cool a little.

“Look,” I said. “Let’s suppose they wanted to search the apartment. They still didn’t have to get cute about it. Did you have anything here?”

“Nothing they would be interested in.”

“Well, they might not have known that. But they still could have shot you down on the street and then sent a man upstairs. Or they could break in, kill you, then search. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

“I guess not,” she said.

We sat there drinking our coffee, tossing it all back and forth and getting nowhere in particular. She started to relax. God knows how. I decided that a card mechanic has to have a sound nervous system, and she was a card mechanic’s daughter. Maybe that’s the sort of thing that passes down a family tree.

I told her to go to sleep.

“Is it safe?”

“Nothing’s safe,” I said. “I don’t think they’ll be around tonight. It’s late and we’re both half-dead. I am, anyway, and you must be.”

“I’m kind of tired, Ed.”

“Sure. We’ll get some sleep and see what happens tomorrow. It’s been their play all along now. Maybe I can start something for our side, set some wheels in motion.”

“I’m scared, Ed.”

“So am I. But I’m tired enough to sleep. How about you?”

She shrugged. “I guess I’m all right,” she said. “Uh…you’ll sleep on the couch tonight, won’t you?”

“No.”

“Ed,” she said. “Ed, listen, don’t be silly. You’re exhausted and you almost got killed tonight and—”

“No.”

“Ed, you’re crazy. Oh, you nut. Ed, Ed, you will sleep on the couch, won’t you?”

I didn’t—not on the couch…

 

SHE FELL ASLEEP RIGHT AWAY. I tossed and turned and listened to her measured breathing, and I wondered how the hell she managed it. I closed my eyes and counted fences jumping sheep, and things like that, and nothing worked. I hadn’t expected it to.

It was still too tangled up to make any appreciable sort of sense. There were just too damned many inconsistencies. I couldn’t figure them out.

Sleep on it, I told myself. Sleep on it, stupid. And, eventually, I did just that.

The morning wasn’t too bad. She woke up first, and by the time I opened my eyes she was busy frying bacon and eggs in the kitchen. I showered and got dressed and went in for breakfast. There was fresh coffee made and the food was on the table. She even looked pretty in the morning. It seemed impossible, but she did.

The bacon was crisp, the eggs were fine, the coffee was perfect. I told her so and she beamed. “I had plenty of practice,” she said. “I used to cook for Dad all the time, since my mother died.”

It was around ten by the time I got out of there. First we had to go over the ground rules. This time, dammit, she would stay in the apartment. This time, dammit, she wouldn’t answer the phone unless it was my signal. Same for the door.

“Ed—”

I was at the door. I turned. Her mouth came up to me and her lips brushed mine.

“Be careful, Ed.”

Outside, the sun was shining. There was a different doorman on duty. He ignored me—he knew the ground rules there, by George, and the rules said that the doorman took no notice of anyone. They were strictly ornamental.

I hauled out my wallet, dug out the card I’d gotten a day ago. Just a day? It seemed much longer. I studied the card—Phillip Carr. Attorney at Law. 42 East 37^thStreet.

I walked to the corner to save the doorman the trouble of hailing me a cab, and to save myself the tip I’d have had to give him. I got into a taxi and told the driver to take me to Fifth and 37th.

It was time to get rolling. Carr and Zucker and the rest of the crooked-card-game set had dealt every hand so far. Rhona and I were just throwing our chips in the center and calling every bet.

You can do that for just so long. Then it’s time to deal a hand yourself.

I sat in the backseat and gnawed on a pipestem while the cabby fought his way uptown through mid-morning traffic. Phillip Carr, Attorney at Law. Okay, shyster, I thought. Let’s see what happens.

NINE

The cab dropped me in front of Carr’s building about midway between Fifth and Madison on 37th Street. I took an express elevator to the twentieth floor, walked along a chrome-plated hallway to a door with Carr’s name on it. I walked in.

The secretary’s desk was kidney shaped. The girl behind it wasn’t. Her bright red hair had been painfully spray-netted until it had the general consistency of plastic. Her smile was metallic. Her sweater bulged nicely, giving a hint of flesh that the hair and the smile tried to conceal. I told her I wanted to see Carr.

“Your name, please?”

“Ed London,” I said.

She got up gracefully, wiggled her well-girdled hips on the way through a door marked PRIVATE. The door closed behind her. I picked up a magazine from a table, glanced at it, tossed it back. The door opened and the girl came out again.

“He’ll see you,” she said.

“I thought he would.”

Phillip Carr’s office had framed diplomas on the wall from every college but Leavenworth. He stood up, smiled at me, and stuck out his hand for a handshake. I didn’t take it, and after a few seconds he fetched it back again.

“Well,” he said. “I’m damn glad to see you, London. You were pretty hostile yesterday. I guess you’ve thought things over.”

“Something like that.”

“Cigar?”

“No thanks.”

“Well,” he said.

“I thought it all over. Especially what you said about rewards and punishments.”

“And?”

“I’ve got a reward for you.”

He didn’t get it until I hit him in the face. He’d stood there, hands at his sides, waiting patiently for me to tell him what the reward was, while I curled one hand into a fist, and aimed it at his jaw. It was a nice punch. It picked him up and sent him sailing over his desk, and it dropped him in an untidy pile on the floor.

He came up cursing. He made a grab for a desk drawer, probably to get a gun. I kicked him away from it. He crouched, snarling like a tiger at bay, and lunged for the button that would summon the secretary. I caught him by the lapels and gave him a little push that turned his lunge into a full-blown charge. He didn’t slow down until he bounced off a wall and collapsed onto the high-pile carpet.

“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 the 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 sweater. 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.”

“What?”

“The dynamite,” I said. “Did you forget the dynamite, Rhona? You tried to kill me!”

That time I didn’t slap her. It would have been superfluous. She reacted as though someone had belted her but good.

“The dynamite,” I said. “It didn’t make any sense at the time. I couldn’t figure out why Zucker would use a cockeyed routine like that to get you out of the way, or how he knew where you were, or any of it. The dynamite had to be all your idea. Maybe you were afraid I would sell you out for Carr’s ten-grand reward. Maybe you thought I was guessing too much about you.

“Anyway, you decided to get rid of me. And you were cute about it, too. You knew I’d come over here sooner or later. You left the apartment, figuring I’d eventually wander over to the closet. Then the dynamite would go off and I’d be out of your hair.

“And you would be in the clear. You were subletting the place under a phony name, and once I blew myself to hell you would just disappear, rent another apartment somewhere else. Nobody could tie you to me. You’d be all alone in the clear.”

“Ed, I must have been crazy—”

“You still are if you think you can talk your way out of this, Rhona.”

“Ed, I’m sorry. Ed—”

She was making sexy movements, slithering toward me. But I saw what she was really doing, moving toward the table next to the couch, heading toward her purse. I could have stopped her then and there, but I wanted to give her more rope to hang herself.

She got her hands on the purse. She was talking but I wasn’t listening to a word she was saying. I watched her hands move behind her back, opening the purse, dipping inside.

She never managed to point her gun at me. My timing was too good. She dragged it out of the purse and I slapped it out of her hand and it sailed across the room and bounced around on the carpet. A .22, a woman’s gun. They can kill you too.

Then she was beaten, and she knew it. I took out my own gun and pointed it at her, but I didn’t even need it. She stayed put while I picked up the phone. It was too late to get Jerry Gunther at Headquarters. I called him at his home.

“Call downtown,” I said. “Tell them to get a pickup order out for Phillip Carr and Abe Zucker. And get over here”—I gave him the address—“and make an arrest of your own.”

He whistled softly.

“This is going to get a lot of unsolved ones off your books,” I said. “Maybe I’ll let you do the buying during our next vital conference.”

He said something unimportant. I hung up. Then I stood pointing the gun at Rhona while we waited for him.

ELEVEN

It was Thursday, and I was having dinner at McGraw’s, a favorite steakhouse of mine. I wasn’t eating alone. There was a girl across the table from me, a girl named Sharon Ross.

She chewed a bit of steak, washed it down with a sip of Beaujolais, and looked up at me with wide eyes.

“The girl,” she said. “Rhona. What’s going to happen to her, Ed?”

“Not enough.”

“Will she go to jail?”

“Probably,” I said. “It’s hardly a sure thing, though. She was a blackmailer, and there’s a law against that sort of thing, but she’s in a position to turn state’s evidence and help them nail the lid on Zucker and his buddies. And, as she said, she never killed anyone. Only tried.”

I shrugged. “And she’s a girl. A pretty one. That still makes a difference in any case where you have trial by jury. The worst she can look forward to is a fairly light sentence. She could even get off clean, if she has an expensive lawyer.”

“Like Phil Carr?”

“Like him, but not Carr. He won’t be practicing much law anymore. He’ll be in jail for everything the D.A. can make stick. And Zucker will stand trial, too.”

 

I’D CALLED SHARON A DAY OR TWO after the whole thing was wrapped up, and after she had cooled off from the broken-date routine. And, over our steaks, I had filled her in on most of the story. Not all of it, of course. She got the expurgated version. You never tell one girl about the bedroom games you played with another girl. It’s not chivalrous. It’s not even especially intelligent.

“I guess I forgive you,” she said.

“For what?”

“For breaking our date, silly. Brother, was I mad at you! You didn’t sound like a man with business on his mind, not when you called me. You sounded like a man who had just crawled out of bed with someone pretty. And I was steaming.”

I looked away. Hell, I thought. When I called her I had just crawled out of bed with something pretty. But I didn’t know you could tell over the phone.

“Ed?”

I looked up.

“Where do you want to go after dinner?”

“A little club somewhere on the East Side,” I said. “We’ll listen to atonal jazz and drink a little too much.”

She said it sounded good. It did. We would listen to atonal jazz and drink a little too much, and then we would go back to her place for a nightcap. She wouldn’t be a secretive blackmailer with a closet full of dynamite. She would just be a soft warm girl, and that was enough.

There might be explosions. But dynamite wouldn’t cause them, and I wouldn’t mind them at all.