The elevator came up and they rode down to the huge, silent lobby of the Chester Towers. Two house detectives lounged at the end of the marble desk, two clerks stood alert behind it.
Pete Anglich lifted his manacled hands in the fighter’s salute. “What, no newshawks yet?” he jeered. “Vidaury won’t like hushhush on this.”
“Keep goin’, smartie,” one of the dicks snapped, jerking his arm.
They went down a corridor and out of a side entrance to a narrow street that dropped almost sheer to treetops. Beyond the treetops the lights of the city were a vast golden carpet, stitched with brilliant splashes of red and green and blue and purple.
Two starters whirred. Pete Anglich was pushed into the back seat of the first car. Angus and another man got in on either side of him. The cars drifted down the hill, turned east on Fountain, slid quietly through the evening for mile after mile. Fountain met Sunset, and the cars dropped downtown toward the tall, white tower of the City Hall. At the plaza the first car swung over to Los Angeles Street and went south. The other car went on.
After a while Pete Anglich dropped the corners of his mouth and looked sideways at Angus.
“Where you taking me? This isn’t the way to headquarters.”
Angus’ dark, austere face turned toward him slowly. After a moment the big detective leaned back and yawned at the night. He didn’t answer.
The car slid along Los Angeles to Fifth, east to San Pedro, south again for block after block, quiet blocks and loud blocks, blocks where silent men sat on shaky front porches and blocks where noisy young toughs of both colors snarled and wisecracked at one another in front of cheap restaurants and drugstores and beer parlors full of slot machines.
At Santa Barbara the police car turned east again, drifted slowly along the curb to Noon Street. It stopped at the corner above the lunch wagon. Pete Anglichs face tightened again, but he didn’t say anything.
“Okey,” Angus drawled. “Take the flippers off.”
The dick on Pete Anglich’s other side dug a key out of his vest, unlocked the handcuffs, jangled them pleasantly before he put them away on his hip. Angus swung the door open and stepped out of the car.
“Out,” he said over his shoulder.
Pete Anglich got out. Angus walked a little way from the street light, stopped, beckoned. His hand moved under his coat, came out with a gun. He said softly: “Had to play it this way. Otherwise we’d tip the town. Pearson’s the only one that knows you. Any ideas?”
Pete Anglich took his gun, shook his head slowly, slid the gun under his own coat, keeping his body between it and the car at the curb behind.
“The stakeout was spotted, I guess,” he said slowly. “There was a girl hanging around there, but maybe that just happened, too.”
Angus stared at him silently for a moment, then nodded and went back to the car. The door slammed shut, and the car drifted off down the street and picked up speed.
Pete Anglich walked along Santa Barbara to Central, south on Central. After a while a bright sign glared at him in violet letters—Juggernaut Club. He went up broad carpeted stairs toward noise and dance music.
FOUR
The girl had to go sideways to get between the close-set tables around the small dance floor. Her hips touched the back of a man’s shoulder and he reached out and grabbed her hand, grinning. She smiled mechanically, pulled her hand away and came on.
She looked better in the bronze metal-cloth dress with bare arms and the brown hair curling low on her neck; better than in the shabby polo coat and cheap felt hat, better even than in skyscraper heels, bare legs and thighs, the irreducible minimum above the waistline, and a dull gold opera hat tipped rakishly over one ear.
Her face looked haggard, small, pretty, shallow. Her eyes had a wide stare. The dance band made a sharp racket over the clatter of dishes, the thick hum of talk, the shuffling feet on the dance floor. The girl came slowly up to Pete Anglich’s table, pulled the other chair out and sat down.
She propped her chin on the backs of her hands, put her elbows on the tablecloth, stared at him.
“Hello there,” she said in a voice that shook a little.
Pete Anglich pushed a pack of cigarettes across the table, watched her shake one loose and get it between her lips. He struck a match. She had to take it out of his hand to light her cigarette.
“Drink?”
“I’ll say.”
He signaled the fuzzy-haired, almond-eyed waiter, ordered a couple of sidecars. The waiter went away. Pete Anglich leaned back on his chair and looked at one of his blunt fingertips.
The girl said very softly: “I got your note, mister.”
“Like it?” His voice was stiffly casual. He didn’t look at her.
She laughed off key. “We’ve got to please the customers.”
Pete Anglich looked past her shoulder at the corner of the band shell. A man stood there smoking, beside a small microphone. He was heavily built, old for an m.c., with slick gray hair and a big nose and the thickened complexion of a steady drinker. He was smiling at everything and everybody. Pete Anglich looked at him a little while, watching the direction of his glances. He said stiffly, in the same casual voice, “But you’d be here anyway.”
The girl stiffened, then slumped. “You don’t have to insult me, mister.”
He looked at her slowly, with an empty up-from-under look. “You’re down and out, knee-deep in nothing, baby. I’ve been that way often enough to know the symptoms. Besides, you got me in plenty jam tonight. I owe you a couple insults.
The fuzzy-haired waiter came back and slid a tray on the cloth, wiped the bottoms of two glasses with a dirty towel, set them out. He went away again.
The girl put her hand around a glass, lifted it quickly and took a long drink. She shivered a little as she put the glass down. Her face was white.
“Wisecrack or something,” she said rapidly. “Don’t just sit there. I’m watched.”
Pete Anglich touched his fresh drink, smiled very deliberately toward the corner of the band shell.
“Yeah, I can imagine. Tell me about that pick-up on Noon Street.”
She reached out quickly and touched his arm. Her sharp nails dug into it. “Not here,” she breathed. “I don’t know how you found me and I don’t care. You looked like the kind of Joe that would help a girl out. I was scared stiff. But don’t talk about it here. I’ll do anything you want, go anywhere you want. Only not here.”
Pete Anglich took his arm from under her hand, leaned back again. His eyes were cold, but his mouth was kind.
“I get it. Trimmer’s wishes. Was he tailing the job?”
She nodded quickly. “I hadn’t gone three blocks before he picked me up. He thought it was a swell gag, what I did, but he won’t think so when he sees you here. That makes you wise.”
Pete Anglich sipped his drink. “He is coming this way,” he said, coolly.
The grayhaired m.c. was moving among the tables, bowing and talking, but edging toward the one where Pete Anglich sat with the girl. The girl was staring into a big gilt mirror behind Pete Anglich’s head. Her face was suddenly distorted, shattered with terror. Her lips were shaking uncontrollably.
Trimmer Waltz idled casually up to the table, leaned a hand down on it. He poked his bigveined nose at Pete Anglich. There was a soft, flat grin on his face.
“Hi, Pete. Haven’t seen you around since they buried McKinley. How’s tricks?”
“Not bad, not good,” Pete Anglich said huskily. “I been on a drunk.”
Trimmer Waltz broadened his smile, turned it on the girl. She looked at him quickly, looked away, picking at the tablecloth.
Waltz’s voice was soft, cooing. “Know the little lady before—or just pick her out of the line-up?”
Pete Anglich shrugged, looked bored. “Just wanted somebody to share a drink with, Trimmer. Sent her a note. Okey?”
“Sure. Perfect.” Waltz picked one of the glasses up, sniffed at it. He shook his head sadly. “Wish we could serve better stuff. At four bits a throw it can’t be done. How about tipping a few out of a right bottle, back in my den?”
“Both of us?” Pete Anglich asked gently.
“Both of you is right. In about five minutes. I got to circulate a little first.”
He pinched the girl’s cheek, went on, with a loose swing of his tailored shoulders.
The girl said slowly, thickly, hopelessly, “So Pete’s your name. You must want to die young, Pete. Mine’s Token Ware. Silly name, isn’t it?”
“I like it,” Pete Anglich said softly.
The girl stared at a point below the white scar on Pete Anglich’s throat. Her eyes slowly filled with tears.
Trimmer Waltz drifted among the tables, speaking to a customer here and there. He edged over to the far wall, came along it to the band shell, stood there ranging the house with his eyes until he was looking directly at Pete Anglich. He jerked his head, stepped back through a pair of thick curtains.
Pete Anglich pushed his chair back and stood up. “Let’s go,” he said.
Token Ware crushed a cigarette out in a glass tray with jerky fingers, finished the drink in her glass, stood up. They went back between the tables, along the edge of the dance floor, over to the side of the band shell.
The curtains opened on to a dim hallway with doors on both sides. A shabby red carpet masked the floor. The walls were chipped, the doors cracked.
“The one at the end on the left,” Token Ware whispered.
They came to it. Pete Anglich knocked. Trimmer Waltz’s voice called out to come in. Pete Anglich stood a moment looking at the door, then turned his head and looked at the girl with his eyes hard and narrow. He pushed the door open, gestured at her. They went in.
The room was not very light. A small oblong reading lamp on the desk shed glow on polished wood, but less on the shabby red carpet, and the long heavy red drapes across the outer wall. The air was close, with a thick, sweetish smell of liquor.
Trimmer Waltz sat behind the desk with his hands touching a tray that contained a cut-glass decanter, some gold-veined glasses, an ice bucket and a siphon of charged water.
He smiled, rubbed one side of his big nose.
“Park yourselves, folks. Liqueur Scotch at six-ninety a fifth. That’s what it costs me—wholesale.”
Pete Anglich shut the door, looked slowly around the room, at the floor-length window drapes, at the unlighted ceiling light. He unbuttoned the top button of his coat with a slow, easy movement.
“Hot in here,” he said softly. “Any windows behind those drapes?”
The girl sat in a round chair on the opposite side of the desk from Waltz. He smiled at her very gently.
“Good idea,” Waltz said. “Open one up. will you?”
Pete Anglich went past the end of the desk, toward the curtains. As he got beyond Waltz, his hand went up under his coat and touched the butt of his gun. He moved softly toward the red drapes. The tips of wide, square-toed black shoes just barely showed under the curtains, in the shadow between the curtains and the wall.
Pete Anglich reached the curtains, put his left hand out and jerked them open.
The shoes on the floor against the wall were empty. Waltz laughed dryly behind Pete Anglich. Then a thick, cold voice said: “Put ‘em high, boy.”
The girl made a strangled sound, not quite a scream. Pete Anglich dropped his hands and turned slowly and looked. The Negro was enormous in stature, gorillalike, and wore a baggy checked suit that made him even more enormous. He had come soundlessly on shoeless feet out of a closet door, and his right hand almost covered a huge black gun.
Trimmer Waltz held a gun too, a Savage. The two men stared quietly at Pete Anglich. Pete Anglich put his hands up in the air, his eyes blank, his small mouth set hard.
The Negro in the checked suit came toward him in long, loose strides, pressed the gun against his chest, then reached under his coat. His hand came out with Pete Anglich’s gun. He dropped it behind him on the floor. He shifted his own gun casually and hit Pete Anglich on the side of the jaw with the flat of it.
Pete Anglich staggered and the salt taste of blood came under his tongue. He blinked, said thickly: “I’ll remember you a long time, big boy.”
The Negro grinned. “Not so long, pal. Not so long.”
He hit Pete Anglich again with the gun, then suddenly he jammed it into a side pocket and his two big hands shot out, clamped themselves on Pete Anglich’s throat.
“When they’s tough I likes to squeeze ‘em,” he said almost softly.
Thumbs that felt as big and hard as doorknobs pressed into the arteries on Pete Anglich’s neck. The face before him and above him grew enormous, an enormous shadowy face with a wide grin in the middle of it. It waved in lessening light, an unreal, a fantastic face.
Pete Anglich hit the face, with puny blows, the blows of a toy balloon. His fists didn’t feel anything as they hit the face. The big man twisted him around and put a knee into his back, and bent him down over the knee.
There was no sound for a while except the thunder of blood threshing in Pete Anglich’s head. Then, far away, he seemed to hear a girl scream thinly. From still farther away the voice of Trimmer Waltz muttered: “Easy now, Rufe. Easy.”
A vast blackness shot with hot red filled Pete Anglich’s world. The darkness grew silent. Nothing moved in it now, not even blood.
The Negro lowered Pete Anglich’s limp body to the floor, stepped back and rubbed his hands together.
“Yeah, I likes to squeeze ‘em,” he said.