FIVE
The Negro in the checked suit sat on the side of the daybed and picked languidly at a five-stringed banjo. His large face was solemn and peaceful, a little sad. He plucked the banjo strings slowly, with his bare fingers, his head on one side, a crumpled cigarette-end sticking barely past his lips at one corner of his mouth.
Low down in his throat he was making a kind of droning sound. He was singing.
A cheap electric clock on the mantel said 11:35. It was a small living room with bright, overstuffed furniture, a red floor lamp with a cluster of French dolls at its base, a gay carpet with large diamond shapes in it, two curtained windows with a mirror between them.
A door at the back was ajar. A door near it opening into the hall was shut.
Pete Anglich lay on his back on the floor, with his mouth open and his arms outfiung. His breath was a thick snore. His eyes were shut, and his face in the reddish glow of the lamp looked flushed and feverish.
The Negro put the banjo down out of his immense hands, stood up and yawned and stretched. He walked across the room and looked at a calendar over the mantel.
“This ain’t August,” he said disgustedly.
He tore a leaf from the calendar, rolled it into a ball and threw it at Pete Anglich’s face. It hit the unconscious man’s cheek. He didn’t stir. The Negro spit the cigarette-end into his palm, held his palm out flat, and flicked a fingernail at it, sent it sailing in the same direction as the paper ball.
He loafed a few steps and leaned down, fingering a bruise on Pete Anglich’s temple. He pressed the bruise, grinning softly. Pete Anglich didn’t move.
The Negro straightened and kicked the unconscious man in the ribs thoughtfully, over and over again, not very hard. Pete Anglich moved a little, gurgled, and rolled his head to one side. The Negro looked pleased, left him, went back to the daybed. He carried his banjo over to the hail door and leaned it against the wall. There was a gun lying on a newspaper on a small table. He went through a partly open inner door and came back with a pint bottle of gin, half full. He rubbed the bottle over carefully with a handkerchief, set it on the mantel.
“About time now, pal,” he mused out loud. “When you wake up, maybe you don’t feel so good. Maybe need a shot … Hey, I gotta better hunch.”
He reached for the bottle again, went down on one big knee, poured gin over Pete Anglich’s mouth and chin, slopped it loosely on the front of his shirt. He stood the bottle on the floor, after wiping it off again, and flicked the glass stopper under the daybed.
“Grab it, white boy,” he said softly. “Prints don’t never hurt.”
He got the newspaper with the gun on it, slid the gun off on the carpet, and moved it with his foot until it lay just out of reach of Pete Anglich’s outfiung hand.
He studied the layout carefully from the door, nodded, picked his banjo up. He opened the door, peeped out, then looked back.
“So long, pal,” he said softly. “Time for me to breeze. ‘You ain’t got a lot of future comin’, but what you got you get sudden.”
He shut the door, went along the hallway to stairs and down the stairs. Radios made faint sound behind shut doors. The entrance lobby of the apartment house was empty. The Negro in the checked suit slipped into a pay booth in the dark corner of the lobby, dropped his nickel and dialed.
A heavy voice said: “Police department.”
The Negro put his lips close to the transmitter and got a whine into his voice.
“This the cops? Say, there’s been a shootin’ scrape in the Calliope Apartments, Two-Forty-Six East FortyEight, Apartment Four-B. Got it? … Well, do somethin’ about it, flatfoot!”
He hung up quickly, giggling, ran down the front steps of the apartment house and jumped into a small, dirty sedan. He kicked it to life and drove toward Central Avenue. He was a block from Central Avenue when the red eye of a prowl car swung around from Central on to East FortyEight Street.
The Negro in the sedan chuckled and went on his way. He was singing down in his throat when the prowl car whirred past him.
The instant the door latch clicked Pete Anglich opened his eyes halfway. He turned his head slowly, and a grin of pain came on his face and stayed on it, but he kept on turning his head until he could see the emptiness of one end of the room and the middle. He tipped his head far back on the floor, saw the rest of the room.
He rolled toward the gun and took hold of it. It was his own gun. He sat up and snapped the gate open mechanically. His face stiffened out of the grin. One shell in the gun had been fired. The barrel smelled of powder fumes.
He came to his feet and crept toward the slightly open inner door, keeping his head low. When he reached the door he bent still lower, and slowly pushed the door wide open. Nothing happened. He looked into a bedroom with twin beds, made up and covered with rose damask with a gold design in it.
Somebody lay on one of the beds. A woman. She didn’t move. The hard, tight grin came back on Pete Anglich’s face. He rose straight up and walked softly on the balls of his feet over to the side of the bed. A door beyond was open on a bathroom, but no sound came from it. Pete Anglich looked down at the colored girl on the bed.
He caught his breath and let it out slowly. The girl was dead. Her eyes were half open, uninterested, her hands lazy at her sides: Her legs were twisted a little and bare skin showed above one sheer stocking, below the short skirt. A green hat lay on the floor. She had four-and-a-half-inch French heels. There was a scent of Midnight Narcissus in the room. He remembered the girl outside the Surprise Hotel.
She was quite dead, dead long enough for the blood to have clotted over the powder-scorched hole below her left breast.
Pete Anglich went back to the living room, grabbed up the gin bottle, and emptied it without stopping or choking. He stood a moment, breathing hard, thinking. The gun hung slack in his left hand. His small, tight mouth hardly showed at all.
He worked his fingers on the glass of the gin bottle, tossed it empty on top of the daybed, slid his gun into the underarm holster, went to the door and stepped quietly into the hall.
The hall was long and dim and yawning with chill air. A single bracket light loomed yellowly at the top of the stairs. A screen door led to a balcony over the front porch of the building. There was a gray splash of cold moonlight on one corner of the screen.
Pete Anglich went softly down the stairs to the front hall, put his hand out to the knob of the glass door.
A red spot hit the front of the door. It sifted a hard red glare through the glass and the sleazy curtain that masked it.
Pete Anglich slid down the door, below the panel, hunched along the wall to the side. His eyes ranged the place swiftly, held on the dark telephone booth.
“Man trap,” he said softly, and dodged over to the booth, into it. He crouched and almost shut the door.
Steps slammed on the porch and the front door squeaked open. The steps hammered into the hallway, stopped.
A heavy voice said: “All quiet, huh? Maybe a phony.”
Another voice said: “Four-B. Let’s give it the dust, anyway.”
The steps went along the lower hail, came back. They sounded on the stairs going up. They drummed in the upper hail.
Pete Anglich pushed the door of the booth back, slid over to the front door, crouched and squinted against the red glare.
The prowl car at the curb was a dark bulk. Its headlights burned along the cracked sidewalk. He couldn’t see into it. He sighed, opened the door and walked quickly, but not too quickly, down the wooden steps from the porch.
The prowl car was empty, with both front doors hanging open. Shadowy forms were converging cautiously from across the street. Pete Anglich marched straight to the prowl car and got into it. He shut the doors quietly, stepped on the starter, threw the car in gear.
He drove off past the gathering crowd of neighbors. At the first corner he turned and switched off the red spot. Then he drove fast, wound in and out of blocks, away from Central, after a while turned back toward it.
When he was near its lights and chatter and traffic he pulled over to the side of the dusty tree-lined street, left the prowl car standing.
He walked towards Central.
SIX
Trimmer Waltz cradled the phone with his left hand. He put his right index finger along the edge of his upper lip, pushed the lip out of the way, and rubbed his finger slowly along his teeth and gums. His shallow, colorless eyes looked across the desk at the big Negro in the checked suit.
“Lovely,” he said in a dead voice. “Lovely. He got away before the law jumped him. A very swell job, Rufe.”
The Negro took a cigar stub out of his mouth and crushed it between a huge flat thumb and a huge flat forefinger.
“Hell, he was out cold,” he snarled. “The prowlies passed me before I got to Central. Hell, he can’t get away.”
“That was him talking,” Waltz said lifelessly. He opened the top drawer of his desk and laid his heavy Savage in front of him.
The Negro looked at the Savage. His eyes got dull and lightless, like obsidian. His lips puckered and gouged at each other.
“That gal’s been cuttin’ corners on me with three, four other guys,” he grumbled. “I owed her the slug. Oky-doke. That’s jake. Now, I go out and collect me the smart monkey.”
He started to get up. Waltz barely touched the butt of his gun with two fingers. He shook his head, and the Negro sat down again. Waltz spoke.
“He got away, Rufe. And you called the buttons to find a dead woman. Unless they get him with the gun on him—one chance in a thousand—there’s no way to tie it to him. That makes you the fall guy. You live there.”
The Negro grinned and kept his dull eyes on the Savage.
He said: “That makes me get cold feet. And my feet are big enough to get plenty cold. Guess I take me a powder, huh?”
Waltz sighed. He said thoughtfully: “Yeah, I guess you leave town for a while. From Glendale. The ‘Frisco late train will be about right.”
The Negro looked sulky. “Nix on ‘Frisco, boss. I put my thumbs on a frail there. She croaked. Nix on ‘Frisco, boss.”
“You’ve got ideas, Rufe,” Waltz said calmly. He rubbed the side of his veined nose with one finger, then slicked his gray hair back with his palm. “I see them in your big brown eyes. Forget it. I’ll take care of you. Get the car in the alley. We’ll figure the angles on the way to Glendale.”
The Negro blinked and wiped cigar ash off his chin with his huge hand.
“And better leave your big shiny gun here,” Waltz added. “It needs a rest.”
Rufe reached back and slowly drew his gun from a hip pocket. He pushed it across the polished wood of the desk with one finger. There was a faint, sleepy smile at the back of his eyes.
“Okey, boss,” he said, almost dreamily.
He went across to the door, opened it, and went out. Waltz stood up and stepped over to the closet, put on a dark felt hat and a lightweight overcoat, a pair of dark gloves. He dropped the Savage into his left-hand pocket, Rufe’s gun into the right. He went out of the room down the hall toward the sound of the dance band.
At the end he parted the curtains just enough to peer through. The orchestra was playing a waltz. There was a good crowd, a quiet crowd for Central Avenue. Waltz sighed, watched the dancers for a moment, let the curtains fall together again.
He went back along the hall past his office to a door at the end that gave on stairs. Another door at the bottom of the stairs opened on a dark alley behind the building.
Waltz closed the door gently, stood in the darkness against the wall. The sound of an idling motor came to him, the light clatter of loose tappets. The alley was blind at one end, at the other turned at right angles toward the front of the building. Some of the light from Central Avenue splashed on a brick wall at the end of the cross alley, beyond the waiting car, a small sedan that looked battered and dirty even in the darkness.
Waltz reached his right hand into his overcoat pocket, took out Rufe’s gun and held it down in the cloth of his overcoat. He walked to the sedan soundlessly, went around to the righthand door, opened it to get in.
Two huge hands came out of the car and took hold of his throat. Hard hands, hands with enormous strength in them. Waltz made a faint gurgling sound before his head was bent back and his almost blind eyes were groping at the sky.
Then his right hand moved, moved like a hand that had nothing to do with his stiff, straining body, his tortured neck, his bulging blind eyes. It moved forward cautiously, delicately, until the muzzle of the gun it held pressed against something soft. It explored the something soft carefully, without haste, seemed to be making sure just what it was.
Trimmer Waltz didn’t see, he hardly felt. He didn’t breathe. But his hand obeyed his brain like a detached force beyond the reach of Rufe’s terrible hands. Waltz’s finger squeezed the trigger.
The hands fell slack on his throat, dropped away. He staggered back, almost fell across the alley, hit the far wall with his shoulder. He straightened slowly, gasping deep down in his tortured lungs. He began to shake.
He hardly noticed the big gorilla’s body fall out of the car and slam the concrete at his feet. It lay at his feet, limp, enormous, but no longer menacing. No longer important.
Waltz dropped the gun on the sprawled body. He rubbed his throat gently for a little while. His breathing was deep, racking, noisy. He searched the inside of his mouth with his tongue, tasted blood. His eyes looked up wearily at the indigo slit of the night sky above the alley.
After a while he said husklly, “I thought of that, Rufe . You see, I thought of that.”
He laughed, shuddered, adjusted his coat collar, went around the sprawled body to the car and reached in to switch the motor off. He started back along the alley to the rear door of the Juggernaut Club.
A man stepped out of the shadows at the back of the car. Waltz’s left hand flashed to his overcoat pocket. Shiny metal blinked at him. He let his hand fall loosely at his side.
Pete Anglich said, “Thought that call would bring you out, Trimmer. Thought you might come this way. Nice going.”
After a moment Waltz said thickly: “He choked me. It was self-defense.”
“Sure. There’s two of us with sore necks. Mine’s a pip.”
“What do you want, Pete?”
“You tried to frame me for bumping off a girl.”
Waltz laughed suddenly, almost crazily. He said quietly: “When I’m crowded I get nasty, Pete. You should know that. Better lay off little Token Ware.”