The worn ostrich-skin wallet came out and a weedy five slipped acrosS the marble. “All I could shake him for,” Tony said loosely.
The clerk took the five and looked puzzled. “You’re the boss,” he said, and shrugged. The phone shrilled on the desk and he reached for it. He listened and then pushed it toward Tony. “For you.”
Tony took the phone and cuddled it close to his chest. He put his mouth close to the transmitter. The voice was strange to him. It had a metallic sound. Its syllables were meticulously anonymous.
“Tony? Tony Reseck?”
“Talking.”
“A message from Al. Shoot?”
Tony looked at the clerk. “Be a pal,” he said over the mouthpiece. The clerk flicked a narrow smile at him and went away. “Shoot,” Tony said into the phone.
“We had a little business with a guy in your place. Picked him up scramming. Al had a hunch you’d run him out. Tailed him and took him to the curb. Not so good. Backfire.”
Tony held the phone very tight and his temples chilled with the evaporation of moisture. “Go on,” he said. “I guess there’s more.”
“A little. The guy stopped the big one. Cold. Al—Al said to tell you goodbye.”
Tony leaned hard against the desk. His mouth made a sound that was not speech.
“Get it?” The metallic voice sounded impatient, a little bored. “This guy had him a rod. He used it. Al won’t be phoning anybody any more.”
Tony lurched at the phone, and the base of it shook on the rose marble. His mouth was a hard dry knot.
The voice said: “That’s as far as we go, hub. G’night.” The phone clicked dryly, like a pebble hitting a wall.
Tony put the phone down in its cradle very carefully, so as not to make any sound. He looked at the clenched palm of his left hand. He took a handkerchief out and rubbed the palm softly and straightened the fingers out with his other hand. Then he wiped his forehead. The clerk came around the screen again and looked at him with glinting eyes.
“I’m off Friday. How about lending me that phone number?”
Tony nodded at the clerk and smiled a minute frail smile. He put his handkerchief away and patted the pocket he had put it in. He turned and walked away from the desk, across the entrance lobby, down the three shallow steps, along the shadowy reaches of the main lobby, and so in through the arch to the radio room once more. He walked softly, like man moving in a room where somebody is very sick. He reached the chair he had sat in before and lowered himself into it inch by inch. The girl slept on, motionless, in that curled-up looseness achieved by some women and all cats. Her breath made no slightest sound against the vague murmur of the radio.
Tony Reseck leaned back in the chair and clasped his hands on his elk’s tooth and quietly closed his eyes.
THE KING
IN YELLOW
ONE
George Millar, night auditor at the Canton Hotel, was a dapper wiry little man, with a soft deep voice like a torch singer’s. He kept it low, but his eyes were sharp and angry, as he said into the PBX mouthpiece: “I’m very sorry. It won’t happen again. I’ll send up at once.”
He tore off the headpiece, dropped it on the keys of the switchboard and marched swiftly from behind the pebbled screen and out into the entrance lobby. It was past one and the Carlton was two thirds residential. In the main lobby, down three shallow steps, lamps were dimmed and the night porter had finished tidying up. The place was deserted—a wide space of dim furniture, rich carpet. Faintly in the distance a radio sounded. Millar went down the steps and walked quickly towards the sound, turned through an archway and looked at a man stretched out on a pale green davenport and what looked like all the loose cushions in the hotel. He lay on his side dreamy-eyed and listened to the radio two yards away from him.
Millar barked: “Hey, you! Are you the house dick here or the house cat?”
Steve Grayce turned his head slowly and looked at Millar. He was a long black-haired man, about twenty-eight, with deep-set silent eyes and a rather gentle mouth. He jerked a thumb at the radio and smiled. “King Leopardi, George. Hear that trumpet tone. Smooth as an angel’s wing, boy.”
“Swell! Goon back upstairs and get him out of the corridor!”
Steve Grayce looked shocked. “What—again? I thought I had those birds put to bed long ago.” He swung his feet to the floor and stood up. He was at least a foot taller than Millar.
“Well, Eight-sixteen says no. Eight-sixteen says he’s out in the hall with two of his stooges. He’s dressed in yellow satin shorts and a trombone and he and his pals are putting on a jam session. And one of those hustlers Quillan registered in Eighteleven is out there truckin’ for them. Now get on to it, Steve—and this time make it stick.”
Steve Grayce smiled wryly. He said: “Leopardi doesn’t belong here anyway. Can I use chloroform or just my blackjack?”
He stepped long legs over the pale-green carpet, through the arch and across the main lobby to the single elevator that was open and lighted. He slid the doors shut and ran it up to Eight, stopped it roughly and stepped out into the corridor.
The noise hit him like a sudden wind. The walls echoed with it. Half a dozen doors were open and angry guests in night robes stood in them peering.
“It’s O.K. folks,” Steve Grayce said rapidly. “This is absolutely the last act. Just relax.”
He rounded a corner and the hot music almost took him off his feet. Three men were lined up against the wall, near an open door from which light streamed. The middle one, the one with the trombone, was six feet tall, powerful and graceful, with a hairline mustache. His face was flushed and his eyes had an alcoholic glitter. He wore yellow satin shorts with large initials embroidered in black on the left leg—nothing more. His torso was tanned and naked.
The two with him were in pajamas, the usual halfway-goodlooking band boys, both drunk, but not staggering drunk. One jittered madly on a clarinet and the other on a tenor saxophone.
Back and forth in front of them, strutting, trucking, preening herself like a magpie, arching her arms and her eyebrows, bending her fingers back until the carmine nails almost touched her arms, a metallic blonde swayed and went to town on the music. Her voice was a throaty screech, without melody, as false as her eyebrows and as sharp as her nails. She wore highheeled slippers and black pajamas with a long purple sash.
Steve Grayce stopped dead and made a sharp downward motion with his hand. “Wrap it up!” he snapped. “Can it.. Put it on ice. Take it away and bury it. The show’s out. Scram, now—scram!”
King Leopardi took the trombone from his lips and bellowed: “Fanfare to a house dick!”
The three drunks blew a stuttering note that shook the walls. The girl laughed foolishly and kicked out. Her slipper caught Steve Grayce in the chest. He picked it out of the air, jumped towards the girl and took hold of her wrist.
“Tough, eh?” he grinned. “I’ll take you first.”
“Get him!” Leopardi yelled. “Sock him low! Dance the gumheel on his neck!”
Steve swept the girl off her feet, tucked her under his arm and ran. He carried her as easily as a parcel. She tried to kick his legs. He laughed and shot a glance through a lighted doorway. A man’s brown brogues lay under a bureau. He went on past that to a second lighted doorway, slammed through and kicked the door shut, turned far enough to twist the tabbed key in the lock. Almost at once a fist hit the door. He paid no attention to it.
He pushed the girl along the short passage past the bathroom, and let her go. She reeled away from him and put her back to the bureau, panting, her eyes furious. A lock of damp golddipped hair swung down over one eye. She shook her head violently and bared her teeth.
“How would you like to get vagged, sister?”
“Go to hell!” she spit out. “The King’s a friend of mine, see? You better keep your paws off me, copper.”
“You run the circuit with the boys?”
She spat at him again.
“How’d you know they’d be here?”
Another girl was sprawled across the bed, her head to the wall, tousled black hair over a white face. There was a tear in the leg of her pajamas. She lay limp and groaned.
Steve said harshly: “Oh, oh, the tornpajama act. It flops here, sister, it flops hard. Now listen, you kids. You can go to bed and stay till morning or you can take the bounce. Make up your minds.”
The black-haired girl groaned. The blonde said: “You get out of my room, you damned gumheel!”
She reached behind her and threw a hand mirror. Steve ducked. The mirror slammed against the wall and fell without breaking. The black-haired girl rolled over on the bed and said wearily: “Oh lay off. I’m sick.”
She lay with her eyes closed, the lids fluttering.
The blonde swiveled her hips across the room to a desk by the window, poured herself a full half-glass of Scotch in a water glass and gurgled it down before Steve could get to her. She choked violently, dropped the glass and went down on her hands and knees.
Steve said grimly: “That’s the one that kicks you in the face, sister.”
The girl crouched, shaking her head. She gagged once, lifted the carmine nails to paw at her mouth. She tried to get up, and her foot skidded out from under her and she fell down on her side and went fast asleep.
Steve sighed, went over and shut the window and fastened it. He rolled the black-haired girl over and straightened her on the bed and got the bedclothes from under her, tucked a pillow under her head. He picked the blonde bodily off the floor and dumped her on the bed and covered both girls to the chin. He opened the transom, switched off the ceiling light and unlocked the door. He relocked it from the outside, with a master key on a chain.
“Hotel business,” he said under his breath. “Phooey.”
The corridor was empty now. One lighted door still stood open. Its number was 815, two doors from the room the girls were in. Trombone music came from it softly—but not softly enough for 1:25 AM.
Steve Grayce turned into the room, crowded the door shut with his shoulder and went along past the bathroom. King Leopardi was alone in the room.
The bandleader was sprawled out in an easy chair, with a tall misted glass at his elbow. He swung the trombone in a tight circle as he played it and the lights danced in the horn.
Steve lit a cigarette, blew a plume of smoke and stared through it at Leopardi with a queer, half-admiring, half-contemptuous expression.
He said softly: “Lights out, yellow-pants. You play a sweet trumpet and your trombone don’t hurt either. But we can’t use it here. I already told you that once. Lay off. Put that thing away.”
Leopardi smiled nastily and blew a stuttering raspberry that sounded like a devil laughing.
“Says you,” he sneered. “Leopardi does what he likes, where he likes, when he likes. Nobody’s stopped him yet, gum-shoe. Take the air.”
Steve hunched his shoulders and went close to the tall dark man. He said patiently: “Put that bazooka down, big-stuff. People are trying to sleep. They’re funny that way. You’re a great guy on a band shell. Everywhere else you’re just a guy with a lot of jack and a personal reputation that stinks from here to Miami and back. I’ve got a job to do and I’m doing it. Blow that thing again and I’ll wrap it around your neck.”
Leopardi lowered the trombone and took a long drink from the glass at his elbow. His eyes glinted nastily. He lifted the trombone to his lips again, filled his lungs with air and blew a blast that rocked the walls. Then he stood up very suddenly and smoothly and smashed the instrument down on Steve’s head.
“I never did like house peepers,” he sneered. “They smell like public toilets.”
Steve took a short step back and shook his head. He leered, slid forward on one foot and smacked Leopardi open-handed. The blow looked light, but Leopardi reeled all the way across the room and sprawled at the foot of the bed, sitting on the floor, his right arm draped in an open suitcase.
For a moment neither man moved. Then Steve kicked the trombone away from him and squashed his cigarette in a glass tray. His black eyes were empty but his mouth grinned whitely.
“If you want trouble,” he said, “I come from where they make it.”
Leopardi smiled, thinly, tautly, and his right hand came up out of the suitcase with a gun in it. His thumb snicked the safety catch. He held the gun steady, pointing.
“Make some with this,” he said, and fired.
The bitter roar of the gun seemed a tremendous sound in the closed room. The bureau mirror splintered and glass flew. A sliver cut Steve’s cheek like a razor blade. Blood oozed in a small narrow line on his skin.
He left his feet in a dive. His right shoulder crushed against Leopardi’s bare chest and his left hand brushed the gun away from him, under the bed. He rolled swiftly to his right and came up on his knees spinning.
He said thickly, harshly: “You picked the wrong gee, brother.”
He swarmed on Leopardi and dragged him to his feet by his hair, by main strength. Leopardi yelled and hit him twice on the jaw and Steve grinned and kept his left hand twisted in the bandleader’s long sleek black hair. He turned his hand and the head twisted with it and Leopardi’s third punch landed on Steve’s shoulder. Steve took hold of the wrist behind the punch and twisted that and the bandleader went down on his knees yowling. Steve lifted him by the hair again, let go of his wrist and punched him three times in the stomach, short terrific jabs. He let go of the hair then as he sank the fourth punch almost to his wrist.
Leopardi sagged blindly to his knees and vomited.
Steve stepped away from him and went into the bathroom and got a towel off the rack. He threw it at Leopardi, jerk�d the open suitcase onto the bed and started throwing things into it.
Leopardi wiped his face and got to his feet still gagging. He swayed, braced himself on the end of the bureau. He was white as a sheet.
Steve Grayce said: “Get dressed, Leopardi. Or go out the way you are. It’s all one to me.
Leopardi stumbled into the bathroom, pawing the wall like a blind man
TWO
Millar stood very still behind the desk as the elevator opened. His face was white and scared and his cropped black mustache was a smudge across his upper lip. Leopardi came out of the elevator first, a muffler around his neck, a lightweight coat tossed over his arm, a hat tilted on his head. He walked stiffly, bent forward a little, his eyes vacant. His face had a greenish pallor.
Steve Grayce stepped out behind him carrying a suitcase, and Carl, the night porter, came last with two more suitcases and two instrument cases in black leather. Steve marched over to the desk and said harshly: “Mr. Leopardi’s bill—if any. He’s checking out.”
Millar goggled at him across the marble desk. “I—I don’t think, Steve—”
“O.K. I thought not.”
Leopardi smiled very thinly and unpleasantly and walked out through the brass-edged swing doors the porter held open for him. There were two nighthawk cabs in the line. One of them came to life and pulled up to the canopy and the porter loaded Leopardi’s stuff into it. Leopardi got into the cab and leaned forward to put his head to the open window. He said slowly and thickly: “I’m sorry for you, gumheel. I mean sorry.”
Steve Grayce stepped back and looked at him woodenly. The cab moved off down the street, rounded a corner and was gone. Steve turned on his heel, took a quarter from his pocket and tossed it up in the air. He slapped it into the night porter’s hand.
“From the King,” he said. “Keep it to show your grandchildren.”
He went back into the hotel, got into the elevator without looking at Millar, shot it up to Eight again and went along the corridor, master-keyed his way into Leopardj’s room. He relocked it from the inside, pulled the bed out from the wall and went in behind it. He got a .32 automatic off the carpet, put it in his pocket and prowled the floor with his eyes looking for the ejected shell. He found it against the wastebasket, reached to pick it up, and stayed bent over, staring into the basket. His mouth tightened. He picked up the shell and dropped it absently into his pocket, then reached a questing finger into the basket and lifted out a torn scrap of paper on which a piece of newsprint had been pasted. Then he picked up the basket, pushed the bed back against the wall and dumped the contents of the basket out on it.
From the trash of torn papers and matches he separated a number of pieces with newsprint pasted to them. He went over to the desk with them and sat down. A few minutes later he had the torn scraps put together like a jigsaw puzzle and could read the message that had been made by cutting words and letters from magazines and pasting them on a sheet.
TEN GRAND BY TH U RS DAY NI GHT, LEO PAR DI. DAY AFTER YOU OPEN AT T HE CL U B SHAL OTTE. OR EL SE—CURTAINS. FROM HER BROTHER.