Murder for Madame Page 18

  He led me behind the bar, close to the spot where the telephone sat on the ledge. It was a simple door, and I should have seen it when the bartender phoned him. A panel slid away to the right of the phone, but it operated on a doorknob. A tall man would have to stoop to get under the frame and into the small room beyond. Barchy and I did not stoop.

  The bartender brought us each a Tom Collins and crept away, sliding the door shut behind him. The room sat alongside a trick stairway that came out of nowhere at all in the ceiling. There would be a trap door upstairs, somewhere in Barchy’s business office, a hop, skip and jump from here. A small desk in the corner was littered with an assortment of papers and magazines, and the walls were spotted with photographs and news-clippings, all of them concerning theatrical personages of another era. The heat hung over us. And there was the flat, dank smell of old furniture here. Barchy reached behind him and flipped the switch to start a small fan moving. It did nothing but circulate the torrid air. A small bulb hung over the desk under a cracked green glass shade. Three flies were driving themselves crazy up there, circling and humming and buzzing. Nothing stirred but their singing wings. Nothing moved but a loose paper on the desk, riffled by the circling fan.

  “You look ready to bust,” Barchy said. “You got something for me?”

  “Everything.”

  He fingered his tie gently. He did not move in his chair. He was wearing a complete sports ensemble, gray jacket and light tan pants, a pale yellow silk shirt and a maroon tie. His collar was buttoned tight, but he did not sweat at all. Somewhere, back among his ancestors, the business of living with heat must have been commonplace. His face was freshly shaved and as cool-looking as an advertisement for the drink he was sipping. He put down the Tom Collins and leaned forward, burning me with his eyes.

  “The book, Conacher?”

  “We’ll have it soon.”

  “What have we got now?”

  “We’ve got this,” I said. And I showed him the bracelet, holding it up high so that the diamonds set up a sparkle under the electric glare.

  He reached up for it and I let him have it. He eyed it curiously, the slow light of recognition and remembrance kindling in his memory.

  “That’s Mary’s gimmick,” he said, not angrily, but with a fresh and sullen interest, like a small boy who finds a lost toy. His fist was tight on it and he opened his hand and tossed the bracelet up and caught it, not looking at it, not looking at me, but focusing his eyes on the woodwork behind me. “Where’d you get this ice?”

  “Krubaker.”

  “The fence? Who hocked it?”

  “Noonan.”

  I could hear his breathing behind the sound of the flies circling over his head. He got up, still holding the bracelet. He let the bracelet slide to the desk top. He was sweating now. His face tightened under the strain of some internal fire that was breaking him up, opening the pores along his upper lip so that the beads of upset glistened under the light. He sat down at last, stiffly and with a jerkiness I had never seen him display before.

  “Are you sure it was Noonan who hocked this?” he asked quietly.

  “Krubaker wasn’t lying.”

  “When did you see the fence?”

  “This morning.”

  “It fits,” said Barchy, a half tone above a whisper. “Noonan had a phone call this morning. Krubaker must have tipped him off.”

  “Noonan’s not around?”

  “Not since the call.”

  “Where would he go?”

  “You got me.”

  “You’re lying!” I shouted, on my feet now. “You’re covering for the bastard!”

  Barchy pulled back and away from the sight of my gun. I had it in close to him, where it would do the most good. I rubbed it against his yellow shirt, up high, near the heart. He was in the corner against the wall, his body stiff against the plaster, his eyes bunged down at the muzzle of the automatic. The sweat came through his fleshy face now. He was bathing himself in sweat, alive to the purpose in me.

  “You’re out of your head, Conacher,” he muttered. “I want him as bad as you do, remember? Why would I hire you to get me the little book? You think I was kidding when I came to see you? How in hell can a bright boy like you think so crazy? I want Noonan, I tell you. I want him worse than you.”

  “Who else would know about the book?”

  “Nobody. Noonan was my right hand.”

  “He didn’t seem that smart to me,” I said.

  “He’s smart, all right. He was smart enough to take my girl away from me, too.”

  “Where would he hide now?”

  “He won’t hide, Conacher,” Barchy said, still giving himself over to appraising the gun in my hand. “Noonan’s going to go out fighting. He’s a dangerous hood, one of the worst in the business. He’s on the prowl, if I know Noonan.”

  “On the prowl?”

  “For you, Conacher.” Barchy watched me now, and when my gun came down he licked his lips and seemed to sigh. “You’re the only man in town who’s wise to him.”

  “You and me both, King.”

  “He’s got me over a barrel, Conacher. And he knows it. If he has the book, he’ll hang me up on a meat hook with it. I can’t make a move until I get it back. Because if I do, he’ll sell it off to the highest bidder and then scram. You can’t suck me in on this.”

  “You’re in, King. You’re either in, or I turn the deal over to Doughty. You want that?”

  “What for?” he shouted. “Where will it get you, giving the dicks what you know?”

  “It’ll get me cooperation. Now.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Give me Noonan.”

  “I told you I don’t know where he is.”

  “Who are his pals?”

  “Nobody,” Barchy sighed. “Noonan didn’t make friends easy.”

  “Think!” I shouted. “There must be somebody in this deal with him. Which one of your boys would line up with the crumb?”

  “Nobody,” Barchy said again. He was mouthing the word hopelessly, as though it pained him to let me down. He was eating a bitter pill and it stuck somewhere in his craw and tightened the muscles of his face, flattening his sensual mouth, dulling his eyes and giving him the stiff, starched look of a man who has just buried a good friend. If he was acting, his act was good. “Honest to God, Conacher, Noonan didn’t have friend he could call his own—except me.”

  I got up and moved to the door behind the bar. I turned to him before I left and he was in the same pose, a beaten man, a man who wanted to be believed.

  “Honest to God, Conacher,” he said again. “I’m leveling.”

  CHAPTER 29

  I didn’t believe Barchy.

  I couldn’t afford to gamble on his honesty, despite the fact that his personality inspired trust and confidence. He could be covering for Noonan. He could have piloted me into the dusty room behind the bar so that Noonan could catch our dialogue from up above, at the trap door. In that case, Noonan would be well informed at this moment.

  So I sat in a small restaurant diagonally across the street from the Rebus and slurped my third glass of iced coffee. Through the dirty window, the canopy of the Rebus shone with an eerie glow, a glimmering spot of light in the summer night. I could see the bistro from a forced and queer angle. I nibbled a slice of Danish and beckoned the plump waitress behind the counter.

  “Fill her up again,” I said.

  “Not a chance, mister,” she said, not mad, but annoyed with me for interfering with her. feminine gymnastics before the mirror. She was adjusting her hair and face for the street. “You drank your last coffee. I’m closing up in ten minutes.”

  “You close early. It’s only ten. How about just one more?”

  “Early?” She laughed at her face in the mirror. “If I had a boss with a heart
, I’d be down at Coney right now. Only a heel would keep a joint like this open in such hot weather. Where does it get him, I ask you? All I sold the last hour and a half is your three coffees and a lousy Danish. For this I have to keep open?”

  I regretted her state of mind. The little place gave me an adequate view of the Rebus, from the edge of the canopy to the black line of the alley beyond. I had been watching the place impatiently, waiting for a sign of movement over there. There are times when the hunter must squat and listen for the quarry, biding his time until the leaves begin to rustle and the game moves out into the open field. I was fighting a battle with facts, struggling to fit Barchy into his proper place among the ideas simmering in my mind. But Barchy did not seem to work into the black pattern of my theories. Barchy did not move out of the Rebus. Nor did Noonan move in.

  I went to the phone booth and called Slip Keddy. But he knew little about the structure of Barchy’s empire.

  “How about a character named Louie?” I asked.

  “Louie Figgio? He’s a dead end, Steve. Lives over in Brooklyn—and has a wife and four kids. Simple family man when he’s away from Barchy’s racket.”

  “One of them must be a pal of Noonan’s. Who?”

  “From what I know of Noonan—nobody,” Slip said. “He’s a lone wolf type of hood.”

  “He’s a wolf who’s on the prowl—for me.”

  “Why don’t you give it all up and phone Doughty? He’ll pick the crumb up and book him.”

  “I want him booked for murder.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since this morning—when I grabbed the bracelet from Krubaker.”

  “And Noonan knows about this?”

  “He must have. Krubaker must have reached him. Noonan hasn’t reported to Barchy for duty as he usually does.”

  “He’s a bad apple, Steve,” Slip said, his voice alive with urgency now as he tried to talk me out of my purpose.

  I listened to Slip’s friendly advice, but my mind was off the beam because of the picture of Noonan that held my inner eye. The image of Noonan ripped at my sensibilities, stinging me into anger, heating me with a fevered anxiety to spring the trap on him, to get him where I wanted him. And on my own terms. There would be pleasure in facing up to him and smacking his handsome face until the sly smile faded. There would be joy, too, in wiping away the blossoming tension that had ridden with me since my interview with Krubaker. The sharp itch of my restlessness was soothed by the sound of Slip Keddy’s voice. But my eyes were being stimulated by the waitress outside the phone booth, fixing her hair in the mirror behind the food counter. I stared at her buxom frame, letting it play games with my intellect. She lifted her hands to her face and began to apply her lipstick, and in the mirror, her face was dull and tired until the color hit her lips.

  My mind loosened as I watched her.

  My mind sang with a cloying memory, a subtle pitch that was brought about by the impact of the scene before me. Sometimes the brain is a sounding board for the voice of memory. Sometimes the brain moved under a strange power, stimulated by a quick image or a quick sound. You walk down a street and observe the line of the rooftops and suddenly your mind slips backward into the distant past. You are on another street, in another town. You have been jerked back into the past by way of your optics. You have been transported over the edge of time into a memory so real that it seems alive. The waitress jerked my brain around. She was reminding me of another woman, in a similar pose.

  She was reminding me of Tiny.

  Slip was saying, “—and maybe you’d be smarter to think it over before hopping, Steve.”

  “I’m hopping right now,” I said. “I know where Noonan must be.”

  “How do you know?”

  “A little bird just sang for me, Slip. Noonan must be up at Tiny’s. I’m going up there to get him.”

  I left the restaurant carefully, casing the street before I stepped into the shadows. Above the Rebus, lights glowed on the second floor. Barchy would be up there, worrying about his little green book. I hugged the edge of the buildings, moving with a caution that I could not shake off, the bothersome surge of fear that brought my hand into my jacket pocket to feel the automatic. But the gun was no tonic for me. Fear is a deep-rooted annoyance when the hunter moves against a cunning adversary. Fear is the hot sweat of panic when the game can spring from a hidden corner. Noonan could be anywhere and everywhere. There were convenient rooftops from which a slug could level me. There were convenient alleys. Around and about me were parked cars, dark and dangerous because Noonan might be hidden in one of them, waiting for me. I skipped quickly along the edge of the shadows, moving faster now, anxious for the brighter lights of Lexington Avenue.

  I took a cab down to Forty-Sixth Street and got out at the corner of Fifth Avenue, hurrying down the block to the spot where Fider had watched Tiny’s place not too long ago. Her flat was lit. I ran to Sixth Avenue and into a drugstore.

  Tiny’s voice was sleepy on the phone.

  “I thought we had a date tonight,” I said. “You promised me a hot snack, remember?”

  “It’s just about ready for the fire.”

  “And how about you?”

  “I was napping a minute ago,” Tiny said. “But I’m not sleepy anymore. When will you get here?”

  “Sooner than you expect, lady.”

  “Are you near a liquor store?”

  “They’re all closed.”

  “I need some Scotch, Steve. There’s a bar and grill down the block on Sixth Avenue, a place called the Grotto. The bartender will sell you a bottle of Haig and Haig if you mention my name. Be a good boy and stop there for me, will you?”

  “Of course, Tiny.”

  So I didn’t visit the Grotto. Instead I ran back to Tiny’s and up the stairs, taking the steps in bounding leaps so that my breath was high and hollow when I finally stood before her door. And I listened, my ear to the key hole, like a two-bit detective in a musical comedy. From somewhere deep inside her flat came the sound of music—the radio, probably. A muffled band was playing a hot boogie number, and a feminine voice shrilled the lyrics in an off-beat shriek, loud enough to bury the sound that I was straining to hear.

  When I slid the door open, Tiny was standing at the far end of her living room her back to me. The telephone sat on a small table near the window, and it seemed to me that she was turning away from it at the split second of my entrance. Or was she only moving from the window? Her hand was up in a gesture that could have meant that she had been fiddling with the shade. And as my eyes absorbed the tableau, Tiny started for the other room. She had a cigarette in her hand and when she saw me, she snuffed it out hastily and started across the room toward me.

  And she said, “Steve! You sure got up here fast.”

  “I’m quick, like a rabbit.”

  “But you didn’t get the liquor,” she said petulantly.

  “The hell with the Scotch, Tiny. We won’t need it.”

  “You could be right,” she said, reacting to my lightness and gaiety with her usual laugh, deep and throaty and calculated to raise my blood pressure. She had on a new outfit tonight, another silken creation, a riot of color. Her slacks were a deep crimson, tailored to make her buttocks strain in the right places. Her blouse was cut of gossamer material, so thin and fluffy that it revealed the shape and texture of her body underneath. She moved close to me and put her arms around me, going through the gestures of helping me off with my jacket.

  “Take off your stuffy coat, Stevie. We won’t need it.”

  “Not yet,” I said. “I always eat with my jacket on. It’s a hangover from my childhood.”

  “You want to eat?”

  “That was the deal, wasn’t it?”

  “But it’s so hot,” she sighed. “I thought we’d maybe go out later.”

  “No home cooked grub?”<
br />
  “I can still manage it, if you insist,” she said.

  But she was making it tough for me to insist. She wanted to play. She had spread herself on the couch in a deliberate pose, like a bad actress in a melodrama, patting the coverlet beside her and closing her eyes in the sleepy signal of the professional tart.

  And her mouth was saying, “You don’t really want to eat now, do you, Stevie?”

  “You’re killing my appetite.”

  “Why not bury it over here?”

  “Not now.”

  “What are we waiting for?”

  “The right mood,” I said. “Maybe I’m not in the mood.”

  “I can fix that.”

  She leaned on an elbow and smiled up at me, showing me her good-natured smile, soft and tender. She patted the couch again and winked at me. “Come on over and try me.”

  “Talk to me first,” I said. “Talk to me about the Scotch.”

  “The Scotch?”

  “What was the gag about the Scotch?”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Stevie.”

  “I’ll break it down for you. You’ve got a cupboard full of the stuff. I saw it the last time I was up here. It made me wonder why you asked me to stop at the Grotto.”

  I caught her off guard, but she was quick and clever. She sat up and laughed to demonstrate her control of the situation. I had caught her in a lie and she would attempt to squirm out of it now. She would laugh for a long moment and turn the situation over in her fertile mind and come up with a perfect answer, a logical excuse for her request for more Scotch.

  “Make it good,” I suggested. “Make it a good pitch, Tiny.”

  “Pitch?” she asked, lifting her eyebrows to show me the hurt in her eyes. “I only wanted you to have a better brand of Scotch, that’s all. The stuff I have in that cupboard is pure rotgut.”

  “I didn’t mind it the other night. Why the sudden worry about my taste buds?”

  “Maybe it’s because I like you, Stevie.”

  “Nuts!” I was close enough to drop the word with the proper enunciation, a crisp and nasty breath of distrust that brought her head up. And it was loaded with sudden worry. I reached down for her arm and grabbed it and pulled her forward a bit. “I’ll tell you why you dreamed up the Scotch routine,” I said. “You were stalling me out on the street. You wanted me to take my time getting up here, wasn’t that it?”