Dick Tracy (15 page)

“Get down!” he yelled back to the boy, instinctively, and he pushed Tess back, into the recession of the doorway, and Tracy covered her body with his as tommy-gun fire ripped open the night, bullets eating chunks out of the brownstone building; he caught sight of the black sedan as it rolled by, the barrel of the weapon snorting orangely, bullets biting into the building, the tommy gun held in obscure hands. He kept her covered with his body, and the tommy-gun chatter ceased, and he moved away from her, yanking his .38 from under his arm.

Then Tracy was standing in the street, watching the red taillights disappear.

He slipped the gun back in the shoulder holster, glanced at his car—saw no bullet holes in either the body of it or the windshield, saw the bright eyes of the apparently uninjured boy as he popped up in the front seat—and rushed to Tess, sat on the stoop with her, cradling her in his arms. She was trembling. So was he. “Are you all right, Tess? Are you all right?”

“I’m okay, I’m okay . . . is the boy . . . ?”

“I’m fine, lady,” the Kid said, standing there in his new suit and tie. He shrugged. “It’s just the clothes.”

Tracy laughed, and so did Tess.

The boy did, too.

But then the the smell of gunpowder, and the holes the bullets ate in the brick building reminded them that nothing was funny at all.

“Jeez,” the Kid said, eyes round more with wonder than fear, “I thought we was goners.”

“They’re just trying to scare us, Kid,” Tracy said, not believing it.

“Let’s go get ’em!” the Kid said eagerly. “What’re we waitin’ for?”

Two beat cops were approaching quickly on foot. One of them asked Tracy if he’d seen who the shooter was.

Tracy shook his head no. He spoke to them in a whisper: “Stick around here, boys, will you? A little protective custody for my girl.”

The two cops nodded; one said, “Sure, Tracy.”

Tracy walked Tess up the brownstone steps. “Sorry, honey,” he said, embarrassed, as if this were somehow all his fault. Maybe it was, at that.

“Don’t be,” she said gently. She had pulled herself together, somehow. “When you play in the streets, it’s all part of the game. I may not like it—but I know it.”

She touched his cheek, said, “Don’t worry about me, Dick,” and went inside.

Tracy returned to the dark street, collected the Kid, climbed in the car, and headed back to headquarters. There’d been no license plate on that sedan, but he could identify the make and model, and that was a start.

I
n a pool of light from his banker’s lamp, Tracy sat in his otherwise dark office, studying photos the boys from the Auto Theft squad provided him. He tapped one of them and smiled tightly; this was it: the make and model and year of sedan that the machine-gunner had fired from.

“Excuse me,” a voice said.

A sultry, female voice.

Tracy looked up.

Breathless Mahoney was standing in the doorway, draped against the doorjamb like a glamour pinup come to unlikely life. She was wearing a black satin gown, tight as her skin, trimmed with black feathers, a plunging neckline revealing a wealth of bosom and a slit up the front showing off one long, lush leg. In one hand, gripped by the neck, was a bottle of champagne; in the other, clutched by their stems, were two glasses.

In the hall, asleep on a bench, was the Kid.

“You caught me rehearsing,” she said, as if that explained her apparel. Her smile was a wispy, teasing thing. “So glad you called.”

“Why the champagne?”

She moved slowly into the room; she was catlike, languorous in a deliberate way. “Long as I was going to drop by, I thought I might as well help you celebrate.”

“Celebrate what, Miss Mahoney?”

“Being alive,” she said. “I heard you almost died this evening.”

“News travels fast in this town,” Tracy said. “Almost as fast as bullets.”

Catchem stuck his head in the door, made a slow, wide-eyed, appreciative survey of Tracy’s guest, then said, “One of the boys is makin’ a sandwich run at the deli over on Division. You want ’em to bring you back something, Tracy?”

“No thanks, Sam.”

Catchem raised his eyebrows. “Don’t do anything anything I wouldn’t do, children.”

And he closed the door.

She moved liquidly across the small office and perched herself on the edge of Tracy’s desk; she wore black spike heels that showed most of her pretty feet. “I have a feeling your partner’s admonition leaves us plenty of leeway.”

Tracy said nothing.

She set the champagne bottle on the desk, the glasses as well; they looked more than a little out of place amidst the cop clutter.

“I was beginning,” she said, “to wonder what a girl has to do in this town . . . to get arrested.”

“Wearing that dress,” Tracy said, “is a step in the right direction.”

She laughed. “Who’s the kid in the hall?” she asked, turning an arched eyebrow to the smoked-glass-and-wood door.

“Just a little street urchin I picked up. Trying to give him a break.”

“Cute.” She picked up Tess’s framed picture on the desk. “Also cute. Nice hair color.” She studied the picture. “She could use some help with her makeup.”

“I think she looks fine.”

She put Tess’s picture down. She gave him a look that would’ve fried an egg. “Are you going to make a move, or do I have to do it all?”

“I’m on duty,” Tracy said.

“Don’t you ever get a day off?”

“Sure. This isn’t it.”

Then she touched one finger to the cork of the champagne bottle. “If I open this, you think it’d wake the kid?”

“Miss Mahoney . . .”

“Breathless.”

“Breathless. We have regulations about alcoholic beverages in city buildings, and Central Police Headquarters certainly qualifies as a city building.”

“Oh, really?” she said. She reached for the bottle; her hands caressed the neck. Then, with sudden, masculine authority, she popped the cork. It sounded like a gunshot. She poured the overflowing bottle in one of the glasses and held the brimming glass out to Tracy.

He took it.

She poured herself a glass; she raised hers in a toast.

“Here’s to crime,” she said. “Where would you be without it?”

She clinked the glass against his.

“So. What do you want from me, Tracy?”

He pointed to the photo on the desk. “That car look familiar to you? Know anybody who works for Big Boy who drives a car like that?

She glanced at it, shrugged. “Not really. I’m more interested in drivers than cars.”

“Me, too.”

“Afraid I’m no help on that subject. That can’t be all you wanted . . . ?”

He reached in his desk, found what he was looking for, and dropped the item in Breathless’s drained champagne glass.

It was the blue sapphire earring.

“I had a lot of bad news today,” Tracy said. “But one small piece of
good
news: We identified you through the jeweler who sold you those earrings . . . though they were charged to the late Lips Manlis.”

She frowned. Then she slid off the desk, the dress hiking up as she did, showing him creamy white thigh. She strolled over and stopped in the doorway, her shapely backside to him. She looked over her shoulder at him and when she spoke, the words seemed ironic, but there was no irony in her voice.

“You’re right, Tracy. Why would you want to get mixed up with a cheap floozy like me? I’ll be lucky if I get through the week alive. They probably followed me here.” She laughed mirthlessly. She turned the champagne glass upside down and the earring tumbled to the office floor. “If you want to throw me in jail, go ahead. I’d probably be better off.”

And she drifted out.

Tracy got up, knelt and plucked the earring from the floor, and returned it to a small evidence envelope in his desk. Then he got his yellow topcoat and went out in the hall, where Catchem was discussing with Patton the vision of sensuality in the tight black gown who’d just exited past them.

Tracy gestured to the boy who still slept on the bench. “Keep an eye on him,” he told his two assistants.

“Where you goin’, Tracy?” Catchem asked.

“I’m going to follow her,” Tracy said. “That woman’s in trouble.”

“What?” Patton asked Tracy’s back, as the detective hurried down the hall.

“That woman
is
trouble.” Catchem smirked.

T
he conference table seemed endless, its surface as slick and reflective as glass, only red, a brilliant blood-red slash down the center of the room. The color seemed fitting, considering the amount of blood that had been spilled by the dozen gangsters seated there—amongst themselves alone.

Big Boy’s spacious office—a red art-deco chamber unchanged since the departure of its previous tenant, the late Lips Manlis—was on the third floor of the Club Ritz. Tomorrow night was the club’s grand reopening, but tonight was an even more special occasion.

Tonight Big Boy had gathered together the city’s crime lords, the aristocracy of the local underworld. Dressed to their yellow teeth in all their colorful, wide-lapelled glory, they sat glowering at each other, their respective bodyguards lining the walls, the tension tighter than piano wire in an assassin’s grip.

They were all present; a virtual Who’s Who of hoodlums: Pruneface—his long, grotesquely wrinkled mug a fright mask out of which cold dark eyes glittered—ran much of the Northside out of Ravenwood; Texie Garcia—ebony-haired, fortyish, witchily attractive in a slinky black dress—was the city-wide queen of prostitution; Northsider Lawrence “Acey-Deucey” Doucet, a razor-thin blond, had gambling in the suburbs sewn up; beaky one-time Big Boy gunman Ribs Mocca—looking sporty in his bowler hat and bow tie—now operated the city’s widest-spread protection racket; Southside boy Johnny Ramm—dark, dapper, mustached—owned nightclubs perhaps less grand than the Club Ritz but many in number; Ben “Spud” Spaldoni—who might have been Ramm’s brother—was the West Side slot-machine king. There were half a dozen dangerous more, seated at the blood-red table in the blood-red room, rivals in the business of crime, trading looks of suspicion and displeasure in strained silence.

Seated at the head, in a pinstripe suit as red as the table, and redder than the room, was the Big Boy himself. Smiling paternally, a thick Havana cigar in the corner of his thick lips, Caprice rose slowly and hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his vest. A gold watch chain draped itself across his belly. A carnation as red as the suit was snug in his lapel. An ashtray mingling cigar butts and walnut shells was set before him. Behind him were Itchy and several other bodyguards. Seated near him was his balding, bespectacled accountant, Numbers Norton.

“I suppose you’re wonderin’ why I asked you all here tonight,” Big Boy said grandly.

“We’re wondering,” Pruneface said, in a deep, gravelly voice that suited his hideously crêped face, “why a guy who just started a war would ask for a peace conference.”

“I didn’t start a war,” Big Boy said, smiling genially. He shrugged matter-of-factly. “Lips Manlis was importing torpedoes; he was the one getting ready to start a war. Against us all. I just took some, what do you call it . . . preventative measures.”

“Yeah, and you bring the heat down on us all,” Spaldoni said. He shook his head in undisguised disgust. “That’s just plain stupid, Big Boy.”

Big Boy frowned; but just momentarily.

Spaldoni went on. “A massacre like that, it gets Joe Q. Public all up in arms. Followed by a
cop
killing. It gets the newshounds up on their high horse. It makes the cops act crazy.”

“Yeah,” Mocca said. He chewed the end off his own cigar, definitely not a Havana, and spit it on the floor. “No offense, Big Boy—you and me go way back . . . but look at the way you got Tracy all hot and bothered. That’s all we need, is that guy throwin’ the book out the window.”

Big Boy frowned.

“I hear the bigshot flatfoot’s in trouble with City Hall,” Texie Garcia said, lighting up a cigarette in a long holder. “I think maybe he’ll take himself out of the game.”

“Don’t worry about Tracy,” Big Boy said. He smiled enigmatically. “I got him covered.”

The door behind him opened and Big Boy glanced back and saw Flattop enter; Flattop frowned and shook his head, no, at his boss. He was conveying, silently, the news that the hit on Tracy tonight had failed.