Long Live the Dead (12 page)

P
ippo’s lunch cart has the best coffee you ever tasted, and he deals it to you by way of his black-eyed daughter Anna who stands five-three and has a smile that wide.

I slupped the coffee and thought things over. This wasn’t an ordinary case of detecting. There are standard jobs and there are crazy quilts. In the former you smell along a given trail knowing more or less what ought to be at the end of it. You just keep on smelling until you uncover the source of the stench. But in this particular job there were too many possible angles. Smells emanated from it the way tentacles curl out from an octopus.

First-off the world was never going to miss Vanetti. The air would be cleaner with him underground. And I could name at least ten persons to whom his demise would bring a great big belly laugh. So without any deep thinking at all you could practically fill a phone book with the names of suspects.

And then again maybe Vanetti’d really hung himself.

I drank a second mug of coffee just to see Anna Pippo smile at me. Jojo Evans slid onto the stool beside me. “There’s going to be hell to pay,” he said. I glared. “Why?” “Nick Lomac didn’t ask to have you fired. I eavesdropped.” “Why should he ask to have me fired?” “He’s sore.” I said, “That guy is always sore. He just hops from one

sore spell to another. Last week he burned up because a right guy got elected to fill that vacancy on the school committee. The week before that he had pups because Mitchell Brothers got the contract for that high school.”

“Only this time,” Evans said, “he didn’t blow up. He didn’t shoot off his mouth.” He gave me a fishy stare. “I’m only the police photog man but I know this time, Thompson, that it goes a lot deeper. The Lomac guy actually told the Chief to lay off you. Said you only did what you thought was your duty.”

“Real nice of him,” I snapped.

Evans reached across me for the sugar. “You keep out of dark alleys, cop. You watch your step.”

I didn’t think much about it. There was too much else on my mind. “You get those pictures finished yet?” I asked.

He shook his head. I dropped my check into his coffee and walked out and drove up to Ancell Street, to the rooming house where Mr. Leon Vanetti had committed suicide—perhaps.

It was a crummy dive, as you’d expect in a neighborhood like that. The name of Ancell Street got to be so bad at one time that respectable residents at the cleaner end of it petitioned the city fathers to change its label. Mrs. Fretas’ rooming house offered its high class tenants a nice respectable view of a dump on one side and an abandoned brewery on the other.

The downstairs door was open and I walked in. The door of the landlady’s apartment was open, too. Mr. Fretas was parked in a rocking chair in his shirtsleeves, reading a paper, and the missus was jammed into another chair, the whole two hundred and fifty pounds of her, peeling spuds.

I told her I was going upstairs to have another look around.

“Sure,” she said. Her old man didn’t even look up.

Vanetti’s room was second floor front, and when I got into it I just stood there looking around, wondering why I’d come. It wasn’t anything I could put a finger on, but that room fascinated me, just the way certain scenes in a movie do things to you. As a room it was worth just about what Vanetti’d paid for it—four bucks a week. The bed was up against one wall, a seedy green carpet covered the floor, and the furniture was heavy old-fashioned stuff salvaged from a junk store somewhere.

I felt dumb, gaping there. Something in that room was getting me down. I walked around it slowly, poking at the bed, the bureau. I hefted the chair which Jojo and I’d found overturned on the floor. I decided what the hell, maybe I was crazy. But still I couldn’t shake that feeling.

I hiked downstairs again, and Mrs. Fretas was still peeling potatoes. I sat down, envying her old man because he looked so all-fired comfortable. A spud dropped with a noisy plop into Mrs. Fretas’ bucket of water and I asked:

“Did Vanetti have many phone calls?”

She blinked her eyes at me. She had a face like an inflated basketball and her eyes were like imperfections in the leather. “Phone calls?” she echoed. “Why, no, I don’t think so, officer.”

“Who was the girl called him last night? Know?”

She shook her head, very solemn. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Did she ever call before?”

“No. No girl ever call him before, which I know of.”

“And she didn’t give her name, hey?”

“She just say, ‘Please, I wish to speak with Mr. Vanetti. You call him to the phone, please.’”

I was wasting time. Still, that phone call could have been important. I wondered if by any streak of long-shot luck I’d be able to trace it.

There was another angle, though, which might prove to be more valuable at the moment. I lit a cigarette, watched the skin curl off a potato for a moment, then said: “You have keys to most of your rooms, don’t you, Mrs. Fretas?”

She said, “Yes,” and labored around to point to a row of hooks on the wall. Each hook held a couple of keys and the keys were tagged.

“Did Vanetti lose his keys very often?”

“Oh, no. Just once.”

“You remember exactly when that was?”

I didn’t think she would, but after scowling at a potato for a couple of minutes, she surprised me. “Today,” she said, “is Thursday. Now let me see. Mr. Vanetti, he kill himself yesterday, which is Wednesday. The day before that I go to the movies with Mrs. Molinoff. That is Tuesday. So it is Monday Mr. Vanetti lose his key.”

“Monday, hey?”

“Monday. I am sitting here reading the noosepaper. My husband, he is go out for some beer. It is maybe ten o’clock when Mr. Vanetti comes in. He goes straight up the stairs. Then he comes down again and he says, ‘Mrs. Fretas, I lose my key I am afraid. You give me another, please, and tomorrow I get a new one made for myself and give your key back to you.’ So I give him my key and he goes upstairs again.”

“Ten o’clock Monday night, eh?” I said. “I don’t suppose you’d have any idea where he went that night.”

She shook her head. “No-o. He go to the doctor that afternoon, I remember, because his leg trouble him. But where he go at night …” She shrugged her shoulders.

I almost had it then. The reason for my queer ideas about that upstairs room, I mean. The doctor. Vanetti’d been to a doctor because his leg troubled him. A couple of years ago Vanetti’d been banged up in an automobile accident which had left him with a limp.

I almost had it. It came up to me like a wave on a beach whispering closer, closer, and then suddenly receding without having washed out the cobwebs in my brain. Like a name you almost but can’t quite remember. Like a strain of music or a voice on the telephone. Close but not quite.

I closed my eyes and conjured up a mental picture of Vanetti as I remembered him: Small, thin, ratty in face and figure, dipping along like a two-wheeled cart with one wheel off center. I made fists of my hands and tried to force my brain to think through that last thin layer of mist. But it was no go.

I sat there, struggling, then gave it up. You can put yourself in a chuckle college that way. I stood up and said good night to Mrs. Fretas and her old man and walked out of there, my face so full of scowl that it ached.

I
t was all over town of course that Vanetti’d committed suicide and that didn’t help me a bit. When I asked my questions I got a flock of negative head-shakes for replies and I put those questions to citizens who couldn’t possibly have been so void of information. I asked bartenders in joints where Vanetti had hung out. I asked men who had palled around with him. They just didn’t want to remember. Had any of those mugs seen Vanetti Monday night? Hell no!

I made a nuisance of myself for two days. I covered the town like an epidemic, visiting every possible place the guy could have been to. But he hadn’t been anywhere. So far as Monday night was concerned Vanetti could have hung himself Monday morning.

I had a talk with Bill Donahue who’d sat in on my little conference with Nick Lomac and my Chief. Bill didn’t get around much lately. A siege of the flu had taken plenty out of him, and the doctors had warned him to ease up. But he still had the best brain in the department. Put that guy flat on his back, lop off his arms and legs, and with his brain alone he could solve more cases than most of the healthy lads who do their thinking on the hoof. Including me.

He heard me out and then spent a long time looking at me, with a solemn frown on his rugged face. Finally said, “Why don’t you drop this business, Thompson? After all, Vanetti was just a heel. No one misses him.”

“And besides,” I said, “I have no proof he was murdered. I can’t even convince myself.”

“Huh?”

“You’re telling me,” I said, “what Joe Evans told me. Keep out of dark alleys. Pull in my horns before someone breaks them off and rams them down my throat. Okay, Bill. You want me to go on living, and I like you for it. On the other hand I’m single—no wife, no kids—and I’m an insatiable glutton for punishment. And this thing has me goofy.”

He did his best to dissuade me, and he failed. I’m a sap. I’m a dope. I’m always going into barrooms and gulping down some screwy concoction the barkeep claims will knock your hat off.

So Bill said, “Well, if you must find out where Vanetti was Monday night, try number 10 Casavant Street. And be careful.”

I thanked him. On my way I bumped into Jojo Evans. “Listen, you,” I snorted. “When do we get a look at those pictures of the room and body?”

“I’m gonna do them up tonight,” he informed me.

I told him he’d better.Then I drove out to Casavant Street.

You wouldn’t expect to run into a mugg like Vanetti at Number Ten Casavant. We have a Social Register in our town, and a lot of those lads with too much money and nothing to do like to play around; and Number Ten Casavant is where they do it.

What I mean, you have to be properly dressed, properly named and quite properly heeled; otherwise your ambitions are deflated at the front door and you are reminded that for ordinary bums like you there are beer joints, bowling alleys and backroom crap games.

The police shut both eyes when looking in that direction. It would have been voluntary suicide for any mere cop to get tough with that glittering collection of money-changers.

I spoke to Paul, the gate-keeper. I said, “How’s everything tonight, Paul?” and he said, “Oh, so-so. Quiet.” I’d been there before. Venny Hamlin was always very nice to cops, provided the cops were nice to Venny.

“Mr. Hamlin around, Paul?” I asked.

Paul nodded.

I strolled in, and at that hour the place was a morgue. A couple of blue book ladies were sipping cocktails at the fancy bar, and off in a corner four well dressed men were silently playing with a deck of cards, and that was all. I hiked along a soft red carpet, went down the hall to Venny Hamlin’s office and knocked.

Venny was a bit surprised when I entered. He arched his eyebrows and said, “Well I! My friend, Detective Thompson!” He pushed a box of cigars toward me, leaned back in his chair and frowned. “Sight-seeing or what?”

“Sleuthing,” I said.

“Here?”

“I’m as surprised as you are. The tip almost floored me.”

He hung onto his scowl. It didn’t mean anything. Venny Hamlin was really a good egg when you got to know him. No gangster background, no gutter upbringing. Out of college four years ago, he’d chauffeured for some old gal with a heap of bank books. This Number Ten Casavant Street was a natural outgrowth of a dawning realization that the money-money people didn’t mind losing a few dollars if they could be entertained while parting with them.

I said, “Strictly off the record, Venny, I’m checking the activities of one Leon Vanetti. He was here Monday night.”

“Leon Vanetti? That the Vanetti who hung himself?”

I nodded.

“I don’t think I know him.”

“You might not, by name,” I told him. “But he was here Monday night. Bill Donahue says he was here, and Bill’s never wrong.”

Venny shrugged.

“Listen,” I said, and described Vanetti. Described the face, the form, the limp. The limp did it.

“Right,” Venny admitted. “He was here.”

“Who brought him?”

“Why?”

“Just curious.”

He hesitated, looking very thoughtful. “Thompson,” he said finally, “you don’t want to know the answer to that.”

“Why don’t I?” I snapped.

“Look. This Vanetti is gone, forgotten. From what I’ve read in the papers, he won’t be missed any more than a case of smallpox. You, Thompson, you’re a good guy, a smart dick. You’ve got a future. You take my advice and drop this. There’s nothing in it for you except trouble some night in a dark alley.”

It was funny, and I don’t mean humorous. Joe Evans had handed me that same line; now I was getting it from the sachem of a gambling casino. Lay off.

I didn’t press him for more. I knew one thing, anyway, and it was big enough to chew on for a while. I said, “Well, thanks, pal,” and walked out.

Business, I noticed, was picking up. There were three more cars outside now than when I’d entered.

I piled into my own jalopy and drove back to town, slowly, thinking about Leon Vanetti and his limp, and that room at Mrs. Fretas’ place. I had a lot to think about, and I must have driven three miles before I waked up to the fact that someone in a machine behind was more than a little interested in me.

I slowed to a nice smooth twenty on a four-lane highway. By rights the fellow should have whizzed past. He didn’t. I reached up, tipped the rear-view mirror to a better angle and hoofed the jalopy up to forty. He came right along.

One of Venny Hamlin’s men? I didn’t think so. True, Venny had gently tried to nudge me off this job, and perhaps he had other reasons than an interest in the future state of my health, but this particular bit of play was crude. Venny Hamlin was never crude.

I did my level best for a mile to make that lad go by me, so I could get a look at his face, but it didn’t work. When I slowed, he slowed. When I stopped—just once, as an experiment—the louse pulled off into one of those shady glens built by WPA to accommodate neckers and picnic hounds.