Shake a Crooked Town (4 page)

“Jesus!” It was a breathy rasp from behind Johnny. The lieutenant knelt up on the floor with a.38 special in both hands trained steadily on the body on the floor. When it didn’t move Dameron spared a hand to rub the base of his neck. “Slip inside and call in on your phone,” he mumbled hoarsely to Johnny.

• • •

Lieutenant Joseph Dameron sat slumped in the depths of Johnny’s armchair, a drink in his hand. His red face looked shiny. He glanced at Johnny lying on the bed with his hands clasped loosely behind his head. “My damn neck feels like a truck ran over it,” he complained.

“Why the hell is it you get a carpet to fall on and I get the sidewalk?” Johnny inquired from the bed.

Dameron started to reply and then sat up straighter as the same lean-faced medical examiner Johnny had seen earlier entered the room. “Well, Frank?” the lieutenant asked.

“Why don’t you run a shuttle service over here?” the medical examiner demanded irritably. He set down his bag.

“What about that one in the hall, Frank?”

“Deceased. Violently. Neck broken. Back broken. Minor fractures. Lesions, contusions, and abrasions. Face about obliterated. Identification will have to be from his prints. This hotel running locomotives down its corridors?” No one answered him. He shrugged, picked up his bag and bounced it against his thigh. “Should I take a look at you, Lieutenant?”

“I’m all right, Frank,” Dameron said. “Thanks. Thanks just the same.” The medical examiner departed and the lieutenant raised his glass toward the bed. “Just like Europe, by God. Killain to the rescue in the nick of time. Where was the camera and the man with the megaphone?”

“I wish I’d had a camera to get the expression on your tomato puss when you came up for air,” Johnny said. He rolled up on an elbow and looked at the chair. “Like the time they cornered us in the cave outside Florence. You were the same ripe shade of kelly green when you found twenty cases of dynamite and realized the assorted loose lead they’d wafted at us had chipped a few splinters off the boxes.”

Lieutenant Dameron grunted and took a long pull at his drink. “Reminds me, I had a card from Jimmy Rogers,” he said when he put down his glass. “Before he left on vacation he told me the only reason he was still around was that you’d stepped in and taken a slug intended for him.”

“Then he told you a damn lie. Jimmy doesn’t need me to hold his end up an’ you know it.” Johnny leveled a finger at the chair. “You know that this guy out here thought it was me, don’t you, Joe?”

“Thought it was you?” Dameron’s eyes narrowed. “Why do you say that?”

Johnny bounded from the bed and went to the armchair. He placed his sleeve alongside Dameron’s. The material was different but the color was a match. “He thought it was me,” Johnny repeated. “That was my boy from up the street back to finish the job. He didn’t see your face till your hat fell off. From the back we’re a size except your most recent forty pounds is lard. I keep tellin’ you but you don’t listen: someone’s afraid of what Thompson might have told me.”

“Can you identify him?”

“With no face? The rest of him fits.”

“I can’t see it, Johnny. What’ll you bet his prints make him an inside worker?”

“A hotel thief who jumps a man right out in the open? Why did he go for you, Joe?”

Dameron hesitated. “I tell you I don’t believe it,” he said finally. “You’re—”

“Joe.” The lieutenant fell silent at the stark monosyllable. Johnny stared down at him. “You don’t believe it, or you
won’t
believe it? I already told you I talked to Toby Lowell today. Did you? Did you get another call beside the one that sent you over here? Are you holdin’ the lid on something?”

“You know me better than that. Where murder is concerned I keep the lid on for nobody.”

“Nobody?” Johnny asked him softly. “Nobody, Joe?”

The lieutenant surged to his feet impatiently. “Nobody. You’re trying to make an Everest out of an anthill.” He put down his glass and started for the door. “There’ll be an inquest on this, but it will only be a formality. You’ll have to keep yourself available, though. I’ll let you know when it comes up.” He walked rapidly from the room, closing the door.

Standing in the room’s center Johnny pounded a knuckled fist into the opposite palm in disgust. So he had to keep himself available, did he? The hell he did. The next time someone made a move from the darkness, or the rear, Johnny Killain was not going to be a sitting duck.

He went to the closet and changed clothes hurriedly. He counted his money and shook his head disparagingly. If he just hadn’t left that damn envelope lying out in the open he’d have been in good shape. He needed a fresh bankroll.

He put out the light and left the room.

J
OHNNY WENT DIRECTLY
to the switchboard in the lobby. He looked at his watch as he approached it. Sally Fontaine’s face lighted up when she saw him but Johnny hurried to get in the first word. “Do me something, ma. It’s only an hour to daylight. Cut out of here an’ shoot over to the apartment. An’ listen. I’ve got a bag in the cloakroom. Tan, with no ticket on it. Take it with you. If anyone asks you when I leave here what this conversation was about steer him into left field.
Anyone
, y’hear? I’ll see you at the apartment in thirty minutes.”

“But Johnny, I’ll have to get someone to relieve—”

“Get Marty,” he cut her off. “He’s finished his transcript by this time. An’ hustle it up, ma. Tell ‘em you got the gal-lopin’ wobblies an’ got to get home.” He walked away from her before she could protest again.

Out on the street he turned west as he had a few hours before. Quite a bit had taken place in those few hours. He walked lightly, out toward the curb. He watched the doorways. He watched his reflection in the windows across the street. No one stepped suddenly from a doorway. No one came up on him from behind. His eyes raked the street. Since the advent of Carl Thompson that afternoon someone was taking a sudden and unhealthy interest in Johnny Killain.

At Eighth Avenue he turned right and in the middle of the block saw the green-neoned outline of the crude boulder advertising Mickey Tallant’s Rollin’ Stone Tavern. The sky was streaked with gray and Johnny realized that the temperature had dropped considerably. New York in October wasn’t going to stay warm. He wondered if he had a coat at Sally’s apartment.

At the tavern, he pushed inside through a heavy plate-glass door and advanced on a redfaced Irishman behind the horseshoe bar. Mickey Tallant was a beefy man with short, thick arms and big-knuckled sledgehammers attached to the ends of them. He had no hair at all, a ravaged kewpie-doll face, and a cauliflower ear. A damp white towel encircled his ample girth. At sight of Johnny he reached behind him on the back bar for a bottle and then caught himself. “Even for you I’m not blowin’ my ticket, man. Whyn’t you get around before closin’? I’m just about to put up the shutters.” His voice was a surprising tenor.

“I don’t want a drink, Mick. You got any money?” The Irishman lifted his apron to get at his hip pocket. “Money,” Johnny said with emphasis.

“Oh. Okay.” The tavern owner turned and started to waddle up the duckboards to a door at the end of the bar marked OFFICE.

“An’ Mick, where can I get a coat?”

Mickey Tallant halted in his tracks. “For Christ’s sake, did your room burn up? You got more clothes ‘n the Salvation Army.”

“I don’t want to go back to the room.” Although he’d seen no sign of a watcher, Johnny reflected.

The Irishman nodded wisely. “Money, an’ a coat. You’re runnin’. From the cops? You belted one, maybe?”

Johnny shook his head. “I got a look at a hole card in a fresh game, Mick.”

“No kiddin’?” The tavern owner looked eager. “I could stick my old lady behind the mahogany here an’ go with you. Could be you’ll need someone knows how to throw a punch, man.”

“Then I’d rather have your old lady.”

“Is that so?” Mickey Tallant began indignantly, and foundered on Johnny’s grin. “What are you up to? Are you bein’ followed?”

“If I am it’s a good job. How about that coat?”

“You haven’t got a prayer. Coat sizes to include a twenty an’ a half inch neck an’ a fifty inch chest don’t grow on trees.” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I’ve got a leather jacket out in back you could probably get into, though.”

Johnny looked at the beer barrel upper body of the man behind the bar. “Fetch it out with the geld, Mick.”

“Sure.” The Irishman was back in two minutes and handed Johnny an expensive-looking black leather jacket studded with silver trimmings.

Johnny looked at the gaudy ensemble. “You in your second childhood? Where’s the motorcycle goes with this thing?”

“I just happen to like it,” Mickey Tallant said placidly. “Don’t you let nothin’ happen to it. I paid a hundred forty fish for that jacket.”

“Then you’re out of your damn mind.” Johnny tried it on. It was a little short in the waist but the shoulders were all right. And it was fleece-lined and warm. He removed it and put his suit jacket back on. “Okay. You sold me. Where’s the lettuce?”

“In the jacket. I stuck it in an envelope.”

“Today I’m allergic to envelopes all of a sudden.” Johnny removed the envelope from the jacket and the money from the envelope and spread a sheaf of bills on the bar. “What the hell?” he said as he saw tens, twenties, and hundreds. “How much is here?”

“About three thousand. If you run short get on the phone—”

“Three
thousand
? You lunatic, all I need is about three hundred. Here—” Johnny tried to separate some of the bills.

Mickey Tallant caught his wrist. “Take it,” he said brusquely. “You don’t know what you’ll need. Jesus, I’d give a farm to be goin’ with you. I wouldn’t give a damn if it was to Australia.” He looked at Johnny hopefully. “All I’d need would be twenty minutes to get the old lady over here an’ I’d be on my way.” He wadded up the money and thrust it at Johnny.

“Man, you’re three-to-five to win the Poorhouse Derby in a pulled-up trot.”

“Shut up. I owe you a favor, an’ if I’ve got to stand around here listenin’ to my arteries harden at least I can finance a little action.”

Johnny put the roll in his pocket and raised his hand in a half salute. “Well, keep punchin’, Mick.”

“
You
keep punchin’. An’ if you run into a buzzsaw you call the Mick.”

Johnny left the tavern with the silver-studded leather jacket on his arm. He walked over to Broadway and caught a south-bound cab to the apartment. Full dawn was not far away when he let himself in quietly. His eyes felt as though they had been sandpapered.

Sally was asleep sitting up in a living-room chair. She was in robe and slippers and Johnny’s bag lay open at her feet. Johnny picked her up and sat down in the chair with her on his lap. Her eyes flew open. “Johnny, why are your clothes in that bag? Are you going somewhere?” she began immediately.

“Not if anyone asks you, ma.”

“Does Dr. Randall know about it?” Her brown eyes probed at him. “You know he prescribed a rest. What—”

“I’m restin’, an’ I’m not married to Doc Randall. Have I got any clothes over here?”

“I’ll look. There’s pajamas, I know.”

“Pajamas I got no time for.” Johnny dropped his head and lipped at her neck. “Ever.”

“Stop it, Johnny.” He could feel the little shiver that rippled through her. The slim body moved uneasily on his knees. “I don’t think you ought to be going anyplace. You’re barely out—”

“You’re outvoted, ma, two forty to a hundred. Pounds. How about the clothes?”

She slid from his lap and caught sight of the jacket Johnny had dropped on a couch. “What in the world is that?” She picked it up, held it up by the shoulders an instant, and slipped it on over her robe. The bottom hit her at the knees and the sleeve-ends hid her hands completely. Johnny burst out laughing at the small-featured bright face above the huge jacket as she pirouetted before him. “What’s so funny? What is it, a disguise?”

“For you it would be, sure as hell.” Johnny rose and captured the jacket, swinging Sally off her feet and up into his arms. He carried her into the bedroom and stood her up in the center of the bed while he removed the jacket.

“I haven’t looked for your clothes,” she murmured as her robe followed the jacket.

“Forget it.” He picked her up by the elbows and set her down on the floor. “Maybe I could use this.” He whisked her nightgown up around her shoulders.

“Johnny!” she cried out, her voice muffled as he pulled it over her head. He dropped the nightgown, boosted her slender whiteness aloft and tossed her onto the bed. Before she had bounced twice he was beside her. She snatched off a slipper and flailed away at him. “You—big—walrus!” she panted, and yelped as he inserted a finger in her ribs. “Johnny! No tickling!”

“Say somethin’ now, ma,” he said deeply as he tucked her down beneath his weight. “Say somethin’ now.”

A long-drawn, hissing inhalation was his only answer.

There was no further conversation in the bedroom.

• • •

Late afternoon sunlight bathed the Albany terminal as Johnny alighted stiffly from a Greyhound Scenicruiser. He had been awake for twenty-four hours, and he felt it. He could have gone straight on to Jefferson in the same bus but he had decided against it. No one should be looking for him in Jefferson, but if they were the bus terminal would be watched.

On the ride up he had dozed fitfully without getting any real rest and thought his way around in circles. The role of Micheline Thompson bothered him. The timing of her call to him and the call to the police bothered him. Was it possible she’d known all the time that her husband was already dead? Johnny didn’t like to think so.

Had she collaborated with Daddario to call him down to the Manhattan where he could be looked over at close range by Kratz and Savino who could then step down to the street to engineer the first attempt on Johnny’s life? The possibility left a bad taste in his mouth.

He remembered Micheline Laurent in the hands of a German corporal screaming a warning to Johnny Killain to save himself. Could such a girl sell out her husband? The answer should be in Jefferson, along with the people who seemed determined that Carl Thompson’s story should end with Johnny Killain.

In the terminal washroom he changed from his wrinkled suit to slacks, a wool shirt, and Mickey Tallant’s leather jacket. He had already felt the nip in the northern air. Back upstairs he asked directions and caught a local bus to Jefferson.

It bumped along interminably, stopping at everyone’s back door. When it finally descended a long hill Johnny could see the city in the valley below. Smoke poured from tall chimneys. There was industry in the valley. He left the bus a few blocks short of the business district and walked toward it slowly. It looked clean and had an air of liveliness although an occasional gap toothed empty storefront indicated a worm or two in the local economic apple.

He bought a paper at a corner newsstand. He had already decided he didn’t want to stay at a hotel and he was in the process of folding the paper back to the classified section when the caption beneath a front page picture caught his eye. “Mayor Richard Lowell turns first shovelful of earth in groundbreaking ceremonies for new—”

It surprised him. Lowell. Mayor Richard Lowell. And Jefferson was Toby Lowell’s home town. Johnny looked closely at the picture of a big, openfaced hearty-looking man smiling into the camera, an expensive-looking shoe atop a silvered shovel. There was no resemblance that Johnny could see, but a man might go broke in a hurry bucking the odds on it’s being a coincidence.

Toby Lowell. Toby hadn’t said a word about a Richard Lowell. After Johnny’s Washington phone call, Toby Lowell had known where to find Carl Thompson. And someone had very definitely found Carl Thompson not so long afterward. Had Toby made a call to the man who had found Thompson? Had he made another to Dameron? Something certainly seemed to have frozen the lieutenant to his hotel thief theory.

Johnny took another look at the smiling face of the big man on the front page of the paper and put the paper under his arm. He turned off the main street and walked cross-town, away from the solid business district. As soon as he nested in someplace he intended to pay a call at City Hall. Mayor Richard Lowell might be able to contribute something to the picture.

In eight or ten blocks he had moved out of the banked lineup of stores. In the new neighborhood only an occasional corner grocery appeared among houses and apartments. A sign in a downstairs window across the street caught his eye. ROOMS. He crossed the street. It was close enough to downtown without being downtown. He climbed five stone steps fronting an old-fashioned Georgian house and rang the bell.

He had to ring it again before it was opened by a thin-faced woman with a mass of red hair loosely knotted atop her head. She wasn’t young but the hair looked natural, Johnny decided. She had on blue jeans and a man’s white shirt. She carried a dustmop in a work-reddened hand and shrewd blue eyes took Johnny in from head to foot. Her eyes came back to the silver-studded jacket and finally to his face. “I’d like to see a room,” he told her.

She let him in. “Construction worker?” she asked over her shoulder, leading the way through the front hall.

“I’ve done it,” Johnny said. He followed her up the front stairs. He noticed that if her face was sharply-angled her figure was not. She moved lightly, with grace.

He set down his bag with his suit draped over it in the room to which she took him. He walked to the bed and sank both hands into it, deeply. The mattress was all right, not too soft, firm without being rigid. The room had two windows and the light was good. The carpeting was worn. The furniture was just furniture. He turned and crossed the hall to the bathroom he had seen on his way in. He looked for an outlet for his electric shaver and tested the shower. Everything looked clean. He returned to the bedroom. “How much?” he asked her.

She had been standing leaning on her mop, her eyes following his inspection. “I allow no liquor in here,” she said. Her tone was matter-of-fact. “And positively no women.” The dust mop lifted itself from the floor and pointed itself in Johnny’s direction. “And if you think I’m talking just to hear myself talk you can think again.” Her glance brushed over the leather jacket again. “Fifteen a week.”

“Twelve,” Johnny said.

“Twelve it is,” she said amiably. “I’m Mrs. Peterson.” She held out her hand.

Johnny gave her twelve dollars. “Johnny Killain,” he said before he thought. He shrugged mentally. It probably didn’t make too much difference. He took the paper from under his arm and showed her the picture on the front page. “I used to know a Lowell in Washington whose home town was Jefferson,” he said casually.

“Dick’s got a brother in Washington, but he’s a big shot in the State Department.” Mrs. Peterson’s intonation clearly expressed her belief that Johnny couldn’t be expected to know a big shot in the State Department. “Dick’s not the man Toby was, or their father, either. It’s probably just as well old Mr. Lowell passed on.”