Taco Noir (5 page)

              “You did, but what’s a little breaking and entering between old pals,” the reprobate asked. Jimmy Two-Fingers was a short, wiry little second-story man I knew from the neighborhood. I had known Jimmy for most of my life, back even when he was known as Jimmy Four-Fingers. He was a quick, graceful man who could make his way into a penthouse, clean the place out, and have a credible alibi before you knew you were missing Granny’s china.

              I reached towards a nearby lamp to turn it on, but Jimmy grabbed my arm before I could pull the cord. The effort took it out of me, so once again I renewed my close acquaintanceship with the couch.

              “Ixnay on the amplay,” said the burglar. He was fluent in Pig Latin. “I’m in the soup right now, and I need to be discreet.” It was news to me that Jimmy knew words like ‘discreet.’

              “Jimmy, I don’t suppose that you took the locked door as a sign that I wasn’t entertaining?” I groaned.

              “If you didn’t want to entertain no visitors,” answered Jimmy with a grin, “then you should get a better lock than that piece of cake you got on your door.”

              It was a valid point, and my gun wasn’t handy, so I conceded it. I watched as Jimmy found the seat that I usually reserve for the paying clientele and made himself at home. He took out a cigarette, lit it with a small chrome flip-top, and flicked it closed with one hand, which is no small feat when your nickname is “Two-Fingers.”

              “It all started when I did a B&E for Big Tommy Markowitz over on the West End,” said Jimmy, settling in to the tale as if he were reading a tyke “The Three Bears.”

              “And when did you start working for Big Tommy?” I asked. “The last I heard, you were strictly small time.”

              “Thanks,” said Jimmy, blowing smoke in my face. “I appreciate that.” I waved the puff of noxious fumes and told him to continue. “Big Tommy calls me up when he needs certain items… liberated from people who might have him in a compromising position.”

              “Oh dear lord,” I gasped, and tried to sit up. The congestion in my head told me otherwise, so we compromised and I raised my head slightly. “Tell me that you aren’t blackmailing Big Tommy Markowitz!”

              “I happen to be quite fond of my remaining fingers,” said Jimmy dryly. “I staked out the apartment of a small time operator who at this moment,” Jimmy rolled back a sleeve and checked his watch, “well, I’d avoid the fresh fish for a while if I were you.”

              “Sounds charming,” I said, my voice sounding as if it I had a bucket on my head. “Where do I come in?”

              “Well, as I retrieved the items for Big Tommy, I couldn’t help but notice that there were other subjects that had captured the artist’s eye.”

              “Don’t tell me,” I barked, my voice once again interrupted by rapid-fire coughing. I recovered my voice but not my common sense. “You helped yourself to a fistful of blackmail photos.”

              “I helped myself to some photos that would have done no one any good, now that the photographer was…?”

              “Chum?” I suggested.

              “Indisposed,” he offered. “Anyway, I couldn’t just let all those compromising pics just fall into the hands of some cleaning lady….”

              “Or police officer?” I asked.

              “Like the cops wouldn’t put the finger on some schmo stepping out on his Mrs.” said Jimmy. I’d had run-ins with some of the beat cops in the city, and I had to agree that Two-Fingers had a point. “I performed a public service and burnt the pictures.”

              “All the pictures?” I asked.

              “Well... most of the pictures,” Jimmy offered. I had a bad feeling that this was where yours truly fell into the picture. “Not everybody involved in this little blackmail scheme was exactly pure as the driven snow. I had a chance to flip through the photos and I found this little gem.”

              Jimmy passed me a picture and I did my best to reach for it. Kind soul that he was, Jimmy walked over to me and held it while my hands tried to catch up. I took the picture, and when it was done spinning, I was able to make out two faces, a man and a woman, in a passionate embrace. With all the leaves and vines in the foreground of the picture, it was easy to surmise two things.

One was that the photographer was a scumbag who made his way sandbagging people when they were at their most vulnerable. Whatever was happening to the parasite at the hands of Big Tommy Markowitz, while unpleasant, was richly deserved.

The other thing that jumped out at me was the mugs captured in mid-embrace. The woman’s face was well known to anyone who picked up a newspaper in the city, and not just on the society page. That woman was Ellie Danforth, and Ellie was a part-time saint and full-time fund raiser. She helped fund everything from hospitals, boy scouts, orphans, strays, and the occasional nun. She was widely regarded as the Florence Nightingale of a city that was woefully short on Florence Nightingales. But the picture also showed that Ellie Danforth had an Achilles’ heel. The man in the photo wasn’t Ellie’s husband. It turned out that the saint was just as human as the rest of us.

“So what do you want to do with this?” I asked Two-Fingers. In all the time I had known Jimmy, he had strictly been a second story man. In his line of work, he had the opportunity to run numbers, even a protection racket or two. Lots of things that would be easier on a man missing more fingers than he possessed, but Jimmy always passed them up. Now the opportunity of the big payday had come, and I was curious as to which of his angels the old burglar would listen to.

“From what I gathered, the scumbag who took these already had their hand in Mrs. Danforth’s pocketbook,” said Jimmy, looking as my carpeting as if the threadbare rug would come together and spell out the answer to him. Without looking up, it seemed as if the carpet gave him what he was looking for.

“She needs to know that she ain’t under this guy’s thumb anymore,” he said. “She needs to get this back.”

“Well, good luck getting it back to her,” I said. “Don’t let the door smack you on the keister on the way out.”

“Wattaya mean?” he asked. I guess that the rug had dummied up on him. “I did my part. Didn’t you see me have my moment just then? I gave the pics to you, and now you gotta get ‘em to her.”

I sighed as a rattling sound made its way through my chest and worked its way into a coughing fit. I closed my eyes and worked my way through it, and when I opened my eyes, Jimmy Two-Fingers was gone and I had a case.

During the last few years I had cultivated a long list of sources and informants, most of it through favors, intimidation, and good-old fashioned threats. In the past I had been able to track down fences, number runners, enforcers, and even the odd hit-man or two. When it came to tracking down saints, however, that was where the system hit a snag.

What I learned through my sources was that Ellie Danforth didn’t make bets with any of the bookies in the city, hadn’t tried to have anyone bumped off, wasn’t in the market to buy or sell hot merchandise, and wasn’t looking for any narcotics.

Sometimes when the pigeon I’m looking for has a taste for the finer things, I can take a peek at the society pages or lay a saw-buck across the palm of a greedy doorman or a desperate waiter. Even a tailor or jeweler could provide me with a something, but this case was going nowhere.  People in my line just didn’t know how to work with a “decent” human being.

For those cases, we usually just drank.

The park across the street from the Danforth residence was the pride of the city, and unlike the parks on my side of town, they actually had cops who patrolled the neighborhood. My head still pounded to beat the band and I was running a temperature, but I kept an eye on the mansion across the road. I also got run off so many times I was beginning to develop a case of athlete’s foot. Somewhere in my comings and goings the Danforths went on their merry way, and it took me three days before I got a solid bead on Little Ellie Danforth.

It turned out that Ellie volunteered time at the Sisters of Mercy, a hospital on the East Side, my neck of the woods and about a block from my office. I didn’t beat myself up too much over this. Whatever went on inside the minds of saints and do-gooders was foreign land.

The lobby inside the Sisters of Mercy was worn, beat, and would have lost in comparison with any hospital outside of a war zone. The line waiting for care was significant in both length and despair.  The nurse behind the desk looked as if she had experienced her fair share of misery as well, and when it came to my turn in line, she never bothered to look up.

“Uh…hello,” I said, channeling my inner Cary Grant. I eventually got the old maid to abandon her interest in the comics section and look up at me, my toothiest grin on display. I managed to turn her frown, but it became a sneer rather than a smile.

“Take a number,” she barked, pointing towards a wheel that one tends to find in your finer delis. I looked around the waiting room and decided that I might in fact be the sickest person in the group, so I did.

I waited for the nurse to call my number and, as I did, reluctantly made small talk with a codger who parked himself next to me. For a while he droned on about hemorrhoids, arthritis, and gout, and I silently prayed for my ears to congest as much as my nose. Eventually a candy striper stopped by and dropped off some magazines for the room. The old guy pounced on them like a cougar on venison, and when I reached for one of the magazines for myself, I got the stink-eye from the old coot.

“I’ll be done in a minute,” he squawked, and I pulled back my hand before any of the fingers went missing. Taking pity on me, the young candy-striper gave me a copy of the morning edition.

“This should hold you over for a while,” she said. “The doctor should see you shortly.”

I started to say thank-you to the young woman with the sing-song voice as I took a look at the young biscuit for the first time. She was an angel with raven hair, alabaster skin, and the rosy complexion of someone who didn’t spend their evenings in parks staking out do-gooder heiresses.

I’d seen the candy-striper before, and the pictures didn’t do her justice. She was Ellie Danforth.

“Mrs. Danforth?” I croaked, my question fading into a series of coughs and sputters.

“Why…yes,” answered Ellie, her angelic smile giving way to confusion as to how this scruffy stranger knew her name.

“Mrs. Danforth,” I sputtered, trying to catch my breath. I reached into the breast pocket of my jacket for the envelope that Jimmy Two-Fingers had provided me. “I have some pictures that were taken of you that you might be interested in.”

I don’t know what reaction I was expecting, but I wasn’t prepared for what I got. A quick shot to the chin proved to yours truly that just because a dame had been brought up in charm school didn’t mean that she couldn’t put a little shoulder behind a punch.

“You creep!” spat Ellie, her angelic face contorting to demonic. “I can’t believe that scum like you could be a brazen as to walk right into the Sisters of Mercy and try to put the touch on me!”

“No, wait,” I stammered, the pain in my head now fighting it out with the pain in my jaw. “You got it all wrong!”

“Billy! Tim!” she yelled into the nearby hallway. As if by magic two slabs of meat dressed in orderly’s whites appeared, and they didn’t seem to be the nurturing sort.

“Is this guy botherin’ you, Ellie?” said one of the slabs.

“This …gentleman needs to be escorted off the grounds,” said Ellie, her jaw as clenched as mine now was. “And you needn’t be delicate about it.”

I started to protest, but neither Tim nor Billy seemed to be open to debate. Working much faster than I would have thought men so large could work, Tim had one of my arms bent behind me and his free hand around my neck while Billy picked up my legs. Or maybe it was the other way around. Regardless of the order, the effect was the same. I was “escorted” to the side entrance where I was ejected from the Sisters of Mercy with particular care given to distance and propulsion.

I spent a few moments doing an inventory of the parts of my body that hurt, but gave up when I made it to the ache in my head. The unfortunate part of being thrown out of a hospital is that when it occurs, you are most likely to need one.

I sat down on the bench outside the hospital and planned my next move. The most prudent seemed to be going home, having a shot, hitting the hay, and then finding Jimmy Two-Fingers and smacking him about the head and upper torso. I suppose there must have been some comfort in the thought, because my eyelids fell like the stock market, and I drifted off to sleep.

“Excuse me?” said a voice, accompanied by a gentle nudge. I had fallen asleep on the bench, and rolled over onto my side. “Are you all right? Do you have a place to sleep?” It was a familiar voice in a tone much more pleasant than I had previously heard.

“Mrs. Danforth!” I gasped, turning over to face the young lady. Once again, her features changed from saintly to down-right homicidal.

“Oh, it’s you again,” she spat, backing up and looking around for what I assume was more simian orderlies. She had a small thermos in her hand, and I thought she was going to brain me with it as she turned.

“Wait, please,” I said, sitting up. “I’m not the mug who’s been trying to lean on you. I’ve been given these pictures and instructed to tell you that you don’t have anything to worry about. Your blackmailer is out of the picture.”

Words failed Mrs. Danforth as she opened the envelope and peeked inside. Almost dropping her thermos she quickly stashed the pics in her coat and pulled it closed as if they were gold.

“Is this on the level?” Ellie asked.

“Scout’s honor,” I said, getting to my feet before falling back to the bench. A salute was still a little too much for me. “A friend asked me to make sure you knew that you were out of the woods.”

“Oh thank you!” said Ellie, wrapping her arms around me and hugging me tightly. I felt the air rush from my lungs as the thermos dug into me and I wondered how a society dame had developed such strength. She quickly composed herself and straightened up as I got to my feet.