The Paul Cain Omnibus (32 page)

The man in the dark-brown coat held the curtain aside with one arm and leaned against the side of the narrow doorway.

He said: “Hello.”

The other swarthy man was sitting next to the window, reading a paper. He put the paper down and looked up and his color changed slowly, curiously, until his face was almost as yellow and as green as his jauntily cocked hat. He did not speak.

From outside, the conductor’s voice came in to them: “All aboard… .”

The man in the dark-brown coat smiled a little; he whispered:

“Let’s walk back and look at the lights.”

The train began to move, slowly.

The other man’s empty eyes were on one of the big pockets of the dark-brown coat where something besides the big man’s hand bulged the material. He did not move, seemed incapable of moving.

The man in the dark-brown coat repeated: “Let’s walk back… .” Then he crossed swiftly and grabbed the other’s coat collar with his free hand and jerked him to his feet, shoved him to the door and out into the narrow corridor; they went towards the rear of the train.

They went through four cars, most of them with the berths made up and curtains drawn, encountered only a heavily breathing drunk in pajamas who had mislaid something, and two sleepy porters. The last car was partly compartments, partly observation car. As they entered it, a red-haired brakeman passed them without looking at them and went forward. They went to the observation rear end and the man in the green hat said: “This is far enough, Lew, if you want to talk.”

The man in the brown coat smiled. His right hand moved the coat pocket suggestively. He nodded his head sidewise, erupted, “Out on the platform, Gino. Then no one will hear us.”

Gino took one glance at the bulged coat pocket, and opened the door to the observation platform.

The train was just coming out of the tunnel to the elevated tracks and the rosy glow of midtown Manhattan was reflected by the gray wind-driven clouds. The wind slashed like an icy knife and green-hat mechanically turned up his collar, shivered violently.

Following him, the man in the dark-brown coat pulled the door shade down—both window shades were drawn—and closed the door tightly. He jerked his hand from his pocket. There was a momentary flash of something bright and glittering as he swung his hand up and down in a short arc against the other’s skull. The hat went whirling away into the wind and darkness and the man sank to his knees, toppled forward to crush his face against the floor.

The man in the dark-brown coat knelt beside him and went through his pockets swiftly, carefully. In the inside pocket of his suitcoat he found a thick packet of currency, slipped it into his own inside pocket.

A new sound, the faint stutter of an incoming train on the adjoining track, grew above the roar of the wind. The man glanced ahead, around the corner of the car, seemed for a moment to be calculating the distance away of the approaching headlight, then stooped again, swiftly.

Hurriedly he stripped off the man’s overcoat, then his own. He struggled into the former—a rather tight-fitting tweed Chesterfield—and somehow forced the other man’s arms and shoulders into his own big dark-brown camel’s hair; then he finished transferring the contents of his own inside pockets—several letters, a monogrammed cigarette case and other odds and ends—to the inside pockets of the unconscious man.

The stutter of the approaching train grew to a hoarse scream. He boosted the limp body onto his shoulder, stood up, and when the blinding headlight of the train on the adjoining track was about twenty-five or thirty feet away, he dumped his burden over the side-rail of the observation platform down onto the track in front of the onrushing locomotive.

Then he turned swiftly and went back through the observation car. As he reached the third car forward the train slowed and he heard a far-off voice shout:

“Hundred an’ Twenty-fifth Street.”

When the train stopped and a porter opened the doors of the vestibule between the third and fourth car, the man, now in a tightfitting tweed Chesterfield, swung off and sauntered down the stairs that led from the station to the street.

As he crossed the street towards a cab he heard the conductor’s thin far-off wail above the wind: “All aboard… .”

He climbed into the cab, snapped: “Three thirty-two West Ninetieth—and make it fast.”

Green lit a match and examined the mailboxes carefully. The second one on the left rewarded him with a dingy label upon which:

john darrell sallust

paula sallust

had been typewritten in bright-blue ink.

He rang the bell under the label and after a minute the lock of the outside door buzzed; he went in and climbed two flights of narrow stairs to Apartment B5. The door was ajar; he knocked and a man’s high-pitched voice called:

“Come in.”

Green went into a very large and bare studio, dimly lighted by two floor lamps in opposite corners and a small but very bright desk lamp on a wide central table.

The high-pitched voice: “Well, Mister Green—this is an unexpected pleasure.”

Green took off his hat and went to the wide table. He bowed slightly.

“Might you, by any chance,” he inquired blandly, “have been out this evening—since, say eleven o’clock?”

John Sallust was a thin, consumptive-looking Englishman with a high bulging forehead, stringy mouse-colored hair, and cold gray eyes, so light in color that they appeared almost white. He sat straddling a chair, his chin resting on his clasped hands on the back of the chair.

“I not only might have,” he said evenly—“I was. I only got home about a quarter of an hour ago.”

Green glanced at the square heavy watch on the inside of his left wrist; it was fifty-two minutes after one.

Sallust turned his head. “This is Paula, my sister. This is Nick Green. You’ve probably heard me speak of him.”

She was half sitting, half lying on a low couch against one of the long walls of the room, a very dark, very diminutive girl with porcelain-white skin, a deep-red mouth and large oddly opaque eyes.

She nodded and Green bowed again slightly.

“We went to a theater.” She sat up slowly. “We went to a theater and John brought me home afterwards—it must have been about ten-thirty—and then he went for a walk.”

Green smiled. “That’s simply dandy. Now, if you two can jump into your hats and coats and the three of us can get out of here in about one minute flat”—he raised one snowy eyebrow and grinned at Sallust—“you won’t have to take another of those very unpleasant trips to jail.”

Paula leapt to her feet, almost screamed: “Jail!”

Sallust’s thin face twisted to a wry smile. “You choose a rather bizarre time to joke, Mister Green,” he said softly.

Green was looking at his watch. “Maybe in two minutes,” he whispered as if to himself.

Paula crossed to him swiftly.

“What are you talking about?” she gulped. “What is it?”

“I haven’t time to tell you about it, now. Take my word for it that the Law will be here in a split-jiffy to arrest your brother for the murder of Bruce Maccunn and a half dozen or so innocent bystanders. Let’s go first and talk about it afterwards… .”

Sallust did not move. His eyes moved swiftly to his sister once, then back to Green. He muttered: “No.”

Green stared at him blankly. “No? No what?”

Sallust shook his head a little. “I returned three days ago,” he said gently, “from the better part of five years in prison, I was as I believe you call it, framed. I was accused by lies, tried by lies, convicted by lies… .”

He cleared his throat and straightened in the chair, gazed very intently at Green.

“I know you very slightly, Mister Green. I have been led to believe at one time or another that you are in some way sympathetic to our cause, but I have just returned from a painful five-year lesson in misplaced trust. I do not know what you are talking about, now, but I know that I have done no wrong and I shall stay exactly where I am.”

It was entirely silent for a moment and then Paula’s voice rang softly, tremulously: “Perhaps you’re making a mistake, John. Mister Green is—” She stopped.

Green put his hand up and rubbed the heel of it slowly down the left side of his face. His eyes were fixed more or less vacantly on a small turkey-red cigarette box on the table. Very suddenly he went forward and as Sallust sprang to his feet, Green’s arm moved in a long looping arc, his knuckles smacked sharply against Sallust’s chin; Sallust crumpled and fell to his knees, clutched blindly at the chair, went limp.

Paula was too surprised to scream, or move; she stood with her hands to her mouth, her great eyes fixed on Green in startled amazement.

Green mumbled, “Sorry,” shortly, stooped and swept Sallust’s slight figure up into his arms and moved towards the door. “Come on,” he grunted over his shoulder, “and make it snappy.”

She followed in stunned silence; at the door he turned and jerked his head at her coat and she took it up from a chair and put it on like a somnambulist motivated and moved by something unknown, something irresistible.

The bleak Greenwich Village street was deserted; Green carried Sallust across the glistening sidewalk and put him in the car, hurried around to climb in behind the wheel. Paula stood hesitantly on the sidewalk; the cold air had brought back her momentarily dimmed senses and she reflected that it was not too late to scream, reflected further, after glancing up and down the street, that it was more or less useless. She got into the car and closed the door, put her arm around Sallust and waited.

Just east of Eighth Avenue, Green slowed and pulled over to the curb to allow two speeding police cars to pass, then turned and watched them skid to the curb outside the building where the Sallusts lived.

He grinned at Paula. “My timing wasn’t so hot,” he observed. “The Law was about three minutes less efficient than I figured.”

She turned from watching the men swarm out of the cars and run into the house. Her inclination to scream was definitely gone; she tried to return his smile.

“What is it all about?” she whispered. “I don’t understand… .”

“Neither do I yet.” He let the clutch in and the car rounded the corner, whirred north on Eighth Avenue. “I’m sorry I had to resort to that to get your brother out, but I thought he got a raw deal before and I want to do what I can to prevent his getting another one. After five years on the inside he shouldn’t mind a sock on the jaw if it saves him even one night in the cooler.”

Green’s apartment was on East Sixty-first; the elevator boy helped him with Sallust, who was beginning to stir and moan feebly; Green explained that he was very drunk and when they reached his apartment on the top floor they put Sallust on one of the divans in the huge living room. The elevator boy went away.

Green turned to Paula. “He’ll be all right in a little while,” he said. “The main thing is that he’s not to show up outside of this place until certain matters—I’m not quite sure what, yet, so I can’t tell you about them—are straightened out. Do you trust me enough to help, and to see to it that he stays here?”

She nodded.

Green smiled slightly. “Your word?”

She nodded again, returned the faint shadow of a smile.

He went towards the door.

“I’ll be back or give you a ring as soon as I can. Make yourself at home. If you get hungry or thirsty try the icebox.”

He went out and closed the door.

Downstairs, he admonished the night clerk. “There’re a man and woman in my apartment and I want them to stay there. I think they will, but if they get tough call Mike and let him handle them.”

The clerk nodded; he was accustomed to more or less curious orders from Mister Green. Mike was the janitor, a husky Norwegian who had performed odd jobs of a strong-arm nature for Green upon more than one occasion.

Green turned in the doorway. “And if they make any telephone calls, keep a record of who they call and what they have to say.”

The clerk nodded again. Green went out into Sixty-first Street and walked to a drugstore.

At eighteen minutes after two the phone on Blondie Kessler’s desk jingled cheerily for the tenth time in twenty-five minutes.

He whirled from his typewriter, picked up the receiver and yelped: “Hello.”

Green’s voice hummed silkily over the wire: “How many more identifiable pieces have they dug out of Tony’s? And how’s that red-hot Kessler theory coming along?”

Kessler scowled sourly into the transmitter.

“That Kessler theory is holding its head up and taking nourishment very nicely, thank you!” he barked with elaborate irony. “We found a chunk of the fuse with a foundry label on it, a place in Jersey—”

Green interrupted: “Don’t tell me. Let me guess… . Sallust used to work there, or anyway, he used to live in Jersey, or maybe he went to Jersey once to visit his aunt.”

Kessler snorted: “All right, all right. I say Sallust is a cinch for this job, you say not. I’ll bet—I’ll bet you fifty dollars.”

Green snapped: “Bet.”

Kessler cackled shrilly. “The clincher is that Sallust and his sister took a powder about a minute and a half before the boys in blue swept in. Their next-door neighbors heard them go out and from the timing it looks like it was a tip.”

Green sighed. “Maybe I’m the bedbug, after all,” he murmured. “And how about my first and most important question—what else have they dug up?”

“Nothing more that they could make sense of. They’ve got a lot of arms and legs that might have been Gino or Costain or who-have-you.” Green’s voice droned on: “I’m still curious about whether Gino and Costain got to Tony’s before the fireworks. Has anybody tried to locate them?”

“Uh-huh. Gino was supposed to leave for Boston on a late train, after he went to Tony’s. A business trip according to his wife. She don’t know whether he reached Tony’s or whether he made the train or not. She’s going nuts. Then I reached Costain’s girl and she said Lew started for Tony’s about midnight, said he was going to stop by a couple places first. She hasn’t heard from him since. She’s jumping up and down and yelling and screaming, too, and calling me back every two minutes.”