Hard Case Crime: Baby Moll (11 page)

“I don’t know anything about him but this: he’s a chunky little guy, about five eight or so. Likes sharp clothes. Wears a sky blue hat with a light-colored band. He likes shotguns, too. If you know him from that it’ll be a miracle.”

He stared down into his glass. “I was vice squad for fifteen years,” he said. “I knew every gun in town. Intimately.”

“How long you been busted?”

“Five months. Like I said, I knew ’em all. I knew everybody who came to town five minutes after they got off the plane. I knew Pete Mallory, too,” he said, glancing up. “Even the ones who kept clean. I had to know. That was before I got busted. I was a conscientious bastard.”

“Who’s this one?”

“I think I know, but I could be wrong.”

I grinned at him. “Sure. Fifteen years on the same beat. You could be wrong.”

He grinned back sourly. “His name’s Winkie Gilmer. A Southern boy, from Birmingham. Connected with Holtz in Buffalo once. Then a hired gun out of Cleveland for two years. Drifted in here seven months ago and caught on right away at Zavelli’s luxury resort up the beach a few miles. Neptune Court. He don’t do nothing much but sun himself and make out with the women. He disappears now and then for a week, ten days. Probably still freelances. He’s twenty-four. He may have killed a dozen men.”

“What’s his talent?”

“Chiv.”

“Thanks.”

He poured himself another. “Don’t mention it.” He looked at me again, briefly. “You used to be up real high with Macy Barr. I thought you were out of that kind of work. I knew about you, but I never had the pleasure. Not that it’s any pleasure.”

“It gets into your blood, doesn’t it?” I said.

“What?”

“The poison you make. Why keep the badge around? Think you might get to wear it again sometime?”

“Get out,” he said dully.

“Okay.” I stood up and walked around the bed. Then I stopped and reached for my wallet.

“I don’t need it,” he said. He looked around the room. “I got plenty.”

“You gave me information I needed.”

“I didn’t do you no favor,” he said. He laughed in an
ugly way. “This Gilmer is tough. He don’t goof his jobs.”

“He goofed one, or I wouldn’t be talking to you now.”

I got as far as the door this time. Then I swung around and his eyes were on me. They were the only bright spots in the dingy room.

“I hope you kill him,” he said. “But only because it’ll save some cop the trouble.”

“You’re all heart,” I said.

He showed me his teeth. “I’m just a big, wonderful sucker,” he said. “I could have made lieutenant. The only trouble was, I beat the hell out of my superior. Now why would I do that?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said.

He looked down into the glass. “He was only making love to my wife,” he said with a little sob. “Big hairy slob making love to my wife. No reason for me to smash his face for him, just over a little bit of tail that never was any good anyway.” He began to laugh, rocking a little on the bed. “I could of been a lieutenant.”

“Don’t feel so bad,” I told him. “Maybe somebody else will make you an angel.” I shut the door as I went out. Rose sat with the puppy on the kitchen floor. I thanked her politely as I opened the door and started my descent down the back steps.

The sun was beginning to drop like a flat stone in deep water. I figured Gilmer could wait another hour. I wanted a shower and something to eat. It would give me an excuse to use the room I had bought for the mention of Macy’s name. I wondered what else his name was buying these days. Not much, probably.

On my way to the hotel I stopped off long enough to buy a gun and some shoulder leather from a pawnshop owner who specialized in supplying iron to those who couldn’t show a license. I knew all sorts of useless people like that. At the Coral Gardens I parked in the restricted zone under the eyes of a cop. He wasn’t interested. I went on in and upstairs.

I was dressing after my shower when the phone rang.

“Yeah?”

“It’s Macy, Pete. I thought you might be at the hotel. What’s new?”

“I lucked out of a bomb try this morning, The boy who set the trap might be an ex-Cleveland hood named Winkie Gilmer. Apparently somebody’s nervous about me looking around for the one survivor of the fire. Her name is Carla Kennedy. She’d be about thirty now.

“You’ve got a lead on her?”

“Yes. I won’t know where she is until tomorrow night, though.”

“How did you come up with this Gilmer?”

“Mostly luck. An ex-cop told me about him.”

“What’s Gilmer like?”

“I haven’t met him yet. He’s supposed to be tough. I’ve been warned off him. Strictly a hired gun. I’m interested in who hired him. He can’t be very bright to wear a hat like that on a job. He might as well have had on a neon necktie.”

“It sounds like a good break. Play it cool, Pete. You’ve been away a long time. Listen, stop by Stan’s Restaurant and see if Diane is there.”

“She hasn’t showed up yet?”

“No. She sent the kid home with Taggart this afternoon. Aimee’s cranky from those shots she got this morning. Tell Diane to pick up a car at the hotel and come on home. I don’t like her wandering around after dark, anyway.”

Stan’s Restaurant was a low modern building with a curved roof and a front of thin orange bricks, fluted aluminum, chrome and glass blocks. His name blazed in the dusk in three-foot-high script letters. The restaurant was located on the flashy Rosamorada Strip eleven miles north of downtown and four blocks from Sunlan Park Race Track.

Inside, the restaurant was separated into dining room and bar by an angle of wall padded with leather-like material on the bar side. I looked into the dining room first. There was an overflow crowd, including a lot of small dark men in good suits and some who weren’t so small, and beautiful women. The place was crawling with beautiful women, lean and fragile as expensive models. Yellow-jacketed waiters with placid expressions slipped between the full tables like good dancers, handling trays crisply.

I recognized a few faces: Suarez, king of the Spanish Town bug; Venetti, waterfront gambling; Scobey, whose bootlegging enterprise ran to tens of thousands of gallons a year. There were stills throughout the back country, and cars with heavy-duty springs in the back ends and trucks packed with large milk cans of the stuff were thick on crumbling, weed-lined roads every night. I stood there for a moment, picking out the faces, recognition coming from the nod of a head, the expansive lift of a hand.

Memories of a precarious time were sharp with the taste of danger light along the tongue. Annacone, call girls — and an uglier traffic in the merchandise of sex. There were strings tied to all of them, and to a hundred others scattered in half a dozen counties. Macy held all the strings, but not so securely any more.

The cuts came in by the week, by the month. Some of it was delivered, some had to be collected. There was always cheating. Books falsified. Revenues faked. It had been my job to see the rake-off was always right, to see that the boys who might be tempted to pocket too much never forgot how narrow the line was, how uncertain the balance of favor; to make sure they were always just a little bit uneasy, that they never stopped looking behind them when night came. It was dirty work. I did it competently. Still, there were always the bold, whose fingers were too sticky, whose appetites for the big piles of easy money were not diminished by the gentle prod of an unseen gun. Some of them were killed. Nothing pretty about it. The shotgun was usually the final judge of the sweet plunge into temptation. Sometimes they went into the bay, or a canal. I never knew when it would happen, or who would do it. I didn’t want to know. I kept out of that. It was my only way of rebelling.

They would recognize me if I wanted them to see me. They would be secretly anxious behind big empty smiles. Maybe the strings were being slipped and cut now, the men under Macy growing plump on profits that brought less commission for Macy each month while the organization crumbled and he sat on his island playing with the child of a whore, a deep moan in his mind as he thought of a killer who waited for his chance. Maybe Stan Maxine
was shifting the strings skillfully and discreetly to his own fingers. The cheating, the holding back always went on, even if the man who held the strings leaned on his employees ceaselessly, playing one against another, sending his own boys in unexpectedly to check and recheck operations. Macy had been that kind of leader once. Now the boys would be running wild, filling their pockets before the inevitable change of leadership and a new crackdown, an over-all tightening. So my reappearance would be an omen. Macy was trying to pull things back together. The last feeble blow from a declining giant. The word would go out, passed to silent men in obscure bars. Before the sun went down on another day, I’d be dead — unless I was incredibly lucky.

I pushed the thoughts away from my mind. I had enough to worry about. I went into the bar, which was about half full. On a small stage at the rear a Negro trio thumped out
Jumping the Boogie.
It was good barrelhouse stuff. I recognized one of the bartenders. He had once worked at the Coral Gardens, and he was good. Another gentle reminder that Stan was the fair-haired boy now. The flock came dutifully to his fancy watering hole.

“Hello, Paul,” I said, leaning against the bar. He had hair like brushings from moths’ wings, and his face was aging gracefully.

“Pete!” he said. “Pete, it’s good to see you.” A look of alarm killed the smile before it had a chance to widen. “You better get out of here, Pete.”

“Why?”

He looked up and down the bar, leaned closer to me. “Stan’s boys are turning this town upside down looking
for you. It’s a rush order. You’re in bad trouble, son. Run for it.”

“What is it? Why do they want me?”

“I don’t know. The word was dropped. I’m telling you, Pete...”

“I saw Maxine once today. I don’t get...”

“Play safe, Pete.”

“Yeah. Okay. I’ll clear out in a second. Have you seen a girl named Diane? She’s wearing a green skirt and one of those pullover playshirts. Tall blonde. She may come around here once in a while.”

“I know her. She was in about four this afternoon. I saw her with the boss.”

“Stan?”

He nodded. “Yeah, Stan.” He looked past me and the hollows in his cheeks deepened. “Oh, Lordy,” he groaned. “Here comes trouble, Pete.”

I turned around and put both elbows on the bar. They were on me already. One of them was tall and Irish-looking, with curly copper hair and a nose canted from too many beatings. The other one was shorter, wider, with about a quarter-inch of brown hair on his stone skull. His face was wider at the chin than through the forehead. He was wearing a purple necktie with a single streak of red in it.

“You Mallory?” Irish asked.

“That’s right.”

He was polite. “I’m O’Toole. This is Kostrakis. We’ve been looking for you.”

“You found me,” I said. “Shall we have a drink to celebrate?”

His lip arched slightly. The Greek didn’t say a word. He just watched me.

“We don’t have time. We’re going to see Stan.”

“What does he want?”

The Greek took one of my arms. He twisted it in such a way that his arm was inside my elbow, his hand on my wrist. He had a nerve under pressure in the wrist. With little effort on his part the arm could be broken.

“Let’s walk on out,” he said.

We went outside with the Greek at my side and O’Toole behind me. In the parking lot O’Toole moved up, edged the .38 from beneath my coat.

“I pulled the teeth,” he said to the Greek. Kostrakis opened the door of a two-tone blue Chrysler and saw that I was seated comfortably before releasing the arm. He drove. O’Toole sat in back.

“Just take it easy,” he advised. “Kostrakis, let’s have some music.” We had some music from the radio. O’Toole made small talk.

“Hear you used to work around these parts six or seven years ago. Ever know Vic Mount?” I never knew Vic Mount. “Cousin of mine. Used to pick up policy slips for Chiozza down around the Gresham Park district.” It went like that. I kept my eyes on the streets we took, wondering where we were going. I was careful not to let the tiny growth of fear feed and enlarge in my tense mind.

We drove south on Rosamorada for a time, then turned right on Robinson Parkway, away from the bay. Ten minutes later we were at Lake Alena and we took a left at Jacaranda, the street on which Stan lived. In another minute we cut through an alley and pulled into a two-car
garage. I was hustled through the darkened yard into Maxine’s kitchen. The boys weren’t trying so hard to be gentle now.

Stan was in the living room. When I was shown in he glanced at me, his face unnaturally composed. He got up and pulled the blinds down over the front windows. He turned to me, his mouth set in anguished lines. “Nice of you to come.”

“It wasn’t my choice.”

“Where is she?”

“Where is who?”

“You know who. You know who I’m talkin’ about. Gerry. Where’s Gerry? What did you do with her, you bastard?” His breath spurted frantically from his lungs, betraying his unhealthiness.