Juvenile Delinquent (14 page)

T
HE
hotel parking lot was across the street from the Bremmer Hotel. My two captors hustled me across to a Buick sedan parked on the lot. Not more than a half dozen other cars were parked on the lot, and one of them was my Plymouth. Another, I noted, was Mouldy Greene’s long yellow convertible, which in that neighborhood stuck out like a Cadillac would in the Bowery.

I sat in the back under Buzz Thurmond’s gun while Limpy Alfred drove. It was only about twelve blocks to Seventh and Lucas, and the trip took no more than five minutes. Limpy parked in the alley behind the darkened repair garage.

With Thurmond’s gun still in my back, we crossed a back yard to the house in front of the repair garage. The only lights in the house came from the basement windows. Buzz and I waited while Limpy Alfred went down some cellar steps and rapped on the basement door. When it opened, he gestured us down too.

The rear part of the basement seemed to be a furnace and laundry room. When Buzz and I entered, Limpy Alfred was already disappearing through a door at its far end. Buzz prodded me after him and I walked into a neatly decorated game room.

The room was about fifteen by twenty feet, with a fireplace at one end and a small bar at the other. The walls were of plaster, painted light blue, and the ceiling was white acoustic board. A pool table stood in the center of the room, a wicker sofa sat in front of the fireplace and two small round cocktail tables were near the bar.

It was Harry Krebb who had opened the door to Limpy Alfred’s knock. After looking about the room I said to him, “The bandit business must be pretty good.”

“Hey!” the auto-repair man said with an air of discovery. “This guy brought his car into my garage!”

Buzz Thurmond said without concern, “He’s been sticking his nose in a lot of places.”

The only other door in the room aside from the entrance, apparently a rest room, opened and my pool-shark acquaintance, Art Cooney, strolled out.

Both Buzz Thurmond’s and Limpy Alfred’s gaze jerked to him.

“What you doing here?” Buzz asked.

“Harry and I was shooting a little pool when Bremmer phoned. I thought I’d stick around.” His eyes touched me indifferently, then recognition dawned. “Hey, I shot a game over at the pool hall with this guy the other night!”

“Three games,” I said.

“He’s been nosing into the whole setup,” Buzz explained. “Don’t worry about it. He ain’t going to tell anybody whatever he found out.”

He was a little late, since I’d already passed on to Warren Day everything I knew, but I didn’t see any point in enlightening him.

Nearly ten minutes passed before footsteps sounded in the laundry room and Bremmer entered with Sam Polito following him.

The barber took one look at me and said, “This man. I shampoo his head one evening.”

Buzz gave me an irritated look. “My you were a busy little bee.” To Bremmer he said, “Moon must have been casing everybody Stub Carlson told him about. He got to Harry’s garage and to Art Cooney here too.”

Bremmer asked quickly, “Any of you let anything drop?”

Harry Krebb said, “He didn’t ask anything,” Art Cooney said, “All we talked about was pool,” and Sam Polito shook his head.

Bremmer seemed to dismiss it. Turning to Polito he said, “What we want is to find out where Moon here hid out Stub Carlson. The kid’s not at home and he’s not at Moon’s flat. It’s your baby.”

The swarthy barber merely nodded.

“You lock the basement door when you came in?” Krebb asked.

Bremmer said, “No. You better lock it.”

Krebb walked out into the laundry room, pulling the door to the game room shut behind him.

“Lay him out on the pool table,” Bremmer ordered the others. “Strip him to the waist first.”

As Buzz closed in on me from one side and Art Cooney from the other, I held up one hand.

“Don’t bother,” I said. “I’ll do it myself.”

Shrugging out of my coat, I hung it over one of the chairs at one of the two cocktail tables. I draped my tie across it, folded my shirt neatly and laid it on top, then pulled off my undershirt. Then I climbed up on the pool table, lay on my back and folded my hands across my stomach.

Sam Polito reached in his pocket, brought something out, there was a sharp click and a thin blade with a razor edge jumped from his fist. At a signal from Bremmer, Thurmond grabbed one of my arms, Cooney grabbed the other and Limpy Alfred clasped his arms around my legs.

The barber came nearer and held the knife next to my nose so that I could examine it carefully.

“Sam doesn’t like to talk much, so I’ll explain things for him,” Bremmer said. “Sam’s so expert with that thing, he can peel off skin a square inch at a time without even cutting the tissue underneath. According to Sam, a man can live until two thirds of his skin has been cut away. But I imagine he’d stop wanting to long before that. Now I don’t enjoy this sort of thing, Mr. Moon, and I’d just as soon dispense with it. Why don’t you tell us where the kid is and save both us and yourself trouble?”

I examined Sam Polito. There was nothing sadistic in his sullen face. His expression was simply unfeeling. He had a job to do and he’d do it efficiently, but he didn’t really care one way or the other whether he had to do it or not.

This unnerved me more than if he had done a little gloating. The man impressed me as little more than an animal, standing there holding his knife and patiently waiting for an order to begin. I felt sweat pop out on my forehead and roll off the side of my face.

I made an effort to say something heroic, then decided the hell with it. Everybody there knew I was scared, including myself, and some smart crack wasn’t going to convince them any differently. I just clamped my mouth shut and looked at Polito’s knife.

Bremmer gave a resigned nod and the point dipped toward my chest.

I brought my legs up, shot them forward again and hurled Limpy Alfred halfway across the room. The knife retreated and the barber said unemotionally, “Such a little man cannot hold his legs alone.”

“You can say that again,” Limpy Alfred said as he got up and dusted himself off. He looked around. “Where the hell’s Harry?”

The rest of them looked around too. Finally Bremmer went to the door and jerked it open.

He opened it just as a figure reached for the knob on the other side. But the man wasn’t Harry Krebb. When the doorknob receded from his seeking grasp, Mouldy Greene changed the direction of his grab and instead gathered a handful of Bremmer’s shirt front.

Pushing the hotel man before him, Mouldy came all the way into the room, gave me a friendly wave with his free hand and said, “Hi, sarge.”

Both my arms were released as both Thurmond and Cooney simultaneously decided to straighten up and draw guns. Mouldy picked all two hundred pounds of Sherman Bremmer off the floor and tossed him at Buzz Thurmond like a medicine ball.

I didn’t see what else happened, because I was rolling on my side and clamping one hand across the cylinder of Art Cooney’s revolver as it appeared. I clamped down tight, preventing the cylinder from rotating and consequently making it impossible to fire. At the same time I swung my left leg around, got my foot under his armpit and pushed.

Cooney let loose of the gun and staggered across the room to crash into the bar.

When I turned my attention back to the rest of the room, Mouldy was nimbly leaping aside to let Sam Polito’s knife whistle past him and sink into the door jamb. As I scrambled off the pool table Mouldy stepped forward and landed a six-inch jab on the barber’s chin. Polito made a complete spin and collapsed on his face.

Catching the fat hotel proprietor in his stomach had knocked Buzz Thurmond down and jarred the gun from his hand. I scooped it up and turned to cover the room with both guns as Mouldy went past me toward Thurmond.

Art Cooney backed against the bar and put up his hands. Sherman Bremmer, seated spraddle-legged on the floor, looked at me ruefully and followed suit. Sam Polito couldn’t because he was unconscious. Only Buzz Thurmond still showed a little fight.

When Mouldy jerked him to his feet and clamped a big hand around his right bicep, Buzz took a swing at him with his left. He probably weighed a few pounds more than Mouldy, but some of his weight was fat. None of Mouldy’s was. Mouldy simply deflected the blow with his palm and gave him a casual backhand slap which made his eyes cross.

Buzz persisted by attempting to bring up a knee. This seemed to make Mouldy impatient, for he placed his fist about two inches from Buzz’s jaw and gave it a sharp rap. Buzz’s knees folded and when Mouldy released his arm, he slid to the floor out cold.

Mouldy looked down at him in astonishment.

“He has a glass jaw,” I informed him. “What brought you rolling in like the Marines?”

“Me? Oh, I spotted the little guy coming out of your flat and followed him.”

He gestured toward one of the cocktail tables and I saw Limpy Alfred peacefully sleeping beneath it. In the confusion of the last few moments, I had completely forgotten the little man, but now I realized he must have ended up under the cocktail table during the few seconds I was wresting Art Cooney’s gun from him. Apparently Mouldy had given him one of his gentle taps immediately after hurling Bremmer at Buzz Thurmond.

Seeing Limpy Alfred made me remember the other missing member of the party. “What happened to Harry Krebb?” I asked.

“You mean the fellow who came out to lock the back door? He’s hung up in the laundry room.”

“What do you mean, hung up?”

“By the seat of his pants on a spike in the wall,” Mouldy said. “I hogtied him with his necktie first, so he couldn’t reach up and turn himself loose.”

It occurred to me that it must have taken incredible bad luck for Mouldy Greene’s former employer to get himself killed while Mouldy was acting as bodyguard for him.

I said, “Let me get this sorted out a little. You followed Limpy Alfred from my apartment. What were you doing at my apartment?”

Mouldy’s brow furrowed in an effort to remember. Then an expression of enlightenment crossed his flat face. “Oh yeah. Fausta sent me. When you was nearly an hour late and didn’t answer your phone, she sent me to check up. I got there just as the little guy came out. Boy, if you think you had trouble with these guys, wait till Fausta catches up with you.”

“I think I had a fair excuse,” I said drily.

Handing the two guns to Mouldy so that he could supervise our still conscious captives, I put on my shirt, tie and coat. Then I retrieved my P-38 from Buzz Thurmond’s pocket and thrust it under my arm.

I was just rising when a voice from the door said, “Freeze buddy. And put those guns down real slow.”

My gaze jumped to the door. A tall, leanly-built man in a light gray suit stood there covering the room with a short-barrelled pistol. Mouldy looked at me apologetically and slowly set his two guns on the floor.

“This one’s a stranger,” I said to Mouldy. “I thought I’d gotten to know the whole gang.”

The tall man advanced into the room. His left hand dipped into his breast pocket and came out with a small leather folder which he flashed open to exhibit a badge and an identification card.

“Sergeant Hudson of Burglary,” he announced. “You’re all under arrest.”

I
T TOOK
me some time to convince the sergeant that Mouldy and I weren’t criminals. But after he had examined my license and listened to my story, he finally decided to believe us.

It developed that the place was practically surrounded by police. On the basis of the information I had given Warren Day, and he in turn had passed along, the Vice Squad, Burglary Squad and Narcotics Squad had all gotten together and detailed men to cover each of the suspects starting at five that afternoon. Sergeant Hudson was in charge of the combined detail.

When Limpy Alfred had been seen leaving the Hotel Bremmer that evening by the man assigned to tail Sherman Bremmer, the word was passed along to Limpy’s assigned shadow, who had been patiently waiting in a doorway across the street from Limpy’s living quarters. The gray-haired man’s shadow joined Bremmer’s shadow at the hotel in time to see Limpy return from his trip to my flat and also to spot Mouldy Greene tailing him.

On a hunch that Buzz Thurmond might be at the Bremmer Hotel too, as he hadn’t showed at the place he lived, Buzz’s shadow was also ordered to the Bremmer Hotel. Consequently the car in which I rode to Krebb’s was followed by two cops in addition to Mouldy, and when Bremmer drove over to pick up Sam Polito, he was followed by one.

At the barber’s place Polito’s shadow joined the caravan. Krebb’s and Art Cooney’s tails were already watching the garageman’s home. When the other four cops arrived on the scene, they all got together, decided something important was up and phoned Sergeant Hudson.

When the sergeant arrived, he decided to chance sneaking around a bit to see if he could do a little eavesdropping. He tried the basement windows first, but they were all closed and curtained. Finally he tried the basement door and discovered to his pleasant surprise that it was unlocked. When he saw no one in the laundry room, he slipped inside.

I gathered he was a little startled to find a gagged and hogtied man hanging by the seat of his pants from a spike in the laundry room, but police sergeants are made of strong stuff and he managed to take it in his stride.

His men had told him about Mouldy and me being inside with the rest, but neither of us had been identified and the sergeant assumed we were merely additional members of the gang. Therefore when he peeked through the open door of the game room, saw three figures horizontal on the floor and Mouldy flourishing a pair of guns, he decided it was time to forget his shadow role and arrest everybody in sight.

When he learned what the actual circumstances were, he wasn’t too certain he’d acted correctly.

“The brass wanted this gang nailed for fencing, narcotics pushing and burglary conspiracy,” he said doubtfully. “Pulling them in on an attempted murder charge which probably won’t stick and will be reduced to assault and battery isn’t going to make the big boys very happy.”

“If I were you, I’d get a flock of search warrants fast,” I advised. “You’ll probably find stolen property here, and both stolen property and narcotics at Polito’s and Cooney’s. I doubt that you’ll get much talk out of Polito even if you prove a case against him, but once you get the goods on Krebb and Cooney, I have an idea they’ll break and implicate the rest of the gang. That won’t get you the kids, who have been doing the actual stealing, but you can’t have everything.”

I didn’t add that I was just as happy it wouldn’t get him the kids. Maybe my attitude wasn’t completely law-abiding, but I felt that once the vultures who had been preying on the teenagers were out of the picture, Wilfred Reed and his YMCA program could do more to straighten out the Purple Pelicans than some juvenile court judge.

Sergeant Hudson decided this was good advice. After he had turned over the whole gang to the six cops outside and started them off toward the jail, he left to rout a judge out of bed and obtain a few search warrants.

I had Mouldy drive me back to the Bremmer Hotel to pick up my car.

“Tell Fausta I’ll phone her tomorrow,” I said when he dropped me off.

“You better phone her tonight,” he advised. “Matter of fact, if I was you, I’d follow me back to the club.”

“She’ll understand when she hears the story,” I said.

“Maybe,” he said dubiously. “But she’s been sitting around in that green rag all night.”

What Mouldy referred to as Fausta’s green rag I took to be her favorite formal, an off-the-shoulder thing she wore only on the most festive occasions. Apparently she had planned a big night for us.

After considering for a few moments, I decided perhaps it would be better if I showed up even at that late hour at least long enough to give her an explanation. I told Mouldy I’d follow him.

It was one-thirty in the morning when we reached El Patio. The place closed at one, but there are always a certain number of customers at any club who like to linger over the last drink after the bar closes. The last of the final-round drinkers were just leaving when we entered the place.

The room lights in the cocktail lounge were out, but the bartender was still cleaning up and the lights back of the bar were still burning. Fausta was seated on a bar stool, swinging one foot.

As Mouldy had indicated, she was wearing the festive-occasion green formal. It was a lovely gown, but on the one or two previous occasions I had seen it, I’d felt it would be more appropriate in a bedroom than in public. It concealed the lower part of her body adequately enough, but from the waist up it could hardly be classed as clothing, if you accept Webster’s definition that clothing is “a covering.” It contained no back and barely enough front to squeeze by the indecent exposure laws.

When I said, “Hi,” Fausta merely examined me moodily.

She took in my rumpled suit, my mussed hair and my general state of dishabille with a judicial air of reserving opinion until all the facts were in. Probably she had been furious at nine-thirty, but when we first walked in the door I thought I had caught an expression of almost frantic relief in her eyes. We were too far away for me to be sure, and by the time we reached the bar she had erased it, if it had ever been there. Nevertheless it led me to the mental observation that if you are going to keep a woman waiting, it is probably smarter to keep her waiting hours instead of minutes. If you’re merely late, you’re likely to catch hell, but if you don’t show up until she’s lost all hope of seeing you at all, you possibly may even get sympathy if you’re good at telling stories.

When Fausta had completed her examination she asked, “Drink, other women or an accident, my love?”

“All three,” I said. “I was having a drink with this other woman, and when I told her I had to leave for a date with you, I had an accident. She clouted me with a bottle. See?”

I turned my head and pointed to the lump behind my right ear.

Immediately she was all concern. “Oh, Manny!” she said, jumping from her stool and gently touching the swelling. “What happened?”

“Some guys were slugging him around when I got there,” Mouldy said. “The sarge and I didn’t have much trouble straightening things out though, did we, Sarge?”

“No,” I said. “We divided them up equally. I took one and Mouldy took the other five.”

“Six!” Fausta said wide-eyed. “And they were all beating you?”

“Not exactly. They were getting ready to skin me. Literally. Any chance of a drink at this late hour while I spin the yarn?”

Fausta said to Joe the bartender, “Fix Mr. Moon a Mount Vernon and water, will you, Joe?”

“And leave the chloral hydrate out,” I added.

“Huh?” Joe said.

“It’s what us comedians call a topical gag,” I explained. “You have to be up on current events to understand it.”

Without comment Joe mixed a rye and water and slid it across to me.

It took me fifteen minutes to explain everything that had happened. Meantime Joe finished his cleaning up, but instead of leaving he stayed to hear the rest of the story. He seemed nearly as enthralled as Fausta, who sat quiet as a mouse and didn’t even interrupt until I had finished.

Then she gave a deep sigh and cocked her head at me.

“I told you to call the police and then stay here where you would be safe from such awful people,” she said.

I changed the subject by asking how Stub Carlson was getting along.

“He still walks like an old man with rheumatism,” Fausta said. “But except for his stiffness he says he feels all right. A taxi man brought some clothing for him after you left.”

She said Stub had gone to bed in Mouldy’s room at nine-thirty, before she sent Mouldy looking for me, and though no intruder could have gotten at him without passing through the kitchen, where a chef and three assistants were on duty, she had taken the precaution of locking him in until Mouldy returned.

“I don’t think he’ll be in danger now,” I said. “Not from Bremmer’s gang at least, because they’re all in jail. But keep him here a day or two more anyway. I plan on giving the Purple Pelicans a little pep talk before sending him back to his own neighborhood.”

Before I left, Fausta reminded me that our date for that evening didn’t count, and I still owed her two evenings. I told her I’d pick her up at nine the next night if I didn’t run into any more hoodlums.

“You had better not run into any other women either,” she said darkly.

• • •

The next morning I got back on my normal schedule by sleeping until noon. Probably I would have slept even later, since it was two-thirty a.m. before I fell into bed, but the phone woke me up.

It was Ed Brighton.

“Sorry to bother you, Manny,” he said. “But it’s been five days since I heard from you, and I wondered if you’ve turned anything up.”

“I’ve been at least partly responsible for getting six hoodlums thrown in the can,” I told him. “The gang I mentioned to you which may have been responsible for killing the Meyers kid and framing it on Joe. Warren Day promised me he’d question them about the killing after a few other departments get through with them, but I haven’t checked with him yet. The thing only broke last night.”

“You think maybe they’ll pin the kill on these guys?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But Homicide’s got a pretty good staff of interrogators. There isn’t any material evidence tying the mob to the murder, so all we can hope for is that somebody breaks down and talks. It’ll probably be tomorrow before they’re even turned over to Homicide, so we’ll just have to wait and see.”

Actually I was a little more hopeful than I sounded, since there was a good chance Joe Brighton would be released even if Homicide couldn’t prove a case against the Bremmer gang. All that was necessary was for Warren Day to become convinced the gang had engineered the kill. Even if he couldn’t prove it, he’d recommend to the D.A. that charges against young Joe be dropped, in that event.

I didn’t mention this to Ed though, as there was no point in building what very well might be false hopes.

At one-thirty I dropped by Warren Day’s office. I interrupted him in the process of giving Hannegan a blast about something or other, a timing which seemed to be appreciated by Hannegan even if it wasn’t by Day. My entrance sidetracked the inspector and he looked up with a scowl.

I said, “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” and took a seat.

Day waved Hannegan away and turned his artillery on me. “You certainly loused things up good, Moon. Burglary, Vice and Narcotics wanted to check that gang’s contacts for a few days before they moved in. Now we can’t nail any of the kids they were dealing with.”

“You’re too big to pick on kids anyway,” I said. “And quit complaining. If it hadn’t been for my tip in the first place, you wouldn’t have anybody.”

The inspector dug a cigar butt out of his ash tray and shoved it into a corner of his mouth. “What got you up so early?” he asked with his usual subtlety.

“I couldn’t sleep for thinking of all the time and money I saved the police by singlehandedly rounding up a whole gang of criminals.”

“Singlehandedly?” he snorted. “The way I heard it, you’d have been skinned and boiled if Sergeant Hudson and his crew hadn’t walked in to save you in the nick of time.”

So the sergeant had taken a little more credit than was due him, I thought. But since he had taken it from Mouldy Greene rather than me, I let it pass. I’d probably have let it pass anyway, as a commendation from the police department wouldn’t mean anything to either Mouldy or me, but it might pave the sergeant’s way to a lieutenancy.

“Heard how Burglary et al. are making out with their catch?” I asked.

“Pretty good, I guess,” Day said sourly. “They found Krebb’s house loaded with stolen stuff and got a confession from him on receiving stolen property. Claims he didn’t know it was stolen, of course, and can’t remember the names of the boys who brought it in. Not because he gives a hoot about protecting them. He’s just afraid the kids will break down and implicate him even worse. Then they found a good supply of reefers and heroin in both the back room of Polito’s barbershop and Art Cooney’s apartment. Polito won’t talk, and so far they’ve only got him for possession, but Cooney admitted peddling, so they’ve got him on two counts. He was also beginning to break down and implicate Buzz Thurmond as his source, last I heard.”

“How about Limpy Alfred and Bremmer?” I asked.

“Nothing yet,” he said indifferently. “But they’ll take the count with the rest. Once one rat starts squealing, they all blat on each other sooner or later. It may take a little time, but they’ll all be salted away before we’re through.”

“When do you get a crack at them?”

“I’ve asked for them in the morning. But don’t get your hopes up.”

“Why not?”

“I sat in on Thurmond’s interrogation for a time. He’s the one you think probably actually pulled the kill if the gang was behind it, isn’t he?”

I nodded.

“I threw in a couple of questions about the Meyers kid when the other boys temporarily ran down. But he just looked irritated instead of guilty. He said, ‘You must have been talking to that crazy Moon.’ Good judge of character for a hood.”

“So? Did you expect him to admit it right out?”

“I didn’t expect anything,” Day growled. “But I’ve grilled enough homicide suspects to be able to judge when a man’s lying. I think Thurmond was telling the truth.”