The Cutie (2 page)

“Two seconds,” I told her. I pushed the sheet out of the way and climbed to my feet. While I was yanking on some clothes, the bell sounded again. I stomped through the apartment to the living room, ready to punch a face in.

Usually, when the bell rings, I check through the peephole before opening the door, but this time I was too annoyed to be cautious. I pulled the door open and glared.

It was Billy-Billy Cantell, jittering like a Model T. I didn’t say a word for a minute, I just stared at him. Of all the people I know, Billy-Billy Cantell is one of the last I’d think of as a possible two
A.M
. visitor. He’s a scrawny, scraggy, scrubby little bum who might be thirty or forty or fifty, you can’t tell from looking at him. He’s one of the poor clowns for whom life is spelled with a capital H, and I do mean heroin. He does everything it is possible to do with narcotics. He buys it, sells it, transports it, and takes it. He’s a retailer on the Lower East Side, and I hadn’t seen him for six months or more. The last time we’d talked, it was because he owed Ed Ganolese some money and I’d asked Ed not to send one of the regular collectors. I talked to him about it myself, being careful not to break any bones, and he paid up a couple days later.

The point of all this is that Billy-Billy Cantell and I do not normally move in the same circles, and I wasn’t used to the idea of him dragging me out of the sack at two-thirty in the morning. So I asked him what the hell he thought he was doing, and he blubbered at me. “Cuh-Clay,” he started, “you guh-got to help me. I’m in a jah-juh-jam.” See where he gets the name Billy-Billy?

“What’s that to me?” I asked him. I wasn’t worried about this little snowbird and his little problems. I was thinking about Ella, waiting for me three rooms away.

Billy-Billy was chattering and flinching, and his hands were jerking around, and he kept glancing in terror down toward the elevators. “Luh-let me in, Clay,” he begged me. “Plea-please.”

“You got law on your tail?”

“Nuh-no, Clay. I duh-don’t think so.”

He kept shaking like an IBM machine gone crazy. He looked as though he’d fall apart any second now, and there’d be pieces of him rolling all over the hall. I shrugged and stepped aside and said, “Come on in, then. But this better not take very long.”

“It wuh-won’t, Clay,” he promised me. He scampered inside, and I shut the door after him. Even inside the apartment, he kept looking around and shaking, and I wondered whether I should offer him something to drink. I finally decided it wasn’t worth it. Besides, alcohol isn’t his vice.

I pointed at a chair. “Sit down,” I told him. “And quit shaking. You’re making me nervous just looking at you.”

“Thu-thanks, Clay.”

When we were both seated, I said, “All right. What is it?”

“I been pat-puh-patsied, Clay. S-s-s-somebody s-set me up for a bad-buh-bad rap.”

“How’d they do this? From the beginning, Billy-Billy, and take it easy.”

“I’ll tuh-try, Clay,” he said. And he really did try. You could see him struggling to get himself all into one piece. He almost made it. “I guh-got a little high this after-afternoon,” he jabbered. “I muh-made s-s-s-some guh-good s-s-s-sales and give myself-myself a guh-good jolt. I wuh-went to s-s-s-sleep and wuh-woke up in this apart-apart-apartment. And there was this buh-broad there. S-s-s-somebody knifed her.”

“You,” I said.

He looked more terrified than ever. “Nuh-no, Clay. Honest. I duh-don’t carry no blade. I ain’t the ty-type.”

“How do you know what you did while you were high?”

“All I duh-do is fuh-fall asleep. You can ask any-any-body.”

“So this time you did something different.”

“I duh-don’t even know-know this buh-broad,” he stammered. “I wouldn’t kill-kill nobody, Clay.”

I sighed. Ella was still waiting for me, and this—There was a pack of cigarettes on the end table near me. I shook one out, lit it, and said, “Okay. You didn’t kill her.”

“I knuh-know I didn’t, Clay.”

“Where was this place?”

“I duh-don’t know. I just-just got out of there, as fuh-fast as I could.”

“Anybody see you leave?”

“I duh-don’t think so. Wuh-when I got duh-down to the corner, I s-s-s-saw a puh-prowl car puh-pull up in front of the puh-place. The guy who s-s-s-set me up musta-musta tipped them.”

“You clean your fingerprints off the doorknob and everything before you left?”

“I wuh-was too shuh-shook, Clay. I even luh-left my huh-hat.”

“Your hat?” I remembered that hat of his. It was a little plaid cap, like the one Humphrey Pennyworth wears in the Sunday funnies. But Humphrey’s cap is too small for him, and Billy-Billy’s is too big. It’s a plaid, mainly red, and it droops down over his ears, and Billy-Billy, afraid maybe that he’d lose it while his head was still in it, has written his name and address inside, in indelible pencil.

“I’m in a juh-jam, Clay,” he said.

“You’re damn right you are. How’d you get into this place to begin with?”

“I duh-don’t know. I juh-just fell asleep.”

“Where?”

“Downtown s-s-somewhere. This place was uptown, nuh-near the puh-park. I couldn’t of made-muh-made it all the wuh-way up there.”

“No? You
did
make it all the way up there.”

“Cuh-Clay, you got to huh-help me.”

“Like what? What am I supposed to be able to do?”

“Cuh-call Ed Ganolese.”

That one set me back. “You’re nuts,” I told him. “You’re out of your head. You must still be high. It’s almost three o’clock in the morning.”

“Puh-please, Clay. He-he’d wuh-want you to cuh-call him.”

“What do you expect Ed to do for you? If you really did leave your hat there, and fingerprints all over the place, you are now hot. Too hot for Ed or anybody else to touch. Ed can’t get you out of this like it was a user rap.”

“Puh-please, Clay. Just call him.”

“Why not go see him yourself?”

“He tuh-told me not to cuh-come around. He duh-don’t want his wuh-wife or kids to s-s-s-see me. That buh-bodyguard of his wuh-would throw me out. Buh-but you could cuh-call him and tuh-tell him what hap-happened.”

“Why should I?”

“Juh-just s-s-s-see what he’s guh-got to s-s-s-say, Clay, please.”

I had a feeling I knew what Ed would have to say. If somebody had set Billy-Billy up to take a bum rap, he had done a fine job of it. A murder charge isn’t all that easy to fix. And with somebody like Billy-Billy Cantell, it just isn’t worth the effort.

Which doesn’t mean that Ed would tell me to leave Billy-Billy for the cops. Far from it. Billy-Billy was, after all, a junkie, and he was also a member of the organization. He knew too much about the narcotics business, sources of supply, delivery points, names of retailers. Put him in a cell for twenty-four hours, and he would say anything about anybody. All the cops would have to do is promise him a needle.

So I had a feeling I knew what Ed would have to say when I filled him in on Billy-Billy’s problem. It was standard operating procedure. I give Billy-Billy a fatal accident, and leave the remains for the cops. Then John Law is happy, because a case has been closed. And the organization is happy, because things are calm and peaceful again. And I’m happy, because I can go back to Ella. Everybody’s happy but Billy-Billy, and he isn’t worried about anything any more. So maybe he’s happy, too.

That was standard operating procedure. But I didn’t think I should go ahead with it on my own authority. Billy-Billy had been talking as though there was something between him and Ed Ganolese that I didn’t know about. Maybe it was nothing, probably it was nothing—what could Ed Ganolese and Billy-Billy Cantell have in common?—but there was no sense taking an unnecessary chance.

I got to my feet. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll call him. But he won’t be happy about it.”

“Thu-thanks, Clay,” he said, and that scrubby little face broke out in a great big smile. “I rea-ruh-really appreci-a-a-appreciate this.”

“You wait here,” I told him. “I’ll call from the bedroom. If you pick up the extension in here and try to listen in, I’ll hear you. And I’ll come in and take you apart.”

“I wuh-wouldn’t do that, Clay. Honest. You know-know me buh-better than that.”

“Sure.”

I walked back to the bedroom and grimaced at Ella. “Problems,” I said.

“Very long?” she asked me.

She was sitting up in bed, a pillow fluffed up against the headboard behind her. She had the kind of face which is most beautiful with no make-up on at all. She had no make-up on now, and her lips were full and pale red, her eyes large and deep and hazel-colored, her skin warm-looking and tanned. Her face was framed by that soft black hair, deep as night in the glow from the table lamp. Her body, outlined beneath the sheet, was full and firm and curving, and I didn’t want to call Ed Ganolese or worry about Billy-Billy Cantell, all I wanted to do was crawl under that sheet beside that warm soft body—

I looked away from her and sat down on the edge of the bed. “A couple minutes more,” I said. “I’ve got to call Ed.”

“Do you want me to wait in the kitchen?” Ella was a smart woman, and a good woman to have around. I don’t think she ever really approved of Ed Ganolese and my job, but she never said anything about it. She just ignored it, didn’t want me to talk to her about anything I did, didn’t want to hear anything about it at all. And she assumed that I wouldn’t want her to know very much about my work, so she moved out of hearing range whenever I had to talk business with anyone.

But this time it didn’t really matter. Billy-Billy had arrived, I would call Ed, he would tell me to do what I already knew I had to do, and that would be all there was to it. So I said, “It isn’t important. You don’t have to get up.”

“Hurry,” she said.

I was afraid to look at her. “I will,” I said, and reached for the phone on the bedside table. I dialed Ed’s home number, and waited for eight rings. Then Tony Chin, Ed’s bodyguard, answered, and I told him who I was and that I wanted to talk to Ed. He grunted, and clanked the phone down on a table or something. I’ve never heard Tony Chin do anything else
but
grunt. If he knows how to talk, you can’t prove it by me.

I waited a few minutes, and finally Ed came on the line. “It’s after three in the morning, Clay,” he said. “This better be important.”

“I’m not sure it is,” I admitted. Then I filled him in, telling him what Billy-Billy had told me, and wound up by saying that Billy-Billy had begged me to call him.

“That’s no good,” he said thoughtfully. “You did right, calling me.”

“Want me to give him an accident, Ed?”

I heard Ella make a quick sound behind me, and for a second I wished I’d told her to go to the kitchen after all. In the two weeks Ella’d been living with me, the fact that I was occasionally called on to give people accidents had been carefully ignored by both of us. I wasn’t sure what her reaction would be.

But my worrying about Ella lasted only a second. Then Ed answered my question, with a loud and surprisingly vehement “No!” and I spent a couple of blank seconds trying to figure out what that meant.

Ed went on, “Get him out of the city. Right away. Take him up to Grandma’s. When you get back, call me.”

“Now, Ed?” I threw Ella a helpless look.

“Of course, now. You want to wait till the law shows up?”

“Ed,” I said, “I’ve got something on the fire here—”

“Turn the fire off, put a cover on the pot, and get going. Call me when you get back to town.”

“I don’t get it, Ed. Billy-Billy isn’t anybody. He isn’t worth fifteen cents for parts.”

“I’ll give it to you in words of one syllable,” he said. “Billy-Billy has friends across the big water. Somebody he met over there during the war, somebody big. He knows better than to try to use the in for anything, because it isn’t that strong. But it’s strong enough to make us help him out of this. The guy wouldn’t like it if he found out we’d thrown Billy-Billy to the wolves.”

“We won’t tell him,” I suggested. “

Fine idea. Only trouble is, Joe Pistol’s here.”

“Who? I don’t think I know the name.”

“He just got off the boat, bringing greetings from all our friends overseas. He hopes the New York branch is doing well. He’s what you might call an inspector.”

“Oh,” I said. Then I knew what Ed meant. Practically every ounce of narcotics in the country is imported, because it’s a little too dangerous to try growing your own in this country. That means that Ed has a close tie-in with a couple of boys in Europe. He’s the distributor for them just the way Billy-Billy is a distributor for Ed. Every once in a while, a representative from one of these European boys comes over and looks around a little, not saying much of anything, just to see how things are doing. If he should happen to decide that things aren’t doing as well as they might, there would very likely be a shuffling of authority, and Ed would no longer be my boss. And, since a new broom sweeps clean, Ed and I would probably go together.

And into all this comes Billy-Billy, who did something non-dangerous behind the lines during World War Two and who probably worked black market a bit. He wasn’t a snowbird then. He met somebody, did the guy a favor or two, and it turns out that that somebody became very big after the war, and still remembered Billy-Billy. Which complicates things when standard operating procedure calls for Billy-Billy to have an accident.

“Get going, Clay,” Ed told me. “Call me when you come back, and we’ll figure out what to do next.”

“Yeah, Ed,” I said. “Sure.”

He hung up, and I sat there holding the phone for a minute. “I’ll be double-damned,” I said.

“What’s the matter?” Ella asked me.

I looked at her, then at the silent phone, and then back at her again. I put the phone back in its cradle, and said, “I’ve got to go to New Goddam England.”

“Now?”

“I’ll be a royal son of a bitch,” I said.

“Now, Clay?”

“He’s got friends. That two-bit, unwashed, flea-ridden, dime-a-dozen punk has friends.” I got to my feet and glared at the phone. “Why?” I wanted to know. “Why should a lousy punk like that have friends? Why should I have to go all the way up to New England because that good-for-nothing bum has friends?”