The Complete Casebook of Cardigan, Volume 3: 1934-35 Page 30

  Cardigan strode across the street, saw a blue telephone sign outside the pool parlor, and entered.

  The room in front was small, hot, dusty. It contained a cigar counter behind which a fat man in a collarless shirt was drowsing and wheezing over a newspaper. The pool room was in back and two men were playing, themselves and the green table isolated in a pool of light.

  “Phone?” said Cardigan.

  The fat man wheezed: “Back there,” and did not look up.

  The booth was around the corner, in the pool room. The men were intent on their game and did not look up. Layer on layer of cigarette smoke weaved and coiled sluggishly about them and their faces were lean, gray-white in the fierce downward pouring light.

  Cardigan dropped his bag beside the booth, crowded in and folded shut the door and placed a nickel in the slot. The nickel jangled down into the box, opened the wire, and Cardigan dialed a number. In a minute a thin male voice was on the wire and Cardigan said: “Mr. Ballard?”

  “Who is calling?”

  “Cardigan.”

  “Just a minute.”

  A minute actually passed and then a deeper voice said: “Yes?”

  “Is this Mr. Ballard?”

  “Yes. Where are you?”

  “Across from the station. I just rolled in. D’you want me to beat it out there now or in the morning?”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “I’m going to stop at the Westbrook.”

  “Good. Suppose I ring you at nine in the morning. I’d just gone to bed.”

  “It’s O.K. by me.”

  “Fine. I’ll ring you at nine then.”

  “Swell.”

  IT WAS exactly ten o’clock when Cardigan stepped out of the booth, scooped up his bag and banged his big feet into the front room. He tossed a quarter on the counter and asked for a pack of cigarettes. The fat man wheezed, got the pack and made change with fat, clumsy fingers.

  “You sure keep it hot in here, mister.”

  “Yeah. I get chills easy. It’s account of I guess I’m maybe anaemic. I had a brother died on account of he was anaemic. Well, it wasn’t exactly straight anaemia, but it helped. The doctor said if he wasn’t anaemic in the first place, he would’ve lived.”

  “Caught cold, huh?” Cardigan muttered, lighting up.

  “Nope. He was shot, Christmas Eve, three years ago. He was making believe he was Santa Claus, only he busted in a place where I guess they didn’t believe in Santa Claus.”

  “Tough,” muttered Cardigan.

  He took his bag, opened the glass door and stepped out into the dismal cold drizzle; went as far as the curb and looked around for a taxi. His battered old fedora was crushed down over his forehead, a slab of hair stuck out alongside his left ear. The collar of his worn, shabby ulster was turned up. He bulked huge in the wet darkness.

  “Mr. Cardigan.”

  His name thus spoken made him pivot and he saw standing several feet away a small, slender man dressed in a dark overcoat, snugly belted, and with its upturned collar shrouding the lower part of his face. A black crush hat, its brim turned down all around, equally shrouded the upper part of his face. He was holding a cigar in a gloved hand.

  He spoke again. “Hello, Mr. Cardigan.” His voice was low, dry, unhurried, with a note of mockery in it. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  “If I could see your face, maybe I’d say the same.”

  “I recognized you from pictures I’ve seen in the papers. It wouldn’t matter if you saw my face. You’ve never met me. I’ve always admired your work, Mr. Cardigan.”

  “Thanks. What’s the catch?”

  “There’s no catch.”

  “Oh, maybe you just want an autograph.”

  “No,” the man went on in his dry, patient voice. “Believe it or not, I’ve got ten one-hundred-dollar bills in my pocket. They’re yours for the asking.”

  “Ripley’d go nuts about this.”

  “There’s a train out for New York in twenty minutes. Why not take the thousand dollars—and the train?”

  Cardigan’s dark eyes shuttered down. “Suppose I took it into my head to take the thousand dollars—and you?”

  “That wouldn’t be very sensible.”

  “I didn’t say it would be.”

  The man took a quiet backward step. “I can assure you,” he said in the same level voice, “that Farrell’s alive and unharmed. Farrell’s just young—and headstrong. He got out of his depth. When the time comes, he’ll be released. Meantime, take a tip. In fact, take the thousand and take the next train back. You’re known here. You’re known on sight. You’ll never get to first base.”

  “I’ll get to first base and I’ll get Farrell. And you know I’ll get him. You know I’ll find out what Farrell came here to find out. If you didn’t think I would, you wouldn’t be trying to pass me a grand. You know what you can do with that grand.”

  “Think it over, Mr. Cardigan.”

  “I thought it over before I came here. And I’ll tell you something else: I got a hunch Farrell’s dead.”

  He was still holding his bag in his right hand and he had noticed from the first how rigidly the man kept his right hand buried in his overcoat pocket.

  “Your hunch is wrong, Mr. Cardigan.”

  “I’ll take the chance. So break it up. You’re holding a rod on me in that right-hand coat pocket of yours, and I’m holding a bag, so we understand each other. Go back to whoever sent you here and tell him to hold his hand on his neck. I don’t know what your puss looks like, but I know your voice, and if you ever come around again I’ll kick your teeth out.”

  “How tough you talk.”

  “It’s not half as tough as a kick in the teeth.”

  THE shrouded slim man did not reply instantly. He took a slow drag on his cigar, seeming to deliberate. His body remained motionless but there was no effect of muscular tension. Presently he said: “You’ve had your choice. There’s nothing else I can do about it.”

  “I’ll do about it.”

  The slim man shrugged. His head turned slowly from left to right, as though he looked up and down the street. He used the little finger of the hand holding the cigar to roll ash off the cigar. The red end glowed. He sighed ruefully. “All right, Mr. Know-it-all.” He looked at the cigar, said: “You see, you were wrong about another hunch,” and withdrew his right hand from his pocket. “I wasn’t holding a gun on you.”

  “Check.”

  “So now why don’t you pull your own gun and hold it on me?”

  Instantly some sixth sense warned Cardigan, and he did not attempt to draw his gun, he did not budge. For some reason not clear to himself he looked upward, saw in the misty pall a woman leaning on a window sill on the third story of the rooming house. She had a coat or a shawl round her shoulders and was leaning on her elbows—he could see her hands clasped loosely together. He dropped his eyes instantly. His brain was clear as a bell’s sound on a cold winter night. A chill shivered the length of his spine. He had a feeling that somewhere, near at hand, danger was cocked on a hair-trigger.

  The slim man chided drily: “Go ahead. I’m unarmed. You’re so tough, why don’t you try to take me? Or is it another case of the barking dog that never bites?”

  Cardigan felt his body growing tense all over. His eyes slid warily from side to side, he moved his head an inch this way, an inch that way. He tried desperately to penetrate the wet darkness that enveloped this ragtag end of the city.

  “Go ahead,” the slim man goaded patiently. “Take me.”

  Cardigan scowled at him in the darkness, said in a husky voice: “With a woman planted up at that window to testify I yanked a rod on an unarmed man?”

  “Nonsense. What good would that do me if I got killed?”

  “You made damn sure, baby, that you’d never be killed. This big display of guts you’re putting on is a horse laugh. The thousand bucks was to go to me. If I took it, O.K. If I didn’t, it was to go to a guy for shooting me the mi
nute I made a play to go for you. He’s across the street in the shadow of that viaduct.”

  Above, the window banged shut.

  The slim man started, seeming for a moment panicky.

  Across the street there was movement, half seen, half heard.

  Cardigan flung himself back of a pole as three blasts of gunfire shattered the wet silence. The window of the pool room exploded in a burst of crackling glass. The pole was nicked. The slim man was running away. Cardigan dropped his bag and tried to get at his gun. Two more blasts thundered. He straightened rigidly against the pole as the bullets thudded into it. The slim man disappeared. There were running feet elsewhere. Cardigan saw a shape speed out of the well of shadow made by the viaduct. He saw an arm raised. He pressed back of the pole as a sixth blast cut loose. The lead whanged into the telephone sign in front of the pool room. The figure sped away into other shadows.

  Cardigan half turned. He saw the fat man inside standing speechless with a horror-stricken look on his face. The fat man was not looking toward the street, but toward the rear of the store. There Cardigan saw one of the pool players weaving back and forth on his feet, with blood all over one side of his face. He saw as the bloody-faced man suddenly plunged out of sight, downward; heard the thud of a body hitting boards.

  Cardigan swiveled, broke into a run, headed up a side street into a tunnel of darkness. He cut through an alley, banging along blindly, and came out on another street. It was dark here also and he strode along past darkened stores and old brick buildings, reached another street that led him into a brighter thoroughfare where moving-picture houses winked colored lights, cigar stores glowed, late restaurants did a good business. Two blocks off this street, on a low grade, was the Hotel Westbrook.

  It was twenty-five past ten when Cardigan registered. A bellhop carried his bag to the sixth floor, ushered him into Room 606. Cardigan gave him a dime and told him to never mind about the windows. The boy went out and Cardigan stood by a window, a deep frown on his face, his hat and overcoat still on. Across a court in an apartment house somebody was playing Adios, Muchacha, on a piano.

  Chapter Two

  Second Warning

  THE female voice on the wire had a low, lipless intimate tone that would have gone well with a chummy living room, not much light and a bottle of brandy for mixing with hot black coffee. This idea passed through Cardigan’s head without his giving it his entire attention. It was just an idea. He was standing with his feet spread, his hips shot forward, his stomach slack; in his undershirt, his suspenders looped downward; the continental-type phone in one hand, a quarter of a tumbler of Irish whisky in the other.

  “What I want to know,” he said in a low rumbling half-whisper, “is how you found out I was here. Here it’s eleven o’clock. I’ve been in the town about an hour and a strange woman calls me up. Miracles stopped happening with Jonah and the whale. Come clean.”

  “Why don’t you do what I said? Come over and see me.”

  “I’d like to. If it wasn’t for business, if it wasn’t for this and that, I’d do it in a minute. Why don’t you come over here?”

  “I couldn’t do that.”

  “In the lobby, I mean.”

  “No, I couldn’t do that.”

  He said: “How’d you find out I was in town?”

  “Please.”

  “Because,” he said, “there’s only two sources you could’ve found out from.”

  “Are you coming over?” she asked.

  “You like to skip things, don’t you?”

  She said: “I’ll wait an hour,” and hung up.

  He put the instrument back in its cradle and kept his hand on it for a long minute, his lips pursed, his eyes narrowed with thought and his shaggy eyebrows meeting above his large, strong nose. It was a toss-up. She had something to tell him or it was a gag intended to put him on the spot.

  Hiram Ballard, the governor, had called in the Cosmos Agency on the quiet, when state and metropolitan police had summarily failed. Election day was only a week off and Ballard, favorite of the conservative press, reputedly a square and conscientious man, was nevertheless slated, according to the wiseacres, to lose the election. The betting money was on James Donnelly, the golden-tongued spellbinder.

  The trouble had started because of the governor’s apparent loyalty to his own conscience. Twelve good men and true had found Truman “Big Boy” Shay guilty of murder in the first degree and Judge Servilla had sentenced him to die in the electric chair. Subsequently there had been a timely reprieve, legal gymnastics. And then, when the eleventh hour had again drawn near, a man by the name of Max Kovac had burst into the press with a statement that he and not Truman Shay had shot Nan Tuscany to death. A second stay of execution. The gathering of lawyers. And then, one night, the escape of Max Kovac, the admitted killer of Nan Tuscany. The governor had called in the Cosmos Agency to find Max Kovac. Billy Farrell, the young, debonair op of the agency, who looked more like a crooner than a private detective, had been sent on the job. Three days later he had vanished.

  Cardigan drained the tumbler of whisky, rasped his throat, planked the glass down on the glass top of the bureau. There was money in this job, but there was also Billy Farrell. A lad who had always been able to take it. A lad with brains and a heart. He’d done some sweet work on several cases and had never been known to say uncle. A breezy, good-natured, laughing kid. Cardigan, of whom it could not be said that he was always good-natured or breezy, liked Billy Farrell. Whenever he thought of Billy lying dead and abandoned somewhere, it stuck in his throat; a savage, ugly determination knotted something in his chest. And thinking of this now, he scowled darkly, his face looked heavy and grim and ugly.

  He cursed, made a pass at his shirt, put it on. In five minutes he was fully dressed and before leaving his room he took another long slug of Irish whisky. He could stand it just so long. He could stand someone daring him to take a chance just so long. For he was by nature reckless and not a swivel-chair detective—dropping cool pearls of wisdom. George Hammerhorn, the head of the agency, had long ago given up trying to drum the virtues of caution into his ace detective’s head. Hammerhorn had set aside a special fund for hospital expenses and in his idle moments jotted down suitable epitaphs, just in case.

  AFTER the warm hotel room, the raw seaboard drizzle seeped into Cardigan’s marrow like water into a sponge. He buttoned his shabby ulster up to the neck. It was so dark and gloomy that people passing looked like little more than shadows. You could not tell what they looked like. He wondered about the man with the bloody face who had slammed down in that pool room. Cardigan supposed he should have hung around, but that would have meant the police, questions, detention as a material witness. He’d hoped to operate here unknown to the police. The police had thought Farrell had been engaged as the governor’s personal bodyguard and not for the special purpose of finding Kovac. And if that woman above the pool room went to the cops things might go hard for him, Cardigan reflected.

  He had a rough idea of the city, for he had worked here on several previous occasions. Walking two blocks, he boarded a street car and rode eight. Getting off, he entered a drug store and managed to buy a quart of fairly good rye. He had it wrapped and then walked around the corner to a telegraph office, where he asked for a messenger. On the package he wrote—275 Wellend Street, Apartment 30.

  “That’s only four blocks from here,” he was told.

  “I know,” said Cardigan. “Deliver it with the compliments of Mr. Cardigan.” He paid for the service and added a quarter tip.

  When the messenger had left, Cardigan went outside and hung around the corner. He was still standing there, fifteen minutes later, when the messenger came around the corner on his way back to the office.

  “Listen, son,” Cardigan said.

  “Oh,” the boy said; and then recognizing him: “Oh, hello, sir.”

  “Did you deliver it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Who took it from you?”
>
  “A lady.”

  “Did you see into the apartment?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Was there anyone there besides the lady?”

  “No, sir. Only a dog. A little dog.”

  “Did you see anyone hanging around the lobby?”

  “No, sir.”

  “The street?”

  “No, sir.”

  Cardigan gave him another quarter. “Forget about it, son.”

  He cut across to Welland Street, which it seemed to him was darker than all the other streets; its infrequent street lamps shedding little light. Number 275 was a five-storied tan brick building with two milky white globes of light flanking the entryway. Cardigan approached the address on the other side of the street, went past to the next block, then crossed the street and returned. He strode in no great hurry until he was within a foot of the entry; then he practically dived through, expecting almost anything, receiving nothing.

  It was a neat walk-up. He climbed on dark red tiles to the third floor, found himself in a small square foyer with three sides, a door in each. There was a small white button alongside the door numbered 30, and this he pressed with his thumb. He put his right hand back into his overcoat pocket and warmed the cool butt of his revolver with his palm.

  She wore a suit of dark blue velvet lounging pajamas. The coat had large patch pockets and a broad belt. Her mules matched the color of the pajamas. She was tall enough. Her hair was black, straight, shiny, and combed back off her ears.

  “What was the idea?” she said.

  “The rye?”

  She nodded.

  He said: “It was just an idea.”

  “I’ll bet it was.”

  “I always thought,” he said, “that those smart guys at circuses who shoved their heads in a lion’s mouth were going a little too far.”

  “I catch on,” she nodded. “Well, come in.”

  IT WAS a small, warm living room, with a bedroom off one side, a kitchenette off the other. There was a divan with an end table at either side; on one of the tables a small brass lamp. There were two standing lamps, no others. Cardigan scaled his hat onto the divan, then went over and dropped down into a thick-cushioned armchair. He unbuttoned his overcoat. She held out a small lacquered box and from it he took a cigarette. She took one herself, lit up and sat down on the divan. She seemed preoccupied and after a few puffs she looked up at Cardigan with dark, remote eyes.