Shake a Crooked Town (3 page)

“Killain!” Johnny turned at the strident bark. A hatchet-faced, sallow-complexioned man with protruding eyes rushed up to him. “I want to talk to you, Killain.”

“So talk, Cuneo,” Johnny invited him. Ted Cuneo was a Detective First Class attached to the local precinct, and he and Johnny Killain had no use at all for each other. Johnny looked around the lobby and appeared to notice the herd of police for the first time. “What’s the matter? One of your boys lose a collar button?”

“You’ve got some explaining to do,” Cuneo said with evident satisfaction. “Upstairs,” he added, and barged onto an elevator.

“That’s for the paying customers,” Johnny said. He walked to the service elevator. “You types that run up the tax bills ride over here.”

“Just so we get there,” Cuneo sneered, following him.

“Where to?” Johnny asked him, a hand on the controls.

“Your room.”

“
My
room?” Johnny pretended surprise. “That big nose of yours finally caught up with the still I’ve got up there?” Detective Ted Cuneo’s saturnine features flushed darkly. Johnny could see that it was only with an effort that he contained himself.

In the sixth-floor corridor the first thing Johnny set eyes on was Lieutenant Joseph Dameron’s impressive bulk. The lieutenant was emerging from Johnny’s room. Frosty gray eyes in an applecheeked broad face surveyed Johnny impassively. The close-cropped hair was iron-gray. “Well, well, well!” Johnny said softly. “Heap-big-frog-in-a-small-puddle himself. What the hell have I been up to that requires your august presence, Joe? You were just leaving? Don’t let me detain you.”

Without a word the lieutenant turned and re-entered the room. Johnny and Ted Cuneo followed. The first glance was enough to tell Johnny that the police had already been there long enough for Carl Thompson’s body to have been removed. Johnny’s lips tightened. He didn’t like what he was thinking.

Micheline Thompson didn’t look exactly the type to be any sort of prisoner of Jim Daddario. If, instead, she were an accomplice, her call to Johnny could have been contrived to get him out of the hotel before the police arrived. Had she and Daddario wanted to know if he had already spoken to Carl Thompson? Johnny wondered what turn the conversation might have taken if he had admitted it. The idea put Micheline Thompson in a different perspective.

Lieutenant Dameron turned from a brief conversation with the medical examiner, a lean-faced, clear-eyed man carrying a small black bag. Technicians still milled about the room. Johnny headed for his armchair. “When you boys get ready—” He broke off, whistled, and pointed at chalk marks on the floor. “Is that for real or are you guys practicin’?” He turned to the lieutenant. “Thompson? Someone used my place for a shootin’ gallery?” He made a sound of disgust at Dameron’s silence and turned again to the chair.

“Don’t sit down there!” A tall man with a black box on a cord around his neck dashed up. “I want more prints from that.” He grabbed Johnny’s arm as he went to sit down.

Johnny grabbed back, and the man whitened and cursed. “If it’s mine you want, take ‘em off your arm, Jack,” Johnny advised him. “Keep your damn hands to yourself.”

“That’s enough of that,” Lieutenant Dameron said mildly. He shook his head at the tall man who had colored angrily. The lieutenant said nothing further until the last of the laboratory men had departed. Ted Cuneo closed the door behind them and stood with his back to it.

“Well?” Johnny demanded. “Did you come over here to sell me sweeps tickets?”

Lieutenant Dameron lit a filter cigarette. He sat down on the edge of the bed and studied his well-polished shoes. All his movements were leisurely. He looked like a man with all the time in the world. He exhaled a thin cloud of blue smoke in a diminishing stream before looking up at Johnny again. “What happened here?” he asked. His voice was quiet but the official steel lay close to the surface.

“How the hell do I know?” Johnny grumbled. “Was I here?”

The lieutenant’s hard gray eyes rested on the torn-out knees of Johnny’s trousers. The eyes moved up until they encountered the gap left by the missing button. They missed nothing of the street grime. “Since you weren’t here, just where were you?” he probed.

“Maybe I need a lawyer,” Johnny countered. “Maybe I shouldn’t even be tryin’ to answer your questions. Who was killed here, Joe?”

“You seem to think it was someone named Thompson. What happened to your knees?”

“Oh, those.” Johnny glanced down at them. “A guy just now unloaded on me up the street with a silenced gun. I was tryin’ to dig a foxhole in the sidewalk.” From the doorway Ted Cuneo snorted in patent disbelief. Johnny ignored him. “What’s it all about?” he continued to Dameron. “What bugged you enough to get you out on the street this time of night?” At the resulting silent stare Johnny rose to his feet and walked to the bedside telephone.

“Get away from that phone!” Detective Cuneo rapped at him. He took two steps into the room.

Johnny looked at him over his shoulder. “If I’m under arrest, boy scout, pull your gun an’ hope it works. Otherwise shut up.” He picked up the receiver. Cuneo glared at him and looked hopefully at Dameron. The lieutenant made no sign. “Hi, ma,” Johnny said into the phone. “What’s all the excitement?”

“Oh, Johnny, I’ve been trying to call you
everywhere
.” The night switchboard operator’s voice pushed into an upper register. Sally Fontaine was a slim, brown-eyed girl with whom Johnny had a long-time, comfortable understanding. “I tried to get you at Mickey Tallant’s, at the apartment, at the poker game—” Her tone turned curious. “Say, how did you get rid of them so soon?”

“The constabulary? I didn’t. They’re breathin’ hard on the back of my neck. What happened?”

“Oh. One of the uniformed men said there’d been a phone call. The lieutenant and that man Cuneo were in the lead. Cuneo didn’t seem to want to believe Tommy Haines when Tommy told them you’d been in the bar for four hours until just ten minutes before they got here. Johnny, who was the—”

“Get me later, ma.” Johnny hung up and looked from Dameron on the bed to Cuneo at the door. “If four hours gets me an alibi he must’ve been killed just before you got here, right, boys? I always knew your pigeon service was the best, Joe, but are you wired right into the gunners now? The kid says you were here first.”

“The message to the stationhouse said ‘Tell Dameron there is a stiff in 615 at the Duarte’.” The lieutenant’s expression was bland. “Since I’ve been half-expecting a call like that for a long time, I thought I should take a look.” He stubbed out his cigarette without removing his eyes from Johnny. “Why would anyone line you up on the street with a silenced gun?”

“Was the man who was killed heavy-set, redheaded, with a badly scarred face?” Johnny asked innocently. He continued at Dameron’s gradging nod. “Then I can tell you. That was Carl Thompson of Jefferson, N.Y.” He told them Carl Thompson’s story, omitting only his prior discovery of the body. “The same people who scratched Thompson from the entries would be the only ones interested in addin’ me to the score. They don’t know how much he told me.”

Ted Cuneo made a loud br-r-acking noise. “What a pipe dream!” he jeered.

Johnny kept his attention on the lieutenant. “The phone call to the precinct was a little more of the same, Joe. If I got hung for Thompson, fine.”

“A phone call to me and an attempt to kill you right back-to-back?” Deep furrows etched themselves in Dameron’s ruddy forehead. “That’s too much of a good thing.”

“Maybe somebody got nervous. I’m tellin’ you that’s what happened. Get on your stick an’ find out why.”

“If it’s ‘why’ we’re talking about, why was Thompson killed?”

“For Christ’s sake, were you listenin’ to me? He was killed to keep him from goin’ on up to Jefferson an’ burnin’ down the barn over the heads of the outfit that gave him the goosin’.”

“You believed his story?”

“What the hell difference does it make if I believed it or not?
He
believed it. He was goin’ back there an’ shake that place to pieces. The people who ran him out knew it. They found him here an’ put a stop to it.”

Lieutenant Dameron frowned. “You expect me to believe that someone in Jefferson close to the policy-making level had this ex-police chief murdered?”

“What’s so hard to believe about it? They’d had him half-killed when they threw him out of office. It hadn’t shut him up.”

Ted Cuneo repeated the sound he had made previously. “A man of your talents ought to be able to come up with a better story than that when a dead man’s found on the floor of his room, Killain.”

Johnny rose suddenly from his chair. “All of a sudden I don’t like the tone of your voice, Cuneo.”

“I don’t give a damn what you don’t like!” the detective bristled. Twin pin-points of high color emblazoned his sallow complexion. “All of that lip-flapping of yours gives me a pain. If I ever heard a jerked-off story—”

Lieutenant Dameron slid from the bed and interposed himself between them as Johnny started forward. Johnny’s shoulder knocked him to one side. “Cut it!” Dameron ordered. “This isn’t the children’s hour. This idea of yours, Johnny. It just won’t hold—” He turned his head at a knock on the door. Cuneo shifted from his hands-raised, glowering regard of Johnny to look inquiringly at the lieutenant, who nodded. The detective opened the door. Over his shoulder Johnny could see Chet Rollins’ round face and gold-rimmed glasses.

The chubby auditor bustled into the room, unconscious of the tension. “They called me at home,” he said to Johnny. “Ed’s at a hotel supply convention in Philly.” Ed Carrolton was the Duarte’s manager. Rollins looked curiously at Dameron and Cuneo before glancing worriedly around the room. “You get him out? Hell of a thing for the hotel.”

“It didn’t do him much good, either,” Johnny said. He introduced the auditor to the others.

Rollins turned back to Johnny after the double handshake. “Nobody downstairs seemed to know who he was. Was he a friend of yours? Did he get killed trying to save your money? All the way over in the cab I kept thinking it mightn’t have happened if I hadn’t sent that damn envelope upstairs.”

“Money?” Cuneo asked alertly.

“Sure.” Chet Rollins looked surprised. “Wasn’t that how it happened?” He looked at Johnny. “It’s still here?”

“I haven’t had a chance to look.” Johnny could cheerfully have throttled the little auditor. He knew how this was going to look to Cuneo.

“I’d like to hear about this money,” the detective said unpleasantly.

“Well—” Rollins stared uncertainly from Cuneo to Johnny and back again. The atmosphere was beginning to get through to him. “I sent an envelope up to Johnny this afternoon by one of the bellboys. It contained wages I’d been holding for him in the safe.”

“Cash?” Cuneo demanded. Rollins nodded. “How much?”

“Nine hundred and thirty-nine dollars.” The auditor said it almost apologetically.

Cuneo stared. He turned abruptly to Johnny. “Is it here?”

Johnny went to the bureau and opened and closed drawers. When he closed the last one he faced about silently. No words were necessary.

“Where was it when you last saw it?” Cuneo pressed him.

“On top of the bureau,” Johnny admitted reluctantly.

“A thousand bucks right on top of the—” Cuneo waggled his head in amazement. “And this Thompson was supposed to be cracked?” He looked at his superior. “I like the sound of this a hell of a lot better than that jazz we heard before. This poor bastard Thompson probably caught a hotel thief right in the act.” He swung back to Rollins. “Who’d you send up here with the money?”

“Richie Gordon, one of our regular boys.” Rollins said it defensively.

“Did he know what was in the envelope?”

“He could have.” Rollins looked unhappy. “He was in the outer office when I was talking to the bookkeeper about getting it out of the safe.”

“Better have a talk with this Gordon, Ted, and find out how much broadcasting he did about his errand,” Dameron said.

“Right,” Detective Cuneo said briskly. He looked at Johnny, solemnly tapped a finger to his forehead three times, and left the room.

“I’ll—I’d better check around downstairs,” Chet Rollins said uneasily. When no one said him nay he departed hurriedly.

“You guys are foulin’ off the pitch, Joe,” Johnny began as the room emptied. “This Richie Gordon’s a good kid.”

“Good kids talk, too.” Lieutenant Dameron plucked a loose thread from the sleeve of a tan suit very similar in color to Johnny’s. “How come we didn’t hear about this money before? Are you going to try to deny it makes more sense than what you were peddling?”

“The hell it does. I heard Thompson’s story right out of the horse’s mouth, Joe. You didn’t. All right, I forgot the envelope on the bureau an’ it’s gone. What I’m sayin’ is that if the money hadn’t been missing something else would have been gone. The closet would’ve been stripped if nothing else offered. Whoever did the job
wanted
it to look like a room robbery walked in on by Thompson.”

“You’ve been watching too many late, late shows. Be over at the station in the morning to sign a statement.” Lieutenant Dameron settled his expensive-looking dark brown fedora more firmly on his head and started from the room.

“Goddammit, Joe—” Johnnny tramped to the door after him.

“In the morning,” the lieutenant repeated from the corridor. He marched off toward the elevator, his heels hitting heavily.

From the doorway Johnny watched him go. How in the hell was he going to let a little daylight into that thick skull? Why Joe Dameron couldn’t see something as plain as—

Down the hall Dameron strode past the corridor leading to the west wing. A dark figure leaped from it, behind the lieutenant’s broad back. The right arm swung viciously. Clubbed hard at the base of the neck, Dameron dropped heavily. His momentum pitched him forward on his face. His hat flew off and bounced away. He struggled to roll over. Above him the dark figure stood poised, glittering steel in the left hand. A woman’s silk stocking covered the head.

Johnny came down the corridor in all-out charge. The intent stocking-masked assailant whirled from its crouch at the sound of the bull-buffalo rush. Before the knife could be oriented to the new danger Johnny’s lowered shoulder blasted the man under the breastbone with tremendous force, up and off the floor into the wall. The man screamed as the stocking-mask slammed into the wall. He caromed off into Johnny’s reaching hands and Johnny dug in his heels in a sliding skid to halt his own headlong progress. He almost jumped into the air from the recoil of the force with which he smashed the man to the floor. The body hit hard with a soggy sound, bounced, and fell back as limply as a disjointed rag doll. The silk stocking was a flat wet smear.