You Bet Your Life: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Three) (18 page)

The cop car was across the street when we went through the door. Costello followed us out into the wind with his hands in his pockets. He moved his blue face close to me so that I’d be the only one to hear.

“When Frank gives you the word to go,” he said without moving his lips, “you got exactly two hours to be out of town and not come back, not ever. Got it?”

“I got it,” I said, and led the way around the corner to Narducy’s cab. The street was pretty well deserted. The area was mostly industrial. A couple of big factories stood in the sky, silhouetted against the moon. We got in, and Narducy asked how it had gone. The Marxes were quiet. I told Narducy everything looked fine.

We pulled away, and he made a U-turn to take us back to Michigan Avenue. Something bumped in the car and rattled. Narducy said he’d check it later and guessed it was a loose muffler.

We got back to the Drake in ten minutes, and the Marxes got out. I said goodnight and that I’d see them in the morning. Groucho leaned through the door and said “Thanks.” No gags, no smirk. No sour face. Harpo shook my hand and grinned, and Chico suggested that he never knew when he might need my help again. I closed the door, and Narducy pulled away singing “Lydia the Tattooed Lady” in his Groucho voice. I didn’t mind.

When he pulled in front of his apartment building, I paid him and marked the price and tip in my black book. He said he’d be on the street for a few more hours. I turned to head in and up to Merle while Narducy got out of the cab to check the loose muffler.

About twenty seconds later, he caught me going up the stairs. His eyes were wide and he had something to say, but words weren’t coming out, not even an impression of Cary Grant. I followed him back down the stairs and out to the cab.

“Muffler wasn’t loose,” he finally said, breathing fast in little gulps. “It was the trunk. Someone broke the lock.”

He pointed to the trunk and I went over to it. It was partly open. I opened it the rest of the way and found out what had happened to Gino Servi. Someone had put a bullet in his forehead and folded him into Narducy’s trunk. Narducy didn’t move around to where he could see the corpse again.

“Well?” he said as if he had to find a toilet fast.

“No, not well. Not well at all.”

A large caliber bullet had not only cancelled Gino Servi’s life but maybe the chance for Chico Marx to walk away clean and me to turn a killer over to the cops.

I was five squares back with nowhere to go, and I was tired, damned tired.

“You got two choices, Raymond,” I said, looking down the street to be sure no one was coming or looking. Whoever had given Narducy this present probably knew about me, Narducy, and Merle. Sooner or later he was going to find it easier to get rid of me than to keep sweeping witnesses out of my path. “You go to the cops and tell them you found this gentleman in your trunk, or you dump the body someplace. I suggest you avoid the questions and dump the body.”

“I never—” he started. “I can’t.”

“I have,” I said. “And I can. Get back in and tell me a good place to put our friend where the cops can find him.”

Ten minutes later, we left Gino sitting on a bench in Lincoln Park looking at a bunch of icebound pleasure boats in a harbor. Ten minutes after that Narducy had dropped me at the Ambassador Hotel. He was too nervous to tell if someone had followed us, and I was having too much trouble scheming to worry about it.

The doorman at the Ambassador was tall, black, and polite. He was also young and handsome in a blue uniform. We were a nice contrast on every point. I made my way to the desk walking on a carpet four feet thick. Just off the desk was a restaurant with a sign indicating it was “The Pump Room.” Someone opened the door of the Pump Room and I spotted a Negro waiter dressed like Punjab with a big turban. It looked like the kind of place where Ian Fleming would feel at home.

The desk clerk wore a modified tux and was too classy to even give me a suspicious look. He just called Fleming’s room and announced me, and Fleming, apparently, said I should come up.

11

Fleming opened the door with an amused smile on his face, a drink in one hand, and his pearl cigarette holder in the other. He wore a dark smoking jacket that looked as if it were made of velvet. The only other time I had seen anything like it was in a Ricardo Cortez movie a good ten years earlier.

“Mr. Peters,” he said genially. “To what do I owe this pleasure? Another attempt on your life?”

He stepped back to let me in, and in I went to a large, carpeted room with plenty of soft furniture and a tall, black-haired woman in a black dress. She looked like an ad for expensive perfume. She didn’t look soft like the furniture.

“Were you followed?” Fleming asked matter-of-factly.

“Maybe,” I said, looking at the woman, who raised a drink to her mouth as if she were in a fashion show. The mouth pouted and the face did not show signs of pleasure in my company.

Fleming turned off the hall light behind us and moved quickly to switch off the overhead light in the room, leaving only the light of a table lamp in the corner and the silhouette of the woman.

“I always take rooms on this floor in the Ambassador when I’m in Chicago,” Fleming explained. “Someone was overzealous on the doors, and there is a distinct gap between floor and door.”

I looked at the door and could see the light from the hall spreading evenly onto the carpet.

“If someone approaches,” he explained, “no matter how softly, their shadow will show. Learned that from a Japanese diplomat I was following in New York City last year. Formidable group, the Japanese.”

He sat comfortably in the chair after smoothing his smoking jacket behind him and asked me if I wanted a drink. I passed, and tried not to look at the tall woman. Fleming acted as if she were not there and might have gone on ignoring her had she not cleared her throat.

“Ah, yes, Mr. Peters, this is Prosephone Fabrikant, a not very old and not yet a dear friend.”

The woman winced at both the phoney name and the comment, but said nothing.

“I’m sorry to—”

“Don’t apologize,” Fleming said quickly. “Our last meeting was the most exhilarating event of recent years. Perhaps our second can evoke the memory.”

“Are you going to be tied up long?” sighed Prosephone Fabrikant in an accent distinctly cultured and distinctly American, probably Boston.

Fleming looked at me with an eyebrow raised.

“I was hoping you could put me up for the night,” I said.

Prosephone Fabrikant’s irritation reverberated from the walls and shot right through me.

“Of course,” said Fleming. “Prosephone and I can continue our discussion tomorrow.” He looked at her with confidence coming dangerously close to indifference. She tried to stare him down icily, but she was no match for a man who had practiced that look for long hours before a mirror, or else was just born to it. If I tried it, I’d look like a punch-drunk middleweight who heard bells when there were no bells.

“Of course,” she said, finally putting down her drink and stalking to the door. Fleming rose to follow her, but he didn’t hurry and he was right. She hesitated with her hand on the knob, and I retreated as discreetly as I could to the window to look out at the lights of downtown Chicago.

I couldn’t make out the words, but her voice sounded hurt and weak—a voice that seemed out of place in that cool body. His voice was firm but soft. He kissed her for a long time, but without frenzy or fire. Then he opened the door, guided her out, and closed it behind her.

“Met her in the bar downstairs,” Fleming said, returning to the room. “Don’t really remember her name, but have the distinct impression from her ring that she is married. Toby, women are not to be trusted—but American women, for all their deceit, are a distinctly superior lot to Englishwomen. Englishwomen simply do not wash and scrub enough.”

I shrugged and told my tale. When I was about to tell him about Servi’s body in the park waiting for sunrise, he rose and put his finger to his lips. He nodded to the door, and I could see a distinct shadow blocking out a chunk of light in the hall. Fleming made an opening and closing motion with his hand to indicate that I should continue talking. I did while he made his way slowly to the door. He was within a foot of the door when an ancient floorboard under the carpeting gave him away with a distinct creak. The shadow snapped away from the door and footsteps clopped down the hall. Fleming jerked the door open and disappeared. I was a few feet behind him.

Fleming had ten years on me and I remembered him telling me something about having been an athlete. He made a strange looking sprinter in his velvet smoking jacket and slippers, but he was a fast son-of-a-bitch. I couldn’t keep up with him. He went through an exit door and I followed about fifteen feet behind. When I went through the door I stopped to listen for footsteps. My heavy breathing got in the way, but I managed to control it long enough to determine that people were running up the stairs, not down. I went up. Down would have been more fun.

About four flights up I heard a metal door open and close with a clang. Then it opened and closed again. A second or two later I thought I heard a shot. By the time I reached the metal door at the top of the stairway, I hoped there was no one beyond it waiting for me. I needed a week or two to get my legs back and inhale enough air to stay alive. It was either age or the flu or both, or maybe just good sense, but I was tired. I was also responsible for a partly mad Englishman who might be getting shot at by a guy who knew how to shoot.

I pushed the door open and got hit in the face by a blast of wind from the lake. I waited for the wind to pass, but it didn’t. The roof of the Ambassador in the winter was not the ideal place for shelter.

The moon was partially out and I could make out the shapes of chimneys and air ducts, but I couldn’t see any people. I did hear the shot that tore up a spray of snow at my feet. I jumped into the darkness behind a chimney and tripped over a body.

“Fleming?”

“Fleming the fool, at your service,” he said tightly. “I have a very neat little Barretta in my suitcase —oiled, clean, dying to be used.”

“Sorry,” I said, waiting for the man we had trapped to figure out we were unarmed and come looking for us. My eyes adjusted to the near light and I looked at Fleming who, in spite of the thin jacket, didn’t look in the least cold. The only effect of the last ten minutes had been to mess up his hair. As if sensing this, he reached up and patted it neatly in place.

“I wonder,” he said, “if there is another way down from here.”

“I don’t want to try it,” I said.

“No, no old chum, I wasn’t worried about our escape. I don’t want our elusive friend to scamper.”

Something crunched in the snow about twenty feet away. The howl of the wind mixed with the sound, but both Fleming and I heard it. We looked at each other. I’m sure the fear was clear in my eyes. He looked positively happy.

“Good, now we know where he is,” he whispered, and pointed to the right while he slipped away into the darkness on the left. I crawled where he had indicated as quietly as I could, but it wasn’t good enough. Another shot hit too close to me to be luck. I crawled fast, rolling for cover behind a ridge of brick. Both my heart and the footsteps were about equal in volume and both were getting louder. He couldn’t have been more than a dozen feet from me when whoever it was let out a pained grunt. Less then a second later the footsteps retreated. I peered over the ridge of bricks cautiously and saw the faint outline of a man about thirty feet away. He took two more shots into the darkness, and I screwed up my courage and stood up.

“This is the police,” I shouted, making my voice as deep and as loud as I could. “Step out here with your hands over your head. Murphy,” I said in a stage whisper, “if anyone comes in view with a gun in his hand, start shooting and ask questions later.”

Not having thought out the consequences of this move, I wondered what I would do if someone did step forward with a gun in hand and saw me unarmed. I hurried in a crouch to a metal air duct and was rewarded by the sound of hurrying feet and the slam of the metal door. Just in case it might be a trick, I sat for another shivering minute or two and then made a circle to the door. I pulled it open and found nothing.

Then I began to search for Fleming’s velvet-clad body. By leaning forward, I managed to follow a maze of foot prints in the snow in a variety of circles. One set of prints, however, led to a nauseating end at the edge of the building. I didn’t want to look over and down. A few months earlier, in Los Angeles, I had seen a midget take an enforced dive out of a high window—and one sight like that in a man’s life is one more than he needs. I rubbed a ball of snow in my face and leaned over into the blast of wind.

The fingers of a pair of hands stood out distinctly no more than two feet below, clinging to a concrete design in the hotel.

“Fleming?” I called into the wind though it didn’t take much to realize it couldn’t be anyone else.

“Peters,” he said somewhat faintly, but without fear—at least without fear I could detect. “Glad you found me. It’s rather difficult to hold on and I really don’t see how I can scramble up.”

I leaned over with one hand on the brick ridge of the roof and watched while one of Fleming’s slippers dropped from his foot and went sailing down into the night, flickering past lighted windows to disappear far below. Fleming’s face was hidden by the jutting of concrete, but I could see his body literally swaying in the stiff wind. I eased my way out, trying not to lose my frosty grip with my left hand while my not-long-enough right arm inched down to Fleming’s fingers.