The Gutter and the Grave (17 page)

“Open up, Paulson. You think that other bum’d take this for you?”

“What other urgghhh!” Another jab in the gut. Paulson’s face went white. I kept remembering the lead pipe he’d wielded, and I wondered how many poor bastards he’d used that talented piece of metal on. I began wishing he’d never talk. I began wishing they’d beat his brains out. They kept pounding at him with questions and fists. One cop delivered a rabbit punch that I thought would knock Paulson’s head off. He almost fell out of the chair on that one. Then he shook his head and sat up straight again, ready to take a beating for another hood who used a blackjack on people he didn’t know.

The door opened. A uniformed cop walked in. “Call for you, Frank,” he said. I followed Miskler into the
squad room. He picked up the nearest uncradled phone and said, “Detective Miskler here.”

He paused, listening. “Yeah, uh-huh, uh-huh, okay, don’t touch anything, I’ll be right over.” He slammed down the phone. “You may want to come with me, Cordell.”

“Where to?”

“Your floozy’s apartment.”

“What?”

“Laraine Marsh. Someone just tried to shoot her.”

* * *

Laraine looked like a bird that had flown into a high-tension wire. Her hair was mussed, and she wore no lipstick, and her eyes were wide with fright. She wore a dressing gown, and when she let us in the gown parted over her knees to reveal a black slip beneath it. She threw herself into my arms instantly, and Miskler nodded sourly and said, “All right, what happened?”

Laraine began sobbing. I held her. Miskler looked around for a jug of whiskey, poured a jigger and handed it to her. Laraine drank it. I led her into the living room, and she sat on the sofa with her hands clenched tight in her lap, and again Miskler asked, “What happened?”

“Some…somebody tried to kill me.”

“When?”

“I was…I was putting on my lipstick. At the…the dressing table. My bedroom. I’ve got to work today. I’m late now. Somebody…”

“Take it easy, Laraine,” I said. “Tell us what happened as well as you can remember it.”

“I was putting on my lipstick. I use a brush. A lipstick brush. I was…was bending close to the mirror when I…I…” She began sobbing again. Miskler and I waited. She was trembling as she tried to find her voice.

“Go on,” Miskler said gently.

“I…I saw what…what he had in his hand. A gun. I didn’t know what to do. I jumped off the chair, flat, on the floor, and he shot at me. He shot three times. He broke the mirror, that’s hard luck, he broke the mirror, Matt, I’m terrified! Suppose he comes back?”

“Take it easy, baby,” I said. “What happened after those three shots?”

“I screamed. I couldn’t stop screaming! My neighbor down the hall came in.”

“What happened to the man on the fire escape?”

“He dropped the gun and ran…down…away…I don’t know, I didn’t look out the window.”

“Did your neighbor see him?”

“I don’t think so. He was gone by that time.”

“What did he look like?” I asked.

“A big man, very big. With black hair and…and a heavy beard.”

“Did he say anything to you?”

“Nothing. He just…shot. And when I screamed, he ran.”

“What was he wearing?”

“I don’t know. A sports jacket, I think.”

“Tie?”

“No,” Laraine said. “I don’t think so.”

“White shirt?”

“Blue. A blue sports shirt.”

“Think you’d remember him if you saw him again?”

“Forever,” she said, and she shuddered.

“Let’s take a look at the bedroom,” Miskler said.

She led us into the other room. A dressing table was against the wall opposite the fire escape window. It was a small table covered with a chintz affair that hid the legs. A large mirror was on the wall behind it. Or rather, the remnants of a large mirror. All that remained of it, actually, was the frame and a few long silver shards. Three big holes were in the cardboard backing that had held the actual mirror in the frame. The mirror itself was shattered into a thousand pieces that lay on the tabletop and the floor. The chair in front of the dressing table had been overturned, and a box of face powder was spilled all over the floor.

“I…I guess I knocked it over when I jumped,” Laraine said apologetically. “I’ll get a broom and…”

“No, leave it alone,” Miskler said. “Is that the fire escape?” He pointed.

“Yes.”

He walked to the window, looked out, and said, “There’s the gun, all right. A .38, Cordell.” He spread a handkerchief over his fingers and gingerly lifted the gun from where it lay in a far corner of the fire escape, leaning far out the window to get it. Then he walked to me and held the gun out, the handkerchief under it.

“Smith and Wesson,” I said.

“You bet. I’ll tell you something else.”

“What?”

“Before the lab even checks it, and before I call Pistol Permits for serial numbers, I can tell you this is Johnny Bridges’ missing gun, and the gun that killed both Dom and Christine Archese.”

“That sounds like a safe estimate,” I said.

“I only make safe estimates,” Miskler said. “Was this man wearing gloves, Miss Marsh?”

“Yes, yes, I think so. I thought it was strange, in this weather…”

“Nothing strange about that,” Miskler said. “Only strange thing is that he left the gun behind. I guess your scream scared the hell out of him. If he was going to get caught, he didn’t want the weapon in his hands. I meant to ask you. Did you ever see this man before?”

“Never.”

“No idea who he might be?”

“None.”

“Well, we’ll let you look through some mug shots. Think it might be the baby who worked you over, Cordell?”

“Worked…?” and Laraine suddenly turned to me, as if seeing me for the first time and then said, “Matt! Oh my God, Matt, what have they done to you?” She put her hand up to touch my eye gently, and then she bit her lip, and I thought she was going to start crying all over again.

“He’ll survive,” Miskler said drily. “I’m going to
send a patrolman up here, Miss Marsh. Whoever fired those shots wasn’t playing around. We may have scared him off, but maybe not. In any case, you need police protection.”

“But I’ve got to get to work,” she complained.

“He’ll accompany you to the store and stay with you all day. I’m sorry. That’s the way it’s got to be. May I use your phone, please?”

“Certainly.”

He went into the other room. Laraine came to me and kissed me and I held her close and again she shuddered, remembering the experience, reliving it, allowing it to frighten her all over again. Miskler came back into the room and said, “No necking, please. A patrolman’s on the way over. Hang around until he gets here, will you, Cordell? I’m going to question Miss Marsh’s neighbor.”

He went out of the apartment, and I could hear him knocking on a door in the hallway.

“This man at the window,” I said. “He wasn’t the guy I tangled with Tuesday night, was he?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“You’re a lucky girl. He could have potted you.”

She nodded. “Matt, I’m still shaking. God, isn’t anyone safe? What’s behind it all? Why Dom and…and Christine…and now me? What have we done? What has anyone got against us?”

I shook my head.

Laraine got up and went to the closet. “I want to finish dressing before the patrolman gets here,” she
said, and she took a black skirt from a hanger. “Stay, Matt.”

I stayed. She took off the dressing gown and got into the skirt, smoothing it over her hips. It was a pleasure watching her. Then she went to the chest near the closet, opened a drawer, and took out a neatly folded black sweater that she pulled over her head quickly. She fastened a string of pearls at her neck and then brushed out her hair. She was wearing bedroom slippers, and she went to the closet, took them off, and pulled out a pair of black flats, which she hastily slipped onto her feet.

“I hate these ugly shoes,” she said, “but I have to stand all day.”

“They’re not so ugly,” I said.

She made a face and said, “Irrkkk” or something like that to express her loathing of the black working shoes. She lit a cigarette then, and we sat around chatting about small things, anything to keep her mind off what had happened, until the knock came on the door. The patrolman introduced himself and he and Laraine trotted off to the five and ten. Before she left, she made me promise I’d meet her there after work. I hung around in the hall waiting for Miskler. When he came out, I said, “What’d she say?”

“Heard three shots and then a scream. Figured it came from here. Waited a few seconds because she didn’t want to get involved in any trouble, and then decided to come in anyway. Miss Marsh, she says, was sitting on the floor near the dressing table, with spilled
face powder all around her. She was crying like a madwoman. The neighbor suggested that she call the police. Any ideas who the bird might be, Cordell?”

“Nope.”

“Your floozy have any?”

“No. And stop calling her a floozy, Frank.”

“And stop calling me Frank,” he said. “Why don’t you go back to the squad and take a look at some mug shots? If we find your assailant, he may be one and the same.”

“Maybe I’ll do that,” I said.

“I’ll put in a call for some lab people,” Miskler said. “See if they can dig up anything on that fire escape.” Miskler paused. “Goddamnit, I hate mystery men, don’t you?”

I nodded.

“Go up to the squad, Cordell. Start earning your keep, will you?”

“I didn’t realize I was being paid.”

“You could be in jail right now, you bastard. Thank your lucky stars I’m a kind considerate cop who always wanted to be a hobo.”

I made a slight raspberry and stepped past Miskler.

As I went down the steps, he yelled, “Go on up to the squad and look at those mug shots!”

“Okay,” I said. “I will.”

I didn’t.

I didn’t because I accidentally heard a radio as I passed an apartment on the second floor.

The radio was turned up rather loud. That’s not unusual for a tenement. The radio was turned to a disc jockey, and the record on the turntable was “Lover.”

It was like getting hit with the lead pipe all over again. It hit me in the gut, a solid club that caught my stomach and knocked the wind out of me. It was only a combination of notes, a trumpet with a muted sax background, not anything with real physical force, but it was “Lover,” and I was weak all at once. I clutched for the bannister, and Toni McAllister Cordell was suddenly in that hallway with me.

There was a place. It was called Mike’s but it could have been called anything because there are a thousand places exactly like it, and every pair of lovers has a place, and this place was ours, before we were married and for a while after we were married. It was a nice place, Mike’s. We didn’t know a soul there except the bartender and the piano player, and we never talked to anyone but them. We really didn’t need anyone. There was always plenty to talk about, so we didn’t search out conversationalists. The clientele of
Mike’s was a mixed one. Television executives and playwrights and an occasional Broadway star sprinkled with guys who worked in the garment district and an old guy who lived on the block and who was a postman. It was a combination of a local bar and a haven from the local bar, and so the crowd was always mixed, but I’d never seen a fight in all the time we went there, except for the night I had one, and then of course we stopped going to Mike’s, and anyway the end, the real end, wasn’t too long after that—so I guess it was only fitting that Mike’s should go down the drain along with everything else.

The place was on 31st Street, off Lexington Avenue. When we got married, we lived in a place on East 36th, which was convenient to the bar we’d come to think of as special. We’d been married two months when I had the fight.

It was a Monday night, I remember.

It was raining. It always rains on Mondays, anyway. Monday is the bitchinest day in the week and should be struck completely from the calendar. We were just sitting around the apartment, I remember. I’d just hired Parker, and he was out on a case, and I was looking over some reports from one of the other guys who worked in the office, and Toni was lounging around in a black velvet sort of thing with tapered slacks and a very low-cut top. She wasn’t wearing a bra, what the hell the thing was designed for wearing around the house, and this was her own apartment, so the hell with you.

“Are you going to be busy long?” she asked.

“A few more minutes,” I said. “Why?”

“It’s such a dreary night. I thought we might go over to Mike’s for a drink.”

“All right,” I said. “You go change. I’ll be ready when you are.”

“Do I have to?” she said. “I’ll keep my raincoat on.”

“Okay,” I said. I was wearing a sports jacket and an open-throat sports shirt. I knew I wouldn’t have to change because one of the nicest things about Mike’s was its complete informality. Toni’s costume, of course, was not intended for street wear but would do fine under a raincoat. I finished the reports, and then I helped Toni into her coat. It was one of these white jobs with a belt. She buttoned it across her throat, and it covered the skimpy top. All that showed were the tapered black slacks stemming from the bottom of the coat, and a pair of pony-skin boots Toni put on. I threw on a raincoat that looked nothing whatever like the raincoats private eyes are supposed to wear. Most private detectives dress like ordinary citizens. If you could spot an investigator by his raincoat, his value as an investigator would be absolutely nil.

We went downstairs.

It wasn’t raining very hard. A soft misty drizzle covered the streets, hazing the lights, giving the city a muted look, the look of an impressionist painting. We decided to walk to Mike’s. Toni took my arm, and we talked about rain a little and about the best kind of drinks to have when it was raining, and we decided to
ask the waiter for a hot rum toddy. I bet Toni he wouldn’t know what we were talking about, and she bet he’d serve it within five minutes. The stakes were a private matter.

Mike’s was pretty crowded when we got there, but we found a table over near the piano. The bartender waved to us—a guy named Freddie—and we waved back. Emmett, the piano player, looked up and nodded and Toni and I both nodded back, and then the waiter came over to the table.