The Tough Guys Read online

  Every head in the room swivelled my way when I walked in but there wasn’t a sign of recognition on any of them. Miles and his two sons threw a quick look at the pair of hoods, wondering if I were part of them, but when Carl Matteau shrugged they knew I wasn’t and Uncle Miles came halfway out of his chair with his face flushed in anger at the intrusion.

  “Just what is the meaning of this!” he demanded.

  I grinned at him, slow and deliberately. “A social call, Uncle. I came to pay my respects to the family. Relax.”

  It was Rudy who recognized me first. Something happened to his breath. It seemed to stick in his throat. “Cat!” he said. “Cat Cay!”

  “Hello, Punk.” I walked over to him, stood there looking down at his eyes, knowing what he saw scared him stiff. He started to hold out his hand and I slapped him across the mouth.

  Teddy never moved for a few moments, then skittered behind the desk. “Are… are you crazy?” he managed to get out.

  “Sure, kid.” I laughed and watched Miles let go the arms of the chair and sink down into the padded seat. He looked even smaller than before.

  All he could say was, “It can’t be. It can’t be you.”

  But it was and he knew it.

  The one sitting behind me, the good looking one, came out of his chair very casually, strode over to the desk and stared at me with eyes as cold as my own. He was as big as I was, but only in height, but he had the kind of build you couldn’t trust. A lot of those angular guys could be like whips. “Do you mind explaining who you are?”

  I pushed him a little. “You first, buddy.”“

  He rolled with the nudge. “Vance Colby. I happen to be engaged to Anita Bannerman.”

  Anita! Damn, I had almost forgotten about her. The distant cousin who was ten to my twelve, fair headed and frail who used to follow me around like a puppy. She was another who had sneaked me sandwiches and milk when they had my back against the wall. Cute little kid. She had met me by the gate the night I ran away and kissed me goodbye and ran back to the house crying her eyes out.

  “Well, how about that,” I said.

  “That doesn’t explain you.”

  “I’m a Bannerman, buddy. The bastard Bannerman. You should have heard of me. Max, my old man, and Miles here were brothers. I used to live here.”

  “So.” That was all he said. He nodded as if he knew the whole story and turned to look at Uncle Miles. The old man seemed to be in a stupor.

  For some reason the whole thing got funny. Everything was out of focus and there was a charge in the air that you could feel on your skin. I said, “Well, I didn’t expect any fatted calf killed for me, but I sure didn’t think the clan would be so far on their heels they’d entertain a couple of bums like these two here.” I turned around and looked at Matteau and Gage.

  It was Gage who started to move until Matteau tapped his arm. “Easy, boy,” he said to me.

  I walked over to him, gave him one stiff shot in the chops and when he folded I laid one on the back of his neck that piled him into the rug. When Gage reached for the gun I jammed the barrel of the .45 in his mouth and felt teeth snap and saw the blood spill down his chin and the wide eyes of a guy who had just made one hell of a big mistake. He hit the wall, came off it knowing what was going to happen and too late to stop it. I let him have the gunsight across his jaw that laid the flesh open and he went down on top of Matteau with a soft whimper and stayed there.

  All you could hear was the terrified silence. It was a noise in itself. I said, “Don’t anybody ever call me boy,” and I looked at the three other Bannermans who never knew any other name for me.

  She didn’t call me boy though. From the doorway where she had seen the whole thing start and end she half whispered, “Cat!”

  My love, my little love, only now she wasn’t small and frail. Darkly blonde still, but luscious and beautiful with those same deep purple eyes and a mouth that had given me my first kiss. Her breasts accentuated the womanliness of her, dipping into a pert waist and swelling into thighs and calves that were the ultimate in sensuous beauty.

  “Hello, Anita,” I said.

  Even the pair on the floor, the blood or the gun in my fist couldn’t stop the headlong rush she made into my arms and hold back the tears. I laughed, grabbed her close a moment and held her back so I could look at her. “I’ll be damned,” I said, “How you’ve changed.”

  Through eyes that were wet and streaking mascara she looked at me. “Cat… where did you come from? You were supposed to be dead. Oh, Cat, all these years and you never wrote… we never heard a thing. Why didn’t…”

  “I never left anything here, kid.” I tilted her chin up with my hand. “Except you. I wanted to take you along but I couldn’t have made it then.”

  “Anita!” Vance Colby was snubbing his cigarette out in an ash tray. He was the only one who seemed calm enough to speak up.

  “At ease, friend. We’re sort of kissin’ cousins. Take it easy until we’ve said our hellos.”

  She seemed to see the others then. Like them there was a tension that came back over her, and eyes that were happy, clouded, and her finger bit into my arm. “Please… can we go outside… and talk?”

  I looked at Colby and felt a smile twist my mouth. I put the gun back and said, “Mind?”

  “Not at all.”

  I pointed toward Gage and Matteau. “Better sober up your friends.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The summer house had always been a place where we could find each other and we went there now. She sat in one of the big wicker chairs and I perched on the railing and said, “Okay, honey, spill it. What’s going on here?”

  “Cat… nothing. Really, I…”

  “Since when do a pair of hoods sit in the Bannerman mansion? Grandpop or my old man would have thrown them through the nearest window and there was a time when Miles wouldn’t let anybody in the front door who wasn’t listed in the social register. So what gives, honey?”

  “You… you knew those two, didn’t you?”

  “Sure I did. They’re Syndicate men they call ‘watchers.” They come in while an operation is being set up with Syndicate money to make sure it gets spent right.”

  “How did you know them?”

  “Why?”

  “You… had a gun.”

  “So I’m in the same business, that’s why, but don’t worry about it. What’s the score here?”

  “I can’t tell you,” she said simply.

  “Swell, so I’ll find out myself.”

  Even in the darkness I could see her hands tighten into hard knots. “Please don’t.”

  “I’m the curious type. Maybe I can stick something up Rudy’s tail. He did it to me often enough.”

  “They’re… not like they used to be.”

  “Neither am I, chicken. Now, do you explain?”

  “No.”

  I slid off the rail and stood in front of her. “So tell me and I’ll blow,” I said. “I don’t want anything from those creeps.”

  Anita shook her head slowly, not wanting to look at me. “I’m afraid, Cat. They did… too much to you. Nobody can forget what they did. But please… don’t make it worse.”

  “You make it sound interesting.” I reached out, lifted her to her feet and put my arms around her. I tried to make it casual, a thing that cousins might do, but it didn’t quite work that way. My fingers kneaded the firm structure of her back, my palms pressed her close and some crazy thing went through my head and down through my body and was happening to her too. She said something I couldn’t hear because my face was buried in the fragrance of her hair, then my mouth was tasting her and feeling the wild response and fiery dart of her tongue and I had to shove her away with arms that wanted to shake.

  “Cat… I waited. I never believed what they said… about you being dead. The night you left I told you I’d wait.”

  “We were just kids, honey.”

  “You said you’d come back for me.”

 
And I remembered. It was why I had turned off the road into the driveway.

  “I’m too late, kid.”

  Her eyes were misty and she leaned her face against my chest. “I know. It can’t be changed.” She looked up at me. “Take me back, Cat… please?”

  I left her at the door without bothering to go in. The black Caddie that had been in front of my Ford was gone now, the Buick still there. I got in the car, turned the engine over and drove out the way I had come. Culver City was six miles east and I had nine days before I had to do the job in New York and get back to the coast.

  Outside of town I stopped at a second rate motel, put down nine bucks and signed the register. I said I didn’t need a receipt, got the key, the guy didn’t even bother to look at the name and never commented on it, so I drove down to my room.

  After a shower I lay on the bed staring up at the ceiling wondering just how badly I’d like to plaster Rudy and Ted all over their palatial mansion. I laughed at the thought because now it was ridiculous. I could take them both with one hand. I would have settled for a swift kick in the tail or a belt in the puss, dumped old Miles in the cistern out back and called it square.

  Except that now a new note was added. The boys from Chicago were on the inside and the fun might be too much to miss out on.

  I got up at seven a.m., grabbed breakfast downtown and at eight-thirty when I knew I’d get my party, made a call. Marty Sinclair came on the line with a gruff hello and I said, “Cat Bannerman.”

  “You in New York?”

  “No, Culver City. I’m going to stick around a while.”

  “You and them crazy broads! When…”

  “Come on, Marty. I used to live here.”

  “So why the call?”

  “I don’t know… something cute here we might tie in with. Look, work it easy, but see if you have a line into the local situation.”

  “Hell, man, Culver City is wide open. Gambling is legal, the horses are out of season but…”

  “Can you do it?”

  “Sure. Take ten minutes.”

  I gave him the number of the phone booth. “Call me back in fifteen.”

  He was right on the dot. Fifteen minutes later I knew of a Sid LaMont, had his address and was on the way.

  Five sixty one River Street was a sleezy building on the end of a line of apartments with a painted sign advertising a popular beer facing the water. On the ground floor was a printing jobber, a top floor with smashed windows, which put Sidney LaMont right in the middle.

  The guy who answered the door was about thirty but looked fifty. He came up to my shoulders, peering at me with a ratty little face, hands fiddling with a dirty undershirt. These guys I knew how to handle without wasting time so I just pushed him back in the room and watched the sweat start forming on his forehead.

  They always try a little bull at first. He said, “Look, mister… don’t you come bustin’ in here and…”

  “Shut up.” I didn’t have to say any more. When I pulled out the handkerchief and wiped my nose he saw the .45 in the hip holster, swallowed hard and backed into a chair.

  “Mac… I’m clean, see. I paid my freight. Ask Forbes, he’ll tell you. What kind of stuff is this? I’m nickels and dimes. Last week I clear sixty bucks. I don’t bother nobody. I…”

  “Shut up.”

  I gave him the full treatment, going around the room, just looking until I was satisfied, then pulled up a straight backed chair, turned it around and sat down facing him. His face was wringing wet. So was his undershirt.

  “Bannerman,” I said. “What do you know about them?”

  He seemed genuinely bewildered. “Them? Jeez, Mac, I…”

  “Quick.”

  The side of his mouth twitched. “You… you cops?”

  For a full five seconds I just stared at him until his eyes couldn’t meet mine at all any more. “I’m not from Culver City,” I told him.

  Between my face and where the gun was he couldn’t keep his eyes still. He said, “So they’re big wheels. Live west of here. Hell, I…” I started to move my hands and he held up his for me to wait. “Okay, they’re real fancy stiffs. You think I meet them? The two kids are always travelling with some hot tomatoes from the clubs and they blow the dough like it’s water. The old one’s a crap shooter and his brother likes the wheel. So what else do you want? They got the money, let ’em spend it.”

  I sat without speaking another minute and let him sweat some more, then I got up and walked to the door. I turned around and said, “What do I look like?”

  He got the message. “Man, I never seen you in my life.”

  “Remember that,” I said.

  There were five major clubs in town all located on the bay side. None of them were open for business, but somebody was in each one and when I told them I was checking on customer credit they weren’t a bit backward about obliging me. I mentioned the Bannermans and all I got was a fat okay. They were big spenders and had been for a long time. They paid their bills and could get credit any time they wanted. They weren’t big winners, though. Like any habitual players against the house they wound up in the red, but at least they enjoyed the pleasure of laying it out.

  But I could still see the gates hanging off their hinges and picture the worn spots in the oriental rug in the library and it didn’t make sense. There was just too much pride and tradition behind the Bannermans to let the old homestead run down.

  I never knew what the financial set up was. My old man’s father had piled up the loot during the gold rush trade. He had made a find, exploited it as far as he could, then sold out to a company. He had split the pile down the middle between Miles and Max, but the old man wasn’t one for investments when he could high tail it around the world chasing wine, women and song. Max had me and Miles nursed his dough. And that’s how it goes. The snag in the picture was the gaming tables because you can always spend it faster than you can make it and the signs were that the Bannermans weren’t what they had been.

  I had gone through all the spots where you can usually pick up a word or two without coming out with a single thing at all. At a quarter to four I tried the public library on State Street, found all the recent issues of the Culver Sentinel and started scanning through them.

  In two weeks there were five mentions of the Bannermans, all in connection with some civic project or social function, but not a squib about them in the traffic violation column. Three weeks back the headlines were having a ball because there were four rape cases, a hit and run that killed two prominent local citizens, a murder in the parking lot of the Cherokee Club and a raid by the Treasury Department men on a narcotics setup in town. The rapes and the narcotics angle were solved, three teen-age kids were being held for the hit and run and the parking lot murder was still up in the air. The dead man there was the lot attendant who had been fooling around with a friend’s wife and the husband was being sought after. He was an ex con who had done time for second degree murder and had blown town the night of the killing.

  Past that the Bannermans came up again, but only in the society columns. There was one half page of notes and pictures devoted to the engagement of one Anita Bannerman to Vance Colby, a prominent realtor who had settled in Culver City some year and a half before.

  When the library closed I went up the hill to Placer Street where the Culver Sentinel still turned out the only paper in town and walked in the bar in the next block, sat down and ordered a beer. A few minutes after five-thirty the place started filling up with thirsty types and it wasn’t hard to pick out the newshawks in the crowd. But one was a guy I remembered well. He was a little weatherbeaten guy who had lost one ear when he and the old man had sailed the Turia II with a load of Canadian booze on board and the Coast Guard hard behind shooting with everything they had. The old man lost the boat and Hank Feathers had lost an ear and I had heard them laugh over the story many a time.

  I waited until Feathers squeezed into what seemed to be a customary spot and ordered a drink,
then I moved up behind him. I said, “If it isn’t Vincent Van Gogh himself.”

  He put the drink down slowly, craned around and looked at me with the two meanest eyes I ever saw. Old as he was, there was a peculiar stance about him that said he was ready to travel no matter who it was. I grinned at him and the slitted eyes lost some of their meanness.

  “That’s what you get for sticking your head out a porthole,” I said.

  “Damn you, kid, only one man ever knew about that.”

  “And he liked to call you Van Gogh too didn’t he?”

  “Okay, son, who are you?”

  “The bastard Bannerman. The old man used to tell you lies about my mother.”

  “Cat Cay! I’ll be hanged.” His face went into a broad, wrinkled smile and he held out his hand. “Yep, you got his eyes all right. And son, they weren’t lies about your mother. I saw her. She was something.” He grabbed my arm and pulled me to the bar. “Come on, drink up. Damn if we haven’t got something to talk about. What the hell you doing here? I heard you were dead.”

  “Passing through, that’s all.”

  “See the family?”

  “Briefly.”

  “All slobs. Idle rich and they stink. The girl’s okay, but the boys and the old man the world can do without. They got too many people in their pockets.”

  “Come on, Hank, who could they control?”

  He took a pull of the drink and set the glass down. “It’s not control exactly, it’s just that they’ve been here long enough to know where the bodies are buried and can play the angles. The old man wants a bit in the paper… he gets a bit in the paper. He wants opening night tickets to the Civic Theatre, he gets them. He wants his name out of the paper, he gets that.”

  “When does he want to be ignored?”

  “Ha. Like when Theodore wrapped up two cars in a drunken driving spree and later when his old man had a statutory rape thing squashed for him and like when they interrogated everybody at the Cherokee Club after the attendant was killed. But not Rudy. He went home and no mention of him when everybody was listed in black and white. The power of social position, my boy, especially when wives try to climb the white ladder to the blue book and politicians need an in through an exclusive club in the state capital.” He stopped and laughed. “But how about you? Where the hell have you been?”