The Death Dealers Read online

  “Is that service exit near it?”

  “One moment.” I heard him open a drawer, consult a chart, then: “Yes, immediately next to it, in fact. But that one is always locked. Is something wrong?”

  “No, everything checks. Thanks.” I hung up.

  “What was that about?” Lennie asked.

  “Sarim Shey made a contact outside earlier. Somehow he got a key to a service entrance which probably wasn’t too difficult and slipped away a few minutes.”

  “Why?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. That cigar trick was planned. The damn door probably wasn’t guarded because it was locked tight.” I made a time check. It was almost eight o’clock. I tossed my hat and raincoat on the table and left them there. “Stay on tap. I’ll get to you if I need you.”

  “Let’s hope,” Lennie grinned, his face happy with the prospect of some excitement.

  But I had been in business too long. There were too many scars I could feel and some that hurt when it rained. “Let’s hope not,” I said.

  This time I didn’t have to be concerned about being admitted. There was a polite young guy at the desk waiting for me who should have worn his suit a little bigger because I could see the bulge of a gun at his hip. He told me Vey Locca had left instructions that I was to be escorted to her rooms immediately and pointed toward the elevator at the far end of the bank that stood there open, with the interior light off and only the folding gate across its opening.

  As we walked over I turned my head idly toward the crowd surging around the other elevators, women and men in the finery that only an official occasion can bring out, waiting their turn to go up to the ballroom on the fifth floor.

  There, smiling at me, so beautifully gowned, so damned gorgeous she was the absolute center of attraction for every man around her, was Rondine. Beside her was Talbot, man of the world and agent-at-large enjoying himself at my expense.

  I got in the elevator and rode it up to Vey’s floor.

  She opened the door herself and as she did the music from the console in the living room faded in the way a movie would, coming from nowhere, but a perfect orchestral description to accentuate an unexpected moment.

  I didn’t know what I anticipated, but it wasn’t this. Vey Locca had forsaken the Western world and now she was draped within the folds of startling white silk highlighted with odd, almost fluorescent overtones, that made her tawny skin and shimmering black hair vivid by contrast.

  Nothing was concealed. Nothing was revealed, either, the fabric sweeping around her in such a manner that you knew she was naked within it because there was no need for anything else to be there. Every line and curve of her delightful body was possessed by the sheer cloth as it hugged her jealously, clutching the sensuous contours of her hips, grateful for the pleasure of enveloping her breasts. One shoulder was covered, the other bare, her waist encircled by an ingenious twist that was ropelike until it parted at the junction of her thighs and fell to curve in an opening down the side of her leg so that when she walked you had a titillating experience of seeing a glimpse of pure woman that was forbidden, yet ready to be received.

  She knew what I was thinking. She realized the impact the sight of her had and enjoyed knowledge that desire was there in my eyes and the way I looked at her.

  I grinned, knowing she was waiting for a compliment. “You’ll be a sensation.”

  “I’m supposed to be,” she said.

  She was a little too cocksure of herself so I winked and said, “Come with me, little girl, and I’ll give you candy.”

  For a second she lost her arched look, seemed puzzled, then broke into a gentle laugh. “Yankees,” she said. “I will never understand you. I have gone to great lengths to be beautiful and you make silly jokes. Besides, I do not want candy.”

  “What do you want?”

  In the living room she turned around and faced me. “You have something to return to me.”

  I picked the ruby out, looked at it again and felt that peculiar sensation of having an answer in my mind, then held it out to her.

  The rich blossom of her mouth opened in a smile. “But aren’t you going to put it back?”

  “I was hoping you’d ask.”

  With my forefinger I touched the warmth of her belly, held the silken fold aside and thumbed the ruby in place. Beneath my fingers I felt her stomach undulate and the flesh around the stone encompass it, drawing it in, holding it there until it was firmly in place.

  I had wondered and now I knew. Vey Locca waited for more, her senses matching mine, waiting for more regardless of the consequences, only I wasn’t playing. There wasn’t enough time.

  “Shouldn’t we go?”

  Vey took my hand and led me to the bar. “I am a woman, my Tiger. Although Teish is the guest of honor I stand on my prerogative of making a late, but dramatic entrance. At the moment Teish is in the penthouse suite with members of your government. In exactly ten minutes he will be escorted down with Henry Balfour of your State Department and two policemen, make his appearance and a few minutes thereafter I shall follow, not late enough to disrupt or annoy anyone, but late enough to be observed. Do you mind?”

  “Not a bit, kid,” I said. “I hope Teish doesn’t.”

  Her eyes had a sensual look, slanting upwards. “He favors you, Tiger. He would enjoy having a son like you. Perhaps he shall have.”

  I didn’t answer. I wanted to tell her I could charge stud fees, but I didn’t.

  “Drink?”

  “Four Roses and ginger.”

  She mixed mine and hers and we touched glasses. They were small and didn’t take long to finish. Above the bar was an ornate clock and the minute hand was working its way into position. Vey put her glass down and held out her hand. “Come. It is time now. They will all be waiting.” Then she added impishly, “But it will be me they see. The men, that is.”

  Damn broads are all alike.

  We had the corridor to ourselves and walked to the bank of elevators alone. On this side there were four in a row and when I looked at the dials above the doors I noticed just the one on the end. Only it had a P after the twenty-sixth floor, the topmost level. As I watched it the pointer climbed from the lobby up through the numerals, passing us, until it slowed and rested at the penthouse apartment.

  For a few minutes it remained there, then started its countdown, heading for the fifth floor. As it passed us I could hear the muted hiss of air and see the light of the car descending and muffled laughter behind the glass door.

  Vey smiled, then reached out and pushed the downbutton for our elevator, timing her arrival at the ballroom like a stage pro coming out for a curtain call or the fight champ coming through the ropes last.

  Inadvertently, I looked up at the dials. The others were still at ground level loading up, but the official car was nearing the fifth. I watched the pointer swing nearer the floor waiting for it to stop.

  It never did.

  Instead, it kept going down at that steady pace until it reached the main lobby and even then it didn’t stop.

  When it did the hand rested on the big B and I knew the car Teish was in had grounded at the basement and the hackles rose on the back of my neck like little fingers and the muscles of my neck stood out like thick cords.

  I didn’t realize our elevator had arrived until Vey took my arm. She was looking at me puzzled, said, “Tiger ... ?” then I shoved her in ahead of me and told the operator to get moving and don’t stop for anything. He assumed I meant not until the fifth floor and bypassed the other floors even though the red lights were blinking on his board, eased us in and pulled the door open at the fifth floor.

  Vey stood there, knowing something was wrong, eyes wide with some unnamed fear. I gave her a push with my hand and she half stumbled out of the car.

  “The basement ... get some cops down there, damn it! Do it fast.”

  I nudged the operator with my fingertips. “Down. All the way and don’t stop.”

  “Tig
er!”

  The door was closing, but I had time to yell, “They got Teish!”

  It seemed like we crawled down, inch by inch. Through the glass partition in the door that was there for the operator to check his floors I could see the layers of steel and concrete. The numbers on the indicator over the door reversed themselves with agonizing slowness until we were at the mezzanine, then the lobby and finally the basement.

  Before the door was all the way open I squeezed through, cut to the side where the other elevator had stopped and halted with my hands stretched to the walls of the car.

  On the floor were three men sprawled in heaps, their bodies running blood, one with his hand still gripped around a service revolver that never left its holster and the other lying there with one hand clawing outward in a vain hope to grab a killer. The uniformed elevator operator still clutched the handle of his control trying to hold it in a stop position.

  The other body was out on the concrete where he had crawled and from his formal attire I knew I had found Henry Balfour.

  But there was no sign of Teish El Abin.

  There was a sharp bend in the junction of the elevator wall and on the other side a steel door was still open leading to the street. The rain was running down the ramp and rivulets of water were just beginning to form at the bottom of it.

  On the street normal traffic was passing by and the rainy mood of New York was not disturbed at all. I walked out and looked at the cabs passing by. Right by the curb was the glowing tip of a cigarette butt that the rain winked out as I looked at it.

  Like the ruby when I turned the light off, I thought.

  Upstairs a party was going on.

  And someplace Malcolm Turos had Teish El Abin.

  Teddy Tedesco had. flashed the Skyline signal, all right. He didn’t know how really right he was. Death on both sides of the world. We were dealing in death. I was in the middle again and the whole world was in a state of flux.

  I looked at the dead cigarette on the curb.

  Once more the little voice inside me laughed because I couldn’t give it a name, but it held up the ruby as a hint and laughed again.

  chapter 9

  They held the interrogation in an empty room on the second floor, a dozen hard, cold faces staring into mine. Vey Locca had come down with Hal Randolph and some others from I.A.T.S. and had gotten me off the hook with her verification of my explanation, then was taken upstairs numbed by what had happened, but accepting the fact that nobody should know about it.

  Two of the Washington men had come back in, drenched to the skin, flanking a scabby-looking character who had told them about a cab that he had seen pull to the curb, wait a few seconds, then pull away again. He didn’t notice anything about it except that it was yellow like most of the others and he hadn’t seen the driver or its occupants.

  Just as he completed his story another cop came in with a phone message that a cabbie had been slugged and left unconscious in the back of a building off Ninety-second Street and Amsterdam and his cab stolen. There had been no attempt to lift his wallet that contained over sixty dollars and the guy who hit him was a passenger he was about to discharge at that address whose face he never got a clear look at. The license number of the cab was being flashed to all squad cars and the cab companies were alerting their drivers to be on the lookout for it.

  Of the four men who had been shot, three were still alive but in critical condition. Only the elevator operator was dead, an innocuous little guy who had worked in the hotel since it had been built and had run the cars in the nine-story building that had formerly occupied the site. Two bullets had been recovered, imbedded in the walls of the elevator, both of .38 caliber, and the one taken from the operator matched them.

  The initial concept was that the assassin was one person lying in wait in the basement with an accomplice outside, who had paid off the elevator operator to haul his passengers all the way down and had gotten killed for his trouble.

  I was the only one who knew better.

  When Charlie Corbinet came in I knew he had the picture of the situation and although it wasn’t all clear yet, he knew I wasn’t involved even though I was part of it. He walked over to where I was sitting and said, “You have anything to add?”

  “Get Hal Randolph and let’s go out to the elevator.” My old C.O. gave me that some old “Okay, but watch yourself” look I had seen so often and cornered Randolph, spoke to him a minute and nodded for me to follow them.

  Outside the door Randolph said, “Don’t you clear out, Tiger.”

  “Who’s running?”

  “So talk.”

  “Where was the elevator operator when you found him?” I asked.

  “On the floor with the rest.”

  “Then he slipped.”

  Randolph gave me a hard, curious stare. “What are you getting at?”

  I said, “When I saw him his hand was still holding the control down in the stop position. Has anybody tried to run this car since?”

  He shook his head. “Why should they?”

  “Suppose we try it, okay?”

  Charlie said, “The lab boys finished?”

  “Thirty minutes ago.”

  “So go along. Maybe there’s an angle.”

  Hal Randolph stepped inside with me and Charlie behind him. I levered the door closed, shut the gate, and moved the control handle over into the UP slot. The car just stayed there. You couldn’t even hear the whine of the electric motors. I pushed the reset button and tried again while they watched me. It still didn’t move. Then I shoved the gate back and opened the door.

  Randolph stood with his back to the wall, idly looking down at the dark stains on the floor at his feet. “What are you getting at, Tiger?”

  “Get an electrical engineer to look at the circuits that activate this thing. They’ve been gimmicked by an expert. The operator couldn’t stop the car at all. He went down where induced automation took him and died there. Take a look at the panel there.” I pointed to the stainless steel face punctuated with buttons that indicated each floor. “This car can be operated automatically or manually and it wouldn’t be a hard job for a first-class engineer to rerig the circuits.”

  Hal Randolph took his eyes off the floor and glanced up at me. They were small and hard and black. “Who, Tiger?”

  “Malcolm Turos,” I said. “He taught the course in a Paris Technical School. You might check out the possibility.”

  “Believe me, we will,” he told me.

  “You need me for anything?”

  Charlie and Randolph looked at each other and Charlie said, “Keep everything under your hat. So far nobody knows about this and that’s the way we want it.”

  “What are you telling those reporters upstairs?” I asked him.

  “Teish El Abin is indisposed. The possibility isn’t unlikely and they’ll go along with it. We’ll blame it on something he ate. In the meantime they have Sarim Shey and Vey Locca to stare at. She’s putting on a good show for them. There’s enough booze flowing to make the party a success and he won’t be too much of a loss.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Now ... one question. Did Teish sign any agreements with our people before the snatch?”

  Hal Randolph hesitated a second, then shook his head. “No. State was hoping to get something down tonight. Harry Balfour had the papers on his person. Now the whole deal is scrambled.”

  “Maybe. Okay, I’ll be upstairs if you want to get hold of me.”

  “Stay out of the action,” Randolph warned. “We don’t need you in any part of this. Orders, Tiger.”

  I grinned back at him, waved to Charlie and got in the next elevator and told the operator to take me to the fifth floor. He waited for an acknowledgment from Randolph and when he got the nod, closed the door and took me upstairs.

  The earlier formalities were finished with and most of the several hundred in the ballroom were on the dance floor with scattered groups at the tables. Over drinks the world’s problems were b
eing discussed, settled or agitated, and out of the affair would come a debriefing tomorrow that would fill hundreds of pages of reports.

  I stood by the entrance scanning the crowd, saw Sarim Shey in earnest conversation with several of our government officials and as he talked, Vey Locca danced by, her partner a heavyset senator from an Eastern state. Sarim’s glance was cold and there was a glitter of triumph in those dark eyes of his.

  When I started circling the floor to the right I saw Rondine and Talbot walking back to their table and intercepted them. Although on the surface they appeared no different from the others, I knew they were tense from sitting on the powder keg that could cause a political explosion that would reach around the world.

  “You filled in on the details?”

  Rondine sat in the chair I held out for her. “As soon as it happened.”

  “Watch yourself,” Talbot said. “We aren’t the only ones who use lip readers.”

  I nodded, and sat with my back to the dance floor.

  Talbot walked around behind me and leaned forward. “I have a few duties to attend to. Things have taken quite a messy turn, haven’t they?”

  “They’ll get worse before they get better,” I told him.

  “By the way, just before you arrived one of our men said they found that stolen cab. It was left on lower Broadway, wiped nice and clean and not a witness around who saw anyone who was in it. They must have had another car waiting and switched into it. Right now they’re conducting a house-to-house search, but I doubt if anything will come of it.” He laid a hand on my shoulder. “See you later, old chap.”

  When he was gone I said, “Let’s have it,” and reached for her hand. Her fingers were cold as they tightened around mine.

  “I was waiting for Vey Locca when she came in. Apparently she didn’t know what had happened and was cool enough to make the best of it. I heard about it while she was upstairs and so did Sarim Shey. All of us were warned to keep quiet and Sarim was told the same thing. He put up quite a protest until one of your tougher men bluntly told him that if he—” she frowned, looking for the right words—“shot his mouth off he’d get tossed in the can.” Rondine smiled at the thought and said, “He didn’t have much choice and so far everything is all right. However, there are a couple of reporters who smelled something and went upstairs where they weren’t admitted to Teish’s suite. I think they suspect something.”