The Long Wait Read online

  “Okay, okay.” I started to go back to the Ford then remembered something. “You know anything or anybody by the name of Harlan?”

  “No. Is it important?”

  “It could be. How about finding out? It may be a woman.”

  “I’ll find out,” he said. I watched him roll up the window then pull away. When his taillight had turned off down the street I climbed in my heap, went about a hundred yards to the first diner I came to, parked, had something to eat, then found a phone booth around by the men’s room.

  The operator took my number, rang and the velvet voice said hello.

  “Johnny, Venus. I’ve been wondering how you staged a disappearing act last night.”

  The voice kept its velvety tone, but that was all. “I’m awfully sorry, but I’m afraid it will have to be some other time.”

  “No, you don’t understand. This is Johnny. You remember.”

  “If you care to I’ll be glad to make arrangements later in the week.”

  It finally came to me, I said, “Trouble, kid?”

  “Yes, that’s right.” There was no hesitation at all in her answer.

  “Bad trouble.”

  She even made it sound good. “Certainly.”

  “Cops?”

  “No ... no, of course not.”

  “Hang on, Venus. Give me five minutes. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  I slid the phone back in its cradle, slapped a bill on the counter to pay for my meal and got out of there in a hurry. For a change I was lucky. Traffic was light enough for me to edge by on the outside lane and there weren’t any stop lights to hold me up. I cut across town at an angle, picked up the road I was looking for and came out on the street I wanted. It must have been too early for the customers because the cars weren’t bumper to bumper along the curb. I counted four on the one side and two on the other, then picked a spot behind a new Buick and killed the engine.

  The house was completely dark. Not that it was any different that way because more than half the others were showing blank spaces where the windows were. But somebody had to be home. A short stocky girl came out of a place that was still lit up and walked toward me. She was whistling under her breath until she saw me then stopped. Her smile was as friendly as it was professional. “Looking for somebody special, stranger?”

  “Sort of. What happened to everything? The last time I was here everything was lit up.”

  The smile flashed again. “Please, it’s suppertime. Everybody has to eat, you know, even us.”

  “Oh.”

  “Give you a ride to town if you want. You can come back with me later.”

  “No ... thanks anyway. I’ll stick around.”

  She shrugged and crossed over to a small coupé. I watched her drive away before going up the walk to the house. I didn’t even bother checking around the place first. I didn’t give a damn if somebody was standing right inside the front door and in a way I was hoping somebody would be. I tried the knob and it didn’t turn so I gave the window alongside it a tentative shove. That didn’t budge either. But it did when I slid a knife blade between the crosspieces and pushed the lock open.

  I couldn’t see a damn thing. Oh, I heard them all right, but I couldn’t see anything so I had to stand there until I could. Then things began to take shape and I walked across the room to the stairs where I could hear them fine, even the muffled sobbing of a woman and a sharp, ratty voice of a man. I heard them better at the top of the landing, and outside the room that opened off the end of the hall I could even make out their words.

  When I kicked open the room I could see them too. Both of them.

  Servo and Eddie Packman. And Venus.

  She lay across a couch crying into her hands while Eddie tried to prop her up so he could slap her again. Servo was watching with a wise sneer twisting his mouth up on one side.

  If he hadn’t tried to go for something he had in his pocket he might have ducked the first wild swing I let loose. It caught him right on the mouth and the remains of his teeth tore jagged holes through his lips into my fingers and he went into the wall with a sickening smash and lay there. Eddie was a kill-mad face looking at the blood on my hand and the wild expression I wore. A whole mouthful of yellow teeth bared in a crazy grimace and he did the same thing he had done the night before.

  He came right for me and in that one second I saw two things... Eddie was just the right size to fit those impressions on the roof top where somebody had tried to turn me inside out with a slug and the other thing was a nasty switch-blade knife in his hand held the way a pro holds it, low and with the blade up ready to make one final swipe across a stomach or throat.

  You don’t use your hands against a blade. You don’t kick or punch or rush cold steel. You do things and wonder later how you knew those things but don’t really care because they worked.

  I had the pillow off the couch between my fingers and let him come. He was too mad to see what I was going to do until it happened. When the knife whipped out I went into it, caught the blade in the pillow and tore the damn thing out of his hand.

  He tried to run. Sure, he made a good try, but he ran into my foot and fell face down on the floor and I jumped on his back. His mouth was bubbling out a scream when I pulled his arm up over his head and broke it with a snap that was the loudest thing I ever heard.

  Maybe it was just my imagination, because just as it popped Venus let out a short, hoarse sound and something laid my scalp open again.

  This time it was better than the other two times. There were flowers in the air and my head was on a soft warm pillow that was a leg attached to a face that had the red imprints of a hand on one side, but a mighty pretty face just the same. A lot of black hair tumbled down where I could reach up and feel it and when Venus saw I was still alive she smiled and bent down and kissed me.

  “He hit you.”

  “Hard, too.”

  “He used the ash tray. I tried to yell, but he didn’t give me a chance.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “He didn’t have any teeth and his mouth looked like he was eating an apple.”

  “Eddie... ?”

  Venus gave me a grin of sheer pleasure. “You broke his arm. He was still screaming when Lenny dragged him out. He wanted to kill you and was cursing Lenny out because he thought he had already done the job.”

  I wanted to grin myself, but my head hurt too much. The ash tray was still there on the floor, a heavy metal job that would have made a pulp of my skull if it hadn’t been for the layers of bandage that softened the blow. The tape was torn and soggy with the blood that seeped through, but as far as I could tell I wasn’t any worse off than before.”

  I rolled my head and looked up at her. “Chick, how come our friends left me for dead and didn’t try to knock you off too?”

  “Now you’re not thinking, man. In this town you could have died and it would have been self-defense, especially with a witness on hand to tell how you attacked them first.”

  “You’d tell a jury that?”

  Her mouth made a smile again. “There wouldn’t be much else I could tell, could there? Living is fun. I’d like to live it without Lenny Servo around sometime.”

  She was right. I put my head down and closed my eyes. “What’d they want with you?”

  “Information. Why I was fooling around with you. They thought I had something to do with it.”

  “Oh.”

  She ran her fingers acros my face, stroking it gently. “Feel pretty bad?”

  “Not much worse than usual.”

  “Sure?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  This time both her hands went under my head, lifted it, then laid it down gently on the cushions. She did something to the lamp, turned it so that its brightness diminished until there was nothing but a faint hint of light like that of dawn in the room. For the first time I saw how she looked, not trim and tailored like last night, but smooth and sleek in a clinging black dress that swept to the
ground.

  She moved languidly, turning on the record player, standing in front of it swaying to the faint but deep rhythm of a chorus of drums. She said, “I know things you might want to know.”

  “What things?”

  Her feet took two rapid steps and she spun gracefully so that her skirt lifted and swirled around her legs, the white of her thighs flashing momentarily against the black of the dress.

  “About Lenny Servo and his Business Group. Do you know how powerful his organization is?”

  “I have a good idea. He’s the money man behind the boys, isn’t he?”

  The drums went into a single throbbing beat and she stood there with her legs apart, stiff at first, then melting slowly into a gentle undulation. I could see her half-closed eyes watching me, her mouth faintly smiling as her hands went to the buttons at her back.

  Each word was timed with the drums, keeping pace to the motion of her body. “It’s more than that, Johnny. It’s a place like this and other places down the street. It’s places like the back rooms of night clubs where men have smokers and girls are hired for the occasion. It’s places where very candid pictures can be taken and casually shown to the right people afterward so they know that a club doesn’t have to be made out of wood or iron.”

  She had the dress in her hand and curled it over her arm so that it was a curtain that parted briefly every now and then, a black curtain she stepped through and disappeared behind so fast you thought your eyes were playing a trick.

  There was a glistening black wedge around her hips. Another crossing her breasts. Tight. Sensual. It wasn’t easy to speak. I finally said, “What else?”

  “Servo was broke when he came to town. Somebody put him on his feet again.”

  She smiled, turned her head and made the gesture of covering her eyes coyly. Her hips went back and back, then jerked forward. She did it again, laughed and tightened up so that every muscle in her body seemed to be working at once. “I used to be good, man.”

  My mouth felt dry. “Who backed him?”

  “Somebody said you must have. Nobody else in town had that kind of money. He couldn’t have gotten it any other way.”

  She stopped dancing. She moved and dipped quickly and something fluttered to the floor. When she took up the rhythm again I saw through the curtain and the glistening black was only around her hips this time.

  “That makes Lenny the boss ... and me the sucker.”

  The drums got louder and faster. The curtain whirled and parted too fast, much too fast. “Definitely,” I heard her say. Then, “There may be a pair of suckers. There’s more.”

  “Spell it out.”

  “I was told he came with a woman. A very possessive woman. She disappeared before he got to be a big shot.”

  “Who told you this?”

  “Don’t ask me that. There wasn’t any more information and she isn’t important enough to be dragged into anything.”

  “Okay, kid,” I said. “You did good enough.”

  Venus smiled again, did something too quick for me to follow, but I had a chance to see through the curtain before the music ended in a crazy, strained beat. The black around her waist was gone too. Then she threw the curtain at me. It missed.

  It was supposed to cover my face so I wouldn’t have a chance to see her before she snapped the light off, but it missed and there she was, a symphony in black and white, lithe and graceful with sharply rising breasts that swelled with every breath she took, the muscles of her stomach a predatory ripple, quivering and dancing above the luscious taper of her legs.

  Then the light was gone and I could only hear her moving toward me in the darkness. “I liked what you did to them, man,” she said.

  “I’m glad of that.”

  “Now I’ll show you what a real woman’s like. In style, of course.”

  I said, “Of course,” and my voice sounded weak like it did the first time I had said it.

  She showed me.

  Chapter Ten

  THE FORD was still there, but now it was wedged in between a couple of seedy old cars that bore college stickers on the windshield. It was eight-thirty-two by my watch, but by my head it was time to hole up someplace and die. There were lights on in the house now, every window except one a yellow square and at that one I tossed a half-hearted salute and said good night to my Venus.

  Okay, so I’m a jerk sometimes. I get the rest of my brains damn near knocked out all for something in style from Venus. But hell, they give medals to soldiers for the same thing, and I’d take Venus to a medal any time. Besides, she was handy to have around for inside info if I needed it.

  I climbed behind the wheel and poked the key into the lock. It made some tricky juggling to get out of the spot, but I made it and started around the corner when I heard the wail of the sirens coming up behind me. Don’t ask why I did it, but my hand hit the light switch and kicked off the lights as I jammed into the curb and made like an all-night parker.

  There were three of them. Two were official and the other was a coupe, but they all had sirens dying to a low growl and seemed to spill out cops by the dozens. It was a nicely planned maneuver if you were on the outside looking in. They covered the house in pairs so that there wasn’t a chance of a mouse getting through, then Lindsey and Tucker went up the front steps and rattled the doorknob.

  Inside, somebody screamed, a door opened and slammed and a couple of guys started swearing and telling the cops off. Then more screams of indignation. None of the voices belonged to Venus.

  I grinned to myself in the darkness.

  If Tucker had come to pick up a corpse he was going to be a mighty upset copper. I knew two other guys who were going to be a little upset, too. It was funny as hell to watch because the cops weren’t taking any chance on having a corpse run out on them. Or maybe Lenny Servo wasn’t too sure about being a corpse and hoped I’d be made one if I tried to get out of the trap.

  The more I thought about it the better it looked and the madder I got. They were playing it cagy and weren’t taking any chances at all. Not even one. The bastards were angling for my death harder than they were at the beginning only now they had the cops ready to pull the pay-off so it would have a nice legal wrapper on it and there wouldn’t even be the trouble of an investigation or trial.

  I said to hell with it and started the car up again. If they saw me they could chase me. Just to keep luck on my side I didn’t turn the lights on until I was all the way down the block and heading back toward the city.

  Nobody saw me. They were all too busy looking the other way.

  The Circus Bar was my first stop. I didn’t see Logan’s car around anywhere so I looked around inside. When I didn’t see him anyplace I cornered the bartender. “You see Logan tonight?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, sure. Said he was going on a bat, only his office called and he had to stay sober to see a couple of men.”

  “Where’d he go?”

  “Gosh, pal, I wouldn’t know where any of these joes go. One minute they’re here an’ the next they’re tearing around the city. You know reporters.”

  I said I knew and let him get back to work. I did better on the phone. The city editor told me that a couple of insurance investigators had wanted to see him and had left their phone number for Logan to call so he probably had met them.

  After I thought it over a minute I thumbed through the directory until I found Gardiner, Havis, called his number and got the housekeeper. She sounded curt and was starting to tell me that Mr. Gardiner wasn’t in to anyone at this hour, but I heard the echo of footsteps and Gardiner himself telling her that he’d take it, then his voice said, “Gardiner speaking. What is it?”

  “McBride, Mr. Gardiner.”

  “Yes, Johnny.” He sounded annoyed at being called so late.

  “I’ll only take a moment,” I said. “Look, Logan had to meet a couple of investigators tonight. Were they your men?”

  “Why yes, as a matter of fact, they were. Both represent the Nation
al Bank Insurance Company. May I ask why you want to know?”

  “Sure, I want to find Logan. I thought you might know where he is.”

  “You might find him someplace in the newspaper office. The insurance men were looking for some recent pictures of Vera West to take back to New York for identification purposes. They thought the paper might be able to supply them.”

  “Oh. Okay, thanks. I’ll shop around.”

  I hung up and tried the paper again. This time I was connected with the file clerk in the morgue and a voice as old as parchment and just as crackly told me that yes, Logan had been m with a couple of men, yup, they did get some pictures, sure ’nuff Logan had left and said he was going to finish getting canned. And oh, yeah, he was so potted already he had a crying jag on.

  I felt like telling the guy to go shoot himself. Crying jag hell. Logan was crying all right, but it wasn’t the whisky coming out. Try being in love with a dame while you’re working to get her hung. Just try it. That’s what Logan was doing.

  When I backed out of the booth I was ready to give up and find a sack someplace. It had been another one of those nights with everything happening, yet meaning nothing and my head was starting to pound so much I couldn’t think straight. I was all set to leave when I saw the bartender waving at me and went over to see what he wanted.

  “Damn near forgot,” he said. “Your name Johnny?”

  I told him it was.

  He slid an envelope across the bar at me. “Logan told me you might come in looking for him and to give you this.”

  I picked up the envelope and slid my finger under the flap. “Before he left he gave you this?”

  “Yeah, not five minutes before. Want a drink?”

  “Beer.” I waited while he drew a tall one and carried it over to the table. I put the drink down in a hurry before I pulled the two sheets out of the envelope. Across the top of the first one was the notation: Harlan ... name of several counties and cities in the U. S.: Harlan, Inc., manufacturers of electrical appliances. Harlan, paint supply house in Va. Harlan, stage name of actress copyrighted. George Harlan, holdup, murder, life sen. and escaped, captured, killed in attempted escape Alcatraz. Harlan, William, prominent South American financier. Harlan Gracie, worked con game. Convicted N. Y. 1940. This sounds interesting. See clipping.