Me, Hood! Page 5

  “You mean the leg action.”

  “Don’t get smart.”

  She made a kiss with her mouth and blew it across the room. “Now really, why did you come up?”

  “I’m in a bind.”

  The smile softened, then worked into a frown. “Police?”

  “A little worse, sugar. The sign’s on me.”

  She didn’t need any explanation. She took a few seconds letting it sink in and there was something tight about the way she held herself. “Bad?”

  “Real bad. They called out the troops.”

  Her eyes crinkled thoughtfully. She got up, took my glass and refilled it. When she handed it to me, she said, “Will it help to tell me?”

  “No, but I will.” And I told her.

  She sat wordlessly a moment; then: “What can I do, Ryan?”

  “Pack me in for the night, kitten, I don’t like to be shot when I’m sleeping, and all my usual pads are off limits now.”

  “That’s all?” She stood up and studied me with the edge of her forefinger between her teeth.

  I stood up too and took her hand away. “No, there’s more, but I wouldn’t inflict it on you, sugar.”

  She was there in my arms without seeming to move. Suddenly she was just there, pressing tightly against me and she was warm and woman and I could feel the life inside her. Her finger touched my mouth, then her own. “Why, Ryan?”

  Softly, I said, “For a hood I got certain sensitivities.”

  She reached up and kissed me lightly. She smiled, did it again and took my arm under hers. She showed me the guest room and opened the door.

  Once more she came back into my arms. “I have certain sensitivities too. I wish you would inflict them on me.”

  “Later.”

  Her mouth was warm and very wet. “All right, later.” Lightly, she touched my lips with her tongue, deliberately tantalizing.

  Her grin got impish and she did something with her hands. Then she shrugged and handed me the housecoat, stepped back and smiled again. She walked away from me into the light, turned into her room and was gone.

  When I began to breathe again, I tossed the housecoat on a chair, took a real cold shower and went to bed. Before I could sleep my mind dwelt on the litheness of her, the swaying stride, the lush, yet muscular curves that seemed to melt into each other and dance in the subdued, shadowy tones of dark and light. Brunette, I thought, a luscious, chestnut-hued brunette.

  The radio alarm beside the bed went off softly. Awakening, I knew where I was at once, knowing, too, that I had never set the alarm. But the door was partly open and the housecoat gone, so I knew who had. The note on the clock was brief. It said, Call me, hood. And the P.S. was just as brief. She had written, You look pretty. There were no covers on the bed and now we were even for the housecoat.

  Coffee was ready in the electric perc and there were some Danish in a basket. While I grabbed a bite, I called the Naples Cafe, got a number for me to call Art and dialed it.

  In the background there were morning noises of people eating, and strange, loud languages. There was juke music and somebody yelling and Art was drunk. He was all-night drunk, but purpose-drunk and there’s a difference. He felt his way through his words, mouthing each one. “Ryan… I got what you wanted.”

  “Good. Let’s have it.”

  “You see the papers?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Those punks… you hit… your place?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Cullen and… and Stanovich. From Elizabeth, Jersey, y’know? Muscle boys… docks. This here… Lardbucket Pearson… him… I mean, he and Turner Scado car piled into… big ditch outside Hoboken. They got killed. Looks like your boys… muff it, they get it.”

  The picture was clear enough. It even made the deal bigger than ever. When somebody can afford to knock off help who flubbed, it was big time, real big-time.

  I said, “What’s their connections, Art?”

  He fumbled against the phone for a second. “Topside Big. It reaches, Ryan. Goes far… to… to Europe.”

  “What names, kid?”

  I could hear ice clink in a glass, then he paused to swallow. He finally said, “Those Jersey Joes… Mafia musclemen. Used to be part of… Lucky’s crew. You know what that means?”

  “It’s making sense. What else?”

  He laughed sourly. “I’m gonna… beat you… on this one, Irish. I have a friend in Rome. Good friend. In their organization over there. For… American cash… he’s tipping me to your mysterious buddy.”

  “What buddy?”

  “Lodo,” he chuckled. “Lodo… pretty big stuff. Lodo’s… code name for Mafia’s East coast enforcer. Big killer. Little while I’ll know who.”

  I said, “Okay. Go home and stay there. You hear?”

  “I’ll go slow.” He paused a moment, coughed and said, “You’re lucky, Irish.”

  “How?”

  “You’re going to get to die real… soon.”

  I hopped a cab to 34th St., picked up an envelope at General Delivery in the Post Office and opened it on the street.

  The laddies were real efficient. Usually it took a month to get a gun permit. This one came through quick. I tucked it in my pocket and looked at the other slip of paper. There were seven digits there, and the first two had to be exchange letters. I found a pay phone and dialed.

  A male voice said, “Yes?”

  I said, “Big Man?”

  He said, “That you, Ryan?”

  “Me. And don’t trace this.”

  His voice sounded strained. “What do you need, Irish?”

  “Two guys. They work a ship that was in around the week a certain Juan Gonzales was killed. All I know is the alias. One’s Spanish Tom, the other ’Fredo… probably Alfredo. You big enough to handle it?”

  “We’re big enough.”

  I left the booth, walked to the corner and had two minutes before the unmarked cruiser drew up and the guys hopped out. Another one blocked off the street at the other end and a fast, systematic search started. I laughed at the slobs and walked away. Big Man was playing both ends from the middle.

  I gave him an hour. It was plenty of time. They had men and equipment and millions and could do nearly any damn thing they wanted when they wanted.

  I called and said, “Big Man?”

  He said, “Both men are on the Gastry. It’s in port now. Spanish Tom is Tomas Escalante. The other one is Alfredo Lias. Both from Lisbon. They’ve been on the same ship since ’46. Both have had numerous drunk arrests in various ports but nothing more serious. The line vouches for their honesty.”

  “Thanks. You haven’t bothered to look for them, have you?”

  He caught the sarcasm. “They’re in port, Ryan. We’ve been looking but so far we haven’t found them.”

  I laughed. “What would you ask them if you did?”

  “We’d think of something.”

  “Good for you,” I said. “There’s just one more thing I never bothered asking. You guys don’t operate without certain facts or at the most without ideas.”

  “So?”

  “What did you suspect Billings of having for sale?”

  Quietly, he said, “A month ago two skin divers were killed going down on the wreck of the Andrea Doria.”

  “I read about it.”

  “There were three on the expedition. The last one hasn’t shown.”

  “Go on.”

  “It should be obvious. Highly classified material went down in that wreck and if found by the wrong parties could jeopardize the safety of the whole country. Possibly the whole world.”

  After a moment he said, “That enough?”

  I said, “That’s enough,” and hung up.

  Nobody was outside and I walked away from the phone thinking about it. There were just too many possibilities now. Some of them had to go. I walked slowly and let things dribble through my mind. A pattern began to come out of it.

  Further down the street I stepped
into another phone booth, rang the apartment to see if Art was there. I let it ring a dozen times then decided he was either asleep or passed out, then gave up.

  I picked up a paper from a newsstand. They had given me pretty good coverage. Pictures and all.

  Police opinion seemed to be that it was a gang killing of some kind, that I had been poaching in foreign fields. There was speculation that I had been taken for an old-fashioned ride. So far their leads were lousy.

  So was their liaison. The big agency upstairs that had conned me into this rumble wasn’t talking either.

  Natural coloration is the animal’s best protection. In the slop chutes that were the playgrounds for the dock crowd I fitted smooth and easy. They could smell money on you, they knew you were brand new to the neighborhood, but all the time they knew the other thing they saw in your face. You just weren’t takable.

  A couple I knew, tough apples who’d work any kind of a touch for pocket money. They passed me over with a nod and gave me room at the bar.

  If the word was out all the way, it hadn’t reached here yet. But maybe they were figuring it the usual way… a hood hates to leave his own back yard. Every step away from his own hole and he becomes more vulnerable. His own distorted sense of security that led him into a hole in the first place makes him stay close to it even when he’s dying.

  There could be another reason too. New York was a big town. The word can only travel just so fast… and it wasn’t good to think about it. Any time now the posters could go up and in this section hired guns were handy to get to.

  The pair I spoke to on the Gastry didn’t have much to say about Escalante or Lias. As far as they knew, all they did in port was visit around the Spanish-speaking sections and get gassed up. Neither had steady women or much to do with the rest of the crew.

  Neither one of them was very smart. Both were dull, plodding types who were at the peak of their earning capacity in the grimy hold of the freighter.

  It just didn’t figure right. They weren’t 10-grand types. They weren’t international types. They weren’t the type anybody should get excited about or interested in for any damn reason whatsoever. Their being around at all had all the earmarks of a crazy, distracting coincidence like a fly in the soup but until I found them I couldn’t be sure.

  A long time ago I learned how to get answers without ever having to ask the questions. But it took time. It took me from 57th Street down to the Battery and halfway back and by then it was night again with the same damn rain thick with dirt and soot that steamed up from the pavement and got inside your clothes.

  But I found Spanish Tom. He was in the middle of a crowd of dock workers and the center of attraction, sitting on the pavement with his back against the overhead highway support and if you didn’t see the hole in him right away you’d think he was sleeping.

  The uniformed cop taking notes squatted and held his coat open with the tip of his pencil and for a moment everybody quieted down and craned to see the business better. It was quite a tap, a real professional job, one hard knife jab under the ribs and up into the heart and that was the end.

  I worked my way through to the front and stood there trying to figure the angle on it. I kind of started a trend and a few more wanted in close and when the cop stood up he yelled for everybody to get the hell away. He scared the half-drunk sailor beside me and he nudged the body and Spanish Tom flopped sideways on the pavement and one leg kicked out like he was still alive.

  The cop yelled again and shoved the nearest ones away. He turned to me, but by then I had already backed off and the pasteboard ticket that had come out of Spanish Tom’s pocket was under my foot. I scraped it back, retrieved it, and squeezed back through the crowd.

  In the one second I saw it I had thought it was a pawn slip, but when I got back under the light I could have spit. It was an ADMIT TWO in Spanish to some shindig up in the quarter. I crumbled it in my fist and threw it back in the gutter and mouthed a curse at it.

  Then I thought about it again and picked it up. If Alfredo Lias had one of these too it could be the place he’d be at. The date was tomorrow; the place a bloody-up with an olé olé band. The clientele was the kind you saw in the tabloids leaning up against a wall while the fuzz frisked them.

  But that was tomorrow. I had now to think about. Until tomorrow I had to stay out of sight of everybody and it wasn’t going to be easy. I flagged a cab down, gave an address a block away from Art’s and got out on an empty corner.

  Halfway down I found the Wheeler Apartments and touched Art’s bell. The vestibule door was open so before he could answer I went ahead up. I knocked at his door and waited, knocked again and listened for him stirring around.

  There wasn’t a sound from inside.

  I tried the door and the knob turned under my hand. I pushed it open, stepped inside, shut it behind me and waited there in the semi-gloom of the room. It was too still, much too still. I pulled the .45 out already cocked and held it ready, then flicked on the light.

  Nothing.

  It wasn’t much of a place. Something a bachelor would have. One main room with the kitchen separated from it by a bar, an open door leading to the bath and another door, cracked a little, going to the bedroom.

  I walked over to that one, pushed it open the rest of the way and reached for the light switch inside the frame.

  And then I found Art.

  The spare pillow beside him showed powder burns and one corner had been ripped off from the bullet blast the pillow had muffled. It had caught him in the temple and without ever realizing it Art had reached the goal he had striven for.

  All I could say was one word. There was nothing else. I was being hung higher all the time. Nobody knew I told Art to make a feature yarn out of the kills at my place and now the fuzz would lay this tap at my door and label it a revenge kill. Whoever coined the word shafted had me in mind.

  There was a whiskey, cordite and burnt feathers smell still in the air, a smell that could hang for hours. I felt Art’s face, knew by the heat of it that death came only a short time ago. I went back to the door to see if it had been forced, but there were no marks around the lock. Art had made it easy for the killer. He had come home drunk, opened up and shut the door. The lock was a type you had to hand turn from the inside to latch and he had done what a thousand other drunks did before him. He forgot about it. He flopped in bed and that was it.

  I went through his pockets carefully, tried his jacket thrown over a chair, then the clothes in the closet. There was something not quite orderly enough about the clothes in his dresser and I knew that all this had been done earlier by an expert and if there had been anything important, it was gone now.

  I wiped the spots I had touched with my handkerchief and backed out of the apartment. I went upstairs and over the roof to a building near the corner and came out there in case anybody was waiting for me outside Art’s place. Two blocks further down I found a cab and gave him Carmen’s number.

  The important little man remembered me from before, but even then he double-checked. He told me reluctantly that Miss Smith would see me, then huffed away, so supreme in his own importance that he never recognized me even with the paper on his desk open to my picture.

  I went upstairs to where she was waiting and grinned at the worry that showed around her eyes. Then suddenly she was tight inside my arms and her mouth was a hungry thing tasting me almost painfully, her body taut with life that has been confined too long and for the first time senses a release;

  Tears made glistening streaks down her cheeks and when she took her mouth from mine she kept it open, sobbing against my neck.

  I said, “Easy, baby,” and held her away to look at her, but only for a second because she grabbed me again and hung on fiercely.

  Very softly she repeated over and over, “You crazy hood. You crazy hood, you!”

  I wiped off the tears, kissed her lightly, then took her arm and went inside. There was still a sob in her breathing and she wasn’t ready to
talk to me yet. I said, “I’m not used to such pleasant receptions.”

  She forced a smile, then it became real. “You crazy Irishman. Every paper, every TV newscaster, every radio broadcast has you in it. Ryan… you haven’t got a chance… you haven’t… I don’t know how to put it… ”

  “It’s bad, huh?”

  “Why, Ryan? Why does it have to be you?”

  “Why all the concern, sugar?”

  She said nothing for a moment. Her eyes frowned and she took her hand from mine and folded them in her lap. “I’m not the type who should do something like this. I know better. I’ve been familiar with… wrong situations a whole lifetime. It’s never happened before. Now, for the first time I know what it’s like, having to… care for somebody who feels nothing, well, very special about you. It’s happened to others. I never thought it could possibly happen to me.” She looked up, smiled and added lightly, “And with a hood too. I’ve never been in love with a hood before.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “You’re class, baby. With me a fling could be fun. Some excitement, like playing cards, maybe. But sugar… like I’m not the kind of slob kids like you fall in love with. You’re class.”

  “Irish… you’ve never had trouble getting a woman… ever. Have you?”

  I squinted and shook my head. “Tomatoes, though.”

  “So let me be a tomato. Or should I ask please?”

  “You’re talking crazy, girl.”

  “I have nothing else, Irish. I never had.”

  “Hell, I could be cut down any time. You know what that means? You get connected with me and you’re done, kid. Done. Maybe it’s like you said… you’ve never been in love with a hood before, but it’s like the excitement of drawing three cards from the dealer and finding yourself with a royal flush. It’s great if the stakes are high, but when the other hands are twos and threes and go out on a small pot the big excitement is all wasted. It only seemed big. It wasn’t worth anything. Damn it, you’re crazy!”

  I was tight on talk and that scar on my back began to draw up again. I had to tell her. She knew what the score was!