The Long Wait Page 9

  “Remember any of ’em?”

  “Sure. Remember ’em all. This one is best.”

  I shook out another butt and lit it, thinking through the smoke. “A long time ago he had one named Vera West. Remember her?” When he didn’t answer right away I said, “Well?”

  He was flexing the muscles in his arms, his face tight. “Mac,” he told me slowly, “I don’t know you from nobody, but she’s one dame I don’t talk about.”

  I didn’t waste time offering him another bill. I just kept it friendly and said, “Don’t blame you. She was okay. I don’t want that kind of dope about her.”

  “Yer damn right she was okay. So she was always plenty high. She was one of them party girls or something, but even a looker gotta live. She was still okay and knocked Servo off’n his high horse plenty. Hell, I heard him plenty of times tryin’ to get her to shack up there. She gives him the business. Lenny, he likes the treatment so he keeps her around. Maybe he gets tired of the easy stuff. But like I said, she was okay. Time I got clipped by the car she gimme a transfusion. Hardly knew me at all, but she gimme blood.”

  “She’s disappeared.”

  “So I hear,” he said sourly. “I hope she had sense to get a roll together and blow this dump. That’s what she did, I think.”

  I let another trailer of smoke drift toward the ceiling. “Servo didn’t like that, huh?”

  “He was pretty burned about it. Hell, he got another one in fast enough. They last awhile then he kicks ’em out. That redhead upstairs must be pretty good. She’s sticking around. She got a temper, that one. Oughta hear her work Lenny over. She makes him jump.”

  “What she’s got anybody’d jump for,” I said.

  “Not that kind of jump, pally. She’s boss up there. Like a wife, you know?”

  “Happens after awhile,” I said. I got up, stretched and stubbed my butt out in an ash tray. “Maybe I’ll drop in again sometime. If you think you have anything worth five hundred bucks, keep it under your hat until I see you.”

  “Sure.” He walked me as far as the door and opened it. “There was a fight up there last night,” he said.

  I stopped and looked down at him. “The dame?”

  “No. Him and some other guy. They tried to keep it quiet, but I heard ’em. I was up on the roof.”

  “What went on?”

  “Beats me. He got air-conditioning and all the windows stays closed. I heard ’em yelling at each other, but I couldn’t catch none of it. They was plenty sore.”

  “Know who it was?”

  “Just know one was Servo. He did most of the yelling.”

  “Oh.” I thought it over, tacked it down in the facts-to-be-remembered department and thanked the guy. He gave me another gummy grin and let me out.

  For a while I stood outside the building looking at the long slanting shadows on the street. I finished a cigarette and had another, but they didn’t do much good. I tried to think, to figure angles, to put things together, but nothing clicked in place.

  Try walking in a town sometime. Try picking up pieces that are five years old. Try finding a girl named Vera West without tipping your hand to the whole population, I thought.

  So far it had been great. I got beat up, shot at, slapped a hood around and almost seduced. It hadn’t been a bad beginning. At least I knew how important I was.

  Or the real Johnny.

  He was so damned important he either had to be run out of town or killed quick. But why? Damn it, why run him out of town, if he could have been bumped to start with? That much was clear. It was better to have him run for it than dead. But why, damn it, why?

  Did he run from Minnow’s murder or the two hundred grand? Either one was a good excuse, but which one.

  I threw the butt in the gutter and walked down the street. Maybe it would have been better if I had stayed with old gummy. At least the guy had wanted to talk. If I had talked it out maybe I could have thought of something.

  I turned in at a drugstore and went back to the phone booth. I tried to call Logan and couldn’t get him. The next nickel got me the bus station and Nick. He got all jumpy again when I told him it was me.

  He said, “What’re you doing? You’re all right, aren’t you?” “Nothing’s wrong with me. I’m trying to think. You got any time to spare?”

  “Sure, plenty. Nothing’s due in for an hour. You had me pretty worried, boy. Wendy called and said you wouldn’t stay at her place.”

  “How is blondie?”

  “Fine. She sure was sore at you.”

  “Too bad.” Then I thought of it. I said, “I’m coming down to the station. How about calling her for me. Think she’d come?”

  “Yeah...” he slowed up a bit and added, “sure, she won’t be leaving for Louie’s for a while.”

  Now I had something to do. It was something I could chew on while a cab hauled me down to the station. I could pass it around in my mind and it made better sense each time. Nick and Blondie. They were right there on the end of the receiving line when I came to town. The very front end. They said hello and patted me on the back. They played it sweet and low and not long after somebody was pumping a slug in my direction.

  The cabbie skidded his wheels in the gravel outside the station, marked something on a report sheet and held his hand out. I put a buck in it and climbed out.

  Both of them were inside the office. The window was closed, the little radio was blaring away and there was a steaming container of coffee on the table. Nick shut the door behind me, locked it and pumped my hand.

  And over by the wall there was Wendy. Blondie. Beautiful blonde Wendy with the lovely legs and round hillocks that tried to peek out of the dress. She was a good-looking twist if you didn’t get too close. She was smiling and shrugging out of a light trench coat and the motion shoved her breasts out for inspection. It didn’t take a second look to see that if she had anything on under the white blouse it must have been painted on with a brush. The skirt part of the ensemble was too tight around the hips, but it was designed that way. There was the suggestion of a rumba in every motion she made and for good measure a slit ran up the side seam to let the flash of nylon show through, and if you looked hard enough the slippery sheen of skin above where the nylon ended.

  She threw the coat over the back of a chair and sat down. Nick did too.

  Not me.

  I stood there with my back against the door looking at the two of them and my face must have made a picture of everything that went on in my mind. Wendy’s lips moved as if to say something, but Nick cut her off. He frowned at me: “What’s wrong with you? I ...”

  My mouth pulled tight in the corners. “Did I ever tell you what was going to happen to three people?” They looked at each other wonderingly, then back to me. “One’s going to die,” I said. “One’s going to get his arms broken. The other one is going to get the hell kicked out of her.”

  Wendy’s fingers locked on the arms of the chair. She was half up and her eyes were a nasty blaze. Like a fast fuse. “Say it,” she snapped out.

  “I got shot at.”

  Pop let out a startled grunt. “Johnny...”

  “Shut up. I’ll get to you.”

  Wendy was a sharp little cooky. She caught wise in a hurry. So she had nice legs and a nicer bosom, but she wasn’t drawing any admiration from my side of the room at all. I looked at her and looked at her, trying to decide if a sweet dish like her could bump a guy and decided she could. I said, “Where you been all day?”

  “Why?”

  “Answer me.”

  The eyes got brighter if anything. “Don’t be so damned domineering. I don’t like tough guys... if you’re a tough guy.”

  “I’m tough enough. You can find that out if you want to. Some other people already did.”

  The corners of her mouth looked strained. “So now you think one of us shot at you?”

  “Maybe, sugar, maybe. It’s pretty simple when you think of it. Who else knew I was in town? I can rattle them of
f on my hand if you want. Nick here. You. Lindsey. Tucker. Maybe I should throw in the bellboys at the hotel and the taxi driver.” My eyes closed down on themselves and I watched her face. “It even gets simpler. Lindsey or Tucker wouldn’t have missed.

  Nick couldn’t see that far. The bellboys and hack jockey weren’t important enough to try a stunt like that. That leaves you. Funny, isn’t it?”

  I smiled at her.

  She didn’t smile back. The white lines at each end of her mouth faded. For the first time it grew soft and pretty and if I didn’t know better I would have thought she was feeling sorry for me.

  She said, “At a quarter to nine the mailman awakened me. I had to sign for a registered letter. You can check on that. About twenty minutes later the milkman got me up again and I paid my bill. His name is Jerry Wyndot and you can reach him at Lyncastle Dairy. Before he left Louie drove by with my new costume and stayed until noon. He had a friend with him from ASCAP. Then at ...”

  “That’s enough,” I said. I felt a little foolish. I went over to the table and reached for the coffee. When I took a good pull I set it down and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. Nick was shaking his head sadly. “Sorry, kid. I never make little mistakes, only big ones.”

  Her eyes came up to mine and the fire was out of them. “That’s all right, Johnny, I understand.” The little smile she gave me said she meant it, too.

  I laugh when I feel good. Hell, I felt good! When do you meet a dame that lets you throw an attempted murder in her teeth and then understands why without being sore about it for a week?

  I laughed, Nick thought I was nuts, but Wendy, she laughed too. In a way it was a pretty good joke. I parked on Nick’s window stool and passed the butts around. “I get in trouble a lot that way,” I told them.

  Nick agreed readily. “You’ll get in too much to get out of if you do that to the wrong people. Maybe now you’re ready to say what you came to say.”

  “I didn’t come to say, Nick. Ask is the word. I’m stuck. What do I do now?”

  Wendy pulled on her cigarette .“Stuck for what?”

  “Ideas. Information. I can’t go to the cops and nobody else knows anything. Lindsey has a murder charge written out with my name on it and he can’t serve it. Someday he’s going to find a way to do it, but before then I have to get clear of the thing. Unless I do I can’t make a play without sticking my neck out.”

  Nick slid his chair closer to the table and propped his elbows on it. “You tell us, Johnny. Shucks, I know plenty of people I can go to. What’s it you need?”

  Things I never even thought about before started popping in my head. “I don’t like the way Minnow died. He was sitting there and bang, just like that he caught it. Neat. Clean. No fuss. And there I was with a beautiful tailor-made motive for bumping him.”

  “The gun,” Wendy said quickly. Her eyes sprayed me with a cool glance. Nick looked at my hands automatically and waited to hear what I had to say about it.

  “Yeah, the gun,” I repeated. The big question. Lindsey asked it. Wendy asked it. Inside, I was asking it myself. “I wonder what Minnow was doing there that night.”

  “The papers said he was working,” Nick muttered. “It was his office.”

  “It was pretty late, too.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Back to what I said first. I didn’t like the way he died. He should have been out of his chair on the floor or something. If he was surprised in the office by the killer, especially me, he would have tried to make one move, at least.”

  Nick pulled at his whiskers. “You got medals for shooting quick and fast in the army, Johnny.” There wasn’t any hedging about him at all.

  “Not that fast,” I said. “I like it better to think that the killer was there all the time. Maybe Minnow even went there to meet him. What about that?”

  They said it together. “Maybe.” They meant me. It was getting rougher.

  “How can I find out?”

  Wendy crossed one leg over the other. White, slippery white above nylon showed through the slit in the skirt. “Minnow left a widow. She might know.”

  “Know where she lives?”

  “I can find out.”

  I got down off the stool. “Come on, then. Let’s find out.”

  She lived in a white frame house in the suburbs. It was a quiet neighborhood and all the houses had plenty of lawn space around them. There were swings out in the back and kids playing on the lawns and people gathered in hammocks on open porches. The house we wanted had a fence around it, a bird house on a pole and a rustic sign that said “Minnow.”

  I opened the gate and let Wendy go in ahead of me. She went up on the porch, rang the bell and smiled at me while we waited. The door opened and a woman in her fifties said, “Hello, can I do something for you?”

  “Mrs. Minnow?”

  She nodded at Wendy. “That’s right.”

  It was hard trying to find the right words. I stepped forward and said, “If you have a few minutes, we’d like to talk to you. It’s pretty important.”

  She held the door open wide. “Certainly, come right in. Make yourselves at home.” We stepped inside and followed her into the living room. It was a nice room that told you that whoever lived there liked things orderly and in good taste. Wendy and I sat together on the couch while the woman settled herself. She smiled again and waited.

  “It’s about your... husband,” I started.

  At one time it might have startled her. Not now. She sat there relaxed, but there was a question in her face.

  “My name is Johnny McBride.”

  “I know.”

  Wendy and I stared at her.

  “I couldn’t very well forget your face, could I?”

  “You don’t seem very excited about it.”

  “Should I be?”

  “I was supposed to have killed your husband.”

  “Did you?” Cripes! She was more like my mother waiting to hear why I got a low grade at school.

  I said, “No.”

  “Then why should I be excited?”

  The pitch was too fast for me. I shook my head. “I don’t get it.”

  “I never thought you shot my husband either,” she said.

  Wendy’s fingernails made a sharp click in the silence. She was staring at the woman, shot me a glance out of the corner of her eyes and went back to picking at her nails.

  I came out of it. “Let’s do it over again, Mrs. Minnow. I’m still in the fog. If you thought I didn’t do it then why not go to the police?”

  “Mr. McBride, by the time I came to that conclusion the police had already made their decision. In all fairness to Captain Lindsey, let me say that I did tell him what I thought but he didn’t consider it reasonable. Since I spoke to him I’ve gone over the matter carefully enough to be sure I’m right. I’ve been waiting.”

  “For what?”

  “You. A man never stays away from murder. Not if he didn’t do it.”

  “‘Thanks. Or do I remind you about the fingerprints on the gun?”

  Her smile was a tight knowing thing. “That’s something for you to figure out, young man.”

  “Great. With a detail like that in the picture how’d you figure me innocent?”

  She leaned back in her chair with something like a sigh. “Bob and I were married a long time. Did you know he was a police officer in New York before he took up law? Well, he was. A good one too. A better one after he was made District Attorney. Bob never put too much store in details. He was more interested in motive.” Her eyes passed over mine. “The motive behind his death wasn’t revenge.”

  “What was it then?”

  “I’m not quite sure.”

  “The night he died ... why’d he go to his office?”

  “I’ll have to go back a way to explain that. He told me that one day a girl came to his office. She was frightened and left a letter with him that wasn’t to be opened unless she died. That may seem unusual, but it is
n’t. He had several requests like that every year. However, he forgot to put it in his office safe and brought it home with him. That night he put it in his safe upstairs and forgot about it.

  “Several months later he came home quite worried and asked me about the letter. I reminded him where he had put it and he seemed satisfied. That evening when I brought his tea to his room upstairs he was sitting in front of the safe quite preoccupied and I saw him take the letter out of one of the compartments, stare at it a moment, then put it back.

  “Two nights later he had a call from New York. It seemed to excite him and I heard him mention the word ‘verification’ several times. He went upstairs and I heard him open that safe. When he came back down he put on his hat and coat, left the house for a good two hours, came back, went to his safe again and stayed in his room working on some papers. A few minutes later he had a call from his office, told me he had to leave and went out. I never saw him again. He was killed that night.”

  “Who called him?”

  “An officer named Tucker.”

  My hands knotted into fists. “Why?”

  “A special delivery letter came for Bob. He wanted to know if he should hold it or deliver it to him at the house here. Bob told him he’d come down and get it.”

  Damn, damn, damn. I was all ready to catch the big bite and it had to turn out simple. Tucker, the bastard! I said, “Lindsey checked on all this?”

  “Oh, yes indeed.”

  She was waiting for me to ask the next question. It was right there ready to be asked so I did. “What happened to the letter?”

  “I don’t know. When I went over his effects the safe was open and I noticed that it wasn’t where I had seen it before. Captain Lindsey showed me all that were in Bob’s office, but since it was nothing but a plain white envelope I couldn’t help out.”

  “You think he died because of that letter?”

  “Among other things. It was fortunate for a lot of people that he died.”

  “Servo?”

  She nodded.

  “Me?”

  She smiled and nodded again.

  “A whole crooked setup in a whole crooked town?”