Hard Case Crime: Baby Moll Read online

  “You went fishing today,” he said. “I couldn’t find you.”

  I took the ice chest from the shelf, straightened up and turned around, setting the chest carefully on the glass top of the display case. A drop of perspiration fell from my chin, splashing on the glass. I was conscious of my heart beating too fast.

  “You ever been shot, Rudy?” I said harshly.

  He was a stocky man, with too much weight on his bones now. He wore a wrinkled light-blue cord suit, a tired gray hat pushed back on his head. His hair was graying, oiled, long around the ears, thinning on top. He watched me steadily, wearily, from behind a large pair of glasses, the clear plastic frames yellowed by the sun. There was a crack at the corner of one lens.

  His lips stretched wide in a humorless smile. “Lots of times.”

  “You know better than to come on me like that. You might have picked up another one.”

  A brown insect with buzzing wings whirled in the door, hovered near his ear, soared away. He chewed steadily on the wood end of a match. “You wasn’t nowhere near a gun,” he said, then added defensively, as if he hadn’t considered the possibility before, “and I was as close as my hip pocket.”

  “Finish coming in,” I told him, “and shut the door.” I walked around the display case and turned on the air conditioner at the back of the store.

  Rudy Mask sat in a chair and looked curiously about the store, sighed as the cold air from the big Carrier unit reached him. “So this is what you bought with Macy’s money,” he said.

  I stood watching him. “Money I earned, Rudy,” I said.

  He nodded, taking in the stuffed sailfish, the racks of slender rods. He knew nothing about fishing, cared less. He was an old hoodlum, an aging tough guy, his body scarred from knives and an occasional healed bullet wound. Not many. You don’t take many and keep walking around. His face and ears were worn and lined from the back alley poundings, the careless brawls in dives in every kind of town. His eyes had seen too many women, in brothels, in stinking chicken coops when things were bad, in magnificent apartments that smelled of strange flowers and perfume and the sweet flesh of hundred-dollar girls when things were fabulously good. His fingers had held too much whisky, and they weren’t steady.

  It had been six and a half years since I had seen him, and he didn’t belong here. I didn’t want to see him now. I had left his kind of life one day when the stink of it had clutched at my stomach and made sleep impossible. In the last months I had gradually forgotten there was always a loaded gun pointed at my head wherever I went. Rudy was a reminder that the trigger could be pulled at any time.

  “What are you doing in Orange Bay?” I asked him.

  “Macy wants you.” He took the chewed match from his mouth, glanced at it, tossed it on the floor. He looked for another in his coat pocket. “Somebody’s going to kill him,” he said, and coughed. Then it was quiet in the store, except for the air conditioner.

  “Is that supposed to make me unhappy?” I said.

  “Well, Jesus!” Rudy said, surprised.

  “Who’s trying to kill him and why would I be interested?” I said, impatient to know what he was getting at.

  He shook his head. “Macy doesn’t know. It’s not a Syndicate order.”

  “What does he know?”

  Rudy shifted his weight in the chair. “You remember the old gang, Macy’s first gang, back in the thirties? I started with Macy then, after I drifted out of Kansas City. There were four others besides me, Pete. Clemente and Porter and Tin Ear and Lundquist. Did Macy ever tell you what racket we had then?”

  “Shakedown. Protection.”

  “It was sweet. We lined up whole neighborhoods. Once in a while a customer wouldn’t buy. We ran into a tailor like that. He had a scrubby little shop and lived upstairs with fat mamma and two-three kiddies. Little old guy with a bent back and thick glasses. I remember him kinda well. He didn’t need the protection. His place burned one night. It was tough. So quick he didn’t have time to get himself and fat mamma and the kiddies out. We lost a client, but the other merchants on the block came through in a hurry.”

  “I never heard about it,” I said grimly.

  “Macy’s been hearing about it lately — in the last three years. Every time one of the old gang was knocked off, he got a clipping in the mail, an old yellow newspaper clipping about the fire that burned the tailor and his family. Along with another story about how each one of the boys got it. Porter was the first. In an alley in Hammond, Indiana, about three years ago. Ripped apart with a big knife. There was maybe a couple of paragraphs in the local paper. Nobody would have known about it, except Macy got the story a few days later, cut from the paper. And the first clipping about the fire.”

  “Who else is dead?”

  Rudy slicked back his dirty hair, pressed a hand against his abdomen. “Stomach’s kind of wacky lately,” he explained apologetically. He took a couple of hard breaths. “Clemente went back to Cuba after the war. I think it was about seven months after Porter was killed that Macy got the story about Clemente. In Spanish, yet. His woman found him hung upside down in some Havana crib, slit open from throat to groin.”

  “Another clipping about the fire with this newspaper story?”

  “Right... Let’s see. It was Tin Ear next. New Orleans, this time. Throat cut and belly opened. About a year after Clemente. Three weeks ago Lundquist was knifed in an old folks’ home outside of Tampa.”

  “Any message with these clippings? Some kind of threat?”

  “Hell, no. It’s clear enough, ain’t it?”

  “Yeah. Macy’s getting shook about all this?”

  “Not too much. But he wants to get this thing off his back. He’s got other problems. He wants you to find the guy with the knife who’s sending him these newspaper stories.”

  “How about you, Rudy?” I said. “You getting worried?”

  He rubbed the back of his hand across his lumpy chin. His eyes weren’t happy. He was beginning to look like an old man. “The guy sticks with it,” he said, his voice rasping. “It takes a lot of patience to hunt down men like he does.”

  “And a lot of hate to use a knife like that.”

  “Yeah,” Rudy said. He squirmed in the chair.

  I packed the ice chest with ice from the refrigerator, put the fish inside. It was time for me to pick Elaine up. She would begin to wonder what was keeping me. I thought of the menace of Rudy Mask, and Macy Barr, who should have been untouchable, but was feeling the pressure from a slow and patient killer. I wondered if I was going to be able to say no to Macy again and get away with it.

  Without looking at Rudy I said, “Tell Macy to get another boy. I made a clean break. I want it to stay clean.”

  Rudy was silent.

  “If he told you to bring me whether I wanted to come or not, forget that too,” I told him.

  “He didn’t figure you’d come back because you love him so much,” Rudy said. “So he wanted me to remind you of something. About what a nice girl you’re engaged to.”

  I turned, my jaw tight with rage. Rudy wasn’t gloating. He looked at me soberly. “He wouldn’t hurt your girl,” Rudy said. “He wouldn’t have somebody brought in to hurt her and leave her in an alley without her clothes like he’s done to others. He just said he’d take a letter you wrote a long time ago and wrap it up and send it to her so she could read it.” He was watching me closely. He must have seen what happened to my eyes, because he grunted, satisfied, and walked away, poking his bad teeth with the end of a match.

  No, Macy wouldn’t hurt Elaine. Not in the old manner, breaking bones and faces. Once in a while this was the best way, the only way to make sure a warning was obeyed, to maintain control of the uncertain human element in a sprawling illicit operation. But through the years Macy had learned better and safer ways of control: how to bring a man to his knees through the gentle pressure of his own mistakes; how to hit a man through others close to him so that it is more painful than any beating.
/>   The letter would tell Elaine what I had never told her: about a wife named Jean, whose home for five years had been an institution in New York State until in a lucid moment some time ago she had slashed herself and bled to death. It would be the beginning of ruin. Maybe Elaine could take it. But if her mother and father found out... They weren’t sure of me, anyway. And if they should start looking into my past, I was through.

  Rudy stood near the front window watching the cars go by in the street, jingling change in his pocket. I heard the telephone and picked up the receiver without thinking about it.

  “Pete?” Elaine said cheerfully. “You break your leg or something?”

  “I was just leaving,” I said thickly. “Be right over.”

  “Nothing wrong, is there?”

  “No. Of course not. See you in a little while.”

  I put the receiver down. Rudy yawned. “We’ll have to get moving. Macy was expecting us today.”

  “You bastard,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, Pete,” he said, sounding as if he really meant it.

  Chapter Three

  Elaine answered the door when I rang the bell. She was wearing a pastry-pink semiformal dress and the edges of her short black hair sparkled. A welcoming smile faded when she saw me.

  “Pete, you’re not dressed!”

  I went on inside. “Anyone else home?”

  She frowned as if she were beginning to get angry with me. “No. Mother and Dad left ten minutes ago. Why—”

  I couldn’t look at her. “I’m going away for a few days, Elaine. I have to leave tonight.”

  She didn’t get it right away. She stood silently looking at me as if I were out of my mind.

  “What are you talking about, Pete?” Her voice was high.

  It was getting worse by the second. I tried not to yell at her because of the hurt I was feeling. “I just said I have to go away. That’s all. I’ll be back in a few days.”

  “Oh.” Her hands brushed at the crisp ruffles on her dress. “It’s kind of sudden, isn’t it? Where are you going that you have to leave in such a hurry?”

  “To the south. It’s — business. I didn’t know about it until a few minutes ago.”

  She put a hand to her cheek. Her mouth turned down at the corners. “Nice of you to come by and tell me about it.”

  “Damn it, Elaine, don’t—”

  She took two quick steps and put her arms around me. Her eyes were frightened. “Pete, what is it? You’re acting — I never saw you like this. Are you in some kind of trouble? Is that — Oh, Pete, what’s the matter?”

  “Does anything have to be the matter? I’m just going to Castile for a few days.”

  “Tell me why,” she whispered. “You can do that.”

  I held her. “No. I — It’s not imp—”

  She broke away from me, looked at me, her eyes full of rage and hurt. “You don’t really love me so much after all, do you?”

  “There are some things it’s better for you not to—”

  “What things? What are you talking about? This morning that car — now you suddenly have to leave town — ” Her voice broke. “All right, leave. Go ahead and leave, Pete. But don’t come back. Ever. Not until you think I’m important enough in your life to help you when you need help.”

  I walked to the door. It wasn’t doing any good to stay there.

  “I love you, Elaine,” I said quietly. “I’m not really in trouble. A long time ago I worked for a man. A big and important man. I guess you’d call him a gangster. I owe my life to him. Now I’m going to pay an installment on it. The last payment, I hope.”

  I opened the door. She tried to stop me. “No, Pete! Whatever it is, don’t go!”

  I kept walking, out to the car. She followed me, caught my arm. “Please, Pete. It’s all right, I’m not angry with you, just don’t go, stay with me, please!”

  “I’ll come back,” I said.

  She was crying now. “What are you going to do?”

  “This man I worked for, his name is Macy Barr. Somebody’s trying to kill him. I’ve got to find out who. It’s the only chance we’ve got, Elaine. This time I’ll make sure the past stays dead. Believe me.”

  I held her suddenly and kissed her, then got into the car quickly. She watched me silently, holding both arms across her stomach, hurting too much to speak. I saw her image in the mirror as I drove away, then the drive twisted and I couldn’t see her any more. Once I thought I heard her call me, but maybe it was just a sound I made myself.

  Rudy and I drove south fast. I discouraged conversation. I was thinking of how Macy had always had his way, even though it seemed for a while that I might make it stick when I went to him that day and told him I was quitting.

  He had looked up at me irritably when I said it, as if I were trying to be funny in a way he didn’t appreciate.

  “You’re what?”

  I told him again. “I’m leaving,” I said.

  He looked at me with his eyes narrowing but spoke calmly. “Oh? Where do you think you’re going?”

  “I’m not sure. Upstate somewhere. Where I can lie in the sun and fish if I feel like.”

  He was playing along with me now, not sure how serious I was. “Then what?”

  “Get a job. Work with my hands. A construction job, maybe. Something useful. I’d like that.”

  His mouth opened and closed. He couldn’t cope with this right away. Nobody had ever tried to talk to him like that. I should have been scared but I wasn’t. I was perfectly calm. Maybe that helped put it over. That and the fact that he knew me well and liked me.

  “What’s the matter? Don’t I pay you enough?” He was looking for a reason he could understand, and so was defeated already.

  “You pay me enough.”

  He picked up a pencil and turned it over rapidly in his big fingers. His eyes were hard and chill, like ice on marble. “I’ll be damned,” he said, somewhat awed. “Five years, and then you turn up in here one morning and tell me you’re through.” His lips formed a stubborn, dangerous line. “You know more about me than any man alive. You don’t just quit. What’s the matter with you?”

  “I quit,” I said.

  He looked at me steadily for over a minute, then I could see the doubt in his eyes, and the lines of his mouth soften. “You... kid,” he said. “You... punk kid. College boy. Trouble with you is, you got too much education. Too many ideas crammed into your brain. Like your dad.” He spread his hands. “Why? Just tell me why. Tell me something reasonable. You’re not happy?”

  “No. I’m not happy. I don’t know if I ever will be. Maybe it’s not important. Maybe I just want a change. My side of life has always been the side with its face in the gutter. I’m tired of neon sunsets and living at night. Maybe I want a woman who’s never been rented out like a lending library book.”

  He lit a cigarette and watched the match burn, the charred wood curling slowly like a dying thing. “You nut. A regular nut. That’s what I got. I kept you from drinking yourself to death once, didn’t I, boy?”

  I nodded. He seemed about to go on, then caught his breath. “Oh, what the hell. I can’t say nothin’ to you. You might as well go. Feeling the way you do you wouldn’t be no good to me. I never understood you. You’re the biggest screwball I ever knew. Sometimes I think you could tell me to spit and make me like it. You shouldn’t have any trouble. They don’t even have your phone number downtown you’re so clean.”

  When I hesitated he told me to get out. He stopped me with a word when I reached the door.

  “You know Lollipop, Pete?”

  There was a hard surge of fear to smother the rising happiness and relief I was feeling. “I know what it stands for.”

  “I’m soft in the head for letting you walk out on me alive,” he said tonelessly. “Maybe I got to know you too well. Maybe I’m soft because of your old man, remembering what a hell of a good lawyer he was—”

  “Don’t talk to me about the bastard.”

 
; “Don’t ever give me reason to call somebody like Lollipop,” he finished. “I can’t help how much you know. But I can do something about it. Remember that!”

  “I’ll remember,” I said.

  I flipped a cigarette stub into the cool air streaming outside the car window, put my face into my hands, trying to press the ache from my eyes with my fingertips. For many months I had slept with a revolver tied to my wrist, always careful of the strangers around me, of the shadows at my back. No one ever came. Gradually I learned how to forget the way it had been: the tense crowded nights, living at the edge of a scream, nerves straining and alert for a look, a footstep, a gleam of light on knife or gun; trusting nothing, not the secretive men who gave information in whispers, nor the whisky drunk in locked bedrooms in a vain hope for relaxation, nor the silken flesh and long hot touch of many women.

  “What’s it like down there now?” I asked Rudy.

  “There’s a squeeze on,” he said, glancing at me. “Stan Maxine’s behind it. You remember Stan?”

  “I remember him,” I said dryly.

  “Stan’s a big boy now. Got a taste for big money. He has an idea that Macy runs too much. Maxine’s got important friends upstairs. Guys who believe in taking care of their own. Macy’s owned South Florida for years but he doesn’t come from north of the Mediterranean and some of the wheels resent that. They wouldn’t try to move one of their own boys into Macy’s territory but if Maxine cut in they’d look the other way.”

  “Why doesn’t Macy slap him down?”

  Rudy shook his head slowly. “Who knows?” He paused, hunting for the right way to tell me what was on his mind. “You know how it was when you were with him, Pete. Macy owned everything then. He got his cut on every drop of bootleg, every deck of morph and stick of tea, every policy slip. There wasn’t any two-bit gambler or waterfront loan shark who wasn’t under Macy’s thumb. He told everybody what to do. From the crummiest cat house to police headquarters to the union halls. Macy musta owned a thousand people in five or six counties.”