Crime of Their Life (7 page)

Jack Allen was listening to Mrs. Phelps with half an ear. He was wondering how Liddell could have spent any time in Barbados and still have no trace of a tan, let alone a sunburn. Normally, even a one-day stay on the island would show some effect—

Mrs. Phelps broke off in the middle of a sentence, frowned at the cruise director. She wasn’t used to having people listen to her with only half an ear. Especially since she was in the habit of more than paying her way, and had gotten used to people fawning over her instead of half ignoring her. She flashed an especially warm smile at the young waiter who reached past her to remove her soup plate. Word of Mrs. Phelps’s generosity had already filtered down into the galley and the salon. He returned the smile and Mrs. Phelps made a mental note to ask her room steward to see if “that nice dining room steward” couldn’t arrange for her to have a warm milk and sandwich every night.

The honeymooners talked to each other in low voices giggling at some secret joke. The conversation at the table lagged, became desultory with each of the diners lost in his own thoughts.

CHAPTER 7

After dinner, Jack Allen, the ship’s cruise director, sprawled comfortably in a chair on the lower promenade deck, enjoying his first few minutes of solitude for the day. In the west, the sun was getting ready to make its exit in a Technicolor spectacular. Already, the sky was a blaze of red and the billowing water picked up the rosy glow and seemed to catch fire.

For the past ten years, the winters had all been like this for him. The days hot and the perspiration dried on his skin by the trade winds, the evenings ushered in by pyro-technical displays like this one, the nights cool and black.

But it hadn’t always been so. His mind went back to the winters of his childhood on the East Side of New York. The cold winds that blew off the East River sent the kids running off the streets to huddle around the oversized stoves in the kitchen of the railroad flats. Hardly a week passed that some old bum was found dead in a hallway along the Bowery, or some family was found asphyxiated when the cold drafts that roamed the ramshackle buildings blew out an oil heater while they slept.

The kids almost all wore rubbers from right after Thanksgiving until the April showers were finished. The rubbers served a double purpose—kept their feet dry and postponed the need for putting on new half soles. A piece of cardboard cut to fit on the inside and rubbers on the outside doubled the lives of their shoes. Most of the kids took their rubbers off the minute they were called into the house because it was a widely known fact that rubbers worn indoors could ruin a boy’s eyesight.

Allen watched the slow, leisurely descent of the sun. Back in the old days there was nothing like this. Night came with startling swiftness, the gas jets were lighted in the flats and in the hallways. There was always a faulty one some place in the building that gave the halls a permeating smell of gas.

On the streets, the hardy old pushcart peddlers stood watch over their wares, which included everything an ordinary household could use—clothing, crockery, food, even furniture. Their faces almost invisible under the stockings pulled down to protect their ears from the cold, old fedoras pulled down over the stockings, they stood sentry over their merchandise, ready and anxious to haggle with any soul hardy enough to make an appearance.

Sometimes it was not a customer who made the appearance. It might be a band of hoodlums intent on upsetting the pushcart. One would hold the struggling, begging merchant while the others dumped his merchandise into the slush. Other gangs would show up to offer the peddlers insurance against these raids. Sometimes the protectors would be challenged by other gangs wanting a slice of the protection money. This led to gang fights, the most famous of which was between the Monk Eastmans and the Paul Kellys on Allen Street where over a hundred armed men fought a pitched gun battle.

But this didn’t stop the East Siders from being proud of their neighborhood. In spite of the decaying, unheated hallways and the peeling paint and overcrowded flats, this was the neighborhood of Cherry Street where George Washington once lived; of Mulberry Street where Al Smith started his climb that reached almost into the White House, and of Hester Street where Jacob Epstein first molded a piece of modeling clay into a semblance of the human figure.

Barney Ryan was the name of the cop who walked the beat on the block where Jack Allen lived. Ryan was before the days of the new breed, back when a cop spoke with a brogue instead of a cultivated accent, when he won more arguments with a nightstick than with logic. There were none of the bleeding hearts to decry police brutality and to coddle the underprivileged when Ryan found it necessary to line some of the boys up against a wall and rap their shins with his nightstick if he wasn’t satisfied with their answers.

The neighborhood hangout, unlike the candy stores of today, was the local poolroom. Here behind shuttered doors, in the midst of the odor compounded of part stale nicotine, part untended toilets, many an education that had been started in P.S. 104 was completed.

It had been on a winter night around this time of the year that Barney Ryan strolled into Mac’s Poolroom, his nightstick dangling from the oversized pin that held his badge in place. He closed the door behind him, wrinkled his nose at the characteristic odor of the place, squinted through the ever present fog that swirled in the inverted cone of light spilling from the lamps down onto the green tables.

Mac, the operator of the poolroom, was sitting in his regular spot behind the glass case displaying cigarettes and an open cigar box. He was thin to the point of emaciation, wore a black, sleeveless sweater over a wool shirt, a spit-stained unlit cigarette dangled from the corner of his lips.

The muted clicking of the pool balls stopped, all eyes in the room turned to stare at the red-faced man in the blue uniform.

“Old Doc Schwartz was robbed tonight,” Ryan told them in his husky brogue. “Whoever did it hit the old man too hard. He might die.” His eyes glared balefully around the room. “That would mean that some rat faces a murder one.” He turned to the thin man with the sleeveless sweater. “I warned you what would happen to you if anybody got out of line on my beat. Who did it?”

Mac’s face gleamed wetly in the reflected light. He lifted the dead cigarette from between his lips, shook his head. “Why ask me, Barney? I ain’t been outta the place since I opened up at noon.” The hand holding the cigarette shook.

Ryan walked over to the glass case where the thin man sat. Contemptuously he shouldered past him, almost knocking his high stool over. He reached for a sliding panel behind the counter, slid it back, exposing a pile of cartons of cigarettes. “Whoever robbed Doc got away with a lot of butts.”

He started to turn to face the room when it happened. Rusty Garsen, at table one, inverted his cue in his hands, caught in by the shooting end. It described a short arc, caught the patrolman across the side of his head with a sound like the popping of an overripe pumpkin. Ryan’s uniform hat flew halfway across the room, blood ran down the side of his face as he tumbled into a heap behind the counter.

There was a sudden silence. The others in the room stood frozen, with vacant, staring expressions on their faces. Suddenly they all seemed to come to life at once. Garsen threw the cue across the room, sprinted for the door. The others stampeded after him. As suddenly as it happened, it was all over. The room was empty save for Mac, the poolroom proprietor, wringing his hands. He stood staring with stricken eyes at the unconscious man, whose blood was running down his face to stain the blue of his uniform a dark black.

Jack Allen had no idea where he was going when he ran out of the closeness of the poolroom to the cold clearness of the winter night. All he did know was that he was not going home, that he probably could never go home again. He’d listened too often with morbid interest to the description of what happened to cop killers in the back rooms of the precinct houses. He never returned to the East Side.

Weeks later, when he had bummed his way half across the country, he read that Rusty Garsen had been arrested for the murder holdup of old Doc Schwartz, that Barney Ryan’s uniform cap had saved his life and that he was alive to testify against Rusty. Mac, the poolroom owner, was being tried for receiving stolen property.

Allen kept traveling west, managed to wangle a job as a page boy on the old Panama Pacific Lines. By the time his first voyage through the Canal brought him back to New York, he had discovered the world outside the East Side and had learned that the combination of a boyish smile, exuberant good health and a lonely female passenger with plenty of money could add up to a very pleasant existence.

It still held true, he conceded, as the round ball of the sun melted behind the horizon.

Today, although he’d never see fifty again, there were still plenty of women stalking him, but all too often these days it was the basket cases. The junior members of the staff, like Larry Weston, caught the fancy of the younger, more eligible ones.

Idly, he wondered if Weston might finally hit the jackpot with the Eldridge girl. The kid had been trying hard enough to connect with someone wealthy for the past three or four cruises. This one was the most likely of all, Allen conceded, lonely, grateful and impressed by the rush Weston was giving her. The pay-off would be worth all the work he was putting into it, but even so Allen didn’t envy the kid.

Just the memory of the girl’s shrill giggle sent chills up and down the cruise director’s spine. And that old man of hers was no pushover. Allen didn’t envy anybody who had to go up against him. He had that cold dignity, the ability to make a man ill-at-ease with a word. He had been around and wasn’t naive enough to think the third officer was giving his daughter a rush for her good looks. He’d
seen the cold calculating look in Eldridge’s eyes several times when he was watching Weston and the girl. Anything Weston got out of him he’d have to work for.

Allen squinted at the horizon. For a hard-boiled, down-to-earth character like Eldridge, his choice of Lew Herrick, the writer, as an almost constant companion was a little out of character. But it was probably attributable to the fact that Herrick and the old movie star were constant companions. Less puzzling was the old man’s immediate acceptance of the newcomer, Johnny Liddell.

He frowned as the new passenger popped into his head. There was something about Liddell that made him wonder. Maybe it was the fact that Keen had turned so green when he got his first glimpse of him at dinner. Keen had struck him as a pretty cold character, not easy to stampede. There was no question that he had seen Liddell before and was scared of him. That would seem to indicate that the new passenger wasn’t the amiable, easy-going vacationer he tried to portray.

It bothered Allen not to be able to put the passengers in their rightful niches. He had spotted from the first the fact that the Sands couple were anything but uncle and niece, just as easily as he had been able to see through Lewis Herrick’s pose as a great and insatiable lover. There had been any number like him prancing around in the past ten years, waging a conscious or unconscious fight against a latent homosexuality and cloaking it by trying to prove they were male to the soles of their shoes.

But Liddell as a type eluded him. After the Landers incident, it was more than curiosity that made Allen want to know more about the newcomer. He seemed interested in Ingrid, he mused, but then so did almost every other male on the ship, eligible or otherwise. He wondered if it would do any good to have Ingrid make a play for Liddell and find out who or what he really was. He had the unhappy conviction that it would be Liddell who would wind the blonde around his finger rather than vice versa. But it might be worth trying.

Allen sighed, headed for the companionway.

It was a good thing that he had finally decided that this would be his last year of cruising. He must be getting old if little things like these bothered him, after all these years!

CHAPTER 8

Johnny Liddell stood at the rail, stared down into the thrashing water as it rushed past the hull of the ship to be congealed into a wake at its stern. The sun had gone down in a blaze of red that spilled a rosy glow over the water and left streaks of color in the sky. He took a last drag on his cigarette, flipped it out into the water. The screaming gulls that had followed the
Queen
from Barbados looking for a meal ticket had long ago given up and turned back.

Carson Eldridge, his white hair covered by a plaid cap, nodded briefly as he passed Johnny on his second lap around the deck. There was no sign of his daughter, Fran, or the crew cut type on the deck. They were probably in the grand hall dancing to the after-dinner music, Liddell figured.

Nor had he seen any of his table companions after they had all straggled out of the dining salon in ones and twos after the meal. The honeymooners, Harry and Belle Doyle, had remained oblivious to the rest of the diners through most of the meal, were the first to finish and disappear. Maurie Handel and his well-stacked wife had lingered only a short time after the honeymooners, then had beat a hasty exit. Only the “uncle and niece” were still dawdling over dessert when Liddell had left. He thought he detected signs of disillusionment on the part of the girl, wondered if the idyll would survive to the end of the cruise.

The door to the Piccadilly Bar opened, Rita Keen stepped out on deck. She saw Liddell leaning against the rail, walked over to him. Her red hair was covered with a wisp of green silk; she had drawn a white cashmere sweater over her shoulders. Her body was ripe, lush. Swelling breasts showed over the top of her low-cut dress; a small waist hinted at the full hips, long shapely legs concealed by the fullness of the skirt.

She stopped alongside Johnny, looked out at the streaked sky, the expanse of water as smooth as a millpond. “Quite a show tonight,” she commented.

“In Technicolor,” Liddell agreed.

She turned to him, gave him the full impact of her slanted eyes. “Would you have a cigarette? I left my purse in the cabin.”