Dead on the Level (17 page)

“Who wants him?”

“I do. I just told you.”

“He ain’t in.”

Casey took a quick look at what there was to the lobby and decided against it, but an open doorway led into the bar and a man could get thirsty on a job like this.

“I’ll wait,” he said.

“Don’t know when he’ll be in.”

“I’ll still wait.”

The bar whisky was none too good, and bar whisky was all they had, but at least it was wet. Casey’s palms were a little wet, too. He realized that, with some surprise, after he’d been sitting at the far end of the bar for maybe twenty minutes. It must be the excitement, the tensing for something he could only guess at. He ordered another shot and nursed it along a bit, wishing that something would break. Who was Victor Vanno, anyway? What would he look like? What would he say? The bartender didn’t seem talkative, but Casey was going to have a try at it anyway when the street door opened and a buxom female with a mop of orange hair stumbled up to the bar. She wasn’t completely drunk; on the other hand, she wasn’t completely sober. Besides, she was talking to herself.

“On your way, he says, you bother me! How you like that guy talkin’ that way to me? How you like that, huh?”

She wasn’t going to get an answer, which was all right on account of she wasn’t talking to anybody. The bartender merely drew a beer and shoved it across the bar in a way that told Casey this was old stuff.

“Like he was a duke, or something! Well, I’ll tell you—” She stopped long enough to drain her beer in one long, deliberate pull that held Casey fascinated, and then wiped one hand across her rouge-smeared mouth. “Nobody’s pushin’ me aroun’! Not me, see? I’m goin’ up an’ tell that dirty—”

“Hey,” the bartender said.

She was already shoving off toward the hotel lobby. She stopped and looked back to where he was rapping the bar next to the empty beer glass. “Vanno’ll take care of that,” she roared. “He’ll take care of plenty before I’m through with him! Nobody’s pushin’ me aroun’!”

Vanno. That’s all Casey needed to hear. He slid off the bar stool and followed the woman into the hotel lobby. She didn’t even bother with the desk clerk; she knew where she was going and Casey wasn’t far behind. The stairs led up to a dark, narrow hall, and three doors down she stopped and yanked at the doorknob. The door didn’t give.

“Vanno!” she called. Then her voice softened and turned sticky. “Vanno, honey, open the door.”

Casey gave her all of thirty seconds and then stepped up to the doorknob. “All right, Vanno,” he said. “Open it up.”

Things were happening on the other side of the panel. He could hear a heavy body stirring on the bed, getting up, and then waiting, undecided, behind the door. Then it opened slowly, and Casey wanted to duck. The light in the room behind him made Vanno a giant. Casey measured his shoulders against the doorframe and felt a prickling at the back of his neck. The face, heavy and swollen with liquor and sleep, was unfamiliar; but he’d have known those shoulders anywhere. Casey Morrow wasn’t one to forget an assailant who’d caressed him with a blackjack.

“I told you to clear outa here,” Vanno growled, glaring right past Casey to where the woman stood open-mouthed and bewildered. “Who’s this you brought around? What are you tryin’ to pull, anyway?” She began to blubber something but it wasn’t important. Vanno had stepped back and let some of the light spill out into the hall, and Casey could actually feel the recognition. He could figure that, too, now. Gorden and his houseman would have compared notes on their mysterious callers and formed a pretty pat description, and Junior, here, had been briefed for that expedition to Erie Street. Now he was remembering and that could complicate matters.

“Hello, Vanno,” Casey said, edging into the room. “Mind if I come in?”

He didn’t feel that brave. As a matter of fact, he was beginning to appreciate that fortification he’d picked up at the bar. The woman scurried in behind him and Vanno closed the door. The room suddenly seemed awfully crowded.

“I’m a little disappointed in your diggings,” Casey observed. “But I guess even a hundred thousand doesn’t stretch very far these days.”

“What do you want?” Vanno demanded. “Who sent you?”

“Nobody. It was my own idea.”

“You should be more careful what ideas you get.”

Vanno didn’t seem to be the analytical type, but he’d been told that this man in the raincoat and the brown hat was trouble and that was good enough for him. His coat was unbuttoned and Casey could see the shoulder holster next to his shirt.
All that muscle, and he has to carry a gun
, Casey thought.
Maybe I’m not the most frightened man in the world after all
.

“I don’t know how you came to wash Gorden’s dirty linen,” he said, “but he sure must not pay much.”

“Who’s Gorden?” Vanno asked.

“A nervous man. A very nervous man. Personally, I wouldn’t care to do business with anybody so jumpy. I think he’s got a guilt complex, Vanno. I wouldn’t be surprised if he talked in his sleep, especially when it gets warm.”

“Honey,” the woman with the orange hair demanded, “who is this guy?”

“Mr. Opportunity,” Casey answered. “I just got Vanno’s name in a quiz contest. For the right answers he wins the grand prize.”

“What answers do you want?” Vanno growled.

“The big one. What happened to Carter Groot?”

It was the big one, all right. Vanno had been uncertain until now; now he knew. His hand slid toward that shoulder holster (the big ones, Casey remembered, scare the easiest) but he didn’t have time. A man learns things in the South Pacific; he learns fast or he never learns at all. No sooner did he make that move than Vanno was sprawled on the floor with a foolish expression on his big meat face and an empty hand where the gun had been.

“That’s better,” Casey said. “I always like a man who knows how to relax.”

“Honey,” the woman said, “are you all right?”

“Shut up,” snapped Vanno.

“He’s the law, that’s what he is. He has to be the law!”

“I told you to shut up!”

“But you’re a two-time loser!”

So that was it. Gorden would know, of course. Gorden, Casey remembered, was a lawyer; he would know Victor Vanno like the book he could throw at him if things got rough.

“Inflation,” he mused aloud. “One day you get your name on the deed to a run-down estate about to be sold for taxes, and six months later Mrs. Brunner pays one hundred thousand dollars for it. That’s as neat a piece of free enterprise as I’ve ever come across. When did old man Brunner get wise?”

“You can’t pin that on me!” Vanno bawled.

“Famous last words,” Casey observed. “I bet you could swing a mean poker, too.”

Vanno was on his feet again but this time it was different; Casey held the gun. “Where’s Groot?” he demanded.

“You go to hell!”

“Think I’ll find him there?”

“Maybe.”

“You should know,” Casey said.

A little bell was ringing in his head.
Get out
, it was saying.
Get out fast. Phyllis was right. Groot is dead, and such a condition could become contagious
. He didn’t need Vanno any more, anyway. Whatever he’d hoped to learn by this visit had been made wonderfully clear the moment he recognized those shoulders in the doorway. The pieces fit now. Now even Mrs. Brunner would have to be convinced, and Mrs. Brunner was the one person who could blast Gorden’s alibi.

But Casey, much as he wanted to run, wasn’t turning his back on anybody. Across the room was a closet with a key in the lock, and with a gun in his hand Casey felt great.

“I hate to see you two break up,” he said, indicating the way with the gun. “Sometimes these little spats iron themselves out when you’re alone together.”

They weren’t liking the idea in pretty violent language when Casey turned the key and drew a deep breath. It was the first time the room had seemed big enough to breathe in.

Outside the streets were almost dark, and that was good. Casey walked back to the parking-lot where he’d left the coupé and started for the northwest side as fast as traffic allowed, because now he wanted to keep that date with Mrs. Brunner. Now he really wanted to keep that date. On the way back to Big John’s he suddenly got scared. Suppose Vanno ran out? Suppose Gorden got wind of what was going on and sent him out of town? But now he was just being a foolish man talking to himself, because facts were facts and Gorden couldn’t wipe out the whole trail even if he had time. If Mrs. Brunner had kept her silence he didn’t have any time at all.

When Casey got back to Big John’s all the lights were on and out in front, parked right under the street lamp, was a shiny black squad car. Casey had slowed almost to a stop before he spotted it. He shifted to second and went around the block again, but it was still there. He didn’t like it. Squad cars didn’t hang around Big John’s—it wasn’t that kind of a place. He drove past again and came up the alley, parking alongside the yellow brick garage. If he could just sneak in the back way and get Phyllis— But first he had to get rid of something. He pulled Vanno’s gun out of his pocket, looked about him, and then tossed it up on the flat roof of the garage. Some day somebody might drag a body out of the river, or the lake, or a park lagoon, and find a slug in it that had come from Vanno’s weapon. Casey wanted no part of that deal.

He waited a few seconds until his breathing was easy again and then followed the gangway up to the back door. He let himself in quietly and moved across the kitchen toward the stairs.

Then a man in a wrinkled gray raincoat moved out from behind the sandwich table.

“Hi, Casimir,” Lieutenant Johnson said. “I had a hunch you might be coming in this way.”

THE LIEUTENANT looked so harmless, what with the piece of spiced ham in one hand and the slab of rye bread in the other, that Casey knew the pressure was on. He was a cop, wasn’t he? A man went on guard with a cop in his kitchen, especially when that man was Casimir Morokowski.

“Getting cold,” Johnson said, putting the bread and meat together. “Gives a guy an appetite. Besides, I haven’t had supper yet.”

“Working overtime?” Casey asked.

Foolish question. Johnson merely looked at him and that was enough.

“John tells me you just got in from California last Friday.”

“Was it Friday? I don’t remember.”

“Funny.” Johnson paused long enough to take a huge bite and chew it carefully. “Drive a gray coupé, don’t you?”

“They have them,” Casey observed, “even in California.”

“But not with Illinois plates.”

Now Casey knew. Saturday night, the night of the party, it wasn’t just a casual call that Johnson had made. He had remembered, all right—remembered the man at that lake-front hotel. How he had picked up the trail was something else again, but Casey had no doubt but what he would hear about it soon enough. Down at the station, probably. That was the next move. He waited while the lieutenant went back for the coffee he’d left sitting on the sandwich table, and then something in the man’s eyes told him to look around. He did, and it was Ma who was standing on the stairway under the naked light bulb. Ma with an old blue shawl thrown about her shoulders and ragged felt slippers on her feet. “Casimir—” she said.

Just one word, but it was more.
You’re home
, the word said;
you’re here and there’s a policeman waiting just like I feared all along. I knew there was some trouble
.

“Hello, Ma,” Casey answered, trying to make it sound light. “What’s up?”

She gnawed her lower lip a moment. She was watching the lieutenant but he had his face in the coffee cup.

“Your wife—”

Phyllis! My God, he’d almost said it aloud; he’d almost said her name! He waited for Ma to finish, not daring to speak himself.

“She wants—she wants to see you upstairs.”

Lieutenant Johnson was giving the orders now. Casey took a step toward the stairway, then hesitated. “Go ahead,” Johnson said. “And ask her to come down with you when you come back. I’d like to meet the lady.”

I’ll bet you would
, Casey thought. I’ll
just bet you would
. He took the stairs as fast as he could with Ma shuffling on ahead. If only she hadn’t come down the way she did, bringing Phyllis into the conversation, he might have been able to make that trip to the station alone. But now it was too late. With everything so close to working out, too.

Ma opened the door into the kitchen and he followed her in. She closed the door behind them and leaned back against it. “You lied,” she said in a dull, hollow voice. “You said there was no trouble. You lied.”

“Never mind the lecture!” Casey snapped. “Where’s my wife?”

“She’s gone.”

For a moment he couldn’t believe her. He stared back with his jaw unhinged. “Gone? Gone where? When did she go?” All of this he wanted to know in one sudden burst of questions. Ma merely shook her head.

“How should I know?” she cried. “Nobody tells me nothing. I had to go by the A & P so when I come back she’s gone. All afternoon she’s gone and now it’s getting dark already.”

“She didn’t say anything?”

“Nothing.”

“Or leave a note?”

There was no note. Like Ma said, nothing. Casey forgot about the man waiting downstairs in the kitchen; now, for a long, empty moment he could forget everything—Gorden, Vanno, everything—because the only important thing in the world was that Phyllis had gone away. She hadn’t said anything, just gone away.

“What does that police lieutenant want?”

Ma brought back the realities. She’d always been good at that. No hints, no subtlety for Ma. “He’s been here half an hour, maybe, asking for you. I knew there was trouble. My son don’t come home unless he’s in trouble.”

But Ma’s eyes didn’t match her words. She was looking at him in a peculiar, disturbing way. Not accusingly, like her voice; not derisively, but almost—Casey’s throat tightened a little just at the thought of it—as if she might be afraid for him.

“But you said that she wanted to see me,” he choked.

“It was me that wanted to see you,” Ma said, “without that policeman.”