Long Live the Dead (37 page)

The car was in second speed, roaring its challenge at the night, when it struck him. A deft twist of the wheel threw Latham against the curb and pinned him there while the forward surge of the machine dragged him along for twenty feet. Then the car veered to mid-street and roared away.

Link Latham was pulp in the rain-filled gutter.

Behind the car’s wheel, the stocky, block-shouldered man named Joe sucked up a slow breath, exhaled heavily and said “Neat, if you ask me. That will save Link a heap of trouble.”

He switched the headlights on.

His companion said matter-of-factly: “Make for the Gray Street Garage and we’ll get this hack cleaned up before the cops snoop. Then we’ll mosey over to Link’s place. There’ll be extra dough in this for us. Link always pays big for smart headwork.”

He flipped open the glove compartment, took out a pint bottle and uncorked it. “Well—here’s to what’s left of Ed Corley.”

C
orley frowned at the Armenian waiter and the waiter said again to the cop with the notebook: “The coat he’s wearing belongs to this gentleman here.” “To you?” The cop stared at Corley. “Yes,” Ed Corley said, “it’s mine.” “What’s your name, mister?” “Philip Smith,” Ed Corley said. “He must’ve swiped your coat on purpose, hey?” “I don’t know.”

“Well,” the cop said, “it’s a cinch he’ll never tell us, one way or the other.” He snapped the notebook shut and turned to shoulder the crowd back. “All right, now, all right, get back! Get back, I’m tellin’ you! There’s nothin’ to gape at. The guy got run over, is all. Get
back
!”

The waiter said solicitously: “You’ll need a coat of some sort, sir, to go far in this rain.”

“I will,” Ed Corley agreed.

“Well, sir—turn-about is fair play. Why not take
his
coat?

I can point it out to you. Of course it’s all very irregular, but you left a handsome gratuity, sir, and what the management doesn’t know won’t hurt.” He smiled, and his smile was as smooth as his voice. No accent now. That, evidently, was merely a part of the Armenian atmosphere, to be discarded in more serious moments.

Link Latham’s coat was a few sizes too huge for Ed Corley, and seedy in comparison with Corley’s own. It offered protection, though, from the rain. Engulfed in it, Ed Corley walked leisurely down Mabel Street to Fourth. A corner clock read two A.M.

He kept on walking.

It was on Seventh Street, twenty-five minutes later, that the black and yellow cab fell in behind him. The driver, his cap pulled low, had two passengers. When he spotted Ed Cor-ley he slowed to a crawl, slid the glass partition behind him and said: “Is that him?”

The two passengers peered through the wet window. One was a slim, jet-haired youth with sultry eyes. The other was not much older but had a slack, wet mouth and was slower of motion, less crisp of speech. Nick Vierick picked his men carefully, though, and Wet Mouth was more dangerous than he looked.

“That’s him, ain’t it, Al?” Wet Mouth said.

“Yeah.” And to the driver: “Get ahead of him, Andy.”

The black and yellow machine passed Ed Corley at normal speed, then slowed. Al, the slim sultry-eyed youth, got out. The cab moved on again and turned a corner. Al sent a swift, stabbing glance at his approaching victim and stepped into a tenement doorway.

It looked perfectly natural. It looked as though Al lived in that tenement and had just arrived home by cab.

Ed Corley walked past.

Al’s feet were noiseless as the pads of a cat when he stepped from the tenement doorway and closed the gap. The automatic in his pocket nudged Ed Corley’s hip. “Keep right on goin’,” he said.

Ed Corley glanced at him and frowned. He missed a step. The gun’s pressure increased and the sultry-eyed youth said with sudden venom: “I ain’t afraid of you, Corley! Get that out of your head! You try any stunts and I’ll blast you!”

Ed Corley’s mouth thinned, but he did not again look at the man beside him. At the corner, the pressure of the automatic steered him in the direction Al wished him to go. The black and yellow cab was waiting.

Wet Mouth had a gun in his hand and the cab door open when Ed Corley came abreast of the machine. “Nice going, Al,” was all he said. His free hand slid over Corley’s clothing and he seemed surprised to find no weapon. He moved back on the seat and Al crowded Corley against him.

Al got in and closed the door. “Stop at Carey’s place,” he told the driver. “I’ll phone Nick.”

His gaze slanted to Ed Corley’s face. “You surprise me,” he added with a trace of a sneer. “I had you figured for a tough guy.”

Ed Corley stared straight ahead of him and was silent.

They rode across town. Grey’s place, a bar-room, was on lower Eustace Street, and Al was inside but a moment.

“Nick says bring him to Flo’s apartment.”

“O.K.,” the driver said.

“Nick says don’t rush it. He wants to get there first.”

“O.K.”

N
ick Vierick stepped briskly out of a cream-colored coupe, a very swank job, in front of the apartment house toward whose upkeep he so generously contributed. The rain had stopped. A stoop-shouldered man lounging near the entrance lit a cigarette, holding the match overlong to his face, and nodded. Nick favored him with a short syllable in passing. It hadn’t been so tough, Nick thought. You learn early in the day that your deadliest enemy is in town gunning for you, and before the night is out, you have the situation under control. Neat. Organization was the answer. “Give me the right boys, smart enough to think for themselves in a squeeze, but level-headed enough to take orders,” Vierick mused, “and I could run the country.”

He was in good spirits. He hummed softly on his way up the stairs. For a moment he listened outside the door of Mrs. Ed Corley’s apartment, then thrust a key into the lock, opened the door and stepped inside.

“Where are you, kid?”

“Right—here, Nick.”

He walked into the living-room and stared at her, and for an uncomfortable moment wondered what he had ever seen in her. She looked worn. The eighty-dollar evening gown had been swapped for an old black satin housecoat, her hair was in her eyes and her face was bird-tracked with fatigue lines.

“Why aren’t you in bed?” Nick demanded.

She gazed at him out of bloodshot eyes, holding her head up with an effort. “I did go to bed, Nick. I—I couldn’t sleep.” Her voice dropped to a whisper, rough at the edges. “Nick Why did he have to come back? What does he want?”

Smiling a tight little smile that looked skimpy on his lean face, Nick Vierick sank into a chair and lit a cigarette. She would know what Ed Corley wanted, he thought, a lot quicker than she expected. He relaxed, and Flo watched him, afraid of him. Nick was on his third cigarette when footfalls in the hall caught his attention.

He looked at the door, and someone knocked. He got out of his chair and said tautly: “Who is it?”

A voice replied: “Us, chief.”

Nick opened the door.

The girl’s eyes widened when she saw Ed Corley. She sucked a breath and put a hand to her throat, stared at Ed as though she were seeing a ghost. Nick stared at him, too, but if Nick expected a display of emotion on Ed Corley’s part he was disappointed. Ed glanced at the girl, veered his gaze around to Nick, then showed no further interest in either of them and stared, instead, at his feet.

Vierick’s two hoods shoved him deeper into the living-room, one on each side of him. “What now, chief?” Al asked.

“Tie him up. Tape his mouth.”

“We go ridin’ before daylight?”

“There’s a big burlap sack in the trunk of my car, out front. You, Pete”—to Wet Mouth—“go get it.” He tossed Pete a key. “Al, you go down and tell Andy to move the other car around back, to the alley.”

“It’s there already. We come in the back way.”

“Go down and sit with him, then. After you tie this mug up.”

Al was efficient with a roll of adhesive tape. Down on one knee, he slapped Ed Corley’s feet together and deftly secured them. A nurse with a roll-bandage could have done no neater job. Rising, he pulled Ed Corley’s arms back, but found the ill-fitting coat too cumbersome, and paused to yank it off. He tossed the coat onto a chair and finished his taping.

A neat thrust of his foot spilled Corley to the floor, and Al sat on him, taped his mouth. Ed had nothing whatever to say before his lips were sealed, and after that could utter no sound loud enough to travel ten inches.

Al and Pete went out. Nick Vierick took a step forward, looked down at Ed Corley and said with a slow, curling smile: “You know, Corley, I’ve been wondering just how much you’re really wise to what happened to you. This business of coming back—it was a noble gesture, sure—tough Ed Corley, fresh out of a rest home and determined to get even with the boys who put him there. But it had a lot of angles, guy.

“First place, I didn’t have a thing to do with snatching you that time. Grossman ordered it, but I wasn’t doing Grossman’s dirty work then—Link Latham was. Link’s boys grabbed you, Corley—not mine. And they never figured you’d live through the workout they gave you. When they dumped you on Toole Street that night they thought you were finished. You surprised them, hey?

“But if you think I had a hand in that little bit of business, guy, you’re wrong. I’m no angel, understand. Oh, no. Fact, I was having ideas about doing away with you myself. But my motives were a mite different from Grossman’s. I had an eye on the little lady here. Husbands are a nuisance.”

Ed Corley lay on his back with his taped wrists under him, his knees drawn up. His eyes were open, returning Vierick’s gaze. The eyes closed and Nick Vierick shrugged, moved away.

Corley’s coat—Link Latham’s coat—lay there on the chair, and Vierick picked it up. He picked it up to move it, so he could sit down. Something clinked in one of the pockets, and curiosity led Vierick to investigate. He pulled out a cigarette lighter.

I
t was worth something, that lighter. Small, exquisitely made of yellow gold with a deep red stone, not of the semi-precious variety, winking above the engraved name
Flo
, it weighed but an ounce or two in Vierick’s palm—yet he almost dropped it.

His eyes thinned to slits and ominously darkened. His mouth thinned with them, spreading in a tight white line across his face. He put the coat back on the chair, walked to a table and placed the lighter on the table and backed up, staring at it.

The door opened and Pete came in. “Here’s the sack, chief.” “Leave it and get out,” Nick Vierick said, his voice strangely metallic. “Come back with Al in ten minutes.” Pete gave him an odd stare. The door closed. Nick Vierick

looked at the lighter again. “I paid a lot of money for that, kid,” he said, without turning his head toward the girl.

Flo looked at the lighter, too. Puzzled at first, her gaze flicked from the lighter to Ed Corley and back again, like a humming-bird. Then she was too scared to be puzzled. Every last touch of color ebbed from her face, and her hands tightened jerkily on the gleaming arms of her chair. She knew she had to say something. She knew that every passing second was of enormous importance, that if she were not quick with an explanation she would not be believed.

But her mind was trapped. Nick Vierick had given her the lighter months ago. Last week, last Monday, she and Link Latham had been fooling with it, looking it over, wondering how much Nick had been stuck for it. Last Monday night, late—Nick safely out of town. Only when Nick was out of town did Link and some of the others drop in for their surreptitious visits.

Link must have walked off with the thing, by mistake. Now it was in Ed’s pocket. How in God’s name—

She looked up, white as wax, and Nick Vierick was standing over her. His hands were reaching for her. Cruel as trap-jaws, they closed on her shoulders and yanked her out of the chair.

“You dirty, two-timing little tramp! You knew Ed was back! You had him up here!”

She tried to say no, but his right hand shifted lightning-like to her throat and burned the denial before it was born. And she knew then that she was through. This was the end. Nick Vierick’s anger was not this time the kind that could be softened with a melting glance, a few whispered words of endearment.

He had caught her in the one crime which in his code of ethics was inexcusable. Two-timing.

She found her voice, finally. “Nick, it—it isn’t what you think!” But it was a waste of breath and she knew it. Nick Vierick flung her back into the chair.

“Say your prayers.”

“No, Nick! Oh my God!”

He put a hand in his pocket. The automatic he kept there was a tiny thing, a special job weighing but fourteen ounces. She had seen it, she knew what it looked like. She knew that he carried it always but used it only for those rare tasks too intimate or too personal to be entrusted to the hired help. And now suddenly Flo was out of her chair, fear-crazed, clawing at him with a savagery that surprised even herself.

Vierick stumbled, fell over Ed Corley and went down. And Flo was on him, tearing at his face with her crimson nails, biting, kicking, clawing.

She heard the gun go off and felt the burn of the bullet under her shoulder, felt a sudden sickening rush of pain to her stomach. But she had both hands on his gun-wrist now and his upturned face was a ghastly shade of gray. One of her sharp knees had struck something sensitive and inflicted agony.

The gun went off again. But this time she was writhing over it. Both her hands were clawing at it. When it exploded, Nick Vierick’s agonized eyes were looking into the muzzle of it, and the bullet ploughed his face like a torpedo churning through sea-water.

H
e stiffened convulsively and the girl lost her balance, fell away from him. She rolled into the legs of a table, lay there and listened to Vierick’s horrible groans of torment, saw him twisting and curling like a snake under a heavy stone. It lasted but a moment, then he thrust his legs straight out and was still, but his groans continued.

She staggered erect, the pain in her own body forgotten in her desperation. She knew all at once, with crystal clarity, that she had only a few minutes in which to do what had to be done. Al and Pete would be coming. “Hurry, hurry, hurry!” she whispered. But Nick Vierick wouldn’t stop groaning and the blood in his gaping mouth bubbled like a fountain with every outpouring of sound.