The Cutie (17 page)

“Mr. Tesselman knows I was coming here.”

“Did he know you got here?”

“If you’re kidding,” I told him, “you’re taking your life in your hands.”

“Why? I’m the one with the gun.”

“If I move fast enough, you might miss the first time.”

He frowned. “The joke is going sour,” he said, and walked over to hand me the gun.

I took it from him, smelled the barrel, broke it open. It was empty, and it had been neither fired nor cleaned in some time. I gave it back. “You shouldn’t joke with guns,” I said.

“I suppose not.” He sat down, glanced over at the television set, looked back at me. “You moved the chairs.”

There was no sense answering that one. “About your second wife,” I said. “Did she ever meet Mavis?”

“I certainly hope not. No, I don’t think so, or she would have said something about it. Janeen wasn’t the silent type.”

“You say she’s in California now?”

“Married again. Why, did you think she might have had an attack of belated jealousy? Janeen isn’t a murderess, at least not with a knife. Her method is to talk people to death.”

“You had a third wife, didn’t you?”

“She’s in Europe. And I had been finished with Mavis for some time before I even met Alisan.”

I worked at my drink for a minute, and then said, “I can’t think of any more questions. Can you think of any more answers?”

He smiled over his drink. “I can think of a couple of questions,” he said. “For instance, you haven’t mentioned your name. Or your connection with this Mr. Tesselman.”

I finished my drink. “You’re right,” I said, getting to my feet. “I never did. Thank you for your time.”

“I would like to know,” he said.

I smiled at him and started for the door.

“Would it do any good,” he asked me, “for me to threaten you with the police?”

I stopped and looked back at him. “In what way?”

“I could call the doorman after you leave here, tell him to stop you from getting out of the building. Then I could call the police and tell them you impersonated a detective.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“You’ve had this whole thing your way,” he said. “I’m not used to that. I want to know who you are.”

“Do you know anybody named Bull Rocco?” I asked him.

“Union man?”

“That’s him. Did he ever give you a bad time for any reason?”

“No, I’ve gotten along with him all right. I haven’t had an awful lot to do with him. Why?”

“If you give me a bad time,” I told him, “Bull will give you a bad time.”

“You’re the damnedest name-dropper I’ve ever met,” he said. “Any minute now, you’ll tell me you also know George Clayton.”

I gaped at him. “George Clayton?”

“That was the man arrested for killing the Benson girl. Don’t tell me you don’t know him.”

I grinned at him and relaxed. I’d forgotten about the newspapers. Of course my full name had gone in. “I
am
him,” I said.

He didn’t believe me.

I still had three people to see, Alan Petry and Paul Devon and Ernest Tesselman, but I decided they could wait till tomorrow. It was now after ten o’clock at night, and it would be easier to get in to talk to people in the daytime. I had four hours to kill until I was due to pick up Ella at the Tambarin, so I went back home.

I was just finishing a beer when the phone rang. I hadn’t expected anybody to come through with information this fast, and I tried to figure out who’d be calling me, as I went into the living room and picked up the phone.

It was a voice I didn’t recognize, deep and muffled and heavily accented. “You are Clay?” it asked.

“Who’s calling?”

“Do you know,” asked this voice, the words all garbled by the accent, “a Mr. William Cantell?”

“William Cantell? Do you mean Billy-Billy Cantell?”

“That is him. He has asked me to telephone you.”

“When did he ask this?”

“Just a few moments ago.”

“You know where he is?”

“He asked me,” said the voice, maddeningly slow and almost impossible to understand because of the accent, “to tell you where you might meet him.”

“Where?” I asked, fumbling for pencil and paper.

“There is a tube station at 95th Street—”

“A what?”

“Your pardon. A subway station. It is no longer in use. Mr. Cantell is there now, waiting for you.”

“In a subway station?”

“Do you have pencil and paper? I will tell you how to get there.”

“Yes, go ahead.”

“Now, listen,” he said. “This subway station is no longer in use. The normal entrances have been sealed off. But there is still a way to get into the station, through the cellar of a building on East 95th Street.” He gave me instructions on getting into the subway station, and I copied them down. Then he said, “The authorities are using the platforms for the storage of lumber and other building materials. Mr. Cantell has fashioned himself a little hideaway on the downtown platform. Do you have that? On the platform where trains going downtown would stop. That is on the west side of the station.”

“I have it,” I said.

“You must go across the overpass to the downtown platform,” he said, “and then turn left. He is down at the southern end of the platform. He has taken refuge behind a stack of lumber there. Do you have all that?”

“I have all that,” I said. “What did you say your name was?”

“Mr. Cantell told me,” he said, “that it would be unnecessary for me to give my name, since you do not know me.”

“I’d like to know you,” I said, and the phone clicked in my ear as he hung up.

I sat there for a while, trying to decide what to do. I didn’t believe for a minute that this guy was anybody but my cutie. The phony foreign accent, the use of Billy-Billy as bait. He wanted to get me into a nice quiet spot where he could finish the job he’d loused up earlier in the evening.

Well, I’d give him his chance. I didn’t doubt I’d find my cutie waiting for me in that unused subway station. And it was nice to know, for a change, just where the guy was.

I went back out into the heat, walked down to the garage, and got the Mercedes from the Puerto Rican kid. “Still hot,” he told me, as he got out of the car.

“Have a good sleep in the movies?”

“Pretty good. You been thinkin’ about me for a job?”

“It isn’t what you think it is, kid,” I told him.

He shrugged. “It’s better than workin’ here,” he said.

“That’s what you think.”

“I wanna get out of here.”

“I’ll ask around,” I told him. “I don’t promise anything.”

“Thanks, mister,” he said. “You tell them, I drive like hell. And when cops ask me questions, I don’t speak English.”

“I’ll tell them,” I said.

I got behind the wheel of the Mercedes, said so long to the kid, who was grinning from ear to ear, and drove up to 86th Street and through the park to the East Side. On the way, I pulled out the .32 from under the dash-board, and checked it. It was clean and loaded and ready to go. I slipped it into my suitcoat pocket.

I found a parking space a couple of doors away from the house I wanted. This was a quasi-tenement block, brick buildings four and five stories high, built to be cheap apartment buildings. They hadn’t depreciated, because they’d never been anything particularly good. But they were still half a notch above real tenements, and the smell was still bearable.

I walked into the hall of the building I wanted, hunted around for a minute, and found the cellar door. It was locked, but the lock was one of those old-fashioned things, and I have the two standard skeleton keys on my key chain. The first one I tried opened the door. I slipped through, shut the door behind me, and switched on the light. A million cockroaches went scurrying off the steps and walls, ducking into cracks and crannies. I went down the stairs and headed cautiously for the rear of the building. I expected to find the cutie in the station itself, but he just might be waiting here in the cellar.

The break in the wall was right where he’d said it would be. I crawled through, picked my way over some ancient rubble, and wound up on the subway platform. A few small electric bulbs were the only illumination.

This was one of the really old-time subway stations, shaped like the interior of a Quonset hut, with a high-domed curving ceiling covered with mosaic tile in patterns too complicated for today’s hurrying builders to bother with. A rickety-looking metal overpass stretched high over the tracks, leading to the other platform. Stacks of lumber and other building materials, as the cutie had said, covered about half the floor area of both platforms. The cutie could be waiting behind any of them.

I dragged the .32 out of my pocket and inched forward, heading for the overpass. I went up the steps, slow and cautious and moving in a half-crouch, and just got to the top when a rumbling down to my left told me a train was coming.

I didn’t want any subway motorman to get a look at me. If one did, he’d call in to the dispatcher’s office, and the place would be crawling with cops in no time. Besides that, I didn’t relish the idea of being spotlighted by the train’s headlamps. I’d make too good a target for the cutie to shoot at. So I threw myself flat on the steel floor of the overpass and waited for the train to go by.

There were two of them, one northbound and one southbound, and they went by simultaneously, with racket enough to ruin my eardrums for life. I waited one long minute after they’d both gone by, and then I got slowly to my feet and moved forward again, still in the half-crouch.

I went down the steps on the other side, and waited again. Somewhere down in the lumber-filled and tarpaulin-mounded dimness to my left, Billy-Billy was supposed to be waiting for me. Sure. Well,
something
was waiting for me down there. If I was right, it was the guy who’d killed Mavis St. Paul.

I headed down in that direction, moving slowly and cautiously from one stack of lumber to the next. I’d never before realized just how long subway platforms really are. I was about halfway to the end when I heard another train coming. I knelt behind a tarpaulin-covered mound, and waited. In a minute, two trains roared through again, the row of lighted windows flashing by and throwing fast patterns of light and darkness on the wall behind me. The last car of the northbound train threw a blinding blue-white spark out just as it passed the station, and for a millisecond the whole place was etched clear and bright.

Then it was quiet and dark again, and I moved on. I hadn’t heard a sound so far, except for my own muffled movements and the passage of the trains. I wondered if this was just somebody’s bad idea of a joke.

I finally got down to the end of the platform, and there was the last stack of lumber, directly in front of me. I sidled up to the edge of it, shoved the .32 out in front of me, and peeked around the lumber.

And the joke was on me, because there, right there in front of me, eyes wide open and looking at me, sat Billy-Billy Cantell.

But the joke was on Billy-Billy, too. He was dead.

I stood there, crouched, for a long minute, just staring at him. He’d been knifed. There was a jagged cut across his filthy shirt front, now filthier than ever, smeared with dried blood. A series of brownish ribbons ran down his shirt front and connected with a dry brown pool on the cement floor, beside his left hand.

He had been brought here, and then he had been knifed. The amount of blood on the floor by the left hand (that left hand, palm up, fingers curled, pale and lifeless, the very expression of death) showed that he hadn’t been brought here after he’d been murdered.

I stood there, staring at him, and then sound brought me back to movement and awareness again. Sound, the sound of voices. I straightened, tense and listening. The voices were coming from the black maw of the subway tunnel, from down to the south of me.

And then I saw it, I saw what the killer had suck-ered me into. He’d called me and sent me up here to find Billy-Billy. And then he’d called the police and told
them
Billy-Billy was here. The way he’d had it all doped out, the law would not only find Cantell, they would also find me.

It didn’t matter whether or not the cops could pin the Cantell killing on me. They wouldn’t have to. I work for Ed Ganolese. I work for an organization outside the law, and the law doesn’t have to wait around to get me on a murder rap. The law will grab me on any rap it can find.

My being down here, in this closed and abandoned subway station, was illegal already, a nice cheap conviction, and the law would jump at the chance to grab me for it. The .32 in my hand was another cheap conviction. The law could put me away for a few years without bringing in the Cantell killing at all. And there goes the cutie, scot-free.

I had to get the hell out of there. I turned and ran. I wasn’t worried about noise now, all I was worried about was getting out of that station and out of that neighborhood.

I ran to the overpass and up the iron steps, and they clanged beneath my feet. I heard sudden shouting way down to my right, but I didn’t waste time looking down there. I raced across to the other side of the tracks and down the steps, three at a time, and I dove through the crumbled place in the wall and into the stinking cellar of the quasi-tenement.

I stumbled over something or other getting through, and sprawled on the cellar floor. I heard the .32 go skittering away in the darkness. I had to find it, it had my prints all over it. I scrabbled frantically through the dust and refuse of the cellar floor, hearing the shouts and the sound of running feet behind me, and at last my fingers touched the barrel of the gun. I picked it up, got to my feet, and ran for the stairs. I dashed up the steps, ignoring the cockroaches scurrying around my feet, and shoved through the door to the hallway.

A short fat woman, lugging a grocery-filled shopping bag (at eleven-thirty at night!), was just passing the cellar door, and she gaped at me, all wide eyes and stained teeth. I slammed the door behind me, ignoring her, and pawed through my pockets for my keys. Then I realized I was still holding the .32, and that that was what the fat woman was staring pop-eyed at. I shoved it into my jacket pocket, found my keys, and locked the cellar door again. Already, I could hear feet pounding up the stairs.