The Cutie (7 page)

Now, the cab finally made it to Fifth Avenue and to Clancy’s building. I tossed a bill at the driver, climbed out, and hurried into the building. I was five minutes late.

I got into the elevator with a crowd of people on their way to work, and we started and stopped all the way up to the twenty-third floor, where Clancy Marshall, Attorney-at-Law, paid rent on three large rooms of office space. And practically all of this for only one client, Ed Ganolese. Clancy had a few minor clients outside the organization, of course, but only as a respectable cover. He made his living, and a good living at that, from the organization and Ed Ganolese.

I went down the hall to 2312, Clancy’s office, and walked in. His secretary, a big, well-busted, well-hipped blonde with an I-know-what-you-want-and-it-will-cost-you expression perpetually on her face, was just getting settled behind her desk. She looked at me, recognized me, and said, “Mr. Marshall’s expecting you. Go right in.”

So I went right in. Clancy’s office is all plush-carpet, gray-metal and bookcase-bound, and at the moment, there were four people present. Sitting behind Clancy’s desk was Ed Ganolese, my boss. Ed looks as though he might have been a Latin lover in the movies maybe twenty years ago, but he’s put on weight since then. His face is large and just slightly puffy, but somehow distinguished-looking in spite of that. His hair is still glossy black, though he’s the other side of fifty-five. He goes to the right tailor and the right barber and the right manicurist, and he looks like a very successful and very shrewd businessman, the kind who automatically cheats on his taxes and marks prices up whenever there’s nobody looking.

Sitting behind Ed, in the chair by the window overlooking Fifth Avenue, was Tony Chin, Ed’s bodyguard. Tony Chin was undoubtedly born with a different last name, but I don’t know it, and neither does anybody else, with the possible exception of Tony himself. And Tony Chin is a name that suits him. He’s all chin and a yard wide. He’s also two yards and four inches high. He isn’t very bright, but he’s pretty damn strong, and he’s surprisingly fast. He’s one of the best bodyguards in the business.

Clancy Marshall was the third member present, sitting on the sofa off to the right. Clancy is a tall, dapper, graying-at-the-temples, dignified shyster. He was dressed, as usual, in a severe dark-gray suit, and the narrowest tie ever seen off Madison Avenue. He was smiling as I walked in, giving out with that old barbecue charm, and I got that feeling about him again. That feeling is a conviction of mine that, if his parents hadn’t sent him to law school, he’d have been a pickpocket instead.

Number four was a stranger to me, which meant he must be the Joe Pistol Ed had mentioned. He was sitting on the sofa, beside Clancy, and he was encased in a tight pin-stripe blue suit, the kind George Raft used to wear while scaring the kiddies at the Saturday matinée. This suit was double-breasted, wide-lapeled and shoulder-padded. It was also padded under the left armpit, which meant he was walking around begging to be picked up on a concealed-weapons charge. His face was one of those blanks, a blob of putty in the middle for a nose, eyes so small and so surrounded by scar tissue that you could barely see them, and a jaw almost as big as Tony Chin’s. He was sitting there, waiting, absolutely expressionless.

Clancy gave me the big smile when I walked in. “You’re late, keed,” he said.

“I stopped off to push an old woman in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs,” I told him.

He showed me his sparkly teeth. “Kidder,” he said.

“What about Billy-Billy?” asked Ed.

“No word yet,” I said. “I’ve got a guy waiting in Junky Stein’s apartment. Junky’s the guy Billy-Billy would normally go to. As far as I know, the cops haven’t picked him up yet, and he hasn’t showed up at Junky’s yet.”

“We don’t want the cops to get to him at all.” Ed pointed suddenly at George Raft. “I don’t think you ever met Joe Pistol,” he said. “Joe, this is Clay. My good right hand.”

Joe and I shook good right hands, and he said, “Clay?” He said it with a rising inflection, smiling at me a bit, inviting me to tell him the rest of the name.

I smiled right back and said, “Joe Pistol?” I was inviting him to tell me his real name. He calls himself something stupid like Joe Pistol for the same reason Tony Chin has a new name and Clancy Marshall changed his name from whatever it was and I’m just Clay. A long time ago I was George Clayton. Today I’m only Clay.

“We want to get Billy-Billy fast,” said Ed. “Clay, you spread the word wider. You don’t know where a clown like that will run when he’s spooked. Get onto everybody he knows.”

I nodded. “Okay, Ed.”

“I don’t like this,” he said. “It’s going to screw things up. With Billy-Billy on the loose, the cops are going to be poking their dirty noses in all over the place.”

“I got the word Homicide East is involved,” I said. “Somebody higher up raised a squawk on this one.”

“Why?” Ed demanded. “Now why the hell does it have to be like that?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll maybe be able to tell you after I find out who Mavis St. Paul called sugar daddy.”

Everybody looked blank. Ed echoed, “Mavis St. Paul?”

“That’s the girl who got knifed,” I explained. “I’m working on it now, to find out who she was playing house with.”

Ed nodded and gave me a thin smile. “You’ve been working, Clay,” he said. “Good boy.”

Clancy chimed in, saying, “You look as though you didn’t get much sleep, Clay.”

“I didn’t get any,” I told him.

“I understand,” said Joe Pistol, “this Cantell is hiding out somewhere?”

“We think so,” Ed told him. “Maybe he’s on a train, for all we know. The cops don’t have him, and we don’t have him.” He looked over at me. “By the way, Clay,” he said. “You remember what we discussed last night on the phone, about Europe. You don’t spread it, okay?”

I had to think for a second before I knew what he was talking about. Then I caught on. He didn’t want anybody to know he had to go to bat for a punk like Billy-Billy Cantell because of somebody in Europe who’s a bigger wheel even than Ed Ganolese. I avoided grinning. I could tell how the whole situation must be jabbing Ed in the pride. And Ed is a boy with a lot of pride. “I’ll forget it all right now,” I told him.

“Good.”

Clancy spoke up again. “Even after we locate Cantell,” he said, “we’ve still got a problem on our hands. The police will be looking for him. As you said, sticking their dirty noses in everywhere. We can’t afford to cover for him, but we can’t afford to turn him over to the police alive, either.”

“We’re covering for him,” said Ed quietly.

Clancy was surprised. He knew standard operating procedure as well as I did. “Ed, I don’t get it,” he said. “The police will just keep looking until they find him. And they’re liable to find a lot of other stuff first.”

“Maybe not,” said Ed. “A lot of killings never get solved. If the law doesn’t find Billy-Billy, they’ll just forget the whole thing after a while.”

Even though I knew the situation better than Clancy did, I had to admit that Clancy had a point. “Ed,” I said, “I don’t like to butt in here. But you know as well as I do the cops only forget a case when they can’t figure out who to put the grab on. This time, they’ve got a fine candidate for the grab. Billy-Billy. So they’ll keep hunting, as Clancy says, until they find him. I’m not saying we should turn him over to the law, alive
or
dead. But we’re going to have to do something to get the cops quiet.”

“We’re going to,” he said. “We’re going to do two things. First, we’re going to get our hands on Billy-Billy Cantell, and we’re going to get him out of sight, somewhere the law can’t find him. Up in New England or somewhere. Second, we’re going to have to find the cutie who set Billy-Billy up in the first place, and turn
him
over to the cops.”

I stared at him. “You serious, Ed?”

“Do I look like I’m making a joke?”

“You want us to play Homicide Squad?”

“It doesn’t make sense, Ed,” said Clancy. “Cantell isn’t worth it.”

“Finding killers is up to the law,” I said.

“The law isn’t going to look any further than Cantell,” he told me. “The cutie who set him up knows that. The only way to get the heat off Cantell is to turn it on the cutie.”

“Ed,” said Clancy. “Listen, Ed. How do we know Cantell didn’t murder her himself? He was all doped up, he doesn’t remember a thing. All this business about being framed and all the rest of it—that’s only a theory.”

“Have you ever seen Cantell?” Ed asked him.

Clancy shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably. The name’s familiar, I’ve probably bailed him out on user charges.”

“Clay knows him. And he’ll back me up on this. Cantell doesn’t carry any armament of any kind, never did and never would.”

“Besides which,” I added, “he couldn’t take a Central Park pigeon two falls out of three. No, Ed’s right. Cantell was framed.”

“And I want to know who set him up,” finished Ed. He pointed at me. “That’s your job.” He looked back at Clancy again. “Your job,” he said, “is to play lawyer. Get with those contacts of yours in the D.A.’s office. I want to know what the situation is, every step of the way. I want to know why Homicide East is called in on a simple slashing. If the time comes when Billy-Billy needs a lawyer, you’re it. If they get him, you get him out. I don’t want him in jail for a minute, not for a minute.”

“Ed,” I said. “About the guy who set Billy-Billy up.”

“Find him.”

“I don’t know, Ed. He killed a woman named Mavis St. Paul. You don’t know Mavis St. Paul, neither does Clancy, neither does Tony or Joe, neither do I. We don’t have any kind of a tie-in with this woman at all. The guy who killed her went out on the sidewalk, grabbed a bum at random, dragged him into the apartment and left him there. The bum was one of our bums, and that’s our only connection with the killing.”

“You trying to say you couldn’t find him?” Ed asked me.

“Hell, no, Ed, you know better than that. I can find him all right. But it’ll take time. And meanwhile the cops are going to be agitating.”

“Ed,” said Clancy. “Listen, I don’t think it matters whether Cantell is guilty or not. The police think he’s guilty, and that’s the important thing. I don’t see why—”

Ed cut him off before he could get any further. “We don’t turn him over to the law,” he said. “Subject closed. Don’t mention it any more.”

“Okay, Ed,” said Clancy. “I don’t know why you’re so set on rescuing this little nobody—”

“That’s right, you don’t.”

All this time, Joe hadn’t been saying a word. He’d just been sitting there, watching us all, interested but not particularly excited. Now, he said, in a soft voice. “They told me Americans like to talk a thing to death before they take any action. Now I believe it.”

Ed gave him a sour look. “You’re right,” he said. “Meeting adjourned. Clay, go to work.”

“Ed, wait a second,” said Clancy. “I’m your lawyer, right? I tell you what to do to keep from having trouble with the law, right?”

“If you’ve got any suggestions besides leaving Billy-Billy Cantell for the cops, I’m all ears.”

“All right. You don’t want this Cantell to take the rap. Why not somebody else, then? We set up a fall guy of our own, get out from under that way.”

“That would be a hell of a lot more complicated than getting the cutie who started all this,” Ed told him. “Besides that, I want that cutie. Who the hell does he think he is, anyway? He can come around, grab one of my people, put the heat on the whole organization, and walk away whistling. The hell he can! I want him.”

“Ed, you’ve got to look at this in a business way—”

The intercom on Clancy’s desk buzzed then, breaking into the conversation, and Ed depressed the key. “What is it?” he said.

The secretary’s voice said, “Call for Clay on one.”

“Who is it?”

“Mr. Freihofer.”

“I had him checking on Mavis St. Paul,” I said. “I might as well take it, see what he got.”

I walked over to the desk, sat on the corner of it, and picked up the phone. “Clay here,” I said.

“Mary Komacki,” he said. “Belleville, Illinois. Twenty-five years old. Been in New York six years.”

“Hold it, hold it. Let me get pencil and paper.”

“Okay.”

I fumbled around Clancy’s desk, got pencil and paper, and picked up the phone again. “You’re talking about Mavis St. Paul,” I said.

“Who else? Mavis St. Paul. Born Mary Komacki, in Belleville, Illinois, twenty-five years ago. Came to New York when she was nineteen. Went to acting classes for about a year, hoofed in a club, modeled a bit, got mixed up with Cy Grildquist for a while, two, three years ago.”

I was writing like mad. “Cy what?” I asked him.

“Grildquist. The Broadway producer.” He spelled the name, said, “She was trying to build an acting career on the casting couch. They were together maybe six months. Then Johnny Ricardo, who owns a couple of clubs around town. A few other guys.”

“Who right now?”

“Ernest Tesselman. For almost a year. He’s the boy who’s been paying all that rent.”

“I see. Anything else?”

“One more thing. Between boyfriends, she always roomed with a girl named Betty Benson. God knows what
her
real name is. She’s been here five years and she’s still at the acting-class stage.”

“You got her address?”

“Yeah. Here, somewhere. Hold on.”

I heard papers rustling, and then he gave me the address, on Grove Street in Greenwich Village. I thanked him and hung up, then read the name of Mavis St. Paul’s boyfriend again. Ernest Tesselman. That explained why Homicide East was involved, and who was doing all the pushing from upstairs.

Ernest Tesselman is, to coin an understatement, in politics. He’s never run for any office, never campaigned, never made any speeches, never addressed the graduating classes of any law schools, and never got his picture in the paper for making statements on national defense or atom-bomb tests. But he picks the boys who do. He and Ed Ganolese had been good friends for years, though they weren’t partners or rivals or anything like that. But, like a brewer and a bottlemaker, their businesses were connected.