Judge Me Not (20 page)

“A farmer built it in the early twenties. The kindest
thing you could say about him was that he was slightly eccentric. He made dough in the first war. Always wanted to live in a hotel. So he had one built. A few salesmen stopped there until the old guy decided he didn’t like guests in his hotel. He lived there alone, getting screwier every year. When he decided people were laughing at him he had the big stone fence built, with barbed wire on the top. Had all the trees cut down. He’d sit up in a fourth-floor room and fire a shotgun in the air whenever anybody stopped by the gate. When he died, in the thirties, a couple bought it cheap, and went broke trying to run it as a restaurant. Later, one of Raval’s front men bought it. It’s ideal for them. No interruptions. It’s outside the city, and the county cops don’t bother with it. It has been raided a couple of times by narcotics people. But they didn’t find a thing. Take a good look and memorize as much of it as you can, Teed. This is the last look we’ll get at it until we get inside the wall. Better whisper from here on.”

They moved cautiously down toward the gate, staying close to the wall.

Armando stopped, his back against the wall. He put his lips close to Teed’s ear. “We’re thirty feet from the gate. Time is three-thirty-two. Can you spot the guard?”

As Teed watched there was a puzzling glow that lasted a few seconds, and then a click, clearly audible.

“Cigarette lighter,” Armando whispered.

The smell of tobacco drifted down the night wind, verifying the guess. Teed wanted a cigarette badly. He took the automatic out of his coat pocket, shoved it inside his belt.

“Four more minutes,” Armando whispered.

Teed’s nerves were drawn tight. There was a hollow feeling in his middle. It had been easy enough to think of taking on Castle Ann singlehanded when he had been back in the city. But now it was a place where you could go behind a high wall and be suddenly taken dead. Both the girls were in there. And from the hilltop he had seen the shiny cars flanked near the bar.

Armando put his mouth close to Teed’s ear again. “Rumor has it that several people who became objectionable to Raval are planted behind that wall. Look, stay right where you are.”

“But …”

“Shut up. You’ll be able to hear how it goes.”

Armando walked silently up the hill, away from the gate. Teed waited, puzzled. Armando crossed the ditch, reversed his direction, and came noisily down the road, heels clacking loudly.

He walked right up to the gate. Teed saw the flashlight catch Armando full in the face.

“Get the light out of my eyes,” Armando demanded in an irritated tone.

“Where do you think you’re going, friend?” a deep voice asked.

“I’m trying to get a phone. My car ran out of gas about a mile back.”

“I seen you some place.”

“Get the light out of my eyes!”

The light shifted down to the ground at Armando’s feet. “What do you want a phone for?”

“I want to call up the Vassar field hockey squad. We’re all going to dance barefoot on your dewy grass.”

“Wise, eh? This is private property. Where did I see you before?”

“Maybe you want my birth certificate. What kind of a place is this? Just let me go phone, will you?”

“Say, aren’t you Rogale?” the guard asked.

“So skip it,” Armando said. “I’ll try the next place.” He started to move back. The light caught him in the face again.

“You just stand nice and still, Mr. Rogale. People are going to be glad to see you. They’re going to want to know why you’re nosing around. Now stand still while I get the gate open.”

Teed moved slowly, quietly down toward the gate. The gun was going to be no good. A shot would ruin what feeble chances they had. Teed heard a metallic clack, a creak of hinges. The man moved out into view, gun and flashlight pointed at Armando.

Teed fumbled in the grass, found a pebble. He flipped it over the guard’s head so that it landed in the grass beyond the gate. As the guard’s head turned, Teed tried to reach him in four running strides. But the moment that he had turned, Armando had kicked the man lustily in the pit of the stomach. As the guard bent forward from the waist, Armando laced his fingers around the back of the man’s neck, yanked down hard as he raised his knee. The guard fell with a thud that drove the air out of him.

“Quick and efficient,” Teed said.

“I grew up in a rough neighborhood. Haven’t hit anybody in six years. Thought I’d forgotten how.”

Armando found the flashlight, swept the beam around until he located the gun. He searched the man. “Gun and a sap. Which do you want?”

“Take them both. I’ve got Weiss’ automatic.”

“Are we thinking along the same lines?” Armando said in a low tone.

There was unsteadiness in Teed’s voice as he answered “There isn’t much else to do, is there? I’m scared.”

“And you are not alone. Help me drag him inside. We’ll leave him in the brush. First let me give him this.” The sap made a small dull sound as Armando swung it.

They dragged him through the gate, off to one side. Armando opened the gate wide, said, “We’ll leave the gate like this. I don’t know how much time we’ll have. I think another guard patrols the fence line. Any ideas?”

“Just move fast, see if we can find both girls, and try to get out. Go ahead. You know the layout.”

The drive was of coarse gravel. They walked on the grass beside the drive. A hundred feet from the gate Armando veered sharply to the left. They circled the lighted windows. They could not see in.

“Eight cars, not counting mine,” Armando said in a low tone. “How do you like those odds? If the Bar Association could only see me now. Let’s hope for an unlocked back door. I’m trying to pretend I’m Humphrey Bogart. Who are you?”

Teed laughed softly, nervously. “Henry Aldrich.”

“You a good shot?”

“At a target. I’ve never tried people.”

At the rear of the building Armando risked using the flashlight. He narrowed the beam by shielding part of it off with his hand. He swept the narrow beam across a battered row of garbage cans. They were overflowing and the stench was rancid, nauseous. There was a secondary odor of faulty plumbing. The light touched the bottom step of a short flight that led up to a back stoop, a narrow door. Armando tiptoed up the steps and tried the door. He came back down.

“Not that way,” he said softly.

It was the only door in the rear of the building. As they reached the back corner on the end opposite the bar music
blasted out into the night, freezing them in their tracks for a moment. An old Armstrong that Teed knew well. Gravel-voice, sweet and true.

“That means people in the bar,” Armando said tautly.

“A window?” Teed asked, above the music sound.

“Too high, and too risky.”

Armando stepped around the corner of the building and then tried to dodge back, treading so heavily on Teed’s instep that he made an involuntary gasp of pain. Armando stared, then let out a long sigh. “It’s O.K.”

A man stood, face to the building, spread-legged, one arm flat against the wall, forehead against his forearm. He made a dry retching sound.

As they watched he fell to his knees, struggled up again. He moaned.

He paid no attention to them as they walked around him. Armando paused after they were by him. “I wonder,” he said.

“What’s the matter?”

“Sometimes those people get in the way. They get well too quick.” He shrugged, took two quick steps and swung the sap. The man slid down the wall, face first, and rolled over onto his side.

“Who is he?”

“Belongs to Stratter. Drives for him sometimes. Come on.”

The front door was on ground level. Armando raised his head cautiously and looked through the glass. He beckoned to Teed. Teed stood beside him and looked in. Three wide wooden steps six feet inside the door led up to the lobby. Directly opposite the lobby a stairway went to the floors above. The lobby was dark, but the bar lights shone through an open door.

The music was louder.

The bar lights made a bright wide streak through the lobby, ending at the deserted desk.

“Maybe nobody is looking into the lobby,” Armando said. “But we got to figure they are. If we sneak, somebody will investigate. Can you walk across like you owned the place?”

“I can try.”

A man’s heavy laugh came from the bar. The music ended. Armando, his hand on the door, paused. There was silence in which Teed could hear conversation, a woman’s
voice taking part, rising high and shrill. And the music started again. The same piece. Somebody liked it.

“Like you owned the place,” Armando said, pushing the door open.

The board floor was bare. They walked across the light path. Out of the corner of his eye Teed saw a smoky room, the corner of a dark-stained bar, a big round table with a group sitting at it, a shirt-sleeved man with a cigar carrying a tin tray of drinks to the table.

They passed the light. They were almost to the stairs when somebody in the bar yelled, “Hey! Who’s that out there?”

Armando yelled back, in whining falsetto, “It’s Greta Garbo, you stupid jerk.”

“Wise guy,” the man bellowed. The others laughed at him. The man didn’t come out to investigate.

Halfway up the stairs to the wide landing, Armando whispered, “Stratter is in there. And that is not good.”

“Where do we go from here?”

“Eyes and ears open. I can’t think of anything else.”

The second-floor hallway stretched the long way of the building, with a window at each end, doors opening off both sides of the hall. Teed counted nine doors on a side. Eighteen rooms. Three floors. Fifty-four rooms to wonder about, to search.

The hall was carpeted. Armando started in one direction. He held his ear close to the first door, motioned Teed to head the other way and do the same. The first two rooms were silent. In the third he heard a woman saying, “… so I told Joe that if that was the way he was going to act about it, he could damn well kiss …”

He tiptoed around the door. At the last door he listened and heard a girl’s muted, helpless crying, pillow-muffled. His heart gave a great leap. He tried the knob. The door was locked. He looked back and motioned to Armando. Armando came quickly and silently down the hall. He listened for a moment. He tapped cautiously on the door.

There was a creak of bed springs and a ribbon of light appeared under the door. Steps came close to the door.

“Whaddya want?” a tear-dulled voice asked beyond the thin panel.

Armando looked at Teed and raised one eyebrow. Teed shook his head regretfully.

“Let me in a minute, baby,” Armando said.

“You go tell her I’m not going to do it. You go tell her I’m not going to let nobody else in here no matter what she says she’ll do to me.”

“Not so loud, baby,” Armando said. “This isn’t what you think. There’s two of us here. We want to help you. No kidding.”

“Oh, sure,” she said bitterly.

“I want to find out about another girl who might be here,” Teed said. The door panel was so thin that they could hear the thick catch in her breathing, the aftermath of sobs.

A key turned in the lock and the door swung open a crack. She looked at them, prepared to slam it again. She seemed reassured.

“O.K., so come in,” she said.

The room was drab and unpleasant. A metal bed frame painted white. A round hooked rug so ancient and soiled that it was all of a color—a fetid brown. A stand with a cracked marble top. A white pitcher, tin wash basin, scabbed soap dish. A pile of clean threadbare towels on the lower shelf of the wash stand. There was no other furniture in the room except for the flimsy unpainted chest of drawers, a round bleary mirror fastened over it.

The girl had a ripe sturdy body, a long pale Mediterranean face, enormous dark eyes. She wore a too-tight cerise house coat that zipped from throat to ankles. Her dark hair was an unpleasant tangle and there was a bruise under her right eye.

Armando spoke to her in rapid Italian. She answered in kind, and then, as she continued to answer, the phrases grew more broken, disjointed. Tears spilled out of the huge dark eyes. She sat on the edge of the bed, put her face in her hands, continued to talk, her voice muffled, torn.

Armando asked soft questions. She answered them, some with anger, some apathetically.

Armando turned to Teed. His eyes were angry. “I know of her people. Laboring people. It’s a tired old story. A very ordinary story. The boy she was going to marry married somebody else. She dated a man who came often to the restaurant where she worked. She didn’t care what happened to her any more. He took her on a business trip to Buffalo with him. Then he brought her out here and turned her over to Maria. She’s ashamed to go home and she’s lost her job. She expects to be taken away with another
girl in the morning. A man is going to drive them to another city. Scranton, she thinks. I know the man who left her here. She was drunk when he left her here. His name is Kissler and he’s been indicted for small things, and never convicted. She’s been here three nights. The only girl she knows is the Polish girl who is being taken away with her in the morning. And, of course, Maria.”

The girl lifted a tortured face. She touched her fingertips to the bruise on her cheek. There was hate in her face, mingled with fear.

“Won’t her family notify the police?”

“She wrote them a letter. Maria dictated it. They won’t make a fuss.”

“We better try the next floor.”

Armando spoke to her again, this time in English. “Keep your door locked. I think if we’re lucky we can get you out of here. And no one will have to know where you’ve been.”

“Skip it,” she said. “I’m all right here. Maybe I like it.”

Teed pulled the door shut. She sat on the bed staring after them as if she hated them. He wondered if she did.

They made the next floor without incident. The juke music was fainter. The tune had been changed. Boogie-woogie dirge. Lament for a fallen lady. A room door was open. Two girls in house coats sat on the bed. Their eyes were vacant with liquor, heavy glass tumblers in their hands.

“Go ’way, palsies. We’re busy. We’re on vacation,” a puffy blonde said.