Seduction of the Innocent (19 page)

The tall skinny trembling figure, on the brink of tears, stood in front of the seated Price and Feldman like a lowly, loyal subject before his rulers.

“Can you guys front me some dough?” he asked.

Again, Feldman took the lead. “Why, Will? Sit down, sit down, tell us about it.”

He swallowed and sat in another secondhand comfy chair across the coffee table from them. He wasn’t exactly sitting next to me, because the chairs were spaced apart and angled in. We had met briefly but he didn’t acknowledge me or even look my way.

“I gotta get out of town,” he said. “Man, I gotta split
right now
.”

Price asked, “Is it this Frederick thing?”

He nodded, the pompadour bouncing. “I threatened the guy, right there in court!”

Hadn’t been court exactly, but he did threaten the doc, all right, in a very public place.

“I got no alibi,” he said. “Not a damn thing!”

I said, “How do you know that?”

His face swung toward me and he blinked, as if noticing my presence for the first time. Maybe that was the case.

“I’m Jack Starr,” I said. “We met the other night.”

“Uh...I remember.” He looked at Feldman. “Can I talk in front of this guy?”

Feldman nodded.

“Will,” I said, “I’m friends with your shrink, Dr. Winters.”

“My shrink, too,” Price noted quietly.

“So you know my shrink?” the kid sneered, but it was all show. “So what?”

Feldman asked, “What good will money do you?”

The kid jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “I got my motorcycle out front, and I’m gonna hit the road till this blows over. I didn’t
do
this thing! I’m innocent!”

“How do you know,” I repeated, “that you don’t have an alibi?”

He frowned at me, confused, veins standing out on his forehead. “Huh?”

“Time of death hasn’t been established, much less announced. How do you know when the doctor was killed? For that matter, how do you know he
was
killed? He might have committed suicide.”

Allison stared at me agape.

“Take your time, son,” I said.

He swallowed. “Well, the radio said, ‘suspicious death.’ I figure that’s murder. I mean, is it any surprise somebody in our business would kill that guy? I don’t mean he deserved it, nobody deserves to get killed, but...he was killing our
business
.”

“I wouldn’t share that thought with the police,” I said.

He sprang to his feet. “That’s why I need some
dough!
I need to split! They’ll toss me in the can. They’ll fit me up for this! If I’m gone, they’ll look somewhere else. And then I can come back.”

Feldman was shaking his head. “We don’t have any cash in the office. I couldn’t give you any if I wanted to.”

“Okay, okay. How about this. I’ll work for you by mail. I’ll move around, one post office box here, another there, I got wheels, I can do this.”

I said, “Tell me about your lack of alibi, Will.”

Exasperated, he turned toward me again. “I live with my mom. In Manhattan. My dad’s dead. We got an apartment, and...”

He was floundering.

“Is your
mom
your alibi?” I said. Maybe he’d figured out that a boy’s mother is not the best witness.

“That’s just it,” he said. “She’s out of town. Visiting my aunt. I was home alone, working on pages for these guys...” He jerked a thumb toward the couch where Price and Feldman sat. “...and I haven’t stuck my head out of there since that courthouse deal.”

“No contact with neighbors during that time?”

“No!” He returned his gaze to the publisher and editor. “Fellas, you
know
I’m good for it. Have you got
any
cash on you? Just for gas and food. I know I’m not always reliable on deadlines, but picture this—I’ll be on the move, hiding out, keeping my head down. Nothing to do but pencil and ink pages. What do you say?”

I said, “Will, you need to go to the police of your own volition. Flight is an admission of guilt.”

“But I’m not
guilty!”

“Then,” Captain Pat Chandler said from the doorway, two uniformed men behind him, “I wouldn’t flee.”

The Kaiser-Darrin was parked on Lafayette. I’d left it with the top up because leaving a convertible top down on any Manhattan street was a gamble. I had the driver’s side door unlocked when a big beefy hand slid to open it for me.

“Allow me,” the low rumble of a voice intoned, or something to that effect. He had the diction of Demosthenes before he spit the pebbles out.

Like his hand, my new friend was big and beefy, a hooded-eyed ex-pug with the standard-issue misshapen nose, puffy scarred-up lips and cauliflower ears. His suit fit him well enough, either tailored or from a big-and-tall shop, but the bulge of a hip holster hadn’t been accounted for. His hat was on the snazzy side, a light green porkpie with a darker green-and-red feather. Perfect for the hood about town.

“Have we met?”

“No. I work for Mr. Sarola. He asks in a nice way that you drop by. You drive. I’ll ride.”

I just looked at him. This was a city street and if I were to shut this thing down, now would be the time and place.

“This is a friendly invitation,” the guy said.

“Well, if it’s friendly, how about you give me the address and I drive myself over?”

He shook his head, just slightly, but enough to make his point. “It ain’t
that
friendly.”

Like a hitchhiker you would not in a million years pick up, he jerked a thumb over his shoulder. Parked behind me was a big green Nash from the late ’40s with another big, beefy guy at the wheel, another probable ex-pug, with features so flattened somebody might have hit him in the puss with a garbage can lid. Repeatedly.

“You got an escort,” he explained.

Two escorts, actually. The thug (and that’s what he was) who would ride with me, and the other thug who would follow along.

Down just two cars behind the Nash—these gangsters seemed to like the ’40s models better than the less-sinister ’50s ones—a police car was parked, and behind that Captain Chandler’s unmarked vehicle, a blue Ford I knew well. If I stalled long enough, maybe Chandler would be down with Will Allison and possibly Price and Feldman, on the way to the Tenth Precinct, and I could attract his attention and find a way to decline this “friendly” invitation.

“You get in,” the beefy guy said. “Unlock the door on my side. No funny business. Even Uncle Miltie don’t make me laugh.”

“Even in a dress?”

No reaction.

Okay, so no funny business. I slid in behind the wheel and unlocked the door on his side. I was not wearing a gun—I rarely did—and no other weapon was hidden away in the glove compartment, either. The only thing I had in common with those well-armed private eyes on TV was the license in my billfold.

The guy was almost too big for the convertible, and he had to take off the feathered hat to keep from smashing it, which actually was fairly comical, despite his ban on funny business. I might have smiled if I wasn’t getting taken for some kind of ride, probably not the permanent variety, but a ride nonetheless. And suffering the indignity of providing my own car and driving my own damn self, at that.

The address was in the Printing District, which was centered around Hudson and Varick Street, near the Holland Tunnel. Not much of a ride really, but an agonizingly slow one at rush hour. I made several unsuccessful attempts at conversation (“Any idea what Mr. Sarola wants to see me about?” “What name did you box under?”) that got nowhere. When we finally arrived, the massive brick warehouse took up half a block, with enough wear, soot and fade to date back to the turn of the century. An automatic door went up, big enough for several good-size trucks to enter side-by-side, and both my little convertible and the big ugly Nash rolled in. The door closed behind us.

The warehouse was not bustling. This was after five o’clock, and the place was just a big, high-ceilinged box, its darkness interrupted by conical lights hanging high up, with boxes and bundles of comic books and other periodicals stacked everywhere. Walls of the boxes were at the right and left of where we’d parked, and up ahead was another wall of boxes in front of which sat a massive ancient desk with a banker’s green-shaded lamp on it and a man seated behind it.

The man was Vince Sarola.

Sarola was a big guy, not as big as his goons but big enough—let’s just say he never had a need for shoulder pads in his custom suits. He was natty, as so many top gangsters are, this afternoon wearing a light green tropical suit with a pale yellow shirt and green-and-yellow tie; even his dark complexion had a greenish tinge, or maybe that was the lamp.

He bore a massive head with naturally dark, wavy hair that he kept glisteningly immaculate. His eyebrows were heavy slashes from a charcoal pencil riding a slightly protruding forehead, his eyes dark and large, his nose well-formed but big, his lips thick, grooves of past dissatisfactions making vertical lines in his cheeks. He had a prominent facial mole low on one cheek, and yet he had a brutally handsome look. That had helped a parade of chippie mistresses, over the years, put up with him, that and his dough.

Nobody held onto me as I walked over to Sarola, who smiled at me like I was an old friend who’d dropped by, and rose to extend a hand across the desk, which was cluttered with various bills of lading and other paperwork. But I could hear the hollow echo of footsteps on cement of the big men following me.

I shook with Sarola, who had a skillet of a hand; he sat, and so did I, in a hard wooden chair that had been waiting. It was cold in the warehouse, but not freezing or anything. No need for heat with winter a memory, even when a couple of unseasonably cool days came along like we’d had lately. The smell in there combined ink from the periodicals piled around and grease from the trucks that would roll in and out of here. We four seemed to be alone—no sound of anyone else in the vast chamber.

Sarola ran Independent Newsstand Services. This was only one of several INS warehouses in Manhattan—he covered the entire nation, with his string of warehouses and fleet of trucks—and comic books were the backbone of his business. He distributed girlie magazines, men’s adventure rags and low-end paperbacks, too. But he was very much in second place to Newsstand Distribution, Inc., which had the most popular comic-book line in the country (Americana) as well as the best of the slick magazines and paperback companies.

Savor, why don’t you, the irony that the two major distributors of the comic books featuring strong-jawed all-American heroes like Wonder Guy, Batwing and Crime Fighter were run in part or in whole by gangsters like Frank Calabria and Vince Sarola. Comic books in which the bad guys the good guys slugged and jugged were thugs not unlike the ones standing behind me right now....

“Been a long time, Jack,” Sarola said in his rich baritone.

We were not old pals. I’d encountered him maybe half a dozen times in twenty years. But Sarola had at one time been a partner of the major’s, and one of Frank Calabria’s top men, who had broken off in the early ’40s to start his own rival firm. Calabria, who was a silent partner but a key one in Newsstand Distribution, had allowed this because Sarola was dealing with lower-end, more questionable material that ND did not care to carry.

If you’re wondering why gangsters would be involved in magazine distribution, here’s a brief history lesson: Calabria became involved as a silent partner in many periodical firms when,
during Prohibition,
those firms decided to buy their paper in
Canada.
Got it?

“Mr. Sarola, a pleasure,” I said. “The major thought the world of you.”

The major despised Sarola.

“The major was a grand old guy,” Sarola said. “The business is much the lesser without him.”

Sarola despised the major.

“If I’m not out of line saying,” I said, “all it would’ve taken to get me here was a phone call. Or you could come see us at the office, any time. I’m sure Maggie would be delighted to see you again.”

Maggie despised Sarola.

“Well,” the gangster said smoothly (and he
was
smooth, no accent, more than passable grammar), “much as I would enjoy that...”

Sarola didn’t despise Maggie. He liked strippers.

“...we have a situation here, a problem here, that makes such niceties impossible. A situation, Jack, that is getting worse by the minute. By the second.”

“What situation is that, Mr. Sarola?”

“Come on, Jack. It’s
Vince.”
The brutal face split with a smile. His teeth were perfect—they should have been, for what they cost him. “You’re the major’s kid, for Chrissake. We go back forever, you and me.”

“We do at that, Vince.”

Still smiling like a greenish jack-o-lantern, he opened a drawer and got out two water glasses and a bottle of bourbon. “How about a snort, kiddo?”

“No thanks.”

“Oh, that’s right! You don’t
drink,
do you? I admire that. That’s rare, a guy who can’t handle the sauce has the presence of mind, the goddamn will power, to put it aside....
Lou!
Get Jack a Coca-Cola from the machine.”

Sarola flipped a nickel to Lou, the flat-faced guy, who trundled off somewhere, slipping between walls of bundles and boxes.