The Cutie (18 page)

I pushed by the fat woman, still gaping at me but not yet screaming, and ran out to the street.

Once I hit the pavement, I forced myself to stop running. I forced myself to stroll down to the Mercedes, to look casual and calm and peaceful, like an insurance salesman, and I got into the Mercedes, stuck the key into the ignition, and got the hell out of there.

All the way home, I thought about that bastard. First, he tries to kill me. When that doesn’t work, he tries to set me up for a medium-size jail term, enough to keep me out of circulation for a few years. He knows me, and I don’t know him, which means he has the edge on me. And it’s no longer a case of the hunter and the hunted. We’re both hunting now, and he has the edge on me.

And he isn’t moving slowly. He’s sniping away at me, one thing after the other, and he isn’t going to slow down until he gets me.

Which means my next move is plain. I have to speed up. I have to work faster than he does, because I’ve got to make up for the edge he has on me. He knows who I am. I’ve got to know who he is.

Otherwise I’m dead.

I went home and left the Mercedes out front, by the sign that says
TOW-AWAY ZONE
. It was ten minutes to twelve, and parking is legal after midnight. If the cops could get a tow truck here within ten minutes, they were welcome to the car.

Upstairs, I went directly to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. Oh, I was pretty. My face was filthy, with smudges of dirt on my forehead and right cheek and jaw, all of it running with perspiration. My hands were even dirtier than my face, and my clothes were a total loss. My shirt and jacket were both dirt-stained, and both knees of my trousers were ripped, probably from when I’d catapulted through into that cellar. A chunk of leather had been scraped away from the toe of my right shoe.

The cutie now owed me a clothing bill. I was looking forward to collecting.

I stripped, showered, put on clean clothes, and called Ed. I filled him in up to date, including the finding of Billy-Billy’s body, and when I was finished, he said, “That rotten son of a bitch.”

“Just what I was thinking,” I said.

“Okay,” said Ed. “Okay, okay. He asked for it. He went a little too far this time, Clay, he got a little too cute for his own good. The cops have Billy-Billy now, and that means they’ll close the goddam case. That means he’s ours, Clay. That son of a bitch is ours, we don’t have to turn him over to the law at all.”

“That’s right,” I said. “I hadn’t thought about that.”

“Neither did he, the bastard. But
I’m
thinking about it. Clay, I want that son of a bitch more than ever now. I want him right in front of me. He’s mine, Clay. You get him and you deliver him to me. That little cutie has got just a bit too goddam cute for his own good.”

“I’ll get him, Ed,” I promised.

“I’m counting on you, boy.”

“Ed, listen, one more thing. This settles the Mavis St. Paul killing as far as the cops are concerned. But what about the Betty Benson thing? I’m still on the books for that one, you know.”

“Now the cops have Billy-Billy,” he said, “it shouldn’t take too much work to convince them to use him for both jobs.”

“I hope so. And what about Billy-Billy himself? You think the cops will be looking for the guy who killed him?”

“Hell, no. They’ll figure it was us that did it, and they’ll let it alone. What the hell do they care who bumped a little no-account punk like that?”

“Yeah, I guess so. Okay, Ed, I just thought you ought to know about Billy-Billy. I’ll get back to work now.”

“You do that, Clay. You bring me that bastard.”

“On a platter,” I said. “With an apple in his mouth.”

“Hold on a second,” he said. “Clancy ought to know about this, too. He’s the guy to convince them to switch the Benson killing from you to Billy-Billy. You go out and talk to him, figure out some way to clear you, so they can use Billy-Billy.”

“Out where? To his house?”

“Where the hell else? It’s midnight.”

“That’s what I mean, Ed. You know how Clancy is about mixing his business life with his private life.”

“Who isn’t? The hell with that,” he said. “This is important. You go on out and talk to him.”

“Okay, Ed.”

“Then get me the guy.”

“Will do.”

I shrugged into a jacket and was just about to leave, when the phone rang. It was Bull Rocco. “You wanted to know where Cy Grildquist was yesterday afternoon at four o’clock,” he said. “I found out. At a backer’s audition for his new play.”

“For sure?” I asked him. “He couldn’t have ducked out for maybe half an hour?”

“Not from a backer’s audition. He was there for sure, sucking after money every minute.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks a lot.”

So now I knew one guy who was
not
the cutie I was looking for. That was nice.

Clancy Marshall lives in the Bronx, but not in the
Daily News
Bronx, the one people automatically think of when they hear the name. He lives farther north than that, still in the Bronx, still in a borough of New York City, but it’s another world entirely. The section is called Riverdale, and it’s neatly split between asterisk-shaped red-brick apartment buildings, seven to ten stories high, and winding country lanes flanked by ranch-style split-levels and solid prewar-style clapboards with front porches, dining rooms, and attics. And it’s all part of New York.

Clancy lived in one of the prewar clapboards, two stories high, painted white with green shutters and gray flooring on the porch. The front lawn was dotted with tiny statues, all in color. There were rabbits, puppies, frogs and ducks, all just as cute as morning television, and a plantation slave stereotype boy next to the carriage light, dressed in jockey’s duds and with his black wooden hand permanently out to accept the reins. This is as close as some people can get to admitting they wish there was still an aristocracy.

I turned off Kingsbridge Road onto Rogers Lane, followed the curvature for a while, and pulled to a stop in front of Clancy’s place. My Mercedes doesn’t have any reins, so I shrugged at the plantation boy, his hand out in unflagging hope that a set of reins would some day once again be placed there, and clopped up the stoop to the front porch. It was now one o’clock in the morning, and only one upstairs window showed light. I knew Clancy wasn’t going to be happy about this, but I rang the bell anyway. He could bitch at Ed, if he wanted.

It took me a while to get an answer, and then it was Clancy’s wife, Laura. Laura Marshall is easily described. It only takes four words. She’s a rich bitch suburban matron. She’s the Congressional Whip, at the grassroots level. Whip of the PTA, whip of the Junior League and the Monday Afternoon Club, whip of Clancy Marshall. She’s a snob, and as far as she’s concerned she’s married to a well-to-do lawyer of the stuffy stocks-and-bonds corporation type. I don’t mean she doesn’t know what Clancy really does for a good living, but she manages pretty successfully to double-think herself into being able to spend his ill-gotten gains with no conscience tweaks.

Clancy, for some reason known only to Clancy, is madly in love with this well-girdled symptom of our times, and is deathly afraid that one of these days she’s going to pack up and go away, her and the kiddies, of which there are two, inevitably two. (It isn’t possible to have two point six.) Not that he doubts his own charm so much, he’s just afraid that the dirt of his business will one day become so noticeable that Laura won’t be able to ignore it any more. Then she’ll leave. She probably will, too. Clancy doesn’t do anything for her that a monthly alimony check couldn’t do with less talk.

Most people who don’t know me assume, on first seeing me, that I’m a rising young man in some business concern somewhere, maybe advertising or insurance or some such thing. In a way, that’s almost true. But Laura Marshall, on seeing me at her door at one in the morning, obviously made the immediate decision that I couldn’t possibly know anyone she knew, not on a social level at any rate, and she froze me with a glance, as the Victorians used to say.

The hell with her. I don’t freeze that easy. “I’d like to speak to Clancy,” I said, using the first name just to see her wince.

“At one o’clock in the morning?” she asked me.

“It’s necessary,” I said, and that’s the closest I intended to get to an apology.

“My husband has office hours,” she started, but I interrupted her. I didn’t have all that much time. “Tell him Clay is here,” I said. “He’ll want to see me.”

She looked as though she doubted it. “Wait here,” she said, and closed the door in my face.

So I waited. There was a glider on the porch, one of those old green jobs, and I sat down on it. It squeaked, as I’d known it would, and I rocked back and forth, making noise for the fun of it. I wanted to irritate Laura Marshall just as much as her very existence irritated me.

Clancy pulled open the front door a couple minutes later. He was wearing a George Sanders robe, dark-colored, figure-patterned, shiny-lapeled, and his smile, in a less spineless man, could have been called dan-gerous. “Come in, Mr. Clay,” he said. “We can talk in the study.”

I followed him into the house. The study was off the dining room which was off the living room which was off the foyer by the front door. The whip was nowhere in sight.

In the study, a squarish room from
Better Homes and Gardens,
in which the celebrities used to show Ed Murrow their souvenirs, Clancy switched on the lights, shut the door, and turned to me to say, “Where the hell did you get the idea you could come here?” His voice was soft, but hard, and his usual fund-raising smile had been replaced by a furious glare.

“From Ed,” I told him. “He not only told me I
could,
he told me I
should.
Things have been happening.”

“You don’t come to my house,” he said. “Get that straight, for once and for all, you do not come to my house.”

“I do when it’s important.”

He ignored that. “I told Laura you worked for a client of mine,” he said. “A legitimate client. This is a business matter, and when you leave you talk that way.”

“All right, all right. Let’s get to the subject.”

“The subject is that you don’t come here,” he insisted. “Not at all. I don’t ever want you near this house again.”

I wondered if I would some day be hiding from Ella that way. “Bitch at Ed, if you feel like bitching,” I told him, pushing the thought of Ella out of my mind. “I’ve got more important things to do.”

“I want it understood,” he said. “You don’t come here. I have an office, and I’m in it all day long. This could wait for morning, whatever it is.”

“Ed told me to come here. I don’t want to argue about it. After letting me sit around in that lousy jail for nineteen hours, you’re in no position to complain about anything I do to you.”

“It was tough to get you out. They didn’t want to let you go.”

“Crap. You were sitting on your hands. That’s a habit of yours. Sit down, for God’s sake, and let’s get to the subject at hand. I’ve got other things to do tonight.”

He wanted to carry on about his home being his castle some more, but it finally got through to him that he wasn’t getting anywhere that way. So he sat scowling behind his desk—as bare a desk as Ernest Tesselman’s, but not as big—and I sat in the chair facing him.

“What is it?” he asked me. “Let’s get it done and over with.”

“I found Billy-Billy tonight,” I told him. “So did the cops. They almost found us together.”

His eyebrows rose, and he forgot to be sore at me. “The police have him? Or do you?”

“They do.”

“So you want him out. Clay, you could have called me on that, you didn’t have to come all the way up here.”

“Shut up and listen for a second, Clancy. Billy-Billy was dead when I found him. All the cops have is the mortal coil, so to speak.”

“Dead?” He sat back for a second, thinking that one over, and then he smiled at me. “Then it’s all over,” he said. “We can get back to normalcy now.”

“I’m afraid not. Ed still wants me to find the guy for him.”

“Why? For God’s sake, if the police have Cantell’s body, they’ll be satisfied. The whole thing’s finished.”

“Ed isn’t satisfied. We’ve been to a lot of trouble, and Ed wants the guy who caused it all.”

He leaned over the desk toward me, anxious and sincere, all lawyer now, the husband forgotten. “Clay, listen,” he said. “This is no way to run the business. Take it from me, Clay. For the last couple of days, we’ve been attracting attention to ourselves, we’ve been running into police trouble, and that is no way to keep a healthy organization.”

“Tell Ed that, not me. I just follow orders.”

“I intend to tell him. Where is he, home?”

“Uh huh. But I don’t think you’ll get anywhere with him. He’s annoyed.”

“I’m his lawyer, Clay. I’ve got to warn him when he’s planning to do something stupid. And having you play Sherlock Holmes is stupid. You’ll be bumping into people outside the organization, annoying them, bringing the cops back into it again, keeping the organization out where they can look at it and be reminded of it. Billy-Billy Cantell is dead, the police have the body. So the case is closed.”

“The Betty Benson case isn’t closed,” I reminded him. “In fact, that’s the main reason I’m here.”

“I can square that with no problem at all,” he told me. “They can use Billy-Billy for both killings. And they won’t try very hard to find out who killed him. So the whole thing is finished. Let it stay finished, that’s what I say.”

“As I say, I’m not the one to talk to.”

“I’ll talk to Ed,” he said. He said it very firmly, and I knew he’d have to spend some time building up his courage before he’d be able to call Ed Ganolese and tell him he’s doing things wrong.

But that wasn’t my concern. “Back to Betty Benson,” I said. “I was there, I talked with her, I drank coffee, I left fingerprints all over the place. They have a half-hour spread on the time of the killing, and I’ve already admitted I was there during part of that time.”