The Long Night (9 page)

“Judith Walker was paid off,” I said. “Now, money's no good to her, either.”

“I'm still not scared. And there's one thing I'd like to know: what are you in this for?”

It was a good question. So good, I didn't know the answer myself. What was I getting out of it? Money, no. Glory, no. Maybe nothing more than a kind of satisfaction . . . like solving a cross-word puzzle. But it's a helluva note when
the penalty for not solving the puzzle could've been my neck.

She was watching me intently as if my reasons might be very important. I couldn't understand that. Then again, I couldn't understand a lot of things. I said, “I don't like anybody playing me for a sucker . . . and don't try to make sense out of that. It doesn't make much sense to me . . . is that a friend of yours over there?”

The all-glass door of Ivor Kovak's salon was open again. A woman came out. With her back to the driving rain, she fumbled with some keys like she wasn't accustomed to locking-up. In the light of a street lamp her hair was burnished silver.

Miss Gordon said, “A girl with her looks doesn't have any friends. Judith Walker found that out the hard way.”

“You're a cynic,” I said. “Where's Kovak? Does he sleep on the premises?”

“I'm a realist. And you're a bum detective. Kovak left around five o'clock. Guess Judith would've been wasting good money if she'd hired you.”

“Who told you she'd been going to hire me?”

“I've got ears, haven't I?”

Carole Van Buren had put the keys in her bag and she was giving the door a final check the way a woman does to make sure when there isn't any doubt. Then she adjusted the hood of her plastic mac and came to the edge of the sidewalk.

I said, “Maybe those sharp ears of yours picked up where Miss Van Buren intends to go now . . . m-m-m?”

“Home,” Miss Gordon said. “And you needn't bother to follow her. I can give you the address. She isn't going anywhere to-night so I wouldn't be in a hurry if I was you.”

“Anything else you know?”

“Yes. You're wasting your time both ways with Carole Van Buren. She doesn't know who killed Judith. And a guy like you will never even get to first base with her. When she wants a man, it's got to be a man with plenty of sugar. You got lots of crust, mister, but not enough pie. Now me——” she ran the tip of her tongue over her lips and made big eyes at me “—I'm more your type.”

“The only thing you've got that I want right now,” I said, “is the name of Judith's boy-friend. Anything else you can put on ice for the next guy.”

She laughed. And she made the laugh sound like it was real. Then she left me in the doorway and crossed the sidewalk. In a voice that carried clearly, she called back, “That's my secret . . .” as she stepped off the kerb.

I saw Carole getting into a cab and I saw the cab begin to roll. But I didn't see where the other car came from—the car with only its parking lights on and the roar of its unleashed motor suddenly everywhere.

Miss Gordon didn't see it, either. Not before she had taken a couple of steps across the pavement. By then it was too late.

Maybe she screamed. I couldn't hear a thing except the noise of the car. But I saw her mouth gape wide as the front fender picked her up and threw her like a bundle of old clothes back on to the sidewalk.

She landed hard and she lay with her head at a queer angle. She was as still as you'd expect a woman to be who's had her neck broken. The secret was going to go on being a secret.

It had all happened as if in slow motion. I hadn't moved. When normal time took over again, the hit-and-run car had gone into the blur of rain-swept distance where street lamps and traffic and glistening pavements formed a kaleidoscope of shifting light.

Carole Van Buren had gone, too. I could hear the dame with the platinum streak saying “. . .
I know a guy who'll pay off big
. . . . ” The way she was lying with her eyes and her mouth wide open, I had a lousy feeling she was laughing at me again.

Three People had seen the killing. Each of them gave the car a different description and none of them had caught the tag number. They couldn't even agree on whether the driver was a man or a woman. For that matter, neither could I. But I wasn't asked, anyway.

I made it my business to see I wasn't asked. I wasn't keen on notoriety. Me and Ivor Kovak both.

Nobody thought of inquiring why she hadn't had a handbag, either. I guess someone got around to wondering about that later, but later was too late. By that time I was in the men's wash-room at the corner of Fourteenth and Lister making myself free with the late Miss Gordon's possessions.

Her bill-fold held eight bucks and a ticket from a downtown dry cleaners and two cuttings from some movie magazine that knew how to get rid of wrinkles. In a little leather case there were half a dozen visiting cards—all with men's names. Two of the guys I had heard of. They were pretty big shots in the commercial world and they ought to have known better. Or chosen better.

She'd been carrying an old letter around, too. It was addressed:
Miss Pauline Gordon, 224a McAdam Street, New York City
, 38. Nothing of interest. Some dame called Muriel was sorry but she couldn't make it Sunday and would next week-end be O.K.? Muriel hadn't given her address but it didn't matter. The letter had been written six months before.

One thing about it was interesting, however. McAdam was the street next to Gifford. And Judith Walker had lived in Gifford. Which meant that she and Pauline had been pretty near neighbours. . . . Funny how things work out. Right then, they were probably even nearer neighbours in the same city ice-box. . . .

The rest of the contents were just make-up things and some orange sticks and a pair of eyebrow tweezers and a few dimes lying among fluff and face powder at the bottom. In
a pocket in the silk lining, I found a latch key on a ring with a brass tab numbered 7. Stuck in a corner of the pocket was a scrap of paper folded small.

I put everything back except the six visiting cards and the folded paper and the key. The visiting cards were merely lay-off play. My money was on the scrap that had been torn off the margin of a printed page.

It wasn't much to look at. Folding it tightly had left rectangular creases that made the writing hard to decipher, especially since it had been done with a blunt pencil to start with. And in a hurry. And on an uneven surface.

But it was legible, as far as it went; although that wasn't very far. Just a name and three numbers in a straggle:

Maybe from that Sherlock Holmes would've decoded a couple of verses from Isaiah. Me, I'm a simple guy. I settled for a phone number that somebody hadn't been too sure of because somebody had got it down three different ways. And it was no exercise in genius to decide that the somebody was Pauline Gordon. It was also obvious what she must've done next. And what Pauline could do, so could I.

I left her bag in the cubicle and I went out into the street and I found me a phone booth. The time was ten minutes off seven. It was still raining like hell.

Three nickels later, I discovered that Pauline had given me a bum steer. There was no one called Ricky at any one of those numbers. The problem then was—what had Pauline done when she'd made the same discovery? I had better than a hunch that she'd eventually located this Ricky . . . perhaps by altering only one figure . . . which one? Trial and error was no good. The number of possible combinations could've run into thousands of calls. I didn't expect to live that long.

All the time, the name itself was worrying me. I'd heard it somewhere and not so long ago. Or I'd read it recently . . . Ricky . . . or Rick . . . short for Richard . . . lots of guys called Richard . . . but this had been a very special guy . . . he stood for something big . . . Richard . . . what went with Richard? . . .

And then I got it. I remembered the rest of the name.
Gilmore—Richard (King) Gilmore, the guy behind the rackets, the one-time grafter who was now the big brains controlling anything and everything that would show a dirty dollar.

Wherever he'd come from, he'd come up the hard way. He'd done many things while he was climbing—the kind of things nobody talked about . . . if they were wise. King Gilmore was a snob. He didn't like to be reminded of the days when he was some other guy's hired cannon . . . even if the details had gone a bit dim and the police couldn't pin anything on him.

Besides . . . that was the past. Nowadays, he was the big boss. He gave the orders. He controlled the muscle-men who collected a rake-off from this and that and these and those: anything from Chinese laundry protection money to a luxury clip joint, from a phoney employment bureau to a Lonely Hearts club where dumb broads met handsome guys and finished up amusing the natives in some South American dive.

That was Ricky: clever, good-looking, and with an infallible nose for a percentage. They called him a smooth operator. He had to be. Twice he'd been before a grand jury and twice he'd skipped the rap. Evidence against him always seemed to fall down at the last minute. He always knew when someone was about to sing off-key. And his elimination squad served him discreetly and well. There was never any come-back. You kept your big mouth shut—one way or the other.

How he had got himself involved with Judith Walker and Pauline and the fashion house on Fifth Avenue was something else. But he was involved; the phone book said so. There it was—
Gilmore, Richard, 1222 Parkway North, 10 . . . Pulman 7963.
Pauline had been only one figure out. I wondered how long it had taken her before she got round to dialling 6847963.

Over a hot meal, I did a lot of wondering about a lot of things. If the set-up had been screwy before, now it was completely crazy. King Gilmore had no reason to be gunning for me. I'd never even met the guy. Besides, he had smoother ways of getting me out of his hair than an elaborate murder frame that he must've known couldn't be made to stick.

When I'd got to the coffee stage, I was trying to convince
myself that the phone number probably had nothing to do with the killing of Judith Walker. Pauline could've been carrying the scrap of paper with some other idea in mind . . . but she'd told me she knew the name of the guy who'd had a date with Judith the night before . . . who would pay off big to keep her mouth shut . . . and the hit-run stunt bore Gilmore's trademark. He'd used it more than once when it came to the pay-off.

Pauline had known too much so she'd been rubbed out. That made sense. But Judith's murder didn't. She just wouldn't have called me on the phone to set me up as the fall-guy for her own death. Therefore, Gilmore would've had to get some other dame to do the talking while Judith was drinking doped rye unaware that——

But a wisehead like Gilmore wouldn't trust a femme with a job of that kind. And it was all too complicated. Why drag me into it? If Judith had known something to his disadvantage, he could've used any one of ten different ways to get her from under his feet before she talked to me. I was odd man out. I was a wholly unnecessary hazard. And Richard (King) Gilmore never did things that weren't necessary.

It was about then that I got a nice grim thought which spoiled the taste of my coffee. When I'd paid the bill and gone out into the street, the thought was still with me.

Judith Walker, or someone who'd called herself Judith Walker, had talked with me. And Judith Walker had died. Pauline Gordon had talked with me. And Pauline Gordon had died. It looked like I was getting to be a jinx. Carole Van Buren had done some talking, too. Would that rate the push-off for her? Or . . .

Or was I scheduled to be next? The frame had folded up. I was still walking around making myself awkward. It wasn't likely to be very healthy . . . if I were right. I had a strong feeling I wasn't wrong.

Round about that time, I had another feeling—the kind you get when somebody is watching you. At a time like that it didn't help my peace of mind.

The sidewalk outside the eaterie was busy. Street lights were bleary in the rain and the riding lights of the traffic were ringed with a shimmering fuzz that made them look
larger than they were. People came and went in glistening macs and slickers and the pavement shone with a myriad reflections. To locate one pair of watching eyes was an impossibility.

But those eyes never left me. When I picked up a cab, they rode with me. They were the lights of the car that followed me all the way to my office—the car my jockey felt obliged to tell me about long after I'd realised the hunt was up.

He said, “Know what, mister? You got some guy on your tail.”

“It's your imagination,” I said. “Or else the finance company don't like you being behind with your payments on the cab and they're going to jerk it next time you stop.”

“Yeah? That'd be a laugh. This ain't my cab.” He hunched himself over the wheel again. Every now and then he flicked a look up into the mirror. I could hear him grunting to himself as he tooled the cab downtown.

When we pulled up outside my office, he said, “My imagination's right behind you, bud. He's getting outa that Brown and White less than a block down the street. D'you know the guy?”

I didn't know the guy and I said so. The jockey didn't believe me but he took his money and he drove off. The car parked on the next block stayed where it was. Of the character who'd ridden in it, I couldn't see a sign. It didn't make me feel any better.

In my office, I had a gun. I also had a licence to carry that gun. But at that time of night the office building would be deserted. And two flights of stairs is a lot of flights . . . not counting getting the door unlocked . . . and rummaging in a desk drawer . . . and finding a clip of shells. Meantime, what might happen to me shouldn't happen to a dog.