Tough as Nails: The Complete Cases of Donahue From the Pages of Black Mask (4 page)

“You’d go anywhere to save your hide, and I don’t blame you. Listen here, kid. You’re in bad now. You come across to me and I’ll do everything I can to get you a break. My job is to get the ring, and not the killer of a cop that didn’t watch his tricks.”

Thunder banged against the roof. Lightning crackled, spat, flashed in the dim room. Micky jerked on his chair. His voice rushed out as the thunder stumbled reluctantly away.

“Jeeze, I tell you I’m broke—flat, on my uppers! I never saw the damn’ ring! So help me, God, I never saw it!” He suddenly began to blubber, to choke, to cry. His head fell down to his chest.

Donahue reached out, put the heel of his hand against Micky’s forehead, and shoved the head up, saying, “Cut it out!”

The head fell down again. Donahue shoved it up again.

“You goof, cut out bawling! What a hell of a chance you’ll stand against Hocheimer!” He stood up, stepped in front of Micky, grabbed a handful of hair, jerked the head up and held it back, peering down into the pale, tear-and-sweat smeared face. His voice came low, husky: “Get this, lad. You’re in a pinch. Come across about that ice and I’ll do anything I can for you. I’ll get you a lawyer. Listen, Micky. You could never stand the gaff here. Hocheimer’ll whale hell out of you and they’ll hang you sure as hell! Use your head. Listen to me, do you hear! Listen to me! I’ll—”

Thunder exploded. The window rattled. Sheet-lightning blazed luridly through the window. Micky cringed, sobbed. The rain thrashed violently.

“For God’s sake, let me go!”

“You listen to me!”

“Let—me—go! I tell you, I didn’t—I don’t know anything about—”

Thunder seemed to bang through the room. Micky jerked. The chair fell over and Micky fell with it. Donahue hung on to his chair and followed him to the floor, stopping on one knee. Micky lay panting. His lips blubbered and sweat poured down his face.

“Micky, think hard. I’m a guy can make things easy for you.”

“I—don’t know! I didn’t get that ring! If I had it, I’d tell you. But I haven’t got it. I never had it. I don’t know anything about it. I don’t. I—I—Lemme go! I tell you, lemme go! Lemme….”

Donahue said, “Hell,” without emotion, and let the head drop to the floor. He knelt, looking down at Micky, forearm resting on knee, hand hanging motionless. There was a dark scowl between his eyes. His mouth was unpleasantly bent. His dark eyes scintillated. He said, “Hell,” again, this time deeper in his throat. He motioned his lips. He pulled out a wrinkled handkerchief and ran it over his face. He combed his fingers back through his hair.

Suddenly he snarled, “You’re a damn’ liar, Micky!”

“No—no! God’s honest truth—”

“Stow it, you hop-head!” His teeth shone between curled lips. He stood up. He leveled an arm down at Micky. “Just before they hang you, baby, I’ll come around and maybe you’ll tell me for the good of your soul.”

Micky scrambled to his feet, stood shaking on them, moving his manacled hands up and down. “And—they won’t hang me! Because I didn’t kill Cross!”

“Didn’t? Well, they’ll hang some guy for the killing, and you’ll do as well as any. I’ll do my little bit towards seeing you do hang.”

Micky’s voice grated—“Frame me, eh? Frame me, eh?”

“Sure. Think that over.” He bowed and smiled with mock obsequiousness. “Shall I tell Hocheimer you’d like an audience with him?”

Thunder boomed. Lightning blazed in the room. Micky cringed, gasped, stood shivering.

Donahue laughed shortly, without humor. “Little boy afraid of lightning?”

“You—you—”

“Ah, for cripes’ sake, lay off! That gutter language is out of date. Sit down”—he started towards the door—“before I knock you down.”

Stein sat behind his shiny flat-topped desk and probed abstractedly beneath a thumb nail with a long, slender paper knife. The thunder storm of three days before had in some measure broken up the heat wave. It was still hot, but not unbearably so. Stein looked very neat in his light tan summer suit, with a henna-colored tie trimly meeting a tan silk collar. Below in Olive Street a trolley car bell clanged petulantly, a lot of motor horns blew. Then a police traffic whistle shrilled, and bell and horns stopped.

A girl appeared in the door that connected Stein’s private office with the outer office.

She said, “Mr. Donahue.”

Stein looked up at her, looked down at his finger nails. He threw the paper knife on the desk and sat erect, picked up some papers and bent his brows over them. He looked annoyed.

But he said, “All right.”

The girl disappeared.

Donahue appeared. He came in strolling, hands in jacket pockets, stiff straw hat clamped between left side and left arm. He was smoking a long, thin panatela of a very light brown color. He was strolling, but the expression on his face was not a strolling expression.

He stopped midway between the door he had entered and the desk at which Stein sat looking very absorbed in the papers before him. But Stein looked up, nodded curtly, said, “Hello, Donahue,” and went on reading.

Donahue said nothing. He rolled the light brown panatela from one corner of his mouth to the other and stared with dark, hard brown eyes at the bald pate of Stein. Stein went on reading with an amazing show of intense concentration. He turned sheet after sheet in a brusque, businesslike manner. He made quick notations with a pencil.

Donahue stood motionless, feet planted a little apart, hands idle in pockets, smoke rising in a thin gray column between his eyes. His long, lean face looked very brown, very mask-like. The muted noise of traffic in the street below rose and fell in waves of varying sound. The electric fan in the office droned with the hot monotony of a bee. The typewriter in the outer office began clicking spasmodically.

Stein shifted his horn-rimmed spectacles, twitched his eyebrows. The spectacles seemed to annoy him. He took them off, took the silk handkerchief from his breast pocket, polished the glasses, held them up and looked at them and beyond them, at Donahue.

“Little cooler, Donahue?”

“I didn’t come here to talk about the weather.”

“One talks about the weather from force of habit.”

“One two-times from force of habit, too.”

Stein put on his glasses, was very fussy about the way they fitted. He took pains to fold the silk handkerchief before returning it to his breast pocket. He coughed behind a small white well-kept hand. He motioned to the chair at the opposite side of his desk.

“Won’t you sit down?”

“You don’t have to be polite.”

“I’m not. I want to talk to you.”

“Talk.”

Stein picked up the paper knife, leaned back in his chair, poked idly at the desk blotter with the point of the paper knife. He pricked six holes in a row, then pricked six more at right angles, and then threw down the paper knife.

“Well, Donahue, business is business, you know,” he said airily.

Donahue nodded very slowly. “Yeah, two-timing is two-timing. You call it what you like. It’s still two-timing.”

“Don’t be an ass.”

Donahue ripped his hand from his pocket and slashed it shortly away from his stomach. “I’m no ass! But you’re a——damned double-crossing kike!”

Stein remained calm, casual. “Now, Donahue, please—”

Donahue took three hard steps that brought him to the desk. The hand that he had ripped from his pocket became a fist and the fist landed dully on the desk and remained there at the end of a rigid arm. His wiry brows almost met above his nose, and dark fury burned in his eyes, his lips thinned against his teeth.

His voice rapped out swiftly, deep-toned, rough-shod—“I know I’m in a rotten game, Stein. I’m not defending it. I don’t know why I’m in—but I’m in it. It keeps me in butts and I see the country and I don’t have to slave over a desk. I get places. It’s not a pretty game, and no guy ever wrote a poem about it. But it’s the only hole I fit in.”

He stopped. He turned, strode to the connecting door and closed it. He came back to the desk, put his palms flat down on it, and leaned on his arms.

“Stein, I may be a bum, but I’m not the bum that you are.”

“Now, now, Donahue—”

“Shut up! I’m talking! My boss sent me out here with your address. I came here. I told you what I wanted. It was none of your damned business what I was after and you knew it. If I got in Dutch, I got right out of it—and without your help. You wanted to make a case right off the bat, so you could get some easy dough from the Agency. But there was no case. You got sore at me because you couldn’t buffalo me.”

“Donahue, I tell you—”

“I told you to shut up! For two cents I’d break a chair over your head! I’ve been up against crooks, guns, and I’ve double-crossed them to get what I wanted. That’s what my game is. It’s not a polite business of question-and-answer bunk. You work against crooks and you’ve got to beat them at their own game. But now—now, Stein—I’m up against a different proposition. I’m up against a smooth-tongued kike who’s double-crossed me!”

Stein’s spectacles flashed. “You take it easy, Donahue! I’m not standing for any loose talk from a cheap Mick gumshoe, and you and your agency can go plumb to hell. Get out of my office!”

“You get this, Stein! You went to Shane because you knew I wouldn’t tell what I was after. You’re his lawyer now, and I know damned well you wouldn’t work for charity. There’s money in this job. You know what I’m after. You know what Shane has, or you know that he’s got money that represents what he did have. And you’re figuring to get that money by taking his case and saving him from the gallows!”

Stein smiled his thin, artificial smile. “Yes, I am Shane’s attorney. Beyond that you’re just a big bag of wind.”

“Am I? Well, don’t let that idea run away with you. You’re not going to get that money, Stein. I haven’t been spending all of my time in bed, and you’re going to land so hard that it ain’t even going to be funny. Stuff that down your belly and see if it doesn’t give you indigestion.”

Stein put his fingertips together. “Now will you get out of my office?”

Donahue gave him a short, harsh laugh, walked to the water-cooler, poured out a drink and turned and looked at Stein while he held the glass in his hand. He was breathing heavily and perspiration gleamed in silvery streaks on his brown face. He took a drink, licked his lips, flexed his body in his sweaty clothes. He made a motion with the glass and some of the water slopped out and slopped to the floor.

“So don’t spend too much time on Shane,” he said. “You’ll lose money on him.”

“On your way out, Donahue, please leave the door open.”

Donahue laughed, finished the drink, set down the glass. He strode to the door, stopped with his hand on the knob, looked at Stein. Stein sat with fingertips lightly together, face expressionless, daylight shining on his spectacles and hiding his eyes.

Donahue said, “Shane claims he’s innocent, doesn’t he?”

“Read the papers, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. Wouldn’t it be funny if he is?”

Donahue pulled open the door and went out chuckling.

Donahue had been getting on well with the Greek Constantine. Hocheimer had okeyed Donahue, and the Greek knew on which side his bread was buttered. He supplied Donahue with beer and cigars—gratis, but Donahue was looking for information, too….

“I’m still working on this case, you know,” he said, two days after the seance with Stein.

“’S too bad about Luke. ’S too very bad.”

“Yeah. Luke was a nice guy.”

“Very nice guy.”

Donahue started a glass of beer. “You know, I don’t think the case is settled yet.”

“Yeah.”

“No.”

“Oh, yeah…. No.”

“That’s right. I don’t think it’s all settled. Say, did Luke used to meet any guys here?”

“Some, yeah.”

“Who?”

“Well, Luke use to meet… let’s see. Um. Oh, was Charley Hart from de newspaper. Um. Was Luke’s brodder-in-law, Meester Coombs. Um. Was Tony Nesella. Um. Was Johnny Murphy from over de station-house. Um. Guess dat’s all.”

“What’s Nesella do?”

“He was waiter down de place by de river dey call de Show Boat Club. I ain’t seen Tony.”

“Where’s this Show Boat Club?”

“By de river. Let’s see. She’s on Second Street. She’s crazy club. I tell you, de likker she ain’t no good dere. But maybe you see Tony you tell him my name, he give you some good.”

“Night-club, eh?”

“Yeah. De nigger band. Yeah. Like dat. Make whatcha call whoopee.”

Donahue laughed. “Well, I feel like making whoopee.”

“She’s open only de night. De women”—he grimaced and shook his head—“no good. Tony tell me.” He grinned, patted Donahue’s arm. “Good-lookin’ guy like you no play around women like those.”

“Never can tell.” Donahue took another drink.

A waiter yelled, “Cash!” and the Greek made a bee-line for the cash register.

Donahue went down to the Show Boat Club that night

It crouched in a slanting cobbled alley a couple of blocks from the river. A damp warm mist had come up from the Mississippi. It hung motionless in the cobbled alley. Street lights were few and far between, and brick houses, dark-windowed, stood irregularly along the alley, and a blue glow hung over the doorway before which a taxi deposited Donahue. The blue glow revealed a square board sign with the words Show Boat Club painted in large letters. There were a half-dozen cars parked in the alley, and a man in a wrinkled white duck suit stood leaning outside the doorway.

Donahue had no trouble getting in. The place was wide open. A man inside took his hat and gave him a check. Another led him down a musty hallway where blue lights glowed. This man opened a big door and led him into a large room on the walls of which were painted a hazy idea of a show boat and some plantation scenes. The tables were rough board, without covers, and lined three walls. Against the fourth wall was a raised platform that was supposed to look like the stern of a show boat. Negro musicians sat there and mopped shiny black faces. Four wooden propellers thrashed beneath the ceiling and stirred the second-hand atmosphere.

As Donahue sat down at a table he muttered to himself, “Joint.”