Black Cat Weekly #13

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 5FRAMED

WHEN Basserty returned with the racing papers, I glanced over the scratch sheet. My eye lit on a horse named Hidden Thing. I handed the Killer a couple of bucks and told him to go invest it on Hidden Thing. He said he’d wait at the pool room for the result.

When the Killer returned, his big, battered, silly face was one large grin.

“Hey, guys!” he bellowed. “That Hidden Thing wins and pays twelve-sixty. We got drinking money.” He declared himself and the others in as a matter of course.

We sat down at a table and switched to wine. I went easy on the Sneaky Pete, though, because it made the red haze come in front of my eyes. Maybe it even made me stick ice picks in naked women.

I stayed in the Palace, because I had to stay somewhere away from the cops. My dinner consisted of a corned beef sandwich, the only thing on the menu of the Palace and which gave Grogan the excuse of calling his place a café as well as a bar. After Suds had gone off duty and “Sad Eyes,” the night man had taken over, the telephone rang. I was sure it was Chet calling me, but Sad Eyes said that the Killer was wanted on the phone.

When he finished the conversation he was fairly blubbering with excitement.

“Hey, Sad Eyes! Sad Eyes,” he called. “You got the special bottle?”

“What special bottle?” asked Sad Eyes sourly.

“Why, Tommy Twotoes’ bottle,” said the Killer. “He’s a-coming down tomorrow to see us. He just ranged me up. He wants me to have the boys here.”

The fabulous Tommy Twotoes was a Bowery god. When he was a punk kid, he’d played the Skid Rows from San Francisco to Boston. Now he was a retired millionaire. He had drunk so much during his long and fantastic career that he had become a bloated, crippled caricature of a man. He must have weighed around three hundred pounds, and was so bald that even his eyebrows had disappeared. Even at a short distance his face appeared to be a pallid blob except for the rose-tinted nose. He walked like a semi-paralytic, his head hunched down between his shoulders at a grotesque angle.

Tommy Twotoes made a point of visiting the vagrants of the Bowery periodically. He would set up drinks for all and sundry, stake the boys to a week’s flop and drinking money and listen to their troubles.

The day I’d met Tommy Twotoes I was mean-drunk on sweet wine. I hated everybody. I looked upon the grotesque old man as an interloper, come to Skid Row to taunt and patronize its unfortunates. I’d sounded off so insultingly that his gigantic body servant, “Ebony” Black, would have lowered the boom on me if Tommy Twotoes had not intervened.

Tommy Twotoes’ family had gone under the name of Tuthill for generations, but Tommy discovered that he had Indian blood and that the family name had originally derived from a brave called Two Toes. He promptly adopted Twotoes as his legal name.

He became the outstanding sports promoter of his day and branched out into the theatrical entertainment field. He had opened a racetrack in Mexico and had offered the Twotoes Stakes, the first $100,000 race in the history of the world. He had owned theaters and night clubs and a motion picture studio and it was rumored, but never proved, that his was the capital and the brains behind the most successful ring of Prohibition rum-runners.

* * * *

The Killer was still telling the boys of Tommy Twotoes’ impending visit when the phone rang again. It was Chet.

He said, “Hello, is this Soldier?”

“This is George Spelvin Jones,” I replied.

Before he could tell me of any developments, I admitted that I had visited Ginny and blurted out the story of Vince Parada, his connection with the murdered woman, and the fact that he had been away from his club for a week before the murder. I didn’t tell Chet about having socked Parada. I didn’t tell about finding the ice pick, either, and maybe that was wrong.

When I let him get a word in edgewise, Chet said he was glad we had another suspect because the cops were always inclined to handle a citizen of Mr. Malcolm Little’s prominence with kid gloves. He said he’d have Parada’s Miami alibi checked right away. Then he told me his own news. It wasn’t good.

“Kid,” he said, “the identification of your fingerprints came through from Washington this afternoon. The cops are looking for Terence R. Rooke, war veteran, former newspaperman who ha been in Government hospitals. Of course, they know about the scar, so keep under cover. Stay lost.”

Chet said that Little had no real alibi for the time of the murder, and that he might bust the case wide-open by telling Romano that the man knew of his wife’s assignation at the Sheridan Towers and had hired a shamus to tail her. He said he didn’t want to tell Romano that right away, though, because he was saving it for his ace in the hole.

Chet said he’d call me at the Palace at noon the next day.

The fact that the cops had already traced me back as far as my newspaper days showed that they were getting close. They must want me and want me bad. I wondered how long it would be before I was connected with Chet. Romano wouldn’t like Chet then and we’d lose an invaluable contact at Headquarters. We’d lose it anyway if Chet told his story this late. Or if Mr. Little spilled about hiring Chet’s agency to put the peek on his ever-loving wife and her mysterious boy-friend, Mr. J. K. Provost.

I went back to the table and sat down and drank for awhile. Then a Western Union messenger boy came into the saloon. He walked up to the bar and spoke to Sad Eyes.

“Hey, Soljer!” yelled Sad Eyes. “You gotta telegram! What happens next in this jernt? I’m a cussed social sekketary.”

The telegram addressed to “Soldier,” read:

URGENT YOU MEET ME MY APARTMENT NINE-THIRTY. IN DANGER

GINNY

It was eighteen minutes to nine. I went into the phone booth, dialed the number of Ginny’s apartment. There was no answer. I hung up, then called Vince Parada’s Triangle Club and asked for Ginny.

“The dinner show’s on,” some mugg told me gruffly. “We can’t call no performers to the phone now. Call after nine.”

The dinner show ran until nine, but Ginny’s turn was over before that time. Probably the danger she feared wouldn’t arise before nine-thirty. I decided to hurry to the apartment. Outside I caught a cruising cab and arrived at Ginny’s address in a little more than twenty minutes.

It was hardly possible that Ginny could have arrived home, but I raced up the two flights of stairs. I unlocked the door with the key she had given me. The apartment was dark. I reached for the light switch, flicked the button and nothing happened. The ceiling bulb must have been burnt out. I started to grope my way toward a table where I knew a fat-bellied lamp was standing.

* * * *

The guy who dropped the atom bomb was an expert marksman. The missile hit me on the back of my head. I saw all the weird, unearthly swirling and billowing and brightly colored things that the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki must have seen the instant the big bombs fell. Then I hit the floor and I no longer saw anything….

When my mind clutched feebly toward returning consciousness, my head was a great bulge of pain. My neck felt as if it were broken.

Someone was bending over me, going through my pockets. I was too weak to resist. I thought, “I’m not just weak, I’m dead.”

There was a nerve-rasping, screeching sound. It sliced like a sharp tool into the throbbing hurt of my head. A window in Ginny’s apartment made that sound when you raised it.

Somebody was lifting me up. Maybe more than one. I was being propped up against something. There was night air on my face. It revived me some. Below me there was a concrete areaway. Three stories below me.

Instinctively I fought for a foothold. I got my feet propped against a baseboard. I struck out blindly, using the side of my hand like the blade of a cleaver, a ju-jutsu blow they’d taught me in the Army.

Somebody grunted and stumbled. I lunged away from the open window, and fell flat on my face. A heavy shadow was coming toward me, slowly, carefully. I could hear breathing in the taut silence. I made a supreme effort and sprang toward the shadow. I missed. I was flat on my face again in the darkness.

The shadow fled across the room. A door opened and shut. I staggered to my feet, plunged out into the lighted hallway.

I could hear footsteps clattering down the stairs. Vertigo overcame me. I fell. I didn’t stop rolling until I had tumbled half a flight.

There were no longer any clattering footsteps. I crawled back up the stairs. The door to Ginny’s apartment was open. I went in, switched on the table lamp, and collapsed in a chair.

It was just nine-thirty-seven by Ginny’s alarm clock. I laughed. Ginny hadn’t planned to meet me at nine-thirty or nine-thirty-seven or any other time. She’d sent her boy friend instead. She’d told the suave, sleek Mr. Parada who caused the ladies’ hearts to go pitty-pat, about my socking him, and suspecting him of the murder of Danise Little. Then he, or some of his boys, had formed a reception committee for me.

It didn’t make sense, of course, Ginny turning suddenly on me like that. But figuring Mr. Parada and my ever-loving girl friend as confederates explained why Ginny had put that little ice pick in my pocket.

Whoever had clouted me and had tried to toss me out of a third-story window had been going through my pockets. I found my money intact. They hadn’t been out to roll me. They had been out to murder me. In a pocket of my trench coat I felt a piece of paper. I thought at first it was the telegram from Ginny. But it wasn’t. The telegram had disappeared. It was a piece of paper on which was typed:

To Whom It May Concern:

I can’t take it any longer. I murdered the Little woman in a fit of insanity. The war caused it all. My name is Terence Robert Rooke. I was George Spelvin, the man in 616 of the Sheridan Towers Hotel.

This touching little missive about explained everything, I thought. Ginny and Parada were in love. Parada’s old girl friend and Ginny’s boy friend had stood in their way. So they’d planned to get rid of them both. Parada had killed Danise and framed me for the murder. Then he was going to fakemy suicide!

* * * *

After I burned the suicide note I decided the safest place for me was bed. I went to the Castle again, got a room and stripped off my clothes. I flopped on the cot and before long I was dreaming that I was manning a 50-caliber in an M-4 tank that was chasing a bunch of naked women. Some of them looked like Mrs. Malcolm Little and the others looked like Ginny.