Black Cat Weekly #13

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 3BACK TO THE BOWERY

I WENT up to the bar and ordered a beer.

“Hiya, Suds?” I said. “How’s Portia facing life these days?”

He scrutinized me closely with his little pig eyes, then said heartily:

“Well, hiya, Soldier! Ain’t been around for a spell. Jail or Bellevue?”

“Bellevue,” I told him. “Any of the old gang around? The Canned Heat Kid? Or Goosey George and Red Eye?”

“Them characters,” he said disapprovingly, “rolled some lush, I hear. Got a big stake. They faded.”

“Nice guys,” I said. “Maybe they’re up in the Union League Club drinking Scotch, huh?”

“Trouble with these characters,” said Suds, “they get too much gold, they go hog-wild. They drink too fast. So they get indigestion and you don’t see no more of ’em account of they’re dead.”

Suds poured some milk in a saucer and placed it beside Portia, the kitten, sleeping behind the bar.

I put money on the bar and ordered another beer.

“Have one yourself,” I invited.

Suds never drank alcoholic beverages, but on the rare occasions when a patron offered him a drink, he would pour milk from the cat’s bottle and charge a dime for it. He always put the dime in his pocket instead of the cash register, to buy more milk for the cat.

“Don’t mind a short one,” he said. He poured out the milk and took my money. “Basserty the Beard’s back. You know, the jock what goes on periodicals. He got ruled off again, down in Maryland this time. Got so drunk he fell off a horse right in the pad-dock. He’s over there in the corner, helping some of the boys figure out a parlay.”

Basserty had the dubious distinction of being the only jockey on the American turf who wore a beard. It was about the only distinction he did have, for he seldom rode a winner. He was nearing fifty, an ancient age for a jock. He weighed about a hundred and five pounds when he was soaking wet with sweet wine. He would ride where-ever he could, and save his money for six months. For the next six months he’d hit Skid Row. When his money and his credit were gone, he’d return to the tracks and wheedle the stewards into reinstating him.

I stood around waiting for somebody to recognize me.

“I’m tellin’ ya, they ain’t gonna beat this horse Sober Sides,” Basserty was saying. “I rode his daddy, Deacon Smith, and there was a horse that could really take it.”

“Knotty,” a dwarf who wore a monocle, peered at the scratch sheet.

“Naow, chums, naow,” he said. “I definitely do not like the name of the bloomin’ steed. Son of Deacon Smith, you sye? Knew a deacon’s son in h’England once. Came to no good end. Hanged by the neck.”

Knotty pretended not to regard himself as a misshapen accident of Nature. He said he came from a long line of dwarfs, all of whom had entertained the crowned heads of Europe. His accent was as phony as a seven-dollar banknote, but he swore he had been educated at Cambridge. His monocle, he believed, proved his British heritage beyond any shadow of a doubt.

Another of the engrossed handicappers, “Killer” Carney, the punch-drunk baby-sitter, suddenly discovered my presence.

“Hey, guys!” he bellowed. “Hey! It’s the Soljer! Hiya, Soljer? Where ya been, boy?”

“Hello, Killer,” I said. “How’s the babysitting business?”

“Aw,” said the big goon with the fist-mangled features, “I got plenty of clients. But they ain’t no future in it.”

* * * *

The Killer worked at baby-sitting almost entirely as a labor of love. The broken-down old heavyweight’s wife had died in childbirth and the baby had not lived. The Killer would even go without his vino to buy candy and bubble gum for the grimy youngsters who formed a vociferous cortege around him every time he walked down the street. When his presence as a baby-sitter was required the Killer never got drunk. He was conscientious about his baby-sitting.

“Never ask questions of a returning prodigal,” Jockey Basserty admonished the Killer, and informed me: “We’re figuring out a three-horse parlay. Maybe you’d like to declare in the pool.”

Knotty adjusted the monocle and looked me over carefully. “What I sye is, let the Soldier pick the blawsted third beast for us. Fresh viewpoint, y’know.”

He handed me the scratch sheet. One name leaped out at me. “Unlucky Lady.”

“Well,” conceded Basserty grudgingly, “she’s out of a good mare.”

I tossed a dollar in the pool and the Killer clumped out to place our bet.

The boys appeared to have plunged all their capital on the parlay, so I bought them vino for the rest of the afternoon. I stuck to beer myself. I had things to do.

Two more stumblebums I knew came into the bar—the Professor and Shakey. They greeted me effusively.

The Professor was a harmless screwball, supposed to have been a professor of physics once. He always carried a battered old briefcase filled with scraps of paper on which he had computed endless rows of figures, and often tried to explain his “formulas” to the other boys.

Shakey didn’t get his nickname because he had a shaky hand. When he was in his cups, which was most of the time, he insisted upon quoting Shakespeare. Besides being a student of the Bard, Shakey was a cop-hater, wanted to destroy them all.

“Good morrow, sir!” cried Shakey. “You been away, Soljer, and you didn’t hear the good news. You remember that cop, Turrone? He’d framed two fellows’ sister on a street-walking charge, so they cut his ears off. ’Friend, Romany countryman, lend me your ears,’ they said to him.”

“You shouldn’t bear false witness like that, my friend,” said the Professor. “Turrone was simply transferred to another precinct.”

The Professor informed me he had just sold the formula for a synthetic atom bomb for a mere ten thousand dollars, which he had to collect that afternoon.

The Killer went to get the race results. He returned to say that Unlucky Lady was the only horse in our parlay that had won.

It was nearing five. I had to get to Frayne’s. I rose and left the place.

I don’t know why I noticed the truck parked outside Frayne’s except it was a funny time of day to deliver ice. “Inter-City Ice Co.” was painted on the truck.

* * * *

When I went inside the night shift had just come on. I saw Frayne frowning at me, and guessed he didn’t want a guy dressed like I was at his bar. Finally he came up to me.

“What’s the idea in coming in here in that get-up?” he asked unpleasantly.

“Because I want an answer,” I said. “A straight one.”

“I’m fresh out of answers,” he growled. “Why don’t you dust, like a good boy?”

“I want to know if you saw me in here last night,” I said. “I want to know if Jerry and Ray saw me, too.”

He looked me straight in the eye. “I didn’t see you because you weren’t in here. Jerry didn’t see you. Neither did Ray. Satisfied?”

“No,” I said. But there was nothing I could do about it.

“Look,” said Frayne. “I don’t know what trouble you’re in, but I don’t want any part of it. Now get out.”

I got out. I was punch-drunk, like Killer Carney, the baby-sitter. Why should those three guys lie in their teeth like that? Or if they weren’t lying, and if the naked woman wasn’t found, what did that make me?

I hadn’t eaten since early breakfast, so I walked over to Ninth Avenue where they wouldn’t mind my informal apparel and ate at a lunch counter. After that, I walked across and sat in Bryant Park until six-thirty when I called Chet.

“Oh, yes, Mr. Jones,” said Chet. “I want to talk about that case with you, at the place we met this morning.”

When I got to the Hill Tavern, Chet was standing outside the place, waiting for me. We got a couple of drinks at the bar, then went into the back room and sat down.

“Well,” Chet said, “I paid that visit to Romano. The call came in while I was there. They found Mrs. Malcolm Little just after five o’clock this afternoon. Romano let me go along to the hotel with him.”

“So they found her,” I said dumbly.

“Yeah,” replied Chet. “But she wasn’t sitting in a chair. She was lying on the bed. And fully clothed, right down to her girdle. There was quite a lot of blood on the dress. Expensive dress. Hattie Carnegie label, Romano said.”

“But Chet—”

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “And there’s more to it, so keep listening. Some of the clothes were hung up neatly in the closet of Room Six-sixteen. Others were in her suitcase and in the drawers. Another suitcase was empty. A plastic suitcase. The only good fingerprints they found were on the plastic suitcase.”

Chet paused, and I tossed off my drink.

“They found out her identity easily enough,” Chet continued, “from cards in her pocketbook. She was also identified as the dame who registered as Mrs. J. K. Provost in Six-seventeen that morning. J. K. Provost had flown the coop, bag and baggage. I hope Mr. Malcolm Little doesn’t spill about hiring us to tail his wife. And there’s one more thing. The medical examiner swore she’d been dead for at least twenty-four hours.”

“But, Chet,” I said, “that means she was dead by five o’clock yesterday afternoon! It means—”

“Yeah,” said Chet. “It means you were sitting right there when the dame was killed.”

It was funny to be sitting there wondering if I was a murderer, while the peeling, naked, red-haired women danced all around me.

Finally I said to Chet, “Suppose I should go up to the Vets’ Administration, see a doc I know. Suppose I should tell him just what I think I did and what actually happened? Have him get me hospitalized, put under observation.”

“That would put you in the clear so far as the cops are concerned,” Chet said. “But suppose they don’t turn up anybody else who might have done the job? What would they do to you then?”

“Put me in a locked ward,” I said. “Throw the key away.”

He shook his head. “That wouldn’t be nice,” he said. “Let’s look at it the other way, say that everything happened just the way you think it did. If you had blacked out and done a murder, maybe your subconscious would try to build up an alibi. But being at Frayne’s wouldn’t be any good because the dame was killed before you got there. And you were right in your room at the time she was being killed. You didn’t know the woman. You were in the hotel solely because you were working on a case in which she was involved. She registered for Six-seventeen as Mrs. Provost. And there was a Mr. Provost, and he’s lammed.”

“I wonder how the guy got out of the hotel without his baggage?” I said.

“Probably traveling light,” said Chet. “So we have the mysterious Mr. Provost as a suspect. And there’s Mr. Little, jealous of his ever-loving wife, and suspicious. There might have been a lot of other men, too.”

Chet ground his cigarette out in the ashtray.

“I’m not even going to consider all the questions you want to ask,” he said. “How did the dame get in your room in the first place? How did a dead woman get up off a chair and lie down on a bed? How did a dead woman who was naked get herself fully clothed? How did her clothes and baggage get in your room? I can’t answer right now. So it’s up to me to make like a sleuth, and it’s up to you to get lost on the Bowery. Don’t try to get in touch with me. Is there any place I can reach you about this time tomorrow? A place I can phone you?”

I told him that Grogan’s Elite Palace Café and Bar had a phone and he could call me there and ask for “Soldier.” That they knew me by that name.

I was hardly conscious of my aching feet during the walk downtown. My brain was too busy, wondering if I were sane. I’d been angry at Ginny and the world at large. The doctors had warned me especially against becoming angry. Then I’d got the headache, a danger signal. Frankly, I didn’t remember much of anything about that trip from Ginny’s apartment to the hotel. I wondered if I had met the woman in the hotel hall and lured her into my room. Maybe I was some kind of s*x maniac and sadist when spells came over me. Maybe I’d placed her on the bed because a bed is closely associated with the s*x impulse.

But even looking at it the worst way, there were a lot of things that needed explaining. The absence of a weapon, for instance. And when I had searched the room there simply had been nothing there belonging to the woman.

By the time I hit the Bowery the morning tabs were out. It was there, all right, smack on Page One. I took the papers I bought into Grogan’s Elite Palace Café and Bar to read all about it. But there was nothing I did not already know, except that robbery was not the motive, since valuable jewelry and a large amount of cash had been found in Mrs. Little’s effects. And she had been a night club entertainer named Danise Darlan before she married Little who was very wealthy.

The bellhop had remembered my Purple heart, and my scar. So now I was a marked man in more ways than one. Old Scarface Spelvin! The boys on Skid Row sure didn’t have anything on me!