Dick Tracy (30 page)

B
ig Boy dragged Tess Trueheart through the showroom where the socially elite patrons of the Club Ritz cowered panic-stricken under tables and against walls. Outside, the squeal of tires and the tattoo of tommy-gun fire provided a muffled but distinct backdrop. Inside, an insectlike murmuring filled the air; but not a soul confronted Big Boy about the situation, perhaps because he was wild-eyed and had a revolver in one hand even as he dragged a bound-and-gagged woman across the shiny floor, as if in a parody of an Apache dance.

88 Keys, a cigarette insolently dangling, sat on his piano bench; he looked spiffy in his black dinner jacket with red carnation, and bored. As Big Boy passed, hauling Tess Trueheart, Keys played a brisk rendition of “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime,” smirking to himself. Big Boy knew he was getting razzed, but he resisted the urge to blow the bum’s smug face off.

He did take time, as he dragged the dame, to look sharply back at Keys.

“If you was in on this frame-up,” Big Boy snarled at the pianist, whose fingers now had frozen over the keys, the sarcastic serenade halted, “you’d be better off practicin’ a funeral march.”

Keys swallowed and said nothing.

The muffled sound of gunfire continued outside; there were occasional sounds vaguely recognizable as screams. The customers clung to each other under their tables; some of the women were sobbing. Most of the men were wanting to.

Watching with seeming dispassion as Big Boy and his pretty package moved in her direction, Breathless remained seated at the bar, ravishing in a silver gown, her lush legs crossed, her generous bosom dripping with diamonds.

“Cig me,” she said to the bartender, who was crouching behind the counter.

Without moving, he said, “Cig yourself, honey.”

Her beautiful mouth twitched with disgust.

An arm around the waist of the captive Tess, Big Boy was moving behind the bar, toward the wine-cellar door. He opened it, then paused to look back at Breathless. “You want to come along, baby?”

“Looks like you already have a girl.”

“You change your mind, you know the way.”

She laughed at him. “Bon voyage, tough guy,” she told him, with quiet contempt.

Big Boy would have shot her, but he was too busy. He clomped down the cellar stairs, dragging Tess behind him. Yanking her by her bound hands, he led her through the rows of racked wine bottles. He moved to the far end of the low-ceilinged cellar and sat her down on a wine barrel, while he went to a wall covered by a wine rack, the bottles on which were secured and filled with nothing.

The wall was movable—a heavy cement door that yawned groaningly open onto darkness, but the cellar was well enough lit to reveal what lay beyond: a small flatbed railroad car on tracks in a low-ceilinged tunnel. Just inside the tunnel was the switch that turned on electric bulbs strung sporadically along its ceiling.

He hauled Tess into the tunnel, which was barely tall enough to stand in, and picked her up bodily and laid her on her stomach on the flatbed of the dolly. After putting the wine rack back in place as best he could, wedging several loose boards in front of the wall to keep the opening obstructed, he situated himself next to her, half on top of her. She smelled good.

Up to this point he’d said almost nothing to the woman; now, he turned to her and whispered almost tenderly, “You got nothin’ to worry about. You just behave yourself. I never hurt a dame in my life.”

That was a lie, of course, but what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. Yet.

Big Boy released the brake and the dolly moved quickly down the incline of the tracks, but not too quickly; he’d only used the thing once before, on a practice run. Keeping this little getaway cart handy was one of the few smart moves Lips Manlis had ever made. The tunnel—which connected the nightclub with Manlis’s warehouse and a riverfront loading point—had been useless since prohibition ended; it had even been blocked off from the rest of the city’s underground railroad system.

But as a means of back-door escape, it was useful indeed. He would end up near the dock, near a waiting motor launch. From the river he could head to the lake, where he could go any number of places. A foghorn echoed down the tunnel, beckoning them. The sound made him smile; it was comforting, somehow.

As Caprice and his unwilling passenger coasted down the tracks—which were a pretty straight shot to the riverfront, only a matter of half a dozen or so city blocks—he felt calm again, confident again. His pockets stuffed with money, he was starting to feel like Big Boy once more.

But in the recesses of his mind he was beginning to wonder: Why did the Blank do this to him? Was the Blank in fact Frank Redrum, and had Redrum been planning all along to depose him and take over?

The overhead lights were spread out, so eerie shadows were cast on the rounded, smoothed concrete walls of the tunnel. Now and then the foghorn called out to them from their destination. The rumble of the steel wheels on the tracks echoed down the gently snaking passageway. The woman wasn’t making any noise at all; no sobbing, no moaning, no nothing. She had pride, this dame; moxie, too. It was a crying shame he had to ice her.

But once he was well away, she’d be excess baggage; and living evidence. It almost made him sad.
He
didn’t kidnap her, after all! Well—he didn’t kidnap her
first
. . .

Now the tunnel moved through the basement of the Manlis warehouse; up ahead there was, finally, light at the end of the tunnel for Big Boy.

If not for Tess.

Tracy knelt at the pavement; the sound of metal on metal had faded, but he thought he might know what it was.

“Don’t you think,” Catchem said, confused by Tracy’s behavior, “we ought get inside that joint?”

He stood. “Yes.”

And the detective stormed into the Club Ritz, past patrons cowering under tables, and stopped before Breathless Mahoney, who sat regally at the bar, drinking a cocktail as casually as if at a country-club soirée.

“Where are they?” he said.

“Who?” Breathless asked innocently. She didn’t meet his eyes.

He heard something; not the metallic sound this time: something else. Something faint, something mellow, like a musical instrument.

“Where’s the basement?” he demanded.

She nodded behind the bar. “Door leads down to the wine cellar.” She pointed halfheartedly. “He took her through there.”

Tracy just looked at her.

“What’s wrong?” she asked with no apparent irony. “Don’t you trust me?”

His eyes tightened as he heard the sound again: mellow but commanding.

He moved behind the bar, to the door, and hurtled down the steps, where he found himself in a shadowy dank cellar. Almost immediately he noticed a certain wall engulfed by a well-stocked wine rack. A wall that was slightly ajar . . .

He put both shoulders into it, but something on the other side was wedging it so that the wall simply would not budge.

And then, as he stood helplessly facing that wall, he heard the sound again, coming from behind it: a
foghorn.

He ran up the stairs, past Breathless, without looking at her or giving her a single word; he burst out the entrance, where Catchem was cuffing a sullen 88 Keys.

“I’m going after Big Boy!” Tracy yelled as he ran. “He’s got Tess, and I think I know where he’s taken her . . .”

And he sprinted down the street, toward the riverfront.

Catchem exchanged glances and shrugs with Chief Brandon; neither of them knew what to make of it.

Nor did the boy who had earlier hopped the Chief’s spare tire and, unseen by anyone, witnessed the entire shoot-out. A boy who, still unseen, staying in the shadows, ran along after the man whose name he’d taken.

T
he tunnel ended at the riverbank, and Big Boy helped the doll off the dolly, and ushered her out of the viaductlike opening into the chill of the night. The foghorn welcomed them; the harbor lights winked on the surface of the river, but the fog was such that you couldn’t see across to the other side.

While his own tux seemed none the worse for wear, the dame’s red-and-black dress was dirty now, and ripped here and there; her reddish blond hair was mussed. But she was a good-looker. Nice shape on her. It was a pity, but once they were out on the lake, she’d have to be fish food.

He held her by the arm and she walked along with him, her head held high; he didn’t have to drag her anymore.

“Gonna be fine, missy,” he said, dragging her by the elbow toward the limestone stairs of the massive municipal drawbridge. On the other side of the bridge was the private dock where Big Boy, unknown to even his closest cronies, kept a getaway boat waiting. “Don’t you worry. You’ll be back with that square-jawed boyfriend of yours ’fore you know it.”

“You may be right,” Tess said with a tight, defiant smile, as he pulled her up the steps.

“Let go of her, Big Boy!”

Tracy’s voice!

Big Boy, at the top of the stairs now, up on the pedestrian walkway of the bridge where he was leading Tess across, looked back and to his dismay saw the detective, in that stupid yellow topcoat, running down the embankment near the tunnel opening. His eyes bulged.

A brightly lit cruise ship was heading toward the bridge. The sound of gears meshing announced that the bridge was separating to allow the ship to pass.

The cement-and-steel leaves of the drawbridge were raising on Big Boy’s one side, with Dick Tracy sprinting toward him below, and a cityful of cops waiting, back in the other direction. Cornered and then some, Big Boy glanced around desperately, looking for any alternative. Someplace to shoot from behind, if nothing else. A doorway in the nearby bridge tower beckoned.

“Come on, baby!” Big Boy growled, and yanked Tess toward that door, which God or the Devil or somebody had left unlocked for him.

Big Boy dragged Tess into what proved to be the gearhouse of the massive bridge; the gangster stood on the steel-grating floor and looked around at what resembled gigantic, monstrous watchworks all around him. Eyes darting about, he spotted a supply area, where a coil of rope waited.

He smiled.

He felt as at home here as Quasimodo in a bell tower.

“What are you doing?” Tess demanded, as he dragged her toward a huge spoke that lay horizontally as it revolved ever so slowly into its vertical twin.

“You play Sleeping Beauty,” Big Boy said, and pushed her down on her back on the gigantic spoke. He began to tie her down with the thick hemp. “And I’ll wait for your prince to come . . .”

Tracy had known at once, when Big Boy sent all of his partners in crime bursting out that garage into the waiting armed arms of the entire city police force, that the cunning crime boss had only been providing a diversion for his own escape. And hearing the rumbling of metal wheels below the pavement, and the sound of the foghorn coming from behind the movable wall in the wine cellar had told Tracy just exactly how Big Boy was making that escape.

Tracy knew the underground train system connected the club with the warehouse and the riverbank. But he had to choose between those two places as the most likely one for Big Boy to head to . . .

He targeted the riverbank, figuring Big Boy would consider that warehouse of his too likely to be crawling with cops in the aftermath of the assault on the club. But just the same, Tracy called by two-way as he ran, to have somebody cover the warehouse.

“Will do, Tracy,” Patton’s voice said.

Tracy was glad to find that Pat had made it safely out of the attic, but he didn’t discuss the matter. He was too busy running. He was nearing the waterfront area now.

He moved past the dock to the rather steep incline of the riverbank. Fog hugged the river, and as Tracy moved down the slope, the pea soup was thick enough to partly obscure the nearby municipal drawbridge. Below him somewhere was the viaduct-type opening of the tunnel—the riverfront drop point where, in bootleg days, crates of liquor from Canada had been shifted from boats off the lake, to the river, through the tunnel to the Manlis warehouse and various speakeasies beyond.

Then, as he came down the embankment, he saw them! Big Boy escorting Tess out of the tunnel; the grotesque, hunched gangster, in his black tux with white carnation, looked like the headwaiter in Hades.

Gun in hand, Tracy sprinted down the slope; he called out to them—“Let go of her, Big Boy!”—as the slouchy gangster pulled Tess up the cement stairway. The lights of a ship of some kind were shooting through the fog toward the bridge.

Tracy could see the gangster looking around desperately; saw the evil gnome-king pull Tess into the tower of the bridge.

He kept running.

The wet riverbank slowed his steps, but he kept running, and then he was up the stone stairs, standing hesitantly by the door he’d seen Big Boy go in.

He knew that when he went through that door, odds were he’d be fired upon.

His hand settled on the knob. He turned it, pushed the door open, and could hear nothing but the inexorable grinding of giant gears.
I love you, Tess
, he thought, and he went in, slowly, sidestepping into darkness, for cover, putting his back to the cement wall, searching the room with his eyes.