Dick Tracy (6 page)

“Not bad, not bad. Any cash?”

“I lifted three wallets, but these guys was as broke as us, maybe broker.” He put the three bucks on the table.

Steve scowled; his eyes were black pools of distrust surrounded by bloodshot white. “If you’re holdin’ out on me . . .”

“I’m not, Steve! Honest! I wouldn’ta come back so empty-handed, except . . .”

The tiny eyes narrowed. “Except what?”

“Nothin’.”

The Kid didn’t figure he better tell Steve about the shooting at the garage; he didn’t know why, exactly—he’d just learned that telling Steve as little as possible was the best way to get hit as little as possible.

“You was out of breath when you come in. You was runnin’, weren’t you? Why? Who from?”

The boy made a face; how he hated to admit this to Steve. But he better. “I took a watch off a guy, outside that diner, and he turned out to be a copper.”

“A copper!”

“How was I supposed know? He was wearin’ plainclothes! He chased me awhile, into the ’yards, but I shook him.”

Steve backhanded the boy; this time the Kid didn’t get up so fast. He didn’t get up at all, just cowered, and tasted the blood in his mouth, and tried not to cry.

“If you led a plainclothes dick here, you little vermin, I’ll give you the beating of your life.”

“There’s an old expression,” somebody said.

The Kid turned toward the space that served as a doorway; a shadow stood there—it had spoken.

It spoke again: “Pick on somebody your own size.”

The shadow moved into the room and it wore a bright yellow coat and a matching fedora. It was the square-jawed plainclothes cop who the Kid had hoped he’d lost, but now was glad had found him.

Steve stood and, with a strange grace for such a big man, picked up one of the orange crates and smashed it over the cop.

The cop was not fazed; he swung a hard right into Steve’s stomach and doubled the tramp over, then crossed with a left that connected with Steve’s stubbly jaw.

Steve went down hard, and the plainclothes cop loomed over him with fists half-raised. The tramp appeared to be knocked out.

“Careful,” the Kid said. To the plainclothes cop.

The plainclothes cop glanced at the Kid and smiled and that was when Steve made his move; the tramp came up with a board in his hand, a board with a nail that glinted in the lantern-light.

Only the plainclothes cop sidestepped and sent Steve crashing into the wall of the shack, knocking a hole in the packing-crate wall, shaking the flimsy structure. As Steve lumbered back at him, the board-with-nail still in hand, the plainclothes cop kicked it out of the tramp’s grasp.

Steve growled and dove at the cop, and the cop went down with the big smelly tramp on him like a rabid attack dog. Steve’s hands went to the cop’s throat, but the cop must’ve plowed Steve in the belly real good, because Steve went rolling off him, doubled in pain.

“Come on, kid,” the plainclothes cop said, and reached out a hand.

But Steve, despite his pain, got to his big feet and tried one more time, charging the cop like a car trying to run somebody over.

They stood slugging it out, until a flurry of yellow-sleeved punches sent Steve flying into another wall and suddenly the whole shack came down on them.

The Kid found himself being pulled out from under the tar paper and boards and such by the plainclothes cop, who said, “Give me a second with your pal. Don’t go anywhere now, junior, or I’ll chase you down again.”

The Kid felt pretty shook up, but he still managed, “Go suck an egg, mister!”

The cop seemed to find that funny. “The name is Tracy. Detective Tracy.”

“Oh. I think I heard of you. You’re Dick Tracy, ain’t you?”

“That’s right. Now, let’s have the loot. You got a watch to return.”

“Why should I?” the Kid asked, but he gathered the stuff, just the same.

Tracy was kneeling over the now genuinely unconscious Steve, who was half-under pieces of the demolished shack; he was cuffing Steve’s hands, in back.

“Is this guy your old man?” he asked the Kid.

“Him? Not on your life!”

Nobody in the Hooverville was paying any attention to this, strange as the sight of the interloper might be. In fact, many of them had disappeared into their shanties; nobody liked having a cop around, and despite the plainclothes, it was obvious that’s what Tracy was.

“Now,” Tracy said, smiling, taking the watches from the boy, slipping them in his topcoat pocket, “we’ll be on our way.”

“What about Steve?”

“Is that his name? I’ll find the nearest patrol car and have him hauled in.”

“You taking me to Juvenile Detention?”

“You bet, junior. But not right away.”

“Not right away?”

Tracy lifted the half-conscious tramp to his feet. The trio began walking through the Hooverville, toward the trainyards—though the lumbering Steve was being half-dragged as the cop and kid moved briskly along.

“First we’re going back to that diner and get you a decent meal.”

“Jeez, mister. That’s decent of ya.”

“I’m doing it for myself, really.”

“Yourself?”

“You saw that good-looking lady I was with.”

“Yeah.” The Kid whistled. “Nice shape on that dame.”

Tracy looked at him with wide eyes. “How
old
are you?”

“I don’t know. How old are you?”

“Never mind,” Tracy said. He scolded the boy gently with a wag of his forefinger. “Look, she’s not a ‘dame’—she’s a very proper and respectable young lady. But . . .” And Tracy grinned, suddenly, like a kid. “. . . if I don’t take you back to that diner and give you a meal, that very proper and respectable young lady just might get tough with me.”

“I know the feelin’,” the Kid admitted.

B
reathless Mahoney, in a midnight-blue gown that left nothing to the imagination, was singing a torch number her piano player had written for her: “I Always Get My Man.” She stood defiant, insolent in her beauty, in the midst of the black-marble dance floor of the Club Ritz, whose elegant chrome-and-glass showroom was filled to capacity; the bandstand behind her was empty, the orchestra on break but for the piano player, if anyone noticed or cared. One shapely leg exposed thanks to a slit in her painted-on gown, the young woman seemed half Harlow, half harlot—heaven in a hell of a package.

There was a studied casualness about her beauty: her white-blonde hair a mass of curls, some of which nearly cascaded over one eye; her eyebrows dark, rather thick, unplucked; her eyes liquid blue and sleepy; mouth red-rouged and swollen. Her breathy singing and her passive sensuality projected a strange air of boredom—a boredom that was a challenge to the men of the world to wake her up.

Lips Manlis, despite all his money, his power, even his capacity for violence, had never quite woken her. He’d been with her for over a year; it made for an elegant sort of misery—she made no attempt to feign ardor, much less passion.

He figured she was playing him for a sap, but he was hooked. She was driving him bughouse, and for the life of him, he didn’t know why he put up with it. After all, there were twenty dames in the chorus line, any one of whom would go with him at the nod of his bucket head. For years, frails had worked off their tails making him feel like a man, convincing him that they were crazy about him.

But Breathless didn’t even bother.

Maybe that was the fascination in itself. Manlis had been a power in the city for over ten years; worked his way up, a West Side kid who went from pushcart sneak-thief to stickup man to truck hijacker. He’d gotten in on the ground floor of Prohibition and in a matter of a couple years controlled the central city and several suburbs. For a long time that had been enough for him. But since Repeal, things had been getting tight. The pie was getting smaller, but there were still just as many pieces getting sliced out of it.

Time to make a move. That was why he’d imported the expensive shooters from all over the country; and with his old pal Little Face heading ’em up, they’d make a deadly assassination squad, and Big Boy and the others wouldn’t know who, let alone what, hit ’em.

Maybe when he was sitting on top of the whole town, maybe then Breathless would moan with delight at his touch. Maybe then.

He was a squat, dark, hairy man with the large, almost malformed lips that had given him his nickname. The black tuxedo, with rose in the lapel, was meant to give him a dapper man-of-the-world look, but didn’t—particularly since he had a napkin tucked in his collar like a bib. He was faintly aware of all this, but nobody dared make him feel his deception was anything less than fully successful.

Except, of course, the sullenly arrogant Breathless Mahoney.

She was lucky, Lips thought, that God gave her skin like cream and breasts like peaches. Lips frequently thought of women in terms of food. He loved food. He was, at the moment, slurping the third of twenty-four oysters that had been served him on the half-shell.

The Club Ritz—a private club, the most successful night spot in town, with a bustling casino room—was only moderately busy tonight. Still, the take would be well into the thousands. Manlis could have been content to loll in the income of this one property. But somewhere in him was the need to prove himself. Somewhere in him still lived the little West Side kid they called “Liver Lips” Manlis, who wanted to be respected by men, and loved by women.

The bodyguard who approached—who also wore a black tux, as did all of Manlis’s help, even those with cauliflowered ears and automatics bulging under their arms, like this fellow—seemed ill at ease. Caught in mid-oyster, Lips knew the news was bad.

“Give it to me straight, Joey,” Lips said.

Joey bent over to whisper in his boss’s ear. Out on the obsidian dance floor, Breathless was singing about a man, but didn’t seem very interested.

“They bumped off everybody,” Joey said.

“What do you mean—‘everybody’?”

“I mean,
everybody.
Little Face included.”

“Damn.” Little Face had been a good friend for a long, long time; they went back years in the stickup game. Lips ate another oyster. “So who did it?”

“Nobody knows. Not the cops, not nobody.”

“Smells like Big Boy.”

“I don’t know, boss. It was real mean. The boys was shot up so’s their own mamas couldn’t recognize ’em.”

“Maybe Pruneface, then,” Lips mused. “He likes to pitch in on his own dirty work, that trigger-happy lunatic.”

“Sorry to bear ya bad tidings, boss.”

Lips was thinking. “Nobody knows we’re the ones who brought those boys to town. We just gotta lay back for a few days, let the dust settle, and try again.”

“Sure, boss.”

He waggled a finger at the bodyguard. “But beef up the security. I don’t want nobody getting within a mile of me, or my girl.”

“You got it, boss.”

“You’re a good boy, Joey. Go fetch Breathless, before she starts another number.”

Breathless spoke a word to, and smiled faintly at, her piano player, a brunette pretty boy with Oriental eyes who tickled the keys regularly at the Club Ritz. His name, at least his stage name, was “88 Keys.” Keys looked at her with open admiration as she walked across the empty dance floor, as slow as a summer afternoon, but hotter. Every man in the room watched her with longing; every woman with envy. She shimmered, and shimmied, and she didn’t even try, or anyway seemed not to. Nor did she seem to care.

Lips didn’t get up; but he did gesture to a chair. “Sit, baby, sit.”

She sat. “Cig me,” she said.

“Sure, baby.” He snapped open a gold cigarette case and held it open in front of her and let her select one. She did.

“Match me,” she said, holding the cigarette between two fingers.

He lit it for her with a decorative silver lighter shaped like a nude woman. The flame came out of the silver woman’s head. Lips found it classy.

Breathless inhaled, blew a smoke ring, tossed her head of curls. The gesture fully revealed her previously half-hidden eye; it proved just as blue, and just as uninterested, as the other.

“Magnificent, my dear,” Lips said between oyster slurps, “as always.”

“I’m so happy you like it.”

“I love it. You’re singing great.”

“What about that talent scout from a record label you promised me?” she asked. “When’s he coming around?”

“Soon. Soon. But baby, you don’t belong on records, you don’t belong on the radio, you belong in the movies where they can see you, see that shape of yours. Watching you walk over here, why sugar, it was like watching Jell-O quiver on a plate.”

“You say the loveliest things,” she said, sucking smoke, not looking at him.

“You should be nice to me, baby.”

“You should close your mouth when you chew.”

He frowned; then he slurped the fourteenth oyster. “Sometimes you don’t seem to know which side of the bread the butter’s on, baby.”

“I’m sure
you
do.”

“There’s a gang war brewing in this burg, and you’re gonna know, soon enough, that you’re lucky to be in
my
camp. In fact, I don’t want you going nowhere without two bodyguards, plus a chauffeur with a gun.”

“I’m safe enough when 88 takes me around.”