Everybody Had A Gun (17 page)

It took fifteen or twenty minutes to get from Breed's "finance" company to the Pit. Lonely pulled into the alley off Seventh Street and parked outside the elevator that led down into Marty Sader's club. He left the keys in the ignition when he got out, I noticed. That was a break; things were really going my way. The other car pulled in behind us and stopped. The lights of the cars were turned off and I stepped out into the black alley.

The wind hit me as soon as I got out of the car. It was a raw, rough wind that scraped the skin on my face and bit into my lungs. I was shivering, and it was cold enough to make a man shiver, but that wasn't the only reason. The closer we'd come to the Pit, the bigger the ball of fear had grown in my stomach. Depression had been growing inside me, too. I tried to shake it off. Hell, I thought, I'm not dead yet. And that cheered me up so much I damn near threw up.

I'd talked my way out of Breed's office, but I wasn't patting myself on the back. Silver-tongued Scott. Sure. That was like talking yourself right out of the lion's mouth and into his stomach.

I wish I knew what was coming when the crowd of us stepped out of that elevator and into the Pit below. There were a lot of possible angles. Sader might have a dozen gunmen there ready to blast us; Breed's boys might find Marty alone and kill him, or they might go hog-wild and shoot up anybody that was in the place. Or it could even be that the Pit was empty now, though there'd been somebody there thirty or forty minutes ago when I'd phoned and got a busy signal. But of all the possibilities, I couldn't find one that meant I could keep on living.

In the time since I became a private detective, and the four years before that, as a Marine in a bigger murder mess called, euphemistically, World War II, I'd been shot at and scared and almost killed a lot of times. But never in all those years had the dead weight of hopelessness weighed me down like it did now. I had the feeling that this was finally it, that I was washed up. I was tired to the bone, my head ached and throbbed, and I was weary of even thinking. I'd been up for fifteen or sixteen hours already and I felt it. There was a physical and mental exhaustion all through me, so leaden that I could almost say I didn't give a damn what came next. Almost, but not quite. A man always has a little something in reserve somewhere, and I knew if I got any kind of chance I'd do something with it—and if I could, I'd take one or two of these boys who were casually planning to murder me right along with me.

We all gathered around the elevator. The door was unlocked and the elevator was up at the top, and it looked to me as if maybe nobody was down below. That perked me up a little. Even if Marty had been here before, if he'd taken the elevator up and gone someplace else, I might be able to stall my guards for a while. Tell them Marty would show up, something like that. At least it was something to hang onto.

The four boys shoved Flick and me in first, facing out the way the door would open below, then got in behind us. If anybody shot at us, we'd get it first. A new way to get it going and coming. Then we started down. There wasn't any sensation of movement, and I remembered the last time I'd been in here with Iris—only we'd been coming up. Well, I'd got my wish. Then I'd wanted to know what the score was, what was behind all the screwy activity of the morning, and I knew now: Sader had been trying to muscle into the rackets and Big Boy Breed had sent the "upstart" an ultimatum with Lobo—and Sader had killed Lobo. Then Iris, me, and a madhouse—the beginnings of a gang war, and me in the middle of no man's land with a slingshot. I knew all about it now, but I'd felt better this morning before my curiosity had been satisfied.

The elevator stopped, the door automatically started sliding open, and I finally remembered that little bulb over the door in Sader's office. It had been burning for sixty seconds now. The boys I was with might not know about that gimmick, but I did, and I knew that whoever was in the Pit knew there was company on the way.

My throat was dry as the door opened and there was nothing but blackness ahead of us in the club. I was still in the middle: Sader in front, Breed behind, Breed's boys all around me, and Flick right next to me dying to put a bullet in my belly. And none of us could see a thing out there in the darkness.

Somebody shoved me from behind and I stumbled out of the elevator, Flick alongside of me. One of the boys pushed the elevator door shut and the light was squeezed out behind us. It took a few seconds for my eyes to get accustomed to the darkness, but when they did I saw a narrow thread of light under what would be the door to Sader's office. Then there was a hand against my back and we were all moving toward the light.

I knew that every step gave me less of a chance and I was thinking up a storm. There was somebody in there, and if it was Sader—and I didn't know anybody else who would be here this late—I was headed for hell and no place to grab. But if I could get the boys to let Flick and me go in alone, on the pretense that Sader would "welcome" Flick, I might—I might what? Leap up through the ceiling? But it was better than nothing.

I tried to slow down and started to whisper my brilliant idea to the man behind me, but a horny hand was slapped over my mouth and the cold, hard muzzle of a gun was shoved roughly against the back of my neck.

That settled that, and now that we were so close, part of my fear was dissolving into a kind of desperation. We reached the door. One of the men brushed by me, felt for the doorknob, and flung the door open. Hands hit my back and practically hurled me into the room.

I tripped on the carpet at the edge of the door, staggered forward into the room, and grabbed the sharp corner of the white desk to keep from falling. I blinked in the sudden flood of light and looked across that gleaming white desk right into Marty's eyes. His dead eyes.

They didn't find the hole in Sader's head right away, but finding him like that was a fat shock for me. I'd half expected guns to roar and people to die all around me, and maybe with me, and finding Sader dead jarred me so hard I stopped moving and my mouth dropped open.

Flick shut it for me. He whirled on me with his lips in a hard grin, and his hand shot out and grabbed at my throat. His knuckles glanced off my chin and jolted my teeth together. I slapped his arm away and reached for him, but I didn't get to him. Big, burly Harry grabbed my arms, and Shenandoah and Lonely latched onto Flick. Flick's face twisted and he yelled at me, "You smart son of a bitch!"

Then Lonely shouted, "Shut your trap, Flick. What the hell is this?" He glared at Flick for a moment, then walked to the desk and looked down at Sader.

There'd been a surge of voices, but everybody quieted down now except Shenandoah. He gawked at the dead man and said softly, "Jesus," shaking his head.

Marty had fallen onto the desk, his right arm stretched forward over it and his other arm dangling over the side. The left side of his face was flat on the desk top and his eyes were open, staring blankly. His rimless glasses lay unbroken on the desk, two or three inches from his head. The carefully combed black hair was only slightly mussed, but the fine hair had fallen aside and Sader's bald spot gleamed dully in the strong light. It seemed almost indecent.

Flick hadn't taken his eyes off me except for a brief glance at the body. He ran his tongue over his teeth and squinted his small black eyes. I knew he was thinking, getting ready to make a little spiel of his own, and he looked as if he were enjoying imagining how I'd squirm. I had an idea I'd squirm plenty.

Lonely lifted Sader's head casually by a few strands of hair, looked curiously at it and at Sader's chest, then pointed at the back of Sader's head with his other hand. "Lookit," he said. "A little one. A twenty-two or twenty-five, maybe." He might have been asking the time of day. He let Sader's head flop back on the desk. I felt the thud in my spine.

Everybody had to take a look except Shenandoah and Flick. Shenandoah took Lonely's word for it, and Flick was more interested in me. Lonely glanced at a smear of red on his finger, and wiped it on Sader's black coat. Little Joe-Joe Klein looked Sader over and started prowling around the desk while one of the other boys roamed around the room. Shenandoah, at a word from Lonely, went into the next room and threw on switches that flooded the entire club with light. He left the door open when he came back in, and I glanced over my shoulder, out the office door to the inside of the club, where lights flooded the chairs and booths and tables.

Then Joe-Joe straightened up. "Hey, boys! Lookit this!" He held a wisp of a handkerchief in his hand. A woman's handkerchief. He squinted at a corner of it. "What's this?" he asked, then read off the letters, "C-A-G." He laughed. "Who's that, huh? Cag? Short for Cagney, maybe? Wait'll Bogart hears about this." He haw-hawed.

I thought about it, myself, wondering who C. A. G. might be. I mentally listed the women I knew in this deal: Mrs. Vivian Sader, Kitty Green, Iris Gordon, Mia—something or other. "Something you couldn't pronounce," she'd said. Nobody seemed to fit.

And then I stopped even wondering because I realized it didn't make any difference to me, and I started realizing fully and completely what this new development did mean. It looked as if, with the death of Sader, had gone any and all of the cracked and cockeyed hopes I might have had of pulling something, anything, to get myself out of the mess I was in.

And Flick took that very moment to start in on me.

"Lonely!" he snapped. "All the rest of you guys. Listen. Now you see what this Scott bastard's been trying? I told you guys he was lyin'. I tried to tell you. You gonna listen to me now?"

All four of the other men straightened up and walked over by Flick. They all had guns in their hands, and they kept both Flick and me covered, but they grouped around Flick and looked at me. I'd never had them really convinced, and I'd lost them now. But Flick had at me anyway. He'd been dying for this chance ever since I'd screwed him up in front of Breed and his chums. He took advantage of it now.

"Scott," he said softly, "get with it. Let's have a little co-operation, bright boy. Where's this safe with all the cabbage? Give us that goddam list you was singin' about." He stopped and looked at me.

I licked my lips and my tongue felt like a dry corncob. There wasn't even one gun pointed at Flick now. It was my scene; I'd had my cue, and five pairs of hostile eyes stared at me. And four guns pointed at me. Three .45 automatics scattered around, and one .38 revolver in Lonely's big right hand. It seemed like every time I turned around today I ran into a guy with a gun. Everybody had a gun—and they were all pointed at me.

And the boys with all these guns right now were waiting for me to muff my answer to Flick. I couldn't do anything but muff it.

I said, "Take it easy, boys. Don't jump to conclusions. Nothing's changed." Just words, and they knew it and it showed. "Look," I said, "I couldn't have known about this. It must have happened after I talked to Sader and made the arrangements. I. . ."

I stopped. I wasn't getting anywhere. This was one spot I wouldn't talk my way out of. But there was another reason for stopping. Flick had the widest grin on his face I'd seen all night He'd apparently been waiting for just what I'd said. I'd walked into his trap.

"You hear that, Lonely? Hear what he says, boys?" Flick stooped to the floor on the far side of the desk. I couldn't figure what he was doing at first, but he came up with a phone in his hands. It was the phone that had been on Sader's desk, and apparently when Marty had slumped forward, his left arm had knocked the phone to the carpet. Now Flick held the phone toward me, the base in his left hand, the receiver in his right.

Grinning, he said, "Scott, old pal. Somebody calls Sader now, what's he get? A busy signal, maybe?" He looked from one to another of the men around him. "That's what Breed got when he called. That right? It was busy? Why the hell wouldn't it be busy with the phone off the hook?"

Joe-Joe pulled on his slanting nose, separated himself from the crowd, and walked around behind me, his gun held carelessly in his right hand.

Flick looked at me. "You smart son of a bitch. You smart, dead son of a bitch. Talkin' to a dead man. Talkin' to nothing."

I knew it wasn't any use, but I said, "He was alive when I talked to him. Hell, you heard me; you were in the same room with me."

Lonely grew a sneer on his ugly face and Harry chuckled in his deep chest. Nobody said anything, and that was worse than if they'd started yelling at me.

I said desperately, "Don't let Flick throw you guys. He's just getting back at me, trying to save his own skin. Christ, use your heads."

It was no good. Silver-tongued Scott. Hah! The boys smelled blood now, and they were starting to enjoy it. I shivered; the blood they smelled was mine, and it was all I had.

I tried to think, think of something I could do, but that was no good either. There wasn't a thing. And being in a room with death didn't help me think any clearer. Sader's glazed eyes stared past me at nothing.

Flick slowly put the receiver on the white top of the desk, then jiggled the phone's hook up and down two or three times. He lifted the receiver to his ear, whirled the dial once, and said, "Operator, I've just discovered my phone's been off the hook for a while." He chuckled. "I'm expecting an important call. Any chance you could tell me how long the phone's been off the receiver?" He waited for a long minute, or half an hour. I don't know. Probably only a few seconds, but my time sense was shot and I kept staring at the phone in his hand.

Then Flick smiled and hung up. He said, "She doesn't know for sure, Lonely, but I'll bet it's an hour or more."

Lonely said, "Looks like it to me, Flick." He lifted his revolver and stepped toward me. I swallowed and tightened my muscles to jump. If he was going to shoot me, I was at least going to give him a fat lip.

Flick stepped forward and grabbed Lonely's arm. He was one of the boys again. "Wait a minute, Lonely. What you gonna do?"

"Breed said if this was a gag, not to bring him back, Flick."