Strange Embrace (12 page)

Johnny kept going. He walked down Tenth as he had walked into Sully’s Place, head cocked and shoulders set and hands in pockets. It would have been easier to put on the role when he got to the Castle but he stayed in the part on the way. He did not want anybody to notice him behaving out of character, for one thing. For another, the Method School of acting had a few sound things to say. If you lived a part you played it more effectively.

He turned on Twenty-eighth and found the Castle. The neighborhood was slightly better south of Thirty-fourth Street and the Castle was correspondingly higher in tone than Sully’s Place had been. The clientele was uppercaste for the Kitchen—minor loan sharks, numbers runners, ten-dollar prostitutes. He stopped in the doorway to straighten his tie, then took a few steps inside and glanced around. The shorter of the two men who had worked him over a night ago was not there, but he saw the big one, the one Sully had called Lou Rugger. Johnny ignored the man and stepped up to the bar.

Like Sully, the bartender at the Castle came over to him in a hurry.

“Tell Lou Rugger,” Johnny said, “that I’m outside. Tell him I want to talk to him.”

He did not wait for an answer. He turned around and walked casually out of the bar. On the outside he puffed at what was left of his cigar and waited for Rugger to get the message.

Soon Rugger came out, his face puzzled, and walked over to Johnny. There was no recognition in his eyes.

“You wanted me?”

Johnny nodded. “You do muscle work,” he said. “You’re for hire.”

“So?”

“So maybe I can use you. First we talk. You got a place handy we can talk?”

Rugger thought about it. “Down the block,” he said. “There’s a building condemned. Nobody there now.”

Johnny gave him a look.

Rugger hesitated. “We could go to my place. I got a room around the corner. But my broad’s there.”

“She could move,” Johnny suggested.

“Yeah, but—”

She was probably working, Johnny thought. Working flat on her tail with her knees pointing at the stars. A man like Rugger seemed capable of holding two jobs easily enough. Muscle man and pimp.

“Forget it,” Johnny said. “The building’s fine. Let’s go.” The street was dark. He followed the big man down the block, followed him when he turned at a doorway. The building deserved to be condemned. When they condemn a building in New York they chalk huge white X’s on the windows. But this particular building had few windows left.

“That’s far enough,” he said. “Now turn around.”

Rugger turned. He started to say something. Then he saw the gun in Johnny’s hand. Rugger’s mouth fell open and his face went white. Even in the half-light thrown by a street lamp Johnny could see how pale his face was.

“Hey—”

“You die now,” Johnny said. “You die, Rugger. How do you want to die? Quick or slow?”

Rugger tried to answer but no words came out of his mouth. He seemed thoroughly lost. Things were happening too quickly for him to follow them.

“You did a job last night,” Johnny said. “A muscle job. A guy name of Lane.”

“We had orders.”

“From who?”

Rugger closed his mouth. That was the code, Johnny thought. You didn’t talk. You took whatever they handed you and you didn’t talk. That was why Johnny had to play the role all the way. It would have been a pleasure to drop the part, to tell Rugger who he was and then beat the information out of the big goon. But it wouldn’t work that way. Rugger would talk only to somebody who was more of a mob man than the man who had hired him in the first place. And he would talk only with a gun staring him in the teeth—all the beatings in the world couldn’t open him up. “This Lane,” Johnny said. “He was better connected than you thought. He knows a lot of people.”

“I didn’t know.”

“You know now. So you get hit in the head, Rugger. You get killed.”

“Look—”

Johnny was holding the gun in his right hand. With his left he took the cigar from his mouth and threw it to the floor. He covered it with his heel and ground it out. “You’d better open up,” he told Rugger. “You better say where the job on Lane came from. You better talk fast.”

“Look, I—I don’t know who it was.”

Johnny flicked off the safety catch. “First I shoot off your knee-cap,” he said. “You know how that feels? Then when you fall, I let it go into your gut. Then I give another slug in your…”

“Take it easy,” the big man begged. Terror gleamed in his eyes. “I’m telling you the truth. I’m not holding out.”

“Yeah?”

“I did the job with Marlo. Jackie Marlo—hangs out on Bleecker, around there.”

“Go on.”

“Marlo don’t know more than I do. We got this job—work over this Lane, don’t kill him but hit him a little. Enough to put him off doing this show.” Rugger hesitated. His eyes dropped to the gun, then came up again. “Yesterday afternoon,” he said, “a little kid comes in with a note plus half of a hundred-dollar bill. You know—the bill torn in half, right down the middle. There’s a note attached to the bill, says I should stay close to the phone in the Castle. So I do. What the hell—you get half the bill, it’s not worth a thing without the other half. And nobody rips a bill for a joke.”

“Keep talking.”

“I stayed near the phone. Maybe five minutes later it rings and I pick it up. This voice asks me if I got the piece of the bill. I say yes.”

“What was the voice like?”

“Like nothing,” Lou Rugger said. “A whisper, sort of. A low whisper.”

“Go on.”

“This voice says how would I like to make the other half of the bill. I say fine, who do I have to hit? The voice tells me about this Lane. I’m supposed to get a call later that night saying when and where.” He paused, shrugged his shoulders. “I thought it was a solo. Later I get the call, go over and wait for Lane to show. I run into Marlo—he got the same deal. Half a bill to start, the other when the job was over. We waited for Lane and we worked him over. That was all.”

“Did you get your money?”

Rugger shook his big head. “Not yet. So I got half a bill. It don’t make any sense. Why should the guy keep the other half? It don’t do him any good.”

Johnny had to work to keep the smile off his face. “He didn’t keep the other half, stupid. He sent it to Marlo.”

Rugger’s mouth opened very wide.

“So you and Mario got a yard between you,” Johnny went on. “If you put the two halves together. You’re a jerk to fall for an old one like that, Rugger. And a jerk to work for people you don’t know. You get in trouble that way.”

“I—”

“Who gave the bill to the kid? Didn’t you think of asking?”

The muscle man lowered his eyes. “The kid was in and out before I knew what was coming off. I don’t even remember what the kid looked like. The streets are full of kids. They all look the same.”

“The second phone call. What time did you get it?”

“Around nine. I don’t know.”

“And you went right over there?”

“Yeah. We waited around for Lane. He came out alone and we picked him up.”

That narrowed it down a little, Johnny thought. It wasn’t a complete blind alley. But that was as much as he was going to get from Rugger. The man did not know who had hired him. He could not tell even though he obviously wanted to.

“Look,” Rugger was saying. “Look, I got suckered, too. I got stuck on the money end of it. I shouldn’t of taken the job in the first place, all right. I needed the dough so I took it. Lay off, will you?”

Johnny raised his left hand, dipped into his jacket pocket. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his face with it. He rubbed makeup from the corners of his eyes, from his mouth. He let his face relax. His posture changed from gangster stance to his usual position.

“Rugger,” he said, his voice normal now. “Don’t you recognize me, Rugger?”

Rugger blinked. Then recognition came, and shock. The man started to move toward Johnny. Then he remembered that mob man or not, Johnny was still holding a gun in his hand. Rugger stopped in his tracks.

Johnny shrugged out of the heavy coat. He let it fall and stepped toward Rugger. “Now there’s just two of us,” he said. “Let’s see if you’re worth a hundred dollars or not.”

He dropped the gun to the floor. And Rugger rushed him, coming fast and hard.

It did not last long. Rugger was on his own this time and Rugger was soft from too much beer. Johnny ducked the first punch and came up under it, sinking a right to Rugger’s belly. When Rugger folded, Johnny linked both bands behind Rugger’s head and rushed the head down into his own knee. The knee was an effective club. It knocked out two or three of Rugger’s teeth and brought a rush of blood from his flat nose.

He came up and rushed where angels feared to tread. Johnny ducked another punch, dodged one that would have cracked his jaw if it had landed. Then he moved inside, pivoted and tossed Rugger into a wall. The wall gave way and Rugger went partway through it. He came up cursing but he came up slowly and most of the fight was out of him.

A left to the jaw finished the job. He went to one knee and stayed there.

“That was a fight,” Johnny said.

Rugger was silent.

“We didn’t have a fight last night,” Johnny told him. “We started off with a fight. We wound up with a beating.”

Rugger stared.

“So now you get a beating,” Johnny said, hauling the other to his feet. Johnny held him with his left hand and hit him with the right. Rugger lifted into the air. He sagged and fell on his face.

“The building’s condemned,” Johnny said. “They have to tear it down anyway. So we’re saving the wrecking crew some time. We’re knocking the walls down for them. You’re the battering ram.”

He picked Rugger up again. It was like picking up a corpse. He aimed Rugger at a wall and sent him on his way. Rugger took the wall with his shoulder and crashed off in time to get hit in the face once more. He fell down and sat on the floor.

“Get up,” Johnny said. “C’mon—get up.”

Rugger got up and Johnny hit him again. They went on that way until Rugger could not get up any more. Then all the fun was gone. Johnny rescued his gun, jammed it into the shoulder holster. He grabbed the coat and put it on, set the short-brimmed hat on his head. Then he prodded Rugger in the ribs until the man’s eyes opened. “You shouldn’t beat up people,” Johnny told him gently. “It’s a rotten way to make a living. Besides, you can get hurt that way.”

J
OHNNY TOOK A CAB
back to his apartment. That was the best move, he decided. The alternative—hunting for Jackie Marlo on Bleecker Street and handing him the same routine he had handed Rugger—was not entirely without appeal. But in the long run it would be a waste of time, an elaborate game which would only result in his knocking Mario around without getting any additional information. And it could work the other way. If Rugger recovered in time to warn Marlo by telephone, Johnny could get more than he had bargained for. No, the only sensible thing was to go home. There was bourbon there, and coffee, and a comfortable chair. All of which sounded inviting.

The hack took Eighth Avenue. Johnny gazed out to the right, watching the throngs of people pouring out of the theaters along the side streets leading from Broadway. His eyes took in theater marquees:
Up for Grabs—A Sound of Distant Drums—The Lonely.
All good shows, and all drawing good audiences.
A Touch of Squalor
belonged with them, he thought. But it would not be up there, wouldn’t place a few more neon jewels in the hair of that tarnished lady named Broadway. Not for another season. Maybe never.

He sighed. Hell, the play was a minor casualty when you stopped to think about it reasonably. The major pity was that two fine actors were dead. One of them happened to have been a son of a bitch, and the other happened to have been a blackmailer, but they had been actors, good theater people. They would have been great in
Squalor.

And they were dead.

He thought back to what he had managed to learn from Lou Rugger. First of all, Johnny now knew one thing about the killer. He was not a professional mobster as Haig had half-guessed. A gangster type would not have hired muscular talent in such a bizarre manner. If you were one of the hard boys and you wanted muscle you went calling and arranged the deal.

Which meant the killer was an amateur. A clever amateur—it took a little ingenuity to hire a pair of playboys like Rugger and Marlo without letting them know who you were. And letting a single hundred-dollar bill do the work of two was a touch of genius tempered with poetic beauty.

Admirable.

What else did he know? Well, Rugger had said that the joker with the whisper made his last call around nine. That was roughly the time that the meeting of the cast had broken up. So the caller had known about it. That wasn’t all—the caller had seen him come out of Jan’s place, had tailed him back to the apartment and then had arranged the deal with Rugger and Marlo. But what did that prove?

Only the cast had known about the meeting. Only the cast and whoever had been told by somebody in the cast. Johnny had waited until the rest of the cast had left before dropping back to Jan’s. Which meant…

Which meant he was up the creek.

Somebody could have been tailing him all along, could have tailed him to the meeting, waited outside, stayed on his tail while he taxied around the block, then placed the call. If so, Johnny was right back where he had started from. Because such a person did not have to know about the meeting in the first place. He just had to follow Johnny.

He lit another cigarette. The cab stopped in front of his building and he paid off the driver and got out. The doorman looked at him suspiciously, then did a pronounced take and greeted him by name. “Didn’t recognize you at first, Mr. Lane,” he apologized.

Johnny grinned. The clothes were not exactly his style, he thought. And his nose still had some of the build-up job left on it. No wonder the doorman had missed him the first time around.

The elevator operator did not notice anything different, or if he did he did not say anything one way or the other. He took Johnny up to his penthouse swiftly and silently, and Johnny opened the front door.