Эд Макбейн - Running From Legs and Other Stories

It was bitterly cold.

Diamond and his family got into a taxi he had hired to chauffeur him to and from the courthouse during the trial. The rest of his party got into cars behind him. In our own car, a maroon sedan, Dominique and I followed them into Albany and then to a speakeasy at 518 Broadway. We did not go into the club. We sat in the car and waited. We did not talk at all. It was even colder now. The windows became rimed with frost. I kept rubbing at the windshield with my gloved hand.

At a little after one in the morning, Diamond and his wife Alice came out of the club. Diamond was wearing a brown chinchilla coat and a brown fedora. Alice was wearing a dress, high-heeled shoes, no coat. The driver came out of the club a moment later. From where we were parked, we could not hear the conversation between Alice and Diamond, but as he walked with his driver toward where the taxi was parked, he yelled over his shoulder, “Stick around till I get back!” The driver got in behind the wheel. Diamond climbed into the backseat. Alice stood on the sidewalk a moment longer, plumes of vapor trailing from her mouth, and then went back into the club. We gave the taxi a reasonable lead and then pulled out after them.

The taxi took Diamond to a rooming house on the corner of Clinton Avenue and Tenbroeck Street. Diamond got out, said something to the driver, closed the door, and went into the building. We drove past, turned the corner, went completely around the block, and then parked halfway up the street. The cab was still parked right in front of the building. We could not have got by the driver without being seen.

Diamond came out at 4:30 A.M.

I nudged Dominique awake.

We began following the taxi again.

Ten days ago, a man and a woman named “Mr. and Mrs. Kelly” had rented three rooms in a rooming house on Dove Street — for themselves and their relatives, a sister-in-law and her ten-year-old son. I learned this from the owner of the rooming house, a woman named Laura Wood, who gave me the information after she identified some newspaper photographs I showed her. She seemed surprised that Mr. Kelly was in fact the big gangster Legs Diamond who was being tried “over in Troy.” She told me he was a respectable gentleman, quiet and well behaved, and she had no real cause for complaint. I gave her fifty dollars and asked her not to mention that a reporter had been there.

The taxi took Diamond there now.

Sixty-seven Dove Street.

Diamond got out of the taxi. It was a quarter to five in the morning. The taxi drove off. The street was silent. Not a light showed in the rooming house. He unlocked the front door with a key, and went inside. The door closed behind him. The street was silent again. We waited. On the second floor of the rooming house, a light came on.

“Do you think the wife is already here?” Dominique asked.

“He told her to stay at the club.”

“What will you do if she’s there with him?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You will have to kill her, too, no?”

“First let me get in the building, okay?”

“No, I want to know.”

“What is it you want to know?”

“What you will do if she is there with him.”

“I’ll see.”

“Well, I think you will have to kill her, no?”

“Dominique, there is killing and there is killing.”

“Yes, I know that. But if you go in there, you must be prepared to do what must be done. Otherwise, his people will come after us again and again. You know that.”

“Yes. I know that.”

“We will have to keep running.”

“I know.”

“So if the woman is there with him, you will have to kill her, too. That is only logical, Richard. You cannot leave her alive to identify you.”

I nodded.

“If she is there, you must kill them both, it is as simple as that. If you love me.”

“I do love you.”

“And I love you,” she said.

The light on the second floor went out.

“Bonne chance,” she said, and kissed me on the mouth.

I left her sitting behind the wheel of the car, its engine running.

I tried the front door of the rooming house.

Locked.

I leaned hard on the door. The lock seemed almost ready to give. I backed away, lifted my left leg, and kicked at the door flat-footed, just above the knob. The lock snapped, the door sprang inward.

Silently, I climbed the steps to the second floor. Mrs. Wood had innocently told me that Diamond and his wife were staying in the room on the right of the stairway. “Such a quiet couple,” she’d said. The steps creaked under me as I went up. A night-light was burning on the second floor. Almost too dim to see by. A shabby carpet underfoot. I turned to the right. The door to Diamond’s room was at the end of the hall. I took a gun from each pocket of my overcoat. I had loaded both pistols with soft-nosed bullets. Dum-dums. If I was going to do this, it had to be done right.

I tried the doorknob.

The door was unlocked.

I eased it open.

The room was dark except for the faintest glow of daybreak beyond the drawn window shade. I could hear Diamond’s shallow breathing across the room. A leather traveling bag was on the floor. His chinchilla coat lay beside it. So did his hat. His trousers were folded over the back of a chair. I went to the bed. I looked down at him. He was sleeping with his mouth open. He stank of booze. My hands were trembling.

My first bullet went into the wall.

The next one went into the floor.

I finally shot Diamond in the head three times.

I came tearing down the steps. The front door was still ajar. I ran out into a cold gray dawn. A man coming out of the building next door saw me racing across the street to where Dominique was standing outside the car on the passenger side, the engine idling, the exhaust throwing up gray clouds on the gray dawn.

“Was she there?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Did you kill him?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

Across the street, the man was staring at us.

We got into the car and began driving north. I was behind the wheel now. Dominique was wiping the guns. Just in case. Wiping, wiping with a white silk handkerchief, polishing those gun butts and barrels in the event that somehow, in spite of the gloves, I’d left fingerprints on them. As we approached St. Paul’s Church, a mile and a half from Dove Street, I slowed the car. Dominique rolled down the window on her side, and threw out one of the guns, wrapped in the silk handkerchief. Five minutes later, she tossed out the second gun, wrapped in another handkerchief. We sped through dawn. In Saugerties, a uniformed policeman looked up in surprise as we raced through the deserted main street of the town.

We were free again.

But not because I’d killed Legs Diamond.

“What do you mean?” I asked Vinnie on the phone.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Somebody talked to the goons who scared your grandmother.”

“What do you mean? Who? Talked to them about what?”

“About you and Dom.”

“Who did?”

“Mickey Tataglia. He went to see them and convinced them you’re not worth bothering with.”

“But Diamond is dead. Why would they...?”

“Yeah, somebody killed him, what a pity.”

“So why would they be willing to forget...?”

“Well, I think some money changed hands.”

“How much money?”

“I don’t know how much.”

“You do know, Vinnie.”

“I think maybe five thousand.”

“Where’d the money come from?”

“I don’t know.”

“Whose money was it, Vinnie?”

The line went silent.

“Vinnie?”

More silence.

“Vinnie, was it Grandma’s money? The money she’s been saving for another shop?”