Уильям Макгиверн - Rogue Cop

Ackerman rubbed his smooth hard jaw and was silent again for several minutes. Then he said, “Well, we’ve got a beef. Think he’s the man to settle it?”

“Well, that’s up to you,” Beaumonte said. Ackerman’s manner was making him nervous. He liked straight, direct orders; but Ackerman wasn’t giving orders. He was giving him an unwelcome responsibility in the deal. Beaumonte frowned, watching Ackerman hopefully for a crisp, final decision. In his heart he was a little bit afraid of Carmody; there was a look on the detective’s face at times that made him uneasy.

“We’ll give him a chance to settle it,” Ackerman said tapping his cigar on the side of an ashtray. “But just one. I don’t like the brother angle.”

“Blood is thicker than water, eh?”

“That’s it,” Ackerman said, using another rare smile. “But it’s not thicker than money. Anyway, I’m going to hedge the bet just in case. You call Dominic Costello in Chicago and ask him to line us up someone who can do a fast job.”

Beaumonte liked this much better. The decision was made, the orders given and he was in the clear. “I’ll take care of it,” he said. “How about a nightcap?”

“Okay. Make it light though, we’re driving to the country tonight.”

Carmody drove directly across town to his hotel which was near the center of the city and about a block from the river. He parked a car length from the canopied entrance and told the doorman that he would be going out again shortly.

Carmody had lived here for six years, in a three-room suite on a premium floor high above the city’s noise and dust. Letting himself in, he snapped on the lights and checked the time. Twelve-thirty. He had missed his shift completely, which would give Wilson something to complain about tomorrow. Let him, he thought. There was more at stake now than eight hours of routine duty.

First he had to get fixed on Karen Stephanson. She might be the lever to pry Eddie off the spot. Carmody paced the floor slowly, thinking over each word of their conversation, trying to recall every expression that had shifted across her small pale face. Finally, he sat down at the phone and called a man named Tony Anelli, a gambler who spent six months of each year in Miami.

Anelli sounded a little tight. “Howsa boy, howsa boy?” he said cheerfully. Carmody heard a woman’s high laughter in the background.

“I’m looking for some information,” Carmody said.

“Came to the right party,” Anelli said. “We got a party going, as a matter of fact.” This struck him as comical and he began to laugh. Carmody let him run down and then said, “Do you know anything about a girl named Karen Stephanson?”

“Karen Stephanson? Sounds Swedish,” Anelli said. He was silent a few seconds. “It’s familiar, Mike. I wish I wasn’t loaded. The old head is turning around like a merry-go-round. Wait a second. I met her a couple of times, if she’s the same dish. Thin girl, brown hair, kind of serious. Does that fit?”

“Yeah, that fits,” Carmody said. “What do you know about her?”

“Well, nothing much. She was Danny Nimo’s girl.”

“Danny Nimo?”

“He ran a string of handbooks in New Orleans. Pretty rough character.”

“She was his girl, eh?”

“Yeah, that’s right. He’s dead though. Died a year or so ago of pneumonia,” Anelli said. “That’s what always gets those big chesty guys. Let’s see now. I met her in Miami in ’50 or ’51. She’d been in a hell of an accident. Nimo took me up to the hospital to see her, and that’s why I remember her, I guess.”

“What kind of an accident?” Carmody asked. He was thinking of her coldly and savagely. The pale little face, the poised and regal manner, and twisting his brother around in her slim hands like a piece of helpless clay. A bitter smile appeared at the corners of his mouth. He’d put an end to that act.

“It was an automobile accident,” Anelli said. “Nimo was driving, and the story was that he was drunk. They hit a truck head-on; he told me her legs were broken in a dozen places.”

In spite of his anger, Carmody winced. He hated the idea of physical suffering, not for himself but for others. It was about the only crack in his hard, iconoclastic shell. But her suffering was over, he thought, and now she was staging a cheap, phony act for Eddie. He understood her flare-up at his offer of a drink; she had thought he knew about her relationship with Nimo and was attempting to blackmail her into two-timing Eddie. A nice sweet kid. The Miami phase is all over. That’s what she’d said. Sure, he thought, sure. Miami and Danny Nimo were a little trip along the primrose path, but now she was back on the strait and narrow, redeemed in the nick of time, saved by the bell, cheating the devil with a shoestring catch of her virtue. That would be her story, Carmody knew; told with a tactful tear or two and Eddie would buy it at any price.

“Thanks, Tony,” he said into the phone. “See you around.”

“Sure, keed. Take it easy. Wish I could do the same, but the night’s going to be bumpy, I think.”

Carmody hung up and walked into the bedroom, stripping off his suit coat. He showered and shaved, then opened the closet doors to choose his clothes. A dozen suits faced him in a neat row, and there was a line of glossy shoes with wooden blocks inside them in a rack on the floor. On either side of the suits were cedar-lined drawers filled with shirts, socks and underwear, and smaller trays containing cuff-links, tie-clips, handkerchiefs, a wallet and cigarette cases. Carmody took out a blue gabardine suit, a white shirt and a pair of cordovan shoes which had been shined and rubbed until they were nearly black. After dressing he glanced at himself in the full-length mirror. His thick blond hair was damp from the shower and there was an unpleasant little smile on his hard handsome face. All set for fun with Danny Nimo’s ex-passion-flower, he thought. It should be good. He wondered what would happen to her when he dropped Danny Nimo’s name into her lap. Fall apart in nice delicate pieces probably.

Carmody walked into the living room, made himself a light drink and put on an album of show tunes. She wound up her turn at two o’clock and Eddie had told him she lived at the Empire Hotel. Two-thirty should find her home, unless she was out with someone else. Staring at the gleaming sweep of the river, he realized he was letting himself get emotional about her. And that was no good. Anger could upset his judgment as drastically as any other passion. What he thought of her didn’t matter; it wasn’t his job to strip away her defenses. His only job was to make her help him with Eddie. So to hell with what he thought of her, to hell with everything but his dumb kid brother.

Still staring at the river, he lit a cigarette and sipped his drink. The music wrapped itself around him, filtering into his mind with stories of love — love lost, love found, love dying, love growing. Every kind of love there is, he thought irritably. The songs were as bad as the movie he had walked out of tonight. All promise, hope, and sickly enchantment. Did anyone know love as it was defined by these groaning singers? Where was this nostalgia, this grandeur, this thing that could enrich a man even as he lost or destroyed it?

Well, where was it? he asked himself. Not in this world, that was certain. It was like Santa Claus, and the big kind man with whiskers who looked down from the clouds with a sad smile on his face. Fairy tales for dopes who would fall on their faces if it weren’t for these crutches.

To get his mind off it, he emptied an ashtray and straightened the pile of magazines on the coffee table. The room pleased him with its look of expensive comfort. It needed pictures, but he hadn’t enough confidence in his own judgment to buy the modern paintings he thought he liked, and he balked at the hunting prints which a dealer had told him would go with just about anything. Glancing about, Carmody remembered the way his father had hung holy pictures around the house with a bland disregard for anything but his own taste. St. Michael with his foot on Lucifer’s neck, the good and bad angels, St. Peter dressed like a Roman senator and St. Anthony looking like a tragic young poet. All over the place, staring at you solemnly when you snapped on the lights. Carmody hadn’t minded the pictures as much as his father’s stubborn insistence on sticking them in the most conspicuous spot in every room. It was like living in a church. Carmody hardly remembered his mother; she had died two months after having Eddie, when he himself was just eight years old. The old man had raised his sons alone; getting married again had never crossed his mind.