Ричард Деминг - Manhunt. Volume 1, Number 2, February, 1953

He nodded, said, “Beer?” and when I shook my head, called down the bar for a tall orange. “Figured you’d be in sooner or later.”

“Yeah?”

That wise old face wrinkled a little. “How does it feel to be live bait, kiddo?”

“You got big ears, grandma.”

“I get around.” He toasted his beer against my orange, put it down and said, “You’re in pretty big trouble, Joe. Maybe you don’t know it.”

“I know it.”

“You don’t know how big. You haven’t been here that long. Those boys put on the big squeeze.”

It was my turn to squint. His face was set as if he smelled something he didn’t like and there was ice in his eyes. “How much do you know, Bucky?”

His shoulders made a quick shrug. “Phil Carboy didn’t post the depot and the bus station for nothing. He’s got cars cruising the highways too. Making sure, isn’t he?”

He looked at me and I nodded.

“Renzo is kicking loose too. He’s pulling the strings tight. The guys on his payroll are getting nervous but they can’t do a thing. No, sir, not a thing. Like a war. Everybody’s just waiting.” The set mouth flashed me a quick grin. “You’re the key, boy. If there was a way out I’d tell you to take it.”

“Suppose I went to the cops?”

“Gerot?” Bucky shook his head. “You’d get help as long as he could keep you in a cell. People’d like to see him dead too. He’s got an awfully bad habit of being honest. Ask him to show you his scars someday. It wouldn’t be so bad if he was just honest, but he’s smart and mean as hell too.”

I drank half the orange and set it down in the wet circle on the bar. “Funny how things work out. All because of Vetter. And he’s here because of Jack Cooley.”

“I was wondering when you were gonna get around to it, kid,” Bucky said.

“What?”

He didn’t look at me. “Who are you working for?”

I waited a pretty long time before he turned his head around. I let him look at my face another long time before I said anything. Then: “I was pushing a junk cart, friend. I was doing okay, too. I wasn’t working for trouble. Now I’m getting pretty curious. In my own way I’m not so stupid, but now I want to find out the score. One way or another I’m finding out. So they paid me off but they aren’t figuring on me spending much of that cabbage. After it’s over I get chopped down and it starts all over again, whatever it is. That’s what I’m finding out. Why I’m bait for whatever it is. Who do I see, Bucky? You’re in the know. Where do I go to find out?”

“Cooley could have told you,” he said quietly.

“Nuts. He’s dead.”

“Maybe he can still tell you.”

My fingers were tight around the glass now. “The business about Cooley getting it because of the deal on Renzo’s tables is out?”

“Might be.”

“Talk straight unless you’re scared silly of those punks too. Don’t give me any puzzles if you know something.”

Bucky’s eyebrows went up, then down slowly over the grin in his eyes. “Talk may be cheap, son,” he said, “but life comes pretty expensively.” He nodded sagely and said, “I met Cooley in lotsa places. Places he shouldn’t have been. He was a man looking around. He could have found something.”

“Like what?”

“Like why we have gangs in this formerly peaceful city of ours. Why we have paid-for politicians and clambakes with some big faces showing. They’re not eating clams... they’re talking.”

“These places where you kept seeing Cooley...”

“River joints. Maybe he liked fish.”

You could tell when Bucky was done talking. I went down to Main, found a show I hadn’t seen and went in. There were a lot of things I wanted to think about.

(To be continued)

There were three funny things about the man in Paul Pine’s waitingroom. One was that he wore an expensive coat — and a pair of paint-stained trousers. Another was that he wore expensive shoes — and no socks. And the third was that he had a knife buried deep in his chest.

When I got through telling the sergeant at Central Homicide about it, he said to sit tight and not touch anything, that somebody would be right over. I told him I wouldn’t even breathe any more than was absolutely necessary and put back the receiver and went into the reception room to take another look at the body.

He was at the far end of the couch, slumped in a sitting position, with his chin on his chest and an arm hanging down. A wick of iron-gray hair made a curve against the waxen skin of a high forehead, his half-open eyes showed far too much white, and a trickle of dark blood had traced a crooked line below one corner of a slack-lipped mouth. His coat hung open, letting me see a circular red stain under the pocket of a soiled white shirt. From the center of the stain protruded the brown bone handle of a switch-blade knife.

I moved over to lean against the window frame and light a cigarette. It was one of those foggy wet mornings we get early in April, with a chill wind off the lake and the sky as dull as a deodorant commercial. Umbrellas blossomed along the walks eight floors below and long lines of cars slithered past with a hooded look.

I stood there breathing smoke and staring at the dead man. He was nobody I had ever seen before. He wore a handsomely tailored suit coat of gray flannel, dirty brown gabardine slacks spattered with green paint and an oil stain across one knee, and brown bench-made shoes. His shirt was open at the throat, showing a fringe of dark hair, and he wasn’t wearing a tie.

The rummage-sale air of those slacks bothered me. This was no Skid Row fugitive. His nails had that cared-for look, his face, even in death, held a vague air of respectability, and they didn’t trim hair that way at barber college.

I bent down and turned back the left side of his coat. The edge of a black wallet showed in the inner pocket. That was where I stopped. This was cop business. Let the boys who were paid for it paw the corpse.

A black satin label winked up at me. I put my eyes close enough to read the stitched letters in it. A C G — in a kind of Old English script. The letters seemed too big to be simply a personal monogram, but then there’s no accounting for tastes.

I let the lapel drop back to the way I had found it. The dead man didn’t seem to care either way. Something glistened palely between the frayed cuffs and the tops of the custom-made shoes. I said, “Huh?” out loud and bent down to make sure.

No mistake. It made no sense but there it was. The pale white shine was naked flesh.

The dead man wasn’t wearing socks.

Detective Sergeant Lund said, “Right smack-dab through the old ticker. He never even had time to clear his throat. Not this guy.”

His curiously soft voice held a kind of grim respect. He straightened up and backed away a couple of steps and took off his hat and shook rain water from it onto the carpet and stared thoughtfully at me out of gun-metal eyes.

I moved a shoulder and said nothing. At the wicker table across the room the two plainclothes men were unshipping tape measures and flashbulbs and fingerprint kits. Rain tapped the glass behind me with icy fingers.

“Your turn, Pine,” Lund said in the same soft voice.

“He was like that when I came in,” I said promptly. I looked at my strapwatch. “Exactly thirty-two minutes ago.”

“How’d he get in here?”