Richard Deming: Tweak the Devil’s Nose

As the little cabbie tried to dig a hole in the gravel drive, I swung toward the bush from which the shot had come. It was a dark night, I was unarmed and I had no intention of trying to grapple with the gunman, so I made no attempt to rush after him. But I did listen, and I could hear the rustle of fallen leaves as someone moved hastily toward the highway.

Swiftly I ran toward my car, leaped in and threw it in reverse. My intention was to back the approximately fifty yards to the drive entrance, swing my lights along the edge of the parklike area where it touched the highway, and attempt to get a glimpse of the gunman when he reached the road. But I was foiled by another car swinging into the drive just before I reached the stone pillars.

Braking, I attempted to honk it out of the way, but the driver failed to get the point and simply sat there. Finally I jumped out, shouted, “Emergency! Back out and let me pass!”

So what did the guy do? He got flustered and killed his engine. At the same moment I heard a car spin its wheels as it roared away from about where I figured the assassin would have come out on the road.

Giving up, I told the driver behind me to forget it, drove back and parked behind the In the interval a number of people had come out of the club. At the top of the steps I spotted the vivid blonde hair of Fausta Moreni, flaming like a pink beacon in the light of the neon sign over the door. Surrounded by customers, she calmly listened to the doorman’s excited story.

Standing over the crumpled white figure next to the cab, a forty-five automatic in his hand, was Marmaduke Greene, affectionately known to his friends as “Mouldy” due to a mild but persistent case of acne. Seeing me return, the cabbie had crowded behind Mouldy’s wide back.

“That’s him!” the cabbie hissed in Mouldy’s misshapen ear. “Look out! He’s got a gun!”

Mouldy Greene’s flat face registered amazement. “Manny Moon?” he asked over his shoulder. “The sarge tried to use a rod on a little punk like you? And missed on top of it?”

He shook his gun at me friendlily. “Hi, Sarge. What’s new?”

“Put it away,” I told him, eying the automatic warily. Mouldy is not the safest person in the world to let handle a gun, sometimes forgetting what he has in his hand and preoccupiedly squeezing the trigger.

“Sure, Sarge.” Obediently he tucked it under the arm of his dinner jacket.

During World War II Mouldy Greene had been the sad sack of my outfit overseas. Every outfit had at least one: a well-meaning bungler with a talent for fouling up every detail he was assigned, but for whom you developed veloped the same sort of exasperated fondness a mother feels for an idiot child.

Immediately after the war, while El Patio was still a gambling casino, the underworld character who owned the place hired Mouldy as a bodyguard. He must have been hard up for strong-arm men, for while Mouldy looks tough, having a build like a rhinoceros and a face nearly as flat as the top of his head, he has a mind like a rhinoceros too. He proved just as efficient a bodyguard as he had a soldier, managing to be leaning against El Patio’s bar when a business rival put a bullet through his boss’s head.

Fausta inherited Mouldy when she took over El Patio, and while she had no compunction about instantly firing the other gunmen and bouncers inhabiting the place as members of the club’s staff, it would have taken a harder heart than Fausta possessed to cast Mouldy out into a competitive world. She tried him as a waiter, bus boy and even as head waiter before she gave up in despair and created a special job for him.

Mouldy was official customer greeter for the establishment. Evenings he stood just inside the main entrance with a hideous smile on his face, calling celebrities by their first names (generally the wrong ones), familiarly slapping barebacked dowagers on the back and in general acting the part of the genial host with earthy informality. The customers loved it once they got over the initial shock, and in the public mind he had become an institution.

Now he casually collared the miniature cabbie, held him with his feet dangling six inches off the ground and asked, “What about this guy, Sarge?” The “Sarge” was a holdover from Army days, and I had given up trying to break him of the habit.

“Put him down,” I said. “He hasn’t done anything.”

Stooping, I felt for pulse in the prone man’s wrist, but found none. He was lying on his chest, both arms flung forward, and there were bloodstains immediately beneath each armpit, indicating the bullet had passed entirely through him from right to left.

The man lay on one cheek, a thin, austere-looking face turned in the direction of the club entrance. In the dim light cast by the neon sign “El Patio” immediately over the bronze doors, I again thought I detected something familiar about his appearance, but it eluded me. I was sure I had never seen him before, but almost equally sure I had seen his picture somewhere.

“Know who he is?” I asked Mouldy.

“Butch here?” He shook his head. “First time he’s dropped in.”

“Then how do you know his name’s Butch?”

“Huh? Oh, I call ‘em all Butch when I don’t know who they are. Sounds better than just ‘Hey you!’”

Ordinarily I know better than to ask Mouldy anything at all, but it had been some time since I had seen him and I was a little rusty.

To the little cabbie, who had again dodged behind Mouldy as soon as his collar was released and was still peering at me apprehensively, I said, “Shut off your motor and prepare to stick around. The cops will want you as a witness.”

As an afterthought I told Mouldy to keep track of the little man until the police arrived.

Then I walked over to the steps, which were by now packed by at least twenty people. Others, still half inside, held wide the big double doors, and behind them crowded a solid pack of customers straining to see what was going on. For some reason, possibly because the doorman, like the cabbie, had the impression I was the one who had fired the shot and had passed his opinion along, no one but Mouldy had ventured farther than the lowest step.

The manner in which the crowd seemed to shrink back as I neared substantiated this guess.

I had never thought my experience as a first sergeant during the war would be of any value in civilian life, but after all the intervening years I finally found a use for one thing I had learned. Summoning up my old parade-ground voice, I boomed, “Everybody back to their tables! ON THE DOUBLE!”

The whole crowd jumped like people do after a thunder crash. Then they meekly turned and filed back inside, leaving only Fausta and the doorman on the steps. The doorman eyed me nervously and seemed inclined to follow the customers inside where there were no homicidal maniacs running loose.

Fausta turned her big brown eyes on me. “What happened, Manny?”

“In a minute, Fausta,” I said. I looked at the doorman, an imposing figure in the maroon uniform of a Central American general. “Seems to me you called yonder corpse by name. Who is he?”

He swallowed, finally got out, “Mr. Walter Lancaster, sir.”

My hair nearly turned white. Being innocently involved in a murder is bad enough. Having one witness, and possibly two, convinced you are the killer is even worse. But when the victim is the kind whose assassination will cause deep-seated political repercussions and make headlines all over the country, you are, to put it mildly, in an unpleasant spot.

Walter Lancaster was lieutenant governor of our neighboring state, Illinois.

At twenty-seven Fausta Moreni is one of the richest women in the city, but when I first met her during the war she was a nineteen-year-old penniless refugee from Fascist Italy, frightened and alone in a strange country. Most of America’s Italian immigrants have come from Sicily and southern Italy, but Fausta was from Rome. While she is as dark-eyed as her southern countrywomen, her skin is a creamy tan instead of the sultry olive possessed by most southern Italian beauties, and her hair is a gleaming natural blonde.