Richard Deming - Tweak the Devil’s Nose

“For assault and battery?” He let out a laugh intended to be derisive, but it wavered slightly at the end.

Sliding off the bed, I picked up my hat. “Well,” I said briskly, “just dropped in to see how you were taking it. I have to hand it to you. You’re certainly a cool guy.” I started to move toward the door.

“Just a minute!” Percy called.

I stopped and half turned toward him. The creases between his eyes had deepened to pull his expression into an uncertain scowl. He watched me uneasily, half suspicious that I was merely throwing out bait.

When he didn’t speak, I said, “Well?”

“Just what in hell are you talking about?”

I let my eyebrows climb again. “The Lancaster killing, of course. Have you bumped so many guys, you don’t know which one you’re taking the count for?”

From his expression it was hard to determine whether he was disturbed or not. His mouth tightened and his visible eye became more wary, but that was all.

“What’s your rush?” he asked. “Sit down for a minute.”

After frowning at my watch, I shrugged, returned to my former seat and waited for him to resume conversation. Before saying anything, he studied my face for a while.

Eventually he asked, “What about the Lancaster killing?”

“Hasn’t anyone from Homicide been here yet?”

He shook his head, still watching me suspiciously. “Just one regular cop this morning.”

“I thought they’d have been here long ago.” Checking my watch again, I turned on an astonished expression. “It’s two hours since Barney Seldon broke. I wouldn’t have come over, but I thought you’d surely know about it by now.” Suddenly I looked concerned. “Maybe I better shut up before I tell something Inspector Day doesn’t want let out.”

At mention of Barney Seldon, Percy’s face had become expressionless. “The boss broke, huh?”

I nodded. “If I were you, I’d get a smart lawyer and shift the blame right back on him. If you establish that you were just following orders, and the planning was all Seldon’s, you might get off with life.”

“Life, huh?”

His face was still without expression. I waited for him to say something more, but apparently his conversational mood had passed.

I said, “Is ‘huh’ your favorite question?”

He gave me a sardonic grin. “You got a nice technique, Mr. Moon. If I knew anything about the Lancaster job, I’d probably take the hook. But the night Lancaster stopped a slug I never left my room in Maddon, Illinois, after seven o’clock.”

“Got any witnesses?” I asked.

“You got any that I did?”

I slid off the bed and stuck my hat back on my head. Gesturing to Mike, who had stolidly taken in our whole conversation without a flicker of interest crossing his face, I again started for the door.

Just as I reached it, Percy called, “Hey, Mr. Moon!”

I looked back over my shoulder.

“Thanks for the cigar,” he said derisively.

The rest of that day was as unrewarding as my visit with Percy Sweet, which made it a fairly normal day for leg work. The days you turn up anything new during routine investigation are rare, most of your time being consumed in gathering negative knowledge: that is, by a process of elimination ruling out one possibility after another.

After leaving City Hospital, I made four more calls, none of which added to my knowledge of who killed Walter Lancaster, or why. The first was to headquarters, where I mollified Warren Day by signing formal charges against Percival Sweet and Barney Seldon.

The second was to the Jones and Knight Investment Company, where I learned from Matilda Graves she had been unable to unearth anything whatever about Willard Knight’s personal financial transactions. I found Harlan Jones in, but he seemed as remarkably uninformed about his partner’s private affairs as was the secretary-bookkeeper.

My third visit was to Willard Knight’s home, where I bullied Mrs. Knight into letting me go through his private papers. And again I drew a blank. If Knight ordinarily kept personal financial records at home, he had removed them along with himself, I decided.

Although from our previous conversation I was reasonably sure Knight did not make a habit of confiding anything at all to his wife, I asked her if she knew what stocks he owned. She didn’t. Then I asked her for a picture of her husband, only to learn Lieutenant Hannegan had beat me to the request and the only two photographs she had of him were now at Police Headquarters.

My fourth visit was back across the river to Carson City, where I spent the rest of the afternoon in the morgue of the Carson City Herald. When I finished I had a chronological record of Walter Lancaster’s public life, including all the welfare fund drives he had headed during the past twenty years, all the speeches he had made and the community projects he had engaged in, but none of it pointed to anything interesting. If he had ever been involved in anything unsavory, his influence had been great enough to keep it out of the papers.

At six I quit for the day, had a leisurely dinner and went home to shower and dress for my date with Fausta.

When I arrived at the apartment over El Patio, I found Fausta prepared for an evening of riotous gaiety. Her gown, an affair of flaming red which sedately hid her legs clear to the ankles, was not quite so sedate from the waist up. It had no back, no shoulder straps, and so little front she would have been arrested had she appeared in it on a stage. Since obviously it was held up solely by chest expansion, and would embarrass us both the first time she exhaled in public, I balked.

“Some kind of jacket go with that?” I asked tentatively.

“No, I’m all ready.”

“We’re not going to a burlesque house,” I told her. “Go put some clothes on.”

“Why must you always act like a father when I wear a pretty dress?” she asked irritably. “Do you think my skin ugly?”

“I’ve never seen lovelier skin,” I assured her. “Or so much of it in public. I’m just trying to keep you out of jail.”

“Pooh! You are jealous that other men will look at me.” With her nose in the air she swept out of the apartment and down the stairs.

Since the stairs led down to the same hall where the office was, we had to traverse the whole length of El Patio’s dining room to get out of the building. I let her get ten feet ahead of me in the hope people would think I was a casual customer instead of Fausta’s escort when we ran the gantlet, but I could have saved myself the worry. Nobody looked at me anyway.

Every eye turned as Fausta passed, however, the male eyes in frank but startled admiration, and the female in outraged envy. With some surprise I noted a number of feminine diners wore gowns as scanty as Fausta’s, but for some reason — possibly because her flesh was such a creamy tan and what little of it was covered promised to be so much more interesting than the ordinary woman’s — Fausta managed to appear more nearly naked than any of the others.

At the front door Mouldy Greene said, “Hey, that’s a pretty rag you got on, Fausta.”

Fausta smiled at him, I pushed open the door and the ordeal was over.

As I helped her into the car she grinned at me. “You are such a Puritan, Manny. Most men would drool over my pretty gown, but all you do is look disapproving.”

Rounding the car, I slid under the wheel. “I like your dress,” I said. “Particularly the bottom half. But don’t come around for sympathy when you get pneumonia.”

“With the temperature eighty-five? Where are we going?”

“I planned making the rounds. A drink here, a drink there. Maybe a floor show later on. But in that gown I think I’d better take you to the Coal Hole.”