Richard Deming - Tweak the Devil’s Nose

“If Inspector Day set you on my tail, he didn’t tell you to get in my hair,” I snapped at him. “Check with Day later, if you want, but don’t try to stop me now.”

One or two passers-by had stopped to gape at us curiously. The bull-necked man paid no attention to them, but held his coat wide so they could not fail to see his badge, and suddenly drew a short-barreled gun with his other hand.

“Get in the back, Buster,” he ordered.

“Now wait a minute,” I said. “I’m on my way to prevent a murder witness from getting killed. Come along if you want, but if you delay me, Warren Day will have your scalp.”

There was a click as the hammer of the short-barreled gun drew back. And a sudden thinness about the man’s lips warned me he would have no compunction about squeezing the trigger.

A trigger-happy cop, I thought with a sense of shock. The guy wants an excuse to shoot somebody.

Opening the sedan’s rear door, I got in the back.

As the heavy-set man climbed in next to me, still holding me under his gun, I said, “Don’t blame me if you end up walking a beat.”

“All right, Slim,” my arrester said to the thin-faced man behind the wheel, and the sedan moved away with a purr of power.

It was not till then that I got it.

“Oh,” I said, glancing down at the cocked gun. “I forgot you could buy tin badges in a dime store.”

“You catch fast, Buster. Just hold still now.” His left hand reached across and patted me beneath the arms and at the waist. “No artillery, huh?”

“I didn’t realize anybody was gunning for me,” I apologized. “I’ll start wearing some tomorrow. What did you do with Fausta?”

The heavy-set man looked me over thoughtfully. Finally he asked, “Miss Moreni?”

“You been setting traps for any other women named Fausta?”

We were rolling sedately along in the direction of Midland Park. The car stopped for a red light at Mason Avenue and my rear-seat companion continued to regard me thoughtfully.

“Something happen to Miss Moreni?” The way he asked it made me think he actually didn’t know. There was a note of doubtfulness in his voice, and had it not been for the cocked gun pointing unwaveringly at my stomach, I might have gotten the impression he was upset at the thought of anything happening to Fausta.

As the car moved forward again, he said, “Speak up, Buster. What gives with Miss Moreni?”

It was my turn to regard him thoughtfully. “You really don’t know?”

“Buster, we sat in front of your apartment house since six A.M., and we’d have grabbed you when you came out at eight if Slim hadn’t gone to sleep when he was supposed to be watching.” The driver interspersed an irritated grunt. “By the time he woke up, you were pulling out of the garage and there was nothing we could do but tail you. Ever since we been parked across from Police Headquarters. We don’t know from nothing about Miss Moreni.”

Wryly I thought that if Warren Day’s early morning call had not gotten me out of bed four hours prior to my usual rising time, I might still be peacefully sleeping at home instead of being taken for a ride by a couple of hoods. Then I also had to admit to myself I wouldn’t have known about Fausta’s danger. Not that knowing about it seemed to be doing me any good.

I asked, “Why are you interested?”

His expression grew irked. “I’m going to ask once more, Buster, then put a slug in your guts. What’s with Miss Moreni?”

It did not seem to me that suppressing the story was worth a slug in the guts, for though I completely failed to understand his interest in Fausta, I couldn’t see how his knowing about the fake call she had received would put her in any more danger than she already was in.

I told him.

By now we were driving through Midland Park, presumably in search of a quiet spot where they could dump my body, or give me a going over, or do whatever else they had in mind. My stocky seatmate surprised me by suddenly ordering the driver to turn around.

Nosing onto a bridle path, Slim expertly backed the car and headed it back the way it had come.

“Hold it,” the heavy-set gunman said before the car started forward motion again. Then to me, “All right, Buster. Out you go.”

I looked at him without understanding, but when he waggled his short-nosed revolver at me, I opened the door on my side and climbed out.

“Push it shut again.”

Pushing it shut, I stared at him through the window.

“Keep your nose clean, Buster.” As the car shot forward, I heard him say, “Back to the Sheridan. And don’t spare the horses.”

They had left me approximately a mile inside the park on the road going past the Art Museum. However, ten thirty A.M. apparently was not a good hour for art lovers, for not a person or a car was in sight in any direction. I started to walk.

I am sufficiently used to an artificial leg so that it is rarely a handicap any more, but I will never become an expert hiker. Walking as fast as I could, it took me fifteen minutes to get to the edge of the park. And then, of course, there was no cab in sight.

Directly across from the park’s main entrance on Park Lane was a huge cut-rate drugstore. The sidewalk in front of the store also happened to be an express bus stop, and I mentally tossed a coin to decide whether to use one of the drugstore’s phones to call a cab, or take a chance on a bus coming along within the next few minutes. The expresses only ran every twenty minutes.

Inside my head the coin came down tails for the bus. One stopped five minutes later.

When I got off the bus across the street from the Sheridan, my watch told me it was exactly thirty-two minutes since my heavy-set friend had abandoned me in the park. I saw no sign of the blue sedan, but my Plymouth stood where I had left it in the loading zone, unchanged except for a bright pink ticket attached to the windshield wiper.

Somehow it failed to amuse me to discover the police were still diligently on the job ticketing parking violations while Fausta possibly was in the hands of a killer.

A crowd was gathered on the sidewalk outside the Sheridan, and a uniformed cop tried to stop me from entering the Lounge.

“Sorry, sir,” he said in the mechanical manner of one who has been repeating the same phrase over and over. “There’s been an accident and the bar is closed.”

Just beyond the cop I saw the straw-hatted figure of Warren Day, an unlighted cigar in his mouth thrust upward at an angle as he peered down sourly at a sheet-covered figure lying on the floor. I was conscious of a number of other people wandering around the barroom, but Day was the only one I really saw before my eyes touched the motionless figure, and after that I couldn’t even see him.

I said, “I’m with Inspector Day,” and when the cop didn’t move aside at once, put my hand against his chest and pushed.

“Hey!” he said, staggering back.

“Take it up with the inspector,” I snarled at him, strode over to the sheet-covered figure and glared down at it.

The inspector watched silently as I fell to one knee and tenderly lifted an edge of the cloth. The body beneath the sheet was as dead as a body can get. Lips were drawn back in a grimace of agony and the face had a faintly bluish cast.

But it was not Fausta. It was a man I had never in my life seen before.

Dropping the sheet, I slowly rose and looked at Warren Day. He simply looked back at me, not even scowling for a change. Then he jerked his head sidewise at a corner of the room.

Turning, I saw one of the most welcome sights I have ever seen. Seated at a table with her back to me, calmly smoking a cigarette, was Fausta, and hovering over her in the belligerent manner of a mastiff guarding a bone was Mouldy Greene.