Richard Deming - Tweak the Devil’s Nose

Other than we three new arrivals, only one person occupied the playroom. Attired in formal trousers, a purple smoking jacket and leather loafers, Barney Seldon sat on one of the bar stools watching television.

The moment we entered Barney jerked a thumb at the television screen. Slim walked over and cut off one of TV’s highest paid comics in the middle of a gag.

Seldon said, “Evening, Mr. Moon,” drained the highball before him and lit a cigarette with a gold lighter. Frowning at his two hirelings, he said, “Took you long enough.”

“After we phoned you about that business this morning we never had a chance,” Flat-face explained. “He was stuck to Miss Moreni all day, and we figured you wouldn’t want us pulling nothing with her around. We finally pried him out of her apartment with a fake call.”

Barney Seldon’s face darkened as he swung toward me. I felt mine darken too, but more with shame than with anger. That Farmer Cole had been tailing me without my being able to spot him I knew, but the Farmer had been trained by the FBI. The discovery that two run-of-the-mill hoods had also managed to stay on me all day without detection touched my vanity where it hurt.

I took a bar stool a seat or two away from Seldon, leaned my back against the bar and made a point of slowly studying the room. Slim seated himself at the poker table and idly shuffled a deck of cards. Flat-face leaned against the pool table, his gun still in his hand and still cocked.

Barney examined me coldly, finally said, “You were a little bit rough on my boy, Percy Sweet.”

“Tit for tat,” I told him. “Percy tried to be a little rough on me.”

“And then you yelled cop,” Barney said. “Really I was a little disappointed. Fausta built you up as such a tough guy, but instead of fighting your own battles, you yell cop.”

I looked at him in astonishment. “My own battles? When you try to scare me off a murder case, it isn’t a simple matter of Moon versus Seldon. It becomes Seldon versus the People.”

Barney’s eyebrows went up. “Murder case? You talking about the Lancaster affair?”

“That and Willard Knight. You had anyone else bumped recently?”

Barney laughed a short unpleasant laugh. “Is that why you think you’re on my stink list?”

I merely looked at him without answering.

“What did Percy say to you?” he asked.

I simulated his short unpleasant laugh. “He intimated in his terse, ungrammatical way that he was going to learn me to kick a field goal, my head being the ball. And the lesson was to teach me to stay out of your hair.”

“No explanation of how you got in my hair?”

I shook my head. “Since our sole contact concerned Walter Lancaster, I assumed my looking into his murder ruffled your toupee.”

Barney snorted smoke in my direction. “We also discussed a lady.”

For a moment I didn’t get it, and when I finally did, it filled me with such a mixture of disgust and rage, I slid from my stool and reached out to gather a fistful of smoking jacket.

Across the room Flat-face said tonelessly, “You’ll get a slug in your guts.”

That deterred me from slugging Barney, but did nothing to abate my anger. Gripping the seat of the bar stool between us instead of his jacket, I leaned toward him and said impolitely, “You underdeveloped cretin! I’m up to my neck in a double murder investigation, trying to prevent a third, and you bother me with a lot of teen-age nonsense over a girl! In grammar school, boys sick their gangs on fellows who mess with their girls, but they outgrow such juvenile stuff by the time they get to high school. Of course, never having attended either one, a paleolithic moron like you wouldn’t know that, but—”

“Hold it, Moon!” Barney said in a strangled voice.

“You ape-brained simpleton!” I yelled. “Grown men don’t win women by having their rivals beat up. What in hell do you think you’re accomplishing with this nonsense?”

Leaving his stool, Barney gripped the opposite side of the same one I was gripping and put his handsome nose an inch from mine. “I’m going to marry that girl! That’s what I’m accomplishing!” he yelled back at me. “And I’m keeping you away from her if I have to beat your brains out every hour on the hour!”

I straightened up. “She wouldn’t have a triple-plated jerk like you if you had every man in a radius of fifty miles beaten up.”

That released his trigger. Stepping away from the bar, he started a fast left hook at my head. Unfortunately, for him, this put him between me and the gun in Flat-face’s hand.

Deflecting his hook with my open right palm, I leaned my back against the bar, brought up my aluminum foot, planted it in his groin and snapped my leg straight. He shot across the room on his heels, crashed into Flat-face and took him to the floor with him.

I was vaulting the bar while Slim dropped his cards, leaped to his feet and began to reach under his coat.

With a pinch bottle of Scotch in one hand and a quart of Irish whisky in the other, I spun toward him and hurled the former end-over-end just as his gun began to clear. The Irish I flipped two feet lower an instant later.

Slim ducked the Scotch just in time to catch the Irish squarely on the nose. The pinch bottle burst all over the wall behind him, but the Irish didn’t even break. It rolled one way, Slim rolled the other, then both lay still.

The instant the Irish left my hand, I was re-armed again, this time with a square bottle of gin and a quart of bourbon. Both started toward the corner containing the pool table just as Barney rolled from Flat-face’s lap. Seated spread-eagled on the floor, Flat-face tried to duck and fire at the same time. Both bottles missed, but so did his bullet, burying itself somewhere in the ceiling above me.

Before Flat-face could align his sights for a second shot I had two more bottles started, and after that I kept them going as rapidly as a juggler throws Indian clubs. It is amazing how accurately you can toss a full quart bottle clear across a room. In spite of hardly taking time to aim, not one of the eighteen quarts I threw missed Barney or Flat-face more than two feet. After the second volley Flat-face gave up trying to get in a shot, and he and Barney devoted themselves to scampering about on all fours in a frantic attempt to dodge the rain of hard drinks.

Had they kept out of each other’s way, perhaps all the bottles would have missed, but they were both paying more attention to me than to where they were going, and they met head on just in time for the seventeenth bottle to catch them right where their heads were touching. The eighteenth I had already started by then, and it sailed harmlessly over their prone figures to burst against the windows of one of the one-armed bandits. Had this final bottle connected with either of the men, I would have had a corpse on my hands, for it seemed to possess more steam than my earlier throws. It was hard enough to disrupt the mechanism of the slot machine, for the machine emitted a dull clanking noise, slowly turned its left-hand drum until a lemon showed, and spit dimes all over the floor.

The floor was a mess. Counting the two bottles I had thrown at Slim, I had fired twenty quarts and all but four had broken. Four gallons of mixed liquor trickled over broken glass and filled the air with an overpoweringly rich aroma.

Rolling both Flat-face and Barney on their backs to prevent them from drowning in a puddle of whisky, I examined them and decided neither probably suffered anything more dangerous than mild concussion. Slim was going to require some plastic work on his nose and possibly had a fractured skull, but he also was alive.

For a few moments I contemplated the recumbent figure of Barney Seldon, wondering what I had better do about him. I realized he would regard this incident only as further reason for having his goons teach me a lesson, and the prospect of permanently keeping one eye over my shoulder did not appeal to me. After some thought I picked Flat-face’s pistol off the floor, wiped it clean of liquor and thrust it in my coat pocket. Relieving Slim of the keys to the blue sedan, I pocketed them also. Then I found an ice bucket behind the bar, filled it with water and dumped it in Barney’s face.