Richard Deming - Tweak the Devil’s Nose

After the second bucket he woke up.

Spluttering, the gang leader sat erect, groaned and pressed both hands to the side of his head where the seventeenth bottle had caught him. A noticeable bump was beginning to form. When I judged the bells in his head had reduced their jangle sufficiently for him to understand words, I said, “Barney!”

He looked up slowly, still holding his head, and blinked at me.

I said, “Barney, can you understand me?”

He started to nod his head, but the movement brought a moan from his lips. Thickly he said, “Yes.”

“Then listen carefully. I don’t care how hard you chase Fausta, because when she gets tired of your chasing, she’s perfectly capable of tying a can to your tail without my help. And if I feel like it, I’ll chase her too. Without your permission. But keep your goons away from me.”

He said something under his breath.

“Understand this clearly, Barney. I’ve no intention of spending the rest of my life jumping at shadows. One more pass at me and I’m coming at you with a gun. Not after your hoods, but straight at you. And if you think that won’t get you dead, check the morgue records over my way.”

Still clasping both hands to his head, Barney said indistinctly, “I know you’ve knocked off a bad boy or two, Moon.”

“Mr. Moon.”

After a pause he sulkily amended, “Mr. Moon.”

“Want to call it quits, Barney, or want to make this a real feud?”

His glazed eyes peered up at me with hate, but after an imperceptible hesitation, he said, “I guess a dame’s not important enough to kill a guy over, and I’d have to kill you if you came gunning.”

“Think you could?” I asked.

“I don’t want to,” he said with a mixture of pain and irritation. “All I ever intended was to give you a few bumps, but you got to take things serious. Just go away and leave me alone.”

I left him alone amid the ruins of his playroom and his two hoods.

I left Flat-face’s pistol in the glove compartment of the blue sedan, and the sedan I abandoned with the keys in it across the street from my apartment in the same spot my visitors had previously parked it. On my own car I found a parking ticket, of course, over an hour and a half having elapsed since I left it in the “no parking” zone. I filed the ticket in my breast pocket for later presentation to Warren Day.

My front door had been left unlocked, but apparently I had received no other visitors, for things were exactly as they had been left. I recovered my P-38 from the mantel, rolled my pajamas into a tight package with my toothbrush inside, and was out of the flat again within two minutes.

Fausta, attired in a thin but opaque white dressing gown which hid all but the bottom six inches of a startlingly transparent nightgown, was amusing Mouldy by letting him watch her paint her toenails when I finally got back. This I gathered not from observation, but from deduction, for by the time I had convinced Mouldy through the locked door that it was really I and I was alone, Fausta had completed the job. When Mouldy finally let me in, she had her tiny feet on a footstool and was wriggling them in an apparent attempt to make them dry faster.

The moment I entered, Fausta wrinkled her nose and said, “Are you drunk, Manny?”

I said, “You’re acting more and more like a wife. Keep it up and I’ll start insisting on the pleasures of marriage as well as the inconveniences.”

“You will?” she asked in an interested voice. Then she screwed up her nose again. “You smell like a distillery. Have you been swimming in the stuff?”

“Just wading,” I told her, for the first time becoming conscious of the aroma I was carrying about with me.

Examining my shoes, I discovered they were soaked above the insole with liquor. Kicking them off, I carried them over to the open window and set them on the sill to dry.

“You can get back to your back-slapping,” I told Mouldy.

“Sure, Sarge. Where’d you find liquor deep enough to wade in?”

“Barney Seldon’s over in Maddon.”

Fausta said, “Barney Seldon? You were over at his place tonight, Manny?”

“Yeah. And your handsome boy friend is out as a murder suspect. The two hoods who dumped me in Midland Park were Barney’s boys, incidentally, and their original intention was the same as Percy Sweet’s. To beat me up. But it develops Barney was just jealous about my chasing you, and knows nothing of the Lancaster killing. Apparently the reason the hoods changed their minds about beating me up was that they knew Barney would regard your welfare as more important, and they dumped me out in order to run to your rescue. I assume that when they found cops already on the scene, they quietly faded out of sight.”

Fausta said indignantly, “Wait until that Barney Seldon comes here again!”

“I don’t think he’ll try any more passes at me,” I said. “We talked the matter over and he agreed he was being childish.”

Fausta looked at me suspiciously. “You beat him up,” she accused.

“I didn’t lay a hand on him,” I said truthfully.

Mouldy asked, “How come you were wading in liquor?”

“Barney has a stream of it running right through his house.”

Mouldy looked surprised. “That jerk? A real whisky stream?”

“A real whisky stream.”

“What do you know?” Mouldy said. “A jerk like Romeo Seldon striking whisky. Luck never happens to guys who deserve it.”

“Try drilling under your bed,” I suggested. “Maybe you’ll strike a Martini spring.”

“Now you’re kidding,” Mouldy said. “Everybody knows Martinis aren’t raw products like whisky. You mix gin and vamoose.”

“Yeah, do that. Vamoose, I mean. I’ll take over Fausta’s protection.”

When the door closed behind Mouldy, Fausta asked, “Who is supposed to protect me against you?”

“Your virtue, my honor and the lock on your bedroom door. Not to mention my state of near collapse after a hard day.”

Fausta watched broodingly as I stripped back the day bed and plumped my pillow into shape. Giving her toes a final wriggle, she stretched like a kitten and came erect.

“Good night, Manny,” she said politely. I said, “Good night, Fausta,” in an equally polite voice, but as she padded by on bare feet, I suddenly grabbed her by the shoulders and swung her against my chest.

Far from being surprised, she met me as though expecting the maneuver. Using my ears as handles, she pulled my mouth down to hers and kept it there until smoke began to curl from between us. Then with a side twist as efficient as a shifty halfback’s, she slipped from my arms and scooted into her bedroom. The door closed, but I heard no sound of a key turning.

Slowly I undressed, donned my pajamas and took my time getting two drinks mixed. I was starting toward the door with the drinks in my hands when it suddenly opened.

There was no light behind Fausta, but the front room was brightly lighted, and the nearly transparent nightgown she wore only softened her lines without concealing a thing. The vision stopped me in my tracks, and I was still standing there foolishly with my hands full of highball glasses when she grinned like a gamin, gently closed the door in my face and locked it.

Setting both glasses on an end table, I tried the knob without success.

Bitterly I said through the door, “A woman who does things like that deserves to be hanged by the thumbs.”

“What happened to your honor and your state of near collapse?” she asked from the other side.

“I’ll collapse you when I get my hands on you.”

“Do you want me to open the door, Manny?”

“Of course I want you to open the door.”